Look to the West: Thread III, Volume IV (Tottenham Nil)!
- Thread starter Thande
- Start date
- Status
Good, actually.
Thande will be back in about a week or so. Stay patient until then, and reread the older chapters, if you like.
Guess I'll wait.
Loved the chapter on the Catholic Church. Have one question, though.
The version of Jansenism that you've developed seems to resemble OTL's Old Catholic Church, which broke with the Roman Catholic Church in the mid-19th century over Papal infallibility, I hope that all the richness of the original Jansenists' "Calvinist-Catholic" theology hasn't been lost.
During the Reformation, the works of people in the Middle Ages that had once been condemned as heretics by the Church was dug up and re-evaluated. In some cases, like John Wycliffe, Jan Hus, and Peter Waldo, they were praised by the Reformers as men centuries ahead of their time. Also, some of the Reformers, like Michael Servetus, were so much taken up by the spirit of challenging everything the Pope in Rome held as doctrine that they started reviving ideas like Arianism and various flavours of anti-Trinitarianism.
And doesn't seem to me to be particularly implausible that the writings of Jansen, Arnauld, Pascal, and Quesnel would suddenly experience a renaissance, and that the Jansenist Church would develop a more distinctive theological position than merely "Catholicism minus the Pope".
The version of Jansenism that you've developed seems to resemble OTL's Old Catholic Church, which broke with the Roman Catholic Church in the mid-19th century over Papal infallibility, I hope that all the richness of the original Jansenists' "Calvinist-Catholic" theology hasn't been lost.
During the Reformation, the works of people in the Middle Ages that had once been condemned as heretics by the Church was dug up and re-evaluated. In some cases, like John Wycliffe, Jan Hus, and Peter Waldo, they were praised by the Reformers as men centuries ahead of their time. Also, some of the Reformers, like Michael Servetus, were so much taken up by the spirit of challenging everything the Pope in Rome held as doctrine that they started reviving ideas like Arianism and various flavours of anti-Trinitarianism.
And doesn't seem to me to be particularly implausible that the writings of Jansen, Arnauld, Pascal, and Quesnel would suddenly experience a renaissance, and that the Jansenist Church would develop a more distinctive theological position than merely "Catholicism minus the Pope".
Thande
Donor
Part #168: The Reconstituted Turkey
“What is ‘freedom’? Certainly, a cause which has excited the hearts of many a revolutionary. Or has it? In the cold light of day, most men, most of the time, will reject freedom and instead choose the safe and familiar. Consider as an example the tired workman wearily trudging his way home after his day’s labour. He could choose a different route home tonight, take different streets, get different experiences. Or tomorrow he could take his pay to the market and buy different foods so his wife can make him different sandwiches for next week. Yet he almost certainly will do neither. Men like the word ‘freedom’ but find themselves reluctant to embrace the reality of the concept. Usually when a revolutionary talks of freedom, he means he wants to improve his own station. And if he is worthy of greater things, certainly his mobility to do so should be as ‘free’ as possible. But as for ‘freedom’ in general – it is a cause for the heart, not for the head. And real freedom is usally more trouble than it is worth...”
*
From: “Asian Renaissance: The Other Side of the Nineteenth Century” by Lourenço Fernandes (Portuguese original 1985, authorised English translation 1987)—
While it is possible to define the beginning of the Turkish Time of Troubles as the death of Dalmat Melek Pasha in 1816, determining the end is slightly more problematic. From a chauvinistic European perspective one could perhaps argue that this came when the crowned heads of Europe began treating the so-called Janissary Sultanate in the Balkans as a long-lived but fundamentally transient rebellion against the inevitable ascendancy of Abdul Hadi Pasha rather than a serious rival claimant to the name Ottoman Empire. This shift in attitudes occurred around the end of the 1830s and start of the 1840s. Yet it is perfectly possible to argue (as Lopez and Correia did in their 1971 monogramme The Blind Decade) that this simply reflects a belated realisation on the part of European powers that were looking away from internal conflicts for the first time since the Popular Wars had begun. Ottoman historians themselves might seem a more reasonable choice to set a date, but too many of their writings are tinted by either a sycophantic attitude to Abdul Hadi or occasionally, latterly, revisionist attacks that go too far the other way. A purely military approach to the question might set the date of the end of the Troubles at 1854, when the last Janissary general, Mehmed Bushati Pasha,[1] surrendered when his forces were trapped before they could retreat into their mountain strongholds near Valbona. However, this incident seems to have been highlighted by military historians purely because of its drama, Bushati being a famous commander from earlier conflicts, and a more objective view suggests his rebel band was no more or less a continuing remnant of the Sultanate than any number of Kleinkrieger groups who were destroyed either earlier or later, or gradually degenerated into pure criminal gangs of bandits.
