Empire: World History - 34. The Sick Man of Europe

Episode Date: February 21, 2023

The winds of nationalism are blowing through Ottoman territory in the Balkans. Unrest is rife and the Empire is bankrupt. The young sultan Abdülhamid is at the helm. Listen as William and Anita are joined by Eugene Rogan to discuss whether the Ottoman Empire really was the sick man of Europe in the run-up to the First World War. LRB Empire offer: lrb.me/empire This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/empirepod. Twitter: @Empirepoduk Goalhangerpodcasts.com Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpower.com. And welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Duremple. Now, at the last episode, we introduced you to a rather redoubtable woman, Lady Mary. And this was at a time when the West still fell. it had a lot to learn from the Islamic world.

It was the Ottomans, basically, who gave Europe the science of inoculation. And she was pivotal in that role of bringing, bridging these two different cultures. This time we're going to move forward a century to the second half of the 19th century, a period when the Europeans were clearly dominant. And the Ottoman Empire just seems to be falling apart. It's got the pressure of Russian invasions from the north, resurgent, religious nationalisms across the Balkans, basically, it is. under attack from all quarters. And we are going to be focusing in on one particularly fascinating

figure, who I've always been gripped by. I've spent a lot of time in Istanbul, poking around his palace. And he's someone that's also fascinated many novelists. He appears in novels and in movies. I think partly because he seems to embody the difficulties faced by many in the Islamic world, then as now. How do you confront the West? Do you? you embrace it, or do you reject it as decadent and fall back on the politics of Islam? And this is something, you know, this is as much a story of the 21st century as it is of the late 19th. And the person we're talking about is the Ottoman Sultan, Abdul Hamid II, and one of the the most fascinating characters of all. On one hand, he loved comic opera and built a small

opera house in his new palace, in Yildiz, the Star Palace in Istanbul. But he hated sad endings and even commissioned a new concluding scene for Latrabiata, where the doctor arrives in time and restores via letter to health. He served the best claret at dinner parties, and he commissioned special Turkish translations of Sherlock home stories that he had read to him through a lattice in his bedroom. Please tell me he solved the crimes before Sherlock did. He probably had them rewritten if he didn't like the ending.

He's that kind of dude, though. We're talking about that kind of man. He is that kind of a man. He is that kind of man, and he was in a position to rewrite the stories if he'd like to. But what's fascinating is that in the end, he rejects the West, having initially flirted with democracy and Western liberalism and made friends with all the ambassadors and so on. In the end, he ends up cracking down. He abolishes the parliament. He tries to reunify the Ottoman Empire instead using the power of Islam and the Ulema and his position as a caliph.

And this in turn leads to disaffection with the religious. minorities, which in turn leads to a series of massacres, which gets him even further alienated from Europe and regarded among many in Europe as a monster. I mean, with us to discuss this, we have the best person, I think, to discuss this. A historian, a distinguished historian of the Ottomans. He is the Silver Fox that is Eugene Rogan of St. Anthony's in Oxford. And listen, I know you're, don't wince, you are, just wear it with pride. Okay, so look, we did start by talking about a man who, you know, felt under pressure.

And can you just describe that geopolitical pressure that he was feeling? I mean, why don't we sort of start with the loss of Crimea? Because that feels quite current these days, doesn't it? And the kind of upheaval that causes. Well, the loss of Crimea was, of course, an inheritance for Abdul Hamid. And people in my profession spend a lot of time debunking this tendency to talk about the Ottomans having been in a unilinear decline. line from about the end of the reigning of Soleiman until you hit the reform era, if the world

stood still, then we in Europe would still be scared of the Ottoman Empire. The fact is, the Ottomans had a system that worked really well, and it was quite a dynamic place, but its neighbors were even more dynamic, and they're the ones putting the pressure on the Ottomans. They're the ones forcing the Ottomans to change the rules of the game. So like the rulemaking shifts from the Ottomans dictating the terms to Europe to Europe with new ideas and technology, And you really begin to see that coming home at the end of the 18th century where the Ottomans not only lose a battle to the Russians, there's a war to the Russians, but they lose Muslim territory for the first time of the Empire of the history. And they have to sign a peace treaty in 1774 that concedes the Tatar Crimean Khanate to Russia, to the Russian Empire. And that hits right at the heart of what it means to be not just the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire,

but the caliph of the Muslim world, putting not Muslims under non-Muslims. And it bears mentioning, again, we have done in this podcast before, but Russia is starting to see itself as the inheritor of the old church, the old ways, the bulwark against this spread of Islam. So, I mean, the world is shifting, and Russia wants to be a big player at this time. And everyone is painting their conflict in terms of their culture. if you want to talk about the original culture wars, it's going to be Russia claiming to uphold the rights of Orthodox Christianity against the Ottoman Sultan upholding Sunni Islam. And in a sense,

the nerve center of that is Constantinople claimed by both. It had been the target of Islamic conquerors going back to the day of the Prophet, but it only falls to the Ottomans in the 15th century. Since which time, the Russian Tsar, or in case of Catherine the great, Tsarina, is targeting Constantinople as the kind of target of all of their cultural wars. But this is also the period. We've just had the American Revolution. The Brits have been kicked out of America. We're about to have the French Revolution.

