Explain a Meme: Balkan Wars
As the power of the Ottoman Empire faded, the nations it spawned created a series of alliances that seem haphazard and random in the light of history. Here's an explanation.
The demise of the Ottoman Empire was a long, devastating process that spanned the whole 19th Century. The rise of the Turkish Republic in the 20th Century halted this decline and — by the end of that century, had returned Turkey to an important place in the region and the broader world.
This meme, which I found on Twitter from @SonerCagaptay, focuses on the 20th Century. It serves as a chance to look back at some key moments in Turkish history and connect it with important neighbors: enemies and allies.
End of Empire, the 19th Century
There are many different accounts of the decline of the Ottoman Empire. For me, the person most responsible for its demise was Catherine the Great, empress of Russia from 1762 to 1798.
When she took the throne, The Black Sea was an Ottoman lake, surrounded by Ottoman cities and settled by Turkish peoples. Russia was a Baltic Sea kingdom. The Black Sea and its warm, ice-free ports was a dream.
Catherine began an aggressive expansion southwards. Over the seven years of the First Russo-Turkish War (1768-1774), Russia conquered lands all the way to the Crimean Peninsula. The Ottomans were on their heels. The Hapsburg rulers of Austria followed suit, seizing Ottoman possessions in the Balkans (Romania, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina) in the next century, even as Russian forces claimed more territories on the eastern and western shores of the Black Sea.
Within the empire, an independence movement severed Greece in 1832 after a bitter, 11-year struggle. But the action that unleashed the dogs of war was the Crimean War (1853-56) a conflict over Ottoman possessions in Romania and Crimea which became a world war when Britain and France joined the Ottomans to block Russian expansion into the Middle East.
The war halted Russian expansion, but it accelerated Ottoman decline. Revolts broke out across the empire — in Lebanon, in Serbia, Albania, and other lands. Serbia and Romania gained independence in 1878, the same year that Bosnia was annexed by Austria-Hungary. Bulgaria followed in 1908, and Albania, the last Balkan posession of the empire, declaried independence in 1912 and won it during the First Balkan War.
The 20th Century: the First Balkan War
The empire faced internal strife in the dawning years of the 20th Century. In the late 1800s the hope of reformers in the Ottoman empire was a Constitution along with progressive, westernizing reforms. A constitution was ratified in 1876, setting up a parliament but retaining the Sultan as the head of state. This constitution was withdrawn two years later by Sultan Abdul Hamid, whose despotic rule stretched into the 20th Century.
A rising movement of Turkish army officers and exiles known as the “Young Turks” sought to restore the Constitution and modernize the empire. They took power in a coup in 1908, led by a triumverate of officers.
In the meantime, a mad scramble for Ottoman territories began. Italy invaded Libya in 1911, and in early 1912 it occupied the Dodecanese, a group of islands off the southwestern coast of Turkey that includes Rhodes. Then came the First Balkan War, as an alliance of Balkan countries took on the empire.
The struggle was over a string of Ottoman province that stretched westward from Constantinople to the Adriatic Sea: Thrace, Macedonia, and Albania.
In eight brutal months of fighting, the Ottoman frontier was rolled back from the Adriatic Sea to the gates of Constantinople. Albania gained independence. The Greek border moved up to include the key Ottoman city of Salonika (modern Thessaloniki).
But major differences remained between the Balkan allies. Bulgaria had placed the lion’s share of force in the field, and it felt that it deserved a greater share of northern Macedonia. It moved forces in to occupy the region. Serbia and Greece countered. Romania joined in, as did the Ottoman Empire, opening a three-front war on the Bulgarians, who sued for peace after 9 months of fighting. It was a modest success for the Turks, returning eastern Thrace (the area around Edirne) to the empire, a region which remains Turkish to this very day.
Alliances in World War I
Less than a year after the end of the Second Balkan War, a Serbian terrorist murdered the Austrian crown prince in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Hercegovina. Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire were recruited by Germany in order to open new fronts on the Russian Empire.
Bulgaria, the recent loser of the 2nd Balkan War, was spoiling or another fight with Serbia, which is why it joined the Central Powers at the dawn of the war. The German and Ottoman empires had long-established economic and military ties, and the Young Turks — hoping to recover lost territories in the eastern Black Sea — joined up. One notable opponent to the Central Powers alliance was a young officer by the name of Mustafa Kemal, later Atatürk, whose influence as the Republic’s first president ensured Turkish neutrality in the 2nd World War.
Greece remained neutral over deep divisions: its King Constantine I was of German heritage and married to a daugher of Kaiser Wilhelm II. He insisted on neutrality at the outset of the war. But its prime minister, Eleftherios Venizelos, a budding imperialist, had his eyes on Ottoman possessions in the eastern Aegean, and saw an alliance with the Entente powers as a way to fulfill these ambitions. In an event known as the National Schism, which sent the king into exile and brought Greece into the alliance.
Though the Ottomans had repelled a British/French invasion at Gallipoli in 1915, when the Bulgarian army was defeated in September 1918, a month later the Ottoman Empire capitulated as well. The sultan would stay on as a figurehead until 1923, outlasting both the Russian Tsar (1917) and the Austrian Kaiser (1918), thus ending 400 years of rivalry between the three empires.
As described elsewhere in this newsletter, World War I segued into a Greek invasion of Anatolia in May of 1919 amidst a proposed breakup of present-day Turkey among British, French, Italian and Armenian claimants. The war lasted four more years but led ultimately to the founding of the Turkish Republic from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire.
World War II
In March 1941, Bulgaria joined Germany, Italy and Japan in the Axis alliance. Even after the disasters of the 2nd Balkan War and World War I, it was still eager to claim territory in Macedonia from Serbia and Greece. It was careful to forego involvement in the invasion of the Soviet Union later that year. However, that didn’t keep the Soviets from invading in 1944, a move which would ensure Bulgaria’s membership in the Soviet Bloc during the Cold War.
Turkey remained neutral until the end of the war. It was in a precarious situation, sharing a border with the Soviet Union, clinging to the independence of a fragile republic that was only 16 years old at the onset of the war.
Greek had war forced upon it with the invasion on October 8, 1940, by Italian troops based in Albania. Initially successful against the Italians, the Greeks were overwhelmed by German allies and occupied until 1944. Sadly, a civil war broke out once the occupation had ended, extending that brutal war until 1949.
The Cold War
Bulgaria lay well behind the Iron Curtain as a member of the Soviet Bloc. But in 1952, both Greece and Turkey joined NATO, providing the alliance with key bulwarks in southeastern Europe.
For the first time since the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence in 1821, Greece and Turkey were allies. The circle of bizarre Balkan alliances was now complete!
Today
And in 2004, 14 years after the fall of single-party, Communist rule, Bulgaria joined the NATO Alliance. As a love of the Balkan region, I have hope for peace and prosperity, but the Balkans are the Balkans. Serbia, Bosnia-Hercegovina and Kosovo remain outside the alliance, and ethnic tensions — even between Greece and Turkey — remain just below the surface, as the world saw in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
I’ve tried my best to summarize the historical events mentioned in this meme and to show how and why the alliances changed as they did. Admittedly, though, I’m just learning this for myself. If you have anything to add, please continue the discussion in the comments below.