Alternate History Thread V
- Thread starter Dachs
- Start date
Tours going another way does have an impact on the internal politics of the Merovingian kingdom, though. Charles Martel and his family would take a hit; at the very least, their sway over Aquitaine would be postponed, if not averted entirely. No Carolingians - or a radically different Carolingian monarchy - has rather drastic effects on Europe, I would think.
Yes, but that would not be the context of what he was looking for. He wanted to know of the possibility of Tours causing an Islamic Europe and that just wouldn't have happened.
However as you say it would have created very different European politics, but they would still be Catholic politics.
However as you say it would have created very different European politics, but they would still be Catholic politics.
When I said Islamic Europe I was meaning like from Scotland to Italy or something like that. And I might actually agree with Adrogans, now that I think about it, but at the very least, I'd think Islam would have a stronger presence in Europe for a longer period of time. It could cause a lot of problems for Europe though, like create political and religious instability.
From what I remember, Al Ghafiqi, who led the invasion, was actually quite the stabilizing force on the Muslim army which was already plagued with infighting and things only got worse after he died. Even if it wouldn't lead to a Muslim controlled France, I wonder what his survival would do for Al Andalus. Or to flip things even more, if the Muslim army scored a minor victory and he still died after. While the latter would probably just lead to an eventual fallback into Iberia, it could create a situation with a very overextended and badly commanded Muslim Army in the region allowing some nice follow up victories for the Franks.
SKILORD
Insurgent
If you want worthwhile outcomes for your timeline, like an Islamic Europe, the trick is not that it cannot be done, but that it cannot be achieved so simply as the outcome of a single battle. Just build it backwards, find the factors that implanted Christianity so strongly in Europe, tweak them, and then work on the outcomes of a few different battles. The idea of a truly "Holy Roman Empire" surrounded by the frankish and balkan caliphates seems to me a worthwhile enough scenario to construct in such a fashion, at which point, plausibility be damned, alter multiple variables and forcefully seize control of the timeline to create a legitimately interesting scenario.
Yeah, Adrogans, I agree. If you're going to do some Islamic Europe stuff, Tours ain't the place. (If there is one.)
al-Andalus didn't start having real problems until centuries after he died. If you're going to have the one impact the other, it'd be confined to butterflies.
I just can't see a realistic Muslim controlled Europe beyond going further in the Balkans, minus Greece for sure, southern Italy, and Iberia. Even then it's just hard for me to think up a lasting entity (Iberia being the most likely, but again major constant rebellions).
Edit - I guess this is mainly due to catholisim being more centralized and having such a head start in Europe.
Edit - I guess this is mainly due to catholisim being more centralized and having such a head start in Europe.
I think it's fairly easy to keep al-Andalus around for the long term. The middle of the eleventh century really was quite unusually bad for it - runs of really abominable luck tend to kill states and societies more often than do supposed long-term systemic failings. It's rather like the Roman Empire (and the Byzantine one), Parthia, and Hungary in that respect.
I wasn't suggesting it would lead to a long lasting al-Andalus as much as just pondering the general impact on their domestic politics. I do recall there being a period of strife in Iberia and the Maghreb following the defeats in Southern France, but I don't really know how important this was in the overall scheme of things.
Ahem.
This is not my idea. It is, in fact, das' idea; he wrote a TL several years ago based on a PoD in the Russo-Japanese War. He has graciously allowed me to meddle with it. I have not changed the broader strokes of events, so anybody who has read the original timeline will not be surprised at how things occur; I have, however, edited the original document with regard to construction, grammar, and such, and I have changed the way many events occurred. I have attempted to cut out references I found to be irrelevant, but added in entirely too much exposition (as is my wont) and also took the time to impose some metaphysical polisci garbage on you as a parable about the First World War, because I suck at self-editing.
Of course, I do all of this mutilation out of love and because I thought the original idea was baller.
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The Turn of the Twentieth Century.
It is a common, yet dimwitted mistake to think that the world before the Eurasian War was divided between two armed camps, the members of each awaiting the signal for an all-out melee; it is erroneous to say that the two alliance systems of the day had put each other in deadlock, unable to back away from their alliances and stated obligations. To the very end, diplomacy remained volatile, even chaotic; to the very end, the Great Powers in each alliance system viewed their alliances not as obligations, but as mechanisms of serving their own interests. All alliances, no matter how often they were explained by dynastic ties or ideological affinities, were chiefly ones of convenience. As such, they were changed as was convenient for the interested powers.
The fact that the alliance system remained flexible to the end is easily demonstrated by the fact that, at the turn of the twentieth century, the two main European alliances were not the ones that would end up fighting the Eurasian War. France and Russia were tied together by their Dual Alliance of 1894, while Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Germany constituted the Triple Alliance and the United Kingdom remained in splendid isolation or arrogant neutrality, depending on who was talking about it. By 1915, the alliances as the world knew them would not survive, indeed would be dramatically changed, by a myriad of wars and lesser crises, and by treaties both official and secret.
In 1900, the world geopolitical situation was nothing if not in flux. Several up-and-coming powers had begun to spread their influence, both violently and peacefully, forming new empires, while even the older dominant powers expanded their holdings dramatically. The German chancellor Bernhard von Bülow had, in a memorable speech before the Reichstag, claimed a place in the sun for Germany, and German colonies soon sprouted in Africa and Asia. Americas Manifest Destiny became a similar slogan, driving expansion across the American continent to the Pacific Ocean and then, after a war with Spain in 1898, across that ocean to the Philippines. Japan, too, had come onto the scene following the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-5, and now controlled a foothold on the Asiatic mainland in Korea. But the older powers the British, French, and Russians had never ruled empires as large as the ones they then controlled. So far, the Germans and the others had their place in the sun without pushing the older powers out of their own: the Great Powers carved up fresh new territories in China and Africa to incorporate into their empires, both officially and unofficially. Could that state of affairs continue? Most politicians were increasingly pessimistic.
It must be said that, though some prophesized an apocalyptic war once the Great Powers ran out of room to expand, as it were, the men who controlled those Powers remained unwilling to solve their disputes by force of arms at least, the disputes with other European powers. (Unlettered savages in Asia and Africa were, of course, fair game.) Between the various alliance groups, there were still strong ties. In 1897, the Russians and Austrians had put the Balkans on ice, promising to consult each other on disputes and crises and, remarkably, the solution had worked, to the bemusement of those convinced there could be naught but eternal war between Teuton and Slav. Germany, too, had joined with their supposedly implacable French and Russian enemies to restrain the Japanese from demanding too much from China at the end of the Sino-Japanese War.
The story of the early twentieth century is one in which the willingness of European statesmen to keep the peace eroded, slowly but surely. If the battle lines were not drawn in 1900, by 1916 they surely were; it is therefore also a tale of the widening and solidification of the alliance blocs that dominated the Eurasian continent. Frequently, the tale is told as teleology, with the ultimate outcome of the Eurasian War already written before the British even ended their splendid isolation; some trace it to the militarism of Japanese/German/French/Russian culture, or to specific statesmen, like Kaiser Wilhelm II, Edward Grey, or Tsar Nikolai II, whose characters made their actions supposedly inevitable. But in reality, none could have foreseen the way things played out; at several key moments, things may have gone the other way, and chance or human agency proved the deciding factor.
Since the early 1890s, it had been clear that the British would have to end their splendid isolation one way or another; indeed, some Continental statesmen remarked, the whole thing had been illusory anyway. The UK was thus the greatest of the prizes up for grabs by the alliance blocs. With the ascent of Arthur Balfour to the head of the ruling Conservative Party in 1902, the British finally made their first tentative steps towards a foreign connection, ever-conscious of the need to save on the costs of defending their vast empire by having proxies do it for them: they allied with the Japanese, seeing the Japanese as the greatest threat to British possessions in the Far East and thus electing to co-opt them. This sent mixed signals: on the one hand, it boded well for a French alliance, because it was France who most threatened British colonies around the world. On the other hand, it boded ill for a French alliance, because Japan and Russia Frances closest ally were already at loggerheads over China.
Russias Asiatic orientation had been a constant element in foreign policy since the 1880s, if not earlier. While broadsheets in St. Petersburg trumpeted about Russias essential Asiatic nature and about the Mongol tutelage that set Russia apart from Europe and fixed her future in the East, Russian statesmen expanded Russias holdings in Central Asia and Trans-Amur, tying all of it together with the great Trans-Siberian Railway project. Russia had a clear sphere of influence in Manchuria, Mongolia, and Xinjiang a relic of the Boxer Rebellion, when the Russians had occupied Manchuria to restore order (and never left) and Russian intervention in 1895 had won her the prized naval base of Port Arthur on the Liaodong Peninsula, from which Russian naval power was projected into the eastern seas. But Port Arthur had had to be wrested from the Japanese at the end of the Sino-Japanese War with French and German help; Japans expansionism in Korea posed a threat to Russias Manchurian sphere, and Japanese fleets considered those very eastern seas that the Russians cruised to be Japans backyard.
A clash between the two might not have been inevitable, but it was surely very likely. By 1903, it was clear that the Russians would not be leaving Manchuria any time soon, so the Japanese and Russians attempted to formalize their spheres of influence. What had been expected to be intractable negotiations, sure enough, ended up stalling late in the year. Even Port Arthur could be papered over, at least for a little while; what ended up being the sticking point was northern Korea. Russia refused to countenance Japanese troops on the Yalu, while the Japanese in turn thought it was absurd to have to keep their advisors south of the thirty-ninth parallel. Eventually (on 6 February 1904), the negotiations broke down completely, and the Japanese severed diplomatic relations; two days later, they sent a declaration of war.
Several hours before that, though, the Imperial Japanese Navy had launched a surprise torpedo-boat attack on the Russian flotilla at Port Arthur. The attack was poorly managed and the Japanese scored few hits (the few that they did score were lucky, though), but the attack provided cover for the Japanese to land troops in Korea, from where they took over the peninsula and stormed towards the Yalu. Russias Manchurian forces had not concentrated in time; the Eastern Detachment that was to bar the way out of Korea was outnumbered by the Japanese attackers, and after a costly assault (proving, many decided, the power of fortifications and modern firepower) the Russians were driven back. The Japanese, it seemed, were far from bush league in terms of military prowess.
The Japanese commander, Marshal Ōyama Iwao, had stormed the Chinese defenses on the Liaodong Peninsula in 1894; his plan in 1904 was to do the same, matching military policy to diplomatic policy, for Port Arthur was Japans primary goal, having secured northern Korea. The problem was that, unlike the Chinese, Russia was massing a large army to the north. If Port Arthur were to be stormed, thus clearing the sea-lanes of possible Russian interference, then the Japanese army would need to be split, with most of the troops acting as a rear guard for the besiegers at Port Arthur. This was an incredibly dangerous task splitting the army invited defeat in detail making it a priority to capture Port Arthur before the Russians could ship enough troops down the Trans-Siberian Railway to launch their own offensive.
Despite the riskiness of the plan, the Japanese did have several things going for them. For one, the Russian Asiatic fleet was immobilized in Port Arthur, with several of its most powerful warships disabled by mines and its well-respected commander, Admiral Stepan Makarov, killed in action. For another, the Russian commander, Aleksei Kuropatkin, who had been Minister of War before the wars outbreak, was loathe to try conclusions against the Japanese until he had more troops in hand, thus giving the Japanese extra breathing space in which to conquer Port Arthur. And the besieging Third Army, commanded by Nogi Maresuke, caught several breaks of its own. The Russian commander of the Port Arthur garrison, Anatoly Stessel, incompetently managed the defense of the port; though the Japanese bled for every inch, they managed to seize the commanding 203 Meter Hill overlooking the harbor, and from there shelled the Russian Asiatic fleet into oblivion. Stessel surrendered the day after the New Year, 1905, yielding the invaluable naval base as well as copious stores of food, water, and ammunition that had inconceivably never been doled out to the starving defenders.
Nogis troops moved as quickly as they could to return to the rest of the Japanese army, which had been doing an admirable job of shielding the besiegers from the Russians, and which had even launched attacks of its own. The last Russian offensive of 1904, which had ended at the bloody and inconclusive Battle of Shaho, had seemingly set an end to operations for months to come, and so Ōyama believed he and his men had breathing space, time in which to wait for Nogi, whereupon the Japanese would be able to renew their offensive and crush the Russians once and for all. Once Port Arthur fell, it seemed as though that was that: the Japanese were home free. But Kuropatkin was worried about the Japanese concentration; despite the weather, he ordered his troops to prepare for a general offensive against the Japanese left wing before Nogis troops could link up with the rest of the army, and had a detachment of cavalry raid the Japanese rear areas in preparation for the attack. On 18-9 January the attack went forward; although the cautious Kuropatkin had initially limited Oskar Grippenberg, the commander of his Second Manchurian Army, to a one-corps offensive near Sandepu, the excitable and somewhat inexperienced Grippenberg was surprised by the limited resistance his troops met and, without orders, threw in the rest of his troops. The Japanese had failed to prepare fortifications, believing that the winter weather would suffice to protect them from the Russians, and so they fell back in disarray. Kuropatkin, seeing the result of Grippenbergs attack, followed it up by reinforcing Grippenbergs troops and ordering holding attacks against the Japanese center, hoping to envelop part of the Japanese army. The poor weather prevented effective coordination, and the Russians inadequate maps did the rest, keeping Kuropatkin from bagging most of the Japanese army, but the Japanese casualty count was astronomical and Ōyama was forced to pull his troops back in disarray. The Russians then reoriented their army and engaged Nogis outnumbered troops, moving north from Port Arthur; these too were defeated, and forced to pull back into the very fortifications they had just captured.
The Battle of Sandepu vindicated Kuropatkins defensive-offensive strategy and saw the decisive defeat of the Imperial Japanese Army, which was forced to fall back over the Yalu and retreat into Port Arthur. While the Japanese retained naval supremacy especially after the Russian Baltic Fleet was annihilated off Tsushima by the Japanese under Tōgō Heihachirō after an odyssey around half the world their land forces were collapsing, unrest in Korea was growing, and the Japanese economy was in the toilet. To be sure, the Russians had problems of their own, and, despite the victory at Sandepu, riots had broken out in several cities in Europe. But the Russians had clearly won this round, and so when the good offices of the American President Theodore Roosevelt were offered to solve the dispute, both parties gratefully accepted.
What became the Treaty of Portsmouth was still months of tense negotiations in the making. The Russians, fired by the victory of Sandepu, demanded to annex Manchuria, Korea, Mongolia, and the Kurils, along with a sizable indemnity from the Japanese; ultimately, though, pressure from the British and Americans convinced them to moderate their goals. Manchuria namely, the Three Provinces, not including Hebei was formally annexed by the Russians, with a small squeak of protest from the imperial government in Beijing, while the Japanese lost all claims to suzerainty over Korea, which entered a period of independence it had never before known, no longer having tributary obligations to either China or Japan. The British, on the side, attempted to hammer out their differences with the Russians by agreeing to divide western China, as well: Tibet to be a British sphere, Xinjiang and Outer Mongolia to be Russian. Since, as far as the Russians were concerned, Xinjiang and Outer Mongolia were in the Russians sphere anyway, they demanded instead to have further rights in northern Afghanistan and Iran rights the British were unprepared to concede, thus adding to the already-long list of Anglo-Russian grievances. Eventually, the Russians were permitted to formally annex Outer Mongolia as well in exchange for the British sphere over Tibet, something that prompted howls of anger from Beijing that everybody promptly ignored.
