The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire (35 page)

At this point—the closing days of June 1895—Rosebery’s weak Liberal government gave way to a strong Conservative–Unionist ministry. Lord Salisbury once again became both
Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary, and a month later enhanced his authority with a striking electoral triumph. The Eastern Question at once absorbed his attention. Turkey, he told the German
ambassador, was ‘too rotten’ to last much longer; and he added that ‘there would be no difficulty today if England had not committed the mistake of rejecting Tsar Nicholas’s
proposal to the British representatives before the Crimean War.’
²
These sentiments Salisbury repeated on other occasions. There is no doubt that
he was convinced the Ottoman Empire would crumble into pieces within a few years. Yet it would be wrong to assume that he had, ready in his mind, any clear-cut partition plan. Over the following
months he approached the Germans, French and Russians in search of a common policy, but met suspicion and misrepresentation.
⁵

At first Salisbury believed he could coerce the Sultan by ‘big words spoken in a loud voice’—and supported by a squadron of warships cruising in the approaches to the
Dardanelles. The British were said to be planning the seizure of Lemnos or naval action off Smyrna or Iskenderun. There was alarm at the Porte and unrest in the Stamboul streets: ‘Let the
Sultan judge the effect the fleet will have on other parts of the Empire by the effect he sees it has had on the feeling in Constantinople,’ Salisbury telegraphed to Currie, the British
ambassador.
⁶
Briefly this firm stance seemed effective. Abdulhamid shuffled his ministers, appointing Mehmed Kamil as Grand Vizier of a government of
‘westernizers’, and announced that he would accept the ambassadors’ reform programme which he had resisted for six months. But mounting evidence of friction between Great Britain
and Russia—together with a not unjustified suspicion that Kamil would work with foreign embassies to thwart Yildiz policies—induced the Sultan to change his mind, and Mehmed Kamil was
dismissed after a mere five weeks in office. Little was accomplished. Consular reports described a reign of terror in the six vilayets of eastern Anatolia. By the end of winter in 1895–6 it
was reported that over 30,000 Armenians had
perished in the bloodshed of the past two years. These figures were disputed by an Ottoman commission of investigation; not
surprisingly, they are challenged by historians who use the Yildiz Palace archives.
⁷

Salisbury, like Palmerston earlier in the century, wished to give the ambassador ‘discretionary powers’ to call the fleet up to Constantinople in an emergency, without reference back
to London. This proposal was strongly opposed by the First Lord of the Admiralty, George Goschen, who had himself been ambassador to the Sultan in 1880–1, and who argued that there was a risk
of the fleet finding itself trapped in the Straits between a Russian squadron ‘invited’ by the Sultan to enter the Bosphorus and a French squadron, sailing eastwards from Salonika. So
dangerous did the First Sea Lord think this strategy that he refused to discuss it. Although sarcastically speculating whether Her Majesty’s capital ships were made of porcelain, Lord
Salisbury accepted the verdict of the professionals.
⁸
Nevertheless, he encouraged contingency planning in case it became necessary to use force against
the Sultan, and in the second week of February 1896 he received a secret memorandum from Colonel Chermside, the military attaché in Constantinople, which for the first time examined the
prospects of landing troops to seize ‘the south-western extremity of the Gallipoli Peninsula’. Chermside thought—and the commander of the Mediterranean fleet agreed with
him—that marines landed from transports covered by the guns of the fleet would soon occupy the peninsula. Both the Director of Naval Intelligence and the Director of Military Intelligence
strongly advised the cabinet against any such action, for which they claimed at least 20,000 men would be needed. The proposal was dropped; but, significantly, Chermside’s report remained a
top secret document, retained for future reference. Half a century later, when most nineteenth-century British archives were open, it was still not available for public inspection.
⁹

