Armistice of Mudros
Mondros Mütarekesi | |
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Type | Armistice |
Signed | October 30, 1918 |
Location | HMS Agamemnon |
Signatories |
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The Armistice of Mudros was signed on 30 October 1918 and took effect at noon the next day, the Armistice of Mudros (
Among its conditions, the Ottomans surrendered their remaining
The armistice was followed by the
Background
World War I took a chaotic turn in 1918 for the Ottoman Empire. With
Developments in Southeast Europe quashed the Ottoman government's hopes. The
Grand Vizier
Negotiations
The British cabinet received word of the offer and were eager to negotiate a deal. The standing terms of the alliance was that the first member that was approached for an armistice should conduct the negotiations; the British government interpreted that to mean that Britain conduct the negotiations alone. The motives for this are not entirely clear, whether it was the sincere British interpretation of the alliance terms, fears that the French would insist on over-harsh demands and foil a treaty, or a desire to cut the French out of territorial "spoils" promised to them in the Sykes–Picot Agreement. Townshend also indicated that the Ottomans preferred to deal with the British; he did not know about the American contact or that Talaat had sent an emissary to the French as well but that emissary had been slower to respond back. The British cabinet empowered Admiral Calthorpe to conduct the negotiations with an explicit exclusion of the French from them. They also suggested an armistice rather than a full peace treaty, in the belief that a peace treaty would require the approval of all of the Allied nations and be too slow.[2]
The negotiations began on Sunday, October 27 on HMS Agamemnon, a British battleship. The British refused to admit French Vice-Admiral Jean Amet, the senior French naval officer in the area, despite his desire to join; the Ottoman delegation, headed by Minister of Marine Affairs Rauf Bey, indicated that it was acceptable as they were accredited only to the British, not the French.[2]
Both sides did not know that the other was actually quite eager to sign a deal and willing to give up some of their objectives to do so. The British delegation had been given a list of 24 demands, but were told to concede on any of them if pressed, except occupation of the forts on the Dardanelles and free passage through the
[Lloyd George] was also very contemptuous of President Wilson and anxious to arrange the division of Turkey between France, Italy, and G.B. before speaking to America. He also thought it would attract less attention to our enormous gains during the war if we swallowed our share of Turkey now, and the German colonies later.[2]
The Ottoman authorities, for their part, believed the war to be lost and would have accepted almost any demands placed on them. As a result, the initial draft prepared by the British was accepted largely unchanged; the Ottoman side did not know it could have pushed back on most of the clauses, and the British did not know they could have demanded even more. Still, the terms were largely pro-British and close to an outright surrender; the Ottoman Empire ceded the rights to the Allies to occupy "in case of disorder" any Ottoman territory, a vague and broad clause.[2]
The French were displeased with the precedent; French Premier Georges Clemenceau disliked the British making unilateral decisions in so important a matter. Lloyd George countered that the French had concluded a similar armistice on short notice in the Armistice of Salonica with Bulgaria, which had been negotiated by French General Franchet d'Espèrey, and that Great Britain (and Tsarist Russia) had committed the vast majority of troops to the campaign against the Ottoman Empire. The French agreed to accept the matter as closed. The Ottoman educated public, however, was given misleadingly positive impressions of the severity of the terms of the Armistice. They thought its terms were considerably more lenient than they actually were, a source of discontent later when it seemed that the Allies had violated the offered terms during the Turkish War of Independence.[2]
Aftermath
The Armistice of Mudros officially brought hostilities to an end between the Allies and the Ottoman Empire. However, incursions by the Italians and Greeks into Anatolia in the name of "restoring order" soon came close to an outright partition of the country. The Treaty of Sèvres in 1920 officially partitioned the Ottoman Empire into zones of influence; however, the Turkish War of Independence (1919–23) saw the rejection of the treaty by Turkish nationalist forces based in Ankara, who eventually took control of the Anatolian Peninsula. Ottoman territory in Syria, Palestine, and Arabia stayed as distributed by the Treaty of Sèvres while the borders of the Turkish nation-state were set by the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923.
See also
Notes
- ^ The Bolsheviks had support only in Petrograd and Moscow in 1917 and 1918. After allowing both Trotsky and Lenin to return to Russia by train from Switzerland and lead the October Revolution, Germany considered the Bolshevik government a puppet state under its power. After the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, most Russians disliked the terms of the Bolshevik signed treaty and believed that the Bolsheviks were a puppet under German interests, too.
- Trabzon peace conference convened but failed to define the borders between the Ottoman Empire and the Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic. This led to the recognition that a state of war exists between Tiflis and Constantinople in April 1918.
References
- ^ Karsh, Efraim, Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East, (Harvard University Press, 2001), 327.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-8050-8809-0.
Literature
- Laura M. Adkisson Great Britain and the Kemalist Movement for Turkish Independence, 1919–1923, Michigan 1958.
- Paul C. Helmreich From Paris to Sèvres. The Partition of the Ottoman Empire at the Peace Conference of 1919–1920, Ohio 1974, S. 3–5, the text can be found on pages pp. 341f.
- Patrick Balfour Kinross Atatürk: A Biography of Mustafa Kemal, father of modern Turkey, New York 1965.
- Sir Frederick B. Maurice The Armistices of 1918, London 1943.
- Ata, Ferudun (2018). The Relocation Trials in Occupied Istanbul. Offenbach am Main: Manzara Verlag. p. 357. ISBN 9783939795926.
- Uluç, Gürkan (2024). Understanding the Armenian Question: Malta Tribunal (1919-1921). Offenbach am Main: Manzara Verlag. p. 304. ISBN 9783911130004.
External links
- Yanıkdağ, Yücel (2020). "Mudros, Armistice of". In Fleet, Kate; ISSN 1873-9830.
- "Mudros Agreement: Armistice with Turkey (October 30, 1918)" (full text (in English)), volume 6, German History in Documents and Images, German Historical Institute, Washington, DC (www.germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org)
- Armistice, in Turkey in the First World War website.