Like the Mongols before them, early Ottoman Armies
conquered mercilessly. Massacre of captives were common place, an accepted
aspect of warfare. And by 1588 –the year Spain’s
Armada was routed by England
–the Sultans ruled an empire which circled most of the Mediterranean.
It stretched from the Red Sea port of Aden to Budapest and Belgrade, from the Crimea north of the Black Sea to Algeria. Huge
Chunks of present day Hungary,
Poland and Russia shared the same masters as the people of Greece, Egypt,
Tunisia, Libya, Lebanon,
Syria, Israel, Yugoslavia,
Romania and Bulgaria. Any
revolts among the 30 million subjects were ruthlessly suppressed.
But the absolute power of the Sultans not only corrupted
them, it blinded them to changing the world outside their realms. In 1876 a
rebellion in Bulgaria
was repressed with traditional carnage. Ottoman Troops ran amok in an orgy of
killing, and more than 12,000 men, women and children were slaughtered. But by
then the western world had newspapers, and millions were appalled to realize
that medieval-style tyranny still went on in the ‘modern’ age. Historians were
to discover that such tyranny had run virtually unchecked for 350 years –and
would carry on well into 20th Century.
The sinister Sultans had more reason than most absolute
rulers to be paranoid about the plots. A strong tradition of strangulation by
deaf, mutes using silk bowstring, existed inside the walls of their Grand
Seraglio palace. Mahomet the conqueror (1431- 81) formulated a law by which his
successors as Sultan had the right to execute their brothers to ensure the
peace of the world.’ It was throne in 1595, his father Murad III’s prowess in
the harem meant he had to murder 19 brothers, all aged under 11, and throw
seven pregnant concubines into the Bosporus tied up in sacks.
Thereafter, close male relatives of the incoming Sultan
were locked up in a windowless building within the Grand Seraglio complex until
the Sultan’s death called them to the throne. Cut off from the outside world,
with only deaf mutes and sterilized concubines for company, many were
completely deranged when they came to power, sometimes after more than 30 years
incarceration. It was 1789 before the practice was abolished –and by then,
madness was in the blood of the Ottoman dictators.
Suleiman the Magnificent, who ruled from 1520 to 1566, is
regarded by most historians as the last great Sultan. In 1526 he seized more Hungary, massacring 200,000 – 2,000 were killed
for his enjoyment as he watched from a throne –and taking 100,000 slaves back
to Constantinople. Three years later, when Vienna stubbornly refused to surrender, he scoured the
surrounding countryside and selected the most nubile girls for Turkey’s
harems. Then he threw hundreds of unwanted peasants on a gigantic fire in view
of the city walls. Such sanity in the name of military strength was succeeded
by a dynasty of Sultans who were weak, debauched, indecisive or insane -or
sometimes all four.
Suleiman’s son Selim II was a drunkard, despite the
proscription of alcohol by the Koran, and decided to wrest Cyprus, source
of his favorite wine, from its Venetian rulers. He sacked Nicosia, slaughtering 30,000. When the key
fortress of Famagusta
fell after a two-year siege, the Turks promised to spare the heroic garrison
–then killed them all. Their commander was flayed alive, then paraded in front
of the Turkish troops, his body stuffed with straw. Venice,
Spain and Austria
retaliated with the humiliating naval triumph of Lepanto, at which 50,000 Turks
died. But the Ottomans still held Cyprus when, in 1574, Selim lost
his footing climbing into his bath after a drinking session, and died from
fractured skull.
His son, Mahomet III, the man who killed his 19 young
brothers, was a man with a fiery temper who enjoyed the sight of a women’s breast
being scorched off with hot irons. Osman II, who ruled for less than a year
before his 1618 murder, enjoyed archery –but only if his targets were live
prisoners-of-war or page boys. And while these two, and a string of
insignificant Sultans, indulged themselves, the empire began to fall to pieces.
Neglect and oppression ravaged the countryside, with tax income tumbling as
famine laid waste to areas. The rigid disciplines which had made the Ottoman Empire strong were also disintegrating.