And these winds of nationalism are blowing through the Balkans, aren't there? The Serbs, the Greeks, the Bulgarians, all these guys are beginning to wake up and wonder why they're being ruled by the Seltan in Constantinople. And that's the big idea of the 19th century. I think that nationalism was the one idea that most challenged. conservative rulers like the Ottoman sultan, and saw the whole territories in the western Balkan provinces of the Ottoman Empire, which we tend to see as Eastern Europe. But if you go back to Abdul Hamid's day, that's the Ottoman heartland. This was certainly the most important agricultural

land. It's where a lot of the ruling elites of the Ottoman Empire came from. So having these territories, starting with Greece in 1820, and then right through until you get the sort of Montenegro, Serbia, Bulgaria rising up against the Ottomans. They're taking away the very heartland of the Ottoman Empire. That's a big threat. This is where we dealt in an earlier podcast with Soculumemet Pasha. This is where he was from, wasn't? He was originally a Serbian, I think, by birth.

Absolutely. And so, you know, through the boy levy that had been the main recruiting method, both for the higher ranks of the military and for the civil service, Christians coming from Balkan provinces, converted to Islam, trained in the imperial capital and becoming the rulers of the empire, had been the norm right until the 19th century. And that norm is being challenged because now these peoples in the Balkan provinces are beginning to identify themselves away from the Ottoman Empire as nation states in their own right. Is this being stoked by, I mean, again, it just all feels so

very contemporary at the moment, doesn't it? So is it being stoked by European powers that you know what, you don't want to be under them anymore? You don't have to, I mean, how much of the dark arts is going on? Because that is the accusation, of course, that is facing the Russian today. The Russians level it at NATO. NATO powers are leveling it at Russia. You know, you're the one stirring things up behind the scenes. How much is that true in this day and age? You know, using Christian minorities as a cat's paw to interfere in Ottoman affairs was a game that every single great power was playing, whether it was Pan Slavism and the Orthodox Church for the Russians, whether it was the, you know, Habsburgs trying to extend their influence over neighbor states in the Ottoman Balkans,

just the way that the French were playing to Roman Catholic and Latin churches in the East, which will prove so destabilizing to Ottoman rule in the 19th century and lead to things like the Crimean War. And the French are actually going in, aren't the, Napoleon in 1798, actually invades Egypt and lands his troops there and takes his fleet up to Abu Ghia Bay. A story familiar to you, Willie, of course, because it was a French trying to put pressure on British positions in India in the 18th century and thinking, if they could get a foothold in Egypt, then, you know, it was a kind of quick burst of Gallic genius by Napoleon, but he's soon tired of Egypt, abandons his troops, and goes back home to take control over the directory, his path towards dictatorship in France. And of course,

it's an ignominious retreat for the French in 1801 from Ottoman Egypt. But, yeah, you're seeing the European interventions coming fast and furious, and they're putting pressure on the Ottoman. to rethink the way they're running their armies and running the government. So this chap, who we're talking about today, Abdul Hamid, I'm really interested. This is a young man who ascends the throne in 1876 after a century, pretty much a century of his empire, the Ottoman Empire, being chipped away at squeezed, punched around by foreign powers.

When he is that young man who takes the throne, first of all, under what circumstances does he take the throne? And what is he like when he does initially take the throne? So you could not imagine a less propitious moment to take control over the Ottoman Empire. Ablhamid, as the young Sultan, comes to power a year after the Ottoman economy declares bankruptcy. So the European powers have come to dominate this country, not just militarily, but economically, through developed projects, by making loans.

So the Ottomans have been on a big spending spree. And demanding concessions. And demanding concessions that allow their railways and steamship lines and port building to really dominate the Ottoman Empire. So the reformist wing of the Ottoman Empire has been putting increasing pressure on the ruling sultans, that their failings are in some way responsible for this. And a group of reformist officers actually depose the sultan in 1876. With the fall of Abd al-Aziz, he succeeded by Sultan Murad, who was a man of a very nervous disposition to begin with,

when his predecessor, Abdelaziz is found in his private apartments, an apparent suicide. But he took scissors to his own wrists. Well, both wrists. I've heard so many conspiracy theories. He couldn't have done it because both wrists were slashed in such a terrible, egregious way. It just seems like a really hard way to do yourself in, and it looked like he had some help. And it was all it took from Rod the Fifth's, you know, nervous temperament to collapse.

And the man experienced a nervous breakdown. The villain of our series one, Robert Clive, also took scissors to his wrist, but I think only one wrist in his case, not both. The very musing we're doing right here on the podcast is what Ottomans were doing in the street. Did this sultan kill himself or was he helped? Murad within three months of ascending the throne steps down. And so it's at the end of 1876 and the era three sultans that we get the accession of Abdulhabid II. So you couldn't think of a worse way to come to power.

So terrible time. I mean, if only we could imagine what it would be like to have three prime ministers. I mean, sultan's in the space of a year. Couldn't happen today. No. So, I mean, this does not ease economic pressure to have this much instability. So you've got political turmoil. No doubt you've got continuing economic turmoil. We've learned that in recent times.

So we've got a young sort of 20-something-year-old man who's taken the throne. And it's awful. It's sort of, you know, it's surrounded by pools of mysterious blood. What is his sedative mind when he takes over? And how secure is he in the position? Well, the first thing he has to deal with, as he comes to power, are the pressures from reformists within his own empire. in trying to hold his empire together, he gives them the big concession they've been bargaining for all

along, which is a constitution. Why is a constitution so important? It brings the rule of law to government, and it means that no one can make arbitrary decisions that might lead you into bankruptcy or bad wars. So reformers have been calling for the silver bullet of a constitution, and he concedes it. But in so doing, he's giving away some of his powers, right? A lot of his power. I mean, it's a constitution model on the Belgian constitution, which, was a really autocratic constitution. I mean, the guys pushing this agenda knew how to persuade an autocratic sultan to come round to a constitution, because he still had the power to suspend

parliament to pick his own cabinet ministers and fire them at will. You know, the Belgian king was a very autocratic king and the Ottoman sultan took that constitution as a role model. And as part of the constitution, we're talking about an elected parliament that represents minorities, you know, because we've often spoken about how Jews who were chased out of the rest of Europe found sanctuary. in the Ottoman Empire. So we've got Muslims, Christians, and Jews all muddling along in this new parliament, this vision for a sort of a multi-colored government, if you like. The Rainbow Parliament ruled in Istanbul for about 12, 14 months, no more than that. But the idea of bringing the masses into politics by giving them a vote. Admittedly, it was a two-phased

vote. So you first voted for electors, and then electors actually picked parliamentarians. But yes, I mean, it did return the diversity of the empire for better or for worse. And I think Abdul Hamid thought for worse. Eugene, described the young man. What's he like? What do people expect from him? I think everyone saw the young Abdul Hamid as the bright hope of the empire. He was clearly very bright and shrewd man.

