Treaty of Sèvres

Signed on 10 August 1920 at the porcelain works of Sèvres, outside Paris, this was the peace settlement the Allies of the First World War imposed on the defeated Ottoman Empire. It would have stripped the empire of nearly all its non-Turkish lands, opened its heartland to foreign zones of influence and placed its finances under Allied control. The treaty was never ratified. Resistance to it fuelled the Turkish War of Independence, and it was replaced in 1923 by the Treaty of Lausanne.

Fighting with the Ottomans had ended with the Armistice of Mudros in October 1918, but the peace took far longer. The Allies had already planned a division of Ottoman lands in secret wartime deals such as the Sykes–Picot Agreement, and they disagreed among themselves over the details. Discussions ran from the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 through a London conference in February 1920 and took final shape at San Remo in April 1920.

The draft was presented to the sultan's government in Istanbul, which objected that the terms were incompatible with real independence. The Allies refused all but trivial changes. In July 1920 a council of dignitaries convened by Sultan Mehmed VI accepted that there was no alternative, and three Ottoman delegates signed. Greece, which had a stake in the settlement, never ratified it either.

The Arab provinces were removed. Palestine and Mesopotamia went to Britain as mandates, and Syria and Lebanon to France, while the Kingdom of Hejaz was recognised as independent. The treaty wrote the Balfour Declaration into the terms for Palestine.

In Anatolia itself the losses were heavy. Eastern Thrace and several Aegean islands were ceded to Greece, and Smyrna and its region were placed under Greek administration, with a plebiscite on union with Greece to follow after five years. Italy kept the Dodecanese and gained a zone of influence in the south-west, and France one in the south-east. Armenia was recognised as "free and independent", its border with Turkey to be settled by arbitration of the American president. A Kurdish region was to be offered a referendum on its future. The Straits were to be internationalised under a commission.

The army was to be limited to 50,700 men, the navy to a handful of small vessels, and an air force was forbidden. An Allied commission was to supervise the budget, taxes and loans, and the old capitulations giving foreigners special privileges were restored. The treaty also required the surrender of people accused of the wartime massacres, provisions linked to the Armenian genocide, but the planned prosecutions were later abandoned.

Many observers considered the terms far harsher than those Germany received at Versailles, and they provoked fierce Turkish nationalist opposition. A rival government had already formed in Ankara under Mustafa Kemal, with a Grand National Assembly established in April 1920. It declared invalid all treaties signed by Istanbul since the Allied occupation of the capital, and stripped the treaty's signatories of their citizenship.

The nationalists then fought to overturn the settlement in the Turkish War of Independence. After a near clash with Britain over the Straits in the Chanak crisis of September 1922 and the Armistice of Mudanya that October, the Allies agreed to new negotiations. The resulting Treaty of Lausanne, concluded in 1923, returned large territories in Anatolia and Thrace to Turkish control, ended the French and Italian zones of influence and left Constantinople under Turkish rule. The Republic of Turkey was established the same year.

Opposition was not confined to Anatolia. Arabs in Syria resisted French rule, Turks near Mosul attacked British forces, Arabs rose against British rule around Baghdad, and there was unrest in Egypt. Although the treaty itself never took effect, the mandates it confirmed in the Arab lands survived and became the frame for several modern states.

Our 1920 map shows the region as the treaty was signed, with Allied occupation and the new mandates, and the 1930 map shows the Republic of Turkey within the borders fixed at Lausanne.