The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire (18 page)

Stratford Canning, always confident of outmanoeuvring any Russian diplomat, had regarded the French as the great intriguers at Constantinople; his successor concentrated
his mistrust on the Tsar’s emissaries. Strangford became the first British ambassador to accept ‘the Russian bogey’ implicitly, as an article of faith. In this conviction he was
grossly unfair to his Russian colleague, Alexis Stroganov, who throughout the Greek crisis showed remarkable restraint. The Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church constantly urged the government
in St Petersburg to avenge the insults to the Church by a new war against the Turk. But Tsar Alexander I remained resolutely set against embarking on any expansionist policy so long as his Empire
was weakened by problems left unresolved following the Napoleonic upheaval, and in his relations with the Sultan’s ministers Alexis Stroganov skilfully interpreted the Tsar’s
wishes.
¹⁷
He protested strongly against the widespread attacks on Christians in Constantinople, reminding the Porte of the protective rights accorded
to his sovereign by the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainardji, and he made ready to leave for Russia; but he chose his words carefully. The Ottoman authorities were left in no doubt that the Tsar deplored
rebellion against legitimate government, be it Christian or Muslim. So long as Alexander remained on the throne, Mahmud II discounted the Russian bogey. He was convinced the Greek revolt would be
short-lived. Although the coasts of the Peloponnese and Attica and the more prosperous islands might be controlled by Greeks, the rising was ill-coordinated and there was intense rivalry, both
between the rebel leaders themselves, and between different regions in the Greek lands. Without Russian intervention it seemed to Mahmud that within a few months his armies would reconquer the
Peloponnese and restore order by ruthless repression. Consistently the Ottomans underrated their insurgent opponents.

The Sultan fatally miscalculated in failing to recognize the long-term significance of the Easter killings. In sanctioning the execution of the Patriarch and the vilification of his remains at
such a moment in the Church’s calendar, Mahmud alienated a quarter of his subjects. The Orthodox Christian
millet
was thrown into permanent opposition to the Sultanate, thereby
weakening the Ottoman Empire throughout the last century of its existence. Moreover, Gregorius V continued, in death,
to trouble the Ottomans. The Patriarch’s body did
not decompose in the murky waters of the Golden Horn. Shortly before dusk on one evening in that Easter Week of 1821 it floated to the surface, close to a grain ship trading with Russia. The
corpse, and what remained of the vestments, were recognized by a refugee from the patriarchal household who was already aboard the ship. To the Orthodox faithful this reappearance of their martyred
Patriarch came as a sign of Divine beneficence. Unobtrusively the Greek master of the vessel recovered the body before sailing for Odessa. There Gregorius was accorded a martyr’s funeral. By
June he had become the symbol of that Hellenic awakening which he publicly deplored throughout the last troubled months of his life.

Half a century later, when the Russians wished to emphasize the interdependence of the Orthodox churches, Gregorius’s bones were translated to his Greek homeland, and his remains have been
revered for over 120 years in a tomb still standing near the entrance to the Metropolitan Cathedral of Athens. However, in the summer of 1821 the religious demonstration in Hetairist Odessa merely
confirmed Mahmud II’s hostility towards every aspect of the Russian Church. ‘The Turks’, Bartolomeo Pisani reported, ‘consider it a further proof of the uniformity of
sentiments, in religion as well as political matters, prevalent between the Russians and the Greeks.’
¹⁸
The Sultan, in his anger, threw caution
to the wind. He personally ordered all vessels sailing through the Straits to be searched. When he refused to allow the passage of grain ships, it seemed to the diplomats in Constantinople as if
another Russo-Turkish conflict was inevitable. Hastily both Strangford and his Austrian colleague intervened: the embargo on the Odessa grain ships was lifted.

By the autumn the crisis in the capital was over. Although Stroganov was recalled to St Petersburg in July, Russia did not declare war on the Ottoman Empire for seven more years; and by then the
Eastern Question was posed in an entirely different form. The intermittent clashes of Ottoman troops and Greek rebels were merciless encounters, each side perpetrating acts of cruelty long and
bitterly remembered. In July 1822 it seemed as if the Greeks would soon be subdued: at Peta, three miles to the east of Arta, the army which had disposed of Ali Pasha earlier in the year gained a
striking victory, restoring to Ottoman rule all of western
Greece except for Missolonghi; and at the same time 20,000 of the Sultan’s best troops sought to cross the
isthmus of Corinth and advance on the Greek strongholds in the Peloponnese. But, to Mahmud’s fury, his commanders could make little headway. By the spring of 1823 there was complete
stalemate: rival insurgent leaders fought among themselves, but the Sultan could not take advantage of these divisions, for the Greeks had command of the islands and the sea.

