The Crimean War (65 page)
Authors: Orlando Figes
Tags: #History, #Military, #General, #Europe, #Other, #Russia & the Former Soviet Union, #Crimean War; 1853-1856
To encourage the Christian settlement of the Crimea, the tsarist government introduced a law in 1862 granting special rights and subsidies to colonists from Russia and abroad. Land abandoned by the Tatars was set aside for sale to foreigners. The influx of new Christian populations during the 1860s and 1870s transformed the ethnic profile of the Crimea. What had once been Tatar settlements were now populated by Russians, Greeks, Armenians, Bulgarians, even Germans and Estonians – all of them attracted by promises of cheap and fertile land or by special rights of entry into urban guilds and corporations not ordinarily available to newcomers. Armenians and Greeks turned Sevastopol and Evpatoria into major trading centres, while older Tatar towns like Kefe (Theodosia), Gözleve and Bakhchiserai fell into decline. Many of the rural immigrants were Bulgarian or other Christian refugees from Bessarabia, territory ceded by the Russians to the Turks after the Crimean War. They were settled by the government in 330 villages once occupied by the Tatars, and were helped financially to transform mosques into churches. Meanwhile, many of the Tatars who had fled from the Crimea were resettled on the lands abandoned by the Christians in Bessarabia.
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All around the Black Sea rim, the Crimean War resulted in the uprooting and transmigration of ethnic and religious groups. They crossed in both directions over the religious line separating Russia from the Muslim world. Greeks emigrated in their tens of thousands from Moldavia and Bessarabia to southern Russia after the Crimean War. Moving in the opposite direction, from Russia into Turkey, were tens of thousands of Polish refugees and soldiers who had fought in the Polish Legion (the so-called ‘Ottoman Cossacks’) against Russia in the Crimea and the Caucasus. They were settled by the Porte on Turkish lands in the Dobrudja region of the Danube delta, in Anatolia and other areas, while others ended up in Adampol (Polonezkoi), the Polish settlement established by Adam Czartoryski, the leader of the Polish emigration, on the outskirts of Constantinople in 1842.
On the other side of the Black Sea, tens of thousands of Christian Armenians left their homes in Anatolia and emigrated to Russian-controlled Transcaucasia in the wake of the Crimean War. They were fearful that the Turks would see them as allies of the Russians and carry out reprisals against them. The European commission appointed by the Paris Treaty to fix the Russian-Ottoman border found Armenian villages ‘half inhabited’ and churches in a state of ‘advanced decay’.
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Meanwhile, even larger numbers of Circassians, Abkhazians and other Muslim tribes were forced out of their homelands by the Russians, who after the Crimean War stepped up their military campaign against Shamil, engaging in a concerted policy of what today would be defined as ‘ethnic cleansing’ to Christianize the Caucasus. The campaign was largely driven by the strategic demands created by the Paris settlement in the Black Sea, where the Royal Navy could freely operate and the Russians had no means of self-defence in their vulnerable coastal areas where the Muslim population was hostile to Russia. The Russians focused first on the fertile lands of Circassia in the western Caucasus – territories close to the Black Sea coast. Muslim villages were attacked by Russian troops, men and women massacred, farms and homes destroyed to force the villagers to leave or starve. The Circassians were presented with the choice of moving north to the Kuban plains – far enough away from the coastal areas for them not to be a threat in case of an invasion – or emigrating to the Ottoman Empire. Tens of thousands resettled in the north but equally large numbers of Circassians were herded by the Russians to the Black Sea ports, where, sometimes after weeks of waiting by the docks in terrible conditions, they were loaded onto Turkish boats and taken off to Trebizond, Samsun and Sinope in Anatolia. The Ottoman authorities were unprepared for the mass influx of refugees and several thousands of them died from disease within months of their arrival in Turkey. By 1864 the Muslim population of Circassia had been entirely cleared. The British consul C. H. Dickson claimed that one could walk a whole day in formerly Circassian territories and not meet a living soul.
