Glimpses of World History

by Jawaharlal Nehru

  Africa, known as the Dark Continent, was an almost unknown land, so far as its interior was concerned, till the latter half of the nineteenth century. Many an adventurous and exciting journey across it had to be undertaken before this land of mystery could be put properly on the map. The greatest of its explorers was David Livingstone, a Scottish missionary. For years the continent swallowed him up and the outside world had no news of him. Connected with his name is that of Henry Stanley, a newspaperman and explorer, who went to look for him and found him at last in the heart of the continent.

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  Turkey Becomes the “Sick Man of Europe”

  March 14, 1933

  From Egypt, across the Mediterranean, to Turkey is a small and natural step. The nineteenth century was to see the progressive crumbling away of the empire of the Ottoman Turks in Europe. The gradual decline had started in the previous century. Perhaps you remember my telling you of the Turkish sieges of Vienna, and of how, for a while, Europe trembled before the sword of the Turks. Pious Christians in the West considered the Turk as the “Scourge of God” sent to punish Christendom for its sins. But the final repulse of the Turks from the gates of Vienna turned the tide, and thenceforward they were on the defensive in Europe. The many nationalities they had subdued in south-eastern Europe were so many thorns in their side. No attempt was made to assimilate them, and probably this was not possible even if the attempt had been made, and the spirit of nationalism was coming into conflict with the heavy rule of the Turk. In the north-east Tsarist Russia was growing bigger and bigger, and always pressing hard on the Turkish dominions. She became the traditional and persistent enemy of the Turks, and for nearly 200 years waged intermittent war against them till both Tsar and Sultan went down almost together and took their empires with them.

  The Ottoman Empire lasted long enough as empires go. After existing for a long period in Asia Minor, it was established in Europe in 1361. Although Constantinople itself did not fall to the Turks till 1453, all the territory round it went to them long before this date. The great city was saved for a while by the eruption of Timur in western Asia and his crushing defeat of the Turkish Sultan in 1402 at Angora. But the Turks soon recovered from this. From 1361 to the end of the Ottoman Empire in our own time is over five and a half centuries, and that is a long time.

  And yet the Turk did not fit in at all with the new conditions that were developing in Europe after the end of the Middle Ages. Trade and commerce were growing, production was being organized on a bigger scale in the manufacturing cities of Europe. The Turk felt no attraction for this kind of thing. He was a fine soldier, a hard fighter and disciplinarian, easy-going in his intervals of leisure, but fierce and cruel when roused. Although he settled down in cities and beautified them with fine buildings, he carried something of his old nomadic way about him and fashioned his life accordingly. This way was perhaps the most suitable in the homelands of the Turks, but it did not fit in with the new surroundings in Europe or Asia Minor. The Turks refused to adapt themselves to the new surroundings, and so there was a continuous conflict between the two different systems.

  The Ottoman Empire connected three continents—Europe, Asia, Africa; it covered all the ancient trade routes between East and West. If the Turks had been so inclined and had possessed the necessary capacity for it, they could have taken advantage of this favourable position and become a great commercial nation. But they had no such inclination or capacity, and they went out of their way to discourage this trade, probably because they did not like to see others profiting by it. It was partly owing to this stopping of the old trade routes that the seafaring and commercial peoples of Europe felt compelled to search for other routes to the East, and this led to the discoveries of new routes by Columbus in the west and Diaz and Vasco da Gama in the east. But the Turks remained indifferent to all this and controlled their empire by sheer discipline and military efficiency. The result was that commercial and wealth-producing activities gradually faded away in the European parts of the Ottoman Empire. Partly also this was brought about by the racial and religious conflict. The Turks and the Christian peoples of the Balkans had inherited the old religious feud from the time of the Crusades and before. The growth of the new nationalism added fuel to this fire, and there was continuous trouble. To give you an instance of how the European parts of the Ottoman dominions deteriorated: Athens, the famous city of old, was but a village of about 2000 inhabitants when Greece became free in 1829. (Now, hundred years later, Athens has a population of over 500,000.)

