The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire (28 page)

Abdulaziz was deposed before news of the Bulgarian atrocities broke in the newspapers of the West. On 10 May thousands of Muslim students packed the squares in front of the mosques in Stamboul
and along the Galata waterfront demanding the dismissal of Nedim and the
ş
eyhülislâm
. Their mood was fundamentally conservative, hostile to outside pressure, and sympathetic to
their co-religionists in Salonika; they accused the Porte of abject appeasement of the Great Powers after the killing of the two foreign consuls. The unrest was exploited by Midhat, Hüseyin
Avni and the inner directorate of the Young Ottomans. Abdulaziz dismissed Nedim. He reinstated Hüseyin as Commander-in-Chief. He even appointed Midhat, whom he hated, a member of the Divan.
But he could not save his throne.

Within a fortnight of Nedim’s dismissal Sir Henry Elliot, the British ambassador, reported that the overthrow of the Sultan seemed inevitable: the word ‘ “Constitution”
was in every mouth’.
²⁸
As Sir Henry was notorious for spending much of his time with a voluptuous Greek on a tranquil island in the Sea of
Marmara, it is not clear where he observed these mouths shaping so rare a word: but the British, fearing grave riots in the capital, ordered the Mediterranean fleet to Besika Bay off the approaches
to the Dardanelles, and Ignatiev fortified the Russian Embassy. In the small hours of 30 May, on Hüseyin’s orders, the commandant of the military academy sealed off the Dolmabahche with
two battalions of infantry, while warships moored off-shore trained their guns on the palace. The
serasker
’s bodyguard escorted Hüseyin into the throne-room, where on the previous
evening Abdulaziz had staged a cock-fight to amuse himself.

There followed some minutes of high drama. Hüseyin was suddenly confronted on the ceremonial staircase by the massive figure of his Sultan, still in a night-shirt but wielding a sword as if
determined to fight to the death. Behind him appeared his formidable mother, the sixty-six-year-old
Valide Sultana
Pertevniyal, a tigress urging her son to defend himself (and her own
privileged position). There was no bloodshed,
however; both
serasker
and Sultan remained at heart traditional formularists; Hüseyin presented a solemn
fetva
of deposition, and Abdulaziz bowed to the inevitable. His state barge took him across the Golden Horn to the Topkapi Sarayi, passing on its short voyage the caique of his nephew,
Prince Murad, coming reluctantly to assume the responsibilities of Empire under Midhat’s watchful eye. The frightened Murad implored Midhat to remain in the Dolmabahche. He did so
willingly.
²⁹

After a night in the old palace, Abdulaziz was rowed back to the Çira
an, where he was joined by Pertevniyal and members of his harem. On 4 June the deposed
Sultan was found dead, his wrists slashed by scissors. Officially he had committed suicide, a verdict accepted by the ambassadors. But the doctor attached to the British Embassy was among
physicians who were allowed to examine the corpse; he came to the conclusion that the cuts could not have been self-inflicted. The drama was not yet over. Eight days after Abdulaziz’s death,
his favourite young Circassian wife Nesrin died, apparently in childbirth. The tragedy unhinged Nesrin’s brother, Çerkes Hasan, a young army officer who had served as an aide-de-camp
in the imperial household. On 14 June he burst into a meeting of ministers, firing his revolver wildly. Hüseyin Avni and the Foreign Minister were assassinated as they sat in
conference.
³⁰

These events were too much for the new Sultan, who may well have doubted the suicide verdict on his uncle. Murad V was a westernizer by upbringing, sympathetic to the Masonic movement and a
member of the Grand Orient Lodge. His visit to Paris had taught him the delights of champagne, which he would fortify with good cognac. Palace politics, laced with murder, were not to his liking.
Sir Henry Elliot reported to the Foreign Office that, on hearing of Abdulaziz’s death, Murad fainted and then was stricken with fits of vomiting for the next day and a half.
³¹
He was, too, deeply affected by the fate of Çerkes Hasan, who was publicly hanged four days after running amok at the cabinet meeting. So strange was
Murad’s conduct in the first fortnight of his reign that the
kiliç ku
ş
anmaci
—the coronation ceremony at Eyüp—was postponed. Murad V became the only Sultan since
the fall of Byzantium never girded with the sword.

Nine weeks after his accession a skilled British newspaper correspondent described the thirty-five-year-old Sultan ‘as one possessed, sitting on his sofa,
motionless and speechless, smoothing his thin moustaches and beardless chin with his right hand hour after hour the livelong day, meditating on his abdication and only wondering on which of his
reluctant brothers may devolve the burden which is too much for his shoulders.’
³²
That burden was becoming heavier with the passage of each week
of crisis. By now the Ottoman Empire was at war with Serbia and Montenegro, whose princes had responded to a widespread demand among their subjects to support their compatriots rebelling against
Turkish rule in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Although the local Ottoman commanders had little difficulty in holding the frontiers, the presence of thousands of Russian volunteers alongside the Serbs and
Montenegrins made it likely that the conflict would soon spread. If so, the Ottoman soldiery needed a sovereign more resolute than the nervous wreck whom Midhat had pushed on to the throne.

