The history of the Mediterranean has been presented in this book as a series of phases in which the sea was, to a greater or lesser degree, integrated into a single economic and even political area. With the coming of the Fifth Mediterranean the whole character of this process changed. The Mediterranean became the great artery through which goods, warships, migrants and other travellers reached the Indian Ocean from the Atlantic. The falling productivity of the lands surrounding the Mediterranean, and the opening of high-volume trade in grain from Canada or tobacco from the United States (to cite two examples), rendered the Mediterranean less interesting to businessmen. Even the revived cotton trade of Egypt faced competition from India and the southern United States. Steamship lines out of Genoa headed across the western Mediterranean and out into the Atlantic, bearing to the New World hundreds of thousands of migrants, who settled in New York, Chicago, Buenos Aires, São Paulo and other booming cities of North and South America in the years around 1900. Italian emigration was dominated by southerners, for the inhabitants of the southern villages saw none of the improvement in the standard of living that was beginning to transform Milan and other northern centres.
For the French, on the other hand, opportunities to create a new life elsewhere could be found within the Mediterranean: Algeria became the focus of French emigration, for the ideal was to create a new France on the shores of North Africa, while keeping the wilder interior under colonial rule. Two manifestations of this policy were the rebuilding of large areas of Algiers as a European city, and the collective extension of French citizenship to 35,000 Algerian Jews, in 1870. The Algerian Jews were seen as évolué, ‘civilized’, for they had embraced the opportunities provided by French rule, opening modern schools under the auspices of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, founded to promote Jewish education on the European model, and transforming themselves into a new professional class.1 From the 1880s onwards, after it fell under French control, Tunisia also attracted French colonists, though more slowly; around 1900 it was a more popular target for Italian settlers than for French ones. The kingdom of Italy also looked towards North Africa, as its political leaders saw opportunities to establish their country as a colonial power within the Mediterranean comparable to France. The Italians were not yet articulating the idea of the Mediterranean as Mare Nostrum, as Mussolini would do in the 1930s, for it was obvious that Great Britain dominated the sea, but Italian public opinion, and Italian democrats, were convinced that Italy possessed an imperial destiny. In part, the arguments were moral: as in French Algeria, there was an opportunity to bring European civilization to peoples condescendingly regarded as backward. In part they were political: Italy would lose influence within Europe if it could not show itself capable of grandiose achievements. To a large extent the arguments were economic: the strength of the Italian state would depend on its economic advancement, and that was possible only if one could take advantage of the raw materials supplied by a colonial territory. Spain, which by 1904 had extended its control of the Moroccan coastline to include Tetuán and the hinterland of Ceuta and Melilla, was only a minor competitor.2
The collapse of state finances in Tunisia during the 1860s provided opportunities for both France and Italy. Large numbers of French creditors would suffer if the bey and his government could not meet their obligations. The situation was not vastly different from that in the Egypt of Said and Ismail. An international financial commission was established, which the French aimed to dominate. The Italian government was not happy with this: the heavy involvement of Italians in the Tunisian economy, and the large number of Italian settlers encouraged Italy to demand control over whole areas of the Tunisian economy, such as the production and export of tobacco, and the running of the railways. By 1883, however, the French had managed to secure a dominant position, and the bey agreed to the creation of a French protectorate over Tunisia.3 The Italian government was forced to look in other directions, and rapidly saw that similar opportunities existed close by, in Ottoman-ruled Libya; by 1902 the French and the British, intent on carving up the Mediterranean, had agreed that Italy could do what it liked there – a useful way of coaxing Italy into a wider political alliance against future enemies. Who those enemies might be was rapidly made plain: German banks began to invest in Libya in competition with the Banco di Roma. In 1911, Germans, but not Italians, were permitted to acquire lands in Libya. As tension between Rome and Constantinople grew, the Turks attempted to appease Italy with commercial concessions. But it was too late. The Italians had decided that an imperial mission was an integral part of Italy’s entry into the ranks of the European nations. The weakness of Ottoman power, especially in the outlying provinces, daily became more obvious. In late September 1911 the Italian government declared war on Turkey, and by the end of October Italian fleets had smoothly moved an occupying force of 60,000 troops into Tripoli, Benghazi and other major towns. That was the easy part; local resistance flared, and, as Italian casualties mounted, the Italian government agreed to discuss peace terms with Constantinople. As ever, the Ottoman sultan was unwilling to renounce nominal Turkish sovereignty over his former subjects. A year after the invasion, he recognized Italian rule over a notionally Ottoman Libya.4 The Italians were unable to control the hinterland, but, as in Algiers, they were determined to Europeanize those parts they did control, and began to rebuild Tripoli as a modern Italian city.
