How's the Start?


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The so called "eastern federation" was not one strictly speaking at least in the sense of a single state between the two countries. Rather full equality within the empire with the Greeks of it having full equality and sharing in power/government.
That's kinda already done. The 1908 constitution guaranteed the rights of all ethnicities as equal within the empire before it was repealed in 1913.
 
Chapter 16: Rising Foes
Chapter 16: Rising Foes

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“The Ottoman Empire as it entered the central half of the year of 1914 was becoming acutely aware that Europe was coming onto the brink of war with one another. Elections in France, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy was becoming dominated by the question of expansion, colonial expansion and the alliances of Europe. Whilst the Ottoman Empire had pursued a policy of alliance with the British Empire, the Russian objections to the alliance had dashed any hopes of Ottoman alliance with Westminster and the deal was watered down to a non-aggression pact. Germany and Austria-Hungary seemed like good allies as well, however the fact that Italy was a part of the Triple Alliance dashed any hopes for the Ottomans joining them too.

This feeling of tensions and this oppressive feeling within Europe continued to grow with the assassination of Serbian Prime Minister Nikola Pasic, and the infamous Serbo-Black Hand conflict which saw the Serbian state fight against the ultra-nationalist secret society of the Black Hand. For the first time in centuries, Serbs and Ottomans worked together to attack and arrest members of the Black Hand, which was quite disconcerting, as the Ottomans knew about the Serbian alliance with Bulgaria which was aimed squarely against the Ottoman Empire.

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The Zaian War took place in the Middle Atlas Mountains.

However another event was starting to draw Ottoman attention in the Maghreb region. The Zaian War had started. The signing of the Treaty of Fez in 1912 had established a French protectorate in Morocco. The Treaty had been prompted by the Agadir Crisis of 1911 during which French and Spanish troops aided Sultan Abdelhafid to put down anti-colonial revolts. The new French protectorate was led by the resident-general Louis Hubert Lyautey, and adopted the traditional Moroccan way of governing through the tribal system. Upon taking office however the French replaced Sultan Abdelhafid with his brother, Yusuf. The tribes took offence at this and installed their own sultan, Ahmed al-Hiba in Marrakesh and taking 8 europeans (7 were French, 1 was a Swedish journalist) captive. General Charles Mangin acted fast and using 5000 colonial troops, stamped down on this rebellion fast. Al-Hiba fled into the Atlas Mountains where he lived the rest of his life out until his death in 1920.

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Louis Hubert Lyautey

A popular idea among the French population of the metropole was to possess an unbroken stretch of territory from Tunis to the Atlantic Ocean including the so called Taza Corridor in the Moroccan interior. Lyautey was in favor of this idea and encouraged expansion through peaceful means where possible. This French expansion into the Middle Atlas Range was strongly opposed by the powerful Bedouin trinity of Mouha ou Hammou Zayani, the leader of the Zaian Confederation, Moha ou Said, the leader of the Ait Ouirra tribe, and Ali Amhaouch, a religious leader of the Darqawa variant of islam prevalent in the Atlas mountains.

The Zaians has a commanding force of 4000 to 4200 tents and Zayani was an experienced leader, having commanded the Zaians since 1877. Zayani was also personally outraged from the French expansion because his daughter was the second wife of the deposed Moroccan Sultan, and he declared holy war against the French and intensified his tribes attacks on the pro-French tribes of the region and military convoys in the Atlas mountains. Despite the Zaian’s anti-French rhetoric and the French anti-Zaian rhetoric however, both side seemed to ill-want to confront each other directly and largely only attacked the other’s allied tribes. Lyautey in early 1914 tried to propose a peace by making the Zaians a highly autonomous protectorate of France with only foreign policy power in the hands of Paris, however this was dismissed by the Zaians as an offer that Lyautey could not guarantee, as Lyautey did not have the ability or power to finalize such an offer.

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Zayani, leader of the Zaian Confederacy.