At this point Mahmud took a gambler’s risk: he turned for help to the most efficient and most ambitious of his vassals, Muhammad Ali. Over the preceding ten years the Viceroy of Egypt had
gone from strength to strength, creating in this historic Ottoman dependency the Europeanized-Islamic New Order which Selim III had vainly sought to impose at the heart of his empire. At Sultan
Mahmud’s request Muhammad Ali had sent disciplined troops to crush Wahhabi revolts in Arabia, ensuring that his army controlled the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina, in the name of the
Sultan-Caliph. Another army, trained by Napoleonic veterans, thrust southwards along the Nile, swelling its number with slaves and in 1822 founding the city of Khartoum. The Viceroy could give his
Sultan a well-drilled and disciplined army, a good navy, and an able commander to restore order in Greece as in Arabia. In return, Sultan Mahmud offered Muhammad’s son, Ibrahim, considerable
power as both Pasha of Crete and Governor of the Peloponnese. The Greek seamen assumed that, although Ibrahim might establish himself in Crete, he would not attempt a sea crossing in winter. They
were wrong. In February 1825 Ibrahim landed some 10,000 men, with horses and artillery, at Modon, in the southern Peloponnese. A co-ordinated grand strategy ensured that, at the same time, the
Greeks were attacked from the north by the regular Ottoman army.
¹⁹

At first it seemed as if Ibrahim would gain a speedy victory. In the Peloponnese only Nauplion successfuly resisted the Egyptian assault. But in western Greece Missolonghi defied a siege by a
predominantly Turkish army until April 1826, when Ibrahim himself crossed the Gulf and took the town where Byron had died two years earlier. The legendary association of Missolonghi with those last
heroic months of ‘the noblest spirit in Europe’ made it certain that Ibrahim’s intervention would revive old
prejudices in Britain and in France, where
philhellenic sentiment was growing rapidly. Reports from merchants and consuls in the Peloponnese emphasized the devastation caused by Ibrahim’s ‘inhuman barbarians’ as they set
fire to villages and small towns along their line of march. As early as July 1825 the Greek provisional government had asked for British protection, relying on the apparent sympathy of the Foreign
Secretary, George Canning, and on the influence of the City of London, where a Greek loan of £800,000 had been floated nine months before. The long-disputed Ionian Islands had passed under
British protection in 1815 by agreement among the four Great Powers. A unilateral assurance of protection for the whole of Greece was more than any British statesman could give, but the Foreign
Secretary was unwilling to stand aside and leave the fate of the Greeks to be decided in Constantinople—or St Petersburg. Accordingly, in the winter of 1825–6 the British and Russian
governments—though at heart mutually suspicious—came gradually to accept the need for joint mediation between the Sultan and his rebellious Christian subjects. The Duke of Wellington,
in Russia for the funeral of Tsar Alexander I, signed an agreement with Count Nesselrode in early April 1826 which provided for mediation ‘in the contest of which Greece and the Archipelago
are the theatre’, and for the creation of an autonomous Greek state within the Ottoman Empire. At the same time George Canning sent his cousin Stratford back to Constantinople as ambassador,
but with instructions to pursue a devious policy. ‘Exaggerate, if you can, the danger from Russia,’ ‘Stratty’ was told.
²⁰

Yet, so far as Mahmud II was concerned, by the spring of 1826, the Greek rebellion was at an end. Muhammad Ali’s modernized military machine brought the victory which had so long eluded
the traditional Ottoman regiments and the Janissaries. The Sultan was therefore faced with two urgent—and inter-related—tasks: to free himself from dependence upon his Egyptian vassals,
father and son; and to emulate Muhammad Ali’s example in Cairo by imposing a series of drastic reforms on the imperial capital. He sought to consolidate central authority and, at the same
time, to sweep away the archaic institutions which hindered westernization by their vested interest in retaining obsolete practices. But, to avoid provoking the reaction which had frustrated the
efforts of earlier reformers, he had to move with caution. As a preliminary step to ensuring success Mahmud wooed the
ulema
, hoping to silence any doubts over his zeal
for the faith. New mosques were built, and religious establishments which had fallen into decay were revived. In November 1825 Mahmud secured the appointment of the energetic and personally loyal
Mehmed Tahir Effendi as
ş
eyhülislâm.
He was a natural reformer, a Grand Mufti who had no intention of allowing local imams to behave as though they were Janissary commanders at
prayer.

