The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire (12 page)

These good intentions look tediously familiar, but Selim’s plans went further than any reforms contemplated by his predecessors. The twenty-two collected memoranda
encouraged Selim to seek a ‘New Order’ (
Nizam-i Cedid
), thereby virtually imposing a revolution from above. Administrative changes included revised regulations to strengthen
provincial governorships, the creation of more specialist secular schools to provide training in the ancillary subjects essential for military and naval command (including the French language),
control of the grain trade, the institution of regular ambassadorial diplomacy with the major European Powers, and improvements in methods of ensuring that provincial taxes reached a new central
treasury, which was given the right to impose taxes on coffee, spirits and tobacco. Earlier Sultans had given their somewhat erratic support to the building of modern ships of the line and the
reform of new light and heavy artillery units; Selim III instituted a form of conscription for the navy in the Aegean coastal provinces, tightened discipline in the artillery and other specialist
corps and, amid widespread consternation, announced the creation of new infantry corps, organized and trained on French lines and equipped with modern weapons. The Janissaries, suspicious as ever
of innovation, had their arrears of back pay settled, and were promised more money for active service, and regular pay-days. But the new barracks for young Turkish recruits above the Bosphorus and
at Üsküdar seemed a direct challenge to the entrenched status of the Janissaries. Sultan Selim’s other reforms were soon forgotten, and the term ‘New Order’ became
applied solely to the regular infantry battalions which the
Nizam-i Cedid
brought into being.

Selim was well informed of events in revolutionary Paris.
⁷
In June 1793 Citizen Marie Louis Henri Decorches—the Marquise de Saint-Croix in less
egalitarian times—arrived in Constantinople as representative of the French Republic. On
quatorze juillet
two French ships rode at anchor off Sarayburnu (Seraglio Point), impartially
flying the Ottoman crescent, the stars and stripes, and the tricolor; they fired a salute, while a ‘tree of liberty’ was solemnly planted beside the Bosphorus. Some eight weeks later
the Sultan sent a detailed inventory to Paris, listing the type of technicians and instructors he wished to recruit from France for temporary service in his army and navy. Despite pressing concerns
around
France’s frontiers, the Committee of Public Safety gave careful attention to the Sultan’s requests: an Eastern Front on the lower Danube or an aggressive
naval presence in the Black Sea would distract the rulers of Austria and Russia from the activities of republican armies along the Rhine or in northern Italy. And Selim’s advisers, for their
part, were pleased to encourage the revolutionaries in Paris: ‘May God cause the upheaval in France to spread like syphilis to the enemies of the [Ottoman] Empire’, the head of the
Sultan’s personal secretariat wrote early in 1792, when war between France and Austria seemed imminent.
⁸

But Selim was too shrewd to commit his empire irretrievably to an unholy alliance with Jacobins. When he decided to modernize his diplomatic system, accrediting resident ambassadors to other
courts rather than sending envoys on special missions, he chose London rather than Paris as the first destination of an Ottoman representative. For this decision there were three sound reasons: the
hostility shown by William Pitt, the Prime Minister, to Russian aggrandizement in the Black Sea, and especially to the fortification of Ochakov; the absence, as yet, of any apparent British desire
to acquire Ottoman possessions; and a passing acquaintance with the ways of the British aristocracy gained from Sir Robert Ainslie, whose eighteen years as George III’s ambassador in
Constantinople were drawing to a close. Soon afterwards Selim sent resident ambassadors to Berlin, Vienna and St Petersburg. Only then did he choose a permanent envoy for the French Republic.

It was more natural for Selim to establish links with Paris than with any other capital. Some of his officials were already familiar with the language, and the Sultan encouraged the teaching of
French, although he does not seem to have spoken or read it himself. Among European writers, only in eighteenth-century France was a rational attempt made to anatomize systems of government and
administration, providing blueprints for peoples whose institutions were shaped by other traditions.
⁹
It is interesting that, when a French-language
library was set up to serve Selim’s specialist military and naval academies, among the works shipped out from Marseilles was a complete set of the
Grande Encylopédie
. But far
more general than these touches of rarefied learning were the commercial contacts, many of them long-established, especially
in Syria and the Levant. More recently, French
trade at the centre of the Empire had increased threefold in eighty years, with a sizeable community settling in Smyrna. The influences of one culture upon another were, of course, two-way. At the
start of the century while fashionable society in Paris and Versailles amused itself with
turquerie
, Constantinople discovered French furniture, French ornamental gardens and French
decorative design.

‘Frankish’ customs had cost Ahmed III his throne, and Selim must have realized it was rash for a Sultan-Caliph to turn so often towards Paris while every Janissary around him was
turning towards Mecca. A persistent legend ascribes the intensity of Selim’s francophilia to his delight in the company of Aimée Dubucq de Rivery, a young Creole who disappeared while
sailing between Marseilles and Martinique.
¹⁰
She is supposed to have been captured by Barbary pirates, sent from Algiers to Constantinople as a
placatory gesture from the corsairs to Abdulhamid I, and then to have lived happily ever after as the ‘French Sultana’ and the mother of Selim’s cousin, Mahmud II—who was
born at least three years before Aimée went missing. There is no authentic evidence that the unfortunate young woman reached Algiers, let alone Turkey. But even supposing she did become one
of the Favourites in the imperial harem, how could she have enlightened the Sultan on the politics and pursuits of the French? She was too young to know much about them herself. Not every girl from
Martinique became so worldly-wise in the ways of Paris as Aimée’s distant kinswoman, the future Empress Josephine. For Sultan Selim the fascination of France was never personal; it
remained political and military. He was convinced that he would find there a key to unlock for his empire the science of modern war.