On 17 August Sir Henry Elliot described the visit to the Dolmabahche of an eminent Austrian neurologist: the Sultan, it was said, ‘was suffering from chronic alcoholism aggravated by the
emotions he has gone through’; with total abstinence and rest his mind might well recover.
³³
But the constitution-seekers were in a hurry. A
fetva
was prepared justifying this second deposition in three months on the grounds of the Sultan’s insanity. No violence was used. Murad’s younger brother, Abdulhamid, had
already assured Midhat of his support for reform. On 31 August 1876 Abdulhamid II was proclaimed Sultan. The deposed Murad was transferred to the Çira
an, where
he was confined in a modernized
kafe
until his death, twenty-eight years later.

C
HAPTER
10

Y
ILDIZ

A
BDULHAMID
’
S SUBJECTS WERE ABLE TO ACCLAIM THEIR
S
ULTAN
and Caliph a week after his accession.
Some 100,000 people—men, women and children—lined the waterfront or watched from higher vantage points as, in the late forenoon of 7 September 1876, twenty-eight oarsmen of the imperial
barge rowed the new Sultan up the Golden Horn, to be girded with the sword at Eyüp. Not that much could be seen of him: ships dipping their flags as the barge passed seemed to salute a crimson
canopy rather than a person, for at thirty-four Abdulhamid would already hunch his cadaverous body into that sinister, brooding figure whom cartoonists portrayed in later years as ‘Abdul the
Damned’.
¹
He looked more impressive astride the traditional white horse with a golden bridle, riding back to the city after the ritual of
kiliç ku
ş
anmaci
was fulfilled; but even then an observer commented on the furrows of thought across his face and the ‘profound expression of melancholy’ in those dark and
darting eyes. His hooked nose, pallid skin, chiselled cheekbones and luxuriant beard emphasized the mistrust and suspicion inherent in his character.

Psychologically, everything was wrong about Abdulhamid’s childhood. His father Abdulmecid had offered the ugly little boy scant affection; his mother, a Circassian dancing girl from the
Trebizond slave market, had died from consumption when he was ten; his brothers found him an eavesdropper and a spoil-sport. He grew up lonely but never alone, so often reproved that he retained
into manhood an inner timidity which made him fearful of assassination and inclined to waver at the moment
any policy initiative was put to the test. Yet he came to the
throne strong-willed and determined: he would rule, not reign; the centre of authority was to lie in the imperial palace rather than at the Sublime Porte.

A week after the
kiliç ku
ş
anmaci
ceremony the British ambassador sent back to London his considered opinion of the new Sultan. Sir Henry Elliot commended Abdulhamid’s
‘kindliness of disposition and enlightened views’, but he doubted ‘whether he will accept restrictions which the reforming party thinks necessary’.
²
Over the previous twelve months the Sultan had prepared himself seriously for his duties. He never liked the Dolmabahche; as often as possible in the last years of
Abdulaziz he had absented himself from the palace. Sometimes he stayed with his foster-mother at her villa inland from Pera, but he preferred his summer pavilion ten miles up the Bosphorus, above
the wooded bay of Therapia (now Tarabya). There he would sound out the opinions of an English businessman—‘Mr Thompson’—who had a house and land next to the imperial estate.
Thompson kept Abdulhamid well-informed about Disraeli and Derby, and all the eccentricities of the British parliamentary system. Almost certainly, he was the anonymous ‘Englishman’ who,
on the eve of Abdulhamid’s accession, let Elliot know of the heir-presumptive’s intention to introduce a ‘totally new era’ of government, in which competent and unsullied
ministers would exercise ‘rigorous economy’.

Abdulhamid gained some understanding of finance from his banker, Hakop Zarifi, an Armenian he consulted at his mother’s villa and at Therapia.
³
He seems, too, to have trusted his physician, John Mavroyeni, from whom he learnt of the Phanariot attitude to the crises of the Empire, noting the scant sympathy shown by Greek Orthodox believers
for Bulgarians, or any other group of their Southern Slav co-religionists. Throughout the first months of the reign Abdulhamid continued his practice of seeking to draw out opinions on current
problems of government, while saying little himself. Yet when he received the Young Ottoman intellectual leader Namik Kemal in audience, he went so far as to hold out to him some prospect of a
revitalized Sultanate; and in the first week of October Abdulhamid set up a commission authorized to prepare a constitution. Sixteen officials with experience of central
government or administration, ten
ulema
and two senior army officers were to meet under the chairmanship of Midhat Pasha.

A preliminary constitutional draft was swiftly completed. It bore a close resemblance to the parliamentary monarchy established by the Belgian Constitution of 1831 which, in its turn, had
borrowed from Great Britain and France. But Abdulhamid, backed by the army and by religious leaders, had no intention of seeing the Ottoman Empire transformed into a parliamentary Sultanate. He did
not object to a bicameral legislature, with an elected Chamber of Deputies and a Chamber of Notables (‘Senate’) nominated by himself; and he accepted some basic guarantees of human
rights, even freedom of the press. Yet he ensured that the constitution was entirely dependent upon his whim: a late insertion into the draft secured recognition of the Sultan’s right to
declare a state of siege which would suspend the guarantees of the constitution during a grave emergency; and Article 113 authorized the Sultan to send into exile any person whom he considered
dangerous to himself or to the empire as a whole.
⁴