In the spring of 1453, as the Ottoman Turks worked doggedly to breach the walls of Constantinople, both besiegers and besieged were constantly looking for omens. For the Byzantines within, losing the city to the infidel could only mean that God had forsaken his chosen people. Certain death or enslavement awaited them. For Mehmet II (ruled 1444–46, 1451–81), victory would mean the heavens had fated him for imperial greatness. As the legitimate capital of the Roman empire and, according to the Byzantines, the earthly counterpart to the Kingdom of Heaven, the city carried exceptional symbolic significance. As one Italian contemporary reported, Mehmet now claimed the right to ‘extend his rule over the whole Christian world’.1 For Mehmet, who also drew inspiration from Central Asian and Islamic warrior traditions and from the equally youthful Alexander the Great, possession of Constantinople meant he was entitled to a universal empire. Over the next two centuries, Mehmet and his successors proceeded to build a suitably massive empire, from the Mahgreb (Algeria) to Mesopotamia (Iraq), and from Hungary down to the Indian Ocean.
Ottoman history thereafter experienced two successive, and quite distinct, phases. For much of the early modern age, the Ottomans were the world’s most formidable military power. During the reign of Süleyman the Magnificent (1520–66), the greatest of all Ottoman rulers, Constantinople was recognized across the entire Sunni Muslim world as the seat of the Khalifa (caliph), or ‘deputy of the prophet of God’, that is, of Muhammad. The Ottoman sultan assumed responsibility for overseeing the hajj (pilgrimage), he was custodian of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, and he held the ultimate temporal authority for Muslims as far away as Senegal and Sumatra. The empire’s second career started from the mid-eighteenth century, when it gradually succumbed to European powers that had found the means to exercise global political and economic domination. By that stage, the Ottomans had acquired the disreputable image of a ramshackle anachronism: the empire was now the principal site for Western fantasies of ‘Oriental’ decadence. To survive, the empire struggled to renew itself, and but for the intervention of the First World War it might well have survived in a workable, albeit truncated, form.
Founded in 1300 and dissolved in 1922, the Ottoman empire was one of the most durable in world history. How does one account for its durability? How did it assert such firm control over the Balkans and the Middle East, perhaps the most militarily contested zone in world history?
Some answers can be found among the semi-arid steppes of Central Asia, the ancestral homeland of the Ottoman Turks. As with the Huns and Mongols, the Turks were pastoral nomads who formed tribal confederations and created vast (albeit short-lived) empires from the sixth century CE. Around the eleventh century, Turks migrated south and formed a series of powerful states from the Mediterranean through to India, including the Delhi Sultanates (1206–1526) and the great Mughal empire (1526–1707).
That nomads should be able to produce such formidable military states had much to do with the exceptionally unstable nature of the pastoral economy of the steppes. As the Chinese historian Sima Qian noted, ‘It is the custom to herd their flocks in times of peace and make their living by hunting, but in periods of crisis they take up arms and go off on plundering and marauding expeditions.’2 Periods of crisis were so common, however, that hunting and plundering were routine. Extreme climatic conditions, the unpredictable nature of livestock reproduction, and fierce competition for pastureland forced nomadic groups to supplement their pastoral activities with trade, hunting game and raiding other groups. War was intrinsic to the pastoral way of life, and nomads were not unlike professional soldiers, spending much of their lives honing their riding and martial skills. Many great empires, from Rome across to China, suffered at the hands of Central Asian tribal confederations that used their great mobility and supreme archery skills to disperse and annihilate enemy formations.
The chronically insecure nature of pastoral life also conditioned the peoples of Central Asia to be versatile when formulating survival strategies. As mobile peoples they mingled frequently with different cultures, and became accustomed to adopting and modifying ideas to meet their own needs. Such qualities were extremely important when pastoral armies encountered unfamiliar challenges, such as sophisticated stone fortifications and naval power. Like the Mongols, the Turks were quick to master military techniques (e.g. siege warfare) and technologies (e.g. catapults, gunpowder weapons), so as to eliminate the advantages enjoyed by more sophisticated sedentary states. Pastoral empires therefore managed to grow to impressive sizes. In 1280, for example, much of Asia and Europe, between the Sea of China and Poland, was ruled by four such empires or ‘khanates’.