On 11 February 1896 the First Lord of the Admiralty told Parliament that, as the Sultan had failed to carry out the promised reforms in Anatolia, ‘we are free from any engagement as to the
maintenance of the Ottoman Empire’.
¹⁰
This announcement was intended less as a direct warning to the Porte than as a sop to British public
opinion, angered by continued reports of massacre from Armenia. The Foreign Minister,
Ahmed Tevfik, showed some desire for reconciliation, but the Eastern Question rapidly
increased in complexity during the early months of the year. In the third week of January 1896 the Consul-General in Salonika sent the Foreign Office clear evidence that Armenian revolutionaries
were encouraging unrest among the Greeks in Macedonia.
¹¹
By the end of February the ardently patriotic Greek community in Crete was in revolt against
Ottoman rule. In the late spring there were rumours in Constantinople of British agents fomenting disturbances so as to give Salisbury an excuse for occupying the island, effectively absorbing it
into the British Empire. This, however, was nonsense; the Cretan troubles embarrassed the British, especially as they coincided with phases of Anglo-American tension over Venezuela and Anglo-German
tension after the Kaiser’s tactless telegram to President Kruger. But the Cyprus Convention and the occupation of Egypt rankled with other governments, who noted the strategic value of Crete
to a great naval power.

News of the Cretan rising had caused little surprise abroad. Insurrections in 1770, 1821, 1857, 1866–8, 1879 and 1889 left the islanders resentful of Ottoman repression; and they were
increasingly angered by the harsh administration of Mahmud Jellaledin, a conservatively-minded
Vali
. Tension became acute in the late summer of 1894, after Jellaledin hanged four prominent
members of the Orthodox Church on the island; although he was replaced by a
Vali
of Greek origin, acts of terrorism and counter-terrorism were reported from isolated villages over the
following eighteen months. The most serious unrest came after riots at Khania in the last week of May 1896. At the same time reports were circulating in Stamboul and Pera of secret talks in Athens
between Armenian revolutionaries, Cretan insurgents and the radical patriotic Greek nationalist movement,
Ethnike Hetairia
. Three Greek guerrilla bands were said (correctly) to have crossed
the frontiers in Thessaly and Epirus. The governors of the Salonika, Monastir and Kossovo vilayets mobilized the
redif
(military reservists) in anticipation of an
Ethnike Hetairia
rebellion throughout the remaining Greek provinces of the Ottoman Empire.
¹²

Momentarily, in the summer of 1896, the diplomatic initiative passed to Count Goluchowski, the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister. Francis
Joseph’s ambassador to the
Porte, Baron Calice, was also
doyen
of the diplomatic corps at Constantinople. In the first week of July Calice warned the Ottoman authorities that unless autonomy was conceded to the Greek
majority in Crete, there would be such grave unrest throughout Thessaly, Epirus and Macedonia that the Powers would be forced to summon another Congress and impose a new order upon the Ottoman
lands. At the same time Goluchowski asked Salisbury for the Royal Navy to join Austrian, Russian, French and Italian warships in a preventive international blockade of Crete, to stop Greek
nationals coming to the aid of their compatriots. Salisbury refused: ‘In view of the feeling which the cruelty of the Ottoman Government has excited in England we should have great hesitation
in taking any step which would constitute us the ally of the Sultan against an insurgent Christian population,’ he explained to the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office in the Note
which formed a basis for his reply to Goluchowski.
¹³
This principle the British never abandoned so long as the Ottoman Empire remained in being.

By the second week of August 1896 the Sultan had 420,000 men retained indefinitely on a war footing, a terrible burden for a government still heavily dependent on foreign loans. His ministers
urged Abdulhamid to settle the Cretan Question. Once again there was a Porte
versus
Yildiz tussle, with the ‘second scribe’, Ahmed Izzet, urging the Sultan to stand firm against
all promptings for reform. But although the diplomats regarded the thirty-two-year-old Izzet as the current ‘power behind the throne’, Abdulhamid was at that moment more impressed by
independent pressure from the German, French and Russian ambassadors. On 25 August he accepted a programme of reform in Crete, prepared by a commission from all the embassies at Pera: the Cretans
would have a Christian Governor and a General Assembly with broadly autonomous powers and would be assured of two-thirds of the public offices, while the gendarmerie was to be reorganized under
European commissioners. Although there were reports from the Van vilayet of a fresh wave of Armenian killings and terrorism, it seemed as if, in Crete, one deep-rooted grievance had at last been
satisfied.
¹⁴

