Considering the magnitude of the change which Mahmud instituted, the stage at which he left it, and the character of the society in which it had to be carried out, it was unfortunate that he should have been followed on the throne by two well-meaning weaklings, of whom the first was a voluptuary, the second a fantastic spendthrift of doubtful sanity. Mahmud, as has been said, being occupied for the greater part of his reign in destroying the old order, had been able to reconstruct little more than a framework. His operations had been almost entirely forcible—of a kind understood by and congenial to the Osmanli character—and partly by circumstances but more by his natural sympathies, he had been identified from first to last with military enterprises. Though he was known to contemplate the eventual supremacy of civil law, and the equality of all sorts and conditions of his subjects before it, he did nothing to open this vista to public view. Consequently he encountered little or no factious opposition. Very few held briefs for either the Janissaries or the Dere Beys; and fewer regretted them when they were gone. Osmanli society identified itself with the new army and accepted the consequent reform of the central or provincial administration. Nothing in these changes seemed to affect Islam or the privileged position of Moslems in the empire.

It was quite another matter when Abdul Mejid, in the beginning of his reign, promulgated an imperial decree—the famous Tanzimat or Hatti Sherif of Gulkhaneh—which, amid many excellent and popular provisions for the continued reform of the administration, proclaimed the equality of Christian and Moslem subjects in service, in reward, and before the law. The new sultan, essentially a civilian and a man of easy-going temperament, had been induced to believe that the end of an evolution, which had only just begun, could be anticipated per saltum, and that he and all his subjects would live happily together ever after. His counsellors had been partly politicians, who for various reasons, good and bad, wished to gain West European sympathy for their country, involved in potential bondage to Russia since the Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi (1833), and recently afflicted by Ibrahim Pasha’s victory at Nizib; and they looked to Great Britain to get them out of the Syrian mess. Partly also Abdul Mejid had been influenced by enthusiasts, who set more store by ideas or the phrases in which they were expressed, than by the evidence of facts. There were then, as since, ‘young men in a hurry’ among the more Europeanized Osmanlis. The net result of the sultan’s precipitancy was to set against himself and his policy all who wished that such it consummation of the reform process might never come and all who knew it would never come, if snatched at thus—that is, both the ‘Old Turks’ and the moderate Liberals; and, further, to change for the worse the spirit in which the new machine of government was being worked and in which fresh developments of it would be accepted.

To his credit, however, Abdul Mejid went on with administrative reform. The organization of the army into corps—the foundation of the existing system—and the imposition of five years’ service on all subjects of the empire (in theory which an Albanian rising caused to be imperfectly realized in fact), belong to the early part of his reign; as do also, on the civil side, the institution of responsible councils of state and formation of ministries, and much provision for secondary education. To his latest years is to be credited the codification of the civil law. He had the advantage of some dozen initial years of comparative security from external foes, after the Syrian question had been settled in his favour by Great Britain and her allied powers at the cheap price of a guarantee of hereditary succession to the house of Mehemet Ali. Thanks to the same support, war with Persia was avoided and war with Russia postponed.

But the provinces, even if quiet (which some of them, e.g. the Lebanon in the early ‘forties’, were not), proved far from content. If the form of Osmanli government had changed greatly, its spirit had changed little, and defective communications militated against the responsibility of officials to the centre. Money was scarce, and the paper currency—an ill-omened device of Mahmud’s—was depreciated, distrusted, and regarded as an imperial betrayal of confidence. Finally, the hostility of Russia, notoriously unabated, and the encouragement of aspiring rayas credited to her and other foreign powers made bad blood between creeds and encouraged opposition to the execution of the pro-Christian Tanzimat. When Christian turbulence at last brought on, in 1854, the Russian attack which developed into the Crimean War, and Christian allies, though they frustrated that attack, made a peace by which the Osmanlis gained nothing, the latter were in no mood to welcome the repetition of the Tanzimat, which Abdul Mejid consented to embody in the Treaty of Paris. The reign closed amid turbulence and humiliations—massacre and bombardment at Jidda, massacre and Franco-British coercion in Syria—from all of which the sultan took refuge with women and wine, to meet in 1861 a drunkard’s end.

His successor, Abdul Aziz, had much the same intentions, the same civilian sympathies, the same policy of Europeanization, and a different, but more fatal, weakness of character. He was, perhaps, never wholly sane; but his aberration, at first attested only by an exalted conviction of his divine character and inability to do wrong, excited little attention until it began to issue in fantastic expenditure. By an irony of history, he is the one Osmanli sultan upon the roll of our Order of the Garter, the right to place a banner in St, George’s Chapel having been offered to this Allah-possessed caliph on the occasion of his visit to the West in 1867.

