Introduction
When most people reflect upon World War I, the first thing that comes to mind is the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, which triggered the start of the great war. However, a key element of World War I that is not so easily remembered or even discussed is that of the Ottoman Empire and the events which took place in what today we call the Middle East. While war was being waged on the continent of Europe, war broke out in the areas of Palestine, and the territories of modern day Iraq. World War I would eventually topple the monarchies of Europe and dissolve the Ottoman Empire into what we know today as the country of Turkey. But to better understand the role the Ottoman Empire played in World War I and its relationship to Europe, we must first refer to when the Ottomans rose to power and their geographical origins.
An
Overview of The Ottoman Empire
The origins of the Ottoman Turks can be traced back to the Turkic peoples who migrated from the steppes of Central Asia to the eastern parts of Anatolia, in what is today modern Turkey, beginning in the 11th century AD. It was also at this time that these semi-nomadic tribes adopted the religion of Islam, which originated in the desert of the Arabian Peninsula in the mid 7th century AD. The first clash between Christian Byzantium and Islam came in 636 AD, when the Arab Muslims surged out of Arabia and ran headlong into the territories of the Byzantine Empire. During this time, the Byzantine Empire covered much of present day Turkey, Armenia, Jordan, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. When they first encountered the Muslims, the Byzantines had just concluded a very long and costly war with the Persians, who themselves were exhausted and would soon fall to advancing Islamic armies. The Byzantine Empire, however, would prove more difficult for the Arab Muslims to overwhelm – for even in her weakened state Byzantium was still very strong. Only a combination of unrelenting pressure from without, and disorder from within caused the topple of the Byzantine Empire by the Ottoman Turks with the Siege of Constantinople on the 29th of May, 1453. The areas controlled by the former Christian Byzantines would be taken over by the Muslim Turks, who would now rule this territory and reestablish it as the Ottoman Empire.
The Ottoman Empire in the 20th Century
At the turn of the 19th/20th century, a new Turkish political party known as “The Young Turks” was formed. One of the main goals of the Young Turks was to drag the Ottoman Empire out of its old Oriental spirit and traditions and transform the nation into a modern, strong, and stable European-style state. Germany had favorable positions within the empire, sponsoring the Berlin-to-Baghdad Railway, which began construction in 1888. The Germans managed all of Constantinople's electricity generating plants, its gasworks, its munitions factory, and its arsenal, and the Kaiser's subjects occupied almost all of the skilled technical positions. And during the World War I, Germany and the Turks were also allies.
World War I
Franz Ferdinand was the Archduke of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Royal Prince of Hungary and of Bohemia, and from 1896 until his death in 1914, was the heir to the Hapsburg throne. On Sunday, 28 June 1914, at approximately 10:45 am, Franz Ferdinand and his wife were killed in Sarajevo, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian province of Bosnia and Herzegovina, by Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian nationalist and one of a group of assassins organized and armed by a secret society known as the Black Hand. And this event led to a series of events which eventually triggered World War I.
What did Franz Ferdinand do to prompt the Black Hand to select him for assassination? A possible answer can be suggested by a “secret treaty” made between the Vatican and Serbia, which would have annexed Serbia to the Vatican State and imposed cannon law on that non-Catholic country. When the treaty became known, Archduke Ferdinand, “Roman Catholic heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne,” was targeted for assassination. The Encyclopedia Britannica confirms the nefarious means and ends of the Black Hand: It “used terroristic methods to liberate Serbs subjected to Hapsburg or Ottoman rule and was instrumental in planning the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand...the society was formed in 1911, and its membership was primarily made up of army officers with some government officials. Within Serbia it dominated the army and wielded tremendous influence over the government.” The aim of the Black Hand was to unite all the Slavic southern states into one federation, which could only be achieved through the death of Archduke Ferdinand. And five weeks following the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, World War I began.
