The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire (49 page)

Four months later a twenty-two-day battle was fought along the river Sakarya, barely fifty miles from Ankara. Rumbold hoped the Greeks and Kemalists would exhaust each other, allowing the
British and the Sultan to come forward as mediators. The Greeks were indeed exhausted, but not the Turks, who knew the terrain and the climate. Over the following winter Kemal was able to draw on
new resources and create a formidable army out of the desperate defenders who had triumphed along the Sakarya. On 26 August 1922 Kemal launched, in person, a surprise offensive against Greek
positions in the mountains,
200 miles inland from Smyrna. General Harington’s warnings to London were justified. Within a fortnight Kemal had gained an outright
victory. By 13 September a wall of fire two miles long was consuming the Greek and Armenian quarters of Smyrna. Nearly a quarter of a million Christians and Jews sought refuge aboard the foreign
warships which lay off the burning city.
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The magnitude of Kemal’s victory left the fate of the Ottomans in his hands. His immediate objectives were clear: the replacement of the Treaty of Sèvres by a new settlement which
would restore to the Turkish people the cities they knew as Istanbul and Edirne. His troops pressed forward towards the Dardanelles, entering a neutral zone established by the Treaty of
Sèvres, some fifty miles in depth and based upon Çanakkale, ‘Chanak’ as it was generally called during these critical weeks. The flags of the three Allies—Great
Britain, France and Italy—flew over the quay at Chanak, but in reality only a token British force was deployed around the town. A single infantry battalion, a squadron of Hussars, and an
artillery battery protected Britain’s foothold in Asia Minor, the twelve-mile deep ‘Zone of the Straits’, although this meagre garrison was supported by three battleships in the
Narrows of the Dardanelles. Within ten days of the great fire of Smyrna, British and Turkish troops were ominously facing each other, entrenched behind barbed wire close to the excavations of
ancient Troy. Throughout the third and fourth weeks of September 1922 there were alarmist headlines in the British press. War between Great Britain and Kemalist Turkey seemed imminent.
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It was avoided by the common sense and moderation of General Tim Harington and Sir Horace Rumbold. Harington declined to present an ultimatum from Lloyd George’s cabinet to the
Nationalists, as he thought it would ‘put a match’ to the crisis; and Rumbold induced Turkish delegates to come to Mudanya and discuss there the future of the Straits and eastern
Thrace, and the need for the Kemalists to respect the Neutral Zone. After ten days of talks at Mudanya a formal convention was signed on 11 October, providing for the withdrawal of Kemal’s
troops from the Neutral Zone and leaving the Allies in occupation of Constantinople, Chanak and the Gallipoli peninsula, pending the negotiation of a new peace treaty to replace Sèvres. At
first it was thought the
negotiations would be held in Venice, but Italy was convulsed by the political crisis which, at the end of October, brought Mussolini to power and
inaugurated the ‘Fascist Era’. It was agreed instead that the peace conference would meet at Lausanne.
³⁴

During the talks at Mudanya, there was still technically an imperial sovereign of the Ottoman Empire. But by now the Sultan’s dominions had contracted to what Mehmed VI Vahideddin could
see about him as he strolled around his Yildiz parkland. Mustafa Kemal, ever a realist, regarded the Sultanate as an anachronistic institution, to be swept away with the autumn leaves. But, though
no member of the Nationalist inner circle wished to keep Vahideddin on the throne, there were several who still respected the traditions of Sultanate and Caliphate. They feared that any drastic
constitutional change favouring the growth of republicanism would alienate the Faithful; nowhere in the world was there, in 1922, an Islamic republic. For the moment, Kemal was prepared not to
force the issue. He appointed his close friend Colonel Refet Pasha as Military Governor of eastern Thrace, with his headquarters in Stamboul. On 19 October Refet crossed the Sea of Marmara from
Mudanya in the steamer
Gulnihal
and landed at the quay of Eminonü, beside the Galata Bridge. Festooned arches covered the narrower streets of Stamboul, flags flew from the minarets,
banners proclaimed the glory of the Turkish people, reborn by the victories of Ghazi Mustafa Kemal’s army. Everywhere the triumph of the Turkish Revolution was celebrated for the next three
days.
³⁵

