Istanbul, the imperial capital of the Ottoman Turkish Empire, is still known by its former name "Constantinople" by European countries. Yihuai has been the thousand-year-old imperial capital of the Byzantine Empire, which has fallen for more than five centuries.

On the balcony of the third floor of the Embassy of the Imperial Chinese Empire in the Ottoman Empire, on the edge of the Bosphorus Strait and on the coast of Europe, Lieutenant General Zhou Shuren, 36, reclined comfortably on an Islamic-style chaise longue with a thick stack of documents in his hand, an embroidered parasol on his head, a Bavarian pipe in his mouth, a cup of pale cyan mint tea on the small coffee table next to him, and a hardcover copy of "The History of Chinese Novels" on his knees. Actually, what he really wants to see is this thing", "this is his main business" and other suspicions.

It seems that the thick eyebrows and beard of the word "one" in Lishu, a pair of slender eyes with single eyelids and a pair of big ears, the head that has taken off the military hat, the forehead that is straight as a wall, and the hair stands up like a steel brush.

“…… It is known as the best of Kuangfu constitutionalism, but in the end, it has created a military ** form of government, which is not what is desired, the ideal is defeated by reality, and the system is defeated by the people's hearts, which is nothing more than the case at home and abroad. Alas...... And how? ”

After muttering to himself without pressure, Zhou Shuren pinched the exquisite openwork glass teacup on the coffee table with one hand - the bright green mint leaves were still swirling in the cup, took two sips, cooled and refreshed, squinted comfortably, put down the teacup, and continued to flip through the documents on his lap.

In 1907, the Ottoman Empire's ** joint organization "Unity and Progress Council", which was funded by Jewish bankers and Freemasons, first launched a mutiny in Macedonia and waved the banner of "restoring the 1876 constitution". Hamid II, who had personally killed the constitutionalism movement thirty years earlier, was forced to declare the Imperial Constitution in force again.

However, the "Unification and Progress Committee" was originally an organization formed by a haphazard patchwork of many political opponents, and although the Europeans generally called all the Ottoman ** organizations advocating the idea of social reform as the "Young Turks", in fact there was no such organized "party" -- just as the "** party" before and after China's Xinhai ** was collectively referred to as the "** party", the "Unity and Progress Committee" was mainly composed of the "Ottoman Freedom Association" and "Ottoman Freedom Association" dominated by young Zhuang officers who had received Western modernization education. Movement for the Fatherland and Freedom", as well as the "Ottoman League", which was dominated by students and politicians in exile. Even before the coup d'état, the group had split into two factions: nationalist, nationalistic, liberal and liberal, with the nationalist faction itself including "Ottomanization" without regard for ethnicity, "Islamization" of Muslim peoples, and "Turkicization" with Turkish national control. The two Grand Viqi, who were initially in power after the coup d'état (equivalent to prime minister or prime minister), belonged to the liberal faction, but they were soon forced to resign due to a series of attacks by the nationalists. Himir became the Grand Vizi.

After the coup d'état, Archduke Ferdinand of Bulgaria took the opportunity to revoke his vassal status to the Ottoman Empire and establish himself as Tsar, while Austria-Hungary took the opportunity to formally annex Bosnia and Herzegovina, which had still nominally worshipped the Ottoman Empire as its suzerain. This in turn led to internal strife among the "Young Turks" and discontent among the nationalists. The Albanian soldiers of the First Army launched a riot*, they stormed the parliament building together with the religious students of the seminary, killed the guards, demanded the establishment of an Islamic theocracy by relying on the Sultan as the caliphate of the Islamic religious leader, and immediately received the support of Hamid II, who agreed to all the demands of the rioters, pardoned the rioters, and removed the Grand Viqi and the ministers, but what he did not expect was that the "Young Turks" would soon launch a counterattack: the formation of the "Third Army" stationed in Macedonia"Rescue**" marched into the capital, easily quelled the violence in two days*, and then deposed Hamid II, who had not been happy for a few days, in the name of parliament, and was succeeded by his 65-year-old half-brother, who was Mohammed V.