By the time the First World War broke out, then, the entire line of towns from Ceuta in the west to Port Said in the east lay under the rule or protectorate of Spain, France, Italy and Great Britain. The German Kaiser visited Tangier in 1905, and made noises about the growth of French influence in Morocco, but Germany did not gain a foothold in Morocco, any more than in Libya. Indeed, Tangier became a special enclave, in which the sultan of Morocco shared power with the foreign consuls. One particularly important figure was the chief inspector of police, who acted as a liaison between the sultan and the consuls; he provides a rare example of a Swiss presence in the Mediterranean, for what was vital was to employ someone whose neutrality was assured. So the Turks had lost what remaining authority they possessed in North Africa; the Germans had not gained a foothold anywhere; the Austrians remained confined to Trieste and the coast of Dalmatia, and took no part in the scramble for North Africa; and Great Britain dominated the sea-ways between Gibraltar and the Suez Canal.
An additional, valuable prize for Italy was Rhodes, along with the Dodecanese islands. The islanders, mainly Greek, had tried to emancipate themselves from Ottoman control, and the prospects for a ‘Federation of the Dodecanese Islands’ had seemed good: the islands were well placed along the trade routes, bringing prosperity to the local Greeks and Jews. The Italians, however, appreciated the strategic value of islands that lay so close to the centre of Ottoman power, and took advantage of the war with Turkey over Libya to seize the islands in 1912. Italy tried to promote the economy of its new colony. The Dodecanese were a very different proposition to Libya, or to the empire the Italians also dreamed of creating in Abyssinia, and the Italians were more willing to treat the Dodecanesians as humans on the same level as they believed themselves to be.5 This conquest marks the first stage in an attempt by the European powers finally to dismantle the Ottoman Empire. It was hardly a coordinated process; indeed, much of the initiative came from within the Ottoman territories, for even Albania, traditionally quite loyal to Constantinople, had become a focus of discontent by 1912. The First World War only accentuated a fast-growing trend towards the detachment of the Ottoman provinces. The adherence of Turkey to the German side was by no means inevitable. As the war clouds gathered over Europe, the Turks showed themselves keen to discuss a new treaty with Great Britain, which they continued to see as their obvious ally against attempts by the Russians to break through from the Black to the White Sea; they were aware, too, that Greek adventurism, which had brought King George of Greece as far as Salonika, remained a threat to their capital – the Megalé Idea or ‘Great Idea’ of Venizelos involved nothing less than the substitution of Constantinople for Athens as Greek capital. But the most striking feature of the Mediterranean in August 1914 was the extreme volatility of all political relationships: would Britain cut a deal with Turkey? Or rather with Russia? What was to be done with Greece? It seemed that the sultan was being drawn into the Kaiser’s net, but nothing was certain. Two German warships were permitted to sail into the Golden Horn on 10 August 1914, and the Turkish government agreed that, if they were pursued by British ships, Turkish batteries would open fire on the British. Meanwhile, two ships being built in Britain for the Ottoman fleet, at a cost of £7,500,000, were commandeered by the Royal Navy, setting off fierce denunciations of Britain in the Turkish press.6
One of those who turned decisively against the Turks was Winston Churchill, now First Lord of the Admiralty. The prime minister, Asquith, noted on 21 August that Churchill was ‘violently anti-Turk’. Yet underneath his rhetoric there lay a distinctive and bold policy. Victory over the Ottoman Empire would ensure the safety of British interests not simply in the Mediterranean, but within the Indian Ocean, where Persia was emerging as an important source of oil, shipped through the Suez Canal. Once Russia joined the war against Germany, the Dardanelles became a vital passage-way through which Russia could be supplied with arms and through which it could export Ukrainian grain, which was important for its balance of payments.7 In March 1915, fearful of a Russian-German truce, the British government accepted that Russia should be allowed to control Constantinople, the Dardanelles, southern Thrace and the Aegean islands closest to the Dardanelles.8
Churchill’s impassioned advocacy of a campaign to force the Dardanelles resulted in the most important naval offensive to take place in the Mediterranean during the Great War. This war, unlike the Second World War, saw relatively limited action within the Mediterranean, and the Austrian fleet, as will be seen, made few ventures beyond the Adriatic, which it was determined to defend. Around the edges of the Mediterranean, though, some important land campaigns took place, notably in Palestine and north-eastern Italy. A Turkish military threat to the Suez Canal was enough to make the British impose their own nominee as khedive of Egypt and to denominate the country as a British protectorate – from now on, both here and in Cyprus, the fiction that these lands still lay under the sultan’s umbrella was forgotten.9 The surface of the Mediterranean remained rather unruffled, even though beneath it there now lurked increasing numbers of submarines, whose capacity for doing harm to imperial navies was most clearly demonstrated out in the Atlantic. Part of the explanation for this relative quiet was that British and German ships were required for what were seen as more important duties in northern seas.
The highly controversial exception was the Gallipoli campaign of 1915. In January 1915 Fisher, the First Sea Lord, complained to his colleague Lord Jellicoe:
The Cabinet have decided on taking the Dardanelles solely with the Navy, using 15 battleships and 32 other vessels, and keeping out there three battle cruisers and a flotilla of destroyers – all urgently required at the decisive theatre at home! There is only one way out, and that is to resign! But you say ‘no!’, which simply means I am a consenting party to what I absolutely disapprove. I don’t agree with one single step taken.10
And, even when Fisher had given way, he sent a message to Churchill saying: ‘the more I consider the Dardanelles the less I like it!’11 He firmly believed that the naval conflict had to be resolved in the North Sea. The Gallipoli campaign is best remembered for the bitterly fought battles in which the Turks confronted British, Australian and New Zealand troops on the tongue of land commanding the European flank of the Dardanelles. The original plan had been for British ships, supported by the French, to force the passage. When it became obvious that this could not be done, the decision was made to ferry 50,000 troops to the bay of Mudros, a massive natural harbour on the south side of Lemnos, suitably close to the Gallipoli peninsula. Mudros lacked the harbour installations the Royal Navy needed, and there was neither sufficient water for the troops nor anywhere to accommodate them. Since they arrived in February, they had to endure unpleasant winter conditions.12 A British naval attack on the entrance to the Dardanelles on 18 March 1915 resulted in the loss of three British battleships, though the Turks firing down on the fleet used up all their ammunition, and mines in the straits proved a greater danger.13 The British had been hoping that the Russian Black Sea fleet would head for Constantinople with 47,000 troops, but the Russians did no more than bombard Turkish positions at the mouth of the Bosphorus from a safe distance. They could see that the time for the recovery of Constantinople by Orthodoxy had not come.14 Further disasters resulted in the sacking of Churchill from the Admiralty, but by then the troops were bogged down in impossible positions:
Upon the margin of a rugged shore
There is a spot now barren, desolate,
A place of graves, sodden with human gore
That Time will hallow, Memory consecrate.
