The Crimean War (66 page)
Authors: Orlando Figes
Tags: #History, #Military, #General, #Europe, #Other, #Russia & the Former Soviet Union, #Crimean War; 1853-1856
In Nablus, to take just one example, the troubles began on 4 April, shortly after Muslim leaders had denounced the Hatt-i Hümayun at Friday prayers. There were 5,000 Christians in Nablus, a town of 10,000 people, and before the Crimean War they had lived peacefully with the Muslims. But the war had increased tensions between them. The defeat of Russia was seen as a ‘Muslim victory’ by the local Palestinians, whose religious pride was offended by the new laws of religious toleration in the Hatt-i Hümayun. Christians, for their part, saw it as an allied triumph. They raised French and British flags on their houses in Nablus and placed a new bell over the Protestant mission school. These were provocations to Islamic sentiment. At Friday prayers, the ulemas condemned these signs of Western domination, arguing that Muslims would soon be called to prayer by the English bell, unless they rose up to destroy the Christian churches, which, they said, would be ‘a proper form of prayer to God’. Calling for jihad, crowds spilled out onto the streets of Nablus, many of them gathering by the Protestant mission, where they tore down the British flag.
Amid these heightened tensions, violence was sparked by a bizarre incident involving the Reverend Mr Lyde, a Protestant missionary and Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, who had accidentally shot a beggar attempting to steal his coat. ‘The cup of fanaticism was full, and one drop more caused it to run over,’ wrote James Finn, the British consul in Jerusalem, who reported on the incident. Lyde had taken refuge from the mob in the house of the town governor, Mahmud Bek, who pacified the family of the dead man and proposed to bury him. But the ulemas were not satisfied with this. After a religious council, they forbade the burial and suspended public prayers in all the mosques ‘until the price of the blood of Islam should be paid’. Calling for ‘Vengeance on the Christians!’ a large crowd assembled outside the governor’s house and demanded to be given Lyde, who offered to sacrifice himself, but Mahmud Bek refused, whereupon the the mob began to rampage through the town, pillaging and destroying any property on which they could lay their hands. Christian houses, schools and churches were ransacked and burned. Several Prussian consular officials were murdered, along with a dozen Greeks, according to Finn, who also reported that ‘eleven women are known to have given premature birth to infants from the effect of fright’. Order was eventually restored by the intervention of the Sultan’s troops, and on 21 April Lyde was put on trial in a Turkish court in Jerusalem, where a mixed Muslim and Christian jury acquitted him of murder but ordered him to pay a large sum in compensation to the beggar’s family.
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Lyde returned to England in a deranged mental state: he had delusions of himself as Christ. The ringleaders of the Muslim riots were never brought to trial, and attacks on Christians in the area continued for many months. In August 1856 the violence spread from Nablus to Gaza. In February 1857 Finn reported that 300 Christians were ‘still living in a state of terror in Gaza’, for ‘no one could control the Muslim fanatics’, and the Christians would not testify for fear of reprisals.
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Lyde returned to England in a deranged mental state: he had delusions of himself as Christ. The ringleaders of the Muslim riots were never brought to trial, and attacks on Christians in the area continued for many months. In August 1856 the violence spread from Nablus to Gaza. In February 1857 Finn reported that 300 Christians were ‘still living in a state of terror in Gaza’, for ‘no one could control the Muslim fanatics’, and the Christians would not testify for fear of reprisals.
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Faced with the prospect of this sort of violence almost anywhere, the Ottoman authorities dragged their heels over implementing the new laws of religious toleration in the Hatt-i Hümayun. Stratford Canning was increasingly frustrated with the Porte. ‘Turkish ministers are very little disposed to meet the demands of Her Majesty’s Government on the subject of religious persecution,’ he wrote to Clarendon. ‘They pretend to entertain apprehensions of popular discontent among the Mussulmans, if they were to give way.’ Turkish participation in the Crimean War had led to a resurgence of ‘Muslim triumphalism’, Stratford reported. As a result of the war, the Turks had become more protective of their sovereignty, and more resentful of Western intervention into their affairs. There was a new generation of Tanzimat reformers at the head of the Turkish government who were more secure in their personal position and less dependent on the patronage of foreign powers and ambassadors than Reshid’s generation of reformers had been before the Crimean War; they could afford to be more cautious and more practical in their implementation of reforms, carrying out the economic and political requirements of the Western powers but not hurrying to fulfil the religious promises contained in the Hatt-i Hümayun. Throughout his last year as ambassador, Stratford urged the Turkish leaders to be more serious about the protection of the Christians in the Ottoman Empire: it was the price, he told them, that Turkey had to pay for British and French help in the Crimean War. He was particularly exercised by the continued execution of Muslims for converting to Christianity, despite the Sultan’s promises to secure the Christians from religious persecution and abolish the ‘barbarous practice of putting seceders to death’. Citing numerous cases of Christian converts being driven from their homes and killed, Stratford wrote to the Porte on 23 December 1856:
The great European powers can never consent to perpetuate by the triumphs of their fleets and armies the enforcement in Turkey of a law [apostasy], which is not only a standing insult to them, but a source of cruel persecution to their fellow Christians. They are entitled to demand, the British Government distinctly demands, that the Mohamedean who turns Christian shall be as free from every kind of punishment on that account as the Christian who embraces the Mohamodean faith.
