Read The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire Online
Authors: Alan Palmer
The unfortunate Selim had not ‘ceased to reign’, but his power was more circumscribed than any outside observer realized. At the very time Napoleon was
drafting his letter, Selim was seeking to raise more troops for his ‘New Order’ army by ordering a general levy throughout the Balkan provinces. This measure would have deprived both
war-lords and Janissaries of recruits and necessitated the transfer of some Janissaries to the new regiments. There were skirmishes between Janissary and New Order units in several districts of
Rumelia; enlistment and training at Edirne was made impossible, for the Janissary commanders and local notables cut off supplies and imposed military ‘picket lines’ to exclude recruits
from the city. Weakly Selim capitulated, fearing a march on the capital by insurgent forces.
Beyond the frontiers there was a dramatic shift in the balance of power during these months of internal crisis for the Ottomans. More than 50,000 crack Austrian troops were forced to surrender
to Napoleon at Ulm in October 1805; on 13 November the French entered Vienna; and on 2 December the Austrian and Russian Emperors were defeated in the decisive battle of Austerlitz. By the Treaty
of Pressburg, three weeks later, the Austrians surrendered to France all the one-time Venetian lands in the Adriatic, theoretically making Dalmatia part of metropolitian France, and giving Napoleon
a common frontier with the troubled Ottoman province of Bosnia. Soon afterwards Senyavin’s squadron from Corfu seized Cattaro (Kotor), partly to prevent the surrender of this fine natural
anchorage to the French, but also to give the Russians contact with the Montenegrins and insurgent Serbs. Sultan Selim hesitated no longer. He refused to ratify the latest proposed alliance with
the Tsar and, in February 1806, belatedly accorded Napoleon his recognition as Emperor. On August 9 yet another soldier-diplomat, that arch-intriguer General Sébastiani, arrived in
Constantinople as ambassador. A military mission accompanied him, once more raising Selim’s hopes of creating the westernized, modern army he had sought for nearly twenty years.
Sébastiani’s instructions, which the Emperor personally dictated, differ remarkably in tone from the letter sent to Selim eighteen months earlier.
6
The instructions fall into two sections. The first lays down the
qualities necessary for an ambassador to ensure that France is ‘treated as the most
favoured Power’: ‘tact, subtlety and trust rather than arrogance, force or intimidation’; ‘no support of any rebel against the Porte . . . , in Egypt, Syria or any Greek
island’; ‘the instilling of a feeling of confidence and security’. The second section shows what role Napoleon was prepared to assign to a westernized Sultanate. Significantly,
like every later plan drafted in foreign chancelleries, it assumed that the Ottoman Empire would survive solely by grace of Europe’s sufferance.
My unswerving objective in policy is to make a triple alliance between myself, the Porte and Persia, aimed directly or indirectly against Russia . . . All our negotiations
must seek these points: (i) closure of the Bosphorus against the Russians . . . ; (ii) forbidding Greeks from sailing under the Russian flag; (iii) arming every fortification against the
Russians; (iv) subduing [anti-Ottoman] rebels in Georgia and re-asserting the Porte’s absolute rule over Moldavia and Wallachia. I do not want to partition the empire of Constantinople;
even were I offered three-quarters of it, I should refuse to do so. I wish to strengthen and consolidate this great empire and to use it, as it stands, against Russia.
A Franco-Ottoman-Persian alliance would not merely protect the right flank of Napoleon’s armies as his empire thrust deeper into Eastern Europe: it would provide a
corridor to the Caucasus and the frontiers of India. So intent was Napoleon on completing this grand strategic plan that a Persian envoy travelled to his headquarters in a remote Polish castle,
while General Gardane was sent off on a diplomatic mission to Teheran.
Napoleon’s grand strategy brought seven years of conflict to Russia and Persia and six years of war between Russia and the Ottoman Empire, fought mainly in modern Roumania, or down the
Black Sea littoral of Georgia. No French troops participated in these campaigns. To Napoleon they were diversions. But the fate of the Ottoman capital was another matter for him: ‘Who is to
have Constantinople? That is the crux of the problem’, he remarked, in slightly varied words, more than once.
7
Paradoxically, in posing the
Eastern Question in a broader form he
aroused for the first time a British strategic interest in the Ottoman heartlands. In the short term, this diplomatic manoeuvring of
arch enemies was to have a dramatic effect on events in Constantinople and on the fate of the Sultan.
