Download PDF | Virginia H. Aksan - Ottoman Wars, 1700-1870_ An Empire Besieged -Routledge (2007).
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Acknowledgements
I is customary for an author to thank profusely a vast array of institutions, granting agencies, colleagues, anonymous readers, friends, neighbours and of course family for the patience with which they have endured the research journey just finished. I assume that as a given here, as I am very fortunate to be situated in a happy place as regards all of the above. Without the well-grounded sense and support of my partner in crime, Oktay Aksan, this book would never have been finished. I am also particularly blessed with the collegiality of a core group of Ottomanists, remarkable scholars all, who tolerate my naive rantings and ramblings with great good humour and sage advice. They know who they are.
I agreed to write the history of Ottoman wars without the least understanding of the journey that would entail, and how long it would take. The project has stretched in time through the seismic shifts in world politics engendered by the war on terror. To my complete horror, I found myself writing about the British bombarding Beirut in 1840, and the folly of the Crimean War, just as Washington made the benighted decision to make war on Iraq. That historians are trapped in their own eras may well be a truism, but finding oneself reflecting on the repeated global idiocy regarding the Middle East was emotionally wrenching.
Ottoman military historians writing in English are few in number: Caroline Finkel, Victor Ostapchuk and Gabor Agoston have encouraged me to continue this madness. Suraiya Faroghi, in spite of her well-known dislike of the subject of warfare, has read various pieces of the manuscript, for which I thank her. I am much indebted to Rossitsa Gradeva at the American University of Bulgaria, and her colleagues Fionera Filipova, Director of the Historical Museum in Vidin, and Theodora Bakardjieva at the Historical Museum in Rusguk, for the particularly eye-opening trip from Vidin to Silistre to tour surviving Ottoman fortresses. Theodora has been instrumental in preserving the columns commemorating the tour of Mahmud II to Bulgaria in the 1830s, one of which is pictured in the book.
What came as the greatest surprise to me was the serendipity of the internet. I have corresponded with a number of scholars, most of whom I have yet to meet, who pointed me to new or otherwise unavailable sources, and even supplied them on occasion. This I wish to acknowledge with heartfelt thanks. They include Avigdor Levy, who sent me a copy of his unpublished PhD thesis which is so important to the discussion of the reforms of Mahmud II; Alexander Mikaberidze, who supplied me with his translation of Danilevsky’s history of the Russo-Ottoman War of 1806-12; Mesut Uyar, of Ankara, who is writing a history of the Ottoman military himself, and whose advice has been invaluable; Veysel Simsek, and Kahraman Sakul, students both, whose own writings and references have enriched this manuscript immensely. I would also like to thank Peter Harrington, Curator of the Anne S.K. Brown Military Collection at Brown University, who sent along a number of possible illustrations, one of which adorns the cover.
I need to thank my colleagues at McMaster University, particularly John Weaver, Stefania Miller and Richard Rempel, for helping me steer the course by reading various parts of this manuscript.
To Hamish Scott I owe a debt of gratitude for taking me on as an untried military historian, and for his insistence that the Ottoman military post-1700 be included in Longman’s series Modern Wars in Perspective. I am also grateful for his seeing the work into press, and especially thank Christina Wipf Perry and Melanie Carter at Pearson Education for making it happen.
That I chose to situate the Ottomans among their neighbours, and write a comparative imperial history about war and society, should be laid at my door. The book has ambitions to educate a general audience as well as suggest to experts the inherent narrative possibilities of texts and documents. When I began the task such work was just beginning. As I finish, a generation of international scholars is taking up the challenge of comparative Russian-Ottoman history from the point of view of Ottoman as well as Russian sources.
I do not pretend to have dealt with the subject of Ottoman warfare from 1700 to 1870 with anything like completeness. Much of the material lends itself to snapshots of a particular moment, or a particular crisis. The Ottoman archives are immensely rich, vast and intimidating on the post-1826 period, but also require time to digest, share and interpret. At one point I had to abandon the hope of using the archives for all the wars, but remain optimistic that this introduction to the topic will encourage others to take up the cudgel. As they used to say in Turkish when a young child was surrendered to his first teacher at school: ‘Eti senin; kemigi benim.’ ‘His flesh is yours, his bones are mine.’ Virginia H. Aksan McMaster University October 2006
Publisher’s acknowledgements
We are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce copyright material:
Plate 9 courtesy of McMaster University Library; plate 19 Cevdet Askeriye 635, from Prime Ministry Ottoman Archives, Istanbul, with thanks to Veysel Simsek, graduate student, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey; plate 21 courtesy of the editors of the International Journal of Turkish Studies, Machiel Kiel, ‘Urban development in Bulgaria’, IJTS 4 (1989), 79-159.
