War, and Christian allies, though they frustrated that attack, made a peace by which the Osmanlis gained nothing, the latter were in no mood to welcome the repetition of the Tanzimat, which Abdul Mejid consented to embody in the Treaty of Paris.  The reign closed amid turbulence and humiliations—­massacre and bombardment at Jidda, massacre and Franco-British coercion in Syria—­from all of which the sultan took refuge with women and wine, to meet in 1861 a drunkard’s end.

His successor, Abdul Aziz, had much the same intentions, the same civilian sympathies, the same policy of Europeanization, and a different, but more fatal, weakness of character.  He was, perhaps, never wholly sane; but his aberration, at first attested only by an exalted conviction of his divine character and inability to do wrong, excited little attention until it began to issue in fantastic expenditure.  By an irony of history, he is the one Osmanli sultan upon the roll of our Order of the Garter, the right to place a banner in St, George’s Chapel having been offered to this Allah-possessed caliph on the occasion of his visit to the West in 1867.

Despite the good intentions of Abdul Aziz himself—­as sincere as can be credited to a disordered brain—–­and despite more than one minister of outstanding ability, reform and almost everything else in the empire went to the bad in this unhappy reign.  The administration settled down to lifeless routine and lapsed into corruption:  the national army was starved:  the depreciation of the currency grew worse as the revenue declined and the sultan’s household and personal extravagance increased.  Encouraged by the inertia of the imperial Government, the Christians of the European provinces waxed bold.  Though Montenegro was severely handled for contumacy, the Serbs were able to cover their penultimate stage towards freedom by forcing in 1867 the withdrawal of the last Ottoman garrisons from their fortresses.  Krete stood at bay for three years and all but won her liberty.  Bosnia rose in arms, but divided against herself.  Pregnant with graver trouble than these, Bulgaria showed signs of waking from long sleep.  In 1870 she obtained recognition as a nationality in the Ottoman Empire, her Church being detached from the control of the Oecumenical Patriarch of the Greeks and placed under an Exarch.  Presently, her peasantry growing ever more restive, passed from protest to revolt against the Circassian refugee-colonists with whom the Porte was flooding the land.  The sultan, in an evil hour, for lack of trained troops, let loose irregulars on the villages, and the Bulgarian atrocities, which they committed in 1875, sowed a fatal harvest for his successor to reap.  His own time was almost fulfilled.  The following spring a dozen high officials, with the assent of the Sheikh-ul-Islam and the active dissent of no one, took Abdul Aziz from his throne to a prison, wherein two days later he perished, probably by his own hand.  A puppet reigned three months as Murad V, and then, at the bidding of the same king-makers whom his uncle had obeyed, left the throne free for his brother Abdul Hamid, a man of affairs and ability, who was to be the most conspicuous, or rather, the most notorious Osmanli sultan since Suleiman.