The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire (33 page)

Abdulhamid’s ambition of reasserting direct Ottoman authority in Cairo and Alexandria came close to success, at least on paper. Successive prime ministers in London did, indeed, have every
intention of pulling out of Egypt as soon as possible. The continued military occupation was caused, in the first instance, by the need to contain the Mahdist revolt in the Sudan, safeguarding both
the fertile regions of Egypt and the Red Sea ports against devastation from what was regarded as fanatic anarchy. But the decision to stay in Egypt was also an indirect consequence of an unexpected
twist in Ottoman policies. Until 1887, and perhaps as late as 1894, the British envisaged an accommodation with the Sultan: Egypt would be governed by the Porte through a viceregal Khedive, with
guarantees for foreign bond-holders and for unimpeded passage of the Suez Canal; if there were international pledges to observe Egypt’s neutrality, British troops would be withdrawn. Sir
Henry Drummond Wolff was sent on a special mission to Constantinople to persuade the Sultan to share in the administrative control of Egypt, and a preliminary agreement was speedily signed. It was
followed in May 1887 by a formal Anglo-Turkish Convention: Great Britain would enjoy preferential rights
in an Ottomanized Egypt, to be freed from military occupation within
three years. For eight weeks Drummond Wolff waited in Constantinople while Abdulhamid had second—and third, and fourth—thoughts about the treaty. The French resented Britain’s
special status in Egypt and their ambassador received support from his Russian colleague; there was even a threat of war if the Convention were ratified. The ambassadors’ strong words were
intended to make the neurasthenic Sultan quail, and he took them seriously. It was not difficult for Abdulhamid to convince himself that the British were tricking him into signing away Egypt. In
the rarefied isolation of the Yildiz Kiosk, he was highly receptive to the mystical revelations of Abul Hauda al-Sayyadi, a visionary prophet from Aleppo who viewed world affairs very differently
from the Sultan’s ministers and officials three miles away at the Sublime Porte itself.
⁴

Ultimately Abdulhamid refused to ratify the treaty. The moment for such an undertaking was inauspicious, it appeared. The Sultan’s hesitancy—or, as some believed, the generously
greased palm of his Syrian soothsayer—allowed Egypt to slip from his grasp. An Ottoman High Commissioner resided in Cairo from 1887 to 1914 and each year tribute money of some £665,000
(about four per cent of the national revenue) was handed over to the Ottoman treasury. But, though lip-service was rendered to the Sultan’s suzerainty so long as the world remained at peace,
from 1883 until 1922 Egypt was enveloped in the British Empire as closely as an Indian princely state. Abdulhamid gained no advantage from his obduracy over ratifying the Convention, for successive
British governments rode rough-shod over Turkish susceptibilities. Soon Egypt was to supersede the Straits in Whitehall’s strategic planning. ‘Cairo is . . . the gateway between Europe
and Asia and between Europe and Australia,’ a Foreign Office official patiently explained to his colleagues at the Treasury in November 1898; ‘Recent events have made it also the
gateway to a considerable portion of Africa,’ he added.
⁵

Twice Abdulhamid tried to rectify his error of policy, vainly seeking to secure a firm hold on that strategic gateway. In August 1894 his ambassador raised the possibility of a revised Drummond
Wolff Convention with Lord Rosebery’s Liberal government, and eighteen months later the Sultan persisted in efforts to persuade Salisbury to open
new talks on Egypt,
despite rebuffs from both the Foreign Office and the embassy in Pera. Marginally he preferred Salisbury and the Conservatives to the Liberals, among whom the formidable Gladstone continued to
champion the rights of Christians under Ottoman rule until the autumn of 1896 (when he was approaching his eighty-seventh birthday). But Lord Salisbury never concealed his lack of confidence in the
Ottoman will to survive. Nor, indeed, did most European statesmen of his generation. All seemed eager—to borrow Bismarck’s metaphor—‘to pluck ripe fruit’ from the
Ottoman orchard. The French, who at the height of the Egyptian Crisis in 1881 grabbed ‘the pear’ of Tunisia, retained their political ambitions in Syria. Although official Tsarist
policy was less committed to Panslavism than in the 1870s, the Russians remained a threat from the Caucasus; so, too, did Austrian commercial enterprise throughout the western Balkans. Even the
Italians, who had looked covetously at Tunisia before the French established their protectorate, were showing an interest in Tripolitania and the Dodecanese islands. Only the Germans remained
disinclined to stake an anticipatory claim to Ottoman spoils; and it was accordingly with Germany that Abdulhamid established the closest relations.

