A Box of Sand Read online

  Abdülhamid did not however trust the navy. A number of explanations have been offered for this, including the part played by naval officers in deposing Murad, that these officers threatened mutiny if arrears of pay where not made good, and that he feared a coup instigated by them. Whatever the truth, it was certainly the case that from 1876 the navy was neglected and allowed to run down. The new Sultan would not sanction the fleet leaving the Golden Horn whilst, by 1880, the vast majority of the British engineers had been discharged and sent back to the UK. The officer corps was also dispersed, and by 1890 it no longer existed as a coherent force. Indeed, so anxious was Abdülhamid that he decreed that essential parts of the machinery and armament were removed from the vessels and stored onshore, whilst the ships themselves were allowed to disintegrate.

  It naturally followed that when the threat of conflict with Greece broke out in 1897, the Ottoman navy was in no shape to intervene. The most it could manage was to send the central battery ship Mesudiye (1875) together with four other vintage vessels escorted by three torpedo boats to the Dardanelles. This flotilla left the Golden Horn on 19 March 1897, with the larger vessels having to tow the smaller, and berthed at Canakkale in the strait. Two Ottoman naval advisers, officers from Germany and Britain, arrived at Canakkale to inspect the vessels on 15 April 1897. The report from Vice-Admirals Kalau von Hofe and Sir Henry F Woods is devastating; many of the guns had been rendered useless by corrosion and damage, whilst some vessels had weapons, or vital parts of weapons, missing.28

  Even Abdülhamid was forced to concede that the Ottoman fleet had degenerated to a state that was both an embarrassment and a source of great weakness for the Empire. Accordingly he had a naval commission set up to examine ways of restoring some degree of Ottoman naval power. There were however a growing group of influential figures within the Empire who had become dissatisfied in the extreme with the ramshackle and corrupt nature of the governing and administrative institutions. This eventually led to the formation of a movement that called itself the Committee of Union and Progress (ttihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti) or CUP, also colloquially known as the ‘Young Turks.’ The origins of the CUP can be traced back to 1889, and it was basically an alliance of several discontented and otherwise fissiparous factions within the Empire. Most importantly was the joining, in 1907, of officers of the Ottoman 3rd Army Corps based in the European vilayets. One of these, the comparatively junior Major Ahmed Niyazi inaugurated what became a revolution on 23 July 190829 when he led a revolt against the authorities at the town of Resna (Resen), now in the Republic of Macedonia. This rebellion rapidly spread throughout the empire, and the next day the reigning Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II conceded to its demands; the restoration of the 1876 constitution and the recall of parliament.

  The CUP had then succeeded in establishing a government ostensibly committed to liberal and constitutional rule of the Ottoman Empire as part of their reform programme. Under the terms of the 1876 constitution elections were held throughout the Empire in November 1908, and on December 17 the Ottoman parliament was reopened. The deputies were elected according to a somewhat complex two-tier system. The first stage saw taxpaying male citizens over the age of 25 voting for a member on the basis of 500 voters per member. Those members so chosen then took part in a second stage, voting in turn for a deputy to represent them in Istanbul on the basis of one deputy per fifty-thousand voters.30 Eight deputies were sent to the Ottoman capitol from Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, including Sulyman al-Baruni and Farhat al-Zawi, who will appear later.31

  The CUP programme was ambitious, even revolutionary, and dedicated to, as part of their name suggests, union of all the peoples of the empire on an equal footing. Though there is a great deal of scholarly debate about whether or not the Ottoman Empire was an Islamic State it had certainly discriminated against non-Muslims. Whilst Islam was the state religion, the population of the Empire comprised peoples of many different religious and national groupings, and most of these had a degree of communal autonomy. Within limits, these communities were allowed to order their own social and religious lives and apply their own laws to civil matters, such as marriage and inheritance. Only in respect of penal laws were they subject to Islamic regulation. These minority communities, or millets, elected or otherwise chose a high-ranking religious figure as their leader, who became their representative responsible to the Sultan. These leaders, who were accorded the status of state officials, had the authority to settle civil legal matters between members of their community and collected taxes. In other words, and put simplistically, the Ottoman Empire was not a strongly centralised polity.

