Chapter 5  •  From “New Order” to “Re-Ordering”: The Tanzimat
75
particular the Lancasterian monitor school that
became popular in England and the United
States in the 1810s and 1820s. The Lancasterian
system tried to promote mass education beyond
simple religious instruction. Later criticized as
too rigid and mechanical, it relied on using
more successful students to mentor less suc-
cessful peers to allow more pupils to be in one
class with a single teacher. The system drew
praise for its much lower cost and became a
model for public school expansion in Europe
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and North America.
The Lancasterian system came to the atten-
tion of the Ottomans as a direct con­sequence
of the influx of foreign missionaries, particularly
Protestant Christians. William Goodell, one of the
first American Protestant missionaries to become
established in Istanbul, opened a Lancasterian
school there for Greek and Armenian boys on
his arrival in 1831. One year later, he added a
branch for Greek and Armenian girls. These
schools produced a strong negative reaction
among local Greek and Armenian Orthodox
priests and bishops, who saw these schools
and the activities of their Protestant teachers as
direct threats to their own authority and power.
Nevertheless, these educational experi-
ments soon attracted the attention of promi-
nent Muslim military officers, who visited them
and within a short time set up their own pilot
schools of this type for the Muslim community.
Such innovation now alarmed Muslim ­clerics,
who began to assert more stringent control over
Muslim primary education through the Shaykh
al-Islam (still the highest-ranking official in the
traditional religious/judicial bureaucracy).
Despite such resistance, the ­reform-minded
“Council of Public Works” (Mejlis-i Umur-u
Nafia) had approved in 1838 the establishment
of a group of Rushdiye schools. What really
got these new institutions to flourish was the
creation of a teachers’ training academy for
them in 1846. In 1850, this academy was placed
under the direction of Ahmed Jevdet Pasha
(1822–1895), later one of the main architects of
Ottoman judicial reform.
With his background reminiscent of
Reshid Pasha’s, Jevdet first trained in a reli-
gious primary school and joined the ilmiye
(religious/judicial/educational) section of the
Ottoman bureaucracy. By coincidence, one of
his first assignments was to be sent in 1846
as a religious tutor for Mustafa Reshid’s fam-
ily, which landed him in the midst of Tanzimat
activities and completely reshaped his career
path. Holding a series of important official
positions beginning in the 1840s and continu-
ing through the 1890s, Jevdet played important
roles in a wide range of Tanzimat-era mod-
ernization projects. It was once rumored that
Jevdet might be a candidate for the office of
Shaykh al-Islam but was opposed by more con-
servative clerics. He made his most enduring
contribution at the end of the Tanzimat period
as compiler of the Mejelle, the first codified
Ottoman legal code. It was formally based on
Sharia law, but employed the style, vocabulary,
and form of modern European legal systems.
The Crimean War
Implications for the Tanzimat
The Tanzimat did not take place in a v­ acuum.
The encounter between Ottoman and ­foreign
concepts that shaped its reform processes
h appened simultaneously with ongoing
­
international political developments. Trends
e lsewhere had a growing impact on the
­
Ottomans, particularly what was going on in
Russia. Its renewed push southward, as well as
the steady Austrian advance into the Balkans,
again threatened the Ottomans’ concept of
empire, continuing to nibble away at what they
had conquered centuries earlier.
For a few years around 1800, Russia and
Austria became distracted from their long-
term policies of southward expansion by the
revolutionary fervor that swept Europe after
the rise of Napoleon. Soon, their southerly
focus returned as conflict within Europe sub-
sided following the Congress of Vienna in
 76 Chapter 5  •  From “New Order” to “Re-Ordering”: The Tanzimat

Moscow

London
Berlin Kiev
Paris C
as
Vienna pi
an
Budapest

Se
Zagreb Tiis Mashhad

a
Bucharest
Sea
Black
Belgrade
Sarajevo Istanbul Tabriz
Rome Tehran
Madrid Edirne Ankara
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Salonika Mosul
I sfahan
Adana
Izmir Kermanshah
Aleppo
Athens Baghdad Shiraz
Tunis
Algiers Damascus Pe Muscat
Casablanca Medi Kuwait rsi
terranean Sea an Gulf
Jerusalem
Tripoli Alexandria
Benghazi
Cairo

