ASIA MINOR (Part Two)

Comfortable?  Frosty mug of Midas Touch Golden Elixir at hand?  (After all, you've had a week to find where you can get it.)  Okay, here we go, off again to the "Crossroads of history" that is Asia Minor and has become modern-day Turkey.

We left off at the Ottoman Turks' defeat at the Battle of Vienna in 1683.  That year saw the greatest extent of the Ottoman Empire.  Let's recapitulate its expansion since 1300 and gasp at its enormity:

The first thing that startles Westerners is the giant piece of Europe the Ottomans seized and Moslemized, all of the present-day countries of:

Greece, Albania, Macedonia, Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia, Montenegro, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova, Hungary, and parts of southern Ukraine and Russia.

There was a marvelous exception that stayed free: Dubrovnik and Dalmatia along the east coast of the Adriatic (see The Resilience of Man).

What a tribute it is to the peoples of these countries that, with the exception of Albania, the majority of all of them refused to submit and retained their Christianity.  The same applies to Armenia and Georgia (south of the Caucasus, they are in Asia.)

Look again at the map and you see how much of the entire Arab world of the time was ruled by the Ottoman Turks:  present day Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, eastern and western Saudi Arabia, western Yemen, Egypt, northern Libya, Tunisia, and Algeria.

Recall that the Arabs had lost their capital of Baghdad to the Seljuks in 1055, and their Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina to the Ottomans in 1500.  The inventors of Islam had been treated as subservient üntermenschen by the Turks for centuries and would continue to be for centuries more.

Store that away, for we'll return to these folks later in our story.  Now let's get back to Europe and the aftermath of 1683.  As Pope Pius V had organized a Holy League alliance of Christian countries that inflicted defeat upon the Ottomans at Lepanto in 1571, so now Pope Innocent XI formed another Holy League – this time between Austria, Poland, and Venice – to press the Christian advantage against the occupying Moslems.

Venice went for Greece, liberating Athens in 1687, albeit with a cultural disaster.  Shortly after the Ottomans under Mehmed II had taken Athens in 1458, the Parthenon on the Acropolis was turned into a Moslem mosque.  Now it was also used by the Turks for gunpowder storage (a mosque that doubles as a powder magazine:  just like Al Qaeda in Iraq now).

So when an errant Venetian artillery shell landed in the Parthenon on September 26, 1687, this architectural wonder that had survived intact since 432 BC was irreparably damaged with the roof blown off.  That's why it looks like a ruin today.

The Austrians went for Hungary, liberating Budapest in 1685 which had been under Ottoman control since 1541.  The Poles went for southwestern Ukraine, then known as Podolia.  The Ottomans sued for peace. 

In a humiliation known as the Treaty of Karlowitz (signed in a town on the Danube in northern Serbia on January 26, 1699), Sultan Mustafa II surrendered all Ottoman claims to Slovenia, Croatia, Hungary, Transylvania (northern Romania), Podolia, and Morea (southern Greece).

It would have been more – indeed, the Christian Holy League was poised to remove the Ottomans from all of Europe – but the French came to the Moslems' rescue.

As we saw in Sarkozy and History, France's alliance with the Ottoman Empire began with Francis I (1494-1547) who was deranged with hatred for Charles V (1500-1556), the Hapsburg Holy Roman Emperor.

It was Francis who encouraged Suleiman to invade and conquer Hungary and lay siege to Vienna in 1529 as a way to weaken Hapsburg power.   Now, a century and a-half later it was Louis XIV (1638-1715) who encouraged the Ottomans to try for the Hapsburg capital, Vienna, again.

When Louis, bitterly disappointed at the Ottoman defeat, saw Hapsburg armies and allies on the verge of total Christian victory against Moslem forces in Europe, he ordered his army to cross the Rhine and attack a Hapsburg state called the Palatinate, precipitating a conflict known as the Nine Years' War (1688-1697).

Louis' French soldiers put ancient German cities like Heidelberg, Mannheim, Speyer, and Worms to the torch and laid waste the surrounding countryside – all for the purpose of forcing Hapsburg Emperor Leopold I (1640-1705) to redirect his army away from the Turks and defend the Palatinate.

