The Ottoman Empire is named after its eponymous founder, the Emir Osman. "Osman" is from Arabic, ʿUθmān (عُثْمَان), the name of the Third Caliph. We get /s/ in "Osman" because the /θ/ becomes /s/ in Persian, a language that, for secular purposes, had become by the 10th century as prestigious in ʾIslām as Arabic. From the /θ/ becoming a /t/, as it does in Italian or Modern Arabic, we get "Ottoman," henceforth the name of the dynasty of Osman -- otherwise , Osmanlı (عُثْمَانْلِى).
The proper name of the country, as it has become, Türkiye, (تُرْكِيَا), Turkey, is from the name of the people or the language, the Turks and Turkish, respectively. That goes back well before the Ottoman Empire and applies to other Altaic speaking peoples and their languages in Central Asia; but modern Turkey, even after several Pan-Turkish or Pan-Turanian movements, has tended to absorb the Turkish identity from the other peoples to the East -- the Kazakhs now seem to think of themselves as Kazakhs, not Turks.
Recently, the aspiring dictator of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has decided that "Türkiye," rather than "Turkey," should be used diplomatically and in public discourse for Turkey -- we already see it in commercials for Turkish tourism on American television -- perhaps because "Turkey" sounds like the stupid bird that Americans eat on Thanksgiving. Since we know that Erdoğan thinks that insults against him are a crime, this sounds characteristic of his thinking. Perhaps tourism would be better encouraged if Erdoğan had not made Sancta Sophia and other Byzantine churches into mosques, after Atatürk had secularized them. At the same time, a significant segment of Turkish public opinion seems to have gone Islamist, anti-American, and anti-Semitic -- where Turkey used to be a reliable friend of Israel.
Apart from the Turkic past, Turkish identity has otherwise come from ʾIslām, in which the Turks became a major factor when the Seljuk Turks took Baghdad in 1055, and from Anatolia, which the Seljuks invaded in 1071, establishing the Sultānate of Rūm, and where the Ottomans eventually overthrew and replaced Romania, i.e. the Mediaeval Roman or so-called "Byzantine" Empire. By the end of the 15th century, the Ottoman Empire was in extent much like Romania of the Macedonian Emperors had been in the mid-11th century, with, of course, now the same capital, Constantinople. Much that seems characteristic of ʾIslām today, like the domed mosque, inspired by the great church of Sancta Sophia, and perhaps even the symbol of the Crescent, are due to Byzantine influence by way of the Ottomans. There is therefore a sense in which I would regard the history of the Ottoman Empire as a continuation, mutatis mutandis, of Roman history. Thus, Lord Kinross (John Patrick Douglas Balfour, 3rd Baron Kinross, 1904-1976), in his The Ottoman Centuries, The Rise and Fall of the Turkish Empire [Morrow Quill Paperbacks, 1977], gives Part II of the book the title "The New Byzantium" -- hence the "Fifth [Roman] Empire" and "Islamic Byzantium" designations in the heading above.
As an Islamic state, of course, Turkey does not really belong to the same civilization as Ancient Rome or Mediaeval Constantinople, but then that sort of mismatch continues in the story of Modern Turkey, which Atatürk tried, with considerable success, to make into a European rather than a Middle Eastern country. This achievement is now eroding; and the conflicts that attend these different influences continue.
V. THE FIFTH EMPIRE, OTTOMANS,
ISLAMIC "BYZANTIUM," 1453-1922,
Era of Diocletian 1170-1639, 469 years
Osmanlı Oghulları | |
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ʿOsman I | Amir, 1290-1326 |
village of Söğüt, 1265; defeats Romans near Nicomedia, Ottoman conquest begins, 1302; Seljuks overthrown, 1307; Bursa [Prusa] taken, 1326 | |
Orkhān | 1326-1359 |
defeats Andronicus III, 1329; İznik [Nicaea] taken, 1331; İzmid [Nicomedia] taken, 1337; Gelibolu [Kallipolis] taken, 1354; Ankara [Angora] taken, 1354 | |
Murād I | Sulṭān, 1359-1389 |
Edirne [Adrianople] taken, 1369; Konya [Iconium] taken, 1387; Thessalonica taken, 1387; battle of Kosovo, "Field of the Blackbirds," Sulṭān killed defeating Serbs, 1389 | |
Bāyezīd I Yıldırım, the "Thunderbolt" | 1389-1402 |
Siege of Constantinople, 1394-1402; Battle of Nicopolis, Sigismund of Hungary defeated, 1396; Battle of Ankara, Sulṭān defeated, captured & imprisoned by Tamerlane, 1402 | |
Meḥmed I | 1402-1421 |
Civil War, 1402-1413, between Meḥmed, Süleymān, & Mūsā; Thessalonica ceded to Romania, 1403 | |
Murād II | 1421-1451 |
Siege of Constantinople, 1422; Thessalonica captured from Venice, 1430; Crusade of Varna, János Hunyadi of Transylvania defeated, Vadislav of Hungary & Poland killed, 1444; invades Morea, breaking Hexamilion Wall with cannon fire, enslaving 60,000, 1446 | |
Meḥmed II Fātiḥ the "Conqueror" | 1451-1481 |
İstanbul [Constantinople] taken, 1453; conquest of Bosnia, 1463; Khanate of Crimea becomes a Vassal, 1475; Siege of Rhodes repulsed, 1480 | |
Bāyezīd II | 1481-1512 |
earthquake, "little doomsday," 1509 | |
Selīm I Yavuz, "the Grim" | 1512-1520 |
Conquest of Syria and Egypt, 1516-1517 | |
Süleymān I, the Magnificent | 1520-1566 |
Fall of Rhodes, 1523; Battle of Mohács, Conquest of Hungary, death of Louis II of Hungary & Bohemia, 1526; First Siege of Vienna, 1529; Conquest of Mesopotamia, 1534; First public coffee-house, 1554; Appeal arrives from Sulṭān of Acheh for aid against the Portuguese, 1563; Siege of Malta, 1565 | |
Selīm II | 1566-1574 |
Peace of Adrianople, tribute from Austria, 1568; conquest of Cyprus, 1571; Battle of Lepanto, naval defeat by Spain, Venice, & Malta, 1571 | |
Murād III | 1574-1595 |
first English ambassador, William Harborne, 1582; inconclusive war with Austria, 1593-1606 | |
Meḥmed III | 1595-1603 |
tobacco introduced, 1601 | |
Aḥmed I | 1603-1617 |
Muṣṭafā I | 1617-1618 |
deposed | |
ʾOsmān II | 1618-1622 |
Bosporus freezes, 1620; deposed & murdered because of intention to Pilgrimage to Mecca & raise an Arab army | |
Aḥmed I (restored) | 1622-1623 |
Murād IV | 1623-1640 |
tobacco prohibited, 1633 | |
Ibrāhīm | 1640-1648 |
tobacco allowed, 1647; earthquake, 1648 | |
Meḥmed IV | 1648-1687 |
Naval defeat by Venice & Malta at Dardanelles, 1656; War with Austria, 1663-1664; Conquest of Crete from Venice, 1669; Second Siege of Vienna, 1683; Austrian conquest of Hungary, 1686-1697; defeated at Mohács, Army Mutinies, Vizier executed, Meḥmed deposed, 1687 | |
Süleymān II | 1687-1691 |
Parthenon destroyed in explosion, 1687; Begrade lost, 1688 | |
Aḥmed II | 1691-1695 |
Muṣṭafā II | 1695-1703 |
Russia takes Azov, 1696; defeat at Zenta, by Eugene of Savoy, loss of Hungary, 1697; Peace of Karolwitz, 1699 | |
Aḥmed III | 1703-1730 |
last levy of children for the Janissaries, 1703; Recovery of Azov, 1711; War with Austria, 1716-1718; Loss of Banat, Serbia, & Little Wallachia, 1716-1718; defeat at Belgrade by Eugene, 1717; Peace of Passarowitz, 1718; earthquake, 1719 | |
Maḥmud I | 1730-1754 |
War with Austria, Recovery of Serbia & Wallachia, 1737-1739; Peace of Belgrade, 1739 | |
ʾOsmān III | 1754-1757 |
Muṣṭafā III | 1757-1774 |
earthquake, 1766; Russo-Turkish War, 1768-1774; Russian occupation of Wallachia & Moldavia, 1769-1774; defeated by Russia, Naval Battle of Chesma, July 5-7, 1770, Battle of Larga, July 7, 1770, Battle of Kagul, August 1, 1770 | |
ʿAbdül-Ḥamīd I | 1774-1789 |
Russian conquest of Khānate of Crimea, 1774-1783 | |
Selīm III | 1789-1807 |
Odessa annexed by Russia, 1791; Revolt of Serbs, 1804-1813; Russian invasion, occupation of Moldavia & Wallachia, 1806-1812; Sulṭān overthrown by Janissaries, 1807 | |
Muṣṭafā IV | 1807-1808 |
Maḥmūd II | 1808-1839 |
Treaty of Bucharest, Russia ceded Bessarabia, 1812; Serbian autonomy, 1813; Greek Revolt, 1821-1829; Patriarch executed, 1821; Sulṭān massacres Janissaries, 1826; adoption of the fez, 1826-1829; Russian invasion, occupation of Moldavia & Wallachia, 1828-1829; Treaty of Adrianople, Greek Independence, Danube Delta to Russia, autonomy of Moldavia & Wallachia, 1829; defeat by Egyptians, battle of Nezib, navy defects to Egypt, 1839 | |
ʿAbdül-Mejīd I | 1839-1861 |
Crimean War, 1853-1856; Russian invasion, 1853; Britain, France, & Austria enter against Russia, 1854; Austria occupies Moldavia & Wallachia, 1854-1857; Siege of Sebastopol, 1854-1855; Peace of Paris, recovery of Danube Delta, Wallachia & Moldavia combined as Romania, with part of Bessarabia, 1856 | |
ʿAbdül-ʿAzīz | 1861-1876 |
Revolts in Bosnia & Bulgaria, 1875-1876 | |
Murād V | 1876 |
ʿAbdül-Ḥamīd II, "the Damned" | 1876-1909, d.1918 |
Russo-Turkish War, 1877-1878; Congress of Berlin, Serbia, Romania, & Montenegro Independent, Bulgaria autonomous, Bessarabia to Russia, Dobruja to Romania, Cyprus to Britain, Bosnia, Herzegovina & Novipazar, Austrian Protectorate, 1878; British Occupy Egypt, 1882; Bulgaria annexes East Rumelia, 1885; earthquake, 1894; massacres of Armenians, perhaps 200,000, 1894-1896; revolt of the Young Turks, 1908, Sulṭān overthrown | |
Meḥmed V | 1909-1918 |
First Balkan War, 1912-1913; Coup d'État, Grand Vizier Maḥmud Ševket Paša assassinated, 1913; Italy occupies Libya & the Dodecanese, 1912; Second Balkan War, recovery of Adrianople, 1913; World War I, 1914-1918; deportation & massacre of Armenians & Nestorian & Syriac Christians, more than 1.5 million, 1915-1916 | |
Meḥmed VI | 1918-1922, d.1926 |
Allied Occupation of Constantinople, 1918-1923; massacres & deportaton of Greeks, more than 1 million, 1919-1922; Revolt of Kemal, 1920, Treaty of Sèvres, Greeks occupy Smyrna, Bursa, & Edirne, 145,693 White Russian refugees arrive, 1920; Armenian Republic conquered by Kemal, 1920-1921; Greco-Turkish War, 1920-1922; Greeks defeated by Kemal, Smyrna taken, Greek commander captured, 200,000 Greeks flee, massacred, or deported, 1922-1924 | |
ʿAbdül-Mejīd II | Caliph only, 1922-1924, d.1944 |
Treaty of Lausanne, Allied evacuation, Kemal enters Constantinople, 1923 |
The new domains that resulted were the Oghullar or "sons" of Rūm. These included many , ghuzāh (غُزَاة; singular ghāzin, -- غَازٍ -- or ghāzī, , without the indefinite nunation), or fighters for ʾIslām (otherwise , mujāhidūn, مُجَاهِدُون), particularly frontier fighters. However, ghāzin literally means someone engaged in a , ghazwah (غَزْوَة), a "raid," which could simply have meant a tribal affair, with no relation to the , Jihād (جِهَاد), or proper warfare.
Strictly speaking, frontier fighters would be , murābiṭūn (مُرَابِطُون; singular , murābiṭ, مُرَابِط), those fighters at the , ribāṭ (رِبَاط), the frontier or, more specificially, frontier fortress.
Curiously, this terminology tended to drift towards North Africa, where the name fixes on the dynasty of the Almoravids, the Spanish pronunciation of ʾal-Murābiṭūn, . Also, the meaning of ribāṭ itself drifted towards "hermitage," something a little unusual in ʾIslām, where there is no formal monasticism -- or even toward meaning "caravansary" or "hospice." This North African locus, and the changing meanings, may be why the Turkish fighters in the East became known just as ghuzāh, .
'Osman Ghāzī, (now just Osman Gazi) found himself on the frontier of Roman Bithynia, across from his Christian military counterparts, the akritai, ἀκρίται (singular akritês, ἀκρίτης). He defeated the Roman army at Bapheus in 1302 but is best remembered for breaking through into Bithynia and capturing Prusa (1326), which became Bursa, the first capital of the Ottoman Emirate.
Thereafter Ottoman progress was steady and often spectacular. The most fateful moment may have been in 1354, when Turkish forces were ferried across to Europe to help in a war between Venice and Genoa. I think John Cantacuzenus was responsible for this. When Orkhān took Kallipolis, after an earthquake had thrown down its walls -- to become "Gelibolu" in Turkish but better known as "Gallipoli" in Italian -- the Ottomans achieved a fateful foothold in Europe whose importance would still echo in World War I -- and still belongs to Turkey today.
While Ankara would be taken in the same year, this is not a city that would be of political importance until Atatürk chose it to be the capital many years later. Instead, when Adrianople was captured in 1369, the Ottomans transferred their capital there from Bursa. The Ottoman capital was now on the continent of Europe, where it would remain, with a switch to Constantinople, all the rest of the dynasty.
In short order Turkey became a European as much or more than an Asian power, a duality that persists, even when Turkey's modern holdings in Europe are a shadow of the former Empire. As the Anatolian Roman Empire was known in Arabic and Turkish as Rūm, , initial Ottoman possessions in Europe became Rumelia (Turkish Rumeli, ) -- subsequently contrasted with Anatolia as Anadolu (, where we see some not unusual in Ottoman Turkish, that a final "u" is actually written as a "y," with the phonetic expression determined by vowel harmony).
Steady Ottoman conquest and victory suffered a stunning setback in 1402. Bāyezīd I, known as the "Thunderbolt" (Yıldırım), who had obtained a diploma from the Abbasid Caliph in Egypt as Sulṭān of Rūm, was defeated and captured by Tamerlane at the Battle of Ankara. He died in captivity, Tamerlane restored some of the Oghullar, and Bāyezīd's sons, whimsically named after the founders of Judaism, Christianity, and Islām, fell out among each other in a fraternal civil war (note that ʿÎsā is Arabic for Jesus, as Mūsā is for Moses). With poetic suitability, Meḥmed I, named, of course, after Muḥammad, won the Throne. He then initiated a grim Ottoman custom. New Sulṭāns henceforth, until 1603, murdered all their many brothers (of their polygamous fathers) to prevent such civil wars. This had a more durable evil effect. Ottoman heirs were raised as prisoners in the Harem, with no exposure to the outside world or real political education. Even a Sulṭān without rivals, and even a Sulṭān who no longer murdered his brothers, would have little of the knowledge or experience to be an effective ruler. It is hard to know how much this contributed to Ottoman stagnation and decline, but the effect was likely considerable.
It took a couple of generations for the Ottomans to recover from Tamerlane. When a young Meḥmed II came to the Throne, however, the Empire was ready and the new Sulṭān went straight for Constantinople. On May 29, 1453, its walls breached for the first time by modern cannonballs, Constantinople fell -- exactly 1123 years and 19 days after the City was dedicated by Constantine I on May 11, 330 AD. The last Roman Emperor, Constantine XI, died anonymously in the fighting. His body may or may not have been recovered, leading to legends that he still sleeps under the Golden Gate of modern Istanbul. Europeans now seem loath to admit, as contemporaries then were well aware, that this was the last of the Roman Empire (Romania), which had effectively guarded the flank of Christendom and preserved the heritage of Classical Civilization all through the Middle Ages. With the Ottomans already on the Danube, there was nothing left to block their advance into Central Europe.
At Meḥmed II's death, the Ottoman Empire looked much the way Romania had in the 11th Century. Selīm I "the Grim" did what the old Emperors had never been able to do, restore Syria and Egypt to the empire, from the Mamlūks. Selīm I had deposed his own father, who died shortly thereafter, and executed two brothers already regarded as Heirs Apparent. A nephew fled to Persia. Selīm I smashed the Safavids and massacred Shiʿites.
Süleimān I then added areas that had never been permanent parts of the Roman Empire, like Iraq and Hungary. Picking up the conflict with the Safavids, Süleimān I for the first time since Alexander the Great removed Iraq from Iranian possession (the map above shows the pre-Safavid Aq Qoyunlu or White Sheep Turks). This was a historic shift in Middle Eastern geography. Iraq had long been linked to the states on the Iranian plateau, either ruling them or ruled by them. Even Trajan could not permanently detach Iraq from Irān. But now Süleimān did. And Iraq remained part of Turkey until after World War I, when the British installed a Hashemite monarchy. The conquest of Hungary was the first penetration of Islām into Francia since the conquest of Spain.
The Ottoman Empire was at its height for about 150 years. It had at that point, however, reached the limits beyond which it could not easily project its power. One reason for this was that much of the Ottoman army, like Medaeval armies, was still a matter of temporary annual levies. No modern conquests could have been made at all with such an army, but the spearhead of the Ottoman military consisted of the famous Janissaries (Turkish , Yeŋiçeri, يَڭِيچَرِى, "new soldiers"). This was a corps of wholly modern outfit and training, at least for the 15th and 16th centuries. However, it was also limited in size by a very Mediaeval aspect of its constitution: Its ranks were filled with slave boys taken from Christian families and converted to Islām. This was the infamous Devşirme, دوشيرمه ("collecting"), the "child levy" or "blood tax." These were drawn from all over the Empire, but there seemed to be particular emphasis on Circassians, from the Caucasus. It is hard to imagine an institution more evil: "We will take your child away from you, alienate him from his family, his religion, and his culture, and make him an enemy of all of them."
The use of slave troops for an Imperial guard went back to Abbasids and was currently the practice, as it had been for centuries, of the Mamlūks in Egypt (where , mamlūk means "possessed," i.e. a slave). The ultimate threat of such an elite body of troops is always that it will become a Praetorian Guard whose interest is more political and personal than it is faithful and disinterested. Thus, while Abbasid Caliphs were sometimes prisoners of their guards, the Mamlūks had actually overthrown their original employers, the Ayyūbid Sulṭāns, and replaced them.
The height of the evil influence of the Janissaries may be when they overthrew the reforming Sulṭān Selīm III in 1807. They met their end in 1826 when the vigorous Sulṭān Maḥmūd II turned the guns of his new artillery corps on the Janissary barracks and massacred them. It would prove difficult, however, for the Ottomans to find a replacement, since an effective modern military depended on an effective modern economy, which the Ottomans would really never have. In World War I Turkish soldiers would prove themselves tough and even formidable, given proper equipment, leadership, and support -- but these were often lacking. In Korea, Turkish troops had the reputation of being very tough -- and not taking prisoners.
It is noteworthy at the beginning of the 17th century that Ottoman Sulṭāns ceased to murder their brothers on accession. Henceforth the Throne passes, by Middle Eastern custom, to brothers and even to cousins before going to the next generation.
From the 16th to the 17th centuries, conflict continued with Austria and with Christian powers in the Mediterranean, but respective holdings didn't change much. The Sulṭān Aḥmad Mosque, or the Blue Mosque, adjacent to the site of the old Hippodrome of Constantinople, is a fitting symbol of this period. However, the Venetians were on the offensive, and most of the achievements of the period were due to the energetic Köprülü vizirs.
In 1656 the Valide Sultan, (Queen Mother), Turhan, appointed Mehmed Köprülü Grand Vizir (in the genealogy, "Köprülüzade" employs the Persian patronymic for the family). The long delayed fall of Crete in 1669 (from Venice) then seemed like the portent of renewed conquests.
The power of the Empire was renewed. A new assault was planned, after 150 years, against Vienna in 1683. But this turned into a disaster, suddenly revealing the relative weakness that had actually overcome the Empire. At first the siege went well. The Austrians were hard pressed, and the Ottoman works, over two months, since July 14th, relentlessly approached and undermined the walls. The City could well have fallen, and would have. Charges were set to open a large breach in the walls. Defenders were prepared to fight in the streets. However, Vienna in 1683 would have something that Constantinople in 1453 did not have, which was a significant relief and rescue force.
Raised by the tireless efforts of the Emperor Leopold I (1658-1705), 81,000 Polish, Austrian, and German troops (about half the size of the Ottoman army) approached the city on 12 September 1683, led by the Polish King John III Sobieski (1674-1696).
"King John III Sobieski blessing Polish attack on Turks in Vienna, 1683," 1871, by Juliusz Kossak (1824–1899) |
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Where Süleymān I had broken off the siege and withdrawn in good order from Vienna in 1529, the retreat in 1683 was a disaster. The siege was not lifted, it was destroyed, along with the Ottoman army.
The Ottoman camp was so large that it was looted for a full week; and the victorious soldiers found coffee, from Ethiopia, for the first time in Central Europe -- it had arrived in England by sea earlier, with the first coffee house opening in 1652. The ability of the Turks to stay awake during the long siege was then attributed to this wonder drug.
The 1683 siege and battle of Vienna turned out to be the High Water Mark of the Ottoman Empire. As the failure of Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg is seen as the High Water Mark of the Confederacy, the success of King John's charge seals the limit of the Ottoman advance in Europe. The age of Ottoman decline had begun. World War I would see the last losses, and the end of the Empire itself.
The Grand Vizir, Qara "Black" Mustafa, now a Köprülü-in-law, who planned and led the Vienna campaign, was executed after the retreat. In the aftermath, even a de facto alliance with friendly France, the greatest power of the day, could not prevent a series of defeats, the loss of Hungary, and the temporary loss of southern Greece to Venice (when the Parthenon would be destroyed in 1687).
The threat of continuous defeat, which the beginning of the 18th century seemed to display, receded somewhat. Austria would not advance deeper into the Balkans and there was some breathing room. Nevertheless, the Ottomans were now facing the problem of catching up with the technological advances of Europe, even of relatively backward Russia, which it was in no way prepared to tackle. The problem was not any particular hostility to modern commercial culture -- merchants and markets were perfectly respectable characteristics of Middle Eastern Islāmic civilization -- but a very profound social conservativism, a satisfaction with the Mediaeval forms of life, prevented any of this from developing into modern institutions of banking, industry, and entrepreneurship.
Like the Chinese, the Turks literally did not believe there was anything new to learn, much less from despised Unbelievers. The bustle and excitement of the great Bazaar of Constantinople thus never led to the explosion of energy and production that was already characteristic of the Netherlands and other places in Western Europe. Turkey would always be playing catch-up but would then never actually catch up. Institutional reforms, when they were even tried, still could never go deep enough, could never actually produce a people striving and inquisitive beyond their previous habits. Indeed, much of business was conducted by Greeks and Armenians. Peter the Great faced similar problems with another conservative society about the same time.
At the beginning of the 19th century, as Napoleon surged back and forth across Europe, the subject Christians of the Balkans became more and more restless, and Russia began to try again and again to retrieve Constantinople for Christendom and break through the Straits. The Ottomans, although achieving some successes, were not going to be able to resist this. The Empire's status as the "Sick Man of Europe" was now becoming quite established. It was Realpolitik that came to the rescue of the Sulṭān: Britain did not want Russia to be too successful and so entered into a long policy of supporting the Turks against the forces, from Russia or Egypt or wherever, that might result in the collapse of Ottoman rule. Nevertheless, Britain could not allow too much oppression of subject Christians, and as the century wore on, small Christian states, from Serbia to Greece to Bulgaria, were allowed autonomy and then independence by the agreement of the Great Powers. This did not get any of them all they wanted, and it certainly limited Russian gains, but it kept the geo-political dam from bursting and kept the Sulṭān from falling off his Throne. When Turkey joined the Central Powers in World War I, however, Britain would have had good reason to regret its policy.
Finally, it was the internal forces of Turkey that began to shake things up after a pattern that would become all too familiar in "underdeveloped" countries later: A military coup, the "Young Turks," against the detested Sulṭān ʿAbdül-Hamīd II, known as "the Damned," in 1908. This did not help much when the Balkan states fell on Turkey in the First Balkan War of 1912. The choice of Germany as a European ally would then be fatal for the Ottoman future.
Another ill effect was the transformation of the Mediaeval Cause of Islām into a more modern Turkish nationalism. This did not work well, and never would, with the Arabs, Armenians, and Kurds living within Turkish borders. The disaffection of the first exploded in a pro-Allied revolt in World War I. Suspicion about the second, with the Russians actively promoting Armenian disaffection (but then often doing little when substantive support was needed), led to shameful deportation and massacre about the same time.
Although Turkish actions, even now, are justified in terms of the disloyalty, or suspected disloyalty, of the Armenians, no actions amounting to persecution, deportation, or genocide were launched against the Arabs, many of whom ended up in open revolt, adhering to the Allied cause, although, as we know, there were some executions of Arab nationalists in Damascus and Beirut: which actually helped spark the revolt in the first place.
The leadership of the Young Turks boiled down to the "Three Pashas," , who came to power in the Coup of 1913. These were Meḥmed Ṭalaʿat (Talaat, Talāt), (1874-1921), Ismaʾil Enver, (1881-1922), and Aḥmed Jemāl (Djemal, Cemal), (1872-1922). These three led Turkey into World War I, engineered the Armenian genocide, were condemned in absentia by Turkish authorities after the War, and then met their deaths soon afterwards. In 1921, Talaat was assassinated in Berlin by an Armenian student, Soghomon Tehlirian (1896-1960). Both British and Russian intelligence had put out a kind of "contract" for the killing of Talaat, and Tehlirian may have been acting with their aid and cooperation. Although freely admitting the killing, he was found innocent of murder after a three day trial. Tehlirian is buried under an elaborate monument in Fresno, California.
Enver ended up Russia, where Lenin sent him to help pro-Soviet forces in Bukhara. There he broke with the Soviets and was killed in fighting, evidently by a Soviet force led by an Armenian, Hakob Malkumyan (1885-1962). After the War, Jemāl fled to Afghanistan but then traveled to Georgia to negotiate with the Soviets, where he was assassinated by a three man Armenian team, which, as with Soghomon Tehlirian, was part of "Operation Nemesis," a sort of Armenian death squad that assassinated a number of former Ottoman officials associated with the Armenian genocide. Talaat and Enver are actually buried at the "Monument of Liberty" in İstanbul, apparently reflecting their rehabilitation as Turkish nationalists. For some reason, Jemāl is only buried in Erzurum.
