What Vaso Vidović presented to Habsburg Emperor Francis Josef's chancellery on 12 August 1873 was a memorandum intended as a magnifying glass: a missive from two dozen Orthodox Christian merchants from the Ottoman town of Gradiška who, accused of crimes they claimed not to have committed, had fled Ottoman Bosnia for Habsburg Croatia-Slavonia. The memorandum uses the small details and broad context of the seemingly inconsequential event in an effort to enlarge its importance and focus international attention on the crime, torture, and killings that local Muslims—and even the area's Ottoman officials—carried out against Gradiška's Christian community. Acute danger was the proximate cause of the merchants’ flight, but the memo argues that exile had already become their last remaining option—a dramatic final act after years of complaints and petitions to local, provincial, and Ottoman imperial officials, including the sultan.
Vidović and his fellow members of the Plenipotentiary Committee of the Refugee Christians from Stara Gradiška in Bosnia directed the memorandum not only to the Habsburg emperor but also to the European great power guarantors of the 1856 Treaty of Paris.Footnote 1 Given the intended audience, the document was more than a testament to the “circumstances and suffering” of the Christians in Bosnia; it was a civic appeal to international law, and it invoked what it depicted as the great powers’ implicit—though not articulated in the treaty language—obligation to protect Bosnia's Christian populations from the depredations of Ottoman misrule. The merchants assured their loyalty to the sultan, but the memorandum frames the flight as the culminating event in an escalating series of confession-based persecutions and complaints. This was not some unremarkable and unauthorized border-crossing normally dealt with at the local or regional level. Rather, through an extensive analysis of recent diplomatic history, the memorandum attempts to demonstrate the Ottoman Empire's failure to live up to commitments—including equality before the law, security of life and property, and the freedom of religion—it made during the Tanzimat reforms, as framed in the original 1839 Hatt-ı Şerif of Gülhane, and in particular the 1856 Hatt-ı Hümayun, the Imperial Reform Edict that accompanied the Treaty of Paris.Footnote 2
The refugees extrapolated the supposedly unfulfilled promises of the Ottoman reform documents to argue that their situation demonstrated that the empire stood in violation of the 1856 Treaty of Paris. The powers were therefore obliged to interfere in the domestic affairs of the Ottoman Empire to create the conditions necessary for the refugees to return home.Footnote 3 Precisely what the merchants wanted was not entirely clear and changed over the course of their eight-month sojourn, but one demand remained constant: foreign powers must guarantee their security as Ottoman Christian subjects within the territory of the Ottoman Empire. It was effectively a demand to assert extraterritorial jurisdiction and thereby abrogate the Treaty of Paris's most foundational promises: maintaining the integrity of the Ottoman Empire and abiding the principle of nonintervention in Ottoman domestic affairs.Footnote 4
It had been two months since the refugees crossed when the twenty-five-year-old Vidović, in the company of two other merchants, made the journey to Vienna.Footnote 5 When the refugees first arrived, old business partners and the Chamber of Commerce in the town of Sisak had vouched for their integrity, and many of them subsequently took up temporary residency near the border, where they could better maintain contact with their families and compatriots at home.Footnote 6 Their unwillingness to return home without guarantees of some sort had turned the border-crossing into a question for the Ottoman and Habsburg imperial governments. A series of mutual recriminations ensued in which the Habsburgs alleged a pattern of abuse and the Ottomans accused the merchants of combining and intriguing against authorities with the help of the pan-Slavic activist and Habsburg vice-consul in Banja Luka.
Imperial entanglements and diplomatic missteps quickly ratcheted up Ottoman-Habsburg tensions, but the merchants’ bold overtures to the European concert were all but ignored by representatives of the great powers. In Vienna, the group was told the document would be forwarded to the Habsburg foreign minister, Gyula Andrássy, but two weeks later, Vidović and the other petitioners had still received no response.Footnote 7 The British ambassador was unwelcoming; the Italian ambassador suggested they turn to the Russians; and the Russians in turn thought the Habsburgs should deal with the matter first.Footnote 8
The great power statesmen's easy dismissal of the note has resulted in it largely being viewed as a failure and subsequently overlooked by historians. For Vaso Čubrilović, the memorandum showed a “revolutionary spirit” but otherwise had little effect; Milorad Ekmečić barely mentions the memorandum and discounts any national-revolutionary character to the refugees or their flight.Footnote 9 It was, after all a minor event: two dozen grumbling merchants, a diplomatic break averted after protracted negotiations, and an apparent resolution with the merchants’ official return to the Ottoman Empire in February 1874, eight months after they had fled.Footnote 10 Moreover, the flight was soon eclipsed by the Eastern Crisis of 1875–78, when the revolt of Orthodox Christian peasants in Ottoman Herzegovina spread quickly to Bosnia before engulfing the Ottoman Balkans in the rebellion and violence that ultimately precipitated the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877–78. Some of the same characters also reemerged during the Eastern Crisis: Vaso Vidović and several others turned from supplication to violence, with Vidović in particular taking on a leadership role as the head of one of the largest insurgent organizations—based in Bosnian Gradiška.
Overshadowed and underacknowledged, the merchants’ case has acquired its historical meaning largely from connections to subsequent events—an inaugural “herald of the storm” as historian Theodor Sosnosky described the affair in 1913.Footnote 11 Yet focusing on the Gradiška refugees through the lens of what happened later obscures both the unique form and content of the refugees’ claims, as well as the nuances of the political circumstances. Examining instead what these events intrinsically were shows the merchants’ claims were in fact notable precisely because they lacked some ineffable revolutionary force. Their formulations were at once both radical and essentially conservative: radical, because by taking seriously what they interpreted as the principles underlying the Treaty of Paris, the merchants sought to insert themselves as individuals into the international law of states—seizing a language and international forum to effect change, and in doing so to shape and customize their own strategic goals.Footnote 12 Conservative, because they sought to work within the existing legal structure rather than fundamentally change the political dynamics of the region—an unrevolutionary approach that largely vanished during the violence of 1875–78.
While it is true Serbia had developed a large network of agents and activists across Ottoman Bosnia and Habsburg Croatia, they had little success in mobilizing a national movement, and by 1873 Serbia's young Prince Milan Obrenović had largely ceased funding their activities.Footnote 13 The merchants’ flight took the Serbian government by surprise not just because it abandoned its agents but also because the whole affair had little to do with Serbia and avoided nationalist rhetoric.Footnote 14 The refugees and the accusations in their memorandum were instead an indictment of the Ottoman central government's ineffective implementation of its Tanzimat reform program and the persistent strength of the local Muslim elite. The Ottoman Empire had long struggled to maintain central government control over restive Bosnian Muslim elites, and while it was able to suppress the violent insurrection that followed the introduction of the Tanzimat, crucial questions went unanswered—agrarian reforms lay fallow, efforts to curb tax abuse withered, and, by the time of the merchants’ flight, provincial administration was also in disarray. From 1869 to 1874 the province had ten different governors-general, all of whom served less than one year—including two who lasted under a month.Footnote 15
Despite the challenges in Ottoman Bosnia, the refugees burst on the scene at a moment of relative tranquility among the great powers and stability along the Ottoman-Habsburg border. In the decades preceding the merchants’ flight, Habsburg policy in the region was guided by the perceived need to restrain Serbian nationalism and Russian influence, but vacillated between a moderate policy aimed at preserving the stability of the Ottoman Empire and pressing for the southern expansion envisioned by the emperor and his military leadership. The historian Istvan Dioszegi, considering a host of contradictory statements and maneuvers at precisely this time, has suggested Habsburg policy tilted more toward the Balkan peoples than the Ottoman Empire—but also acknowledged that Foreign Minister Andrássy had no desire to hasten (or hinder) the “fall” of the Ottoman Balkans.Footnote 16
Expansion, of course, ultimately prevailed, but in 1873 Austria-Hungary had little reason to upend the peace for the sake of some small-town merchants. Internationalization of the affair—elevating it from the local, through the bilateral, to the level of the Concert of Europe—was an undesirable outcome that any form of official Austro-Hungarian intervention might nevertheless achieve. Moreover, local interests and independent actors were shaping imperial knowledge and cross-border relationships. By working on behalf of Orthodox Christian Ottoman subjects, the Habsburg vice-consul in Banja Luka had frequently overstepped his mandate and involved himself in Ottoman domestic affairs.Footnote 17 Whether or not he was seeking to reorient Habsburg policies, the consul's “careless behavior” and reputation of pan-Slavic activism had already compromised the Habsburg position.
