Franco-Italian agreement on Asia Minor

On 27 July 1917 the Italian ambassador in Paris, the Marquis Giuseppe Salvago Raggi, handed the French Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Alexandre Ribot a note which closed the dispute over one stretch of the future boundary between the French and Italian zones in Asia Minor. The British chronology of the war records under this date an agreement between the French and Italian governments defining their spheres of influence in Asia Minor. Italian diplomatic documents published later show that what was settled then was a single question, though one disputed for months: the course of the line dividing the two zones on the coast of Cilicia. The partition as a whole was still waiting on the British.

The matter had dragged on since the conference at Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne. On 19 April the prime ministers of Britain, France and Italy had agreed there that the Italian zone in the Ottoman Empire, to be partitioned after the war, would begin at a point to be fixed west of the port of Mersin. The French, to whom the Sykes–Picot Agreement had assigned Cilicia with Mersin and Adana, did not want to give the Italians even a scrap of that coast. Over the following weeks London, Paris and Rome exchanged memoranda, and the British and French added conditions that the prime ministers had not discussed in April. An opportunity for a face-to-face talk arose in Paris, where on 25 and 26 July the Allied conference on the Balkans was meeting, attended by the Italian Foreign Minister Sidney Sonnino.

On the morning of 26 July Salvago Raggi met the secretary-general of the French Foreign Ministry, Jules Cambon. They agreed that the boundary of the French and Italian zones would run from the sea up the Lamas river (the ancient Lamos, today Limonlu), which flows into the sea a few dozen kilometres south-west of Mersin, to its source, and from there straight to the Franco-Italian boundary already fixed earlier in the Taurus Mountains. That same day Ribot informed the ambassador by note that he agreed. On 27 July Salvago Raggi replied on Sonnino’s behalf that the Italian government also accepted the proposal. It was agreed that the ambassadors in London, the Frenchman Paul Cambon and the Italian Marquis Guglielmo Imperiali, would inform each other of the agreement and pass it on to the British government. Sonnino noted briefly in his diary: “Agreement found on the Mersina boundary”.

The agreement settled that Mersin itself and its surroundings would remain on the French side. The Italians were to receive a huge area further west: south-western Anatolia with Antalya and Konya, and in addition Smyrna in a zone of influence. The next day, 28 July, Sonnino went to London to complete the negotiations with the British. Further talks went on into August. The final text of the Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne agreement was approved by the three powers between 18 August and 26 September 1917, subject to the consent of Russia, which was never obtained. After the war the British and French invoked this lack to declare the agreement void, and the Italians, although in 1919 they occupied the area around Antalya, kept none of the lands promised to them in Asia Minor.