If Thomas Gordon became the Clio of the revolution, another Gordon was its Calliope, its muse of eloquence. No individual did more to alert the West to a kind of new crusade in Greece than the poet George Gordon, Lord Byron. In Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812), Byron’s pyrotechnic gallop through Western art, philosophy, and history, he first presented Greece as a land of epic struggle. The rebirth of ancient Hellas in a new Greece would usher in a wider, universal revolution:
A thousand years scarce serve to form a state;
An hour may lay it in the dust; and when
Can man its shatter’d splendour renovate,
Recall its virtues back, and vanquish Time and Fate.55
This conflict transcended all the earlier struggles. In Byron’s eyes the obstacle to this new age was Ottoman rule, the infidels “whose turbans now pollute Sophia’s shrine,” and who had made the “path of blood along the West.”56 But his attitude to the East moved beyond the traditional stereotypes. His Turkish Tales, published following the astonishing success of the first canto of Childe Harold, were filled with “noble Turks” such as Hassan in The Giaour (1813) or the unlucky Selim of The Bride of Abydos (also 1813). Although Byron’s tragic characters contained, in their externals, the typical eighteenth-century typology of the Turk, they were more human and vulnerable than any of the usual lay figures.57 Hassan and Selim were Western in their passions, hopes, and fears. What destroyed those hopes was the brutal harshness of the pashas and sultans, and what destroyed human life on an individual level was even more lethal to human aspirations on the national scale.
From the beginning of the Greek revolt in 1821, books and pamphlets had begun to appear against the “cruel Turks” and their savagery in Greece. After Byron’s “martyr’s death” at Easter 1824 in the citadel of Missolonghi, in western Greece, there was a sudden increase in the publications devoted to the Greek cause.58 France in particular was gripped by the drama of the Greek revolt. Paris had for many years been a gathering point for expatriates and exiles, including the pioneer of the revival of the Greek language Adamantios Korais, who spent most of his adult life in the city; he died there in 1833. Some, like Grigorios Zalykis, were closet revolutionaries who also served the Turks—he was first secretary at the Ottoman embassy in Paris from 1816 to 1820. Minas Minoidis taught Greek in the city and also acted as an interpreter to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Paris was the first European capital to receive news from this Greek “colony.”
The emotional appeal of Hellenism was powerful, but we should not forget that French artists had more mundane motives for the sudden flood of images of the war in Greece that they produced. Napoleon’s empire had provided a multitude of commissions for artists, while printmakers and retailers had made a living from selling copies of famous paintings to a wider public. After 1815, artists who had found a ready market for battle scenes were looking for new subjects. The outbreak of the revolution in Greece itself was much more stirring than a rising in the Danubian principalities.59 All the political factions in France, from Ultramonarchists to Liberals and former Bonapartists, supported the Greek cause. Those who hated revolution quelled their misgivings: the Ultramonarchist newspaper Le Drapeau Blanc concluded that “they [the Greeks] are Christians who want to shake off the Islamic yoke, therefore it is good.”60 It was also a wonderfully romantic cause, exotically Oriental. Women dressed à la Turque once again, but now in the politically correct Greek colors of blue and white.
The sudden efflorescence of paintings and prints that followed the start of the war in Greece thus had a variety of “triggers.” The French press presented highly colored accounts of Ottoman atrocities. On May 27, 1821, Le Constitutionnel reported that it had been officially decided in Constantinople “to slaughter all the Christian subjects of the Ottoman empire”; by July 24 this had become a plan of the Ottomans to wipe Christianity from the face of the earth. The Gazette de France of May 25, 1821, had compared the Turks to bloodthirsty wild beasts, a “mob attacking every Christian without any distinction.” Ironically, at that time, in the Peloponnese, the Greeks fitted this stereotype better than the Turks. There were one or two depictions of Turks being killed, and an ode by Alphonse Dupré on the capture of Tripolitsa by the Greeks on October 5, 1821. But the vast majority of the images presented the conflict in very simplistic Hellenophile terms. The cross was omnipresent, set against the emblem of Turkish power, the pasha’s horsetail standard. Usually the latter was cast down into the dust, as in an unfinished sketch by the Lyonnais painter Pierre Revoil. His War in the Morea or, The Triumph of the Labarum (a labarum is a cross and flag combined) showed the pasha’s standard lying at the feet of the fierce-eyed Greeks, with the cross looming above. Conversely, in the Disaster at Missolonghi, Charles Langlois’ painting depicts the horsetails advancing on the fleeing Greeks.
