The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire (24 page)

British doubts were intensified by the Tsar’s decision to send a special envoy to Constantinople. For Nicholas chose, not a seasoned and conciliatory diplomat like Orlov, but a turcophobe
soldier, Prince Alexander Menshikov. His appointment worried Nesselrode, who warned Menshikov that ‘the Ottoman Empire would dissolve at the first clash of arms’, adding that Tsar
Nicholas ‘did not wish to precipitate this
catastrophe’.
²⁷
But the Prince’s written instructions made it
clear that Nicholas expected him to interfere in Ottoman affairs far more than had Orlov, twenty years before. He was given a threefold task: to secure the dismissal of the pro- French Foreign
Minister, Mehmed Fuat; to conclude a treaty reasserting ‘Greek’ Orthodox privileges in Palestine; and to obtain formal acknowledgement of Russia’s right to protect Orthodox
Christians throughout the Ottoman lands. As a gesture of good will Sultan Abdulmecid might be told that, provided he rescinded every concession to the French, a secret defensive alliance would
safeguard his empire and his throne.

Menshikov landed at Galata in great state on the last day of February, having reviewed the Black Sea Fleet at Sebastopol before embarking in an armed paddle-steamer, the
Gromovnik
(‘Thunderer’). He speedily engineered the fall of the Foreign Minister by the simple expedient of refusing to deal with the Porte so long as Mehmed Fuad remained in office. With
Lavalette back in Paris and Stratford de Redcliffe still in England, the interests of France and of Britain were in the hands of chargés d’affaires rather than ambassadors, and both
were puzzled and alarmed by Menshikov’s menacing manner. The British chargé, Colonel Hugh Rose (for ten years consul- general in Beirut), was served by a good intelligence service
which informed him of Russian troop movements along the borders of the Danubian Provinces and naval preparations in Sebastopol. Rose thought war imminent. His French colleague, Vincente Benedetti,
sent an urgent message to Paris requesting the dispatch of a French naval squadron. Rose, without reference to London, appealed directly to Admiral Dundas in Malta, sending him details of an
anchorage in a bay near Smyrna to which he was at once to bring his fleet.
²⁸

The French squadron left Toulon for the Aegean on 25 March; but Admiral Dundas had no intention of sailing for Turkish waters without orders from the Admiralty, and these were not forthcoming.
Instead of support from the Royal Navy, Colonel Rose was faced with the precipitate return, on 5 April, of Stratford de Redcliffe in person. At first the ambassador played down the crisis:
Menshikov’s tone was ‘considerably softened’, Stratford informed the Foreign Secretary, Lord Clarendon, on 11 April, adding that ‘there was no
question of a defensive treaty’ between the Russian and Ottoman empires.
²⁹
Yet the fears of Rose and Benedetti were justified.
Tsar Nicholas had given serious consideration to plans for the Black Sea Fleet to land several divisions close to the mouth of the Bosphorus and surprise the Sultan and his capital before the other
Powers could intervene. This project did not become known for another half-century, but the possibility of such a contingency was examined, with remarkable insight, by Captain T. A. Blakely, RN, in
a report submitted to Stratford de Redcliffe a fortnight after his return to Constantinople. Another naval officer, William Slade, outlined means of defending the city against a Russian naval
assault in a memorandum completed three weeks later.
³⁰
Over the following five months the British ambassador was therefore able to provide the Porte
with shrewd advice based not only upon his long acquaintance with Ottoman affairs but upon careful military and naval assessments as well. When on 21 May Prince Menshikov left for Odessa, furious
with Abdulmecid for refusing Russia’s protective patronage, he blamed the British ambassador for having ‘bewitched’ the Sultan and the viziers with his ‘frantic
activity’.