In most cases, however, the khanates were unstable political states that collapsed within a generation or two. What set the Ottoman Turks apart was their unique ability to extend that pastoralist virtuosity to state-building. In its quest to expand, consolidate and survive, the Ottoman empire seemed to be constantly reinventing itself throughout its long history.
The Ottoman state began life as a minor principality or emirate in northwestern Anatolia, along the frontier with the Byzantine empire, a Christian state that for centuries acted as a barrier between Christian Europe and Islam. As with the other Muslim principalities that dominated the Anatolian hinterland, the Ottoman emirate consisted of warrior tribesmen committed to perpetual holy war, or gaza, against the infidel. Its founder, Osman (c.1300–24), revived a languishing struggle against the Byzantines and, after a series of military campaigns, created a sizeable domain centred on the city of Bursa. His immediate successors, Orhan (1324?–62), Murad I (1362–89) and Bayezit I (1389–1402), built upon his achievements and transformed the House of Osman into a major regional power. Orhan’s main feat was to establish a foothold on European soil, while Murad I captured the city of Adrianople (Edirne), the gateway to the Balkans, and followed up by conquering much of Thrace and Macedonia. Under Murad and Bayezit, the Ottomans consolidated their power in the Balkans, making the Bulgarian king a vassal and capturing Thessalonika (Salonica), a significant Mediterranean trading port. Following Murad’s death at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, Bayezit extended Ottoman authority over the emirates in the east. Bayezit was captured and executed by the Mongols following a disastrous defeat in 1402, after which a prolonged period of civil war ensued. Mehmet I (1413–20) and Murad II (1420–51) oversaw the re-emergence of Ottomans as a regional power and set the stage for the imperial golden age under Mehmet II.
By the siege of Constantinople, Osman’s descendants had gone from tribal chiefs to sultans, while the loosely organized principality that consisted of a warrior leader and his band of Turkic tribesmen had become a state with a fixed capital. This transformation from pastoral to sedentary state was the kind of metamorphosis that would happen time and again in Ottoman history. The gaza warrior principalities of Anatolia had been, by their nature, very unstable entities, partly because they maintained the Central Asian practice of polygeniture, whereby political power was distributed among male relatives rather than passed undivided to the eldest son. As a result, the emirates often collapsed in disarray during struggles for succession. The Ottomans jettisoned the pastoralist tradition of polygeniture and replaced it with a new system whereby the most able son, who was not necessarily the first-born, became the new sultan. Although it did not completely resolve the problem of succession, it contributed to a more stable transferral of power and produced a series of able rulers. It appears that the House of Osman survived also because it was more amenable to change in its search for a durable political order. Ottoman commitment to perennial holy war, for example, did not preclude alliances and intermarriage with Christian dynasties as a means of consolidating power in the region. Thus Orhan was linked to the Byzantine royal family, the Katakouzenoi, through his marriage to the princess Theodora in 1346, while Bayezit, whose mother was a Byzantine princess, became sultan with the support of Christian princes and a predominantly Christian army.
The versatility of the Ottomans may be attributable to the fact that they inhabited the frontier zone between the Christian and Islamic worlds, where civilizations not only clashed but, more commonly, interacted and blended.3 Forms of religious syncretism, the melding of Christian, Muslim, shamanistic and animistic beliefs, for example, were commonplace throughout Anatolia and the Balkans.
