The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire

by Alan Palmer

  Although Abdulhamid took the initiative, setting up a Rumelian Provinces Reform Commission and linking Salonika, Kossovo and Monastir in a single province, the Vilayet-i Selase (‘The Three Vilayets’), more was required than administrative paper reforms if Macedonia were to stay under Ottoman rule.24 High among the needs were changes in land-ownership for, apart from the immediate vicinity of Salonika and Serres, where Greek Christians owned big estates, the predominantly Slav peasantry remained in almost feudal subjection to the whims, caprices and farming methods of Muslim beys.

  The British ambassador in Constantinople soon recognized the significance of the Thirty-Day War for Abdulhamid’s reign. Early in June 1897 Currie told Salisbury:

  A reform movement had made progress among the Turks, provoking strong measures of repression on the part of the Sultan, and the dissatisfaction with the arbitrary rule of the Palace was gaining ground. The Ambassadors were only waiting for the instructions of the Governments to press the reforms upon the Sultan. The state of things has now been entirely changed by the Greek War. Prompt mobilisation and good organization have brought about a reaction. The victories in Thessaly have restored the prestige of the Sultan and of his Mussulman subjects and have to a certain extent repaired the breach between them.25

  All this was true, although foreign military assessors observed that the war had not continued long enough to prove whether the army commanders possessed the skill to improvise, modifying agreed plans should determined resistance jeopardize their success. The war gave notice to the European chancelleries that the Ottoman Empire was not so close to disintegration as they had assumed ten months earlier, when mob rule in the capital seemed to foreshadow a speedy foreign intervention.

  The Thirty-Day War had one strange consequence, which passed unnoticed at the time. In February 1897, when Greek volunteers sailed from Salamis and Piraeus to help the Cretan insurgents, the ambassadors in Constantinople were attending conferences to discuss ways of safeguarding the Sultan’s Armenian subjects from repression and massacre. The war crisis put a sudden end to these meetings; and the Armenian Question, so recently the cause of such deep feeling abroad, remained unanswered. The incidence of killings in the six vilayets died down as the Armenian nationalist groups quarrelled among themselves. An uneasy truce prevailed, until in 1909 there were further reports of massacre around Adana. By then a few Armenians held administrative posts, especially in the Ministry of Finance. Many wealthier Armenians from the capital and the greater trading cities considered themselves fortunate to be alive, and no less fortunate to emigrate. They brought their wealth and skills to Britain, America, Egypt and France, while their compatriots still within the Sultan’s lands became once more a historic people, half-forgotten by the West.

  Half-forgotten, yet half-remembered, too. As the Armenian crisis receded, one folk image remained firmly set in popular prejudice. In January 1896 the Punch cartoonist Lindsay Sandemann created a bogey figure, whom he dubbed ‘The Unspeakable Turk’: a sinister Sultan, caressing the edge of an unsheathed scimitar as he stands outside a ruined house of death; glancing diabolically up a deserted path, he exclaims: ‘Ha, ha! There’s no one about. I can get to business again.’ Each fresh challenge to Ottoman rule brought ‘The Unspeakable Turk’ back to haunt the pages of the popular journals. The Sultanate could never shake off the odium of the Armenian massacres.26

  CHAPTER 13

  ANCIENT PEOPLES AND YOUNG TURKS

  DESPITE THE ABHORRENCE WITH WHICH HE WAS REGARDED IN so many foreign capitals, Abdulhamid II could still count on backing from the most vociferous of Europe’s sovereigns. Briefly, in August 1896, Kaiser William II had thought the Sultan would have to be deposed, but he soon rallied to his support and was gratified by the success of the German-trained troops in the war against Greece. Within two years William was contemplating a second visit to the Ottoman Empire, an ‘expedition to the Orient’ which would be more extensive than the customary cruises in the imperial yacht.1 No Christian ruler had entered Jerusalem since the Hohenstaufen emperor Frederick II captured the Holy City during the Sixth Crusade. Now, six and a half centuries later, a Hohenzollern emperor would go to Jerusalem and Damascus as an emissary of peace and Christian good will, a pilgrim counting on the benevolent protection of the Sultan-Caliph. First, however, he conceded that it was essential to pay a courtesy call on Abdulhamid in his capital.