The immediate aftermath of the war was an even more open rift between the British and the Russians. Russias Baltic Fleet had already nearly caused a shooting war with the British in the Dogger Bank incident while sailing east. Balfours Conservatives were then faced with an outcry in Parliament over the failure to support the Japanese alliance, over the cavalier sale of northern China for Tibet a Tibet that could not even honor the agreements to which the Dalai Lama had been forced to acquiesce in 1904 during Britains Younghusband Expedition, and over which the British still had to argue with China itself. It was over these issues, along with Chamberlains legacy of free trade, that the Conservative government collapsed in the winter of 1905-6, yielding a Liberal government that was more willing to tie itself to the French in the name of peace and retrenchment.
For the French, too, were estranged from the Russians. The tsars forces had been brutal in quelling the riots that had broken out during the war, which brought the complete lack of ideological similarity between the two starkly into the open. France, for its part, was widely disliked in Russian councils for failing to step up at Portsmouth and support its ally, even when Russia and the hated British were at the brink of a shooting war. Furthermore, the French had, during the height of the Manchurian war, come to a colonial agreement with the British, the so-called entente cordiale; while a long way from an alliance, the understanding that it promoted helped bring the British closer in line with the French, at least on matters outside Europe. The new Liberal Foreign Minister, Edward Grey, also helped, his affinity for the French well-known.
Into the fray strode the always-controversial German Kaiser, Wilhelm II. Wilhelms taste for personal diplomacy, his bombastic, flamboyant nature, and his constant attention to PR (or at least, PR in Germany; he was not given to doing things that played well in other countries) are all quite well known, making him perhaps the first media monarch. He was difficult for his advisors to control, but in turn only intermittently tried to control or at least coordinate them. He had learned of the increasing Franco-Russian estrangement and saw it as an opportunity; without informing Bülow (still the chancellor), he secretly met with the tsar during a yachting trip to Finland. Wilhelm and Nikolai had always had a fairly strong rapport, which made the treaty of friendship and mutual defense that they signed almost unsurprising in the wake of the tsars fury with his French allies. What was actually surprising is that the tsars cabinet, upon learning of this Treaty of Björkö, did not even try to convince the tsar to disavow it. Even those who had most loudly supported the French alliance such as the new Foreign Minister, Aleksandr Izvolsky were disheartened by Frances lack of support. Insofar as there was a cabinet consensus, the tsars ministers wished to pursue the profitable course of abandoning European disputes with Germany and Austria-Hungary in favor of expansion in Asia. The Franco-Russian Dual Alliance was not abrogated yet, but as soon as the Björkö treaty was made public, the world knew it was a dead letter, and would not be renewed.
The Kaisers visit to Finland had been another in a string of major media events for him that year; the first had been dramatic enough. A crisis had been brewing over Morocco one of the last independent states in Africa for some time. The French considered the place to be their backyard, and had been involved in Moroccan politics since the conquest of Algeria in the 1830s and 1840s; over the years immediately leading up to the crisis of 1905-6, the French had carefully made agreements with the British, Spanish, and Italians to clear the way to the assumption of a French protectorate. Indeed, that had been one of the purposes of the Anglo-French entente cordiale. Moroccos imminent financial collapse was to be the final stepping stone, just as Egypts bankruptcy had permitted the British to gain a lodgment there in 1882.
But at the same time, Morocco was an object of German interest, as well. It dated back further than the influx of German investments, which at any rate were not that substantial (since German capital was never as available overseas as was French capital). In 1880, the French had agreed with the Germans not to extend their exclusive control over Morocco, and were preparing to violate that agreement unilaterally or, rather, violate it multilaterally, with the support of Spain, Italy, and the United Kingdom. Partly, then, to safeguard German interests and remind the French of their own treaty obligations for if the French were allowed to simply violate the agreement at will, German prestige was sure to suffer and partly to score a PR victory of his own, Wilhelm made a landing at Tangiers to the adoration of the local crowd in March 1905.
The French were first shocked, then livid; war was threatened, on both sides, with the French bleating about the Germans attempting to gain a back door into France via the Mediterranean (ludicrous) and the Germans complaining of French designs on other territories agreed to be neutral in China and even the Americas (preposterous). Germany had good diplomatic cards, but ultimately no ability to project power into the area, while the French had done their homework and secured the agreement of every other power in the Western Mediterranean; while the Kaiser negotiated his treaty in Finland with the tsar, the French Foreign Minister Delcassé confirmed his own agreements. In the 1906 conference at Algeciras that resulted when Bülow called for American mediation, the Germans, Russians, and Austrians were outnumbered by the Americans, Spanish, Italians, French, and British, and so the Franco-Spanish joint spheres of influence went ahead although the Germans did manage to get the French to give up part of their equatorial African colonies to add to German Kamerun in exchange.
For the example of Morocco was worrisome to the Russians as well, outside of being an example of the French conspiring with perfidious Albion. Few enough countries were independent from European (or American, or Japanese) control by 1906; many of those that were, were in areas deemed vital to Russian interests. What if the British and French decided to pull the same stunt they had done in Morocco elsewhere say, in Iran, or the Ottoman Empire? If there had been a hope of rescuing the Russo-French alliance and some in the Russian government thought there was it was dead after the Algeciras conference. Frances short-term gains had resulted in a very grievous long-term loss: that of Russia as a partner in alliance.
In the short term, what resulted from the crisis was a solidification of the developing alliances. Following up on the Björkö treaty, the Russians, Germans, and Austrians revived the Three Emperors League in a summit at Kreuzburg in the summer of 1906. While, formally, the league charter involved no commitments on the side of any party (it was, essentially, a glorified nonaggression pact), the side meetings and protocols defined unified league policy with regard to the rest of the world. Austria-Hungary and Russia revised their 1897 agreement, changing their Balkan policies from agree to disagree to mutual support tentative, especially as the Russians were leery of abandoning Serbia, but still quite real. And the Germans and the Russians had long discussions about China
At the same time or close to it the British and French made their own agreements. Secretly, Grey met with Delcassé in the fall of 1906 and confirmed that the British would join the war on Frances side if France and Germany ever went to war, and both men provisionally divided up Germanys African colonies. Grey also promised to add diplomatic weight towards convincing the Italians to abandon the Triple Alliance. Though Greys actions were never sanctioned by Parliament, and indeed in 1906 would have been rejected by the Liberal backbenchers, he had Prime Minister Campbell-Bannermans support, and after Campbell-Bannerman died suddenly in 1907, the new PM, H. H. Asquith, confirmed his predecessors decision. In a separate and non-secret meeting, the French acceded to the 1902 Anglo-Japanese Alliance, forming a formidable triplice in the Far East.
Even by late 1906, with the cores of the alliances firmly in place, war was still far from inevitable. Instead of a volatile affair where no alliances lasted longer than a few years and war scares popped up every few months, where every power was out for itself, the optimists believed that the alliances made it possible for Germany and Britain to regulate the conduct of their allies, to prevent things from going too far. And for ten years, they were right. Only when it became clear to one of the two sides that peaceful solutions screwed them over, regardless of whether policy was aggressive or conciliatory, did that side opt for open war.
If the story of 1904-6 was of the end of the old diplomacy in Europe, the story of 1906-15 is that of the end of European diplomats belief in peace, and their failure to maintain it. For peace is not a default state of affairs any more than war is: just as a conscious effort must be made to keep a country in the fight, so must one be made to keep a country out of one.
This is not my idea. It is, in fact, das' idea; he wrote a TL several years ago based on a PoD in the Russo-Japanese War. He has graciously allowed me to meddle with it. I have not changed the broader strokes of events, so anybody who has read the original timeline will not be surprised at how things occur; I have, however, edited the original document with regard to construction, grammar, and such, and I have changed the way many events occurred. I have attempted to cut out references I found to be irrelevant, but added in entirely too much exposition (as is my wont) and also took the time to impose some metaphysical polisci garbage on you as a parable about the First World War, because I suck at self-editing.
Of course, I do all of this mutilation out of love and because I thought the original idea was baller.
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The Turn of the Twentieth Century.
It is a common, yet dimwitted mistake to think that the world before the Eurasian War was divided between two armed camps, the members of each awaiting the signal for an all-out melee; it is erroneous to say that the two alliance systems of the day had put each other in deadlock, unable to back away from their alliances and stated obligations. To the very end, diplomacy remained volatile, even chaotic; to the very end, the Great Powers in each alliance system viewed their alliances not as obligations, but as mechanisms of serving their own interests. All alliances, no matter how often they were explained by dynastic ties or ideological affinities, were chiefly ones of convenience. As such, they were changed as was convenient for the interested powers.
The fact that the alliance system remained flexible to the end is easily demonstrated by the fact that, at the turn of the twentieth century, the two main European alliances were not the ones that would end up fighting the Eurasian War. France and Russia were tied together by their Dual Alliance of 1894, while Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Germany constituted the Triple Alliance and the United Kingdom remained in splendid isolation or arrogant neutrality, depending on who was talking about it. By 1915, the alliances as the world knew them would not survive, indeed would be dramatically changed, by a myriad of wars and lesser crises, and by treaties both official and secret.
In 1900, the world geopolitical situation was nothing if not in flux. Several up-and-coming powers had begun to spread their influence, both violently and peacefully, forming new empires, while even the older dominant powers expanded their holdings dramatically. The German chancellor Bernhard von Bülow had, in a memorable speech before the Reichstag, claimed a place in the sun for Germany, and German colonies soon sprouted in Africa and Asia. Americas Manifest Destiny became a similar slogan, driving expansion across the American continent to the Pacific Ocean and then, after a war with Spain in 1898, across that ocean to the Philippines. Japan, too, had come onto the scene following the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-5, and now controlled a foothold on the Asiatic mainland in Korea. But the older powers the British, French, and Russians had never ruled empires as large as the ones they then controlled. So far, the Germans and the others had their place in the sun without pushing the older powers out of their own: the Great Powers carved up fresh new territories in China and Africa to incorporate into their empires, both officially and unofficially. Could that state of affairs continue? Most politicians were increasingly pessimistic.
It must be said that, though some prophesized an apocalyptic war once the Great Powers ran out of room to expand, as it were, the men who controlled those Powers remained unwilling to solve their disputes by force of arms at least, the disputes with other European powers. (Unlettered savages in Asia and Africa were, of course, fair game.) Between the various alliance groups, there were still strong ties. In 1897, the Russians and Austrians had put the Balkans on ice, promising to consult each other on disputes and crises and, remarkably, the solution had worked, to the bemusement of those convinced there could be naught but eternal war between Teuton and Slav. Germany, too, had joined with their supposedly implacable French and Russian enemies to restrain the Japanese from demanding too much from China at the end of the Sino-Japanese War.
The story of the early twentieth century is one in which the willingness of European statesmen to keep the peace eroded, slowly but surely. If the battle lines were not drawn in 1900, by 1916 they surely were; it is therefore also a tale of the widening and solidification of the alliance blocs that dominated the Eurasian continent. Frequently, the tale is told as teleology, with the ultimate outcome of the Eurasian War already written before the British even ended their splendid isolation; some trace it to the militarism of Japanese/German/French/Russian culture, or to specific statesmen, like Kaiser Wilhelm II, Edward Grey, or Tsar Nikolai II, whose characters made their actions supposedly inevitable. But in reality, none could have foreseen the way things played out; at several key moments, things may have gone the other way, and chance or human agency proved the deciding factor.
Since the early 1890s, it had been clear that the British would have to end their splendid isolation one way or another; indeed, some Continental statesmen remarked, the whole thing had been illusory anyway. The UK was thus the greatest of the prizes up for grabs by the alliance blocs. With the ascent of Arthur Balfour to the head of the ruling Conservative Party in 1902, the British finally made their first tentative steps towards a foreign connection, ever-conscious of the need to save on the costs of defending their vast empire by having proxies do it for them: they allied with the Japanese, seeing the Japanese as the greatest threat to British possessions in the Far East and thus electing to co-opt them. This sent mixed signals: on the one hand, it boded well for a French alliance, because it was France who most threatened British colonies around the world. On the other hand, it boded ill for a French alliance, because Japan and Russia Frances closest ally were already at loggerheads over China.
Russias Asiatic orientation had been a constant element in foreign policy since the 1880s, if not earlier. While broadsheets in St. Petersburg trumpeted about Russias essential Asiatic nature and about the Mongol tutelage that set Russia apart from Europe and fixed her future in the East, Russian statesmen expanded Russias holdings in Central Asia and Trans-Amur, tying all of it together with the great Trans-Siberian Railway project. Russia had a clear sphere of influence in Manchuria, Mongolia, and Xinjiang a relic of the Boxer Rebellion, when the Russians had occupied Manchuria to restore order (and never left) and Russian intervention in 1895 had won her the prized naval base of Port Arthur on the Liaodong Peninsula, from which Russian naval power was projected into the eastern seas. But Port Arthur had had to be wrested from the Japanese at the end of the Sino-Japanese War with French and German help; Japans expansionism in Korea posed a threat to Russias Manchurian sphere, and Japanese fleets considered those very eastern seas that the Russians cruised to be Japans backyard.
A clash between the two might not have been inevitable, but it was surely very likely. By 1903, it was clear that the Russians would not be leaving Manchuria any time soon, so the Japanese and Russians attempted to formalize their spheres of influence. What had been expected to be intractable negotiations, sure enough, ended up stalling late in the year. Even Port Arthur could be papered over, at least for a little while; what ended up being the sticking point was northern Korea. Russia refused to countenance Japanese troops on the Yalu, while the Japanese in turn thought it was absurd to have to keep their advisors south of the thirty-ninth parallel. Eventually (on 6 February 1904), the negotiations broke down completely, and the Japanese severed diplomatic relations; two days later, they sent a declaration of war.
Several hours before that, though, the Imperial Japanese Navy had launched a surprise torpedo-boat attack on the Russian flotilla at Port Arthur. The attack was poorly managed and the Japanese scored few hits (the few that they did score were lucky, though), but the attack provided cover for the Japanese to land troops in Korea, from where they took over the peninsula and stormed towards the Yalu. Russias Manchurian forces had not concentrated in time; the Eastern Detachment that was to bar the way out of Korea was outnumbered by the Japanese attackers, and after a costly assault (proving, many decided, the power of fortifications and modern firepower) the Russians were driven back. The Japanese, it seemed, were far from bush league in terms of military prowess.
The Japanese commander, Marshal Ōyama Iwao, had stormed the Chinese defenses on the Liaodong Peninsula in 1894; his plan in 1904 was to do the same, matching military policy to diplomatic policy, for Port Arthur was Japans primary goal, having secured northern Korea. The problem was that, unlike the Chinese, Russia was massing a large army to the north. If Port Arthur were to be stormed, thus clearing the sea-lanes of possible Russian interference, then the Japanese army would need to be split, with most of the troops acting as a rear guard for the besiegers at Port Arthur. This was an incredibly dangerous task splitting the army invited defeat in detail making it a priority to capture Port Arthur before the Russians could ship enough troops down the Trans-Siberian Railway to launch their own offensive.