He spoke the language of reform. He demonstrated an openness to Europe and that he would prelude. preserve good relations with the powers that most threatened the Ottoman Empire. I just want to know if he was fun to hang out with. Was he fun? Did he like a joke? Well, we know that he liked the opera and we know we tried to rig the endings to put a smile on the audience's faces. But, you know, he was a mysterious man even then. There are descriptions of him lighting his guest cigarettes with matches that he struck himself. This, when his predecessors hadn't even allowed people to talk in their presence.

This sounds a very different style. It is. And I mean, you can sort of take that from the palace that he built himself, very different from, you know, the ancient palace of Topkapir, the kind of Baroque splendor of Dolmabace. If you go to Yildas palace and it still stands in Istanbul today, it's a series of one-story buildings that are, of course, sumptuous. It's an imperial capital palace. It reminded me a bit of similar. It has those sort of tin roofs and sort of shallets that you find in sort of Raj, hunting lodges and that sort of stuff. But you know, that openness dissolves when he survives his first assassination attempt. And it comes quite early in his reign. And I think the beginnings of the paranoid sultan can be traced right back to his concerns for his own security. Yeah, and that's something one gets in all those later descriptions that he's described as sort of eternally paranoid. He has pistols specially made to hide in various pockets.

I mean, I don't think it's unreasonable. No, and again, he was a product of the paranoia in the palace. And he has, he chooses his bodyguards from Albanian. duelists who've been quicker on the draw than their rivals and this sort of thing. Not unlike an American president, right? That's true. When was the assassination attempt? In the early years of his reign, he faced his first assassination attempt.

And I think that was a total game changer for Abdul Hamid, who remembered all too well the rumour mill around the time of his accession that, you know, penned the death of Sultan Abdelaziz. He's on an assassin. And so, you know, I think it was very early. in his reign that he came to isolate himself, surround himself with a small circle of trusted advisors, and began to show ever greater signs of paranoia. And things go badly wrong quite quickly, don't they? After the default of the debt in 1875, Bosnia, Herzegovina and Montenegro break off.

Then there's the loss of Bulgaria and Romania in 1878, is it? Yeah. So he's dealing with, he's dealing with a kind of catastrophe happening in the western half of his empire. Absolutely. And In a sense, the whole experiment with Constitution and Parliament comes crashing down when the head of the Baker's Guild begins to hurang the Sultan in January of 1878, saying, you're coming to the Parliament too late for our advice. We're not responsible for the mistakes you've made that led us to the current catastrophe. And the Sultan says, right, that's it. The day I take advice from a baker, this Sultanate is going to tank. So he immediately after that session in Parliament, you know, dissolves the Parliament and goes back to the business. of taking control in his own hands of an empire that's threatened by a fast-moving Russian army

that's moving very quickly on Constantinople, a city that they've long targeted to try and regain for Orthodox Christianity, which would really reduce the Ottoman Empire into a kind of servant state of Russia. And to add to the anger from his neighbors and enemies, there are reports of terrible atrocities in Bulgaria and horrors. The horrors, the horrors that were attributed to the Hamidian regime, actually predate the Hamidian regime. So the horrors in Bulgaria are part of the context within which Russian pressure will lead to the 1877 war with Russia.

And it really comes down to the latest struggle for independence in the Balkans as agitators working among the Christian community of Bulgaria sets off attacks on Muslim villages that provoke retaliatory attacks. This is picked up in the Western press as the Bulgarian horrors of the Bulgaria of the Bulgarian atrocities, to this day, Turkish historians object to the fact that no one counts

how many Muslim villages were being massacred at the same time. But it really leads to a break in British support for the Ottoman Empire, which had been a really important bulwark for the Ottomans against, let's say, Russian or French or Hobbesburg threats. And I think with Gladstone coming to power, he writes a very influential tract about the Bulgarian atrocities, and the mood in Britain changes very dramatically against the Ottoman Empire. Now, they are more alone than that. ever they have been in the 19th century. What's really interesting about Gladstone writing that paper is it really puts Disraeli, who has until that point in Britain been such a popular man on the back foot,

he has always believed that the way to push back Russia is to put all your forces behind the Ottomans. The Ottoman, you know, my enemy's enemy is my friend. The Ottomans are my friend. And suddenly that all gets just completely turned around by this, as you say, powerfully written Gladstonean paper. I would say the Gladstonean moment doesn't last, that the importance of the Ottoman Empire as a buffer keeping Russia out of the Mediterranean world will be revived.

But for this one moment, the culture wars moved to Britain through the British press. And just as we have seen, let's say at the time of British support for the Greek uprising in the 1820s, you're going to see a moment where fellow feeling with Balkan Christians leads the British to turn their back on the Ottomans when they're really a very vulnerable moment. Bankrupt, threatened by the Russians with a weak army. And what follows, takes the empire to the brink of total defeat to the Russians. Just to give some context, this is the same empire which had fought the Crimean War to protect. British troops had gone to the Crimea to stop the Russian army advancing on Constantinople in the 1850s.

