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Egypt was evacuated on 2nd September 1801 and under the First Consul France hastened to restore diplomatic relations with the Porte. The hegemony of Selim III over Egypt was acknowledged under the condition that the English should not be allowed into the country (the Preliminary Peace of Paris, October 1801). In the following year these terms were confirmed in the Treaty of Amiens (27th March 1802), which was not signed by the Porte itself. Then Napoleon sent the young General Sebastiani to Constantinople under orders to negotiate a new, separate alliance. Sebastiani was so successful in fulfilling his mission that the Russians objected. They countered with the Serbian Declaration of Independence (1803), which they supported. War with Russia seemed inevitable.

The implications of the decline of Ottoman power, the vulnerability and attractiveness of the empire's vast holdings, the stirrings of nationalism among its subject people, and the periodic crises resulting from these and other factors became collectively known to European diplomats in the nineteenth century as "the Eastern Question." In 1853 Tsar Nicholas I of Russia described the Ottoman Empire as "the sick man of Europe." The problem from the viewpoint of European diplomacy was how to dispose of the empire in such a manner that no one power would gain an advantage at the expense of the others and upset the political balance of Europe.

European historians tend to present Ottoman decline solely from the perspective of the wars with Europe. While these wars were significant, Ottoman decline was more pronounced internally and economically in the eighteenth century. There are two overwhelming aspects of this decline: meteoric population increase and the refusal to modernize.

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