Any account of the Ottoman Empire in this period which starts with its breakaway provinces risks putting the cart before the horse. While much of what the Ottoman government attempted in the way of reform was clearly reactive, not least to the prospect of partition by the great powers, it would be misleading in the extreme to suggest that the sultans had not been interested in reform in the first place. The problem was how to get there.
By the turn of the century, Selim III had pioneered change by driving many if not all of the janissaries into the provinces and building up in their stead a 'New Model' army of professional troops. Yet there was arguably an even greater obstacle to reform than the obstreperousness of janissaries and Balkan Christians. This was the innate conservatism of the Ottoman elite and its suspicion that modernisation might come at the cost of westernisation.
The New Model was understandably opposed by the janissaries, who correctly saw it as a threat to their own primacy. But the fact that it relied on European-style training and command structures was also seen by conservatives as an unsettling break with tradition. Much of the opposition to Selim came from the ulema, the clerical interpreters of Islamic law, who feared that reform would lead to European forms of education and European legal practices and hence the corruption of Ottoman Muslim values. Selim simply had not built up enough of a support base to overcome these forces. In addition he was faced, by 1806, with simultaneous Serbian revolt and war with Russia, to say nothing of the continuing unruliness of warlords such as Ali Pasha and Pasvanogjlu.
Matters came to a head in May 1807, when the 'delicate and precarious balance' between reformers and their opponents broke down.5 An alliance of janissaries, conservative notables and ulema staged a revolt in Constantinople and deposed Selim, who preferred to accept defeat rather than risk civil war by calling on the New Model for support. Selim's cousin was made Sultan Mustafa IV and a conservative government promptly disbanded the New Model. Enough of Selim's adherents, however, had fled to the provinces to make possible a counter-coup, led by Mustafa Pasha Bayraktar. When Mustafa Pasha's army entered Constantinople in July 1808, the conservatives managed to kill Selim before being toppled themselves and executed, and the last surviving member of the imperial house was installed as Mahmud II (1808—39). Mahmud's position was nevertheless precarious: the bulk of Mustafa Pasha's forces had no sooner been sent back to the Russian front than the conservatives struck again, killing Mustafa Pasha and retaining Mahmud on the throne, on condition that reform was abandoned.
Mahmud II, as one historian justly notes, was 'a man of incredible patience'.6 Isolated and mistrusted, he spent years winning over religious conservatives by donations to schools and mosques and the ostentatious support of tradition. He gradually inserted men he could trust into positions of power and in particular built up an alternative military force in the non-janissary units of the army like the artillery, but without obviously Europeanising them. The janissaries, in the meantime, did themselves no favours by their continuing corruption and violence and their palpable inefficiency in various wars and revolts; on one occasion in 1825, at the height of the Greek revolt, they set fire to houses in the capital to demonstrate their indignation at being asked to fight. By June 1826, with great power intervention on behalf of the Greeks looming, Mahmud felt strong enough to strike, on the basis that janissary indiscipline was imperilling the security of the empire. The janissaries were provoked to revolt by rumours of renewed attempts to reform them, but this time the sultan had enough military and popular backing to crush them. Janissaries in Constantinople and the provinces, denounced as 'a useless and insubordinate body', were literally slaughtered and their reign of terror ended.7
Free at last, Mahmud concentrated on administrative changes, which laid the groundwork for more far-reaching reforms later. Officials were paid salaries instead of being expected to do their jobs for a fee. Something like a 'cabinet' of ministers was formed, with specific administrative remits. A post office was created in 1834 and in the same year permanent embassies in foreign capitals were established. This last, together with the founding in 1833 of a Translation Office for teaching officials foreign languages, had an incalculable effect by introducing an increasing number of Ottoman public servants to outside customs and outside ways of thinking. The first Ottoman newspaper, the weekly Takvim-i Vekayi (Calendar of Events), was started by the government in 1831 to provide officials and foreigners with the texts of laws and basic news, but proved the prototype for other journals. Mahmud even dared to resume the European-style organisation of the army and in 1835 entrusted this
To a young Prussian, Helmut von Moltke, more famous as the later military genius of German 'unification'.
These reforms, however, came too late and were not enough. The Empire as we have seen was not strong enough to suppress the Serbian and Greek revolts, far less avert defeat by Russia in 1829. Even before Russia's intervention in the Greek revolt Mahmud had been forced to turn for backup to the most powerful Ottoman warlord of all, Mohammed Ali of Egypt, and to promise him Crete and the Peloponnesus as a reward. The rise of the Albanian-born Mohammed Ali was itself symptomatic of the Empire's weakness. Most humiliatingly of all, when Mohammed Ali decided to invade Syria in 1832, as compensation for being denied the Peloponnesus, Mahmud's forces were soundly defeated at Konya in the heart of Anatolia in December. Constantinople itself was saved only by the paradox of Russian support. In return for signing the Treaty of Hunkar Iskelesi in July 1833, which guaranteed Russia closure of the Straits to foreign warships in time of war, Mahmud bought protection from Mohammed Ali, albeit at the cost of leaving him in control of Syria. In 1839 Mahmud attempted to regain Syria, but the result was catastrophic. The Ottoman army was again defeated at Nezib in June, after Moltke had recommended a tactical withdrawal and the Ottoman commander had refused, revealingly, on advice from the ulema attached to the army, who were convinced that 'the cause of the sultan was just; Allah will come to his aid, and all retreat would be a dishonour'.8 Mahmud died before learning of this, but in the meantime the Ottoman fleet had deserted to the Egyptians. The 'Mohammed Ali crisis' was eventually resolved when the great powers ejected the Egyptians from Syria, but it induced the Porte to recognise Mohammed Ali as hereditary Pasha of Egypt. A 'Convention of the Straits', in 1841, effectively internationalised this vital strategic waterway, closing it to all foreign warships in peacetime. The sultan could not even control his own doorstep.
