The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire

by Alan Palmer

  The French and Italians never felt so strongly committed to the Sèvres settlement and the maintenance of the Sultan’s government as did the British; and in March both France and Italy concluded agreements of their own with Kemal’s representatives. Ironically, these understandings were reached in London, where Curzon had invited representatives of both the Sultan’s government and the Nationalists in Ankara to meet the three Allied Powers and discuss possible modifications of the Treaty. By now the British were wavering in their support of the Greeks, for Venizelos was no longer in office and the sudden death of the young King Alexander of the Hellenes had brought back to the throne his father, King Constantine I, whom the British and French had forced into exile in 1917 as an alleged ‘pro-German’. Yet, though Lloyd George mistrusted Constantine, he was too heavily committed to the Anatolian venture to follow the example of the French and Italians.26

  More and more the Sultan was being forced to appear to be a British puppet, a state of servility the Foreign Office had never wanted; better far that he should be seen to reign as an enlightened autocrat. Soon after his arrival in Constantinople, Sir Horace Rumbold set out on the traditional task of strengthening the Ottoman government through the Sultanate; this, as Rumbold telegraphed to Curzon, involved the use of ‘the Sultan as corner-stone. . . . giving him definite and whole-hearted assistance with a view to reconstruction of administration on sound financial basis’.27 But Mehmed VI Vahideddin was too brittle for such a task. Rumbold’s first audience with the Sultan left the High Commissioner puzzled and disappointed. ‘He remained absolutely silent for a considerable time, his mouth twitching nervously,’ reported Rumbold to King George V a week later.28

  There were moments when Mehmed impressed foreign officers in his capital by a sudden assertion of the Islamic sovereignty he had inherited: towards the end of his life General Tim Harington recalled how, on the holiest night of Ramadan, the Leilat al-Kadir, the Sultan arrived at the Ayasofya mosque resplendent on a white horse, while ten thousand worshippers bent in prayer beneath the vast dome of the old basilica.29 But these occasions were rare. For much of September 1921, a critical period in the war between Kemal’s Nationalists and the Greeks, no minister or foreign diplomat could transact business with the Sultan. On the first of the month, so Mehmed’s friend Šerif Ali Hayder recalls, ‘he had taken a new wife, who so demanded his attention that he refused to see any visitors’. Mehmed was sixty; his ‘new wife’, Nevzad, was nineteen.30

  Not surprisingly, Rumbold’s dispatches to London paid increasingly detailed attention to the qualities of the Nationalist leaders, even if he could not travel to Ankara to meet them. Both the High Commissioner and the military commander were impressed by reports of the resilient spirit of the Turks in Anatolia. Harington irritated Lloyd George by reiterating his conviction that, though the Greek army was impressive during an offensive, there would be little resistance if Kemal once successfully broke the Greek lines. As early as the first week in April 1921 Harington was assessing the prospects of holding the approaches to Üsküdar and the Sea of Marmara, should the Kemalists pursue the Greeks back down the railway route from Eskisehir to Haydarpaša.31

  Four months later a twenty-two-day battle was fought along the river Sakarya, barely fifty miles from Ankara. Rumbold hoped the Greeks and Kemalists would exhaust each other, allowing the British and the Sultan to come forward as mediators. The Greeks were indeed exhausted, but not the Turks, who knew the terrain and the climate. Over the following winter Kemal was able to draw on new resources and create a formidable army out of the desperate defenders who had triumphed along the Sakarya. On 26 August 1922 Kemal launched, in person, a surprise offensive against Greek positions in the mountains, 200 miles inland from Smyrna. General Harington’s warnings to London were justified. Within a fortnight Kemal had gained an outright victory. By 13 September a wall of fire two miles long was consuming the Greek and Armenian quarters of Smyrna. Nearly a quarter of a million Christians and Jews sought refuge aboard the foreign warships which lay off the burning city.32

