Lords of the Horizons

by Jason Goodwin

  But as Count Helmuth von Moltke, who in 1835 was brought from Prussia to train the army, pointed out, it was one thing to demolish the old structure, quite another to build a replacement acceptable to all the groups who now leaned upon the Ottoman regime: the ulema, the European powers, the restless minorities, the Muslims, the traders, the agriculturalists, the nationalists and the imperialists. ‘It was indispensable for him … to clear the site before setting up his own building,’ von Moltke wrote. ‘The first part of his great task the Sultan carried through with perspicacity and resolution; in the second he failed.’ It was hardly to be wondered at. Everyone had their own plans for the site, and the ramshackle and extended edifice of power seemed in retrospect to have hung together well, and housed its inhabitants more snugly than anything which succeeded it.

  Von Moltke’s contemporary Augustus Slade* put the case against reform: ‘Hitherto the Osmanley paid nothing to the government beyond a moderate land-tax, although liable to extortions, which might be classed with assessed taxes. He paid no tithe, the vacouf [vakif] sufficing for the maintenance of the ministers of Islam. He travelled where he pleased without passports; no customs-house officer intruded… no police watched… His house was sacred. His sons were never taken from his side to be soldiers, unless war called them. His views of ambition were not restricted by the barriers of birth and wealth: from the lowest origin he might aspire without presumption to the rank of pasha; if he could read, to that of Grand Vizier; and this consciousness ennobled his mind, and enabled him to enter on the duties of high office without embarrassment. Is not this the advantage so prized by free nations?’

  Certainly the Sultan’s plans ran ahead of his subjects’ ability to fulfil them. In 1821, when all Greeks were under suspicion, the Dragoman of the Sublime Porte was executed and the authorities looked about for a Muslim to replace him, in an office which had been a Phanariot perk since the eighteenth century. The difficulty was finding any Muslim with knowledge of a foreign language. For weeks the correspondence piled up, before the post could be filled by a convert who founded a dragoman dynasty. Mahmut had to begin with schooling, which until now had been controlled by the ulema, and was narrowly religious; without openly challenging the medrese, he opened a range of primary and secondary schools with a secular curriculum, and a number of technical colleges to receive their alumni.

  Westernisation had to be imposed against all the instincts of his Muslim subjects. Two generations of reform, beginning with Mahmut’s uncle Selim, had produced a certain number of men with an understanding of western ways, or the enterprise would never have got anywhere at all; but von Moltke soon discovered how slender a resource they were. ‘A Turk will concede without hesitation that the Europeans are superior to his nation in science, skill, wealth, daring and strength, without its ever occurring to him that a Frank might therefore put himself on a par with a Muslim,’ he reckoned. ‘The Colonels gave us precedence, the officers were still tolerably polite, but the ordinary man would not present arms to us, and the women and children from time to time followed us with curses. The soldier obeyed but did not salute.’

  Mahmut II began to reorganise his government along bureaucratic lines, in an effort to replace personalities and old traditions with more anonymous offices and committees, whose voices were less powerful as a result. The Grand Mufti was pushed into an office and had all his fatwas drawn up by committee. The new schools were kept out of the hands of the ulema and entrusted to a Ministry of Education, while the legal system was placed under a new Ministry of Justice. Even the grand vizierate was abolished for a while, before its use as a pillory for unpopular measures was recognised once again.

  Mahmut died on 1 July 1839, in the midst of the so-called Eastern Crisis: Ibrahim Pasha had defeated an Ottoman army in Syria, and Mehmet Ali had announced his intention of ruling Egypt as an independent sovereign. Mahmut’s sixteen-year-old successor, Abdul Mecit, fathered the last four Ottoman sultans; he also forged the link between domestic policy and Great Power approval which was to dog their sultanates. In 1839, in return for the powers putting pressure on Mehmet Ali to accept a hereditary governorship of Egypt, he issued the Rescript of the Rose Chamber, a reformist charter which was proclaimed in the lower gardens of the Topkapi Saray to an audience of ministers and foreign ambassadors. It called for the abolition of tax farming, security of life, property and honour for all, universal conscription, fair public trials and equality for every subject before the law. It even dared to use the word ‘innovation’, which spelled heresy for the devout: had not the Prophet said: ‘Every novelty is an innovation, every innovation is an error, every error leads to Hellfire’?

