The Grand Turk: Sultan Mehmet II - Conqueror of Constantinople and Master of an Empire (36 page)

A crisis arose in 1840 when the Ottoman admiral Ahmet Fevzi Pasha sailed the Ottoman fleet to Alexandria and surrendered it to Mehmet Ali, for fear that the grand vezir Mehmet Husrev Pasha would turn it over to the Russians. The foreign minister, Mustafa Reşit Pasha, negotiated with the European powers - Britain, France, Russia, Austria and Prussia - to intervene, promising that Sultan Abdül Mecit would institute far-reaching reforms in the Ottoman Empire. The five powers intervened and forced Mehmet Ali to allow the Ottoman fleet to be returned to Istanbul, on the promise that Abdül Mecit would make him the governor of an autonomous Egypt.

Mustafa Reşit then worked with Abdül Mecit on the reforms he had promised the Western powers. These were embodied in a Hatti Şerif, or imperial decree, proclaimed by Abdül Mecit at a pavilion in the lower gardens of Topkapı Sarayı known as Gülhane, the Rose Chamber. The Gülhane decree announced that Abdül Mecit thenceforth would rule as an enlightened monarch, protecting the lives and property of all his subjects - Muslims, Christians and Jews alike - and that he would create a government in which there would be equitable taxation, regular legislative councils, and a fair system of conscription to obtain manpower for a modern army and navy. This was the beginning of the
Tanzimat
, or Reform Movement, which would continue under Abdül Mecit’s immediate successors.

The British mounted an expedition against Ibrahim Pasha in 1840 and forced him to withdraw from Syria early the following year. A British fleet then bombarded Alexandria and prepared to land troops, which led Mehmet Ali to evacuate Crete and the Arabian peninsula. Sultan Abdül Mecit then issued a decree on 13 February 1841 confirming Mehmet Ali and his heirs as the hereditary Ottoman governors of Egypt, settling the so-called Eastern Crisis for the time being.

Another crisis arose in October 1853, when Russia refused to evacuate Moldavia and Wallachia, the trans-Danubian principalities that had been taken from the Turks in 1774. This gave rise to the Crimean War, which began on 28 March 1854, when the British and French joined the Turks in fighting against the Russians on the Crimean peninsula. The Crimean War ended with the Treaty of Paris, signed on 30 March 1856. The terms of the treaty left the map much as it had been before the war. Turkey was admitted to the Concert of Europe, the harmonious family of civilised European nations, and the other signatories undertook ‘to respect the independence and the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire’.

Abdül Hamit II succeeded as sultan on 7 September 1876, and three months later, under pressure from the great powers of Europe and the Turkish reform movement, he agreed to the adoption of a constitution. The constitution provided for the creation of an Ottoman parliament, which met for the first time on 19 March 1877.

Russia declared war on the Ottoman Empire on 16 April 1877, its soldiers invading Turkish territory in both eastern Anatolia and the Balkans, capturing Edirne and penetrating to the suburbs of Istanbul before they were stopped by pressure from the great powers. The war was officially ended by the Treaty of Berlin, signed on 13 July 1878, in which part of Bulgaria became independent of the Ottoman Empire along with all of Montenegro, Serbia and Romania, while a large part of north-eastern Anatolia was ceded to Russia, to which Sultan Abdül Hamit II agreed to pay a huge indemnity. Aside from the financial losses, the Treaty of Berlin cost the Ottoman Empire 40 per cent of its territory and 20 per cent of its population, of whom almost a half were Muslims. Another casualty of the war was the Ottoman parliament, which Abdül Hamit dissolved on 14 February 1878, suspending the constitution as well.

That same year the Ottoman Empire entered into a defensive alliance with the United Kingdom. As part of the agreement Britain took over the administration of Cyprus as a British protectorate, seeking to safeguard its sea lanes to Egypt.

The movement of reform in the Ottoman Empire was led by a group known as the Young Turks, who formed a number of loosely knit coalitions, among which the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) eventually came to the fore. On 23 July 1908 the leaders of the CUP gave an ultimatum to Abdül Hamit, warning him that unless the constitution was restored within twenty-four hours the army in Macedonia would march on Istanbul. The sultan was terrified, and on the following day he restored the constitution and declared that the parliament would be reconvened. After elections the second Turkish parliament opened on 17 December 1908, with Abdül Hamit now reduced to the status of a constitutional monarch.

