Part 28
After the 1770-74 war, the Porte, which was Poland’s ally, lost Bukovina and Lesser Tatary, whose independence was recognised by the treaty of Kuchuk-Kainarji on July 21, 1774, but which became a Russian province in 1783. The treaty of Kuchuk-Kainarji ceded Kinburn and Yenikale to Russia, left to the Christians the principalities lying to the north of the Danube, and guaranteed the Orthodox Greeks’ liberty under the patronage of the Russian ambassador at Constantinople. Catherine II also compelled the Turks by the same treaty not to defend the independence of Poland, threatened by Russia with the complicity of the Great Powers, and to give her a right of intervention in their home affairs. The Tatars of the Crimea and Kuban, detached from Turkey, soon after fell under the Russian sway, in 1783. The Sultan even had to sign a treaty granting a right of free navigation in the Black Sea and in the rivers of his empire.
About the same time the European Powers began to interfere in Turkey: that was the beginning of the “Eastern question.” In opposition to the Austro-Russian alliance of Catherine and Joseph II, England, dissatisfied with Russia’s attitude in the American War of Independence, and wishing to find allies in Germany to counterbalance Russian influence in Europe, concluded an alliance with Prussia, Sweden, Poland, and Turkey. The death of Frederic II soon put an end to this coalition, and Russia’s unfriendly attitude, her encroachments in Caucasus, and her territorial claims in Bessarabia, compelled Turkey on August 16, 1787, to declare war on Catherine, and Joseph II entered into the war in 1788. The Austrians took Khotin; the Turkish fleet was destroyed at Otchakov; Belgrade fell on October 8, 1789. Then Leopold, Joseph II’s brother, left the Turks and made peace with Turkey at Sistova on August 4, 1791. The Russians, who had defeated the Turks at Machin, were about to invade the Empire when, as a result of the intervention of England and Prussia, a treaty of peace was signed at Jassy, by which the Dniester became the new frontier between the two States. Thus Russia, who owing to the perturbed state of Europe was preparing to dismember Poland, was compelled to give up her dream of restoring the Byzantine Empire.
After the 1809-12 war, Turkey lost the provinces lying between the Dnieper and the Danube which were ceded to Russia by the treaty of Bukharest.
Russia, who, by the convention of Akkerman in October, 1826, had compelled Turkey to recognise the autonomy of Serbia and Moldo-Wallachia and cede her the ports of the coast of Circassia and Abkasia, declared war on her again on April 26, 1828, after the manifesto she had issued to her Moslem subjects on December 28, 1827. The Russians took Braila, advanced as far as Shumla, captured Varna, and laid siege to Silistria, but the plague and food shortage compelled them to make a disastrous retreat. In Asia they took Kars, Akhalzikel, and Bayazid. The next year they entered Erzerum; Diebitch captured Silistria, outflanked the Grand Vizier’s army shut up in Shumla, crossed the Balkan mountains, and laid siege to Adrianople. On September 14, 1820, Turkey signed a treaty in the latter town, which put Moldavia, Wallachia, and Serbia under Russian protectorate, and by which she ceded to Russia all the coast of Transcaucasia, granted her the free passage of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, and promised to pay a war contribution of 137 million francs.
In 1833 Mehemet Ali, Pasha of Egypt, who, not having been able to obtain the Morea through the Powers’ support, wanted to capture Syria, defeated the Turks at Konia and threatened Constantinople. The Tsar, Nicholas I, who hoped he could turn Turkey into a kind of Russian protectorate, then sent Mouraviev to Mahmoud to offer to put at his disposal a fleet and an army to fight with Mehemet Ali. A Russian fleet came and cast anchor before Constantinople, and a Russian detachment landed in the town. But then France, Austria, and Prussia, perhaps foreseeing the danger of a Russian occupation which might pave the way to a definite possession, asked the Sultan to make the necessary concessions to his vassal, and the latter to accept them. The treaty of Kutahia, signed on May 4, 1833, gave the Pasha of Egypt the whole of Syria and the province of Adana. Russia withdrew her troops, but did not lay down arms, and thus Count Orlov compelled the Porte to sign the treaty of Unkiar-i-Skelessi, which stipulated an offensive and defensive alliance between Russia and Turkey, and the closing of the Dardanelles to the other Powers. Turkey was now under Russian tutelage.
