#ottoman order

“The new regime tried to avoid the stormy days of previous revolutions. Security on the streets was bolstered. The prices of bread and meat were reduced. The administration developed policies to prevent the mob from intervening in politics. The month of Romanadan arrived, and while Bayraktar took action to ban ‘political conversations’ (devlet sohbeti) in public spaces such as coffee- and bathhouses, he encouraged the people of Istanbul to make use of the promenades in the city and on the Bosporus, listen to storytellers and watch shadow theater, liberates themselves from worry, and enjoy the holy month. Despite such measures to divert the public’s attention from janissary politics to entertainment and amusement, Krasnokutskii was right to be concerned. In late October, observers recorded several minor episodes of unrest in the city. Early signs of a rebellion against Bayraktar appeared in mid October. A crowd jeered Ubeydullah Kuşmani, a popular preacher and a strong supporter of the New Order, who had mercilessly ridiculed the janissaries in his Letters and sermons. Soon afterward, a massive janissary gathering around the Fatih Mosque protested against Kuşmani, and the government expelled him from the city to calm the protesters.

Bayraktar’s attempts to stop the daily salaries paid to some janissary affiliates and to draft soldiers for the New Militia generated serious tensions. Mahmud II was said to have secretly backed the janissaries against the grand vizier in this conflict. Grand Admiral Ramiz’s decision to repeal the fees collected from foreign vessels at the docks by the marinas created discord between the mariners, rowers, and porters of Galata harbor and the new regime. Most of these harbor workers had janissary affiliations. Tensions only amplified after the New Militia stormed dockside coffeehouses and the sailor’s leader, Kahveciouğlu Mustafa Agha, was executed on Bayraktar’s orders.

Conflict between the new regime and janissary affiliates was just one prolem that the New Orderists faced. Support from the palace circles was also shaky. The deposed Sultan Mustafa IV remained alive, ensconced in his chamber, and his supporters, particularly his sister Esma Sultan, who was a generous benefactor of the janissaries, lobbied among the elders of the corps on his behalf. According to a contemporary historian, at one moment, some janissaries spoke of Esma Sultan as a possible candidate for the Ottoman throne. Although the credibility of this report is unsure, the possibility of a pro-Mustafa IV revolt with her support was not totally to be discounted. Perhaps the most important development that left Bayraktar’s regime vulnerable was the fact that he had already sent most of his troops to the Danubian front in October. By early November, Bayraktar did not have enough of a military presence in Istanbul to protect his regime. Reporting to Vienna, an Austrian diplomat summarized the situation in Istanbul:

After the troops of Mustafa Pasha and the armies of other pashas who had been invited to the capital city [for the assembly] left the city for their regions, the janissaries raised their heads and picked up their courage again. For a couple of weeks, rumors and murmurs, which had been suppressed, started to circulate among the people once again. But these were not taken into consideration, because such chatter had long been common ever since the arming of the general public after the arrival of the British fleet in February 1807. New songs and expressions mocking the New Militia emerged. People ridiculed the soldiers’ hats. According to one rumor, the keys of the twenty-four gates of the city, which had been held by the janissaries, would be taken from them and given to the New Militia. This was the state of the people on the night of November 14 [1808].

At a dinner party organized by Manuk at his mansion in honor of the Russian delegation, Signora Pizzani, the wife of an Italian consultant to several embassies in Istanbul, told Krasnotkutskii that people were angry at Bayraktar because of his treatment of the janissaries. She said that another revolt soon would not be unexpected. As Signora Pizzani anticipated, the next day, November 15, the storm began. Bayraktar visited the chief mufti’s residence fo the ceremony of the Night of Destiny, a holy day in Ramadan. On his way back to his palace with his entourage, he encountered protests. Observers mention notes attached to the walls predicting that blood would soon be shed on the streets of Istanbul. Before long, various groups were heard to have mobilized in different parts of the city. These began marching on Bayraktar’s residence, which was not well guarded, and around midnight, a large number of janissaries attacked it. Rather imprudently, Bayraktar had sent his closest associate and bodyguard, Boşnak Agha, to Ruse [on the Danube] following news from the region that Molla Idris, the magnate of Vidin, was [conspiring against him.] ...

In Istanbul, on November 15, the janissaries besieged Bayraktar’s mansion. Noting that he himself was a janissary, connected the 42nd unit, Bayraktar protested that he had even had a fountain built at their barracks, so how could he be against the janissary cause? He asked the crowd to let women and servants leave the mansion. Following skirmishes with a handful of his [personal guards from Bulgaria], an explosion then occurred in the building when ammunition exploded in a storage area. The building collapsed, and dozens of janissaries were killed. It is not clear whether Bayraktar was dead or whether he had escaped through a tunnel from his mansion. People would later believe that he had committed suicide.

Soon groups atacked the mansions of other members of the ruling elite, slaughtered many of them, and plundered their property, while others attacked the New Militia’s remaining troops. Many soldiers of the New Militia came from the Balkans, were not familiar with the streets of the city, and in many cases, found themselves trapped by the janissaries on dead-end streets. These scuffles continued for several days in different neighborhoods of Istanbul, in Galata, and in Üsküdar. This mutiny was not nearly as well organized as the May revolution, and in many ways was not typical of janissary revolts. This episode was more violent, uncontrolled, and widespread. On several occasions, janissary elders and some members of the ulema tried to hold back the crowd. In fact, to limit the struggle to overthrow Bayraktar, they prevented janissaries from attacking mansions in which provincial notables were being hosted. It remained possible that the notables who had left and those who had stayed in Istanbul would unite, as provided for in the Deed of Alliance, and that they would attack the janissaries to save Bayraktar and the New Order. But this did not happen.

Meanwhile, in the post-Ottoman Balkans and in Arab lands, new states depicted the Ottoman past as a dark age under the Turkish yoke. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were seen as periods of Ottoman decline, but also of national revival. In this framework, the notables of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as centrifugal forces that were instrumental in national awakenings. Ali Pasha of Ioannina was depicted as an important figure in the Greek War of Independence and the later Albanian national awakening, and Osman Pazvantoğlu as an unruly Muslim notable who helped Christians (Greeks and Bulgarians) in their national movements. In the Arab world, however, some of the provincial dynasties of the late Ottoman era were among the founders of new regimes. In Egyptian historiography, Muhammad Ali was seen as the architect of modern Egypt; scholars ignored his Ottoman and Balkan roots. Many figures from the Ottoman age of revolutions were remembered in the age of nationalism. Mustafa Bayraktar’s Armenian moneyman Manuk Bey, one of the architects of the 1808 coup, is an interesting example. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Manuk was venerated by Armenian historians in the Balkans, who wrote biographies of him that verge on hagiographies.