Under Sultan Abdul Aziz (1861—76) the reforms initiated in the Tanzimat period continued, albeit at a slackened pace. The premise of the Tanzimat was that the Empire could be preserved only through modernisation and that this was possible only by establishing full legal equality for all subjects, Muslim and non-Muslim, and ensuring a fair taxation system. A law of 1864 extended the principle of representative government by creating provincial assemblies, elected from local notables of all faiths. Public education made painful progress, with the products of the teacher training colleges, set up under Mahmud II, going on to found a widening network of primary and middle schools. Christians and Jews were able to attend the new schools and were eligible for positions in the state bureaucracy.3
The real sticking point, though, was taxation. A programme of land registration, started in 1858, was still not completed by 1914, and in its absence the inefficient and abusable system of tax-farming had to continue. Revenue from foreign imports was kept low by the Capitulations or trade agreements forced on the Porte by the great powers. Worst of all was the soaring state indebtedness to western banks: by 1860 the government was paying a fifth of its meagre revenue on the interest alone, a figure which by 1875 had climbed to 50 per cent.4 To top it all, the Empire was host to a steady stream of Muslim refugees. Russia between 1854 and 1876 expelled 1.4 million Crimean Tartars, and in the mid-1860s another 600,000 Circassians from the Caucasus. Their arrival produced further economic dislocation and expense.5
I f the Tanzimat constituted the first practical attempt at modernisation, the group of thinkers known as the Young Ottomans, emerging in the 1860s, represented the first generation of western-educated elite to formulate something like an 'Ottoman nationalism', a state-reinforcing ideology that would give the sultan's subjects a common identity. Young Ottomans like Namik Kemal and Ali Suavi were proponents of western-style liberalism, in that they believed representative institutions and a constitution were essential preconditions for modernisation. As opposed to the secularisers of the Tanzimat, however, the Young Ottomans also held that Islam was the crucial binding element for an Ottoman identity. Adept at exploiting the new Turkish-language newspapers, they initially appealed to all Muslims, but increasingly their emphasis was on ethnic Turks. Kemal, for instance, was responsible for popularising the term 'fatherland' (vatan), but it was always unclear whether this could ever include non-Turks. Suavi specifically advocated an educational system which would be Turkish-language only, which begged the question whether the Turkish used would be the elite's Ottoman Turkish, heavily influenced by Arabic and Persian and virtually unintelligible to the masses, or the demotic language of Anatolian peasants. The Young Ottomans' liberalism put them on the wrong side of Abdul Aziz's regime, and their influence was necessarily confined to the literate elite, but they won some adherents to constitutionalism and sowed the seeds of a modern Turkish nationalism.6
The Young Ottomans' case for constitutional accountability was reinforced when the Empire was overtaken by catastrophe in 1875—8, with revolts in Bosnia—Hercegovina and then Bulgaria triggering war and partition. The rising in Bosnia in 1875 was due to resentment of oppressive tax collection rather than nationalism, but as it progressed the insurgents were joined by genuine nationalists, both Serb and Croat, from neighbouring Serbia, Montenegro and the Habsburg lands. It was these outsiders, often, who were responsible for the worst atrocities against the province's Muslims; Ottoman army reprisals were equally fierce and prompted a flood of refugees into Habsburg territory.
In the Bulgarian provinces, in April 1876, the revolt led by the Bulgarian Revolutionary Committee was calculated to provoke outside intervention. Bulgarians had profited from the proto-industrialisation begun earlier in the century; they were also largely responsible for running their own affairs. Yet tax collection was problematical here too and some among the younger generation were determined to take advantage of Ottoman preoccupation with Bosnia. Nationalism had been slow to appear among the largely peasant Bulgarians, and the nationalists were split between moderates who would have settled for autonomy, and revolutionaries who had been trying for years to foment an uprising from bases in Serbia and Romania. The rising never progressed beyond the Balkan Mountains, and it is clear that the vast majority of Bulgarians wanted nothing to do with it. But the massacre of Muslims at the start led to murderous reprisal by Ottoman irregular troops, and it was these 'Bulgarian horrors' which caught the attention of the western and Russian press and ultimately led to intervention.