When Mehmet II seized Constantinople, he rescued a dying city of a dead empire. The sultan repopulated it by transferring communities from other parts of his empire, and within a century it had again become the largest city in Europe. The Topkapi Palace was among the many new structures that reflected the glory of the empire: so grand that it took nearly a century to complete. Conquests by later sultans were commemorated with buildings, pavilions and other landmarks. Ottoman architectural and artistic styles drew much influence from Persian and Italian motifs, while the Italian artist Gentile Bellini was commissioned to paint portraits of Mehmet, who styled himself a new Caesar. The city was also made a fitting capital for a Muslim empire. The Hagia Sophia (Church of the Holy Wisdom), commissioned by the Emperor Justinian in the sixth century, the world’s largest Christian basilica, was converted into the sultan’s mosque. Mehmet also established eight medreses (colleges of Islamic law) and other religious institutions that made the city the new centre of Islamic learning. With Constantinople (or Istanbul) in hand, the House of Osman was bold enough to challenge the other great Muslim powers, including Safavid Persia and Mamluk Egypt. During the short reign of Selim I (1512–20), most of what is now the Middle East and North Africa as far as Algiers were incorporated into the empire. When Selim defeated the Mamluks in 1516 and 1517 and established his dominion over Mecca and Medina, he could convincingly claim leadership of the Muslim world. Süleyman, Selim’s successor, took the next step and assumed the title of caliph.
Military historians have often assumed unfairly that the empire’s military edge was based on numbers and sheer ferocity. Throughout the early modern period, field battles were not all that common, but where they did take place, superior Ottoman tactics and a highly disciplined, professional infantry, the legendary Janissaries, usually won the day. At the Battle of Mohács in 1526, for example, firearm-wielding Janissaries and field artillery decimated a Hungarian army of feudal knights. As one historian has put it, the battle saw ‘the destruction of a medieval army by an early modern one’.4 In terms of tactics and technology, the Ottomans kept abreast of changes chiefly by learning from their enemies. During a protracted struggle against the Kingdom of Hungary during the 1440s, the Ottomans were quick enough in adopting Hungarian military technology to blunt their opponents’ military edge and emerge victorious: in this case it was cannons and mobile fortresses.5 The Ottomans promptly became masters in the manufacture and use of large cannons, which gave them the means to breach the great walls of Constantinople in 1453. Fortresses dominated early modern warfare, and more often than not the Ottomans were tenaciously besieging towns and cities along their frontier lines using heavy artillery, siege towers, mangonels and tunnelling. During its classical phase the empire also demonstrated unmatched sophistication when it came to mobilization and provisioning. It created the most effiient fiscal mechanisms for funding imperial campaigns, while field manoeuvres, as one expert puts it, were a ‘tour de force of administrative precision and finesse’.6
Until recently, historians felt the Ottoman political order assumed its classical form in the period between Mehmet II and Süleyman (1451–1566), but, as with the feudal order in Europe, one is hard-pressed to find a precise moment when the system functioned in this ideal form. Discussing some of these institutions in their designated ‘classical’ form, however, illustrates the characteristic resourcefulness that made the Ottomans so distinctive.
Perhaps the most striking feature of the classical Ottoman state was the immense concentration of power in the hands of the sultan. In contrast to states elsewhere in Europe and Asia, the classical Ottoman political system functioned without a landed aristocracy or nobility. Rather, ministers, bureaucrats, provincial administrators and the elite soldiery were recruited from a well-trained population of slaves. The highest officials, including the grand vizier, were essentially the sultan’s possessions, or kuls. The main source of kuls was the devshirme, a child levy imposed on Christian families, whereby healthy males were recruited and raised to be Muslims and were trained in the arts of warfare or government service. Prisoners of war were another source of kuls, but it was the devshirme that provided the most reliable and eager recruits for the Janissaries, the most vital component of the classical Ottoman army. The sipahis, the sultan’s elite cavalry force, were also totally beholden to the sultan, for they were recipients of land grants or timars that were conditional on service. Timars were not unlike feudal fiefdoms in that they gave sipahis the freedom to commit their energies to warfare, but timars remained the sultan’s personal property and could not be inherited. As such, the system, which was an adaptation of Byzantine and Seljuk feudal traditions, worked against the formation of regional power bases.
