Page:EB1911 - Volume 18.djvu/98

 Constantinople on the 1st of May he found Russia practically in possession. Sultan Mahmud was to the last degree embittered against the powers which, with lively protestations of friendship, had forced him to humiliate himself before his hated vassal. Russia had given him deeds, not words; and to Russia he committed himself. A further contingent of six or seven thousand Russians had arrived on the 22nd of April; Russian engineers were busy with the fortifications along the Straits; Russian agents alone were admitted to the sultan’s presence. “It is manifest,” wrote Lord Ponsonby, “that the Porte stands in the relation of vassal to the Russian government.” The relation was soon to be yet more manifest. Before, on the 9th of July, the Russian fleet, with the Russian troops on board, weighed anchor for the Black Sea, there was signed at the palace of Unkiar Skelassi the famous treaty (July 8, 1833) which, under the guise of an offensive and defensive alliance, practically made Russia the custodian of the gates of the Black Sea. (See : History.) 

Mehemet Ali had triumphed, but he was well aware that he held the fruits of his victory by a precarious tenure. He was still but a vali among the rest, holding his many pashaliks nominally by the sultan’s will and subject to annual reappointment; and he knew that both his power and his life would be forfeit so soon as the sultan should be strong enough to deprive him of them. To achieve this one end had, indeed, become the overmastering passion of Mahmud’s life, to defeat it the object of all Mehemet Ali’s policy. So early as 1834 it seemed as though the struggle would be renewed; for Mehemet Ali had extended to his new pashaliks his system of monopolies and conscription, and the Syrians, finding that they had exchanged Turkish whips for Egyptian scorpions, rose in a passion of revolt. It needed the intervention of Mehemet Ali in person before, in the following year, they were finally subdued. Meanwhile it had needed all the diplomatic armoury of the powers to prevent Mahmud hastening to the assistance of his “oppressed subjects.” The threats of Great Britain and France, the failure of Russia to back him up, induced him to refrain; but sooner or later a renewal of the war was inevitable; for the sultan, with but one end in view, was reorganizing his army, and Mehemet Ali, who in the autumn of 1834 had assumed the style of viceroy and sounded the powers as to their attitude in the event of his declaring his complete independence, refused to continue to pay tribute which he knew would be used against himself.

The crisis came in 1838. In March the Egyptians were severely defeated by the revolted Arabs of the Hauran; and the Porte, though diplomatic pressure kept it quiet, hurried on preparations for war. Mehemet Ali, too, had small reason for postponing the conflict. The work of Moltke, who with other German officers who had been engaged in organizing the Turkish army, threatened to destroy his superiority in the field; the commercial treaty signed by the Ottoman government with Great Britain (Aug. 16), which applied equally to all the territories under his rule, threatened to destroy at a blow the lucrative monopolies which supplied him with the sinews of war. Months of suspense followed; for the powers had threatened to cast their weight into the scale against whichever side should prove the aggressor, and Mehemet Ali was too astute to make the first move. In the end Mahmud’s passion played into his hands. The old sultan thirsted to crush his rebel ous vassal, at any cost; and on the 21st of April 1839 the Ottoman army, stationed at Bir on the Euphrates, crossed the stream and invaded Syria. On the 23rd of June it was attacked and utterly routed by Ibrahim at Nezib. On the 1st of July the old sultan died, unconscious of the fatal news, leaving his throne to Abdul-Mejid, a lad of sixteen. To complete the desperateness of the situation the news reached the capital that Ahmed Pasha, the Ottoman admiral-in-chief, had sailed to Alexandria and surrendered his fleet to Mehemet Ali, on the pretext that the sultan’s advisers were sold to the Russians.

So far as the forces of the Ottoman Empire were concerned, Mehemet Ali was now absolute master of the situation. The grand vizier, in the sultan’s name, wrote beseeching him to avoid the further shedding of Mussulman blood, offering him a free pardon, the highest honours of the state, the hereditary pashalik of Egypt for himself, and Syria for Ibrahim until he should succeed his father in Egypt. Mehemet Ali replied diplomatically; for, though these offers fell far short of his ambitions, a studious moderation was essential in view of the doubtful attitude of the European powers.

On the 27th of July the ambassadors of the five powers presented to the Porte a joint note, in which they declared that an agreement on the Eastern Question had been reached by the five Great Powers, and urged it “to suspend all definite decision made without their concurrence, pending the effect of their interest in its welfare.” The necessity for showing a united front justified the diplomatic inexactitude; but the powers were agreed on little except the need for agreement. Especially was this need realized by the British government, which feared that Russia would seize the occasion for an isolated intervention under the treaty of Unkiar Skelessi. On the 1st of August Palmerston wrote to Ponsonby impressing upon him that the representatives of the powers, in their communications with the Porte, “should act not only simultaneously in point of time, but identically in point of manner”—a principle important in view of later developments. Yet it was a task all but impossible to preserve this appearance of unanimity in view of the divergent views within the concert. France and Great Britain had hitherto acted together through common opposition to the supposed designs of Russia. Austria, too, now that the revolutionary spectres of 1830 had been laid, was reverting to her traditional opposition to Russia in the affairs of the Near East, and Metternich supported Palmerston’s proposal of an international conference at Vienna. Everything depended on the attitude of the emperor Nicholas. This was ultimately determined by his growing distrust of Austria and his perennial hatred of the democratic régime of France. The first caused him to reject the idea of a conference of which the activities would have been primarily directed against Russia; the second led him to drive a wedge into the Anglo-French entente by making direct overtures to Great Britain. Palmerston listened to the tsar’s proposals, conveyed through Baron Brunnow, “with surprise and admiration.” The emperor Nicholas was prepared to accept the views of Great Britain on the Turco-Egyptian question; to allow the Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi to lapse; to act henceforth in the Ottoman Empire only in concert with the other powers, in return for an agreement closing the Dardanelles to the war-ships of all nations and to extend the same principle to the Bosporus. Finally, Brunnow was empowered to arrange a coalition of the great powers with a view to the settlement of the Egyptian question; and in this coalition the tsar was willing, for political reasons, that France should be included, though he stated his personal preference for her exclusion.

To these views Austria and, as a natural consequence, Prussia acceded without difficulty. The attitude of France was a more doubtful quantity. In France Mehemet Ali had become a popular hero; under him French civilization had gained a foothold in Egypt; he was regarded as invincible; and it was hoped that in alliance with him French influence in the Mediterranean would be supreme. Palmerston, on the other hand, believed that the Ottoman empire would never be secure until “the desert had been placed between” the pasha of Egypt and the sultan; and the view that the coalition should be directed against Mehemet Ali was shared by the other powers. In the circumstances France should either have loyally accepted the decision of the majority of the concert, to which she had committed herself by signing the joint note of the 27th of July, or should have frankly stated her intention of taking up a position outside. The fact that she did neither led to a crisis that for a moment threatened to plunge Europe into war.

For nearly a year the diplomatic pourparlers continued without an agreement being reached; France insisted on Mehemet Ali’s receiving the hereditary pashalik of Syria as well as that of