After the defection of Ahmed Pasha, who led the Turkish fleet at Alexandria, Great Britain, lest Russia should establish her protectorate over Turkey, offered to France, through Lord Palmerston, to participate in a naval demonstration, but France declined the offer. Metternich then suggested a conference between the representatives of the five Great Powers, in order to substitute their guarantee for a Turkish protectorate. On July 27, 1839, the ambassadors handed the Sublime Porte a note communicating their agreement, and advising that no definite decision should be taken without their co-operation. Then England, having no further fear of Russian intervention, turned against Mehemet Ali, and Baron de Brunov even proposed an Anglo-Russian agreement.
Owing to the intervention of Austria, which was averse to a war with France, the question of Egypt was only settled on July 13, 1841, by a hatti-sherif, which gave Mehemet Ali the hereditary possession of Egypt, and by the treaty of London, which guaranteed the neutrality of the Straits, as Russia wanted to control the Straits and conquer Constantinople to free the Christians in the Balkan Peninsula from the so-called Ottoman tyranny, and “relight the tapers which had been put out by the Turks” in St. Sophia, restored to Orthodoxy. France, following the old traditions of her foreign policy and in agreement with England, confined the Russians within the Black Sea by the convention of the Straits in 1841, and thus secured, not the integrity, but the existence of the Turkish Empire.
But the Tsar, Nicholas I, who was bent on defending the Greek faith within the Ottoman Empire, was anxious to see Turkey pursue the work of the Tanzimat—_i.e._, the new régime—confirmed by the promulgation by Abdul Mejid of the hatti-sherif of Gulhané on November 3, 1839. In 1844 he made overtures concerning the partition of Turkey, to England, to which the latter country turned a deaf ear. Thanks to the support of Great Britain and France, the Turkish troops, which had been sent to Moldavia and Wallachia after the riots which had broken out after the revolution, compelled the Tsar in 1849-51 to withdraw his army beyond the Pruth.
In 1850 France protested against the encroachments of Russia in the East, who, in order to protect the Greek monks living in Palestine and secure her own religious domination, wanted to deprive the Roman monks of their time-honoured rights over the Christian sanctuaries.
In 1853 the Tsar sent Prince Menshikov to Constantinople in order to demand a formal treaty granting the Greek Church religious independence and temporal privileges. The Sublime Porte, backed by France and England, rejected the ultimatum. The latter Powers then sent a fleet to the Dardanelles, and the next month—on July 4, 1853—Russia occupied Moldavia and Wallachia. At the instigation of Austria, the Powers assembled at Vienna on the 24th of the same month drew up a conciliatory note, which was rejected by Russia. Then the English fleet sailed up the Dardanelles, and on October 4 Turkey declared war on Russia. Austria tried again, at the Vienna Conference which she reopened in December, 1853, to bring about an understanding between Russia and Turkey. But Nicholas I declared that he meant to treat only with England and Prussia to restore peace in the East, which Turkey looked upon as an affront. He also rejected Napoleon III’s mediation on January 29, 1854, and the Franco-English summons on February 27, upon which France declared war on him. Notwithstanding the political views which unfortunately are still held by most of the present diplomatists, and in pursuance of which the Powers had already checked Mehemet Ali’s success and prevented Turkey resuming her former state, France and England realised the dangerous consequences of the Russian threat and backed Turkey. In consequence of the manœuvres of Austria and the unwillingness of Prussia, who had declared “she would never fight against Russia,” the Allies, who were at Varna, instead of attacking the principalities, decided to launch into the Crimean expedition. Finally, after the ultimatum drawn up by Austria, to which the Emperor Alexander submitted at the instigation of Prussia, a treaty of peace signed in Paris on March 30, 1856, recognised the integrity of Turkey, abolished the Russian protectorate over the principalities, and guaranteed the independence of Serbia, Moldavia, and Wallachia, under the suzerainty of the Ottoman Empire. Our diplomats seem then to have partly realised the extent of the danger constituted by the Slavs, and to have understood that the Turks, by driving back the Slavs and keeping them away from Western and Mediterranean Europe since the fourteenth century, had enabled Western civilisation to develop.
