The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire

by Alan Palmer

  Orlov would have preferred to see the Imperial Rescript written into the final Peace Treaty, so as to safeguard the improved status of the Sultan’s Christian subjects by an international guarantee. Napoleon III sympathized with the Russians over this point. But, as Palmerston wrote to the ambassador in Paris, the British had fought ‘not so much to keep the Sultan and his Mussulmans in Turkey as to keep the Russians out of Turkey’; and, if Orlov wanted written guarantees of the Rescript, then it must surely be because he wished to preserve for the Russians that claim of interference they had asserted ever since Kuchuk Kainardji. The British, and the Austrians with them, eagerly seized on Ali’s assurance of Abdulmecid’s firm commitment to reform; and on 30 March 1856 the Peace Treaty of Paris gave Ali what he wanted. While Article IX noted the ‘generous intentions’ of Abdulmecid’s Rescript, it insisted that the Powers had no right to interfere ‘in the relations of His Majesty the Sultan with his subjects, nor in the Internal Administration of his Empire’.6

  Tsar Alexander II, who had succeeded his father Nicholas I twelve months before, claimed the Hatt-i-Hümayun as a moral victory. An Imperial Manifesto, issued in St Petersburg on the day after peace was signed in Paris, told the Russian people that by solemnly recognizing the rights of the Sultan’s Christian subjects the Rescript fulfilled ‘the original and principal aims of the war’.7 Yet it was impossible to deny that the Treaty undid the work of Catherine the Great and her successors. Kars and all other towns and villages in eastern Anatolia won by Russian arms during the previous two years were restored to the Ottoman Empire. The Tsar lost all claims to protect the Danubian Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia which, though still technically under Ottoman suzerainty, were to acquire ‘an independent and national’ administration, authorized to raise its own army. Moreover, southern Bessarabia was ceded by Alexander II to Moldavia, thereby depriving Russia of any opportunity to control the Danube delta. Most striking of all the treaty’s provisions were the clauses which provided for the Black Sea to be neutralized and demilitarized. The waters of the Black Sea were thrown open to merchant vessels from any nation but closed to all warships, apart from ‘light vessels, necessary for the service of’ the Russian and Ottoman ‘coasts’. All military and maritime arsenals at the Black Sea ports were to close. To Alexander II the dismantling of the forts and dockyards of Sebastopol and Odessa was a humiliation too bitter for a proud sovereign to sustain for any length of time.

  By contrast, it mattered little to Abdulmecid that Sinope should cease to be a naval base. On paper, ‘His Majesty the Emperor of the Ottomans’ did well from the peace settlement. The independence and territorial integrity of his lands were formally guaranteed. Kars was restored to him. He remained nominal sovereign of the two Danubian Principalities and overlord of Serbia, where he retained a right to garrison troops. At the same time, the Sublime Porte was formally admitted to what the Treaty called ‘the Public Law and System of Europe’, thereby enabling the Ottomans to look confidently to financial institutions in London, Paris and Vienna for aid which, it was believed abroad, would increase Turkey’s economic strength. This was a false assumption. Over a twenty-year period the Ottoman Empire contracted fourteen foreign loans—and in 1875 the government was forced to issue a declaration of bankruptcy.

  Yet at first the new status of the Ottomans within the Concert of Europe, together with the prospect of further reforms, seemed at last to have checked the Empire’s decline. The Sultan’s pledge of civic equality between Christians, Muslims and Jews attracted refugees from Hungary and Poland to settle within the Ottoman Empire. Many were modern craftsmen bringing new skills to the cities. Some converted to Islam and helped promote the new educational system favoured by the Tanzimat reformers. But there were farming communities, too; best known was the village founded in honour of Adam Czartoryski and still called Polonezkoy, a few miles off the route from modern Üsküdar to Sile, on the Black Sea coast. Polonezkoy long retained its Vistulan Catholic character, with a cluster of dairy farms and cherry orchards and a flourishing pork trade, rare in Muslim Anatolia. The refugees brought not simply a new vitality to this particular region near the capital, but also much of the romantic nationalism which had stirred central Europe and the western Balkans in the past two decades and was, as yet, an alien concept in Anatolia.8

