Mahmud II

• 1. Introduction

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  Mahmud II clung to the roof of the Ottoman Imperial Harem while assassins searched for him below. A Georgian slave girl named Cevri had bought him precious minutes by hurling ashes into the faces of the killers, temporarily blinding them. Palace pages lowered him down with strips of clothing knotted into a makeshift ladder. The year was 1808, and the man who would reshape the Ottoman Empire had nearly died before his reign began.

  Who was this sultan, born on the 20th of July 1785, who would earn comparison to Peter the Great of Russia? What drove him to demolish the empire's most formidable military institution with cannon fire? And how did a ruler who spent his early years locked in the palace cage known as the Kafes become the architect of Ottoman modernity? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. A Throne Won by Luck

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  Mustafa IV, Mahmud's half-brother and predecessor, had ordered two men killed in 1808: Mahmud himself and the deposed Sultan Selim III. The logic was brutal. Eliminate the other candidates and the rebellion against Mustafa would have no one to rally around. Selim III was killed. Mahmud survived only because his mother hid him.

  The rebel leader who arrived too late to save Selim, Alemdar Mustafa Pasha, had no choice but to place Mahmud on the throne once Mustafa IV was deposed. Alemdar then became Mahmud's own vizier, a remarkable turn for someone who had come to the palace intent on restoring a different sultan entirely.

  The 19th-century Ottoman historian Ahmed Cevdet Pasha recorded the full drama of that night. Cevri's act of throwing ashes bought Mahmud enough time to flee. For her courage, she was appointed haznedar usta, the second most powerful position in the hierarchy of the Imperial Harem. A plain stone staircase at the Altinyol, the "Golden Way" of the harem, still carries her name: the Staircase of Cevri Kalfa.

• 3. Wars and Shrinking Borders

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  The Russo-Turkish War of 1806-1812 was already underway when Mahmud took the throne, and its conclusion cost the empire dearly. By the Treaty of Bucharest, signed on the 28th of May 1812, the Ottomans ceded the eastern half of Moldavia to Russia, the territory Russia renamed Bessarabia. Emperor Alexander I approved the treaty on the 11th of June, a mere thirteen days before Napoleon invaded Russia, allowing Russian commanders to redeploy soldiers from the Balkans in time for the expected attack.

  Napoleon had in fact approached Mahmud with an invitation to join the march on Russia. Mahmud rejected the offer. A ruler who had invaded all of Europe except the United Kingdom and the Ottoman Empire, Mahmud reasoned, could not be trusted as an ally.

  The losses continued across Mahmud's reign. Greece declared independence after a rebellion that started in 1821, and in 1827 a combined British, French, and Russian naval force defeated the Ottoman fleet at the Battle of Navarino. The Treaty of Constantinople in July 1832 forced the empire to formally recognize Greek independence. France conquered Ottoman Algeria in 1830. Then another Russo-Turkish war, from 1828-1829, was fought without the Janissaries who had so long formed the empire's backbone, against Marshal von Diebitsch, a commander who would earn the nickname Sabalskanski, the crosser of the Balkans, by forcing his troops over the mountains and appearing before Adrianople.

• 4. The Auspicious Incident

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  In June 1826, Mahmud II moved against the Janissary Corps with careful calculation. He had already prepared a reformed wing of the military intended to replace them. When the Janissaries staged a demonstration against his proposed reforms, he ordered their barracks fired upon. He then burned Belgrad Forest outside Istanbul to eliminate any survivors who had fled there.

  The corps that had once been the empire's elite fighting force was gone. Mahmud abolished not only the soldiers but also the Bektashi religious order associated with them, and he exiled or executed those who remained. The new army that replaced them was named the Asakir-i Mansure-i Muhammediye, recruited mainly from Turkish speakers across both Rumelia and Anatolia.

