In September, 1918, a new offensive took place, backed by the French troops that took Nablus, and the French navy that made the British advance possible by bombarding the coast. General Allenby entered Haïfa and Acre on September 23 and Tiberias on the 24th, and on the 28th he effected his junction with the troops of the King of the Hejaz. He entered Damascus on October 1 with the Emir Feisal, who commanded the Arabian army. On October 6 the French squadron sailed into the port of Beyrut, which was occupied on the 7th. Tripoli was captured on the 13th, Homs on the 15th, Aleppo on the 26th of October, 1918. By this time Syria, Lebanon, Mesopotamia, and Arabia had fallen into the hands of the Allies. Meanwhile the disintegration of the Turkish troop was completed by General Franchet d’Espérey’s offensive and the capitulation of Bulgaria. Turkey applied to General Townshend—who had been taken prisoner at Kut-el-Amara—to treat with her victors. The negotiations of the armistice were conducted by Rauf Bey, Minister of the Navy; Reshad Hikmet Bey, Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs; and Sadullah Bey, head of the general staff of the Third Army. As early as 1916 Turkey of her own authority had suppressed the Capitulations—_i.e._, the conventions through which the Powers, as has been seen, had a right, amongst other privileges, to have their own tribunals and post-offices; and by so doing she had freed herself from the invidious tutelage of Europe. The Ottoman Government, in a note sent on November 1, 1916, by the Turkish ambassadors in Berlin and Vienna to the German and Austrian Ministers of Foreign Affairs, notified to their respective Governments and the neutrals that henceforth they looked upon the two international treaties of Paris and Berlin as null and void. Now the treaties of Paris in 1856 and of Berlin in 1878 were the most important deeds that had hitherto regulated the relations between the Ottoman Empire and the other European Powers. The treaty of Paris confirmed the treaty of 1841, according to which the question of the closing of the Straits to foreign warships was considered as an international question which did not depend only on the Turkish Government. The Berlin treaty of 1878, too, asserted a right of control and tutelage of the Powers over Turkey, and in it Turkey solemnly promised to maintain the principle of religious liberty, to allow Christians to bear evidence in law-courts, and to institute reforms in Armenia.