The word "Balkan" derives from the Ottoman Turkish term for "mountain" or "wooded mountain range," originally applied to the range traversing Bulgaria from west to east, the natural barrier that separates the peninsula from the rest of Europe. Its earliest recorded appearance is on a 14th-century Arab map, which uses the word "Balkan" to describe the mountain range running through Bulgaria, a range the ancient Romans had called the Haemus Mountains. Western historians and geographers only began adopting the term in the 19th century, gradually extending it to describe the broader region stretching between the Adriatic and the Black Sea. The Ottomans themselves called these territories "Rumelia", from the Turkish Rûm-ėli, meaning "Land of the Romans", a reference to the Byzantine Empire, whose subjects had long styled themselves Rhomaioi, or Romans.1
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The Ottoman presence in the Balkans began in 1354, when Gazi Süleyman Pasha, son of Sultan Orhan, crossed the Dardanelles and seized a Byzantine fortress on the Gallipoli peninsula, the first foothold of what would become a century-long conquest. The fall of Edirne (Adrianople) followed in 1362, Serbia after the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, Bulgaria in 1396, Istanbul (Constantinople) in 1453, and Bosnia in 1463. By the time Sultan Murat I fell on the battlefield at Kosovo, Ottoman dominion already stretched from the Danube to the Adriatic and the Peloponnese. Expansion continued until the failed second siege of Vienna in 1683 marked the outer limit of Ottoman ambition in Europe. Over these centuries, millions of Turks migrated from Anatolia to the Balkans, settling alongside the region's Christian population in a relationship that, while unequal, was often more coexistent than the later nationalist narratives would acknowledge. Edirne, the empire's second capital, became one of the great cities of Europe: by one estimate it had some 350,000 inhabitants around 1700, which would have made it the fourth-largest city on the continent after Istanbul, Paris and London.2
The long arc of Ottoman decline in the Balkans began with the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699, which forced the Empire to cede significant European territories for the first time. Internal stagnation, administrative rigidity, and the persistent failure to extend meaningful political representation to the Empire's many minority communities all accelerated the erosion of Ottoman authority. The spark that transformed discontent into open revolt came from the West, as the French Revolution of 1789 introduced the language of nationalism and popular sovereignty to a region of extraordinary ethnic and religious complexity, and the 19th century became an era of successive upheavals as Greeks, Serbs, Bulgarians, and others sought to translate those ideas into independent statehood, steadily dismantling Ottoman power in Europe piece by piece.3 It was the last chapter of that story, the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913, that cost the empire almost all of what remained of Rumelia, and in doing so set the stage for the Ottoman entry into the First World War.
Key dates
| 8 Oct 1912 | Montenegro declares war |
| 16–19 Oct 1912 | War between the Empire and Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece |
| 22–24 Oct 1912 | Battle of Kırk Kilise |
| 23–24 Oct 1912 | Battle of Kumanovo |
| 29 Oct–2 Nov 1912 | Battle of Lüleburgaz–Pınarhisar |
| 2 Nov 1912 | Nazım Pasha orders the retreat to Çatalca |
| 9 Nov 1912 | Greek army enters Salonica |
| 17–18 Nov 1912 | Bulgarian assault on the Çatalca lines is repelled |
| 3 Dec 1912 | Armistice signed at Çatalca |
| 16 Dec 1912 | Peace conference opens in London |
| 23 Jan 1913 | Raid on the Sublime Porte |
| 8–10 Feb 1913 | Battle of Bolayır and the Şarköy landing |
| 6 Mar 1913 | Ioannina surrenders |
| 26 Mar 1913 | Edirne falls after a 155-day siege |
| 23 Apr 1913 | Shkoder surrenders |
| 30 May 1913 | Treaty of London ends the First Balkan War |
| 29–30 Jun 1913 | Bulgaria attacks Serbia and Greece: the Second Balkan War |
| 21–22 Jul 1913 | Ottoman forces re-enter Edirne |
| 10 Aug 1913 | Treaty of Bucharest |
| 29 Sep 1913 | Treaty of Istanbul with Bulgaria |
The Eastern Question
Great Power rivalries
The roots of the Balkan Wars lie in the emergence of nation-states at the fringes of the Ottoman Empire during the 19th century. The Balkan Peninsula was a mosaic of diverse ethnicities, languages, and religious beliefs, many of which opposed Ottoman dominance. In the late 19th century, the "Eastern Question" became a popular term used to describe the potential consequences of the power vacuum if the Ottoman Empire, often referred to as the "Sick Man of Europe," lost control over the Balkan provinces. Great Powers had conflicting regional ambitions, considering the region their "backyard." These aspirations led to diplomatic conflicts among the Great Powers vying for influence in the Ottoman territories.
Russia sought access to the Mediterranean through the Turkish straits and pursued a pan-Slavic policy, supporting Bulgaria and Serbia as protectors of the Orthodox Christian Slavic peoples. The Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca of 21 July 1774 had given it a pretext to intervene in Ottoman affairs as the self-appointed protector of the sultan's Orthodox subjects, and in 1781 Catherine II and Joseph II of Austria had already discussed a "Greek Project" for partitioning the empire's European provinces. Britain aimed to prevent Russia's access to warm waters, supporting the integrity of the Ottoman Empire while also backing limited expansion of Greece as an alternative plan; from the French Revolution until the Congress of Berlin, the principle of Ottoman territorial integrity was the cornerstone of its policy in the Near East.4 France aimed to bolster its position in the region, while Austria-Hungary desired the continued existence of the Ottoman Empire, as both empires were multiethnic entities governed by a small elite. The collapse of one would affect the other. Notably, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which had significant Serbian and Croatian populations, strongly opposed a stronger Serbia. Meanwhile, Germany's Drang nach Osten policy aimed to make the Ottoman Empire a de facto colony, thus supporting its integrity.
The Great Powers exploited the nationalist feelings in the region in order to destabilize and further weaken the Ottoman rule to their advantage. Their formula was simple. First the Christian minorities in the Balkans were encouraged to revolt and then they themselves would interfere and ask the Ottoman government to realize reforms that would give more rights to those minorities. If the Ottoman government would carry out the requested reforms, then they would first ask for autonomy and then independence; if not, there would be war. Naturally, autonomous or independent states would emerge after these wars.5
The Serbian and Greek revolts
The first of these movements to succeed was Serbian. In 1804 the Serbs of the pashalık of Belgrade rose under Karađorđe (Kara Yorgi, George Petrović), a livestock dealer who had served in the Austrian army. The revolt began as an appeal to Sultan Selim III against the abuses of the rebellious Janissary commanders (dayıs) who had seized control of the province, but when the Porte refused the rebels' demands for self-government it turned into a war of independence. Karađorđe was driven out in 1813, and two years later a second uprising under Miloš Obrenović won the Serbs a limited autonomy in return for tribute; Miloš, recognized as "Grand Knez," had his rival Karađorđe murdered in 1817 and sent his head to Istanbul. Serbian autonomy was confirmed by the Treaty of Edirne in 1829 and a series of decrees in 1830, which recognized Miloš as hereditary prince.6
Other Balkan nationalities were inspired by the success of the Serbians. In 1814, Greek nationalists had formed a secret organisation called Φιλικὴ Ἑταιρεία - Philiki Eteria (Society of Friends) in Odessa. With the support of wealthy Greek exile communities in Europe and covert assistance from Russia, this organisation launched an uprising in early 1821, led by Alexander Ypsilanti, a former aide-de-camp to the tsar, aiming to create an independent Greece with the ultimate purpose of reviving the Byzantine Empire. Ypsilanti's rising began in Moldavia, where the Romanian peasantry refused to follow him and he was quickly defeated, but in March the Peloponnese rose in revolt. Soon, the revolt spread to the islands of the Aegean and to Crete. This uprising and the accompanying violence against the local Muslims caused great anger in Istanbul, where not only the rich Greek merchants lost their wealth and influence, but also Patriarch Gregory V of Constantinople, who had excommunicated Ypsilanti, was hanged at the gate of the Patriarchate on Easter Sunday, 22 April 1821, together with several metropolitans. The execution horrified Orthodox Christians who had remained loyal to the Porte and strengthened the rebels' cause.7
Inconclusive fighting between Greeks and Ottomans continued until 1825, when the Sublime Porte asked for help from the Governor of Egypt, Mehmet Ali Pasha. Although this support was of great value for the Ottoman efforts against the Greek movement, which managed to crush much of the rebellion by 1826 and recapture Athens in 1827, there was a growing pro-Greek attitude in Europe, which soon formed into a form of military alliance that turned the tide against the Turks. On 20 October 1827, the British, Russian and French fleets attacked and destroyed the Ottoman-Egyptian fleet at the Battle of Navarino. Kutlu suggests that had the Ottomans been able to suppress the revolt without Egyptian help, Britain and France would probably not have intervened at all. A Russian war followed in 1828, in which Russian armies reached Edirne, while a French expeditionary force landed in the Morea. By the Treaty of Edirne of 14 September 1829, the Porte accepted an autonomous, then independent, Greece; the European powers fixed its status at a conference in London, and the Porte recognized Otto of Wittelsbach as the first king of an independent Greece by the Kalender Köşkü agreement of 21 July 1832. This was the first time in history that a European territory of the Ottoman Empire had become an independent state. It also set an example for other ethnic groups in the Balkans and led to the further deterioration of the Pax Ottomanica.8
Reform and the churches
In 1839, the Sublime Porte issued the Tanzimat Fermanı, a reform decree aimed at establishing a modern state structure and fostering equality between Muslims and non-Muslim ethnic groups. This decree marked the initiation of a series of reforms undertaken by the Ottoman Empire. Subsequently, in 1856, the Islahat Fermanı, another reform package, was introduced, further expanding the rights of minority communities. Despite the Ottoman Empire's pursuit of modernization, these reforms also exacerbated ethnic tensions.
