The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean

by John Julius Norwich

  At last the Sultan, exasperated by the blatant support that was being given by the Greek government to the Cretan insurgents, presented it in 1868 with an ultimatum: within five days Greece must undertake to cease the equipment of ships designed for acts of aggression against Turkey. There were other points too, but they were academic; Greece angrily refused. Diplomatic relations were broken off, and a certain Hobart Pasha, a retired Royal Naval captain who had taken service with the Sultan and was now commanding the Turkish fleet, threatened the country with a blockade. War seemed imminent, but a conference of European ambassadors managed to persuade the Greeks to accept the Turkish terms and relations were resumed the following year. In return the Sultan granted Crete a constitution, which provided for a degree of self-government and–temporarily at least–soothed Cretan feelings.

  In the summer of 1876 the Balkan peninsula burst into flame.270 The conflagration began when the Serbian Orthodox populations of Bosnia and Herzegovina rose up against their Ottoman masters. Serbia and the neighbouring principality of Montenegro–also Orthodox and Serbian-speaking–rallied to their aid, and it was then unthinkable that the only other Slav people in the Balkan peninsula, the Bulgars, should remain unmoved. Insurrection in the Vilayet of the Danube–as Bulgaria was officially styled–broke out in May 1876. It was in itself relatively insignificant, but it was suppressed with almost unbelievable brutality. In the village of Barak, which after a brief resistance had already surrendered, most of the male population was butchered; women and children were herded into the village church and school, both of which were then set on fire. Barak alone lost some 5,000 of its 7,000 inhabitants; it was estimated that the total number of Christians massacred in that one month fell not far short of 12,000.

  The news was received with horror throughout the civilised world–particularly in Russia, where the Tsar instantly voiced his solidarity with his co-religionists. In London ‘the Bulgarian atrocities’ were the subject of a furious pamphlet by Mr Gladstone–at that time out of office–who also castigated the pro-Turkish policy of the Disraeli administration. The revulsion expressed on all sides had its impact even in Constantinople, where some 6,000 theological students staged a mass demonstration demanding the dismissal of the Grand Vizir and the Chief Mufti. Sultan Abdul-Aziz capitulated at once, but the demonstrators–and indeed the people as a whole–remained unsatisfied. From that moment, according to the British ambassador, ‘the word “constitution” was in every mouth’.

  Meanwhile, the Turkish army had soundly defeated the Serbs, and would have marched on Belgrade had not the Powers–now joined by Germany and Austria–put their foot down just in time and insisted on an armistice. The Tsar and the Austrian Emperor together, supported by Germany, drew up what was known as the Berlin Memorandum, designed to put pressure on the Porte to institute radical reforms, and now requested British cooperation. Disraeli turned the request down flat. Britain, he pointed out, had not been consulted in advance, and refused to join the three powers ‘in putting a knife to the throat of Turkey’. Further, to bolster Turkish morale, he ordered a squadron of the Mediterranean fleet to take up its station at the mouth of the Dardanelles. Determined to avert the war on which Russia had clearly set its heart, he then called for a six-power conference, to be held at Constantinople the following December.

  The situation in the city was not improved by the fact that the mental health of the Sultan was already giving rise to serious concern. Abdul-Aziz had succeeded his half-brother Abdul-Mejid in 1861. Few Sultans in modern times had been more terrifying. Nearly seven feet in height–his eight-foot bed may still be seen in the Dolmabahçe Palace–with a thick black beard and a ferocious temper, he seemed to many of his courtiers a throwback to the worst days of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1867, when he was thirty-seven, he had been invited by Napoleon III to France for the Great Universal Exhibition and had visited Vienna and London on the way. He had thus been the first Sultan in Ottoman history to set foot peaceably in Christian Europe, and the experience had gone badly to his head, instilling in him a determination to acquire a fleet of modern warships (despite an embarrassingly public attack of seasickness while reviewing the Home Fleet with Queen Victoria at Spithead) and a passion for railways, which he managed to bring to Constantinople only six years later. But with every year that passed his paroxysms of rage became more furious and ungovernable, and by 1876 his extravagance had brought the state to the brink of bankruptcy.

