We need a strong boss ruling over Constantinople, and since we cannot let any other power assume this role, we must take her for ourselves. For us to accomplish this without waging war on Turkey would, of course, be impossible.
-M.N.Girs. October 1914

コンスタンティノープルを支配する強力なボスが必要です。他の勢力にこの役割を任せることはできないため、トルコを自身としなければなりません。もちろん、トルコとの戦争をせずにこれを達成することは不可能です。 -ロシア外相M.N.ギールス. 1914年10月

IN HIS SECOND INAUGURAL ADDRESS, delivered as the American Civil War entered its final terrible year, U.S. president Abraham Lincoln said of chattel slavery, "all knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war." Much the same could be said of the Ottoman Empire and the First World War. Everyone knows that the July crisis grew out of the "Sarajevo outrage" of 28 June 1914, which brought to a head the long-simmering simmering rivalry between Austria and Russia in the Balkans, which was in turn a product of the decline of Ottoman power in Europe as manifested fested in the Balkan Wars of 1912-13. The fact that the brunt of the initial fighting and dying took place in France and Belgium due to the strategic accident of the Schlieffen Plan has colored popular memory of the conflict flict and dominated its literature, but not even the most blinkered historians ans of the western front deny that the war's real causes lie farther east.

　There remains considerable confusion, however, about how far east we should go in explaining the origins of World War I. The dominant theories of the war's outbreak relate to German imperial ambitions and fears of the growth of Russian power. The assassination of the archduke, by this account, functions merely as a kind of "inevitable accident" used by the Austrians to chastise Serbia and by the Germans as a convenient excuse for settling accounts with Russia. The outbreak of the world war by this logic was all owing to what Bismarck famously called "some damn fool thing in the Balkans." On this view, the war's proximate origins were essentially meaningless, a mere happenstance pretext for the insatiable ambitions of German Weltpolitik.

　Like all great historical myths, this one is appealing in its simplicity-and and its elegant Bismarckian cynicism. But we must be careful with Bismarck's marck's seductive bon mots. The "damn fool thing in the Balkans" line appears to be apocryphal, likely inspired by Bismarck's actual speech to the Reichstag during the Balkan crisis of 1876, when he notoriously said that the Balkans were "not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier." dier." Except that this is not quite what Bismarck said: in fact he claimed that the entire Ottoman Empire (den ganzen Orient) was not worth the life of a Prussian soldier.2

In this misquote, we can see something of the elision in popular mythology of the true nature of the Eastern Question, which was never really about "the Balkans," as many western (particularly British) observers mistakenly believed, but rather about the entire Ottoman man inheritance, up to and including-especially-the Straits.

　There are good reasons for this enduring confusion. Sazonov, as we have seen, kept the British deliberately misinformed about Russia's real foreign policy aims in July 1914, using Serbia and "the Balkans" as a brilliant liant smokescreen to conceal Russia's secret mobilization-and Russian ambitions to dominate Turkey. Russia's designs on the Straits had nearly been a casus belli between London and Petersburg in 1878, and might easily have sundered the fragile Anglo-Russian Accord had they emerged into public consciousness that fateful summer. True, the Liberal ascendancy dancy in British politics since 1905 had tipped the balance at Whitehall slightly toward Russophilia and Turcophobia (as against roughly the opposite posite tendency among old-line Tories). But the new pro-Russian line was fragile, needing constant massaging: thus Sazonov's careful May 1914 instructions that Benckendorff, his ambassador in London, not even use the word "agreement" (soglashenie) in his discussions of naval policy with Churchill and Grey.

　While French leaders like Poincare and Viviani had a better idea about the belligerent atmosphere in Petersburg in July 1914, the overriding obsession session in Paris with the German threat meant that they, too, failed to perceive ceive Russia's true war aims. In part the diplomatic disconnect between the western and eastern halves of the Entente coalition could be attributed to simple geography: Constantinople and the Straits remained an ever-present present concern of Russian foreign policy in a way it had not been for London or Paris since the Crimean War, when, tellingly, the joint object of Britain and France was more to deny them to Russia than to achieve anything in particular for themselves. In the intervening half-century, the primacy of the Porte had been downgraded in both Paris and London. Britain's long-serving ambassador, Lord Stratford Canning de Redcliffe, had been, in his day, arguably the most powerful man in Constantinople; Louis Mallet, in 1914, was an afterthought in the British Foreign Office, and not incidentally the worst-informed ambassador in the Ottoman capital. ital. By contrast, the Porte had long been and remained the most important tant post in Russian diplomacy, the province of old-line dynasties (like the Girs) who frequently served as foreign ministers. M. N. Girs, ambassador sador to the Porte during the Balkan wars (when command of the Black Sea fleet had been entrusted to him), was such a crucial figure in Russian foreign policy that he was asked to attend the notorious planning conference ence of 8/21 February 1914, which produced Russia's historic naval program gram envisioning conquest of the Straits. Revealingly, the primacy of the Porte had become a truism in German diplomacy as well: Marschall von Bieberstein, the "Giant of the Bosphorus" who served from 1897 to 1912, was a former state secretary; Hans von Wangenheim, his successor, sor, was a confidant of Kaiser Wilhelm II who had ambitions for the Chancellery. Girs and Wangenheim would both have a leg up in reading the tense diplomatic drama at the Porte in fall 1914 because they took the place seriously in a way their British and French counterparts simply no longer did.