The Greek Orthodox Church in Istanbul, traditionally regarding itself as superior to all non-Muslim subjects in the Empire, expressed discontent with the principle of "equality between all groups." Seeking to safeguard its influence, the church's resistance prompted minority groups to intensify efforts towards establishing independent churches. Consequently, the Romanian Church was founded in 1865, followed by the establishment of the Bulgarian Church, the Exarchate, by an imperial decree of 11 March 1870. These additions supplemented existing communities, including the Catholics, recognized as a separate millet in 1831 under French patronage, and the Protestants, recognized in 1847–1850. The Bulgarian church struggle had peaked in the late 1860s with Russian backing; the Patriarchate responded by excommunicating the Exarchists as schismatics, and a village could transfer to the Exarchate if two-thirds of its inhabitants voted to do so, which turned every Macedonian village into a battleground between rival clergies.9
The establishment of these churches triggered revolts. Following the unsuccessful revolutions of 1848 in Moldavia and Wallachia, European intervention resulted in the union of these principalities: in 1859 both elected Alexandru Ioan Cuza as their prince, and from 1861 they formed Romania. Cuza was succeeded by Carol of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen in 1866. Simultaneously, Pan-Slavic endeavors spearheaded by Russia found success among Ottoman subjects of Slavic origin.10
Turco-Russian War of 1877-1878
The Great Eastern Crisis
In 1875, a significant insurrection erupted in Herzegovina and Bosnia, prompted by the onerous tax burdens imposed under Ottoman rule. Insurgents initiated assaults and looting against the possessions of influential Muslim residents, who found themselves compelled to defend against the aggression due to the tardiness of Ottoman governmental intervention. The Powers responded with the Andrássy Note of December 1875, demanding reforms, and with the Berlin Memorandum of May 1876, which called for a two-month armistice, a mixed commission and the right of Christians to bear arms under consular supervision.11 Subsequently, the rebellion extended to Bulgaria in April–May 1876. The circumstances in Bosnia-Herzegovina, coupled with Russian backing, prompted the principalities of Serbia and Montenegro to declare war against the Ottoman Empire on 30 June and 2 July 1876. On 8 July 1876, Russia and Austria-Hungary clandestinely entered into the Reichstadt Agreement, outlining the partitioning of the Balkan Peninsula contingent upon the war's outcome: Austria was to have Bosnia-Herzegovina and Russia southern Bessarabia, while Istanbul might become a free city.12 However, these arrangements proved futile as the Ottoman Army successfully quelled the uprising. In May-June 1876, under the leadership of Abdülkerim Nadir Pasha, two divisions decisively suppressed the Bulgarian rebels. On 29 October 1876, Ottoman forces triumphed over the Serbians in the Battle of Alexinats and opened the road to Belgrade, which they were prevented from entering only by a Russian ultimatum of 31 October; an armistice followed on 2 November.13
The Istanbul Conference
The recurring involvement of Russia in Balkan affairs raised apprehensions among European powers, leading to the convening of a conference. The Istanbul Conference (known in Turkish as the Tersane Konferansı, after its venue at the naval arsenal) commenced on 23 December 1876, four months subsequent to Sultan Abdülhamid II's ascension to the Ottoman throne following the brief and mentally troubled reign of Sultan Murat V. The predecessor of Murat, Sultan Abdülaziz, was deposed by his ministers on 30 May 1876, and his subsequent demise a few days later was attributed to suicide. The Istanbul Conference, convened nine times over 29 days, saw the Great Powers deliberating on the demarcation of one or more prospective autonomous Bulgarian provinces within the Ottoman Empire. However, the conference was abruptly interrupted by the Ottoman foreign minister, who informed the delegates of the Ottoman Empire's approval of a new Constitution, ensuring the rights and freedoms of all ethnic minorities.14
Notwithstanding this circumstance, a unanimous agreement eluded the Great Powers, primarily due to the reservations harboured by Britain and France regarding Russian access to the Turkish straits. Russia had already secured Austrian neutrality at Budapest and could count on Bismarck's goodwill. When the Ottoman parliament rejected the London Protocol of 31 March 1877, in which the Powers renewed their reform demands, Russia concluded a transit agreement with Romania on 16 April and declared war on 24 April 1877.15 The Turco-Russian War of 1877-78, alternatively denoted as "93 Harbi" (War of 93) in Turkish (referencing the year 1293 in the Rumi calendar corresponding to 1877), proved to be a significant calamity for the Ottoman Empire. Confronted with a vastly superior Russian Army on two fronts, namely Caucasus and Danube, the Ottoman forces encountered formidable challenges.
Two fronts
On the Caucasian front, the Ottoman Army, under the command of Ahmet Muhtar Pasha, demonstrated resilient resistance against the Russian forces, achieving victories at Halyaz and Zivin, as well as prevailing in the battles of Gedikler (25 August 1877) and Yahniler (4 October 1877). Regrettably, these triumphs could not forestall the relinquishment of Doğubeyazıt and Ardahan. Following the Russian success at the Battle of Alacadağ on 15 October, the cohesion of Ottoman forces began to disintegrate. Subsequently, Kars succumbed in November, and Ahmet Muhtar Pasha's defensive line between Kars and Erzurum collapsed shortly thereafter.
On the Danube front, three Turkish armies, commanded by Abdülkerim Nadir Pasha, confronted the Russian Army, supported by Romanian, Serbian, and Montenegrin units. Hostilities commenced on 21 June 1877 with a significant Russian offensive. Following the capture of Trnova and Nicopolis, the Russians advanced to the Pass of Shipka. The Turkish army's most noteworthy success during this period was the legendary defence of Pleven, where troops led by Gazi Osman Pasha withstood the Russian siege for five months, yielding only in the face of the imminent threat of starvation when enemy forces severed all supply routes to the fortified city. Plevna and Ahmed Muhtar's battles in the Caucasus were, in the words of the Turkish official history, the only bright spots of the war.16 Following the fall of Pleven, the Russians rapidly advanced into Ottoman territory, capturing Sofia, Stara Zagora, and Plovdiv, and crossing the River Maritsa. Edirne succumbed on 20 January 1878, and Russian forces penetrated into the suburbs of Istanbul. The civilian population suffered even more than the army: the Muslims of Eski Zağra (Stara Zagora), for example, were massacred after General Gurko's troops entered the town.17
San Stefano and Berlin
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Having sustained substantial losses and facing pressure from the British, Russia acquiesced to the truce proposed by the Ottoman Empire but persisted in advancing towards Istanbul. In response, Britain dispatched a fleet of battleships to dissuade Russia from entering the city, leading to the halting of Russian troops at San Stefano (present-day Yeşilköy) in the suburbs of the Ottoman capital. Subsequently, with the signing of the Treaty of San Stefano on 3 March 1878, the Ottoman Empire acknowledged the independence of Romania, Serbia, Montenegro, and the autonomy of a "Greater Bulgaria" stretching from the Danube to the Aegean and including Macedonia and much of Thrace. Batum, Kars, Ardahan and Doğubayazıt went to Russia in part payment of the indemnity, and Kotur to Iran. Fearing that Russia would now dominate the Balkans, Abdülhamid concluded a defensive alliance with Britain on 4 June 1878, by which he handed Cyprus over to British administration.18 Later, the Great Powers compelled revisions to this treaty during the Congress of Berlin. As per prior agreements among the Great Powers, preventing the establishment of a sizeable new Slavic state, Bulgaria was to be divided. The northern part became an autonomous principality between the Danube and the Balkan range, and the southern part the autonomous province of Eastern Rumelia, with a Christian governor appointed by the sultan. Simultaneously, the Macedonian region, initially part of Bulgaria under San Stefano, was to be placed back under direct Ottoman administration. Serbia and Montenegro became fully independent, Romania received Dobruja in exchange for southern Bessarabia, Austria-Hungary was authorized to occupy Bosnia-Herzegovina and to garrison the Sanjak of Novi Pazar, and Russia kept Kars, Ardahan and Batum.19
The conflict resulted in a decline in the Muslim population in Bulgaria between 1876 and 1882, with an estimated 262,000 fatalities due to various reasons and 515,000 individuals compelled to emigrate.20 The Turks, who had formed about half of Bulgaria's population, became a minority in their own homeland.
Nevertheless, the Congress of Berlin engendered considerable tensions among the Balkan nations as it deviated from the principle of nationality in delineating new boundaries. The long-standing coexistence of different nationalities in many areas made it impracticable to adhere strictly to this principle. None of the Balkan nations achieved national unification within a single state, prompting the pursuit of this goal to become a focal point in their foreign policies. The Ottomans had lost half of their European lands; Serbia resented the Austrian occupation of Bosnia, Romania the loss of Bessarabia, Bulgaria the loss of its San Stefano frontiers, and Greece the failure to obtain Thessaly and Epirus.21 This ambition led to a series of crises and diplomatic endeavours aimed at resolving the issues stemming from the Congress of Berlin. The signing of the second "League of Three Emperors" convention by Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary on 18 June 1881, which allowed Austria to annex Bosnia whenever it wished and promised not to oppose a union of Bulgaria and Eastern Rumelia, failed to appease the Balkan nationalists.22
Eastern Rumelia and Crete
To start with, Bulgarians expressed dissatisfaction with the arrangements in Berlin. On 18 September 1885, Bulgarian militia in East Rumelia launched an assault on the Ottoman Government House in Plovdiv (Filibe), compelling Governor Gavril Pasha to vacate the city. They assumed control of all transportation and communication infrastructure, subsequently proclaiming the annexation of East Rumelia to the Principality of Bulgaria. The parliament in Sofia endorsed this annexation, and Prince Alexander ascended to the throne as the ruler of both Bulgaria and East Rumelia. Abdülhamid, who regarded the province as having been lost at Berlin, refused to go to war over it. Serbia did, declaring war on Bulgaria on 14 November 1885, only to be routed at Slivnitsa; the peace of Bucharest of 3 March 1886 restored the status quo, and the Tophane conference in Istanbul formally entrusted the governorship of Eastern Rumelia to the Bulgarian prince in April 1886.23
Simultaneously, the broader Balkan region was descending into a state of chronic instability, with the island of Crete emerging as one of its most explosive flashpoints. The island's Greek Christian majority had long chafed under Ottoman rule, rising in a three-year revolt in 1866 and winning a measure of self-government by the Halepa Pact of 1878, and by the mid-1890s a full-scale insurgency had taken hold, fueled by an overwhelming popular desire for unification with the Greek mainland.24 The uprising was marked by severe intercommunal violence between the island's Greek and Muslim populations, drawing the alarmed attention of the Great Powers, who feared the crisis could ignite a broader regional conflict. Britain, France, Russia, Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Germany intervened diplomatically, pressuring the Sublime Porte to extend autonomous status to the island as a compromise that might satisfy Cretan aspirations without formally dismembering Ottoman territory. The arrangement satisfied no one. Greece, emboldened by nationalist sentiment at home and increasingly unable to resist public pressure, refused to accept anything short of complete unification and dispatched troops to the island in early 1897.
The crisis rapidly escalated into open war. In April 1897, Greek irregulars and then the Greek army crossed into Ottoman-held Thessaly and Epirus, and the Ottoman Empire declared war on 18 April, triggering a conflict that quickly exposed the gulf between Greek ambition and Greek military preparedness. The Ottoman army, reorganized and stiffened by German military advisors under Colmar von der Goltz, proved far more formidable than the Greeks had anticipated. Within weeks, Turkish forces under Edhem Pasha had routed the Greek army in Thessaly, reversed the initial Greek advances, and, after taking the Furka pass north of Thermopylae, were pressing southward toward Athens itself, where riots brought down the government. The speed and completeness of the Ottoman military success shocked European opinion. Once again, the Great Powers intervened, driven less by sympathy for Greece than by concern that a total Ottoman victory would destabilize the region further and threaten the delicate balance of interests each power maintained in the Eastern Mediterranean. Armistices were signed on 19 and 20 May, and peace in Istanbul on 4 December 1897.25 The terms they brokered were, under the circumstances, remarkably favorable to the defeated Greeks. Greece ceded only minor border adjustments and paid a modest indemnity, while Crete was placed under an international administration with Prince George of Greece appointed as High Commissioner. This settlement brought the island a step closer to the very unification the Porte had sought to prevent, and although full unification with Greece would not be formally achieved until 1913, the outcome of 1897 had already rendered it a matter of time.