In some instances we have been unable to trace the owners of copyright material, and we would appreciate any information that would enable us to do so.
A note on foreign terms and place names
In the interests of accessibility, I have kept foreign terms to a minimum. Some, such as pasha, agha, shar‘ia, kadi (court judge), ulema, or jihad, have entered the English language. For others, I have used modern Turkish, based on the spelling in the New Redhouse Turkish-English Dictionary of 1968. A small glossary with minimal definitions is included at the back of the volume for those terms that are consistently used in Turkish throughout the text.
In the matter of place names, those that are commonly known in English are used that way (Istanbul instead of Constantinople; Izmir instead of Smyrna; Ochakov instead of Ozii, for example). I have been a bit stubborn, and used the Ottoman names for other places that have long since disappeared or been renamed (Ruscuk for Ruse, Bulgaria, for example). To help the reader, I have included a glossary of some of the names with variants, and an occasional location if it seems called for. I have also tried to locate the important ones on the maps that follow these pages, as a way of pinpointing particular wars and campaigns.
Introduction
t is without doubt the height of folly to undertake a history of Ottoman warfare which spans more than a century of conflict, bridges early modern and modern-style military systems, and describes an evolution of an army from the Janissaries to the Regular Army (Nizamiye) of the Crimean War, especially as for most of the wars to be discussed, campaign histories from the Ottoman point of view are few and far between.’ To do so is also to fly in the face of a formidable body of historical studies which, with notable exceptions, have consistently overlooked the Ottomans as agents in their own development, generally attributed all military reform to French or Prussian assistance, and buried Ottoman military history under the carpet of European international relations.
Writing the story of Ottoman warfare after the treaty of Karlowitz in 1699 is a daunting task, as the nineteenth-century views on the nature of European warfare have strongly influenced the way we consider both the nature of violence and conflict in early modern societies and the Ottoman place within that system. Not only does a historian of the Ottoman Empire work against the stereotypes of decline embodied in the ‘Eastern Question’ historiography; he or she is faced with assumptions about state systems on the raison d’état that emerged in Europe after 1648, contrasted with Ottoman strategy driven by continuous holy war and impermanent peace with infidel (that is to say Christian) nations.” While both assumptions about early modern society are gradually unravelling in the twenty-first century, it remains difficult to engage meaningfully in questions of military imperatives when the debate is framed by the European narrative.
This is an oversimplified critique of a very large literature about an extremely important period in international politics. In keeping with the aims of this work, I will make a conscious effort to tell the story from the vantage point of Istanbul rather than London, or Paris, or Vienna, or St Petersburg. To the extent possible, my intent is to provide a more detailed version of the Ottoman ‘Western Question’ of the period. The core of this book is about the evolution of a military system from a Janissary to a conscript army, especially as events unfolded during the reigns of Selim III (1789-1807) and Mahmud II (1808-39).
There remain significant barriers, however, to telling the story properly from the Ottoman point of view. Not the least of these problems is that Ottomanists find themselves caught in the twilight zone between the empirical and the mythical. Much of the English and French material of the period (on which present-day western historians continue to rely) was written when fiction and fact had merged in the fantastic tales of eighteenth-century entertainments concerning the Turk and his world. The life story of Ottoman ayan Ali Pasha of Iannina, popularised by Byron, is the most obvious example of the genre and the conundrum.? Recent discussions have led to a reconsideration of nineteenth-century imperialism, and of representations of non-western, non-Christian societies as part of the discourse of empires. Gradually, a more balanced picture is emerging of the eastern Mediterranean in an important moment of transformation of the global order.
The opacity of the Ottoman record in surviving archives, in addition to its daunting volume, also proves a formidable barrier to such a project. For the period in question, archival records are chaotic and disorderly, perhaps reflecting the political confusion of the age. Multiple and illdefined modern cataloguing projects have scattered related materials across confusing collections, and complicated the task of analysis. Nonetheless, we are gradually recovering the Ottomans through their archival history, and rethinking the role that nineteenth- and twentiethcentury nationalist rhetoric has played in skewing our observations about the nature of pre-modern societies such as those of the Middle East.
Scholars working on the Ottomans in the Balkans, Anatolia, Egypt, and Syria have independently reached something of a consensus about the importance of the 1760-1830 period as a watershed for the Ottomans.’ It was a moment when reform became necessary not just as a palace experiment, but as a matter of life and death for the dynasty and empire alike. Survival in the Ottoman dynastic context meant engaging in a series of multilateral negotiations, not only with foreign powers, but also with a host of new military, intellectual and religious elite groups, who emerged precisely because of shrinking borders, mobile military forces, and refugee populations. Arguably, the greatest challenge came not from external enemies, but from internal challengers who benefited from the central collapse and came to control the dialogue.