Despite the riskiness of the plan, the Japanese did have several things going for them. For one, the Russian Asiatic fleet was immobilized in Port Arthur, with several of its most powerful warships disabled by mines and its well-respected commander, Admiral Stepan Makarov, killed in action. For another, the Russian commander, Aleksei Kuropatkin, who had been Minister of War before the wars outbreak, was loathe to try conclusions against the Japanese until he had more troops in hand, thus giving the Japanese extra breathing space in which to conquer Port Arthur. And the besieging Third Army, commanded by Nogi Maresuke, caught several breaks of its own. The Russian commander of the Port Arthur garrison, Anatoly Stessel, incompetently managed the defense of the port; though the Japanese bled for every inch, they managed to seize the commanding 203 Meter Hill overlooking the harbor, and from there shelled the Russian Asiatic fleet into oblivion. Stessel surrendered the day after the New Year, 1905, yielding the invaluable naval base as well as copious stores of food, water, and ammunition that had inconceivably never been doled out to the starving defenders.
Nogis troops moved as quickly as they could to return to the rest of the Japanese army, which had been doing an admirable job of shielding the besiegers from the Russians, and which had even launched attacks of its own. The last Russian offensive of 1904, which had ended at the bloody and inconclusive Battle of Shaho, had seemingly set an end to operations for months to come, and so Ōyama believed he and his men had breathing space, time in which to wait for Nogi, whereupon the Japanese would be able to renew their offensive and crush the Russians once and for all. Once Port Arthur fell, it seemed as though that was that: the Japanese were home free. But Kuropatkin was worried about the Japanese concentration; despite the weather, he ordered his troops to prepare for a general offensive against the Japanese left wing before Nogis troops could link up with the rest of the army, and had a detachment of cavalry raid the Japanese rear areas in preparation for the attack. On 18-9 January the attack went forward; although the cautious Kuropatkin had initially limited Oskar Grippenberg, the commander of his Second Manchurian Army, to a one-corps offensive near Sandepu, the excitable and somewhat inexperienced Grippenberg was surprised by the limited resistance his troops met and, without orders, threw in the rest of his troops. The Japanese had failed to prepare fortifications, believing that the winter weather would suffice to protect them from the Russians, and so they fell back in disarray. Kuropatkin, seeing the result of Grippenbergs attack, followed it up by reinforcing Grippenbergs troops and ordering holding attacks against the Japanese center, hoping to envelop part of the Japanese army. The poor weather prevented effective coordination, and the Russians inadequate maps did the rest, keeping Kuropatkin from bagging most of the Japanese army, but the Japanese casualty count was astronomical and Ōyama was forced to pull his troops back in disarray. The Russians then reoriented their army and engaged Nogis outnumbered troops, moving north from Port Arthur; these too were defeated, and forced to pull back into the very fortifications they had just captured.
The Battle of Sandepu vindicated Kuropatkins defensive-offensive strategy and saw the decisive defeat of the Imperial Japanese Army, which was forced to fall back over the Yalu and retreat into Port Arthur. While the Japanese retained naval supremacy especially after the Russian Baltic Fleet was annihilated off Tsushima by the Japanese under Tōgō Heihachirō after an odyssey around half the world their land forces were collapsing, unrest in Korea was growing, and the Japanese economy was in the toilet. To be sure, the Russians had problems of their own, and, despite the victory at Sandepu, riots had broken out in several cities in Europe. But the Russians had clearly won this round, and so when the good offices of the American President Theodore Roosevelt were offered to solve the dispute, both parties gratefully accepted.
What became the Treaty of Portsmouth was still months of tense negotiations in the making. The Russians, fired by the victory of Sandepu, demanded to annex Manchuria, Korea, Mongolia, and the Kurils, along with a sizable indemnity from the Japanese; ultimately, though, pressure from the British and Americans convinced them to moderate their goals. Manchuria namely, the Three Provinces, not including Hebei was formally annexed by the Russians, with a small squeak of protest from the imperial government in Beijing, while the Japanese lost all claims to suzerainty over Korea, which entered a period of independence it had never before known, no longer having tributary obligations to either China or Japan. The British, on the side, attempted to hammer out their differences with the Russians by agreeing to divide western China, as well: Tibet to be a British sphere, Xinjiang and Outer Mongolia to be Russian. Since, as far as the Russians were concerned, Xinjiang and Outer Mongolia were in the Russians sphere anyway, they demanded instead to have further rights in northern Afghanistan and Iran rights the British were unprepared to concede, thus adding to the already-long list of Anglo-Russian grievances. Eventually, the Russians were permitted to formally annex Outer Mongolia as well in exchange for the British sphere over Tibet, something that prompted howls of anger from Beijing that everybody promptly ignored.
The immediate aftermath of the war was an even more open rift between the British and the Russians. Russias Baltic Fleet had already nearly caused a shooting war with the British in the Dogger Bank incident while sailing east. Balfours Conservatives were then faced with an outcry in Parliament over the failure to support the Japanese alliance, over the cavalier sale of northern China for Tibet a Tibet that could not even honor the agreements to which the Dalai Lama had been forced to acquiesce in 1904 during Britains Younghusband Expedition, and over which the British still had to argue with China itself. It was over these issues, along with Chamberlains legacy of free trade, that the Conservative government collapsed in the winter of 1905-6, yielding a Liberal government that was more willing to tie itself to the French in the name of peace and retrenchment.
For the French, too, were estranged from the Russians. The tsars forces had been brutal in quelling the riots that had broken out during the war, which brought the complete lack of ideological similarity between the two starkly into the open. France, for its part, was widely disliked in Russian councils for failing to step up at Portsmouth and support its ally, even when Russia and the hated British were at the brink of a shooting war. Furthermore, the French had, during the height of the Manchurian war, come to a colonial agreement with the British, the so-called entente cordiale; while a long way from an alliance, the understanding that it promoted helped bring the British closer in line with the French, at least on matters outside Europe. The new Liberal Foreign Minister, Edward Grey, also helped, his affinity for the French well-known.
Into the fray strode the always-controversial German Kaiser, Wilhelm II. Wilhelms taste for personal diplomacy, his bombastic, flamboyant nature, and his constant attention to PR (or at least, PR in Germany; he was not given to doing things that played well in other countries) are all quite well known, making him perhaps the first media monarch. He was difficult for his advisors to control, but in turn only intermittently tried to control or at least coordinate them. He had learned of the increasing Franco-Russian estrangement and saw it as an opportunity; without informing Bülow (still the chancellor), he secretly met with the tsar during a yachting trip to Finland. Wilhelm and Nikolai had always had a fairly strong rapport, which made the treaty of friendship and mutual defense that they signed almost unsurprising in the wake of the tsars fury with his French allies. What was actually surprising is that the tsars cabinet, upon learning of this Treaty of Björkö, did not even try to convince the tsar to disavow it. Even those who had most loudly supported the French alliance such as the new Foreign Minister, Aleksandr Izvolsky were disheartened by Frances lack of support. Insofar as there was a cabinet consensus, the tsars ministers wished to pursue the profitable course of abandoning European disputes with Germany and Austria-Hungary in favor of expansion in Asia. The Franco-Russian Dual Alliance was not abrogated yet, but as soon as the Björkö treaty was made public, the world knew it was a dead letter, and would not be renewed.
The Kaisers visit to Finland had been another in a string of major media events for him that year; the first had been dramatic enough. A crisis had been brewing over Morocco one of the last independent states in Africa for some time. The French considered the place to be their backyard, and had been involved in Moroccan politics since the conquest of Algeria in the 1830s and 1840s; over the years immediately leading up to the crisis of 1905-6, the French had carefully made agreements with the British, Spanish, and Italians to clear the way to the assumption of a French protectorate. Indeed, that had been one of the purposes of the Anglo-French entente cordiale. Moroccos imminent financial collapse was to be the final stepping stone, just as Egypts bankruptcy had permitted the British to gain a lodgment there in 1882.
But at the same time, Morocco was an object of German interest, as well. It dated back further than the influx of German investments, which at any rate were not that substantial (since German capital was never as available overseas as was French capital). In 1880, the French had agreed with the Germans not to extend their exclusive control over Morocco, and were preparing to violate that agreement unilaterally or, rather, violate it multilaterally, with the support of Spain, Italy, and the United Kingdom. Partly, then, to safeguard German interests and remind the French of their own treaty obligations for if the French were allowed to simply violate the agreement at will, German prestige was sure to suffer and partly to score a PR victory of his own, Wilhelm made a landing at Tangiers to the adoration of the local crowd in March 1905.
The French were first shocked, then livid; war was threatened, on both sides, with the French bleating about the Germans attempting to gain a back door into France via the Mediterranean (ludicrous) and the Germans complaining of French designs on other territories agreed to be neutral in China and even the Americas (preposterous). Germany had good diplomatic cards, but ultimately no ability to project power into the area, while the French had done their homework and secured the agreement of every other power in the Western Mediterranean; while the Kaiser negotiated his treaty in Finland with the tsar, the French Foreign Minister Delcassé confirmed his own agreements. In the 1906 conference at Algeciras that resulted when Bülow called for American mediation, the Germans, Russians, and Austrians were outnumbered by the Americans, Spanish, Italians, French, and British, and so the Franco-Spanish joint spheres of influence went ahead although the Germans did manage to get the French to give up part of their equatorial African colonies to add to German Kamerun in exchange.
For the example of Morocco was worrisome to the Russians as well, outside of being an example of the French conspiring with perfidious Albion. Few enough countries were independent from European (or American, or Japanese) control by 1906; many of those that were, were in areas deemed vital to Russian interests. What if the British and French decided to pull the same stunt they had done in Morocco elsewhere say, in Iran, or the Ottoman Empire? If there had been a hope of rescuing the Russo-French alliance and some in the Russian government thought there was it was dead after the Algeciras conference. Frances short-term gains had resulted in a very grievous long-term loss: that of Russia as a partner in alliance.
In the short term, what resulted from the crisis was a solidification of the developing alliances. Following up on the Björkö treaty, the Russians, Germans, and Austrians revived the Three Emperors League in a summit at Kreuzburg in the summer of 1906. While, formally, the league charter involved no commitments on the side of any party (it was, essentially, a glorified nonaggression pact), the side meetings and protocols defined unified league policy with regard to the rest of the world. Austria-Hungary and Russia revised their 1897 agreement, changing their Balkan policies from agree to disagree to mutual support tentative, especially as the Russians were leery of abandoning Serbia, but still quite real. And the Germans and the Russians had long discussions about China
At the same time or close to it the British and French made their own agreements. Secretly, Grey met with Delcassé in the fall of 1906 and confirmed that the British would join the war on Frances side if France and Germany ever went to war, and both men provisionally divided up Germanys African colonies. Grey also promised to add diplomatic weight towards convincing the Italians to abandon the Triple Alliance. Though Greys actions were never sanctioned by Parliament, and indeed in 1906 would have been rejected by the Liberal backbenchers, he had Prime Minister Campbell-Bannermans support, and after Campbell-Bannerman died suddenly in 1907, the new PM, H. H. Asquith, confirmed his predecessors decision. In a separate and non-secret meeting, the French acceded to the 1902 Anglo-Japanese Alliance, forming a formidable triplice in the Far East.
Even by late 1906, with the cores of the alliances firmly in place, war was still far from inevitable. Instead of a volatile affair where no alliances lasted longer than a few years and war scares popped up every few months, where every power was out for itself, the optimists believed that the alliances made it possible for Germany and Britain to regulate the conduct of their allies, to prevent things from going too far. And for ten years, they were right. Only when it became clear to one of the two sides that peaceful solutions screwed them over, regardless of whether policy was aggressive or conciliatory, did that side opt for open war.
If the story of 1904-6 was of the end of the old diplomacy in Europe, the story of 1906-15 is that of the end of European diplomats belief in peace, and their failure to maintain it. For peace is not a default state of affairs any more than war is: just as a conscious effort must be made to keep a country in the fight, so must one be made to keep a country out of one.
The Chinese and Ottoman Crises.
Since it had been over the Chinese Question that the two blocs had formed, it was only appropriate that China continued to consume their interest in the years after 1906. All three of the Entente powers had quite sizable spheres of influence in China south of the Yangzi, even Japan, which dominated Fujian. With the three acting in concert (described, in the years before it became commonplace to refer to them as the Entente powers, as the Far Eastern Triplice), an agenda of liberal reform was pushed strongly among key governors and members of the Qing court an action that only embittered the conservatives and Empress Dowager Cixi. Things did not really change once Cixi and the Guangxu Emperor died in 1908, for the Empress Dowager Longyu, the most powerful figure in the regency for the Xuantong Emperor, was equally indisposed towards reform proposals
The Empire of the Great Qing had, to put it lightly, fallen on hard times, and it was clear to everybody that the Empire was in a period of great flux, that would leave it irrevocably changed even if it survived. Modernization was the main issue how to do it, what it even entailed, and so forth. Some vestiges of the old way were being swept aside. In 1905, the old imperial examination system, the organizing ritual for the entire state bureaucracy, had been abolished, but nothing new replaced it. And it was doubtful that the replacement system, if it ever arose perhaps to rely on Western-style university degrees would ever command the kind of social cachet that the old examinations had. So while the Qing ridded themselves of archaic rituals, they also ridded themselves of one of the most important pillars holding up the edifice of their power: the connection of the state to the people. It was much the same in other scenarios. The military was only partially modernized. A sizable European-style force, the Beiyang Army, had been created with the receipts from taxation around the Bo Hai and the Yellow Sea, and it could reasonably be expected to stand up to Russian, French, or Japanese troops but it was just one army, and most of the rest of the Qing Banners remained equipped with ancient weapons and drilled in bygone tactics, while the officers of the Beiyang Army itself began to get some very dangerous ideas in their heads, having learned at schools in Germany, the United States, and Japan.
But the Qing were not the only empire on the ropes, for the Ottomans, too, had problems. Sultan Abdülhamid II had granted a constitution back thirty years prior, at the climax of Tanzimat, but had long since abrogated it, while the Ottoman Empires problems continued to fester. Macedonia was practically in a state of open war, with Greeks, Bulgarians, and Serbians all fighting Turks and Albanians and each other to try to have the opportunity to launch a revolution. Since the 1880s, the Armenian Question had opened up a further sore, while Libya edged further and further away from Ottoman hands. And the crowning humiliation, the British seizure of Egypt, had not even meant anything in concrete terms, for Egypt had been nigh-independent anyway, but it further increased the tenuousness of Ottoman control outside Anatolia and served as a reminder of what the European Great Powers would do to partition the Ottomans, given half the chance.
