Aram Sakalian, The Young Ottomans from Tanzimat to Democracy (Stamboul: Abdülhamid University Press, 2011)
... In 1875, the newly strengthened reformist government of Midhat Pasha and Ibrahim Şinasi undertook two projects. One would go a long way toward stabilizing the empire; the other would, in the short term, lead to instability and war.
That March, they unveiled a radical overhaul to the Ottoman system of taxation and government finance. The patchwork of local taxes and exemptions was replaced by a single tax which applied across the board: an expanded
temettu, or graduated income tax, that applied to both wages and corporate profits. For companies, the tax rate was 5 percent; for individuals, regardless of religion, it varied from 10 percent for the lowest income category to 50 percent for the highest. Those still outside the money economy - the remaining subsistence farmers and herders - were permitted to pay an in-kind agricultural tithe, but it was anticipated that everyone would pay a monetary tax within twenty years. [1]
Tax collection and administration were taken entirely out of local hands, and given to a newly-created Central Tax Agency under the control of the Imperial Ottoman Bank. The bank itself received expanded powers to set monetary policy, manage the public debt and act as treasurer of the empire. The existing bank administration was replaced by a nine-member board of governors, appointed by the Sultan with the consent of the lower house for staggered twelve-year terms.
The fiscal reforms occurred just in time. The Ottoman Empire had run up an enormous public debt in the wake of the Crimean War, and although the reformist government had made heavy cuts in the court budget since taking power, the Aceh conflict had largely offset these economies, and the nation was only months away from a default. The prospect of efficient tax collection and professional fiscal management, however, persuaded the creditors to stay their hand and allowed Şinasi to negotiate a bridge loan and a partial writedown of interest payments. [2]
The reformists' attempt at a political settlement in the Balkans proved less successful. In May, the Porte announced the
de jure independence of Serbia and Romania in exchange for their assumption of a prorated share of the Ottoman debt. At the same time, the limited autonomy that had been granted to the Bulgarian-majority sanjaks in 1872 was expanded to a regional government, subordinate to the Ottoman state in fiscal and military affairs but with its own legislature and broad internal self-rule. In the areas around Skopje and Monastir, where the Ottomans could not devolve power without endangering their corridor to Albania and Bosnia, the central government offered subsidies to Bulgarians willing to move into the autonomous region, while also subsidizing Turkish immigration from Anatolia.
But rather than calming Balkan nationalist tensions as hoped, these measures only inflamed them. Bulgaria did experience a ratcheting-down of confrontation; although the nationalists were unhappy at the size of their autonomous province, most of them were willing to accept it, and the hard-liners were reduced to a fringe. Serbia, however, not content with its formal independence, began encouraging irredentist movements among the Bosnian Serbs, which turned Bosnia's simmering peasant rebellion into a bewildering multi-sided affair. And the Greeks of Yanya and southern Monastir vilayets agitated for the same concessions that the Bulgarians had received - concessions that the Ottoman government was unwilling to grant, because an autonomous Greek region would inevitably seek union with Greece.
By early 1876, therefore, both Bosnia and Yanya were in a state of low-grade civil war, with atrocities on all sides and many clan leaders using the fighting as a convenient excuse to pursue old feuds. When the Ottoman army moved in to crush the rebellions, it was like oil on flames. Lurid tales of massacres and other atrocities began circulating in European capitals; in Stamboul, these stories involved killings of Muslim families by Christian rebels, while in St. Petersburg and the cities of western Europe, they typically featured soldiers murdering and torturing innocent Christians. Possibly a tenth of the stories were true, but in the politically charged atmosphere, passions ran high.
The tinder was dry, and the spark was ignited on May 30, 1876, when a battalion of Ottoman soldiers pursued a fleeing group of Bosnian Serb rebels across the border. A few miles into Serbia, it encountered a Serbian army patrol which ordered it to give over its pursuit and return to Ottoman territory. The Ottoman commander refused, and in a brief engagement, most of the Serbian detachment was killed or taken prisoner. The following day, Serbia declared war on the Ottoman Empire and appealed for Russian aid.
In Russia, which had openly sided with the Balkan rebellions, sentiment ran heavily in favor of the Serbs, and both the royal court and the public favored war. On June 4, St. Petersburg issued an ultimatum demanding that the Ottomans withdraw not only from Serbia but from Bosnia and the Greek sanjaks, and that a commission headed by the Tsar administer the provinces until their disposition could be decided. Midhat Pasha refused, and on June 7, Russia - which had already begun mobilizing its troops - declared war. The following week, Greece followed suit, and two Greek armies crossed the border, driving for Ioannina and Larissa. The War of the Balkan Alliance had begun...
