The life of Midhat Pasha; a record of his services, political reforms, banishment, and judicial murderAli Haydar Mithat
History
The life of Midhat Pasha; a record of his services, political reforms, banishment, and judicial murder
Ali Haydar Mithat
Midhat Paşa, 1822-1884; Statesmen -- Turkey -- Biography; Turkey -- History -- 19th century
with iron bars hastily snatched from the windows of the mosque, and
murdered them on the spot. The English Consul, Mr Blunt, accompanied
by his _cavass_, seems to have been the only one who kept his head on
this occasion and acted with presence of mind and sagacity; for, at
the risk of his own life, he forced his way to the Konak, and when he
found that the Governor could not effect the restoration of the girl,
which was the only way to calm the mob and rescue the Consuls, he sent
to the American Vice‐Consulate to apprize Mr Lazaro, who was the cause
of the whole disturbance, of the perilous situation of his colleagues,
the French and German Consuls, and to implore him to restore the girl.
Unfortunately, Mr Lazaro at first procrastinated and pretended that
he did not know where the girl was, and so precious time was lost;
and when subsequently, on a further appeal from Mr Consul Blunt, he
delivered up the girl, it was too late, for the crime against the
foreign Consuls who had intervened had been accomplished.
Although the Ottoman Government took immediate steps to punish the
authors of this crime—the six principal leaders of which were
immediately executed, and the remainder punished with severe terms
of penal servitude—the effect of the outrage on the public opinion
of Europe, in the existing state of feeling in regard to Turkey,
can easily be conceived. It excited indignation everywhere; but the
anti‐Turkish Press, now pretty numerous, seized on it with avidity and
pointed to it as irrefragable evidence of the incorrigible fanaticism
of the whole Mussulman population of the empire, and called for various
coercive measures, amounting in some cases to a combined crusade, to
protect the Christians in the country, now threatened with wholesale
massacre.[7]
It was in vain that Europeans who had lived all their lives in the
country, and were acquainted from personal experience with the feelings
and opinions of the inhabitants, protested against these exaggerations
and deprecated their vain terrors. Colonel James Baker, an English
resident for twenty years in the neighbourhood of Salonica, where he
had been farming on a large scale, and whose occupation had brought
him in contact with all sorts and conditions of men, Christian and
Mahomedan alike, wrote a book ridiculing these apprehensions, and
communicating his experiences of the harmony and good fellowship
existing among the adherents of both religions, with whom he had for
twenty years been brought into contact.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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