The feeling of helplessness was exacerbated by the belief that, unfettered by the restrictions of the foreign powers, the Ottoman Empire would be doing just fine. Abdülhamid had ascended to the throne of a state which was forced to use four-fifths of its revenues to meet its foreign debts. Despite the Sultans energetic efforts, the situation had hardly improved in the last three decades. In some ways, it had even gotten worse, for Abdülhamid encouraged European economic competition in lieu of territorial ambitions, and relied on foreign loans to construct the stuff of industrialization railroads and factories that he believed necessary to provide a foundation for the Ottoman economy. By 1908, the Ottoman peasantry contributed more to the state exchequer than it had thirty years prior, and the value of Anatolian grain exports nearly doubled from 465 million kurus to 754 million. But this was money that the Ottomans could not take advantage of by export duties or tariffs, because the European capitulations prevented any rise in government customs duties. So even as the Ottoman economy expanded, Ottoman finances got progressively worse and worse, and foreign encroachment only increased.
Since the 1880s, the Committee for Union and Progress had been working towards the resumption of the constitutional era: for if Abdülhamid could not fix these problems, it was better that he be replaced, no? In 1906, one of its members, one postal worker named Mehmed Talaat, founded the Ottoman Freedom Society in Thessaloniki. He found particular success in gaining adherents among the officers of the Third Army, stationed nearby; in 1907 the OFS absorbed an already-extant officers organization, Vatan (Fatherland), which had been founded by one Mustafa Kemal. Many members of the army were convinced that Abdülhamid feared a coup, and so kept the army powerless; given a free hand, they believed, the army could crush the endemic terrorism in Macedonia and maintain Ottoman integrity. And the men of the Third Army had little problem with turning strong words into strong actions, for they mutinied on several occasions between 1906 and 1908 although the issue of pay arrears tended to be more important to them than the issue of constitutionalism!
It was during the last of these mutinies that the officers of the Third Army finally decided to take matters into their own hands; they and their troops marched on Constantinople, and with no other loyal troops at hand, Abdülhamid was forced to grant them the concessions they craved: their salaries, for one, but the restoration of the old constitution and the reconstitution of the parliament. These Young Turks did not, however, take over the government. Abdülhamid's vezirs remained in charge, while the politicians that ran the parliament remained those of the old school. For now, the members of the CUP preferred to exercise their power indirectly, by influence. The soldiers were by and large of a similar mindset: Kemal, for one, declared that officers ought to disengage from politics entirely, although later on this turned out to be a ploy to increase his own influence by playing the disinterested arbiter.
The fact that the Young Turk Revolution did not actually put the Young Turks into power in Constantinople meant nothing to the Ottoman Empires neighbors. Public opinion of la jeune Turquie in France and Great Britain was generally quite positive, with the CUP cast in the same mold as the men of 1789. The governments of those countries, however, regarded the resumption of constitutionalism as dangerous: France and Britain preferred a Turkey that was barely strong enough to stay together to one that was strong enough to safeguard its own independence.
And the Ottomans more immediate neighbors saw in the revolution an opportunity of their own. Within two weeks of the restoration of the constitution, the Austrian foreign minister, Alois von Ährenthal, announced the annexation of Bosnia, long occupied by the Austrians under the terms of the Treaty of San Stefano. Russia remained suspiciously quiet, for the Russians had agreed to support such an initiative at Kreuzburg two years prior. Ährenthal then bought the Serbians off with a promise to evacuate the Sanjak of Novipazar and as Austrian troops shipped out, Serbs took their place. A day later, Ferdinand of Bulgaria, formerly a subordinate prince subject to Ottoman suzerainty, declared himself tsar. The Greeks completed the round of humiliations when a Cretan rebellion led by Eleftherios Venizelos seized control of the island and announced its annexation to Greece.
The Ottomans had their own problems, of course, for the revolt had left a rather gaping power vacuum at the top, and for much of the rest of 1908 various politicians attempted to fill it. The state of half-revolution finally turned ugly in April 1909. Third Armys officers had been motivated by issues of pay and failure to release conscripts from duty when their terms were up, but they were also motivated by more elitist concerns. Kemal and others like him were products of military academies; they disliked the trend of recent years to promote officers from the ranks, and had convinced Parliament to discharge many of these ex-rankers to increase the armys reliance on academy graduates. Many of these discharged veterans gathered in Constantinople; the revolt of a local army battalion that kicked off in April was a product of their influence, mixed with a healthy dosage of Islamic fundamentalism. Regardless of their actual intentions, the rebels were quickly branded as a conservative countercoup, and the Sultan who was almost certainly uninvolved was called their leader; Kemal and Mahmud Sevket formed an Action Army from the Second and Third Armies, marched on Constantinople again, put down the revolt, purged the old Ottoman elites that populated the parliament, declared martial law, and deposed Abdülhamid, replacing him with his brother, Mehmed V.
What happened in 1909 was the real Young Turk revolution, and reactionaries across the Empire knew it. Within a few months, fresh rebellions had broken out in the Yemen, Lebanon, Macedonia, and Albania. Sevket, who had become minister of war, demanded extraordinary credits for the modernization of the army, ordering German and French weapons with which to crush the rebellions. By 1910 he had largely succeeded in marginalizing the Macedonian rebels, thus permitting Ottoman troops to march into Albania. Under normal circumstances, the Albanians would hardly have been a threat. Unfortunately, the Albanians were backed up by Italy. The Italians had long been interested in establishing an Albanian puppet state; this was the perfect opportunity, and they were hardly going to waste it. By virtue of Italys ostensible adherence to the Triple Alliance, the Italians had purchased German and Austrian support for such an invasion; by virtue of the secret conventions with France and the UK that signaled Italys unofficial adherence to the ententes, they had gained the acquiescence of the western powers as well. The Italians thus convinced the Albanians to accept the duke of Aosta, Emanuele Filiberto, as a king, and duly sent him across the Straits of Otranto with a sizable army; further troops were dispatched to Libya.
With the Ottoman armies in Albania driven back, fresh Macedonian uprisings ignited. In May 1910, the Serbs and Greeks made an agreement, at Italian behest, to divide Ottoman Macedonia between them; the Bulgarians adhered to the alliance within a week, and the so-called Balkan League quickly made a perfunctory series of protests about national self-determination, mobilized, and plunged into Ottoman Macedonia. Confronted with overwhelming numbers on all fronts, the Ottoman armies only narrowly managed to pull back from their Albanian positions. By June, Serb armies had seized Uskub, Greeks had made it to Ioannina and Thessaloniki, and Bulgarians had reached the Aegean; the Montenegrins, not included in the league but anxious to make a profit out of Ottoman difficulties, managed their own expansion in northern Albania.
There were, to be sure, a few bright spots in the whole thing for the Ottomans. The Bulgarians had, following up on their successes in the Rhodope Mountains, attempted to seize Edirne, but a numerically inferior force under Sevkets personal command had managed to hold them off. And in Libya, the Italians managed to seize a few coastal ports, but were soon confronted by a massive popular uprising in the interior under the leadership of the Young Turk officer Ismail Enver. Enver, dubbed Napoleonlik by both friends and enemies (a mark of his stature, his ambitions, and his friends claimed his military skill), allied with the Senussi and played off their particular brand of Islamic fundamentalism to energize opposition to the Italians, who were quickly driven back to Tripoli.
Wisely, the Italians managed to get out of this Balkan War early; by using the Balkan League as a stick with which to hit the Turks, they managed to gain Libya and an independent Albania (well, independent from the Ottomans, but under Italian control) in a treaty signed at Bodrum in August 1910. The League itself, after some squabbling over the division of the remaining spoils, failed to push the Turks out of Edirne, although the Greeks gained command of the Aegean Sea. Finally, in January, the Great Powers convened a conference at London to dispose of Ottoman Macedonia properly. Italys Albanian puppet and its control of Libya were confirmed. East Macedonia went to the Bulgarians, the south went to the Greeks, and the north to the Serbs, with the Montenegrins picking up small slices of Albania and Kosovo. Despite the successful cruise of the Greek navy, though, the Greeks were prevented from claiming Chios or Mytilene, both of which remained Turkish, although they did pick up the Dodecanese/Kyklades almost by default.
The aftermath of the Balkan War led to a restructuring of the local alliances. Serbia, which despite its anti-Austrian government had been willing to work with the Austro-Russian bloc to make its gains, now cast aside any pretense of being willing to work with Vienna, having gained the slice of Macedonia it coveted, and elements of the military soon began to revive their projects for Bosnian revolution and annexation. With Dragutin Dimitrijević, the chief of Serbian intelligence, running terrorist operations in both Bosnia and in Bulgarian Macedonia, Serbia rapidly began to wear out its welcome with its neighbors. Despite Russias unwillingness to risk its Austrian connections for the sake of Serbian terrorism, Dimitrijević continued to ramp up his operations abroad while redefining the terms of political debate at home his extremism forced even more moderate politicians like the revered elder statesman Nikola Paić to take a harder anti-Austrian line merely to retain electoral support. If the Serbs had any allies, they were the Montenegrins and Greeks, the former rather more supportive than the latter.
For their own part, the Ottomans, with Sevket remaining the most powerful man in the government (bolstered by the successful defense of Edirne, and his ability to blame the rest of the cabinet for not supporting the army), began to reach out for alliances. Britain in particular seemed willing to listen, for the same reason that the British had come to terms with the French and Japanese: the Ottoman Sultan was also the Sunni Khalifa, and the worrisome rise in Muslim fundamentalism in Egypt and India made reconciliation nigh-critical. The Young Turks remained outside the government, but their supposed ideological affinity with the British and French helped facilitate further ties. It helped, too, that the British had prevented the Greeks from taking Chios and Mytilene. Sevket convinced the parliament to order new British battlecruisers and even two Dreadnoughts to bolster the Ottoman navy (spurring an arms race with the Greeks, who ordered their own cruisers and battleships from both Britain and Germany). Libya, however, remained a festering sore; even though it had been officially ceded to Italy, Enver remained in the country with Ottoman support, leading the rebellion and feeding off of various victories.
By late 1911, though, Ottoman concerns were increasingly taking a back seat to Chinese ones as far as the Great Powers were concerned. The military, and in particular the Beiyang Army, was hard pressed to suppress the various rebellions that periodically erupted in southern China; Hubei and Guangxi both flared up in the fall of 1910 while the Beiyang Army was busy further north, and the Bannermen showed no sign of successfully defeating the uprisings anytime soon. In March 1912, the worst of the revolts kicked off in Guangdong, led by Huang Xing, organized by the Tongmenghui (the Revolutionary Alliance) with most distressingly Japanese-provided arms and cash. After a comic-opera chase that ended in the capture of the local Qing viceroy, Huang Xing and his followers seized control of Guangdong and Guangxi and began calling for further rebellions elsewhere in southern China. Thousands of Bannermen and Green Standard troops defected to the rebels, who proclaimed a Republic, demanded that Dowager Empress Longyu abdicate in the Xuantong Emperors name, and called for a national assembly in Nanjing to organize the new government. Within a month, the Republic gained a (provisional) President, Dr. Sun Yat-sen, who returned from exile in America after learning of the success of the Guangdong rebellion. The Japanese and French both recognized the new government and put pressure on Beijing to bow to the inevitable.
Like most supposedly inevitable things, the triumph of the Republic was, well, not. For it was the Beiyang Army that remained the most powerful force in the state; whoever controlled it was the arbiter of China. And the man that controlled it, indeed had shaped its very core for decades, Yuan Shikai, was well aware of his bargaining position. He had been cast out of government in 1909 by Zaifeng, the regent, and had sat at his country estate cooling his heels, all the while keeping abreast of the situation in the south and of the Beiyang Armys position via his protégés in the Beiyang officer corps. Only a week after Huang Xings successful uprising in Guangdong, Yuans patience paid off: the Dowager Empress dismissed Zaifeng and asked Yuan to personally return to government as Prime Minister.
Almost immediately, Yuans Beiyang Army divisions began to move south under the command of Duan Qirui, establishing advance positions in Henan and northern Jiangsu. At first blush, it seemed the Republic was doomed. Huang Xing was the only military commander of note, and he was hardly of note at all; the Republics armies on the Yangzi, hastily assembled from a collection of revolutionary diehards and defecting Bannermen and Green Standard troops, were far from equal to the task of fighting Duan Qiruis regulars, despite their numerical superiority. But, in fact, the advance south was only a way to enhance Yuans own bargaining position. Shortly thereafter, he opened negotiations with the Republic at Nanjing, demanding the position of the Presidency in exchange for the Beiyang Armys support. Bolstered by Suns confidence, along with a steadily increasing stream of Japanese arms and advisors, the still-assembling Assembly rejected his terms and prepared for all-out war.
If the Republics armies were, to put it lightly, garbage, at least Huang Xing and Sun Yat-sen had the ability to trade space for time. Except for Shandong, the region between the Huanghe and the Yangzi was basically under the Republics control. Of course, trading space for time only worked if you actually made the enemy armies work for that space, and so Huang Xing deployed his troops in a defense in depth, attempting to grind the Beiyang columns to a halt. It was an effective strategy, but Huang Xing, not exactly a paragon of military brilliance, bungled its implementation, drawing his troops into bloody fights and eroding his initial numerical advantage. Between the start of Duans advance in late April 1912 and the end of summer, the Republican forces bled themselves to death in fruitless attacks on Qing trench lines and machine gun emplacements. By August, Huang and his forces had been backed up to the key rail center of Xuzhou, which had to remain open long enough for Republican troops to evacuate southern Shandong, lest they be encircled; the Republican army held Xuzhou long enough to get the rest of their soldiers out, but Huang Xing was killed by a lucky artillery airburst at the climax of the fight. The battered Republican troops retreated south, barely held together by the leadership of Li Yuanhong.
Despite the Republics inability to score a defensive victory over the inexorable Beiyang troops, Duans columns were running out of steam by the fall of 1912, and were forced to halt north of the Huai River for the winter; the concurrent attacks further west on Chengdu, led by Zhang Xun, also ground to a halt in the Qinling Mountains just south of Xian. It was at this point, at the ends of their supply lines, that the outnumbered but still qualitatively superior Beiyang forces faced the greatest threat of the campaign thus far. Despite Huang Xings bloodletting, the Republican armies still greatly outnumbered the Qing troops, and the long summer campaign had proved valuable in terms of experience for both commanders and troops. Japanese advisors also aided the Republican soldiers, especially in setting up a military academy in the Baixia District. And Japanese arms continued to stream to the Republic from the Japanese sphere in Fujian. With the Qing armies deep in enemy territory and, whats more, isolated from each other, they were ripe for encirclement. Sun therefore ordered Li to envelop Duans column, which had begun to set up winter cantonments in Huainan. The attack went through on November 8 and, beyond all expectations, achieved operational surprise; a sizable portion of the Beiyang regulars were cut off and forced to surrender, although Duan pulled the majority of his troops back to the north.
