The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire (9 page)

Rather surprisingly, Damat Ibrahim survived that crisis. He believed that he remained in touch with the public mood in the capital. Ordinary townsfolk in Stamboul and Galata had benefited from
the coming of cheap coffee houses, from the shoring-up of long neglected buildings and the provision of more fountains, and from the institution of the first Ottoman fire brigade, set up in 1720 by
Ahmed Gerçek, Louis David by birth, a French convert to Islam. Across the Bosphorus, too, Damat Ibrahim courted popular favour. In March 1729, when he was returning from further palace
building at Kandilli, famished peasants at Üsküdar begged him to help find them food. Next day, an ample supply of free bread arrived from the Stamboul bakeries; and the hungry of
Üsküdar gave thanks to Allah for the ready response of such a charitable Grand Vizier.

But in the autumn of 1730, after twelve years in office, Damat Ibrahim misread all the signs of popular discontent. Rumour reached the capital that he had accepted a
compromise truce with the Persians which involved the surrender of Sunni Muslim villages to the Shi’ites. On 28 September 1730 Patrona Halil, an Albanian-born ex-Janissary who had become a
second-hand clothes dealer, began haranguing worshippers outside the Bayezit Mosque; five close companions supported him in denouncing the constant violation of Holy Law by the Grand Vizier and the
Sultan’s closest advisers. From the mosque an angry crowd of demonstrators surged towards the Topkapi Sarayi, collecting dissidents from the Janissary barracks as they went. The Janissary
mutiny turned a demonstration into an insurrection.
¹⁴

Damat Ibrahim seems to have thought that the crowd could be easily dispersed. He had forgotten—or did not know—that the most reliable troops were encamped at Üsküdar, on
the Anatolian shore, ready to set out eastwards on a further Persian campaign. He also placed unjustifiable confidence in his imperial father-in-law. For when Ahmed III heard that Patrona’s
rebels were demanding the heads of the Grand Vizier, the Grand Admiral, and one other ‘westernized’ minister, he obliged them. All three were, as was the custom, swiftly strangled
before decapitation; the executioners disturbed the Grand Admiral in his waterside villa as he was transplanting his tulips, totally unaware of any political crisis in downtown Stamboul.

If Ahmed III thought that by sacrificing his ministerial cronies he could save his throne, he was mistaken. Along both banks of the Golden Horn there followed two days of rioting, arson and
looting—a sudden show of cultural xenophobia towards anything thought to be ‘Frankish’ (western). On 1 October Ahmed abdicated, under threat of deposition, making obeisance to his
thirty-four-year-old nephew, Mahmud I, who had been confined in the
kafe
ever since his seventh birthday. Back to the
kafe
went the ‘tulip king’, spending the last six
years of his life only a few hundred yards from the pavilion where he had sat in floral majesty each April. His daughter Princess Fatma—Damat Ibrahim’s widow—was imprisoned a year
later for plotting to restore her father, and it is possible that Ahmed’s death, in his
sixty-third year, was hastened by poison, although no Sultan since Suleiman I
had survived into his sixties.

Ahmed III had reigned for twenty-seven years. Against all expectancy, his nephew remained on the throne for twenty-four. For thirteen months after his accession, foreign envoys looked on Mahmud
as a mere puppet of Patrona Halil and his bully boys, rebels who set fire to most of the exquisite palaces and kiosks of the Tulip Years. Their leader grew rich very quickly, as boss of a city-wide
protection racket. Momentarily it seemed he might find an even broader field in which to peculate; on 24 November 1731 the Sultan invited Patrona Halil and his chief supporters to come to the
palace in order to discuss plans for another Persian War. No such discussion took place. Soon after their arrival in the Topkapi Sarayi, Patrona Halil and his associates were seized, and strangled
on the spot. Mahmud could now rule in his own right, entrusting the administration to Grand Viziers sympathetic towards westernizing reform, but more cautious than Damat Ibrahim and less tenacious
of office.

Much survived the Patrona Terror, most notably Muteferrika’s printing press. There was even an imperial tulip festival each spring, albeit trimmed down to economy size. Like Ahmed III,
Mahmud showed an interest in books and education, at least in his capital city: a small library outside the Mosque of the Conqueror and a primary school attached to the mosque of Ayasofya are still
standing. He also completed a project, abandoned in the previous reign, for supplying water piped from outlying reservoirs to Pera, Galata and the northern shore of the Golden Horn; the octagonal
water distribution centre (
taksim
), erected on the Sultan’s orders, is still at the top of Istiklal Caddesi (modern Istanbul’s Regent Street or Rue de Rivoli) and has given its
name to Taksim Meydani, which it is tempting to call Istanbul’s Piccadilly Circus.

