The Balkan Wars were two conflicts which occurred in quick succession across a significant amount of the Balkans region of south-eastern Europe between October 1912 and August 1913. Both wars were caused by a combination of the interminable decline of the Turkish Ottoman Empire since the early nineteenth century and more immediate issues around Serb, Romanian and Bulgarian nationalism. The First Balkan War broke out when the Balkan League, an alliance of four Orthodox Christian powers, Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria and Greece, attacked the Ottoman Empire in October 1912. They won a crushing victory and stripped the Ottomans of most of their remaining territory in the Balkans. The Second Balkan War followed immediately afterwards and was launched by Bulgaria against its former allies along with Romania in an effort to secure a greater amount of the recently acquired, former-Ottoman territory. It ended in swift defeat for Bulgaria. The wars had major implications for the demography of the Balkans as significant population transfers were engaged in following them in order to create more ethnically and religiously homogenous states.[1]
Balkan Wars chronology of events
The nineteenth century had ushered in sweeping changes across the Balkans. The region had been dominated by the Ottoman Empire since it was virtually entirely conquered by the Turks in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. But by the nineteenth century the Ottomans were the ‘sick man of Europe’ and each decade seemed to bring further territorial losses. In the 1820s the Greek War of Independence secured autonomy for Greece. In the mid-nineteenth century increasing autonomy was granted by the sultan and his ministers to a number of groups elsewhere in the Balkans. Then, at the end of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 to 1878, Romania and Serbia became independent states.[2] The Kingdom of Montenegro would emerge as well near Serbia in 1910. Finally, in 1908, in the midst of the Young Turk Revolution within the Ottoman Empire, Bulgaria exploited the political crisis to formally announce its independence after years of self-government.[3]
What all of this meant was that by the start of the 1910s Greece, Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria and Romania had all emerged as independent states out of the collapsing Ottoman Empire. But these countries did not occupy their present borders at that point. Instead the Ottomans still held a large chunk of territory which extended from Constantinople westwards through what is now the southern half of Bulgaria, into North Macedonia and parts of northern Greece and into Kosovo and Albania to the shores of the Adriatic Sea. It was with the explicit aim of seizing the majority of this remaining Ottoman territory in the Balkans that Greece, Serbia, Montenegro and Bulgaria formed the Balkan League in 1912. They then went to war with the Turks in October 1912 in the outbreak of the First Balkan War.[4]
The First Balkan War lasted nearly eight months. The Orthodox allies benefited from speed, dispatching their armies into Ottoman territory quickly and advancing towards Constantinople before the end of 1912. The decisive engagement was the siege of Adrianople (modern-day Edirne) between November 1912 and March 1913. When the city fell to the Serbs and Bulgarians on the 26th of March it opened the way for the allied states to advance on Constantinople. By then an internal coup was occurring amongst the Ottomans and Britain decided to broker a remarkable treaty at London in May 1913 whereby the British government effectively ceded over 80% of the Ottomans’ Balkan territory to the victorious Orthodox states without any major consultation with the Turkish government.[5]
The Treaty of London led directly to the Second Balkan War. Within days of the initial agreement being reached, the Bulgarians, who perceived that they had done most of the heavy fighting at Adrianople and elsewhere but not been sufficiently rewarded, expressed their unhappiness with the division of spoils and launched attacks against their former allies to claim more of the territory that had been taken from the Ottomans. The ensuing conflict was brief as Serbia, Montenegro and Greece were joined by Romania and, in a peculiar volte-face, the Ottomans as well, who saw an opportunity to reclaim some of their recently lost territory. Faced with such overwhelming opposition, the Bulgarians were defeated within six weeks and the Treaty of Bucharest was agreed to between the various Orthodox powers. A separate Treaty of Constantinople was signed between Bulgaria and the Ottomans in September 1913. Through these small chunks of border territory were taken from the Bulgarians and assigned to the Serbs, Ottomans, Romanians and Greeks.[6]
Extent of migration during and after the Balkan Wars
Even before the Balkan Wars ended in the autumn of 1913 there was already a large wave of migration underway across the Balkans as people fled the fighting and also moved across borders in anticipation of the new political dispensation. This was an era of pronounced religious and ethnic sentiment across the Balkans and each of the states involved wanted to create nations which were religiously and ethnically homogenous. What this meant in practice was that Muslims were often moved out of the expanding Orthodox states into what remained of the Muslim Ottoman Empire, while Orthodox Christians were sent in the other direction. As soon as the wars were over, a conference was convened at Adrianople in late 1913 to agree on official population exchanges between the countries which had so recently been at war. Hundreds of thousands of people were moved across borders and between countries as a result. This process was still underway in the summer of 1914 when the First World War broke out. Although it was interrupted at that time, it recommenced again in the late 1910s and into the 1920s, leading in the long-run to the migration of millions of people across the Balkans and the Aegean Sea.[7]
Demographic impact of the Balkan Wars
The demographic impact of these population transfers following the Balkan Wars was immense. Consider that the Macedonia region alone was subject to at least seventeen bouts of population transfers in the years between 1912 and 1925.[8] Some of this activity was more nefarious and massacres of Orthodox Christians and Muslims were carried out in numerous regions if they proved reluctant to relocate. Overall the long-term demographic impact has been to create states in Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria which are more homogenously Orthodox Christian and ‘European’ in their culture and religion, while in Turkey millions of people today are the descendants of those Muslims who were transferred to within the Ottoman borders from the Balkans as part of the population transfers of the 1910s and 1920s. The descendants of these Muslims who relocated to Turkey during the decades of Ottoman collapse are known today as the Muhacir.[9]
Explore more about the Balkan Wars
- Greece, Electoral Rolls and Male Registers, 1856-1950 record collection on MyHeritage
- Greece, Asia Minor Refugees, 1914-1923 record collection on MyHeritage
References
- ↑ https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/balkan_wars_1912-1913
- ↑ https://www.britannica.com/event/Treaty-of-San-Stefano
- ↑ https://history.state.gov/countries/bulgaria
- ↑ E. C. Helmreich, ‘Montenegro and the Formation of the Balkan League’, in The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 15, No. 44 (Jan., 1937), pp. 426–434.
- ↑ https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/balkan_wars_1912-1913
- ↑ Richard C. Hall, The Balkan Wars, 1912–1913: Prelude to the First World War (London, 2000), chapters 6–7.
- ↑ https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780199796953/obo-9780199796953-0236.xml
- ↑ Taner Akçam, The Young Turks' Crime against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton, 2013), chapter 3.
- ↑ https://thelausanneproject.com/2023/01/13/erol/