The rivalry between the Christian Churches was intensified by the rapid growth in the number of pilgrims to Palestine in the nineteenth century. Railways and steamships made mass travel possible, opening up the region to tour-groups of Catholics from France and Italy and to the devout middle classes of Europe and America. The various Churches vied with one another for influence. They set up missions to support their pilgrims, competed over purchases of land, endowed bishoprics and monasteries, and established schools to convert the Orthodox Arabs (mainly Syrian and Lebanese), the largest but least educated Christian community in the Holy Lands.
‘Within the last two years considerable presents have been sent to Jerusalem to decorate the Church of the Holy Sepulchre by the Russian, French, Neapolitan and Sardinian governments,’ reported William Young, the British consul in Palestine and Syria, to Lord Palmerston at the Foreign Office in 1839.
There are many symptoms of increasing jealousy and inimical feeling among the churches. The petty quarrels that have always existed between the Latin, Greek and Armenian convents were of little moment so long as their differences were settled from time to time by the one giving a larger bribe to the Turkish authorities than the other. But that day passes by, for these countries are now no longer closed against European intrigue in church matters.3
Between 1842 and 1847 there was a flurry of activity in Jerusalem: the Anglicans founded a bishopric; the Austrians set up a Franciscan printing press; the French established a consulate in Jerusalem and pumped money into schools and churches for the Catholics; Pope Pius IX re-established a resident Latin patriarch, the first since the Crusades of the twelfth century; the Greek patriarch returned from Constantinople to tighten his hold on the Orthodox; and the Russians sent an ecclesiastical mission, which led to the foundation of a Russian compound with a hostel, hospital, chapel, school and marketplace to support the large and growing number of Russian pilgrims.
In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the Russian Orthodox Church sent more pilgrims to Jerusalem than any other branch of the Christian faith. Every year up to 15,000 Russian pilgrims would arrive in Jerusalem for the Easter festival, some even making the long trek on foot across Russia and the Caucasus, through Anatolia and Syria. For the Russians, the holy shrines of Palestine were objects of intense and passionate devotion: to make a pilgrimage to them was the highest possible expression of their faith.
In some ways the Russians saw the Holy Lands as an extension of their spiritual motherland. The idea of ‘Holy Russia’ was not contained by any territorial boundaries; it was an empire of the Orthodox with sacred shrines throughout the lands of Eastern Christianity and with the Holy Sepulchre as its mother church. ‘Palestine’, wrote one Russian theologian in the 1840s, ‘is our native land, in which we do not recognize ourselves as foreigners.’4 Centuries of pilgrimage had laid the basis of this claim, establishing a link between the Russian Church and the Holy Places (connected with the life of Christ in Bethlehem, Jerusalem and Nazareth) which many Russians counted more important – the basis of a higher spiritual authority – than the temporal and political sovereignty of the Ottomans in Palestine.
Nothing like this ardour could be found among the Catholics or Protestants, for whom the Holy Places were objects of historical interest and romantic sentiment rather than religious devotion. The travel writer and historian Alexander Kinglake thought that ‘the closest likeness of a pilgrim which the Latin Church could supply was often a mere French tourist with a journal and a theory and a plan of writing a book’. European tourists were repelled by the intense passion of the Orthodox pilgrims, whose strange rituals struck them as ‘barbaric’ and as ‘degrading superstitions’. Martineau refused to go to the Holy Sepulchre to see the washing of the pilgrims’ feet on Good Friday. ‘I could not go to witness mummeries done in the name of Christianity,’ she wrote, ‘compared with which the lowest fetishism on the banks of an African river would have been inoffensive.’ For the same reason, she would not go to the ceremony of the Holy Fire on Easter Saturday, when thousands of Orthodox worshippers squeezed into the Holy Sepulchre to light their torches from the miraculous flames that appeared from the tomb of Christ. Rival groups of Orthodox-Greeks, Bulgarians, Moldavians, Serbians and Russians – would jostle with each other to light their candles first; fights would start; and sometimes worshippers were crushed to death or suffocated in the smoke. Baron Curzon, who witnessed one such scene in 1834, described the ceremony as a ‘scene of disorder and profanation’ in which the pilgrims, ‘almost in a state of nudity, danced about with frantic gestures, yelling and screaming as if they were possessed’.5
It is hardly surprising that a Unitarian such as Martineau or an Anglican like Curzon should have been so hostile to such rituals: demonstrations of religious emotion had long been effaced from the Protestant Church. Like many tourists in the Holy Land, they sensed that they had less in common with the Orthodox pilgrims, whose wild behaviour seemed barely Christian at all, than with the relatively secular Muslims, whose strict reserve and dignity were more in sympathy with their own private forms of quiet prayer. Attitudes like theirs were to influence the formation of Western policies towards Russia in the diplomatic disputes about the Holy Land which would eventually lead to the Crimean War.