Selim was personally heartened by the Sébastiani mission. The General, a Corsican training for the priesthood when the Revolution secularized his thoughts and ambition, could claim an
achievement denied any Ottoman commander: he had led cavalry into Vienna. Perhaps for this reason he was honoured as no ambassador before him, becoming the first non-Muslim envoy permitted to wear
a sword in the Sultan’s presence. Of more practical value was the freedom he enjoyed to spread propaganda. The embassy printing press turned out
Grand Armée
bulletins in both
Turkish and Arabic and, on Napoleon’s personal insistence, circulated them to ports throughout the Levant. The news, in mid-November, that the renowned Prussian army had been defeated at
Eylau and scattered, made a deep impression. It strengthened Selim’s conviction that the French cause was invincible.
Sébastiani’s coming had already led to swift changes in Ottoman policy.
8
Within four days of the ambassador’s arrival the Sultan
dismissed the allegedly pro-Russian hospodars in Wallachia and Moldavia. A month later he closed the Straits to Russian warships; and he went ahead with plans for doubling the number of ‘New
Order’ troops. The Tsar’s ambassador, Alexander Italinskii, warned St Petersburg that the Turks had gone over to the French side; and under threat of an immediate Russian attack on the
Bosphorus, Selim wavered, even reinstating the deposed hospodars as a gesture of appeasement. But this came too late to change Russian policy. In the last week of November 1806 Moldavia and
Wallachia were overrun and on 16 December the Sublime Porte declared war on Russia. At that moment General Sébastiani achieved an ascendancy at the Porte unmatched by any previous foreigner.
He seemed to possess greater influence on Sultan Selim than the
ş
eyhülislâm
. He even succeeded in persuading Selim that to imprison an ambassador when declaring war on the
sovereign whom he represented was a barbarous custom. Largely thanks to Sébastiani, Italinskii escaped incarceration; he found refuge with his family aboard HMS
Canopus
,
an eighty-gun line-of-battle ship which had been at anchor in the mouth of the Golden Horn for three weeks.
It was on the initiative of the British ambassador that
Canopus
was lying off Galata. Charles Arbuthnot—better remembered in middle age as ‘Gosh’ Arbuthnot, the close
friend of the Duke of Wellington—had been in residence for the past two years. Like so many of his compatriots, he was certain that nothing would so effectively concentrate a Sultan’s
mind on essentials as the sight of warships flying the White Ensign above the waters off his palace. A couple of months before Sébastiani’s arrival Arbuthnot had assured the Foreign
Secretary (Charles Grey, Viscount Howick) that Selim III ‘would prefer a French war in Bosnia to an English one off the Seraglio Point’. His reports confirmed the predilection of the
Foreign Office and the Admiralty for a show of strength at Constantinople similar to the action off Copenhagen in April 1801, when Admirals Hyde Parker and Nelson used some fifty ships to
intimidate the Danes. At the end of the second week in November, Howick notified Arbuthnot that naval reinforcements would soon be sailing from Plymouth for the eastern Mediterranean. Meanwhile the
ambassador was to demand Sébastiani’s departure, on the grounds that the General’s activities were a breach of Ottoman neutrality.
9
But Arbuthnot was already shaping British policy long before the messages from London reached Constantinople. He sought armed mediation in Turkey’s quarrel with Russia; and it was to give
weight to his diplomacy that at the beginning of December he induced Rear-Admiral Louis to bring
Canopus
and the forty-four-gun frigate HMS
Endymion
up through the
Dardanelles—the Hellespont of ancient times—into the Sea of Marmara. While Sir John Duckworth was bringing a more powerful squadron from Gibraltar to the Aegean, Arbuthnot tried to
convince the Porte of Britain’s indignation at Sébastiani’s privileged position, but he made little impression. Louis took
Canopus
back down the Hellespont, carefully
studying the Turkish forts on the way; as yet, no fleet had attempted to force its way through the Straits in the face of Ottoman resistance.
10
At the end of January 1807 tension in Constantinople became explosive, and Arbuthnot was warned by his spies to leave Pera. He invited the
British merchants in
Constantinople to dine with him aboard
Endymion
on 29 January; once they were aboard, the frigate slipped quietly away and headed for the Dardanelles. If Arbuthnot had hoped to find a
powerful naval force awaiting him at the mouth of the Straits, he was disappointed; there was only Admiral Louis in
Canopus
, with two other ships. The Admiral told Arbuthnot the French were
helping the Turks to improve the defences of the Dardanelles, belatedly modernizing the sixteenth-century fortresses of Sedd-el-Bahr and Kilid Bahr and siting new batteries on the Asian shore.
