The Ottoman Empire
Documentation of the early history of the Ottomans is scarce. According
to semilegendary accounts, Ertugrul, khan of the Kayi tribe of the Oguz
Turks, took service with the sultan of Rum at the head of a gazi force
numbering "400 tents." He was granted territory--if he could seize and hold
it--in Bithynia, facing the Byzantine strongholds at Bursa, Nicomedia
(Izmit), and Nicaea. Leadership subsequently passed to Ertugrul's son, Osman
I (r. ca. 1284-1324), founder of the Osmanli Dynasty--better known in the
West as the Ottomans. This dynasty was to endure for six centuries through
the reigns of thirty-six sultans.
Osman I's small amirate attracted gazis from other amirates, who required
plunder from new conquests to maintain their way of life. Such growth gave
the Ottoman state a military stature that was out of proportion to its size.
Acquiring the title of sultan, Osman I organized a politically centralized
administration that subordinated the activities of the gazis to its needs
and facilitated rapid territorial expansion. Bursa fell in the final year of
his reign. His successor, Orhan (r. 1324-60), crossed the Dardanelles in
force and established a permanent European base at Gallipoli in 1354. Murad
I (r. 1360-89) annexed most of Thrace (called Rumelia, or "Roman land," by
the Turks), encircling Constantinople, and moved the seat of Ottoman
government to Adrianople (Edirne) in Europe. In 1389 the Ottoman gazis
defeated the Serbs at the Battle of Kosovo, although at the cost of Murad's
life. The steady stream of Ottoman victories in the Balkans continued under
Bayezid I (r. 1389-1402). Bulgaria was subdued in 1393, and in 1396 a
French-led force of crusaders that had crossed the Danube from Hungary was
annihilated at Nicopolis (see fig. 5).
In Anatolia, where Ottoman policy had been directed toward consolidating
the sultan's hold over the gazi amirates by means of conquest, usurpation,
and purchase, the Ottomans were confronted by the forces of the Mongol
leader Timur (Tamerlane), to whom many of the Turkish gazis had defected.
Timur crushed Ottoman forces near Ankara in 1402 and captured Bayezid I. The
unfortunate sultan died in captivity the next year, leaving four heirs, who
for a decade competed for control of what remained of Ottoman Anatolia. By
the 1420s, however, Ottoman power had revived to the extent that fresh
campaigns were undertaken in Greece.
Aside from scattered outposts in Greece, all that remained of the
Byzantine Empire was its capital, Constantinople. Cut off by land since
1365, the city, despite long periods of truce with the Turks, was supplied
and reinforced by Venetian traders who controlled its commerce by sea. On
becoming sultan in 1444, Mehmet II (r. 1444-46, 1451-81) immediately set out
to conquer the city. The military campaigning season of 1453 commenced with
the fifty-day siege of Constantinople, during which Mehmet II brought
warships overland on greased runners into the Bosporus inlet known as the
Golden Horn to bypass the chain barrage and fortresses that had blocked the
entrance to Constantinople's harbor. On May 29, the Turks fought their way
through the gates of the city and brought the siege to a successful
conclusion.
As an isolated military action, the taking of Constantinople did not have
a critical effect on European security, but to the Ottoman Dynasty the
capture of the imperial capital was of supreme symbolic importance. Mehmet
II regarded himself as the direct successor to the Byzantine emperors. He
made Constantinople the imperial capital, as it had been under the Byzantine
emperors, and set about rebuilding the city. The cathedral of Hagia Sophia
was converted to a mosque, and Constantinople--which the Turks called
Istanbul (from the Greek phrase eis tin polin , "to the city")--replaced
Baghdad as the center of Sunni Islam. The city also remained the
ecclesiastical center of the Greek Orthodox Church, of which Mehmet II
proclaimed himself the protector and for which he appointed a new patriarch
after the custom of the Byzantine emperors.
Ottoman Institutions
At the apex of the hierarchical Ottoman system was the sultan, who acted
in political, military, judicial, social, and religious capacities, under a
variety of titles. He was theoretically responsible only to God and God's
law--the Islamic seriat (in Arabic, sharia ), of which he was the chief
executor. All offices were filled by his authority, and every law was issued
by him in the form of a firman (decree). He was supreme military commander
and had official title to all land. During the early sixteenth-century
Ottoman expansion in Arabia, Selim I also adopted the title of caliph, thus
indicating that he was the universal Muslim ruler. Although theocratic and
absolute in theory and in principle, the sultan's powers were in practice
limited. The attitudes of important members of the dynasty, the bureaucratic
and military establishments, and religious leaders had to be considered.