Men such as Ali Pasha, as above, but also Alemdar Mustafa Pasha of Ruscuk, and Osman Pasvanoglu, to mention only the most famous, engaged in an elaborate pas-de-deux with the dynasty over the defence of the frontier, and supplying men and arms for increasingly difficult campaigns on the Danube. As the eighteenth century evolved, an alteration of the imperial premise emerged, in response to the intensification of appeal of co-religionists in Russia and Austria to their ‘countrymen’ still under Ottoman rule. Mahmud II (1808-39) understood the need to reiterate Sunni Muslim orthodoxy not just as part of campaign rhetoric, but also as a means of responding to those resisting his reforms.
The challenge to the dynasty from within the Muslim world has only begun to be assessed, particularly as regards reform impulses such as the Wahhabis in Arabia, and the Naqshbandi in Anatolia and Central Asia. To what extent the reformation of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century consti tuted the iteration of a Muslim ‘colonising’ or ‘civilising’? mission comparable to a similar process in Russia, Britain or France, remains a major question of this study.°
The passage from empire to nation in the modern world has been perceived as the natural trajectory of pre-modern empires. In that discussion, religious rhetoric has normally been couched as one aspect of proto-nationalism, or as one of the psychological tools of empire. Religious concerns were generally dismissed as irrelevant, or peripheral, to the concerns of realpolitik. By contrast, it has always been assumed that religion was the sole modus vivendi of the Ottomans, or of collaborationist groups, such as the Greek Orthodox community and patriarch of Istanbul, the Phanariots.
Nationalist movements in parts of Europe, it has recently been argued, have evolved identities based exclusively on religion, which is assumed to be a distinctive, and resilient (read virulent) form of statehood.° The debate about the role of religion in the formation of the modern republic continues in Serbia and Greece, former territories of the Ottomans. More publicly, in Istanbul, where ‘secularism’ has been opposed to ‘Islamism’ in the political arena, the underlying assumption remains that a ‘modern’ state must be secular. My point is that the wholesale adoption of the western model to the history of the Ottomans continues to pervert discussion of vigorous internal debates over the conundrum of multi-national empires facing the modern age. It has prevented a more inclusive narrative of Ottoman history from emerging.
An intensification of Ottoman ‘Islamism’ was without a doubt one of the consequences of the revival of religious fervour stimulated by foreign Catholic-Orthodox rivalries, by missionaries, by the immense and complex web of sufi organisations, as well as by the heterodox exile communities thronging into remaining Ottoman lands from the Danube and Black Sea frontiers.’ Reformer sultans such as Mahmud II were forced to recreate an ‘orthodoxy’ in the face of both Muslim and non-Muslim challenges to legitimacy.
There is another way of expressing the problem. In the Romanov and Ottoman contexts, military reform of the nineteenth century was invariably accompanied by religious symbolism, which military historians relegate to the realm of iconography (or regimental symbolism), except in the Ottoman (Muslim) case. Thus, for example, ‘fanatic’ as a descriptor belongs uniquely to the Ottoman armies of the period, although there are myriad contemporary European records of observers equally appalled at Russian troop ferocity, carried out in the name of the Virgin Mary, or Mother Russia, or Catherine the Great.
What did it really mean for Mahmud II to ask of each of the surviving Janissaries after the massacre of the Istanbul troops in 1826, ‘Are you a Muslim?’ or to call his new army ‘The Victorious Army of Muhammad?’ Mahmud II’s elimination of the Janissary corps in 1826 struck down not just an obsolete military force, but an entire social stratum, nominally Muslim, but sprinkled with fellow travellers (yoldags) of all religious (and ethnic) affiliations, who benefited from tax relief, entitlements and protection. So too he destroyed the foundation of a society that had tolerated (often contemptuously) a multiplicity of ethnicities and religions, more by neglect than actual application of principles. This, I wish to argue, is social transformation indeed, and leads directly into consideration of the fundamental contradictions of late imperial ‘Ottomanism’. Such contradictions were hardly unique to this empire.
So why take on the book at all? One reason is to fill a void. I was initially encouraged that Hamish Scott, the editor of the Modern Wars in Perspective series at Longman, felt the need to include a work devoted to the Ottoman military. My own dissatisfaction with the traditional historiography has also meant the reopening of a number of questions concerning Ottoman longevity and survival, part of ongoing discussions among Ottoman and world historians. There are three main aims in this particular narrative: one is to set the Ottomans among their neighbours, in a bid to contrast developments in the empire with those in Romanov and Habsburg domains. The second is to study the manning, maintenance, and sieges and battles in the fortresses along the Ottoman northern defensive line, which bristled from Belgrade to Ochakov on the Danube River and Black Sea, to Kars and Erzurum in the Caucasus. A third aim is to describe the transformation engendered by imitating the ‘infidel’ in both military and political spheres, which had an impact on social cohesion, and imperial logic.
