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Background
Mehemet Ali of Egypt, ostensibly only a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire, had taken his newly-reformed military into a war against the Ottoman Sultan, Mahmud II, in late 1831 seeking to increase his personal power and gain control over Palestine, Syria and Arabia. He had easily overriden Turkish forces and threatened Constantinople itself. While Britain and France were sympathetic to Mehemet Ali, Nicholas I sent a Russian army to the assistance of the Turks. This intervention brought about peace by May 1833, which left Mehemet Ali in control of Syria and Arabia.
The Treaty
On July 8 1833, the Russians and Ottoman Turks signed the Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi. This promised mutual assistance should either be attacked by a foreign power. A secret article exempted Turkey from sending military forces; instead, they were to close the Dardanelles to all non-Russian ships.
Britain and France were suspicous of the treaty, fearing that Turkey had given Russia freedom of action to send warships through the Dardanelles.
Straits Convention
When Mehemet Ali and Mahmud II went to war again in 1839, Russia agreed to a British proposal to contain the Egyptian leader and sign a more general agreement that closed both the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus to all foreign warships. Nicholas I had grown to fear that Unkiar Skelessi was too constraining an agreement and that it might turn the other great powers against him at a time when Europe was enjoying a period of relatively harmonious international relations.
This new understanding was formalised in the London Straits Convention of July 1841.
However, Anglo-Russian tension over the region remained. Turkey was the area where their two empires rubbed side by side.
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