The Fate of the Ottoman Empire
Picking it up after my last blog, where I explored what an early German victory in 1914 could’ve meant for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, we’ll now look toward Turkey. The Ottoman Empire was declining well before they joined the fighting in Europe. It was a move of desperation as they tried to stave off collapse.
However, in the scenario we are discussing, Germany achieves a victory in the first two months of the war with the Schlieffen Plan. The Ottoman Empire did not join the fray until 31 October. So, in this scenario, the Ottoman Empire would’ve never joined the fight (given that the victory would've happened in September). So, would the empire continue longer than it did in our timeline?
Before we explore this question, I’ll provide some background on the empire's rise and decline, its relationship with the German Empire, and how long it could’ve survived if Germany had won the war in the first two months of the war.
The Rise of the Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman Empire was founded in 1299 by a Turkish-Mongol chieftain named Osman. Unlike other empires and kingdoms where the future leaders diminished compared to their founders, the empire reaped the benefits of having ten generations of unbroken warrior sultans who continued the empire's expansion. In 1354, they entered Europe for the first time only to conquer Constantinople, the epicenter of the Byzantine Empire, ninety-nine years later.
Their last great leader, Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent (Suleiman the Lawmaker as his own people knew him versus the former name, which was what Christian Europe called him), inherited an empire that doubled in size under his father, Selim I. When it was passed to his son, Suleiman ruled over a domain that contained the major cities of Alexandria, Algiers, Athens, Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus, Jerusalem, and Smyrna.
However, in the Ottoman Empire, the sultans never married. Instead, it was a chain of fathers and sons who kept scores, sometimes hundreds, of women as property. These women were prisoners and were not allowed to make contact with any men except the rulers who owned them and their army of custodians (for the latter, these men were primarily black Africans whose sexual organs had been surgically removed).
If this didn’t already sound like something out of Game of Thrones (which is no surprise given actual history inspired Martin’s stories), hang on. Suleiman, ruling during the time of Henry VIII of England, led his armies in thirteen campaigns. He moved even deeper into Europe, capturing Belgrade and Budapest, completing the conquest of the Balkans. He besieged Vienna but was thwarted by poor weather, suffering a defeat to the alliance of the Hapsburg-ruled Holy Roman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (the battle featured the largest cavalry charge in military history with 18,000 storming down the hills). This checked the Ottoman expansion for good.
Suleiman had around three hundred concubines and a promising son named Mustafa. As part of the booty won in a slave-gathering raid into Poland, he gained a red-haired Polish woman named Ghowrem (she would become known as Roxelana). She was quite a remarkable woman given that as soon as she arrived, Suleiman did something no other sultan had done before—he slept only with her and eventually married her.
While Mustafa appeared to have all the characteristics of a great sultan, he stood in the way of Roxelana’s son, whom we assume was fathered by Suleiman (though there’s some controversy whether or not Suleiman actually fathered Roxelana's son). Roxelana persuaded Suleiman to believe that his son Mustafa was plotting against him (which he wasn’t). The ploy worked, and Suleiman had Mustafa strangled by five executors who had their tongues removed so they could not speak of it. The sultanship would pass to Selim II, and nothing would be the same again.
Put all the bad kings in Game of Thrones in one line of sultans, and that’s essentially what we get for three and a half centuries. They lacked the military and leadership skills of previous sultans, who created one of the greatest empires in history. I’ll save some time here and dispense with the horrific stories and degeneracy that follow with these sultans (but look it up, as it's as intriguing as it is mortifying). I’ll let Meyer provide a snippet that I think gives you an idea of what these sultans were like:
“The rulers erected a windowless building called the Cage in which their heirs were confined from early childhood until they died or were put to death or, having been taught nothing about anything, were released to take their turns on the throne. The results were as insatiable as it was monstrous: an empire ruled year after year and finally century after century by utterly ignorant, utterly incompetent, sometimes half-imbecilic, half-mad men, some of whom spent decades in the Cage before their release and all of whom, after their release, were free to do absolutely anything they wanted, no matter how vicious, for as long as they remained alive.”
The Pivot into Decline and Repercussions
Rotting from within, many in Europe still feared the Ottoman Empire. But that all came crashing down when Napoleon Bonaparte easily captured Egypt in 1798. And it wouldn’t be the Ottomans who would drive the French out of Egypt, but the British Navy. In an ironic sequence of events, the Ottomans continued through the 19th century mainly due to the actions of European powers to check each other’s power. But as they did, the Ottomans started to lose their possessions one by one to them.
