by Alan Palmer
Stratford Canning—back again as ambassador from January 1842 onwards—participated in what he once called ‘the great game of improvement’ for some nine years.13 He could claim, with some justice, that he had sustained the impetus of reform during Reşid’s virtual exile to the Paris embassy, browbeating Abdulmecid and exposing the corruption of the Finance Minister (probably the least desirable of the Valide Sultana’s nominees for office). He helped secure laws against the slave trade and formal condemnation by Abdulmecid of the religious persecution of Christian believers, but he failed to have specifically Christian evidence declared admissible in the law courts, nor could he gain recognition of the right of Christians to serve in the Ottoman army. As ambassador he was concerned, not only with the effect of the Tanzimat reforms at the centre of the empire, but with the military expeditions which sought to impose respect for the authority of the Sultan far away from the capital, notably in the Levant and in the western Balkans.
The departure of Ibrahim’s army from Syria and the Lebanon deprived four Ottoman provinces—Aleppo, Damascus, Tripoli, Sidon—of the most benevolent and effective government they had experienced for several centuries. Egyptian rule had brought considerable benefit to both Christians and Jews, particularly those engaged in trade or commerce. Basir II, who for almost half a century had sought to control the Lebanon from his palace of Beit-ed-Din much as Ali Pasha had ruled over Epirus from Ioánnina, collaborated closely with the Egyptians, and when they left he was deposed and sent to exile in Malta. His banishment gratified Muslim notables, out of favour during the Egyptian occupation; and at first they welcomed the return of Ottoman officials. By the spring of 1841, however, the whole region was in disorder, with armed resistance to the Ottomans coming from rival factions, many of whom remained bound in an almost feudal loyalty to the historic dynasties which had racked the same provinces in Abdulhamid I’s reign. The Ottoman military commanders were forced to undertake punitive expeditions, at times showing a ruthless vengeance condemned by foreign observers—although, as in the Greek revolt, neither side possessed a monopoly of cruelty.
The European Powers, especially Britain, were more concerned by Syrian unrest than they had been by any earlier rebellion apart from the Greek. The Anglo-Turkish Commercial Treaty of 1838 provided new markets for British exports and gave British merchants favourable terms for the purchase of goods, raw materials and foodstuffs, thus stimulating the agricultural output of the Ottoman lands. Other governments soon concluded similar commercial conventions, making the Ottoman Empire more susceptible to the fluctuations of world trade while, at the same time, giving Europe a more immediate interest in the well-being of ‘Turkey’ as a whole. The restoration of the Sultan’s rule in both Syria and the Lebanon was therefore carefully reported by local representatives of foreign governments and trading companies. The consuls offered protection to particular communities favoured in London or St Petersburg, Paris or Vienna: Orthodox Christians by the Russians; the Druze, and various Jewish and Protestant groups, by Palmerston; and the Maronites by the French and Austrians. But support for these groups varied widely from district to district, making generalization misleading. The journals and dispatches of the British consul-general in Beirut, Colonel Hugh Rose, show his personal willingness to protect Maronite convoys from attacks by the Druze, and his mistrust of the regular Ottoman troops. But they also complain of the extent to which his French colleagues stirred up Maronite unrest in ways ‘detrimental to the interests of the Porte’.14
Peace of a kind was imposed in both Syria and the Lebanon in 1843 and again, after renewed fighting, in May 1845; but, despite the mediation of Stratford Canning and a visit to Beirut by Resid in October 1846, there was little hope of an enduring settlement in a region where there were so many conflicts of interest. In 1848 and intermittently from 1850 to 1852 there were further risings against Ottoman attempts to impose military conscription and Arabicize the Fifth Army, the permanent garrison. Rather than be subject to a reformed and efficient central Ottoman government, local notables began to affect a particularist ‘nationalism’, especially in the Maronite districts around Mount Lebanon, a development of considerable significance for the second half of the century.15
Along the Ottoman Empire’s north-western frontier, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, there was even more open hostility to the Tanzimat reforms. For the past fifty years the landowners—southern Slav in race and speech but conservatively Muslim in religion and outlook—had resisted every attempt at westernization made by successive Sultans. Mahmud II’s formal abolition of feudalism finally destroyed the Kapetanate, the privileged caste of forty-eight beys who, when the Empire was at its zenith, had been entrusted with administering the subdivisions of Bosnia in return for raising sipahi detachments for the Sultan’s cavalry. But the Kapetanate went down fighting, literally. Open revolt against Mahmud in 1837 was followed by an even wider rebellion when reports of the Gülhane Decree held out a promise of legal equality and social upgrading for Christians and Jews. Not until March 1850 did a powerful Ottoman army under Omer Lutfi Pasha finally suppress the Bosnian beys in a three-day battle beside the shores of Lake Jezero. Omer entered Jajce in triumph, having already routed the Herzegovinan Muslim notables outside Mostar.
