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The Ottomans in Yemen and Arabia. Ottoman power in southwestern Arabia came in two hard-fought waves. In 1538 Suleiman the Magnificent's admiral Hadim Suleiman Pasha took Aden, and by 1547 the Ottomans held Sanaa and the Yemeni highlands - the empire's southernmost province, prized for the Mocha coffee trade and for closing the Red Sea to the Portuguese. But the Zaydi imams of the highlands, led by al-Mansur al-Qasim and his son al-Mu'ayyad Muhammad, fought a forty-year war that drove the empire out entirely by 1635 - the first great Ottoman retreat of the modern age.
For two centuries Yemen went its own way under the Qasimi imams - the age when Mocha's coffee supplied the world - while Ottoman Arabia contracted to the Hejaz, governed through the sharifs of Mecca and Egyptian garrisons. The Wahhabi wars (1803-1818) then convulsed the peninsula: the Saudis took the holy cities until Muhammad Ali of Egypt, on the sultan's behalf, destroyed Diriyah and occupied the Hejaz and Yemen's coast.
The second Ottoman conquest came in 1849 (coast) and 1872 (Sanaa): the empire built telegraphs, barracks and a vilayet administration, fought the imams' endless revolts - Imam Yahya's uprising from 1904 cost the empire tens of thousands of men and forced the Treaty of Daan (1911), recognizing his autonomy - and held Yemen until 1918, when its garrisons surrendered at the empire's collapse.
The Ottoman centuries left Yemen and Arabia divided along lines that persist: the highland-coast split between Zaydi imamate and Sunni lowlands, the Aden-Hadhramaut separation that became the two Yemens of the 20th century, and a memory of Turkish rule - in the Hejaz, of order and subsidy; in Yemen, of occupation and war - that still colors the region's politics.
Britannica: Yemen
Britannica: History of Arabia
Britannica: Hejaz