Louis had sent a fast vessel to Malta with a request for ten line-of-battle ships and troop transports to provide landing parties to spike batteries on the Gallipoli peninsula and across the
Narrows. Meanwhile the four ships waited in Besika Bay, off Tenedos (Bozcaada).
A swift naval passage up the Dardanelles, with all the panache of the Nelson touch, might have speedily toppled Sébastiani from his eminence. But ten days elapsed between
Endymion
’s reunion with
Canopus
and the arrival of seven line-of-battle ships in Admiral Duckworth’s squadron. For nine more days the wind blew directly down the
Dardanelles, keeping the squadron in the lee of Tenedos. At last, on 19 February 1807—for the first time in the history of the Royal Navy—British warships began to force the
Dardanelles. Heavy cannonades came from the forts and from some of the older Ottoman ships, off Maidos; several were sunk by return fire; no British vessels were seriously damaged. By the following
evening Duckworth’s small fleet had crossed the Sea of Marmara—not, however, to threaten Sultan Selim in the Topkapi Sarayi, for winds and current down the Bosphorus were too strong to
approach the moorings Louis had used in December. HMS
Royal George
, Duckworth’s flagship, dropped anchor some eight miles short of the city, off the island of Prinkipo
(Büyükada).
11
For two days pinnaces and caiques plied across the waters, as Arbuthnot sought to negotiate from strength. The arrival of the ships, outwardly unscathed, caused consternation—until it was
noted that they were lying well off shore. Despite a heavy sea
Endymion
reached the mouth of the Golden Horn, but was withdrawn when an envoy from the Porte warned Arbuthnot that feeling was
running so high, the
presence of the frigate might precipitate a general massacre of foreigners. At 11.20 in the morning of 22 February Duckworth ordered his ships to prepare
to sail close in and bombard the city, but almost immediately he cancelled the order: constant squalls and strong headwinds saved Constantinople from the fate of Copenhagen.
While armed diplomacy faltered and stuttered, General Sébastiani resumed his military career. The French mission supervised the siting of artillery around the city. Civilians were
mobilized to strengthen the defences: even the Greek Patriarch, staff in hand, was seen exhorting a thousand Phanariots to help build new fortifications. The strong winds straight down the
Bosphorus continued until the last day of the month. By then some 300 guns were in position, commanding the waters between Prinkipo and the Golden Horn. They were not called into action. Duckworth,
fearing that his ships might be bottled up in the Sea of Marmara, sailed the squadron down the Straits and into the Aegean. On this occasion the fire from the forts at the Narrows was more
accurate; masts and rigging on several vessels were shot away.
12
Back in the lee of Tenedos Duckworth’s chastened captains were joined on 8 March by a Russian force under Admiral Senyavin. Briefly Arbuthnot and the two Admirals considered forcing the
Straits and bombarding the capital; but to what purpose? Without troops, there was no prospect of striking a militarily decisive blow. Moreover, the British were by no means convinced it was in the
national interest to help the Tsar become master of Constantinople. On Friday, 13 March, the allied squadrons sailed off across the Aegean. The first British naval demonstration in the Dardanelles
had proved a fiasco.
It was not the only one. On Saturday, 14 March, 6,000 British troops were landed seven hundred miles way at Alexandria, in an attempt to wrest Egypt from Ottoman suzerainty. Had their transports
been attached to Duckworth’s squadron, the show of strength off Selim’s capital might well have achieved all Arbuthnot desired. As it was, the Egyptian expedition, too, was a blunder.
Five months of determined resistance by Muhammad Ali, backed by an energetic French consul-general, confined the invaders to a few hundred square miles of swampy shore around Alexandria and
Rosetta. An orderly evacuation followed
in September. From the Bosphorus to the Nile delta, British prestige stood at rock bottom.
13
On paper, Duckworth’s failure vindicated Sultan Selim’s policies. As the British ships sailed away from Prinkipo Island there was wild rejoicing in Stamboul and Galata. A shower of
rich gifts testified to the Sultan’s high regard for Sébastiani and the French military mission. The Grand Vizier prepared to strike at Turkey’s other enemy. Early in April 1807
the main Ottoman army left the capital for Edirne in preparation for a summer offensive against the Russians in the Danubian Principalities. The fleet, too, prepared to seek Senyavin in the Aegean.
The more modern ships were undamaged by Duckworth’s guns, having wintered up the Bosphorus; and on 10 May the Ottoman navy left the Golden Horn, sailing southwards through the Dardanelles a
few days later. After the big military and naval concentration around the capital in the first quarter of the year, Constantinople was relatively denuded of troops.