1913

by Charles Emmerson

  And what of Britain? The sun still shone – but were the country’s prospects as bright as they had seemed a generation previously? Was the life slowly ebbing from British power? Was the sun beginning to set? Relative decline was hard to square with Britain’s unprecedented prosperity in 1913, or with the dominance of the British Empire, or the majestic centrality of London to world affairs, both economic and political. But a quick glance at an almanac, or at a newspaper, was enough to confirm the facts: Britain was no longer in a class of her own; the Americans were richer and the Germans more productive.

  As a whole, the British Empire was still remarkably strong. Canada and Australia continued to boom. India flourished. The population of the British Empire far outstripped that of any other empire. But the problems of imperial defence, so crucial in the political debates of Canada and Australia in 1913, loomed larger than ever. The long-term integrity of the empire would not be assured by warm words alone. Britain’s own position in the empire had changed. Once, the country had been the engine room of empire, the productive heart of the beast. But was Britain now becoming more like a boardroom, investing money, taking decisions, but essentially living off the labour of others, and off the earnings of the past? At some point in the future, might even this role wither away, and might Britain become little more than a repository of British tradition, a common idealised land into which Britons abroad – in Australia, Canada, New Zealand or South Africa – could retreat, a collective memory of green fields and swooping glens?

  In 1897, Queen Victoria’s Jubilee year, Rudyard Kipling had shocked British sensibilities with the warning tone of his poem Recessional:

  Far-called our navies melt away—

  On dune and headland sinks the fire—

  Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

  Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

  Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,

  Lest we forget—lest we forget!

  A decade and a half later, such dire warnings of the inevitable decline of even the greatest of empires had entered deep into public consciousness. In 1911, Recessional was set to music, forming part of the closing ceremony of the Festival of Empire, held in London’s Crystal Palace that year.10 Imperial pomp was now tempered by elegy.

  And then there was the worrying situation at home in Britain, which occupied just as many column inches, pub conversations, and university debates as the situation abroad. In 1913, there were suffragettes on the street, challenging the male-dominated political culture of Britain, and claiming the right to vote. At the same time, and quite separately, militant trade unions threatened to shut off the country’s food supply. Above all, there was a very real possibility that Home Rule for Ireland, the most divisive issue in British politics for a generation, would finally come about – and be opposed by armed volunteers on the streets of Ulster. Was Britain still a ‘living’ power – or had it slipped, somewhere along the line from one side of the ledger to the other?

  CONSTANTINOPLE

  Tides of History

  In 1913, the city of Constantinople – known in ancient times as Byzantium, and to modern Turks as Istanbul – was entering the twenty-sixth century of its existence. Founded by the Greeks at a strategic point on the Bosphorus between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, the city had first flourished as a city of trade. Later, in the year 330, when London was little more than a Roman encampment by the shores of the Thames, Constantinople had become the eastern capital of the Roman Empire. In 1453, fifty years before Columbus arrived in North America, the Christian city of Constantinople had been conquered by the Muslim Turks. Since then, the city had been the capital of the Ottoman Empire, ruled by an Emperor who was at once a mighty temporal potentate – ruling an empire which at its peak covered most of north Africa, all of the Arabian peninsula, and much of south-eastern Europe – and Caliph of the world’s Muslims. Much reduced since its medieval hey-day, even now the Ottoman Turks still ruled the heartlands of the Near and Middle East. The holy cities of Jerusalem, Mecca and Medina were all in their hands – and Muslim, Christian and Jewish pilgrims would most likely pass through Constantinople on their way to visit them. In the east, Ottoman territory stretched towards the Russian Caucasus and Persia, in the south it ran along the coast of the Red Sea, in the north it went up to the shores of the Black Sea and, in the west, it retained – just – a small corner of Europe.