Comparative empires
Ottoman pre-nineteenth century history is usually divided into two periods: a golden or classical Ottoman age, when the Janissary-style military system was at its strongest (1400-1600), then a long, slow, two hundred year descent into stasis and decay (1600-1800). The latter period is envisioned as a process of decentralisation, when powerful local notables emerged who challenged the Ottoman dynasty itself. The brief recovery of Ottoman absolutism in the nineteenth century is largely attributed to clever statesmen modelling themselves on the Europeans, with little reference to the internal dynamics which prohibited or facilitated the transformation of the military system. Recent work, partly enabled by increasingly accessible and better catalogued archives, has questioned the paucity of documentary evidence which underpins the historical narrative after 1800. The internal dynamics of change, strategies of negotiation between centre and periphery, and political legitimation of the late Ottoman state have emerged as questions for discussion concerning the Ottoman evolution after 1600. These large themes form a backdrop for this study on military strategy and imperatives, which is grounded in the discussions of comparative empires.
In our case, three land-based empires stood poised at the edge of the modern world, facing similar problems of finance and control over internal and external violence. For all three, the imperial army was the central organisation responsible for the survival of the dynasty. They were certainly universal empires at some point in their long histories, whether one defines that in political, economic or cultural terms. The ways in which they differed from the overseas empires of western Europe, the French, British and Dutch, has been a much belaboured subject in recent historiographical debates, but the ways in which they were similar to one another, or shared some similar historical trajectories, has been less studied. Taking up the story of Habsburg, Romanov and Ottoman rivalries in 1700, one contemplates huge expanses of territory, bewildering religious and ethnic variations and intricate real or constructed lineages and genealogies as justification for conquest. I do not intend to tell the story of all three in any completeness. Rather, the more developed historiographies of the Habsburg and Romanov cases will help to illuminate the less well-known Ottoman example.
The northern defensive line
The Ottoman defensive line is where most of the major campaigns with external foes of the empire took place after 1700. Because this is essentially a military history, a number of assumptions drive the discussion. The geopolitics of the region from Belgrade to Kars are of particular interest to me, as are the degrees of absolutism and legitimacy expressed in three different contexts, and the relationships between a dynasty and its internal challengers. Warfare was very often the catalyst of change, and very often the centre of periods of political and economic crisis, which could severely challenge dynastic legitimacy. Ottoman survival strategies most engage me in this context. To the extent that material is currently available to me, I have focused on describing select campaigns.®*
At the beginning of the period under study, the three dynasties resembled one another more than they did at the end. In 1700, the Habsburgs had just triumphed over the Ottomans, acquired Hungary and a relatively stabilised border with their hereditary enemy. The victory was the greatest moment in the history of the Christian—Muslim struggle and the counterreformation, and considerably enlarged the territories of the Habsburgs, bringing with it a destabilisation of the delicate balance of the federative, hierarchical Reich. The Ottomans, contained on their western front, had to come to terms with the erosion of both hegemony and legitimacy should they attempt to imitate the successful military systems of Europe. The Romanovs had stuck a claw in one end of the Black Sea, and were poised to burst on the European and Central Asian stages, with an arguably revolutionary modernised army and administration. In each case, there were western and eastern frontiers to subdue, requiring dexterity and ingenuity in styles of warfare. Ancient rights and privileged estates of various stripes continued to challenge the ruling houses for power. In each case, survival depended on the ability to mobilise and sustain long, debilitating and destructive, if episodic, campaigns. The conjunction of success and failure on the battlefields of the Danube, the Crimea and the Caucasus is a particularly apt way to compare and contrast the choices and consequences of power. Especially acute in the Romanov and Ottoman case was the question of vast, undefined frontiers, dominated by nomadic groups, or confederations, with their own proud traditions and styles of governance. These similar problems encouraged me to attempt to include the Ottomans in a normative discussion of limits and choices of early modern agrarian states, as exemplified in their military systems. There are limits to the comparative analysis, however, which are particularly apparent after 1750, when Austria began a long process of disengagement and accommodation with her neighbours to the north and east.
