The Turco-Italian War of 1911–12, known in Turkey as the Trablusgarp Harbi (War of Tripoli) and in Italy as the Guerra di Libia (The Libyan War), was fought primarily in the Ottoman province of Tripolitania, roughly corresponding to modern-day Libya, before expanding to the Adriatic, Aegean, and Red Seas.
MapItalian map of TripolitaniaClick to view full screen and zoom in
MapMapClick to view full screen and zoom in
By the late 19th century, Italy had fallen considerably behind other European powers in the acquisition of overseas colonies. As rival empires expanded globally, Italian strategic interest increasingly focused on Tripoli, which occupied a commanding position across the Mediterranean. This ambition intensified following France's occupation of Tunisia in 1881 (it had held Algeria since 1830) and Britain's occupation of Egypt in 1882, which left Tripoli as the last remaining Ottoman territory in North Africa, and, in Italian eyes, the last unclaimed prize. In the year 1900, a secret agreement was forged between France and Italy, with France setting its sights on Morocco and Italy coveting Tripoli.1
From 1902 onwards, Italy began implementing a policy of "peaceful penetration" in Tripoli, creating enterprises financed by Banco di Roma to establish an economic foothold before initiating a full-scale invasion. The Ottoman government, which had only nominal control in Tripoli, exerted significant effort to curb Italian economic expansion, even with some success. The economic development ceased, and Banco di Roma faced financial difficulties, seeking assistance from British and German financiers to cover its debts to shareholders. The bank also urged the government to protect its investments in Tripoli and enhance the value of its land holdings. Banco di Roma had invested about $4-5 million in Tripoli by 1911. Furthermore, the Italian government had set up schools, post offices, sent archaeological expeditions, and encouraged Italians to undertake various initiatives.2
Key dates
| 23 Sep 1911 | Italian note accuses Ottoman officers of inciting the population |
| 25 Sep 1911 | The Derne reaches Tripoli with arms and ammunition |
| 28 Sep 1911 | Italy's 24-hour ultimatum |
| 29 Sep 1911 | Italy declares war on the Ottoman Empire |
| 3 Oct 1911 | Italian fleet bombards Tripoli |
| 5 Oct 1911 | Italian troops land in Tripoli |
| 23 Oct 1911 | Ottoman–Arab attack at Şara Şat (Sciara Sciat) |
| 1 Nov 1911 | First aerial bombing in history |
| 5 Nov 1911 | Italy declares the annexation of Tripoli |
| 22 Dec 1911 | Ottoman–Sanusi victory at Nadura near Tobruk, the battle associated with Mustafa Kemal |
| 7 Jan 1912 | Ottoman gunboats destroyed at Kunfuda in the Red Sea |
| 24 Feb 1912 | Italian cruisers bombard Beirut |
| 18 Apr 1912 | Italian navy bombards the Dardanelles |
| 4–5 May 1912 | Italian landing on Rhodes; the Dodecanese fall |
| 18–19 Jul 1912 | Italian torpedo boats try to force the Dardanelles |
| 15/18 Oct 1912 | Treaty of Ouchy ends the war |
| 14–15 Jan 1913 | Neşet Bey and the last main body of Ottoman troops leave the province |
The Road to War
The last Ottoman province in Africa
Tripoli had been Ottoman for three and a half centuries. Captured by the Spanish in 1510 and handed to the Knights of St John in 1530, the town was taken in 1551 by an Ottoman force under Sinan Pasha, Murad Ağa and the corsair Turgut Reis, and Murad Ağa became its first governor. From 1711 the Karamanlı family, descendants of a local Janissary officer, ruled the province as a hereditary and practically independent dynasty, until an Ottoman expedition under Çengeloğlu Tahir Pasha landed in May 1835 and restored direct rule from Istanbul. In 1877 the eastern half of the province, Cyrenaica, was detached as the separate sancak of Benghazi, administered directly from the capital.3 Seen from Istanbul, it was a distant and poor frontier: officials regarded a posting there as exile, and the deserts of Fezzan were notorious as a place of banishment for political suspects.4 Yet Tripoli and Benghazi mattered far beyond their size. They were the last Ottoman foothold in Africa, the gateway through which the sultan-caliph's influence reached the Sahara and the Sudan, and their population was overwhelmingly Muslim and attached to the Caliphate.
Italy's colonial ambitions
Italy, unified only in 1870, came late to the scramble for colonies, and its first target had been Tunisia, where some 10,000 Italians had lived as early as 1815 against a mere 2,000 Frenchmen. At the Congress of Berlin in 1878, Bismarck encouraged France to take Tunis, and Italian diplomats were said to have left the congress with "clean hands" and empty pockets; Tripoli was already being mentioned as Italy's eventual compensation. France's occupation of Tunisia in 1881 drove Italy into the Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary the following year.5 A second humiliation followed in East Africa, where an Italian army was crushed by the Ethiopians at Adwa in 1896, a defeat that left a lasting wound in Italian military pride and that the advocates of a Libyan war promised to avenge.6 Italian nationalists spoke of Tripoli as the "fourth shore" of a reborn Roman Mediterranean; others saw in it a destination for the hundreds of thousands of southern Italians who emigrated every year to the Americas, or simply a matter of national prestige that a great power could not afford to let slip.7
The diplomatic groundwork was laid patiently. The Franco-Italian exchange of 1900 and the Prinetti–Barrère accord of 1902 traded Morocco for Tripoli; Britain had given Italy similar assurances; and in October 1909, at Racconigi, Tsar Nicholas II and King Victor Emmanuel III agreed that Italy would look favorably on Russia's interests in the Straits, and Russia on Italy's interests in Tripoli.8 Germany and Austria-Hungary, Italy's allies, had acknowledged Italian "rights" in Tripoli in the renewals of the Triple Alliance. By 1911 every one of the great powers had, in one form or another, signed away a province of the Ottoman Empire, which was not a party to any of these arrangements.
Britain had been the first to hold out the prospect. When the Italian prime minister Francesco Crispi sounded London in 1887, he was told: "Not now, but at an appropriate moment Tripoli will be Italian."9 The 1902 accord with France was less secret than it seemed. Paris passed the text to the Foreign Office, which passed it on to Berlin. Its only real secret was its date: it was signed on 10 July 1902 but dated 1 November, to spare both governments the reproaches of their allies. As Koloğlu observes, it contained nothing new; its value for Rome was that a great power had at last endorsed its "right" to Tripoli.10 The aim, in the words of the journalist Giuseppe Bevione, one of the loudest advocates of the expedition, was to absorb the province "quietly and gradually" and to take it "without firing a shot."11
Peaceful penetration and Ottoman obstruction
Abdülhamid II understood the danger. His policy was to deny the Italians any concessions he could, play the powers against one another, and strengthen the province militarily without provoking Rome. When the Italian government of Alessandro Fortis demanded concessions in 1905, the Porte turned to France for support, only to be told by Paris to give way; once the concessions were granted, Fortis remarked to the French foreign minister that he was now "sure we shall easily succeed in occupying Tripoli." The sultan even suggested, unsuccessfully, that Italy might be compensated with concessions in Iraq rather than in North Africa. In the 1890s and early 1900s the Tripoli division was raised to some 20,000 men, a local auxiliary militia, the Kuloğulları, was reorganized so that 40,000–50,000 men could be called up in an emergency, and 40,000 Martini and Schneider rifles were stockpiled to arm them.12
The Banco di Roma became the spearhead of Italian penetration. The bank's vice-chairman was a brother of the Italian foreign minister Tommaso Tittoni, and it had close ties to the Vatican; it opened its Tripoli branch in 1907 despite the protests of the governor, Recep Pasha, who proposed that the state agricultural bank lend to local farmers so as to keep them out of the hands of Italian moneylenders. The bank bought land and grain, financed shipping lines and flour mills, and acquired interests in sponge fishing and esparto grass, while Italian schools grew from five in 1900 to ten by 1911, alongside Italian hospitals, post offices and newspapers. Archaeological and scientific missions combed the province for phosphate and sulphur deposits.13
The bank's reach extended even into the administration: when the provincial gendarmes mutinied over arrears of pay, their salaries were met from a special credit opened by the Banco di Roma. In April 1909 the governor warned the bank's representative, Bresciani, that "there is a formidable file against you in Istanbul," but by 1911 the bank's transactions had reached 244 million francs.14 Recep Pasha's successor, İbrahim Pasha, followed the same line. When the bank opened a 100,000-franc credit for the Tripoli municipality in May 1910, the governor stepped in and had the Ottoman Bank lend to the municipality instead; only 20,000 francs of the Italian credit had been drawn.15
In February 1911 the Italian embassy protested formally against his "obstruction," Rome persuaded Berlin and Vienna to support its demand, and in August 1911 the Porte recalled him. His appointed successor, Bekir Sami Bey, was on leave in Tokat and in no hurry to take up the post; he was still in Istanbul when the Italian ultimatum arrived.16
The Young Turks in Tripoli
Libya's ties with the Young Turks went back to the reign of Abdülhamid. In September 1897 a first group of 78 political exiles arrived in Tripoli: doctors, officers, students of the military, medical and engineering schools of Istanbul, and some civilians. They had been sentenced to Fezzan, the "sunny Siberia" of the empire, but the governor had their place of exile changed to the provincial capital. Most were given administrative, teaching or medical posts, and many married and settled there. They opened a library and a school, the Mekteb-i İrfan, staffed entirely by exiles, and under Dr. Mehmed Reşid (Şahingiray) they founded the seventh secret branch of the Committee of Union and Progress. Koloğlu argues that the sympathy they won among the townspeople made the local population all the readier to join the resistance in 1911.17
After the revolution of 1908, officials of the old regime, notables and sheikhs in Tripoli formed a faction against the returning exiles, and the Committee sent a young staff officer, Mustafa Kemal, on a fact-finding mission. Between September and mid-November 1908 he visited Tripoli and Benghazi, met all the interested parties and secured their loyalty to the new regime without resorting to force.18 The revolution also brought a boom in the local press. The Arabic weekly al-Mirsad campaigned so persistently against Italian designs on North Africa that Rome demanded an apology from the Porte for its contempt for the Italian army; the foreign minister, Rıfat Pasha, replied that he disapproved of the paper's tone but that the law did not allow him to close it down. Italian papers in Tripoli, such as the Eco di Tripoli, were subsidized through the Banco di Roma. Their fiercest opponent was Carlos Guzman, an anticlerical Argentinian of Italian descent who published Il Progresso. At Italy's request he was expelled in August 1910, and expelled again when he tried to return in 1911.19
A province left defenceless
The constitutional governments that followed the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 not only failed to continue Abdülhamid's precautions; in several respects they dismantled them. The Kuloğulları organization was abolished, depriving the province of the 40,000–50,000 auxiliaries on which its defense had been planned. Months before the invasion, on the orders of the Minister of War, Mahmut Şevket Pasha, much of the Tripoli division was shipped to Yemen to fight the rebellion of Imam Yahya, the strength of its battalions was cut, the 40,000 rifles intended for the militia were sent back to Istanbul to be exchanged for a newer model and never replaced, and not a single gun was added to the coastal forts; some were even removed. Arabic-speaking officers familiar with the country were replaced by officers who spoke only Turkish.20 The province was also in the grip of famine. By March 1911, according to figures given in the Ottoman parliament, 514 people, most of them women and children, had died of hunger and some 200,000 had emigrated to Tunisia and Egypt; of the 10,000 lira the Chamber of Deputies voted for relief, only 2,000 reached Tripoli.21
There was no shortage of warnings. The Ottoman ambassador in Rome, Kazım Bey, and the military attaché, Major Ali Fuat, reported repeatedly on Italian preparations. In February 1911 the former foreign minister Rıfat Pasha read the cabinet a report urging that the garrison be reinforced quietly, concluding that "the presence of a perfect division there is the strongest of all the laws of international law." The government did nothing.22 It reasoned that Germany would never allow its ally to attack the Ottoman Empire, that France would not want Italy as a neighbor of Tunisia, that Britain coveted Benghazi for Egypt, and that Austria was Italy's arch-rival; Italian military preparations, if they were directed anywhere, must be aimed at Austria.23 When war came, the province had no governor and no appointed division commander, and several district governors were away on leave; Kazım Bey himself was on holiday in Istanbul and the embassy in Rome was in the hands of a young chargé d'affaires, Seyfettin Bey.24
Diplomacy and deception
Despite Italy being, since 1882, a partner of Germany in the Triple Alliance, while Germany cultivated a close friendship with the Ottoman Empire, Germany harbored growing unease over Italy's designs on Tripoli, fearing the region could serve as a springboard for broader Italian expansion into areas of German interest.25 By September 1911, the Tripoli question had become a dominant topic in the Italian press, with public opinion broadly convinced that the Ottoman government had treated Italian nationals unjustly. Amid suspicions of German intrigue, Italy began searching for a pretext for war.
