Tanzimat

The Tanzimat was a series of reforms carried out across the Ottoman Empire from 1839 to 1876, intended to modernise the state's administration, legal system and military along lines drawn largely from European models.

The era opened with the Edict of Gulhane in 1839, issued under Sultan Abdulmecid I, which promised equality before the law for all subjects regardless of religion and set out reforms to taxation and military conscription. Further reform followed with the 1856 Reform Edict, which extended the equality guarantees further toward the empire's non-Muslim subjects, and the era culminated in the Ottoman Constitution of 1876, which briefly created an elected parliament, the empire's first.

The Tanzimat reforms did not resolve the empire's underlying weaknesses, chronic fiscal strain and rising nationalist movements among its subject peoples chief among them, and the era ended when Sultan Abdulhamid II suspended the new constitution in 1878 and reverted to autocratic rule. Even so, the legal and administrative changes the Tanzimat had put in place outlasted that reversal, and both the Young Turk reformers of the early twentieth century and the secular Turkish republic that followed the empire built directly on ground the Tanzimat had cleared.