Mahmut II had been a witness both to the limited successes of the Nizam-i Cedid and to the fall and death of his cousin Selim. He seems to have learnt his lessons well and also to have been a much more adept tactician. He started from an extremely weak position. He had been put into power by the Bayraktar, who himself was no longer there, and the only reason Mahmut II was left on the throne was that there was no other male successor available. He therefore had to move circumspectly and spent the first 15 years of his reign establishing a power base. This meant appointing trusted supporters to key positions in the scribal service, the ulema hierarchy and the army. His second aim was the reduction of the semi-independent ayan who had brought him to power. This he to a large extent accomplished. Between 1812 and 1817 the major Anatolian notables were brought under control, and between 1814 and 1820 the same happened in the Balkans. In Kurdistan the process took longer, but there too the power of the practically independent Kurdish princes, the mirs who had ruled over large tribal coalitions, was eventually broken. Here, the existing tribal structure of society meant that the removal of the princes and the inability of the central Ottoman government to replace them with effective central control led to a long period of anarchy, in which authority reverted to the tribal chiefs and to the religious leaders who built up their authority as mediators in inter-tribal conflicts.1 In the Arab provinces the restoration of Ottoman government authority over the notables took place only later, in the 1840s.
The methods employed in subduing the ayan, in the age-old Ottoman tradition, were peaceful where possible (bribes were given, titles conferred, hostages taken, divisions among the notables ably exploited). Open warfare was used only as a last resort, and before 1826 it was that of the traditional military establishment: mainly the janissaries. It is important to understand that, while the sultan was slowly strengthening his hold on the government, he had not yet broken with the scribal or military establishment. While proponents of reform were put into more and more important positions, the most powerful politician of these early years of Mahmut’s reign was Mehmet Sait Halet Efendi, a member of the ulema and former ambassador to Paris, with a generally conservative outlook. He was close to the janissaries and his efforts at, and success in, subjugating the ayan can also be seen as being motivated by a desire to strengthen the position of the janissary garrisons in the provinces, which were the great competitors of the notables.2
Lost territories: Serbia, Greece, Egypt
Mahmut and his servants succeeded in re-establishing control over most of the central Ottoman lands, but in a few important cases they failed. In 1804 the insurrection led by Kara George broke out in Serbia against the excesses of the local janissary garrisons. The government of Selim III, engaged in its own struggle with the janissaries, had condoned the insurrection, but after the elimination of the garrisons the movement developed into one aimed at Serbian autonomy. In spite of some modest Russian support for the Serbs, the Ottoman army suppressed the movement in 1813. Two years later, however, it flared up again and this time the new Serbian leader, Miloš Obrenovič, reached agreement with the Ottomans on autonomy for a Serbian principality between Belgrade and Nish. The Ottomans retained the right to garrison the major towns and to receive a yearly tribute (this, it should be remembered, amounted to the same degree of influence as the central government had enjoyed in, for instance, Kurdistan or some of the Arab provinces in the eighteenth century).
The Greek insurrection, which broke out in 1821, was more important for three reasons. First, the Greek community in the empire played a crucial role in the empire’s external relations, both economic and diplomatic. Second, from the very beginning of the insurgency many of its leaders aimed at full independence; and third, the crisis that ensued directly involved all the major European powers.
The Philiki Hetairia, a Greek patriotic society founded in Odessa in 1814, had been busy over the next few years founding cells throughout the Balkans. Kara George was at one time a member. From 1820 the organization was led by Alexander Ipsilantis, a member of one of the elite Phanariote (so-called after the Phanar quarter in Istanbul) Greek families of the Ottoman Empire and himself a general in the Russian army. In 1821 Ipsilantis and his group considered the time ripe for a full-scale insurrection, which they hoped to trigger by an invasion of Moldavia and Wallachia (present-day Romania). Their aim was a general rebellion in the Balkans, in order to create a new Byzantine Empire under Greek leadership, and not merely a Greek national state. The invasion that was supposed to bring about the realization of this ambitious scheme was, however, a disaster. The invading army was much too small (about 3000 men) and the peasant population in Moldavia and Wallachia was never likely to side with the invaders, since the great landowners and the governors of these provinces were traditionally from the same Phanariote families from which Ipsilantis stemmed. For their part, many of the influential and rich Greek families of the Ottoman Empire actually opposed the Hetairia’s nationalist aspirations.3
At the same time as the invasion failed, another and very different Greek insurrection began to spread in the southernmost parts of the Balkan peninsula and on the Aegean isles. Although the rebels were influenced by Hetairia propaganda, it was a genuine popular revolt against Ottoman misrule. The rebels were badly organized and divided among themselves, but nevertheless the Ottoman army in 1821–24 signally failed to defeat them. By 1824 almost the whole of the Morea (the Peloponnese) and many islands were in the hands of the rebels. It has been argued that the success of the rebellion was due in part to the fact that in 1820–22 the Ottoman government was engaged in the military suppression of the most powerful of all the Balkan notables, Ali Pasha of Yanina. In removing him, they also removed the only force that could effectively control the area.4
The most important territory lost to the empire in this period was the province of Egypt with about four million inhabitants. This loss was the work of one man, the Ottoman governor of Egypt, Mehmet Ali. In the years when Mahmut II was gradually strengthening his hold on the government apparatus by infiltrating it with his supporters, his governor in Egypt demonstrated what effective concentration of all power at the centre could accomplish. Mehmet Ali was an Albanian from Kavalla (now in northern Greece), who had come to Egypt as an officer in the Albanian contingent in the Ottoman expeditionary force against the French. In 1803 he had become the leader of that corps and had established himself as the de facto ruler of Egypt. In 1808, he was officially recognized as governor of Egypt by the sultan.
