Nizam-i Cedid

'new order') 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.

Its central objectives were the creation of a professional army along European lines, a private treasury to finance military spending, and other administrative reforms.

[2] The irony, however, was that yeniçeri, the Turkish word for Janissaries, also means "new army", thus leading to the designation of Nizam-i Cedid ("New Order") forces instead.

[2] 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.

[4] 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.

[5] 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".

[9] 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.

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.

[7] The investment quickly paid results, and several hundred New Order forces widely outperformed conventional Ottoman troops in the 1799 defense of Acre from Napoleon Bonaparte.

[15] There were also attempts to co-opt the Janissaries, and the Sublime Porte issued decrees praising their role in Ottoman history as well as assuring them that their salaries would continue.

The new military demanded new forms of taxation and the uprooting of entrenched elite groups, and the "New Order Army" had to be financed by a "New Treasury"[17] (Irad-i Cedid).

In 1806, during the Edirne incident, local Janissaries and notables joined to lynch a qadi who had come to recite an imperial decree announcing the deployment of New Order troops to the region.