Mustafa Kemal landed at the Black Sea port of Samsun on the 19th of May 1919. He was thirty-eight years old. He had been sent by the Ottoman government, under Allied pressure, as inspector-general of the Ninth Army — nominally to supervise the demobilisation of the few remaining Anatolian units, in practice to keep an eye on local resistance movements that had begun to form. He had no intention of doing either.
Three days before his landing, on the 15th of May 1919, a Greek expeditionary force had landed at Smyrna (modern İzmir) on the Aegean coast, with British, French, and American naval support, occupying the city as a Greek possession under the post-war Allied dispensation. Smyrna's Greek population, around 200,000 strong, welcomed them. The Turkish and Jewish populations of the city, around 250,000, did not. Within forty-eight hours, the occupation had triggered massacres of Turkish civilians by Greek troops and irregulars in the city's hinterland.
Mustafa Kemal, in Samsun a hundred and fifty miles north, learned of the landing on the day of his own arrival. He concluded, within the first twenty-four hours, that the Ottoman government in Istanbul — now under Allied occupation and unable to refuse Allied demands — could not be the basis of any future Turkish state. A new political authority would have to be built, in the Anatolian interior, from local resistance committees that were already forming in opposition to the Greek invasion. He began, immediately, to build it.
The Treaty of Sèvres
The Allies, meanwhile, were drafting a treaty. The Treaty of Sèvres, signed by the Ottoman government on the 10th of August 1920, was a peace settlement designed to extinguish the empire entirely. Its terms would have: granted Greece the entire European portion of the empire and the city of Smyrna with a substantial hinterland in western Anatolia; granted an independent Armenian state in eastern Anatolia with its territory drawn by President Wilson; granted an autonomous Kurdistan in the south-east; granted Italy a sphere of influence in southern Anatolia; granted France a mandate over Syria and Lebanon; granted Britain a mandate over Iraq, Palestine, and Transjordan; demilitarised the Bosphorus and Dardanelles under permanent international control; reduced the Ottoman army to fifty thousand men; and reduced the empire to a rump state in central Anatolia and a small zone around Istanbul.
It was, by the standards of any peace treaty ever negotiated, an extraordinary settlement. It went beyond Versailles in severity. It was, however, signed by a government that no longer controlled the territory it was disposing of. By August 1920 the Anatolian resistance — organised since the Sivas Congress of September 1919 around Mustafa Kemal as its chairman — had already declared the Sèvres signatories traitors. A new Grand National Assembly had met in Ankara on the 23rd of April 1920, declaring itself the only legitimate Turkish government. It would, over the next three years, fight a war to render Sèvres a dead letter.
The Turkish War of Independence
The war that followed — the Turkish War of Independence — was fought on four fronts simultaneously: against Greek forces in western Anatolia (the main theatre), against Armenian forces in the east (decisively defeated by November 1920), against French forces in the south (a stalemate, ended by negotiated French withdrawal in 1921), and against Allied occupation forces around Istanbul (largely a stand-off). The decisive front was the Greek front.
The Greek army had advanced, in 1920 and 1921, almost to the Anatolian plateau. Its objective was the destruction of the Ankara government and the imposition of the Sèvres settlement. The Turkish army, hastily assembled from former Ottoman officers, conscripts, and irregulars, fought a fighting retreat to the Sakarya River, twenty miles west of Ankara. There, between the 23rd of August and the 13th of September 1921, in a battle that lasted twenty-two days, Mustafa Kemal personally commanded an army that stopped the Greek advance. The following year, in the Great Offensive of August 1922, the Turks broke the Greek line at Dumlupınar and drove the Greek army back to the Aegean coast in three weeks. Greek troops evacuated Smyrna on the 8th of September 1922; the city was occupied by Turkish forces the next day; a fire that broke out on the 13th destroyed most of the Greek and Armenian quarters within four days. The destruction of Smyrna, and the death or expulsion of its Christian populations, was the final act of the war.