  On 18 October 1898 the steam yacht Hohenzollern, gleaming white in the crisp autumn sunshine, moored off the Dolmabahche Palace, allowing the Kaiser to begin his second state visit with a display of naval showmanship watched by thousands of his host’s subjects. In 1889, when an earlier Hohenzollern first brought the German imperial couple to Constantinople, the Germans were building up their influence in Turkey, and the Sultan’s guests responded enthusiastically to Ottoman hospitality: ‘just like something out of the Arabian Nights,’ the Kaiserin noted at the time. Now the prize for Germany lay in Asia Minor rather than on the Bosphorus. The final decision had still to be taken by the Sultan over the vital rail link from Konya eastwards through Mesopotamia to the Gulf. As the first reports of rich oil deposits around Mosul were at that moment exciting British and Dutch companies, it seemed essential for Germany to secure agreement to complete this last sector in the vaunted Berlin-Baghdad railway project. European governments had long acknowledged the strategic value of such a railway across Asia Minor, which would reduce the journey time between Constantinople and Baghdad from twenty-three days to forty-eight hours. The oil rumours revived interest in the project, for it was assumed that a railway concession would carry exclusive oil and mineral rights for several miles on either side of the track. A ‘Trade and Resources Map of Asia Minor’, produced by enterprising printers in Halle, went on sale in Germany while the Hohenzollern was still in the Aegean. It sold with astonishing rapidity.2

  Already, in 1897, William II had emphasized the importance of his Pera embassy by appointing as ambassador Baron Marschall von Bieberstein, head of the Foreign Ministry since the fall of the Bismarcks seven years before. Now the Kaiser included in his suite aboard the Hohenzollern Marschall’s successor as State Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Count von Bülow, the future Chancellor. Together Bülow and Marschall sought out the Sultan’s ministers and favourites, determined to consolidate Germany’s commercial hold on Anatolia. Good arguments were persuasively supported with lavish baksheesh; Ahmed Izzet, in particular, fared well.

  Abdulhamid himself was too shrewd, too proud and too suspicious to fall for such enticement. He needed German diplomatic backing, German finance and German technical skills. But not in a hurry. He had no wish to make his Empire a Hohenzollern dependency. Although by nature parsimonious in minor matters, if imperial presents were to be exchanged then he, too, would be generous, and he spared no expense in his determination to impress his visitors: a sober estimate by a French diplomat at the end of the year claimed that the Kaiser’s visit had cost the Ottoman Treasury some thirty million francs, of which six million were spent on gifts.3 Yet no treaty concessions were signed while the German visitors remained in the Ottoman Empire. In a symbolic gesture Sultan and Kaiser crossed the Bosphorus to the Anatolian shore and formally opened an impressive railway terminus at Haydarpaša, while Abdulhamid let it be known that he was prepared to lease port facilities around the terminus to the German directors of the Anatolian Railways. In November 1899 the Sultan at last made clear his willingness to accord Germany a further concession, but there was then a delay of almost three and a half years before the formal grant was signed and sealed. In the first week of March 1903 a German-controlled syndicate was authorized to complete the construction of the Baghdad Railway, covering 1,280 miles from Konya to Basra. At the same time the syndicate gained, as anticipated, oil rights extending for twenty kilometres on either side of the track.4

  The Kaiser was convinced that his ‘journey to the Orient’ significantly boosted German trade and investment in the Ottoman Empire; and perhaps he was right
. In Berlin the Baghdad Railway Project became a matter of national pride, not simply a business enterprise. But the value of the concessions was never fully realized. Engineering problems, together with political harassment from the Russians, French and British, delayed construction of the railway through the Taurus and Amanus mountains. The line was still not complete when, in October 1917, William paid a final visit to the Ottoman capital.

  Whatever his later feelings, in 1898 the Kaiser resented suggestions that he had gone to the Ottoman Empire as Germany’s principal sales representative. He accepted that political necessity dictated his visit to Constantinople itself, but he claimed that his intention was to bolster effective government within the Ottoman lands at a time when the authority of the Sultan had been diminished by the propaganda of terrorists in foreign pay. More than thirty years later, in exile in the Netherlands, William II peppered the margin of a German edition of Harold Nicolson’s Lord Carnock with a defence of Abdulhamid, seeking to explain ‘why the Sultan acted so severely’ against the Armenians when the Ottoman Bank was seized.5 He recalled ‘the new bombs which I saw myself’ seized from ‘Armenians rounded up by the police’ and ‘brand new, shiny British pounds in gold’; and he developed an elaborate argument that the Armenians in the capital had been ordered by exiles in London ‘to stage an insurrection so that the British government would be able to use it as a pretext for military intervention’. But, so the ex-Kaiser maintained, ‘the red coats stayed away, and the Armenians waiting for them were killed. Thus England betrayed the Armenians, who had risen upon her instigation.’ What he was shown in Pera and Stamboul convinced him that western denunciation of ‘Abdul the Damned’ was hypocritical. By contrast, the ruler of Germany would offer a hand of friendship, not only to Abdulhamid, but to all loyal Ottomans, irrespective of their faith and nationality.