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Yet by the time of his return to London the next year, very little had been done by the Porte to satisfy the demands of the European governments. ‘Among the Christians,’ Finn reported in July 1857, ‘a strong feeling of discontent is on the increase because of the slowness of the Turkish government to implement religious toleration.’
The Christians complain that they are insulted in the streets, that they are not placed in equal rank at public courts with Muslim fellow subjects, that they are ousted from almost every office of government employment, and that they are not allowed the honour of military service but instead of it have the old military tax doubled upon them.
In the rural areas of Palestine, according to Finn, the Hatt-i Hümayun remained unobserved for many years. Local governors were corrupt, ill-disciplined and closely linked to the Muslim notables, clerics and officials, who kept the Christians in their place, while the Porte was too remote and weak to curb their excesses, let alone to force them to uphold the new laws of equality.
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But it was in the Balkans that the failure of the Porte to carry out reforms would have the most lasting consequences for the Ottoman Empire. Throughout the Balkan region, Christian peasants would rise up against their Muslim landlords and officials, beginning in Bosnia in 1858. The continuation of the
millet
system would give rise to nationalist movements that would involve the Ottomans and the European powers in a long series of Balkan wars, culminating in the conflicts that would bring about the First World War.
millet
system would give rise to nationalist movements that would involve the Ottomans and the European powers in a long series of Balkan wars, culminating in the conflicts that would bring about the First World War.
The Paris Treaty did not make any major territorial changes to the map of Europe. To many at the time, the outcome did not appear worthy of a war in which so many people died. Russia ceded southern Bessarabia to Moldavia. But otherwise the treaty’s articles were statements of principle: the independence and integrity of the Ottoman Empire were confirmed and guaranteed by the great powers (the first time a Muslim state was recognized by international law, the Congress of Vienna having specifically excluded Turkey from the European powers regulated by its international laws); the protection of the non-Muslim subjects of the Sultan was guaranteed by the signatory powers, thereby annulling Russia’s claims to protect the Christians of the Ottoman Empire; Russia’s protectorate over the Danubian principalities was negated by an article confirming the autonomy of these two states under Ottoman sovereignty; and, most humiliating of all for the Russians, Article XI declared the Black Sea to be a neutral zone, open to commercial shipping but closed to all warships in peacetime, thus depriving Russia of its naval ports and arsenals on this crucial southern coastal frontier.
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But if the Paris Treaty made few immediate changes to the European map, it marked a crucial watershed for international relations and politics, effectively ending the old balance of power, in which Austria and Russia had controlled the Continent between themselves, and forging new alignments that would pave the way for the emergence of nation states in Italy, Romania and Germany.
Although it was Russia that was punished by the Paris Treaty, in the longer term it was Austria that would lose the most from the Crimean War, despite having barely taken part in it. Without its conservative alliance with Russia, which never quite forgave it for its armed neutrality in favour of the allies in 1854, and equally mistrusted by the liberal Western powers for its reactionary politics and ‘soft-on-Russia’ peace initiatives during the war, Austria found itself increasingly isolated on the Continent after 1856. Consequently it would lose out in Italy (in the war against the French and Piedmontese in 1859), in Germany (in the war against the Prussians in 1866) and in the Balkans (where it steadily retreated from the 1870s until 1914).
