Crescent and Iron Cross | Page 5

there
dawned on the doomed subject peoples of the Ottoman Empire a day of
bloodier import than any yet. The year before and during that year had
occurred the Bulgarian atrocities and massacres, and the word
'massacre' lingered and made music in Abdul Hamid's brain. He said it
over to himself and dwelt upon it, and meditated on the nature and
possibilities of massacre. The troubles which massacre had calmed had
arisen before his accession out of the establishment of the Bulgarian
Exarchate, which corresponded to the Greek Patriarchate, and was
given power over districts and peoples whom the Greeks justly
considered to belong to them by blood and religion. Greek armed bands
came into collision with Bulgarian bands, and in order to calm these
disturbances by thoroughly effectual means, irregular Turkish troops
were sent into Bulgaria, charged with the command to 'stop the row,'
but with no other instructions. Indiscriminate killing, with all the
passions and horrors that bloodshed evokes in the half-civilised,
followed, and there was no more trouble just then in the disturbed
districts, for there was none to make trouble. In 1876 Abdul Aziz was
deposed by a group of king-makers under Midhat Pasha, Murad V.
reigned shadow-like for three months, and during the same year Abdul
Hamid was finally selected to fill the throne, and stand forth as the
Shadow of God. It was a disturbed and tottering inheritance to which
he succeeded, riddled with the dry-rot of corruption, but the inheritor
proved himself equal to the occasion.
For a little while he was all abroad, and at the bidding of Midhat, who
had placed him on the throne, he summoned a kind of representative
Turkish Parliament, by way of imbuing the Great Powers with the idea

that he was an enlightened Shadow of God bent on reform. This parody
of a Parliament lasted but a short time: it was no more than a faint,
dissolving magic-lantern picture. In the spring of 1877 Rumania, under
Russian encouragement, broke away from Turkish rule. Turkey
declared war on Russia, and in 1878 found herself utterly defeated. At
Adrianople was drawn up the Treaty of San Stefano, creating an
independent Bulgarian state, and, in the opinion of Great Britain and
Germany, giving Russia far greater influence in the Balkan Peninsula
than was agreeable to that disastrous supporter of Turkey, the Balance
of Power. In consequence the Treaty of San Stefano was superseded by
the Treaty of Berlin.
In those arrangements Abdul Hamid had no voice, but he was well
content to sit quiet, think about what was to be done with what was left
him, and thank his waning crescent that once again the Balance of
Power had secured Constantinople for him, leaving him free to deal
with his Asiatic dominions, and such part of Europe as was left him, as
he thought fit. He could safely trust that he would never be ejected
from his throne by a foreign Power, and all he need do was to make
himself safe against internal disturbances and revolutions which might
upset him. And it was then that he begot in the womb of his cold and
cunning brain a policy that was all his own, except in so far as the
Bulgarian atrocities, consequent on feuds between Bulgars and Greeks,
may be considered the father of that hideous birth. But it was he who
suckled and nourished it, it was from his brain that it emerged,
full-grown and in panoply of armour, as from the brain of Olympian
Zeus came Pallas Athene. This new policy was in flat contradiction of
all the previous policy, as he had received it from his predecessors, of
strengthening Turkey by tributes of man-power from his subject tribes,
but it would, he thought, have the same result of keeping the Turk
supreme among the alien elements of the Empire. Times had changed;
it behoved him to change the methods which hitherto had held together
his hapless inheritance.
Now Abdul Hamid was not in any sense a wise man, and the ability
which has been attributed to him, in view of the manner in which he
successfully defied the civilisations of Europe, is based on premisses

altogether false. He never really defied Europe at all; he always yielded,
secure in his belief that Europe in the shape of the Balance of Power,
was unanimous in keeping him where he was. He never even risked
being turned out of Constantinople, for he knew--none better--that all
Europe insisted on retaining him there. As regards wisdom, there was
never a greater fool, but as regards cunning there was never a greater
fox. He had a brain that was absolutely impervious to large ideas: the
notion of consolidating and strengthening his Empire by ameliorating
its internal conditions, by bringing it within speaking