The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire

by Alan Palmer

  With bubonic plague spreading among his troops, Bonaparte abandoned the siege of Acre. General Kléber defeated the sipahi cavalry at Mount Tabor on 16 April and, on this victorious note, the French retired from Syria to Egypt. With British and Russian naval backing, a convoy of sixty vessels brought 15,000 ‘New Order’ troops and Janissaries to the Egyptian coast in mid-July; they landed at Abu Qir (Aboukir) without waiting for the arrival of their horse transports, and threatened the French base at Alexandria; but they could not prevent the infiltration of their lines by the battle-hardened French infantry, and were scattered by Murat’s cavalry. French reports of their victory emphasized the folly of the Janissaries, who showed greater interest in securing ‘trophies’ by decapitating wounded prisoners than in regrouping to meet the enemy’s next assault.

  Napoleon never again fought personally against Ottoman troops. By mid-October he was in France; a month later he became First Consul. As the Ottoman Empire had joined the Second Coalition, the war continued after Bonaparte left Egypt. In March 1801 an Ottoman army, with British military and naval backing, landed successfully near Alexandria and, in a seven-month campaign, forced the capitulation of the hard-pressed and deserted survivors of the Armée de l’Orient. A peace treaty was signed at Amiens in the following summer.15

  It had been a bitter war, especially so long as Napoleon still aspired to become ‘Emperor of the East’. His troops broke faith and committed atrocities at Jaffa; and, after two rebellions in Lower Egypt, he ordered the execution of Muslim hostages in Cairo. Selim III, for his part, had assumed a proper anti-French stance. He confiscated French property; he even worked with the Russians, allowing a fleet to pass through the Straits, while a Russo-Turkish military condominium replaced the pro-French regime set up in the Ionian Islands on the fall of the Venetian Republic. But at heart Selim remained a francophile, eager to turn to Paris for aid and advice at the earliest opportunity. It is tempting to speculate on what might have happened in 1798–9, had Talleyrand gone on his projected mission to Constantinople and achieved such diplomatic success that the ‘Sultan and French army’ alliance of Bonaparte’s proclamation was a reality before the Armée de l’Orient set foot in Selim’s Egyptian lands.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE STRANGE FATE OF SULTAN SELIM

  AS SOON AS THE PEACE TREATY HAD BEEN SIGNED AT AMIENS in June 1802, Selim III seemed to slip easily back into the traditional friendship with France. Confiscated property was restored, the favourable commercial concessions which had facilitated the growth of a richly rewarding trade in the Levant were renewed, and the French were assured of access for their merchantmen to the Black Sea ports. Yet there remained deep suspicion and mistrust. French policy was devious. General Horace-François Sébastiani was sent on a mission to Syria and Egypt in the autumn to reassert French influence in a troubled area, either openly or subversively. At the same time, to show respect for the Sultan, the First Consul appointed a distinguished soldier as ambassador: General Guillaume Brune, a one-time revolutionary poet and law student, had fought at Arcola and Rivoli, and in 1799 had repelled an Anglo-Russian invasion of Holland. Selim’s choice of emissary to Paris was stranger: Mehmed Said Halet Effendi was a Muslim fanatic, ashamed to be sent to the evil capital of so hateful a land of infidels.

  The return of peace put an end to Selim’s collaboration with the feudal notables in Syria, the Lebanon and Anatolia. Yet, despite Sébastiani’s intrigues, from Egypt there came at first a firm assertion of the Sultan’s suzerainty and a steady flow of tribute money. In part this was a legacy of good French rule, but it owed more to the perception and carefully calculated loyalty of Muhammad Ali, a tobacco merchant from Kavalla born in the same year as Napoleon, who had arrived in Egypt as a junior officer in an Albanian regiment and won rapid promotion by defeating two Mameluke leaders who were seeking to recover their old ascendancy. The Sultan appointed Muhammad Ali provincial wali (governor) in May 1805: but as early as 1803 he was grafting ‘New Order’-style reforms on to the framework of a Bonapartist administration. This creation of a westernized autocracy in Egypt was to take Muhammad Ali some thirty years.1

