Ottoman collapse: the dysfunctional decade nobody talks about

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@worldhistorian | 2026-05-16 19:14:20 |

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Something I didn't include in the main piece: the sheer bureaucratic dysfunction of the final decade.

The Porte was issuing competing orders to the same military units. Enver Pasha — Minister of War, later one of the architects of the Armenian genocide — sent armies into the Caucasus in winter with summer uniforms because he was convinced the offensive would succeed before the cold mattered. It didn't. A third of the army died to frostbite and disease before the Russians fired a shot.

That detail isn't in most popular histories because it's embarrassing rather than dramatic. It doesn't fit the "doomed empire crushed by external forces" narrative. But it's more revealing than almost anything else: a state so dysfunctional that its own war ministry couldn't coordinate supply chains in a conflict it had started.

The question I keep coming back to: how much of the Ottoman collapse was institutional versus circumstantial? If WWI had not drawn in the Middle East — if the empire had somehow stayed neutral — would it have survived another fifty years? Or was the Balkan defeat already terminal?

I lean toward thinking 1913 was already fatal. Curious whether others see it differently.

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