Transnational Policing after the 1848–1849 Revolutions: The Habsburg Empire in the Mediterranean

Abstract

Abstract

This article investigates the policing measures of the Habsburg Empire against the exiled defeated revolutionaries in the Mediterranean after the 1848–1849 revolutions. The examination of this counter-revolutionary policy reveals the pioneering role Austria played in international policing. It shows, in particular, that Vienna invested more heavily in policing in the Mediterranean after 1848 than it did in other regions, such as Western Europe, due to the multitude of ‘Forty-Eighters’ settled there and the alleged inadequacy of the local polities (e.g., the Ottoman Empire, Greece) to satisfactorily deal with the refugee question themselves. The article explains that Austria made use of a wide array of both official and unofficial techniques to contain these allegedly dangerous political dissidents. These methods ranged from official police collaboration with Greece and the Ottoman Empire to more subtle regional information exchanges with Naples and Russia. However, they also included purely unilateral methods exercised by the Austrian consuls, Austrian Lloyd sailors and ship captains, and ad hoc recruited secret agents to monitor the émigrés at large. Overall, the article argues that Austrian policymakers in the aftermath of 1848 invented new policing formulas and reshaped different pre-existing institutions (e.g., consuls, Austrian Lloyd), channelling them against their opponents in exile. Therefore, apart from surveying early modes of international policing, this study also adds to the discussion about Austrian (and European) state-building and, furthermore, to the more specific discussion of how European states dealt with political dissidents abroad in the nineteenth century.

Introduction

Greece and Corfu have from time to time a great significance, and most probably, they will have especially in the near future because revolutionaries from different parts of Italy have repeatedly moved there. Inasmuch as it would be good to maintain … the surveillance [of the revolutionaries], it could [be advisable] at least to bring on the expenditure of an unofficial [secret] agent as a supplement, provided that the imperial consuls stationed there were to develop additional activity … 80 forints should be sufficient for this purpose in the future. ¹

In this police memorandum dated July 1851, the Austrian interior minister Alexander von Bach stressed to Emperor Franz Joseph the importance of the Greek Kingdom and the British-controlled Ionian islands as spaces of recurrent mobility for transnational political agitators across the Mediterranean. The timing of Bach’s attempt to raise awareness of such potential subversion was not accidental. The Europe-wide revolutions of 1848–49 had hit the Austrian empire particularly hard. ² Despite the military suppression of the rebellions, the populace that took part in them turned more politicized afterwards, while cosmopolitan agitators demonstrated their capacity for political action across borders. Their activity largely overlapped with that of the numerous revolutionary exiles who found themselves scattered across Europe after 1849. ³

The Habsburg Monarchy overcame the severe crises of 1848, yet its policymakers (including Bach) did not seek a mere return to the status quo ante. Instead, after 1849, the imperial government in Vienna reformed and enlarged its bureaucratic apparatus, inaugurating a ‘revolution in government’ from above that had notable parallels with other Central European states. ⁴ It was also at this time when experts of various kinds, from statisticians to urban planners, began to communicate with each other across Europe and governments started to collaborate and exchange information in several fields including policing. ⁵ These ambitious projects aimed to improve the quality of state services offered to the public, thus diverting Europeans from the possibility of future uprisings and effectively resolving the legitimacy and security crisis that the revolutions had caused. ⁶ To achieve these aims, as Kurt Weyland has noted, the victors of 1848 also tried to weaken the resource base and organization of their opponents and to restrict their political space. ⁷ In practice, this meant that Vienna not only (re-)forged its internal bureaucracy and policing structure but also considerably expanded its control mechanism abroad to keep track of the émigrés of 1848 who were still at large. ⁸

The current article focuses on this transnational version of political policing concerning both unilateral espionage abroad and multilateral interstate police cooperation. To date scholars have looked only passingly at the impact of the events of 1848 on the development of international policing, ⁹ whereas others have pointed to Austria’s leading role in this field already in the years before 1848. ¹⁰ Yet, such observations lack a more thorough analysis. A number of studies have emphasized the persecution of exiles in Victorian England or the suffering of national heroes in exile, such as Lajos Kossuth, and have added to the reactionary reputation of Austria, Prussia, and France after 1848. ¹¹ Such approaches, I argue, are not helpful in understanding the deeper nature, aims, and anxieties of these continental regimes. They are also quite narrow in their understanding of the ways these countries attempted to tame political dissidents across borders after 1848.

Below I wish to follow a different path. Instead of examining familiar places such as Britain or France, I aim to offer a slightly different perspective of mid-nineteenth-century political subversion and repression. I shall turn to the Mediterranean Sea and investigate the measures, methods, and personnel Austria mobilized locally in order to neutralize the ‘Forty-Eighters’ who settled there, especially in Greece but also in the Ottoman Empire. In agreement with recent scholarship on Austria under Metternich, I argue that the Mediterranean (and particularly its eastern half) became an important space of Austrian influence in the mid-nineteenth century. ¹² As I will claim, it is important to examine the Habsburg Empire from the standpoint of its Mediterranean interests rather than approaching it as being solely a German, Italian, or East-Central European power. ¹³ By turning to the Mediterranean, I also enter into dialogue with scholars who have recently analysed this region not as a European backwater but as a space of osmosis and circulation of people and ideas. ¹⁴ Reversing the terms of this discussion, I am looking at the largely under-researched state-led efforts to raise barriers against the supposedly seditious aspects of Mediterranean mobility. In summary, I intend to contribute to a better comprehension of nineteenth century Austrian (and European) state-building and, more generally, to the debate on the origins of international policing and the ways contemporary states were dealing with political fugitives.