On August 21, 1915, eleven suspected Arab nationalist leaders were hung in the central square of Beirut, oddly called "Liberty Square" at the time, now "Martyrs Square," by the Turkish military authorities. On May 6, 1916, the Turks executed twenty-one others, seven in Damascus and fourteen in Beirut. On hearing the news of the latter, Prince Fayṣal, son of the Sharīf Ḥusayn of Mecca, who was visiting near Damascus, is supposed to have thrown down his headress and exclaimed, "Death has become sweet, Oh Arabs!" (a literary quotation by Fayṣal that I have not been able to track down either in English or Arabic). Fayṣal returned to Mecca, and the Arab Revolt against the Turks, long in preparation by Fayṣal's father, commenced on the 5th of June.
But there have been no accusations of Turkish deportations or genocide against the Arabs. Although Woodrow Wilson and the Treaty of Sèvres impotently called for an independent Armenian state, in an area where there were few Armenians left, soon there would be almost none, after Mustafa Kemal pushed the Armenian Republic back east of the Araks (Aras) River in 1920.
Nationalistic conflict over the Kurds continues, with campaigns of terrorism and suppression, even today. No Power has ever called for an independent Kurdish state. Atatürk made the word "Kurd" and the Kurdish language illegal, and even now Kurdish names for children are prohibited as "terrorism." Kurdish efforts at revolt in Turkey have failed, but a de facto Kurdish state has arisen in Iraq and Syria, and been subject to Turkish attacks, even while Americans are embedded with Kurdish forces, whom the United States has supported. This is part of the geopolitical change by which Turkey has been shifting away from NATO and the West towards Islamism and a Russian alliance.
Meanwhile, after World War I, the British and French were perfectly happy to detach the Arab lands from the Empire, not for independence, to be sure, but to further British and French imperial projects. This turned out to be more trouble than it was worth, especially when the Zionist colonization of Palestine, allowed by the British, led to the creation of Israel and to a conflict, including five major wars (1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982), that continues until today. The settlement of World War I has thus been aptly called "the peace to end all peace" -- although much the same dynamic is evident with India and Pakistan, where Muslims were as much in favor of Partition as they were against it in Palestine.
Allied Occupation High Commissioners, 1918-1923 | |
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British | |
Admiral Somerset Gouth-Calthorpe | 1918-1919 |
Admiral John de Robeck | 1919-1920 |
Sir Horace Rumbold | 1920-1923 |
French | |
Louis Franchet d'Esperey | 1918-1919 |
Albert Defrance | 1919-1920 |
Maurice César Joseph Pellé | 1921-1923 |
Italian | |
Count Carlo Sforza | 1918-1919 |
Marchese Eugenio Camillo Garroni | 1920-1923 |
Greek | |
Efthymios Kanellopoulos | 1918-1923 |
Treaty of Lausanne, 24 July 1923; Allied evacuation, 24 August-2 October 1923 |
Occupation authority was vested in a Council of "High Commissioners," from Britain, France, Italy, and Greece, all of whom had territorial interests against the Ottoman Empire. The British seem to have been the senior partners in this, and most directly in military command. They were also the most biased in favor of the Greeks, who were allowed and encouraged to advance into Turkish territories. King Constantine of Greece, who had been deposed as pro-German in 1917, but who had also sometimes styled himself "Constantine XII" in succession to the last Roman Emperor, returned to the Throne in 1920 and actually entered Edirne -- Adrianople -- as a liberated city. Many Greeks expected Constantinople to be next, although the Allies did prohibit that.
The Greeks, and those relying on them, had their chance, and they even thought they could march into the interior of Anatolia from Smyrna. But what they met were the battle-hardened veterans of Gallipoli, commanded by their very commander, the resolute Mustafa Kemal -- who destroyed the Greek Army, captured its general, and entered Smyrna -- İzmir -- on 9 September 1922. The Greek cause collapsed, and the Allies, who had no real interest in restarting a war with Turkey, realized that their position was hopeless. Also, the success of the Russian Revolution meant that Russian interests in the Straits, or in Constantinople, were no longer of concern. The British Government actually fell, ending the career of David Lloyd George.
An ethnographic map from 1861 shows us that Thrace and the litoral of the Sea of Mamara were predominantly Greek. So the Greeks were justified in occupying Thrace and Adrianople. However, Atatürk, of course, drove them out. The population of Constantinople itself, which was less than half Turkish in 1914, increased to 67% by 1927, 80% by 1950, and is now all but entirely so. Also noteworthy here is that the island of Imbros, now the only Turkish island in the Aegean Sea, was nevertheless entirely Greek. The Turkish population shown on Crete was itself deported after World War I (1923).
The Sultān, whose position had been compromised, who had not been a free agent under either the Young Turks or the Occupation, and who had already been declared only a Caliph by Kemal (on 1 November 1922), abdicated and went into exile (17 Novembeer 1922). The Treaty of Lausanne, negotiated with Kemal rather than with the Sulṭān, was signed on 24 July 1923, the Allies evacuated by 2 October, and the Turkish Army, which had already infiltrated the City, formally arrived on 6 October. Once again, Constantinople was under Turkish, but no longer Ottoman (after 469 years), control. Indeed, Constantinople, without an Emperor, was no longer "Tsargrad," an Imperial Capital, for the first time in 1592 years. In 1926, the Turkish post office ceased recognizing "Constantinople" in addresses, although "İstanbul" did not formally become the name until 1930. Ankara had always been the capital for Kemal, become Atatürk -- who, athough he seemed to dislike Constantinople, actually died while living in the Dolmabahçe Palace in 1938.
As it happens, the Treaty of Lausanne, even with the Russians out of the picture, made the Straits an international waterway. Russian warships have enjoyed free transit, even at the height of the Cold War, with Turkey in NATO. This is about all that remains from the Treaty of Sèvres of restrictions on previous matters of Ottoman sovereignty. Germany should have been so lucky at Versailles.
The final genealogy of the Ottomans continues down to the living heirs of the dynasty. When Abdül-Mejīd II was deposed in 1924, he had been ruling as the Caliph, not as Ottoman Sultan; and both he and the entire family were expelled from Turkey. Male members of the family were not allowed back until 1973 (the women in 1951). I have identified Abdül-Mejīd II with the icon for a Pretender to the Throne (unspide crown), but numbered "0" since he had, after a fashion, occupied the Throne.
After him the Heads of the House of Osman are numbered in sequence, to the current Head, Harun Osmanoğlu (#9), and after him the Heirs in order of precedence. When one of those dies, the succession will need to jump -- in the Middle Eastern fashion to collateral lines. It may be a while before we get heirs who are not at least in their 80's. Recent heirs have some traditionally Ottoman names, but we see that others are now "Eric," "Roland," "Daniel," etc.
Everyone in the male line can use the surname "Osmanoğlu," "Son of Osman," although this is shown, perhaps gratiutiously, for only a few of the people in the diagram. Also, sons of actual Sultans can bear the title Şehzade, (Persian Šāhzāde, Hindi Šāhzāda, ), "Son of the King," with the Persian patronymic ending. There are some modifications in these names, as above, from modern Turkish orthography. Thus, since Cem is pronounced "Jem," that is how it is written here.
The upper part of the diagram has some female members of the family, but these disappear further down because, by House Law, there are no women (or non-Muslims) in the Succession, the purpose is to show the heirs in the order of Succession, and the diagram is already crowded enough. Indeed, it is a bewildering tangle. It ends up showing Ömer Hilmi, the son of Mehmed V, twice -- above (1) to show the marriage of one of his daughters, below (2) for the line of succession (the two occurrences are connected by a red line). Consequently, a larger, simplified, and untangled genealogy can be accessed in a popup. The popup diagram attempts to show the same generations on the same horizontal span, and it avoids lines crossing each other. There is only one (Shehzade) Ömer Hilmi. From this it is more easily determined that the Succession relies on date of birth, which tends to go from brother to brother to cousin in the same generation, but not always.
After the modern history of "ethnic cleansing" through massacre and deportation, it is now extraordinary and even jarring to recollect the ethnic patchwork of Ottoman Turkey, which was formalized in the "Millet," (Arabic millah, "religious community; religion, creed, faith, confession, denomination"), system of government, which afforded to the confessional communities degrees of self-government. One might walk down streets in early 20th century Istanbul and see nothing but signs in Greek and Armenian.
A study of the Ottoman Empire, for example, found that "of the 40 private bankers listed in Istanbul in 1912 not one bore a Muslim name." Nor was even one of the 34 stockbrokers in Istanbul a Turk. Of the capital assets of the 284 industrial firms employing five or more workers, 50 percent were owned by Greeks and another 20 percent by Armenians. In the seventeenth century Ottoman Empire, the palace medical staff consisted of 41 Jews and 21 Muslims. [Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, Basic Books, 2011, pp.117-188]
This was a world now long gone and in retrospect almost inconceivable. Equally striking is that the Christian community under the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople was the Millet-ı-Rūm, , the "community of Rome," retaining the identity of Mediaeval Romania, Ῥωμανία. Although this is often now said to be the "Greek" community, it initially included all Orthodox Christians under the authority of the Patriarch and even into the 20th century retained its identity as Rhômaioi, "Romans." Other Patriarchates might correspond to other Millets, such as the Bulgarians, Serbs, Romanians, and others. The Ottomans even sponsored the establishment of an Armenian Patriarchate in Constantinople in 1461, so as to distinguish the local Armenian community from the "Romans."
But "Rome," of course, was more than a Christian community. The Ottoman Sulṭān himself was the Qaisar-ı-Rūm, , the "Caesar of Rome." This should remind us of George of Trebizond (1395-1472/73) telling Meḥmed II the Conqueror, "Therefore you are the legitimate Emperor of the Romans... And he who is and remains Emperor of the Romans is also Emperor of the whole earth."
The great , Topkapı Palace (Sarayı, "its palace") occupies an area that was originally the acropolis of Byzantium. Constantine curiously left this site alone, perhaps out of persistent respect, or fear, for the old gods. I am only aware of one Mediaeval institution in the area, the Church and Monastery of St. George of Mangana. The circuit wall of the Topkapı grounds essentially encompasses all of ancient Byzantium.
The original Imperial Palace of the Emperors of Mediaeval Romania, the Great Palace, Μέγα Παλάτιον (Méga Palátion), entered by the Χαλκῆ, Chalke or Brazen Gate, from the square of the Augustaeum [or Augusteum, in Greek Αὐγουσταῖον, Augustaion or, often, Augusteion], was south of the Church of Hagia Sophia, down through the area of the present Sultan Aḥmad Mosque -- adjacent to the Hippodrome, where the Emperor's box was connected to the Palace -- all the way to the Sea of Marmara. Some excavation has uncovered floors and substructures in the Great Palace, which consisted of a number of buildings and so could even be construed as consisting of multiple palaces. One of those, with its own harbor on the Sea of Marmara, was the Βουκολέων, Bucoleon [Boukoleôn], Palace, which sometimes gives its name to the whole of the Great Palace.
The Great Palace was left in such disrepair by the Latins that the Palaeologi abandoned it for residence in the Βλαχέρναι, Blachernae Palace by the City walls. When Meḥmed II arrived, he is supposed to have wandered through the empty and ruined palace and quoted from Firdawsī:
The spider spins his web in the Palace of the Caesars,
An owl hoots in the towers of Afrasiyab [a Turanian king in the Shāh-nāma].
Dolmabahçe, Dolmabağçe: dolma, "filled, landfill," bahçe, bağ, "garden," Persian bāγ -- çe, lookks like a suffix, and ç is a suffix, but I don't see how that would work here -- the site was a garden created by landfill. |
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Today one of the sights of Istanbul is the , Fatih Camii, the "Conqueror's Mosque"(Fātiḥ Jāmi-i, the "conqueror," "his mosque," in the Turkish grammatical construction). This contains the tomb of Meḥmed II, with a dedicated mosque, school, hospice, and (formerly) caravansaray. It stands on the site of the Church of the Holy Apostles, which contained the Heroön, τὸ Ἡρῷον, the mausoleum of Constantine I and most subsequent Emperors of Romania (space for tombs was exhausted in 1028 with the burial of Constantine VIII -- perhaps a bad omen).
Already in ruinous disrepair in 1453 (though the seat of the Patriarch of Constantinople, 1453-1455), it is not clear what the fate of all the Imperial burials was. Tombs that were above ground are certainly gone, and some anonymous sarcophagi survive at the Istanbul Archaeological Museum. The bases of some of the original walls of the Church, however, have been identified; and I wonder if burials below ground or in a crypt may actually have simply been covered over by the later construction, the way the Imperial mosaics in Sancta Sophia were simply whitewashed, preserving them for modern display [note].
A great deal of Roman Constantinople actually survives underground and invisible in modern Istanbul. What the Church of the Holy Apostles probably looked like can still be seen in a probable copy, St. Mark's in Venice.
The spelling of the names of the Ottomans on this page is intended to indicate both the Turkish pronunciation and how they are spelled in Arabic. In practical terms this no longer matters, since Turkish is no longer written in the Arabic alphabet, but it is of historical interest. In fact, it may be illegal to write Turkish in the Arabic alphabet. I once heard that it was a felony to staple pages together at the upper right rather than the upper left corner. I have no confirmation of this.
Here I have pretty much followed the usage of The Cambridge History of Islam [Volume 1B, The Central Islamic Lands Since 1918, Cambridge University Press, 1970, 1977, p.734]. A good example is the name of the Conqueror of Constantinople, Meḥmed II. This name is Muḥammad in Arabic but is actually pronounced Me[h]met in Turkish -- which is an Altaic language that is entirely unrelated to Arabic. Some dispute the reality of the Ural-Altaic family, or even the Altaic family, or whether Korean and Japanese are Altaic members. We don't need to worry about that.
Obviously, some compromises are made and the system is not perfect. In general, the consonants look Arabic and the vowels Turkish. Since Turkish (following Persian) reads the Arabic alphabet with three s's (Arabic s, ṣ, and θ) and four z's (Arabic z, ẓ, ḍ, and ð), some attempt is made to differentiate (e.g. with s for θ). Modern Turkish writes c for English j and ç for English ch, but the English equivalents are used here, since most people will be completely unfamiliar with the conventions of Turkish orthography, whose peculiarities many books do not bother to explain.
The main reason that Arabic writing did not work well for Turkish was the Turkish vowel system. Where Classical Arabic had three short and three long vowels, and Persian could match its six vowels with those, Turkish has eight vowels, as shown below left (in the official Romanization).
The most intriguing thing about Turkish vowels is the system of vowel harmony. Related Ural-Altaic languages, like Mongolian and even Hungarian, also have vowel harmony, but this seems to appear in Turkish in its most complete, logical, and elegant form. The undotted "i" ("ı"), with the dotted capital "I" ("İ"), are distinctive.
The rules are simply, (1) front vowels are followed by front vowels (e.g. i by e), back vowels by back vowels (e.g. u by a), (2) unrounded vowels are followed by unrounded vowels (e.g. i by e), and (3) rounded vowels are followed by high rounded (e.g. o by u) or low unrounded vowels (e.g. o by a) [note].
There are Turkish grammatical inflections in which the vowel is supposed to be simply either high or low, with its character otherwise determined by the preceding vowels in the word -- thus, the common third person possessive suffix, which may appear as i, ı, u, or ü, is typically written as "y," ى, or "w," و, with its character otherwise determined by the earlier vowels. Specific vowels were all impossible to show in the Arabic alphabet without a special notation that might have been developed but, evidently, never was. This left Turkish orthography woefully inadequate to Turkish phonology.
Turkish grammar as six noun cases. Since Turkish is an "agglutinative" language, there are distinct suffixes for the cases (except for the nominative) and the root of the noun is not modified, as it would be in Greek or Latin. The table at right displays the suffixes, as modified by vowel harmony, and the Arabic letters that (ambiguously) wrote them. The "rounded" vowels are all high, because the corresponding low vowels, /o/ and /ö/, are precluded by vowel harmony.
Ottoman Case Suffixes | |||||||
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Cases | Arabic | Front | Back | ||||
High | Low | Rounded | High | Low | Rounded | ||
Nominative or Absolute | - | ||||||
Genitive | ڭ | -(n)iŋ | - | -(n)üŋ | -(n)ıŋ | - | -(n)uŋ |
Dative | ه | - | -(y)eh | - | - | -(y)ah | - |
Accusative | و/ى | -(y)i | - | -(y)ü | -(y)ı | - | -(y)u |
Locative | ده | - | -deh | - | - | -dah | - |
Ablative | دن | - | -den | - | - | -dan | - |
The table is based on The Routledge Introduction to Literary Ottoman, by Korkut Buğday [Routledge, 2009, translated by Jerold C. Frankes from German Osmanisch-Lehrbuch, Einführung in die Grundlagen der Literatursprache, Weisbaden, 1999]. The letters in parentheses are used where the noun ends in a vowel [cf. G.L. Lewis, Teach Yourself Turkish, 1953, 1975, p.29]. The Accusative case is only used for definite objects. Indefinite objects are "Absolute" and without suffix [cf. Lewis, p.27]. This is a version of what we see in "Ergative" languages, where the object of intransitive verbs is in the same case as the subject of transitive verbs.
Buğday says something that strikes me as odd, that /ü/ and /u/ do not occur in the Accusative case in Ottoman, as they do in Modern, Turkish [p.16]. However, if we are required to write only /i/ and /ı/, this would often violate vowel harmony. Rounded vowels must be followed by high rounded, or low unrounded, vowels. If the Accusative suffix requires a high vowel, then often only the rounded vowels will be allowed.
Buğday also seems to rule out /ü/ & /u/ in the 3rd person possessive pronoun [p.17], which is also a suffix, and is used for what Buğday calls the "generic genitive construction" [p.39], what Lewis calls the construction of the "Qualifying Relationship" [p.39], whose examples begin with Çarşamba gün-ü "Wednesday, its-day," (Persian چَهَارشَنْبِه, Čahāršanbeh, "Wednesday"), where we see vowel harmony enforced (gün-ü, گونو, or گونى, "its day"). This "Qualifying Relationship" is common in Turkish, as we have seen above in the name of the Topkapı palace.
Now, Turkish has foreign words that violate vowel harmony; but I would be astonished if the ordinary functioning of Turkish grammar, even in the Ottoman period, required such a violation. Since Turkish written in Arabic usually doesn't give us a clue about the pronunciation of the vowels, I would wonder how much evidence there actually is for what Buğday says.
There are many words in Turkish that violate vowel harmony, but by this they can be identified as foreign loan words -- for example İslām (instead of *İslem), from Arabic, and İstanbul (instead of *İstenbil), from Greek or Arabic. Arabic Turkiyā, , although retaining its Arabic spelling in Ottoman Turkish, nevertheless came to be pronounced with the proper vowel harmonic "e" in the final position, as Türkiye. However, the medial "i" violates vowel harmony. The word properly should be *Türküye -- with the high rounded "ü" followed by a high rounded "ü" -- or *Türkeye -- with the high rounded vowel followed by the low unrounded "e."
The phonology of Modern Turkish has simplified somewhat from Classical Ottoman Turkish. Unlike Persian or Urdu, Turkish only needed to introduce one extra letter to write a sound that did not exist in Persian or Arabic. This was for the velar nasal, "ng" ("ŋ"), as in words like dengiz (deŋiz), , "sea," or yalngız (yalŋız), , "alone." However, this sound has now been lost, and the modern pronunciation of "sea" is just deniz and of "alone" yalnız.
Of equal interest is the loss in Turkish of velar fricatives, such as "gh" (γ) and "kh" (χ). We often see the Arabic letters for "gh" and "q" (for which "gh" and "kh" were allophones) in Turkish words that are not of Persian or Arabic origin. Examples of this are the words for "son," , oghul; "mountain," , dagh; "white," , aq; and "black," , qara. Indeed, we can put together expressions that feature more than one obsolete sound: , the Aq Deŋiz, or "White Sea," i.e. the Mediterranean; and , the Qara Dagh, or "Black Mountain," i.e. Montenegro. Today, the "q" has become a "k," while the "gh" has become the "ğ," a "g" with a breve. This gives us ak and kara, oğul and dağ -- as in Ak Deniz and Kara Dağ.
This "ğ" is a notable letter in its own right. In other languages of the Mediterranean, like Italian and French, the letter "g" has been often reduced or become silent. In the names of the French physicist Louis de Broglie and the Italian-American art historian Camille Paglia, the "g" is silent in each name, often to the confusion of Americans. The gamma (γ) in Modern Greek is often no more than a "y," as in Γιάννης, Yannis, "John." The "g" in English is palatalized into a "j" before front vowels ("George," "gem" as opposed to "go"). Atatürk's spelling favors us with "ğ" to show where a "g" is reduced or silent.
Turkish Numbers | |
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one | |
two | |
three | |
four | |
five | |
six | |
seven | |
eight | |
nine | |
ten |
At the end of a word or before a consonant, "ğ" lengthens the preceding vowel, as where , dagh, becomes dağ. Between vowels, "ğ" becomes a glide: "y" between front vowels, "w" between back vowels. However, the first vowel may be lengthened and the second all but lost. The name of the present, dictatorial President of Turkey, Mr. Erdoğan, is usually pronounced in the news as "Erdowan." Close enough.
This phenomenon of the velar fricatives being lost to the reduced "ğ" was already well underway in Ottoman Turkish; and we also already see it in a word like the title "bey," , beğ, where the letter "k" was written for "ğ." I have no idea how long it has been since the "k" was actually pronounced that way, if ever.
A notable case is the name of the Seljuk Great Sulṭān Ṭughril Beg. I see this written at Wikipedia as (without the vowels), which would be read in Persian as Toghrelbek. However, the bek always seems to be read beg, which would be written more like . In Modern Turkish, we seem to get Tuğrul Beğ, where, of course, "gh," "g," and/or "k" have all become "ğ." There is uncertainty about the origin of beg. Suggestions are that it comes from a Persian cognate to , bhaga, "lord," in Sanskrit or even from a Chinese word that ultimately becomes the feudal rank , which was paek in Middle Chinese [A Student's Dictionary of Classical and Medieval Chinese, Paul W. Kroll, Brill, 2017, p.26].
All the lost phonology of Turkish was completely lost with the shift from the Arabic to the Latin alphabet. Unlike English, Turkish no longer contains, to the confusion of young spellers, evidence of earlier stages of the language.
We see special Turkish and Persian consonants in the name of the famous corps of "Janissaries," , the Yeŋiçeri or "new soldiers." Since this is unpronounceable in Arabic, the Arabic version is , Inkisharī, where the now lost Turkish nasal is replaced with "nk" and "ç" with "sh," with some alteration in the vowels also.
Two terms of Turkish or at least Altaic origin, with obsolete phonology, are now more recognizable in unrelated languages than in Turkish. These are the titles , agha, and , khan. Agha is now used as "Mr." in Persian. Khān is very familiar as a Turkish or Mongolian title in the Middle Ages (or as a beloved villain in Star Trek -- although he bears the characteristic Sikh surname "Singh"). The latter seems to be a variant, root, or derivative of khaghan, which is seen in Persian as , khāqān (the medial "q" is pronounced as "gh"). In Modern Turkish, with the loss of the velar fricatives, agha, just to mean "master, gentleman," is reduced to ağa, and khan to han -- although kağan (as from qaghan) is also seen as a surname. In Modern Mongolian, agha, meaning "elder brother," has been reduced to akh. The loss of intervocalic "g" is also something we evidently see in Mongolian, where khaan looks like a reduction of khaghan. For the purposes here, these titles simply futher illustrate the recent phonetic simplification of Turkish.
Books that we might expect to take some care using and explaining words in Ottoman Turkish that have changed since, because the account is about the Ottoman period, often do not do so. Thus, Istanbul, A Tale of Three Cities, by Bettany Hughes [Da Capo Press, 2017], and Constantinople, City of the World's Desire, 1453-1924, by Philip Mansel [John Murray, London, 1995], simply use Modern Turkish spelling and ignore the differences that existed in Ottoman Turkish. Mansel's case is worse, since he doesn't even use Turkish diacritics, leaving us with mysterious words that even Turks, unfamiliar with the history, would often not know how to pronounce. But scholarly mistreatment of language is nothing unusual.
Persian Numbers | |
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one | |
two | |
three | |
four | |
five | |
six | |
seven | |
eight | |
nine | |
ten |
As it happens, of course, fewer and fewer American students are even taught English grammar, much less enough Greek or Latin to understand or appreciate its use of them. This is not a virtue. Nor is the nationalistic enthusiasm that seeks to purge languages of "foreign" words, which has happened in Turkish, German, French, Hungarian, and elsewhere. This kind of thing is simply an attempt to purge history itself -- along with a ugly attempt to sharpen ethnic identities and differences.
Hagopian's attention to Arabic and Persian was very much like the arrangement of the much later, modern Persian Grammar of A.K.S. Lambton [Cambridge University Press, 1953, 1967]. Part I of the book (pp.3-177) is the Persian grammar proper, while Part II (pp.181-245) is "The Arabic Element." Similarly, it would be difficult to be fully educated in Japanese without considerable attention to the Chinese source of Japanese characters and the Chinese literary and religious antecedents of much of Japanese culture.
G.L. Lewis applied the false paradigm derived from the recent history of European languages, which now seriously neglect the Classical roots of their own languages, literature, and civilization -- so seek to eliminate it.
In tribute to Hagopian, I provide the names of the first ten numbers in Persian at right. As it happens, combinations of Turkish and Persian names for the numbers are traditionally used in backgammon in the Middle East, with the name of the game itself occurring as "Shesh-Besh," (right to left), i.e. "Six & Five," in Persian and Turkish, respectively. Hagopian, among his many useful details, actually gives the names used for all the combinations of dice. These are now not generally remembered, and game is often called "Trick-Track" after the sound of the pieces on a wooden board [note].
Later, Geoffrey Lewis appears to have thought better of his ridicule. Subsequent editions of Teach Yourself Turkish cut down on the dismissive remarks; and recently Lewis has published The Turkish Language Reform, A Catastrophic Success [Oxford, 1999, 2002]. Here we learn about the artificial coinages, supposedly "true" Turkish, and the confusion that has now alienated modern Turkey from its own heritage, the best of Ottoman literature. Indeed, the writings of Kemal Atatürk himself have needed more than once to be "translated" into New(er) Turkish. At a literary or technical level usage still sometimes shifts between an Arabic word (e.g. , maktab, "place for writing," i.e. "school"), a "Turkish" neologism (okul), or French (école), just to make sure that everyone can recognize one of the words. Lewis's own Turkish Grammar [Oxford, 1967, 2000] provides information to enable people to read the Ottoman language. It probably is too late to deliberately go back, but, like German returning to Telefon from Fernsprecher, perhaps Turkish usage will drift back to more of its Persian and Arabic heritage. This need have nothing to do with Islamicization, merely with remembering the history of the language.
Curious things now can get said about the Ottoman Empire, for instance in the "Author's Note" to Lawrence in Arabia -- War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East [Anchor Books, 2013, 2014], by Scott Anderson:
As many Middle East historians rightly point out, the use of these Western-preferred labels -- Turkey rather than the Ottoman Empire, Constantinople instead of Istanbul -- is indicative of a Eurocentric perspective that, in its most pernicious form, serves to validate the European (read imperialist) view of history. [p.ix] There is something odd about "rightly" standing up for the identity of the Ottoman Empire as an Empire, to the point of defending its rule of conquered peoples and the change of the name of its conquered capital, and yet present it as a victim of "imperialism." If the Ottoman regime was not itself "imperialism," then we have the use of a novel principle that only Europeans have empires or imperial ideology (an ideology of conquest, like Islamic Jihād) -- even though we have decided that "Empire" is the only non-Eurocentric thing to call the Ottoman state.