It was great power pressure on the Ottoman government, in the shape of proposals for reform of its European provinces, which drove the Empire to transform itself into a constitutional monarchy. In May 1876 a coalition of conservatives and reformers, headed by Midhat Pasha, deposed Abdul Aziz; after the brief reign of the mentally unstable Murad V, the latter's brother became sultan as Abdul Hamid II (1876—1909). Midhat's government, determined to justify Ottoman rule in the Balkans and thus avert further foreign dictation, induced Abdul Hamid to promulgate the first constitution of an Islamic state on 23 December 1876.
This remarkable document represented a fundamental political change, in that its mere existence implied that the sultan was no longer the absolute ruler and sole lawgiver. Instead, the constitution's provision for a bicameral legislature, with a nominated senate of 25, and a lower chamber of 120 deputies elected on a restricted franchise, constituted an admission of the principle of popular sovereignty. Modelled on Belgium's 1831 constitution, the Ottoman constitution retained the sultan as central: he still appointed ministers, who were responsible to him, not parliament, and he had the power to approve or reject all laws as well as to dissolve the assembly. The constitution also attempted to redefine Ottoman citizenship and encourage a sort of 'official nationalism' by reaffirming the legal equality of Muslims and non-Muslims.7 To the astonishment of observers, domestic and foreign, the first elections were held early in 1877 and the parliament duly met in March. A second election was held towards the end of the same year, and a second parliament met in December.
The only problem with the 1876 constitution was that its lynchpin, Abdul Hamid, had no intention of governing constitutionally if he could help it. Abdul Hamid was as anxious as anyone to modernise and shake off foreign influence, but he was autocratic and mistrustful by disposition. He dismissed Midhat Pasha in February 1877 and, when the second elected assembly dared criticise the disastrous loss of the war with Russia, he dismissed it as well in February 1878. Censorship and police surveillance took the place of debate, and the dreams of the Young Ottomans seemed doomed to disappointment.
Instead their worst fears were realised when, in June 1878, the sultan's diplomats signed the Treaty of Berlin. This product of international mediation between the Ottomans and Russia, while modifying the peace terms originally imposed by Russia at San Stefano, nevertheless forced major losses on the Porte. An autonomous Principality of Bulgaria, whose prince would be a vassal of the sultan, was created; its territory amounted to roughly a third of that considered at the time to be inhabited by Bulgarian speakers. A slice of territory between the Balkan and Rhodope Mountains, christened Eastern Rumelia, was to be administered by an Ottoman Christian governor under great power supervision. Serbia, Montenegro and Romania all became formally independent; there were minor territorial gains for the first two, and for Romania a forced exchange of Southern Bessarabia, ceded to Russia, for the territory south of the Danube estuary known as Dobrudja. Greece was also empowered to negotiate territorial demands, and by 1881 great power intervention had secured it parts of Thessaly and Epirus. Most humiliating of all from the Ottoman point of view was the handing over of Bosnia—Hercegovina and Cyprus to Austro-Hungarian and British administration, respectively; although both provinces remained formally Ottoman possessions, there was little disguising the intended permanence of these transfers. As before, the
Muslim population of the territories in question paid the heaviest price of all. Thousands were massacred or forced to flee by Russian troops during the war of 1877—8. It has been estimated that of the 1.5 million Muslims in Bulgaria, 800,000 were either killed or died of disease or starvation, or emigrated to Ottoman-ruled territory. The Muslim population of Bosnia was reduced by about a third between 1875 and the completion of Austro-Hungarian occupation in 1879.8