But now with the reports of horrors coming in, horrors in Bulgaria, also Armenian massacres, the first big massacres of Armenians and Christians being murdered in Damascus, I think. This is an area you're writing about at the moment, I think, Eugene. You'll have to wait for that book, Willie. It's on its way. We'll talk about 1860 massacres in Damascus in another. other podcast. But yes, I mean, the reputational damage for the young Sultan Abdu Hamid was quite stark. And very early, he'll get this moniker being the Red Sultan for having blood on his hands.

And that's going to be something he's going to struggle against all through his reign. Can I ask you, I mean, the blood on his hands, is it by design that he sends people out to go and commit these atrocities? Or is it, you know, sort of a bunch of Bashi Bassooks who have never had any order. We talked about the Bashi Bassoots. I like saying it. But, you know, that they have no order, they have no control, and they are just going out and doing what men on a rampage do? The thing is that Abdu Hamid was accused of having organized Kurdish militias in eastern Turkey to conduct the dirty work. And so for many, and this is really more to do with the 1890s and the 1870s, but these Hamidian regiments of Kurdish cavalry are going to play a really

important role in the massacres that will really establish the Red Sultan reputation. And ironically, these cavalry regiments are modeled on the Cossacks, aren't they? Some of them are trained by the Russians. And it's all taking place in the Caucasus. So you have a kind of Caucasus culture of Cossacks that do rampages, as we know, into the Persian Empire and crossing into the Caucasus territories. One of the things that the Ottomans will see when they make peace with Russia in 1878 will be three key territories of Ardahan Kars and Batum to the Russian Empire. So this culture of Cossack-like behavior between Kurds and Russians and the Armenians being caught in the middle really comes to a head starting in 1878

and casting the Armenians as something of a fifth column in the Ottoman mind is people who tied to Russia through an Eastern church, even if not the Eastern Orthodox Church, and that they will, from that point, be used by the Russians as a way to penetrate the Ottoman Caucasus and vulnerability. Is this a new accusation? Because these are accusations that continue to be made into the early 20th century. But is it the first time we've heard it at the reign of Abdul Hamid? Well, the first time we get the Armenian Reform Project is 1878.

And the Armenian Reform Project is a Russian. supported project to put between three and six provinces of eastern Turkey that are closest to the Russian frontier under autonomous Armenian rule. And these are the territories, the provinces in which the Armenians live, but in none of them are the Armenians in the majority. So you'd be talking about Armenians minority rule over a Turkish and Kurdish Muslim majority, which is, if you like, the flashpoint from 1878, right until the notorious Armenian genocide of World War I. You can see this storm brewing from 1878 onwards. And this, this campaign of repression that he feels he needs to pursue to stay in power and to stay alive, does it help him?

The thing that we underestimate is how effective a ruler Abdul Hamid was. He wasn't a reformer in the sense of bringing constitutional monarchy to the parliament, to the empire. He tried that and he abandoned it. But he was able to hold the empire together after massive territory losses at the beginning of reign. And really, after the loss of Egypt in 1882, something which he really had no means of stopping, he is going to hold that empire against further encroachment until the revolution in 2008. It's not until 1908 when his iron grip of the empire is challenged that you're going to see the next parceling out of Ottoman territories to European neighbors. And he does so, not just by authoritarian repression, but by continuing reforms that make the Ottoman state fit

for purpose. So a better running bureaucracy, a better education system. Actually, a codification of law that makes the rule of law more meaningful. This is all under the surface. None of this is PR. Doesn't make great press in the West, but it makes the Ottoman Empire work much better. It explains why we get such a long reign of Abduhlamyid II. I'm so glad you raised that, because I just disappeared down a rabbit hole of Abdul Hamid. He's misunderstood. You know, there are so many people who regard him as being one of the greatest leaders of the Ottoman Empire. And we have this impression. Certainly, you know, I'm chatting to William if this is a man who hangs out with murderous bastards.

You know, what was the name of the fat, pink-cheeked, torturous psychopath that he liked palming around with? Fahim Pasha, who he was meant to be the torturer directly linked to Abdul Hamid in Constantinople. And when people disappeared in the capital, there was always said to me this was the man who Abdul Hamid had set loose on the opposition. And taking great joy in torturing and dismembering people. But, you know, I mean, I've just, there are two piles of, of, of.

a thought on this. And the one that comes, I see from the Middle East, and, you know, there were a lot of getting really annoyed about this that don't believe the Western story. It is not true. This was a great man. And he was actually the last great Caleb of the Ottoman Empire. Anita, you know we're always getting it wrong when we try and take complex characters and reduce them to one thing or the other. And so he was both. You know, on the one hand, he did create a paranoid spy network that totally disturbed the educated elites of the Ottoman Empire. The closest thing we've seen to it in modern times would be the Stasi and East Germany, where you really proved your loyalty to the state by denouncing others. And pretty soon, that cancer spreads right through literate,

educated society. It said that one half of the empire was paid to spy on the other half, and every prominent household had either a cook or a slave in the employ of the Sultan's intelligence. Is that likely to be true, or is that just? Very unlikely to be true. But if it was, was the perception that worked just as well. I mean, you know, to try and manage that extensive a network would be beyond the scope of just about anyone. Again, one thinks of the Shah of Iran and the role of Savak. You know, I visited Tehran in 1977 when I was a high school student. And my hosts at the time talked about their cooks like they were spies.

And whether they were or not, it didn't matter because you behaved constrained by that fear. So that's the paranoid. He's the authoritarian ruler side of Abdul Hamid. But the other side is somebody who really looked to European precedent. I would say Abdul Hamid was really a translator of European ideas and technologies. And yes, some stuff got lost in translation. But he really saw himself as being a key gateway for the ideas that would make this empire work better. And those Kelvin came from the West.

