The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean (83 page)

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.