The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire (36 page)

Ambassador Nelidov did, indeed, return to St Petersburg two months later. There he sought to win the backing of the young Tsar Nicholas II for a project he had advocated for the past four
years—a surprise naval assault on the Bosphorus, with troops landing at Kilyos, Sariyer and Büyükdere for a lightning advance on the Golden Horn. Nelidov argued that Russia’s
traditional enemies on the Straits would not dare support
the Sultan at such a time. ‘Turn the Bosphorus into a Russian Gibraltar’, he urged a Crown Council.
Momentarily Tsar Nicholas was attracted by the thought of Russian troops dominating the Straits ‘for ever’. But Nicholas’s closest advisers were more interested in the Far East;
they encouraged him to put the Near East ‘on ice’. The whole episode intrigued London, although it caused no adjustment of policies. Intelligence reports from Odessa kept the Foreign
Office well informed of Russian plans and troop movements, but Salisbury, who had discussed the Eastern Question with Nicholas II at Balmoral in September, rightly discounted any precipitate
Russian action. The chief consequence of Nelidov’s flurry of activity that winter was to weaken the collective weight of coercion pressing the Sultan towards reform. Despite their deep
mistrust of one another the ambassadors in Constantinople, responding to a British initiative, began six weeks of discussion at the end of December 1896, and by mid-February had completed a
comprehensive programme of reforms for presentation to Abdulhamid. But there was no reason for the Sultan to bow to what he might, quite legitimately, regard as yet another instance of
‘outside interference’.
¹⁹

He could, too, by now cite the last series of reforms imposed upon him as a failure. Although the Cretans had accepted the settlement proposed in August, there were frequent clashes between
Christians and Muslims on the island during the winter months, and early in February 1897 the Greek consul in Khania telegraphed to Athens, insisting that a massacre of Orthodox families was
imminent, a claim never substantiated. In the mountains a committee of Cretan revolutionaries proclaimed the island absorbed into the kingdom of the Hellenes, and on 11 February a flotilla of
torpedo boats commanded by the Greek king’s second son, Prince George, sailed from Salamis to take possession of the island. Hasty diplomatic activity, including strong pressure from the
Tsar, induced the Greek king to summon the flotilla home again two days later. No restraining orders from their sovereign could check the
Ethnike Hetairia
, however. Fifteen hundred armed
volunteers embarked at Piraeus and sailed for Crete, determined to emulate the achievements of Garibaldi’s Thousand redshirts in Sicily, the patriots who in 1860 made possible the speedy
unification of Italy. Further
north, armed bands of irregulars made provocative raids across the frontier into Thessaly.

Urgent appeals to the King and Queen of the Hellenes from their relatives in Western Europe and Russia failed to halt the drift towards war. Philhellene Liberals from Britain, in Athens that
spring, also urged caution, for it was assumed that, with reservists, the Sultan could eventually put an army of a million men into the field. Their efforts failed. Canon MacColl, a persistent
campaigner for the Christian nationalities under Ottoman rule, was told by the King of the Hellenes that, in the case of war, the Greeks would rise against their Turkish oppressors throughout the
Sultan’s empire; other nationalities would follow the Greek lead. In exasperation at the activity of the ‘brigands’, Sultan Abdulhamid declared war on Greece in the second week of
April. No wave of insurrection shook the fabric of his empire.
²⁰

The mobilization plans perfected by General von der Goltz worked efficiently. An initial thrust by the Greek army on the Meluna Pass was halted by superior numbers of Turks based on Ellasona.
Soon the Ottoman Army was advancing on Greek field headquarters in Larissa. ‘In a few minutes the Army, from an organized and disciplined unity, was transformed into a seething disorganized
mass of fugitives that sped helter-skelter across the plain, back to Larissa, a distance of almost forty miles,’ Prince Nicholas wrote many years later, recalling his baptism of fire as
commander of an artillery battery on 23 April, the fourth day of the war.
²¹
The Greeks rallied sufficiently to halt the invasion short of Thermopylae,
while General Smolensky checked the Ottoman incursion in a valiant defensive battle at Valestino. But after thirty days of fighting King George I of the Hellenes reluctantly accepted an armistice,
obtained from the Ottoman commanders through Russian mediation. All Greek combatants were withdrawn from Crete, which was policed by an international force drawn from the navies of Austria-Hungary,
France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy and Russia. Across the main battle zone on the plains of Farsala and in Epirus an uneasy cease-fire was imposed while the ambassadors sought to improvise a
peace settlement.

The Ottoman victory raised the prestige of the Sultan and the expectations of the Porte. In London, however, Salisbury was adamant that
there must be no handing back of
Christian towns to Ottoman rule; and he believed that the Tsar, as the greatest of Orthodox sovereigns, shared this conviction. Four months previously Salisbury had raised the possibility of a
joint naval demonstration at the Straits with the Austro-Hungarian ambassador, only to be rebuffed in Vienna. Now he was willing to propose to Britain’s traditional rival on the Straits
collective naval coercion of the Porte. A telegram sent to Sir Nicholas O’Conor, the ambassador in St Petersburg, as the peace talks were beginning, showed Salisbury’s belief that
Abdulhamid, despite the victory of his army in the field, must accept a settlement dictated by Europe in concert:

No such naval demonstration was attempted, for the Russians were convinced—rightly—that Abdulhamid would treat the Greeks leniently, thereby ruling out the need for
coercion. The Salisbury Plan is of interest as a historical might-have-been, a sign that he had abandoned the traditional policy of maintaining the Ottoman Empire as a barrier against Russian
expansion into the Mediterranean. Henceforth the Ottomans would have either to stand on their own, using army and Caliphate to concentrate on the Asian mission of the dynasty, or find from among
the European Powers another natural ally. The success of German arms in the Thirty-Day War left little doubt in which direction Abdulhamid would turn for foreign support.