After first charting the developments that changed the merchants’ flight from a local issue on the Habsburg-Ottoman border to a matter for discussion in imperial cabinets, this article analyzes the memorandum the refugees brought to Vienna and the language of law and internationalism it employed. The Treaty of Paris was a critical document here. For the Ottomans, the treaty became a cornerstone of their diplomacy; for the refugees, the treaty tied the Ottoman administrative and legal reform agenda to international legitimacy. It offered a means to reformulate the discourse of suffering under the “Turkish yoke” into a question of domestic policies and international obligations—to “speak Tanzimat” to the outside, but facing in.Footnote 18 As a diplomatic act, the petition failed. The refugees became victims to the exigencies of the international system and Habsburg-Ottoman diplomacy as politics overwhelmed the framework of their demands. However, the refugees took a sophisticated approach to internationalizing their claims of suffering that, while soon eclipsed by the Eastern Crisis, momentarily stood on its own, prefiguring the language of protection in the 1878 Treaty of Berlin and demanding of the international system a new attention to “humanity.”Footnote 19
Defining the People, Finding the Problem
The twenty-four merchants crossed the Sava River from Bosnian Gradiška to the village of Uskoci, near Croatian Stara Gradiška, on 15 June 1873. It was a familiar route; they regularly made the same trip when traveling to Slavonia for trade and business. This time, however, they surrendered to military border guards and requested protection. They had broken no laws, they said, but even so Emin Efendi, the prefect of the Gradiška kaza (district), had accused them of treason and fabricating complaints about Ottoman misrule, and wanted to execute them without trial. Flight was their only option. In Zagreb, the military border's general commander instructed officers of the Gradiška regiment to interview the refugees and then, following “existing directives,” intern them in the town of Požega, some twenty kilometers from the border.Footnote 20 Four days later, Kamil Efendi, the subgovernor of Banja Luka sançak (subprovince), demanded their immediate return. The merchants’ flight was illegal—they had evaded authorities by crossing the border without permission. Yet Kamil assured them that because their fears of persecution and retaliation were unfounded, they could return safely. If they did so within three days, they would not face any legal action.Footnote 21 The merchants declined, choosing instead to remain under the temporary protection of Austria-Hungary.
In explaining their refusal to Habsburg officials, the merchants described a world of unprovoked stabbings, murder, torture, and arson that, they claimed, Muslims committed against Christian “innocents” and went unpunished.Footnote 22 They also claimed the area's Ottoman administrators were just as bad as Muslim civilians: they failed to enforce laws, abused their positions, and enabled the violence and persecution—all of which, the merchants said, had worsened in the past three years. Since 1870, the merchants and others had submitted at least ten petitions to Banja Luka's subgovernor, to the governor-general of Bosnia, to the Ottoman foreign minister, and to the sultan, in which they swore their loyalty as Ottoman subjects and requested redress and reform.Footnote 23
The immediate event that precipitated the flight was related to these petitions. Stevo “the Spy” Ekmić, a Christian merchant from Gradiška, had collected signatures from Christian townsfolk for a letter supposedly asking the authorities to return account books they had seized from a young man who owed taxes on his failed business.Footnote 24 The letter was in Ottoman Turkish, and many Orthodox Christians had already signed it. Yet, when the merchants translated it, they realized that Ekmić's letter accused the merchants of lying in their earlier petitions and alleged that agitators had convinced them to plot against the Ottoman government. Sources disagree whether Ekmić had been bribed or threatened into gathering signatures, whether he may have been working off debts to an Ottoman official or even been simply oblivious, but the merchants immediately filed a complaint against him with Emin, the Gradiška prefect.Footnote 25 When Emin finally summoned the parties, he sided with Ekmić “the Spy,” and warned the merchants that, as an Ottoman official, he could bind them, cut them, or even throw them in the river if he wanted. When he then asked if the merchants really wanted to push their complaint against Ekmić further, their dilemma was clear: either they continued to denounce a man now under the protection of the prefect or they tacitly admit to trying to undermine the Ottoman government. The merchants chose a third option and fled to Austria-Hungary.Footnote 26
The merchants failed to alert the Ottoman authorities to their journey. This time, the trade route they had long followed uneventfully turned them into refugees. Yet what did that mean? What kind of refugee were they? For the merchants any answer mattered only insofar as it was functional: security on the other side of the border and the hope for a safe return home. For the Habsburgs as well as the Ottomans, the question was categorical, and the answer would delineate responsibilities and privileges that went along with it. Habsburg officials at first treated the merchants as political refugees. The Habsburg's existing directives were intended to manage people in a manner that largely complied with the international legal expectations customarily pertaining to individuals who fled the country of their residence due to persecution based on political ideology or crimes committed as political acts.Footnote 27 The general principle was to neutralize such refugees by disarming them when necessary and then interning them—in this case in Požega, where the merchants stayed at the Steamboat Inn—to prevent them from carrying out any cross-border political activities that might provoke their home government and compromise their hosts.Footnote 28
International law interpreted the right to asylum as a question of state, not subject, and asylum law gave host countries the sovereign right to protect political refugees without provoking a diplomatic crisis or conflict. Looking back on the events years later, Ilija Bilbija, who later took a leading role in the uprisings of 1875–78, described the members of his group as political refugees. But at the time, this categorization was inaccurate because the refugees denied any activities that could warrant the designation, and neither the Habsburgs nor the Ottomans thought the flight was based on political persecution.Footnote 29 They were also not common criminals on the run or border thieves, whose cases were typically handled by local officials.Footnote 30 The Gradiška merchants stood in an indeterminate and temporary category of exile. Under what terms they would return and how those terms would be achieved was unspecified. The initial request was fairly straightforward; they refused to return without guarantees for their personal safety. But the records do not clarify what “guarantees” meant—and who the intended underwriter would be.Footnote 31 Within weeks the list had grown: they wanted Istanbul to replace local officials, provide safety guarantees, and grant them amnesty for the crimes they were accused of committing.
