Mahmud I
Mahmud I was put on the throne by a rebellion, executed the men who had raised it, and gave the empire its last successful war for a century. He came out of the confinement in which Ottoman princes were now kept and onto the throne in 1730, when a rising of Janissaries and Istanbul tradesmen led by an Albanian bath attendant overthrew his uncle and ended the period of ornamental Westernising known for the tulips that were its speculative mania. The rebels expected to govern through him. Within weeks he had their leaders strangled in the palace, which is the conventional demonstration that the sultanate still had teeth, and then he governed for twenty-four years by balancing the factions rather than confronting them. His wars went unusually well. A long conflict with Persia held the eastern frontier against an opponent who had just conquered India. More remarkably, a joint Russian and Austrian attack in 1736 was fought to a standstill and then reversed: Belgrade was retaken in 1739 and the treaty signed there recovered northern Serbia and Little Wallachia and kept Russia out of the Black Sea as a naval power. It was the last Ottoman treaty of the century that gained territory, and the frontier it drew held for fifty years. He is also the sultan under whom the empire first tried to import European military technique, employing a French nobleman turned Muslim convert to reorganise the artillery corps and found a school of geometry - an experiment that produced a competent bombardier corps and was allowed to lapse, because reform that touched the Janissaries touched the constituency that made and unmade sultans. He founded libraries, endowed the aqueduct system, and left an empire that looked stable and was running out of the century in which it could afford to be.
- Lived: 1696 CE – 1754 CE
- Nationality: Ottoman
- Roles: head_of_state, monarch