Another reason for focusing on the Eastern Mediterranean lies in the special nature of state-building in this area and the cognitive dispositions the Austrians held vis-à-vis the local polities. Austrian statesmen, diplomats and other agents invariably interpreted the ‘Orient’ through orientalist and Balkanist discourses. ¹⁵ Consular reports often remarked on the supposed softness and inefficiency of the Ottoman and Greek bureaucracies and their inability to face the exile question. ¹⁶ These conditions only strengthened another stereotype shared by exiles and their persecutors alike: the former were truly dangerous and able to destabilize the empire again. This perception, which turned out to be largely exaggerated, was, however, highly influential at that time. It was a result, to a considerable extent, of the recent memories of the series of uprisings between 1789 and 1848 that afterwards kept haunting many European governments. ¹⁷

Bringing the above together, I argue that the idea that these perilous groups might be left uncontrolled led Austrian policymakers, above all prime minister Felix von Schwarzenberg and interior minister Bach, to initiate official interstate police cooperation (as happened in Western Europe), but also to act beyond that too. More precisely, I claim that the ‘revolution in government’ that took place domestically in Austria was also expanded outside its state borders because the Habsburg Monarchy invested significant resources abroad to surveil the refugees. In the Mediterranean, Vienna, I maintain, tried to overcome the allegedly imperfect Greek and Ottoman state-building on its own by weaving denser unilateral networks of surveillance against the exiles. The staff manning these networks spanned many layers: ambassadors, consuls, secret agents, and Austrian Lloyd seamen and ship captains. These personnel operated in the Ionian Islands, Greece, and large sections of the Ottoman Empire, reaching their heyday between 1849 and the outbreak of the Crimean War (1853). As I shall show, following Bach’s and Schwarzenberg’s orders, these actors engaged not only with the local authorities, but also with parts of the refugee communities themselves in order to map the lives of the exiles and set limits on their political activities.

Finally, it is important to point out that although this article is dealing with political policing, I have no intention of enhancing the anachronistic Austrian ‘black legend’, which has long emphasized the ostensibly reactionary qualities of the Habsburg Empire. As a number of scholars have indicated, the empire was by no means backward and after 1848 it took bold steps towards economic liberalization and institutional modernization. ¹⁸ However, as Pieter Judson has recently noted, economic liberalism and growth went along with strict policing. The latter aimed at containing political opposition at home and abroad, allowing for higher government echelons to carry on their modernizing project undisturbed. ¹⁹ Transnational policing formed part of the same process and, as I will show below, its techniques and personnel could be simultaneously modern and counter-revolutionary.

This article is divided into several sections. First, I briefly look at earlier revolutionary movements and nascent forms of police cooperation from the 1820s until 1848. Second, I focus on the institutionally highest layer of counter-revolutionary politics, that is, ambassadors, high-level bilateral police collaboration, and legal assistance. Third, I discuss the activities of lower-ranked diplomatic personnel (such as consuls) and their milieu, therefore reflecting on local policing and its dynamics. Fourth, I go through the agency of unofficial policing actors, personified in secret agents and Austrian Lloyd seamen; and in the final section I summarize my conclusions.

Revolutionary Challenges and Early Transnational Policing Prior to 1848

The Mediterranean revolutions of the 1820s constituted the first challenge to the post-Napoleonic restoration order of Europe. ²⁰ In a time when Italian, Greek, and Spanish insurgents were thought to have developed unofficial networks of collaboration, ²¹ conservative European states attempted to obstruct these bonds and devised early forms of transnational policing to face the threat. ²² These modest beginnings included limited and ad hoc information exchange between France, Austria, and other German states. ²³ Within the German Confederation, the Frankfurt Investigation Commission was founded to control the public sphere after the oppressive Carlsbad Decrees (1819–1828). ²⁴

In the Mediterranean, although the Italian and Iberian upheavals were quickly put down, the prolonged strife in Greece continued until 1830. The Eastern Mediterranean and the Ottoman Empire formed significant spaces for the Austrian diplomacy, at least since the 1820s, trying to maintain peace at least among the Great Powers. Metternich took a keen interest in the Greek revolution of 1821, trying to prevent the transportation of volunteers to the belligerent Greek territories and also limit the (supposed) contacts between Greek rebels and Italian carbonari. ²⁵ Moreover, the European-wide trend of Philhellenism and the liberal institutions the riotous Greeks envisioned for their new polity worried conservative observers, such as the Austrian emissary (and later, ambassador) Anton Prokesch, in the 1820s. ²⁶ Finally, the establishment of a small, independent Greek nation state under the absolutist King Othon from Bavaria in 1832 seemed to offer Vienna a stable guarantee against revolution in the Eastern Mediterranean. ²⁷

Following the July revolution in 1830, measures against insurrection became more systematized in the German confederation in the 1830s than they had been in the past. Between 1830 and 1836, the German states signed a number of extradition treaties among themselves to reduce rebellious trans-state cooperation. ²⁸ At the same time, Metternich’s Mainz Information Bureau (1833–1848) set up as its mission the gathering of information on seditious activities at a confederative level. ²⁹

To the southeast of the Austrian Empire, the new methods of interstate legal assistance also found people to make examples of. Thanks to the regular communication between Vienna and the royal court in Athens, a number of convicted Austrian fugitives who had fled to Greece were deported in 1835. ³⁰ Nonetheless, such small numbers of expatriates presented no real source of trouble. Before 1848, the number of émigrés across Europe was actually quite low. Even in Paris, foreign political exiles under the July regime have been estimated to number only approximately 250. ³¹ In the Eastern Mediterranean, there were no more than 50 such Italians in the Ionian Islands, and there were equally negligible groups in Greece and the Ottoman Empire as well. ³² Even if the numbers appeared harmless, however, the preconditions for receiving more émigrés in the region did exist. The Ottoman Tanzimat reforms and the Othonian state-building project in Greece required trained personnel who, in the 1830s, were largely found among foreigners, hence the employment of educated Polish and French exiles in the 1830s for the projects. ³³ Sultans Mahmud II and Abdulmejid I welcomed such European expatriates and used them to centralize and rationalize the Ottoman governing structures so as to resist secessionist movements and Western infiltration. ³⁴ Moreover, in constitutional Greece (from 1844), liberal circles sympathized with the Italian resistance to Austria and with Mazzini in particular, not least because Metternich was popularly considered the arch-enemy of Greek irredentism. ³⁵