And he looked to the Japanese, didn't he, as an example of how you could do this? He admired the Japanese taking on the Russians, sinking their fleet and so on. I think the whole Port Arthur experience of watching Japan defeat Russia sent an electric shock through the Ottoman Empire that an Asian power much smaller than the Ottomans could take on and defeat their great nemesis Russia. And that gave them tremendous encouragement that if you could just master European technologies, then you could restore your place of power in the world and respect of the world. And that's where the kind of, yeah, the, the, the, the,

translator of European ideas comes to power. Eugene, you were talking about liberal elites watching their cooks and, you know, their coachmen with a great deal of suspicion. Liberal elites are very rarely quiet people. I mean, how do they react to this amount of oppression? Well, you know, for a while you had in Abdel Hamid's reign, a totally respectful reform movement called the young Ottomans who were calling for, you know, the Sultan to willingly concede to reform changes, and they just ban themselves before they'll ever get to the point of actually

confronting the Sultan. That didn't work particularly well. But you start getting in the elite higher institutions of learning, the university equivalence, so the civil service academy, the military academy, the medical faculty, free-thinking, well-trained, well-educated individuals, the Krem de la Krem, who you'd expect to be the ultimate loyalists. But they think for themselves, and they don't like the repression, they don't like the paranoia, and they don't like the paranoia, and they begin to organize around a new reform agenda in the 1880s, 1890s, that would increasingly come to challenge the control the Sulton has over in society with ideas about going back to constitutional reform.

And those are your young Turks. And again, I'm really always struck by the fact that nothing we see is ever new. So if you are a man whose friends all of a sudden overnight aren't speaking to him, you know, the doctors, the just players are people who like reading Sherlock Holmes and discussing it, if they're suddenly not speaking to you anymore because they think that you have murderous pink-cheeked assassins up your sleeve, you are often driven and I'm thinking sort of of, it's not murderous, but someone like Donald Trump who was once a liberal, who then falls into step, lockstep with a religious message, with those people who have a religious

doctrine who may not have been his people ever growing up. Is that the same? Is that what happens with Abdul Hamid as well? is there is a real pragmatism in Abdulhabit's turn to Islam as the glue that will hold the empire together. Because his experience coming to power at the time of Bulgaria atrocities and all of that, is that the Christian communities of the empire did not have the same commitment as did the Muslims. And if you wanted to find a glue that would hold the empire together, it was Islam. Everywhere else, the Christians were between, you know, 8 and 15% of the population. go for the 85, get them squarely behind your sultanate, and you'll have the cohesion,

ideological appeal that will keep the empire together. And the other thing is, it's your way of putting pressure on the British in India or the French in North Africa, because you can appeal to a Muslim sentiment in the empires of your European adversaries that will make them nervous about shaking your tree too much. Today, we're obviously very familiar with those who reject the West. in the Islamic world and who looked to Islam as the solution. Turn your back on the West, turn your back on the decadence of Europe and today America, and look to your Islamic roots for sustenance. Is Abdul-Hamid one of the first people to sort of pick up this message and use

it politically? Well, you know, for those who argued reform had to come by imitation of European norms, there was a very influential counter-voice. And someone like Jamal al-Din Lavrani will emerge as a really influential character right across the Middle East and India, as someone who's saying, look, there's a lot we can learn from Europe, but it's not by imitating them that we're going to be strong again. It's by returning to our values that we're going to be able to really challenge Europe in its own game. You, Jimmy, you've got to take a break there, but let's come back to Jamal and Dean Afghani's very important character, still an Islamist voice that has great resonance across the Islamic

world today. Let's come back to him after the break. Hello and welcome back to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Duremberg. Now, just before the break, Eugene introduced us. Eugene Rogan is with us, Ottoman expert, extraordinary. And you introduced us to this character who I've always pronounced as Jamaluddin al-Afghani, but clearly I know nothing. You said it in a very beautiful way. Can you say his name again?

Jamaluddin, Afghani. Wow, it's good, isn't it? Whoa. You don't get to teach at St. Antony's without that kind of pronunciation of your Ottoman Turkish. That's how I got my job. Okay. I mean, it's very, very good. Okay, so, and you were just going to tell us how significant he was.

So just talk us through who he was and why he mattered. Well, the point was really that there's an Islamic alternative to imitating the West, which is to recognize the West for the opportunities and the challenges that it poses, but a different solution, which is Muslims need, one, to go back to the values. that made them strong. So you really want to look at prophetic precedent or the prophet is a role model and his early community is a role model. And the second is to really work to try and achieve unity among the global Ummah, the community of Muslim believers. And that in this way, there's a power to be harnessed that will level the playing field for the Muslim world in the challenge

it's confronting with an ascendant and assertive Europe. And al-Afghani is actually not just sort of part of the world in Istanbul. He's actually brought within the walls of Yildis, isn't he, to advise the sultan. And he's traveled far and wide before he reaches the Ottoman Empire. He has a couple of stints there. His first visit to Istanbul is actually going to be in late 1860s before Abdu Hamid's even in power, and he gets expelled for his reformist views. So he's already seen as a bit of a firebrand. And he's going to spend the 1870s in Cairo, so the early years of Abdul Hamid's rule, where he's going to settle into the very famous mosque university, 10th century. El Azhar. And there he's going to create a circle of followers who are going to prove very

influential to this Islamic response to the challenge of Europe, none more so than Sheikh Muhammad Abdu, who will wind up becoming a very influential figure in El Azhar, in Egypt, and in the Muslim world at large. And the two of them will spend some time in exile together in France, where they publish their views in an Arabic journal published in France because you couldn't find a press willing to publish that hot material in Ottoman Arab domains. This is incredibly, again, this sort of sense of history repeating. This is like sort of the Ayatollah going to France and coming back to Persia, bringing a revolution that wouldn't have gone off without the time spent away in Europe.

