The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire (16 page)

Selim III—that ‘Most Exalted, Most Excellent, Omnipotent, Magnanimous and Invincible Prince’ (the salutation is Napoleon’s)—had promised much and accomplished
little. In the end, prejudice and convention triumphed over his will to reform. In one sense Selim was a would-be saviour of the Empire, rejected by his people because they could not understand
him. Perhaps his main achievement was negative, a warning to later Ottoman reformers how not to refurbish their inheritance. Yet in two respects the dramatic climax to Selim’s reign possessed
lasting significance. It showed the revived importance of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles as vital strategic guard-posts of the Empire, essential to be kept in good repair and held by troops whose
loyalty was beyond suspicion. And it also emphasized the oddest feature of Ottoman rule in these years of arrested decline: the extent to which, as in an older Mediterranean civilization, nominal
government of a vast empire in three continents still depended upon the mood of a single city. With the politics of Constantinople counting for so much and the Sultan’s distant subjects
receiving so little attention in the capital, it is hardly surprising if movements for local autonomy, which even before Selim’s accession had cost the Ottomans direct sovereignty over many
outlying provinces, were becoming clearly defined expressions of separatist sentiment.

Mustafa Pasha Bayraktar perceived the danger, for he had spent much of his life consolidating a virtual satrapy along the lower Danube. During his sixteen-week Grand
Viziership he summoned the powerful notables of the empire to the capital for a conference to discuss reform.
²⁰
In the last days of September 1808 the
heads of over-mighty families arrived from inner Anatolia, from Karaman, Aleppo and the Lebanon, and from southern Rumelia. Of those who did not care to travel so far from their power base, most
sent deputies. Yet, sound though the idea of such a conference was in itself, once again little was achieved. The notables pledged loyalty to the Sultan and respect for the Grand Vizier as his
sovereign representative, but they safeguarded their local rights so jealously that Mahmud II rejected their agreement. In retrospect, the greatest interest of the gathering is in noting those who
thought themselves so independent that this first initiative of Sultan Mahmud’s reign was of no concern to them. From Bayraktar’s conference there were two outstanding absentees. There
was no Ali Pasha of Ioánnina: the lord of southern Albania and the Greek mainland did not even send one of his sons, but was represented by a single frightened nominee, attended by his own
bodyguard. Most significantly, from Muhammad Ali in Cairo there came no one at all.

C
HAPTER
6

M
AHMUD
II, T
HE
E
NIGMA

O
VER A CENTURY AND A HALF AFTER HIS DEATH
, M
AHMUD
II remains the most puzzling of the thirty-six Ottoman Sultans. We know what
he looked like because his enlightened views allowed artists to paint several portraits. All show a vigorous, broad-chested man, haughtily conscious of his sovereignty; a well-trimmed dark beard
emphasizes the paleness of his face. Most of all we notice the ‘large black peculiar eyes which looked you through and through and which were never quiet’, as a Scottish traveller,
Charles MacFarlane, commented—and as Byron, too, observed on the one occasion he was admitted to the audience chamber.
¹
But, although we may
recognize him framed on a wall, the inner man eludes us. Was he a despot or a reformer, a capricious betrayer of trust or a dedicated ruler of vision, a muddler who plunged into disastrous wars or
a shrewd statesman who preserved his Empire from rapacious neighbours? Should we think of him as the ‘Infidel Sultan’ who imposed European ways on the Islamic faithful, or as
Mahmud
Adli
(‘Mahmud the Just’), like Turks today? The contrasts seem endless. Mahmud is one of history’s more enigmatic figures; he defies over-simplified docketing as a
‘good’ or ‘bad’ ruler.

Yet the attempt has been made. Harold Temperley, writing shortly before the fall of the Ottoman Empire, thought he was ‘the greatest sovereign since the days of Suleiman’, a Sultan
who, acceding when ‘all was chaos at Constantinople’, ensured by percipient statecraft that ‘the marvellous vitality of the Turkish Empire was soon to reassert itself.’ From
across the Atlantic later historians, too, pay tribute to Mahmud ‘the
determined reformer’, ‘the Ottoman Westernizer’.
²
And in Istanbul the epitaph on the Sultan’s
turbe
in Yenicerila Caddesi recalls ‘A great Sovereign, just and wise, the sun to his empire, He who opened the
gate of the East to new life’.