  Thus it was that not long after the theologians had dispersed, in the early hours of 30 May of that terrible year, the Commander-in-Chief of the army, Hüseyin Avni, surrounded the Dolmabahçe with two battalions of infantry while a naval squadron drew up immediately opposite on the Bosphorus. On entering the palace he instantly found himself confronted by the Sultan, standing on the staircase in his nightshirt with drawn sword; when the act of deposition was presented, however, Abdul-Aziz offered no resistance and obediently boarded the state barge which was waiting to take him to the old palace of Topkapi. There he was lodged for the night–somewhat insensitively, it might be thought, in the room in which his predecessor Selim III had been murdered in 1808–before being rowed back the following day a little further up the Bosphorus to the irag'an Palace (next to which there today rises one of modern Istanbul’s most glamorous hotels). Just four days later he was found dead in his new apartment, having slashed his wrists with scissors. There were the usual rumours of something a good deal more sinister than suicide, but the testimony of eighteen doctors to the contrary seems finally to have been accepted.

  All this should have been excitement enough; but the drama was only beginning. A week later, Abdul-Aziz’s favourite young Circassian wife died in childbirth, a tragedy which so affected her brother–who was serving as an equerry in the Sultan’s household–that on 14 June he burst into a meeting of the Council of Ministers, shooting dead both the Commander-in-Chief and the Foreign Minister. This latest development had a profound effect on the new Sultan, Murad V. Already, on hearing of his uncle’s death, he had fainted dead away and vomited for thirty-six hours; the news of the two later assassinations sent him into a deep depression, which his chronic alcoholism did little to relieve. On the last day of August he went the same way as Abdul-Aziz. This time, however, there were no scissors; Murad was to remain a prisoner in the C¸irag'an for the next twenty-eight years.

  Of the new Sultan, Abdul-Hamid II, it can safely be said that he was an improvement on his two predecessors; he was not, however, a great improvement. Having lost his Circassian mother at the age of seven, he was virtually ignored by his father, Abdul-Mejid, and had retreated back into himself, totally without friends or even companionship. Cruel, scheming and vindictive as a man, weak and vacillating as a ruler, with a morbid fear of assassination which dominated his life and kept his public appearances to the minimum, he hated Abdul-Mejid’s Dolmabahçe with its exposed position on the shore of the Bosphorus, creating for himself a whole new seraglio–a centre of government and power–behind the high and impenetrable walls of his park at Yildiz, high in the hills above. From here this hunched and stooping figure, hook-nosed, black-bearded and sallow-skinned, always apparently cowering from some imagined attacker, spun his webs of intrigue, secretly received his regiments of spies and informers and directed, after a fashion, his crumbling empire.

  Abdul-Hamid was not, one would have thought, the type of ruler to present his people with a constitution; he was, however, astute enough to realise that if he did not go at least some way towards assuaging popular discontent he might well become the third Sultan to lose his throne within that fateful year. He was also anxious to reassure the European delegates to the coming conference: after all, if it could now be seen that Turkey had a complete plan of her own for constitutional reform, what part was there for the Powers to play? It was certainly no coincidence that the decree promulgating the new constitution was published on the very morning the conference opened. But the delegates, it need hardly be said
, remained unconvinced. Even the leader of the British party, the Marquess of Salisbury, who as Secretary of State for India in Disraeli’s administration might have been expected to share his chief’s sympathies, made no attempt to conceal his disgust. Unlike most of his fellows he was granted an audience with Abdul-Hamid, but described him afterwards as ‘a wretched, feeble creature, who told me he dared not grant what we demanded because he was in danger of his life’.271

  Thus, thanks in part to the constitution–which, as soon became apparent, was not worth the paper it was printed on and was anyway soon suspended–and in part to the fact that the Sultan had no intention of granting autonomy to Bulgaria, Bosnia and Herzegovina simply because the Powers demanded it, the Constantinople conference was an utter failure. War was now inevitable.

