The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire (34 page)

Concern for the basic teachings of Islam inevitably strengthened the autocratic character of the Sultanate. Yet there was no Hamidian counter-revolution to the
Tanzimat
restructuring. The
reform era continued: better public education; an agricultural bank to provide capital for the most widespread and least progressive of occupations; more municipalities, paved roads and gas-lit
towns; and the standardization of procedure in both criminal and civil law courts—although, to his intense irritation, the Sultan was unable to abolish the special legal status enjoyed by
foreign residents under the long-standing ‘Capitulations’ treaties. In one sense the Hamidian empire became more closely integrated in Europe, with the completion of Baron
Hirsch’s section of the railway into Serbia. On 12 August 1888 the first through-train from Western Europe reached Constantinople. From November it was possible for a traveller to leave Paris
aboard the Orient Express at 7.30 on Wednesday evening and, after a 1,867-mile journey by way of Munich, Vienna, Budapest and Belgrade, to step down from the same carriage in Stamboul’s
‘elongated shed on a barren waste’ at what the timetable
cited as 5.35 on Saturday afternoon. The Sirkeci terminus was built soon afterwards and, across the
Golden Horn, the Wagons-Lits Company opened a luxury hotel, the Pera Palace, in ‘a thoroughly healthy situation, high up and isolated on all sides’. The coming of the trunk railway and
an elegant hotel did not, of course, open up the shores of the Bosphorus to tourism, but they strengthened commercial contacts with Western and Central Europe, for good or for bad. The British
ambassador believed that Abdulhamid was personally hostile to the new railway links. The arrival of the first train from the West went virtually unnoticed: ‘The Turkish authorities had
removed on the previous evening all flags and other signs of rejoicing and no Ottoman official was allowed to take any part in that important occasion,’ the ambassador reported.
¹²
The Sultan’s reactions continued to puzzle foreign observers, who were too ready to assume that the wearing of western dress made Ottomans occidental in
thought and behaviour.

More than ever, the Hamidian Sultanate remained an empire of contradictions. The gas-lit streets of Pera and Stamboul offered the travellers a constantly changing peepshow, part European, part
North African but, above all, richly Asian in cultural character and colour. Some outsiders were uneasy at the spectacle, disturbed as much by what was hidden from them as by what passed before
their eyes. An astute and experienced British diplomat, returning to Constantinople in 1893 after an absence often years, was appalled at the degeneracy of a ‘system rotten to the
core’. He complained of a ‘craze for money-making and speculation’ among the ‘men we deal with now . . . the products of a vitiated French education overlying the old
(Turkish) stock’; and he contrasted the ‘tawdry splendour of Yildiz entertainments’ with ‘the real Palace we don’t see—the Sheikhs, and the astrologers and hole
and corner intrigue, and all the dark doings and sayings.’
¹³
Yet, despite the cynical doubts of outside observers, a vein of Islamic piety ran
not far beneath the surface. If, for example, a foreign visitor wished to relax in a Turkish bath (
hamam
) he would find that it constituted a ‘religious foundation’
(
vakif
); the
hamam
tradition implied cleanliness for the soul as well as for the body. More specifically Hamidian in character was the Sultan’s encouragement of the holy
language of the sacred Koran. Classical Arabic might
have received an official status equal to that of Ottoman Turkish, had not the Grand Vizier persuaded him that patronage
of even the purest Arabic would cause resentment in Stamboul, where there was already the first stirring of a narrowly Turkish national feeling.

That was a telling argument, for Abdulhamid was deeply sensitive to the temper of his peoples. He grew reluctant to ride through the streets of his capital, constantly fearing attempts on his
life. So obsessed was he with the politics of murder that Ottoman newspapers were forbidden to inform their readers of the assassination of a foreign ruler or statesman: there was no suggestion
that Tsar Alexander II, President Garfield, President Sadi Carnot, Shah Nasr-ed-Din or the Empress Elizabeth had met violent deaths. Once or twice a week Abdulhamid dared to emerge from Yildiz
Park; occasionally he travelled up the Bosphorus, crossing to the Anatolian shore; but he was disinclined to venture deeper into his empire, least of all in Europe. Although he might possess
visionary concepts of imperial and spiritual authority, the Caliph made himself as much a prisoner of his palace as, in those days, was the Pope in Rome. The directors of the Oriental Railway
Company had presented Abdulhamid with a sumptuous royal coach. It remained unused until 1909, when it bore him into exile.

