1913
Page 43
In 1906, the dream of greater Western freedom had led a young Turkish woman, Zeyneb Hanoum, to flee the restrictions of her life in Constantinople, where she was ‘kept in glass cages and wrapt in cotton wool’.44 She travelled widely, spending six years in between Paris, London, Brussels and Italy. Ultimately, however, Hanoum returned to the Ottoman Empire. The West, she had found, was not necessarily any better than the East, it simply had different vices: crassness, greed, violence and selfishness. ‘How dangerous it is to urge those Orientals forward’, she concluded, ‘only to reduce them in a few years to the same state of stupidity as the poor degenerate peoples of the West, fed on unhealthy literature and poisoned with alcohol’.45 Hanoum had experienced the West and found it artificial; Pera was the symbol of Western artificiality in the heart of Constantinople.
Over several decades’ residence in the city, Byzantine scholar Alexander van Millingen had noted much that had changed in Constantinople, not all of it for the better.46 The city, he wrote at the beginning of the twentieth century, had become perhaps a little less distinctive over the years. Its Eastern mystery had been tarnished by the march of Western technology. The varied clothes described by De Amicis in the 1870s, by which every passer-by’s nationality and religion could be discerned by the expert Ottoman eye, were increasingly being swapped for standard European garb: ‘now, the order of the day is “à la Franca”’.47 Latticed screens, which had imparted mystery to the traditional Turkish home and hid its women from an intruder’s gaze, were being replaced by Venetian shutters. ‘The groups of horses standing at convenient points in the great thoroughfares to carry you up a street of steps or to a distant quarter’, noted van Millingen melancholically, ‘have given way to cabstands, and to a tunnel which pierces the hill of Galata’.48 Older people, who had been children in the 1840s, might remember the first steamer on the Bosphorus; now, the water heaved with such vessels, crowding out the fragile but elegant caïques of before. Whereas the postal service from Europe had once been a week by boat from Trieste, and three times a month from Marseilles, it now arrived daily by train, at a fraction of the price:
Little, perhaps, did the crowds that gathered at the Stamboul railway station [Sirkeci – the Asian line terminated across the water at Haydarpaşa] on the 14th of August that year [1888] to witness the arrival of the first train from the Austrian capital, appreciate the significance of that event. But it was the annexation of Constantinople to the Western world. New ideas, new fashions now rule, for better or for worse. And soon the defects of the old Oriental city will be a dream of the past.49
The defects of the old city might be going by 1913 – but, in van Millingen’s eyes, perhaps some of its charm too.
There were new processions on the Galata Bridge now: Turkish troops, many from the Anatolian hinterland, heading to fight off the Balkan armies which had made it almost to the gates of Constantinople – and refugees, overwhelmingly Muslim, arriving in a city they had never seen, leaving behind the villages and towns in Europe where their ancestors had lived for centuries.
Violence had always been a part of the borderland experience of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman authorities had long battled localised revolts in the mixed Muslim and Christian province of Albania, mostly related to the eternal bugbears of tax and conscription and, after the Young Turk revolution, a dispute over which script should be used in Albanian schools.50 A wider pattern of low-level brigandage and military reprisal had become the stuff of Balkan lore. English traveller Edith Durham quoted a characteristically gung-ho Balkan song in her book High Albania in 1909:
Oh we’re back in the Balkans again,
Back to the joy and the pain –
What if it burns or it blows or it snows?
We’re back to the Balkans again.