Trans-State Police Cooperation and Legal Assistance against Political Exiles in the Mediterranean after 1848

These conditions explain the first local reactions to the incoming ‘Forty-Eighters’. Although not directly affected by the storm of 1848, the Balkans experienced a massive influx of refugees in the autumn of 1849. Approximately 5500 defeated Hungarians crossed the Ottoman border in Wallachia; up to 2000 fugitives from Italy arrived in the largest Greek cities of Athens, Patras, and Syros, while smaller numbers settled temporarily in Corfu. ³⁶ By comparison, celebrated exile destinations such as Britain or Switzerland attracted approximately 4400 and 1500 political refugees, respectively, ³⁷ a fact that points to the magnitude of the crisis that south-eastern Europe experienced in 1849. This crisis was also caused by the fact that these 8000–10,000 newcomers were overwhelmingly male, armed, and war-trained and were possibly infused with radical ideas.

Having recovered from domestic upheaval after August 1849, Austria attempted to neutralize potential sources of instability abroad by targeting, above all, the last centres of insurrection and the largest émigré communities. The new interior minister and police chief, Alexander von Bach, identified three major security threats across Europe in late 1849: France, the traditional metropolis of all revolutionaries; Saxony, due to the Dresden uprising of May 1849; and the ‘Orient’, to which numerous refugees had fled. ³⁸ In Western Europe, Bach and Schwarzenberg, could count on the cooperation of the German states. Together they established a semi-official police union in 1851 that regulated information exchange against subversive elements in Germany and lasted until 1866. ³⁹ Another factor that encouraged multilateral policing understandings was the aversion of most European governments to a large-scale military conflict, which could accidentally erupt out of the generalized turmoil in 1848, especially at a time when the trauma of the Napoleonic wars was still relatively recent in European memory. ⁴⁰

The conditions in the Mediterranean were quite different. War seemed no unlikely alternative given Russia’s perpetual aggression against the Ottoman Empire. As regards the newly arrived exiles, in Corfu in the summer of 1849, the Italian émigrés, in association with Ionian radicals, engaged in conspiratorial plans, which were promptly suppressed by the British. ⁴¹ More importantly, in Greece, the refugees were welcomed and received charity from state and local notables alike. ⁴² The anti-Austrian feeling in the country worried the Austrian ambassador, who believed that the exiles could regroup, taking advantage of the constitutional liberties in Greece. ⁴³ Similar fears were expressed about those in the Ottoman Empire, who also enjoyed the Sultan’s hospitality. ⁴⁴ The presence of Lajos Kossuth in Vidin near the Habsburg-Ottoman border in 1849–50 alarmed Bach, who thought that Kossuth could always engineer new tensions within the Austrian Empire if he remained close. ⁴⁵ Vienna feared that the exiles could benefit from the allegedly plot-friendly milieu of the Balkans and from the inability of the local authorities to control them. ⁴⁶ The exiles would then obtain stable roots in a region neighbouring Austria and use the region as a base from which they could plan a new revolution such as the one in 1848. However exaggerated it may seem at first, these assumptions were shared by both exiles and their persecutors, which means that they should be taken into account. The study of these assumptions is meaningful to the extent that they gave birth to concrete policing measures that mobilized entire bureaucracies and influenced thousands of lives in the 1850s and 1860s.

With these dispositions in mind, I can explain the measures Vienna took against the fugitives in the Eastern Mediterranean. From a legal point of view, the historical and institutional interdependence between the German states (including the Habsburg Empire), which had facilitated their police cooperation, did not exist in the Mediterranean. The establishment of such a ‘transnational security regime’ was far more difficult due to the legal pluralism, fragmentation, and institutional regime collision that characterized the local polities. ⁴⁷ Nonetheless, Austria took active steps to bridge these differences. In January 1849, before the massive refugee arrivals of the autumn, Schwarzenberg had already instructed his ambassador in Athens, Anton Prokesch von Osten, to limit the activities of Hungarian fugitives in the region. ⁴⁸ Prokesch then replied regarding his request for the assistance of the Greek government to that end. Othon and his ministers were willing to cooperate, the ambassador continued, but they were obstructed by the constitution and the non-existence of a bilateral extradition treaty. All they could do was ask the state prefects to be vigilant for Austrian citizens without valid passports, and order them to work unofficially with the local Austrian consuls on the arrest and deportation of the named escapees. ⁴⁹ Later, Prokesch’s successor, Victor Weiß von Starkenfels, moved to normalize police cooperation through the enactment of a bilateral extradition treaty signed in April 1849. ⁵⁰ With this treaty, Weiß reported, Greece became part of a group of countries that had recently signed similar agreements with Austria. Weiß added that this development advanced Vienna’s plan to forge a European network of states against illegal political mobility. ⁵¹

In the following years, legal cooperation reached the level of prosecuting individuals with a criminal record in the other state. In May 1857, after an Austrian initiative, the Habsburg Empire and Greece signed a high treason treaty, which was clearly designed to target the remnants of the émigré communities in Greece. According to the treaty, those who had insulted or harmed the other country’s sovereign or his representative or had taken any initiative to violently detach a territory of the state would be sentenced to a few years of imprisonment. ⁵² These stark ordinances stemmed from the standard Austrian penal code of 1852 that provisioned similar penalties for those who committed the above crimes (§58). ⁵³ Additionally, the Austro-Greek treaty formed part of a wider contemporary trend to legally confront radical violence against foreign sovereigns by producing political legislation as a means to overcome the enemies of the state. ⁵⁴ Therefore, given such laws’ deeper political purpose, it is unsurprising that they could also be drastically altered should new circumstances dictate such a change. The 1857 treaty concerning high treason was essentially annulled ten years later when, as part of the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, the last exiles from the Habsburg territories in south-eastern Europe were amnestied. ⁵⁵

The above treaties encapsulate a more general tendency of trans-state legal assistance against transnational political criminals beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. The supposed threat of subversion and revolution pushed European states to work towards the de facto harmonization of their policing and criminal justice systems, which also set the legal framework of political asylum and extradition. ⁵⁶ Nonetheless, I do not mean to exaggerate the efficiency of these nascent international police practices. As Karl Härter has noted, this normative order of transnational criminal justice systems remained incomplete and trapped in collisions between rival national legal traditions throughout the nineteenth century. ⁵⁷ Most importantly, initiatives of international policing in this era remained subject to the wider foreign policy priorities of their respective states. ⁵⁸ The discrepancy between security and high politics was still not visible when single state political agendas aligned with one other, as happened with counter-revolutionary politics across Europe from Britain and France to Naples and Greece after 1848.

