The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire

by Alan Palmer

  This fourth Russo-Turkish war of the century lasted for ten and a half months. When the Russians crossed the lower Danube in June it seemed as if they would sweep all before them, for although the Ottoman soldiery fought bravely and had good artillery, staff-work was almost nonexistent. On the Caucasus Front the Russians swiftly seized several forts, forcing the Ottoman commander, Ahmed Muhtar, to concentrate his forces at Kars, the fortress which had been stormed twice by the Russians in the past half-century. Now Kars was again defended ably for five months. Despite initial Russian victories in the Balkans the former commandant of the War Academy, Husnu Suleyman, showed great enterprise in bringing an army by sea from Albania to Dedeagatch and launching a surprise counter-offensive which halted the invaders at the Shipka Pass, in the main Balkan chain. But the hero of the campaign was Osman Pasha. On 20 July, and again ten days later, his courageous generalship resisted wave upon wave of Russian assaults against the small fortified town of Plevna (Pleven), some eighty-five miles north of Sofia. A third attempt to take Plevna in mid-September cost the Russians even heavier casualties. Thereafter Plevna was meticulously invested by Russia’s great military engineer, General Eduard Totleben. He would not storm the town; he would starve its defenders into surrender.11

  Briefly, before the coming of winter, a mood of optimism prevailed on the Golden Horn. There was hope that fog, rain and snow would impose a stalemate on the battle fronts, making the Tsar seek peace: the long Russian supply lines were vulnerable to wintry conditions while Abdulaziz’s expensive toys, the Ottoman ironclads, gave the Sultan naval supremacy in the Black Sea. At the same time, Abdulhamid raised morale by what, in retrospect, stands out as the earliest appeal to Panislamic sentiment. He countered the Tsar’s invocation of ‘Orthodoxy and Slavdom’ by placing a new emphasis on his claims as Caliph. The sacred standard of the Prophet was solemnly borne out from the Topkapi Sarayi. With this Islamic oriflamme in his hands and with the backing of the şeyhülislâm, the Sultan-Caliph proclaimed a Holy War (jihad) against the infidel armies of the Tsar. As Alexander II had some 10 million Muslim subjects, a full response to the call of jihad would have provoked a grave rebellion within the Russian Empire. An agent of the Sultan travelled to Kabul to encourage the Afghan Muslims to open a new battle front in Central Asia. For the moment, however, a mass Islamic uprising remained unlikely. The immediate consequence of the jihad in the Ottoman heartland was an upsurge of patriotism, bringing recruits to the army and contributions to a war fund. Significantly, on 21 May the parliamentary deputies paid their sovereign the compliment of proposing that he assume the honoured title of Ghazi (warrior leader against the Infidel).12

  During the summer the Sultan became increasingly hopeful of support from London. Four days before the Russian declaration of war, Sir Henry Elliot was succeeded as ambassador by Henry Layard, a turcophile archaeologist who had excavated Nineveh in the 1840s while serving as an attaché under Stratford de Redcliffe. Layard’s public and private papers show the extent to which he modelled himself on Stratford, offering Abdulhamid the type of constructive criticism which the Sultan’s father had accepted from the Great Elchi during the Crimean War. ‘A man out of whom much might be made,’ the ambassador wrote home patronizingly after his first audience with Abdulhamid; and at their second audience he was, he declared, ‘even more favourably impressed’ by the Sultan’s qualities.13 Prime Minister Disraeli (created Earl of Beaconsfield the previous summer) accepted Layard’s judgements and warnings at their face value, although his Foreign Secretary (Lord Derby), his Indian Secretary (Lord Salisbury) and other cabinet ministers remained sceptical. In July, when the Russians seemed likely to break through to Edirne and the Gallipoli peninsula, Disraeli sent friendly assurances to the Sultan, indicating his willingness to order the British fleet through the Dardanelles to protect Constantinople from Russian occupation. Abdulhamid, however, had no desire to see the ironclads of the Mediterranean Fleet in the Sea of Marmara. The stubborn defence of Plevna and the failure to push Suleyman Pasha’s troops back to Thrace relieved the threat to his capital, and the warships came no nearer than Smyrna.

