The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire (23 page)

Along the Ottoman Empire’s north-western frontier, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, there was even more open hostility to the
Tanzimat
reforms. For the past fifty years the
landowners—southern Slav in race and speech but conservatively Muslim in religion and outlook—had resisted every attempt at westernization made by successive Sultans. Mahmud II’s
formal abolition of feudalism finally destroyed the
Kapetanate
, the privileged caste of forty-eight beys who, when the Empire was at its zenith, had been entrusted with administering the
subdivisions of Bosnia in return for raising
sipahi
detachments for the Sultan’s cavalry. But the
Kapetanate
went down fighting, literally. Open revolt against Mahmud in 1837
was followed by an even wider rebellion when reports of the Gülhane Decree held out a promise of legal equality and social upgrading for Christians and Jews. Not until March 1850 did a
powerful Ottoman army under Omer Lutfi Pasha finally suppress the Bosnian beys in a three-day battle beside the shores of Lake Jezero. Omer entered
Jajce in triumph, having
already routed the Herzegovinan Muslim notables outside Mostar.

As a historical figure, Omer Lutfi is more familiar under the name ‘Omar Pasha’, the renowned soldier of the Crimean War and the first eminent commander of a modernized Ottoman
army.
¹⁶
He was born Michael Lotis (sometimes spelt ‘Lattas’) in Croatia in 1809 and became an Austrian army cadet, but while he was still
under twenty he deserted and crossed the mountains into Bosnia. He was commissioned in the Ottoman army and, having apostatized, took the name of the second of the seventh-century caliphs. Mahmud
II promoted him to the rank of major and appointed him military instructor of the boy-prince Abdulmecid. He gained an important victory over Ibrahim in the hills north-east of Beirut in October
1840, but was much criticized by the foreign consuls for the ruthless way in which he subsequently restored the Sultan’s authority in the Lebanon. This rigorous maintenance of discipline Omer
brought back to Bosnia, where he undertook operations in a terrain he had known since his boyhood. Inevitably he incurred the wrath of the Austrians, who regarded him as a renegade from Habsburg
service.

During ten years of virtual anarchy in Bosnia the Austrians several times sent columns forward from Croatia, ready to advance their frontier if the Ottomans failed to re-establish effective
government. There appear to have been at least three occasions in this troubled decade when Austrians and Russians discussed a hypothetical partition of the Ottoman Empire: Serbia, Bosnia and
Herzegovina would fall to Austria, while Russia would establish client kingdoms in the eastern Balkans.
¹⁷
Yet these exchanges did not produce any
clear-cut partition plan. If they show anything at all, it is Nicholas I’s growing conviction that the decay of the Ottoman system of government could not be arrested by a fine-sounding
programme of reform.

Not that Tsar Nicholas thought highly of Metternich’s Austria, either. ‘Sick, very sick,’ he commented privately on the Habsburg monarchy early in 1846, thereby coining the
metaphor he was later to apply more famously to another neighbour.
¹⁸
The Tsar’s verdict on Austria appeared sound. The revolutions of 1848,
beginning dramatically in
France and the Italian peninsula, spread to the German-speaking lands and to the Danubian basin, outwardly destroying Metternich’s Europe. No
European government wished to see the Eastern Question posed at a time of convulsion in so many other parts of the continent. With tacit approval from Palmerston in London, as well as from Sultan
Abdulmecid, the Tsar ordered his army across the river Pruth and into Moldavia and Wallachia to root out a suspected hornet’s-nest of Roumanian patriot radicals in Bucharest. The consequent
two-and-a-half-year Russian occupation of the Danubian Principalities aroused little protest in itself: no one seriously disputed Nesselrode’s claim that the Russian move was justified by the
treaty terms of both Kuchuk Kainardji and Adrianople. The revolutions did not spread into the Ottoman Empire.

What caused concern in London and Paris was the Tsar’s failure to be content with occupying Moldavia and Wallachia. By July 1848 his troops were spread around the arc of the Carpathians,
as if hovering over both the Habsburg and the Ottoman empires. There they might have halted, had it not been for the needs of the young Emperor Francis Joseph; in the early spring of 1849, four
months after his accession, he sought Russian aid in restoring Habsburg authority along the central Danube; and Tsar Nicholas responded by sending two armies from the Principalities across the
frontier into Transylvania to stamp out Kossuth’s nascent independent Hungarian state.

