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ABSTRACT
Throughout the nineteenth century several Western officers joined the Ottoman Army. Not a few adopted Ottoman citizenship, commanded troops, fought in major wars, and rose to the highest echelons of the military. For these men the Ottoman Empire represented a formidable military power, notwithstanding contemporary discourses about its supposed decline. Asking what prompted these military men to emigrate, this article elucidates how they reconciled, for themselves, some of the putative contradictions of their positions as (former) Christian men in the military body of an Empire that drew on Islam as its main source of legitimacy. How did they try to make sense of what they were doing and how did they later remember and represent their Ottoman travails to those they left behind? This article answers these questions through a close reading of the career and memoirs of the Belgian baron Charles de Schwartzenberg a.k.a. Emin Pasha (d. 1878), who was employed in the Ottoman Army for nearly two decades, fighting in the Crimean War before serving in Syria. Typical for the mercenary-like European officers who chose to venture abroad, his biography illuminates the kind of mobility that was possible in, and integral to, the late Ottoman military structure.
Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this article were presented in 2014 at a workshop on the army in Belgian history, organized by Nel de Mûelenaere and Josephine Hoegaerts at CegeSoma in Brussels, and in 2018 at a conference on foreign fighters and multinational armies, put on by Guillaume Piketty and Steven O'Connor at SciencesPo in Paris. Sincere thanks goes to the organizers of these events for giving me the opportunity to discuss my work. I am further indebted to Jaafar Alloul, Isa Blumi and Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, as well as to the editors of this special issue for providing critical feedback on previous drafts. Many thanks also goes to Sebastiaan De Block who, back in 2012, first shared photographs of parts of Charles de Schwartzenberg’s officer file. Professor James O’Reilly in Toronto most kindly answered my questions about Ottoman Hama and Piet Veldeman, director of the War Heritage Institute in Brussels, generously provided me with digital scans of Le Franc tireur. Any errors or inconsistencies are entirely my own.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Ágoston, Guns for the Sultan, 42ff. A different category was the European converts in the early modern Ottoman military elite. See Graf, The Sultan’s Renegades.
2. It decreased afterward and ‘by the 1870s the Ottoman military consisted of only Muslim rank and file’. Uyar and Erickson, A Military History of the Ottomans. See in particular 61–6, 140 and 180. The Ottoman Army’s composition changed again after the 1908 revolution, when Christian and Jewish subjects were no longer exempted from, and effectively entered into, Ottoman military service.
3. Landweber, “Leaving France, ‘Turning Turk’.”
4. The foreign advisers invited by Sultan Selim III to coordinate the foundation of what would become his Nizâm-i Cedid (‘New Order’) troops ‘played important roles in the transition from the old to the new military technology’. Aksan, Ottoman Wars, 198. Inspirational models for a new Ottoman professional army came from within the Empire too. As is well known, the regimes established by the de facto autonomous governors Ali Pasha of Janina and Mehmed Ali in Egypt greatly impressed Ottoman reformers.
5. Conscription was still confined to the Ottoman heartland surrounding Istanbul at first, and non-Muslims and Muslims with financial means could be exempted.
6. Yıldız, “Ottoman Military Organization.” Similar developments were noticeable in Egypt under the rebel-governor Mehmed Ali. Fahmy, All the Pasha’s Men; see in particular p. 80.
7. Yıldız, “Ottoman Military Organization,” 1620.
8. On some of the Britons serving in the Ottoman Army, most often temporarily, during and after the Crimean and 1877–8 Russo-Ottoman wars, see Chastain, “For Queen and Sultan.”
9. In fact, almost until its very end the Empire remained a European power and it was only during the First Balkan War (1912) that direct access to the Adriatic was lost. On expansion in Arabia, see, among others, Kuehn, Ottoman Rule in Yemen; and Anscombe, The Ottoman Gulf.
10. See, for instance, Tóth, An Exiled Generation; and Grüßhaber, The German Spirit in the Ottoman and Turkish Army.
11. The most evident example is the mamlūk class (slave soldiers mainly drawn from the Caucasus) in the Ottoman provinces of North Africa, which in places like Tunisia remained important up until its annexation by France. Hathaway, “Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Egypt;” Oualdi, “Slave to Modernity?”
