A World Undone

by G. J. Meyer

  The Ottomans continued their expansion for another century after taking Constantinople, conquering among other places all of eastern Europe south of the Danube. Suleiman’s father, Selim I, doubled the size of the empire by winning a single battle that made him the master of Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and Algeria. The domain that he passed on to Suleiman included among its major cities Alexandria, Algiers, Athens, Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus, Jerusalem, and Smyrna. The Ottomans had become not only the political and military masters of the Islamic world but also—what put their supremacy beyond challenge—the custodians of Mecca and Medina and the other holy places associated with the Prophet Muhammad.

  As its power increased, the dynasty evolved into something that was not a family in any ordinary sense of the term but a chain of fathers and sons who never married. Instead of taking wives, the sultans kept scores and even hundreds of women who were property rather than spouses. These women lived as prisoners in a harem. They were allowed contact with no men except the rulers who owned them and an army of custodians, many of them black Africans, whose sexual organs had been surgically removed.

  Suleiman, a contemporary of Henry VIII of England, took this strange heritage to a peak of vitality. Like his forebears, he was a warrior, personally leading his army in thirteen campaigns. He pushed deeper into Europe, capturing Belgrade and Budapest and completing the conquest of the Balkans. He besieged Vienna, the keystone of central Europe, and would have captured it too if torrents of rain had not made it impossible for him to bring his heavy guns north. He was a poet, a student of the works of Aristotle, and a builder who made Constantinople grander and more beautiful than it had ever been. The opulence of life in his Topkapi Palace beggars the imagination.

  Suleiman had some three hundred concubines, as well as a promising young son and heir named Mustafa, when he was given a red-haired Russian girl named Ghowrem, who came to be known as Roxelana. She came into his harem as part of his share of the booty from a slave-gathering raid into what is now Poland, and she must have been a remarkable creature. (Not surprisingly, in light of the power she acquired in Constantinople, she eventually won a second new name: “the witch.”) Almost from the day of her arrival, Suleiman never slept with another woman. Eventually and amazingly, he did something that no sultan had done in centuries: he married. Their love story would have been one of the great ones if it hadn’t ended up taking the dynasty and the empire in such a sordid direction.

  Mustafa gave every indication of developing into yet another mighty branch on the family tree. At an early age he showed himself a bold military leader adored by his troops, a capable provincial governor, and a popular hero. But he stood in the way of the son whom Roxelana had borne to (presumably) Suleiman, and so he was doomed. Working her wiles, Roxelana persuaded Suleiman that Mustafa was plotting against him. (He was doing nothing of the kind.) With his father looking on, Mustafa was overpowered and strangled by five professional executioners whose tongues had been slit and eardrums broken so that they would hear no secrets and could never speak of what they saw. And so when Suleiman died some years later, master of an empire of almost incredible size and power, he was succeeded by Roxelana’s son, Selim II. Nothing was ever the same again.

  Selim the Sot was short and fat and a drunk. He never saw a battlefield and died after eight years on the throne by falling down and fracturing his skull in his marble bath. His son, Murad III, was also a drunk and an opium addict as well; during a reign of twenty years he sired 103 children and apparently did little else. His heir, Mahomet III, began his reign by ordering all of his many brothers, the youngest of them mere children, put to death, thereby introducing that custom into Ottoman royal culture. Having done so he followed his father in devoting the rest of his life to copulation. And so it went. Every sultan from Roxelana’s son forward was a monster of degeneracy or a repulsive weakling or both. The abruptness and permanence of the change, the sharpness of the contrast between the murdered Mustafa and his half-brother Selim II, has given rise to speculation that perhaps Roxelana’s son was not Suleiman’s son at all.

  In the post-Suleiman empire, a new breed of craven sultans came to live in terror of being overthrown by rivals from within the dynasty. Appalling new traditions emerged, to be observed whenever one of them died. All the women of the deceased sultan would be moved to a distant place and kept in even deeper solitude for the rest of their miserable lives. Any who happened to be pregnant would be murdered (generally by being bundled in sacks and drowned), and the younger brothers and half-brothers of the new monarch (often a large number of men, boys, and infants) were murdered as well (generally by strangulation).

  The rulers erected a windowless building called the Cage in which their heirs were confined from early childhood until they died or were put to death or, having been taught nothing about anything, were released to take their turns on the throne. The result was as inevitable as it was monstrous: an empire ruled year after year and finally century after century by utterly ignorant, utterly incompetent, sometimes half-imbecilic, half-mad men, some of whom spent decades in the Cage before their release and all of whom, after their release, were free to do absolutely anything they wanted, no matter how vicious, for as long as they remained alive. They commonly indulged their freedom to kill or maim anyone they wished to kill or maim for any reason—for playing the wrong music or for smoking, for example—or for no reason at all.

