The Turkish Empire, its Growth and Decay

Abdul Aziz, who succeeded his brother and reigned for fifteen years, was physically one of the finest of his race. He was majestic in appearance. His mien was gracious. He was every inch a Sultan. But this was about all that could be said for him. His mind was vacuous. His education had been neglected. He had spent many years in forced seclusion, but had secretly intrigued with the more fanatical party in the State against his brother, and had raised hopes that on coming to the throne he would reverse the measures of reform, such as they were, which his two predecessors had initiated. But he belied these expectations for a time. On his accession he issued a proclamation announcing his intention to follow his two predecessors in the path of reform. He promised to economize the resources of the State and to reduce the vast expenditure of the palace. He pensioned off the multitudes of concubines of his brother, and gave out that he meant to content himself with the most modest harem. But these proved to be no more than good intentions, which only paved the way to very opposite measures. Before long his own retinue of women was increased to nine hundred, and the number of eunuchs in his palace to three thousand. His extravagance soon emulated that of his brother. His reign was one of external peace, which afforded full opportunity for giving effect to the reforms promised by his brother and registered by the treaty of Paris. Nothing was ever done. The firman proved to be a dead letter. His ministers cared no more than himself for reforms. Successive British Ambassadors made no serious efforts in this direction. Indeed, they were precluded by the treaty of Paris from any exclusive pressure on the Porte, without the support of all the other Powers.

The reign was chiefly conspicuous for the enormous borrowings of money in London and Paris by the Porte, following on the bad example set by Abdul Mehzid. The debt was rapidly increased by Abdul Aziz till it reached a total of nearly two hundred millions sterling. It does not appear that the accruing interest on this great debt was ever paid out of the revenues of the Empire. Fresh loans were continually raised, out of which the accumulated interest on previous loans was provided. Huge commissions to financiers who brought out the loans, and bribes to pashas for consenting to their issue, accounted for another large part of the borrowed money. What remained was mainly devoted by the Sultan to new palaces and to extravagances of his harem. This merry game went on as long as credulous people in Western Europe could be induced to continue lending. But the credit of the Turkish Empire was exhausted in 1874. A repudiation of half of the interest was then announced, and in the following year the remaining half was repudiated. This did much to weaken the interest of Western Europe in the Turkish cause. Eventually a composition was arrived at with the creditors of the State. An International Commission was appointed, in whom certain revenues of the State were vested, out of which the interest of a greatly reduced total of the original debt was to be paid. The principle of foreign control over the finance of the Empire was thus introduced.

The Russian Government during this reign, by its skilful diplomacy, backed by threats of force, recovered much of its old influence at the Porte, and its ambassador, General Ignatief, began to dominate its councils and to nominate its Grand Viziers. Three events during the period showed the gradual downward course of the Empire. In 1867 the two Danubian principalities succeeded in accomplishing their long-desired object of uniting together in a single State, thenceforth known as Roumania; and in 1868 Prince Charles of Hohenzollern was elected, and was invested by the Sultan as the hereditary ruler of this new State. The union of the two provinces into a single State practically secured independence to it, while the connection of its ruler with the reigning family of Prussia marked the advent of that Power into the political system of the Christian States founded on the débris of the Turkish Empire in Europe, and was the first of many important alliances of which we now see the intent and result. Serbia also made an important advance to independence. In 1867 the Turkish garrison in Belgrade, the occupation of which had been confirmed by the treaty of Paris, was withdrawn by the Porte. These two events were the result of pressure of the ambassadors of the Great Powers, who were anxious to minimize the causes of friction to the Porte, which did not add to its real strength.

