Obverse, Sultan Abdul Mejid's royal cipher with inscription around on a gold-bordered circle of red enamel; the whole on a star of seven triple quills with small crescents and five-pointed stars between them, suspended from a red enamelled crescent and star suspender with green enamelled edges |
Reverse, inscription and marginal engraving on a convex silver disc secured to the back of the star with pins |
The Order of the Medjidie was founded by Sultan Abdul Mejid of the Ottoman Empire in 1852, as a reward for distinguished services. When the Crimean War began in 1854, therefore, and British and French officers came to the aid of the Empire against Russia, a number of British soldiers, mostly officers but also a few private soldiers whose deeds had particularly distinguished them, were admitted to the order over the course of hostilities and their immediate aftermath.
This Badge was awarded to Colonel Lawrence Fyler of the 12th Lancers, whose service in the Crimea earned him two other medals and whose medal group has come entire into the Watson Collection and shows a career spent in India and the East fighting for the Crown from the 1830s to the 1850s.
Fyler's medals are not, for the most part, physically attached to each other, although the catalogue of the Watson Collection considers them as Group 8, so the opportunity has been taken to treat them separately here. Nonetheless, it was as a group that Lester Watson bought them, from the London dealers Seaby, in 1929.