A Peace to End all Peace (4 page)

Grey therefore negotiated a treaty with Russia, executed in 1907, that reconciled the differences between the two countries in Asia. Tibet was neutralized; Russia gave up her interest in Afghanistan, and left control of that country’s foreign policy in Britain’s hands; and Persia was divided into a Russian zone, a neutral zone, and a British zone. The Great Game had seemingly been brought to an end.

It could have been anticipated that the settlement of 1907 would arouse fears in Constantinople that Britain would no longer protect Turkey against Russia. A Palmerston or a Stratford Canning might have allayed such fears, but neither Sir Edward Grey nor his ambassador in Constantinople took the trouble to do so.

VI

There was an intellectual time lag between London and the outposts of empire. Grey, Asquith, and their Liberal colleagues saw Britain’s traditional rivals, France and Russia, as British friends and allies in the post-Victorian age. But British officers, agents, and civil servants stationed along the great arc that swung from Egypt and the Sudan to India failed in many cases to adopt the new outlook. Having spent a lifetime countering Russian and French intrigues in the Middle East, they continued to regard Russia and France as their country’s enemies. Events in 1914 and the succeeding years were to bring their Victorian political views back into unexpected prominence.

In one respect officers in the field and ministers in London were in agreement: both shared the assumption that what remained of the independent Middle East would eventually fall under European influence and guidance. Asquith and Grey had no desire for Britain to expand further into the Middle East, while junior British officers in Cairo and Khartoum harbored designs on the Arab-speaking provinces to their east. Both groups believed, however, that the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East would collapse one day and that one or more of the European powers would have to pick up the pieces. This assumption—that when the Ottoman Empire disappeared, Europe would have to take its place—proved to be one of those motors that drive history.

I

For decades and indeed centuries before the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the native regimes of the Middle East had been, in every sense, losing ground to Europe. The khanates of Central Asia, including Khiva and Bukhara, had fallen to Russia, as had portions of the Persian Empire. The Arab sheikhdoms along the Gulf coast route from Suez to India had been brought under British sway; and Cyprus and Egypt, though formally still attached to Turkey, were in fact occupied and administered by Britain. The Anglo-Russian Agreement of 1907 brought Afghanistan into the British sphere, and divided most of Persia between Britain and Russia. In the Moslem Middle East, only the Ottoman Empire effectively retained its independence—though precariously, as its frontiers came under pressure.

Indeed, the still-independent Turkish Sultanate looked out of place in the modern world. Like a ruined temple of classical antiquity, with some of its shattered columns still erect and visible to tourists such as those aboard the
Enchantress
, the Ottoman Empire was a structure that had survived the bygone era to which it belonged. It was a relic of invasions from the east a millennium ago: beginning around
AD
1,000, waves of nomad horsemen streamed forth from the steppes and deserts of central and northeast Asia, conquering the peoples and lands in their path as they rode west. Pagan or animist in religious belief, and speaking one or other of the Mongolian or Turkish languages, they carved out a variety of principalities and kingdoms for themselves, among them the empires of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane. The Ottoman (or Osmanli) Empire, founded by Turkish-speaking horsemen who had converted to Islam, was another such empire; it took its name from Osman, a borderland
ghazi
(warrior for the Moslem faith) born in the thirteenth century, who campaigned on the outskirts of the Eastern Roman (or Byzantine) Empire in Anatolia.

In the fifteenth century Osman’s successors conquered and replaced the Byzantine Empire. Riding on to new conquests, the Ottoman Turks expanded in all directions: north to the Crimea, east to Baghdad and Basra, south to the coasts of Arabia and the Gulf, west to Egypt and North Africa—and into Europe. At its peak, in the sixteenth century, the Ottoman Empire included most of the Middle East, North Africa, and what are now the Balkan countries of Europe—Greece, Yugoslavia, Albania, Rumania, and Bulgaria—as well as much of Hungary. It stretched from the Persian Gulf to the river Danube; its armies stopped only at the gates of Vienna. Its population was estimated at between thirty and fifty million at a time when England’s population was perhaps four million; and it ruled more than twenty nationalities.
¹

The Ottomans never entirely outgrew their origins as a marauding war band. They enriched themselves by capturing wealth and slaves; the slaves, conscripted into the Ottoman ranks, rose to replace the commanders who retired, and went on to capture wealth and slaves in their turn. Invading new territories was the only path they knew to economic growth. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the conquests turned into defeats and retreats, the dynamic of Ottoman existence was lost; the Turks had mastered the arts of war but not those of government.

