12. GLORY

THE LAST DAYS OF THE GILDED AGE

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OTTOMAN TURKEY

Moral rot had set in at numerous levels of the empire.  A major problem was the Imperial Harem, made up of hundreds of wives, concubines, eunuchs and children belonging to the sultan.  Presiding over all of it was the sultan’s mother, the Valide Sultan, the second most powerful person in the empire.  With all these possible inheritors of the sultan’s throne, it was inevitable that the Harem would become a center of dangerous intrigue ... involving even the sultans themselves who moved from the palace to the harem supposedly to govern their empire.  Little by little however the sultans found themselves spending more time managing the harem than they did managing their decaying empire.

Another failing of the Ottoman sultanate ... not untypical of many governments unwilling to live within their own means ... was the massive debt that was run up by the sultan in his effort to live up to the high material standards he thought sovereign lords should be able to enjoy.  Part of the independence he accorded Egypt in its political operations was in exchange for the tax revenues that Egypt promised to send to the sultan.  As the Egyptian khedive was a major stockholder in the new Suez Canal Company, those revenues were expected to be substantial.  Thus on the basis of those expected revenues, the sultan was able to engage massive loans to support his rule ... not aware of the huge dangers he was courting in doing so.   When the costs in building the canal proved to greatly exceed the revenue it subsequently received from those using the canal and the khedive was forced in 1875 to sell his shares (primarily to the British), that key source of revenue flow to the sultan ended abruptly.  In turn the sultan was forced to default on his loans to the European banks, provoking the Great Eastern Crisis (1875-1878) ... in which the sultan himself was forced to commit "suicide" by some of his pashas (1876).   Finally in 1881 an international debt collection agency was set up by the European powers to collect the payments owed by the Ottoman Empire to its European creditors.  But not only did this agency collect on debts, it also played a key role in finding financing for ongoing industrial and railroad projects for Turkey.  While this served greatly to help modernize Turkey, it also compromised deeply the empire’s political independence.  But being the "Sick Man of Europe," the empire seemed to have no way to avoid this development.

In the mid-1860s a group of Turkish intellectuals formed a secret society, the Young Ottomans, whose focus was on modernizing the political structure of the empire.  They hoped not only to bring the empire up to the constitutional standards of the constitutional monarchies of Western Europe ... but also to create a broad Ottoman "nationalism" that would develop a sense of Ottoman pride, a super-nationalism designed to bridge the ethnic differences dividing the various national groupings within the empire.  In 1876 they seemed to have made great progress toward that goal when the new Sultan Abdül Hamid II (reigned 1876-1909) did indeed extend to the empire a constitution designed to make the Ottoman government conform more closely to the West European version.  But only two years later the sultan reversed himself completely in the face of a growing conflict with his new parliament and he simply suspended the new constitution and returned the empire under his rule as absolute monarch. At this point the animosities separating the various ethnic groups making up the empire simply magnified.