The French occupation had fatally weakened the position of the Mamluks, the part-Circassian, part-Turkish military ruling elite of the country. They had been chased from lower Egypt by the French and during the Napoleonic wars had been unable to replenish their numbers by recruiting slaves in the areas north of the Caucasus, as had been their practice for hundreds of years. In a sense, therefore, the French occupation had provided Mehmet Ali with a clean slate. He used this opportunity to destroy the last vestiges of Mamluk power, massacring their leaders in the Cairo citadel in 1811. Thereafter, he embarked on an ambitious programme of reform aimed at the strengthening of his government.
As with Selim III’s Nizam-i Cedid, the main element of the programme was to create a large, modern, European-style army. This brought with it the need for larger state income through taxation, the need for a more efficient bureaucracy to mobilize the resources of the country, and the need for modern Western-style education in order to create the cadres for the new army and bureaucracy. The Ottoman reformers from Selim III and Mahmut II onwards had faced the same dilemma; but they did not have the advantage of a situation, such as Egypt’s, in which the old establishment had been destroyed by outside interference. Furthermore, Mehmet Ali took more drastic action than the early Ottoman reformers could or would undertake to solve the two main problems that modernizing the army entailed: lack of income and lack of dependable manpower from outside the military establishment (the janissaries and affiliated corps in the Ottoman case, the Albanian forces and the Mamluks in Egypt). Mehmet Ali first had recourse to slave-hunting in the Sudan in 1820–21, but when it turned out that the slaves died like flies when they were enrolled in the army, he decided to solve the manpower problem by a radical innovation: the conscription of Egyptian peasants in 1822.5 The monetary problem was never completely solved, but Mehmet Ali was much more successful than the Ottomans of his era in increasing his income to pay for the expensive new army (and fleet). He replaced the tax farm system with direct taxation; and he encouraged the development of agriculture, investing in irrigation and road works and forcing the farmers to grow cash crops, of which cotton became the mainstay of the Egyptian economy. Also, Mehmet Ali enlarged the highly profitable state monopolies precisely at the time when, as we shall see, the Ottomans were forced to abandon them.
There can be no doubt that Mehmet Ali’s example was highly influential in Istanbul, both as an inspiration and as a source of rivalry. In the early years of his reign, the sultan in his weakened position had no choice but to apply for help to his most powerful subject. When the tribal leader of the central Najd area in the Arabian peninsula, who had adopted the teachings of the fundamentalist Wahabi movement as the ideology of his political movement, extended his sway to the Hijaz and even occupied the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, it was Mehmet Ali who restored the sultan’s authority there after a costly and difficult campaign against the Wahabis between 1811 and 1818. When the Ottoman janissary army proved incapable of suppressing the Greek rebellion, the sultan turned to his Egyptian governor once more.
The last phase of the Greek rebellion, war with Russia again
At the request of the sultan’s government, Egyptian troops landed in the Morea in 1825. Where the janissaries had failed, they were highly successful and over the next two years they conquered most of the mainland. Only the dominance of the Greek merchant navy, which was able to supply the rebels with arms and food, prevented a complete collapse of the rebellion. In the face of military disaster, the Greek insurrection was now saved by European intervention. There was a great deal of sympathy with the Greek rebels in Europe, most of all in Britain and in Russia. In Britain the sources of this philhellenism were liberal sympathy for Greek national aspirations and admiration for classical Greek civilization, with which the modern inhabitants of the southern Balkans were identified. In Russia, the main motive behind the sympathy for the Greeks was religious solidarity within the Orthodox Church. This public sympathy with the rebels did not translate into political support, except in one country: Russia. Tsar Alexander I tried to get the other great powers of Europe to agree to intervene in the conflict in support of the establishment of an autonomous Greece. The other powers, however, were not enthusiastic, fearing that an autonomous Greece would become a Russian puppet state. Tsar Alexander, one of the principal architects of the international order established in 1815, set too much store by the international ‘system’ and the principle of legitimate rule to intervene unilaterally against the wishes of the other powers.
This aspect of the situation changed with the death of Alexander and the accession by Nicholas I in December 1825. The new tsar let it be known that if no agreement with the other powers could be reached Russia would go it alone. This threat eventually had its desired effect for, rather than see Russia intervene on its own, first Britain agreed to autonomy for Greece (in 1826) and then in June 1827 Britain, France and Russia jointly decided to intervene to force a ceasefire on the parties (thus in effect saving the rebels).
When the sultan refused to accept the mediation of the powers, their fleets first blockaded the Ottoman and Egyptian navies in the harbour of Navarino on the western coast of the Morea (Peloponnese), and then on 20 October destroyed them completely, cutting off the Egyptian expeditionary force. This effectively decided the conflict, but even though Mehmet Ali agreed to withdraw his troops from the Balkans, the government in Istanbul refused to face facts, which led to full-scale war with Russia. After initial successes, Ottoman resistance collapsed in the summer of 1829. Russian troops occupied Erzurum and Edirne. At the Treaty of Edirne, concluded in September 1829, the Ottomans had to recognize the independence of Greece and the autonomy of the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia and of a Serbia to which several Ottoman districts were added. That the Greece that emerged on the map was only a very small state, and fell far short of the designs of the Greek nationalists, was only due to the fact that Britain, France and Austria preferred a malleable Ottoman Empire to a strong Greece dominated by Russian influence.