AT THE END of the Crimean War in 1856, the concert of European states recognised the Ottoman Empire as an equal member. But by that point they were anything but equal. At the end of the eighteenth century the Ottoman elite realised that the dynasty and empire had fallen behind the military and economic levels of elsewhere in Europe and of Russia, whose armies encroached on their territory from without. Within the empire, subject peoples imbued with nationalism began to demand autonomy or independence. In response, eighteenth and nineteenth century sultans and elites launched reforms to strengthen the empire against occupation and colonisation from abroad and chaos within. In their view, they needed to modernise the empire, striking the right balance between adapting European innovations and strengthening their own traditions. Reforming sultans went so far as to wipe out the Janissaries, suppress the Bektaşi Sufi order with which the army was affiliated, and ostensibly abolish the hierarchical social order based on religious and class difference. Conversion to Islam was no longer a path to assimilation. But instead of saving the empire, these changes deepened the chasm between Ottoman Christians and Muslims. One of the reasons for this was that in this era, elite Muslims—while promoting the newly granted religious freedom, constitution, and parliamentary form of government—did not relinquish the idea of the superiority of Islam or the primacy of Islamic law. They exalted Ottoman Muslims and, for the first time, Turks, including the sultan caliph who was the head of government.
For the Ottoman Empire, the nineteenth century was a long one, for it began in 1789, the year that witnessed the French Revolution. Accompanied by massive bloodshed, French revolutionaries would abolish the monarchy, execute the king, disestablish the church, nationalise its revenue and property, and close churches and monasteries. They established a de-Christianised republic based on the principle of the equality of all citizens no matter their religion (but not their gender). The French established a system of rule based on the will of the people and freedom of speech. They unleashed nationalism and made devotion to the fatherland a guiding principle. They abolished the slave trade.
The French Revolution had been preceded by the American Revolution (1775–1783), during which thirteen British colonies in North America fought for and gained their political independence. The founding principles of the United States of America as articulated in the Constitution (1787) and Bill of Rights (1791) include the separation of powers and the prohibition of religious tests for officeholders. They also include individual liberty manifested in freedom of speech, religion, and the press, the right to assembly, to petition, to hold property (including African American slaves), and to impartial justice. The Ottoman dynasty closely monitored these developments with trepidation. In the early nineteenth century, some of the component elements of the empire, such as the Greeks and Serbs, would be inspired by these ideas, including nationalist revolution. In the second half of the nineteenth century, influential Ottoman Muslim intellectuals and statesmen would also promote patriotism, liberty, and separation of powers.
Less revolutionary but nonetheless dramatic transformations ensued in the Ottoman Empire with the rise of Selim III (reigned 1789–1807), the son of Mustafa III, who acceded to the throne at the age of twenty-eight upon the death of his uncle, Abdülhamid I. Selim III was a sultan willing to change the administration and the military root and branch, revising relations between ruler and subjects and among subjects. The dynasty also renegotiated its relation to various groups in society and to the new imperial powers.
Acceding to the throne in the year of the French Revolution, which would spark feelings of nationalism within the empire and contribute to its shrinkage and then collapse, Selim III sought to strengthen his realm. Coming to power in the midst of a losing campaign against Russia—and keeping one eye on this nemesis, with an ultimate goal to retake the Crimea—he incorporated into his army the latest French, Prussian, and Russian advances in the military sciences. Open to reforms yet hesitant to completely revolutionise society, Selim III favoured Europe and European advisors; when still a prince, he had corresponded with France’s Louis XVI (reigned 1774–1792). At the same time, Selim III was keen to maintain the gendered religious hierarchy of Ottoman society. As he launched his new order, Selim III enforced clothing restrictions on women, Christians, and Jews, marking them as distinct. The centrepiece of his reform was a new army and navy corps made up of Muslim recruits. The sultan revised the aims of Osman II, who had been deposed and murdered for his reforms nearly two centuries earlier. The new army was trained by French military advisors at new academies and medical schools. The Ottoman elite began to learn French. Selim III established the first permanent Ottoman embassies in Berlin, London, Paris, and Vienna, dispatching portraits of himself to such figures as Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte (reigned 1804–1814, 1815), who began his military and political career during the French Revolution.
Despite good relations with France, like the rest of the European continent including Russia, the Ottoman Empire suffered from Napoleon’s militant expansion. During the Napoleonic Wars—which lasted from 1792 to 1815 and which partly played out on Ottoman territory—France invaded and occupied Egypt, which had been part of the Ottoman Empire since the early sixteenth century. The 1798 occupation was a reminder of the role that the Ottomans played in European history. Napoleon’s aim in targeting Egypt was Britain, for he sought to control the route to India.
The arrival of the French demonstrated the weakened Ottoman condition in the face of the expanding military might of other European powers in the nineteenth century. In 1799, Napoleon and his army marched from Egypt to Syria, but returned to Egypt after failing to capture the coastal fortress of Acre, Palestine. It was defended by the semiautonomous governor of Sidon and Damascus—the Bosnian Cezzar (the Butcher) Ahmed Pasha—and a British fleet. To seize power in Paris, Napoleon returned to France that same year. It was only in 1801 that the Ottomans, relying on the British navy, forced the French army to quit Cairo and Alexandria. Nevertheless, the Ottomans again allied with France and went to war against Britain and Russia in 1806 as the Napoleonic Wars continued. In late 1806, the British fleet bombarded Istanbul.
While breaking new ground within the empire, the reformist sultan Selim III faced opposition from entrenched interests, especially the Janissaries, who were unhappy with the creation of a new corps. He was also opposed by the jurists, who were nervous about the French culture on display and were concerned about a revitalised sultanate that they had thought they had under their control. Tax farmers were outraged when their holdings were confiscated to pay for the new army. He also alienated provincial notables. In summer 1806, they blocked the new army from being set up in Thrace. The new order had been stopped.
In spring 1807, Janissaries in Istanbul rioted. They were joined by underclass militiamen led by a Turk named Mustafa, whose Albanian supporters demanded the abolition of the new corps. Thanks to a legal opinion issued by his own sheikhulislam, Selim III was deposed. The reason given was that he had introduced innovations allegedly contrary to Islamic law. He was murdered a year later while under house arrest. He suffered the same fate as Osman II, killed in 1622 in part for attempting to create a new army.
Conventional wisdom has long depicted a clash in late Ottoman society between those labelled as Westernisers, modernisers, reformers, and secularists versus Islamists, traditionalists, conservatives, and religious reactionaries.1 But the categories were not exclusive. Modernising Islamist reformers initiated secularising processes, as in Selim III’s reforms. But the Janissaries and jurists did their best to limit the power of the sultan. High points of radical change and reform would occur under Selim III’s successors.
