Achmet abdicated in favour of his nephew, Mahmoud I, whose reign, from 1730-1754, showed a yet greater decline of Turkish power and prestige. Topal Osman, Mahmoud’s general, scored some successes over the raiding Persian armies, but was defeated and killed at Kerkoud, while Nadir, Shah of Persia, was beating other Turkish armies. Desultory wars with Austria led to no other result than that Turkey was passing out of the ranks of great Powers, through its inability to adapt itself to the spirit of the age, to adopt new methods in place of those which had proved useless, even harmful, in the day of trouble.
Attempts were made from time to time at a new order of things. Amongst the reformers was Gazi Hassan, the hero of the battle of Shio, in 1770. A fierce sea-fight was raging, in which the Turks were being worsted, when Hassan brought his ship alongside the Russian Admiral’s and fought yard-arm to yard-arm until both vessels caught fire and went up. Hassan was the last to leave his ship, and then swam ashore, badly wounded. He rose to high office in the State, and endeavoured to introduce modern improvements, to equip the army with up-to-date weapons, and to restore some sort of discipline; but the army would have none of it, and even stout-hearted Hassan could not push his way through the inert mass of Turkish officialdom which crowded in to stifle all efforts at reform. Only the navy experienced any improvement, and that because Hassan insisted on the high-pooped, heavy Turkish ships being replaced by lighter, faster vessels, built on English lines. But fresh difficulties arose over the manning of these ships, as the Turks declined to do anything but act as gunners, so Greeks had to fill the ratings of the sailors. Gazi Hassan worked hard at this reform, and was surely entitled to the gratitude of his country; but such feelings existed not in those days, neither will any reformer find it in Turkey of to-day. Gazi Hassan was unsuccessful in war, during the latter years of his life, owing to the opposition offered to all his reforms, but this was not taken into consideration; it probably increased his unpopularity, till Selim III, on his accession in 1789, had to execute the old hero to appease a tumult among the populace of Constantinople.
Selim III did not gain anything by his complaisance to the unruly soldiery, for by the beginning of his reign the Janissaries had become quite unmanageable, at least to a weak man. Their numbers had increased considerably, and stood at one hundred and fifty thousand, at least on paper, but there was sufficient reason to suppose that many figured on paper only, and that high-placed officials pocketed the pay of the non-existent members of the corps. Another change which had crept into the corps was that members were not necessarily available for, or liable to, military service, so many being engaged in civil employment. They were, however, ever ready to take up arms in revolt, and proved their political power by deposing and murdering Sultan Achmet III. The Janissaries had lost their raison d’être, and were no more than a public nuisance at a time when all Europe was seething with discontent, when old thrones were falling to the ground and new popular political institutions were teaching monarchs how a people prefers to be governed. Possibly the Janissaries were influenced by the spirit of revolt which informed so many peoples at this period, but I think it more likely that they acted out of selfishness only, and had no other desire than to hold the power of the State in their own hands, to their own advantage, allowing the Sultan to reign as long as he did not interfere with their rule. They were far too bigoted and jealous of their privileges to have taken to the idealistic notions which possessed so many patriots of the French Revolution. They deposed Selim III, and his successor reigned only a few months.
Then came Mahmoud II, and he was more like the Sultans of the days of conquests than any of his immediate predecessors had been. The Janissaries annoyed him, so he determined to get rid of them, and happily had heard of the method used by Murat for soothing the turbulent Madrileños. It was time for drastic measures, because the external situation was becoming very dangerous; the Greeks were in revolt, Kara George had risen in Servia, Christians were being massacred in the Ottoman dominions, and the fact was beginning to attract the notice of Europe, in spite of so many other preoccupations. So Mahmoud II saw to his artillery, and instructed his Master of the Ordnance, Ibrahim, commonly called Kara Gehennin, Black Hell, in the use he wished it put to. The Janissaries were ordered out to military exercises one day, and as this did not please them, they gave the usual signal of revolt, by upsetting their camp-kettles.
Mahmoud was ready for them; he unfurled the Sacred Standard of the Prophet, called on all true believers to rally round their Padishah and Caliph, and left Ibrahim to do the rest with his artillery. Those Janissaries who survived this treatment broke back to barracks, where they barricaded themselves, some six thousand. Ibrahim came up with his guns and knocked the buildings down about their ears; those who did not perish here were slain by irate citizens wherever they were caught, and so a great corps, whose earliest records were those of honourable battle, perished in a day. A new army of forty thousand was then raised, clothed, armed, and disciplined, according to European models.
The old order was changing, had changed, with startling quickness all over Europe, and all the known world was affected by the events that filled the times when Mahmoud II sat on the throne of Constantine. When this Sultan succeeded, France had already passed through the fire of Republican Government to the glory of a military Empire, had again accepted the principle of hereditary nobility while French arms were victorious over nearly all the continent of Europe. A new Republic had arisen out of muddle and misrule in Great Britain’s American colonies, and as compensation, perhaps, that country was laying the foundations of the Indian Empire, and paving the way to the possession of Egypt, on the battlefields of the Iberian Peninsula.
Mahmoud lived long enough to witness all these many changes. Before he died, in 1839, he saw the fleets of Great Britain, France, and Russia threatening him with punishment unless the bloodshed caused by the Hellenic effort after freedom ceased at once, saw his own fleet, despite its bravery and that of his Egyptian allies, destroyed at Navarino, and as consequence a Christian King appointed by the Powers to rule over his former subjects in Greece.
Even Turkey endeavoured to show some appreciation of the “Zeit Geist” by instituting reforms, and wisely began with the Army, calling in for the first time German instructors. One of these, a tall young officer with fair curly hair, some forty years later planned the campaign which laid the second French Empire in the dust, Field-Marshal Count von Moltke. Of the Turks, after the war with Russia, which followed shortly on Navarino, Moltke said: “The splendid appearance, the beautiful arms, the reckless bravery of the old Moslem horde had disappeared, yet this new army had one quality which placed it above the numerous host that in former times the Porte could summon to the field—it obeyed.”
Does the spirit of obedience still form one of the many good qualities of the Turkish soldier? It is hard to say, for this war has given instances of the old bravery and devotion, steadiness under fire, which means discipline, obedience; but against that you have evidence of the contrary, of swarms of men straying away unarmed from their posts at the front, and hiding in the purlieus of Stamboul, while from Asia Minor come reports of whole divisions which had declined to take part in the Balkan War.
In the meantime the dismemberment of the Turkish Empire continued. By 1811 Milosh Obrenoviç had forced the Porte to relinquish all claims on Servia, and in 1832 a Bavarian Prince became King of an independent Greece. Some thirty years later the Russo-Turkish War gave autonomy to Bulgaria, Bosnia and Herzegovina were occupied by Austria, these events being followed by the independence of Roumania and Servia as kingdoms entirely free from any Turkish control. The last of Turkey’s conquered provinces became free when Tsar Ferdinand proclaimed himself ruler of all the Bulgarians. This last event synchronized with an expression of popular feeling engineered by a political association generally known as Young Turks.