Abdulhamid approved the Cretan reform programme on a Tuesday morning. Early on Wednesday afternoon—26 August 1896—Armenian
Dashnak extremists seized the
headquarters of the Ottoman Bank in Galata (Beyo
lu). Their activities anticipated the methods used by numerous terrorist organizations in the Near East over the
following century. They planted explosives in the building, took hostages, and demanded immediate reforms in the six eastern vilayets: they sought rights for the Armenians to match the concessions
promised to the Cretans—even though, unlike the Greeks in Crete, nowhere did the Armenians form a majority of the population. For two hours there was shooting around and from within the Bank.
Negotiations between the bank officials, the dragoman of the Russian Embassy and the terrorists made it clear that the chief Dashnak objective was to alert Europe to the plight of the Armenians;
and in this they were eminently successful. In the small hours of Thursday morning the surviving terrorists were led from the building under safe-conduct to the bank director’s yacht in the
Bosphorus, and eventually into exile.
¹⁵

They were the fortunate ones. Within thirty-six hours mob vengeance was to cause the massacre of some five to six thousand Armenians in the capital. During Wednesday night and the daylight hours
on Thursday, Ottoman troops made no move to check the violence. British marines and Russian sailors were landed from the stationnaire warships attached to the embassies. On Thursday morning the
ambassadors jointly asked the Sultan to issue ‘such precise and categorical orders as will put an immediate end to this unheard of state of things, which is calculated to bring about the most
serious consequences for Your Majesty’s Empire.’ When Abdulhamid protested that ‘he had never heard such language in the twenty years he had been on the throne,’ he was
given an opportunity to hear even tougher talk from Baron Calice and from General Nelidov, the Tsar’s ambassador. The Powers, he was told, would have to consider ‘what remedy there
could be for such great evils’: failure to end the massacres would imperil both throne and dynasty. After prayers at the Friday
ş
elamlik
the Sultan at last took action: henceforth the
faithful were ‘forbidden to kill’.
¹⁶

The Cretan rebellion had aroused little interest in Western Europe or the United States, but carnage in the streets of Constantinople was another matter. News of the massacre revived the
agitation against
‘Abdul the Damned’, alias ‘the Great Assassin’ or, as Clemenceau in Paris preferred it, ‘that monster of Yildiz, the
blood-red Sultan’. To British statesmen, whether Conservative or Liberal, and to French radicals, there seemed little prospect of a stable, prosperous and well-governed Ottoman Empire so long
as Abdulhamid remained on the throne. Even Kaiser William II, an appreciative and much-fêted guest seven years earlier, wrote in the margin of a dispatch from his ambassador, ‘The
Sultan must be deposed’. Kaiser William encouraged the British ambassador in Berlin to discuss the problems of alternative Sultan-making with his Foreign Minister. But not, perhaps, too
seriously; within a few days the ‘three emperors’ (German, Russian, Austrian) had agreed that ‘if left alone from outside interference’, the Ottoman Empire could be
preserved for many years to come. Characteristically, the Kaiser thereupon sent Abdulhamid the latest Hohenzollern family group photograph, duly autographed, as a personal gesture of good
will.
¹⁷

The Sultan did not entirely owe his survival to the deep mistrust between the European Powers, but he continued to benefit from their suspicion of each other’s objectives in policy. Hardly
had the Armenians attacked the Ottoman Bank before the rival diplomats began posing questions to which there could be no clear-cut answers. Who had known of the raid in advance? Why did so many
wealthy Armenians leave the capital by steamer that Tuesday and Wednesday morning? Why, in this week of massacre in the capital, did the Italians ‘quietly’ send warships to Salonika and
Smyrna, the other embassies speculated? Why did the British Mediterranean Fleet sail from Malta to Lemnos, according to operational plans drawn up some months before? And at the British embassy
there was a suspicion that the Russians were behind the raid, for ‘the present moment would provide a splendid opportunity for a Russian
coup de main
on
Constantinople’.
¹⁸