Despite the good intentions of Abdul Aziz himself—as sincere as can be credited to a disordered brain—-and despite more than one minister of outstanding ability, reform and almost everything else in the empire went to the bad in this unhappy reign. The administration settled down to lifeless routine and lapsed into corruption: the national army was starved: the depreciation of the currency grew worse as the revenue declined and the sultan’s household and personal extravagance increased. Encouraged by the inertia of the imperial Government, the Christians of the European provinces waxed bold. Though Montenegro was severely handled for contumacy, the Serbs were able to cover their penultimate stage towards freedom by forcing in 1867 the withdrawal of the last Ottoman garrisons from their fortresses. Krete stood at bay for three years and all but won her liberty. Bosnia rose in arms, but divided against herself. Pregnant with graver trouble than these, Bulgaria showed signs of waking from long sleep. In 1870 she obtained recognition as a nationality in the Ottoman Empire, her Church being detached from the control of the Oecumenical Patriarch of the Greeks and placed under an Exarch. Presently, her peasantry growing ever more restive, passed from protest to revolt against the Circassian refugee-colonists with whom the Porte was flooding the land. The sultan, in an evil hour, for lack of trained troops, let loose irregulars on the villages, and the Bulgarian atrocities, which they committed in 1875, sowed a fatal harvest for his successor to reap. His own time was almost fulfilled. The following spring a dozen high officials, with the assent of the Sheikh-ul-Islam and the active dissent of no one, took Abdul Aziz from his throne to a prison, wherein two days later he perished, probably by his own hand. A puppet reigned three months as Murad V, and then, at the bidding of the same king-makers whom his uncle had obeyed, left the throne free for his brother Abdul Hamid, a man of affairs and ability, who was to be the most conspicuous, or rather, the most notorious Osmanli sultan since Suleiman.

6
Relapse

The new sultan, who had not expected his throne, found his realm in perilous case. Nominally sovereign and a member of the Concert of Europe, he was in reality a semi-neutralized dependant, existing, as an undischarged bankrupt, on sufferance of the powers. Should the Concert be dissolved, or even divided, and any one of its members be left free to foreclose its Ottoman mortgages, the empire would be at an end. Internally it was in many parts in open revolt, in all the rest stagnant and slowly rotting. The thrice-foiled claimant to its succession, who six years before had denounced the Black Sea clause of the Treaty of Paris and so freed its hands for offence, was manifestly preparing a fresh assault. Something drastic must be done; but what?

This danger of the empire’s international situation, and also the disgrace of it, had been evident for some time past to those who had any just appreciation of affairs; and in the educated class, at any rate, something like a public opinion, very apprehensive and very much ashamed, had struggled into being. The discovery of a leader in Midhat Pasha, former governor-general of Bagdad, and a king-maker of recent notoriety, induced the party of this opinion to take precipitate action. Murad had been deposed in August. Before the year was out Midhat presented himself before Abdul Hamid with a formal demand for the promulgation of a Constitution, proposing not only to put into execution the pious hopes of the two Hatti Sherifs of Abdul Mejid but also to limit the sovereign and govern the empire by representative institutions. The new sultan, hardly settled on his uneasy throne, could not deny those who had deposed his two predecessors, and, shrewdly aware that ripe facts would not be long in getting the better of immature ideas, accepted. A parliament was summoned; an electorate, with only the haziest notions of what it was about, went through the form of sending representatives to Constantinople; and the sittings were inaugurated by a speech from the throne, framed on the most approved Britannic model, the deputies, it is said, jostling and crowding the while to sit, as many as possible, on the right, which they understood was always the side of powers that be.

It is true this extemporized chamber never had a chance. The Russians crossed the Pruth before it had done much more than verify its powers, and the thoughts and energies of the Osmanlis were soon occupied with the most severe and disastrous struggle in which the empire had ever engaged. But it is equally certain that it could not have turned to account any chance it might have had. Once more the ‘young men in a hurry’ had snatched at the end of an evolution hardly begun, without taking into account the immaturity of Osmanli society in political education and political capacity. After suspension during the war, the parliament was dissolved unregretted, and its creator was tried for his life, and banished. In failing, however, Midhat left bad to become so much worse that the next reformers would inevitably have a more convinced public opinion behind them, and he had virtually destroyed the power of Mahmud’s bureaucracy. If the only immediate effect was the substitution of an unlimited autocracy, the Osmanli peoples would be able thenceforward to ascribe their misfortunes to a single person, meditate attack, on a single position, and dream of realizing some day an ideal which had been definitely formulated.