The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire

by Alan Palmer

  Briefly, in the early 1880s, Abdulhamid II considered the possibility of offsetting the empire’s decline in the Balkans by reasserting Ottoman authority in Egypt. A few years earlier such an apparent reversal of history would have been out of the question; on at least two occasions Cairo had seemed about to cut all links with Constantinople and proclaim Egypt’s full independence. During the protracted ceremonies which had accompanied the opening of the Suez Canal in November 1869 it was Ismail, the ruler of Egypt, and not his imperial master, who was host to the Empress of the French, the Emperor of Austria, the Crown Prince of Prussia and the Princes of Orange and Hesse. Empress Eugénie, Francis Joseph and the other foreign dignitaries might pay courtesy calls on Abdulaziz in Constantinople, as had the Prince and Princess of Wales a few months earlier; but in the Nile delta Ismail stood out as heir to the Pharaohs. He was responsible for giving Cairo an opera house to impress his guests and for commissioning Aïda from Verdi (for staging two years later). Proudly Ismail once assured an eminent foreign banker, ‘My country is no longer in Africa, it is in Europe.’2

  There is no doubt that the French-educated Ismail, who had succeeded his uncle Said as Viceroy in 1863, accelerated the pace of westernization, effectively separating Egypt from Turkey. He used the wealth of an expanding cotton trade to raise foreign loans and, until the European financial crisis of 1873, Egypt’s economy prospered, with benefits from a good railway system and the highly profitable Suez Canal—of which, at its opening, Ismail was the largest single bond-holder. In the spring of 1866 Ismail struck the first of two bargains with his Ottoman suzerain: the annual tribute paid by Egypt was doubled in return for recognition of his rank as Khedive, with a right to increase the Egyptian army, to coin his own currency, and to confer titles and decorations without reference to the Sultan. After a state visit to Constantinople, in which he was lavish in distributing bribes to Sultan Abdulaziz and to influential courtiers, the Khedive secured even more generous concessions: a firman issued in June 1873 gave the Egyptian ruler virtual financial and administrative autonomy. Hitherto he had been able to raise money only by short-term credit; now he could seek long loans from foreign banks.

  The concession was extracted from the Sultan too late. Four weeks earlier the Vienna Stock Exchange crash had shaken the confidence of European bankers. Credit sources contracted; and within two years Ismail found himself unable to pay the high interest on his short-term loans. His Suez Canal holdings passed to the British government, thanks to the enterprise of Disraeli and the ready funds of the Rothschilds. British and French experts sought to rescue the Egyptian economy, gaining greater control of public resources than the Ottomans had ever possessed. Hurriedly Ismail sought to please the Ottoman authorities: in 1877 some 30,000 Egyptian troops fought for the Sultan against the Russians. But the Dual Commissioners—the Anglo-French controllers of Egypt’s finances—ordered drastic economies in the Khedive’s army. They believed, though it is hard to agree with them, that Ismail was as reckless a spendthrift as Abdulaziz had been, and they made ready to bustle him off his throne. Desperately he appealed to Abdulhamid: a deposition imposed by foreigners in Cairo was an ominous precedent for Constantinople, he argued.

  The Sultan was unimpressed. He was not sorry to see so staunch a champion of Egypt’s independence pass into exile. On 26 June 1879, with the encouragement of the British and the French, he ordered Ismail’s deposition. As overlord of Egypt the Sultan summoned to the throne Tewfik, Ismail’s twenty-seven-year-old son. At the same time Abdulhamid imposed a top limit of 18,000 men on the Khedival army and cancelled the firman of June 1873, thereby effectively curbing Egyptian autonomy once again.

  But this was not what the Dual Commissioners wanted. The Sultan had miscued his lines. They expected him to get rid of Ismail and cut the army down to size, but Tewfik was to be their puppet, not Abdulhamid’s. Pressure from the ambassadors in Constantinople led two months later to publication of a revised version of the firman of deposition: Khedive Tewfik might exercise the same autonomous rights as his father, provided he paid the annual tribute to the Sultan and kept his army within the agreed limits. This restriction, however, intensified the Egyptian crisis. Which officers would keep their military careers, Arab-speaking Egyptians or the Turco-Circassians who were habitually promoted to the higher ranks? Over the following two years a xenophobic pressure group of Arab-speaking junior officers continuously threatened disorder in Cairo and Alexandria. Their leader was Lieutenant-Colonel Ahmed Orabi—conveniently known as ‘Arabi Pasha’ in Western Europe.