  Throughout the three and a half centuries from the death of Suleiman until the Great War, only one sultan displayed some of the fire and strength of the men who had built the empire. This was Murad IV, who reigned from 1623 to 1640. He became sultan when he was only ten years old—too young to have been incapacitated by the Cage—and he grew into a man of immense courage and physical power. He was the first sultan since Suleiman to be a soldier, leading his army into Persia, where he savagely put down an uprising. He was also even more insanely cruel than most sultans. In just one year of his reign, 1637, some twenty-five thousand of the empire’s subjects were executed, many of them by Murad’s own hand. He claimed the right to kill ten innocent people per day, and occasionally he would sit on the wall of his palace shooting randomly at passersby. At night he would make incognito visits to the taverns of Constantinople, where anyone found smoking would be executed on the spot. “Wherever the sultan went,” says Noel Barber in his book The Sultans, “he was followed by his chief executioner, Kara Ali, whose belt bulged with nails and gimlets, clubs for breaking hands and feet, and cannisters containing different kinds of powder for blinding.”

  Almost uniquely among the Ottomans, Murad produced no children, and on his deathbed he ordered the death of his brother and heir, Ibrahim, who had been living in the Cage from the age of two. This order was not obeyed, Ibrahim being the last living member of the dynasty, but from that point there were few further signs of vitality in the Ottoman line. Ibrahim devoted himself to building up a harem of 280 beautiful young women. Then, acting on a dubious report that one of these women (no one could say which one) had become romantically involved with a eunuch, he had all of them drowned. And so it continued.

  Not surprisingly, the empire rotted from within under this kind of leadership and became an increasingly inviting target. Young General Napoleon Bonaparte first showed Europe just how impotent the Ottomans had become when, in 1798, he invaded and almost effortlessly conquered Egypt. Also suggestive of what lay ahead was the fact that Napoleon was driven out of Egypt not by the Turks or their Egyptian subjects but by the British navy. From then on, and increasingly, the survival of the sultans and their decaying empire depended less on themselves than on the jealousies and rivalries of the European powers. The Ottomans hung on through the nineteenth century less through any acts of their own than because Britain and France blocked Russia from finishing them off.

  Even so, the hundred years leading up to 1914 brought uninterrupted losing wars: with the empire’s own Turkish satraps as they tried for autonomy in Egypt, Syria, and elsewher
e; with Arab chieftains seeking independence; with Persia; with the Christian peoples of the Balkans; and—four times between 1806 and 1878—with a Russia hungering for Constantinople.

  In 1830 the French seized control of Algeria in North Africa. At about that same time the British began building a power base in Arabia and the Persian Gulf. In 1853 Russia, tempted by what appeared to be easy pickings, invaded the Ottoman provinces south of the Danube. The Ottoman presence in Europe might have come to an end then if not for the Crimean War, in which Britain and France intervened to stop the Russians.

  Britain, fearful that its position in the eastern Mediterranean and control of India might be lost if Russia broke through to the south, saved the Ottomans from destruction yet again in 1878. But by that time several European countries, Britain included, were feasting on the Turkish empire’s extremities. Austria-Hungary took possession of Bosnia and Herzegovina, literally preparing the ground for the Sarajevo assassination. France, with British support and in the face of such strong German opposition that for a time the issue threatened to spark a war, took Tunisia and Morocco in North Africa. Britain took Egypt and Cyprus, and finally even Italy reached across the Mediterranean to grab Tripoli (today’s Libya), along with islands in the Aegean and Mediterranean. Germany meanwhile, having arrived too late to share in this plunder, focused on building ties with the Turks. It began work on a Berlin-to-Baghdad railway, and Kaiser Wilhelm II paid a state visit to Constantinople and Jerusalem.

  In 1908, the year when Austria-Hungary formally annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina, a group of would-be reformers called the Young Turks (their leader, an army officer named Enver Pasha, was only twenty-seven years old) seized control of the government in Constantinople and introduced a constitution. In 1912 the First Balkan War drove the Turks almost entirely out of the Balkans. This, and the failure of the Constantinople regime to deliver the reforms expected of it or to stop the disintegration of the empire, gravely damaged the prestige of the ruling faction, which was replaced by nationalist extremists once again led by Enver. Some of it was regained the following year, however, when the Second Balkan War led to Turkey’s recovery of the city of Adrianople on the European mainland. The sultan was at least as ridiculous a figure as the sorriest of his predecessors. (He had been deemed a safe choice for the throne after boasting that he had not read a newspaper in more than thirty years.) No one even pretended that he mattered. In January 1914, Enver Pasha left the army to become minister of war, and in July he took his empire into a secret defensive alliance with Germany.

  Enver Pasha War Minister and Young Turk Eager to recoup the Ottoman Empire’s humiliating losses in the Balkans and elsewhere.

  Astonishingly in light of all the humiliations it had experienced, the Ottoman Empire of July 1914 was still bigger geographically than France, Germany, and Austria-Hungary combined. It still ruled Arabia, which soon would emerge as the world’s greatest source of oil. If war did erupt, no one knew if the empire would enter it or, if so, on which side. It would be a coveted ally—or a rich, probably easy conquest.

  Chapter 6

  Saturday, August 1:

  Leaping into the Dark

  “If his majesty insisted on leading the army eastwards, he would have a confused mass of disorderly armed men.”

