The First World War by Keegan John

Author:Keegan, John [Keegan, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9781407064123
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2011-08-30T23:00:00+00:00

GALLIPOLI

The Dardanelles, which separates Europe from Asia, is a passage thirty miles long, at its narrowest less than a mile wide, leading from the Mediterranean into the landlocked Sea of Marmara. On its north-east coast Istanbul, or Constantinople (formerly the capital of Byzantium, in 1915 that of the Ottoman empire) guards the entrance to the Bosphorus, a waterway narrower than the Dardanelles, which gives on to the Black Sea. The European shore of the Dardanelles, Sea of Marmara and Bosphorus was, in 1915, a narrow strip of Turkish territory. From the Asiatic shore, the expanses of the Ottoman Empire stretched north, east and south to the Caucasus, the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. The strategic location of the Dardanelles had brought armies, and navies, to it scores of times in history. At Adrianople, in its hinterland, fifteen recorded battles had been fought; at the first, in AD 378, the Emperor Valens was killed by the Goths, a disaster that caused the collapse of Rome’s empire in the west; at the most recent, in 1913, the Turks had repelled a Bulgarian attempt on Istanbul itself.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.