Russian intervention in Hungary had two important consequences for the Eastern Question. In Europe as a whole it completed a diplomatic revolution: there was such widespread sympathy in London
for Kossuth and his cause that the westward march of the Tsar’s armies finally ended the fragile Anglo-Russian entente which had struggled on for nearly ten years. Britain and France began to
act together, while Tsar Nicholas assumed he could count on close support from Vienna for his policies. Secondly, the suppression of the Hungarian revolution forced Kossuth himself, and four Polish
generals who had fought for him, to seek asylum within the Ottoman Empire. In September and October 1849 the Sultan and Re
ş
id, encouraged by Stratford Canning and the presence of a British naval
squadron in the Dardanelles, stubbornly refused to surrender Kossuth and the Polish refugees to the Austrian and Russian
governments. Not even the peremptory withdrawal of
the Russian and Austrian ambassadors to the Sublime Porte made Abdulmecid waver.
¹⁹

The crisis gave the
Tanzimat
ministers a diplomatic success. Mehmed Fuat travelled to Bucharest and on to St Petersburg, successfully negotiating with the Russians an agreement by which
the Tsar would give up his demand for the surrender of the Polish refugee generals, provided that the Ottomans undertook to keep them away from the borders of the Russian Empire. The Austrians,
too, abandoned their insistence that Kossuth should be handed over. Yet in both Vienna and St Petersburg there was some satisfaction that, even if the Sultan had refused to give way, at least
Palmerston was prepared to acknowledge a breach of international law. He admitted that in taking his warships up the Dardanelles as far as Chanak (Cannakale) the British Admiral, Sir William
Parker, had broken the Straits Convention—although Parker had, in fact, responded to an appeal for support from the British consul at the Dardanelles, Frederic Calvert.
²⁰

Admiral Parker’s penetration of the Dardanelles set a bad precedent. It was the first in a series of provocative measures which culminated in the Crimean War. With one exception—a
punitive campaign undertaken by Omer in Montenegro in 1852, halted under the threat of Austrian intervention—these actions were assertions of sea power by the rival European navies, generally
to support intimidating demands on the Ottoman Government by overbearing envoys to the Sublime Porte; and it could be argued that naval power was also the principal issue at stake in the Crimean
War itself, at least in Black Sea waters. But the protracted crisis which posed the Eastern Question in its most acute form was caused, not by battleship diplomacy, but by the revival of an old
dispute: in May 1850 the Foreign Ministry in Paris ordered the ambassador in Constantinople to assert French rights to defend the privileges of ‘Latins’ (Roman Catholics) in Jerusalem,
Nazareth and Bethlehem, complaining that ‘Greeks’ (Orthodox monks protected by Russia) were excluding them from the Holy Places.
²¹

There was nothing new in the French claim, which was based on a treaty concluded in Mahmud I’s reign. Both Louis XVIII in 1819 and Louis Philippe in 1842 had sought electoral capital by
backing ‘Latins’
against ‘Greeks’ in Palestine, and most foreign governments assumed that the latest ruler of France, Prince-President Louis
Napoleon, would similarly lose interest in the Holy Places once his position at home was secure. But on this occasion the wrangle dragged on. Tsar Nicholas I remained intensely suspicious of Louis
Napoleon, and the neo-Bonapartist system of plebiscitary government left the Prince-President needing support from the clergy-dominated French provinces, certainly until November 1852 when a
referendum gave overwhelming backing to the return of Empire and he became the Emperor Napoleon III.

Sultan Abdulmecid wished to avoid antagonizing ‘Latins’ or ‘Greeks’. In February 1852 he devised a compromise which offered concessions to the French over the vexed
question of Latin access to the churches in Bethlehem but gave secret assurances to the Russians that there would be no change ‘in the existing state of things’. The compromise was
welcomed by Stratford Canning (now Viscount Stratford de Redcliffe), who four months later left Constantinople, ‘perhaps’ (as he thought) ‘never to return’. But even before
Stratford de Redcliffe reached England, there was renewed crisis in the capital. Both the Russians and the French suspected they had been duped by the compromise. Moreover, Louis Napoleon hoped
that with the Great Elchi’s departure for home a French diplomat might speedily acquire the influence at the Porte he had so long enjoyed. By chance the French ambassador, the Marquis de
Lavalette, was in Paris for consultations. In June Louis Napoleon ordered him back to his post; and he was told to make so impressive a return to Constantinople that all the residents of the city,
Turks and foreigners alike, should be well aware of his coming.