Three characteristics were necessary for acceptance into the ruling
class: Islamic faith, loyalty to the sultan, and compliance with the
standards of behavior of the Ottoman court. The last qualification
effectively excluded the majority of common Turks, whose language and
manners were very different from those of the Ottomans. The language of the
court and government was Ottoman Turkish, a highly formalized hybrid
language that included Persian and Arabic loanwords. In time Greeks,
Armenians, and Jews were also employed in state service, usually in
diplomatic, technical, or commercial capacities.
The day-to-day conduct of government and the formulation of policy were
in the hands of the divan, a relatively small council of ministers directed
by the chief minister, the grand vizier. The entranceway to the public
buildings in which the divan met--and which in the seventeenth century
became the residence of the grand vizier--was called the Bab-i Ali (High
Gate, or Sublime Porte). In diplomatic correspondence, the term Porte was
synonymous with the Ottoman government, a usage that acknowledged the power
wielded by the grand vizier.
The Ottoman Empire had Turkish origins and Islamic foundations, but from
the start it was a heterogeneous mixture of ethnic groups and religious
creeds. Ethnicity was determined solely by religious affiliation. Non-Muslim
peoples, including Greeks, Armenians, and Jews, were recognized as millets
(see Glossary) and were granted communal autonomy. Such groups were allowed
to operate schools, religious establishments, and courts based on their own
customary law.
Selim I and Süleyman the Magnificent
Selim I (r. 1512-20) extended Ottoman sovereignty southward, conquering
Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. He also gained recognition as guardian of the
holy cities of Mecca and Medina.
Selim I's son, Süleyman I (r. 1520-66), was called the "lawgiver" (kanuni
) by his Muslim subjects because of a new codification of seriat undertaken
during his reign. In Europe, however, he was known as Süleyman the
Magnificent, a recognition of his prowess by those who had most to fear from
it. Belgrade fell to Süleyman in 1521, and in 1522 he compelled the Knights
of Saint John to abandon Rhodes. In 1526 the Ottoman victory at the Battle
of Mohács led to the taking of Buda on the Danube. Vienna was besieged
unsuccessfully during the campaign season of 1529. North Africa up to the
Moroccan frontier was brought under Ottoman suzerainty in the 1520s and
1530s, and governors named by the sultan were installed in Algiers, Tunis,
and Tripoli. In 1534 Kurdistan and Mesopotamia were taken from Persia. The
latter conquest gave the Ottomans an outlet to the Persian Gulf, where they
were soon engaged in a naval war with the Portuguese.
When Süleyman died in 1566, the Ottoman Empire was a world power. Most of
the great cities of Islam--Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem, Damascus, Cairo, Tunis,
and Baghdad--were under the sultan's crescent flag. The Porte exercised
direct control over Anatolia, the sub-Danubian Balkan provinces, Syria,
Palestine, and Mesopotamia. Egypt, Mecca, and the North African provinces
were governed under special regulations, as were satellite domains in Arabia
and the Caucasus, and among the Crimean Tartars. In addition, the native
rulers of Wallachia, Moldavia, Transylvania, and Ragusa (Dubrovnik) were
vassals of the sultan.
The Ottomans had always dealt with the European states from a position of
strength. Treaties with them took the form of truces approved by the sultan
as a favor to lesser princes, provided that payment of tribute accompanied
the settlement. The Ottomans were slow to recognize the shift in the
military balance to Europe and the reasons for it. They also increasingly
permitted European commerce to penetrate the barriers built to protect
imperial autarky. Some native craft industries were destroyed by the influx
of European goods, and, in general, the balance of trade shifted to the
disadvantage of the empire, making it in time an indebted client of European
producers.
European political intervention followed economic penetration. In 1536
the Ottoman Empire, then at the height of its power, had voluntarily granted
concessions to France, but the system of capitulations introduced at that
time was later used to impose important limitations on Ottoman sovereignty.
Commercial privileges were greatly extended, and residents who came under
the protection of a treaty country were thereby made subject to the
jurisdiction of that country's law rather than Ottoman law, an arrangement
that led to flagrant abuses of justice. The last thirty years of the
sixteenth century saw the rapid onset of a decline in Ottoman power
symbolized by the defeat of the Turkish fleet by the Spanish and Portuguese
at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 and by the unbridled bloody succession
struggles within the imperial palace, the Seraglio of Constantinople.
