The Crimean War: A History

2 Eastern Questions

The Sultan rode on a white horse at the head of the procession, followed by his retinue of ministers and officials on foot. To the sound of an artillery salute, they emerged from the main Imperial Gate of the Topkapi Palace into the midday heat of a July day in Constantinople, the Turkish capital. It was Friday, 13 July 1849, the first day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. The Sultan Abdülmecid was on his way to reinaugurate the great mosque of Hagia Sophia. For the past two years it had been shut down for urgent restorations, the building having fallen into chronic disrepair after many decades of neglect. Riding through the crowd assembled in the square on the northern side of the former Orthodox basilica, where his mother, children and harem awaited him in gilded carriages, the Sultan arrived at the entrance of the mosque, where he was met by his religious officials and, in a break from Islamic tradition which specifically excluded non-Muslims from such holy ceremonies, by two Swiss architects, Gaspare and Giuseppe Fossati, who had overseen the restoration work.

The Fossatis led Abdülmecid through a series of private chambers to the sultan’s loge in the main prayer hall which they had rebuilt and redecorated in a neo-Byzantine style on the orders of the Sultan, whose insignia was fixed above the entry door. When the dignitaries had gathered in the hall, the rites of consecration were carried out by the Sheikh ül-Islam, the supreme religious official in the Ottoman Empire, who was (wrongly) equated with the Pope by European visitors.¹

It was an extraordinary occasion – the sultan-caliph and religious leaders of the world’s largest Muslim empire consecrating one of its most holy mosques in chambers rebuilt by Western architects in the style of the original Byzantine cathedral from which it was converted following the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks. After 1453 the Ottomans had taken down the bells, replaced the cross with four minarets, removed the altar and iconostasis, and over the course of the next two centuries plastered over the Byzantine mosaics of the Orthodox basilica. The mosaics had remained concealed until the Fossati brothers had discovered them by accident while restoring the revetments and plasterwork in 1848. Having cleared a part of the mosaics on the north aisle vault, they showed them to the Sultan, who was so impressed by their brilliant colours that he ordered all of them to be liberated from their plaster covering. The hidden Christian origins of the mosque had been revealed.

Realizing the significance of their discovery, the Fossati brothers made drawings and watercolours of the Byzantine mosaics, which they presented to the Tsar in the hope of receiving a subvention for the publication of their work. The architects had previously worked in St Petersburg, and the elder brother, Gaspare, had originally come to Constantinople to build the Russian embassy, a neoclassical palace completed in 1845, where he was joined by Giuseppe. This was a time when many European architects were constructing buildings in the Turkish capital, many of them foreign embassies, a time when the young Sultan was giving his support to a whole series of Westernizing liberal reforms and opening up his empire to the influence of Europe in the pursuit of economic modernization. Between 1845 and 1847 the Fossatis were employed by the Sultan to erect a massive three-storey complex for Constantinople University. Built entirely in the Western neoclassical style and placed awkwardly between the Hagia Sophia and Sultan Ahmet mosques, the complex was burned down in 1936.²

The Tsar of Russia, Nicholas I, was bound to be excited by the discovery of these Byzantine mosaics. The church of Hagia Sophia was a focal point in the religious life of tsarist Russia – a civilization built upon the myth of Orthodox succession to the Byzantine Empire. Hagia Sophia was the Mother of the Russian Church, the historic link between Russia and the Orthodox world of the eastern Mediterranean and the Holy Lands. According to the Primary Chronicle, the first recorded history of Kievan Rus’, compiled by monks in the eleventh century, the Russians were originally inspired to convert to Christianity by the visual beauty of the church. Sent to various countries to search for the True Faith, the emissaries of the Grand Prince Vladimir reported of Hagia Sophia: ‘We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there is not such splendour or such beauty, and we are at a loss how to describe it. We only know that God dwells there among them, and their service is fairer than the ceremonies of other nations. For we cannot forget that beauty.’³ The reclamation of the church remained a persistent and fundamental aim of Russian nationalists and religious leaders throughout the nineteenth century. They dreamed of the conquest of Constantinople and its resurrection as the Russian capital (‘Tsargrad’) of an Orthodox empire stretching from Siberia to the Holy Lands. In the words of the Tsar’s leading missionary, Archimandrite Uspensky, who had led the ecclesiastical mission to Jerusalem in 1847, ‘Russia from eternity has been ordained to illuminate Asia and to unite the Slavs. There will be a union of all Slav races with Armenia, Syria, Arabia and Ethiopia, and they will praise God in Saint Sophia.’⁴

The Tsar rejected the Fossatis’ application for a grant to publish plans and drawings of the great Byzantine church and its mosaics. Although Nicholas expressed great interest in their work, this was not the time for a Russian ruler to get involved in the restoration of a mosque that was so central to the religious and political claims of the Ottoman Empire on the former territories of Byzantium. But at the heart of the conflict that eventually led to the Crimean War was Russia’s own religious claim to lead and protect the Christians of the Ottoman Empire, a demand that centred on its aspiration to reclaim Hagia Sophia as the Mother Church and Constantinople as the capital of a vast Orthodox imperium connecting Moscow to Jerusalem.

The Fossatis’ studies would not be published until more than a century later, although some drawings of the Byzantine mosaics by the German archaeologist Wilhelm Salzenberg were commissioned by the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, the brother-in-law of Nicholas I, and published in Berlin in 1854.⁵ It was only through these drawings that the nineteenth-century world would learn about the hidden Christian treasures of the Hagia Sophia mosque. On the Sultan’s orders, the figural mosaic panels were re-covered with plaster and painted in accordance with Muslim religious customs prohibiting the representation of humans. But the Fossatis were allowed to leave the purely ornamental Byzantine mosaics exposed, and they even painted decorations matching the surviving mosaic patterns onto whitewashed panels covering the human images.

The fortunes of the Byzantine mosaics offered a graphic illustration of the complex intermingling and competing claims of Muslim and Christian cultures in the Ottoman Empire. At the beginning of the nineteenth century Constantinople was the capital of a sprawling multinational empire stretching from the Balkans to the Persian Gulf, from Aden to Algeria, and comprising around 35 million people. Muslims were an absolute majority, accounting for about 60 per cent of the population, virtually all of them in Asiatic Turkey, North Africa and the Arabian peninsula; but the Turks themselves were a minority, perhaps 10 million, mostly concentrated in Anatolia. In the Sultan’s European territories, which had been largely conquered from Byzantium, the majority of his subjects were Orthodox Christians.⁶

From its origins in the fourteenth century, the empire’s ruling Osman dynasty had drawn its legitimacy from the ideal of a continuous holy war to extend the frontiers of Islam. But the Ottomans were pragmatists, not religious fundamentalists, and in their Christian lands, the richest and most populous in the empire, they tempered their ideological animosity towards the infidels with a practical approach to their exploitation for imperial interests. They levied extra taxes on the non-Muslims, looked down on them as inferior ‘beasts’ (rayah), and treated them unequally in various humiliating ways (in Damascus, for example, Christians were forbidden to ride animals of any kind).⁷ But they let them keep their religion, did not generally persecute or try to convert them, and, through the millet system of religious segregation, which gave Church leaders powers within their separate, faith-based ‘nations’ or millets, they even allowed non-Muslims a certain measure of autonomy.

The millet system had developed as a means for the Osman dynasty to use religious élites as the intermediaries in newly conquered territories. As long as they submitted to Ottoman authority, ecclesiastical leaders were allowed to exercise a limited control over education, public order and justice, tax collection, charity and Church affairs, subject to the approval of the Sultan’s Muslim officials (even for such matters, for example, as the repair of a church roof). In this sense, the millet system not only served to reinforce the ethnic and religious hierarchy of the Ottoman Empire – with the Muslims at the top and all the other millets (Orthodox, Gregorian Armenian, Catholic and Jewish) below them – which encouraged Muslim prejudice against the Christians and the Jews; it also encouraged these minorities to express their grievances and organize their struggle against Muslim rule through their national Churches, which was a major source of instability in the empire.

