Revival
It has been waiting, nevertheless, ever since--waiting for much more than
a century; and perhaps the end is not even yet. Why, then, have
expectations not only within but without the empire been so greatly at
fault? How came Montesquieu, Burke, and other confident prophets since
their time to be so signally mistaken? There were several co-operating
causes, but one paramount. Constantinople was no longer, as in 1453, a
trading republics of Italy. It had become involved with the commercial
interests of a far wider circle, in particular of the great trading
peoples of western Europe, the British, the French, and the Dutch, and
with the political interests of the Germanic and Russian nations. None of
these could be indifferent to a revolution in its fortunes, and least of
all to its passing, not to a power out of Asia, but to a rival power among
themselves. Europe was already in labour with the doctrine of the Balance
of Power. The bantling would not be born at Vienna till early in the
century to come: but even before the end of the eighteenth century it
could be foreseen that its life would be bound up with the maintenance of
Constantinople in independence of any one of the parent powers--that is,
with the prolongation of the Osmanli phase of its imperial fortunes. This
doctrine, consistently acted upon by Europe, has been the sheet anchor of
the Ottoman empire for a century. Even to this day its Moslem dynasty has
never been without one powerful Christian champion or another.
There were, however, some thirty years still to elapse after Selim's
accession before that doctrine was fully born: and had her hands been
free, Russia might well have been in secure possession of the Byzantine
throne long before 1815. For, internally, the Osmanli state went from bad
to worse. The tumultuous insubordination of the Janissaries became an ever
greater scandal. Never in all the long history of their riots was their
record for the years 1807-9 equalled or even approached. Never before,
also, had the provinces been so utterly out of hand. This was the era of
Jezzar the Butcher at Acre, of the rise of Mehemet Ali in Egypt, of Ali
Pasha in Epirus, and of Pasvanoghlu at Vidin. When Mahmud II was thrust on
to the throne in 1809, he certainly began his reign with no more personal
authority and no more imperial prestige or jurisdiction than the last
Greek emperor had enjoyed on his accession in 1448.
The great European war, however, which had been raging intermittently for
nearly twenty years, had saved Mahmud an empire to which he could succeed
in name and try to give substance. Whatever the Osmanlis suffered during
that war, it undoubtedly kept them in Constantinople. Temporary loss of
Egypt and the small damage done by the British attack on Constantinople in
1807 were a small price to pay for the diversion of Russia's main energies
to other than Byzantine fields, and for the assurance, made doubly sure
when the great enemy did again attack, that she would not be allowed to
settle the account alone. Whatever Napoleon may have planned and signed at
Tilsit, the aegis of France was consistently opposed to the enemies of the
Osmanlis down to the close of the Napoleonic age.
Thus it came about that those thirty perilous years passed without the
expected catastrophe. There was still a successor of Osman reigning in
Constantinople when the great Christian powers, met in conclave at Vienna,
half unconsciously guaranteed the continued existence of the Osmanli
Empire simply by leaving it out of account in striking a Balance of Power
in Europe. Its European territory, with the capital within it, was of
quite enough importance to disturb seriously the nice adjustment agreed at
Vienna; and, therefore, while any one's henceforth to take or leave, it
would become always some one's to guard. A few years had yet to pass
before the phrase, the Maintenance of the Integrity of the Ottoman Empire,
would be a watchword of European diplomacy: but, whether formulated thus
or not, that principle became a sure rock of defence for the Osmanli
Empire on the birthday of the doctrine of the Balance of Power.
Secure from destruction by any foes but those of his own household, as
none knew better than he, the reigning Osmanli was scheming to regain the
independence and dignity of his forefathers. Himself a creature of the
Janissaries, Mahmud had plotted the abolition of his creators from the
first year of his reign, but making a too precipitate effort after the
conclusion of peace with Russia, had ignominiously failed and fallen into
worse bondage than ever. Now, better assured of his imperial position and
supported by leading men of all classes among his subjects, he returned
not only to his original enterprise but to schemes for removing other
checks on the power of the sovereign which had come into being in the last
two centuries--notably the feudal independence of the Dere Beys, and the
irresponsibility of provincial governors.