The opportunity came with the second Moroccan crisis. When French troops entered Fez in April 1911 and Germany sent the gunboat Panther to Agadir on 1 July, the Italian government concluded that the time to cash in its agreements had arrived. Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti charged his foreign minister, the Marquis di San Giuliano, with the diplomatic preparation, to be completed between June and September. In London, Sir Edward Grey assured the Italian ambassador in July that Britain would give diplomatic support if Italian subjects were mistreated, although by August he was reminding him that "Morocco is disintegrating, whereas Tripoli is part of the Turkish empire and is not disintegrating." In September the French foreign minister de Selves assured Rome that France stood unconditionally behind Italy, and Russia welcomed the enterprise provided it did not spill over into the Balkans.26
At the same time, Giolitti took pains to lull the Ottomans. On 9 June 1911 San Giuliano told the Italian parliament that Italy had "no complaint" against the Ottoman government over Tripoli and Benghazi, and that the Turks' suspicion of Italian economic activity was "entirely wrong." Giolitti and San Giuliano spent the summer away from Rome to give the impression that nothing serious was afoot. As Giolitti later wrote in his memoirs, the furious attacks of the nationalist press on his apparent passivity "pleased me very much, because this violent campaign showed that my plan was succeeding perfectly, and naturally dispelled the suspicions of the Turkish government, which was indeed caught completely unawares by our ultimatum."27 When the Italian note finally arrived, the Ottoman Ministry of the Interior complained that it had received no information at all on Italian preparations.28 Inside Italy, opposition to the war came mainly from the socialists, among them the young Benito Mussolini, who led demonstrators onto the railway tracks to stop troop trains, and from intellectuals such as Gaetano Salvemini, who warned that Libya was no promised land; but they were a minority against a press and public eager for war.29
Relations had been souring since the revolution. Italian diplomats had hoped for a friendlier partner in the Young Turks, but the experienced consul in Salonica, Primo Levi, concluded that with Hakkı Pasha, "like the majority of the Young Turks, the chapter of our courtesy has come to an end." The ambassador, Mayor des Planches, reported that the interior minister, Talat Bey, was the most hostile of all to Italy.30 When Germany tried to mediate, Rıfat Pasha summed up the Ottoman position: "We are not against Italian business as long as it observes the same rules as the other states. However, they want to be the only one. We cannot accept that."31
In Italy the press called Libya the "Terra Promessa," the promised land, and announced almost daily that "time has come, the fruit is ripe." Few voices dissented. One was the orientalist Leone Caetani, who told the Chamber on 7 June 1911 that "Turkish obstructions are simply the outcome of the tremendous clamour that has been raised by the Italian press in Tripoli against Turkey."32 Even Italy's own diplomats were kept in the dark. Seeing off the new consul, Galli, to Tripoli, San Giuliano whispered that he would be "the last," and said no more.33 In Istanbul, the Libyan deputy Sadık Bey published a letter in Tanin on 12 September 1911 accusing the constitutional government of neglecting Tripoli just as the old regime had done. He called for food and ammunition for 50,000–60,000 fighters and a regular militia of 25,000–30,000 men.34
The Italian note of 23 September
On 23 September 1911, the Italian embassy in Istanbul delivered a diplomatic note to the Sublime Porte, accusing Turkish officers in Tripoli of inciting the local population against Italians and thereby endangering their lives. Istanbul firmly rejected this characterization, asserting that no threat existed and that the Ottoman Empire was fully capable of maintaining order within its own territory.35
Simultaneously, the Sublime Porte initiated diplomatic efforts to avert a conflict. A cable dispatched to the Ottoman Embassies in London, Paris, and Berlin conveyed a clear message: "Every conceivable effort, even the seemingly impossible, should be made to reach an agreement with Italy. Should they commence hostilities by landing troops or by any other means, we will be confronted with the peril of a severe deterioration in our domestic situation."36 The Ottoman chargé d'affaires in Rome, Seyfettin Bey, engaged with the Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs, San Giuliano, who left no room for ambiguity. They expected the Ottoman Empire to peacefully vacate Tripoli, and should this not come to pass, Italy would not hesitate to resort to military force.37
Even now the Porte placed its hopes in Germany. Grand Vizier İbrahim Hakkı Pasha, himself a former ambassador in Rome who had dined and played bridge with Italian diplomats, asked the German ambassador, Baron Marschall von Bieberstein, to intercede with Germany's ally, offering any economic concession Italy might wish. Marschall blamed the Committee of Union and Progress for ignoring his warnings and promised only to consult Berlin.38 On 27 September, the day before the ultimatum, the Ministry of the Interior assured the provinces in a circular that the Italian threat had "lost its first effect thanks to the political measures taken by the Sublime State" and was expected to disappear altogether.39 Unknown to the Porte, the Italians had broken the Ottoman diplomatic cipher.40
The Derne and the ultimatum
MapThe Port of Tripoli in the 1900sClick to view full screen and zoom in
In an attempt to provide support for the Turkish garrison in Tripoli, as an Italian invasion seemed imminent, the Ottoman Chief of Staff decided to dispatch material aid to the province. Escaping the pursuit of Italian warships, the Turkish vessel Derne, loaded with guns and ammunition, arrived in the town of Tripoli on 25 September. The arrival of the Derne offered significant moral support to the local population.41
The ship's departure had been no secret: the Italian military attaché in Istanbul reported that it carried 10,000 rifles, and Rome ordered its navy to intercept it. The Italian dispatch boat Galileo left the Golden Horn on the same day, ostensibly to fetch the new ambassador from Piraeus, and rumors soon spread in the capital that the Derne had been captured. In fact it slipped through, and the townspeople of Tripoli, notables included, carried its crates on their shoulders. The rifles had been hidden beneath sacks of flour and biscuit in case of an Italian search, and unloading went on day and night for five days. According to Kurtcephe the ship brought 12,500 Mauser rifles and 600 cases of ammunition, besides flour, biscuit and uniforms; the official history gives a larger figure of 25,000 Mausers and 6,812 cases of cartridges.42 News that arms had arrived punctured the Italian propaganda that the state had abandoned the province, and Arabs from the surrounding districts hurried into town to enroll as volunteers.43
The following day, four Italian warships, Varese, Napoli, Roma, and Garibaldi, blockaded Tripoli. Within a few days, the number of ships on patrol duty would increase to 22.44 On 28 September, sixteen Italian warships lay off Zanzur, and one of them sent eleven sailors ashore to a quarry, where they questioned the workers in Arabic about their mood; seeing an angry crowd gather, they hurried back to their boat. That night a boat entered Tripoli harbor and asked the Derne's crew, in English, the name and nationality of their ship.45 With the Derne's arrival, the Italian government now had the excuse it had been seeking. On 28 September, Italy issued a 24-hour ultimatum to Istanbul, demanding the presence of Italian troops in Tripoli to protect the local Italian population, which then numbered hardly a thousand, with scarcely two hundred having come from Italy.
Giolitti's cabinet had decided on the ultimatum on 26 September, but De Martino delivered it only on the 28th, after Marschall had given Italy the green light. It declared that Italy had for years warned the Porte about the "disorder and neglect" of Tripoli and Benghazi, whose development was a matter of vital interest to Italy because of their proximity to its coasts; that the hostility of the population was the work of Ottoman officials and officers; that the dispatch of military transports had made the situation critical; and that Italy had therefore decided to occupy the two provinces militarily and expected a reply within 24 hours.46
The Ottoman cabinet, which only days earlier had resolved to buy off Italy with economic concessions, replied on 29 September, before the deadline expired, that the constitutional governments could not be held responsible for a situation inherited from the previous regime, that they had placed no obstacles in the way of Italian enterprise for three years, and that they were ready to negotiate any guarantee short of the empire's territorial integrity.47 At its congress in Salonica, the Committee of Union and Progress issued a proclamation calling on the nation to keep calm and dignified and "not to touch a hair" of Italian subjects, so as to show that the Turks were more law-abiding and civilized than their attackers.48
Preparing for the invasion
Simultaneously, the Ottoman Minister of War, Mahmut Şevket Pasha, was sending telegrams to the garrison commander, Colonel Neşet Bey, providing him with instructions on how to respond should the Italians initiate an invasion. While the Sublime Porte was engaged in diplomatic efforts to avert a war, Neşet Bey and his troops were already making preparations for the defense of the region, in consultation with Mahmut Şevket Pasha.49 In an urgent cipher of 26 September, Mahmut Şevket instructed that an Italian squadron appearing off Tripoli was to be saluted as custom required; if the Italian admiral announced a landing, the commanders were to refer to Istanbul, resist at first without arms, and then by force if fired upon. The garrisons of the forts were to fight "to the end, manfully and heroically," never hesitating "to sacrifice their lives to uphold the honor of the Ottoman name." If the forts were destroyed, the guns were to be spiked, and the troops would withdraw inland, keep Ottoman administration alive in the interior and communicate with Istanbul through Egypt and Tunisia.50
The plan was straightforward. In the event of an invasion, Neşet Bey's initial objective was to attempt to halt the Italian advance at the beachhead. If this proved unsuccessful, new battalions were to be formed using reserves, and a strategy of engaging the enemy in a tactical retreat to Garyan was to be implemented. In this scenario, combat would primarily involve small units rather than a large-scale offensive. The plan also assumed that the Italian landings would occur in Tripoli and Benghazi, without attempts to venture inland. Mahmut Şevket Pasha additionally instructed Neşet Bey to establish contact with the leader of the local Sanusi tribe, who held significant influence over the Muslim population.51
The means at Neşet's disposal were pitiful. The coastal forts mounted old guns whose shells could reach barely 2,000 meters, against the 9,000–10,000 meters of the Italian naval artillery. There were no animals or carts to move stores inland, and of the measures ordered at the last minute, most remained on paper: on 27 September the War Ministry promised 30,000 meters of barbed wire and asked the division to prepare 50,000 wooden stakes for it, but none ever arrived. Of the commissions formed in the town for transport, supply and the distribution of arms, only the last actually functioned.52
The Invasion and Ottoman Defense
War is declared
On 29 September 1911, with the backing of the British and French governments and without waiting for the 24-hour ultimatum to run its course, Italy declared war on Turkey. Just two hours prior to this declaration of war, the Italian fleet had sunk two Turkish torpedo boats off Preveza in the Adriatic Sea. Grand Vizier Hakkı Pasha, who had maintained confidence in a peaceful resolution until the very last moment, resigned from his post. He was succeeded by Said Pasha.53
The declaration was handed to Hakkı Pasha by the Italian embassy's chief dragoman while the cabinet was meeting at the palace. Only days earlier the grand vizier had assured parliament that relations with Italy were friendly. Faced with ruin, he resigned at once, asking in his letter to be relieved so that he might take responsibility for the events upon himself. "In the old days," he is said to have remarked, "sultans had grand viziers in my situation beheaded at the mounting-stone; and that is the state I am in." The opposition soon demanded that he be tried before the High Court for leaving Tripoli without troops, arms, governor or commander; the Committee of Union and Progress shielded him.54
His successor, the veteran Mehmed Said Pasha, who had served as grand vizier seven times before, sent Mahmut Şevket to see Marschall; the German ambassador replied that Germany could do nothing to stop the war, though it did not approve of Italy's conduct. Britain answered that the Porte had asked for mediation too late.55 Germany took over the protection of Italian subjects in the empire; Italian employees of the Anatolian, Jaffa–Jerusalem and other railways were dismissed within days; and on 29 September a provisional law imposed a customs duty of 100 percent on Italian goods, the only form of boycott the capitulations allowed.56
The sinkings in the Adriatic had come before any declaration of war. On the afternoon of 29 September the torpedo boats Tokat and Alpagut and the yacht Trablusgarp were patrolling against smugglers off Preveza when four Italian destroyers appeared. The Turkish crews, unaware of the ultimatum, began preparing to salute them as custom required; the Italians opened fire. With its torpedoes stowed away in peacetime fashion, Tokat could only run for the shore, where it was beached and wrecked with one man killed and many wounded. In the following days the Italians destroyed or captured further vessels at Preveza and at Gomenitsa (Reşadiye), and seized the yacht as a prize.57 Opening the new session of parliament on 2 October, Sultan Mehmed Reşad denounced Italy for attacking, before its own deadline had expired, torpedo boats that "were performing the ceremonial salute customary towards the warships of friendly states." Austria-Hungary, which would not tolerate fighting on the coast of Albania, warned Rome so sharply that Giolitti ordered the navy to avoid further operations in the Adriatic and Ionian Seas.58
Chaos in Tripoli
The situation in Tripoli was one of utter chaos, and Ottoman authorities struggled to regain control of the city. Local residents were encouraged to join volunteer battalions, but many opted to remain in their homes and defend themselves. There was a severe shortage of weaponry, ammunition, and vehicles. Colonel Neşet Bey found himself in command of only some 4,000 ill-equipped men.59
On 30 September, an Italian officer landed and sought surrender. Neşet Bey sought guidance from Istanbul on how to respond. Mahmut Şevket Pasha, still hopeful for a diplomatic resolution, believed it was premature to engage in combat. He instructed Neşet Bey to cede some coastal areas to the Italians and withdraw inland without resisting the enemy.60
In effect, the Porte had all but abandoned the province to its fate. Hoping to the end that the powers would bring Italy to the negotiating table, Istanbul ordered the garrison not to resist the landings, without reckoning on the effect that a withdrawal would have on a population that had been told for months that the state would defend it.61 On 1 October an Italian torpedo boat flying a white flag entered the harbor and took off the Italian residents, who were embarked on a Banco di Roma steamer waiting offshore, while the German consul called on Neşet Bey on behalf of his Italian colleague to announce the blockade and to ask that neutral ships leave the port.62
Surrender demands
The following day, the Italians demanded the surrender of two Turkish warships anchored in Tripoli, the Derne and the gunboat Seyyad-ı Derya. Instead of relinquishing the vessels to the enemy, their commanders opted to scuttle the two ships. On the same day, Derna came under bombardment, and the cable connecting Tripoli to Malta was severed, cutting off communication with Istanbul.63
Admiral Faravelli, the commander of the Italian invasion force, delivered an ultimatum to Neşet Bey on 2 October, requesting the surrender of Tripoli. When this request was rebuffed, Italian naval artillery commenced shelling the city on the following day. Meanwhile, in compliance with Mahmut Şevket's directives, Neşet Bey's forces were in the process of retreating inland. This withdrawal led to disorder in the city, and upon Acting Governor Besim Bey's appeal, Neşet Bey dispatched a few units back to Tripoli to restore order.64
The ultimatum was delivered with some ceremony. Rear Admiral Thaon di Revel came ashore and presented the commander-in-chief's terms: the Italian ships were to be free to anchor and land unmolested, the forts and batteries were to be disarmed, and Italian officers were to supervise these measures. Neşet Bey excused himself on grounds of illness, and the acting governor, the provincial treasurer (defterdar) Besim Bey, went out to the flagship that evening with Captain İsmail and Arif Bey, the provincial director of foreign affairs. They explained that they had no authority to surrender a city, and asked for time to consult Istanbul; the Italians replied that the cable had been cut. When they returned with the answer at noon on 3 October, it was that the local government had sworn to die defending the homeland.65
The bombardment of Tripoli
The bombardment began at 15:30 on 3 October, with the battleship Benedetto Brin opening fire, and was conducted in three zones by squadrons under Borea Ricci, Faravelli and Thaon di Revel. The Ottoman shells fell short of the Italian ships; by 17:00 the forts had fallen silent, with eleven men killed and some twenty wounded. The inexperience of the gunners and the sight of shells dropping into the sea broke the morale of soldiers and townspeople alike, and the garrison abandoned the forts and withdrew towards its camp in the interior.66 Most of the troops had in fact left the day before, on the War Ministry's orders, with Neşet Bey at their head.
With the garrison gone, the town fell into anarchy. The prisons were thrown open and looters ransacked the castle, the depots, the abandoned houses and even the military hospital, whose patients were thrown into the street. A group intent on destroying the land registers broke into the state archive and scattered its records. Looted goods were sold for next to nothing at street corners; a Mauser rifle went for two kuruş, a sack of flour for two francs. Many inhabitants sold the rifles distributed to them to the Italians, who were offering ten francs apiece, and more than 10,000 rifles changed hands in two days.67
On the morning of 4 October the bombardment resumed, and the magazine of the Turgut battery blew up. The town's notables, led by the mayor, Hassuna Pasha, a descendant of the Karamanlı dynasty who had long been in the pay of the Banco di Roma, asked Besim Bey to surrender the town. Besim replied that he could not decide without Neşet, and sent a messenger to the division; the notables then met in a mosque and sent their own delegation to Admiral Faravelli, while a merchant named Halife hoisted a white sheet on the flagpole of the governor's residence.68
The landings
Italian troops landed in Tripoli on 5 October, just one day after invading Tobruk, and they encountered little resistance. The occupation of the city was swiftly completed within a day, with Admiral Borea Ricci assuming the role of the new governor and the arrest of Besim Bey. Subsequently, Derna was captured on 18 October, Benghazi on 20 October, and Khoms on 21 October.69 The first to land, at 07:30 on 5 October, were two naval infantry regiments under Captain Umberto Cagni, the Arctic explorer, who became commander of the occupation; the Sultaniye fort was taken a quarter of an hour later, and by noon the Italian flag flew over the government house. Besim Bey was arrested, insulted and deported to Malta, and on 9 October 254 Ottoman officials and their families followed him. Hassuna Pasha pledged his loyalty to the new rulers and was kept on as mayor.70
At that time, the Turkish military presence in Tripoli was significantly weaker compared to the Italian invasion force, consisting of 30,000 troops, 6,000 animals, 103 artillery pieces, 800 trucks, and nine airplanes.71 Yet for the first weeks the Italians did not leave the immediate vicinity of the towns. General Carlo Caneva, who arrived on 11 October to take command, entrenched his troops in a semicircle a few kilometers deep around Tripoli, within range of the fleet's guns, and waited for reinforcements.72
An unequal struggle
The Empire was already grappling with various insurgencies in regions such as Yemen, Macedonia, and Albania. Moreover, the disruption of land routes to Tripoli posed significant logistical challenges, rendering support incredibly difficult, if not unfeasible. Additionally, the Italian navy held a dominant position in the Mediterranean. Meanwhile, the local tribes, who shared the Islamic faith, displayed limited interest in the conflict between the Turks and Italians. The Sanusi tribe, however, offered crucial support to the Turkish resistance. These resistance forces, comprised of Turkish troops and local militia, gathered in Garyan.