Abdul Hamid's strategy for holding together what was left of the Ottoman imperium has been described as 'Pan-Islamism'. This stressed the essentially Islamic nature of the state and the sultan's role as leader of the Muslim faithful. To inculcate in his subjects a sense of loyalty to himself, Abdul Hamid encouraged the spread of education, and it is clear that Ottoman officials in this period believed 'they were engaged in a battle for the hearts and minds of the young generation'.9 The sultan also recognised the importance of rapid communications as a means of physically holding things together, and his reign saw a big increase in railway and road construction as well as telegraph facilities. Overriding everything was an insistence on maximum centralisation and control. to the research of scholars like Selim Deringil, we now know that the Ottoman state mounted a much more concerted effort to create a legitimising ideology than was hitherto appreciated.10
Pan-Islamism proved an inadequate substitute for constitutionalism. Apart from its obvious lack of appeal to Christians, it was increasingly clear that nonTurkish Muslims were hardly wooed by it either. Among Albanians, for instance, 1878 saw the first stirrings of nationalism when the League of Prizren was formed to agitate for the use of Albanian in schools; by 1896 this had evolved into an appeal to the great powers for administrative autonomy. The expansion of education, too, was a double-edged weapon. Not only did the spread of literacy increase the number of subjects inclined to question authority; a decree of 1894, that henceforth Turkish must be used in all schools, alienated Christians and non-Turkish Muslims alike. Finally, expenditure, especially on railways, could be maintained only by borrowing from the West, and by 1881, after the Ottoman government had defaulted on its debts, a consortium of European powers forced it to accept the Ottoman Public Debt Administration. This international body earmarked the revenue from certain government monopolies and taxes for the Empire's foreign creditors. The arrangement enabled the government to continue borrowing, but at the price of sacrificing 29 per cent of real income; it was also a highly visible symbol of the Empire's helplessness vis-a-vis the European powers.11
The combination of autocracy, nationalist unrest and above all humiliation by the great powers prompted the beginnings of a specifically Turkish nationalism. In 1889, a number of young Muslim scholars in Constantinople, of predominantly middle-class background, formed a secret revolutionary society, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), later known as the Young Turk movement. The Young Turks' principal aims were the overthrow of
Abdul Hamid and the restoration of the 1876 constitution, but they also initially envisaged a federalised Empire which would be able to retain the loyalty of its peoples. As the movement expanded and acquired more ethnic Turks, however, it was also influenced by Namik Kemal's concept of vatan and a tendency to equate 'Ottoman' with 'Turkish'. A major influence in this direction was the Russian Tartar emigre Yusuf Akjura, who disputed the point of trying to win over non-Turks and wrote in 1903, 'The Young Turks' attempts to found an Ottoman nation is [a] cul-de-sac. Nationalism is the only road to take.'12 This appealed especially to the increasing number of army officers who joined the movement. For these there were additional spurs to action in the shameful outcome of the Greco-Turkish War of 1897 (see below), but especially the situation in Macedonia. This Ottoman-ruled area of the Balkans was claimed by Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece, all of which supported armed bands there. The great powers repeatedly interfered with Ottoman efforts to control Macedonia and in 1903, following an unsuccessful Bulgarian-led uprising, imposed an international police force to maintain order. For the Young Turks this was the ultimate indignity.
In July 1908 a CUP-inspired revolt, demanding the restoration of the constitution, was mounted by officers of the Third Army Corps, stationed in Macedonia. Supported to begin with by Muslims and Christians, Turks and non-Turks across the Empire, it spread rapidly to other army units, and by 24 July Abdul Hamid had conceded defeat and reinstated the constitution. A government was installed dominated by the CUP, although the latter stayed in the background at this stage, insisting that it was not a political party.