Probably Mahmud II--if he is to be credited with personal initiation of
the reforms always associated with his name--was not conscious of any
purpose more revolutionary than that of becoming master in his own house,
as his ancestors had been. What he ultimately accomplished, however, was
something of much greater and more lasting moment to the Osmanli state. It
was nothing less than the elimination of the most Byzantine features in
its constitution and government. The substitution of national forces for
mercenary praetorians: the substitution of direct imperial government of
the provinces for devolution to seigneurs, tribal chiefs, and
irresponsible officers: the substitution of direct collection for
tax-farming: and the substitution of administration by bureaucrats for
administration by household officers--these, the chief reforms carried
through under Mahmud, were all anti-Byzantine. They did not cause the
Osmanli state to be born anew, but, at least, they went far to purge it of
original sin.
That Mahmud and his advisers could carry through such reforms at all in so
old a body politic is remarkable: that they carried them through amid the
events of his reign is almost miraculous. One affront after another was
put on the Sultan, one blow after another was struck at his empire.
Inspired by echoes of the French Revolution and by Napoleon's recognition
of the rights of nationalities, first the Serbs and then the Greeks seized
moments of Ottoman disorder to rise in revolt against their local lords.
The first, who had risen under Selim III, achieved, under Mahmud,
autonomy, but not independence, nothing remaining to the sultan as before
except the fortress of Belgrade with five other strongholds. The second,
who began with no higher hopes than the Serbs, were encouraged, by the
better acquaintance and keener sympathy of Europe, to fight their way out
to complete freedom. The Morea and central Greece passed out of the
empire, the first provinces so to pass since the Osmanli loss of Hungary.
Yet it was in the middle of that fatal struggle that Mahmud settled for
ever with the Janissaries, and during all its course he was settling one
after another with the Dere Beys!
When he had thus sacrificed the flower of his professional troops and had
hardly had time to replace the local governments of the provinces by
anything much better than general anarchy, he found himself faced by a
Russian assault. His raw levies fought as no other raw levies than the
Turkish can, and, helped by manifestations of jealousy by the other
powers, staved off the capture of Constantinople, which, at one moment,
seemed about to take place at last. But he had to accept humiliating
terms, amounting virtually, to a cession of the Black Sea. Mahmud
recognized that such a price he must pay for crossing the broad stream
between Byzantinism and Nationalism, and kept on his way.
Finally came a blow at the hands of one of his own household and creed.
Mehemet Ali of Egypt, who had faithfully fought his sovereign's battles in
Arabia and the Morea, held his services ill requited and his claim to be
increased beyond other pashas ignored, and proceeded to take what had not
been granted. He went farther than he had intended--more than half-way
across Asia Minor--after the imperial armies had suffered three signal
defeats, before he extorted what he had desired at first: and in the end,
after very brief enjoyment, he had to resign all again to the mandate, not
of his sovereign, but of certain European powers who commanded his seas.
Mahmud, however, who lived neither to see himself saved by the giaur
fleets, nor even to hear of his latest defeat, had gone forward with the
reorganization of the central and provincial administration, undismayed by
Mehemet Ali's contumacy or the insistence of Russia at the gate of the
Bosphorus.
As news arrived from time to time in the west of Mahmud's disasters, it
was customary to prophesy the imminent dissolution of his empire. We,
however, looking backward now, can see that by its losses the Osmanli
state in reality grew stronger. Each of its humiliations pledged some
power or group of powers more deeply to support it: and before Mahmud
died, he had reason to believe that, so long as the European Concert
should ensue the Balance of Power, his dynasty would not be expelled from
Constantinople. His belief has been justified. At every fresh crisis of
Ottoman fortunes, and especially after every fresh Russian attack, foreign
protection has unfailingly been extended to his successors.