Everywhere, that is, except at Yildiz. Refet made it clear that he did not acknowledge the Sultan’s government, although he had respect for the ‘high office of the Caliphate’.
When he was received in audience by Mehmed VI he urged him to abdicate. The Sultan, as ever, played for time. His fate was settled by the insistence of the Allies on observing diplomatic protocol;
they invited to the Lausanne Conference a delegation from the Grand National Assembly in Ankara, and a delegation from the Sublime Porte. This misguided courtesy so angered the deputies at Ankara
that Kemal drafted a motion calling on the Assembly to abolish the Sultanate. An Ottoman prince would hold office as Caliph; the secularist Kemal did not wish to offend the ‘Holy Men’
who
supported him. But henceforth temporal power would be vested in the sovereignty of the Turkish people.
³⁶

The Grand National Assembly was not a supine institution. When the motion was debated on 1 November, many members were uneasy. The breach with the past was too drastic. It was Kemal himself who
made the decisive speech:

Five years later Kemal recalled how ‘finally the chairman put the motion to the vote and announced that it had been unanimously accepted. Only one opposing voice was heard
saying “I am against it” . . . In this way, gentlemen, the final obsequies of the decline and fall of the Ottoman Sultanate were completed.’

On 4 November Tevfik surrendered to the Sultan-Caliph the seals of office of the last Government of the Ottoman Empire; and on the following Friday Mehmed VI heard the muezzin call for prayers
for him as Caliph, no longer as sovereign too. The experience unnerved him; he had no wish to be in Constantinople for another Friday
selamlik.
With most of his personal suite deserting him,
he turned for help to General Harington: ‘Considering my life in danger in Constantinople, I take refuge with the British Government and request my transfer as soon as possible from
Constantinople to another place,’ he wrote in a note to the General dated 16 November 1922 and signed, significantly, ‘Mehmed Vahideddin, Caliph of the Mussulmans’.
³⁸
Once approval had been telegraphed from London, Harington’s staff perfected elaborate plans for
whisking the last of the Sultans
secretly away from Yildiz on the following Friday morning, long before the
selamlik.

It was never likely that Mehmed VI would be able to make a dignified departure, worthy of the heir to six centuries of sovereignty. No one, however, could have predicted that his exit would be
quite so Chaplinesque.
³⁹
The plans were, in themselves, perfect. On Thursday evening Mehmed told his staff he would sleep at the Merasim Kiosk in the
Yildiz complex, which was close to a gate adjoining barracks where Harington had quartered the Grenadier Guards. The weather was wet and blustery: on the Friday morning, had they been awake, the
spies employed by Refet Pasha to keep watch on the deposed ruler might have thought it curious that a detachment of Grenadiers should have been drilling in the pouring rain, more than an hour
before dawn. They might also have found it odd that two ambulances should be waiting on the edge of the parade ground. A party of eleven men emerged through the gate into the Yildiz unobserved; but
a Turkish naval officer under Refet’s orders recognized the sexagenarian who was helped into the first of the ambulances, which drove away as soon as the umbrella of its distinguished
passenger could be extricated from the door in which it was wedged. Most of the party, and some heavy trunks, went aboard the second ambulance, which left ten minutes later.

The Turkish naval officer hurriedly threw on some clothes and, still wearing carpet slippers, began running through the rainswept streets towards the Galata Bridge and Refet’s headquarters
in Stamboul. He does not seem to have observed the small group waiting on the naval quay near the Dolmabahche, prominent among whom were General Harington and the British chargé
d’affaires, Nevile Henderson (who was to be ambassador in Berlin when the Second World War broke out). The second ambulance arrived safely: but, to the dignitaries’ consternation, the
first ambulance, with the fallen Sultan aboard, had gone missing. When it eventually appeared, to the relief of Harington and Henderson, the driver explained that a tyre had punctured, and he had
been forced to change a wheel in a dark side-street in pouring rain. A naval launch carried the Sultan and his suite with greater dignity out to HMS
Malaya
, lying with steam up off the
Golden Horn. As the launch drew near to the
battleship, Mehmed Vahidddin had one final request for General Harington: would he please take care of the five wives left behind
at Yildiz, and send them on? By nine o’clock in the morning, while Refet was trying to reassure his distraught agent in the rain-soaked carpet slippers,
Malaya
was steaming out into
the Sea of Marmara. Would His Imperial Majesty be content to sail to Malta, Henderson had asked? No objection was raised. When at noon the muezzin called the faithful to the
ş
elamlik
prayers, the battleship was ploughing through heavy seas towards the Dardanelles. Once more ‘the bird had flown’. For this migrant, there would be no return.