  Less gratifying to Selim were reports from the western Balkans, where Ali Pasha had hoped to add the Ionian Islands and the old Venetian enclaves along the coast to his growing dominions in Albania and Epirus. The uneasy Russo-Turkish collaboration in Corfu checked Ali’s ambitions, but he continued to rule from Ioánnina in great state, establishing his own diplomatic contacts with European Powers, inviting foreign experts to train his troops and, when it suited him, ignoring orders and decrees from Constantinople. Further north, the line of the Danube along the present Bulgarian-Roumanian frontier was controlled by two veteran warlords, Osman Pasvanölü Pasha of Vidin in the west, and Tirsinikliölü Ismail further east. Both were dead by the summer of 1806, and effective military power was then exercised by Mustafa Bayraktar (‘the standard bearer’), nominal commander of the Sultan’s troops on the vital eighty-mile sector between Rushcuk and the fortress of Silistria, in reality the master of much of Bulgaria. Across the Danube, the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia had enjoyed considerable autonomy since the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainardji; they were ruled by Christian hospodars appointed by the Sultan, Constantine Ypsilantis and Alexander Maruzzi. Both were regarded by the more reactionary members of the Divan as virtual agents of the Tsar.

  In Serbia Selim III’s reign opened with a period of mild administration. The Serbs were even allowed to raise their own national militia in order to protect themselves from Pasvanölü’s marauders. But the advance towards autonomy was abruptly halted when the Sultan sought the backing of the war-lords to hold the line of the Danube. In February 1804 five years of exploitation and misrule by the Janissaries stimulated a national Orthodox Christian rebellion in the wooded hills of the Šumadija district, between the rivers Drina and Morava. The Serbian leader, Karadjordje Petrovic—once a pig-dealer, and an ex-sergeant of the Austrian army—insisted that he was fighting to secure acceptance of Sultan Selim’s reforms by the Janissaries and the local beys; and there was some truth in this assertion. Selim was at first more troubled by Ali Pasha’s pretensions than by the Serbian revolt, even though Karadjordje gained control in December of Belgrade and the towns of Smederevo and Sabac. Only in 1805, when the Russians began giving the Serbian movement active support, did Selim awaken to the full danger of recent events in the Šumadija.2

  The wide disruption in so many outlying provinces increased the importance of the diplomatic power game being played out in the capital. From where would the Sultan gain the strongest support? British naval power was of little help in keeping order along the Danube or in the Balkans. Should he look to the French army, or risk the invidious embrace of the Russian bear? His inclination had been to preserve his independence by insisting on neutrality when Europe went to war again in 1803 and Pitt began to build a Third Coalition. But the weakening power of Ottoman rule was spread over too many sensitive areas for there to be any real hope of peace. Wiser emissaries than Brune and Mehmed Effendi might have resurrected the Franco-Turkish alliance, but in Paris the Sultan’s envoy was regarded as a bad joke, while Brune was at least as poor an ambassador as Bernadotte had been six years earlier in Vienna.

  General Bernadotte could, when he chose, exercise a certain charm of manner. General Brune could not, for he had none. He irritated the Divan and the Porte by his arrogance, and by insisting on courtesies due to his rank and that of his master in Paris.3 Although Selim III had accepted the beheading of a French king without protest and the planting of a tree of liberty on Turkish soil, he reacted strongly against the assumption of an imperial title by a commoner-soldier. He saw no reason to acknowledge the former invader of Egypt and Syria as ‘Emperor of the French’, nor to recognize the high status accorded to Brune in May 1804, when Napoleon made him the ninth senior Marshal of the Empire. Brune, convinced that Selim needed French backing for his army reforms, complained of an insult to his sovereign and
demanded his passports, confident that the Porte would give way and apologize. But the Grand Vizier indicated that Brune was perfectly free to return to Paris. Twice the ambassador delayed his departure, vainly hoping for a change of mood in Stamboul. By the autumn, when he at last accepted failure and sailed back down the Dardanelles, French influence counted for little, despite Selim’s personal inclinations. More was at stake in this curious quarrel than mere temperament or prestige. In the previous year almost a quarter of the grain from southern Russia had found its way to Marseilles through the Straits, much of it in fifteen vessels flying the tri-color flag.4 That trade was now at an end.

