The Ottoman Empire: a Historical Encyclopedia [2 Volumes]

by Kia, Mehrdad;

  LAND TENURE IN THE LATE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

  In Turkey of the Ottomans, the British traveler Lucy Mary Jane Garnett described the categories of land ownership in the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century:

  Real estate in Turkey falls into three categories, mulk (Turkish: mülk or private property), mirié (Turkish: miri or lands owned by the sultan and the Ottoman government), and vakouf (Turkish: vakif or land designated as a tax-exempt pious foundation), or freeholds, Crown-lands, and Church-lands. Freeholds are, as elsewhere, the absolute property of their owner, and may be held by foreigners, as well as by native Ottomans. They form, however, no very considerable portion of the area of the country, owing to the difficulties encountered in establishing safe titles, as title-deeds are frequently forged, falsified, and otherwise tampered with. The Crown-lands comprise, in addition to the private estates of the Sultan and the Imperial family, the lands set apart for the support of the administration, the forests, hill-pasturages, and waste-lands, together with the very considerable area originally granted as military fiefs which reverted to the Crown on the abolition of that system of land tenure…. The holders of these Crown-lands labour under the disadvantage of not being allowed to sell, transfer, or mortgage their fields without a licence from the authorities….

  Vakouf lands are those which have been dedicated to the service of Allah—in other words, lands the revenue of which are applied to the support of mosques and the religious and charitable institutions generally attached to them, such as medressehs, the theological colleges in which Moslem law is studied.

  Source: Lucy Mary Jane Garnett, Turkey of the Ottomans (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1915), 170–171.

  See also: Empire and Administration: Administration, Central

  Further Reading

  Imber, Colin. The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1650: The Structure of Power. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.

  Inalcik, Halil. The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age 1300–1600. Translated by Norman Itzkowitz and Colin Imber. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1973.

  Lewis, Raphaela. Everyday Life in Ottoman Turkey. London: B.T. Batsford Ltd., 1971.

  McCarthy, Justin. The Ottoman Turks, An Introductory History to 1923. London: Addison Wesley Longman, Limited, 1997.

  Pitcher, Donald Edgar. An Historical Geography of the Ottoman Empire. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1972.

  Atatürk, Kemal (Mustafa Kemal) (1881–1938)

  Kemal Atatürk, also called Mustafa Kemal and Mustafa Kemal Pasha, was the officer, statesman, and secular reformer who emerged as the founder and the first president of the Republic of Turkey in 1922. He was born in Salonika (Greek: Thessaloniki) in 1881. His father, Ali Riza, who was a customs official, died when Mustafa was seven years old. His mother, Zübeyde Hānim, hailed from a farming community near Salonika. In Salonika he enrolled in a secular primary school. For his secondary education, he attended a military school. It was at secondary school that he received the nickname Kemal (the Perfect One), from one of his teachers. From then on he was known as Mustafa Kemal. He went on to enroll at military school at Monastir (now Bitola, Macedonia). In 1899, after completing his studies in Monastir, he moved to Istanbul, where he enrolled in the military academy (i.e., the War College). He graduated from the military academy as a second lieutenant in 1902. He continued his studies at the General Staff College, from which he graduated with the rank of captain in 1905. In 1907 Mustafa Kemal joined the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), which was the umbrella organization for the officers and intellectuals who opposed the autocratic rule of Sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–1909). In 1908 a group of young Turkish officers rose in rebellion against Abdülhamid II and forced the sultan to restore the Ottoman constitution of 1876. Abdülhamid II remained on the throne, but severe limitations were imposed on his powers. On April 12–13, 1909, an attempt was made by pro-Abdülhamid forces in Istanbul to restore his autocratic rule. Pro-CUP army units, however, struck back, marching from Salonika and seizing Istanbul on April 23. Abdülhamid II was deposed, and the CUP seized control of the government. Mustafa Kemal participated in suppressing the counterrevolutionary forces who tried to overthrow the government dominated by the CUP in 1909, but refused to assume political office after the triumvirate of Enver, Talat, and Cemal (Jemal) seized control of the government. It was rumored that he had opposed and criticized Enver Pasha. In 1911, after Italy invaded and occupied Libya, Mustafa Kemal went to the North African province to fight the Italian forces. During World War I he fought with distinction at Gallipoli (1915), in the Caucasus (1916), and in Palestine (1917). At the end of the Great War Mustafa Kemal was stationed in Syria.