*******
Hilaire Lind, The War of the Balkan Alliance (Paris: Flammarion, 1960)
... The first battles of the War of the Balkan Alliance actually took place in the Caucasus, where 100,000 Russian troops under Melikian and Danilov invaded eastern Anatolia on a broad front. [3] On June 12, elements of the Caucasian Army captured Batum; the following day, Bayazid fell, and by the end of the week, the main body of the Russian force had laid siege to Kars. The Ottoman force, slower to mobilize, gave way before the invaders as the high command struggled to get reinforcements to the front.
The Balkan campaign was delayed several days due to the need to negotiate transit rights with the Romanian government. Romania was officially neutral; with the grant of
de jure independence the previous year, it already had everything it wanted from the Ottomans, and the court of Prince Michael had no desire to exchange Ottoman domination for Russian. Nevertheless, the newly-independent principality knew how dangerous it was to anger the Bear, so after brief consultation, it agreed to allow Russian troops to transit its territory in return for a small fee and a guarantee of its security. By June 14 - the same day that Greek troops crossed into Yanya and Monastir vilayets - the first Russian elements had crossed Romania and opened two fronts. One corps of what was ominously named the Danube Army reinforced the Serbian forces in Bosnia, while the main body of the army crossed at Rusçuk and Silistre, making for Edirne and for the Black Sea coast.
The first weeks of the war went badly for the Ottomans, who were outnumbered and had difficulty getting troops to the front. There were a few bright spots: the Bulgarians largely stayed out of the fight – either out of desire to honor their commitments or, more cynically, waiting to see who won – and the large Ottoman force already in place to quell the Yanya rebellion was initially able to stop the Greek advance. On July 3, however, the Army of Livadia under Dimitrakis – who would repeatedly prove himself the best of the Greek generals in that war – was able to turn the flank of the Ottoman corps, and the Ottomans were forced to abandon Ioannina. The city fell on July 11, with a jubilant ethnic Greek population welcoming Dimitrakis’ army in, and by the fifteenth, Larissa was under siege. On the same date, rebellion erupted in Crete, overwhelming several of the local garrisons and quickly seizing control of the countryside.
In the meantime, the Russian drive south advanced rapidly. The Ottoman forces opposing them along the northern frontier were unable to coordinate in time, and the Russians defeated them in detail or drove them back. At the beginning of August, the Danube Army’s Black Sea column had reached the outskirts of Varna and the main force was approaching Edirne, with the Tsar’s generals openly predicting that Stamboul would be under siege by fall. And while the Ottomans’ Anatolian Army was able to lift the siege of Kars, the southern Russian column under Melikian was moving steadily westward and threatened to cut the Ottomans off.
But as August drew on, the Ottoman resistance stiffened. In Bosnia, the peasant leader Osmanović, who had until lately been in rebellion against the landlords and the governors who supported them, joined forces with the Ottoman army, and the Serbo-Russian advance was halted outside Sarajevo. And while the Russians had been advancing through Tuna, the Ottoman Army of Stamboul, under the personal command of Hussein Avni Pasha, was feverishly digging entrenchments outside Varna and Edirne. The Russian forces approaching those cities found themselves in the same meat-grinder of trench warfare that had characterized the second phase of the Franco-Prussian War, with the Ottomans using their purchased Gatling guns and quick-firing Krupp artillery to deadly advantage. During the two-month Battle of Edirne, which the Ottomans fought entirely on the defensive, Russia suffered more than 100,000 casualties, and even the seasoned British and French military observers were appalled at what they saw of the horrors of industrial war.
Three events in September and October contributed to the turning of the tide. Late in August, the Greek army gambled on an offensive northward through Monastir, hoping to relieve the Russians at Edirne and cut Bosnia and Albania off from the rest of the Ottoman empire. Their advance was initially successful, with Monastir city falling on September 2 and Salonika being invested a week later. On September 13, however, an Ottoman relief force arrived at Salonika and, due to a Greek tactical blunder, was able to divide and surround the besieging forces. The Greeks were forced to surrender on September 20, and Dimitrakis, whose separate column was advancing on Skopje, had to retreat in order to avoid being cut off and to reinforce Larissa against an Ottoman counteroffensive.
In the meantime, the Ottoman armies in eastern Anatolia had been reinforced, and on October 1, troops brought up from the Levant encountered and defeated Melikian’s advancing column. The Ottoman side scored an even greater triumph on October 3 when it got around Danilov’s flank north of Kars, cutting off his retreat and encircling his entire army. On October 9, after six days of deadly artillery fire, Danilov surrendered, leaving virtually no Russian effectives in the Caucasian theater.
