CHAPTER XXVI
The Ottoman Sultan Mahmoud II deserved better than he got. He was, in many ways, an enlightened ruler and reformer, who did everything within his power to modernise his creaking empire. In 1826 he had got rid of the janissaries–for five hundred years the empire’s crack military corps, but now becoming increasingly mutinous–by the simple expedient of massacring them wholesale. He established a new army, under his own direct control and trained by German instructors, with a military college modelled on Napoleon’s Saint-Cyr; he slashed the power of the religious ulema, depriving them of their secular responsibilities; he centralised and to some extent streamlined his civil service; he virtually introduced modern principles of education; he inaugurated a postal service and the first Turkish-language newspaper in Istanbul; he established a school of medicine and introduced new laws on public health. Finally–and perhaps rather sadly–he abolished the old Turkish dress. Away went the long robes and turbans, the billowing pantaloons and soft slippers. In came the fez, the frock coat, the European trousers and the black leather boots.
It was sad indeed for him that he had to preside over the loss of his navy, of southern Greece and of several other previously Ottoman territories–and then was still obliged to cope with that perennial thorn in his flesh, Mohammed Ali in Cairo. As a reward for his intervention in the Peloponnese, Mohammed Ali had expected the pashalik of Syria; Mahmoud, however, had fobbed him off with Crete, which his viceroy considered shamefully inadequate. In the spring of 1832 Mohammed Ali therefore sent his son Ibrahim with an army to Syria, instructing him to occupy it by force. Ibrahim obeyed him to the letter. Gaza fell, and Jerusalem, and–after a short siege–Acre; Ibrahim then swept north to Damascus and Aleppo, whence he led his army through Anatolia until he was threatening Istanbul itself.
With his capital now in a state not far short of panic, the Sultan sent an urgent plea to London for aid. The British Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, however, was not interested; Mahmoud had no choice but to call upon his old enemy Russia. Tsar Nicholas, ever ready to meddle in Turkish affairs, asked nothing better; early in 1833 he landed 18,000 troops at Scutari, directly across the Bosphorus from Istanbul. Against such a force Ibrahim knew that he had no chance; sensibly enough, he decided to negotiate. By this time Palmerston had woken up to the seriousness of the situation, as had the French government; together they prevailed upon the Porte to insist on the Russians’ withdrawal, in return for certain major concessions. Mohammed Ali was confirmed in the pashaliks of Egypt and of Crete, and was now in addition presented with that of Syria, which included Damascus, Tripoli, Aleppo and Adana. Simultaneously but in a separate treaty, Mahmoud confirmed an offensive and defensive agreement with Russia, a secret clause of which gave Russian warships the right to pass freely through the straits from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean–a privilege denied to all other foreign powers without Turkish consent.230
The Sultan had successfully averted both the Russian and the Egyptian threats, but he had paid a heavy price. With the whole of the southeastern Mediterranean under his control, Mohammed Ali was now a serious rival, and although Syria had been specifically awarded to him for his lifetime only, Mahmoud was well aware that he had every intention of turning his possessions into what would effectively be an independent hereditary monarchy. Five years later he was proved right, when in 1838 Mohammed Ali refused to pay his annual tribute to the Porte. The Sultan seized his opportunity and the following year declared war, sending an army of 24,000 and a supporting fleet to Syria with explicit orders to drive out the Egyptians once and for all.
The result, from his point of view, was catastrophic. On 24 June Ibrahim’s army, though heavily outnumbered, routed Mahmoud’s forces at Nezib in northern Syria. Thanks to generous Egyptian bribes vast numbers of Turkish troops deserted, while the commander of the fleet–presumably for much the same reason–sailed it straight to Alexandria; and on 1 July 1839, the very day that Sultan Mahmoud died in Istanbul, handed it over to Mohammed Ali. The French, who believed their own best interests to lie with Egypt, declined to take any action, but the other powers were horrified. On 15 July 1840 a conference in London, presided over by Palmerston himself and including both Austria and Prussia, presented Mohammed Ali with an ultimatum. He must withdraw all his troops from northern Syria and Crete and return the Turkish fleet to Istanbul. If he did so, he would be recognised as hereditary Pasha of Egypt, and Pasha of southern Syria for his lifetime; if he refused, the British and Russian fleets would together put both Egypt and Syria under a blockade.