So by the time he gets back to Istanbul, it's in the 1890s, when Abdul Hamid is very committed himself to an Islamic agenda for advancing the power of the Ottoman Sultanate. And he's trying to harness the power of this firebrand preacher in his dying days. I mean, he'll, he'll, Rani actually dies in Istanbul in 1890s. And by that stage, he's allegedly in disgrace, isn't he? Because he's encouraged somebody to assassinate the Shah of Persia, despite being in the household of the Ottoman Caliph.

The plot was hatched in Istanbul. And while I don't think it necessarily brought any problems between Persia and the Ottoman household itself, it was something that overshadowed Abdul Hamid to his dying days. So we've established the sort of the hardliner side of things. You mentioned the Young Turks very briefly, but I don't feel we really yet have got to grips with who they are and what place they have in this Ottoman Empire. So the Young Turks emerge in elite institutions, as we said before. It was largely a civilian movement. And they showed all of the enthusiasm that they lacked in discipline.

And so they proved to be a very easy circle of thinkers for the spy network of Abdul Hamid to penetrate. And even though they tried to take a kind of cellular approach on the model of, let's say, the Carbonarian in nationalist Italy fighting against Hobbesburg, Austria, so you try and create these cells that don't communicate with each other. By the 1890s, they've been fairly blown. And the movement will move from civilians to the military. And it's at times like that that someone like Mustafa Kamal, the later Adatyrk, will get drawn into the movement and where it's the military academy in particular that will become the hotbed of young Turk thinking and mobilization. And the city of Salonika in particular? Well, what happens is the young Turks are driven from Istanbul by the effectiveness of the Hamidian spy network. And then they go to the periphery.

So you have cells that are quite active in the Syrian provinces and cells that are quite active in the remote. remaining territories under Ottoman rule in the Balkans. And at this point, you're really reduced to Albania, Macedonia, and Thrace, that sort of central band going from the Adriatic right across to the Aegean. That's still an Ottoman rule. So a city like Solonica would have been a hotbed of young Turk mobilization and activism. And tell me about these three figures who come to the fore as the committee of union and progress. Enver Pash. Talat Pasha and Jamal Pasha. You know, three more random characters

you probably would have a hard time finding in one team. Because Enver was the Dapper military officer with the sort of waxed mustaches. Very good looking. Very handsome man. He was conscious of that. He would always pose with the correct profile that made the crowds wilt.

He had spent time as a military attaché in Berlin, so a great German, was really enamored of Prussian military culture and tradition and was a great believer in German power. And this is going to be very important later, isn't it? This fondness of Germany. It's going to very much shape his views when we get to the young Turks coming to power in World War I. Next to him, you get the postmaster's son, Talat Pasha. Who's not a totally good looking. He was a kind of burly, sort of hopeless character.

Well, hopeless, but obviously very canny, very shrewd, respected by his peers. one of the key thinkers of a constitutional reform movement, and so a central player, is it? And ruthless? He will prove to be ruthless. I think that he would have been perceived by many of those he would later turn on, and none more so than the Armenians, as an avowed friend. So the ruthlessness really comes in the height of World War I.

Before then, you would have seen him as an open-handed reformer. And with a very sweet smile. People talk about his smile, do they? And he had a lot to smile about as his movement was, going from opposition to challenging the regime to a successful revolution. And third, will be Jamal Pasha, who is in many ways seen as the most choleric, you know, a person of violent temper. He will don a uniform with very little prior military experience, will emerge as Minister of Marine and try and set the Navy of the Ottoman Empire on a reform agenda, will be driving for them

to acquire British-built dreadnots that would change the balance of power in the United States. in the Eastern Mediterranean and in the Black Sea. So we're having great ambitions. And these three men will come together around a common agenda of trying to force a return to constitutional limits on the sultan. So we're headed towards that really important milestone in 1908 where everything changes. So how long were they together working together, scheming together, before 1908 and they can put their plans into action?

You know, we have very little evidence of what exchanges these three men engaged in. we rather have the descriptions of the way that they embraced each other upon the success of their revolution. And in the first instance, the revolution happens without a great deal of coordination between the masterminds of the movement. In a sense, what happens is an accident of history where the sultan sends a campaign force to Salonica and to the Balkans to root out cells of young Turks, who, fearful that they're about to have their cells exposed, take to the bush in a rogue bid to call for the constitutional movement to become a popular movement among the towns around Monastery and in the villages around Salonica. And the surprising thing is these dissident officers going out in small bands were able to generate so much popular support that you have whole townships declaring themselves liberated townships under constitutional rule.

And at this moment, the head of the Sultan's campaign force is assassinated in a moment that sends panic through the Ottoman capital and encourages the revolutionaries that if they strike at that moment of vulnerability, that success will favor the bold. And they move on Istanbul in 1908. You know, they actually move on the campaign force that takes them and they then move on to Istanbul to impose their writ on the sultan who concedes the biggest demand. the restoration of the Constitution before this action army is able to reach the gates of Istanbul so that he could claim credit of having restored the Constitution

without having done so under pressure. I mean, he's so strange because he does almost sort of take credit. Look, look what I've done. Look at me. But wouldn't you? Well, yeah, I suppose. But did people buy it?

Well, the interesting thing is you would expect, you know, the Times, the New York Times, the banner headlines. Constitution restored. Revolution wins. If you look at the Ottoman newspapers the day after the revolution, it's a little story in little letters. And the sultan declaring that it was through his benevolence that he felt the time propitious to return to constitutional rule.

