by Alan Palmer
CHAPTER 8
SICK MAN?
MAHMUD II’S DEATH WAS MADE PUBLIC ON 1 JULY 1839 AND within twenty-four hours there was a minor palace revolution in Stamboul. The septuagenarian Mehmed Husrev Pasha seized the Grand Vizier’s seals of office (literally) and induced Abdulmecid to confirm him as head of an emergency government. A sixteen-year-old ruler might have fared far worse: although a cynical French ambassador called Husrev the ‘master-strangler’, he could at least claim a long experience of the Ottoman administrative system.1 As far back as 1801, Sultan Selim III had appointed him Governor of Egypt, the last before Muhammad Ali, and under Mahmud II he fought in the Peloponnese and against the Persians. For twelve years he was Grand Admiral of the Ottoman fleet and in 1827 he succeeded Hüseyin as serasker of the army, a post he held for another ten years. But age had made Husrev an arch-conservative, with many enemies. Like so many pillars of the Ottoman establishment, he had received generous gifts from Orlov at the time of the Unkiar Skelessi Treaty: now—six years later—one eminent rival, Grand Admiral Ahmed Fevzi, convinced himself that Husrev remained in Russian pay. So certain was he of Husrev’s likely betrayal of Ottoman interests that he committed an even greater act of treachery himself. Even before news of the Nezib disaster could be confirmed in the capital, Fevzi sailed his fleet across to Alexandria. There he surrendered it to the Viceroy of Egypt, Muhammad Ali.
The odds were therefore stacked heavily against the frail young Sultan: no navy in the Mediterranean; no field army to face Ibrahim in Anatolia. Nor could he hope to find sound currency in the treasury, for that department of state was so troubled with chronic deficits that Mahmud had authorized debasement of the coinage on seventy-two occasions in a thirty-one-year reign. Yet, fortunately, Abdulmecid acceded with two great assets: his mother, the Valide Sultana Bezmialem; and a promise of loyal support from the most skilled of his father’s westernizing reformers, Mustafa Reşid, who was a special envoy in London at the time of Mahmud’s death.2
Bezmialem, a Georgian said to have been a bath-attendant before entering the imperial harem, was only fifteen when she gave birth to Abdulmecid. At thirty-one she was still young enough to despise and mistrust the elder non-statesman who had made himself chief minister. She advised her son to allow Husrev to incur the odium of seeking terms from Muhammad Ali but urged him to resist the Grand Vizier’s attempts to advance his nominees to important offices of state. Abdulmecid duly played for time, awaiting Reşid’s return from England before taking any major decisions on policy. His mother had given him sound counsel. So shrewd was her judgement of men and their motives that the Valide Sultana continued to influence the choice of ministers until shortly before her death fourteen years later.
Bezmialem recommended Reşid to Abdulmecid because she believed he understood what Mahmud had been seeking to achieve in his reform programme. But Reşid had qualities of his own, too. By 1839 his command of French was so good that he could converse with King Louis Philippe without an interpreter. He had met Palmerston in London and Metternich in Vienna, and he knew what Europe thought of the Ottoman Empire. Of equal value to the Sultan was a mission Reşid had undertaken to Egypt four years before, enabling him to see for himself the kingly authority Muhammad Ali exercised in Cairo and Alexandria. Abdulmecid appointed Reşid as Foreign Minister, retaining Husrev as Grand Vizier until June 1840. But it was Reşid who, with a sound instinct for cultivating goodwill in Westminster and Paris, persuaded Abdulmecid to allow him to make the first dramatic public gesture of the reign, the promulgation on 3 November 1839 of the Imperial Rescript of the Rose Chamber.
The occasion was described by several ambassadors and other foreign visitors to Constantinople.3 All the higher dignitaries of Ottoman society, together with foreign envoys accredited to the Sublime Porte, gathered in the Gülhane (‘Rose Chamber’) gardens beyond the outer wall of the Topkapi Sarayi. There, in front of Grand Vizier Husrev, Reşid read out their sovereign’s first ‘Noble Rescript’, with Abdulmecid looking down on the assembly from a window of the Gülhane kiosk itself. The ‘Gülhane Decree’ let the outer world know it was Abdulmecid’s intention to reign as an enlightened Sultan. He would protect the lives and property of his subjects, introduce a code of justice asserting the equal status of Muslims, Christians and Jews before the law, institute a regular system of assessing and levying taxes; and he undertook to enhance and respect the consultative legislative councils favoured by his father, and to develop a fair method of conscripting his subjects for service in a modernized army and navy.
