CHAPTER XXXI
Greece, in her first years of independence, remained an unhappy land. Her new king in particular had been a disappointment. It was perhaps too much to hope that the seventeen-year-old Otto speaking not a word of Greek and not even a member of the Orthodox Church, would be able to endear himself to his swarthy, battle-scarred subjects. The King’s father, Ludwig I of Bavaria, in the name of the London Conference powers–Britain, France and Russia–had therefore appointed a Regency Council of three, all Bavarian, only one of whom had ever set foot in Greece. None showed the least sensitivity to local custom or tradition, introducing their own legal and educational systems, gagging the press and imposing taxes that were both oppressive and unjust. They continued in this way for almost three years–years that were known as the Bavarokratia, the Bavarocracy–but even after Otto came of age in 1835 there was little real change. Bavarian influence was as strong as ever, and was increasingly resented. Was it for this, the Greeks asked themselves, that they had fought so long and so valiantly? Their new rulers were even worse than the Turks.
Matters came to a head in 1843, when a virtually bloodless military coup forced Otto to grant a constitution. On paper, this seemed liberal enough, providing inter alia for nearly universal male suffrage (though women had to wait for their vote until 1952). Meanwhile, the Bavarian ministers were dismissed and replaced by a new ministry composed exclusively of Greeks, together with a Greek National Assembly. In fact, traditional Greek society had–thanks to the long Turkish occupation–evolved in a totally different manner from the societies of western Europe, and the people were quite unprepared for a sophisticated modern democracy; it seemed, nonetheless, that Greece had taken a significant step forward, and there were grounds for hoping that there might be better times ahead.
Alas, such hopes were vain. All that had happened was that a Bavarian oligarchy had been set aside in favour of a Greek one, even more ham-fisted than its predecessor. It was certainly understandable that, on the outbreak of the Crimean War in March 1854, the Greeks should have identified themselves emotionally with Russia–then the only other sovereign power with a national Orthodox Church–and violently opposed the Ottoman Empire, which had held them in thrall for nearly five hundred years. It was, on the other hand, sheer folly that led them to launch an utterly abortive invasion of Turkish-held Thessaly and Epirus, the only result of which was that British and French fleets occupied Piraeus, landing detachments of foreign troops which were to remain on Greek soil until 1857. So much, it seemed, for Greece’s newly acquired and much vaunted sovereign status.
In the last years of his reign Otto showed genuine patriotism for his adopted country, and was much influenced by what was known as the Great Idea: in essence, the elimination of the Ottomans and their replacement by a reborn Byzantium, a Greek Christian empire with its capital once again in Constantinople. But he was never popular with his subjects. In 1862, on one of his progresses round the Peloponnese, an insurrection broke out in the old Venetian fortress of Vonitza. Before the royal yacht could return to Athens, the government had proclaimed its king deposed. Otto returned to Germany and settled in Bamberg, where five years later he died.
The Powers had accepted his expulsion without protest, and his former subjects set about looking for a successor. The search took them two years. Their first choice was Prince Alfred, second son of Queen Victoria; unfortunately, however, it had been laid down in the agreements of 1827 and 1830 that no member of the reigning families of the three powers should occupy the Greek throne; the proposal was accordingly turned down flat. Only then was an approach made to the seventeen-year-old son of Christian IX of Denmark, whose sister Alexandra had recently married the Prince of Wales. His name, William, smacked too much of the north and was more or less unwritable in the Greek alphabet, but he was only too happy to change it; it was thus as King George I of the Hellenes that he was to ascend the throne in 1863 and occupy it for the next half-century until 18 March 1913, when he was assassinated in Thessalonica while taking an afternoon stroll.
King George’s reign got off to an auspicious start when Britain voluntarily–despite the powerful opposition of William Ewart Gladstone–ceded to Greece the Ionian Islands, which had been under its protection since 1815.268 It continued with another success: the introduction in 1864 of a new constitution, a huge improvement on that of 1844. George’s later popularity was largely due to his having adopted principles precisely contrary to those of Otto; instead of trying to impose his own personality and leadership he made a point of remaining a figurehead, interfering with government as little as possible and allowing his ministers a free hand to do much as they liked.
With the Ionian Islands now safely incorporated within the kingdom, the next territorial problem was posed by Crete. This island had a far longer experience of foreign domination: after four centuries under Venice, it had–unlike Corfu and most of its fellows269–already suffered two more under Ottoman rule, which was as firmly established as ever. In Venetian days it had been in a state of almost constant insurrection, and the War of Independence had still further increased nationalist feeling among the Christian population, to the point where the Cretans had now set their sights not simply on the expulsion of the Turks but on union with the new Greek kingdom. Crete had sent delegates to the National Assembly of Argos in 1829, but in the following year, as we have seen, Sultan Mahmoud had bestowed the island on Mohammed Ali as a reward for his services in the recent hostilities. This union with Egypt–unnatural, to say the least–lasted for only ten years; in 1840, furious at his viceroy’s insubordination, the Sultan took it back again.
