Armies of the Italian-Turkish War: Conquest of Libya, 1911-1912

Italy was a young country, ambitious for colonies, but had been defeated in Ethiopia in the 1890s. Giovanni Giolitti was keen to overwrite the memory of that failure, and to gain a strategic grip over the central Mediterranean by seizing Libya.

The Italian expeditionary force that landed in October 1911 easily defeated the Ottoman division based in the coastal cities, incurring few losses. However, the Libyan inland tribes reacted furiously to the Italian conquest, and their insurgency cost...