The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire
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7. E.M. Earle, Turkey, the Great Powers and the Baghdad Railway, pp. 107–10.
8. Ulrich Trumpener in Kent, pp. 115–16; Goltz, Denkwürdigkeiten, pp. 120–6.
9. Intelligence report of 22 May 1890, enclosure in FO 195/2053.
10. Shaws, p. 246; Langer, p. 160.
11. Full account is in Sir Charles Eliot (‘Odysseus’), Turkey in Europe, pp. 115–17; a long extract is in Laurence Kelly, Istanbul, pp. 272–3.
12. White to Salisbury, 17 August 1888, FO 78/4102/320, cited in C.L. Smith, The Embassy of Sir William White, p. 116. For comments on the railway terminus see Frances Elliot’s account of arriving by train, printed in Kelly, op. cit., pp. 259–60.
13. H. Nicolson, Lord Carnock, pp. 88–9.
Chapter 12: Armenia, Crete and the Thirty-Day War
1. A.O. Sarkissian, History of the Armenian Question, chapters 1–2.
2. S.H. Longrigg, Oil in the Middle East, p. 13. See also on Armenians: Langer, chapter 5; Sumner, pp. 16–17, 513, 547, 572; and L. Arpee, The Armenian Awakening, History of the Armenian Church 1820–60.
3. Sarkis Atamian, The Armenian Community, pp. 51–130; growth of Armenian revolutionary movement, Louise Nalbandian, The Armenian Revolutionary Movement, pp. 80–98, 104–18, 151–63.
4. Langer, p. 162.
5. Hatzfeldt to Holstein, 30 July 1895, GP vol. 10, no. 2371.
6. Staal to Lobanov, 13 August 1895, Meyendorff (ed.), Correspondence de M. de Staal, p. 256; Salisbury’s telegram to Currie, 9 October 1895, FO 195/1862/177.
7. Shaws, p. 204; Langer, p. 161.
8. A. Marder, British Naval Policy, p. 245; Papadopoulos, England and the Near East, p. 55.
9. Chermside’s report enclosed in Currie to Salisbury, 29 January 1896, FO 78/4884/78, reaching London on 10 February. For its assessment in London, Marder, op. cit., pp. 249–50.
10. Goschen’s speech, 11 February 1896, Hansard, Parliamentary Debates, 4th Series, vol. XXVII, p. 162.
11. Consul-General Blunt to Salisbury, 20 January 1896, FO 78/4734/1. D. Dakin, The Unification of Greece, 1770–1923, covers both the Cretan problem (pp. 149–51) and the Macedonian imbroglio (pp. 159–79).
12. Herbert to Salisbury, 4 July 1896, FO 78/4724/263.
13. Salisbury to Sanderson, 25 July 1896, FO 7/1240; for reply to Vienna, see Queen Victoria’s Letters, ser. 3, vol. 3, p. 58.
14. Papadopoulos, op. cit., pp. 77–9.
15. Details of these events were telegraphed by Herbert to Salisbury, 30 and 31 August 1896, FO 78/4724/365 and 374. Eyewitness account in an anonymous article, ‘The Constantinople Massacres’, in Contemporary Review for October 1896, pp. 457–65.
16. Papadopoulos, op. cit., pp. 82–3.
17. William II’s comment appears as a footnote to GP vol. 12, no. 2901; see also Haslip, The Sultan, pp. 225–6.
18. Herbert to Salisbury, 31 August 1896, FO 78/4724/tel. 374. Other questions: telegrams 368 (30 August) and 386 (5 September); and Herbert’s dispatch of 2 September, FO 78/4714/695.
19. Details of the Nelidov Plan were revealed in V. Khvostov’s article for Krasnyi Arkhiv, vol. 47 (1931), with English summary in Boutelle and Thayer’s Digest of the Krasnyi Arkhiv, p. 384; see also Langer, pp. 337–40. Full reports on movements of the Black Sea Fleet were sent to London from the consul-general in Odessa: see FO 65/1540; the earliest (no. 10) is dated 5 February 1897. For the ambassadorial conference, see Currie’s telegrams to Salisbury in FO 78/4724 and 4797; also see Papadopoulos, op. cit., pp. 112–20.