Twentysomething Mustafa IV, son of Abdülhamid I, had been put in power upon the deposition of his cousin Selim III in 1807. In July 1808 he ordered the murder of Selim III so as to put down a rebellion that was demanding the restoration of his predecessor, and his assassins attacked Selim III in his private quarters. In the words of the official chronicler, they ‘defiled his corpse with blood and earth’, dumped his body outside, covered it with a tarp, and left it.2 Mustafa IV’s young brother, the future Mahmud II, was hidden by servants until it was safe to appear.3 But Mustafa IV lasted only a year in office before he, too, was deposed in a coup, in August 1808. From the point of view of the dynasty, something had to be done to prevent further humiliation.
Twenty-eight-year-old Mahmud II (reigned 1808–1839) was enthroned during the coup that deposed Mustafa IV, led by provincial notable Bayraktar Mustafa, who also was commander of the Ottoman Danubian army. Bayraktar was appointed grand vizier. In September 1808, he led an assembly in Istanbul made up of the heads of leading Anatolian and Rumelian notable families as well as members of the imperial council, chief military judges, and commanders of the Janissaries and the cavalry at the sultan’s court. They and the sultan signed a contract, the Deed of Alliance (sened-i ittifak).4
The deed aimed to bring about unity and order in the realm. To accomplish this aim, the signatories agreed to protect the person of the sultan and the dynasty and to draft soldiers to create a new standing army (sekban-ı cedid, New Militia), deployed in camps in the provinces as an alternative to the Janissaries. They pledged to collectively punish anyone who attacked or betrayed the ruler and the sultanate or opposed the creation of the new army. They agreed to implement the decisions of the grand vizier as representative of the sultan and to punish those who opposed them, yet also to depose the grand vizier if he acted unlawfully. The signatories consented to the rule of provincial notables and their inviolable power in perpetuity in their respective regions. They outlawed arbitrary punishment of these notables if they were suspected of committing an offence. Should the Janissaries rebel in Istanbul, the signers of the deed pledged, the provincial notables would immediately send soldiers from the new standing army to put down the insurrection. The rebels would be executed after judicial investigation if found guilty of treason. The threat of the Janissaries as an autonomous political opposition in league with the populace hung over the document.
The signers of the deed intended for it to be maintained over the following generations, to be signed and affirmed by all future grand viziers and sheikhulislams. But within a couple of months, in November 1808, the Janissaries in Istanbul rebelled again. Thousands of people were killed in the imperial capital, including Bayraktar Mustafa and many of the deed’s signatories. Bayraktar Mustafa had taken refuge in a powder magazine; when the Janissaries entered he blew himself up.5
Bayraktar Mustafa’s deed, which had never been implemented or publicly announced, was effectively null and void. The standing army in the provinces could not arrive in Istanbul in time to save the regime. Memory of that agreement, however, would have long-lasting political effects. The deed was neither a constitutional nor a republican reform. It was not egalitarian, as it concerned only the Muslim elite running the empire. It did not set up a consultative assembly or diet. However, it envisioned government as a negotiated partnership, a coalition of elites. It was the first legal document limiting the power of the sultanate and the dynasty’s ability to execute its servants and confiscate their wealth and property without judicial process.6
Mahmud II would have to wait to promote reform so that he could ensure stable sultanic rule. He had his predecessor, Mustafa IV, strangled as the Janissaries marched on the palace in November 1808.7 Troops loyal to the sultan killed thousands of Janissaries. The navy even fired on the Janissary barracks from their ships in the Golden Horn.8 But Mahmud II agreed to the Janissaries’ demand to disband the New Militia. He remained the only living male heir of the Ottoman dynasty, his position still at the mercy of the Janissaries.
Facing insurrection from within the regime, Mahmud II also had to contend with the fact that Serbs, Greeks, and Egyptians gained measures of independence during his reign. Following sustained revolts, Serbia was granted semi-autonomy following the 1814–1815 Congress of Vienna, the peace conference that concluded the Napoleonic Wars. Controlled by Austria, Russia, Prussia, and Great Britain, the congress excluded the Ottoman Empire, despite its role in the recent wars. The great powers omitted the empire from the idea and geography of Europe. Serbia was given full autonomy in 1830. Following a nearly decade-long uprising, Greece (consisting of what is today southern Greece as far north as Arta and Volos, midway on the mainland) was given autonomy in 1830 and independence in 1832. Greek independence was related to Egyptian secession. After decades of independent political and military action that threatened the Ottoman dynasty, an Egyptian rebel proclaimed independence in 1838 and two years later he and his heirs were granted rule over Egypt for perpetuity.
For Greeks, the movement began among diaspora intellectuals outside the Ottoman Empire who were inspired by the American and French revolutions. The most influential intellectual, Rigas Velestinlis—a native of Thessaly who was based in Vienna—reinterpreted the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and promoted a revolution that would replace Ottoman rule with an independent, secular, democratic Greek republic modelled on Jacobin France.9 The revolutionary, secret Philikí Etaireía (Friendly Society) was founded in 1814 in Odessa, Russia—the Black Sea port built by Catherine II and home to many wealthy Greek merchants as well as the new Greek bourgeoisie—and began to disseminate these ideas within the Ottoman Empire wherever Greeks lived, including Moldova, Wallachia, and the Peloponnese peninsula. Wealthy and influential Greeks including professionals, local notables, governors, priests, militiamen, members of the Istanbul secular elite, and Greek Russian military officers joined the organisation, which espoused violence to achieve the goal of freedom for Orthodox Christians.10
Southeastern Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth century experienced that which seventeenth-century Anatolia had faced: the rise of provincial notables who amassed great fortunes in cash through lifetime grants of tax farming, which they used to employ large militias and purchase government office. Finding themselves with such regional power, they often rebelled against the central government. The difference with Anatolia was that the new local powerful men in Southeastern Europe were as likely to be Christian as Muslim. The British, French, Habsburgs, Ottomans, and Russians had all armed Greeks and used them as irregulars in the eastern Mediterranean and Southeastern Europe in the Napoleonic Wars. These were accompanied by high-ranking Greeks in the armies of the Christian empires as well. All of these men—provincial notables, irregulars, and officers—would join the 1821 rebellion.11
In late March of that year, Ottoman forces were engaged in a campaign to take back control from the forces of Tepedelenli Ali Pasha: an overly powerful, wayward provincial Muslim notable in mountainous Ioannina, in northwestern Greece, some of whose advisors were leading members of the Friendly Society. Seizing the opportunity, a Christian local notable, Petrobey Mavromihalis, came out in rebellion, which spread rapidly across the Peloponnese in a mass revolt joined by peasants who rose up against their landlords.12 Within weeks, having massacred or expelled Muslims and Jews and pillaged their property, the rebels controlled most of the fortresses, garrisons, and towns of the peninsula.13
The Ottoman court chronicler records that Mahmud II was so enraged by the audacity of the rebels that he demanded that ‘all of his Greek subjects be massacred’.14 He decreed that the commander of the Janissaries begin carrying out the order in Istanbul and the surrounding region. Sheikhulislam Halil Efendi, supported by the grand vizier Seyyid Ali, asked the sultan to delay implementing this plan for several days so that he could investigate whether Islamic law permitted the intended massacres.15 Thus buying time, the sheikhulislam and grand vizier alerted the Orthodox patriarch, Gregory V, and several metropolitans and urged them to declare their loyalty to the dynasty and to condemn the rebels. The Christian notables appeared before Mahmud II, trembling with fear as they begged for mercy because they had nothing to do with the uprising. As a result, the sultan ordered that those Greek subjects who were not guilty of rebelling would not be attacked.16 A general massacre was thus averted.
