Meanwhile the Great Powers convened a meeting in Constantinople, to hammer out an agreement on the integrity of the Ottoman Empire, and to urge as a corollary Bulgarian reforms. Abdulhamid appointed Midhat Pasha as Grand Vizier and on 19 December, to the boom of cannon, he proclaimed a constitution along Belgian lines, which undercut the conference entirely: it broke up a few weeks later. Midhat Pasha did not outlast it: when the foreigners had quit the city Abdulhamid ordered him from the country. The vaunted constitution produced an assembly – seventy-one Muslim deputies, forty-four Christians and four Jews – which met for the first time in March 1877 and was soon plunged into the crisis of a Russian war. On 20 January 1878 the Russians, having broken through the Shipka Pass, took Edirne. Facing muted criticism in parliament, Abdulhamid dissolved the assembly.
With that, the so-called Young Ottoman movement – inspired by a desire for a return to simple Islamic pieties, while recognising no contradiction between liberal democracy and the founding tenets of the faith – lost credibility, and largely withered away. The Sultan was forced to sign an armistice at San Stefano so disastrous for the Ottoman Empire, and so favourable to the victorious Russians, that Britain insisted on its revision a few months later at Berlin; but to even moderately pious Muslims, it looked as if Islam had been decisively rejected by the West. The Sultan was not invited to attend, and Bismarck, Disraeli and the Russian minister thrashed out a settlement. Part of Bulgaria, all of Romania, Serbia and Monenegro, became independent. Russia took control of north-eastern Anatolia, and received a massive war indemnity, the modern equivalent of plunder. At a stroke, the Ottoman Empire lost nearly half its territory, and a fifth of its population.
Abdulhamid himself survived this reverse: survival was his consuming passion. His opponents were driven into exile, bought, or locked up, while he took modernisation into his own hands. He recognised the benefits of science and education, just as long as neither became a tool against himself, and used the new telegraph, as Eliot observed, to full advantage: ‘It is no longer necessary to leave a province to the discretion of a governor, and trust that he will come home to be beheaded when that operation seems desirable. With the telegraph one can order him about, find out what he is doing, reprimand him, recall him, instruct his subordinates to report against him, and generally deprive him of all real power.’ It was hardly surprising that many country mullahs viewed the telegraph with deep suspicion, and argued fiercely against having the voice of Satan pass anywhere near their mosques. Sadly for Abdulhamid, the telegraph provided the revolutionaries with the means of delivering him an ultimatum in 1906; and the telegraph operators themselves – with eyeshades, Morse, perfect French and an unusually deep knowledge of the empire’s affairs – were thoroughly disloyal.
Abdulhamid imposed a sultanic despotism on the people, linking the claustrophobia of the ancien regime with all the modern apparatus of security. The Swiss Family Robinson was banned because the Robinsons’ dog was called Turk. An Ottoman dictionary of 1905 defined the word ‘tyrant’ as an American bird. Newspapers were forbidden to mention assassination: Empress Elizabeth of Austria died of pneumonia, President Carnot of France of apoplexy, US President McKinley of anthrax, and the King and Queen of Serbia simultaneously of indigestion in 1903. While Abdulhamid’s mad brother, his predecessor Murad V, remained under lock and key in Ciragan Saray, the Sultan announced that he had died, and his name was never mentioned in the press – Murads I and II could not be referred to directly. Abdulhamid did away with all sorts of pomp: he would settle visitors down on the sofa beside him and light their cigarettes.He was the first sultan to receive a Christian woman at his dining table. He spoke good French, although he craftily conversed with foreigners through a dragoman. So monstrous was his morbidity that he refused to hear Sarah Bernhardt when she came to Pera, because she mimicked death so well; and electric light was forbidden in the empire, everyone said, because he had mistaken the word ‘dynamo’ for ‘dynamite’.
But it needed more than electric light to dispel the gloom. In 1898 the Turkish poet Tevfik Fikret portrayed the decay of Constantinople in his ode ‘Mist’:
Once more a stubborn mist has swathed your horizons…
Veil yourself and sleep forever, whore of the world!