Jihad (Holy War)
At the outset of the war the Russians fought with a skill and a tenacity that startled the Germans, and now Berlin was no longer content for the Turks to remain neutral. The result was that the Germans chose to follow what they termed the “Jihad” (Holy War) strategy. Planning to incite uprisings across the entire Muslim world, which were subject to “infidel” European powers. On November 14, 1914, the German “Holy War” strategy paid off. In Constantinople, Mehmed V acting as both Sultan and Caliph of all Islam, issued a fatwa calling all Muslims worldwide to rise up against: British, French, and Russian “infidels” and wage a holy war against them. The Russians were the first of the Allies to react to the Ottoman declaration of war. It was at this time that four battalions of Armenian troops volunteered to serve with Russian forces advancing into Turkey, in order to fight (and hopefully defeat) their Turkish oppressors. And this Armenian uprising was one of the first steps of what would eventually lead to the Armenian Genocide in 1915.
The Armenian Genocide
The Armenian Genocide, also known as the Armenian Holocaust and, traditionally by Armenians, as Medz Yeghern (Great Crime) was the Ottoman government's systematic extermination of its minority Armenian subjects from their historic homeland within the territory constituting of present-day eastern Turkey. The starting date is conventionally held to be 24 April 1915, the day Ottoman authorities rounded up and arrested some 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople. The genocide was carried out during and after World War I and implemented in two phases: the wholesale killing of the able-bodied male population through massacre and subjection of army conscripts to forced labor, followed by the deportation of women, children, the elderly and infirm on death marches leading into the Syrian desert. Driven forward by military escorts, the deportees were deprived of food and water and subjected to periodic robbery, rape, and massacre. The total number of people killed as a result has been estimated at between 1 and 1.5 million. Other indigenous and Christian ethnic groups such as the Assyrians, Greeks and other minorities were similarly targeted for extermination by the Ottoman government, and their treatment is considered by many historians to be part of the same genocidal policy. The majority of Armenian diaspora communities around the world came into being as a direct result of the genocide.
Raphael Lemkin was explicitly moved by the Armenian annihilation which led him to coin the word genocide in 1943 and define systematic and premeditated exterminations within legal parameters. The Armenian Genocide is acknowledged to have been one of the first modern genocides, because scholars point to the organized manner in which the killings were carried out in order to eliminate the Armenians, and it is the second most-studied case of genocide after the Jewish Holocaust. Turkey, the successor state of the Ottoman Empire, denies the word genocide is an accurate term for the mass killings of Armenians that began under Ottoman rule in 1915. However, in recent years Turkey been faced with repeated calls to recognize what happened to the Armenians as genocide. To date, 23 countries have officially recognized the mass killings as genocide, a view which is shared by most genocide scholars and historians.
Russia, Britain and France
On January 3, 1915, Tzar Nicholas of Russia urged Britain and France to attack the Turks. Now the Young Turks had got their country into a war which was too big for them. For the British won the battle of The Suez Canal against the Turks in 1915. Turkey called for an Arab uprising in Egypt against the British, but the Egyptian Arabs were indifferent. The British military or Royal Navy, long understood the Ottomans were poised to threaten Great Britain's oil fields and refineries in Persia (modern day Iran). For Britain's war effort and it's very survival was dependent on the Navy, which needed the fuel from Persia. Troops from India helped Britain in the Persian Gulf to drive the Turks out of Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq), and the city of Basra was captured as a result.
Enter: T.E. Lawrence “Lawrence of Arabia” - Arab name = El Aurens
Thomas Edward Lawrence was born in Wales in 1888, and would ultimately graduate from Oxford University in 1910 with first class honors in history, and then wanted to become an archaeologist. Four years of fieldwork for the British Museum followed. Later at a dig at Carchemish, on the banks of the Euphrates river, is where he was introduced to Arab culture and language. It was there that he developed an affinity with the Arabs. For he began to dress like a Bedouin, and his diet and personal habits also became Arabic. In his notes he mentioned how he believed the Arabs to be “morally superior,” to Europeans, yet at the same time he believed the Arabs to be “intellectually inferior,” to Europeans. Incorporating his admiration and goodwill towards all things Arabic, and his connections to the British government, Lawrence was able to assist the Arab cause in fighting the Turks by supplying the Arabs with weapons and other types of military support. Through his leadership in the Arab revolt against the Turks, Lawrence would go down in history as none other than, “Lawrence of Arabia.” In the Arab Peninsula Sharif Hussein was in open rebellion against the Turks. His goal was a separation of Arabia from the Ottoman Empire, bringing an end to the Sultan's Hegemony. When the Ottoman Empire declared war on the Allied Powers in 1914 the whole Arabian Peninsula, as well as some parts of Palestine and Syria were waiting for the opportunity to breakout in revolt. On November 14, 1914 when Mehmet Resad issued Jihad against the Allies Hussein refused, saying “the holy war is doctrinally incompatible with an aggressive war, and absurd with a Christian ally, namely Germany.” On January 1, 1916 the Arab revolt was openly declared.