  The first nation to act was Russia, whose armies simultaneously crossed the European and the Asiatic frontiers of Turkey on 24 April 1877. A month later Romania declared her independence and joined the combatants, and before long the Turks were retreating on all fronts. At last, on 31 January 1878, the Sultan agreed to an armistice. It was virtually an act of surrender; even so, it did little to assuage the state of panic prevailing on the Bosphorus. There seemed a real possibility that, after more than four centuries, the Crescent might once again give way to the Cross.

  But such a prospect held little appeal for Austria, which was now casting a covetous eye on Bosnia and Herzegovina, nor indeed for Britain, where Disraeli had always been a friend of Turkey and where the people, still remembering the Crimean War, lustily bellowed the contemporary music-hall song:

  We don’t want to fight, but by jingo if we do,

  We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too;

  We’ve fought the Bear before, and while Britons shall be true,

  The Russians shall not have Constantinople!

  To emphasise the point still further, in mid-February Britain ordered a squadron from her Mediterranean fleet to sail up through the narrows into the Sea of Marmara, returning fire if necessary, and to take up a station opposite the city. If, as seems likely, this was intended to have a calming effect, it was unsuccessful. The Sultan was more terrified than ever, while the Russians chose to regard it as a hostile act and themselves advanced to the Marmara, halting only at San Stefano (now Yeilköy, site of the international airport). With Britain and Russia now drifting ever nearer to war, the Grand Duke Nicholas–commanding the Russian forces–agreed to advance no further, Admiral Sir Phipps Hornby consenting on his side to withdraw his ships to the Princes’ Islands, about eight miles south of the Golden Horn.272

  Where the Greeks were concerned, recent events suggested that the Great Idea was perhaps no longer the pipe dream that it once had been; the vision of the Greek flag flying over St Sophia was not one that any true Greek could resist. There was the additional hope that open hostilities might encourage the Greek populations within the Ottoman Empire to rise in revolt, and insurrections did indeed break out in Thessaly and Epirus, and once again–inevitably–in Crete. Thus it was that Greece entered the field. Alas, her timing could hardly have been worse: she declared war on 2 February 1878, having no knowledge of the armistice concluded just forty-eight hours before. The Greek army, which had actually crossed the Turkish border, was–not without some embarrassment–hastily recalled. Peace was soon restored in Epirus and eventually in Thessaly also; in Crete, however, desultory fighting continued.

  The armistice led directly to the Treaty of San Stefano, signed by the Russian and Turkish delegates on 3 March. It was an extraordinary agreement, satisfying as it did no one except Bulgaria, to which it would virtually have restored her once-great medieval empire, and putting an end to all Greek aspirations in Macedonia. Its other provisions do not concern us; suffice it to say that it could never possibly have worked. The Great Powers–now including also the Ottoman Empire–therefore met together just three months later at Berlin, where their deliberations initially proved a good deal more favourable to Greece; but the Ottoman government reneged on its promises, endlessly prevaricating and procrastinating, and it was three more years before the Greeks received even part of what they had been awarded. They eventually had to be content with Thessaly–admittedly a very valuable province, which had been Turkish for five centuries–and part of Epirus, including Arta.

  Crete still remained in Turkish hands. In that same year of 1878, however, the Sultan granted it what was in effect a supplementary constitution. This established a General Assembly of forty-nine Christians and thirty-one Muslims, and decreed inter alia that Greek should be the language of both the Assembly and the law courts, and that half the annual revenues should go to the building of schools, hospitals, harbours and roads, on which virtually nothing had been spent since the days of the Venetians. This dispensation kept the island relatively quiet for a decade; it was not until 1889 that a new insurrection broke out, to be followed in 1896–97 by two more. These last were considerably more serious, the second of them resulting in a massacre of Christians in the streets of Canea and the burning of the Christian quarter of the town.

