The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean

by David Abulafia

  The weakness of Ottoman power in the eastern Mediterranean became ever more obvious when the British prevailed upon the sultan to cede the administration of the island to Great Britain in 1878. The sultan, Abdülhamid II, understood that he needed British support if he were to keep the Russians at bay, for the Russians still hoped to establish a permanent presence in the Mediterranean, which could be achieved only if they were able to maintain free access through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles. British support for the Ottomans was ebbing away as news reached Great Britain of massacres of Armenians and others who opposed Turkish authority; British sympathy for the Greeks living beyond the boundaries of the independent kingdom also remained very strong.15 So Cyprus was seen as a down-payment for continuing friendship. In the typical Ottoman style, the Sublime Porte retained notional sovereignty over the island, and the British were supposed to remit any profits from their administration to Constantinople (it was only when Britain and Turkey faced one another on opposite sides during the First World War that the island was annexed by Great Britain, and only in 1925 that Cyprus became a Crown Colony). British interest in Cyprus was purely strategic, following the acquisition of the massive British share in the Suez Canal, and its value was enhanced when Great Britain established its ascendancy over Egypt in 1882. Tenure of Cyprus granted Britain control of bases all the way from Gibraltar to the Levant, by way of Malta, but Britain had acquired a cauldron in which anatagonism between Cypriots of the two faiths was not eased but exacerbated by living under the rule of a third party: the Greek islanders became increasingly insistent that the destiny of the island lay within Greece, while the Turkish islanders feared that what was happening to the Turks in Crete would begin to happen in Cyprus as well. By the start of the twentieth century, Turkish Cypriots were following with avid interest the reform movement of the Young Turks in the Ottoman Empire, and a sense of national identity began to develop, which was further accentuated by competition with Greek nationalism.16 The erosion of the Ottoman Empire was, then, accompanied by increasingly assertive expressions of national identity that threatened to tear apart societies where once different ethnic and religious groups had lived in some degree of harmony.

  IV

  National identities were developing in Ottoman lands where ethnic and religious groups were scattered and intermingled. It is no surprise that the greatest jumble of peoples and faiths could be found in Mediterranean port cities such as Salonika, Alexandria and Smyrna. Salonika, in particular, became the battleground between Turks, Slavs and Greeks, even though the Jews were the largest single group in the city in 1912, and there were so many Jewish stevedores that the docks closed on Saturdays.17 As Mark Mazower has observed, four main scripts were in use in the city, and four calendars, so the question ‘At what time is noon today?’ made a sort of sense.18 In large parts of the city the main language was Judaeo-Spanish, brought by the Sephardic exiles after 1492. The names of the synagogues still recalled the places of origin of the Salonika Jews: there was a synagogue of the Catalans, of ‘Saragossa’ (in reality Syracuse in Sicily), and one nicknamed Macarron, because it was frequented by Jews of Apulian descent, who were believed to share the Italian love of macaroni.19

  It would be a mistake to romanticize Salonika. In 1911 the view was expressed in a Ladino newspaper, La Solidad Ovradera, that

  Salonika is not one city. It is a juxtaposition of tiny villages. Jews, Turks, Dönmehs [followers of Shabbetai Zevi], Greeks, Bulgarians, westerners, Gypsies, each of these groups that one today calls ‘nations’, keeps well away from the others, as if fearing contagion.20

  Admittedly, a newspaper entitled Workers’ Solidarity might not have been offering the most objective view of relations between ethnic groups, wishing, rather, to transcend national feeling and to create a single proletarian community. Some sense of easy daily interaction between Jews, Turks and others can be gathered from Leon Sciaky’s account of his childhood in late nineteenth-century Salonika; here, a prosperous Jewish family is shown enjoying warm relations with Bulgarian peasants who supplied Sciaky’s father with the grain he traded, while on the streets of the city the young Sciaky received many kindnesses from Muslim and Christian neighbours, who were often willing to help members of other communities when rioting broke out.21