Nowhere was this more apparent than among the Orthodox, the largest Christian millet with 10 million of the Sultan’s subjects. The patriarch in Constantinople was the highest Orthodox authority in the Ottoman Empire. He spoke for the other Orthodox patriarchs of Antioch, Jerusalem and Alexandria. In a wide range of secular affairs he was the real ruler of the ‘Greeks’ (meaning all those who observed the Orthodox rite, including Slavs, Albanians, Moldavians and Wallachians) and represented their interests against both the Muslims and the Catholics. The patriarchate was controlled by the Phanariots, a powerful caste of Greek (and Hellenized Romanian and Albanian) merchant families originally from the Phanar district of Constantinople (from which they derived their name). Since the beginning of the eighteenth century the Phanariots had provided the Ottoman government with the majority of its dragomans (foreign secretaries and interpreters), purchased many other senior posts, assumed control of the Orthodox Church in Moldavia and Wallachia, where they were the main provincial governors (hospodars), and used their domination of the patriarchate to promote their Greek imperial ideals. The Phanariots saw themselves as the heirs of the Byzantine Empire and dreamed of restoring it with Russian help. But they were hostile to the influence of the Russian Church, which had promoted the Bulgarian clergy as a Slavic rival to Greek control of the patriarchate, and they were afraid of Russia’s own ambitions in Ottoman Europe.

During the first quarter of the nineteenth century the other national Churches (Bulgarian and Serb) gradually assumed an equal importance to the Greek-dominated patriarchy in Constantinople. Greek domination of Orthodox affairs, including education and the courts, was unacceptable to many Slavs, who looked increasingly to their own Churches for their national identity and leadership against the Turks. Nationalism was a potent force among the different groups of Balkan Christians – Serbs, Montenegrins, Bulgarians, Moldavians, Wallachians and Greeks – who united on the basis of their language, culture and religion to break free from Ottoman control. The Serbs were the first to win their liberation, by means of Russian-sponsored uprisings between 1804 and 1817, leading to the Turkish recognition of Serb autonomy and eventually to the establishment of a principality of Serbia with its own constitution and a parliament headed by the Obrenović dynasty. But such was the weakness of the Ottoman Empire that its collapse in the rest of the Balkans appeared to be only a question of time.

Long before the Tsar described the Ottoman Empire as the ‘sick man of Europe’, on the eve of the Crimean War, the idea that it was about to crumble had become a commonplace. ‘Turkey cannot stand, she is falling of herself,’ the Prince of Serbia told the British consul in Belgrade in 1838; ‘the revolt of her misgoverned provinces will destroy her.’⁸

That misgovernment was rooted in the empire’s failure to adapt to the modern world. The domination of the Muslim clergy (the mufti and the ulema) acted as a powerful brake on reform. ‘Meddle not with things established, borrow nothing from the infidels, for the law forbids it’ was the motto of the Muslim Institution, which made sure that the sultan’s laws conformed to the Koran. Western ideas and technologies were slow to penetrate the Islamic parts of the empire: trades and commerce were dominated by the non-Muslims (the Christians and Jews); there was no Turkish printing press until the 1720s; and as late as 1853 there were five times as many boys studying traditional Islamic law and theology in Constantinople as there were in the city’s modern schools with a secular curriculum.⁹

The stagnation of the economy was matched by the proliferation of corrupt bureaucracy. The purchasing of offices for the lucrative business of tax-farming was almost universal in the provinces. Powerful pashas and military governors ruled whole regions as their personal fiefdoms, squeezing from them as many taxes as they could. As long as they passed on a share of their revenues to the Porte, and paid off their own financial backers, no one questioned or cared much about the arbitrary violence they employed. The lion’s share of the empire’s taxes was extracted from the non-Muslims, who had no legal protection or means of redress in the Muslim courts, where the testimony of a Christian counted for nothing. It is estimated that by the early nineteenth century the average Christian farmer and trader in the Ottoman Empire was paying half his earnings in taxes.¹⁰

But the key to the decline of the Ottoman Empire was its military backwardness. Turkey had a large army in the early nineteenth century, and it accounted for as much as 70 per cent of treasury expenditure, but it was technically inferior to the modern conscript armies of Europe. It lacked their centralized administration, command structures and military schools, was poorly trained and was still dependent on the recruitment of mercenaries, irregulars and tribal forces from the periphery of the empire. Military reform was essential, and recognized as such by reformist sultans and their ministers, particularly after the repeated defeats by Russia, followed by the loss of Egypt to Napoleon. But to build a modern conscript army was impossible without a fundamental transformation of the empire to centralize control of the provinces and overcome the vested interests of the 40,000 janizaries, the sultan’s salaried household infantry, who represented the outmoded traditions of the military establishment and resisted all reforms.¹¹

Selim III (1789–1807) was the first sultan to recognize the need to Westernize the Ottoman army and navy. His military reforms were guided by the French, the major foreign influence on the Ottomans in the final decades of the eighteenth century, mainly because their enemies (Austria and Russia) were also the enemies of the Ottoman Empire. Selim’s concept of Westernization was similar to the Westernization of Russia’s institutions carried out by Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century, and the Turks were conscious of this parallel. It involved little more than the borrowing of new technologies and practices from foreigners, and certainly not the adoption of Western cultural principles that might challenge the dominant position of Islam in the empire. The Turks had invited the French to advise them, partly because they assumed they were the least religious of the European nations and therefore the least likely to threaten Islam – an impression gained from the anti-clerical policies of the Jacobins.

Selim’s reforms were defeated by the janizaries and the Muslim clergy, who were opposed to any change. But they were continued by Mahmud II (1808–39), who built up the military schools established by Selim to undermine the janizaries’ domination of the army by promoting officers on a meritocratic basis. He pushed through reforms of military dress, introduced Western equipment, and abolished the janizaries’ fiefdoms in an effort to create a centralized European-style army into which the Sultan’s household guards would eventually be merged. When the janizaries rebelled against the reforms, in 1826, they were put down, with several thousand killed by the Sultan’s new army, and then liquidated by imperial decree.

As the Sultan’s empire weakened to the point where it seemed in danger of imminent collapse, the great powers intervened increasingly in its affairs – ostensibly to protect the Christian minorities but in reality to advance their own ambitions in the area. European embassies were no longer content to limit their contacts to the Ottoman administration, as they had done previously, but took a hand directly in the empire’s politics, supporting nationalities, religious groups, political parties and factions, and even interfering in the Sultan’s appointment of individual ministers to promote their own imperial interests. To advance their country’s trade they developed direct links with merchants and financiers and established consuls in the major trading towns. They also began to issue passports to Ottoman subjects. By the middle of the nineteenth century as many as one million inhabitants of the Sultan’s empire were using the protective powers of the European legations to escape the jurisdiction and taxes of the Turkish authorities. Russia was the most active in this respect, developing its Black Sea commerce by granting passports to large numbers of the Sultan’s Greeks and allowing them to sail under the Russian flag.¹²

For the Orthodox communities of the Ottoman Empire, Russia was their protector against the Turks. Russian troops had helped the Serbs to gain autonomy. They had brought Moldavia and Wallachia under Russian protection, and liberated the Moldavians from Turkish rule in Bessarabia. But the Russians’ part in the Greek independence movement showed how far they were prepared to go in their support of their co-religionists to exert their hold over Turkey’s European territories.

The Greek revolution really began in Russia. In its early stages it was led by Greek-born Russian politicians who had never even been to mainland Greece (a ‘geographical expression’ if ever there was one) but who dreamed of uniting all the Greeks through a series of uprisings against the Turks, which they planned to begin in the Danubian principalities. In 1814 a Society of Friends (Philiki Etaireia) was set up by Greek nationalists and students in Odessa, with affiliated branches established soon thereafter in all the major areas where the Greeks lived – Moldavia, Wallachia, the Ionian islands, Constantinople, the Peloponnese – as well as in other Russian cities where the Greeks were strong. It was the Society that organized the Greek uprising in Moldavia in 1821 – an uprising led by Alexander Ypsilantis, a senior officer in the Russian cavalry and the son of a prominent Phanariot family in Moldavia that had fled to St Petersburg on the outbreak of the Russo-Turkish war in 1806. Ypsilantis had close connections to the Russian court, where he had received the patronage of the Empress Maria Fedorovna (the widow of Paul I) from the age of 15. Tsar Alexander I had appointed him his aide-de-camp in 1816.

There was a powerful Greek lobby in the ruling circles of St Petersburg. The Foreign Ministry contained a number of Greek-born diplomats and activists of the Greek cause. None was more important than Alexandru Sturdza from Moldavia, a Phanariot on his mother’s side, who became the first Russian governor of Bessarabia, or Ioannis Kapodistrias, a Corfu nobleman who was appointed Russia’s Foreign Minister jointly with Karl Nesselrode in 1815. The Greek Gymnasium in St Petersburg had been training Greek-born youths for military and diplomatic service since the 1770s, and many of its graduates had fought in the Russian army against the Turks in the war of 1806–12 (as did thousands of Greek volunteers from the Ottoman Empire, who fled to Russia at the war’s end). By the time Ypsilantis planned his uprising in Moldavia, there was a large cohort of Russian-trained, experienced Greek fighters on which he could count.