None of that was yet apparent in April 1856, when Austria joined France and Britain in a Triple Alliance to defend the Paris settlement. The three powers signed an agreement that any breach of the Paris Treaty would become a cause of war. Palmerston saw it as a ‘good additional Security and Bond of Union’ against Russia, which he fully expected to re-emerge in due course as a major threat to the Continent. He wanted to expand the
entente
into an anti-Russian league of European states.
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Napoleon was not so sure. Since the fall of Sevastopol, there had been a growing rapprochement between the French and the Russians. Napoleon needed Russia for his plans against the Austrians in Italy. Meanwhile, for the Russians, and in particular for their new Foreign Minister, Alexander Gorchakov, who replaced Nesselrode in 1856, France represented the most likely power to support their efforts to remove the humiliating Black Sea clauses of the Paris Treaty. Both France and Russia were revisionist powers: where Russia wanted revisions to the treaty of 1856, France wanted to remove the remnants of the 1815 settlement. A deal between them could be made.
entente
into an anti-Russian league of European states.
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Napoleon was not so sure. Since the fall of Sevastopol, there had been a growing rapprochement between the French and the Russians. Napoleon needed Russia for his plans against the Austrians in Italy. Meanwhile, for the Russians, and in particular for their new Foreign Minister, Alexander Gorchakov, who replaced Nesselrode in 1856, France represented the most likely power to support their efforts to remove the humiliating Black Sea clauses of the Paris Treaty. Both France and Russia were revisionist powers: where Russia wanted revisions to the treaty of 1856, France wanted to remove the remnants of the 1815 settlement. A deal between them could be made.
Unlike Nesselrode, a firm supporter of the Holy Alliance and its legitimist principles, Gorchakov took a pragmatic view of Russia’s role on the Continent. In his opinion, Russia should not form alliances that committed it to general principles, such as the defence of legitimate monarchies, as it had done before the Crimean War. The war had shown that Russia could not rely in any way on the solidarity of legitimate European monarchies. Nesselrode’s policy had made Russia vulnerable to the failings of other governments, Austria in particular, a power Gorchakov despised from his time as ambassador in Vienna. Instead, Gorchakov believed Russia should focus its diplomacy on its own national interests, and ally with other powers regardless of their ideology to further those interests. Here was a new type of diplomacy, the realpolitik later practised by Bismarck.
The Russians tested the Paris Treaty from the start, focusing on minor issues which they could exploit to open up divisions in the Crimean alliance. In May 1856 they claimed ownership of a lighthouse on tiny Serpent Island, in Turkish waters near the mouth of the Danube delta, and landed seven men with an officer to take up residence in the lighthouse. Walewski was inclined to let the Russians have the insignificant island, but Palmerston was adamant that they had to be ejected, on the grounds that they were infringing Turkish sovereignty. When the captain of a British ship made contact with the Turks on Serpent Island, he was told that they did not mind the Russians being there: they saw them as guests and were happy to sell them their supplies. Palmerston put his foot down. ‘We must avoid the fatal mistake made by Aberdeen in permitting the early movements and indications of Russian aggression to go on unnoticed and unrepressed,’ he wrote to Clarendon on 7 August. Orders were prepared to send the gunboats in to remove the Russians physically, but John Wodehouse, the British envoy in St Petersburg, was doubtful whether Britain had the right to do this, and the Queen shared these doubts, so Palmerston backed down and diplomatic pressure was used instead. Gorchakov insisted that the island had been owned by the Russians since 1833, and appealed to the French, who were thus manoeuvred into a position of international mediation between Britain and Russia.
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Meanwhile, the Russians launched a second challenge to the Paris Treaty in connection with the border between Russian Bessarabia and Turkish-controlled Moldavia. By an accident of mapping and confusion over names, the allies had drawn the border running to the south of an old village called Bolgrad, 3 kilometres to the north of New Bolgrad, a market town situated on the shores of Lake Yalpuk, which runs into the Danube. The Russians made use of the lack of clarity, claiming that they should be given both Bolgrads, and thus joint ownership of Lake Yalpuk. Palmerston insisted that the border should remain at the old village – the intention of the treaty having been to deprive the Russians of access to the Danube. He urged the French to remain firm and show a united front against the Russians, who would otherwise exploit their differences. But the French were happy to concede the Russian claim as a matter of good faith, though they then proposed that the boundary should run along a narrow strip of land between the market town and Lake Yalpuk, thereby granting more territory to the Russians but depriving them of access to the lake. Once again, the French acted as intermediaries between Russia and Britain.
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