Part 11 (1/2)
M. de Lavelaye, who studied the condition of things in Turkey not long after the war of 1877-78, thus summed up the causes of the social and political decline of the Turks:--
The true Mussulman loves neither progress, novelty, nor education; the Koran is enough for him. He is satisfied with his lot, therefore cares little for its improvement, somewhat like a Catholic monk; but at the same time he hates and despises the Christian _raya_, who is the labourer. He pitilessly despoils, fleeces, and ill-treats him to the extent of completely ruining and destroying those families, which are the only ones who cultivate the ground; it was a state of war continued in time of peace, and transformed into a regime of permanent spoliation and murder. The wife, even when she is the only one, is always an inferior being, a kind of slave, dest.i.tute of any intellectual culture; and as it is she who trains the children--boys and girls--the bad results are plainly seen.
Matters were not always and in all parts of Turkey so bad as this; but they frequently became so under cruel or corrupt governors, or in times when Moslem fanaticism ran riot. In truth, the underlying cause of Turkey's troubles is the ignorance and fanaticism of her people. These evils result largely from the utter absorption of all devout Moslems in their creed and ritual. Texts from the Koran guide their conduct; and all else is decided by fatalism, which is very often a mere excuse for doing nothing[86]. Consequently all movements for reform are mere ripples on the surface of Turkish life; they never touch its dull depths; and the Sultan and officials, knowing this, cling to the old ways with full confidence. The protests of Christian nations on behalf of their co-religionists are therefore met with a polite compliance which means nothing. Time after time the Sublime Porte has most solemnly promised to grant religious liberty to its Christian subjects; but the promises were but empty air, and those who made them knew it. In fact, the firmans of reform now and again issued with so much ostentation have never been looked on by good Moslems as binding, because the chief spiritual functionary, the Sheikh-ul-Islam, whose a.s.sent is needed to give validity to laws, has withheld it from those very ordinances. As he has power to depose the Sultan for a lapse of orthodoxy, the result may be imagined. The many attempts of the Christian Powers to enforce their notions of religious toleration on the Porte have in the end merely led to further displays of Oriental politeness.
[Footnote 86: ”Islam continues to be, as it has been for twelve centuries, the most inflexible adversary to the Western spirit”
_(History of Serbia and the Slav Provinces of Turkey,_ by L. von Ranke, Eng. edit. p. 296).]
It may be asked: Why have not the Christians of Turkey united in order to gain civic rights? The answer is that they are profoundly divided in race and sentiment. In the north-east are the Roumanians, a Romano-Slavonic race long ago Latinised in speech and habit of mind by contact with Roman soldiers and settlers on the Lower Danube. South of that river there dwell the Bulgars, who, strictly speaking, are not Slavs but Mongolians. After long sojourn on the Volga they took to themselves the name of that river, lost their Tartar speech, and became Slav in sentiment and language. This change took place before the ninth century, when they migrated to the south and conquered the districts which they now inhabit. Their neighbours on the west, the Servians, are Slavs in every sense, and look back with pride to the time of the great Servian Kingdom, carved out by Stephen Dushan, which stretched southwards to the _aegean_ and the Gulf of Corinth (about 1350).
To the west of the present Kingdom of Servia dwell other Servians and Slavs, who have been part.i.tioned and ground down by various conquerors and have kept fewer traditions than the Servians who won their freedom.
But from this statement we must except the Montenegrins, who in their mountain fastnesses have ever defied the Turks. To the south of them is the large but little-known Province of Albania, inhabited by the descendants of the ancient Illyrians, with admixtures of Greeks in the south, Bulgarians in the east, and Servians in the north-east. Most of the Albanians forsook Christianity and are among the most fanatical and warlike upholders of Islam; but in their turbulent clan-life they often defy the authority of the Sultan, and uphold it only in order to keep their supremacy over the hated and despised Greeks and Bulgars on their outskirts. Last among the non-Turkish races of the Balkan Peninsula are a few Wallachs in Central Macedonia, and Greeks; these last inhabit Thessaly and the seaboard of Macedonia and of part of Roumelia. It is well said that Greek influence in the Balkans extends no further inland than that of the sea breezes.
Such is the medley of races that complicates the Eastern Question. It may be said that Turkish rule in Europe survives owing to the racial divisions and jealousies of the Christians. The Sultan puts in force the old Roman motto, _Divide et impera_, and has. .h.i.therto done so, in the main, with success. That is the reason why Islam dominates Christianity in the south-east of Europe.
