Crisis in the Mediterranean: Naval Competition and Great Power Politics, 1904-1914

By Jon K Hendrickson

Prior to July 1914, the extensive British grip on the Mediterranean Sea was beginning to weaken, leading to a wide-open competition between Austria-Hungary, Italy, France and Great Britain. This change, Jon Hendrickson contends, was driven by three largely understudied events: the weakening of the British Mediterranean Fleet to provide more ships for the North Sea, Austria-Hungary's decision to build a navy capable of operating in the Mediterranean, and Italy's decision to seek naval security in the Triple Alliance after the Italo-Turkish War. These three factors radically altered the Mediterranean balance of power, forcing Britain and France to come to a mutual accommodation and accelerate ship construction to defend their respective interests in the region. However, the July Crisis and the ensuing World War obscured these events, leading later historians to ignore these events.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Naval Institute Press
• Release date: Apr 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9781612514765

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CRISIS

IN THE MEDITERRANEAN

Titles in the Series

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New Perspectives on Maritime History and Nautical Archaeology

James C. Bradford and Gene A. Smith, editors

Rivers, seas, oceans, and lakes have provided food and transportation for man since the beginning of time. As avenues of communication they link the peoples of the world, continuing to the present to transport more commodities and trade goods than all other methods of conveyance combined. The New Perspectives on Maritime History and Nautical Archaeology series is devoted to exploring the significance of the earth’s waterways while providing lively and important books that cover the spectrum of maritime history and nautical archaeology broadly defined. The series includes works that focus on the role of canals, rivers, lakes, and oceans in history; on the economic, military, and political use of those waters; on the exploration of waters and their secrets by seafarers, archeologists, oceanographers, and other scientists; and upon the people, communities, and industries that support maritime endeavors. Limited by neither geography nor time, volumes in the series contribute to the overall understanding of maritime history and can be read with profit by both general readers and specialists alike.

Naval Institute Press

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© 2014 by Jon K. Hendrickson

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Hendrickson, Jon K.

Crisis in the Mediterranean : naval competition and great power politics, 1904-1914 / Jon K. Hendrickson.

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ISBN 978-1-61251-476-5 (epub) 1.Europe—History, Naval—20th century. 2.Mediterranean Region—History, Naval—20th century. 3.Mediterranean Sea—Strategic aspects. 4.Great Britain. Royal Navy. Fleet, Mediterranean—History—20th century. 5.Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Kriegsmarine—History. 6.Sea-power—Mediterranean Area. 7.Geopolitics—Mediterranean Area. 8.Naval strategy—History—20th century. 9.Europe—Foreign relations—1871-1918.I. Title.

D436

359’.0309182209041—dc23

2014006054

Print editions meet the requirements of ANSI/NISO z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

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First printing

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1:The Mediterranean Equilibrium

Chapter 2:The Calm before the Storm

Chapter 3:The Austro-Italian War Scare

Chapter 4:The Italo-Turkish War and Its Consequences

Chapter 5:Britain’s Mediterranean Crisis

Chapter 6:The Austro-Italian Combination

Chapter 7:The French 19e Corps and Mediterranean Control

Conclusion

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures

Figure I.1.Naval Spending, 1904–1914

Figure 2.1.Tonnage of Mediterranean Navies, 1904

Figure 2.2.Broadside Throw Weights (in pounds), Mediterranean Navies, 1904

Figure 3.1.Battle Line Tonnage, Austria-Hungary and Italy, 1906–1911

Figure 3.2.Broadside Throw Weights, Austria-Hungary and Italy, 1906–1911

Figure 5.1.Tonnage of Mediterranean Fleets, 1914

Figure C.1.Tonnage of the Mediterranean Combinations by Year, 1913–1920

Figure C.2.Broadside Throw Weights, Mediterranean Combinations

Tables

Table I.1.Naval Spending, 1904–1914

Table 3.1.Tonnages of Austrian and Italian Battle Lines, 1906–1911

Table 3.2.Broadside Throw Weights, Austria-Hungary and Italy, 1906–1911

Table C.1.Tonnage of Mediterranean Combinations by Year, 1913–1920

Table C.2.Broadside Throw Weights, Mediterranean Combinations

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Dr. Jennifer Siegel, Dr. John Guilmartin, Dr. Alan Beyerchen, and Dr. James Bradford for their assistance and advice in producing this work. Without their help, this project would have never succeeded. I would also like to thank the archivists in London, Paris, Vienna, and Rome for their assistance in helping a young, none-too-bright historian find the documents that he needed. Finally, I would like to thank the U.S. Naval Academy’s Class of 1957, the Tyng Fund, the Bradley Foundation, the Mershon Center, and The Ohio State University for financial assistance.

