The Balkan Wars 1912-1913

Prelude to the First World War

Richard C. Hall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134583621
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In The Balkan Wars 1912-1913, Richard Hall examines the origins, the enactment and the resolution of the Balkan Wars, during which the Ottoman Empire fought a Balkan coalition of Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro and Serbia.

The Balkan Wars of 1912 - 1913 opened an era of conflict in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century, which lasted until 1918, and which established a basis for problems which tormented Europe until the end of the century.

Based on archival as well as published diplomatic and military sources, this book provides the first comprehensive perspective on the diplomatic and military aspects of the Balkan Wars. It demonstrates that, because of the diplomatic problems raised and the military strategies and tactics pursued to resolve those problems, The Balkan Wars of 1912-1913 were the first phase of the greater and wider conflict of the First World War.

1
BALKAN WAR ORIGINS

The Balkan Wars were a sharp and bloody series of conflicts fought in southeastern Europe during the autumn of 1912 and the winter, spring, and summer of 1913. In the First Balkan War, the Ottoman Empire fought a loose alliance of Balkan states, which included Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro, and Serbia. The First Balkan War began in October 1912. An armistice in December 1912 interrupted the fighting until January 1913. Fighting resumed around two besieged cities in Albania, one besieged city in Thrace, and in eastern Thrace until the spring of 1913. The participants in the First Balkan War signed a preliminary peace treaty in London on 30 May 1913.

In the Second Balkan War, Bulgaria fought a looser coalition of Greece, Montenegro, Serbia, Romania, and the Ottoman Empire. Fighting began on 29 June 1913. By the time it ended a little over a month later, the allies had overwhelmed Bulgaria. Peace treaties signed in Bucharest in August 1913 and Constantinople in September 1913 concluded the Second Balkan War. In less than one year the Balkans would again be at war.

Congress of Berlin

The concept of nationalism, appearing from France and the German countries, swept into the Balkan Peninsula early in the nineteenth century. The initial impact was largely cultural. Intellectuals made great efforts to standardize and celebrate the vernacular languages of the Balkans. In doing so, they frequently referred and connected to the medieval states that had existed in the Balkans before the Ottoman conquest.

Soon the emphasis of nationalism became political. A strong desire to achieve national unity motivated the Balkan states to confront their erstwhile Ottoman conquerors. Balkan leaders assumed that only after the attainment of national unity could their states develop and prosper. In this regard the Balkan peoples sought to emulate the political and economic success of western Europe, especially Germany, by adopting the western European concept of nationalism as the model for their own national development. The Balkan peoples perceived nationalism as a justification for the creation of specific geopolitical entities. As Vasil Levski, a nineteenth-century Bulgarian revolutionary activist, explained, “We are a people and want to live in complete freedom in our lands, there where the Bulgarians live, in Bulgaria, Thrace and Macedonia.”¹ This concept of western European nationalism displaced the old Ottoman millet system in the Balkans, which had permitted each major religious group a significant amount of self-administration. The millet system allowed Moslems, Orthodox, Catholics, and Jews to all live in proximity to each other without intruding upon each other. It gave the Balkan peoples a limited degree of cultural autonomy.

The Serbs in 1803 and the Greeks in 1821 revolted against their Ottoman overlords, partially in response to the dimly understood western European ethos of nationalism. By 1830 an independent Greek state emerged, and at the same time an autonomous Serbian state came into existence. The Ottomans had conceded Montenegrin autonomy since the eighteenth century. This, however, was more in response to the bellicosity and the remoteness of the Black Mountain than to any overt nationalist stirring.