The ceremony in the Gülhane gardens, with the westernizing Foreign Minister prostrating himself twice before his Sultan and Caliph, impressed the foreign observers as Reşid had anticipated it would. ‘Theatrical’ but successful, was the Russian envoy’s verdict. ‘A victorious answer to those who say that this Empire cannot be saved by its ancient Government,’ Lord Ponsonby, the British ambassador, commented two days later in a dispatch to Palmerston. An event ‘fraught with incalculable advantage’, the Foreign Secretary replied early in December; ‘A grand stroke of policy, and it is producing great effect on public feeling here and in France.’4 Both Ponsonby and Palmerston had in mind the mounting impatience of the Russians with their Ottoman neighbour, and the inclination of successive governments in Paris to back Muhammad Ali in building up a financially viable and independent Egyptian state. Any move by the Sultan which indicated renewed vigour at the centre of his empire was welcome. For another three decades Ottoman decline was checked by a parallel process: the imposition of westernizing changes upon traditional society at home; and the bolstering of the imperial structure by other Great Powers seeking stability in order to stave off drastic revision of the map of Europe.
At first the renewal of war between the Sultan and Muhammad Ali in the spring of 1839 had tempted Nicholas I to intervene with war ships and soldiers. Surely, he argued, this provided the opportunity Orlov had foreseen in 1833, the moment when a Russian expeditionary force would be hailed on the Bosphorus as returning guardians of the Straits? Nesselrode was more realistic. Patiently, and with a cold reappraisal of the imperial state debt, he persuaded the Tsar not to risk all the uncertainty and expense of unilateral action. Thereafter Russia, Austria, Prussia, France and Great Britain appeared to act in concert; on 27 July 1839 a collective Note from the ambassadors of the five Powers indicated their wish to arbitrate in the Ottoman–Egyptian War. This willingness of ‘Europe’ to impose a settlement in the Levant came as welcome news for Reşid on his arrival home from London. It enabled him to stiffen Abdulmecid’s resistance to a peace party at court which favoured accepting, as speedily as possible, whatever demands Muhammad Ali might make.
Yet while the five Great Powers were prepared to recognize Muhammad Ali as the head of a new Egyptian dynasty, there was little cohesion among them.5 Austria, whose policy was still shaped by Metternich (Foreign Minister since 1809), favoured the maintenance and strengthening of the Sultan’s authority for two main reasons: a stable government in Constantinople would extend the trade concessions already enjoyed by steamship companies and mining concerns to other Austrian enterprises; while conversely, and of greater significance in Vienna, the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire would unleash Balkan nationalism, thereby threatening the existence of the multinational Habsburg monarchy. The Prussians closely followed the policy of their Austrian ally, although in the Berlin newspapers there was a certain grudging admiration for Ibrahim’s victorious army.
French diplomacy backed Muhammad Ali. The happy coincidence that he had been born at Kavalla under the same zodiacal sign of the same year as Bonaparte at Ajaccio was duly noted; ‘Napoleonic Legend’ romanticism was in fashion that summer. More prosaically, Parisian bankers hoped they might turn Muhammad Ali’s lands into a commercial satrapy dominating the Levant. For a variety of motives, the French therefore sought the inclusion of Syria and Lebanon—as well as the Arabian peninsula—in the territories of which he was overlord.
No other government agreed with the French. Palmerston feared that Muhammad Ali’s efficient army would threaten the shortest route to India; and complained that his monopoly of trade in the vast area over which he asserted Egyptian sovereignty would deprive the City of London of advantages accruing from the Anglo-Turkish commercial treaty which Sultan Mahmud had accepted ten months before his death. Tsar Nicholas I—or, rather, State Chancellor Nesselrode—also mistrusted Muhammad Ali’s ambitions. The Russians had good grounds for believing he was contemplating a grand alliance with the Persians, aimed at extending his empire into Mesopotamia in return for assisting the Qäjár Shah in Teheran to undermine the Tsar’s hold over the Muslims of the Caucasus and Turkestan. There was sufficient hostility to Muhammad Ali and his dynasty in both London and St Petersburg to foster an Anglo-Russian entente which was suspicious of the French and, since it was prepared to bolster up the Ottoman Empire as long as possible, could count on Austrian and Prussian support.
