The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire (26 page)

The Dolmabahche is as characteristic a monument to the
Tanzimat
era as Garnier’s Paris Opéra to the Second Empire or St Pancras Station to Victorian London. In four hundred
years the Topkapi Sarayi had grown into a grimly functional complex, culturally enriched by the compact artistry of its cluster of state rooms. By contrast, from the day that the Sultan first went
into residence there, the Dolmabahche stood out as a spectacular show-piece, Versailles gone Venetian. Its classical columns and porticoes were spread along the shore of the lower Bosphorus like
the façades of the Winter Palace and the Hermitage beside the Neva, but while the Romanovs had settled for rust-red, Abdulmecid delighted in the pristine white marble splendour which the
architects Nikogos and Kalabet Balyan conjured up for him. Yet the Balyans designed their palace, not as a backcloth for the Bosphorus, but in the form of winged pavilions projecting from a central
throne-room which was larger than any other in Europe. Architecturally their palace was a microcosm of the centralized empire. And this was as Abdulmecid intended. The Dolmabahche affirmed his
confidence in the future. Unlike earlier Sultans, he did not simply set about westernizing the Ottoman past; he sought to endow his heritage with an imperialistic grandeur worthy of the newest
Great Power patronizingly welcomed into the Concert of Europe.

The expense of building and maintaining the Dolmabahche Palace was so great that to most contemporary rulers it would have seemed prohibitive. Running costs mounted to
£2 million a year. To this drain on funds could be added renovation of the adjoining ‘domestic’ palace of Çira
an and an imperial villa near
Ahmed III’s fabled Sa’adabad and, above all, the building of another Balyan-planned palace across the Bosphorus at Beylerbey. This newest folly was not finished until four years after
Abdulmecid’s death. Although far smaller than the Dolmabahche, Beylerbey displayed a similar Rococo ostentation. All this was too much for the
Tanzimat
ministers. They repeatedly
deplored the extravagance of both Abdulmecid and his successor, Abdulaziz. In October 1859 the highly respected Mehmed Ali resigned as Grand Vizier in protest at Abdulmecid’s continued
appropriation of funds for the ‘palace which must surpass all others in the world’.
¹²

There is no doubt that the Sultan’s prodigality absorbed much of the £3 million loan which, in the summer of 1854, Ali and Mehmed Fuad had succeeded in raising abroad. In practice,
however, the money received by the Porte was little more than half the nominal amount, because of both a high interest rate and liberal commissions to several groups of underwriters. Accordingly a
second, more favourable, loan for £5 million was contracted within less than a year. It was guaranteed by the French and British governments, but only on condition that the money should be
spent on purposes connected with the Crimean War, and that the expenditure be supervised by a British and a French commissioner. This innovation set a precedent for later years, when the growth of
European financial control over the Ottoman Empire severely curbed the Sultans’ freedom of action. But not in Abdulmecid’s lifetime; there were no commissioners to prevent him from
digging deeply into a third foreign loan. It was this particular act of spendthrift recklessnesses which prompted Ali’s resignation.

Yet not all the financial ventures showed such folly. The Ottoman government also made use of foreign capital to improve communications within the Empire. Railways came slowly; in the Balkans a
strategic line from Varna to the Danube was begun in 1856; and soon afterwards work started on a line along the Menderes valley in south-western Anatolia to
tap the
agricultural wealth of the hinterland serving the port of Smyrna. More postal roads were built in these closing years of Abdulmecid’s reign, but pride of place went to the electric telegraph,
which was developed by the British and French during the Crimean campaign and enthusiastically backed by the Sultan himself. In September 1855 the first telegrams were exchanged between
Constantinople, London and Paris, and before the Sultan’s death in June 1861 there were cables between Stamboul, Bucharest, Belgrade and Salonika, and in Asia from Üsküdar to
Baghdad. Abdulmecid welcomed links with Western Europe. Moreover, he recognized that the electric telegraph provided a means of projecting centralized power from the Porte to provincial governors,
those tiresome beys who had so often vexed earlier Sultans by the cavalier independence with which they administered the more distant regions. The telegraph helped promote a sense of cohesive unity
within the Ottoman Empire.
¹³

By now, however, it was a smaller Empire. The range of the Sultan’s authority had contracted considerably in the past half-century. Algeria was a French possession, Tunisia already
dependent upon France; and, although the Ottomans had re-established effective rule in Tripolitania, the Bedouin of Cyrenaica followed the strictly puritanical Sanussi order which was led
throughout the second half of the century by Sayyid Muhammad al-Mahdi. In Egypt the cordiality which had marked the relationship between the Sultanate and the Viceregal dynasty on the eve of the
Crimean War soon waned; it did not survive the death of Abbas Hilmi in 1854 and the accession of his uncle, Muhammad Said, who had been Muhammad Ali’s favourite son.

Said is sometimes represented as pro-French and anti-Ottoman. But these labels oversimplify. An amiably weak-willed ruler, Said preferred to let events take their own course. The Egyptian
tribute of £360,000 a year to the Sultan’s civil list continued to be paid regularly; on three occasions it provided the guarantee on which the Porte raised a foreign loan. Yet the
growth of a flourishing cotton-based Egyptian economy went ahead without reference to Abdulmecid or Abdulaziz. Nor was Constantinople consulted when, within a few months of becoming Viceroy, Said
authorized his friend Ferdinand de Lesseps to draw up plans for a canal from Suez to the new Mediterranean port that perpetuates the Viceroy’s name.
The canal project
aroused fierce opposition in Constantinople. The British, always mistrustful of the French in Egypt, assured the Porte that the opening of a new waterway in the most prosperous of the
Sultan’s tributary dependencies might benefit entrepreneurs in Paris but would certainly lower the importance of the old trade routes from the Straits to the Euphrates and Persia. Yet the
Ottoman government had no effective power of veto. So weak were the links between Sultan and Viceroy that work on digging de Lesseps’ canal had been in progress for almost seven years before,
in March 1866, Sultan Abdulaziz at last gave his formal approval to the project.
¹⁴

Along the Empire’s European frontiers the main challenge to the Sultan’s authority continued to come from the surfacing of long-submerged Balkan nationalism. By 1860 Serbia was
already virtually lost. The maintenance of Ottoman garrisons in Belgrade and two other fortresses proved an expensive embarrassment, especially when during Ramadan in 1862 a fanatical Turkish
commander bombarded the Christian quarters of the Serbian capital for over four hours; the Ottoman withdrawal in 1867 made good sense, politically and economically. But relations with Serbia
remained strained: the Serbs were encouraging their compatriots outside the Principality, particularly in Bosnia and Herzegovina (where there was an anti-Ottoman revolt in 1857), and their fellow
Southern Slavs in Bulgaria and Montenegro. In May 1858 a punitive Ottoman expedition penetrated Montenegro, only to be trapped and routed in the rocky defile of Grahovo. Unrest along this
mountainous north-west frontier land continued throughout the following decade. As a British traveller drily observed, it was a region where fighting the Turk was looked upon ‘as a pastime,
or a superior kind of field sport’.
¹⁵

‘Latin’ Roumania owed much to the patronage of the Second Empire at a time when the former French ambassador to the Porte, Édouard de Thouvenel, served as Napoleon III’s
foreign minister. French support ensured that the Danubian Principalities—long a granary for Constantinople and its dependent towns—slipped from the Sultan’s grasp within a few
years of the Congress of Paris, as indeed the terms of the peace treaty had anticipated. Moldavia and Wallachia came together under the same hospodar (Alexander Cuza) in 1859 and their formal
union as the ‘United Principalities of Roumania’ was proclaimed in December 1861, a few months after Abdulmecid’s death. Technically Roumania remained an
Ottoman tributary state for another sixteen years; but as a Christian principality it showed even more political independence than Egypt, particularly after 1866 when Roumania’s newly-elected
Prince, Charles of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, began his forty-eight-year rule in Bucharest.

The heart of the Levant posed a different set of problems from the Balkan lands, Egypt or the Maghreb. Syria and Lebanon perplexed the
Tanzimat
ministers in the last years of
Abdulmecid’s reign, as at its beginning. Fighting between Maronite peasants and landowners in 1858 around Mount Lebanon sparked off another civil war between Druze and Maronite factions
which, by the spring of 1860, had spread to Damascus. In that year some 8,000 Maronites and 1,500 Druze were killed in communal fighting or died from starvation in Lebanon alone, and more than
5,000 Catholic Christians were massacred in Damascus. News of this massacre led Napoleon III to urge the dispatch of an international peacekeeping force to protect the Maronites. He proposed an
expedition to Beirut and ultimately to Syria, with most of the troops supplied by the French. Neither the Ottoman authorities nor the British wished to see a predominantly French expeditionary
force in the Levant; was not the official anthem of the Second Empire,
Partant pour la Syrie
, a marching-song composed by Napoleon III’s mother in her girlhood for her stepfather, the
great Bonaparte? The Ottoman Foreign Minister, Fuad, hastened to Beirut ahead of the international peacekeepers, stamping out disorder by the drastic expedient of executing Ottoman officials and
army officers who permitted trouble to break out in any district for which they were responsible. The French argued, with some justice, that the Sultans’ commissioners had attempted to keep
the peace with an iron hand in previous troubled years and that as soon as their firm grip was relaxed, Lebanon and Syria reverted to anarchy, with murder and destruction sweeping yet again through
rival towns and villages. Despite the solemn assurance of the Treaty of Paris that the Powers would not interfere in the internal administration of the Ottoman Empire, the French continued to urge
some form of international supervision to
ensure that the Sultan imposed fundamental reforms on the government of both the Lebanon and Syria. In January 1861 Édouard
de Thouvenel, with Napoleon III’s backing, summoned a conference to discuss the problems of the Levant. So essential was French financial support for Ottoman ventures that the Porte readily
accepted Thouvenel’s proposal and sent delegates to Paris.

Critics of the Second Empire argued that Thouvenel’s conference set a bad precedent, threatening the integrity of the Ottoman Empire.
¹⁶
But
the Sultan’s representatives served him well. With British encouragement they effectively prevented all discussion of specifically Syrian affairs, but in the spring a wise settlement was
reached for the Lebanon itself. It was agreed that most of the interior should become an autonomous province under a non-Lebanese Christian Governor, with an advisory council equally representative
of the differing religious faiths and with administrative districts so arranged that each would represent a separate sect. Not until this new settlement was in operation did Napoleon III withdraw
his troops. To the surprise of diplomats who had known the region in the past two decades, this Lebanese settlement proved effective. It survived until the Ottoman military authorities took
advantage of the war crisis in 1914 to impose direct rule, thereby clumsily ensuring that the Lebanese sided with the Sultan’s enemies. The 1861 settlement did not, as its critics feared,
hamper the
Tanzimat
reformers in their attempts to create a modern unitary state. The merit of the settlement lay in its recognition of local variations, district by district, so that power
could be shared on a communal basis rather than being imposed by a distant and remote sovereign. For other regions devastated by social and religious conflict, the Lebanese Agreement offered a
model of just administration. Sadly, they ignored it.

Abdulmecid gave formal approval to the new regime in the Lebanon on 9 June 1861. It was the last administrative act of his reign. Within three weeks he was dead, from tuberculosis, still only in
his thirty-ninth year. His successor, his half-brother Abdulaziz, was thirty-one, a bearded giant who weighed over sixteen stone and required a bed eight feet long (which may still be seen in the
Dolmabahche). By nature Abdulaziz was autocratic, and even more extravagant than Abdulmecid. Attempts to
curb expenditure at Court led to outbursts of furious temper. He won
Queen Victoria’s approval when he took her arm and escorted her in to luncheon at Windsor in 1867; she liked ‘the true, splendid, soft, brown oriental eyes’, as she wrote to her
eldest daughter, adding that ‘he never touched wine’.
¹⁷
But foreign dignitaries visiting Constantinople were less indulgent. Even allowing
for fabricated rumours which exaggerated the Sultan’s eccentricities, it soon seemed clear to them that Abdulaziz would readily shed the enlightened westernized practices of a reformed
Sultanate in favour of the more sinister whims of a capricious tyrant.