Daily Life In The Ottoman Empire (5 page)

Despite the Serbian revolt that forced the Ottomans to
grant autonomy to a small Serbian principality in 1814–1815 and the Greek
Revolution, which succeeded in establishing an independent Greece in 1832,
Mahmud II was determined to reassert the authority of the central government by
building a modern army. As long as the janissaries survived, however, the
antireform forces could always rely on their support to challenge the authority
of the central government. Thus, the sultan abolished the janissary corps in
June 1826, but he could not create a new and strong army overnight. The absence
of a well-trained army undermined Ottoman attempts to maintain their rule over
Greece. But if the loss of Greece struck a devastating blow to Ottoman prestige
and power, it was the revolt of Muhammad Ali (Mehmed Ali), the governor of
Egypt, that brought the empire to the verge of extinction.

CHALLENGE FROM EGYPT

Muhammad Ali, originally an Albanian from northern Greece,
had emerged as the master of Egypt after building a strong and modern army with
direct assistance and support from France. Mahmud II, who was fully aware of
Muhammad Ali’s successes and his newly acquired military capability, asked for
his support when the Greek Revolution erupted. The defeat in Greece, however,
forced the governor of Egypt to withdraw his troops. Moreover, he lost his fleet
during the Greek campaign, and he could not receive any satisfactory
compensation from the sultan in Istanbul. The battles of the Greek Revolution
had demonstrated that the Ottoman army was in a sorry state. Initially,
Muhammad Ali had thought of building his own kingdom in North Africa by
attacking Algeria and Tunisia, but the French had acted faster by attacking and
occupying Algiers in July 1830.

With North Africa falling into the hands of the French,
Muhammad Ali and his son Ibrahim Paşa, who acted as his father’s army
commander, turned their attention eastward and attacked Palestine and Syria in
October 1831. In May 1832, the town of Acre fell, followed by Damascus in June.
By July, Ibrahim Paşa had routed Ottoman forces twice and established his
rule over the entire country. As in the case of the Greek Revolution, the
sultan refused an offer for a negotiated settlement, which allowed the Egyptian
army to push into Anatolia and defeat the Ottoman troops who had been sent from
Istanbul. By February 1833, the Egyptians had reached Kütahya in western
Anatolia. Mahmud II responded to the military reverses by opening negotiations
with European powers with the aim of securing their support against his
rebellious subject. When the British and Austrians turned down the request, the
sultan asked for military intervention from Russia, which agreed to provide it.
While the arrival of the Russian fleet, in February 1833, prevented Muhammad
Ali from marching his troops to Istanbul, it could not dislodge the Egyptian
forces from their newly conquered territories in Anatolia. To end the crisis,
the sultan agreed to sign the Treaty of Kütahya in April, and appointed
Muhammad Ali the governor of Syria. In July of the same year, he also signed
the Treaty of Hünkar Iskelesi with Russia, an eight-year defense pact that
obligated the Ottoman government to close the straits to all ships at time of
war between Russia and a foreign power.

Despite the peace with Muhammad Ali, the sultan was anxious
to strengthen his army and strike back at the disloyal governor of Egypt. The
British, greatly alarmed by the growing power and influence of Russia, viewed
Muhammad Ali as an ally of France, whose policies toward the Ottoman Empire had
forced the sultan to depend on the Russians for his survival. Meanwhile, the
sultan hoped to utilize British anxiety over Muhammad Ali to gain their support
for a campaign against him.

In 1838, the tension between the sultan and Muhammad Ali
erupted again when the latter stated his intention to declare his independence
from the Ottoman Empire. When his closest ally, France, opposed this
provocative move, Muhammad Ali backed down. The sultan was determined to secure
the support of Great Britain in a campaign to destroy Muhammad Ali. Using this
opportunity to expand its economic interests in the region, the British
government signed a commercial treaty with the Ottoman state in August 1838 that
confirmed British capitulatory privileges and opened the Ottoman markets to
British investment and trade. Despite warnings from the British, Mahmud II
mobilized a force against Muhammad Ali’s army in Syria. Once again, however,
Egyptian forces under the command of Ibrahim Paşa defeated the Ottoman
army, which had attacked Syria in June 1839. Less than a week later, Mahmud II
died in Istanbul after a long battle with tuberculosis.