The fall of Tripoli without a fight caused consternation in Istanbul. On 7 October Mahmut Şevket sent Neşet Bey a harsh telegram asking whether it was "worthy of military honor" merely to withdraw before the enemy, and warning that he could escape this obligation "only by death." Neşet replied that a night raid by two battalions of 120 men each had failed, that he was ready "to die like any private," and that if the minister had lost confidence in him, the command should be given to someone else. Mahmut Şevket relented on 10 October: changing commanders in the middle of a war, he wrote, was not right, and Neşet should retain the command, arm the Arabs and raise a general uprising.73 The War Ministry sent 150,000 lira through Tunisia and Egypt, the government proclaimed a holy war (cihad-ı mukaddes), and volunteer officers were promised a travel allowance of 100 gold pieces and up to four times their normal pay.74
Neşet's headquarters fell back first to Saniyet-i Beni Adem, then to Aziziye and finally to the Garyan mountains, where the province's administrative center was transferred. There, Arab volunteers from Zanzur, Zawiya, Ajilat, the Jabal and Misrata began to gather, some 3,000 armed and as many unarmed. The local deputy for the Jabal, Süleyman el-Baruni, raised a volunteer battalion at Yefren with 1,000 Martini rifles.75 Volunteers who had sold their rifles in the first days of panic were now joined by men determined to fight, and the Italian expectation that the Arabs would welcome them as liberators from Turkish rule was soon disappointed.76
Selling Tripoli?
Throughout the crisis, Rome hoped that the Porte could be persuaded to part with the province for money, as Austria-Hungary had acquired Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1909 by paying compensation. Before the war the Italian financier Giuseppe Volpi, who represented the Ottoman creditors in the Public Debt Administration, put this "Bosnia-Herzegovina" formula to the Unionist journalist and deputy Hüseyin Cahit, who rejected it out of hand. When the idea was passed on through Germany, Hakkı Pasha told the German ambassador that "every minister will refuse with indignation to accept a financial formula, to exchange land for money."77
The most curious episode came after the fighting had begun. According to the memoirs of Alberto Theodoli, the Italian representative in the Public Debt Administration, the Salonica-born deputy for Istanbul, Emanuel Carasso, came to see him at Therapia on 3 October 1911. Carasso said the interior minister had asked him, in the name of the Committee, to beg Theodoli to go to Rome and stop the war. At the Porte, Theodoli wrote, the grand vizier and the minister of war repeated the offer. Its terms were a mandate for the King of Italy to occupy and administer Libya in return for recognizing the sultan's sovereignty, an indemnity of 10 million Turkish pounds, and a treaty of friendship, while the Ottomans would save face by organizing Arab armed resistance and a boycott of Italian goods. Rome turned the proposal down. Back in Istanbul, Marschall greeted Theodoli as one of "those Sicilian bandits who have seized the Consulta" and had him expelled from the empire.78 Koloğlu, who lists fourteen inconsistencies in Theodoli's account and found no Ottoman document to confirm it, treats the story with caution.79
Whatever its truth, the Unionists closed the door in public. "National honour does not give way to a financial solution," Tanin declared on 11 October, and on 19 October the grand vizier, Said Pasha, told parliament that "the country cannot be sold for money." The formula returned in Italy's peace proposals of 1912, which offered to pay the Ottoman debts relating to Libya and buy the state's property there. "They want to be the owner of our land by paying us five to ten paras," Hüseyin Cahit wrote in Tanin on 21 March 1912, and on 15 July Said Pasha again told the deputies that "the Bosnia-Herzegovina system is not acceptable" because "a land cannot be sold for money."80
The rumors did lasting harm to the Unionists. The opposition spread the story that the Committee, at the Kaiser's instigation, had decided to sell Tripoli to Italy, sending Hakkı Pasha to Rome as ambassador to arrange the deal with the help of Carasso and a leading freemason.81 In Libya the rumor that "the caliph sold Libya to the Italians" was so widespread that Enver had to answer it in his first proclamation to the people: "They tried to mislead you by lies consisting of calumnies such as 'Your Caliph sold you to the Italians.' … God forbid, you are not sold and will never be sold."82
The war in parliament
The invasion set off fierce debates in the Ottoman parliament. The Said Pasha cabinet won a vote of confidence by 125 votes to 60, but on 23 October the Libyan deputies Sadık and Nacı opened an interpellation blaming Abdülhamid's reign and the Unionists alike for the defenseless state of the province. Through the attack of "the enemies of justice and humanity," they declared, the fatherland was losing a quarter of its lands, the nation two million of its sons, the sultanate its sovereignty in Africa, and the caliphate its contact with 90 million African Muslims.83
Some deputies drew darker conclusions. The Albanian deputy Basri warned that Albania, not Tripoli, was the heart of the empire, and the Arab nationalist Abdülhamid Zahrawi, deputy for Hama, asked who could prevent the same fate befalling Syria, the Hijaz and Iraq when the state "fails even to send two and half soldiers." Others pledged to fight on. The Syrian deputy Khalid Barazi, himself accused of separatism, declared that if peace were made by giving land to the enemy, "we will destroy this decision with our blood … It can only be done by walking over our dead bodies."84
The mood swung in the Unionists' favor as the Italians failed to advance inland, and on 1 November a telegram from Süleyman el-Baruni was read out to the chamber: "After fierce fighting, we expelled the enemy from the fortress. Today we are heading towards Trablousgharb."85 The war had to be paid for with a new tax, and the official who drafted it, Hafız Mehmed Efendi, put the case to the deputies plainly: "In order to continue the war, a man with two coats should sell one, should eat nothing but bread and cheese."86
The Young Officers and the Resistance
The volunteers
Simultaneously, a strong reaction was brewing among young Turkish officers against the Italian invasion. They could not reconcile with the fact that a portion of their homeland was under enemy control, compelling them to desire involvement in the Turkish military efforts in Tripoli. Almost immediately after learning of the invasion, Major Enver Bey, who at the time served as the Ottoman military attaché in Berlin, made his way to Salonica. Here, he proposed a battle plan to the Committee of Union and Progress, which entailed the Turkish forces drawing the enemy into the desert and eliminating them through nocturnal raids. Following the acceptance of his proposal, Enver Bey journeyed to Istanbul.
Enver Bey was not alone in his eagerness to journey to Tripoli. A group of officers, including Mustafa Kemal Bey, Eşref Bey, Süleyman Askeri Bey, the military attaché in Paris, Ali Fethi Bey, Major Halil Bey, Major Nuri Bey, Captain Fuat Bey, and Captain Ali Bey, were among those actively seeking ways to reach the region. Back in Istanbul, Enver Bey and Eşref Bey met with Mahmut Şevket Pasha, who conveyed that the Empire could not engage in an all-encompassing war with Italy. Instead, they would attempt to protect the province using local resources. Mahmut Şevket Pasha's counsel to the young officers was to undertake the mission covertly. If the government opted for full-scale warfare, they would receive comprehensive support. However, if diplomacy prevailed, the responsibility would fall squarely on their shoulders.87
A clandestine mission
The dispatch of volunteers was organized not by the government but by the army's General Staff and the Committee of Union and Progress acting together. The Third Branch of the General Staff, under Major Ömer Lütfi (Yasan), assisted by officers such as Aziz Samih (İlter), Kâzım (İnanç) and Ömer Fevzi (Mardin), handled the arrangements, financed by secret funds that were not subject to audit; volunteers registered with the Committee's leaders, and the cabinet played no formal role. Kurşun and Bilgin Geçer see in this organization a nucleus of the later Special Organization, the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa.88 The officers traveled under false names with forged passports, often disguised as journalists or as members of the Red Crescent, and the leaders were given code numbers in correspondence: Ömer Fevzi was "1," Enver "5," and Mustafa Kemal "10."89
The allowance registers of the General Staff record 301 officers sent to Tripoli and Benghazi; another document speaks of a first contingent of 340 volunteers. Many of them were captains and lieutenants, but there were also staff officers who would later rise to the highest ranks: of the ten staff officers decorated for their service in Africa, the list included Enver, Muhittin (Kurtiş), Ali Fethi (Okyar), Halil (Kut), Cavit (Erdel), Aziz Ali al-Misri, Mustafa Kemal, Nuri (Conker), Abdülkadir and Tahir. Of forty-four volunteers whose language skills are recorded, twenty-three spoke Arabic, and Neşet Bey complained that the others were of limited use in leading local fighters.90
Journey to the front
Enver Bey, accompanied by Rauf Bey and Ömer Fevzi Bey, all under assumed names and posing as reporters, left Istanbul on 9 October. After a two-week journey, they reached Alexandria and departed for Benghazi eight days later, following a brief sojourn in Egypt. Mustafa Kemal Bey set out from Istanbul on 15 October, masquerading as journalist Mustafa Şerif Bey. In Alexandria, he met Nuri Bey and Fuat Bey, and despite the risks associated with potential British capture, they eventually arrived in Tobruk.91 Ali Fethi took the western route through Tunisia, crossing the border at Bukemmes with a captain and three doctors, and reached Neşet's headquarters on 12 October.92
The journey itself was an ordeal. The western route led by train from Istanbul to Paris and Marseille, by steamer to Sfax or Gabès in French Tunisia, and then across the frontier to Neşet's headquarters, some fifty days in all; several officers were caught by the French, and a group of five who appeared in Tunis harbor in uniform and fez gave the game away. The eastern route ran through British-occupied Egypt, where Prince Ömer Tosun Pasha and other sympathizers helped the travelers, but where growing British vigilance made the crossing ever harder: one officer, Nazmi (Songar), needed sixty-five days to reach the front.93 Money was a constant problem. Mustafa Kemal later complained that the Committee had given him no help; his group ran out of money in Egypt and had to borrow from Ömer Fevzi.94
Organizing the resistance
The resistance had commenced even before the arrival of the Turkish officers, and it had already yielded successful attacks against the Italians. However, these young officers brought a higher level of coordination to these efforts and promptly began the training and organization of local forces. Alongside the Turkish units already stationed in the region, they proved highly effective in their endeavors. In a later newspaper interview, Enver Bey remarked, "Upon my initial arrival here, I encountered only 900 desert fighters. Now, I command 16,000 trained soldiers." The army they had forged also succeeded in capturing two machine guns, 250 rifles, two artillery pieces, and ammunition from the Italians.95
Originally sent to advise, the volunteer officers soon found themselves in command. The theater was divided into separate areas of operation: Neşet Bey commanded around Tripoli, supplied through Tunisia; Enver Bey commanded in Cyrenaica, supplied through Egypt, and was formally appointed commander of the Benghazi region on 23 January 1912; and the Derna front came under Mustafa Kemal.96 Mixed units, built around a nucleus of regulars and officered by Turks, were raised in each district; the local fighters, the mücahidin, fought near their own homes and under their own sheikhs. As Mesut Uyar observes, the Ottoman commanders deliberately adopted a long attritional guerrilla campaign instead of trying to recapture the coastal towns, which lay within range of the Italian navy's guns, and turned the Italian blockade of the coast into a siege of the Italian enclaves.97 Mustafa Kemal warned in a letter of January 1912 that it was a mistake to expect the local fighters to behave like regular soldiers.98
Help from the Islamic world
The war aroused a wave of solidarity across the Islamic world. In the empire itself, donations poured into the Navy League (Donanma Cemiyeti), and the newspapers published long lists of donors. Kurdish notables in Diyarbakır telegraphed that "the Kurds, bound with complete loyalty to the supreme Islamic Caliphate and the Sublime Ottoman State, are ready for military service," the Ruala sheikh Faris Şaalan offered 20,000 horsemen, and Tunisian and Algerian émigrés in Damascus volunteered to fight.99 In Egypt, where British control obliged discretion, the Khedive Abbas Hilmi sent one of his officers to Enver to swear on the Quran that he would help secretly, and committees collected money, arms and supplies; the Egyptian Red Crescent sent three medical teams, with nine doctors and six pharmacists, one of them paid for by the Khedive, which crossed the frontier on 500 camels to work at Tobruk, Derna and Benghazi. Enver wrote to thank the Egyptians: "thanks to your service and sacrifice, Muslims will be bound to one another more sincerely."100 Indian Muslims held mass meetings in Calcutta and elsewhere and had raised some 250,000 francs by early 1912, and donations arrived from as far away as Java and Afghanistan.101
Offers of men were even more generous than offers of money, but they remained offers. The press reported that a Syrian camel owner in Egypt would provide 30,000 camels free of charge, that an Egyptian notable could raise 30,000 men, that Imam Yahya of Yemen, still in rebellion against the Ottomans, stood ready with 50,000 volunteers for the holy war, and that the tribes of Arabia would send 100,000 warriors, provided that their expenses were met. The near bankruptcy of the Ottoman state was no secret, and Ottoman statesmen had no illusions about a general Muslim rising.102 "Holy War! Please do not write about it, you may render us suspect in France," the Libyan deputy Ferhad al-Zawi told a French journalist. "We are not religious fanatics, but shabbily dressed and barefooted patriots like your soldiers of the Revolution." The foreign minister, Asım Bey, was blunter still: "I will say quite plainly that the idea of Pan Islamism is an illusion."103
The Ottoman Red Crescent sent three missions of its own, two to the Tripoli front and one to Cyrenaica. The first, under Dr. Kerim Sebati, traveled through Paris and Tunisia with six doctors and fifteen orderlies and set up a 160-bed hospital in a former school at Aziziye, which the British war artist Seppings Wright called "as perfect as a modern London hospital"; in its first four months it treated some 200 wounded, 550 typhus patients and more than a thousand tribespeople, Italian prisoners among them.104
The Role of the Sanusi
The Sanusiyya
Turkish endeavours received substantial support from the Sanusi tribe, led by Ahmed Şerif, who declared a "holy war" against the Italians. Mustafa Kemal Bey was tasked with ensuring and organizing Sanusi participation. Alongside him, the Sanusi had immense trust in Enver Bey, who happened to be the son-in-law of the Caliph.105
The Sanusis were, strictly speaking, not a tribe but a Sufi brotherhood, the Sanusiyya. Its founder, Muhammad ibn Ali al-Sanusi, was born near Mostaganem in Algeria around 1788, studied in Fez, Cairo and Mecca, and founded his first lodge (zawiya) near Mecca in 1837 before settling in Cyrenaica in the 1840s; from the 1850s the order's center was the oasis of Jaghbub, later Kufra. Preaching a simple, purified Islam and the unity of Muslims, the order spread its network of lodges, which served at once as schools, hostels, courts, markets and military posts, across Cyrenaica, the Sahara and the Sudan. Every brother was expected to keep a weapon and a mount. By the eve of the war there were nearly two hundred lodges in Africa, sixty-four of them in Cyrenaica alone, and the order had fought the French in the Sahara for a decade. After the death of the founder's son, Muhammad al-Mahdi, in 1902, leadership passed to his nephew, Sayyid Ahmad al-Sharif al-Sanusi.106
The Sanusis' relations with the Ottoman state had not always been easy. Abdülhamid had confiscated their weapons, and the order had resented the arrival of Ottoman troops in the Sahara. But it had also defended Ottoman claims against France and Britain: when the British claimed the port of Sollum for Egypt after 1882, it was Ahmad al-Sharif's firm stand that forced them to back down for the time being.107 The Italians knew that the attitude of the brotherhood would decide the fate of Cyrenaica; Kurtcephe remarks that they feared the Sanusis more than the Turkish troops. The Italian king sent Ahmad al-Sharif costly gifts; he returned them, and Enver had them sent back to the Italians.108
Enver and the Sanusi
Enver arrived as an Ottoman officer, a Unionist hero and a member of the imperial family by marriage, and he played all three roles to the full. In his first proclamation he told the Arabs that it was a slander that the Caliph had sold them to the Italians: "You were not sold. The great Caliph sent me here to save you."109 He met the Sanusi leaders at the lodge of Martuba and then, repeatedly, at al-Bayda, and the sheikhs gathered near Tobruk swore an oath to fight until the last Italian had been driven out of the country. Sanusi notables, Kurtcephe writes, "would not say no to anything he said"; some came to see him as a successor to al-Mahdi.110 When the government asked him about Egyptian agents who were spreading propaganda for the union of Benghazi with Egypt, Enver replied that "there is not a single individual who will want to join Egypt at the conclusion of peace," and that all the tribes and lodge sheikhs would "remain bound to the exalted seat of the Caliphate and the eternal Ottoman State until the end of their lives and the last drop of their blood."111
The Ottoman government reinforced this loyalty with appointments, salaries and honors. Influential sheikhs were made district governors, judges and officials, and generous allowances were paid; Ahmad al-Sharif received an imperial letter of a kind normally addressed only to foreign sovereigns, the Order of Osmanieh First Class and a jeweled sword. Enver organized the fighters by lodge districts, raised three Sanusi infantry regiments of three battalions each and Bedouin companies of one to three hundred men, opened primary schools, and issued promissory notes under his own seal as a kind of paper money when the monthly remittances from Istanbul, nominally 25,000 lira, failed to arrive.112
Holy war
Ahmad al-Sharif called the faithful to jihad in a letter to Enver of December 1911, and on 12 January 1912, together with his brothers, issued a formal proclamation, which was published in an Egyptian journal. It summoned all Muslims, and above all those living under the rule of the enemies of the faith, to holy war, declared that abandoning jihad was tantamount to abandoning the faith, and warned that those who collaborated with the enemy for worldly gain would share the same fate.113 Kurtcephe argues that the proclamation was decisive in the failure of Italian efforts to win the population over, as thousands answered the call. It found little echo in the Arabian peninsula, however, where the Idrisi leader of Asir, Sayyid Muhammad al-Idris, made common cause with Italy and even claimed that the arms he received from the Italians had been sent by Ahmad al-Sharif.114
The new command and Şara Şat
According to the new command structure in Tripoli, Neşet Bey assumed leadership of the forces in Tripoli, Major Mustafa Kemal Bey became the commander in the Tobruk–Derna sector, and Major Enver Bey in Benghazi. The first organized attack was initiated on 23 October, when Neşet Bey and Ali Fethi Bey led their troops in a successful offensive against the Italians, resulting, according to Italian figures, in 29 officers and 503 men as casualties on the Italian side.115
The attack on 23 October, which Turkish sources call the Hani taarruzu and the Italians the battle of Sciara Sciat, after the oasis where the fighting was fiercest, was the first serious test of the new army. Caneva's troops held an eight-kilometer semicircle around the town, with only a single battalion in reserve. Against them Neşet and Fethi sent three columns, 4,532 armed men with two guns: in the center regulars under Major Faik, on the right volunteers from Tarhuna, Misrata, the Jabal and Garyan under Major Rüştü, and on the left the volunteers of Zanzur and Aziziye under Major Arif. The attack went in after midnight. At about nine in the morning the inhabitants of the oasis behind the Italian lines rose against the 11th Bersaglieri, attacking them from the rear, and two companies of the regiment's 27th Battalion were surrounded and destroyed at Şara Şat. A gap remained open in the Italian line for twenty-four hours, but the attackers lacked the reserves to exploit it. A second attack on 26 October at the Cemil Bey mansion was beaten off, and the Italians pulled their line back more than a kilometer.116
The battle shook the Italians. Neşet reported on 30 October that the enemy was shaken and the moment ripe for peace, though his men and ammunition were dwindling.117 Although it was not a decisive victory, it alarmed the Italian government, which, as Şıvgın argues, rushed to proclaim the annexation of the province in order to forestall mediation by the powers and to reassure an Italian public shaken by the army's reverses.118
Annexation and reprisals
On 5 November 1911, the Italian government declared the annexation of Tripoli. Istanbul's protests had no effect on altering the course of the war. During the month of November, the Italians managed to recapture some trenches they had previously lost.119
The fighting at Şara Şat was followed by savage reprisals against the population of the oasis, whose rising behind the lines the Italians regarded as treachery. In the days after the battle, according to contemporary accounts and the official history, soldiers shot or bayoneted hundreds of men, women and children; at Menşiye, 105 people were blindfolded, made to lie down and killed with bayonets. Foreign correspondents described the road from the town to the desert, "until recently crowded with men, women and children, now completely empty except for corpses," and more than a hundred bodies lying in a single street.120 An Italian correspondent addressed an open letter to Caneva, published in the Austrian press, describing "four hundred unoffending Arabs, a hundred of them women," shot without trial: "I saw these atrocities with my own eyes and photographed them." British papers such as The Times and the Daily Mail printed similar reports, and Francis McCullagh, correspondent of the New York World and other papers, left Tripoli in protest against the Italian censorship and published his indictment, Italy's War for a Desert, in London.121
The reprisals continued throughout the war. Orchards and date palms in the coastal oases, the livelihood of their inhabitants, were cut down; Arab prisoners were tried by court martial and hanged; hospitals and Red Crescent tents were shelled from the sea and bombed from the air; and from December 1911 the Ottoman commanders reported the use of dum-dum bullets. An Italian prisoner told British journalists that his regiment's officers had ordered the men to kill women and children, because "the Arabs attack our soldiers, so kill everyone you meet."122 Enver rejected Italian counter-accusations of Turkish atrocities, writing that Italian dead and wounded had not been mistreated and that he had "even forbidden the use against them of the dum-dum bullets taken from the Italians."123
Even in Italy there were dissenting voices: the Sicilian deputy De Felice, correspondent of the Milan paper Il Secolo, protested that the hanging of fourteen Arabs at once, on evidence he had examined and found worthless, "tramples on the clearest principles of the Italian penal code," which did not allow the death penalty even in wartime.124
The Italians also tried to win the Arabs over. Their first proclamation on landing promised to respect their religion, customs and property ("your customs are our customs, your honor our honor"), and later leaflets dropped from aircraft offered every Arab who came over with his rifle a gold piece and a sack of wheat and barley. The response of one group of notables was blunt: they had decided to defend their homeland to the end, and they advised the Italians to leave it to them rather than shed more blood in its burning sands.125 To Italian leaflets claiming that the Turks pushed the Arabs into the front line while staying safely behind, the Libyan deputies Baruni and Ferhad replied: "We are in complete solidarity with them. We are the sons of the same fatherland. … It is thanks to the war methods which they teach us that with a force composed of only 500 persons, we were able to defeat your regiment."126
Tobruk, Derna and Benghazi
In the subsequent months, the resistance began to gain the upper hand. Mustafa Kemal's units effectively engaged the Italians in Tobruk and Derna – his units achieved victory in the Battle of Tobruk on 22 December 1911 – while Enver Bey similarly succeeded in Benghazi and Neşet Bey performed admirably in Tripoli. They had succeeded in halting the Italian advance, but they could not compel the Italians to evacuate Tripoli. The Italians received reinforcements, and at one point during the course of the war, their numbers swelled to 100,000.127
At Tobruk, which the Italians had occupied on 4 October, Enver set up his first camp in November, firing his pistol at the Italian lines to show the tribesmen that the enemy's guns were less dangerous than they seemed. The local Sheikh Müberra left the town to join the Turks and repulsed an Italian sortie of some 2,000 men on 13 November. At dawn on 22 December, Müberra, with 120 tribesmen and twelve Cretan volunteers under Lieutenant Necip, stormed the Italian position on the height of Nadura, held by some 200 men; the position fell within two hours and three machine guns were captured, but the sheikh was killed. According to the official history, the attack had been proposed by Mustafa Kemal, who was on his way to Derna, turned back on hearing of it and arrived after the fight was over.128
Derna became Mustafa Kemal's front. The Italian garrison of the town, under General Trombi, grew to thirteen battalions, but it was hemmed in by mujahids in the hills above. According to Ottoman figures cited by Koloğlu, the defense of the Derna front rested on just 8 Ottoman officers and 282 soldiers, supported by 7,742 Bedouin fighters under their tribal sheikhs, against an Italian force of 15,000–16,000 men that soon rose to 25,000.129
On 24 November, an Italian sortie in three columns was ambushed near the waterfalls of Derna and fled; the Turks put the Italian dead at 200, while Italian sources admitted 22 killed and 54 wounded. On 27 and 28 December two further Italian attacks under General Del Buono were routed, Enver himself taking part in the second, and the defenders captured 600 shells, a machine gun, 200 rifles and 25,000 cartridges.130 On 16 January 1912 Mustafa Kemal was wounded in the eye during the fighting at Derna and spent a month in a Red Crescent hospital; on 6 March 1912 he was appointed commander at Derna, a post he held until the autumn.131 In January 1912, when two Italian soldiers killed at Derna were found to be carrying money, Enver had it sent to the Italian War Ministry to be passed on to their families.132
Around Benghazi, Enver's mujahids, joined on 3 November by the Sanusi Sayyid Umar with 2,000 men, kept the Italians confined to the town. Their attack on the Kubbe position on 25 November cost the Italians, by Turkish estimates, some 600 men, against seven Turks killed and fourteen wounded, and nightly raids kept the garrison on edge; the French historian Revol noted how exhausting these night attacks were for the Italians.133 The largest battle in Cyrenaica came on 12 March 1912 at the Two Palms (İkihurmalık, Due Palme) near Benghazi, where General Ameglio attacked with seven battalions. The Turkish official history claims 3,500 Italian dead, the Italian official history only 37 killed and 144 wounded against 1,045 Arab and Turkish dead; the wide gap between the two sets of figures is typical of the war.134
Stalemate on the coast
Around Tripoli, the Italians gradually pushed their lines outwards. On 4–5 December 1911 the Ottoman forces suffered their first defeat at the second battle of Ayn Zara, and on 17 December the Italians occupied Zanzur and Tajura, though a column under Colonel Fara was nearly destroyed at Bir Tobras on 19 December.135 In 1912 Caneva's strategy shifted to cutting the supply routes from Tunisia. Gargaresh was taken after heavy fighting on 18–20 January, a division was landed near the Tunisian border at Macabez in April, Misrata was occupied in June and July, and the battles of Zanzur on 8 June and of Sidi Said and Sidi Ali in June and July drove the Ottoman forces back from the coast; Zuwara fell on 6 August.136 Yet the Italians never reached Aziziye, barely fifty kilometers from Tripoli, and their divisions remained tied to the coast. When peace was signed, the Italians had still advanced only a few kilometers from the shore.137
The Ottoman problem was not courage but supply. Neşet complained on 3 December 1911 that he had received only 220,000 francs (10,000 lira) since the start of the war and had 1,500 lira left, while hundreds of wounded lay without bandages.138 By the summer of 1912 the Tripoli front was running out of ammunition; Neşet's men had five or ten rounds each, the Italians were recruiting local auxiliaries, and the morale of the volunteers began to crack after the defeats at Zanzur, Sidi Said and Misrata. Enver, by contrast, reported in May that he could hold out in Cyrenaica for another year or two.139
Naval Operations and the Aegean
The fleet escapes
The Ottoman navy was in no position to contest the sea. Its main squadron, made up of the old battleships Barbaros Hayreddin and Turgut Reis, the cruisers Hamidiye and Mecidiye and eight destroyers, was at Beirut when the crisis broke. It sailed on 28 September, steering south-west to give the impression that it was bound for Tripoli, then turned north once out of sight of land and made for the Aegean along the Anatolian coast. Off Chios it received the order: "Italy has declared war. Proceed at fifteen knots to the Dardanelles. Be ready for battle and always vigilant." It reached the Dardanelles without loss on 1 October, to a welcome fit for a victorious fleet; the Italian commander-in-chief, Admiral Aubry, learned of its escape only three days later.140
Giolitti later answered critics who wanted the Turkish fleet hunted down and sunk that it would have been easy, but that Italy had promised not to disturb the Balkans and the Aegean, and that an attack at the very beginning would have exposed it to accusations of bad faith.141 The Turkish naval official history concludes that the escape, celebrated in Istanbul, in fact served Italy: with the Ottoman fleet shut up in the Dardanelles for the rest of the war, the Italian navy could carry out its transports and landings "as if in peacetime."142
Widening the war
As the land war in Tripolitania continued, Italy moved to widen the conflict by deploying its naval power against the Ottoman Empire across multiple fronts. In November 1911, Italy drew up plans to strike the Dardanelles, but abandoned them in the face of firm Russian objections as St. Petersburg depended heavily on the Straits for the passage of its grain exports and refused to countenance their disruption. Instead, Italian warships entered the port of Beirut and sank two Ottoman vessels anchored there. In January 1912, an Italian fleet pushed further still, entering the Red Sea, sinking Turkish ships, and bombarding the Yemeni port of Hudaidah, a province already convulsed by rebellion against Ottoman authority.143
Kurtcephe lists six aims behind the Italian decision to carry the war to the seas: to cut off the flow of men and supplies to Tripoli; to break Turkish morale and gain a bargaining counter for the peace negotiations; to placate an Italian public growing impatient with the war's length; to induce the great powers, anxious for the Balkan status quo, to press the Porte; to gain a foothold for influence in the Aegean; and to forestall an Ottoman boycott of Italian trade in the Levant.144
Diplomatically, the obstacle was Austria-Hungary, which invoked Article VII of the Triple Alliance treaty against any change in the status quo in the Balkans or on the Ottoman coasts and islands of the Adriatic and Aegean. Italy argued that Rhodes and the Dodecanese lay in Asia rather than Europe. Russia, by contrast, was encouraging: the foreign minister, Sergei Sazonov, told the Italian ambassador that Russia would be pleased if Italy struck Turkey at one or two vital points and so humbled the Turks, who constantly obstructed Russian wishes. France and Britain raised no objection so long as their own interests were respected, and when Aehrenthal died in February 1912 his successor, Berchtold, agreed to a temporary occupation of the islands.145
The Red Sea
In the Red Sea, Italy aimed to protect its colony of Eritrea against a possible Ottoman attack from Yemen and to stop arms reaching the Sanusis through Sudan. It found a willing ally in the Idrisi ruler of Asir, Sayyid Muhammad al-Idris, who was in revolt against the Ottomans and called the Young Turks "infidel dogs"; Italian ships landed money, 10,000 rifles and artillery for him. The Ottoman commander in Yemen, Ahmed İzzet Pasha, forestalled a similar alignment by concluding an agreement with the other rebel leader, Imam Yahya, on 18 October 1911, granting him wide concessions; the Imam telegraphed the sultan that he was ready to fight the Italians in holy war.146 On 7 January 1912, the cruiser Piemonte and two destroyers caught seven small Ottoman gunboats and an armed yacht in the bay of Kunfuda; the gunboats, with a top speed of six knots and no gun larger than 75 millimeters, were destroyed or scuttled by their crews, and the yacht Şıpka was captured.147
The Italians blockaded the Yemeni coast and bombarded its ports, but did not land troops, wary of the reaction of the Muslim population and of the loyalty of their own Eritrean askaris. When the Italian squadron appeared to threaten the ports serving Mecca and Medina, Indian and other Muslims protested to the British government, and Italy kept clear of the pilgrimage ports. On 21 July 1912, Italian cruisers bombarded Hodeida, which had been declared an open port. The shells fell in the Yemeni quarter, killing a pregnant woman and destroying a small mosque; the Italians justified the bombardment by claiming that Turkish troops were massed in the town, where there was in fact only a small gendarmerie detachment.148 The Porte also considered an alliance with Ethiopia, Italy's bitter enemy, and prepared a secret mission to Emperor Menelik, but the plan was overtaken by the decision to seek peace.149
Beirut
Italy's first blow in the eastern Mediterranean fell on Beirut, chosen, Kurtcephe suggests, precisely because it lay in a region of strong French influence and was the gateway to Jerusalem, so that an attack there would alarm all the powers and push them to press the Porte for peace.150 Two small and elderly Ottoman warships, the corvette Avnillah and the torpedo boat Ankara, had been trapped in the harbor since the start of the war; the Navy Ministry had refused to move them, ordering that they fight an equal enemy outside the harbor and scuttle themselves if overwhelmed. At dawn on Sunday, 24 February 1912, the armored cruisers Giuseppe Garibaldi and Francesco Ferruccio under Admiral Revel appeared off the town and demanded their surrender by 9:00. The Avnillah was sunk in about twenty minutes and the Ankara scuttled; the corvette lost two officers and 49 men killed. Shells also struck the customs house and the Ottoman and Salonica banks, and fell among the crowds that had gathered on the quayside to watch, killing and wounding many civilians.151
The Porte protested to the powers that the bombardment of an undefended town violated the Hague Convention, and the next day ordered all Italian subjects in the provinces of Beirut, Syria and Aleppo and the sancak of Jerusalem to leave within five days. Some 180 left Beirut; five families applied for Ottoman nationality rather than go. The local authorities took such care to protect the foreign communities from the angry population that the consuls called on the governor to thank him, and the departing Italians expressed their gratitude for the humane treatment they had received.152
The powers try to mediate
Amid the escalating violence, Kaiser Wilhelm II attempted to broker a settlement, meeting with King Vittorio Emanuele III in Venice on 25 March 1912. The talks produced nothing. Italy held the military upper hand and saw little incentive to negotiate, and the meeting quietly dissolved without result.