  The CUP sought to change this, and the government after 1908 introduced initiatives intended to promote the unity and modernisation of the Empire. These involved the removal of foreign influence in the internal affairs of the state, the construction of a strong central government, a process of industrialisation, and administrative reforms; the latter included secularisation of the legal system, subsidies for the education of women, and the modernisation of state-operated schools. The notion of a common Ottoman citizenship, and thus identity, had been introduced in the 19th century but met with resistance, not only from the Islamic majority but also from the leaders of the various communities who would see their status disappear. However the CUP proved ineffective at controlling the new government and was subjected to a reactionary counter-revolution the following April. This was in turn defeated by the raising of an ‘Action Army’ in the European vilayets commanded by Mahmud Sevket, with one Mustafa Kemal as chief-of-staff, which moved by train to occupy Istanbul. There was little or no fighting upon its arrival and the Sultan was forced to abdicate in favour of his brother, who became Sultan Mehmed V. Though the counter-revolution was unsuccessful, its defeat came at the price of elevating the army to the position of guarantor of political stability via martial law.32

  Improvements in the naval position of the Empire were also sought as the complete lack of battleships was perceived as a great source of weakness. Accordingly, following the deposition of Abdülhamid the government initiated attempts to acquire one or two capital ships as well as modern armoured cruisers. Incredibly, the Germans initially appeared to be willing to sell the hybrid Blucher, a large armoured cruiser that was nearly a battlecruiser, or even Germany’s first pure battlecruiser Von der Tann or the newer Moltke. Such discussions as took place over the matter were seemingly conducted without the knowledge of Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, State Secretary at the Imperial Naval Office. Tirpitz, who was famously attempting to construct a battle-fleet to rival the British Royal Navy, stopped any further discussions over the matter in July 1910, but did indicate that some older ships were available. Eventually, two Brandenburg Class vessels, Kurfürst Friedrich Wilhelm and Weißenburg, were purchased and transferred to the Ottoman Navy on 1 September 1910 along with some smaller ships.33 Renamed Barbaros Hayreddin and Turgut Reis respectively, this accretion of naval strength was of an order that may have been useful against the Hellenic Navy, the most likely main enemy, but it was to prove of no utility against the much more powerful Italian fleet.

  However, despite corruption, bureaucratic bungling, and personal rivalries creating huge difficulties, some modernisation of the existing larger naval vessels was completed and new purchases of small warships made. Things did not however improve greatly. In 1904 the future British admiral, Captain Mark Kerr, had visited the Ottoman capital and opined that ‘it is no longer possible to talk about the Turkish Navy, as it is practically non-existent.’34 That he had not exaggerated was made evident some four years later when Rear-Admiral Sir Douglas Gamble inspected the fleet in December 1908. Gamble found ‘vegetable gardens growing on the decks of the ageing warships (for Abdülhamid had considered that men-of-war in fighting trim might turn their guns on his palace).’35 Gamble was not inspecting the remains of the Ottoman Navy out of idle curiosity. He had been appointed as head of the British Naval Mission to the Empire, which had the brief of supervising the reor
ganization of the fleet for the new government. During his tenure, between February 1909 and January 1910, he re-organized the fleet, reduced the number of officers and sent some young naval officers to Britain for training. Clearly he, and the British Naval Mission in general, had a formidable task, but a rationalization of the available resources was undertaken and a certain amount of progress was reported:

  The obsolete vessels which had been lying at the Dardanelles and elsewhere have been collected at the Golden Horn and offered for sale by treaty. The latest ships, which possess a certain amount of fighting value, have had their crews completed and have undergone training, a certain amount of target practice having been carried out, and the ships sent on cruises.36

  These cruises, the first of which took place in the Sea of Marmara on 27 May 1909 with another held in the Mediterranean in September, demonstrated that the Ottoman Navy needed a lot of work. As a 1910 British report put it: ‘At present the Turks have neither the officers to navigate and fight, nor the crews to man the ships which they have bought from the Germans, nor are they likely to for some time to come.’37 They had also lost their leader early that year following the resignation of Gamble. The British admiral had clashed with the Ottoman Government over the organisation and finances of the fleet, considering that such decisions should be left in his hands. He was replaced in April 1910 by Vice-Admiral Hugh Pigot Williams, who also found himself at loggerheads with the government and resented his local ‘demotion’ to the rank of Rear-Admiral. Williams was to be at sea with the main body of the fleet, which was built around the two ex-German battleships, when war broke out with Italy.