  On May 15, 1919, with support from the British, the French, and the Americans, the Greek government, which had joined the Allies at the end of World War I, landed troops in Izmir (Mango: 217). In the same month Mustafa Kemal was appointed “Inspector General of Ottoman forces in northern and northeastern Anatolia” and dispatched by the sultan to disarm and disband the remaining Ottoman army units and pacify the local population (McCarthy: 377). On May 19, when Mustafa Kemal arrived in Samsun on the northern coast of Anatolia, he had already decided to disobey his orders and organize a national resistance movement (Mango: 218–221). Support came from other Ottoman commanders and officers who shared his determination to remove foreign forces, particularly the Greeks, from western Anatolia and prevent Armenian nationalists from establishing an independent state in eastern Anatolia. By June Kemal’s activities and telegraphic correspondence with other commanders and officers had aroused the suspicions of the British, who pressured the government in Istanbul to recall him (Mango: 225–226). Though dismissed from his post in June, Mustafa Kemal continued his efforts, with the primary focus being the creation of a national congress to serve as a quasi-alternative government to that in occupied Istanbul, even while he and his associates continued to express their allegiance to the sultan-caliph. The establishment of a national congress also could resolve internal rivalries and disagreements within the nationalist movement and provide Mustafa Kemal with the legal authority to act on behalf of the Muslim people of Anatolia. Throughout the summer of 1919 the Congress met, first in Erzurum (July–August) and then in Sivas (September), discussing and devising a program for the liberation of Ottoman Turkish lands.

  Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was an Ottoman army commander who emerged as the founder and first president of the Republic of Turkey in 1923. (Library of Congress)

  Recognizing the growing popularity of the nationalist movement, the imperial government in Istanbul tried to counter it by calling for elections for an Ottoman parliament, which convened in Istanbul on January 12, 1920. Neither the sultan and his officials nor the British and their strategists recognized the depth of antiforeign sentiments in the new parliament, which issued a “National Pact” (Milli Misak) on February 17, replicating the demands of the nationalist movement (McCarthy: 378; Mango: 269). Allowing that the destiny of the portions of the Ottoman Empire “populated by an Arab majority” should be determined in accordance with the will of the native population, the pact emphatically declared that the Anatolian heartland, an area “inhabited by an Ottoman Muslim majority, united in religion, in race, and in aim” constituted “a whole” and could not be divided and partitioned (Hurewitz: 2:74–75). The pact also insisted on the security and protection of the city of Istanbul, “the capital of the Sultanate, and the headquarters of the Ottoman government” (Hurewitz: 2:75).

  By March the British, who had awakened to the threat posed by the Ottoman parliament in Istanbul, forced the removal of the grand vizier and imprisoned a large number of the deputies, sending some 150 into exile on the island of Malta (McCarthy: 378). The new grand vizier, Damad Ferid Pasha, declared Mustafa Kemal and his lieutenants to be in rebellion against the sultan and deserving of execution for treason. In collaborating with the foreign occupiers and in condemning the leaders of national resistance to death, the sultan and his advisers demonstrated that they lacked the will
and determination to fight against the occupation and domination of the Ottoman Turkish homeland by European powers. Worse, they had decided to collaborate with the occupying armies against nationalist officers who were fighting to liberate the Ottoman homeland. Instead of intimidating the nationalists, the actions of the British government generated popularity for the resistance movement, which convened a Grand National Assembly in Ankara on April 23, 1920. The newly convened assembly elected Mustafa Kemal Pasha as its president, but reiterated the loyalty of the people to the sultan-caliph. The nationalist movement knew full well that after being ruled by sultans for 600 years, the majority of the population, particularly in rural Anatolia, retained a deep emotional and religious loyalty to the Ottoman dynasty. To appease popular sentiments and at the same time diminish the power and influence of the sultan over his subjects, the assembly declared that since the sultan lived under foreign occupation, all power and authority had to rest in the congress as the representative of the people. Britain and France meanwhile moved forward with their plan of partitioning the Ottoman Empire, imposing the humiliating Treaty of Sèvres on the imperial government in Istanbul on August 10. The treaty, which was immediately condemned by Mustafa Kemal and the national resistance movement, forced the sultan to surrender all the non-Turkish provinces of the empire and partitioned Anatolia among European powers, Greeks, Armenians, and Kurds. With the National Assembly behind him, Mustafa Kemal focused on the two most immediate threats; faced with the Armenians to the east and the Greeks to the west, he created a centralized and unified military command structure under the leadership of one of his most trusted and capable commanders, Ismet Pasha (later Ismet Inönü), who was appointed chief of the general staff (McCarthy: 379).

  Mustafa Kemal first turned his attention to the east. The national resistance forces under the command of Kazim Pasha (Karabekir) attacked the forces of the Armenian Republic, which had established itself as an independent state with its capital as the city of Yerevan. In October 1920, as they pushed back the Armenian forces, the Turkish nationalists regained Ardahan and then Kars, which the Ottomans had lost to czarist Russia in 1878. The Treaty of Gümrü, signed between the Republic of Armenia and the nationalist movement on December 3, 1920, confirmed Turkish territorial gains, setting the borders at the pre-1878 boundary between Russia and the Ottoman Empire. Shortly after signing the peace treaty, the republics of the southern Caucasus, namely Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia, were attacked and occupied by the Soviet Red army. All three lost their independence and soon emerged as reconstituted Soviet socialist republics under the direct rule of the Bolsheviks in Moscow. Despite the occupation of the south Caucasus by the Red Army, the Soviet government did not challenge the new boundaries set by the peace treaty between the Turks and the Armenians. Under siege and sanction itself, the new communist regime in Moscow was anxious to support the Turkish nationalist movement as a means of pushing British, French, and Italian forces as far back from Soviet territory as possible. It also could justify its support of Mustafa Kemal and his movement in the name of solidarity with anti-imperialist national liberation movements. On March 16, 1921, the nationalist government signed a treaty of friendship with the Soviets, which recognized the frontiers between the two states and provided Kemal’s army with badly needed funds and war material.

  The second battle for control of Anatolia was centered in the southern region of Cilicia, which had been occupied by the French forces shortly after the end of World War I. The French, like the British, initially supported the establishment of an Armenian state in eastern Anatolia. The principal objective of the French policy in the Middle East was not, however, to gain territory in Anatolia but to establish firm control over Greater Syria. The units that the French moved from Syria into Cilicia were therefore small and could only control the urban centers while Turkish- and Armenian-armed bands fought over the control of the countryside. The Armenian Legion, which intended to seize southern and eastern Anatolia for a future independent Armenian state, was strengthened further when thousands of Armenian refugees, who had been displaced during the war, joined its ranks. The skirmishes between Turkish forces and Armenian Legionnaires culminated in a battle at the town of Maraş (Marash), where the Turkish victory forced French and Armenian forces to evacuate the district. The French, who were anxious to consolidate their control over Syria and Lebanon and not lose credibility in front of their newly acquired Arab subjects, entered into negotiations with the Turkish nationalist forces, which culminated in the signing of a treaty on October 20, 1921. Recognizing the power and popularity of the nationalist movement, the French agreed to withdraw their forces from Cilicia while at the same time disavowing the Treaty of Sèvres and accepting the legitimacy of the emerging Turkish government. But the struggle for the liberation of the Ottoman Turkish homeland could not be completed without the removal of Greek forces from western Anatolia.