Menshikov, like so many of his contemporaries, exaggerated Stratford de Redcliffe’s influence and his ascendancy over Ottoman policy. Even the British Foreign Secretary referred to him as
‘the
real
Sultan’ in a letter to a leading Scottish journalist that summer, and the historical legend which accused the ambassador of encouraging the Ottoman authorities to go to
war persisted for more than a century, though the opening of the archives showed that in fact he favoured the maintenance of peace and worked to promote a settlement of the Holy Places
dispute.
³¹
Stratford de Redcliffe did indeed stiffen Ottoman resistance to Menshikov’s hectoring diplomacy, and he brought new heart to the
Tanzimat
ministers—for example, in mid-May he induced Abdulmecid to entrust foreign affairs once more to Mustafa Resid. But the crisis was heightened by decisions taken in foreign
capitals rather than by the Porte. The Aberdeen cabinet in London ordered Admiral Dundas to Turkish waters on 5 June in response to anti-Russian demonstrations in Britain; Stratford de Redcliffe
did not ask for the dispatch of the warships.
³²
And when Dundas’s squadron sailed from Malta, their destination was not the
Smyrna littoral—as Rose had suggested—but Besika Bay, an anchorage in the lee of the island of Tenedos (Bozcaada), barely twenty miles from the ancient Hellespont. To avid
newspaper readers in Britain, the thought of a fleet off the Dardanelles was more gratifying than reports of a squadron inconspicuously at anchor over a hundred miles down the coast. Unfortunately,
in Constantinople as in London and Paris, public feeling became dangerously excited by tales of foreign warships heading for the Straits in support of the Ottoman cause. Stratford de Redcliffe well
understood this: Lord Aberdeen, Lord Clarendon and the Emperor Napoleon III did not.

Early in July the Russian army crossed the river Pruth and, as in 1848, occupied the Danubian Principalities. On this occasion Nesselrode made it clear that the troops would remain in Moldavia
and Wallachia until the Sultan accepted Menshikov’s demands. The Russian move infuriated the Austrians, whose trade would suffer if war came to the lower Danube, and an ambassadorial
conference in Vienna produced a compromise intended to settle all disputes between the Russian and Ottoman empires by reaffirming the rights of Orthodox believers among the Sultan’s subjects,
while defining more closely the privileges accorded to Russia by the treaties of Kuchuk Kainardji and Adrianople. Nesselrode was prepared to accept the ‘Vienna Note’, although with an
‘interpretation’ more favourable to the Tsar than the ambassadors had intended. Rather strangely, it was assumed in Vienna that Abdulmecid and Re
ş
id would follow suit.

The Porte, however, was angered by the whole episode. Re
ş
id regarded the ambassadorial conference as a double slight on the Sultan’s sovereign authority: no Ottoman spokesman was consulted
over the proposed compromise; and the Note was sent to the Tsar before being notified to the Sultan. The ambassadors in conference had ‘taken upon themselves to draw up a Note without the
knowledge of the party more immediately concerned’, Re
ş
id complained.
³³
Stratford de Redcliffe persuaded Abdulmecid to offer to confirm, in
general terms, the ‘ancient privileges of the religion professed’ by ‘the Emperor of Russia’; but the Vienna Note remained unacceptable. To the British Foreign Secretary,
writing to a friend, it was ‘shocking’ and ‘incredible’ that the ‘horrible
calamity’ of war should threaten Europe because of ‘two
sets of barbarians quarrelling over a form of words’.
³⁴

Clarendon’s indignation shows, yet again, the failure of the Europeans to appreciate the mood in Constantinople. The newspapers carried reports of mounting anger in the capital and the
towns around the Bosphorus, where naturally xenophobic mobs threatened European lives and property; but no commentator saw these events as decisive for Abdulmecid personally. Yet in retrospect it
is clear that the fate of the Sultanate was in the balance that summer. At the start of the century Selim III had sought to modernize the army; it turned against him. Mahmud II had continued the
task; his reign ended in disaster at the hands of his Egyptian vassal. Abdulmecid had made the creation of a reformed conscript army the first object of the
Tanzimat
; and now, fourteen years
after his accession, he was facing the great challenge of his reign. A victorious military campaign would finally silence the critics of westernization: appeasement of Russia would almost certainly
cost him his throne.

In the second week of August the Sultan’s policies were strikingly vindicated, with proof of the renewed vitality they had brought to his empire. Modern Egypt’s founder-Viceroy,
Muhammad Ali, and his soldier son Ibrahim had died within a few months of each other in the winter of 1848–9, and in 1853 the reigning Viceroy was Muhammad Ali’s grandson, Abbas Hilmi.
In politics and religion Abbas was conservative, prepared to travel to Rhodes in 1850 for a meeting with Abdulmecid, to whom he paid respectful homage as Sultan and Caliph.
³⁵
In this role of faithful vassal Abbas dutifully raised an expeditionary force to fight for the Ottomans in any war with Russia; and accordingly, on 12 August, a powerful
Egyptian fleet reached the Golden Horn, bringing 35,000 well-trained and disciplined men to augment the Sultan’s army. Soon, with a nice touch of historic irony, the Egyptians were at Unkiar
Skelessi and Büyükdere, their green tents pitched where Mahmud’s Russian minders had encamped in 1833 after Ibrahim’s victory at Konya. The presence of the Egyptian force
convinced the Sultan’s subjects in his capital that Abdulmecid was a worthy successor of Selim I and Suleiman, sovereign of an Islamic empire that still stretched from Danube to Nile.