This brief explanation will show what are the evils that affect Turkey as a whole and her Christian subjects in particular. They are due to the collision of two irreconcilable creeds and civilisations, the Christian and the Mohammedan. Both of them are gifted with vitality and propagandist power (witness the spread of the latter in Africa and Central Asia in our own day); and, while no comparison can be made between them on ideal grounds and in their ethical and civic results, it still remains true that Islam inspires its votaries with fanatical bravery in war. There is the weakness of the Christians of south-eastern Europe. Superior in all that makes for home life, civilisation, and civic excellence, they have in time past generally failed as soldiers when pitted against an equal number of Moslems. But the latter show no constructive powers in time of peace, and have very rarely a.s.similated the conquered races. Putting the matter baldly, we may say that it is a question of the survival of the fittest between beavers and bears. And in the Nineteenth Century the advantage has been increasingly with the former.
These facts will appear if we take a brief glance at the salient features of the European history of Turkey. After capturing Constantinople, the capital of the old Eastern Empire, in the year 1453, the Turks for a time rapidly extended their power over the neighbouring Christian States, Bulgaria, Servia, and Hungary. In the year 1683 they laid siege to Vienna; but after being beaten back from that city by the valiant Sobieski, King of Poland, they gradually lost ground. Little by little Hungary, Transylvania, the Crimea, and parts of the Ukraine (South Russia) were wrenched from their grasp; and the close of the eighteenth century saw their frontiers limited to the River Dniester and the Carpathians[87]. Further losses were staved off only by the jealousies of the Great Powers. Joseph II. of Austria came near to effecting further conquests, but his schemes of part.i.tion fell through amidst the wholesale collapse of his too ambitious policy. Napoleon Bonaparte seized Egypt in 1798, but was forced by Great Britain to give it back to Turkey (1801-2). In 1807-12 Alexander I. of Russia resumed the conquering march of the Czars southward, captured Bessarabia, and forced the Sultan to grant certain privileges to the Princ.i.p.alities of Moldavia and Wallachia. In 1815 the Servians revolted against Turkish rule: they had always remembered the days of their early fame, and in 1817 wrested from the Porte large rights of local self-government.
[Footnote 87: The story that Peter the Great of Russia left a clause in his will, bidding Russia to go on with her southern conquests until she gained Constantinople, is an impudent fiction of French publicists in the year 1812, when Napoleon wished to keep Russia and Turkey at war. Of course, Peter the Great gave a mighty impulse to Russian movements towards Constantinople.]
Ten years later the intervention of England and France in favour of the Greek patriots led to the battle of Navarino, which destroyed the Turco-Egyptian fleet and practically secured the independence of Greece.
An even worse blow was dealt by the Czar Nicholas I. of Russia. In 1829, at the close of a war in which his troops drove the Turks over the Balkans and away from Adrianople, he compelled the Porte to sign a peace at that city, whereby they acknowledged the almost complete independence of Moldavia and Wallachia. These Danubian Princ.i.p.alities owned the suzerainty of the Sultan and paid him a yearly tribute, but in other respects were practically free from his control, while the Czar gained for the time the right of protecting the Christians of the Eastern, or Greek, Church in the Ottoman Empire. The Sultan also recognised the independence of Greece. Further troubles ensued which laid Turkey for a time at the feet of Russia. England and France, however, intervened to raise her up; and they also thwarted the efforts of Mehemet Ali, the rebellious Pacha of Egypt, to seize Syria from his nominal lord, the Sultan.
Even this bare summary will serve to ill.u.s.trate three important facts: first, that Turkey never consolidated her triumph over the neighbouring Christians, simply because she could not a.s.similate them, alien as they were, in race, and in the enjoyment of a higher creed and civilisation; second, that the Christians gained more and more support from kindred peoples (especially the Russians) as these last developed their energies; third, that the liberating process was generally (though not in 1827) delayed by the action of the Western Powers (England and France), which, on grounds of policy, sought to stop the aggrandis.e.m.e.nt of Austria, or Russia, by supporting the Sultan's authority.
The policy of supporting the Sultan against the aggression of Russia reached its climax in the Crimean War (1854-55), which was due mainly to the efforts of the Czar Nicholas to extend his protection over the Greek Christians in Turkey. France, England, and later on the Kingdom of Sardinia made war on Russia--France, chiefly because her new ruler, Napoleon III., wished to play a great part in the world, and avenge the disasters of the Moscow campaign of 1812; England, because her Government and people resented the encroachments of Russia in the East, and sincerely believed that Turkey was about to become a civilised State; and Sardinia, because her statesman Cavour saw in this action a means of securing the alliance of the two western States in his projected campaign against Austria. The war closed with the Treaty of Paris, of 1856, whereby the signatory Powers formally admitted Turkey ”to partic.i.p.ate in the advantages of the public law and system of Europe.”
This, however, merely signified that the signatory Powers would resist encroachments on the territorial integrity of Turkey. It did not limit the rights of the Powers, as specified in various ”Capitulations,” to safeguard their own subjects residing in Turkey against Turkish misrule.