It was not, however, only in virtue of the increasing solicitude of the
powers on its behalf that during the nineteenth century the empire was
growing and would grow stronger, but also in virtue of certain assets
within itself. First among these ranked the resources of its Asiatic
territories, which, as the European lands diminished, became more and more
nearly identified with the empire. When, having got rid of the old army,
Mahmud imposed service on all his Moslem subjects, in theory, but in
effect only on the Osmanlis (not the Arabs, Kurds, or other half
assimilated nomads and hillmen), it meant more than a similar measure
would have meant in a Christian empire. For, the life of Islam being war,
military service binds Moslems together and to their chiefs as it binds
men under no other dispensation; therefore Mahmud, so far as he was able
to enforce his decree, created not merely a national army but a nation.
His success was most immediate and complete in Anatolia, the homeland of
the Osmanlis. There, however, it was attained only by the previous
reduction of those feudal families which, for many generations, had
arrogated to themselves the levying and control of local forces. Hence, as
in Constantinople with the Janissaries, so in the provinces with the Dere
Beys, destruction of a drastic order had to precede construction, and more
of Mahmud's reign had to be devoted to the former than remained for the
latter.
He did, however, live to see not only the germ of a nation emerge from
chaos, but also the framework of an organization for governing it well or
ill. The centralized bureaucracy which he succeeded in initiating was, of
course, wretchedly imperfect both in constitution and equipment. But it
promised to promote the end he had in view and no other, inasmuch as,
being the only existent machine of government, it derived any effective
power it had from himself alone. Dependent on Stambul, it served to turn
thither the eyes and prayers of the provincials. The naturally submissive
and peaceful population of Asia Minor quickly accustomed itself to look
beyond the dismantled strongholds of its fallen beys. As for the rest--
contumacious and bellicose beys and sheikhs of Kurdish hills and Syrian
steppes--their hour of surrender was yet to come.
The eventual product of Mahmud's persistency was the 'Turkey' we have seen
in our own time--that Turkey irretrievably Asiatic in spirit under a
semi-European system of administration, which has governed despotically in
the interests of one creed and one class, with slipshod, makeshift
methods, but has always governed, and little by little has extended its
range. Knowing its imperfections and its weakness, we have watched with
amazement its hand feeling forward none the less towards one remote
frontier district after another, painfully but surely getting its grip,
and at last closing on Turcoman chiefs and Kurdish beys, first in the
Anatolian and Cilician hills, then in the mountains of Armenia, finally in
the wildest Alps of the Persian borderland. We have marked its stealthy
movement into the steppes and deserts of Syria, Mesopotamia, and Arabia--
now drawn back, now pushed farther till it has reached and held regions
over which Mahmud could claim nothing but a suzerainty in name. To judge
how far the shrinkage of the Osmanli European empire has been compensated
by expansion of its Asiatic, one has only to compare the political state
of Kurdistan, as it was at the end of the eighteenth century, and as it
has been in our own time.
It is impossible to believe that the Greek Empire, however buttressed and
protected by foreign powers, could ever have reconstituted itself after
falling so low as it fell in the fourteenth century and as the Osmanli
Empire fell in the eighteenth; and it is clear that the latter must still
have possessed latent springs of vitality, deficient in the former. What
can these have been? It is worth while to try to answer this question at
the present juncture, since those springs, if they existed a hundred years
ago, can hardly now be dry.
In the first place it had its predominant creed. This had acted as Islam
acts everywhere, as a very strong social bond, uniting the vast majority
of subjects in all districts except certain parts of the European empire,
in instinctive loyalty to the person of the padishah, whatever might be
felt about his government. Thus had it acted with special efficacy in Asia
Minor, whose inhabitants the Osmanli emperors, unlike the Greek, had
always been at some pains to attach to themselves. The sultan, therefore,
could still count on general support from the population of his empire's
heart, and had at his disposal the resources of a country which no
administration, however improvident or malign, has ever been able to
exhaust.
