A handful of ashes saved the Ottoman sultan later compared to Peter the Great
When assassins came for the young prince Mahmud in 1808, a Georgian slave named Cevri reportedly flung ashes in their eyes, buying him time to climb out a window onto the harem roof. Pages lowered him down on knotted clothing, and within hours he was proclaimed sultan. He went on to remake the empire.
The danger came from his half-brother Mustafa IV, who ordered both Mahmud and the deposed Selim III killed to head off a rebellion. Selim died, but rebels led by Alemdar Mustafa Pasha arrived, found the body and raised Mahmud to the throne instead. The account comes from the nineteenth-century historian Ahmed Cevdet Pasha. Cevri was rewarded with the post of chief treasurer of the imperial harem, second in its hierarchy, and a plain stone staircase along the harem's Golden Way still bears her name.
His reign, from 1808 to 1839, brought painful losses. The empire gave up Bessarabia to Russia under the 1812 Treaty of Bucharest, having refused Napoleon's invitation to join his march on Russia. Greece rose in 1821, and after British, French and Russian fleets destroyed the Ottoman navy at Navarino in 1827, Mahmud had to accept Greek independence in 1832. France began seizing Algeria in 1830.
Those setbacks pushed him towards reform, which is why admirers later called him the Peter the Great of Turkey. In June 1826 he forcibly abolished the Janissaries, the entrenched elite corps that had blocked modernisation, and built a European-style conscript army in their place. He brought provincial strongmen under central control, reorganised the foreign office and curbed governors' power to order executions without a judge's sentence. In his last years he set up a Supreme Council of Judicial Ordinances and a Council of Ministers.
Tradition mattered to him too. He worked to revive archery and commissioned the master archer Mustafa Kani to write about Turkish bows, the source of most of what is known about them today. Tuberculosis killed him in 1839, and his son Abdulmecid I carried the reforms into the era called the Tanzimat.
Source: Mahmud II
