Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [149]
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“A Broad Line of Blood”1
BETWEEN THE MASSACRES ON CHIOS IN 1822 AND THE KILLINGS IN 1876 that became known colloquially as “the Bulgarian horrors,” many of the political elements in the equation altered. The Ottomans had acquired a “Western” veneer, from their black frock coats referred to as “Stamboulines” to the trappings of constitutional government. In 1839 and again in 1856, Sultan Mahmud II’s successor, his son Abdul Mejid, issued decrees that outdid Western governments in their paper idealism. Slurs and insults directed at Christians, such as Kaur and Kaurin (anglicized as Giaour), were officially banned.2 In the Crimean War, between 1853 and 1856, the ostensible cause of British and French intervention against Russia was the protection of Turkey from Russian attack. These motives were, of course, scarcely altruistic, but a degree of “Turcophilia” slowly developed in the West.3 Byron had articulated the struggle of the individual dragged down by a cruel and corrupt state. Now, as the Ottoman state proclaimed reform, a new cycle of attraction rather than revulsion began.4
Not everyone believed that the Turks had changed. William Ewart Gladstone later described Britain and France as determining “to try a great experiment in remodelling the administrative system of Turkey, with the hope of curing its intolerable vices and making good its not-less-intolerable vices.”5 More and more Westerners had witnessed Ottoman government at first hand. Christian pilgrims traveled to the sites in Palestine, and inevitably suffered the vagaries of Ottoman officialdom. Something of the old anger that the land where Christ had lived was under alien rule began to resurface. Meanwhile, farther north, the mountains of Lebanon were racked by intercommunal strife, with Druze villagers (regarded as heretics or worse by orthodox Muslims) killing Maronite Christians, and these events were fully reported by Western consuls in the region.6
In 1860, the intermittent violence developed into a civil war, which suddenly extended to a massacre of thousands of Christians in Damascus by an enraged mob. As many as 12,000 terrified Christians were protected by the exiled Algerian leader, Abd el Kader, who ordered his bodyguards to safeguard those sheltering in his palace. Eventually, the Ottoman government responded and dispatched the foreign minister, Fuad Pasha, with an army and instructions to restore the state’s authority. This he did by executing all Ottoman officials who had failed to prevent the murders and rapes, hanging the leaders of the Damascus killings, levying huge indemnities on the Druze community in Lebanon, and exiling Druze chieftains.7 An Austrian geographer, Philip Kanitz, found a few survivors living squalidly in cages fifteen years later in Ottoman Bulgaria.8 Under pressure from Britain and France, new administrative arrangements were created that prevented a recurrence of civil war between Maronites and Druze.9
Few in the West appreciated the complexity of Levantine politics or the volatility of the Damascus mob. They read accounts of Christians being killed and mutilated, with the Ottoman authorities seemingly complicit (or even instigating) the atrocities. There were even reports of Ottoman officials taking Christians under their protection, confiscating their arms, and then allowing their enemies to kill them. When an Englishman, Cyril Graham, visited the district of Hasbeya in Lebanon, he found evidence of atrocity—rotting corpses, arrogant killers, and official inaction. Graham sensed that he was in the midst of some extraordinary blood frenzy, whence all normality had vanished. He reported how “the Druzes accompanying