Yet, not trusting his Christian subjects, Mahmud II ordered that all Greeks and Armenians residing in Istanbul (including the districts of Galata, Üsküdar, and Eyüp) surrender their firearms.17 The sultan did not forgive the grand vizier and sheikhulislam for resisting his wishes. The grand vizier was stripped of his ministerial rank and exiled to Gallipoli. The sheikhulislam, who had refused to issue a fatwa allowing the mass murder of innocent Christians, was dismissed from office and exiled to Afyon-Karahisar.18
The new grand vizier, Benderli Ali Pasha, believed that the leader of the Greek church had advance knowledge of the rebellion. Spurred by Benderli Ali Pasha, Mahmud II reneged on his promise. He decreed that the patriarch, despite his declarations of innocence, his having had excommunicated the rebels, and his advanced age (over ninety years old according to the Ottoman chronicler), be hanged from the main gate of the patriarchate on 22 April, Easter Sunday.19 After the corpse had remained on the gate three days, intended as a warning of what happens to those who dare rebel against the sultan, officials made sure the elderly Christian spiritual leader’s humiliation was complete. They ordered Jews to take down the corpse, tie stones to it, and cast it in the sea so that Greeks could not bury their leader.20
By summer 1821 the Greek uprising had inflamed not only the Peloponnese, but also much of the Greek mainland and Macedonia, the Aegean islands, and the islands of Cyprus, Chios, and Crete. Although most of these revolts were soon crushed, at the end of the year the rebels still controlled central Greece and the Peloponnese. In December 1821, a national congress composed of all the rebel factions throughout Greece gathered in Epidavros in the Peloponnese, proclaimed a constitution, and declared the founding of an Orthodox Christian democratic republic.21
In early 1822, the Ottomans captured and executed the rebellious Muslim local notable Tepedelenli Ali Pasha and were able to turn their full attention to the Greek rebellion. But in summer the Ottoman force sent to retake the Peloponnese was routed and its commander committed suicide. A rebel Greek navy—formed from formerly Ottoman ships and their captains and sailors—ruled the coasts. But by the next year the different factions of Greek rebels soon turned to fighting each other. From 1824 to 1827 the Ottomans managed to take back control over most rebel areas. They did so with the help of the Albanian Mehmed Ali of the Aegean port of Kavala (today in Greece).
After being appointed Ottoman governor of Egypt in 1805 following the French and British withdrawal, Mehmed Ali had carved out a semi-independent kingdom by wiping out all opposition, massacring members of the Ottoman military class. The Ottomans could not remove him, and his power expanded first as head of a successful Ottoman effort between 1811 and 1818 to reassert control over Arabia. Mehmed Ali had a conscript army trained by French military advisors and the latest muskets at his disposal, as well as a well-armed navy. His forces suppressed the Greek rebellion on Cyprus and Crete in 1821.
In 1825 Mehmed Ali’s son Ibrahim Pasha launched a successful sea and land assault from Crete on the rebel-held Peloponnese. As the Egyptians fought the rebels from the south, an Ottoman army descended from the north. Soon the Ottomans again controlled central Greece. But news of the atrocities committed during Ibrahim Pasha’s capture of the town of Missolonghi in western Greece in April 1826—after a yearlong siege that had reduced the inhabitants to near starvation—where the surviving men were killed and the women and children sold into slavery, spurred intervention by foreign powers, which would prove decisive for the Greek struggle.22
Janissary revolt, Greek rebellion, insurrectionary provincial notables, the inferiority of the Ottoman army, defeats at the hands of other Europeans, the forced reliance on superior European armies and navies: all of these factors forced Mahmud II to seek a radical solution to a question faced by the dynasty since repeated Janissary revolts and military defeats had begun in the seventeenth century. How to save the empire? One way was not merely to rein in the Janissaries, but to abolish their regiments and annihilate their men.
Rather than simply establish a new army alongside the Janissaries, as Selim III and Osman II had attempted—paying for it with their lives—Mahmud II sought to hollow the Janissaries out from within. In 1826, he ordered hundreds of men to be taken out of each unit and made into a new elite army corps based on new drills, tactics, training, uniforms, and weapons. In June, the Janissaries revolted in Istanbul, but the sultan had planned for their disobedience. Inspired by the sight of the symbol of the call to jihad, the Prophet Muhammad’s banner at Sultan Ahmed I’s mosque (the Blue Mosque), troops loyal to the sultan and armed men from across the city slaughtered most of the Janissaries who had gathered in the Hippodrome. Others set fire to their barracks, burning them alive.23 An estimated six thousand Janissaries were massacred.24 Having made up the elite backbone of the Ottoman military for five centuries, the Janissaries were wiped out in less than half an hour.25 Surviving Janissaries fled, thousands of provincial Janissaries were hunted down, and the entire corps was abolished.
Since the seventeenth century, Western European observers had noted that rather than being a ‘despotism’, Ottoman government had been a type of ‘limited monarchy’, with the Janissaries and jurists serving as a check upon the sultan’s power.26 Sharing their view was Ottoman intellectual and poet Namık Kemal. A generation after the Janissaries’ destruction, Kemal reflected on their political role over the previous two centuries. In his view, the jurists held the legislative power, the sultan and his ministers wielded the executive power, and the Janissaries restrained the executive branch.27 But with their demise, others would have to arise to perform that function.
The Bektaşi Sufi order to which the Janissaries were attached was also viciously attacked during Mahmud II’s reign. To survive, it was forced to become a clandestine movement. Throughout the empire, Bektaşi shrines and lodges were burned to the ground or handed over along with their assets to the regime-supporting Halveti, Mevlevi, and Nakşibendi orders. Bektaşi sheikhs were executed or banished. Even the Jewish quartermasters of the Janissaries—Çelebi Bekhor Isaac Carmona, Yehezkel Gabay of Baghdad, and Isaiah Aciman, among the most wealthy and influential Jews in the empire, who also served as money changers to the dynasty—were murdered as part of the collective punishment of all Janissaries. The immense fortunes of these bankers were confiscated by the sultan and the large debts he and others owed them were cancelled.28
As the Janissaries and Bektaşis and those connected to them were destroyed, the Mevlevi Sufi order continued to be influential, especially from its Istanbul lodge. The head of the order, the Mevlevi grand çelebi, a descendant of Rûmi, was the girder of the sword at the enthronement ceremonies of the sultan held in Eyüp outside the walls of Istanbul on the Golden Horn. Selim III had been a member of the order and had composed musical numbers for its whirling ceremonies. He had had a close relationship with the famous poet and sheikh of the Galata Mevlevi lodge, Mehmed Galip, who propagated the sultan’s reforms. Mevlevis now supported the reforms of Mahmud II, who was also a member of the order and relied on Mevlevi confidants and courtiers, using them to overcome opposition from other members of the religious class. But with their newfound, more reform-supporting turn, would the Mevlevis remain loyal?
