The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire (32 page)

Fortunately, in his Armenian banker Zarifi, Abdulhamid retained a good adviser. An imperial decree in November 1879 set up a commission of Galata bankers who, with nominees of the Ottoman Bank,
were to help pay off the public debt. At the same time the Ministry of Finance was reorganized, accepting responsibility for the empire as a whole and co-ordinating the collection of taxes from
each province. The
Tanzimat
reform era, with its rationalization of the administrative structure, had left the bureaucracy top-heavy, with too many ministries employing too many officials in
the capital. Economy was preached—and occasionally imposed—at the Ministries of the Interior and Foreign Affairs; a profits tax was instituted and, in theory, levied throughout the
empire; and a Financial Reform Commission was created in order to scrutinize and trim all estimates of expenditure from government departments, although pleas of ‘special interest’
reduced the efficiency of this particular institution. Travellers’ tales, backed by cautious comments from commercial attachés and consuls, suggest that behind an impressive
façade corruption flourished. But the good intent was there.

Yet, if these changes convinced foreign ambassadors of Abdulhamid’s sincerity, it soon became clear that a more powerful authority was needed to guard against any slipping back into the
mismanagement preceding Grand Vizier Nedim’s admission of state bankruptcy. At last, in December 1881, the Sultan accepted long-term supervision of Ottoman finances by European bankers. The
‘Muharrem Decree’ established the Ottoman Public Debt Commission, an institution which became virtually a separate and parallel Ministry of Finance, under an international
directorate (French, Dutch, British, Italian, German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman) and employing some 100 foreign experts in a work-force of five thousand. The long-term effect of these
changes was to raise state revenue by some 43 per cent in the course of Abdulhamid’s reign, and the threat of imperial bankruptcy receded even though there remained an annual budget deficit.
The probity of the Ottoman Public Debt Commission enabled Abdulhamid in his later years to attract European investment in public works projects, thereby stimulating the economy of the Empire as a
whole. While French interests remained considerable, the British disposed of many holdings at the turn of the century, and Germany became the largest investor in Anatolia.
³⁴

In the aftermath of the war with Russia this last development seemed unlikely. Bismarckian Germany, taking its cue from the Chancellor himself, showed as yet little interest in the Ottoman
Empire, and Abdulhamid’s suppliant delegates, going fez in hand to the Congress, fared badly in Berlin. The definitive Russo-Ottoman Treaty of Peace of February 1879 confirmed the loss to
Abdulhamid of some two-fifths of his empire and a fifth of his subjects. At Berlin the Ottoman Empire was relegated from the super-league to which it had won promotion at the end of the Crimean
War. Effectively, it ceased to be a European Power, although Ottoman provinces straddled the Balkans from Edirne to the Albanian vilayet of Scutari on the Adriatic. But the Sultanate continued to
bind together a vast multinational empire, even if in 1879 many outer bonds were slipping loose. Abdulhamid remained overlord of Syria, Mesopotamia, Arabia, Egypt and the Maghreb up to the
Algerian-Tunisian frontier; and, though the frontier in the Caucasus had contracted, he was still sovereign of five vilayets in Armenia and Kurdistan as well as of the lands English-speaking
geographers called ‘Asia Minor’. Moreover, to a greater extent than his immediate predecessors, he was conscious of a moral authority as Caliph. Defeat at Russia’s hands posed for
Abdulhamid the problems of improvising a new concept of empire, and he accepted the challenge. It was fitting that the Sultan enjoyed a fuller panorama of Asia from the slopes of Yildiz than from
the waterfront palaces down the hill.