20. For declaration of war, ibid., pp. 140–2; and Papadopoulos also prints as his Appendix 3 a military assessment of the war made in Pera by Captain H.A. Lawrence (originally in FO 78/4993). Langer, chapter 11, has a good survey of the war, with maps. For optimism in Athens, see G.W.E. Russell, Malcolm MacColl, pp. 195–7. See also Dakin, op. cit., pp. 152–4.
21. Prince Nicholas of Greece, My Fifty Years, p. 157.
22. Salisbury to O’Conor, 15 May 1897, FO 65/1535/tel. 244; answered, O’Conor to Salisbury, 17 May, FO 65/1536/tel. 59 and FO 65/1532/dispatch 112.
23. Papadopoulos, op. cit., p. 222.
24. Shaws, pp. 207–11; Crampton, op. cit., pp. 229–40; D. Dakin, Unification of Greece, pp. 159–79, succinctly covers material more exhaustively assessed in his The Greek Struggle in Macedonia, 1897–1913; Stoyan Pribicevich, Macedonia, Its People and History, pp. 119–36, takes a (moderate) Yugoslav approach to what is still a highly-charged topic.
25. Currie to Salisbury, 2 June 1897, FO 78/4802/372; printed in full as Appendix 2 in Papadopoulos, pp. 245–7.
26. Punch, 18 January 1896; included in a special supplement, ‘The Unspeakable Turk’, which reprinted 24 anti-Ottoman cartoons published between September 1876 and November 1914, and was distributed with the issue of Punch on 16 December 1914.
Chapter 13: Ancient Peoples and Young Turks
1. GP, vol. 12, chapter 83 contains relevant German diplomatic documents. Contemporary reports in G. Gaulis, La Ruine d’une Empire, pp. 156–242. See A. Palmer, The Kaiser, pp. 91–2. Very strangely, the detailed and scholarly first volume of Lamar Cecil’s biography (Wilhelm II, Prince and Emperor 1859–1900) ignores the Kaiser’s visits to Constantinople, Palestine and Syria entirely.
2. F. Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War, pp. 20–2 and 39–40; C. Issawi, Economic History of Modern Turkey, pp. 188–91.
3. Haslip, The Sultan, p. 236.
4. Longrigg, Oil in the Middle East, p. 27.
5. These comments— some 400 words— were made by William II in 1931 on p. 120 of a copy of Die Verschworung der Diplomaten, the German edition of Nicolson’s Lord Carnock, which is in my possession. The page annotated corresponds to p. 89 of the English edition.
6. Prince von Bülow, Memoirs, 1897–1903, p. 249.
7. William II to Nicholas II, 9 November 1898, N. Grant, The Kaiser’s Letters to the Tsar, pp. 65–70.
8. Bülow, op. cit., p. 254.
9. Trumpener, in Kent, pp. 117–20. On the Hejaz Railway, see Kinross, Ottoman Centuries, p. 567, and the specialist study, W. Ochsenwald, The Hijaz Railroad.
10. M. Lowenthal (ed.), Diaries of Theodor Herzl, pp. 266–7 and 282. For Herzl’s meetings with the Kaiser see I. Friedman, Germany, Turkey and Zionism, pp. 75–81, with a detailed study of earlier contacts between Herzl and the German imperial circle (pp. 56–62 and 65–74). For Herzl’s meetings with the Sultan, ibid., pp. 97–8.
11. Ibid., pp. 154–70.
12. Derek Wilson, Rothschild, pp. 289–98.
13. See Currie’s dispatch noted above, chapter 12, note 25, which may be supplemented by an interesting report on military dissidents by Colonel Chermside, 30 March 1896, FO 78/4705. See also O’Conor to Salisbury, 21 December 1898, FO 78/4920/659.
14. Lewis, pp. 208–10; Kinross, Ottoman Centuries, pp. 504–7.
15. Ahmad, pp. 166–81; E.F. Ramsaur, The Young Turks, pp. 55–7; and for Sabahed-din, ibid., pp. 65–7 and 124–9.
16. J. Swire, Balkan Conspiracy, pp. 84 and 94–7.
17. A.P. Vacalopoulos, History of Thesssaloniki, p. 127.
18. David Porter, Mother Teresa, The Early Years; S. Skendi, The Albanian National Awakening, pp. 380–404.
19. B. Jelavich, History of the Balkans, vol. 2, XXth Century, pp. 89–90; Albertini, Origins of the War of 1914, vol. 1, pp. 132–8.