Amid this confusion are some historical falsehoods. There was nothing "Western-preferred" about the "labels" in question. "Turkey" had been used for Turkish states for many centuries, with what now seems like the bizarre inclusion of Hungary in that number, to the point that the Crown of St. Stephen says Τουρκία (Tourkía) on it. There was no other proper name to use for the Ottoman Empire. At the same time, "Istanbul" was not the official name of Constantinople until 1930. It may have been "locally preferred" only in the same sense that people in Philadelphia may say "Philly," and San Franciscans used to say "Frisco," for their cities. Neither of these cases have much to do with Eurocentrism, imperialism, or any sort of ideological manipulation of language. Greeks said Stamboul without the slightest sense that this should replace the full, formal name. "Constantinople" was named after its founder, the Emperor Constantine I, and Mr. Anderson's "a Christian empire" was the Byzantine Empire, or Romania, which for some reason Anderson deigns not to name (showing the Latin bias of Western/Frankish historiography): What kind of "centrism" is that? We might easily see it as a manifestation of the hatred of Christianity so common in American elite culture and academia -- which is what it is that excuses all the racism, misogyny, and anti-Semitism in Friedrich Nietzsche just because he despised Christianity.
Thus, saying that "many Middle East historians rightly point out" these distortions itself betrays a bias on the part of Mr. Anderson, which is for him to be taken in by a Marxist-Leninist discourse on "imperialism" and all the illiberal and often totalitarian principles that go with it. But then, having begun with such a harsh condemnation of "Eurocentrism" on these grounds, Anderson walks it back on the next page, admitting that the Turks themselves often used the names "Turkey" and "Constantinople," and that the Young Turks didn't like using the word "Ottoman" at all -- they were "de-Ottomanizing" Turkey. So Mr. Anderson himself will use "Turkey," "Ottoman Empire," and "Constantinople" in the book. So the whole exercise was "rightly" all "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing" [Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5]. All of Anderson's objections are bogus, and he admits as much himself. Perhaps he counts on his "progressive" friends reading the first page of the book and not continuing on to the second.
The issue of proper names, like "Turkey," as opposed to other descriptions, like "Ottoman Empire," significantly comes up in relation to the Roman Empire.
When the ox climbs to the palace, he does not become a king, Turkish journalist Sedef Kabaş, quoting proverb. Kabaş was arrested early Saturday morning, 22 January 2022, for insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. She was taken to Istanbul’s main police station. A court ruled she, as a public danger, be jailed pending trial.
Thus Turkey again insults human rights and sinks further into dictatorship. Yet the United States also holds January 6 protesters (while releasing violent criminals) without bail, delaying trials, while "public defenders" help coerce guilty pleas out of them. So we all sink into dictatorship.
On 11 March 2022, a Court found Kabaş, somehow, both innocent and guilty of insulting the President, and then released her with a suspended sentence.
The word here for "king," kral, is similar to the words for "king" all over Eastern Europe, for instance, král in Czech.In war, language itself often becomes a weapon, and that was certainly true in the Middle Eastern theater of World War I. For example, while the Allied powers tended to use "the Ottoman Empire" and "Turkey" interchangeably, they displayed a marked preference for the latter designation as the war went on, undoubtedly to help fortify the notion that the non-Turkish populations of the Ottoman Empire were somehow[?] "captive peoples" in need of liberation [like Armenians?]... On a more subtle level, all the Western powers, including the Ottoman Empire's/Turkey's chief ally in the war, Germany, continued to refer to the city of "Constantinople" (its name under a Christian empire overthrown by the Muslim Ottomans in 1453) rather than the locally preferred "Istanbul."
but the palace becomes a barn.
Turkish Republic, 1923; Presidents | |
---|---|
Mustafa Kemal, (1934) Atatürk | 1923-1938 |
Ismet Inönü | 1938-1950 |
France cedes Alexandretta & Antioch, 1939 | |
Celal Bayar | 1950-1960 |
Riots in İstanbul, the "İstanbul Pogrom," Christians, Armenians, Jews, attacked & killed, churches & cemeteries desecrated, businesses looted, 100,000 Greeks flee, 6 September 1955; 50,000 Greeks deported, 1958 | |
Kemal Gürcel | 1961-1966 |
Cevdet Sunay | 1966-1973 |
Fahri Korutürk | 1973-1980 |
Kenan Evren | 1980-1989 |
Turgut Özal | 1989-1993 |
Süleyman Demirel | 1993-2000 |
Ahmet Necdet Sezer | 2000-2007 |
Abdullah Gül | 2007-2014 |
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan | 2014-present |
With no concessions to Greeks, Armenians, or Kurds, Atatürk nevertheless abandoned most imperial aspirations. Giving up the Arabic alphabet and traditional costume (indeed, making their use even a capital offense), deposing the Ottomans, and otherwise trying to make Turkey a European, rather than a Middle Eastern, state, Atatürk simply hoped to make it the equal of other modern powers. To a considerable extent he succeeded, though Turkey is still haunted by the shadow of the military dictatorship that he himself represented, by the threat of militant Islām, whose mediaevalism is fully triumphant in neighboring Irān, and by the disaffection of the Kurds, whose very existence was legally denied for many years. Nevertheless, it is undoubtedly the strongest state in the region, to the chagrin of neighboring Arabs and Christians (and Kurds) alike.
Long a member of NATO, Turkey was looking forward to membership in the European Community, but has little embarrassments like the common use of torture by police, the largest number of journalists in prison, and increasing inclination towards anti-Western Islamicization. Thus, despite Atatürk, we still have several respects in which Turkey is posed between East and West, Mediaeval and Modern, Islām and secularism, liberalism and oppression. The application of Turkey to the European Union was deferred, to be reconsidered in a few years, but now probably suspended indefinitely. Atatürk himself is still the focus of a curious cult of personality, with his image (as photographs, busts, etc.) appearing almost everywhere, even in elevators. Since this does not symbolize the presence of a totalitarian police state, as it would in North Korea, it instead seems to reflect a healthy and popular endorsement of Atatürk's vision of a secular Turkey. In the face of the Islāmic backlash, it is as positive a statement as it has ever been.
The term of Turkish President Ahmet Necdet Sezer ended on 16 May 2007, but a new President was not elected until August. The most likely candidate and eventual President, Abdullah Gül, from an Islamic Party (and with a wife who wears a headscarf), drew wide protest (as shown) from everyone who wished to preserve the secular nature of the Turkish Republic. There was even a warning from the Army, which has deposed the government four times since 1960, that it may not tolerate any compromise to Atatürk's ideal of secular government. The Islamic threat would seem to justify the reluctance of the European Union to expedite the admission of Turkey, an attitude that some Turks regard as simple racism. However, the defeat of the Islamic forces in Turkey should remove some European reservations. The actual election of Gül leaves all these issues rather up in the air. There is no doubt, however, that any moves toward Islamicization could provoke even a violent response from the secular population and the Army.
In March 2008 the Chief Prosecutor of Turkey's Constitutional Court filed a motion to abolish the political party of President Gül, the AK Party, and for a time ban members, like him, from serving in political office. The basis of this is the religious basis and program of the Party. At this point there are also other, equally troubling, complaints about the behavior of the government. If the Court abolishes the party, which seems quite possible, it would forestall a coup by the Army but could also precipitate violence by supporters, who won 46.6% of the vote in 2007. This is certainly the modern dilemma in Islamic countries, where democracy itself threatens the state with the forces of religious reaction. Where in Irān religious government was at first popular, opposition candidates are now kept off the ballot and it is too late for a peaceful return to secular government. In Turkey, however, Atatürk still has more influence than any living Shāh.
On July 30, 2008, the Constitutional Court fined the AK Party but did not disband it. Six out of eleven judges favored banning the Party, but seven votes were required. There was relief in many circles that a crisis had been avoided and that a democratic election had not been overturned, but the conflict over the place of ʾIslām in Turkey will continue.
The judges may live to regret their decision. Getting into 2010, the government has been using the police, much as Hitler did after assuming power, to suppress dissent, harass opposition, and even to arrest secularists in the judiciary and military. The Islamist and fascist program of Mr. Gül, or, more like it, Mr. Erdoğan, thus began to emerge. A document was forged that was purported to be Army plans for a coup. Hopefully, the Army will need no such plan, unless, like the German military, they let their chance slip by or, worse, collaborate with the goals of the government. Western observers are hoping that the AK Party will simply lose the next election; but by then, the election may be rigged (as in 2009 in Iran), or Turkish opinion may not be aroused enough about what is going on.
On 31 May 2010, Israeli forces prevented a flottila of ships from breaching an Israeli blockade of Gaza and delivering goods to the forces of Hamas. They at first tried boarding the ships peacefully, but the crews of the ships began to beat the unarmed Israeli soldiers and throw them overboard. The Israelis then boarded in force, killing a number of those resisting. Since the ships were supposedly delivering humanitarian aid and food to Gaza, there was a great deal of international huffing and puffing and posturing about this action. However, Israel allows humanitarian aid and food into Gaza, if properly inspected; and the purpose of the flottila was clearly to break the blockade so that arms could then be run in to the forces of Hamas. The experience of the past, since the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, is that Hamas begins using weapons against Israel as soon as it can get them, despite the military senselessness of such attacks. Hamas forces, hiding, as Terrorists do, among civilians, and attacking, as Terrorists do, Israeli civilians, use Israeli retaliation to claim that Israel is attacking civilians, like Terrorists! This is usually good enough for those ready to credit anti-Israeli propaganda in the first place.
The most shocking thing about the flotilla event, however, was the support of the project, not just by Iran, which was to be expected, but by Turkey. It now appears that the regime of President Abdullah Gül, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and their AK Party is not just moderately Islamic but has the goal of an Islamist transformation of Turkey, politically, culturally, and diplomatically. Slowly but steadily, Erdoğan has managed to place supporters in the courts, the police, the schools, and, apparently, even in the army. The disturbing developments noted above for early 2010 have now bloomed into a full scale attack on the secular state of Kemal Atatürk. Although Erdoğan himself pursued membership in the European Union, Turkey has now turned its diplomacy towards Iran and other radical regimes. The doubts about EU membership for Turkey, which had delayed its acceptance, now must become a certainty that Turkey is no longer interested in continuing its development as a European nation.
As we see from the quote above, Erdoğan has no more respect for democracy than any other Islamist. More distressing, however, is the possibility, not that Erdoğan will steal the next election, but that he will be continued in power with large and enthusiastic majorities. For, as it seems, Turkish public opinion, no doubt influenced by what is now a Government controlled news media (which runs grotesque anti-Semitic and anti-American "documentaries"), but apparently in little need of such propaganda, has drifted into the Islamist irrationality, paranoia, anti-Semitism, and anti-Americanism that is all too familiar from the rest of the Middle East.
Thus, unless there is enough loyalty to Atatürk left in the army, or among the demonstrators we saw as recently as 2007, it appears that Turkey is all but lost in a creeping anti-Western revolution, which is probably as popular among the urban young as it is among what could be expected to be more religiously conservative elements of the society. This poses a serious problem for the United States, since Turkey is a member of NATO and thus has access to American military technology and secrets. If these come to be passed on to Iran or Hamas, continued Turkish NATO membership will not be tolerable. The full threat that these developments in Turkey represent has not yet been fully appreciated in Washington, but the day of reckoning cannot be far away.
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Prime Minister (now President) of Turkey In 2013, nation-wide protests erupted against Prime Minister Erdoğan. As previously, women in Western dress figure prominently in the protests, exemplifying their concern at the Islamicization of the regime. This has come down to one incident, where a solitary woman in a red dress, identified as Ceyda Sungur, "the woman in red," was pepper-sprayed by a policeman in riot gear, as we see in the now famous Reuters image at right. The policeman obviously had nothing to fear from her. Things have indeed been getting out hand. Erdoğan has been suppressing opposition newspapers, and more journalists are in jail than anywhere else in the world (in countries where there are journalists, of course, unlike Cuba or North Korea). While Erdoğan's strength previously was his competent direction of the economy, it looks like this might not last, and his other sins may be catching up with him. However, as noted above, Erodogan may have already compromised the independence of the military and the judiciary enough that he can suppress any opposition. We shall see. The Western press is paying a bit more attention to this than to attacks on Christians in Egypt.
Unfortunately, the protests didn't make much difference, and an attempted coup by the Army in 2016 came way too late and was easily suppressed. This gave Erdoğan, now the President, all the justification he needed to purge and/or arrest anyone who might be seen by him as opposition. Erdoğan is even openly voicing criticism of the secularism of Atatürk, something previously inconceivable in Turkish politics. Yet enough of the electorate now seems to be Islamized and radicalized that Erdoğan continues to be popular. Thus we may have another case seen more than once in the Islamic world of a democratic system supporting a leader whose ambition is to abolish the democracy and establish his own dictatorship. In Algeria and Egypt, the Army did not allow this process to continue. That used to be the dynamic in Turkey, but then the previous governments that were overthrown were merely corrupt and ineffective, and they were not using ʾIslām to undermine the basic ideology of the State. Things got out of hand with Erdoğan because he was not obviously corrupt, his policies were actually helping Turkey economically, his Islamic ambitions seemed muted and reasonable, and for all these reasons he enjoyed broad support. Yet he had always dropped hints, as in the epigraph, what his ambitions and intentions really were. Now it may be too late. Americans were similarly deceived by someone like Barack Obama. Adolf Hitler, August 22, 1939 [Nuremberg Tribunal document L-3, or Exhibit USA-28 -- the authenticity of the document is disputed by partisans of Turkey] The historical and international image of the Turks does not seem to be the most lovable or romantic. Most Americans probably are going to be more sympathetic to people with historic grievances against Turkey -- Greeks, Armenians, Romanians, Serbs, even Arabs. Most people may not know of all the vanished ancient peoples of Anatolia, from the Phrygians and Galatians to the Isaurians, or even the sad Fall of Constantinople; but most are likely aware of lingering outrage over the genocide of the Armenians and other Christians during World War I -- an event that Turkey still officially and stoutly denies, despite thorough historical documentation, not to mention many surviving eyewitnesses -- and more recent actions against the Kurds [note]. Not long ago it was a crime in Turkey to assert, even on the floor of the parliament, that there even were Kurds in the country -- and in 1994 four members of parliament were sentenced to 15 years in prison for giving speeches in Kurdish. Although responding in some ways to European demands for human rights improvements before being considered for admission to the European Union, since December 2001 the Turkish government has officially regarded Kurdish given names as "terrorist propaganda" and refused to register them for Kurdish children. With all this, one does not even need to see the very hostile, anti-Turkish movie Midnight Express [1978].
In historical perspective, however, it is not clear to what extent the ancient peoples even still existed by the time of the Turkish arrival. Greek assimilation, i.e. Hellenization, of Anatolian peoples had been progressing steadily for centuries, and Turkish settlement in comparison doesn't necessarily look all that different -- indeed, the surge in the Turkish population in the 13th and 14th centuries involved people fleeing the terror of the Mongols. They were refugees. Given the religious cause that the Ottomans thought they were vindicating, the Fall of Constantinople, far from sad, was one of the supreme moments of achievement in the history of Islām. A Western, or a modern liberal, evaluation will not give that much weight, but it is not hard to imagine that the sensation it created in Islām was not much different from that in Christendom at the capture of Jerusalem by the First Crusade, or the completion of the Reconquista in Spain. These are similarly denigrated by modern liberal opinion, but it is hard to imagine how the values at the time could have been different -- and everyone should guard against an anachronistic moral indignation (which liberal opinion tends to focus on the Crusades rather than on any Islamic Conquest, for which Islām usually seems more excused than Christianity -- an example of the selective judgment of moralistic relativism). There is also the fear now of the politically correct of being accused of "Islamophobia" for addressing simple truths of Islamic history and practice.
The subsequent Ottoman Empire features the goods and evils characteristic of most empires, and some peculiar to those of the Middle East -- e.g. the refuge provided for Spanish Jews in 1492 (with Spanish speaking Jews living today in Turkey), as against the slavery and forced conversion of Christian children for the Janissary corps. Evils specific to nationalism emerged later, like the aforementioned genocide of Armenians and the continuing suppression of the Kurds, an Iranian people who happen to be Orthodox Moslems like the Turks. The Turks are not uniquely at fault for this, and the solution is a kind of society (liberal and capitalistic) upon which few in the world entirely agree, even in the ethnic plurality of societies like the United States. Turkey now has an especially tough time with its own identity as it is torn between the Islamic fundamentalist revival seen elsewhere and the secularism that Kemal Atatürk made the foundation of the modern state in the 1920's. None of this may make Turkey particularly lovable, but it does make the Turks mostly like anybody else; and modern Turkey has a large population of people who seem all but indistinguishable from secular Europeans -- and reasonably disinclined to be blamed for the sins of the past. Turkey has a history that has its horrors but, indeed, also its own bit of romance and magnificence: a desire to surpass Sancta Sophia (still called Aya Sofya in Turkish, after the Greek version of the name, Ἅγια Σοφία, Hagia Sophia) produced a series of some of the most beautiful mosques in Islām, which have inspired much of subsequent Islāmic architecture (the standard domed mosque, starting with Muḥammad ʿAlī's Alabaster Mosque in Cairo) [note].
A recent controversy of note has been over the Syriac Orthodox Mor Gabriel Monastery, where a government land resurvey and hostile neighboring Muslim villagers have threatened the monastery, founded in 397 AD, with the loss of half of its land. Since local Christians have been leaving the area for decades, few remain, and the monastery itself is down to three monks and twelve nuns [cf. The Wall Street Journal, March 7-8, 2009, p.A8]. The Turkish government is caught between the attraction of tourism and even Christian return, with economic benefits, and the Islamists, who would just as soon drive all non-Muslims out of the area, if not out of Turkey altogether, regardless of the consequences. As a land dispute, the matter has ended up in the Turkish courts, which have shown some reluctance to get drawn in. With observers and diplomats from the EU and international Christian and human rights organizations present, the courts are at least aware that they operate in a spotlight, with sensitive political issues on the line.
Now, as of January 26, 2011, the Turkish Supreme Court, overturning some lower courts, has approved seizure of much of the land of the Monastery by the Turkish Government, despite the clear record of ownership (for centuries) and even the consistent tax remittances of the Monastery for the land. This seems of a piece with the progress of Islamist radicalism in Turkey. As in Iraq and Egypt, the goal of the movement does seem to be to drive the remaining Christians out of the Middle East. It is hard to imagine that anyone, including the Turkish Government, now takes seriously the application of Turkey for membership in the European Union. Recently, we have seen statements from Britain, France, and Germany all expressing alarm at the growth of extremism and lack of assimilation among Muslim immigrants in Europe. The apologetic for ʾIslām that labels critics as "Islamophobes" cannot survive the exposure of the oppression of Christians in these Islamic countries. A cooperative Western press, with its own illiberal and anti-American agenda, has helped limit knowledge even of outright massacres of Christians -- e.g. the Egyptian military, universally praised for its restraint in dealing with anti-government protestors, has opened fire, in incidents unreported by the "Mainstream" media, against Christian protestors -- but the ugly scale of this process cannot be concealed indefinitely.
A discussion of general sources for this material is given under Francia and Islām. Some additional sources include The Penguin Historical Atlas of Russia (John Channon with Rob Hudson, 1995), and various prose histories, such as The Ottoman Centuries (Lord Kinross, Morrow Quill, 1977).
The Altaic and Uralic Languages
Modern Romania, Ottoman Successor States in the Balkans
The Shihābī Amīrs of Lebanon, 1697-1842 AD
The House of Muḥammad ʿAlī in Egypt, 1805-1953 AD
The Sanūsī Amīrs & Kings of Libya, 1837-1969 AD
A recent correspondent indignantly claimed that the Imperial burials had already been completely destroyed by the Crusaders. Well, the Fourth Crusade was not above looting the dead, but even if they had the energy to open all the tombs, back to Constantine, it is hard to imagine that they would have been so interested in destroying the burials that there would not have been plenty left for the Greeks to subsequently reinter. The Crusaders, after all, were looking for valuables, since the tax base of their domain was pitiful and they were always short of money. Vandalism was not beyond them, but it was not their main concern.
Indeed, on one account, when the Crusaders opened the sarcophagus of Justinian, they "found that his corpse was miraculously uncorrupted after over 600 years. Consequently, they left it alone..." [Jonathan Harris, Constantinople, Capital of Byzantium, Hambledon Continuum, London, New York, 2007, p.161]. An incorruptible body, of course, has been a mark, not just in Christianity but also in Buddhism (and The X-Files), of sainthood. Anyone knowing much about Justinian, whose personality has been compared to that of Richard Nixon, might find that surprising. But Justinian is regarded as a Saint in the Orthodox Church.
And even if the Crusaders then did loot the bodies of all other Emperors, there were almost two hundred years under the Palaeologi to do proper burials of new Emperors, which likely would have used such empty sarcophagi as might have been left from the depredations of the Crusaders. My suspicion therefore, with the most charitable regard for Meḥmed II, is that some of the burials may still lie under the great mosque. Some future archaeology may be allowed to test this.
An interesting assertion has now come to my attention. Peter Sarris says:
This is the first that I have heard of this. Sarris is a "Reader in Late Roman, Medieval, and Byzantine History and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge." So his academic credentials are impressive, but he does not tell us the source of this information -- something probably due to the format of the Oxford "Very Short Introductions" series, of which the Sarris book is number 437. Things are not footnoted here as in full format scholarly works. The reference to Heraclius indicates some specificity in the source.
However, this is an intriguing possibility. There are some imperial sarcophagi lying around Istanbul, but nowhere near as many as we would expect from a 1000 year history of burials, unless many others were broken up or adapted for building material. My thought was that some might still be left under the Fatih mosque, but what Sarris says opens more possibilities. Burying the Roman Emperors, or at least their sarcophagi, under Topkapi not only dramatically appropriates the Imperial tradition, it prevents attempts to recover the burials or make claims that Emperors, like Constantine XI, have risen from the dead. It also prevents the Imperial burials from becoming sites of Christian veneration or pilgrimage, which is probably why the Church of the Holy Apostles was demolished, and the Fatih mosque built, in the first place. This is altogether reasonable, but I would like to know the source that Peter Sarris has used.
Peter Sarris has been kind enough to respond to my inquiry, with the answer that he has derived his information from the lectures of Byzantinist Cyril Mango. There is no contemporary reference for the Ottoman removal of Imperial burials or sarcophagi. However, Mango discusses the issue in a paper, "Three Imperial Byzantine Sarocophagi Discovered in 1750," in the Dumbarton Oaks Papers [Vol. 16, 1962, pp.397-402]. It seems that three porphyry sarcophagi were discovered in 1750 buried on the grounds of the Topkapı palace, as witnessed by the French merchant Jean-Claude Flachat. There seems little doubt that the sarcophagi had been moved to the site of the palace at the time of the demolition of the Church of the Holy Apostles, although any memory of this act had been lost in the two centuries that by then had already passed.
Now, in his work De Ceremoniis, the scholar Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogentus had described 60 some burials of Emperors and Imperial family members in the Church and at locations nearby. Ten of the sacrophagi described by him and in other accounts were porphyry, and eight actually survive. One of the finds of 1750 seems to have been the sarcophagus of the Emperor Manuel I Comnenus, which post-dates Constantine VII, was described by the historian Nicetas Choniates, was attested by him as laid in the monastery of the Pantocrator (which was demolished by the Ottomans like the Church), and whose form features seven domes on the lid, apparently like the Church of the Holy Apostles itself. This extraordinary artifact has since gone missing.
What remains obscure, of course, is the fate of the actual burials, if it was only the sarcophagi that were removed to the Topkapı, not to mention the two score tombs described by Constantine that did not contain porphyry sarcophagi. There seems to be some particular interest by the Ottomans in the porphyry artifacts, which perhaps is not surprising, since the stone was regarded as commensurate in status with the Imperial office, and, having only been obtainable, ultimately, from Egypt, its probable rarity signified just that status. If the Ottomans did not perceive any symbolic or numinous force in the stone used for other sarcophagi, they may have been recycled for building material rather than buried at the Topkapı.
We might be sensible of the possibility that the correspondent might have wanted the Crusaders to despoil all the burials, and not the Ottomans, out of a notion that the Crusaders were bad and the Ottomans good. Of course, many Crusaders, especially in the Fourth Crusade, were bad; but the Ottomans were bad also. All were engaged in looting and vandalism, and the Ottomans had particular reasons to go after churches, monasteries, burials, and statuary, as they did. The satuary that existed in Constantinople, which we know from accounts, is all gone; and not all of it has ended up in Venice. The Ottomans did their part.
Return to the Fall of Constantinople
When I was taking a Linguistics class at the University of Texas, probably in 1976, we had just had a unit on rules like this in languages. On the test, we were given examples of Turkish, and the problem was to figure out the rules of vowel harmony.
I knew the rules already. I had even already found Hagopian's 1907 Turkish grammar in the UCLA Research Library. I was, after all, a graduate student; and I had already taken Arabic and Persian.
Was this cheating? If I raised my hand and said, "Professor, I know the rules already," would this be a kind of boasting? Is this note a kind of boasting? Would he have given me a different problem? Well, if the test was testing my knowledge, I was certainly passing a test of knowledge. I didn't say anything. Nothing like that happened again in that class.
Sitting next to me in this same class was a Chinese girl, who I asked about the authenticity of my Chinese name, 克利.
Applying the kind of phonetic rule that was being tested is something I have otherwise tried to do with the pronunciation of "Hawai'i."
The following table is adapted from Hapogian's list of the names of dice combinations [op.cit., p.264]. Constructing this involved some difficulties, since Hagopian uses his own transcription equivalences for Turkish and does not, in this case, give the names in Arabic script. I have given the names in Modern Turkish phonology but with some modifications to the modern orthography (e.g. "j" for "c" -- since "c" is used for English "j" in no other language that I know of). Atatürk's orthography can easily be restored using the chart in the table at below right. Below the names in the Arabic alphabet is their original pronunciation in Persian or Turkish, identical to the images in the number tables above. The Turkish names themselves are from The Oxford Turkish Dictionary [H.C. Hony, A.D. Alderson, and Fahir Iz, Oxford, 1992, 1995]. The reference for Persian is Persian Vocabulary, by A.K.S. Lambton [Cambridge University Press, 1954, 1969, 32s 6d].
The letter is from Persian, pronounced in that language as va or o, but ultimately from Arabic wa; and it just means "and." Hagopian glosses this as "ou means 'and'." Although Hagopian consistenty writes the word as "ou," in Modern Turkish it becomes subject to vowel harmony; and so gets vocalized, as shown in the table, with ü, i, or as the "i" without a dot. It does not seem to be realized anywhere as an actual u. There are some other phonetic changes in vowels and some consonants.
A couple other difficulties concern sebayüdü (3-2) and dubara (2-2). These have elements that are not numbers. Hagopian gives the former as "sé-ba-dū" and the latter as "dū-baré" (he does not use umlauts for the appropriate vowels). In the first instance, Modern Turkish has introduced an extra syllable, yü, while what we see in Hagopian is liable to be the Persian word , which just means "with." So we're saying, "3 with 2." But what the yü would be just defeats me.
The second word, dubara is worse. The bara or "baré" element seems likely to be Persian , but it has lost a syllable and semantically seems unsuitable -- the word means "for." I can't say what is going on here.
