Five centuries ago, the Catholics of Spain had driven the Moors out of Europe and destroyed the great Moslem monuments at Cordoba, Grenada and Toledo. The Orthodox of Old Greece were now planning to visit the same fate on the Turks and to restore a Byzantine Christian theocracy in Constantinople. The Young Turks’ attempt at Ottomanization had made their Rûm community more than ever tenacious of its institutions, and it had come to a time when the Ottoman Greeks in the capital were ready to join with Athens and the Phanar in lifting the Cross over the yellow-brown dome of the great mosque of Ayiah Sophia in Stamboul.
An ugly and a mediaeval business, but a business in which the Greeks were by no means alone. Its irony lay in the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907. The Church of England had followed its Foreign Office into contact with Russian Orthodoxy and it was only a matter of time until the Foreign Office should acquiesce in the Russian claim to the steep green shores of the Bosphorus and the honey-colored coasts of the Dardanelles.
The shock of defeat in the Balkan Wars turned the Young Turks in the direction of nationalism. Their subject races had never been amalgamated, and now that Greeks, Armenians and even Arabs were developing racial consciousnesses of their own, efforts at amalgamation were hopelessly tardy. Ottomanization had swiftly broken down into Turkification which became a bitter business of force and only drove the races of the Empire farther apart. But the only alternative to Turkification was the abandonment of the Empire and with it the Caliphate of Islam. Still borne down by the heavy responsibilities whose faithful discharge Islam expected of them, the Old Turks clung tenaciously to the Caliphate but the Young Turks, while refraining from a break with Islam, moved increasingly out of the grip of old religious usage toward a new Western nationalism.
There was much that was fine in their crude nationalism. It prized its own Turkish culture. It attempted to purge its language of its borrowed Persian and Arabic vocabulary. It sought to open up the resources of Western literatures by copious translations into Turkish. It even translated the Koran although in so doing it ran close to an open break with Islam, which counts it a sin to print the Koran in any language but the sacred language of Arabic. It broke down the barriers which fence off the enormous religious endowments of Islam, and the Ministry of Evkaf supplied funds to start a national library and to subsidize a national architecture. It started schools and began reforms in the Moslem seminaries, which were Old Turkish strongholds. It began a widespread physical culture after the type of the Slavic Sokols and the Boy Scouts. It found voice in the impassioned cry of the Turkish poet, Mehmed Emin Bey, “I am a Turk, my race and language are great.” It looked forward to the day when the humiliating Capitulations should be abolished and the Turks should take their place as an equal among equals in the family of nations. But it still had to accommodate its fine youth to the old conservatism of Islam, the Empire still obscured and confused it.
The two Balkan Wars had reduced the Empire to a condition which in the West would have been regarded as the end of all things. It was on the verge of bankruptcy, but the Capitulations still prevented it from increasing its sources of revenue. Rauf Bey’s exploits with the raider Hamidieh during the Balkan Wars had stimulated its pride in its Navy and Constantine’s preparations at Athens for another war, this time against Constantinople itself, had shown the immediate need for a larger Navy, but so low had it fallen that money had to be raised by private subscription before an order could be placed with British yards for two new battleships.
Yet the existence of the Empire still preserved a sort of surface peace among its races. They had become drunken on Westernism and they waited only the day of the Empire’s break-up to begin the process of their disentanglement, a process which in any area between Vienna and Bagdad is not a pretty one to contemplate. The Old Greeks were preparing their march to the relief of the “unredeemed” Greeks of Constantinople. The Young Turks were preparing their own march to the “unredeemed” Turks of the Azerbaijan province in Persia, of Russian Trans-Caucasia and the Russian provinces of Central Asia.
The moment was at hand when the Anglo-Russian mill-stone was to close upon the Empire and grind it to pieces, when the broken pieces of it were to be whelmed beneath a very deluge of disentanglement. Meanwhile the Committee of Union and Progress still ruled in Constantinople, with its local committees in every province. There was an Opposition, the old Union and Liberty faction, better known as the Liberal Entente Party, but it had a poor time of it.