The Young Turk revolution was no sooner accomplished than events demonstrated the 'unworkability of a multinational Ottoman state'.13 At the prospect of a parliament being elected which would once more represent all provinces of the Ottoman Empire, the Habsburg Monarchy hastened formally to annex Bosnia—Hercegovina in October; at the same time Bulgaria proclaimed itself independent and Crete, effectively under Greek administration since 1897, announced its union with Greece. The tendency of the Young Turk government, moreover, was decidedly centralist. The CUP itself soon split between a Liberal wing which still hoped to placate the nationalities by concessions such as local autonomy, and the 'Unionists', whose reaction to the loss of the Balkan provinces was an ever greater emphasis on 'Turkification'. Turkish was made the official language of state in 1908 and a compulsory element at all levels of the educational system. As a result of a conservative Muslim attempt at a counter-coup, in the spring of 1909, which was accompanied by revolts by Armenians and, in Kosovo vilayet, Albanians, the CUP formed its own political party, deposed Abdul Hamid in favour of Sultan Mehmet V (1909—18) and announced measures to crack down on nationalist unrest, especially in the Balkans. The three years before the outbreak of the Balkan Wars in 1912 saw a hardening of attitudes on both sides, with non-Turks increasingly alienated and an increasingly authoritarian government pursuing policies that amounted to 'Turkification with lip-service to Ottomanism'.14
A History of Eastern Europe 1740-1918 THE BALKAN NATION-STATES TO 1912
That the Kingdom of Greece in this period remained independent at all, and indeed expanded territorially, owed less to its own exertions than to the favour of the great powers. At the same time the country's economic dependency on those same powers continued, while politically much of Greek society remained in thrall to the goal of national unification.
Under George I (1864—1913) political parties continued to function through clientage rather than coherent ideologies, with the state itself running the biggest client system of all through its control of employment in the swollen bureaucracy. Patronage, corruption and electoral violence were an open book for leaders such as Theodoros Deliyannis and Kharilaos Trikoupis, who alternated as minister-president throughout the 1880s and 1890s, while in foreign policy the predominant influence was exercised by the king. Deliyannis' faction was broadly conservative and hotheadedly nationalist, clamouring for the realisation of the Megali Idea and the liberation of fellow Greeks from Ottoman rule. It was this party which kept public opinion fired up over Crete, where Greek governments inspired no fewer than four revolts between 1866 and 1896, and which finally led Greece into the calamitous one-month war of 1897, from which, thanks to the great powers, Greece was lucky to escape with an indemnity of 4 million Turkish pounds and, to the fury of the Ottomans, an autonomous regime for Crete itself. Nationalist opinion was also behind increased support for Greeks in Macedonia from the 1890s.
Trikoupis' New Party stood for a less adventurous foreign policy and sought to encourage modernisation; the three Trikoupis ministries increased roads by a factor of three in 10 years and railways from 12 to 1,000 kilometres between 1882 and 1896, and oversaw completion of the Corinth Canal by 1893.15 Modernisation, however, was constantly overshadowed by Greece's economic vulnerability. Trikoupis was forced to declare a state bankruptcy in 1893 when the country's main export trade in currants collapsed, and the foreign loans necessitated by the 1897 war indemnity resulted, as with the Ottomans, in the imposition of an International Financial Commission, with the right to collect revenue from Greece's state monopolies and customs for foreign creditors. Much of the economy was sustained only by remittances from the 350,000 Greeks who emigrated to America between 1890 and 1914.16
The Young Turk revolution, with its potential to regenerate the Ottoman Empire, provoked something like a revolution in Greece itself. Army officers concerned at the country's poor state of preparedness formed a Military League and in August 1909 demanded improvements in the armed forces. Their favoured candidate for office was the popular Cretan Eleftherios Venizelos, whose Liberal Party won a convincing majority in the elections of 1910. Venizelos pushed through a variety of measures to increase political efficiency and modernise Greek society. Parliamentary filibustering was restricted and public employment made conditional on examinations; land was expropriated for redistribution, trade unions legalised and a minimum
Wage for women and children and a progressive income tax were introduced. The resulting surplus permitted increased spending on the armed forces. The result was that, when the Balkan League was formed in 1912, Greece was in a much better position to realise its long-standing ambitions against the Ottomans.