By the end of June, Mehmed Raşid Paşa, the Ottoman foreign minister, had ordered Bosnia's governor-general, Mustafa Asim Paşa, to investigate and report on the situation in Banja Luka sançak and Gradiška, and the actual reasons for the merchants’ flight.Footnote 32 As the Ottomans began their investigation, Habsburg Foreign Minister Andrássy was also under pressure from several directions to find answers. The Hungarians were particularly concerned as the refugees were now in Hungarian civil Croatia-Slavonia and might stir dangerous sympathies among the kingdom's large Orthodox Christian population. At the parliamentary meeting on 18 June 1873, the journalist, Serbian nationalist, and minister of parliament, Svetozar Miletić, asked the Hungarian minister-president whether he would take steps to ensure the refugees return and future security “under the protection of the guaranteeing powers.”Footnote 33 Back in Vienna, Foreign Minister Andrássy also had a report, dated 17 June 1873, from Stanislav Dragančić, the Habsburg vice-consul in Banja Luka. Dragančić warned that without an “energetic international intervention” and the immediate removal of Banja Luka's subgovernor, an uprising was imminent.Footnote 34
Andrássy's interpretation of the Dragančić report was significantly less pessimistic than the report, but the next question—how to respond to the events—was still unanswered. The foreign minister asked his emissaries in Istanbul and Sarajevo whether the situation required “a diplomatic intervention with reference to the Hatt-ı Hümayun (Reform Edict) and the Treaty of Paris,” but was reluctant to take such a radical step.Footnote 35 Andrássy saw a neighborly obligation to temporarily shelter the refugees “until their conflict with the local officials is settled,” but opposed any sort of intervention that went beyond localized negotiations over what he identified as a local problem.Footnote 36 Any official intervention to help settle the merchants’ conflict with local officials “in an official manner,” as one military border official helpfully put it, could accord the refugees a political character and legitimize their plight as an international question rather than a local disturbance.Footnote 37 Such a possibility existed, said Andrássy, “if it even appeared that we a priori view their complaints as legitimate and take it upon ourselves to intervene formally.”Footnote 38 Austria-Hungary could claim no capitulatory right to protect Ottoman Christian subjects, and it was not the task of the Habsburg government to “involve itself in the disputes of individual Turkish subjects with their individual local officials, and to dictate to the Porte the terms on which the return of the refugees will depend.”Footnote 39
Local and international circumstances shaped the meaning of the merchants’ flight, and the Ottoman and Habsburg empires tried to minimize the impact of the event on bilateral relations. Any step that moved the refugees and their circumstances from local dynamics to the subject of diplomacy was unwelcome. As long as the problem was with the actual enforcement of Ottoman law rather than the law itself, Andrássy reasoned the refugees could not be placed “in the category of political conspirators.”Footnote 40 As if to emphasize the point, he granted the refugees permission to move from Požega closer to the border. As victims rather than conspirators, they surely did not endanger the integrity of the border or require the treatment of political refugees.Footnote 41
Making a Crisis
Within days of the merchants’ flight, a competing narrative to their tale of persecution emerged that undermined all attempts to localize the event. The refugees’ sustained refusal to go back home without guarantees of foreign mediation presented a problem to authorities on both sides. But contentious parallel Habsburg and Ottoman investigations of the situation in Banja Luka and Gradiška created conflict that burst into the open with Ottoman accusations that Habsburg officials were fueling a revolutionary movement, and that the Gradiška merchants were part of it. When the Bosnian governor-general went to investigate the merchants’ complaints and the circumstances in Banja Luka and Gradiška, Foreign Minister Mehmed Raşid assured the Habsburg ambassador in Istanbul that he would send a special committee if Mustafa Asim's report seemed biased or deceptive.Footnote 42 Raşid raised two other matters. First, he had already learned that the merchants fled Gradiška not because of persecution, but because Ottoman officials discovered they were members of a secret revolutionary committee. Second, Raşid suggested Vice-Consul Dragančić was submitting false and misleading reports from Banja Luka. Raşid asked that Svetozar Teodorović, the Habsburg consul general in Sarajevo, should accompany Mustafa Asim and investigate the matter as well.Footnote 43 The ambassador agreed, and instructed Teodorović accordingly. He also asked Teodorović to report back on Dragančić's “spiritual and moral qualities.”Footnote 44
Raşid hoped Teodorović and Mustafa Asim would arrive at a common report, but it quickly became clear that would not be possible.Footnote 45 As the two carried out parallel inquiries—and Teodorović compiled exhaustive reports on Mustafa Asim's investigations—Asim elaborated on his initial accusation that the merchants were members of a revolutionary committee: they were leaders of a group in Gradiška as well as Banja Luka, they collected money from each Christian house for organizational purposes, and they fabricated stories about persecution to cause unrest and foment revolution.Footnote 46 The Habsburg consul general's investigation rejected these accusations and strongly criticized Mustafa Asim's procedures. Teodorović protested Mustafa Asim's decision to put the merchants’ goods under seal and, despite Tanzimat principles of legal equity, to discount testimony from Christians. For Teodorović, the investigatory process was intended from the start to prove the merchants guilty of conspiring against authorities, and Mustafa Asim's procedures were flawed distortions of reality that led to unsustainable conclusions.
On the Ottoman side of the investigation, Mustafa Asim accused the Habsburg's Banja Luka vice-consul of being a pan-Slavic activist and leader of the same revolutionary committee that Ottoman officials discovered on the eve of the merchants’ flight. In other words, Vice-Consul Dragančić was part of the nationalist agitation and bore ultimate responsibility for the Gradiška merchants’ decision to run.Footnote 47 These claims were not unfounded, and while Teodorović's reports to Andrássy systematically refuted the evidence Mustafa Asim presented to support the accusation, the language of the consul general's reports as well as its assessments were by no means exculpatory. Teodorović described Dragančić's dispatches as exaggeration based on “fear and zealousness,” but his criticisms of the Banja Luka vice-consul were specific and referred back to events that took place over several years.Footnote 48 Taken as a whole, Dragančić's activities went well beyond the vice-consul's designated task of serving the needs of Habsburg subjects abroad. He intervened with local authorities on behalf of the Bosnian Christian community, demanded for Ottoman Christians the protection of person and property, always spoke out loudly in favor of the Christians, and also held meetings in his residence.Footnote 49 Dragančić admitted to extending his work for Habsburg subjects into advocating for Ottoman Christians, which he justified in part because of the local Christian community's reliance on its strong business ties to Austria-Hungary. These close relations were among the reasons for what he saw as their “loyalty [to] and genuine sympathy” for the Habsburg Empire—from which they now expected “help and healing.”Footnote 50
In fact, Teodorović and others had worried about Dragančić's conduct in Banja Luka at least since 1872, when he got in trouble for encouraging the idea among Orthodox Christians that Bosnia should be annexed to Austria-Hungary.Footnote 51 Just one month before the Gradiška merchants’ flight, Mustafa Asim asked Teodorović to caution the vice-consul against interfering in the affairs of the Ottoman Christian community and, even well before that, Teodorović told Mustafa Asim he wanted to replace the vice-consul.Footnote 52 Both men thought Dragančić's relationship with the Orthodox Christian community in Banja Luka and Gradiška was inappropriate, and the merchants’ flight made his replacement urgent. Mustafa Asim believed that as long as Dragančić remained in office in Banja Luka, the Christians there would remain restive, and Teodorović essentially agreed. In a report to Andrássy in late July, he offered a candid evaluation of the vice-consul's performance and abilities, apparently intending as much to outline the problems as to advocate for permission to find a new vice-consul. Dragančić had in any case requested an additional two weeks for his holiday in August, and Teodorović suggested that would be an opportune time to replace him.Footnote 53 Dragančić may not have actively encouraged the merchants to flee, but regardless of the truth in the Ottoman accusations, his presence in Banja Luka increased the likelihood of such a flight. Because the “Christian population of Banja Luka saw him”—and therefore Austria-Hungary writ large—“as the champion of their better future,” they held hope for Habsburg official support.Footnote 54 In mid-August the vice-consul took his previously approved vacation; by the middle of September he had been reassigned to the 79th infantry regiment.Footnote 55
