Biography of an Empire by Philliou Christine M.;

Author:Philliou, Christine M.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2012-01-22T16:00:00+00:00

Compare this low-key reception to the elaborate and lengthy ceremony described by Rev. Robert Walsh, who enjoyed an audience with the sultan in 1821. Walsh and the British ambassador experienced many of the same customs that phanariot voyvodas had before 1821: the day before their visit to the sultan they met with the grand vezir in his quarters; they set off before dawn on Tuesday (the “day of the divan”), supplied with “richly caparisoned horses,” and passed lines of janissaries on either side all along their way, then set off on boats to the same dock, where they stopped and smoked pipes with Turkish officials who were waiting for them; they dismounted their horses, as the voyvodas had, at the second gate of the palace and proceeded to the Divan, where they ate a ritual meal with the council members; and finally, they were seized by the collar and shuffled into their audience with the sultan.106 In the 1830s, in contrast, etiquette had been made more analogous to the conventions of Britain and other “Courts of Christendom.”

In addition to the changes to Ottoman diplomacy at home, the Ottoman foreign diplomatic corps was resuscitated in the early and mid-1830s, again to make that body more analogous to the structures that brought foreign ambassadors to İstanbul. In the 1820s no Ottoman ambassadors were serving in posts abroad. Even by 1832, only one representative, J. Mavroyeni (a phanariot affiliate from long before 1821), was reappointed as a permanent diplomatic envoy in Vienna, following an Austrian request.107 In 1834, Mahmud appointed Mustafa Reşit Bey (made paşa in 1838) to the permanent Paris Embassy and by 1836–37 had appointed staff to London as well. According to Findley, with the exception of Mustafa Reşit Paşa, who took Ruh-üd-din with him to Paris as translator, other appointees still chose Orthodox Christians (Rum) to accompany them abroad as secretaries and dragomans.108

To sum up, the fusing of Ottoman politics and international politics, demonstrated by the proliferation of diplomatic personnel in İstanbul and the frequency of face-to-face meetings involving subsets of that personnel, had a number of repercussions for Ottoman power relations in the 1830s. Most profoundly, the relative significance of military and diplomatic power within the Ottoman Empire was inverted from the 1820s to the 1830s. This meant a marginalization of the military power commanded directly by the Ottoman central state as a deciding factor in intra-Ottoman political conflicts and the growing importance of diplomatic politics as a field in which intra-Ottoman power struggles would be worked out. As a result, factional politics at the court underwent a reorientation so as to align with the international rivalries and alliances that subsumed Ottoman governance. The prestige and capacity of the Translation Office were bolstered, and the office was reorganized along with the Ottoman Foreign Ministry and the Ottoman foreign diplomatic corps in response to the growing significance of diplomacy for Ottoman governance, making the Translation Office the nucleus of a new Muslim reforming elite. And finally, conventions of Ottoman diplomacy were reconfigured so as to correspond with those of European courts.

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