The life of Midhat Pasha; a record of his services, political reforms, banishment, and judicial murder

by Ali Haydar Mithat

In the meantime things went from bad to worse in the affairs of the State. Grand Viziers one after the other were appointed and dismissed. Mehemet Rushdi Pasha, Essad Pasha, Chervani Rushdi Pasha, held office for a few months only, and with the best of intentions were utterly unable to grapple with the situation, and the “villain of the piece,” Mahmoud Nedim, was at last recalled to office. The finances of the country were fast getting beyond all remedy. Although it was only twenty years since the fatal secret of a national debt had been learnt in Turkey, bankruptcy was already staring the country in the face. So palpable was this to the best friends of Turkey, that Mr Yorke in the British Parliament, in the interests of a long‐standing ally of Great Britain, and of the alliance itself, called attention to the state of Turkish finances, and summoned the British Government to intervene through its ambassador at Constantinople to endeavour to ward off impending catastrophes. Three months after this warning the Turkish Treasury suspended payment on half the amount of the coupons of the public debt.

The outcry caused by this measure throughout Europe, not only in strictly commercial and financial circles, but in every class of the community, was indescribable. Tempted by the high rate of interest, and confiding in the assurances of financiers interested in floating successive loans that “Turkey always has paid and therefore always would pay” the coupons of its debts, the petite bourgeoisie and the small investor had largely placed their savings in Turkish bonds, and the “tightness” and misery caused by the suspension was undoubtedly very great (1875). Meetings of indignant bond‐holders were held in every capital and large city in Europe, and the Turkish Government and the Turkish nation, the Pasha and the people, were confounded in a common anathema. The ground was admirably prepared for an explosion of political passion directed against Turkey. The occasion for this was not long in presenting itself.

During the second Vizierate of Essad Pasha, certain movements of a suspicious nature took place on the Montenegrin frontier which would have arrested the attention of a more vigilant Government. A party of sixty Slav peasants from the village of Nevesinje in the Commune of Mostar, on some trivial quarrel with the local authorities, emigrated in a body across the frontier into Montenegro. In a short time, through the good offices of the Russian Ambassador, they obtained leave to return to their homes; but very soon, in concert with their Montenegrin friends, they organised a razzia on the lands of the neighbouring Mussulmans. Instead of nipping this incipient rebellion in the bud and enquiring into its cause, the local authorities temporised with its leaders and awaited instructions from Constantinople as to how they were to proceed. Encouraged by this impunity, and with the assurance of external support, the insurgent bands rapidly increased in numbers, and when at last the Government determined to act, it found itself in presence of a serious rebellion. Essad Pasha, well‐intentioned but weak, and preoccupied with the serious outlook of affairs generally, accepted the insidious offer of the Russian and Austrian Ambassadors to intervene between the leaders of the bands and the Supreme Government. No policy could have been more fatal. It afforded the greatest possible encouragement to the rebels, who considered the step an acknowledgment by the Government of its own inability to deal with the movement; it practically conceded belligerent rights to the rebels, and it encouraged the habit and consecrated the principle of interference by foreign governments in the internal affairs of the empire.

The hollowness of the offer was apparent the moment the terms of surrender came to be discussed, and the net result of this diplomatic comedy was, as was no doubt intended, that what was at first an insignificant rising of a handful of peasants was raised to the dignity of a recognised rebellion that could negotiate on equal terms with the Imperial Government through the medium of foreign consuls and ambassadors.

Mahmoud Nedim had now succeeded Essad Pasha as Grand Vizier (1875), and as no effective measures were taken to suppress the rising, it went on spreading from village to village and district to district till the contagion was caught in Bulgaria. There, in the beginning of 1874, a commencement of unrest showed itself in the districts of Drenova, Kazanlik, and Zagra; but the local authorities (warned by what had taken place in the Herzegovina through the neglect of initial precautions) had all the leaders of the movement arrested. Thereupon General Ignatieff made such energetic representations to the Porte, that orders arrived not only for the release of the imprisoned malcontents, but for the dismissal of all the functionaries concerned in their arrest.[6]

The effect of this novel and original mode of dealing with an insurrection was soon apparent in the effervescence and excitement it caused among the Mussulman population throughout the province. They saw rebel bands, the leaders of which were patronised and supported by foreign consuls and diplomatists, being organised without disguise and approaching their own hearths, whereas all defensive measures on the part of their own natural leaders were discountenanced and punished. They thereupon resolved to take the matter into their own hands, and formed vigilance committees and organised local bands under the command of retired zaptiés throughout the province.