To the Cretans it mattered little whether they were under the Egyptians or the Turks. Their call was for enosis, union with Greece. The insurrections continued, by far the bloodiest of them breaking out in 1866. It was in the course of this that Maneses, abbot of the monastery of Arkadion and one of the great heroes of Cretan history, blew up his powder magazine–though it may be wondered why monasteries had powder magazines–rather than surrender. The ensuing bloodbath, in which large numbers of women and children were killed in cold blood, caused an international scandal; the British government in particular came under severe censure when it was revealed that it had ordered the Royal Navy not to rescue Cretan civilians of whatever age or sex who were threatened with massacre, lest such operations be seen as departures from the strict neutrality which Britain was determined to preserve.
At last the Sultan, exasperated by the blatant support that was being given by the Greek government to the Cretan insurgents, presented it in 1868 with an ultimatum: within five days Greece must undertake to cease the equipment of ships designed for acts of aggression against Turkey. There were other points too, but they were academic; Greece angrily refused. Diplomatic relations were broken off, and a certain Hobart Pasha, a retired Royal Naval captain who had taken service with the Sultan and was now commanding the Turkish fleet, threatened the country with a blockade. War seemed imminent, but a conference of European ambassadors managed to persuade the Greeks to accept the Turkish terms and relations were resumed the following year. In return the Sultan granted Crete a constitution, which provided for a degree of self-government and–temporarily at least–soothed Cretan feelings.
In the summer of 1876 the Balkan peninsula burst into flame.270 The conflagration began when the Serbian Orthodox populations of Bosnia and Herzegovina rose up against their Ottoman masters. Serbia and the neighbouring principality of Montenegro–also Orthodox and Serbian-speaking–rallied to their aid, and it was then unthinkable that the only other Slav people in the Balkan peninsula, the Bulgars, should remain unmoved. Insurrection in the Vilayet of the Danube–as Bulgaria was officially styled–broke out in May 1876. It was in itself relatively insignificant, but it was suppressed with almost unbelievable brutality. In the village of Barak, which after a brief resistance had already surrendered, most of the male population was butchered; women and children were herded into the village church and school, both of which were then set on fire. Barak alone lost some 5,000 of its 7,000 inhabitants; it was estimated that the total number of Christians massacred in that one month fell not far short of 12,000.
The news was received with horror throughout the civilised world–particularly in Russia, where the Tsar instantly voiced his solidarity with his co-religionists. In London ‘the Bulgarian atrocities’ were the subject of a furious pamphlet by Mr Gladstone–at that time out of office–who also castigated the pro-Turkish policy of the Disraeli administration. The revulsion expressed on all sides had its impact even in Constantinople, where some 6,000 theological students staged a mass demonstration demanding the dismissal of the Grand Vizir and the Chief Mufti. Sultan Abdul-Aziz capitulated at once, but the demonstrators–and indeed the people as a whole–remained unsatisfied. From that moment, according to the British ambassador, ‘the word “constitution” was in every mouth’.
Meanwhile, the Turkish army had soundly defeated the Serbs, and would have marched on Belgrade had not the Powers–now joined by Germany and Austria–put their foot down just in time and insisted on an armistice. The Tsar and the Austrian Emperor together, supported by Germany, drew up what was known as the Berlin Memorandum, designed to put pressure on the Porte to institute radical reforms, and now requested British cooperation. Disraeli turned the request down flat. Britain, he pointed out, had not been consulted in advance, and refused to join the three powers ‘in putting a knife to the throat of Turkey’. Further, to bolster Turkish morale, he ordered a squadron of the Mediterranean fleet to take up its station at the mouth of the Dardanelles. Determined to avert the war on which Russia had clearly set its heart, he then called for a six-power conference, to be held at Constantinople the following December.
The situation in the city was not improved by the fact that the mental health of the Sultan was already giving rise to serious concern. Abdul-Aziz had succeeded his half-brother Abdul-Mejid in 1861. Few Sultans in modern times had been more terrifying. Nearly seven feet in height–his eight-foot bed may still be seen in the Dolmabahçe Palace–with a thick black beard and a ferocious temper, he seemed to many of his courtiers a throwback to the worst days of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1867, when he was thirty-seven, he had been invited by Napoleon III to France for the Great Universal Exhibition and had visited Vienna and London on the way. He had thus been the first Sultan in Ottoman history to set foot peaceably in Christian Europe, and the experience had gone badly to his head, instilling in him a determination to acquire a fleet of modern warships (despite an embarrassingly public attack of seasickness while reviewing the Home Fleet with Queen Victoria at Spithead) and a passion for railways, which he managed to bring to Constantinople only six years later. But with every year that passed his paroxysms of rage became more furious and ungovernable, and by 1876 his extravagance had brought the state to the brink of bankruptcy.
