Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/315

 for the division of the Ottoman Empire. During the spring of 1915, as has been indicated,[23] Russia had been promised Constantinople, and Italy had been assigned a share of the spoils equal to that of Great Britain, France, or Russia. To give full effect to these understandings, further negotiations were conducted during the autumn of 1915 and the spring of 1916, looking toward a more specific delimitation of interests.

Accordingly, on April 26, 1916—the first anniversary of the Treaty of London with Italy—France and Russia signed the secret Sazonov-Paléologue Treaty concerning their respective territorial rights in Asiatic Turkey. Russia was awarded full sovereignty over the vilayets of Trebizond, Erzerum, Bitlis, and Van—a vast area of 60,000 square miles (about one and one-fifth times the size of the State of New York), containing valuable mineral and petroleum resources. This handsome prize put Russia well on the road to Constantinople and in a fair way to turn the Black Sea into a Russian lake. And at the moment the treaty was signed the armies of the Grand Duke Nicholas were actually overrunning the territory which Russia had staked out for herself! For her part, France was to receive adequate compensations in the region to the south and southwest of the Russian acquisitions, the actual delimitation of boundaries and other details to be the result of direct negotiation with Great Britain.[24]

Thus came into existence the famous Sykes-Picot Treaty of May 9, 1916, defining British and French political and economic interests in the hoped-for dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. The Syrian coast from Tyre to Alexandretta, the province of Cilicia, and southern Armenia (from Sivas on the north and west to Diarbekr on the south and east) were allocated to France in full sovereignty. In addition, a French "zone of in