TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
. The Ottoman Empire at the Dawn of the XIXth Century
CHAPTER II
. Napoleon in the Near East (1801-15}
CHAPTER III
. The Servian Risings (1804-17)
CHAPTER IV
. The Preface of Greek Independence (1815-21)
CHAPTER
. The War oF Greek Independence (1821-9)
CHAPTER VI
. The Creation of the Greek Kingdom (1839-33)
CHAPTER VII
. The Balkan and Syrian difficulties of Turkey (1822-45)
CHAPTER VIII
. Greece under the Bavarian Autocracy (1833-43)
CHAPTER IX
. The Greek and Ionian Constitutions (1843-53)
CHAPTER X
. The Crimean War (1853-6)
CHAPTER XI
. The Union of the Danubian Principalities (1856-62)
CHAPTER XII
. The Cession of the Ionian Islands (1862-4)
CHAPTER XIII
. Reforms and their Results : the Lebanon and Crete (1856-69)
CHAPTER XIV
. The Roumanian and Servian Questions (1862-75)
CHAPTER XV
. The Bulgarian Exarchate (1870-5)
CHAPTER XVI
. The Balkan Crisis of 1875-8
CHAPTER XVII .
The Union of the Two Bulgarias (1878-87)
CHAPTER XVIII
. ARMENIA, Crete and Macedonia (1887-1908)
CHAPTER XIX
. The Turkish Revolution (1908-12)
CHAPTER XX
. The Balkan League and its Results (1912-14)
CHAPTER XXI
. The Near East in the European War (1914-23)
CHAPTER XXII
. The Greek, Turkish and Albanian Republics (1923-27) on—The Italo the whole period .
CHAPTER I
THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE
AT THE DAWN OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
The near eastern question may be defined as the
problem of filling up the vacuum created by the gradual disappearance of
the Turkish empire from Europe. Its history, therefore, may be said to
begin at the moment when that empire, having attained its zenith,
commenced to decline. The European dominions of Turkey reached their
greatest extent in the latter half of the seventeenth century, when “the
great Greek island” of Crete, as the modern Hellenes love to call it, at
last surrendered to the Turkish forces, and the king of Poland ceded
Podolia to the Sultan. But the close of that same century witnessed the
shrinkage of the Turkish frontiers. The peace of Karlovitz in 1699 has
been justly called “the first dismemberment of the Ottoman empire.” It was
the initial step in the historical process which has slowly but surely
gone on ever since. The eighteenth century saw the continuation of
the work begun at Karlovitz, though now and again the Turkish dominions
gained some temporary advantage, and European statesmen anticipated the
dismemberment of the Sultan’s European possessions and formed schemes for
the partition of the spoil.
At the beginning of the
nineteenth century there were only four great European Powers, instead of six,
directly interested in the eastern question, for Italy was not yet made
and Prussia was only of the second rank, while Venice had ceased to exist.
Of these four—France, Russia,
Austria, and Great Britain—the first had been for centuries the traditional
ally of the Sultans. Francis I, who had begun his reign by proposing, as
so many sovereigns have done since, the partition of Turkey, was the founder
of this alliance, which, with occasional intervals of anti-Turkish
feeling, was the fixed policy of his successors. In spite of the scandal
caused to devout Catholics by this union of France, “the eldest daughter
of the Church,” with the head of the infidel Turks, Francis found it
politic to use Suleyman the Magnificent as an ally in his struggle with
the house of Austria, the historic rival of the French monarchy. The
power and geographical position of Turkey at that period, its naval forces
and the requirements of French trade in the Levant, were all strong
arguments, which outweighed any crusading instincts of the astute French
king, just as in our own day we have seen the German Emperor champion the
Turkish cause in the interests of German commerce. Together the French
and Ottoman fleets bombarded Nice, while Toulon served as the Turkish
base of operations. By the capitulations of 1535, which were the most
practical result of the Franco-Turkish alliance, the French received
permission to trade in all the Ottoman ports—a privilege conceded to the
vessels of other nations only on condition of flying the French flag.
French subjects, residing in Turkey, were permitted the free exercise of
their religion, and the custody of the Holy Places was entrusted to French
Catholics. Henry II carried on the friendly policy of his father, and
concluded a treaty with Suleyman, the object of which was to secure the
co-operation of the Turkish fleet against the house of Austria. For a
time the alliance ceased to be aggressive, but at the beginning
of the seventeenth century French influence was predominant
at Constantinople. The capitulations were renewed in 1604; and all
nations except the English and the Venetians were compelled to seek the
protection, and trade under the flag, of France in the Levant. But the
capitulations of 1604 mark in this respect a change from those of 1535.
France now had powerful rivals in the east; England, Venice, and Holland
exercised a competing influence on the Bosphorus; and in 1634 the
Greeks assumed the custody of the Holy Places, thus foreshadowing the
conflict which two centuries later led to the Crimean war. The French
began to turn against the Turks; the plan of a new crusade was drawn up by
a French priest; a “sure means of destroying” the Ottoman empire was
published by a French diplomatist. At the battle of St Gothard in 1664,
French troops assisted the Austrians to beat the Turks; during
the siege of Candia French men-of-war brought aid to the
Venetians, and the memory of the French commander, the duc de Beaufort, has still lingered outside the walls of that town. In fact,
Louis XIV, though he tried to prevent Sobieski from saving Vienna, was
hostile to the Turkish empire. His fleets entered the Dardanelles, and he
obtained in 1673 new capitulations, recognising him as the sole protector of
the eastern Catholics.
In the eighteenth century, the
old friendly relations were resumed; and Turkey, menaced by Austria and Russia
and already declining in force, was glad to avail herself of the
good offices of France. The French ambassador at the time of the peace
of Belgrade, by checkmating Austria, saved Servia to Turkey for three
generations, and his influence was such that he became a sort of “Grand
Vizier of the Christians”. The capitulations of 1740, completing those of
1673, were the reward of French assistance, and remain at the present day
a memorial of the Marquis de Villeneuve's diplomatic success. Numbers
of French officers endeavoured, like the Germans in our day, to reform the
Turkish army; and Bonneval and Baron de Tott
worked hard in the Turkish cause. But the treaty of Kutchuk-Kainardji (“the little fountain”) in 1774 ruined French influence, and substituted
for it that of Russia; and the French revolution prevented France from
taking an active part in eastern affairs, though indirectly by means of
French émigrés, who found their
way to the Orient, it spread a knowledge of the French language and French
customs. Soon the Ottoman dominions felt the weight of Bonaparte’s
influence. “It is of no use for us”, he wrote to the Directory, “to try
to maintain the Turkish empire; we shall witness its fall in
our time.” The treaty of Campo-Formio in 1797 made France the near
neighbour of the Sultan by ceding to her the Ionian Islands—“more
interesting to us than all Italy put together,” as Bonaparte said—with Butrinto, Arta, Vónitza, and all the former Venetian
establishments in Albania south of the gulf of the Drin. The great French
conqueror paid special attention to the Greeks; and two emissaries of the
French government in Greece, the brothers Stefanopoli, members of the
Greek colony at Cargèse in Corsica, were sent on one of those
semi-scientific, semi-political missions, dear to modern foreign offices,
to spread his fame in the Peloponnese. A legend grew up around the
victorious general. Greek philologists discovered that his name was merely an
Italian translation of two Greek words (Kálo méros, good morning) and that he must therefore be descended from the Imperial family of the Kaloméroi Porphyrogénnetoi, whose glories he was destined
to renew; Greek historians, remembering the emigration of
the Mainates to Corsica more than a century earlier, boldly proclaimed
him as the offspring of one of those Spartan families; and the women of Maina
kept a lamp lighted before his portrait, “as before that of the Virgin”.
The idea of a restoration of the Byzantine empire with his aid
became general among the Greeks; and Bonaparte was regarded as
a deliverer of the Hellenic race. Not content with organising the
Ionian Islands as “the departments of Corcyra (comprising the islands of Corfú, Paxo, Antipaxo, and Fano,
with their continental dependencies, Butrino and
Párga), Ithaca (including the islands of Santa Mavra, Cephalonia, and
Ithaca, with Preveza and Vónitza on the gulf of Arta), and the
Aegean Sea (a vague term, which embraced—for the moment—Zante, the
Strophádes, Cerigo, and Dragoméstre in Akarnania),
the French government founded in the two Danubian Principalities, where the Greek element was predominant, two
consulates, one at Bucharest, the other at Jassy, thus reviving an idea
of Catherine de Medicis, who had once meditated colonising
the Principalities with Huguenots, in order to create
French industries and influence in the east. The Egyptian
expedition of Bonaparte at last caused the Sultan to declare war against France,
his traditional ally, and to ally himself with Russia, his traditional
enemy, Russia was alarmed at the success of the French propaganda among
the Greeks, and desirous that a strong French protectorate over the
Christians of Turkey should not rise up as a barrier to her own schemes.
Britain, engaged in a life-and-death struggle with France, joined
the Russo-Turkish alliance, and the natural result was the loss
of French possessions and the destruction of French trade in
the east. The Ionian Islands were occupied by the Russians and Turks;
the French commercial houses in the Levant were ruined. France, therefore,
at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was no longer the upholder of
the Ottoman empire. Bonaparte had, by his erratic genius, reversed her
secular policy, and forced Russia, in self-defence, to defend the Turk.