The entire system was designed to give the ruler untrammelled authority, and no measure secured this more brutally than unigeniture. Upon the death of the sovereign, the male siblings, and therefore potential rivals, of the anointed successor were put to death. Unigeniture, however, was too callous to be a viable method of succession in a civilized society. This heart-rending and unpopular practice ended in 1595, after the execution of nineteen young princes appeared to cause a mass outcry in the capital.7
This system was quite novel in many respects, but it did not provide the basis for the empire’s long-term viability. As imperial administration became increasingly complicated and required more specialized government and military expertise, the devshirme proved an increasingly inadequate source of talent. In Süleyman’s later years, one begins to see much greater involvement in government affairs from members of the imperial household, namely mothers, sisters, daughters and their husbands. In the seventeenth century, elite families of independent means also became important pools of recruitment in government service, and as the timar system became unworkable provincial nobilities re-emerged. The sipahis and the kuls who were recruited for the Janissaries and the sultan’s bureaucracy eventually found ways of circumventing a recruitment system that denied them a chance to bequeath wealth and status to their progeny. The devshirme was formally abolished by 1704, and although the Janissaries remained prominent in Istanbul’s political life, they had long ceased to be the sultan’s elite military force.
According to contemporaries and later historians, the death of Süleyman the Magnificent signalled the beginning of Ottoman decline, but the empire remained as formidable on the world stage throughout the seventeenth century as it had been in its classical era. Rather, as Daniel Goffman has argued: ‘The secret to Ottoman longevity… was not its legendary military, its loyal bureaucracy, its series of competent rulers, or a particular system of land tenure. Rather, it was its flexibility in dealing with its diverse society.’8 As the empire expanded and governance became more complicated, and as the costs of war became ever more exorbitant, state administration, revenue-raising and recruitment methods were transformed accordingly. Autocracy increasingly made way for a more differentiated and decentralized political order.
Such suppleness was vital when it came to governing a vast, heterogeneous society. The characteristic Ottoman approach was to accommodate the interests of the conquered without compromising the power of the state. The House of Osman wished to be seen as benevolent and just. As a rule, newly conquered subjects were left in possession of their lands, and non-Muslims (dhimmi) were free to observe their faith on condition that they paid a head tax. Despite its sustained commitment to gaza, the Ottoman state took it as given that it ruled a heterogeneous world. The spiritual heads of the various religious communities were accorded social status and required to take up residence in the capital. As for provincial administration, versatility was the key. Rather than impose a single, standard administrative and legal order across the empire, the Ottomans took into account indigenous traditions so that local interests and rights were made part of the new imperial order. The result was a complicated patchwork of administrative and legal systems, but the effect was to make the sultan appear the defender of sectional interests.
The first inklings of imperial decline were felt during the Battle of Vienna in 1683, the Ottomans’ first major defeat on land since 1402. More portentous still was the Peace of Karlowitz in 1699, when the Ottomans were forced to sign a peace treaty and cede territory to Austria. The empire was no longer invincible on land, but it remained among the leading military powers until the 1770s. Wholesale reforms to the taxation system moderated the effects of mushrooming military costs, which meant the Ottomans survived a global military-fiscal crisis that precipitated the collapse of so many other states and empires.9
It was in the latter decades of the eighteenth century that the empire slipped dramatically behind its major European counterparts. An economic depression blighted the second half of the century, as fiscal reform and cheap Western goods devastated Ottoman commerce and manufacturing. Just as ruinous were the crushingly expensive and disruptive wars fought against Catherine the Great’s Russia and Revolutionary France. Foreign armies were now capable of threatening Istanbul itself. In 1774, the Russians converged on the capital and forced the Ottoman government, described in official correspondence as ‘the Sublime Porte’, to sign the first of many humiliating treaties. The Treaty of Küçük-Kaynarca recognized Russia’s patronage of Ottoman Christian communities, which was interpreted as a licence to interfere in internal Ottoman affairs.
After Küçük-Kaynarca, the very survival of the empire became a long-running issue within European diplomatic circles, where the main concern was how the division of its territories might affect inter-state power relations. The entire globe was now vulnerable to the machinations of Europe’s ‘Great Powers’, which had developed the political, technological and economic means to completely alter the balance of global power. European economic interests had developed the means of tapping new and seemingly unlimited sources of energy to achieve unprecedented rates of economic growth and capital accumulation. European states were also applying scientific principles to rationalize political, social and fiscal systems in order to mobilize resources efficiently and effectively. Throughout the nineteenth century, European political and economic might was unassailable, and erstwhile major powers such as China, Persia and the Ottoman empire found such strength overwhelming. The question is not why the Ottoman empire declined, but how it survived into the twentieth century.
