ENVER PASHA (1881-192 2 ), leader of the Young Turks, was born at Apana, on the Black Sea coast, where his father was a bridge keeper and his mother followed the despised profession of laying out the dead. His father was Turkish, his mother Albanian and he had a Circassian grandmother. He entered the Turkish Army as a subaltern, and was sent to Salonika, where he came into touch with the leaders of the Young Turk movement. In 1908 as aide-de-camp of General Hussein Hilmi, he, with Niazi Bey, raised the flag of revolution in Macedonia, originally with the object of restoring the constitution of 1876, which had been disregarded by Abdul Hamid, but also to save himself from a threatened arrest. Abdul Hamid professed to yield, and Enver entered Constantinople as a feted hero. He then went to Berlin as major and military attache, and there pursued his military studies, 1909-11. His stay was only once interrupted, when, in the year 1909, he hastened to Salonika, and with Mahmud Shevket undertook a brief and victorious campaign against the reaction aries.
After the deposition of Abdul Hamid, Enver returned to Berlin. He took command at Benghazi in the Italo-Turkish War and wrote a book called Tripoli (German version, 1918) dealing with this period. The Peace of Lausanne brought his work in Africa to an end, and he returned to Constantinople to find Turkey in the midst of the Balkan war. During the December armistice Enver, then a lieutenant-colonel, was made chief-of staff of the X Army Corps, of which he soon was virtually in command. His attempt at a landing at Sharkoi (in the east of the Gallipoli peninsula), on Feb. 8, 1913, miscarried. During the peace negotiations, when Kiamil, as the Grand Vizier, took the course of deferring to the wishes of the British, Enver with his friends arrived in front of the Sublime Porte, shot the War Minister, Nazim Pasha, turned out Kiamil, forced himself upon the Sultan, and in collusion with the Young Turk Committee filled all the offices with Young Turks. The new Vizier, Mahmud Shevket, was assassinated in June 1913, and this further enraged the Com mittee against the Old Turks and the Union Liberale. The body of the state was purged of all elements which would not blindly carry out the policy of the Committee. More than 1,200 officers, among them 153 generals and colonels, were dismissed by Enver in one day. In July 1913 he made a triumphal entry into Adrian ople, which had already been evacuated by the Bulgarians. On Jan. 3, 1914, he promoted himself Minister of War.
When the World War broke out, Enver began to cherish strategical ambitions. In the winter of 1914-15 he led an entire Turkish Army in the disastrous offensive in the snow-covered mountains on the Russo-Turkish border. With Liman von Sanders, the chief of the German military mission in Constan tinople, his relations were strained, and the situation was not improved by certain Germans who flattered Enver and intrigued against Liman von Sanders. He became a megalomaniac to whom no one offered advice, and though he had no share in the Dardanelles defence, he took all the credit for it. In internal politics he became, by degrees, the absolute ruler of the country, but when the Turkish collapse came he fled by way of Odessa to Germany. In 1919 he was condemned to death at Constantinople in contumaciam. In the same year, after a brief exile among friends in Germany, he fled to Russia. There at first he helped Denikin to maintain the independence of the Caucasus, but when Denikin approached the Entente Powers, Enver left him, stayed for a short time in Azerbaijan, and was mixed up in adventures in Asia Minor and with the Asiatic propaganda of the Soviet Govern ment.
Finally he turned against the Soviet Government and leading an unsuccessful insurrection against them in the mountains of Russian Turkistan—a revival of the "Pan-Turanian" ambitions which he cherished during the War—he was killed at Douchembe, in Bukhara, on Aug. 4, 1922.