There were, however, some thirty years still to elapse after Selim’s accession before that doctrine was fully born:  and had her hands been free, Russia might well have been in secure possession of the Byzantine throne long before 1815.  For, internally, the Osmanli state went from bad to worse.  The tumultuous insubordination of the Janissaries became an ever greater scandal.  Never in all the long history of their riots was their record for the years 1807-9 equalled or even approached.  Never before, also, had the provinces been so utterly out of hand.  This was the era of Jezzar the Butcher at Acre, of the rise of Mehemet Ali in Egypt, of Ali Pasha in Epirus, and of Pasvanoghlu at Vidin.  When Mahmud II was thrust on to the throne in 1809, he certainly began his reign with no more personal authority and no more imperial prestige or jurisdiction than the last Greek emperor had enjoyed on his accession in 1448.

The great European war, however, which had been raging intermittently for nearly twenty years, had saved Mahmud an empire to which he could succeed in name and try to give substance.  Whatever the Osmanlis suffered during that war, it undoubtedly kept them in Constantinople.  Temporary loss of Egypt and the small damage done by the British attack on Constantinople in 1807 were a small price to pay for the diversion of Russia’s main energies to other than Byzantine fields, and for the assurance, made doubly sure when the great enemy did again attack, that she would not be allowed to settle the account alone.  Whatever Napoleon may have planned and signed at Tilsit, the aegis of France was consistently opposed to the enemies of the Osmanlis down to the close of the Napoleonic age.

Thus it came about that those thirty perilous years passed without the expected catastrophe.  There was still a successor of Osman reigning in Constantinople when the great Christian powers, met in conclave at Vienna, half unconsciously guaranteed the continued existence of the Osmanli Empire simply by leaving it out of account in striking a Balance of Power in Europe.  Its European territory, with the capital within it, was of quite enough importance to disturb seriously the nice adjustment agreed at Vienna; and, therefore, while any one’s henceforth to take or leave, it would become always some one’s to guard.  A few years had yet to pass before the phrase, the Maintenance of the Integrity of the Ottoman Empire, would be a watchword of European diplomacy:  but, whether formulated thus or not, that principle became a sure rock of defence for the Osmanli Empire on the birthday of the doctrine of the Balance of Power.