‘The new element, the German, in Eastern politics deserves our grave consideration,’ Layard had observed to Disraeli in 1877, soon after his arrival in Constantinople.
⁶
That particular warning was little more than a shrewd guess. Although Prussian officers had served in the Ottoman army for brief spells of duty from the later
years of Mahmud II, only rarely was there close contact between Constantinople and Berlin during the Bismarck era; the Prussian consulate in Jerusalem, which had been established as early as 1842,
was often more active than the embassy, safeguarding Lutheran religious rights and fostering farming settlements set up in Palestine by primitive Protestant sects. Even after Wilhelm von Pressel
put forward his master-plan for Anatolian railways in 1872, little was done to win support for the venture in his homeland
⁷
German financial
institutions seemed wary of expansion. The prestigious Deutsche Bank, though willing to join the Stuttgart Bank in pledging money for an Anatolian railway in September 1888, had still not opened a
branch anywhere in the Sultan’s empire by the end
of his reign. And when in 1899 the first German Ottoman bank was at last established, it was specifically a regional
institution, the Deutsche Palästinanbank, with branches from Damascus southwards to Gaza. Seven more years passed before a Deutsche Orientbank began promoting German interests throughout the
Levant and Egypt.

If the Sultan’s subjects thought about Germany at all, it was as a military power rather than as a financial agency; bankers traditionally came from Paris, London and Vienna. Moltke, the
most famous Prussian officer who had served Sultan Mahmud, continued to hold Turks in contempt throughout his later years as Chief of the Greater German General Staff; and when in 1882 Abdulhamid
II sought a new team of military advisers, Moltke entrusted the mission to an obscure staff officer, General Otto Kaehler, rather than to a soldier of energy and initiative. Kaehler died within two
years of reaching Constantinople, having shown himself to be a first-rate salesman for Krupps of Essen. It was Colonel Colmar von der Goltz, Kaehler’s deputy and successor, who imparted to
the Sultan’s army the lessons of the three ‘Bismarck wars’ and won himself a European reputation—and eventually a Field Marshal’s baton. Hundreds of heavy guns and
field pieces were shipped to the Golden Horn from Hamburg, for Goltz made sure that modern artillery should defend the Dardanelles, while Krupps’s specialists updated old forts along the
Chatalja Lines to the west of the capital. Goltz’s memoirs show that he despised Abdulhamid personally; he found him intensely suspicious of foreign influence at the War Academy, and so
terrified of assassination that he imposed strict limitations on revolver practice in the capital; and, like other observers, Goltz noted how, as the years passed, the Sultan travelled less and
less outside the Yildiz walls. His mission to Turkey remained frustrating. Attempts to create a smooth-running General Staff were hampered by the factious rivalry within the Ottoman high command,
but Goltz did at least induce the Sultan to reorganize the military structure, thereby speeding up both mobilization and the transmission of orders from the high command to combat troops and
distant garrisons.
⁸

With remarkable patience Goltz, a witty member of a cultured family, countered
ulema
objections and persuaded Abdulhamid to send
chosen officers to Potsdam for
further training alongside the Prussians. Already, in the later years of Mahmud II, a few Turkish cadets had gone to England to receive training at Woolwich, but the German connection established
by Goltz was more thoroughly organized than the somewhat haphazard earlier experiment, and it continued until the First World War. Although there were rarely more than twenty Ottoman officers in
Germany during any one year, some were seconded for long periods. By 1889 when Kaiser William II paid the first of two ostentatious visits to the Sultan, Germany military influence was arousing a
lively interest in the embassies of other governments. In May 1890 an intelligence assessment dispatched from Pera to the British Foreign Office reported with some surprise (and slight
exaggeration) that most Turkish front-line infantry units were already equipped with high-quality Mauser rifles.
⁹