Despite these disastrous events, the accession of the 16-year-old Abdulmecit I (1839—61) was nevertheless the start of the most concerted attempt yet at reform, the period of the Tanzimat (Reordering). This was due to the emergence by this stage of a certain class of Ottoman official, committed to the preservation of the Empire and yet more alive to the need for modernisation and the value of western examples than had hitherto been the norm. Abdulmecit's first grand vezir, Mustafa Resit Pasha, was the archetype, having travelled widely and served as a diplomat in Paris and London. Rejit Pasha's two principal proteges and coadjutors, Ali Pasha and Fuat Pasha, followed him up a similar career ladder and alternated in the highest offices with him and after his death.
The defining document of the Tanzimat was the Hatt-i Serif (Imperial Rescript) of Gulhane, the courtyard of the sultan's palace where the decree was read out on 3 November 1839. This announced three main resolutions with potentially revolutionary implications. All subjects of the sultan, regardless of religion, were entitled to 'security for life, honours and fortune'; there would henceforth be 'a regular system of assessing and levying taxes';
And the levying of troops would be equally regular.9 In effect the Empire was saying that all subjects were equal before the law, with equal rights as well as responsibilities. Christians were entitled to fair treatment in courts, even vis-a-vis Muslims; all subjects would be taxed fairly and proportionately, and all subjects would be liable to conscription.
The Gulhane rescript was obviously intended to convince the great powers that the Empire was still a going concern, intent on rejuvenation. It was equally, however, an attempt to win over the Empire's millions of subjects, so many of whom were disaffected, especially in the Balkan provinces. Whether the new-found rights of non-Muslims could be reconciled with the traditional dominance of Muslims was another matter; certainly the decree's authors hedged their bets when they also represented it as a 'return' to traditional Ottoman values. Whatever the rhetoric, the basic aim was undoubtedly a greater centralisation and control from the centre.
In 1840 a new legal code was issued, formally based on strict equality before the law. Taxes, formerly collected by governors or tax 'farmers', who extorted extra for their own profit, were now entrusted to salaried officials responsible to the sultan's treasury. In administrative terms provincial governors were now to be assisted by councils of notables, 13 in number, of which 7 would be officials and the rest local notables, and include non-Muslims. Below this were local councils of five, one of whose members had to be a nonMuslim notable. The armed forces, especially the army, were subjected to a thoroughgoing reorganisation along regimental lines, and a reserve force was established in which ex-conscripts were enrolled for seven years. Commissariat supply depots were created and a rudimentary educational network for recruits was set up.
Admirable though these reforms were, their practical implementation was more problematical. To begin with there were simply not enough educated and trained bureaucrats to go round, and in many corners of the Empire the sultan's ordinances remained paper only, or met with deliberate obstruction. Then, too, the collection of taxes was necessarily an imperfect exercise, with the result that the government frequently could not pay for its own reforms. The poll tax on non-Muslims was not even abolished until 1855, at which point the government also ruled that non-Muslims were entitled to bear arms and were thus, in theory, liable to be conscripted. In practice Christians preferred to buy their way out of military service, and the Ottoman army was happier not recruiting them. And although the reformers were granted a relatively long period of calm in international affairs, the outbreak of the Crimean conflict set things back generally. The government was obliged to cease construction of all public works and even to suspend council officials' salaries. Apart from the expenses of the war itself, an influx of hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees, expelled from Russia at the war's end, imposed an additional burden on the state.
At the peace negotiations in Paris the great powers, assuming a collective responsibility for the Empire's vassal states in the Balkans, also insisted on a reiteration of Ottoman intentions of reform. The result was the Hatt-i Humayun of 18 February 1856, which again proclaimed the complete equality before the law of all the sultan's subjects. As the Empire's subsequent history shows, this good intention proved easier to announce than to fulfil. Instead, most of the modernisation that took place in the post-Crimean period was in physical infrastructure and technical education rather than in political and social institutions. Slowly the Empire began to construct a railway system, to bind its domains together by telegraph, and to acquire a small cadre of native engineers, physicians and technocrats.
Yet with modernisation came also, in the end, foreign debt. In 1854, after consciously resisting the temptation hitherto, the Ottoman government bowed to the exigencies of the Crimean War and took out its first overseas loan.10 Thereafter the Ottoman state debt ballooned from year to year, and as the interest on the debt increased so too did the Empire's vulnerability to outside pressure, and its potential inability to continue modernisation and hence ensure its own internal stability. By the time Ali Pasha, the last of the original Tanzimat generation, died in 1871, the Ottoman imperium was about to be rocked to its foundations by a combination of bankruptcy, nationalist revolt and foreign intervention.
World History