Bearing these caveats in mind, it can broadly be stated that the Turkish Time of Troubles lasted for around 45 years, the state of the division and conflict waxing and waning at times but no-one ever claiming that the empire had reached a state of normality again. The conflicts of the original civil war between the Balkan Party (which had become the Janissary Sultanate) and the destroyed Shadow Faction were long since forgotten. Abdul Hadi Pasha had built up his position in Egypt, tamed Arabia, and with the help of his brother “Ibn Warraq” and his Azadi movement, had defeated the Persians’ attempt to conquer Baghdad.[2] Given these successes were complete by the mid-1820s it may seem surprising that it took almost thirty years to translate them into a restored, reunited Ottoman Empire under Abdul Hadi’s leadership. This reflects a number of factors: the European powers have often been retrospectively criticised for not taking the opportunity to try for further conquests from the weakened Ottoman Empire when they had the chance. Partly this is down to the effects of the potato famine of 1822 followed by the distraction of the Popular Wars, but a significant factor was Abdul Hadi deliberately using the presence of Janissary Rumelia to add complexity to his diplomatic stratagems and play the Europeans off against one another. He was unquestionably aided in this objective by the Austrian Hapsburgs’ conquest of Wallachia, which cut the Russians off from further expansion into the Balkans.
The Russians themselves, although they continued to put pressure on expanding their influence in the divided Caucasus beyond the gains made in the intervention of 1816 and the creation of a new Georgian kingdom under Russian influence, did not view it as a top priority. The new Tsar Theodore became somewhat disillusioned with the idea of more unpredictable minorities under Russian rule thanks to the quagmire of Crimea and its Masada Legion Jewish partisan movement—aided by the exilic ‘Israelite’ government in Sinope backed by Abdul Hadi, despite the fact that mainstream Sephardic Jewish opinion in the Empire thought the Masada Legion to be crazy heretics for their proclamation of a new Israelite kingdom.[3] Theodore’s priorities for expansion—besides, of course, the Russians’ longstanding Far Eastern projects—instead took the form of deepening Russian influence and control in Independent Tartary[4] after the death of Jangir Khan of the Kazakh Khaganate in 1838. The resulting civil war saw considerable direct military intervention from Russia—which had established an alliance with Jangir and did not want to see her southern frontier turn hostile—but little from Persia, licking her wounds after the Pyrrhic victory of the Ottoman intervention a few years earlier. Zaki Mohammed Shah was able to solidify Persian control over some of the Turkmen lands, converting them from influenced vassals into integral provinces, but in 1841 a Russo-Kazakh force loyal to Jangir Khan’s son Iskander defeated the Persian garrison providing a boot on the neck of the Khan of Khiva, and that land—rich gold wealth and all—became part of the reunited Kazakh Khaganate, itself under increased Russian influence. This embarrassing defeat led long-serving Grand Vizier Nader Sadeq to be attacked and killed by a mob in the streets of Isfahan, and Zaki Mohammed Shah took the unusual step of voluntarily abdicating in favour of his brother, Jafar Karim Shah. There are suspicions of a palace coup, but if so it took place in a more civilised way than usual even in enlightened Zand Persia, with Zaki Mohammed retiring to a life of monastic writing in Muscat—which by now had largely resigned itself to its role as capital of an Oman reduced to a Persian colony by the limited successes of the earlier intervention against the Ottomans.
Jafar Karim Shah would of course come with his own problems, but Russia’s successes and attempted Persian responses in Independent Tartary served to direct the Tsar’s eye away from the divided Ottoman Empire. Throughout the late 1830s and 1840s, Abdul Hadi Pasha and his supporters worked to reform the empire. Not unlike the Persians or the Siamese, they observed Europe’s recent advancements in the fields of technology, military science and new forms of governance, but carefully picked and chose what to emulate and produced their own culturally appropriate interpretations rather than slavishly copying everything. Furthermore, there is certainly an argument that in the case of governance, Danubia’s Rudolfine reforms were inspired by the Ottoman millet system and Abdul Hadi’s modifications to it—though, of course, this would be hotly denied by the Hapsburgs. The ‘Devrim’ or ‘Reform’ Period began with Sultan Murad VI’s ‘Edict of Bursa’ in 1837, named for the de facto capital: while in theory both Abdul Hadi’s Ottoman Empire and the Janissary Sultanate claimed Constantinople as their capital, in practice they continued to use Bursa and Edirne respectively. Constantinople remained divided, with the bulk of the city on the west bank of the Bosporus under Janissary control, but the uncomfortable peace was too fragile to risk more than a few pointed appearances by claimant Sultan Mehmed V there. Both sides traded shots across the Bosporus, usually metaphorical, in the form of diplomatic intrigue, but occasionally literal. Both sides had their voices calling for a renewal of the civil war and a final victory, but both were shouted down for the present. Abdul Hadi’s Empire was concerned with its reforms, while the Janissaries’ situation grew ever more feeble. Already reduced to Rumelia, between 1836 and 1842 the Janissaries fought a losing war against Hapsburg Greece after an incident with a confiscated Greek ship that escalated out of control. It was a humiliating measure of the Janissaries’ weakness that, even with both Danubia and Italy lending only lukewarm token support to the Greeks, King Joseph’s men still managed to conquer Attica and Boeotia from the Janissaries. Athens was taken in a powerfully symbolic move, but its precarious position meant that Nafplion would continue as Joseph’s capital for the foreseeable future.