First, however, a peace was patched up in the Balkans. Greece, close to bankruptcy, had to pay an indemnity to the Ottoman Empire and allow the free migration of Muslims to find refuge in
Anatolia. There was no major redrawing of national boundaries: the Greeks retained
Thessaly, apart from some twenty villages retroceded in a ‘rationalization’ of
the frontier between Mount Ossa and the foothills of the Pindus. Genuine autonomy was established in Crete, the island remaining under Ottoman suzerainty but with a Christian Governor nominated by
the Sultan after consultation with Athens. In September 1898 the last Ottoman troops were withdrawn from the island, after an affray near Khania in which the soldiery killed many Greek Christians
and eight British marines. Two months later Prince George of Greece was appointed High Commissioner in Crete, where he served as his father’s special representative for eight years. Russian,
British, French and Italian troops occupied the chief towns—an early and successful experiment in international policing of a troubled region.
²³

Outwardly the Ottoman hold on Macedonia seemed strengthened by the defeat of the Greeks in the Thirty-Day War.
Ethnike Hetairia
subversion was doused, even if anti-Ottoman resentment
smouldered on. Other Balkan states, ready to stake a claim to parts of Macedonia had the Ottoman army faltered, stood aside and for two or three years there was relative calm in the province. Yet,
potentially, Macedonia remained a more dangerous problem than either Crete or Armenia, for its mixture of peoples attracted interference from neighbouring governments. Greeks might constitute the
most literate and articulate Christian minority in the province as a whole, but both they and the genuine Turks were heavily outnumbered by Southern Slavs, susceptible to propaganda from Bulgaria
or Serbia, while there was also a great concentration of Jews in Salonika itself, and in several districts a Kutzo-Vlach minority, geographically scattered and only occasionally remembered by their
kinsfolk in Bucharest. British consular reports stressed the threat from the Bulgarian terrorist secret society IMRO (Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization), active from 1893 onwards,
although the Sultan was able to exploit IMRO’s rivalry with the rabidly Bulgar-nationalist ‘Supremists’ (alias EMRO), who were controlled directly from Sofia. Warmest champions of
Abdulhamid’s sovereignty were the Muslim Albanians; their resentment of foreign interference and Christian proselytizing was so strong that, early in 1899, they held a meeting of clan
notables at Ipek (now Pec, in Montenegro) where they agreed to set
up an Albanian League, pledged to defend the Sultan’s lands and uphold the Caliph’s authority
against the Infidel.

Although Abdulhamid took the initiative, setting up a Rumelian Provinces Reform Commission and linking Salonika, Kossovo and Monastir in a single province, the
Vilayet-i Selase
(‘The Three Vilayets’), more was required than administrative paper reforms if Macedonia were to stay under Ottoman rule.
²⁴
High among the
needs were changes in land-ownership for, apart from the immediate vicinity of Salonika and Serres, where Greek Christians owned big estates, the predominantly Slav peasantry remained in almost
feudal subjection to the whims, caprices and farming methods of Muslim beys.

The British ambassador in Constantinople soon recognized the significance of the Thirty-Day War for Abdulhamid’s reign. Early in June 1897 Currie told Salisbury:

All this was true, although foreign military assessors observed that the war had not continued long enough to prove whether the army commanders possessed the skill to improvise,
modifying agreed plans should determined resistance jeopardize their success. The war gave notice to the European chancelleries that the Ottoman Empire was not so close to disintegration as they
had assumed ten months earlier, when mob rule in the capital seemed to foreshadow a speedy foreign intervention.

The Thirty-Day War had one strange consequence, which passed unnoticed at the time. In February 1897, when Greek volunteers sailed from Salamis and Piraeus to help the Cretan insurgents, the
ambassadors in Constantinople were attending conferences to discuss ways of safeguarding the Sultan’s Armenian subjects from repression and massacre. The war crisis
put a sudden end to these meetings; and the Armenian Question, so recently the cause of such deep feeling abroad, remained unanswered. The incidence of killings in the six vilayets died down as the
Armenian nationalist groups quarrelled among themselves. An uneasy truce prevailed, until in 1909 there were further reports of massacre around Adana. By then a few Armenians held administrative
posts, especially in the Ministry of Finance. Many wealthier Armenians from the capital and the greater trading cities considered themselves fortunate to be alive, and no less fortunate to
emigrate. They brought their wealth and skills to Britain, America, Egypt and France, while their compatriots still within the Sultan’s lands became once more a historic people,
half-forgotten by the West.

Half-forgotten, yet half-remembered, too. As the Armenian crisis receded, one folk image remained firmly set in popular prejudice. In January 1896 the
Punch
cartoonist Lindsay Sandemann
created a bogey figure, whom he dubbed ‘The Unspeakable Turk’: a sinister Sultan, caressing the edge of an unsheathed scimitar as he stands outside a ruined house of death; glancing
diabolically up a deserted path, he exclaims: ‘Ha, ha! There’s no one about. I can get to business again.’ Each fresh challenge to Ottoman rule brought ‘The Unspeakable
Turk’ back to haunt the pages of the popular journals. The Sultanate could never shake off the odium of the Armenian massacres.
²⁶

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