The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire (22 page)

London now became a pivot for statesmen seeking to solve the Eastern Question. Nicholas I sent a special envoy with proposals for joint pressure on Muhammad Ali and for international agreement
over closure of the Straits (the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus) to foreign warships in time of peace. At first the British cabinet disliked the idea of associating two dissimilar problems in a
single agreement. But Nicholas persisted, and in July 1840 British, Russian, Austrian, Prussian and Ottoman plenipotentiaries concluded the Treaty of London, which closed the Straits to foreign
warships in time of peace and presented a virtual ultimatum to Muhammad Ali.
⁶
He was required to submit to the Sultan’s authority and settle for
hereditary rule over Egypt, or else face joint intervention by the Great Powers. If he accepted these terms within twenty days he would also receive the right to administer Acre and southern Syria
as Governor for life.

The Egyptians still had a formidable army: thirty-eight infantry regiments, more than ten thousand cavalry horses, and an artillery corps trained by Napoleonic veterans. It was spread over a
huge area of the Levant and Crete, but Muhammad Ali also believed he could count on French naval support. Accordingly, he rejected the allied demand,
thereby automatically
forfeiting the offer of southern Syria. But he had gravely miscalculated the balance of forces. The French fleet did not intervene, leaving British and Austrian warships free to harry
Ibrahim’s vulnerable line of communications. They bombarded the Lebanese coast in September and October 1840, while British and Austrian marines and Turkish infantry supported Druze rebels in
the hills north of Beirut. As Ibrahim’s well-disciplined troops began to pull back towards the borders of Egypt, a British squadron bombarded and occupied Acre. Other ships blockaded the
Egyptian coast.

The crisis was soon over. On 5 November Muhammad Ali concluded the Convention of Alexandria, which provided for the evacuation of Egyptian troops from Crete, Arabia and ‘all parts of the
Ottoman Empire . . . not within the limits of Egypt’. The Ottoman fleet, moored in Alexandria since the wretched Fevzi’s defection, was allowed to sail back to the Bosphorus, and in
February 1841 Sultan Abdulmecid formally published a decree which recognized Muhammad Ali as Viceroy for life, with his family assured of hereditary succession to the throne of Egypt.
Ibrahim’s army was limited by treaty to a mere 18,000 men—although within eight years their number had increased almost fourfold. The signatories of the Treaty of London, now joined by
France, guaranteed the Egyptian settlement, and in the Straits Convention of July 1841 reaffirmed the principle of closing the Dardanelles and Bosphorus to foreign warships in time of
peace.
⁷

With the departure of Ibrahim’s army from Anatolia and Syria, the Ottoman Empire was relieved from the only serious
Asian
threat to its existence prior to Allenby’s offensive
at the end of the First World War. In London, Vienna and St Petersburg it was felt that an incompetent and decaying ‘Turkey’ had been saved, not by her own exertions, but by grace of
the major European powers. This conviction sustained the fragile Anglo-Russian entente for several years; it prompted Tsar Nicholas to arrive unexpectedly in London at the end of May 1844, and to
induce Nesselrode to go to England four months later, to press for concerted diplomatic action to forestall any future aggravation of the Eastern Question. As yet the Tsar was not prepared to put
forward a partition plan (which would have aroused intense suspicion at
Westminster), but from 1839 onwards he never wavered in his assumption that the Ottoman Empire was
doomed, whatever palliatives might be proposed in Constantinople. The British, on the other hand, were prepared to wait upon events.
⁸

These years saw Re
ş
id waging a delicate campaign in the capital to persuade the Sultan to implement the promises implicit in the Gülhane Decree. Collectively the reform movement is known as
the
Tanzimat-i Hayriye
(which might be translated ‘Auspicious Restructuring’, since the Turkish
tanzimat
is similar in meaning to the Russian
perestroika
). It was
the most sustained attempt by any Ottoman minister to preserve the empire by centralizing authority and by secularizing, so far as possible, its autocratic character.
⁹

