The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire

by Alan Palmer

  On 11 February 1896 the First Lord of the Admiralty told Parliament that, as the Sultan had failed to carry out the promised reforms in Anatolia, ‘we are free from any engagement as to the maintenance of the Ottoman Empire’.10 This announcement was intended less as a direct warning to the Porte than as a sop to British public opinion, angered by continued reports of massacre from Armenia. The Foreign Minister, Ahmed Tevfik, showed some desire for reconciliation, but the Eastern Question rapidly increased in complexity during the early months of the year. In the third week of January 1896 the Consul-General in Salonika sent the Foreign Office clear evidence that Armenian revolutionaries were encouraging unrest among the Greeks in Macedonia.11 By the end of February the ardently patriotic Greek community in Crete was in revolt against Ottoman rule. In the late spring there were rumours in Constantinople of British agents fomenting disturbances so as to give Salisbury an excuse for occupying the island, effectively absorbing it into the British Empire. This, however, was nonsense; the Cretan troubles embarrassed the British, especially as they coincided with phases of Anglo-American tension over Venezuela and Anglo-German tension after the Kaiser’s tactless telegram to President Kruger. But the Cyprus Convention and the occupation of Egypt rankled with other governments, who noted the strategic value of Crete to a great naval power.

  News of the Cretan rising had caused little surprise abroad. Insurrections in 1770, 1821, 1857, 1866–8, 1879 and 1889 left the islanders resentful of Ottoman repression; and they were increasingly angered by the harsh administration of Mahmud Jellaledin, a conservatively-minded Vali. Tension became acute in the late summer of 1894, after Jellaledin hanged four prominent members of the Orthodox Church on the island; although he was replaced by a Vali of Greek origin, acts of terrorism and counter-terrorism were reported from isolated villages over the following eighteen months. The most serious unrest came after riots at Khania in the last week of May 1896. At the same time reports were circulating in Stamboul and Pera of secret talks in Athens between Armenian revolutionaries, Cretan insurgents and the radical patriotic Greek nationalist movement, Ethnike Hetairia. Three Greek guerrilla bands were said (correctly) to have crossed the frontiers in Thessaly and Epirus. The governors of the Salonika, Monastir and Kossovo vilayets mobilized the redif (military reservists) in anticipation of an Ethnike Hetairia rebellion throughout the remaining Greek provinces of the Ottoman Empire.12

  Momentarily, in the summer of 1896, the diplomatic initiative passed to Count Goluchowski, the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister. Francis Joseph’s ambassador to the Porte, Baron Calice, was also doyen of the diplomatic corps at Constantinople. In the first week of July Calice warned the Ottoman authorities that unless autonomy was conceded to the Greek majority in Crete, there would be such grave unrest throughout Thessaly, Epirus and Macedonia that the Powers would be forced to summon another Congress and impose a new order upon the Ottoman lands. At the same time Goluchowski asked Salisbury for the Royal Navy to join Austrian, Russian, French and Italian warships in a preventive international blockade of Crete, to stop Greek nationals coming to the aid of their compatriots. Salisbury refused: ‘In view of the feeling which the cruelty of the Ottoman Government has excited in England we should have great hesitation in taking any step which would constitute us the ally of the Sultan against an insurgent Christian population,’ he explained to the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office in the Note which formed a basis for his reply to Goluchowski.13 This principle the British never abandoned so long as the Ottoman Empire remained in being.

  By the second week of August 1896 the Sultan had 420,000 men retained indefinitely on a war footing, a terrible burden for a government still heavily dependent on foreign loans. His ministers urged Abdulhamid to settle the Cretan Question. Once again there was a Porte versus Yildiz tussle, with the ‘second scribe’, Ahmed Izzet, urging the Sultan to stand firm against all promptings for reform. But although the diplomats regarded the thirty-two-year-old Izzet as the current ‘power behind the throne’, Abdulhamid was at that moment more impressed by independent pressure from the German, French and Russian ambassadors. On 25 August he accepted a programme of reform in Crete, prepared by a commission from all the embassies at Pera: the Cretans would have a Christian Governor and a General Assembly with broadly autonomous powers and would be assured of two-thirds of the public offices, while the gendarmerie was to be reorganized under European commissioners. Although there were reports from the Van vilayet of a fresh wave of Armenian killings and terrorism, it seemed as if, in Crete, one deep-rooted grievance had at last been satisfied.14