It would not be long before the Janissaries’ weakness was truly exposed by Abdul Hadi’s Empire moving to intervene in this conflict, but for now the Devrim Reforms remained the government’s focus. The millet system was rationalised and simplified, and then used as the basis to create some representative government without the full national parliament that many nobles feared. In each of the new vilayets (provinces, replacing the old eyalets[5]) there would be a tricameral advisory body to the vali ( governor), one council for each millet. These are often described as ‘elected’ in whiggish histories but this is somewhat inaccurate: the councillors were a mix of noblemen and appointed representatives, the latter chosen by an assembly of the village headmen in each kaza (subdistrict). The precise nature and size of the councils varied between vilayets, as did their power; a canny vali could often play the three councils off against one another to prevent them uniting against him. This was a microcosm of the policy Abdul Hadi took in attempting to keep the millets united in purpose across the empire; a significant division was over taxation, with the Christians and Jews historically being taxed more due to the jizya (a tax paid by non-Muslims) but also being exempt from conscription. Abdul Hadi took the unusual step of commissioning a deliberately complex and confusing new tax code under which each group would end up paying roughly the same taxes and have approximately the same privileges, but would arrive at that final stage by different circuitous routes. This would allow each millet to claim it had obtained the best deal over the others with legalistic arguments, and mostly served its purpose of preventing resentment between the groups. The new tax code also abolished the practice of tax farming that had been problematic under the pre-Troubles empire, but its complexity led to a thriving industry in lawyers looking for loopholes. Devrim also formalised the existence of a national anthem and flag, using the ‘Three Faiths Under One Flag’ banner that had been popularised by Abdul Hadi’s forces during the earlier civil war.
Though it is the legal and governmental reforms that scholars have generally focused on, the Devrim period also saw an embrace of the technologies that had aided the Europeans (and Persians) in their late intervention against the empire. Sutcliffism was bloodily cracked down on wherever it reared its head. Abdul Hadi and his lieutenants took the decision to focus on railways, as this was a technology that had clearly proved its worth to the Russians but which many European states had been late to embrace, and thus could be an arena in which the Ottoman Empire might potentially leapfrog its rivals. This meant Optel networks were put on the back burner as a project, which by chance proved to be the right decision as soon Lectel would emerge in any case and—the Telegraph Wars notwithstanding—make Optel obsolete. The fledgeling railway network proved of vital use when the Janissary Sultanate finally collapsed at the end of the 1840s.
This collapse was in part due to the humiliation of the lost war against Greece. The Janissaries’ fleet, already depleted by the early civil war of the Time of Troubles and never a high priority for renewal, had been left in the dust by advancements in Europe. The Greeks were scarcely the best-equipped either, but King Joseph was able to obtain 1810s- and 1820s-era vessels from Italy as King Leopold modernised his own navy, and these still represented a substantial advantage over the Janissaries’ efforts. This was demonstrated when the Greeks invaded Euboea in 1841, successfully blockading the island despite its proximity to the mainland and sinking any attempt to resupply the Janissary troops trapped there. Flushed with success, the Greek Navy was also able to take several of the Cyclades islands. Though King Joseph wisely decided that trying for Crete would stretch his men too thin, freebooters aided by ‘overenthusiastic’ naval officers attempted to take the island as the war drew to a close in 1842. The Ottoman administration in Crete had attempted to tread a neutral line between the factions during the Time of Troubles, waiting for the conflict to resolve itself so they could then declare they had followed the legitimate government (i.e. the eventual winner) all along. Of course, no resolution came and the Cretan administrators were forced to choose. At the time it seemed as though the Janissaries, controlling Constantinople, would win and thus Crete declared for Mehmed V. This rapidly proved to be the wrong decision, and the Greek attack of 1842 saw the authorities appeal for help from Bursa even as they were ejected from Chania and fled to Heraklion. Joseph reluctantly sent some more ‘official’ help after this victory, but the surprise appearance of a large, partly modernised Ottoman fleet changed matters. After a brief spell of intense fighting, the Greeks ended up holding onto Chania and the western quarter of Crete, but the rest was recaptured by the Ottomans and converted into a new vilayet. Cyprus also belatedly declared for Murad VI. Though a disappointment at the end of an otherwise successful war for Greece, the Crete incident did at least let the Greeks write a peace treaty that acknowledged Murad VI as the only true Ottoman Sultan and thumb their nose at the Janissary Sultanate by describing it only as ‘the bandits currently in control of Rumelia’.
