The War of the Ottoman Succession

The outbreak of the First World War is one of the great subjects of modern history. A matter of high-stakes diplomacy ever since the controversial "war guilt" clause of the Versailles Treaty was levied on the Germans in 1919, the issue of the origins of the war of 1914 has also become, more prosaically, a staple of school exam questions. By now, one would think, scholars and students alike would be sick of the subject. And yet, judging by the continuing deluge of books, the origins-of-the-war genre shows no signs of going out of fashion among historians, especially now that the centennial is approaching (whether students are equally fascinated is, of course, another question).

Everyone reasonably well informed on the subject today knows that the origins of the global conflict lie mostly in Berlin, with an assist from Vienna. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Bosnian Serb fanatic in Sarajevo gave Austrian leaders just the pretext they needed to punish Serbia and weaken South Slav irredentism. Assuming—correctly—that Russia would likely object to such punishment, German leaders saw in the Sarajevo outrage a golden opportunity to stave off the mounting Russian threat before the "Great Programme" enacted in 1913 allowed the Tsarist army to mobilize quickly enough that the Russians would be in Berlin before the Germans could reach Paris. When the Russians, backed up by their French allies (and later by Britain), took the bait and mobilized, the outbreak of war thus perfectly fulfilled Bismarck's prophecy of a Great War born of "some damn fool thing in the Balkans."

Does everything we know about the outbreak of war in 1914, however, actually make sense? We must be careful, first of all, with Bismarck's seductive bon mots. His "damn fool thing in the Balkans" line appears, on closer inspection, to be an apocryphal nonquote, likely inspired by Bismarck's actual speech to the Reichstag during the Balkan crisis of 1876, when he notoriously said that the Balkans were "not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier." Except that this is not what Bismarck said: in fact, he claimed that the entire Ottoman Empire (den ganzen Orient) was not worth the life of a Prussian soldier.¹ In this misquote we can see something of the elision in popular mythology about the true nature of the Eastern Question, which was never really about the Balkans, as many Western (particularly British) observers mistakenly believed, but rather about the entire Ottoman inheritance, up to and including—especially—the Straits linking the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, control of which was the highest priority of Tsarist foreign policy in 1914, owing to their outsized importance for the Russian economy. Not for nothing did a European war nearly break out over the Liman affair of December 1913-January 1914, when a German military mission headed by Liman von Sanders arrived in Constantinople, with Liman given effective command over Ottoman Straits defenses. For a German officer to control the shore batteries of the Bosphorus was Russia's worst strategic nightmare, as Russian diplomats made clear in passionate protests against the move. War was narrowly averted by a diplomatic compromise that saw Liman promoted to Inspector-General of the Ottoman First Army that paradoxically rendered him overqualified to command a single corps, such as the one responsible for Straits defenses.

There are good reasons for this enduring confusion about the real nature of the Eastern Question. Unlike today, when the Middle East dominates world headlines, in 1914 it was the Balkans that drove the news cycle. The Asian parts of the Ottoman Empire, by contrast, were seen as a kind of sleepy backwater where nothing much happened, aside from the occasional Armenian uprising or massacre. As David Fromkin writes in what remains the most influential popular account of Turkey's entry into the war, A Peace to End All Peace, few Europeans of Winston Churchill's generation "knew or cared what went on in the languid empires of the Ottoman Sultan or the Persian Shah . . . there was little in the picture to cause ordinary people...