But Ottoman statesmen could
have no illusions as to the ultimate aims of the northern Power. For
generations Russia and Turkey had been rivals, and a series of
Russo-Turkish wars had been chronicled even before the nineteenth
century added four more to their number. By a curious anticipation of
modern history, it was in the Crimea that the two nations first came into
contact. A quarter of a century after the capture of Constantinople,
Mohammed II claimed the suzerainty of the Crim Tartars, whose prince was the
ally of the ruler of Moscow. The Russian merchants at Kaffa and
Azov were now brought into relations with the Turkish
authorities, and their grievances occasioned the despatch of the
first Russian embassy to Constantinople in 1495. Other
Russian embassies followed, and for a long time pacific relations
were maintained between the two governments. But the raids of the
Tartars into Russian territory and the vengeance exacted by Russian hordes
caused considerable friction; and at last, in 1569, the first armed
conflict took place between troops of the two states. It is curious to
find western Powers urging on the Russians at that period to drive the
Turks out of Europe, and already recognising Russia as the natural
protectress of the eastern Christians, while the fear of Russia’s growing
strength was felt in Turkey alone. No western statesman seems to have
suspected at that moment that Russia on the Bosphorus would be a menace to
Europe; but even the Sultans, at that time at the height of their glory,
hesitated to retaliate on a Power which might, they thought, prove too
strong for them even then. It was not for another century that a formal
war broke out between the rivals, in consequence of the Turkish
acquisition of Podolia, which seemed to threaten Russian interests. The
result was an increase of Russian territory at Kiev and the desire for
further gains. Even so early as this, too, the Tsar posed as the guardian
of religious interests by obtaining a safe-conduct for Russian pilgrims on
their way to Jerusalem. The political and theological aims of Russia thus
became inextricably mixed, just as the missionary has been to other nations
the pioneer of the soldier.
Peter the Great gave a great
impetus to the anti-Turkish policy of Russia. His capture of Azov was not
permanent any more than the free use of the Black Sea for his new
navy; but it was he who sent the first Russian man-of-war to
the Bosphorus, though its mission was pacific, it was a sign of the
future. Equally significant were the beginnings of Russian intrigues in
the two Danubian Principalities, whose
princes corresponded with the Tsar, and his proclamation to the Greeks,
to whom he foretold the approaching restoration of the Byzantine empire.
The holy war, which broke out between Russia and Turkey and was concluded by
the treaty of the Pruth in 1711, was a
proof, like so many of its successors, of the military strength of even a
politically feeble empire. The humiliating terms of that treaty, which
imposed the retrocession of Azov to Turkey and the suppression of the Russian
embassy at Constantinople, were, however, modified a few years later; and
a permanent embassy was re-established in the Turkish capital. It is worth
noticing that on this occasion the influence of England was, for the first
time, used against Russia. Since the formation of the Russian navy,
the English Levant Company, which, in the beginning of the eighteenth
century, had all the trade of the near east in its hands, had become
alarmed at the rivalry of Russian merchants; and the English ambassador at
Constantinople, in opposing for this reason the return of his Russian
colleague, drew the attention of the Porte to the dangers of a
political and religious propaganda by Russian agents among
the Sultan’s Christian subjects. Having gained her point in regard to
her embassy, Russia went on with characteristic tenacity of purpose to
recover her lost foothold at Azov; and despite the efforts of England and
Holland, united in their opposition to further development of Russian
trade in the east, again declared war against the Sultan in 1736, and
again occupied Moldavia. By the peace of Belgrade she regained Azov, but
only on condition that its fortifications were destroyed, that no
Russian man-of-war should enter the sea of that name or the
Euxine, and that all the Russian Black Sea trade should be carried
in Turkish bottoms. A lull in the eastern question followed, for the
great Powers were busy elsewhere.
The accession of Catherine II
revived the plans of Peter the Great. Russian agents were sent to stir up the
Greeks and Montenegrins; war broke out in 1768 and a Russian fleet, largely officered by
Englishmen, was despatched to the Peloponnese, received the submission of
18 islands in the Archipelago, and at one moment threatened
Constantinople itself. But the greatest triumph of this war was the
memorable treaty which concluded it. The obscure Bulgarian village of
Kutchuk-Kaïnardji, where this instrument was signed, has given its name to
one of the most stupendous acts of Turkish folly. It was not so much the
territorial losses of Turkey that mattered, though Russia’s retention of
Azov, Kinburn, Kertch, and Yeni Kaleh gave her
the means of dominating the Black Sea, which her ships were now allowed to
navigate, while her guardianship of the Crimean Mussulmans naturally
foreshadowed their absorption in her empire nine years later. The really
fatal clauses of the treaty were those which gave her the right of making
representations on behalf of the Greek Church in Turkey and of “speaking
in favour of the Roumanian Principalities,”
which furnished pretexts for constant interference in the internal affairs of
the Ottoman dominions. The convention of Ainali-Kavak in 1779 confirmed
the provisions of that treaty, and stipulated that the tribute which the
two Danubian Principalities had to pay to the
Porte “should be imposed with moderation and humanity”—an arrangement
which did not prevent the Russian ambassador at Constantinople from
demanding, no less than the Turkish government, ample pecuniary proof of
the fitness for office of the candidates for the two Danubian thrones. Against the wishes of the Turks, a Russian consulate was now
established at Bucharest, as a centre of intrigue; and we find the
Prussian consul at Jassy soon complaining that these agents were “put
everywhere, without any necessity, perhaps to win over the inhabitants”. Russia
had, indeed, supplanted France as the oracle of the Porte, and had taught
the eastern Christians to look to her for protection against their sovereign. The Grand Dule Constantine was educated to be
the emperor of a new Greek empire; and Catherine II receive a memorial from a
Greek deputation. By the peace of Jassy in
l792, which closed the next war between the Russians and the Turks. the former,
in spite of the threatened opposition of England and Prussia, moved their
frontier up to the Dniester. This was the last dispute between the two rivals
in the eighteenth century; and, as we have seen, the close of that period
witnessed their temporary alliance in order to defeat the ambitious
schemes of Bonaparte in the east.
Austria, lately the chief
competitor of Russia in the Balkan peninsula, was early brought into hostile
contact with the advancing Turkish armies. In the fifteenth century the
Turks began their attacks on the Hungarians, who were at that period
the vanguard of Christendom against the Moslem. A century later Budapest
was captured and remained, together with the greater part of Hungary,
under Turkish rule for about 150 years. But the close of the seventeenth
century marked the retreat of the Ottoman armies from Hungarian soil.
After the defeat of the Turks before Vienna and the emancipation of
Budapest, frequent Austrian expeditions invaded Bosnia, over which the
Hungarian crown possessed old historic rights; while an Austrian force
captured Vidin in Bulgaria and Nish in Servia, and penetrated into
Macedonia as far as Üsküb, where Stephen Dushan had fixed the capital of
the medieval Servian empire. Prince Eugene made in 1697 his
memorable march to Sarajevo along the same route that was
afterwards followed by the army of occupation in 1878. “Yet
another campaign,” said a Turkish statesman, on hearing that Macedonia was
invaded, “and the Austrians will be under the walls of Stambul”. But these
feats of arms were without permanent results, and Üsküb is the furthest
point on the road to Salonika that an Austrian army has ever reached. The
peace of Karlovitz, however, finally excluded the Turks from
Hungary (except the Banat of Temesvár, which they abandoned nineteen years later),
gave Transylvania to Austria, and effected a complete change in the
relations between that Power and the Turks. Austria had hitherto regarded
the Turk as an aggressive enemy to be repulsed; she henceforth looked
upon him either as a weak foe to be attacked or as a bulwark, to
be strengthened at need, against the advance of Russia, in whom she
saw a rival in the east all the more dangerous because there were many
Slav subjects of Austria, who might be attracted by the Russian national
and religious propaganda.
The eighteenth century
furnishes examples of all these three points of view. Sometimes, Austria was
mainly actuated by the desire for Turkish territory; and then she was
willing to avail herself of Russian aid, even at the risk of
Russian aggrandisement. This was the case in the war of 1736—39, when
the Austrian and Russian armies were united against the Turks; in the
projected partition of Turkey between Catherine II and Joseph II, which
awarded the Crimea to the former and Bosnia and the Herzegovina to the
latter; and in the war of 1787—91, when once again the two states
were allies, and the Turks their common foes. But it is a
curious fact that, whenever this policy has been pursued by
Austria, her successes have been much less than when she
attacked Turkey single-handed. Whereas the result of the Austro-Turkish
war, which was ended by the peace of Passarovitz, was to give part of Servia,
North Bosnia, and Little Wallachia, as well as the Banat to Austria, her co-operation with Russia in 1736 cost her all her gains
south of the Danube and Little Wallachia, while the alliance of 1787
brought her nothing more than the town of Orsova and two small places on
the Croatian frontier. On the other hand, during the Russo-Turkish war
which was ended by the treaty of Rutchuk-Kainardji, Austria proposed a secret
treaty with Turkey, as soon as she saw that the Russians were becoming
too successful. As the reward of her services, she was to
receive once more Little Wallachia; and when Russia, in alarm, concluded
peace, another Roumanian province, the
Bukovina, became, and has till lately remained, Austrian. At
this period the Austrian diplomatist, Thugut, believed the fall of Turkey
to be at hand, and designated the two Danubian principalities
as his country’s share of the spoil. An Austrian consul was accordingly
placed there to counteract the schemes of his Russian colleague. But the French revolution and
the death of Joseph II saved by an accident, as has so often been the case
since, the life of the “sick man,” and diverted the attention of Austrian
statesmen from the east to the west.
But the eighteenth century had
done much to shape the course of Austrian policy in the regions of the Balkans.
The twenty-one years’ Austrian occupation of Little Wallachia, a
large portion of what is now Servia, and a slice of North Bosnia, between
1718 and 1739, was the beginning of that movement which has been resumed
in so striking a manner in our own time. Austria then became an important
factor in the eastern question, and undertook, though only
temporarily, that duty for which destiny seemed to mark her out.