  The authority of the Empire was threatened by insurrections in the Kosovo vilayet in 1910 and Shkoder vilayet, near the border with Montenegro, the following year.38 Clearly the stability of the Ottoman Empire had not been greatly enhanced by the accession of the ‘Young Turks.’ Indeed, despite Enver’s claim to have cured the ‘sick man,’ the CUP attempts to bring union and progress to the Ottoman Empire arguably resulted in less union and only marginal progress. Therefore the ‘Eastern Question,’ which at bottom revolved around managing Ottoman decline in such a way as to obviate potential conflicts between the Great Powers, was very much a live issue in 1911. It was a question that Italy was about to become deeply involved in, despite the possibility, or even probability, of shattering the status quo. Indeed, the administration of Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti decided to undertake the conquest of the vilayet of Tripoli despite Italy’s rather gloomy history in terms of war and colonial adventures.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Making Italy and making Italians

  The history of Italy between […] 1861 and […] 1922 is the history of a state in search of a nation.

  Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, The Pinocchio Effect: On Making Italians, 1860-19201

  ‘Unfortunately we have made Italy, but we have not created Italians.’

  Massimo d’Azeglio.2

  THE unified Kingdom of Italy was a state born out of conflict, of which Victor Emmanuel II of Piedmont-Sardinia was crowned King in 1861. Curiously, he did not retitle himself to become Victor Emmanuel I, and so appeared to be the second King of Italy. The Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia itself was one of eight Italian states that had been recreated after the defeat of Napoleon at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Autocratic governments ruled all those states, and, though nominally independent, many of them depended on Austrian protection and were effectively satellites of the Austrian Empire. Patriotic sentiments had begun to spread among Italian elites during Napoleonic rule (1805–14), under which large parts of Italy had been politically unified. The post-Napoleonic restoration led to growing demands for the granting of constitutional charters and independence from foreign rule. These, in 1820-21, led to a series of insurrections in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and Piedmont-Sardinia. They achieved very little and were brutally crushed. In the case of the Two Sicilies, an Austrian army was despatched under the auspices of the Holy Alliance who feared that the notion of constitutional government might spread to other Italian states and perhaps even further.3

  Attempts to shrug off Austrian dominance resulted in what became known as the First Italian War of Independence. This was fought in 1848 between Piedmont-Sardinia and the Austrian Empire. The conflict arose from the local manifestation of the widespread revolts of 1848, a pan-European phenomenon. The population of Lombardy-Venetia, under Austrian rule, rose as did the people of Sicily. With similar trouble occurring in Vienna the Austrian forces evacuated the island. Perceiving a time of apparent Austrian weakness, several Italian states, including Piedmont-Sardinia, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, Tuscany and the Papal States, sent their military forces into Lombardy-Venetia. After some initial success, the Italian alliance fractured; the Pope recalled his troops and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies also withdrew. The Grand Duke of Tuscany, Leopold II, greatly alarmed at the course of events in his native state where ‘revolutionaries’ had taken control, decided to follow the Papal example.4 Piedmont-Sardinia was left to face Austria alone, and was too weak to prevail, being forced to acquiesce in a short-lived armistice before having to come to terms on 9 August 1849 and pay an indemnity of 65 million francs. The outcome of the conflict brought home to Piedmont-Sardinia the unlikelihood of being able to defeat Austria single-handedly, and left insurrectionist regimes in Venice (the Republic of San Marco), Florence, the capital of Tuscany, and Rome as the sole representatives of defiance to Austrian domination.5 This was fairly short lived; the Austrians retook the Republic of San Marco in August 1849 after a long siege, and Leopold II was restored to his capital the same year with the assistance of Austrian troops, who occupied Tuscany until 1855.6 One insurrectionary government that was defeated by other than Austrian assistance was that which had risen in the Papal States during March 1849. A constituent assembly had been formed, which abolished the temporal power of the Pope and proclaimed a Roman Republic. A new constitution was proclaimed, which guaranteed a government subject to legal constraints, a free press, freedom of conscience, the abolition of capital punishment and universal male suffrage amongst others. One of the leaders of the Republic was Giuseppe Mazzini, a politician, journalist and activist, known popularly as ‘The Beating Heart of Italy’. He is usually ranked alongside Cavour and Garibaldi as one of the leading figures of the Italian Risorgimento.