To foreigners especially the empire seemed an enjoyably creepy sort of place. Queer tales abounded of abductions, of white slavery, pale hands glimpsed through the grilles which covered upstairs windows, persistent whispers of strange sights to be avoided on the Bosphorus on moonless nights. A whole class of literature sprang up in Europe to deal with the Unspeakable Turk: everyone wanted to hear about harem maidens, ravishings, eunuchs, and slaves with their tongues slit guarding abominable secrets. In that year of European revolution, 1848, a German traveller ferried across the Danube found Belgrade filled with exiles and runaways, its darkest alleys hideaways, its gestures conspiratorial and subdued. In Khimara Lear caught the tone perfectly, being introduced to a crowd of people crammed together in a big low-lit room. As they came forward to shake his hand, three or four ‘gave me so peculiar a twist or crack of my fingers, that I was struck by its singularity. … I shortly became aware that I was among people who, from some cause or other, had fled from justice in other lands.
‘Of these was one who, with his face entirely muffled excepting one eye, kept aloof in the darker part of the chamber, until having thoroughly scrutinised me, he came forward, and dropping his capote, discovered to my horror and amazement, features which, though disguised by an enormous growth of hair, I could not fail to recognise. “The world is my city now,” said he; “I am become a savage like those with whom I dwell. What is life to me?” And covering his face again, he wept with a heart-breaking bitterness only life-exiles can know.’
Certainly savagery marked the Ottoman Empire’s dying decades; the last half of the nineteenth century saw the empire, as it fell, reacting badly to an era of Christian triumphalism. This may explain the relatively low rate of emigration to the United States, and the generally high return rate.* As the borders were driven back, some seven million Muslims moved with them into the rump: Crimean Tartars down the western coast of the Black Sea, Circassians along the east and south; Balkan villagers and townsmen. Fears and jealousies quickened. No longer the complacent rulers of a docile flock, the Ottomans were baffled and afraid when the people rose in nationalist revolt. Massacre became the stock response to threat; the authorities made little effort to check the atrocities; and the frenzied blood-lust of the Turks in retreat is still a delicate subject. Excesses were committed by all sides; the arrival of Protestant missionaries, singing ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’, among the once-quiet Armenians alarmed the Ottomans into thinking that the process which had turned their Bulgarian, Greek or Serbian reaya against them was about to be repeated. The bitterness and betrayal spiralled into pogrom, and every rumour was magnified, every incident was taken for the whole truth; terrified peasants in arms became the butchers of thousands.
The Sultan was not above using circumstances to his own advantage. When it became clear that the western powers had no intention of letting the empire ‘imprison’ its minorities any longer – its western minorities, at least – he launched out on a new tack, by which he became Caliph of the Muslim world – vaunting a pan-Islam to match the pan-Slavic rhetoric of Russia. It was in this guise – a clever one, disquieting to the British in India, the French in North Africa, and the Russians on the Black Sea; disquieting to his own domestic opposition, secular, westernised and progressive – that he became very friendly with the German Kaiser, an emperor without an empire. Much Ottoman state business fell into German hands, most of the Ottoman army was placed under German officers, and railways were built with German capital (except the branch line to Mecca, which was financed by subscription, and at that time was the only railway in the world built by Muslims, with Muslim cash).
The army eventually put an end to the pretensions of the Sultan Caliph. The army, of course, containe
d a very high proportion of ‘advanced’ types: scientists, linguists, mechanics, themselves related to businessmen and administrators in civilian life. It seemed to know, far better than the Ottoman government any longer knew, what values it stood for, and where to stand for them, too: it was predominantly Turkish, and largely modern in outlook.
In 1906 a group of Macedonian army officers mutinied in Salonica – a city which was to be lost to the empire within seven years. They called themselves the Committee of Union and Progress, and the first victories of the CUP were greeted with wild enthusiasm. In the capital Armenians, Turks, Greeks and Jews went about hugging one another, each filled with hope and fellow-feeling. The poet rushed out a sequel to ‘Mist’: ‘A bursting brightness like the dawning sun’, he wrote. In the autumn of 1908 elections were held again, in which the CUP won all but one of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies.