The effects of those twenty-one years of European civilisation
were not wholly lost on the peoples who were put back under Turkish
sway by the treaty of Belgrade. While the Austrian rule was unpopular
among the Roumanians of Little Wallachia owing
to its insistence upon the regular payment of taxes, the Serbs of Turkey
henceforth regarded Austria as the only power which, under existing
conditions, could set them free. Numbers of their ancestors had settled in
Hungary after the downfall of Servian independence in the fifteenth
century; and two Serb patriarchs of Ipek, accompanied by thousands
of their flock, had more recently followed that example by migrating
thither. The Hungarian Serbs were among the most brilliant soldiers of
Prince Eugene; and at the outbreak of every fresh Austro-Turkish war their
brethren in Ser via took up arms on the Austrian side. A Serb poet hailed
Joseph II as “the protector of the Serb race,” and the Serb
leaders bitterly reproached his successor for making peace
with Turkey in 1791. Nor can we be surprised at their regrets. For
the first time since the Turkish conquest, Servia had shown signs of
material progress during the two brief decades of the previous Austrian
occupation; and they naturally hoped that this time Austria would not
retire beyond the Danube and the Save. Knowing little of western politics,
they could not understand why the Power which had taken Belgrade
and entered Bosnia should make peace on the most modest terms. But
the last decade of the century gave Austria a further foothold in the near
east Just as the same year that had witnessed the disappearance of Venice
from the Peloponnese witnessed also the first appearance of Austria as a
Balkan state, so the same year that saw the death of the Republic of St
Mark saw too the assumption of her heritage on the Adriatic by the
Hapsburgs. The treaty of Campo-Formio in 1797, which handed over the
Dalmatian possessions of Venice to Austria, substituted a strong Power for
a declining one as the neighbour of Turkey and Montenegro, and
indicated to the anxious Sultan that the state which had thus
annexed the Illyrian coastline would probably one day occupy
the Bosnian territory behind it.
England was not, like Russia
and Austria, the territorial neighbour of Turkey; but, even before the
foundation of her Indian empire, she had interests in the east, owing to
her large Levant trade. So early as the beginning of the sixteenth century
a Levantine was named English consul at Chios; in 1520 the first English
consul was appointed to Crete. Elizabeth gained free trading facilities in
the Turkish dominions for her subjects, who had previously carried on
their commerce with the near east in the “argosies” of the Ragusan
republic, then the greatest mercantile community of the Balkan peninsula.
It is said that the origin of our trade in the Levant in ships of our own
was a petty quarrel concerning the duty on currants; but, whatever the
cause, the interest of England in the affairs of Turkey was
primarily commercial, and down to the beginning of the
nineteenth century English influence in that part of the world was
almost entirely due to “the Company of Merchants of the Levant,” who
received letters patent from Elizabeth in 1581. It was in the following
year, on the first of the company’s ships that sailed
to Constantinople, that William Harebone went out as the first English
ambassador to the Sultan. Like all his successors in that post down to
1803, he was appointed and paid, not by the English government, but by the
company; and his chief duty was to develop English trade. At the
same time, he was instructed to obtain the Sultan’s support
against the “idolatrous” Spaniards, for the Spanish Armada was
soon to descend upon our shores. This admixture of
commerce, politics, and religion was eminently characteristic of
English statecraft; and the ambassador did not neglect any part of
his instructions. He began at once to appoint more consuls, and both
he and his successor, Sir Edward Barton, used ingenious theological
arguments to prejudice the Sultan’s advisers against Spain. The Turks
admitted that there could not be much difference between their own
religious views and those of Giaours who excluded images and pictures from
their churches. But Spain had the riches of the New World at her back;
and no help was sent by the Turks, though Barton was so popular with
the Sultan that he accompanied him to the war in Hungary.
James I confirmed the company
in its monopoly, and in spite of the insolence with which Christians were
treated by the Turks in the middle of the seventeenth century, English
ships visited Greece; and a Mussulman once observed that Englishmen “always
persisted in what they said, even at the peril of their lives.” The
English ambassador was entrusted by the Austrians with the money to bribe
the chief Ottoman representative at the peace of Karlovitz; and it was our
representative who, at the peace of Passarovitz, obtained for the
Turkish province of the Herzegovina the two small outlets on the
sea, the enclave of Klek and the Sutorina, which were so
important during the insurrection of 1875-6, and were till 1908 among the
curiosities of political geography. During the eighteenth century, when
Russia had come to the front as the possible successor of the Turk in
Europe, British statesmen were, as a rule, without fear of Muscovite
aggrandisement. At one moment, as we have seen, Britain tried to make
peace between Russia and Turkey in the interests of her own trade, and
in 1719 Stanhope had desired “to drive the Muscovite as far
as possible”; but in the middle of the century France was our great
commercial rival in the Levant, where the English company had lost much
ground in consequence of Villeneuve’s vigorous support of Turkey. It was
France, too, and not Russia, which then threatened India; and the opening
of the Black Sea to Russian ships was even regarded as an
advantage for English merchants, who would thus find a new market. We
saw that the Russian fleet, which nearly took Constantinople and destroyed the
Turkish navy at Tchesmé in 1770, was largely under the direction of
English officers; and Turkish officials asked England to explain what her
policy really was. On the eve of the fatal treaty of Kutchuk-Kaïnardji we
find Lord Chatham writing that he is “quite a Russ”; but our ambassador
at Constantinople was not of that opinion. So early as 1786 Mirabeau
contemplated a Russian advance on India. In 1791 it was the intention of
Pitt, had he had the support of the country, to declare war on Russia, in
order to maintain the balance of power; and, while Fox was
enthusiastically on the side of Russia, Pitt pointed out the uses
of Turkey as our ally. But, by a combination of the two policies, the
century closed with a triple alliance of England, Russia, and Turkey
against the French invaders of Egypt.
In view of the great influence
of Germany in Turkish affairs at a recent time, a few words may be said about
the eastern policy of Prussia during the period of which we have just
given a sketch. The Great Elector sought to use the Danubian Principalities in his schemes against Poland; and one of their Princes,
after his deposition by the Turks, endeavoured to obtain aid in
Brandenburg, Frederick the Great saw that the expansion of Russia in the
east could not injure him for he had few interests there—but would
neutralise the rival power of Austria. His representative at Constantinople
occasionally interceded on behalf of a Moldavian ruler; and a Prussian consul
was appointed in that country, partly on the characteristic ground that he
asked no salary, Frederick regarded Turkey as a useful means of keeping
Austria busy, and so of assisting his own plans of conquest; and
Frederick William II formed a triple alliance with England and
Holland, to check the Austro-Russian combination against
Turkey between 1787-91. But in their time the German trade in
the east was in Austrian, rather than Prussian, hands, and Prussia’s territorial
aspirations were not in the direction of the Ottoman empire; at most she
demanded compensation elsewhere for the gains of other nations in the east.
We thus find four great Powers
at the beginning of the nineteenth century directly or indirectly affected by
the eastern question; France, in the main the protectress of the
Sultan, and also the protectress of the Catholics of the Levant; Russia,
with her grand scheme of a new Byzantine empire already sketched out, and
her efforts to attract her Orthodox co-religionists in the Turkish
dominions already begun; Austria, oscillating between the fear of Russia
and the desire of Turkish territory; and Great Britain,
commonly favouring a policy of friendship with Russia. Above all,
we have seen that there was a general conviction that sooner or later
the rest of the Turkish empire in Europe would go.
Still the opening of the
nineteenth century found the Sultan the possessor of a vast European domain. He
held the whole island of Crete, from its then capital of Candia; for
even the warlike Sphakiotes, long independent, had been forced to pay
the haratch, or capitation tax, in 1770. The rest of
the modem kingdom of Greece was his, except the Ionian Islands; and
even they for the moment constituted a republic under the joint protection
of the Tsar and himself. All the former dependencies of the islands on the
mainland, except Párga, were Turkish, having been captured by Ali Pasha of Joannina and
then formally handed over to Turkey by the convention with Russia in 1800. All
that is now known as European Turkey was then part of the Ottoman empire;
and modern Bulgaria, modern Servia, Albania, Bosnia and the
Herzegovina, and more than half of the former kingdom of Montenegro
were direct possessions of the Sultan. Beyond the Danube, the two
Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, including at that time
Bessarabia and stretching as far as the Dniester, formed tributary states,
governed by Greek Princes, selected by the Porte from the wealthy families
of the Phanar at Constantinople. It may be estimated that the Turkish
dominions in Europe in 1801 measured 238,000 square miles, and contained
8,000,000 inhabitants. Their present area is calculated at 10,655
square miles, with a population of 2,000,000 souls, mostly residents of
the capital. Such is the result in figures of a little over a century’s
“consolidation,” as Lord Beaconsfield called it.
Asia had always been the
stronghold of the Turks; thence they came and thither one day they will
return. Their losses there have been accordingly far smaller than
in Europe. The dawn of the last century found the Asian frontiers of
the empire slightly more extended along the Black Sea coast than they are
now; and today Asiatic Turkey, also after the treaty of Lausanne, is
estimated to contain 400,000 square miles with 6,000,000 inhabitants. In
Africa, where, since Tripoli and the Cyrenaica have been placed under
Italian sovereignty, and Egypt under an independent sovereign, Turkey no
longer possesses dominion, she was then about to recover Egypt by British
arms from the French; Tripoli, where Ahmed Karamanli had achieved virtual
independence in 1714, was nominally a tributary province, but really a “Regency”
of pirates, whose chief was then the notorious Yusuf Pasha; while Tunisia,
under a Bey, and Algeria, ruled by a Dey, were theoretically subject to the
Sultan—a subjection seldom pleaded by the local rulers except when some
powerful naval power threatened to punish the piracies of the Barbary
States.