  Abdulhamid approved the Cretan reform programme on a Tuesday morning. Early on Wednesday afternoon—26 August 1896—Armenian Dashnak extremists seized the headquarters of the Ottoman Bank in Galata (Beyolu). Their activities anticipated the methods used by numerous terrorist organizations in the Near East over the following century. They planted explosives in the building, took hostages, and demanded immediate reforms in the six eastern vilayets: they sought rights for the Armenians to match the concessions promised to the Cretans—even though, unlike the Greeks in Crete, nowhere did the Armenians form a majority of the population. For two hours there was shooting around and from within the Bank. Negotiations between the bank officials, the dragoman of the Russian Embassy and the terrorists made it clear that the chief Dashnak objective was to alert Europe to the plight of the Armenians; and in this they were eminently successful. In the small hours of Thursday morning the surviving terrorists were led from the building under safe-conduct to the bank director’s yacht in the Bosphorus, and eventually into exile.15

  They were the fortunate ones. Within thirty-six hours mob vengeance was to cause the massacre of some five to six thousand Armenians in the capital. During Wednesday night and the daylight hours on Thursday, Ottoman troops made no move to check the violence. British marines and Russian sailors were landed from the stationnaire warships attached to the embassies. On Thursday morning the ambassadors jointly asked the Sultan to issue ‘such precise and categorical orders as will put an immediate end to this unheard of state of things, which is calculated to bring about the most serious consequences for Your Majesty’s Empire.’ When Abdulhamid protested that ‘he had never heard such language in the twenty years he had been on the throne,’ he was given an opportunity to hear even tougher talk from Baron Calice and from General Nelidov, the Tsar’s ambassador. The Powers, he was told, would have to consider ‘what remedy there could be for such great evils’: failure to end the massacres would imperil both throne and dynasty. After prayers at the Friday şelamlik the Sultan at last took action: henceforth the faithful were ‘forbidden to kill’.16

  The Cretan rebellion had aroused little interest in Western Europe or the United States, but carnage in the streets of Constantinople was another matter. News of the massacre revived the agitation against ‘Abdul the Damned’, alias ‘the Great Assassin’ or, as Clemenceau in Paris preferred it, ‘that monster of Yildiz, the blood-red Sultan’. To British statesmen, whether Conservative or Liberal, and to French radicals, there seemed little prospect of a stable, prosperous and well-governed Ottoman Empire so long as Abdulhamid remained on the throne. Even Kaiser William II, an appreciative and much-fêted guest seven years earlier, wrote in the margin of a dispatch from his ambassador, ‘The Sultan must be deposed’. Kaiser William encouraged the British ambassador in Berlin to discuss the problems of alternative Sultan-making with his Foreign Minister. But not, perhaps, too seriously; within a few days the ‘three emperors’ (German, Russian, Austrian) had agreed that ‘if left alone from outside interference’, the Ottoman Empire could be preserved for many years to come. Characteristically, the Kaiser thereupon sent Abdulhamid the latest Hohenzollern family group photograph, duly autographed, as a personal gesture of good will.17

  The Sultan did not entirely owe his survival to the deep mistrust between the European Powers, but he continued to benefit from their suspicion of each other’s objectives in pol
icy. Hardly had the Armenians attacked the Ottoman Bank before the rival diplomats began posing questions to which there could be no clear-cut answers. Who had known of the raid in advance? Why did so many wealthy Armenians leave the capital by steamer that Tuesday and Wednesday morning? Why, in this week of massacre in the capital, did the Italians ‘quietly’ send warships to Salonika and Smyrna, the other embassies speculated? Why did the British Mediterranean Fleet sail from Malta to Lemnos, according to operational plans drawn up some months before? And at the British embassy there was a suspicion that the Russians were behind the raid, for ‘the present moment would provide a splendid opportunity for a Russian coup de main on Constantinople’.18

