Middle East

F

The Crusades

In the 11th century, European Christians began to challenge Muslim predominance in the Mediterranean, retaking Sicily and much of Spain by the mid-12th century. At the same time, the papacy inaugurated the Crusades, a series of largely unsuccessful efforts to recapture the Holy Land from the Muslims. Initially the Crusaders established a number of small states on or near the Mediterranean coast: Antioch, Edessa, Jerusalem, and Tripoli. Edessa returned to Muslim control in 1144, and the others had fallen to Kurdish Muslim leader Saladin by the time of the Third Crusade in 1189. Although the influence of the Crusades in the Arab world was slight, many of the European merchant communities established in the Crusader states remained intact after Muslims recaptured the region. These communities continually promoted trade between Europe and the Middle East.

G

The Mongols and the Mamluks

The last nomadic group to migrate west from inner Asia, the Mongols, arrived in the 13th century (see Mongol Empire). By 1231 they had overrun Iran and Mesopotamia, and in 1258 they destroyed Baghdād, ending the caliphate of the Abbasids. Originally pagans, the Mongols soon embraced Sunni Islam and became its zealous defenders. The Mamluks, slaves who had advanced to high military and political posts in Egypt, halted the Mongol invasion of Egypt and Syria in 1260. Mamluk general Baybars I became sultan of Egypt, uniting Egypt and Syria into a single state for the next 250 years.

H

The Ottoman Empire

Late in the 13th century, a Muslim warrior known as Osman began to lead successful raids against the Byzantine strongholds in western Anatolia. His followers, the Ottomans, extended control in all directions, forging an empire that would be the principal political force in the western Islamic world for 600 years. At its height in the second half of the 16th century, the Ottoman Empire included southeastern Europe, Anatolia, Iraq, western Iran, Greater Syria, Egypt, the western Arabian Peninsula, and the coast of North Africa between Egypt and eastern Morocco. Further east the Ottomans' contemporaries and rivals the Safavids established a dynasty in Iran and Afghanistan between 1501 and 1722, imposing Twelver Shia Islam as the official religion and founding the modern Iranian state. Both the Ottomans and the Safavids ruled some of the most advanced and militarily and economically secure states of their time. In the early 18th century the Ottoman Empire began a long process of decline and decay, brought about by a combination of internal strife and external pressures from the rise of the European powers to economic, scientific, and political domination.

I

European Interest

In the mid-18th century, as France and Britain fought for control of India, both took a strategic interest in the Ottoman Empire and Iran, which lay across the route between Europe and India. Britain had gained supremacy in India by 1763, but in 1798 French emperor Napoleon I attempted to establish a stronghold in Egypt from which to attack the British in India. The Battle of the Nile resulted in the defeat of France and Britain's continued supremacy in India, as well as renewed European interest in the Middle East. As industrialization progressed, first in Britain and then in other European nations, demand grew for both raw materials and markets for manufactured products. The Middle East became a source of grains and wool, as well as cotton in Egypt and Syria, silk in Lebanon, and tobacco in Anatolia and Iran. Overall, the value of European trade with the region increased tenfold during the 19th century.

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At various times in the 19th century, the governments of Egypt, Iran, and the Ottoman Empire began to borrow on European money markets, almost always on disadvantageous terms. Partly as a result, Egypt and the Ottoman Empire went bankrupt in the 1870s. Bankruptcy was followed by the installation in local treasuries of European financial controllers who introduced austerity programs and tax increases to pay off the debt. These measures aroused strong local opposition, which in Egypt was followed by a British invasion in 1882. Although supposedly made to protect the ruler from his rebellious subjects, the invasion actually inaugurated a long period of foreign rule.

By the first decade of the 20th century, a variety of nationalist movements had come into being in the Ottoman Empire. Arab nationalism became popular among intellectuals in Greater Syria, while Armenian nationalism also grew after the massacres of Armenians in Anatolia in the 1890s. Zionism (the movement to reunite the Jewish people in Palestine) had begun to gain momentum in Europe, and the first waves of Jewish settlement in Palestine began in 1882. A Turanian movement stressing the unity and solidarity of the Turkish people from present-day Turkey eastwards through Central Asia was growing as well.

J

World War I and Aftermath

In 1914 the Ottoman Empire entered World War I (1914-1918) on the side of the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Bulgaria) against the Allied Powers (28 nations including Britain, France, Russia, Italy, and the United States). In order to protect the oil installations of southwestern Iran and to preempt an Ottoman thrust toward the Persian Gulf, British Indian troops invaded southern Iraq in the first weeks of the war, eventually reaching Baghdād in March 1917. Syria and Palestine remained under Ottoman control until the last months of the war. Upon defeat by the Allies, the Ottoman Empire lost its Arab provinces and was confined to present-day Turkey.

Conflicting arrangements that the Allies had made among themselves and with others during the war complicated control of the Middle East after the war. In 1916 the Allies negotiated the Sykes-Picot agreement, which stated that rulership of the Arab part of the Ottoman Empire would be divided among Britain, France, Italy, and Russia after the war. Meanwhile, in 1915 and 1916 the British government promised Husein ibn Ali, the sharif of Mecca, the right to Arab independence in return for collaboration with the Allies against the Ottomans. However, the British left vague the precise areas where Arab independence would be recognized. Finally, the British promised their support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” in the Balfour Declaration of November 1917 to win worldwide Jewish support for the war effort. The vagueness and potentially conflicting commitments of these agreements strained relationships among all the parties involved, particularly with regard to Palestine.

During various postwar peace conferences the idea of direct colonial rule over the former Arab provinces was discarded in favor of a mandate system. Under this system, members of the newly formed League of Nations were granted supervision of territories with varying degrees of independence. Five new mandate states were created: Britain took over Iraq, Palestine, and Transjordan (now Jordan), while France took Syria and Lebanon. When the Allies attempted to parcel out parts of present-day Turkey, Turkish soldier Mustafa Kemal (later Atatürk) rallied national support and expelled French, Greek, and Italian forces from the country by 1922. Kemal signed the final postwar territorial settlement in 1923, and the Turkish republic, with Kemal as president, was proclaimed later that year. Turkey abolished the caliphate (an office assumed by Ottoman sultans) in 1924.

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