The effect of Dragančić's conduct in Bosnia lasted well after his reassignment, however, and turned what had been a contentious series of Habsburg-Ottoman mutual recriminations into a public scandal and impending diplomatic crisis. At the start of October, the Habsburg chargé d'affaires in Istanbul, Karl Zaluski, was expecting the Ottoman foreign minister to forward him the final report on the outcome of Governor-General Mustafa Asim's investigation. Instead, on 3 October, Zaluski received a printed memorandum regarding “affairs in Gradiška.”Footnote 56 The Porte gave the memo to Zaluski, but it seemed intended for the general public. The Ottoman ambassador to Vienna described it as an unofficial document he had not been told of—perhaps a confidential report from Mustafa Asim to the foreign ministry.Footnote 57
The memorandum is a detailed narrative, based on the governor-general's own findings, of events leading to the merchants’ flight; it is also an account of how the investigation largely disproved the accusations against local Ottoman officials and the Muslim population, uncovered an extensive secret revolutionary organization, revealed Dragančić to be a head of the organization, and exposed the excessive favoritism of Habsburg Consul General Teodorović on behalf of Bosnian Christians. Within a week, newspapers in the Habsburg Empire and beyond were debating the veracity and importance of a document that, while misguided in form, might not be entirely wrong in content.Footnote 58 Indeed, many leading papers conspicuously did not dismiss the Ottoman accusations. The liberal Neue Freie Presse downplayed the importance of the specific claims but wrote that the memo's assertion that Dragančić was the “leader and the soul of the committee in Banja Luka” was a “strong sentence, and the worst is, the Turkish government appears to have a point.”Footnote 59
The Ottoman memorandum embarrassed the Habsburg foreign ministry, which protested the content and complained that the format and publication meant Austria-Hungary was unable to defend its actions to the other great powers.Footnote 60 Newspapers debated the extent to which the memorandum constituted, or should lead to, a complete diplomatic break.Footnote 61 Yet even as the memorandum's publication strained Ottoman–Habsburg relations, it also created an opportunity where previously there had been none. Officially, the whole matter had already been on the brink of closure for months: Mustafa Asim had concluded his investigation in Banja Luka and submitted his reports to Istanbul by the end of August and Teodorović had returned to Sarajevo. The Habsburgs were dissatisfied with the investigatory process, but with Raşid preparing a final report, it seemed the matter had entered the “stage of direct diplomatic negotiation” that would somehow convince the refugees to return. In Istanbul, Zaluski had been working to obtain amnesty for the refugees and the release of the goods Mustafa Asim had placed under seal.Footnote 62 And yet, the investigations and negotiations had not achieved the central goal all along—the refugees, amnesty or not, were still unwilling to return home.Footnote 63
The Ottoman memorandum reset the diplomatic stage. The Habsburg's strong response barely mentioned events leading to the merchants’ flight, but instead recounted the entire series of events since then. Andrássy charged the Ottomans with covering up information during the investigation, of mischaracterizing Teodorović's presence during the investigation as uninvited, and recklessly accusing Habsburg representatives of driving a seditious movement. The tactics were more “appropriate when dealing with some half-barbarous people of Asia” than with a European power, and Andrássy demanded an apology.Footnote 64 He disingenuously portrayed Dragančić's recall as a gesture of goodwill and demanded Ottoman Foreign Minister Mehmed Raşid replace the Banja Luka subgovernor, the prefect of Gradiška, and Bosnian Governor-General Mustafa Asim—and threatened to return Dragančić to Banja Luka should the Ottomans refuse.Footnote 65
Dragančić and Teodorović had both called for replacements early on in the affair, and the Gradiška merchants had demanded it.Footnote 66 Such a request was also exactly the sort of diplomatic intervention Andrássy had hoped to avoid. Even if made in the name of the refugees, any request for changes to the Ottoman internal administration would violate diplomatic norms and infringe on Ottoman sovereignty in a manner the guaranteeing powers of the Treaty of Paris specifically agreed to forgo. The Ottoman memorandum on affairs in Gradiška, however, justified demands for internal administrative reorganization. Mehmed Raşid accepted the terms, and on 1 November 1873 published the dismissal of the heads of Banja Luka and Gradiška, as well as the replacement of Mustafa Asim by Mehmed Akif Paşa, at the time the governor-general of Salonika.Footnote 67 He agreed to grant the refugees an amnesty for their flight but did not, however, extend it to common crimes. The merchants were expected to take an oath of loyalty to the sultan on their return.Footnote 68
The Gradiška merchants submitted their amnesty petition in January 1874. It was a procedural step, but the arrival of Mehmed Akif and the other replacements slowed the application and approval process, as did Istanbul's conflicting instructions to provincial officials about expectations and procedures.Footnote 69 Mehmed Akif's term was short, however, and rumors of his departure complicated matters further. The refugees, many already immiserated after months in exile, were reduced to begging the Habsburg government for support in the hope the government “would not permit [them], as protectees of his Majesty the Emperor, to die of hunger on Austrian territory.”Footnote 70 Andrássy had been willing to provide some aid for their return, but not to support them during their exile out of fear it might attract more refugees. The issue was soon set aside: district officials in Nova Gradiška reported that on 21 February, the refugees crossed back across the Sava River and returned home.Footnote 71
Conclusion
The memorandum Vaso Vidović brought to Vienna in August 1873 very clearly situated the plight of the Gradiška merchants—and the Christian population of the area around Banja Luka in general—into the broader framework of international treaty law and the Eastern Question. The Treaty of Paris acknowledged the sultan's promises in the 1856 Reform Edict to improve the position of Christians, but it also guaranteed the other powers would not interfere in Ottoman internal affairs—including administration and relations with its subjects.Footnote 72 The refugee memorandum, however, pushed this further. It carefully, and tendentiously, traced the great power negotiations regarding Ottoman Christians in the period leading up to the 1856 Treaty of Paris to argue that protection had always been central to the negotiations, and particularly important to the Habsburg Empire. By pulling key quotes and paraphrasing passages of preliminary agreements, diplomatic representations, and conference negotiations made during the course of the Crimean War, the refugees hoped to show protection of Ottoman Christians as inherent to the settlements—even though the topic was simply edged off the agenda during the final negotiations.Footnote 73
What mattered for the refugees was not text but what they saw as values. These were best expressed, they thought, in the interpretation offered by Lord Palmerston, the British prime minister, who argued that because the Reform Edict was included in the Treaty of Paris, the guaranteeing powers could in certain cases engage in “diplomatic interference.”Footnote 74 From that, the refugee memorandum went on to argue that the powers, “based on the nature of the matter itself, and also the aim and goal of the Paris Treaty, had the complete right to protect” Ottoman Christians: “The only legitimate way for the Christians in Turkey . . . to be rescued is for them to turn to the Christian guaranteeing Great Powers of the Treaty of Paris, and [there is] no doubt that these moreover have, in the name of all Christendom and Humanity, the moral right, yea the moral obligation to offer their protection—and [this is also] in the best interests of Turkey.”Footnote 75
The Gradiška merchants argued the existence of a moral responsibility in the international system, and the claims they made on it were done so in the name of the preservation of the system and its constituent parts. The refugees kept their complaints detailed and specific, and in conclusion demanded that Istanbul send to Bosnia an independent commission to investigate their claims, that their persecutors be brought to trial and punished, that Christians be allowed to vote for representation in councils, and finally, that they be assured a safe return home.
For Andrássy, the events of 1873 were only truly internationalized with the Ottoman memorandum, which he argued would take what the document described as a local incident and “somehow refer to the judgment of the [guaranteeing] powers a problem of internal administration.” With their own memorandum, Andrássy snarked, the Ottomans seemingly “wanted to emulate the example of the refugees,” although they produced “a result which all the efforts of what the Turkish memorandum calls the Gradiška committee could not achieve.”Footnote 76 In this view, internationalization happened at the moment of a diplomatic misstep. But the refugee memorandum offered an alternative interpretation. For the Gradiška merchants, it wasn't their cross-border flight that created an international incident: the persecution and misrule they claimed caused their flight already was an international question. For the refugees, their flight was a result of infractions not just against them but against the community of states and the Concert of Europe.