The Macedonian Issue
Abdülhamid's balancing act
Sultan Abdülhamid pursued a policy in addressing challenges in the Balkans by exploiting conflicts among the newly independent Balkan states, thereby thwarting their potential unity against the Ottoman Empire. This strategy found justification in the absence of shared objectives among the Balkan states during a period marked by pervasive mistrust. Abdülhamid II successfully impeded movements in the Balkans by capitalizing on this discord. Nevertheless, the Sublime Porte refrained from challenging the fait accompli of Bulgaria. Instead, through an agreement signed in 1886, it sanctioned the annexation, albeit with the stipulation that the kaza of Kırcaali and a number of Pomak villages in the Rhodope Mountains, which had Muslim majorities, would be attached to the vilayet of Edirne and remain within the Ottoman Empire's boundaries.26 After the Berlin settlement, what remained of Ottoman Macedonia consisted of the vilayets of Salonica and Monastir and the sanjaks of Üsküp (Skopje) and Serfice, roughly the region between the Šar mountains, the Rhodopes, Lake Ohrid and the Aegean.27
Rival claims
The concept of a "Greater Bulgaria" necessitated access to the Aegean Sea and the acquisition of Macedonia. However, multiple claimants, including Serbia and Greece, contended that the province should rightfully belong to them. Each invoked history: the Greeks pointed to Alexander the Great and Byzantium, the Bulgarians to the medieval tsars Krum, Omurtag and Simeon, and the Serbs to the empire of Stefan Dušan. Each also tried to prove that it held a majority of the population, and for that purpose used three instruments in particular: armed bands (çetes), priests and schoolteachers. In the struggle for the villages, the rival Christian nationalities often fought one another more fiercely than they fought the Ottoman state.28 This clash of interests transformed Macedonia into a fertile ground for bands and terrorist organizations, predominantly Bulgarian, causing concern for both the Serbs and the Greeks. The Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO), founded in Salonica in 1893, aimed at autonomy for Macedonia, while the Supreme Macedonian-Adrianople Committee in Sofia worked for outright union with Bulgaria; the rivalry between the two wings culminated in the murder of the "Supremist" Boris Sarafov in Sofia in 1907 on the orders of the IMRO leader Yane Sandanski.29 The Austro-Russian understanding of May 1897, which provided that whatever the Ottomans lost in the Balkans would be shared among the small states so as to preserve a balance between them, only intensified the competition.30
Bands and terror
Abdülhamid's endeavours to institute reforms in Macedonia in 1902 proved futile. In January 1899, the revolutionaries had told the European ambassadors that the Turks must be given a pretext for a massacre in order to move Christian Europe; in 1901 they kidnapped an American missionary, Ellen Stone, and released her only on payment of a large ransom.31 Subsequently, in 1903, a committee in Salonica orchestrated the bombing of the Ottoman Bank branch, catalysing a widespread revolt involving Macedonian Slavs, Albanians, and Bulgarians, the Ilinden (St Elijah's Day) uprising of August 1903, in which some 26,000 rebels took part. The uprising persisted for three months before being quelled by the Turkish army. According to the revolutionaries' own reckoning, 198 villages were burned, about 30,000 people fled to Bulgaria, 71,000 were left homeless and some 6,000 were killed.32 The Powers reacted with the Mürzsteg program of October 1903, which appointed Russian and Austrian civil agents to supervise the Ottoman inspector-general, Hüseyin Hilmi Pasha, and placed a reorganized gendarmerie under an Italian general, Emilio De Giorgis, with foreign officers in charge of each sector: Austria-Hungary at Üsküp, Italy at Monastir, Russia at Salonica, France at Serres and Britain at Drama. When the Porte refused an international financial commission in 1905, the Powers sent a fleet to seize the customs and post offices at Mytilene and Lemnos until the sultan gave way.33
The entirety of Macedonia found itself besieged by a series of raids, acts of arson, kidnappings, and the payment of ransom from government coffers, as well as train robberies, destruction, and bloodshed. The atmosphere was tense, with people in a perpetual state of vigilance. Regardless of their religious or linguistic affiliations, Macedonian villagers went to bed uncertain whether they would awaken the following morning. Muslim villages, farms, and even towns faced constant threats from marauding bands. The region was in the grip of terror and anarchy, with formidable gangs considering it their opportune moment for reprisal against a government that seemed powerless. Indeed, the Ottoman government itself conducted raids on villages in an effort to uncover the origins of these bands, confiscating firearms and grenades. Churches, priest lodgings, schools, and teacher hostels served as de facto arsenals, and individuals apprehended in possession of such weaponry faced sentences ranging from imprisonment and exile to, in certain instances, execution. However, timely intervention by the Russian Consul General, along with his assistance and intercession, provided swift relief. Reflecting on my childhood, likely during the 1905 uprising, I recall Greek and Bulgarian band members being liberated from the Edirne prison by the Russian Consul General. They were triumphantly returned to their villages amid cheers and celebrations...
as recounted by Turkish historian Şevket Süreyya Aydemir
Aydemir, who was born in Edirne in 1897, was describing the atmosphere of his own childhood.34 As Hallı notes, the bands' first enemy was often each other rather than the Ottoman state, but their combined effect was to make Macedonia ungovernable and to convince European opinion that only foreign supervision could bring order.35
Revolution and annexation
In 1908, the Young Turk Revolution reinstated the constitutional order in Turkey, ushering in a representative and multi-ethnic Ottoman parliament. Of the 275 deputies, 140 were Turks, 87 represented Muslim minorities, and 48 hailed from non-Muslim communities, including 23 Greeks, 12 Armenians, 5 Jews, 4 Bulgarians, 3 Serbs, and 1 Romanian.36 This development kindled heightened expectations for reforms and autonomy among ethnic groups in the Balkans.
In October 1908, Austria-Hungary seized the opportunity presented by the Ottoman Empire's domestic political turmoil to formally annex Bosnia-Herzegovina, a region it had occupied and administered since the Congress of Berlin in 1878. The annexation was a calculated act of imperial opportunism, timed to coincide with the upheaval following the Young Turk Revolution, when the Ottoman government was too preoccupied with its own internal crisis to mount an effective response. At Buchlau on 15 September 1908, the Austrian foreign minister Alois von Aehrenthal had obtained the consent of his Russian counterpart, Alexander Izvolsky, in return for vague promises to open the Straits to Russian warships; the annexation was proclaimed on 5 October.37 The move sent shockwaves across the Balkans and beyond. For Serbia, which had long regarded Bosnia-Herzegovina as a natural sphere of influence and a future component of a Greater Serbian state, the annexation was a profound humiliation, igniting a fury that would simmer for years. Russia, positioning itself as the protector of Slavic interests, protested vigorously but ultimately lacked the military readiness to translate its outrage into action. Concurrently, Bulgaria declared full independence from nominal Ottoman suzerainty, a status the Sublime Porte was compelled to recognize in 1909 after receiving financial compensation. The following years brought further shocks to Ottoman authority in the region, with a major Albanian insurrection erupting in Kosovo in 1910 and Montenegro formally establishing itself as a kingdom, further shrinking the Empire's European footprint.
The cumulative effect of these developments was to sharpen the territorial ambitions of every Balkan state to an acute degree. Serbia sought to recover what it regarded as historically Serb lands, with Novi Pazar and Kosovo occupying a particularly charged place in the national imagination as the heartland of the medieval Serbian kingdom. Greece looked to settle old scores, aspiring to complete the unification of Crete with the mainland and to reverse the humiliations of 1897 in Thessaly and Epirus. Bulgaria, whose population had strong ethnic and cultural ties to communities living under Ottoman rule in Thrace and Macedonia, cast its gaze eastward and southward, determined to bring those territories within its borders. Each of these states nursed its own grievances and ambitions, but they also shared a common interest, which was the further dismemberment of what remained of Ottoman Europe. What had once seemed like an intractable strategic problem, how to coordinate the competing claims of rival Balkan nationalisms, was gradually resolving itself into a common cause against a weakening common adversary.
In the years following 1908, events gathered a momentum that the Ottoman Empire was increasingly powerless to arrest. The Young Turk government, despite its reformist ambitions, found itself unable to arrest the centrifugal forces pulling the Empire's European territories apart. Diplomatic crises multiplied, military resources were stretched thin across multiple fronts, and the confidence of the Balkan states grew with each demonstration of Ottoman weakness. The stage was being set, with a speed that caught even experienced observers off guard, for the final and decisive struggle over the Empire's remaining Balkan possessions.38
Balkan States against the Ottoman Empire
From Bosnia to the Balkan League
The Austrian annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908 constitutes a pivotal historical juncture, as it served to galvanize the Slavic populations against Austrian expansionist endeavors. This occurrence not only signifies the zenith of the conflict between Slavism and Germanism but also steered the gaze of the newly-independent Balkan states towards the division of the remaining Ottoman territories in Europe.39
With their ambitions for Bosnia and Herzegovina dashed by the Austrian annexation, the Serbs redirected their focus towards expansion and the restoration of the Serbian Kingdom of the 14th century, concentrating efforts on Kosovo and southern regions. Given that the annexation of Bosnia impeded their path to the Adriatic, the Serbs subsequently set their sights on Macedonia as a gateway to the Aegean.
From this juncture onward, a sequence of alliances has either united the Balkan states or brought them into confrontation with one another. Notably, Bulgaria enjoyed the backing of Russia and harbored ambitions concerning Macedonia. In Greece, a progressive administration led by Eleftherios Venizelos embraced the Μεγάλη Ιδέα - Megali Idea, the goal of establishing a Greek state encompassing all ethnic Greeks and incorporating Ottoman territories with substantial Greek populations, including those in Anatolia. This objective, along with the matter of Crete, occupied a prominent position on its agenda. Greek bands operated actively in Macedonia, paralleling the actions of the Bulgarians. Concurrently, in August 1910, Montenegro emulated Bulgaria's precedent by assuming the status of a kingdom.
Distinct differences of opinion arose among the Balkan states concerning Macedonia. Bulgaria advocated for the province's autonomy, which it expected to lead to eventual union, while Serbia and Greece pursued a partition. Nevertheless, when Italy initiated an invasion of Tripolitania in September 1911, the Balkan states deemed it opportune to set aside their dissimilarities and jointly act against the faltering Ottoman Empire. Russian diplomacy first tried to bring about a Balkan union that would include the Ottomans themselves, with an eye on the Straits; when Istanbul declined, St Petersburg backed a league of the Christian states alone, ostensibly to preserve the status quo, in reality as a weapon against Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire.40 In the spring of 1912, consultations among Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece culminated in the establishment of a network of military alliances, subsequently known as the Balkan League. Montenegro joined this coalition at a later stage.
The cornerstone was the Serbo-Bulgarian treaty of 13 March 1912 (29 February in the Julian calendar). Its public articles promised mutual assistance against any Great Power that tried to annex Balkan territory, an obvious reference to Austria-Hungary; a secret annex provided that the two states would act together in the event of internal disorder in the Ottoman Empire, divided Macedonia into a Serbian zone in the north, an "uncontested" Bulgarian zone in the south and east, and a "contested zone" in between whose fate was to be decided by the arbitration of the tsar.41 A military convention followed on 12 May, a general staff agreement at Varna on 1 July, and a further agreement in Sofia on 14 September by which the whole Serbian army was to be deployed in Macedonia while Bulgaria concentrated its forces on the Maritsa. Greece, approached by Venizelos as early as the autumn of 1911, signed a defensive alliance with Bulgaria on 29 May 1912 and a military convention on 22 September. Montenegro, which reached a verbal agreement with Bulgaria in August, undertook to start the war first, with some 40,000 men against an estimated 100,000 Ottoman troops, and received a Bulgarian loan of 2,250,000 leva; Serbia and Montenegro sealed their own alliance at Lucerne on 27 September 1912, with Russia paying Montenegro's costs.42 Not every Russian leader welcomed the result. When the Bulgarian politician Stoyan Danev visited St Petersburg, Nicholas II told him that Bulgaria must not go to war with Turkey, since Russia could not fight and would not be ready for several years.43
The Great Powers
The Great Powers of Europe were inclined towards maintaining the status quo in the Balkans. The preservation of the Ottoman Empire served their interests in the region. Alternatively, should the Ottoman Empire prove untenable, the preference was for a partitioning of the Balkans among smaller nations, rather than allowing a single dominant power to control the entire area. In essence, if the Ottoman Empire were to exit the stage, Britain and France would prefer to witness a Balkan alliance under the auspices of Russia, as opposed to the German Empire asserting control in the Balkans. While they sought to avoid war, they did not oppose the formation of a Balkan alliance against the Ottoman Empire. Germany's sympathies, moreover, were not unambiguous: the Greek crown prince Constantine and his wife Sophie, the Kaiser's sister, had won Wilhelm II's affection, and "unser Tino" could count on a hearing in Berlin. When the French prime minister Raymond Poincaré visited St Petersburg in August 1912, Sergei Sazonov told him that the League was directed not only against the Ottomans but also against Germany and Austria.44
Illusions in Istanbul
Meanwhile, the Sublime Porte displayed profound negligence. Ottoman politicians were deeply entangled in internal conflicts and misled by the false assurances of peace from the Russians and Bulgarians, rendering them oblivious to the realities unfolding in the Balkans. The Ottoman government learned of the Serbo-Bulgarian treaty only when the Balkan states mobilized, although the British minister in Sofia had known of it for months; according to the testimony of the acting chief of the General Staff, Hadi Pasha, the General Staff was unaware of the alliances and heard of the Bulgarian mobilization only the day after it was ordered.45 Two months after alliances were forged among Balkan States, Grand Vizier Sait Pasha made the following statements in parliament, to applause from the deputies:
Our relations with the Balkan governments are very favourable... As a prudent statesman, Monsieur Venizelos is working for peace rather than war... The fact that a visionary person who appreciates our common relations like Monsieur Sazanov occupied the post of the Russian Foreign Minister is a sufficient guarantee for us to be in good terms with Russia.