12. Several Ottoman officers were (the sons of) Muslim refugees from the Caucasus, fleeing Russian terror and expansion. Scattered and anecdotal evidence exists for the presence of other foreign Muslims in the Ottoman military: from an exiled Algerian military leader in late-1840s Damascus and a mid-century Moroccan-born Ottoman officer in Libya, to an Indian Muslim who volunteered during the Russo-Ottoman War. Zürcher, “Children of the Borderlands;” Bardin, Algériens et Tunisiens dans l’Empire Ottoman, 6–7; Rollman, “Military Officers in Morocco,” 216 and 220; and Özcan, Indian Muslims, 41.
13. Briggs et al., “Transnationalism.”
14. Burbank and Cooper, Empires in World History. For a similar effort with regard to late Ottoman historiography, see Blumi, Reinstating the Ottomans.
15. Naoum-Duhani, Quand Beyoglu s’appelait Péra, 84–5.
16. The majority of these refugees, among whom were Italians too, left the Empire later on. Recent and stimulating work on these migrants includes Deringil, Conversion and Apostasy, 159–74; and Tóth, An Exiled Generation, 144–5, 158–61.
17. As Deringil points out there was a bias toward the lower-ranking cadres and foot soldiers; Conversion and Apostasy, 193.
18. Ibid.
19. Important details of his biography remain murky. See Koller, “Ömer Pasha.”
20. Another well-known example is Baker Pasha (d. 1887). After having been put on trial in Britain for sexually harassing a woman on a train, he left his country, fought in the Russo-Ottoman war and later served in Egypt. Both he and Hobart Pasha published recollections of their Ottoman careers. For more details, see Chastain, “For Queen and Sultan.”
21. Koller, “Ömer Pasha,” 267.
22. See, for instance, the following newspaper article with regard to the Crimean War: “American Officers in the Ottoman Armies,” Republican Banner, 3 June 1854. During the late 1870s, when the Ottomans were at war with Serbia and Montenegro and then Russia, several military men showed up at the sultan’s embassies and legations throughout Europe, inquiring about possibilities to join the Ottoman military. Kuneralp and Tokay, The Balkan Crisis.
23. Numerous such stories exist, yet remain to be collected, told and then unravelled. My on-going research on Belgo-Ottoman encounters has already yielded some extraordinary cases, including that of Edmond de Lobel a.k.a. Hassan Cemil Pasha (d. 1901). A veteran of the Russo-Ottoman war, this native of a small Flemish town rose from a petty Belgian army captain to Ottoman general and aide de camp to Abdülhamid II.
24. For a colourful example, see Uysal, Avusturyalı Murad Efendi.
25. Mercenarism is, of course, not an old system, no longer relevant today. On the contrary, it has developed into a global industry with severe repercussions for international relations. See McFate, The Modern Mercenary.
26. The use of mercenary troops became less common as the century continued, although this was a complex and uneven process. For a critique of the traditional military history narrative of the transition to modern standing armies, see the excellent introduction to Arielli and Collins, Transnational Soldiers. See especially at 3–4 and 9. Note also that in their colonies Western imperial powers predominantly depended on locally recruited forces, many of whom were Muslim.
27. Deák, Beyond Nationalism, 39.
28. They variably worked as drill sergeants, commanding officers, engineers, teachers in military schools or medics. See Stoker, Military Advising and Assistance.
29. As one historian noted: ‘Although their numbers were few (statistically negligible), the Ottoman army also employed professional foreign soldiers who served for money during the Great War. A well-known example is the Venezuelan officer Rafael de Nogales’ who after vain ‘attempts to join various European armies […] applied in 1915 to serve in the Ottoman army’, ending up on ‘the Caucasus and Mesopotamia fronts’. Beşikçi, “The Age of Total War,” 563.
30. He described these months in detail in his memoirs. His status as a foreign nobleman meant he often received a privileged treatment from the Austrians compared to his Hungarian comrades.
31. Belgian law stipulated that citizens planning to fight for a foreign army could do so only after prior permission from the king. His Belgian in-laws (see note 33) had historical ties with the Habsburg court, which probably alienated de Schwartzenberg from them too.
