Treaty of Lausanne (1912)
1912 peace treaty between Italy and the Ottoman Empire
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Treaty of Lausanne, also known as the Treaty of Ouchy (Italian: Trattato di Losanna or Trattato di Ouchy; Turkish: Uşi Antlaşması), was a peace treaty signed on 18 October 1912 in Ouchy, a district of Lausanne in Switzerland, between the Kingdom of Italy and the Ottoman Empire following the Italian victory in the Italo-Turkish War.[1] Under its terms, the Ottoman Empire ceded the African provinces of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica to Italy, while retaining a nominal religious sovereignty over the local Muslim population through the caliph.[2]
| Treaty of Lausanne (also known as the Treaty of Ouchy) | |
|---|---|
| |
| Type | Peace treaty |
| Signed | 18 October 1912 |
| Location | Ouchy, Lausanne, Switzerland |
| Effective | 18 October 1912 |
| Parties | |
| Language | French |
The agreement marked the formal end of hostilities of the Italo-Turkish War, which had begun in September 1911 when Italy invaded the Ottoman possessions in North Africa. Although the Ottomans were compelled to accept the loss of their last African provinces, the treaty also stipulated that Italy would evacuate the Dodecanese Islands in the Aegean Sea, which Italian forces had occupied in the spring of 1912. In practice the islands remained under Italian control until 1947.[3]
Background
In September 1911 the Kingdom of Italy declared war on the Ottoman Empire, in order to seize the Ottoman vilayet of Tripolitania and the sanjak of Cyrenaica, the last territories of the Mediterranean still considered available for Italian colonial expansion.[2] Italian forces quickly occupied the principal coastal cities of Tripoli, Benghazi, Derna, Tobruk and Homs, but encountered determined resistance from Ottoman regular forces and Arab–Berber irregulars in the interior, and were unable to make significant gains inland.[2][3]
To force the Ottoman government to negotiate, Italy carried the war into the eastern Mediterranean during the spring of 1912, bombarding the entrance to the Dardanelles in April and occupying Rhodes and the other islands of the Dodecanese archipelago in May.[4] The temporary closure of the Straits to Ottoman shipping further damaged the empire's finances and trade.[4]
The outbreak of the First Balkan War in October 1912 made the Ottoman position untenable. With the armies of Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece and Montenegro launching a coordinated attack in the Balkans, the Ottoman government was compelled to seek an immediate end to the war with Italy in order to redeploy its forces to defend its European territories.[5]
Negotiations
Preliminary talks between Italian and Ottoman emissaries were opened in Switzerland during the summer of 1912, first at Caux above Montreux and later at the Château d'Ouchy at Ouchy, near Lausanne.[6] The negotiations were complicated by the question of religious sovereignty: as caliph, the Ottoman sultan claimed spiritual authority over Muslims everywhere, and the Ottoman delegation pressed for an explicit acknowledgement of that authority over the populations of the ceded provinces.[2]
A compromise formula was eventually adopted. Italy issued, on the same day as the treaty, a unilateral firman granting administrative autonomy and religious freedoms to the Muslim inhabitants of the ceded territories, while the sultan would appoint a personal religious representative to oversee Islamic affairs.[2][3] The treaty was signed at Ouchy on 18 October 1912, the same day as the London preliminaries of the Balkan war were under preparation.[4]
Provisions
The treaty consisted of a public agreement of eleven articles, accompanied by a confidential annex.[1] Its principal provisions were as follows.
The Ottoman Empire undertook to withdraw all officers, troops and civilian officials from Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, while Italy reciprocally undertook to evacuate the islands of the Dodecanese in the Aegean Sea once the Ottoman withdrawal from Libya had been completed.[1] The two governments granted a mutual amnesty for political offences committed during the war, and agreed to restore commercial, consular and judicial relations on the basis of the capitulatory regime that had existed before the conflict.[2]
A separate Italian decree, published simultaneously with the treaty, granted full administrative and judicial autonomy to the inhabitants of the two African provinces, and recognised the religious authority of the sultan-caliph, who would appoint a personal representative (Arabic: نائب, romanized: naib) to oversee Islamic religious affairs.[3] The two territories were soon afterwards grouped by the Italian government under the colonial name Libia, reviving the Roman designation of the region.[7]
Aftermath
Although the treaty formally ended the war, Italian control of the Libyan hinterland remained contested for many years. Armed resistance led by the Senussi order continued in Cyrenaica well into the 1920s and 1930s, and full Italian "pacification" of the territory was not achieved until the campaigns conducted by Rodolfo Graziani under the Fascist regime.[7]
In the Aegean, Italy did not evacuate the Dodecanese as agreed; the islands remained under Italian military administration and were formally annexed in 1923 by the Treaty of Lausanne that ended the Turkish War of Independence.[3] The islands stayed under Italian sovereignty until they were ceded to Greece by the 1947 Treaty of Peace.[3]
The Ottoman defeat encouraged the Balkan League to launch its attack only weeks before the signature, and the rapid collapse of Ottoman power in Rumelia during the autumn of 1912 was widely attributed to the demonstration of Ottoman weakness during the Libyan war.[5]
Significance
The Treaty of Lausanne completed Italy's transformation into a colonial power in North Africa and confirmed the decline of Ottoman authority on the southern shore of the Mediterranean.[2] By exposing the military and financial fragility of the empire, the war and its peace settlement also accelerated the chain of conflicts that would lead, within two years, to the outbreak of the First World War.[5]