As the Russians crossed the Pruth, the Turkish government ordered Omer Pasha, the commander of the Rumelian army, to strengthen the Turkish forts along the Danube and prepare for their defence. The Porte also called for reinforcements from the Ottoman dominions of Egypt and Tunis. By mid-August there were 20,000 Egyptian troops and 8,000 Tunisians encamped around Constantinople and ready to depart for the Danubian forts. A British embassy official described them in a letter to Lady Stratford de Redcliffe:
’Tis a pity you can’t see the Bosphorus about Therapia, swarming with ships of war, and the opposite heights crowned with the green tents of the Egyptian camp. Constantinople has itself gone back fifty years, and the strangest figures swarm in from the distant provinces to have a cut at the Muscov[ite]. Turbans, lances, maces, and battle-axes jostle each other in the narrow streets, and are bundled off immediately to the camp at Shumla for the sake of a quiet life.28
The Turkish army was made up of many nationalities. It included Arabs, Kurds, Tatars, Egyptians, Tunisians, Albanians, Greeks, Armenians and other peoples, many of them hostile to the Turkish government or unable to understand the commands of their Turkish or European officers (Omer Pasha’s staff contained many Poles and Italians). The most colourful of the Turkish forces were the Bashi Bazouks, irregulars from North Africa, Central Asia and Anatolia, who left their tribes in bands of twenty or thirty at a time, a motley bunch of cavalrymen of all ages and appearances, and made their way to the Turkish capital to join the jihad against the Russian infidels. In his memoirs of the Crimean War, the British naval officer Adolphus Slade, who helped to train the Turkish navy, described a parade of the Bashi Bazouks in Constantinople before they were sent off to the Danubian front. They were mostly dressed in old tribal gear, ‘sashed and turbaned, and picturesquely armed with pistols, yataghan [Turkish sword] and sabre. Some carried pennoned lances. Each squadron had its colours and its kettle-drums of the fashion of those, if not the same, carried by their ancestors who had marched to the siege of Vienna.’ They spoke so many different languages that, even within small units, translators and criers had to be employed to shout out the orders of the officers.29
Language was not the only problem of command. Many Muslim soldiers were unwilling to obey Christian officers, even Omer Pasha, a Croatian Serb and Orthodox by birth (his real name was Mihailo Latas) who had been educated in an Austrian military school before fleeing from corruption charges to the Ottoman province of Bosnia and converting to Islam. Jocular and talkative, Omer Pasha enjoyed the luxurious lifestyle that his command of the Rumelian army had afforded him. He dressed in a uniform decorated with gold braid and precious stones, kept a private harem, and employed an orchestra of Germans to accompany his troops (in the Crimea he had them play ‘Ah! Che la morte’ from Verdi’s recent opera Il Trovatore). Omer Pasha was not an outstanding commander. It was said that he had been promoted on the basis of his beautiful handwriting (he had been the writing-master of the young Abdülmecid and had been made a colonel when his pupil became Sultan in 1839). In this sense, despite his Christian birth, Omer Pasha was typical of the Ottoman officer class, which still depended on personal patronage for promotion rather than on military expertise. The military reforms of Mahmud’s reign and the Tanzimat had yet to create the foundations of a modern professional army, and the majority of Turkish officers were tactically weak on the battlefield. Many still adhered to the outmoded strategy of dispersing their troops to cover every bit of ground rather than deploying them in larger and more compact groups. The Ottoman army was good at ‘small-war’ ambushes and skirmishing, and excellent at siege warfare, but it had long lacked the discipline and training to master close-order formations using smooth-bore muskets, unlike the Russians.30
In terms of pay and conditions there was a huge gulf between the officers and the soldiers, a divide even wider than in the Russian army, with many senior commanders living like pashas and their troops left unpaid for several months, sometimes even years, during a war. The Russian diplomat and geographer Pyotr Chikhachev reported on the problem when he worked at the Russian embassy in Constantinople in 1849. In his calculation, the annual cost of the Turkish infantry soldier (salary, rations and clothing) was 18 silver roubles; the equivalent costs for the Russian soldier were 32 roubles; for the Austrian, 53 roubles; for the Prussian, 60 roubles; for the French, 85 roubles; and for the British foot soldier, 134 roubles. European soldiers were shocked by the conditions of the Turkish troops on the Danubian front. ‘Poorly fed and dressed in rags, they were the most wretched specimens of humanity,’ according to one British officer. The Egyptian reinforcements were described by a Russian officer as ‘old men and country boys without any training for battle’.31