Military reform
This study argues that the struggle for survival was central to the changing dynamics of Ottoman society, especially in a period when war was generally proving too costly in human and economic terms, both for individuals as well as for the dynasty. Violence was endemic in the early modern period, when it was integral to daily life, accelerated when great campaigns were mounted, and never very far from one’s doorstep, either in battle, or accompanying disease and famine. The problem was hardly uniquely Ottoman, but one which afflicted the Habsburg and Romanov dynasties as well.
The problem of moving from mercenary to native, conscripted armies was a universal pre-modern preoccupation, which proved more difficult to achieve in the Ottoman context than elsewhere. Over the period 1700-1830, an Ottoman military system had emerged, which was drawn from manpower overwhelmingly Muslim and peripheral (nomadic, mountainous and tribal) to an Ottoman urbanity. When the Ottoman sultans first entertained reform, they emulated Napoleon and Peter the Great. By the mid-nineteenth century, Tsars Nicholas I and Alexander II, Napoleon III of France, and Franz Joseph and Metternich of Austria were the contemporaries, and models for the reforms of Abdiilmecid I (1839-61). The Ottomans had just begun the social transformation to a loyal instrument (Nizamiye) that would allow them to monopolise violence within Ottoman realms, when revolutionary nationalism and constitutionalism burst upon the absolutists of Europe in 1848. Trickling into the Ottoman Empire, and finding fertile ground in disaffected and abused non-Muslim communities, new ethno-religious identities competed with the ‘Ottomanism’ of the Tanzimat era, 1839-76, to result in the authoritarianism of Sultan Abdiilhamid II (1876-1908).
It is the period 1760-1830, a pivotal moment in world history, which is most lacking in detail about Ottoman military developments, and which is the core of this story. It was a do-or-die moment for the Ottoman house, hardly the moment to introduce liberalism, or constitutionalism.
Reform, commonly tslah in Turkish, was as much about improvement, or eliminating defects in the military system, as it was about Ottomanism. The parameters and imperatives of the late Ottoman state arose from the need to acquire and mobilise the means of war for survival and defence. The struggle by the late eighteenth century required a considerable alteration of the imperial premise, in order to convince the large non-Muslim population at home of the legitimacy of Ottoman power. The battle for the loyalties (suzerainty) of the Principalities (Wallachia and Moldavia) is particularly illuminating in that respect.
The Ottoman system militated against the development of a wealthy competitive or elite group in a number of ways which will be discussed. Nonetheless, provincial nobles play an enormous role in the success or failure of the war effort after the 1750s. While confiscation of estates, and more rarely, of charitable endowments, was within the power of the sultan, and frequently exercised, war profiteering generated powerful local elites who both challenged and cooperated with the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Ottoman state. Local committees of notables and Muslim judges were responsible for raising troops, supplying grain, baking and shipping biscuit, maintaining the bivouacs, especially along the army routes to the battlefront, and supplying horses and wagons, in the myriad of contractual relationships which characterised Ottoman centre and periphery. Loyalty to the system persisted even in the midst of widespread corruption and abuse of taxation privileges. The toll on local society was large, and accounts of deserted lands, increasing banditry and decimated populations are legion, yet many of the territories of the empire were not directly within the war zones. The balance of loss and gain for local populations must be considered.
The outline of the narrative
In short, the perspective of this study will be partially integrative and comparative, in an effort to draw the empire into the historiography of Europe and the Mediterranean. Certain fundamentals about the Ottoman side will also have to be established, including mobilisation, logistics, financing, ideological claims, and the impact of military choices and demands on the diverse populations and social groups under Ottoman hegemony.
Each narration of the campaigns of the period 1700-1870 will include a brief survey of the origin, causes, progress and conclusion of the wars, highlighting significant battles, and discussing the treaties and their geopolitical implications. More importantly, those descriptions will be followed by an assessment of Ottoman military mobilisation, financing, supply, leadership and strategy, emphasising continuity and change, and the creation of alternative fighting forces to the obsolete and obstreperous Janissaries.
The transformation which occurred at the centre, especially from 1792 to 1830, has been much described but little understood. Massive documentation is slowly being brought to bear on many questions which have remained unanswered except in the most facile way. What we do know is that by the end of the period covered by this book, both Ottoman bureaucratic and military classes were trained in western systems and languages, and represented the new Ottoman elites with aspirations concerning the nation and constitutionalism. Part of the investigation here is to determine who made up those elites, and why they became attached to the reform agenda.