Louis' strategy was to carry on a level of fighting to divert just enough Hapsburg forces to enable the Ottomans to regroup.  This went on for nine years until the Ottomans regained their strength.  So instead of the Treaty of Karlowitz renouncing all Ottoman claims in Europe, it had to let nearly all the Balkans – Bosnia, Serbia, Bulgaria, southern Romania, Albania, and mainland Greece – stay Moslem.

Just like Francis I, France's Louis XIV would rather see Europe Moslem than under a rival Christian king. 

After the Treaty of Karlowitz, his rivalry with the Hapsburgs metastasized into a gigantic conflict called the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), exhausting Europe and leaving the Ottomans alone.

Under Sultan Ahmed III, they were able to recapture southern Greece (called the Morea, or the Peloponnesian Peninsula) from Venice in 1715.  All of Greece was again Ottoman.

As before, the Ottomans turned their attention towards their historic rival Persia, now ruled by a military genius, Nadir Shah (1688-1747).  They were saved from military disaster by Nadir Shah's timely assassination. 

The salvation was soon over – for another gigantic threat to the Ottoman Empire was now looming over its northern horizon.  The threat was in the form of a minor German Princess named Sophie Friederike Auguste von Anhalt-Zerbst.

History knows her as Catherine the Great (1729-1796).

Raised a Lutheran, she was married to Russian Grand Duke Peter, Peter the Great's grandson, when she was 16 years old, after conversion to the Russian Orthodox Church and being christened Ekaterina (Catherine).  In 1761, her husband was crowned Czar Peter III.  Six months later, he was killed in an "accident."  Princess Sophie was now Empress of Russia.

And the Empress really did not like her fellow Orthodox Christians being ruled by Moslem Turks.  Particularly when, by defending them, she could expand the Russian Empire at Ottoman expense. 

So she suckered Sultan Mehmed III into declaring war on Russia in 1768, then sweet-talked the British Crown into assigning two of its most capable officers in the Royal Navy, John Elphinston and Samuel Grieg, to the Imperial Russian Navy.

These two Brits (actually, Grieg was Scottish) commanded the Russian fleet when it obliterated the entire Turkish Navy at the Battle of Chesma (off Turkey's west coast near Izmir), July 5-7, 1770. 

This First Russo-Turkish War (1768-1774) ended with  the Ottomans surrendering what is now southwestern Ukraine including the entire Crimean Peninsula to Russia, giving her at last access to the Black Sea. 

But the Ottomans didn't learn their lesson and tried to regain it in a Second Russo-Turkish War (1787-1792) – which resulted in their getting still more of the tar beat out of them, for by then Catherine had teamed up with the Hapsburgs.  With Catherine's annexation of the northern Black Sea coast solidified, she founded the great port city of Odessa in 1794.

The children of Greece learned the lesson of Ottoman vulnerability, and when they grew up, they threw off the Moslem shackles.  For over two and a-half centuries, all Greek Christians had to pay a jizya Islamic poll-tax. No Greek Christians were allowed to ride a horse, and if riding a mule or donkey they had to dismount for a Moslem passing by. 

Young Greek boys were forcibly converted to Islam and made to serve in the Ottoman military.  The list of humiliations was long, adding up to the subservient status of dhimmitude.  (A dhimmi is a non-Moslem second-class citizen in a Moslem state.)

When the Greeks finally erupted in rebellion in 1821 – first in Messolonghi near Lepanto (remember Don Juan defeating Ali Pasha there in 1571?) where British poet Lord Byron went to fight with the rebels and died of a fever in 1824 – the Ottomans tried to suppress them with bloody savagery.

The Greeks fought on but it didn't look good until a wonder occurred – the British, French, and Russians formed an alliance to come to their rescue.  British Admiral Sir Edward Codrington (1770-1851) was placed in command of a joint naval force, which met the entire Turkish armada in Navarino Bay (southwest tip of Greece) on October 20, 1827.­

Codrington had been one of the Royal Navy's most distinguished officers since his heroics at the Battle of Trafalgar under Admiral Lord Nelson in 1805.  He lived up to his reputation at Navarino, where he so decimated the Ottomans they had no option but to flee from Greece.

