A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire by M. Şükrü Hanioğlu

Author:M. Şükrü Hanioğlu [Hanioğlu, M. Şükrü]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, pdf
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2010-03-08T05:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 10. Ottoman deputies 1877 (province/electoral district). a. Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies Ahmed Vefik Efendi (later pasha, senator, and grand vizier); appointed on February 5, 1877. b. Hacı Mehmed Mes‘ud Efendi (Diyar-ı Bekir/Diyar-ı Bekir). c. Sayyid Aḥmad al-Barzanjī (the Hejaz/Medina). d. Georgios Athinadoros (Edirne/Tekfurdağı). e. Ahmed Muhtar (Erzurum/Erzurum). f. Petraki Petrovitch (Bosnia/Sarajevo). Wikipedia.org/wiki/image:Ahmed_Vefik; Resimli Kitab, 1/4 (December 1908), pp. 317, 320, 324–25, 332.

The first Ottoman parliament convened on March 19, 1877 on the brink of war. It survived less than a year, holding only two sessions: one from March 19 to June 28, 1877, and the other from December 13, 1877 to February 14, 1878. The sultan was quick to exercise the prerogatives granted him by the new constitution in order to dismiss Midhat Pasha and banish him from the empire soon after the failure of the Istanbul Conference. On February 13, 1878, once again relying on his constitutional rights, the sultan “temporarily prorogued” the parliament.40 From this point on, the constitution remained confined to the pages of the official yearbooks, where it was published year after year, while the temporary prorogation of parliament lasted more than three decades. The first constitutional era (1876–78) can hardly be considered constitutional in the strict sense of the word. The sultan remained to a certain extent above the constitution, while the Ottoman parliament acquired real legislative powers only after 1909. Still, it served as an important precedent for the Second Constitutional Period (1908–18) and marks the starting point for the Turkish Republic’s elongated journey toward democracy.

The Russo-Ottoman war of 1877–78 was a disaster for the Ottomans. Despite a heroic defensive battle at Plevne (Pleven) and sporadic successes on the Eastern front, their resistance was feeble. The Russians, free of the fear of British naval intervention, enjoyed their finest hour vis-à-vis the Ottomans, forcing them to sign one of the most severe peace treaties in history. The San Stefano Treaty of March 3, 1878 marked the high point of Russian expansion at the expense of the Ottoman Empire. Not only did the treaty award Russia certain territorial gains, it granted independence and additional territory to the ostensibly Ottoman states of Montenegro, Rumania, and Serbia. Moreover, the treaty stipulated the establishment of an autonomous Bulgarian principality on land stretching from the Danube to the Aegean. Finally, it committed the Ottoman government to the implementation of reforms in Bosnia and Herzegovina which it had rejected at the Istanbul Conference. Luckily for the Ottomans, the other Great Powers, and especially Great Britain and Austria-Hungary, were not prepared to accept this extensive revision of the status quo by fait accompli. Russian territorial gains at the expense of the Ottomans were one thing; the wholesale transformation of the Balkans into a Slavic federation under Russian hegemony was another matter altogether.

The Berlin Congress of June–July 1878 was one of the last great conferences convened to settle a major international problem in the era before the First World War. The attempt to resolve the Eastern Question once and for all was an ambitious one, from which the Ottomans emerged very much the losers.

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