　It is curious, although hardly surprising, that the downgrading of Turkey's key's importance by western ambassadors of the time has carried over into the historical literature. In what remains the most influential popular account of Turkey's entry into the war, A Peace to End All Peace, David Fromkin notes astutely that the anti-Semitic prejudice of Gerald Fitzmaurice, rice, the embassy dragoman, left London woefully misinformed about the government of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), as the ambassadors bassadors Fitzmaurice advised, including Mallet, mistakenly believed the Young Turks to be internationalists, rather than adamant Ottoman-Turkish nationalists. So heavily does Fromkin rely on British sources that their dismissive tone toward Turkey seeps subtly into his own account. "Few Europeans of Churchill's generation," he writes with elegant detachment, "knew or cared what went on in the languid empires of the Ottoman Sultan or the Persian Shah ... there was little in the picture ture to cause ordinary people living in Paris, London, or New York to believe it affected their lives and interests." Small wonder Fromkin emphasizes phasizes the "relative casualness with which the British drifted into the Ottoman war," which was "not a war to which they attached much importance.", portance.", Much like the Bismarckian view of a world war brought on by some silly Balkan bagatelle, Turkey's entry into the same appears on this view a tragic accident, mere spillover from a basically European conflict the belligerents had been unable to settle on the main battlefields.

　Nothing could be further from the truth. Although Fromkin is probably bly right that few people in France, Britain, or the United States cared overmuch in 1914 about what was happening in Turkey or Persia, these two countries constituted the primary arena of Russian imperial ambition. tion. In Petersburg, Ottoman affairs were deadly serious business in 1914, followed and analyzed with the rapt attention-and nearly unlimited intelligence telligence budget-that Paris then paid to Germany, London to Egypt and India, and Washington to its own strategic backyard in Mexico and South America. French and British diplomats may have been surprised and perturbed turbed when Krivoshein and Sazonov began demanding Constantinople before Turkey had even entered the war, but this was because they had not been paying careful attention. Austrian Galicia, the subject of so much inter-Allied acrimony in fall 1914, clearly mattered to Russia's leaders-but but nowhere near as much as the Straits. For Russia, the war of 1914 was always, ultimately, about Turkey.

　This essential truth is borne out clearly by the evidence. In the last week of July 1914, as the eyes of most European governments remained focused on Austria's threat to punish Serbia, Russia's own leaders were thinking about Turkey. Yanushkevitch (secretly) mobilized the Caucasian army on the Ottoman frontier as early as 27 July 1914. On the same day, Girs wrote a "top secret" memorandum to Sazonov in which he highlighted lighted the importance of not backing down in the face of the Austro-German German threat because doing so would lead to the "complete ruin of our entire position in the Near East," an outcome which, Girs warned, would force Russia "to take the initiative ourselves in waging war [against Turkey].4

Two days later, Yanushkevitch wired Tiflis command to proceed with variant 4 of Russia's general mobilization plan for a European war in which "Turkey does not at first take part." On 30 July, as Europeans first awakened to the acute danger posed by Russia's mobilization against Germany and possible German countermeasures, Sazonov issued a little-known known yet profoundly revealing directive to his ambassador to London. "In the present crisis," Russia's foreign minister wired urgently to Benckendorff,

it is a matter of the highest degree of importance that Turkey not receive ceive the two Dreadnoughts "Rio de Janeiro" [aka the Sultan Osman I] and "Reshadieh" [Reshad V] being built for her in England. The construction of these ships is so far advanced, that the first of them could be sent off to Turkey within weeks, and the second within months. Please make the English government aware of the overriding importance of this question for us, and impress upon them energetically cally that these ships must be retained in England.5

Already a vital matter for Russia in May and June, when Sazonov had first authorized Benckendorff to raise the matter with Grey and Churchill as delicately as possible, with a general war on the horizon on 30 July the question had become so urgent that the foreign minister could not afford to pussyfoot around any longer.