Back, where tomorrow the quick may be dead,
With a hole in his heart or a ball in his head –
Back, where the passions are rapid and red –
Oh, we’re back to the Balkans again!51
But the latest round of international wars threatening the Ottoman Empire – and the domestic political ascendancy of the Young Turks – had started not in the perennially difficult Balkans but in sparsely populated north Africa. In 1911, the Italians invaded the then Ottoman province of Libya, hoping for a quick victory to erase the memory of the Battle of Adowa (when an Italian force had been defeated by the Ethiopians in 1896) and confirm Italy’s status as a great power. Tripoli and Benghazi were, as expected, rapidly occupied. The Ottomans, unable to reinforce Libya by land – because the British refused them transit across Egypt – and incapable of reinforcing it by sea, were reduced to subterfuge. Young Turk military officers, Mustafa Kemal amongst them, travelled to Libya in civilian disguise to organise guerrilla resistance. Such resistance would never dislodge the Italian army from the coast, but it prevented them from securing inland areas. In response, in order to try and force the Ottoman government to make peace, Italian forces occupied the Dodecanese islands in the Aegean in the summer of 1912, just off the coast of Turkey. This provoked a political crisis in Constantinople. The Ottoman Parliament – in which the Young Turks had recently, by means fair and foul, won a renewed majority – was suspended. Young Turk leaders were sidelined from the Ottoman government. A new Grand Vizier was installed who was known for his anti-Young Turk views.
The proud pose of Young Turk leader Enver Pasha, hero of Edirne. The Young Turks sought to modernise the Ottoman Empire in order to better defend it.
In October 1912 the Ottoman Empire finally agreed to cede Libya in return for an Italian promise to evacuate the Dodecanese. By then, however, the empire was under attack on another front, in the Balkans this time, from the combined armies of Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegro loosely allied in the Balkan League.52 This was an entirely different kind of war to the conflict in Libya – it was a war for survival. In Libya, Ottomans had fought for pride. In the Balkans, they were fighting for the homes of their compatriots and sometimes for their own. In Constantinople, the departure of the Turkish troops for the front was met with raucous cheers and waving handkerchiefs. One Turkish soldier showed an American journalist his shepherd’s pipe tucked into his cartridge belt: ‘that was the way to go to war, he said – as to a wedding’.53
What Ottoman troops found in the Balkans, however, was a bloodbath. The advances of the Balkan League were swift. Salonica fell to the Greeks in November 1912 (a poisoned chalice: King George of Greece was assassinated there, by a Greek, the following year). Edirne (Adrianople), a city which had once been the Ottoman capital, was surrounded. Over the winter of 1912 and the spring of 1913 Turkish wounded returned to Constantinople in ever-greater numbers. The city swelled with new inhabitants; offices and embassies became makeshift hospitals, British doctors and French nurses tended to Turkish wounded. (Mary Poynter’s diary, and the foreign-language newspapers, were full of Lady Lowther’s war relief committee.) Cholera broke out.
At one point towards the end of the year Bulgarian troops were within a few miles of Constantinople, their planes scouting ahead to catch a glimpse of the city’s minarets and to assess the Ottomans’ last line of defence around Çatalca. Naval vessels of the European powers stood ready to disgorge soldiers into the city should protection of their citizens be necessary. Bags were packed in preparation for a hasty departure. The cemeteries on the outskirts of the city became encampments. ‘There the living had taken refuge with the dead’, wrote Poynter, ‘upon the very ground where camped the Crusaders, who came to take a Christian city in 1203, and where camped the Turks who took Byzantium on that sunny May morning in 1453’:
Will the [Bulgarian] army from the north, now so near us, if victorious, come into the city through our European quarter or will they go through the cypress cemetery, where so many refugees are camping …? And will they hold mass in Sancta Sophia …? We shall know in a few days. What moments of waiting these are! One forgets to be afraid, though they tell us we are in danger.54
Foreign opinion on the rights and wrongs of the Balkan War was divided. Some were sympathetic to the Turks. Pierre Loti saw them as brave defenders of their homeland, and asked what would happen when Edirne was overrun by the Christian armies of the Balkan states. ‘When the boots of the bearded hirsute victors have soiled the exquisite mosque of Selim II and its funerary kiosks’, he warned, ‘then pillage, rape and murder will begin’.55 (In Constantinople it was suggested that a road should be named after the French writer, as indeed one subsequently was.) Many more Europeans were unmoved by the Ottoman Empire’s plight. Harry Johnston, a British colonial administrator, saw the Balkan War as opening the way to what he called ‘the final solution of the Eastern Question’.56 The expulsion of the Ottoman Empire from Europe would be an advance for civilisation. ‘The Turk, pur sang, is stupid’, he wrote, claiming that their architects, doctors, surgeons, financiers and admirals were all drawn from the peoples who they subjected, not from their own ranks.
