Treaty of London (1915)

• 1. Introduction

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  The Treaty of London was signed on the 26th of April 1915, and almost nobody outside a small circle of diplomats was meant to know it existed. On one side of the table stood the United Kingdom, France and Russia. On the other stood Italy. British Foreign Minister Edward Grey put his name to it, alongside the ambassadors Paul Cambon, Guglielmo Imperiali and Alexander von Benckendorff.

  The goal was to pull Italy into the Great War on the side of the Triple Entente. The price was land, and much of that land belonged to other people.

  Why would three great powers pay so heavily for one more army? How could they promise Italy a coastline that other nations had already been promised? And what becomes of a country on the winning side when its partners refuse to honour a secret deal? The answers run through Adriatic ports, a march of veterans, and a phrase, mutilated victory, that Italian nationalists turned into a weapon.

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• 2. A Cautious Courtship

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  On the 4th of August 1914, Italy's ambassador to Russia floated an idea that would eventually redraw the Adriatic. Italy, he suggested, might join the Entente in return for Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol, the city of Vlorë, and a dominant position in the Adriatic.

  Russian foreign minister Sergey Sazonov seized on the idea. He believed an Italian move would push Romania to enter the war against Austria-Hungary too. Grey backed him and added a suggestion of his own. Trieste, he said, should join the list, because it might help win over Italian public opinion.

  Grey's enthusiasm had limits. Italy's ambassador in London, Guglielmo Imperiali, presented the Italian conditions, but Grey doubted the talks could produce anything practical. He told Imperiali that Britain would discuss nothing further until Italy committed itself to joining the Entente. Grey then instructed Rennell Rodd, the British ambassador in Rome, to ask Prime Minister Antonio Salandra whether Italy could enter the war. Salandra replied that it was impossible for now. Any premature attempt to abandon neutrality, he warned, would damage the prospect of a later alliance. Russia was informed and dropped the matter.

  Neither side was acting out of friendship. The Entente saw Germany as its principal enemy and hoped Italy's entry would force Germany to pull forces away from existing battlefields. Italy wanted something different. It saw a chance to fulfil irredentist aims against Austria-Hungary, to dominate the Adriatic basin, and to enlarge its colonial empire.

  Italian opinion was divided. At first, most of the public favoured neutrality. Yet groups demanding an expansionist war against Austria-Hungary formed across the political spectrum. The most ardent were irredentist bodies such as Trento e Trieste, associated with the names of Giovanni Giuriati and Alfredo Rocco, who saw the war as an ethnic struggle against neighbouring South Slavic peoples.

  Salandra and his foreign minister, Antonino Paternò Castello, chose not to end the talks entirely. On the 16th of September, Castello told Rodd that Britain and Italy shared an interest in stopping Slavic domains under Russian influence from spreading west, especially into the Adriatic, where irredentists claimed Dalmatia. Yet he instructed Imperiali to say Italy would not abandon neutrality until the Entente accepted its conditions. Grey again insisted that Italy commit first, and the talks collapsed a second time.

  Opposition to the Dalmatian claim came from Arthur Nicolson, the Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. He agreed with Sazonov that Dalmatia wished to unite with the Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia. If Italy annexed it, he argued, Italy would inherit Austria-Hungary's old problem of a large South Slavic population seeking greater independence.

  Castello did win one concession. Britain endorsed an Italian occupation of Vlorë, a step meant as preparation for intervention and as a boost to the prestige of the Italian government. Expecting Sazonov to object, Castello asked Grey to get the Russians to allow it without demanding anything in return, calling it an unavoidable cost of attracting Italy.

  In late October, the Entente tried to draw Italy in against an expected Turkish attack on the Suez Canal. Sazonov warned Grey not to offer Dalmatia as payment. Grey answered that no such offer had been made, since an open canal served Italian interests too.

  By November, Sidney Sonnino had replaced Castello. He and Rodd took up the question of an alliance, and Sonnino proposed a non-binding agreement that could be made binding at a convenient moment. Rodd learned through his Italian contacts that the Italian armed forces could intervene by February 1915, and he urged Grey to reconsider. Grey declined, apparently indifferent to an Italian alliance at that point.

