The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire (25 page)

Sinope was a legitimate act of war, effectively postponing an Ottoman offensive in the Caucasus. In Britain, however, Nakhimov’s masterstroke was misrepresented by press and public
opinion, becoming ‘the massacre of Sinope’. ‘The English people are resolved that Russia shall not dictate conditions to Europe, or convert the Black Sea, with all the various
interests encompassing its shores, into a Russian lake,’ an editorial in
The Times
declared. ‘To stop the aggressor with a blow’ was as ‘plain a duty towards
humanity’ as to ‘send succour to Sinope’, commented the
Morning Chronicle.
²
By the end of the first week in January 1854 ten
British and nine French ships of the line had sailed up through the Bosphorus. Any Russian vessel, warship or merchantman, should be ‘required to return to Sebastopol’, Stratford de
Redcliffe was informed by the Foreign Office. Soon afterwards four British warships began convoying Ottoman troops from Sinope to Trebizond. Few people doubted that war between Russia and
Turkey’s Western allies would follow in the spring. It came on 31 March.

The vanguard of a French and British expeditionary force reached the Gallipoli peninsula within nine days of the declaration of war, later moving northwards to Varna. Originally the allies
intended to join Omer Pasha’s army on the Danube, advance through the Principalities to the delta, and eventually take Odessa. But Austrian mediation induced the Russians to evacuate Moldavia
and Wallachia, which were then policed
by Francis Joseph’s soldiery throughout the war, a neutral buffer between the combatants. Thereafter the allied objective
changed: the Anglo-French expeditionary force would capture Sebastopol and destroy the fleet responsible for the Sinope ‘massacre’; the war against Russia became identified with the
Crimea.

In this familiar tale of battle heroics and administrative confusion the role of Omer Pasha’s army has often been overlooked. Yet 6,000 Ottoman troops took part in the initial invasion of
the Crimea and it was an Ottoman outpost which reported the first Russian advance on the morning of Balaklava. Lord Raglan, the British Commander-in-Chief, thought highly of the Ottoman infantry.
According to Colonel Hugh Rose, who was serving as a liaison officer at headquarters, it was Raglan’s concern for the valiant Turkish defenders of Canrobert’s Hill that sent the Light
Brigade forward on their famous charge. ‘We must set the poor Turks right again, get the redoubt back,’ Rose heard Raglan say on that historic October morning.
³
‘Johnny Turk’, as the British called their ally, remained in the peninsula until after the final assault on Sebastopol. Thirteen thousand Ottoman troops
defended the allied base at Eupatoria from a Russian attack, others joined the British and French in raiding the eastern Crimea, while in August 1855 Ottoman gunners and infantry fought beside the
French and Piedmontese on the river Chernaya.

Twice Lord Stratford de Redcliffe had to travel to the Crimea to ease relations between Omer and Raglan’s successors, for the Ottomans were eager to withdraw from the peninsula. Omer
insisted that the vital front for the Sultan lay in the Caucasus rather than in the Tsar’s Crimean appendage. At the end of September 1855, with the ruins of Sebastopol in allied hands,
Omer’s troops were at last able to sail for the Caucasian theatre of war. It was hoped they would relieve Kars, where for seven months an Ottoman garrison and a handful of British officers
had resisted a series of Russian assaults. But Omer moved too slowly. The Kars garrison, fated to suffer more deaths from starvation than from Russian guns, was forced to surrender on 25 November,
giving the Tsar’s troops their principal prize of the whole war.
⁴

In both the Crimea and the Caucasus the fighting ended with news of an armistice, concluded on 28 February 1856 far away in Paris.
Grand Vizier Mehmed Emin Ali—the
Tanzimat
reformer—served as the Sultan’s principal plenipotentiary at the Peace Congress, which Napoleon III had hoped would settle the affairs of all Europe as well as finding a
solution for the Eastern Question. It was the only occasion in the nineteenth century when an Ottoman spokesman sat among the victorious peace-makers after a war against Russia; and Ali did
well.
⁵
He showed a patient fluency in French and a fine sense of tactful restraint in dealing with the Tsar’s chief representative, that
deceptively courteous veteran of diplomatic bargaining, Alexis Orlov. There were moments in Paris when there seemed a closer accord between French and Russians than among the wartime allies, and
Ali took pains to convince the peacemakers of Sultan Abdulmecid’s sincere determination to persevere with the enlightened reforms promised in the Gülhane Decree of seventeen years
earlier. Ali’s task was made easier by Abdulmecid’s decision to issue the second Imperial Rescript of the
Tanzimat
era exactly a week ahead of the Peace Congress’s opening
in Paris. This
Hatt-i-Hümayun
of February 1856 reaffirmed the principles of Gülhane by asserting, even more categorically, the full equality of Muslims and non-Muslims within the
Ottoman Empire. At the same time, the Rescript foreshadowed further provincial administrative reforms, made practical provision for the direct collection of taxes in place of the discredited
tax-farming system, and accepted the need for official decrees to be written in simpler Ottoman Turkish, rather than in archaic forms often borrowed from Persian or Arabic.

