The Nizam-i Cedid () was a series of reforms carried out by Ottoman Sultan Selim III during the late 18th and the 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. Its central objectives were the creation of a professional army along European lines, a private treasury to finance military spending, and other administrative reforms. The age of the New Order can be generally said to have lasted from 1789 to 1807, when Selim III was deposed 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. That army was largely a failure in its own time but reflected an important step in the stages of Ottoman attempts at reform.
Selim III's desire for an army necessitated far-reaching changes in the bureaucracy and structure of the Ottoman Empire and profoundly reorganised contemporary Ottoman politics.
The New Order, according to the historian Stanford Shaw, reflected a profound shift in Ottoman thinking on how to confront the West. Hitherto, Ottomans had conceived of beating the West by returning to the glory days of the 16th century, but the Nizam-i Djedid reforms were premised on the idea that Western ideas and processes had to be adopted to restore Ottoman global prestige.
Etymology
and are loanwords from Arabic in Ottoman Turkish. The equivalent phrase in Arabic would be , , meaning "new order" or "new system".
Selim III's forces were designed to be a new force to counterbalance the Janissaries, which were regularly accused of being both ineffectual and of holding too much political power. The irony, however, was that , the Turkish word for Janissaries, also means "new army", thus leading to the designation of ("New Order") forces instead.
Origins
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 its rivals, especially Russia and Austria, which had each dealt the Ottoman regime several defeats since the 1760s.
The most notable of them was the 1774 Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca, which resulted in the loss of Crimea to Russia, which was also given major concessions: permission for its ships to sail freely in the Black Sea, access to the Mediterranean and 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. His successor and brother, Abdulhamid I, initiated a second war in an attempt to reclaim what had been lost in Crimea, but it was a disaster.
A decisive battle in 1789 became a show of Ottoman military weakness since 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 the 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 , or renewal.
While Selim III often receives credit for the military reforms, he was hardly the sole instigator. Ideas for reform, especially of the military, 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 organised a separate corps to drill a select core of soldiers in the midst of the Second Russian-Turkish War.