C
HAPTER
12

A
RMENIA
, C
RETE AND THE
T
HIRTY
-D
AY
W
AR

I
N THE LAST DECADE OF THE OLD CENTURY THREE INTERNAL
crises—in Armenia, Crete and Macedonia—alerted the European chancelleries yet again to
what they assumed was the imminent collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Viewed down the avenue of history it is clear that the three problems were closely related to each other, in timing and in
character. But it was not clear to contemporaries. The Armenian Massacres stirred humanitarian sentiment on both sides of the Atlantic even more profoundly than the Bulgarian Horrors twenty years
before. In comparison with the sufferings of the Armenian people, the Cretan struggle for union with Greece and the tangle of nationalities in Macedonia were vexing variations on a far too familiar
theme.

Most Armenians had been Ottoman subjects for some five hundred years.
¹
Like Greeks and Persians, they were an ancient people, the first nation who
collectively embraced the Christian faith—Gregory the Illuminator baptized their king, Tiridates III, some three hundred years before Augustine brought organized Christianity into Kent. By
430, however, the Armenian monarchy had disappeared, its lands divided between the Byzantine and Persian empires. The mountain ranges and high plateaux where the Armenians lived from earliest times
passed under Ottoman rule in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but large Armenian communities remained subject to Persia until 1828, when their lands were ceded to Russia. Despite the
buffeting of history, bonds of
language, literature and religion enabled them to retain a sense of national identity. At the time of the Ottoman conquest their
‘Armenian Gregorian Church’ had been, for more than a century and a half, united with Rome. Although they subsequently accepted most Orthodox dogmas and liturgical teaching, the
Armenian hierarchy showed greater independence than other, numerically larger, Churches in eastern Christendom; the Armenians continue, for example, to make the Sign of the Cross in a Latin manner
rather than in the Greek. Under the Sultans they received a separate status as the Gregorian
millet
, with an Armenian Gregorian patriarch in Constantinople.

These spiritual leaders played no political role whatsoever until January 1878, when Patriarch Nerses Varjabedian was induced by some western-educated members of his community in the capital to
travel to Russian headquarters at San Stefano and seek the Tsar’s support for Armenian self-government in eastern Anatolia. But Alexander II—and even more his successor, Alexander
III—mistrusted Armenian political ambitions. Neither at San Stefano nor at the subsequent Congress did the Russians press their cause. Lord Salisbury’s concern for the Armenians in 1878
led to the appointment of eight British ‘military consuls’ who were to ensure that the Sultan carried out reforms in eastern Anatolia, but their activities—like the reforms
themselves—were minimal. Their brief presence encouraged Armenian agitators to exaggerate the interest of successive British governments in their cause. Despite disappointment at the Berlin
Settlement there was, from 1878 onwards, an active national independence movement among the Armenians, although the pace-setters were exiles rather than subjects of either the Tsar or the
Sultan.

Unlike the Slav peoples within the Ottoman Empire, the Armenians remained a minority in every province they settled. There was a heavy concentration in Cilicia, around Adana, but most lived in
the six eastern vilayets of Erzerum, Van, Bitlis, Diyarbekir, Sivas and Mamuret, forming a peasant population constantly in conflict with the nomadic Muslim Kurds around them. Intelligent or
ambitious Armenians migrated to Constantinople, Smyrna and Aleppo. At the close of the 1880s there were about 150,000 members of the Armenian Church living in the capital, compared to 153,000 Greek
Orthodox and 385,000 Muslims. Many
Armenians became small shopkeepers. Some rapidly established themselves as merchants or bankers, often with notable success. Hakop Zarifi
was accepted and trusted as Abdulhamid’s financial agent long before he came to the throne; and in 1890 the Sultan was so impressed by a report on the oil potential of the Baghdad and Mosul
vilayets submitted to the Ministry of Mines by a twenty-one-year-old Armenian from Üsküdar that a firman ordered all petroleum revenue to be assigned henceforth to his Privy Purse rather
than the Ottoman treasury. The percipient young Armenian was Calouste Gulbenkian.
²