This work is primarily a study of the warfare on the Danube, Crimean and Caucasus battlefronts between the years 1700 and 1870. The Ottomans confronted armies of different calibres on the Iranian and southern frontiers in the same period, but it is the Danube frontier fortress line to which they devoted the most attention. In fact, the neglect of the other ‘frontiers’ (if one is willing to accept Greater Syria as a ‘frontier’ in military terms) cost the Ottomans dearly — for example, once Safavid Persian hegemony, always tenuous, dissolved in the 1720s. Or, when Mehmed Ali and his new Egyptian army reconnected the Egyptian—Syrian geographical entity in the 1830s, reconfiguring a centuries-old topos which predated Ottoman hegemony. While it is the northern tier that is the subject of most of this narrative, the southern, or Arab, tier becomes important to the story after the 1760s, but especially with Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt in 1798.
This is also a study of land warfare, logistics and their integration into and impact on local societies. The Ottoman navy will not feature significantly in this story. The importance of the Danube fleet to the movement of men and goods from Istanbul to the battlefront, and the possible impact that had on local populations, is of interest to our story, but not central. Arguably, the Ottomans shifted revenues to land-based defensive systems, especially after the exhausting but successful conquest of Crete (1669), which cemented supply systems for the eastern Mediterranean and meant the beginning of the end for the Venetians. The navy does return in the nineteenth century, and has already attracted considerable interest among historians.”
Habsburg, Ottoman and Romanov diplomacy and politics in the seventeenth century open the story, followed by a description of the traditional military context circa 1700 in the second chapter. At the centre of the discussion are the challenge to Ottoman legitimacy in the Karlowitz Treaty of 1699 and the alteration to the sources of military manpower. Thereafter, the following chapters will include a brief review of the major diplomatic and military concerns of a particular period, with select campaigns, and select questions about Ottoman strategies and organisation as the focus of discussion. Under-utilised Ottoman texts and an attempt to describe warfare from the ground up, whenever feasible, will enhance the better-known political and diplomatic narratives.
For example, in discussing the 1737-39 Austro-Russian and Ottoman War, it seems appropriate to dwell on the Ottoman recuperative strengths and the nature of siege style warfare in the Balkans, in what proved to be the last great Ottoman war, and its illusionary triumph in the return of Belgrade. While the whole period is marked by monumental difficulties, notable successes, usually involving fortresses, and an ability to reestablish supply systems in desuetude suggest the resilience of an institutional apparatus, and, in fact, convinced contemporaries of the rightness of imperial aims. The 1768-92 Russo-Ottoman wars, the Kiciik Kaynarca, Sistova and Jassy treaties and the significant loss of the Crimea, by contrast, will be followed by a discussion of the new methods of mobilisation, the complete dominance of provincial forces on the battlefield, and the bankruptcy of outmoded supply systems.
The 1768-74 Russo-Ottoman War remains the pivotal moment for the Ottomans, redolent in the literature as the inauguration of the ‘Eastern Question’, but also truly the greatest test to the traditional military systems, which had to be reorganised following the long, peaceful hiatus after 1740. That ‘Eastern Question’ generally would make of the Ottomans pawns on the international chessboard, disregarded except as a nuisance by the great powers. Three interrelated questions are embodied in the ‘Eastern Question’ as it concerned Britain, but also Russia and France: (1) access to India and trade; (2) access to the Dardanelles and the Black Sea for economic and strategic reasons; and (3) the problem of central and eastern European territories and the Ottoman Empire, more particularly the increasing threat of Russia.
The perception of the need to control Egypt, in order to have access to the trade routes to India, drove British policy discussions concerning the Ottomans during the Napoleonic period. Francophobe, and later, Russophobe British governments, often unwillingly, found British interests tied to the preservation of the Ottomans, colonial occupation and an informal empire that remained operative in the Middle East until the 1960s. The question of access to the Black Sea through the Aegean and Bosphorus straits, and all it implied for international trade and the balance of power after 1800, was a second underlying theme of the debates. The conflict between Mahmud II and Mehmed Ali (d. 1849) of Egypt was pivotal to the debates, especially during the the Syrian Crisis 1839-41, but beginning with the Greek Rebellion of 1821.
The third question concerned the struggle among Austria, Russia, and Prussia (and retreating Ottomans) over Poland, Ukraine and the Danubian territories. The general concern of European chancelleries was about the collapsing balance of power and prestige, expressed as concern over the fate of the Ottoman Empire but in reality driven by much posturing of empires and nation-states. Enlightenment views of liberation often conflicted with nineteenth-century religious and racial justifications for empire and domination.