Thus it was that not long after the theologians had dispersed, in the early hours of 30 May of that terrible year, the Commander-in-Chief of the army, Hüseyin Avni, surrounded the Dolmabahçe with two battalions of infantry while a naval squadron drew up immediately opposite on the Bosphorus. On entering the palace he instantly found himself confronted by the Sultan, standing on the staircase in his nightshirt with drawn sword; when the act of deposition was presented, however, Abdul-Aziz offered no resistance and obediently boarded the state barge which was waiting to take him to the old palace of Topkapi. There he was lodged for the night–somewhat insensitively, it might be thought, in the room in which his predecessor Selim III had been murdered in 1808–before being rowed back the following day a little further up the Bosphorus to the 
irag'an Palace (next to which there today rises one of modern Istanbul’s most glamorous hotels). Just four days later he was found dead in his new apartment, having slashed his wrists with scissors. There were the usual rumours of something a good deal more sinister than suicide, but the testimony of eighteen doctors to the contrary seems finally to have been accepted.
All this should have been excitement enough; but the drama was only beginning. A week later, Abdul-Aziz’s favourite young Circassian wife died in childbirth, a tragedy which so affected her brother–who was serving as an equerry in the Sultan’s household–that on 14 June he burst into a meeting of the Council of Ministers, shooting dead both the Commander-in-Chief and the Foreign Minister. This latest development had a profound effect on the new Sultan, Murad V. Already, on hearing of his uncle’s death, he had fainted dead away and vomited for thirty-six hours; the news of the two later assassinations sent him into a deep depression, which his chronic alcoholism did little to relieve. On the last day of August he went the same way as Abdul-Aziz. This time, however, there were no scissors; Murad was to remain a prisoner in the C¸irag'an for the next twenty-eight years.
Of the new Sultan, Abdul-Hamid II, it can safely be said that he was an improvement on his two predecessors; he was not, however, a great improvement. Having lost his Circassian mother at the age of seven, he was virtually ignored by his father, Abdul-Mejid, and had retreated back into himself, totally without friends or even companionship. Cruel, scheming and vindictive as a man, weak and vacillating as a ruler, with a morbid fear of assassination which dominated his life and kept his public appearances to the minimum, he hated Abdul-Mejid’s Dolmabahçe with its exposed position on the shore of the Bosphorus, creating for himself a whole new seraglio–a centre of government and power–behind the high and impenetrable walls of his park at Yildiz, high in the hills above. From here this hunched and stooping figure, hook-nosed, black-bearded and sallow-skinned, always apparently cowering from some imagined attacker, spun his webs of intrigue, secretly received his regiments of spies and informers and directed, after a fashion, his crumbling empire.
Abdul-Hamid was not, one would have thought, the type of ruler to present his people with a constitution; he was, however, astute enough to realise that if he did not go at least some way towards assuaging popular discontent he might well become the third Sultan to lose his throne within that fateful year. He was also anxious to reassure the European delegates to the coming conference: after all, if it could now be seen that Turkey had a complete plan of her own for constitutional reform, what part was there for the Powers to play? It was certainly no coincidence that the decree promulgating the new constitution was published on the very morning the conference opened. But the delegates, it need hardly be said, remained unconvinced. Even the leader of the British party, the Marquess of Salisbury, who as Secretary of State for India in Disraeli’s administration might have been expected to share his chief’s sympathies, made no attempt to conceal his disgust. Unlike most of his fellows he was granted an audience with Abdul-Hamid, but described him afterwards as ‘a wretched, feeble creature, who told me he dared not grant what we demanded because he was in danger of his life’.271
Thus, thanks in part to the constitution–which, as soon became apparent, was not worth the paper it was printed on and was anyway soon suspended–and in part to the fact that the Sultan had no intention of granting autonomy to Bulgaria, Bosnia and Herzegovina simply because the Powers demanded it, the Constantinople conference was an utter failure. War was now inevitable.
The first nation to act was Russia, whose armies simultaneously crossed the European and the Asiatic frontiers of Turkey on 24 April 1877. A month later Romania declared her independence and joined the combatants, and before long the Turks were retreating on all fronts. At last, on 31 January 1878, the Sultan agreed to an armistice. It was virtually an act of surrender; even so, it did little to assuage the state of panic prevailing on the Bosphorus. There seemed a real possibility that, after more than four centuries, the Crescent might once again give way to the Cross.