  The foreigners swung into action: in 1840 the British chased Ibrahim Pasha from Syria and bombarded Alexandria. Mehmet Ali pulled his troops out of Crete and Arabia, accepted hereditary governorship, and died within months of his son Ibrahim in the winter of 1848-9.In 1850 his grandson Abbas Hilmi met the Sultan on Rhodes, and did homage to him. Four years later a crisis broke out in another region of the empire, when the Russians refused to evacuate the Danubian principalities which they had occupied in 1848. Mindful of Russian ambitions to control the Bosphorus and the Black Sea, the French and British joined the Ottomans in declaring war on Russia in 1854. The Crimean War was brought to an end by the treaty of Paris on 30 March 1856, making few changes to the borders and binding all the signatories ‘to respect the independence and the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire’, which was rather more generous on paper than the treatment meted out to another old-fashioned and limping empire, China, at the time. But China was not, as yet, the scene of superpower rivalries, nor entramelled like the Ottoman Empire by western economic demands, and up to her eyes in debt. The war, the costs of the Tanzimat, or restructuring, ushered in by the Rescript of the Rose Chamber, and Abdul Mecid’s fancy for glamorous palaces and parties forced the empire into a series of ruinous loan issues on the European markets.

  While Urquhart once met an old Albanian bey who seemed glad of a change, and was ‘tearing out his eyes learning French’, the reforms scandalised traditionally minded Muslims. The concentration of government power, along with the rising cost of living, when the westernised élite were expected to have dining chairs, and wear tailored clothes, and keep a carriage, made corruption almost irresistible. For pious Muslims the new dress code was not only an affront to taste. From 1829 only the ulema were permitted to wear robes and the turban – but the turban was a mark of a believer, and people passing in the street were no longer sure how to salute one another without risk of blasphemy. It looked, from the outside, more orderly; it spread confusion from within. Visitors continued to remark on the ineffable courtesy and apparently instinctive good manners they encountered – the practice of ‘a gentleman to comport himself towards another gentleman, as in Europe he would comport himself to a lady’ – but increasingly they found them only among the older Turks, less and less among the young, and hardly at all among the Greeks.

  The political reforms themselves were sometimes well-intentioned, sometimes mere sleight of hand. Outside Istanbul, they were often ignored, or misunderstood, or just inapplicable. The idea of equality before the law, regardless of faith, made no sense in traditional Muslim terms, and merely brought authority into disrepute. Henry Holland had been glad to receive Ali Pasha’s passport, with its terrible injunction, ‘Do this, or the Snake will eat you’, in 1814; he felt that, like Ali Pasha himself, it was irregular but practical, and it saw him through to Monastir; but when Edward Lear stuffed his pockets with all manner of official passports and letters patent for Albania in 1848 he soon discovered that almost anything would do, down to a ‘bill from Mrs Dunsford’s Hotel at Malta’. The more liberal institutions were constantly being short-circuited by the peremptory actions of the Sultan. Exile was the unfailing penalty for anyone who took to the letter of reform too enthusiastically, and failed to observe its peculiarly Ottoman spirit. A whole generation grew up, deliberately infused w
ith western attitudes, but constrained to sort them, all the time, into the acceptable and the dangerous, to recognise instinctively which order was really to be obeyed, and which was but a ‘watery command’. As Eliot put it, ‘no reform is clamoured for which does not already figure in the statute book’.

  As the empire opened itself up to reform it began erecting public clocks, in an effort to graft on what was punctilious and punctual about the successful West. These great towers stand as a symbol of Ottoman reform, lonely as lighthouses in every Ottoman city. Very often they were erected outside mosques, or across the square. They were ambiguous because they were built, for the most part, by the Armenian Balian family, royal architects, and their Armenian assistants; and something of the ambiguous relationship between the Armenians and the Ottomans may be seen in these edifices. For the Armenians then as now were a people without a country; the only Christians without a useful proximity to Christendom; scattered and industrious and frequently poor, debarred by their faith and customs from full Ottoman citizenship, but lacking champions abroad.