32. Charles claimed his great-grandfather was the ‘prince de Schwartzenberg-Schwartzburg-Arnstadt’, a fanciful title that would imply connections to both the Thuringian House of Schwarzburg and the more famous and powerful Czech House of Schwarzenberg. Whereas his 1860s carte de visite simply stated ‘Le Général Baron de Schwartzenberg,’ the Belgian officer often signed his letters as ‘de Schwartzenberg-Schwartzburg.’ But while his aristocratic status remains somewhat ambiguous, it certainly never prevented him from gaining entry into noble circles. The de Schwartzenberg-Schwartzburgs would become extinct by the turn of the nineteenth century. This information, and the rest of this passage, draws on the following sources: a preface and introduction to an aborted edition of the general’s memoirs; a rudimentary family tree drawn up by the ‘baron’; a typed copy of an eight-page memorandum by de Schwartzenberg: ‘Extrait d’un petit mémoire écrit pour mes parents et amis qui me demandait pourquoi j’avais quitté le service actif en Turquie en 1868’; and a funeral oration for his deceased spouse by a parish priest in Stuttgart, translated and copied from the German by the baron, dated 11 November 1871. More information on these sources, all kept at the RMAF, is provided below.
33. His spouse, Augustine, born and educated in Vienna, was the daughter of Count Auguste de Norman d’Audenhove, former chamberlain of the Austrian Emperor Francis I. Their marriage remained childless.
34. Wanty, Le Milieu militaire belge, 158–9; Duchesne, Belges au Mexique; Balace, Recrutements pour les troupes fédérales.
35. Gann and Duignan, Belgian Africa, 60–4.
36. Van Everbroeck, “Leconte.”
37. His undated preface was probably written in 1912, as Leconte makes a contemporary reference to the Balkan War. His edition was tentatively entitled Un Belge au service de la Hongrie et de la Turquie. Les mémoires du baron Charles de Schwartzenberg-Schwartzburg, Général de l’armée ottomane.
38. RMAF, OF, 3384. Three versions of the baron’s memoirs, including the original, are preserved. For this contribution Leconte’s edition has been used. Starting in 1848, they are paginated, number 312 pages in total, and from the year 1850 onward are typewritten. Henceforth, these are simply referred to as Mémoires. The Hungary section takes up two-thirds of the narrative, with the focus being on the long sequence of battles and skirmishes in which de Schwartzenberg led his troops, and on his own small victories and braveries. Why he joined the Hungarian revolutionary army is unclear. In his memoir romantic-nationalist sympathy for Hungarian emancipation is barely, if at all pronounced. What predominate are indefinite expressions of a sense of duty and honour and a preoccupation for achieving military distinction and glory. For a political and military history narrative of the revolution, see Deák, The Lawful Revolution.
39. E.g. Mémoires, 276 and 295.
40. The years 1852–3, 1857–8 and 1861 are also missing.
41. In an undated letter to his sister, written on the occasion of her entry into ‘society,’ he confided to her: ‘[Y]ou thought of me as vain at one point, but I was not. I was catching a sight of a future […] full of hope and I accepted everything [sic] to get there; the balls, soirées and grand feasts of the grande monde filled me with disgust [sic].’ RMAF, OF, 3384.
42. In the memoir, the baron never failed to stress his unique qualities, unwavering perseverance and steely composure (see, for instance, Mémoires, 6 and 77). He repeatedly glorified battle, while stressing his own standing as a ‘real soldier’ who detested favouritism in the military. Finally, his memoirs have a strong moralizing dimension (e.g. ibid., 78–9). After the ultimate Hungarian debacle that nearly saw him killed he wrote: “C’est là [la sacrifice] le côté noble de notre métier; le soldat doit savoir mourir, quand le sort de la cause qu’il defend, demande ce sacrifice.” Ibid., 189.
43. Mémoires, 196–200.
44. Mémoires, 210.
45. Deák, The Habsburg Officer Corps, 172–3.
46. For a discussion, see Deringil, Conversion and Apostasy, 160ff.
47. On the politics of conversion, see ibid., 156–9.
48. His service in Kars is described in the Mémoires, 217–59.
49. Badem, The Ottoman Crimean War, 148.
50. Ibid., 147.
51. Mémoires, 263.
52. This battle is well covered. For an Ottoman perspective, see Aksan, Ottoman Wars, 281–93; and Reid, Crisis of the Ottoman Empire.
53. Mémoires, 267.
54. In his memoirs he wrote ‘Mahra,’ which does not exist. It is almost certain, however, Maʿarrat al-Nuʿmān (or al-Maʿarra) is concerned. This old city, north of Hama, was located on the north–south route linking the great cities of Aleppo and Damascus, just like the two other cities over which de Schwartzberg had the military command.
