Omer Pasha was born Mihajlo Latas (Serbian: Михајло Латас), an ethnic Serb and Orthodox Christian,[1][2] in Janja Gora, at the time part of the Croatian Military Frontier of the Austrian Empire (in modern Plaški, Lika region, Croatia).

[6] After escaping to Bosnia and living rough for a time, Latas was offered, in 1828, a position as tutor to the children of a Turkish merchant, on condition that he converted from Christianity to Islam and was circumcised.

By astute networking and doubtless exploiting his curiosity value as a European ex-military man, he was appointed lecturer at the Turkish Military Academy.

[7] Now a major, Omer completed a mapping assignment in Bulgaria and the Danube territories, gaining detailed knowledge of the ground which was to serve him well in the future.

He thereby met and married a rich heiress Adviye Hanım (a daughter of Çerkes Hafız Mehmed Pasha), the start of his meteoric rise in Ottoman military circles.

His firm and effective handling of a powder keg situation involving potential confrontation with the Russian and Austrian armies demonstrated that he possessed considerable diplomatic skills.

[9] Omer Pasha executed, plundered and abolished the respected historical aristocracy of the Muslim faith, in the interest of buttressing Ottoman central power.

The Austrians intervened forcing The Porte to withdraw their representative to Constantinople; it was a humiliating climbdown proving that Turkish administrative control was ebbing away in the face of the Great Powers.

Omar made a powerful stand at Oltenitsa in southern Romania defeating (according to Turkish accounts) a numerically-superior Russian force under the indecisive General Pyotr Dannenburg.

In January 1854 he successfully persuaded Lord Raglan to keep his word by reinforcing Varna, while the French remained deeply sceptical of Omar's strategy to protect the Turkish army's flank on the Lower Danube.

Despite later attempts by Raglan to get the Turks to launch an attack over the River Pruth with direct intention to provoke Austria into a defensive counter-attack, neither Vienna nor Pasha's forces would be drawn into such a cataclysm.