The great powers were themselves moving, if slowly. On 9 March 1912 their ambassadors in Rome called separately on San Giuliano to sound out Italy's terms. The answer was uncompromising: the Ottomans must recognize the annexation and withdraw their troops, in return for which Italy would recognize the Caliph's religious authority over the Muslims of Libya, take over the province's share of the Ottoman Public Debt, proclaim an amnesty and respect the empire's integrity elsewhere.153 The Ottoman reply, handed to the five embassies on 23 April, was equally firm: the Ottoman state had held the Italians on the coast for seven months; it could accept peace only if its actual sovereignty over Tripoli and Benghazi were preserved, Italy revoked the annexation and Italian troops were withdrawn.154 The editor of Tercüman-ı Hakikat, Ahmed Ağaoğlu (Agayef), summed up the public mood: Tripoli was "the only door left to us to Africa," and if it closed, "the bond of the Caliphate with an Islamic world of two hundred million will be closed. Is it easy to consent to that?"155
The Dardanelles
Italy then acted on its Dardanelles ambitions directly. On 18 April 1912, the Italian navy bombarded the Strait's fortifications, forcing the Ottoman government to close the waterway entirely to naval traffic. The closure immediately disrupted the commerce of Russia, Britain, Greece, Bulgaria, and Romania, and laid bare the enormous strategic sensitivity of the Straits to the wider region. Istanbul reopened them to merchant shipping at the beginning of May, bowing to intense international pressure.156
The Ottomans had been preparing for this blow for months. In November 1911, amid rumors of an Italian attack, the Russian ambassador, Charykov, offered the Porte a Russian guarantee of the Straits in return for the right of passage for Russian warships, an initiative that collapsed when Britain and France refused to support it.157 The defenses of the Dardanelles comprised 105 fixed guns, many of them old pieces bought thirty or forty years earlier. From early March 1912 the Straits were closed to all traffic at night, and on 13 March the first line of automatic mines, bought from the German firm Carbonit, was laid; by April there were five minefields with 183 mines, leaving a single swept channel through which merchant ships were guided by a Turkish tug.158
The Italian attack was timed for the opening day of the new session of the Ottoman parliament. At dawn on 18 April an Italian fleet of twenty-four ships under Admiral Viale appeared off the entrance and, from 11:30 to 14:30, fired some 550 heavy shells at the forts of Orhaniye, Kumkale and Seddülbahir from ranges of 10,000–13,000 meters. The Turks mined the remaining channel, the forts replied, and after three hours the Italians withdrew. One Turkish soldier was killed; a shell from Orhaniye grazed the cruiser Ferruccio.159
The Porte had warned in February that it would close the Straits and expel the Italians if the war were carried into the Aegean, and it did both. Of some 50,000 Italian subjects in the empire, most of them employed by foreign railway companies, only about 2,000 were actually expelled, as the powers intervened.160 Wider economic retaliation proved impossible. A 100 percent duty on Italian goods was resisted because the vine growers of the Aegean needed Italian sulphur and the weavers of Aleppo Italian thread; dismissed Italian railway workers had to be recalled; and the Italian post offices stayed open. The one effective measure was to deny Italian subjects the benefits of the Capitulations.161
The closure, meanwhile, trapped Austrian ships in the Black Sea and Russian ships in Port Said and the Syrian ports. Sazonov demanded the immediate reopening of the Straits or compensation, and Grey added Britain's voice. Announcing the reopening, the Istanbul daily Sabah remarked bitterly that the Ottoman state was clearing its mines "to protect the general interest from harm, while the enemy wreaks destruction one step beyond the Strait."162 Kurtcephe argues that the Italian attempt of 1912, by forcing the Ottomans to rethink and reinforce the defenses of the Straits, helped prepare the ground for their victory at Çanakkale in 1915.163
Rhodes and the Dodecanese
The expansion of the conflict reached its most dramatic expression in the Aegean. On 4 May 1912, Italian forces landed on Rhodes and, in a swift and largely unopposed campaign, had by 20 May seized the Dodecanese Islands. It was a strategically significant conquest as the islands lay astride vital Ottoman sea lanes and their capture marked a permanent shift in the naval balance of the Eastern Mediterranean.164
The operation began with the cutting of the islands' cables and the destruction of the wireless station on Chios on 15 April. On the morning of 4 May an Italian fleet appeared off Rhodes and landed General Giovanni Ameglio's composite division at Kalithea, south of the town, and at Trianda to the west. The Ottoman garrison of some 1,000 regulars and 200 volunteers could not oppose a landing under the guns of the fleet; its commander, Major Abdullah Bey, reported that his men had killed two Italian artillery officers and a number of men and captured a sergeant before withdrawing inland. The governor, Suphi Bey, told the Italian admiral that he lacked the means to resist, but resigned his office in protest.
The town was occupied on 5 May. The garrison withdrew to Psithos in the mountains, where the local Greek population, which welcomed the Italians, kept watch on its every move and refused it food. Ameglio, who estimated Turkish strength at 2,000 to 5,000 men, waited until he had landed some 10,000 troops; attacked from land and sea on 15–16 May, the Turks held out for two days, and on 17 May Abdullah Bey surrendered with 920 men, who were shipped as prisoners to Italy.165 On Kalymnos, the Italian admiral was received by the Greek metropolitan, who held a service for the Italian war dead; elsewhere Ottoman officials and gendarmes were taken prisoner and the government's records torn up and thrown away.166
The loss of the islands alarmed Istanbul far more than the fighting in Africa. The French prime minister, Poincaré, confided to the Ottoman ambassador that he feared "several islands in the situation of Crete," that is, in permanent revolt against Ottoman rule, and the Greek government was already seeking French support for their independence.167 In a cabinet meeting on 19 May, Said Pasha argued that the islands mattered more than Tripoli: "I am not of the opinion 'I will give the islands, but not Tripoli.' The islands are of very great importance... They are the outposts of Istanbul and Anatolia." Eight ministers, however, still opposed any approach for peace, fearing the effect on the Muslim world.168 Coastal militias were raised in western Anatolia, troops were sent to the coast from Aydın and Konya, and plans were drawn up to arm several thousand of the 20,000 Muslims of Lesbos, which the Italians were expected to attack next.169
The last attempt on the Straits
On the ground in Tripolitania, the war was also turning in Italy's favor. By early June 1912, Ottoman forces had been pushed back from their forward positions and compelled to retreat deeper into the desert interior, while Italian troops consolidated control over the western coastal areas through the summer months. Yet Italian ambitions on the water continued to encounter limits. On the night of 18–19 July, five Italian torpedo boats made a bold attempt to force entry into the Dardanelles, only to be repelled by a formidable combination of searchlights and concentrated artillery fire from the Turkish shore batteries, a sharp reminder that despite its setbacks, the Ottoman Empire retained the capacity to defend its most vital strategic chokepoint.170
The raid was led by Captain Enrico Millo with the torpedo boats Spica, Perseo, Centauro, Climene and Astore. Spotted by the searchlight at Seddülbahir shortly after midnight, they pushed on under fire as far as the narrows between Kilitbahir and Çanakkale, where the Spica briefly ran aground, before turning back with minor damage. It was the last serious Italian move against the Straits.171
Peace and Its Aftermath
The cost of resistance
By the late spring of 1912, the Ottoman government was divided over whether to go on. Its finances were in desperate straits. In cabinet on 15 May, the Finance Minister, Nail Bey, admitted that the treasury held money for barely five or ten days; the Ottoman Bank had turned down a request for a loan of one million lira, pleading a shortage of cash and Italian pressure, and the Régie and the lighthouse administration would lend only on onerous terms. Government expenditure ran at no less than 140,000 lira a day, and salaries alone required three and a half million.172 For Kurtcephe, the impossibility of financing the war was the main reason why Said Pasha came to favor peace: as the grand vizier told his colleagues, "this Italian war resembles none of the wars the state has fought; it is even heavier than the Russian war."173
The Unionists were reluctant to give way. "If we give up in the Trablousgharb affair," Talat Bey argued, "this will have a very bad effect on the Arabs, as well as on all Muslim communities. It will also incite the ambitions of other states towards other regions of our Empire."174 But on 17 July Neşet Bey reported from Tripoli that the sheikhs were threatening to negotiate directly with Italy unless arms, ammunition and supplies arrived, and that the population dependent on the fighters had grown to 100,000. The finance minister reckoned that the war could be carried on only if 135,000 lira a month could be found.175
The cabinet was not easily persuaded. On 15 May it resolved to continue the war until Italy recognized Ottoman sovereignty over Tripoli and Benghazi, arguing that any sign of weakening would have the worst effect on the Arabs and on Muslims everywhere and would whet the appetites of other powers.176 A private peace project put forward by the British lawyer Sir Thomas Barclay, who turned out to have consulted Tittoni and other Italian statesmen, was rejected, as were Austrian and French suggestions that the Porte give up Tripoli and keep Benghazi, or hand Tripoli to Italy on the model of Cyprus in 1878.177
In the debates of 19 and 20 May, Said Pasha threatened to resign: "I will not consent to the destruction of a six-hundred-year-old state in my hands." Talât Bey, the Committee's strongman, answered that the real question was money, and that losing the bond with the Arabs and the other peoples of the empire would be a great loss; the cabinet agreed to cut all non-essential spending and to hold out for another fortnight.178 In June, the Venetian businessman Giuseppe Volpi, who was serving as Serbian consul in Istanbul, sounded Mahmut Şevket, Asım Bey and leading Unionists on Giolitti's behalf and returned to Rome convinced that the Ottomans wanted a way out that would save their honor.179
Lausanne, Caux and Ouchy
On 13 August 1912, peace negotiations commenced between Turkey and Italy while fighting persisted. The outbreak of the Balkan War and the pressing need for Turkish officers and manpower in other theaters of war forced the Sublime Porte to accept Italy's terms. Consequently, a peace treaty was signed between Italy and the Ottoman Empire in Ouchy, a lakeside district of Lausanne in Switzerland, on 18 October 1912.180
The first round foundered on the question of sovereignty. Said Halim Pasha, president of the Council of State and the future grand vizier, proposed autonomy for Tripoli under the sultan's suzerainty; the Italians refused to discuss anything that called the annexation into question. In Istanbul, meanwhile, a group of officers, the "Saviour Officers" (Halaskâr Zâbitan), forced the Unionist-dominated government out of office. Said Pasha resigned on 17 July, the day after winning a vote of confidence, and the new "Great Cabinet" of Gazi Ahmed Muhtar Pasha, which included the elder statesmen Kâmil Pasha and Hüseyin Hilmi Pasha, gave Said Halim no instructions; he left Lausanne at the end of the month.181
The military situation now left the new government little choice. In July the War Ministry reported that the ammunition on the Tripoli front was nearly exhausted, the volunteers' morale was breaking and the Italians were recruiting local men to fight "Muslim against Muslim"; Neşet Bey, supported by Ali Fethi and the province's deputies, urged that the war be ended within a week.182 On 6 August the cabinet concluded that Cyrenaica could hold out for another year or two but Tripoli could not, decided to seek terms compatible with "the rights and honor of the state," and instructed Enver accordingly.183
The talks resumed at Caux, above Montreux, on 18 August, with the Ottoman minister in Sofia, Nabi Bey, and the consul-general in Budapest, Fahreddin Bey, as delegates. Giolitti recorded that both men acted honestly and in a friendly spirit, and that Fahreddin admired the West greatly but detested westernized Orientals.184 The Ottoman delegates put forward three successive proposals, all based on autonomy under the sultan; the Italians rejected each, arguing that to revoke the annexation would be "moral suicide" for Italy and might bring down the monarchy. Giolitti claimed that Nabi Bey admitted that his government needed only a formula with which to satisfy Turkish public opinion.185
What finally decided the matter was the Balkans. On 2 October the cabinet in Istanbul learned that Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece and Montenegro had ordered general mobilization, and that Italy was preparing another 20,000–30,000 men, possibly for a landing at Dedeağaç that would cut communications between Anatolia and Rumelia. The minister Reşid Pasha, sent secretly to Switzerland, was warned by his old friend Fusinato that if war broke out in the Balkans Italy would break off the talks, extend hostilities and keep the islands.186 The majority of ministers concluded that if peace were not made at once, the empire risked losing not only Tripoli and Benghazi but also the islands and the whole of Rumelia. Montenegro declared war on 8 October; Italy set a deadline of 15 October; and on that day the treaty was signed at Ouchy.187
The terms
According to the Ouchy Treaty, Tripoli was ceded to Italy with autonomous status, but Turkey was to act as the protector of the rights of the Muslims in the region. The Dodecanese Islands were to be returned to the Ottoman Empire at the conclusion of the Balkan Wars. However, the Italians violated the treaty's relevant article and did not return the islands. This incident marked the conclusion of the Ottoman Empire's centuries-long authority in the Aegean Sea.188
Read the full text: Treaty of Peace between Italy and Turkey, 18 October 1912 →
The settlement was a carefully constructed fiction. Neither side wanted its real terms known: Italy feared the reaction of the Libyans and of its own public, the Porte the accusation of having sold a Muslim land to the enemy. Two sets of documents were therefore prepared, a public treaty and secret instruments. The public treaty provided for the cessation of hostilities, the withdrawal of Ottoman officers, troops and officials from Tripoli and Benghazi and of Italian forces from the Aegean islands, the exchange of prisoners, an amnesty for the inhabitants of both, and the restoration of pre-war treaties. Italy undertook to support the Porte's efforts to abolish the capitulations, to close its post offices in the empire, to consent to an increase in Ottoman customs duties from 11 to 15 percent, and to pay the Ottoman Public Debt each year a sum equal to the average revenue of the provinces previously assigned to it, not less than two million lire.
Under the secret instrument, the sultan was to issue within three days a decree (ferman) granting the people of Tripoli and Benghazi "full and complete autonomy," and to appoint a representative (naib-i sultan) and a chief judge (kadı), whose nomination required Italian approval; the king of Italy would then issue a decree confirming Italian sovereignty.189
Breaking the news
The war drew to a close when the situation began to favor the resistance. The Italians had not managed to advance more than 3-4 kilometers inland, and the fighting was proceeding favorably for the Turks and their local supporters in Tripoli and Benghazi. It was exceedingly challenging for Istanbul to convey to the people in the province that peace had been established, leaving them to determine their own destinies.190
Ah, this Tripoli affair! As I told you, it became a personal matter of honour for me. Do you know that I am guiding the Arabs here towards the Italians with their wives and children? I promise them that even if the Sultan lets them down, I won't. How can I abandon these brave people to the Italians who intend to harm them? God, there are significant difficulties in my country as well. But, no, I do not want to see that the Bedouins are more faithful to the promises they had made than I am. Retracting a word of honour is nothing but cowardice, and besides, the Grand Chief of Sanusi is sending me the message that he will always obey my orders. God, what should I do? War has broken out with Montenegro, and other Balkan states are likely to follow suit due to the problems with Europe. Under these circumstances, what would our issue with Italy mean?