The plan was to start the uprising in Moldavia and then move to Wallachia. The insurgents would combine their attacks with the pandur (guerrilla) militia led by the Wallachian revolutionary Tudor Vladimirescu, another veteran of the Tsar’s army in the Russo-Turkish war of 1806–12, whose peasant followers were in practice more opposed to their Phanariot rulers and landlords than they were to the distant Ottomans. The Treaty of Bucharest had placed the principalities under the joint sovereignty of Russia and the Ottoman Empire. They did not have any Turkish garrisons but the local hospodars were allowed to maintain small armies, which Ypsilantis expected to join the uprising as soon as his army of Greek volunteers from Russia crossed the River Pruth. Ypsilantis hoped that the revolt would spark a Russian intervention to defend the Greeks once the Turks took repressive measures against them. In the Moldavian capital of Iaşi he appeared in a Russian uniform and announced to the local boyars that he had ‘the support of a great power’. There was certainly a great deal of support in the élite circles of St Petersburg, where philhellenic sentiment ran high, as well as among military and Church leaders. The Russian consulates in the principalities even became recruiting centres for the revolt. But neither Kapodistrias nor the Tsar knew anything about the preparations for the uprising, and both men denounced it as soon as it began. However much they might have sympathized with the Greek cause, Russia was the founder of the Holy Alliance, the conservative union formed with the Austrians and Prussians in 1815, whose raison d’être was to combat revolutionary and nationalist movements on the European continent.

Without Russian support, the Greek uprising in the principalities was soon crushed by 30,000 Turkish troops. The Wallachian peasant army retreated to the mountains, and Ypsilantis fled to Transylvania, where he was arrested by the Austrian authorities. The Turks occupied Moldavia and Wallachia, and carried out reprisals against the Christian population there. Turkish soldiers looted churches, murdered priests, men, women and children and mutilated their bodies, cutting off their noses, ears and heads, while their officers looked on. Thousands of terrified civilians fled into neighbouring Bessarabia, presenting the Russian authorities with a massive refugee problem. The violence even spread to Constantinople, where the patriarch and several bishops were publicly hanged by a group of janizaries on Easter Sunday 1821.

As news spread of the atrocities, causing ever-stronger Russian sympathy for the Greek cause, the Tsar felt increasingly obliged to intervene, despite his commitment to the principles of the Holy Alliance. As Alexander saw it, the actions of the Turks had gone well beyond the legitimate defence of Ottoman sovereignty; they were in a religious war against the Greeks, whose religious rights the Russians had a duty to protect, according to their interpretation of the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji. The Tsar issued an ultimatum calling on the Turks to evacuate the principalities, restore the damaged churches, and acknowledge Russia’s treaty rights to protect the Sultan’s Orthodox subjects. This was the first time any of the powers had spoken out on behalf of the Greeks. The Turks responded by seizing Russian ships, confiscating their grain, and imprisoning their sailors in Constantinople.

Russia broke off diplomatic relations. Many of the Tsar’s advisers favoured war. The Greek revolt had spread to central Greece, the Peloponnese, Macedonia and Crete. Unless the Russians intervened, they feared that in these regions it would be repressed with similar atrocities to those in the principalities. In 1822 Ottoman troops brutally crushed a Greek uprising on the island of Chios, hanging 20,000 islanders and deporting into slavery almost all the surviving population of 70,000 Greeks. Europe was outraged by the massacre, whose horrors were depicted by the French painter Eugène Delacroix in his great masterpiece The Massacre of Chios (1824). In the Russian Foreign Ministry, Kapodistrias and Sturdza argued for military intervention on religious grounds. In a rehearsal of the arguments employed in 1853 for Russia’s invasion of the principalities, they reasoned that the defence of Christians against Muslim violence should outweigh any considerations about the sovereignty of the Ottoman Empire. To support revolts in, say, Spain or Austria, they maintained, would be a betrayal of the principles of the Holy Alliance, because these two nations were both ruled by lawful Christian sovereigns; but no Muslim power could be recognized as lawful or legitimate, so the same principles did not apply to the Greek uprising against the Ottomans. The rhetoric of Holy Russia’s duty to its co-religionists was also employed by Pozzo di Borgo, the Tsar’s ambassador to France, though he was more interested in promoting Russia’s strategic ambitions, calling for a war to expel the Turks from Europe and establish a new Byzantine Empire under Russian protection.

Such ideas were widely shared by high officials, army officers and intellectuals, who were increasingly united in the early 1820s by their Russian nationalism and at times by an almost messianic commitment to the Orthodox cause. There was talk of ‘crossing the Danube and delivering the Greeks from the cruelties of Muslim rule’. One leader in the southern army called for a war against the Turks to unite the Balkan Christians in a ‘Greek Kingdom’. The pro-war lobby also had supporters at the court, where the legitimist principles of the Holy Alliance were more strictly recognized. The most enthusiastic was Baroness von Krüdener, a religious mystic who encouraged Tsar Alexander to believe in his messianic role and campaigned for an Orthodox crusade to drive the Muslims out of Europe and raise the cross in Constantinople and Jerusalem. She was dismissed from the court and ordered by the Tsar to leave St Petersburg.¹³

Alexander was far too committed to the Concert of Europe to give serious consideration to the idea of unilateral Russian intervention to liberate the Greeks. He stood firmly by the Congress System established at Vienna by which the great powers had agreed to resolve major crises through international negotiation, and realized that any action in the Greek crisis was bound to be opposed. By October 1821 a European policy of international mediation over Greece had already been coordinated by Prince Metternich, the Austrian Foreign Minister and chief conductor of the Concert of Europe, together with the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Castlereagh. So when the Tsar appealed to them for support against Turkey, in February 1822, it was agreed to convene an international congress to resolve the crisis.

Alexander called for the creation of a large autonomous Greek state under Russian protection, much like Moldavia and Wallachia. However, Britain feared that this would be a means for Russia to advance its own interests and intervene in Ottoman affairs on the pretext of protecting its co-religionists. Austria was equally afraid that a successful Greek revolt would set off uprisings in parts of central Europe under its control. Since Alexander prized the Austrian alliance above all, he held back assistance to the Greeks, while continuing to urge collective European action to help them. None of the powers would support the Greeks. But two things happened in 1825 to change their minds: first, the Sultan called in Mehmet Ali, his powerful vassal in Egypt, to put down the Greeks, which the Egyptians did with new atrocities, giving rise to an ever-growing wave of pro-Greek sympathy and ever-louder calls for intervention in liberal Europe; and then Alexander died.

The new tsar – the man responsible, more than anyone, for the Crimean War – was 29 when he succeeded his brother to the Russian throne. Tall and imposing, with a large, balding head, long sideburns and an officer’s moustache, Nicholas I was every inch a ‘military man’. From an early age he had developed an obsessive interest in military affairs, learning all the names of his brother’s generals, designing uniforms, and attending with excitement military parades and manoeuvres. Having missed out on his boyhood dream of fighting in the war against Napoleon, he prepared himself for a soldier’s life. In 1817 he received his first appointment, Inspector-General of Engineers, from which he derived a lifelong interest in army engineering and artillery (the strongest elements of the Russian military during the Crimean War). He loved the routines and discipline of army life: they appealed to his strict and pedantic character as well as to his spartan tastes (throughout his life he insisted on sleeping on a military campbed). Courteous and charming to those in his intimate circle, to others Nicholas was cold and stern. In later life he grew increasingly irritable and impatient, inclined to rash behaviour and angry rages, as he succumbed to the hereditary mental illness that troubled Alexander and Nicholas’s other older brother, the Grand Duke Constantine, who renounced the throne in 1825.¹⁴

More than Alexander, Nicholas placed the defence of Orthodoxy at the centre of his foreign policy. Throughout his reign he was governed by an absolute conviction in his divine mission to save Orthodox Europe from the Western heresies of liberalism, rationalism and revolution. During his last years he was led by this calling to fantastic dreams of a religious war against the Turks to liberate the Balkan Christians and unite them with Russia in an Orthodox empire with its spiritual centres in Constantinople and Jerusalem. Anna Tiutcheva, who was at his court from 1853, described Nicholas as ‘the Don Quixote of autocrats – terrible in his chivalry and power to subordinate everything to his futile struggle against History’.¹⁵

Nicholas had a personal connection to the Holy Land through the New Jerusalem Monastery near Moscow. Founded by Patriarch Nikon in the 1650s, the monastery was situated on a site chosen for its symbolic resemblance to the Holy Land (with the River Istra symbolizing the Jordan). The ensemble of the monastery’s churches was laid out in a sacred topographical arrangement to represent the Holy Places of Jerusalem. Nikon also took in foreign monks so that the monastery would represent the multinational Orthodoxy linking Moscow to Jerusalem. Nicholas had visited the monastery in 1818 – the year his first son, the heir to the throne, was born (a coincidence he took to be a sign of divine providence). After the monastery was partially destroyed by fire Nicholas directed plans to reconstruct its centrepiece, the Church of the Resurrection, as a replica of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, even sending his own artist on a pilgrimage to make drawings of the original, so that it could be rebuilt on Russian soil.¹⁶

None of Nicholas’s religious ambitions were immediately obvious in 1825. There was a gradual evolution in his views from the first years of his reign, when he upheld the legitimist principles of the Holy Alliance, to the final period before the Crimean War, when he made the championing of Orthodoxy the primary goal of his aggressive foreign policy in the Balkans and the Holy Lands. But from the start there were clear signs that he was determined to defend his co-religionists and take a tough position against Turkey, beginning with the struggle over Greece.

