The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire

by Alan Palmer

  Enver was no longer greatly interested in the fate of the Arab lands within the Empire. Turkestan beckoned him eastwards. The collapse of Russia enabled the Ottoman armies to reoccupy Erzerum, eastern Anatolia and the historic ‘Armenian’ vilayets lost in three years of war. Provided Enver was allowed a free hand to concentrate Turkish troops in Transcaucasia and thereby secure Central Asia, he was prepared to leave Europe and Asia Minor to the German mission which he had for so long encouraged. Within a few months such mistrust had developed between Enver and the German units around the Black Sea that his staff produced maps marking German outposts in the Caucasus as ‘held by the enemy’.49 But in January 1918 he was by no means displeased that the German ascendancy on the Straits was as strong as ever: Admiral Souchon still commanded the feet; the Chief of the Ottoman General Staff was a gifted Prussian strategist, General Hans von Seeckt; and German officers were in command of the Ottoman Fifth Army (Liman von Sanders) and, in the Levant, of the Eighth Army (Kress von Kressenstein) and ‘Army Group F’ (Falkenhayn). No Ottoman commander could work amicably with Falkenhayn, and there was widespread satisfaction when Seeckt persuaded Berlin to recall him and replace him in Damascus with Liman. Enver regarded these German specialists as shock-absorbers who would contain the expected Allied onslaught in Palestine while he gave his attention to the Caucasus. Thanks to Enver’s initiative, the crescent flag flew that autumn over lands which no Sultan had possessed for more than three centuries. Yet while Enver was employing good Turkish regiments to indulge his Caucasian fantasies, his colleagues in government were wondering how long they could count on the crescent flag continuing to fly over Stamboul itself.

  By now the British had perfected their strategic plans for a three-pronged blow which would knock the Ottomans out of the war before the coming of winter.50 The principal offensive would begin in Palestine, with Allenby following the traditional route of Bonaparte and Ibrahim Pasha into Syria and, if necessary, across Cilicia and Anatolia, too. Once at Aleppo Allenby’s army would be joined by cavalry advancing up the Euphrates from Ramadi. Feisal’s Arabs would give support east of the Jordan valley, with Damascus as their main objective. Meanwhile, on the Salonika Front in the Balkans, the British divisions serving in General Franchet d’Esperey’s multinational army would help defeat Germany’s ally, Bulgaria, and turn eastwards to follow another familiar route to Constantinople, through the mountains of Thrace. In this Balkan sector the Ottomans had their weakest troops; even in the spring of 1917, at the height of the campaign, no more than eighteen Ottoman battalions fought alongside the Germans, Austrians, Hungarians and Bulgars against the Entente allies in Macedonia; and when the Bulgars concluded their separate armistice with the Allies on 30 September 1918 it was unlikely that this skeleton contingent in Europe would offer serious resistance.

  It seemed indeed by the late summer of 1918 as though Young Turk rule were crumbling. There had been a relaxation of political censorship in the press in June, and although Talaat remained Grand Vizier he appointed a liberal Minister of the Interior in July. A few weeks later political exiles were encouraged back to the capital, where new political parties and societies began to spring up.51 Among them, significantly, was a ‘Turkish Wilsonian League’ of liberal intellectuals. As the USA was never at war with the Sultan, this could not be regarded as in any sense a treasonable society. Parlour politicians in Constantinople hoped that, by resuscitating Ottoman parliamentarianism, they might gain a sympathetic hearing from the great prophet of democracy in Washington.

  Only in Palestine—and at distant Medina—did the Ottoman commanders still show any real determination to withstand the Allied onslaught. Mustafa Kemal had returned to Palestine in the second week of August to command the Seventh Army, one of the three corps in Liman von Sanders’s Army Group. He did not think the war could continue much longer, but he wished to save the genuinely Turkish heartland from invasion, enemy occupation or partition. It was therefore primarily as Turkish nationalists, rather than as good Ottomans, that the Seventh Army resisted Allenby’s onslaught when, on 18 September, the Allied advance began along the coast north of Jaffa. Constant use of aircraft and imaginative deployment of cavalry enabled the British to defeat the two Ottoman armies west of Jordan within three days, while Feisal’s Arabs cut the railway links north of Deraa.