  The Crimean War quickened the pace of life in the Ottoman heartlands. Two years of naval and military comings and goings had made the Turks more familiar with European manners and customs than any earlier incursion from the West. The newcomers were drawn from all classes and both sexes: rank-and-file soldiers and naval ratings; journalists; nurses; dignitaries of state and aspiring politicians from both London and Paris; civil engineers; churchmen both Protestant and Catholic; and specialists in railways, in the electric telegraph, and in other facets of the new technology. There were instances of shocked protest from the ulema in several outlying districts. Knowledge that unveiled women were nursing sick and wounded soldiers within the sprawling Selimiye Kislasi barracks at Üsküdar aroused real distress among faithful Muslims. When on the last day of February 1855 both shores of the Bosphorus were shaken by an earthquake, there were some who saw in this seismic phenomenon Allah’s indictment of ‘women who make display of their adornment’. Yet, in general, the presence of so many foreigners in Stamboul, Pera and other towns seems to have helped break down local resistance to westernization. It may therefore have eased the task of the later Tanzimat reformers.

  Of equal interest was the impact made by Ottoman society and customs upon these outsiders from the West. Unlike earlier travellers, they were for the most part men and women who had never expected to find themselves beside the Bosphorus. Some, like Sister Sarah Anne of an Anglican religious nursing order in Devon, had set out for Turkey at three days’ notice. When Sarah Anne reached Constantinople, on 4 November 1854, the day was so wet that Florence Nightingale complained, in a letter home, of ‘the Golden Horn looking like a bad daguerreotype washed out’. But Sarah Anne responded to this ‘most beautiful view in all the world’ much as had Lady Mary Wortley Montagu a hundred and thirty years before her: ‘Giddy and confused,’ she wrote home, ‘we could hardly realise that these painted houses, gay gardens and glittering minarets were not a vision or panorama.’9 For the remainder of the decade a succession of books in English—many of them by women authors—sought to counter the prejudice of centuries against the ‘terrible Turk’. They portrayed Imperial Constantinople as both a treasure-house of the past and the living capital of an empire made viable by the reforms of its sovereign and his ministers. For some twenty years this optimistic view of Turkey’s moral assets prevailed in London society, a dream-image which in 1876 not even the flame of Gladstone’s outraged conscience could expunge entirely.

  Not every visitor was so rosy-eyed as Sister Sarah Anne. ‘I never was more disappointed with any town than with Constantinople,’ Colonel Charles Gordon wrote to his father in May 1854. ‘I could not have believed it possible that such a magnificent situation could have been so thrown away by any set of barbarians. It is quite time that some civilised nation should get possession of it and build a proper town.’10 The recipient of the letter was the Prime Minister, Lord Aberdeen, who had himself spent some eight weeks on the Bosphorus half a century before and could therefore judge the value of his son’s jaundiced comments. Filth and dust abounded in both Stamboul and Üsküdar, but the building of ‘a proper town’ was, at that moment, high among the cherished ambitions of the Sultan. In (mainly non-Muslim) Pera the Tanzimat reformers were creating a Parisian-style municipality; a nominated council in this ‘Sixth Arrondissement’ (altinci daire) was responsible for planning and naming new roads, for supervising restaurants, hotels and theatres, and within a year introduced the first gas-lighting of a Turkish street. In one respect the waterfront skyline had already changed dramatically between the visits of Lord Aberdeen and his son. Facing Colonel Gordon as he looked across the Bosphorus from Üsküdar was Abdulmecid
’s newest palace, the Dolmabahche, which became the Sultan’s chief residence a few months before the outbreak of war. The palace was more than a home: it was a symbol of Abdulmecid’s faith in a revived empire.11

  The Dolmabahche is as characteristic a monument to the Tanzimat era as Garnier’s Paris Opéra to the Second Empire or St Pancras Station to Victorian London. In four hundred years the Topkapi Sarayi had grown into a grimly functional complex, culturally enriched by the compact artistry of its cluster of state rooms. By contrast, from the day that the Sultan first went into residence there, the Dolmabahche stood out as a spectacular show-piece, Versailles gone Venetian. Its classical columns and porticoes were spread along the shore of the lower Bosphorus like the façades of the Winter Palace and the Hermitage beside the Neva, but while the Romanovs had settled for rust-red, Abdulmecid delighted in the pristine white marble splendour which the architects Nikogos and Kalabet Balyan conjured up for him. Yet the Balyans designed their palace, not as a backcloth for the Bosphorus, but in the form of winged pavilions projecting from a central throne-room which was larger than any other in Europe. Architecturally their palace was a microcosm of the centralized empire. And this was as Abdulmecid intended. The Dolmabahche affirmed his confidence in the future. Unlike earlier Sultans, he did not simply set about westernizing the Ottoman past; he sought to endow his heritage with an imperialistic grandeur worthy of the newest Great Power patronizingly welcomed into the Concert of Europe.