The defeat at Huainan and the subsequent bloody Qing assault on the entrenchments in the Qinling Mountains (which succeeded, albeit with such a heavy cost that Zhang Xun deemed his army unable to continue its attack into the Han River valley towards Chengdu) provided a welcome boost to the Republics morale and made it clear that this particular war would not be over any time soon. Yuan began to look elsewhere for allies against the Japanese. The obvious choice would be the Germans and Russians, who had already begun offering assistance in 1912; considering Russian designs on Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia, the price for such assistance seemed too expensive early on. But now Yuan needed German arms, German advisors, and perhaps even German soldiers. The Germans, always interested in expanding their influence in China, wholeheartedly agreed. Furthermore, Helmuth von Moltke (the Younger), the Chief of the German Great General Staff, had the perfect man to head up a mission to China: Erich von Falkenhayn, who had served there during the Boxer Rebellion and as such was somewhat annoyingly out of sync with the opinions of the rest of the German officer corps. If he loves China so much, groused Moltke, let him stay there and be out of my hair, and so he did.
What the Kaiser and Moltke could not agree to was Yuans request for soldiers to shore up the faltering Beiyang Army, and that in turn was because Germanys internal politics had changed.
Bülow, the longtime Chancellor, had resigned in 1910 after it became clear that his so-called Weltpolitik program was failing to manage the Reichstag; his successor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, had nothing like Bülows experience in foreign affairs, and furthermore had to deal with rising popular support for the Social Democrats. In the 1912 elections, the SPD gained a plurality in the Reichstag, forcing Bethmann to resort to short-term expedients and the support of the Catholic Center to push through his policies. The case for Chinese intervention suffered, as the SPD limited the China credits to merely dispatching advisors and technical staff. But the ultimate result was to, albeit temporarily, destroy the case for the Anglo-German naval race. Bülows Weltpolitik might be better described as Sammlungspolitik: a policy of bringing together disparate interests, like the Prussian Junkers, the nouveau riche industrialists, and even the workers of the Rhine steel mills and the North Sea shipyards. The naval building programs of Alfred von Tirpitz had been justified in large part by their supposed ability to bring together such a coalition. But German arms spending had never made up more than five percent of the economy as a whole, and most of that spending had been on personnel, not plant. The navy itself further weakened Tirpitzs case by stating that the focus needed to be on training and personnel, not matériel, while the Russian alliance (further solidified by a naval convention in 1911) reduced the viability of Tirpitzs arguments for naval expansion on defensive grounds. The election of 1912 had been the death knell; the growing power of the SPD clearly indicated the collapse of the Sammlungspolitik initiative among the workers.
Even though German politics were increasingly difficult to manage, those of the British were even worse. Back when the Anglo-German naval race was still at its height, the Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer for Asquiths government, David Lloyd George, had unveiled a massive Peoples Budget, which included massive tax hikes on various commodities as well as on land, to provide a financial basis for both the construction of the Royal Navys battleships and for an expanded welfare and health-insurance scheme. The political crisis that this kicked off in Parliament, which involved two general elections in the space of a single year, ultimately resulted in the Parliament Act 1910, by which the Lords, who had blocked the Peoples Budget time and again, were bypassed. No longer could the Lords break a bill by veto; if the Commons passed a bill, the Lords could only exercise a veto twice before they could be overridden. But to buy the support of enough of the Commons to pass this act and the budget, Asquith and Lloyd George had been forced to make concessions to John Redmonds Irish nationalists. Home Rule, dead for two decades, was to be brought up once again.
In Home Rule, the Tories saw a wedge issue not merely to break the Liberal alliance with the Irish, but to break the Liberal Party itself and return to power. Led by Andrew Bonar Law, the Tories began a risky campaign of threatening civil war to try to force a general election on Asquiths Liberals. Perhaps Bonar Law never intended to actually start a war; it was never particularly clear. But his words, and those of Edward Carson, inflamed the Unionists of Ulster and spawned a grassroots anti-Home Rule militia movement. Irish nationalists and Dublin socialists formed their own militias, so that by late 1913 there were three private armies running around in Ireland. Sentiment in the British officer corps ran strongly towards the Ulster Unionists, so that it slowly became clear that the Liberals could not even rely on the military to enforce order. And even in Great Britain itself, pro- and anti-Home Rule clubs sprang up, many of which were armed; thousands of people from England and Scotland (yes, and Wales) took the same covenant that Carsons Ulster Volunteers did.
Some British politicians, such as the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, believed that the Liberals could only solve the Irish problems by entering into a general European war; nationalism and sacred-union politics could keep everybody hanging together against the common foe. His views were in the minority in 1912, for few, even in the Liberal cabinet, saw any reason to intervene in Europe. But over the next two years, crisis upon crisis built up. China had exploded, and German officers were, according to the British broadsheets, practically running the Qing Empire while the British themselves timidly refused to give succor to the Republicans (ignoring, of course, that the Japanese were, but that was beside the point). In late 1912, Morocco heated up again, as France sought to convert its spheres of influence into actual control following a fresh financial crisis there; the Germans sent a gunboat to Morocco to enforce their own claims, and were only bought off with vast swathes of French African colonies utter nonsense, claimed the British and French press, for after all, had not Algeciras given France and Spain exclusive spheres in Morocco anyway? That same year, Russian troops intervened en masse in Iran, which was in the throes of its Constitutionalist revolution; Azerbaijan and the northern half of Iran were secured by Russian forces in the name of the shah, but the Constitutionalists were able to flee southward and received no help from the British.
Since it had been over the Chinese Question that the two blocs had formed, it was only appropriate that China continued to consume their interest in the years after 1906. All three of the Entente powers had quite sizable spheres of influence in China south of the Yangzi, even Japan, which dominated Fujian. With the three acting in concert (described, in the years before it became commonplace to refer to them as the Entente powers, as the Far Eastern Triplice), an agenda of liberal reform was pushed strongly among key governors and members of the Qing court an action that only embittered the conservatives and Empress Dowager Cixi. Things did not really change once Cixi and the Guangxu Emperor died in 1908, for the Empress Dowager Longyu, the most powerful figure in the regency for the Xuantong Emperor, was equally indisposed towards reform proposals
The Empire of the Great Qing had, to put it lightly, fallen on hard times, and it was clear to everybody that the Empire was in a period of great flux, that would leave it irrevocably changed even if it survived. Modernization was the main issue how to do it, what it even entailed, and so forth. Some vestiges of the old way were being swept aside. In 1905, the old imperial examination system, the organizing ritual for the entire state bureaucracy, had been abolished, but nothing new replaced it. And it was doubtful that the replacement system, if it ever arose perhaps to rely on Western-style university degrees would ever command the kind of social cachet that the old examinations had. So while the Qing ridded themselves of archaic rituals, they also ridded themselves of one of the most important pillars holding up the edifice of their power: the connection of the state to the people. It was much the same in other scenarios. The military was only partially modernized. A sizable European-style force, the Beiyang Army, had been created with the receipts from taxation around the Bo Hai and the Yellow Sea, and it could reasonably be expected to stand up to Russian, French, or Japanese troops but it was just one army, and most of the rest of the Qing Banners remained equipped with ancient weapons and drilled in bygone tactics, while the officers of the Beiyang Army itself began to get some very dangerous ideas in their heads, having learned at schools in Germany, the United States, and Japan.
But the Qing were not the only empire on the ropes, for the Ottomans, too, had problems. Sultan Abdülhamid II had granted a constitution back thirty years prior, at the climax of Tanzimat, but had long since abrogated it, while the Ottoman Empires problems continued to fester. Macedonia was practically in a state of open war, with Greeks, Bulgarians, and Serbians all fighting Turks and Albanians and each other to try to have the opportunity to launch a revolution. Since the 1880s, the Armenian Question had opened up a further sore, while Libya edged further and further away from Ottoman hands. And the crowning humiliation, the British seizure of Egypt, had not even meant anything in concrete terms, for Egypt had been nigh-independent anyway, but it further increased the tenuousness of Ottoman control outside Anatolia and served as a reminder of what the European Great Powers would do to partition the Ottomans, given half the chance.
The feeling of helplessness was exacerbated by the belief that, unfettered by the restrictions of the foreign powers, the Ottoman Empire would be doing just fine. Abdülhamid had ascended to the throne of a state which was forced to use four-fifths of its revenues to meet its foreign debts. Despite the Sultans energetic efforts, the situation had hardly improved in the last three decades. In some ways, it had even gotten worse, for Abdülhamid encouraged European economic competition in lieu of territorial ambitions, and relied on foreign loans to construct the stuff of industrialization railroads and factories that he believed necessary to provide a foundation for the Ottoman economy. By 1908, the Ottoman peasantry contributed more to the state exchequer than it had thirty years prior, and the value of Anatolian grain exports nearly doubled from 465 million kurus to 754 million. But this was money that the Ottomans could not take advantage of by export duties or tariffs, because the European capitulations prevented any rise in government customs duties. So even as the Ottoman economy expanded, Ottoman finances got progressively worse and worse, and foreign encroachment only increased.
Since the 1880s, the Committee for Union and Progress had been working towards the resumption of the constitutional era: for if Abdülhamid could not fix these problems, it was better that he be replaced, no? In 1906, one of its members, one postal worker named Mehmed Talaat, founded the Ottoman Freedom Society in Thessaloniki. He found particular success in gaining adherents among the officers of the Third Army, stationed nearby; in 1907 the OFS absorbed an already-extant officers organization, Vatan (Fatherland), which had been founded by one Mustafa Kemal. Many members of the army were convinced that Abdülhamid feared a coup, and so kept the army powerless; given a free hand, they believed, the army could crush the endemic terrorism in Macedonia and maintain Ottoman integrity. And the men of the Third Army had little problem with turning strong words into strong actions, for they mutinied on several occasions between 1906 and 1908 although the issue of pay arrears tended to be more important to them than the issue of constitutionalism!
It was during the last of these mutinies that the officers of the Third Army finally decided to take matters into their own hands; they and their troops marched on Constantinople, and with no other loyal troops at hand, Abdülhamid was forced to grant them the concessions they craved: their salaries, for one, but the restoration of the old constitution and the reconstitution of the parliament. These Young Turks did not, however, take over the government. Abdülhamid's vezirs remained in charge, while the politicians that ran the parliament remained those of the old school. For now, the members of the CUP preferred to exercise their power indirectly, by influence. The soldiers were by and large of a similar mindset: Kemal, for one, declared that officers ought to disengage from politics entirely, although later on this turned out to be a ploy to increase his own influence by playing the disinterested arbiter.
The fact that the Young Turk Revolution did not actually put the Young Turks into power in Constantinople meant nothing to the Ottoman Empires neighbors. Public opinion of la jeune Turquie in France and Great Britain was generally quite positive, with the CUP cast in the same mold as the men of 1789. The governments of those countries, however, regarded the resumption of constitutionalism as dangerous: France and Britain preferred a Turkey that was barely strong enough to stay together to one that was strong enough to safeguard its own independence.
And the Ottomans more immediate neighbors saw in the revolution an opportunity of their own. Within two weeks of the restoration of the constitution, the Austrian foreign minister, Alois von Ährenthal, announced the annexation of Bosnia, long occupied by the Austrians under the terms of the Treaty of San Stefano. Russia remained suspiciously quiet, for the Russians had agreed to support such an initiative at Kreuzburg two years prior. Ährenthal then bought the Serbians off with a promise to evacuate the Sanjak of Novipazar and as Austrian troops shipped out, Serbs took their place. A day later, Ferdinand of Bulgaria, formerly a subordinate prince subject to Ottoman suzerainty, declared himself tsar. The Greeks completed the round of humiliations when a Cretan rebellion led by Eleftherios Venizelos seized control of the island and announced its annexation to Greece.
The Ottomans had their own problems, of course, for the revolt had left a rather gaping power vacuum at the top, and for much of the rest of 1908 various politicians attempted to fill it. The state of half-revolution finally turned ugly in April 1909. Third Armys officers had been motivated by issues of pay and failure to release conscripts from duty when their terms were up, but they were also motivated by more elitist concerns. Kemal and others like him were products of military academies; they disliked the trend of recent years to promote officers from the ranks, and had convinced Parliament to discharge many of these ex-rankers to increase the armys reliance on academy graduates. Many of these discharged veterans gathered in Constantinople; the revolt of a local army battalion that kicked off in April was a product of their influence, mixed with a healthy dosage of Islamic fundamentalism. Regardless of their actual intentions, the rebels were quickly branded as a conservative countercoup, and the Sultan who was almost certainly uninvolved was called their leader; Kemal and Mahmud Sevket formed an Action Army from the Second and Third Armies, marched on Constantinople again, put down the revolt, purged the old Ottoman elites that populated the parliament, declared martial law, and deposed Abdülhamid, replacing him with his brother, Mehmed V.
What happened in 1909 was the real Young Turk revolution, and reactionaries across the Empire knew it. Within a few months, fresh rebellions had broken out in the Yemen, Lebanon, Macedonia, and Albania. Sevket, who had become minister of war, demanded extraordinary credits for the modernization of the army, ordering German and French weapons with which to crush the rebellions. By 1910 he had largely succeeded in marginalizing the Macedonian rebels, thus permitting Ottoman troops to march into Albania. Under normal circumstances, the Albanians would hardly have been a threat. Unfortunately, the Albanians were backed up by Italy. The Italians had long been interested in establishing an Albanian puppet state; this was the perfect opportunity, and they were hardly going to waste it. By virtue of Italys ostensible adherence to the Triple Alliance, the Italians had purchased German and Austrian support for such an invasion; by virtue of the secret conventions with France and the UK that signaled Italys unofficial adherence to the ententes, they had gained the acquiescence of the western powers as well. The Italians thus convinced the Albanians to accept the duke of Aosta, Emanuele Filiberto, as a king, and duly sent him across the Straits of Otranto with a sizable army; further troops were dispatched to Libya.
With the Ottoman armies in Albania driven back, fresh Macedonian uprisings ignited. In May 1910, the Serbs and Greeks made an agreement, at Italian behest, to divide Ottoman Macedonia between them; the Bulgarians adhered to the alliance within a week, and the so-called Balkan League quickly made a perfunctory series of protests about national self-determination, mobilized, and plunged into Ottoman Macedonia. Confronted with overwhelming numbers on all fronts, the Ottoman armies only narrowly managed to pull back from their Albanian positions. By June, Serb armies had seized Uskub, Greeks had made it to Ioannina and Thessaloniki, and Bulgarians had reached the Aegean; the Montenegrins, not included in the league but anxious to make a profit out of Ottoman difficulties, managed their own expansion in northern Albania.
There were, to be sure, a few bright spots in the whole thing for the Ottomans. The Bulgarians had, following up on their successes in the Rhodope Mountains, attempted to seize Edirne, but a numerically inferior force under Sevkets personal command had managed to hold them off. And in Libya, the Italians managed to seize a few coastal ports, but were soon confronted by a massive popular uprising in the interior under the leadership of the Young Turk officer Ismail Enver. Enver, dubbed Napoleonlik by both friends and enemies (a mark of his stature, his ambitions, and his friends claimed his military skill), allied with the Senussi and played off their particular brand of Islamic fundamentalism to energize opposition to the Italians, who were quickly driven back to Tripoli.