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What Vaso Vidović presented to Habsburg Emperor Francis Josef's chancellery on 12 August 1873 was a memorandum intended as a magnifying glass: a missive from two dozen Orthodox Christian merchants from the Ottoman town of Gradiška who, accused of crimes they claimed not to have committed, had fled Ottoman Bosnia for Habsburg Croatia-Slavonia. The memorandum uses the small details and broad context of the seemingly inconsequential event in an effort to enlarge its importance and focus international attention on the crime, torture, and killings that local Muslims—and even the area's Ottoman officials—carried out against Gradiška's Christian community. Acute danger was the proximate cause of the merchants’ flight, but the memo argues that exile had already become their last remaining option—a dramatic final act after years of complaints and petitions to local, provincial, and Ottoman imperial officials, including the sultan.
Vidović and his fellow members of the Plenipotentiary Committee of the Refugee Christians from Stara Gradiška in Bosnia directed the memorandum not only to the Habsburg emperor but also to the European great power guarantors of the 1856 Treaty of Paris.Footnote 1 Given the intended audience, the document was more than a testament to the “circumstances and suffering” of the Christians in Bosnia; it was a civic appeal to international law, and it invoked what it depicted as the great powers’ implicit—though not articulated in the treaty language—obligation to protect Bosnia's Christian populations from the depredations of Ottoman misrule. The merchants assured their loyalty to the sultan, but the memorandum frames the flight as the culminating event in an escalating series of confession-based persecutions and complaints. This was not some unremarkable and unauthorized border-crossing normally dealt with at the local or regional level. Rather, through an extensive analysis of recent diplomatic history, the memorandum attempts to demonstrate the Ottoman Empire's failure to live up to commitments—including equality before the law, security of life and property, and the freedom of religion—it made during the Tanzimat reforms, as framed in the original 1839 Hatt-ı Şerif of Gülhane, and in particular the 1856 Hatt-ı Hümayun, the Imperial Reform Edict that accompanied the Treaty of Paris.Footnote 2
The refugees extrapolated the supposedly unfulfilled promises of the Ottoman reform documents to argue that their situation demonstrated that the empire stood in violation of the 1856 Treaty of Paris. The powers were therefore obliged to interfere in the domestic affairs of the Ottoman Empire to create the conditions necessary for the refugees to return home.Footnote 3 Precisely what the merchants wanted was not entirely clear and changed over the course of their eight-month sojourn, but one demand remained constant: foreign powers must guarantee their security as Ottoman Christian subjects within the territory of the Ottoman Empire. It was effectively a demand to assert extraterritorial jurisdiction and thereby abrogate the Treaty of Paris's most foundational promises: maintaining the integrity of the Ottoman Empire and abiding the principle of nonintervention in Ottoman domestic affairs.Footnote 4
It had been two months since the refugees crossed when the twenty-five-year-old Vidović, in the company of two other merchants, made the journey to Vienna.Footnote 5 When the refugees first arrived, old business partners and the Chamber of Commerce in the town of Sisak had vouched for their integrity, and many of them subsequently took up temporary residency near the border, where they could better maintain contact with their families and compatriots at home.Footnote 6 Their unwillingness to return home without guarantees of some sort had turned the border-crossing into a question for the Ottoman and Habsburg imperial governments. A series of mutual recriminations ensued in which the Habsburgs alleged a pattern of abuse and the Ottomans accused the merchants of combining and intriguing against authorities with the help of the pan-Slavic activist and Habsburg vice-consul in Banja Luka.
Imperial entanglements and diplomatic missteps quickly ratcheted up Ottoman-Habsburg tensions, but the merchants’ bold overtures to the European concert were all but ignored by representatives of the great powers. In Vienna, the group was told the document would be forwarded to the Habsburg foreign minister, Gyula Andrássy, but two weeks later, Vidović and the other petitioners had still received no response.Footnote 7 The British ambassador was unwelcoming; the Italian ambassador suggested they turn to the Russians; and the Russians in turn thought the Habsburgs should deal with the matter first.Footnote 8
The great power statesmen's easy dismissal of the note has resulted in it largely being viewed as a failure and subsequently overlooked by historians. For Vaso Čubrilović, the memorandum showed a “revolutionary spirit” but otherwise had little effect; Milorad Ekmečić barely mentions the memorandum and discounts any national-revolutionary character to the refugees or their flight.Footnote 9 It was, after all a minor event: two dozen grumbling merchants, a diplomatic break averted after protracted negotiations, and an apparent resolution with the merchants’ official return to the Ottoman Empire in February 1874, eight months after they had fled.Footnote 10 Moreover, the flight was soon eclipsed by the Eastern Crisis of 1875–78, when the revolt of Orthodox Christian peasants in Ottoman Herzegovina spread quickly to Bosnia before engulfing the Ottoman Balkans in the rebellion and violence that ultimately precipitated the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877–78. Some of the same characters also reemerged during the Eastern Crisis: Vaso Vidović and several others turned from supplication to violence, with Vidović in particular taking on a leadership role as the head of one of the largest insurgent organizations—based in Bosnian Gradiška.
Overshadowed and underacknowledged, the merchants’ case has acquired its historical meaning largely from connections to subsequent events—an inaugural “herald of the storm” as historian Theodor Sosnosky described the affair in 1913.Footnote 11 Yet focusing on the Gradiška refugees through the lens of what happened later obscures both the unique form and content of the refugees’ claims, as well as the nuances of the political circumstances. Examining instead what these events intrinsically were shows the merchants’ claims were in fact notable precisely because they lacked some ineffable revolutionary force. Their formulations were at once both radical and essentially conservative: radical, because by taking seriously what they interpreted as the principles underlying the Treaty of Paris, the merchants sought to insert themselves as individuals into the international law of states—seizing a language and international forum to effect change, and in doing so to shape and customize their own strategic goals.Footnote 12 Conservative, because they sought to work within the existing legal structure rather than fundamentally change the political dynamics of the region—an unrevolutionary approach that largely vanished during the violence of 1875–78.
While it is true Serbia had developed a large network of agents and activists across Ottoman Bosnia and Habsburg Croatia, they had little success in mobilizing a national movement, and by 1873 Serbia's young Prince Milan Obrenović had largely ceased funding their activities.Footnote 13 The merchants’ flight took the Serbian government by surprise not just because it abandoned its agents but also because the whole affair had little to do with Serbia and avoided nationalist rhetoric.Footnote 14 The refugees and the accusations in their memorandum were instead an indictment of the Ottoman central government's ineffective implementation of its Tanzimat reform program and the persistent strength of the local Muslim elite. The Ottoman Empire had long struggled to maintain central government control over restive Bosnian Muslim elites, and while it was able to suppress the violent insurrection that followed the introduction of the Tanzimat, crucial questions went unanswered—agrarian reforms lay fallow, efforts to curb tax abuse withered, and, by the time of the merchants’ flight, provincial administration was also in disarray. From 1869 to 1874 the province had ten different governors-general, all of whom served less than one year—including two who lasted under a month.Footnote 15
Despite the challenges in Ottoman Bosnia, the refugees burst on the scene at a moment of relative tranquility among the great powers and stability along the Ottoman-Habsburg border. In the decades preceding the merchants’ flight, Habsburg policy in the region was guided by the perceived need to restrain Serbian nationalism and Russian influence, but vacillated between a moderate policy aimed at preserving the stability of the Ottoman Empire and pressing for the southern expansion envisioned by the emperor and his military leadership. The historian Istvan Dioszegi, considering a host of contradictory statements and maneuvers at precisely this time, has suggested Habsburg policy tilted more toward the Balkan peoples than the Ottoman Empire—but also acknowledged that Foreign Minister Andrássy had no desire to hasten (or hinder) the “fall” of the Ottoman Balkans.Footnote 16
Expansion, of course, ultimately prevailed, but in 1873 Austria-Hungary had little reason to upend the peace for the sake of some small-town merchants. Internationalization of the affair—elevating it from the local, through the bilateral, to the level of the Concert of Europe—was an undesirable outcome that any form of official Austro-Hungarian intervention might nevertheless achieve. Moreover, local interests and independent actors were shaping imperial knowledge and cross-border relationships. By working on behalf of Orthodox Christian Ottoman subjects, the Habsburg vice-consul in Banja Luka had frequently overstepped his mandate and involved himself in Ottoman domestic affairs.Footnote 17 Whether or not he was seeking to reorient Habsburg policies, the consul's “careless behavior” and reputation of pan-Slavic activism had already compromised the Habsburg position.
