J.Z. Bem, also called Murad Pasha (Tarnów, now in Poland, 1794 – Aleppo, Syria, 1850) was an army officer who had fought for the Hungarian revolution against the Habsburg troops in 1848–49. After its collapse, he fled to Turkey, adopted Islam, and eventually became the Ottoman governor of Aleppo, where in 1850 he saved the Christian population from being massacred.

The Romanian writer and political leader Ion Ghica (1817–97) studied in Paris, becoming a vocal supporter of the Romanian national movement against Ottoman overlordship. A member of the revolutionary committee formed in 1848 in Wallachia, he was appointed official representative to the Ottomans; later the sultan appointed him governor of Samos (1854–58). After the union of Wallachia and Moldavia in 1859 he returned to high office in Romania, also serving as prime minister.

Mihajlo Latas, born in Croatia, served in the Austrian army until a charge of embezzlement forced him to flee to Ottoman Bosnia. He converted to Islam, joined the Ottoman army and had a long and brilliant career. Governor of Lebanon (1842) and of Bucharest (1850), a successful commander in the Crimean War, he later served as Ottoman governor of Baghdad (1857) and Herzegovina (1861) before becoming minister of war in 1868.

The Bashi Bazouk were mercenaries of great ethnic diversity who fought for the Ottomans in hope of plunder, as they were not paid. They did not wear regular army uniform. After the Russo–Turkish War of 1877–78, the Ottoman government decided to abandon their use.

Edmund, Count Szechenyi – born in Bratislava and educated in London – was a specialist in fire fighting. In 1875, the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph I dispatched him to Istanbul to help set up a fire brigade in the Ottoman capital. He remained in Istanbul until his death in 1922.