Another important event was the repudiation by Russia on October 31, 1870, during the Franco-German War, of the clause in the treaty of Paris of 1856 which interdicted the Black Sea to Russian and Turkish vessels of war, and forbade to both Powers the creation or maintenance of naval arsenals on the coasts of that sea. We now know that Prince Bismarck, on behalf of Prussia, secured the neutrality of Russia in the war with France, in 1870, by promising to support this repudiation by the Czar of his treaty obligation. Complaint has not unfrequently been made of the refusal or neglect of the British Government, of which Mr. Gladstone was then the head, to insist on the maintenance of this treaty by Russia, even at the risk of war. But the Porte, in whose interest the provision had been framed by the Congress of Paris, and which was primarily concerned in its maintenance, showed no desire or intention to make its breach by Russia a casus belli, and it would have been sheer madness for England, either with or without Turkey, to have taken up the challenge of the Czar. A humiliating restriction such as this on the sovereign rights of a great country was obviously of a temporary character, and could not, in the nature of things, be a permanent arrangement. It had served its purpose by giving to the Porte a respite of fourteen years from naval attack by Russia. Lord Palmerston, who was Prime Minister in England when the treaty was made, had himself put on record the opinion that the enforced neutrality of the Black Sea might be expected to last for fifteen years. It is to be noted that some years would necessarily elapse after the repudiation of the treaty before a Russian fleet could be created in the Black Sea and before Sebastopol could be restored as a naval base. In point of fact, in the war, which was soon to break out between Russia and Turkey, in 1877, the latter Power had virtual command of the Black Sea, and the Russian army which crossed the Balkans and advanced to the vicinity of Constantinople did so without the support of a naval force in the Black Sea, as had been the case in 1829.

Another event also occurred in 1870, the significance of which was not fully appreciated at the time. Previous to that year the Christian Slav populations of the Balkans, such as the Bulgarians, Bosnians, and others, were under the spiritual jurisdiction of the Greek Ecumenical Patriarch and were regarded as Greeks. The ancient history of Bulgaria and its claims to a distinct nationality appear to have been forgotten or ignored by politicians interested in the Eastern question. On March 10, 1870, Abdul Aziz, under pressure from Russia, backed by its able ambassador, General Ignatief, issued a firman recognizing the separate existence of Bulgaria, and creating for it a national Church independent of the Greek Church, though differing in no important respect in point of doctrine or ritual. This laid the foundation for a new nationality in the Balkans. Bulgaria, long forgotten, emerged from obscurity and came to the front as a competitor of the Greeks. The importance of this will be appreciated later, when we come to the rivalry of these races for the débris of the Ottoman Empire in Europe.

In 1876 a bloodless revolution took place in Constantinople. A new ministry was forced upon Abdul Aziz, of which Midhat Pasha – one of the few genuine and convinced reformers among the leading Turks – was a member. They decided to depose the Sultan. They obtained a fetva from the Mufti justifying this on the ground of his incapacity and extravagance. No single hand was raised in his favour. After a vain protest, he submitted to his fate, and was removed from his palace to another building destined to be his prison. Four days later he was found dead there, and nineteen physicians of the city, including men of all nationalities, testified that Abdul Aziz died by his own hand.

XXI

ABDUL HAMID II

1876-1909

On the deposition of Abdul Aziz, his nephew, the eldest son of Abdul Mehzid, much against his will, was proclaimed as Sultan, under the title of Murad V. His feeble mind, reduced to a nullity by long seclusion in the Cage, and by the habit of intemperance, was completely unhinged by this unexpected elevation, and after a few weeks – on August 31, 1876 – it became necessary for the committee of ministers who had set him on the throne to depose him in favour of the next heir. His brother, Abdul Hamid II, held the Sultanate for thirty-three years, and is still alive, in the custody of another brother, the present Sultan, after being deposed, in his turn, in 1909.