  After these atrocities Greece could no longer remain inactive. Prince George, the King’s second son, left Salamis with a flotilla of torpedo boats to prevent the landing of reinforcements by the Turks; on 15 February 1897, 1,500 armed Greek volunteers landed near Canea–with memories of Garibaldi’s Redshirts in Sicily to spur them on–to take over the island in the name of the King. Perhaps, even at this point, firm and concerted action by the European powers might have prevented open hostilities, which neither the King nor the Sultan wanted, but such action was not forthcoming and on 17 April Turkey declared war.

  The King himself had assured foreign visitors that in the event of war the Greek communities throughout the Sultan’s empire would rise up against their oppressors, and that most other Christian minorities would follow the Greek lead. Alas, nothing of the kind occurred; the Thirty Days’ War, as it came to be called, gave rise to an almost unbroken series of disasters for Greece. According to the Cambridge Modern History, ‘the Greek navy, which was superior to that of the Turks…effected nothing except the futile bombardment of Preveza, the capture of a cargo of vegetables at Santi Quaranta, and that of a Turcophil British Member of Parliament.’ On land, the Greek performance was very little better. It was lucky for Greece that the Powers intervened when they did and forced the belligerents to agree to an armistice. All Greek combatants were withdrawn from Crete, which was to be policed by an international force. Greece–already nearly bankrupt–had to pay a heavy indemnity to the Sultan; on the other hand, Abdul-Hamid was finally obliged to fulfil his twenty-year-old promise by the formal cession of Thessaly.

  Only then did the Powers make a serious effort to solve the Cretan problem once and for all. The Sultan was persuaded to go one step further, giving the island autonomous status under Ottoman suzerainty. In November 1898 the last Turkish troops withdrew from Crete; and from the end of the year a High Commissioner in the person of Prince George, second son of the Greek King, governed from Canea, while British, French, Italian and Russian troops occupied the chief towns. Crete was given her own flag, coinage and postage stamps.

  Abdul-Hamid’s grip had once again been loosened. Even then, however, he could not bring himself finally to let go. It was to be another fifteen years before the Cretans received their reward.

  The Congress of Berlin did, however, affect the fate of one other major Mediterranean island. Cyprus had been under Ottoman rule since the Turks captured it from the Venetians in 1570. At first, among the vast majority of the people, the change of government was welcomed. The Turks had permitted the re-establishment of the Greek Orthodox Church, the hierarchy of which soon assumed the role of ambassador for its flock, engaging itself regularly as spokesman and mediator with the Turkish administration. The feudal system had been abolished; the serfs had been freed; once again Cypriots could own land–even though by doing so they became taxpayers. They wer
e less happy, however, to see some 3,000 Turkish soldiers given land and settling permanently on the island–a development that was to have dire consequences in our own day. Strangers as the two communities were through both their language and their religion, there was little or no intermarriage. From the start, therefore, the Cypriots were sharply divided; divided they still remain.

  With the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence, the Turkish governor of the island had become seriously alarmed. Summoning the Archbishop, Kyprianos, and other leading churchmen–they included the Bishops of Paphos, Kitium and Kyrenia and the Abbot of Kykko monastery–to Nicosia, he had had them murdered in cold blood.273 Other influential clerics were given asylum by the foreign consuls at Larnaca, but the power of the Cypriot hierarchy was, from one day to the next, dramatically eclipsed.

  By the middle of the century conditions on the island had begun once again to improve. Sultan Abdul-Mejid undertook to accord equality of treatment to all his subjects regardless of race or creed, and abolished the iniquitous practice of tax-farming.274 He also ordered that the governorship should in future be by appointment, rather than sold to the highest bidder as it had been in the past. Then in 1869 came the exciting news of the Suez Canal, from which Cyprus stood to gain immeasurably in commercial importance. One of the first statesmen to realise this was Benjamin Disraeli, who managed to conclude with Turkey what was known as the Cyprus Convention. By its terms, Britain undertook to join the Sultan in the defence of his Asiatic dominions against any further Russian attack. The better to enable her to do this, the Sultan assigned to her Cyprus as what was called ‘a place of arms’ in the Levant, on payment of an annual tribute.