Nicholas restored relations with Kapodistrias, whose active support for the Greek cause had forced him to resign from the Foreign Ministry and leave Russia for exile in 1822. He threatened war against the Turks unless they evacuated the Danubian principalities, and accepted plans from his military advisers to occupy Moldavia and Wallachia in support of the Greek cause. The Tsar was closely guided by his Foreign Minister, Karl Nesselrode, who had lost patience with the Concert of Europe and joined the war party, not out of love for the Greek rebels, but because he realized that a war against the Turks would promote Russian goals in the Near East. At the very least, reasoned Nesselrode, the threat of Russian intervention would force the British into joining Russia in efforts to resolve the Greek Question, if only to prevent the Tsar from exercising overwhelming influence in the region.¹⁷

In 1826 the Duke of Wellington, the commander of the allied forces against Napoleon, who was now a senior statesman in the British government, travelled to St Petersburg to negotiate an Anglo-Russian accord (later joined by France in the Treaty of London in 1827) that would mediate between the Greeks and Turks. Britain, Russia and France agreed to call for the establishment of an autonomous Greek province under Ottoman sovereignty. When the Sultan rejected their proposals, the three powers sent a combined naval force under the command of the fiery British philhellene Admiral Edward Codrington, with instructions to impose a resolution by peaceful means if possible, and ‘by cannon’ as a last resort. Codrington was not known for diplomacy, and in October 1827 he destroyed the entire Turkish and Egyptian fleets in the battle of Navarino. Enraged by this action, the Sultan refused any further mediation, declared a jihad, and rejected the Russian ultimatum to withdraw his troops from the Danubian principalities. His defiance played into Russia’s hands.

Nicholas had long suspected that the British were unwilling to go to war for the Greek cause. He had been considering an occupation of the principalities to force the Turks into submission, but feared that would encourage the British to renounce the Treaty of London. Now the Sultan’s rejection of his ultimatum had given him a legitimate excuse to declare war against Turkey without the British or the French. Russia would fight on its own to secure a ‘national government in Greece’, Nesselrode wrote to Kapodistrias in January 1828. The Tsar sent money and weapons to Kapodistrias’s revolutionary government, and received from him an assurance that Russia would enjoy an ‘exclusive influence’ in Greece.¹⁸

In April 1828 a Russian attack-force of 65,000 fighting men and Cossacks crossed the Danube and struck in three directions, against Vidin, Silistria and Varna, on the road to Constantinople. Nicholas insisted on joining the campaign: it was his first experience of war. The Russians advanced quickly (the land was full of forage for their horses) but then got bogged down in fighting around Varna, where they succumbed to the pestilent conditions of the Danube delta and suffered severe losses. Half the Russian soldiers died from illness and diseases during 1828–9. Reinforcements soon got sick as well. Between May 1828 and February 1829 a staggering 210,000 soldiers received treatment in military hospitals – twice the troop strength of the whole campaign.¹⁹ Such huge losses were not unusual in the tsarist army, where there was little care for the welfare of the serf soldiers.

Renewing the offensive in the spring of 1829, the Russians captured the Turkish fortress of Silistria, followed by the city of Edirne (Adrianople), a short march from Constantinople, where the cannons of the nearby Russian fleet could be heard. At this point the Russians could easily have seized the Turkish capital and overthrown the Sultan. Their fleet controlled the Black Sea and the Aegean, they had reinforcements on which they could draw from Greek or Bulgarian volunteers, and the Turkish forces were in complete disarray. In the Caucasus, where the Russians had advanced simultaneously, they had captured the Turkish fortresses of Kars and Erzurum, opening the way for an attack on Turkish territories in Anatolia. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire appeared so imminent that the French King Charles X proposed partitioning its territories between the great powers.²⁰

Nicholas, too, was convinced that the collapse of the Ottoman Empire was at hand. He was prepared to hasten its demise and liberate the Balkan Christians, provided he could get the other powers, or at least Austria (his closest ally with interests in the Balkans), on his side. As his troops advanced towards the Turkish capital, Nicholas informed the Austrian ambassador in St Petersburg that the Ottoman Empire was ‘about to fall’, and suggested that it would be in Austria’s interests to join Russia in the partition of its territories in order to ‘forestall the people who would fill the vacuum’. The Austrians, however, mistrusted Russia and chose instead to preserve the Concert of Europe. Without their support, Nicholas held back from dealing the fatal blow to the Ottoman Empire in 1829. He was afraid of a European war against Russia should his attack on Turkey move the other powers to unite in its defence, and even more afraid that the collapse of the Ottoman Empire would result in a frantic rush by the European powers to seize Turkish territories. Either way, Russia would lose out. For this reason, Nicholas abided by the viewpoint of his cool and calculating Foreign Minister: that it would best serve Russia’s interests to keep the Ottoman Empire in existence, but in a weakened state, where its dependence on Russia for survival would enable the promotion of Russian interests in the Balkans and the Black Sea area. A sick Turkey was more useful to Russia than a dead one.²¹

Consequently, the Treaty of Adrianople was surprisingly kind to the defeated Turks. Imposed by the Russians in September 1829, the treaty established the virtual autonomy of Moldavia and Wallachia under Russian protection. It gave the Russians some islands in the mouth of the Danube, a couple of forts in Georgia and the Sultan’s recognition of their possession of the rest of Georgia as well as the south Caucasian khanates of Erivan and Nakhichevan, which they had wrested from the Persians in 1828, but compared to what the Russians might have forced out of the defeated Turks, these were relatively minor gains. The two most important clauses of the treaty secured concessions from the Porte that had been wanted by all the signatories of the Treaty of London: Turkish recognition of Greek autonomy; and the opening of the Straits to all commercial ships.

The Western powers did not trust these appearances of Russian moderation, however. The treaty’s silence on warship movements through the Straits led them to conclude that Russia must have gained some secret clause or verbal promise from the Turks, allowing them exclusive control of this crucial waterway between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Western fears of Russia had been growing since the outbreak of the Greek revolt, and the treaty fuelled their Russophobia. The British were especially alarmed. Wellington, by now the Prime Minister, thought the treaty had transformed the Ottoman Empire into a Russian protectorate – an outcome worse than its partition (which at least would have been done by a concert of powers). Lord Heytesbury, the British ambassador in St Petersburg, declared (without any intended irony) that the Sultan would soon become as ‘submissive to the orders of the Tsar as any of the Princes of India to those of the [East India] Company’.²² The British may have totally supplanted the Mughal Empire in India, but they were determined to stop the Russians doing the same to the Ottomans, presenting themselves as the honest defenders of the status quo in the Near East.

Fearful of the perceived Russian threat, the British began to shape a policy towards the Eastern Question. To prevent Russia from gaining the initiative in Greece, they gave their backing to the independence of the new Greek state, as opposed to mere autonomy under Turkish sovereignty (which they feared would make it a dependant of Russia). British fears were not unwarranted. Encouraged by the Russian intervention, Kapodistrias had been calling on the Tsar to expel the Turks from Europe and create a larger Greece, a confederation of Balkan states under Russian protection, on the model once proposed by Catherine the Great. However, the Tsar’s position was seriously weakened by the assassination of Kapodistrias in 1831, followed by the decline of his pro-Russian party and the rise of new Greek liberal parties aligned with the West. These changes moderated Russian expectations and cleared the way for an international settlement at the Convention of London in 1832: the modern Greek state was established under the guarantee of the great powers and with Britain’s choice of sovereign, the young Otto of Bavaria, as its first king.