The new sultan was mediocre and weak, at the mercy of the "Young Turks", and the nationalist officers of the "National Salvation Service" took de facto control of the "Unity and Progress Council" and state power, replaced all court officials and government officials, and implemented a set of centralized policies that were worse than those of Hamid II. They imposed a policy of Turkization on the Muslim subjects of the non-Turkic nationalities of the empire, such as Arabs, Albanians, and Kurds, and at the same time abolished all the original autonomy rights of Christian subjects, which aroused growing dissatisfaction among all nationalities and strata.

In July 1912, due to repeated defeats in the Italian-Turkish War, the ruling nationalist cabinet was forced to resign en masse under the threat of mutiny, and the liberal cabinet came to power, but the ensuing First Balkan War led to the complete collapse of the Ottoman Empire: in order to compete with Italy for the fruits of victory, Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Montenegro formed a Balkan coalition and suddenly launched an attack from the Balkan front, with 700,000 allied troops, and was suing for peace with Italy (and finally ceded Libya to Italy, Rhodes and the Dodecanese Islands in the southeastern Aegean Sea) were only able to commit 325,000 men, and only 20 days after the outbreak of the war, almost all of the Ottoman territories in the Balkans fell.

In the ensuing peace talks, when the liberal cabinet was finally forced to accept the Balkan Alliance's demand for land cession, the nationalist officers led by Enver staged a coup d'état in the capital, they stormed the cabinet room, shot and killed the Minister of War Nazim, forced the liberal Grand Vitsikamil to sign a letter of resignation, and instructed Sultan Mohammed V to appoint General Shevkai, a staunch supporter of the Nationalists, as the Grand Viqi, and the Nationalists regained power and resumed the war, but failed to reverse the decline. In the end, he had to accept the original request for land cession, and lost most of the territory of the Balkan Peninsula and almost all the islands in the Aegean Sea.

Defeat to European powers such as Russia, France, Austria, and Italy is just a matter of reading the book ~ come to wWw}. The humiliating humiliation of losing to the former vassal and vassal nations was unbearable for the Ottoman nationalists, and shortly after the war, General Shevkai was shot dead in his car on his way to the Grand Viqi's residence. Jemar, the backbone of the national faction and the military governor of the capital, immediately used this incident as a pretext to arrest and exile the opposition, especially the liberal "New Party" figures, and in fact established the military government of three military oligarchs: War Minister Enver, Home Minister Talat and Navy Minister Jemar.

Only 4 weeks after the end of the First Balkan War, Bulgaria in the original Balkan coalition army was dissatisfied with the results of the spoils, and brazenly launched an attack on the Serbian and Greek armies occupying Macedonia, but was strongly counterattacked by the Serbian-Greek coalition army that had been prepared in advance, and its main force of the second army of 80,000 people was defeated by the Greek king Constantine himself in the battle of Kirkis with six divisions of 72,000 people. The Ottoman army under Enver's command crossed the armistice line and, with little resistance, recaptured Adrianople, considered the second capital of the empire, and finally recaptured a small piece of European territory.

This was the tragic course of the "Young Turks**" of the Ottoman Empire, which was contemptuously called the "sick man of Europe" before the outbreak of the European War.

With the rise of the nationalist wing of the Young Turks, German influence on the Ottoman Empire reached a new level.

Long before the **, the liberals in the "Young Turks" were known for their pro-British sentiments, after all, in the frenzy of partition of the Ottoman Empire set off by Russia and Austria-Hungary after the Napoleonic Wars, thanks to the support of British foreign policy and the Royal Navy, the Ottoman Empire was saved from national extinction many times - although at the same time it also served as a "protective wall" for the strategic passage between the British mainland and India, and many liberals with a background of studying abroad were inevitably full of longing for British constitutional democracy.

