Agreement on Asia Minor

On 18 August 1917 the Italian ambassador in London, the Marchese Guglielmo Imperiali, handed the British Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, a note announcing the Italian government’s consent to the future partition of the Asian part of the Ottoman Empire. Balfour replied the same day that the British government agreed that the provisions quoted reflected the results of the talks between France, Britain and Italy at Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne and at the subsequent conferences on Asia Minor. Attached to the note was a map marked with the zones, which Balfour signed in his own hand. Both sides stipulated that the agreement would remain secret. This in practice brought to an end the bargaining that had gone on since the spring, which had begun at the Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne conference on 19 April.

The final text was prepared at an inter-Allied conference which met in London at Downing Street on 7 and 8 August. It was attended by the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, the French Prime Minister, Alexandre Ribot, and the Italian Foreign Minister, Sidney Sonnino. Before that the French and Italians had reached agreement on the boundary between their zones in Cilicia. The memorandum drawn up in London on 8 August had nine points. Italy acceded to the Anglo-French Sykes–Picot Agreement of May 1916, and in return France and Britain granted it two zones marked on the map. The green zone, under direct Italian administration, comprised south-western Anatolia with Smyrna, Konya and Antalya. Zone “C”, north of Smyrna, was to be an Italian sphere of influence. The Italians undertook to make Smyrna a free port for French and British trade. In return Mersin, in the French zone, was to be a free port for the Italians, with the right of free rail transit through the vilayet of Adana. The international administration of Palestine was to be decided with Italy’s participation, and the provisions of the Sykes–Picot Agreement on the Arabian Peninsula and the Red Sea were to apply to Italy as well.

The whole was hedged with two reservations. The first repeated the formula Lloyd George had proposed at Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne: if after the war any of the powers could not receive in full the Ottoman territories promised to it, the balance of power in the Mediterranean would be taken into account in any changes of frontiers, in accordance with the Treaty of London of 1915. The second was more important. All the provisions were accepted “subject to the assent of the Russian Government”, and the memorandum was to be communicated to Petrograd so that it could state its view. In London a proposed final article, under which the agreement of the three powers would remain in force even if Russia did not consent or did not take a position, was rejected. That was why the French took care that the notes should not read like the conclusion of a final agreement.

The disputes went on to the last moment. Ribot wanted the note to state that the map had been presented by Lloyd George. As the political director of the French foreign ministry, Pierre de Margerie, explained to an Italian diplomat, the Prime Minister was anxious that before parliament and public opinion the initiative to give Smyrna to Italy should appear to be British. Sonnino firmly opposed this. France and Italy exchanged notes only on 21 and 22 August, and only on 20 September did Ribot instruct the ambassador in London to acknowledge to Balfour receipt of the British communication. Russia’s consent was never obtained: in November the Bolsheviks took power in Petrograd. At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 the British and French invoked this lack of consent to treat the agreement as void, and Smyrna was occupied by the Greeks.