The ‘weak neighbour’ policy dominated Russia’s attitude to the Eastern Question between 1829 and the Crimean War. It was not shared by everyone: there were those in the Tsar’s army and Foreign Ministry who favoured a more aggressive and expansionist policy in the Balkans and the Caucasus. But it was flexible enough to satisfy both the ambitions of Russian nationalists as well as the concerns of those who wanted to avoid a European war. The key to the ‘weak neighbour’ policy was the use of religion – backed up by a constant military threat – to increase Russian influence within the Sultan’s Christian territories.

To enforce the Treaty of Adrianople, the Russians occupied Moldavia and Wallachia. During the five years of the occupation, from 1829 to 1834, they introduced a constitution (Règlement organique) and reformed the administration of the principalities on relatively liberal principles (far more so than anything allowed in Russia at that time) to undermine the remaining vestiges of Ottoman control. The Russians tried to ease the burden of the peasantry and win their sympathy through economic concessions; they brought the Churches under Russian influence; recruited local militias; and improved the infrastructure of the region as a military base for future operations against Turkey. For a while, the Russians even thought of turning occupation into permanent annexation, though they finally withdrew in 1834, leaving behind a significant Russian force to control the military roads, which also served to remind the native princes who took over government that they ruled the principalities at the mercy of St Petersburg. The princes placed in power (Michael Sturdza in Moldavia and Alexander Ghica in Wallachia) had been chosen by the Russians for their affiliations with the tsarist court. They were closely watched by the Russian consulates, which often intervened in the boyar assemblies and princely politics to advance Russia’s interests. According to Lord Ponsonby, the British ambassador to Constantinople, Sturdza and Ghica were ‘Russian subjects disguised as hospodars’. They were ‘merely nominal governors… serving only as executors of such measures as may be dictated to them by the Russian government’.²³

The desire to keep the Ottoman Empire weak and dependent sometimes required intercession on behalf of the Turks, as happened in 1833, when Mehmet Ali challenged the Sultan’s power. Having helped the Sultan fight the Greek rebels, Mehmet Ali demanded hereditary title to Egypt and Syria. When the Sultan refused, Mehmet Ali’s son Ibrahim Pasha marched his troops into Palestine, Lebanon and Syria. His powerful army, which had been trained by the French and organized on European principles, easily swept aside the Ottoman forces. Constantinople lay at the mercy of the Egyptians. Mehmet Ali had modernized the Egyptian economy, integrating it into the world market as a supplier of raw cotton to the textile mills of Britain, and even building factories, mainly to supply his large army. In many ways, the invasion of Syria was prompted by a need to expand his base of cash crops, as Egyptian exports came under pressure from competitors in the globalized economy. Yet Mehmet also came to represent a powerful religious revival among Muslim traditionalists and an alternative to the more accommodating religious leadership of the Sultan. He called his army the Cihadiye – the Jihadists. According to contemporary observers, had he seized the Turkish capital, Mehmet Ali would have established a ‘new Muslim empire’ hostile to the growing intervention of the Christian powers in the Middle East.²⁴

The Sultan appealed to the British and the French, but neither showed much interest in helping him, so he turned in desperation to the Tsar, who promptly sent a fleet of seven ships with 40,000 men to defend the Turkish capital against the Egyptians. The Russians considered Mehmet Ali a French lackey who posed a significant danger to Russian interests in the Near East. Since 1830 the French had been engaged in the conquest of Ottoman Algeria. They had the only army in the region capable of checking Russian ambitions. The Russians, moreover, had been disturbed by reports from their agents that Mehmet Ali had promised to ‘resurrect the former greatness of the Muslim people’ and take revenge on Russia for the humiliation suffered by the Turks in 1828–9. They were afraid that the Egyptian leader would stop at nothing less than ‘the conquest of the whole of Asia Minor’ and the establishment of a new Islamic empire supplanting the Ottomans. Instead of a weak neighbour, the Russians would be faced by a powerful Islamic threat on their southern border with strong religious connections to the Muslim tribes of the Caucasus.²⁵

Alarmed by the Russian intervention, the British and French moved their fleets to Besika Bay, just beyond the Dardanelles, and in May 1833 brokered an agreement known as the Convention of Kütahya between Mehmet Ali and the Turks by which the Egyptian leader agreed to withdraw his forces from Anatolia in exchange for the territories of Crete and the Hijaz (in western Arabia). Ibrahim was appointed lifetime governor of Syria but Mehmet Ali was denied his main demand of a hereditary kingdom for himself in Egypt, leaving him frustrated and eager to renew his war against the Turks should another chance present itself. The British strengthened their Levant fleet and put it on alert to serve the Sultan if Mehmet Ali threatened him again. Their arrival on the scene was enough to force the Russians to withdraw, but only after they had, in recognition of Russia’s role in rescuing the Ottoman Empire, managed to extract from the Sultan major new concessions through the Treaty of Unkiar-Skelessi, signed in July 1833. The treaty basically reaffirmed the Russian gains of 1829, but it contained a secret article guaranteeing Russia’s military protection of Turkey in exchange for a Turkish promise to close the Straits to foreign warships when demanded by Russia. The effect of the secret clause was to keep out the British navy and put the Russians in control of the Black Sea; but more importantly, as far as the Russians were concerned, it gave them an exclusive legal right to intervene in Ottoman affairs.²⁶

The British and the French soon found out about the secret clause after it was leaked by Turkish officials. There was outrage in the Western press, which immediately suspected that the Russians had obtained not just the right to close the Straits to other powers but also the right to keep them open to their own warships – in which case they would be able to land a major force in the Bosporus and seize Constantinople in a lightning strike before any Western fleet would have time to intervene (the Black Sea Fleet at Sevastopol was only four days’ sailing from the Turkish capital). In fact, the secret clause had left this point unclear. The Russians claimed that all they had wanted from the controversial clause was a means of self-defence against the possibility of an attack by France or Britain, the major naval powers in the Mediterranean, whose fleets could otherwise sail through the Straits and destroy the Russian bases at Sevastopol and Odessa before their entry into the Black Sea was discovered in St Petersburg. The Straits were ‘the keys to Russia’s house’. If they were unable to close them, the Russians would be vulnerable to an attack on their weakest frontier – the Black Sea littoral and the Caucasus – as indeed they were when Turkey and the Western powers attacked during the Crimean War.

Such arguments were discounted in the West, where Russia’s good intentions were increasingly mistrusted by informed opinion. Now, almost every Russian action on the Continent was interpreted as constituting part of a reactionary and aggressive plan of imperial expansion. ‘No reasonable doubt can be entertained that the Russian Government is intently engaged in the prosecution of those schemes of aggrandizement towards the South which, ever since the reign of Catherine, have formed a prominent feature of Russian policy,’ Palmerston wrote to Lord John Ponsonby in December 1833.

The French statesman François Guizot maintained that the 1833 treaty had converted the Black Sea into a ‘Russian lake’ guarded by Turkey, the Tsar’s ‘vassal state’, ‘without anything hindering Russia herself from passing through the Straits and hurling her ships and soldiers into the Mediterranean’. The chargé d’affaires in St Petersburg lodged a protest with the Russian government warning that if the treaty led to Russia intervening in ‘the internal affairs of the Ottoman Empire, the French government would hold itself wholly at liberty to adopt such a line of conduct as circumstances might suggest’. Palmerston empowered Ponsonby to summon the British fleet from the Mediterranean for the defence of Constantinople, if he felt that it was threatened by Russia.²⁷

The events of 1833 were a turning point in British policy towards Russia and Turkey. Until then, Britain’s main concern in the Ottoman Empire had been to preserve the status quo, mainly from fears that its breakup would affect the balance of power in Europe and possibly lead to a European war, rather than from any firm commitment to the sovereignty of the Sultan (their support for Greece had not demonstrated much of that). But once the British woke up to the danger that the Ottoman Empire might be taken over by the Egyptians at the head of a powerful Muslim revival, or, even worse, that it might become a Russian protectorate, they took an active interest in Turkey. They increasingly intervened in Ottoman affairs, encouraging economic and political reforms by which the British hoped to restore the health of the Ottoman Empire and expand their influence.

Britain’s interests were mainly commercial. The Ottoman Empire was a growing market for the export of British manufactures and a valuable source of raw materials. As the dominant industrial power in the world, Britain generally threw its weight behind the opening up of global markets to free trade; as the dominant naval power, it was prepared to use its fleet to force foreign governments to open up their markets. This was a type of ‘informal empire’, an ‘imperialism of free trade’, in which Britain’s military power and political influence advanced its commercial hegemony and curtailed the independence of foreign governments without the direct controls of imperial rule.

Nowhere was this more in evidence than in the Ottoman Empire. Ponsonby was at pains to stress the economic dividends of increased British influence in Constantinople. ‘Protection given to our political interests’, the ambassador wrote to Palmerston in 1834, ‘will throw open sources of commercial prosperity perhaps hardly to be hoped for from our intercourse with any other country upon earth.’ By this time there was a large and powerful body of British traders with extensive interests in Turkey who put growing pressure on the government to intervene. Their viewpoint was expressed in influential periodicals, such as Blackwood’s and the Edinburgh Review, both of which depended on their patronage; and it found an echo in the arguments of Turcophiles, such as David Urquhart, the leader of a secret trade mission to Turkey in 1833, who saw a huge potential for British commerce in the development of the Ottoman economy. ‘The progress of Turkey,’ Urquhart wrote in 1835, ‘if undisturbed by political events, bids fair to render it, in a few years, the largest market in the world for English manufacturers.’²⁸

In 1838, through a series of military threats and promises, Britain imposed on the Porte a Tariff Convention which in effect transformed the Ottoman Empire into a virtual free-trade zone. Deprived of tariff revenues, the Porte’s ability to protect its nascent industries was seriously handicapped. From this moment the export of British manufactured goods to Turkey rose steeply. There was an elevenfold increase by 1850, making it one of Britain’s most valuable export markets (surpassed only by the Hanseatic towns and the Netherlands). After the repeal of the protectionist Corn Laws in 1846, British imports of cereals from Turkey, chiefly from Moldavia and Wallachia, increased as well. The advent of ocean steamships, steam river-boats and railroads opened up the Danube for the first time as a busy commercial highway. The river’s trade was dominated by British merchant ships exporting grain to western Europe and importing manufactures from Britain. The British were in direct competition with the merchants of Odessa, Taganrog and other Black Sea ports, from which the grain of Russia’s breadbasket in the Ukraine and south Russia was exported to the West. The cereal export market was increasingly important to Russia as the value of its timber trade declined during the steam age. By the middle of the nineteenth century the Black Sea ports were handling one-third of all Russian exports. The Russians tried to give their traders an advantage over their British rivals through their control of the Danube delta after 1829 by subjecting foreign ships to time-consuming quarantine controls and even allowing the Danube to silt up and become once more unnavigable.

On the eastern side of the Black Sea the commercial interests of Britain were increasingly bound up with the port of Trebizond, in north-eastern Turkey, from which Greek and Armenian merchants imported large quantities of British manufactured goods for sale in the interior of Asia. The growing value of this trade to Britain, observed Karl Marx in the New York Tribune, ‘may be seen at the Manchester Exchange, where dark-complexioned Greek buyers are increasing in numbers and importance, and where Greek and South Slav dialects are heard along with German and English’. Until the 1840s, the Russians had a near-monopoly of trade in manufactured goods in this part of Asia. Russian textiles, rope and linen products dominated the bazaars of Bayburt, Baghdad and Basra. But steamships and railways made it possible to open up a shorter route to India – either through the Mediterranean to Cairo and then from Suez to the Red Sea, or via the Black Sea to Trebizond and the Euphrates river to the Persian Gulf (sailing ships could not readily cope with the high winds and monsoons of the Gulf of Suez or with the narrow waters of the Euphrates). The British favoured the Euphrates route, mainly because it ran through territories ruled by the Sultan (as opposed to Mehmet Ali); developing the route was seen as a way to increase British influence and check the growing power of Russia in this part of the Ottoman Empire. In 1834 Britain received permission from the Porte for General Francis Chesney to survey the Euphrates route. The survey was a failure, and British interest in the route declined. But plans for a Euphrates Valley Railway from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf via Aleppo and Baghdad were revived in the 1850s, when the British government was looking for a way to increase its presence in an area where they perceived a growing Russian threat to India (the railway was never developed by the British, for lack of financial guarantees, but the Baghdad Railway built by Germany from 1903 followed much of the same route).

The danger Russia posed to India was the bête noire of British Russophobes. For some, this would become the underlying aim of the Crimean War: to stop a power bent not just on the conquest of Turkey but on the domination of the whole of Asia Minor right up to Afghanistan and India. In their alarmed imagination there were no bounds on the designs of Russia, the fastest growing empire in the world.

In truth, there was never any serious danger of the Russians reaching India in the years before the Crimean War. It was much too far and difficult to march an army all that way – though the Russian Emperor Paul I had once entertained a madcap scheme to send a combined French and Russian force there. The idea had been taken up again by Napoleon in his talks with Tsar Alexander in 1807. ‘The more unrealistic the expedition is,’ Napoleon explained, ‘the more it can be used to terrorize the Englishmen.’ The British government always knew that such an expedition was not feasible. One British intelligence officer thought that any Russian invasion of India ‘would amount to little more than the sending of a caravan’. But while few in official British circles thought that Russia was a serious threat to India, this did not prevent the Russophobic British press from whipping up that fear, emphasizing the potential danger posed by Russia’s conquest of the Caucasus and its ‘underhand activities’ in Persia and Afghanistan.²⁹

The theory made its first appearance in 1828, in a pamphlet, On the Designs of Russia, written by Colonel George de Lacy Evans (a general by the time he took up the command of the British army’s 2nd Infantry Division during the Crimean War). Speculating on the outcome of the Russo-Turkish war, de Lacy Evans conjured up a nightmare fantasy of Russian aggression and expansion, leading to the conquest of the whole of Asia Minor and the collapse of British trade with India. De Lacy’s working principle – that the rapid growth of the Russian Empire since the beginning of the eighteenth century proved the iron law that Russian expansion must continue until checked – reappeared in a second pamphlet he published, in 1829, On the Practicality of an Invasion of British India, in which he claimed, without any evidence of Russia’s actual intentions, that a Russian force could be built up on India’s north-west frontier. The pamphlet was widely read in official circles. Wellington took it as a warning and told Lord Ellenborough, the president of the Board of Control for India, that he was ‘ready to take up the question in Europe, if the Russians [should] move towards India with views of evident hostility’. After 1833, with Russia’s domination of the Ottoman Empire seemingly secured, these fears took on the force of a self-fulfilling prophecy. In 1834 Lieutenant Arthur Connolly (who coined the term ‘the Great Game’ to describe Anglo-Russian rivalry in Asia Minor) published a best-selling travelogue, Journey to the North of India, in which he argued that the Russians could attack the north-west frontier if they were supported by the Persians and Afghans.³⁰

The Russians had in fact been steadily increasing their presence in Asia Minor in line with their policy of keeping neighbours weak. Russian agents advised Persia on foreign policy and organized support for the Shah’s army. In 1837, when the Persians took the Afghan city of Herat, many British politicians had no doubt that it was part of Russia’s preparation for an invasion of India. ‘Herat, in the hands of Persia,’ wrote a former British ambassador to Tehran, ‘can never be considered in any other light than as an advanced point d’appui for the Russians toward India.’ The Russophobic press criticized the inactivity of British governments that had failed to see the ‘underhand’ and ‘nefarious’ activities of the Russians in Persia. ‘For several years,’ warned the Herald, ‘we have endeavoured to make them understand that the ambitious designs of Russia extended beyond Turkey and Circassia and Persia, even to our East Indian dependencies, which Russia has not lost sight of since Catherine threatened to march her armies in that direction, and rally the native Indian princes round the standard of the Great Mogul.’ The Standard called for more than watchful vigilance against Russia: ‘It is of little use to watch Russia, if our care and exertion are to end with that exercise of vigilance. We have been watching Russia during eight years, and within that time she has pushed her acquisitions and military posts nearly 2000 miles on the road to India.’³¹

The view that Russia, by its very nature, was a threat to India became widespread among the British broadsheet-reading classes. It was expressed by the anonymous author of a widely read pamphlet of 1838 called India, Great Britain, and Russia, in a passage that is reminiscent of the domino theory of the Cold War:

To counteract the perceived Russian threat, the British attempted to create buffer states in Asia Minor and the Caucasus. In 1838 they occupied Afghanistan. Officially, their aim was to reinstall the recently deposed Emir Shah Shuja on the Afghan throne, but after that had been achieved, in 1839, they maintained their occupation to support his puppet government – ultimately as a means of moving towards British rule – until they were forced to withdraw by tribal rebellions and disastrous military reverses in 1842. The British also stepped up their diplomatic presence in Tehran, attempting to wean the Persians off the Russians through a defensive alliance and promises of aid for their army. Under British pressure the Persians left Herat and signed a new commercial treaty with Britain in 1841. The British even considered the occupation of Baghdad, believing that it would be welcomed by the Arabs as a liberation from the Turks, or at least that any resistance would be undermined by the division between Sunni and Shia, who in the words of Henry Rawlinson, the British consul-general in Baghdad, ‘could always be played off against each other’. An army officer of the East India Company and a distinguished orientalist who first deciphered the ancient Persian cuneiform inscriptions of Behistun, Rawlinson was one of the most important figures arguing for an active British policy to check the expansion of Russia into Central Asia, Persia and Afghanistan. He thought that Britain should set up a Mesopotamian empire under European protection to act as a buffer against Russia’s growing presence in the Caucasus and prevent a Russian conquest of the Tigris and Euphrates valleys on the route to India. He even advocated sending the Indian army to attack the Russians in Georgia, Erivan and Nakhichevan, territories the British had never recognized as Russian, as the Turks had done through the Treaty of Adrianople.³³

Rawlinson was also instrumental in getting British aid to the Muslim tribes of the Caucasus, whose war against the Russians gained new force from the charismatic leadership of the Imam Shamil after 1834. To his followers Shamil seemed invincible: a warlord sent by God. There were stories of his legendary bravery, his famous victories against the Russians, and of his miraculous escapes from certain capture and defeat. Having such a leader gave new confidence to the Muslim tribes, uniting them around the imam’s call for a jihad against the Russian occupation of their lands. The strength of Shamil’s army derived from its close ties with the mountain villages: this enabled them to carry out the guerrilla-type operations which so confounded the Russians. With the support of the local population, Shamil’s army was ubiquitous and practically invisible. Villagers could become soldiers and soldiers villagers at a moment’s notice. The mountain people were the army’s ears and eyes – they served as scouts and spies – and everywhere the Russians were vulnerable to ambush. Shamil’s fighters literally ran circles around the tsarist army – launching sudden raids on exposed Russian troops, forts and supply lines before vanishing into the mountains or merging with the tribesmen in the villages. They seldom engaged with the Russians in the open, where they knew they ran the risk of being defeated by superior numbers and artillery. It was difficult to cope with such tactics, especially since none of the Russian commanders had ever come across anything like them before, and for a long time they simply threw in ever-growing numbers of their troops in a fruitless effort to defeat Shamil in his main base in Chechnya. By the end of the 1830s Shamil’s way of fighting had become so effective that he began to appear as invincible to the Russians as he did to the Muslim tribes. As one tsarist general lamented, Shamil’s rule had acquired a ‘religious-military character, the same by which at the beginning of Islam Muhammed’s sword shook three-quarters of the Universe’.³⁴

But it was in Turkey that the British sought to create their main buffer state against Russia. It did not take them long to realize that by ignoring the Sultan’s call for help against the Egyptian invasion they had missed a golden opportunity to secure their position as the dominant foreign power in the Ottoman Empire. Palmerston said it was ‘the greatest miscalculation in the field of foreign affairs ever made by a British cabinet’. Having missed that chance, they redoubled their efforts to influence the Porte and impose on it a series of reforms to resolve the problems of its Christian population which had given Russia cause to intervene on their behalf.

The British were believers in political reform and thought that with their gunboats in support they could export their liberal principles across the globe. In their view, the reform of the Ottoman Empire was the only real solution to the Eastern Question, which was rooted in the decay of the Sultan’s realm: cure the ‘sick man’ and the problem of the East would go away. But the motives of the British in promoting liberal reforms were not just to secure the independence of the Ottoman Empire against Russia. They were also to promote the influence of Britain in Turkey: to make the Turks dependent on the British for political advice and financial loans, and to bring them under the protection of the British military; to ‘civilize’ the Turks under British tutelage, teaching them the virtues of British liberal principles, religious toleration and administrative practices (though stopping short of parliaments and constitutions, for which the Turks were deemed to lack the necessary ‘European’ qualities); to promote British free-trade interests (which may have sounded splendid but was arguably damaging to the Ottoman Empire); and to secure the route to India (where Britain’s free-trade policies were not of course pursued).

The British were encouraged in their reformist mission by the outward signs of Westernization they had noted in the culture of the Turks during the last years of Mahmud’s reign. Although the Sultan’s military reforms had yielded limited success, changes had been made in the dress and customs of the Ottoman élites in the Turkish capital: the tunic and the fez had replaced robes and turbans; beards had been removed; and women had been brought into society. These cosmetic changes were reflected in the rise of a new type of Turkish official or gentleman, the European Turk, who had picked up foreign languages, Western habits, manners and vices, while in other ways remaining rooted in the traditional culture of Islam.

Travellers to Turkey were impressed by the manifestations of progress they observed in Turkish manners, and their writings transformed British attitudes. The best-selling and most influential of these publications was undoubtedly Julia Pardoe’s The City of the Sultan; and Domestic Manners of the Turks in 1836, which sold over 30,000 copies in four editions between 1837 and the start of the Crimean War. Pardoe set out to correct what she saw as the prejudices of earlier accounts by travellers to the Ottoman Empire. On the surface Turkey seemed to conform to all the European stereotypes – exotic, indolent, sensual, superstitious, obscurantist and religiously fanatical – but on closer inspection it was seen to possess ‘noble qualities’ that made it fertile soil for liberal reform. ‘Who that regards with unprejudiced eyes the moral state of Turkey can fail to be struck by the absence of capital crime, the contented and even proud feelings of the lower ranks, and the absence of all assumption and haughtiness among the higher?’ The only obstacle to the ‘civilization of Turkey’, Pardoe argued, was ‘the policy of Russia to check every advance towards enlightenment among a people she has already trammelled, and whom she would fain subjugate’.³⁵

By the 1840s such ideas were the common currency of numerous travelogues and political pamphlets by Turcophiles. In Three Years in Constantinople; or, Domestic Manners of the Turks in 1844, Charles White encouraged the idea of Britain setting out to ‘civilize the Turks’ by citing examples of improvements in their habits and behaviour, such as the adoption of Western dress, the decline of religious fanaticism, and a growing appetite for education among the ‘middling and inferior classes’. Among these two classes

Closely connected to such ideas was a romantic sympathy for Islam as a basically benign and progressive force (and preferable to the deeply superstitious and only ‘semi-Christian’ Orthodoxy of the Russians) that took hold of many British Turcophiles. Urquhart, for example, saw the role of Islam, much as the Turks would have it seen themselves, as a tolerant and moderating force which kept the peace between the warring Christian sects in the Ottoman Empire:

Some of these ideas were shared by Lord Stratford de Redcliffe (1786–1880), known as Stratford Canning until his elevation in 1852, who served no less than five times as Britain’s ambassador to Constantinople, directly guiding the reform programme of the young Sultan Abdülmecid and his main reformist minister Mustafa Reshid Pasha after 1839. The first cousin of George Canning, who had been Foreign Secretary and briefly Prime Minister before his death in 1827, Stratford Canning was a domineering and impatient character – a consequence perhaps of never having had to wait for advancement (he was only 24, fresh out of Eton and Cambridge, when he took up his first office as Minister-Plenipotentiary in Constantinople). It is an irony that at the time of his first appointment as ambassador to the Porte, in 1824, Stratford had a profound dislike of Turkey – the country he said it would be his mission to save ‘from itself’. In his letters to his cousin George, he wrote of a ‘secret wish’ to expel the Turks ‘bags and baggage’ from Europe, and confessed that he ‘had a mind to curse the balance of Europe for protecting those horrid Turks’. But Stratford’s Russophobia far outweighed his dislike of the Turks (in 1832, the Tsar, knowing this, took the extraordinary step of refusing to receive him as ambassador in St Petersburg). Russia’s growing domination of Turkey persuaded Stratford that only liberal reform could save the Ottoman Empire.

Unlike Urquhart and the Turcophiles, Stratford Canning had limited knowledge of Turkey. He did not speak Turkish. He did not travel widely in the country, spending nearly all his time in the seclusion of the British embassy at Pera or its summer residence in Therapia. Stratford had no faith in modernizing the old Turkish institutions, and no sympathy for or even understanding of Islam. In his view the only hope for Turkey was to be given a complete injection of European civilization – and Christian civilization at that – to rescue it from religious obscurantism and steer it on the path towards rational enlightenment. He, too, was encouraged by the signs of Westernization in Turkish dress and manners that he observed on his second posting as ambassador, in 1832. They convinced him that, if the Turks were not perfectible, at least they could be improved. ‘The Turks have undergone a complete metamorphosis since I was last here, at least as to costume,’ he wrote to Palmerston.