On the other hand, the nationalist young officers of the "Young Turks" admired Germany: the majesty and strict discipline of the Prussian army, and the ideology of **ism and obedience embodied in the constitution of the Second German Reich. and the highly developed industrial and technological ...... It is enough to deeply intoxicate many young officers who disdain tedious thinking, thirst for absolute strength, and are accustomed to acting on military orders regardless of the occasion.

The influence of the emerging Second German Empire on the ancient Ottoman Empire began in the 1870s, when German bankers invested in the construction of the "Eastern Railway" from Constantinople to Filipolis (present-day Plovdiv, Bulgaria) and then to Berlin via Vienna. In the 1890s, the German bank group began to extend the railway further eastward, attempting to build it all the way to Basra on the Persian Gulf, which was known as the 2B (Berlin-Baghdad) railway that the British regarded as a thorn in their side. In addition, the 100 narrow-gauge Krupp locomotives and 1,100 wagons used on the Hejaz Railway (Damascus to Mecca), built by Muslims from all over the world, were built by the Ottoman Empire with donations from Muslims from all over the world.

On the military front, as early as the top-down "Tanzimat" reform campaign launched by Sultan Mahmut II (1826-1839), a number of military advisers were recruited from the then small power of the Kingdom of Prussia. He helped train the new army, including a man who would become famous in Helmut. Feng. Major Moltke.

By 1882, although the "Tanzimat" movement had died more than a decade earlier due to internal and external pressures, and the dramatic constitutional movement had come to an end four years earlier, the politically ultra-conservative Sultan Hamid II could not remain indifferent to the backwardness of the imperial affairs. A military advisory group headed by General Keller, with the help of the advisory group and Krupp experts, ordered a large number of Krupp light and heavy artillery guns, placed them in concrete batteries on both sides of the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus, and strengthened a series of fortresses on the Balkan Peninsula with modern means.

In the "Thirty Days War" between the Ottoman Empire and Greece for the island of Crete in 1897, the new Turkish army trained by the German Advisory Group used Krupp cannons to inflict heavy losses on the Greek army, and finally forced Greece to cede land and pay reparations under the intervention of foreign powers. After this war, the connection between the Ottoman Empire and the German Empire became closer, and the following year, Kaiser Wilhelm II's visit to the Middle East announced the advent of the honeymoon era between the two countries, in addition to Constantinople, Wilhelm II also visited Damascus and Jerusalem, becoming the first Christian monarch to enter the Holy City of the Nativity since the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II 650 years ago, and received more than 100 acres of land at the foot of Mount Sinai and said to be the former residence of the Virgin Mary given by Hamid II. From then on, the influence of the German advisers in the Ottoman Empire continued to grow, until it eventually influenced the government's war decisions.

However, it was not only the European powers who were interested in the Ottoman Empire, as early as 1907, when the emissary sent by the legendary "newly awakened lion" in the far east, expressed an unusual affection for the "Young Turks", and even secretly gave hundreds of thousands of francs to the "Unification and Progress Committee" when it was preparing for its establishment in Paris. What impressed the young officers of the "Young Turk Party" even more impressively was that this ancient eastern country, which claimed to have a history of 5,000 years of civilization and was ranked with the Ottoman Empire 20 or 30 years ago as the "sick man of Asia and Europe," three years ago beat the Russian Empire, which had been constantly attacking and encroaching on the Ottoman Empire since the 18th century and had been invincible for nearly half a century, and the Romanov Dynasty, which claimed to have inherited the orthodoxy of the Byzantine thousand-year-old Empire, was almost devoured by the anger caused by the defeat.

Unlike the insatiable, inch-grabbing European powers. Soon after Hamid II was forced to restore the constitution, the Chinese envoys did not say a word about the bonus, but they were very enthusiastic to invite the leaders who had just seized power to "come to us if they have time", and Jemar, who later became one of the "three oligarchs" of the military government and served as the Minister of the Navy, was driven by curiosity, and the following year with the "rescue" to suppress the capital riots, he was invited to lead a delegation to find out.