INTRODUCTION

The Mediterranean Sea has long been one of the world’s crossroads. A place where climatic zones, cultures, and trade routes meet, it has played a major role in the history of numerous civilizations. Its relatively calm seas and numerous ports made it a place for humanity to begin its efforts to go down to the sea in ships. A hotbed for shipping, the fortunes of people and nations were won and lost along the shores of the Mediterranean. For the majority of history, the Mediterranean was anarchic, without a single power controlling passage through the region and guaranteeing the safety of merchant traffic. By 1904, however, the Mediterranean had enjoyed nearly a century under the virtual control of Great Britain, with the free movement of ships and general peace enforced by the power of the Royal Navy. The Royal Navy had won control of the Mediterranean from a series of rivals in a century of war, culminating with the destruction of the Franco-Spanish squadrons at Trafalgar that ended imperial France’s bid to topple Great Britain on the seas. However, Great Britain’s dominance of the Mediterranean was, in 1904, starting to unravel. It would not have been obvious at the time, since the Royal Navy seemed as indomitable as ever. However, the slow, almost unnoticed rise of Austria-Hungary from the status of a coastal defense power that was content to control the waters along its shoreline to the status of a Mediterranean-wide power, combined with the strain of protecting British Home Waters from the German navy, threatened to break the Royal Navy’s hold on the Mediterranean. The collapse of British power in the Mediterranean, ultimately averted by the unexpected outbreak of World War I, combined with the rise of the Austrians to a major regional power, would have ushered in a new Mediterranean equilibrium, a new order that was well on its way to becoming established by 1912.

Britain gained dominance in the Mediterranean during the age of sail. Using wind-powered wooden ships that were armed with smoothbore cannon, the Royal Navy defeated first the Spanish and then the French, the Mediterranean’s traditional powers. In these wars, the British gained control of numerous, well-fortified bases across the Mediterranean. The most significant of these—Gibraltar, Malta, and Alexandria—gave Britain a chain of fortified, mutually supporting naval facilities that allowed it to station and support ships permanently in the Mediterranean, and to base those ships close to any sort of crisis zone that might develop. Not only did Great Britain establish control over the Mediterranean, no small feat in itself, but it also managed to maintain that control in a period of immense technological change. By the 1850s the products of the Industrial Revolution had come to the navies of the world. Steam engines replaced sails. Steel became cheap enough to serve as a replacement for wood. Improved metallurgy allowed for rifled guns that could be larger and longer, and withstand higher pressures. When combined with improved propellants, this meant that naval artillery could fire even farther. Improved metallurgy also led to better armor and to better shells to pierce that armor. These new technologies brought a fresh challenge to Britain’s naval superiority. France looked to these new technological marvels to give it the edge it needed to overcome Britain’s material advantages. However, with each attempt by the French to surpass the British, Britain responded by adapting to new technologies, and then out-producing the French. New weapons, new ships, new ways of fighting at sea all came from the massive technological shifts of the era, but through it all the Royal Navy remained the top dog in the Mediterranean.

Despite preserving its status as the leading power in the Mediterranean for nearly a century, by 1904 Great Britain’s lead was starting to slip away. Britain’s attentions were pulled away from the Mediterranean as Germany increased its presence in the North Sea and began flexing its muscles across the globe. With Britain’s hold weakening, a new equilibrium would have to emerge amongst the Mediterranean powers. The quest to establish this new balance required naval growth. Naval budgets for the three major Mediterranean powers—France, Italy, and Austria-Hungary—increased. The total tonnage of major surface combatants—battleships and armored cruisers—under the command of the Mediterranean powers increased, and the pace of growth accelerated after 1910. The number of light fleet elements—light and protected cruisers, destroyers, and torpedo boats—also increased. Compared to older ships, the new ships that came into service were vastly more powerful, armed with more and better guns and torpedoes, protected by better armor, and used improved engines that produced more speed. However, in the face of the growing Mediterranean navies, the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean Fleet shrank, then stagnated. In an environment of explosive growth, stagnation was the same as shrinking. With Great Britain’s hold weakening, the Mediterranean powers would have to shift into a new alignment, one where Great Britain would be forced into the role of junior partner.