As in earlier reigns, priority was given to reform of the army. The introduction of other changes depended, first and foremost, on military need; and the earliest stage of the
Tanzimat
may therefore be seen as emanating from what the old warrior Mehmed Husrev was prepared to concede as essential to building up an effective fighting force. The proposal to create a modernized army
of a quarter of a million conscripts and to continue with earlier shipbuilding projects for a modern fleet required a full treasury, thus providing an obvious motive for reforming the system of
taxation. But how could taxes be raised without closer administrative links between the capital and the provinces and without the improvisation of a new civil service? And good gunnery, accurate
navigation, skilled accountancy, as well as efficient administration, all required better learning than the old religious foundations could give; hence the appointment in 1845 of a council of seven
learned men who were to report on ways of developing a widespread secular educational system. On the other hand, the guarantees of property rights and of religious equality before the law, which
had looked so impressive in the Gülhane Decree, held little appeal to the military mind. Where reforms of this character were even drafted, they remained ineffective—although, on paper,
the new penal code of May 1840 looked an impressive step forward. Constantly the reformers were anxious not to provoke the
ulema
by legal reforms which ran counter to the
ş
eriat.
The
Islamic code, which had once provided Suleiman the Magnificent with so sure a
foundation of government, continued throughout the century to constrain the advocates of a new
model Ottoman autocracy.

The
Tanzimat
reform era remains a contentious subject of study. Even its precise dates are in dispute. Recent historians analyse a long and almost continuous process, covering the years
from 1839 to 1876, when Abdulmecid’s successor and half-brother Abdulaziz was deposed. Older commentators limited the
Tanzimat
to the 1840s, although they acknowledged a further phase
of reform in the period after the Crimean War. They insisted that, even in the 1840s, there were interludes of ‘reaction’—times when, in Temperley’s revealingly reprehensive
phraseology, no ‘Englishman’ was able ‘to drive orientals along new roads’.
¹⁰
Re
ş
id did indeed suffer setbacks, notably in
1841 when his plans for a system of provincial administration based upon the French model aroused such hostility from local tax-farmers and military governors that they were dropped, and he was
sent off to Paris as ambassador. But he was back as Foreign Minister in 1845. Between September 1846 and January 1858 he was six times Grand Vizier.

Re
ş
id did not foresee the problems of seeking to impose on a vast empire with poor communications changes to which the mass of the population remained indifferent. Much of his work was
restricted to the area around the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn, and to towns having good sea links with the capital. An experiment in paper money (
kaime
) carrying interest, intended to
relieve the treasury crisis of 1839–40, met with some success in Constantinople and Smyrna but caused new problems when shopkeepers began to hoard the notes so as to claim their eight per
cent return each year.
¹¹
Less progress was made in developing secular education than Re
ş
id had hoped. Work on a much-heralded modernization of the
university in Stamboul stopped when the walls were a few feet above the foundations, largely because of hostility from the
ulema
and the military authorities, alarmed by tales of student
unrest in Germany and Central Europe. A shortage of trained teachers outside the
ulema
hampered Re
ş
id’s plans for secondary schools (
rusdiye
) and only six, with a mere 870 boy
pupils, were founded in the 1840s. In 1846, however, one of Re
ş
id’s first tasks as Grand Vizier was to give his patronage to a teachers’ training college, appointing the gifted twenty-
four-year-old writer and scholar Ahmed Cevdet as first principal. It is significant that by the time of Re
ş
id’s death in 1858 the number of
rusdiye
had
increased to forty-three, with 3,371 boy pupils.
¹²

The appointment of Ahmed Cevdet, nineteenth-century Turkey’s ablest educational and judicial reformer, was a typical instance of Re
ş
id’s gift for intellectual talent-spotting. His
long ascendancy in government enabled Re
ş
id to advance other westernizers whom he hoped would complete his work (though in later years several protégés became his rivals for office).
Chief among them were the Stamboul shopkeeper’s son Mehmed Emin Ali, and Kececizade Mehmed Fuad who, emerging from an
ulema
family background, worked for fourteen years at the Porte
translating French laws and manuals on administration. This continuity of personnel has encouraged the modern tendency to treat the
Tanzimat
as a single span of active reform giving Ottoman
institutions a vitality foreign diplomats were too prejudiced to perceive. But the number of reformers was small, a compact community able to find inspiration from the Code Napoleon. Moreover,
there was no certainty that experimental reforms would be allowed to mature. Measures to which ‘His Majesty the Most Noble, Most Powerful and Most Magnificent Sultan’ had deigned to
consent could, by the same superlative sovereign, be even more speedily rescinded.