In such psychological conditions an explosion of popular passions was certain sooner or later to take place. The occasion for this was furnished by an incident that occurred at Salonica on the 5th May 1875. This incident was, with the Bulgarian insurrection and the Berlin Note, one of the external difficulties that confronted the Government, and placed it in a very critical position. A young Bulgarian girl had come by rail to Salonica from a neighbouring village on the evening of the 5th May, accompanied by a hoadja, with a view to making a declaration of conversion to Mahomedanism before the Grand Council of Salonica—a formality required by the law, as a preliminary to her being married to a young Mahomedan of her village. On her arrival at the station she was met by a mob of Greeks and Bulgarians who pulled off her yashmak and feradje (mantle and veil), and forcing her into a carriage, in spite of the efforts of four zaptiés who came up in the middle of the disturbance, drove her at a gallop to the American Consulate, where the brother of the Vice‐Consul (a Bulgarian), who had arranged the abduction, concealed her during the night. The next day he had her removed to the house of a friend, so that all trace of the girl should be lost. But early next morning a Mussulman mob, comprising (as in such occurrences is certain to be the case) the worst and most violent sections of the population, had assembled at the Konak and loudly demanded the restoration of the girl and her appearance before the Grand Council. As their demands were not complied with, they retired to the Saatli Mosque, adjacent to the Governor’s Konak, where they reiterated their demands for the restoration of the girl. Unfortunately, by some fatality which was never satisfactorily explained, the German and French Consuls found their way into the mosque in the very midst of excited Mussulmans. Whether they went there of their own accord to remonstrate and argue with the people, or approaching the scene of the demonstration were hustled into the mosque, was never cleared up. But once they appeared there, the frenzy of the mob burst all bounds, and the most violent amongst them, pursuing the Consuls into one of the apartments of the Muderris (Academy) in connection with the mosque, fell on them with iron bars hastily snatched from the windows of the mosque, and murdered them on the spot. The English Consul, Mr Blunt, accompanied by his cavass, seems to have been the only one who kept his head on this occasion and acted with presence of mind and sagacity; for, at the risk of his own life, he forced his way to the Konak, and when he found that the Governor could not effect the restoration of the girl, which was the only way to calm the mob and rescue the Consuls, he sent to the American Vice‐Consulate to apprize Mr Lazaro, who was the cause of the whole disturbance, of the perilous situation of his colleagues, the French and German Consuls, and to implore him to restore the girl. Unfortunately, Mr Lazaro at first procrastinated and pretended that he did not know where the girl was, and so precious time was lost; and when subsequently, on a further appeal from Mr Consul Blunt, he delivered up the girl, it was too late, for the crime against the foreign Consuls who had intervened had been accomplished.

Although the Ottoman Government took immediate steps to punish the authors of this crime—the six principal leaders of which were immediately executed, and the remainder punished with severe terms of penal servitude—the effect of the outrage on the public opinion of Europe, in the existing state of feeling in regard to Turkey, can easily be conceived. It excited indignation everywhere; but the anti‐Turkish Press, now pretty numerous, seized on it with avidity and pointed to it as irrefragable evidence of the incorrigible fanaticism of the whole Mussulman population of the empire, and called for various coercive measures, amounting in some cases to a combined crusade, to protect the Christians in the country, now threatened with wholesale massacre.[7]

It was in vain that Europeans who had lived all their lives in the country, and were acquainted from personal experience with the feelings and opinions of the inhabitants, protested against these exaggerations and deprecated their vain terrors. Colonel James Baker, an English resident for twenty years in the neighbourhood of Salonica, where he had been farming on a large scale, and whose occupation had brought him in contact with all sorts and conditions of men, Christian and Mahomedan alike, wrote a book ridiculing these apprehensions, and communicating his experiences of the harmony and good fellowship existing among the adherents of both religions, with whom he had for twenty years been brought into contact.

But the experience of people living on the spot could not stem the torrent of hostile prejudice fortified by such dramatic examples as the murder of the Consuls at Salonica. General Ignatieff, whose plans were being admirably served by events, was not slow in lending the weight of his authority to the propagation of these imaginary terrors. He embodied 300 Montenegrin workmen at Constantinople to serve as a body‐guard of his Embassy, to the amusement of his more sensible colleagues, who were quite aware of the baselessness of the fears that were the pretext of these ostentatious precautions. But the mise en scène contrived by the ingenious ambassador was not the less effective, and these picturesque mountaineers as they lounged about the streets of Pera, in their handsome national costume, bristling with multifarious arms in their embroidered sashes, were striking advertisements of the terrible dangers that threatened all Christians in the fanatical land of the Osmanli.