London now became a pivot for statesmen seeking to solve the Eastern Question. Nicholas I sent a special envoy with proposals for joint pressure on Muhammad Ali and for international agreement over closure of the Straits (the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus) to foreign warships in time of peace. At first the British cabinet disliked the idea of associating two dissimilar problems in a single agreement. But Nicholas persisted, and in July 1840 British, Russian, Austrian, Prussian and Ottoman plenipotentiaries concluded the Treaty of London, which closed the Straits to foreign warships in time of peace and presented a virtual ultimatum to Muhammad Ali.6 He was required to submit to the Sultan’s authority and settle for hereditary rule over Egypt, or else face joint intervention by the Great Powers. If he accepted these terms within twenty days he would also receive the right to administer Acre and southern Syria as Governor for life.
The Egyptians still had a formidable army: thirty-eight infantry regiments, more than ten thousand cavalry horses, and an artillery corps trained by Napoleonic veterans. It was spread over a huge area of the Levant and Crete, but Muhammad Ali also believed he could count on French naval support. Accordingly, he rejected the allied demand, thereby automatically forfeiting the offer of southern Syria. But he had gravely miscalculated the balance of forces. The French fleet did not intervene, leaving British and Austrian warships free to harry Ibrahim’s vulnerable line of communications. They bombarded the Lebanese coast in September and October 1840, while British and Austrian marines and Turkish infantry supported Druze rebels in the hills north of Beirut. As Ibrahim’s well-disciplined troops began to pull back towards the borders of Egypt, a British squadron bombarded and occupied Acre. Other ships blockaded the Egyptian coast.
The crisis was soon over. On 5 November Muhammad Ali concluded the Convention of Alexandria, which provided for the evacuation of Egyptian troops from Crete, Arabia and ‘all parts of the Ottoman Empire . . . not within the limits of Egypt’. The Ottoman fleet, moored in Alexandria since the wretched Fevzi’s defection, was allowed to sail back to the Bosphorus, and in February 1841 Sultan Abdulmecid formally published a decree which recognized Muhammad Ali as Viceroy for life, with his family assured of hereditary succession to the throne of Egypt. Ibrahim’s army was limited by treaty to a mere 18,000 men—although within eight years their number had increased almost fourfold. The signatories of the Treaty of London, now joined by France, guaranteed the Egyptian settlement, and in the Straits Convention of July 1841 reaffirmed the principle of closing the Dardanelles and Bosphorus to foreign warships in time of peace.7
With the departure of Ibrahim’s army from Anatolia and Syria, the Ottoman Empire was relieved from the only serious Asian threat to its existence prior to Allenby’s offensive at the end of the First World War. In London, Vienna and St Petersburg it was felt that an incompetent and decaying ‘Turkey’ had been saved, not by her own exertions, but by grace of the major European powers. This conviction sustained the fragile Anglo-Russian entente for several years; it prompted Tsar Nicholas to arrive unexpectedly in London at the end of May 1844, and to induce Nesselrode to go to England four months later, to press for concerted diplomatic action to forestall any future aggravation of the Eastern Question. As yet the Tsar was not prepared to put forward a partition plan (which would have aroused intense suspicion at Westminster), but from 1839 onwards he never wavered in his assumption that the Ottoman Empire was doomed, whatever palliatives might be proposed in Constantinople. The British, on the other hand, were prepared to wait upon events.8
These years saw Reşid waging a delicate campaign in the capital to persuade the Sultan to implement the promises implicit in the Gülhane Decree. Collectively the reform movement is known as the Tanzimat-i Hayriye (which might be translated ‘Auspicious Restructuring’, since the Turkish tanzimat is similar in meaning to the Russian perestroika). It was the most sustained attempt by any Ottoman minister to preserve the empire by centralizing authority and by secularizing, so far as possible, its autocratic character.9
As in earlier reigns, priority was given to reform of the army. The introduction of other changes depended, first and foremost, on military need; and the earliest stage of the Tanzimat may therefore be seen as emanating from what the old warrior Mehmed Husrev was prepared to concede as essential to building up an effective fighting force. The proposal to create a modernized army of a quarter of a million conscripts and to continue with earlier shipbuilding projects for a modern fleet required a full treasury, thus providing an obvious motive for reforming the system of taxation. But how could taxes be raised without closer administrative links between the capital and the provinces and without the improvisation of a new civil service? And good gunnery, accurate navigation, skilled accountancy, as well as efficient administration, all required better learning than the old religious foundations could give; hence the appointment in 1845 of a council of seven learned men who were to report on ways of developing a widespread secular educational system. On the other hand, the guarantees of property rights and of religious equality before the law, which had looked so impressive in the Gülhane Decree, held little appeal to the military mind. Where reforms of this character were even drafted, they remained ineffective—although, on paper, the new penal code of May 1840 looked an impressive step forward. Constantly the reformers were anxious not to provoke the ulema by legal reforms which ran counter to the şeriat. The Islamic code, which had once provided Suleiman the Magnificent with so sure a foundation of government, continued throughout the century to constrain the advocates of a new model Ottoman autocracy.