Contemporaries were more critical. Stratford Canning, later Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, the most famous of British ambassadors, remembered Mahmud as ‘in temper and policy a despot and a
caliph’, a ruler whose ‘natural abilities would hardly have distinguished him in private life. He had no scruple of taking life at pleasure from motives of policy or interest.’
Adolphus Slade, a British naval officer who spent many years at Constantinople, complained of Mahmud’s stubborn inflexibility; reform, Slade argued, removed natural checks on a Sultan’s
despotism, ‘accomplishing the entire subversion of the liberties of his subjects’; and, after four years in Ottoman service, the great Prussian soldier Helmuth von Moltke considered
Mahmud’s qualities as essentially destructive: he would ‘raze to the ground any other authority within the compass of his Empire’, and yet he lacked the skill to ‘set up his
own building in its place’. Moltke scorned the analogy often drawn between Mahmud’s services to the Ottoman Empire and Peter the Great’s achievements in Russia: while the Tsar
acquired strategically valuable land to expand his empire north and south, Mahmud lost historic possessions in two continents.
³

Yet, whatever their reservations, contemporary critics and later commentators agree that from his accession until the last weeks of his life Mahmud recognized the need for change in the Ottoman
state. Romanticists like to believe he was introduced to the concept of enlightened despotism in his youth by the ‘French Sultana’ said to have been his mother, Aimée Dubucq de
Rivery. More plausibly, it seems possible that he was influenced by the unfortunate Selim III in the months the fallen Sultan and the heir-apparent spent confined together in the
kafe.
Mahmud’s first years on the throne were certainly overshadowed by memories of Selim’s fate, and by a fear of renewed violence in the capital. He showed no inclination to live in the
Stamboul palace where he had so narrowly escaped death at the hands of his half-brother. It remained the Grand Seraglio, the formal residence of the Court, but Mahmud dined
and slept in a smaller and more defensible palace, across the Golden Horn at Besiktas. From there an imperial caique carried the Sultan in state to the Topkapi Sarayi for official
ceremonies.

For four years after his half-brother’s death Mahmud was still the only male member of the dynasty. In December 1812 an Ottoman prince was born in the palace, after a lapse of more than a
quarter of a century, but the child was sickly and died in infancy. The Sultan’s continued good health therefore remained essential in order to ward off that old bogey, an empire
disintegrating in a power struggle between rival notables. Mahmud faced a double task: he had to safeguard his position, while not offending powerful sections of the community; and he had to
convince the other powers that the Ottoman Empire was still an effective unitary state. Small wonder that after those critical days in November 1808 he moved cautiously. Outwardly he seemed to
abandon all pretence of westernization, restoring the traditional corps of the Ottoman armies and ignoring the recent improvisations of Selim and Mustafa Bayraktar. But gradually, and almost
imperceptibly, the Sultan placed his own supporters in key military and naval commands and in the principal offices of state, ready to revive the active rule of the sovereign. It was a slow
process, spanning eighteen troubled years in which there were few signs of renewed vitality at the heart of the Empire.

The beginning of this period coincided with the arrival in Turkey of Stratford Canning, who by mid-century was the best-known of ambassadors to the Porte, ‘the Great Elchi’. He
reached Constantinople at the end of January 1809, less than three months after Bayraktar’s death. At twenty-two he was beginning his diplomatic career as secretary to Sir Robert Adair, the
envoy sent to re-establish links with the Ottoman Empire; and already, before their ship was allowed into the Sea of Marmara, Adair had concluded a formal peace treaty at the Dardanelles, secretly
pledging British naval aid if the Sultan’s Aegean and Adriatic possessions were attacked by France, Austria or Russia. Somewhat surprisingly, the improvement of Anglo-Turkish relations was
soon entrusted to this young and inexperienced secretary, for within eighteen months Adair left for Vienna and Canning became ‘minister plenipotentiary to the Sublime Porte’. In all,
Stratford Canning—created Viscount Stratford
de Redcliffe in 1852—represented British interests at the Porte for twenty-three years (1810–12; 1824–7;
1831–2; 1841–6; 1848–58), and his opinions on Turkish affairs still commanded respect in London in the late 1870s, during the great Eastern Crisis. But at no later moment did
Ottoman prestige abroad count for so little as in these early years, when it seemed as if the Empire must soon fall. ‘Mahmud’, Stratford later recalled, ‘had everything to
apprehend from the circumstances in which he was placed. Both morally and materially his empire was bordering on decrepitude.’
⁴