Wisely, the Italians managed to get out of this Balkan War early; by using the Balkan League as a stick with which to hit the Turks, they managed to gain Libya and an independent Albania (well, independent from the Ottomans, but under Italian control) in a treaty signed at Bodrum in August 1910. The League itself, after some squabbling over the division of the remaining spoils, failed to push the Turks out of Edirne, although the Greeks gained command of the Aegean Sea. Finally, in January, the Great Powers convened a conference at London to dispose of Ottoman Macedonia properly. Italys Albanian puppet and its control of Libya were confirmed. East Macedonia went to the Bulgarians, the south went to the Greeks, and the north to the Serbs, with the Montenegrins picking up small slices of Albania and Kosovo. Despite the successful cruise of the Greek navy, though, the Greeks were prevented from claiming Chios or Mytilene, both of which remained Turkish, although they did pick up the Dodecanese/Kyklades almost by default.
The aftermath of the Balkan War led to a restructuring of the local alliances. Serbia, which despite its anti-Austrian government had been willing to work with the Austro-Russian bloc to make its gains, now cast aside any pretense of being willing to work with Vienna, having gained the slice of Macedonia it coveted, and elements of the military soon began to revive their projects for Bosnian revolution and annexation. With Dragutin Dimitrijević, the chief of Serbian intelligence, running terrorist operations in both Bosnia and in Bulgarian Macedonia, Serbia rapidly began to wear out its welcome with its neighbors. Despite Russias unwillingness to risk its Austrian connections for the sake of Serbian terrorism, Dimitrijević continued to ramp up his operations abroad while redefining the terms of political debate at home his extremism forced even more moderate politicians like the revered elder statesman Nikola Paić to take a harder anti-Austrian line merely to retain electoral support. If the Serbs had any allies, they were the Montenegrins and Greeks, the former rather more supportive than the latter.
For their own part, the Ottomans, with Sevket remaining the most powerful man in the government (bolstered by the successful defense of Edirne, and his ability to blame the rest of the cabinet for not supporting the army), began to reach out for alliances. Britain in particular seemed willing to listen, for the same reason that the British had come to terms with the French and Japanese: the Ottoman Sultan was also the Sunni Khalifa, and the worrisome rise in Muslim fundamentalism in Egypt and India made reconciliation nigh-critical. The Young Turks remained outside the government, but their supposed ideological affinity with the British and French helped facilitate further ties. It helped, too, that the British had prevented the Greeks from taking Chios and Mytilene. Sevket convinced the parliament to order new British battlecruisers and even two Dreadnoughts to bolster the Ottoman navy (spurring an arms race with the Greeks, who ordered their own cruisers and battleships from both Britain and Germany). Libya, however, remained a festering sore; even though it had been officially ceded to Italy, Enver remained in the country with Ottoman support, leading the rebellion and feeding off of various victories.
By late 1911, though, Ottoman concerns were increasingly taking a back seat to Chinese ones as far as the Great Powers were concerned. The military, and in particular the Beiyang Army, was hard pressed to suppress the various rebellions that periodically erupted in southern China; Hubei and Guangxi both flared up in the fall of 1910 while the Beiyang Army was busy further north, and the Bannermen showed no sign of successfully defeating the uprisings anytime soon. In March 1912, the worst of the revolts kicked off in Guangdong, led by Huang Xing, organized by the Tongmenghui (the Revolutionary Alliance) with most distressingly Japanese-provided arms and cash. After a comic-opera chase that ended in the capture of the local Qing viceroy, Huang Xing and his followers seized control of Guangdong and Guangxi and began calling for further rebellions elsewhere in southern China. Thousands of Bannermen and Green Standard troops defected to the rebels, who proclaimed a Republic, demanded that Dowager Empress Longyu abdicate in the Xuantong Emperors name, and called for a national assembly in Nanjing to organize the new government. Within a month, the Republic gained a (provisional) President, Dr. Sun Yat-sen, who returned from exile in America after learning of the success of the Guangdong rebellion. The Japanese and French both recognized the new government and put pressure on Beijing to bow to the inevitable.
Like most supposedly inevitable things, the triumph of the Republic was, well, not. For it was the Beiyang Army that remained the most powerful force in the state; whoever controlled it was the arbiter of China. And the man that controlled it, indeed had shaped its very core for decades, Yuan Shikai, was well aware of his bargaining position. He had been cast out of government in 1909 by Zaifeng, the regent, and had sat at his country estate cooling his heels, all the while keeping abreast of the situation in the south and of the Beiyang Armys position via his protégés in the Beiyang officer corps. Only a week after Huang Xings successful uprising in Guangdong, Yuans patience paid off: the Dowager Empress dismissed Zaifeng and asked Yuan to personally return to government as Prime Minister.
Almost immediately, Yuans Beiyang Army divisions began to move south under the command of Duan Qirui, establishing advance positions in Henan and northern Jiangsu. At first blush, it seemed the Republic was doomed. Huang Xing was the only military commander of note, and he was hardly of note at all; the Republics armies on the Yangzi, hastily assembled from a collection of revolutionary diehards and defecting Bannermen and Green Standard troops, were far from equal to the task of fighting Duan Qiruis regulars, despite their numerical superiority. But, in fact, the advance south was only a way to enhance Yuans own bargaining position. Shortly thereafter, he opened negotiations with the Republic at Nanjing, demanding the position of the Presidency in exchange for the Beiyang Armys support. Bolstered by Suns confidence, along with a steadily increasing stream of Japanese arms and advisors, the still-assembling Assembly rejected his terms and prepared for all-out war.
If the Republics armies were, to put it lightly, garbage, at least Huang Xing and Sun Yat-sen had the ability to trade space for time. Except for Shandong, the region between the Huanghe and the Yangzi was basically under the Republics control. Of course, trading space for time only worked if you actually made the enemy armies work for that space, and so Huang Xing deployed his troops in a defense in depth, attempting to grind the Beiyang columns to a halt. It was an effective strategy, but Huang Xing, not exactly a paragon of military brilliance, bungled its implementation, drawing his troops into bloody fights and eroding his initial numerical advantage. Between the start of Duans advance in late April 1912 and the end of summer, the Republican forces bled themselves to death in fruitless attacks on Qing trench lines and machine gun emplacements. By August, Huang and his forces had been backed up to the key rail center of Xuzhou, which had to remain open long enough for Republican troops to evacuate southern Shandong, lest they be encircled; the Republican army held Xuzhou long enough to get the rest of their soldiers out, but Huang Xing was killed by a lucky artillery airburst at the climax of the fight. The battered Republican troops retreated south, barely held together by the leadership of Li Yuanhong.
Despite the Republics inability to score a defensive victory over the inexorable Beiyang troops, Duans columns were running out of steam by the fall of 1912, and were forced to halt north of the Huai River for the winter; the concurrent attacks further west on Chengdu, led by Zhang Xun, also ground to a halt in the Qinling Mountains just south of Xian. It was at this point, at the ends of their supply lines, that the outnumbered but still qualitatively superior Beiyang forces faced the greatest threat of the campaign thus far. Despite Huang Xings bloodletting, the Republican armies still greatly outnumbered the Qing troops, and the long summer campaign had proved valuable in terms of experience for both commanders and troops. Japanese advisors also aided the Republican soldiers, especially in setting up a military academy in the Baixia District. And Japanese arms continued to stream to the Republic from the Japanese sphere in Fujian. With the Qing armies deep in enemy territory and, whats more, isolated from each other, they were ripe for encirclement. Sun therefore ordered Li to envelop Duans column, which had begun to set up winter cantonments in Huainan. The attack went through on November 8 and, beyond all expectations, achieved operational surprise; a sizable portion of the Beiyang regulars were cut off and forced to surrender, although Duan pulled the majority of his troops back to the north.
The defeat at Huainan and the subsequent bloody Qing assault on the entrenchments in the Qinling Mountains (which succeeded, albeit with such a heavy cost that Zhang Xun deemed his army unable to continue its attack into the Han River valley towards Chengdu) provided a welcome boost to the Republics morale and made it clear that this particular war would not be over any time soon. Yuan began to look elsewhere for allies against the Japanese. The obvious choice would be the Germans and Russians, who had already begun offering assistance in 1912; considering Russian designs on Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia, the price for such assistance seemed too expensive early on. But now Yuan needed German arms, German advisors, and perhaps even German soldiers. The Germans, always interested in expanding their influence in China, wholeheartedly agreed. Furthermore, Helmuth von Moltke (the Younger), the Chief of the German Great General Staff, had the perfect man to head up a mission to China: Erich von Falkenhayn, who had served there during the Boxer Rebellion and as such was somewhat annoyingly out of sync with the opinions of the rest of the German officer corps. If he loves China so much, groused Moltke, let him stay there and be out of my hair, and so he did.
What the Kaiser and Moltke could not agree to was Yuans request for soldiers to shore up the faltering Beiyang Army, and that in turn was because Germanys internal politics had changed.
Bülow, the longtime Chancellor, had resigned in 1910 after it became clear that his so-called Weltpolitik program was failing to manage the Reichstag; his successor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, had nothing like Bülows experience in foreign affairs, and furthermore had to deal with rising popular support for the Social Democrats. In the 1912 elections, the SPD gained a plurality in the Reichstag, forcing Bethmann to resort to short-term expedients and the support of the Catholic Center to push through his policies. The case for Chinese intervention suffered, as the SPD limited the China credits to merely dispatching advisors and technical staff. But the ultimate result was to, albeit temporarily, destroy the case for the Anglo-German naval race. Bülows Weltpolitik might be better described as Sammlungspolitik: a policy of bringing together disparate interests, like the Prussian Junkers, the nouveau riche industrialists, and even the workers of the Rhine steel mills and the North Sea shipyards. The naval building programs of Alfred von Tirpitz had been justified in large part by their supposed ability to bring together such a coalition. But German arms spending had never made up more than five percent of the economy as a whole, and most of that spending had been on personnel, not plant. The navy itself further weakened Tirpitzs case by stating that the focus needed to be on training and personnel, not matériel, while the Russian alliance (further solidified by a naval convention in 1911) reduced the viability of Tirpitzs arguments for naval expansion on defensive grounds. The election of 1912 had been the death knell; the growing power of the SPD clearly indicated the collapse of the Sammlungspolitik initiative among the workers.
Even though German politics were increasingly difficult to manage, those of the British were even worse. Back when the Anglo-German naval race was still at its height, the Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer for Asquiths government, David Lloyd George, had unveiled a massive Peoples Budget, which included massive tax hikes on various commodities as well as on land, to provide a financial basis for both the construction of the Royal Navys battleships and for an expanded welfare and health-insurance scheme. The political crisis that this kicked off in Parliament, which involved two general elections in the space of a single year, ultimately resulted in the Parliament Act 1910, by which the Lords, who had blocked the Peoples Budget time and again, were bypassed. No longer could the Lords break a bill by veto; if the Commons passed a bill, the Lords could only exercise a veto twice before they could be overridden. But to buy the support of enough of the Commons to pass this act and the budget, Asquith and Lloyd George had been forced to make concessions to John Redmonds Irish nationalists. Home Rule, dead for two decades, was to be brought up once again.
In Home Rule, the Tories saw a wedge issue not merely to break the Liberal alliance with the Irish, but to break the Liberal Party itself and return to power. Led by Andrew Bonar Law, the Tories began a risky campaign of threatening civil war to try to force a general election on Asquiths Liberals. Perhaps Bonar Law never intended to actually start a war; it was never particularly clear. But his words, and those of Edward Carson, inflamed the Unionists of Ulster and spawned a grassroots anti-Home Rule militia movement. Irish nationalists and Dublin socialists formed their own militias, so that by late 1913 there were three private armies running around in Ireland. Sentiment in the British officer corps ran strongly towards the Ulster Unionists, so that it slowly became clear that the Liberals could not even rely on the military to enforce order. And even in Great Britain itself, pro- and anti-Home Rule clubs sprang up, many of which were armed; thousands of people from England and Scotland (yes, and Wales) took the same covenant that Carsons Ulster Volunteers did.
Some British politicians, such as the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, believed that the Liberals could only solve the Irish problems by entering into a general European war; nationalism and sacred-union politics could keep everybody hanging together against the common foe. His views were in the minority in 1912, for few, even in the Liberal cabinet, saw any reason to intervene in Europe. But over the next two years, crisis upon crisis built up. China had exploded, and German officers were, according to the British broadsheets, practically running the Qing Empire while the British themselves timidly refused to give succor to the Republicans (ignoring, of course, that the Japanese were, but that was beside the point). In late 1912, Morocco heated up again, as France sought to convert its spheres of influence into actual control following a fresh financial crisis there; the Germans sent a gunboat to Morocco to enforce their own claims, and were only bought off with vast swathes of French African colonies utter nonsense, claimed the British and French press, for after all, had not Algeciras given France and Spain exclusive spheres in Morocco anyway? That same year, Russian troops intervened en masse in Iran, which was in the throes of its Constitutionalist revolution; Azerbaijan and the northern half of Iran were secured by Russian forces in the name of the shah, but the Constitutionalists were able to flee southward and received no help from the British.
But perhaps the worst indignity was the destruction of Serbia in 1913. Dragutin Dimitrijević finally went too far that summer; attempting to force a confrontation between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, so as to make it possible to overthrow the government, he had one of his terrorist cells assassinate the Austrian Archduke Friedrich in Sarajevo. Dimitrijević got his wish – with the enraged Austrians demanding that the conspirators be brought to justice, the army by and large followed him in launching a coup d’état against Prime Minister Milovanović, who had been trying to smooth relations with the Austrians and Bulgarians. Serbia promptly declared war on Austria-Hungary and invaded Bosnia in conjunction with the Montenegrins. The Serbian army, battle-hardened from the (First) Balkan War, managed to seize a few Austrian border fortifications and make some headway in the Banat, and when the Bulgarians joined the war on Austria’s side, Dimitrijević played his ace in the hole, Romania, which invaded the Bulgarian Dobruja and diverted Bulgaria’s attention. Within a month, though, the Austrians had fully mobilized, and annihilated the Serbian armies. Belgrade was occupied in early September, and the Romanians were quietly “convinced” to back down by Habsburg armies and Romanov diplomatic pressure. Dimitrijević was assassinated, Serbian resistance collapsed, and the Austrians and Bulgarians busily set about partitioning Serbia and Montenegro (Macedonia to the Bulgarians, Montenegro and Novipazar to the Austrians, rump Serbian kingdom to be ruled by the Obrenović family as Austrian puppets).
The death of independent Serbia caused shockwaves in the British and French governments, both of which were outraged about the elimination of a useful sockpuppet; with their Balkan policies in tatters, they began grasping at straws for fresh solutions, approaching the Ottomans and Greeks to try to craft some kind of unified agreement against the Bulgarians, who had by then grown far too powerful. But in larger terms, a sort of pessimism had set in among the French and British leaders, a conviction that, by the rules of the current game, Germany and Russia and even Austria-Hungary ended up winning, no matter what policy France and Britain followed. If the French and British followed a forward policy as in Morocco, Germany was able to extort African colonies away, all the while bleating about Anglo-French aggression; if they followed a policy of restraint, as in the Balkans and Iran, the Germans and Austrians and Russians simply steamrolled what little opposition was in their way. The whole situation was intolerable. At a memorable cabinet meeting in 1914, Churchill argued that, if the game were rigged, it was better not to play by the rules any longer. Even then, it took some time for his words to sink in, but the idea had been planted in the minds of the British statesmen.