The British were divided in their reaction to the Russian occupation of the principalities. The most pacific member of the cabinet was the Prime Minister Lord Aberdeen. He refused to see the occupation as an act of war – he even thought it had been partly justified to press the Porte to recognize the Russians’ legitimate demands in the Holy Lands – and looked for diplomatic ways to help the Tsar retreat without losing face. He certainly was not inclined to encourage Turkish resistance. His greatest fear was being drawn into a war against Russia by the Turks, whom he generally mistrusted. In February he had written to Lord Russell to warn against the sending of a British fleet to help the Turks:
These Barbarians hate us all, and would be delighted to take their chance of some advantage, by embroiling us with the other Powers of Christendom. It may be necessary to give them our moral support, and to endeavour to prolong their existence; but we ought to regard as the greatest misfortune any engagement which compelled us to take up arms for the Turks.
At the more belligerent end of the cabinet, Palmerston thought the occupation was a ‘hostile act’ that demanded immediate action by Britain ‘for the protection of Turkey’. He wanted British warships in the Bosporus to put pressure on the Russians to withdraw from the principalities. Palmerston was supported by the Russophobic British press, and by anti-Russian diplomats, such as Ponsonby and Stratford Canning, who saw the occupation of the principalities as an opportunity for Britain to make good on its failure to oppose the Russians on the Danube in 1848–9.32
London had a large community of Romanian exiles from the previous Russian occupation of the principalities who formed an influential pressure-group for British intervention that enjoyed the support of several members of the cabinet, including Palmerston and Gladstone, and many more MPs who lobbied Parliament with questions about the Danube. The Romanian leaders had close connections to the Italian exiles in London and were part of the Democratic Committee established by Mazzini which by this time had also been joined by Greek and Polish exiles in the British capital. The Romanians were careful to distance themselves from the revolutionary politics of these nationalists, and were well aware of the need to tailor their arguments to the liberal interests of the British middle classes. With the support of several national newspapers and periodicals, they succeeded in getting across to the British public the idea that the defence of the principalities against Russian aggression was vitally important for the broader interests of liberty and free trade on the Continent. In a series of almost daily articles in the Morning Advertiser, Urquhart joined their calls for intervention in the principalities, although he was more concerned about the defence of Turkish sovereignty and Britain’s free-trade interests than about the Romanian national cause. As the Russian invasion of the principalities progressed, Romanian propagandists grew bolder and made direct appeals to the public on speaking tours. In all their speeches the main theme was the European crusade for freedom against Russian tyranny – a rallying cry that was at times extremely fanciful in its vision of a Christian uprising for liberty in the Ottoman Empire. Constantine Rosetti, for example, told a crowd in Plymouth that ‘an army of 100,000 Romanians stood ready on the Danube to join the soldiers of democracy’.33
While the nature of the Russian occupation of the p
rincipalities remained unclear, the British government hestitated over where to send the Royal Navy. Palmerston and Russell wanted British warships in the Bosporus to prevent the Russian fleet attacking Constantinople; but Aberdeen preferred to hold the navy back in order not to threaten a negotiated peace. In the end a compromise was reached and the fleet was kept on a war footing at Besika Bay, just outside the Dardanelles, close enough, so the thinking went, to deter a Russian attack on the Turkish capital but not close enough to provoke a conflict between Britain and Russia. Then in July the Russian occupation of the principalities began to assume a more serious character. Reports reached the European capitals that the hospodars of Moldavia and Wallachia had been ordered by the Russians to break off relations with the Porte and to pay tribute to the Tsar instead. The news caused alarm because it suggested that Russia’s real intention was to take possession of the principalities on a permanent basis, despite the assurances of the Tsar’s manifesto to the contrary.34