The employment of foreign specialists to modernize the army was, of course, a familiar expedient favoured by all reformer Sultans, including Abdulhamid I and Selim III as well as Mahmud II. Yet,
uniquely, Abdulhamid II modelled a newly-created cavalry corps on what was in many respects an outdated concept. In March 1891 he established a force of irregular horsemen reminiscent of the
akinji
outriders of the seventeenth century or, more recently, of the
ba
ş
i bozuka
, the notorious ‘bashi-bazouks’ whose bestialities were chronicled in every Western
European and American account of the Bulgarian atrocities. These new battalions—
hamidiye
, as they were called—were recruited from the nomadic Kurdish and Turcoman peoples of
eastern Anatolia; they were led by tribal chieftains, with Ottoman officers attached to them as inspectors. It was assumed that their natural enemies were the Russians, who seemed likely to thrust
southwards from their Transcaucasian possessions..
¹⁰

At first the
hamidiye
were organized into thirty nominally disciplined regiments of 600 men, although the force rapidly expanded; there were 63 regiments of between 800 and 1,150 men at
the end of the century. Superficially they resembled the Cossack troops maintained by the Russians for over two hundred years; but while the Cossacks were famous as a fighting horde before they
became soldiers of the Tsars, the Kurdish and Turcoman tribes had long thrived on brigandage, with
some six or seven chieftains only occasionally uniting in a loose
confederacy, primarily to defend themselves against punitive expeditions. Old habits died hard, and the circumstances in which local Ottoman commanders employed the Sultan’s ‘tribal
gendarmerie’ did not encourage their abandonment of traditional ways, especially in the mountains around Erzerum. This development caused dismay among the consular representatives of the
Great Powers and intensified the widespread abhorrence of ‘Abdul the Damned’. If the Kurds used the weapons and regimental organization of the
hamidiye
to scourge the Armenian
Christians around them in eastern Anatolia, their Sultan and Caliph was disinclined to check such bloody effusions of fanatical zeal. The Kurds, militant Muslims who had mistrusted
Tanzimat
westernization, served proudly in the
hamidiye
, which they accepted as a form of recognition of national identity bestowed upon them by their Ottoman sovereign. Tragically the
hamidiye
—like the ‘Black and Tans’ in Ireland—left a legacy of racial and religious hatred which survived the Ottomans and their immediate successors.

The creation of the
hamidiye
was characteristic of the reign as a whole. Earlier rulers had westernized Ottoman life: Abdulhamid sought to islamicize institutions they had imported from
Europe. At the same time he became a champion of Arab causes they had neglected. Never before had Arabs from Lebanon and Syria received such high advancement in Ottoman government as in the first
half of his reign. They encouraged the assumption that, as Caliph, he had a right to protect Muslims living under British, French or Russian imperial rule; and he personally selected and approved
religious dignitaries called to exercise spiritual authority in the Crimea and Cyprus, tributary Bulgaria and Egypt, and the Austrian-occupied western Balkans. It might be said that he harnessed,
and effectively rode, the wild Panislamic sentiment which spread through much of Asia and northern Africa in a reaction to imperialism.

Abdulhamid’s religiosity was not humbug. Unlike his recent predecessors, he emphasized the sincerity of his faith, scrupulously observing Muslim holy days and assigning money from his
Privy Purse to restore mosques, spread Muslim schools and augment
ulema
funds. His subjects treated him with awed respect, hardly distinguishable from
reverence. Sir
Charles Eliot, a third secretary at the British embassy from 1893 to 1898, described the
namaz
prayers at the Yildiz mosque in the twenty-second year of Abdulhamid’s reign: