1913 Ottoman coup d'état
coup d'état in the Ottoman Empire
The 1913 Ottoman coup d'état (23 January 1913), also known as the Raid on the Sublime Porte (Turkish: Bâb-ı Âlî Baskını), was a coup d'état carried out in the Ottoman Empire by a number of Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) members led by Ismail Enver Bey and Mehmed Talât Bey, in which the group made a surprise raid on the central Ottoman government buildings, the Sublime Porte (Turkish: Bâb-ı Âlî).
The coup occurred in the context of toxic partisanship in the Ottoman Empire between the CUP and the Freedom and Accord Party, including a fraudulent April 1912 general election benefiting the CUP and a coup against them in July. After receiving the permission of Sultan Mehmed V to form a new government in October 1912, Kâmil Pasha engaged in diplomatic talks with Bulgaria after the unsuccessful First Balkan War. With the looming Bulgarian demand for the cession of the former Ottoman capital city of Adrianople (today, and in Turkish at the time, known as Edirne) and the outrage among the Turkish populace and CUP leadership, the CUP carried out their coup on January 23, 1913. The Minister of War, Nazım Pasha, was killed and the Grand Vizier, Kâmil Pasha, was forced to resign. The government was then led by the triumvirate known as the "Three Pashas": Enver, Talât, and Cemal Pasha.
After the coup, opposition parties were subject to heavy repression. The new government led by Mahmud Şevket Pasha with Unionist support withdrew the Ottoman Empire from the ongoing London Peace Conference and resumed the war against the Balkan states to recover Edirne and the rest of Rumelia, but to no avail. After his assassination in June, the CUP would take full control of the empire, and opposition leaders would be arrested or exiled to Europe. Ottoman victory in the Second Balkan War and the recovery of Edirne in the face of pressure by the Entente powers moved the CUP closer to Germany ahead of World War I.
Immediate pretext
While the inner circle of the CUP may already have decided earlier to stage a coup to return to power, the proximate occasion was the CUP's fear that the government would concede to a demand by the Great Powers that the town of Adrianople (a former Ottoman capital city) be handed over to Bulgaria after the disastrous results of the First Balkan War for the Ottoman Empire.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “1913 Ottoman coup d'état” as coup d'état in the Ottoman Empire. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as coup d'état in the Ottoman Empire. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4559693. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1913 and 1912.
Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
- Event chronology
- Institutional context
- Locating named record creators
Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “1913 Ottoman coup d'état”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow 1913 Ottoman coup d'état primary sources, 1913 Ottoman coup d'état archive and Ottoman research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “1913 Ottoman coup d'état”?
- Who created the surviving record, and for what administrative purpose?
- Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “1913 Ottoman coup d'état” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.