Italy lay in the center of this new alignment. Italy enjoyed a central position in the Mediterranean, with the Italian peninsula and Sicily nearly evenly dividing the Mediterranean Basin into halves: the Eastern Basin and the Western Basin. Its long coastline required a navy capable of defending it. This forced the Italians into significant investments in shipbuilding, steel production, and naval construction over the kingdom’s short life, making the Italians into a regional naval power. Diplomatically, too, the Italians helped stabilize the region. The Italians, along with Germany and Austria-Hungary, were members of the Triple Alliance that offered Italy security to its landward side. By allying with Austria and Germany, the Italians gained protection from an Austrian invasion, if for no other reason than Germany’s desire to keep the Alliance together. Italy also gained protection from France, Germany’s main rival on the continent, since a French attack on Italy was certain to pull Germany in on Italy’s side. However, the Italians played a double game at sea. While they relied on Germany and Austria on land, they relied on Britain for stability at sea. Since, at the founding of the Triple Alliance, neither Austria nor Germany was a major naval power and Britain was enjoying its period of splendid isolation, this position made sense. However, as Britain became more and more entangled with the affairs on the continent, this position became less and less tenable for the Italians. Fortunately for them, however, the growth of the Austrian navy gave the Italians a potential solution to their problem, at the cost of tearing apart the Mediterranean system that had ruled the nineteenth century.

That said, these trends were yet to develop in 1904. In fact, in that year Britain’s lead in the Mediterranean seemed quite secure. Britain’s Mediterranean Fleet was as strong as any in the Sea, and could easily be reinforced by the British Atlantic Fleet in Gibraltar, free for service in either the Mediterranean or Home Waters. While the growth of the German navy was becoming a threat to Britain’s interest, and the rivalry between the two powers was growing, neither the naval race nor the rivalry had reached the fever pitch that it would in coming years. Britain’s lead at sea was still comfortable, and there was still hope for some sort of diplomatic agreement. However, to guard against any German antagonism, the British came to a series of agreements with France. These agreements smoothed points of friction between the two powers, drawing them closer together. While France made progress on the diplomatic front, its power at sea began to waver. A new government, formed by the Radicals, attacked naval spending. New ship construction slowed to a halt. Money slated for construction and improvement was funneled to political cronies. Admirals were fired in an effort to democratize the French navy. Maintenance on older ships suffered, cutting their service life and reducing their availability. The French navy was not the only one suffering from political problems. The Italian navy, once among the strongest in the world, had fallen on hard times. Naval budgets suffered as the Italian economy went south in the 1890s. Even when the money returned, a new problem emerged: a parliamentary investigation into ineffective Italian naval spending uncovered a series of scandals—payoffs to political allies; materials ordered before they could be used, then going to waste and having to be reordered; and delays in construction projects. The worst part of the scandal, however, was the discovery that the Italian armor plant, Terni, had falsified results in its armor plate testing, resulting in more-expensive and less-effective armor plate. The discovery that the Italian navy had essentially been duped by a snake-oil sales pitch damaged that navy’s reputation considerably. The Austrians were the only Mediterranean navy that experienced notable growth. However, that growth caused trouble in Vienna. Hermann von Spaun, the admiral pushing this growth program, was not an effective politician, and his efforts made too many enemies. His moment of triumph, the ordering of a new class of large battleships, cost him his job. Doubtless, a less-aggressive reformer would replace him, to appease the navy’s foes in Vienna.

That, however, did not happen. The Austrian navy had gained the support and patronage of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. This support allowed Count Admiral Rudolf Montecuccoli, von Spaun’s replacement, to pursue efforts designed to continue expanding the Austrian navy. Where von Spaun had made enemies by refusing to play politics, Montecuccoli was willing to do whatever it took—including lying, cheating, and spending money he did not yet have—to secure more ships and men for the Hapsburgs. His efforts, and continued survival, provoked a certain amount of fear in Italian naval circles. This fear allowed the Italian navy to reverse its fortunes after the Terni scandal, and prompted a wave of shipbuilding in Italy. This tension between Italy and Austria occurred shortly after a major French diplomatic effort in Italy. That effort, led by the French foreign minister, Théophile Delcassé, aimed at removing Italy from the Triple Alliance and pulling it into the Franco-Russian fold. This effort made some progress: after renewing the Triple Alliance in 1902, Italy promised the French that it would not join a Franco-German War, and the Italians supported the French over the Germans at Algerçias. However, the crisis that prompted that conference cost Delcassé his position, which led to a decline in French efforts to court Italy. While the tension between Italy and Austria was good for their respective navies, leading to new ships and funding, war was not really in the best interest of either power. The Austrians made conciliatory gestures toward Italy. Between Austria’s efforts to repair poor Austro-Italian relations, and France’s declining interest in Italy’s friendship, the Italians decided to pursue a closer relationship with the Triple Alliance.