The reaction of the European powers was immediate. The Austrians mobilized 25,000 troops on their southern frontiers, mainly as a warning to the Serbs and other Habsburg Slavs not to rise up in support of the Russian invasion. The French put their fleet on a war footing, and the British followed them. Stratford Canning, who had first heard the news of the order to the hospodars, and who was eager to make amends for the failure of the British to make a stand against the last Russian invasion in 1848–9, called for decisive military action to defend the principalities. He warned the Foreign Office that ‘the whole of European Turkey, from the frontier of Austria to that of Greece’, was about to fall to the Russians; that if they crossed the Danube there would be uprisings by Christians everywhere in the Balkans; that the Sultan and his Muslim subjects were prepared for war against Russia, provided they could rely on the support of Britain and France; and that while it would be a misfortune for Britain to be dragged into a war whose consequences were so unpredictable, it would be better to deal with the danger of Russia now than later on, when it would be too late.35
The threatening nature of the Russian occupation raised a bundle of security concerns for the European powers, none of which could afford to stand by while Russia dismantled the Ottoman Empire. Britain, France, Austria and Prussia (which basically followed Austria’s lead) now agreed to act together in a peace initiative. The diplomatic lead was taken by Austria, the key guarantor of the Vienna Settlement, of which it was the major beneficiary. The Austrians were heavily dependent on the Danube for their foreign trade and could not tolerate the Russian annexation of the principalities, yet could least afford a European war against Russia in which they were likely to bear the heaviest burden. What the Austrians proposed was probably impossible: a diplomatic solution that would allow the Tsar to drop his demands and withdraw from the principalities without losing face.
The peace process involved an elaborate exchange of diplomatic notes between the European capitals with endless variations on the precise wording of a formula to satisfy the interests of Russia and underline the independence of Turkey. The culmination of this activity was the Vienna Note drafted by the foreign ministers of the four powers at a conference in Vienna on behalf of the Turkish government on 28 July. Like all diplomatic documents designed to end hostilities, the wording of the Note was deliberately vague: the Porte agreed to uphold the treaty rights of Russia to protect the Orthodox subjects of the Sultan. The Tsar saw the Note as a diplomatic victory and agreed to sign it at once ‘without modifications’ on 5 August. The trouble started when the Turks (who had not even been consulted on the drafting of the Note) asked for details to be clarified. They were concerned that the Note had not set proper limits on the Russian right to intervene in Ottoman affairs – a concern that was soon proved to be justified when a private diplomatic document was leaked to a Berlin newspaper showing that the Russians had interpreted the Note to mean that they could intervene to protect the Orthodox anywhere throughout the Ottoman Empire and not just in areas where a specific conflict had occurred, as in the Holy Lands. The Sultan suggested a couple of minor verbal alterations to the Note – forms of words but important to a government that was being asked to sign the Note as a concession to Russia or face the loss of two of its richest provinces. He also wanted the Russians to evacuate the principalities before the re-establishment of diplomatic relations, and a guarantee from the four powers that Russia would not invade them again. These were reasonable demands for a sovereign power to insist upon, but the Tsar refused to accept the Turkish modifications, on the grounds that he had agreed to sign the Note unchanged, although his suspicion that Stratford Canning had encouraged the Turks to dig in their heels was also not irrelevant. In early September the Vienna Note was reluctantly abandoned by the four powers and, with Turkey on the brink of declaring war on Russia, negotiations had to start again.36