The successes of the Italians in 1861 and Germans in 1871 in attaining national unity further inspired the Balkan peoples. The military aspects of the Italian and German unifications served as examples to follow. Each Balkan people envisioned the restoration of the medieval empires on which they based their national ideas. The Bulgarians sought the boundaries of the First or Second Bulgarian Empires, the Greeks the revival of the Byzantine Empire, and the Montenegrins and Serbs sought to recover the extent of the empire of Stephan Dushan. In 1876 Serbia and Montenegro went to war against the Ottoman Empire to establish large national states in the western Balkan Peninsula. That same year an anti-Ottoman revolt broke out in Bulgaria. In 1877 Russia intervened in the Balkans on the side of the Bulgarian nationalists. After nine months of unexpectedly hard fighting, the Russians prevailed. The Treaty of San Stefano in March 1878, ending the Russo-Turkish War, created a large independent Bulgarian state and enlarged Serbia and Montenegro. The Treaty of San Stefano fulfilled the maximum territorial aspirations of the Bulgarian nationalists. The new Bulgaria included most of the territory in the eastern Balkan Peninsula between the Danube River and the Aegean Sea. It also included Macedonia. For the first and only time in modern history, a Balkan people had attained all of their national goals.

The Treaty of San Stefano met a negative response from the leading countries of Europe, who had for the past 200 years assumed the prerogative of arbitrating international affairs. These countries as they existed in 1878, Germany, Great Britain, France, Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Italy, were known collectively as the Great Powers. A desire to limit the ambitions of the Russian Empire in the Balkans and to impose order on the chaotic conditions in Ottoman Europe, especially on the part of Austria-Hungary and Great Britain, led the Great Powers to accept the offer of Otto von Bismarck to host a conference to resolve the Balkan issues. Bismarck promised to serve as an “honest broker, who really wants to do business.” ² Bismarck invited representatives of the Great Powers to meet in the German capital. The subsequent Congress of Berlin was attended by the leading diplomats of the time, including Lord Salisbury of Great Britain and Count Andrassy of Austria-Hungary. It greatly diminished the size and independence of the new Bulgarian state. In place of a large independent Bulgaria, the Congress of Berlin established an autonomous Bulgarian principality under Ottoman suzerainty, a semi-autonomous Eastern Rumelia under the authority of the Ottoman sultan, and returned Macedonia to the direct rule of the Sultan. This settlement was a catastrophe for Bulgarian nationalism. Ivan E.Geshov, who would lead Bulgaria into the First Balkan War in 1912, wrote,

When we in Plovdiv read in the Times in the ominous month of July 1878 the first published text of the agreement, in which a short sighted diplomacy in Berlin partitioned our homeland, we were left crushed and thunderstruck. Was such an injustice possible? Could such an injustice be reversed?³

The Congress of Berlin also recognized the full independence of a slightly smaller Serbia and deprived Montenegro of San Stefano-sanctioned gains in Hercegovina, the Sandjak of Novi Pazar and northern Albania. Austria-Hungary advanced into the western Balkans by the occupation of Bosnia-Hercegovina and the Sandjak of Novi Pazar. These territories remained de jure parts of the Ottoman Empire. They also remained objectives of Montenegrin and Serbian national aspirations. Persistent Greek claims led to something of a corollary to the Berlin settlement. In 1881, the Great Powers sanctioned the Greek annexation of Thessaly and part of southern Epirus.

The Bulgarians soon recovered from the shock of their loses. Geshov wrote to a friend, “Bulgaria is not only truncated but stabbed in the heart. The operation, or better to say this series of operations, inflicted upon Bulgaria, cause us terrible pains and will cripple us for a long time, but will not prove fatal to us.” ⁴ Lord Salisbury, the British advocate of a contained Russia and small Bulgaria, indicated that a big Bulgaria was a matter of time.⁵ The Bulgarians were not alone in their frustrations over the Berlin settlement. The Greeks, Montenegrins, and the Serbs likewise perceived in the Treaty of Berlin a barrier to their national aspirations. After 1878 all the Balkan states strove to overcome the Berlin settlement and realize national unity.

Balkan national aspirations

The Bulgarians were the first to act against the Berlin settlement. In 1885, they unilaterally proclaimed the unification of Bulgaria with Eastern Rumelia. The Great Powers did not act directly to preserve the Berlin settlement. Serbia, however, with some support from its ally Austria-Hungary, attacked Bulgaria later that same year. In the ensuing Serbo-Bulgarian War, the Bulgarians successfully defended their unification and administered a sharp rebuff to the Serbs. Only the intervention of Austria-Hungary prevented a Bulgarian invasion of Serbia. The enmity between these two Balkan Slavic states created an obstacle to the idea of Balkan cooperation against the Berlin settlement and the Ottoman Empire. Nor were relations between Montenegro and Serbia conducive toward the realization of national unity. Dynastic and local rivalries prevented these two Serbian states from mounting a pan-Serb effort against the Ottomans.