Unaware of and indifferent to the importance of the Holy Lands to Russia’s spiritual identity, European commentators saw only a growing Russian menace to the interests of the Western Churches there. In the early 1840s, Young, now the British consul, sent regular reports to the Foreign Office about the steady build-up of ‘Russian agents’ in Jerusalem – their aim being, in his view, to prepare a ‘Russian conquest of the Holy Lands’ through sponsored pilgrimage and purchases of land for Orthodox churches and monasteries. This was certainly a time when the Russian ecclesiastical mission was exerting its influence on the Greek, Armenian and Arab Orthodox communities by financing churches, schools and hostels in Palestine and Syria (an activism resisted by the Foreign Ministry in St Petersburg, which rightly feared that such activities might antagonize the Western powers). Young’s reports about Russia’s conquest plans were increasingly hysterical. ‘The pilgrims of Russia have been heard to speak openly of the period being at hand when this country will be under the Russian government,’ he wrote to Palmerston in 1840. ‘The Russians could in one night during Easter arm 10,000 pilgrims within the walls of Jerusalem. The convents in the city are spacious and, at a trifling expense, might be converted into fortresses.’ British fears of this ‘Russian plan’ accelerated Anglican initiatives, eventually leading to the foundation of the first Anglican church in Jerusalem in 1845.6
But it was the French who were most alarmed by the growing Russian presence in the Holy Lands. According to French Catholics, France had a long historical connection to Palestine going back to the Crusades. In French Catholic opinion, this conferred on France, Europe’s ‘first Catholic nation’, a special mission to protect the faith in the Holy Lands, despite the marked decline of Latin pilgrimage in recent years. ‘We have a heritage to conserve there, an interest to defend,’ declared the Catholic provincial press. ‘Centuries will pass before the Russians shed a fraction of the blood that the French spilled in the Crusades for the Holy Places. The Russians took no part in the Crusades … . The primacy of France among the Christian nations is so well established in the Orient that the Turks call Christian Europe Frankistan, the country of the French.’7
To counteract the growing Russian presence and cement their role as the main protector of the Catholics in Palestine, the French set up a consulate in Jerusalem in 1843 (an outraged Muslim crowd, hostile to the influence of the Western powers, soon tore the godless tricolour from its mast). At Latin services in the Holy Sepulchre and the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem the French consul began to appear in full dress uniform with a large train of officials. For the midnight Christmas Mass in Bethlehem he was accompanied by a large force of infantry furnished by Mehmet Pasha but paid for by France.8
Fights between the Latins and the Orthodox were as common at the Church of the Nativity as they were at the Holy Sepulchre. For years they had squabbled about whether Latin monks should have a key to the main church (of which the Greeks were the guardians) so that they could pass through it to the Chapel of the Manger, which belonged to the Catholics; whether they should have a key to the Grotto of the Nativity, an ancient cave beneath the church thought to be the place where Christ was born; and whether they should be allowed to put into the marble floor of the Grotto, on the supposed location of the Nativity, a silver star adorned with the arms of France and inscribed in Latin: ‘Here Jesus Christ was born of the Virgin Mary’. The star had been placed there by the French in the eighteenth century, but had always been resented as a ‘badge of conquest’ by the Greeks. In 1847 the silver star was stolen; the tools used to wrench it from the marble floor were abandoned at the site. The Latins immediately accused the Greeks of carrying out the crime. Only recently the Greeks had built a wall to prevent the Latin priests from accessing the Grotto, and this had ended in a brawl between the Latin and Greek priests. After the removal of the silver star, the French launched a diplomatic protest to the Porte, the Ottoman government in Constantinople, citing a long-neglected treaty of 1740 which they claimed secured the rights of the Catholics to the Grotto for the upkeep of the silver star. But the Greeks had rival claims based on custom and concessions by the Porte.9 This small conflict over a church key was in fact the start of a diplomatic crisis over the control of the Holy Places that would have profound consequences.
