The Oriental Crisis of 1840

Great Power politics at their best

The Bombardment and Capture of St Jean D’Acre. Image Source:Lt John Frederick Warre RN; P & D Colnaghi & Co Ltd, Richard Gilson Reeve, A. W. Reeve, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

The decline of the Ottoman Empire

Starting with the 16th century, when Sultan Selim the Grim in a lightning campaign in 1516–17 defeated and annexed the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt and Syria, the Ottoman Empire was the dominant state in the Eastern Mediterranean.

The Ottomans reached the peak of their power and influence during the reign of Selim’s son, Suleiman the Magnificent, but starting in the late 16th century, the power of the Sublime Porte started to decline. The reasons for the decline of the Ottoman state were multiple and rather complex, but the main ones( without going too much into the root cause of the decline) were the following:

1. The decline of the Ottoman military

During the 15th and 16th centuries, the Ottomans were among the leading European powers in the usage of gunpowder weapons, this usage of the latest generation of military gear played no small part in the Ottoman conquest of the Mamluk Sultanate or even the Kingdom of Hungary, whose obsolete armies the Ottomans shot to pieces in the early 1500s.

The Ottoman armies started to fall behind their European counterparts in the 17th and 18th centuries, and as the Ottomans failed to reform their armies, they increasingly…