The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire by Alan Palmer

Author:Alan Palmer [Palmer, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781435139510
Publisher: Fall River Press

CHAPTER 11

THE HAMIDIAN EMPIRE

FOR THE FIRST TEN YEARS OF HIS REIGN ABDULHAMID II reluctantly accepted a constant diminution of Ottoman power and authority within Europe. The humiliations of San Stefano and Berlin were followed in 1880 by the enforced handing over to Montenegro of Ulcinj and a few miles of Adriatic coastline and, a year later, by the cession of Thessaly and the Arta district in Epirus to Greece. A convention signed with Austria–Hungary in April 1879 affirmed that Bosnia and Herzegovina were still Ottoman provinces, temporarily administered by the Austro-Hungarian Ministry of Finance. But it was a bitter blow to Ottoman pride when, in 1881, young Bosnians and Herzegovinians were conscripted to serve in Francis Joseph’s army, as if they were already Austrian subjects. The subsequent foundation in Sarajevo of an Islamic şeriat law-school, with a delightful colonnaded portico and built from Habsburg government funds, was no doubt more gratifying to Abdulhamid as Caliph than as Sultan. Habsburg–Ottoman relations after 1878 remained coldly correct, with Vienna and Budapest insisting on exploiting every possible commercial concession, while the Sultan hoped for increased revenue from Austrian railway projects. The sanjak of Novibazar, the strategically important corridor which separated Serbia from Montenegro, remained under Ottoman rule; but for most of Abdulhamid’s reign the Austro-Hungarian XVth Army Corps garrisoned four of the sanjak’s few towns.

To lay the ghost of San Stefano’s ‘Big Bulgaria’ became an increasingly difficult task. Eastern Rumelia, the autonomous Ottoman province conjured up by the Berlin Congress, proved an unworkable creation. Although the province brought a steady revenue into the Sultan’s coffers, misrule by his nominee as Governor—a Greek Orthodox bureaucrat from Samos—intensified Pan-Bulgarian feelings and in September 1885 provoked a revolt in Plovdiv whose leader, Stefan Stambulov, declared Eastern Rumelia united with Bulgaria. Over the following eighteen months the Ottoman authorities showed restraint and discretion, not least because Abdulhamid wished to avoid further accusations of ‘massacring’ Bulgars. He welcomed an ambassadorial conference in his capital, only to find in April 1886 that, in return for retrocession of a cluster of Muslim villages in the Rhodope mountains, the ambassadors required him to issue a firman confirming the union of ‘the two Bulgarias’ as a single tributary Principality. Technically, until October 1908 Bulgaria remained under Abdulhamid’s suzerainty, and after his accession as Prince in July 1887 Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg ensured that regular annual payments went from Sofia to Constantinople. But Bulgarian national ambition still sought an outlet to the Aegean. In practice, from 1885 onwards Bulgaria was as lost to its Ottoman suzerain as independent Serbia and Roumania.1

Briefly, in the early 1880s, Abdulhamid II considered the possibility of offsetting the empire’s decline in the Balkans by reasserting Ottoman authority in Egypt. A few years earlier such an apparent reversal of history would have been out of the question; on at least two occasions Cairo had seemed about to cut all links with Constantinople and proclaim Egypt’s full independence. During the protracted ceremonies which had accompanied the opening of the Suez Canal

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.