MACEDONIA—AND AFTER? For the second time in his troubled reign Abdul Hamid II. has been forced to place his administration of a great province, whose frontier lies but a few hours from his capital, under the tutelage of Christian Powers. He has tried principiis obatare and failed; and the parallel between the first steps taken to 'reform' Macedonia and those by which Eastern Roumelia was detached from his sovereignty twenty years ago is too close to escape him. There are circumstances which add complication to the Macedonian case, and doubtless neither do these escape him. Adroitly manipulated, the latent jealousies of the two intervening Powers, too long rivals in Balkan diplomacy to go far hand in hand, as well as the heterogeneity of the Macedonian population (which is more evenly and variously divided than the East Roumelian), and the existence of a warlike and still faithful Albania in its rear, may yet clog the wheels of fate. But he knows that the Concert of the Powers has never yet allowed a province of his Empire, taken under its official protection in any sense or degree, to return to its former state; and that all such provinces as lie in Europe have developed from a protected towards an autonomous condition. These considerations must 'give seriously to think' in Yildiz at this moment; for the Sultan's stake in Macedonia is far more serious than that which was involved in the other lost Balkan provinces. Sooner or later it will be found that, in playing for the basins of the Mesta, Struma, Vardar, and Vistritza, the Ottoman Power has been staking its continued existence in Europe. Looking back over the nineteenth century, few students of Balkan politics would now dispute that the successive losses of Servia, of Roumania, and of Bulgaria with Eastern Roumelia, hardly relinquished after terrible sacrifices as was each of these provinces, have amounted, by a paradox, to an eventual gain to the Porte. In each case, as in those also of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a considerable revenue, the political allegiance of numerous Moslems, and the impaired prestige of the Caliph, had to be put to debit. But that was all the loss. No further province was directly involved; no bulwark of Ottoman power was found to have been Vol. xn.—!CO. M, w.8. 12 abandoned, for these provinces had long been an embarrassment and a menace ; but, on the contrary, a new bulwark had been raised in their autonomy. When all was over, and Russia had withdrawn, it was seen that the emancipated provinces were fortifying themselves rather against Moscow than against Constantinople; and the Sultan was left to enjoy a new security behind a screen of buffer states. It is due more to the existence of free Roumania and Bulgaria and Servia than to any other fact, that Abdul Hamid has been on his throne for above a quarter of a century without meeting a European Power in arms. Of which among his predecessors can the like be said? The one reservation which, however, must be made brings us to the present point. The emancipation of the other Balkan provinces was sure sooner or later to entail a Macedonian question, and that question, if solved in the same way, would change the whole face of the account. In, and by itself, Macedonia is not worth more than Bulgaria or Bosnia. The revenue, which will be lost with it, when fully emancipated, is not greater than vanished with the former of these provinces; its peasantry is worth less to the Ottoman military system than the militia of the latter used to be. True, there is a Moslem population in the Macedonian valleys, somewhat more numerous than that in any one of the other lost provinces (not excepting Bosnia) at the time of their detachment, and in part it is of older settlement, for there were colonies of Seljuk Turks planted on the Struma, the Vardar, and the Vistritza before Othman; and the future conquerors of Constantinople had added others, as far north as the Kossovo plain, before they marched to make an end of the Byzantine Empire. As the sentiment of the Moslem world in favour of these communities may be greater, so may the Caliph's loss of prestige, if he must now abandon them to Giaur rule, or transport them exiles to Asia. But these losses are trifles compared with another and supplementary one, which that of Macedonia seems inevitably to entail—the loss of Albania. This momentous consequence, which the Powers, foreseeing, hastened to avert in 1878 by tearing up the Treaty of San Stefano and annulling Macedonian Bulgaria, and the Sultan so dreaded that his consent to the cession even of the southern pashalik of Yanina was not to be obtained, will follow Macedonian emancipation as surely as night follows day. A glance at the map, and a moment's reflection on the maritime impotence of Turkey, will show why. The Albanians themselves are under no illusion about the matter; and so far as chiefs can take common counsel, who must first proclaim a Truce of God, and then gather armed to the teeth to see that it is kept, they have debated more than once on the course to be adopted. Rejecting certain obscure Servian overtures early in 1901, and a little later an appeal from an Italianised descendant of Scanderbeg who would be recognised as prince of an autonomous state, they revived in 1902 an old project of federation with the Hellenic Kingdom.1 They do not pretend to admire its military spirit, or even its civic integrity; but under its benign and ineffective flag they frankly anticipate comparative immunity for the indulgence of their peculiar social tastes. Within the past two years, in this district of Kossovo, at Kalkandelen, at Dibra, in the Mirdite country, and even in Epirus, the Albanians have more than once pushed their panic-stricken protests against the beginning of change in Macedonia to the point of armed rebellion. Not that they would call rebellion even a movement in which the laying of formal siege to Ottoman troops in Mitrovitza and Prishtina, the slicing of an Ottoman governor's ears in Ferisovich, and the shooting of an Ottoman commissary at Dibra, have been characteristic events; for the defence of local custom and parochial