Then there is a case that is not puzzling in the same ways. Hepyek (1-1) clearly uses the Turkish word hep, meaning "all"; but my writing of it as is a guess. I cannot find the word written in Arabic in Hagopian, whose English-Turkish vocabulary does not give the Arabic writings and who is lacking a Turkish-English vocabulary.
The final issue may be whether these words should all be written as one word. I have written them as separate words largely for convenience, just using the Persian and Turkish names of the numbers directly from the separate treatments; but we also have the evident practice in Hagopian that where he writes "ou," he actually leaves a space between the words. This is where the Arabic script versions of the names would again have settled the problem.
Note that, while there are three cases here that add up to "7," for purposes of probability, the complete table should be filled out, so that the combinations 3-4, 2-5, and 1-6 would also occur, giving six chances out of 36 of rolling a "7." Thus, one is in the best position at the beginning of a dice game ("Craps"), where the best chance exists of rolling "7," a winner, and the lowest of rolling "2" or "12," which are losers. Afterwards, "7" is the loser. Curious phenomena of probability carry over into quantum mechanics.
Not all who deny the existence of the Armenian genocide are Turkish, as I have heard from recent correspondents. Anyone sincerely sceptical or confused about the matter should consult Death by Government [Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1995, pp.209-239], by R.J. Rummel, one of the greatest living experts on mass murder. Rummel estimates the number of Armenians murdered in the main organized genocide program (there were others), from 1915-1918, as 1,404,000 persons.
Some of the eyewitness testimony to this included reports by the American Ambassador to Turkey, Henry Morgenthau, Sr. (whose son, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., would be Franklin Roosevelt's Secretary of the Treasury), and by other American consular officials, at a time when the United States was still neutral in World War I. Morgenthau's account was published in 1919 as Ambassador Morgenthau's Story. I believe there is an accusation that Morgenthau's book was ghost-written by Armenians. Even if that were true, it still does not mean that the accounts were not correct (Armenians in exile would tend to be living evidence of what the Turks did), and much of the evidence associated with Morgenthau consists of diplomatic records that are contemporaneous with the events.
Morgenthau said:
This doesn't sound like some Armenian ghost-writer putting (uncontradicted) words in the mouth of Morgenthau. In turn, Morgenthau quotes Interior Minister Talaat Pasha:
Morgenthau answered:
Our people will never forget these massacres. They will always resent the wholesale destruction of Christians in Turkey. Even though Atatürk himself condemned the Ottomans for the massacres of Armenians (while doing nothing in recompense), the Turkish government still denies, denies, denies.
Americans were not the only neutral diplomats in Turkey during World War I. Norway, Denmark, and Sweden were neutral countries all through World War I, and information is now emerging from their diplomatic archives about what the Scandinavians observed of the Armenian genocide, as well as of Ottoman treatment of Greeks and the Aramaic speaking communities. In addition to this, there were Scandinavian Christian missionaries who had been operating among Ottoman Armenians, and they reported to their embassies what they had been seeing out in the countryside. Hitherto, I don't think that the existence of this evidence has been generally recognized, even by Rummel.
Nor need we dismiss the endless pornographic fantasies that revolve around the Harīm of the Sulṭān's Topkapı Palace. Fascination with this is now often disparaged as "Orientalism," i.e. the projection of unrelated and hostile imaginings onto misunderstood institutions; but there is no doubt of the extraordinary and bizarre characteristics of the Imperial Harīm. I think some Turks are torn between condemnation of what can be seen as a dated and decadent insitutition, everything bad about the Ottomans (indeed, it was disbanded in 1909 after the Young Turks took over), and a defensiveness that is both politically correct and nationalistic, despite its incommensurability with Atatürk's reforms. But if it was diverting for the Sulṭān, I don't see why it should not continue to be so to the curious modern. An honest and informed treatment of this can be found in Harem, The World Behind the Veil [Abbeville Press, New York, London, Paris, 1989], by a woman who grew up in Turkey, Alev Lytle Croutier, many of whose own relatives had lived in traditional harīms. The book contains photographs from the Ottoman era (including her relatives) as well as historical drawings and the sort of lush and sensual paintings by Western artists that infuriate the anti-"Orientalism" crowd. The image above is a 19th century photograph. It is given by Croutier [p.74], but I also remember it from many years ago in Time magazine, at the time that the Topkapı Harīm was first opened to the public. Recent apologetics that life in the Harīm represented some sort of progressive political power for women are simply ridiculous, and they disturbingly parallel justifications for the horrors of the status of women in many contemporary Islamic states.
The Altaic and Uralic languages are the most widespread and important families of languages after the Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic (Hamito-Semitic), and the Austronesian (Malayo-Polynesian) languages. Just how important they are, however, depends on some questionable judgments about what languages belong in the family. This begins with whether the Altaic and Uralic languages themselves belong to the same family, the Ural-Altaic. For all the subtleties that must be involved in such judgments, I would tend to take seriously the impression of one of my colleagues, who is Turkish, that when he hears Finnish spoken, he feels like he should be able to understand it. I'm not sure I can say the same thing about languages closely related to English, like Dutch or German.
More intriguing is the question of Korean and Japanese. If Korean and Japanese are related to anything, or even to each other, the Altaic family is the most promising option. There is even a book I have, Japanese and Other Altaic Languages, by Roy A. Miller [U. of Chicago Press, 1971], which wears its decision in the title. The matter, however, remains contentious. The least I can say is that Korean and Japanese sound similar to me, and I might not be able to tell them apart, but for Japanese word endings like -masu and -mashita that I can recognize. But then my background for such a subjective impression is pretty shallow. The extent of the Ural-Altaic languages is impressive, from Eastern Europe to the Pacific. The Uralic languages are named after the Ural Mountains, at whose northern end we get a convergence of Finnic, Ugric, and Samoyed languages. Their northern range looks to be autochthonous and probably used to be continuous, before Russian settlement broke it up, especially across a broad area in northern Russia. The original southern limit of Finnic speech is probably still represented by Estonian. The Ugric speech area is probably not much different from what it always had been, except for the Magyars, who adopted a steppe culture, swept into Europe, terrified a broad area in the 10th century, but then settled down to become the Kingdom of Hungary -- named after the earlier Huns, whose language was probably Mongolian or Turkic but is so poorly attested that we can't even be sure of that.
Nevertheless, the recent One Thousand Languages, Living, Endangered, and Lost, by Peter K. Austin [University of California Press, 2008] asserts that the Turkic Chuvash "is related to mediaeval Volga Bolghar, Khazarian, and Hunnic" [p.153]. The Khazars and Bulgars appear in Southern Russia after the disappearance of the Huns and the departure of the Avars. The Khazars, converts to Judaism and stauch allies of Constantinople, remained on the lower Volga until the arrival of the Cumans in the 11th century. The Bulgars (Bolghars) stretched from the upper Volga (the Volga Bulghars), through the Ukraine (the Onogur Bulgars), into modern Bulgaria (the Danube Bulgars). Austin probably cites "Volga Bolghar" because this peristed the longest, in the area where Chuvash is spoken today, while Onogur Bulgar disappeared, and Danube Bulgar was replaced with a Slavic language, leaving its name on the Kingdom of Bulgaria.
The Altaic languages are named after the Altai Mountains, which are at the extreme north-eastern limit of the Turkic language area. Most of the extent of the Turkic languages is the result of migration in the Middle Ages, which split the Indo-Iranian languages off from the other Indo-European languages and overwhelmed originally Indo-European speaking peoples in Turkistan and modern Turkey. Migration and conquest also left a small area of Mongolian speakers, Kalmyk, on the far shore of the Caspian Sea. The earliest information on Altaic speakers is from the Chinese, who were partially overrun by them during the period of the Sixteen Kingdoms of the Five Barbarians; but, as I note there, it is extremely hard to identify the languages and affinities of these groups with any precision. Part of the problem is that Turkic and Mongolian languages may not have yet become differentiated, so we may be dealing with people speaking a kind of Proto-Altaic. The Hsiung-nu, , had long troubled the Chinese, and are usually thought to be the group that turned up in Europe and India later as the Huns (Huna in India). Subsequent Mongolian or Altaic peoples on the western Steppe, such as the Avars, Bulgars, Kazars, Patzinaks, and Cumans, have disappeared or been ethnically and linguistically assimilated (e.g. the Danube Bulgars). The Tungusic and Samoyed languages and Yakut actually consist of small pockets of people in areas that are either empty of habitation or that also now have small pockets of Russian speakers. The map thus indicates a range rather than solid habitation.
Looking at Turkish, which I have already discussed elsewhere, there are striking characteristics that belong to the family, such as vowel harmony and the agglutinative grammar. "Agglutination" is the device by which grammatical morphemes (parts of words with distinct meanings) are attached, one after another, unchanged (except for vowel harmony), to a root. For instance, both Latin and Turkish have an ablative case, meaning, in general, "from" or motion away from. In Latin "from the girls" is puellīs, while in Turkish it is kızlardan. In Turkish -lar is the plural ending and -dan is the ablative ending; but in Latin -īs, the plural and ablative elements have melted together and are indistinguishable. From these Turkish forms, we can predict the ablative singular, kızdan, and the nominative plural, kızlar, in Turkish, but not in Latin -- there they are puellā and puellae, respectively, neither of whose endings have anything in common with puellīs.
Some Indo-European experts think that originally the source of languages like Latin had an agglutinative grammar also, which is reasonable, but this is not directly attested anywhere. Another important agglutinative language in history was Sumerian, the very first written language. When we then notice that the Turkish word for "father," ata, looks like adda, the Sumerian for "father," this adds to evidence, such as it is, that Sumerian, which is neither Semitic nor Indo-European (but part of a number of anomalous isolated languages now confined to the Caucasus), may be part of a larger family that includes the Altaic languages.
Indeed, when we notice that the Hittite word for father was attas and the Gothic word was atta, this could feed enthusiasm for theories combining Indo-European languages, Altaic languages, and Sumerian into a super-family, as examined elsewhere. This also helps out a bit with Turkish nationalism: If Turkish and Hittite have (more or less) the same word for father, then maybe there is a Turkish connection to Anatolia that long antedates the actual first Turkish invasion of 1071 AD. Even if the Altaic and Indo-European languages are related, however, this doesn't imply any pre-historical Turkish presence in Anatolia.
Below are links to the webpages at this site that concern Uralic or Altaic speaking peoples. The page on the Mongol Khāns also includes Central Asian states with Mongolian or Turkic languages, such as Kazakhstan. Even tiny Tuva, the special hobby of the physicist Richard Feynman, has its own Turkic language (Tuvinian or Tuvan). The Manchu conquest of China in 1644, although a historic humiliaton for the Chinese, nevertheless turned out to be suicidal for Manchu identity. The language only survives in tiny pockets in Manchuria, which otherwise is dominated by the settlement of the Chinese and their language.
The list of languages here is based on The Languages of the World, by Kenneth Katzner [Routledge & Kegan Paul, revised 1986, Third Edition, 1995, 2002, 2006]. The map is based on the Rand McNally New Cosmopolitan World Atlas [1965, p.146 -- at the time they did not regard the Tungusic languages, let alone Korean or Japanese, as Altaic]. Additional information, though by no means with the detail available, was derived from some ethnographic maps from the National Geographic Society, "A Cultural Map of the Middle East" [July 1972], "Peoples of the Soviet Union" [February 1976], and "The Peoples of China" [July 1980]. Not everything matches up from the older sources with the more recent ones. Languages with more than 30,000,000 Speakers as of 2005
The Spread of Indo-European and Turkish Peoples off the Steppe
The Ottoman Sulṭāns and Caliphs
Philosophy of Science, Linguistics
Democracy is like a streetcar. When you come to your stop, you get off.
Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?Copyright (c) 1996, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved
The Ottoman Sulṭāns and Caliphs, Note 1
Moreover, Mehmed and his heirs were determined to literally build on the achievements of the rulers of Byzantium: beneath the Topkapi palace from which they ruled, they buried the sarcophagi of Byzantine rulers, including Heraclius, whose tombs had originally been placed in the Church of the Holy Apostles, while that Church was demolished and replaced by a mosque honouring Mehmed Fatiḥ [Byzantium: A Very Short History, Oxford University Press, p.126]
The Ottoman Sulṭāns and Caliphs, Note 2
The Ottoman Sulṭāns and Caliphs, Note 3;
Perso-Turkish Backgammon Dice Combinations
Perso-Turkish Backgammon Dice Combinations 6 5 4 3 2 1 1 2 3 4 5 6 The Ottoman Sulṭāns and Caliphs, Note 4
When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race; they understood this well, and, in their conversations with me, they made no particular attempt to conceal the fact. ["The Diplomat Who Called Out Mass Murder," The Wall Street Journal, May 4, 2015, A13]
Why are you so interested in the Armenians anyway? You are a Jew; these people are Christians... Why can't you let us do with these Christians as we please?
I am not here as a Jew, but as American ambassador. My country contains something like 97 million Christians and something less than three million Jews. So, at least in my ambassadorial capacity, I am 97% Christian. But after all, that is not the point. I do not appeal to you in the name of any race or religion, but merely as a human being...
The Ottoman Sulṭāns and Caliphs, Note 5
The Altaic and Uralic Languages
Copyright (c) 2008 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved
The Shihābī Amīrs of Lebanon | |
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Bashīr I | 1697-1707 |
Ḥaydar | 1707-1732 |
Mulḥim | 1732-1754 |
Manṣūr | 1754-1770 |
Yūsuf | 1770-1788 |
first Maronite Amīr, 1770 | |
Bashīr II | 1788-1840 |
overthrown by Britain & Turkey, 1840 | |
Bashīr III | 1840-1842 |
direct Turkish Rule, 1842-1918; French Rule, 1920-1943 | |
Republic of Lebanon | |
Bishara al-Khuri | President, 1943-1952 |
Camille Chamoun | 1952-1958 |
Fuad Chehab | 1958-1964 |
Charles Hélou | 1964-1970 |
Sulayman Franjieh | 1970-1976 |
Elias Sarkis | 1976-1982 |
Amin Gemayel | 1982-1988 |
Selim al-Huss | 1988-1989 |
Elias Hrawi | 1989-1998 |
Émile Lahoud | 1998-2007 |
Fuad Siniora | acting, 2007-2008 |
Michel Suleiman | 2008-2014 |
Tammam Salam | acting, 2014-2016 |
Michael Aoun | 2016-present |
Umbrella Pine near Ras al-Matn, Mount Lebanon, 1969 |
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Still symbolic of the success of this alliance and the prosperity of the period is the beautiful Bayt ad-Dīn (or Beit ed-Din, "House of Religion") Palace, begun by Bashīr II in 1788 and not completed for 30 years. Unfortunately, Bashīr II moved to consolidate his power through an alliance with Muḥammad ʿAlī of Egypt. This would have been an excellent strategy were it not for the intervention of Britain to drive the Egyptians out of Syria and restore Ottoman authority. Bashīr II was deposed in the process. Also, the influence of France, especially, to protect the Christians in Lebanon, was not exerted successfully to preserve Lebanese autonomy, and tended to alienate the non-Christians anyway. The Turks managed to rid themselves of the Shihābīs altogether, which at times resulted in the persucution and even massacre of Christians.
After Lebanese independence from France itself in 1946, Bayt ad-Dīn became a residence for the President of the Republic. For many years Lebanon prospered as the "Switzerland of the Middle East," and Beirut as the "Paris of the Middle East"; but by the 1970's the communal differences that had been a source of strength when the communities needed to unite against outside persecution began to be a source of weakness, as sometimes had happened before, when the communities fell out among themselves and the issue came to be the distribution of political privileges and patronage to each "confessional" community. Things were particularly destablized by the large number of Palestinian refugees, who had no political standing in Lebanon at all,
Beit ed-Din Palace, 1969 |
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The shakeup of the civil war then brought to the surface something new: The Shi'ite community, always the poor relation in Lebanese politics, predominant in the South and in the Bekaʿa Valley (areas originally peripheral to Mount Lebanon), had not only quietly grown into the largest community in Lebanon (from the third) but now was thoroughly radicalized and activized, in a natural alliance with the Palestinians, and, ominously, with the more distant Shi'ite coreligionists, the Iranian Islāmic Revolutionaries. The Israelis, who invaded Lebanon in 1982 to get rid of the Palestinians, more or less accomplished that task, with the PLO leaving for Tunisia, but then discovered, as the Syrians had already, that the communal rivalries of the Lebanese themselves, especially with the Shi'ites adopting Iranian suicide and terror tactics, made the place a tar baby for any outsiders who wanted to exert control by force.
With the foreign powers chasened, the Lebanese began to patch things up with some needed political compromises; and as the 1990's progressed, some peace and prosperity seemed to be returning to the country. It remains to be seen, however, if a modus vivendi can be found to produce another golden age of communal alliance against the outside.
Subsequent experience has not been encouraging. Shi'ite autonomy and terrorism in the South again drew in the Israelis, and the Syrians seem to be exerting their influence by assassinations and bombings. This still leaves Lebanon at the mercy of foreign powers and foreign influences.
When I lived in Beirut myself, 1969-1970, some favorite books in town were Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet (Justine, 1957, Balthazar, 1958, Mountolive, 1959, & Clea, 1960). No one had any difficulty recognizing the ways that Beirut at the time was like the cosmopolitan Alexandria of Durrell's story. And there were pure touches of the '60's: Women students from Saudi Arabia headed for the American University would change into see-through blouses on the flights from Jiddah. Veils were rare. That Beirut (let alone the see-through blouses) is now as long gone as Durrell's Alexandria.
Phoenician Commerce & Colonization
Maronite Patriarchs of Lebanon
The Ottoman Sulṭāns and Caliphs
Egypt was abruptly pulled into modern history with the invasion of Napoleon in 1798. Although Egypt had been conquered by the Turks in 1517, the strange slave dynasty of the Mamlūks had continued and by Napoleon's time had reestablished de facto authority in the declining Empire. After the French were driven from Egypt in 1801, Muḥammad ʿAlī arrived, supposedly to reëstablish Turkish authority.
The House of Muḥammad ʿAlī
in Egypt, 1805-1953 AD
The House of Muḥammad ʿAlī in Egypt | |
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Muḥammad ʿAlī | Pasha, 1805-1848 |
Ibrāhīm | 1848 |
ʿAbbās Ḥilmī I | 1848-1854 |
Muḥammad Saʿīd | 1854-1863 |
Suez Canal Started, 1859 | |
Ismā'īl | 1863-1867 |
Khedive, 1867-1879, d. 1895 | |
Suez Canal Opened, 1869 Britain buys Khedive's share in Canal, with loan from the Rothschilds, 1875 | |
Muḥammad Tawfīq | 1879-1892 |
Ibn Arabi Revolt, 1879-1882; British Occupation, 1882 | |
ʿAbbās Ḥilmī II | 1892-1914, d. 1944 |
British Protectorate, 1914-1922 | |
Ḥusayn Kāmil | Sulṭān, 1914-1917 |
Aḥmad Fu'ād I | 1917-1922 |
King, 1922-1936 | |
Fārūq | 1936-1952, d. 1965 |
Aḥmad Fu'ād II | 1952-1953 |
Republic of Egypt, 1953- | |
Muhammad Naguib | President, 1953-1954 |
Gamal Abdel Nasser | 1954-1970 |
Suez Crisis, 1956; 1967 War; Suez Canal closed, 1967-1975 | |
Anwar as-Sadat | 1970-1981 |
Yom Kippur War, 1973; Peace Treaty with Israel, 1979 | |
Mohammed Hosni Mubarak | 1981-2011 |
Military Rule, 2011-2012 | |
Muhammad Morsi, Muslim Brotherhood | 2012-2013 |
Coup against Morsi, 2013; Military Rule, 2013-2014 | |
ʿAbdal Fattah Saʿid Hussain Khalil as-Sīsī | 2014- present |
Brilliant, ruthless, farsighted, and probably the most important Albanian in world history, Muḥammad ʿAlī very quickly established his own authority instead. The final Mamlūks were massacred in 1811, and Muḥammad ʿAlī moved to create a modern state, and especially a modern army, for Egypt. In this he was as successful as any non-European power at the time. By the time the Greeks revolted against Turkey in 1821, it was Muḥammad ʿAlī who turned out to have the best resources to put down the revolution and was called on by the Sulṭān in 1824 to do so. He very nearly did, until Britain intervened and sank the Egyptian fleet at the Battle of Navarino in 1827.
Frustrated in that direction, Muḥammad ʿAlī was successful in his conquest of the Sudan (1820-1822), probably advancing further up the Nile than any power since Ancient Egypt, though at a terrible cost to the Sudanese in massacre, mutilations, and slaving (of which the American boxer Cassius Clay was probably unaware when he adoped the name "Muhammad Ali" upon his conversion to Islām).
British Consul Generals for Egypt | |
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Edward Malet | 1879-1883 |
Evelyn "Over" Baring, Earl of Cromer | 1883-1907 |
Sir Eldon Gorst, Plenipotentiary | 1907-1911 |
Herbert Kitchener, 1st Viscount Kitchener, Plenipotentiary | 1911–1914 |
British High Commissioners | |
Sir Milne Cheetham (acting) | 1914-1915 |
Sir Henry McMahon | 1915-1917 |
Sir Reginald Wingate | 1917-1919 |
Edmund Allenby, 1st Viscount Allenby | 1919-1925 |
George Lloyd, 1st Baron Lloyd | 1925-1929 |
Sir Percy Loraine | 1929-1933 |
Sir Miles Lampson | 1934-1936 |
British Ambassadors to Egypt | |
Miles Lampson, 1st Baron Killearn | 1936-1946 |
Sir Ronald Campbell | 1946-1950 |
Sir Ralph Stevenson | 1950-1955 |
Sir Humphrey Trevelyan | 1955-1956 |
Suez Crisis, 1956 |
Egyptian interventions in Arabia in 1818-1822 and 1838-1843 very nearly exterminated the House of Saʿūd and its fundamentalist Wahhābī movement, which much later would create a united and independent Saʿūdī Arabia -- and later much international mayhem when Wahhābī radicalism spread elsewhere, especially to India and Afghanistan.
When Muḥammad ʿAlī moved into Syria in 1831, however, this was a threat to the authority and perhaps even the existence of the Ottoman Empire. When war broke out in 1839, Britain intervened to support the Empire and to throw Muḥammad ʿAlī out in 1841.
The most formative subsequent event for Egyptian history was certainly the construction of the Suez Canal. Although Britain had nothing to do with the project, and it was the French Emperor Napoleon III who attended the lavish opening ceremonies, the collapse of Egyptian financies led to the purchase by Britain of all Egypt's shares in the Canal Company. Benjamin Disraeli simply borrowed the money from the Rothschilds, on the security of no more than the full faith and credit of the Government of Britain.
This did not solve Egypt's financial problems, which got worse. The Khedive Ismā'īl also wasted resources on disastrous campaigns against Ethiopia in 1875-1876. With its interests now in danger, Britain occupied Egypt, without French support, in 1882. Ironically, the Occupation was undertaken under Prime Minister William Gladstone, who was opposed to British Imperialism. He was not, however, going to endanger British finances just because the Khedive didn't know how to handle his. Meanwhile, the British had already occupied Cyrpus in 1878, to anchor British forces in the Eastern Mediterranean.
This made Egypt a de facto part of the British Empire, indeed one of the most important parts, with the Suez Canal an essential strategic link between Britain and India. Some of the most colorful episodes in British Imperial history occured because of this. In 1881 a revolt had started in the Sudan, led by a man claiming to be the Apocalyptic Mahdī of Islāmic tradition. Gladstone was not going to spend British money, or Egyptian, in trying to suppress the rebellion. Consequently, Charles Gordon, known as "Chinese Gordon" for his part in putting down the Taiping Rebellion in China (1860-1864), and who had already been governor-general of the Sudan from 1877-1880, was sent back in order to evacuate the Egyptian garrison.
Once there, Gordon decided to stay and resist the Mahdī. By 1885 this insubordination stirred up public opinion back home and forced Gladstone to send a relief expedition; but it missed rescuing Gordon by two days, as the Mahdī's forces overran Khartoum and killed Gordon. This made Gordon one of the great heroes of the day, humiliated Britain, and resulted in the fall of Gladstone's government. However, the Sudan was, for the time being, abandoned -- much as the United States abandoned Afghanistan in 2021.
When the British returned in 1898, in the heyday of imperial jingoism, Lord Kitchener, with a young Winston Churchill along, calmly massacred the mediaeval army of the Mahdī's successor at the Battle of Omdurman, avenged Gordon, and made himself one of the immortal heroes of the British Empire too. Although formally in Egyptian service, Kitchener reconquered the Sudan as an Anglo-Egyptian "condominium." The theory of British and Egyptian joint rule in the Sudan continued until Sudanese independence in 1956, though between 1924 and 1936 the British didn't even allow Egyptian forces or authorities into the Sudan.
British High Commissioners for Cyprus | |
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Lord John Hay (acting) | 1878 |
Sir Garnet Joseph Wolseley | 1878-1879 |
Sir Robert Biddulph | 1879-1886 |
Sir Henry Ernest Gascoyne Bulwer | 1886-1892 |
Sir Walter Joseph Sendall | 1892-1898 |
Sir William Frederick Haynes Smith | 1898-1904 |
Sir Charles Anthony King-Harman | 1904-1911 |
Hamilton Goold-Adams | 1911-1915 |
Sir John Eugene Clauson | 1915-1918 |
Sir Malcolm Stevenson | acting, 1918-1920, 1920-1925 |
British Governors of Cyprus | |
Sir Malcolm Stevenson | 1925-1926 |
Sir Ronald Storrs | 1926-1932 |
Sir Reginald Edward Stubbs | 1932-1933 |
Sir Herbert Richmond Palmer | 1933-1939 |
William Denis Battershill | 1939-1941 |
Charles Campbell Woolley | 1941-1946 |
Reginald Fletcher, 1st Baron Winster | 1946-1949 |
Sir Andrew Barkworth Wright | 1949-1954 |
Sir Robert Perceval Armitage | 1954-1955 |
Sir John Alan Francis Harding | 1955-1957 |
Sir Hugh Mackintosh Foot | 1957-1960 |
Cyprus Independent, 1960 |
All this took place with Egypt still legally part of the Ottoman Empire. Right down until 1914 the Turkish flag was dutifully flown and Turkish passports issued, for Egypt, Cyrpus, and the Sudan. When Turkey repaid a century of British support by throwing its lot with Germany in World War I, however, the fiction came to an end, and Egypt de jure came under British rule as a Protectorate, with the Sulṭānate, abolished by the Turks in 1517, reëstablished.
This was not popular in Egypt, and after the war Egypt did become a formally independent Kingdom, as Cyprus, however, became a British Crown Colony. However, the British did retain Treaty rights to garrison and protect the Suez Canal; so, in many ways, the British Occupation of 1882 simply continued. There was little doubt of that once World War II started. Egypt, a legally Neutral country, was first invaded by Italy and then by Germany, with British forces meeting, fighting, and ultimately expelling them. Egypt at the time seemed no less a part of the British Empire than it had ever been, with the Ambassador calling the shots. Egypt did eventually declare war on Germany, but not until February 24, 1945.
