Shadow of the Sultan's Realm: The Destruction of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East

261 Pages·2011·2.53 MB·English

by  Daniel Allen Butler

SHADOW OF THE
SULTAN’S REALM
THE DESTRUCTION OF THE OTTOMAN
EMPIRE AND THE CREATION OF
THE MODERN MIDDLE EAST
DANIEL ALLEN BUTLER
Copyright © 2011 by Potomac Books, Inc.
Published in the United States by Potomac Books, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be
reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of
brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Butler, Daniel Allen.
Shadow of the sultan’s realm : the destruction of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of the modern
Middle East / Daniel Allen Butler. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-59797496-7 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-59797-584-1 (electronic edition)
1. Turkey—History—Mehmed V, 1909–1918. 2. World War, 1914–1918—Turkey. 3. Middle East—
History—1914–1923. I. Title.
DR583.B87 2011
956’.02—dc22
2011005409
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper that meets the American National Standards
Institute Z39-48 Standard.
Potomac Books
22841 Quicksilver Drive
Dulles, Virginia 20166
First Edition
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
TO EMILY KORF
It’s amazing how far ten years of friendship can take you.
CONTENTS
List of Maps
Introduction

ONE THE SULTAN’S REALM
TWO THE EVE OF WAR
THREE OPENING MOVES
FOUR ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS
FIVE GALLIPOLI
SIX KUT
SEVEN ARMENIAN AGONY
EIGHT EL AURENS
NINE THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS
TEN THE FALL OF THE SULTAN’S REALM

