Mark Sykes

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Sir Mark Sykes, 6th Baronet
Sledmere House, home of the Sykes family in the East Riding of Yorkshire

Sir Tatton Benvenuto Mark Sykes, 6th Baronet (March 16, 1879 , † February 16, 1919 in Paris ) was a British writer, colonel , conservative politician and diplomat . His name is primarily associated with the Sykes-Picot Agreement . This secret agreement, which was concluded between the United Kingdom and France during the First World War , regulated the spheres of influence of these two states and Russia in the crumbling Ottoman Empire , namely in the areas of the Middle East . He died in 1919 of the consequences of the Spanish flu .

youth

Mark's father, Sir Tatton Sykes, 5th Baronet , the owner of the Sledmere House family estate in Yorkshire , which included 120 square miles of land, married his secretary Christina Anne Jessica Cavendish-Bentinck at the age of 48. Several sources assume that the marriage only came about through the energetic efforts of Christina's mother and was never very happy. Tatton Sykes had to pay for his wife's enormous debts until he ran an ad in the newspapers that he would not pay any more bills for his wife. The divorce process that followed caused a sensation in society at the time.

Mark Sykes was the couple's only child. He shuttled between his mother, who had moved to London, and his father's estate in Yorkshire. After his mother converted from the Anglican to the Catholic Church, Mark was also baptized Catholic at the age of three and remained a Catholic all his life. Like his mother, Mark Sykes also developed a great imagination and writing talent, but due to a lack of self-discipline, he was not always able to translate his talents into appropriate school performance. In the winter months he usually accompanied his father on his travels to the regions of the Middle East, Egypt and India. He also visited the Caribbean, Mexico, the United States, and Canada.

The books were the result of his travels to the Orient

  • Through Five Turkish Provinces , which he published in 1900 at the age of 21,
  • Dar-Ul-Islam , 1904, and
  • The Caliphs' Last Heritage: A Short History of the Turkish Empire .

Then there were the satirical works

  • D'Ordel's Pantechnicon , 1904, illustrated by Edmund Sandars, a parody of the newspapers of his time and
  • D'Ordel's Tactics and Military Training , a parody of the Infantry Drill Book , published in 1896, also illustrated by Sanders.

Political and military career

In 1897 Mark Sykes had joined the 3rd Battalion of the Yorkshire Green Howards Infantry Regiment . After completing his training, however, he did not stay on his father's property. He took part in the Second Boer War in South Africa, where he served under Lord Kitchener of Khartoum .

After the end of the Boer War, he returned to his travels in the Middle East.

From 1904 to 1905 Sykes was Parliamentary Secretary to the Chief Secretary George Wyndham in Ireland . He then became an honorary attaché at the British Embassy in Istanbul , the capital of the Ottoman Empire.

In 1911 Sykes was elected to the House of Commons for the Conservative Party in the Hull Central constituency. Previously, had run twice in another constituency, but was narrowly beaten. After his father's death in 1913, he inherited his possessions and the title of 6th Baronet , of Sledmere in the County of York.

In parliament he worked closely with Lord Hugh Cecil and became acquainted with Frederick E. Smith , who later became Lord Birkenhead, and with the writer and Catholic MP Hilaire Belloc .

During the First World War , Sykes served in the War Office on the Bunsen Committee, which advised the British government on matters relating to the Middle East . On his initiative, an “Arab Bureau” of the Foreign Office was founded in Cairo at the beginning of 1916 to coordinate intelligence and propaganda in the Arab world and to play a key role in sparking the Arab revolt . Before that, Sykes had negotiated the Sykes-Picot Agreement with his French counterpart François Georges-Picot , a secret agreement on the division of the territories to be conquered of the Ottoman Empire.

Sykes was friends with Aubrey Herbert , who was also very influential in matters of the Middle East. He made the acquaintance of Gertrude Bell , the pro-Arab advisor to the British Foreign Office, who also stayed in the Middle East as an archaeologist and who later played a key role in the establishment of the new state of Iraq in Baghdad. He was interested in the fate of the Armenians, who suffered under the pressure of the Ottoman Empire and about whom he had written in his book Through Five Turkish Provinces :

"I feel such an intense prejudice against Armenians that I am certain that anything I might say would only be biased and therefore not worth reading; and I think anyone who has had dealings of any kind with this abominable race would probably be in the same position. The Armenian inspires one with feelings of contempt and hatred which the most unprejudiced would find it hard to crush. His cowardice, his senseless untruthfulness, the depth of his intrigue, even in the most trivial matters, his habit of hoarding, his lack of one manly virtue, his helplessness in danger, his natural and instinctive treachery, together form so vile a character that pity is stifled and judgment unbalanced. I cannot believe, as some urge, that his despicable personality has been produced merely by Turkish tyranny. There are other nations who have been tyrannized; the Bulgarians, the Druses, and the Maronites. But not one of them shows a tithe of the abominable qualities which mark off Armenians from the rest of mankind. "

- Mark Sykes, Through Five Turkish Provinces (London, 1900), p. 80.

He was also committed to the then emerging claims of the Jews to an area in Palestine.

Sykes died of the Spanish flu at the age of 39 in his Paris hotel room, where he was staying for the 1919 Paris Peace Conference . He was buried in the Anglican cemetery at Sledmere. In 2008, with the consent of his descendants, his body was exhumed by British scientists to extract traces of the virus.

He had six children from his marriage to Edith Violet Gorst in 1903.

literature

  • Janet Wallach: Desert Queen . Anchor Books, New York 1999.
  • Karl E. Meyer, Shareen Blair Brysac: Kingmakers. The Invention of the Modern Middle East . WW Norton, New York 2008.
  • David Fromkin : A Peace To End All Peace . Avon Books, New York 1990.
  • Benny Morris: Righteous Victims . Vintage Books, New York 2001.
  • Jonathan Cape: Mark Sykes. Portrait of an amateur . Cape, London 1975.
  • Christopher Simon Sykes: The Big House. The Story of a Country House and Its Family . Harper Perennial, London 2005.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ bbc.co.uk Quote: "Sir Mark Sykes, landowner, politician and diplomat died in France in 1919 of the Spanish Flu, which killed 50 million people worldwide."
  2. ^ David Fromkin: A Peace to End All Peace New York 1989, First Owl Book Edition 2001, p. 146
  3. ↑ Body exhumed in fight against flu on BBC Online September 16, 2008, accessed June 3, 2012.
predecessor Office successor
Tatton Sykes Baronet (of Sledmere)
1913-1919 		Richard Sykes
personal data
SURNAME Sykes, Mark
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Sykes, Sir Tatton Benvenuto Mark, 6th Baronet
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British diplomat (Sykes-Picot Agreement) and politician, Member of the House of Commons
DATE OF BIRTH March 16, 1879
DATE OF DEATH February 16, 1919
Place of death Paris