  With direct support from the British and French naval forces, the Greek government had landed troops in Izmir on May 15, 1919. The initial agreement with the Allies allowed the Greek forces to occupy the city and the immediate surrounding region for five years before a plebiscite would determine whether the territory could remain under Greek rule. Having recognized the absence of a significant Ottoman military presence and an organized resistance, the Greek forces advanced quickly beyond Izmir and occupied the entire west Anatolian province of Aydin. As they moved farther inland, the Greeks met with little resistance, with the exception of a few skirmishes that could not be sustained by remaining Ottoman divisions because they lacked leadership, manpower, and war material. As the Greek forces occupied Turkish towns and villages, Ottoman officials and representatives were either arrested or executed, while the local population was forced out of their homes and businesses, which were often set on fire. With the British refusing to stop their expansion, the Greek forces occupied Bursa and Izmit while a second Greek army invaded eastern Thrace in the summer of 1920, concentrating its efforts on capturing Edirne. With their confidence at an all-time high, the main Greek force focused on Ankara, the new capital of the nationalist movement under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal. The nationalist forces under the command of Ismet Pasha managed to repulse a Greek army advancing toward Ankara at the river Inönü in January 1921, replicating the feat again in April. Although they could not exploit their victories, the two successful military campaigns boosted the confidence of the nationalist forces and enhanced the prestige and popularity of Mustafa Kemal. As the Greek forces mounted another offensive in the summer of 1921, the Grand National Assembly requested that Mustafa Kemal assume the leadership of the army. At the battle of Sakarya in August, the Turkish nationalists scored an impressive victory against the Greeks, who fled on September 13 (Zürcher: 155). A year passed before the Greeks could mount a new campaign. The historic battle that sealed the fate of Anatolia began on August 26, 1922, and ended with the total defeat of the Greek army on August 30. Overextended and suffering from inadequate supply lines, the Greek forces were routed, while their commanders surrendered on September 2 and 3. The result was a total collapse of the Greek imperial idea. Officers and soldiers fled to Izmir, where they and many Greek residents of the city boarded British and French ships that transported them to mainland Greece. At the last moment the city was set on fire. On September 9, 1922, the nationalist army entered Izmir. A few days later the Greek forces evacuated northwestern Anatolia, including the city of Bursa, the first Ottoman capital (Mango: 344). The victory was total. Turkey had gained its independence, and Mustafa Kemal had succeeded in establishing Turkish sovereignty over Anatolia.

  The Turkish victory resulted in a shift of attitude by the European powers, who recognized the new reality on the ground and adopted a more conciliatory policy toward the nationalist movement. The only remaining European power in the area, Britain, controlled Istanbul and the straits. Having witnessed the decisive defeat of Greek forces and realizing that their allies, particularly the French, did not intend to
fight the Turkish nationalists, the British convinced the Greek government to withdraw from eastern Thrace and sign an armistice (the Armistice of Mudanya) with the Turks on October 11, 1922. On October 27 the allies invited the nationalist government in Ankara and the imperial government in Istanbul to attend a peace conference in Lausanne, Switzerland (Hurewitz: 2:119–120). The Turkish nationalists, however, announced that the sultan in Istanbul no longer represented the Turkish nation, and on November 1 the Grand National Assembly in Ankara abolished the Ottoman sultanate (Hurewitz: 2:119–120). Shortly afterward, on November 20, a Turkish delegation led by the hero of the war of independence, Ismet Pasha, arrived in Lausanne to negotiate a peace treaty. The Turkish nationalist government intended to negotiate on the basis of the National Pact that had been drafted and ratified by the Grand National Assembly, which clearly stated that the Turkish nationalist movement was willing to accept the loss of Arab provinces. The nationalists were not, however, willing to compromise on the preservation of the territorial integrity of Anatolia, the security and restoration of Istanbul under Turkish sovereignty, the participation of the government of Turkey in establishing a new arrangement for the straits, and the abolition of the capitulations (Hurewitz: 2:119–120). When the treaty was finally concluded many months later, on July 24, 1923, the final document represented significant compromises by the new Turkish government and the allies. Exhausted by the war and anxious to end all hostilities, both sides had realized that they had to give up some of their demands to achieve a lasting and meaningful peace. The Turkish side clearly had recognized that it could not revive the Ottoman Empire and that the former Arab provinces, occupied by the British and the French during and after World War I, were permanently lost. The new government also renounced its claim on the island of Cyprus, which was under British occupation, as well as several other islands, including Rhodes, Lispos, and Cos, which remained under Italian rule. The Turks also guaranteed the civil and political rights of their non-Muslim minorities, agreeing to the principle that “all inhabitants of Turkey, without distinction of religion, shall be equal before law” (Hurewitz: 2:119–120). The Turks renounced their claims on Mosul in present-day northern Iraq and the region of Hatay, which was occupied by the French until 1938, when it was returned to Turkey. Despite such compromises, however, the Turkish side emerged from Lausanne as the principal victor.