The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire (40 page)

The development of an Ottoman constitutional monarchy was hampered by a succession of foreign crises. News of the Young Turk Revolution caused alarm in Vienna and Budapest. For thirty years
Francis Joseph’s ministers and soldiers had treated the nominally Ottoman provinces of Bosnia–Herzegovina as a virtual colony. What would happen if the new regime in Constantinople
challenged Habsburg authority by seeking the return of parliamentary deputies from Bosnia and Herzegovina? And what, too, if the Ottoman Parliament claimed representation from tributary states like
Bulgaria? It was in the interests of the Sultan’s neighbours to clarify and define the limits of his authority in the Balkans. Already, before the Young Turk revolution, Baron von Aehrenthal,
the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister, had raised the ghost of traditional Balkan enmities by support for a projected railway from Sarajevo through the
sanjak
of Novibazar to Mitrovica and
on to the port of Salonika, thus opening up Habsburg Croatia at the expense of independent Serbia. The CUP’s activities spurred both Aehrenthal and the ruler of Bulgaria into action. In the
first week of October 1908 Austria–Hungary formally annexed Bosnia–Herzegovina, and in Sofia Prince Ferdinand was proclaimed independent ‘Tsar of the Bulgarians’ (a title
downgraded to ‘King’ when independence was recognized by the Powers six months later). Soon afterwards the Cretans sought formal acknowledgement of their freedom from Ottoman
sovereignty and their union with Greece.
⁵

The first effect of the crisis inside the Ottoman Empire was to strengthen the hands of the anglophiles. Two leading CUP officials, Dr Nazim and Ahmed Riza, travelled to London in the second
week of
November 1908 to seek an Anglo-Ottoman alliance, and were received by the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey. They explained to him that the CUP wished to change the
character of the Ottoman Empire; potentially, so they claimed, ‘Turkey was the Japan of the Near East.’ Grey assured them of ‘our entire sympathy in the good work they were doing
in Turkey’ and offered to lend ‘men to organise customs, police, and so forth, if they wished them.’ But he explained that there could be no close Anglo-Ottoman partnership since,
except in the Far East, Britain still stood firmly outside the alliance system. It was an amiable but unproductive interview.
⁶
Although Grey and his
principal advisers knew the importance of his two visitors, the Foreign Office seems to have been acutely conscious that they were technically private travellers rather than envoys from the Ottoman
government. And there is no doubt that the Foreign Secretary himself rated lowly any prospect of a lasting Young Turk civilian administration. ‘It may well be that the habit of vicious and
corrupt government will be too strong for reform,’ Grey had already written to Lowther ten weeks before meeting Nazim and Ahmed Riza. ‘Out of the present upheaval there may be evolved a
strong and efficient military despotism.’
⁷

Yet it is hard to avoid a feeling of opportunities lost by the British during the Bosnian Crisis. With Germany, Austria–Hungary’s staunchest ally, temporarily discredited at
Constantinople, Grey might have welcomed a chance to recover Britain’s lost influence at the Porte. Interests had, of course, changed over the last twenty years. No Foreign Secretary would
wish to see European peace endangered by a scramble for land, as the Ottoman tide finally receded in the Balkans. But since the turn of the century, the Foreign Office—and, even more, the
India Office—had been showing a greater concern for the Persian Gulf and the future of Mesopotamia than for the Straits; and the CUP was as alive to the importance of the Sultan’s Asian
lands as Abdulhamid himself. By 1899 skilled negotiations, conducted for the most part locally by agents of the Viceroy of India, had ensured that all the small Persian Gulf sheikdoms, including
Kuwait, were in practice British protectorates, even if technically under the Sultan’s sovereignty; and the London-registered Euphrates and Tigris Steam Navigation Company had a monopoly of
port rights at
Baghdad and Basra unchallenged until the Ottoman treaty concessions to Berlin in the Baghdad Railway agreements. Germany’s discomfiture in the winter of
1908–9 should have given Grey an opportunity to safeguard trading interests in a region where the traditional Anglo-Indian commercial predominance was under threat. More was at stake than
railway construction. By now oil politics, too, influenced decision-making at the Foreign Office and at the Porte. On 26 May 1908—just nine weeks before the Young Turk Revolution—the
first significant flow of oil in the Gulf region was reported from Masjid-i-Sulaiman, across the Persian frontier but barely 150 miles from Basra. Not surprisingly, one of the first actions of the
Kamil Pasha government, under CUP pressure, was a decree which transferred oil revenue and property from the Sultan’s Privy Purse back to the Ottoman State, thus countering Abdulhamid’s
swift initiative eighteen years before. Foreign bids for oil concessions and development, provisionally approved or subject to tentative bargaining under the old regime, had now to be resubmitted
through the Ministry of Finance. Over such matters Ambassador Lowther’s ‘good-intentioned children’ were precociously shrewd.
⁸

