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That misgovernment was rooted in the empire’s failure to adapt to the modern world. The domination of the Muslim clergy (the mufti and the ulema) acted as a powerful brake on reform. ‘Meddle not with things established, borrow nothing from the infidels, for the law forbids it’ was the motto of the Muslim Institution, which made sure that the sultan’s laws conformed to the Koran. Western ideas and technologies were slow to penetrate the Islamic parts of the empire: trades and commerce were dominated by the non-Muslims (the Christians and Jews); there was no Turkish printing press until the 1720s; and as late as 1853 there were five times as many boys studying traditional Islamic law and theology in Constantinople as there were in the city’s modern schools with a secular curriculum.⁹

The stagnation of the economy was matched by the proliferation of corrupt bureaucracy. The purchasing of offices for the lucrative business of tax-farming was almost universal in the provinces. Powerful pashas and military governors ruled whole regions as their personal fiefdoms, squeezing from them as many taxes as they could. As long as they passed on a share of their revenues to the Porte, and paid off their own financial backers, no one questioned or cared much about the arbitrary violence they employed. The lion’s share of the empire’s taxes was extracted from the non-Muslims, who had no legal protection or means of redress in the Muslim courts, where the testimony of a Christian counted for nothing. It is estimated that by the early nineteenth century the average Christian farmer and trader in the Ottoman Empire was paying half his earnings in taxes.¹⁰

But the key to the decline of the Ottoman Empire was its military backwardness. Turkey had a large army in the early nineteenth century, and it accounted for as much as 70 per cent of treasury expenditure, but it was technically inferior to the modern conscript armies of Europe. It lacked their centralized administration, command structures and military schools, was poorly trained and was still dependent on the recruitment of mercenaries, irregulars and tribal forces from the periphery of the empire. Military reform was essential, and recognized as such by reformist sultans and their ministers, particularly after the repeated defeats by Russia, followed by the loss of Egypt to Napoleon. But to build a modern conscript army was impossible without a fundamental transformation of the empire to centralize control of the provinces and overcome the vested interests of the 40,000 janizaries, the sultan’s salaried household infantry, who represented the outmoded traditions of the military establishment and resisted all reforms.¹¹

Selim III (1789–1807) was the first sultan to recognize the need to Westernize the Ottoman army and navy. His military reforms were guided by the French, the major foreign influence on the Ottomans in the final decades of the eighteenth century, mainly because their enemies (Austria and Russia) were also the enemies of the Ottoman Empire. Selim’s concept of Westernization was similar to the Westernization of Russia’s institutions carried out by Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century, and the Turks were conscious of this parallel. It involved little more than the borrowing of new technologies and practices from foreigners, and certainly not the adoption of Western cultural principles that might challenge the dominant position of Islam in the empire. The Turks had invited the French to advise them, partly because they assumed they were the least religious of the European nations and therefore the least likely to threaten Islam – an impression gained from the anti-clerical policies of the Jacobins.

Selim’s reforms were defeated by the janizaries and the Muslim clergy, who were opposed to any change. But they were continued by Mahmud II (1808–39), who built up the military schools established by Selim to undermine the janizaries’ domination of the army by promoting officers on a meritocratic basis. He pushed through reforms of military dress, introduced Western equipment, and abolished the janizaries’ fiefdoms in an effort to create a centralized European-style army into which the Sultan’s household guards would eventually be merged. When the janizaries rebelled against the reforms, in 1826, they were put down, with several thousand killed by the Sultan’s new army, and then liquidated by imperial decree.