Eastern questions and new Ottomans
The chronological boundaries of the Eastern Question in most surveys extend from the 1774 Treaty of Kiigik Kaynarca, which ended the RussoOttoman War of 1768-74, to the collapse of the Ottoman, Habsburg and Romanov empires in World War I. It is possible, however, to break up the period 1760-1860 into two phases of European involvement in the East: the first, 1760-90, covers the period when investigative missions, diplomatic and military, characterised British and French involvement in eastern affairs. The French, long-standing friends of the Ottomans, pursued with vigour the development of trade networks in the east, both with the Russians and the emerging Greek entrepreneurial class. Secret initiatives and military missions gave the French a considerable tactical edge in the eastern Mediterranean, which facilitated the invasion of Alexandria in 1798 by Bonaparte and his army. Absorbed by intense rivalries with the French elsewhere, in North America and India, British policy makers failed to give the Mediterranean, the routes to India, and Russian aggrandisement serious consideration until the fall of Ochakov in 1788, the last Ottoman fortress on the northern coast of the Black Sea, served to forcibly remind Europe of the changed status of the region.
A second phase of the ‘Eastern Question’ after the 1790s involved the increasing importance of Britain as an ally to the Ottomans, in the long struggle with Napoleonic France, which was part of an emerging international consensus that the best solution to Russian encroachment was a live rather than a dead Ottoman Empire. This latter policy, which vacillated according to prime ministerial politics in London, committed Britain to an undeclared colonial domination of the Middle East crowned by the occupation of Egypt in 1882. The further consequence was the almost total eclipse of French political influence on subsequent events in the East except in greater Syria, especially Lebanon. The unresolved rivalries between France and Russia over the protection of Catholic and Orthodox communities resident in Ottoman territories, which centered around the holy sites in Jerusalem, were the casus belli of the Crimean War (1853-56). Ottoman, French, British, Italian and Russian armies became embroiled in one of the more tragic examples of pre-modern imperial warfare, fought, like the later American Civil War, in the full light of eye-witness journalism, photographs, and public opinion.
Caught up in global politics, the Ottomans struggled to survive and adapt to the new challenges of European financial and technical superiority. It is here that the book makes a contribution, by both injecting the Ottomans into the ‘Eastern Question’ and challenging two attitudes of enlightenment thought that have influenced the historiography concerning Ottoman military organisation and reform. One is the disregard of ‘Muslim’ protestations about ‘infidel innovations’, as nothing more than religious obscurantism. Most studies of the reform period to date have simply dismissed any protest cloaked in religious terms as non-progressive, backward and ignorant. The second inheritance is the discourse on ‘despotism’, particularly aimed at the kings of France in the eighteenth century, which settled on the Ottomans as the clearest example of the worst excesses of absolutist government, with China and Russia close behind.'® Traces of both remain part of the narrative of empires into the present. My intention is not to nullify such generalisations, but rather to present more evidence from within the Ottoman context, as a way of balancing the picture.
If one measure of a modern state lies in its ability to centralise and monopolise the control of violence, the Ottomans failed to make the transition in the eighteenth century. They also failed to design a fiscal system as well-organised as their European foes around the business of war, another of the characteristics of European states of the same era. The consequences of the neglect of financing war made itself felt in 1768. Some long-term fiscal adjustment, and new taxation, however, can be traced over the period under discussion, at least until the disastrous 1787-92 war with Russia during the reign of Selim II. Bankruptcy faced Selim II, inhibiting the expansion of his ‘new order’ and accompanying economic reforms. Austria, meanwhile, reluctant partner of Russia throughout, withdrew from eastern adventures after the 1790 rapprochement of Prussia and Austria, and the signing of a Habsburg—Ottoman armistice. By 1791, the second ‘diplomatic revolution’ of the eighteenth century, and limited territorial gains from a costly war, ended centuries of Ottoman-Habsburg confrontation until the late nineteenth century.
I will argue for the continuity of indigenous military reform in both mobilisation and artillery systems from Selim III to Mahmud II, to counteract the historiographical reliance on works such as the Memoirs of Baron de Tott, the well-known technical adviser to Mustafa II (1757-74), who claims sole responsibility for artillery reform in Istanbul. (A colleague of mine once referred to Tott’s memoirs as the French equivalent of Twain’s The Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court.'') Fictional or not, the cultural assumptions and full-blown Eurocentrism of Tott and others of his contemporaries, taken at face value, continue to influence the way this history is written. I do not evade a discussion of cultural difference, but rigid dichotomies such as civilised/barbaric, or occidental/oriental I have tried to avoid.
Thus, in examining the Napoleonic era, starting with the invasion of Egypt in 1798 and ending with the 1812 Bucharest Treaty, it seems particularly appropriate to emphasise the gradual redefinition (or perhaps more accurately, the reassertion) of the Muslim identity of the army. It had been re-fashioned on European models, particularly apparent in Mahmud II’s ‘Victorious Soldiers of Muhammad’ which replaced the Janissaries after 1826. The success and failure of the military reforms of Mahmud II, and the construction of the new absolutism around the ‘new’ Ottomans, modelled on their near neighbours, deserves serious reconsideration from the Ottoman perspective, and without the assumption that the key to success lay in mimicking western Europe. One of the great turning points in Ottoman history is in 1828, when Mahmud II declared war on Russia and marched 40,000 new model army troops to the mouth of the Danube, two years after eliminating the Janissaries and one year after France and Britain sank his fleet at Navarino.