Grand Vizier Sait Pasha in the Ottoman parliament, 1912
His foreign minister, Asım Bey, told the deputies on 20 July 1912 that the empire's foreign relations were "many times better than twelve months ago."46 However, even after the Sait Pasha government was succeeded by the high-profile "Grand Cabinet" under Gazi Ahmet Muhtar Pasha, negligence persisted. The new Foreign Minister, Gabriel Noradunkian, asserted that he could assure the Parliament that the Balkan States had no intention of attacking the Ottoman Empire; he gave this guarantee about a month before the war broke out.47 The Ottoman envoy in Sofia was no better informed. Received by King Ferdinand, who was suffering from rheumatism, he was asked: "Excellency, they say I want war. Look at me: am I in a state to fight?" The envoy telegraphed home that he was "as sure of the Balkans as of my faith. No war can break out."48
The Sublime Porte's negligence was evident in certain actions. While forming alliances with other Balkan states, Serbia purchased artillery guns from the French firm of Schneider-Creusot. However, Austria-Hungary refused to permit the transportation of these guns and ammunition through its territories. In a display of naivety, the Sait Pasha government agreed to transport the guns by sea to Salonica and then by train to Serbia, on condition that Serbia remain neutral. Gazi Ahmet Muhtar Pasha later realized the situation and revoked permission; the last consignment was seized in Salonica only on 15 October. Nevertheless, Serbia had acquired enough guns by then to use against the Ottoman Empire.49 Furthermore, in August 1912, the government disbanded large numbers of well-trained and experienced troops stationed in the Balkans, ostensibly to showcase peaceful intentions: their discharge had already been postponed for two years for fear of an Italian landing, and the men of the 1908 class now went home while the Bulgarians rehearsed assaults on the forts of Edirne.50 Additionally, many of the army's best units were far from the Balkans: the First Army alone had sent 28 infantry and rifle battalions out of its own area, to Yemen, Scutari, the Aegean coast and Damascus, further highlighting the Sublime Porte's lack of foresight.51 The acting chief of the General Staff, Hadi Pasha, had warned in a memorandum of 29 September 1912 that the army would need at least five years to be ready, and an extraordinary meeting of the cabinet with senior generals on 8 October concluded that it would be difficult even to secure the empire's defense.52
The road to war
During the summer of 1912, amidst a significant uprising in Albania, insurgent activities escalated in Macedonia with the intention of fabricating a pretext for engaging in war against the Ottoman Empire. A wave of bombings struck railway lines, post offices and public buildings. The detonation of two bombs in the vegetable and grain markets of Kočani (Koçana), in the vilayet of Kosovo, served as the catalyst. In the panic that followed, soldiers fired at random into the crowd and fighting broke out between Muslims and Christians. According to a report by a French officer of the international gendarmerie, 47 people were killed (20 Muslims, 25 Bulgarians and two Jews) and 49 wounded, although European opinion counted only the Bulgarian victims. This situation provided Bulgaria with grounds to register a protest against the Ottoman Empire, and the "Kočani massacre" caused a wave of indignation in Sofia.53 A parallel occurrence transpired in Greece when a bomb exploded on the island of Samos, eliciting a similar chain of events. In Bulgaria, mass rallies demanded autonomy for Macedonia from April 1912 onwards, and on 13 August a crown council under King Ferdinand at Čamkorija decided on war if Article 23 of the Treaty of Berlin, which promised reforms in the Ottoman Balkans, was not implemented.54
The Great Powers, with the exception of Russia, expressed reluctance towards a conflict that could potentially engulf Europe. France took the lead in advocating measures to avert the war, driven by the fact that over half of the Ottoman public debt at that juncture was owed to French capital. France stood to incur substantial losses in the event of a war. On 1 October 1912, Raymond Poincaré, then prime minister and foreign minister, declared the imperative to preserve the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire and maintain the status quo in the Balkans. He proposed that the Sublime Porte implement a reform package for the Balkans, based on the provincial law drafted for Rumelia in 1880. While the government of Gazi Ahmet Muhtar Pasha accepted this proposal, promising on 6 October to apply the law, the Balkan states persisted in their mobilization efforts.55 The Unionist press called the concession a surrender. On 4 October, a mass rally of the Committee of Union and Progress at Sultanahmet, addressed by Talat, Ömer Naci, Hasan Fehmi, Agop Boyacıyan and Nesim Mazliah among others, sent crowds through the streets chanting "We want war!" and "To Sofia!"56 In Tanin, the young writer Enis Avni (later known as Aka Gündüz) published an oath, sworn at the tomb of Mehmed the Conqueror, to turn the enemy's rose gardens into graveyards with his bayonet.57 Eventually, the Turks also decided to commence mobilization. A limited mobilization of the Edirne region was ordered on 23 September; after the Balkan states announced a general mobilization on 30 September, the Ottoman Empire followed suit on 1 October 1912, although mobilization was not declared in Syria, Mesopotamia and the eastern provinces.58
The War Begins
Ultimatums and declarations
Nevertheless, the Balkan states exhibited a pronounced willingness for war. On 8 October, Montenegro officially declared war against the Ottoman Empire, asserting that it perceived the demonstrations outside its embassy in Istanbul as a hostile act; the declaration was voted by the Montenegrin assembly on the proposal of King Nikola himself.59 Subsequently, the Great Powers, with Russia and Austria-Hungary acting in their name, issued a warning to the four Balkan states and the Ottoman Empire. It conveyed their opposition to any actions disrupting peace, the expectation that the Ottoman Empire would implement the promised reforms, and a warning that if war persisted between the Balkan states and the Ottoman Empire, the Great Powers would not endorse alterations to the territorial status quo, whatever the outcome.60
On 12 October, the governments of Serbia, Greece, and Bulgaria presented an ultimatum to the Sublime Porte, including demands they were aware could not be met: autonomy for the European provinces on the basis of nationality, Belgian or Swiss governors-general, elected provincial assemblies, a local gendarmerie and militia, supervision by the ambassadors of the Powers and the four Balkan states, and the cancellation of the Ottoman mobilization.61 At the same moment the Porte hurried to end the Italian war: the preliminary peace with Italy was signed at Ouchy, near Lausanne, on 15 October, and the final treaty on 18 October.62 The Ottoman Empire declared war on the Balkan states on 16 October, prompting Bulgaria and Serbia to declare war on 17 October, with Greece following suit two days later.63 The Porte's last diplomatic move, Kutlu notes, was an offer of Suda Bay in Crete to Britain in return for mediation.
There exists no other European state capable of demonstrating the same degree of patience and tolerance as we do. The more reforms we undertake, the more aggressive and insolent the Balkan States become... Now war is upon us. Let there be war. We neither sought nor actively instigated its outbreak. Nevertheless, we shall engage in this conflict with unwavering strength and patriotism, even though history will not attribute its genesis to us. Should we venture into enemy territory, our conduct will mirror that of guests in a host's abode. If we face defeat, we shall confront it with dignity. From our side, there shall be neither bloodshed nor falsehoods.
Ottoman Foreign Minister Noradunkian
Noradunkian, an Ottoman Armenian and one of the empire's most experienced international lawyers, had argued in cabinet that the onus of declaring war should be left to the enemy, against the war minister Nazım Pasha, who on 15 October urged an immediate declaration on the grounds that enough troops were already in Thrace.64
An army unprepared
In reality, the Ottoman Empire was ill-prepared for a Balkan conflict, preoccupied with the ongoing Italian issues in North Africa and the Aegean Sea and with revolts in Yemen, Asir and Albania. The state of the army itself was suboptimal, despite attempts, with the aid of German military experts, to reform the armed forces. However, tangible results necessitated time.65 Under Abdülhamid, live-firing exercises had been all but banned and new weapons kept locked in depots; the manoeuvres held near Edirne and Lüleburgaz in 1909 had shown the army to be unfit for war.66 The reorganization of 1910 into army corps and triangular divisions was incomplete, and the infant formations could not absorb the loss of trained men and the sudden influx of raw recruits.67 With a population of some 24 million, the empire had a theoretical pool of 730,000 men, but the General Staff counted only its roughly 15 million Muslims as reliable. There were only 713,404 rifles for the 1,092,448 men the mobilization plans required, so that about a fifth of the 706,966 men mobilized in the First and Second Armies had no rifle; there were some 600 rounds per rifle instead of the planned 1,000, only 388 machine guns, and 620 shells per field gun. The army was also short of 47,834 draught animals, and the soldiers' ration provided only about 80 percent of the calories a peasant ate at home.68 One of the most significant developments was the enlistment of non-Muslim male subjects alongside Muslims, a departure from the historical norm.