  The magnitude of Kemal’s victory left the fate of the Ottomans in his hands. His immediate objectives were clear: the replacement of the Treaty of Sèvres by a new settlement which would restore to the Turkish people the cities they knew as Istanbul and Edirne. His troops pressed forward towards the Dardanelles, entering a neutral zone established by the Treaty of Sèvres, some fifty miles in depth and based upon Çanakkale, ‘Chanak’ as it was generally called during these critical weeks. The flags of the three Allies—Great Britain, France and Italy—flew over the quay at Chanak, but in reality only a token British force was deployed around the town. A single infantry battalion, a squadron of Hussars, and an artillery battery protected Britain’s foothold in Asia Minor, the twelve-mile deep ‘Zone of the Straits’, although this meagre garrison was supported by three battleships in the Narrows of the Dardanelles. Within ten days of the great fire of Smyrna, British and Turkish troops were ominously facing each other, entrenched behind barbed wire close to the excavations of ancient Troy. Throughout the third and fourth weeks of September 1922 there were alarmist headlines in the British press. War between Great Britain and Kemalist Turkey seemed imminent.33

  It was avoided by the common sense and moderation of General Tim Harington and Sir Horace Rumbold. Harington declined to present an ultimatum from Lloyd George’s cabinet to the Nationalists, as he thought it would ‘put a match’ to the crisis; and Rumbold induced Turkish delegates to come to Mudanya and discuss there the future of the Straits and eastern Thrace, and the need for the Kemalists to respect the Neutral Zone. After ten days of talks at Mudanya a formal convention was signed on 11 October, providing for the withdrawal of Kemal’s troops from the Neutral Zone and leaving the Allies in occupation of Constantinople, Chanak and the Gallipoli peninsula, pending the negotiation of a new peace treaty to replace Sèvres. At first it was thought the negotiations would be held in Venice, but Italy was convulsed by the political crisis which, at the end of October, brought Mussolini to power and inaugurated the ‘Fascist Era’. It was agreed instead that the peace conference would meet at Lausanne.34

  During the talks at Mudanya, there was still technically an imperial sovereign of the Ottoman Empire. But by now the Sultan’s dominions had contracted to what Mehmed VI Vahideddin could see about him as he strolled around his Yildiz parkland. Mustafa Kemal, ever a realist, regarded the Sultanate as an anachronistic institution, to be swept away with the autumn leaves. But, though no member of the Nationalist inner circle wished to keep Vahideddin on the throne, there were several who still respected the traditions of Sultanate and Caliphate. They feared that any drastic constitutional change favouring the growth of republicanism would alienate the Faithful; nowhere in the world was there, in 1922, an Islamic republic. For the moment, Kemal was prepared not to force the issue. He appointed his close friend Colonel Refet Pasha as Military Governor of eastern Thrace, with his headquarters in Stamboul. On 19 October Refet crossed the Sea of Marmara from Mudanya in the steamer Gulnihal and landed at the quay of Eminonü, beside the Galata Bridge. Festooned arches covered the narrower streets of Stamboul, flags flew from the minarets, banners proclaimed the glory of the Turkish people, reborn by the victories of Ghazi Mustafa Kemal’s army. Everywhere the triumph of the Turkish Revolution was celebrated for the next three days.35

  Everywhere, that is, except at Yildiz. Refet made it clear that he did not acknowledge the Sultan’s government, although he had respect for the ‘high office of the Caliphate’. When he was received in audience by Mehmed VI he urged him to abdicate. The Sultan, as ever, played for time. His fate was settled by the insistence of the Allies on observing diplomatic protocol; they invited to the Lausanne Conference a delegation from the Grand National Assembly in Ankara, and a delegation from the Sublime Porte. This misguided courtesy so angered the deputies at Ankara that Kemal drafted a motion calling on the Assembly to abolish the Sultanate. An Ottoman prince would hold office as Caliph; th
e secularist Kemal did not wish to offend the ‘Holy Men’ who supported him. But henceforth temporal power would be vested in the sovereignty of the Turkish people.36

  The Grand National Assembly was not a supine institution. When the motion was debated on 1 November, many members were uneasy. The breach with the past was too drastic. It was Kemal himself who made the decisive speech:

  Gentlemen, sovereignty and Sultanate are not given to anyone by anyone because scholarship proves that they should be, or through discussion or debate. Sovereignty and Sultanate are taken by strength, by power, and by force. It was by force that the sons of Osman seized the sovereignty and Sultanate of the Turkish nation; they have maintained this usurpation for six centuries. Now the Turkish nation has rebelled, has put a stop to these usurpers, and has effectively taken sovereignty and Sultanate into its own hands. This is an accomplished fact. The question under discussion is not whether or not we should leave Sultanate and sovereignty to the nation. That is already an accomplished fact—the question is merely how to give expressionto it.37

  Five years later Kemal recalled how ‘finally the chairman put the motion to the vote and announced that it had been unanimously accepted. Only one opposing voice was heard saying “I am against it” . . . In this way, gentlemen, the final obsequies of the decline and fall of the Ottoman Sultanate were completed.’