As the influence of France in Turkey was imperilled after her defeat in 1870, Russia took advantage of this to declare she would no longer submit to the most important clauses of the London treaty of March 13, 1871. Russia, whose ambassador in Turkey at that time was General Ignatiev, took in hand the cause of the independence of the Bulgarian Church, for which, in 1870, she had obtained the creation of a national exarchate with its own hierarchy, which had exasperated the Phanar at Constantinople and brought about deadly encounters between Turks and Bulgarians.
In 1875 Russia, alarmed at the reforms instituted by Turkey, and fearing the European organisation she was attempting to introduce into the Empire might strengthen it and thus prove an obstacle to the realisation of her designs, fomented a Christian rising in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was a pretext for her to declare war on Turkey. Russia, backed by the Bulgarians, obliged Turkey to agree to an armistice and to an International Conference at Constantinople. In consequence of the rejection by Turkey of the protocol of London and the Russian comminatory note which followed it, Russia carried on the hostilities which, after the defeat of Plevna in Europe and the capture of Kars in Asia, led to the negotiations of San Stefano, on March 3, 1878.
Lastly, in the same year, on the occasion of the treaty of Berlin, which gave Kars to Russia and modified the San Stefano preliminaries by cancelling several of the advantages Russia hoped to obtain, France, pursuing her time-honoured policy, showed clearly her sympathy for Turkey, by bringing to bear on her behalf the influence she had regained since 1871.
By so doing, France incurred Germany’s anger, for we have already shown the latter country’s sympathy for Slavism. As recent events have proved once more, an alliance with Russia could only be brought about by a corresponding understanding with Germany, since Russia, where German influence has been replaced by Slavonic influence, is now being invincibly drawn towards Germany, where Slavonic influence is now prevalent. This twofold understanding could only be brought about by sacrificing the whole of Western Europe and all her old civilisation. The Europe “which ends on the Elbe,” as has been said, would become more and more insignificant in such a political concept, and there would only remain in the world, standing face to face for a decisive struggle, the Germano-Russians and the Anglo-Saxons.
Spurred on by the annexation of Eastern Rumelia to Bulgaria, consequent on the rising of September 18, 1885, at Philippopolis, the Macedonian Slavs carried on an agitation the next year, in 1886, in favour of their union with Bulgaria, and resorted to an insurrection in 1895-96.
Lastly, the two Balkan wars of 1912-13, notwithstanding the complexity and intricacy of the interests at stake, may be looked upon to a certain extent as a fresh outcome of the Slavonic pressure and the ambitions of Orthodoxy.
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The Russians, who had driven back the Turanian peoples to Turkistan, began the conquest of this country in 1815. From 1825 to 1840 they subdued the Khirgiz. They took Khiva in 1854, and in 1864 conquered the lower valley of the Syr Daria. In 1863 they occupied Tashkent, and in 1867 grouped the territories they had conquered under the authority of the Governor-General of Turkistan. In 1873 they occupied all the country lying between the Caspian Sea and the Aral Sea, and in 1876 took Kokand.
Even before the war, as has already been seen, Russia had turned her attention in the East towards Armenia, who, owing to her situation, could best serve her policy of expansion in Asia Minor. According to the plans of the Imperial Russian Government set forth on June 8, 1813, Armenia was to be converted into an autonomous province under the power of a governor-general, including the vilayets of Erzerum, Van, Bitlis, Diarbekir, Kharput, and Sivas, with the exception of a few territories whose boundaries had not yet been fixed. But in a memorandum presented at the same time, the Imperial Russian Government insisted upon “the close connection between the Armenian question and the problems the Russian administration had to solve in Transcaucasia.” These plans lay in abeyance, for they were opposed by the German policy, which was hostile to any Russian encroachment on Turkish territories; and Russia, on the other hand, prevented Germany obtaining the concession of a railway line which was to connect the Turkish ports on the Black Sea, Samsun and Trebizond, with the Baghdad Railway and the Mediterranean Sea at Alexandretta, and settling down on the coast of the Black Sea.