  The Turkish poet Tevfik Fikret described Constantinople itself as a harlot, yet one which still mesmerised its visitors and its million-odd inhabitants alike:

  Oh Decrepit Byzantium, Oh great bewitching dotard

  Oh widowed virgin of a thousand men

  The fresh enchantment in your beauty is still evident

  The eyes that look at you still do so with adoration1

  It was a fittingly ambivalent description of a city which had experienced massacres in its streets (just five years previously 10,000 Armenians had died in inter-communal violence), which was the regular victim of fires that burned down whole neighbourhoods of wooden houses, which was subject to the periodic shudders of earthquakes, and yet which survived. Even in the decrepitude of old age, Byzantium-Constantinople-Istanbul was still cherished by the different religious and national groups for whom the city played a key part in their communal history. And the city was still coveted by outsiders – particularly the Russians – who saw it as the rightful seat of Christian Orthodoxy and who resented the Ottoman stranglehold on the strategic waterway running through the centre of Constantinople, the gateway from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean.

  ‘Thrice-titled town, jewel of mankind’s common heritage’, rhapsodised German travel writer Hermann Barth, expostulating on the city which Greeks still called Byzantium, most other Christians (and foreign visitors) called Constantinople, and Turks called Istanbul.2 Like Jerusalem – which the Turks ruled over, but which had resonance for Jews, local Arabs and foreign Christians alike – Constantinople was home to many different populations, all keenly aware of their historical ties to the place, and all sensitive to their relative position within it. To be an Ottoman, in the fullest and most political sense of the word, was to understand and celebrate these different religions and cultures as part of a larger whole, whatever one’s own background. But to be a true Ottoman in 1913, whether Turkish, Arab or Greek, was increasingly difficult. To many, the empire seemed to be pulling in different directions, its territory was under siege, and the central government in Constantinople, led by the ‘Young Turks’, seemed ambivalent towards the traditional heritage of Ottomanism. Was Constantinople, therefore, a multi-ethnic and multi-religious anachronism in an age of nations and nationalism, or was it, like the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a symbol of the possibilities of inter-communal harmony and cooperation?

  Ships at anchor in Constantinople, gateway to the Mediterranean, capital of the multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire, eyed jealously by the empire’s neighbours. In 1912–13 Bulgarian troops got to within a few miles of the city limits.

  At different times of the year, the different communities which had been washed up on the shores of the Bosphorus – Greeks, Arabs, Shi’a Muslims, Sunni Muslims, Turks, Kurds, Persians, Armenians, Bulgarians, Jews – would take over parts of the city for their particular religious or national celebrations. The greatest of these was undoubtedly the end of the fasting month of Ramadan, when the city’s Muslims – mostly Turks, but also Kurds and Arabs – would pour on to the streets in three days of celebration, paying visits to friends and family, and exchanging gifts of sweets and tobacco, porcelain from the imperial works and perfume. A religious celebration rapidly became an excuse for the secular pastimes of bayram, a festival, not unlike those of a country fair in the Australian outback or a village fête in France: ‘merry-go-rounds propelled by hand, swings in the form of boats, milder swings for girls … so many arguments against Mr Kipling and the East-is-East theory’.3 More particular to Turkey were the Karagöz shadow plays in the city’s coffee houses, as bawdy as the audience they ente
rtained. Later in the year came the second great Muslim festival, commemorating Abraham’s near sacrifice of his son Ishmael (not Isaac, as in the Christian and Jewish faiths), celebrated by the ritual slaughter of rams shipped in to Constantinople in great number over the weeks before the day itself, the noise of bleating animals encroaching upon the usual bustle of the city, the bark of its many dogs, and the call to prayer of the muezzin.