The European empire of Turkey
was at that period divided into five governorships, which were subdivided into
provinces and again into districts. In addition to these
governorships there were the two Danubian Principalities, which had the misfortune to enjoy a quasi-independence,
worse even than the lot of the Sultan’s direct possessions. The five
European governments were known as Roumelia,
Bosnia (including Vidin in Bulgaria), Silistria (including Belgrade), Djezair (including the
Peloponnese and many of the Greek islands), and Crete; and the governor of Roumelia, who was styled in Turkish beylerbey, or “prince of princes”, was the commander-in-chief of
all the European contingents in time of war. These five European
governments comprised nine pashaliks: Roumelia, Belgrade,
Bosnia, Scutari, Joánnina, Negropont, the Morea, Candia, and the
Archipelago. The Sultan’s subjects in our continent were of various
races—Turks, Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs, Albanians, and Roumanians;
but there were some common misfortunes which they all had to bear, though
these were much lighter in the case of the Mussulmans than in that of
the Christians. The former found it easier to bring their complaints to
the ear of the Sultan, while their interests were protected in the
provinces by the little bodies of local worthies, who assisted the
governor in the discharge of his duties. But, even a century ago, the fate
of the provincials was so hard as to attract the sympathy of even avowed
partisans of the Turks. In reading of their sufferings, one is reminded of
the grim descriptions which the Roman satirists give of the exactions
of their own provincial authorities. It was not that the fixed
and recognised taxation of the empire was heavy, but that the whole
administrative system, excellent though it might be in theory, was utterly
rotten in practice. Corruption had entered into the Sublime Porte, and
everything was to be bought. A pasha, appointed to a provincial
governorship for a year, had to pay a heavy price for his appointment, and
recouped himself at the cost of his province. As the end of his year
approached, he found it necessary to renew his bribes at Constantinople,
if he wished to remain at his post; and for that too the unhappy province had to pay. Bad as this system was if the
pasha were a rich man and had capital at his disposal to invest in
a governorship, it was much worse when, as usually happened, he was
poor, and therefore compelled to borrow at heavy interest from some Greek
or Armenian banker, who thus had a sort of lien on the revenues of the
province. The judges, appointed in Constantinople in the same way as the
governors, sold justice without scruple; and the officers who executed
their sentences were even more odious to the people. The authorities were
also fond of imposing taxes, merely as temporary expedients, which tended
to become permanent institutions. It was calculated at this time that
about one half of the product of each man’s industry was paid to the
government in one way or another throughout the provinces; and, when
we consider the need which the governors had of money, we cannot
wonder at this high proportion of taxation to income. The frequent
journeys of the pashas, the presents inseparable from Oriental
administration, the necessity of sending a messenger on the smallest business,
as there was no postal service, and the luxury and vast establishments
kept up by the great officials, ail involved a heavy expenditure. The
general insecurity of the country, owing to bands of brigands,
repressed all industry; there were few means of investing money
safely; and the deterioration of the roads, which had once struck English
travellers as superior to those of their own country, increased the
difficulties of commercial intercourse.
Selim III, who at this time
sat on the throne, was, it is true, a reforming Sultan, anxious to raise his
empire from its declining state, and willing to take western nations as
his model. He made, for a moment, a clean sweep of the Bulgarian and
Macedonian brigands and the Aegean pirates, repaired the ruinous
fortresses on his frontiers, and employed French shipbuilders to construct
men-of-war. But, like most autocrats, he was powerless to change a whole
system of misgovernment with a stroke of his pen. Albania and
Epirus, always the most dangerous part of European Turkey, were in such
a state that a Turk could not venture to show his face there, while all
travellers were liable to be murdered with impunity by the natives of that
mountainous region. In many parts of the empire hereditary tyrants, known
as dereh beys, or “lords of the valleys,” terrorised
their humble neighbours. Here and there great pashas, like Ali of Joánnina
and Pasvanoglu of Vidin, fought for their own hands and acted
like semi-independent sovereigns. The “lion of Joánnina” has been
made familiar to the reader by the poetry of Lord Byron and the prose of Jókai,
while, as a forerunner of the Greek revolution, he has gained a place in
the best-known chapter of modern Oriental history. Ali belonged to an
Albanian Mussulman family of Tepelen, which had once been Christian; but
his grandfather had fallen for the Crescent in 1716 at the siege of Corfù. Pasha of Joánnina since 1788, he had
distinguished himself by his cruelty, ability, and ambition; poets sang
in Greek how he had thrown a beautiful lady into the lake and avenged
the injuries done to his family by the impartial destruction of both a
Christian and a Mohammedan community; a British traveller summed up his
character as a “mixture of magnificence and meanness”. Osman Pasvanoglu, though
almost forgotten now, was in his day scarcely inferior to Ali in
influence. With the true fanaticism of a Bosnian Mussulman he declared
against the reforms of his sovereign, whose real and only friend he
pretended to be. Master of the “virgin-fortress” of Vidin, he showed his
loyalty by defeating the Sultan’s armies and despoiling his
fellow-subjects. He raised a private force of his own, levied his own
taxes, coined his own money, and sent his representative to Paris to negotiate on his own account with the French government. A British consul
visited his court; and such was the terror of his name that there was a
general stampede from Bucharest on the approach of his men. Severe as were
the sufferings of the Roumanians and Bulgarians
from his depredations; the cost of maintaining an army to oppose him was
an even greater burden to the Wallachian peasants. It was on this occasion
that Hangerli, their Prince, confiscated practically all the cattle
of his people, and thus left them without sustenance in a
winter which has become proverbial as one of the four plagues of
that sorely oppressed principality. The Bulgarians experienced in their
turn the usual fate which at that time befell a country through which a
Turkish army marched. Southern Bulgaria was reported to be almost
destitute of inhabitants, and its now flourishing capital was left a heap of corpses and
charred timber. The fearful ravages of the plague in most
Turkish cities completed the devastation of the empire, though in
this respect the European provinces suffered less than the Asiatic,
The division of the Sultan’s
subjects into two sharply defined classes, those who were Mohammedans and those
who were not, was the cause of much evil. It has been justly said that
the Turkish government has shown itself far more tolerant of religious
opinions than many so-called Christian nations. The welcome extended by
Turkey in the fifteenth century to the Spanish, and in the nineteenth to
the Russian Jews, contrasts most favourably with the Jewish persecutions
in Catholic Spain and Orthodox Russia. Such was the hatred which one sect
of Christians felt for another, that the Bogomiles of Bosnia preferred to be conquered by the Sultan rather than converted by
the Pope, and the Orthodox Greeks chose to be the subjects of infidel
Turks rather than of Catholic Venetians. Mohammed II, like the great
statesman that he was, saw at once that the Greek church might become in
his hands a powerful support of the Ottoman rule. He accordingly restored
the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople and made
the Patriarch his tool. But, with all his tolerance for freedom of thought, the
Mussulman regarded the Christians as an inferior caste. The ráyahs had to put up with
a hundred slights, and were made to feel that they were outside the
pale of the dominant religion. They were liable to all sorts of aggravating
rules, which regulated the colour of their clothes, the style of their
houses, and the professions which they might enter. Their women were
exposed to the droit de seigneur at the pleasure of the young bloods of Islam; if their children were
no longer taken as a tribute for the Sultan’s armies, and they were exempt
from compulsory military service, they had to victual and do all the dirty
work of the Ottoman forces, build military roads and fortresses, transport
artillery, and carry munitions of war. It was no wonder, then, that those
of little faith abandoned Christianity for a religion which would
assure them the respect of the Turks, and the right, equally dear
to them as perverts, of despising and maltreating their
former co-religionists. Numbers of Serbs in Bosnia, numbers of Greeks
in Crete, many Bogomiles in Bulgaria, embraced
Islam after the Turkish conquest; and the Bosnian, Cretan,
Bulgarian, and Albanian Mussulmans became the most conservative of
all the Sultan’s subjects in their opposition to reforms, the
most fanatical of all Mohammedans in their devotion to the law of the
prophet. Popular phraseology, which calls these people “Turks,” obscures
the fact that some of the worst oppressors of the Christians in Turkey
were not Turks at all, but perverts from Christianity, of the same race as
the persecuted. The high road to honours was to profess Islam; and it
became proverbial that “one must be the son of a Christian renegade to
attain to the highest dignities of the Turkish empire”. Thus, in Bosnia,
although a Turkish governor was sent from Constantinople, he was a mere
figure-head; and all real power was centred in the great Bosnian nobles,
who gradually became hereditary headmen of the divisions of that country.
So strong was the influence of these Mussulman Serbs that they permitted the pasha to remain at Sarajevo for no more than
forty-eight hours, and resisted all attempts to move the official
capital from Travnik thither. So the Bosnian begs administered that province on feudal lines, and were quite content with a
system which allowed them to do as they pleased at home and provided
them with the occasional luxury of a foray abroad. It was only when the
Turkish military power began to decline and Bosnia was invaded by Austrian
armies, that the Bosnian Mussulmans began to doubt the wisdom of the
Sultan’s government.
In Servia, where there was no
native aristocracy as in Bosnia, a number of these Bosnian begs were settled as landowners, forming the majority of the spahi, or cavalry, who were the sole
possessors of the soil, to the complete exclusion of the ráyah from all rights of
ownership. There were at this period some 132,000 of these military
landowners in all Turkey, some 900 in the pashalik of Belgrade. In return
for their lands they owed military service to the Sultan; but even in time
of peace they were mostly absentees, idling away their days in the towns
and letting the despised Christians manage their farms. In addition to
these spahi, another military
force, the Janissaries, were to be found in detachments through the
provinces. Their leaders, or dahi, were often more powerful than the Sultan’s representative, and not
only maltreated the Christian peasants, but even seized the lands of
the Mohammedan spahi with impunity. The
natives had, indeed, some small share in the administration; and
when, as was the case in Servia at this period, the pasha was a
just man, their chosen representatives could temper the wind to their
shorn flock. The head-man of the village, the village magistrate, and, in
many cases, the district official or (in Serb) oborknes, who was responsible for the collection of
the Turkish taxes, and acted as a medium between the pasha and
the taxpayers, were elected by the people. The oborknes whether so elected or nominated by the
pasha, usually held office for life—it had formerly been an hereditary
post—and acquired considerable influence both with the Turkish officials
and the Serb peasants. Not a few of these local worthies
became leaders of the Servian revolution. One branch of the
Serbs formed the only independent state of the
peninsula—the principality of Montenegro, governed since 1696 by Prince-Bishops,
or Vladikas of the family of Petrovich, a dignity which descended, as the theocratic
ruler could not marry, from uncle to nephew. A firman of 1799 had
recognised that the Montenegrins had never been subjects of the Porte.