Köprülü Era
Ottoman imperial decadence was finally halted by a notable family of
imperial bureaucrats, the Köprülü family, which for more than forty years
(1656-1703) provided the empire with grand viziers, combining ambition and
ruthlessness with genuine talent. Mehmet, followed by his son Ahmet,
overhauled the bureaucracy and instituted military reforms. Crete and Lemnos
were taken from Venice, and large provinces in Ukraine were wrested
temporarily from Poland and Russia. The Köprülü family also resumed the
offensive against Austria, pushing the Ottoman frontier to within 120
kilometers of Vienna. An attempt in 1664 to capture the Habsburg capital was
beaten back, but Ahmet Köprülü extorted a huge tribute as the price of a
nineteen-year truce. When it expired in 1683, the Ottoman army again invaded
Austria, laying siege to Vienna for two months, only to be routed ultimately
by a relief force led by the king of Poland, Jan Sobieski.
The siege of Vienna was the high-water mark of Ottoman expansion in
Europe, and its failure opened Hungary to reconquest by the European powers.
In a ruinous sixteen-year war, Russia and the Holy League--composed of
Austria, Poland, and Venice, and organized under the aegis of the
pope--finally drove the Ottomans south of the Danube and east of the
Carpathians. Under the terms of the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699, the first
in which the Ottomans acknowledged defeat, Hungary, Transylvania, and
Croatia were formally relinquished to Austria. Poland recovered Podolia, and
Dalmatia and the Morea were ceded to Venice. In a separate peace the next
year, Russia received the Azov region (see fig. 6).
The last of the Köprülü rulers fell from power when Mustafa II (r.
1695-1703) was forced by rebellious janissaries to abdicate. Under Ahmet III
(r. 1703-30), effective control of the government passed to the military
leaders. Ahmet III's reign is referred to as the "tulip period" because of
the popularity of tulip cultivation in Istanbul during those years. At this
time, Peter the Great of Russia moved to eliminate the Ottoman presence on
the north shore of the Black Sea. Russia's main objective in the region
subsequently was to win access to warm-water ports on the Black Sea and then
to obtain an opening to the Mediterranean through the Ottoman-controlled
Bosporus and Dardanelles straits. Despite territorial gains at Ottoman
expense, however, Russia was unable to achieve these goals, and the Black
Sea remained for the time an "Ottoman lake" on which Russian warships were
prohibited.
External Threats and Internal Transformations
During the eighteenth century, the Ottoman Empire was almost continuously
at war with one or more of its enemies--Persia, Poland, Austria, and Russia.
Under the humiliating terms of the Treaty of Kuchuk-Kaynarja that ended the
Russo-Ottoman War of 1768-74, the Porte abandoned the Tartar khanate in the
Crimea, granted autonomy to the Trans-Danubian provinces, allowed Russian
ships free access to Ottoman waters, and agreed to pay a large war
indemnity.
The implications of the decline of Ottoman power, the vulnerability and
attractiveness of the empire's vast holdings, the stirrings of nationalism
among its subject peoples, and the periodic crises resulting from these and
other factors became collectively known to European diplomats in the
nineteenth century as "the Eastern Question." In 1853 Tsar Nicholas I of
Russia described the Ottoman Empire as "the sick man of Europe." The problem
from the viewpoint of European diplomacy was how to dispose of the empire in
such a manner that no one power would gain an advantage at the expense of
the others and upset the political balance of Europe.
The first nineteenth-century crisis to bring about European intervention
was the Greek War of Independence (1821-32). In 1827 an Anglo-French fleet
destroyed the Ottoman and Egyptian fleets at the Battle of Navarino, while
the Russian army advanced as far as Edirne before a cease-fire was called in
1829. The European powers forced the Porte to recognize Greek independence
under the London Convention of 1832.
Muhammad Ali, an Ottoman officer who had been designated pasha of Egypt
by the sultan in 1805, had given substantial aid to the Ottoman cause in the
Greek war. When he was not rewarded as promised for his assistance, he
invaded Syria in 1831 and pursued the retreating Ottoman army deep into
Anatolia. In desperation, the Porte appealed to Russia for support. Britain
then intervened, constraining Muhammad Ali to withdraw from Anatolia to
Syria. The price the sultan paid Russia for its assistance was the Treaty of
Hünkar Iskelesi of 1833. Under this treaty, the Bosporus and Dardanelles
straits were to be closed on Russian demand to naval vessels of other
powers.
