Abdulmejid I
Abdulmejid I promised his Christian and Jewish subjects legal equality, won a war by having Britain and France fight it, and mortgaged the empire to pay for both. He was sixteen when he succeeded, in the week the Ottoman army was destroyed by the Egyptian one and the fleet defected to it, and the empire was saved by the European powers who preferred it to the alternative. Within months he issued the decree that opened the reform era: security of life and property for all subjects regardless of religion, taxation by assessment rather than by tax farm, regular conscription, and public trials. A second decree in 1856 went further, abolishing the poll tax on non-Muslims and admitting them to the army and the civil service. Together they are the attempt to convert a Muslim empire ruling subject communities into a state of equal citizens. The reforms were real on paper, partial in the provinces and resented everywhere. Muslims experienced them as the removal of their legal precedence at the demand of foreign powers; Christian communities experienced conscription and direct taxation as a loss of the autonomy the old system had given them; and the clerical and landowning interests obstructed what they could. The reform decrees are also the point at which European ambassadors acquired a standing right to comment on Ottoman internal affairs. The Crimean War of 1853 began as an Ottoman quarrel with Russia over the holy places and became the first European war fought to preserve the empire. Britain and France did most of the fighting and all of the lending. The empire emerged with its territory intact, admitted formally to the Concert of Europe, and carrying the first foreign loans in its history; Abdulmejid borrowed again for the palace he built on the Bosphorus, and the debt his brother inherited would end in bankruptcy and foreign control of Ottoman revenues within twenty years of his death.
- Lived: 1823 CE – 1861 CE
- Nationality: Ottoman
- Roles: head_of_state, monarch