  But it was not just the Sunni Muslim Turks, Kurds and Arabs who took to the city’s streets. For the city’s Shi’a, mostly Turkish-speaking Persians from Tabriz, the key day was Ashura, a commemoration of the death of the Prophet’s grandson Hussein, the moment of bifurcation between Sunni and Shi’a Islam. An American observer remembered seeing ‘a gruesome company of men in white, who chanted hoarsely and slashed their shaven heads with bloody swords’, winter snows swirling around their half-naked bodies.4 The climax of the Christian calendar was Easter, celebrated by Greeks, who represented nearly a quarter of Constantinople’s inhabitants in 1913, and Armenians, who numbered one in every ten. (The Armenian share had been much reduced by communal troubles in the 1890s – since when the city’s Armenian street porters had been replaced by Kurds – but still contained many of the city’s prominent citizens: shopkeepers, architects, government officials, even the holders of the Ottoman gunpowder monopoly.5)

  These celebrations could be boisterous affairs. In 1909, British resident Mary Poynter noted in her diary that the Greek Orthodox celebration of Easter included ‘firing guns and revolvers in the air, and at figures of Judas … a few people being killed and several wounded’.6 Other Christian feast days offered quieter festivities: on a January morning by the shores of the Bosphorus one might see a Greek Orthodox blessing of its waters, accompanied by ‘shivering mortals in bathing trunks’ who were waiting for the opportunity to rescue a gilt wooden cross tossed into the Bosphorus by the local bishop.7 In late 1912 the Greek population drew to a silent halt to bury Patriarch Joachim, seventy-eight years old, the streets lined with ‘black masts … from which hung black gonfalons with white crosses in the centre, while black and white wreaths or garlands decorated all the houses’.8

  The New Year – ignored by most Muslims, feted by a few thousand Persians as Nowruz, and celebrated by different Christian sects on different dates in January – provided a further opportunity for revelry. On the first day of 1913 the Austro-Hungarian Ambassador Marquis Pallavicini held a reception in his embassy, after Mass at the nearby Sainte Marie Draperis church; in the embassy of the French Republic respects were paid to Ambassador Bompard and to his wife, a picture of the ‘virtues of French womanhood’ according to a local paper.9

  Besides Ottoman Muslims and Ottoman Christians – and the city’s many foreigners – local officials estimated the Jewish population of the city at around 52,000.10 Amongst these numbered two ambitious young law students, David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi – who were to become the first Prime Minister and second President of Israel – melting into the background of the city in their dark European suits, crisp white shirts and Turkish fezzes.

  The bustling midpoint of the city of Constantinople was not a square, or a palace, but an inlet of the Bosphorus known as the Golden Horn – and the Galata Bridge which crossed it from one half of the city to the other.

  On the south side of the Golden Horn lay the older part of the city, Stamboul, in which were situated the majority of the city’s local population, the bazaar, the old (and by this time abandoned) palace of Topkapi, and the city’s main mosques (including the Ayasofya mosque, which for eleven centuries had been a church). On the north side lay Galata, and, above it, Pera (now Beyoğlu). Founded six or seven centuries ago by Genoese and Venetian traders, Galata and Pera were the areas favoured by Constantinople’s foreign population – so much so that Turks and Arabs from Stamboul referred to Pera as ‘Frengistan’, foreigner-land. A little further along the waterfront, this was also where the imperial court had built several new palaces in the nineteenth century: first the Europeanised Dolmabahçe, then the Çirağan and finally the Yildiz palace complex, a little inland behind high walls, with its own water and electricity supply, and its own harem – everything necessary for the paranoid Sultan who built it, Abdül Hamid II.

  It was from the old Galata Bridge that, in the 1870s, the Italian writer Edmondo De Amicis had recommended that visitors could find the best vantage point of Constantinople, able to take in its full scale, and the variety of its peoples and their activities:

  The Albanian in his long white garment with pistols thrust in his belt, brushes against the Tartar clad in sheepskin; the Turk guides his richly-caparisoned ass between two files of camels; close behind the aide-de-camp of one of the imperial princes, mounted on an Arabian charger, a cart rumbles along piled up with the odd-looking effects of some Turkish household. A Mussulman woman on foot, a veiled female slave, a Greek with her long flowing hair surmounted by a little red cap, a Maltese hidden in her black faldetta, a Jewess in the ancient costume of her nation, a negress wrapped in a many-tinted Cairo shawl, an Armenian from Trebizond all veiled in black … It is an ever-changing mosaic, a kaleidoscopic view of race, costume and religion … It is one continuous tramp and roar, a murmur of hoarse gutturals and incomprehensible interjections, among which the occasional French or Italian words which reach the ear seem like rays of light seen through a thick darkness.11