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• 3. Haggling Among Allies

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  Dalmatia sat at the centre of a collision between two Entente promises. The Entente was courting Bulgaria at the same time as Italy, and to tempt the Bulgarians it asked Serbia to give up much of Vardar Macedonia. As compensation, Serbia was to receive Bosnia and Herzegovina and an Adriatic outlet in Dalmatia. Handing Dalmatia to Italy would largely block that outlet. Sazonov wanted to strengthen the Serbian offer by guaranteeing the outlet, but Grey blocked the move, arguing that an Italian alliance mattered more.

  In mid-February 1915, the Gallipoli campaign began, and the British became convinced that Bulgaria would join the Entente within weeks. Russia, though it worked to win Bulgaria, feared that Bulgarian and Greek forces might occupy Constantinople and push Russia out, despite the Entente's promise of the city to Russia. Sonnino judged that a joint Bulgarian and Greek entry would all but assure an Entente victory in the Balkans.

  Grey called the Italian claims excessive, but he noted that they did not conflict with British interests. He also hoped Italian troops might overcome Russia's stubborn objections to a Greek attack on Constantinople. Above all, he thought Italy's entry would hasten decisions in Bulgaria and Romania, both still waiting to commit.

  Sazonov would hear nothing of an Italian role at Constantinople. He saw it as a threat to the Russian control that the allies had promised in return for Russian losses. Grey responded by securing formal recognition of the Russian claim from the Committee of Imperial Defence and from France. Sazonov then relented, with two conditions. Italy must not take the Adriatic coast south of Split, and Italian troops must not join the capture of the Turkish Straits. Grey found the second condition easy to accept, since Britain never expected Italy to fight there.

  The core of the Italian demand, covering Trentino, Trieste and Istria, was likely to draw protest from Frano Supilo, a leading voice of the nascent Yugoslav Committee, which spoke for South Slavs living in Austria-Hungary. Serbian Prime Minister Nikola Pašić and Sazonov, however, found it acceptable. Serbia's Niš Declaration had called for the liberation and unification of "unliberated brothers", described as "three tribes of one people": the Serbs, the Croats and the Slovenes. Yet Pašić was chiefly concerned with building a Greater Serbia. Sazonov was blunt about the others. He had nothing to say on behalf of the Croats and Slovenes, and he would not approve Russian forces fighting "half a day" for the liberty of the Slovenes.

  Still, talks stretched over six weeks. The sticking point was the extent of Italian gains in Dalmatia. Italy claimed the coast as far as the Neretva River, including the Pelješac Peninsula and every Adriatic island. Its negotiators justified this not by self-determination but by security. They argued that Russia might occupy the Austrian-controlled coast while Italy had no defensible port on the western shore. The Committee of Imperial Defence was worried about growing Russian naval power in the Mediterranean. That may have shaped British support for the Italian claim as a way to keep the coast from Russia, though no direct evidence says so.

  Grey, hoping for a breakthrough with Bulgaria, Romania and Greece, turned Sonnino's sixteen points into a draft agreement and sent it to Russia over the protests of the Yugoslav Committee. Sazonov objected. He dismissed an Italian offer of Dubrovnik as a port for South Slavs because it lacked inland transport routes. He demanded Split as well, and he opposed demilitarising the coast of the Kingdom of Montenegro. Grey revised the document to answer the Russian objections and passed it to Imperiali, but Sonnino threatened to end the negotiations over the remaining differences.

  The deadlock broke because of French Foreign Minister Théophile Delcassé. He was ready to pay any price for an Italian alliance, believing it would bring Bulgaria, Greece and Romania along. Delcassé proposed trimming the Italian claim in Dalmatia in favour of Serbia, in exchange for unrestricted possession of the Dodecanese Islands.

  Battlefield news helped him. The Russian Imperial Army had lost the initiative in the Carpathians, and its commander in chief, Grand Duke Nicholas, told Sazonov that Italian and Romanian support was urgently needed. Sazonov accepted Delcassé's proposal. He insisted that Italy enter the war by the end of April, and he left the demilitarisation questions to British Prime Minister H. H. Asquith. Asquith produced a draft on the 9th of April. Sonnino accepted it, with minor amendments, five days later.