But such a prospect held little appeal for Austria, which was now casting a covetous eye on Bosnia and Herzegovina, nor indeed for Britain, where Disraeli had always been a friend of Turkey and where the people, still remembering the Crimean War, lustily bellowed the contemporary music-hall song:
We don’t want to fight, but by jingo if we do,
We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too;
We’ve fought the Bear before, and while Britons shall be true,
The Russians shall not have Constantinople!
To emphasise the point still further, in mid-February Britain ordered a squadron from her Mediterranean fleet to sail up through the narrows into the Sea of Marmara, returning fire if necessary, and to take up a station opposite the city. If, as seems likely, this was intended to have a calming effect, it was unsuccessful. The Sultan was more terrified than ever, while the Russians chose to regard it as a hostile act and themselves advanced to the Marmara, halting only at San Stefano (now Ye
ilköy, site of the international airport). With Britain and Russia now drifting ever nearer to war, the Grand Duke Nicholas–commanding the Russian forces–agreed to advance no further, Admiral Sir Phipps Hornby consenting on his side to withdraw his ships to the Princes’ Islands, about eight miles south of the Golden Horn.272
Where the Greeks were concerned, recent events suggested that the Great Idea was perhaps no longer the pipe dream that it once had been; the vision of the Greek flag flying over St Sophia was not one that any true Greek could resist. There was the additional hope that open hostilities might encourage the Greek populations within the Ottoman Empire to rise in revolt, and insurrections did indeed break out in Thessaly and Epirus, and once again–inevitably–in Crete. Thus it was that Greece entered the field. Alas, her timing could hardly have been worse: she declared war on 2 February 1878, having no knowledge of the armistice concluded just forty-eight hours before. The Greek army, which had actually crossed the Turkish border, was–not without some embarrassment–hastily recalled. Peace was soon restored in Epirus and eventually in Thessaly also; in Crete, however, desultory fighting continued.
The armistice led directly to the Treaty of San Stefano, signed by the Russian and Turkish delegates on 3 March. It was an extraordinary agreement, satisfying as it did no one except Bulgaria, to which it would virtually have restored her once-great medieval empire, and putting an end to all Greek aspirations in Macedonia. Its other provisions do not concern us; suffice it to say that it could never possibly have worked. The Great Powers–now including also the Ottoman Empire–therefore met together just three months later at Berlin, where their deliberations initially proved a good deal more favourable to Greece; but the Ottoman government reneged on its promises, endlessly prevaricating and procrastinating, and it was three more years before the Greeks received even part of what they had been awarded. They eventually had to be content with Thessaly–admittedly a very valuable province, which had been Turkish for five centuries–and part of Epirus, including Arta.
Crete still remained in Turkish hands. In that same year of 1878, however, the Sultan granted it what was in effect a supplementary constitution. This established a General Assembly of forty-nine Christians and thirty-one Muslims, and decreed inter alia that Greek should be the language of both the Assembly and the law courts, and that half the annual revenues should go to the building of schools, hospitals, harbours and roads, on which virtually nothing had been spent since the days of the Venetians. This dispensation kept the island relatively quiet for a decade; it was not until 1889 that a new insurrection broke out, to be followed in 1896–97 by two more. These last were considerably more serious, the second of them resulting in a massacre of Christians in the streets of Canea and the burning of the Christian quarter of the town.
After these atrocities Greece could no longer remain inactive. Prince George, the King’s second son, left Salamis with a flotilla of torpedo boats to prevent the landing of reinforcements by the Turks; on 15 February 1897, 1,500 armed Greek volunteers landed near Canea–with memories of Garibaldi’s Redshirts in Sicily to spur them on–to take over the island in the name of the King. Perhaps, even at this point, firm and concerted action by the European powers might have prevented open hostilities, which neither the King nor the Sultan wanted, but such action was not forthcoming and on 17 April Turkey declared war.
The King himself had assured foreign visitors that in the event of war the Greek communities throughout the Sultan’s empire would rise up against their oppressors, and that most other Christian minorities would follow the Greek lead. Alas, nothing of the kind occurred; the Thirty Days’ War, as it came to be called, gave rise to an almost unbroken series of disasters for Greece. According to the Cambridge Modern History, ‘the Greek navy, which was superior to that of the Turks…effected nothing except the futile bombardment of Preveza, the capture of a cargo of vegetables at Santi Quaranta, and that of a Turcophil British Member of Parliament.’ On land, the Greek performance was very little better. It was lucky for Greece that the Powers intervened when they did and forced the belligerents to agree to an armistice. All Greek combatants were withdrawn from Crete, which was to be policed by an international force. Greece–already nearly bankrupt–had to pay a heavy indemnity to the Sultan; on the other hand, Abdul-Hamid was finally obliged to fulfil his twenty-year-old promise by the formal cession of Thessaly.
