The Ottoman Administration and Police Structures
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Before getting into the narrative of events surrounding the reform schemes in our next installment of this series, it is necessary to get acquainted with some terms relating to the administrative organization of the Ottoman Empire, and the regions they covered.
The Turkish Balkan possessions were divided according to a precise administrative system, which however generally does not conform to the present borders of today’s Balkan states. The largest unit was the province or vilayet. The governor of the province was known as a vali, and he had the rank of a pasha- equivalent to a military general. Above the vali, overseeing multiple provinces, was the beylerbey, second only to the vizier. Each vilayet was subdivided into two or three sandzaks or districts, the governors of which were termed mutessarifs, who also had the rank of pasha. The caza was a department, governed by a caimakam or prefect, who had the rank of a bey, equivalent to a military colonel. The nahiye was a group of villages, governed by a moudir or sub-prefect.
In all, there were six vilayets in European Turkey. There were the two Albanian ones in the west, Jannina (Epirus) and Scutari. The three vilayets in the center were largely Macedonian- Salonika, Monastir (Bitola), and Kosovo, with the capital being in Skopje, or Üsküb in Turkish. Subdividing the Macedonian vilayets, the territory consisted of 12 sandzaks and 71 cazas- 26 in Salonika, 22 in Monastir, and 23 in Kosovo.
To the east, in Thrace, was the vilayet of Adrianople (Edirne). The Ottoman capital, Constantinople, formed a vilayet in itself. The Mürzsteg Reforms were meant to apply only to the three Macedonian vilayets of Salonika, Monastir and Kosovo.
The police entrusted with providing law and order in Macedonia, the Ottoman gendarmerie, fell under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of War. The gendarmes were made up of males between 25 to 45 years of age, who served for two years. They were organized into regiments, battalions, and companies. Each vilayet was assigned a gendarme regiment, while each sandzak had a battalion, and each caza had a company. They functioned as a rural police under the command of the vali.
These groups patrolled the rural areas to maintain public safety and order, acted as sentries, security guards at banks and post offices, delivered court orders and executed arrest warrants. They were organized in gendarme forts called karakols, or station houses. The officer corps was described wittily by Austrian military attaché Gustav Hubka as a “privileged extortionist mob and scourge of brigands.”
The turn of events that led to the Mürzsteg Reforms and Western intervention in Macedonia in 1902 had origins in a political conception formalized three-quarters of a century earlier. In 1815, the Congress of Vienna had established the foundations for a ‘Concert of Europe,’ a grouping of the most powerful European nations, which would ideally work jointly to ensure political stability and prevent the outbreak of war. It was, in a limited form, the primitive ancestor of the European Union.
In its time, the Concert of Europe was a reaction to the excessive aspirations of Napoleon, enacted in order to ensure the peace settlement of the Congress of Vienna. Its structure depended on the “Quadruple Alliance” of Britain, Austria, Prussia and Russia, which was expanded three years later to include the restored French monarchy. But the harmony was ephemeral, and differences of policy in dealing with and defining wars to be suppressed, especially between Britain and the Continental powers, led to the slow death of the values originally envisioned in the agreement.
Before the 1815 agreement had run its course, however, the temporary unity of Europe was harnessed for assisting in the liberation of Greece from the Ottoman Empire.