Author’s Note
Chapter Source Notes and Citations
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
MAPS
1. The Ottoman Empire, circa 1900
2. The War in Egypt and Palestine
3. Gallipoli
4. The War in Mesopotamia
5. The Ottoman Empire, 1923
INTRODUCTION
It was the cataclysm that nobody knew had occurred.
Just as the world had kept its attention riveted to the four-year-long carnage
of the Western Front during the Great War, so, also, it focused on the drama
unfolding in the palace of Versailles as the victorious Allies dictated terms of
peace to the defeated Germans. And so hardly anyone noticed that along with the
Houses of Romanov, Hapsburg, and Hohenzollern, another imperial throne had
vanished in the dust and rubble that were postwar Europe. It was a realm far
older than any of the others, one with a history as rich, colorful, tumultuous, and
bloody as any of them—an empire that, at the height of its glory, had stretched
from the eastern shore of the Black Sea to the Pillars of Hercules: the House of
Osman and the Ottoman Empire.
And yet, in its passing, the Ottoman Empire determined much of how the next
century would unfold, not only in the Middle East, but for the larger part of the
civilized world as well. It was both the fortune and the curse of the Ottoman
Empire and the sultans who ruled it to have been at the center of world events
for most of its fourteen hundred–year history. Geography had placed the
Ottoman Turks at what would become a crossroads between the Occident and
the Orient at a time when those terms were still valid; history dictated that their
empire would still have a place in the political and military calculus of the Great
Powers even after the Ottomans’ power had irrecoverably waned.
Nor did the influence of the Sultan’s realm end with its collapse. The
destruction of the Ottoman Empire would lead to the creation of one of the
greatest super-powers of the twentieth century—the Union of the Soviet
Socialist Republics, and with it, a half-century of international tension that
became known as the Cold War. At the same time, as the Allies dismembered
the empire and created the patchwork of nation-states that became the modern
Middle East, they sowed the wind that would be the whirlwind of terror and
warfare reaped in the opening decade of the twenty-first century.
And because they were looking elsewhere, fascinated first by the negotiations
in Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors, then turning their attention inward as they began
to confront their own grief over the sacrifices of blood and treasure that had been
made during the Great War, nobody really knew it had happened.
The Ottoman Empire would be destroyed through a combination of battles,
blunders, bureaucrats, and buffoons. Campaigns such as Gallipoli, battles with
names like Kut and Beersheba. Monarchs such as Sultan Abdul-Hamid and
names like Kut and Beersheba. Monarchs such as Sultan Abdul-Hamid and
Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and ambitious politicians like Ismail Enver,
Mehmed Talaat, David Lloyd George, and Arthur Balfour. Diplomatic ciphers
like Sir Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot. The empire would be brought
down by men such as Gen. Sir Frederick Maude, Gen. Sir Edmund Allenby, and
Lt. Col. T. E. Lawrence. And as it finally fell, the empire would introduce to the
world the towering figure of Middle Eastern history in the twentieth century,
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.
While much of the narrative that follows is, of necessity, military in content,
this is not a military history in the conventional sense of being a “battle
narrative.” It is an accounting of who, how, and why, not a recapitulation of
carnage and combat; it is an examination of how the Ottoman Empire essentially
destroyed itself. For the Ottoman Turks did not passively stand aside while
greedy and ambitious politicians in London and Paris plotted and schemed over
how they would dismember the corpse of what had been called “the Sick Man of
Europe.” That Sick Man showed a remarkable vigor in what were supposed to be
his final days and, for a few brief astonishing moments, actually stood on the
threshold of triumphing over the combined naval and military power of France
and the British Empire. That the Turks failed in so doing was not the result of
the brilliant and ruthless execution of policies by the Allies or any glorious feat
of Allied arms; the Turks failed because of their own acts of commission and
omission, which combined to bring down the edifice of the Ottoman Empire. In
the end, it was brought down so low that all what remained, when the dust had
finally settled in the Middle East, was just the shadow of the Sultan’s realm.
Chad Blevins
CHAPTER ONE
THE SULTAN’S REALM
Embedded in one of the walls of the nave of St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna is
a Turkish cannonball. A relic from the Siege of 1683, it marks the flood tide of
the last great surge of the Ottoman Empire into Europe, the farthest point of the
Turkish assault on Christendom. The Austrian-Polish Army, led by the Polish
warrior-king Jan Sobieski, reached Vienna, with only days to spare before the
beleaguered city fell, and immediately attacked the Turks. From September 11 to
September 13 the two armies fought, a struggle marked by merciless ferocity
and astonishing courage on both sides, before the Turks, already nearly
exhausted by the siege, withdrew from Vienna, never to return. Although more
than three centuries would pass before the Ottoman Empire ceased to exist, the
retreat of the Ottoman Army from the walls of Vienna signaled the beginning of
the empire’s irreversible decline and eventual collapse. Lost in the shadows of
the Great War, it was a fall to which much of the world paid scant attention, yet
as it died, the Ottoman Empire would give shape to the next century.
The origins of the Ottoman Turks can be traced back to the Turkic peoples
who had migrated from the steppes of Central Asia to the central and eastern
parts of the old Roman province of Anatolia, what is today modern Turkey,
sometime between 300 and 400 A.D. In the eighth century these seminomadic
tribes had given up their somewhat amorphous animistic religion in exchange for
the new dynamic creed of Islam, which was then surging out of the Arabian
Peninsula, its faithful bringing conversion on the edge of their swords. Called
Beyliks, as early as the sixth century A.D., these settlements became small
emirates nominally subject to the authority of the Seljuk Turks of Mesopotamia,
their responsibility being the protection of the border that the Seljuk realm
shared with the Byzantine Empire.
The first turning point in the Ottoman Turks’ history came in 1071, when the
Seljuk Sultanate of Rûm won a decisive victory over the Byzantines at the Battle
of Manzikert. No sooner had the Seljuk Empire defeated the Byzantines than it
became embroiled in a struggle for dominance of the Moslem world with the
Arab Fatimids in Egypt and southern Syria. Taking advantage of the Seljuks’
distraction, the Beyliks were able to permanently establish themselves, asserting
their independence from the Seljuks as they carved out a homeland for
themselves in western and central Anatolia, in what had once been the heart of
the Byzantine Empire.