In the hopes of receiving substantial aid from France–which, it need hardly be said, was not ultimately forthcoming–Mohammed Ali refused, and the British at least were as good as their word. That autumn a British squadron under Captain Charles Napier bombarded the forts of both Beirut and Acre and destroyed them; it even landed an expeditionary force, also commanded by Napier, which with the help of the local Arabs–who had greatly suffered under Mohammed Ali’s regime–easily defeated the Egyptian army of occupation at the battle of Boharsef (one of the Royal Navy’s most unlikely victories). The French, furious at what they denounced as unprovoked aggression, threatened war but were not taken very seriously; as King Louis-Philippe himself was later to point out, there was all the difference in the world between threatening war and making it. Napier then sailed on to Alexandria, which would surely have suffered the same fate as the two Syrian ports if Mohammed Ali had not agreed to negotiate. He hastily returned the Turkish fleet to Istanbul and resumed his annual tribute to the Sultan, withdrawing altogether from Syria and Crete.
The old ruffian lived on until 1849, dying at the age of eighty. He continued to rule as hereditary Pasha of Egypt and Sudan, but always under Ottoman suzerainty. And he made no further attempts at territorial expansion. He was a man of high intelligence and, we are told, great personal charm. He was also energetic and efficient: his rule in Egypt certainly marked a dramatic improvement on what had gone before. But he was uneducated and possessed no real political vision or ideology. He governed by Ottoman principles and, though he went some way towards creating a new and more forward-looking society, much of his time was spent consolidating his own position and resisting repeated attempts by sultan after sultan to get rid of him. In this he was remarkably successful. The dynasty that he established was to last well over a hundred years, until the middle of the twentieth century, and if he missed his opportunity of laying the foundations of a modern Egyptian state, he at least cleared the way for his successors. If they too failed, the blame for their failure can hardly attributed to him.
One April day in 1827 Hussein, Dey231 of Algiers, angrily struck the French consul three times with his fly-whisk. Outraged at such treatment of its official representative, the French government despatched a naval squadron to the city to demand an apology and reparations. When the Dey refused, the consul and all French residents were put on board the ships and Algiers blockaded. Then, in July 1830, a French expeditionary force landed at Sidi-Ferruch, some twenty miles to the west of Algiers, while the city itself was simultaneously subjected to a formidable naval bombardment. It fell a few weeks later. The Dey went into exile. The French occupation of Algeria had begun.
The occupiers did not, however, have it all their own way. As early as 1832 fighting broke out in the interior under a twenty-five-year-old resistance leader named Abd el-Kader and continued for the next fifteen years, but by the time Abd el-Kader surrendered in 1847 to Marshal Thomas-Robert Bugeaud, French colonists were pouring into Algeria. Already by 1841 there were over 37,000 of them, and well before the end of the century they accounted for a good 10 percent of the total population. It was, they found, an easy place in which to settle–indeed, many different peoples had already done so: Carthaginians, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs and Turks. Recently the power of the Barbary corsairs had grown to the point where they were virtually the masters of the land–though not its governors, if only because they made no attempt to govern. What is unquestionable is the fact that under the French army and Bugeaud’s bureaux arabes Algeria was more efficiently and more fairly administered than it had been for many centuries.