C
HAPTER
11

T
HE
H
AMIDIAN
E
MPIRE

F
OR THE FIRST TEN YEARS OF HIS REIGN
A
BDULHAMID
II reluctantly accepted a constant diminution of Ottoman power and authority
within Europe. The humiliations of San Stefano and Berlin were followed in 1880 by the enforced handing over to Montenegro of Ulcinj and a few miles of Adriatic coastline and, a year later, by the
cession of Thessaly and the Arta district in Epirus to Greece. A convention signed with Austria–Hungary in April 1879 affirmed that Bosnia and Herzegovina were still Ottoman provinces,
temporarily administered by the Austro-Hungarian Ministry of Finance. But it was a bitter blow to Ottoman pride when, in 1881, young Bosnians and Herzegovinians were conscripted to serve in Francis
Joseph’s army, as if they were already Austrian subjects. The subsequent foundation in Sarajevo of an Islamic
ş
eriat
law-school, with a delightful colonnaded portico and built from
Habsburg government funds, was no doubt more gratifying to Abdulhamid as Caliph than as Sultan. Habsburg–Ottoman relations after 1878 remained coldly correct, with Vienna and Budapest
insisting on exploiting every possible commercial concession, while the Sultan hoped for increased revenue from Austrian railway projects. The
sanjak
of Novibazar, the strategically
important corridor which separated Serbia from Montenegro, remained under Ottoman rule; but for most of Abdulhamid’s reign the Austro-Hungarian XVth Army Corps garrisoned four of the
sanjak
’s few towns.

To lay the ghost of San Stefano’s ‘Big Bulgaria’ became an increasingly difficult task. Eastern Rumelia, the autonomous Ottoman
province conjured up by
the Berlin Congress, proved an unworkable creation. Although the province brought a steady revenue into the Sultan’s coffers, misrule by his nominee as Governor—a Greek Orthodox
bureaucrat from Samos—intensified Pan-Bulgarian feelings and in September 1885 provoked a revolt in Plovdiv whose leader, Stefan Stambulov, declared Eastern Rumelia united with Bulgaria. Over
the following eighteen months the Ottoman authorities showed restraint and discretion, not least because Abdulhamid wished to avoid further accusations of ‘massacring’ Bulgars. He
welcomed an ambassadorial conference in his capital, only to find in April 1886 that, in return for retrocession of a cluster of Muslim villages in the Rhodope mountains, the ambassadors required
him to issue a firman confirming the union of ‘the two Bulgarias’ as a single tributary Principality. Technically, until October 1908 Bulgaria remained under Abdulhamid’s
suzerainty, and after his accession as Prince in July 1887 Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg ensured that regular annual payments went from Sofia to Constantinople. But Bulgarian national ambition still
sought an outlet to the Aegean. In practice, from 1885 onwards Bulgaria was as lost to its Ottoman suzerain as independent Serbia and Roumania.
¹

Briefly, in the early 1880s, Abdulhamid II considered the possibility of offsetting the empire’s decline in the Balkans by reasserting Ottoman authority in Egypt. A few years earlier such
an apparent reversal of history would have been out of the question; on at least two occasions Cairo had seemed about to cut all links with Constantinople and proclaim Egypt’s full
independence. During the protracted ceremonies which had accompanied the opening of the Suez Canal in November 1869 it was Ismail, the ruler of Egypt, and not his imperial master, who was host to
the Empress of the French, the Emperor of Austria, the Crown Prince of Prussia and the Princes of Orange and Hesse. Empress Eugénie, Francis Joseph and the other foreign dignitaries might
pay courtesy calls on Abdulaziz in Constantinople, as had the Prince and Princess of Wales a few months earlier; but in the Nile delta Ismail stood out as heir to the Pharaohs. He was responsible
for giving Cairo an opera house to impress his guests and for commissioning
Aïda
from Verdi (for staging two years later). Proudly Ismail once
assured an eminent
foreign banker, ‘My country is no longer in Africa, it is in Europe.’
²

There is no doubt that the French-educated Ismail, who had succeeded his uncle Said as Viceroy in 1863, accelerated the pace of westernization, effectively separating Egypt from Turkey. He used
the wealth of an expanding cotton trade to raise foreign loans and, until the European financial crisis of 1873, Egypt’s economy prospered, with benefits from a good railway system and the
highly profitable Suez Canal—of which, at its opening, Ismail was the largest single bond-holder. In the spring of 1866 Ismail struck the first of two bargains with his Ottoman suzerain: the
annual tribute paid by Egypt was doubled in return for recognition of his rank as Khedive, with a right to increase the Egyptian army, to coin his own currency, and to confer titles and decorations
without reference to the Sultan. After a state visit to Constantinople, in which he was lavish in distributing bribes to Sultan Abdulaziz and to influential courtiers, the Khedive secured even more
generous concessions: a firman issued in June 1873 gave the Egyptian ruler virtual financial and administrative autonomy. Hitherto he had been able to raise money only by short-term credit; now he
could seek long loans from foreign banks.