  Damascus fell on 1 October.52 The historic city was officially liberated by the Arabs, who were anxious to gain support for their claims to administer the Syrian capital; but in reality the first troops to reach the centre of Damascus—at six in the morning—were Australians of the 3rd Light Horse Brigade. The French, eager to secure control of the Syrian ports, reached Beirut next day, although here the ‘first in’ were units of the 7th Indian Division. The loss of Damascus and Beirut had dramatic consequences in Constantinople; the bad news finally toppled the government. Talaat resigned on 8 October, but there was such confusion in the capital that it took the Sultan six days to find a successor whom he could trust. At last, on 14 October, General Ahmed Izzet was able to form a ‘Peace Ministry’. By then, in Thrace, the vanguard of General Milne’s British Salonika Army was approaching Dedeagatch, while in Mesopotamia British and Indian troops were fighting their way resolutely up the Tigris, heading for the Mosul oil wells (which were not finally secured until 3 November).53

  Peace talks began on 26 October aboard the flagship of the Mediterranean fleet, HMS Agamemnon, moored off Mudros. They lasted for five days; there was confusion over the delineation of provincial boundaries; and Admiral Calthorpe, the chief Allied representative, had the difficult task of reconciling his own practical needs with the demands of an Anglo-Indian pressure group in London and with hardliners in Paris and Rome, too.54 The Ottoman delegation missed the hidden menace of clauses giving the Allies a right to occupy strategic points ‘in case of disorder’. When, on 30 October, an armistice was signed, it was not as harsh as the Turks had feared; there was to be no mandatory occupation of Constantinople. Ottoman garrisons in Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia and Arabia were to surrender to the Allies, who would establish military administrations pending the conclusion of a peace treaty; Armenian internees would be released; Allied troops would occupy the forts of the Dardanelles and Bosphorus; the Straits would be cleared of mines, enabling warships to enter the Black Sea; Allied commissioners would control the railways; the army would demobilize, except for units needed to safeguard internal order.

  The Mudros Armistice was a businesslike document imposing no formal restraints on the Sultan’s sovereignty, yet Mehmed VI was soon to see for himself the reality of defeat. By 13 November a line of Allied warships stretched for sixteen miles from the Golden Horn westwards into the Sea of Marmara. ‘I can’t look out of the window. I hate to see them,’ the Sultan is reported to have told a deputation of Turkish parliamentarians who visited him in the Dolmabahche.55 He was painfully aware that he possessed only a shadow authority. That, however, was more than Kaiser William, Emperor-King Charles, or King Ferdinand of Bulgaria now enjoyed. Of the four defeated rulers, by mid-November only the Sultan retained his throne.

  CHAPTER 16

  SOVEREIGNTY AND SULTANATE

  CONSTANTINOPLE IN THE WINTER OF 1918–19 WAS A WRETCHEDLY demoralized city. It was overcrowded with refugees, many weakened by typhus and other diseases. Everywhere food was short, and coal for heating almost unobtainable. No trams were running, and few ferries crossed between Europe and Asia. The Ottomans had lost nine wars in the past century and a half, but never before had the people of the capital felt so bitterly the impact of defeat. Allied ‘protection’ was hardly distinguishable from enemy occupation. In practice little could be done without the permission of the senior Allied High Commissioner, Admiral Calthorpe, who was assisted by French and Italian colleagues. Although the Commissioners personally worked well together, the divergent policies of their respective governments prevented close collaboration or forward planning for the Empire as a whole. In the more distant provinces of north-eastern Tu
rkey, the mountainous terrain often left the ‘strategic points’ occupied by the Allies in remote and ineffectual isolation. Uncertainty over the future of Russia intensified the virtual anarchy in these vilayets.1