Not all belonged to the Armenian Gregorian Church. In Sivas and Diyarbekir many were Roman Catholics, having traditional links with France; and from 1839 onwards American Protestant missionaries
were active around Erzerum, winning converts and giving them a good schooling. It is a curious thought that, while Unionists and Confederates answered the call to the colours, a group of
compatriots 5,000 miles from the Civil War battlefields were protecting a mission in Bitlis from marauding Kurds whose sheikhs remained hostile to all Armenian Christians, whether Protestant,
Catholic or Gregorian. Thirty years later, when the Armenian Question was first posed, there were nearly a hundred interdenominational mission stations in Armenia. No US President before Woodrow
Wilson paid much heed to their accounts of the Armenian struggle, but their presence in Anatolia ensured that they were able to arouse interest in the Armenian cause among newspaper readers on both
sides of the Atlantic. By the early 1890s the Armenians could count on better publicity abroad than any subject peoples since the Greek War of Independence.

Throughout the previous decade there had been mounting tension in the eastern vilayets of Anatolia. In response to propaganda from their exiled compatriots the Armenians refused to pay legalized
protection money to the Kurds, and complained of the rapacity of the Sultan’s local representatives. Foreign consuls reported kidnappings and murder. The killings began in 1890 at Erzerum,
where Armenian churches, homes and shops were wrecked in a spontaneous explosion of mutual hatred. They were followed by local massacres in the villages and by a hardening of attitudes on opposing
sides. In 1891 the Sultan raised the
hamidiye
regiments among the Kurds. Two exiled groups took up the Armenian cause: the semi-Marxist
Hunchaks
(‘Bell’) movement, had been established in Geneva in 1887 and now an equally radical, but less Marxist, Armenian Revolutionary Federation (
Dashnagtzoutiun
, or
‘Dashnaks’) was founded in Tbilisi. Neither group had links with the Russian government, as Ottoman apologists claim; for seven years the Tsarist authorities had been seeking to russify
their national minorities and they were even less inclined to tolerate an Armenian autonomist movement than during the great Eastern Crisis of the late 1870s. There is, however, no doubt that
fanatical
Hunchak
agents encouraged hopes of an ‘Armenian Revolution’ in villages where there was deep resentment at discriminatory taxation favouring the Kurds. Moreover, it is
difficult to understand the purpose behind a rising in the Sassun district south-west of Mu
ş
, during the autumn of 1894, unless it was to achieve martyrdom by provoking ‘harsh
reprisals’ in order ‘to make their case in Europe’. If it was this political calculation which prompted the rising in Sassun, the cynical planners did, indeed, fulfil their
ghastly purpose. The
hamidiye
, well-primed before the rising began, wreaked a terrible vengeance: twenty-five villages were destroyed that autumn and more than 10,000 Armenians slaughtered.
British consular officials had little doubt that the massacres were ordered by the local Ottoman authorities.
³

Over the winter of 1894–5 the anti-Turk campaign of protest gained momentum abroad. In Britain the campaign transcended party divisions, with Liberals and Conservatives, Radicals and
Unionists appearing on the same platform to uphold humanitarianism and the Christian faith of a martyred people. Reports of the Armenian massacres prompted speaker after speaker in Britain to
demand punishment of ‘Abdul the Damned’ for permitting the condition of his Christian subjects to deteriorate rather than improve over the past decade. No British politician could hope
for support from the electorate if he dared recall the Crimean alliance or the Jingo pledges to save Constantinople. In mid-April 1895, under pressure from Lord Rosebery in London, the British,
Russian and French ambassadors drew up proposals for administrative improvements in the six vilayets of eastern Anatolia.
⁴
Abdulhamid, rightly
suspecting
that Paris and St Petersburg would not back their men on the spot with coercive measures, simply ignored the proposals.