Free The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire by Alan Palmer Page A

collecting dissidents from the Janissary barracks as they went. The Janissary
mutiny turned a demonstration into an insurrection. 14
    Damat Ibrahim seems to have thought that the crowd could be easily dispersed. He had forgotten—or did not know—that the most reliable troops were encamped at Üsküdar, on
the Anatolian shore, ready to set out eastwards on a further Persian campaign. He also placed unjustifiable confidence in his imperial father-in-law. For when Ahmed III heard that Patrona’s
rebels were demanding the heads of the Grand Vizier, the Grand Admiral, and one other ‘westernized’ minister, he obliged them. All three were, as was the custom, swiftly strangled
before decapitation; the executioners disturbed the Grand Admiral in his waterside villa as he was transplanting his tulips, totally unaware of any political crisis in downtown Stamboul.
    If Ahmed III thought that by sacrificing his ministerial cronies he could save his throne, he was mistaken. Along both banks of the Golden Horn there followed two days of rioting, arson and
looting—a sudden show of cultural xenophobia towards anything thought to be ‘Frankish’ (western). On 1 October Ahmed abdicated, under threat of deposition, making obeisance to his
thirty-four-year-old nephew, Mahmud I, who had been confined in the kafe ever since his seventh birthday. Back to the kafe went the ‘tulip king’, spending the last six
years of his life only a few hundred yards from the pavilion where he had sat in floral majesty each April. His daughter Princess Fatma—Damat Ibrahim’s widow—was imprisoned a year
later for plotting to restore her father, and it is possible that Ahmed’s death, in hissixty-third year, was hastened by poison, although no Sultan since Suleiman I
had survived into his sixties.
    Ahmed III had reigned for twenty-seven years. Against all expectancy, his nephew remained on the throne for twenty-four. For thirteen months after his accession, foreign envoys looked on Mahmud
as a mere puppet of Patrona Halil and his bully boys, rebels who set fire to most of the exquisite palaces and kiosks of the Tulip Years. Their leader grew rich very quickly, as boss of a city-wide
protection racket. Momentarily it seemed he might find an even broader field in which to peculate; on 24 November 1731 the Sultan invited Patrona Halil and his chief supporters to come to the
palace in order to discuss plans for another Persian War. No such discussion took place. Soon after their arrival in the Topkapi Sarayi, Patrona Halil and his associates were seized, and strangled
on the spot. Mahmud could now rule in his own right, entrusting the administration to Grand Viziers sympathetic towards westernizing reform, but more cautious than Damat Ibrahim and less tenacious
of office.
    Much survived the Patrona Terror, most notably Muteferrika’s printing press. There was even an imperial tulip festival each spring, albeit trimmed down to economy size. Like Ahmed III,
Mahmud showed an interest in books and education, at least in his capital city: a small library outside the Mosque of the Conqueror and a primary school attached to the mosque of Ayasofya are still
standing. He also completed a project, abandoned in the previous reign, for supplying water piped from outlying reservoirs to Pera, Galata and the northern shore of the Golden Horn; the octagonal
water distribution centre ( taksim ), erected on the Sultan’s orders, is still at the top of Istiklal Caddesi (modern Istanbul’s Regent Street or Rue de Rivoli) and has given its
name to Taksim Meydani, which it is tempting to call Istanbul’s Piccadilly Circus.
    These projects belong mainly to Mahmud I’s later years, as also does the patronage he extended to the building of Stamboul’s first Baroque mosque, the Nurousmaniye Cami, next to the
Bazaar. He had begun his personal rule by giving urgent attention to defects in the methods of tax collection; a new law improving the efficiency of