  On the Golden Horn there was at least the semblance of orderly administration. General Sir Henry Maitland Wilson established his headquarters in Pera, while British, French and Italian detachments guarded strategic positions. Yet Turkish units still bore arms. When the victorious French general, Franchet d’Esperey, arrived in the snow-choked city from Salonika in February, Ottoman officers as well as Greeks and Italians joined him in inspecting the British guard of honour; and when a panic report swept Stamboul asserting that Greeks were about to restore Christian symbols in the mosque of Ayasofya, it was Ottoman guards who kept in check an ugly crowd of Muslim demonstrators. Such rumours were common that winter: the Allies were said to be allowing Greeks and Armenians to massacre Muslims and destroy their homes in the disputed vilayets; Christian priests were alleged to be taking over Muslim schools and orphanages, even in the capital; and non-Turks were reputedly receiving preferential treatment by the Allied military administration in every region. There were enough instances of discrimination to give credence to these tales, exaggerated though the reports were in many cases. When forced to choose between the subject-peoples of the Ottoman Empire, Admiral Calthorpe over-simplified: as far as he was concerned, Turks were ‘baddies’. ‘It has been our consistent policy to show no kind of favour whatsoever to any Turk,’ he assured the Foreign Secretary seven months after taking up his duties.2

  This suspicion and mistrust hampered the growth of the fledgling Ottoman democracy. During November and early December 1918 it looked as if the parliamentary regime, introduced ten years before, would survive the eclipse of the Young Turks. With the CUP triumvirate in exile, there was an immediate revival of the Ottoman Liberal Union, headed by the Sultan’s brother-in-law and close friend, Damat Ferid Pasha. But in the absence of strong political leadership more policy decisions depended upon the Sultan’s personal inclinations than had seemed likely so long as the war continued. Mehmed VI Vahideddin—as the Sultan was officially styled—was not a natural autocrat. He possessed to the full all the awkward obstinacy of a weak ruler, short of temper and narrow in outlook. A trivial incident soon after his accession was a pointer to his character. Sultans traditionally had beards, any clean-shaven prince hurriedly seeing that his chin became hirsute within weeks of his accession. Not, however, Mehmed VI; at fifty-seven he saw no reason to conform. Despite remonstrances from the ulema, he was prepared to strike one defiant note of modernity; he would reign as ‘the beardless Sultan’. It was widely felt that, in some strange way, the innovation lessened the sovereign’s stature.3

  For Mehmed Vahideddin this was unfortunate, since he was determined to rule as well as to reign. The Sultan had no liking for parliamentary institutions and did not bother to conceal his prejudices, trying to play the political game in the style his elder half-brother had perfected after the humiliation of San Stefano. Mehmed lacked Abdulhamid’s guile and had fewer cards to put on the table; but successive High Commissioners acknowledged his usefulness, however trimmed-down his autocracy had become. Outwardly Sultan and High Commissioners seemed to share common objectives; the latter, too, preferred to govern through decrees rather than respect the wishes of a political forum, especially one in which they thought they detected a nascent socialism.

  There were no protests from the High Commissioners when, on 21 December, Mehmed VI dissolved parliament, following this political coup with a return to more traditional ways of government.4 The authority of the şeyhülislâm was re-established, over both education and the interpretation of family law. When, in the first week of March 1919, Mehmed VI appointed Damat Ferid as Grand Vizier, some of the Sultan’s most loyal supporters expressed doubts over his brother-in-law’s probity and good faith. But Mehmed insisted on upholding the Sultan’s prerogatives. He could, he reminded his critics, appoint anyone he wished—‘even the Greek or Armenian Patriarchs or the Chief Rabbi,’ he insisted.5 Soon it became clear that Damat Ferid’s ‘liberalism’ was lightly held. He would comply with most Allied demands, while emphasizing to the High Commissioners the value of the ulema as guarantors of good order and discipline. British officials with experience of India were inclined to agree with Damat: better a mullah than a red revolutionary, they believed.