Directors-General of Antiquities | |
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Auguste-Édouard Mariette | 1858-1880 |
Gaston Maspero | 1881-1886 |
Eugène Grébault | 1886-1892 |
Jacques Jean Marie de Morgan | 1892-1897 |
Gaston Maspero | 1899-1914 |
Pierre Lacau | 1914-1936 |
Étienne Drioton | 1936-1952 |
Mostafa Amer | 1953-1956 |
Abbas Bayoumi | 1956-1957 |
Moharram Kamal | 1957-1959 |
Abd el-Fattah Hilmy | 1959 |
Mohammad Anwar Shoukry | 1960-1964 |
Mohammad Mahdi | 1964-1966 |
Gamal Mokhtar | 1967-1971 |
Director, Egyptian Antiquities Organization | |
Gamal Mokhtar | 1971-1977 |
Mohammad Abd el-Qader Mohammad | 1977-1978 |
Shehata Adam | 1978-1981 |
Fuad el-Oraby | 1981 |
Ahmed Khadry | 1982-1988 |
Mohammad Abdel Halim Nur el-Din | 1988 |
Sayed Tawfik | 1989-1990 |
Mohammad Ibrahim Bakr | 1990-1993 |
Director of the Supreme Council of Antiquities | |
Mohammad Abdel Halim Nur el-Din | 1993-1996 |
Ali Hassan | 1996-1997 |
Gaballa Ali Gaballa | 1997-2002 |
Zahi Hawass | 2002-2011 |
Mohamad Abdel Fattah | 2011 |
Moustapha Amine | 2011-2013 |
Mohammad Ibrahim | 2013-? |
Mostafa Waziri | 2017-present |
It is noteworthy that every single one of the Directors of Antiquities during the period of the House of Muḥammad ʿAlī is French. This may involve a certain anti-British political statement, since the French were seen as allies during the building of the Suez Canal and did not join the British occupation of Egypt in 1882. The educated Egyptian elite remained Franophile for many years. Of course, when France joined Britain at Suez in 1956, that was the end of that, as the office of Director had ceased going to foreigners with the overthrow of King Fārūk.
Recently, among the successors in the office has most conspicuously been Zahi Hawass, who became the international face of Egyptian archaeology, is responsible for significant discoveries in his own right, and does not suffer gladly the sort of fools who promote or are entranced by the endless crackpot theories about Egypt.
Indeed, Egyptology has now larged passed into the hands of Egyptians. They are prominent in recent excavations and with striking discoveries at Saqqara and elsewhere. Thus, Mohammad Yussef, in charge of a site at Saqqara, and Mostafa Waziri, Director of Antiquities, have found many shaft tombs in the Bubasteion, Βουβαστειών, an originally Saite temple of the cat goddess Bastet, (see Dynasty XXII), situated at the eastern edge of the Saqqara necropolis. Multiple well preserved tombs with coffins, mummies, and other funerary equipment, including statues, some much older than the XXVI Dynasty, some well into the later periods, including under the Ptolemies, have been uncovered.
Monument of Auguste-Édouard Mariette, at his birthplace, Boulogne-sur-Mer, France, 2019; his actual tomb is at the Cairo Museum |
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Nearby, south of the pyramid of Unas, excavations by Ramadan Hussein, who actually is affiliated with Tübingen University, has concentrated on Saite tombs. The mummies discovered there seem less well preserved than those in the Bubasteion, but Dr. Hussein topped that off with a unique and spectacular discovery.
One burial shaft led down, not to a tomb, but to a room apparently used for mummification, with spaces to work on bodies and channels cut in the rock to drain away bodily fluids. The depth of the room kept the heat of the desert, up above, away, slowing decomposition. What looks like a large pot was actually used to burn incense, in the first place so that the smoke would keep away insects, but, we might imagine, also to cover some of the smells of bodies and chemicals. Herodotus commented on the bad smell that tended to cling to embalmers.
But there was more. Foundations adjacent to the top of the shaft were apparently for a tent or shelter erected as part of the mummification site. Dr. Hussein remembered an actual image of such a place in an Old Kingdom tomb at Giza. Pictured in some detail, with a distinctive entrance ramp, the shelter was called an , an "ibu." Despite the Old Kingdom image, no actual "ibu" has otherwise ever been found in Egypt, so this was a discovery of epic proportions, even if it didn't produce objects that people might like to look at in museums. In turn, we might wonder if this site handled mummification for the entire Saqqara necropolis, over a period of centuries.
The term for the "ibu" is a curiosity in its own right. What we get in the dictionaries of Alan Gardiner and Bill Petty (Hieroglyphic Dictionary, A Middle Egyptian Vocabulary, Museum Tours Press, 2012) are words that are glossed as meaning "refuge," or , and nothing else. The determinative in the dictionaries is the glyph for "house."
However, in a National Geographic documentary, we actually see Ramadan Hussein reading the word off the wall of the Old Kingdom tomb, and the three phonetic glyphs are followed, not by "house," but by the "offering table" glyph, , although a non-standard form that is missing the actual offerings. Neither Gardiner nor Petty list the non-standard form, but the Hieroglyphica font does. It must not occur very often. I do not see the discussion that this warrants at any of the treatments of Dr. Hussein's work on line, including those from the National Geographic Society. The end of Muḥammad ʿAlī's dynasty resulted from the humiliation of continuing British occupation, the mortification of Egyptian failure in the war against Israeli independence in 1948, and from the failure of King Fārūq, who was rather more successful as a playboy than as a leader, to deal with any of it. The army, soon led by Gamal Abdel Nasser, swept away the monarchy, got British forces to leave Egypt, nationalized the Canal, and then won a great political victory when Britain and France (74 years late) reoccupied the Canal, Israel invaded the Sinai, and both the United States and the Soviet Union told them all to leave in no uncertain terms, in the Suez Crisis of 1956 (just as Soviet tanks were rolling into Hungary!). Thus, Egypt became a player in the Cold War, and the heritage of Muḥammad ʿAlī, the Ottoman Empire, and British imperialism faded rapidly.
After Nasser provoked Israel into war in 1967, and lost the Sinai, the Canal was closed for many years. Anwar Sadat launched a surprise attack across the Canal in 1973. This was at first successful, but Egyptian forces ended up cut off and surrounded in the Sinai before a cease-fire was called. It was close to the consensus of opinion, among both Arabs and Israelis, that Sadat engaged in this war simply to give himself enough credibility to make peace with Israel, which he did. Expelling the Soviets and contracting an American subsidy, this has remained the basis of Egyptian foreign policy ever since, even after Sadat's assassination. Egypt, however, has begun to simmer with Islamic radicalism, some of whose roots are in the Muslim Brotherhood, which was founded in Egypt. Nasser had no patience for such people, and the hand of his police state lay on them heavily. Sadat, of course, was assassinated by them. Today, the worst sign is the increasing level of attack on the Copts, the native Christians of Egypt. From perhaps 10% of the population of Egypt in recent times, the Copts are now down to less than 6%, with a steady stream of them fleeing the country. Christian villages and churches are shot up, in one case actually at Christmas, people murdered, women and children kidnapped and forcibly converted to ʾIslām and "married" to Muslims against their will, and the government does not even allow churches to be built or repaired without its permission, which is effecively never given. Thus on 24 November 2010, Egypt security forces actually stormed the St. Mary and St. Michael churches, which were under construction in Giza, occupying them and firing live ammunition at Coptic demontrators, killing at least four. The official complaint was that a permit for the construction had not been obtained, although actually it had. Either way, a paramilitary attack, shooting civilians, is not the reasonable response to people building churches.
The Western Press pays little attention to these atrocities, both because the Western secular elite is hostile to Christianity, and generally kills stories about the persecution of Christians, and because the political Left is effectively an ally of Islamic Fascism. Since State Security forces fail to protect Christians and often appear to cooperate in their persecution, including this recent case of shooting Christian demonstrators, this bodes ill for the future of a pro-Western Egyptian government -- although with such friends, one might wonder, what might enemies look like? Of course, we know. The United States encouraged Hosni Mubarak to democratize his rule; but this may be a case, familiar from elsewhere, that a genuinely popular government would plunge Egypt into the savage Mediaeval theocracy familiar from Irān and Afghanistan. Indeed, the first elected President after the overthrow of Mubarak is a representative of the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization previously illegal in Egypt, since the days of Nasser, and associated with Terrorism. We are likely in for a rough ride, and Brooklyn may end up with a largely Coptic demographic.
The Muslim Brotherhood President, Muhammad Morsi, soon wore out his welcome. He was clearly intent on imposing an Islamic regime in Egypt, including moves to consolidate dictatorial power. The Army overthrew him in 2013; and in 2014 a general with the unfortunate name of as-Sīsī (usually rendered "al-Sisi" by the Press, when they could have made it just like "Assisi," like the town of St. Francis) was elected President. This reproduces a now familiar pattern in the Arab world. A dictatorship is overthrown. Islamists are voted in. They soon manfest themselves to be worse than the dictatorship. So there is then a coup, with a new military dictatorship installed. The paradigm for this was some years ago in Algeria. Unfortunately, the pattern was not repeated in Iran, which retains its dangerous and vicious theocracy. Since Iranians aren't Arabs, one wonders about the cultural or political differences involved. In Egypt, it is not clear what the effects of all his are going to be, especially on Christians; but the Brotherhood itself has been outlawed, as under Nasser, and many of its members sentenced to death. The Coptic Patriarchs of Alexandria
The Ottoman Sulṭāns and Caliphs
Copyright (c) 1996, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2018, 2019, 2021 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved
The Sanūsī Amīrs & Kings of Libya | |
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Muḥammad as-Sanūsī | 1837-1859, Cyrenaica, 1841 |
Muḥammad al-Mahdī | 1859-1902 |
Aḥmad ash-Sharīf | 1902-1916, d.1933 |
Italian occupation, 1911 | |
Muḥammad Idrīs | 1916-1949; Amir, 1949-1951; King, 1951-1969, d.1983 |
Mu'ammar al-Qaddhāfī dictatorship, 1969-2011 |
This was a thinly populated backwater for the Turks, noteworthy mainly for Roman ruins and piracy (with U.S. Marines landing at Derne in Cyrenaica in the First Barbary War, 1801-1805). It all achieved greater significance when Italy displaced the Ottomans in 1911 (ceded in 1912). Indeed, Libya became one of the most important strategic theaters of World War II. The Italians tried invading Egypt from Libya in September 1940 but by February 1941 had been thrown completely out of Cyrenaica, with 130,000 soldiers captured. Alarmed, Hitler sent Erwin Rommel with a couple of divisions to prevent the Italian position from collapsing completely. Rommel, however, went on the offensive. For more than a year, things surged back and forth, with Cyrenaica recovered, lost, and recovered again. By July 1942, Rommel was deep into Egypt, barely stopped at El Alamein, 60 miles from Alexandria. By then, however, the United States was in the War; and the strongly reinforced British began an offensive in October. They broke through and soon swept the Germans and Italians entirely out of Libya. Retreating into Tunisia, they were caught against the Americans who had landed in Morocco and Algeria in November.
After the War, Libya formally became independent in 1951, under the Sasūnī Amīr of Cyrenaica. The long lived King Idrīs was eventually overthrown in 1969. This was under the leadership of the erratic and megalomaniacal Mu'ammar al-Qaddhāfī. Along with armed clashes with Egypt and Chad, Libya became a sponsor of terrorism. Blamed for a bombing in Berlin in 1986, Libya was bombed by Ronald Reagan in retaliation. Later blamed for a bomb that brought down Pam Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988, sanctions were imposed on Libya until accused operatives were surrendered. This eventually happened, Qaddafi may have thought better of his ways, and sanctions were lifted in 2003. Meanwhile, Qaddafi had dressed up his dictatorship with an idiosyncratic political theory. Libya became the "Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya." Jamahiriya, similar to the Arabic word for "republic," jumhūrīya, was a term coined by Qaddafi for his political system, which was supposed to be a kind of direct, mass democracy, but was no more democratic than similar arrangements in the Soviet Union. Like Mao's little red book, Qaddhāfī produced a little green book. Qaddhāfī seemed secure enough, like many other dictators (one thinks of Castro), but increasingly anachronistic (Castro, again). At the same time, Qaddhāfī became an object of humor, as his appearance was oddly altered by either aging or plastic surgery, he usually appeared in outlandish costumes, and he created a personal bodyguard consisting entirely of women. Much of his family seemed happy to enjoy the benefits of an international jet-set lifestyle abroad and dictatorship at home.
In 2011, with the revolts of the "Arab Spring" well underway, Qaddhāfī himself was perhaps within days of putting down a revolt in Cyrenaica when NATO contributed air power to the defense of the rebels. Slowly, the tide of battle turned, and Tripoli itself was captured in August. Qaddhāfī apparently fled to his hometown of Sirte. As the town was falling in October, Qaddhāfī attempted to flee to the South. Captured, he seems to have been beaten, tortured, and finally killed by rebel forces. One figure, wearing a New York Yankees baseball cap, is seen on video shooting Qaddhāfī with what he claimed were the fatal shots. This treatment of the fallen leader was an embarrassment, although few doubted that it paled besides the treatment that Qaddhāfī had often given to his own enemies. As in Iraq, a culture of violence and terror had been fostered that left little room for respect, either for the fallen or even for the dead. It remains to be seen how moderate or sensible the new government will prove to be. Just as Charlie Chaplin parodied Adolf Hitler and Fascist dictatorship in The Great Dictator [1940], Sacha Baron Cohen parodies Mu'ammar al-Qaddhāfī in The Dictator [2012]. Although Cohen's dictator keeps his country poor by refusing to sell oil, which Qaddhāfī never did, his eccentric behavior and clothing, his ruthless tyranny, and especially his all female bodyguard, unmistakeably link the parody to the Libyan.
Since Qaddhāfī was already dead by the time the film was released, one might think that the whole project would be in poor taste. However, the film was certainly well in production before the end-game of the Libyan revolution, and poor taste has never inhibited Sacha Baron Cohen in any case -- although he does carefully avoid any references to ʾIslām, as he had also previously done in Borat [2006], despite that film's purported source in Muslim Kazakhstan. Although this movie was entirely scripted, and Cohen did not film it, like his previous movies, by approaching in character unknowing people in public; he nevertheless publicized his movie by appearing in character in public situations. He was allowed to do this at the Oscars when he agreed that he would perpetrate no stunts during the telecast. Instead, we got a stunt on the Red Carpet outside, where Cohen appeared with an urn that he said contained the ashes of the late North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il, who supposedly had always wanted to attend the Oscars. Showing the urn to E! television host Ryan Seacrest, Cohen, accompanied by some of his female bodyguards, "accidentally on purpose" spilled "ashes" all over Seacrest's clothing.
An intriguing feature of the movie is Cohen's speech about democracy near the end. Although supposedly in praise of democracy, which the dictator will now supposedly bring to his country, we nevertheless find the speech reproaching American democracy with a long wish list of Leftist complaints, including the "Occupy Wall Street" slogan that 1% of the popular control the wealth and probably the government of the country. When I saw the movie in Los Angeles, this part was actually cheered by the audience, which apparently consisted mainly of the sort of California brain-dead Democrats who reelected Jerry Brown and Barbara Boxer in 2010. And one might wonder if these sentiments happened to be Cohen's own, breaking through the pose of his character.
Or, Cohen may be deriving humor from his habit of putting on and hoaxing his audience, like Andy Kaufman, and deceiving their expectations. For, in the context of the movie, the Leftist complaints are reasons why democracy does not work and is not desirable. And while Cohen's dictator returns to his country and stages an election, he of course steals the election and happily returns to his old dictatorial habits. He has never been sincere; and the heartfelt repentance that he expresess to his new American girlfriend (Anna Faris), who now awkwardly turns out to be Jewish (with an anti-Semitic implication but without, as also in Borat, the real world Islamist context where that would make sense), may have been just as much a cynical ploy as everything else. It therefore looks like the dictator's endorsement of "Occupy Wall Street" propaganda was just Sacha Baron Cohen's clever way of getting his audiences to cheer for dictatorship.
The Ottoman Sulṭāns and Caliphs
"Romania" means the area in the Balkans and Middle East with successor states to the Mediaeval Roman Empire. It might be called Greater or Former Romania (Romania Maior, Prior) in contrasted to the later Kingdom and Republic of România (Romania Minor, Posterior). Romania is thus distinguished from historic Francia (the land of the "Franks" to Greeks or Muslims), which means Western, Central, and Northern Europe originally subject to the Latin, Roman Catholic Church in Rome, and from historic Russia in Eastern Europe, subject to the Russian Orthodox Church (still in doctrinal union with the Patriarch of Constantinople). The map below thus roughly corresponds to the territories covered by the Roman Empire at the mid-11th century, except for modern România and Georgia. These were outside the Empire, but in culture and religion they are historically linked to Constantinople. This will be an unfamiliar use of the name "Romania" for most, and the reason for it is explained in "Decadence, Rome and Romania, the Emperors Who Weren't, and Other Reflections on Roman History," "The Vlach Connection and Further Reflections on Roman History," and the "Guide and Index to Lists of Rulers." The double headed eagle of the Palaeologi symbolized the European and Asian sides of the Empire. This now represents a significant historical and cultural divide. The Asian side, and the center of the Empire at Adrianople and Constantinople, is still largely Turkish. This is a rather different Turkey from the Ottoman Empire, however, secularized and Westernized by Kemal Atatürk, with things like the Arabic alphabet actually outlawed, now hoping to join the European Union. On the European side, the successor states to Rome in the 12th and 13th centuries have reemerged. This is also the case to the east, where Georgia and Armenia, kept from the Ottomans by Russia, are now independent.
Thus, "Modern Romania" here means the modern successor states, first to Rome ("Romania" to itself, "Byzantium" to the historians), second to the Ottoman Empire, which in the 14th and 15th centuries established its domination over all former Roman possessions, and more, in the Eastern Mediterranean. As the Roman successors emerged in the 12th century, so do the Ottoman successors emerge in the 19th century. Familiar states from the earlier period are Serbia, Bulgaria, Cyprus, and even Bosnia. The earlier states of the Vlach speaking Romanians, Wallachia and Moldavia, continue from the past, subject to special achievements in Ottoman misrule, ultimately to unite as the modern state of România, the only country in Europe to preserve the proper name of the Roman Empire. Turkey is still the largest and most powerful state in the region.
Entirely new states are Montenegro and Greece itself. Montenegro, the "Black Mountain" ( , Qara Dagh in Turkish and Crna Gora, Црна Гора, in Serbian), like many remote areas of the Ottoman Empire, began to drift out of central control as Turkish power went into its long decline. "Greece" itself was something that, in a sense, didn't exist in the Middle Ages. What the Ancient Greeks had called themselves, "Hellenes," came to be used in Late Roman times to mean Greek pagans. Greek Christians were "Romans," Rhômaioi in Greek. This distinction was maintained through the Middle Ages, and was remembered well into the 19th, if not the 20th, century (a Greek can still be Rum in Turkish). A modern Greece, Hellas, that was not an heir to Rome, was an entirely new phenomenon.
The politically, religiously, and culturally dominant language of Mediaeval Romania was Greek, whose alphabet today, however, is only used for Greek. Other alphabets, nevertheless, were developed, based on the Greek, for other languages, from Gothic, to Armenian, Georgian, and Cyrillic. The Armenian alphabet was in use by Armenians both in Romania and in the often separate kingdoms of Armenia. Under the Ottomans,
Copyright (c) 2005, 2012, 2015 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved
MODERN ROMANIA
Ottoman Successor States in the Balkans
Princes, Kings, and Presidents of România, Montenegro, Greece, Serbia, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Albania, Macedonia, Armenia, and Georgia
Europa | 1. Romania | 2. Constantinople |
2. Francia | 1. Rome | |
3. Russia | 3. Moscow |
A characteristic of imperial states is an easy mixing of peoples and languages. They all have too much to fear from the imperial power for too much trouble to develop between them. When the heavy imperial hand is withdrawn, however, serious trouble can result. Thus, the end of the British Empire resulted in the partitions, amid war and massacre, of India, Palestine, and Cyprus. The decline of Turkish power similarly uncorked more than a century of conflict, continuing even in the 21st century, in the Balkans. Border areas end up with the most ambiguous identities and so can provoke the greatest conflict.
Bosnia and Herzegovina, which had been swapped back and forth between Hungary and Romania and Serbia in the 12th and 13th centuries, and then were long held by the Turks, ended up with a mixed population of Croats (Latin/Catholic Christians), Serbs (Orthodox Christians), and Moslem Bosnians (Bosniacs). All, as it happened, spoke the same language, Serbo-Croatian, but written in different alphabets. The disintegration of Yugoslavia, with the lifting of the heavy imperial hand of Communism in the 1990's, led to terrible fighting, massacres, and atrocities, most famously carried out by the Serbs against the others, but not unheard of from the Croatians, Bosniacs, and Kosovar Albanians also. A famous bridge in Mostar in Herzegovina, which had linked, actually and symbolically, the Christian and Moslem parts of the city, was destroyed (evidently by Croatians) in the fighting.
With a peace settlement patched up for Bosnia, the Serbs then turned their hand against the restless Albanian majority of Kosovo, which the Serbs regarded as the Serbian heartland but which had contained few Serbs for a long time. It is enough to make one yearn for the return of the Palaeologi. The first map above shows the situation in 1817, after the Russo-Turkish War of 1806-1812, rebellions, and a final grant of autonomy to Serbia. The Ionian Islands had originally belonged to Venice but were seized by Britain in the Napoleonic Era and ceded to Britain by the Congress of Vienna. The continuing concern of Russia for Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire, and the proximity of a phil-Hellene Britain to Greece, set the stage for a long century of revolt and intervention against the tottering Ottoman Empire.
The Ottoman Sulṭāns and Caliphs The first map shows the situation after the War of Greek Independence (1821-1829). To save Greece, all the Great Powers were drawn in against Turkey. In addition to traditional concerns about the treatment of Christians under Ottoman rule was now added the fruit of an 18th century Neo-Classical love of Greece. This drew enthuasiasts like Lord Byron (1788-1824), who arrived in Greece in 1823 and drew both financial aid, political support, and the attention of a new popular press to the revolt. In perfect Romantic form, Byron then died in the midst of the struggle.
Against the feeble Ottomans, the Greeks did well enough; but the Sultān then appealed for aid to the modernizing Muḥammad ʿAlī of Egypt. The Greeks were then defeated, but this lead to the intervention of the Powers. The British sank Muḥammad ʿAlī's fleet at Navarino in 1827, and that spelled victory for the Greeks. With Greek independence went increased territory for Serbia, autonomy for Wallachia and Moldavia, and border concessions to Russia.
Index
1. ROMÂNIA |
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After the middle of the 17th century, appointments begin to feature Greeks, the Phanariots, Φαναριώτες (singular Φαναριώτης, Attic plural Φαναριώται) as Princes (indicated with the Greek letter φ below). This name is from the Phanar section (Φανάριον, "streetlight"; Modern Greek, Φανάρι; Turkish, Fener) of Constantinople. Their job was simply to get as much money out of the land as possible, both for the Sultān and for themselves (the reason to be a tax farmer). This was not good for the Principalities, nor popular, but not much could be done about it until the influence of some friendly Christian power, like that of Russia, began to be felt in the region. Or, the Princes, Phanariots or not, began to sympathize with those, like themselves, subject to the evils of Ottoman rule.
Phanariots can be identified by family, like the prominent Mavrocordats, Μαυροκορδάτοι (singular Μαυροκορδάτος), and sometimes these are familiar from earlier history, such as the houses of Dukas, Δούκας (Ducas), and Cantacuzino, Καντακουζηνός (Cantacuzinus) -- Greeks of Mediaeval derivation who figure early in the Phanariot period. These rulers, while enjoying the benefits of tax farming, nevertheless began to experience flashes of anti-Ottoman nationalism, leading to collaboration with the Russians, imprisonment in Constantinople, defection to the Russians, and finally to leadership, by both Mavrocordats and Ypsilanti, ᾿Υψηλάντες (singular ᾿Υψηλάντης, Attic plural ᾿Υψηλάνται), of the revolt and independence of Greece.
The multiple terms of the Princes here are fiendishly complicated and sometimes extend to the neighboring Principality. Rulers of Wallachia and Moldavia are numbered separately, but this does not always seem to be done consistently. There is some overlap here with the previous table. See there for discussion of the language, the names of the Principalities, and the titles of the Princes.
Рȣмѫниа, ROMÂNIA | |||
---|---|---|---|
Continued from "Rome and Romania," "Romanians"; Ottoman Sovereignty, unless otherwise noted | |||
Валахиа, WALLACHIA, Ottoman conquest, 1395 | Мωлдова, MOLDAVIA, Ottoman conquest, 1455 | ||
воевода, Voivode, Prince, Governor, 1593-1600, d.1601 | Michael (Mihail) II the Brave | Transylvania, 1599-1600 | |
воевода, Voivode, Prince, Governor, 1600 | |||
Nicholas I Patrascu | co-regent, 1599-1600 | Ieremiah Movila | 1600-1606 |
son of Michael II | |||
1600-1601 | Simeon Movila | 1606-1607 | |
1601-1602, 1611, 1611-1616, 1620-1623 | Radu Mihnea Basarab | 1616-1619, 1623-1626 | |
Radu (VII) Serban Craiovescu-Basarab | 1602-1610, 1611 | Mihail II Movila | 1607, 1607 |
Constantin I Movila | 1607, 1607-1611 | ||
to Transylvania, 1610-1611 | Stefan X Tomsa Mushatin | 1611-1615, 1621-1623 | |
Gabriel Movila | 1616,1618-1620 | Alexandru V Movila | 1615-1616 |
Alexandru IV Ilias Basarab | 1616-1618, 1627-1629 | Gaspar Gratiani | 1619-1620 |
Alexandru V Ilias Mushatin | 1620-1621 | ||
Alexandru V Basarab the Child-Prince | 1623-1627 | Myron Barnovschi-Movila | 1626-1629, 1633 |
Leon Mushatin | 1629-1632 | Alexandru VI Coconul Basarab | 1629-1630 |
Moses Movila | 1630-1631, 1633-1634 | ||
Radu VIII Ilias Basarab | 1632 | Alexandru Ilias Mushatin | 1631-1633 |
Matthew Basarab Craiovescu-Brancoveanu | 1632-1654 | Basil Lupu | 1634-1653, 1653 |
1654-1658, d.1661 | Constantin (II of Moldavia) Serban Craiovescu-Brancoveanu | 1659, 1661 | |
Mihnea III Craiovescu-Brancoveanu | 1658-1659 | George Stefan Ceaur | 1653, 1653-1658 |
1659-1660 | George/Gheorghe I Ghica, Γκίκας, Ghika | 1658-1659 | |
Gregory I Ghica | 1660-1664, 1672-1673 | Stephanito Lupu | 1659-1661, 1661 |
Radu Leon Mushatin | 1664-1669 | Istrate Dabija | 1661-1665 |
Anthony Voda din Popesti | 1669-1672 | Ilias Alexander Basarab | 1666-1668 |
Stefan X Petriceicu | 1672-1673, 1673-1674, 1683-1684 |
While Phanariot tax farmers do not begin with the Mavrocordatoi, that family constitutes one of the most prominent and significant. They begin here with Alexander, who was the Grand Dragoman, δραγομάνος, or principle translator, for the Ottoman Sultan. Alexander's son, Nicholas, first continued in this capacity but then moved to ruling the Danubian principalities. Although these positions were sources of great wealth, it was a precarious existence; and it was not unusual for family members to be imprisoned and/or pay ranson to the Ottoman government, or seek refuge in the French Embassy in Constantinople.