The battalions that marched to the front were a patchwork. According to Kutlu, in most of them two-fifths of the men were untrained or had received only twenty days of training, two-fifths were reservists (redif) and only one-fifth were regulars; many reserve officers had forgotten their trade. Christian conscripts served for the first time on a large scale, and the experience was not a happy one on either side: many young Christians paid the exemption fee or fled abroad, while the official idea of an "Islamic army" made non-Muslim soldiers feel unwelcome. Kutlu nonetheless notes that some 8,000–10,000 Armenian conscripts from Anatolia served loyally, while a number of Dashnak and Hunchak volunteers fought on the Bulgarian and Serbian side.69
Politics in Istanbul
Simultaneously, political upheaval gripped Istanbul. The Committee of Union and Progress had departed from the government in July 1912, and upon the outbreak of war, the Grand Cabinet led by Gazi Ahmet Muhtar Pasha also resigned. The subsequent government, formed on 29 October under the veteran and anglophile Kâmil Pasha, was anti-Committee, mirroring its predecessor.70 However, the army remained significantly influenced by the Committee, leading to profound conflicts between the government and the military. After the counter-revolution of 31 March 1909 and the purge of the officer corps that followed, the senior commanders, newly appointed by governments hostile to the Committee, were mostly opponents of the CUP, while the junior officers were mostly its supporters; Uyar describes rival officer cliques fighting for political control and engineering the elimination of their opponents on the very eve of war.71
Plans and armies
As hostilities commenced, Minister of War Nazım Pasha assumed command of the Ottoman army forces on behalf of the Sultan; Mahmud Şevket Pasha, the former war minister, declined an army command, which he suspected was a trap. The armed forces designated to engage in the Balkans were organized into two major armies: the Eastern Army (or Thrace Army) tasked with confronting the Bulgarians, and the Western Army (or Macedonia Army) assigned to face the Serbs, Greeks and Montenegrins. Instead of using the existing field armies, the General Staff improvised these two new army groups out of three numbered armies, so that both had to defend vast areas while garrisoning the fortresses of Edirne, Shkoder (İşkodra) and Ioannina (Yanya), the Dardanelles, provincial centres and lines of communication.72 The Eastern Army, under the command of Abdullah Pasha, comprised four regular army corps (the I, II, III and IV) and three provisional reserve corps, with a cavalry division and brigade, slated to deploy along the line between Didymoteicho and Kırk Kilise (modern-day Kırklareli). Mahmut Muhtar Pasha, who had relinquished his post as Minister of the Navy, led the III Corps stationed at Kırk Kilise, while Şükrü Pasha defended the city of Edirne (formerly Adrianople), with its seventeen forts spread over a perimeter of some 40 kilometres, and the IV Corps positioned west of Edirne, under the command of Abuk Ahmet Pasha.73 A further Reserve Army was formed in Istanbul under Hurşit Pasha.74
Behind these dispositions lay a long debate about strategy. The war plan of 1910, drawn up by the chief of the General Staff Ahmed İzzet Pasha after the manoeuvres of that year, foresaw Edirne as a rock that would split the Bulgarian torrent, while five corps concentrated behind it would counterattack from Vize or Dimetoka; an alternative "Plan No. 5" against all four Balkan states envisaged concentration further back, behind the Ergene, around Saray–Muradlı or even at Çatalca.75 Ahmed İzzet, however, left for Yemen in early 1911 and did not return until 1913, and Nazım Pasha based his strategy on an early offensive. In his memoirs Abdullah Pasha claimed that İzzet's plan for a war against all four states had been deliberately concealed so as not to upset Nazım's decision to "attack from the start"; Sait Pertev, then head of operations, denied that anyone on the staff had favored such a course and blamed Nazım's preference for the offensive on the bitter memories of 1877–78 and on the cabinet's faith in the Powers' guarantees.76 The result, in Uyar's judgment, was an attempt to fight on the strategic defensive and the operational offensive at the same time, as German doctrine taught, without the means to do either: the plan allowed only 30 days for mobilization and concentration and assumed that railways and sea lanes would stay open, whereas the single-track railway collapsed under the traffic, the Greek navy closed the Aegean, and half the units from Anatolia never reached their destinations.77
The Western Army, headquartered in Salonica and under the command of Ali Rıza Pasha, consisted of three groups designated for the Serbo-Bulgarian border, the Montenegrin front, and the Epirus and Thessaly fronts: the Vardar Army of three corps around Skopje, the Struma Corps, the VIII Provisional Corps at Salonica, the Yanya Corps and the Shkoder garrison, with several independent detachments in Kosovo and the Sanjak.78 However, at the outbreak of the war, the Ottoman army had not completed its mobilization. The Eastern Army, with approximately 115,000 men, fell significantly short of its normal wartime strength of 478,850, while the Western Army, numbering 188,000 men, was below its expected strength of 418,900. In essence, the Ottoman army entered the war with a force of approximately 300,000, pitted against the combined Balkan forces numbering around 610,000, and about one man in eight had no rifle.79
Notably, at this early stage, certain German officers stationed in Istanbul expressed their desire to participate in the conflict. Nazım Pasha, however, was disinclined to involve the Germans, a sentiment shared by the German Foreign Ministry. A compromise was reached, resulting in five officers, including Major Otto Stephan Hermann von Lossow and Major Gustav von Hochwächter, being naturalized as Ottoman citizens and joining the Ottoman army. Hochwächter, who served on Mahmud Muhtar Pasha's staff, found the young officers eager but the army as a whole unready for war.80
On 19 October 1912, Bulgarian forces breached the Ottoman border, advancing towards Edirne. General Nikola Ivanov, leading the Bulgarian Second Army, swiftly neutralized the feeble Ottoman border units, subsequently besieging Şükrü Pasha's forces in Edirne from the north and west. Concurrently, General Vasil Kutinchev's Bulgarian First Army crossed the border, engaging Ottoman forces, while the Third Army under General Radko Dimitriev initiated its march towards Kırk Kilise. Dimitriev had brought his army forward in great secrecy, and the Ottoman command did not know where it was.81 In Thrace, 168 Bulgarian battalions faced 130 Ottoman battalions, 43 of which were locked up in Edirne.82
Ottoman Defeats and the Balkan Advance
Kırk Kilise
Abdullah Pasha, the commander of the Ottoman Eastern Army, expressed reluctance towards initiating a counter-offensive; nevertheless, he found himself compelled to launch an attack upon receiving a communication from the Minister of War, Nazım Pasha, during the late hours of 20 October. Nazım had already urged a general offensive by telegram on 16 October, and in Abdullah's view the greatest failing of the high command was its insistence on constant attacks without regard to the real condition of the army.83 Commencing on 22 October, the Ottoman offensive targeted the Bulgarian positions situated between Edirne and Kırk Kilise. The plan was to pin down the bulk of the Bulgarians in front of Edirne and to envelop the rest from the north and south; but the Bulgarian command left only a weak force around Edirne and threw its main strength against the Kırk Kilise line, so that the Ottoman attackers found themselves facing an enemy more than twice their strength with better artillery.84 The ensuing engagement between the Ottoman Eastern Army and the Bulgarian First and Third Armies, commonly referred to as the Battle of Kırk Kilise (or Petra–Seliolu–Eskipolos), unfolded southwest of the town.
After two days of skirmishes, panic ensued among the soldiers of Mahmut Muhtar Pasha's III Corps, leading them to prematurely retreat from the battlefield, under the mistaken belief of impending defeat, even though the overall situation remained inconclusive. During the night of 22–23 October the 3rd Infantry Division panicked, and Abdullah ordered a limited withdrawal at three in the morning. The Bulgarians, who used Turkish-speaking soldiers to approach the trenches of the Afyon reserve division and were helped by an aeroplane overhead, broke the Ottoman line with bayonet charges; Mahmud Muhtar tried to halt the fugitives by striking them with the flat of his sword, but by the afternoon of 23 October the III Corps was retreating, and the next day Abdullah ordered the whole army to fall back to the Pınarhisar–Lüleburgaz line, more than 30 kilometres to the rear.85 The retreat cost the III Corps alone 55 guns and more than 2,000 men; the I Corps left 140 badly wounded men behind at Yenice, and the troops abandoned baggage, ammunition and even an aeroplane.86
Kırk Kilise witnessed utter chaos as Bulgarian forces, anticipating a Turkish assault that failed to materialize, dispatched scouts to investigate. By this point, Turkish troops and the city's Muslim inhabitants had already evacuated, leaving only the Christian population, who greeted the Bulgarian occupation with open arms; when Mahmud Muhtar Pasha reached the town on the evening of 23 October, he found it completely deserted by its inhabitants. The Bulgarians, Kutlu writes, realized the scale of their victory only after a day, when they found the Ottoman depots full. The Battle of Kırk Kilise delivered a significant blow to the Ottoman forces and marked an uncomplicated triumph for the Bulgarians.87 Mahmud Muhtar's own verdict was scathing: "No retreat and flight so causeless can be found in military history... The Bulgarians won a great victory without a battle, and the Turks were routed without being pressed, abandoning a third of their war material because of rain and mud." He blamed, among other things, the unfinished road from Vize to Kırk Kilise, where material worth some 250,000 lira sank in the mud.88
I posit that culpability rests with those responsible for thrusting the Turkish soldiers to the forefront amidst these adverse circumstances. Consideration should be given to the morale of Anatolian peasants accustomed to warmer climates, who find themselves traversing unfamiliar territories in conditions of hunger and thirst, lacking clarity regarding the purpose of their engagement in warfare and unacquainted with the operation of the rifles handed to them. Abandoned and left to their own devices, they proceed with uncertainty, traversing muddy terrain in rudimentary footwear. Following a night exposed to the cold elements without shelter, they return to the front with the break of dawn. The individual reflects upon the pitiable condition of the wounded witnessed the previous day, grappling with internal sensations of fear and impending mortality. He turns away, and others subsequently emulate his retreat. The retreat evolves from a state of initial confusion in the face of the calamity to an outright escape, a flight from the encroaching adversary. Thus begins the onset of a panic that obliterates all semblance of order. The thoroughfares appear interminable, indistinguishable in their lack of commencement or conclusion, impeding forward progress. Rivers surge beyond their banks, bridges succumb to collapse, villages succumb to conflagration, and enemy gunfire decimates the ranks. This mass exodus assumes a dreadful character, reducing man to an animalistic state. The entire horror and catastrophe of war manifests itself in this tumultuous spectacle.
Major Gustav von Hochwächter in his memoirs
Hochwächter's account was published in Berlin in 1913, while the war was still in progress.89 Some of the untrained recruits, Kutlu notes, had never fired a rifle and broke their noses by holding the stock against their foreheads.90
Lüleburgaz–Pınarhisar
Benefiting from the Bulgarians' decision not to pursue the retreating Turks, Turkish commanders successfully halted the panicked withdrawal of their forces at Lüleburgaz on 25 October. The Bulgarians had rested for three days after Kırk Kilise, and the line between Lüleburgaz and Pınarhisar, astride the main road and railway from Edirne to Istanbul and the road from Kırk Kilise to Vize, with the Ergene river to the south and broken country to the north, offered the retreating army the best defensive ground in eastern Thrace.91 Nevertheless, Abdullah Pasha remained indecisive and telegraphed Mahmut Muhtar Pasha, contending that engaging in combat under these circumstances was unfeasible, advocating for a political resolution to the Balkan issue. Although he proposed a retreat to Çorlu, Nazım Pasha, arriving at the front and setting up his headquarters at Çerkesköy on 25–26 October, concurred with Abdullah Pasha. Nazım Pasha issued the directive to establish a defensive line at Lüleburgaz, and on 28–29 October the Eastern Army was reorganized into a First Eastern Army, three corps strong, under Abuk Ahmet Pasha and a Second Eastern Army of three corps under Hamdi Pasha.92
Concurrently, the Bulgarians heightened their reconnaissance efforts to locate the Turkish troops. On 25 October, they effortlessly seized the town of Babaeski. Subsequently advancing towards the Turkish positions, the First and Third Armies initiated an offensive against the Turkish defensive line starting on 29 October. At the start of the battle the Ottomans had about 126,000 infantry, 96 machine guns, 342 guns and 3,500 cavalry, against 107,386 Bulgarians with 116 machine guns and 360 guns; measured by the numbers engaged, Erickson considers it the largest battle fought in Europe between the end of the Franco-Prussian War and the outbreak of the First World War.93 Combat persisted for several days around Lüleburgaz, with the initially resilient Turkish troops that had retreated from Kırk Kilise demonstrating tenacity. On the first day the Bulgarian "Preslav" division shattered the Ottoman I Corps, but Mahmud Muhtar's III Corps threw back the Bulgarians at Pınarhisar and a counterattack drove them out of Lüleburgaz itself.94
However, the fortunes for the Turks quickly reversed, leading to renewed panic as three corps sought to withdraw per Abdullah Pasha's orders. This development imperiled Hamdi Pasha's offensive to the north of Lüleburgaz as well. Although Mahmud Muhtar reported that he was holding his positions in the north and wished to continue the battle, Nazım judged that the broken First Eastern Army could fight no longer. On 2 November, Nazım Pasha issued a comprehensive retreat to Çatalca, situated 30 kilometres west of the Ottoman capital, Istanbul. In adverse weather conditions, amid heavy rain, tens of thousands of soldiers and the Muslim population continued to flee from the advancing Bulgarian forces. The Bulgarians had lost 20,162 men, 2,534 of them killed; the Ottomans about 22,000, including some 2,000 prisoners, and another 45 guns.95
On the roads, soldiers were fleeing back in total disorder. Infantrymen were collapsing on the mud, due to hunger and exhaustion, never to stand up again. The crying and begging of these desperate people who were drowning in the mud was piercing our ears and hearts... The villages on the road were filled with soldiers. It was such a view that nobody could believe that soldiers, who were fighting successfully for days, ended up in this situation. As it was the case in Kırk Kilise, we were again facing an army that was fleeing without even looking back. But why? This question was too difficult to answer.