After two years of uneasy truce, hostilities with Russia were resumed in December 1809, and the Ottoman army fared disastrously. Sultan Mahmud’s commanders suffered a series of defeats;
their ill-equipped troops were forced back from the Danubian fort of Izmail southwards across Bulgaria into the main Balkan mountain range. To Stratford Canning’s intense fury, although the
Sultan could no longer count on help from Napoleon, the French encouraged the Turks to carry on fighting against the Russians. The French embassy, he informed the Foreign Secretary, contained
‘the vilest scum that ever fell from the overboilings of the pot of Imperial Jacobinism’, and he spent much of his first eighteen months as ambassador finding honeyed phrases to flatter
the Grand Vizier and counter a series of French intrigues.
⁵
It was clear to all outside observers that, as Franco-Russian relations deteriorated from
the high point reached at Tilsit, Napoleon would use every means to prevent Tsar Alexander from concentrating his armies in Poland.

In October 1811 Stratford Canning’s persuasive attempts at mediation seemed close to success: Russo-Turkish peace talks opened in Giurgevo. But, as so often, the clash of Turkish pride and
Russian obstinacy made the discussions drag on inconclusively. Eventually, in May 1812, the imminence of a Napoleonic invasion induced the Russians to accept terms, and a peace treaty was at last
signed at Bucharest, generous to the defeated Ottomans. Although Bessarabia became a Russian province and limited autonomy was promised to insurgent Serbia, the Sultan’s authority was
confirmed in the Danubian Principalities (subject to the restoration in both Moldavia and Wallachia of the traditional hospodar administration).

The Bucharest settlement pleased Canning: the Turks had won concessions unattainable seven months before. He was well satisfied by the way the Sultan’s emissaries
had extricated their master from the Russian imbroglio. So, it seemed, was Mahmud; he declared himself ‘much gratified’ by the ‘English minister’s interest . . . in my royal
affairs.’ But when the
Grande Armée
crossed the river Niemen and thrust relentlessly forwards into Russia, the Sultan had second thoughts. In the autumn of 1812, with Napoleon
in Moscow and the Tsar’s armies apparently beaten, Mahmud decided that his emissaries had conceded far too much, and he took vengeance on them: two Phanariot brothers employed as translators
and intermediaries during the peace talks at Giurgevo were executed, while the plenipotentiary who signed the Treaty of Bucharest was sent into exile. By then, however, Stratford Canning had left
Turkey and was home in England.
⁶

Over the following three years the map of central and western Europe was dramatically redrawn through the collapse of the French Empire and the peacemaking of the Great Powers at the Congress of
Vienna. But, apart from the establishment of a British protectorate over Corfu and the seven Ionian islands, there were no significant changes in the Balkans or around the eastern Mediterranean.
The Bucharest settlement, together with Tsar Alexander’s Grand Design for a lasting European peace, thrust Ottoman affairs temporarily into the background: Mahmud II could face the immediate
problems of his Empire without the risk of intervention from formidable neighbours beyond the Danube. No help came to the Serbs when, in 1813, the convergence of three Turkish armies on their
nascent principality crushed the nine-year rebellion and forced Karadjordje Petrovic to flee to Hungary. And little interest was taken by the European Powers in what was happening at the opposite
extremity of the Empire, in Mesopotamia, where the ruthless policies of Halet Effendi ensured a restoration of direct Ottoman rule. So impressed was Mahmud by Halet Effendi’s success in
Baghdad that, from 1813 onwards, he accepted this arch-traditionalist and former envoy to Napoleon’s court as his most trusted adviser.