Meanwhile, the neighbours of the Ottoman Empire had taken advantage of its weakness to grab whatever Turkish territory they could. On 6 October 1908 Austria annexed Bosnia and Hercegovina from the Ottoman Empire. On that same day all of Bulgaria declared its independence, including the part that had remained Ottoman territory in 1878. Then on the following day Greece announced its annexation of Crete, which had been under the control of the great powers since the Ottomans had been forced to remove their troops from the island in 1898.

Abdül Hamit was deposed by an army coup on 23 April 1909 and replaced as sultan by his brother Mehmet V Reşat, who was merely a puppet of the Young Turks, a group of officers led by Talat Pasha, Cemal and Enver Pasha, who controlled the Ottoman government for the next decade.

Italy’s designs on north Africa led it to declare war on the Ottoman Empire on 29 September 1911, putting Tripoli under blockade. The Italians opened another front by occupying the Ottoman-held island of Rhodes and bombarding the forts at the entrance to the Dardanelles.

The Balkan states now sought to take advantage of the Tripolitan War by forming alliances against the Ottomans in the summer and early autumn of 1912, their coalition comprising Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegro. The First Balkan War began when Montenegro invaded Ottoman territory in northern Albania on 8 October 1912, with the other allies beginning offensives against the Turks shortly afterwards. The war continued until an armistice was arranged on 30 May 1913, by which time the Bulgars were at Çatalca, less than twenty-five miles from Istanbul, having captured Edirne, while the rest of the Ottoman possessions in Europe were occupied by the other Balkan allies. Ten days later the Treaty of London was signed, establishing the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire in Europe as close as sixty miles from Istanbul.

The Second Balkan War began on 29 June 1913, when the Bulgars launched surprise attacks on the Greeks and Serbs, who were soon aided by Romania and Montenegro. The four allies proved too much for the Bulgars and soon forced them to surrender. Enver Pasha seized the opportunity and led an army to recapture Edirne on 21 July. The war was officially ended by the Treaty of Bucharest, signed on 10 August 1913, in which Greece took most of Epirus and western Thrace from the Ottoman Empire.

Enver Pasha had been busy behind the scenes preparing the way for a pact with Germany, for he knew that Russia was now entering an alliance with Britain and France known as the Triple Entente. A treaty of alliance between the Ottoman Empire and Germany was signed secretly on 2 August 1914, just as the Triple Entente and the Central Powers were declaring war on one another. Three months later the Ottoman Empire entered the First World War as an ally of Germany. Then on 2 October 1914 Britain annexed Cyprus, declaring it a crown colony of the British Empire.

During the First World War the Ottoman forces were engaged on several fronts: the Caucusus, eastern Anatolia, the Persian Gulf, Iraq, Syria and Palestine, Thrace, and the Dardanelles, where in 1915 the Turks under Mustafa Kemal Pasha drove back the Allies in an eight-month battle on the Gallipoli peninsula in which more than 100,000 men lost their lives on both sides. The Young Turks were in complete control of the government throughout most of the war, with Talat Pasha appointed grand vezir on 3 February 1917, forming a triumvirate with Cemal and Enver. Mehmet V Reşat died on 2 July 1918 and was succeeded the following day by his brother Mehmet VI Vahidettin, fated to be the last sultan of the Ottoman Empire.

Meanwhile, the Ottoman forces had suffered a series of defeats in both Iraq and Syria, where Mustafa Kemal Pasha commanded the Seventh Army. Damascus fell to the British on 1 October 1918 and the French took Beirut the following day, as the Ottoman army retreated to make a last stand in Anatolia. As they did so Mustafa Kemal sent a cable to the sultan urging him to form a new government and sue for peace.

Talat Pasha resigned as grand vezir on 8 October, and soon afterwards he, Enver and Cemal fled from Turkey on a German warship. Six days later the sultan appointed Ahmet Izzet Pasha as grand vezir, and he immediately began making overtures to the British for peace. An armistice was signed at Mudros to come into effect on 31 October 1918, eleven days before fighting between Germany and the Allies stopped on the western front. The Mudros Armistice called for the total and unconditional surrender of the Ottoman army, with all strategic positions in Turkey to be occupied by Allied forces. A large Allied fleet sailed through the straits and reached Istanbul on 13 November, landing troops to begin the occupation of the city.