The symbolism proliferated as time went on. After the invasion of the Peloponnese by the well-trained Egyptian troops commanded by Mehmed Ali’s son Ibrahim Pasha, acting for the sultan Mahmud II, the Greek armies were shattered and their strongholds taken with great bloodshed. A print by Ducarme of 1828 presented “Greece sacrificed” (La Grèce immolée). An old man with a young boy clutching his knees stands before the cross. A woman, her arms wrapped around the cross, has a naked child grasping her hand, while to the side another Greek is dying, an arrow through his heart, while yet another lies already dead close by. In the background, a classical column has fallen over. Riding toward them on rearing stallions are a group of Turks, armed with bows, pistols, and a long yataghan. Behind, a standard-bearer brandishes the horsetail pennant. There is little doubt about the fate of the old man and the children. For the woman, sexual violation seems certain, as she raises her eyes to heaven. No one in Paris in 1828 who saw this print could have had any doubt as to its meaning.
These tropes appeared time and again on canvas: the cross, the heroic Greeks on foot fighting against expressionless Turks on horseback, women with children at the breast, maidens praying to the Virgin. They were just as omnipresent in the images sold on the streets of Paris as in the paintings shown in the salons and in aid of the Greek cause. They presented a strong single image of “good” fighting “evil.” Many of the themes were already familiar, from earlier paintings, such as Gros’ 1806 Battle of Aboukir, where the horsetails were reeling toward the ground as the vanquished Mamluk commander offered his scimitar to General Murat. But the mixture of pathos, Christian pride and heroism, and Ottoman arrogance was a new combination. Eugène Delacroix’s Massacre on Chios, exhibited in 1824 and then bought by Louis XVIII for the Louvre, was the quintessence of these themes. Criticized at the time for being muddled and chaotic, it drew upon Delacroix’s skill in satirical cartooning, which at that point provided his main source of income. It was not art but propaganda.61 The exhausted Christians herded together to be shipped to the capital as slaves are languidly guarded by two Turks. A cold and expressionless Ottoman, on a rearing horse, is drawing his sword to hack down a brawny Greek seeking to protect a half-naked woman. But it is in the background that the real business of conquest is taking place. Women are dragged along by their hair, others are having their clothes ripped from them, still others are pursued by lancers on horseback. In contrast to a great classical painting in the style of David, the main action is not in the center of the foreground, but in the random savageries revealed behind.
The many paintings of the fall of Missolonghi in April 1826 revealed a double theme: martyrdom and triumph. At Missolonghi the Greeks were massacred by the victorious Turks, but in their last moments they blew up their powder magazine, killing, it was claimed, more than 2,000 of the “barbarians.” After Missolonghi the image of savagery was made still more powerful and explicit. In the print of Eugène Devéria, a naked baby is about to be skewered by a Turkish sword despite its mother’s pleas, while the Turkish horses wear a string of Christian heads like a necklace.62 In another image a woman prepares to stab herself and her child rather than suffer
“a fate worse than death.”63 Delacroix’s Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi (1826) is more subtle: the horsetail standard waves in the background, and the great city has exploded, crushing its people beneath its stones. Yet the incarnation of Greece, half kneeling on the ruins, is not cowed or fearful; she is defiant and proud.
