The Ottoman Empire

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Title:     The Ottoman Empire
Author: Evelyn Baring [More Titles by Baring]

THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE[81]

_"The Spectator," June 14, 1913_

Although proverbial philosophy warns us never to prophesy unless we know, experience has shown that political prophets have often made singularly correct forecasts of the future. Lord Chesterfield, and at a much earlier period Marshal Vauban, foretold the French Revolution, whilst the impending ruin of the Ottoman Empire has formed the theme of numerous prophecies made by close observers of contemporaneous events from the days of Horace Walpole downwards. "It is of no use," Napoleon wrote to the Directory, "to try to maintain the Turkish Empire; we shall witness its fall in our time." During the War of Greek Independence the Duke of Wellington believed that the end of Turkey was at hand. Where the prophets have for the most part failed is not so much in making a mistaken estimate of the effects likely to be produced by the causes which they saw were acting on the body politic, as in not allowing sufficient time for the operation of those causes. Political evolution in its early stages is generally very slow. It is only after long internal travail that it moves with vertiginous rapidity. De Tocqueville cast a remarkably accurate horoscope of the course which would be run by the Second Empire, but it took some seventeen years to bring about results which he thought would be accomplished in a much shorter period. It has been reserved for the present generation to witness the fulfilment of prophecy in the case of European Turkey. The blindness displayed by Turkish statesmen to the lessons taught by history, their complete sterility in the domain of political thought, and their inability to adapt themselves and the institutions of their country to the growing requirements of the age, might almost lead an historical student to suppose that they were bent on committing political suicide. The combined diplomatists of Europe, Lord Salisbury sorrowfully remarked in 1877, "all tried to save Turkey," but she scorned salvation and persisted in a course of action which could lead to but one result. That result has now been attained. The dismemberment of European Turkey, begun so long ago as the Peace of Karlovitz in 1699, is now almost complete. "Modern history," Lord Acton said, "begins under the stress of the Ottoman conquest." Whatever troubles the future may have in store, Europe has at last thrown off the Ottoman incubus. A new chapter in modern history has thus been opened. Henceforth, if Ottoman power is to survive at all, it must be in Asia, albeit the conflicting jealousies of the European Powers allow for the time being the maintenance of an Asiatic outpost on European soil.

It is as yet too early to expect any complete or philosophic account of this stupendous occurrence, which the future historian will rank with the unification first of Italy and later of Germany, as one of the most epoch-making events of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Notably, there are two subjects which require much further elucidation before the final verdict of contemporaries or posterity can be passed upon them. In the first place, the causes which have led to the military humiliation of a race which, whatever may be its defects, has been noted in history for its martial virility, require to be differentiated. Was the collapse of the Turkish army due merely to incapacity and mismanagement on the part of the commanders, aided by the corruption which has eaten like a canker into the whole Ottoman system of government and administration? Or must the causes be sought deeper, and, if so, was it the palsy of an unbridled and malevolent despotism which in itself produced the result, or did the sudden downfall of the despot, by the removal of a time-honoured, if unworthy, symbol of government, abstract the corner-stone from the tottering political edifice, and thus, by disarranging the whole administrative gear of the Empire at a critical moment, render the catastrophe inevitable? Further information is required before a matured opinion on this point, which possesses more than a mere academic importance, can be formed.

There is yet another subject which, if only from a biographical point of view, is of great interest. Two untoward circumstances have caused Turkish domination in Europe to survive, and to resist the pressure of the civilisation by which it was surrounded, but which seemed at one time doomed to thunder ineffectually at its gates. One was excessive jealousy--in Solomon's words, "as cruel as the grave"--amongst European States, which would not permit of any political advantage being gained by a rival nation. The other, and, as subsequent events proved, more potent consideration, was the fratricidal jealousy which the populations of the Balkan Peninsula mutually entertained towards each other. The maintenance and encouragement of mutual suspicions was, in either case, sedulously fostered by Turkish Sultans, the last of whom, more especially, acted throughout his inglorious career in the firm belief that mere mediaeval diplomatic trickery could be made to take the place of statesmanship. He must have chuckled when he joyously put his hand to the firman creating a Bulgarian Exarch, who was forthwith excommunicated by the Greek Patriarch, with the result, as Mr. Miller tells us, that "peasants killed each other in the name of contending ecclesiastical establishments."

