by Alan Palmer
Critics of the Second Empire argued that Thouvenel’s conference set a bad precedent, threatening the integrity of the Ottoman Empire.16 But the Sultan’s representatives served him well. With British encouragement they effectively prevented all discussion of specifically Syrian affairs, but in the spring a wise settlement was reached for the Lebanon itself. It was agreed that most of the interior should become an autonomous province under a non-Lebanese Christian Governor, with an advisory council equally representative of the differing religious faiths and with administrative districts so arranged that each would represent a separate sect. Not until this new settlement was in operation did Napoleon III withdraw his troops. To the surprise of diplomats who had known the region in the past two decades, this Lebanese settlement proved effective. It survived until the Ottoman military authorities took advantage of the war crisis in 1914 to impose direct rule, thereby clumsily ensuring that the Lebanese sided with the Sultan’s enemies. The 1861 settlement did not, as its critics feared, hamper the Tanzimat reformers in their attempts to create a modern unitary state. The merit of the settlement lay in its recognition of local variations, district by district, so that power could be shared on a communal basis rather than being imposed by a distant and remote sovereign. For other regions devastated by social and religious conflict, the Lebanese Agreement offered a model of just administration. Sadly, they ignored it.
Abdulmecid gave formal approval to the new regime in the Lebanon on 9 June 1861. It was the last administrative act of his reign. Within three weeks he was dead, from tuberculosis, still only in his thirty-ninth year. His successor, his half-brother Abdulaziz, was thirty-one, a bearded giant who weighed over sixteen stone and required a bed eight feet long (which may still be seen in the Dolmabahche). By nature Abdulaziz was autocratic, and even more extravagant than Abdulmecid. Attempts to curb expenditure at Court led to outbursts of furious temper. He won Queen Victoria’s approval when he took her arm and escorted her in to luncheon at Windsor in 1867; she liked ‘the true, splendid, soft, brown oriental eyes’, as she wrote to her eldest daughter, adding that ‘he never touched wine’.17 But foreign dignitaries visiting Constantinople were less indulgent. Even allowing for fabricated rumours which exaggerated the Sultan’s eccentricities, it soon seemed clear to them that Abdulaziz would readily shed the enlightened westernized practices of a reformed Sultanate in favour of the more sinister whims of a capricious tyrant.
Yet, until Ali Pasha’s death in 1871, Tanzimat restructuring of the state continued, with the Sultan under pressure from the French, British and Austrian governments to carry through the reform programme. Changes in provincial government in 1858 were complemented six years later by the Vilayet Law, which extended the pattern of large provincial units (vilayets), with clearly differentiated administrative departments, to the Empire as a whole. In general, law reform closely followed French models, as practised under the Second Empire: a new Ottoman penal code in 1858 was followed by a commercial code, promulgated at the start of Abdulaziz’s reign, and in 1869 by Ahmed Cevdet’s civil code, the Mecelle, a masterly compromise allowing the Islamic şeriat tradition to be preserved—and even enhanced—within a fundamentally Napoleonic concept of law. French influence persisted, too, in education. The Galatasaray Lycée (the Imperial Ottoman School), a boys’ secondary school in the heart of Pera, opened its gates in September 1869. The Mekteb-i Sultani was founded in order to provide servants of Empire for the Ottomans—much as did Eton and Harrow in England or, more precisely, the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris. The boys, Muslim and Christian alike, received most of their tuition in French and followed a western curriculum, even to the extent of learning Latin.18
There were, however, already signs of a reaction against Tanzimat. In January 1865 a Press Law set up a special department of the Sublime Porte which soon afterwards began to suppress newspapers whose tone was considered ‘hostile’. It is significant that in June of that same year the first influential group of intellectual dissidents emerged in the capital. They were inspired by the essayist and playwright Namik Kemal and the writings of the older reformer Sadik Rifat. Like dissidents in the Soviet bloc during the 1980s they were strongly individualistic, with no agreed panacea for the Empire’s problems. Namik thought the Tanzimat reformers too inclined to borrow ideas and institutions from the West without allowing for the Koranic traditions which still shaped society, especially in the more remote provinces. One splinter group, led by Ali Suavi, went even further than Namik, becoming Islamic fundamentalist in its total dedication to the priority of şeriat teachings.19
At first these ‘Young Ottomans’ (Yeni Osmanlilar) received financial backing from Prince Mustafa Fazil, son of that formidable warrior, Ibrahim Pasha; and it is possible that the Prince saw himself as the constitutional monarch of a federalized empire which would stretch from the lower Danube to the Euphrates and the Nile. But the dissidents were totally loyal to the Ottoman state. They preached an Ottoman patriotism which, at least from 1870 onwards, began to emphasize Turkish nationalism, a new concept. So, too, in the Ottoman lands was their campaign in favour of a ‘constitution’, an experiment already working in Tunisia and, from 1866 onwards, in Egypt. Namik Kemal advocated the summoning by the Sultan of a parliament on the model of Britain or France. The Sultan’s capricious style of personal rule ensured that the Young Ottomans’ campaign for an elected chamber received increasing attention among the intelligentsia in the greater cities. In 1873 Namik was shipped off to Famagusta, where he was imprisoned in close confinement, but his arrest scarcely checked the momentum of the campaign. It increased the appeal of the Young Ottomans’ cause by giving them a heroic exile awaiting a summons home.