Jemal did not regret it, in that strange and magical country, he and his companions opened their eyes, especially the battleship "Beiyue", which was still in trial voyage at that time, which made Jemar, who had a deep naval complex, admire: "Even the British may not be able to build such a good battleship."

After returning home, Jemal moved up and down, set off a "naval fever", and finally two years later through donations and loans, raised enough funds to order a dreadnought, at that time participated in the bidding of the British, German, and Chinese four shipyards, at the beginning, the "Beiyue" class improved "Nanyue" class as the model of China's Dalian shipyard 305 mm main gun carrier program is not prominent, who knows that in the second round of bidding, the Chinese side suddenly came up with a 350 mm main gun carrier program based on the "Yangbo" class under its own construction, And with the Chinese bank group providing low-interest loans to help the Ottoman Empire order the No. 2 ship as an additional condition, the Anglo-German shipyard holding the early dreadnought ships equipped with 305 mm or even 280 mm guns as a treasure was confused, and the Ottoman side immediately made a decision: "Just use you Chinese." ”

In 1911, although it coincided with the outbreak of the Italian-Turkish War, the Chinese side still started construction of the first dreadnought ship of the Ottoman Navy, "Resadih", which has a standard displacement of 27,000 tons, a maximum speed of 23 knots, and is equipped with 8 350 mm 45 times diameter (4 twin turrets are arranged in the full center line) main guns and 20 150 mm gun frame secondary guns, the maximum thickness of the main armor belt is 254 mm, the horizontal armor deck is 100 mm thick, the frontal armor of the turret is 305 mm, and the armor of the command tower is 350 mm. In addition to the strong secondary gun firepower, the main gun firepower is comparable, and ...... In addition to the extravagant interiors (even at the expense of opening up large watertight areas for the Sultan's royal quarters, hammams, and ballrooms for "balls"), the speed, protection, and fire control systems were far inferior to those of the Yangbo-class counterparts of China and its East Asian allies.

Even so, the "Resadikh", which arrived in Turkey in February 1914, became the most powerful capital ship of the countries bordering the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, 4 203mm 50x II main guns and 12 152mm 45x secondary guns.

The 13,500-ton hull of the 13,500-ton battleship "Salamis" has just been completed, equipped with three American-made twin 356-mm guns and a maximum speed of 21 knots. Due to the fact that the smaller hull was equipped with super-dreadnought-sized heavy guns, the freeboard was low and the seaworthiness was poor, and it could only be used in the Aegean Sea. Armor protection was also weak: the narrow main armor belt was up to 250 mm thick, the turret front was 250 mm thick, the command tower was 300 mm, and there was no horizontal armor deck.

In addition, in order to counter the "Resadikh", Greece urgently ordered two second-hand former dreadnoughts built in 1904 "Kirkis" class are also on the voyage, and their original bodies are the "Mississippi" class abandoned by the US Navy: the standard displacement of 13,000 tons of hull is mainly equipped with 2 twin 305 mm 45 times the diameter MK5 main gun, 4 twin 203 mm 45 times the diameter MK6 secondary main gun and 8 single-barreled 178 mm 45 times the diameter MK2 secondary gun, with a speed of 17 knots, the freeboard is lower than the "Salamis" and is completely unsuitable for operations in the open sea.

Half a year later, when the sister ship of the Resadikh, the Sultan Osman I, sailed into the Bosphorus, Constantinople held the greatest celebration since the opening of the Hejaz Railway thirty years ago, and the whole country rejoiced, followed by a huge "Navy Week" parade in the Golden Horn, where the former Sultan Mehmed II defeated the Byzantine fleet, in the presence of all the warships of the Ottoman Navy, including the oldest paddle steamer. Also invited to participate in the parade were two cutting-edge warships led by German Rear Admiral Sorochin: the battle cruiser "Goeben" and the light cruiser "Breslau......