Here’s a list of events to highlight their loss of power across one hundred years:
1803, the French seize Algeria, with Britain expanding their power in Arabia and the Persian Gulf.
1853, Russia invaded the Ottoman provinces south of the Danube, nearly ending the Ottoman presence in the Balkans if not for the intervention of Britain and France.
In 1878, Britain saved the Ottoman Empire again in the Russo-Turkish war, as Biritan feared it would lose its position in the Eastern Mediterranean and, thereby, India. Britain took Cyprus.
1881, France seizes Tunisia.
1882, Britain takes Egypt.
1908, Austria and Hungary seized Bosnia and Herzegovina (paving the way for the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand).
1911, Italy took Tripoli (modern-day Lybia) along with other Mediterranean and Aegean islands.
1912, France seized Morocco.
I covered the First and Second Balkans War extensively in the last blog, so I won’t reiterate it here. But what’s important to note, and something Meyer calls out as “history’s little joke,” is that the Ottomans would play no part in the July Crisis. Yet, the crisis could not have occurred without the power vacuum everyone was rushing to fill in their decline. And yet, in our timeline, they would be affected by World War I the most profoundly.
The Berlin to Baghdad Railway
The one nation that did not seize the opportunity to feast on Ottoman territories was the German Empire. Instead, it decided to foster closer ties with the failing empire. It began work on a Berlin to Baghdad railway that would bypass the Suez Canal and essentially enable trade between German ports and those in the Persian Gulf. This would enable Germany to establish a stronger transportation network with its African colonies and have a regional line to tap into the nearby oil fields discovered in Persia in 1908.
As you can imagine, this worried European powers, including France and Britain. Even though diplomatic measures hampered it, the work on the railroad continued. By the outbreak of war, some 600 miles remained in its completion. In our alternate timeline, the railway probably would’ve been completed if Germany had won an early victory. This would tie Turkey and Germany closer together, perhaps shifting the power in Europe with the railroad functioning as an IV drip to delay the Ottoman Empire’s collapse.
Moreover, one of the Three Pashas was already forging this Turkish-German tie (they took control of the government in a coup in 1913). Enver Pasha became minister of war after leaving the army in January 1914. In July, just before the outbreak of war, he put the Ottoman Empire in a secret defensive alliance with Germany.
Setting the Stage for a Future War
Without World War I, the Ottoman Empire would’ve most likely endured if Germany had won an early victory in 1914. That also raises the question of whether Kemal Pasha, known as Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, would have become the first president of the Republic of Turkey (featured above). Without World War I, who knows if the Turkish War of Independence would've happened. Maybe it would've occurred at a later time, but regardless, for the sake of the timeline we're exploring, it's most likely that this would not have happened.
In this exploratory timeline, by drawing closer to Germany, the Ottomans might have forged a future alliance that would’ve faced off with France and Britain (assuming Russia still falls victim to a communist revolution. We’ll discuss that in the next blog). Moreover, Austria probably would’ve broken apart even if Germany had won the war in 1914. Its leaders were already looking toward federalization and more social-democratic ideas. In an interesting turn of events, we could see Austria draw closer to the former Entente powers in the wake of 1914, leaving the German-Turkish Alliance as the main threat to the balance of power in Europe. On the other hand, the railway might have kept Austria closer to Germany, given its economic benefits.
Yet, it seems that with the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the power vacuum would still be centralized in the Balkans. To protect the Berlin to Baghdad railway, which ran through the region, it’s not inconceivable to see how another World War could erupt on the continent from this area. If not a World War, at least another crisis, with nations vying for control over territory along national and religious lines (especially since many were dissatisfied with the results of the first two Balkan wars). At the same time, you would've had an even more powerful Germany with Turkey as its ally trying to maintain the free passage of the trains on their railway.
Would that mean an intervention in the region by these two powers? If so, it would no doubt create a regional conflict with a vortex that could suck in the other nations, given what a German-Turkish domination of the region would mean to the balance of power. Yet, one must wonder, would there have been a Russia to intervene? We’ll explore that empire's potential fate in the next blog.
Sources:
Meyer, G.J. A World Undone: The Story of the Great War 1914 to 1918. New York, Bantam Books, 2015.
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