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• 4. The Articles

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  Article 1 of the treaty looked first to the Eastern front. It called for a military agreement fixing the number of troops Russia would commit against Austria-Hungary, so that Austria-Hungary could not throw its whole strength at Italy. Article 2 required Italy to fight all the enemies of Britain, Russia and France. Article 3 bound the French and British navies to help the Italian effort by destroying the Austro-Hungarian fleet.

  Article 4 gave Italy Trentino and the southern part of Tyrol, later called South Tyrol. It drew a new Italian-Austrian frontier between Piz Umbrail and Toblach. It also ran a new eastern frontier from Tarvisio in the north down to the coast in the Kvarner Gulf, leaving Rijeka just outside Italian territory.

  Article 5 was the most contested. It awarded Italy the part of Dalmatia north of a line running northeast from Cape Planka, including the cities of Zadar and Šibenik and the basin of the Krka River. It also gave Italy all Austro-Hungarian Adriatic islands except twelve named ones, among them Brač and Krk. The coast between Rijeka and the Drin River that remained went to Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro.

  The same article demanded demilitarisation of the coast from Cape Planka to the Aoös River. Two stretches were exempt. One was the strip between Pelješac and a point 10 km southeast of Dubrovnik. The other was Montenegrin territory, where military bases were allowed under prewar arrangements. The purpose was to guarantee Italian military dominance in the region. The coast from that point near Dubrovnik to the Drin was to be divided between Serbia and Montenegro. Together, Articles 4 and 5 added 200,000 German speakers and 600,000 South Slavs to Italy's population.

  Articles 6 and 7 gave Italy full sovereignty over Vlorë, Sazan Island and the surrounding territory needed for their defence. Italy had to leave a strip of land west of Lake Ohrid so that Serbia and Greece could share a border. Italy would also represent Albania in foreign relations, while accepting Albania's partition among Serbia, Montenegro and Greece if the three Entente powers so decided.

  Beyond Europe, the promises grew vaguer. Article 9 offered territory around Antalya in any partition of the Ottoman Empire. Article 10 gave Italy the rights that the Sultan held in Libya under the Treaty of Ouchy. Article 13 promised compensation if France or Britain gained German colonial territory in Africa. In Article 12, Italy joined the Entente in supporting future control of Mecca and Medina by an independent Muslim state.

  The final articles dealt with money and politics. Article 11 promised Italy a share of any war indemnity, and Article 14 promised a loan of 50 million pounds sterling. Article 15 pledged Entente support for Italy in opposing any role for the Holy See in settling questions raised by the war. Article 16 ordered the whole treaty kept secret.

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• 5. Leaks and Protests

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  The secret did not hold. In late April 1915, an outline of the provisions reached the Yugoslav Committee and its supporters in London. Serbia and the committee protested in strong terms in Entente capitals.

  Pašić condemned the disregard for the self-determination principle on which the Niš Declaration rested, and he complained that Serbia had not been consulted. He demanded that the Entente make no treaties with Hungary or Romania on borders of interest to Croatia without first conferring with Serbia. He also asked for assurances of a future political union of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. He telegraphed these proposals to Grey from Niš, the provisional wartime capital, through the British ambassador Charles Louis des Graz. Grey declined both requests.

  Ante Trumbić, president of the Yugoslav Committee, met Lord Crewe, a senior member of the British Cabinet. He demanded support for the unification of Croatia, Istria and Dalmatia, followed by a political union with Serbia. The news also changed the committee's temper. Its members now took a less critical view of Serbian demands about how South Slavs should unite, because it was clear that the unity of the Croats and the unity of the Slovenes would depend on Serbia's success.