　As we know now, Sazonov need not have insisted so strongly. Churchill had in fact already resolved to detain the Turkish dreadnoughts in the interest terest of impressing them into Britain's own navy. That Sazonov did take the time to insist that the British government block delivery of these warships ships to Turkey in such an unequivocal manner-on the very day when Russia's general mobilization against Germany began-gives us a good idea as to just how important the issue of Ottoman naval power was to Russia. Once the world war was on, Russia could not possibly hope to import warships of any kind through the Straits, which, in case Turkey was able to deploy the dreadnoughts on order in England, would leave the Russian Black Sea fleet entirely at Ottoman mercy and close off any possibility of securing control of the Straits. It was a nightmare scenario for Russian foreign policy, avoided only due to Churchill's rash and controversial troversial actions 6

　The nightmare nearly came to pass anyway. Matching Russia's Caucasian casian mobilization tit for tat, War Minister Ismail Enver Pasha ordered general Turkish mobilization on 2 August 1914, and on the next day "ordered dered the immediate closure and mining of the southern end of the Dardanelles danelles (Bahr-1 Sefid) and the northern end of the Bosphorus (Bahr-1 Siyah).7

While a small passage in both the Bosphorus and Dardanelles remained open for "friendly vessels," Said Halim Pasha, the Ottoman grand vizier who played something like "good cop" with the Entente ambassadors to the ostensibly Germanophile "bad cop" Enver, warned Girs on 4 August that any Russian naval provocation in the Black Sea would be met by the complete closure of the Straits to Russian ships of any kind.8

To show the Turks meant business, Enver then "ordered the requisitioning sitioning of foreign, mainly Russian, merchandise docked in Ottoman ports, including Russian oil and foodstuffs." In retaliation, the Russians began detaining Ottoman subjects in Black Sea ports, arresting over a thousand in Batum alone.9

The Porte (despite signing a secret alliance treaty with Berlin on 2 August 1914) still maintained a posture of neutrality ity in the European conflict, but Turkey's and Russia's armies and navies were already on a mutual war footing. The only real question regarding an armed clash between these ancient enemies was when, exactly, it would begin.

　This question acquired new urgency following the arrival of two German man warships, the SMS Goeben and Breslau, in Besik Bay at the mouth of the Dardanelles on io August 1914. The preceding week had seen furious diplomatic intrigue at the Porte. The grand vizier had negotiated stiff terms for allowing in the German ships, which, if denied entry, would have been blown out of the water by a superior British force in pursuit. These terms, we now know, included Berlin's acceptance of the abrogation tion of the hated Capitulations, which allowed European subjects a kind of extra-territorial legal status on Ottoman soil, a promise to "procure appropriate propriate reparations" from the Entente powers "to be paid to the Ottoman man Empire," along with a German commitment to help Turkey win back Aegean islands lost to Greece in the Balkan wars and enough Caucasian territory lost to Russia in 1878 so as to give Turkey "direct contact with the Russian Muslims there."10

The Entente ambassadors, naturally, did everything they could to convince the Turks not to let in the German warships, ships, up to and including-in Russia's case-authorizing the Black Sea fleet to sink them if they did finally arrive in the Bosphorus. Winston Churchill's own angry threat to sink the Goeben, issued in conversation with Prime Minister H. H. Asquith on 17 August 1914, a week after the German ships had passed through the Straits, is well known, despite its proving hollow due to strong Cabinet opposition.11

But the still little-known known Russian threat was of a far more serious nature, issued not in passing ing conversation like Churchill's, but in a formal written directive from Sazonov to his ambassador in Constantinople, who possessed the power to summon the Black Sea fleet. "In case the Goeben and Breslau come through the Dardanelles," Russia's foreign minister instructed Girs ominously nously on 9 August 1914 (one day before they actually did come through), "flying the German flag, we will authorize [Black Sea fleet commander] Admiral [Andrei] Eberhart to pursue all measures in his power to prevent them from entering the Black Sea and to annihilate them, even if this means we must violate Turkish territorial waters." Such measures, Sazonov zonov warned Girs, could easily provoke Turkey into declaring war, a possibility he wished his ambassador to do his utmost to prevent, as he believed that "a war with Turkey would not be advantageous [for us] at the present time."12