  French discomfiture was to Russia’s benefit. The Tsar’s ambassador, Alexander Italinskii, had upstaged Brune ever since their arrival on the Golden Horn in the same week in December 1802. Although Italinskii’s requests were unwelcome at the Sublime Porte, they were generally supported by convincing evidence. Russian consuls reported the infiltration of the Peloponnese by French agents, and French encouragement, not only of Ali Pasha and his family in Ioánnina, but of Wahhabi fundamentalist trouble-makers beyond the fringe of the Syrian desert. Reluctantly Selim turned towards an alliance with the Tsar. Russian vessels moved steadily through the Straits, enabling Admiral Dmitri Senyavin to concentrate a flotilla of five ships of the line and several thousand troops on Corfu.

  Napoleon, for his part, believed that half the Divan was in Russian pay. So, indeed, he told Selim, in a peremptory personal letter sent from Paris at the end of January 1805. ‘Have you, a descendant of the great Ottomans and emperor of one of the greatest of world empires, ceased to reign?’ Napoleon asked. ‘How do you come to allow the Russians to dictate to you? . . . Are you blind to your own interests? . . . I am writing to you as the only friend France still has in the Seraglio . . . Rouse yourself, Selim, make your supporters ministers . . . The Russians are your true enemies, because they wish to control the Black Sea and cannot do so without having Constantinople, and because they are of the Greek religion, which is the faith of half your subjects.’ It was a powerful plea to ‘France’s most ancient ally’. In effect, the letter told the Sultan to be his own master and restore cordial relations with France, or else face Napoleon’s wrath ‘. . . and I have never been a feeble foe’.5

  The unfortunate Selim had not ‘ceased to reign’, but his power was more circumscribed than any outside observer realized. At the very time Napoleon was drafting his letter, Selim was seeking to raise more troops for his ‘New Order’ army by ordering a general levy throughout the Balkan provinces. This measure would have deprived both war-lords and Janissaries of recruits and necessitated the transfer of some Janissaries to the new regiments. There were skirmishes between Janissary and New Order units in several districts of Rumelia; enlistment and training at Edirne was made impossible, for the Janissary commanders and local notables cut off supplies and imposed military ‘picket lines’ to exclude recruits from the city. Weakly Selim capitulated, fearing a march on the capital by insurgent forces.

  Beyond the frontiers there was a dramatic shift in the balance of power during these months of internal crisis for the Ottomans. More than 50,000 crack Austrian troops were forced to surrender to Napoleon at Ulm in October 1805; on 13 November the French entered Vienna; and on 2 December the Austrian and Russian Emperors were defeated in the decisive battle of Austerlitz. By the Treaty of Pressburg, three weeks later, the Austrians surrendered to France all the one-time Venetian lands in the Adriatic, theoretically making Dalmatia part of metropolitian France, and giving Napoleon a common frontier with the troubled Ottoman province of Bosnia. Soon afterwards Senyavin’s squadron from Corfu seized Cattaro (Kotor), partly to prevent the surrender of this fine natural anchorage to the French, but also to give the Russians contact with the Montenegrins and insurgent Serbs. Sultan Selim hesitated no longer. He refused to ratify the latest proposed alliance with the Tsar and, in February 1806, belatedly accorded Napoleon his recognition as Emperor. On August 9 yet another soldier-diplomat, that arch-intriguer General Sébastiani, arrived in Constantinople as ambassador. A military mission accompanied him, once more raising Selim’s hopes of creating the westernized, modern army he had sought for nearly twenty years.