During the nineteenth century, only Meiji Japan managed to bridge the widening gap between the Western (European and North American) powers and the rest of the world. The Ottomans sought to do the same by modernizing its entire political order. With characteristic versatility, the Porte set about reforming government, military and legal institutions by drawing eclectically from various European models – by the century’s end, Japan too had become an inspirational paradigm. During the nineteenth century and through to the eve of the First World War, the chief aim was to transform the empire into something akin to a modern nation-state, which involved developing a patriotic bond between state and society not unlike that which had mobilized Revolutionary France. By the beginning of the twentieth century, these attempts to modernize the empire appeared to be bearing fruit.
The impetus for reform was driven by the litany of defeats and territorial losses that followed Küçük-Kaynarca. By 1792, Russia had conquered the Crimea and Georgia, and it made further territorial gains in 1829. In 1830, Greece won its independence and the French occupied Algeria. In the meantime, the Porte had lost control over most of its provinces, including much of Anatolia and the Balkans, to regional power magnates. Egypt effectively functioned as an independent state from 1805 to 1882. In 1831, an Egyptian army under Muhammad Ali, an Ottoman governor who made himself the supreme authority in this rich province, defeated the Ottomans at the Battle of Konya. As the prestige of the empire diminished, regional, religious and ethnic groups began to question its legitimacy. One reaction came in the form of Islamic revivalist movements, most notably the Wahhabis in western Arabia, who did not recognize Ottoman authority and threatened its control over Mecca and Medina. Another reaction came from educated Christian elites in the Balkans who, inspired by the Enlightenment and the example of the French Revolution, called for national self-determination and the removal of the Ottoman yoke. An alliance between such intellectuals and powerful Christian bandit chiefs led to the Greek War of Independence in 1821, the first successful secessionist rebellion in the Balkans.
Selim III (1789–1807), the first sultan not to imprison foreign diplomats if their monarchs misbehaved, was also the first to champion political reform.10 Over the next century, Ottoman reformers waged a difficult campaign to create a modern state by streamlining the empire’s vast and complex array of administrative and legal systems. The centralization of political power would also take generations of struggle to realize. Reforming central government was somewhat easier. The transition from the ancien régime to a modern system entailed a radically expanded government and public service. Between the 1790s and the beginning of the twentieth century Ottoman administration expanded: the number of bureaucrats rose from 2,000 to 35,000, and the number of public servants grew to half a million. Secular education rather than personal connections became the most vital qualifications for employment in state departments.
Under Selim III, who witnessed the power unleashed by such a comparatively modest-sized state as revolutionary France, the first attempts were made to reform the existing ruling order, but it was Mahmut II (1808–39) who started the process of creating modern institutions. Between 1835 and 1839, central government was divided into ministries and departments. Mahmut’s reign set the stage for the so-called Tanzimat period (1839–76), an era defined by its ‘beneficial reforms’ (Tanzimat-i Hayriye). These included the promotion of legal equality for all the sultan’s subjects, regardless of religious affiliation, and the introduction of constitutional government, including a parliamentary system. In the meantime, Mahmut succeeded in reasserting authority over most of the Ottoman provinces: Albania (1822), Iraq and Kurdistan (1831–38), Libya (1835), the Hijaz (1840).
Resistance to reform, however, proved formidable. In 1807 Selim III was overthrown by reactionary forces that included the Janissaries, but not before supporters of reform had been dragged into the capital’s ancient hippodrome and slaughtered. The Janissaries in particular, who took a recalcitrant position on any reforms to the military, posed a constant threat to the sultanate. In 1826 Mahmut II suppressed yet another Janissary revolt and disbanded the entire corps.