20. Haslip, The Sultan, p. 234; Kent, pp. 122–3.
21. Ramsaur, op. cit., pp. 94–5; Kinross, Atatürk, pp. 24, 25, 28.
22. Incident at Drama; Ahmad, op. cit., p. 12, citing FO 371/544/423. The works of Ramsaur and Ahmad complement Lewis, pp. 206–9.
23. Shaws, p. 267.
Chapter 14: Seeking Union and Progress
1. Shaws, p. 273; Haslip, The Sultan, pp. 263–4.
2. Ahmad, pp. 20–1, 172, 175.
3. Lowther to Grey, 4 August 1908, BDD, vol. 5, no. 205; see also Lowther’s private letter of 25 August, no. 209.
4. Shaws, p. 276; Lewis, p. 226.
6. Grey to Lowther, 13 November 1908, cited from the Grey Papers in PRO by Feroz Ahmad, ‘Great Britain’s Relations with the Young Turks’, Middle East Studies, vol. 2, no. 4 (1966), p. 306 and p. 309.
7. Grey to Lowther, 11 August 1908, BDD, vol. 5, no. 207.
8. B.C. Busch, Britain and the Persian Gulf 1894–1914, pp. 187–234 and 304–47; Longrigg, Oil in the Middle East, pp. 18–19.
9. M.K. Chapman, Great Britain and the Baghdad Railway 1888–1914, chapter 4. The Anglo-Russian exchanges may be traced in BDD, vol. 5, nos 535–41.
10. Ahmad, pp. 39–42; Shaws, pp. 279–81; Lewis, pp. 211–12; Francis McCullagh, ‘The Constantinople Mutiny of April 13th’, Fortnightly Review, vol. 86 pp. 58–69, and his book The Fall of Abdul Hamid; Sir Andrew Ryan, The Last of the Dragomans, pp.54–6.
11. Ahmad, pp. 43–8.
12. Shaws, p. 282; Anderton, p. 71. For fetva of deposition: Abbot, Turkey in Transition, p. 258.
13. Kinross, Ottoman Centuries, p. 578; Haslip, Sultan, pp. 285–7.
14. M. Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 3, p. 189, and Companion to vol. 3, pt. 1, p. 39. See also Ahmad, pp. 49–51.
15. Ahmad, pp. 58–61.
16. Shaws, pp. 284–6.
17. Ahmad, pp. 45–8, 106–7, 179. Feroz Ahmad has also contributed a valuable article on Shevket to EI ii.
18. S. Skendi, The Albanian National Awakening, 1878–1912, pp. 398–404; Shaws, p. 288.
19. Timothy W. Childs, Italo-Turkish Diplomacy and the War over Libya, 1911–1912, p. 25. For events in the Yemen, P. Mansfield, The Ottoman Empire and its Successors, p. 30; Yapp, Making of Modern Near East, pp. 174–5.
20. This theme is developed in Childs, op. cit; chapters 2 and 3. See also Albertini, op. cit., vol. 1, chapter 6.
21. Childs, op. cit., pp. 70–91; G.F. Abbot, The Holy War in Tripoli, is a contemporary English account, sympathetic to the Ottomans. See also E.N. Bennett, With the Turks in Tripoli.
22. Ahmad, pp. 94 and 107.
23. Childs, op. cit., p. 24: Mallet to Grey, 5 December 1913, BDD, X (i) no. 403 is informative on British naval mission.
24. B. Jelavich, History of the Balkans, Vol. 2, XXth Century, pp. 95–100; Dakin, Unification of Greece, pp. 195–200; R. Crampton, History of Bulgaria, pp. 401–28; W. Miller, The Ottoman Empire and its Successors, pp. 498–522.
25. Ahmad, pp. 113–16, 172–3.
26. The diplomat was Gerald Fitzmaurice, whose report on the affair is in FO 195/2451/340, dated 5 February 1913; cf. Ryan, op, cit., p. 80. For the Sublime Porte Raid see: Ahmad, pp. 116–21; Shaws, pp. 295 and 299; Djemal, Memoirs of a Turkish Statesman, pp. 1–3; Sir E. Pears, Forty Years in Constantinople, pp. 331–2.
27. Ahmad, p. 128.
28. E.C. Helmreich, The Diplomacy of the Balkan Wars, pp. 324–32 may be supplemented by Crampton’s account; see also Albertini, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 450–53.