Following this reasoning, the main reason that Austria and Greece could reach an understanding concerning the exiles is that after 1849 the Greek government itself wished to block the refugee influx and send away those who had already settled in the country. The pressing sanitation and employment problems the refugees faced in Greece, in addition to the supposed security threat they posed for Othon’s regime, led the Greek state to activate stricter policing and border controls against refugees. ⁵⁹ Simultaneously, the successive Austrian ambassadors in Athens maintained close relations with both the Greek interior and the foreign ministers, as well as with Queen Amalia and Othon’s privy secretary, Wendland, to influence both the government and the court over the refugee question. ⁶⁰ The Austrian embassy’s efforts to obstruct the collective organization of the remaining exiles on Greek soil in 1850–1851 illuminate how state officials engaged in extra-institutional modes of communication to achieve their aims. Despite their unofficial nature, these networks were crucial for weaving a more or less coherent transnational anti-refugee policy in the Eastern Mediterranean.

When planning their strategy against the émigrés, the Austrians could count not only on the support of the Greek authorities but also on the cooperation of other likeminded states from which the émigrés had fled. The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies also expanded its policing apparatus abroad after 1849 in order to maintain surveillance of their fugitives elsewhere in the Mediterranean region. ⁶¹ The Bourbon ambassador and consuls in Greece followed closely the activities of Neapolitan and Sicilian exiles in the country. ⁶² The same applied to the papal nuncio and (even more importantly) the Russian ambassador in Athens, who threatened Othon’s government in late 1849 that the tsar would not tolerate Greece becoming a hub of revolutionary émigrés. ⁶³ All these Powers were eager to cooperate with Austria against the exiles on Greek soil, also given the fact that they all still maintained friendly diplomatic relations with each other at that time. When the Italians of Athens established a society of mutual assistance in November 1850, Schwarzenberg instructed the Austrian ambassador, Friedrich von Ingelheim to contact his fellow ambassadors of Russia, Naples, Rome, and Tuscany to forge a common front against such endeavours. ⁶⁴ This initiative aimed to circulate information about the refugees and exercise more effective pressure on the Greek government; and this agenda indeed bore fruit. ⁶⁵ In early 1851, the Greek police shut down the Italian society of Athens, despite the desperate protests of the refugees and the vehement attacks of the clearly anti-Austrian Athenian liberal press. ⁶⁶

The increasingly gloomy political and financial conditions of the exiles in Greece forced most of them to migrate gradually to the Ottoman Empire until 1854 in search of better living prospects. ⁶⁷ In the Ottoman Empire, the Sublime Porte granted asylum to Hungarian, Polish and Italian exiles from 1849, aiming to use this largely trained personnel and its know-how to strengthen the ongoing Tanzimat reforms in the empire. Quite a few newcomers embraced Islam too and indeed the contribution of these ‘career converts’ to Ottoman defence and culture proved significant. ⁶⁸ Thus in this case the Austrian policing policy achieved more modest results because it had to confront a sultan who was less compliant than the Greek king, while the refugees’ advent triggered further complications with regard to the Eastern Question. In this context, the prevailing of individual state priorities, above all those of Russia and the Ottoman Empire, revealed the limits to official transnational police cooperation. As in Greece, Schwarzenberg wished to achieve the deportation of all the fleeing revolutionaries – or at least their leaders. If this were not possible, the second best option would be their internment deep within Ottoman territory to weaken their ties to their homeland. ⁶⁹ In this case, unlike Greece, Vienna argued that there was no need for any new legal provisions because the Treaty of Belgrade (1739) regulated both the mutual extradition of such criminals and the authority of the Austrian missions and consulates over them while on Ottoman soil (§18). ⁷⁰ Austria joined ranks with Russia, since the tsar also demanded the extradition of the Polish fugitives who had fought in Hungary in 1849. ⁷¹ However, backed by Britain, who opposed Russian aggression, the Porte refused to comply, claiming the absence of a treaty for political agitators; but the Sultan did stop accepting new exiles. ⁷²

In August 1849, the Porte provided asylum to the Hungarian émigrés, including Lajos Kossuth, despite recurrent Austrian protests. ⁷³ This legal and political stalemate, which is the main difference between the situation in the Ottoman Empire and the one in Greece, led both Vienna and St Petersburg to suspend their diplomatic relations with the Porte in September. ⁷⁴ In November, Russia and the Porte reached a compromise resulting in the extradition of the Polish escapees and the normalization of the bilateral relations between the two – a move that did not favour Austrian policy. ⁷⁵ Vienna’s pressure on the Porte waned without Russian support. The request for extradition was abandoned in January 1850, and only the question of the refugees’ internment remained open thereafter. Finally, Austria was forced to restore diplomatic relations with the Porte in April 1850 without having achieved a permanent agreement about the remaining refugees, who continued to reside on Ottoman territories. ⁷⁶

The deadlock between the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires regarding the refugees and the fear that the exiles in Greece could still operate politically despite the opposing policy of the Greek government, pushed Vienna to adopt additional measures. Having exhausted official means, Schwarzenberg and Bach unilaterally decided from that point on to make use of semi-official and unofficial Austrian networks (e.g., consuls, secret agents, Austrian Lloyd seamen) against the émigré communities in the Eastern Mediterranean.