  Some of Abdulhamid’s later hostility towards Great Britain sprang from misplaced confidence in his relationship with Layard during these months of protracted crisis. He knew that, while embassy telegrams necessarily went through the Foreign Office, Layard was also in direct personal correspondence with Disraeli. The Sultan treated both the ambassador and his wife with rare courtesy, inviting them to ‘dine in a quiet way’ with him on several occasions. He almost certainly suspected that Layard’s news was passed on to a more august russophobe than the Prime Minister; at one audience that winter the Sultan, so Layard informed Disraeli, expressed the ‘greatest admiration and affection for the Queen’, ‘spoke like an enlightened Christian’, and ‘referred more than once to Prince Albert and H.M.’s married life’ as a fine example. Layard thought the conversation ‘curious’.14

  Winter did not, as the Turks had hoped, assist their defenders. The Balkan snows ruled out all possibility of relieving Plevna, which on 11 December at last surrendered to the Russians. Within a month the Tsar’s troops were in Sofia, in time to celebrate there the great Orthodox Festival of the Epiphany. By 20 January 1878 they had taken Edirne and were threatening both Constantinople and the Gallipoli peninsula. This climax to the war coincided with the second session of the Ottoman Parliament, for which elections had been held in November and which the Sultan formally opened on the last day of the old year. The military collapse made this second parliament more vociferous than its predecessor, attacking the mismanagement of the war with detailed criticisms which, coming at a time when enemy artillery could be heard in the capital, made Abdulhamid fear that the religious patriotism he had encouraged earlier in the campaign would be turned against him personally. But, whatever the mood of parliament, the Sultan personally recognized the need for peace. On 31 January an armistice was agreed at Edirne.

  The end of military operations left Abdulhamid exposed to three main dangers: the anger of the parliamentary deputies; the further encroachment of the enemy; and provocative actions by his would-be ally. The Sultan was not greatly troubled by the Meclis-i Mebusan. A fortnight after the Armistice he went in person to the lower chamber: one deputy complained that the elected representatives of the people were not consulted over ways to avert the military disaster; another deputy went so far as to propose a curb on the Sultan’s personal expenditure. Abdulhamid listened impassively to all that was said. That night he issued a decree dissolving the chamber on the grounds that it could not carry out its duties effectively at such a moment of crisis for the Empire. The Sultan also authorized the arrest of the more outspoken deputies, but his Grand Vizier persuaded him to countermand this order, fearing the arrests would provoke a popular revolt. The deputies returned safely to their homes. Parliament, the Sultan subsequently explained, had not been abolished; it was suspended until the Empire should be ready for it. The chamber remained empty year after year. Three decades were to pass before Abdulhamid opened a third parliament.15

  The Russians could not be sent about their business so simply or so swiftly. For three weeks after the Edirne armistice they threatened to enter Constantinople itself. To halt Grand Duke Nicholas’s army the Sultan had been forced to make what was virtually an unconditional surrender. The armistice terms provided for the immediate withdrawal of the remaining Ottoman forces from Bulgaria; they also stipulated that the final peace treaty would include the imposition of a war indemnity, autonomy for Bulgaria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, total independence for Roumania, Serbia and Montenegro, and a revision of the Straits Convention to accord Russia new rights over the opening and closure of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles. If the Ottoman authorities evaded any of the armistice conditions, Grand Duke Nicholas reserved the right to order his troops forward. Some advanced units had already reached the Aegean coast at Dedeagatch, and the local Ottoman commanders insisted that the movement of Russian units had not
ceased with the signing of the armistice. This was not so; the Grand Duke scrupulously observed the terms he had laid down. But rumour intensified the near-panic in Constantinople. On 5 February Layard telegraphed to London: ‘Armistice does not stop Russian advance. Porte in great alarm.’16 Two days later the Russians in Bulgaria cut all telegraphic lines between Constantinople and Western Europe, forcing Layard to send his messages by way of Bombay. This ominous development convinced Disraeli that the Russians were about to seize the Ottoman capital. On 8 February Admiral Sir Phipps Hornby, who had brought the finest battleships in the Mediterranean Fleet up to Besika Bay a fortnight earlier, was ordered to enter the Straits, return fire if necessary, and take up station off Constantinople.