War with Muhammad Ali resumed in 1839, and Ottoman forces were again
defeated. Russia waived its rights under the 1833 treaty and aligned itself
with British efforts to support the Ottoman Empire militarily and
diplomatically. Under the London Convention of 1840, Muhammad Ali was forced
to abandon his claim to Syria, but he was recognized as hereditary ruler of
Egypt under nominal Ottoman suzerainty. Under an additional protocol, in
1841 the Porte undertook to close the straits to warships of all powers.
The Ottoman Empire fought two more wars with Russia in the nineteenth
century. The Crimean War (1854-56) pitted France, Britain, and the Ottoman
Empire against Russia. Under the Treaty of Paris, which ended the war,
Russia abandoned its claim to protect Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman
Empire and renounced the right to intervene in the Balkans. War resumed
between Russia and the Ottoman Empire in 1877. Russia opened hostilities in
response to Ottoman suppression of uprisings in Bulgaria and to the threat
posed to Serbia by Ottoman forces. The Russian army had driven through
Bulgaria and reached as far as Edirne when the Porte acceded to the terms
imposed by a new agreement, the Treaty of San Stefano. The treaty reduced
Ottoman holdings in Europe to eastern Thrace and created a large,
independent Bulgarian state under Russian protection.
Refusing to accept the dominant position of Russia in the Balkans, the
other European powers called the Congress of Berlin in 1878. At this
conclave, the Europeans agreed to a much smaller autonomous Bulgarian state
under nominal Ottoman suzerainty. Serbia and Romania were recognized as
fully independent states, and the Ottoman provinces of Bosnia and
Herzegovina were placed under Austrian administration. Cyprus, although
remaining technically part of the Ottoman Empire, became a British
protectorate. For all its wartime exertions, Russia received only minor
territorial concessions in Bessarabia and the Caucasus. In the course of the
nineteenth century, France seized Algeria and Tunisia, while Britain began
its occupation of Egypt in 1882. In all these cases, the occupied
territories formerly had belonged to the Ottoman Empire.
The Ottoman Empire had a dual economy in the nineteenth century
consisting of a large subsistence sector and a small colonial-style
commercial sector linked to European markets and controlled by foreign
interests. The empire's first railroads, for example, were built by foreign
investors to bring the cash crops of Anatolia's coastal valleys--tobacco,
grapes, and other fruit--to Smyrna (Izmir) for processing and export. The
cost of maintaining a modern army without a thorough reform of economic
institutions caused expenditures to be made in excess of tax revenues. Heavy
borrowing from foreign banks in the 1870s to reinforce the treasury and the
undertaking of new loans to pay the interest on older ones created a
financial crisis that in 1881 obliged the Porte to surrender administration
of the Ottoman debt to a commission representing foreign investors. The debt
commission collected public revenues and transferred the receipts directly
to creditors in Europe.
The 1860s and early 1870s saw the emergence of the Young Ottoman movement
among Western-oriented intellectuals who wanted to see the empire accepted
as an equal by the European powers. They sought to adopt Western political
institutions, including an efficient centralized government, an elected
parliament, and a written constitution. The "Ottomanism" they advocated also
called for an integrated dynastic state that would subordinate Islam to
secular interests and allow non-Muslim subjects to participate in
representative parliamentary institutions.
In 1876 the hapless sultan was deposed by a fetva (legal opinion)
obtained by Midhat Pasha, a reformist minister sympathetic to the aims of
the Young Ottomans. His successor, Abdül Hamid II (r. 1876-1909), came to
the throne with the approval of Midhat and other reformers. In December of
that year, on the eve of the war with Russia, the new sultan promulgated a
constitution, based on European models, that had been drafted by senior
political, military, and religious officials under Midhat's direction.
Embodying the substance of the Young Ottoman program, this document created
a representative parliament, guaranteed religious liberty, and provided for
enlarged freedom of expression. Abdül Hamid II's acceptance of
constitutionalism was a temporary tactical expedient to gain the throne,
however. Midhat was dismissed in February 1877 and was later murdered. The
sultan called the empire's first parliament but dissolved it within a year.
