Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878

In 1877–1878 the Russian Empire, joined by Romania, Serbia and Montenegro, fought and defeated the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans and the Caucasus. Russian armies advanced to the outskirts of Constantinople before the other great powers intervened. The peace settlement, revised at the Congress of Berlin, made Romania, Serbia and Montenegro formally independent, created an autonomous Bulgaria, and redrew much of the map of south-eastern Europe.

After its defeat in the Crimean War of 1853–1856, Russia sought to recover its position on the Black Sea and its influence in the Balkans, where Pan-Slavist ideas of Russian-led Slav unity were gaining ground. Ottoman finances were collapsing, and in October 1875 the government declared bankruptcy. That year Serbs in Herzegovina rebelled, and in spring 1876 a Bulgarian uprising was put down by regular troops and irregular bashi-bazouks; up to 30,000 people were killed, including most of the inhabitants of the village of Batak. Reports of the massacres turned British opinion against Disraeli's support for the Ottomans, and William Gladstone's pamphlet Bulgarian Horrors called for Bulgarian autonomy. In Russia a wave of popular sympathy for the Bulgarians swept society.

Serbia and Montenegro declared war on the Ottomans in June 1876 but fared badly. A conference of the great powers in Constantinople in December 1876 proposed autonomy for Bulgaria and Bosnia, which the Ottomans rejected. Having secured Austria-Hungary's neutrality in January 1877, Russia declared war on 24 April 1877.

Russian troops marched through Romania, which proclaimed its independence on 10 May 1877, and crossed the Danube in June with about 185,000 men. The decisive obstacle proved to be the town of Plevna, now Pleven in Bulgaria, which the Ottoman commander Osman Pasha fortified and held against repeated assaults. With too few troops of their own, the Russians called on Romanian help and besieged the town for 145 days until it fell on 10 December 1877. Meanwhile Russian forces and Bulgarian volunteers held the Shipka Pass against Ottoman attempts to relieve Plevna. In winter a Russian army crossed the snowbound Balkan Mountains, won at Tashkessen and took Sofia, opening the road through Plovdiv and Adrianople towards Constantinople.

In the east, Russian forces under a group of Armenian-born generals took Bayazid in April 1877 and, after setbacks, captured the fortress of Kars on 18 November 1877.

The Ottomans sought a truce, which Russia accepted on 31 January 1878. When a British fleet arrived to deter an advance on Constantinople, the Russians halted at San Stefano, where a treaty was signed on 3 March. It recognised the independence of Romania, Serbia and Montenegro and created a large autonomous Bulgaria. Britain and Austria-Hungary feared that this new state would become a Russian outpost close to the Straits, and the great powers revised the settlement at the Congress of Berlin, convened in June 1878. Bulgaria was divided: the north became an autonomous principality, the south the province of Eastern Rumelia, and Macedonia returned to Ottoman rule. Russia gained Kars and Batum and southern Bessarabia, Austria-Hungary occupied Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Britain occupied Cyprus.

Russian losses ran to tens of thousands killed and more than 80,000 dead from disease, while Ottoman forces lost tens of thousands dead and over 100,000 captured. The war also brought great suffering to Muslim civilians in Bulgaria. Historians' estimates vary widely, from tens of thousands to over 200,000 killed, with hundreds of thousands more becoming refugees. Serbia, for its part, expelled most of its Muslim population between 1877 and 1880.

The war brought Bulgaria back onto the map after nearly five centuries of Ottoman rule. The settlement of 1878 shaped the politics of the Balkans for a generation, until the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913 remade the region again.

Our 1878 map shows the Balkans after the Congress of Berlin, with independent Romania, Serbia and Montenegro and the new Bulgarian principality; the 1815 map shows the region under much wider Ottoman rule earlier in the century.