  This dropping away of commercial and other wealth-producing activities was ultimately bad for the Turkish rulers themselves. As the limbs of the empire grew weak and poor, the heart of the empire also grew weak and suffered. It is surprising, indeed, that in spite of all these conflicts and difficulties the empire lasted so long.

  The strength of the Ottoman Sultans for several hundred years consisted in the “Janissaries”, a corps of Turkish soldiers consisting of Christian slaves, who were carefully trained from boyhood upwards. These Janissaries remind one of the Egyptian Mamelukes, but there was a difference between them. Although they remained the flower of the Turkish army, they never became the ruling power as in Egypt. But, like the Mamelukes, they did not form a hereditary caste. As slaves they were favoured people with high posts and offices reserved for them; their sons, however, became free Muslims, and for a long time they could not remain in this favoured corps, which was confined to slaves. Recruitment to the corps was always from new white Christian slaves. All this sounds very extraordinary, does it not? But remember that the word slave had not got quite the same meaning in Islamic countries in those days, as it has now. Slaves were often technically and legally slaves, but they rose to the highest offices. In India you will remember the Slave Kings of Delhi; Saladin of Egypt also was originally a slave. The point of view of the Turks seems to have been that a very thorough training should be given to the ruling class to make them as efficient as possible. They knew, as every teacher knows, that the best period to train a person is from early childhood upwards. It was perhaps not easy to take away the children of their Muslim subjects and cut them off completely from their parents or make them slaves. So they got hold of little Christian boys and made them join the Sultan’s slave household and gave them a rigorous training. Of course the little boys became Muslims as they grew up.

  The Turk’s Last Foothold in Europe

  This system was extended to the Sultans themselves. The Sultan did not marry in the ordinary way. Carefully chosen slave-girls were sent to his household, and they became the mothers of his children. Thus all the Ottoman Sultans up to the early eighteenth century were sons of slave mothers, and they had to undergo the same rigorous training and severe discipline as any other member of the slave household.

  There was a certain amount of science in this careful selection of slaves and their discipline and training for special functions, from that of the Sultan downwards. It did result in a measure of efficiency in particular spheres, and continually fresh blood came from the new slaves, and a hereditary ruling caste could not grow up. Perhaps the early strength of the empire depended on this system. But it was obviously utterly out of keeping with European or Asiatic conditions. It was quite different from the feudal system, and it was even farther removed from the system which was replacing feudalism in Europe. Under this system, and in the absence of much trade and commerce, no real middle class could grow up. The system could not continue in its original purity after the second half of the sixteenth century, when a hereditary element came into the slave household, and the sons of members of the household could remain in it and follow their fathers’ careers. In many other ways also there was a gradual loosening of the system. But the background remained, and this made Turkey entirely different from, and a stranger in, Europe in spite of centuries of close association. Within Turkey itself the foreign communities remained wholly apart, with their own laws and groupings.

  I have told yo
u so much about this extraordinary old Turkish system because it was unique and it helped to shape the Ottoman Empire. It does not, of course, exist now; it is a matter of history.

  Turkey’s history for the last 200 years is one of warfare against the continually advancing Russians and against revolts by subject nationalities. Greece, Rumania, Serbia, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Bosnia, were all Balkan countries and parts of the Ottoman Empire. Greece, as we saw, broke away in 1829 with the help of England, France and Russia. Russia is a Slav country, and so are Bulgaria and Serbia in the Balkans. Tsarist Russia tried to appear as the protector and champion of these Balkan Slavs. The real lure for Russia was Constantinople, and all its diplomacy was aimed at the eventual possession of this ancient seat of empire, the Tsar considering himself a successor of the Byzantine emperors. In 1730 began the series of Russo-Turkish wars, and they continued, with intervals of peace, in 1768, 1792, 1807, 1828, 1853, 1877 and, lastly, in 1914. In 1774 Russia got the Crimea from Turkey, and thus reached the Black Sea. But this was not much good, as the Black Sea is bottled up and Constantinople sits at the neck. In 1792 and 1807 the Russian frontier kept on advancing towards Constantinople and the Turkish frontier receding. During the Greek War of Independence, the Tsar tried to profit by it by attacking the Turks when they had their hands full elsewhere. He would have captured Constantinople if England and Austria had not intervened.