  To this theme of protective friendship the Kaiser repeatedly returned during his pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The planned itinerary provided for the Hohenzollern to sail southwards to Haifa, enabling him to travel up through Palestine, Syria and the Lebanon in a conducted tour, organized by Thomas Cook and Son. Had the Hohenzollern anchored off Jaffa rather than Haifa it would have been possible for the Kaiser to go by train to Jerusalem, for as early as 1892 a line had been opened down to the coast. But ‘The journey from Haifa to Jerusalem was . . . on horseback or by carriage, and this pleased us all,’ Count Bülow later explained. ‘A railway . . . really did not suit the scene.’6 Bülow did not add that the Jaffa–Jerusalem line was completed and run by a French, rather than a German, company.

  The ostensible reason for this imperial Cook’s Tour was to allow the German Emperor to be present at the dedication on Reformation Day (31 October) of a new Lutheran church in Jerusalem, the Erlöserkirche (Church of the Redeemer). But Germany’s Roman Catholics were remembered, too. From his friend the Sultan William had obtained possession of the site of the Dormition, the traditional resting-place of the Virgin Mary, which he presented to the Catholic ‘German Association in the Holy Land’. Most of all, the Kaiser sought to impress the Sultan’s subjects with his stature as a world ruler. His entry into Jerusalem, astride a black charger and wearing white ceremonial uniform, his helmet surmounted by a burnished gold eagle, projected the might and grandeur of the German Empire, as if to awe a troubled city which Abdulhamid was too scared to visit.

  Like Bonaparte in Egypt, William was attracted by Islam. ‘If I had come there without any Religion at all I certainly would have turned Mahometan,’ he wrote to the Tsar.7 He was also influenced by consular reports showing how the growing Panislamic movement might be harnessed to serve Germany’s needs. Accordingly, at Damascus, a week after his entry into Jerusalem, William laid a wreath on Saladin’s grave, and it was there that he responded to a welcome from the ulema by giving ‘His Majesty the Sultan and the three hundred million Muslims who . . . revere in him their Caliph’ a pledge ‘that the German Emperor will ever be their friend’. The Kaiser could offer such an assurance knowing that, in contrast to other world empires, his colonies contained few Muslim believers.8

  The Germans made cultural and material gains from their sovereign’s expedition among these ‘ancient peoples’, as he chose to call them. In material terms, Turkey’s imports from Germany rose from 6 per cent in 1897 to 21 per cent in 1910, to the cost of Britain and France in particular. Apart from occasional months of suspicion and strain (notably in 1908–9), official relations between Berlin and the Porte remained cordial. Religious groups and educationists spread the German language and German ideas in Asia Minor and the Holy Land. One Protestant organization, the Jerusalems-Verein, maintained eight schools in Judaea, while the Catholic Palästinaverein was active over a bigger region and the Deutsche Orient-Mission ‘poached’ Armenian districts earlier served by the Americans. Yet the three main German influences in Turkey remained armaments salesmen, bankers and railway engineers. In sixteen years German industry provided 200 locomotives and some 3,500 passenger coaches or freight waggons for the Anatolian Railway and its Baghdad offshoot, as well as steel rails for the tracks themselves. A Saxon engineer, Heinrich Meissner, was entrusted with construction of the Hejaz Railway, laid between 1900 and 1908 from Damascus southwards to Medina. Orders went to Germany for another hundred locomotives and some 1,100 coaches, built specifically for this narrow-gauge ‘pilgrim railway’.9 The Haydarpaša concession for quays on the Anatolian shore of the Bosphorus attracted further German investment, although French firms continued to control the harbour works on the European shore of the Bosphorus as well as in Smyrna, Salonika, and Beirut, the most profitable ports of the Ottoman Empire.

