The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire

by Alan Palmer

  Their problems were compounded by doubts over what was happening in Constantinople. By the time they reached Berlin it was by no means certain that the sovereign who had entrusted them with such imprecise responsibilities would remain much longer on his throne. The Russian advance through the Balkans had forced thousands of refugees to flee to Constantinople, more than doubling the city’s population. Food was short and there was no work for them. They were natural tinder for any demagogue seeking to kindle mob violence.

  On 20 May Ali Suavi, once a Young Ottoman radical and now a hotheaded Islamic fundamentalist, armed a small group of these unfortunate refugees. He then led about a hundred men into the Çiraan Palace and attempted to free the deposed Murad V, whom he intended to proclaim Sultan. The local police chief arrived, struck down Ali Suavi with his cudgel and, backed by the gendarmerie, killed or wounded half the raiders.

  The whole incident lasted less than an hour.27 It forms a trivial episode in the long tale of an empire in decline. But the abortive coup made a lasting impression on Abdulhamid’s mind. Initially it threw him into a panic. For at least a fortnight he pursued uncertain policies, changing his ministers rapidly and giving orders which, within a few hours, he would countermand. A beneficiary of this vacillation was the deposed Sultan: Abdulhamid authorized his private execution but no action was taken, probably because Murad, a Freemason, was able to get a message to the Master of the Phanariot Masonic lodge, seeking help from Kaiser William I and the Prince of Wales. One night in that May Abdulhamid sent his secretary to the British Embassy to ask that HMS Antelope, the stationnaire assigned to the ambassador, should be moored off the Dolmabahche, ready to give the Sultan sanctuary in case of need. No sooner had Antelope taken up position than a second message to the embassy asked for the steam yacht to return to her old berth. Next morning the Sultan received Layard alone in the harem. He was, he said, in ‘the greatest possible peril’; the army hated him; the people felt no affection for him; since his accession he had not enjoyed a single night of rest. He feared, not death, but immurement for life in the kafe. Would Layard protect his family if, in fighting for his throne, he was killed? A note on the following day, written by the Sultan himself, again stressed his sense of imminent peril. ‘I grieve most sincerely for the poor Sultan, for whom I cannot but feel pity and even affection,’ Layard wrote to Salisbury, six days before the Congress opened in Berlin. ‘If however the safety of the state and our paramount interests require that he should be put aside, he must be sacrificed.’28 No British ambassador—not even Stratford de Redcliffe in his prime—ever matched Sir Henry Layard as the would-be arbiter of Ottoman affairs during this summer of protracted crisis.

  Abdulhamid was not ‘sacrificed’. But his position remained uncertain for several months. At least two more conspiracies to restore Murad V were hatched by the Phanariot Freemasons and revealed to the Sultan by the growing network of police spies in the capital. The incompetence of the plotters seems to have helped Abdulhamid recover his nerve. Until the disasters of the war weakened his sense of mission he had been working towards the creation of a new autocracy; before the coming of winter in 1878 these despotic tendencies in his character began to reassert themselves. Ever since his accession he had chosen to live, not amid the Mecidian grandeur of the Dolmabahche Palace, but in the hillside summer pavilion at Yildiz which Abdulaziz had built over old cemeteries on a site looking out over the Çiraan Palace. Now Abdulhamid turned Yildiz into a tightly secure township, as intricate as the Topkapi Sarayi in the previous century and accommodating five or six thousand people, but more spacious than any earlier imperial Ottoman complex.29 There was no single imperial residence. It was safer to move frequently from one small house to another, to confound possible assassins. Outwardly Yildiz was—as it is today—peaceful and attractive parkland, with shrubberies, lakes and fountains, gravel paths to chalet kiosks, and sudden panoramas of the Anatolian shore and of ships on the Bosphorus or out beyond the Stamboul headland. But Yildiz had, too, its own prison; it stood close to the menagerie in order, so it was said, that ambassadors and guests might hear the screech of birds and animals rather than of humans in captivity.