  Sephardic Judaism has always been more open to surrounding cultures than the often stricter forms of Judaism practised in Ashkenazi eastern Europe, and, as western European influences became increasingly powerful within the Ottoman world, the Jewish elites became westernized in manners and speech. There was ambivalence about Sephardic identity. Ideally, it would combine western sophistication with a touch of eastern exoticism, a view shared by Disraeli in Britain. Even as a child, Leon Sciaky wore western clothes, a clear sign of his family’s social and economic status and of their cultural aspirations, while Salonika’s wealthiest Jewish family, the Allatini, surrounded themselves at home with the finest furnishings from both East and West.22 From 1873, channelled through the new schools of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, French began to make massive inroads among the Salonika Jews, edging out Ladino, which some saw as the language of the lower classes (in Alexandria too French was becoming de mode, even de rigueur, among the Jewish elite). By 1912 the AIU possessed over 4,000 pupils, more than half the children in the city’s Jewish schools.23 The Salonikans and Alexandrians were unworried about the French cultural imperialism to which they were succumbing; not just Jews but all prosperous city-dwellers across the Ottoman Empire saw French as a badge of distinction.

  While they still ruled Salonika, the Turks knew that, though a minority, they had the upper hand. Sciaky reported how in 1876 riots broke out when a Bulgarian father appealed to the foreign consuls to prevent the wedding of his daughter to a Turk; the French and German consuls made the cardinal error of entering a mosque while tempers were flaring, and were lynched.24 Unrest among the different communities became more intense by 1900. The Greeks were fired by the spread of education: children were now taught their own language in proper schools, and they could look southwards and observe the fact that their brethren lived in an independent Greek kingdom. The Slavs became very restive. In the 1890s radical Macedonian Slavs, who spoke a form of Bulgarian, organized themselves around the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO), seeking autonomy for the wide swathe of Ottoman provinces between Salonika and Skopje, but they saw Salonika as the obvious capital, and they were intent on giving these lands a Bulgarian cultural identity. This was intolerable to the Greeks of Salonika, who obliged the Turks with information they picked up about the activities of IMRO.25 Before long IMRO decided that the time had come for drastic action. In January 1903 its agents acquired a small grocery shop opposite the Ottoman Bank, staffed by a dour Bulgarian who seemed unwilling to sell the exiguous stock he displayed. At night, though, the shop came to life, as an IMRO team burrowed under the road, placing mines under the handsome edifice of the Ottoman Bank. The tunnellers were almost caught, because they had blocked off one of the city sewers that lay across their path, and the Hotel Colombo, nearby, complained that its plumbing had ceased to work. On 28 April they set off their bombs, demolishing the bank and several neighbouring buildings.26

  Salonika felt the strong ripples of change within the Turkish government, as the Young Turks asserted themselves and political reform was in the air. Political troubles in the Mediterranean were depriving Salonika of its livelihood: Italian goods were boycotted after the Italians invaded Tripolitania in 1911, and trade with Trieste was boycotted because the Austrians had, controversially, taken control of Bosnia. The wealthy Allatini had had enough and decamped to Italy. Ottoman power was crumbling faster than ever, and it was no great surprise when the Greeks marched into Salonika in 1912, claiming it for the motherland. Unfortunately, Bulgarian troops also arrived, and were unwilling to leave; even when they were persuaded to depart, skirmishes broke out between Greek and Bulgarian units beyond the walls. So the Greeks held Salonika, but the Bulg
arian threat was real, and the city was deprived of the fertile hinterland from which Leon Sciaky’s father had obtained grain. In 1913, the city was still home to nearly 46,000 Muslims and over 61,000 Jews, as against 40,000 Orthodox Christians, but Greek activists intended to make them feel unwelcome.27 Cemeteries were desecrated and shops were ransacked. The prime minister, Venizelos, a hero of the Cretan revolution, was a strong believer in the idea of a Greece populated by Orthodox Greeks. Quite where this left the Jews, of whom Venizelos remained suspicious, was unclear. In August 1917, a great fire destroyed vast tracts of the city, wrecking the Jewish and Muslim districts. The fire, along with increasing Jewish and Muslim emigration, gave the Greek authorities the opportunity to forge ahead with the rebuilding of Salonika as a Greek city, populated by Greeks. The aim was clear: Salonika would again become the Christian city of St Demetrios. Salonika would be reborn as Thessaloniki.