‘European systems of government, European ideas, European laws or customs—no honest Turk will ever pretend to admire any of these,’ Stratford de Redcliffe had remarked to one of his aides during the Crimean War. ‘If ever Easterns (sic) get imbued with Liberal ideas of government their own doom is sealed,’ he added.20 Sir William Bulwer, Stratford’s successor as ambassador in 1858, was also more concerned with efficient government than with ‘liberal’ government, for his sojourn in Pera coincided with the peak period of unrestricted encroachment on the Ottoman economy by foreign banks. When he retired from diplomacy in 1865 he broke with precedent by serving as agent in the Levant for a French banking institution. As ambassador he had always welcomed reforms which provided openings for financial credit.
The Imperial Ottoman Bank was established with French and British capital in 1863: the Director-General was French, and his deputy was a City banker from London. A smaller institution, the Société Générale de l’Empire Ottoman, was set up later in the same year, and followed in 1868 by the Crédit Général Ottoman and by a small Russian Bank.21 Throughout the decade French funds flowed into government bonds and investments likely to promote trade. The opportunities for foreign bond-holders were so great that successive governments in London as well as political leaders in Paris and Vienna willingly deluded themselves that ‘Turkey’ had become a modern and reformed state. When the Ottomans suppressed the Cretan rebellion of 1866–7 there were far fewer protests in the West than during the earlier conflicts with Greeks ‘struggling to be free’.
The seal of international approval was extended to Abdulaziz in 1867, when he was invited to Napoleon III’s ‘Great Universal Exhibition’ in Paris in 1867. It was the first occasion upon which a Sultan visited a non-Islamic state except to wage war. The Sultan was received by Emperor Francis Joseph in Vienna and, after meeting Queen Victoria at Windsor, rode in a colourful procession through the streets of London, ‘looking like a typical Turk’, as The Times reported, searching none too assiduously for the fitting phrase. A fast train sped him to Portsmouth, where the Queen made him a Knight of the Garter. When not prostrate below decks, the Sultan saw the might of the Royal Navy pass in review off Spithead and was deeply impressed, despite being ‘not comfortable’ (the Queen’s words).22 Abdulaziz brought with him to th
e West his nine-year-old son and two nephews, the future Sultans Murad V and Abdulhamid II. The Sultanate had shed the isolation of centuries. Rigid kafe immurement of princes was gone; or so it seemed.