But most Westerners looked at events in the Balkans, and the question of the survival of the Ottoman Empire, through the prism of their own national interests. The Russians had no love of the Ottoman Empire, but they did not want the Bulgarians to conquer Constantinople – if any European power was to control the city it should be them, they reasoned. The Austro-Hungarians, again, no particular friends to the Ottoman Empire, worried that the war would strengthen Serbia and Montenegro as a Slav bulwark against their own presence in the Balkans, and wanted to ensure that the Adriatic port of Scutari fell to the Albanians instead (preparing to intervene militarily if necessary). The Germans, who had long had a political alliance with the Ottoman Empire, wanted to ensure that their position was not compromised. The British, who in the past had worried about German influence in Constantinople, expressed concern now that should the Islamic Caliph be forced to leave Istanbul as the result of a Christian invasion this would cause problems in India. (As it was, Indian Muslims were already active in donating money for relief efforts in the Ottoman Empire, and even issued a fatwa calling for a boycott of European goods.57)
On the ground in the Balkans, the situation deteriorated for the Ottomans with the fall of Edirne to the Bulgarians in March 1913. The Great Powers urgently pushed for some kind of peace settlement, ultimately imposing the Treaty of London upon the warring parties in May, by which time the Ottoman Empire had lost nearly all of its territory in Europe. But this was not an end to the affair. Before the ink was dry on the Treaty of London, plans for a new war were afoot. The Balkan League, always a marriage of geopolitical convenience, rather than one of love, was falling apart at the seams. Though Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegro had all made startling territorial gains as the result of their war against the Ottoman Empire, they all felt they deserved a little more of the pie. By June, the Bulgarians were fighting the Greeks and the Serbians. The Ottomans saw their chance. Albania and Macedonia were lost forever, but Edirne at least could be reclaimed. In July the Bulgarians, having overplayed their hand, were forced out of the city, and the Young Turk military leader Ismail Enver (now known as Enver Pasha) was able to claim, at last, an Ottoman victory. The Treaty of London was hastily revised to reflect the changed facts on the ground – it now became the Treaty of Bucharest, confirming Ottoman possession of Edirne.
It had been a bloody and vicious set of wars, behind the lines as well as along them. It was a conflict which would leave deep scars across the Balkans. In areas occupied by Bulgarian troops Muslims were subject to forced conversions, completed by the sprinkling of holy water and the symbolic eating of sausage.58 When Edirne fell, Ottoman troops were confined to an island where they died by the hundred each day, the bark torn off the trees up to the height of an outstretched hand. A Jew in Salonica, Leon Sciaky, later pinpointed 1913 as the beginning of mass Jewish emigration from the city, many heading to that other corner of the Ottoman Empire: Palestine.59 Visiting the outlying countryside that year he recalled that ‘not even the barking of dogs greeted our coming … where the laughter and songs of children had resounded yesterday, an oppressive silence now hung’.
An international investigating committee sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace noted that ‘the burning of villages and the exodus of the defeated population is a normal and traditional incident of all Balkan wars and insurrections’.60 Depressingly, there was a circularity to such conflicts: ‘what they have suffered themselves they inflict in turn upon others’. Although the Ottoman Turks had been ejected too quickly to be the perpetrators of many atrocities during the first phase of the Balkan wars there was room for revenge in its closing stages. In the village of Kirka, in eastern Thrace, the Greek population which had massacred local Muslims was in turn slain.61
In retaking Edirne, a degree of honour had been restored to the Ottoman Empire. The return of the Young Turks to political power in Constantinople had been cemented. If the peace were to hold, the Young Turks could now turn to the pressing challenge of modernising a much-reduced, but perhaps more easily-managed, Ottoman Empire. In September 1913 the congress of the Committee of Union and Progress proposed a series of administrative and economic reforms for the empire, and proposed that the committee itself become a fully fledged political party, a step towards Western political normalisation.