Ni Medina
le

0 Kilometers 1000 Mecca

R
ed
Se
0 Miles 1000 Port Sudan

a
Sana’a
The Ottoman Empire c.1850

Iran c.1850

Map 5.1  Middle East in 1850

1815. Britain and France became increasingly War. A spirit of revolutionary sentiment once
concerned about renewed Russian plans for again erupted in France, but led now to the
expansion. Tsar Nicholas I (r. 1825–1855), a enthronement of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte
staunch nationalist, revived imperialist dreams (Napoleon I’s nephew) as Emperor Napoleon
of Peter and Catherine the Great. He again III. The Crimean War arose from his seem-
pushed for Russia’s continuous expansion ingly trivial challenge to Russia that France,
southward, ever with an eye on reclaiming instead of Russia, was entitled to symbolic con-
the lost Byzantine capital of Constantinople: trol over certain holy sites in Palestine, which
wellspring of Orthodox Christianity. Russia included possession of the keys to the door of
flexed its muscles in the 1820s in support of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. When
the Greek rebels and again in the 1830s dur- Napoleon forced the Ottomans to acknowl-
ing the conflicts between the Ottomans and edge France’s authority in these places, Russia
Muhammad Ali. Populist excitement across demanded that its longstanding rights over
Europe was reignited in 1848, later dubbed the Orthodox Christians and their holy places in
“Year of Revolution.” the Ottoman Empire be affirmed and addi-
All these trends helped set the stage tional privileges be granted them.
for the next world conflict with a signifi- But the Ottomans refused this request,
cant impact on the Ottomans: the Crimean prompting the Russians to march into
 Chapter 5  •  From “New Order” to “Re-Ordering”: The Tanzimat 77
Moldavia and Wallachia in July 1853. These
Balkan areas were still under nominal Ottoman
s overeignty, but Russia had been granted
­ Times. In one, Russell depicted a “Charge of
increasing amounts of actual authority over
them since the 1820s. Known as the “Danubian
Principalities,” they took advantage of being
controlled neither fully by the Ottomans nor
the Russians, and asserted increasing local
autonomy. After 1848, their fragile political
system was thrown into turmoil by ­nationalist
uprisings in Moldavia, giving the Russians a
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pretext to invade. This in turn led Britain and
France to join the Ottomans in a war against
Russia in February 1854 after the Russians had
destroyed an Ottoman fleet at anchor.
Although Russia soon withdrew its troops
from Moldavia and Wallachia, Britain and
France decided to use the war as a chance to
settle the Eastern Question. They made four
demands on Russia for a peace treaty. Russia
would have to (1) end its protectorate over the
Danubian Principalities, (2) give up the right
to intervene in Ottoman affairs as the recog-
nized protector of Orthodox Christians there,
(3)  agree to revise the Straits Convention of
1841 to reduce its naval control over the Black
Sea, and (4) guarantee freedom of navigation
along the Danube.
Russian refusal of these demands really
started the Crimean War. After a few incon­
clusive battles in the fall of 1854, the war
became defined by the long siege of Sevastopol
between October 1854 and September 1855.
It produced neither a substantial change in
control of territory nor caused the fall of
­ in 1829, played an important role in the siege
a ­government, so had little impact as a con­
ventional war. Instead, the Crimean conflict
was noteworthy as one of the first “modern”
conflicts because of how it juxtaposed tradi-
tional and modern military tactics, strategy,
and technology in ways that changed how
wars would be planned and fought around
the world. It was among the first wars to be
­covered by mass-circulation newspapers and
of which photographs were taken.
The Crimean conflict was one of the first
media wars in the modern sense. The British
public became enthralled by frontline dispatches
from William Howard Russell in the London
the Light Brigade” at the Battle of Balaclava
in a vivid and grim report published in his
­newspaper only three weeks after the event,
prompting Alfred Tennyson’s poem of that name
that appeared one month later in a rival London
newspaper. The British government became
concerned about negative effects on morale
­
when versions of Tennyson’s poem started
to ­circulate among troops in the field. Roger
Fenton was allowed to take a series of photo-
graphs and William Simpson to draw a series
of illustrations designed to portray events in a
more positive light. But Fenton’s photographs
depicted war  with a brutal immediacy never
before possible, to be replicated a few years
later by Matthew Brady’s daguerreotypes of the
American Civil War.
Vivid newspaper accounts from the
Crimea moved Florence Nightingale to set
up one of the world’s first modern military
hospitals. Housed in the Selimiye barracks
of the Ottoman army in Uskudar, across the
Bosphorus from Istanbul, the equipment and
methods she used there became models for
modern army medical care. This took place
in an Ottoman military building named for
Sultan Selim III, built in 1800 as part of the
nizam-i jedid military modernization initiative.
Another important artifact of early Ottoman
naval modernization, the European-style tall
ship Mahmudiye constructed by Mahmud II
of Sevastopol during the war. The Mahmudiye
was for many years the largest warship in the
world and continued in Ottoman service until
1875. The Crimean War also saw the first seri-
ous military use of railroads and telegraphs
as well as prototypes of rifles that fired the
Minié ball: a new type of bullet with radically
improved accuracy and deadliness.
The war was not just a showcase for
medical and technological innovations: It also
exposed how traditional military practices,
such as the sale of officer commissions by the