After the bloodletting of 1826, the new Victorious Army of Muhammad replaced the Janissaries. Soldiers were dressed in Western-style uniforms and given the latest European weaponry, and the army was paired with a professional bureaucracy and massive investment in public works, notably roads and bridges. Professional colleges were opened to train a generation of administrators, architects, engineers, and military doctors. Censuses and means for more effective tax collection followed suit. Just like in other European states and empires, modernising nineteenth-century sultans would invest in conscription for a standing army, telegraph technology, and railways for the same reason: to centralise control and better govern the population.
To control the population, the government had to know what people thought. As in the rest of Europe, one new way of managing the population was to learn what gossip and rumours people were spreading at coffeehouses. In an unprecedented expansion of governmental surveillance, most likely begun during Mahmud II’s reign after the destruction of the Janissaries (who had owned one-third of the coffeehouses in Istanbul), spies continuously fanned out across the imperial capital and systematically listened to the conversations of people, mainly in coffeehouses, but also in barbershops, at the mosque, on the streets, at markets, at public baths, and even in the privacy of homes. They reported what people said about the government and the sultan to officials who recorded and analysed the conversations. The grand vizier relayed these reports directly to the ruler, who used this knowledge of public opinion to shape his policies and undercut opposition, increasing his own popular legitimacy.29
In 1829, Mahmud II decreed that civilian men had to wear a fez and Western-style jacket and trousers. He was the first sultan to have a portrait of himself wearing a Western-style kit distributed across the empire, displayed in barracks, government offices, and schools. In the 1830s, Mahmud II became the first Ottoman ruler to take lengthy imperial excursions whose sole aim was to see his empire (Rûmeli and Anatolia) and come into contact with the population. The journeys were undertaken to shape public opinion in his favour, to draw the people closer to the sultan.30
Having abolished the Janissaries and replaced them with a new, smart, elite army corps, Mahmud II still faced the imperial headache of the Greek rebellion, as well as further troubles. A British, French, and Russian fleet defeated an Ottoman-Egyptian fleet three times its size at the Bay of Navarino (Pylos) in the Ionian Sea in 1827.31 By 1829 Ibrahim Pasha had evacuated Greece. That year, a Russian army invaded Southeastern Europe and took territory as near to Istanbul as the former Ottoman capital of Edirne, as another Russian army attacked from the Caucasus and conquered eastern Anatolia, including Erzurum and Trabzon. It seemed the Ottoman Empire was about to fall. The Russian advances compelled the Ottomans to agree to a peace treaty by which they gave autonomy to Serbia and Greece, as well as to Moldova and Wallachia under Russian oversight. The first king of Greece was Bavarian Catholic prince Otto (reigned 1832–1862). The seventeen-year-old son of King Ludwig I, he symbolised foreign, especially British, French, and Russian, intervention in Ottoman Southeastern Europe.
Independence was also pursued by Bulgarians, Macedonians, and others. Unlike rebels of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, who were looking to be rewarded with positions within the Ottoman system, these rebels wanted their liberty. Inspired by the American and French Revolutions, they wanted out, to go their own way, and they intended to take their entire nation with them, breaking away and establishing new states. These rebellions demanded different answers. The Ottomans could let them go, reframe the social contract, or try to crush them—which they did, with calamitous results, both in terms of the number of dead and the loss of Ottoman territory. The Ottomans were weak, and when subject peoples rebelled they had the backing of much stronger foreign empires. At times the Ottomans needed foreign powers to save the dynasty from rebels.
After the Ottoman-Egyptian fleet was destroyed in 1827 at Navarino, French advisors helped Mehmed Ali improve his personal military and navy again and in 1831 he launched a campaign by sea and land against Ottoman Syria. His forces under his son Ibrahim Pasha invaded Anatolia. The Ottoman army sent to oppose Ibrahim Pasha was defeated and its head, the grand vizier, was captured. By 1833 Ibrahim Pasha’s army reached Kütahya, a town in the region of northwestern Anatolia where the Ottomans had first risen to power. The weak Ottoman dynasty could do nothing but reward Mehmed Ali and Ibrahim Pasha for their rebellion with governorships in Syria and the Hijaz—Arabia in addition to Egypt. Finally, in 1838, Mehmed Ali proclaimed his independence. An Ottoman army marched on Ibrahim Pasha’s forces in 1839 but was defeated near Antep in southeastern Anatolia. Shortly thereafter Mahmud II died of tuberculosis and his son Abdülmecid (reigned 1839–1861) became ruler, just as the grand vizier defected to Mehmed Ali in Egypt and took the imperial navy with him.32 It was only the diplomatic involvement of Austria, Britain, Prussia, and Russia that enabled the Ottomans to secure an agreement with the rebels to return the navy and withdraw to Egypt, where Mehmed Ali and his heirs were granted governorship in perpetuity the following year, reflecting the spirit of the never-implemented Deed of Alliance of 1808.
The Serbian, Greek, and Egyptian episodes during Mahmud II’s reign illustrate ‘the eastern question’, which, from the point of view of the imperial powers, was how to balance their own interests with those of the emerging nation-states as they divided up the Ottoman Empire. Throughout the nineteenth century, Christian subjects would revolt, one or more foreign powers would intervene militarily or diplomatically on their behalf, and other foreign powers would seek a political settlement restoring the balance of power, benefiting the rebels to the detriment of the Ottomans.33 The Ottomans, however, did not see themselves as moribund and about to collapse. But they did perceive the need for additional major changes.
Under Abdülmecid I, reform edicts in 1839 and 1856 instituted more thoroughgoing reforms, the last granting equality to all citizens of the empire, no matter their religion. The act intended to sweep away a nearly six-century-old social order, in which Ottoman society had been governed by distinct legal and social hierarchies favouring Muslims above Christians and Jews.
Abdülmecid I built the magnificent Dolmabahçe Palace in Beşiktaş on the European shore of the Bosporus, with a chandelier given by Queen Victoria. The new palace was designed and constructed by members of the Armenian Balyan family of architects to the dynasty, who had been educated in France and built numerous mosques and palaces in the imperial capital. Abdülmecid I’s new home made concrete the move away from Topkapı Palace and all it represented. Located in the heart of the old city, Topkapı Palace had been built by Mehmed II after the conquest of the city from the Byzantines in 1453 as the centre of administration, a palace hidden by walls in the heart of the ancient city. Abdülmecid I built a palace architecturally modelled on Western European palaces and, like its counterparts elsewhere in Europe, visible to the public. He ushered in the Tanzimat (Period of Reforms, 1839–1876).
The ‘empire’s longest century’ was marked by the creation of a new class of bureaucrats who aimed to guide the empire through a period of administrative and legal reorganisation and reform. The objective was to centralise the bureaucratic system and increase control through newly developed technologies and agency specialisation, including the establishment of new provincial and urban administrative bureaus.34 This led to widened public control of administration, diffusion of authority, and the entrance of new people into the realm of administration.