  None of the Ottoman ministries in the winter of 1918–19 was harshly repressive. Censorship was selective. ‘Societies for the Defence of the Rights of Turks’ were tolerated by the Sultan’s ministers, despite protests from the High Commissioners. It is probable that Sultan Mehmed knew of the secret ‘Outpost Society’, a group of officials who smuggled arms along the Black Sea coast to eastern Anatolia or through the Dardanelles to Smyrna. Almost certainly he was aware that his most respected general-in-mufti, Mustafa Kemal, was encouraging the spread of a specifically Turkish nationalism. But he said nothing. He had a curious habit of occasionally shutting his eyes in the presence of ministers and officers to whom he had granted an audience, as Kemal himself noticed when the Sultan engaged him in conversation after a selamlik.6 Was Vahideddin’s gesture subconsciously symbolic? At all events, and with or without the Sultan’s connivance, an embryonic resistance movement linked the main Turkish towns even before mid-January in 1919, when the Peace Conference opened in Paris. And Kemal was one of three generals on the retired list who knew how extensive were the volunteer militia groups, as they awaited a signal to protect their homes from foreign rule.

  The pace of events was determined by what was—or was not—happening in Paris. The statesmen, diplomats and co-opted experts gave priority to the making of peace with Germany and then concentrated on settling the fate of Austria and Hungary before they considered the needs of the Ottoman peoples in any detail. Not until 17 June 1919 was an Ottoman delegation received by the Council of Ten, effectively the Conference’s chief executive body; another eleven months passed before the final peace terms reached the Sublime Porte. Long before then a combination of pride, resentment and disillusionment had fostered among the Turks a new sense of national identity.

  When the Armistice of Mudros was signed, genuine liberals in Constantinople confidently expected the peace-makers to redraw the map of Europe and Asia to accommodate the principles of the American President, Woodrow Wilson, with their emphasis on self-determination as a cure for the international malaise. It was assumed that Wilson’s crusading idealism would somehow expunge the secret wartime treaties for the partition of Turkey, the baits tempting Italy into the war, the bargains struck by Sir Mark Sykes and Georges-Picot, and all the other devices of a discredited diplomacy made public by the Bolsheviks. These hopes were, for the most part, dashed. Wilson’s self-determination favoured the Armenians, partly because wealthy emigrants could mount a well-organized campaign on both sides of the Atlantic, but also because US missionaries had long been active in the predominantly Armenian vilayets. The Peace Conference recommended the temporary cession of disputed Ottoman lands to the victorious Great Powers as League of Nations ‘mandates’. When the League began to function Iraq, Palestine and (later) Transjordan became British mandates while, after fierce wrangling between Paris and London, France gained the mandate for Syria and the Lebanon. In May 1919, in a complete break with the basic tradition of US diplomacy, President Wilson agreed to seek Congressional approval for American mandates over Armenia, and even over Constantinople itself.7

  Towards one government’s ambitions Woodrow Wilson remained as hostile as the Ottoman liberals had hoped. He strongly opposed Italian attempts to secure a foothold in Asia Minor, largely because there were no Italian communities already established there. Yet here, too, Wilson’s principles proved disastrous for the Turks; the arguments with which he reproached the ‘colonialists’ in Rome were twisted by Venizelos, the chief Greek delegate, to further his own ambitions. In Smyrna, the finest Ottoman port on the Aegean, there remaine
d a large Greek community; and it was not difficult for Venizelos to convince Wilson of the need for Greek troops to occupy the port and its hinterland, both to protect their compatriots from the Turks and to forestall an Italian leap from the Dodecanese to the mainland of Asia. Venizelos had long enjoyed the warm backing of the British Prime Minister, Lloyd George. Within two months of the opening of the Paris Peace Conference, he could count on support from both the British and the American delegations. Reports of violent attacks by Turkish militia upon Greek communities in western Anatolia gave Venizelos his opportunity. A full division of the Greek army was transported to Smyrna on 15 May 1919, their landing protected by British, French and American warships lying out to sea.8