  Sébastiani’s instructions, which the Emperor personally dictated, differ remarkably in tone from the letter sent to Selim eighteen months earlier.6 The instructions fall into two sections. The first lays down the qualities necessary for an ambassador to ensure that France is ‘treated as the most favoured Power’: ‘tact, subtlety and trust rather than arrogance, force or intimidation’; ‘no support of any rebel against the Porte . . . , in Egypt, Syria or any Greek island’; ‘the instilling of a feeling of confidence and security’. The second section shows what role Napoleon was prepared to assign to a westernized Sultanate. Significantly, like every later plan drafted in foreign chancelleries, it assumed that the Ottoman Empire would survive solely by grace of Europe’s sufferance.

  My unswerving objective in policy is to make a triple alliance between myself, the Porte and Persia, aimed directly or indirectly against Russia . . . All our negotiations must seek these points: (i) closure of the Bosphorus against the Russians . . . ; (ii) forbidding Greeks from sailing under the Russian flag; (iii) arming every fortification against the Russians; (iv) subduing [anti-Ottoman] rebels in Georgia and re-asserting the Porte’s absolute rule over Moldavia and Wallachia. I do not want to partition the empire of Constantinople; even were I offered three-quarters of it, I should refuse to do so. I wish to strengthen and consolidate this great empire and to use it, as it stands, against Russia.

  A Franco-Ottoman-Persian alliance would not merely protect the right flank of Napoleon’s armies as his empire thrust deeper into Eastern Europe: it would provide a corridor to the Caucasus and the frontiers of India. So intent was Napoleon on completing this grand strategic plan that a Persian envoy travelled to his headquarters in a remote Polish castle, while General Gardane was sent off on a diplomatic mission to Teheran.

  Napoleon’s grand strategy brought seven years of conflict to Russia and Persia and six years of war between Russia and the Ottoman Empire, fought mainly in modern Roumania, or down the Black Sea littoral of Georgia. No French troops participated in these campaigns. To Napoleon they were diversions. But the fate of the Ottoman capital was another matter for him: ‘Who is to have Constantinople? That is the crux of the problem’, he remarked, in slightly varied words, more than once.7 Paradoxically, in posing the Eastern Question in a broader form he aroused for the first time a British strategic interest in the Ottoman heartlands. In the short term, this diplomatic manoeuvring of arch enemies was to have a dramatic effect on events in Constantinople and on the fate of the Sultan.

  Selim was personally heartened by the Sébastiani mission. The General, a Corsican training for the priesthood when the Revolution secularized his thoughts and ambition, could claim an achievement denied any Ottoman commander: he had led cavalry into Vienna. Perhaps for this reason he was honoured as no ambassador before him, becoming the first non-Muslim envoy permitted to wear a sword in the Sultan’s presence. Of more practical value was the freedom he enjoyed to spread propaganda. The embassy printing press turned out Grand Armée bulletins in both Turkish and Arabic and, on Napoleon’s personal insistence, circulated them to ports throughout the Levant. The news, in mid-November, that the renowned Prussian army had been defeated at Eylau and scattered, made a deep impression. It strengthened Selim’s conviction that the French cause was invincible.

  Sébastiani’s coming had already led to swift changes in Ottoman policy.8 Within four days of the ambassador’s arrival the Sultan dismissed the allegedly pro-Russian hospodars in Wallachia and Moldavia. A month later he closed the Straits to Russian warships; and he went ahead with plans for doubling the number of ‘New Order’ troops. The Tsar’s ambassador, Alexander Italinskii, warned St Petersburg that the Turks had gone over to the French side; and under threat of an immediate Russian attack on the Bos
phorus, Selim wavered, even reinstating the deposed hospodars as a gesture of appeasement. But this came too late to change Russian policy. In the last week of November 1806 Moldavia and Wallachia were overrun and on 16 December the Sublime Porte declared war on Russia. At that moment General Sébastiani achieved an ascendancy at the Porte unmatched by any previous foreigner. He seemed to possess greater influence on Sultan Selim than the şeyhülislâm. He even succeeded in persuading Selim that to imprison an ambassador when declaring war on the sovereign whom he represented was a barbarous custom. Largely thanks to Sébastiani, Italinskii escaped incarceration; he found refuge with his family aboard HMS Canopus, an eighty-gun line-of-battle ship which had been at anchor in the mouth of the Golden Horn for three weeks.