Along with the keys to the church at Bethlehem, the French claimed for the Catholics a right to repair the roof of the Holy Sepulchre, also based on the treaty of 1740. The roof was in urgent need of attention. Most of the lead on one side had been stripped off (the Greeks and the Latins each accusing the other side of having done this). Rain came through the roof and birds flew freely in the church. Under Turkish law, whoever owned the roof of a house was the owner of that house. So the right to carry out the repairs was fiercely disputed by the Latins and the Greeks on the grounds that it would establish them in the eyes of the Turks as the legitimate protectors of the Holy Sepulchre. Against the French, Russia backed the counterclaims of the Orthodox, appealing to the 1774 Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji, signed by the Turks after their defeat by Russia in the war of 1768–74. According to the Russians, the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji had given them a right to represent the interests of the Orthodox in the Ottoman Empire. This was a long way from the truth. The language of the treaty was ambiguous and easily distorted by translations into various languages (the Russians signed the treaty in Russian and Italian, the Turks in Turkish and Italian, and then it was translated by the Russians into French for diplomatic purposes).10 But Russian pressure on the Porte ensured that the Latins would not get their way. The Turks temporized and fudged the issue with conciliatory noises to both sides.
The conflict deepened in May 1851, when Louis-Napoleon appointed his close friend the Marquis Charles de La Valette as ambassador in the Turkish capital. Two and a half years after his election as President of France, Napoleon was still struggling to assert his power over the National Assembly. To strengthen his position he had made a series of concessions to Catholic opinion: in 1849 French troops had returned the Pope to Rome after he had been forced out of the Vatican by revolutionary crowds; and the Falloux Law of 1850 had opened the way to an increase in the number of Catholic-run schools. The appointment of La Valette was another major concession to clerical opinion. The Marquis was a zealous Catholic, a leading figure in the shadowy ‘clerical party’ which was widely viewed as pulling the hidden strings of France’s foreign policy. The influence of this clerical faction was particularly strong on France’s policies towards the Holy Places, where it called for a firm stand against the Orthodox menace. La Valette went well beyond his remit when he took up his position as ambassador. On his way to Constantinople he made an unscheduled stop in Rome to persuade the Pope to support the French claims for the Catholics in the Holy Lands. Installed in Constantinople, he made a point of using aggressive language in his dealings with the Porte – a tactic, he explained, to ‘make the Sultan and his ministers recoil and capitulate’ to French interests. The Catholic press rallied behind La Valette, especially the influential Journal des débats, whose editor was a close friend of his. La Valette, in turn, fed the press with quotations that inflamed the situation and enraged the Tsar, Nicholas I.11
In August 1851 the French formed a joint commission with the Turks to discuss the issue of religious rights. The commission dragged on inconclusively as the Turks carefully weighed up the competing Greek and Latin claims. Before its work could be completed, La Valette proclaimed that the Latin right was ‘clearly established’, meaning that there was no need for the negotiations to go on. He talked of France ‘being justified in a recourse to extreme measures’ to support the Latin right, and boasted of ‘her superior naval forces in the Mediterranean’ as a means of enforcing French interests.
It is doubtful whether La Valette had the approval of Napoleon for such an explicit threat of war. Napoleon was not particularly interested in religion. He was ignorant about the details of the Holy Lands dispute, and basically defensive in the Middle East. But it is possible and perhaps even likely that Napoleon was happy for La Valette to provoke a crisis with Russia. He was keen to explore anything that would come between the three powers (Britain, Russia, Austria) that had isolated France from the Concert of Europe and subjected it to the ‘galling treaties’ of the 1815 settlement following the defeat of his uncle, Napoleon Bonaparte. Louis-Napoleon had reasonable grounds for hoping that a new system of alliances might emerge from the dispute in the Holy Lands: Austria was a Catholic country, and might be persuaded to side with France against Orthodox Russia, while Britain had its own imperial interests to defend against the Russians in the Near East. Whatever lay behind it, La Valette’s premeditated act of aggression infuriated the Tsar, who warned the Sultan that any recognition of the Latin claims would violate existing treaties between the Porte and Russia, forcing him to break off diplomatic relations with the Ottomans. This sudden turn of events alerted Britain, which had previously encouraged France to reach a compromise, but now had to prepare for the possibility of war.12
The war would not actually begin for another two years, but when it did the conflagration it unleashed was fuelled by the religious passions that had been building over centuries.