The many edicts and laws issued by the sultan during this period introduced new state primary and secondary schools, open to all irrespective of religion. Prior to this, each religious community had been responsible for educating its children in its own religion and language. Law was also secularised. Formerly, Islamic law courts, which applied Islamic and secular law, had been supreme, but now secular courts were introduced, and as their jurists grew in prominence, Islamic jurists began to lose their power. The former Ottoman class system dividing tax-exempt elite from tax-paying commoners was abolished, making all male citizens equal and, for the first time, eligible to serve in the military, regardless of religion. The economy was liberalised, the right to private property protected.
The changes even affected the timeworn practice of slavery. Abdülmecid I closed the Istanbul slave market and ended the trade in African slaves, but without ever completely abolishing slavery. Circassian girls continued to stock the private homes of the Ottoman elite.
In 1839, Abdülmecid I promulgated the Decree of the Rose Garden. The decree guaranteed ‘security for life, honour, and property’ of all subjects, and a ‘regular system of assessing taxes’.35 Tax collection would no longer be based on tax farming, through which a tax farmer could abuse his grant to obtain taxes by demanding amounts greater than what he was required to submit to the central treasury. That practice was criticised in the words of the decree as ‘handing over the financial and political affairs of a country to the whims of an ordinary man and perhaps to the grasp of force and oppression, for if the tax farmer is not of good character he will be interested only in his own profit and will behave oppressively’. The decree also called for an ‘equally regular system for the conscription of requisite troops’, which was meant to be universal conscription, what it referred to as ‘the inescapable duty of all the people to provide soldiers for the defence of the fatherland’. Universal conscription was in fact never realised in that era. What was most radical about the decree was its affirmation that ‘the Muslim and non-Muslim subjects of our lofty Sultanate shall, without exception, enjoy our imperial concessions’.
What is striking about the decree is the way it mixes Islamic and Western European elements. It begins with praise for the Qur’an and Muhammad and states the necessity of adherence to Islamic law, and then justifies the introduction of the basis of European statecraft, including regular taxation and universal conscription. On the one hand, the decree was meant for European, especially British, consumption. One of the aims of issuing it was to secure British aid to suppress Ottoman governor Mehmed Ali, who at that time had built a mini-empire in Egypt, Syria, and the Hijaz and was threatening Anatolia. The decree was published in Ottoman Turkish and in French. It was proclaimed in Gülhane Park adjacent to Topkapı Palace before European diplomats. On the other hand, it was the work of Ottoman reformers who realised that the empire needed to change its financial and political administration to survive. The most important of these was a former ambassador to Britain and France, Foreign Minister Mustafa Reşid Pasha, a man with close relations to the dynasty and whose family and network were primarily Mevlevi Sufis.36
Most significant, the Period of Reforms brought about changes in the religious hierarchy of the empire. For the first time, the religious hierarchy was being replaced by equality between different religious groups. The decree aimed to sap the strength of ethnic nationalism by increasing the patriotism of its subjects. By granting his Christian subjects equality, the sultan aimed to convince them to support his regime and not be persuaded to join nationalist movements.
The sultan wanted to create an Ottoman nation, promoting Ottomanism. Ottomanism was a new ideology that advocated the loyalty of all subject peoples, no matter their religion or ethnicity, to his person and to the empire. The sultan reportedly stated that he wanted to be able to distinguish the religious differences of his subjects only when they entered their houses of prayer, as in France, where all citizens were equal and Jews, for example, were referred to as ‘French of Mosaic persuasion’.37 This type of nationalism was based on voluntary consent rather than on blood or lineage, and on the belief in the possibility of integrating diverse peoples into a single nation. Whereas for nearly six centuries the singular path to integration as an Ottoman had been conversion to Islam, this new ideology was based on loyalty alone.
Equality meant that apostasy could no longer be punished. From the beginning, Muslims had been prohibited from converting to Christianity or Judaism, but the inverse was encouraged and facilitated through various Ottoman institutions such as the Collection, which had recruited hundreds of thousands of Christian boys for the administration and military, and the harem, which had brought tens of thousands of female slaves to the home of the royal family to serve as concubines or become wives. The last official beheading of an apostate—an Armenian shoemaker named Avakim who had converted to Islam and become Mehmed before reverting to Christianity—however, occurred in Istanbul in 1843. That he was executed wearing European dress was seen as especially provocative by foreign statesmen and journalists.38 Under intense pressure from the British and French, Abdülmecid I promised foreign diplomats the following year that apostasy would no longer be punishable by a death sentence in the empire. Because the issue was so sensitive for the dynasty and administration, provincial authorities were secretly informed of the sultan’s wish, and they committed to not making the decision public and not trying offenders in local courts, but sending them instead to Istanbul.
The apostasy law was not abolished; the sultan had promised only to hinder future executions. With this arrangement, the sultan was able to gain credence in the rest of Europe and in Ottoman reformist circles but still not lose Islamic legitimacy in the eyes of the Muslim majority. But debates over the sentence illustrate how the Ottoman regime found itself floundering among competing demands. For the first time, conversion of Ottoman subjects had become an international issue. The dynasty found itself caught between foreign powers, Muslim public opinion, and its commitment to granting equal rights to Ottoman Christians and Jews. As part of the eastern question, foreign powers took upon themselves the role of protectors of Ottoman Christians. Beginning with the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca in 1774, Russia had claimed to be the protector of Greeks and Armenians. The British declared themselves protectors of the Protestants, a group recognised in the Ottoman Empire only in 1847, and of Jews. The Ottoman regime feared internal disorder and external intervention. Contested conversions of obscure subjects brought it both. The French and German consuls in Salonica were lynched by a mob because they were blamed for the apostasy of a Christian Bulgarian girl who had converted to Islam.39 The Ottoman government feared Muslims converting to a minority religion. That Catholic and Protestant missionaries from Europe and North America were now permitted to offer education in the empire and convert Ottoman subjects to Christianity only increased their anxiety.
The decree of 1839 was promulgated as the Ottomans faced a rising tide of nationalism that had begun to break the bonds between the sultan and millions of his subjects and had caused the loss of much precious territory in Southeastern Europe and the Middle East. But the decree did not succeed in its aims. The reforms only exacerbated the various nationalist movements and did not increase Ottoman patriotism. Less than two decades later, a new decree was promulgated. The Imperial Reform Edict of 18 February 1856 came at the end of the Crimean War.