As a historical figure, Omer Lutfi is more familiar under the name ‘Omar Pasha’, the renowned soldier of the Crimean War and the first eminent commander of a modernized Ottoman army.16 He was born Michael Lotis (sometimes spelt ‘Lattas’) in Croatia in 1809 and became an Austrian army cadet, but while he was still under twenty he deserted and crossed the mountains into Bosnia. He was commissioned in the Ottoman army and, having apostatized, took the name of the second of the seventh-century caliphs. Mahmud II promoted him to the rank of major and appointed him military instructor of the boy-prince Abdulmecid. He gained an important victory over Ibrahim in the hills north-east of Beirut in October 1840, but was much criticized by the foreign consuls for the ruthless way in which he subsequently restored the Sultan’s authority in the Lebanon. This rigorous maintenance of discipline Omer brought back to Bosnia, where he undertook operations in a terrain he had known since his boyhood. Inevitably he incurred the wrath of the Austrians, who regarded him as a renegade from Habsburg service.
During ten years of virtual anarchy in Bosnia the Austrians several times sent columns forward from Croatia, ready to advance their frontier if the Ottomans failed to re-establish effective government. There appear to have been at least three occasions in this troubled decade when Austrians and Russians discussed a hypothetical partition of the Ottoman Empire: Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina would fall to Austria, while Russia would establish client kingdoms in the eastern Balkans.17 Yet these exchanges did not produce any clear-cut partition plan. If they show anything at all, it is Nicholas I’s growing conviction that the decay of the Ottoman system of government could not be arrested by a fine-sounding programme of reform.
Not that Tsar Nicholas thought highly of Metternich’s Austria, either. ‘Sick, very sick,’ he commented privately on the Habsburg monarchy early in 1846, thereby coining the metaphor he was later to apply more famously to another neighbour.18 The Tsar’s verdict on Austria appeared sound. The revolutions of 1848, beginning dramatically in France and the Italian peninsula, spread to the German-speaking lands and to the Danubian basin, outwardly destroying Metternich’s Europe. No European government wished to see the Eastern Question posed at a time of convulsion in so many other parts of the continent. With tacit approval from Palmerston in London, as well as from Sultan Abdulmecid, the Tsar ordered his army across the river Pruth and into Moldavia and Wallachia to root out a suspected hornet’s-nest of Roumanian patriot radicals in Bucharest. The consequent two-and-a-half-year Russian occupation of the Danubian Principalities aroused little protest in itself: no one seriously disputed Nesselrode’s claim that the Russian move was justified by the treaty terms of both Kuchuk Kainardji and Adrianople. The revolutions did not spread into the Ottoman Empire.
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br /> What caused concern in London and Paris was the Tsar’s failure to be content with occupying Moldavia and Wallachia. By July 1848 his troops were spread around the arc of the Carpathians, as if hovering over both the Habsburg and the Ottoman empires. There they might have halted, had it not been for the needs of the young Emperor Francis Joseph; in the early spring of 1849, four months after his accession, he sought Russian aid in restoring Habsburg authority along the central Danube; and Tsar Nicholas responded by sending two armies from the Principalities across the frontier into Transylvania to stamp out Kossuth’s nascent independent Hungarian state.