The Austrian Consuls Versus the Exiles in the Eastern Mediterranean

The activity of European consuls in the Ottoman Empire dates back to the sixteenth century, when merchants gained a privileged status through their actions as commercial agents of their governments in the Levant. ⁷⁷ In the nineteenth century, contemporaries were aware of the special role of consuls in the Ottoman Empire and its successor states and their extended legal and commercial jurisdiction in the region. ⁷⁸ These low-level diplomatic actors frequently advanced the ‘soft’ power of their states (education, religion, etc.) instead of engaging directly in high politics, ⁷⁹ although they could acquire considerable regional influence, especially in times of turmoil such as the 1820s or after 1848. ⁸⁰ Thus, the reports of these ‘agents of information’ in the Mediterranean often contained valuable data on, among other things, educational, social, health, or religious affairs, ⁸¹ although their multifarious activity has not received much credit so far. ⁸²

The Habsburg Empire began attributing increasingly greater significance to its consuls in the Ottoman Empire and Greece during the nineteenth century. ⁸³ Vienna moved away from merely relying on ill-trained merchants for consular services in the area and had its consuls obtain a good knowledge of the local languages and conditions in addition to their legal education. ⁸⁴ This development mirrored the greater politicization of the consular office throughout the century and Vienna’s pragmatic need for more active representatives on the ground. Competent and well-trained experts across the Eastern Mediterranean were crucial, given the political and financial significance of that region for Austria. Understandably, it was in the Ottoman Empire and in Greece that the largest Habsburg consular contingent was already reporting to the foreign ministry before 1848, when all other consulates still reported to the trade ministry. ⁸⁵ Likewise, it is mostly due to the training received there, that some of the most talented foreign ministry staff began their careers working in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman Balkans (e.g., Joseph von Schwegel, Anton Prokesch von Osten, Benjamin von Kállay).

Thus, consuls became the unspoken vanguard of a ‘quiet revolution’ that concerned the ways foreign policy was conducted in the nineteenth-century Eastern Mediterranean. ⁸⁶ I maintain that this ‘quiet revolution’ also represented another aspect of the broader ‘revolution in government’ after 1848. The consuls, who were not even required to be Austrian citizens, were traditionally focused on protecting Austrian trade interests and taking care of the Austrian subjects in the consul’s immediate vicinity. ⁸⁷ However, their authority to grant passports, and thus allow or deny entry into Austria, dramatically increased their political significance after 1849, when numerous fugitives repeatedly sought to return to their homeland. Vienna comprehended the renewed responsibility of the consuls in a time when successfully regulating the influx of people in Habsburg lands had evolved into a matter of the utmost priority. Therefore, since the mid-century, consuls moved away from being simple commercial agents and acquired quasi-police and quasi-judicial functions as well. Their usually close contacts with the local milieu enabled consuls to regularly to offer Vienna secret police services. ⁸⁸

Several European countries, such as France, Russia, and many German states, followed similar norms and retained strict border controls and passport-granting processes after 1848 to limit revolutionary mobility. ⁸⁹ Yet, Austria was the only power with adequate resources to create and coordinate an entire network of consulates across the Eastern Mediterranean to surveil the refugees. On 14 August 1849, Schwarzenberg instructed the general consulate in Istanbul, the embassy in Athens, and the consulates in Jassy, Bucharest and Belgrade to be vigilant for Hungarian and Italian émigrés in their surroundings and to focus their efforts on the arrest and safe and prompt deportation of such people to Austria. The foreign minister underlined that although the Austrian consulates enjoyed the right of extraterritoriality (according to the Treaty of Belgrade), the consuls should expect no support from the Ottoman authorities. Schwarzenberg also underlined the allegedly poor condition and supposed inability of the Ottoman police to contain the exiles. In practical terms, this meant that consuls had to rely on their own resources and ingenuity to attract the refugees to the consulates and then ship them back to Austria. ⁹⁰

As the refugee numbers skyrocketed, additional instructions soon followed. On 10 September, interior minister Bach alerted the ambassador in Athens, Alois von Kübeck, that, following the arrival of the rebels in the Orient, the Austrian consulates would have to prioritize their political duties and stand as a bulwark against the exiles. More specifically, the consuls in Corfu and Janina, Wilhelm von Mayersbach and Johann Georg von Hahn, who were closer to the refugee entry points in the Balkans through the Adriatic, had to gather and circulate pertinent information to their colleagues in Athens and Istanbul. ⁹¹ During the following months, Kübeck and his successor in Athens, Ingelheim, progressed to forging such an information network. They reported back that effective communication had been established among the consulates in Corfu, Janina, Salonica, Smyrna, and Syros and with the general consulate in Istanbul to ensure that the transregional activity of the émigrés could be tracked. ⁹² Additionally, in order to keep up with refugee mobility, the expansion of the consular service in Ottoman Bosnia and Greece was proposed in 1850 and 1851. Bach suggested the establishment of new consulates in Lamia near the Greco-Ottoman frontier in Thessaly, Novi Pasar, and Bosna Seraj (Bosnia), as well as the establishment of new vice-consulates in the Athens harbour of Piraeus, and in Nafplio. ⁹³

The consuls’ authority to grant passports was related to which exiles could be amnestied and thus return without any legal persecution. After long deliberations following the end of the war with Sardinia in late July 1849, field-marshal Radetzky issued an amnesty, beginning on 18 August, for Lombardo-Venetians participating in the recent clashes, which were due to end in September 1849. ⁹⁴ Two days before, on 16 August, after consulting with Radetzky, Schwarzenberg had forwarded an encyclical to all embassies and consulates instructing them not to grant passports to those ineligible to return under the conditions of the amnesty. ⁹⁵ Almost 200 Italians in Greece benefited from the imperial pardon, although from that point on the Austrian government would be much more cautious about who would be granted the right to return. ⁹⁶