Ottoman leaders in the nineteenth century attempted programs of sweeping reform. Their goals were the centralization of government; the establishment of an executive branch under the Sultan’s chief minister, the Grand Vizier; the rationalization of taxation and conscription; the establishment of constitutional guarantees; the founding of secular public schools offering technical, vocational, and other training; and the like. A start—but not much more—was made along these lines. Most of the reforms took place only on paper; and as an anachronism in the modern world, the ramshackle Ottoman regime seemed doomed to disappear.

The empire was incoherent. Its Ottoman rulers were not an ethnic group; though they spoke Turkish, many were descendants of once-Christian slaves from Balkan Europe and elsewhere. The empire’s subjects (a wide variety of peoples, speaking Turkish, Semitic, Kurdish, Slavic, Armenian, Greek, and other languages) had little in common with, and in many cases little love for, one another. Though European observers later were to generalize about, for example, “Arabs,” in fact Egyptians and Arabians, Syrians and Iraqis were peoples of different history, ethnic background, and outlook. The multinational, multilingual empire was a mosaic of peoples who did not mix; in the towns, Armenians, Greeks, Jews, and others each lived in their own separate quarters.

Religion had some sort of unifying effect, for the empire was a theocracy—a Moslem rather than a Turkish state—and most of its subjects were Moslems. The Ottoman Sultan was regarded as caliph (temporal and spiritual successor to the Prophet, Mohammed) by the majority group within Islam, the Sunnis. But among others of the seventy-one sects of Islam, especially the numerous Shi’ites, there was doctrinal opposition to the Sultan’s Sunni faith and to his claims to the caliphate. And for those who were not Moslem (perhaps 25 percent of the population at the beginning of the twentieth century), but Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Armenian Catholic, Armenian Gregorian, Jewish, Protestant, Maronite, Samaritan, Nestorian Christian, Syrian United Orthodox, Monophysite, or any one of a number of others, religion was a divisive rather than a unifying political factor.

The extent to which religion governed everyday life in the Middle East was something that European visitors in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries found remarkable; for religion had played no such role in Europe for centuries. Indeed, Europeans visited the Middle East largely to see the past. They came to see Biblical sites, or excavated wonders of the ancient world, or nomads who lived as they had in the time of Abraham.

The Porte, too, appeared to live in the past. Ottoman officials continued to pretend, for example, that Bulgaria formed part of the empire long after losing control of that territory in 1878, and counted Egyptians as among its subjects even after Britain occupied Egypt in 1882. For this and other reasons, Ottoman statistics were unreliable, and it is only in the roughest sense that we can say that the empire’s population in the early twentieth century may have been about twenty to twenty-five million, in a territory—depending on how it is defined—about six times the size of Texas. It comprised, broadly speaking, most of the Arabian peninsula and what is now Turkey, Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq.

Until the early twentieth century, the Ottoman Empire was for most of the time under the absolute personal rule of the Sultan. In at least one respect he was quite unlike a European monarch: as the son of a woman of the harem, he was always half-slave by birth. Under his rule civil, military, and Holy Law administrations could be discerned in an empire carefully divided into provinces and cantons. But the appearance of orderly administration—indeed of effective administration of any sort—was chimerical. As Gertrude Bell, an experienced English traveler in Middle Eastern lands, was later to write, “No country which turned to the eye of the world an appearance of established rule and centralized Government was, to a greater extent than the Ottoman Empire, a land of make-believe.”
²
There were army garrisons, it is true, scattered about the empire, but otherwise power was diffuse and the centralized authority was more myth than reality. Gertrude Bell, in the course of her travels, found that outside the towns, Ottoman administration vanished and the local sheikh or headman ruled instead. There were districts, too, where brigands roamed at will. The rickety Turkish government was even incapable of collecting its own taxes, the most basic act of imperial administration. On the eve of the First World War, only about 5 percent of taxes was collected by the government; the other 95 percent was collected by independent tax farmers.
³

Foreign countries exercised varying degrees of influence and control within the empire. It was not only that Egypt and Cyprus were in fact governed by Britain, which had occupied them in the late nineteenth century; and that the sheikhdoms along the Gulf coast were under British control. Lebanon, a separate canton under arrangements established in 1864, was governed by a Christian military governor directly serving under the Porte which, however, was obliged to act only in consultation with six European powers. Russia and France reserved to themselves the right to protect, respectively, the Orthodox and Catholic populations of the empire; and other powers also asserted a right to intervene in Turkish affairs on behalf of the groups they sponsored.

What was more than a little unreal, then, was the claim that the Sultan and his government ruled their domains in the sense in which Europeans understood government and administration. What was real in the Ottoman Empire tended to be local: a tribe, a clan, a sect, or a town was the true political unit to which loyalties adhered. This confused European observers, whose modern notions of citizenship and nationality were inapplicable to the crazy quilt of Ottoman politics. Europeans assumed that eventually they themselves would take control of the Ottoman domains and organize them on a more rational basis. In the early years of the twentieth century it was reasonable to believe that the days of Turkish dominion were numbered.