  In Britain, the press attacked Grey's policy. An early critique was "The National Union of South Slavs and the Adriatic Question" by Arthur Evans, published in April 1915. Evans called the treaty a sign of Italian chauvinistic ambitions against Dalmatia that was provoking a crisis. He expanded the argument in an article titled "Italy and Dalmatia", published by The Times on the 27th of April. Historians Robert Seton-Watson and Wickham Steed joined him, describing the Italian claims as absurd and Grey's policies as unjust. Grey replied that if the Entente won, Serbia would receive territory from Austria-Hungary and be enlarged.

  The full text only became public after the October Revolution, when the Bolsheviks published it. By then the South Slavs had already moved to answer it. In 1917, Pašić and Trumbić negotiated the Corfu Declaration, a plan for the post-war unification of the South Slavs designed to counter the Italian claims laid out in London.

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• 6. A Selective War

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  In the final weeks before Italy entered the war, speeches by Gabriele D'Annunzio whipped up national fervour. He called for war as a measure of national worth and incited violence against neutralists, including former Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti, who favoured staying out. The period became known as the radiant days.

  On the 22nd of May 1915, the Italian government launched the Alpine Front by declaring war on Austria-Hungary alone. That ignored Article 2, which demanded war against all the Central Powers. France accused Italy of violating the treaty, and Russia speculated that a non-aggression agreement might exist between Italy and Germany. Italy cited the army's lack of preparation. The omission, especially regarding Germany, left Italy isolated among the Entente powers. Under Entente pressure and amid internal political struggle, Italy declared war on the Ottoman Empire on the 20th of August. It did not declare war on Germany until the 27th of August 1916.

  Italy's arrival did not tempt Bulgaria. After early British and French setbacks at Gallipoli, Bulgaria grew more cautious. When the Germans captured Kaunas in Lithuania in late June during the Russian retreat, Bulgaria concluded that the Entente would lose. In August, the Entente sent Pašić a note offering Serbia territory in return for concessions in Vardar Macedonia to Bulgaria. The note promised Bosnia and Herzegovina, Syrmia, Bačka and the Adriatic coast from Cape Planka to the point 10 km southeast of Dubrovnik. It added the Dalmatian islands not assigned to Italy, and Slavonia if the Entente captured it militarily. At Sonnino's request, Central Croatia was not offered.

  Pašić agreed in principle. He offered to cede part of Vardar Macedonia along the lines agreed in 1912 at the end of the First Balkan War, but he asked for more, adding Central Croatia and Banat to his terms. The Slovene lands not promised to Italy appeared destined to stay in Austria-Hungary. On the 6th of October, Bulgaria joined the Central Powers, and five days later it attacked Serbia.

  Italy's own war nearly ended in disaster. The Central Powers almost defeated it in 1917 at the Battle of Caporetto. After a major retreat, Italian forces recovered and mounted a comeback a year later at the Battle of Vittorio Veneto. The price was 600,000 dead, social unrest and a badly damaged economy.

  The Armistice of Villa Giusti then allowed Italy to occupy Austro-Hungarian territory that the Treaty of London had promised. The diplomatically unrecognised State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs claimed parts of it too. Italian troops began moving into these areas on the 3rd of November 1918 and entered Rijeka on the 17th of November. They were stopped short of Ljubljana by a city-organised defence that included a battalion of Serbian prisoners of war.

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• 7. The Paris Reckoning

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  At the Paris Peace Conference, the chief Italian representatives were Prime Minister Vittorio Emanuele Orlando and Sonnino. They demanded that the Treaty of London be enforced, relying on the security principle. They also demanded annexation of Rijeka on the basis of self-determination, while disregarding its mainly Slavic suburb of Sušak. The British and the French would not publicly endorse claims beyond the treaty. Privately, they felt Italy deserved little because of its reserved attitude toward Germany in the early stages of the war.

  Britain and France left the job of restraining Italian ambitions to US President Woodrow Wilson, who argued for self-determination in the Adriatic under point nine of his Fourteen Points. Wilson regarded the treaty as a symbol of the perfidy of European diplomacy. He held it invalid under the legal doctrine of clausula rebus sic stantibus, citing the fundamental change of circumstances after the breakup of Austria-Hungary.