Alexander is often identified as a "Doctor," because he actually had Doctor of Philosophy and of Medicine degrees from the University of Bologna. This made him him as much a European figure as a personage of the Balkans or the Ottoman Empire. He was made a Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, a Reichsgraf, by Leopold I in 1673 -- a hereditary title retained by the Mavrocordatoi. As part of the Ottoman government, he drafted the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699, by which the Ottomans acknowledge that they had lost possession of Hungary, after 150 years, and adjacent territories -- defeats begun at the failure of the Ottoman attack on Vienna in 1683.
Eventually, many Mavrocordatoi, like the Ypsilanti, fled to Russia. While we find a branch of the family then participating in the Greek Revolt, so that one actually became a President of Greece (before the Monarchy was established), others, and in-laws, continued to serve the Ottomans right up to the 20th century.
The genealogy of the Mavrocordatoi is given by Philip Mansel [Constantinople, City of the World's Desire, 1453-1924, John Murray, London, 1995, p.444]. The value of Mansel's book is compromised by his decision to eliminate all diacritics for Turkish, Arabic, Greek, etc. This makes it difficult to identify or reconstruct the spelling of many names and words. Wikipedia is now a good resource for such research. Many scholars should now be ashamed that Wikipedia has assumed a responsibility that they, with specious explanations (or none), have abandoned.
Some of the Princely families are not, of course, Phanariots, or have anomalous origins. Thus, the Ghicas are Românian (perhaps ultimately even Albanian, as Gjika), whom we see before the beginning of the Phanariot period; but they are said to have undergone "Hellenization," with the Greek name Γκίκας (where Modern Greek γκ is used to write "g" as a stop), assimilating them to the Phanariots. It ended up that Gregory V Alexander Ghica was the last Prince of Moldavia before the unification of România (while Wallachia was occupied by Austria).
While six Mavrocordatoi served as Princes of Wallachia and Moldavia, no less than ten of the Ghica family did so. Also, they began earlier and continued right down to the last day of the separate existence of the Principalities. Gregory V was the last Prince of either state. My particular attention to the family, however, was because of descendants who had nothing to do with the Principalities. Costanza Ghika (1835-1895) married an Italian of a noble family, Gioacchino Rasponi (1829-1877), who for some years was the Mayor of Ravenna, Italy, including the year, 1865, when the bones of Dante Alighieri were discovered where they had been hidden by Franciscan monks, who did not want them removed to Dante's birthplace, Florence.
After Napoleon expelled the Franciscans from the city in 1810, the location of the bones, and even the fact that they were not in Dante's tomb, was forgotten. After the discovery, examination, and reburial, there were rumors that relics of Dante had been kept by some of the discoverers. These rumors, in all but one verified case, turned out to be false. However, Costanza was given a gold medallion that was purported to contain some kind of relic. It is still not known what it does contain, but the artifact ended up in the possession of the Senate of the Kingdom of Italy, where Costanza's brother-in-law, Achille, served. Whether it will ever be examined in a good question.
Another Ghica woman, remarkable for qualities more intrinsic to her than her marriage, was Elena Ghica (1818-1888), otherwise the Duchess Helena Koltsova-Massalskaya, who wrote under the pen name "Dora d'Istria." Like Alexander Mavrocordatos, Elena benefited from a European education, in Dresden, Vienna, Venice, and Berlin, and she apparently ended up speaking, not just her native Romanian, but Italian, German, French, Latin, Classical and Modern Greek, and Russian. This is already pretty impressive. Marrying a Russian Duke, she found life in St. Petersburg rather too oppressive; and, with her husband's consent, explored Europe a bit more before settling down in Florence -- not unlike Dr. Edith Farnsworth, whose interesting life I have just examined elsewhere.
Elena, as Dora d'Istria, was a prolific author, producing novels, political tracts, history, and even some travel writing. Politically, she was liberal enough to favor women's emancipation and even the abolition of monasticism -- something not likely to be popular with her Romanian or Russian relatives. Among her political causes was a unique interest in Albania, probably inspired by her convication that the Ghica family derived from there. She wrote about the history of the family and advocated Albanian independence. However, for all her many languages, she did not learn Albanian. Although the cause thus may be have been a bit idiosyncratic, it was a considerable inspiration to the Albanians themselves, whose independence would need to wait until 1914. Otherwise, she had gotten the idea that 19th century Germany was a civilizing and progressive force in Europe, a serious mistake made by others, to be calamitously falsified in the 20th century. On the other hand, her hopes for a Ghica King of România were dashed by the imposition by the Powers of a Hohenzollern Prince on the country in 1866.
Assembling the genealogy of the Ghicas has proven difficult since it only exists in fragmentary form in the on-line recources I have found. A page at Wikipedia lists Gregory III as the father of Dimitrie (d.1803); but other pages and sources, with much more detail, have him as Dimitrie's brother instead. It may be particularly noteworthy that all the Ghicas of the Phanariot period are descendants of the daughter, Roxandra, of no less than Alexander Mavrocordato. Two 19th Century Prime Ministers of România were from the Ghica family. The crowns here, as with the Mavrocordatoi, are separetely numbered for Wallachia and Moldavia. Another interesting case of Phanariot families is that of the Rosetti, whose name turns up as "Ruset" or "Rosset" in Românian. The Rosettis are Phanariots, but their name is obviously Italian. They are, in fact, of Genoese origin, which is not surprising for the ethnic mix in Constantinople. I have not seen, however, the way "Rosetti" is written in Greek. Several branches of the family, under different names, continued to live in Wallachia, Moldavia, and România.
Similarly noteworthy are the Mavrogenes, Μαυρογένης, who were Greek but not Phanariots, and the Hangerli, who, curiously, are not always listed as Phanariots. I see that the name "Hangerli" is Turkish, but without explanation of what the word would mean. "Hančer" (with "-i" or "-li" as a suffix) means "dagger," and I do not see a lot of alternatives. But the name, whatever it means, appears to have been added, as an epithet, to the Greek name Chatzeris, Χατζερής. Since Constantine Hangerli (Wallachia, 1797-1799) claimed descent from the Palaeologi, this is the kind of thing we might expect if there was some serious question about the origin of the family.
Phanariot Greek Tax Farming, φ Валахиа, WALLACHIA Мωлдова, MOLDAVIA 1673-1678 George II Dukas, Δούκας, Ducas, φ 1665-1666, 1668-1672, 1678-1683 Serban Cantacuzino, Καντακουζηνός, φ 1678-1688 Dumitrascu Cantacuzino, φ 1673, 1674-1675, 1684-1685 Antioh I Rosetti, φ 1675-1678 Constantin III Cantemir 1685-1693 Constantin I
Brancoveanu1688-1714 Demetrius Cantemir 1693, 1710-1711 Constantin III Dukas, φ 1693-1695, 1700-1703 Antioh II Cantemir 1695-1700, 1705-1707 Michael III Racovita 1703-1705, 1707-1709, 1715-1726 d. 1744 1715-1716, 1719-1730 Nicholas II (of Wallachia)/I (of Moldavia) Mavrocordat, Μαυροκορδάτος, φ 1709-1710, 1711-1715 d. 1730 Stefan II Cantacuzino, φ 1714-1715 Occupied by Russia, 1739 1716-1719 John Mavrocordat, φ 1743-1747 1730, 1731-1733,
1735-1741, 1744-1748,
1756-1758, 1761-1763,
d.1769Constantin II (of Wallachia)/IV (of Moldavia) Mavrocordat, φ 1733-1735, 1741-1743, 1748-1749, 1769 1730-1731,
1741-1744Michael I (of Wallachia)/III (of Moldavia) Racovita 1703-1705, 1707-1709, 1715-1726 d. 1744 1733-1735, 1748-1752, d.1752 Gregory II Ghica, Γκίκας, Ghika 1726-1733, 1735-1739, 1739-1741, 1747-1748, d. 1752 1752-1753 Matthew Ghica 1753-1756 George III Racovita 1753-1756 Constantine V Racovita 1749-1753, 1756-1757 1758-1761,
1765-1766Scarlat I Ghica 1757-1758 d. 1766 Constantin III Racovita 1763-1764 John Theodore Callimachi, Καλλιμάχης, φ 1758-1761 Stefan III Racovita 1764-1765 Gregory III
Callimachi, φ1761-1764, 1767-1769 Alexandru VI Ghica 1766-1768 1768-1769 Gregory III (of Wallachia)/IV (of Moldavia) Ghica 1764-1767, 1774-1777 Occupied by Russia, 1769-1774; Russian right of intervention,
Treaty of Kuchuk Karinarji, 1774Emanuel Giani Rosetti (Ruset), φ 1770-1771 Constantine VI Mourouzis (Moruzi), Μουρούζης, φ 1777-1782 1774-1782, 1796-1797 Alexandru VII (of Wallachia)/IX (of Moldavia) Ypsilanti, ᾿Υψηλάντης, φ 1786-1788, d.1797 Nicholas III Caragea 1782-1783 Alexander VII Mavrocordat, the Mad Prince, φ 1782-1785 Mihail II Drakos Soutzos, Σούτζος (Suţu), φ 1783-1786, 1791-1793, 1801-1802 Alexander VIII
Mavrocordat, the Fugitive, φ1785-1786 Nicholas IV Mavrogenes, Μαυρογένης (Mavrogheni);
from Paros rather than Phanar1786-1790 Occupied by Austria, 1787-1788 Emanuel Giani Rosetti (Ruset), φ 1788-1789 Occupied by Russia, 1789 Occupied by Austria, 1789-1791 1793-1796, 1799-1801,
d.1807/1816?Alexander VIII (of Wallachia)/X (of Moldavia) Mourouzis (Moruzi), φ 1792, 1802-1806, 1806-1807 Constantin IV Chatzeris, Χατζερής (Hangerli), φ 1797-1799 Michael IV Soutzos
(Suţu), d.1864, φ1792-1795, 1819-1821 Alexander XI Callimachi, φ 1795-1799 1802-1806, 1806-1807 Constantin IX (of Wallachia)/VII (of Moldavia) Ypsilanti, φ 1799-1801, d.1807 1806, 1818-1821 Alexander IX (of Wallachia)/XII (of Moldavia) Soutzos (Suţu), φ 1801-1802, d.1821 Occupied by Russia, 1806-1812 John George Caragea 1812-1818 Alexander XIII Chatzeris (Hangerli), φ 1807 1821 Scarlat (II of Wallachia) Callimachi, φ 1806, 1807-1810, 1812-1819, d.1821 Gregory IV Ghica 1822-1828 Direct Ottoman military administration, 1821-1822 Ionita (John VIII) Sandu Sturza 1822-1828 Occupied by Russia, 1828-1834; Governor Count Kisselev Autonomy for Wallachia and Moldavia, 1834 Alexander X Ghica 1834-1842 Michael V Sturza 1834-1849 George IV Bibescu 1842-1848 Revolution in Wallachia, 1848 Russian Occupation, 1848-1851 Barbu Ştirbei 1849-1853, 1854-1856 Gregory V Alexander Ghica 1849-1853 Crimean War, 1853-1856; Russian Occupation, 1853-1854 Occupied by Austria, 1854-1856 Gregory V Alexander Ghica (again) 1854-1856 Ottoman Occupation, 1856-1859, Sovereignty until 1881
ROUMANIA, ROMÂNIA | |
---|---|
Alexander (XIV) John Cuza of Moldavia | 1859-1866 |
Charles Eitel Frederick of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, Carol I | 1866-1881 |
King, 1881-1914 | |
Russo-Turkish War, 1876-1878; Russian Invasion, România proclaimed independent, 1877; Congress of Berlin, 1878; România Independent, 1881 | |
Ferdinand | 1914-1927 |
Michael | 1927-1930, 1940-1947 |
Carol II | 1930-1940 |
Ion Antonescu, pro-German dictator | 1940-1944 |
Communist takeover, 1947 | |
Constantin Parhon | President, 1948-1952 |
Petru Groza | 1952-1958 |
Ion Georghe Maurer | 1958-1961 |
Georghe Georghiu-Dej | 1961-1965 |
Chivu Stoica | 1965-1967 |
Nicolae Ceauçescu | 1967-1989, overthrown & executed |
Ion Iliescu | 1989-1996, 2000-2004 |
Emil Constantinescu | 1996-2000 |
Nicolae Vacaroiu | interim, 2007 |
Traian Băsescu | 2004-2007, 2007-2014 |
Klaus Iohannis | 2014-present |
With the Allies in World War I, winning Transylvania from Hungary and Moldova from Russia, Romania was the biggest long term winner of the War in the Balkans. However, after much internal strife, she switched to the Axis in World War II, losing Moldova to the Soviet Union (seized in 1940, actually, before Romania was a belligerent) and part of Dobruja to Bulgaria. While Moldova (traditionally called Bessarabia) is now independent, I have not noticed any discussion of reunion with Romania. The Russians tried hard to promote the idea that the language of Moldova was not Romanian, but it is.
Rejecting the Cyrllic alphabet and the Turkish influenced "Rumania" (or "Roumania") for the Latin alphabet and the pure Latin România, Romania can now claim that name as its own, with few remembering that it was the proper name of the Roman (and the "Byzantine") Empire. In the Middle Ages, "Romania" tended to refer to the contemporaneous extent of the Empire, i.e. Anatolia and the Balkans ("Asia and Europa" or "Rūm and Rumelia"). The modern state might be said to be "Lesser Romania" (Romania Minor) in contrast to that "Greater Romania" (Romania Maior); but this might be considered insulting by Romanians (though intentionally no more so than "Lesser Armenia" in Cilicia) and so is not likely to catch on. However, Romania Maior could be used for the Roman Empire without any corresponding modification of România for the modern state.
The mysterious history of Romance speakers in the Balkans, the Romanians and Vlachs, whose existence is not noticed until the 12th Century and whose language is not attested until the 16th, is treated separated in "The Vlach Connection and Further Reflections on Roman History." This is a story now charged with the nationalism both of Romania and neighbors like Hungary.
The marriages of the Romanian Royal Family quickly connected it to major European, especially British and Greek, royalty. Thus King Ferdinand was the grandson of a first cousin of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert (Ferdinand of Portugal, the brother of Augustus, Prince of Coburg, who was the father of Ferdinand of Bulgaria), and he married one of their own grand- daughters, Marie of Saxe-Coburg- Gotha. Marie was a bit of a stylish international personality in the 1920's. King Carol II then married Helen of Greece, who was a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, through her mother Sophia, the sister of Kaiser Wilhlem II of Germany. All these connections, of course, profited the monarchy little in the conflicts of fascism and communism that had the country under one form of dictatorship or another from 1940 to 1989.
A notable personality of modern România was Mircea Eliade (1907-1986), who fruitfully extended Rudolf Otto's ideas in history and philosophy of religion. Controversy continues over the degree to which Eliade was involved in the Fascist movement in România, but he actually avoided residence in the country during the War, by taking diplomatic posts in London (during the Blitz!) and Lisbon. After the War he was able to do what he had wanted to do before, emigrate to America.
In 2010 we have a Romanian documentary about the regime of Nicolai Ceauçescu, The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu (Autobiografia lui Nicolae Ceausescu). What intrigues me more than the documentary, which I have not seen, is the review in Daily Variety, by Jay Weissberg (May 18, 2010). Weissberg says that one purpose of the documentary seems to be to, "drive home a devastating critique of both Romanian society and international realpolitik: We all let this happen" [boldface added]. Who is the "we" here? Weissberg may be young, but he would need to be remarkably clueless not to know that Romania was a member of the Warsaw Pact and a beneficiary of the Soviet nuclear umbrella. Ceausescu's regime was vicious because it was a Communist dictatorship. What were "we" supposed to do about that? Start a nuclear war? Weissberg goes on to say, "What is important is for auds to identify Richad Nixon, Charles de Gaulle, Imelda Marcos, Mao Tse-Tung and a host of other leaders whose hands of friendship lent legitimacy and tacit support to Ceausescu's rule while knowing full well what was really happening." Well, everyone knew full well that Ceausescu (and, for that matter, Mao) was running a Stalinist police state. Duh. Similar knowledge, however, even now does not stop Hollywood leftists from extending "hands of friendship" that lend "legitimacy" to the very similar dictatorship of Fidel Castro in Cuba. Are those not, in Weissberg's words, "immoral choices?"
Perhaps Weissberg does not remember, through the fog of his liberal guilt, that in foreign policy Ceausescu was a bit of a maverick, supporting Israel and cultivating other friendships that were out of line with Soviet policy. Indeed, people wondered at the time why he did not receive the same Russian treatment as Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. The answer seemed to be that his foreign policy did not imply any internal liberalization either of the economy or individual rights. The Realpolitik in part was the hope that Ceausescu was actually acting with the blessing of Moscow, in order to keep Soviet options open. Otherwise, the idea that there was anything we could have done about Ceausescu's particular regime is ridiculous.
But, speaking of "we," what does Wiessberg want "us" to do about North Korea and Iran, which are similarly vicious, and a danger to others, with the threat of nuclear weapons, in the bargain? It may always feel good to overthrow dictators, but Mr. Weissberg may want to ask his Hollywood friends how they feel about the United States overthrowing the vicious dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. He may discover that he knows people who will defend the fellow and damn America for destroying the happy lives of the Iraqis under their loving and caring leader (see Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11). "Watching Jimmy Carter praise the dictator's leadership is particularly stomach-churning," says Weissberg. Well, yes. But how does he feel about Sean Penn or Danny Glover praising Hugo Chavez? Or Ted Turner saying that "it hasn't been proven" that Castro has imprisoned and murdered thousands of Cubans? Perhaps we can't expect very serious historical or political thought from a movie reviewer at Daily Variety, but this is ridiculous.
In the miraculous year 1989, the end of Nicolai Ceauçescu came swiftly and dramatically. The saying is that Poland was freed from Communism in 10 years, Hungary in 10 months, Czechoslovakia in 10 days, and România in 10 hours. Indeed, with other events in Eastern Europe going on, for a good while it looked like Ceauçescu's police state and hard line were going to make him immune to change, or even trouble. The man was confident enough of his position that he called a mass rally in Bucharest to demonstrate his popularity. This had always come off well in the past, and at first it looked to be the same old, same old thing. However, in a moment of quiet, it appears that one man, never identified, began to boo Ceauçescu. Unthinkable in the past, and previously a sure ticket to prison, the peril of the one man disappeared as the entire crowd soon began booing. Ceauçescu and his wife, high on their Mussolini-esque balcony above the crowd, visibly quailed and shrank back into the doorway. Within hours they were both dead. Unfortunately, his loyalists fought on, although it is hard to understand what for, at that point; and serious damage was done in Bucharest, like the tragic burning of the National Library. They were put down soon enough, and România emerged into the difficulties that have beset other governments in Eastern Europe, where the paradigm of Euro-socialism offers a poor means of economic development, and sometimes the voters bring back former Communists, as though somehow they knew how to run the economy better. By 2015, there is also the danger of renewed Russian aggression and interference. Thus, at the moment, uncertainties multiply.
The two maps above show the situation before and after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878. Note that by then Britain had ceded the Ionians Islands to Greece (1864). In 1875 rebellions started in Bosnia and then Bulgaria. The brutality with which these were suppressed aroused European opinion, and after some delay Russia declared war. With some hard fighting, the Russians ended up capturing Adrianople and arriving at the outskirts of Constantinople. The Treaty of San Stephano which ended the war mostly freed the Balkans, but the Great Powers didn't like it. The Congress of Berlin rolled things back a bit. Serbia, România, and Montenegro all became independent, with increases in territory, but Bulgaria was divided and merely allowed autonomy. Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Novipazar were made protectorates of Austria. The map looked much the same for many years, with Bulgaria annexing East Rumelia in 1885.
2. MONTENEGRO | |
---|---|
Danilo I Petrovic | Prince-Bishop, 1697-1737 |
Sava | 1737-1756 d.1782 |
Vasili | Coadjutor, 1756-1766 |
Stephen the Little | Coadjutor, 1766-1774 |
Sava | Coadjutor, 1774-1782 |
Peter I | 1782-1830 |
Peter II | 1830-1851 |
Danilo II | 1851-1860 |
Nicholas | 1860-1910 |
King, 1910-1918, d.1921 | |
Union with Yugoslavia, 1918 | |
Presidents of Montenegro; Republic of Yugoslavia, 1992-2003; Union of Serbia & Montenegro, 2003-2006 | |
Momir Bulatović | 1990-1998 |
Milo Đukanović | 1998-2002 |
Filip Vujanovic | acting, 2002-2003 |
Rifat Rastoder & Dragan Kujović | acting, 2003 |
Filip Vujanović | 2003-2006 |
President, 2006-2018 | |
Independent, 3 June 2006 | |
Milo Ðukanović | 2018-present |
After World War I, King Nicholas, who had spent the War in exile, was thrown out of office so that Montenegro could join Yugoslavia. This was effected basically by a Serbian invasion, with the Serbs then packing a custom-ordered assembly to depose the King, substitute the King of Serbia, and join Yugoslavia. Montenegro was the only Allied country to cease to exist as the result of World War I. This was vigorously protested by Nicholas and Montenegran diplomats at Versailles and elsewhere; but the Powers, although giving lip-service to self-determination, apparently decided that the actions of Serbia were self-determination enough.
When Yugoslavia collapsed, Montenegro was the only former Yugoslav republic to stick with Serbia. Religiously and lingustically (with the Serbian language) this may have been understandable, at least to the Serbs, although Montenegro had had its own autonomous Church until the Serbian Orthodox Church was imposed. But the Montenegrans became ambivalent about the contemporary Serbian government, neither entirely sympathetic nor entirely unsympathetic. Since Montenegro represented Serbia's only access to the sea, through the historic port of Kotor (Cattaro in Italian, obtained from Austria after World War I), the fear was that, should the Montenegrans decide to go their own way, the Serbs would use force, with enough local support to make resistance abortive.
Nevertheless, Montenegro voted for independence in 2006 and seems to have successfully made the transition, recognized by many governments and admitted as a member of the UN. The pretense that the two countries still constituted Yugoslavia had been abandoned in 2003, so the secession of Montenegro simply left Serbia as, well, Serbia.
The events of World War I bear some recollection. The Gulf of Cattaro, now remember as Kotor, or Котор in Cyrillic, at the time part of Dalmatia, was a natural harbor and, as noted, an Austrian Naval Base. The mountainside above the town of Cattaro, on Mt. Lovcen, Ловћен, however, was in Montenegro; and the Montenegrans were harrassing the Austrians below, with artillery. When the Austrians suppressed the fire, with naval gunfire, the Montenegrans got their French allies to bring in heavier guns. In such situations, naval assets are more vulnerable than land based guns. However, it is much easier to bring in many more and heavier naval guns than it is to bring in more or larger guns on land. The Austrians brought enough ships to suppress even the French guns, and they withdrew.
Finally, after the Austrians, Buglarians, and the Germans had defeated and occupied Serbia, they decided to turn against Montenegro. In 1916 the defenders where swept from their country. The ultimate return of the Montenegrans, as we have seen, was bittersweet, since occupation by Austria was exchanged for effective occupation by Serbia. What we can note from the maps, however, is the permanent addition of the Gulf of Cattaro to Montenegro. In terms of the territory of Yugoslavia, that wouldn't even have made a difference. Now it does make a difference, since modern Kotor otherwise would be part of Croatia instread of Montenegro. 1908 was a big year in the Balkans. Bulgaria became independent and Austria annexed most of its protectorate from the Congress of Berlin. Part of the territory was even returned to Turkey. This all was bitterly resented by Serbia because of the large Serb population of Bosnia and Herzegovina. A casus belli was thus introduced for Serbian attempts to stir up trouble in the provinces, which ultimately meant a Serbian assassin who killed the Austrian Archduke Francis Ferdinand and set off World War I. In Turkey, the Sultan, "Abdul the Damned," was overthrown by the Young Turks, whose impetus, unfortunately, was more merely nationalistic than liberal. As a stage in the modernization of Turkey, it was also unfortunately more militaristic than liberal, a direction that soon resulted in increasingly friendly dealings with Germany. This was not a good deal for Turkey. Meanwhile, Greece was able to add Thessaly (1881, with adjustments in 1897). A rebellion on Crete led to autonomy (1898) as a prelude to Greek control (1912).
3. GREECE | |
---|---|
Greek War of Independence, 1821-1829 | |
Alexander Ypsilanti | leads revolt, 1821-1828, d.1828 |
Battle of Drăgăşani, Wallachia, defeat by Ottomans, 1821 | |
Alexandros Mavrocordatos | President, 1822-1823 |
First Hellenic Republic, 1822-1832, Capital at Nauplion, (Modern Greek, Nafplio, ); Ottoman expediation of Dramali, defeated, 1822 | |
Petros Mavromichalis | 1823 |
Georgios Kountouriotis | 1823-1826 |
Sphaceteria seized, Battle of Maniaki, Fall of Missolonghi, Greeks annihilated by Egyptian Ibrahim Pasha, Battle of Lerna Mills, Ibrahim first defeated, 1825 | |
Andreas Zaimis | 1826-1827 |
Athens Acropolis surrenders to Ibrahim, last Ottoman victory, Treaty of London, Britain, France, & Russia support Greek independence, Battle of Navarino, Egyptian fleet sunk, 1827 | |
Count Ioannis Kapodistrias | Governor, 1827-1831 |
Russo-Turkish War, 1828-1829; Battle of Petra, Ottomans defeated, 1829; Peace of Adrianople, 1829; London Conference, recognition of Greek Independence, 1830 | |
Augustinos Kapodistrias | 1831-1832 |
Governmental Commission, 1832-1833 | |
Otto of Bavaria | King, 1832-1862 |
George I of Denmark | 1863-1913 |
assassinated by anarchist, 1913 | |
Constantine I/XII | 1913-1917, 1920-1922 |
Alexander | 1917-1920 |
George II | 1922-1924, 1935-1941, 1946-1947 |
Second Hellenic Republic, 1924-1935 | |
Pavlos Konduriotis | President, 1924-1926, 1926-1929 |
Theodoros Pangalos | 1926 |
Alexandros Zaimis | 1929-1935 |
German Occupation, 1941-1944 | |
Paul | 1947-1964 |
Constantine II | 1964-1973, exile 1967 d.2023 |
Military Dictatorship, 1967-1974 | |
Giorgios Zoitakis | 1967-1972 |
Giorgios Papadopoulos | 1972-1973, President, 1973 |
Phaidon Gizikis | 1973-1974 |
Third Hellenic Republic, 1974-present | |
Michael Stasinopoulos | 1974-1975 |
Konstantin Tsatsos | 1975-1980 |
Konstantin Karamanlis | 1980-1985, 1990-1995 |
Christos Sartzetakis | 1985-1990 |
Konstantin Stephanopoulos | 1995-2005 |
Karolos Papoulias | 2005-2015 |
Prokopis Pavlopoulos | 2015-2020 |
Katerina Sakellaropoulou | 2020-present |
Against the Ottomans alone, the Greeks could well have been successful, but the Sultan called in Muḥammad ʿAlī, who had modernized the Egyptian army enough that the rebellion was being suppressed. This was too much, however, for "civilized" opinion. Not only the Russians, the traditional protectors of Orthodox Christians in Turkey, but Britain and France, inspired by all that Classical Oxbridge learning, and the propaganda of Byron's poetry, moved to help the Greeks.