The new Ottoman Navy, the Donanmasi, had been built up in the 1830s from a core consisting of the Omani sailors who had fought for Abdul Hadi during the civil war. Though many of the sailors had deserted after Oman fell to the Persians, becoming pirates or returning home, some stayed on and helped train the personnel for a new fleet. New ships, including some modern craft, were obtained through deals with the exilic Dutch Republicans following the Popular Wars: Abdul Hadi allowed the Dutch to build shipyards on Ottoman territory (notably at Aden) which would construct modern ships for both the Batavian Republic and the Ottoman Empire. The Dutch would train Ottoman shipwrights who would then modernise the older shipyards on the Anatolian coast to duplicate such craft.
The Navy would prove vitally important when the Janissaries finally fell in 1848. The House of Osman, once so numerous, had been substantially thinned by the civil war and most of the convincing heirs had declared for Abdul Hadi Pasha and Murad VI. When Mehmed V died in that year, the Janissaries hoped to pass the crown to the exilic Devlet VI, claimant Khan of Crimea; it had long been assumed that if the House of Osman ever died out, the House of Giray would succeed. Devlet assured the Janissary leadership he would take the throne and continue to support their aims. As Mehmed V lay on his deathbed, Devlet then escaped across the Bosporus and declared for Abdul Hadi even as prepared edicts in Rumelia proclaimed him as the new Sultan. The result was mass chaos in Rumelia and long-suppressed revolts against the unpopular Janissary rulers exploded once again. Constantinople, so well fortified, fell almost by popular acclamation. Edirne proved to be the only major challenge for Abdul Hadi’s forces, holding back a siege for six months before surrendering. Murad VI finally ruled from the Topkapi Palace and Rumelia was reunited with the rest of the Empire, soon to be subject to the popular Devrim reforms.
One might perhaps expect this sudden collapse to see more interventions by the Europeans, but it seemed to catch even them offguard. The Danubians did obtain more of Bosnia, but at the present were managing their own careful modernisations and reforms and Rudolph III was unwilling to risk getting bogged down in a major war. The Russians, of course, were cut off by Wallachia, and began to consider the project of a war against Danubia to regain a frontier with the Ottomans. The uncomfortable vigour of Abdul Hadi’s Empire—now the sole and unquestioned Ottoman Empire once again—troubled the Russian court, which had been predicting the decadent and stagnant Empire’s inevitable demise for at least two centuries. Many now began to wonder what Grand Vizier Abdul Hadi Pasha would do next. A bold and audacious move, surely. Try to reclaim some of the territory the Ottomans had lost to the Hapsburgs, to the Russians, to the Persians and their puppet Emirate of Basra?
Such guesses would be both somewhat grounded—Abdul Hadi did indeed intend to reclaim an ancestral Ottoman territory—and wide of the mark. But in any case, the Great American War, as it would later be named, served once again to distract the crowned heads of Europe from his ambitions. The Time of Troubles was over, the Ottoman Empire was reborn...and uncharted territory lay ahead.
[1] Note that Bushati was not strictly a Janissary as such, being an Albanian noble, but in this sense the author is somewhat ambiguously using the term to describe people fighting for the Rumelian state referred to as ‘the Janissary Sultanate’.
[2] A summary of events from parts #99, #102, #113 and #116.
[3] See Part #137.
[4] A contemporary term for what is now called Central Asia or colloquially ‘the ‘stans’.
[5] A similar change was made by the OTL Tanzimat reforms. A major difference however is that Tanzimat abolished the Millets altogether, whereas TTL’s Devrim programme instead reforms them.
“What is ‘freedom’? Certainly, a cause which has excited the hearts of many a revolutionary. Or has it? In the cold light of day, most men, most of the time, will reject freedom and instead choose the safe and familiar. Consider as an example the tired workman wearily trudging his way home after his day’s labour. He could choose a different route home tonight, take different streets, get different experiences. Or tomorrow he could take his pay to the market and buy different foods so his wife can make him different sandwiches for next week. Yet he almost certainly will do neither. Men like the word ‘freedom’ but find themselves reluctant to embrace the reality of the concept. Usually when a revolutionary talks of freedom, he means he wants to improve his own station. And if he is worthy of greater things, certainly his mobility to do so should be as ‘free’ as possible. But as for ‘freedom’ in general – it is a cause for the heart, not for the head. And real freedom is usally more trouble than it is worth...”
