Mustapha II defeated by Prince Eugène—The Peace of Carlowitz—Death of Mustapha II—Charles XII of Sweden—More Turkish provinces lost—Mahmoud I—Gazi Hassan—Selim III and the Janissaries—Mahmoud II ascends the throne—Ibrahim punishes the Janissaries—Changes in Europe—The battle of Navarino—Von Moltke and the Turkish Army—The steady loss of provinces—Recent changes in the Ottoman Empire—Independence of military governors—Revolt of the Pasha of Scutari—Influence of the telegraph—The reign of Abdul Hamid—The Turks and non-Islamic subjects—The Young Turk party—Revolution and reaction—Deposition of Abdul Hamid—Western opinion of the Young Turks—The result of reform—The invasion of Turkey by the Allies—Turkey at the outbreak of the war.
THE power of the Ottoman Empire had been brought very low by the time Mustapha II, son of Mohammed IV, came to the throne in 1695. This Sultan was a man of greater capacity than any of his predecessors, and saw that only a return to the old ideals could bring the people back to the ways that lead to success in the field and prestige in the council of nations. He therefore issued a Hatti-Sherif, a manifesto of state, declaring that he would restore ancient usages, and in person lead his armies in the field. This he did with some initial success, marching from Belgrade to Temesvar, retaking several strong places, and defeating the Austrian general, Veterani, whose hiding-places were the caves which the traveller may see in the precipitous rocks that close in the Danube to northward on its way through the pass of Kazan to the Iron Gate. The campaign against Austria in 1696 also brought to the Sultan the victory over the Duke of Saxony and an{216} imperial army at Temesvar. But in the following year Mustapha had to meet Prince Eugène at Zenta, and being completely out-man?uvred, suffered defeat, aggravated by the conduct of the mutinous Janissaries, who thought fit to massacre their officers during the battle. By evening of September 11th, 1697, Prince Eugène saw his enemy in full flight, and was able to send the following message to his imperial master at Vienna: “The sun seemed to linger on the horizon to gild with his last rays the victorious standards of Austria.”
Sultan Mustapha fled from the field, where his Grand Vizier lay slain among thousands of his army, and never led his troops again in person. A treaty of peace for twenty-five years was signed at Carlowitz, on the Danube, after a vast amount of unnecessary trouble. The ambassadors of all the Powers, and there were many, represented at the conference, were each so jealous of their sovereign’s dignity that the order of precedence could not be agreed upon. So a special chapel was built, and provided with so many doors that all the ambassadors could enter at the same moment. The chapel still stands on a hill-side near Carlowitz, a witness to this scene of exquisite trifling.
Turkey was still strong at sea, and able to check Venetian aggressions, but on land Ottoman power had sunk below the level of the great nations of Western Europe, and so began that r?le of political rather than military importance, which has characterized the status of the Sublime Porte ever since.
Another Kiüprilü Grand Vizier, Hussein, assisted Mustapha with the family aptitude for affairs, and certainly managed to improve Turkey’s financial position. But the enemies of the Porte were all too powerful, not only Austria, but also Russia, for Peter the Great had been waging war with energy, and had added Turkish territory by the Sea{217} of Azof to his Empire. Sick at heart, Mustapha II died in 1703, shortly after his Grand Vizier, Hussein Kiüprilü.
It was perhaps owing to Russian designs that the Porte looked with a friendly mien towards Great Britain, and we find Sir Robert Sutton establishing pleasant relations between his sovereign and Achmet III, brother of and successor to Mustapha III. In this monarch’s reign a romantic person roamed at large in Europe, fought battles, lost and won, and generally conducted himself more after the manner of the condottieri of other times than of a reigning sovereign of eighteenth-century Europe: Charles XII of Sweden was abroad, and though doing very much, effecting nothing. He drifted through Russia at variance with that country’s ruler, and being defeated by Peter the Great at Pultowa in 1709, sought refuge in the Sultan’s dominions. Another name well known to legend comes into history for a moment here—Hetman Mazeppa, who joined forces with Charles XII and, being considered a traitor by the Russians, met with the treatment his case required, according to their standard.
The Swedish King’s stay in Turkish territory did not improve the relations between the Porte and Russia; war was declared by the former in 1710, the method adopted being to incarcerate the Tsar’s ambassador in the stronghold of Yedi Koulé. It is true that Turkey gained some successes, defeating Peter the Great by the banks of the Pruth, and Ottoman arms won some small victories over in Austria; but the decline of Turkey was not arrested. Prince Eugène marched on Belgrade, Servia rose, and more and more possessions passed from the Ottoman Empire in Europe, till by the Peace of Passarowitz, in Servia, all Hungary became free of Turkey, who had also lost Belgrade, Semendria, several other cities, and the province of Wallachia.