The Tanzimat reform era remains a contentious subject of study. Even its precise dates are in dispute. Recent historians analyse a long and almost continuous process, covering the years from 1839 to 1876, when Abdulmecid’s successor and half-brother Abdulaziz was deposed. Older commentators limited the Tanzimat to the 1840s, although they acknowledged a further phase of reform in the period after the Crimean War. They insisted that, even in the 1840s, there were interludes of ‘reaction’—times when, in Temperley’s revealingly reprehensive phraseology, no ‘Englishman’ was able ‘to drive orientals along new roads’.10 Reşid did indeed suffer setbacks, notably in 1841 when his plans for a system of provincial administration based upon the French model aroused such hostility from local tax-farmers and military governors that they were dropped, and he was sent off to Paris as ambassador. But he was back as Foreign Minister in 1845. Between September 1846 and January 1858 he was six times Grand Vizier.
Reşid did not foresee the problems of seeking to impose on a vast empire with poor communications changes to which the mass of the population remained indifferent. Much of his work was restricted to the area around the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn, and to towns having good sea links with the capital. An experiment in paper money (kaime) carrying interest, intended to relieve the treasury crisis of 1839–40, met with some success in Constantinople and Smyrna but caused new problems when shopkeepers began to hoard the notes so as to claim their eight per cent return each y
ear.11 Less progress was made in developing secular education than Reşid had hoped. Work on a much-heralded modernization of the university in Stamboul stopped when the walls were a few feet above the foundations, largely because of hostility from the ulema and the military authorities, alarmed by tales of student unrest in Germany and Central Europe. A shortage of trained teachers outside the ulema hampered Reşid’s plans for secondary schools (rusdiye) and only six, with a mere 870 boy pupils, were founded in the 1840s. In 1846, however, one of Reşid’s first tasks as Grand Vizier was to give his patronage to a teachers’ training college, appointing the gifted twenty- four-year-old writer and scholar Ahmed Cevdet as first principal. It is significant that by the time of Reşid’s death in 1858 the number of rusdiye had increased to forty-three, with 3,371 boy pupils.12
The appointment of Ahmed Cevdet, nineteenth-century Turkey’s ablest educational and judicial reformer, was a typical instance of Reşid’s gift for intellectual talent-spotting. His long ascendancy in government enabled Reşid to advance other westernizers whom he hoped would complete his work (though in later years several protégés became his rivals for office). Chief among them were the Stamboul shopkeeper’s son Mehmed Emin Ali, and Kececizade Mehmed Fuad who, emerging from an ulema family background, worked for fourteen years at the Porte translating French laws and manuals on administration. This continuity of personnel has encouraged the modern tendency to treat the Tanzimat as a single span of active reform giving Ottoman institutions a vitality foreign diplomats were too prejudiced to perceive. But the number of reformers was small, a compact community able to find inspiration from the Code Napoleon. Moreover, there was no certainty that experimental reforms would be allowed to mature. Measures to which ‘His Majesty the Most Noble, Most Powerful and Most Magnificent Sultan’ had deigned to consent could, by the same superlative sovereign, be even more speedily rescinded.