Unrest in Eastern Rumelia led the European powers to insist on the union
of that province with Bulgaria in 1885. Meanwhile, Greek and Bulgarian
partisans were carrying on a running battle with Ottoman forces in
Macedonia. In addition, the repression of revolutionary activities in
Armenia during 1894-96 cost about 300,000 lives and aroused European public
opinion against the Ottoman regime. Outside support for a rebellion on Crete
also caused the Porte to declare war on Greece in 1897. Although the Ottoman
army defeated the Greeks decisively in Thrace, the European powers forced a
compromise peace that kept Crete under Ottoman suzerainty while installing
the son of the Greek king as its governor.
More isolated from Europe than it had been for half a century, the
Ottoman regime could count on support only from Germany, whose friendship
offered Abdül Hamid II a congenial alternative to British and French
intervention. In 1902 Germany was granted a ninety-nine-year concession to
build and operate a Berlin-to-Baghdad rail connection. Germany continued to
invest in the Ottoman economy, and German officers held training and command
posts in the Ottoman army.
Opposition to the sultan's regime continued to assert itself among
Westernized intellectuals and liberal members of the ruling class. Some
continued to advocate "Ottomanism," whereas others argued for pan-Turanism,
the union of Turkic-speaking peoples inside and outside the Ottoman Empire.
The Turkish nationalist ideologist of the period was the writer Ziya Gökalp,
who defined Turkish nationalism within the context of the Ottoman Empire.
Gökalp went much farther than his contemporaries, however, by calling for
the adoption of the vernacular in place of Ottoman Turkish. Gökalp's
advocacy of a national Turkish state in which folk culture and Western
values would play equally important revitalizing roles foreshadowed events a
quarter-century in the future.
The Young Turks
The repressive policies of Abdül Hamid II fostered disaffection,
especially among those educated in Europe or in Westernized schools. Young
officers and students who conspired against the sultan's regime coalesced
into small groups, largely outside Istanbul. One young officer, Mustafa
Kemal (later known as Atatürk), organized a secret society among fellow
officers in Damascus and, later, in Thessaloniki (Salonika) in present-day
Greece. Atatürk's group merged with other nationalist reform organizations
in 1907 to form the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP). Also known as the
Young Turks, this group sought to restore the 1876 constitution and unify
the diverse elements of the empire into a homogeneous nation through greater
government centralization under a parliamentary regime.
In July 1908, army units in Macedonia revolted and demanded a return to
constitutional government. Appearing to yield, Abdül Hamid II approved
parliamentary elections in November in which the CUP won all but one of the
Turkish seats under a system that allowed proportional representation of all
millets . The Young Turk government was weakened by splits between
nationalist and liberal reformers, however, and was threatened by
traditionalist Muslims and by demands from non-Turkish communities for
greater autonomy. Abdül Hamid II was forced to abdicate and was succeeded by
his brother, Mehmet V, in 1909. Foreign powers took advantage of the
political instability in Istanbul to seize portions of the empire. Austria
annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina immediately after the 1908 revolution, and
Bulgaria proclaimed its complete independence. Italy declared war in 1911
and seized Libya. Having earlier formed a secret alliance, Greece, Serbia,
Montenegro, and Bulgaria invaded Ottoman-held Macedonia and Thrace in
October 1912. Ottoman forces were defeated, and the empire lost all of its
European holdings except part of eastern Thrace.
The disasters befalling the empire led to internal political change. The
liberal government in power since July 1912 was overthrown in January 1913
in a coup engineered by Enver Pasha, and the most authoritarian elements of
the Young Turk movement gained full control. A second Balkan war broke out
in June 1913, when the Balkan allies began fighting among themselves over
the division of the spoils from the first war. Taking advantage of the
situation, Ottoman forces turned on Bulgaria, regaining Edirne and
establishing the western boundary of the empire at the Maritsa River.
After a brief period of constitutional rule, the leadership of the CUP
emerged as a military dictatorship with power concentrated in the hands of a
triumvirate consisting of Mehmet Talat Pasha, Ahmet Cemal Pasha, and Enver,
who, as minister of war, was its acknowledged leader in the war.
World War I
As the two European alliance systems drew closer to war in 1914, Enver's
pronounced pro-German sympathies, shared by many in the military and
bureaucracy, prevailed over the pragmatic neutrality proposed by Talat and
Cemal. Germany had been pro-Ottoman during the Balkan wars, but the Porte
had no outstanding differences with either Britain or France in the summer
of 1914. In guiding his government toward alignment with Germany, Enver was
able to play on fear of the traditional Ottoman enemy, Russia, the ally of
Britain and France in the war.