– Pablo Sanchez, The Winter of Nations, 1851
*
From: “Asian Renaissance: The Other Side of the Nineteenth Century” by Lourenço Fernandes (Portuguese original 1985, authorised English translation 1987)—
While it is possible to define the beginning of the Turkish Time of Troubles as the death of Dalmat Melek Pasha in 1816, determining the end is slightly more problematic. From a chauvinistic European perspective one could perhaps argue that this came when the crowned heads of Europe began treating the so-called Janissary Sultanate in the Balkans as a long-lived but fundamentally transient rebellion against the inevitable ascendancy of Abdul Hadi Pasha rather than a serious rival claimant to the name Ottoman Empire. This shift in attitudes occurred around the end of the 1830s and start of the 1840s. Yet it is perfectly possible to argue (as Lopez and Correia did in their 1971 monogramme The Blind Decade) that this simply reflects a belated realisation on the part of European powers that were looking away from internal conflicts for the first time since the Popular Wars had begun. Ottoman historians themselves might seem a more reasonable choice to set a date, but too many of their writings are tinted by either a sycophantic attitude to Abdul Hadi or occasionally, latterly, revisionist attacks that go too far the other way. A purely military approach to the question might set the date of the end of the Troubles at 1854, when the last Janissary general, Mehmed Bushati Pasha,[1] surrendered when his forces were trapped before they could retreat into their mountain strongholds near Valbona. However, this incident seems to have been highlighted by military historians purely because of its drama, Bushati being a famous commander from earlier conflicts, and a more objective view suggests his rebel band was no more or less a continuing remnant of the Sultanate than any number of Kleinkrieger groups who were destroyed either earlier or later, or gradually degenerated into pure criminal gangs of bandits.
Bearing these caveats in mind, it can broadly be stated that the Turkish Time of Troubles lasted for around 45 years, the state of the division and conflict waxing and waning at times but no-one ever claiming that the empire had reached a state of normality again. The conflicts of the original civil war between the Balkan Party (which had become the Janissary Sultanate) and the destroyed Shadow Faction were long since forgotten. Abdul Hadi Pasha had built up his position in Egypt, tamed Arabia, and with the help of his brother “Ibn Warraq” and his Azadi movement, had defeated the Persians’ attempt to conquer Baghdad.[2] Given these successes were complete by the mid-1820s it may seem surprising that it took almost thirty years to translate them into a restored, reunited Ottoman Empire under Abdul Hadi’s leadership. This reflects a number of factors: the European powers have often been retrospectively criticised for not taking the opportunity to try for further conquests from the weakened Ottoman Empire when they had the chance. Partly this is down to the effects of the potato famine of 1822 followed by the distraction of the Popular Wars, but a significant factor was Abdul Hadi deliberately using the presence of Janissary Rumelia to add complexity to his diplomatic stratagems and play the Europeans off against one another. He was unquestionably aided in this objective by the Austrian Hapsburgs’ conquest of Wallachia, which cut the Russians off from further expansion into the Balkans.
The Russians themselves, although they continued to put pressure on expanding their influence in the divided Caucasus beyond the gains made in the intervention of 1816 and the creation of a new Georgian kingdom under Russian influence, did not view it as a top priority. The new Tsar Theodore became somewhat disillusioned with the idea of more unpredictable minorities under Russian rule thanks to the quagmire of Crimea and its Masada Legion Jewish partisan movement—aided by the exilic ‘Israelite’ government in Sinope backed by Abdul Hadi, despite the fact that mainstream Sephardic Jewish opinion in the Empire thought the Masada Legion to be crazy heretics for their proclamation of a new Israelite kingdom.[3] Theodore’s priorities for expansion—besides, of course, the Russians’ longstanding Far Eastern projects—instead took the form of deepening Russian influence and control in Independent Tartary[4] after the death of Jangir Khan of the Kazakh Khaganate in 1838. The resulting civil war saw considerable direct military intervention from Russia—which had established an alliance with Jangir and did not want to see her southern frontier turn hostile—but little from Persia, licking her wounds after the Pyrrhic victory of the Ottoman intervention a few years earlier. Zaki Mohammed Shah was able to solidify Persian control over some of the Turkmen lands, converting them from influenced vassals into integral provinces, but in 1841 a Russo-Kazakh force loyal to Jangir Khan’s son Iskander defeated the Persian garrison providing a boot on the neck of the Khan of Khiva, and that land—rich gold wealth and all—became part of the reunited Kazakh Khaganate, itself under increased Russian influence. This embarrassing defeat led long-serving Grand Vizier Nader Sadeq to be attacked and killed by a mob in the streets of Isfahan, and Zaki Mohammed Shah took the unusual step of voluntarily abdicating in favour of his brother, Jafar Karim Shah. There are suspicions of a palace coup, but if so it took place in a more civilised way than usual even in enlightened Zand Persia, with Zaki Mohammed retiring to a life of monastic writing in Muscat—which by now had largely resigned itself to its role as capital of an Oman reduced to a Persian colony by the limited successes of the earlier intervention against the Ottomans.