TANZIMAT

To halt the disintegration of the Ottoman state, a small
group of Ottoman officials used the death of Mahmud II to embark on a new
program of governmental reforms, which came to be known as
Tanzimat
(Reorganization).
On 3 November 1839, the new Ottoman sultan, Abdülmecid (1839–1861), ordered his
ministers and dignitaries as well as representatives of foreign powers, to
gather in the rose garden of the Topkapi Palace, where his foreign minister,
Mustafa Reşid Paşa, read a decree entitled
Hatt-i
_¸
Serif-i
Gülhane,
the Noble Rescript of the Rose Garden. The document guaranteed the
subjects of the sultan security of life, honor, and property. It also promised
a regular system for assessing and levying taxes, as well as a just system of
conscription and military service. The royal rescript also committed the
central government to a number of essential reforms such as establishing a new
penal code, eradicating bribery, and creating a regular and just tax system
that would eliminate inequities and special privileges, such as tax farming.
Thus, the imperial decree demonstrated a new commitment by the sultan and his
advisors to the rule of law, the equality and fair treatment of all Ottoman
subjects regardless of their religion and ethnicity, and the establishment of a
new justice system that protected their life and property against arbitrary
attacks and confiscation.

In addition to the modernization of the empire’s
infrastructure, the Tanzimat period also witnessed a significant transformation
in the Ottoman educational system. Mahmud II had introduced the
Ruşdiye
(adolescent) schools, which provided a secular education for male students
who had completed the
mekteps
(the traditional schools devoted to the
study of the Quran). The principal objective for the creation of modern schools
was to train a new educated elite capable of administering an empire. The fear
of opposition from conservatives, however, slowed down educational reform and
forced the reformers to attach modern schools to various governmental
ministries and bureaus. Thus, the first medical and engineering schools in the
Ottoman Empire were introduced as academic units within a military school. The
introduction of modern educational institutions also suffered from a lack of
adequate funding and the absence of well-trained teachers and instructors.
Despite these difficulties, a new bureaucracy, which was four to five times
larger than the imperial administration and relied heavily on graduates from
the modern schools, was created.

Finally, the men of Tanzimat tried to create a modern
financial structure and an efficient tax collection system that would provide
the central treasury with sufficient funds to support governmental reforms. The
“main thrust” of their financial reforms was “to simplify the collection of
revenues” by delegating “the responsibility of tax collection to the salaried
agents of the government, rather than governors, holders of prebendal grants,
or other intermediaries of the classical system.”

Despite their best efforts to focus on reform, the men of
the Tanzimat faced serious challenges both from internal rebellions and foreign
aggression that ultimately undermined their efforts and resulted in the
disintegration of the empire. In October 1840, the Ottomans and the British
began to exert military pressure on Muhammad Ali, forcing his troops to
evacuate Palestine and Syria in February 1841. The sultan, however, issued a
decree granting Muhammad Ali and his family the right to rule Egypt. The second
important foreign policy crisis of the Tanzimat era was the Crimean War, which
forced the Ottoman Empire to declare war on Russia in October 1853. By acting
as the big brother and protector of Serbia, the Danubian Principalities, and
the sultan’s Orthodox Christian subjects, Russia intended to replace both the
Ottoman Empire and Austria as the dominant power in the Balkans. The ultimate
goal of Russian foreign policy was to create a series of satellite states that
depended on Russian protection and support for their political survival. During
this time, Catholic and Orthodox churches debated over their right to various
holy sites in Jerusalem, with Russia championing the Orthodox position and
France that of Rome. In 1852, the Ottoman government announced its decision on
the question of Christian Holy Places in Palestine and sided with the French
position. The Russian government was outraged, and Tsar Nicholas I ordered a
partial mobilization of his army to back a new series of demands, including the
Russian right to protect the sultan’s Orthodox Christian subjects. Confident
that it would receive support from Great Britain, France, and Austria, the
Ottoman government rejected the Russian demands. When the tsarist forces invaded
the Danubian Principalities, the Ottoman Empire declared war on Russia.

As the British and the French naval forces crossed the
Turkish Straits on their way to the Black Sea, the Ottomans fought the Russian
navy at Sinop, where the Ottoman fleet was destroyed and thousands of sailors
were killed. After negotiations collapsed in March 1854, France and Great
Britain declared war on Russia. Fearing an attack from Austria, the Russian
forces withdrew from Wallachia and Moldavia. The military campaigns that
followed, particularly the attack on Sevastopol, which was occupied in October
1855, forced Russia to sue for peace.

