The End of the Ottoman Empire

Abstract

At the Armistice of Mudros, signed on 30 October I918, the Sick Man of Europe as the Ottoman Empire had for so long been derisively known finally died. For all his alleged sickness, however, the Sick Man did not die of disease, but was violently destroyed in a long and bitter war in which he proved a formidable opponent and gave quite a good account of himself. But now, at the end of 1918, the Empire was lying prostrate, its central government quite powerless, its armies in dissolution, and its territories in Arabia, the Levant, and Mesopotamia under Allied mostly British occupation. Its enemies for half a century and more had desired and prophesied the destruction of the Ottoman Empire, had denounced it as a corrupt, oppressive despotism. It now looked as though the Turk would at last be expelled, bag and baggage, not only from Europe, but from Asia as well; that his possessions would be dismembered and divided and the nationalities whom he was said to have oppressed for so long at last set free. In fact the Allies, that is Great Britain, France, Russia, and Italy, had by various treaties concluded in I9I5, 1916, and 1917 in anticipation divided Ottoman territories among themselves, and at the end of the war it seemed that nothing could prevent such schemes being implemented. Russia, of course, had by then dropped out, and the Soviets had abandoned all claim to Ottoman territory; but another claimant had appeared in their stead, whose ambitions evoked the Turks' determined and desperate resistance and forced the Allies to reckon with them. Ever since the Greek Revolution, Greek nationalists had aspired to extend the boundaries of Greece so as to take in the Greek population of Asia Minor, and resuscitate the glories of Byzantium. At the war's end, Venizelos was Prime Minister in Greece. During the war he had been pro-Entente, and he now persuaded the Allies to award Smyrna