The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire (13 page)

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

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

C
HAPTER
5

T
HE
S
TRANGE
F
ATE OF
S
ULTAN
S
ELIM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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