After first charting the developments that changed the merchants’ flight from a local issue on the Habsburg-Ottoman border to a matter for discussion in imperial cabinets, this article analyzes the memorandum the refugees brought to Vienna and the language of law and internationalism it employed. The Treaty of Paris was a critical document here. For the Ottomans, the treaty became a cornerstone of their diplomacy; for the refugees, the treaty tied the Ottoman administrative and legal reform agenda to international legitimacy. It offered a means to reformulate the discourse of suffering under the “Turkish yoke” into a question of domestic policies and international obligations—to “speak Tanzimat” to the outside, but facing in.Footnote 18 As a diplomatic act, the petition failed. The refugees became victims to the exigencies of the international system and Habsburg-Ottoman diplomacy as politics overwhelmed the framework of their demands. However, the refugees took a sophisticated approach to internationalizing their claims of suffering that, while soon eclipsed by the Eastern Crisis, momentarily stood on its own, prefiguring the language of protection in the 1878 Treaty of Berlin and demanding of the international system a new attention to “humanity.”Footnote 19
Defining the People, Finding the Problem
The twenty-four merchants crossed the Sava River from Bosnian Gradiška to the village of Uskoci, near Croatian Stara Gradiška, on 15 June 1873. It was a familiar route; they regularly made the same trip when traveling to Slavonia for trade and business. This time, however, they surrendered to military border guards and requested protection. They had broken no laws, they said, but even so Emin Efendi, the prefect of the Gradiška kaza (district), had accused them of treason and fabricating complaints about Ottoman misrule, and wanted to execute them without trial. Flight was their only option. In Zagreb, the military border's general commander instructed officers of the Gradiška regiment to interview the refugees and then, following “existing directives,” intern them in the town of Požega, some twenty kilometers from the border.Footnote 20 Four days later, Kamil Efendi, the subgovernor of Banja Luka sançak (subprovince), demanded their immediate return. The merchants’ flight was illegal—they had evaded authorities by crossing the border without permission. Yet Kamil assured them that because their fears of persecution and retaliation were unfounded, they could return safely. If they did so within three days, they would not face any legal action.Footnote 21 The merchants declined, choosing instead to remain under the temporary protection of Austria-Hungary.
In explaining their refusal to Habsburg officials, the merchants described a world of unprovoked stabbings, murder, torture, and arson that, they claimed, Muslims committed against Christian “innocents” and went unpunished.Footnote 22 They also claimed the area's Ottoman administrators were just as bad as Muslim civilians: they failed to enforce laws, abused their positions, and enabled the violence and persecution—all of which, the merchants said, had worsened in the past three years. Since 1870, the merchants and others had submitted at least ten petitions to Banja Luka's subgovernor, to the governor-general of Bosnia, to the Ottoman foreign minister, and to the sultan, in which they swore their loyalty as Ottoman subjects and requested redress and reform.Footnote 23
The immediate event that precipitated the flight was related to these petitions. Stevo “the Spy” Ekmić, a Christian merchant from Gradiška, had collected signatures from Christian townsfolk for a letter supposedly asking the authorities to return account books they had seized from a young man who owed taxes on his failed business.Footnote 24 The letter was in Ottoman Turkish, and many Orthodox Christians had already signed it. Yet, when the merchants translated it, they realized that Ekmić's letter accused the merchants of lying in their earlier petitions and alleged that agitators had convinced them to plot against the Ottoman government. Sources disagree whether Ekmić had been bribed or threatened into gathering signatures, whether he may have been working off debts to an Ottoman official or even been simply oblivious, but the merchants immediately filed a complaint against him with Emin, the Gradiška prefect.Footnote 25 When Emin finally summoned the parties, he sided with Ekmić “the Spy,” and warned the merchants that, as an Ottoman official, he could bind them, cut them, or even throw them in the river if he wanted. When he then asked if the merchants really wanted to push their complaint against Ekmić further, their dilemma was clear: either they continued to denounce a man now under the protection of the prefect or they tacitly admit to trying to undermine the Ottoman government. The merchants chose a third option and fled to Austria-Hungary.Footnote 26
The merchants failed to alert the Ottoman authorities to their journey. This time, the trade route they had long followed uneventfully turned them into refugees. Yet what did that mean? What kind of refugee were they? For the merchants any answer mattered only insofar as it was functional: security on the other side of the border and the hope for a safe return home. For the Habsburgs as well as the Ottomans, the question was categorical, and the answer would delineate responsibilities and privileges that went along with it. Habsburg officials at first treated the merchants as political refugees. The Habsburg's existing directives were intended to manage people in a manner that largely complied with the international legal expectations customarily pertaining to individuals who fled the country of their residence due to persecution based on political ideology or crimes committed as political acts.Footnote 27 The general principle was to neutralize such refugees by disarming them when necessary and then interning them—in this case in Požega, where the merchants stayed at the Steamboat Inn—to prevent them from carrying out any cross-border political activities that might provoke their home government and compromise their hosts.Footnote 28
International law interpreted the right to asylum as a question of state, not subject, and asylum law gave host countries the sovereign right to protect political refugees without provoking a diplomatic crisis or conflict. Looking back on the events years later, Ilija Bilbija, who later took a leading role in the uprisings of 1875–78, described the members of his group as political refugees. But at the time, this categorization was inaccurate because the refugees denied any activities that could warrant the designation, and neither the Habsburgs nor the Ottomans thought the flight was based on political persecution.Footnote 29 They were also not common criminals on the run or border thieves, whose cases were typically handled by local officials.Footnote 30 The Gradiška merchants stood in an indeterminate and temporary category of exile. Under what terms they would return and how those terms would be achieved was unspecified. The initial request was fairly straightforward; they refused to return without guarantees for their personal safety. But the records do not clarify what “guarantees” meant—and who the intended underwriter would be.Footnote 31 Within weeks the list had grown: they wanted Istanbul to replace local officials, provide safety guarantees, and grant them amnesty for the crimes they were accused of committing.