Russian intervention in Hungary had two important consequences for the Eastern Question. In Europe as a whole it completed a diplomatic revolution: there was such widespread sympathy in London for Kossuth and his cause that the westward march of the Tsar’s armies finally ended the fragile Anglo-Russian entente which had struggled on for nearly ten years. Britain and France began to act together, while Tsar Nicholas assumed he could count on close support from Vienna for his policies. Secondly, the suppression of the Hungarian revolution forced Kossuth himself, and four Polish generals who had fought for him, to seek asylum within the Ottoman Empire. In September and October 1849 the Sultan and Reşid, encouraged by Stratford Canning and the presence of a British naval squadron in the Dardanelles, stubbornly refused to surrender Kossuth and the Polish refugees to the Austrian and Russian governments. Not even the peremptory withdrawal of the Russian and Austrian ambassadors to the Sublime Porte made Abdulmecid waver.19
The crisis gave the Tanzimat ministers a diplomatic success. Mehmed Fuat travelled to Bucharest and on to St Petersburg, successfully negotiating with the Russians an agreement by which the Tsar would give up his demand for the surrender of the Polish refugee generals, provided that the Ottomans undertook to keep them away from the borders of the Russian Empire. The Austrians, too, abandoned their insistence that Kossuth should be handed over. Yet in both Vienna and St Petersburg there was some satisfaction that, even if the Sultan had refused to give way, at least Palmerston was prepared to acknowledge a breach of international law. He admitted that in taking his warships up the Dardanelles as far as Chanak (Cannakale) the British Admiral, Sir William Parker, had broken the Straits Convention—although Parker had, in fact, responded to an appeal for support from the British consul at the Dardanelles, Frederic Calvert.20
Admiral Parker’s penetration of the Dardanelles set a bad precedent. It was the first in a series of provocative measures which culminated in the Crimean War. With one exception—a punitive campaign undertaken by Omer in Montenegro in 1852, halted under the threat of Austrian intervention—these actions were assertions of sea power by the rival European navies, generally to support intimidating demands on the Ottoman Government by overbearing envoys to the Sublime Porte; and it could be argued that naval power was also the principal issue at stake in the Crimean War itself, at least in Black Sea waters. But the protracted crisis which posed the Eastern Question in its most acute form was caused, not by battleship diplomacy, but by the revival of an old dispute: in May 1850 the Foreign Ministry in Paris ordered the ambassador in Constantinople to assert French rights to defend the privileges of ‘Latins’ (Roman Catholics) in Jerusalem, Nazareth and Bethlehem, complaining that ‘Greeks’ (Orthodox monks protected by Russia) were excluding them from the Holy Places.21
There was nothing new in the French claim, which was based on a treaty concluded in Mahmud I’s reign. Both Louis XVIII in 1819 and Louis Philippe in 1842 had sought electoral capital by backing ‘Latins’ against ‘Greeks’ in Palestine, and most foreign governments assumed that the latest ruler of France, Prince-President Louis Napoleon, would similarly lose interest in the Holy Places once his position at home was secure. But on this occasion the wrangle dragged on. Tsar Nicholas I remained intensely suspicious of Louis Napoleon, and the neo-Bonapartist system of plebiscitary government left the Prince-President needing support from the clergy-dominated French provinces, certainly until November 1852 when a referendum gave overwhelming backing to the return of Empire and he became the Emperor Napoleon III.
Sultan Abdulmecid wished to avoid antagonizing ‘Latins’ or ‘Greeks’. In February 1852 he devised a compromise which offered concessions to the French over the vexed question of Latin access to the churches in Bethlehem but gave secret assurances to the Russians that there would be no change ‘in the existing state of things’. The compromise was welcomed by Stratford Canning (now Viscount Stratford de Redcliffe), who four months later left Constantinople, ‘perhaps’ (as he thought) ‘never to return’. But even before Stratford de Redcliffe reached England, there was renewed crisis in the capital. Both the Russians and the French suspected they had been duped by the compromise. Moreover, Louis Napoleon hoped that with the Great Elchi’s departure for home a French diplomat might speedily acquire the influence at the Porte he had so long enjoyed. By chance the French ambassador, the Marquis de Lavalette, was in Paris for consultations. In June Louis Napoleon ordered him back to his post; and he was told to make so impressive a return to Constantinople that all the residents of the city, Turks and foreigners alike, should be well aware of his coming.