The British sank Muḥammad ʿAlī's fleet at Navarino Bay in 1827. They say that the ships are still visible at the bottom of the bay, right by the island of Sphacteria, where Spartans surrendered to Athens in 425 BC, early in the Peloponnesian War, and just south of "Sandy Pylos," where a great Mycenaean city supplied wise Nestor to the Greek forces at Troy. A lot of history in that area.
The Greek revolt begins with a Phanariot family, the Ypsilantis. After periods as Princes of Wallachia and Moldavia, Constantine defects to Russia. His son, Alexander, a general in the Russian Army kicked off the Greek revolt in 1821 by invading from Russia with a group of followers. He didn't get very far, was defeated, and had to retreat to Austria. But things got going. His brother, Demetrius, continued to be involved with the revolt in Greece. The family name is now remembered in the city of Ypsilanti, Michigan.
Princes of Samos | |
---|---|
Stephanos Vogoridis | 1833-1850, d.1869 |
Alexandros Kallimachis | 1850-1854 |
Ion Ghica | 1854-1859, d.1897 |
Miltiadis Aristarchis | 1859-1866, d.1893 |
Pavlos Mousouros | 1866-1873, d.1876 |
Georgios Georgiadis | acting, 1873 |
Konstantinos Adosidis | 1873-1874, 1879-1885, d.1895 |
Konstantinos Photiadis | 1874-1879 |
Alexandros Karatheodoris | 1885-1895, d.1906 |
Georgios Verovits | 1895-1896 |
Stephanos Mousouros | 1896-1899 |
Konstantinos Vagiannis | 1899-1900, d.1919 |
Michail Grigoriadis | 1900-1902 |
Alexandros Mavrogenis | 1902-1904, d.1929 |
Ioannis Vithynos | 1904-1906, d.1912 |
Konstantinos Karatheodoris | 1906-1907, d.1922 |
Georgios Georgiadis | 1907-1908 |
Andreas Kopasis | 1908-1912, d.1912 |
Grigorios Vegleris | 1912, d.1948 |
Similiar to Samos, but shorter and sharper, was the experience of Crete. After various rebellions, the Ottoman government granted autonomy to Crete in 1878. This was revoked in 1889 and rebellion began again in 1895. This expanded until Greek troops landed in Crete and a general war between Greece and Turkey broke out in 1898. The Greeks were badly defeated, and the Turks were marching on Athens, but the Great Powers intervened.
An International Squadron, of Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and Britain, was formed 1897 to stop the fighting on Crete. They forced Greek forces on Crete to withdraw and ordered Ottoman armies out of Greece. Crete was temporarily governed by the Powers, except for Germany and then Austria, who withdrew. In 1898 the remaining powers imposed a settlement on Crete, which included the explusion of Ottoman forces after Cretan Muslims masacred Christians and murdered the British vice-consul and British sailors. Crete was made an autonomous Πολιτεία under Ottoman authority. This gets translated "State," but in the Middle Ages the word translated Latin Res Publica; so Crete could be called the "Cretan Republic." In Turkish, it was the , Girid Devleti, i.e. "Crete, it's State," in the characteristic Turkish grammatical construction.
A "High Commissioner," Ὕπατος Ἁρμοστής, was appointed; and this would be Prince George, a son of King George I of Greece, and, as it happens, the husband of the intriguing Marie Bonaparte, the patient, supporter, and colleague of Sigmund Freud. George governed from 1898 to 1906, contending all the way with Greek nationalists who wanted union with Greece. He was then replaced by former Greek Prime Minister Alexandros Zaimis (until 1911), under whom the last of foreign forces withdrew from Crete. In 1908 Crete voted union with Greece. But Greece actually wasn't cooperating. When Cretan deputies showed up in Athens in 1912, they were not allowed to be seated in the Greek Parliament. This changed with the First Balkan War in 1912. In 1913, Greece asserted sovereignty, and the Great Powers and Turkey conceded it. In 1923 the Muslims, in the red areas on the map, left Crete as part of the "ethnic cleansing" of the day.
Some details of this history turn up in, of all places, the book [1946] and movie [1964] of Zorba the Greek. In 1916, a half-Greek Englishman travels to Crete to take possession of his family's property. Along the way, he acquires a helper, the colorful Alexis Zorba. Arriving in Crete, they stay for a while at the "Hotel Ritz," run by a French expatriate, Madame Hortense. The aging Hortense treasures her memories of the affairs she had with all the Admirals of the International Squadron during the Cretan rebellion against Turkey, especially the Italian Admiral. In the movie, Zorba was memorably played by Anthony Quinn (1915-2001), who was himself Mexican but whom we remember, not just as Zorba, but as the dynamic ʿAudah Abū-Tāyah (1872-1924) in the story of Lawrence of Arabia.
The house of Denmark supplied most of the kings of modern Greece. The kingship itself contained an interesting ambiguity, since the Greek word βασιλεύς, basileus, only meant "king" in Classical Greek. But in mediaeval Greek, basileus was used by the Emperors of Romania to translate Latin imperator, i.e. "emperor."
So which was it? Was the ruler of Greece merely the King of the Hellenes (Ἕλληνες, Héllênes), or the Emperor of the Romans (Ῥωμαῖοι, Rhômaioi)? When the Greeks tried to seize a large part of western Asia Minor from the Turks in 1920, it looked like restoring the Empire was the objective. Also, recovering Constantinople had always been a Greek ambition, with the declining and weakening Ottoman Empire making this seem possible. During the Balkan Wars, the King of Greece, Constantine, even styled himself, "Constantine XII," in succession to Constantine XI Palaeologus, rather than "Constantine I" of no more than Greece. Although receiving credit for success in the Balkan Wars, Constantine's German wife and desire to remain neutral in World War I led to his exile.
Greece participated in the Occupation of Constantinople after the War and Greek troops even occupied Adrianople, with a restored Constantine taking credit for that. Unfortunately, Turkey remained, and remains, fundamentally stronger than Greece. The Greek invasion of 1922, with an ambitious plan of taking Ankara, came to grief on the genius of Mustafa Kemal and his veterans of Gallipoli. The Greek army was destroyed and the whole business only provoked the expulsion of all Greeks from mainland Turkey -- under the formula of an "exchange," in which the much greater numbers of Christians in Turkey were "exchanged" for Muslims, not always Turkish, in Greece. Now we call it "ethnic cleansing."
King Constantine, discredited again, abdicated and went into exile. His brother, Prince Andrew, father of Prince Philip, husband of Queen Elizabeth of England, who was a commander of the army, was actually condemned to death, until King George V of Britain pressured the Greeks to exile him instead. He died in Monte Carlo in in 1944, having not seen his son Philip since World War II began in 1939. He had not seen his wife, Alice of Battenberg, either, since she was first treated for insanity in Switizerland in 1930 and subsequently returned to Greece, where she spent the War, sheltering Jews to the extent that she was recognized by Israel as "Righteous Among the Gentiles." Living in exile in Britain from 1967 until her death, her remains were later moved to an Orthodox convent in Jerusalem. Andrew's remains had been moved back to Greece in 1946.
I haven't noticed that the last King of Greece, Constantine II, ever styled himself "Constantine XIII," and with the Monarchy now gone, it is hard to make any symbolic claim to Ῥωμανία.
Politically, Greece has swung back and forth in the 20th century. Whether the monarchy was a good thing was often in doubt, as it was briefly abolished in the 20's and almost not reinstituted after World War II. Then the Army took over in 1967, creating a dictatorship that lasted until 1974. King Constantine tried to organize a counter-coup against the dictatorship, but then fled the country when he failed. Eventually the dictators abolished the monarchy. When democracy was restored, after a stupid attempt by the generals to overthrow the government of Cyprus (provoking a Turkish invasion), the Greeks nevertheless seemed to think that Constantine had not been sufficiently vigorous in opposing the dictatorship, so the monarchy was not restored. So, ironically, Greek dictatorship and Greek democracy agree on the issue of monarchy. When we reflect that the Great Powers imposed a monarchy on the newly independence Greece to prevent the kind of radicalism that we have in fact since seen, we might think there was perhaps some wisdom there.
Since then, Greece has made a speciality of electing anti-American, socialist governments, long after that made any sense either geo-politically or economically. A good example of recent foolishness was a nationwide strike on May 17, 2001, with 10,000 protesters marching on the Parliament in Athens. Protesting what? Well, the Greek state pension system was nearly bankrupt, and the Government was considering reforms, like cutting benefits and increasing the retirement age (to 65). Even the socialist government, however, might have anticipated the offense to the (not just) Greek sense of entitlement that this would cause.
This kind of thing was all bad enough, but then 60 Minutes reported (6 January 2002) that the Greek government, and especially the dominant Socialist Party, appeared to be tolerating a radical leftist terrorist organization, "17 November," that had been responsible for bombings and murders for years. Not a single member of this organization had been arrested or even identified by the government, even though unmasked members raided a police station for weapons and could easily have been described. When members of the Greek press were threatened for reporting on the organization, and police closed the investigations even of murder cases against them, one began to wonder if a sort of tolerated leftist death squad had come into existence in Greece. This boded ill for the future of Greece, not only economically, but even as a functioning democracy.
Subsequently, however, this situation began to improve. Perhaps under pressure to straighten things out if Greece wanted to host the 2004 Olympics, the government arrested many members of "17 November," and the suspects were spilling details about the membership and operations of the organization [Los Angeles Times, Wednesday, August 7, 2002, "Toppled From Their Pedestal"]. The actual popularity of the group was damaged by the very willingness of its members to inform and cooperate in order to avoid harder sentences. Happily, the 2004 Olympics went off without incident. Although the Greek monarchy is now gone, the Greek Royal family remains impressively connected to two of the most important centers of contemporary European royalty. The heirs of the British monarchy are now all descendants, through Prince Philip, of King George I of Greece; and all the Greek Royal Family itself is descended from both Queen Victoria and the Emperor Frederick III of Germany. Then Constantine II's sister Sophia married Juan Carlos of Spain, who was able to do in Spain what Constantine wasn't able to in Greece -- restore democracy. Now, after the abdication of Juan Carlos, the new King of Spain, Philip (Filipe) VI, is a descendant of Kings George, Constantine I, and Paul of Greece.
One might gather from this diagram that the throne of Britain is due to pass the House of Denmark and Greece, or, more precisely, the House of Schleswig- Holstein- Sonderburg-Glucksburg; but on marrying Elizabeth, Prince Philip renounced his rights to the Greek throne and his connection to the Greek Royal family, taking the name of his mother's family, Battenberg/Mountbatten, so this connection is obscured.
Now that royalty is more a matter of international celebrity than of political power, Greece, by blaming Constantine for a bunch of military dictators, is really missing out on its share of space in People magazine. Both Constantine and his son Paul have five children each, which means that the Greek Royal Family actually has a large demographic footprint. This may seem like an absurdly trivial consideration, but Greece depends heavily on foreign tourism; and foreign tourism depends heavily on international perception and publicity. Space, free space, in People magazine means millions of dollars in business for Greece. Instead, Greeks still have these ridiculous demonstrations for socialism (not to mention the frightening terrorist activity) and nurse their (legitimate but futile) historic grievance against Turkey.
A real basis for the latter concerns Cyprus. In 1974 the Greek generals tried to annex Cyprus to Greece. This provoked a Turkish invasion and the de facto partition of the Island (and, happily for Greece, the overthrow of the generals). The Turks even set up a separate Turkish Cypriot Republic, which is recognized by no one in the world but Turkey. What this all really meant was that the effort to maintain Cyprus as a bi-national Republic, since independence from Britain in 1960, had failed utterly. The obvious solution would seem to be a real partition of the island with the Greek and Turkish parts annexed, respectively, by Greece and Turkey. Since the Turks took rather more of the island than was warranted by the Turkish percentage of the population (with Turkish settlers now introduced to fill the space), Greece could expect a territorial adjustment in exchange for international recognition of Turkish separation. For some reason, however, the international community still expects a restoration of the bi-national Republic. With no real pressure on Turkey, however, and no prospect of it, the bi-national Republic is certainly dead and buried, and the realistic solution is not even being addressed.
The irrationality and folly of Greek politics seemed hit a new high (or low, perhaps) in 2010. The American and international recession of 2008-2010 imperiled the credit of several members of the European Union who had been spending beyond their means. These collectively became known as the PIIGS -- Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, and Spain. Greece, however, was in the worst shape, badly in debt, with domestic spending out of control. The EU began organizing a "bailout" for Greece, to tide it over. However, no one wishes to give Greece money unless there is more responsible restraint in spending -- and some higher taxes also. The Greek government has undertaken to control its spending, but such sensible and prudent measures have set off the lunatics in Greek politics. Led, as we might imagine, by public employee unions and anarchists, Athens on several occasions has been flooded with rioters and vandals. There has been so little in the way of merely peaceful protest that "demonstrations" is hardly the word to use. Three employees of a bank were killed, including a pregnant woman, when their office was firebombed. This insane conduct, however, is merely an exaggerated version of influences that occur elsewhere. The State of California is in nearly as bad shape as Greece, and for most of the same reasons, especially because of the power of public employee unions. The welfare state and socialists simply never have enough money. Greece would probably just be printing money if it were not already under the discipline of the Euro and its sober German bankers.
The Leftist irrationality of Greek politics unfortunately has its representatives in the form of some influential Greek-Americans. Chief among these may be Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington and Markos Moulitsas (Zúñiga). Huffington was born in Greece, was married to Republican Congressman Michael Huffington, became a conservative political commentator after her divorce, but then flew off the tracks as a born-again Leftist. Her public comments, often dopey, seem to have increasingly marginalized her personally, but she remains influential through her "Huffington Post" website, subsidized by George Soros and then bought by a major media outlet. Markos Moulitsas was born in the United States of a Greek father. He spent years in El Salvador and in the United States Army but came out of it all to found the "Daily Kos," which has proven to be one of the most lunatic of lunatic fringe Leftist websites. I have yet to see Mr. "Kos" appear in public or make personal statements in the media, and so it has been hard to get an impression of what he is all about and why his politics should have become so vicious. I would wonder if his early experience had imbuded him with the Communist propaganda that is so prevalent in Latin America -- where there is scarcely a country that can be said to have achieved real economic success in the modern world, while explanations for this typically are of the Marxist, conspiratorial, and anti-American sort. Kos' politics thus may actually owe little to his Greek roots.
How ridiculous the radical take on events in Greece can be we see in this statement from internet blogger Chris Hedges:
Unfortunately, Mr. Hedges doesn't seem to "get it" that a welfare state of public employee parasites (the actual "power elite" of Greece with its consistently socialistic governments) living beyond its means will eventually run out of money. Greek prosperity was borrowed, often secretly and under false pretenses. A healthy economy could generate its own revenues and does not need to borrow from international banks, or be bailed out by the European Union. All that Greece needs to do to screw "Goldman Sacks" is default on its debts. Of course, it will not then be able to borrow any more money, the gravy train will be gone, and I am curious where Mr. Hedges thinks more money will then come from. Doubtless, the "proletariat" will just produce the goods, in good Marxist fashion, without money; and Greece can join the Proletarian heaven that is Cuba. Perhaps Mr. Hedges isn't old enough, or educated enough, to know that such things have been tried. Even Lenin had to resort to the New Economic Policy -- but the Modern Left would need to learn such lessons all over again, perhaps with a few more purges, terror famines, and Gulags to help out.
Indeed, Greece would be better off if it just defaulted. The EU bailouts have been given on the condition that Greece reforms its government and its economy. It is not at all clear that the will is there to do anything of the sort, and the bailouts merely create the moral hazard that the day of reckoning can be postponed. Rioters trashed the center of Athens again on February 12, 2012, to protest measures such as cutting the minimum wage 22%. But something like that only scratches the surface. With a third of the workforce employed by the government, unemployment at 21%, and the "ease of doing business" ranked 100th by the World Bank, behind Yemen, Greece is nowhere near realizing what it needs to do to return to the real world from the socialist Nirvana that leftist ideology has foisted on it. The Greeks at least can have the comfort that California has fallen for a similar leftist folly and is in similar shape -- which is probably why people like Chris Hedges can believe what they do. After all, it's what's taught in school.
In 2014, Greek unemployment is still over 26%, which has become a kind of "new normal." The "austerity" of EU conditions of financial support has included reduced spending, anti-growth higher taxes, and precious little in the way of useful recommendations to reform the economy. Radicals on both left and right, including a kind of neo-Fascism movement, the "Golden Dawn," have taken heart. Clueless comments on the situation continue to be the norm. Thus, the excellent and revolutionary Byzantinist, Anthony Kaldellis, who is here celebrated for his ground-breaking book, Hellenism in Byzantium, has come to engage in the kind of opaque political sniping that now characterizes the unrelated writing of Leftist scholars. In the otherwise excellent Ethnography after Antiquity [University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013], Kaldellis writes:
The background of this remark was the situation in the 15th century when many Rhômaioi were ready to prefer the "turban of the Turk to the red hat of the Cardinal." However, this was never the policy of the Emperors of Romania, who were willing to sacrifice the independence of the Orthodox Church in order to obtain Western help against the Turks, or of the Russians, who inherited the conflict and never worried remotely as much about Catholicism, which was no threat, as about Turkey and ʾIslām. Catholicism was a threat to the Greeks only because of Catholic claims of supremacy, which were effected by the policy of their own Emperors and, briefly, by the occupation of Romania after the Fourth Crusade. Otherwise, the Rhômaioi resented the Latin ideological denial that they were Romans and the direct heirs of the Empire of Augustus and Constantine.
These conflicts, which are barely remembered outside Greece, and are certanly not remembered at all by modern EU politicians and bankers (who no longer have Classical educations -- which actually used to incline Westerners to sympathy for modern Greece, rather than antipathy for [the equally forgotten] Romania), are of little modern political significance; and it is not clear how Kaldellis thinks that EU "reaction" to the Greek financial collapse is "shaped" by such things. As is characteristic of Leftist political sniping, Kaldellis provides neither explanation nor argument. One is left to wonder how an EU financial bailout represents the sort of Frankish arrogance that the Greeks resented. If Greece doesn't want the bailout, or the attendant EU conditions, it can chuck the whole mess. It didn't need to join the EU. However, like all good socialists, the Greeks still want the money.
Since Kaldellis puts "crisis" in scare quotes, one might also wonder what he thinks is unreal about Greece's situation. Again, we get neither explanation nor argument. Instead, we might notice that the hostility of the "Orthodox world" is now less about Catholicism than about the relatively lack of economic success of places like Greece and Russia in modern life, a problem that a writer like Kaldellis probably blames on Capitalism rather than on the ideological claims of Charlemagne, Otto the Great, the Crusaders, or the Popes -- let alone on the actual statist and socialist policies found in Greece or Russia. Indeed, from many indications, it is clear that the true hostility of Kaldellis himself is for Capitalism, with residual resentment for Catholicism only secondary and incidental. His comment is thus not only without explanation or argument, but it is also disingenuous or dishonest -- concealing his true preferences. Sadly, this is also characteristic of the political sniping of Leftist scholars, whose remarks are never meant to persuade or demonstrate but only to signify their political allegiance and orthodoxy to readers of similar Leftist convictions. This buys them good standing in the tight community of academic Leftist ideologues. (This is rather different, on the other hand, from academics who are openly and unapologetically Marxists.)
The irony of Kaldellis's reference to ʾIslām is that Greece is now inundated with refugees from the civil war in Syria, carrying with them the sort of cultural problems from ʾIslām that have resulted in significant increases in crime in Germany and Sweden, which have taken in many such refugrees. Greece is in no shape to support large and durable refugee camps, and the Greeks have not been tolerant of ʾIslām and its practices for a long time. If the refugees include terrorists and anti-Americans, this might not be enough, despite its appeal, to win Greek hearts.
Mr. Tsipras’s statist ideology is as hostile as ever to the supply-side reforms Greece needs, and both the IMF and other creditors seem to be giving up hope that any other Greek politician could enact such reforms. Which means Greece’s crisis will drag on no matter what happens next with Greece’s debts. "The Greek Debt Fiction," The Wall Street Journal, May 26, 2016 Although economists plead with the EU to reform their labor law, taxes, and suffocating regulation, "austerity," as in Greece, has done little but raise taxes, cut spending, and lay off some bureaucrats. The success of liberalization in formerly resolutely socialist Sweden seems to be lost even in places like France, let alone Greece. According to The Economist, in 2014 Greece remains with an economic freedom index of 55.7, little better than Russia's 51.9 and well below Germany at 74.4, Sweden at 74.1, and even Japan, which has stiffled itself for more than two decades now, at 72.4.
Since high taxes and little economic freedom (including requirements to small businesses that they pay taxes up front, regardless of not yet having any sales, let alone profits) mean no growth, in 2015 frustrated Greek voters turned to people who are essentially communists, electing Alexis Tsipras and the socialist Syriza Party. With a quantum jump in idiocy, the Syriza promised more government spending again and also rehired all the bloated, overpaid, corrupt bureaucrats who had previously burdened Greece and had been let go. Now, of course, the bureaucrats, like American public employee unions, will happily vote for more communism. But this will require more borrowing from the EU, meaning Germany, which isn't going to be in the mood, or leaving the Euro and printing drachmas, which will receate for Greece the joys of the Weimar Republic, or the current prosperity of Zimbabwe or Venezuela. The Greek prime minister poses a threat to NATO as well as to the EU, since he is soliciting support from Vladimir Putin, who is currently in the process of conquering the Ukraine. Putin, however, is no longer in a position to subsidize Greek spending (with oil revenues way down), so he cannot be the kind of help that the Greeks might have hoped for previously; and the Greeks consequently still endeavor to reschedule their debt with the EU (now mainly held by governments rather than banks), without undertaking any real reform of their economy or their government.
As it happened, the EU called Greece's bluff; and as Greek credit collapsed, the day rapidly approached when shipments of food to Greece would have stopped. As in socialist Venezuela, actual hunger and starvation loomed. So Tsipras forgot about most of the demands he was making, his coalition of lunatics broke up, and it is not clear whether he or some other government will continue trying to avoid real reform, gaming the EU. Meanwhile, refugees and terrorist infiltrators from Syria flood into Greece, introducing whole new forms and level of crisis -- shared by Germany and other countries as well as Greece.
The level of actual delusion in modern politics is remarkable. Thus, the Greeks, who have voted for socialists for decades, and now should be able to see the obvious results of this -- crushing public debt, suffocating bureaucracy, a third of the workforce parasitically employed by the government, small business (and big business) hounded out of the country or out of existence, etc. -- nevertheless persist in blaming what it was they planned to escape from by voting for socialists in the first place, namely, capitalism -- as we see in the street art from Athens at left.
Not to worry. There is little of capitalism left in Greece. It is just that the Greeks may not have awakened to the actual logical result of this, which is impoverished slavery to the state. As we have just seen in the citation above, the Greek government still will not tolerate the kinds of liberal reforms that would allow what was once a famous Greek knack for business to revive the country. The EU and the Germans cannot and will not carry them along forever. Now that Britain has voted (June 2016) to leave the EU, the European Union is facing enough of a problem to revive its own economic fortunes, let alone its moral determination in the face of terrorism, Putin, and the militant Leftists (not just in Greece) who think that the job of government is to hand out money (which they will get some somewhere -- loot, print, or borrow). It is not a task for which huddled bureaucrats are suited. The Greeks, meanwhile, seem determined to keep banging their heads against the wall, perhaps hoping that a triumphant socialist Venezuela, where you can't even buy toilet paper anymore, will bail them out. If only American politics were free of such delusions. Conspicuous Americans of Greek origin in recent years have been the lovely actress Melina Kanakaredes, of the late NBC drama Providence (she now appears on other popular shows), and the comedienne, actress, writer, and producer Nia Vardalos, whose 2002 movie, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, was an unexpected and astonishing success, with over $200 million in domestic boxoffice. The movie good naturedly pokes fun at the father's old world paternalism and exaggerated nationalistic claims (e.g. that the Japanese word kimono is actually of Greek origin), a familiar phenomenon in Greek nationalism. Nia's subsequent movies, including a sequel to Wedding, have not been as successful.
There are other figures of Greek derivation we might notice in American public life. The Fox Business Channel has Nicole Petallides on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Conservative commentator Andrea Tantaros appeared in multiple fora on the Fox News Channel, until some kind of dispute over her book, Tied Up in Knots: How Getting What We Wanted Made Women Miserable [2016], got her fired. Both of these women -- stunning beauties -- thus participated in the Fox networks of Rupert Murdoch, the bête noire of the just mentioned Leftist ideologues. American Greeks can thus be seen fighting back against the likes of Arianna Huffington and Markos Moulitsas.
As noted above, it is now largely forgotten even in Greece, and entirely outside of it, that in the Middle Ages the Greeks called themselves "Romans" (Rhômaioi, Ῥωμαῖοι), because, as it happens, they were -- striktly speaking, under the terms of continuously operating Roman Courts and Law. For many centuries Hellênes, Ἕλληνες, which the Ancient Greeks had called themselves, and now the modern Greeks again, meant pagan Greeks. The history of Mediaeval Greece is thus found with that of Rome and Byzantium.
The map for 1912 gives us the situation right before the Balkan Wars. Turkish holdings in Europe still extend all the way to the Adriatic, including Albania which, although largely Moslem, has already been restless for independence. When this status quo gives way, we have a conflict that is already a kind of fuse for World War I. Having mostly satisfied its ambitions in the south, Serbia will turn its attention to the north, where a bit of violence in Bosnia, the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand, sets off a long line of secondary explosions, until all of Europe erupts.
Here’s to the Greeks. They know what to do when corporations pillage and loot their country. They know what to do when Goldman Sachs and international bankers collude with their power elite to falsify economic data and then make billions betting that the Greek economy will collapse. They know what to do when they are told their pensions, benefits and jobs have to be cut to pay corporate banks, which screwed them in the first place. Call a general strike. Riot. Shut down the city centers. Toss the bastards out. Do not be afraid of the language of class warfare -- the rich versus the poor, the oligarchs versus the citizens, the capitalists versus the proletariat. The Greeks, unlike most of us, get it.
Incidentally, the reaction to the current "crisis" in Greece is shaped by perceptions that go this far back, as do the reasons why the Orthodox world is in some ways more hostile to Catholicism than to ʾIslām. [p.168]
To qualify for the next tranche of aid, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and his far-left Syriza party this month raised taxes again with no accompanying liberalization of labor or product markets.