Only then did the Powers make a serious effort to solve the Cretan problem once and for all. The Sultan was persuaded to go one step further, giving the island autonomous status under Ottoman suzerainty. In November 1898 the last Turkish troops withdrew from Crete; and from the end of the year a High Commissioner in the person of Prince George, second son of the Greek King, governed from Canea, while British, French, Italian and Russian troops occupied the chief towns. Crete was given her own flag, coinage and postage stamps.
Abdul-Hamid’s grip had once again been loosened. Even then, however, he could not bring himself finally to let go. It was to be another fifteen years before the Cretans received their reward.
The Congress of Berlin did, however, affect the fate of one other major Mediterranean island. Cyprus had been under Ottoman rule since the Turks captured it from the Venetians in 1570. At first, among the vast majority of the people, the change of government was welcomed. The Turks had permitted the re-establishment of the Greek Orthodox Church, the hierarchy of which soon assumed the role of ambassador for its flock, engaging itself regularly as spokesman and mediator with the Turkish administration. The feudal system had been abolished; the serfs had been freed; once again Cypriots could own land–even though by doing so they became taxpayers. They were less happy, however, to see some 3,000 Turkish soldiers given land and settling permanently on the island–a development that was to have dire consequences in our own day. Strangers as the two communities were through both their language and their religion, there was little or no intermarriage. From the start, therefore, the Cypriots were sharply divided; divided they still remain.
With the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence, the Turkish governor of the island had become seriously alarmed. Summoning the Archbishop, Kyprianos, and other leading churchmen–they included the Bishops of Paphos, Kitium and Kyrenia and the Abbot of Kykko monastery–to Nicosia, he had had them murdered in cold blood.273 Other influential clerics were given asylum by the foreign consuls at Larnaca, but the power of the Cypriot hierarchy was, from one day to the next, dramatically eclipsed.
By the middle of the century conditions on the island had begun once again to improve. Sultan Abdul-Mejid undertook to accord equality of treatment to all his subjects regardless of race or creed, and abolished the iniquitous practice of tax-farming.274 He also ordered that the governorship should in future be by appointment, rather than sold to the highest bidder as it had been in the past. Then in 1869 came the exciting news of the Suez Canal, from which Cyprus stood to gain immeasurably in commercial importance. One of the first statesmen to realise this was Benjamin Disraeli, who managed to conclude with Turkey what was known as the Cyprus Convention. By its terms, Britain undertook to join the Sultan in the defence of his Asiatic dominions against any further Russian attack. The better to enable her to do this, the Sultan assigned to her Cyprus as what was called ‘a place of arms’ in the Levant, on payment of an annual tribute.
Until that moment, the only historical link between Britain and Cyprus had been the island’s conquest by Richard Coeur-de-Lion in 1191. Now–although technically it would remain part of the Ottoman Empire until its formal annexation by Britain in November 1914–it was once again effectively in British hands. Since surplus revenues were still payable to Constantinople, the island was always a financial liability; nonetheless, both before and after the annexation and over the next eighty years, Britain was to pour money into it, transforming its agriculture, initiating ambitious programmes of reforestation, constructing roads and public buildings. Cyprus, in short, had never had it so good–although among the Greek population thoughts of enosis were seldom far away.
One day in the late summer of 1901 Miss Helen Stone, an American Protestant missionary from Boston, was ambushed by Macedonian revolutionaries when travelling by cart near the town of Bansko. With her was her friend, known only as Madame Tsilka. The two were quickly surrounded and carried up into the mountains. It was only then that their captors discovered a complication: Madame Tsilka was pregnant. There was nothing they could do; they treated their captives with every consideration circumstances would allow until, one stormy December night in a village wine cellar, a healthy girl was born. Everyone was delighted; the health of mother and daughter was drunk all round; and when shortly afterwards the village was raided by Turkish troops and they all had to flee, Madame Tsilka rode by herself while one of the comitadjis, on another horse, carried her baby.