There lie the ashes of the mighty dead,
The youth who lit with flame Obscurity,
Fought true for Freedom, won through rain of lead
Undying fame, their immortality.15
Total losses were 265,000 troops from Britain, the British Empire and France, and perhaps 300,000 on the Turkish side; but, despite their dreadful losses, it was the Turks who held the ground, and after less than nine months the attacking forces retreated. Gallipoli had some positive effects from the British perspective: the Turks were forced to withdraw many of their best troops from Palestine, taking pressure off Egypt and the Suez Canal.16
During the Great War, large parts of the Mediterranean remained quiet. On the eve of the conflict, the British and French hoped to draw King Alfonso of Spain into an alliance, and the British Admiralty eyed Ceuta as a base suitable for submarines and torpedo boats, while the French hoped that the Balearic islands could be used as a way-station for troops transferring from French North Africa. Perhaps negotiations would have gone further had the Spanish king not recklessly raised the possibility of receiving the disordered republic of Portugal as compensation for any support he might offer France and Britain.17 But at least he stayed neutral, and Spanish waters remained safe for shipping. In the centre the main focus of naval activity was the Adriatic, where the Austrian fleet was stationed. Italian irredentists were casting covetous eyes on the coasts of Istria and Dalmatia, and the Austrians saw Kotor as the vital naval station on which their ability to hold the eastern Adriatic shores depended. A mutiny at Kotor in February 1918 proved that more thought should have been given to the conditions under which sailors had to work while they were deployed there. Sailors complained that officers lived in some style, often accompanied by their wife or mistress, and one sailor claimed that he was expected to use up his soap ration washing the captain’s dog. Worse still, ratings had to make do with threadbare clothes and suffer an evil diet of rotting meat and underweight loaves, while officers were properly fed with good-quality meats, vegetables and fruit. Given the novelty of flying, it is no surprise that officers who wanted to impress young nurses would take them on plane trips, or that seaplanes occasionally carried Austrian officers to an elite brothel in Dubrovnik. Once the mutiny was suppressed, the authorities shot only the obvious ringleaders, realizing that the time had come for serious reorganization of the navy (under the newly promoted Admiral Horthy, who years later continued to wear his title with pride even as ‘regent’ of the landlocked state of Hungary).18
At the start of the war conditions at Kotor were not as bad. The harbour lies deep within its fjord, beyond the narrows of the Bocche di Cattaro; behind lie the precipitous mountains of Montenegro. To ensure maximum safety, the Austrians would need to tame Montenegro, whose ruler, out of sympathy for his fellow-Serbs, had declared war against Austria-Hungary soon after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. In late summer 1914 the Austrian navy started to bombard the Montenegrin port of Bar, and the French responded with a sizeable fleet sent out from Malta: fourteen battleships and several smaller vessels. The French fleet cleared the Austrians away from Bar and bombarded the outer fortifications of the Bocche di Cattaro, without denting Kotor. But it was a parlous situation: until Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary in May 1915, the French had no closer base than British Malta, and French troops were fully committed fighting on the Marne, far to the north.19 Then the Austrians became bolder, brazenly attacking Italian coastal towns such as Senigallia, Rimini and Ancona, where they wreaked havoc by destroying the railway station and stores of coal and oil, and damaging several public buildings, including a hospital; there were sixty-eight deaths. Even so, the Austrians kept well clear of Taranto, which was the main Italian naval base. They were not seeking a sea battle. The Italians responded by sending their navy from Apulia to southern Dalmatia; they broke the railway line from Dubrovnik to Kotor. This game of tit-for-tat continued with torpedo attacks by German U-boats on Italian shipping; since Italy was not yet at war with Germany, only with Austria, the U-boats shamelessly flew the Austrian flag. In November 1915 the surreptitious German presence had ugly consequences: a German U-boat sank the Italian liner Ancona, with heavy loss of life, off the coast of North Africa, while it was heading from Sicily to New York, and the American president protested volubly to Austria about an act the Austrians were, of course, only too keen to blame on the Germans.20 Finally, after renewed bombardment from the sea, Austrian troops ascended the heights of Montenegro and captured Cetinje, the capital, early in 1916.21
This was, then, a struggle for mastery of just one corner of the Mediterranean. In spring 1917 action was concentrated on the narrow passage-way between Otranto and Albania, where the Austrians now held Durazzo. All the new technology that was to hand was put to the fullest possible use. Each side mobilized seaplanes that lobbed bombs at enemy ships without doing any noticeable damage, and the British established a new base for seaplanes at Brindisi. Nets were deployed against the Austrian and German submarines, but, even if they could stop a submarine, they could not stop a torpedo. Reinforcements arrived, in support of the British, Italians and French: fourteen Japanese destroyers and one cruiser played an especially significant role in defeating German submarines; six Australian cruisers also arrived, and, once Greece tardily entered the war, in July 1917, a respectable Greek fleet became available.22 The importance of the relatively limited conflict with the Austrians lies in the appearance of new methods of fighting for control of the sea: aeroplanes, which still had to prove their worth, and submarines, which rapidly did so. Some new dangers had become obvious: merchant shipping was at risk from enemy submarines, and by 1917 the British and French had introduced an effective system of convoys to accompany vessels eastwards from Gibraltar.23 In time of war, a more insidious enemy than the Barbary corsairs had arrived, after a century of relative peace: invisible, deadly and wantonly destructive in a way that the corsairs, who sought booty and captives, had never been.