  Why did England and Austria save Turkey from Russia? Not for love of Turkey, but because of rivalry and fear of Russia. I have told you before of the traditional rivalry of England and Russia in Asia and elsewhere. The possession of India especially brought the British right up to the Russian frontier, and they were continually having nightmares as to what Tsarist Russia might do to India. So it was their policy to thwart her and prevent her from adding to her strength. The possession of Constantinople would have given her a fine port in the Mediterranean and enabled her to keep a fleet of warships near the route to India. This was too much of a risk, and so England repeatedly stopped Russia from crushing Turkey. Austria also was interested in keeping Russia away. Austria is a tiny country now, but a few years ago it was a big empire adjoining the Balkans, and it wanted to have a big share in the Balkan countries itself when Turkey went to pieces. So it had to keep Russia away.

  Poor Turkey seemed in a bad way with these powerful neighbours waiting for something to happen to her in order to pounce upon her and tear her to pieces. The Tsar of Russia, referring to Turkey, said to the British Ambassador in 1853: “We have on our hands a sick man—a very sick man . . . He may die suddenly upon our hands . . .” The phrase became a famous one, and Turkey was henceforth the “Sick Man of Europe”. But the sick man took a mighty long time in dying!

  In that very year, 1853, the Tsar made another attempt to put an end to him. That resulted in the Crimean War, in which England and France checked Russia. Twenty-one years later, in 1877, the Tsar again attacked Turkey and defeated her, but again foreign intervention saved Turkey to some extent, at any rate saved Constantinople from Russia. There was a famous international conference in Berlin in 1878 to consider the fate of Turkey, and Bismarck was there and Disraeli, and many other leading politicians of Europe, and they threatened and intrigued against each other. England seemed to be on the verge of war with Russia when the latter gave in. As a result of the Treaty of Berlin, the Balkan countries Bulgaria, Serbia, Rumania and Montenegro gained their independence; Austria occupied Bosnia and Herzegovina (which in theory remained under Turkish sovereignty); and Britain took the island of Cyprus, as a kind of commission from Turkey, for having sided with her to some extent.

  The next Russo-Turkish war took place thirty-six years later, in 1914, as a part of the Great War.

  Meanwhile considerable changes had been taking place in Turkey. The decisive defeat by Russia in 1774 had given the first shock to the Turks, and made them realize that they were getting left behind by the rest of Europe. Being a military nation, the first thing that struck them was that the army should be brought up to date. This was done to some extent and it was through the new officer class that Western ideas crept into Turkey. As I have told you, there was not much of a middle class, and there was no other organized class. After the Crimean War of 1853–56 a real attempt at westernization was made. A movement favouring a constitutional form of government (which meant a democratic assembly instead of the autocracy of the Sultan) developed. Midhat Pasha was the leader of this. In 1876 there were riots in Constantinople in favour of having a constitution, and the Sultan granted it, only to set it aside almost immediately because of a revolt in Bulgaria and the Russian War. The heavy expense of this war and the cost of the reforms at the top without any fundamental economic change brought about the bankruptcy of the Turkish Government, with the result that money had to be borrowed from Western financiers, and these people took control of part of the revenue. So the attempt at westernization and reform was not a success. It was difficult to fit this in with the old fabric of the empire.