Mahmut Muhtar Pasha in his memoirs
Mahmud Muhtar wrote these lines about the retreat towards Saray, where he met the former XVIII Corps commander Hamdi Pasha and Major Pertev at Vize and learned that headquarters had decided to fall back to the Istranca–Çerkesköy line.96 Abdullah Pasha's own explanation of the disaster was that three commanders, the commander-in-chief, the chief of the General Staff and the army commander, had been trying to direct the battle at the same time from three different places.97 The overstretched logistic system collapsed; casualties could not be evacuated, and soldiers were unable to find food or safe drinking water.98
Kumanovo and the loss of Macedonia
The scenario remained unchanged on other fronts. The Serbs, who had crossed the border on 19 October, encountered the Vardar Army, a constituent unit under the Ottoman Western Army, three days later. Turkish forces, under the command of Halepli Zeki Pasha, were assembled around the town of Kumanovo in Macedonia; most of his divisions had to march more than 100 kilometres to reach their concentration area, and from 14 to 21 October he used aggressive covering-force actions to hide the fact that some of them had not yet arrived.99 The VII Corps of Fethi Pasha was positioned on the left, the VI Corps of Cavid Pasha held the center, and the V Corps of Sait Pasha was situated on the right. On 23 October, Zeki Pasha initiated the Turkish offensive, without waiting for his remaining divisions; Fethi Pasha's VII Corps had attacked even before the army's orders arrived. The Vardar Army had only about 58,000 men against a Serbian First Army more than twice as strong, but the Turkish troops swiftly began to inflict substantial damage on the First Army of the Serbs, commanded by Crown Prince Alexander.100
However, the situation took a turn when Serbian artillery guns arrived at the front. From 05:30 on 24 October, superbly directed Serbian fire shattered the Monastir and Üsküp reserve divisions, and within half a day, the Vardar Army lost its momentum and commenced a retreat that turned into a rout after dark.101 The Ottoman strategy for an offensive war had faltered, compelling the Vardar Army to relinquish significant territory and suffer considerable artillery losses: it lost 81 guns in the battle and the retreat. Casualty figures vary widely. Using Serbian official figures, Richard Hall gives 687 Serbian dead, 3,208 wounded and 597 missing, and some 12,000 Ottoman killed and wounded and 300 prisoners; the Turkish official history gives 1,200 Ottoman dead, 3,000 wounded and 327 prisoners. Erickson suggests that the real Ottoman toll lay somewhere in between, perhaps around 7,000.102 This setback was exacerbated by the inability to reinforce, as supply routes from Anatolia were severed. The Vardar Army was also incapable of organizing a defense along the Vardar River and was obliged to abandon Skopje, which the Serbian army occupied on 26 October.103 Following the capture of Kumanovo, the Serbs advanced towards Monastir (present-day Bitola), where Zeki Pasha's forces had retreated, fighting delaying actions at Prilep (3–5 November) and Kırçova (Kičevo). In Kosovo and the Sanjak, the independent detachments of İpek, Taşlıca and Priştina dissolved within a fortnight; the notables of İpek and Prizren decided to surrender their towns without a fight, and at İpek the commander of a retreating detachment was killed by the townspeople.104 Simultaneously, the Montenegrin army seized the town of Tuzi and attempted to besiege Shkoder.105
The Greek front
Greece fielded two armies during this historical period. The larger Thessaly Army, commanded by Crown Prince Constantine, was stationed in the east, while the smaller Epirus Army, under the command of General Konstantinos Sapountzakis, was positioned in the west. On the Ottoman side, the defence of the Salonica region fell under the purview of the VIII Provisional Corps, led by Hasan Tahsin Pasha, while the responsibility for defending Ioannina rested with Esat Pasha's Ioannina Corps.106 At sea, the Greek fleet, built around the fast armored cruiser Georgios Averof, quickly won control of the Aegean, cutting the sea route by which the Ottomans had hoped to move troops from Anatolia to Macedonia.107
Fall of Salonica
Sarantaporo and Yenice
The Greek offensive commenced on 18 October, with the Thessaly Army engaging the Ottoman VIII Corps in a significant battle around the town of Sarantoporo (Serfiçe pass) four days later. The Turks estimated that their 15,836 men faced 65,000 Greeks, with 55 Greek battalions engaged against 21 Ottoman. Following a day of intense fighting, in which Greek troops broke through to the road junctions behind the Ottoman positions, Hasan Tahsin Pasha ordered a strategic retreat towards Salonica to avert encirclement. Lacking telegraph lines between his headquarters and his divisions, he was left in the dark about the tactical situation and withdrew hastily, losing 21 badly needed guns along with 500 dead and 1,000 wounded. Retreating rearguards watched the Greeks enter the village of Serfiçe and set its mosque on fire.108 The Greek advance, Erickson writes, was by the standards of 1912 almost a Blitzkrieg: on 29 October the Thessaly Army cut the railway from Salonica to Monastir.109 Subsequently, on 1-2 November, the Greek forces once again prevailed over the Turks, this time near the Lake of Giannitsa (Yenice-i Vardar). The newly arrived 14th Infantry Division held its ground on the first day, but on 2 November concentrated Greek attacks, at odds of up to six to one, broke it; the Greeks lost 188 dead and 785 wounded, the Turks some 1,300 killed and wounded, 200 prisoners and 11 guns, and the Greeks advanced closer to Salonica.110
The city surrenders
As Greek forces closed in, Salonica faced imminent peril. Simultaneously, while hostilities unfolded in Giannitsa, the deposed ex-Sultan, Abdülhamit II, in exile, was relocated from Salonica to Istanbul for his safety aboard the German embassy's station ship Loreley, which landed him at the Beylerbeyi Palace on the Bosphorus at the beginning of November.111 Concurrently, Greek naval support was provided to the Thessaly Army from the sea. Troops were landed on the shores east of Salonica, and on the night of 31 October–1 November a Greek torpedo boat slipped into the harbour, despite the presence of foreign warships, and sank the Ottoman warship Feth-i Bülent, anchored at the port of Salonica, with two torpedoes; the ship's imam and six men were killed.112 The town not only found itself blockaded but was also subjected to shelling by Greek warships, including the Averof, targeting the Turkish fortifications.
The entreaty from Nazım Bey, the Governor of Salonica, implored Hasan Tahsin Pasha to refrain from engaging in hostilities within the suburbs. The purpose of this plea was to safeguard the city and its denizens from potential harm. Similar appeals were made in other Macedonian towns: in Monastir, Salonica, Skopje and İpek, townspeople asked the army not to fight in the streets, and notables and muftis offered surrender through the European consuls.113 The Turkish commander, facing dire circumstances, commanded a mere 25,000 troops, encircled by an overwhelming force of over 100,000 Greeks and Bulgarians, while the city, though well stocked with ammunition and food, had no defenses facing the sea or the land. Contemplating the notion that surrender might be a more prudent course than engaging in fruitless bloodshed, Hasan Tahsin Pasha negotiated an armistice with Crown Prince Constantine. A sixteen-article protocol was agreed at eight in the evening of 8 November by Hasan Tahsin and the crown prince's delegates, Captain Viktor Dousmanis and Captain Ioannis Metaxas, the future Greek dictator.114 Consequently, on 9 November, the Thessaly Army peacefully occupied the city without encountering resistance. Subsequently, 1,000 Turkish officers, including Hasan Tahsin himself, along with 25,000 soldiers, were taken captive, and 70 artillery guns were seized.115 Two days later, amidst the jubilation of the local Christian populace, King George I of Greece entered Salonica; Bulgarian troops, who had arrived only hours after the Greeks, were allowed into the city as allies, and the rivalry for the city soon poisoned relations between the two allies.116 Within a week or two of the Greek march on Salonica, some 25,000 Muslim refugees had left the city.117 Simultaneously, the Struma Corps, under the command of Ali Nadir Pasha, tasked with impeding the advance of Serbian and Bulgarian forces to the Aegean shores, had fallen back on the city and shared its fate.118
Sorovich and Monastir
As the Greek forces continued their advance, they posed a significant threat to the Vardar Army engaged in combat against the Serbs in the north. This perilous situation emerged because the road to Monastir was left vulnerable by the Ottoman VIII Corps, which had shifted its focus to Salonica. Crown Prince Constantine faced a strategic decision – whether to advance towards Monastir or Salonica. Opting for the latter, he recognized the imperative of securing his exposed flank, prompting the deployment of the 5th Division of the Thessaly Army to Monastir. Confronted with this impending threat, Ali Rıza Pasha, the commander of the Ottoman Western army, resolved to task the VI Corps of Cavid Pasha with engaging the approaching Greek forces.
On 6-7 November, the VI Corps achieved victory over the Greek 5th Division at Sorovits (Soroviç), situated midway between Salonica and Monastir, retaking Ekşisu and driving the Greeks back to Nalbant.119 However, during the absence of the VI Corps, the Vardar Army suffered defeat in the Battle of Prilep against the Serbs, leading to the recall of Cavid Pasha's forces to bolster the Turkish efforts against the advancing Serbs near Monastir.
On 14 November, General Bozidar Jankovic's Serbian Third Army confronted Turkish forces to the north of Monastir. Zeki Pasha had reached the city on 7 November with most of his artillery and baggage already lost; for the battle he could still muster 100 guns, but only about 120 rounds per gun.120 The Battle of Monastir persisted for four days. Once again, Zeki Pasha tried to encircle the Serbs by launching a surprise attack with his demoralised units. On the final day, Cavid Pasha's VI Corps successfully repelled the Serbs in an offensive maneuver. The front was breached in the VII Corps sector, as the Serbs exploited a gap caused by the irresponsible withdrawal of a reserve regiment during the rainy night. On the night of 18 November, Zeki Pasha ordered a retreat, and the Serbs entered Monastir on 19 November. Resne fell on 20 November, followed by Ohrid the next day.121 The Battle of Monastir marked the conclusion of the Ottoman Western Army's major operations in the region, signifying the end of the five-century-long Ottoman rule over Macedonia. After the battle, the Vardar Army's 78 battalions, with a paper strength of some 70,000, counted 39,398 men, 100 guns and 12 machine guns; it had lost its depots and its hospitals in Skopje, Salonica and Monastir, and retreated into Albania via Korçë, while the Greeks pressed it at Bilisht and Korçë in mid-December.122 The disastrous situation was exacerbated by Albanian nationalists who proclaimed independence at Vlorë on 28 November 1912, under Ismail Kemal Bey, and the already reluctant Albanian soldiers began to desert their units in the hundreds.123 One of the soldiers who retreated with the Western Army was the writer Ömer Seyfettin, a reserve officer whose diary records how, near Leskovik in December, his fellow officers dug a grave for a soldier dying of hunger who could hear the picks at work before he breathed his last.124
Who was to blame?