By 1914 the much-diminished Ottoman Empire no longer ruled North Africa or Hungary or most of southeastern Europe. It had been in a retreat since the eighteenth century that finally looked like a rout. For decades, in the Ottoman army and in the schools, discontented men had told one another in the course of clandestine meetings that the empire had to be rapidly changed to meet the intellectual, industrial, and military challenges of modern Europe. Stimulated but confused by the nationalism that had become Europe’s creed, intellectuals amongst the diverse Turkish-speaking and Arabics-peaking peoples of the empire sought to discover or to forge some sense of their own political identity.

In the final years before the outbreak of the First World War, obscure but ambitious new men took power in the Ottoman Empire, relegating the Sultan to a figurehead position. The new men, leaders of the Young Turkey Party, were at once the result and the cause of ferment in Constantinople, the Ottoman capital, as they tried to meet the challenge of bringing Turkey’s empire into the twentieth century before the modern world had time to destroy it.

II

Constantinople—the city originally called Byzantium and today known as Istanbul—was for more than eleven centuries the capital of the Roman Empire in the East, and then for more than four centuries the capital of its successor, the Ottoman Empire. Like Rome, Constantinople was built on seven hills and, like Rome, it was an eternal city: its strategic location gave it an abiding importance in the world’s affairs.

Constantinople is a collection of towns located principally on the European side of the great waterway that links the Mediterranean to the Black Sea, at a point where the channel separating Europe from Asia narrows to widths of as little as a half-mile. The site is a natural fortress, difficult to conquer or even to attack. A bay some four miles long, known as the Golden Horn, forms a magnificent natural harbor that provides shelter and protection for a defending fleet.

In 1914 the population of Constantinople stood at about a million. It was a cosmopolitan and polyglot population: most residents of the city were Moslem, Greek, or Armenian, but there was also a considerable colony of European and other foreigners. A European influence was evident in the architectural style of the newer buildings, in the style of dress, and in such innovations as street lights.

Rudimentary modernization had only just begun. In 1912 electric lighting had been introduced into Constantinople for the first time.
⁴
A start had been made toward constructing a drainage system for the city’s narrow, filthy streets; and the packs of wild dogs that for centuries had patrolled the city were, by decision of the municipal council, shipped to a waterless island to die.
⁵
Some work had been done on the paving of roads, but not much; most streets still turned to mud in the frequent rainstorms, or coughed dry dust into the air as winds blew through the city.

Violent alternating north and south winds dominated the city’s climate, bringing sudden changes of extreme heat or cold. The political climate, too, was subject to sudden and extreme changes at the beginning of the twentieth century; and for many years prior to 1914 British observers had shown that they had no idea where the winds were coming from or which way they were blowing. Political maneuverings at the Sublime Porte, the gate to the Grand Vizier’s offices from which the Ottoman government took its name, were conducted behind a veil of mystery that the British embassy time and again had failed to penetrate.

III

The British embassy, like those of the other Great Powers, was located in Pera, the European quarter of the city, which lay to the north of the Golden Horn. Foreign communities had grown up in proximity to their embassies, and lived their own lives, separately from that of the city. In Pera, French was the language of legation parties and entertainments; Greek, not Turkish, was the language of the streets. Three theaters offered revues and plays imported from Paris. The Pera Palace Hotel offered physical facilities comparable with those available in the palatial hotels of the major cities of Europe.

Most Europeans succumbed to the temptation to live in the isolation of their own enclave. Few were at home in the narrow, dirty lanes of Stamboul, the old section of the city south of the Golden Horn, with its walls and fortifications crumbling into ruin. One of the few who felt at ease on either side of the Golden Horn was an Englishman named Wyndham Deedes, who had come to play an important role in the new Young Turkey administration.

Deedes was from a county family of Kent: four centuries of English country gentlemen had preceded him. After Eton, he took a commission in the King’s Own Rifles, and for twenty-two years thereafter he remained a British officer. (When asked once about the horrors of the Boer War, he replied, “Well, anything was better than Eton.”)
⁶
Early in his military career, Deedes volunteered to serve in the Ottoman Gendarmerie, a newly created Turkish police force commanded by European officers. Its creation was a reform forced upon the Sultan by the European powers, for the old police force had become indistinguishable from the robber bands it was supposed to suppress. Deedes and his European colleagues were commissioned as officers of the new force while, at the same time, retaining their commissions in their respective national armies.