also was 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. 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”. He died shortly thereafter. His successor and brother, Abdulhamid I, initiated a second war in an attempt to reclaim what had been lost in Crimea, but it was a disaster. A decisive battle in 1789 became a show of Ottoman military weakness since 120,000 Janissaries were defeated by 8,000 Russian troops on the shores of the Danube. New Order reformers argued that the Janissary corps had grown from a hardened fighting force into an entrenched interest group with little interest in training and fighting. In 1789, Selim III inherited the throne from his uncle Abdulhamid at the age of 28. 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. Selim headed a coalition of reformers and quickly convened a consultative assembly to advance tajdid, or renewal. While Selim III often receives credit for the military reforms, he was hardly the sole instigator. Ideas for reform, especially of the military, had preoccupied the Ottoman political class for nearly a century before Selim III took the throne. The first Western-style military training in the Ottoman world was done without the Sultan's knowledge. 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 (Shaw 294). Reforms The primary focus on the New Order reforms for which all others were named was military reform. Selim III, having seen his armies easily routed by European forces, brought foreign lecturers to serve as military advisers and organized two colleges for Naval and Army Engineering, respectively, along European lines, with French as the language of instruction. Selim also embarked on an institutional reorganization of the Armed Forces bringing Artillery and Transportation into the same department. The investment quickly paid results, and several hundred New Order forces widely outperformed