The Bosnian Crisis absorbed the attention of Europe’s chancelleries for some six months, and throughout this period the Ottoman Government continued to stress its desire for friendship
with Great Britain. To a limited extent British diplomacy secured some compensation for the Young Turks: Grey persuaded his Russian Entente partners to postpone discussion of a revised Straits
Convention, on the grounds that it was an ‘inopportune’ moment in Turkish affairs to raise so general a question; the presence of a British naval squadron off Crete emphasized
Grey’s insistence on ruling out any immediate transfer of sovereignty over the island to Greece; and in Anglo-Russian exchanges a curious bargain was struck by which the Turkish recognition
of Bulgaria’s independence won a renunciation by the Russians of forty Ottoman instalments of the 1878 war indemnity.
⁹
At the same time a British
naval mission, headed by Rear-Admiral Sir Douglas Gamble, was sent to Constantinople to set in order, yet again, the Sultan’s fleet.

All these face-saving gestures could hardly offset the sad reality that the coming of constitutional government coincided with a resumption of
the old dreary round of
territorial losses, after twenty years of Hamidian pride in empire. Muslim purists, already offended by the sight of unveiled ‘modern’ wives and daughters in the smarter streets of the
cities, began to campaign against the reformers: a socially conservative Society of Islamic Unity was established, with the Sultan’s fourth son, Mehmed Burhaneddin, as a member, and with
rumours of financial backing from the palace. In the second week of February 1909 the CUP engineered the fall of the liberal Kamil Pasha and his replacement as Grand Vizier by their nominee,
Hüseyin Hilmi. This political manoeuvre gave substance to Islamic Unity’s complaint that the men from Macedonia were creating a new autocracy. Friction developed between the First Army,
garrisoning the capital, and the officer politicians of the Third Army who had travelled from Salonika to direct the constitutional revolution. On the night of 12/13 April 1909 troops from the
First Army barracks mingled with religious students in Stamboul, demanding the resignation of the government and the establishment of a Muslim fundamentalist regime strictly observing the
ş
eriat
code and respecting the authority of the Sultan as Caliph. Next morning a mob burst into the parliament building and killed two deputies. Abdulhamid willingly gave in to the
demonstrators’ demands and Ahmed Tevfik improvised a loyal coalition—which might be described as a ‘Government of the Friends of Yildiz’. Foreign diplomats duly reported the
restoration of imperial autocracy.
¹⁰

Such an assessment was premature. The counter-revolutionary coup did not follow the traditional pattern; the demonstrators did not capture the CUP leaders, nor indeed did they detain—or
kill—more than a handful of parliamentary deputies. There were, moreover, dissident officers who, though critical of many modernizing reforms, preferred the patriotic ideology of the
Unionists to the uncertainties of Yildiz autocracy. Among these officers was the fifty-three-year-old general, Mahmud Shevket Pasha; he had spent nine years in Prussia co-ordinating the secondment
of Ottoman officers to the German army, and was serving as Governor of Kossovo when the Young Turk Revolution began. The Pasha never joined the CUP, but he was entrusted by the new regime with
crucial responsibilities as commanding general of the Third Army in Macedonia. When reports of events in the capital reached Salonika,
Shevket Pasha ordered his divisional
chief-of-staff, Adjutant-Major Mustafa Kemal, to organize the movement of the Third Army to the outskirts of the capital; and by 22 April a combination of Kemal’s logistical planning and the
benefits of a strategic railway enabled troops and guns to be concentrated at San Stefano. There Shevket’s formidable army could offer protection to an assembly of parliamentary delegates who
issued a manifesto formally condemning the Sultan’s actions. After desultory fighting next day outside the Porte administrative buildings and the barracks in Taksim, Abdulhamid gave way and
dismissed Tevfik’s ministry. This time, however, the Sultan’s swift change of heart could not save him. The CUP was determined his reign must end.
¹¹