By early September Stratford de Redcliffe knew he might delay the coming of war, but could hardly prevent it. Throughout that month there was much lawlessness in the
capital: religious fanaticism inflamed public opinion against foreigners, while hotheads among the
ulema
called for the proclamation of a Holy War (jihad) against Russia. Eventually on
Tuesday, 4 October, the ambassador received instructions from London authorizing him to summon Dundas’s squadron from Besika Bay to protect Constantinople from a Russian assault, or to keep
order in the city if grave rioting undermined the Sultan’s authority. Stratford, however, delayed summoning the ships up to the Bosphorus, knowing that their presence would encourage still
further the more bellicose of the Sultan’s ministers.
³⁶

It was too late to save the peace. Already the Sultan had girded himself with the Sword of the Prophet as a pledge of war against the Infidel; and, on that same Tuesday, Omer Pasha as Ottoman
commander on the Danube sent an envoy to Russian headquarters in Wallachia with an ultimatum demanding an immediate evacuation of the Principalities. For three weeks nothing happened, to the anger
of fiery russophobes in the capital; renewed rioting at last induced Stratford de Redcliffe to summon the fleet from Besika Bay on 20 October—the anniversary of Navarino, as he wryly
remembered.
³⁷

Three days later Turkish and Egyptian troops made surprise crossings of the Danube near Tutrakhan and attacked Russian outposts thirty miles south of Bucharest. When news of Omer’s
initiative reached Stamboul, there was wild rejoicing. With a modernized Ottoman army north of the Danube, huge camps of reinforcements on either shore of the Bosphorus, and French and British
warships off the Golden Horn, what could go wrong? The ‘sick man’ had sprung suddenly to life.

C
HAPTER
9

D
OLMABAHCHE

A
T FIRST THE MOMENTUM OF
O
MER
P
ASHA
’
S OFFENSIVE HELD
promise of early
victory. In the Principalities the Russian commander on the lower Danube, Prince Michael Gorchakov, was forced to fall back to new defensive positions around Bucharest, while from the southern
Caucasus Prince Vorontsov complained that his armies were below strength; it would be impossible, Vorontsov warned the Tsar, to hold the foothills of the Georgian mountain chain the next spring if
the Turks were able to ferry men and munitions to the Caucasus.
¹
But the buoyant mood of elation in the Ottoman capital did not last more than a few
weeks. The coming of winter froze all activity along the battle fronts in Europe and in Asia; and before the end of the year, the naval balance in the Black Sea had swung decisively in favour of
the Russians.

On 24 November Admiral Nakhimov’s flotilla from Sebastopol was cruising along the Anatolian coast when it sighted the masts of the main Ottoman fleet in harbour at Sinope. The Russians
sailed away again, back towards Sebastopol, only a hundred miles across the Black Sea. But Nakhimov’s sortie convinced the Turkish commander, Osman Pasha, that a Russian fleet would soon
return in strength. He therefore sent a fast frigate to the Bosphorus, seeking reinforcements. But Sinope was three times as far from Constantinople as from Sebastopol, and disaster struck before
any help could reach Osman. A wise commander would have put to sea: Osman, ignoring the lessons of Cesme and Navarino, remained close inshore. His prediction, however, was perfectly correct. Six
days after his reconnaissance, Admiral Nakhimov returned; and this
time he commanded a squadron so powerful that it could concentrate 720 guns on the Turkish fleet and the
shore batteries around Sinope. Most of the Ottoman vessels were sunk or, like Osman’s flagship, ran aground while manoeuvring to give battle, and were captured. Fires, fanned by a strong
inshore wind, spread from the stricken warships to envelop the straggling town. Only one Ottoman vessel, a steam-powered auxiliary under an English captain, escaped destruction. Forty-eight hours
later this sole survivor sailed up the Bosphorus, bringing news of the disaster to Sultan Abdulmecid and to the commanders of the Anglo-French fleet at anchor off his palace. If Nakhimov decided to
exploit his victory, only the allied squadron could give Constantinople an outer shield of protection. But to do so the allies would have to break precedent, and sail out into the Black Sea.