  The expense of building and maintaining the Dolmabahche Palace was so great that to most contemporary rulers it would have seemed prohibitive. Running costs mounted to £2 million a year. To this drain on funds could be added renovation of the adjoining ‘domestic’ palace of Çiraan and an imperial villa near Ahmed III’s fabled Sa’adabad and, above all, the building of another Balyan-planned palace across the Bosphorus at Beylerbey. This newest folly was not finished until four years after Abdulmecid’s death. Although far smaller than the Dolmabahche, Beylerbey displayed a similar Rococo ostentation. All this was too much for the Tanzimat ministers. They repeatedly deplored the extravagance of both Abdulmecid and his successor, Abdulaziz. In October 1859 the highly respected Mehmed Ali resigned as Grand Vizier in protest at Abdulmecid’s continued appropriation of funds for the ‘palace which must surpass all others in the world’.12

  There is no doubt that the Sultan’s prodigality absorbed much of the £3 million loan which, in the summer of 1854, Ali and Mehmed Fuad had succeeded in raising abroad. In practice, however, the money received by the Porte was little more than half the nominal amount, because of both a high interest rate and liberal commissions to several groups of underwriters. Accordingly a second, more favourable, loan for £5 million was contracted within less than a year. It was guaranteed by the French and British governments, but only on condition that the money should be spent on purposes connected with the Crimean War, and that the expenditure be supervised by a British and a French commissioner. This innovation set a precedent for later years, when the growth of European financial control over the Ottoman Empire severely curbed the Sultans’ freedom of action. But not in Abdulmecid’s lifetime; there were no commissioners to prevent him from digging deeply into a third foreign loan. It was this particular act of spendthrift recklessnesses which prompted Ali’s resignation.

  Yet not all the financial ventures showed such folly. The Ottoman government also made use of foreign capital to improve communications within the Empire. Railways came slowly; in the Balkans a strategic line from Varna to the Danube was begun in 1856; and soon afterwards work started on a line along the Menderes valley in south-western Anatolia to tap the agricultural wealth of the hinterland serving the port of Smyrna. More postal roads were built in these closing years of Abdulmecid’s reign, but pride of place went to the electric telegraph, which was developed by the British and French during the Crimean campaign and enthusiastically backed by the Sultan himself. In September 1855 the first telegrams were exchanged between Constantinople, London and Paris, and before the Sultan’s death in June 1861 there were cables between Stamboul, Bucharest, Belgrade and Salonika, and in Asia from Üsküdar to Baghdad. Abdulmecid welcomed links with Western Europe. Moreover, he recognized that the electric telegraph provided a means of projecting centralized power from the Porte to provincial governors, those tiresome beys who had so often vexed earlier Sultans by the cavalier independence with which they administered the more distant regions. The telegraph helped promote a sense of cohesive unity within the Ottoman Empire.13

  By now, however, it was a smaller Empire. The range of the Sultan’s authority had contracted considerably in the past half-century. Algeria was a French possession, Tunisia already dependent upon France; and, although the Ottomans had re-established effective rule in Tripolitania, the Bedouin of Cyrenaica followed the strictly puritanical Sanussi order which was led throughout the second half of the century by Sayyid Muhammad al-Mahdi. In Egypt the cordiality which had marked the relationship between the Sultanate and the Viceregal dynasty on the eve of the Crimean War soon waned; it did not survive the death of Abbas Hilmi in 1854 and the accession of his uncle, Muhammad Said, who had been Muhammad Ali’s favourite son.

  Said is sometimes represented as pro-French and anti-Ottoman. But these labels oversimplify. An amiably weak-willed ruler, Said preferred to let events take their own course. The Egyptian tribute of £360,000 a year to the Sultan’s civil list continued to be paid regularly; on three occasions it provided the guarantee on which the Porte raised a foreign loan. Yet the growth of a flourishing cotton-based Egyptian economy went ahead without reference to Abdulmecid or Abdulaziz. Nor was Constantinople consulted when, within a few months of becoming Viceroy, Said authorized his friend Ferdinand de Lesseps to draw up plans for a canal from Suez to the new Mediterranean port that perpetuates the Viceroy’s name. The canal project aroused fierce opposition in Constantinople. The British, always mistrustful of the French in Egypt, assured the Porte that the opening of a new waterway in the most prosperous of the Sultan’s tributary dependencies might benefit entrepreneurs in Paris but would certainly lower the importance of the old trade routes from the Straits to the Euphrates and Persia. Yet the Ottoman government had no effective power of veto. So weak were the links between Sultan and Viceroy that work on digging de Lesseps’ canal had been in progress for almost seven years before, in March 1866, Sultan Abdulaziz at last gave his formal approval to the project.14