Soon, in June all-out war between the Zaians and the French broke out as the Zaians and French finally began to attack each other head on multiple pitched battles in the Atlas mountains against each other. As Zayani had declared holy war, the French turned towards the leader of Islam, The Ottoman Caliphate to intervene, lest the restless populace of Algeria, Bornu and Tunisia decided to join such a holy war. The Ottomans had neither forgotten the slight that the French had committed to the Ottomans during the Italo-Ottoman War, nor had they forgotten the French for it, and instead demanded refused to deny Zayani of his declaration of holy war, and however knowing their own precarious position, declared neutrality of the Caliphate in the Zaian War.

Despite this declaration however, several members of the Ottoman Empire, including prominent Arabian and Bedouin businessmen and merchants smuggled multiple scores of weapons and their associated ammunition to the Zaian Confederacy and sent multiple mercenary supervisors to teach the Zaians on how to fight a modern war. This made the war against the Zaian confederacy all the more harder, and the French would be stuck fighting a colonial war without a real end in the Zaian Confederacy for the next few years to come, proving to be a massive monetary, financial and military drain.” Ottoman Involvement in the Zaian Confederacy, Rabat Publishing, 1999

“Mustafa Kemal Pasha was in June 18th, 1914 named the Ottoman Military Attaché to Bulgaria, Serbia and Romania, and was given a promotion to Mirliva or Major General in normal military terms. Becoming a general officer of the Ottoman Military and Armed Forces. The man was a household name for his antics and his actions in Libya, and his coordination and the construction of the Rhodope Mountain defenses had earned him a new series of fame as well. On June 28th, the man reached Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria to commit himself to his duties as Military Attaché and became involved in coordinated Ottoman military developments with Bulgarian military developments as well.

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Stiliyan Kovachev

While in Bulgaria, he met with Dimitrina Kovacheva, the daughter of famous Bulgarian general Stilliyan Kovachev, who had recently completed her education in Switzerland and during a ball in Sofia, fell in love with her. The two danced at the ball and started to secretly date with one another in the following days. Mustafa Kemal proposed to her twice which she accepted, however Dimitrina’s family refused to accept the marriage, especially her father who was worried about the religious denomination of his daughter if she married into a muslim family and one from the Ottoman Empire at that. Kovachev was also the Minister of Defense of the Tsardom of Bulgaria and had to think of his own political career if his daughter married into the Ottoman Empire’s famous war hero.

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a picture of Dimitrina and Mustafa Kemal Pasha in the late 1920s.

Finally it would be in the year 1915, wherein Kovachev finally accepted the third proposal on the condition that Dimitrina would be allowed to practice her faith, Orthodox Christianity freely and would be allowed to speak her native tongue Bulgarian freely as well, and that Mustafa Kemal would not be involved in Bulgarian political shenanigans which may arise from the marriage. A marriage ceremony was held in Salonika where both Islamic and Orthodox rites were observed for the marriage and Dimitrina Kovacheva became Dimitrina, the wife of Mustafa Kemal Pasha. Whilst this marriage would be a happy one, with both sides loving each other intently, the marriage with a foreigner, a bulgarian at that would spell a lot of troubles for Mustafa Kemal during his rise to power in the Ottoman empire.” Mustafa Kemal Pasha: Rise of Glory, Angora Publishing, 2009.

“The Jewish settlement in the Sinai region, especially in the new city of New Tiberias was going along swimmingly well, however underneath the smiling faces of both the Zionist Congress as well as that of the government of Cairo, tensions were already starting to erupt between the two sides. The Egyptian government was allowing Jewish settlement but that didn’t mean they wanted the Jews to snuff out the Arabians in their full extent within the Sinai and wanted to keep the Zionists as subjects to the Egyptian Khedivate. The Zionists on the other hand wanted no Arabian in their new homeland and certainly wanted no connection to Egypt other than the most flimsy and weak loyalties.