It took a while for the Greek rebels to finish off the remaining Ottoman garrisons and for Sultan Mahmud II to admit defeat.  Finally he did on July 21, 1832 by signing the Treaty of Constantinople and giving independence to Greece.

For the first time, a Christian subject people had thrown off the Moslem yoke, their independence recognized by the Ottomans and celebrated in Christian Europe.

In 19^th century Europe, however, alliances changed faster than the crushes of a teen-age girl.  By the time the boys and girls of Britain and France who cheered for Russia at Navarino grew up, they were freaking out over the growing expansionist power of their one-time ally.  The Ottomans, of course, had been freaking out over the Ruskies for generations.

When Czar Nicholas I (1796-1855) was stupid enough (certain historians think he really did have an IQ at room temperature) to attempt to seize the Ottoman's "Danubian Principalities" of Moldavia and Wallachia (the future Romania), it precipitated the Crimean War (1854-1856).

This was Britain and France both allied with the Ottoman Empire against Imperial Russia!  Russia lost (even though it did win the Battle of Balaclava on October 25, 1854, immortalized by Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem, The Charge of the Light Brigade).

Yet so did the Ottomans, for the war ended up with both the Turks and the Russians having to get out of Wallachia and Moldavia, setting them on the road to independence, and to top it off, the Ottomans had to cede its neighboring province of Bessarabia to Moldavia. 

As this newly autonomous territory was merging into Romania, directly to the south lay the ancient Kingdom of Bulgaria, a Christian nation since Boris I (d. 907), conquered by the Moslem Ottomans in the late 1300s.  There was no way the Bulgarians weren't going to go for freedom now.

Bulgar rebels, with help from Romanian forces, cleaned the Ottomans' clock at a place called Shipka Pass, and by 1878, Bulgaria was liberated as well.

To the west of Bulgaria lay Serbia.  The Serbs were Orthodox Christians who had been defeated by the Ottomans at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389.  A great many Serbs subsequently converted to Islam, particularly in a region called Bosnia, while others were able to keep their religion by hiring themselves out as mercenary soldiers fighting for the Ottomans against the Hapsburgs. 

Other South Slav peoples such as the Slovenes of Slovenia and Croats of Croatia were Catholic Christian, and were comfortable within the Catholic Hapsburg empire which protected them from the Ottomans.

The Serbs, however, chose to develop an alliance with the emerging power of Imperial Russia, with whom they shared a common Orthodox religion.  Two previous Serbian uprisings against their Ottoman rulers, in 1804 and 1835, had failed.  Now, with Russia's support and the concomitant liberation of Bulgaria and Romania, by 1878 the Serbs of Belgrade were able to slip their Turkish leash.

Here we come to a crux move of history.  The set-up is this. 

The Holy Roman Empire, founded by Charlemagne in 800, ruled by the Hapsburg (Hawk Castle) family since 1298, had by mid-19^th century morphed into the Austro-Hungarian Empire, capital in Vienna. 

This Christian Empire was staunchly Catholic and had defended Christian Europe from the Moslem Turks for centuries.  Just as this giant alien threat was finally receding after 400 years of struggle, another threat emerged – the original rival to Roman Christianity, that of Byzantine Orthodox Christianity now being used by the Russians to create a rival imperial empire.

These three empires – Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Turkish – fatally clashed where all three collided in the deepest heart of the Balkans, a swirling mélange of Catholic Croats, Orthodox Serbs, and Moslem Serbs.  This was Bosnia, and here would be the spark to ignite the doom of the Hapsburg, Romanov, and Ottoman Empires.

The dance of imperial death began in a region of southern Bosnia called Herzegovina (the Herzog or Duke's Estate from medieval times), when Croats and Serbs rebelled against their rulers, Moslem Serbs called Bozniaks in 1875.  The Austrians sent troops to support their fellow Catholics, the Russians threatened to similarly support their fellow Orthodox.

Europe's latest power, a unified Germany under the leader of Prussia, Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898), brokered a deal.  Bismarck was helped by Britain, who wanted to protect Constantinople from the Russians. 