At the same time, the Russian government was getting increasingly antsy. With unrest growing once more at home – not quite to 1905 levels yet, but strikes were increasing both in number and, in some cases, intensity – councils were divided as to whether it would be best for Russia to alleviate the tension by fixing everyone’s attention abroad, or to avoid foreign entanglements for fear that prolonged war would cause revolution. Despite the solidifying agreements with Germany and Austria-Hungary, the government was, if anything, even more touchy about violations of what it perceived to be its interests, while increasingly unwilling to see how Russian interests and, say, British ones clashed. Russia could occupy northern Iran, but if the British made any protest about it, much less any moves toward occupying the south, the Russians would harbor resentment, even anger; Russia could annex Manchuria and Mongolia and ship arms and advisors to the Qing, but if the Japanese made any protest about it, the Russians would, well, you get it. Perhaps the Russians, having gained so much, were abjectly terrified of having to yield any of it; diplomatic historians have never quite come to an agreement of how this Russian cognitive bias worked, but, nevertheless, it was there, and it was dangerous as far as the maintenance of peace was concerned.
In the meantime, the Chinese civil war increased in intensity and breadth, with Japan now openly sending arms and advisors to the Republic, along with a few divisions of “volunteers”; bolstered by these reinforcements, the tyro Republican general Jiang Jieshi in the Henan Province, aiming to capture Zhengzhou. The Republican divisions stepped off on April 12, 1913 and, backed by considerable artillery preparation, managed to sweep aside the exhausted Beiyang Army units that stood in their way. Three weeks later, Jiang’s troops stood on the Huanghe and prepared to roll up the Qing positions further east. Amid the consternation in Beijing, Yuan appointed Falkenhayn chief of staff of the Beiyang Army, replacing his own man, Xu Shichang; with the German advisors doing Qing staffwork, Falkenhayn devised a plan to redeploy the Beiyang forces. It had become apparent that Jiang had drawn resources away from the defense of the west to fuel his offensive, so Falkenhayn simply took the drastic step of shipping most of the army west. With Feng Guozhang commanding, the Qing forces smashed through the brittle Republican cordon and swarmed south into Sichuan; several corps swung eastwards, down the Han River, and launched their own push down the rail line towards Wuhan. Jiang was forced to pull his troops back from the north before their lines of communication were cut; after a series of savage counterattacks he managed to regain control of Xiangfan, the vital gateway from the western mountain country into the plains, but Chengdu itself was lost, as were the advance positions on the Huanghe. After two seasons of hard fighting, the Republican troops were back where they started, on the line of the Huai.
In early 1914, the British Home Rule Bill went through its First Reading, handily passed the Commons, and was of course blocked by the Lords; the process of preparing the bill for the next reading went ahead apace, neither side willing to back down even an inch. Interestingly, one of the officers prominently involved in the Ulster unionist movement, Sir Henry Wilson, was also the man responsible for joint war planning with the French – joint war planning that was, by both the cabinet’s lights and by those of the Commons, completely illegal. Wilson played a key role in a display of disobedience by several officers at the Curragh camp in Ireland in May 1914, who refused to have anything to do with shooting their fellow Ulstermen (never mind that they hadn’t been ordered to do it yet); Wilson passed the information to the Tories, who quickly brought it up in the Commons as yet another tactic to try to break the Liberal government. This most recent attack of Bonar Law’s failed, but it further impressed upon Churchill and, by now, even Asquith and Lloyd George the necessity of finding some alternative means of unifying the country and redirecting everybody’s attention from the Home Rule crisis before the Third Reading.
Increasingly, Britain’s government was coming to view its established alliances as absolutely vital, to be maintained at any cost. In August, that exclusive club of Japan and France was joined by a fourth member, the Ottoman Empire, which finally managed to get the British and French to restructure its debt and ship over arms and advisors in exchange for an alliance. Grey cannily sent over Hubert Gough, one of the general officers from the Curragh “mutiny”, to be inspector-general of the Ottoman army – which immediately sparked a major crisis with Russia, as the Russians were determined not to let the British simply seize control of the Ottoman military. Eventually Gough was shifted to an advisory role in the Ottoman war ministry (still under the indefatigable Sevket), but Anglo-Russian bad feelings continued to simmer. What’s more, Armenian terrorism ramped up in eastern Anatolia; of the cabinet, Sevket alone believed that the Russians were behind it all, but lacked the ability to persuade the rest of the government that drastic action needed to be taken.
Italy, having seen the benefits of a reckless, adventurous policy in the Balkans, looked elsewhere for fresh and – supposedly – easy conquests. Libya, unfortunately, was proving a rather tough nut to crack; despite the influx of fresh troops, the Italians still could not penetrate Cyrenaica, nor could they make an impression against the Senussi. So, in the interest of acquiring cheap glory, the Salandra government of 1913-5, although short-lived, inaugurated the Italo-Abyssinian War in the fall of 1914 by sending Luigi Capello and several divisions to intervene in the civil war between the negus Iyasu V and his aunt Zewditu. Iyasu, who, as many eccentric rulers do, had completely alienated his own nobility, had been on the back foot, his armies crushed and forced to the Eritrean border. Rather like the Albanians in 1910, he received aid from the Italians; rather unlike the Ottomans of 1910, Zewditu and her adherents put up stiff resistance, giving the Italians a bloody nose at Mek’ele and pulling back into the Ethiopian plateau.
And, finally, in China, the Russo-German alliance stepped up its efforts in favor of the Qing, smelling victory after the fall of Chengdu. Russian troops were now beginning to serve openly with the Qing (the Germans continued to restrict their efforts to sending advisors and arms, though), and participated in Feng Guozhang’s offensive against Chongqing in the spring of 1914. That attack failed, but it diverted the Republic’s reserves, opening the way for the real attack, a coastal thrust through the Jiangsu canal country conducted by Duan Qirui. Falkenhayn correctly surmised that Jiangsu would be lightly guarded, since the terrain was not exactly conducive to an offensive, and that the Qing forces could rely on the Huai River to guard their western flank. By July, the Beiyang Army was attacking Taizhou and Nantong with little chance of relief for Yan Xishan’s beleaguered defenders – until Jiang Jieshi was placed in command. Through judicious deployment of artillery reserves and a desperate strategy of flooding many of the Jiangsu dikes, Jiang halted the Qing offensive short of the Yangzi and earned for himself an impressive military reputation. Nanjing was, temporarily at least, saved.
The fall of 1914 saw an unhappy development for the Entente powers: the fall of Bethmann Hollweg from the German chancellorship. Bethmann’s ability to manage the Reichstag had already been in question after the 1912 elections, but the death knell for his administration had been the Zabern affair of 1914, an uncomfortable confrontation between army officers and Alsatians in the Reichsland of Elsaß-Lothringen. While the French angrily demanded some sort of apology – a startling reversal, as hitherto there had been little interest by the French government in Alsatian affairs, despite all of the “Lost Provinces” rhetoric – the SPD led the charge in the Reichstag, voting no confidence in Bethmann’s leadership out of concern about his supposed militarism, while the various conservative parties joined in out of dislike for his policy of détente with the West. When Bethmann tendered his resignation in October, the Kaiser briefly thought of replacing him with the vice-chancellor, Clemens von Delbrück, who could serve as a bit of a mad dog to cow the Reichstag into submission, but eventually decided against that, bringing the Bavarian Georg von Hertling into power; Hertling, as a (former) key leader in the Center Party, was able to command a majority easily, and soon began to pass laws increasing the size and power of the army and navy. Hertling also managed to obtain credits to ship a full army corps east to China to serve under Falkenhayn’s command.
Britain’s Home Rule Bill went through its Third Reading in February 1915, and over the objections of the Lords, per the Parliament Act 1910, was passed. Asquith, however, had inserted a key clause specifying that the Act only established a devolved government for Ireland with a separate Parliament; the extension of “Ireland” was left up to further implementation, and it was now this implementation over which the Tories and Liberals began to wrangle in a conference at Buckingham Palace. Bonar Law and the Unionists demanded that the Six Counties be excluded from the territory under the Irish Parliament-to-be; Redmond and the Nationalists were prepared to concede all but County Tyrone and County Fermanagh, and neither side came close to a compromise. In the midst of the Buckingham Palace meetings, the UVF shipped in tens of thousands of rifles and millions of rounds of ammunition into the port at Larne, successfully evading the constabulary. Within two days, gunfire erupted at Bachelors Walk in Dublin, and several German Mausers were discovered at the scene. And, as if Britain’s problems weren’t getting bad enough, the so-called Triple Alliance of transport unions in London made public their plans for a general strike in April 1915.
Thus, one might be forgiven for thinking that Churchill, Asquith, Grey, and the others felt a significant amount of relief when news came of the assassination of Mahmud Sevket Paşa by an Armenian nationalist on March 12, 1915. The following day, followed by claims of complicity in the attack by members of the Ottoman cabinet, Ismail Enver, the hero of Libya, marched into a cabinet meeting at the head of a squad of troops and personally shot the grand vezir. Brandishing evidence of a Russian plot – supposedly, the Armenian had been working with Russian intelligence – with members of the Ottoman government against the Young Turk revolution, he finally brought the CUP into actual government and installed a triumvirate of leaders: himself as minister of war, replacing Sevket, with Talaat as minister of the interior and another Young Turk, Cemal, became minister of public works. The new grand vezir, Mehmed Said Halim Paşa, was a CUP member as well. The new government quickly crushed an attempted coup by the conservative politician Mehmed Kamil and, once its power had been secured, issued an ultimatum to Russia to cease harboring Armenian terrorists and, more outrageously, to return Kars.
The two weeks that intervened between Enver’s rise to power and the ultimatum were filled with tense discussions between the Ottomans and British. Enver, like the rest of the CUP, was convinced that the Russians’ actions, if permitted to continue, would spell the end of the Ottoman state: it would break up on ethnic lines, and destroy the Empire. He and his colleagues threatened to go it alone if the British failed to support them, ending the alliance and perhaps – just perhaps – calling for a jihad in Britain’s colonies. Confronted with the prospect of revolution in the colonies, a complete and messy collapse of the Middle East, and an unceasing Russo-German advance across the rest of Asia, and convinced at any rate that the Russo-German provocations Had To Be Stopped, Grey agreed to back the Ottomans up completely. Sure, the alliance with the Ottomans could have been used to restrain them from rash and drastic actions like going to war with Russia. But Grey and the rest of the British government had lost faith in restraint, and they had their own internal problems with which to deal.
For their own part, the Russians believed that the Ottoman ultimatum was preposterous. Perhaps an effort to compromise – dropping the Armenian terrorism, if the Russians were in fact behind it (and the records are sketchy) – could have been a reasonable way to defuse the situation, although of course Kars was out of the question. But the Russians believed that backing down in the Caucasus would set an entirely too dangerous precedent. Furthermore, the strongest advocate for peace in the Russian cabinet, the interior minister Durnovo, was lately an advocate of attempting to regain the old French ties; he was discredited in the tsar’s councils for reasons other than his actual arguments for avoiding war. Durnovo claimed that if Russia went to war – and considering the interlocking nature of the alliance blocs, it would be a global war, from China through Central Asia to the Caucasus – that they could expect revolution from below, which had almost destroyed the Russian state in 1905 (or so he said). But Krivoshein, the agriculture minister, argued a different point with the same evidence. In Krivoshein’s hands, the fear of revolution was a reason for a forward policy: Russia must forestall revolution by unifying the people against a common foe, the hated ‘Englishwoman’ and her French and Japanese and Turkish lapdogs. Nikolai II came to agree with Krivoshein and Izvolsky, who laid out a similar argument: he ordered mobilization to begin, and ignored the Ottoman ultimatum.
Much is sometimes made of the efforts to stop the war from spreading. The British, wary of facing down the expanded German High Seas Fleet, made a brief attempt to neutralize Western Europe on March 28, trying to use the lack of an explicit German military commitment to aid Russia as a wedge, but the Germans would have none of it, and stood by their Russian allies. Russia, too, tried to keep the war localized (relatively so), by trying to argue to the Japanese that the Anglo-Japanese Alliance only embraced East Asia, and did not apply to a war in the Caucasus or Central Asia. The Japanese foreign minister, Katō Takaaki, brushed off the Russian claims and instead presented the Russians with his own ultimatum: withdraw advisors from Qing China or go to war with Japan. Needless to say, the ultimatum failed to deter the Russians, and indeed Russian mobilization plans included shipping troops down the now-completed Trans-Siberian Railway. (If the neutrality agreement with Japan had gone through, the Russian minister of war, Danilov, would probably have resigned in a rage, as it would have made nonsense of all his plans.)
Despite these last-minute attempts to localize a conflict that was increasingly obviously a global war, the central point remains the same: Britain, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire, and to a lesser extent Japan, considered war to be desirable: peace was no longer an important goal in and of itself. In the nineteenth century, European states had avoided war over crises far more serious than the assassination of Mahmud Sevket because those European states fundamentally believed that war was not a viable option, and that peace was qua peace a desirable state of affairs. Any arguments that war was inevitable in 1915 – perhaps not that specific war, but any global war between the Entente and the Three Emperors’ League – must rest on this fact, not on facile arguments about economics, the self-consuming nature of capitalistic imperialism, or the so-called balance of power.
The Ottoman Empire declared war on Russia after the ultimatum ran out on April Fools’ Day, 1915. Two days later, Russia declared war on Japan, preempting Katō’s declaration by six hours, and the United Kingdom declared war on Russia a few hours after that. On April 4, Germany declared war on both the United Kingdom and Japan, which brought France into the fray eight hours later; Austria-Hungary was last to join, and only declared war on France and the Ottoman Empire. (Britain declared war on Austria-Hungary on May 15.) The requisite war declarations from the Qing Empire and the Republic of China flurried in within the next few weeks, while Iran joined in on the Russian side (and Afghanistan on the British) on April 20. Britain’s Empire and the Dominions had already jumped in from April 7-9.
So it was that a few scraps of paper and a few inconveniently placed Armenian bullets set the entire Eastern Hemisphere ablaze.
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Since this is supposed be an improvement of the previous TL, I'd really like it if people hounded me about dumb crap I pulled.
Other comments and questions would be awesome, too.
The death of independent Serbia caused shockwaves in the British and French governments, both of which were outraged about the elimination of a useful sockpuppet; with their Balkan policies in tatters, they began grasping at straws for fresh solutions, approaching the Ottomans and Greeks to try to craft some kind of unified agreement against the Bulgarians, who had by then grown far too powerful. But in larger terms, a sort of pessimism had set in among the French and British leaders, a conviction that, by the rules of the current game, Germany and Russia and even Austria-Hungary ended up winning, no matter what policy France and Britain followed. If the French and British followed a forward policy as in Morocco, Germany was able to extort African colonies away, all the while bleating about Anglo-French aggression; if they followed a policy of restraint, as in the Balkans and Iran, the Germans and Austrians and Russians simply steamrolled what little opposition was in their way. The whole situation was intolerable. At a memorable cabinet meeting in 1914, Churchill argued that, if the game were rigged, it was better not to play by the rules any longer. Even then, it took some time for his words to sink in, but the idea had been planted in the minds of the British statesmen.
