Balkan Wars

Within barely a year, between October 1912 and August 1913, south-eastern Europe was redrawn by a pair of wars. In the first, an alliance of Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece and Montenegro drove the Ottoman Empire out of almost all its remaining European lands; in the second, the victors fell out over the spoils and Bulgaria was defeated by its former allies, joined by Romania and the Ottomans. The wars created an independent Albania, roughly doubled the size of Serbia and Greece, and sharpened the tensions that led to the First World War.

By the early twentieth century Greece, Serbia, Montenegro and Bulgaria had emerged from Ottoman rule, several of them gaining ground in the wake of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, but large communities they regarded as their own still lived in Ottoman Macedonia, Thrace and Albania. From 1904 Greek and Bulgarian armed bands fought each other and the Ottoman army in Macedonia. The Young Turk Revolution of 1908 raised hopes of reform but brought a more nationalist government. That year Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina, under its occupation since 1878, and Bulgaria declared its full independence. Italy's victory over the Ottomans in the war of 1911–1912 and revolts in Albania exposed the empire's weakness.

In 1912, with Russian encouragement, the Balkan states formed a web of secret treaties. Serbia and Bulgaria signed an alliance in March 1912 that provisionally divided Macedonia, with a disputed zone left to the arbitration of the Russian tsar. Greece and Bulgaria allied in May without agreeing any partition, and by the end of September Bulgaria had alliances with Serbia, Greece and Montenegro.

Montenegro declared war on 8 October 1912, and its allies followed after an ultimatum. Bulgaria's army drove through Eastern Thrace until it was halted at the Çatalca lines outside Constantinople. Serbian forces pushed south towards Skopje, captured Kosovo and reached the Adriatic coast, while the Greek army advanced into Macedonia, accepting the surrender of Thessaloniki and some 26,000 Ottoman troops on 8 November. The Greek navy defeated the Ottoman fleet twice, preventing reinforcements from reaching Europe by sea. After a coup in Constantinople in January 1913 the Ottomans fought on, but Adrianople fell to Bulgarian and Serbian troops, the Greeks took Ioannina and the Montenegrins captured Shkodra. The Treaty of London, signed on 30 May 1913, ceded nearly all Ottoman territory west of a line from Enos to Midia, and the great powers insisted on an independent Albania.

The creation of Albania denied Serbia an Adriatic port, and it refused to hand Bulgaria the parts of Macedonia it had occupied. Greece and Serbia allied against Bulgaria on 1 May 1913. On 29 June, on the orders of Tsar Ferdinand and without a declaration of war, Bulgarian troops attacked Serbian and Greek positions. Serbian and Greek armies threw them back and invaded Bulgaria, Montenegro joined them, Romania invaded from the north, and the Ottomans retook Adrianople.

The Treaty of Bucharest of 10 August 1913 partitioned Macedonia. Serbia gained a large part of Macedonia and the eastern half of the Sanjak of Novi Pazar, doubling its territory; Greece more than doubled in size with southern Epirus and most of southern Macedonia; Romania took southern Dobruja; and Montenegro took the western half of the Sanjak. A separate agreement in Constantinople confirmed the Ottoman recovery of Adrianople. Ottoman rule in Europe was reduced to Eastern Thrace and Constantinople.

Both wars saw ethnic cleansing and grave atrocities against civilians, for which all sides were responsible. Muslim populations suffered especially heavily: by 1923 only 38 per cent of the Balkan Muslim population of 1912 remained in the region. Austria-Hungary, alarmed by Serbia's growth and its appeal to the empire's own South Slavs, was more ready to confront Serbia after a Serbian-backed group assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, setting off the crisis that led to general war. The violence of 1912–1913 has also been linked to atrocities in the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s.

Our 1900 map shows the Ottoman Balkans before the wars, and our 1914 map shows the new borders of Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria and Albania on the eve of the First World War.