By 1911 Italy had sufficiently repaired its relationship with Austria for the Italian government to take advantage of the diplomatic situation to gain one of Italy’s long-cherished goals, a foothold in North Africa. A major focus of Italian diplomacy had been to secure the rights to seize control of Tripolitania, gaining guarantees from the other Great Powers to allow Italy a free hand there.¹ France’s assent was conditional: Italy would only be able to establish a colony in Tripolitania when France established a protectorate over Morocco. In the summer of 1911, in the events preceding the Agadir Crisis, France intervened in Moroccan affairs with the intention of establishing a protectorate over the sultanate of Morocco. At the same time, the Italian press furiously denounced the alleged abuse of Italian subjects in Tripoli, and ran stories about the mineral wealth and lack of Ottoman defenses in the area. In September the Italians seized the moment and declared war on the Ottoman Empire. The Italo-Turkish War would come to redefine the Mediterranean situation. That war, a general success for Italy, made it many enemies, particularly in France. Despite its earlier agreement, France viewed Italy’s movements with alarm, not to mention that some quarters of French politics believed that Tripolitania was rightly French. Italy’s conduct, and French reaction to that conduct, drove a rift between the two powers. France and Italy clashed over arms smuggling to Bedouin rebels from French territory, which led to the seizure of French merchantmen at sea. Italy’s efforts to force an end to the Italo-Turkish War also led to the seizure of islands in the Aegean and the closure of the Dardanelles to trade, angering Britain and Russia. While Italy gained the territory it sought, the course of the Italo-Turkish War left Italy diplomatically isolated.

Figure I.1. Naval Spending, 1904–1914

Figure I.1. Naval Spending, 1904–1914

Sources: Brassey, Brassey’s Naval Annual; Vego, Austro-Hungarian Naval Policy, 1904–1914.

Table I.1. Naval Spending, 1904–1914

Table I.1. Naval Spending, 1904–1914

Sources: Brassey, Brassey’s Naval Annual; Vego, Austro-Hungarian Naval Policy, 1904–1914.

Italy’s diplomatic isolation, hostile relationship with France, and newfound territory to defend forced it to make a decision. The time when Italy could play its diplomatic double game, relying on the Triple Alliance on land and on Britain and France at sea, had ended. Italy’s closer relationship between France and Britain, and worsening relationship with Germany, meant that the Italians would have to eventually fish or cut bait. The Italo-Turkish War changed Italy’s strategic and diplomatic situation enough to force a reevaluation of their earlier strategy. The rise of the Austrian navy gave the Italians the chance to find a new partner on the Mediterranean, one that allowed Italy to rely on one alliance rather than two for its own protection. This change in strategy led Italy to call for the early renewal of the Triple Alliance. In order to make this happen, the Italians were willing to make some concessions, and one of those was a promise to the Germans to try to intercept the French 19th army corps (19e Corps d’Armée, hereafter 19e Corps), as it moved from North Africa back to France. Since the Italians did not believe they could defeat the French on their own, they approached the Austrians with a proposal to operate jointly to seize control of the Mediterranean for the Triple Alliance. Those efforts produced a joint plan for the two navies to sail and fight together to defeat the French—and, if needed, the British. Both the Italians and the Austrians, in the months before World War I, began to take steps to make this planned joint action a reality.

Even before the Italo-Turkish War came to an official end, the British were reevaluating their Mediterranean position. Given the likely outcome of the Italo-Turkish War, members of the British government believed that the Italians would have to move closer to the Triple Alliance. In addition, the North Sea steadily demanded more and more of the Royal Navy’s ships in order to provide a sufficient surplus to defeat a surprise German attack. This meant that the Mediterranean Fleet not only shrank as ships were pulled to reinforce Home Waters, but that all the ships on the station were older. Given that seven years previously dreadnought-pattern battleships had arrived on the naval scene, this meant that the British Mediterranean Fleet was no longer even equal to that of any other Mediterranean Power, so the British had to find some way to solve their particular problem: holding on to the Mediterranean, where their enemies grew more powerful, while defending the British Isles from German attack with sufficient force to absolutely prevent disaster, while not spending any more money. A debate erupted between those who supported abandoning the Mediterranean and those who believed that the British Empire needed to find a way to hold on to its position on the Mediterranean. This led to Britain trying to find the right balance of naval forces in the Mediterranean and the North Sea, scouring the Dominions for support, and entertaining an offer from the French for cooperation between the two powers in the Mediterranean. Ultimately, Britain decided to station battle cruisers instead of dreadnoughts in the Mediterranean, and took up the French offer of Mediterranean support. In return, the British offered to safeguard the French Atlantic coast, though Britain denied France a formal alliance.