Accordingly, in mid-July Lavalette sailed up the Dardanelles and into the Bosphorus aboard the most formidable warship in the world, the ninety-gun steam-powered
Charlemagne
. In
penetrating the Straits the French navy committed a further breach of the 1841 Convention, but the Porte allowed this technicality to pass without complaint. The warship’s presence greatly
impressed the Ottoman authorities, as Louis Napoleon had anticipated: here, lying off the Sultan’s palace, was a floating fortress able to master ‘the most rapid currents of the
Bosphorus by the sole power of the screw’;
²²
and supporting the
Charlemagne
in
the eastern Mediterranean was a
powerful squadron which, at the end of July, threatened to bombard the Lebanese port of Tripoli when the Ottoman governor refused to surrender French deserters. The apparent primacy of French
sea-power ensured that, from July 1852 until his recall to Paris seven months later, Lavalette called the tune in Constantinople. His nominees became Grand Vizier and Foreign Minister; and in
October and again in December 1852, instructions were sent to Jerusalem requiring the ‘Greeks’ to make concessions to the ‘Latins’ at Bethlehem.

No phase of the Eastern Question has provoked so much historical debate nor received such close attention in the West as the events of the following fifteen months—not least because the
resultant conflict is the only occasion upon which French and British troops have fought together against the regular, organized army of a Russian state, Tsarist or Soviet. Yet during the winter of
1852–3 there were statesmen in both St Petersburg and London prepared to work for renewed Anglo-Russian collaboration, as in 1839–40, rather than fatalistically accept a drift into war.
At Christmas in 1852 the Foreign Office and Stratford de Redcliffe (now in London) still sympathized with ‘Greeks’ rather than with ‘Latins’ over the Holy Places dispute.
But Tsar Nicholas gravely misunderstood the mood in London. He believed that, like him, the British Government regarded the pusillanimous behaviour of the Porte as a sign of feeble corruption among
Abdulmecid’s ministers, despite the high-sounding intentions of the
Tanzimat
reforms. Nesselrode warned his imperial master that any discussion with the British of ‘plans for an
uncertain future’ would be ‘both dangerous and utterly useless’, forcing London back into a suspicious hostility which it would prove hard to overcome.
²³
Against Nesselrode’s advice, Nicholas decided to sound out Lord Aberdeen’s new Whig–Peelite coalition ministry over possible partition plans, should
the Ottoman Government prove unable to resist foreign pressure or quell internal upheaval. On 9 January 1853, in a conversational aside to the British ambassador (Hamilton Seymour) as he was
leaving a private concert, Nicholas I for the first time applied his anthropomorphic metaphor of ‘sick man’ to the Ottoman Empire: ‘The country is falling to pieces—who can
say when?’ Nicholas said, according to the entry Seymour made in his diary that night.
²⁴

When Seymour wrote up the conversation two days later in a formal dispatch to the Foreign Office, he gave the famous metaphor a greater emphasis than in the entry in his
private journal. And when in late January and early February the Tsar on four occasions received Seymour in private audience, the ambassador faithfully reported Nicholas’s words, catching
precisely the melodramatic tone with which he tended to heighten all his pronouncements.
²⁵
Inside the Winter Palace these remarks of the Tsar seemed
in accord with the setting—like Rastrelli’s masterpiece they were grandiose, over-elaborate and artificial enough not to be taken too seriously; but read dispassionately in Westminster
in an ambassador’s dispatch, they caused a stir. Nicholas seemed to be putting forward plans to carve up the Ottoman Empire: ‘England’ might receive possession of Crete and a free
hand in Egypt in return for the creation of Russian satellite states in the Balkans.

Briefly it seemed as if the survival of the Sultan’s empire depended on the European chancelleries. So at least it was assumed in London, where the significance of Nicholas’s
‘sick man’ talks with Seymour was much exaggerated. Ever since Catherine the Great’s ‘Greek Project’, hypothetical partition plans had from time to time enlivened
Russo-Austrian diplomacy; they figured, too, in Franco-Russian exchanges during the Tilsit era. But the redrawing of maps on this scale was an unfamiliar pastime in Downing Street. The Aberdeen
coalition cabinet—which contained more ministers skilled in foreign affairs than any other British government, before or since—was highly suspicious of this newest twist to Russian
policy.
²⁶
Why, the ministers wondered, did the Tsar prefer a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ to a formal treaty? And was it Seymour’s
reporting, or Nicholas’s imprecision, that clouded with such vagueness the ‘commercial policy’ Britain and Russia might pursue after the Ottoman Empire’s disintegration?