  The two faces of Yildiz made the imperial township as much a symbol of Abdulhamid’s reign as the Dolmabahche had been of his father’s. Only trusted guards and intimates were allowed to work for the Sultan within the yellow-stuccoed walls. For nineteen years after his release from Russian internment the hero of Plevna, Gazi Osman Pasha, was head of Yildiz administration, responsible for security. Osman also served as chairman of a newly-established Imperial Privy Council, one of whose tasks was to root out corruption and inefficiency at the highest level of state, military or civilian. Until he became Grand Vizier in October 1879, the Sultan’s secretary Mehmed Said organized the Yildiz bureaucracy, and the palace remained Said’s power base throughout the reign; but Yildiz also had its own Press Department, Foreign Affairs office and Abdulhamid’s personal financial secretariat, headed by Hakop Zarifi. The most sinister institution based at Yildiz was the hafiye ((secret police), controlled for some twenty years by the Sultan’s Circassian protégé, Ahmed Celaleddin. Subordinate to the hafiye were hundreds of informants (jurnalcis) paid to feed the Sultan with titbits of news, not only from his capital but from distant towns and villages as well. Arabs from Syria and Tripolitania—most of them influential members of the ulema—found a place in the hafiye secretariat alongside spies hotfoot from the labyrinth of the Kapali Carsi, Stamboul’s grand bazaar. Many reports were fabricated, still more could not be verified, but all were carefully studied by Abdulhamid himself. The general effect on the Sultan of an overstaffed secret police force was disastrous; cumulatively, the scraps of information intensified his paranoia and sense of betrayal. For the remainder of his reign Abdulhamid’s mind readily conjured up the bogey of imminent assassination. Guests entertained at Yildiz reported that the Sultan employed, not merely taster eunuchs who tested food before a meal passed his lips, but a first-puff eunuch to ensure that no one had poisoned his cigarettes.30

  The dark suspicion of betrayal which so often clouded Abdulhamid’s brooding mind was turned on ambassadors and foreign statesmen as well as on Ottoman ministers and bureaucrats. Layard soon fell from grace, despite his turcophile enthusiasm. Reports from Berlin and the other European capitals convinced the Sultan of British treachery. Shortly before the opening of the Congress The Globe newspaper in London published a leaked version of a secret Anglo-Russian protocol which proposed that the Russians should retain Kars and Batum while restoring the town of Bayazid and accepting the division of Big Bulgaria into two provinces. The secret convention also agreed that, as Britain had a special interest in Greece, the Great Powers should consult together over the future of Epirus, Thessaly ‘and the other Christian provinces left under the Porte’. The Globe’s revelation had ‘serious’ effects on Britain’s immediate standing at Constantinople: ‘There is not a Turk or Christian, who is not now convinced that we have been playing Turkey and Europe false,’ Layard wrote in a private letter to his predecessor, Elliot, ‘that . . . we have been all along in secret agreement with Russia and Austria, to dismember the Turkish Empire and take our share of the spoils.31

  Fears aroused by The Globe’s revelations were confirmed when news of the final treaty terms reached Constantinople. Big Bulgaria was, indeed, destroyed, but the Sultan had to accept the creation of a Bulgarian Principality extending from the Danube to the Balkan range, and a province of Eastern Rumelia which, though directly under Ottoman rule, was to be given a Christian Governor and a special administrative system. Bayazid and the valley of the river Eleskirt were returned to the Sultan, as also was Macedonia south of Niš. Bosnia and Herzegovina remained Ottoman provinces but were to be occupied by Austro-Hungarian troops and administered through civil servants appointed in Vienna. No change was made in the Straits Convention, but the Ottoman Government undertook to introduce reforms in the remaining Armenian provinces and, once again, confi
rmed religious freedom throughout the empire. Montenegro more than doubled her pre-war size, while Serbia obtained Niš and some of the lands assigned at San Stefano to Bulgaria. Only over Greece were the provisions of the Treaty less exacting than The Globe’s revelations had led Abdulhamid to anticipate. British backing for the government in Athens was half-hearted, Disraeli even suggesting at the Congress that, as the Ottoman Empire had lost so much territory, it would be unwise to contemplate further redrawing of the map in the Balkans.32 The Sultan was, however, required to authorize talks with the Greeks over frontier revision in Thessaly; he was informed that, should the two governments be unable to determine the new border, the Great Powers would mediate a settlement of the problem. Eventually, in 1881, the Sultan’s troops evacuated Thessaly as far north as the river Pinios and the Arta district in southern Epirus, but the Porte continued to deny Greek claims to northern Epirus and Macedonia. Arta, Larissa and Trikkala became Greek: Ioánnina and the historic port of Salonika (Thessaloniki) remained firmly in Ottoman hands.