The source materials for all these images were events as they were perceived in France. They drew on news reports, public meetings, pamphlets, poems, and even novels. But the process was circular. The images were generated from the written texts, and they both catered to popular taste and then helped to form that taste. Thereafter they became sources for further texts and images. The massacres on Chios were remembered as Delacroix or other artists such as Colin had painted them. Conversely, because the killings of the Muslims in the Peloponnese were not depicted, although they were reported, these atrocities seemed less real and were less potent and emotive. The great paintings survived in the public imagination long after the written texts on which they were based had been forgotten. French artists, from masters to hack printmakers, created visual metaphors for the Hellenic revival, which they portrayed as a new crusade.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“A Broad Line of Blood”1
BETWEEN THE MASSACRES ON CHIOS IN 1822 AND THE KILLINGS IN 1876 that became known colloquially as “the Bulgarian horrors,” many of the political elements in the equation altered. The Ottomans had acquired a “Western” veneer, from their black frock coats referred to as “Stamboulines” to the trappings of constitutional government. In 1839 and again in 1856, Sultan Mahmud II’s successor, his son Abdul Mejid, issued decrees that outdid Western governments in their paper idealism. Slurs and insults directed at Christians, such as Kaur and Kaurin (anglicized as Giaour), were officially banned.2 In the Crimean War, between 1853 and 1856, the ostensible cause of British and French intervention against Russia was the protection of Turkey from Russian attack. These motives were, of course, scarcely altruistic, but a degree of “Turcophilia” slowly developed in the West.3 Byron had articulated the struggle of the individual dragged down by a cruel and corrupt state. Now, as the Ottoman state proclaimed reform, a new cycle of attraction rather than revulsion began.4
Not everyone believed that the Turks had changed. William Ewart Gladstone later described Britain and France as determining “to try a great experiment in remodelling the administrative system of Turkey, with the hope of curing its intolerable vices and making good its not-less-intolerable vices.”5 More and more Westerners had witnessed Ottoman government at first hand. Christian pilgrims traveled to the sites in Palestine, and inevitably suffered the vagaries of Ottoman officialdom. Something of the old anger that the land where Christ had lived was under alien rule began to resurface. Meanwhile, farther north, the mountains of Lebanon were racked by intercommunal strife, with Druze villagers (regarded as heretics or worse by orthodox Muslims) killing Maronite Christians, and these events were fully reported by Western consuls in the region.6
In 1860, the intermittent violence developed into a civil war, which suddenly extended to a massacre of thousands of Christians in Damascus by an enraged mob. As many as 12,000 terrified Christians were protected by the exiled Algerian leader, Abd el Kader, who ordered his bodyguards to safeguard those sheltering in his palace. Eventually, the Ottoman government responded and dispatched the foreign minister, Fuad Pasha, with an army and instructions to restore the state’s authority. This he did by executing all Ottoman officials who had failed to prevent the murders and rapes, hanging the leaders of the Damascus killings, levying huge indemnities on the Druze community in Lebanon, and exiling Druze chieftains.7 An Austrian geographer, Philip Kanitz, found a few survivors living squalidly in cages fifteen years later in Ottoman Bulgaria.8 Under pressure from Britain and France, new administrative arrangements were created that prevented a recurrence of civil war between Maronites and Druze.9
Few in the West appreciated the complexity of Levantine politics or the volatility of the Damascus mob. They read accounts of Christians being killed and mutilated, with the Ottoman authorities seemingly complicit (or even instigating) the atrocities. There were even reports of Ottoman officials taking Christians under their protection, confiscating their arms, and then allowing their enemies to kill them. When an Englishman, Cyril Graham, visited the district of Hasbeya in Lebanon, he found evidence of atrocity—rotting corpses, arrogant killers, and official inaction. Graham sensed that he was in the midst of some extraordinary blood frenzy, whence all normality had vanished. He reported how “the Druzes accompanying me made jokes on the bodies, and one fellow showed me a pair of pistols set in silver, one of which had been broken in dashing the brains out of Christian heads.” What also shocked him was the Druze themselves: “I have travelled all over their country … and never met with anything but courtesy; now they speak with great insolence, boast of the numbers of Christians they have killed, and assert they will cut to pieces any force which shall be brought against them.”10 For many, these murders came as no surprise. The Turk had merely (once again) reverted to type.