While the representatives of European powers were arriving
at the peace conference in Paris in February 1856, the sultan, under pressure
from France and Great Britain, issued a second major reform decree, the
Hatt-i
Hümayun,
or the Imperial Rescript, committing his government to the
principle of equality of all Ottoman subjects. The Treaty of Paris, signed in
March 1856, forced Russia to withdraw from Wallachia and Moldavia, which, along
with Serbia, were to regain their autonomy under Ottoman rule. Russia’s access
to the Danube was blocked by its surrender of southern Bessarabia to Moldavia.
That famous river, as well as the Turkish Straits, was declared open to ships
of all countries and the Black Sea was demilitarized. Russia was also obliged
to withdraw its forces from eastern Anatolia, including the city of Kars, which
it had occupied during the war. The Crimean War and the Treaty of Paris
resulted in the de facto inclusion of the Ottoman Empire in the “Concert of
Europe” that had tried to maintain the balance of power on the continent since
the defeat of Napoleon and the convening of the Congress of Vienna in 1814. The
territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire was, thus, theoretically preserved
and Russia’s expansion into southeast Europe contained.

With Russian aggression checked, the leaders of Tanzimat
could once again focus on the implementation of their reform agenda. The
Crimean War had been very costly and forced the Ottoman government to apply for
high interest loans that eventually undermined the economic independence of the
state. The accumulation of significant debt to European banks and the
continuous struggle to generate sufficient revenue to repay them undermined
efforts to reform the government for the remainder of the 19th century.

OTTOMAN CONSTITUTION

After the death of Âli Paşa, the last great statesman
of the Tanzimat era in September 1871, several grand viziers came and went,
while Sultan Abdülaziz (1861–1876) became increasingly involved in running the
everyday affairs of the empire, thus introducing an element of chaos. Then, in
the early hours of Tuesday, 30 May 1876, a small group of officials and army
commanders led by the reform-minded statesman Midhat Paşa, who had served
as governor of Nish (1861–1868) and Baghdad (1869–1872), carried out a peaceful
military coup. A nephew of Abdülaziz, Prince Murad, was brought out of his
residence to the ministry of war and declared the new sultan.

Before the new monarch could establish himself, however,
news of Abdülaziz’s sudden death was announced to a shocked populace. The body
of the deposed sultan had been discovered in his private bedroom, his wrists
slashed with a pair of scissors, leading many to conclude that he had been
murdered. To diffuse the rumors of assassination, the government called on
doctors from several foreign embassies in Istanbul to examine the body and
offer their medical opinion on the cause of death, which was officially
declared a suicide. The events profoundly affected the new sultan, Murad, who
suffered a nervous breakdown. Accordingly, Midhat and his colleagues decided to
depose Murad in favor of his brother, who ascended the Ottoman throne in August
as Abdülhamid II. Meanwhile, Midhat Paşa was appointed grand vizier in
December, and shortly after, the first Ottoman constitution was introduced.

These momentous events in Istanbul took place in the
context of major developments in European power politics and another crisis in
the Balkans that erupted when Serbia and Montenegro attacked the Ottoman Empire
in July 1876. With chaos and uncertainty reigning in Istanbul and revolt and
instability spreading to the rural communities in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Russia
had pushed for military intervention by Serbia and Montenegro. This Pan-Slavic
project designed by Russia failed when Ottoman troops struck back, defeating the
Serbs and forcing them to sue for peace. Russia then instigated a nationalist
uprising in Bulgaria, which was crushed by Ottoman forces with heavy casualties
and massacres of the civilian population. This allowed the tsar to demand that
the Ottoman Empire introduce reforms and grant autonomy to the Bulgarian
people. Recognizing the threat of Russian intervention in the Balkans, the
British government intervened and called for the convening of an international
conference to meet in Istanbul with the intention of diffusing the possibility
of another war between Russia and the Ottoman Empire. On the first day of the
conference, 23 December 1876, however, the Ottoman delegation shocked the
European participants by announcing that a constitution had been promulgated
and that any attempt by foreign powers to press the Ottoman state into
introducing reforms in its European provinces was unnecessary since, under the
new political regime, all Ottoman subjects would be treated as equals with
their rights protected and guaranteed by the government.