Along the coast and in the northern mountains, the Algerian climate is typical of the Mediterranean, with warm, dry summers and mild, rainy winters. Before the arrival of the French the land had been by no means uncivilised–as early as 1834 a French general noted that illiteracy hardly existed, since every village boasted two schools–but although technically under Ottoman domination its successive governments had been chronically unstable: of the Dey’s twenty-eight predecessors, over half had met a violent death. Property rights were vague, and to the French unimportant. Addressing the National Assembly in 1840, Bugeaud made his own opinion clear: ‘Wherever there is fresh water and fertile land, there we have to put settlers [colons], without concerning ourselves as to whom these lands belong.’ On the other hand, there were about a million hectares–some 4,000 square miles–which had been the property of the Ottoman government and which the French could be said to have inherited, together with other vast tracts which had been taken over, either because they were lying uncultivated or as the result of some malfeasance on the part of the former owners.
In the early days Bugeaud’s regime was fairly dictatorial, with relatively little comprehension between rulers and ruled. Gradually, however, the French attitude became more enlightened. Soon after the establishment of the Second Empire in 1852 Napoleon III was to say that, while he hoped that an increased number of settlers would keep Algeria French, it should be remembered that France’s first duty was to its three million Arabs. Algeria was ‘not a French province but an Arab country, a European colony and a French camp’. Military rule, however, was to continue until after the fall of the Second Empire in 1870. Before that time the Governor-General of Algeria–a title first given to Bugeaud in 1845–was almost invariably a high-ranking army officer. It was only in 1870 that thecolons–otherwise known as the pieds noirs–by now over 200,000 strong, insisted on more control over their own affairs, similar to that enjoyed by their compatriots across the Mediterranean. Algeria was now formally annexed, constituting an integral part of France itself, and was governed through the French Ministry of the Interior in Paris.
Because of this, Algeria’s position was essentially different from that of her neighbours to east and west, Tunisia and Morocco. Here too French influence was strong, but since there was relatively little immigration these two countries were deemed to be protectorates only and were dealt with by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the Quai d’Orsay. Tunisia too had been technically an Ottoman province, although in fact entirely autonomous. When in 1830 the French occupied Algiers, the reigning Bey of Tunis had cautiously accepted French assurances of non-intervention, but then in 1835 the Ottoman Empire seized the opportunity of a disputed succession in neighbouring Libya to depose the ruling dynasty there and re-establish direct Ottoman rule. Thereafter Tunisia found herself most delicately placed, sandwiched as she was between the two great powers of France and Turkey, both of which were casting covetous eyes upon her. It says much for the Bey and his successors that she performed a successful balancing act until 1881, when the French, on the flimsy enough pretext that a bunch of Tunisian tribesmen had settled in Algerian territory, invaded the country, transferred to France the Bey’s authority in finance and foreign affairs and appointed a French Resident Minister.
The Sultanate of Morocco–the only North African country with coastal exposure to both the Mediterranean and the Atlantic–was in a different position again. Because of its lack of natural harbours, its rugged mountainous interior and the immense distance separating it from imperial centres in the east, it was still, in the middle of the nineteenth century, very largely isolated. It was this isolation–encouraged by successive rulers–which had enabled it firstly to preserve, to a far greater degree than was possible elsewhere, its ancient Islamic, Berber and African traditions, and secondly to resist exterior pressures, notably that of the Spanish Reconquista in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Morocco thus remains the only Arab country never to have become part of the Ottoman Empire, which for so long controlled virtually all the rest of the Arab world.
The arrival of the French in neighbouring Algeria could not, however, be ignored. Relations deteriorated sharply in 1844, after the rebel Abd el-Kader took refuge in Morocco, and the Sultan despatched an army to the border. The French responded by bombarding Tangier in early August, and Mogador ten days later; on the 14th they virtually destroyed Sultan Moulay Abd el-Rahman’s army at Isly, near Oujda. The Sultan was obliged, inter alia, to promise that he would intern or expel the rebel should he ever again enter Moroccan territory. He proved as good as his word: in 1847, when Abd el-Kader sought refuge for the second time, he was arrested by Moroccan troops and forced to surrender. It comes as a relief to report that the French were merciful towards him: he was to spend the rest of his life in honourable exile in Damascus.