Outwardly the conventions of law were observed. Under considerable pressure from Talaat, the
ş
eyhülislâm
sanctioned a
fetva
which provided for the removal of the Sultan
from the throne; and on 27 April 1909 the sixty-six-year-old Abdulhamid II was succeeded by his sixty-five-half-brother, Mehmed V. But in two respects this deposition differed significantly from
the thirteen depositions which had preceded it. The request to the
ş
eyhülislâm
came, not from the viziers in council, but from representatives of parliament affronted by a ruler
who ‘swore to re-enter the path of righteousness, but broke his oath and raised a civil war’; and the Sultan was informed of his fate by a parliamentary delegation of two senators and
two deputies who told him that ‘the
Nation
has deposed you’.
¹²
Secondly, Abdulhamid was not to be immured in the
kafe
of an
Ottoman palace. He was told parliament had decided he must be exiled to the provinces: a villa would be found for him in Salonika. On hearing of his destination, Abdulhamid fainted into the arms of
his Chief Eunuch (an unfortunate who was soon to suffer a worse fate, being publicly hanged on Galata Bridge for cruelties perpetrated in his master’s name in Yildiz’s hidden cells).
Abdulhamid’s pleas and protests were in vain. Late that same night the ex-Sultan, two princes, three wives, four concubines, five eunuchs and fourteen servants set out on their twenty-hour
train journey to the city where his troubles had begun.
¹³

Apart from Abdulhamid’s hated henchmen at Yildiz, there was no blood purge of yesterday’s politicians, for in several instances the new
regime needed their
services. Ahmed Tevfik went to London as ambassador and stood aside from politics for the next ten years, declining to consider any inducements to hold office so long as the Unionists retained
their grip on the reins of power. On 5 May Hüseyin Hilmi returned as Grand Vizier, heading the government until the closing days of the year, when he was succeeded by the jurist and former
diplomat, Ibrahim Hakki Pasha. Two prominent Unionists held cabinet office under both Hilmi and Hakki, Talaat as Minister of the Interior and Cavit (Djavid) as Minister of Finance. Of the other CUP
leaders, Colonel Cemal was successively military governor of Üsküdar and Adana, while Major Enver went to Berlin as military attaché. Four months after Abdulhamid was deposed Enver
attended German military manoeuvres at Würzburg, where he made a considerable impression, not least upon his fellow guest, Winston Churchill.
¹⁴
If, over the next few years, statesmen and soldiers in Western Europe liked to assume that the handsome young Major was virtual ruler of the Ottoman Empire, then it was not in Enver’s nature
to disabuse them. There were moments when he believed it himself.

Yet who
was
‘lord of the Golden Horn’ following Abdulhamid’s deposition? Never again did the Ottoman Empire have a sovereign with pretensions to rule as well as to
reign. Mehmed V was a benign dodderer. He ascended the throne physically and morally weakened by excesses of drink and sex, habits which for over thirty years were encouraged by his half-brother in
the belief they would distract the heir-presumptive from political intrigue. Even had he been an ascetic monarch of quick intelligence, he would have found his powers trimmed by extensive
amendments to the 1876 Constitution agreed by parliament in August.
¹⁵
Only the Grand Vizier and the
ş
eyhülislâm
should in future be
chosen by the Sultan, who would therefore no longer appoint individual ministers or the presiding chairmen of the two Chambers (henceforth elected by their own members). Even the Sultan’s
personal staff was to be appointed by parliament—a provision intended to prevent the creation of another Yildiz inner government. Parliament had to meet from November to May in each year;
ministers were responsible to the Deputies rather than to the Grand Vizier; and the Sultan was to possess no more than a delaying, suspensive veto on legislation initiated by either parliamentary
chamber
Fundamental to all these revolutionary innovations was the amended Article 3 of the Constitution: sovereignty was vested in the head of the Osmanli dynasty only so
long as he fulfilled an accession oath of loyalty to Fatherland and Nation, pledging observance of both the
ş
eriat
and the Constitution. Parliament therefore asserted an inalienable right to
depose any sultan who infringed the basic codes of his empire.