Italo-Turkish War
The Italo-Turkish or Turco-Italian War (Turkish: Trablusgarp Savaşı, "Tripolitanian War", Italian: Guerra di Libia, "War of Libya") was fought between the Kingdom of Italy and the Ottoman Empire from 29 September 1911, to 18 October 1912. As a result of this conflict, Italy captured the Ottoman Tripolitania Vilayet, of which the main sub-provinces were Fezzan, Cyrenaica, and Tripoli itself. These territories became the colonies of Italian Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, which would later merge into Italian Libya.
During the conflict, Italian forces also occupied the Dodecanese islands in the Aegean Sea. Italy agreed to return the Dodecanese to the Ottoman Empire in the Treaty of Ouchy[9] in 1912. However, the vagueness of the text, combined with subsequent adverse events unfavourable to the Ottoman Empire (the outbreak of the Balkan Wars and World War I), allowed a provisional Italian administration of the islands, and Turkey eventually renounced all claims on these islands in Article 15 of the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne.[10]
The war is considered a precursor of the First World War. Members of the Balkan League, seeing how easily Italy defeated the Ottomans[11] and motivated by incipient Balkan nationalism, attacked the Ottoman Empire in October 1912, starting the First Balkan War a few days before the end of the Italo-Turkish War.[12]
The Italo-Turkish War saw numerous technological changes, most notably the use of airplanes in combat. On 23 October 1911, an Italian pilot, Capitano Carlo Piazza, flew over Turkish lines on the world's first aerial reconnaissance mission,[13] and on 1 November, the first aerial bomb was dropped by Sottotenente Giulio Gavotti, on Turkish troops in Libya, from an early model of Etrich Taube aircraft.[14] The Turks, using rifles, were the first to shoot down an airplane.[15] Another use of new technology was a network of wireless telegraphy stations established soon after the initial landings.[16] Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of wireless telegraphy, came to Libya to conduct experiments with the Italian Corps of Engineers.
Italian diplomats decided to take advantage of the situation to obtain a favourable peace deal. On 18 October 1912, Italy and the Ottoman Empire signed a treaty in Ouchy in Lausanne called the First Treaty of Lausanne, which is often also called Treaty of Ouchy to distinguish it from the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, (the Second Treaty of Lausanne).[49][50]
The main provisions of the treaty were as follows:[51]
Subsequent events prevented the return of the Dodecanese to Turkey, however. The First Balkan War broke out shortly before the treaty had been signed. Turkey was in no position to reoccupy the islands while its main armies were engaged in a bitter struggle to preserve its remaining territories in the Balkans. To avoid a Greek invasion of the islands, it was implicitly agreed on that the Dodecanese would remain under neutral Italian administration until the conclusion of hostilities between the Greeks and the Ottomans, after which the islands would revert to Ottoman rule.
Turkey's continued involvement in the Balkan Wars, followed shortly by World War I (which found Turkey and Italy again on opposing sides), meant that the islands were never returned to the Ottoman Empire. Turkey gave up its claims on the islands in the Treaty of Lausanne, and the Dodecanese continued to be administered by Italy until 1947, when after the Italian defeat in World War II, the islands were ceded to Greece.
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