  Abdulhamid believed he could handle Orabi as dexterously as he dealt with Midhat. He was prepared to use the Orabist mutineers to undermine Khedival authority, spreading such anarchy in Egypt that the Dual Commissioners would welcome direct Ottoman rule and give financial backing to the recovery of what was, potentially, the richest province of his empire. The Sultan’s personal Egyptian policy was therefore extremely devious; while the Grand Vizier and other members of the Divan welcomed a British initiative which in June 1881 convened yet another ambassadorial conference in Constantinople, Abdulhamid refused to permit Ottoman participation in the talks and persistently turned down all requests for the dispatch to Egypt of an Ottoman expeditionary force. Instead, he summoned Orabi to Constantinople, while sending a personal emissary to Cairo for talks with Tewfik. At the same time, he secured from the ambassadors a curiously vague assurance that foreign troops would not intervene in Egypt ‘except in case of unforeseen circumstances’.3

  At first events played into Abdulhamid’s hands. Riots in Alexandria—almost certainly spontaneous—led to looting and to the killing of some fifty Christians. British warships duly bombarded the city; a few weeks later, their guns covered the landing of an expeditionary force commanded by Sir Garnet Wolseley. On 13 September 1881 Wolseley destroyed Orabi’s army at Tel-el-Kebir. The Sultan protested at the British action on two grounds: the invasion of Egypt infringed Ottoman sovereignty: and unilateral intervention made nonsense of the attempts at reconciliation which, as Ottoman emperor, he was sponsoring. He was not entirely mollified by British assurances that their military presence in Egypt was, like the Austro-Hungarian garrisoning of Novibazar, only a temporary exigency.

  Abdulhamid’s ambition of reasserting direct Ottoman authority in Cairo and Alexandria came close to success, at least on paper. Successive prime ministers in London did, indeed, have every intention of pulling out of Egypt as soon as possible. The continued military occupation was caused, in the first instance, by the need to contain the Mahdist revolt in the Sudan, safeguarding both the fertile regions of Egypt and the Red Sea ports against devastation from what was regarded as fanatic anarchy. But the decision to stay in Egypt was also an indirect consequence of an unexpected twist in Ottoman policies. Until 1887, and perhaps as late as 1894, the British envisaged an accommodation with the Sultan: Egypt would be governed by the Porte through a viceregal Khedive, with guarantees for foreign bond-holders and for unimpeded passage of the Suez Canal; if there were international pledges to observe Egypt’s neutrality, British troops would be withdrawn. Sir Henry Drummond Wolff was sent on a special mission to Constantinople to persuade the Sultan to share in the administrative control of Egypt, and a preliminary agreement was speedily signed. It was followed in May 1887 by a formal Anglo-Turkish Convention: Great Britain would enjoy preferential rights in an Ottomanized Egypt, to be freed from military occupation within three years. For eight weeks Drummond Wolff waited in Constantinople while Abdulhamid had second—and third, and fourth—thoughts about the treaty. The French resented Britain’s special status in Egypt and their ambassador received support from his Russian colleague; there was even a threat of war if the Convention were ratified. The ambassadors’ strong words were intended to make the neurasthenic Sultan quail, and he took them seriously. It was not difficult for Abdulhamid to convince himself that the British were tricking him into signing away Egypt. In the rarefied isolation of the Yildiz Kiosk, he was highly
receptive to the mystical revelations of Abul Hauda al-Sayyadi, a visionary prophet from Aleppo who viewed world affairs very differently from the Sultan’s ministers and officials three miles away at the Sublime Porte itself.4

  Ultimately Abdulhamid refused to ratify the treaty. The moment for such an undertaking was inauspicious, it appeared. The Sultan’s hesitancy—or, as some believed, the generously greased palm of his Syrian soothsayer—allowed Egypt to slip from his grasp. An Ottoman High Commissioner resided in Cairo from 1887 to 1914 and each year tribute money of some £665,000 (about four per cent of the national revenue) was handed over to the Ottoman treasury. But, though lip-service was rendered to the Sultan’s suzerainty so long as the world remained at peace, from 1883 until 1922 Egypt was enveloped in the British Empire as closely as an Indian princely state. Abdulhamid gained no advantage from his obduracy over ratifying the Convention, for successive British governments rode rough-shod over Turkish susceptibilities. Soon Egypt was to supersede the Straits in Whitehall’s strategic planning. ‘Cairo is . . . the gateway between Europe and Asia and between Europe and Australia,’ a Foreign Office official patiently explained to his colleagues at the Treasury in November 1898; ‘Recent events have made it also the gateway to a considerable portion of Africa,’ he added.5