  3

  Ottoman Exit,

  1900–1918

  I

  The history of the Mediterranean has been presented in this book as a series of phases in which the sea was, to a greater or lesser degree, integrated into a single economic and even political area. With the coming of the Fifth Mediterranean the whole character of this process changed. The Mediterranean became the great artery through which goods, warships, migrants and other travellers reached the Indian Ocean from the Atlantic. The falling productivity of the lands surrounding the Mediterranean, and the opening of high-volume trade in grain from Canada or tobacco from the United States (to cite two examples), rendered the Mediterranean less interesting to businessmen. Even the revived cotton trade of Egypt faced competition from India and the southern United States. Steamship lines out of Genoa headed across the western Mediterranean and out into the Atlantic, bearing to the New World hundreds of thousands of migrants, who settled in New York, Chicago, Buenos Aires, São Paulo and other booming cities of North and South America in the years around 1900. Italian emigration was dominated by southerners, for the inhabitants of the southern villages saw none of the improvement in the standard of living that was beginning to transform Milan and other northern centres.

  For the French, on the other hand, opportunities to create a new life elsewhere could be found within the Mediterranean: Algeria became the focus of French emigration, for the ideal was to create a new France on the shores of North Africa, while keeping the wilder interior under colonial rule. Two manifestations of this policy were the rebuilding of large areas of Algiers as a European city, and the collective extension of French citizenship to 35,000 Algerian Jews, in 1870. The Algerian Jews were seen as évolué, ‘civilized’, for they had embraced the opportunities provided by French rule, opening modern schools under the auspices of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, founded to promote Jewish education on the European model, and transforming themselves into a new professional class.1 From the 1880s onwards, after it fell under French control, Tunisia also attracted French colonists, though more slowly; around 1900 it was a more popular target for Italian settlers than for French ones. The kingdom of Italy also looked towards North Africa, as its political leaders saw opportunities to establish their country as a colonial power within the Mediterranean comparable to France. The Italians were not yet articulating the idea of the Mediterranean as Mare Nostrum, as Mussolini would do in the 1930s, for it was obvious that Great Britain dominated the sea, but Italian public opinion, and Italian democrats, were convinced that Italy possessed an imperial destiny. In part, the arguments were moral: as in French Algeria, there was an opportunity to bring European civilization to peoples condescendingly regarded as backward. In part they were political: Italy would lose influence within Europe if it could not show itself capable of grandiose achievements. To a large extent the arguments were economic: the strength of the Italian state would depend on its economic advancement, and that was possible only if one could take advantage of the raw materials supplied by a colonial territory. Spain, which by 1904 had extended its control of the Moroccan coastline to include Tetuán and the hinterland of Ceuta and Melilla, was only a minor competitor.2

  The collapse of state finances in Tunisia during the 1860s provided opportunities for both France and Italy. Large numbers of French creditors would suffer if the bey and his government could not meet their obligations. The situation was not vastly different from that in the Egypt of Said and Ismail. An international financial commission was established, which the French aimed to dominate. The Italian government was not happy with this: the heavy involvement of Italians in the Tunisian economy, and the large number of Italian settlers encouraged Italy to demand control over whole areas of the Tunisian economy, such as the production and export of tobacco, and the running of the railways. By 1883, however, the French had managed to secure a dominant position, and the bey agreed to the creation of a French protectorate over Tunisia.3 The Italian government was forced to look in other directions, and rapidly saw that similar opportunities existed close by, in Ottoman-ruled Libya; by 1902 the French and the British, intent on carving up the Mediterranean, had agreed that Italy could do what it liked there – a useful way of coaxing Italy into a wider political alliance against future enemies. Who those enemies might be was rapidly made plain: German banks began to invest in Libya in competition with the Banco di Roma. In 1911, Germans, but not Italians, were permitted to acquire lands in Libya. As tension between Rome and Constantinople grew, the Turks attempted to appease Italy with commercial concessions. But it was too late. The Italians had decided that an imperial mission was an integral part of Italy’s entry into the ranks of the European nations. The weakness of Ottoman power, especially in the outlying provinces, daily became more obvious. In late September 1911 the Italian government declared war on Turkey, and by the end of October Italian fleets had smoothly moved an occupying force of 60,000 troops into Tripoli, Benghazi and other major towns. That was the easy part; local resistance flared, and, as Italian casualties mounted, the Italian government agreed to discuss peace terms with Constantinople. As ever, the Ottoman sultan was unwilling to renounce nominal Turkish sovereignty over his former subjects. A year after the invasion, he recognized Italian rule over a notionally Ottoman Libya.4 The Italians were unable to control the hinterland, but, as in Algiers, they were determined to Europeanize those parts they did control, and began to rebuild Tripoli as a modern Italian city.