The Albanians had offered,
under their hero Skanderbeg, the most determined resistance to the Turkish
conquest; and even at the beginning of the nineteenth century, as
indeed later, their land was hardly under the control of its
nominal sovereign. Divided by three religions—the Catholic, the Orthodox,
and the Mohammedan—and split up into two main branches—the Ghegs and the
Tosks—and into numerous tribes, the Albanians were alike in their love of
fighting. The best regiments in the Turkish army, the crack
regiment in the kingdom of Naples, were composed of these
warriors, who in our own time formed the bodyguard of the
timorous Sultan. Even before the Turks had conquered Greece, Albanian
colonies had settled there; and in southern Italy there is a large
Albanian element. In northern Albania one tribe, the Catholic Mirdites,
enjoyed practical independence under an hereditary ruler of the family of
Gion (John) Marcu, called “captain” by his men, but “prince”
by Europeans from a mistranslation of the name of Prenk (Peter),
borne by each successive chief. In Epirus, the Orthodox
Souliotes, an admirable blend of Greeks and Hellenised Albanians, who won the
admiration of Byron, formed a sort of military commonwealth, composed
first of four, then of eleven villages, paying in time of peace the tithe
and the capitation-tax to the Porte, but in wartime maintaining practical
independence by their swords. At once rulers and
ruled, they levied the same imposts from the Parasouliotes, or inhabitants
of some 60 conquered hamlets, who depended upon them, till, after a three
years’ struggle, Soili was betrayed to Ali Pasha in 1803, the
women hurled themselves and their babes in the dance of death
from the rock of Zálongo, and the survivors fled
to Corfù.
Of all the Christian races
beneath the rule of the Turk, the Greeks were at that time the most important
and the most prosperous. They had had, like the Serbs, the
advantage early in the eighteenth century of being, though for a
very short period, under the administration of a western Power and
the Venetian government of the Morea, though not by any means popular
while it lasted, nor remembered with any gratitude, was a great advance
upon Turkish rule. Although Russia, when she invaded the Morea in 1770, clearly
demonstrated that her aim was not to make the Greeks free but to make them
her subjects, and abandoned them so soon as it suited her purpose, the
treaty of Kainardji placed them more or less
under her influence; and later arrangements entitled the Greek islanders
to trade under her flag. The French revolution not only provided the
Greeks, and especially those who inhabited the Ionian Islands during the
first French occupation, with majestic phrases about the liberty of
nations and the equality of men, but indirectly favoured Greek commerce,
owing to the fact that the Turkish government was generally neutral and
its flag could therefore go anywhere. The Greeks combine two usually
irreconcilable qualities—great aptitude for business and great love of book-learning.
Both these qualities, already developed at the beginning of the nineteenth
century, tended to prepare them for national independence, though neither
of them implied the possession of that political training which nations
only acquire, as a rule, after centuries of experience. Commerce led
them to visit other and better-governed countries, and so to draw
inferences as to their own future prospects; literature, as created by
Eugenios Boúlgaris the Corfiote, and Koraes the Chiote, formed a bond of national union; and Rhégas of Velestino gave to
the impending Greek revolution its Marseillaise, while “to Joánnina,” in the phrase of a Greek writer, “Greece owes the
regeneration of her education”.,
Travellers noticed that the
Greeks bore “the Turkish yoke with greater impatience than other Christians”,
although, except in Crete, they had perhaps less to complain of
than their fellows. They occupied, indeed, a position of
superiority towards the Sultan’s other Christian subjects. For the
Greek Patriarch was the ecclesiastical head of all the
Christian population, irrespective of race, throughout the Balkan peninsula.
The services of the Greek Church and clergy in the struggle for Greek
independence were very great; but by Bulgarians and Serbs, and still more
in Moldavia and Wallachia, the Greek bishop was regarded as a foreign
agent. With the suppression of the two ancient autocephalous Serb and
Bulgarian Churches of Ipek and Ochrida in 1766-7, the last ecclesiastical
bulwarks of those Slav races fell before the influence of the Greek
clergy, who had long been as supreme in the spiritual life of the
peninsula as the Turkish officials were in its political affairs. The
Greek bishop, chosen from the Phanariotes of Constantinople, usually had
to buy his see, just as the Turkish pasha bought his post, and made
the people pay him back what he had expended. He was generally a
valuable ally of the pasha, because he wanted the latter’s aid to compel
the peasants to comply with his requests, while he could render various
diplomatic services to the pasha in return. Under the influence of these
spiritual pastors, who rarely spoke any language but Greek, and, of
course, conducted the service in that tongue, Slavs and Roumanians alike
became outwardly hellenised. Their own
languages were despised as barbarous jargons; to speak Greek came to be
considered as the mark of a gentleman; the two Roumanian codes were published, and even Bulgarian business correspondence conducted
in Greek, as the most useful and widest spoken idiom of the near east.
Foreigners therefore might be excused for considering the Greek Church
as coextensive with the Greek race and for reckoning up the Christian
population of the Balkan peninsula at this period as collectively “Greeks”. Rhégas poetically assumed that “all the
Macedonians” would “rise together,” that “Bulgarians and Albanians, Serbs
and Roumanians” would “draw the sword” for the
cause of Greece and liberty. Until our own day, enthusiasts alone imagined
the beautiful picture of the Christian races of the east united against
the Turk. For the cardinal difficulty of the eastern question
always had been, before the Balkan League of 1912, the mutual animosities
of these very same Christian races. For the Bulgarians sought to free
themselves not only from the political domination of the Turks, but from
the ecclesiastical authority of the Greeks; and in our time the quarrels
of the Patriarchists and Exarchists have been
quite as serious as those of Mussulmans and Christians.
Apart altogether from their
ecclesiastical influence, the Greeks found many profitable careers open to them
in the Turkish service. Their superior intelligence and
linguistic skill enabled them to attain distinction as dragomans
and envoys of the Porte. Their happy hunting-ground was beyond the
Danube in the Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, where thrones
could be bought by the great Phanariote families
of Constantinople and fortunes could be made out of the administration. It
was noticed by travellers that the Greeks of the Turkish capital were less
moral than those of the islands; and the descriptions which contemporaries
have left us of the Phanar, the quarter of that city where
the Patriarchate was situated, represent it at this period as
an academy of intrigue —the only weapon by which the weak can
circumvent the strong. Greek historians accuse the Phanariotes of pride
towards their own fellow-countrymen, and of forgetting
that their own position depended upon the uncertain favour of a tyrant. Indeed,
few portions of oriental history are so unedifying as that which records
the reigns of the Phanariote Hospodars at
Bucharest and Jassy during a large part of the eighteenth and the
nineteenth centuries. The luxury of the two alien princes contrasted as
strongly with the poverty of their subjects as did their proud
demeanour to the Roumanians with their enforced
humility to the Turks. “The two Hospodars” said a Turkish proverb, “are
the eyes of the Ottoman empire, turned towards Europe.” They were, in
fact, the real foreign secretaries of the Sultan; but they betrayed their
master, whenever it suited their own purpose to play the game of Austria
or Russia at his expense. The chief aim of the Hospodar of Wallachia, the
richer principality, was to keep his place and make money out of it; the
chief object of the Hospodar of Moldavia was to obtain promotion to
Bucharest. Thus, the two became bitter rivals, while all the time there
were hungry place-hunters at Constantinople, eager to dispossess them
both. Under this system, these two provinces, justly called “the granary
of the capital,” became perhaps the most miserable part of the whole
empire. Nature had done much for the great plains of the Danube, the
fine the slopes of the Carpathians; but
the government had ruined the country for the poor Roumanian peasant. His songs are full of lamentations over his woes and of
denunciations of the oppressors who caused them—the Turk, who was his
over-lord, the Russian, who came to “deliver” him in the name of religion,
the Jew, who plundered him, the Phanariote, who
misgoverned him under the authority of the Sultan. But it is only fair to
recognise the diplomatic ability, the superior culture, the greater
refinement, and the political experience of the Phanariotes, who furnished
to the Greek revolution its leading statesman, in the person of Alexander
Mavrokorádtos, and contributed a valuable element to the society of the
young Greek kingdom.
In Greece itself, though there
were no such brilliant openings for talent as in Moldavia and Wallachia, scope
was found for the administrative abilities of the natives.
The primates, or kodjabashis, formed a kind of official aristocracy, whose
business it was to assess the share of the taxes that each person had to
pay. They were agents of the Turkish dignitaries, who fanned the taxes,
and, in some respects, imitated their Turkish patrons. In the Peloponnese,
where local administration was better organised than elsewhere, there
was, even under the Turks, some attempt at self-government. Every village
elected a head-man; and these head-men collectively with the townsfolk
elected representatives, who chose the primate of the province. All the
primates resided at Tripolitsá, the capital; and
their interests were represented by a delegate at Constantinople. Here and
there Greek communities enjoyed even greater privileges. The island
of Chios was the most favoured of them all. Before the Turkish conquest,
it had been governed by a Genoese mercantile company—the first instance of
one of those chartered companies so common in our own day. The Turks
continued the enlightened Genoese system of government; and the Chiotes were better off than any other Greeks at the
beginning of the nineteenth century. The three “Nautical Islands”
of Hýdra, Spetsái, and Psará, the nurseries of the future Greek fleet, almost
unknown before the eighteenth century, had suddenly risen to be
flourishing communities, where the sailors had a share in the ships and
their cargoes. At this time Hýdra was governed
by George Boulgares, a capable administrator, Spetsái by a similar local official, known as a zampites (or policeman),
and Psará by a council of “elders.” Ténos, after five centuries of Venetian rule, was
another example of a Greek island, in the affairs of which the Turks
interfered but little; while Naxos, once the capital of a Catholic duchy,
retained, together with some vestiges of Latin civilisation, the right to
govern itself according to its own customs. The 12 southern Sporádes had enjoyed special privileges, ratified by
successive Sultans since the conquest of Rhodes. In the mountainous
districts of Pindus and Olympus, the Christians had another and more
dangerous privilege, that of bearing arms, and so forming, under
the name of armatotoi, a local militia. In their “free villages,”
or eleutherochória (the name may still be found in that region), they formed military
communities, which in the eighteenth century had excited the apprehensions
of the government. Repeated attempts were made to weaken them, but it
was not till the time of Ali of Joánnina that these efforts
were successful.