On August 2, 1914, Enver concluded a secret treaty of alliance with
Germany. General mobilization was ordered the next day, and in the following
weeks concessions granted to foreign powers under the capitulations were
canceled. It remained for Germany, however, to provide the casus belli. Two
German military vessels--the battleship Göben and the heavy cruiser Breslau
--that had been caught in a neutral Ottoman port when war broke out in
Europe were turned over to the Ottoman navy. In October they put to sea with
German officers and crews and shelled Odessa and other Russian ports while
flying the Ottoman flag. Russia declared war on the Ottoman Empire on
November 5, followed the next day by Britain and France. Within six months,
the Ottoman army of about 800,000 men was engaged in a four-front war that
became part of the greater conflict of World War I.
Enver launched an ill-prepared offensive in the winter of 1914-15 against
the Russians in the Caucasus, vainly hoping that an impressive demonstration
of Ottoman strength there would incite an insurrection among the tsar's
Turkish-speaking subjects. Instead, a Russian counteroffensive inflicted
staggering losses on Ottoman forces, driving them back to Lake Van. During
the campaign in eastern Anatolia, assistance was given to the Russians by
some Armenians, who saw them as liberators rather than invaders. Armenian
units were also part of the Russian army. Enver claimed that an Armenian
conspiracy existed and that a generalized revolt by the Armenians was
imminent. During the winter months of 1915, as the shattered Ottoman army
retreated toward Lake Van, a massive deportation of as many as 2 million
Armenians was undertaken in the war zone. It shortly degenerated into a
massacre, as ethnic Turks and Kurds descended on Armenian villages or
slaughtered refugees along the road. The most conservative estimates put the
number of dead at 600,000, but other sources cite figures of more than 1
million. The situation of those Armenians who survived the march out of
Anatolia was scarcely improved under the military government in Syria.
Others managed to escape behind Russian lines. The episode occasioned a
revulsion in Western Europe that had its effect in the harsh terms meted out
by the Allies in the postwar settlement.
In the spring of 1915, the Allies undertook naval and land operations in
the Dardanelles that were intended to knock the Ottoman Empire out of the
war with one blow and to open the straits for the passage of supplies to
Russia. Amphibious landings were carried out at Gallipoli, but British
forces, vigorously opposed by forces commanded by Atatürk, were unable to
expand their beachheads. The last units of the expeditionary force were
evacuated by February 1916.
In Mesopotamia the Ottoman army defeated a British expeditionary force
that had marched on Baghdad from a base established at Basra in 1915. The
British mounted a new offensive in 1917, taking Baghdad and driving Ottoman
forces out of Mesopotamia. In eastern Anatolia, Russian armies won a series
of battles that carried their control west to Erzincan by July 1916,
although Atatürk, who was then given command of the eastern front, led a
counteroffensive that checked the Russian advance. Russia left the war after
the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. The new Russian government concluded the
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Central Powers in March 1918, under which
the Ottoman Empire regained its eastern provinces.
Sharif Husayn ibn Ali, the sultan's regent in Mecca and the Hijaz region
of western Arabia, launched the Arab Revolt in 1916. The British provided
advisers, of whom T.E. Lawrence was to become the best known, as well as
supplies. In October 1917, British forces in Egypt opened an offensive into
Palestine; they took Jerusalem by December. After hard fighting, British and
Arab forces entered Damascus in October 1918. Late in the campaign, Atatürk
succeeded to command of Turkish forces in Syria and withdrew many units
intact into Anatolia.
Ottoman resistance was exhausted. Early in October, the war government
resigned, and the Young Turk triumvirate--Enver, Talat, and Cemal--fled to
exile in Germany. Mehmet VI (r. 1918-22), who had succeeded to the rule upon
his brother's death in July, sued for peace through a government headed by
liberal ministers that signed an armistice at Mudros on October 30, 1918,
that had been dictated by the Allies. Allied warships steamed through the
Dardanelles and anchored off Istanbul on November 12, the day after the end
of the war in Europe. In four years of war, the Ottoman Empire had mobilized
about 2.8 million men, of whom about 325,000 were killed in battle. In
addition, more than 2 million civilians are believed to have died of
war-related causes.
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