INTRODUCTION       ii

Nor did her efforts end here; for in 1833, when the revolt of Mehemet Ali had shaken the empire of Ottomans to its very centre, she came forward as a protector to the nation which she had thus despoiled; and, as the recompense of her insidious friendship, compelled her powerless victim to sign the celebrated Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi, which opened the Strait to the Russians, and closed it against every other European power; while, with so much ostentation was this mortification inflicted upon the ill-fated victims of Muscovite ambition, that the waters of the Bosphorus, as far as Buyukdèrè, were laden with Russian tents. For nearly four centuries the crescent alone had held sway where now the blue cross on a white field fluttered in the rough blasts which swept down from the Black Sea; and as the bewildered Moslems gazed upon the throning strangers, many a proud heart swelled with resentment, or sank with sad forebodings of the future: nor were politicians wanting in Europe to foretell the speedy annihilation of the Ottoman Empire.

Still, however, the other Powers were true to the faith which they had pledged; and when, in 1839, the Pacha of Egypt, already master of Syria and Candia, gained the battle of Nezib, they once more interposed; an for awhile Russia had no pretext for further aggression.

Crushed as he had been alike by his enemies and by ally, Sultan Mahmoud hat earned for himself the respect of the western sovereigns; he had given evidence of high and noble powers; an it is probable that, had his life been spared, he might have redeemed his misfortunes; but they were yet too recent at the period of his decease for him to have recovered from the shock which he had received. He had, moreover, committed a fatal mistake in the destruction of the Janissaries, who, turbulent and unruly as they were, could be relied on alike for their bravery and their devotion; and who, when disbanded, returned to their homes and to their families, and resumed their duties as mechanics and agriculturists; while the new troops which were levied to replace them, and which were pressed, and conducted to the capital rather like felons than like men who were called upon to uphold the freedom and dignity of their country, were forbidden, on pain of death, to marry, to revisit the villages or the relatives from whom they had been torn, or to form any social ties which would divert them from their military duties. The effect of so harsh and ill-judged a measure as this became only too apparent ere there was time to remedy the evil. The villages thus decimated fell to ruin; the fields were bare of tillage, and the country of population; the exactions of the Pashas drove the remaining inhabitants to despair; and, meanwhile, the raw and undisciplined state of the conscript-army was pitiable in the extreme.