There was much to be done to secure the future of the smaller Ottoman Empire. It was inevitable, after such a loss of territory and population, that the political arrangements between different groups would now have to be recalibrated. The empire’s Arabs, in particular, would have to be placated, so as to be relieved of any temptation to split off. In April 1913, for the first time, the government allowed the use of Arabic in law courts in Arab-majority provinces and provided for Arabic to be used as the main language in schools.62 The following month, a German military adviser to the Ottoman army suggested that perhaps the capital of the empire be moved to Aleppo – a move which, he argued, would make both military and political sense. That was too much for Young Turks to stomach. But the appointment of an Arab Grand Vizier certainly showed the empire’s direction of travel in 1913.
Meanwhile, opined The Economist, ‘Constantinople is taking things philosophically, and is little concerned by national triumphs and defeats’.63 A bumper harvest was being collected and trade was returning. (The Economist suggested the city be boosted by being made a free port.) Constantinople’s first power station was under construction in Silahtarağa. Tram services had begun to be electrified, starting with a few lines on the Galata side of the city. Work was underway to roll out a telephone service with no fewer than twelve telephone exchanges by the following year.64 In December, much to the Russians’ anger, German General Liman von Sanders arrived in Constantinople at the head of a delegation of forty officers – a far larger group than in the past – invited by the government to assist in the continuing modernisation of the army. (Russian protests meant he was subsequently over-promoted and so could not formally serve as Constantinople’s garrison commander – as originally intended – though he stayed on to play a major role in the Ottoman army during the Great War.) Between international crises, in other words, the process of modernisation resumed. Might 1913 ultimately be remembered as the beginning of a new chapter in the long history of the Ottoman realms, down, but not out; a moment when the tides of history which had for so long run against the empire, began finally to run in its favour?
PEKING—SHANGHAI
Waking Slumber
‘A plate of spinach with some egg yolks’, was some foreign wit’
s description of the view of Peking from the city walls, reported by Alphonse Favier, the city’s French Catholic Bishop.1 ‘Nothing but trees, trees, and more trees’, Favier explained, ‘the yellow-tiled roofs of a few palaces and pagodas peeking through the green’. It was only in 1860 that foreigners had been granted the right to walk along the city’s walls – a right denied to most Chinese and a concession which the Chinese imperial court hoped would soften foreign demands on other matters in the wake of the Second Opium War. By the beginning of the twentieth century the view from the city’s walls was considered amongst the best for visiting tourists or for new arrivals, a way of grasping the city’s dimensions and some elements of its layout, a layout laden with the symbolism of power and with the Confucian ideal of the Chinese Empire and its Manchu Qing dynasty. (Even today, the vastly-extended layout of modern Beijing essentially follows the square layout of the imperial city.)
The view from the city walls was not the very best to be had in Peking, however. That honour was traditionally reserved for one man, the Emperor. Only through the Emperor’s eyes could the city be seen in its proper majesty, from a pavilion on the Scenery Hill, at one end of the aptly named Forbidden City.2 This point in Peking was protected from the outside world by a moat and three sets of walls. Each wall represented – in principle and in reality – a boundary between the Emperor and his people. Cities within cities, walls behind walls, worlds within worlds: such was the ordering of imperial Peking.
The Forbidden City, reserved to the court and to the eunuchs who staffed it, was contained within the larger Imperial City, where aristocrats and high officials could reside, and behind the walls of the Inner City, where the city’s bannermen (soldiers) were based. ‘From this “Inside”’, wrote Katharine Carl, an American visitor in 1903, ‘customs and habits flow and pulse over the rest of China, as the blood flows from the heart, by a thousand arteries reaching to the very confines of the Empire’.3 Since the end of the Second Opium War, when foreign states had at last been granted the right to have permanent embassies in Peking, the city’s small foreign community resided in the Foreign Legation quarter. Complete with its own churches and schools, this area broke up the architectural harmony of imperial Peking with spires and Western architecture. Beyond this lay the Outer City, where commerce was accepted and where the physical ordering of Peking finally began to break down into a mess of low-rise hutongs, beautiful courtyard houses hidden behind thick wooden doors, muddy lanes overflowing with garbage, and unpaved streets crowded with rickshaws and pigs, Mongolian camels from the Gobi desert and the stunted horses of northern China.