independence even with arms has not hitherto been held rebellious in Albania. The beys, while imprisoning Turkish commissioners, have always been careful to distinguish between hostility to the Caliph and hostility to Reform; and nothing seems to have created so profound an impression through the Albanian tribes as the discovery that Hi Imi Pasha really meant business when he marched on Ipek and Jakova early in 1903. Poor beys of Kossovo! survivors of a past age, whereof Urquhart has recounted the beginning of the end. When the Central Government required nothing of them but a modest tribute, they often ruled their own localities not unwisely in their own interests. But the day of decentralised government is past in the Balkans, and their intransigeance will not avail them. If there are any crypto-Christians among them still, they may soon declare themselves now, and the rest must go under, or become Mohajin in Asia, paying heavily at the last for less than two centuries of politic apostasy. What his Empire has owed to the Albanian race, the present Sultan is only too well aware, and no one acquainted with Ottoman • See Pmrl. Paper; Twrley, No. 1 (1903), pp. 5, 116, 169, 177. history can well state in terms too strong. Since vigour died down in the true Osmanlis, the 'Arnaut' has been the prop and pillar of the heritage of Othman. It was the Albanian house of Kiiprili that held the Empire of Suleiman together through the seventeenth century: Albanians, as officials at Stambul and as policeofficers and governors in the provinces, have been said by every traveller in Turkey during the eighteenth century to supply in nearly every case conspicuous exceptions to the rule of Ottoman place-men. Even to-day, wherever in Asia Minor or Syria one finds the roads comparatively safe, the villages quiet, and government an obvious if grim reality, one is sure to learn in nine cases out of ten that the real executive officer is an Arnaut. In the tenth case he is usually of Caucasian origin. The most capable and honest man now concerned in introducing reform into Macedonia on the Sultan's part is Ferid Pasha, an Albanian. It is not too much to say that the Albanian race has furnished for two centuries the one invigorating European element to the Ottoman system, and since the disgrace of the Phanariote Greeks, which ensued on the War of Liberation, the only such element. Nor is it only to Turkey that it has been of supreme value. Almost every genuine hero of the Greek struggle between 1820 and 1830 was an Albanian; and at this day the rare spectacle of a man of energy and promptitude in the Hellenic administration is usually due to the Albanian blood of Epirus, Hydra, Psara, or another of the pseudo-Hellenic regions of Greece. The paramount military importance of the Albanian in Turkey dates from the decay of the Janissaries; and after the final destruction of the latter in 1826, the Arnauts became the mainstay of a government which, despite all outward changes, had still to rest, as of old, solely on armed force. They had already reconquered Egypt, first for the Sultan, and then for one of their own number, whose descendant is still its titular ruler: they had raised Ali Pasha of Tepelen to an all but independent throne, and were presently to enable Mustapha Pasha of Scodra to be in a position to have sealed the fate of the invading Russian army in 1829, had he anticipated the Treaty of Adrianople. To the suppression of the Greek revolt Mahmud had no other troops to send. It was an Albanian force which took Missolonghi at its own good time;l it was Albanians, too, who stormed Kasos for 1 See Urquhart, Spirit of the East, i. p. 253, for light on the true inwardness of trbe protracted siege of Missolonghi. Ibrahim, and were the most useful agents in the reconquest of the Morea and Athens. In our own day they are to be found where the Sultan needs picked troops or the most soldierly of guards. They form the nucleus of the best of his army corps, the Fourth, which watches the Russian frontier in Asia. They hold the all-important district of the Holy Cities of Arabia: and they and no others guard in Yildiz the Caliphial person itself. Cut off from the centre by a belt of autonomous Christian territory, not a few Albanians of the present generation would doubtless elect to expatriate themselves and follow still the receding shadow of their Padishah; but the race must soon cease to be a potent factor in the Ottoman system. And what then? Deprived of its single effective European element, restricted to a corner of Roumelia, could the Turkish Empire long subsist in Europe at all? There would be little enough reason then—there is little enough now—even from the Turks' point of view, for delaying the final abandonment of European soil. Mahomet II. planted his flag in Constantinople to acquire such prestige as still hung about the imperial name of Rome in the East. But all that prestige has long since waned and disappeared; and for two centuries at least the grave embarrassments which a seat in Europe entails on a Moslem Caliph have not been compensated by any practical advantage, Each successive Sultan has had a double game to play of ever-increasing difficulty: a game imposed on him by the incongruous inheritance of the two thrones of Byzantine and Arab Empire. In virtue of his tenure of the first, he must maintain himself at the natural capital of the Western East, on Europe's main crossway, astride of roads whose ends, west and east, are in infidel hands. There he accepted as his subjects, and has had to protect more or less, Christian majoritie», survivors of an Empire which was once the protagonist of Christendom; and there too he finds himself in inevitably close relation with the mightier Christian races, whose force has waxed as his has waned. At the same time, and on the same seat of empire, the Ottoman Sultan is Caliph, sworn to unite and lead the legions of Islam against Christendom, Jewry, and all heathenry. He is titular head of a vast community of creed, the breath of whose life is propagation by force of arms. The vital centre of this community is far from Stambul, in a land which Europeans may |