Some of the old grace died hard, even in an age of juntas and telephones. ‘One district in Stamboul’, H. G. Dwight recalled later, ‘brought its voting urn to the Sublime Porte on the back of a camel. Five great fishing caiques, with their splendid in-curving beaks, their high poops gay with flags and trailing rugs, their fourteen to twenty costumed rowers… made a water pageant that reminded one of state days in Venice…. Near the head of the procession, led by an Arab on a camel, rode a detachment of men representing the different races of the empire, each in the costume of his “country”. And later came a long line of carriages in which imams and Armenian priests, imams and Greek priests, imams and Catholic priests, imams and Jewish rabbis, drove two and two in the robes of their various cults.’
Muslim Turks, however, formed a scant majority in the Chamber: they had 147 seats, the Arabs 60, the Albanians 27, the Greeks 26, the Armenians 14, the Slavs 10 and the Jews 4. Within six months an Islamic backlash – with shadowy support from the throne – inspired a coup. It was suppressed when the CUP abandoned its civilian dress and marched the Third Army into Constantinople. On 27 April 1909 a hastily convened assembly voted to depose Abdulhamid. The Grand Mufti provided the necessary fatwa, and while Abdulhamid was dispatched to Salonica by rail his brother Mehmet Resat, who was enormously fat, struggled with some difficulty into the belt holding Osman’s sword.
The presence of the army at the heart of Ottoman political life did not, however, prevent military disaster in the field. Italy launched an attack on Libya in 1911. A Balkan coalition of Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegro launched an attack on the empire by invading Albania on 8 October 1912; six months later the Bulgarians were forty miles from Istanbul. Arguments over the division of the victors’ spoils, though, prompted Bulgaria to launch a surprise attack on her erstwhile allies on 29 June 1913. The Second Balkan War was over in a month; Bulgaria was defeated, and Enver Pasha – military darling of the CUP – led an army to recapture Edirne.
The kind of government the CUP committee fostered was modern, populist, Turkish and authoritarian all at once. Women, for instance, were admitted to university, and Turkish was made the obligatory medium of every school. Opponents – traditional Muslims, linguistic minorities, sultanic reactionaries – were consequently imagined around every corner. More and more the CUP found it impossible to direct affairs through a succession of weak mouthpieces, and were dragged out into the open where the only solution they could offer to the doubt and confusion was an increasing intimidation, and the cloak of war.
Fairly inevitably, they brought Turkey in on the wrong, the losing, side: the entire army was, after all, the beneficiary of Abdulhamid’s pro-German policy, and Enver Pasha, one of the CUP triumvirate, had been trained in Berlin. The Austrian annexation of Bosnia Herzegovina in 1908 had pushed Russia, the Ottomans’ most rapacious foe, into the Triple Entente with France and Britain. The Ottoman army was trained and re-equipped under Prussian auspices. The navy, which was very much less significant, had been run with British help; but the British were lukewarm supporters of Ottoman power, and at the outbreak of war they commandeered two ships on slipways on the Clyde, for which Turkish crews had already been sent out, and the money paid. A secret alliance between Germany and the empire was signed on 2 August 1914, and did not remain secret for very long. The war saw Ottoman troops engaged against the Russians in the Caucasus and eastern Anatolia, against the British on the Persian Gulf, in Syria and Palestine, against the Greeks in Thrace. It brought Gallipoli, that stubborn defence of Turkish soil against the Allies in which 100,000 died and which created, curiously, two resonant justificatory myths of nationhood; for Australians tend to date the crystallisation of a national consciousness from the death trap into which the British imbroglio led them, while the Turks fought for their homeland, and were ably led by Mustafa Kemal.
As the First World War drew to a close the empire slipped away. Mehmet V Resat died of a heart attack on 2 July 1918, Damascus and Beirut fell in October, and on 13 November an Allied fleet occupied Istanbul, by the terms of an armistice in which the Ottomans surrendered unconditionally.
The Greeks, who had come out on the allied side in time, were given control of Izmir and the Anatolian hinterland at Paris in 1919; by July 1920 Greek armies had overrun western Anatolia, captured Bursa, and occupied Thrace. British pressure prevented the Greeks from capturing Istanbul, which remained under Allied occupation, but the Ottoman government, under Allied auspices, was forced to sign the treaty of Sevres in August 1920, which largely recognised Greek conquests and put the straits between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean under international control, like the Danube.
