by Alan Palmer
After a night in the old palace, Abdulaziz was rowed back to the Çiraan, where he was joined by Pertevniyal and members of his harem. On 4 June the deposed Sultan was found dead, his wrists slashed by scissors. Officially he had committed suicide, a verdict accepted by the ambassadors. But the doctor attached to the British Embassy was among physicians who were allowed to examine the corpse; he came to the conclusion that the cuts could not have been self-inflicted. The drama was not yet over. Eight days after Abdulaziz’s death, his favourite young Circassian wife Nesrin died, apparently in childbirth. The tragedy unhinged Nesrin’s brother, Çerkes Hasan, a young army officer who had served as an aide-de-camp in the imperial household. On 14 June he burst into a meeting of ministers, firing his revolver wildly. Hüseyin Avni and the Foreign Minister were assassinated as they sat in conference.30
These events were too much for the new Sultan, who may well have doubted the suicide verdict on his uncle. Murad V was a westernizer by upbringing, sympathetic to the Masonic movement and a member of the Grand Orient Lodge. His visit to Paris had taught him the delights of champagne, which he would fortify with good cognac. Palace politics, laced with murder, were not to his liking. Sir Henry Elliot reported to the Foreign Office that, on hearing of Abdulaziz’s death, Murad fainted and then was stricken with fits of vomiting for the next day and a half.31 He was, too, deeply affected by the fate of Çerkes Hasan, who was publicly hanged four days after running amok at the cabinet meeting. So strange was Murad’s conduct in the first fortnight of his reign that the kiliç kuşanmaci—the coronation ceremony at Eyüp—was postponed. Murad V became the only Sultan since the fall of Byzantium never girded with the sword.
Nine weeks after his accession a skilled British newspaper correspondent described the thirty-five-year-old Sultan ‘as one possessed, sitting on his sofa, motionless and speechless, smoothing his thin moustaches and beardless chin with his right hand hour after hour the livelong day, meditating on his abdication and only wondering on which of his reluctant brothers may devolve the burden which is too much for his shoulders.’32 That burden was becoming heavier with the passage of each week of crisis. By now the Ottoman Empire was at war with Serbia and Montenegro, whose princes had responded to a widespread demand among their subjects to support their compatriots rebelling against Turkish rule in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Although the local Ottoman commanders had little difficulty in holding the frontiers, the presence of thousands of Russian volunteers alongside the Serbs and Montenegrins made it likely that the conflict would soon spread. If so, the Ottoman soldiery needed a sovereign more resolute than the nervous wreck whom Midhat had pushed on to the throne.
On 17 August Sir Henry Elliot described the visit to the Dolmabahche of an eminent Austrian neurologist: the Sultan, it was said, ‘was suffering from chronic alcoholism aggravated by the emotions he has gone through’; with total abstinence and rest his mind might well recover.33 But the constitution-seekers were in a hurry. A fetva was prepared justifying this second deposition in three months on the grounds of the Sultan’s insanity. No violence was used. Murad’s younger brother, Abdulhamid, had already assured Midhat of his support for reform. On 31 August 1876 Abdulhamid II was proclaimed Sultan. The deposed Murad was transferred to the Çiraan, where he was confined in a modernized kafe until his death, twenty-eight years later.
CHAPTER 10
YILDIZ
ABDULHAMID’S SUBJECTS WERE ABLE TO ACCLAIM THEIR SULTAN and Caliph a week after his accession. Some 100,000 people—men, women and children—lined the waterfront or watched from higher vantage points as, in the late forenoon of 7 September 1876, twenty-eight oarsmen of the imperial barge rowed the new Sultan up the Golden Horn, to be girded with the sword at Eyüp. Not that much could be seen of him: ships dipping their flags as the barge passed seemed to salute a crimson canopy rather than a person, for at thirty-four Abdulhamid would already hunch his cadaverous body into that sinister, brooding figure whom cartoonists portrayed in later years as ‘Abdul the Damned’.1 He looked more impressive astride the traditional white horse with a golden bridle, riding back to the city after the ritual of kiliç kuşanmaci was fulfilled; but even then an observer commented on the furrows of thought across his face and the ‘profound expression of melancholy’ in those dark and darting eyes. His hooked nose, pallid skin, chiselled cheekbones and luxuriant beard emphasized the mistrust and suspicion inherent in his character.