As the Entente had given Russia a free hand, the latter country, as has been seen, resumed the realisation of her plans as soon as war broke out. Russia, who had begun the conquest of Caucasus in 1797 and of the Transcaspian isthmus from 1828 to 1878, occupied Upper Armenia in 1914-15. The Young Turks, who believed in the triumph of Germany, expected that, thanks to the latter, they could hold in check the Russian designs, and for this reason stood by her side.
Meanwhile the Russian policy with regard to Turkey asserted itself more and more energetically, especially in reference to Constantinople, so that the antagonism of the two nations, created by Muscovite ambition, had grown into a deep and lasting hostility.
It was recommended in the testament which is supposed to have been written by Peter the Great—
“Article 9. To draw as close as possible to Constantinople and India, for he who rules over that city will rule over the world. It is advisable, therefore, to bring about continual wars, now in Turkey, now in Persia, to establish shipbuilding yards on the Black Sea, gradually to get the mastery of that sea and of the Baltic Sea—the possession of these two seas being absolutely necessary for the triumph of our plans—to hurry on the decay of Persia, to advance as far as the Persian Gulf, to restore the once thriving Eastern trade, if possible through Syria, and to advance as far as India, the emporium of the world.
“When once we are there, we shall no longer be dependent on English gold.
“Article 11. To show the House of Austria it has an interest in ejecting the Turks from Europe, and to neutralise her jealousy when we shall conquer Constantinople, either by bringing about a war between her and the old European States, or by giving her a share of the conquest—and take it back from her later on.”
Russia never gave up this policy; indeed, she did not carry out her plans by force of arms, for the other Powers would have opposed them; but she resorted to all possible means to ensure its triumph. She constantly aimed at the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire by supporting and grouping the Christian elements included in this empire, especially those of Slavonic race and Orthodox faith; and thus she really partitioned the Empire and bound to herself the old Ottoman provinces now raised to the rank of autonomous States. She acted most cautiously, and in order to carry out her plans peacefully she sought to dismember Turkey gradually and weaken her in order to finally rule over her. It has been rightly said that as early as 1770 the Russians opened the Eastern question exactly as it stands to-day, and already advocated the solution they have always insisted upon.[45]
A century ago Alexander I declared it was time to drive the Turks out of Europe. Talleyrand, in the account he gave of the conversations between that Emperor and the French ambassador, relates that he said one day:
“Now is the time to give the plans laid down by us at Tilsit the liberal aspect that befits the deeds of enlightened sovereigns. Our age, still more than our policy, requires that the Turks be driven into Asia; it will be a noble deed to free these beautiful lands. Humanity wants the eviction of those barbarians; civilisation demands it.”
But Napoleon had fully understood the Russian policy, for at the end of his life he said at St. Helena: “I could have shared Turkey with Russia; many a time did I speak about it with the Emperor, Alexander I, but every time Constantinople proved the stumbling-block. The Tsar demanded it, and I could not cede it; for it is too precious a key; it is worth an empire.”
At the memorable sitting of the House of Commons of March 29, 1791, some speakers expressed the anxiety felt in Great Britain, just after Catherine II had annexed the Crimea, lest the Russians should capture the whole of the East. But Fox, the leader of the Liberal party, declared he saw no ground for fear in the constant increase of Muscovite power; he did his best to please the Tsarina, who, on her side, continued to flatter him to obtain what she wanted from England; he recalled that the British themselves had opened the Mediterranean to Russian ships twenty years before, and he had told the French Minister Vergennes, who desired him to protest against the annexation of the Crimea, that Great Britain did not wish to raise any difficulty with Catherine II.
Unfortunately, the Marquis de Villeneuve, Louis XV’s ambassador, and the Comte de Bonneval, who had been converted to Islam, had been the last Frenchmen who had supported the Sublime Porte against the Russian Tsar’s hostility and endeavoured to use Islam as the protector of the liberty of peoples imperilled by the Tsars; and yet this old policy of France had the advantage both of benefiting French trade and counterbalancing the power of the enemies of France.[46] On the other hand, at the Congress of Sistovo in 1791, Sir Robert Murray Keith, who acted as mediator in the conclusion of the Austro-Turkish treaty of peace, recommended his fellow-countrymen “to let the Turks dwindle down in their own dull way.” So now French policy and English policy were going the same way.
During the reign of Charles X, the Polignac Cabinet was willing to sacrifice Constantinople to the Russians in return for the left bank of the Rhine, and in 1828 Chateaubriand, French ambassador at Rome, favoured an alliance with the Tsar in order to obtain the revision of the 1815 treaties, at the cost of Constantinople. Moreover, Admiral Sir Edward Codrington, by destroying the Turco-Egyptian fleet at Navarino on October 20, 1827, with the combined fleets of Great Britain, France, and Russia, furthered the Russian Tsar’s plans.
As the direct capture of the Straits was bound to raise diplomatic difficulties, Nicholas I, on September 4, 1892, summoned a secret council to discuss what policy Russia was to pursue on this point. The opinion which prevailed was expressed in a memorandum drawn up by a former diplomatist, Dimitri Dashkov, then Minister of Justice, and in a draft partition of the Turkish Empire penned by a Greek, Capodistria. This secret committee, dreading the opposition of the Western States, decided to postpone the partition lest, as Great Britain and France refused their consent, it should not finally benefit the designs of Russia and Greece on Constantinople. These secret debates have been summed up in a book published in 1877;[47] and M. Goriainov, in the book he wrote on this question in 1910,[48] thought it proper to praise the consistent magnanimity of the Tsars towards the Turks—whereas the policy which maintained that no reforms would ever be instituted by Turkey of her own free-will if they were not urged on by diplomatic intrigues or international interference, and that “the sick man” could only be restored to health by the intervention of Christendom and under the Orthodox tutelage, was the real cause of the decay of Turkey and the origin of all the intricacies of the Eastern problem.
In 1830 Lord Holland, Fox’s nephew—it will be remembered that on March 29, 1791, Fox had said in the House of Commons he was proud of supporting Russia’s advance to the East, in opposition to William Pitt, who wanted to admit Turkey into the European concert—declared he was sorry, as “a citizen of the world,” that the Russians had not yet settled down in the Golden Horn.
Besides, whereas the Tories felt some anxiety at the territorial development of Russia—without thinking of making use of Turkey to consolidate the position in the East—the Whigs, on the contrary, to use the words of Sir Robert Adair in 1842, thought they could bring the Muscovite Empire into the wake of the United Kingdom.
In June, 1844, the Tsar himself came to London in order to induce Great Britain to approve his Eastern policy, and Russian diplomacy felt so confident she could rely on the support of the English Liberal Cabinet that in 1853 Nicholas I, in the overtures made to Sir Hamilton Seymour, expressed his conviction that he could settle the Turkish problem in ten minutes’ conversation with Lord Aberdeen.
On June 4, 1878, Lord Beaconsfield, who looked upon the part of England in the East as that of a moral protectorate over Islam and a mediator between Europe and Asia, by ensuring the institution of a system of reforms, signed a treaty of alliance with Turkey, by which England pledged herself to protect the Porte against Russian greediness in Asia. Unfortunately, Mr. Gladstone, under the influence of the ideas we have already expounded,[49] soon reversed the Eastern policy of England and unconsciously made his country the Tsar’s ally against Turkey.
Russia, to whom it was now impossible, since the Bulgarians and Rumanians were no longer under Ottoman dominion, to reach the shores of the Bosphorus through Thrace and to conquer Constantinople and the Straits, which had been the aim of her policy for centuries, then turned her designs towards Turkish Armenia and Anatolia, as we have just seen, in order to reach Constantinople through Asia.
Tiutshev, in one of his poems entitled _Russian Geography_, said:
“Moscow, Peter’s town, and Constantine’s town, are the three sacred capitals of the Russian Empire. But how far do its frontiers extend to the north and the east, to the south and the west? Fate will reveal it in the future. Seven inland seas and seven great rivers, from the Nile to the Neva, from the Elbe to China, from the Volga to the Euphrates, from the Ganges to the Danube—this is the Russian Empire, and it will last through untold centuries! So did the Spirit predict. So did Daniel prophesy!”
And in another place: