This is the first in a short series of posts on the run-up to the current tragic situation in the Holy Land. This first post deals with the rise and decline of the Ottoman Empire.
The Last Caliphate
From the 7th Century BC up to modern times, the history of the Holy Land has been a history of control by outside powers –the Assyrian Empire, the Babylonian Empire, the Persian Empire, the Ptolemies and the Seleucids, the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the Seljuk Empire, the Crusaders, the Ottoman Empire, the British Empire.
The fall of an empire creates opportunities for plunder and political chaos. For example, the fall of Rome led to barbarian invasions and the Dark Ages. Similarly, the current horror of war in the Middle-East is itself a testament to what can happen to a region when an empire collapses and a vacuum of power is created. In this case, the imperial power was the Ottoman Empire: going East to West, its control once stretched from Algeria to the Persian Gulf; to the North and West, it included the Balkan States (11 of them in all), Hungary and even parts of modern Ukraine; to the South and East, it brought together Lebanon, the Holy Land, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Arabia, Yemen and the Gulf States.
Historians trace the origin of the Ottoman Empire to the year 1299 and the emergence of Osman I as the ruler of Anatolia, the central and eastern parts of modern day Turkey – a region that includes ancient Lydia, the land ruled over by Midas and Croesus!
From the Fall of Constantinople at the hands of Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II in 1453 and on into the following centuries, an almost constant state of war existed between the Ottoman Empire (aka Turkish Empire) and different European powers.
N.B. In 1953, at the 500th anniversary of the Fall of Constantinople, the fun song “Istanbul, Not Constantinople,” became a Hit Parade standard and a gold record; click HERE . (Not making this up!)
N.B. The Fall of Constantinople is credited with accelerating the Italian Renaissance as Greek scholars and intellectuals fled to Florence and other Italian cities bringing their trove of classical secular learning with them.
N.B. One more thing – the Turkish Empire was renowned for its well run administration, one which practiced tolerance for religious minorities like Christians and Jews. In particular, Istanbul inherited sizable populations of Greek and Armenian Christians in 1453 and the city took on a significant Jewish population when the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella banished Jews from Spain in 1492 with the infamous Alhambra Decree (aka Decree of Expulsion) – these Jews brought with them their Judeo-Spanish language known as Ladino, a language still spoken today but by ever diminishing populations. As an example, American pop star Eydie Gormé grew up speaking Ladino in the Bronx as her mother was a Sephardic Jew from Turkey.
Moving forward, with the conquest of Mamluk Egypt in 1517, the Ottoman sultan Selim I claimed title to the Caliphate which made him legitimate ruler of Muslim lands in the Middle East and North Africa as well as Defender of the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina. The Empire became a superpower with the storied reign of Selim’s successor, Suleiman-the-Magnificent (1520-1566). As an example of his imperial greatness, Suleiman himself led the Ottomans to victory at the Battle of Mohács in 1541 which added Hungary to the Empire.
The Mediterranean Sea was to be the scene of struggle between the Turkish Empire and the Western European nations for centuries. As an example, the great naval Battle of Lepanto (1570) was fought during the Fourth-Venetian-Ottoman War (1570-1573), a victory for the Spanish-led Holy League which is credited with saving the Western Mediterranean for Christianity. But their immediate goal was to keep Cyprus, an important trading link with the Levant, under the control of the Republic of Venice and in that the Holy League failed as the Venetians were forced to surrender Cyprus in 1571.
Literary Asides: (1) Miguel de Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote, fought in the Battle of Lepanto. (2) The struggle between the Venetians and Turks for Cyprus is the setting for Shakespeare’s Othello – the Moor of Venice is in charge of the garrison there; exercising literary license, the bard has the Turkish victory forestalled by an opportune storm at sea which destroys their fleet and leaves Iago free to scheme.
Turkish expansion in Europe continued in the 17th Century and was only checked by a Christian victory at the Battle of Vienna (1683) where the Turkish siege was broken by the dramatic arrival of King John Sobieski of Poland and his army. The Christians pressed their advantage and next liberated the city of Buda from the Ottomans in 1686, ending the latter’s occupation of Hungary.
To have something to say about the 18th Century, the Russo-Turkish War (1768-1774) ended with the much fought over Crimean Peninsula in Russian hands. Sadly, this war was just one in a long series; indeed the Turks and the Russians set some kind of record in that history lists 12 different Russo-Turkish wars!
But as the European countries developed and prospered with their lucrative colonial empires and the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, the power of the Turkish Empire waned and by the 19th Century Turkey became known as “the sick man of Europe” and the dismemberment of the Empire began to take place.
Already, the decade of the 1820s saw the Greek War for Independence from the Turkish Empire; the Greek cause was backed by the English, the French and the Russians. With the Treaty of Adrianople of 1829 and the London Protocol of 1830, Greek independence was recognized as well as the autonomy of Serbia and areas of modern day Romania; Armenia was ceded to Russia; etc.
BTW The Greek cause was also sanctified by Lord Byron who wrote philhellenic poetry, sold his estate to be able to support the Greeks, went to Greece, fought the Turks at Missolonghi but died from sickness in 1824 at the age of 36 as he made preparations to attack the Turks at Lepanto (that same fateful Lepanto). As an example of his philhellenic poetry, here is the first stanza of The Isles of Greece, which he wrote in 1819:
The isles of Greece! the isles of Greece
Where burning Sappho loved and sung,
Where grew the arts of war and peace,
Where Delos rose, and Phoebus sprung!
Eternal summer gilds them yet,
But all, except their sun, is set.
At the same time (1830), in North-Africa, under orders from Louis-Philippe, le roi bourgeois, the French began carving Algeria out of the Ottoman Empire. It was a long and brutal process of genocidal villainy; it took till 1875 for the conquest to be complete and, by then, “The war had killed approximately 825,000 indigenous Algerians since 1830” [Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur, 2007 ]; “825,000” is an especially frightening number when you factor in the population of Algeria at the time – about 2.5 million. France further alienated the Muslim population there in 1870 with the Décret Crémieux, by which the French government declared that the Jews of Algeria were French citizens; the French aim was to bring these 35,000 Sephardic Jews over to the French side in their takeover of the region. The stratagem basically succeeded as these Jews quickly became French speakers etc.; on the other hand, the Décret Crémieux serves as a justification for Muslim anti-Semitism in France today – which is a serious problem. One more thing, the Décret Crémieux was abrogated by the collaborationist Vichy regime’s Law of the 7th of October, 1940, taking away French citizenship from the Jewish population of Algeria for the period of WWII – it was not France’s finest hour !
Algeria secured, Tunisia followed – becoming a French “protectorate” in 1881. Continuing East, Libya was taken over by Italy following the Italo-Turkish War of 1911-1912;
Somewhat further East in Egypt, in 1859, the French engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps set up the Suez Canal Company and construction of the link between the Mediterranean and Red Seas was completed in 1869. Officially, the canal belonged to the Egyptian state but its operation was in the hands of the company. The Egyptian ruler, the Khedive Ismail Pasha, held 44% of the company’s shares but under financial duress, he sold them to the British Government in 1875 which made Her Majesty’s Empire the single largest shareholder and basically brought the canal under British control – the story is that the British government was able to react quickly when the shares came on the market thanks to the Rothschild Bank in London; for a dramatization, click HERE .
British activity in Egypt didn’t stop there – their interests threatened, the British launched an invasion in 1882 (the Anglo-Egyptian War) and took full control although officially the country somehow remained part of the Ottoman Empire.
BTW According to that most imperial web site, britishempire.co.uk, the Anglo-Egyptian War was over in four days and the elite Scottish regiment, the Gordon Highlanders, were heroes once again. In fact, their renown was so great, that when an American League franchise was established in New York City in 1903, the team was called the Highlanders, a nod to team president Joseph Gordon’s Scottish heritage – the name stood till 1912 when it was replaced by the unmistakably American “Yankees.”
Returning to the European front, the 19th Century again saw multiple conflicts between the Turkish Empire and Tsarist Russia, most famously the Crimean War. In that case, with British and French assistance, the Ottomans prevailed on the battlefield and the war ended with yet another Treaty of Paris: but the Empire was weakened once again as the Christian vassal states of Wallachia and Moldavia became virtually independent being officially designated “autonomous regions” within the Empire; etc.
As the Zionist movement gained traction in Europe, organized Jewish emigration to the Holy Land began in the late 1800s. The indigenous Palestinians and the Turkish authorities both resisted this development but it continued, fueled as it was by Tsarist pogroms and other violent outbursts of anti-Semitism in Europe. Things progressed steadily: thus in 1909 the new city Tel Aviv was begun and the first Kibbutz was founded.
Somewhat further East, in Persia, the British began prospecting for oil in 1901 and struck it big in 1908, just as they were about to abandon the project. The enterprise was then named the Anglo-Persian Oil Company in 1909 – establishing an important English presence on the Eastern flank of the Turkish Empire. The company was renamed the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1935 when the reigning shah requested that the exonym Persia be replaced by the endonym Iran. The company would be renamed again in 1954 as British Petroleum, aka BP.
As 1914 approached, the role of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans ended with the Balkan Wars (1911-1912); in particular Bosnia-Herzogovina officially became part of the Austrian Empire, a side effect of which would be the assassination in July 1914 of the Crown Prince of Austria by an ethnic Serbian militant of Young Bosnia, a movement dedicated to the unification of the South Slavs. (The assassination led directly to WWI and, perversely but logically, the militants achieved their goal when Yugoslavia was created in the aftermath of WWI.)
Getting back to Africa and Asia, by this time, North Africa was controlled by the French from Morocco to Tunisia, Libya by the Italians and Egypt by the English. The Middle East, however, was still in Turkish hands or, at least, in the Turkish Sphere of Influence – except for an English toehold at Aden.
All this loss of land and influence in the 19th Century led to important changes in the power structure of the Ottoman Empire itself. After a failed attempt at constitutional monarchy, a group known as the Young Turks came to power at the beginning of the 20th Century, in 1908; as things became more and more tense and difficult, the triumvirate known as the Committee of Union and Progress (aka the CUP , aka the Three Pashas) took power in 1913 with a coup d’état and promptly steered the Empire into WWI. In fact, when WWI broke out in August, 1914, the Empire was officially neutral though it had ties to Germany by means of a secret treaty. The incident that triggered the actual Ottoman entry into the war on the side of the Germans and Austrians is almost too theatrical to be believed: the Germans were in the process of turning two war ships over to the Ottomans in August 1914; on Oct. 29, 1914, the ships were flying the Turkish flag but were still staffed by German officers and sailors (who had been formally inducted into the Turkish navy and who wore Turkish uniforms) when they carried out a surprise attack on Odessa, Sebastopol, Yalta and other Russian ports in the Black Sea!! Russia responded with a declaration of war on Nov 1; England and France followed suit on Nov. 5. The Turks reciprocated on Nov. 11.
World War I would lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Ottoman citizens, to the horrific Armenian genocide, to the end of the Caliphate and would leave the Middle East in the hands of the English and French giving these two European countries virtual control of the Muslim world from Morocco to modern day Bengladesh.
More to come.
P.S. For the next post in this series, click HERE .