Much of Serbia's development, or lack of it, from the 1860s was conditioned by its relationship with the Habsburg Monarchy. The assassination of Prince Michael Obrenovic, in 1868, not only put his ambitious plans for a Balkan alliance against the Ottomans on hold but was followed by a Regency on behalf of his nephew Milan (1868—89), which was anxious not to upset Vienna, although not above flirting with Russia. Milan, on attaining his majority in 1872, was equally unadventurous, not least because of the emergence of party politics. A constitution agreed by the Regency in 1869 had legitimised greater political activity, even if the dominant Liberal Party of Jovan Ristic showed little inclination to share power. Serbia in this period has been cited as an example of 'politics as development': despite remaining an essentially peasant society due to its lack of economic development, it nevertheless was well on the way to becoming a functioning democracy, with effectively universal manhood suffrage, a critical press and a new political force emerging by the 1870s, the Radical Party, which represented the views of its smallholder supporters.17 All parties were strongly nationalist, but differed as to how liberation of fellow Serbs under Ottoman rule should be achieved. For economic investment Serbia remained totally dependent on foreign, which meant Austro-Hungarian, capital.
The Near Eastern crisis of 1875—8 starkly illustrated Serbia's weakness. The war against the Ottomans for Bosnia, entered into so vaingloriously in 1876, ended in humiliating defeat, from which Serbia was rescued only by Russia; the latter then forced Serbia back into the wider Russo-Turkish conflict, only to abandon it in favour of the Bulgarians at the peace negotiations. Recognition of Serbia's independence and minor territorial gains to the south-west were secured only with the help of Austria-Hungary, but in return Serbia was obliged to look on while the Habsburgs occupied Bosnia and to accept the treaties of 1880-1, which kept it in political and economic subjection to Vienna for the next generation. Elevation to the status of a kingdom, in 1882, was poor consolation, and an unprovoked attack on the new Bulgaria, in 1885, seeking compensation for the latter's union with Eastern Rumelia, resulted in another mortifying defeat.
King Milan, an Austrophile playboy with little affection for his subjects, abdicated in 1889, leaving his underage son Alexander (1889-1903) a Regency and a new, even more democratic constitution. Alexander, however, proved precociously authoritarian, staging his own coup in 1893 at the age of 16, reinstating the 1869 constitution and ruling through an unpopular clique, while persecuting Radical opponents of the regime and maintaining close relations with Austria-Hungary. The king's marriage to his mistress, in 1900, lost him the support of the officer corps of the army, and in June 1903 a conspiracy of the military and the Radical Party brutally murdered the royal couple, installed Peter KaradordeviC, descendant of Karadorde, on the throne and restored the 1889 constitution.
The 1903 revolution marked a decisive shift in Serbian policy. Henceforth governments were dominated by the Radical Party under Nikola Pasic, which in 1906 dared to make the economic break with Austria-Hungary, without which a more aggressive pursuit of nationalist goals would have been impossible. Given the danger of confronting the Habsburgs too openly over Bosnia, as shown by the crisis of 1908-9, Serbia focused increasingly on a military build-up and the formation of an alliance against the Ottomans. By 1912 these twin preoccupations were about to bear fruit.