At the same time, the Russian government was getting increasingly antsy. With unrest growing once more at home – not quite to 1905 levels yet, but strikes were increasing both in number and, in some cases, intensity – councils were divided as to whether it would be best for Russia to alleviate the tension by fixing everyone’s attention abroad, or to avoid foreign entanglements for fear that prolonged war would cause revolution. Despite the solidifying agreements with Germany and Austria-Hungary, the government was, if anything, even more touchy about violations of what it perceived to be its interests, while increasingly unwilling to see how Russian interests and, say, British ones clashed. Russia could occupy northern Iran, but if the British made any protest about it, much less any moves toward occupying the south, the Russians would harbor resentment, even anger; Russia could annex Manchuria and Mongolia and ship arms and advisors to the Qing, but if the Japanese made any protest about it, the Russians would, well, you get it. Perhaps the Russians, having gained so much, were abjectly terrified of having to yield any of it; diplomatic historians have never quite come to an agreement of how this Russian cognitive bias worked, but, nevertheless, it was there, and it was dangerous as far as the maintenance of peace was concerned.
In the meantime, the Chinese civil war increased in intensity and breadth, with Japan now openly sending arms and advisors to the Republic, along with a few divisions of “volunteers”; bolstered by these reinforcements, the tyro Republican general Jiang Jieshi in the Henan Province, aiming to capture Zhengzhou. The Republican divisions stepped off on April 12, 1913 and, backed by considerable artillery preparation, managed to sweep aside the exhausted Beiyang Army units that stood in their way. Three weeks later, Jiang’s troops stood on the Huanghe and prepared to roll up the Qing positions further east. Amid the consternation in Beijing, Yuan appointed Falkenhayn chief of staff of the Beiyang Army, replacing his own man, Xu Shichang; with the German advisors doing Qing staffwork, Falkenhayn devised a plan to redeploy the Beiyang forces. It had become apparent that Jiang had drawn resources away from the defense of the west to fuel his offensive, so Falkenhayn simply took the drastic step of shipping most of the army west. With Feng Guozhang commanding, the Qing forces smashed through the brittle Republican cordon and swarmed south into Sichuan; several corps swung eastwards, down the Han River, and launched their own push down the rail line towards Wuhan. Jiang was forced to pull his troops back from the north before their lines of communication were cut; after a series of savage counterattacks he managed to regain control of Xiangfan, the vital gateway from the western mountain country into the plains, but Chengdu itself was lost, as were the advance positions on the Huanghe. After two seasons of hard fighting, the Republican troops were back where they started, on the line of the Huai.
In early 1914, the British Home Rule Bill went through its First Reading, handily passed the Commons, and was of course blocked by the Lords; the process of preparing the bill for the next reading went ahead apace, neither side willing to back down even an inch. Interestingly, one of the officers prominently involved in the Ulster unionist movement, Sir Henry Wilson, was also the man responsible for joint war planning with the French – joint war planning that was, by both the cabinet’s lights and by those of the Commons, completely illegal. Wilson played a key role in a display of disobedience by several officers at the Curragh camp in Ireland in May 1914, who refused to have anything to do with shooting their fellow Ulstermen (never mind that they hadn’t been ordered to do it yet); Wilson passed the information to the Tories, who quickly brought it up in the Commons as yet another tactic to try to break the Liberal government. This most recent attack of Bonar Law’s failed, but it further impressed upon Churchill and, by now, even Asquith and Lloyd George the necessity of finding some alternative means of unifying the country and redirecting everybody’s attention from the Home Rule crisis before the Third Reading.
Increasingly, Britain’s government was coming to view its established alliances as absolutely vital, to be maintained at any cost. In August, that exclusive club of Japan and France was joined by a fourth member, the Ottoman Empire, which finally managed to get the British and French to restructure its debt and ship over arms and advisors in exchange for an alliance. Grey cannily sent over Hubert Gough, one of the general officers from the Curragh “mutiny”, to be inspector-general of the Ottoman army – which immediately sparked a major crisis with Russia, as the Russians were determined not to let the British simply seize control of the Ottoman military. Eventually Gough was shifted to an advisory role in the Ottoman war ministry (still under the indefatigable Sevket), but Anglo-Russian bad feelings continued to simmer. What’s more, Armenian terrorism ramped up in eastern Anatolia; of the cabinet, Sevket alone believed that the Russians were behind it all, but lacked the ability to persuade the rest of the government that drastic action needed to be taken.
Italy, having seen the benefits of a reckless, adventurous policy in the Balkans, looked elsewhere for fresh and – supposedly – easy conquests. Libya, unfortunately, was proving a rather tough nut to crack; despite the influx of fresh troops, the Italians still could not penetrate Cyrenaica, nor could they make an impression against the Senussi. So, in the interest of acquiring cheap glory, the Salandra government of 1913-5, although short-lived, inaugurated the Italo-Abyssinian War in the fall of 1914 by sending Luigi Capello and several divisions to intervene in the civil war between the negus Iyasu V and his aunt Zewditu. Iyasu, who, as many eccentric rulers do, had completely alienated his own nobility, had been on the back foot, his armies crushed and forced to the Eritrean border. Rather like the Albanians in 1910, he received aid from the Italians; rather unlike the Ottomans of 1910, Zewditu and her adherents put up stiff resistance, giving the Italians a bloody nose at Mek’ele and pulling back into the Ethiopian plateau.
And, finally, in China, the Russo-German alliance stepped up its efforts in favor of the Qing, smelling victory after the fall of Chengdu. Russian troops were now beginning to serve openly with the Qing (the Germans continued to restrict their efforts to sending advisors and arms, though), and participated in Feng Guozhang’s offensive against Chongqing in the spring of 1914. That attack failed, but it diverted the Republic’s reserves, opening the way for the real attack, a coastal thrust through the Jiangsu canal country conducted by Duan Qirui. Falkenhayn correctly surmised that Jiangsu would be lightly guarded, since the terrain was not exactly conducive to an offensive, and that the Qing forces could rely on the Huai River to guard their western flank. By July, the Beiyang Army was attacking Taizhou and Nantong with little chance of relief for Yan Xishan’s beleaguered defenders – until Jiang Jieshi was placed in command. Through judicious deployment of artillery reserves and a desperate strategy of flooding many of the Jiangsu dikes, Jiang halted the Qing offensive short of the Yangzi and earned for himself an impressive military reputation. Nanjing was, temporarily at least, saved.
The fall of 1914 saw an unhappy development for the Entente powers: the fall of Bethmann Hollweg from the German chancellorship. Bethmann’s ability to manage the Reichstag had already been in question after the 1912 elections, but the death knell for his administration had been the Zabern affair of 1914, an uncomfortable confrontation between army officers and Alsatians in the Reichsland of Elsaß-Lothringen. While the French angrily demanded some sort of apology – a startling reversal, as hitherto there had been little interest by the French government in Alsatian affairs, despite all of the “Lost Provinces” rhetoric – the SPD led the charge in the Reichstag, voting no confidence in Bethmann’s leadership out of concern about his supposed militarism, while the various conservative parties joined in out of dislike for his policy of détente with the West. When Bethmann tendered his resignation in October, the Kaiser briefly thought of replacing him with the vice-chancellor, Clemens von Delbrück, who could serve as a bit of a mad dog to cow the Reichstag into submission, but eventually decided against that, bringing the Bavarian Georg von Hertling into power; Hertling, as a (former) key leader in the Center Party, was able to command a majority easily, and soon began to pass laws increasing the size and power of the army and navy. Hertling also managed to obtain credits to ship a full army corps east to China to serve under Falkenhayn’s command.
Britain’s Home Rule Bill went through its Third Reading in February 1915, and over the objections of the Lords, per the Parliament Act 1910, was passed. Asquith, however, had inserted a key clause specifying that the Act only established a devolved government for Ireland with a separate Parliament; the extension of “Ireland” was left up to further implementation, and it was now this implementation over which the Tories and Liberals began to wrangle in a conference at Buckingham Palace. Bonar Law and the Unionists demanded that the Six Counties be excluded from the territory under the Irish Parliament-to-be; Redmond and the Nationalists were prepared to concede all but County Tyrone and County Fermanagh, and neither side came close to a compromise. In the midst of the Buckingham Palace meetings, the UVF shipped in tens of thousands of rifles and millions of rounds of ammunition into the port at Larne, successfully evading the constabulary. Within two days, gunfire erupted at Bachelors Walk in Dublin, and several German Mausers were discovered at the scene. And, as if Britain’s problems weren’t getting bad enough, the so-called Triple Alliance of transport unions in London made public their plans for a general strike in April 1915.
Thus, one might be forgiven for thinking that Churchill, Asquith, Grey, and the others felt a significant amount of relief when news came of the assassination of Mahmud Sevket Paşa by an Armenian nationalist on March 12, 1915. The following day, followed by claims of complicity in the attack by members of the Ottoman cabinet, Ismail Enver, the hero of Libya, marched into a cabinet meeting at the head of a squad of troops and personally shot the grand vezir. Brandishing evidence of a Russian plot – supposedly, the Armenian had been working with Russian intelligence – with members of the Ottoman government against the Young Turk revolution, he finally brought the CUP into actual government and installed a triumvirate of leaders: himself as minister of war, replacing Sevket, with Talaat as minister of the interior and another Young Turk, Cemal, became minister of public works. The new grand vezir, Mehmed Said Halim Paşa, was a CUP member as well. The new government quickly crushed an attempted coup by the conservative politician Mehmed Kamil and, once its power had been secured, issued an ultimatum to Russia to cease harboring Armenian terrorists and, more outrageously, to return Kars.
The two weeks that intervened between Enver’s rise to power and the ultimatum were filled with tense discussions between the Ottomans and British. Enver, like the rest of the CUP, was convinced that the Russians’ actions, if permitted to continue, would spell the end of the Ottoman state: it would break up on ethnic lines, and destroy the Empire. He and his colleagues threatened to go it alone if the British failed to support them, ending the alliance and perhaps – just perhaps – calling for a jihad in Britain’s colonies. Confronted with the prospect of revolution in the colonies, a complete and messy collapse of the Middle East, and an unceasing Russo-German advance across the rest of Asia, and convinced at any rate that the Russo-German provocations Had To Be Stopped, Grey agreed to back the Ottomans up completely. Sure, the alliance with the Ottomans could have been used to restrain them from rash and drastic actions like going to war with Russia. But Grey and the rest of the British government had lost faith in restraint, and they had their own internal problems with which to deal.
For their own part, the Russians believed that the Ottoman ultimatum was preposterous. Perhaps an effort to compromise – dropping the Armenian terrorism, if the Russians were in fact behind it (and the records are sketchy) – could have been a reasonable way to defuse the situation, although of course Kars was out of the question. But the Russians believed that backing down in the Caucasus would set an entirely too dangerous precedent. Furthermore, the strongest advocate for peace in the Russian cabinet, the interior minister Durnovo, was lately an advocate of attempting to regain the old French ties; he was discredited in the tsar’s councils for reasons other than his actual arguments for avoiding war. Durnovo claimed that if Russia went to war – and considering the interlocking nature of the alliance blocs, it would be a global war, from China through Central Asia to the Caucasus – that they could expect revolution from below, which had almost destroyed the Russian state in 1905 (or so he said). But Krivoshein, the agriculture minister, argued a different point with the same evidence. In Krivoshein’s hands, the fear of revolution was a reason for a forward policy: Russia must forestall revolution by unifying the people against a common foe, the hated ‘Englishwoman’ and her French and Japanese and Turkish lapdogs. Nikolai II came to agree with Krivoshein and Izvolsky, who laid out a similar argument: he ordered mobilization to begin, and ignored the Ottoman ultimatum.
Much is sometimes made of the efforts to stop the war from spreading. The British, wary of facing down the expanded German High Seas Fleet, made a brief attempt to neutralize Western Europe on March 28, trying to use the lack of an explicit German military commitment to aid Russia as a wedge, but the Germans would have none of it, and stood by their Russian allies. Russia, too, tried to keep the war localized (relatively so), by trying to argue to the Japanese that the Anglo-Japanese Alliance only embraced East Asia, and did not apply to a war in the Caucasus or Central Asia. The Japanese foreign minister, Katō Takaaki, brushed off the Russian claims and instead presented the Russians with his own ultimatum: withdraw advisors from Qing China or go to war with Japan. Needless to say, the ultimatum failed to deter the Russians, and indeed Russian mobilization plans included shipping troops down the now-completed Trans-Siberian Railway. (If the neutrality agreement with Japan had gone through, the Russian minister of war, Danilov, would probably have resigned in a rage, as it would have made nonsense of all his plans.)
Despite these last-minute attempts to localize a conflict that was increasingly obviously a global war, the central point remains the same: Britain, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire, and to a lesser extent Japan, considered war to be desirable: peace was no longer an important goal in and of itself. In the nineteenth century, European states had avoided war over crises far more serious than the assassination of Mahmud Sevket because those European states fundamentally believed that war was not a viable option, and that peace was qua peace a desirable state of affairs. Any arguments that war was inevitable in 1915 – perhaps not that specific war, but any global war between the Entente and the Three Emperors’ League – must rest on this fact, not on facile arguments about economics, the self-consuming nature of capitalistic imperialism, or the so-called balance of power.
The Ottoman Empire declared war on Russia after the ultimatum ran out on April Fools’ Day, 1915. Two days later, Russia declared war on Japan, preempting Katō’s declaration by six hours, and the United Kingdom declared war on Russia a few hours after that. On April 4, Germany declared war on both the United Kingdom and Japan, which brought France into the fray eight hours later; Austria-Hungary was last to join, and only declared war on France and the Ottoman Empire. (Britain declared war on Austria-Hungary on May 15.) The requisite war declarations from the Qing Empire and the Republic of China flurried in within the next few weeks, while Iran joined in on the Russian side (and Afghanistan on the British) on April 20. Britain’s Empire and the Dominions had already jumped in from April 7-9.
So it was that a few scraps of paper and a few inconveniently placed Armenian bullets set the entire Eastern Hemisphere ablaze.
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Since this is supposed be an improvement of the previous TL, I'd really like it if people hounded me about dumb crap I pulled.
Other comments and questions would be awesome, too.
What were the Americans doing in regard to the European situation in OTL 1914?
America has no inclination to intervene, and won't for some time. Nobody's been attacking American shipping (yet), for instance. And the Americans have their own problems with which to deal in Mexico (still largely as OTL). They won't play much of a role in the early stages of the Eurasian War.
America has no inclination to intervene, and won't for some time. Nobody's been attacking American shipping (yet), for instance. And the Americans have their own problems with which to deal in Mexico (still largely as OTL). They won't play much of a role in the early stages of the Eurasian War.
Dreadnought
Deity
I gotta say, the last part was pretty dramatic! Good show!
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