ABSTRACT
What possessed Mahmud II to go to war, unprepared as theempire was for another confrontation on the Danube? Most contemporaries concluded that there was little else he could do, as the empire was faced with dissolution on all sides, by an aggressive challenger in Egypt, by a cacophony of voices of resistance from his Muslim subjects, and by the continuous Russian encroachment in both the Caucasus and the Balkans, and even in the Mediterranean, where a Russian blockade of the Dardanelles began with the declaration of war. The empire was stunned and the sultan humiliated by the sinking of the fleet at Navarino earlier that same year. In retaliation, Mahmud II closed the straits to foreign shipping. On 20 December 1827, Mahmud II declared war on Russia. He presented the case to his own public, justifying the new conflict as a jihad. The text of his declaration is full of evidence of the impact the Greek rebellion had made on his thinking. In summary form: All infidels, but especially the Russians, the declaration began, were mortal enemies of ‘the Islamic millet and the Sublime State of Muhammad’. The elimination of the Janissary eGkıya had allowed the Russians to invade and conquer Islamic territory as they had for the past fifty years. They had provoked their co-religionists into treason, aiming at the destruction of the Ottoman state. While the rebels of the mainland had generally been repressed, the bandits of the Morea continued their rebellion, calling themselves, ‘with unspeakable nonsense’, the Greek government (Yunan hükümeti). Then the Russians, English and French entered the fray, with the aim of separating the Greek millet from Ottoman
subjecthood. Their offer of mediation in order to achieve autonomy for the Greek millet was unacceptable, even after they attacked and destroyed the Ottoman navy at Navarino. The sultan called upon all Muslim subjects to unite in this war, which was not only about land and boundaries. The goal of the infidels was to eradicate the Muslim millet from the face of the earth.1 For Mahmud II, known to all as the ‘infidel sultan’, this was clearly a piece of propaganda which aimed at arousing the public and swelling the ranks of his new army. His declaration may have been an attempt to pre-empt resistance, for, while the sultan experienced some success at raising new troops, Mahmud II found both his administrators and his subjects deeply divided on the question of whether or not to go to war with Russia in 1828.