Jafar Karim Shah would of course come with his own problems, but Russia’s successes and attempted Persian responses in Independent Tartary served to direct the Tsar’s eye away from the divided Ottoman Empire. Throughout the late 1830s and 1840s, Abdul Hadi Pasha and his supporters worked to reform the empire. Not unlike the Persians or the Siamese, they observed Europe’s recent advancements in the fields of technology, military science and new forms of governance, but carefully picked and chose what to emulate and produced their own culturally appropriate interpretations rather than slavishly copying everything. Furthermore, there is certainly an argument that in the case of governance, Danubia’s Rudolfine reforms were inspired by the Ottoman millet system and Abdul Hadi’s modifications to it—though, of course, this would be hotly denied by the Hapsburgs. The ‘Devrim’ or ‘Reform’ Period began with Sultan Murad VI’s ‘Edict of Bursa’ in 1837, named for the de facto capital: while in theory both Abdul Hadi’s Ottoman Empire and the Janissary Sultanate claimed Constantinople as their capital, in practice they continued to use Bursa and Edirne respectively. Constantinople remained divided, with the bulk of the city on the west bank of the Bosporus under Janissary control, but the uncomfortable peace was too fragile to risk more than a few pointed appearances by claimant Sultan Mehmed V there. Both sides traded shots across the Bosporus, usually metaphorical, in the form of diplomatic intrigue, but occasionally literal. Both sides had their voices calling for a renewal of the civil war and a final victory, but both were shouted down for the present. Abdul Hadi’s Empire was concerned with its reforms, while the Janissaries’ situation grew ever more feeble. Already reduced to Rumelia, between 1836 and 1842 the Janissaries fought a losing war against Hapsburg Greece after an incident with a confiscated Greek ship that escalated out of control. It was a humiliating measure of the Janissaries’ weakness that, even with both Danubia and Italy lending only lukewarm token support to the Greeks, King Joseph’s men still managed to conquer Attica and Boeotia from the Janissaries. Athens was taken in a powerfully symbolic move, but its precarious position meant that Nafplion would continue as Joseph’s capital for the foreseeable future.
It would not be long before the Janissaries’ weakness was truly exposed by Abdul Hadi’s Empire moving to intervene in this conflict, but for now the Devrim Reforms remained the government’s focus. The millet system was rationalised and simplified, and then used as the basis to create some representative government without the full national parliament that many nobles feared. In each of the new vilayets (provinces, replacing the old eyalets[5]) there would be a tricameral advisory body to the vali ( governor), one council for each millet. These are often described as ‘elected’ in whiggish histories but this is somewhat inaccurate: the councillors were a mix of noblemen and appointed representatives, the latter chosen by an assembly of the village headmen in each kaza (subdistrict). The precise nature and size of the councils varied between vilayets, as did their power; a canny vali could often play the three councils off against one another to prevent them uniting against him. This was a microcosm of the policy Abdul Hadi took in attempting to keep the millets united in purpose across the empire; a significant division was over taxation, with the Christians and Jews historically being taxed more due to the jizya (a tax paid by non-Muslims) but also being exempt from conscription. Abdul Hadi took the unusual step of commissioning a deliberately complex and confusing new tax code under which each group would end up paying roughly the same taxes and have approximately the same privileges, but would arrive at that final stage by different circuitous routes. This would allow each millet to claim it had obtained the best deal over the others with legalistic arguments, and mostly served its purpose of preventing resentment between the groups. The new tax code also abolished the practice of tax farming that had been problematic under the pre-Troubles empire, but its complexity led to a thriving industry in lawyers looking for loopholes. Devrim also formalised the existence of a national anthem and flag, using the ‘Three Faiths Under One Flag’ banner that had been popularised by Abdul Hadi’s forces during the earlier civil war.
Though it is the legal and governmental reforms that scholars have generally focused on, the Devrim period also saw an embrace of the technologies that had aided the Europeans (and Persians) in their late intervention against the empire. Sutcliffism was bloodily cracked down on wherever it reared its head. Abdul Hadi and his lieutenants took the decision to focus on railways, as this was a technology that had clearly proved its worth to the Russians but which many European states had been late to embrace, and thus could be an arena in which the Ottoman Empire might potentially leapfrog its rivals. This meant Optel networks were put on the back burner as a project, which by chance proved to be the right decision as soon Lectel would emerge in any case and—the Telegraph Wars notwithstanding—make Optel obsolete. The fledgeling railway network proved of vital use when the Janissary Sultanate finally collapsed at the end of the 1840s.