The ransom money, the equivalent of $66,000, was willingly supplied by the United States government (though the approval of President McKinley had to be assumed since he was at that moment on his deathbed, the victim of a terrorist’s bullet a few days before). The head of Miss Stone’s mission, a Dr House, himself carried the gold, packed in wooden chests, to Bansko, but he learned just in time that the Turks planned to seize it at the moment of collection. Having first courteously warned the kidnappers what he was doing, he therefore hid the money at a prearranged place and filled the chests with scrap iron. The Turks duly fell upon them and carried them all the way back to Serres before they discovered the deception. Meanwhile, the two ladies and the baby were released in the neighbouring town of Strumica. Everybody, it was felt, had behaved well; Miss Stone in particular was so delighted with her treatment that when she returned to Boston she became the foremost American champion of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation, soon to become famous as the IMRO.
By this time Macedonia had been part of the Ottoman Empire for over five centuries. It had given its conquerors no particular trouble until 1870, when Russia, determined to extend her influence in the Balkans through the Orthodox religion, persuaded Turkey to allow the formation of an autocephalous Bulgarian Church. This had inevitably roused the wrath of both Greece and Serbia. The Greek Patriarch declared the new Church to be schismatic, and violently resisted the spread of Bulgarian influence–national and cultural as well as ecclesiastical–in Macedonia. The Serbs, despite being fellow Slavs, felt much the same resentment towards their Bulgar neighbours. Thus began the three-sided contest for the province, which became quadrilateral with the appearance of the Macedonian separatists, who had founded IMRO as a secret society in 1896, somewhat naively choosing for its standard a black flag bearing a crimson skull and crossbones.
The Helen Stone affair gave the organisation just the international publicity it needed. The eyes of the Powers turned towards Macedonia, and the Ottoman government settled back with a sigh to the usual lectures by western ambassadors on the importance of further reforms in the Balkan lands–lectures which were given additional force by a dramatic increase in the number of bomb outrages in Thessalonica and elsewhere.275 All but one of the Powers, however, were fundamentally in favour of the continuation of Ottoman rule; only Britain wanted the complete withdrawal of Ottoman troops from the area.
What the Powers did not perhaps fully understand was that the Sultan had on his plate a number of more immediate concerns, the most important of which was another secret society, this time on his own doorstep: the Young Turks. This too seems to have originated in the last decade of the century–the very first cell is in fact said to have been formed by army medical students as early as 1889–and though its members were by no means all military, nearly all were from the young officer class. They were not, in these early stages, dedicated to the overthrow of the Ottoman Empire; all they wanted was reform, and in particular westernisation. They remained, nonetheless, a potentially dangerous threat, and as time went on gave ever-increasing anxiety to Abdul-Hamid’s secret police. Part of this anxiety was due to the fact that the Young Turks found a particularly fertile field for recruitment in the Balkan peninsula, especially Macedonia, adding yet another element to a region that was rapidly becoming a seething cauldron of unrest. There many of them established organisations of their own. One of these, founded in 1906, was the Vatan, or Fatherland Movement, the creation of a young staff captain of twenty-five born in Thessalonica, but whose political activities in Macedonia had already resulted in his transfer to distant Damascus. His name was Mustafa Kemal; thirty years later he would be known to the world as Atatürk–Father of the Turks.
Internal organisations like Vatan were of necessity secret; outside the empire, by contrast, the Young Turks sought as much publicity for their movement as they could get. They called their first congress in Paris as early as 1902; a second was held in the same city in December 1907, and it was soon after this second assembly that the leaders assumed the name of the Committee of Union and Progress (the CUP), establishing a permanent secretariat and absorbing many of the smaller societies–Vatan included–before they could yield to centrifugal forces and start opposing one another.
It was in 1908 that matters came to a head, when on 3 July a certain Major Ahmed Niyazi, stationed deep in the Macedonian hinterland between Monastir and Lake Ochrid, brought out his men in armed rebellion. Many junior officers from other Macedonian stations joined him, the CUP gave its enthusiastic support and by the end of the summer most of what is now northern Greece was up in arms. Troops sent hurriedly across from Anatolia were almost immediately infected by the prevailing mood, and Abdul-Hamid saw that he would have to act quickly if he were to save his throne. On 24 July he announced that the suspended constitution of 1876 would be immediately restored. This announcement was followed by a general amnesty for political prisoners and exiles. Finally, on 1 August, a further imperial decree proclaimed the abolition of the secret police, freedom from arbitrary arrest, the right to foreign travel, equality of race and religion and a promise that all existing governments within the empire would be reorganised.
Preempted by the speed and scope of the Sultan’s reaction, the CUP were thrown seriously off balance, but the rest of his subjects were jubilant. They had expected Abdul-Hamid to hold tightly to the absolutist principles he had cherished for the past thirty-two years; concessions, if any, would have to be wrung out of him one by one. Now, suddenly, and without a single shot being fired from anywhere closer than Macedonia, he was offering them on a platter far more than they had dared to hope. That Friday he drove through the streets of Constantinople amid cheering crowds to pray in St Sophia–a mosque since the Turkish conquest of 1453. It was the first time in a quarter of a century that he had summoned up sufficient courage to cross the Golden Horn.