Given that Ottoman society comprised a vast and heterogeneous collection of communities, each defined by particular rights and privileges, government reforms were often a source of deep resentment. For many Muslims, the most difficult reform to stomach was the granting of equal legal status to non-Muslims, which involved a transgression of Muslim sharia law. However, reformers were keen to win the loyalty of their large religious minorities, particularly in the Balkans where Christians in fact constituted a majority, and which were therefore susceptible to secessionist mobilization. By the Tanzimat period, the non-Muslim minorities were organized into confessional orders or millets, which functioned as states within the state, as each group held responsibility for organizing tax revenue, administering justice in accordance with their own laws, and overseeing such services as education. The reforms aimed to abolish this segregated system and create a comprehensive Ottoman citizenship. While Muslims resented the threat to their superior status, Greeks in particular feared the loss of particular rights and privileges, especially exemption from military service.
The constitutional agenda came unstuck in 1877, when Abdülhamit II (1876–1909), with the backing of most ministers, returned to a more autocratic political system. The loss of much of the Balkans to Christian separatist movements in 1878 saw ‘Ottomanism’ make way for ‘Islamism’ – the new regime focused on its Muslim subjects (e.g. ethnic Turks, Kurds, Arabs, Tartars, Circassians, Albanians) as the foundation of a rejuvenated state. In the meantime, state modernization and centralization continued. By the end of his reign, Abdülhamit had secured greater control of the empire’s human and material resources than any of his predecessors. The army, local administration, public education, communications (steam shipping, and road, rail and telegraph networks) and palace administration had been significantly rationalized.
Ottoman society and its economy under Abdülhamit also began to display many of the hallmarks of modernization. By 1900, railways and steamships had eclipsed animal-driven transport and sailing craft. Between the 1830s and 1912, Istanbul had grown from 375,000 to 1,125,000 inhabitants, Izmir from 110,000 to 300,000, Salonica from 70,000 to 150,000, while Beirut began with 10,000 in 1800 and ended with 150,000 by 1914.11 Urban expansion was largely a consequence of the commercialization of agriculture and the dramatic expansion of domestic and external trade. Having suffered heavily from cheap European imports in the period 1800–70, the Ottoman manufacturing sector enjoyed a significant revival. Factories proliferated in and around urban centres, especially Istanbul, Salonica, Izmir and Beirut, as did workers’ organizations and labour protests. In 1908 Istanbul had 285 printing houses, a vibrant critical press that lampooned politicians and satirized modern life, including the effects of Western dress, automobile fatalities and the disorienting effects of Western clock-driven conceptions of time.12 Prior to the First World War, youths in Salonica and other major centres had taken to Western-style dance, operettas, bicycles and the cinema.13 Ottoman society remained overwhelmingly rural at the beginning of the twentieth century, but the habits of urban bourgeois society also showed unmistakeable patterns of change not unlike those found elsewhere in Europe.
However one might interpret the pace of modernization over the nineteenth century, Ottoman standing in relation to the European powers continued to diminish. By the end of Abdülhamit’s reign in 1909, its predicament seemed bleaker than ever. Whereas Japan had developed the wherewithal to become a predatory colonial power in its own right and to defeat Russia decisively in 1905, the Ottomans had in the meantime conceded most of their European and African territories. With Great Power support, the Serbs, Montenegrins and Romanians won formal independence in 1878. The Treaty of Berlin also granted Bulgaria autonomy, while Austria and Britain gained nominal control over Bosnia-Herzegovina and Cyprus, respectively. France established a protectorate over Tunisia in 1881, and Britain occupied Egypt the following year. The empire experienced this dramatic loss of territory even though it was a nominal member of the Concert of Europe, which was meant to maintain a balance of power on the continent but which effectively assumed that Ottoman interests were dispensable. After all, the Ottoman empire was deemed Europe’s ‘Sick Man’, whose death was only a matter of time.
Territorial contraction was not the only source of humiliation. In 1878, Abdülhamit complained bitterly that Britain ‘appeared intent to use and administer the Sublime Porte as its own possession and colony’.14 In 1881, Ottoman finances were placed under a Public Debt Administration overseen by Britain and France, and managed by Greek and Armenian intermediaries. Western capital investment increased significantly in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and, as happened with China, the empire was divided into spheres of economic influence. The same powers guaranteed economic and legal privileges (called ‘capitulations’) to Christian merchants, which caused much resentment among their Muslim counterparts.