The very first religious riots took place in early July when the Arab population of the Sinai launched a massive campaign protesting against the encroaching Zionists and pleaded with the Zionists to respect the Arabian population of the peninsula if they wished to settle down in the area. Seeing as the Jews were still very outnumbered in the Sinai, the representatives of the Zionist congress in the region led by Romanian Jewish nationalist Samuel Pinelese agreed and passed some jurisdiction laws that protected both Zionism and Arabs of the peninsula.

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Zionist Congress

However these cracks in the surface worried the ottomans who certainly didn’t wish for an unstable border near Transjordan, which was an integral part of the Ottoman Empire, and produced one of the highest revenues of the state. Grand Vizier Ali Kemal called on the Zionist Congress to remember their promise to the Ottoman State of respecting the Islamic population of the peninsula, and added the sweet deal of around 30,000 pounds in investment to New Tiberias to follow through with the promise and the deal, which Pinelese snapped up almost immediately.

Meanwhile within the Ottoman Empire itself, many Jewish organizations within the empire were starting to distance themselves from the Zionist Congress as tensions slowly rose over the Sinai question and distinguished themselves as Ottoman Jews, and continued to encourage Jewish migration into the empire. Jewish organizations within the empire, with the aid of the political party, Poale Zion met in Beirut, Ottoman Lebanon on July 27th, 1914 and declared the merging of all the organizations into the Ottoman Jewish Front and Organization or the OJFO and declared that the front would be representative organization of all Ottoman Jews, and that the Zionist Congress had no jurisdiction over the OJFO or the Jewish population of the Ottoman Empire. Whilst this act aided the Ottomans domestically as it consolidated the political power of the Jewish population within the empire, diplomatically this event only helped to further tensions with the World Zionist League and forced the Ottomans to withdraw some investments into the Zionist Congress.

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Ottoman Jews in the Ottoman Armed Forces.

Whilst the Sinai Crisis would only erupt in the 1940s, the foundations for it were already being laid down during the year of 1914.” How the Sinai Crisis came to be: A History of the Sinai Conflict. Penguin Publishing, 2017.

“The defection of the Armenians and Assyrians to the Zia government created a massive whole in the defenses of the loyalist Qajar regime and by this point the government was starting to collapse. The loyalist Qajar Dynastic members were defecting to the dissident Qajar Dynasty left, right and center, and the governmental functions of the loyalists was starting to flounder, and the Russians, seeing the writing on the wall was also starting to disengage slowly but surely.

It was at this time that the Ottoman aid to the loyalists in the form of 10,000 rifles and their associated ammunition arrived to Tehran, to scenes of rapid disillusionment and rapid collapse. The Mullahs of Iran and the reformist conservatives and the reformist islamists were rapidly defecting to Zia and the government was thrown into utter chaos. In order to capitalize on this, Zia ordered Reza Pahlavi to be reinforced with 5,000 troops, and ordered Pahlavi to move towards Isfahan, Qom and Tehran in a daring attack led by 17,000 troops. Pahlavi initially refused, calling the order suicidal and impossible to commit into, however as the defenses of the loyalist regime began to break apart, he found it easy to advance up north, and ordered his Turkmen allies in the north to keep the loyalists busy with raids.

The Battle of Shahreza was the last major battle of the Persian Civil War as Pahlavi went against the last remnants of the loyalist military. 15,000 dissidents went up against 21,000 loyalists and the battle raged throughout the area. Pahlavi had advanced from the south bypassing the Zagros mountains through Luristan and managed to take the loyalists by surprise and ambushed them during the battle. A portion of his military swung north and reach Bahrestan, managing to encircle around 8,000 of the loyalist troops, and crushed them in an encircling move, forcing the rest of the loyalist militia to flee into the mountains and nearby areas. The city of Isfahan then fell without a fight after the devastating defeat at the Battle of Shahreza. The road to Qom and Tehran was wide open and Pahlavi knew this. As per his instructions from Zia and the government in Bandar Abbas, he led his troops up the deserted path and only found loyalist tribes in their way and managed to defeat the tribes back. A few garrisons were left here and there along the path however they were not a problem for Pahlavi’s massive army (in comparison to the loyalists at least).

