Italy signs the Treaty of London

On 26 April 1915 in London representatives of four states signed a secret agreement under which Italy was to enter the war on the side of the Entente. The signatures were those of the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, and the ambassadors of France, Paul Cambon, of Russia, Count Alexander Benckendorff, and of Italy, the Marquis Guglielmo Imperiali. In Polish literature the document is most often called the Treaty of London, in Italian literature the Pact of London (Patto di Londra).

On the same day the four signatories signed a declaration in which they undertook not to conclude a separate peace and to settle the terms of peace jointly. This meant Italy’s accession to the Pact of London that Britain, France and Russia had concluded on 5 September 1914. This declaration too was to remain secret until Italy declared war.

The road to London

In August 1914 Italy, although bound to Germany and Austria-Hungary by the Triple Alliance, declared neutrality. In the autumn the Prime Minister, Antonio Salandra, announced that the country would be guided by “sacred egoism”, that is, solely by its own interest. From November foreign policy was conducted by Sidney Sonnino. He bargained with both sides. From Vienna he demanded the compensation that the Triple Alliance treaty promised Italy, above all the Trentino, inhabited by Italians. Austria-Hungary long procrastinated, and when it finally agreed to concessions, they were too modest for Rome and were to take effect only after the war.

The Entente could offer more, because it was promising other people’s land. On 4 March 1915 Imperiali presented Grey with sixteen Italian conditions. The most difficult question proved to be Dalmatia. The Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Sazonov, opposed handing Italy a coast inhabited by Slavs, which Serbia, Russia’s ally, was counting on. The deadlock was broken by the French Foreign Minister, Théophile Delcassé, who proposed limiting the Italian demands in Dalmatia in exchange for full rights to the Dodecanese. At the beginning of April the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, presented a draft agreement, and in the middle of the month Sonnino accepted it with minor amendments.

What Italy was promised

After a victorious war Italy was to receive the Trentino and South Tyrol with a frontier on the Brenner Pass, Trieste, Gorizia and Gradisca, and the whole of Istria up to the Kvarner Gulf, with the islands of Cres and Lošinj. To this was added the northern part of Dalmatia with Zadar and Šibenik and most of the Dalmatian islands. The port of Fiume, today’s Rijeka, was to remain with Croatia, and Split and the coast further south were to go to Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro. Part of the coast was to be neutralised.

In the Balkans Italy was to get the Albanian port of Vlorë with the island of Sazan, which it had already occupied in December 1914, and to represent in foreign relations a small state that was to be created in central Albania. The north and south of the country could be divided between Montenegro, Serbia and Greece. In the Aegean it received outright the Dodecanese, occupied since the war with Turkey in 1912. If the Asian part of the Ottoman Empire were partitioned, it was entitled to a just share in the region of Antalya, and if Britain and France enlarged their empires at the expense of the German colonies, Italy could count on compensation in Africa. It was also to receive part of the war indemnity, and London promised to help it raise a loan of 50 million pounds on its market.

One of the articles concerned the Holy See. At the request of the Italian government, which had been in dispute with the papacy since the capture of Rome in 1870, the allies undertook to oppose jointly its participation in the peace negotiations.

The promises went far beyond the lands inhabited by Italians. According to historians’ calculations, the areas Rome demanded were home to about 650,000 Italians, but also to more than 700,000 Slovenes and Croats and about 230,000 Germans of the Tyrol. Sonnino justified these demands not by the principle of nationality but by Italy’s strategic security in the Adriatic.

Italy’s obligations

In return Italy undertook to wage war jointly with France, Britain and Russia against all their enemies and to take the field “as soon as possible”, no later than a month after the signing of the agreement. The French and British fleets were to support the Italians in the Adriatic until the Austro-Hungarian fleet had been destroyed or peace concluded. The Italian and Russian general staffs were to agree a military convention that would prevent Austria-Hungary from throwing all its forces against Italy. The last article stipulated that the agreement was to remain secret.

May in Italy

Only a few men in Rome knew of the signing, above all Salandra, Sonnino and King Victor Emmanuel III. Most deputies, grouped around the former Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti, favoured neutrality. At the beginning of May Italy denounced the Triple Alliance, and in the middle of the month the country went through an acute crisis. Salandra resigned, but the King did not accept his resignation, and the streets of the big cities were taken over by demonstrations of supporters of war. On 23 May 1915 Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary. It declared war on Turkey in August 1915, and on Germany only in August 1916. Italy’s formal accession to the declaration against a separate peace was announced publicly at the end of November 1915.

The world learned the content of the agreement after the October Revolution, when the Bolsheviks published the secret documents of tsarist diplomacy. After the war the promises made in London collided with the principle of national self-determination defended by the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, and with the claims of the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Italy received the Trentino, South Tyrol, Trieste and Istria, but of Dalmatia it got only Zadar and a few islands. Unfulfilled hopes and the dispute over Fiume, which had not been promised to Italy in London at all, gave rise to the myth of the “mutilated victory”, on which Italian fascism grew.