Murad IV, a savage, dark-eyed giant, tried to reimpose them
when he took over in 1623. After the Janissaries, the Sultan’s special army,
forced him to sack the chief minister and 16 other officials, he later revenged
himself for their impudence by having more than 500 of their leaders strangled
in their barracks. Then he set about the rest of the nation, as author Noel
Barber records in his excellent book, Lords of the Horn.
‘Murad quickly found a simple panacea for the ills of the
country,’ writes Barber. ‘He cut off the head of any man who came under the
slightest suspicion. In 1637 he executed 25,000 subjects in the name of
justice, many of by his own hand. He executed the Grand Mufti because he was
dissatisfied with the state of the roads. He beheaded his chief musician for
playing a Persian air. He liked to patrol taverns at night and if he caught
anyone smoking he declared himself and executed the offender on the spot. When
he caught one of his gardeners and his wife smoking, he had their legs
amputated and exhibited them in the public while they bled to death.’
A Venetian who added a room to the top of his house was
hanged because Murad thought he had done it to spy on the Sultan’s harem. A
Frenchman who arranged the date with a Turkish girl was impaled. And according
to Barber, Murad spent hours … exercising the royal prerogative of taking ten
innocent lives a day as he practiced his powers with the arquebus on passers by
who were too near the palace walls. On one occasion he drowned a party of women
when he chance to come across them in the meadow and took exception to the
noise they were making. He ordered the batteries to open fire and sink a
boatload of the women on the Bosporus when
their craft came too near the Seraglio walls. . .’
Murad atrocities were not confined to home. In 1638 he led
his troops to the Persian capital, Baghdad.
After a six-week siege, during which he sliced in half the head of a Persian
champion in single-handed combat, he ordered the massacre of the defending
garrison of 30,000. When accidental ammunition explosion killed some Turkish
troops, Murad slaughtered 30,000 men, women and children.
But Murad was the last of the all conquering Ottoman
despots. His son Ibrahim’s most notable congquest was deflowering the virgin
daughter of the grand Mufti,
Turkey’s
highest religious leader. Then, when one concubine from his harem was seduced
by an outsider, he had all 280 girls tied in weighted sacks and thrown into Bosporus. Even Constantinople,
which could forgive its Sultans almost anything, could not condone that. The
Grand Mufti took revenge by organizing a coup which toppled Ibrahim, then had
him, his mother and his favorite lover strangled.
The Ottoman armies had long lost their invincible
reputation. In 1683 an alliance of European forces crushed another attempt to
take Vienna. In
1790 the Russian forces of Catherine the Great took Ismail, 40 miles north of
the Black Sea, and dropped the corpses of 34,000 fallen Turks into the Danube through holes in the ice. In 1827, a six-year war,
with massacres on both sides, ended with the Greeks winning independence. Egypt achieved
a large measure of self government.
The Ottoman Empire was in
steady decline. Elsewhere in the world, such events as the French Revolution,
the American Constitution, with its declaration of rights, the Industrial
Revolution, a more general right to vote and the introduction of newspapers had
all helped foster an awareness of human rights which forced government to act
more humanely. But in 1876, the Ottoman Sultan showed just how far behind the
tide of civilization his country had fallen.
In that year, the Bulgarians, who had been part of the Ottoman Empire for nearly 500 years, revolted -and Sultan
Abdul Aziz unleashed the blood lust of unpaid troops who were rewarded only by
what they could loot. Within days 12,000 men, women and children were dead and
60 villages burned to the ground. The Sultan gave the commander of the troops a
medal.
The carnage in the town of Batak was witnessed by American journalist
J.A. MacGahan and, when his report appeared in the Daily News, the stunned
world had its first eye-witness account of an Ottoman atrocity. ‘On every side
as we entered the town was the skulls and the skeletons of women and children,’
he wrote. We entered the churchyard. The sight was more dreadful. The whole
churchyard for three feet deep was festering with dead bodies partly covered.
Hands, legs, arms and heads projected in ghastly confusion. . . I never
imagined anything so fearful. There were three thousand bodies in the
churchyard and the church. In the school 200 women and children had been burnt
alive … no crime invented by Turkish ferocity was left uncommitted.’