In the second place the Osmanli 'Turks', however fallen away from the
virtues of their ancestors, had not lost either 'the will to power' or
their capacity for governing under military law. If they had never
succeeded in learning to rule as civilians they had not forgotten how to
rule as soldiers.
In the third place the sultanate of Stambul had retained a vague but
valuable prestige, based partly on past history, partly on its pretension
to religious influence throughout a much larger area than its proper
dominions; and the conservative population of the latter was in great
measure very imperfectly informed of its sovereign's actual position.
In the fourth and last place, among the populations on whose loyalty the
Osmanli sultan could make good his claim, were several strong unexhausted
elements, especially in Anatolia. There are few more vigorous and enduring
peoples than the peasants of the central plateau of Asia Minor, north,
east, and south. With this rock of defence to stand upon, the sultan could
draw also on the strength of other more distant races, less firmly
attached to himself, but not less vigorous, such, for example, as the
Albanians of his European mountains and the Kurds of his Asiatic. However
decadent might be the Turco-Grecian Osmanli (he, unfortunately, had the
lion's share of office), those other elements had suffered no decline in
physical or mental development. Indeed, one cannot be among them now
without feeling that their day is not only not gone, but is still, for the
most part, yet to be.
Such were latent assets of the Osmanli Empire, appreciated imperfectly by
the prophets of its dissolution. Thanks to them, that empire continued not
only to hold together throughout the nineteenth century but, in some
measure, to consolidate itself. Even when the protective fence, set up by
European powers about it, was violated, as by Russia several times--in
1829, in 1854, and in 1877--the nation, which Mahmud had made, always
proved capable of stout enough resistance to delay the enemy till European
diplomacy, however slow of movement, could come to its aid, and ultimately
to dispose the victor to accept terms consistent with its continued
existence. It was an existence, of course, of sufferance, but one which
grew better assured the longer it lasted. By an irony of the Osmanli
position, the worse the empire was administered, the stronger became its
international guarantee. No better example can be cited than the effect of
its financial follies. When national bankruptcy, long contemplated by its
Government, supervened at last, the sultan had nothing more to fear from
Europe. He became, ipso facto, the cherished protege of every power
whose nationals had lent his country money.
Considering the magnitude of the change which Mahmud instituted, the stage
at which he left it, and the character of the society in which it had to
be carried out, it was unfortunate that he should have been followed on
the throne by two well-meaning weaklings, of whom the first was a
voluptuary, the second a fantastic spendthrift of doubtful sanity. Mahmud,
as has been said, being occupied for the greater part of his reign in
destroying the old order, had been able to reconstruct little more than a
framework. His operations had been almost entirely forcible--of a kind
understood by and congenial to the Osmanli character--and partly by
circumstances but more by his natural sympathies, he had been identified
from first to last with military enterprises. Though he was known to
contemplate the eventual supremacy of civil law, and the equality of all
sorts and conditions of his subjects before it, he did nothing to open
this vista to public view. Consequently he encountered little or no
factious opposition. Very few held briefs for either the Janissaries or
the Dere Beys; and fewer regretted them when they were gone. Osmanli
society identified itself with the new army and accepted the consequent
reform of the central or provincial administration. Nothing in these
changes seemed to affect Islam or the privileged position of Moslems in
the empire.
It was quite another matter when Abdul Mejid, in the beginning of his
reign, promulgated an imperial decree--the famous Tanzimat or Hatti Sherif
of Gulkhaneh--which, amid many excellent and popular provisions for the
continued reform of the administration, proclaimed the equality of
Christian and Moslem subjects in service, in reward, and before the law.