The Ottoman Grand Tour had important social consequences. It intensified Abdulaziz’s delight in palace extravagance, and filled him with desire for a fleet of ironclads, mostly laid down in British yards. Above all, it confirmed his love of railways, ‘une véritable fièvre de chemin de fer’ as the Russian ambassador wrote in 1873, the year locomotive smoke was first seen blowing out across the Bosphorus.23 In that summer of 1873 trains began running in Anatolia, though only as far as Izmit, some 50 miles along the coast from Haydarpaša, the terminus facing Stamboul. The railway was built by the French, who were also responsible for a short line opened in the same year from Mudania, on the Anatolian shore of the Sea of Marmara, inland to Bursa. Yet, while French and British concerns still dominated the Ottoman economy, the chief beneficiaries from Abdulaziz’s railway mania were Germany and Austria-Hungary. In 1872 a German engineer, Wilhelm von Pressel, presented the Porte with a ten-year master plan to extend the Izmit line to Ankara and the Persian Gulf, a project which appealed to Abdulaziz, though little was done to fulfil it until long after his death.24
The Sultan was also attracted by plans for an Orient line drawn up by the Bavarian-born Baron Hirsch, whose banking interests were in Vienna and Paris. In 1870 it therefore seemed as if the Ottoman capital would soon be linked with the railway network of central Europe. Significantly, a year later, a Banque Austro-Ottomane and a Banque Austro-Turque opened offices in Constantinople. But all Austrian railway projects suffered from the collapse of the Vienna stock-market on Black Friday, 9 May 1873; and by the end of Abdulaziz’s reign the Orient railway had made little progress. It linked Constantinople with Edirne and Plovdiv (Philippopolis), while a feeder line ran southwards from Edirne to the Aegean coast at Dedeagatch (now Alexandroúpolis). Legend insists that the apparent inability of the Plovdiv route to follow a straight line across flat and open country was due to a clause in Hirsch’s contract which provided for him to be paid, not an overall sum, but a fee for each kilometre of track laid. This tale is probably apocryphal, but there is no doubt that corruption was widespread at every level during the railway craze.
Shock-waves from Vienna’s ‘Black Friday’ shook the already fragile Ottoman financial system. Almost half the total resources of the government was absorbed by the need to meet annuities, interest payments, and the demands of a sinking fund on a dozen foreign loans contracted by the Sultans since the Crimean War. As the Treasury accounts made no distinction between the needs of state and the inroads of the sovereign, it is small wonder that, with less than one-tenth of the loans being spent on measures to increase the Empire’s economic well-being, Abdulaziz’s conduct of government should have exasperated a succession of ministers. When Emin Ali died in September 1871 he had completed five terms of office as Grand Vizier, effectively dominating the Porte for some eighteen years, even though he had often clashed with his sovereign. This relative continuity of government ended with Ali’s death, for Abdulaziz resolved to rule as an autocrat. He sought pliant Grand Viziers, whom he would dismiss as soon as they began to form political groups of personal followers; and he also nominated provincial governors, choosing those whom he believed capable of speedily collecting taxes in their particular vilayet. Between September 1871 and February 1874 there were six different Grand Viziers; in the provinces there were so many changes at the top that the average length of term for a governor was little more than four months.25 With Grand Viziers flipping in and out of office every seven months and provincial governors every four, the widespread frustration at persistent misrule was turned against the Sultan himself rather than against his ministers or officials. If the ousted viziers possessed any strength of character, they could count on support from the Young Ottoman dissidents.
Two of these transient Grand Viziers were powerful personalities. Ahmed Midhat had served as an enlightened provincial governor on the lower Danube and in Baghdad. He was appointed Grand Vizier in the last week of July 1872, soon after his fiftieth birthday. Within three months, however, Midhat was dismissed, having fallen foul of the Sultan on three counts: he aired the possibility of a federalized structure for the Empire; he set up an Accounting Department; and, most disturbing of all, he began to investigate corruption at the heart of the Dolmabahche itself. The second masterful Grand Vizier was Hüseyin Avni, who held office from February 1874 to April 1875. To foreign diplomats Hüseyin seemed more formidable than Midhat, but he was less intelligent: he had served as serasker (Commander-in-Chief) for four years. No one was better placed to organize a military coup; and it was therefore foolish of Abdulaziz to dismiss Hüseyin because he resented his attempts to divert funds from the palace to meet the needs of the army. It was also foolish of the Sultan, four months later, to make Mahmud Nedim his Grand Vizier, for Nedim was popularly believed to be in Russian pay. There was no doubt that he treated the Tsar’s ambassador, General Nikolai Ignatiev, with a consideration similar to the exaggerated respect which earlier viziers had accorded to Stratford de Redcliffe.