There was also continuity in the period in the growing peripheralisation of the Ottoman economy, represented in the commercial privileges system (capitulations) which extended to European powers and culminated in the 1838 commercial treaty with Great Britain, which forced free trade on Ottoman territories. The 1838-41 international crisis, when Mehmed Ali and his son Ibrahim threatened the very doorstep of Istanbul, represented the moment that indebtedness to Europe became a fait accompli. It is also known as the beginning of the era of the Tanzimat, which opened with the public promulgation of Ottoman intentions to reorganise society for the benefit of all subjects. The Crimean War worsened the debt problem, although foreign management of debt payments was only institutionalised in the 1881 Ottoman Public Debt Administration under French and British supervision. After the withdrawal of Mehmed Ali from Syria in 1841, the Ottomans and the Tanzimat bureaucrats clearly saw themselves in the role of ‘civilising’ monarchs in their peripheral and reoccupied territories such as Albania, Kurdistan, Iraq and Lebanon.
In the final chapter, I take a look at the origins of the Crimean War, and the Russo-Ottoman confrontations at Vidin on the Danube and at Kars in the Caucasus. What makes the Crimean War interesting is the confrontation of British and Ottoman military styles, and the drawing of the Ottoman Turk further into the European sphere of influence, and the global marketplace. For the first time on Ottoman battlefields, Turks, Albanians, and myriads of Caucasus tribesmen, fought side by side with, and were under the command of, dozens of foreigners, among them British, Polish, French, Hungarian, and Italian soldiers and officers. In truth, the military reforms of 1843 and 1846 mark the end of a particular period of military reform in the empire. In 1853-55, the ‘Turkish’ soldier, for better or worse, joined the modern historical record.
The impact of war and reform on the development of late Ottoman absolutism is of particular interest to me. This too will be comparative, especially with the Russian context, for though the balance of power had shifted to the northern empire by the end of this study, the process of transformation to a European-style absolutism looks somewhat similar. Ambivalence about foreign advisers, reappropriation of religious ideology as both a conservative and liberating force, increasing intolerance of multiethnic groups, and a more or less continuous problem with financing as suggested above, are some of the bases for comparison. The Austrian bid for empire, exemplified by the aggressive military build-up of Joseph II, could not be sustained when confronted at the turn of the century by the juggernaut of the Napoleonic ‘citizen’s armies’. Both Austrian and Russian contexts are instructive when examining the Ottoman evolution. So too is the Mehmed Ali era in Cairo, 1811-40, a phenomenal period of ruthless modernisation and militarism, culminating not just in altering Ottoman rule over Egypt, but also testing great power diplomacy at critical moments in world history. Arguably, Egypt was informally ‘colonised’ and drawn into world markets long before the British occupation of 1882, while the Ottomans found themselves colonised from within, by minority financiers and their international protectors, never more so than after the Crimean War. Austria, too, had a role to play in the final act of the three early modern empires, but it was not until the Balkan crisis of 1875-78 that Austria thrust east again, into Bosnia—Herzegovina. After 1848, and during the Crimean War, the Austrians played a tricky game of cards, which led to an increasing isolation of the Habsburgs from both eastern and western allies.
How to describe the new society that emerged by the end of Mahmud II’s reign has long eluded historians of the Ottomans. By 1856, it is possible to think in terms of an Ottoman—Muslim absolutism that eschewed the ‘secularism’ of the Janissary era as once argued by Serif Mardin. Mardin’s ‘secularism’ might better be described as a Muslim universalism, which managed benevolence, if not strictly speaking equality, among its subjects. Abdiilhamid II’s reign is recognised as the age of ideology and the Ottoman Caliphate, especially in the work of Selim Deringil.'? Later historiography has been so dominated by inter-related paradigms of imperialism and nationalism that the essential question of the re-Islamisation of Ottoman ideology in this earlier period has been overlooked. The reign of Abdilhamid II (1876-1908) is generally characterised as an era of extreme despotism, tremendous political upheaval, countryside violence and destruction, and a severe identity crisis, brought on by the ‘turning Turk’ of the military class. I argue that the crisis had its antecedents in the previous century of reform and the refashioning of the Ottoman ideological premises, which is a transition not yet very clearly delineated within Ottoman historiography.
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