Abdul Hamid proved to be the most mean, cunning, untrustworthy, and cruel intriguer of the long dynasty of Othman. His mother was an Armenian. He was destitute of physical courage. He lived in constant fear of plots and assassination, and in suspicion of every one about him. He trusted no one, least of all his ministers. He allowed no consultations between them. If he heard that two of them had met in private, his suspicions were aroused and they were called to account. He employed a huge army of spies, who reported to him directly and daily as to the doings of his ministers, of the ambassadors, and of any one else of importance. They fed him with reports, often false, on which he founded his actions. Plots were invented in order to induce him to consent to measures which otherwise he would not have sanctioned. He claimed and exercised the right of secret assassination of his foes or suspected foes. No natives of Turkey were safe. They might disappear at any moment, as so many thousands had done by the order of the Sultan, through some secret agent, either to death or exile. This was not so much from pure wickedness of heart as from fear of being assassinated himself, and the belief that his safety lay in exterminating his enemies before they had the chance of maturing their plans against himself. The ambassadors of foreign Powers had little influence with him, except so far as they were able to threaten the use of armed force, when, sooner than risk war, he gave way. He showed great cunning in playing off one ambassador against another, and was an adept in all the meanest intrigues of diplomacy.

Abdul Hamid’s life was one of incessant labour. He devoted himself most assiduously to the work of his great office. Whatever his demerits, he was absolute master of his ministers and of his State. There never was a more centralized and meticulous despotism. As he trusted no one, he was overwhelmed by most trivial details and graver questions were neglected. He could not, indeed, administer the vast affairs of his Empire without information or advice from others, but no one knew from day to day who was the person on whose advice the Sultan overruled his ostensible ministers, whether a favourite lady of his harem, or a eunuch, or some fanatical dervish, or an astrologer, or a spy. There was constant confusion in the State, arising from antagonism between the officials of the Porte and the minions of the palace.

Outwardly, Abdul Hamid had the manners of a gentleman, but inwardly he was as mean a villain as could be found in the purlieus of his capital. He was avaricious to an extreme, and though his expenditure was most lavish and his charities wide, he amassed immense wealth, which he invested secretly through German bankers against the rainy day which he expected. When it came and he was deposed, amid universal execration and loathing, his life was spared in the hope mainly of extracting from him these secret investments. He was not above receiving bribes himself, on a great scale, from financiers in search of concessions. He did nothing to check the chief evil of Turkish rule – the sale of offices and the necessity for officials to recoup themselves for their outlay by local exactions. Though he was not without some instincts for good government, and was free from any fanaticism, his system was such that everything went to the bad in his reign, and that many years of peace, after the treaty of Berlin, were attended by no improvement in the condition of his people, but the reverse. The result of his policy was that his Empire suffered a greater dismemberment than had been the bad fortune of any of his predecessors, and as he monopolized power, he must be held mainly responsible for its evil results.

At the very outset of his reign Abdul Hamid was confronted with most serious questions affecting the integrity of his Empire. In 1875 an outbreak had occurred in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the result not merely of misgovernment by the Turkish pashas and officials, their rapacity and exactions, and of the system of farming the taxes, but of a vicious agrarian system. The great majority of landowners, though of the same Slav race as the rayas, the cultivators of the soil, were Moslems by religion. Their forbears had become so when the Ottomans conquered their State in order to save their property. They were as rapacious and fanatical as any landowners of Turkish race in any part of the Empire. No Christians were employed in the administration of these provinces. The evidence of the Christian rayas was not admitted in the courts of law. Justice or injustice could only be obtained by bribes. The police and other officials lived by extorting money from those whom it was their duty to defend.

The bad harvest of 1874 was the immediate cause of the outbreak, for the farmers of the taxes refused to make any concessions. It was, in the first instance, directed rather against the Moslem landowners and the local Turkish officials than against the Sultan, but it rapidly developed into a general insurrection against the Sultan’s government. Every effort was made by Austria and Russia to localize it and to induce the Porte to make concessions. Count Andrassy, the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister, drew up a scheme for the pacification of the two provinces. It proposed that the system of farming the taxes should be abolished, that the taxes raised in the provinces should be expended locally for their benefit, that complete religious equality should be established, and that a mixed commission should be appointed to supervise the carrying out of these reforms. The scheme was agreed to by Russia, Great Britain, and the other Powers, and was presented to the Sultan, who acquiesced in it. But it proved, like other promises of reform in Turkey, to be a dead letter. Not a single step was taken to give effect to any part of it. The rebellion in the two provinces continued. The insurgents increased their demands. They insisted that one-third of the land should be given up to the rayas. The movement soon extended to Bulgaria, which was seething with disaffection.