The “24 hamlets of Volo,” each
with its school-house, aroused the admiration of travellers; while the
flourishing community of Ambelákia on the slopes of Ossa, thanks
to its dye-works, vied with the prosperity of the villages on Pelion,
till local jealousies and British competition ruined Ambelakia and the
sword of Ali destroyed the autonomy of all the “24 hamlets” save Zagora.
On the peninsula of Chalkidté a confederation of
villages, the so-called Mademochória elected the local authorities; while “the Holy Mountain” of Athos enjoyed the
privilege of self-government, and the Turkish official, who resided at Karýes,
the capital of this theocratic republic, interfered in its affairs as
little as the Madem-aga in those of the Chalkidic confederacy. At the extreme south of Greece, Maina, after the rising of
1770, was governed by a local chief, appointed for life by the Sultan
and dignified with the title of bey;
and in practice the tribute consisted of as much money as would lie on the
flat blade of a sabre. Levádeia, then the chief
town in eastern Greece, was governed by the local magnates, whose
president represented the town in all negotiations with the Turkish
civil and military authorities. Finally, Athens was the private property
of the Sultan, who let it out for life to the highest bidder. The Turkish
authorities consisted of the voïvode (or “governor”),
appointed by the Imperial Mint, the cadi (or “judge”), the mufti (or “bishop”), and
the disdar-aga (or “commander of the garrison”), who
lived with his harem in the Eréchtheion. But the
Athenians annually elected their “elders”; and their own “agents” conducted
the business of the community with the Turkish officials. The tyranny
of Hajji Ali the Haskey, who repeatedly held the office of voïvode in the latter part
of the eighteenth century, had combined with two recent plagues to
diminish the prosperity and population of the city, which contained
about 10,000 inhabitants. Even then Athens could boast an historian
in the person of John Benizélos, the Athenian schoolmaster.
Thus, at the dawn of the
nineteenth century, we find religion, rather than race, the dividing line
between the subjects of the Sultan. The Mussulmans, whether Turks
or the descendants of Bulgarian, Bosnian, Albanian, or
Cretan converts from Christianity, formed a dominant caste;
the Christians, except the comparatively few Catholics in Bosnia, Albania,
Servia, Bulgaria, and in one or two of the Greek islands, were classed
together as Greeks, because they belonged to the Greek Church and owned
the spiritual authority of the Ecumenical Patriarch. European statesmen,
except perhaps in the case of the Serbs, had scarcely become conscious of the fact that the eastern question would have to consider the claims
of other Christian races of Turkey than the Greeks as heirs to some part
of the Turkish empire. The principle of nationalities was not yet a
powerful force in politics ; and the career of Napoleon in the near east,
as elsewhere, was its negation.
CHAPTER II
NAPOLEON IN THE
NEAR EAST (1801-15)
The relations between the four great Powers and
the Sultan changed considerably during the early years of the
nineteenth century, for the selfish inconsistencies of Napoleon’s
policy caused them to support or oppose the Turks according to the requirements
of the moment, without much regard for any general principle. Turkey, like
other countries, was simply a pawn in the great game, which the Corsican
played for his own hand.
Both Great Britain and Russia
reaped some reward for their assistance to the Sultan against the invaders of
Egypt. The grateful Turks presented the Levant Company with the site
of the present British Embassy at Constantinople; the Russians obtained a
more important concession, the so-called hatti-Sherîf, or Imperial ordinance, of 1802, which provided that the Hospodars of
Moldavia and Wallachia should not be deposed without the consent of the
Tsar, and that the term of their office should be seven years. This
provision was a further increase of Russia’s influence in the Danubian Principalities, a step beyond the advantage gained
by her at Ainali-Kavak. The two Princes were now Russian agents, and
showed an independence of the Sultan which was as marked as their
servility towards the Tsar.
France was reconciled to
Turkey in 1802, and Colonel Sébastiani was sent on a
special mission to the Levant, ostensibly for the promotion of French
trade, really to report on the
strategic importance of various places in the east. In 1805 the treaty of Pressburg,
by which Austria ceded to Napoleon her lately acquired possessions in
Dalmatia, gave France the only footing she has ever had in the
Balkan peninsula. It was on this occasion that Talleyrand drew up a
famous memoir on the eastern question, in which he advised the French
Emperor to give Austria as compensation Moldavia and Wallachia, and so bar
the road to Constantinople against the Russians. Had the idea been carried
out, the history of the near east would have been changed, and the war of
1877 might have never taken place.
The nine years’ French
occupation of Dalmatia has not been adequately described by any English
historian; but it deserves attention as an example of the mistakes which
even so great a genius as Napoleon I could make in the government of
a country placed on the confines of west and east. The long Venetian rule
over Dalmatia has left a permanent mark on the coast towns; but it was the
policy of the Republic of St Mark to repress Dalmatian trade and prevent
the spread of enlightened ideas. The Austrians during their first brief ownership,
from 1797 to 1805, had no time to effect much; but they began to make
roads, which were wholly wanting in the Venetian times, though even in
this respect they had not accomplished much when the French succeeded them
in the administration of the province. Napoleon’s emissaries
had, therefore, practically everything to create, and at first
they set about their work with considerable common-sense. But there
are two distinct periods in the French government of Dalmatia, each of
which has a separate character of its own and represents a different
aspect of Napoleonic policy. So long as Dalmatia formed part of the Kingdom
of Italy, from 1805 to 1809, the French Emperor, still dreaming of
Balkan conquests, and even of an advance on India, regarded
the Illyrian coast-line as an excellent base from which to start. He
realised the value of the harbour of Gravosa and the Bocche di Cattaro as future naval stations, and impressed upon the
distinguished men whom he sent to govern the Dalmatians in those early
years the necessity of adapting their methods to the local requirements.
Marmont and Dandolo, who succeeded his first representative, Molitor,
were, as an Austrian historian has said, “the two most eminent
administrators that Dalmatia has ever had,” but they were quite unable
to agree together; the civilian thought the soldier an
interfering ignoramus, and the soldier treated the civilian as an
unpractical pedant. Yet both, in their way, did something for the
benefit of the province committed to their charge. Molitor had
not greatly altered the Austrian system, but Dandolo lost no time in
founding a newspaper, the first in Dalmatia, in starting a high school,
and in making a bid for the support of the Orthodox clergy, who had
hitherto been under the Catholics, by giving them a bishop of their own
persuasion. This measure, which the Austrians had already meditated in
order to break the influence of Montenegro in Dalmatia, had, however, the
effect of estranging the Catholics without securing the gratitude of the
Orthodox. When the Russians invaded Dalmatia, the latter were their
strongest supporters; and throughout the French occupation the Dalmatian
clergy of all denominations depicted the agents of Napoleon as
atheists and regicides, and used their vast influence with the
ignorant people against their rulers. Marmont, on the other hand, has left
a permanent reputation in the country as a road-maker; and the peasants
still tell the marvellous tale how the French general “mounted his horse
and bade his soldiers make roads,” and how “when he dismounted, lo! the
roads were made.” A Frenchman, too, drew up an accurate chart of the
difficult Dalmatian coast, with its countless islands and
dangerous currents; while another of his compatriots induced even
the conservative natives to recognise the advantages of vaccination, and
so diminished the terrible scourge of most oriental lands.
After 1809 Napoleon’s schemes
changed, and he looked upon Dalmatia merely as a nursery for tall soldiers and
its inhabitants as food for powder. Now, it is a curious fact that the
same people who had willingly furnished aid to Venice in her last days
resolutely refused to follow the standards of the French Emperor. From
first to last the conscription was most unpopular in the country; and,
when war broke out between France and Austria in 1809, the Dalmatians
rose almost as one man against the French. From this time, too, the
country was treated without the smallest regard to its special conditions.
No longer a part of the Kingdom of Italy, but forming, together with
Ragusa, two of the seven “Illyrian Provinces,” it ceased to have a
separate history from that of the other dominions of Napoleon. The
Illyrian kingdom, composed as it was of five nationalities—Germans,
Italians, Croats, Serbs, and Slovenes—had no unity, while there
was nothing in common between the Norman or Breton peasant and the
Dalmatian fisherman. Vet the Dalmatian, no less than the Norman and
Breton, was now subjected to the rigid and unbending Code Napoléon;
what was good for France was declared to be good for Dalmatia; and, in the
room of men like Dandolo and Marmont, inexperienced doctrinaires or mechanical
clerks were sent to govern the people on hard-and-fast rules, laid down in
Paris, without the least regard for the past history or present needs of
the governed. The elaborate organisation of the “Illyrian Provinces” in 1811
was a complete failure, as the French candidly admitted;
everything was sacrificed to the desire for centralisation; and
when, in 1814, the Austrians re-entered Dalmatia they were hailed as
liberators. Moreover, the trade of the country suffered greatly from the
British cruisers during the struggle against Napoleon, though there was
some compensating benefit to those Dalmatian islands—Lissa, Curzola, Lesina, and the Ragusan archipelago—which
were regularly occupied by our forces between 1812 and 1815. The important
naval station of Lissa, in
particular, where the British fleet defeated the French in 1811, became a
centre of trade during our brief occupation. In two years its population
was nearly trebled; all the nationalities hostile to Napoleon found
shelter there; and at no period of its history, before or since, has the
island known such prosperity. Curzola was
provided by the British governor with local institutions; and an
inscription still preserves his memory there and expresses the gratitude
of the inhabitants. In the five Ragusan islands the old Ragusan laws were
restored by our representatives, and native nobles placed at the
head of their respective administrations. Britain has no cause to be
ashamed of the part she played at a critical time in a country whose manly
sailors are scarcely inferior to her own.