The concession was extracted from the Sultan too late. Four weeks earlier the Vienna Stock Exchange crash had shaken the confidence of European bankers. Credit sources contracted; and within two
years Ismail found himself unable to pay the high interest on his short-term loans. His Suez Canal holdings passed to the British government, thanks to the enterprise of Disraeli and the ready
funds of the Rothschilds. British and French experts sought to rescue the Egyptian economy, gaining greater control of public resources than the Ottomans had ever possessed. Hurriedly Ismail sought
to please the Ottoman authorities: in 1877 some 30,000 Egyptian troops fought for the Sultan against the Russians. But the Dual Commissioners—the Anglo-French controllers of Egypt’s
finances—ordered drastic economies in the Khedive’s army. They believed, though it is hard to agree with them, that Ismail was as reckless a spendthrift as Abdulaziz had been, and they
made ready to bustle him off his throne. Desperately he appealed to Abdulhamid:
a deposition imposed by foreigners in Cairo was an ominous precedent for Constantinople, he
argued.

The Sultan was unimpressed. He was not sorry to see so staunch a champion of Egypt’s independence pass into exile. On 26 June 1879, with the encouragement of the British and the French, he
ordered Ismail’s deposition. As overlord of Egypt the Sultan summoned to the throne Tewfik, Ismail’s twenty-seven-year-old son. At the same time Abdulhamid imposed a top limit of 18,000
men on the Khedival army and cancelled the firman of June 1873, thereby effectively curbing Egyptian autonomy once again.

But this was not what the Dual Commissioners wanted. The Sultan had miscued his lines. They expected him to get rid of Ismail and cut the army down to size, but Tewfik was to be their puppet,
not Abdulhamid’s. Pressure from the ambassadors in Constantinople led two months later to publication of a revised version of the firman of deposition: Khedive Tewfik might exercise the same
autonomous rights as his father, provided he paid the annual tribute to the Sultan and kept his army within the agreed limits. This restriction, however, intensified the Egyptian crisis. Which
officers would keep their military careers, Arab-speaking Egyptians or the Turco-Circassians who were habitually promoted to the higher ranks? Over the following two years a xenophobic pressure
group of Arab-speaking junior officers continuously threatened disorder in Cairo and Alexandria. Their leader was Lieutenant-Colonel Ahmed Orabi—conveniently known as ‘Arabi
Pasha’ in Western Europe.

Abdulhamid believed he could handle Orabi as dexterously as he dealt with Midhat. He was prepared to use the Orabist mutineers to undermine Khedival authority, spreading such anarchy in Egypt
that the Dual Commissioners would welcome direct Ottoman rule and give financial backing to the recovery of what was, potentially, the richest province of his empire. The Sultan’s personal
Egyptian policy was therefore extremely devious; while the Grand Vizier and other members of the Divan welcomed a British initiative which in June 1881 convened yet another ambassadorial conference
in Constantinople, Abdulhamid refused to permit Ottoman participation in the talks and persistently turned down all requests for the dispatch to Egypt of an Ottoman
expeditionary force. Instead, he summoned Orabi to Constantinople, while sending a personal emissary to Cairo for talks with Tewfik. At the same time, he secured from the ambassadors
a curiously vague assurance that foreign troops would not intervene in Egypt ‘except in case of unforeseen circumstances’.
³

At first events played into Abdulhamid’s hands. Riots in Alexandria—almost certainly spontaneous—led to looting and to the killing of some fifty Christians. British warships
duly bombarded the city; a few weeks later, their guns covered the landing of an expeditionary force commanded by Sir Garnet Wolseley. On 13 September 1881 Wolseley destroyed Orabi’s army at
Tel-el-Kebir. The Sultan protested at the British action on two grounds: the invasion of Egypt infringed Ottoman sovereignty: and unilateral intervention made nonsense of the attempts at
reconciliation which, as Ottoman emperor, he was sponsoring. He was not entirely mollified by British assurances that their military presence in Egypt was, like the Austro-Hungarian garrisoning of
Novibazar, only a temporary exigency.