The Balkan territories were lost within a mere month. Despite the Ottoman army being undermanned and in suboptimal condition before the war, the swift collapse took everyone by surprise. A heated debate ensued in Istanbul regarding the reasons behind this rapid deterioration. Nazım Pasha faced criticism for inaccurately assessing the true strength of the army, disregarding pre-existing war plans, and opting for an offensive strategy over a defensive one; there were even rumours that he hoped to become grand vizier, like his father-in-law. The Foreign Ministry was reproached for not timely recognizing Balkan alliances, while Grand Vizier Gazi Ahmet Muhtar Pasha received criticism for disbanding tens of thousands of troops just before hostilities commenced. According to critics, assigning an overly extensive and border-proximate area to the Eastern Army was a mistake, as was deploying the Western Army disorderly across a wide region; it should have waited at İştip instead of advancing to Kumanovo.125 Uyar adds that the planners had neglected the primary lesson of the Russian wars: that forces must not be spread too thinly over the theatres of operations, nor field armies broken up into composite groups.126
These challenges were by no means the sole impediments encountered. Profound deficiencies were evident in the realms of logistics, communication, and intelligence; telegrams from Abdullah and Ali Rıza Pasha often failed to reach Nazım Pasha's headquarters at all.127 Mahmut Muhtar Pasha, in his subsequent memoirs, asserted that the Ottoman strategies were not the primary issue; rather, the defeat stemmed from the inadequacies within the military organization, insufficient pre-war preparations, and the pervasive societal, political, and moral decay afflicting the Empire.128 Other participants agreed that the roots lay deeper. The anonymous author of Why Were We Defeated in the Balkan War?, published in 1913 and usually attributed to the staff officer Ali İhsan (Sabis), wrote that the Hamidian regime had "killed all martial zeal in the army and the nation" and that five years of experience had shown that "most of the evil lay in ourselves"; Ottoman patriotic songs, he observed, spoke only of defending the homeland, while the Bulgarians sang of conquest.129 The Western Army commander, Ali Rıza Pasha, interviewed by an Italian correspondent in a tent near Fier in May 1913, where the remnants of three armies, some 25,000 men under fifteen pashas, were camped in the mud, insisted that the army had done its duty to the end: the war had come before the reorganization was complete, before Christians and Muslims had been welded together, and the Albanians' mass desertion at Kumanovo had begun the defeat.130 Hafız Hakkı Pasha, who fought in the Eastern Army, put it more bluntly: "In an army the most important cause of rout is rout in the command and among the officers. War is a question of spirit more than of science."131 Five years later, Mustafa Kemal summed up the judgment of his generation: "The Balkan War was not a rout of the Turkish army. No, not at all; it was the collapse of the old in Turkey, the withdrawal of the ignorant command at the head of the army."132
Another contributing factor to the Balkan setback, as articulated by Mahmut Muhtar Pasha himself, lay in the inability to restore confidence between officers and troops following the 31 March incident, which had left the army highly politicized. Lower-ranking officers tended to sympathize with the Committee of Union and Progress, while their higher-ranking counterparts and generals were largely opposed to the Committee. Consequently, younger officers frequently disobeyed orders and pursued independent courses of action. Abroad, the defeats were read as a verdict on German training and German arms. French newspapers celebrated the victory of Creusot guns over Krupp, while Wilhelm II concluded that the Ottomans were finished in Europe and that the Bulgarians could be in Istanbul within eight to ten days.133
Çatalca and cholera
Meanwhile, the conflict was far from concluded. Although the Balkan territories had been lost, the capital now faced imminent peril. A mere eight days after the defeat in Lüleburgaz, the Turkish forces regrouped along the Çatalca line, spanning 30 kilometres between the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara. The line, first fortified during the war of 1877–78, consisted of a chain of old-style redoubts along the ridge west of Hadımköy, strengthened on German advice before 1912 and hastily improved during the battle; guns were brought from the Bosphorus forts and even from the military schools, and the two Eastern Armies were merged into a new Çatalca Army on 11 November.134 The troops confronted dire conditions of starvation and thirst, resorting to consuming whatever water was available. In early November, a cholera outbreak afflicted the Ottoman III Corps in Çatalca, apparently from drinking stagnant water. On November 15, 1912 alone, a staggering 2,786 men fell ill, with 817 succumbing to cholera. These figures surged in the ensuing days: burials peaked between 19 and 22 November, with 670 on 19 November alone.135 The estimates of the final toll range from some 3,300 officers and men to as many as 40,000 deaths on the Çatalca line in 1912.136 The afflicted, along with the wounded and refugees fleeing the Bulgarian advance, were transported to Istanbul. In a matter of days, 50,000 individuals entered the city, catalyzing the spread of the cholera epidemic. Refugees from the Çatalca district alone soon numbered some 100,000, and ships had to be chartered from Egyptian, Austrian, Russian, Italian, Romanian, British and Belgian companies to carry them across to Anatolia.137
Istanbul not only grappled with the ravages of disease but also harboured fear among its inhabitants due to the Bulgarian advance. Cholera patients were housed in tents at Gülhane and Sarayburnu, in hotels and schools, and, after the mayor, Cemil (Topuzlu) Pasha, overcame the objection of the Şeyhülislam that mosques were houses of God, in the Şehzade, Sultanahmet and Hagia Sophia mosques; quarantine stations at Tuzla and Serviburnu took in thousands more.138 The Ottoman Red Crescent, which had opened field hospitals at Lüleburgaz, Edirne, Salonica and Skopje at the start of the war, set up a 250-bed hospital of tents and barracks at Hadımköy and another in the Vefa secondary school.139
The heightened anxiety among the denizens stemmed from reports conveyed to Istanbul by the wounded and refugees. Trains arriving from theatres of war were replete with casualties and individuals fleeing towns and villages under enemy occupation. The routes connecting Istanbul to Çatalca teemed with villagers escaping with laden oxcarts, transporting women, children, livestock, and whatever possessions they could salvage. Notably, a considerable influx of fugitive soldiers was converging upon Istanbul. Conversely, the atmosphere in Pera remained seemingly impervious to the conflict, with Greeks and Armenians comporting themselves as if the war bore no relevance to their concerns. The quotidian life in the streets of Pera manifested no discernible impact from the proximate war, the sole predicament being the scarcity of phaetons due to the government's requisition of all available horses in the city.
Wilhelm Feldmann, a German journalist stationed in Istanbul
The calm of Pera was deceptive. Each time the empire suffered a heavy blow, the Levantine quarters were gripped by fear of a massacre, and rumours spread that a thousand Kurdish porters had gathered before the War Ministry demanding arms to kill the Christians.140 The Great Powers sent a combined squadron to the Bosphorus on 5 November, and on 8 November landed marines at Salıpazarı and Karaköy to guard their embassies; the ambassadors even urged the Porte to move the capital to Bursa, as France had moved its government to Bordeaux in 1870, a suggestion the Ottomans refused. Kâmil Pasha even suggested that Sultan Mehmed Reşad withdraw to Bursa for a few weeks; the sultan replied that only his coffin would leave the palace.141
The First Battle of Çatalca
On 12 November, the Sublime Porte petitioned the Bulgarian government for an armistice, only to encounter rejection. Three days hence, General Mihail Savov, the commander-in-chief of the Bulgarian Army, arrived in Çatalca to survey the front alongside General Dimitriev. Despite encountering analogous challenges as the Turks, Savov and Dimitriev contemplated an offensive manoeuvre owing to their proximity to Istanbul, reluctant to forego the prospect of seizing the Ottoman capital. "History did not forgive Krum and Simeon for failing to attack Constantinople," Dimitriev is reported to have said, "and it will not forgive us either." After conferring with Tsar Ferdinand, to whom Dimitriev's staff estimated their chances of success at 85–90 percent, General Savov issued the directive for the attack and told the press that the army would be in Istanbul within a week. The plan was a plain frontal assault by the First and Third Armies, with no attempt at surprise or manoeuvre.142 Simultaneously, Nazım Pasha had relieved Abdullah Pasha of command and assumed leadership of the Eastern Army himself.
The Bulgarian offensive at Çatalca commenced in the early hours of 17 November, marked by an intense barrage of artillery that could be heard in Istanbul. In response, Turkish artillery promptly returned fire. At approximately 9 am on the same day, the Bulgarian infantry initiated their advance. On the left flank, the I Corps, under the command of Ömer Yaver Pasha, adeptly defended its positions against the Bulgarian forces. This successful defense was reinforced by naval artillery support from Turkish warships in both the Sea of Marmara and the Bay of Büyük Çekmece, notably the battleships Barbaros Hayreddin and Mesudiye, while Turgut Reis supported the III Corps from the Black Sea.143 Faced with staunch resistance, the Bulgarians were compelled to retreat.
In the central sector, Hamdi Pasha's II Corps also managed to repel the Bulgarian forces. Simultaneously, on the right flank held by the III Corps under Mahmut Muhtar Pasha, intense bayonet charges persisted throughout the day. Ultimately, the Bulgarians were forced to withdraw from this sector as well. Nazım Pasha watched the battle from the heights of Sancaktepe above Büyük Çekmece.144
During the night spanning 17 to 18 November, the Bulgarian 29th Infantry Regiment executed a surprise bayonet charge, overrunning the Alaiye (Alanya) reserve battalion, whose exhausted men had fallen asleep in their trenches in front of the İleri Tabya (Forward Redoubt), and successfully capturing the redoubt. However, due to adverse weather conditions characterized by fog and poor visibility, neither the Turkish nor the Bulgarian forces were immediately aware of the situation. In the morning, during an inspection of the area, Mahmut Muhtar Pasha and his staff were wounded by Bulgarian rifle fire from the redoubt. The Turkish troops accompanying him realized that the position had been captured by the enemy, and a counterattack by units of the 9th and 29th Divisions reclaimed it by 09:30, before Bulgarian reinforcements could arrive; Mahmud Muhtar was evacuated to Istanbul by train the same day, and Abuk Ahmet Pasha took over the III Corps.145 Dimitriev called off the attack in the afternoon of 18 November. The Bulgarians had lost more than 12,000 men, most of them from the fourteen regiments, about 35,000 men, that had led the assault; Erickson estimates the real Ottoman losses at fewer than 5,000.146 The Bulgarian High Command, Uyar concludes, had failed to appreciate both the strength of the Çatalca line and the determination of its defenders.147 Among the Bulgarian dead were teachers and students of the Sofia Conservatory.148
Armistice and Diplomacy
The Çatalca armistice
By 22 November, Ottoman forces in Çatalca had decisively repelled the Bulgarians. This victory proved to be a significant morale boost for the Turks; nevertheless, both belligerents found themselves in a state of exhaustion, disinclined to prolong hostilities. Apprehensive about the potential expansion of the conflict across Europe, Britain and France seized the initiative to propose an armistice. While the talks were under way, the Porte secretly sounded out Athens about a Balkan confederation under the sultan, without result.149 The accord was ultimately signed on 3 December 1912 in Çatalca, in the railway carriage that had brought Nazım Pasha to the front, with delegations from the Ottoman Empire, Serbia, and Bulgaria in attendance: Nazım Pasha, Reşid Pasha and Ali Rıza Bey for the Ottomans; Danev, Savov and General Fichev for the Bulgarians.150 It lasted until 3 February 1913.