  Of the Balian clock towers there are some which resemble minarets, several like pagodas, with decorated eaves, and others like campaniles. Some were made of wood, and others, heavy and fat, of stone, plonked atop older monuments like the Koprulu’s Gate in Istanbul, or the fifteenth-century medrese at Merzifon. Often the clock itself resembles an afterthought, a round face in a square hole, or a sort of spiky mushroom which has grown up beneath a well-head, and driven the little canopy uncomfortably high. But whatever bits and pieces of the Ottoman heritage they appropriate, none of them really belong to it – least of all to the mosques which they so frequently shadow. They stand close, but still apart; rather in the attitude of a mute to the pasha he has come to bowstring.

  The harder the empire tried to secularise time – to bring it up to date, and make it open and available to all – the more absolutely ordinary it became. There was always, as Bagehot explained of the British Empire, an impressive as well as an effective dimension to rulership: and the faster the Ottomans built clocks for their people, the more disputatious and querulous those people grew, and the louder the bells tolled for the Ottoman state. ‘Oh, the Turkish time!’ wrote J. F. Fraser in 1906: for it sometimes seemed that the measurement of Ottoman time proved nothing but its laggardliness, that it only pointed to a world slipping inexorably behind. ‘The day begins with sunrise. That is 12 o’clock. But the sun does not rise at the same time every day. So the Turk – who happily has much spare time – is constantly twiddling the lever of his cheap Austrian watch to keep it right. Nobody is ever sure of the time. The very fact that the Turks are satisfied with a method of recording time which cannot be sure unless all watches are changed every day, shows how they have missed one of the essentials of what we call civilisation… ’

  And nothing more succinctly demonstrates the loss of cohesion, and the rise of the private man and the discrete institution, or better evokes the way in which an atmosphere of sauve qui peut, such as had only existed in an interregnum, became permanent, than the little Almanach a l’Usage du Levant which the British consul in Istanbul consulted on 9 December 1898. There he discovered that the Greeks were lagging a fortnight behind, and believed it to be 27 November. The Bulgars and Armenians agreed with the Greeks, but the Jews were well into their fifth millennium, the Muslims were living in the fourteenth century and the Ottoman government, too, although broadly quattrocento, followed a calendar which seemed two years out of date. It was the month of December; or November; or Kislev or Rejeb or Tehren-i-sani. It was the 9th of the month, or the 25th, the 26th, or the 27th. On a Friday all the Muslim business of the city shut down: the Sultan went to the mosque in a landau,* where prayers were said in his name. On Saturday the synagogues were full. On Sunday all the Balkan races in the city – the Serbs, Bulgars and Greeks – and all the Franks on Pera, and the Armenians, too, attended their churches. But on a Thursday the Ottoman government itself was closed for business, French style. An almanac would be useful, thought the consul, ‘to the Pasha and the Rabbi; to him who speaks Bulgarian and to him who speaks French; to him who thinks that the sun sets at 4.30, and to him who considers that mid-day is twenty-three minutes past seven’.

  Turkish almanac

  The nineteenth century was not kind to the Ottomans. Their cities were muffled in a sort of greyness, which went unrelieved by pageantry and showing off now that the guilds were breaking up. The palace itself was less showy and more secretive, and the army, in drill khaki and kepis, rather less eye-catching than before.

  Inevitably, people in the outer world began to appreciate what they were already beginning to lose. Men like Disraeli perceived a sort of political honesty in the empire, or at least a tolerant conservatism. French writers and poets were to remain fascinated by the Levant, perhaps treating it as a storehouse of emotions squeezed out from rational society, extremes of feeling and indolence; perhaps sensing, as artists might, their kinship with a world that maintained a rich inner life combined with material poverty and a total lack of influence on the world stage. But while a host of artists arrived to record, heighten, distort, interpret and refurbish the scenery, colour and costume of the East, more hard-boiled observers threw up their hands in despair.

  By then you could say – as many did – that the empire was a rather ugly place, a pastiche of western styles. Its architecture descended to the gimcrack. The Stambouline, the black frock coat adapted from European dress in the 1820s, was a hideous confection: its tails were economically but inelegantly short, and its high round collar and tight sleeves gave its wearer the look of a struggling insect. When Captain Nolan, of the Light Brigade, considered the effect of French training on the cavalry, he found only that the Turks had lost the benefit of their old ways without mastering the advantages of the new: ‘Buttoned up in close jackets and put into tight pantaloons the men, accustomed to sit cross-legged, and to keep their knees near the abdomen… are always rolling off, and get frequently ruptured.’