This collapse was in part due to the humiliation of the lost war against Greece. The Janissaries’ fleet, already depleted by the early civil war of the Time of Troubles and never a high priority for renewal, had been left in the dust by advancements in Europe. The Greeks were scarcely the best-equipped either, but King Joseph was able to obtain 1810s- and 1820s-era vessels from Italy as King Leopold modernised his own navy, and these still represented a substantial advantage over the Janissaries’ efforts. This was demonstrated when the Greeks invaded Euboea in 1841, successfully blockading the island despite its proximity to the mainland and sinking any attempt to resupply the Janissary troops trapped there. Flushed with success, the Greek Navy was also able to take several of the Cyclades islands. Though King Joseph wisely decided that trying for Crete would stretch his men too thin, freebooters aided by ‘overenthusiastic’ naval officers attempted to take the island as the war drew to a close in 1842. The Ottoman administration in Crete had attempted to tread a neutral line between the factions during the Time of Troubles, waiting for the conflict to resolve itself so they could then declare they had followed the legitimate government (i.e. the eventual winner) all along. Of course, no resolution came and the Cretan administrators were forced to choose. At the time it seemed as though the Janissaries, controlling Constantinople, would win and thus Crete declared for Mehmed V. This rapidly proved to be the wrong decision, and the Greek attack of 1842 saw the authorities appeal for help from Bursa even as they were ejected from Chania and fled to Heraklion. Joseph reluctantly sent some more ‘official’ help after this victory, but the surprise appearance of a large, partly modernised Ottoman fleet changed matters. After a brief spell of intense fighting, the Greeks ended up holding onto Chania and the western quarter of Crete, but the rest was recaptured by the Ottomans and converted into a new vilayet. Cyprus also belatedly declared for Murad VI. Though a disappointment at the end of an otherwise successful war for Greece, the Crete incident did at least let the Greeks write a peace treaty that acknowledged Murad VI as the only true Ottoman Sultan and thumb their nose at the Janissary Sultanate by describing it only as ‘the bandits currently in control of Rumelia’.
The new Ottoman Navy, the Donanmasi, had been built up in the 1830s from a core consisting of the Omani sailors who had fought for Abdul Hadi during the civil war. Though many of the sailors had deserted after Oman fell to the Persians, becoming pirates or returning home, some stayed on and helped train the personnel for a new fleet. New ships, including some modern craft, were obtained through deals with the exilic Dutch Republicans following the Popular Wars: Abdul Hadi allowed the Dutch to build shipyards on Ottoman territory (notably at Aden) which would construct modern ships for both the Batavian Republic and the Ottoman Empire. The Dutch would train Ottoman shipwrights who would then modernise the older shipyards on the Anatolian coast to duplicate such craft.
The Navy would prove vitally important when the Janissaries finally fell in 1848. The House of Osman, once so numerous, had been substantially thinned by the civil war and most of the convincing heirs had declared for Abdul Hadi Pasha and Murad VI. When Mehmed V died in that year, the Janissaries hoped to pass the crown to the exilic Devlet VI, claimant Khan of Crimea; it had long been assumed that if the House of Osman ever died out, the House of Giray would succeed. Devlet assured the Janissary leadership he would take the throne and continue to support their aims. As Mehmed V lay on his deathbed, Devlet then escaped across the Bosporus and declared for Abdul Hadi even as prepared edicts in Rumelia proclaimed him as the new Sultan. The result was mass chaos in Rumelia and long-suppressed revolts against the unpopular Janissary rulers exploded once again. Constantinople, so well fortified, fell almost by popular acclamation. Edirne proved to be the only major challenge for Abdul Hadi’s forces, holding back a siege for six months before surrendering. Murad VI finally ruled from the Topkapi Palace and Rumelia was reunited with the rest of the Empire, soon to be subject to the popular Devrim reforms.
One might perhaps expect this sudden collapse to see more interventions by the Europeans, but it seemed to catch even them offguard. The Danubians did obtain more of Bosnia, but at the present were managing their own careful modernisations and reforms and Rudolph III was unwilling to risk getting bogged down in a major war. The Russians, of course, were cut off by Wallachia, and began to consider the project of a war against Danubia to regain a frontier with the Ottomans. The uncomfortable vigour of Abdul Hadi’s Empire—now the sole and unquestioned Ottoman Empire once again—troubled the Russian court, which had been predicting the decadent and stagnant Empire’s inevitable demise for at least two centuries. Many now began to wonder what Grand Vizier Abdul Hadi Pasha would do next. A bold and audacious move, surely. Try to reclaim some of the territory the Ottomans had lost to the Hapsburgs, to the Russians, to the Persians and their puppet Emirate of Basra?