These amnesty provisions were issued before the massive refugee outflow of late August and early September resulting from the simultaneous collapse of the fronts in Hungary and Venice. Soon thereafter, various émigrés, most impoverished and unhealthy, began to request permission to return home. On 26 August, the general consul in Corfu, Mayersbach, asked Schwarzenberg how to proceed with the groups of destitute exiles who petitioned for repatriation. ⁹⁷ A few months later, on 10 November, consul Heinrich von Rößler in Vidin, where hundreds of escapees from Hungary had fled, informed Schwarzenberg that approximately 600 Hungarians, Poles, and Italians stationed there had expressed the cordial wish to return. ⁹⁸ In both cases the foreign minister denied them entry since these individuals had been excluded from the proclaimed amnesty. ⁹⁹ In later years, numerous refugees across the Ottoman Empire persisted in requesting that they be allowed to return home, but Schwarzenberg remained suspicious and argued that the consuls had to decide on a case-by-case basis who would be allowed back. In a revealing manner, Bach commented in July 1850 that he had obtained materials about the petitioners and their backgrounds and intentions, which he would communicate to the consuls so that the latter could determine who should receive a passport. ¹⁰⁰ Based on their informants on the ground, Bach and Schwarzenberg carefully reviewed the political beliefs and conduct in exile of those wishing to repatriate. The ministers were thus disinclined towards accepting those who seemed to still pose a threat to Austria’s domestic security.

The headquarters of the Austrian surveillance network in the Ottoman Empire were located in Istanbul, where Bach suspected that most revolutionaries were gathered and most anti-Habsburg plots were drawn. ¹⁰¹ Striking proof of the weight of consuls as policing actors stems from the fact that the main coordinator of the network was not the Austrian ambassador in Istanbul but the general consul, Anton von Mihanovitch. ¹⁰² He was well acquainted with the Ottoman space because since 1836 he had served successively as consul in Belgrade, Salonica, and Smyrna before getting promoted to the newly founded general consulate in Istanbul in April 1849. ¹⁰³ Mihanovitch developed a close connection with Bach and became his most trusted collaborator on surveillance affairs in the Ottoman Empire, winning Bach’s praise for his services. ¹⁰⁴

The general consul was instrumental in collecting information and dispatching regular reports to Vienna on the everyday activities of the Hungarian and Italian émigrés in Istanbul. The factual data enclosed frequently concerned refugee arrivals and departures from the city, their gatherings and matters discussed, as well as their relations with foreign consuls, particularly British and American ones, who were considered to be allied with the refugee cause. ¹⁰⁵ As with the Greek case, Mihanovitch worked hard to limit the forms of collective refugee expression. Alongside the Neapolitan ambassador in Istanbul, he strongly pressed for the Ottoman government to terminate the activity of an Italian charitable society in 1850 and 1851, and he kept sharing information with the Russian ambassador Titof regarding the fugitives until early 1850. ¹⁰⁶ Later on, Mihanovitch kept operating in policing affairs until his retirement in 1854 and his death two years later. ¹⁰⁷

Mihanovitch’s methods are indicative of the general operational techniques of the Austrian consuls in the Ottoman Empire and Greece. Another representative example of these patterns comes from the Greek island of Syros, located in the centre of the Aegean. Syros’ capital, Hermoupolis, had been built by refugees of the massacre of Chios in 1822. By 1850, the city had evolved into one of the busiest Mediterranean ports thanks to its lucrative transit trade between Western Europe and the Ottoman Empire. ¹⁰⁸ Its geographic location meant that many émigrés moving between the Western Mediterranean or Greek mainland and the Ottoman harbours stopped there. ¹⁰⁹

This also explains why approximately 700 fugitives from Venice and Genoa set foot on the island in autumn 1849 and were received hospitably by the locals. ¹¹⁰ The local Austrian consul, Giuseppe Nizzoli thereafter became alarmed and took appropriate measures. ¹¹¹ Beginning in spring 1849, armed with the new Austro-Greek extradition treaty and in association with the local prefect, Nizzoli began capturing Italian and Hungarian exiles in Syros and arranging their transportation back to Austrian soil. ¹¹² This policy elicited the open hostility of the émigrés, who kept provoking the Austrian authorities. ¹¹³ The wretched exiles had to watch out for both the Austrian consulate and the Greek police who remained suspicious of their political initiatives. ¹¹⁴ The Russian consulate and its agents were also active due to a number of Poles who had reached Syros. ¹¹⁵ Russian informants on the island compiled reports and communicated them to the Austrians. According to their information, the émigrés maintained a keen interest in European politics, hoping in vain for a renewed insurrection in Italy in 1850–1851. ¹¹⁶

The same policy continued after the appointment of Johann Georg von Hahn as new consul in October 1851. ¹¹⁷ Like his colleagues elsewhere, Hahn remained suspicious of the émigrés who wished to repatriate. In April 1853, for example, a certain Hungarian named Heinrich Lampe applied to return to Austria. Hahn then inquired with the Greek municipal authorities and the Russian consul about Lampe in order to make his decision – proof that the Russian reports did influence the consul. ¹¹⁸ In any case, most exiles in Syros had emigrated to the Ottoman Empire and by 1854 only a handful of them remained on the island, a fact that calmed the Austrian fears. ¹¹⁹

This close mingling between consuls and the exiles could often acquire an underground character, while the consuls resorted to methods that would certainly be labelled illegal by most of their contemporaries. The most infamous such case was the so-called Koszta affair. It occurred in Smyrna in June and July 1853 and illuminates the local dynamics and interpersonal rivalries that affected political policing beyond top-down orders. ¹²⁰ After a group of Hungarians attacked an Austrian consular officer in Smyrna, the consulate retaliated by orchestrating the abduction of one of the group’s well-known members, Martin Koszta with the aim of transporting him to Trieste to stand trial. ¹²¹ The following diplomatic crisis between Austria and the USA (Koszta had applied for American citizenship) underlines the uniqueness of this case but obscures the fact that Koszta was only one among many whom Austrian consuls treated in such a way.