The idea of a Balkan alliance extended back to the 1860s, when the Serbian government provided some shelter and assistance for Bulgarian revolution-aries. In 1891, the Greek premier, Kharilaos Trikoupis, had proposed a Bulgar-Greek-Serbian alliance. Neither Serbia nor Bulgaria had responded enthusiastically at that time. The Slavic states remained aloof from their Greek co-religionists because of lack of interest in Greek aspirations in the Aegean and because of rivalries with the Greeks over Macedonia. In 1897 the Bulgarians and Serbs reached an ephemeral agreement for cooperation in Macedonia.

That same year the Greeks made their second assault on the Treaty of Berlin by attempting to annex Crete. The resulting war was over in thirty days. The Ottomans easily deflected the Greek attack. The Great Powers, however, intervened to prevent Constantinople from realizing any meaningful gains from this victory and to maintain the Berlin settlement. They also landed troops in Crete to prevent a Greek occupation and to stop Greek massacres of Moslems. The humiliated Greeks did have to cede several points along their frontier in Thessaly to the Ottomans. Crete, however, received autonomy under the aegis of a Great Power commission but was forbidden a union with Greece. The Greek failure demonstrated the difficulties that any one Balkan state faced in confronting the fading power of the Ottoman Empire. It also greatly undermined the confidence of the other Balkan states in the abilities of the Greek military.

The Bulgarians looked to Thrace, the Greeks to the Aegean Islands, especially Crete, and Epirus, the Serbs to Bosnia-Hercegovina, and the Montenegrins to northern Albania as the locations of their aspirations. Bulgarian, Greek, and Serbian claims all overlapped in Macedonia. The Ottoman vilayets (provinces) of Salonika and Monastir made up most of this fertile region in the center of the Balkan Peninsula. All three Orthodox Christian states considered Macedonia as their own irredenta, based variously on cultural, historical, and linguistic claims. Macedonia first became a problem in 1870, when the Russian government pressured the Ottoman Turks to allow the formation of a Bulgarian Orthodox church independent of the Greek Patriarchate in Constantinople. This so-called Exarchate included churches in Bulgaria and parts of Macedonia. Eight years later a de facto independent Bulgarian state emerged from the Russo-Turkish War. The initial Treaty of San Stefano in March 1878 created a big Bulgaria, which included Macedonia. The Treaty of Berlin of July 1878 revised this settlement and returned Macedonia to Ottoman control. Throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century, the Bulgarians, Greeks, and Serbs contested control of Macedonia with the Ottoman Turks and among themselves. The largest revolutionary group, IMRO (Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization) was organized in Salonika in 1893. It adopted the slogan, “Macedonia for the Macedonians,” and indeed at times even supported the idea of an autonomous Macedonia within the Ottoman Empire rather than annexation of Macedonia to Bulgaria. In part to counter IMRO, the Bulgarian government established the Supreme Committee or External Organization in 1895. Even so, the orientation of IMRO was clearly toward Sofia. The Greeks organized the Ethniki Etairia in 1894 to further Greek nationalist aims in Macedonia. The Serbs had already established the Society of Saint Sava back in 1886. All of these groups had educational and propagandistic purposes. They also served as adjuncts for military organizations. Not to be outdone, the Ottoman authorities likewise armed those elements in the population favorable to them and promoted educational and Islamic opportunities. The competition for Macedonia among the Balkan states created an obstacle that prevented a Balkan alliance directed against the Ottomans.