Whatever authority the Ottomans still possessed now withered. In Anatolia three months before, a Grand National Assembly of the Turkish nation had met and elected as president Mustafa Kemal Pasha, the military hero and the backbone of armed resistance to the Greeks. When Greece opened a new offensive in 1920 it was halted by the Nationalist army, and in 1922 Kemal led a rout of the Greek forces, who fell back in confusion on Izmir and took to flight. On 13 September 1922 Izmir itself suffered a catastrophic fire, and on 11 October an armistice was signed, leaving only Istanbul’s status to be defined by a subsequent peace treaty.
The act of parliament separating the sultanate and the caliphate was passed on 1 November 1922, shortly before Sultan Vahi-deddin was informed that his office had been abolished. The caliphate was formally bestowed on Crown Prince Abdul Mecid Effendi, but two years later Turkey’s capital was moved to Ankara, a republic was declared, and the caliphate abolished.
Belief in the empire had long since leached away when the First World War swept out Europe and ushered in our own century of dictators and massacres. The Ottoman Empire by then was one of the cobwebs; one of the crazy hopeless causes; and a new polity had arrived to take the shrunken place of an empire which had long since ceased to possess a rationale. In its days of greatness, the Ottoman enterprise had been conquest; its gift, by and large, peace and prosperity on terms familiar and appreciated by everyone. Even in stasis and decline it had preserved for the people of the empire at least some of the peace and some of the prosperity of former times; it had kept at bay some of the elements of modernity, maintained an appreciation of the old ways, kept up the traditional way of life. Dignity and honour flourished in their old circuits. Trouble was couched in familiar terms. The Serbs who walked barefoot through Kosovo in 1911 were matched by the Turks who reaped the corn and filled the byres when they marched through enemy lands at harvest time; and even the King of the Jinns held court, until the eleventh hour.
In 1896 Edmondo de Amicis walked down to the new steel-built Galata Bridge, where today the Turkish restaurateurs beguile you with fish and napery, and the traffic which is slowly reducing Istanbul rumbles overhead. Tourists peek into the fishtanks. A minion, staring vacantly up one of the great waterways of the world, cuts up another lemon. Now and then a tug, or a trawler, comes chugging up the Golden Horn.
There in 1896 de Amicis saw ‘all of Constantinople pass in an hour’.
A mussulman woman on foot, a veiled femal
e slave, a Greek with her long flowing hair surmounted by a little red cap, a Maltese hidden in her black faletta, a Jewess in the ancient costume of her nation, a negress wrapped in a many-tinted Cairo shawl, an Armenian woman from Trebizond, all veiled in black – a funereal apparition… Then the Syrian, clad in a long Byzantine dolman, with a gold-striped handkerchief wrapped around his head; the Bulgarian, in sombre-coloured tunic and fur-edged cap; the Georgian, with his casque of dressed leather and tunic gathered into a metal belt; the Greek from the Archipelago, covered with lace, silver tassels, and shining buttons. From time to time it seems as though the crowd were receding somewhat, but it is only to surge forward once more in great overpowering waves of colour crested with white turbans like foam, in whose midst may occasionally be seen a high hat or umbrella of some European lady tossed hither and thither by that Mussulman torrent… Every tint of skin can be found, from the milk-white Albanian to the jet-black slave from central Africa or the blue-black native of Dafur… While you are trying to make out the designs tattooed on an arm, your guide is calling your attention to a Serb, a Montenegrin, a Wallach, an Ukrainian Cossack of the Don, an Egyptian, a native of Tunis, a prince of Imerzi… An expert eye can distinguish in that human torrent the distinctive features and costumes of Caramania and Anatolia, of Cypress and Candia, of Damascus and Jerusalem – Druses, Kurds, Maronites, Telemans, Pumacs, and Kroats… No two persons are dressed alike. Some heads are enveloped in shawls, others crowned with rags, others decked out like savages – shirts and undervests striped or particoloured like a harlequin’s dress; belts bristling with weapons, some of them reaching from the waist to the arm-pits; Mameluke trousers, knee-breeches, tunics, togas, long cloaks which sweep the ground, capes trimmed with ermine, waistcoats encrusted with gold, short sleeves and balloon-shaped ones, monastic garbs and theatre costumes; men dressed like women, women who seem to be men, and peasants with the air of princes…
Lords of the Horizons Page 33