Stratford Canning—back again as ambassador from January 1842 onwards—participated in what he once called ‘the great game of improvement’ for some nine years.
¹³
He could claim, with some justice, that he had sustained the impetus of reform during Re
ş
id’s virtual exile to the Paris embassy, browbeating Abdulmecid
and exposing the corruption of the Finance Minister (probably the least desirable of the
Valide Sultana
’s nominees for office). He helped secure laws against the slave trade and formal
condemnation by Abdulmecid of the religious persecution of Christian believers, but he failed to have specifically Christian evidence declared admissible in the law courts, nor could he gain
recognition of the right of Christians to serve in the Ottoman army. As ambassador he was concerned, not only with the effect of the
Tanzimat
reforms at the centre of the empire, but with
the military expeditions which sought to impose respect for the
authority of the Sultan far away from the capital, notably in the Levant and in the western Balkans.

The departure of Ibrahim’s army from Syria and the Lebanon deprived four Ottoman provinces—Aleppo, Damascus, Tripoli, Sidon—of the most benevolent and effective government they
had experienced for several centuries. Egyptian rule had brought considerable benefit to both Christians and Jews, particularly those engaged in trade or commerce. Basir II, who for almost half a
century had sought to control the Lebanon from his palace of Beit-ed-Din much as Ali Pasha had ruled over Epirus from Ioánnina, collaborated closely with the Egyptians, and when they left he
was deposed and sent to exile in Malta. His banishment gratified Muslim notables, out of favour during the Egyptian occupation; and at first they welcomed the return of Ottoman officials. By the
spring of 1841, however, the whole region was in disorder, with armed resistance to the Ottomans coming from rival factions, many of whom remained bound in an almost feudal loyalty to the historic
dynasties which had racked the same provinces in Abdulhamid I’s reign. The Ottoman military commanders were forced to undertake punitive expeditions, at times showing a ruthless vengeance
condemned by foreign observers—although, as in the Greek revolt, neither side possessed a monopoly of cruelty.

The European Powers, especially Britain, were more concerned by Syrian unrest than they had been by any earlier rebellion apart from the Greek. The Anglo-Turkish Commercial Treaty of 1838
provided new markets for British exports and gave British merchants favourable terms for the purchase of goods, raw materials and foodstuffs, thus stimulating the agricultural output of the Ottoman
lands. Other governments soon concluded similar commercial conventions, making the Ottoman Empire more susceptible to the fluctuations of world trade while, at the same time, giving Europe a more
immediate interest in the well-being of ‘Turkey’ as a whole. The restoration of the Sultan’s rule in both Syria and the Lebanon was therefore carefully reported by local
representatives of foreign governments and trading companies. The consuls offered protection to particular communities favoured in London or St Petersburg, Paris or Vienna: Orthodox Christians by
the
Russians; the Druze, and various Jewish and Protestant groups, by Palmerston; and the Maronites by the French and Austrians. But support for these groups varied widely
from district to district, making generalization misleading. The journals and dispatches of the British consul-general in Beirut, Colonel Hugh Rose, show his personal willingness to protect
Maronite convoys from attacks by the Druze, and his mistrust of the regular Ottoman troops. But they also complain of the extent to which his French colleagues stirred up Maronite unrest in ways
‘detrimental to the interests of the Porte’.
¹⁴

Peace of a kind was imposed in both Syria and the Lebanon in 1843 and again, after renewed fighting, in May 1845; but, despite the mediation of Stratford Canning and a visit to Beirut by Resid
in October 1846, there was little hope of an enduring settlement in a region where there were so many conflicts of interest. In 1848 and intermittently from 1850 to 1852 there were further risings
against Ottoman attempts to impose military conscription and Arabicize the Fifth Army, the permanent garrison. Rather than be subject to a reformed and efficient central Ottoman government, local
notables began to affect a particularist ‘nationalism’, especially in the Maronite districts around Mount Lebanon, a development of considerable significance for the second half of the
century.
¹⁵