Accordingly, in mid-July Lavalette sailed up the Dardanelles and into the Bosphorus aboard the most formidable warship in the world, the ninety-gun steam-powered Charlemagne. In penetrating the Straits the French navy committed a further breach of the 1841 Convention, but the Porte allowed this technicality to pass without complaint. The warship’s presence greatly impressed the Ottoman authorities, as Louis Napoleon had anticipated: here, lying off the Sultan’s palace, was a floating fortress able to master ‘the most rapid currents of the Bosphorus by the sole power of the screw’;22 and supporting the Charlemagne in the eastern Mediterranean was a powerful squadron which, at the end of July, threatened to bombard the Lebanese port of Tripoli when the Ottoman governor refused to surrender French deserters. The apparent primacy of French sea-power ensured that, from July 1852 until his recall to Paris seven months later, Lavalette called the tune in Constantinople. His nominees became Grand Vizier and Foreign Minister; and in October and again in December 1852, instructions were sent to Jerusalem requiring the ‘Greeks’ to make concessions to the ‘Latins’ at Bethlehem.
No phase of the Eastern Question has provoked so much historical debate nor received such close attention in the West as the events of the following fifteen months—not least because the resultant conflict is the only occasion upon which French and British troops have fought together against the regular, organized army of a Russian state, Tsarist or Soviet. Yet during the winter of 1852–3 there were statesmen in both St Petersburg and London prepared to work for renewed Anglo-Russian collaboration, as in 1839–40, rather than fatalistically accept a drift into war. At Christmas in 1852 the Foreign Office and Stratford de Redcliffe (now in London) still sympathized with ‘Greeks’ rather than with ‘Latins’ over the Holy Places dispute. But Tsar Nicholas gravely misunderstood the mood in London. He believed that, like him, the British Government regarded the pusillanimous behaviour of the Porte as a sign of feeble corruption among Abdulmecid’s ministers, despite the high-sounding intentions of the Tanzimat reforms. Nesselrode warned his imperial master that any discussion with the British of ‘plans for an uncertain future’ would be ‘both dangerous and utterly useless’, forcing London back into a suspicious hostility which it would prove hard to overcome.23 Against Nesselrode’s advice, Nicholas decided to sound out Lord Aberdeen’s new Whig–Peelite coalition ministry over possible partition plans, should the Ottoman Government prove unable to resist foreign pressure or quell internal upheaval. On 9 January 1853, in a conversational aside to the British ambassador (Hamilton Seymour) as he was leaving a private concert, Nicholas I for the first time applied his anthropomorphic metaphor of ‘sick man’ to the Ottoman Empire: ‘The country is falling to pieces—who can say when?’ Nicholas said, according to the entry Seymour made in his diary that night.24
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When Seymour wrote up the conversation two days later in a formal dispatch to the Foreign Office, he gave the famous metaphor a greater emphasis than in the entry in his private journal. And when in late January and early February the Tsar on four occasions received Seymour in private audience, the ambassador faithfully reported Nicholas’s words, catching precisely the melodramatic tone with which he tended to heighten all his pronouncements.25 Inside the Winter Palace these remarks of the Tsar seemed in accord with the setting—like Rastrelli’s masterpiece they were grandiose, over-elaborate and artificial enough not to be taken too seriously; but read dispassionately in Westminster in an ambassador’s dispatch, they caused a stir. Nicholas seemed to be putting forward plans to carve up the Ottoman Empire: ‘England’ might receive possession of Crete and a free hand in Egypt in return for the creation of Russian satellite states in the Balkans.
Briefly it seemed as if the survival of the Sultan’s empire depended on the European chancelleries. So at least it was assumed in London, where the significance of Nicholas’s ‘sick man’ talks with Seymour was much exaggerated. Ever since Catherine the Great’s ‘Greek Project’, hypothetical partition plans had from time to time enlivened Russo-Austrian diplomacy; they figured, too, in Franco-Russian exchanges during the Tilsit era. But the redrawing of maps on this scale was an unfamiliar pastime in Downing Street. The Aberdeen coalition cabinet—which contained more ministers skilled in foreign affairs than any other British government, before or since—was highly suspicious of this newest twist to Russian policy.26 Why, the ministers wondered, did the Tsar prefer a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ to a formal treaty? And was it Seymour’s reporting, or Nicholas’s imprecision, that clouded with such vagueness the ‘commercial policy’ Britain and Russia might pursue after the Ottoman Empire’s disintegration?