Elsewhere, the Montenegrins and Serbs both aspired to the Austro-Hungarian occupied Sandjak (county) of Novi Pazar. The Sandjak of Novi Pazar was a finger of the Ottoman province of Kosovo, which separated Montenegro from Serbia. The Sandjak of Novi Pazar had a mixed population of Albanians, Serbs, and Slavic-speaking Muslims. Montenegro and Serbia also both claimed Kosovo, which they called Old Serbia because it was the location of the epic battle in 1389 between a Serbian-led Balkan army and the Ottoman invaders of the Balkan Peninsula. This area had a large Albanian population, as well as Serbs and the usual Balkan conglomeration of Turks, Gypsies, Vlachs, and others. These rivalries over Macedonia, Novi Pazar, and Kosovo escalated as the nineteenth century drew to a close.

Increasingly, Macedonia became the focus of Balkan aspirations. The Ottomans preserved their authority in Macedonia by playing the rival Bulgarian, Greek, and Serbian factions against each other. Initially the Bulgarians, favored by the Constantinople government, made educational and cultural gains in Macedonia. The Bulgarians further bolstered their situation by concluding a military alliance with Russian on 14 June 1902, which provided for mutual aid in case of a Romanian attack.⁶ The next year a revolt directed against Ottoman authority broke out in Macedonia. Led by IMRO, it resulted in defeat and enabled the Greek and Serbian factions to improve their situations. The failure of this revolt caused tremendous excitement in Bulgaria. As the Bulgarian prime minister at that time, Stoyan Danev, recalled, “For public opinion at that time Bulgarian foreign policy revolved around only one question, Macedonia.”⁷ The Bulgarian army was unprepared to intervene at that time, but it began to reorganize the next year.⁸ After 1903 the Bulgarians contemplated direct military action against the Ottoman Empire to achieve their national goals. In answer to the Macedonian revolt, the Great Powers, led by Austria-Hungary and Russia, formulated the Mürzteg reform program, which proposed limited reforms for the European part of the Ottoman Empire. It served to support the Berlin settlement, but never really gained the attention of the Ottoman government.

Cognizant of their own weaknesses, the Bulgarians joined an alliance with Serbia in April 1904.⁹ The Karageorgeviches had come to power in Belgrade the previous year after a strongly nationalist conspiracy within the army, known as the Black Hand, had murdered the previous king, Alexander Obrenovich, and his wife. Peter Karageorgevich, the new king, was much more overtly nationalistic and coincidentally anti-Habsburg than his unfortunate predecessor. King Peter concurred with the nationalist aspirations of his new prime minister, Nikola Pashich. The Serbo-Bulgarian accord of 1904, actually two separate agreements, addressed economic and political issues. It also provided for mutual military assistance in case of an outside attack and called for united action in Macedonia and Kosovo if these areas were threatened. Ultimately it remained unrealized because of Austro-Hungarian pressures and because of a downturn in Serbo-Bulgarian relations. Because of reservation about the alliance, the Bulgarians sabotaged it by making the agreements public before the Serbs were ready.

The accession of Peter Karageorgevich to the Serbian throne also intensified the rivalry between Serbia and Montenegro for leadership of the Serbian nationalist cause and the establishment of a “Greater Serbia.” Montenegro, despite its small size, had enjoyed some advantages in this contest until 1903. Montenegro benefited from the prestige of centuries-long resistance to the Ottomans. Prince Nikola Petrovich Njegosh of Montenegro was a poet of some talent and acclaim. Also, Prince Nikola had succeeded through the marriages of his daughters in becoming father-in-law to some influential European royals. One daughter had married King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy; two others had marr ied Russian grand dukes. A fourth daughter was the wife of Peter Karageorgevich. This made Nikola the father-in-law of the kings of Italy and Serbia and a relation of the Romanovs. These dynastic connections were valuable in securing foreign aid for impoverished Montenegro.

Neither the Karageorgeviches nor the Petrovich Njegoshes had yet produced an heir who seemed capable of continuing the cause. One diplomat described Crown Prince Danilo of Montenegro as, “as good as crazy. ”¹⁰ Another diplomatic source reported that Crown Prince George Karageorgevich was not fit for any “respectable parlor.”¹¹ Nevertheless, in 1904 the Serbs offered an alliance to Montenegro.¹² Nothing resulted from this Serbi...