  The Kingdom of Italy in 1911, showing the pre-unification states and the dates of their accession. Having created an Italian state in 1861, with King Victor Emanuel II of Piedmont-Sardinia becoming Victor Emanuel II of Italy, the problem then was, as Massimo d’Azeglio put it, creating Italians. The capital city, after previously being located at Turin (1861-64) and Florence (1864-71), was moved to Rome in 1871 following the surrender of Pope Pius IX to military force. (© Charles Blackwood).

  The reactionary forces that sought to ‘restore the Pope’ came this time from France. France was then under the presidency of Louis Napoleon. His motives in intervening were largely domestic-political; French ultramontane Catholics formed a large part of his core constituency.7 A French expeditionary corps, with some Spanish assistance, was duly despatched and one of the French commanders, General Charles Oudinot, when told that he would meet resistance uttered the quip ‘Italians don’t fight’ (les Italiens ne se battent pas). He was wrong, and as he found to his cost the Italians did fight and bloodily repulsed his advance.8 Indeed, it was only after fierce resistance that the short-lived Roman Republic surrendered in June 1849.9

  The fact that Piedmont-Sardinia alone, or with unreliable allies, could not prevail against Austrian military strength, even when this was diluted by domestic discontent, seemed to pose an insoluble problem. A solution however came from the former French President, Louis Napoleon, who had, since 2 December 1852, reinvented himself as Emperor Napoleon III. Since that time the two states had been allied during the Crimean War against Russia, fighting alongside the forces of the United Kingdom and The Ottoman Empire. Napoleon III ha
d chosen to pick a quarrel, indeed a fight, with Austria in a bid to extend French influence in Italy; ‘a new Bonapartist hegemony’ in A J P Taylor’s phrase.10 He did not expect that his strategy would lead to the creation of a unified Italian state. Rather, in the south, he expected the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies to remain as it was, whilst in central Italy the Papal States would endure and the smaller territories would combine to form a kingdom that France might control. Northern Italy would be dominated by Piedmont-Sardinia, which would receive Lombardy and Venetia; the whole confederation would be presided over by the Pope.11

  The Emperor invited the Piedmontese Prime Minister, Camillo Benso, Count Cavour, to a secret meeting at Plombieres, in eastern France on 20-21 July 1858. The outcome of this meeting was an agreement, the main strands of which were that France would help Piedmont-Sardinia to fight against Austria, and Piedmont-Sardinia would then give Nice and Savoy to France in return.12 There were caveats, inasmuch as Austria had to be seen as the aggressor, and that ‘the war should have no revolutionary taint to alarm the reactionary governments of Europe.’13

  In order to provoke Austria, Cavour arranged for military manoeuvres to be held close to the Austrian border and did nothing to discourage the Austrian belief that Piedmont-Sardinia had been supplying armaments to separatists in Lombardy. The desired effect was realised when Austria issued an ultimatum on 23 April 1859 demanding the disarming of the army of Piedmont-Sardinia. This of course went unheeded, and Austria accordingly, on 29 April, declared war. Napoleon, declaring he had come to ‘liberate Italy from the Alps to the Adriatic,’ decided to lead his army in person, and on 13 May he met the Piedmontese king, Victor Emanuel II, at Genoa. The combined, though overwhelmingly French, armies fought and won two significant battles over the next four weeks; the Battle of Magenta on 4 June and the much larger Battle of Solferino, or Solferino and San Martino as it is also known, on 24 June. The latter was a particularly vicious struggle lasting some nine hours; the casualties on the French and Piedmontese side have been computed as around 17,000 whilst Austria suffered some 22,000 losses.14 These figures are probably underestimates; an anonymous correspondent of the New York Times, who had been at the scene on the day and was in the area for two week afterwards, calculated that the Franco-Piedmontese army alone had suffered 45,000 killed and wounded.15