It seemed, briefly, in the autumn of 1795, that the lock might be opened for the Sultan by Brigadier-General Bonaparte. On 20 August Napoleon, whose career had made little progress over the past
fifteen months, wrote to his brother Joseph: ‘If I ask for it, I shall be sent to Turkey by the Government, with a fine salary and a flattering ambassadorial title, to organize the artillery
of the Grand Turk.’ Ten days later a note was left at the War Ministry: ‘General Buonaparte, who has won a certain reputation during his command of the artillery of armies in difficult
circumstances, particularly at the siege of Toulon, offers to accompany a government mission to Turkey. He will take with him six or seven officers, each an expert in some
particular branch of the art of war. If, in this new career, he can make the Turkish armies more formidable, and the fortresses of the Turkish empire more impregnable, he will consider he has
rendered signal service to his country; and when he returns he will merit her gratitude.’
¹¹
He appears to have been issued with a passport in
mid-September; but before he could set out, the legendary ‘whiff of grape-shot’ against a mob marching down the rue Saint-Honoré on 5 October carried ‘Citizen
Buonaparte’ into French history. He never saw Constantinople—‘the centre of world empire’, as he was once to call the city.

Napoleon’s non-mission to Turkey is a fascinating minor ‘might-have-been’. It is tempting to assume that his genius would, in some way, have arrested the military decline of
the empire. But why should a relatively unknown Corsican of twenty-six achieve more than Baron de Tott before him or Major von Moltke forty years later? Opposed to all westernizers were four
centuries of tradition and prejudice, intensified by the narrowly selfish interest of privileged office-holders. Only if Bonaparte had entered Constantinople as a conqueror and a convert to Islam
might he have reshaped the Sultan’s empire, and for a few months in 1798–9 this eventuality seemed not impossible.

Ever since the mid-1760s a pressure group of Marseilles merchants had urged successive governments to seize Egypt and establish a colony there. Choiseul briefly favoured such a project but
Vergennes, with his long experience of Ottoman rule, argued that French commercial interests would be better served by continuing the traditional policy of good relations with the Sultans. The
earlier revolutionary regimes followed this line, but the Directory wavered. Repeated memoranda from Bonaparte, his great Italian campaign by now behind him, convinced the Directors of the
advantages of sending an expedition to ‘the Orient’. In April 1798 it was agreed that Bonaparte would embark an army for Egypt, consolidate French control over the Levant to the
discomfiture of the English and, while destroying the corrupt power of the Mamelukes in Cairo, impose good and beneficial government in the name of the
Sultan, whose treasury
would thereafter be able to rely on the arrival of the annual tribute. The basic directive for the expedition emphasized that respect must be shown towards the Muslim faith. In order that the Porte
should be left in no doubt of the Directory’s good will, it was decided that Talleyrand—who became Foreign Minister for the first time in July 1797—should travel to the Golden
Horn and explain to Sultan Selim the finer subtleties of French policy. This interesting encounter never took place. General Bonaparte, with some 38,000 men, duly sailed for Egypt in the third week
of May; but Talleyrand did not set out for Constantinople. It was never his intention to do so.
¹²

For four or five months the Directory backed the Egyptian expedition. All at first seemed to go well. Bonaparte defeated the Mameluke forces at the ‘Battle of the Pyramids’ (fifteen
miles distant) on 21 July and entered the capital in triumph three days later. His civil administration became a model of good government, the wisest known in Egypt for many centuries. Despite the
state of war, irrigation projects were begun, new mills and hospitals built, conditions in the markets improved, tax-collection made efficient. All the reforms which a benevolent Sultan might
profitably have introduced in Constantinople were embodied in decrees signed by the conqueror of Cairo. Apart from an irreverent tendency to use minarets as king-size flagpoles, Napoleon made every
effort to please the Muslim faithful, speaking to the
ulema
of his deep respect for Islamic teaching, hinting that he might himself accept conversion. In each town and village entered by the
French, printed proclamations in Arabic were posted. They listed the blessings of liberation—of which, it was confidently hoped, those who could read would inform those who could not:

This rhetoric provoked a sour response from Constantinople. Not only did the Sultan decline to recognize the French army as his ally; in September he
formally declared war on the French Republic. A month later a firman proclaimed the jihad, a Holy War against the ‘infidel savages’ who were holding Egypt.

The Directory was no longer interested in Egypt, however, for Nelson’s naval victory at the mouth of the Nile on 31 July had cut the links between Marseilles, Toulon and Alexandria. On 4
November Talleyrand informed Bonaparte that he might, if he wished, seek to march on India; or he could remain in Egypt, organizing the province as a French dependency, as in his transformation of
northern Italy; or he could advance through Palestine, Syria and Anatolia and seek the capture of Constantinople. These grandiose instructions did not reach Napoleon’s headquarters until 25
March 1799; and by then, working out his own grand strategy, he had struck northwards and was besieging Acre.
¹⁴
There it became clear that
Bonaparte’s expedition was bringing an expedient cohesion to the Ottoman Empire. Selim was by no means displeased to see the Mameluke usurpers humbled, but he was not prepared to allow the
French to seize a potentially rich province of his empire. The factious feudatories of Palestine and Syria collaborated with the Sultan’s nominal governor in Damascus to confront the
invaders. Ahmed Djezzar ‘the Butcher’ was capable of raising an army of 100,000 men to check Bonaparte’s thrust northwards and, with the assistance of a British naval flotilla
under Commodore Sidney Smith, resisted French assaults on Acre for seven weeks, until a convoy brought from Rhodes a contingent of Selim’s ‘New Order’ troops to reinforce the
garrison.

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