78 A Short History of the Middle East
warned him off such a scheme, and he then turned in 1831 to the
conquest of Syria and Palestine, which he had been previously
promised by the Sultan for his part in opposing the Greek Revolt;
moreover, he wished to use the forests of the Lebanon to rebuild the
fleet he had lost at Navarino. By 183 3 Ibrahim Pasha had conquered
Syria and his army, for which the feeble Ottoman army was ab-
solutely no match, was less than 150 miles from Istanbul. 'We
rejoice/ commented the French Foreign Office, 'that we have
facilitated the birth and development of a Power worthy of our
collaboration and as interested as we are in the prosperity of the
Mediterranean. We shall always be ready to give to the Pasha in
the future the same evidence of our friendship and goodwill as he
has received in the past from the French government.'
The Ottoman. Sultan appealed to Britain for support; but
Britain, preoccupied with a delicate situation in Western Europe,
could spare no naval detachments for the Eastern Mediterranean at
this moment. In Ms helplessness the Sultan was compelled to accept
an offer of aid from Russia, who had emerged a Great Power from
the Napoleonic Wars.1 She had encouraged the Greek Revolt,
in the hope of eventually dominating that country through the
medium of the Orthodox Church; and now a Russian force was
promptly sent to the Asiatic side of the Bosporus to 'protect' the
Sultan. Alarmed at the prospect of Russian domination of the
Ottoman Empire, Britain and France were at length impelled to
concerted action. Mohammed Ali was pressed to recall his army
from Anatolia; the Sultan ceded him Palestine, Syria, and Cilicia,
which were henceforth administered by Ibrahim Pasha; and the
Russian force was withdrawn from Turkey. The crisis of the First
Syrian War was over; but it had had the effect of stimulating in the
mind of Palmers ton, who was to dominate British foreign policy
for the next thirty years and whose constant concern was the
possibility of a Franco-Russian combination against Britain, a
lasting, deep, and possibly exaggerated mistrust of Mohammed Ali
as a pawn in the hands of these Powers.
1 Her bid to replace the Ottoman Empire as the dominant power in the Black
Sea had begun with Peter the Great's invasion of the Ukraine a hundred years
before, and had advanced her frontiers by 1815 to the Lower Danube. In 1813
she had forced Persia to acknowledge the cession to her of Transcaucasia in-
cluding the Baku region, the value of whose oil-deposits was not then under-
stood; and when Persia attempted to set aside this treaty by an ill-advised act of
aggression, Russia forced on her in 1828 the Treaty of Turkmanchai, which
made serious inroads on Persian sovereignty to the economic advantage of Russia."