Psychologically, everything was wrong about Abdulhamid’s childhood. His father Abdulmecid had offered the ugly little boy scant affection; his mother, a Circassian dancing girl from the Trebizond slave market, had died from consumption when he was ten; his brothers found him an eavesdropper and a spoil-sport. He grew up lonely but never alone, so often reproved that he retained into manhood an inner timidity which made him fearful of assassination and inclined to waver at the moment any policy initiative was put to the test. Yet he came to the throne strong-willed and determined: he would rule, not reign; the centre of authority was to lie in the imperial palace rather than at the Sublime Porte.
A week after the kiliç kuşanmaci ceremony the British ambassador sent back to London his considered opinion of the new Sultan. Sir Henry Elliot commended Abdulhamid’s ‘kindliness of disposition and enlightened views’, but he doubted ‘whether he will accept restrictions which the reforming party thinks necessary’.2 Over the previous twelve months the Sultan had prepared himself seriously for his duties. He never liked the Dolmabahche; as often as possible in the last years of Abdulaziz he had absented himself from the palace. Sometimes he stayed with his foster-mother at her villa inland from Pera, but he preferred his summer pavilion ten miles up the Bosphorus, above the wooded bay of Therapia (now Tarabya). There he would sound out the opinions of an English businessman—‘Mr Thompson’—who had a house and land next to the imperial estate. Thompson kept Abdulhamid well-informed about Disraeli and Derby, and all the eccentricities of the British parliamentary system. Almost certainly, he was the anonymous ‘Englishman’ who, on the eve of Abdulhamid’s accession, let Elliot know of the heir-presumptive’s intention to introduce a ‘totally new era’ of government, in which competent and unsullied ministers would exercise ‘rigorous economy’.
Abdulhamid gained some understanding of finance from his banker, Hakop Zarifi, an Armenian he consulted at his mother’s villa and at Therapia.3 He seems, too, to have trusted his physician, John Mavroyeni, from whom he learnt of the Phanariot attitude to the crises of the Empire, noting the scant sympathy shown by Greek Orthodox believers for Bulgarians, or any other group of their Southern Slav co-religionists. Throughout the first months of the reign Abdulhamid continued his practice of seeking to draw out opinions on current problems of government, while saying little himself. Yet when he received the Young Ottoman intellectual leader Namik Kemal in audience, he went so far as to hold out to him some prospect of a revitalized Sultanate; and in the first week of October Abdulhamid set up a commission authorized to prepare a constitution. Sixteen officials with experience of central government or administration, ten ulema and two senior army officers were to meet under the chairmanship of Midhat Pasha.
A preliminary constitutional draft was swiftly completed. It bore a close resemblance to the parliamentary monarchy established by the Belgian Constitution of 1831 which, in its turn, had borrowed from Great Britain and France. But Abdulhamid, backed by the army and by religious leaders, had no intention of seeing the Ottoman Empire transformed into a parliamentary Sultanate. He did not object to a bicameral legislature, with an elected Chamber of Deputies and a Chamber of Notables (‘Senate’) nominated by himself; and he accepted some basic guarantees of human rights, even freedom of the press. Yet he ensured that the constitution was entirely dependent upon his whim: a late insertion into the draft secured recognition of the Sultan’s right to declare a state of siege which would suspend the guarantees of the constitution during a grave emergency; and Article 113 authorized the Sultan to send into exile any person whom
he considered dangerous to himself or to the empire as a whole.4