　Advantageous timing or not, a new Russo-Turkish war seemed imminent nent when the Goeben and Breslau entered the Sea of Marmara on ii August gust 1914. Although this event did not quite commit Turkey to enter the war against the Entente powers, the arrival of the two German warships was a clear violation of the laws of neutrality, as protested vigorously by all the Entente ambassadors. Had the ships docked in Constantinople under the German flag, there is every chance Eberhart would have carried out Sazonov's orders to mine the Bosphorus exit to the Black Sea, if not also to venture into the Bosphorus itself to try to catch Admiral Wilhelm Souchon, chon, the commander of the Goeben, unaware with a surprise attack. It would have been hard for any Ottoman government to survive such a humiliation miliation without declaring war on Russia, not least because the Germans would have demanded such a declaration as payment for Souchon's sacrifice. rifice. Enver, who had been willing to let in the German warships without even a quid pro quo-the terms discussed above were drawn up by Said Halim Pasha-would certainly not have minded such an outcome. But the wily old grand vizier again outsmarted Enver, concocting an ingenious ruse which saw the ships "sold" to Turkey on 11 August to replace the two "stolen" by Churchill: the Goeben and Breslau were renamed the Iavuz vuz Sultan Selim and the Midilli, while their German crews famously put on Turkish fezzes and ran up the Ottoman colors (although the Germans were not above periodically teasing Ambassador Girs by donning German man caps in full view of the Russian Embassy and singing a few loud bars of "Deutschland uber alles" before putting the fezzes back on).13

　The war scare was over, for now. Paradoxically, the arrival of two German man warships in Constantinople-at least after they had been transformed into "Turkish" ships by Said Halim's fictitious sale-likely delayed the onset of hostilities between Turkey and Russia for months. The reason should not be difficult to grasp, when we recall Russia's keen interest in the Turkish dreadnoughts commandeered by Churchill at the end ofJuly. In terms of striking power, Goeben and Breslau did not truly "replace" the Sultan Osman I and the Reshad V. The Breslau was only a light cruiser, about one-fourth the weight of the Goeben, itself just barely dreadnought class. The Goeben, though mounting ten 11-inch guns and capable of making twenty-six knots, was itself inferior in firepower to the state-of-the-art the-art British-built Sultan Osman I with its 13'/2-inch guns. But then the Sultan Osman I, impressed into the British navy, no longer factored into Russian naval calculations. The Goeben did. At a stroke, Russia's Black Sea fleet had lost its supremacy vis-a-vis the Ottoman fleet. Although Russia still floated more warships overall in the Black Sea than did Turkey, key, she had none in the Goeben's class in terms of either speed (her five pre-dreadnought battleships could make only sixteen knots) or firing range.14

The arrival of the German dreadnought in Turkish waters rendered dered Russia's fleet strategically useless. It is not that Russia's surface ships could no longer operate in the Black Sea, but rather that whenever doing so they would be acutely vulnerable to hit-and-run attacks. This made offensive operations supremely difficult, and rendered any kind of amphibious operation in the Bosphorus-the highest operational priority ity at Black Sea naval headquarters-well-nigh impossible. Had the Goeben ben not made it through the Allied Mediterranean screen against heavy odds-an achievement that owed as much to British naval blundering as to Souchon's irascible will-the Russians might themselves have forced the issue, as suggested by Sazonov's aggressive orders to Girs on 9 August gust 1914. The Porte's acquisition of the Goeben instead forced Russia's Black Sea fleet to play defense while allowing the Turks to play offense. As Wangenheim himself had noted in a 2 August 1914 dispatch to Berlin (when pitching Enver's request that Germany dispatch her Mediterranean nean warships to Constantinople), "With the Goeben, even a landing on Russian territory would be possible.15

Effectively, this put the power to initiate hostilities in Turkish, not Russian, hands. The war would not begin until the Turks were good and ready.

　Meanwhile, the diplomatic battle over Ottoman belligerence was on. Inevitably, a bidding war developed between the two coalitions, with the Turks extracting everything they could from the Central powers for letting ting in the German warships and promising to attack Russia, even while quietly promising the Entente ambassadors they would remain neutral-but but only if the latter offered substantially more than the Germans were offering, fering, as the Ottoman finance minister, Djavid Bey, at one point told Russia's sia's ambassador.'16

　It was not a game the Russians could possibly win-nor one they wanted to. Publicly, Girs, along with his British and French counterparts Louis Mallet and Maurice Bompard, made a great show of desiring Ottoman man neutrality, but there is little chance the Russian diplomat was ever sincere about this. "There is no doubt," Girs wrote Sazonov as early as 2 August 1914 (without knowing that Turkey and Germany were signing a secret alliance treaty that very day), "that the Turks, knowing of our ... plans to seize the Straits, desire in their deepest heart the triumph of our enemies.17