Romania in this period was a country of paradoxes. Politically stable, it remained governed by an oligarchical elite. Economically it became increasingly diverse and achieved greater modernisation than other Balkan states; yet the gulf between its richest and poorest grew ever wider. The constitution agreed in 1866 on the accession of Prince Charles I (1866-1914) established an indirect voting system, whereby four electoral colleges were elected by voters according to property qualifications. The wealthiest three classes of electors in turn elected 118 deputies to the National Assembly, while the college representing the peasantry, 60 per cent of the population, returned 30 deputies. Politics was dominated by two parties, with the prince occupying a pivotal role as arbiter between them: the Conservatives represented the landowning boyars, while the Liberals spoke for the urban, and more overtly nationalist, middle classes. The Liberals, once in power, modestly amended the system in 1884 to three electoral colleges, with the peasant college returning 38 out of 183 deputies, but this hardly altered the disenfranchisement of peasants, since a literacy requirement for voting excluded the 60 per cent of them who could not read.18
Internationally Romania had a foot in both camps. Forced to participate in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-8, mainly as a transit camp for Russian troops, its reward was independence and the Dobrudja, followed in 1881 by recognition as a kingdom. Its penalty was the retrocession of Southern Bessarabia to Russia and the revision of its constitution, demanded by the great powers in 1878 but intensely resented, to make discrimination against non-Christians, but especially Jews, illegal. Partly from Russophobia, the Liberal government of Ion Bratianu concluded a defensive (and secret) alliance with Austria-Hungary in 1883. This, however, was never more than a marriage of convenience, given the general strength of feeling against the Habsburgs over the position of fellow Romanians in Transylvania.
Romania's economic development was impressive. It was the first Balkan state to attract serious investment in railways, and as a result the big estates profited immensely from a boom in the international grain trade; by 1914 Romania was the third greatest exporter of corn and the fourth greatest of wheat in the world.19 An increasing proportion of the economy was devoted to agricultural processing industries such as sugar refining and tobacco, a development encouraged by the government's decision, in 1885, to emancipate itself commercially from Austria-Hungary and seek other markets for its produce. Extractive industrial activity also took off, based initially on forestry and then, following the discovery of major deposits in the 1860s, oil, of which Romania produced 1.8 million tonnes by 1913.20 Much of the oil industry was controlled by foreign corporations, given the lack of indigenous capital accumulation. Yet on the eve of the First World War Romania presented an increasingly modern face to the world.
Under the surface, however, there were serious socio-economic tensions. Apart from the fact that the corruption and closed nature of Romanian politics made even the urban classes feel excluded from decision-making, the condition of the peasant majority worsened appreciably. The agrarian legislation of the 1860s had failed to create a peasant smallholder class; instead 200,000 peasants had no land at all at the start of this period and 300,000 at the end of it, while a growing number of the rest either leased more land and fell increasingly into debt as a result, or laboured on bigger estates while trying to maintain their own plots.21 Peasant indebtedness, and the use of force to ensure debt collection, led to chronic unrest and violence in the latter decades of the century, ameliorated only marginally by the creation of an Agricultural Credit Bank in 1881 and the legalisation of cooperatives in 1904. In 1907 a spontaneous and generally directionless peasant uprising, put down with exemplary brutality, cost 10,000 lives, but although both main parties agreed that something must be done to avert a repetition, legislation to redistribute land and introduce a universal suffrage system was only being considered in 1914.
Autonomous Bulgaria, after 1878, was intended by its creator Russia to be an outpost of influence in the Balkans, but proved more independent-minded than expected. The new state was indeed dominated in its early years by Russians, who drafted the constitution finalised by an Assembly of Notables at Turnovo in February 1879; ironically, given its tsarist provenance, this was yet another model democratic document, providing for direct, universal manhood suffrage, with power shared between a prince and his appointed ministers and the National Assembly or SUbranie. The Russians also hand-picked Alexander of Battenberg (1878-86) and provided officers for the fledgling army, but soon found that neither the prince nor his government took kindly to constant interference. Party politics divided initially between the Conservatives, paternalist and elitist, and the more nationalist and democratic Liberals; not until the formation in 1899 of the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union (BANU) did the peasant masses find a powerful political voice of their own.
