The challenges of the new order

It's easy to see why, despite his desire to continue the work of his cousin Selim III, Mahmud avoided the slightest reference to the "accursed" term that had caused his downfall. The Ottoman political system was then based on a central power and two main counterpowers: the provincial notables(ayan) and the janissary corps(yeniçeriocağı). The ayan owed their power to local political, social and economic capital, notably through agriculture and tax farms. The janissary corps, created as early as the ^14th century as a slave militia, in line with the Ottoman ideal of administrators and soldiers from the devşirme (raising Christian children from conquered territories) had "gentrified", becoming increasingly integrated into urban society and economy, making them even more formidable in the eyes of the palace.

In 1808, Mahmud II signed the "alliance pact"(Sened-i İttifak) with the main a yan, recognizing their status in exchange for their support. Nevertheless, a few years later, he would embark on a policy aimed at reducing the authority and autonomy of these provincial magnates. However, it was not until much later that he finally dared to tackle the janissaries, this time decisively. The "happy event"(Vak'a-i Hayriyye) of June 16, 1826 destroyed the Janissary Corps manu militari, banishing even the memory of the corps and its affiliates.

The destruction of the janissaries took place in the midst of the long conflict between the state and Greek insurgents, from 1821 until the establishment of an independent Greek state in 1830. What had begun as a simple rebellion quickly became tinged with ideology and international politics. While the European powers initially kept their distance from the issue, public opinion in Europe, motivated by philhellenism, quickly came to the defense of the Greek cause. The massacres on the island of Chio (1822) and the fall of Missolonghi (1826) only intensified this phenomenon, exacerbated by the presence of numerous European volunteers who had come to defend, arms in hand, an increasingly idealized Greece.

For the Ottomans, it was the discovery of a solidarity between Europe and the Greek insurgents whose ideological and sentimental underpinnings seemed surprising. The documentation concerning the citadel of Athens - the Acropolis - during the siege of the city by Ottoman troops in 1826 is a particularly good illustration of how the Ottomans were led to discover the importance of a European ideology with which they were hardly familiar. Pressed by European diplomacy to spare ancient monuments to which they themselves attached little importance, the Ottomans were forced to realize that these "old stones" had a symbolic value that denoted a radical change in the way politics and diplomacy were now conducted in this new world order.

This observation provides a transition to the first lectures of 2018-2019, which will begin with the internal upheavals of the 1820s and 1830s, from the destruction of the Janissaries to the Egyptian crisis, and of which the Tanzimat decree (1839) will be a kind of denouement. However, it is also a transition to the central theme of this year's symposium, which will focus on the history of archaeology and, in particular, the "discovery" of Phoenicia in the second half of the ^19th century.