To be sure, Great Power rivalries were such that no single European state was allowed to control the strategically sensitive Near East. For the time being at least, the region was best left in Ottoman hands. The empire therefore survived on European sufferance, not unlike Chakri Siam or Qing China. Russian ambitions to attain warm-water ports, particularly Istanbul, were constantly thwarted by British determination to keep the Near East, its gateway to India, out of rival hands. And yet, the same Concert of Europe was open to piecemeal dissection of Ottoman territories when it suited the interests of more powerful states. Moreover, the empire was vulnerable to European public opinion, which assumed that Muslims, and Turks in particular, were barbarians who persecuted Christians. Occasionally, public opinion influenced foreign policy against the empire, as happened when the Great Powers intervened to resuscitate the Greek War of Independence in 1827, or when British prime minister Gladstone exploited public outrage following the massacre of Bulgarian civilians in 1876 (the so-called ‘Bulgarian Horrors’) to win an election in 1880.
That the empire’s welfare hinged on shifts in domestic and international politics in Europe inevitably engendered deep insecurities in Istanbul. So too did the loyalties of minority elites. Fears of nationalist awakenings among the Greeks, for example, were intensified by the rapid expansion in the latter half of the nineteenth century of Greek educational and cultural institutions, many of them sponsored by the Greek government. Abdülhamit’s decision to promote Muslim interests and sanction the massacre of Armenian communities in 1894–96, in reprisal for the actions of Armenian nationalists, reflected a growing view among Muslim elites that Christian minorities were a security liability. Of particular concern was the propensity of nationalist secessionists to induce Great Power intervention by publicizing and, in Ottoman eyes at least, exaggerating persecution of Christian minorities. In the first decade of the twentieth century, many advocates of reform became increasingly interested in an ethnically specific, namely Turkish, basis for reconstituting the empire. Renewed interest in Turkish heritage and culture, led by intellectuals such as Ziya Gökalp and Yusuf Akçura, led to the cultivation of Turkish, as opposed to Muslim, consciousness, and thus formed the seedbed of Turkish nationalism.
The extent to which ordinary Ottomans contributed to this nationalist awakening is a difficult question. Sectarian conflict certainly increased in the nineteenth century. National revolutions in the Balkans, which were explicitly anti-Turkish and anti-Muslim, and which involved the persecution and expulsion of Balkan Muslims, inevitably fuelled animosities towards Christians within other Ottoman territories. So too did the estimated 5–7 million Muslims who fled or emigrated from Russia during the nineteenth century through to 1913. In 1860, Lebanon was the scene of a major sectarian bloodbath, principally involving Druze and Maronite Christians. The Armenian Genocide (1915) was preceded by mass killings in 1894–96 and 1909, while violent exchanges between Christians and Muslims took place intermittently on Crete between 1841 and 1908. Yet it is important to note that the vast majority of Ottoman Muslims, Christians and Jews continued to coexist peacefully in this period. More characteristic of the period were the vibrant, cosmopolitan towns of the eastern Mediterranean littoral, where communities of all religions interacted and prospered. Across northern and western Anatolia, Muslims and Christians continued to celebrate many religious holidays together, venerated the same saints and sought miraculous cures from the same shrines. Nationalism had barely begun to seep into mass consciousness at the beginning of the twentieth century. Subjects within the Arab-speaking provinces continued to accept the legitimacy of the empire until at least the First World War. Most Greeks and Armenians in Anatolia, minorities living among an overwhelmingly Muslim majority, stood to lose a great deal if intercommunal relations de-teriorated. Hence they were not particularly receptive to separatist nationalist ideas.15 Relations, however, did deteriorate irretrievably during the empire’s last, war-ravaged decade (1912–22), when millions of Muslims and Christians were persecuted and displaced by virtue of their religious identities.