The breaking point with the Russians came over Eastern Rumelia, whose separation from the principality was deplored by Bulgarian nationalists and whose regional assembly was in any case dominated by Bulgarians. In 1885 a revolutionary committee in Plovdiv, Eastern Rumelia's capital, proclaimed union; the Bulgarian government, fearful of its own public opinion, hastened to accept. Russia, furious at this wilfulness, withdrew its military personnel, while Serbia, hoping for easy gains, attacked Bulgaria but, to everyone's surprise, was decisively routed. Russia insisted that it would sanction the union only if Alexander abdicated, and the unwilling prince was actually kidnapped in 1886 by officers acting for the tsar and, after a prolonged international crisis, replaced by Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (1887-1918).
The government of Ferdinand's first minister-president, Stefan Stambolov, was authoritarian in the extreme and resorted to unprecedented electoral violence to maintain its majority. This was partly to shore up a shaky new regime and partly a reaction to the malign effects of the 'Macedonian question'. Some 200,000 Macedonian Slav refugees lived in Bulgaria after 1878, and their efforts to foment rebellion in Ottoman territory were a standing embarrassment to Stambolov, who repressed them. He could do nothing, however, to hinder the formation in 1893, in Ottoman-ruled Salonica, of a Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation. The ministry which succeeded Stambolov, on his dismissal in 1894 (he was murdered by embittered Macedonians a year later), felt less able to withstand Macedonian demands for support, and a Supreme Macedonian Committee was formed in Sofia that year in an attempt to control the movement and work for the incorporation of Macedonia into Bulgaria. The Salonica-based group, however, was less amenable to such direction and ambivalent about annexation; to distinguish itself from the 'Supremacists' in Bulgaria it eventually renamed itself the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation (IMRO). The IMRO complicated matters dangerously for the Bulgarian government, which was held by most outside observers to be complicit in IMRO's extremist tactics.
I n its domestic development Bulgaria was hag-ridden by debt, obliged from the start of its existence to borrow in order to function at all. Much of Bulgarian politics revolved around land tenure. Some of the land belonging to the 150,000 Muslims who fled the principality in 1878 was confiscated, but some Muslims returned, and by the turn of the century 15 per cent of arable land was still in Muslim hands. A majority of Bulgarian peasants, however, as in Serbia, were smallholders, most of them self-sufficient but not producing much surplus. The country remained an overwhelmingly agrarian society, with what industry there was being extractive or food processing. In 1899 the government, desperate to increase revenue, introduced a tithe payment in kind on arable land, which was vastly unpopular and led directly to the formation of the Agrarian Union. Alexanddr Stamboliiski, leader of BANU, epitomised the gulf between town and countryside, a genuine populist who extolled the peasant as the backbone of the nation and distrusted everything urban. Governments after 1900 struggled to contain the rising electoral presence of the Agrarians, as well as increasing labour and socialist unrest, by electoral fraud and violence; the particularly harsh policies of one minister-president, Nikola Petkov, led to his assassination in 1907. Independence in 1908 did little to alleviate these internal tensions, even if it meant Bulgaria now controlled its own trade and the income from its own customs.
Ottoman Retreat and the Balkan Nation-States to 1914 THE COLLAPSE OF OTTOMAN POWER IN THE BALKANS 1912-14
The sudden rollback of the Ottoman imperium in 1912—13 surprised most observers, yet should perhaps have been expected. With hindsight it was clear that the Young Turk revolution, though an attempt to preserve the Empire, had temporarily weakened it, while the Balkan states, uncharacteristically and briefly united, had modernised, militarily at least, just enough to prevail. In doing so they unintentionally contributed to the establishment of a final nation-state, Albania.
The Balkan League, forged between Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece and Montenegro between March and May 1912, was promoted by the Russian government in an effort to limit Habsburg influence in the peninsula, but the Balkan states, demonstrating once again that they had minds of their own, promptly turned the alliance against the Ottomans. They were encouraged by Italy's successful war of 1911—12 in pursuit of Ottoman Libya, and were fearful lest the Young Turks regenerate the Empire, as well as alarmed by growing Albanian calls for an autonomous unit to be carved out of the four vilayets in which Albanians were concentrated. A revolt against Young Turk centralisation had in fact been simmering among the Albanians of Kosovo since 1909, spreading to neighbouring vilayets by 1911. Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece were all therefore anxious to wrest the remaining Balkan provinces from Ottoman control, so much so that they concluded only the vaguest of agreements as to how these territories should be divided in the event of victory.