The new sultan, essentially a civilian and a man of easy-going
temperament, had been induced to believe that the end of an evolution,
which had only just begun, could be anticipated per saltum, and that he
and all his subjects would live happily together ever after. His
counsellors had been partly politicians, who for various reasons, good and
bad, wished to gain West European sympathy for their country, involved in
potential bondage to Russia since the Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi (1833),
and recently afflicted by Ibrahim Pasha's victory at Nizib; and they
looked to Great Britain to get them out of the Syrian mess. Partly also
Abdul Mejid had been influenced by enthusiasts, who set more store by
ideas or the phrases in which they were expressed, than by the evidence of
facts. There were then, as since, 'young men in a hurry' among the more
Europeanized Osmanlis. The net result of the sultan's precipitancy was to
set against himself and his policy all who wished that such it
consummation of the reform process might never come and all who knew it
would never come, if snatched at thus--that is, both the 'Old Turks' and
the moderate Liberals; and, further, to change for the worse the spirit in
which the new machine of government was being worked and in which fresh
developments of it would be accepted.
To his credit, however, Abdul Mejid went on with administrative reform.
The organization of the army into corps--the foundation of the existing
system--and the imposition of five years' service on all subjects of the
empire (in theory which an Albanian rising caused to be imperfectly
realized in fact), belong to the early part of his reign; as do also, on
the civil side, the institution of responsible councils of state and
formation of ministries, and much provision for secondary education. To
his latest years is to be credited the codification of the civil law. He
had the advantage of some dozen initial years of comparative security from
external foes, after the Syrian question had been settled in his favour by
Great Britain and her allied powers at the cheap price of a guarantee of
hereditary succession to the house of Mehemet Ali. Thanks to the same
support, war with Persia was avoided and war with Russia postponed.
But the provinces, even if quiet (which some of them, e.g. the Lebanon in
the early 'forties', were not), proved far from content. If the form of
Osmanli government had changed greatly, its spirit had changed little, and
defective communications militated against the responsibility of officials
to the centre. Money was scarce, and the paper currency--an ill-omened
device of Mahmud's--was depreciated, distrusted, and regarded as an
imperial betrayal of confidence. Finally, the hostility of Russia,
notoriously unabated, and the encouragement of aspiring rayas credited
to her and other foreign powers made bad blood between creeds and
encouraged opposition to the execution of the pro-Christian Tanzimat. When
Christian turbulence at last brought on, in 1854, the Russian attack which
developed into the Crimean War, and Christian allies, though they
frustrated that attack, made a peace by which the Osmanlis gained nothing,
the latter were in no mood to welcome the repetition of the Tanzimat,
which Abdul Mejid consented to embody in the Treaty of Paris. The reign
closed amid turbulence and humiliations--massacre and bombardment at
Jidda, massacre and Franco-British coercion in Syria--from all of which
the sultan took refuge with women and wine, to meet in 1861 a drunkard's
end.
His successor, Abdul Aziz, had much the same intentions, the same civilian
sympathies, the same policy of Europeanization, and a different, but more
fatal, weakness of character. He was, perhaps, never wholly sane; but his
aberration, at first attested only by an exalted conviction of his divine
character and inability to do wrong, excited little attention until it
began to issue in fantastic expenditure. By an irony of history, he is the
one Osmanli sultan upon the roll of our Order of the Garter, the right to
place a banner in St, George's Chapel having been offered to this
Allah-possessed caliph on the occasion of his visit to the West in 1867.