Western governments at first refused to accept the reports,
labeling them ‘picturesque journalism.’ But when Britain
sent an investigator from the Constantinople embassy, he told Whitehall the troops had perpetrated ‘perhaps
the most heinous crime that has stained the history of the present century.’
Ex-Prime Minister William Gladstone issued a pamphlet describing the Turks as
‘the great anti-human specimen of humanity.’ The storm of worldwide protest
caused a coup which installed Abdul Aziz’s drunken nephew Murad as Sultan. His
reign lasted three months, until he was declared insane, and his brother Abdul
Hamid II took over.
Abdul was paranoid about possible plots that he built an
entire village, designed only for his safety. Behind the barricades he kept
loaded pistols in every room –two hung beside his bath and constructed glass
cupboards which, when opened, blasted the room with bullets from remote
controlled guns. He personally shots dead a gardener and a slave girl whose sudden
movements alarmed him. He countered the growing revolt of the young Turks with
networks of spies and torture chamber under a cruel executioner who delighted
in slowly drowning broken men.
But his most astonishing act was to order the monstrous
slaughter of the Armenians, a minority race whose homeland was in the
North-East of the dwindling empire, close to the Russian border. He regarded
the business minded Armenians much as Hitler later regarded the Jews. First he
banned the word ‘Armenian’ from newspapers and school books. Then he told
Moslems they could seize Armenian goods –and kill the owners if they resisted.
Clearly, Abdul had learned nothing from the 1876
atrocities. And his massacres were far worse. It was cold-blooded, premeditated
genocide. For days a bugle at dawn and dusk called the faithful to murder.
Nearly 100,000 Armenians were killed. And Westerners witnessed the terror in Trebizond, where every Christian house was plundered
before the owners were ritually slaughtered, their throats cut as if they were
sheep. Those who jumped into the river to flee were caught and drowned by
Moslem boatmen. At Urfa
3,000 men, women and children were roasted alive in the cathedral after seeking
sanctuary. Sultan Abdul noted every detail as his spies sent detailed reports.
If the Sultan hoped to curry favour with his people, using
racial prejudice to blind them to the economic ruin of his empire, he was sadly
mistaken. Many Moslems felt only shame, labeling him Abdul the Damned. And this
time, it was not only Europe that was
outraged. Two Armenian professors at an American missionary school were
arrested, taken in chains for trial for printing seditious leaflets, and
sentenced to die. America
was scandalized. Finally, when 7,000 Armenian were slaughtered in Constantinople in reprisal for a band raid carried out by
20, every European power signed an open telegram to the Sultan. If the
massacres did not end at once, it read, the Sultan’s throne and his dynasty
would be imperiled.
Sultan Abdul Hamid survived to celebrate his silver Jubilee
as the new century dawned. But he was now an obsolete leftover from another
age. And in 1908, the young Turks –whose numbers and influence had been
growing, first in exile, then in Turkey –seized power. The Sultan
was exiled to Salonika and his brother, a
stooge figurehead, installed as constitutional monarch. Sacks of the gold and
precious gems a fortune in foreign bank accounts and shares in international
companies were discovered at Abdul’s palace, all obtained with money milked
from the Turkish treasury.
The repressive rule of Ottomans had finally ended. But if
Turks and the West thought they had seen the end of evil and tyranny, they were
in for a shock. For in 1915, Enver Bey, one of the three Young Turk leaders,
ordered a new massacre of Armenians, even more ruthless than that of the
Sultan. Using the excuse that some Armenians had collaborated with the Russians
during World War I battles –Turkey
fought on the Kaiser’s side –he made his brother-in-law Djevet Bey Governor of
the region, with orders to exterminate the Christians.
The inhabitants of than 80 villagers were rounded up and
shot. Thousands of women were raped. Men were tortured, often by having
horseshoes nailed to their feet. One official admitted he ‘delved into the
records of the Spanish Inquisition and adopted all the suggestions found
there.’ More than 18,000 Armenians were sent on a forced march of exile across
the Syrian dessert to Aleppo.
Then Kurdish rebels were encouraged to attack them. Only 150 women and children
reached Aleppo,
70 days after setting out.