  By the time the First World War broke out, then, the entire line of towns from Ceuta in the west to Port Said in the east lay under the rule or protectorate of Spain, France, Italy and Great Britain. The German Kaiser visited Tangier in 1905, and made noises about the growth of French influence in Morocco, but Germany did not gain a foothold in Morocco, any more than in Libya. Indeed, Tangier became a special enclave, in which the sultan of Morocco shared power with the foreign consuls. One particularly important figure was the chief inspector of police, who acted as a liaison between the sultan and the consuls; he provides a rare example of a Swiss presence in the Mediterranean, for what was vital was to employ someone whose neutrality was assured. So the Turks had lost what remaining authority they possessed in North Africa; the Germans had not gained a foothold anywhere; the Austrians remained confined to Trieste and the coast of Dalmatia, and took no part in the scramble for North Africa; and Great Britain dominated the sea-ways between Gibraltar and the Suez Canal.

  II

  An additional, valuable prize for Italy was Rhodes, along with the Dodecanese islands. The islanders, mainly Greek, had tried to emancipate themselves from Ottoman control, and the prospects for a ‘Federation of the Dodecanese Islands’ had seemed good: the islands were well placed along the trade routes, bringing prosperity to the local Greeks and Jews. The Italians, however, appreciated the strategic value of islands that lay so close to the centre of Ottoman power, and took advantage of the war with Turkey over Libya to seize the islands in 1912. Italy tried to promote the economy of its new colony. The Dodecanese were a very different proposition to Libya, or to the e
mpire the Italians also dreamed of creating in Abyssinia, and the Italians were more willing to treat the Dodecanesians as humans on the same level as they believed themselves to be.5 This conquest marks the first stage in an attempt by the European powers finally to dismantle the Ottoman Empire. It was hardly a coordinated process; indeed, much of the initiative came from within the Ottoman territories, for even Albania, traditionally quite loyal to Constantinople, had become a focus of discontent by 1912. The First World War only accentuated a fast-growing trend towards the detachment of the Ottoman provinces. The adherence of Turkey to the German side was by no means inevitable. As the war clouds gathered over Europe, the Turks showed themselves keen to discuss a new treaty with Great Britain, which they continued to see as their obvious ally against attempts by the Russians to break through from the Black to the White Sea; they were aware, too, that Greek adventurism, which had brought King George of Greece as far as Salonika, remained a threat to their capital – the Megalé Idea or ‘Great Idea’ of Venizelos involved nothing less than the substitution of Constantinople for Athens as Greek capital. But the most striking feature of the Mediterranean in August 1914 was the extreme volatility of all political relationships: would Britain cut a deal with Turkey? Or rather with Russia? What was to be done with Greece? It seemed that the sultan was being drawn into the Kaiser’s net, but nothing was certain. Two German warships were permitted to sail into the Golden Horn on 10 August 1914, and the Turkish government agreed that, if they were pursued by British ships, Turkish batteries would open fire on the British. Meanwhile, two ships being built in Britain for the Ottoman fleet, at a cost of £7,500,000, were commandeered by the Royal Navy, setting off fierce denunciations of Britain in the Turkish press.6