Orlov would have preferred to see the Imperial Rescript written into the final Peace Treaty, so as to safeguard the improved status of the Sultan’s Christian subjects by an international
guarantee. Napoleon III sympathized with the Russians over this point. But, as Palmerston wrote to the ambassador in Paris, the British had fought ‘not so much to keep the Sultan and his
Mussulmans in Turkey as to keep the Russians out of Turkey’; and, if Orlov wanted written guarantees of the Rescript, then it must surely be because he wished to preserve for the Russians
that claim of interference they had asserted ever since Kuchuk Kainardji. The British, and the Austrians with them, eagerly seized on Ali’s assurance of Abdulmecid’s firm commitment to
reform; and on 30 March 1856 the
Peace Treaty of Paris gave Ali what he wanted. While Article IX noted the ‘generous intentions’ of Abdulmecid’s Rescript,
it insisted that the Powers had no right to interfere ‘in the relations of His Majesty the Sultan with his subjects, nor in the Internal Administration of his Empire’.
⁶

Tsar Alexander II, who had succeeded his father Nicholas I twelve months before, claimed the
Hatt-i-Hümayun
as a moral victory. An Imperial Manifesto, issued in St Petersburg on the
day after peace was signed in Paris, told the Russian people that by solemnly recognizing the rights of the Sultan’s Christian subjects the Rescript fulfilled ‘the original and
principal aims of the war’.
⁷
Yet it was impossible to deny that the Treaty undid the work of Catherine the Great and her successors. Kars and all
other towns and villages in eastern Anatolia won by Russian arms during the previous two years were restored to the Ottoman Empire. The Tsar lost all claims to protect the Danubian Principalities
of Moldavia and Wallachia which, though still technically under Ottoman suzerainty, were to acquire ‘an independent and national’ administration, authorized to raise its own army.
Moreover, southern Bessarabia was ceded by Alexander II to Moldavia, thereby depriving Russia of any opportunity to control the Danube delta. Most striking of all the treaty’s provisions were
the clauses which provided for the Black Sea to be neutralized and demilitarized. The waters of the Black Sea were thrown open to merchant vessels from any nation but closed to all warships, apart
from ‘light vessels, necessary for the service of’ the Russian and Ottoman ‘coasts’. All military and maritime arsenals at the Black Sea ports were to close. To Alexander II
the dismantling of the forts and dockyards of Sebastopol and Odessa was a humiliation too bitter for a proud sovereign to sustain for any length of time.

By contrast, it mattered little to Abdulmecid that Sinope should cease to be a naval base. On paper, ‘His Majesty the Emperor of the Ottomans’ did well from the peace settlement. The
independence and territorial integrity of his lands were formally guaranteed. Kars was restored to him. He remained nominal sovereign of the two Danubian Principalities and overlord of Serbia,
where he retained a right to garrison troops. At the same time, the Sublime Porte was formally admitted to what the Treaty called ‘the Public Law and System of Europe’, thereby
enabling the Ottomans to look confidently to financial institutions in London, Paris and Vienna for aid which, it was believed abroad, would increase Turkey’s economic
strength. This was a false assumption. Over a twenty-year period the Ottoman Empire contracted fourteen foreign loans—and in 1875 the government was forced to issue a declaration of
bankruptcy.