On August 24, 1914, Pahlavi entered Qom after a short scuffle with the city’s garrison and the city was captured in the name of the Shah Abdul-Hussein Farman Farma Qajar, the dissident Shah of Iran. The city’s garrison put up a good fight, however by this point, the city’s people had enough of fighting and supported the dissidents against the loyalist garrison, and the garrison was soon outnumbered, encircled and then massacred. The road to Tehran was right open. Not wishing to see the country’s capital razed to the ground in a battle that would certainly destroy many parts of the city, Shah Abdul-Hussein sent a letter to his cousin, Shah Ahmad, and asked the boy to surrender once and for all, to see to it that peace reigned in the country again and the capital was saved from a disastrous battle.

Shah Ahmad, despondent from losing Isfahan and Qom agreed, and agreed to peace. The Armistice of Varamin was signed on August 29th, 1914 which ended hostilities after six months of war, and on September 18th, the Treaty of Tehran was signed between the loyalists and dissidents. The major points of the treaty were:-

  • Shah Ahmad to abdicate the Sun Throne and recognize Shah Abdul-Hussein Farman Farma Qajar as the legitimate ruler of Iran.
  • The Constitution of 1914 to be promulgated in the Qajar Dynasty
  • The Loyalist and Dissident Armies to be merged.
  • Loyalist opponents of Zia to be pardoned, but kept in house arrest.
  • Zia to take power as the new Prime Minister of Iran, with legislative elections to take place in December, 1914.
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Shah Abdul-Hussein Farman Farma Qajar, the New Shah of Iran

The Persian Civil War was over after six months of brutal fighting and slogging with one another, and the British, Russians and Ottomans retained their spheres of influence over Iran. However the dawn of a truly democratic Iran can also be traced to the Ottomans. Zia, Pahlavi, and many other dissidents working against the autocratic and decadent old Qajar regime were inspired by the new democratic route that the Ottomans had chosen for themselves, and had aspired to emulate that within their own country as well. The announcement of universal male franchise which was a picture perfect copy of the Ottoman male voting franchise was testament to this fact as well.” The Qajar Civil War: A History. Qom Publishing, 1999.

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“As the Italians turned increasingly radical and belligerent after their defeat to the Ottomans in the Italo-Ottoman War, they were starting to eye up the Empire of Abyssinia once again and was eager to have retribution for their defeat at Adawa. As the Italians were the Ottoman Empire’s main enemy of late, the empire was forced to look towards the Ethiopian Empire and aid them in their struggles against the Italians, as a few border skirmishes broke out in Eritrea and Somalia.

The monarch of Ethiopia at this time was Lij Iyasu, who was not crowned, but made de-facto monarch of Ethiopia after the death of his grandfather, Menelik II of Ethiopia. Many members of the Ethiopian nobility distrusted Iyasu as his father had been a muslim in a predominantly Christian nation. Iyasu tried to prove himself to the nation by increasing the modernization of the state, however the nobility remained ever so disunited with him. At this point of desperation, Iyasu decided to leave the capital, ostensibly on a military expedition against the Afar peoples, but he simply traveled to the eastern Shewa and into the Wollo, meeting the common people to shore up his public support. He had promised to return to Addis Ababa but instead visited Debre Libanos, and joined Dajazmach Kaddaba’s expedition against the Somali tribes. Here, Iyasu took part in multiple slave raids in which 40,000 peoples of both sexes were enslaved and captured. This action plus his rude behavior with his grandfather’s ministers, who had reformed and modernized the state, plus his wish to appease Italy made him highly unpopular. Finally, Princess Zewditu had enough of the situation.