  —HELMUTH VON MOLTKE

  Why didn’t the Germans seize upon Tsar Nicholas’s eleventh-hour offer? Why didn’t they agree to do as the Russians were doing, mobilize their forces but at the same time pledge not to attack? Why didn’t they wait, pressuring Austria-Hungary to be sensible while Russia put pressure on Serbia and some sort of settlement was worked out? It was a splendid opportunity. Seizing it could have put Germany in a solid bargaining position.

  It all came to nothing in part because of the unmanageable difficulties that mobilizing and then waiting would have created for Germany and Germany alone. An open-ended postponement of hostilities after the great powers had mobilized would have destroyed Germany’s chances of defeating France before having to fight Russia. It would have given Russia especially, but France as well, an advantage that could only grow as time passed. The high command of the German army would, understandably, have called any such postponement an act of madness. When the kaiser suggested something like it, Army Chief of Staff Helmuth von Moltke came close to calling the idea insane.

  Ever since becoming chief of staff, Moltke had been developing a highly secret plan for fighting a two-front war. This came to be called the Schlieffen Plan, after the general who first conceived and proposed it, but it was Moltke who made it Germany’s only military option. By 1914 he had spent a decade immersed in it, tinkering with it, torturing himself about how to make it work. No matter how often or in how many ways he introduced new refinements, the plan continued to have one unchanging thesis at its center: speed was everything. Anything that slowed the Germans down, anything that might allow Russia to get into a war before France had been taken out, was regarded as likely to be fatal.

  For this reason the tsar’s promise to “take no provocative action” while mobilizing was, from the German perspective, nonsense. General mobilization meant, by definition, that Russia was marshaling its forces for an attack on Germany. Every day of mobilization brought Russia closer to being ready to strike at Germany from the east as soon as Germany was ready to engage France in the west. Viewed from Berlin, Russian mobilization was a provocative action of the most serious kind. It was inherently threatening to an extent that the tsar and his advisers could not possibly have understood. And while the Russians hoped that mobilization, by demonstrating the gravity of the situation, would increase the willingness of the Central Powers to negotiate, actually it worked in the opposite direction. The Germans—fearful like all the great powers of appearing weak—were unwilling to give the appearance of having been forced to negotiate by the threat of Russian action.

  But Germany’s mobilization problems went even deeper. Moltke, over the years, had transformed Schlieffen’s idea for a lightning-fast attack on France from an option into an inevitability in case of war. Any delay after mobilization had gone from being a danger into being an impossibility. Moltke and his staff gradually lost the ability to imagine situations in which delay might become advisable. Their planning became so rigid that it left Germany—today this can seem almost impossible to believe—with no way of mobilizing without invading Luxembourg and Belgium en route to invading France.

  This was the self-created trap that the Germans found themselves in on August 1—a trap that gave the army’s high command no choice except to tell the kaiser that Tsar Nicholas was asking Germany to do the one thing that Germany absolutely could not do. Only Russia could now prevent war, the generals told Wilhelm, and Russia could do so only by agreeing to the terms of the double ultimatum.

  At midday on the fifth Saturday since the murder of Franz Ferdinand, the deadline for the double ultimatum arrived without an answer from Russia or France. Kaiser Wilhelm, at the urging of Moltke and Falkenhayn and with the reluctant agreement of Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg, approved a declaration stating that because of St. Petersburg’s continued mobilization a state of war now existed between the two empires. This declaration was wired to Friedrich von Pourtalès, Berlin’s ambassador to Russia, with instructions to deliver it at six P.M. (It would not reach Pourtalès until five-forty-five, and he had to decode it before taking it to Sazonov.)

  Later in the afternoon, when the German ambassador in Paris called on Viviani and asked for his government’s response to the ultimatum, he was told icily that “France will have to regard her own interests.” An hour later the French government declared a general mobilization—General Joffre, chief of the French general staff, was warning that every twenty-four hours of delay would cost ten or twelve miles of territory when the fighting began—and fifteen minutes after that Kaiser Wilhelm agreed to mobilization as well.

  The German mobilization order was made public at five P.M. The kaiser had made its signing a solemn and, in
an improvised way, a formal occasion, inviting Bethmann Hollweg and a number of Germany’s most senior military officials to serve as witnesses. After handshakes and words of firm resolution by men with tears in their eyes, they remained together to wait for word from Pourtalès. Their conversation turned into a discussion of what should be done next, which soon became a heated and somewhat confused argument. Long-bearded old Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, father of the High Seas Fleet that had poisoned relations with Britain, said that neither mobilization nor a war declaration was needed at this point—that all reasonable possibilities of a negotiated settlement should be allowed to play out. Almost everyone except the kaiser, who appeared to be uncertain, disagreed with Tirpitz, but not always in the same way or for the same reasons. Moltke and Falkenhayn remained firm on the need for mobilization without delay. Bethmann, who never would have assented to mobilization if Russia’s earlier mobilization had not been confirmed without possibility of doubt, said that a formal declaration of war was what was needed now.

  The dispute was interrupted by the arrival of Gottlieb von Jagow, the head of the foreign office. Bursting into the room, he announced that a message had just arrived from Ambassador Lichnowsky in London. It was still being decoded but would be ready in minutes. It appeared to be important.