  Although Abdulhamid welcomed assurances of support from Disraeli, conveyed to him both by Layard and by his own ambassador in London, he was alarmed by British naval activity. ‘The Sultan appears to have made up his mind that the entry of our fleet will lead to the loss of his life or at least of his throne, as it will bring the Russians into his capital, and a general massacre of the Mussulmans and destruction of their property will ensue,’ Layard wrote to Lord Derby. ‘I have scarcely been one hour, day and night, without having one of his Ministers in the house, or receiving a letter from them. They implore me to stop the approach of the fleet.’17 Under no circumstances did the Sultan dare grant permission for the warships to enter the Dardanelles; but on 13 February Hornby entered the Narrows, in breach of the Straits Convention. Thirteen months were to pass before the British squadron sailed back into the Aegean.

  As the Sultan had feared, the Russians regarded the arrival of the British ships as a hostile act. Their commander, Grand Duke Nicholas (the Tsar’s favourite brother), ordered an advance to the Sea of Marmara, which his troops reached at San Stefano (now Yesilkoy, the site of Istanbul airport), six miles from Constantinople’s outer walls. At this point, with Britain and Russia drifting into war, a compromise was agreed: the Grand Duke would take advantage of the new Orient Railway to move his headquarters from Edirne to San Stefano but would not send patrols closer to the city; Hornby’s battleships would anchor eight miles south of the Golden Horn, off Prinkipo Island (Büyükada), where in 1807 Admiral Duckworth had brought his squadron after the first British naval passage of the Dardanelles. Tension continued. The British feared that the Russians would seize the Turkish fleet and, on 14 February, Layard was instructed to seek the immediate purchase of the four newest Ottoman ironclads.18 But although the Ottoman Treasury was empty the Porte angrily rejected any such sale. Meanwhile, in San Stefano painful talks continued on a draft peace treaty.

  It was an odd situation. No Russian commander had ever been so close to taking Constantinople as the (militarily incompetent) Grand Duke Nicholas. Among his staff captains in these frustrating weeks was Prince Alexander of Battenberg, whose brother Prince Louis was serving aboard the appropriately-named battleship HMS Sultan off Prinkipo Island. ‘This morning I rode with the Grand Duke to the heights above San Stefano, and we saw Constantinople before us with St Sophia, all the minarets, Scutari, etc.,’ Alexander of Battenberg wrote to his parents. ‘Tears filled the Grand Duke’s eyes. What satisfaction it must give him to stand at the gates of Constantinople with his army!’19 During the uncertain weeks when Russian troops could see the masts of the British warships on the horizon, Prince Alexander was welcomed aboard HMS Sultan by his brother and by the battleship’s captain. Here was a further instance of that royal kinship which made Anglo-Russian collaboration more natural than Anglo-Turkish: HMS Sultan’s commanding officer was Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, second son of Queen Victoria and husband of the Tsar’s only surviving daughter.

  ‘More Russian than the Russians’ was Prince Alexander’s verdict on the feelings of ‘the ship’s company’ in a letter to his parents. A markedly different impression of the sympathies of Hornby’s crews was conveyed to Abdulhamid by Layard and by his Phanariot physician, Mavroyeni.20 At home British public opinion remained divided over the Eastern Crisis, with strong backing in the provinces for Gladstone’s moral crusade on behalf of the Balkan Christians. In London, however, there was a renewal of russophobe patriotism, a mood popularized by James MacDermott’s ‘Jingo’ music-hall song, with its raucous insistence, ‘The Russians shall not have Constantinople’. A translation of MacDermott’s heartening chorus was passed on to the Sultan by Mavroyeni. It is said to have brought a rare smile of satisfaction to those thin, cruel lips. He convinced himself that the British sailors in the ironclads off Prinkipo were Jingos to a man. However much he may have deplored their arrival, from late February 1878 Abdulhamid regarded Hornby’s fleet as his lifeline to the West.

  On 3 March a peace treaty was signed at San Stefano, based on the preliminary terms agreed at Edirne. It was a triumph for Panslavism.21 As well as imposing a large indemnity, giving Russia considerable gains in eastern Anatolia, and confirming the independence of Roumania and of an enlarged Montenegro and Serbia, the treaty created a ‘Big Bulgaria’ as an autonomous principality under Ottoman tributary sovereignty. Never had a Sultan accepted such terms. Abdulhamid’s one hope was that the Panslav settlement would prove unacceptable to Russia’s rivals among the Great Powers.

