Mahmud II

Mahmud II ruled the Ottoman Empire from 1808 to 1839, a reign of lost provinces and radical change. He presided over the independence of Greece and defeats by Russia, but he also destroyed the Janissaries, the old infantry corps that had blocked reform for generations, and began rebuilding the army, government and law along European lines, laying the groundwork for the Tanzimat reforms of his successors.

He was born at Topkapı Palace on 20 July 1785, though some sources give 1784, the youngest son of Sultan Abdul Hamid I and his consort Nakşidil. In 1808 his half-brother, Sultan Mustafa IV, faced a revolt by supporters of the reforming ex-sultan Selim III and ordered both Selim and Mahmud killed to remove rival claimants. Selim died, but Mahmud survived; a traditional story says a slave girl held off the killers by throwing ashes in their faces while he escaped across the palace roofs. The rebel leader Alemdar Mustafa Pasha proclaimed him sultan and became his vizier, but was killed in another uprising that same year, and Mahmud put reform aside for the time being.

His early reign was dominated by war with Russia, ended by the Treaty of Bucharest in May 1812, which gave Russia the eastern half of Moldavia, known as Bessarabia. In Arabia his governor of Egypt, Muhammad Ali, recovered Medina and Mecca from the first Saudi state in 1812 and 1813. The Greek War of Independence broke out in 1821; Mahmud had the Orthodox Patriarch Gregory V executed that Easter for failing to stop it. In 1827 a combined British, French and Russian fleet destroyed the Ottoman navy at the Battle of Navarino, and Mahmud had to recognise an independent Greece in 1832. Another war with Russia in 1828 and 1829 brought Russian troops to Adrianople, and France began its conquest of Ottoman Algeria in 1830.

In June 1826, having built up a new, European-trained force, Mahmud moved against the Janissaries. When they protested against his plans, he had their barracks in Istanbul shelled, and the corps was wiped out through killings, executions and exile; the Bektashi religious order linked to it was banned. Ottoman writers called this the Auspicious Incident. A new conscript army replaced the Janissaries, and Mahmud used it to break the power of provincial strongmen, the derebeys and ayans, bringing distant provinces back under central control.

Mahmud's reforms reached far beyond the army. He abolished the confiscation of the property of condemned men, barred governors from executing people without a judge's sentence, and in 1834 ended many extra charges imposed on taxpayers. He placed religious endowments under a state ministry, abolished idle offices, raised officials' pay to discourage bribery and attended the imperial council himself, a practice his predecessors had long abandoned. In 1831 he founded Takvim-i Vekayi, the first newspaper in Ottoman Turkish. He made the fez standard dress, first for soldiers and then for officials, created the post of foreign minister in 1836 and opened permanent embassies in Europe, starting with Paris in 1834. He also rebuilt the navy, acquiring its first steamships in 1828.

In 1838 and 1839 he created a Supreme Council of Judicial Ordinances and a council of ministers. He died of tuberculosis in Istanbul on 1 July 1839. His son Abdülmecid I succeeded him and soon proclaimed the Edict of Gülhane, which opened the Tanzimat era. Admirers compared Mahmud to Peter the Great of Russia, but his reign also marked the start of the Ottoman Empire's territorial break-up, as nationalist movements and European powers pulled away its provinces.

Our 1800 map shows the empire Mahmud inherited, still including Greece; our 1815 map shows it after the loss of Bessarabia, and Greece appears as a separate state on our 1878 map. Much of the core of his realm lies in today's Turkey.