  Abdulhamid’s hope that the Congress would scrap the war indemnity was not realized. But it constituted less of a problem than he had feared, for the Treaty of Berlin made no reference to the indemnity, leaving the issue to be settled in direct bilateral negotiations. The Russians demanded some £32 million as a matter of principle, the Tsar’s ambassador admitting privately to Salisbury that they attached little importance to the sum and thought payment would prove impossible. After four years of evasive talk the Porte undertook to pay Russia £320,000 annually (until 1982), the Tsar waiving all interest claims. But the Russians well knew that if the Ottomans remained in a state of chronic bankruptcy, their own economy would suffer; and they therefore rarely attempted to force their Turkish neighbour to pay the annual due. To assist the Porte to achieve some financial good order, it was agreed at Berlin that the seceding independent states would each take over a portion of the Ottoman Public Debt. At the same time the Congress recommended to the Porte the creation of an international commission of financial experts who would safeguard the interests of Ottoman state bond-holders.

  Abdulhamid’s resentment of foreign interference made him resist as long as possible the establishment of any international commission. There was one moment at the Congress when the Russians went so far as to propose complete European supervision of Ottoman finances, backed by joint military occupation of the Empire until the economy was put on a sound basis; and a similar solution had been advocated a few months earlier by the nonagenarian Stratford de Redcliffe, although only as a last resort and strictly limited in time.33 The idea of linking financial control and military occupation was received by the other delegates to the Congress with a cynicism bred of experience: once foreign troops had established bases, when would they withdraw again? Nothing more was heard of the proposal. But for Abdulhamid the abhorrent suggestion underlined the gravity of his financial crisis. He had begun his reign determined to avoid further foreign loans. His experience in the winter of 1877–8 confirmed the wisdom of this resolve, for the Ottoman Treasury’s credit was so poor that wartime emergency borrowing in London and Paris brought in no more than three-fifths of the stipulated sum, the remaining two-being absorbed by discount and interest. With the salaries of civil servants in Stamboul some four years in arrears and prices rising week by week, the Sultan knew there was a threat of rioting in the capital, still packed with indigent refugees. Understandably, he rated financial reform high among his priorities.

  Fortunately, in his Armenian banker Zarifi, Abdulhamid retained a good adviser. An imperial decree in November 1879 set up a commission of Galata bankers who, with nominees of the Ottoman Bank, were to help pay off the public debt. At the same time the Ministry of Finance was reorganized, accepting responsibility for the empire as a whole and co-ordinating the collection of taxes from each province. The Tanzimat reform era, with its rationalization of the administrative structure, had left the bureaucracy top-heavy, with too many ministries employing too many officials in the capital. Economy was preached—and occasionally imposed—at the Ministries of the Interior and Foreign Affairs; a profits tax was instituted and, in theory, levied throughout the empire; and a Financial Reform Commission was created in order to scrutinize and trim all estimates of expenditure from government departments, although pleas of ‘special interest’ reduced the efficiency of this particular institution. Travellers’ tales, backed by cautious comments from commercial attachés and consuls, suggest that behind an impressive façade corruption flourished. But the good intent was there.

  Yet, if these changes convinced foreign ambassadors of Abdulhamid’s sincerity, it soon became clear that a more powerful authority was needed to guard against any slipping back into the mismanagement preceding Grand Vizier Nedim’s admission of state bankruptcy. At last, in December 1881, the Sultan accepted long-term supervision of Ottoman finances by European bankers. The ‘Muharrem Decree’ established the Ottoman Public Debt Commission, an institution which became virtually a separate and parallel Ministry of Finance, under an international directorate (French, Dutch, British, Italian, German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman) and employing some 100 foreign experts in a work-force of five thousand. The long-term effect of these changes was to raise state revenue by some 43 per cent in the course of Abdulhamid’s reign, and the threat of imperial bankruptcy receded even though there remained an annual budget deficit. The probity of the Ottoman Public Debt Commission enabled Abdulhamid in his later years to attract European investment in public works projects, thereby stimulating the economy of the Empire as a whole. While French interests remained considerable, the British disposed of many holdings at the turn of the century, and Germany became the largest investor in Anatolia.34