The Constitutional Commission completed its work in record time, a mere nine weeks. There was good reason for this speed. During the autumn the international crisis in the Balkans intensified, with Russia threatening to go to war in order to protect Serbia and Montenegro from Ottoman vengeance and secure reforms in Bulgaria and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Gladstone’s pamphlet on The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East had gone on sale in London on the day before Abdulhamid was girded with the sword at Eyüp: the pamphlet sold 40,000 copies in a week in Britain, while a translation printed in Moscow set up a record for Russia of 10,000 copies in a month. The famous appeal for ‘the Turks’ to ‘carry away their abuses in the only possible manner by carrying off themselves . . . bag and baggage . . . from the province they have desolated and profaned’ made welcome reading in Moscow and St Petersburg, although it was regarded as inflammatory by statesmen still hoping to limit the crisis to the Balkan peninsula. Yet the pamphlet and the meetings of protest in Britain and in Russia helped shape government policies. On 4 November the Great Powers accepted a British proposal for an international conference which was to gather in Constantinople and examine ways of granting administrative autonomy to Bosnia and Herzegovina. The conference would affirm the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire, while considering administrative reforms suitable to the Bulgarian provinces.5
Abdulhamid regarded the proposal for such a conference in the imperial capital as outside interference with the peoples whom Allah had so recently called him to protect. Never before had a Sultan been faced with so humiliating a proposal; and for a fortnight Abdulhamid prevaricated. On 14 November partial Russian mobilization—together with the continued need of the Ottoman state for financial assistance from abroad—induced him, with extreme reluctance, to accept the idea of the conference. With one exception the delegates comprised the ambassadors to the Porte, supplemented by professional diplomats whom the foreign ministries in Paris, Berlin, Vienna and St Petersburg regarded as experts in Balkan affairs. The exception was the principal British delegate, the Marquess of Salisbury, Secretary of State for India in Disraeli’s cabinet. His six-week visit to the Ottoman capital was to have a far more enduring significance than the conference itself.
Lord and Lady Salisbury, and their eldest son, arrived at Constantinople on 5 December, three months after Abdulhamid’s accession. No British cabinet minister had spent so many hours studying foreign affairs or written about them so extensively; and it is characteristic of Salisbury that he should have sounded out opinion in Paris, Berlin, Vienna and Rome before completing his journey to the Golden Horn. While the British prime minister and ambassador were turcophile, Salisbury already privately believed that the Crimean War had been a disastrous error of policy. These prejudices were confirmed by his hosts in the European capitals, who thought the Ottoman Empire had sunk into irreversible decline.
Nothing Salisbury saw in Constantinople caused him to revise his opinions. Abdulhamid received him in audience, showing those exquisite good manners which Elliot admired. But, to the ambassador’s dismay, Salisbury remained unresponsive. He mistrusted the Sultan and all his ministers, despite the honours Abdulhamid bestowed on his guests. Not even the Order of Chastity (Third Class), so courteously awarded to the Marchioness, mollified her husband, although it amused him. ‘A wretched, feeble creature, who told me he dared not grant what we demanded because he was in danger of his life,’ Salisbury wrote in a private letter home to his third son that Christmas.6 Such a comment from a career diplomat accredited to the Porte would be of little interest. But in 1876 Salisbury was the coming man of British imperial politics; as Foreign Secretary or Prime Minister (and generally as both) he was to shape British policy for almost half of the Sultan’s thirty-two years on the throne. Never did he revise his conviction of Abdulhamid’s worthlessness.