By the end of June, Mehmed Raşid Paşa, the Ottoman foreign minister, had ordered Bosnia's governor-general, Mustafa Asim Paşa, to investigate and report on the situation in Banja Luka sançak and Gradiška, and the actual reasons for the merchants’ flight.Footnote 32 As the Ottomans began their investigation, Habsburg Foreign Minister Andrássy was also under pressure from several directions to find answers. The Hungarians were particularly concerned as the refugees were now in Hungarian civil Croatia-Slavonia and might stir dangerous sympathies among the kingdom's large Orthodox Christian population. At the parliamentary meeting on 18 June 1873, the journalist, Serbian nationalist, and minister of parliament, Svetozar Miletić, asked the Hungarian minister-president whether he would take steps to ensure the refugees return and future security “under the protection of the guaranteeing powers.”Footnote 33 Back in Vienna, Foreign Minister Andrássy also had a report, dated 17 June 1873, from Stanislav Dragančić, the Habsburg vice-consul in Banja Luka. Dragančić warned that without an “energetic international intervention” and the immediate removal of Banja Luka's subgovernor, an uprising was imminent.Footnote 34
Andrássy's interpretation of the Dragančić report was significantly less pessimistic than the report, but the next question—how to respond to the events—was still unanswered. The foreign minister asked his emissaries in Istanbul and Sarajevo whether the situation required “a diplomatic intervention with reference to the Hatt-ı Hümayun (Reform Edict) and the Treaty of Paris,” but was reluctant to take such a radical step.Footnote 35 Andrássy saw a neighborly obligation to temporarily shelter the refugees “until their conflict with the local officials is settled,” but opposed any sort of intervention that went beyond localized negotiations over what he identified as a local problem.Footnote 36 Any official intervention to help settle the merchants’ conflict with local officials “in an official manner,” as one military border official helpfully put it, could accord the refugees a political character and legitimize their plight as an international question rather than a local disturbance.Footnote 37 Such a possibility existed, said Andrássy, “if it even appeared that we a priori view their complaints as legitimate and take it upon ourselves to intervene formally.”Footnote 38 Austria-Hungary could claim no capitulatory right to protect Ottoman Christian subjects, and it was not the task of the Habsburg government to “involve itself in the disputes of individual Turkish subjects with their individual local officials, and to dictate to the Porte the terms on which the return of the refugees will depend.”Footnote 39
Local and international circumstances shaped the meaning of the merchants’ flight, and the Ottoman and Habsburg empires tried to minimize the impact of the event on bilateral relations. Any step that moved the refugees and their circumstances from local dynamics to the subject of diplomacy was unwelcome. As long as the problem was with the actual enforcement of Ottoman law rather than the law itself, Andrássy reasoned the refugees could not be placed “in the category of political conspirators.”Footnote 40 As if to emphasize the point, he granted the refugees permission to move from Požega closer to the border. As victims rather than conspirators, they surely did not endanger the integrity of the border or require the treatment of political refugees.Footnote 41
Making a Crisis
Within days of the merchants’ flight, a competing narrative to their tale of persecution emerged that undermined all attempts to localize the event. The refugees’ sustained refusal to go back home without guarantees of foreign mediation presented a problem to authorities on both sides. But contentious parallel Habsburg and Ottoman investigations of the situation in Banja Luka and Gradiška created conflict that burst into the open with Ottoman accusations that Habsburg officials were fueling a revolutionary movement, and that the Gradiška merchants were part of it. When the Bosnian governor-general went to investigate the merchants’ complaints and the circumstances in Banja Luka and Gradiška, Foreign Minister Mehmed Raşid assured the Habsburg ambassador in Istanbul that he would send a special committee if Mustafa Asim's report seemed biased or deceptive.Footnote 42 Raşid raised two other matters. First, he had already learned that the merchants fled Gradiška not because of persecution, but because Ottoman officials discovered they were members of a secret revolutionary committee. Second, Raşid suggested Vice-Consul Dragančić was submitting false and misleading reports from Banja Luka. Raşid asked that Svetozar Teodorović, the Habsburg consul general in Sarajevo, should accompany Mustafa Asim and investigate the matter as well.Footnote 43 The ambassador agreed, and instructed Teodorović accordingly. He also asked Teodorović to report back on Dragančić's “spiritual and moral qualities.”Footnote 44
Raşid hoped Teodorović and Mustafa Asim would arrive at a common report, but it quickly became clear that would not be possible.Footnote 45 As the two carried out parallel inquiries—and Teodorović compiled exhaustive reports on Mustafa Asim's investigations—Asim elaborated on his initial accusation that the merchants were members of a revolutionary committee: they were leaders of a group in Gradiška as well as Banja Luka, they collected money from each Christian house for organizational purposes, and they fabricated stories about persecution to cause unrest and foment revolution.Footnote 46 The Habsburg consul general's investigation rejected these accusations and strongly criticized Mustafa Asim's procedures. Teodorović protested Mustafa Asim's decision to put the merchants’ goods under seal and, despite Tanzimat principles of legal equity, to discount testimony from Christians. For Teodorović, the investigatory process was intended from the start to prove the merchants guilty of conspiring against authorities, and Mustafa Asim's procedures were flawed distortions of reality that led to unsustainable conclusions.
On the Ottoman side of the investigation, Mustafa Asim accused the Habsburg's Banja Luka vice-consul of being a pan-Slavic activist and leader of the same revolutionary committee that Ottoman officials discovered on the eve of the merchants’ flight. In other words, Vice-Consul Dragančić was part of the nationalist agitation and bore ultimate responsibility for the Gradiška merchants’ decision to run.Footnote 47 These claims were not unfounded, and while Teodorović's reports to Andrássy systematically refuted the evidence Mustafa Asim presented to support the accusation, the language of the consul general's reports as well as its assessments were by no means exculpatory. Teodorović described Dragančić's dispatches as exaggeration based on “fear and zealousness,” but his criticisms of the Banja Luka vice-consul were specific and referred back to events that took place over several years.Footnote 48 Taken as a whole, Dragančić's activities went well beyond the vice-consul's designated task of serving the needs of Habsburg subjects abroad. He intervened with local authorities on behalf of the Bosnian Christian community, demanded for Ottoman Christians the protection of person and property, always spoke out loudly in favor of the Christians, and also held meetings in his residence.Footnote 49 Dragančić admitted to extending his work for Habsburg subjects into advocating for Ottoman Christians, which he justified in part because of the local Christian community's reliance on its strong business ties to Austria-Hungary. These close relations were among the reasons for what he saw as their “loyalty [to] and genuine sympathy” for the Habsburg Empire—from which they now expected “help and healing.”Footnote 50
In fact, Teodorović and others had worried about Dragančić's conduct in Banja Luka at least since 1872, when he got in trouble for encouraging the idea among Orthodox Christians that Bosnia should be annexed to Austria-Hungary.Footnote 51 Just one month before the Gradiška merchants’ flight, Mustafa Asim asked Teodorović to caution the vice-consul against interfering in the affairs of the Ottoman Christian community and, even well before that, Teodorović told Mustafa Asim he wanted to replace the vice-consul.Footnote 52 Both men thought Dragančić's relationship with the Orthodox Christian community in Banja Luka and Gradiška was inappropriate, and the merchants’ flight made his replacement urgent. Mustafa Asim believed that as long as Dragančić remained in office in Banja Luka, the Christians there would remain restive, and Teodorović essentially agreed. In a report to Andrássy in late July, he offered a candid evaluation of the vice-consul's performance and abilities, apparently intending as much to outline the problems as to advocate for permission to find a new vice-consul. Dragančić had in any case requested an additional two weeks for his holiday in August, and Teodorović suggested that would be an opportune time to replace him.Footnote 53 Dragančić may not have actively encouraged the merchants to flee, but regardless of the truth in the Ottoman accusations, his presence in Banja Luka increased the likelihood of such a flight. Because the “Christian population of Banja Luka saw him”—and therefore Austria-Hungary writ large—“as the champion of their better future,” they held hope for Habsburg official support.Footnote 54 In mid-August the vice-consul took his previously approved vacation; by the middle of September he had been reassigned to the 79th infantry regiment.Footnote 55