Such dramatic developments as these could not but have their effect far beyond the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire. In Vienna the principal concern was with the territory of Bosnia–Herzegovina, which although technically Turkish had long been treated by the Austrians as one of their own colonies: what if it were required to send deputies to the new bicameral parliament that was shortly to open in the C¸irag'an Palace? The government of the Emperor Franz Josef lost no time; on 6 October 1908, only a few weeks after the Sultan’s bombshell, Austria–Hungary annexed Bosnia–Herzegovina by decree. Just twenty-four hours earlier in Sofia, Prince Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg–who had been made Prince of Bulgaria in 1887–had shaken off Ottoman suzerainty and proclaimed himself Tsar of the Bulgarians (a title which he was forced to downgrade to king as the price of recognition by the Powers a few months later). Meanwhile, Crete made yet another attempt at her long-awaited enosis–though the arrival of a British naval squadron in Cretan waters served as a salutary reminder that Britain would countenance no transfer of sovereignty until such time as she was ready to do so.
In Constantinople it soon became clear that the peaceful revolution had gone too far, too fast. Fundamentalist Muslims, shocked by the unveiled women who suddenly appeared in the streets, began to campaign for the readoption of their traditional values. To this end a so-called Society of Islamic Unity was established, with the Sultan’s fourth son as a founder member. Rumours that it received financial support from Yildiz abounded, but were never proved. Then, in April 1909, another of those demonstrations by theological students–backed, surprisingly enough, by numbers of troops from the local garrisons–went further still, demanding the resignation of the government and its replacement by a Muslim fundamentalist regime that would govern strictly according to Sharia law and would emphasise the authority of the Sultan in his religious role as Caliph. To these demands Abdul-Hamid–it was thought a little too eagerly–gave his consent.
It proved his undoing. In the new parliament there was an immediate uproar. A manifesto formally condemning the Sultan’s actions was published. Once again he gave way–but it was too late. Constitutional government of the kind Turkey now hoped to enjoy could clearly not be entrusted to a ruler who instantly bowed his head to every passing breeze. On 27 April 1909 Abdul-Hamid was deposed in his turn. There could be no question of consigning him, like his two immediate predecessors, to the C¸irag'an Palace, which was now teeming with parliamentarians; it was decided instead to send him into exile. On hearing the news, the Sultan fainted dead away into the arms of his Chief Eunuch. That same night, with two princes, three wives, four concubines, five eunuchs and fourteen servants, he was packed into the train which was to deposit him nearly twenty-four hours later in the city where–ironically enough–all his troubles had begun: Thessalonica.
With the departure of Abdul-Hamid from the scene, the Ottoman Empire was never the same again. His half-brother and successor, Mehmet V, already sixty-four, had spent most of his life in semi-enforced seclusion, consoled by industrial quantities of alcohol and regiments of concubines. He was not unintelligent and was deeply read in Persian literature, but he was totally incapable of governing–a drawback which was in fact of little importance, since he was never asked to do so. Power was now–at least in theory–in the hands of the parliament, and reforms in any number of fields followed thick and fast. There remained areas–freedom of the press and of public gatherings, for example–in which repression continued; nonetheless, had the new government been granted a few years of peace and stability it might have achieved much.
Alas, it was not. The old empire was too divided–and, frankly, too big. There were too many national minorities who still felt themselves to be second-class citizens. Macedonia remained an open sore; in 1910 Albania rose in revolt; there were further serious troubles in Armenia; the Muslims from Syria and Lebanon founded a Young Arab movement on the model of the Young Turks, while their brethren in the Arabian peninsula and the Hejaz stirred up rebellions which were soon causing the government in Constantinople serious anxiety–to the point where they were obliged to send most of their garrisons in what is now Libya to the affected areas. This resulted in a serious weakening in the last section of the North African coast to remain under Turkish control, and the Italians saw their chance.
For the past thirty years–ever since France had occupied Tunisia in 1881–the Italians had looked upon Libya with a covetous eye. The withdrawal of all but some 3,000 of the Ottoman army of occupation convinced them that the time had come for action; if they did not move fast, there could be little doubt that the French would invade from the west, extending their influence from Morocco to the Egyptian border. By the summer of 1911 it was clear that Italian forces were preparing for the attack. All that the Turkish government could do was to ensure that the local tribesmen were well provided with arms and ammunition.