  Twice Abdulhamid tried to rectify his error of policy, vainly seeking to secure a firm hold on that strategic gateway. In August 1894 his ambassador raised the possibility of a revised Drummond Wolff Convention with Lord Rosebery’s Liberal government, and eighteen months later the Sultan persisted in efforts to persuade Salisbury to open new talks on Egypt, despite rebuffs from both the Foreign Office and the embassy in Pera. Marginally he preferred Salisbury and the Conservatives to the Liberals, among whom the formidable Gladstone continued to champion the rights of Christians under Ottoman rule until the autumn of 1896 (when he was approaching his eighty-seventh birthday). But Lord Salisbury never concealed his lack of confidence in the Ottoman will to survive. Nor, indeed, did most European statesmen of his generation. All seemed eager—to borrow Bismarck’s metaphor—‘to pluck ripe fruit’ from the Ottoman orchard. The French, who at the height of the Egyptian Crisis in 1881 grabbed ‘the pear’ of Tunisia, retained their political ambitions in Syria. Although official Tsarist policy was less committed to Panslavism than in the 1870s, the Russians remained a threat from the Caucasus; so, too, did Austrian commercial enterprise throughout the western Balkans. Even the Italians, who had looked covetously at Tunisia before the French established their protectorate, were showing an interest in Tripolitania and the Dodecanese islands. Only the Germans remained disinclined to stake an anticipatory claim to Ottoman spoils; and it was accordingly with Germany that Abdulhamid established the closest relations.

  ‘The new element, the German, in Eastern politics deserves our grave consideration,’ Layard had observed to Disraeli in 1877, soon after his arrival in Constantinople.6 That particular warning was little more than a shrewd guess. Although Prussian officers had served in the Ottoman army for brief spells of duty from the later years of Mahmud II, only rarely was there close contact between Constantinople and Berlin during the Bismarck era; the Prussian consulate in Jerusalem, which had been established as early as 1842, was often more active than the embassy, safeguarding Lutheran religious rights and fostering farming settlements set up in Palestine by primitive Protestant sects. Even after Wilhelm von Pressel put forward his master-plan for Anatolian railways in 1872, little was done to win support for the venture in his homeland7 German financial institutions seemed wary of expansion. The prestigious Deutsche Bank, though willing to join the Stuttgart Bank in pledging money for an Anatolian railway in September 1888, had still not opened a branch anywhere in the Sultan’s empire by the end of his reign. And when in 1899 the first German Ottoman bank was at last established, it was specifically a regional institution, the Deutsche Palästinanbank, with branches from Damascus southwards to Gaza. Seven more years passed before a Deutsche Orientbank began promoting German interests throughout the Levant and Egypt.

  If the Sultan’s subjects thought about Germany at all, it was as a military power rather than as a financial agency; bankers traditionally came from Paris, London and Vienna. Moltke, the most famous Prussian officer who had served Sultan Mahmud, continued to hold Turks in contempt throughout his later years as Chief of the Greater German General Staff; and when in 1882 Abdulhamid II sought a new team of military advisers, Moltke entrusted the mission to an obscure staff officer, General Otto Kaehler, rather than to a soldier of energy and initiative. Kaehler died within two years of reaching Constantinople, having shown himself to be a first-rate salesman for Krupps of Essen. It was Colonel Colmar von der Goltz, Kaehler’s deputy and successor, who imparted to the Sultan’s army the lessons of the three ‘Bismarck wars’ and won himself a European reputation—and eventually a Field Marshal’s baton. Hundreds of heavy guns and field pieces were shipped to the Golden Horn from Hamburg, for Goltz made sure that modern artillery should defend the Dardanelles, while Krupps’s specialists updated old forts along the Chatalja Lines to the west of the capital. Goltz’s memoirs show that he despised Abdulhamid personally; he found him intensely suspicious of foreign influence at the War Academy, and so terrified of assassination that he imposed strict limitations on revolver practice in the capital; and, like other observers, Goltz noted how, as the years passed, the Sultan travelled less and less outside the Yildiz walls. His mission to Turkey remained frustrating. Attempts to create a smooth-running General Staff were hampered by the factious rivalry within the Ottoman high command, but Goltz did at least induce the Sultan to reorganize the military structure, thereby speeding up both mobilization and the transmission of orders from the high command to combat troops and distant garrisons.8