These projects belong mainly to Mahmud I’s later years, as also does the patronage he extended to the building of Stamboul’s first Baroque mosque, the Nurousmaniye Cami, next to the
Bazaar. He had begun his personal rule by giving urgent attention to defects in the methods of tax collection; a new law improving the efficiency of the
timar
system was issued as early as
January 1732. Later in that same year Ibrahim Muteferrika presented the Sultan with a printed edition of his own
treatise, some fifty pages long, an inquiry into the science
of ruling the nations,
Usul ul-hikem fi nizam al-uman.
He described the types of government existing in other states, urged the sovereign to relate external policies to the geographical
structure of neighbouring lands, and suggested how the Ottomans might learn from the military science and discipline of infidel armies—towards whom Muteferrika dutifully showed a tactful
contempt.
¹⁵
Mahmud I was impressed; and, like many later Sultans, he turned for advice to a foreign expert. The Comte de Bonneval would, he hoped,
modernize the Ottoman army, making it once again the conquering vanguard of Islam.

Claude-Alexandre, Comte de Bonneval, a French general from the Limousin, had every confidence that he could live up to what he assumed to be the Sultan’s expectations. He was fifty-two
when in 1727 he entered Ottoman service, having fought for and against Louis XIV and served under Prince Eugene against the Turks before falling out with his commanding general and spending a year
in prison. The Venetian Republic had nothing to offer him and so he travelled down to Ragusa (Dubrovnik), crossed into Bosnia, accepted conversion to Islam, and made ready to fight for the Sultan.
After a few months observing the Ottoman army, he prepared a memorandum for Mahmud I, explaining how he would create new fighting units of infantry and artillery, to be trained by young hand-picked
officers; and how he would restore the Janissaries as an élite fighting force by grouping several
orta
in the corps into regiments, thus giving officers a regular ladder of promotion
on the model of the French and Austrian armies which he already knew so well. Foreign-born military advisers—German, Austrian and Scottish officers, in particular—had played a
considerable role in modernizing the Russian army: one in four of Peter the Great’s senior commanders was a non-Russian, and the new guards regiments founded by his successor, Empress Anna,
were almost entirely raised and trained by foreigners. To assist him, Bonneval knew he would have three somewhat younger French officers who had converted to Islam, together with some Irish and
Scottish soldiers of fortune and, possibly, some Swedes. On paper there seemed no reason why ‘Ahmed’—as Bonneval was now known—should not give the Sultan a fighting force to
match the army of his northern neighbour.

The vicissitudes of Bonneval’s career well illustrate the difficulties facing any reformer at the Sultan’s court. In September 1731 the Grand Vizier Topal
Osman invited him to modernize a single section of the Sultan’s army, the
humbaraciyan
or bombardier corps, responsible for making, transporting and firing all explosive weapons
(mortar bombs, grenades, mines) on land or aboard a naval vessel. He was provided with a training ground and barracks outside Üsküdar, consulted over the construction of a cannon foundry
and musket factory, and asked to draft a memorandum for the Sublime Porte on foreign policy. But six months later Grand Vizier Topal Osman was replaced by an Italian-born convert,
Hekimo
lu Ali, who was so dependent on the conservatively-minded Janissary leaders that he dared not support army reform until he had been in office for some two
years. By the autumn of 1734, however, Bonneval was back in grace: on his recommendation a military engineering school was set up in Üsküdar; and in January 1735 he was made a
high-ranking dignitary, entitled to two horsetails.

For the last twelve years of his life Claude-Alexandre became Kumbaraci Osman Ahmed Pasha. He could not, however, rely on Mahmud’s continued support. Yet another Grand Vizier came into
office in July 1735, and a year later the Pasha was exiled from the capital to Katamonu in northern Anatolia; funds for the bombardiers and the new army institutions were at once cut off. Somehow,
in 1740, he slipped back to Üsküdar, but Janissary suspicion and jealousy made certain he never again enjoyed great influence. His grandiose plans for modernizing the army were ignored,
although he was allowed to continue running his military engineering school until his death at the age of seventy-two. ‘A man of great talent for war, intelligent and eloquent, charming and
gracious’, commented a French envoy; ‘very proud, a lavish spender, extremely debauched and a great philanderer.’
¹⁶

