The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire Read online

  Osman’s successor, his cousin Mustafa III, much admired Frederick the Great’s generalship; and in 1761 a treaty of friendship with Prussia, sweetened with trade concessions, held out prospects of a new twist to the European alliance system. Unfortunately Mustafa attributed Frederick’s success to the alleged attention given by the king to his astrologers. This misunderstanding of the Prussian way of government led Mustafa to decide that if the stars were said to favour a Sultan’s ambitions, the ‘long peace’ must end. With such calculations helping to shape policy, it is hardly surprising that in October 1768 a war party at court had no difficulty in convincing Mustafa of the need to challenge Catherine the Great’s Russia.

  Predictably, after years of military neglect, the Ottomans fared badly. Three Russian squadrons sailed from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. A protest to the Doge for allowing ships from the Baltic to enter the Adriatic at Venice suggests a basic ignorance of Europe’s geography. Naval intelligence was low, too. A curious strategy which used the ships of the fleet as anchored forts in Cesme harbour enabled the Russians to win an easy naval victory and put troops ashore near Smyrna (Izmir). Within a month the Russians gained a striking victory on land, too, when an army moving southwards into Moldavia scattered Ottoman troops at Kagul, on the river Pruth. By early 1772 Empress Catherine’s armies controlled much of the Crimea and all of Moldavia and Wallachia, the heartlands of modern Roumania.

  In tactics and strategy, it was a dull war. Until the last months neither belligerent produced a commander who showed tenacity or initiative. ‘The Turks are falling like skittles,’ ran a contemporary Russian saying, ‘but, thank God, our men are standing fast—though headless.’ At last, in the early summer of 1774, a brilliantly executed thrust by the Russian general Alexander Suvorov threatened to carry the war into Bulgaria. Mustafa III had died from a heart attack in the preceding January; the new Sultan—his forty-eight-year-old brother, Abdulhamid I—was a realist. After six years of war, and with Austria threatening support for Russia in the field, the Sublime Porte wanted to end the fighting, if only to provide a respite in which the new Sultan could build up his army and his fleet. On 21 July 1774 peace was concluded at Kuchuk Kainardji, a Bulgarian village south of the Danubian town of Silistria and now known as Kainardzhi.

  The Kuchuk Kainardji settlement is historically far more important than the war which preceded it. ‘The stipulations of the treaty are a model of skill by Russia’s diplomats and a rare example of Turkish imbecility,’ reported the Austrian envoy, Franz Thugut.19 If Abdulhamid I merely wanted a pause between rounds in a long contest, there is no doubt his negotiators served him poorly, since there was about the territorial settlement a sense of finality. Just as the Peace of Karlowitz in 1699 pushed back the frontier of Islam in central Europe, so Kuchuk Kainardji seventy-five years later acknowledged the dwindling of Ottoman power around the northern shore of the Black Sea. The Sultan gave up Ottoman claims to suzerainty over the Crimea and the Tatar steppe land, acknowledging the independence of the Muslim ‘Khanate of the Crimea’ (absorbed in Russia nine years later). At the mouth of the river Dnieper the Turks ceded to Russia a relatively small section of the Black Sea coast which supplemented the cession of the port of Azov. The Russians also acquired the fortresses of Kerch and Yenikale, which controlled the straits linking Azov to the wider waters of the open sea; and, further south, they were accorded special rights in Wallachia and Moldavia (although these ‘Danubian Principalities’ remained within the Ottoman Empire).

  These territorial changes were a humiliating recognition of Russia’s new status in a region where the Ottomans had enjoyed two and a half centuries of almost unchallenged mastery. But the Russians gained an even greater concession—freedom for their merchant vessels to trade with the ports of southern Europe and the Levant. For the first time since the Turks secured control of the Straits, the vessels of another country were allowed to trade in the Black Sea and to sail out through the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles into the Mediterranean. At the same time, Empress Catherine and her successors were promised the right to maintain a permanent embassy in the Ottoman capital, like the Austrians and the French, and also to establish consulates in every major port of the Sultan’s empire. This concession made it easier for the Russians to send agents to disaffected provinces in south-eastern Europe, notably to Greece.