In the early days of the last century the poet Rhigas, who was to Greece what Arndt was to Germany and Rouget de Lisle to Revolutionary France, appealed to all Balkan Christians to rise on behalf of the liberties of Greece. But the hour had not yet come for any such unity to be cemented. At that time, and for many years afterwards, Europe was scarcely conscious of the fact that there existed "a long-forgotten, silent nationality" which, after a lapse of nearly five centuries, would again spring into existence and bear a leading part in the liberation of the Balkan populations. But the rise of Bulgaria, far from bringing unity in its wake, appeared at first only to exacerbate not merely the mercurial Greek, proud of the intellectual and political primacy which he had heretofore enjoyed, but also the brother Slav, with whom differences arose which necessitated an appeal to the arbitrament of arms.

Although the thunder of the guns of Kirk Kilisse and Lüle Burgas proclaimed to Europe, in the words of the English Prime Minister, that "the map of Eastern Europe had to be recast," it is none the less true that the cause of the Turk was doomed from the moment when Balkan discord ceased, and when the Greek, the Bulgarian, the Serb, and the Montenegrin agreed to sink their differences and to act together against the common enemy. Who was it who accomplished this miracle? Mr. Miller says, "the authorship of this marvellous work, hitherto the despair of statesmen, is uncertain, but it has been ascribed chiefly to M. Venezélos." All, therefore, that can now be said is that it was the brain, or possibly brains, of some master-workers which gave liberty to the Balkan populations as surely as it was the brain of Cavour which united Italy.[82]

Although these and possibly other points will, without doubt, eventually receive more ample treatment at the hands of some future historian, Mr. Miller has performed a most useful service in affording a guide by the aid of which the historical student can find his way through the labyrinthine maze of Balkan politics. He begins his story about the time when Napoleon had appeared like a comet in the political firmament, and by his erratic movements had caused all the statesmen of Europe to diverge temporarily from their normal and conventional orbits, one result being that the British Admiral Duckworth wandered in a somewhat aimless fashion through the Dardanelles to Constantinople, and had very little idea of what to do when he got there. Mr. Miller reminds us of events of great importance in their day, but now almost wholly forgotten: of how the ancient Republic of Ragusa, which had existed for eleven centuries and which had earned the title of the "South Slavonic Athens," was crushed out of existence under the iron heel of Marmont, who forthwith proceeded to make some good roads and to vaccinate the Dalmatians; of how Napoleon tried to partition the Balkans, but found, with all his political and administrative genius, that he was face to face with an "insoluble problem"; of how that rough man of genius, Mahmoud II., hanged the Greek Patriarch from the gate of his palace, but between the interludes of massacres and executions, brought his "energy and indomitable force of will" to bear on the introduction of reforms; of how the Venetian Count Capo d'Istria, who was eventually assassinated, produced a local revolt by a well-intentioned attempt to amend the primitive ethics of the Mainote Greeks--a tale which is not without its warning if ever the time comes for dealing with a cognate question amongst the wild tribes of Albania; and of how, amidst the ever-shifting vicissitudes of Eastern politics, the Tsar of Russia, who had heretofore posed as the "protector" of Roumans and Serbs against their sovereign, sent his fleet to the Bosphorus in 1833 in order to "protect" the sovereign against his rebellious vassal, Mehemet Ali, and exacted a reward for his services in the shape of the leonine arrangement signed at Hunkiar-Iskelesi. And so Mr. Miller carries us on from massacre to massacre, from murder to murder, and from one bewildering treaty to another, all of which, however, present this feature of uniformity, that the Turk, signing of his own free will, but with an unwilling mind--ἑκὼν ἀέκοντί γε θυμῷ--made on each occasion either some new concession to the ever-rising tide of Christian demand, or ratified the loss of a province which had been forcibly torn from his flank. Finally, we get to the period when the tragedy connected with the name of Queen Draga acted like an electric shock on Europe, and when the accession of King Peter, "who had translated Mill _On Liberty_," to the blood-stained Servian throne, revealed to an astonished world that the processes of Byzantinism survived to the present day. Five years later followed the assumption by Prince Ferdinand of the title of "Tsar of the Bulgarians," and it then only required the occurrence of some opportunity and the appearance on the scene of some Balkan Cavour to bring the struggle of centuries to the final issue of a death-grapple between the followers of aggressive Christianity and those of stagnant Islamism.

