The Young Turk revolution of 1908 had been, in its first weeks, a moment of extraordinary inter-communal hope. Greeks and Armenians had embraced Turkish officers in the streets of Salonika and Istanbul. Crowds had carried portraits of Midhat Pasha — the architect of the 1876 constitution — through the avenues of the capital. Newspaper publication, banned for three decades, exploded: by the end of 1908 more than two hundred new periodicals had appeared in Istanbul alone, in Turkish, Greek, Armenian, Ladino, Arabic, and French. The empire's diverse communities had, briefly, allowed themselves to believe in a multinational liberal constitutional future.
It did not last. Within weeks of the constitution's restoration, Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina, which it had administered (but not legally owned) since 1878. Bulgaria declared full independence. Crete announced union with Greece. The Italian seizure of Libya in 1911-12 took the last Ottoman foothold in North Africa. The First Balkan War of 1912 — fought against Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, and Montenegro in coalition — ended in catastrophe within five months: the empire lost almost all its European territory, including Salonika (the second city of the empire), Edirne (the second oldest Ottoman capital), and Albania (independent from 1912). For five days in March 1913, Ottoman troops actually retreated to the Chatalca Line, twenty miles from Istanbul. The Second Balkan War — a falling-out among the victors — allowed the empire to retake Edirne in July 1913 but nothing else.
The Young Turks had, in five years in power, presided over the loss of around two-thirds of the empire's European territory and around twenty per cent of its total population. They had lost Crete, Libya, Bosnia, Macedonia, and parts of Albania. They had not been able to deliver on the constitutional promises of 1908. The CUP, by 1913, had concluded that the empire could only be saved by an authoritarian government that abandoned the inclusive liberal vision of 1908 and refounded the state on a narrower, Turkish-Islamic basis.
The triumvirate
In January 1913 a small group of CUP officers — Enver Pasha, Talat Pasha, and Cemal Pasha — seized power in a coup against the elected government. They governed, from then until 1918, as an effective triumvirate, with Enver as minister of war, Talat as minister of the interior (and later grand vizier), and Cemal as minister of the navy (and military governor of Syria). The sultan, Mehmed V, was a figurehead. The parliament continued to meet but was emptied of substantive opposition.
The triumvirate's foreign policy was, on the eve of the First World War, conditioned by a single conviction: that the empire could not survive without a great-power ally, and that the right ally was Germany. Enver, who had served as Ottoman military attaché in Berlin from 1909 to 1911, had built personal relationships with Wilhelm II's general staff. A German military mission under Liman von Sanders had been sent to Istanbul in 1913 to reorganise the army. When the European war broke out in August 1914, the triumvirate manoeuvred for three months — formally neutral, actually conducting secret naval operations against Russia — before declaring war in November 1914 on the side of the Central Powers.
Gallipoli, Mesopotamia, the Caucasus
The empire fought, against three Allied powers simultaneously, for four years, on five fronts. It was, by the standards of every metric, the most strained combatant of the war. Its economy was a quarter the size of Germany's. Its industrial base was a fraction of any other major belligerent's. It had no domestic capacity to manufacture artillery shells, modern rifles, or military trucks. It was almost entirely dependent on German supply and German credit.
And yet, for a country that "should not" have been able to fight, it fought astonishingly hard. The defence of the Dardanelles between February 1915 and January 1916 — fought against a British, French, Australian, and New Zealand expeditionary force of perhaps half a million men — was one of the great defensive military operations of the twentieth century. The Allied force was finally evacuated without achieving any of its objectives, after losing perhaps 250,000 casualties to about 220,000 Ottoman. The Gallipoli commander on the Ottoman side, an obscure lieutenant-colonel named Mustafa Kemal, emerged from the campaign as a national hero. Within seven years he would be running the country.
In Mesopotamia the Ottomans, under the German general Colmar von der Goltz, captured an entire British and Indian division at the siege of Kut-al-Amara in April 1916. In the Caucasus they held the Russians off, with great difficulty and against numerical disadvantages, until the Russian collapse of 1917 allowed them to recover most of the territory lost in 1878.
The Armenian Genocide
What the triumvirate also did, in the spring and summer of 1915, was to organise the deliberate destruction of the Armenian population of Anatolia. The Armenian Genocide began on the night of the 24th of April 1915 with the arrest in Istanbul of around 250 Armenian community leaders, intellectuals, and clergymen, almost all of whom would be executed within weeks. Over the next eighteen months, the Armenian populations of the eastern provinces — perhaps 1.5 to 1.8 million people — were systematically deported to the Syrian desert, with Talat Pasha's interior ministry issuing the orders, the army carrying them out, and Kurdish irregular units conducting the worst of the massacres along the deportation routes.
The death toll is estimated by historians at between 800,000 and 1.5 million. Most of the dead died of starvation, disease, or exposure during forced marches; substantial numbers were killed outright. The killing extended to other Christian populations: perhaps 250,000 Assyrians and a similar number of Greek Orthodox Christians of Anatolia were also killed or died in deportations. The Armenian Genocide is recognised as such today by perhaps thirty countries, by the United Nations Genocide Convention, by the European Parliament, and by an overwhelming majority of academic historians. The successor states of the Republic of Turkey, founded in 1923, have rejected the genocide designation as a state position, though private Turkish acknowledgment has grown markedly in the twenty-first century.
"The persecution of the Armenians is on a scale which surpasses anything previously known. There can no longer be any question of whether the deportations have ended in their extermination." — Henry Morgenthau Sr., American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, to the State Department, 16 July 1915
The collapse
By the autumn of 1918 the Ottoman fronts were giving way. Allenby's British army had taken Damascus on the 1st of October. Bulgaria, the empire's last Balkan ally, had surrendered on the 29th of September, opening a road to Istanbul that the Ottoman army could not have defended. On the 30th of October the empire signed the Armistice of Mudros aboard a British warship in the harbour of the Aegean island of Lemnos. The terms were severe: occupation of the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus, demobilisation of the army, surrender of the remaining warships, Allied right to occupy any strategic point.
The three members of the triumvirate fled the country in a German submarine on the night of the 1st of November 1918. Enver was killed in Tajikistan in 1922, fighting a hopeless campaign for a pan-Turkic state in central Asia. Talat was assassinated in Berlin in 1921 by an Armenian survivor of the genocide; the assassin was tried and acquitted by a German jury. Cemal was assassinated in Tbilisi in 1922, also by Armenian avengers.
The empire that remained, in November 1918, was reduced to Anatolia and a thin strip of Thrace around Istanbul. Its army was demobilised. Its capital was under Allied occupation. Its sultan, the elderly Mehmed VI, was prepared to accept any peace the Allies offered.
The peace they offered would, when finally drafted in 1920, have dismembered Anatolia itself. What happened instead is the subject of the last chapter.
End of Chapter IX