  On 4 November Tevfik surrendered to the Sultan-Caliph the seals of office of the last Government of the Ottoman Empire; and on the following Friday Mehmed VI heard the muezzin call for prayers for him as Caliph, no longer as sovereign too. The experience unnerved him; he had no wish to be in Constantinople for another Friday selamlik. With most of his personal suite deserting him, he turned for help to General Harington: ‘Considering my life in danger in Constantinople, I take refuge with the British Government and request my transfer as soon as possible from Constantinople to another place,’ he wrote in a note to the General dated 16 November 1922 and signed, significantly, ‘Mehmed Vahideddin, Caliph of the Mussulmans’.38 Once approval had been telegraphed from London, Harington’s staff perfected elaborate plans for whisking the last of the Sultans secretly away from Yildiz on the following Friday morning, long before the selamlik.

  It was never likely that Mehmed VI would be able to make a dignified departure, worthy of the heir to six centuries of sovereignty. No one, however, could have predicted that his exit would be quite so Chaplinesque.39 The plans were, in themselves, perfect. On Thursday evening Mehmed told his staff he would sleep at the Merasim Kiosk in the Yildiz complex, which was close to a gate adjoining barracks where Harington had quartered the Grenadier Guards. The weather was wet and blustery: on the Friday morning, had they been awake, the spies employed by Refet Pasha to keep watch on the deposed ruler might have thought it curious that a detachment of Grenadiers should have been drilling in the pouring rain, more than an hour before dawn. They might also have found it odd that two ambulances should be waiting on the edge of the parade ground. A party of eleven men emerged through the gate into the Yildiz unobserved; but a Turkish naval officer under Refet’s orders recognized the sexagenarian who was helped into the first of the ambulances, which drove away as soon as the umbrella of its distinguished passenger could be extricated from the door in which it was wedged. Most of the party, and some heavy trunks, went aboard the second ambulance, which left ten minutes later.

  The Turkish naval officer hurriedly threw on some clothes and, still wearing carpet slippers, began running through the rainswept streets towards the Galata Bridge and Refet’s headquarters in Stamboul. He does not seem to have observed the small group waiting on the naval quay near the Dolmabahche, prominent among whom were General Harington and the British chargé d’affaires, Nevile Henderson (who was to be ambassador in Berlin when the Second World War broke out). The second ambulance arrived safely: but, to the dignitaries’ consternation, the first ambulance, with the fallen Sultan aboard, had gone missing. When it eventually appeared, to the relief of Harington and Henderson, the driver explained that a tyre had punctured, and he had been forced to change a wheel in a dark side-street in pouring rain. A naval launch carried the Sultan and his suite with greater dignity out to HMS Malaya, lying with steam up off the Golden Horn. As the launch drew near to the battleship, Mehmed Vahidddin had one final request for General Harington: would he please take care of the five wives left behind at Yildiz, and send them on? By nine o’clock in the morning, while Refet was trying to reassure his distraught agent in the rain-soaked carpet slippers, Malaya was steaming out into the Sea of Marmara. Would His Imperial Majesty be content to sail to Malta, Henderson had asked? No objection was raised. When at noon the muezzin called the faithful to the şelamlik prayers, the battleship was ploughing through heavy seas towards the Dardanelles. Once more ‘the bird had flown’. For this migrant, there would be no return.

  EPILOGUE

  OTTOMANS MORIBUND

  IMPERIAL OTTOMAN SOVEREIGNTY WAS DEAD: THE VESTIGIAL authority of the dynasty was not. It lingered for fifteen months in a changing world, delaying the emergence of the Turkish Republic, as Kemal sought to find a compromise which would have retained a made-to-measure Ottoman caliphate as a symbol of cohesion and spiritual unity in the strictly secularized state which he was creating. This proved to be an impossible objective, at variance with the whole character of Islam.