55. On Ottoman Hama, see Reilly, A Small Town in Ottoman Syria.
56. Douwes, The Ottomans in Syria; and Maʻoz, Ottoman Reform in Syria.
57. Mémoires, 268. On Ottoman efforts to subdue tribal populations elsewhere in the Empire and the ‘politics of negotiation’ they inevitably necessitated, see the illuminating article by Çiçek, “The Ottoman State in Hijaz.”
58. On military conscription in Syria, see Maʻoz, Ottoman Reform in Syria, 50 and 81–5; Beinin, “Ottoman Reform,” 48; and Masters, Roots of Sectarianism, 158–9 and 165–6.
59. Mémoires, 270–1.
60. In the immediate wake of the failed Hungarian revolution, many Polish and Hungarian officers were sent to Syria, as far away as possible from the empires against which they had rebelled, in an attempt not to further alienate Russia and Austria. Urbanik and Baylen, “Polish Exiles,” 50.
61. On Ottoman centralization efforts and subaltern resistance against it, see, among others, Beinin, “Ottoman Reform.”
62. Deringil, Conversion and Apostasy, 158–9.
63. Koller, “Ömer Pasha,” 252. Such normative issues of loyalty and trustworthiness were important, especially if we consider that some foreign-born commanders provided intelligence to their former governments. The Irishman Eugene O’Reilly is a case in point: serving the Ottomans in the 1860s, he also sent intelligence reports to London. Chastain, “For Queen and Sultan,” 79–82. Such behaviour can well be qualified as espionage.
64. Historians of the late Ottoman Empire have for some time now analysed these processes in very sophisticated ways. See in particular Blumi, Ottoman Refugees.
65. His move to Hama in a caravan, for instance, includes a description of how he and his men successfully fought off a ‘band of Arabs’ (by which he meant Bedouins) that attacked them on the way. Mémoires, 267.
66. These events are described on pp. 278–98. His contemporaries, as well as some modern historians often confuse(d) Emin Pasha for an Austrian or Prussian general, due to his surname. See for instance Hajjar, Proche Orient, vol. 2: t. 3, 1596; and Huhn, Preussischer Konsul Im Osmanischen Syrien, 146 and 153. De Schwartzenberg is also not to be confused with Emin Muhlis Pasha, governor of Damascus between 1860 and 1862.
67. There is an abundant literature on the 1860s massacres, which, for a long time, however, used to be descriptive and European-source based and reinforce ideas of the Middle East as a transhistorical hotbed for sectarian violence. For revisionist accounts, see Reilly, “Inter‐Confessional Relations;” and Makdisi, Culture of Sectarianism.
68. Hama, de Schwartzenberg’s residence, would be spared from the violence. Reilly, A Small Town in Syria, 131.
69. On the Damascus riots, see Fawaz, An Occasion for War.
70. Farah, Ottoman Lebanon, 592.
71. On Ottoman government policy after the massacres, see Fawaz, An Occasion for War.
72. 26 September 1860, quoted in the French journal L’Ami de la Religion, vol. 7 (Oct.–Dec. 1860), 57. He would later inflate his role in these events. See the previously quoted funeral oration for his deceased spouse in note 32.
73. Anckaer, België en het Osmaanse Rijk, 300. An English translation of this dissertation appeared in 2013 with The Isis Press.
74. Letter to Samih Pasha, February 1877 [day is missing], RMAF, OF, 3384.
75. For a detailed account of Karam’s uprising and the Ottoman response to it, as well as the geopolitics that determined the outcome, see Spagnolo, “Mount Lebanon.” On Karam, see also Akarlı, The Long Peace, 36–8. Details of the circumstances of the confrontation between de Schwartzenberg’s troops and those of Karam are complicated. For accounts of this battle, based on the often very contradictory rumours circulating at the time, see the diary kept by the administrative head of the Jesuit College in Ghazir. Jalabert, Un Montagnard contre le pouvoir. See in particular 91–109. For de Schwartzenberg’s take on the debacle against the ‘Karamists,’ see his 12-page report to Fuad Pasha, written in Istanbul on 18 April 1866, DA, CPT, vol. 11.1. In it, he painted his defeat as a ‘heroic defence’ against an enemy ‘ten times greater,’ related how he had been shot, his clothes punctuated by bullet holes, and even lost his horse. The earlier description of de Schwartzenberg’s encounter with Karam is based on this report and the Jesuit’s diary.