Achmet abdicated in favour of his nephew, Mahmoud I,{218} whose reign, from 1730-1754, showed a yet greater decline of Turkish power and prestige. Topal Osman, Mahmoud’s general, scored some successes over the raiding Persian armies, but was defeated and killed at Kerkoud, while Nadir, Shah of Persia, was beating other Turkish armies. Desultory wars with Austria led to no other result than that Turkey was passing out of the ranks of great Powers, through its inability to adapt itself to the spirit of the age, to adopt new methods in place of those which had proved useless, even harmful, in the day of trouble.
Attempts were made from time to time at a new order of things. Amongst the reformers was Gazi Hassan, the hero of the battle of Shio, in 1770. A fierce sea-fight was raging, in which the Turks were being worsted, when Hassan brought his ship alongside the Russian Admiral’s and fought yard-arm to yard-arm until both vessels caught fire and went up. Hassan was the last to leave his ship, and then swam ashore, badly wounded. He rose to high office in the State, and endeavoured to introduce modern improvements, to equip the army with up-to-date weapons, and to restore some sort of discipline; but the army would have none of it, and even stout-hearted Hassan could not push his way through the inert mass of Turkish officialdom which crowded in to stifle all efforts at reform. Only the navy experienced any improvement, and that because Hassan insisted on the high-pooped, heavy Turkish ships being replaced by lighter, faster vessels, built on English lines. But fresh difficulties arose over the manning of these ships, as the Turks declined to do anything but act as gunners, so Greeks had to fill the ratings of the sailors. Gazi Hassan worked hard at this reform, and was surely entitled to the gratitude of his country; but such feelings existed not in those days, neither will any reformer find it in Turkey of to-day. Gazi Hassan was unsuccessful in war, during the latter years of{219} his life, owing to the opposition offered to all his reforms, but this was not taken into consideration; it probably increased his unpopularity, till Selim III, on his accession in 1789, had to execute the old hero to appease a tumult among the populace of Constantinople.
Selim III did not gain anything by his complaisance to the unruly soldiery, for by the beginning of his reign the Janissaries had become quite unmanageable, at least to a weak man. Their numbers had increased considerably, and stood at one hundred and fifty thousand, at least on paper, but there was sufficient reason to suppose that many figured on paper only, and that high-placed officials pocketed the pay of the non-existent members of the corps. Another change which had crept into the corps was that members were not necessarily available for, or liable to, military service, so many being engaged in civil employment. They were, however, ever ready to take up arms in revolt, and proved their political power by deposing and murdering Sultan Achmet III. The Janissaries had lost their raison d’être, and were no more than a public nuisance at a time when all Europe was seething with discontent, when old thrones were falling to the ground and new popular political institutions were teaching monarchs how a people prefers to be governed. Possibly the Janissaries were influenced by the spirit of revolt which informed so many peoples at this period, but I think it more likely that they acted out of selfishness only, and had no other desire than to hold the power of the State in their own hands, to their own advantage, allowing the Sultan to reign as long as he did not interfere with their rule. They were far too bigoted and jealous of their privileges to have taken to the idealistic notions which possessed so many patriots of the French Revolution. They deposed Selim III, and his successor reigned only a few months.{220}
Then came Mahmoud II, and he was more like the Sultans of the days of conquests than any of his immediate predecessors had been. The Janissaries annoyed him, so he determined to get rid of them, and happily had heard of the method used by Murat for soothing the turbulent Madrile?os. It was time for drastic measures, because the external situation was becoming very dangerous; the Greeks were in revolt, Kara George had risen in Servia, Christians were being massacred in the Ottoman dominions, and the fact was beginning to attract the notice of Europe, in spite of so many other preoccupations. So Mahmoud II saw to his artillery, and instructed his Master of the Ordnance, Ibrahim, commonly called Kara Gehennin, Black Hell, in the use he wished it put to. The Janissaries were ordered out to military exercises one day, and as this did not please them, they gave the usual signal of revolt, by upsetting their camp-kettles.
Mahmoud was ready for them; he unfurled the Sacred Standard of the Prophet, called on all true believers to rally round their Padishah and Caliph, and left Ibrahim to do the rest with his artillery. Those Janissaries who survived this treatment broke back to barracks, where they barricaded themselves, some six thousand. Ibrahim came up with his guns and knocked the buildings down about their ears; those who did not perish here were slain by irate citizens wherever they were caught, and so a great corps, whose earliest records were those of honourable battle, perished in a day. A new army of forty thousand was then raised, clothed, armed, and disciplined, according to European models.
The old order was changing, had changed, with startling quickness all over Europe, and all the known world was affected by the events that filled the times when Mahmoud II sat on the throne of Constantine. When this Sultan succeeded, France had already passed through the fire of{221} Republican Government to the glory of a military Empire, had again accepted the principle of hereditary nobility while French arms were victorious over nearly all the continent of Europe. A new Republic had arisen out of muddle and misrule in Great Britain’s American colonies, and as compensation, perhaps, that country was laying the foundations of the Indian Empire, and paving the way to the possession of Egypt, on the battlefields of the Iberian Peninsula.