  In the aftermath of the war with Russia this last development seemed unlikely. Bismarckian Germany, taking its cue from the Chancellor himself, showed as yet little interest in the Ottoman Empire, and Abdulhamid’s suppliant delegates, going fez in hand to the Congress, fared badly in Berlin. The definitive Russo-Ottoman Treaty of Peace of February 1879 confirmed the loss to Abdulhamid of some two-fifths of his empire and a fifth of his subjects. At Berlin the Ottoman Empire was relegated from the super-league to which it had won promotion at the end of the Crimean War. Effectively, it ceased to be a European Power, although Ottoman provinces straddled the Balkans from Edirne to the Albanian vilayet of Scutari on the Adriatic. But the Sultanate continued to bind together a vast multinational empire, even if in 1879 many outer bonds were slipping loose. Abdulhamid remained overlord of Syria, Mesopotamia, Arabia, Egypt and the Maghreb up to the Algerian-Tunisian frontier; and, though the frontier in the Caucasus had contracted, he was still sovereign of five vilayets in Armenia and Kurdistan as well as of the lands English-speaking geographers called ‘Asia Minor’. Moreover, to a greater extent than his immediate predecessors, he was conscious of a moral authority as Caliph. Defeat at Russia’s hands posed for Abdulhamid the problems of improvising a new concept of empire, and he accepted the challenge. It was fitting that the Sultan enjoyed a fuller panorama of Asia from the slopes of Yildiz than from the waterfront palaces down the hill.

  CHAPTER 11

  THE HAMIDIAN EMPIRE

  FOR THE FIRST TEN YEARS OF HIS REIGN ABDULHAMID II reluctantly accepted a constant diminution of Ottoman power and authority within Europe. The humiliations of San Stefano and Berlin were followed in 1880 by the enforced handing over to Montenegro of Ulcinj and a few miles of Adriatic coastline and, a year later, by the cession of Thessaly and the Arta district in Epirus to Greece. A convention signed with Austria–Hungary in April 1879 affirmed that Bosnia and Herzegovina were still Ottoman provinces, temporarily administered by the Austro-Hungarian Ministry of Finance. But it was a bitter blow to Ottoman pride when, in 1881, young Bosnians and Herzegovinians were conscripted to serve in Francis Joseph’s army, as if they were already Austrian subjects. The subsequent foundation in Sarajevo of an Islamic şeriat law-school, with a delightful colonnaded porti
co and built from Habsburg government funds, was no doubt more gratifying to Abdulhamid as Caliph than as Sultan. Habsburg–Ottoman relations after 1878 remained coldly correct, with Vienna and Budapest insisting on exploiting every possible commercial concession, while the Sultan hoped for increased revenue from Austrian railway projects. The sanjak of Novibazar, the strategically important corridor which separated Serbia from Montenegro, remained under Ottoman rule; but for most of Abdulhamid’s reign the Austro-Hungarian XVth Army Corps garrisoned four of the sanjak’s few towns.

  To lay the ghost of San Stefano’s ‘Big Bulgaria’ became an increasingly difficult task. Eastern Rumelia, the autonomous Ottoman province conjured up by the Berlin Congress, proved an unworkable creation. Although the province brought a steady revenue into the Sultan’s coffers, misrule by his nominee as Governor—a Greek Orthodox bureaucrat from Samos—intensified Pan-Bulgarian feelings and in September 1885 provoked a revolt in Plovdiv whose leader, Stefan Stambulov, declared Eastern Rumelia united with Bulgaria. Over the following eighteen months the Ottoman authorities showed restraint and discretion, not least because Abdulhamid wished to avoid further accusations of ‘massacring’ Bulgars. He welcomed an ambassadorial conference in his capital, only to find in April 1886 that, in return for retrocession of a cluster of Muslim villages in the Rhodope mountains, the ambassadors required him to issue a firman confirming the union of ‘the two Bulgarias’ as a single tributary Principality. Technically, until October 1908 Bulgaria remained under Abdulhamid’s suzerainty, and after his accession as Prince in July 1887 Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg ensured that regular annual payments went from Sofia to Constantinople. But Bulgarian national ambition still sought an outlet to the Aegean. In practice, from 1885 onwards Bulgaria was as lost to its Ottoman suzerain as independent Serbia and Roumania.1