The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire (10 page)

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 concessions 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.

C
HAPTER
4

W
ESTERN
A
PPROACHES

A
BDULHAMID
I
RESPONDED TO THE CHALLENGE OF
K
UCHUK
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 Pasao
lu in the north-east, bordering Kurdish areas where the Sultan’s power was minimal; the
Çapano
lu on the central plateau around Angora (Ankara) and Kayseri; the Jãnikli in the mountains behind Trebizond; the Karaosmano
lu in the south-west, based on Aydin and controlling the Menderes valley; the Yilanlio
lu around Antalya; and the Kuchukalio
lu in the Adana area.