The Edict of Gulhane

By the early nineteenth century the Ottoman Empire, beset by military defeats, by the loss and rebellion of provinces and by the growing pressure and interference of the European powers, was widely felt to be in danger, and its statesmen sought to reform and strengthen it by remaking its institutions on more modern lines. In 1839, in the rose-garden of Gulhane beside the Topkapi Palace, before an assembly of ministers, ulama, foreign ambassadors and notables, the great reforming statesman Mustafa Reshid Pasha read out, in the name of the young Sultan Abdulmecid (rahimahu Allah), a solemn imperial edict, the Hatt-i Sharif of Gulhane, which opened the era of reform known as the Tanzimat, the Reordering. The edict promised to all the subjects of the empire, of whatever religion, security of life, honour and property, an end to arbitrary execution and confiscation, the regular and fair assessment of taxes in place of the old and oppressive tax-farming, and an orderly system of conscription, and it proclaimed the principle that the state would henceforth be governed by fixed laws. Over the following decades the Tanzimat reforms remade much of the Ottoman administration, law, army, education and finance along modern and partly European lines. The reforms were a genuine and in many ways necessary effort to save and renew the empire and to give its peoples justice and security; yet they were carried out under heavy European pressure and influence, they provoked resistance from those whose interests and traditions they overturned, and they could not in the end halt the empire's long decline. The Tanzimat is therefore remembered as a great and double-edged turning-point, the beginning of the Ottoman state's struggle to modernise itself in a hostile age. This scene depicts the proclamation of the edict at Gulhane in 1839. In keeping with the project's ethics any figure is anonymous and at a distance, and the scroll is not legible.