The German Emperor telegraphed his congratulations to the Sultan on the recovery of Adrianople, and to the King of Roumania on the success of his intervention. He also conferred on the King of Greece, his brother-in-law, the bâton of a Field Marshal in the German army. The King received this honour in person at Berlin in the presence of a great gathering of German generals. In a speech on the occasion, he attributed his success in the recent war, in the first place, to the bravery of his army, and in the second to the training which he and many of his officers had received in the military schools of Berlin. Thenceforth, till the outbreak of the great war in Europe in 1914, the influence of Germany in the Near East, and especially in Turkey, was continually on the increase. Enver Pasha, who now predominated in the councils of the Porte, was devoted to the interests of Germany, and was probably in its pay. At his instance the Turkish army, which had so conspicuously failed in the recent wars, was put under the control of the German General Von der Goltz, and large numbers of officers were lent by Germany for its better training. Secret drillings of troops took place in many remote parts of the Empire. These measures were well timed to coincide with the outbreak in 1914 of the great war, which, it is now very certain, had been already determined on by the General War Staff at Berlin.
It only remains to add that when, soon after the commencement of the war, the Porte, at the instance of Enver Pasha, declared itself against the Allied Powers, the British Government at once proclaimed the independence of Egypt, under its protectorate, and the annexation of Cyprus. These were the last territorial losses of the Ottoman Empire which can be counted as faits accomplis. It has been shown that, in the past, there were due to the régime of the Young Turks, during the six years of its predominance, from 1908 to 1914, the loss in Europe of Macedonia, Epirus, and Albania, and of a large part of Thrace; of Crete, Cyprus, and many other islands in the Ægean Sea; and the suzerainty of Bulgaria, Bosnia, and Herzegovina; and in Africa of the province of Tripoli and the suzerainty of Egypt. These great losses rivalled in extent of territory and population those incurred either by Mahmoud II or by Abdul Hamid II. It needs no prophet to predict a further shrinkage of territory, or loss of independence, after the conclusion of the existing war in Europe, whatever may be its other results.
London: T. Fisher Unwin. Ltd. Stanford’s Geog.l Estab.t London.
SOUTH EASTERN EUROPE
AND ASIA MINOR
1914.
XXIII
A RETROSPECT
It has been shown in preceding chapters that the two great historic movements of the growth and decay of the Turkish Empire extended over periods not differing much in length. Reckoning its birth from the accession, in 1288, of Othman, as chief of a small tribe of Turks in Asia Minor, nearly three hundred years elapsed before the Empire reached its zenith. During these years ten eminent Sultans and one Grand Vizier (Sokolli) of a degenerate Sultan were concerned in its extension. It was a period of almost continuous victory and conquest. The Ottoman armies, during these years, met with only a single serious disaster, that at Angora in 1402 at the hands of Timur and a host of Mongolian invaders, which seemed at first to have struck a fatal blow to the Empire. But it soon rallied, and the process of aggrandizement was renewed. With this exception the Ottomans were almost uniformly successful. The number, however, of pitched battles in the field, which decided the fate of States successively invaded, was not great. Thrace was won by the defeat of the Byzantines by Murad I at Eski Baba in 1361. The Bulgarians were conquered at Samakof in 1371, and the Serbians at Kossova in 1389, by the same Sultan. The Hungarians were overthrown at Mohacz in 1529. The Persians were defeated at Calderan, 1514, near Tabriz, and the Egyptians at Aleppo, 1516, and Ridania, near Cairo, under Selim, 1516. The crusaders from Europe were defeated in three great battles—at the Maritza, 1363, Nicopolis, 1396, and Varna, 1444. At most of these battles the Ottomans had great superiority of numbers, and as against the Persians and Egyptians they were provided with a powerful artillery, of which their opponents were wholly deficient. The other very numerous campaigns consisted mainly of successions of sieges by invading armies of Ottomans, where the invaded, with inferior forces, protracted the defence, often over long terms of years.
The Ottomans were almost equally successful at sea, with one notable exception, at Lepanto, at the very end of the period we are referring to, when they met with a terrible disaster from the combined navies of Europe, much inferior in numbers of ships and men. But before this their naval supremacy had enabled them to extend the Empire over Algiers and Tunis. Nothing resulted from the great battle of Lepanto except loss of prestige to the Ottomans. The combination against them was dissolved, and for many years they maintained supremacy in the Eastern Mediterranean.