All the powers met at the Congress of Berlin in 1878 and agreed to give freedom to Romania, Bulgaria, and Serbia (a victory for Russia), place Bosnia & Herzegovina under the "administration" of Austro-Hungary, confirm Greek independence, and retain all the lands between Greece and Bosnia-Serbia-Bulgaria – Macedonia & Thrace or "Turkey in Europe" – for the Ottomans.

Here is what that looked like.  Notice the large portion of southeastern Europe (Macedonia & Thrace) still under Moslem Ottoman control as of 1878:

Bismarck's compromise did not satisfy the Russians and Serbs, who began to agitate for a Unified South Slavic State – in effect a Serbian Empire with its capital in Belgrade overseen by Russia.  The agitation reached such a crescendo by 1908 that Vienna felt its only way to keep Bosnia out of Serbo-Russian clutches was to formally annex it.

As described in The Resilience of Man, this is what happened next:

*…The Russian secret police, Okhrana (forerunner of the Soviet KGB), organized a Bosnian Serb independence movement called Crna Ruka – the Black Hand. 

In June of 1914, the heir to the Hapsburg throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie visited Bosnia to open a museum in the Bosnia capital of Sarajevo.  On June 28, as their open car passed by the Latin Bridge in Sarajevo, a Bosnia Serb Black Hand agent, Gavrilo Princip, ran up to the car with a pistol and fired a bullet into Sophie's abdomen and another into Ferdinand's neck.  Both shots were fatal.

The Archduke's last words were Sopherl! Sopherl! Sterbe nicht! Bleibe am Leben für unsere Kinder! ("Sophie dear, don't die! Stay alive for our children!")

The Austrian government accused the Serbian government of complicity in the assassination, which refused to fully cooperate being supported by Russia.  Austria then declared war on Serbia on July 28, 1914, and World War I began.

Russia mobilized to protect Serbia, Austria's ally Germany threatened war, Russian mobilization continued, Germany declared war on Russia on August 1, Russia's ally France threatened Germany, Germany declared war of France on August 3 (an act of impossible German stupidity), which caused Russia's and France's ally Britain to declare war on August 4…*

The Great War, known now as World War One, had begun.  The Ottomans felt they could not sit on the sidelines.  They had to choose.  On one side were their centuries-old enemies, the Austrian Hapsburgs allied with Germany.  On the other were their sometime ally Britain and their new rival Russia.

They fatally chose to side with the Hapsburgs.  But these were not the same Ottomans as before.  There was no more Sultan.  In his place was an oligarchy collectively known as The Young Turks.

As the humiliation of Ottoman defeats became overwhelming, epitomized by Turkey being derisively labeled the "Sick Man of Europe," a group of young Turkish intellectuals and military students formed a Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), initially as a secret society in 1889, then strong enough to go public in 1906.

Since the Ottoman Empire had from its inception been the personal possession of the Sultan who ruled with absolute powers, all the animosity for the empire's degradation was directed at him. 

Thus the specific goal of  the CUP leaders who called themselves the Young Turks was depose Sultan Abdulhamid II (1842-1918), who had ruled since 1876, and establish a constitutional monarchy with an elected parliament.

When the Army joined with the CUP and threatened to march on the Sultan's personal residence, Yildiz Palace, Abdulhamid II resigned on April 27, 1909, and was replaced by a puppet sultan, his brother Mehmed V.

For it was the "Three Pashas," Young Turk leaders Ismail Enver, Mehmed Talat, and Ahmed Cemal, who now ran the government, consolidating their power into a dictatorship in 1913.  They formed an Ottoman-German Alliance with Germany's promise that together they could destroy the common threat of Russia.

Turkey thus joined the Central Powers focusing only on Russia, forgetting that it had also just declared war on Britain and France as well.  Minister of War Enver Pasha sent the Ottoman Third Army to seize the Baku oil fields (now in Azerbaijan on the Caspian Sea) in November 1914.  90% of it was wiped out by Russian forces.

Enver Pasha and the Young Turks needed a scapegoat.  They blamed the horrific disaster on a "traitorous" Christian people populating eastern Turkey who, they said, sided with their fellow Christian Russians causing Turkish defeat:  the Armenians.