  Even before the treaty was signed Count Andrássy, the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister, had been alarmed by the boundaries proposed in the western Balkans, for they encroached on Austria’s sphere of interest. He sought a new Congress of Vienna to patch up a more acceptable settlement; but the Russians would never allow their traditional rival in the Danube basin an initiative of this character. The most the Tsar and his ministers would concede was a Congress in Berlin later that summer, under German rather than Austro-Hungarian chairmanship. Although the German Chancellor and Foreign Minister, Otto von Bismarck, had little interest in Balkan affairs, he had equally no wish to see the whole continent plunged into war because of friction between Vienna and St Petersburg. At Bismarck’s request, Andrássy sent out invitations to a Congress in Berlin during the very week the terms of San Stefano became generally known.22

  Abdulhamid mistrusted Andrássy, not least because the Vienna stock-market crash five years before had weakened the credibility of any Habsburg minister. The Sultan placed more reliance on Disraeli. On the day the Treaty of San Stefano was signed he invited Layard to dine with him and discuss ways of revising the settlement. The ambassador spent the following week drafting a thirty-two page memorandum for the Foreign Office in which he set out the enormities of San Stefano.23 He emphasized, not only the Balkan aspects of the treaty, but the advance of the Caucasian frontier which gave Russia control of the historic caravan route from Trebizond to Tabriz and Central Asia. Layard’s memorandum intensified the hawkish mood in Downing Street. Cabinet discussion of the question of seeking a permanent ‘place of arms’ for Britain within the Ottoman Empire led Derby to resign as Foreign Secretary; and on 2 April Disraeli strengthened his government by appointing Lord Salisbury to succeed him. The new Foreign Secretary did not share his chief’s romantic enthusiasm for the Sultanate as a historic institution, but he recognized the inherent dangers of a settlement which ‘solved’ the Eastern Question so decisively in Russia’s favour. At the same time, Salisbury’s independence of judgement made him more acceptable to the Russians than his predecessor, and by shrewd negotiations in April and May he secured from the Tsar’s ambassador an acknowledgement that the peace treaty of San Stefano stood in need of revision.24 Without Salisbury’s patient preparatory diplomacy there would have been no redrawing of the Ottoman frontier at the Berlin Congress in late June and July.

  Although Salisbury could never be convinced that the Ottoman Empire was ‘a genuine reliable Power’, he was prepared to negotiate a secret alliance guaranteeing the integrity of the remaining territories of the Sultan in Anatolia. But at a price. Disraeli insisted that fulfilment of the guarantee would be possible only if Great Britain had a base for operations in Asia Minor. What was required, he told the Queen in
early March, was a base which would secure ‘the trade and communications of Europe with the East from the overshadowing interference of Russia’. Serious consideration was given to Crete (‘enormous advantages’, but desire for union with Greece ‘would infallibly produce political trouble’), the island of Stampalia (Astipalia) in the Dodecanese, and to the leasing of Mytilene or Iskenderun. By May Disraeli had decided that ‘Cyprus is the key to Western Asia’.25 On 4 June the Cyprus Convention was signed in Constantinople: if Russia retained Kars, Batum or Ardahan, Britain would defend the Ottoman Empire in Asia against further Russian attack in return for occupying Cyprus, which would remain under the Sultan’s sovereignty. Not until the fourth week of the Congress of Berlin did the Sultan issue the firman authorizing British troops to establish themselves on the island; and he did so then only after the British protested that the deputation he had sent to the Berlin Congress knew nothing of the Cyprus Convention.

  At the Paris Peace Congress in 1856 Ali Pasha had impressed his fellow delegates by his statesmanship. Twenty-two years later the three Ottoman delegates to Berlin were nonentities: a Phanariot Greek who was once Minister of Public Works; a Turkish poet and palace official, with two years’ experience of the Berlin embassy; and, more controversially, a Magdeburg-born convert to Islam who had deserted from the Prussian army and towards whom Bismarck saw no reason to show civility. Abdulhamid personally selected this sorry trio and briefed them verbally, giving them no written instructions. They were to save what they could in the Balkans, get the war indemnity scrapped and see that Varna, Batum and all Armenia were returned to Ottoman sovereignty. Small wonder a Russian delegate noted in his diary of the Congress, ‘The Turks sit and speak—like logs.’26