Yet at first the new status of the Ottomans within the Concert of Europe, together with the prospect of further reforms, seemed at last to have checked the Empire’s decline. The
Sultan’s pledge of civic equality between Christians, Muslims and Jews attracted refugees from Hungary and Poland to settle within the Ottoman Empire. Many were modern craftsmen bringing new
skills to the cities. Some converted to Islam and helped promote the new educational system favoured by the
Tanzimat
reformers. But there were farming communities, too; best known was the
village founded in honour of Adam Czartoryski and still called Polonezkoy, a few miles off the route from modern Üsküdar to Sile, on the Black Sea coast. Polonezkoy long retained its
Vistulan Catholic character, with a cluster of dairy farms and cherry orchards and a flourishing pork trade, rare in Muslim Anatolia. The refugees brought not simply a new vitality to this
particular region near the capital, but also much of the romantic nationalism which had stirred central Europe and the western Balkans in the past two decades and was, as yet, an alien concept in
Anatolia.
⁸

The Crimean War quickened the pace of life in the Ottoman heartlands. Two years of naval and military comings and goings had made the Turks more familiar with European manners and customs than
any earlier incursion from the West. The newcomers were drawn from all classes and both sexes: rank-and-file soldiers and naval ratings; journalists; nurses; dignitaries of state and aspiring
politicians from both London and Paris; civil engineers; churchmen both Protestant and Catholic; and specialists in railways, in the electric telegraph, and in other facets of the new technology.
There were instances of shocked protest from the
ulema
in several outlying districts. Knowledge that unveiled women were nursing sick and wounded soldiers within the sprawling Selimiye
Kislasi barracks at Üsküdar aroused real distress among faithful Muslims. When on the last day of February 1855 both shores of the Bosphorus
were shaken by an
earthquake, there were some who saw in this seismic phenomenon Allah’s indictment of ‘women who make display of their adornment’. Yet, in general, the presence of so many
foreigners in Stamboul, Pera and other towns seems to have helped break down local resistance to westernization. It may therefore have eased the task of the later
Tanzimat
reformers.

Of equal interest was the impact made by Ottoman society and customs upon these outsiders from the West. Unlike earlier travellers, they were for the most part men and women who had never
expected to find themselves beside the Bosphorus. Some, like Sister Sarah Anne of an Anglican religious nursing order in Devon, had set out for Turkey at three days’ notice. When Sarah Anne
reached Constantinople, on 4 November 1854, the day was so wet that Florence Nightingale complained, in a letter home, of ‘the Golden Horn looking like a bad daguerreotype washed out’.
But Sarah Anne responded to this ‘most beautiful view in all the world’ much as had Lady Mary Wortley Montagu a hundred and thirty years before her: ‘Giddy and confused,’
she wrote home, ‘we could hardly realise that these painted houses, gay gardens and glittering minarets were not a vision or panorama.’
⁹
For
the remainder of the decade a succession of books in English—many of them by women authors—sought to counter the prejudice of centuries against the ‘terrible Turk’. They
portrayed Imperial Constantinople as both a treasure-house of the past and the living capital of an empire made viable by the reforms of its sovereign and his ministers. For some twenty years this
optimistic view of Turkey’s moral assets prevailed in London society, a dream-image which in 1876 not even the flame of Gladstone’s outraged conscience could expunge entirely.

Not every visitor was so rosy-eyed as Sister Sarah Anne. ‘I never was more disappointed with any town than with Constantinople,’ Colonel Charles Gordon wrote to his father in May
1854. ‘I could not have believed it possible that such a magnificent situation could have been so thrown away by any set of barbarians. It is quite time that some civilised nation should get
possession of it and build a proper town.’
¹⁰
The recipient of the letter was the Prime Minister, Lord Aberdeen, who had himself spent some eight
weeks on the Bosphorus half a century before and
could therefore judge the value of his son’s jaundiced comments. Filth and dust abounded in both Stamboul and
Üsküdar, but the building of ‘a proper town’ was, at that moment, high among the cherished ambitions of the Sultan. In (mainly non-Muslim) Pera the
Tanzimat
reformers
were creating a Parisian-style municipality; a nominated council in this ‘Sixth Arrondissement’ (
altinci daire
) was responsible for planning and naming new roads, for supervising
restaurants, hotels and theatres, and within a year introduced the first gas-lighting of a Turkish street. In one respect the waterfront skyline had already changed dramatically between the visits
of Lord Aberdeen and his son. Facing Colonel Gordon as he looked across the Bosphorus from Üsküdar was Abdulmecid’s newest palace, the Dolmabahche, which became the Sultan’s
chief residence a few months before the outbreak of war. The palace was more than a home: it was a symbol of Abdulmecid’s faith in a revived empire.
¹¹