The Crimean War (1853–1856) was fought by the Ottomans, Britain, and France against Russia. It was another manifestation of the eastern question, as the war was sparked by Russia demanding to serve as protector of the millions of Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire, as well as disputes between Russia and France over the control of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, built on the spot where Christians believe Jesus was crucified. The first modern war, a dress rehearsal for the methods of destruction of the First World War, the Crimean War included new weapons and tactics—accurate, long-range rifles, steamships and armoured ships, sea mines, and trench warfare—the mass killing of soldiers and attendant civilian casualties, the application of new technologies—battlefield communication by telegraph and transporting of troops and heavy guns by rail—and reporting from the field by journalists accompanied by photographers. Telegraphs and steamships allowed news to travel faster. Extensive media coverage by the new war correspondents led to a high level of public interest. Public opinion influenced military decisions. In response to the catastrophic proportion of casualties caused by disease, the war launched modern military medicine as seen in the reforms of the Russians, who were the first to use anaesthesia in battlefield surgery and a system of triage to sort the wounded.40
The conflict began in autumn 1853 with a Russian invasion in Southeastern Europe. Eighty thousand troops crossed the Prut river into Moldova and Wallachia (Romania), hoping, unsuccessfully, to provoke a Christian uprising against Ottoman rule.41 Pursuing an ongoing war in the region, the Ottomans attacked Russian forces in the Caucasus region of Georgia in coordination with the guerrillas of their local ally, Sheikh Shamil.42 Russia destroyed the Ottoman fleet based at Sinope on the southern coast of the Black Sea and bombed the Muslim neighbourhoods of the town as well.43 At the end of 1853, the British and French agreed to launch a large naval expedition to the Black Sea to defend the Ottoman Empire, push the Russian navy back to the Crimean Peninsula, and decrease Russia’s power in Europe.44 War was declared in spring 1854. That summer, British, Ottoman, and French troops—including many Algerians—pushed the Russian army north out of Bulgaria and back across the Danube into Wallachia. But the allied troops suffered tremendously from cholera in their camps in the port of Varna, and the soldiers threatened to mutiny. Nevertheless, the allies decided not to end the war—despite having already met the goal of expelling Russia troops from Southeastern Europe—but to expand it by sending their armies from Varna across the Black Sea to the Crimea.
Beginning in September, the allies besieged Sevastopol, located on the southwest corner of the peninsula, the base of the Russian Black Sea fleet. Over the course of nearly a year, millions of deafening bombs exploded along a hundred kilometres of trenches and over 125,000 Russians died defending the town.45 Surveying piles of thousands of dead and wounded laying everywhere after one battle, a British war correspondent recorded the industrial carnage: ‘Some had their heads taken off at the neck, as if with an axe; others their legs gone from the hips; others their arms, and others again who were hit in the chest or stomach, were literally as smashed as if they had been crushed in a machine’.46 As at Varna, many more were felled by cholera.
Over the course of the Crimean War, as many as three-quarters of a million combatants were killed or died of disease. Four hundred and fifty thousand of these were Russian.47 The Russian defenders fell so fast and thick in the final battle for Sevastopol that the advancing French troops used the dead and wounded in a ghastly way as human sandbags.48 The French lost one hundred thousand soldiers and the British gave up twenty thousand dead. The Ottomans lost 120,000 soldiers.49 The Ottoman soldiers were beaten by their British allies, who treated them as little more than beasts of burden or slaves and used them mainly to dig trenches or haul loads. Many Ottoman soldiers died from malnutrition because they were not given enough to eat.50 The Crimea was the place where, in the words of Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, one of the last defenders to leave Sevastopol, ‘you will see war not as a beautiful, orderly, and gleaming formation, with music and beaten drums, streaming banners and generals on prancing horses, but war in its authentic expression—as blood, suffering and death’.51 The war left Russia aching to take revenge on the Ottoman Empire.
Just prior to the war, Tsar Nicholas I (reigned 1825–1855)—who, like Catherine II, aimed to destroy the Ottoman Empire and replace it with a Christian kingdom united with Russia, with the Hagia Sophia again the centre of the Orthodox Church—had referred for the first time to the Ottoman Empire as ‘the sick man of Europe’. He believed in its imminent collapse and had planned for its partition.52 But the war ended instead with the Russian Black Sea fleet and its bases destroyed, Russia losing its protectorate over Moldova and Wallachia and having to withdraw from the eastern Anatolian town of Kars, which was seized in 1855 despite the efforts of the British general who commanded Ottoman forces. Instead of breaking apart, the Ottoman Empire was recognised for the first time in the Treaty of Paris (signed 30 March 1856) as an equal member of the concert of European states, states with whom the Ottomans had actually been intimately engaged since the fourteenth century.
One of the key issues that the other European powers, especially Britain, pressed upon the Ottomans after the war was the need to guarantee the protection and rights of Christian subjects, which the Ottomans saw as a pretext for foreign intervention in their internal affairs. The Russian tsar also demanded security for Christians in the Ottoman Empire, yet when he later regained the Crimea he expelled hundreds of thousands of Muslim Tatars—who relocated to the Ottoman Empire—and settled formerly Ottoman Christians, especially Greeks and Bulgarians, in their place.53 He also drove hundreds of thousands of Muslims from the northern Caucasus, forcing them to seek refuge in the Ottoman Empire. It was in this context that, even before the delegates met in Paris for the peace conference, the most significant outcome of the war from the point of view of Ottoman subjects emerged.
The 1856 edict—issued by Abdülmecid I one week prior to the beginning of the peace talks—made that which had been implied by his 1839 decree explicit: complete religious freedom, no forced conversion, and genuine equality. The decree relinquished, at least in theory, the predominant role of Muslims. Not all the Muslim ruling elites were happy about this. According to intellectual and government minister Ahmed Cevdet Pasha, ‘Many Muslims began to grumble: “Today we lost our sacred national rights which our ancestors gained with their blood. The Muslim community used to be the ruling community, but it has been deprived of this sacred right. This is a day of tears and mourning”’ for Muslims.54 As an expression of such sentiment, already in 1859 there was a coup attempt in Istanbul by a group of officers and Nakşibendi Sufis, but it was quickly suppressed.
The government declaration of religious freedom caused a convert alert.55 Beginning at the end of the 1850s, tens of thousands of people the empire had considered Muslims because their ancestors had converted to Islam centuries before revealed themselves as Christians instead, protégés of Austria, Britain, France, Greece, or Russia.56 The Kromlides Greek-speaking Muslims in the Pontus area of the eastern Black Sea, the Stavriotes in central Anatolia, and the Hemşinli Armenian-speaking Muslims along the Black Sea coast all declared that since their ancestors had converted they had never been truly Muslim but had secretly adhered to their former faith. Conversion and apostasy became more a question of political authority than of religion or theology. Loyalty was tied to religion, which became nationalised.57 If a Muslim converted to Christianity, the regime assumed that the apostate would be a fifth column supporting foreign powers. The empire assumed that only Muslims could be loyal to the state, despite its claims to embrace all of its subjects as equals.