At the Paris Peace Conference, which began in January 1919, the Allies considered various plans for dividing up what was left of the Ottoman Empire. Greece, which had come in on the Allied side late in the war, put in a claim for Izmir and its hinterland in western Asia Minor. The Greek prime minister Eleutherios Venizelos received support from Lloyd George and Clemenceau, the British and French prime ministers, to send an expeditionary force to Asia Minor, and on 14 May 1919 an Allied armada landed a Greek division at Izmir. The Greek army quickly headed inland, and by 22 June they had captured Bursa. Another Greek army invaded Thrace in July, and within a week they were within striking distance of Istanbul, from which they were held back only by Allied pressure.

The Ottoman government continued to function under the aegis of the Allied High Commissioners. Meanwhile, a national resistance movement was developing in Anatolia under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Pasha. On 19 March 1920 Kemal announced that the Turkish nation was establishing its own parliament in Ankara, the Grand National Assembly. The new assembly met for the first time on 23 April 1920, choosing Kemal as its first president.

The Allies agreed on the post-war boundaries of the Ottoman Empire at the Treaty of Sèvres, signed on 10 August 1920. The treaty greatly diminished the extent of the empire, putting the straits under international control, while leaving Istanbul nominally under the sultan’s rule.

The Greeks began another offensive in late October 1920, leading Kemal to put Ismet Pasha in charge of the western front. The Greeks were halted early the following year in two battles on the river Inönü, which Ismet Pasha later took as his last name.

The final stage of the war began on 26 August 1922, when Kemal led the Nationalist forces in a counter-offensive that utterly routed the Greeks, who fled in disorder towards Izmir. The Turkish cavalry entered Izmir on 9 September, by which time the Greek army had been evacuated from Asia Minor. A fire broke out in Izmir four days later, destroying half the city with great loss of life, just as the war ended.

An armistice was signed at Mudanya on 11 October, in which it was agreed that the Nationalists would occupy all of Thrace east of the river Maritza except for Istanbul and a zone along the straits, which would continue to be held by the British until a final peace treaty was signed.

On 1 November 1922 the Grand National Assembly in Ankara passed legislation separating the sultanate and the caliphate, with the former being abolished and the latter reduced to a purely religious role subservient to the state. The Allied High Commissioners were informed that henceforth Istanbul would be under the administration of the assembly and that Vahidettin was no longer sultan, though he retained the title of caliph. On 17 November 1922 Vahidettin left Istanbul aboard the British warship
HMS Malaya
, never to return. His brother Abdül Mecit II succeeded him as caliph on 24 November 1922.

The final articles of the Treaty of Lausanne, signed on 24 July 1923, established the present boundaries of the Turkish Republic, except for the province of Hatay in south-eastern Anatolia, which was acquired after a plebiscite in 1939. A separate agreement between Greece and Turkey provided for a compulsory exchange of their minorities, in which some 1.3 million Greeks and about half a million Turks were uprooted. The only exceptions to the exchange were the Turks of western Thrace and the Greeks of Istanbul and the islands of Imbros and Tenedos.

The Allied occupation of Istanbul came to an end on 2 October 1923, when the last detachment of British troops embarked from the city. Four days later a division of the Turkish Nationalist army marched into Istanbul. On 13 October the Grand National Assembly passed a law making Ankara the capital of Turkey.

Then on 29 October the assembly adopted a constitution that created the Republic of Turkey, and on that same day Kemal was elected as its first president, whereupon he chose Ismet Inönü as prime minister. Kemal subsequently took the name Atatürk, meaning ‘Father of the Turks’, symbolising his leadership in creating the new Turkish Republic that rose out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire.

On 3 March 1924 the Grand National Assembly passed a law abolishing the caliphate, thus severing the last tenuous bond that linked Turkey with the Ottoman Empire. This same law deposed Abdül Mecit as caliph, and he and all his family and descendants were forbidden to reside within the boundaries of the Turkish Republic. The following day Abdül Mecit left Istanbul, never to return.

And thus the Ottoman Empire finally came to an end, with the departure of the last member of the Osmanlı dynasty that had ruled in Turkey for more than 700 years. The House of Osman had fallen, and the dynasty that he had founded was sent off into exile, most of them into western Europe, which for centuries had lived in fear of the Grand Turk.

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