Vilayet of Yemen

Vilayet-i Yemen
Vilayet of the Ottoman Empire
← 1872–1918   →   →
Yemen Vilayet in 1900
Capital		Sana'a
History
•	Established	1872
•	Armistice of Mudros	1918
Area
•	c. 1900	200,000 km2(77,220 sq mi)
Today part of		Yemen  Saudi Arabia

Yemen Vilayet (Ottoman Turkish: ولايت یمن Vilâyet-i Yemen; Turkish: Yemen Vilayeti) was a first-level administrative division (vilayet) of the Ottoman Empire. At the beginning of the 20th century it reportedly had an area of 200,000 square kilometres (77,200 sq mi). The population for the vilayet is given by the 1885 Ottoman census as 2,500,000.

Broadly speaking, the vilayet was bounded by the 20th parallel north to the north, the Aden protectorate to the south, the Red Sea to the west and the 45th meridian east to the east. The southern border was demarcated by the Anglo-Turkish Boundary Commission of 1902–1905, while the limit of the eastern border was left vague.

Asir formed a sanjak of the vilayet of Yemen.

Since the Ottoman conquest of Yemen in 1517, it had been known as the Yemen Eyalet. After a land reform in the Ottoman Empire, Yemen Vilayet was established from most of the former Eyalet in 1872.

In the 1830s, aided by the collapse of the Zaidi Imamate due to internal division and the adoption of modern weaponry after the Crimean War, the Ottomans moved into northern Yemen, eventually taking San'a and making it the capital of the Yemen Vilayet in 1872. Even then, Ottoman control was largely confined to cities, and the Zaidi imam's rule over Upper Yemen was formally recognized.

Starting in 1872, after the Sana'a region was firmly under control, Ahmed Muhtar Pasha set about restructuring the administration of the Yemen vilayet, dividing it into four sanjaks, with San'a' city serving as capital of the vilayet.Asir became a sanjak of Yemen in 1872.

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Wikipedia