Now Lawrence's legacy was not what he accomplished but, what he almost accomplished, yet ultimately failed to do, that of redrawing the map of the Arab Middle East. What he hadn't counted on, and of which he had no knowledge of, were the machinations of three men: Sir Mark Sykes, Francois George-Picot, and Arthur Balfour. Sykes and Picot were coauthors of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which was concluded on May 16, 1916. The agreement was a secret compact between Britain and France to which Russia assented. Under the agreement, when the Ottoman Empire was partitioned: Britain would be given control of an area that included the southern half of modern Iraq, modern Jordan, and a small area around Haifa allowing access to the Mediterranean Sea. Southeastern Anatolia, Northern Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon were to go to France. Russia was to get Constantinople, the Turkish straits, and the Armenian provinces. But what stopped the drawing up/dividing of the Middle Eastern territories by both Lawrence and Sykes-Picot was The Balfour Declaration.
The Balfour Declaration
Arthur Balfour, the British foreign secretary, who issued a statement on November 2, 1917, committed Great Britain to support the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, a long-held ambition among Zionists and, in doing so, would plague the Palestinians to this day. Balfour sent the letter to Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild, the most prominent figure in Britain's Jewish community. This document stated that the British government viewed with favor “the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.” The second part of the declaration stated, “it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” The second provision in the Balfour Declaration, protecting the rights of non-Jewish communities in Palestine, seems to suggest that the British government believed that the majority of the inhabitants of Palestine were already Jews, this sentence being the usual reservation to protect the rights of minorities. In fact, when the Balfour Declaration was issued, Jews formed only seven percent of the population of Palestine, “non-Jewish communities” constituting ninety-three percent.
When considering the careless diplomacy of the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration, it is necessary to remember the war situation in 1917. Russia had ceased to fight and the whole strength of Germany, Austria and Turkey was turned against the Allies. When the Balfour Declaration was issued, the continued independence of Britain and France themselves hung in the balance. The best, or perhaps the only hope of being able to repulse the expected German offensive in the spring of 1918, was to secure the entry of the United States into the war. The British government was advised that this could most easily be achieved by conciliating Jewish opinion, in view of the powerful influence exerted by leading Jews in America. Zionist policy throughout showed a remarkable contrast to that followed by the Arabs in one respect. The Zionists always accepted whatever concessions they could get and, having consolidated the ground won, immediately began to work for more. The Arabs repeatedly rejected compromise solutions and insisted on all or nothing. The Balfour Declaration was so vaguely worded that it could mean everything or nothing. The Zionists nevertheless accepted it and immediately began to use it as a lever to get more.
The Mandate for Palestine, allotted by the League of Nations, consisted principally of provisions in favor of the Jews. Although Jews only constituted seven percent of the population, the word Jews or Zionist appeared twelve times in the Mandate. The Arabs, who formed ninety-three percent of the population, were not even mentioned once.
Britain Fights the Turks
The British fought the Turks again at the Suez Canal and were able to push the Turks up through the Sinai desert, and then finally north of Jerusalem. Jerusalem fell from Ottoman control on December 8, 1917 to British forces led by General Allenby. Allenby formally entered Jerusalem through the Jaffa Gate, the traditional entrance used by the city's captors. Allenby presented himself as a pilgrim not a conqueror, for he passed through the gate on foot, rather than mounted on horseback on December 11, 1917.