  With remarkable patience Goltz, a witty member of a cultured family, countered ulema objections and persuaded Abdulhamid to send chosen officers to Potsdam for further training alongside the Prussians. Already, in the later years of Mahmud II, a few Turkish cadets had gone to England to receive training at Woolwich, but the German connection established by Goltz was more thoroughly organized than the somewhat haphazard earlier experiment, and it continued until the First World War. Although there were rarely more than twenty Ottoman officers in Germany during any one year, some were seconded for long periods. By 1889 when Kaiser William II paid the first of two ostentatious visits to the Sultan, Germany military influence was arousing a lively interest in the embassies of other governments. In May 1890 an intelligence assessment dispatched from Pera to the British Foreign Office reported with some surprise (and slight exaggeration) that most Turkish front-line infantry units were already equipped with high-quality Mauser rifles.9

  The employment of foreign specialists to modernize the army was, of course, a familiar expedient favoured by all reformer Sultans, including Abdulhamid I and Selim III as well as Mahmud II. Yet, uniquely, Abdulhamid II modelled a newly-created cavalry corps on what was in many respects an outdated concept. In March 1891 he established a force of irregular horsemen reminiscent of the akinji outriders of the seventeenth century or, more recently, of the başi bozuka, the notorious ‘bashi-bazouks’ whose bestialities were chronicled in every Western European and American account of the Bulgarian atrocities. These new battalions—hamidiye, as they were called—were recruited from the nomadic Kurdish and Turcoman peoples of eastern Anatolia; they were led by tribal chieftains, with Ottoman officers attached to them as inspectors. It was assumed that their natural enemies were the Russians, who seemed likely to thrust southwards from their Transcaucasian possessions..10

  At first the hamidiye were organized into thirty nominally disciplined regiments of 600 men, although the force rapidly expanded; there were 63 regiments of between 800 and 1,150 men at the end of the century. Superficially they resembled the Cossack troops maintained by the Russians for over two hundred years; but while the Cossacks were famous as a fighting horde before they became soldiers of the Ts
ars, the Kurdish and Turcoman tribes had long thrived on brigandage, with some six or seven chieftains only occasionally uniting in a loose confederacy, primarily to defend themselves against punitive expeditions. Old habits died hard, and the circumstances in which local Ottoman commanders employed the Sultan’s ‘tribal gendarmerie’ did not encourage their abandonment of traditional ways, especially in the mountains around Erzerum. This development caused dismay among the consular representatives of the Great Powers and intensified the widespread abhorrence of ‘Abdul the Damned’. If the Kurds used the weapons and regimental organization of the hamidiye to scourge the Armenian Christians around them in eastern Anatolia, their Sultan and Caliph was disinclined to check such bloody effusions of fanatical zeal. The Kurds, militant Muslims who had mistrusted Tanzimat westernization, served proudly in the hamidiye, which they accepted as a form of recognition of national identity bestowed upon them by their Ottoman sovereign. Tragically the hamidiye—like the ‘Black and Tans’ in Ireland—left a legacy of racial and religious hatred which survived the Ottomans and their immediate successors.

  The creation of the hamidiye was characteristic of the reign as a whole. Earlier rulers had westernized Ottoman life: Abdulhamid sought to islamicize institutions they had imported from Europe. At the same time he became a champion of Arab causes they had neglected. Never before had Arabs from Lebanon and Syria received such high advancement in Ottoman government as in the first half of his reign. They encouraged the assumption that, as Caliph, he had a right to protect Muslims living under British, French or Russian imperial rule; and he personally selected and approved religious dignitaries called to exercise spiritual authority in the Crimea and Cyprus, tributary Bulgaria and Egypt, and the Austrian-occupied western Balkans. It might be said that he harnessed, and effectively rode, the wild Panislamic sentiment which spread through much of Asia and northern Africa in a reaction to imperialism.