page_title: Nizam-I Cedid
section_title: Origins
hierarchical_section_title: Nizam-I Cedid / Origins
caption_attribution_description: English: Selim III Türkçe: III. Selim
context_page_description: The Nizam-i Djedid was a series of reforms carried out by the Ottoman Sultan Selim III during the late 18th and early 19th centuries in a drive to catch up militarily and politically with the Western Powers. The New Order regime was launched by Selim III and a coalition of reformers. The central objective was the creation of a professional army along European lines and a private treasury to finance military spending, as well as other administrative reforms. The age of the New Order can be generally said to have lasted from 1789 to 1807, ending with the deposition of Selim III by a Janissary coup.
  While the term “New Order” eventually came to encompass all of Selim III’s reforms, the name was used contemporaneously to refer only to the reform’s central innovation: the New Order Army. While that army was largely a failure in its own time, it reflects an important step in the stages of Ottoman attempts at reform in the Modern period. Selim III’s desire for an army necessitated far-reaching changes in the bureaucracy and structure of the Ottoman Empire, and profoundly reorganized contemporary Ottoman politics.
context_section_description: The mid-to-late 18th century witnessed increasing great power competition as new empires - most notably Britain and France - arose and consolidated their respective dominions. The Ottoman Empire increasingly seemed to be falling behind their rivals - especially Russia and Austria, who had each dealt the Ottoman regime several defeats since the 1760s.
  The most notable of these was the 1774 Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca, which resulted in the loss of the Crimea to Russia. Russia also was given major concessions: for its ships to sail freely in the Black Sea, access to the Mediterranean, as well as consulates and an embassy in Ottoman territory.
  In 1774, Sultan Mustafa summed up the atmosphere of the time in verse: “The world is in decay, do not think it will be right with us; The state has declined into meanness and vulgarity, Everyone at the court is concerned with pleasure; Nothing remains for us but divine mercy”. He died shortly thereafter. While his successor and brother Abdulhamid I initiated a second war in an attempt to reclaim what had been lost in Crimea, it was a disaster.
  A decisive battle in 1789 became a show of Ottoman military weakness: 120,000 Janissaries were defeated by 8,000 Russian troops on the shores of the Danube. New Order reformers argued that the Janissary corps had grown from a hardened fighting force into an entrenched interest group with little interest in training and fighting.
  In 1789, Selim III inherited the throne from his uncle Abdulhamid at the age of 28. He also inherited the Second Russian-Turkish War, which resulted in a humiliating loss for the empire and reinforcement of the disaster of Küçük Kaynarca at the Treaty of Jassy in 1792. Selim headed a coalition of reformers and quickly convened a consultative assembly to advance tajdid, or renewal.
  While Selim III often receives credit for the military reforms, he was hardly the sole instigator. Ideas for reform - especially of military reform - had preoccupied the Ottoman political class for nearly a century before Selim III took the throne.  The first Western-style military training in the Ottoman world was done without the Sultan’s knowledge. In 1790, as Stanford Shaw documents, Koca Yusuf Pasha organized a separate corps to drill a select core of soldiers in the midst of the Second Russian-Turkish War (Shaw 294).
caption: Ottoman Sultan Selim III, who carried out the reforms.
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