4. SERBIA & YUGOSLAVIA | |
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George, "Black George," Karađorđe, Petrović | leads revolt, 1804-1813 |
Miloš Obrenović | leads revolt, 1815-1817; Prince, 1817-1839, 1858-1860 |
Milan I | 1839 |
Michael | 1839-1842, 1860-1868 |
Alexander Karadjordjevic (Karageorgevich) | 1842-1858 |
Milan II Obrenovic | 1868-1882 |
King, 1882-1889 | |
Alexander I | 1889-1903, murdered |
Peter I Karadjordjevic | 1903-1921 |
King of Yugoslavia, 1919-1921 | |
Alexander II | Regent, 1918-1921 |
1921-1934 | |
Assassinated at Marseilles by Croatian Fascists helped by Italian Intelligence, 1934 | |
Peter II | 1934-1945 |
Paul | Regent, 1934-1941 |
German & Italian Occupation, 1941-1943 | |
German Occupation, 1943-1945 | |
Communist takeover, 1945 | |
Ivan Ribar | 1945-1953 |
Josip Broz, "Tito" | 1953-1980 |
Presidency Rotates among Republics, I | |
Lazar Koliševski | 1980, Macedonia |
Cvijetin Mijatovic | 1980-1981, Bosnia- Hercegovina |
Sergej Kraiger | 1981-1982, Slovenia |
Petar Stambolic | 1982-1983, Serbia |
Mika Špiljak | 1983-1984, Croatia |
Veselin Ðuranovic | 1984-1985, Montenegro |
Radovan Vlajkovic | 1985-1986, Vojvodina (Serbia) |
Sinan Hasani | 1986-1987, Kosovo (Serbia) |
Presidency Rotates among Republics, II | |
Lazar Mojsov | 1987-1988, Macedonia |
Raif Dizdarevic | 1988-1989, Bosnia- Hercegovina |
Janez Drnovšek | 1989-1990, Slovenia |
Borisav Jovic | 1990-1991, Serbia |
Stjepan Mesic | 1991, Croatia |
Branko Kostic | 1991-1992, Montenegro |
Slovenia, Croatia, & Macedonia secede, 1991; Bosnia, 1992 | |
Presidents of Republic of Yugoslavia | |
Dobrica Cosic | 1992-1993 |
Miloš Radulovic | acting, 1993 |
Zoran Lilic | 1993-1997 |
Srda Božovic | acting, 1997 |
Srdjan Bozovic | 1997 |
Slobodan Milosevic | 1997-2000 |
Kosovo detached by NATO, 1999 | |
Vojislav Kostunica | 2000-2003 |
Union of Serbia and Montenegro | |
Svetozar Marovic | 2003-2006 |
Montenegro secedes, 2006 | |
Presidents of Serbia Србиа | |
Slobodan Milošević | 1990-1997 |
Milan Milutinović | 1997-2002 |
Boris Tadić | 2004-2012 |
Tomislav Nikolić | 2012-2017 |
Aleksandar Vučić | 2017-present |
The Serbian dream was not just to unite all Serbian speakers remaining in Bosnia, Montenegro, Hungary, and Turkey, but all of the "Southern Slavs," including the Croatians, Slovenians, and perhaps even Bulgarians. In the aftermath of World War I, which began with the Serbian inspired assassination of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo, this dream was realized in the establishment of Yugoslavia, which contained all the Southern Slavs except for Bulgaria, which had its own fiercely separate traditions and ambitions. Macedonia, however, had been wrested from Bulgaria in the Second Balkan War (1913). These benefits were substantially due to the Russians, to whom the Serbs looked as the protectors and patrons of the Orthodox Slavs. World War I formally began when Russia declared war on Austria to protect the Serbs. The flags of both Serbia and Yugoslavia are like the tricolor flag of Russia, with just a different arrangement of the stripes.
The ethnic tensions between Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Slovenes and Croatians (and others), however, manifested themselves both in World War II, when the Germans found willing allies in the Croatians, and with the Fall of Communism, when the growth of democracy unmasked the separatist hostilities again.
In World War II, other forces were at work. When the Germans invaded Yugoslavia on April 6, 1941, an anti-Nazi force, of Yugoslav officers, rose against them. This group was called the "Chetniks," and it was led by the Serbian Dragoljub "Draža" Mihailović (1893-1946). There was no Communist opposition to the Germans, because Stalin at the time was Hitler's ally and gave him a free hand outside the defined Russian sphere of influence.
That, of course, changed. Hilter invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. In Yugoslavia, this got the Communists moving. But it look a while. There wasn't a real Communist force until 1942. This was led by the Croat/Slovene Josip Broz "Tito" (1892-1980). The effectiveness of Tito's force was uneven, and the Germans actually attacked his headquarters and ran him out of the country in May 1944. When the Russians finally took Belgrade, in October/November 1944, they were able to restore Tito to the country. Later, when Tito boasted of liberating Yugoslavia from the Germans, Stalin actually rebuked him. The Russians had done that.
The actual Fascist collaborators with the Germans, the Ustaše, were led by the Croat Ante Pavelić (1889-1959). He ruled a Nazi puppet state of Croatia, initially with a nominal Italian King, Aimone of Spoleto, who had the good sense to mostly stay in Italy.
Once Tito had his forces organized, in late 1942, the project to discredit and destroy Draža Mihailović began. This was one of the most successful Soviet espionage and disinformation operations of World War II. Communist agents and sympathizers in Britain and the United States, including key British intelligence officers in Cairo, and including the Allied agents sent to Yugoslavia to evaluate the situation, reported that Tito was effectively fighting the Germans while Mihailović's forces were actually collaborating with the Germans. Even Chetnik attacks on the Germans ended up reported back as carried out by Tito, the size of whose forces, and their effectiveness, was exaggerated.
As with a similar strategy in China against the Nationalists, this persuaded Allied leaders to drop support for Mihailović and to support Tito. The result, of course, was a Communist Yugoslavia (like a Communist China), while Mihailović ended up captured and executed by Tito. Lies about this are still perpetuated in the ordinary histories of Yugoslavia, including, as I see, treatments at Wikipedia. One wonders how much of that is carelessness, and how much is actual sympathy, even now, for the Communists.
None of the Soviet agents and sympathizers were ever brought to justice, although the Cambridge spy Guy Burgess (1911-1963), who helped promote the pro-Tito message, was at least exposed when he fled to Russia in 1951. The principle British intelligence officer in Cairo, who conducted the Yugoslav disinformation campaign, James Klugmann (1912-1977), although quite openly a Communist, part of the Cambridge group of Burgess, and exposed as a Russian agent, nevertheless never paid any price for it, living out a ostensibly respectable life in Britain, writing apologetics for British and Yugoslav Communism. Meanwhile, Pavelić escaped to exile in Argentina, Chile, and finally Fascist Spain.
After Tito's death, Yugoslavia broke up, with bitter fighting, atrocities, and "ethnic cleansing" as the various communities and new states sought to secure territory. Although all the groups have been guilty of offenses, the consenus of international observers and investigators, not to mention the War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague, seems to be that the Serbs, seeking to maintain a dominant position and initially with a military advantage, are more guilty than others, especially in Bosnia and Kosovo.
Former Yugoslav Republics |
---|
Slovenia |
Croatia |
Macedonia |
Bosnia Herzegovina |
Montenegro |
Kosovo |
The future remains uncertain. For a long time, NATO/UN peacekeeping forces seemed like the only thing that restrained the violence from breaking out again in Bosnia, and the status of Kosovo was long open, as Serbs fled the retaliation of the Albanians, which extended to vandalizing churches and monasteries -- and the Albanians have no interest in being returned to Serbia. All that stood between "Yugoslavia" being just Serbia was the continued adherence of Montenegro. The two countries are no different ethnically, linguistically, or religiously. All that is different is history, which is enough to fuel a Montenegran independence movement, which succeeded in 2006, followed by Kosovo in 2008. Yugoslavia has now been reduced to just Serbia again and is, as such, a lead letter.
A kind of glyph that has been used to represent Serbia is a cross with four crescents drawn in it. This is borrowed, like the double-headed eagle, from Mediaeval Roman/Byzantine symbolism. The crescents come from the Greek goddess Artemis, a moon god, who was the original patron of the Greek city of Byzantium. As was common in Constantinople, a bit of pagan iconography thus survives in the Christian Empire. The addition of the Cross renders it sufficiently Christian. The background for this is discussed elsewhere. The image of the crescent may actually be the source of the use of the Crescent in Islām, which may not antedate the Turkish conquest of Constantinople. The Serbian device, drawn as graffiti, was often seen as symbolic of massacre and terror during the recent Balkan fighting, especially in Bosnia.
The Balkan Wars all but eliminated Turkey in Europe. In the First War (1912-1913), everyone attacked Turkey, which even lost Adrianople to Bulgaria. Serbia was going to annex Albania, but the Great Powers required that it become an independent state. The Serbs were not happy about that, and Bulgaria wasn't happy about its share either. So the Second War (1913) featured everyone against Bulgaria, which lost Macedonia to Serbia, Adrianople to Turkey, and some territory south of the Danube to România. Meanwhile, Italy had been at war with Turkey in 1912 and had obtained Libya and, on this map, the Dodecanese Islands.
This all set the stage for, as Otto von Bismark had said, "some damn thing in the Balkans," which would set off the greatest war in history. Having disposed of the Turks, it meant that Serbia would turn its attentions to Austria.
5. BULGARIA | |
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Russo-Turkish War, 1876-1878 | |
Alexander of Battenberg | Prince, 1879-1886 |
Ferdinand of Saxe-Coberg-Gotha | Prince, 1887-1908 |
King or Czar, 1908-1918 | |
Boris III | 1918-1943 |
Simeon II | 1943-1946 |
Cyril | Regent, 1943-1944 |
Communist takeover, 1946 | |
Vasil Petrov Kolarov | 1946-1947 |
Mintscho Naitschev | 1947-1950 |
Georgi Damjanov | 1950-1958 |
Dimitar Ganev | 1958-1964 |
Georgi Traikov | 1964-1971 |
Todor Schivkov/ Zhivkov | 1971-1989 |
Petar Mladenov | 1989-1990 |
Stanko Georgiev | acting, 1990 |
Nikolay Todorov | acting, 1990 |
Schelju Schelev/ Zhelyu Zhelev | 1990-1997 |
Petar Stojanov | 1997-2002 |
Georgi Parvanov | 2002-2012 |
Rosen Plevneliev | 2012-2017 |
Rumen Radev | 2017-present |
Mediaeval Bulgaria, Qaghans & Tsars
Trouble over Bosnia began World War I, when a member of a Serbian "Black Hand" assassination squad killed the Austrian Archduke Francis Ferdinand. Austria ended up declaring war on Serbia, Russia on Austria, and Germany on Russia. The Germans then, of course, invaded France, Russia's ally, and did so through Belgium, violating recognized Belgian neutrality and bringing Britain into the War. Turkey and Bulgaria, the losers of the Balkan Wars, sided with Germany and Austria, while the other Balkan countries went with the Allies (Greece reluctantly -- Queen Sophia was Kaiser Wilhelm's sister). The result was losses for Bulgaria and gains for all the Allies, with Serbia orchestrating the formation of Yugoslavia from Montenegro, Bosnia, Herzegovina, and other remants of Austria-Hungary, Slovenia and Croatia. România got Transylvania from Hungary and also gains from Russia, which was distracted by the Russian Revolution and Civil War. Bulgaria's loss of its Aegean coast would prove fortunate for the region when it later went communist. However little Greece and Turkey liked each other, it was convenient for them as Western allies to have a land frontier.
6. ALBANIA | |
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Ismail Kemal Bey | 1912-1914 |
Wilhelm of Wied | King, 1914, d.1945 |
Essad Pasha Toptani | 1914-1916 |
Austrian Occupation, 1916-1918 | |
Turchan Pasha | 1919-1920 |
Regency Council, 1920-1924 | |
Bishop Fan Noli | 1924 |
Ahmet Zogu, Zog I | 1925-1928 |
King, 1928-1939 d.1961 | |
Italian & German Occupation, 1939-1943 | |
Victor Emanuel (III) | King, 1939-1943 |
German Occupation, 1943-1945 | |
Communist takeover, Enver Hoxha Dictatorship, 1945-1985 | |
Omer Nishani | 1946-1953 |
Haji Leschi | 1953-1982 |
Leka I | Pretender, 1961-2011 |
Leka II | Pretender, 2011-present |
Ramiz Alia | 1982-1992 |
Kastriot Islami | acting, 1992 |
Pjetër Arbnori | acting, 1992 |
Sali Berisha | 1992-1997 |
Skender Gjinushi | acting, 1997 |
Rexhep Kemal Mejdani | 1997-2002 |
Alfred Moisiu | 2002-2007 |
Bamir Topi | 2007-2012 |
Bujar Nishani | 2012-2017 |
Ilir Meta | 2017-2022 |
Bajram Begaj | 2022-present |
After the schism between Communist China and the Soviet Union, for many years Albania was China's only international ally and supporter, regularly submitting the PRC for membership in the United Nations. But eventually, after membership, China began allowing Capitalism, and Albania had to retreat into its own paranoid isolation as the last surviving Stalinist dictatorship. Since Hoxha expected the Capitalists to invade at any time, the Albanian landscape became covered with small bunkers, to defend every inch.
The country, which had always been poor anyway, became even poorer in Hoxha's grip, and it is nowhere near even recovering, much less developing to the level of its European neighbors. The Fall of Communism even witnessed large numbers of Albanians attempting to flee to Italy by boat.
Among the mysterious, autochthonous peoples of the Balkans, the Albanians were strongly Latinized under Rome, Islamicized under Turkey, coveted by Italy and Serbia, and included substantial communities in Greece (denied by Greece, which officially has no ethnic minorities). Like a number of peoples in the Balkans, they may not know just what to make of themselves in the modern world, much less how their society is supposed to function.
With two maps of Albanian dialects here from Wikipedia, we see that, although centered on Albania, the language is spoken around in a number nearby counties, most of which, besides Greece, acknowledge Albanians as a linguistic minority.
The Albanians in Italy, speaking the Arbëresh dialect, date from the era of the Turkish conquest of Albania, although some are thought to have arrived earlier. These Albanians, naturally, preserve their Christian religion. Some local Italian nobility can trace their descent back to the heroic Skanderbeg.
The speakers of the Arvantika dialect, in Attica, the Peloponnese, and Euboea, are perhaps those whose existence Greece is the least willing to acknowledge. Of significant historical interest may be those speaking the Cham dialect, who occupy the coast of Epirus, in Greece between Albania and the Ambracian Gulf.
As discussed with the Dialects of Greek, a claim now is that the Ancient Epirotes were Greek speakers, when the Ancient Greeks did not regard them as Greek at all. On the other hand, the 19th century ethnograpic map reproduced on the dialect page, and below here with Macedonia (in relation to similar arguments over language), show Albanian speakers extending from the Cham area on these maps all the way over to Thessaly, with some encompassed areas of Vlach speakers.
Since it is all but indisputable that the Albanians are autochthonous to the area since Ancient times, the Greek claims to Epirus and the denial of Albanian presence in Greece seem to be based on exaggerated forms of Greek nationalism, backed up by recent ethnic cleansing.
My own, very indirect, connection to Albania was through my Persian professor, Donald Stilo, at UCLA. While doing research in Iran, he was approached by the Iranian government, in the days of the Shāh, to contact the Pretender to the Throne of Albania. This was Prince Leka, the son of the former King of Albania, Ahmet Zogu, or Zog I. In telling the story, Stilo thus referred to him as "Zog's son." Zog's son had an American grandmother and an Australian wife, so he spoke idiomatic English.
I have no recollection why the Shāh of Iran wanted to be in touch with Zog's son, but Stilo had to fly to Madrid to meet him. Iran didn't use the Spanish as intermediaries because Iran actually didn't recognize the government of Franco's Spain, which was notionally a monarchy, but from which the proper Royal Heir was excluded. This contact apparently was no help to the cause of Leka. However, Leka's own son, styled Leka II, currently resides in Albania and has held offices in the Albanian government. They all seem to get along.
Recent conspicuous Americans of Albanian heritage have been the Belushis, John and his brother Jim, and Sandra Bullock (whose mother is German and father, reportedly, of Albanian derivation). One of John Belushi's memorable roles on Saturday Night Live was in the ongoing "Greek Diner" skits. This contributed the "No Coke, Pepsi" line to popular culture. The Belushis, indeed, had run such a diner in Chicago. To most Americans, the difference between Greek and Albanian probably didn't compute. But I probably wouldn't patronize a place with "No fries, chips."
The villains in the Liam Neeson movie Taken are Albanian gangsters in Paris, dealing in human trafficking and forced prostitution. I gather that the trafficking is a problem, but I don't know if Albanians have much to do with it -- or if the traffic is tolerated by the French government or intelligence services. This began Neeson's career as an action star, which unfotunately seems to have descended into a series of forgettable B movies.
As the Ottoman Empire declined in strength
For a long time the jumble of ethnic groups in Yugoslavia didn't seem to make too much difference. A preview of the future, however, was evident when the Germans didn't have much trouble getting Croatians to kill Serbs and others in World War II. The map at right shows the boundaries the way the Germans sorted them out during the War.
Hungary, Croatia, România, and Bulgaria were all German allies. Hungary, of course, wanted Transylvania back, but this would have to be at the expense of another German ally, so Hitler compromised by giving Hungary a part (the part with the most Hungarians) of Transylvania, but then compensated România with extra territory in the Ukraine (going off the map). Bulgaria got an expanded Aegean coast and a major goal for some time, Macedonia. While Albania was occupied by Italy, it was nevertheless expanded on what would have been Albanian nationalist principles, with large pieces of Kosovo and Eprius. Banat was a Romanian speaking region of Yugoslavia which, for some reason, was made independent rather than ceded to România. The Ionian Islands were directly annexed to Italy, probably because they had belonged to Venice for some centuries. The principle of Italian irredentism in the Adriatic was that any place that had ever had an Italian name should belong to Italy.
On the post-World War II map, România has lost considerable territory to the Soviet Union, including what Stalin took in 1940 (now Moldova), and the territory that had been gotten from Bulgaria in 1913. Otherwise, pre-War boundaries were restored. As we have seen, Tito (a Croat), now styled "Marshall Tito," after organizing the Communist partisans against the Germans, was credited with the fighting and victory against them, although warranting neither.
This was accomplished through a propaganda and disinformation campaign effected by Communist agents in British (and then American) intelligence, who deceived even Winston Churchill that the non-communist guerillas, led by Draža Mihailović, were somehow allies of the Germans -- tactics we also see in contemporary China. So Tito, after murdering his enemies, got Yugoslavia put back together, broke with Stalin, helped found the "unaligned" movement in the Cold War, and for many years appeared to govern a happy and prosperous compromise between East and West -- a favorite vacation destination for Europeans.
A curious artifact of that compromise was a 1971 movie, W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism, by Serbian director Dužan Makavejev. The film promotes the psychological theories of Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957), who attributed the evils of dictatorship to sexual inhibition, whether in the case of either Nazis or Stalinists. The film also includes a somewhat more sensible take on Reich by Alexander Lowen (1910-2008), who included "bioenergetic" physical therapy with conventional psychoanalysis. We also see Reich's books burned by the United States Government in 1956. In between these parts of the movie, in English, we have a story in Serbian about a Yugoslav girl meeting a visiting Russian ice skater. She liberates his suppressed sexual drive, which unfortunately also results in him murdering her. We last seem him singing a lament for what he has done -- and we last see her, a decapitated head on an autopsy table, expressing her satisfaction with the life she has lived. Altogether, a different kind of movie, and no comfort to either Stalinists or the sexual inhibited. But in Yugoslavia we also find the international promotion of further poisonous forms of Hegelianism and Marxism.
With the Fall of Communism, however, the whole business came unglued. Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia, and most Bosnians wanted to go their own way. The dream of the Serbs crumbled, but their vision of destiny and grievance did not. First they moved against Croatia, either as a preemptive attack or in retaliation for the actions of the dictatorial Croatian leader, Franjo Tudjman, against resident Serbs. It is now a little hard to determine who started it; but the Serbs, tempted by military superiority, invaded in a way that looked more like conquest than humanitarianism. Later, when the Serbs were tied up in Bosnia and Croatia had built up its forces, Tudjman really did expel and massacre Serbs, but the international community was already prepared to excuse or ignore that as just retaliation. Both Serbia and Croatia, sometimes in cooperation, then turned on Bosnia, which soon became a byword for massacre and atrocities, including mass rapes, such had not been seen in the Balkans since World War II.
The Serbs, at the very least, handled their public relations very poorly. Photos of emaciated prisoners in Serbian concentration camps immediately lost them the international propaganda war. Although the Croatians and Bosniacs certainly committed some atrocities themselves, the Serbian massacres seemed larger, more blatant, and more insolent and defiant. While Tudjman might well have been prosecuted as a war criminal (he is now dead), it has mainly been the Serbs, and the former President of Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic, who have been the targets of war crime prosecutions by the International Tribunal at the Hague. While this has not been entirely fair to the Serbs, it does not excuse them from what was indeed done. By whining about their own centuries of oppression, while slaughtering Moslems, the Serbs managed to become some of the most self-righteous war criminals within memory. Some NATO bombing, peacekeepers on the ground, arrests, and war crimes trials finally put some kind of lid on the conflict in Bosnia. But many guessed what was coming next. Because of the Croatian offensive and version of "ethnic cleansing," some Serbs then fled all the way to....Kosovo.
As it happened, Greece initially blocked admission of Macedonia to the United Nations. The flag was modified and the country is now usually referred to as the "Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia" (FYRM). Bulgaria seems to have given up claims to Macedonia, but I am still not clear whether Macedonian is or is not a dialect of Bulgarian. There are ways to determine this. Otherwise, the region has simply never been anything but "Macedonia."
I have received correspondence from a couple of Greeks disputing this, contending that the territory of the FYRM was never in historic Macedonia. Well, there is going to be considerable uncertainty about all ancient boundaries, and there is no telling how far Philip II's Macedonia extended north. Chances are it was well into FYRM territory (probably the whole valley of the Vardar/Axios River). Nevertheless, for Roman Macedonia the boundaries are better known. The capital of the FYRM, Skopje (Roman Scupi), was definitely in the early Roman province of Moesia Superior (later Dacia Mediterranea). However, the boundary of Moesia was immediately south of Skopje, which itself is quite close to the northern boundary of the FYRM. One map in the Atlas of the Roman World (Tim Cornell & John Matthews, Facts on File Publications, 1982, 1988, p.75) shows the bend of the Axius (Axios/Vardar) River, with Scupi on the north bank, as the actual northern boundary of Macedonia. Other maps (pp.141, 146) show some of the bend itself in Moesia, but this still leaves most of the territory of the FYRM in Roman Macedonia. The Roman cities of Stobi (near modern Stip), Lychnidus (modern Ohrid), and Heraclea Lyncestis (near modern Bitola) were all in Roman Macedonia and in the present FYRM. There is agreement on this in the Atlas of Classical History (Richard J.A. Talbert, Routledge, 1985, 1989, p.143).
For some, Macedonian claims to Greek Macedonia may be based on the territorial integrity of the Macedonia of Philip II and on the presumed ethnic identity of the modern Macedonians with the ancient. This kind of claim cannot now be taken seriously, both because ancient boundaries are going to mean nothing in modern international law and because the modern Macedonians speak a Slavic language which certainly has nothing to do with the (albeit poorly attested) language of the ancient Macedonians.
The other basis of Macedonian claims, however, is more serious, and that concerns Macedonians living in Greece. The Greeks deny that there is any such presence; but then Greece officially denies that there are any ethnic minorities in Greece. Linguistic maps of Greece in the 19th century, like the one at right (where Macedonia is labelled "Bulgaria"), show areas of speakers of Albanian (yellow), Vlach (dark gray), Macedonian (light green), and even Turkish (red) in areas of Epirus, Macedonia, and Thessaly that are now part of Greece. The Anchor Atlas of World History, Volume II (Hermann Kinder, Werner Hilgemann, Ernest A. Menze, and Harald and Ruth Bukor, 1978) shows Macedonian speakers extending from south of Skopje (Üsküp in Turkish, in a partially Albanian speaking area, continguous with Kosovo) all the way down to Thessalonica (p.120) -- just as in the map above.
If there are no longer Macedonian speakers in the modern Greek part of this area (only acquired in 1913), then there is some explaining to do. If Greece expelled the Macedonians, suppressed their language, or got them to leave through harassment or oppressive policies, none of these are going to be admissions to the credit of Greece, or admissions likely to be made, for just such a reason. At the very least, the FYRM can reasonably ask for an accounting on this issue.
I am informed that Greeks would be happy with the FYRM simply being called "Northern Macedonia." This is a little silly and is not going to make any difference in any Macedonian claims or possible threat against Greece. A parallel situation in Europe is actually the relationship of Luxembourg to Belgium. When Belgium became independent of the Netherlands in 1830, it took with it a very large part of Luxembourg. This area of Belgium is still called "Luxembourg." I have never heard that Luxembourg, which itself became independent of the Netherlands in 1890, today makes any claims against Belgium. But even if it did, tiny Luxembourg, although with the highest per capita income in the world, would not constitute any kind of real threat.
Poor and tiny Macedonia is not going to constitute any more of a threat to Greece. If Macedonian guerillas were crossing over into Greece, this would be a matter of real concern and complaint, but I do not understand that anything of the sort has happened; and even if it did, Greece would have no difficulty knowing where to direct counter-action.
As it has happened, the problem of guerillas has troubled the FYRM itself. Albanian refugees inundated northern Macedonia in 1999, where there was already, as noted, an Albanian community. With them came armed Albanians who, having lost in battle with the Serbs, were interested in "liberating" northern Macedonia. They succeeded no better there, but for a while there was considerable danger of a wider conflict.
Meanwhile, Macedonia is the poorest of the former Yugoslav Republics, with a lower per capita income even than Albania. This puts it perilously close to being the poorest country in Europe -- though it is probably safe from that, since Moldova has a per capita income of not much over $300, while Macedonia's is more than $1500. "Room for improvement" hardly begins to tell the tale. The dispute over Macedonia's name and claims doesn't even begin to address the real problem of economic development in the FYRM and elsewhere in the Balkans.
As it happens, in 2019 Macedonia officially became "Northern Macedonia." This seems to defuse the dispute with Greece.
8. Presidents of Kosovo | |
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Ibrahim Rugova | 2002-2006 |
Nexhat Daci | acting, 2006 |
Fatmir Sejdiu | 2006-2010 |
Kosovo declares independence, 17 February 2008 | |
Jakup Krasniqi | Acting, 2010-2111 |
Behgjet Pacolli | 2011 |
Jakup Krasniqi | Acting, 2011 |
Atifete Jahjaga | 2011-2016 |
Hashim Thaçi | 2016-2020 |
Vjosa Osmani | 2020-2021 |
Glauk Konjufca | 2021 |
Vjosa Osmani | 2021-present |
Unfortunately, in modern Europe several wars have been fought between France and Germany, Italy and Austria, Germany and Poland, etc., over many such "historic" claims. Such things made a poor rationale for dictatorial and terrorist measures, especially by an undemocratic country. When NATO decided to move against Serbian measures in Kosovo in March 1999, we ended up with the next round of the ongoing Balkans War. This time, however, the naked preference of the Russians for the Orthodox Serbs over the Moslem Albanians, and similar sentiments evidently shared by Greeks and others, left the Albanians with no local friends at all. Albania itself has been a basket case of anarchy and corruption almost the whole time since the end of Communism there. But the outcome of such a conflict was very problematic when the NATO countries would rather fight a quick, high tech war on the cheap, before body bags and anti-war sentiment upsets things at home, while the Serbs, who learned their ruthlessness from Marshal Tito, wanted nothing better than to appear as martyrs of America, even while burning villages and driving people out of Kosovo. A century of war thus ended more or less as it began, with Serbian grievance dragging others into a war, while NATO, unable to commit on the ground, ended up bombing civilian infrastructure in Serbia, contrary to international law, in a rapidly growing "total war."
In June 1999, the Serbs finally gave in, after heavy bombing of Serbia itself, and the Kosovars, driving out the remaining Serbs of Kosovo and attempting to provoke an Albanian rising in Macedonia, have behaved more or less the way the Serbs did. In February 2008 Kosovo simply declared its independence of Serbia. No one was going to allow Serbia to do anything about it, and NATO wasn't much inclined to do anything about it either, so Kosovo may just get its way by default.
The Ottoman Sulṭāns and Caliphs