Sultan Mahmud II
Mahmud II destroyed the Janissaries and rebuilt the Ottoman state around the ruins. Born in 1785, he came to the throne in 1808 after his cousin Selim III, who had attempted military reform, was deposed and murdered by the very corps he was trying to replace. Mahmud survived only because a slave hid him in a furnace. He spent eighteen years waiting. The Janissaries had been the empire's elite infantry in the fifteenth century and were by now a hereditary, tax-exempt guild of shopkeepers and tradesmen who drew pay, resisted every reform, and deposed sultans who annoyed them. In June 1826 he announced the formation of a new corps trained on European lines. The Janissaries rose, as he expected, overturning their soup kettles in the traditional signal of revolt, and marched on the palace. He had prepared artillery. Their barracks were shelled, several thousand were killed in the city over a day, the survivors were hunted down and executed across the provinces, and the corps was abolished by decree. It is called the Auspicious Incident. He then moved fast: a conscript army with Prussian instructors, a medical school, a translation bureau, the first Ottoman newspaper, a postal service, a census, the abolition of the timar land system, ministries on the European model, and the fez replacing the turban. The losses were heavy — Greek independence, Serbian autonomy, Algeria to France, and two defeats by his own Egyptian governor. He died of tuberculosis in 1839, weeks before the Tanzimat reforms were proclaimed.
- Lived: 1785 CE – 1839 CE
- Nationality: Ottoman
- Roles: sultan, head_of_state