  Along the Empire’s European frontiers the main challenge to the Sultan’s authority continued to come from the surfacing of long-submerged Balkan nationalism. By 1860 Serbia was already virtually lost. The maintenance of Ottoman garrisons in Belgrade and two other fortresses proved an expensive embarrassment, especially when during Ramadan in 1862 a fanatical Turkish commander bombarded the Christian quarters of the Serbian capital for over four hours; the Ottoman withdrawal in 1867 made good sense, politically and economically. But relations with Serbia remained strained: the Serbs were encouraging their compatriots outside the Principality, particularly in Bosnia and Herzegovina (where there was an anti-Ottoman revolt in 1857), and their fellow Southern Slavs in Bulgaria and Montenegro. In May 1858 a punitive Ottoman expedition penetrated Montenegro, only to be trapped and routed in the rocky defile of Grahovo. Unrest along this mountainous north-west frontier land continued throughout the following decade. As a British traveller drily observed, it was a region where fighting the Turk was looked upon ‘as a pastime, or a superior kind of field sport’.15

  ‘Latin’ Roumania owed much to the patronage of the Second Empire at a time when the former French ambassador to the Porte, Édouard de Thouvenel, served as Napoleon III’s foreign minister. French support ensured that the Danubian Principalities—long a granary for Constantinople and its dependent towns—slipped from the Sultan’s grasp within a few years of the Congress of Paris, as indeed the terms of the peace treaty had anticipated. Moldavia and Wallachia came together under the same hospodar (Alexander Cuza) in 1859
and their formal union as the ‘United Principalities of Roumania’ was proclaimed in December 1861, a few months after Abdulmecid’s death. Technically Roumania remained an Ottoman tributary state for another sixteen years; but as a Christian principality it showed even more political independence than Egypt, particularly after 1866 when Roumania’s newly-elected Prince, Charles of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, began his forty-eight-year rule in Bucharest.

  The heart of the Levant posed a different set of problems from the Balkan lands, Egypt or the Maghreb. Syria and Lebanon perplexed the Tanzimat ministers in the last years of Abdulmecid’s reign, as at its beginning. Fighting between Maronite peasants and landowners in 1858 around Mount Lebanon sparked off another civil war between Druze and Maronite factions which, by the spring of 1860, had spread to Damascus. In that year some 8,000 Maronites and 1,500 Druze were killed in communal fighting or died from starvation in Lebanon alone, and more than 5,000 Catholic Christians were massacred in Damascus. News of this massacre led Napoleon III to urge the dispatch of an international peacekeeping force to protect the Maronites. He proposed an expedition to Beirut and ultimately to Syria, with most of the troops supplied by the French. Neither the Ottoman authorities nor the British wished to see a predominantly French expeditionary force in the Levant; was not the official anthem of the Second Empire, Partant pour la Syrie, a marching-song composed by Napoleon III’s mother in her girlhood for her stepfather, the great Bonaparte? The Ottoman Foreign Minister, Fuad, hastened to Beirut ahead of the international peacekeepers, stamping out disorder by the drastic expedient of executing Ottoman officials and army officers who permitted trouble to break out in any district for which they were responsible. The French argued, with some justice, that the Sultans’ commissioners had attempted to keep the peace with an iron hand in previous troubled years and that as soon as their firm grip was relaxed, Lebanon and Syria reverted to anarchy, with murder and destruction sweeping yet again through rival towns and villages. Despite the solemn assurance of the Treaty of Paris that the Powers would not interfere in the internal administration of the Ottoman Empire, the French continued to urge some form of international supervision to ensure that the Sultan imposed fundamental reforms on the government of both the Lebanon and Syria. In January 1861 Édouard de Thouvenel, with Napoleon III’s backing, summoned a conference to discuss the problems of the Levant. So essential was French financial support for Ottoman ventures that the Porte readily accepted Thouvenel’s proposal and sent delegates to Paris.