The whole tale is at once dramatic and dreary, dramatic because it is occasionally illumined by acts of real heroism, such as the gallant defence of Plevna by Ghazi Osman, a graphic account of which was written by an adventurous young Englishman (Mr. W.V. Herbert) who served in the Turkish army, or again as the conduct of the Cretan Abbot Máneses who, in 1866, rather than surrender to the Turks, "put a match to the powder-magazine, thus uniting defenders and assailants in one common hecatomb." It is dreary because the mind turns with horror and disgust from the endless record of government by massacre, in which, it is to be observed, the crime of bloodguiltiness can by no means be laid exclusively at the door of the dominant race, whilst Mr. Miller's sombre but perfectly true remark that "assassination or abdication, execution or exile, has been the normal fate of Balkan rulers," throws a lurid light on the whole state of Balkan society.

But how does the work of diplomacy, and especially of British diplomacy, stand revealed by the light of the history of the past century? The point is one of importance, all the more so because there is a tendency on the part of some British politicians to mistrust diplomatists, to think that, either from incapacity or design, they serve as agents to stimulate war rather than as peace-makers, and to hold that a more minute interference by the House of Commons in the details of diplomatic negotiations would be useful and beneficial. It would be impossible within the limits of an ordinary newspaper article to deal adequately with this question. This much, however, may be said--that, even taking the most unfavourable view of the results achieved by diplomacy, there is nothing whatever in Mr. Miller's history to engender the belief that better results would have been obtained by shifting the responsibility to a greater degree from the shoulders of the executive to those of Parliament. The evidence indeed rather points to an opposite conclusion. For instance, Mr. Miller informs us that inopportune action taken in England was one of the causes which contributed to the outbreak of hostilities between Greece and Turkey in 1897. "An address from a hundred British members of Parliament encouraged the masses, ignorant of the true condition of British politics, to count upon the help of Great Britain."

It is, however, quite true that a moralist, if he were so minded, might in Mr. Miller's pages find abundant material for a series of homilies on the vanity of human wishes, and especially of diplomatic human wishes. But would he on that account be right in pronouncing a wholesale condemnation of diplomacy? Assuredly not. Rather, the conclusion to be drawn from a review of past history is that a small number of very well-informed and experienced diplomatists showed remarkable foresight in perceiving the future drift of events. So early as 1837 Lord Palmerston supported Milosh Obrenovitch II., the ruler of Servia, against Turkey, as he had "come to the conclusion that to strengthen the small Christian States of the Near East was the true policy of both Turkey and Great Britain." Similar views were held at a later period by Sir William White, and were eventually adopted by the Government of Lord Beaconsfield. An equal amount of foresight was displayed by some Russian diplomatists. In Lord Morley's _Life of Gladstone_ (vol. i. p. 479) a very remarkable letter is given, which was addressed to the Emperor Nicholas by Baron Brunnow, just before the outbreak of the Crimean War, in which he advocated peace on the ground that "war would not turn to Russian advantage.... The Ottoman Empire may be transformed into independent States, which for us will only become either burdensome clients or hostile neighbours." It may be that, as is now very generally thought, the Crimean War was a mistake, and that, in the classic words of Lord Salisbury, we "put our money on the wrong horse." But it is none the less true that had it not been for the Crimean War and the policy subsequently adopted by Lord Beaconsfield's government, the independence of the Balkan States would never have been achieved, and the Russians would now be in possession of Constantinople. It is quite permissible to argue that, had they been left unopposed, British interests would not have suffered; but even supposing this very debatable proposition to be true, it must be regarded, from an historical point of view, as at best an _ex post facto_ argument. British diplomacy has to represent British public opinion, and during almost the whole period of which Mr. Miller's history treats, a cardinal article of British political faith was that, in the interests of Great Britain, Constantinople should not be allowed to fall into Russian hands. The occupation of Egypt in 1882 without doubt introduced a new and very important element into the discussion. The most serious as also the least excusable mistake in British Near-Eastern policy of recent years has been the occupation of Cyprus, which burthened us with a perfectly useless possession, and inflicted a serious blow on our prestige. Sir Edward Grey's recent diplomatic success is in a large measure due to the fact that all the Powers concerned were convinced of British disinterestedness.

[Footnote 81: _The Ottoman Empire_, 1801-1913. By W. Miller. Cambridge: At the University Press. 7s. 6d.]

[Footnote 82: This article was, of course, written before the war which subsequently broke out between the Bulgarians and their former allies, the Greeks and the Servians.]

[The end]
Evelyn Baring's essay: The Ottoman Empire

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