29. See, in general, Ahmad, chapter 7.
30. Wangenheim to Foreign Ministry, 17 May 1913, GP vol. 38, no. 15303.
31. F. Fischer, War of Illusions, pp. 333–4.
Chapter 15: Germany’s Ally
1. Longrigg, Oil in the Middle East, p. 30: Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 3, pp.188–90.
2. Fischer, War of Illusions, pp. 334–5.
3. Wangenheim to German Foreign Ministry, 18 July 1914, cited by H.S.W. Corrigan in his article, ‘German-Turkish Relations and the Outbreak of War in 1914’, Past and Present, no. 36, p. 151. See also Howard, Partition of Turkey, pp. 96–102 and Trumpener, pp. 15–20. For Baghdad Railway: Chapman’s final chapter and Hurst, Key Treaties, vol. 2, pp. 867–73.
4. Fischer, op. cit., p. 336.
5. Corrigan, loc. cit., p. 168; Bompard to Doumergue, 27 May 1914, DDF, sér. 3, vol. 10, no. 291.
6. Note de Departement, 13 July 1914, DDF, sér. 3, vol. 10, no. 504. Djemal, Memoirs, p. 106 and p. 113, is less reliable.
7. Shaws, p. 311. For Turkish reactions to the coming of the war: H. Morgenthau, Secrets of the Bosphorus; Lewis Einstein, Inside Constantinople (a journal for 1915 and 1916); and for the impact of these events on a child, Irfan Orga’s fascinating Portrait of a Turkish Family.
8. Gilbert, op. cit., vol. 3, pp. 191–3 and Companion vol. 3, pp. 9, 10, 19; Fromkin, Peace to End All Peace, pp. 54–61.
9. A.J.P. Taylor, Struggle for Mastery in Europe, p. 533. For the alliance, see also Howard, op. cit., pp. 83–91.
10. Gilbert, op. cit., vol. 3, p. 196.
11. Churchill to Limpus, 9 September 1914, Gilbert, Companion vol. 3, pt. 1, p. 105.
12. Limpus to Churchill, 26 August 1914, ibid., pp. 56–60; Souchon description is by Lewis Einstein, op. cit., p. 43.
13. Shaws, p. 312; Ahmad, p. 157.
14. Gilbert, op. cit., vol. 3, pp. 212–13 clarifies this matter.
15. Trumpener, pp. 23–57; Howard, op. cit., pp. 106–15; Yapp, Making of Modern Near East, p. 272.
16. Holt, Egypt and Fertile Crescent, p. 263.
17. Russian ambassador to Russian Foreign Minister, 13 November 1914, cited by Taylor (op. cit., p. 541) from Russian diplomatic documents. See also Michael Ekstein on ‘Russia, Constantinople, and the Straits 1914–15’ in Hinsley, pp. 423–35.
18. Fromkin, op. cit., pp. 126–37; Gilbert, op. cit., vol. 3, pp. 202–3; 217–19; 229–35.
19. Ibid., p. 222, quoting Churchill’s testimony to the Dardanelles Commissioners in September 1916.
20. The grand strategy behind the Gallipoli campaign may be traced in vol. 3 of Martin Gilbert’s Churchill. Robert Rhodes James’s Gallipoli is fine narrative, and analysis, of the tragedy.
21. Aspinall-Oglander, Military Operations; Gallipoli, pp. 485–6.
22. William II marginal note of 30 July 1914, cited from German diplomatic documents by Fischer, Germany’s Aims . . . , p. 121.
23. Ibid., p. 127; Fromkin, op. cit., p. 209.
24. Holt, op. cit., pp. 273, 276, 290.
25. Fischer, op. cit., pp. 127–8. For problems behind the lines in the southern provinces, see Emin, Turkey in the World War, p. 88.
26. Gilbert, op. cit., vol. 3, pp. 279, 281, 291; Vatikiotis, History of Modern Egypt, pp. 253–4; Shaws, p. 320; Trumpener, pp. 111–12.