  The reach of that same year extended further than the barracks. Mahmud officially adopted the fez for the military after the Janissary eradication, a deliberate break from older military dress. He ordered civilian officials to wear a plainer version of the fez to distinguish them from soldiers. A regulatory law in 1829 extended this expectation to the general population. He faced resistance from religious groups, laborers, and military members for traditional, religious, and practical reasons. His portraits from after 1826 document his own shift toward European military style alongside the new headwear.

• 5. Rebuilding from the Inside

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  A firman dated the 22nd of February 1834 abolished the long-standing practice of public officials extracting payments from locals when traveling through the provinces. The same edict restricted tax collection to two regular half-yearly periods. Mahmud addressed this reform in his own words, writing in the document: "No one is ignorant that I am bound to afford support to all my subjects against vexatious proceedings; to endeavour unceasingly to lighten, instead of increasing their burdens, and to ensure peace and tranquility."

  The harac, the capitation-tax, had long been weaponized by collectors against those who paid it. The 1834 firman restructured how it was levied, putting collection in the hands of local commissions rather than government appointees. Hundreds of sinecure offices were abolished. Officials lost their traditional right to execute people without a legal sentence from a judge; a new appeals system allowed a convicted person to escalate a case all the way to the sultan.

  Mahmud also placed awqaf, the inalienable charitable endowments, under state administration through a new Ministry of Evkaf. Military fiefs, the timars and ziamets that had once funded the old army but had long become engines of corruption, were folded into public domains. The hereditary local chiefs known as derebeys, "valley lords" who had functioned as petty princes across the provinces, were systematically subjugated. By the end of the campaign, the island of Cyprus was the only part of the empire where power not derived from the sultan was permitted to remain.

  In 1831, Mahmud established Takvim-i Vekayi, the Calendar of Events, the first newspaper published in the Ottoman Turkish language, required reading for all civil servants.

• 6. Diplomacy and the Naval Push

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  After the naval defeat at Navarino in 1827, Mahmud gave rebuilding the Ottoman fleet his highest priority. The first steamships arrived in the Ottoman Navy in 1828. The following year, the warship Mahmudiye was built at the Imperial Arsenal on the Golden Horn. At 76.15 by 21.22 meters, with 128 cannons arranged across three decks and a crew of 1,280 sailors, it was for many years the largest warship in the world.

  On the diplomatic side, Mahmud built on work that had begun under Selim III but went further than any predecessor. In 1836 he created the titles of Foreign Minister and Undersecretary for the first time, and he set their salaries and rank equal to the highest military and civilian positions in the empire. By 1833, the Language Office and Translation Office had grown considerably in size and importance. In 1834, the empire established its first permanent European embassies, beginning with one in Paris.

  Mahmud also ordered archery master Mustafa Kani to write a comprehensive book on the history, construction, and use of Turkish bows, preserving technical knowledge that might otherwise have been lost as the empire modernized its military.

• 7. Legacy and Succession

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  Mahmud II died of tuberculosis on the 1st of July 1839. Crowds gathered for his funeral to bid the sultan farewell. He was succeeded by his son Abdülmecid I, born on the 25th of April 1823, who had been the last sultan born at Topkapi Palace before the imperial household moved to the Besiktas Palace.

  Abdülmecid moved quickly. He announced the Edict of Gülhane and the broader program of reorganization called the Tanzimat, which extended into European-style clothing, architecture, legislation, institutional organization, and land reform. The reforms his father had set in motion before dying, including a Council of Ministers and the Supreme Council of Judicial Ordinances established in 1838 and 1839, became foundations for that era.

  A second son, Abdulaziz, born on the 18th of February 1830, would become the 32nd Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Of at least eighteen sons Mahmud fathered, only these two survived to adulthood. In 2006, the historical detective novel The Janissary Tree by Jason Goodwin, set in 1836 Constantinople, placed Mahmud's modernizing reforms and their conservative opposition at the center of its plot, and the sultan and his mother appear in several of its scenes.