A letter sent by Enver Bey to a friend of his only a few days before the armistice
Meanwhile, Neşet Bey remained entirely in the dark about the peace conditions being negotiated in Ouchy. Having received no official communication from Istanbul, he continued to prosecute the war as though no settlement were imminent. The local population, for their part, found themselves in a deeply unsettling limbo. They had fought alongside the Ottomans, placed their trust in Turkish officers, and now faced an uncertain future under Italian rule with little clarity about what protections, if any, the treaty afforded them. Enver Bey, acutely aware of the moral weight of the situation, initiated urgent communications with Istanbul, warning that the resistance in the field would not simply dissolve at the stroke of a pen. He was not a man inclined to abandon those who had fought under his command, and his letters from this period reflect a profound personal conflict between duty to the state and loyalty to the people he had led.
The Ottoman government handled the news with remarkable clumsiness. Throughout the negotiations it had told its commanders nothing, though the European and Turkish press reported the talks openly; officers in the field learned of them from leaflets dropped by Italian aircraft.191 The order to cease fighting, signed by the War Minister Nazım Pasha, was sent on 18 October, but out of fear of the population's reaction the Tripoli command announced it to the troops on 19 October as an armistice rather than a peace. The very next day Italian officers arrived at Ottoman headquarters with the text of the treaty, asking that it be carried out at once.192 Neşet Bey sent telegram after telegram asking for the terms; on 25 October he wrote that the failure to answer had left the command "in a very difficult and dangerous position." Only on 30 October, fifteen days after the signature, did the War Ministry telegraph the ten articles of the public treaty to Tripoli and Benghazi.193
Enver was blunter still. On 27 October he telegraphed that it would be extremely dangerous to inform the Arabs of the peace, and that he had decided to remain in Cyrenaica "because Sheikh Ahmad al-Sharif al-Sanusi and the lodge sheikhs absolutely want it"; if the government wished, it could "show me as a rebel" defying its orders.194 A few days later he reminded Istanbul that "to encourage the tribes to fight, we swore that we would never leave this land and would fight to the end... Sheikh Ahmad al-Sharif trusted in this oath," and had even returned the Italian king's costly gifts; to withdraw now, he warned, would be a disaster like the evacuation of Bosnia.195
The Sanusi leadership, too, made their displeasure with the armistice unmistakably clear. Ahmed Şerif and his followers had not declared holy war against the Italians merely as a gesture of solidarity with Istanbul, they had done so to defend their land, their faith, and their way of life. A negotiated peace concluded in a Swiss lakeside town, without their knowledge or consent, carried little legitimacy in their eyes. For the Sanusi, the war was far from over.
Forty-two Sanusi sheikhs telegraphed the Foreign Ministry that "the news that a peace treaty has been concluded which permits the enemy's presence in our homeland has torn our hearts to pieces." They declared that they would never accept it, that they had sworn before God to fight on until the last of them had fallen, and that they would not allow the officers among them to leave, "since their departure would leave us without leaders and commanders."196 Ahmad al-Sharif himself replied more diplomatically that he would respect the government's decision, but asked that the people not be left without arms.197 In Tripolitania, the notables gathered at Aziziye were divided: those from the occupied coast thought further resistance pointless, while those of the unoccupied interior, led by the Jabal deputy Süleyman el-Baruni, were determined to fight on if they received money and arms, and began organizing a "national defense" of their own.198 When the Foreign Ministry asked whether local volunteers might be shipped to fight in the Balkan War, not a single man came forward.199
The evacuation
The evacuation of Tripoli and Benghazi, which formally commenced in December 1912, proved to be a protracted and deeply complicated affair. The communication channels between Istanbul and the commanders in the field were chronically unreliable, resulting in confusion over the terms of withdrawal, its timing, and its scope. Some Turkish commanders, unwilling to accept defeat, resisted the order to stand down, and local militia units who had no intention of simply laying down their arms added further friction to an already fraught process.
With Greece now at war with the empire and its navy in the Aegean, the Ottoman troops had to be carried home in Italian ships, a humiliation the officers felt keenly. The first convoy, the steamers Sannio and Verona, escorted by the cruiser San Giorgio, left Tripoli for Acre in Palestine in mid-December. In all, 91 officers and 2,452 men with twelve guns were evacuated; they were attached to the VIII Corps in Syria until the end of the Balkan War.200 The Italians, for their part, complained that Enver was obstructing the peace, and on 21 December demanded that the Porte stop all shipments of money and supplies to the province and recall its officers in Cairo and Tunis who organized them.201
The Ottoman government faced the painful and politically delicate task of compelling its own officers to leave a province they had bled to defend. Before departing, however, those officers took deliberate steps to ensure that the struggle might continue in some form after their departure: weapons, ammunition, and supplies were quietly left behind, intended for the Sanusi, who it was widely understood would carry on resisting Italian authority long after the last Turkish soldier had gone.202 The evacuation dragged on through the winter months, slowed at every turn by logistical inefficiency, emotional resistance, and the sheer difficulty of extricating a military presence from a territory where loyalty ran deep. The final contingent of Ottoman forces, among them Neşet Bey himself, who had commanded the defense of Tripoli from the first days of the invasion, departed the province on 15 January 1913, bringing to a close over four centuries of Ottoman rule in North Africa.203
Enver had already gone. News of the Ottoman defeats in the Balkans changed his mind, and he wrote that "the war is going very badly there; I must get there as quickly as possible." He left Cyrenaica secretly in early December and reached Istanbul on 20 December 1912.204 Mustafa Kemal and Nuri Bey, who had asked on 13 October for permission to leave for the Balkan front, had left earlier through Egypt; in November about a hundred officers were waiting in Egypt for money and orders to return home.205 A number of Turkish officers stayed behind with the Sanusis, and others returned in the following months to help them.206
Military Firsts and Historical Legacy
The first air war
The Turco-Italian War witnessed several milestone events in military history. In Tripoli, Italy mobilized its Italian Aviation Battalion under the command of Captain Carlo Piazza, a renowned racing pilot. On 23 October 1911, Piazza made history's first reconnaissance flight over the Turkish lines near Tripoli in a Blériot XI aircraft. Then, on 1 November 1911, Second Lieutenant Giulio Gavotti carried out the world's first aerial bombardment mission, dropping four bombs on two Turkish-held oases. In March 1912, Captain Piazza conducted the first-ever photo-reconnaissance flight in history.207 By Koloğlu's count, between the first flight in October 1911 and the last in March 1912 Italian aeroplanes flew 153 sorties and balloons 194, dropping propaganda leaflets as well as bombs. The panic they caused at first subsided once aircraft had been shot down and their pilots captured.208
The air unit had been added to the expedition almost as an afterthought. It comprised nine aircraft of four different types (two Blériots, three Nieuports, two Farmans and two Etrich Taubes), eleven pilots and some thirty men; it left Naples on 12–13 October and set up its airfield near the Jewish cemetery outside Tripoli.209 Within weeks the aircraft were spotting Turkish columns, directing artillery fire, dropping leaflets and bombs, and, on 1 November, transmitting by radio to the ground for the first time. From March 1912 they were joined by the airships P1, P2 and P3, and in June Captain Alberto Marengo carried out the first night bombing raid.210 The bombs were light and their effect largely psychological, but they did not spare the wounded: on 8 November a hospital flying the Red Crescent flag at Ayn Zara was hit, and later raids struck Ottoman field hospitals and Red Crescent tents again, provoking Ottoman protests to the powers.211
Firing at aircraft
The Ottoman forces, for their part, responded to this new threat with a resourcefulness that earned its own place in the annals of military history. Lacking any dedicated anti-aircraft weaponry, Turkish soldiers adapted their rifles and field guns to fire at attacking aircraft, conducting, in doing so, the world's first recorded anti-aircraft operation. It was a testament to both the novelty of the situation and the ingenuity of those confronting it.212
Their efforts were not without result. On 25 August 1912, Lieutenant Piero Manzini's aircraft was brought down by ground fire, becoming the first plane ever to be shot down in combat. Weeks later, on 10 September 1912, Captain Moizo's aircraft was forced down and captured intact, the first time in history that an enemy aircraft had been seized as a prize of war. In the span of barely a year, the skies above the Libyan desert had become the stage for a series of events that fundamentally altered humanity's understanding of what war could be. The conflicts that followed, from the Balkan Wars to the catastrophe of the First World War, would inherit and vastly expand upon every lesson learned in that remote and unforgiving theater.213
The war also gave birth to Ottoman military aviation. An Aviation Commission had been set up in Istanbul on 1 June 1911, and two officers had been sent to France for flight training; during the war, a public subscription organized by the Navy League bought aircraft in Europe, and the first two Deperdussin machines entered service in April 1912. None reached Libya in time, so the Turco-Italian War did not see aircraft in action on both sides, but, as Orhan Köksal puts it, it served as the laboratory of military aviation.214
The balance sheet
For Italy, the "military promenade" that its nationalists had promised turned into a year-long war that tied down some 100,000 men. Italian records give battle casualties of 236 officers and 4,086 men killed and wounded; counting deaths from disease, cholera and other causes, the French historian Revol estimated that some 35,000 men, about a third of the force, were put out of action, and the war cost Italy about 750 million francs.215 At the moment of peace, the Italians held little more than the coast within range of their naval guns, and the Libyan resistance, led by the Sanusis in Cyrenaica and by local leaders in Tripolitania, continued long after the Ottoman troops had gone.216 Italian control over the whole of Libya would be established only two decades later.
For the Ottomans, the war was in one sense a remarkable feat. With a few thousand regulars, some 300 volunteer officers and the support of the local population, they had held an army of 100,000 men to a strip of coast for a year. But the empire could not reinforce the province by sea, could not pay for the war, and could not prevent the enemy from carrying the war to its coasts and islands. Kurtcephe's verdict on the Ottoman governments of 1911 is severe: through negligence and wishful thinking, they had left the province without troops, arms, a governor or a commander, and then sought to end the war through diplomacy rather than wage it with all the means at their disposal.217
Legacy
The Turco-Italian War of 1911-12 marked the initial conflict in a series of wars spanning over a decade that ultimately contributed to the decline of the Ottoman Empire. While it showcased the emergence of a new generation of young officers, it also revealed the Empire's weakness in conducting a large-scale war, with its Navy lacking the capacity to play a decisive role. This weakness provided the impetus for Russia and the Balkan States to trigger subsequent conflicts. Furthermore, it signified the first instance in which the Ottoman Empire lost a territory predominantly inhabited by Muslims. The Turco-Italian War significantly influenced both Turkish and Italian domestic politics. Notably, the roots of Arab nationalism can be traced back to Tripoli during this period. The idea of an independent Libyan republic, Koloğlu notes, was first conceived in 1912 by Ferhad al-Zawi, one of the organizers of the resistance.218
Many threads of later Turkish history run back to the Libyan desert. The officers who served there, Enver, Mustafa Kemal, Ali Fethi, Nuri, Halil and many others, formed bonds and rivalries that would shape the following decade, and their experience of leading irregular forces with few resources informed both the Ottoman war effort of 1914–18 and the Turkish War of Independence. The clandestine network that sent them to Africa foreshadowed the Special Organization (Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa) of the First World War, and the alliance forged with the Sanusis was revived in 1914–17, when Ottoman officers returned to Cyrenaica to lead them against the Italians and the British.219 The Italian attack on the Dardanelles prompted the Ottomans to rethink the defense of the Straits, a lesson that would bear fruit in 1915.220 And the Dodecanese, occupied "temporarily" in 1912, remained in Italian hands until 1947, when they passed to Greece.221 As Enver told the German field marshal Colmar von der Goltz, his wish was to be able "to utter the word Tripoli in the future without blushing."222
Notes
- Hale Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı ve 1911–1912 Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 2nd ed. (Ankara: Atatürk Araştırma Merkezi, n.d.; 1st ed. 1989), 3–5; Mustafa Arık, "Trablusgarp Vilâyeti Üzerinde İtalya Tehdidinin Ortaya Çıkışı ve Osmanlı Devleti'nin Aldığı Askerî-Siyasî Tedbirler (1881–1911)" (MA thesis, İstanbul Üniversitesi, 2019), 33–36. The 1900 exchange of letters was confirmed and extended by the Prinetti–Barrère accord of 1902, in which each power promised the other a free hand, Morocco for France and Tripoli for Italy. ↩
- Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 22–25; Arık, "İtalya Tehdidi," 39–40. On the bank's branch, opened in Tripoli in 1907, see also Enes Seyhan, "Trablusgarp Savaşı'nda Çanakkale Boğazı'nın Mayınlanması," Çanakkale Araştırmaları Türk Yıllığı 22, no. 34 (2023): 162–83, 166. The naval official history adds that the bank's branches bought up land even in small places such as Tobruk and Bomba, and that Italian steamers ran regular services to coasts no Turkish ship visited. Saim Besbelli and Mustafa Ülman, Türk Silahlı Kuvvetleri Tarihi, Osmanlı Devri: 1911–1912 Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, vol. 3, Deniz Harekâtı (Ankara: Genelkurmay Basımevi, 1980), 42. ↩
- İsrafil Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri (1911–1916) (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1995), 4–5; Nevzat Artuç, İttihat ve Terakki'nin İttihad-ı İslâm Siyaseti Çerçevesinde İttihatçı-Senûsî İlişkileri (1908–1918) (Istanbul: Bilge Kültür Sanat, 2013), 82. Kurtcephe describes Tripoli as the most loyal of the North African provinces, the Garp Ocakları. ↩
- Hamdi Ertuna, Türk Silahlı Kuvvetleri Tarihi, Osmanlı Devri: Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi (1911–1912) (Ankara: Genelkurmay Basımevi, 1981), 128–29. ↩
- Arık, "İtalya Tehdidi," 33; Besbelli and Ülman, Deniz Harekâtı, 41. ↩
- Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 117; Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 35. ↩
- Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 18–20; Artuç, İttihatçı-Senûsî İlişkileri, 83–84. ↩
- Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 3–5; Seyhan, "Çanakkale Boğazı'nın Mayınlanması," 165; Artuç, İttihatçı-Senûsî İlişkileri, 84. ↩
- Orhan Koloğlu, 500 Years in Turkish-Libyan Relations, SAM Paper 1/2007 (Ankara: Center for Strategic Research, 2007), 117. ↩
- Koloğlu, 500 Years, 121–22. ↩
- Koloğlu, 500 Years, 124–25. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 19–20. ↩
- Arık, "İtalya Tehdidi," 37–40, 49; Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 22–25. In 1873 a protocol had given Italian subjects the right to own property in Tripoli, which made it impossible for the Porte to ban land sales outright without handing Rome a pretext. ↩
- Koloğlu, 500 Years, 163–65. ↩
- Koloğlu, 500 Years, 165, 208. ↩
- Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 10–11; Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 118–19. ↩
- Koloğlu, 500 Years, 128–29. ↩
- Koloğlu, 500 Years, 149–50. ↩
- Koloğlu, 500 Years, 150–51. ↩
- Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 119; Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 8–9. The 42nd Independent Division should have numbered 7,518 men (4,568 in Tripoli and 2,950 in Benghazi); in 1911 there were some 2,880 men with 56 guns in Tripoli and 1,200 men with 28 guns in Benghazi. Arık, "İtalya Tehdidi," 92–93; Zekeriya Kurşun and Zeynep Bilgin Geçer, "Trablusgarp Harbi'nde Gönüllü Osmanlı Subayları: Bölgeye Sızma Süreçleri, Rütbe ve Pozisyonlarına İlişkin Prosopografik Bir Değerlendirme," Tarih Dergisi – Turkish Journal of History, no. 88 (2026): 127–51, 129–30. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 26. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 26–27, 45. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 45. ↩
- Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 131; Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 10–11, 41. ↩