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After the Circassians, it was the turn of the Abkhazian Muslims, at that time settled in the Sukhumi – Kale region, where the Russian campaign to clear them off their lands began in 1866. The tactics were essentially the same as those employed against the Circassians, except this time the Russians had a policy of keeping back the able-bodied male workers out of fear for the economy, and forcing out their women, children and the elderly. The British consul and Arabic scholar William Gifford Palgrave, who made a tour of Abkhazia to collect information on the ethnic cleansing, estimated that three-quarters of the Muslim population had been forced to emigrate. Overall, counting both Circassians and Abkhazians, around 1.2 million Muslims were expelled from the Caucasus in the decade following the Crimean War, most of them resettling in the Ottoman Empire, and by the end of the nineteenth century the Muslims of these two regions were outnumbered by new Christian settlers by more than ten to one.
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As a signal of his intention to grant religious toleration, the Sultan agreed to attend two foreign balls in the Turkish capital, one at the British embassy, the other at the French, in February 1856. It was the first time in the history of the Ottoman Empire that a sultan had accepted invitations to a Christian entertainment in the house of a foreign ambassador.
Abdülmecid arrived at the British embassy wearing the Order of the Garter presented to him a few weeks before to mark the allied victory. Stratford Canning, the ambassador, met the Sultan at the carriage door. As the Sultan alighted, a signal was transmitted by electric wire to the British fleet, anchored in the Bosporus, which saluted then with prolonged salvoes of cannon. It was a costume ball and princes, pirates, musketeers, fake Circassians and shepherdesses were in attendance. Lady Hornby wrote down her impressions the next day.
It would take me a day to enumerate half the costumes. But everyone who had been to the Queen’s
bals costumés
agreed that they did not approach this one in magnificence; for besides the gathering of French, Sardinian and English officers, the people of the country appeared in their own superb and varied costumes; and the groups were beyond all description beautiful. The Greek Patriarch, the Armenian Archbishop, the Jewish High Priest were there in their robes of state. Real Persians, Albanians, Kurds, Servians, Armenians, Greeks, Turks, Austrians, Sardinians, Italians and Spaniards were there in their different dresses, and many wore their jewelled arms. Abdülmecid quietly walked up the ballroom with Lord and Lady Stratford, their daughters, and a gorgeous array of Pashas in the rear. He paused with evident delight and pleasure at the really beautiful scene before him, bowing on both sides, and smiling as he went … Pashas drink vast quantities of champagne, of which they pretend not to know the exact genus, and slyly call it ‘
eau gazeuse
’.
At the ball at the French embassy the Sultan appeared wearing the medal of the Légion d’honneur that had been presented to him by Thouvenel, the French ambassador. Welcomed by a military salute, he talked to foreign dignitaries and moved among the dancers, who improvised to the Turkish marches performed by the army band.
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One of the things that pleased the Sultan most at these events was the appearance of the European women, whose dress he claimed greatly to prefer to that of Muslim women. ‘If socializing with these ladies is like their outer appearance,’ he told his Austrian physician, ‘then I certainly envy you Europeans.’ Encouraged by the Sultan, palace women and high officials’ wives began to adopt more elements of Western dress – corsets, silk capes and transparent veils. They appeared more often in society and socialized more frequently with men.
Domestic culture was also Westernized, with the appearance of European table manners, cutlery and crockery, furniture and decorative styles in the homes of the Ottoman élites in Constantinople.
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In almost every sphere of life, the Crimean War marked a watershed in the opening up and Westernization of Turkish society. The mass influx of refugees from the Russian Empire was only one of many ways in which the Ottoman Empire became more exposed to external influence. The Crimean War brought new ideas and technologies into the Ottoman world, accelerated Turkey’s integration into the global economy, and greatly increased contacts between Turks and foreigners. More Europeans came to Constantinople during and immediately after the Crimean War than at any other time in its previous history; the many diplomats, financiers, military advisers and soldiers, engineers, tourists, merchants, missionaries and priests left a deep impression on Turkish society.