  Ambassador Nelidov did, indeed, return to St Petersburg two months later. There he sought to win the backing of the young Tsar Nicholas II for a project he had advocated for the past four years—a surprise naval assault on the Bosphorus, with troops landing at Kilyos, Sariyer and Büyükdere for a lightning advance on the Golden Horn. Nelidov argued that Russia’s traditional enemies on the Straits would not dare support the Sultan at such a time. ‘Turn the Bosphorus into a Russian Gibraltar’, he urged a Crown Council. Momentarily Tsar Nicholas was attracted by the thought of Russian troops dominating the Straits ‘for ever’. But Nicholas’s closest advisers were more interested in the Far East; they encouraged him to put the Near East ‘on ice’. The whole episode intrigued London, although it caused no adjustment of policies. Intelligence reports from Odessa kept the Foreign Office well informed of Russian plans and troop movements, but Salisbury, who had discussed the Eastern Question with Nicholas II at Balmoral in September, rightly discounted any precipitate Russian action. The chief consequence of Nelidov’s flurry of activity that winter was to weaken the collective weight of coercion pressing the Sultan towards reform. Despite their deep mistrust of one another the ambassadors in Constantinople, responding to a British initiative, began six weeks of discussion at the end of December 1896, and by mid-February had completed a comprehensive programme of reforms for presentation to Abdulhamid. But there was no reason for the Sultan to bow to what he might, quite legitimately, regard as yet another instance of ‘outside interference’.19

  He could, too, by now cite the last series of reforms imposed upon him as a failure. Although the Cretans had accepted the settlement proposed in August, there were frequent clashes between Christians and Muslims on the island during the winter months, and early in February 1897 the Greek consul in Khania telegraphed to Athens, insisting that a massacre of Orthodox families was imminent, a claim never substantiated. In the mountains a committee of Cretan revolutionaries proclaimed the island absorbed into the kingdom of the Hellenes, and on 11 February a flotilla of torpedo boats commanded by the Greek king’s second son, Prince George, sailed from Salamis to take possession of the island. Hasty diplomatic activity, including strong pressure from the Tsar, induced the Greek king to summon the flotilla home again two days later. No restraining orders from their sovereign could check the Ethnike Hetairia, however. Fifteen hundred armed volunteers embarked at Piraeus and sailed for Crete, determined to emulate the achievements of Garibaldi’s Thousand redshirts in Sicily, the patriots who in 1860 made possible the speedy unification of Italy. Further north, armed bands of irregulars made provocative raids across the frontier into Thessaly.

  Urgent appeals to the King and Queen of the Hellenes from their relatives in Western Europe and Russia failed to halt the drift towards war. Philhellene Liberals from Britain, in Athens that spring, also urged caution, for it was assumed that, with reservists, the Sultan could eventually put an army of a million men into the field. Their efforts failed. Canon MacColl, a persistent campaigner for the Christian nationalities under Ottoman rule, was told by the King of the Hellenes that, in the case of war, the Greeks would rise against their Turkish oppressors throughout the Sultan’s empire; other nationalities would follow the Greek lead. In exasperation at the activity of the ‘brigands’, Sultan Abdulhamid declared war on Greece in the second week of April. No wave of insurrection shook the fabric of his empire.20

  The mobilization plans perfected by General von der Goltz worked efficiently. An initial thrust by the Greek army on the Meluna Pass was halted by superior numbers of Turks based on Ellasona. Soon the Ottoman Army was advancing on Greek field headquarters in Larissa. ‘In a few minutes the Army, from an organized and disciplined unity, was transformed into a seething disorganized mass of fugitives that sped helter-skelter across the plain, back to Larissa, a distance of almost forty miles,’ Prince Nicholas wrote many years later, recalling his baptism of fire as commander of an artillery battery on 23 April, the fourth day of the war.21 The Greeks rallied sufficiently to halt the invasion short of Thermopylae, while General Smolensky checked the Ottoman incursion in a valiant defensive battle at Valestino. But after thirty days of fighting King George I of the Hellenes reluctantly accepted an armistice, obtained from the Ottoman commanders through Russian mediation. All Greek combatants were withdrawn from Crete, which was policed by an international force drawn from the navies of Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy and Russia. Across the main battle zone on the plains of Farsala and in Epirus an uneasy cease-fire was imposed while the ambassadors sought to improvise a peace settlement.