By May of 1915, the Armenian Genocide was underway.  Over two million Armenians were living in Turkey.  They were rounded up and shipped in cattle cars (guess where Hitler got the idea) to concentration camps run under a program of purposeful starvation.  Historian Arnold Toynbee, assigned by the British Foreign Office after the war to investigate, determined a death toll of between 600 and 800,000 starved or slaughtered by the Young Turks. 

With Germany's surrender at the end of 1918, the CUP dissolved, the Three Pashas fled to Berlin, and Mehmed V's brother (Mehmed V died a few months earlier) Mehmed VI became Sultan, who tried the Three Pashas as war criminals.  They were found guilty in abstentia.  By 1922, all three were dead.

The ink wasn't dry on the Treaty of Versailles, completed on June 28, 1919, when the victorious British and French started tearing the Ottoman Empire apart.  They fought over which Arab lands they got, and that saga is for another day – but as they were doing so, Greece decided to try and reconstruct the Byzantine Empire and take over Turkey.

On May 15, 1919, at the direction of Greek Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos, 20,000 Greek soldiers landed at Smyrna (Izmir) on the Anatolian west coast and occupied the city.  The Greek offensive continued for a year, and by the summer of 1920, controlled all of western Anatolia.

Mehmed VI was forced to sign the Treaty of Sèvres on August 10, ceding Macedonia & Thrace plus the entire western third of what is now Turkey to Greece.  Albania was given independence.  Armenia was to receive independence with its borders drawn by US President Woodrow Wilson – so it was called "Wilsonian Armenia." 

The treaty provided for a referendum determining an independent Kurdistan, which included present southeast Turkey and the province of Mosul, now northern Iraq.

It wasn't just the Ottoman Empire but Turkey itself that was being dismembered.

A 38 year-old general in the Turkish Army decided to prevent it.  His name was Mustafa Kemal (1881-1938).

He was from Thessaloniki (then Selanik in Ottoman Macedonia, now northern Greece).  As a captain in the army, he joined the CUP in 1907.  Mistrusted by the Three Pashas, he was assigned to distant commands, then distinguished himself in the famous WWI battle of Gallipoli in 1915.  By the war's end he had been promoted to general.

With the Allies occupying Constantinople and carving up Anatolia, Kemal formed a movement of Turkish nationalism call the Grand National Assembly, setting up in the spring of 1920 an alternate government to the Ottoman Sultan based in Ankara.

You remember Ankara – Ankuwash to the Hittites, Ankyra to King Midas?  Maybe not if you'd had too much Midas Touch by now – but this ancient city was to be Kemal's capital.

Surrounded by Greek. French, and Armenian forces, somehow Kemal and his small army managed to eke out either victories or delaying actions against them.  His strength grew as the Turkish people came to see him and the alternate government as their only hope.

On November 1, 1922, Sultan Mehmed VI abdicated, leaving Constantinople in a British warship to live a life of comfortable exile in the French Riviera.  The Ottoman Empire, founded in 1299 by Osman I, ceased to exist.

Kemal proclaimed a Republic of Turkey had replaced it, shorn of its Ottoman imperial appendages, composed of its Anatolian heartland.  He demanded a renegotiation of the Treaty of Sèvres.  With the Greek invading force all but defeated, the Allies relented.

The resulting Treaty of Lausanne, signed on July 23, 1924, annulled Sèvres, granting international recognition to the Republic of Turkey as the successor state to the defunct Ottoman Empire, with its borders of what we see as modern Turkey today.

This most ancient land had been reborn.  In gratitude, the Turkish National Assembly awarded him the title of Atatürk – Father of Turks.

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk created modern Turkey.  Today the country he created is in crisis.  How it got to be and what might happen next will be the subject of the third and concluding part of Asia Minor.

END OF PART TWO

[Note:  Even though the Ottoman Empire is long gone, the line of Ottoman Sultans is not.  Current Sultan is Ertugrul Osman V, the 43^rd Head of the Imperial House of Osman and direct descendant of Osman I.  Grandson of Sultan Abdulhamid II, he was born in 1912, has lived in Manhattan since the 1940s, and is now 94 years old.]