But, if the French occupation
of Dalmatia has left little constructive work, except Marmont’s roads, behind
it, it destroyed for ever two interesting survivals of the middle ages —the
Republics of Poljitza and Ragusa. It is curious that Napoleon, who spared
the tiny Italian commonwealth of San Marino, should have swept away its
Illyrian counterpart. The mountain-republic of Poljitza, with a population
of between 6ooo and 7000, had maintained its independence under Hungarian
and Venetian protection for centuries. Governed by a highly aristocratic
constitution, and tempering its constitutional theories with frequent appeals
to violence, as befitted a Balkan state, it was unwise enough to take
sides with the Russians, who hounded it on against the French in 1807. The
result was the destruction of the Republic and its incorporation with the
rest of Dalmatia—an arrangement never since disturbed, although, on St
George’s day 1911, by order of the Emperor, the three communes, which
occupied the territory of the Republic, were formed into one, having
its exact historic boundaries. More tragic still was the end of Ragusa,
a Republic which had existed in one form or another for over eleven
centuries, and won the proud title of “The South Slavonic Athens.” At this
time the Republic numbered 35,000 inhabitants, and consisted of the city of the
same name, the town of Ragusa Vecchia, the district of Canali between that
place and the Bocche di Cattaro,
the beautiful valley of the Ombla, the long peninsula
of Sabbioncello, and the five islands of Lagosta, Meleda, Giupana, Mezzo, and Calamotta.
The Austrians had not touched its liberties and had refused to aid the
refractory Canalesi, who were discontented with the
republican government. But, at the news of the treaty of Pressburg, the
Russians had occupied the Bocche di Cattaro; and Ragusa was thus placed between them and the
French. The latter declared their intention of occupying its territory, but of
evacuating it as soon as the Russians should have withdrawn. This promise was wilfully broken by Napoleon, whose officers, Lauriston and
Marmont, seem both to have been ashamed of the transaction. The siege of Ragusa
by the Russians and their allies, the Montenegrins and the Canalesi,
did much harm to the suburbs, but was raised by the French under Molitor. Once,
however, in possession of the city, the French showed no sign of going. The
lower orders of Ragusa were in favour of French
annexation as an alternative to the aristocratic rule of their fellow
countrymen. The nobles made a final effort to save the commonwealth, and in
vain appealed to Austria and Turkey. The standard of San Biagio, patron of
Ragusa, ceased to float above the famous statue of Orlando; and on the last day
of January 1808, a French colonel informed the assembled Senate that “the
Republic of Ragusa has ceased to exist.” Marmont was created Duc de Raguse; and
the Republican territory became, first, a part of the Kingdom of Italy, and
then one of the “Illyrian Provinces.” Six years later Ragusa was freed from the
French by the combined Austrian and British forces; but, though the nobles
hoped for a revival of the Republic, the people welcomed Austrian, as they had
welcomed French rule, and Ragusa till 1919 remained, like the rest of Dalmatia,
under the sway of the Hapsburgs.
One other result of the French
occupation of Dalmatia was to bring Montenegro for the first time within the
circle of European politics. At the beginning of the nineteenth
century the warriors of the Black Mountain were quite outside
the pale of civilisation, and passed their time in almost
incessant struggles against the Turks. But their traditional
friendship with Russia made them willing to assist the latter power in
its seizure of the Bocche di Cattaro in 1806; and, as we have seen, they took part in the siege of Ragusa. The
French found the Prince-Bishop of Montenegro, Peter I, so tiresome an
opponent that they in vain endeavoured to appease him by offering to make
him Patriarch of Dalmatia; and, after the treaty of Tilsit had given them
undisturbed possession of the Bocche, they
thought it well to be on good terms with so awkward a neighbour. But the
wary Peter, though he granted Marmont an interview, declined to receive a
French consul at Cetinje; and, when Vialla de Sommières was instructed by Napoleon to draw up a
report on Montenegro, he had to obtain his political information under the
pretext of botanising. The Prince-Bishop would not hear of the French
Emperor’s offer of his protection ; and, as soon as the news of the
retreat from Moscow reached him, he prepared to attack the garrisons
of Napoleon, who had planned the wholesale deportation of Montenegrins
to the Low Countries. Peter gladly co-operated with the British fleet in
the siege of Cattaro in 1813, but his tenure of
that coveted place was of short duration. Next year, on the advice of the
Tsar, he restored it to Austria, which for 105 years held it.
Meanwhile, on the other side
of the Balkan peninsula, the diplomacy of Napoleon had not been idle. In 1806,
in consequence of the deposition of the Hospodars of Moldavia and
Wallachia, without the consent of Russia, at Sebastiani’s suggestion, the
Russian troops entered the Principalities, and the first Russo-Turkish war
of the century began. The Tsar had legal right on his side, for the
deposition of the Hospodars was a direct
violation of the ordinance of 1802 ; and in Great Britain he found a willing
ally. A British ultimatum in 1807 demanded the expulsion of Sébastiani, and a declaration of war against France,
the alliance of Turkey with Russia and Great Britain, the cession of the Danubian Principalities to the Tsar, and the surrender
of the Turkish fleet, together with the forts at the Dardanelles, to the
British admiral. As the Sultan, encouraged by the French, rejected this
ultimatum, the British fleet entered the Dardanelles, as Elphinston had advised in 1770, and appeared before
Constantinople. But the admiral allowed himself to be entangled in those
negotiations which Turkish statesmen know so well how to spin out. Had
he shown the decision of another British admiral in Crete ninety-one years
later, the world might have witnessed the spectacle of a British
occupation of Constantinople. But he wasted precious time in
despatch-writing; and, while he wrote, the Turks, urged on by the French
and encouraged by the Sultan in person, worked at the fortifications.
Admiral Duckworth had to retreat beyond the Dardanelles; Constantinople
was saved. Occupied with Napoleon, neither Russia nor Great Britain
could prosecute a war against Turkey with vigour; and the preoccupations
of the Powers seemed, as usual, to be the best safeguard of the Sultan.
But suddenly the world learnt that Napoleon and the Tsar had become
reconciled by the peace of Tilsit, and that, in order to prosecute his
plans against England, the French Emperor had changed his
eastern policy, and was ready to sacrifice Turkey to the
requirements of his ambition. Only a few months earlier he had declared it
to be his “mission to save her.”
The scheme for the partition
of the Turkish empire in Europe, which was sketched out by Napoleon in his
interview with the Tsar Alexander I at Tilsit, was not more
practical than such plans have been in later days. But, rough as it was,
it still contained one or two pregnant suggestions, which even now are not
without value in the discussion of the eastern question. Napoleon was willing
to cede Bessarabia, Moldavia, Wallachia, and North Bulgaria to Russia,
taking as his own share Albania, Thessaly as far as the gulf of
Salonika, the Morea and Crete, while Austria was to be appeased
with a part of Bosnia and Servia. The heir of Peter the Great
and Catherine II was not, however, content with his portion of the spoils.
He was willing to allow Napoleon to take, in addition to the already large
French claims, the islands of the Archipelago, Syria, and Egypt, if Russia
could have Roumelia and Constantinople. We have
it on the authority of an eye-witness, the French Emperor’s private
secretary, that Napoleon replied by indignantly placing his finger on the
spot on the map, which represented the Turkish capital, and exclaiming: “Constantinople!
Constantinople! Never! for it is the empire of the world”. Subsequent
events have perhaps diminished the strategic value of that marvellous
site; but few will deny that it was long the goal of Russian ambition,
though of all the Turkish provinces assigned to Russia at Tilsit,
Bessarabia is the only one that she till very
lately incorporated in her empire. France, at that time in occupation of
Dalmatia, and about to re-enter into possession of the Ionian Islands,
might not unnaturally aspire to further acquisitions in the near
east —an aspiration now abandoned; while Napoleon’s concession of
part of Bosnia to Austria was an anticipation of the Berlin Treaty of
1878. By a secret article the two Emperors pledged themselves, in the
event of the failure of French diplomacy to make its influence felt with
the new Sultan, to “free all European Turkey, except Roumelia and the capital, from the yoke and vexations of the Turks”. No time was
lost in preparing for this philanthropic partition. Marmont was ordered
to procure information about Bosnia, Macedonia, Thrace, Greece, and
Albania, their resources and their military situation, and to be less
friendly with the pasha of Bosnia, at whose residence the French had a
consul-general. As another consequence of the Franco-Russian treaty, the
French were reinstated in the Ionian Islands. The possession of the Bocche di Cattaro and Corfù seemed, indeed, to be a prelude to a grand
campaign against Turkey, which might, as a British diplomatist wrote, be a
prelude to a still grander campaign against the rest of Europe.