  The fez, made in Austria to a design imported from Tunisia, was neither fish nor fowl: yards of muslin might have made it the basis of a turban; with a brim you could have turned it into a sort of Spanish hat; as it was, it was a truncated hybrid of both. The view over Istanbul was not improved when in 1888 a French company blasted a railway line along the Marmara shore, demolishing the great sea walls and slicing into the wooded lower gardens of Topkapi Palace. ‘Alas,’ said an old servant, ‘in that grove of boxwood every Wednesday night the king of the jinns holds council. Where will he go now?’

  But Topkapi, in whose harem labyrinth he had hidden from the murderous janissaries, had come to symbolise all that was crazed and rotten in the state Mahmut II inherited. When, at last, true power was his, he determined to escape the warren which, like the janissaries, had begun by expressing the Sultan’s grandeur and had been smothering sultans notwithstanding for two hundred years. Angrily he compared Topkapi to the palaces of European monarchs. ‘None save a rogue or a fool could class that palace… hidden beneath high walls, and amid dark trees, as though it would not brave the light of day, with these light, laughing palaces, open to the free air, and pure sunshine of heaven,’ he growled. ‘Such would I have my own, and such it will be.’

  The sultans embarked on a frenzy of palace building: it was very expensive and it did not make them happy, for all of them dragged the terrible burden of their line from one palace to the next.* The Armenian Balian architects built every one, as they built the clock towers, too, and a mosque which was both Moorish and Turkish, part Gothic, part Renaissance and overall French Empire. Topkapi was finally abandoned for Dolmabache in 1853 – 800 feet long, with 285 rooms and the world’s heaviest chandelier. Ciragan Saray (now a five-star hotel) was topped out in 1874. Yildiz Saray was a complex of pavilions and living quarters that were raised intermittently throughout the mid-nineteenth century. Kucuksu Kasri went up in 1856-7, a little rococo holiday palace by the Sweet Waters of Asia. Beyl
erbeyi Saray was commissioned by the burly, fun-loving Abdul Aziz in 1865. Sunshine and laughter eluded even him: he was deposed in 1876 and apparently slit his wrists with a pair of scissors a few days later, in Cirigan Saray, where the unfortunate Murad V – who briefly succeeded him – lived out the remainder of his days in imperfect secrecy: his death was officially mourned in 1884, but really he survived until 1904. By the end of the century the Sultan, his brother, had moved definitively to Yildiz, where he reigned among night terrors and revolvers; took coffee in a mock-up of a real street cafe ‘whose other tables were staffed with his own bodyguard; and from which he only emerged when absolutely necessary, confining his Friday procession to a quick dash to a mosque especially built for him just beyond the palace gates.

  Palace of Dolmabache

  Spending became an international issue. After the first Ottoman loan was floated in London in 1854 it was no longer the Ottoman peasant to whom the sultans had to answer for their extravagance. There were no janissaries now to growl at the dissipation of the court. Only the exigencies of the foreign bond market could check the lavish spending; and in 1875 the empire was forced to declare bankruptcy. In return for restructuring the debt, foreign parties demanded extraordinary access to the levers of Ottoman power and finance; they insisted on reform; and they warned the Sultan to take steps to control the situation in Bulgaria, where rebellion had slipped across from Bosnia, and was being furiously repressed by bands of irregulars, the notorious bashi bazouks.

  In 1876 the theology students in the capital revolted, probably with the backing of a liberal ministerial party led by Midhat Pasha, darling of the reformers. Abdul Aziz was deposed by fatwa and promptly committed suicide* – a shock which the new Sultan, Murad V, well versed in European and Turkish affairs, with an interest in science and literature, took badly. Years of seclusion, and a partiality for wine, this mysterious death and the assassination of several ministers in cabinet by a Circassian infantry captain drove Murad over the edge. Within four months, in the midst of foreign war and domestic crisis, mad Murad had been returned to seclusion; and shortly before the noonday prayers on 7 September 1876 Abdulhamid II was girded with the sword of Osman.