On the Sultan’s death in 1859, the spotlight briefly switches to Spain, with which a bitter dispute took place over the boundaries of the Spanish enclave at Ceuta.232 This ended in a declaration of war by Madrid and, in the following year, the Spanish capture of Tetouan, the Sultan being obliged to agree to a large indemnity and a considerable increase in the size of the Ceuta enclave. Meanwhile, the British and the Italians were also hoping somehow to win their slice of the Moroccan cake, but both were bought off by France: Britain agreed to give the French a free hand there in return for a French undertaking not to interfere with her own plans in Egypt, while Italy did much the same in relation to Libya. In 1880 the British, French, Spanish, Germans, Italians and Americans had concluded a convention at Madrid which–in theory at least–virtually guaranteed Moroccan independence, but this did not prevent France from concluding in 1904–with full British connivance–a secret treaty with Spain agreeing on respective ‘spheres of influence’ within the country. This was the situation when at the end of March 1905 Kaiser Wilhelm II arrived at Tangier on the liner Hamburg–and, as so often, put the cat among the pigeons. In his reply to the speech of welcome he declared first for the complete sovereignty and independence of the Sultan, second for the integrity of his realm, and third for ‘a Morocco open to the peaceful competition of all nations, without annexation or monopoly’.
It all sounded innocuous enough, but to the European powers it was clearly a deliberate attempt to put a spoke into the French–and to a lesser extent the Spanish–wheel. The previous year the Kaiser had proposed that Germany should lease Port Mahon in Minorca from Spain–an idea that had met a frigid reception from both France and Britain, the island being situated where it could command the approaches to Toulon and on a direct line between the two vital British bases of Malta and Gibraltar. The last thing either nation wanted was to have Wilhelm meddling once again in the affairs of the western Mediterranean. The whole issue was finally hammered out and–it seemed–satisfactorily resolved in 1906, when a conference of the signatories to the 1880 convention was called at Algeciras to discuss the whole Moroccan question. This reaffirmed the integrity of the country and the economic equality of the powers, but sanctioned French and Spanish policing of Moroccan ports and the collection of customs dues.
Even now the story was not quite over. In 1907 France–always eager to increase her influence in North Africa–occupied Casablanca; then Abd el-Hafid, the brother of the Sultan Abd el-Aziz, led a rebellion against him, claiming that he had betrayed Muslim traditions. Abd el-Aziz took refuge in Tangier, while in Fez Abd el-Hafid was proclaimed Sultan. He was duly recognised in the following year by the European powers, but never managed to impose order throughout the country and eventually, with disorder steadily increasing, was obliged to ask the French to rescue him. The result was the Treaty of Fez of 1912, by the terms of which Morocco became a French protectorate. Tangier, long the seat of the European diplomatic missions, was put under separate administration.
Finally, a word about Libya. Anyone who has ever visited the country will have been struck by its extraordinary geography. To the west–with its capital at Tripoli–is Tripolitania where, in sites like Leptis Magna or Sabratha, we can still feel the impact of ancient Rome; to the east is Cyrenaica–based on Benghazi–which, at Apollonia, Cyrene and elsewhere, immediately takes us back to the world of classical Greece. Between the two, however, are some six or seven hundred miles of virtually nothing, except the nondescript little town of Sirte at what is roughly the half-way mark. The country has probably been kept together by two things only: the Sanussi order that preached a puritanical form of Islam–though even this was largely concentrated in Cyrenaica–and, later, Italian colonialism.233 Like its neighbours, it had been more or less autonomous, although under nominal Turkish rule, until in 1835 the Ottoman Empire took advantage of one of the endless disputes over the succession to reimpose a direct government. For the next seventy-seven years the country was administered by civil servants from Istanbul, until in 1911 Italy took over, gave it its present name and governed it until after the Second World War.