And everyone is so happy by the restoration of the constitution that no one's really making the fight to claim credit or use that to discredit the sultan. If anything, they were happy to demonstrate that the sultan would put his weight behind this, legitimating a movement that until that moment looked like an officer's mutiny, where the leaders would be at risk of being strung up. And now everyone could say they were part of the same happy project, which was bringing good things to the Ottomans. And it leads to a moment of national jubilation. When 48 hours after the magnitude of the revolution sinks in,

the city's central squares are filled with jubilant crowds, who are saying, you know, long live the sultan and long live the young Turks. So again, quite a clever, I mean, clever maneuver from Abdul-Habit. He manages to turn this and stay in the driving seat, almost. You don't stay 32 years in power without learning how to use it. And so the sultan was certainly someone who had demonstrated the canny ability to turn events to his advantage. But could he keep it that way? Because the last thing he wanted was to surrender power.

Power at this stage, you're an autocrat, is a zero-sum game. And so he's looking for the opportunity to try and undermine his opponents and reach, the controls that he took as being the only thing protecting the Ottoman Empire from collapse. And he nearly succeeds in that. By playing to conservative voices, those of the religious establishment, the ulama, those of lower-ranking military men who were often from the countryside and conservative themselves, he was able to play to the theologians in their academies to get them off to demand a counter-revolution nine months into the Young Turk experiment in 1909.

And the children come out of the madrasas, the old Ulama come out of the madrasas with them, and they nearly want their caliph back, and they nearly succeed in turning the Constitution back a second time. Well, it demonstrated that the young Turks did not have the courage of their convictions, because at this point, the young Turks had swept the parliamentary elections that were held immediately after the restoration of the Constitution. And all those young Turk MPs, the moment the counter-revolution starts, hit the road out of Damascus. And they leave it to the military men to once again come back and restore the constitution.

constitutional order when an army from Macedonia, once again, the action army, moves onto Istanbul to force the Sultan this time out of power and to restore the constitutional order once and for all. Yeah, I mean, you mentioned the action army. I mean, we should say that is exactly what they called themselves, the action army from Macedonia. It's not a description of how they felt. That's what they were. And how did the rest of the world react to what was going on? Well, they were used to casting the Turks as being in a state of chaos and disarray. And Abdul Hamid had by this time an established reputation for not just autocracy, but also bloodshed. So there were very few advocates of Abdul Hamid.

The young Turks were seen as progressive and a new generation, and that they would be perhaps the people who could civilize the Ottoman Empire. People we can do business with to use a more contemporary. Exactly, but there were ambitious neighbors who saw the moment here to take autonomous territories that had been increasingly separating themselves from the Ottoman Empire and perhaps make a land grab. And we'll see at this moment that, you know, Crete will declare its independence from the Ottomans. Bosnia and Herzegovina will declare their independence, say, will then be annexed by the Habsburgs into Austria, Hungary. There is a moment of taking advantage of the turmoil at the top where I think Europe saw weakness. And Italy invades Libya? Well, yes.

I mean, the Italian invasion will come a couple years after the Young Turks' counter-revolution, put down the counter-revolution in 1911, imperially frustrated Italy is going to make a bid to extend its footprint into the last bit of the North African coastline, not under European colonial rule. Libya. I thought I was reading sort of what Enver Pasha's response to it. He was a very incredibly brave man. I mean, an incredibly impressive man, that he goes off, sort of gets dressed in civilian clothes and just goes sort of undercover to go and Harry the Italians,

wherever they are. And there are men who follow him, and they will follow him knowing that they are probably going to die doing it. It becomes a badge of honour that they will die fighting the Italians. Yeah, I think that for whatever criticism we'll lay against Denver, and there's plenty. He certainly was someone who was a great believer, a great patriot. great believer in the Ottoman Empire. And the whole war in Italy was one that the Ottomans lost

officially quite early on, but continued to support through volunteers, who were officers, who, you know, shed their uniforms, went surreptitiously to Egypt, crossed over through the Western Desert, through Siwa and places like that that are familiar to you, Willie, and began to mobilize Libyan tribes to maintain a conflict that actually was very effective against the Italians. and put them under a lot of pressure. And it's a very interesting war in all sorts of ways. It's the first time you'll see the airplane being used in warfare. Right.

It's the first time you'll see the Ottomans trying to use jihad as a strategy to mobilize Muslim believers against European invaders. And it's going to be a war that the Italians are finding increasingly difficult. And so they are going to put pressure on the Ottomans to stop it by going for their weak spot and encouraging Montenegro to revive Balkan tensions, which will give rise to a Balkan war. So it's dirty politics that the Italians play when the war doesn't go their way.

So while this is going on, Abdul Hamid has been packed off to exile in Salonika. 230 of his Haring women have been dumped out of Yieldies into top Kappa retirement. What else is going on in Istanbul? Well, in Istanbul, you're going to have a new order to find less by the young Turks' in control. They have the parliament, but they will continue to rely on establishment political figures. It's a recurring theme where military men have the skills to overturn a regime without having the politically experienced to run a government. And it's not going to be until 1913 that you'll have the sublime port coup, where basically young Turks faced with problems in the

Balkan wars will burst into the prime minister's office. They, they, shoot him in the Minister of Defense and take control themselves. At 1913s, when you're going to get our triumvirate coming to power, and at the same time, they have imposed a new Sultan, Mehmet V, who is going to be very subservient to the Young Turks. So it's ended on the days of a dominant, autocratic sultan, but it's going to be really increasingly young Turks who are going to be taking the agenda in a wartime context,

the Libyan War in 1911, and then 1912, the yet more catastrophic first Balkan war. And not long after this, you actually have Germans moving into the war ministry. The Germans are now cozing up. They're building the Berlin to Baghdad railway. There's active railway construction going on in Anatolia and across Syria. What's the position of the Germans and the young Turks? Are they close allies, or are they just one among a number of European powers cozing up to the young Turks?