On April 21, 1876, an outbreak of Bulgarians occurred on the southern slopes of the Rhodope Mountains, of which Batak was the centre. It was put down without difficulty by a small Turkish force sent from Constantinople, under Achmet Agha, with little loss of life to the troops engaged, but with relentless cruelty, not only to the actual insurgents who surrendered on promise of life, but to the whole population of the district. Bands of Bashi-Bazouks, consisting of Tartars from the Crimea who had been planted in Bulgaria, were let loose on them. Indiscriminate murders, rapes, and rapine took place. Sixty villages were burnt. Twelve hundred persons, mostly women and children, took refuge in a church at Batak and were there burnt alive. In all about twelve thousand persons perished in these brutal reprisals. Achmet Agha received a high decoration from the Sultan for this performance. There was nothing new in this method of dealing with an outbreak by the Porte. It was in accord with its traditional system and policy to wreak vengeance on those revolting by orgies of cruelty, which would strike terror among subject races and act as a warning to them in the future.

What was new in the case of the Bulgarians in 1876, and was fraught with misfortune to the Turkish cause, was that full and graphic accounts of the horrors committed at Batak, written by Mr. Edwin Pears (now Sir Edwin), the correspondent at Constantinople of the Daily News, appeared in the columns of that paper. They produced a profound impression on public opinion in England. Discredit was thrown on the story in the House of Commons by Mr. Disraeli, the Prime Minister, but it was fully confirmed by Mr. MacGahan, another correspondent of the same paper, who visited the district, and later by Mr. Walter Baring, a member of the British Embassy at Constantinople, who, by the direction of the Government, made full personal inquiries on the spot. He described what had taken place as “perhaps the most heinous crime that has stained the history of the present century.”

It was also unfortunate for the Turks that Mr. Gladstone, the only survivor in the House of Commons of the British statesmen responsible for the Crimean War, who had recently retired from the leadership of the Liberal party, was fired by the description of these horrors in Bulgaria to emerge from his retirement and to take up the cause of the Christian population of European Turkey, for which he held that the treaty of Paris had made his country responsible.

Meanwhile the horrors at Batak had also aroused the indignation of Russia and the fears of Austria. A fanatical outbreak of Moslems at Salonika resulted in the murder of the Consuls of France and Germany. Serbia and Montenegro, impelled by sympathy for their fellow Slavs in Bosnia, declared war against Turkey. A Turkish force defeated the Serbians, who appealed to Russia for assistance. At this stage another effort was made by Russia and Austria, supported by Germany, to avert a general conflagration, and a scheme was embodied in what was known as the Berlin Memorandum for compelling the Porte to carry out the reforms which it had admitted to be necessary. The British Government, however, very curtly refused to be a party to the scheme, on the ground that they had not been consulted in framing it and did not believe in its success. About this time also the British fleet in the Mediterranean was ordered to Besika Bay, a step taken avowedly for the purpose of protecting British subjects in the turmoil which had arisen, but which seemed to the Porte to indicate an intention to support them against the demands of the other Powers.

Mr. Gladstone, fearing that these actions indicated the intention of the British Government to withdraw from the concert of Europe and to renew the separate policy which had led to the Crimean War, made a vehement attack on it in the House of Commons for refusing to agree to the Berlin Memorandum. Later, in September 1876, he published his well-known pamphlet on “the Bulgarian Horrors,” in which, with passionate language, he dwelt at length on the massacres at Batak and denounced the Turkish Government. He protested that he could no longer bear his share of responsibility for the Crimean War. Otherwise he might be accused of “moral complicity in the basest and blackest outrages upon record in that century.”