The conference was preceded by nine round-table sessions at the Russian Embassy, under General Ignatiev’s chairmanship, intended to decide exactly how the Sultan should put his house in order. As if to prove his commitment to reform, on 19 December Abdulhamid appointed Midhat Pasha Grand Vizier. When, four days later, the conference held a first full session in the Ottoman Admiralty building beside the naval dockyard on the Golden Horn, the opening deliberations were suddenly disturbed by the booming of guns. Blandly the Ottoman Foreign Minister informed the delegates that the sound they heard was a salute honouring the proclamation of Midhat’s constitution. With reforms promised for the peoples of the empire, the Sultan’s representatives argued that the conference had become a superfluous irrelevancy. Well-orchestrated patriotic demonstrations by Muslim students denounced Panslavism and called for war against Russia; delegates noted that Greeks and Armenians were as vociferously anti-Russian as the Young Ottomans. These gestures of popular feeling strengthened the Sultan’s resolve. Every proposal by the foreign delegates was rejected. On 20 January 1877 they abandoned the task. Their collective departure, planned as a dignified reproof, lost its effectiveness when the waterfront was lashed so severely by a gale that only an indignant Lord Salisbury braved the appalling weather.7
Abdulhamid was not displeased over the discomfiture of the foreign delegates who had assembled in his capital to dictate reforms. Nevertheless the failure of what the Turks, with a touch of derision, called the Dockyard Conference (Tersane Konferansi) kept Europe’s money markets closed to the impoverished Ottoman state while bringing closer the prospect of war with Russia; and the Sultan, who hated Midhat, could therefore blame his Grand Vizier for having humiliated the foreign envoys. He also noted with sympathy the complaints of military and religious leaders at the Grand Vizier’s attempt to have Christians accepted alongside Muslims as cadets at the War Academy. A fortnight after the conference broke up, Midhat was summoned to the Dolmabahche; he noticed as he arrived at the palace that the imperial yacht had steam up, though early February seemed an unlikely season for Abdulhamid to put to sea. But the Sultan was not even present at the Dolmabahche. An officer of the household informed Midhat that, under the emergency clause of the constitution (Article 113), the Sultan was ordering his arrest and banishment, as a danger to the state. He was put aboard the imperial yacht, which sailed at once for Brindisi. A minor bureaucrat, totally dependent upon his Sultan, replaced him as Grand Vizier. The diplomatic corps was assured that, although the architect of the 1876 Constitution might be in exile, the Sultan had no intention of abandoning the parliamentary experiment.8
Elections had already taken place in several provinces and were about to be held in the capital. They caused no excitement: the franchise was restricted, and the indirect voting procedure was regulated by a complicated pattern of electoral colleges. Among the more distant subjects of the Sultan, the prospect of parliamentary representation aroused little interest, except negatively in the Lebanon, where the Maronites refused to take part in any elections for fear that an all-Ottoman parliament would threaten the autonomy won fifteen years before. But in the third week of March 1877 the Sultan opened the Meclis-i Mebusan (Chamber of Deputies) in an elaborate ceremony at the Dolmabahche attended by the diplomatic corps, the religious notables and all the dignitaries of state.
The Speaker was nominated by Abdulhamid, ignoring agreed procedures for election to the office by the Chamber itself; but the Sultan’s speech was read to deputies by his palace secretary, Küchük Mehmed Said, who was to serve as Grand Vizier on seven occasions during the reign. The speech held promise of a programme of reforms which would improve administration, justice and farming. The deputies—71 Muslims, 44 Christians, 4 Jews—then retired to the chamber set aside for them in Stamboul, a hall in a building near St Sophia, built in 1840 as a new university but subsequently housing government offices. There, over the following three months, the deputies discussed such topics as the composition of advisory councils in the provinces, a restrictive Press Law, and the need to cut the salaries of civil servants. The Times correspo
ndent, attending one of the early sessions, was impressed by the multinational character of the Meclis-i Mebusan: ‘We have counted in the Chamber 10 nationalities speaking 14 different languages,’ he reported.9 During the summer the Sultan appointed 21 Muslims and 5 non-Muslims to constitute a senate, the Meclis-i Ayan (Chamber of Notables). Abdulhamid allowed the two chambers no power and little initiative. The parliamentary session coincided with a mounting crisis, more threatening to the Ottoman Empire than any since Sinope; and yet the urgency of affairs rarely touched the work of the lower chamber. It was assumed, justifiably, that the deputies would approve any stand made by the Sultan and his ministers against external interference.
The failure of the Constantinople Conference was followed by a Russian diplomatic offensive in the European capitals which culminated in the Russian-inspired joint London Protocol of 13 March: the Sultan, the Tsar and the Balkan rulers would demobilize their armies, pending the introduction of reforms within the Ottoman Empire which would be supervised by the Great Powers. The Sultan would not accept dictation from Europe, and within ten days the Porte rejected the Protocol. The Russians, who had already made secret agreements with Austria–Hungary over the future of Bosnia and Herzegovina, concluded two treaties with Roumania allowing the Tsar’s troops free passage to the borders of Bulgaria. Eight days later—on 24 April 1877—Alexander II proclaimed a state of war with the Ottoman Empire and called on his armies to march ‘for Orthodoxy and Slavdom’.10