The armistice of Mudros, signed on October 30, 1918, gave the Entente Powers control of Constantinople and the Straits and stipulated the evacuation of the Russian Transcaucasian provinces by the Turks. Mesopotamia, Palestine, and Syria were already in Allied hands by conquest. Immediately after the armistice the British pressed forward into Cilicia. Three days before the armistice with Germany, Great Britain and France issued a joint declaration in the Near East, announcing that they had no designs upon these countries but were there simply as liberators, with the intention of helping the oppressed non-Turkish elements of the Ottoman Empire to attain complete independence. But the Entente Powers, separately and together, were already bound by secret agreements which contained their real intentions concerning the devolution of the Ottoman Empire. In March, 1915, the British and French Governments agreed that Russia was to have Constantinople and the European hinterland up to a line drawn from Enos on the Ægean to Midia on the Black Sea; the islands in the Sea of Marmora; Imbros and Tenedos outside the Dardanelles; and the coast of Asia Minor from the Bosphorus to the mouth of the Sakaria River across to the Gulf of Ismid. In exchange, Russia assented to the giving of the middle neutral zone of Persia to Great Britain and to the proclamation of the independence of Arabia. This agreement was enlarged, after Italy entered the war, to give Russia all of Armenia as a sphere of influence. On April 26, 1915, Great Britain, France, and Russia, among the bribes offered in the secret Treaty of London, promised Italy full sovereignty over the Dodecanese Islands and the port of Adalia, in the southwestern corner of Asia Minor, with the strategic hinterland. This was afterward enlarged to include a generous quarter or more of Asia Minor, going north to include Smyrna and east to include Konia in the Italian sphere of influence. In May, 1916, France and Great Britain, to whom had been left by Russia and Italy the non-Turkish-speaking portions of the empire as spoils, concluded the Sykes-Picot agreement, by which France was to have Syria and Cilicia with the hinterland to Mosul, while Great Britain was to take Mesopotamia and Palestine.