When the moment came–on 27 September 1911–the time-worn procedure was followed: the issue of an ultimatum making various accusations, usually exaggerated, accompanied by demands known in advance to be unacceptable; then, immediately this was rejected, the declaration of war. On the 28th, Italian troops were landed simultaneously at Tripoli, Benghazi, Derna and Tobruk. These landings were accompanied by the first air raids in history, with the pilots of early biplanes flying low over their targets and lobbing small bombs out by hand. Against such overpoweringly superior forces the Turks could do little. Inland, however, the situation was reversed. The invaders, who knew nothing of desert warfare, were no match for the tribesmen and failed utterly to penetrate far into the interior. But partial success was enough: on 5 November the Italian government announced its formal annexation of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica. Five months later, in April 1912, it went a good deal further: an Italian naval squadron bombarded the forts protecting the entrance to the Dardanelles. Failing to force an entrance, it then turned back to seize Rhodes and the rest of the Dodecanese, which for the previous four centuries had been part of the Ottoman Empire.
The Empire was now obviously rocking on its heels. If Italy, after little more than forty years as a single nation, could inflict such damage upon it, then surely the way was open for all its other enemies to move in on their own behalf. By the end of the summer Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria and Montenegro had managed to set aside their differences and form a Balkan League, with the objective of driving the Turks once and for all from the European continent. Hostilities began in early October and a week later, its forces outnumbered by more than two to one, the Ottoman government made a panicky peace with Italy, by the terms of which it recognised Italian suzerainty over Tripolitania and Cyrenaica in return for the return of the Dodecanese–a condition to which the Italians agreed, but which they were never to fulfil. By the end of November the Bulgarians had overrun Thrace; the Serbs had occupied Kosovo, Monastir, Skopje and Ochrid; and–most significant of all–the key Mediterranean port of Thessalonica was in the hands of the Greeks.276
In December came a pause; Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegro agreed to an armistice–though Greece pointedly did not–and five days before Christmas a peace conference opened in London. But there was too much unfinished business, and at the beginning of February 1913 war broke out again. Another armistice followed in mid-April and a peace treaty was signed in London on 30 May. Turkey had lost Crete (formally annexed by Greece on 13 December), Macedonia, Thrace, Albania and most of her islands in the Aegean. All that was left of ‘Turkey in Europe’ was the city of Constantinople and its hinterland–little more than half the area that it occupies today; the present frontier, just beyond Edirne, is the result of what was known as the Second Balkan War, which lasted only a week or two. It was caused by the Bulgarians who, resentful at the Greek and Serbian gains in Macedonia, in the early hours of 29 June (of that same year, 1913) launched a surprise attack on their former allies, who were joined soon afterwards by Romania. The Turks decided to intervene, and a certain Major Enver–later Enver Pasha–who had been one of the moving spirits of the Young Turks, led his cavalry at breakneck speed across eastern Thrace to Edirne, capturing the city virtually without firing a shot. It was a brave adventure, and a successful one, but it could not conceal the fact that in little more than a year the Ottoman Empire had lost four-fifths of its European territory and more than two-thirds of its European population.
For these losses it was generally agreed that its army was to blame. It clearly needed extensive reorganisation and reconstruction. The men had gone unpaid for months; all of them were ragged, many of them were hungry, and morale had sunk almost to the point of mutiny. The fleet, too, was hopelessly out of date and in appalling condition. The first German officers who arrived to set the armed forces on their feet again are said to have been horrified to discover that the Turkish language had no word for ‘maintenance’.
The Germans, it went without saying, were the people to do the job. For some years past, Kaiser Wilhelm II had been waging a goodwill offensive. Like several other powers, he had heard of the recent discovery of vast oil deposits in Mesopotamia, and was anxious to obtain the Sultan’s agreement to the extension of the existing Berlin–Constantinople railway eastward to Baghdad. He had first called at Constantinople on his yacht, the Hohenzollern, as early as 1889, the year after his accession; on his second visit in 1898, he and Abdul-Hamid together crossed the Bosphorus and formally opened the magnificent new Asiatic terminus at Haydarpaa. He had then sailed on to Palestine, where on 29 October 1898 he had made a state entry into Jerusalem–the first by a German Emperor since that of Frederick II in 1229–on a coal-black charger, wearing white ceremonial uniform, his helmet surmounted by a golden eagle. The effect may have been faintly ridiculous–‘revolting,’ wrote the Empress Maria Fyodorovna to her son Tsar Nicholas II–but it certainly ensured that Wilhelm would not be easily forgotten. And now, on 30 June 1913–the very day of the Bulgarians’ surprise attack–the Kaiser appointed General Otto Liman von Sanders to lead a German military mission to Constantinople.
How much that mission would have achieved we shall never know. A year later almost to the day, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand fell victim to an assassin’s bullet in Sarajevo–and all Europe was at war.