The Ionians, who had welcomed
the democratic French with enthusiasm in 1797, as an agreeable relief from the
pride of the Venetians, showed themselves completely indifferent to
the second French occupation ten years later. In the interval, under the
unpopular protectorate of Russia and Turkey, the islands on March 21,
1800, had been erected into a “Septinsular Republic”, which, though shorn of their former continental dependencies,
formed the first autonomous Greek state of modern times. Unfortunately,
this Ionian commonwealth had been indulging in the luxury of constant
changes of administration. Three constitutions had been proclaimed in
two years; and a small revolution had demonstrated that Corfù had not greatly altered since the days when it
furnished Thucydides with moral maxims on the wickedness of
civic strife. At first a beautiful scheme of federation was tried, A
federal Senate, whose president was styled árchon, met
at Corfù, and a local council of nobles sat in
each island. But the democrats found this arrangement too aristocratic,
and the federalists found that it tended to separation. Cephalonia
and Ithaca proclaimed their independence, and Zante hoisted the British
flag. A National Assembly was held at Corfù, and
the other islands were left to look after themselves. Then
Russia intervened and granted one of those constitutions which she is
fond of bestowing on her “spheres of influence” outside her direct
dominions. But the returning French made short work with Ionian
self-government. Napoleon was more than ever convinced of the strategic
importance of Corfù; “the greatest misfortune
that could happen to me,” he said, “would be its loss.” So he now
organised the Ionian Islands on a purely military footing; the native
Senate had no power, and the French
governed absolutely, to the great disgust of the inhabitants. But this second
French occupation was not much longer than the first. The British took Zante, Cephalonia, Ithaca,
and Cerigo in October 1809, with the object
of protecting Sicily, then occupied by our troops, and Santa Mavra in
April 1810. Brigadier Oswald organised these islands, and military
governors were appointed. But, as the frequent changes of those officials
caused inconvenience, Lieut.-General James Campbell was appointed Civil
and Military Governor. Two out of the seven islands—Corfù and Paxo—alone remained to the French. Paxo was taken in February
1814, but the blockade of Corfù proved futile.
Napoleon wrote that “Corfù acquires more importance every day; for the English, if they were its
masters, would be masters of the Adriatic too.” But, if he prized it as “
the key of the Adriatic,” if an Ionian Academy was founded under his
auspices, he did nothing for its economic interests. The Corfiote
trade was ruined by the blockade; the superb olive-trees of
the island were cut down by the French troops; and when the French
government ordered its surrender to the British upon the first fall of
Napoleon in pursuance of the convention of Paris of April 23, 1814, an
order executed on June 24, the French administration, though the French
governor Donzelot personally left behind him pleasant memories, had
contented the islanders as little as that of Venice or that of Russia.
Napoleon’s designs for the
partition of Turkey at Tilsit were modified in 1808, when he again met the Tsar
at Erfurt. He had learned to see the hopelessness of any large plan
of operations in the east, while he had the west upon his hands. He
now conceded Moldavia and Wallachia alone to Russia, took nothing for
himself from Turkey, and joined with the Tsar in guaranteeing the other
Turkish provinces. The result of these negotiations was to induce Britain
and Turkey to end their mutual hostilities, and in 1809 to sign the peace
of the Dardanelles. But in spite of a
brief armistice, the Russo-Turkish war continued. The Russians once more found
that it was not an easy matter to conquer their hereditary enemies, but
the victory rested with them. They crossed the Danube, and, more fortunate
than in 1854, look the strong fortress of Silistria.
The Danubian towns of Nikopolis, Svishtov, and Rustchuk passed into their hands, when the changing policy of Napoleon caused them
to pause. The Tsar, foreseeing the French Emperor’s impending attack upon
him, had to withdraw troops for the defence of his own dominions. As in
1829, so in 1812, Russia played what the “new diplomacy” would call
“a game of bluff.” She pretended to have in her hands cards which she did
not possess. She pretended that her differences with Napoleon would be
arranged peacefully, and, having gained a considerable success over the
Turks, expressed a willingness to negotiate. The Turkish government,
mindful of the way in which Napoleon had thrown over his good
friend, the Sultan, at Tilsit, paid no heed to the arguments of
the French agents in favour of continuing the war. The
Russian demands were moderate, and they were accepted. There was no
question now of a Russian annexation of the Danubian Principalities
as a whole. But by the treaty of Bucharest in 1812 the Tsar received the
territory between the Dniester and the Pruth, which is known by the
generic name of Bessarabia. For the Roumanians the cession of Bessarabia was a terrible blow. Austria had taken from them
the Bukovina, now Russia took another piece of their land. During the six
years of the war they had learned to dread their “liberators,” who were
quartered upon them, who made them labour at the fortifications and
provide waggons and oxen for the transport service, who extorted large
sums from the nobles, sold titles to the highest bidder, flooded the
country with a debased currency, and favoured the Greek monks at the
expense of the natives. The full information which we possess on
the state of Moldavia and Wallachia at this period proves the utter
misery of the poor, the utter corruption of the rich, the utter
demoralisation of all classes under the Russian occupation. Wherever the
Russian armies passed “the earth groaned”, says a chronicler;
and, to crown all, in spite of the protests of the native aristocracy and
its efforts to convince the Porte of its folly in yielding so rich a
prize, Bessarabia was to go to swell the dominions of the Tsar, and the
Pruth was to become the frontier of his empire.
The treaty of Bucharest was a
fatal blunder on the part of Turkey; less than a month after its signature
Napoleon formally declared war against Russia; and the Sultan,
regretting his undue haste in making peace, disgraced his Grand
Vizier and cut off the heads of his plenipotentiaries. But the influence of
Great Britain, once more in the ascendant at Constantinople and once more
directed to the great object of breaking the power of the French colossus,
restrained the ardour of the war party. Moreover, the internal state of
Turkey was such as to demand the undivided attention of the
government. Servia was in arms against the Sultan; Ali of Joánnina
was practically independent in Epirus; Pasvanoglu had found
a successor at Vidin; great chieftains kept armies of their own in
Thrace and Macedonia. Still, it is probable that, as at the treaty of
Falksen a century earlier, so at Bucharest in 1812, the Turks, without
much risk, might have obtained better terms. On both occasions they were
sold by their agents; on both occasions Russia got better terms than she
could have expected. The Sultan, it is true, endeavoured to
recover Bessarabia through the good offices of Austria at the congress of
Vienna after the fall of Napoleon. But he only received the reply that
such a retrocession was out of the question. Russia, on her part, did all
she could to prevent the inhabitants of her new province from emigrating
to join their brothers in Moldavia; and so closely did she guard the
frontier that the Moldaves, accustomed to draw
their supplies of food from Bessarabia, suffered great privations.
The career of Napoleon was
over, and but little of his great plans of conquest in the east had been
accomplished; even of that little practically nothing remained. His
seven “Illyrian Provinces” were restored to Austria, the
Ionian Islands were, after a long discussion, erected into an independent
state under the protection of Great Britain. At the congress of Vienna the
British plenipotentiary had proposed that the islands should be placed
under an Austrian protectorate —a proposal which had much to commend it.
As the heir of Venice, the Austrian Emperor could claim to have inherited the
former Venetian possessions, while the master of Corfù commanded
the approach to the Adriatic and would protect the Austrian seaboard in
Dalmatia. This was, however, opposed by the Tsar, who urged that the
wishes of the islanders for a British protectorate should be respected.
For this argument there was much to be said. Great Britain
had conquered six of the seven islands from the French; and
her troops were occupying the seventh by virtue of its surrender by
the new French government. At the congress of Paris the British
representatives accordingly proposed that the seven islands and their
former dependencies on the mainland and elsewhere should pass under the
complete sovereignty of King George III. The Russian plenipotentiary,
Count Capo d’Istria, himself a Corfiote and destined to be the
future President of Greece, insisted, however, on the freedom
and independence of the islands, and was willing to cede no more than
a protectorate over them and their former dependencies to Great Britain.
The final arrangement, signed at Paris in 1815, was that the Seven Islands
and the small islets depending on them should form an independent state,
under the denomination of “the United States of the Ionian Islands,”
and under a British protectorate. As Lord Bathurst, the
Colonial Secretary of that date, under whose department the
islands were placed, saw clearly enough, this arrangement was
unsatisfactory and incomplete. It placed the British government in an
invidious position, because it enabled the Ionians, who were not easily
contented, to represent Great Britain as a tyrannical power whose main
object was to repress their liberties. Moreover, the settlement was
incomplete in another way. For the former dependencies of the islands on
the mainland, which had been awarded to Turkey, as we have seen, by
the Russo-Turkish convention of 1800, were allowed to remain a part of the
Ottoman empire. Párga alone of them was still unconquered; and the
subsequent fate of that place showed what an error had been committed by
the British diplomatists in this affair. Count Capo d’Istria, while
unwilling to grant Great Britain the absolute sovereignty over the Ionian
Islands and their dependencies on the continent, was nevertheless most
anxious that the latter should not be severed from the former under his
scheme for a British protectorate. The British, however, contended that if they
could not have the absolute sovereignty they would have nothing to do
with the continental dependencies of the islands. They were undesirous of
mixing themselves up in Turkish affairs and of disturbing the Turkish
occupation. Unlike the Venetians, who had styled those places in Epirus “the
eyes and ears of the Republic” on the mainland, the British showed in
1815, as at much later periods, that they cared very little for, perhaps
understood very little about, that Balkan peninsula which Napoleon had
tried to partition, but which even his genius had found an insoluble
problem.
CHAPTER II
THE SERVIAN RISINGS
(1804-17)
| NICE READING |
|
|
|
|
W. J. STILLMAN |
|
R. W. SETON -WATSON |
|
|
COUNT LOUIS VOINOVITCH |
|
|
|
CHARLES SEIGNOBOS |
|
|
REV. EDWIN M. BLISS, |
|
Edmond de Cadalvène, |
|
|
LIEUT.-GENERAL VALENTINE BAKER PACHA, |
|
HAROLD W. V. TEMPERLEY |
|
FRANCIS SEYMOUR STEVENSON
|
|
HENRY JERVIS-WHITE
|
|
LEWIS SERGEANT |
|
R. P. GUÉRIN SONGEON |
| |
FRÉDÉRIC DAMÉ |
|
COLONEL CHESNEY, |