The official British report on the atrocities, presented to
Parliament, estimated that, of two million Armenians in Turkey in 1915, a third died and another third
fled to Russia.
The American Ambassador in Constantinople
asked Enver Bey to condemn his underlings for the outrages. To his
astonishment, the callous leader accepted responsibility for everything that
had taken place. His co-leader, Talaat Bey, said it was unwise to punish only
those Armenians who had actually helped the Russians’since those who are
innocent today might be guilty tomorrow. And he had the audacity to ask the
American Ambassador for a full list of Armenians covered by U.S. insurance
companies. As their relatives were probably dead, he said, life assurance
payments should go to the government.
Enver, Talaat and Djevet fled in November 1918, denounced
for choosing the wrong side in a war which cost Turkey half a million battle
casualties and for profiteering in food at a time of famine. The victorious
allies took control in Constantinople. The
empire was now smashed, and Turkey
pushed back almost to its present borders. But to head off feared Italian
territorial ambitions, the allies allow the Greeks to occupy the port of Smyrna. Revenge for centuries of
repression resulted in massacres of Turks –and fuelled the fury that, in
atoning for wrong doing, would make Turkey once again an international
outcast.
Patriot Mustafa Kemal was the focus for Turkish anger at
the allied occupation, and the loss of Smyrna.
Though he was court martialled and sentenced to death in his absence, his
support grew, and the allies were unable to control his rebel forces. Finally
the Greeks offered their army to restore order. In 1920 their campaign pressed
the Turks back. But in August 1921, Mustafa’s men won a three-week battle along
a 60-mile front at SakkariaRiver. The Greeks fled
towards the coast. The following year, reinforced by arms from France, Italy
and Russia, the Turks again
routed their most bitter foes, forcing them back to Smyrna. In September, Mustafa arrived in
triumph at the port, and decreed that any Turkish soldier who molested
civilians would be killed.
But within hours, the Greek Patriarch had been torn to
pieces by a Turkish mob, under the eyes of the town’s new commander. Mass
looting, raping and killing began, Turkish troops methodically moving from
house to house in the Greek and Armenian areas in the north of town. ‘By
evening dead bodies were lying all over the streets,’ said one American
witness. Worse was to come. On Wednesday 13 September, Westeners saw squads of
Turkish soldiers setting fire to houses in the Armenian quarter using
petroleum. The wind spread the flames northwards, and thousands of flimsy homes
were engulfed. Five hundred people perished in a church set ablaze
deliberately. The reek of burning flesh filled the air. Tens of thousands fled
to the water front, pursued by rapidly growing wall of fire. In the bay lay
warships from Britain, America, Italy
and France.
They were there to protect their nationals –but they had strict orders to
maintain neutrality in the war between Greek and Turk. The sailors watched in
horror as the inferno changed the colour of the sea and silhouetted the throng
of helpless refugees on the wharfs. Then, at midnight, they heard what one
described as ‘the most awful scream one could ever imagine.’
Humanity over-rode orders next morning, when a massive
rescue attempt began. Mustafa Kemal had said as he watched the Fire: ‘It is a
sign that Turkey is purged
of the traitors, the Christians, and of the foreigners, and that Turkey
is for the Turks.’ Three days after the blaze began; he announced that all
Greek and Armenian men aged between 15 and 50 were to be deported inland in
labour gangs. Women and children had to be out of Smyrna by 30 September or they too would be
rounded up. He was later persuaded to extend the deadline by six days. Military
merchant ships performed a miracle, ferrying nearly 250,000 people to safety.
No one has ever been able to say how many corpses were left behind, though most
estimates start at 100,000.
Mustafa Kemal always maintained that the Greeks and
Armenians started the great fire of Smyrna.
But a report for the American State Department said all the evidence pointed to
an attempt by the Turks to hide the Evidence of ‘sack massacre and raping that
had been going on for four days.’
Mustafa, oddly, later changed his name to Kamal Ataturk and
instigated massive reforms throughout the government and society which finally
dragged Turkey
into the 20th Century. The last vestiges of the scourge of the
Ottomans were buried forever.