Mahmoud lived long enough to witness all these many changes. Before he died, in 1839, he saw the fleets of Great Britain, France, and Russia threatening him with punishment unless the bloodshed caused by the Hellenic effort after freedom ceased at once, saw his own fleet, despite its bravery and that of his Egyptian allies, destroyed at Navarino, and as consequence a Christian King appointed by the Powers to rule over his former subjects in Greece.
Even Turkey endeavoured to show some appreciation of the “Zeit Geist” by instituting reforms, and wisely began with the Army, calling in for the first time German instructors. One of these, a tall young officer with fair curly hair, some forty years later planned the campaign which laid the second French Empire in the dust, Field-Marshal Count von Moltke. Of the Turks, after the war with Russia, which followed shortly on Navarino, Moltke said: “The splendid appearance, the beautiful arms, the reckless bravery of the old Moslem horde had disappeared, yet this new army had one quality which placed it above the numerous host that in former times the Porte could summon to the field—it obeyed.”
Does the spirit of obedience still form one of the many good qualities of the Turkish soldier? It is hard to say, for this war has given instances of the old bravery and devotion, steadiness under fire, which means discipline, obedience; but against that you have evidence of the{222} contrary, of swarms of men straying away unarmed from their posts at the front, and hiding in the purlieus of Stamboul, while from Asia Minor come reports of whole divisions which had declined to take part in the Balkan War.
In the meantime the dismemberment of the Turkish Empire continued. By 1811 Milosh Obrenovi? had forced the Porte to relinquish all claims on Servia, and in 1832 a Bavarian Prince became King of an independent Greece. Some thirty years later the Russo-Turkish War gave autonomy to Bulgaria, Bosnia and Herzegovina were occupied by Austria, these events being followed by the independence of Roumania and Servia as kingdoms entirely free from any Turkish control. The last of Turkey’s conquered provinces became free when Tsar Ferdinand proclaimed himself ruler of all the Bulgarians. This last event synchronized with an expression of popular feeling engineered by a political association generally known as Young Turks.
It is a common saying that nothing changes in the East; it is also inaccurate, like most generalizations. Changes came, even to Turkey, through her contact with the West. Change comes very slowly to such a people as are the Turks, and when it does come it leaves behind more bewilderment among the bulk of the nation than is usually the case in Western races. Again, to the outside world the changes which have passed over the Ottoman Empire in recent years have seemed to come suddenly, because the effects had the appearance of precipitancy. Revolt, revolutionary changes, are nothing new in the Ottoman Empire, but till lately have passed more or less unnoticed, probably because their effects were not particularly striking.
Constantinople Seen from above Scutari; beyond it the Sea of Marmora and the distant coast where the lines of Chatalja end to southward.
Constantinople
Seen from above Scutari; beyond it the Sea of Marmora and the distant coast where the lines of Chatalja end to southward.
Such changes as have taken place occurred almost entirely in the European provinces of the Ottoman Empire, and may be said to have begun during the last century.{223} The European provinces of Turkey always contained factors making for the disruption of the Empire: subject races, alien in everything to their masters, centrifugal forces for a time controlled by military governors whose methods did not as a rule tend to bring about conciliation. The bonds that bound the provinces to the Central Government were none of the strongest before the days when an official’s every step was dictated to him by telegraph from the Porte, and local governors acted with great independence. Military pashas even made war on and concluded peace with each other, after the manner of medi?val dynasts. Some went even further, as did the Pasha of Janina. He started life as a brigand, and made himself pasha by the simple expedient of forging his commission. This trifling misdemeanour was overlooked by the Porte, as he was a strong man, and might be useful to the interests of the Empire, and, moreover, if it came to the worst, could always be disowned. As it happened, Ali Pasha was too strong, or the Central Government too weak, and so he went to lengths to which no other pasha had gone before him.
Ali Pasha’s lifetime fell into those days when Europe was big with revolution against ancient dynasties, and was tiring of time-honoured institutions. No doubt personal vanity, that strong incentive of revolutionaries, reformers, and others in search of notoriety, swayed Ali Pasha. He conducted a foreign policy quite independent of that pursued by the Porte, entered into negotiations with Napoleon or Pitt, as he deemed expedient, and generally acted with complete independence. Incidentally, Ali Pasha helped towards the dismemberment of his sovereign’s Empire by favouring the Greeks in their strivings after freedom; it was probably not his original intention. Ali Pasha very fittingly fell a victim to a conspiracy of those whom he had injured in one way or another.{224}
Another pasha to raise the banner of revolt was Passvan Oglou of Vidin, who, when the Porte sought to ............