The third and final turning point occurred outside the war zone, in a village near Odobesti, Romania. On October 11, a Russian foraging party entered the village to obtain food, in violation of the Tsar’s agreement with Prince Michael. According to the Russian commander, a Romanian peasant fired on the party; according to the Romanian survivors, the Russians shot first after the villagers refused to give up their grain stores. But while the beginning of the incident is disputed, the end is not: of the 400-odd villagers who rose that morning, less than thirty survived to see the sun go down.
If the Tsar had apologized and made reparations, as several prominent courtiers urged him to do, the affair might have ended there, because the Romanian government was still wary of angering Russia. But the hard-line faction in the Russian court, which considered Romania’s neutrality little short of treason, prevailed. The official response to Romania’s diplomatic protest, delivered on October 14, not only blamed the villagers but demanded that, in the future, Romania provision all Russian troops on its soil. Prince Michael was backed into a corner, and on October 16, the Tsar’s high-handedness accomplished the impossible: it brought Romania into the war on the Ottoman side.
The effect on the Russian war effort was both devastating and immediate. Not only did the Romanian army seize and intern twenty thousand Russian troops who were transiting its territory, but the supply line to Edirne and Varna had been cut. The troops at the front were already suffering privation and sickness, and the loss of the Romanian supply line brought them dangerously low on ammunition. An abortive effort was made to resupply the army by sea through Küstence, which Russia had seized during the early days of the war, but the Ottoman navy prevented the majority of the supplies from getting through. By October 25, the Edirne front was crumbling, and Hussein Avni Pasha’s army was driving the Russians back toward the frontier.
Thus far, the Ottomans had fought a defensive war, but with the collapse of Russian resistance, Midhat Pasha decided to go on the attack. He had been laying the groundwork for weeks, sending ambassadors to treat with the Azeris, Chechens and Dagestanis, and in early November, rebellion erupted in all the Muslim areas of the Caucasus as the regular Ottoman army crossed the border. Shortly afterward, the Ottomans made an even more daring gamble, with a mixed force of Tatar exiles and regulars, under heavy naval escort, landed near Yalta.
Neither attack succeeded as well as the Ottomans had hoped. Their advancing Caucasian army was met with widespread guerrilla resistance from the Armenian and Georgian populations and was unable to reduce all the fortified garrisons in Russian-held cities; as winter deepened, the offensive stalled, and in some places even faltered. The Tatar force quickly occupied the southern parts of the Crimea where Muslims predominated, but it failed to take Sevastopol or Simferopol, and with the Russian navy still active in the Black Sea, it could only be resupplied intermittently.
In January 1877, while fighting continued north of Varna, Russia announced plans for a spring offensive to drive the Ottomans off its soil, punish the Romanians and resume the invasion of Anatolia. But the announcement was met by widespread rebellion among the peasants, who had heard horror stories of conditions at the front and were unwilling to be conscripted in what they saw as a losing war. As the rebellions threatened to spiral out of control, the remaining Russian armies were fully committed at home, and on February 15, the Tsar sued for a cease-fire. Serbia, which had by now been driven entirely out of Bosnia and which saw little prospect of victory without Russian aid, followed suit a day later.
This left Greece as the Ottomans’ only remaining enemy, and Hussein Avni Pasha was able to turn his full attention to the southern Balkan front. On February 20, he retook Larissa, and on the twenty-fourth, with Dimitrakis still holding out in Ioannina but all other Greek troops cleared from Ottoman soil, he crossed the border. The government at Athens, in a panic, sued for peace and appealed to the European powers to prevent a massacre.
At that point, an unlikely coalition of Britain, France and the North German Confederation stepped in to end the war. Britain, while friendly to the Ottoman Empire, was also Greece’s diplomatic patron, and given the lurid stories that had circulated through European capitals during the prewar period, the powers believed that a massacre was a genuine possibility. Under heavy European pressure, Midhat Pasha agreed to a cease-fire in place on March 1, and also agreed that an international force, rather than the Ottoman army, would disarm and intern the rebels who still held most of Crete...
… The peace conference, which convened at Rome in August 1877, proved nearly as messy as the war. It was clear that the Ottomans had won, but the European powers’ opposition to continued Turkish rule over restive Balkan Christian populations was equally clear, and their position was given weight by the fact that Ioannina and Crete remained out of Ottoman hands. The result was that, despite their military victory, the Ottoman Empire actually lost Balkan territory in the peace settlement.