Hostilities, initiated on the flimsiest of pretexts in October 1912, were brief but savage, with Ottoman forces actually outnumbered two to one because of the Italian War, and the Balkan armies assisted by guerrilla activity behind Ottoman lines. Serbia, Montenegro and Greece mopped up the western Balkans, while Bulgaria and Greece attacked in the east, Bulgaria advancing almost to Constantinople and Greece taking Salonica. Most of Macedonia, to Bulgaria's annoyance, fell to Serbia and Greece. The fighting was accompanied by considerable brutality on all sides, with well-documented atrocities recorded by a famous international enquiry, published to much western tut-tutting on the eve of the First World War.22
An armistice was agreed in early December, at great power insistence. This was in part in response to appeals by Albanians, who had set up a provisional government under Ismail Qemal at Vlore in November, and protested against the takeover of territory by the Balkan states, but it owed even more to Austria-Hungary's determination to deny Serbia access to the Adriatic. At the peace negotiations in London the creation of an Albanian state was settled in principle, but proceedings were interrupted by the Ottomans' resumption of hostilities in February 1913 and their loss of yet more territory to their enemies. Peace negotiations resumed in April, at which point it became clear that the planned Albania was being used by Serbia and Greece as justification for hanging on to their Macedonian conquests. The Treaty of London, in May, fixed the limits of Ottoman territory in the south-east and sketched in Albania,
Map 7 The Ottoman Empire and the Balkans 1878-1913, showing territory gained by other nationalities in 1912-13
Source: Redrawn from ‘The Balkans in 1913'; Anderson, M. S., 1966, The Eastern Question 1774-1923: A Study in International Relations, London and Basingstoke, 300.
But left adjustment of borders in Macedonia to the later agreement of the three states concerned. Bulgaria's sense of injustice was only heightened by intimations from Romania, hitherto not involved in the fighting, that it wished compensation, which could come only from Bulgaria. The latter rashly attacked Serbia and Greece in June, but was soundly defeated not only by these states but also by Romania and the Ottoman Empire, which seized the opportunity to claw back the area around Adrianople.
The final territorial redistribution, at the Treaty of Bucharest in August 1913, can be seen from Map 7. The Ottoman reconquest of Adrianople was allowed to stand, but elsewhere the Empire's Balkan dominions were no more. In their place the Balkan nation-states had become in their turn multinational, with Serbia incorporating Albanians, Macedonian Slavs and Turks, Montenegro Albanians and Turks, Greece Albanians, Macedonian Slavs and Turks, and Romania Bulgarians.
In the new Albania, the provisional government of Qemal, whose writ hardly extended beyond Vlore, was ignored by the great powers, who set up instead an International Control Commission, empowered to draft a constitution, assemble an international police force and draw boundaries. The title of Prince was offered to a minor German princeling, Wilhelm of Wied, who arrived in March 1914 but whose 'reign' lasted barely half a year. Albania's tribal factions, split additionally between Muslims, Orthodox and Catholics, proved intractable, and when the First World War broke out, the International Control Commission promptly disbanded.
The end of Ottoman rule was a seeming triumph for Balkan nationalism, but in reality had been brought about by state-led war and territorial aggrandisement. In the process, however, the antagonisms of the different Balkan nationalities to each other were undoubtedly exacerbated, while the emergence of a specifically Turkish nationalism was expedited by defeat and the loss of non-Turkish population. Finally, the elimination of 'Turkey-in-Europe', and the expansion of Serbia in particular, strengthened the conviction in Vienna that the Habsburg Monarchy was next in line.
World History