76. Spagnolo, “Mount Lebanon,” 154 and 152.
77. La Presse, 20 February 1866. Translation is taken from Public Opinion: A Comprehensive Summary of the Press Throughout the World, vol. 9, London, p. 199.
78. Jalabert, Un Montagnard contre le pouvoir, 152 n.4.
79. Gustave d’Alaux in the Revue des deux mondes, 1 May 1866, as quoted in ibid., 155 n.5.
80. Few sources in de Schwartzenberg’s officer file dating after 1861 are available. This passage is based on a rare letter, written in Serbia in February 1877, to Ottoman field marshal Samih Pasha, demanding his help in obtaining promotion through a military command in Anatolia. RMAF, OF, 3384. It is unclear whether the baron was also actively involved in consecutive wars with Russia (April 1877—March 1878) or, again, with Serbia (Dec. 1877—March 1878).
81. Mémoires, e.g. 207 and 210–11.
82. Koller, “Ömer Pasha,” 258.
83. Bouquet, Les pachas du sultan, 279–98.
84. On the linguistic diversity in the Ottoman Army and some of the problems it caused for the military command, see Şimşek, “Conscripts for the Ottoman Army,” 291.
85. In the 1820s and 1830s, the greater majority of the Ottoman Army consisted of Turcophone speakers. Ibid., 289. Yet, de Schwartzenberg also referred to fairly large groups of Arab soldiers in his force. Mémoires, 271.
86. See Mémoires, 290. He corresponded with his superiors in French. Ibid., 242. He started learning Turkish from the moment he crossed the Ottoman border in the winter of 1850–1. Ibid., 206.
87. His popularity among the Ottoman rank and file, who were often left unpaid for months in a row, might not be off the mark, if we also accept his contention that he ‘voluntarily renounced to cash (toucher) my payment for 24 to 36 months’ and even reached into his own pockets to prevent ‘scandals’ (and, probably worse, mutinies) as a result of ever-recurring belated reimbursements of soldiers’ pay. Mémoirs, 267–8. This can be read not solely as an indication of his own financial stability – he was not dependent on his wage to sustain the expenses of living a general’s life and all the social trappings it required – but also of a certain sympathy for his soldiers, not untypical for officers long commanding their regiment.
88. Simons, “The Advisor as Warrior-King,” 113–14.
89. See n. 90.
90. See his description of Verhat [Ferhâd] Pasha in 1855, a German convert and old acquaintance of his: ‘d’un caractère qui prête à tous les rôles où il voit ses intérêts matériels; tour à tour monarchique outré, républicain rouge, philosophe ou dévot, toutes les hypocrisies lui vont; aujourd’hui il est fidèle croyant de Mahomed.’ Mémoires, 216. See also at 206.
91. On these tropes, see, among many others, Burke III and Prochaska, Genealogies of Orientalism; and Bryce, “The Absence of Ottoman Europe.”
92. Mémoires, 270.
93. Ibid., e.g. on 267.
94. See, for instance, the description of his troops after their first victory over a Bedouin tribe. Ibid., 271.
95. Ibid., 292–3.
96. Ibid., see, for instance, 272–6.
97. Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism” and Deringil, “The Post-Colonial Debate.”
98. Mémoires, 276.
99. The baron related the difficulties he encountered imposing conscription in his jurisdiction to Ottoman corruption: “Dans la région des employés turcs, c’est le vol organisé, et personne n’y changera rien. Ceux qui volent le plus et savent partager sont généralement bien vus.” Ibid., 299.
100. Note that similar frustrations with corrupted bureaucrats can be found in the Hungary section of his memoir. See, for instance, ibid., 73–4.
101. Ibid., 270.
102. Izmet Pasha was governor of the Aleppo Eyalet.
103. Mémoires, 234.
104. Tellingly, some of de Schwartzenberg’s future and more famous colleagues included similar portraits in their published memoirs. See, for instance, the frontispiece in the recollections of Woods Pasha (d. 1929), who served as admiral in the Ottoman fleet after a tumultuous career in the British Navy: Forty-Seven Years under the Ensigns of Great Britain and Turkey.
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Houssine Alloul
Houssine Alloul (Ph.D. University of Antwerp) is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Antwerp and currently a visiting scholar at Boğaziçi University. His main areas of research are Euro-Ottoman diplomacy, consular history, finance capitalism and Leopoldian colonialism. He is co-editor (with Edhem Eldem and Henk de Smaele) of To Kill A Sultan: A Transnational History of the Attempt on Abdülhamid II (1905).