  As soon as news of Mehmed VI’s flight was confirmed in Ankara, the Minister of Religious Affairs issued a fetva of deposition: Mehmed was accused of abandoning the Caliphate in collusion with Turkey’s enemies on the eve of the opening of the Lausanne conference summoned to revise the peace settlement.1 Next day the Grand National Assembly elected Abdulaziz’s eldest surviving son, Abdulmecid II, to succeed his cousin as Caliph. The new leader of the Faithful was an amiable aesthete in his mid-fifties. Twenty-two years before, he had achieved a unique distinction for an Ottoman prince when one of his paintings was exhibited at the Paris Salon. Politics held no interest for him. He had rejected approaches from Talaat in the summer of 1918 and from Mustafa Kemal two years later. When, on 24 November, he was invested as Caliph, there was no kiliç kuşanmaci out at Eyüp, with all the pomp of sword-girding. George Young, the only British observer of the investiture in the Topkapi Sarayi, thought the ceremony a travesty: ‘a delegation of Angora deputies notifying an elderly dilettante that he has been elected by a majority vote like any Labour leader,’ Young wrote. As for the new Caliph himself, Abdulmecid seemed ‘a portly person in a fez, frock-coat and green ribbon’. Refet Pasha, Kemal’s representative at the investiture, watched Abdulmecid like ‘a sparrow-hawk,’ Young thought: ‘The Caliph has been denied his Sword of Othman, but he has been given his Sword of Damocles’, he commented.2 Perhaps so; but Abdulmecid seemed content with Refet’s role. Despite the traditional Muslim taboo on the artistic representation of living things, he even painted Refet’s portrait.

  The investiture emphasized the anachronistic character of Turkey’s international status during the Lausanne negotiations. Islamic states were basically theocratic: their sovereigns received temporal power from God, reigning thereafter as His trustee on earth; a republic, on the other hand, was a secular institution created by the godless Infidel and as yet unknown in the Islamic world. If the Ottoman Sultanate had ceased to exist, Muslim purists might argue that the head of state was the Caliph, a prince ordained to defend the faith in a community where the business of government was left in other hands; and when the new Caliph adopted an Imperial style of life, signing himself ‘Abdulmecid bin Abdullah Han’ as if to emphasize his Ottoman heredity, the ulema gave their spiritual leader full support, even beyond some of the frontiers of the new Turkey. Traditionally the name of the ruler was invoked each Friday in the allocution at the midday prayers: from the end of November 1922 that religious courtesy was accorded to Caliph Abdulmecid II, not only in Turkish mosques, but in Baghdad and throughout all the former Ottoman vilayets of Iraq. The Caliphate was a supra-national institution; and the
more conservative deputies in the Grand National Assembly argued that its retention gave the new Turkey world status as a leader of Islam. To abolish it would, they declared, ‘be an action totally incompatible with reason, loyalty and national feeling’.3

  Mustafa Kemal had every intention of cultivating nationalist sentiment, but he wished it to be patriotically Turkish in character, rather than Islamic. Under his instructions Ismet Pasha—the later President, Ismet Inönü—sought to convince the British, French and Italian delegates at the Lausanne Conference that the Ankara Government favoured the creation of a homogeneous Turkish national state, which would be both free from outside interference and disinclined to embark on foreign adventures of its own. Those National Assembly deputies who championed the Caliphate therefore threatened to make Ismet’s task more difficult; and it is hardly surprising that the Turkish delegation to the Conference was determined to concentrate on purely secular issues. So, too, by now, were the old wartime Allies. British backing for an Arab caliphate effectively went down with Kitchener, in the wreck of HMS Hampshire, for more knowledgeable specialists in Arab affairs convinced Whitehall that a caliph could never be simply a spiritual leader, like a post-1870 pope (as Kitchener seems to have believed); no imperial Power asserting sovereignty over the Indian subcontinent could welcome the association of Muslim peoples under a single caliph, in whatever country he resided. Throughout the seven months of negotiations at Lausanne, both Ankara and London preferred to ignore the existence of the Caliphate.