Although the French government was eager to cut a deal with the British in an effort to try to pull the British ever closer to an alliance with France, at the same time the French realized that they suffered from a poor Mediterranean position as well. The French needed the Mediterranean in order to transfer the 19e Corps, a body of elite troops in French North Africa, back to metropolitan France. In French mobilization plans, the 19e Corps was essentially a strategic reserve, able to shift as needed to face a variety of threats. However, the changing Mediterranean situation clashed with France’s need to secure both the 19e Corps’ route back to France and Britain’s Mediterranean possessions as they had agree to do. The French navy was aging, with many ships in poor condition or becoming obsolete. At the same time, the Austrians and Italians, as a result of their period of naval competition, had many modern ships, with more on the way. This left France in the awkward position of making promises its navy could not back. This, in turn, led to the French entering a period of accelerated naval construction unmatched in the history of the Third Republic. France began the construction of a modern battle fleet, and aimed to construct enough battleships, scouting cruisers, and destroyers to match not just the Austrians or Italians alone, but rather their entire combined forces. This building spree marked a departure from France’s usual naval policy, which tended to ignore the Mediterranean, and, since the founding of the Third Republic, was rarely aimed at matching any particular powers.

The changes in the Mediterranean equilibrium brought about by British weakness, the rise of the Austrian navy, and the Italo-Turkish War forced the establishment of a changed diplomatic and strategic situation in Europe. Had events not intervened shortly afterward, a full-fledged naval race was in the offing, between Italy and Austria on one side and France on the other. Britain, who had controlled the Sea for the previous century, would have become less and less important, more reliant on France for support, and with limited ability to influence Mediterranean governments. The ships for this naval race were under construction, on order, or planned well into the future, with all three major Mediterranean powers in a more anarchic environment where it was profitable to build more ships, flex their muscles, and eye each other warily once again.

To understand the nature of the shifts in the Mediterranean balance of power before World War I, the issue must be examined in an international context. By providing this international context, this work departs from preexisting scholarship. Most studies of Mediterranean navies and naval policy, such as Theodore Ropp’s The Development of a Modern Navy: French Naval Policy, 1871–1904, John Walser’s France’s Search for a Battle Fleet, Marco Rimanelli’s Italy between Europe and the Mediterranean, Franco Baratelli’s La Marina Militare Italiana Nella Vita Nazionale, 1860–1914, and Laurence Sondhaus’ two-book series, The Hapsburg Empire and the Sea and The Naval Policy of Austria-Hungary, 1867–1918, focus on specific navies within each nation.² This study relies heavily on this scholarship for information about the various internal pressures on the navies in each nation. However, this work also diverges from those works and focuses on how competition between the powers and the shifting international positions in the Mediterranean drove naval growth. Internally focused studies tend to posit naval growth as the result of reform, political jockeying, and personality. However, this work argues that these maneuvers may have allowed for growth, but that without pressure from other powers most navies would not have expanded as rapidly as the Mediterranean navies did before World War I. Austria was the only power expanding without direct pressure from another power, but the Austrians pushed naval expansion because Franz Ferdinand and Rudolf Montecuccoli were engineering a change in Austrian naval strategy. Only one other major work takes international factors into consideration: Paul G. Halpern’s The Mediterranean Naval Situation, 1904–1914.³ However, Halpern does not place the same emphasis on international factors that this work does. Halpern’s study focuses mostly on internal factors with reference to the major international naval agreements made in this era, the Anglo-French and Austro-Italian agreements. Halpern’s work also does not place any emphasis on the growth of the Austrian navy as a factor in this era, nor does it argue that the Italo-Turkish War was of any real importance. This work, however, will argue that both these factors were paramount in driving the growth of Mediterranean navies before World War I.

