The Rhine Crisis, which brought Europe to the brink of war between France and the German Confederation in 1840, arose from French demands for revisions to the treaties agreed at the Congress of Vienna in 1814/15 in general (Vienna, Congress of), and specifically for the return to French rule of the territories on the left bank of the Rhine. The real origins of the crisis, however, lay not in Europe, but in the Ottoman Empire. Sultan Maḥmūd II’s appointee as Viceroy of Egypt, Muḥammad ‘Alī (Mehmet Ali Paşa), spent the 1830s striving against the wishes of his overlor…