By now Abdulaziz’s behaviour seemed to justify the rumours of his mental instability. Paroxysms of fury became more violent and more frequent. The Sultan seemed incapable of checking his extravagance. He would still spend lavishly on the harem and his palace, especially a new pavilion at Yildiz in high parkland to the north of the Dolmabahche. Yet in October 1875 the wretched Nedim was forced to announce a suspension of payment of interest on the Ottoman Debt, thus virtually admitting state bankruptcy.26 The financial chaos caused by twenty years of European bank loans and extravagant mismanagement left the Ottoman Empire dependent for survival on the good will of foreign governments.
The state bankruptcy could hardly have come at a worse moment. In June 1875 the Christian South Slavs of Herzegovina rose in revolt, their old resentments over taxation fed by intensive Panslav propaganda originating in Moscow (as distinct from official Tsarist policy, which was determined in St Petersburg). The rising soon spread from Nevesinje, near Mostar, into Bosnia and along the restless borderland with Montenegro. It was followed in the spring of 1876 by a Bulgarian rebellion in the villages of the Rhodope Mountains, beyond Plovdiv. While this rebellion was taking place, a riot in Salonika over a Bulgarian Orthodox girl—said (wrongly) to be a convert to Islam against her will—resulted in the murder of the French and German consuls, killed in a mosque by fanatics whom the Ottoman governor was powerless to restrain. The Salonika murders caused instant indignation in the European chancelleries. Worse was to follow. Throughout June graphic newspaper reports from Bulgaria shocked public opinion. Eyewitness accounts of thousands of Christian men, women and children found dead after six weeks of repression by local volunteer militia (başi bozuka) stirred humanitarian crusaders in the West and among the Orthodox faithful of Holy Russia. Assertions that rebels as well as militia had committed atrocities went unheeded. Governments could not check mounting popular anger against ‘the Turk’, however much the great financial institutions might deplore the reopening of the Eastern Question at such a time.27
Abdulaziz was deposed before news of the Bulgarian atrocities broke in the newspapers of the West. On 10 May thousands of Muslim students packed the squares in front of the mosques in Stamboul and along the Galata waterfront demanding the dismissal of Nedim and the şeyhülislâm. Their mood was fundamentally conservative, hostile to outside pressure, and sympathetic to their co-religionists in Salonika; they accused the Porte of abject appeasement of the Great Powers after the killing of the two foreign consuls. The unrest was exploited by Midhat, Hüseyin Avni and the inner directorate of the Young Ottomans. Abdulaziz dismissed Nedim. He reinstated Hüseyin as Commander-in-Chief. He even appointed Midhat, whom he hated, a member of the Divan. But he could not save his throne.
Within a fortnight of Nedim’s dismissal Sir Henry Elliot, the British ambassador, repor
ted that the overthrow of the Sultan seemed inevitable: the word ‘ “Constitution” was in every mouth’.28 As Sir Henry was notorious for spending much of his time with a voluptuous Greek on a tranquil island in the Sea of Marmara, it is not clear where he observed these mouths shaping so rare a word: but the British, fearing grave riots in the capital, ordered the Mediterranean fleet to Besika Bay off the approaches to the Dardanelles, and Ignatiev fortified the Russian Embassy. In the small hours of 30 May, on Hüseyin’s orders, the commandant of the military academy sealed off the Dolmabahche with two battalions of infantry, while warships moored off-shore trained their guns on the palace. The serasker’s bodyguard escorted Hüseyin into the throne-room, where on the previous evening Abdulaziz had staged a cock-fight to amuse himself.
There followed some minutes of high drama. Hüseyin was suddenly confronted on the ceremonial staircase by the massive figure of his Sultan, still in a night-shirt but wielding a sword as if determined to fight to the death. Behind him appeared his formidable mother, the sixty-six-year-old Valide Sultana Pertevniyal, a tigress urging her son to defend himself (and her own privileged position). There was no bloodshed, however; both serasker and Sultan remained at heart traditional formularists; Hüseyin presented a solemn fetva of deposition, and Abdulaziz bowed to the inevitable. His state barge took him across the Golden Horn to the Topkapi Sarayi, passing on its short voyage the caique of his nephew, Prince Murad, coming reluctantly to assume the responsibilities of Empire under Midhat’s watchful eye. The frightened Murad implored Midhat to remain in the Dolmabahche. He did so willingly.29