Turkish nationalism emerged near the very end of Ottoman history. In 1908, the Young Turk movement, composed mainly of Western-educated military officers and bureaucrats, whose aim was to rescue the empire from imminent collapse by accelerating the political reform process, removed Abdülhamit from power and restored constitutional government, including the parliamentary system. Despite their name, the Young Turks did not constitute a nationalist movement as such, even if most of the leaders looked to ethnic Turks as their natural constituency. Rather, the Committee for Union and Progress (CUP), the movement’s political arm, put Ottomanism back on the agenda. As an early Young Turk publication affirmed: ‘We have tried… to defend the rights and the interests of all Ottomans. We have never treated Armenians and Greeks differently from Turks’.16 By January 1913, however, the CUP had installed itself as a dictatorship and had abandoned Ottomanism. Political inexperience, an unstable parliamentary chamber and widespread resistance to its centralization policies frustrated their political agenda. Particularly disappointing was the reaction of minority elites, who, contrary to the spirit of Ottomanism, insisted on keeping their privileges. Bemused by such perceived ingratitude, the CUP leadership looked more and more to its ethnic Turkish core, though it was a series of disastrous military conflicts between 1910 and 1913 that set the Young Turks thinking seriously about an ethnically homogeneous state. Revolts in the Yemen (1910) and Albania (1910 and 1911) showed that not even all Muslim groups were reliable, but it was the loss of most of the empire’s remaining European territories during the Balkan War of 1912 that proved the real turning point. Bulgarian troops came perilously close to Istanbul, while hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees from Macedonia and Bulgaria poured into Anatolia. In Anatolia itself, Muslims began openly to resent the presence of Christian neighbours, as shown by mass participation in boycotts against Greek businesses. Most Anatolian Greeks saw the writing on the wall and began emigrating to Greece and Russia. By 1913, the Ottoman empire no longer saw itself as a body combining many religions, and regarded the removal of significant Christian minorities, especially Greeks and Armenians, as vital to imperial security.
It is not altogether clear why the CUP committed the empire to war on the side of Germany and Austria in 1914. An alliance with Germany, the most powerful European state, must have seemed to promise the best chance of reclaiming lost territories and rebuilding the empire. It proved a fatal decision. The empire was attacked from all sides. A poorly conceived British invasion via the Gallipoli peninsula was successfully repulsed, but the Russians penetrated deep into northeastern Anatolia, and Britain gradually seized control of the Arab provinces. The Ottoman empire held on to the very end of the war, but the government had lost control of much of the countryside to bandit groups, whose ranks were swelled by deserters. Minority groups were removed from strategically sensitive areas, and many died in forced marches. The war provided the government, which was effectively run by a small coterie of military strongmen, with an excuse to remove the Armenian population from the vicinity of Russia and thus extinguish their territorial claims to eastern Anatolia. Over a million civilians died through forced marches, massacres and starvation.17
When Germany sought an armistice in the autumn of 1918, the Ottomans had no choice but to do the same. The peace imposed by the Allies was punitive in the extreme: the bulk of Anatolia, including Istanbul, was to be partitioned among the victorious powers. But remnants of the Ottoman army regrouped under the leadership of Kemal Mustafa, the hero of Gallipoli, and, with mass support, his Nationalist Army reclaimed Anatolia as an independent Turkish homeland. The Nationalists crushed a Greek expeditionary force in August 1922 and forced the British to forfeit their occupation of Istanbul in October. The Treaty of Lausanne of 1923 guaranteed the territorial boundaries that the Republic of Turkey possesses to this day, while it also stipulated a population exchange with Balkan states, especially Greece, in order to make Anatolia and Eastern Thrace more Turkish.
Ironically, it was the Turks themselves, not the Great Powers, who formally extinguished the Ottoman empire. Kemal Mustafa, now known as ‘Atatürk’ (father of the Turks), who by this stage enjoyed incontestable authority, took that momentous step on 1 November 1922. In Atatürk’s mind, and that of many Nationalists, modernization had by now assumed even greater importance than the empire itself. One of the more enduring and stable multi-ethnic states in world history, the Ottoman empire, was extinguished at the stroke of a pen.