The Janissary Corps remained the greatest obstacle to Europeanization. When Byron and his friend Hobhouse arrived in Constantinople in 1810 they found themselves residents of a Janissary-ordered
city. Foreigners lived, for the most part, in the derisively nicknamed ‘Pig Quarter’ of Pera, the district where foreign Christians might eat pork; and in Pera every ambassador had an
orta
(battalion) of Janissaries assigned to his service, providing—on paper—a body of 200 delegated protectors for his nationals. In reality, as Hobhouse wrote, ‘there are
not more than four or five in constant attendance.’
²¹
But the
orta
would assemble speedily ‘upon any requisite emergency’.
Even the fire brigade was under Janissary control. Most blazes in the capital were blamed on Janissary arsonists, who were alleged to start fires in order to secure payment for extinguishing them.
From being the ‘formidable foes’ of Christendom in the seventeenth century, the Janissaries had degenerated into a privileged social menace. When in late May 1811 the Janissaries
mustered for what became their last campaign against a foreign enemy, 13,000 men reported for active service at the barracks in Stamboul, and like their predecessors over so many years duly marched
out of the city along the road towards Edirne and the theatre of war. But by the time the Corps reached Silivri—a mere 35 miles away—they were down to 1,600 men. Some 11,400 deserters
had dropped out. Ten years later, when the Greek Revolt began to shake the heart of the empire, the Janissaries had become little more than a body of licensed bandits. ‘Time and again the
Sultan had passed the pen of pardon over the page of their wrongdoing,’ one of Mahmud’s court propagandists later explained, in a semi-official chronicle of the most momentous event in
his reign.
²²

During the winter of 1825–6 Sultan Mahmud increased the strength of the artillery corps in the capital and in the forts along the Bosphorus. At the same time he
planted his own nominees at the head of the Janissary Corps: the first sound disciplinarian—Kara (‘Black’) Hüseyin—commanded the corps for only eight months in 1823,
for the Sultan had hurriedly to remove him to commands in Bursa and Izmit to prevent a Janissary uprising which he was not yet ready to contain; but Kara Hüseyin’s successor, Celaleddin
Mehmed, prepared the ground more carefully. Hüseyin remained in the vicinity of the capital, and in April 1826 was described by the British ambassador as ‘the Pasha of the
Bosphorus’. He ‘has manifested his energy by a most unsparing execution of refractory Janissaries,’ Stratford Canning commented.
²³

Mahmud was determined to avoid his predecessor’s mistake of 1807: having provoked the Janissaries to insurrection, Selim found he lacked the armed might to keep order in the capital. By
May 1826 Mahmud was confident that most senior officers were sympathetic to reform, and at the end of the month he required the Corps to accept a European code of drill, European uniforms, and
training in the use of rifles. For over a fortnight resentment at this new attempt to impose order and discipline smouldered in the ranks, but the natural rebels within the Corps had no leaders,
nor any plan of resistance. On 5 June the Grand Vizier appeared at a parade in the braided jacket and tight trousers which were accepted dress among officers of the European armies. It was
announced that the Sultan would review the Janissaries, in their new uniforms and drilled in westernized form, on 18 June, a Sunday. Drilling for the parade finally exasperated the Janissaries. On
the Wednesday evening the junior officers of five Janissary
orta
gathered in At Meydani, the old Hippodrome, a time-honoured place of assembly. They demanded the immediate withdrawal of the
army reforms. Their troops in the neighbouring barracks were encouraged to overturn the soup cauldrons, a traditional signal of revolt.

‘I had not long been in bed when my sleep was interrupted by the sudden appearance of a dragoman, who announced that the Janissaries “were up”,’ Stratford recalled in
later years.
²⁴
Despite Mahmud’s precautions it seemed at first as if the Janissaries would soon secure control of
Stamboul. But Mahmud was at Besiktas rather than in the old palace when the revolt began, and Kara Hüseyin was able to bring considerable reinforcements and twenty-five cannon
down the Bosphorus to command the approaches to the Topkapi Sarayi. Moreover, whereas on earlier occasions the Stamboul mob had invariably backed the rebels, in 1826 the mass of the population
failed to respond to the usual xenophobic appeals, probably because the
ulema
were solidly behind the Sultan. Only poorer artisans, afraid of losing their meagre livelihood from ancient
crafts if ‘westernization’ continued, supported the Janissaries. They were strong enough to attack the Porte itself, but the threat of Kara Hüseyin’s cannon halted them short
of the old palace. By Thursday noon the Janissaries had fallen back on their At Meydani barracks.