In 1896, Nusret Pasha, the former Inspector of the 6th Army, passed away in Baghdad. It is unlikely he was mourned by the governor of the province or the local notables, with whom he had been feuding nearly since his arrival there in 1888. Described by a contemporary as ‘pernicious and insane’, Nusret Pasha seems to have spent his final years in Iraq acquiring land through ‘legal and illegal means’, seeking the removal of the province’s governor, and generally making enemies. Born in 1824 as one of the last mamluks of Sultan Mahmud II (r. 1808–39), ‘Deli’ (Mad) Nusret Pasha was Circassian by birth. He was educated in the Palace School and the Officer’s College (Mekteb-i Harbiye). He completed his education with a five-year stint in Paris and returned to the Ottoman Empire by the beginning of the Crimean War, during which he rose in rank, becoming a colonel (miralay) and an inspector in Nis¸, a town within the autonomous Principality of Serbia. Later in his career, he served as governor in Salonica, Ankara, Trabzon and Adana and as aide-de-camp to Sultan Abdülhamid II.

‘Educated, loyal, direct, and shrewd’, Nusret Pasha was a polymath who seemed to excel equally in cartography, translation and burning bridges. Though he charmed British Ambassador Henry Layard and remained a confidant of Abdülhamid II, Nusret quarrelled with Midhat Pasha, the well-known Tanzimat reformer and ‘founding father’ of the 1876 Constitution.