The war also led to a vast expansion of foreign capital investment in the Ottoman Empire, and with it an increase in Turkey’s financial dependence on Western banks and governments (foreign loans to finance the war and Tanzimat reforms spiralled from about £5 million in 1855 to a staggering £200 million by 1877). It stimulated the development of telegraphs and railways, and accelerated the emergence of what might be called Turkish public opinion through newspapers and a new type of journalistic writing that came about directly as a result of the huge demand for information during the Crimean War. With the New Ottomans (
Yeni Osmanlilar
), a loose group of journalists and would-be reformers who briefly came together in something like a political party during the 1860s, the war also triggered a reaction against some of these changes and fostered the emergence of the first Ottoman (Turkish) nationalist movement. The New Ottomans’ belief in adopting Western institutions within a framework of Muslim tradition made them in many ways the ‘spiritual fathers’ of the Young Turks, the creators of the modern Turkish state.
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Yeni Osmanlilar
), a loose group of journalists and would-be reformers who briefly came together in something like a political party during the 1860s, the war also triggered a reaction against some of these changes and fostered the emergence of the first Ottoman (Turkish) nationalist movement. The New Ottomans’ belief in adopting Western institutions within a framework of Muslim tradition made them in many ways the ‘spiritual fathers’ of the Young Turks, the creators of the modern Turkish state.
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The New Ottomans were opposed to the growing intervention of the European powers in the Ottoman Empire. They were against reforms which they believed had been imposed on Turkey by Western governments to promote the special interests of Christians. In particular, they disapproved of the Hatt-i Hümayun decree of 1856, which had indeed been imposed by the European powers. The decree was written by Stratford Canning along with Thouvenel and then presented to the Porte as a condition of the continuation of foreign loans. It reiterated the principles of religious toleration articulated in the Hatt-i Sharif of 1839 but defined them more clearly in Western legal terms, without reference to the Koran. In addition to promising toleration and civil rights for non-Muslims, it introduced some new political principles to Ottoman governance stipulated by the British: strict annual budgets by the government; the establishment of banks; the codification of criminal and civil law; the reform of Turkish prisons; and mixed courts to oversee a majority of cases involving Muslims and non-Muslims. It was a thoroughgoing programme of Westernization for the Ottoman Empire. The New Ottomans had supported the principles contained in the Hatt-i Sharif of 1839 as a necessary element of the Tanzimat reforms; unlike the decree of 1856, it had some domestic origins and had not threatened the privileged position of Islam in the Ottoman Empire. But they saw the Hatt-i Hümayun as a special dispensation for the non-Muslims conceded under pressure by the great powers, and they feared that it would compromise the interests of Islam and Turkish sovereignty.
The foreign origins and terminology of the Hatt-i Hümayun stirred even greater resentment among Muslim clerics and conservatives. Even the old Tanzimat reformer Mustafa Reshid – who returned for a brief spell as Grand Vizier after Stratford had insisted on his reappointment in November 1856 – thought it went too far in its concessions to the Christians. Angered by the Hatt-i Hümayun, a group of Muslim theologians and students plotted a conspiracy against the Sultan and his ministers, but they were arrested in 1859. Under interrogation their leaders claimed that the Hatt-i Hümayun was a contravention of shariah law because it had granted Christians equal rights to Muslims. Sheikh Ahmet, one of the main conspirators, claimed that the Christians had obtained these rights only through the help of foreign powers, and that the concessions would mean the end of the privileged position of Islam in the Ottoman Empire.
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Their views were shared by many power-holders and beneficiaries of the old Muslim hierarchy – local pashas, governors, landowners and notables, clerics and officials, tax-farmers and moneylenders – who were all afraid that the better-educated and more active Christian minorities would soon come to dominate the political and social order, if they were granted civil and religious equality. For centuries the Muslims of the empire had been told that the Christians were inferior. Faced with the loss of their privileged position, the Muslims became increasingly rebellious. There were riots and attacks by Muslims against Christians in Bessarabia, in Nablus and in Gaza in 1856, in Jaffa during 1857, in the Hijaz during 1858, and in Lebanon and Syria, where 20,000 Maronite Christians were massacred by Druzes and Muslims during 1860. In each case religious and economic divisions reinforced each other: the livelihood of Muslims engaged in agriculture and small trades was directly threatened by the import of European goods by Christian middlemen. Rioters attacked Christian shops and houses, foreign churches and missionary schools, even embassies, after they had been stirred up by Muslim clerics opposed to the Hatt-i Hümayun.
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