There's no doubt that European powers are cozying up to the Ottoman Empire and see an Ottoman weakness lots of opportunity. So before putting all the initiative in Germany's court, let's remember that Ender's turn to Great Britain to help modernize the Ottoman Navy. And at this point, you'll have in 1913 a British naval mission that is coming to modernize and train the Ottoman Navy. and they commissioned the shipyards in Belfast to build the dreadnoughts that would change the balance of power in Europe, or in the Eastern Mediterranean anyway. And Vickers sets up, doesn't it? Vickers, the armaments under a new company name, sets up in Istanbul and starts manufacturing armaments for the Ottoman Army and Navy. And you would expect British naval prowess to have made them the country or the power of choice.

And, of course, Britain had this longstanding history of support. the Ottoman Empire against dismemberment, largely, as we keep saying, to keep it as a buffer against Russia. Right. And the Germans will send in a military reform mission. Here again, we see Enver's influence. He had served in Germany. He spoke German.

He had great respect for Prussian military science. And so Lehman von Zanders is going to head up a military mission that ruffles British and French feathers, but will be equally influential. in making Germany the number one trainer and provider of military hardware to the Ottoman Empire starting in 1913. So you've got sort of the whole of the Balkans bubbling up and then you have this one moment of frozen horror where a young man called Gavrilo Princep takes out a gun, fires it in Sarajevo and kills Archduke Ferdinand and all hell will break loose. The first thing to observe is that this was a fight in which the Ottomans had no dog. And many of the Ottoman Empire are

assumed, they could stand back and watch the Europeans fisted out over what remained of the Balkans. But this was going to lead to a general European war. And what the Ottomans knew were that the Russians were just waiting for the fog of war to give them the pretext to make a move that until now had frustrated them to seize Istanbul. This would actually become Tsarist foreign policy as of February 1914. And the Ottomans didn't feel, or the young Turks didn't feel, they could stay out of that war. and so the question was, on whose side would they enter? And the Ottomans would basically side with any country that would give them a defensive alliance against Russian ambitions in their territory.

Would it be the British or the French, who were allied with the Russians and the triple-ontante? As it turns out, no. And so they fall in with the default setting of Germany. Why is that? What happens to propel them into the arms of Germany? Germany was the one country that had a demonstrated track record of sympathy to the Ottoman Empire. the Kaiser declared himself the friend not just of the Ottoman people but of the global Muslims, had no territorial ambition in the Ottoman Empire. There was no German Empire extended into Ottoman domains. If Germany was looking anywhere, it was beyond the Ottoman Empire into South Asia where they wanted

to put pressure on the British. So there was a sense that the Germans could be relied on to ally with the Ottomans, not try and use the pretext to carve up their territory. And the Germans were very militarily strong. What the Ottomans hoped is they could side with Germany and Germany would whip Britain and France very quickly and the Ottomans would come in and reap the benefits. And there is also, you know, at a time like this, when the Germans are playing nice and playing footsy under the table with the Ottoman Empire, you'd think that you would launch some kind of charm offensive and send roses and chocolates if you were, you know, Britain or one of the other powers who will be severely threatened if the Ottomans throw their lot in with Germany. What does Britain do? Britain decides that they are going to requisition two dreadnoughts that the Ottomans had bought and paid for and were ready for delivery.

Now, we can criticize Churchill for having provoked the Ottomans in this way. But of course, if you didn't know which way the Ottoman Empire was going and you were just about to enter total war with Germany, would you have put two state-of-the-art dreadnots, possibly in the hands of your adversaries? So I think Churchill's controversial decision might have had sound reasons, but it certainly annoyed the Turks. My grandfather was a very pro-Ottoman voice at this point in the House of Lords and was making speeches that these dreadnoughts should be given back immediately at this time. And he always said to his dying day that if those dreadnoughts had been given to the Turks, who they were, bought by popular subscription in the Ottoman Empire, that the whole of the First World War in the East would never have happened, that the Ottomans would never have joined on behalf of Germany. Well, let's put that to you, Eugene. Was the Ottoman involvement in the First World War inevitable? The Ottomans did not need to go into the First World War. And there were many voices in Istanbul calling for a more prudent, a more cautious approach. But I think the triumvirate of Enver, Jamal, and Talat were at this point at their most influential. And they had gotten themselves into the mindset that if they didn't act, that they would stand to lose. And they were sufficiently rash to overlook.

All of the possible dangers to throw their lot in and enter the First World War on Germany side. So on the 2nd November, 1914, Britain, Russia and France declare war on the Ottoman Empire. And a week later, on November the 9th, equally important, there's a declaration of holy war, jihad, at the Fatay Mosque by the Mufti of Constantinople. We'll be talking about this in the next few episodes. We'll be dealing with Lawrence of Arabia. We'll have Eugene back to talk about Gallipoli. Yay. And we'll have the whole question of what happened to the Armenians, the Armenian genocide.

It all becomes very interesting. But as we've just seen, none of this needed to have happened. It's on the toss of a Turkish lira that this happens. Can I also say that if you are going to have withdrawal symptoms before our next episode comes out, I can hugely commend you Eugene Rogan's book, The Fall of the Ottomans, the Great War in the Middle East, 1914 to 1920. Incredible book. Incredible book.

But until the next time, it's goodbye for me, Anita Arndt. And me, William Durunple.