As this case reveals, consuls were assisted by various secret agents who infiltrated milieus that official Austrian representatives could not, functioning as their executive policing organs. Likewise, in a world where sea routes were still vital, Austrian Lloyd sailors held an equally significant role in transporting people, goods, and ideas – and policing them too. I will finally focus on these two categories of unofficial policing actors.

Austrian Secret Agents and Austrian Lloyd Seamen Confronting the Émigrés

Authorities have long resorted to using informal secret agents, whistle-blowers, and informants to obtain confidential information. ¹²² The nineteenth-century expansion of the public sphere and the growing fear of subversion meant that governments and the forces of law and order sought more and more information. In a time when expanding policing apparatuses did not always meet with adequate or fully professionalized personnel, governments made ample use of unofficial agents. In the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions, regime insecurities offered first-rate opportunities for ambitious policemen and other information-gatherers on a transnational scale.

The Habsburg Empire, due to its multiple fronts in 1848, thereafter established a genuinely European network of secret agents ranging from England to Syria. ¹²³ In London and Paris in the 1850s, spies on the Austrian payroll, such as Hermann Ebner and Janos Bangya, observed Karl Marx’s activity. ¹²⁴ Nonetheless, it was in the Balkans and the Near East where Vienna organized its most well-staffed and busiest secret police section in order to respond to the several thousand exiles there and the supposed untrustworthiness of the local polities. Approximately half of all Austrian-paid informers abroad in June 1850 (16 out of 33) were stationed in Balkan and Eastern Mediterranean cities. ¹²⁵ In the early 1850s, agents were placed in Corfu, Athens, Syros, Belgrade, Aleppo, Smyrna, Kütahya, Schumla, Catalca, Galatz, Bucharest, and of course Istanbul, which functioned as the regional coordination centre after Vienna. ¹²⁶

Bach attributed crucial importance to the presence of ingenious and well-informed agents among the exiles’ ranks. Therefore, he recruited many of his agents from among the desperate revolutionaries in exile in exchange for a modest allowance and a vague possibility of amnesty and repatriation. ¹²⁷ Several low-level, occasional informers who supplied the Austrians with information, and about whom very little is otherwise known, parade through ambassadorial and consular reports from Greece and the Ottoman Empire. ¹²⁸ Nevertheless, it would be misleading to assume that all or even most agents were led to this occupation only out of necessity. Many others were motivated by sheer ambition and served the post-revolutionary order as a means of social and professional elevation. One of these agents, a Hungarian named Virágh, alias Kiamil, wrote a lengthy report to Bach in July 1849 wherein he predicted that masses of fugitives would flee to the Ottoman Empire and the Christian Balkan states. Emphasizing his familiarity with the region, languages, and customs having lived in Athens, Istanbul, and Bulgaria in the 1840s, Kiamil claimed he could offer valuable services as an informer by penetrating the émigré communities and revealing their (alleged) revolutionary machinations. ¹²⁹ Bach presumably accepted his offer because Kiamil was later found in Vidin and Athens reporting on the exiles living there. ¹³⁰

Kiamil’s story contains notable similarities with the life of Gabriel Jasmagy, the central secret police organizer and the most important Austrian ground agent in the Mediterranean. Jasmagy was born in 1816 in Vienna and was of Hungarian-Levantine descent. Like Mihanovitch and Kiamil, Jasmagy was familiar with the Balkans in 1848. Thanks to his family background, he was competent in many languages, including Turkish, Hungarian, and Serbian, and he was appointed a consular interpreter in 1840 in Istanbul and later in Belgrade, where he cultivated bonds with influential Ottoman and Serbian circles. Throughout the 1840s, Jasmagy undertook intelligence missions concerning various subversive groups, from Italian brigands in Calabria to Mazzini sympathizers in Smyrna, while continuing to travel between Vienna and Hungary from 1844 to 1848. ¹³¹

This experience proved pivotal when Bach started building his agent network and sent Jasmagy into the Ottoman Empire in August 1849 to surveil the Hungarian, Italian, and Polish émigrés. ¹³² Jasmagy arrived in Vidin (currently Bulgaria), where the bulk of Hungarian fugitives had temporarily settled. ¹³³ He accompanied army officer Franz von Hauslab, whom Vienna sent to assess the exiles’ condition. ¹³⁴ Hauslab continued to support the Austrian agents in Vidin and Belgrade afterwards, whereas Jasmagy then moved to Istanbul. In Mihanovitch, Jasmagy found a kindred spirit and an able partner in the surveillance of exiles. ¹³⁵ In the following years, this ingenious agent was committed to establishing, directing, and maintaining the Austrian agent network in the Eastern Mediterranean, recruiting informers across a large array of cities with strong émigré presence and gaining the trust of both Bach and the ambassador in Istanbul, Stürmer. ¹³⁶

In November 1849, with Bach’s approval, Jasmagy visited ambassador Kübeck in Athens, presumably to organize the regional network across Greece and the Ionian Islands. ¹³⁷ After returning to his base in Istanbul, Jasmagy continued making regular tours from Corfu to Aleppo to inspect his agents and obtain first-hand knowledge of the local conditions. ¹³⁸ Additionally, between 1850 and 1853, Jasmagy and his associates relied on the Austrian embassy’s secret fund to bribe Ottoman pashas and Greek state officials. ¹³⁹ The latter agreed to keep closer track of the exiles and pass information regarding the exiles’ conduct directly to Jasmagy and his men. According to contemporary accounts, Jasmagy enjoyed some renown among the refugees, since a fraction of them hoped that his mediation with Bach could guarantee them amnesty. The Ottoman authorities also held him in esteem, as they were aware of his connections to leading Austrian statesmen. ¹⁴⁰ His well-established position made Jasmagy the best-paid agent in the Austrian service: by 1852, he was receiving a standard monthly allowance of 1000 forints, at a time when average annual agent payments varied from 80 to 200 forints. ¹⁴¹