E
PILOGUE

O
TTOMANS
M
ORIBUND

I
MPERIAL
O
TTOMAN SOVEREIGNTY WAS DEAD
:
THE VESTIGIAL
authority of the dynasty was not. It lingered for
fifteen months in a changing world, delaying the emergence of the Turkish Republic, as Kemal sought to find a compromise which would have retained a made-to-measure Ottoman caliphate as a symbol of
cohesion and spiritual unity in the strictly secularized state which he was creating. This proved to be an impossible objective, at variance with the whole character of Islam.

As soon as news of Mehmed VI’s flight was confirmed in Ankara, the Minister of Religious Affairs issued a
fetva
of deposition: Mehmed was accused of abandoning the Caliphate in
collusion with Turkey’s enemies on the eve of the opening of the Lausanne conference summoned to revise the peace settlement.
¹
Next day the Grand
National Assembly elected Abdulaziz’s eldest surviving son, Abdulmecid II, to succeed his cousin as Caliph. The new leader of the Faithful was an amiable aesthete in his mid-fifties.
Twenty-two years before, he had achieved a unique distinction for an Ottoman prince when one of his paintings was exhibited at the Paris Salon. Politics held no interest for him. He had rejected
approaches from Talaat in the summer of 1918 and from Mustafa Kemal two years later. When, on 24 November, he was invested as Caliph, there was no
kiliç ku
ş
anmaci
out at Eyüp,
with all the pomp of sword-girding. George Young, the only British observer of the investiture in the Topkapi Sarayi, thought the ceremony a travesty: ‘a delegation of Angora deputies
notifying an elderly dilettante that he has been elected by a majority vote like any Labour leader,’
Young wrote. As for the new Caliph himself, Abdulmecid seemed
‘a portly person in a fez, frock-coat and green ribbon’. Refet Pasha, Kemal’s representative at the investiture, watched Abdulmecid like ‘a sparrow-hawk,’ Young
thought: ‘The Caliph has been denied his Sword of Othman, but he has been given his Sword of Damocles’, he commented.
²
Perhaps so; but
Abdulmecid seemed content with Refet’s role. Despite the traditional Muslim taboo on the artistic representation of living things, he even painted Refet’s portrait.

The investiture emphasized the anachronistic character of Turkey’s international status during the Lausanne negotiations. Islamic states were basically theocratic: their sovereigns
received temporal power from God, reigning thereafter as His trustee on earth; a republic, on the other hand, was a secular institution created by the godless Infidel and as yet unknown in the
Islamic world. If the Ottoman Sultanate had ceased to exist, Muslim purists might argue that the head of state was the Caliph, a prince ordained to defend the faith in a community where the
business of government was left in other hands; and when the new Caliph adopted an Imperial style of life, signing himself ‘Abdulmecid bin Abdullah Han’ as if to emphasize his Ottoman
heredity, the
ulema
gave their spiritual leader full support, even beyond some of the frontiers of the new Turkey. Traditionally the name of the ruler was invoked each Friday in the
allocution at the midday prayers: from the end of November 1922 that religious courtesy was accorded to Caliph Abdulmecid II, not only in Turkish mosques, but in Baghdad and throughout all the
former Ottoman vilayets of Iraq. The Caliphate was a supra-national institution; and the more conservative deputies in the Grand National Assembly argued that its retention gave the new Turkey
world status as a leader of Islam. To abolish it would, they declared, ‘be an action totally incompatible with reason, loyalty and national feeling’.
³