On and off for the next quarter of a century, Stratford lectured the Sultan and tutored his reformist ministers about how to liberalize Turkey along English lines.

Mustafa Reshid (1800–58) was a perfect illustration of the European Turk that Stratford Canning hoped to see emerge in the forefront of Ottoman reform. ‘By birth and education a gentleman, by nature of a kind and liberal disposition, Reshid had more to engage my sympathies than any other of his race and class,’ Stratford Canning wrote in his memoirs. A short and stocky man with lively features framed by a black beard, Reshid had been the Porte’s ambassador in London and Paris, where he cut a striking figure in French theatres and salons, before becoming Foreign Minister in 1837. He spoke both French and English well. Like many Turkish reformers of the nineteenth century, Reshid had connections to the European Freemasons. He was admitted to a London lodge during the 1830s. Flirting with Freemasonry was a way for Western-oriented Turks like Reshid to embrace secular ideas without giving up their Muslim faith and identity or laying themselves open to the charge of apostasy from Islam (a crime that carried the death sentence until 1844). Inspired by the West, Reshid wanted to transform the Ottoman Empire into a modern monarchy, in which the sultan would reign but not rule, the power of the clergy would be limited, and a new caste of enlightened bureaucrats would run the affairs of the imperial state.³⁹

In 1839, the 16-year-old new Sultan Abdülmecid issued a decree, the Hatt-i Sharif of Gülhane (Noble Decree of the Rose Chamber), announcing a number of reforms, the first in a series, the Tanzimat reforms, which would span the entire period of his reign (1839–61) and lead eventually to the establishment of the first Ottoman parliament in 1876. The decree was the work of Reshid Pasha, who had drafted it in his London residence in Bryanston Square and shown it first to Stratford Canning for his personal approval on his brief second posting as ambassador to Britain in 1838. The English values of the Magna Carta were clearly evident in its wording. The Hatt-i Sharif promised everyone in the Sultan’s empire security of life, honour, property, regardless of their faith; it stressed the rule of law, religious toleration, the modernization of the empire’s institutions, and a just and rational system of centralized taxation and military conscription. In essence, the decree assumed that the commonwealth would be promoted by giving guarantees of personal liberty to the empire’s most dynamic elements, the non-Muslim millets, whose unfair treatment by the Muslim majority had created instability.⁴⁰

How far the decree was motivated by a desire to enlist British support for the Ottoman Empire at a time of crisis is a matter of controversy. There was certainly an element of English window dressing in the liberal language of the Hatt-i Sharif, whose final wording also owed much to Ponsonby, the British ambassador. But this does not mean that the Hatt-i Sharif was insincere, reluctantly conceded as a tactical device to secure British support. At the heart of the decree was a genuine belief in the need to modernize the Ottoman Empire. Reshid and his followers were convinced that to rescue the empire they ultimately needed to create a new secular concept of imperial unity (Ottomanism) based on the equality of all the Sultan’s subjects, regardless of their faith. It was a mark of the seriousness with which the reformers took their task, as well as a sign of their concern to pacify the potential opposition of conservatives, that the concessions of the Hatt-i Sharif were couched in terms of the defence of Islamic traditions and the precepts of the ‘glorious Koran’. Indeed, the Sultan and many of his most prominent reformist ministers, including Mustafa Reshid and Mehmet Hüsrev, the Grand Vizier in 1839–41, had close connections to the Naqshbandi lodges (tekkes), where a strict emphasis on the teachings of Islamic law was preached. In many ways the Tanzimat reforms were an attempt to create a more centralized but more tolerant Islamic state.⁴¹

The Ottoman government did very little to implement its lofty declarations, however. Its promise to improve the conditions of the Christian population was the main sticking point, inciting as it did the opposition of the traditional Muslim clergy and conservatives. There were only minor improvements. The death penalty for apostasy was renounced by the Sultan in 1844, although a small number of Muslims who had converted to Christianity (and Christians who had reversed conversion to Islam) were still executed on the authority of local governors. Blasphemy continued to be punished by the death sentence. Christians were admitted to some of the military schools and were liable to conscription, but since they were not likely to be promoted to the senior ranks, most chose to pay a special tax for exemption from service. From the late 1840s Christians were allowed to become members of the provincial councils that checked the work of governors. They also began to sit on juries alongside Muslims in the commercial courts where Western legal principles were liberally applied. But otherwise there was not much change. The slave trade continued, most of it involving the capture of Christian boys and girls from the Caucasus for sale in Constantinople. The Turks continued to regard the Christians as inferior, and thought that Muslim privileges should not be given up. The informal rules and practices of the administration, if not all the written laws, continued to ensure that the Christians were treated as second-class citizens, although they were rapidly emerging as the dominant economic group in the Ottoman Empire, which became a growing source of tension and envy – especially when they evaded taxes by acquiring foreign passports and protection.

Returning to Constantinople for his third term as ambassador in 1842, Stratford Canning became increasingly despondent about the prospects of reform. The Sultan was too young, and Reshid too weak, to stand up to the conservatives, who gradually gained the upper hand against the reformers in the Council (Divan) of the Porte. The reform agenda was increasingly entangled in personal rivalries, in particular between Reshid and Mehmet Ali Pasha,[3] one of Reshid’s reformist protégés, who served as ambassador in London from 1841 to 1844, and then as Foreign Minister from 1846 to 1852, when he replaced Reshid as Grand Vizier. Such was Reshid’s jealousy of Mehmet Ali that, by the early 1850s, he had even joined the Muslim opposition to granting equal rights to the Sultan’s Christian subjects in the hope of stopping his rival. The reforms were also hampered by practical difficulties. The Ottoman government in Constantinople was far too distant and too weak to force through laws in a society without railways, post offices, telegraphs or newspapers.

But the main obstacle was the opposition of traditional élites – the religious leaders of the millets – who felt beleaguered by the Tanzimat reforms. All the millets protested, especially the Greeks, and there was a sort of secularist coup in the Armenian one; but the reforms were most opposed by Islamic leaders and élites. This was a society where the interests of the local pashas and the Muslim clergy were heavily invested in the preservation of the traditional millet system with all its legal and civil disabilities against the Christians. The more the Porte attempted to become an agency of centralization and reform, the more these leaders stirred up local grievances and reactionary Muslim feeling against a state which they denounced as ‘infidel’ because of its increasing dependence on foreigners. Incited by their clergy, Muslims demonstrated against the reforms in many towns: there were acts of violence against Christians; churches were destroyed; and there were even threats to burn the Latin Quarter in Constantinople.

For Stratford Canning, who was no friend of Islam, this reaction raised a moral dilemma: could Britain continue to support a Muslim government that failed to stop the persecution of its Christian citizens? In February 1850 he was thrown into despair after hearing of ‘atrocious massacres’ of the Christian population in Rumelia (in a region later part of Bulgaria). He wrote in gloomy terms to Palmerston, the Foreign Secretary, explaining that ‘the great game of improvement is altogether up for the present’.

Palmerston agreed that the persecution of the Christians not only invited but even justified the policy pursued by the Russians. In his view, it gave Britain little choice but to withdraw support for the Ottoman government. Writing to Reshid the following November, he foresaw that the Ottoman Empire was ‘doomed to fall by the timidity and weakness and irresolution of its sovereign and his ministers, and it is evident we shall ere long have to consider what other arrangement can be set up in its place’.⁴²

British intervention in Turkish politics had meanwhile brought about a Muslim reaction against Western interference in Ottoman affairs. By the early 1850s Stratford Canning had become far more than an ambassador or adviser to the Porte. The ‘Great Elchi’, or Great Ambassador, as he was known in Constantinople, had a direct influence on the policies of the Turkish government. Indeed, at a time when there was no telegraph between London and the Turkish capital and several months could pass before instructions arrived from Whitehall, he had considerable leeway over British policy in the Ottoman Empire. His presence was a source of deep resentment among the Sultan’s ministers, who lived in terror of a personal visit from the dictatorial ambassador. Local notables and the Muslim clergy were equally resentful of his efforts on behalf of the Christians, and saw his influence on the government as a loss of Turkish sovereignty. This hostility to foreign intervention in Ottoman affairs – by Britain, France or Russia – would come to play an important role in Turkish politics on the eve of the Crimean War.