  If, as many writers believe, Franz Thugut was referring to the religious clauses of the settlement rather than to its territorial and commercial aspects, his judgement is open to question. Confusion over their precise character has sprung from inconsistencies between the original versions, in Russian, Turkish and Italian, of the treaty, intensified by later translations into French, the common language of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century diplomacy.20 It was long assumed that the religious Articles curtailed the rights of the Sultan, thereby hastening the decline of his empire: in reality they enhanced his authority by giving him wider personal responsibilities than any previous treaty had acknowledged. For the first time the Ottoman assertion of universal Islamic leadership received international recognition: Article 3 stipulated that ‘as supreme caliph of the Mohammeddan faith . . . His Sultanian Majesty’ retained spiritual jurisdiction over the Muslim Tatars when they gained political and civic independence. This claim was based upon the totally unsubstantiated tale that in 1517 the Caliphate had been formally transferred from the Abbasids to Sultan Selim I. Although effective jurisdiction over the Tatars survived for less than a decade, Article 3 had a lasting significance, for it confirmed the pontifical status assumed by the Sultans after being girded with the sword upon their accession. Over the following century and a half, respect for the spiritual pretensions of the Ottoman Caliphate increased as the territorial extent of Ottoman sovereignty contracted.

  Even more controversial were Articles 7 and 14, relating to Orthodox Christendom. ‘Henceforth Orthodoxy is under Our Imperial Guardianship in the places whence it sprang,’ Empress Catherine proclaimed in a manifesto welcoming the treaty, eight months after it was signed; and many later Russian statesmen—and some Tsarist and French historians—were to insist that the settlement gave a Russian sovereign the right to protect Orthodoxy, its churches and its believers, throughout the Ottoman lands. This extreme interpretation of Kuchuk Kainardji led to the Eastern Crisis of 1853 and thus, indirectly, to the Crimean War. But Article 7 is specific in according ‘firm protection of the Christian faith and its churches’, not to the ruler in Russia, but to ‘the Sublime Porte’. Since the Article does not mention a particular religious denomination, the Sultan would seem to have possessed a protective obligation towards all Christian churches within his empire, not merely the Orthodox; and later Ottoman reformers—Sultans and their ministers—often supported an impartial Muslim-Christian equality of status under the law. The treaty does, however, authorize the building and maintenance of a public ‘Russo-Greek’ church ‘in the street called Beyöglu of the Galata district’ (Article 14). It is to this building that Article 7 refers when it promises that the Sublime Porte will ‘allow ministers of the Russian imperial court to make various representations in all affairs on behalf of the church erected in Constantinople’.

  No ‘Russo-Greek’ church was ever built in the ‘street called Beyöglu’. It is still possible to walk down the old ‘Grand Rue de Pera’ and visit three Roman Catholic churches, one nineteenth-century Anglican church, and several former embassy chapels; other Christian religious institutions are mentioned in the older guide books; but there is no evidence that the building proposed by the treaty of Kuchuk Kainardji progressed even as far as a foundation stone. This is hardly surprising; had Russia erected a specific place of worship under the protection of the Sublime Porte, it would have become difficult to assert that the treaty gave ‘ministers of the Russian imperial court’ a generalized right to champion the interests of Orthodox believers in the Empire as a whole. At Kuchuk Kainardji the Ottoman diplomats may have surrendered more lands and more commercial concession
s than Abdulhamid I intended. But they were not ‘imbeciles’. Their legalistic minds defined religious rights even down to the naming of a street. They conceded far less than Catherine claimed. Where they failed was in underestimating Russian sharp practice.

  CHAPTER 4

  WESTERN APPROACHES

  ABDULHAMID I RESPONDED TO THE CHALLENGE OF KUCHUK Kainardji in what was, by now, accepted form: he ordered military and naval reorganization at the centre of his empire. Baron de Tott, a Hungarian émigré serving in the French army, was invited to raise and train a rapid-fire field artillery corps, with its headquarters on the Golden Horn. Close at hand were de Tott’s new cannon foundry and his mathematics institute. Also on the Golden Horn were new shipyards where two French naval architects, with a small group of workmen from Marseilles, made certain that the Sultan would soon have a modern fleet to replace the vessels lost at Cesme; and a naval academy was established beside the Bosphorus, to provide some basic skills in navigation. There was one big difference from past reform eras. Earlier advisers had been mostly renegades like Bonneval, with pressing personal needs to ‘turn Turk’. But, as Abdulhamid did not wish to retain foreigners in his service, he never insisted on their conversion to Islam. Baron de Tott returned to France in 1776 and wrote his memoirs, and most of his companions in Constantinople also went home, full of sensational tales of the Orient; some, however, remained in Turkey for another twelve or thirteen years. Only de Tott’s immediate successor, a Scottish officer named Campbell, became a Muslim. No one knows why he cut himself off from a famous clan, but the reasons must have been compelling as Campbell was even prepared to accept that for the rest of his life he would be called ‘Ingiliz Mustafa’ (Mustafa the Englishman).

  Much westernization was superficial. Apart from the creation of a naval base at Sinope, the reforms were concentrated close to the capital. Foreign envoys remained unimpressed. Attempts in 1778 to support Tatar resistance to the Russians in the Crimea exposed the weakness of Turkey as a Black Sea power. Seven months elapsed between the Porte’s decision to intervene and the embarkation of an expeditionary force from Üsküdar and the Bosphorus fortresses. After six weeks of idleness the Ottoman admirals decided that the winds would allow their vessels to sail into the Black Sea. For some eighteen days the ships, with troops still aboard, cruised pointlessly off the southern coasts of the Crimea until, in mid-September, the first gales swept down from the north and they ran before the wind to find refuge at Sinope. As winter set in, the fleet returned to the Bosphorus. No landing had been attempted; no aid reached the Tatars.1

  The absurdity of this ineffectual exercise was in keeping with the chaotic character of administration in other parts of the empire. By 1780 the Ottoman structure was becoming corroded, rather like old feudal bonds in Henry VI’s England three hundred years before. Although outwardly the traditional apparatus of government was still in being, effective authority even in the central provinces was in the hands of local notables, often the heads of families who raised their status by showing extortionate enterprise as acquisitive timar holders. Mere token acknowledgement of a Sultan’s sovereignty, common for several decades among governors of the Maghreb dependencies in North Africa, the Hejaz and lower Mesopotamia, had spread closer to the capital. Southern Lebanon was already a cockpit of warring factions: long-surviving dynasties like the Shihbab and Jumblatt families contested control with the holders of military fiefs; and in the Druze districts the uniate Maronite Christian Church held out for landowners and peasants alike a prospect of order and stability lacking in the predominantly Arab communities.2 Ahmed Djezzar, in origin a Bosnian slave, ruled the coastlands from Beirut to Acre for the last forty years of the century, surviving by the exercise of such ruthless brutality that, even in a land where bloody massacres were commonplace, he was known as ‘the Butcher’.

  In Anatolia the Ottomans could impose authority only between the Marmara coast, Bursa and Eskisehir and in the Karaman province, beyond the lower Taurus. Elsewhere western Anatolia was controlled by six ‘feudal’ families: the Pasaolu in the north-east, bordering Kurdish areas where the Sultan’s power was minimal; the Çapanolu on the central plateau around Angora (Ankara) and Kayseri; the Jãnikli in the mountains behind Trebizond; the Karaosmanolu in the south-west, based on Aydin and controlling the Menderes valley; the Yilanliolu around Antalya; and the Kuchukaliolu in the Adana area.

  A similar pattern prevailed across the straits in Rumelia, where there were four dominant ‘feudatories’. Tirsinikliölü Ismail was master along what is now the Bulgarian bank of the Danube from Ruschuk (Ruse) westwards to Nikopol. Dagdevirenoslu controlled the Edirne region. Kara Mahmud of Bushat, who was lord of northern Albania by 1770, subsequently consolidated the hereditary pashalik of Scutari (now Shkodra), claimed by his father some ten years before. The most famous of all these warlords was Ali Tepedelenliolü, ‘Ali of Tepelene’, whose stormy career spanned more than half a century.3 No one associates Ali Pasha with his birthplace, for Tepelene is a forgotten village at a river-crossing in southern Albania. He is best remembered as the legendary ‘Lion of Ioánnina’ (Janinà), the fortress town in Epirus which he seized in 1788, a few months after Sultan Abdulhamid rewarded his war service against the Austrians by appointing him Pasha of Trikkala. But already by 1770 he was lord of southern Albania, having made himself Bey of Tepelene when he was about twenty-eight years old. From this small Albanian power-base Ali advanced his career, until by the close of the century he and his sons were effective rulers over all Epirus, Thessaly and most of the Peloponnese as well.

  Many provincial notables were capriciously cruel, although several—like the Sultans themselves—tempered a natural despotism with occasional gestures of benevolence. Modern Baghdad rightly recalls the firm and enlightened administration of the Mameluke leader, Suleiman Pasha ‘the Great’. The eastern frontier had long been loosely held by poorly paid Ottoman garrisons and the Persians constituted a serious threat on several occasions, for four years occupying the rising river port of Basra (1775–9). Thereafter, however, from 1780 to 1802, Mesopotamia and most of present-day Iraq was ruled from Baghdad by Suleiman, who imposed an iron rule to curb the Bedouin and check the Persians. He was, however, too contemptuous of his imperial overlord in Constantinople to send anything more than a token annual tribute to the Sultan’s coffers.

  Some sixteen hundred miles away, along the European frontiers of the empire, individual beys observed an Islamic fanaticism more intensive than any fervour shown in the capital. In Bosnia, for example, a conservative landholding Muslim aristocracy subjected a Christian peasantry to heavy taxation, although little revenue found its way back to Constantinople; often the notables, with Sarajevo as their stronghold, defied successive governors in Travnik, the provincial capital, maintaining that they were dangerously innovative. Yet, in reality, both governors and notables had to stand on the defensive against a double threat. They faced, as ever, the risk of invasion from Roman Catholic Hungary; but they were also aware of a challenge from Montenegro, the neighbouring and fiercely independent mountain fastness whose Orthodox ruler, Prince-Bishop Danilo, had celebrated Christmas in 1702 by ordering the massacre of every Muslim in his principality. Eighty years later Danilo’s great-nephew, the wise and able Vladika Peter I—Prince-Bishop in Cetinje from 1782 to 1830—began to westernize his principality as part of the long struggle to keep the Turks away from the Black Mountain, whose villages they had sacked on three occasions; and at last, in 1799, Vladika Peter duly secured from the Sultan formal recognition that the ‘Montenegrins have never been subjects of our Sublime Porte’.

  This assurance to the smallest of the Balkan principalities was an inexpensive gesture of appeasement, given at a time of protracted crisis. Throughout the last two decades of the eighteenth century the Ottoman system was shaken by a succession of challenges to its corporate existence. By 1781–2 the evident decay of centralized administration, the anarchy in many outlying provinces, and the threat of erosion along
distant frontiers, had begun to tempt the Sultan’s most powerful neighbours into behaving as if the Empire were under notice to quit. Catherine the Great, influenced by her favourite Prince Potemkin, exchanged letters with the Habsburg Emperor, Joseph II, proposing an alliance: Austria would acquire large areas of modern Roumania and Yugoslavia while Russia would absorb Turkish lands around the Black Sea and establish autonomous states in Rumelia, eventually setting up a new Byzantine Empire under the sovereignty of Catherine’s grandson, the infant Grand Duke Constantine Pavlovich (1779–1831). When, in April 1783, Catherine proclaimed annexation of the Tatar khanate of the Crimea as a first step towards realization of this secret ‘Greek Project’, there was widespread indignation at Constantinople.4 But no declaration of war was made; the Sultan and his viziers were pessimistic about their chances of success without a powerful ally, and none was forthcoming.