The Balkan Wars

OCT 08 1912 · 12:00

Bayonet charge at the Battle of Lule Burgas, First Balkan War, October 1912. Place: Macedonia, Thrace, Albania, the Aegean; treaties of London (1913) and Bucharest (1913) Figures: Tsar Ferdinand of Bulgaria · King Peter I of Serbia · King George I of Greece (assassinated at Salonika, March 1913) · King Nikola of Montenegro · Sultan Mehmed V of the Ottomans · Conrad von Hötzendorf, Austrian Chief of Staff, urging preventive war against Serbia Two Wars in Ten Months The Balkan League (Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, Montenegro), assembled in spring 1912 with quiet Russian encouragement, declares war on the Ottoman Empire on 8 October. Within six weeks Ottoman forces are driven back to the Çatalca line outside Constantinople. Salonika falls to the Greeks the same day Bulgarian troops arrive at its outskirts. The Treaty of London of 30 May 1913 confirms that Ottoman Europe is reduced to a strip around the capital. Five hundred years of Turkish rule in the Balkans ends in eight months. The victors quarrel over Macedonia. On 29-30 June 1913, Bulgaria attacks its erstwhile Serbian and Greek allies in the night. Romania and the Ottomans join the war against Bulgaria; the Second Balkan War is over in five weeks. The Treaty of Bucharest, signed 10 August 1913, leaves Bulgaria humiliated and territorially diminished. Serbia, by contrast, has nearly doubled in size and population. Albania, carved out under Austrian and Italian pressure to deny Serbia an Adriatic coast, becomes nominally independent in November 1912. Austria-Hungary Reads the Map The strategic consequence for the alliance system (see [[franco-russian-alliance-1894]]) is precise. Serbia, now the largest South Slav state, becomes for Vienna an existential threat: its territorial ambitions extend into Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Habsburg province of two million Serbs annexed in 1908. Austria-Hungary had hoped to seize Serbian-claimed territory during the Balkan upheavals and was prevented from doing so by Russian and German pressure. Conrad von Hötzendorf has been calling for a preventive war against Serbia since 1908; by 1913 he has nearly succeeded in winning the argument. The Sarajevo assassination of 28 June 1914 finds the alliance system primed and the Habsburg general staff already convinced that the Serbian question must be settled by war. The Austrian ultimatum to Belgrade of 23 July 1914 is drafted to be rejected. Russia mobilizes; the Franco-Russian convention triggers; the German Schlieffen Plan triggers; the Belgian neutrality of 1839 (see [[belgian-independence-1831]]) is violated; the British guarantee triggers. The First World War begins from a Balkan crisis the Balkan Wars themselves had made structurally combustible. The Long Nineteenth Century en Video: The Great War channel on the two short wars that broke Ottoman Europe and primed the powder keg Sarajevo would ignite eighteen months later.