Lausanne
The Allies, by the autumn of 1922, recognised that Sèvres was unenforceable. A new peace conference convened at Lausanne in November 1922, with the Ankara government as the recognised Turkish authority. The conference lasted eight months. The resulting Treaty of Lausanne, signed on the 24th of July 1923, gave the new Turkish state: the entirety of Anatolia; eastern Thrace including Edirne; the Aegean islands (other than those granted to Greece in 1913); recognition by all signatories; and an end to all the capitulations — the extraterritorial privileges of European citizens — that had constrained Ottoman sovereignty for centuries.
It also provided for the largest peacetime population exchange in history: the compulsory transfer of approximately 1.2 million Greek Orthodox Christians from Turkey to Greece, and approximately 400,000 Muslims from Greece to Turkey. The exchange, carried out over 1923-24 under League of Nations supervision, was based not on language or self-identification but on religious affiliation — a logic that would have been familiar to the architects of the Ottoman millet system. It ended, demographically, the deep multi-religious character of Anatolia and the southern Balkans that had existed for five centuries. The Greek population of Anatolia, including communities that had lived along the coast since classical antiquity, was effectively erased. The Muslim populations of Greek Thessaly, Macedonia, and Epirus were likewise erased. The exchange is, in its scale and its violence, one of the most consequential demographic events of twentieth-century Europe.
The end of the dynasty
Mustafa Kemal's Grand National Assembly had already, on the 1st of November 1922, formally abolished the Ottoman sultanate. Mehmed VI Vahideddin — the last sultan, who had been negotiating with the British for guarantees of his personal safety — slipped out of the Dolmabahçe Palace on the 17th of November 1922 with a small suitcase, boarded the British warship HMS Malaya at Beşiktaş, and sailed for Malta. He never returned. He died in San Remo, Italy, in 1926, of cardiac failure, in genteel exile.
The caliphate, separated from the sultanate, was retained for a year and a half under Abdülmecid II, a cousin of the last sultan, as a purely religious office. It was abolished by the Assembly on the 3rd of March 1924. Abdülmecid II was put on the Orient Express that evening with a hundred British pounds in his pocket, accompanied only by his wife and adult daughter. The dynasty was banished from Turkey by the same act. It would not be allowed to return for fifty-eight years.
The Republic of Turkey had been proclaimed on the 29th of October 1923, with Mustafa Kemal as its first president. He would later, by an act of the Grand National Assembly, take the surname Atatürk — "father of the Turks." He would rule the new republic for fifteen years, until his death in 1938. He would conduct, in that time, the most radical secularisation any Muslim-majority country has ever attempted: the script changed from Arabic to Latin, the calendar changed from Islamic to Gregorian, civil law replaced sharia, women's suffrage was granted (in 1934, eleven years before France), the fez was banned, the call to prayer was Turkified, the religious courts were abolished. The Turkey that emerged was a different country from the one the Ottoman dynasty had ruled.
"Peace at home, peace in the world." — Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, motto of the Turkish Republic, 1931
What was lost
The Ottoman Empire, at the moment of its dissolution, had ruled — at different times — territory now belonging to Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Bosnia, Albania, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Hungary (in part), Slovenia (briefly), Croatia (in part), Cyprus, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia (in part), Yemen (in part), Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Ukraine (in part), Georgia (in part), Armenia, and Azerbaijan. Twenty-eight successor states — or more, depending on how one counts — sit on its former territory.
The empire's institutional legacies are still visible across that geography: the millet system in Israeli and Lebanese law, the Mecelle code in some Gulf states' civil law, Ottoman architectural styles in Sarajevo and Tirana, Turkish-derived vocabulary in fourteen modern languages, the layout of bazaars from Damascus to Belgrade. The dynasty's surviving members live, today, in Istanbul, Paris, Beirut, New York, and London — entirely private citizens, with no surviving political claims.
What the empire was, in the end, was the longest continuous Islamic dynasty in history and one of the longest-lived multi-ethnic states the world has known. That it ended in genocide and forced population exchange is one of the great tragedies of the twentieth century. That it had, before that, lasted six hundred and twenty-three years and produced Sinan, Süleyman, the Tanzimat, the Hejaz Railway, and the imperial library at Topkapı — is the reason we still write about it.
End of Volume II