That was 1860. The news of the mass killing of Christians in Bulgaria sixteen years later produced a response on a vastly different scale. Yet as Richard Shannon observed, “there was nothing new or unusual in the fact of either the [Bulgarian] insurrection or the massacre. Both were endemic features of Ottoman administration. The massacres in Bulgaria were not unusually extensive, and there is no reason to assume that they were unusually atrocious.”11 To put it crudely, the totals of victims in Damascus and Lebanon in 1860 and in Bulgaria in 1876 were not very different. However, the former provoked anger only among those prone to outrage, while the latter caused a moral crusade on a vast scale. In 1877, the eminent historian E. A. Freeman wrote in the Contemporary Review that opposing the Turks had become a moral imperative: “Men came together as if to deliver their own souls, as if their hearts would not rest within them till their tongues had spoken … to wash their hands clean from the deeds of which they had just heard the tale.” For Freeman, “the common earth had received a defilement, and the common human nature had received a defilement which needed some rite of lustration [ceremonial washing clean] to wipe off from the consciences of all mankind.”12 The agent of this defilement was the “indescribable Turk” or, as one Anglican clergyman privately described it, the “most nauseous of all abominations, Mohammedanism.”13
This superheated language had a precedent. Less than a generation before, in 1857, the British public had eagerly endorsed a wide range of atrocities by the British army in suppressing a “Sepoy Mutiny” in India. Newspapers egged on the government to an ever-greater harshness. They were encouraged in this campaign by many leading figures. On October 4, 1857, the novelist Charles Dickens had assured his readers in London that were he commander in chief in India, he would “do my utmost to exterminate the Race on whom the stain of the late cruelties rested … and with all convenient dispatch and merciful swiftness of execution, to blot it out of mankind and raze it off the face of the earth.” He meant Indians, of all ages, and, presumably, men, women, and children alike. The mechanism of national outrage worked in the same way on both occasions.
Nations in the grip of a mass social panic, whether the British in the face of the Indian mutiny in 1857 or the Bulgarian horrors of 1876–7 or the United States after September 1, 2001, tend to behave in the same fashion. In all these cases, panic was fueled by the written word and visual images. Public rage developed in 1857 as the British read of white women violated and innocent children cruelly murdered.14 In India as in the Balkans there was little organization or serious planning that engendered the initial massacres.15 The counteratrocities, by the British authorities in India and the Ottomans (1822 and 1877), were carried out as an official act of deliberate terror.16 Neither government believed them disproportionate at the time: they saw themselves faced with a massive and all-embracing conspiracy.
A series of disconnected incidents, beginning with strident
Muslim resistance to the plan that a new Orthodox cathedral being built in Sarajevo would tower over the sixteenth-century Begova mosque, sparked violence. From 1872 onward there was resistance to Ottoman tax gatherers, with peasants arming themselves and taking refuge in nearby Montenegro. The local authorities responded, as they usually did, with a knee-jerk brutality: by 1876 hundreds of villages had been burned and more than 5,000 Bosnian peasants killed.17 Soon the contagion of rebellion began to seep into the Bulgarian provinces. The threat of a general uprising seemed imminent.
Every piece of revolutionary propaganda received and each intelligence report read served to bolster the fear. Was the government in Constantinople to disregard the terrorist threats made by the Bulgarian revolutionaries? The insurgents wrote: “Herzegovina is fighting; Montenegro is spreading over the mountains and coming with help; Serbia is ready to put its forces on the move; Greece is about to declare war; Rumania will not remain neutral. Is there any doubt that death is hanging over Turkey?”18 In July 1875, at Nevesinje in Herzegovina, the clan chiefs had met and thrown down a challenge to the Turks. One declared:
Ever since the damned day of Kosovo [Polje, in 1389] the Turk robs us of our life and liberty. Is it not a shame, a shame before all the world, that we bear the arms of heroes and yet are called Turkish subjects? All Christendom waits for us to rise on behalf of our treasured freedom … Today is our opportunity to rebel and to engage in bloody fight.19
This guerrilla war, in Harold Temperley’s view, led directly to the revolt in Bulgaria and all that followed. It was a cruel war on both sides. The first things that British consul Holmes saw as he entered Nevesinje were a Turkish boy’s head blackening in the sun, and a bloody froth bubbling from the slit throat of a young Turkish girl.20
Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam Page 32