  The Ottoman victory raised the prestige of the Sultan and the expectations of the Porte. In London, however, Salisbury was adamant that there must be no handing back of Christian towns to Ottoman rule; and he believed that the Tsar, as the greatest of Orthodox sovereigns, shared this conviction. Four months previously Salisbury had raised the possibility of a joint naval demonstration at the Straits with the Austro-Hungarian ambassador, only to be rebuffed in Vienna. Now he was willing to propose to Britain’s traditional rival on the Straits collective naval coercion of the Porte. A telegram sent to Sir Nicholas O’Conor, the ambassador in St Petersburg, as the peace talks were beginning, showed Salisbury’s belief that Abdulhamid, despite the victory of his army in the field, must accept a settlement dictated by Europe in concert:

  If the Sultan remains obstinate in demanding the retrocession of Thessaly, the matter will require the most serious consideration of the Powers . . . No means of coercing him by land exist except at the cost of a difficult and extensive campaign. Very easy means exist of coercing him by sea . . . It is time for England and Russia to consider whether it is not possible for them to devise some form of agreement which shall enable them, in company with any other Powers who may wish to co-operate, to send a limited number of ships to anchor before Yildiz.22

  No such naval demonstration was attempted, for the Russians were convinced—rightly—that Abdulhamid would treat the Greeks leniently, thereby ruling out the need for coercion. The Salisbury Plan is of interest as a historical might-have-been, a sign that he had abandoned the traditional policy of maintaining the Ottoman Empire as a barrier against Russian expansion into the Mediterranean. Henceforth the Ottomans would have either to stand on their own, using army and Caliphate to concentrate on the Asian mission of the dynasty, or find from among the European Powers another natural ally. The success of German arms in the Thirty-Day War left little doubt in which direction Abdulhamid would turn for foreign support.

  First, however, a peace was patched up in the Balkans. Greece, close to bankruptcy, had to pay an indemnity to the Ottoman Empire and allow the free migration of Muslims to find refuge in Anatolia. There was no major redrawing of national boundaries: the Greeks retained Thessaly, apart from some twenty villages retroceded in a ‘rationalization’ of the frontier between Mount Ossa and the foothills of the Pindus. Genuine autonomy was established in Crete, the island remaining under Ottoman suzerainty but with a Christian Governor nominated by the Sultan after consultation with Athens. In September 1898 the last Ottoman troops were withdrawn from the island, after an affray near Khania in which the soldiery killed many Greek Christians and eight British marines. Two months later Prince George of Greece was appointed High Commissi
oner in Crete, where he served as his father’s special representative for eight years. Russian, British, French and Italian troops occupied the chief towns—an early and successful experiment in international policing of a troubled region.23

  Outwardly the Ottoman hold on Macedonia seemed strengthened by the defeat of the Greeks in the Thirty-Day War. Ethnike Hetairia subversion was doused, even if anti-Ottoman resentment smouldered on. Other Balkan states, ready to stake a claim to parts of Macedonia had the Ottoman army faltered, stood aside and for two or three years there was relative calm in the province. Yet, potentially, Macedonia remained a more dangerous problem than either Crete or Armenia, for its mixture of peoples attracted interference from neighbouring governments. Greeks might constitute the most literate and articulate Christian minority in the province as a whole, but both they and the genuine Turks were heavily outnumbered by Southern Slavs, susceptible to propaganda from Bulgaria or Serbia, while there was also a great concentration of Jews in Salonika itself, and in several districts a Kutzo-Vlach minority, geographically scattered and only occasionally remembered by their kinsfolk in Bucharest. British consular reports stressed the threat from the Bulgarian terrorist secret society IMRO (Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization), active from 1893 onwards, although the Sultan was able to exploit IMRO’s rivalry with the rabidly Bulgar-nationalist ‘Supremists’ (alias EMRO), who were controlled directly from Sofia. Warmest champions of Abdulhamid’s sovereignty were the Muslim Albanians; their resentment of foreign interference and Christian proselytizing was so strong that, early in 1899, they held a meeting of clan notables at Ipek (now Pec, in Montenegro) where they agreed to set up an Albanian League, pledged to defend the Sultan’s lands and uphold the Caliph’s authority against the Infidel.