  At the beginning of the twentieth century a proposal for the rickety old bridge to be upgraded was initially rejected by Sultan Abdül Hamid on the basis that a gallery of shops at water level might provide a strategic location for rebellion against his unloved regime. Eventually, however, a new, wider, iron bridge was built across the Golden Horn by a German company. It was completed in 1912.12

  Over the years since De Amicis had penned his colourful description of the scene on the Galata Bridge, the Ottoman Empire had continued its steady drift from the status of a Great Power – in the same class as Britain, France and Russia – to a second-rank power, still nominally independent, but clearly on the ‘dying’ side of the ledger. The sovereignty of the Ottoman state over its own territory was compromised by a special legal regime – the aptly-named Capitulations – which placed foreigners in the empire under the protection of their various embassies. The share of the Ottoman Empire’s population protected in this way grew over the course of the nineteenth century, giving external powers a permanent interest in the internal arrangements of the Ottoman state. A free-trade agreement signed with the British in 1838 deprived the Ottoman Empire of a trade policy. Having defaulted on its foreign debts in 1875, the empire was forced to cede domestic financial management to the essentially-foreign Caisse de la Dette Publique Ottomane, which, by 1911, had more employees than the Ottoman Empire’s own finance ministry.13 British advisers were brought in to support the modernisation of the Ottoman fleet; German soldiers advised the Ottoman army. But more thorough reform was avoided. The reason that the Ottoman Empire had survived as a state at all, rather than being carved up, was that too many of the Great Powers had conflicting interests over the potential spoils. This was an empire living on borrowed money but, above all, borrowed time.

  Sultan Abdül Hamid, who ruled the Ottoman Empire from 1876 to 1909, was seen by many Ottoman modernisers as part of the problem. On his accession, in a concession to a reform-minded group of officials known as the Young Ottomans, the Sultan had granted constitutional government, overturning centuries of Ottoman administrative autocracy. But the experiment did not last long. In 1878 Abdül Hamid suspended the constitution and returned to the old traditions of Ottoman governance, enforced by the feared agents of the Sultan’s secret police, with political prisoners regularly locked up and the key thrown away. For the following thirty years Abdül Hamid presided over a regime which, though it made sporadic efforts to modernise and reform itself, remained essentially conservative and thuggishly authoritarian.

  Many Ottomans chafed under the restrictions of the regime, and worried th
at the Ottoman Empire was being steadily weakened – both from outside and from within. In 1889, the centenary of the French revolution, a group of young reform-minded government officials, soldiers and doctors – Turks, but also Albanians, Circassians and Kurds, well-educated but mostly middle ranking – set up what amounted, at first, to little more than a secret discussion group for Ottoman modernisers.14 Swearing allegiance to the cause of Ottoman renewal on the Koran and a revolver, and calling themselves the Committee of Union and Progress – but known to others as the ‘Young Turks’, successors to the Young Ottomans – the group’s early leaders were men such as Mehmed Talat, a postal worker in Salonica, and Ismail Enver, a junior military officer posted in the same city. That they were young was seen as a badge of honour, evidence that the future was with them, standing on its head an earlier Ottoman worldview that wisdom goes hand in hand with age. By the early twentieth century, having won strong support in sections of the army, particularly in Macedonia, the discussion group had developed into one of the key political forces of the Ottoman Empire.

  The central objectives of the Young Turks were, first, the restoration of the constitution and, second, the renewal of the Ottoman Empire. Prescriptions for how this renewal was to be achieved differed. A few Young Turks saw decentralisation of political authority as the key – later, a couple even wondered about a confederal Turco-Arabian Empire along Austro-Hungarian lines. But the vast majority saw the path to modernisation lying through the power of a revamped central state. Most Young Turks were not ethnic Turkish nationalists at this stage so much as frustrated Ottoman patriots.