Those [he wrote] who opposed the Crimean War are especially bound to remember that the treaty of Paris made Europe as a whole, and not Russia alone, responsible for the integrity and independence of the Ottoman Empire, which had given this licence to Turkish officers to rob, murder, and ravish in Bulgaria… As an old servant of the Crown and State, I entreat my countrymen, upon whom far more than perhaps any other people of Europe it depends, to require and insist that our Government, which has been working in one direction, shall work in the other, and shall apply all its vigour, in common with the other States of Europe, in obtaining the extinction of the Turkish executive power in Bulgaria. Let the Turks now carry away their abuses in the only possible manner, namely, by carrying off themselves. Their zapties and their mudirs, their bimbashis and their yuzbashis, their kaimakans and their pashas, one and all, bag and baggage, shall, I hope, clear out from the province they have desolated and profaned.42

The pamphlet produced an immediate and profound effect on public opinion in Great Britain. It was followed up by speeches of the same force and eloquence on the part of the veteran statesman. Meetings took place in every part of the country, at which sympathy was expressed for the Christian populations of Turkey. The Turks were denounced for their cruelties and bad government. Resolutions were unanimously passed in accord with the policy recommended by Mr. Gladstone. Lord Stratford himself expressed sympathy with the movement, differing only in this from Mr. Gladstone, that England, in his view, should exert its influence not only for the Bulgarians, but for all the oppressed subject races in Turkey. Many of the most cultivated men in England joined in the movement quite irrespective of party politics.

Mr. Disraeli, who was created Earl of Beaconsfield in the course of these events, on his retirement from the House of Commons, showed great courage and persistence in resisting the movement. His sympathies lay wholly in the opposite direction. His Eastern policy was in accord with that of the previous generation of statesmen, such as Palmerston, and, indeed, Gladstone himself in his earlier stage of opinion, who believed that the maintenance of the Turkish Empire was essential to the integrity of the British Empire. He saw no reason for change. He dreaded the further advance of Russia. He did not believe in the honesty of the professions of its Emperor. He enforced his views at a public meeting at Aylesbury on September 20th, and endeavoured to stem the movement. He scoffed at the Bulgarian horrors. He declared the perpetrators of them were not so bad as those who made them the subject of agitation for their political purposes. He was evidently prepared to support the Turks against any invasion of their country by Russia, and to renew the policy of the Crimean War. But it was in vain.

Though the agitation promoted by Mr. Gladstone did not result in inducing the Government to join the other Powers in compelling the Turkish Government to concede autonomy to its Christian provinces, or to carry out reforms, it had two effects of great historical importance, which must be our justification for referring to the subject. It made impossible the renewal of the policy of the Crimean War – the armed support by Great Britain to the Turks against an invasion by Russia on behalf of the Christian population of the Balkans. It paralysed the hands of those, like Lord Beaconsfield, who desired to support the Turks and the status quo. On the other hand, it doubtless stimulated Russia to armed intervention, by making it clear that there would be no resistance on the part of Great Britain. Lord Beaconsfield’s Cabinet was divided on the subject. A majority of its members evidently concurred with Lord Derby, the Foreign Secretary, in opposition to war with Russia on behalf of Turkey.

On September 21st, the day after Lord Beaconsfield had delivered his fiery pro-Turkish speech at Aylesbury, Lord Derby, on behalf of the Government, in a despatch to the Ambassador at Constantinople, directed him to inform the Porte that the atrocious crimes of the Turkish authorities and troops in Bulgaria had aroused the righteous indignation of the British people, and that Great Britain, as signatory to the treaty of Paris, could not be indifferent to them. He demanded that examples should be made of the perpetrators of these crimes.

On October 30th Lord Derby further informed the Russian Government, through the ambassador at St. Petersburg, that, however strong the feeling in England against the Turkish cruelties, it would be superseded by a very different sentiment if it were believed that Constantinople was threatened, or that British interests in the Suez Canal were in any danger. This message to the Emperor could only be interpreted as meaning that the British Government would not interfere with any action that Russia might take against Turkey, provided it did not involve the conquest of Constantinople or endanger British interests in Egypt. It was evidently so understood by the Emperor, for immediately on receipt of the above despatch, on November 2nd, he gave his word of honour to the British Ambassador that he had no designs on Constantinople and no intentions whatever to annex Bulgaria.