Such guesses would be both somewhat grounded—Abdul Hadi did indeed intend to reclaim an ancestral Ottoman territory—and wide of the mark. But in any case, the Great American War, as it would later be named, served once again to distract the crowned heads of Europe from his ambitions. The Time of Troubles was over, the Ottoman Empire was reborn...and uncharted territory lay ahead.
[1] Note that Bushati was not strictly a Janissary as such, being an Albanian noble, but in this sense the author is somewhat ambiguously using the term to describe people fighting for the Rumelian state referred to as ‘the Janissary Sultanate’.
[2] A summary of events from parts #99, #102, #113 and #116.
[3] See Part #137.
[4] A contemporary term for what is now called Central Asia or colloquially ‘the ‘stans’.
[5] A similar change was made by the OTL Tanzimat reforms. A major difference however is that Tanzimat abolished the Millets altogether, whereas TTL’s Devrim programme instead reforms them.
It's rather pleasing to see the Ottoman Navy having a resurgence of importance in TTL. Good show, sir.
It's rather pleasing to see the Ottoman Navy having a resurgence of importance in TTL. Good show, sir.
They had the biggest ship in the world for a while in like the 1840s OTL. Ottoman Navy for awesome!
Hmm... that only seems to leave North Africa. Unless "ancestral" means they're going for Central Asia?
Thande, has HMRC had a hand in designing this new tax system, by any chance?
We need a (set of) new map(s), showing the world/Europe/both before the start of the Great American War (of absolutely everywhere).
Also, "Telegraph Wars"! Mr Thande, oh how you do tease us so...
Either this is like a format war between VHS and Betamax, or wars fought over the expansion of the lectel system through certain areas.
Or involving a certain newspaper...
EDIT:
Hmm, alt-Pan-Turanism...
This could either go very well, or very, very badly.
We need a (set of) new map(s), showing the world/Europe/both before the start of the Great American War (of absolutely everywhere).
Also, "Telegraph Wars"! Mr Thande, oh how you do tease us so...
Either this is like a format war between VHS and Betamax, or wars fought over the expansion of the lectel system through certain areas.
Or involving a certain newspaper...
EDIT:
Hmm, alt-Pan-Turanism...
This could either go very well, or very, very badly.
Was there ever an update explaining the internal politics of the Janissary Sultanate (ie, how it came to be governed by Janissaries and so on)? In either case, a great update, and it's looking increasingly likely that this 'Great American War' will in reality be a world war (or at the very least, a Popular Wars-style mishmash of separate conflicts that occur simultaneously and are grouped together afterwards).
I'd have to second AE's request for a pre-GAW map, and -- lord knows how many months ago I sent you detailed results for the ENA election of 1840! Those do deserve to see the light of day at some point (especially if, as some suspect, the GAW begins with a crisis in internal ENA politics)
I'd have to second AE's request for a pre-GAW map, and -- lord knows how many months ago I sent you detailed results for the ENA election of 1840! Those do deserve to see the light of day at some point (especially if, as some suspect, the GAW begins with a crisis in internal ENA politics)
I rounded a few recent ones up. I don't think the world at the beginning of the Great American War is different enough to necessarily require new ones before that war ends.
A relatively up-to-date world map
China
South America
Europe
Looks like this will seriously upset both Persia and Russia. I applaud the Turks' ambition.
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Thande
Donor
Thanks for the comments, everyone.
It was the last remnant of the Balkan Party faction in the civil war, which was basically "We will kill anyone who tries to take away the Janissaries' historic privileges" and so it wasn't so much formally governed by the Janissaries as them being an even more blatant power behind the throne to a puppet imperial administration (based on the usual Ottoman model, but restricted to Rumelia) than usual.
My next update concerns events following the ENA election of 1840, so perhaps I should do that first...I'd have to second AE's request for a pre-GAW map, and -- lord knows how many months ago I sent you detailed results for the ENA election of 1840! Those do deserve to see the light of day at some point (especially if, as some suspect, the GAW begins with a crisis in internal ENA politics)
Not a lot has actually changed since that world map by Hawkeye you link to. An important lesson in both real history and AH is to recognise that an awful lot can change in the world without it being reflected in borders. If you have one of those atlases from the 50s that adds the internal borders for the Soviet SSRs and the Yugoslav SRs, really a map of Europe from sixty years ago barely looks any different to a modern one.
Very nice update. It looks like the Ottomans are going to become a serious threat to her European neighbours once more.
Hi Thande, great update as usual. I have a question: how are things going in Bavaria for Victor Felix?
I would.in fact place my suspicion on the current Dutch-Ottoman relationship.
You and your Ottoman Aceh.
Which is Siamese by this point ITTL, IIRC, but the Batavians are going to have to choose sides at some point if that is the case...
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