Selim III
Selim III designed a new army because the old one could not fight, and the old one deposed and killed him for it. He came to the throne in 1789 in the middle of a losing war with Russia and Austria, and with an unusual preparation for the job: he had corresponded with the king of France while still confined, and he had a programme. The New Order was a European-style infantry corps with European drill, European officers and its own treasury and revenue streams, built alongside the existing army rather than replacing it because replacing it was not survivable. He also opened the empire's first permanent embassies in London, Paris, Vienna and Berlin, which is the beginning of Ottoman diplomacy as other states practised it. The reign was consumed by the French. Bonaparte invaded Egypt in 1798, an Ottoman province, and Selim found himself allied with Britain and Russia against the power he had modelled his reforms on. The French army was stopped at Acre in 1799 by an Ottoman garrison and a British squadron, the first check Bonaparte suffered on land. The consequences in the provinces were worse than the invasion. Egypt after the French withdrawal fell in 1805 to an Albanian officer of the Ottoman contingent who made himself its effectively independent ruler and would later invade Syria. In Serbia the local Janissary garrison murdered the notables it was supposed to protect, and the rising of 1804 that began against the garrison turned within a few years into a war for independence. The New Order corps reached about twenty-five thousand men and fought well. That was the problem. In 1807 the auxiliaries of the Bosphorus forts mutinied against being put into the new uniforms, the clerics were persuaded to declare the reforms unlawful, and Selim abdicated to avoid bloodshed. A year later, when an army came to restore him, he was strangled in the harem so that there would be nobody to restore.
- Lived: 1761 CE – 1808 CE
- Nationality: Ottoman
- Roles: head_of_state, monarch