27. Holt, op. cit., pp. 260–1; Fromkin, op. cit., pp. 176–8.
28. Ibid., p. 106–10; Kedourie, Anglo-Arab Labyrinth, pp. 47–52.
29. Expedition to Fao had been planned as early as 1912, see Busch, Britain and Persian Gulf, p. 329. See A.T. Wilson, Mesopotamia; Loyalties 1914–17; the account of the campaign in A.J. Barker’s The Neglected War; M. Fitzherbert, The Man Who Was Greenmantle, pp. 169–81; J. Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, pp. 253–78 (with Kitchener’s bribery offer discussed on p. 270); and Russell Braddon’s moving narrative of Kut, The Siege.
30. Trumpener, passim; and see also Emin, op. cit., and Morgenthau’s Secrets.
31. Yapp, op. cit., pp. 267–72; A. Hayder, A Prince of Arabia, pp. 106–9; Reinhold Lorenz, Kaiser Karl, pp. 461–5.
32. Richard Hovannissian, Armenia on the Road to Independence, pp. 45–56; Shaws, pp. 315–16.
33. T.E. Lawrence, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, p. 48; Jeremy Wilson, op. cit., p. 201.
34. Foreign Office telegram (containing Kitchener’s message) to M. Cheetham (Cairo), 31 October 1914, FO 371/2139/303. See Fromkin, op. cit., pp. 96–100; and the contrasting arguments of Kedourie, In the Anglo-Arab Labyrinth, pp. 17–20, and of J. Wilson, op. cit., p. 165 and p. 1003.
35. Ibid., pp. 214–6 and 1014–16. There is a judicious assessment of this much-disputed question by Professor Marian Kent in Hinsley, pp. 444–7. The correspondence was published as a British Government bluebook (Cmd. 5957) in 1939. See also L. Friedman, ‘The Hussein-McMahon Correspondence and the Question of Palestine’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 5, no. 2 (1970), and the subsequent exchanges between A.J. Toynbee and Friedman in is
sue no. 4 of the same year.
36. Hinsley, p. 446.
37. DBF Series 1, vol. 4, pp. 241–51; Kedourie, pp. 4–5, 65–6, 107–13; Bruce Felton’s contribution to Kent, pp. 163–4; Marian Kent’s contribution to Hinsley, pp. 447–51; Yapp, op. cit., pp. 277–8.
38. J. Wilson, op. cit., p. 288; Fromkin, op. cit., p. 207 and pp. 218–28.
39. J. Wilson, op. cit., p. 300.
40. Ibid., pp. 412–13 and 1069–70.
41. Kinross, Atatürk, pp. 104, 108, 112; Trumpener, pp. 311–33.
42. Papen, Memoirs, p. 72. Interest in Papen’s later career has inclined historians to ignore his shrewd judgements on the Asia Corps commanders and their relations with the Turks, pp. 69–82.
43. Fromkin, op. cit., pp. 311–13 is the most recent account.
44. Kedourie, p. 107.
45. On the Balfour Declaration, see the specialist study by L.J. Stein, and Fromkin, op. cit., pp. 274–300. For the German Jews, Germany and the Declaration see Friedman, Germany, Turkey and Zionism, pp. 339–41.
46. Anderson, p. 348.
47. J. Wilson, op. cit., pp. 469–70, 558, 1087.
48. Lawrence, Seven Pillars, p. 556.
49. Trumpener, pp. 167–90.
50. The clearest account is in C. Falls, Armageddon; see also Fromkin, op. cit., pp. 332–42. For the Balkan Front: Palmer, The Gardeners of Salonika, pp. 229–31.
51. Kinross, Atatürk, p. 126; Shaws, pp. 332–3; Anderson, pp. 348–9.
52. There has been a long-running historical dispute over the capture of Damascus. Effectively the argument began forty years ago with Elie Kedourie’s research, challenging the accepted view of the role of Feisal’s Arab army (cf. Kedourie, pp. 2 and 119–21). Many of Kedourie’s contentions were refuted by Jeremy Wilson in his definitive biography of Lawrence, pp. 559–62, and the accompanying notes, pp. 1103–8. See also later contributions to the debate in Fromkin’s narrative, op. cit., pp. 334–47.
53. Longrigg, op. cit., p. 44; Barker, op. cit., p. 222.
54. See the two-part article by Gwynne Dyer, ‘The Turkish Armistice of 1918’ in Middle East Studies, vol. 8, for May and October 1972. English text of armistice, E.G. Mears, Modern Turkey, pp. 624–6. See also Kinross, Atatürk, pp. 127–34.