At the same time as it feared losing its own Muslims to apostasy, the Ottoman Empire eagerly accepted other empires’ apostates. Following the Europe-wide 1848 revolutions, thousands of useful refugees—several thousand soldiers along with the leading politicians and generals from revolutionary Hungary, Italy, and Poland—were welcomed in the empire. Choosing to ignore the Forty-Eighters ideology—constitutional government, parliamentary rule, and national liberation—the Ottomans focused on the exiles’ leadership experience and military abilities. Their arrival strengthened the Ottomans at the expense of the Habsburg Empire and Russia, which demanded that the rebels and their leaders—including Lajos Kossuth, the leader of Hungary’s parliament, who proclaimed Hungarian autonomy from the Habsburg Empire and then fought for its independence during the revolution—be handed back. But the Ottomans instead gave them asylum, and many of these men became Muslims.58 Conversion exempted them from expulsion by making them Ottoman subjects. In this way, the empire continued its old politics of conversion, using Islam as a means of integrating men into the elite military and administration of the empire.
Whereas once the Ottomans raised boys into men, now the men were already fully formed and experienced military experts. Whereas apostasy was a way to abandon Ottomanness, conversion remained a path to becoming and being Ottoman, to the Ottoman Way. General Józef Bem, hero of the Polish uprising against Russia in 1830 and commander of Hungarian forces in Transylvania in 1848, died as a circumcised Ottoman Muslim named Murad Pasha, killed fighting the Druze in Lebanon in 1850.59 The commander in chief of Ottoman forces during the Crimean War was a converted Croatian Serb and Orthodox Christian who received a military education in Austria, Ömer Lutfi Pasha.60 Many Polish and Hungarian Forty-Eighters served in the defence of Kars in 1855.
Waiting for help to arrive from abroad would not be enough. During this period, the Ottomans established secular schools to train their own governing elite in the new sciences of war and administration. Most significant was the Galatasaray Imperial High School, built in 1868 on the grounds of a former palace for training Collection child recruits. Its imposing, gilded gates are the main feature of Galatasaray Square in Istanbul today. Galatasaray’s main language of instruction was French. Despite regime apprehensions about the loyalty of its Christian subjects, the school aimed to educate members of all religions as civil servants. Unlike the Collection recruits of the past, these young men did not have to convert to Islam, be circumcised, and learn the Islamic languages of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. They obtained high positions in many ministries, including the Foreign Ministry. Yet this centripetal effort faced off against a centrifugal one. The protégés, Ottoman subjects under the legal protection of foreign powers, exercised privileged commercial relations with their European sponsors, leading to the emergence of a wealthy and highly visible Christian and Jewish bourgeoisie in the empire. This group established its own schools and clubs and developed increasing nationalist sentiment—sentiment that, as seen in the Serbian and Greek cases, could lead to autonomy or independence. Within the empire, among Armenians and Greeks, the decrees of 1839 and 1856 led to the increased power of lay authorities at the expense of the religious leaders, the patriarchs. Ottoman Christians established their own lay assemblies and drafted their own constitutions for communal rule. Perhaps to hinder movements for autonomy and independence, an Ottoman citizenship law was issued by the sultan in 1869 that decoupled religion from citizenship.61 It declared, ‘All subjects of the empire are called Ottoman’. No longer would a convert to Islam automatically become an Ottoman subject. Islam was no longer a path to integration.
Beginning with the reform era, the issues of the veil, polygamy, arranged marriages, women’s visibility in public, and their participation in social life were hotly contested.62
A lively public sphere in print emerged in nineteenth-century Istanbul and other cities of the empire. In their periodicals and books, leading Ottoman Muslim intellectuals grappled with the question of how much to adopt from Western Europe. Some believed the entirety of ‘Western civilisation’, including its morality and such features as romantic love, were universal values that had to be accepted in their entirety. For others, only the material innovations—new technologies, ways of administration and government, communications, and new forms of transportation such as the railway—needed to be utilised in order to become modern.
One of the main points of contention centred on women in the public sphere. Those who believed Western values were universal advocated an end to polygamy and promoted women’s education. They claimed that society as a whole could not be modern until women were liberated. Those who rejected the nonmaterial aspects of Western society defended women staying within the private sphere of the home.63 But all these writers accepted Islam as the dominant culture. They differed only in the extent to which they advanced what they considered a civilising project. The most radical aspect of civilising the empire was making all subjects, but not women, equal. On that they agreed. Where they disagreed was on the question of devlet, of governance.
The first constitution in the Ottoman Empire was granted to the Armenian community in the early 1860s. In 1860, the Armenian-language draft document of the new form of communal governance was entitled the ‘Armenian National Constitution’. The 1863 official Ottoman Turkish text ratified by the government labelled it instead ‘Regulations of the Armenian Patriarchate’.64 The Ottoman Turkish name was logical, as the constitution privileged the centrality of the church and the Armenian patriarch as the head of the assembly and all the committees established by the constitution. The aim was to modernise the institution of the patriarchate.65
While the Armenian-language version of the constitution established a ‘National General Assembly’, the Ottoman Turkish version referred to a ‘General Assembly’.66 The final version also insisted that the phrase ‘loyalty to the administration and dynasty’ be added to the patriarch’s oath of office. Befitting its name, the Armenian constitution established a representative administration, consisting of an elected general assembly of 140 men. With only twenty clergy members from Istanbul, the rest were lay members. Eighty seats were reserved for Istanbul Armenians.67 The men elected to these posts were bureaucrats in the Ottoman government, merchants, and progressive intellectuals educated outside the empire. Despite its conservative nature—reserving a central place for the patriarch and the privilege of the Istanbul elite, who held almost three-quarters of the seats—it was a step towards a more secular, democratic form of governance over the Armenian ethno-religious community and its functionaries, churches, schools, monasteries, law courts, hospitals, wealth, and properties. The Armenian constitution had an indirect influence on the future empire-wide Ottoman constitution. Muslim intellectuals perceived Christian assemblies as a model for an Ottoman parliament.
The Young Ottoman movement emerged in the 1860s among bureaucrats who had served in the imperial translation bureau and were well versed in the latest Western European, especially French, ideas, including nationalism. They burst into public consciousness with the first independent newspaper, Tasvir-i efkâr (Illustration of Opinion), edited by Ibrahim Şinasi, who fled to Paris in 1865 in the face of new censorship laws intended to silence his critical journal.68 He left the newspaper in the hands of the articulate Namık Kemal. That same year, six men (including Kemal) founded a secret society, the Patriotic Alliance, modelled along the lines of the Carbonari in Italy.69 In their private meetings with other disgruntled bureaucrats and members of the dynasty—including the crown prince, Murad—in their newspaper columns and pamphlets, and in their clandestine speeches in mosques, Islamic colleges, and coffeehouses, these and other intellectuals discussed how they could adopt American and French Revolutionary political concepts and forms of government while keeping true to the empire’s Islamic values. They criticised the regime, especially the new bureaucratic elite and statesmen who had risen thanks to the reforms of Selim III and Mahmud II from the turn of the nineteenth century to midcentury, and who overshadowed Sultan Abdülaziz I (reigned 1861–1876), Abdülmecid I’s successor.