- The Ottoman Empire was not itself a member of the Triple Alliance, which bound Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy. On Germany's dilemma between its ally and its Ottoman friend, see Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 26–28, 32–33. Berlin's advice to the Porte, Şıvgın notes, was to remove every pretext for a quarrel by making concessions to the Italians, while quietly sending troops to Tripoli. Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 32. ↩
- Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 26–29, 34. Kurtcephe suspects a secret Anglo-Italian bargain: soon after the war began Britain demanded, and obtained, the Ottoman port of Sollum for Egypt, without a word of protest from Rome. Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 39, 86–87. ↩
- Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 20–21. To keep up the appearance of calm, Giolitti and San Giuliano spent the whole summer of 1911 away from Rome, and the prime minister returned only on 25 September. Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 41–42. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 33. ↩
- Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 16–20. ↩
- Koloğlu, 500 Years, 167. ↩
- Koloğlu, 500 Years, 168. ↩
- Koloğlu, 500 Years, 164, 170–71. ↩
- Koloğlu, 500 Years, 172. ↩
- Koloğlu, 500 Years, 174. ↩
- Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 32; Besbelli and Ülman, Deniz Harekâtı, 43. The Ottoman reply, sent the same day, stated that the Italians in the two provinces had been exposed to "no danger whatsoever" and that the Ottoman government "is and will remain capable" of maintaining order there. The note was delivered by the embassy's chargé d'affaires, De Martino, the new ambassador, Garroni, not yet having arrived. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 59. ↩
- Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 31. The conversation took place on 25 September. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 58, 70. ↩
- Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 43. Şıvgın sees in this circular, sent a day before the ultimatum, the clearest proof of how far the government misjudged its situation. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 59. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 50, 54; Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 64–65. The decision to send the ship followed pressure from the province's deputies and a sharply worded petition from Tripoli's notables. Kurtcephe dates its arrival to 25 September; the Turkish official histories, following Italian sources, give 26 September, as does Şıvgın, who points out that the ship escaped capture only by chance. Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 124; Besbelli and Ülman, Deniz Harekâtı, 60. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 53–55; Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 124; Besbelli and Ülman, Deniz Harekâtı, 60. Italian intelligence estimates ranged from 12,000 to 60,000 rifles. The official history calls the Derne's cargo the only major seaborne supply the province received during the whole war. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 55. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 74. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 57. ↩
- Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 34–35; Besbelli and Ülman, Deniz Harekâtı, 43. That the ultimatum was a formality is shown, Şıvgın argues, by Italy's own timetable: the mobilization order of 25 September fixed 28 September as the first day of mobilization, and the class of 1888 had been called up on 23 September and had joined its units by the 26th. Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 37. ↩
- Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 35–36; Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 121; Besbelli and Ülman, Deniz Harekâtı, 43. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 66–67. ↩
- Neşet Bey, the division's chief of staff, was acting commander; he was formally appointed commander by a cipher of 1 October, received on 6 October, with the Paris military attaché, Major Ali Fethi (Okyar), as his chief of staff. Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 131–32. ↩
- Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 132. ↩
- Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 134–36; Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 65. Between 27 and 29 September, 2,200 Mausers, 5,300 Martinis and ammunition were moved to Garyan. Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 133. ↩
- Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 131, 140–41. ↩
- Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 36–37, 47; Besbelli and Ülman, Deniz Harekâtı, 43, 61. The Italian declaration stated that Italy, forced to use the means at its disposal to protect its interests, considered itself "from this moment" at war with the Ottoman Empire, while Ottoman subjects in Italy could remain there unmolested. ↩
- Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 46, 54–55. ↩
- Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 45, 47–48. Hüseyin Cahit summed up the replies in Tanin: "There is no good in anyone." Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 48. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 73–74, 168; Filiz Çolak, "Trablusgarb ve Balkan Savaşları'nın Osmanlı Devleti'nin Ticaret-i Hariciyesi Üzerindeki Etkileri," Turkish Studies 8, no. 5 (2013): 151–64, 154. ↩
- Besbelli and Ülman, Deniz Harekâtı, 61–62; Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 254–58. The accounts differ on the details of which vessels were lost where; according to the naval official history, Tokat was hit five times and beached at Mitika, while Hamidiye and Alpagut were run aground at Gomenitsa (Reşadiye), Alpagut only after holding out behind a headland for three and a half hours; the yacht Trablus was towed away to Taranto. The naval history blames the Preveza command for sending the boats out on 28–29 September, when rumors of war were already circulating. ↩
- Besbelli and Ülman, Deniz Harekâtı, 63, 68; Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 59. On 6 October the Italian navy was ordered to operate only outside the Adriatic, and the blockade of the Albanian and Epirote coast was lifted on 17 October. ↩
- The figure of 8,000 given in earlier versions of this page appears too high. Kurtcephe puts Ottoman forces in the province at the start of the invasion at little more than 4,000; according to the official history, the Tripoli garrison numbered 2,923 men before the war, and by 11 October, after 1,381 desertions, Neşet had 1,518 regulars (of whom only 1,037 were present) and 1,360 local and foreign volunteers, 2,878 men in all. Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 25; Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 164. ↩
- Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 135–37; Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 65. The War Ministry's order explained that strong resistance in Tripoli and Benghazi was impossible with the means available, and that the Italians should be allowed to occupy "as small an area as possible," leaving a neutral zone between the two sides, until diplomacy produced a result. ↩
- Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 137; Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 64–65. ↩
- Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 137; Besbelli and Ülman, Deniz Harekâtı, 71. ↩
- Besbelli and Ülman, Deniz Harekâtı, 66, 68–69; Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 125, 138. The Seyyad-ı Derya was run aground on the rocks beneath the Osmaniye battery; the Derne was sunk at anchor, but not deeply enough: the Italians raised her on 19 October and put her into service as the auxiliary Bengasi. Besbelli and Ülman, Deniz Harekâtı, 71. At Derna the armored cruisers Pisa and Amalfi destroyed the wireless station on 30 September when it failed to answer a summons to surrender. ↩
- Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 138–44; Besbelli and Ülman, Deniz Harekâtı, 70. ↩
- Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 139–41; Besbelli and Ülman, Deniz Harekâtı, 71. ↩
- Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 140–42; Besbelli and Ülman, Deniz Harekâtı, 69, 72. According to the naval official history, the forts' antiquated guns could not reach even half the range of the Italian battleships, which opened fire from 7,000–9,000 meters. ↩
- Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 142–43; Besbelli and Ülman, Deniz Harekâtı, 73. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 82–83, 161–62; Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 143. The battalion Neşet sent back restored order only briefly. ↩
- Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 145–46, 153, 233–35, 245–49. At Derna, Admiral Presbitero demanded the town's surrender on 16 October and was refused; the Italians landed on 18 October in an empty town. At Benghazi, which was bombarded on 19 October, the Ottoman garrison under Lieutenant Colonel Şakir withdrew inland and the city was surrendered by its mayor on 20 October. ↩
- Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 145–47. Koloğlu points out that Hassuna, who led the notables' decision to surrender, had arranged the municipality's loan from the Banco di Roma and was drawing a personal allowance from the bank. He does not regard the surrender as outright treason, since its motive was to spare the town further bombardment, but thinks Hassuna's role deserves closer scrutiny. With it, he writes, 368 years of Turkish rule in Tripoli came to an end. Koloğlu, 500 Years, 208. ↩
- The official history puts the expeditionary force landed by mid-October at about 35,000 men, of whom 26,000 were at Tripoli by 16 October; reinforcements raised Italian strength to about 100,000 men in 83 battalions by the end of 1911. On the aircraft, which numbered nine rather than the four given in earlier versions of this page, see Emin Kurt, "Trablusgarp Savaşı'nda İtalyan Hava Harekâtı ve Türk Hava Kuvvetleri'nin Kuruluşuna Etkisi," in Türk-İtalyan Müşterek Harp Tarihi Sempozyumu Bildirileri, 21–22 Ekim 2019, ed. Gültekin Yıldız and Serkan Osmanlıoğlu (Istanbul: Milli Savunma Üniversitesi, 2020), 243–85, 250–51; Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 162–63, 185, 266. ↩
- Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 160–63. ↩
- Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 154–56. ↩
- Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 133, 158. Kurşun and Bilgin Geçer give the travel allowance as fifty gold coins. Kurşun and Bilgin Geçer, "Gönüllü Osmanlı Subayları," 133. ↩
- Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 147–48, 165–69, 187–88. ↩
- Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 82–83; Mesut Uyar, The Ottoman Army and the First World War (London: Routledge, 2020), 9. A proclamation in Arabic, dated 28 September and distributed by the Italians, promised to respect the inhabitants' religion, property and honor, to exempt them from military service and to lower their taxes. Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 83. ↩
- Koloğlu, 500 Years, 175–76, 189. ↩
- Koloğlu, 500 Years, 179–84. ↩
- Koloğlu, 500 Years, 186–89. ↩
- Koloğlu, 500 Years, 191–92, 195, 203–4. ↩
- Koloğlu, 500 Years, 195–96. ↩
- Koloğlu, 500 Years, 192–93. ↩
- Koloğlu, 500 Years, 197–98. ↩
- Koloğlu, 500 Years, 200–201. ↩
- Koloğlu, 500 Years, 202. ↩
- Koloğlu, 500 Years, 204. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 90; Kurşun and Bilgin Geçer, "Gönüllü Osmanlı Subayları," 130–31. According to Kurtcephe, Enver, Mustafa Kemal and Eşref (Kuşçubaşı) first met at Enver's house in Beşiktaş, where they agreed on the plan of operations, before Enver and Eşref called on the minister. ↩
- Kurşun and Bilgin Geçer, "Gönüllü Osmanlı Subayları," 131–32. Artuç adds that the Said Pasha government, formed on 30 September 1911, approved the dispatch of volunteers on Enver's insistence, and later sent a monthly allowance of 25,000 lira for the Benghazi front. Artuç, İttihatçı-Senûsî İlişkileri, 90–91. ↩
- Kurşun and Bilgin Geçer, "Gönüllü Osmanlı Subayları," 133–34. ↩
- Kurşun and Bilgin Geçer, "Gönüllü Osmanlı Subayları," 138–41. ↩
- The dates of departure vary considerably in the literature, and those given in earlier versions of this page (1 and 15 November) appear to be too late. Artuç, following Enver's letters, has Enver leave Istanbul on 9 October, reach Alexandria on 14 October, set out by train on 22–23 October and arrive near Tobruk on 7 November; the official history gives 9 November for his arrival at Tobruk. Şıvgın dates Mustafa Kemal's departure to 15 October, with Naci, Hakkı and Yakup Cemil; he fell ill on the way and spent fifteen days in hospital in Alexandria, and the official history has him delayed in Egypt until 17 November. Artuç, following Kocatürk, puts his arrival at the front on 8 December. Mahmut Şevket informed the Tripoli command by telegram on 1 November that Enver and his companions had set out. Artuç, İttihatçı-Senûsî İlişkileri, 90–91; Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 228, 236, 250; Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 78–79. ↩
- Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 158. ↩
- Kurşun and Bilgin Geçer, "Gönüllü Osmanlı Subayları," 134–35. Mustafa Kemal's party had to disguise themselves in Arab dress, though, as Şıvgın notes, his fair complexion and soldierly bearing made it hard to pass as an Arab. Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 78–79. ↩
- Kurşun and Bilgin Geçer, "Gönüllü Osmanlı Subayları," 133; Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 78–79. ↩
- Enver made the same claim, of an increase from 900 to 16,000 fighters, in a letter of 28 November 1911. Artuç, İttihatçı-Senûsî İlişkileri, 91. ↩
- Kurşun and Bilgin Geçer, "Gönüllü Osmanlı Subayları," 132, 135–36; Uyar, Ottoman Army, 11; Artuç, İttihatçı-Senûsî İlişkileri, 91. The official history gives earlier dates for Enver's appointment, describing him as appointed commander of the Benghazi region in November 1911 with Lieutenant Colonel Şakir as chief of staff. Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 187–88, 250, 273. ↩
- Uyar, Ottoman Army, 9–11. ↩
- Artuç, İttihatçı-Senûsî İlişkileri, 93. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 138–43. ↩
- Oya Dağlar Macar, "Hilal-i Ahmer Cemiyeti'nin Kurumsal Tarihinde Önemli Bir Deneyim: Trablusgarp Savaşı (1911–1912)," Belleten 81, no. 292 (2017): 947–85, 960–61. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 144–46. ↩
- Koloğlu, 500 Years, 228–29. ↩
- Koloğlu, 500 Years, 229. ↩
- Macar, "Hilal-i Ahmer Cemiyeti," 952–54, 969. According to Koloğlu, the three missions treated some 3,000 patients in all. Koloğlu, 500 Years, 212–13. ↩
- Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 180–81; Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 84–85. In a letter of 16 November 1911, Enver himself wrote that the Arabs did not know "Enver, the hero of liberty," but respected "the son-in-law of the Caliph," as which he presented himself. Macar, "Hilal-i Ahmer Cemiyeti," 968; Artuç, İttihatçı-Senûsî İlişkileri, 97. ↩
- Artuç, İttihatçı-Senûsî İlişkileri, 45–54. ↩
- Artuç, İttihatçı-Senûsî İlişkileri, 103–4. Britain obtained Sollum during the war, when the Porte, unable to defend it, agreed to evacuate it; Enver delayed the handover for weeks until Kitchener threatened to send a warship and cut the telegraph between Benghazi and Istanbul. Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 86–87. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 95, 163. ↩
- Artuç, İttihatçı-Senûsî İlişkileri, 94. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 94; Artuç, İttihatçı-Senûsî İlişkileri, 95–97. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 89. ↩
- Artuç, İttihatçı-Senûsî İlişkileri, 91–92, 100, 105–7. In September 1912 only 10,000 lira of the monthly allowance reached Enver. Artuç, İttihatçı-Senûsî İlişkileri, 100. ↩
- Artuç, İttihatçı-Senûsî İlişkileri, 108–10; Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 85. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 94, 133–34, 166. ↩
- Earlier versions of this page dated the attack to 23 September, before the war had begun. The casualty figures are those the official history takes from Italian sources for 23 and 26 October: 13 officers and 361 men killed and 16 officers and 142 men wounded; the dead thus outnumbered the wounded. Ottoman losses were 170 killed and 360 wounded. Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 177–78. ↩
- Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 169–79. The official history notes that Italian aircraft reconnaissance helped the defenders. ↩
- Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 179–80. ↩
- Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 88–89. ↩
- Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 89–90, 92; Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 187, 262–63. The Porte protested to the powers that the decree violated the treaties of Paris (1856) and Berlin (1878), which guaranteed the empire's territorial integrity. By treating the province as Italian territory, the annexation made those who resisted rebels rather than belligerents in Italian eyes. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 151–52; Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 181. Kurtcephe quotes the correspondents' reports from Tercüman-ı Hakikat, 13 November 1911. Koloğlu dates the Menşiye killings to 1 November 1911, adds that 32 of the 105 victims were children, and puts the number of Arabs killed in the house-to-house searches for "pro-Turks" at some 4,000, 400 of them women. Koloğlu, 500 Years, 212. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 148, 153. Kurtcephe describes McCullagh as the New York Times correspondent. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 154–56, 158. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 156. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 160. ↩
- Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 85; Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 160–61. ↩
- Koloğlu, 500 Years, 210–11. ↩
- Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 185, 266. Enver estimated in February 1912 that there were some 130,000 Italian troops in Tripoli and Benghazi, unwilling to venture inland. Seyhan, "Çanakkale Boğazı'nın Mayınlanması," 171. ↩
- Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 228–31. Popular accounts attribute the victory directly to Mustafa Kemal; the official history describes him as the attack's instigator rather than its leader on the day. ↩
- Koloğlu, 500 Years, 211. ↩
- Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 233–43. The official history's figures for Italian losses are again much higher than those of the Italian sources, which acknowledged 12 killed and 38 wounded on 27 December. ↩
- Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 80–81; Macar, "Hilal-i Ahmer Cemiyeti," 961. The Egyptian Red Crescent ran a field hospital at Ayn el-Mansur, some fifteen kilometers behind Derna. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 157; Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 93. Şıvgın links the episode with the fighting at Derna on 16 and 27 December 1911. ↩
- Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 250–51. ↩
- Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 347–48. Italian leaflets falsely reported Enver killed, first after this battle and again in April 1912. Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 348–49; Artuç, İttihatçı-Senûsî İlişkileri, 95. ↩
- Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 196, 205–12. ↩
- Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 268–74, 288, 301, 317–23. ↩
- Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 205, 412–13; Besbelli and Ülman, Deniz Harekâtı, 126. ↩
- Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 195–96. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 204–6. ↩
- Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 122–23; Besbelli and Ülman, Deniz Harekâtı, 44–45, 64; Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 57–59. The order received at sea read: "Italy has declared war. Proceed at fifteen knots to the Dardanelles." Besbelli and Ülman, Deniz Harekâtı, 44. For the fleet's narrow escape, see also Evren Mercan, "Osmanlı Donanma Penceresinden Türk-İtalyan Harbi ve Çanakkale Boğazı'ndaki Müşterek Savunma Konsepti," in Yıldız and Osmanlıoğlu, Türk-İtalyan Müşterek Harp Tarihi Sempozyumu Bildirileri, 221–41, 223–25. ↩
- Besbelli and Ülman, Deniz Harekâtı, 64; Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 60–61. ↩
- Besbelli and Ülman, Deniz Harekâtı, 64, 126. The naval history counts eighteen Ottoman warships lost during the war: a corvette, three torpedo boats, nine gunboats, three armed yachts, a transport and a motor gunboat. Besbelli and Ülman, Deniz Harekâtı, 127. ↩
- Besbelli and Ülman, Deniz Harekâtı, 95–101; Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 360–62. The seven slow Ottoman gunboats at Kunfuda were scuttled on 7 January 1912 after a three-hour fight against the cruiser Piemonte and the destroyers Artigliere and Garibaldino; the yacht Şıpka was captured. Hodeida was blockaded, and bombarded in July 1912. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 101–2. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 102–3. The French ambassador, Bompard, admitted to the Ottoman foreign minister on 2 May 1912 that all five powers had left Italy free to act in the Aegean. Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 106. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 130–33. ↩
- Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 360–62. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 132, 135. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 135–37. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 106–7. ↩
- Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 365–68; Besbelli and Ülman, Deniz Harekâtı, 101–4. Şıvgın gives the civilian toll as fifteen dead and a hundred wounded. Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 97. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 108–9. ↩
- Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 119–22. ↩
- Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 123. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 176. ↩
- Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 381–83; Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 103; Besbelli and Ülman, Deniz Harekâtı, 109. The Straits were reopened on 2 May; mine clearing had begun on 23 April. Earlier versions of this page gave 10 May. According to Russian figures cited in the naval official history, the closure cost Russia some 30 million rubles a month. Besbelli and Ülman, Deniz Harekâtı, 115. British shipping interests claimed that 150 ships carrying a million tons of cargo had been held up, at a loss of 9,000 lira a day. Koloğlu, 500 Years, 215. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 110–12. ↩
- Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 373–76; Seyhan, "Çanakkale Boğazı'nın Mayınlanması," 172–75; Besbelli and Ülman, Deniz Harekâtı, 46–47. The 200 mines ordered from Germany at the outbreak of war arrived only in January 1912, and the question of who should command the Straits, the fortress or the fleet, was settled only by appointing Ali Rıza Pasha commander-in-chief of land and naval forces at the Dardanelles. Besbelli and Ülman, Deniz Harekâtı, 45–46; Mercan, "Osmanlı Donanma Penceresinden," 229. ↩
- Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 381–82; Besbelli and Ülman, Deniz Harekâtı, 108–9. Ottoman reports that the cruiser Varese had been sunk proved unfounded. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 114, 128. ↩
- Koloğlu, 500 Years, 216–17. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 116. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 119. ↩
- Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 385–90; Besbelli and Ülman, Deniz Harekâtı, 110–13; Eminalp Malkoç, "İtalyanların Trablusgarp Savaşı Sırasında Oniki Ada'yı İşgallerinin Türk Basınındaki Yankısı: İkdam ve Şehbal Örnekleri," Cumhuriyet Tarihi Araştırmaları Dergisi 16, no. 31 (2020): 79–117, 96. The first island to fall was Astypalaia (Stampalia), occupied on 24 April 1912 (28 April in some accounts) as a base for further operations. The official history counts fourteen islands occupied between 24 April and 20 May; the dates given in the literature for the smaller islands differ by a day or so. Earlier versions of this page dated the Rhodes landing to 5 May, the day the town of Rhodes was occupied. ↩
- Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 386–92; Besbelli and Ülman, Deniz Harekâtı, 111–12. The official history gives Turkish losses as 85 killed and 150 wounded and Italian losses as 15 killed and 30 wounded. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 122; Malkoç, "Oniki Ada'yı İşgallerinin Türk Basınındaki Yankısı," 96–97. Among the officials captured were three district governors and four sub-district directors. Malkoç, "Oniki Ada'yı İşgallerinin Türk Basınındaki Yankısı," 96. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 124–25. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 125–26. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 126, 128–29. ↩
- Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 401–4. Earlier versions of this page dated the attempt to 12 July and referred to warships stopped by steel nets. ↩
- Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 401–4. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 183–85, 190–91. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 186, 190. ↩
- Koloğlu, 500 Years, 216. ↩
- Koloğlu, 500 Years, 218–19. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 181. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 180–84, 193; Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 126. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 187–91. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 192–95. ↩
- The negotiations of 13 August were in fact the second round. A first round had been held in July at Lausanne between Said Halim Pasha and the Italian delegates Pietro Bertolini, Guido Fusinato and Volpi, and had broken down after the fall of the Said Pasha cabinet on 17 July. The treaty was signed on 15 October 1912; the public text bore the date of 18 October. Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 196–203, 208; Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 423–24. ↩
- Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 129–31; Artuç, İttihatçı-Senûsî İlişkileri, 112. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 204–6. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 206–7. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 208–9. ↩
- Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 132–33; Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 210–11. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 212–15. ↩
- Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 411; Besbelli and Ülman, Deniz Harekâtı, 120–21; Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 135. The naval official history insists that what drove the Porte to sign was not any Italian success but the state of the empire and the approach of the Balkan war; in Libya, it argues, the defense could have gone on much longer. Besbelli and Ülman, Deniz Harekâtı, 122. ↩
- Strictly, the treaty obliged Italy to evacuate the islands once the Ottoman forces had left Africa; on 29 December 1912, with Greece now at war with the empire, Grand Vizier Kâmil Pasha agreed that the islands should remain in Italian hands until peace was made with Greece, lest they fall to the Greeks. Italy later refused to leave, citing the continued presence of Turkish officers with the Sanusis, and the islands were finally ceded to Italy by Article 15 of the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 393–95. ↩
- Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 416–17, 425–26; Artuç, İttihatçı-Senûsî İlişkileri, 113–14; Besbelli and Ülman, Deniz Harekâtı, 121. The official history comments that the arrangement made the province "in reality an Italian colony." The sultan's decree of 16 October appointed Şemseddin Bey, a former minister of pious foundations, as his representative for five years. ↩
- Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 140–43. ↩
- Artuç, İttihatçı-Senûsî İlişkileri, 112. ↩
- Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 414–15. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 226–27. ↩
- Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 418. ↩
- Artuç, İttihatçı-Senûsî İlişkileri, 117. On hearing the news, Eşref recalled, Enver shouted: "What a contemptible business! What kind of government is this? The people believed in us, trusted us, gave us their property and their blood." Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 143. ↩
- Artuç, İttihatçı-Senûsî İlişkileri, 118. ↩
- Artuç, İttihatçı-Senûsî İlişkileri, 115. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 224–25, 228. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 227–28. ↩
- Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 419–21; Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 230. Kurtcephe dates the departure of the first convoy to 11 December, the official history to 13 December. ↩
- Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 423. ↩
- Neşet Bey left the reserve ammunition, the workshops of the Jabal and the food in the depots to the people of the Jabal, and secretly encouraged them to continue the struggle; Uyar notes that some 300 officers and men were selected to remain and that almost all the heavy weapons and ammunition were left behind. Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 418–19; Uyar, Ottoman Army, 12. ↩
- The official history dates Neşet Bey's departure to 14 January 1913, with 80 officers, 649 men, 153 officials and 260 emigrants, and notes that a single company at Gafta left only on 30 March 1913; Artuç gives 15 January. Neşet's party landed at Beirut on 22 January. Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 422; Artuç, İttihatçı-Senûsî İlişkileri, 117–18. ↩
- Artuç, İttihatçı-Senûsî İlişkileri, 117–18. ↩
- Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 81; Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 418. ↩
- Kurşun and Bilgin Geçer, "Gönüllü Osmanlı Subayları," 136; Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 86, 144. Aziz Ali (al-Misri) stayed on in Cyrenaica to carry on the guerrilla war in Enver's place. Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 144. ↩
- Kurt, "İtalyan Hava Harekâtı," 250–56, 265–66. Kurt, working from Italian records, dates Piazza's first flight to 22 October 1911 at 06:19; the 61-minute flight, made on Piazza's own initiative, took him over the Turkish positions towards Aziziye. The date of 23 October usually given refers to the first flights made on orders, by Piazza and Captain Riccardo Moizo. Gavotti flew an Etrich Taube and dropped four Cipelli grenades of about two kilograms each, one on Ayn Zara and three on Tajura. ↩
- Koloğlu, 500 Years, 212. ↩
- Kurt, "İtalyan Hava Harekâtı," 250–51. ↩
- Kurt, "İtalyan Hava Harekâtı," 253–56, 265–66. ↩
- Kurt, "İtalyan Hava Harekâtı," 255; Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, 91. ↩
- As early as 26 October 1911, Moizo's Nieuport was hit three times by rifle fire, the first recorded hits by ground fire on an aircraft; on 31 January 1912, Captain Carlo Montu became the first airman wounded by ground fire, over Tobruk. Kurt, "İtalyan Hava Harekâtı," 253, 264. ↩
- Kurt, "İtalyan Hava Harekâtı," 267–69. Manzini, the first pilot to die in the war, fell into the sea; Turkish accounts, such as Eşref Bey's memoirs, attribute the loss to a machine gun mounted on a palm tree by Lieutenant Sadık, a claim that Kurt regards as unconfirmed. Moizo was forced down by engine failure near Zawiya, protected from angry tribesmen by a cavalry lieutenant, Ragıp, and interrogated by Ali Fethi at Aziziye. ↩
- Orhan Köksal, "Trablusgarb Harbi'nde Osmanlı Devleti'nin Tayyare Sorunu ve Arayışları," in Yıldız and Osmanlıoğlu, Türk-İtalyan Müşterek Harp Tarihi Sempozyumu Bildirileri, 287–309, 288–89, 302. ↩
- Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 412–13. ↩
- Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 412–13; Uyar, Ottoman Army, 12; Artuç, İttihatçı-Senûsî İlişkileri, 119–20. ↩
- Kurtcephe, Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri, 25–30, 169. The naval official history reaches a similar verdict: although the signs of war had been visible long in advance, the absence of an intelligence service and the refusal of the Ottoman embassy in Rome to believe in an Italian attack meant that preparations began only after the war had started. Besbelli and Ülman, Deniz Harekâtı, 126–27. ↩
- Koloğlu, 500 Years, 232. ↩
- Kurşun and Bilgin Geçer, "Gönüllü Osmanlı Subayları," 131–32; Artuç, İttihatçı-Senûsî İlişkileri, 100, 119–20. ↩
- Seyhan, "Çanakkale Boğazı'nın Mayınlanması," 175; Besbelli and Ülman, Deniz Harekâtı, 126–28. ↩
- Ertuna, Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi, 393–95; Besbelli and Ülman, Deniz Harekâtı, 113. ↩
- Artuç, İttihatçı-Senûsî İlişkileri, 119. ↩
Bibliography
Official histories
- Besbelli, Saim, and Mustafa Ülman. Türk Silahlı Kuvvetleri Tarihi, Osmanlı Devri: 1911–1912 Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi. Vol. 3, Deniz Harekâtı. Ankara: Genelkurmay Askerî Tarih ve Stratejik Etüt Başkanlığı, Genelkurmay Basımevi, 1980.
- Ertuna, Hamdi. Türk Silahlı Kuvvetleri Tarihi, Osmanlı Devri: Osmanlı-İtalyan Harbi (1911–1912). Ankara: Genelkurmay Askerî Tarih ve Stratejik Etüt Başkanlığı, Genelkurmay Basımevi, 1981.
Books and theses
- Arık, Mustafa. "Trablusgarp Vilâyeti Üzerinde İtalya Tehdidinin Ortaya Çıkışı ve Osmanlı Devleti'nin Aldığı Askerî-Siyasî Tedbirler (1881–1911)." MA thesis, İstanbul Üniversitesi, 2019.
- Artuç, Nevzat. İttihat ve Terakki'nin İttihad-ı İslâm Siyaseti Çerçevesinde İttihatçı-Senûsî İlişkileri (1908–1918). Istanbul: Bilge Kültür Sanat, 2013.
- Koloğlu, Orhan. 500 Years in Turkish-Libyan Relations. SAM Paper 1/2007. Ankara: Center for Strategic Research, 2007.
- Kurtcephe, İsrafil. Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri (1911–1916). Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1995.
- Şıvgın, Hale. Trablusgarp Savaşı ve 1911–1912 Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri. 2nd ed. Ankara: Atatürk Araştırma Merkezi, n.d. First published 1989.
- Uyar, Mesut. The Ottoman Army and the First World War. London: Routledge, 2020.
Articles and chapters
- Çolak, Filiz. "Trablusgarb ve Balkan Savaşları'nın Osmanlı Devleti'nin Ticaret-i Hariciyesi Üzerindeki Etkileri." Turkish Studies 8, no. 5 (2013): 151–64.
- Köksal, Orhan. "Trablusgarb Harbi'nde Osmanlı Devleti'nin Tayyare Sorunu ve Arayışları." In Türk-İtalyan Müşterek Harp Tarihi Sempozyumu Bildirileri, 21–22 Ekim 2019, edited by Gültekin Yıldız and Serkan Osmanlıoğlu, 287–309. Istanbul: Milli Savunma Üniversitesi, 2020.
- Kurşun, Zekeriya, and Zeynep Bilgin Geçer. "Trablusgarp Harbi'nde Gönüllü Osmanlı Subayları: Bölgeye Sızma Süreçleri, Rütbe ve Pozisyonlarına İlişkin Prosopografik Bir Değerlendirme." Tarih Dergisi – Turkish Journal of History, no. 88 (2026): 127–51. https://doi.org/10.26650/iutd.1665315.
- Kurt, Emin. "Trablusgarp Savaşı'nda İtalyan Hava Harekâtı ve Türk Hava Kuvvetleri'nin Kuruluşuna Etkisi." In Türk-İtalyan Müşterek Harp Tarihi Sempozyumu Bildirileri, 21–22 Ekim 2019, edited by Gültekin Yıldız and Serkan Osmanlıoğlu, 243–85. Istanbul: Milli Savunma Üniversitesi, 2020.
- Macar, Oya Dağlar. "Hilal-i Ahmer Cemiyeti'nin Kurumsal Tarihinde Önemli Bir Deneyim: Trablusgarp Savaşı (1911–1912)." Belleten 81, no. 292 (2017): 947–85.
- Malkoç, Eminalp. "İtalyanların Trablusgarp Savaşı Sırasında Oniki Ada'yı İşgallerinin Türk Basınındaki Yankısı: İkdam ve Şehbal Örnekleri." Cumhuriyet Tarihi Araştırmaları Dergisi 16, no. 31 (2020): 79–117.
- Mercan, Evren. "Osmanlı Donanma Penceresinden Türk-İtalyan Harbi ve Çanakkale Boğazı'ndaki Müşterek Savunma Konsepti." In Türk-İtalyan Müşterek Harp Tarihi Sempozyumu Bildirileri, 21–22 Ekim 2019, edited by Gültekin Yıldız and Serkan Osmanlıoğlu, 221–41. Istanbul: Milli Savunma Üniversitesi, 2020.
- Seyhan, Enes. "Trablusgarp Savaşı'nda Çanakkale Boğazı'nın Mayınlanması." Çanakkale Araştırmaları Türk Yıllığı 22, no. 34 (2023): 162–83. https://doi.org/10.17518/canakkalearastirmalari.1260802.
Page last updated on 29 October 2026