More than any other power, the Russian Empire had religion at its heart. The tsarist system organized its subjects through their confessional status; it understood its boundaries and international commitments almost entirely in terms of faith.
In the founding ideology of the tsarist state, which gained new force through Russian nationalism in the nineteeth century, Moscow was the last remaining capital of Othodoxy, the ‘Third Rome’, following the fall of Constantinople, the centre of Byzantium, to the Turks in 1453. According to this ideology, it was part of Russia’s divine mission in the world to liberate the Orthodox from the Islamic empire of the Ottomans and restore Constantinople as the seat of Eastern Christianity. The Russian Empire was conceived as an Orthodox crusade. From the defeat of the Mongol khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan in the sixteenth century to the conquest of the Crimea, the Caucasus and Siberia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Russia’s imperial identity was practically defined by the conflict between Christian settlers and Tatar nomads on the Eurasian steppe. This religious boundary was always more important than any ethnic one in the definition of the Russian national consciousness: the Russian was Orthodox and the foreigner was of a different faith.
Religion was at the heart of Russia’s wars against the Turks, who by the middle of the nineteenth century had 10 million Orthodox subjects (Greeks, Bulgarians, Albanians, Moldavians, Wallachians and Serbs) in their European territories and something in the region of another 3 to 4 million Christians (Armenians, Georgians an
d a small number of Abkhazians) in the Caucasus and Anatolia.13
On the northern borders of the Ottoman Empire a defensive line of fortresses stretched from Belgrade in the Balkans to Kars in the Caucasus. This was the line along which all of Turkey’s wars with Russia had been fought since the latter half of the seventeenth century (in 1686–99, 1710–11, 1735–9, 1768–74, 1787–92, 1806–12 and 1828–9). The Crimean War and the later Russo-Turkish war of 1877–8 were no exceptions to the rule. The borderlands defended by these fortresses were religious battlegrounds, the fault-line between Orthodoxy and Islam.
Two regions, in particular, were vital in these Russo-Turkish wars: the Danube delta (encompassing the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia) and the Black Sea northern coast (including the Crimean peninsula). They were to become the two main theatres of the Crimean War.
With its wide rivers and pestilent marshes, the Danube delta was a crucial buffer zone protecting Constantinople from a land attack by the Russians. Danubian food supplies were essential for the Turkish fortresses, as they were for any Russian army attacking the Ottoman capital, so the allegiance of the peasant population was a vital factor in these wars. The Russians appealed to the Orthodox religion of the peasantry in an attempt to get them on their side for a war of liberation against Muslim rule, while the Turks themselves adopted scorched-earth policies. Hunger and disease repeatedly defeated the advancing Russians, as they marched into the Danubian lands whose crops had been destroyed by the retreating Turks. Any attack on the Turkish capital would thus depend on the Russians setting up a sea route – through the Black Sea – to bring supplies to the attacking troops.
But the Black Sea northern coast and the Crimea were also used by the Ottomans as a buffer zone against Russia. Rather than colonize the area, the Ottomans relied on their vassals there, the Turkic-speaking Tatar tribes of the Crimean khanate, to protect the borders of Islam against Christian invaders. Ruled by the Giray dynasty, the direct descendants of Genghiz Khan himself, the Crimean khanate was the last surviving outpost of the Golden Horde. From the fifteenth to the eighteenth century its army of horsemen had the run of the southern steppes between Russia and the Black Sea coast. Raiding into Muscovy, the Tatars provided a regular supply of Slavic slaves for sale in the sex-markets and rowing-galleys of Constantinople. The tsars of Russia and the kings of Poland paid tribute to the khan to keep his men away.14
The Crimean War Page 2
