The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean (81 page)

CHAPTER XXXI

The Balkan Wars

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 fellows
²⁶⁹
–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.