  On the 24th of April 1919, while the British and French stayed passive, Wilson published a manifesto explaining his principles and appealing to the sense of justice of the Italians. Orlando and Sonnino left Paris in protest, and at home they were celebrated as champions of national honour. They returned on the 7th of May but refused to take any initiative, expecting the Allies to make a conciliatory offer. In their absence, the French and British annulled the Agreement of Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne for lack of Russian consent. They also decided not to honour any Italian claims in Asia Minor or Africa.

  That agreement had its roots in 1917. The Entente powers discussed the partition of the Ottoman Empire at two conferences in London in January and February 1917, and then at Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne in April. Italian interests clashed with British and French ones, but the Italian delegates insisted that the promise made in London for the Antalya region be honoured. To keep Italian gains in proportion to those of its allies, they added the Konya and Adana vilayets to their claim. Most Italian demands were accepted. France, however, required Russian confirmation, and that became impossible after the Russian Revolution.

  Orlando and Sonnino also disagreed with each other. Orlando was ready to give up Dalmatia except Zadar and Šibenik, but insisted on annexing Rijeka. Sonnino held the opposite view. The result was a widely publicised slogan, "Pact of London plus Fiume", which turned both the treaty's promises and the fate of Rijeka into a matter of Italian national honour.

  Rijeka was finally assigned the status of an independent city, following negotiations between Orlando and Trumbić. Italy did secure corrections to the treaty's borders around Tarvisio, giving it a direct rail link with Austria. On Dalmatia, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George would support only a free-city status for Zadar and Šibenik, while French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau would support it only for Zadar. Elsewhere, Italy bargained away more. In the secret Venizelos-Tittoni agreement, it gave up its claims over the Dodecanese Islands, except for Rhodes, in favour of Greece, and the two countries agreed to support each other's claims in the partition of Albania.

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• 8. Mutilated Victory

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  When Orlando and Sonnino failed to secure either the full treaty territory or Rijeka, many Italians felt their country was losing the peace. Patriotic fervour curdled into nationalistic grievance, and the government looked incapable of defending the national interest.

  Orlando's successor, Francesco Saverio Nitti, decided to withdraw the occupying Italian troops from Rijeka and hand the city to the inter-Allied military command. That decision prompted D'Annunzio to lead a force of veterans and rebelling soldiers, backed by regular troops deployed in the border area, in what became known as the Impresa di Fiume. The force captured Rijeka. D'Annunzio proclaimed the Italian Regency of Carnaro in the city, and its system of government influenced the development of Fascism. It became a model for the alternative parliamentary order that the Fascists sought.

  The Impresa di Fiume helped bring down the Nitti government, under pressure from the Italian Socialist Party, D'Annunzio and Benito Mussolini. Nitti's successor, Giolitti, and the "democratic renouncers" of Dalmatian heritage became the next targets of nationalist criticism. D'Annunzio condensed the charge into a slogan, "Victory of ours, you shall not be mutilated". It pointed to the promise of Dalmatia in the Treaty of London, the failure to annex the "utterly Italian" city of Rijeka, and an elusive Adriatic domination, all of which, he said, made Italian participation in the war meaningless. From it grew the myth of the mutilated victory.

  Meanwhile, Albanian forces forced the Italian garrison out of Vlorë in what is termed the 1920 Vlora War. Italy kept Sazan Island. On the 22nd of July, it renounced the Venizelos-Tittoni agreement and guaranteed Albanian independence within its 1913 borders instead.

  Italy also contacted the newly established Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes directly to seek a compromise on the eastern Adriatic border. The Treaty of Rapallo settled it. Italy conceded a little of the hoped-for northern gains within the largely Slovene Littoral, also called the Austrian Littoral or Julian March. It gained Istria, the city-enclave of Zadar and several islands. Giolitti ordered the Italian Navy to drive D'Annunzio out of Rijeka, and under Rapallo the city became the Free State of Fiume. The same settlement gave Italy territory on the Snežnik Plateau north of Rijeka and a strip of land between the city and Italian-controlled Istria.

  The Treaty of Rapallo still added 350,000 Slovenes and Croats to the population of Italy.

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