1917 - 1918
In November 1917 the Bolsheviks toppled the provisional government of Russia and began negotiating a separate peace with Germany and Austria-Hungary. Allenby continued to fight the Turks, this time to take Damascus, and in September of 1918 he succeeded. Not long afterward, a surge of Lawrence's Arab troops charged into the city, and began the myth that they alone had captured Damascus. The following day, the Arabs proclaimed Faisal Ibn Hussein the king of Syria. The capture of Damascus essentially brought an end to the war in Palestine. The Turks had had enough: The Young Turk leadership conceded that the war was lost. The Turks asked General Townsend to serve as an emissary to request an armistice with the Allies. The Allies agreed. Mehmed VI designated Raouf Bey to be his chief negotiator. Raouf met with British admiral Somerset Arthur Gough-Calthorpe and on October 28, 1918 they signed the cease-fire. The terms of the armistice were harsh, but the Turks had little choice other than to accept. Turkish forces had to withdraw to the interior of Anatolia, where the Ottoman army was to be immediately demobilized, and the Allies would reserve the right to occupy any Turkish territory “in case of disorder.” The sick man of Europe was now deceased, for after nearly five hundred years of rule in the region, the Ottoman Empire had finally fallen.
When the Turks decided to stop fighting on October 28, no one in any of the Allied capitals could claim it was unexpected; the only real surprise was that the Turks had held on as long as they did. After all, the whole edifice of the Central Power's alliance was crumbling before the eyes of the world. Even as Raouf Bey and Admiral Gough-Calthorpe were sitting down in Agamemnon's wardroom, the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary had already begun disintegrating, bringing an end to nearly five hundred years of Hapsburg rule in Central Europe. Bulgaria had quit a month earlier, signing an armistice with the Allies on September 29. Only the Germans fought on, but even they would reach the end of their strength before another week had passed. Berlin asked for an armistice on November 8, three days later it was signed and became a reality.
The War Ends
The Allies issued conditions that had to be met before they would agree to any armistice, namely the demands for the Kaiser in Berlin and the Emperor in Vienna to give up their thrones. The war approached a resolution after the Russian government collapsed in March 1917, and through the Bolshevik revolution in November brought the Russians to terms with the Central Powers. On 4 November 1918, the Austro-Hungarian empire agreed to an armistice. After a 1918 German offensive along the western front, the Allies drove back the Germans in a series of successful offensives and began entering the trenches. Germany, which had its own trouble with revolutionaries, agreed to an armistice on 11 November 1918, ending the war in victory for the Allies.
In February 1919 French General Franchet D'Esperey rode into Constantinople on a white horse – like Mehmed the conqueror did in 1453. Every Turk understood its meaning. Mustafa Kemal did not like the terms given by the Allies. Kemal joined the Committee of Union and Progress and supported the Young Turks. He believed in the need for the empire to undergo drastic and dramatic reform. On March 18, 1920 he announced that a new Turkish legislative body, the Grand National Assembly, would convene in Ankara where it would assume sovereignty for the Turkish Nation. On April 20, 1920 the new assembly gathered for the first time, assuming for itself full government power and naming Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk) as its first Prime Minister.
Greco – Turkish War
An armistice between the nationalists, Italy, France, and Britain was signed in Mudanya, on October 11, 1922; the Greeks acceded to the armistice three days later. On July 24, 1923, the treaty of Lausanne, Switzerland was signed, and the great war between the Ottoman Empire and the Allied powers officially came to an end. The treaty guaranteed the independence, autonomy, and territorial integrity of Turkey. Under the treaty a provision was made: that of a population exchange between Greece and Turkey. The “Convention concerning the exchange of Greek and Turkish populations,” would deport the ethnic Greeks living in Turkey back to Greece and the Turks in Greece back to Turkey.
The House of Osman
The Sultanate had become distant and detached from the Turkish people. The time had come, in the considered opinion of the new Turkish government, for a clean slate. The Sultanate was officially abolished on November 1, 1922, even before the conference of Lausanne was convened. On October 13, 1923, the Grand National Assembly transferred the seat of Turkish government from Constantinople to Ankara; on October 29, 1923, the assembly formally dissolved the Ottoman Empire, installing in its place the Republic of Turkey. In summation, the true aim of the first world war was the overthrow of monarchies and the triumph of the world republic.
Bibliography
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Daniel, John. Scarlet and the Beast, Vol. 1. (Tyler, TX: JKI Publishing, 1995).
Glubb, Sir John. A Short History of the Arab Peoples. (New York, NY: Barnes & Noble Books, 1995).
Kinross, L. The Ottoman Centuries. (New York, NY: Harper Collins Publishers Inc., 1977).
McMeekin, S. The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany's Bid for World Power. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2010).