Showing that he was just as capable of operating in bad faith as Russia's ambassador, Enver had launched a trial balloon of breathtaking ing cynicism with Russia's military attache, Generalmajor M. N. Leontiev, on 5 August 1914. Just three days after he had engineered a secret alliance with Berlin (and requested that the Germans send him their entire Mediterranean terranean fleet!) Enver told Leontiev that he was willing to pull back the now fully mobilized IX and XI Corps of the Ottoman Third Army from the Caucasian front, so that the Russian army command in Tiflis might choose, if it wished, to send the entire Caucasian army to reinforce the western fronts against Germany and Austria. Turkey and Russia could then reach a sweeping agreement on Balkan issues (by which either western ern Thrace or several Aegean islands would be returned to the Ottomans, in exchange for Bulgarian, Greek, and Serbian gains at Austro-Hungarian expense) as prelude to an outright defensive alliance to last five or ten years.18

The very day such a Russo-Ottoman alliance treaty were signed, Enver promised Leontiev, he would expel the Liman von Sanders military tary mission from Turkey.19

　Considering the inopportune timing-Germany's warships passed through the Straits less than a week after Enver's improbable demarche-it it is not surprising that Petrograd did not ultimately take up his offer. But in fact the Russians rejected Enver's terms on 9 August 1914, a full day before the Goeben and Breslau reached the mouth of the Dardanelles. The reasons they did so-and the identity of the man who insisted the offer be rejected-are significant. While Girs and Leontiev had both been willing to indulge Enver's alliance offer to see what they might learn from it, Yanushkevitch, from Stavka, intervened to cut off further negotiations. One might think that the chief of the General Staff, which was just then entering the final throes of Russia's mobilization against Germany and Austria-Hungary, would have jumped at the chance for reinforcements, not least because of impassioned French insistence that every available resource be directed against the common German enemy. But Yanushkevitch kevitch was already thinking ahead to Turkey's entry into the war. In strategic terms, he reasoned, the current "dispersal" of Ottoman troops (razbroski) was far more advantageous to Russia than would be their concentration centration (sosredochennost' brought about by redeployment of IX and XI Corps elsewhere. More to the immediate point, if word got out that Russia was negotiating for a redeployment of Turkish troops from the Caucasian front, as if Tiflis command was afraid of the Ottoman army, it would be interpreted across the entire Near East "as a sign of our weakness."20

　Here we have a precious glimpse into Russia's real war aims. Given even the hypothetical chance of a rapprochement with Turkey, which would free up troops from the Caucasus to reinforce the European fronts, the architect of Russia's mobilization on those very fronts said no, absolutely lutely not, because these fronts were no more important than the Caucasian sian one, even if the latter was still inactive. Sooner or later, Russia and Turkey would be at war, and the last thing Stavka wanted to do was deprive prive Tiflis command of the troops it needed to fight-or of the fear they inspired on the battlefield.

　It was not only Russia's generals who feared losing strategic ground with Turkey. As Girs reported to Sazonov on 12 August, the day after Said Halim's fictitious "sale" had been arranged to great popular fanfare, "from a military standpoint I believe that Turkey's preparedness for war has increased considerably. Also from a political standpoint the [sale of the German warships] has strongly increased the Turks' self-assurance."21

While not quite expecting the Turks to initiate hostilities, at least not yet, Russian diplomats were now just as anxious about a Turkish sneak naval attack as Ottoman statesmen had previously been about a Russian amphibious phibious strike. In effect, the Russo-Ottoman rivalry had been turned on its head. As even the normally unexcitable Count Benckendorff told His Majesty's Foreign Secretary Edward Grey on 15 August, "the Turks, viewing ing Russia as their most abiding enemy, may consider the present situation tion favorable for avoiding the fate by which Russia will put an end to their empire."22

These fears were reinforced by a report from the Russian Consul at Erzurum of aggressive Ottoman dispositions in eastern Turkey, which Girs and Sazonov forwarded urgently on 22 August to Stavka with the request that reinforcements be sent to Tiflis command.23

Next day Girs sent an even more alarming report of war preparations underway across Turkey, from shipments of German arms arriving to grain requisitions, tions, the calling up of reserves, and trainloads of troops setting out eastward ward from Haydarpasha, the German-built station that served as Constantinople's stantinople's gateway to Asiatic Turkey. "There is a general feeling in the people," Girs wrote Sazonov on 23 August, "particularly among officers cers involved in the mobilization, that a war against Russia is being prepared.24

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