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Travellers to Turkey were impressed by the manifestations of progress they observed in Turkish manners, and their writings transformed British attitudes. The best-selling and most influential of these publications was undoubtedly Julia Pardoe’s The City of the Sultan; and Domestic Manners of the Turks in 1836, which sold over 30,000 copies in four editions between 1837 and the start of the Crimean War. Pardoe set out to correct what she saw as the prejudices of earlier accounts by travellers to the Ottoman Empire. On the surface Turkey seemed to conform to all the European stereotypes – exotic, indolent, sensual, superstitious, obscurantist and religiously fanatical – but on closer inspection it was seen to possess ‘noble qualities’ that made it fertile soil for liberal reform. ‘Who that regards with unprejudiced eyes the moral state of Turkey can fail to be struck by the absence of capital crime, the contented and even proud feelings of the lower ranks, and the absence of all assumption and haughtiness among the higher?’ The only obstacle to the ‘civilization of Turkey’, Pardoe argued, was ‘the policy of Russia to check every advance towards enlightenment among a people she has already trammelled, and whom she would fain subjugate’.³⁵

By the 1840s such ideas were the common currency of numerous travelogues and political pamphlets by Turcophiles. In Three Years in Constantinople; or, Domestic Manners of the Turks in 1844, Charles White encouraged the idea of Britain setting out to ‘civilize the Turks’ by citing examples of improvements in their habits and behaviour, such as the adoption of Western dress, the decline of religious fanaticism, and a growing appetite for education among the ‘middling and inferior classes’. Among these two classes

the ascendancy of good over evil is unquestionable. In no city are social or moral ties more tenaciously observed than by them. In no city can more numerous examples be found of probity, mild single-heartedness, and domestic worth. In no city is the amount of crime against property or persons more limited: a result that must be attributed to inherent honesty, and not to preventive measures.³⁶

Closely connected to such ideas was a romantic sympathy for Islam as a basically benign and progressive force (and preferable to the deeply superstitious and only ‘semi-Christian’ Orthodoxy of the Russians) that took hold of many British Turcophiles. Urquhart, for example, saw the role of Islam, much as the Turks would have it seen themselves, as a tolerant and moderating force which kept the peace between the warring Christian sects in the Ottoman Empire:

What traveller has not observed the fanaticism, the antipathy, of all these sects – their hostility to each other? Who has traced their actual repose to the toleration of Islamism? Islamism, calm, absorbed, without spirit of dogma, or views of proselytism, imposes at present on the other creeds the reserve and silence which characterise itself. But let this moderator be removed, and the humble professions now confined to the sanctuary would be proclaimed in the court and the military camp; political power and political emnity would combine with religious domination and religious animosity; the empire would be deluged in blood, until a nervous arm – the arm of Russia – appears to restore harmony, by despotism.³⁷

Some of these ideas were shared by Lord Stratford de Redcliffe (1786–1880), known as Stratford Canning until his elevation in 1852, who served no less than five times as Britain’s ambassador to Constantinople, directly guiding the reform programme of the young Sultan Abdülmecid and his main reformist minister Mustafa Reshid Pasha after 1839. The first cousin of George Canning, who had been Foreign Secretary and briefly Prime Minister before his death in 1827, Stratford Canning was a domineering and impatient character – a consequence perhaps of never having had to wait for advancement (he was only 24, fresh out of Eton and Cambridge, when he took up his first office as Minister-Plenipotentiary in Constantinople). It is an irony that at the time of his first appointment as ambassador to the Porte, in 1824, Stratford had a profound dislike of Turkey – the country he said it would be his mission to save ‘from itself’. In his letters to his cousin George, he wrote of a ‘secret wish’ to expel the Turks ‘bags and baggage’ from Europe, and confessed that he ‘had a mind to curse the balance of Europe for protecting those horrid Turks’. But Stratford’s Russophobia far outweighed his dislike of the Turks (in 1832, the Tsar, knowing this, took the extraordinary step of refusing to receive him as ambassador in St Petersburg). Russia’s growing domination of Turkey persuaded Stratford that only liberal reform could save the Ottoman Empire.