The Young Ottomans accused these bureaucrats of concentrating power in their own hands, of being little more than a handful of self-appointed individuals administering the empire unchecked by the sultan, the military, or the jurists. They were concerned about the new bureaucratic elite being the first Ottomans to join foreign Masonic lodges. They criticised the secularisation of law and education in the empire. Worst of all, the Young Ottomans accused these new government ministers of being superficially Europeanised and of caring most about opening theatres, attending balls, looking the other way as their wives cheated on them, using European toilets, and allowing women to appear in public in low-necked tops.70
The Young Ottomans were supported by lower-level bureaucrats facing shrinking opportunities to rise in government, by jurists who had lost status in the face of the secularisation of administration and law, and by the military, which had lost power to the new bureaucracy and was now made up of lower-class recruits. Their efforts were funded by the disgruntled, extremely wealthy grandson of Mehmed Ali—the early nineteenth-century semi-independent ruler of Ottoman Egypt—Prince Mustafa Fazıl Pasha. Mustafa Fazıl Pasha had been passed over as hereditary governor of Egypt, despite it being his right, and sought revenge on the Ottomans from exile in France.71
The leading Young Ottoman ideologue was Namık Kemal, who came from a Bektaşi Sufi family, was son of the sultan’s astrologer, and had travelled throughout Europe, residing for a time in England.72 Working in the imperial translation bureau, Kemal was stimulated by the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Montesquieu, Giuseppe Garibaldi, and Voltaire. Convinced by American and French revolutionary and Enlightenment writings on the necessity of a constitution, the separation of powers, checks on the executive branch, popular sovereignty, and representative government, Kemal was nevertheless keen to assert the supremacy of Islam. He favoured a government based on religious law and a constitution rooted in Islam but modelled on the French version—a parliamentary form of representative government with the sultan caliph, the leader of all Sunni Muslims, at its head. He believed both that the sultan’s authority came from God and that it was the result of a contract between him and the people. It was a vision of government for the people, not government by the people, as in the United States and Western Europe.73 The sultan, who would also be limited by the laws, would oversee a government where a council of state nominated by the sultan would prepare laws, an elected senate would approve or reject the laws, and an elected lower chamber would control the budget.74
As important, Kemal popularised the terms hürriyet (liberty) and vatan (fatherland) and gave them an emotional and religious intensity. In his words, ‘One should love one’s fatherland because the most precious gift God has bestowed on us, life, began with the breathing of the air of the fatherland’.75 He promoted Ottomanism, a vision of the union of the constituent peoples of the empire in devotion to the fatherland and empire, no matter their ethnic or religious background. Yet at the same time he glorified Ottoman Muslims and the spirit of holy war, or gaza. He was a patriot who aimed to preserve the empire. He believed that equal political rights and representative government were the paths to that more perfect union of imperial citizens, but he still promoted a leading role for Muslims and Islam.
The regime was stung by the criticism of these civil servants and exiled them within the empire. They regrouped in Paris in 1867, where they began to call themselves the Young Ottoman Society.76 Bankrolled by Mustafa Fazıl Pasha, they published journals in Paris, Geneva, and London, including Namık Kemal’s Hürriyet (Liberty) after 1868, and were able to circulate them within the Ottoman Empire via Western European post offices.77 When by 1871 their main targets of criticism, Fuat Pasha and Ali Pasha—who had for two decades held the offices of foreign minister and grand vizier interchangeably and were disciples of the author of the reform edict of 1839, Mustafa Reşid Pasha—had passed away, the Young Ottomans returned to advocate change within the empire. Along with writing for the pro–Young Ottoman newspaper İbret (Warning), Kemal in 1873 staged and published his popular, patriotic play, Vatan yahut Silistre (Fatherland, or Silistre—referring to a town on the bank of the Danube river on the Bulgaria-Romania frontier). The piece advocated self-sacrifice by both men and women on the battlefield to save the Ottoman Muslim homeland in Southeastern Europe from Russian attack. Its characters sing,
Wounds are medals on the brave’s body.
Martyrdom is the soldier’s highest rank.
The earth is the same, above and underneath.
March, you brave ones, to defend the fatherland.78
The patriotic sentiment of this play, along with the outspoken criticism of the regime by the Young Ottomans, increased the government’s fear of a coup. It closed the Young Ottoman newspaper İbret and again exiled these ideologues and put them under house arrest that same year.79
Inspired by ideals of fatherland and liberty, and facing uprisings in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Bulgaria—where nationalism was stimulated by the Ottoman establishment in 1870 of a Bulgarian Orthodox church, the exarchate, separate from the Greek Orthodox patriarchate—and the threat of war with Russia, leading statesmen decided to act.80 Midhat Pasha, a constitutionalist who had long been praised by the Young Ottomans as an ideal statesman, Minister of War Hüseyin Avni Pasha, and Sheikhulislam Hayrullah Efendi launched a coup and deposed Sultan Abdülaziz I on 30 May 1876.81 They replaced him with his nephew Murad, a longtime supporter of the Young Ottomans and advocate of a constitution and parliament, who became Murad V. His first private secretary was one of the leading Young Ottomans, Ziya Pasha. Within two weeks of his accession, the former sultan Abdülaziz I committed suicide and an army captain killed Hüseyin Avni Pasha and other ministers at a cabinet meeting. The ministers decided to act quickly and have the sultan declare a constitution, but physicians determined that Murad V, suffering from alcoholism and a nervous breakdown, was unfit to rule. His response to suddenly being enthroned was like that of many princes since the seventeenth century: taken from the harem to be made sultan at a mature age, they believed they were being led to their execution. His younger brother Hamid refused to be appointed regent. He demanded to be sultan. He received the oath of allegiance as Abdülhamid II on 1 September 1876.82
A committee to draft a constitution began to meet in October 1876. Headed by the reformer and vizier Midhat Pasha, among its members were several Young Ottomans including Namık Kemal and Ziya Pasha.83 Another member was Krikor Odyan, one of the architects of the 1860 Armenian constitution and close friend and advisor of Midhat Pasha.84
Within three months, the Ottomans promulgated their first constitution for all subjects of the empire. The Ottoman government system put forth in 1876 was based on the Belgian constitution of 1831 and the Prussian constitution of 1850. Belgium was established as a parliamentary monarchy with a separation between the legislative (a parliament made up of a house of representatives and senate), judicial (the courts), and executive powers (the king and his ministers). Prussia also established a bicameral legislature in 1850 along with a government based on separation of powers. However, the kaiser retained more power than the king in Belgium. In Prussia, the kaiser granted some of his subjects the right to a share in governance yet retained full authority. The Ottoman constitutional system more resembled that of Prussia than of Belgium. One could also add a local source of inspiration: the constitution granted to the Armenians a little more than a dozen years earlier. Elections were held for parliamentary representatives in December and January 1877. The Ottoman parliament first met in Istanbul in March 1877.
The Young Ottomans were successful. Thanks in part to the spread of their modern ideas, by 1877 the Ottomans boasted their own parliament and constitution and had enshrined the principles of equality and universal subjecthood. The constitution declared that while Islam was the religion of the Ottoman Empire, ‘the practice of all recognised religions in Ottoman dominions is free on the condition that they do not disturb public order and general propriety. The rights granted to various creeds are all under the guarantee of the state’.85 The question was how long those newfound rights would be maintained.