In fact, contrary to the Tsar’s suspicions, Stratford Canning had played a minor role in the Turkish decision to reject the Note. The British ambassador was well known for his fierce defence of Turkish sovereignty and his hatred of Russia, so it was not surprising that he was held responsible for the unexpected refusal of the Turks to go along with the diplomatic solution imposed on them by the Western powers to appease the Tsar. The idea that Stratford had pushed the Turks towards a war against Russia was later taken up by the Foreign Office, which took the view that the ambassador might have persuaded the Turks to accept the Note, if he had gone about it in the right manner, but that he had chosen not to because ‘he is himself no better than a Turk, and has lived there so long, and is animated with such personal hatred of the [Russian] Emperor, that he is full of the Turkish spirit; and this and his temper together have made him take a part directly contrary to the wishes and instructions of his government’.37 Looking back on the failure of peace on 1 October, Foreign Secretary Lord George Clarendon concluded that it would have been better to have had a more moderate man than Stratford as ambassador in the Turkish capital. The game of deceit the Russians played ‘called forth all his Russian antipathies and made him from the first look to war as the best thing for Turkey. In fact no settlement would have been satisfactory to him that did not humiliate Russia.’38 But this was unfair to Stratford, who took the blame for the failure of the government. The truth is that Stratford did his best to get the Porte to accept the Note, but his influence on the Turks was steadily declining in the summer months, as Constantinople was swept by demonstrations calling for a ‘holy war’ against Russia.
The invasion of the principalities stirred a powerful combination of Muslim feeling and Turkish nationalism in the Ottoman capital. The Porte had roused the Muslim population against the invasion, and now could not contain the ensuing religious emotions. The language of the metropolitan ulema was increasingly belligerent, raising fears among the devout that the invaders would destroy their mosques and build churches in their place. Meanwhile the Porte kept the public ignorant about the Vienna initiative, claiming that any peace would come ‘solely from the Tsar’s awe of the Sultan’ – an idea that encouraged nationalist feelings of Muslim superiority. Rumours circulated that the Sultan was paying the British and French navies to fight for Turkey; that Europe had been chosen by Allah to defend the Muslims; that the Tsar had sent his wife to Constantinople to beg for peace and had offered to repay Turkey for the invasion of the principalities by giving up the Crimea. Many of these rumours were engineered or promoted by the recently dimissed Grand Vizier Mehmet Ali to undermine Reshid. By the end of August, Mehmet Ali had emerged as the head of a ‘war party’, which had gained the ascendancy within the Grand Council. Backed by Muslim leaders, he enjoyed the support of a large group of younger Turkish officials, who were nationalist and religious, and opposed to Western intervention in Ottoman affairs, but calculated, nonetheless, that if they could involve the British and the French on their side in a war against Russia, this would be hugely to their advantage and might even reverse a hundred years of military defeats by the Russians. To secur
e the support of the Western fleets, they were prepared to promise sound administration to interfering Europeans like Stratford, but they rejected the Tanzimat reforms, because they saw the granting of more civil rights to Christians as a potential threat to Muslim rule.39
The war mood in the Turkish capital reached fever pitch during the second week of September, when there was a series of pro-war demonstrations and a mass petition with 60,000 signatures calling on the government to launch a ‘holy war’ against Russia. The theological schools (medrese) and mosques were the organizing centres of the protests, and their influence was clearly marked in the religious language of the posters that appeared throughout the capital:
O Glorious Padishah! All your subjects are ready to sacrifice their lives, property and children for the sake of your majesty. You too have now incurred the duty of unsheathing the sword of Muhammad that you girded in the mosque of Eyyub-i Ansari like your grandfathers and predecessors. The hesitations of your ministers on this question stem from their addiction to the disease of vanity and this situation has the possibility (God forbid) of leading us all into a great danger. Therefore your victorious soldiers and your praying servants want war for the defence of their clear rights, O My Padishah!
The Crimean War Page 16