The Sultan raised great hopes by issuing a firman granting religious liberty to his Christian subjects; this was inserted in the Treaty of Paris, and thereby became part of the public law of Europe. The Powers also became _collectively_ the guarantors of the local privileges of the Danubian Princ.i.p.alities. Another article of the Treaty provided for the exclusion of war-s.h.i.+ps from the Black Sea. This of course applied specially to Russia and Turkey[88].
[Footnote 88: For the treaty and the firman of 1856, see _The European Concert in the Eastern Question, _by T.E. Holland; also Debidour, _Histoire diplomatique de l'Europe _(1814-1878), vol. ii. pp. 150-152; _The Eastern Question, _by the late Duke of Argyll, vol. i. chap. i.]
The chief diplomatic result of the Crimean War, then, was to subst.i.tute a European recognition of religious toleration in Turkey for the control over her subjects of the Greek Church which Russia had claimed. The Sublime Porte was now placed in a stronger position than it had held since the year 1770; and the due performance of its promises would probably have led to the building up of a strong State. But the promises proved to be mere waste-paper. The Sultan, believing that England and France would always take his part, let matters go on in the old bad way.
The natural results came to pa.s.s. The Christians showed increasing restiveness under Turkish rule. In 1860 numbers of them were ma.s.sacred in the Lebanon, and Napoleon III. occupied part of Syria with French troops. The va.s.sal States in Europe also displayed increasing vitality, while that of Turkey waned. In 1861, largely owing to the diplomatic help of Napoleon III., Moldavia and Wallachia united and formed the Princ.i.p.ality of Roumania. In 1862, after a short but terrible struggle, the Servians rid themselves of the Turkish garrisons and framed a const.i.tution of the Western type. But the worst blow came in 1870.
During the course of the Franco-German War the Czar's Government (with the good-will and perhaps the active connivance of the Court of Berlin) announced that it would no longer be bound by the article of the Treaty of Paris excluding Russian war-s.h.i.+ps from the Black Sea. The Gladstone Ministry sent a protest against this act, but took no steps to enforce its protest. Our young diplomatist, Sir Horace Rumbold, then at St.
Petersburg, believed that she would have drawn back at a threat of war[89]. Finally, the Russian declaration was agreed to by the Powers in a Treaty signed at London on March 31, 1871.
[Footnote 89: Sir Horace Rumbold, _Recollections of a Diplomatist_ (First Series), vol. ii. p. 295.]
These warnings were all thrown away on the Porte. Its promises of toleration to Christians were ignored; the wheels of government clanked on in the traditional rusty way; governors of provinces and districts continued, as of yore, to pocket the grants that were made for local improvements; in defiance of the promises given in 1856, taxes continued to be ”farmed” out to contractors; the evidence of Christians against Moslems was persistently refused a hearing in courts of justice[90]; and the collectors of taxes gave further turns of the financial screw in order to wring from the cultivators, especially from the Christians, the means of satisfying the needs of the State and the ever-increasing extravagance of the Sultan. Incidents which were observed in Bosnia by an Oxford scholar of high repute, in the summer of 1875, will be found quoted in an Appendix at the end of this volume.
[Footnote 90: As to this, see Reports: _Condition of Christians in Turkey_ (1860). Presented to Parliament in 1861. Also Parliamentary Papers, Turkey, No. 16 (1877).]
Matters came to a climax in the autumn of 1875 in Herzegovina, the southern part of Bosnia. There after a bad harvest the farmers of taxes and the Mohammedan landlords insisted on having their full quota; for many years the peasants had suffered under agrarian wrongs, which cannot be described here; and now this long-suffering peasantry, mostly Christians, fled to the mountains, or into Montenegro, whose st.u.r.dy mountaineers had never bent beneath the Turkish yoke[91]. Thence they made forays against their oppressors until the whole of that part of the Balkans was aflame with the old religious and racial feuds. The Slavs of Servia, Bulgaria, and of Austrian Dalmatia also gave secret aid to their kith and kin in the struggle against their Moslem overlords.
These peoples had been aroused by the sight of the triumph of the national cause in Italy, and felt that the time had come to strike for freedom in the Balkans. Turkey therefore failed to stamp out the revolt in Herzegovina, fed as it was by the neighbouring Slav peoples; and it was clear to all the politicians of Europe that the Eastern Question was entering once more on an acute phase.
[Footnote 91: Efforts were made by the British Consul, Holmes, and other pro-Turks, to a.s.sign this revolt to Panslavonic intrigues. That there were some Slavonic emissaries at work is undeniable; but it is equally certain that their efforts would have had no result but for the existence of unbearable ills. It is time, surely, to give up the notion that peoples rise in revolt merely owing to outside agitators. To revolt against the warlike Turks has never been child's play.]