Of course, nothing implies that the Bach-Mihanovitch-Jasmagy surveillance system was a perfectly organized structure. These origins of transnational policing were still characterized by much uncertainty, confusion, and improvisation. Amateur organization and imperfect information management were the main reasons for the failure of the plan that Jasmagy and Mihanovitch designed to lure Kossuth to an Austrian consulate and ship him to Austria in early 1850. Jasmagy and his partner in this case, Paul Kovats, a former Magyar tax collector and family friend to the Kossuths, travelled to Kütahya escorted by a few Croat bodyguards to arrest the interned Hungarian leader. ¹⁴² The plan was leaked, so Kossuth took precautions and Jasmagy was unable to approach him. Kossuth’s departure for the USA in September 1851 and the dwindling of the émigré communities in the Ottoman Empire and Greece by 1853 also led to the shrinkage of the Austrian policing network as its raison d’être waned, a fact that resulted in the numerical decline of police reports from the region after 1853. ¹⁴³

The Habsburg consuls and secret agents could also count on the help of the Austrian Lloyd, the largest Austrian shipping company, founded in Trieste in 1836 according to the model of Lloyd’s of London. ¹⁴⁴ The Austrian Lloyd steamships quickly acquired a leading role in Levantine commerce and became a major trading partner in Greek waters, transporting commodities and people at an ever-increasing scale. ¹⁴⁵ Since its establishment, Austrian Lloyd had enjoyed a close relationship with its government, which financially supported the company. ¹⁴⁶ Consequently, both the company and the Austrian authorities were alerted when exiles used Lloyd ships to travel or send their correspondence. ¹⁴⁷ On many occasions, Lloyd captains either refused to let exiles and their belongings on board, or if they did, the crew often spied upon these passengers, intercepted their correspondence, and forwarded their information and routes to the Austrian ambassadors and consuls. ¹⁴⁸ Mihanovitch had even allocated certain secret funds from the embassy for Austrian Lloyd as a reward for such ‘police’ services. ¹⁴⁹ Therefore, it becomes evident that Lloyd did assume de facto surveillance functions after 1848, much as the consuls did, despite its seemingly irrelevant purpose. The Austrian authorities exploited Lloyd’s pre-existing infrastructure and personnel (transport routes, trained crews, etc.) and channelled them against their opponents in exile, thus adding yet another aspect to their multifarious policing networks in the Mediterranean.

Conclusion

Throughout nineteenth-century Europe, expansion of police apparatuses took place, usually after large-scale revolutionary events, such as those of 1848. In these phases of counter-revolution, governments were particularly inventive in creating new policing and surveillance techniques and using pre-existing institutions to control the alleged sources of agitation. Realizing that political subversion took an increasingly transnational character after 1848, European policymakers strove to catch up. They, therefore, went to great lengths to coordinate their individual police and criminal systems and use various semi-official and unofficial actors to surveil their ideological enemies. Counter-revolutionary policies were by no means exceptional and they found examples among liberal and conservative European states alike: Britain for instance crushed the Indian mutiny of 1857, while France sent into exile in Algeria the protagonists of the June days of 1848. Nevertheless, concerning particularly political policing, the Habsburg Empire invested more resources than other states in order to create transnational policing institutions and networks because of the severity and multiple fronts of the 1848 revolutions within Austria, whose magnitude was far greater than in France or Prussia. The fact that multiple states, from Austria and Prussia to Britain and Greece, stood by and large unanimously against revolutionary and radical initiatives from below, enabled them to achieve at least a basic level of often ad hoc and bilateral policing collaboration.

Despite the domestic support (or passive acceptance) of the empire’s peoples towards the government in Vienna, a substantial number of political dissidents had fled abroad after 1848. In order to neutralize the supposed threat they still represented, Vienna initiated and participated in a wide array of bilateral and multilateral policing schemes and recruited numerous informers across Europe to watch over the exiles. As this article demonstrated, these policing measures were not limited to Western Europe but were used on an even larger stage in the Mediterranean. The study of these measures, I maintain, is helpful to understanding the Mediterranean not only as a space of insurrectionary mobility following the revolutions of the 1820s but also as a field of state experimentation regarding techniques to contain this very mobility. From the Austrian point of view, strengthened agency in this area was deemed urgent in 1849 due first and foremost to the multitude of fleeing émigrés (8000–10,000), who were still considered dangerous to Austria’s domestic security. Strengthened agency was also important because the Austrian government had little trust in the monitoring capacity of the local polities (the Ottoman Empire, Greece). Accordingly, Vienna decided to intervene with increased surveillance against the exiles in the Mediterranean. Although official police collaboration was tried (and succeeded in Greece), it soon became supplemented by many less official policing methods.

In addition to discreet information exchange with other ideologically allied powers (e.g. Naples, Russia), Vienna invested heavily in unilateral forms of monitoring. The already readily available Austrian consuls and Lloyd seamen experienced the de facto politicization of their duties because they were often called on to block refugee mobility and thwart the exiles’ wish to return to Austria. Furthermore, a network of secret agents was built ad hoc to spy on the exiles and was manned by renegade former rebels or by other adventurers who sought their own elevation. It is also interesting to observe how the economic expansion of Austria in the Eastern Mediterranean at that time (epitomized in Lloyd’s activity) went along with enhanced policing exercised by the very same agents of economic expansion. This trend seems to confirm Judson’s thesis that economic growth and political policing went hand in hand during neo-absolutism.

This Mediterranean security network held strong as long as the threat seemed realistic, that is, from 1849 until the mid-1850s, when the threat began to decline. However, despite its seemingly short duration, this form of policing represents an important episode in nineteenth-century Austrian (and European) state-building, as it allowed the development of new formulas for dealing with political dissidents abroad. Finally, the question of its contemporary efficiency seems difficult to answer, especially since all Forty-Eighters were amnestied after 1867. Of greater consequence is the integration of the post-1848 measures into a genealogy of modern policing that matured gradually in the nineteenth century, leading to transnational, anti-anarchist collaboration from the 1890s onwards and the creation of international anti-criminal organizations such as Interpol and Europol in the twentieth century. ¹⁵⁰