Bonneval’s reforms contributed to the success of Ottoman armies in the sporadic campaigns from 1736 to 1739 against Russia and Austria. Sultan Mahmud’s armies recovered much of
Serbia, including Belgrade, and strengthened the Ottoman hold on Bosnia. Throughout Mahmud’s reign the Sublime Porte had to look defensively to the east, as well as to the north and west, for
in Persia the ruthless Khan Nadir Afshar seized
power and in 1737 was recognized as Shah. Mahmud and Nadir exchanged gifts: an ornate oval throne, plated with gold and
adorned with pearls, rubies and diamonds, was presented by the Shah to the Sultan; while Mahmud in return sent to Nadir a golden dagger, with three large emeralds in the hilt beneath another
emerald which covered a watch. But despite such costly diplomatic courtesies, Sultan and Shah were at war for most of Nadir’s reign, fighting largely indecisive campaigns in Mesopotamia,
although the Persians gained some success in the southern Caucasus. The danger receded with the assassination of Nadir in 1747, an event which enabled the Sultan to recover the golden dagger he had
presented. Both gifts are on show in the Topkapi Sarayi treasury, the dagger having (in 1964) featured in
Topkapi
, a film based upon Eric Ambler’s thriller
The Light of Day.

Shah Nadir’s murder came at the start of an unexpected interlude in Ottoman history. Between 1746 and 1768, the Empire was at peace. Never before had twenty-two years passed without war
along at least one frontier; and the country was to enjoy no comparable respite until the Kemalist Revolution and the proclamation of a republic. Yet as the Ottoman Empire was essentially a
military institution, the ‘long peace’ proved curiously debilitating. Only one Grand Vizier—Koça Mehmed Ragip, in the late 1750s—tried to arrest the decline of
effective government; he dispatched troops to stamp out banditry in Rumelia, Anatolia and Syria; and he appointed supervisors to check corruption in the
evkaf
and ensure that the revenue
from religious endowments was applied to pious or charitable work.
¹⁷
But despite Ragip’s efforts three familiar abuses soon crept back into the
administration: the sale of offices; nepotism; and the taking of bribes. Instead of building on the reforms of the past quarter of a century, the Janissaries sought to put the clock back. Turkish
printing virtually ceased, to the great relief of the professional scribes and calligraphers who had feared competition. After Ibrahim Muteferrika’s death in 1745 only two volumes were
published in eleven years, and the press thereafter stood idle until 1784 when Sultan Abdulhamid I issued an imperial edict on the need to re-establish Turkish printing. A similar halt was called
to all efforts at army or navy reform. Bonneval’s military engineering school only outlived its founder by three
years; and almost two decades passed before any further
attempt was made to modernize the Ottoman army.

During the ‘long peace’ it is doubtful whether the Sultans or their viziers in Constantinople were fully aware of the extent to which the empire was falling apart. The North African
lands, from Libya westwards, were by now no more than nominal vassal states. In 1711 Ahmed III had recognized the hereditary rule of the Qaramanli family in Tripolitania and the Husaynid dynasty as
beys of Tunis, as well as accepting the right of local Janissaries to nominate a governor in Algeria who would share power with three provincial beys. In Cairo a rapid succession of Ottoman
viceroys had proved ineffectual: Egypt was virtually ‘governed’—a euphemistic verb in this context—by rival Mameluke princes, working sometimes with and sometimes against
the resident Janissaries. The chronic civil war permitted Bedouin to encroach on the fertile lands of the Nile delta, gravely hampering cultivation; there was a major famine in Cairo on four
occasions during the reign of Egypt’s nominal sovereign, Sultan Ahmed III. The famines were almost as bad in Mesopotamia, where Bedouin incursions brought the desert back to a fertile region
on the Tigris north of Baghdad. In Mosul, Baghdad, Aleppo, and Damascus by the middle of the century, the
vali
was, in effect, a hereditary governor-general, his family forming an embryonic
local dynasty safeguarded by a private army. Syria forwarded to Constantinople no more than a quarter of the revenue claimed by the imperial government as tribute money; and other outlying
provinces were no better. Even the few imperial duties laid on local governors were sometimes disastrously neglected. The most notorious incident was the failure of local notables who had secured
the hereditary governorship of Damascus from the Sultan to protect the pilgrim caravan from attack by Bedouin horsemen on its way to Mecca in 1757; on that occasion the raiders left 20,000 devout
Muslims dead, among them a sister of the spineless Sultan, Osman III—who died from apoplexy soon after news of the raid reached his capital.
¹⁸