The effect of Dragančić's conduct in Bosnia lasted well after his reassignment, however, and turned what had been a contentious series of Habsburg-Ottoman mutual recriminations into a public scandal and impending diplomatic crisis. At the start of October, the Habsburg chargé d'affaires in Istanbul, Karl Zaluski, was expecting the Ottoman foreign minister to forward him the final report on the outcome of Governor-General Mustafa Asim's investigation. Instead, on 3 October, Zaluski received a printed memorandum regarding “affairs in Gradiška.”Footnote 56 The Porte gave the memo to Zaluski, but it seemed intended for the general public. The Ottoman ambassador to Vienna described it as an unofficial document he had not been told of—perhaps a confidential report from Mustafa Asim to the foreign ministry.Footnote 57
The memorandum is a detailed narrative, based on the governor-general's own findings, of events leading to the merchants’ flight; it is also an account of how the investigation largely disproved the accusations against local Ottoman officials and the Muslim population, uncovered an extensive secret revolutionary organization, revealed Dragančić to be a head of the organization, and exposed the excessive favoritism of Habsburg Consul General Teodorović on behalf of Bosnian Christians. Within a week, newspapers in the Habsburg Empire and beyond were debating the veracity and importance of a document that, while misguided in form, might not be entirely wrong in content.Footnote 58 Indeed, many leading papers conspicuously did not dismiss the Ottoman accusations. The liberal Neue Freie Presse downplayed the importance of the specific claims but wrote that the memo's assertion that Dragančić was the “leader and the soul of the committee in Banja Luka” was a “strong sentence, and the worst is, the Turkish government appears to have a point.”Footnote 59
The Ottoman memorandum embarrassed the Habsburg foreign ministry, which protested the content and complained that the format and publication meant Austria-Hungary was unable to defend its actions to the other great powers.Footnote 60 Newspapers debated the extent to which the memorandum constituted, or should lead to, a complete diplomatic break.Footnote 61 Yet even as the memorandum's publication strained Ottoman–Habsburg relations, it also created an opportunity where previously there had been none. Officially, the whole matter had already been on the brink of closure for months: Mustafa Asim had concluded his investigation in Banja Luka and submitted his reports to Istanbul by the end of August and Teodorović had returned to Sarajevo. The Habsburgs were dissatisfied with the investigatory process, but with Raşid preparing a final report, it seemed the matter had entered the “stage of direct diplomatic negotiation” that would somehow convince the refugees to return. In Istanbul, Zaluski had been working to obtain amnesty for the refugees and the release of the goods Mustafa Asim had placed under seal.Footnote 62 And yet, the investigations and negotiations had not achieved the central goal all along—the refugees, amnesty or not, were still unwilling to return home.Footnote 63
The Ottoman memorandum reset the diplomatic stage. The Habsburg's strong response barely mentioned events leading to the merchants’ flight, but instead recounted the entire series of events since then. Andrássy charged the Ottomans with covering up information during the investigation, of mischaracterizing Teodorović's presence during the investigation as uninvited, and recklessly accusing Habsburg representatives of driving a seditious movement. The tactics were more “appropriate when dealing with some half-barbarous people of Asia” than with a European power, and Andrássy demanded an apology.Footnote 64 He disingenuously portrayed Dragančić's recall as a gesture of goodwill and demanded Ottoman Foreign Minister Mehmed Raşid replace the Banja Luka subgovernor, the prefect of Gradiška, and Bosnian Governor-General Mustafa Asim—and threatened to return Dragančić to Banja Luka should the Ottomans refuse.Footnote 65
Dragančić and Teodorović had both called for replacements early on in the affair, and the Gradiška merchants had demanded it.Footnote 66 Such a request was also exactly the sort of diplomatic intervention Andrássy had hoped to avoid. Even if made in the name of the refugees, any request for changes to the Ottoman internal administration would violate diplomatic norms and infringe on Ottoman sovereignty in a manner the guaranteeing powers of the Treaty of Paris specifically agreed to forgo. The Ottoman memorandum on affairs in Gradiška, however, justified demands for internal administrative reorganization. Mehmed Raşid accepted the terms, and on 1 November 1873 published the dismissal of the heads of Banja Luka and Gradiška, as well as the replacement of Mustafa Asim by Mehmed Akif Paşa, at the time the governor-general of Salonika.Footnote 67 He agreed to grant the refugees an amnesty for their flight but did not, however, extend it to common crimes. The merchants were expected to take an oath of loyalty to the sultan on their return.Footnote 68
The Gradiška merchants submitted their amnesty petition in January 1874. It was a procedural step, but the arrival of Mehmed Akif and the other replacements slowed the application and approval process, as did Istanbul's conflicting instructions to provincial officials about expectations and procedures.Footnote 69 Mehmed Akif's term was short, however, and rumors of his departure complicated matters further. The refugees, many already immiserated after months in exile, were reduced to begging the Habsburg government for support in the hope the government “would not permit [them], as protectees of his Majesty the Emperor, to die of hunger on Austrian territory.”Footnote 70 Andrássy had been willing to provide some aid for their return, but not to support them during their exile out of fear it might attract more refugees. The issue was soon set aside: district officials in Nova Gradiška reported that on 21 February, the refugees crossed back across the Sava River and returned home.Footnote 71
Conclusion
The memorandum Vaso Vidović brought to Vienna in August 1873 very clearly situated the plight of the Gradiška merchants—and the Christian population of the area around Banja Luka in general—into the broader framework of international treaty law and the Eastern Question. The Treaty of Paris acknowledged the sultan's promises in the 1856 Reform Edict to improve the position of Christians, but it also guaranteed the other powers would not interfere in Ottoman internal affairs—including administration and relations with its subjects.Footnote 72 The refugee memorandum, however, pushed this further. It carefully, and tendentiously, traced the great power negotiations regarding Ottoman Christians in the period leading up to the 1856 Treaty of Paris to argue that protection had always been central to the negotiations, and particularly important to the Habsburg Empire. By pulling key quotes and paraphrasing passages of preliminary agreements, diplomatic representations, and conference negotiations made during the course of the Crimean War, the refugees hoped to show protection of Ottoman Christians as inherent to the settlements—even though the topic was simply edged off the agenda during the final negotiations.Footnote 73
What mattered for the refugees was not text but what they saw as values. These were best expressed, they thought, in the interpretation offered by Lord Palmerston, the British prime minister, who argued that because the Reform Edict was included in the Treaty of Paris, the guaranteeing powers could in certain cases engage in “diplomatic interference.”Footnote 74 From that, the refugee memorandum went on to argue that the powers, “based on the nature of the matter itself, and also the aim and goal of the Paris Treaty, had the complete right to protect” Ottoman Christians: “The only legitimate way for the Christians in Turkey . . . to be rescued is for them to turn to the Christian guaranteeing Great Powers of the Treaty of Paris, and [there is] no doubt that these moreover have, in the name of all Christendom and Humanity, the moral right, yea the moral obligation to offer their protection—and [this is also] in the best interests of Turkey.”Footnote 75
The Gradiška merchants argued the existence of a moral responsibility in the international system, and the claims they made on it were done so in the name of the preservation of the system and its constituent parts. The refugees kept their complaints detailed and specific, and in conclusion demanded that Istanbul send to Bosnia an independent commission to investigate their claims, that their persecutors be brought to trial and punished, that Christians be allowed to vote for representation in councils, and finally, that they be assured a safe return home.
For Andrássy, the events of 1873 were only truly internationalized with the Ottoman memorandum, which he argued would take what the document described as a local incident and “somehow refer to the judgment of the [guaranteeing] powers a problem of internal administration.” With their own memorandum, Andrássy snarked, the Ottomans seemingly “wanted to emulate the example of the refugees,” although they produced “a result which all the efforts of what the Turkish memorandum calls the Gradiška committee could not achieve.”Footnote 76 In this view, internationalization happened at the moment of a diplomatic misstep. But the refugee memorandum offered an alternative interpretation. For the Gradiška merchants, it wasn't their cross-border flight that created an international incident: the persecution and misrule they claimed caused their flight already was an international question. For the refugees, their flight was a result of infractions not just against them but against the community of states and the Concert of Europe.