Unleash Fritz, the dog who lost a war.

History fascinates me.

Louis de Bernieres makes the case that modern Turkey would not exist if King Alexander of Greece had a better behaved dog.

In 1920, Turkey, as such, didn't exist. It was just one region of the collapsed Ottoman Empire; the central region, but still a collection of various nationalities without any real national identity. They had sided with Germany during the war and were now occupied by the British, French and Italian victors of WWI.

Enter Greece, who had always claimed most of Turkey as part of the old greater Greek empire of Byzantium. Greece had been neutral in the war, but under King Constantine had leaned heavily toward Germany and had violated their neutrality in a number of ways. Under allied pressure late in the war, the Greeks deposed Constantine and put his grandson Alexander in place - a pro-British monarch. This made everybody happy, and the allies supplied the Greeks with arms and allowed them to send in their army and occupy most of Turkey while the allies themselves withdrew to concentrate on the rest of the defunct Ottoman empire - Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, etc. The Greeks were still fighting various rag-tag Ottoman forces, but as long as the Brits and French supplied the impoverished Greek army, it was a done deal.
Enter the new Greek King Alexander's dog Fritz and some Barbary Apes. King Alexander liked to zoom around the country vineyards on a motorcycle with Fritz running alongside. One day they zoomed past a resident who had a pair of Barbary Apes chained in the yard. One of the apes was named Moritz and Moritz wasn't the kind of ape who would take any shit from a German Shepherd. Fritz began fighting Moritz and the King intervened to separate the animals and got about 4 inches of ape teeth imbedded in his calf for his troubles. Within two weeks Alexander was dead from a massive systemic infection and the Greeks put Constantine back on the throne.
With Constantine back on the throne, the allies immediately withdrew all military support from the Greeks. Kemal Attaturk rallied the Turks (they now began calling themselves Turks) and with various machinations armed the Turkish forces and whipped the shit out of the Greeks. Attaturk purged all the corrupt sycophants of the old Ottoman government and laid the foundation for a modern democratic state.

Turkey was born.

 

and Moritz was the author of another "Sarajevo" by killing a monarch.

 

And Constantine confounded the situation by sacking many war veteran officers and purging all the Venizelist supporters from the army.

 

Moritz no doubt save the world a lot of trouble. If Greece had won, it would have set off generations of internecine warfare, and it would have put an end to the aspirations of the one man (Ataturk) who wanted Turkey to emulate the west with a secular democracy.