Despite the good intentions of Abdul Aziz himself--as sincere as can be
credited to a disordered brain---and despite more than one minister of
outstanding ability, reform and almost everything else in the empire went
to the bad in this unhappy reign. The administration settled down to
lifeless routine and lapsed into corruption: the national army was starved:
the depreciation of the currency grew worse as the revenue declined and
the sultan's household and personal extravagance increased. Encouraged by
the inertia of the imperial Government, the Christians of the European
provinces waxed bold. Though Montenegro was severely handled for
contumacy, the Serbs were able to cover their penultimate stage towards
freedom by forcing in 1867 the withdrawal of the last Ottoman garrisons
from their fortresses. Krete stood at bay for three years and all but won
her liberty. Bosnia rose in arms, but divided against herself. Pregnant
with graver trouble than these, Bulgaria showed signs of waking from long
sleep. In 1870 she obtained recognition as a nationality in the Ottoman
Empire, her Church being detached from the control of the Oecumenical
Patriarch of the Greeks and placed under an Exarch. Presently, her
peasantry growing ever more restive, passed from protest to revolt against
the Circassian refugee-colonists with whom the Porte was flooding the
land. The sultan, in an evil hour, for lack of trained troops, let loose
irregulars on the villages, and the Bulgarian atrocities, which they
committed in 1875, sowed a fatal harvest for his successor to reap. His
own time was almost fulfilled. The following spring a dozen high
officials, with the assent of the Sheikh-ul-Islam and the active dissent
of no one, took Abdul Aziz from his throne to a prison, wherein two days
later he perished, probably by his own hand. A puppet reigned three months
as Murad V, and then, at the bidding of the same king-makers whom his
uncle had obeyed, left the throne free for his brother Abdul Hamid, a man
of affairs and ability, who was to be the most conspicuous, or rather, the
most notorious Osmanli sultan since Suleiman.
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Stambulov was born at Tirnovo in 1854 and was of humble origin. He took part in the insurrection of 1876 and in the war of liberation, and in 1884 became president of the Sobraniye (Parliament). From 1886 till 1894 he was virtually dictator of Bul... The Rise And Fall Of 'western Bulgaria' And The Greek Supremacy 963-1186
Meanwhile western Bulgaria had not been touched, and it was thither that the Bulgarian patriarch Damian removed from Silistria after the victory of the Greeks, settling first in Sofia and then in Okhrida in Macedonia, where the apostate Shishman h... The Rise And Fall Of The First Bulgarian Empire 893-972
During the reign of Simeon, second son of Boris, which lasted from 893 to 927, Bulgaria reached a very high level of power and prosperity. Simeon, called the Great, is looked on by Bulgarians as their most capable monarch and his reign as the most... The Rise And Fall Of The Second Bulgarian Empire 1186-1258
From 1186 to 1258 Bulgaria experienced temporary resuscitation, the brevity of which was more than compensated for by the stirring nature of the events that crowded it. The exactions and oppressions of the Greeks culminated in a revolt on the part... The Rise And Fall Of The Serbian Empire And The Extinction Of Serbian Independence 1168-1496
From 1168 the power of the Serbs, or rather of the central Serb state of Raska, and the extent of its territory gradually but steadily increased. This was outwardly expressed in the firm establishment on the throne of the national Nemanja dynasty,... The Serbian Supremacy And The Final Collapse 1258-1393
From 1258 onwards Bulgaria may be said to have continued flickering until its final extinction as a state in 1393, but during this period it never had any voice in controlling the destinies of the Balkan peninsula. Owing to the fact that no ruler ... The Serbs Under Foreign Supremacy 650-1168
The manner of the arrival of the Slavs in the Balkan peninsula, of that of the Bulgars, and of the formation of the Bulgarian nationality has already been described (cf. p. 26). The installation of the Slavs in the lands between the Danube, the Ae... The Throes Of Regeneration: Independent Serbia 1830-1903
During his rule of Serbia, which lasted virtually from 1817 till 1839, Prince Milo[)s] did a very great deal for the welfare of his country. He emancipated the Serbian Church from the trammels of the Greek Patriarchate of Constantinople in 1831, f... The Turkish Dominion 1496-1796
The lot of the Serbs under Turkish rule was different from that of their neighbours the Bulgars; and though it was certainly not enviable, it was undoubtedly better. The Turks for various reasons never succeeded in subduing Serbia and the various Se... The Turkish Dominion And The Emancipation 1393-1878
From 1393 until 1877 Bulgaria may truthfully be said to have had no history, but nevertheless it could scarcely have been called happy. National life was completely paralysed, and what stood in those days for national consciousness was obliterated... Turkey
Turkey is no better name for the Osmanli dominion or any part of it than Normandy would be for Great Britain. It is a mediaeval error of nomenclature sanctioned by long usage in foreign mouths, but without any equivalent in the vernacular of the O...