  Early in the twentieth century the demand for a constitution became strong. As before, the only organized people were the military officers, and it was among them that the new party, called the Young Turk Party, spread rapidly. Secret “Committees of Union and Progress” were formed and, having won over a great part of the army, they forced the Sultan in 1908 to restore the old constitution of 1876. There were great rejoicings, and Turks and Armenians and others, who had till then mutually killed each other, embraced and shed tears of joy at the dawn of a new era when all were going to be equal and the subject races would have full rights. Enver Bey, handsome and vain, but also daring and adventurous, was the chief hero of this bloodless revolution. Mustapha Kemal, later to become the saviour of Turkey, was also an important Young Turk leader, but compared to Enver, he was in the background, and the two did not like each other.

  The Young Turks did not have an easy time. The Sultan gave them trouble, and there was bloodshed, and the Sultan was deposed and another put in his place. There were economic difficulties and trouble with foreign Powers. Austria took advantage of the prevailing confusion to declare the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (which she had occupied in 1878 after the Treaty of Berlin). Italy forcibly seized Tripoli in North Africa and declared war. The Turks could do little, as they had no proper navy, and had to submit to Italian demands. They had barely done so, when a new danger nearer home threatened them. Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece and Montenegro, anxious to drive Turkey out of Europe and share the spoils, and seeing that the moment was favourable, allied themselves together in a Balkan League and attacked Turkey in October 1912. Turkey was exhausted and disorganized, and a contest for power was going on between the constitutionalists and the reactionaries. She collapsed completely before the Balkan League and had huge losses. Thus the first Balkan War ended in a few months, and Turkey was driven out of Europe almost completely, with only Constantinople remaining to her. Even Adrianople, the oldest of her European cities, was wrenched from her, much against her will.

  Very soon, however, the victors fell out over the spoils and Bulgaria suddenly and treacherously attacked her previous allies. There was mutual slaughter then and, to profit by the confusion, Rumania, which had previously kept aloof, joined in. In the result, Bulgaria lost all she had gained, and Rumania, Greece and Serbia greatly increased their territories. Turkey also got back Adrianople. The hatred of the Balkan people for each other is something amazing. The Balkan countries are small, but they have been the storm-centre of Europe on many an occasion.

  The Sultan who was deposed by the Young Turks in 1909 was an interesting person. His name was Abdul Hamid II, and he came to the throne in 1876. He had no love for reforms and modern innovations, but he was able in his way, and had a reputation for playing off the great Powers against one another. All the Ottoman Sultans, you will remember, were also Caliphs, or the religious heads of Islam. Abdul Hamid tried to exploit his position as such by attempting to build up a Pan-Islamic movement—that is,
a movement in which Muslims of other countries could join, so that he could get their support. There was some talk of this Pan-Islamism for a few years in Europe and Asia, but it had no substantial foundation, and the Great War completely put an end to it. Pan-Islamism was opposed by nationalism in Turkey, and nationalism proved the greater force of the two.

  Sultan Abdul Hamid became very unpopular in Europe, because he was considered responsible for atrocities and massacres in Bulgaria and Armenia and elsewhere. Gladstone called him the “Great Assassin”, and led a great campaign in England against these atrocities. The Turks themselves consider his reign as the darkest period of their history. Massacres and atrocities seem to have been fairly regular occurrences in the Balkans and in Armenia, and both parties indulged in them. The Balkan peoples and the Armenians were as guilty of massacring Turks as the Turks were of massacring them. Centuries of racial and religious animosities had sunk deep into the very nature of these peoples, and they found terrible expression. Armenia was the worst sufferer. It is now one of the Soviet republics near the Caucasus.

  So after the Balkan Wars Turkey found herself exhausted and with just a foothold left in Europe. The rest of her empire was also cracking up. Egypt, of course, belonged to her in name only; in reality Britain occupied and exploited the country. But even the other Arab countries were showing signs of a national movement. It is not surprising that Turkey felt dispirited and disillusioned. All the brave hopes of 1908 seem to have ended in ashes. Just then Germany seemed to sympathize with her. Germany was looking east, and had visions of German influence pervading the whole of the Middle East. Turkey also turned to Germany, and their contacts grew. This was the position when the World War of 1914 came, just a year after the second Balkan War had ended. Turkey was to have no rest.