[2][3] Ottoman troops operated in Italy and surrounding islands as part of France's war to subdue the region.

This claim dated back to the Ottoman Empire's defeat by Russia during the war of 1877–1878 and subsequent discussions after the Congress of Berlin in 1878, in which France and the United Kingdom had agreed to the French occupation of Tunisia and British control over Cyprus respectively, which were both parts of the declining Ottoman Empire.

The crisis began due to the Ottomans failing to prevent attacks by Turkish Arabs on Italian sambuks.

On 10 November, the Ottoman Empire capitulated and agreed to take measures to curb piracy as well as pay an indemnity, ending the crisis.

[8] Also in 1902, Italy and France had signed a secret treaty which accorded freedom of intervention in Tripolitania and Morocco.

[9] From 1911 to 1912, Italy and the Ottoman Empire fought a war over the Turkish provinces of Tripolitana and Cyrenaica, with the former emerging as the victor.

However, the vagueness of the text, combined with subsequent adverse events unfavourable to the Ottoman Empire (the outbreak of the Balkan Wars and World War I), allowed a provisional Italian administration of the islands, and Turkey eventually renounced all claims on these islands in Article 15 of the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne.

During its occupation Italian troops protected Turkish civilians, who were living in the areas occupied by the Italian army, from Greek troops and accepted Turkish refugees who had to flee from the regions invaded by the Greek army.

The Convention between Italy and Turkey, signed in Ankara on January 4, 1932, by the Italian Plenipotentiary, Ambassador Pompeo Aloisi, and the Turkish foreign minister Tevfik Rüştü Aras, settled a dispute that had arisen in the aftermath of the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923, about the sovereignty over a number of small islets and the delimitation of the territorial waters between the coast of Anatolia and the island of Kastellórizo, which was an Italian possession since 1921.

[14] The Refah tragedy was a maritime disaster that took place during World War II, in June 1941, when the cargo steamer Refah of neutral Turkey, carrying Turkish military personnel from Mersin in Turkey to Port Said, Egypt, was sunk in eastern Mediterranean waters by a torpedo fired from an unidentified submarine.

[16] Mesut Yilmaz, the Turkish prime minister at the time also threatened that Italy is on track to earn Turkey's "eternal hostility".

[19][20] Following a diplomatic incident dubbed as Sofagate in April 2021, Mario Draghi's remarks describing Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as a "dictator" were heavily criticized by the Turkish Foreign Ministry.