This study takes many cues from the literature that has developed on the other major pre–World War I naval race, the race between the British and Germans. Numerous works have been written on this race, and the larger rivalry between the two powers, including the first volume of Arthur Marder’s The Anatomy of British Sea Power, Paul Kennedy’s Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, large parts of his Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery, and Robert Massie’s Dreadnought.⁴ Obviously, while these works concern themselves with the North Sea and not the Mediterranean, work on the Anglo-German race heavily influenced this study. First, it was this naval race and the larger rivalry it helped create that loosened Britain’s grip on the Mediterranean. With Britain’s hold steadily weakening in the Mediterranean, the navies in the region could step into the void left behind. Methodologically, this study has a great deal in common with the best works in this body of literature—in particular, with their international approach. However, the Mediterranean naval situation was much different from the situation in the North Sea. In the North Sea, only Britain and Germany were competing with each other; while there was some hope on the German side of an alliance, it was never in the cards from the British end. However, the Mediterranean was a much more complex problem. With three Great Powers—France, Austria-Hungary, and Italy—each building larger navies but not able to force the others to accept their dominance outright, diplomacy became even more important. In the North Sea, diplomacy was limited to halfhearted arms control meetings and efforts to prevent various international issues from spiraling out of control. In the Mediterranean, with three powers pursuing their own agendas through naval power, the situation could only be more complex, with more variables, problems, and other issues for each power to explore and consider. Geographically, the Mediterranean was much less isolated than the North Sea. Not only were there three Great Powers with coastlines on the Mediterranean, there were numerous minor powers, colonial opportunities, and strategically important islands, which gave the various powers on the Mediterranean even more problems to face. Furthermore, these works tend to be personality driven, emphasizing the role of the people involved over the logic of the situation. This study is less concerned with the personalities involved, and instead focuses on how those with the responsibility found their personal desires constrained by the logic of the situation.

As a result of the complex nature of the Mediterranean situation, smaller navies mattered. Small, of course, is a relative matter, since the pre–World War I navies of the major Mediterranean powers are all much larger than their modern fleets, but none of the three—France, Italy, and Austria—were normally in the top three naval powers in the first decade and a half of the twentieth century. Naval historians, particularly out of the North Sea or Mahanian tradition, tend to dismiss smaller navies as unimportant, since they cannot stand against the massed squadrons of the most powerful naval powers. In a theoretical, purely Mahanian struggle for the control of the sea, the stronger power would overcome the weaker power. Furthermore, major naval powers often have worldwide naval commitments, making them more interesting from the purely Mahanian standpoint. However, smaller navies can and do matter. First, this is not a work about worldwide sea power, but about the control of a specific, very important, waterway. However, as Mahan himself pointed out, the Mediterranean, geographically speaking, has its own quirks and terrain, just like any other specific waterway. On the Mediterranean, strings of bases mattered less than they would in the Atlantic or Pacific, since all the major Mediterranean powers save for Britain had coastlines on the Sea. Additionally, because of the alliance structure in Europe before World War I, the possibility for coalition warfare existed, and became a staple of Mediterranean naval thinking. These conditions meant that smaller navies had the ability to flex their muscles in the pre–World War I Mediterranean, and that their potential and actual accomplishments in their efforts should not be ignored simply because they lacked the tonnage of the British, German, and American navies.

While this study does not concern itself exclusively with the history of Franco-Italian relations, it does try to provide a more nuanced view of the traditional picture of Franco-Italian relations before World War I. That picture, perhaps best summarized in Richard Bosworth’s Italy and the Approach of the First World War and Mary Allen’s The Relations between France and Italy, 1885–1915, draws a connection between the improvement in Franco-Italian relations brought about by Delcassé from 1900 to 1902 and Italy’s decisions for neutrality in 1914 and for war on the side of the Entente Cordiale (hereafter the Entente) in 1915.⁵ This improvement culminated in the exchange of notes in which France agreed to support Italy’s African ambitions and Italy agreed not to attack France in the Franco-German War, and Italy’s decision to remain neutral in 1914. These works generally assume that the good feelings generated between the two powers at this time carried through for the next decade. M. B. Hayne’s The French Foreign Office and the Origins of the First World War, 1898–1914, which argues that the goodwill other works rely on to explain Italy’s position in 1914 had been dissipated by French indolence and problems with the Foreign Office’s organization, presents a more nuanced view of this relationship.⁶ However, these works take the general position that the Italo-Turkish War, and the friction that it generated between Italy and France, was ultimately of no importance in relations between the two powers. This study takes the