Many of Iyasu’s opponents wanted to install her as a puppet monarch and she herself didn’t like Iyasu, but neither did she want to become a puppet monarch of Ethiopia. And neither did she want to appease Italian expansion into Ethiopia either. She secretly contacted the Ottoman legislation in Addis Ababa led by Omar Al-Aziz Pasha, and asked for aid for aid in gaining power in Ethiopia. Omar Pasha relayed the news through telegram to Constantinople where Vlora Bey, the Foreign Minister gave the go ahead for the plan. He sent aid in the manner of money, equipment and weapons to Zewditu and on September 27th, Iyasu was arrested by the Princess’s personal guard which had been equipped with ottoman weapons. She declared Iyasu unfit to rule Ethiopia and demanded him to submit to her authority, basically naming her monarch of Ethiopia. Iyasu resisted, however the weak willed man gave in soon after and three days later named her his heir and successor. The Council of the State, who had never liked Iyasu, and as many of the Councilors were Zewditu’s puppets whom she had bribed through Ottoman money, accepted the change in power, and the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church officially announced the death of Emperor Menelik II and the deposed Iyasu in favor of Zewditu whom they named Empress, and Queen of Kings.

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Empress Zewditu of Ethiopia.

However Iyasu managed to escape captivity and managed to use his supporters to conduct a guerilla campaign in the north against the authority of Zewditu in an attempt to regain the throne. Zewditu again turned to her new allies in Constantinople. The Ottomans were more than happy to aid their new Ethiopian friends against Iyasu and using Ottoman support, and supervisors, Iyasu was recaptured, and then put under house arrest in the Ethiopian highlands, far from urban life. Zewditu then signed a treaty of friendship and trade with the Ottomans giving the Ottomans a massive amount of influence in the nation. The Ottoman-Ethiopian relationship was just beginning.” A History of Constantinople’s relation with Addis Ababa, Imperial University of Addis Ababa, 1994.

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and here's the promised chapter! Tensions rising in Europe, a war in Morocco, conflicts ending in Ethiopia and Iran, and a small snippet of Kemal's life. Thoughts?
 
Ottoman right-wing nationalist: Reee! You can't marry a non-Muslim! Reee!
Bulgarian right-wing nationalist: Reee! You can't marry a white Christian! Reee!
Kemal: Bruh.
 
Ottoman right-wing nationalist: Reee! You can't marry a non-Muslim! Reee!
Bulgarian right-wing nationalist: Reee! You can't marry a white Christian! Reee!
Kemal: Bruh.
"Bulgarian right-wing nationalist: Reee! You can't marry a non-white Muslim! Reee!"

Otherwise they are saying the same thing.
 
A History of Constantinople’s relation with Addis Ababa, Imperial University of Addis Ababa, 1994.

any predictions on Iran and Ethiopia?
That imply imperial ethiopia survive to at least mid 90s. Which I wonder if Haile Selassie never came to power.
As for Iran, their current form seems more stable than OTL, and if Soviet Union still exist in this TL, their can receive lots of western assistance.
 
It's odd Lij Iyasu gave up so easily in this timeline, when historically his father Mikael of Wollo (previously Muhammad Ali) supported him to the end and it was only after losing in the field of battle Iyasu gave up his claim to the throne.
 
That imply imperial ethiopia survive to at least mid 90s. Which I wonder if Haile Selassie never came to power.
As for Iran, their current form seems more stable than OTL, and if Soviet Union still exist in this TL, their can receive lots of western assistance.
Ethiopia has an interesting future indeed. Iran is poised to start re reforms as well. Indeed.
 
It's odd Lij Iyasu gave up so easily in this timeline, when historically his father Mikael of Wollo (previously Muhammad Ali) supported him to the end and it was only after losing in the field of battle Iyasu gave up his claim to the throne.
He did try to regain the throne. However as Zewditu was more prepared ittl his attempt floundered quickly.
 
any predictions on Iran and Ethiopia?
Iran will be a battleground for influences: British, Russian and Ottoman. Ottomans now have a little edge. Could be a future war front?

In Ethiopia, will the ethiopian jews play a role in this ottoman increasing influence? More precisely, with the ottoman jews, now that exists a formal organization that represents them.
 
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