  At the time when Kaiser William II visited the three vilayets which geographically constituted Palestine, the Arab population outnumbered the Jewish by about ten to one. But Jerusalem was, of course, sacred to the most ancient of biblical peoples as well as to Christians and Muslims, and he was well aware of feelings aroused by the Jewish problem, in both Central Europe and the Levant. On the day after his arrival in Constantinople he had received a five-man deputation of non-Ottoman Jews headed by Theodor Herzl, who had formally established Zionism at a World Congress in Basle twelve months before. The possibility of affording German imperial protection to Zionist settlement in Palestine held the Kaiser’s interest, for one in ten of his subjects was Jewish, many of them wealthy and influential in business. ‘Your movement, with which I am thoroughly familiar, is based on a sound, healthy idea,’ he told Herzl. But when, nine days later, Herzl sought a second audience of the Kaiser—on this occasion outside Jerusalem itself—he found William far less receptive. Abdulhamid’s representatives travelling with the imperial party had made it clear to their guests that the Sultan was thoroughly alarmed by Herzl’s talk of the Jewish need for ‘a publicly and legally assured home in Palestine’, and the presence of Herzl and his companions in Jerusalem was an embarrassment. When, in 1901, Abdulhamid agreed to receive Herzl in audience at Yildiz, he made no attempt to conceal his hostility towards incipient Zionism.10

  Jewish aspirations had never posed acute problems for the Ottomans. By the turn of the century Jewish believers made up about 230,000 of the estimated twenty million men and women directly under the Sultan’s rule, almost three-quarters of whom were Muslim. Jews had fared better in the Ottoman Empire than in Russia and many other parts of Eastern Europe. From 1868 onwards at least two Jews sat as regular members of the Tanzimat Council of State, helping to draft laws for the empire as a whole. The Jewish millet had long possessed a similar status to the Greek Orthodox and Armenian millets: the Chief Rabbi of Constantinople was on an equal footing in the Ottoman social structure with the two Christian patriarchs, although the largest concentrations of Jews were far distant from the Ottoman capital—in Salonika, on the north-western shore of the Sea of Galilee, and in Jerusalem itself. The Russian pogroms of Tsar Alexander III’s reign posed a challenge for the Ottoman administration, as for so many other governments faced by the exodus of a pers
ecuted people. In Palestine the Jewish population increased from a mere 24,000 in 1880 (barely half as many Jews as in London) to 49,000 in 1903 and to 90,000 by the outbreak of the First World War, when in the same region there were reckoned to be half a million Arabs. In 1882, as soon as large-scale immigration began, the Ottoman authorities took steps to prevent the landing of Jews from Russia and other parts of Eastern Europe at the ports of Latakia, Beirut, Haifa and Jaffa. Six years later Jerusalem—under Ottoman rule from 1516 onwards—became the centre of a special administrative unit, the Mutasarriflik, which stretched from the Dead Sea to Jaffa and Gaza and was governed directly by the Porte.11

  Control of immigration along the Palestinian coast made political and economic sense to the Ottomans, and indeed to foreign consuls in the region. In contrast to other Arab lands in the Levant, and despite inner Jerusalem’s cosmopolitan character, Palestine at the turn of the century was unusually homogeneous, its peoples overwhelmingly Sunni in faith. For the most part they were good, loyal Ottomans, and Sultan Abdulhamid was inclined to listen with especial sympathy to their representations, advancing some educated Arabs to positions of trust at Yildiz. In the Holy Land the Arabs, too, were an ancient people, like the Jews; they could claim descent from communities living there for ten centuries or more, perhaps even from the Biblical Canaanites. If thousands of poor Jewish peasants from Russia converged on so sensitive a region, the Ottoman government feared they would provoke chronic conflict with the Arabs and become a burden on existing Jewish settlements, some set up more than thirty years before. When therefore in 1891 Abdulhamid received the first petition from Arab notables in Jerusalem demanding a ban on Jewish immigration and land purchase, he gave their plea sympathetic consideration. Even before Herzl began his campaign for a Jewish national home, the Ottoman censorship had resolved that there must be no reference in newspapers or books to the Promised Land of the Jews, to the boundaries of Palestine, or even to the Covenant of Abraham. Arab raiders, who had begun to attack the pioneer Jewish agricultural settlements between Jaffa and Jerusalem as early as 1886, increased their activities while foreign attention was concentrated elsewhere, on the plight of the Sultan’s Armenian subjects. It is a tribute to the tenacity of the settlers—many of whom were pre-Herzl and non-political Zionists—that, although often in conflict with a socially conservative rabbinate as well as with local Muslims, they persevered and confidently sought foreign funds in their resolve to scratch a living from a land sadly reluctant to flow with milk and honey.