The government of Greece initially requested that the Greek-majority sanjaks be annexed to it outright. It was quickly told that it was in no position to make demands, but nor were these territories returned to the Ottomans. Instead, the European powers used the leverage provided by Dimitrakis’ boots on the ground to create the Duchies of Crete and Thessaly. Each duchy would be nominally independent and would have its own legislature; however, each would also be subject to one Greek and one Ottoman commissioner, the consent of both would be required to pass any legislation, and the Ottoman representative would have power to guarantee the rights of the Muslim minority. In addition, at the Porte’s insistence, the port of Salonika was made a free city rather than being incorporated into Thessaly, in the anticipation that its Jewish majority, which was pro-Turkish, would enable the Ottomans to maintain control over sea traffic into the region.
Serbia and Russia fared worse. The Serbs got off with an indemnity somewhat lighter than the Greeks paid, but had to renounce all their claims to Bosnia. Russia, in addition to being assessed a heavy fine, lost the Caucasus and the southern Crimea. Azerbaijan, Dagestan and the Tatar-held portions of the Crimea were made into khanates under Ottoman vassalage. Georgia and Armenia, which the Europeans were unwilling to see fall under Ottoman rule, became kingdoms; at French insistence, the Tsar was allowed to be crowned king of both, but each was to have its own government and no Russian troops could be stationed there…
… The final peace treaty was signed on October 12, 1877. In Stamboul, it was greeted with mixed emotions. The restitution of the Crimean khanate and the gains in the Caucasus were highly popular and the financial indemnity would help defray the cost of the war and provide for the wounded soldiers, but the loss of the Greek territories, even under mutual supervision, cast a shadow on the victory. There was a growing sense that the empire had not done as well at peace as it had at war.
In Greece, the feeling was precisely the opposite. The performance of its generals, other than Dimitrakis, was the cause of much alarm, and the war indemnity was a heavy burden, but the government took credit for liberating Thessaly and Crete, and managed to convince much of the public that the indemnity was a fair price to pay for delivering their coethnics from the yoke. The military defeat was transformed, in official propaganda, into a near-victory.
For Russia, of course, the war was an unmitigated disaster: the military defeat, the loss of territory, the “betrayal” by Romania and the peasants’ rebellion all combined to feed a sense of siege. The government immediately embarked on a course of military reforms, and the court was dominated even more by reactionary pan-Slavism and pan-Orthodoxy, but among the disgruntled veterans, revolutionary currents of all kinds were taking shape…
*******
Aram Sakalian, The Young Ottomans from Tanzimat to Democracy (Stamboul: Abdülhamid University Press, 2011)
... Midhat Pasha and Hussein Avni Pasha had put their rivalry on hold for the duration of the crisis, but once the peace was made, their political conflict revived full force. This time, it was the general rather than the vizier who had the advantage. Both claimed credit for the victory over the Russians, but in the wake of the Rome Treaty, Hussein Avni Pasha's military glory was still bright while Midhat Pasha's diplomatic glory was tarnished.
Exactly how tarnished became clear after the election of 1878, the Ottoman Empire's third. The Constitutionalist Party of Midhat Pasha and Sinasi lost ground in the cities to the secularists, Islamic socialists and supporters of universal suffrage, and in the countryside to the conservatives. When the dust cleared, the Constitutionalists were still the largest single bloc, but they had lost their majority in the lower house, and had also lost control of enough provincial councils to cost them control of the senate. Their only remaining base of power was the central bank and the Tax Authority, on which the governors they had nominated would retain a majority for at least the next eight years.
Hussein Avni Pasha wasted no time: just days after the election results were announced, he went to the Sultan and persuaded him that Midhat Pasha was attempting to save his majority by allying with the radicals. Hours later, Hussein Avni Pasha was named vizier in Midhat Pasha's place. It was, in many ways, an old-fashioned Ottoman palace coup.
But it was also a coup that showed how much things had changed. Although the conservatives were back in power, there was virtually no talk of abrogating the constitution; most of the new ministers were moderate, and both the Sultan and the new vizier pledged to respect the legislature's prerogatives. And unlike the losers of prior power struggles, neither Midhat Pasha nor Şinasi were imprisoned or banished, and they knew much better than their rival what a political opposition could do within a constitutional system. As the 1880s dawned, they would transform Ottoman politics into something based more on institutions than personalities...
_______
[1] In OTL, similar albeit less far-reaching tax reforms (including an income tax and an expanded corporate-profits tax) were enacted in 1886.
[2] The Ottomans did default in 1875 OTL, which prompted central banking reforms somewhat like what is occurring here, but the empire's tax revenues still went into receivership for much of the 1880s. In this timeline, finances will still be a problem, but the earlier tax and banking reforms will maintain solvency.
[3] Loris Melikian was a Russian general during the OTL war, and Hussein Avni Pasha is of course historical; all other military commanders have no historical counterparts.