In a noteworthy development, Greece, dissatisfied with the stipulations and adamant about the evacuation of Ioannina, refused to endorse the armistice. Consequently, Greece persisted in its siege of Ioannina and maintained blockades in the Aegean and Adriatic Seas.151
Per the armistice terms, Ottoman units were to maintain their positions as of 3 December, with a prohibition on sending relief supplies to the three besieged cities. Additionally, to facilitate the resupplying of Bulgarian forces in Çatalca, the Ottoman government was obligated to lift the blockade on Bulgarian Black Sea ports and permit the Bulgarians to utilize the railway passing through Edirne for this purpose.152 The Red Crescent had to struggle even to get medical supplies into Edirne, where Dr. Bahaeddin Şakir ran a hospital within range of the Bulgarian guns; Queen Eleonore of Bulgaria refused to let an Ottoman medical mission through, despite the intervention of the German empress, and only a small consignment was allowed in after the armistice.153 For the Ottoman army, Uyar notes, the two months of the armistice brought much-needed rest and recovery: the old Eastern Army, now the Çatalca Army, kept most of its main units, received reinforcements from Anatolia and Syria, and made training its primary activity.154
The London conferences
Following the armistice, a peace conference was convened in London, attended by delegates from the Balkan allies, including Greece, which had not signed the preceding armistice, and representatives from the Ottoman Empire. The conference commenced on 16 December 1912 at St James's Palace; after an Ottoman objection to the presence of the Greek delegates, it was adjourned and resumed on 24 December. Simultaneously, a Conference of Ambassadors, chaired by Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, and attended by the ambassadors of all the Great Powers in London, was also in session, to deal with Albania, a Serbian outlet to the Adriatic, the Aegean islands and Mount Athos. Mustafa Reşid Pasha, the Minister of Public Works, led the Ottoman delegation, which also included Osman Nizami Pasha, ambassador in Berlin, and Tevfik Pasha, ambassador in London; their instructions were to prolong the talks and divide the allies.155
The Balkan allies asserted claims for a war indemnity and the relinquishment of all European territories held by the Ottoman Empire, excluding Albania. Additionally, Crete and the islands in the Aegean Sea were to be ceded. The Ottoman Empire was permitted to retain control of Istanbul, along with a corridor of land extending from Midia on the Black Sea to Rodosto (present-day Tekirdağ) on the Sea of Marmara, as well as the Gallipoli Peninsula. A Greek delegate told the conference that if they did not bring back Salonica, they could not go home to Athens; the Bulgarians declared that no government that gave up Edirne could survive in Sofia; the Ottomans replied that Edirne was their old capital and a city of holy places.156
Pressure on the Porte
MapMapClick to view full screen and zoom in
The Sublime Porte exhibited a reluctance to relinquish Edirne, a concession vehemently demanded by Bulgaria. On 21 December, the French and Russian ambassadors urged the foreign minister Noradunkian to give up the city. Representatives of the major Powers articulated that should the conference falter on account of the Edirne matter, Armenians were poised to foment unrest in Anatolia. Additionally, there existed a potential scenario wherein the Great Powers might deploy a fleet to Istanbul, and Russia could dispatch troops to Kars. The European military attachés were of the opinion that the Ottomans could hold Çatalca, but could not march to the relief of Edirne.157
The war at sea
The Ottoman navy, meanwhile, tried to break the Greek hold on the Aegean. It was a mixed fleet: two battleships bought from Germany in 1910, Barbaros Hayreddin and Turgut Reis, the old ironclads Mesudiye and Âsâr-ı Tevfik, the cruisers Hamidiye and Mecidiye, and a handful of destroyers and torpedo boats, divided between the Aegean, the Black Sea and the Marmara and poorly trained after decades of neglect under Abdülhamid; a British naval mission had been at work only since 1909.158 On 16 December 1912, the day the London conference opened, the Ottoman battleships sortied from the Dardanelles and met the Greek fleet off Cape Helles in the Battle of Elli (İmroz). The Ottoman ships scored the first hits, a shell from Mesudiye striking the Averof's funnel, but when the faster Averof threatened to cross their line and a torpedo was wrongly reported, the Ottoman commander turned his ships around, and the action ended with the Ottomans back in the Straits and the Greeks still masters of the islands.159 An attempt to land on Tenedos on 4 January 1913 also failed.160
Concurrently, amid the ongoing negotiations in London, Captain Rauf Bey, commanding the cruiser Hamidiye, undertook a personal initiative by navigating his warship to the Aegean, aiming to undermine the Greek blockade and influence the prevailing sentiment in the nation. After several reconnaissance sorties, Hamidiye slipped out of the Dardanelles with her lights extinguished on the night of 13–14 January 1913. Despite successfully breaching the blockade, Rauf Bey's plan to entice the Greek flagship Averof into pursuit, leaving the rest of the Greek fleet vulnerable, proved unsuccessful. Averof did not pursue Hamidiye; nevertheless, Hamidiye achieved several victories, sinking multiple Greek vessels and bombarding Greek ports, beginning with the auxiliary cruiser Makedonia at Syros on 15 January.161 Her cruise lasted some nine months. Using neutral ports such as Port Said, Alexandria and Malta, she passed through the Suez Canal to Jeddah and Hodeida, returned to shell the Greek transports carrying Serbian troops to San Giovanni di Medua on the Albanian coast, and came home only in September 1913, to a hero's welcome that made Rauf one of the most popular officers in the empire.162 Encouraged by Rauf's optimistic reports, the high command ordered the battle fleet out again on 18 January to retake the islands. In the Battle of Lemnos (Mondros) the Ottomans failed to score a single hit, while Barbaros Hayreddin lost the crew of her central turret, and the fleet returned to the Straits for good.163
In London, on 28 December, the Ottoman delegation presented its proposal. According to this proposal, Edirne would persist within the Empire, and Macedonia would evolve into a principate under Ottoman tutelage, designating Salonica as its capital. The prince would be appointed by the Ottoman sultan from candidates proposed by the Balkan states. Albania would enjoy autonomous status under the rule of an Ottoman crown prince. The Aegean islands would retain their Ottoman status, while the matter of Crete would be subject to separate deliberations between the Sublime Porte and the Great Powers.164
Deadlock in London
Edirne and the islands
The Ottoman proposal was rejected, leading to a deadlock in negotiations in London, primarily due to Bulgaria's insistence on acquiring Edirne and the islands of Thassos and Samothrace, while Greece sought Imbros (modern-day Gökçeada), Tenedos (modern-day Bozcaada), and Limnos. The Ottoman delegation contended that Edirne and the four islands, excluding Thassos, were vital for the defense of Istanbul and the Straits, deeming them indispensable, while it had written off Macedonia and Albania as indefensible. The Russian ambassador in London, for one, agreed that a Turkey without the islands at the mouth of the Dardanelles could not defend the Straits.165 On 6 January 1913 the allies broke off the talks. Russia threatened to send warships to Istanbul, Trabzon and Beirut, while the Bulgarian army, struck by cholera and desertion, was eager for a settlement, and Serbia withdrew some of its troops from the siege of Edirne.166
On 17 January, the Great Powers presented a revised proposal to the Ottoman delegation. According to this proposal, Edirne was to be ceded, along with all European territories of the Empire situated beyond a line extending from Enos on the Aegean Sea, at the mouth of the Maritza River, to Midia on the Black Sea. Five days later, on 22 January, the Sublime Porte convened an imperial council (Meclis-i Şûrâ-yı Saltanat) at Dolmabahçe, attended by current and former statesmen, among them Said Pasha and Mahmud Şevket Pasha, to deliberate on this proposition. Recognizing no advantages in continuing the war, the council concluded by a large majority that peace should be pursued on the terms set forth by the Great Powers.167
The Raid on the Sublime Porte
The subsequent day, the Ottoman government convened to finalize its response to be submitted to London. Concurrently, unrest manifested within specific circles, particularly those affiliated with the Committee of Union and Progress. As the government meeting progressed, on 23 January 1913, a faction of Committee sympathizers, led by the distinguished orator Ömer Naci Bey, marched towards Bab-ı Ali (Turkish term for the Sublime Porte), protesting the government's intention to relinquish Edirne to the enemy. Upon reaching their destination, they encountered a group of armed officers, including Enver Bey, Yakup Cemil, Necip Asım, and Sapancalı Hakkı. Enver had returned from Libya on 20 December, leaving the resistance there to Aziz Ali and his own brother Nuri; Fethi (Okyar), who opposed a coup, had been kept out of the plans.168 Together, they forcibly entered the hall where the meeting was underway, marking a coup d'état.
The raid, led by Enver, Talat and Cemal with some forty young officers, began at about three in the afternoon, just as the cabinet was about to approve its reply to the Powers. During the "Raid on the Sublime Porte", shots were fired in the corridors, and the Minister of War, Nazım Pasha, and his aide-de-camp were killed; Grand Vizier Kamil Pasha, with Enver's and Talat's pistols trained on him, was compelled to write his resignation under duress. Although the incident was initially portrayed to the public as a spontaneous response to the government's intentions concerning Edirne, it was, in fact, a premeditated event orchestrated by the Committee of Union and Progress to reclaim political authority.169 Mahmut Şevket Pasha, who had resigned as war minister in July 1912, was appointed as the new Grand Vizier and Minister of War. Uyar sees the raid as a turning point for the army: the new government immediately placed capable young officers in the key posts of the large army staffs, and the raiders themselves were given commands suited to their rank and training, Enver returning as chief of staff of the X Corps and Cemal taking a reserve division in the Çatalca Army.170
Preparing for a new campaign
As the newly formed government insisted on retaining Edirne, compelled by the necessity to justify the coup, the war resumed when the armistice expired on 3 February. Privately, Mahmud Şevket told the German ambassador Hans von Wangenheim on 29 January that the fall of Edirne before the spring was inevitable and the city not vital, and that he wanted only the old town north of the Maritsa, with its mosques; when the Ottoman reply reached London on 30 January, it proposed that the right bank of the river might go to Bulgaria, and asked in return for fiscal independence and the abolition of the capitulations.171 However, the circumstances had evolved since three months prior. Amid ongoing negotiations in London, the Turks had fortified their defensive positions at Çatalca, making it nearly impracticable for the Bulgarians to breach. A second front at Bolayır (Bulair), north of the Gallipoli peninsula, had also been bolstered. The combined Turkish forces at these two fronts amounted to 200,000 men, outnumbering the 150,000 Bulgarian troops. Concurrently, the Bulgarian First and Third Armies were stationed at Çatalca, while the Second Army maintained its siege at Edirne. A new army, the Fourth, commanded by General Stilian Kovachev, was established for the Gallipoli front.172
Mahmut Şevket Pasha, alongside the newly appointed chief of the General Staff and acting commander-in-chief of the Ottoman forces, Ahmet İzzet Pasha, who had just returned from Yemen, promptly initiated preparations for the resumption of hostilities. Volunteers came forward from among the Laz, Circassians, Kurds and Arabs, and the old Hamidiye regiments were revived as tribal cavalry regiments. On 1 February a National Defense Committee (Müdafaa-i Milliye Cemiyeti) was founded to mobilize public support, and even the enormous toll of typhus and cholera, Uyar writes, did not dampen the new spirit of optimism. The precarious nature of the situation stemmed from the uncertain duration of Edirne's endurance. The city found itself besieged, grappling with dwindling supplies, and facing mounting public pressure for the liberation of the former imperial capital. Abroad, the mood was grim: the Greek foreign minister Lambros Koromilas told the German envoy in Athens that a strip of western Anatolia 100 kilometres deep would one day be Greek.173
Şarköy and Bolayır
The inaugural maneuver in this phase of the conflict unfolded in the early hours of 8 February 1913. Ahmed İzzet regarded an offensive as risky, but Enver's plan prevailed. Under the command of Hurşid Pasha, with Enver Bey as his chief of staff, the X Corps was to execute an amphibious landing at the shores of İnceburun and Şarköy on the Sea of Marmara, sailing from İzmit and Istanbul. The strategic intent was to encircle the Bulgarian Fourth Army, employing the X Corps from the east and the Dardanelles Combined Corps in Gallipoli, led by Fahri Pasha, from the south. Major Fethi Bey served as Fahri Pasha's chief of staff, and Major Mustafa Kemal Bey assumed the role of head of operations. The warship Mesudiye was designated to provide naval artillery fire support from the sea, paving the way for a joint advance towards Edirne.174
Regrettably, the execution of the operation did not unfold as planned. The landings, initially scheduled for the morning of 8 February, suffered delays: the transports were late, the sea was rough, and the radio traffic between ships broke down. The Dardanelles Combined Corps, intended to initiate its offensive concurrently with the landings, acted prematurely due to a lack of communication regarding the delay. At Bolayır its two divisions attacked across almost open ground against Bulgarian positions supported by 78 guns, with only 36 of their own; by evening the attack had failed with very heavy losses, while the Bulgarians admitted only 114 dead and 416 wounded.175 Compounded by the decision to use the Mesudiye to support the landings at Şarköy, and the loss of the old ironclad Âsâr-ı Tevfik, which ran aground off Karaburun on the Black Sea coast on the same day, there was a conspicuous absence of naval fire support at Bolayır. Fahri Pasha's corps proved inadequate to confront the Bulgarians in isolation, exacerbated by both delayed landings and the inadvertent deployment of the landing force to Şarköy instead of İnceburun, the latter being closer to the Bulair frontline.176 At Şarköy the landing troops took the town after house-to-house fighting on 9 February, and by that morning half of the X Corps had disembarked, but it proved too little, too late: news of the disaster at Bolayır arrived in the middle of the fighting, and the operation was compelled to abort.177 To the Bulgarians' surprise, the corps broke contact and re-embarked by 10 February with light losses, which Uyar regards as a rare combination of leadership, discipline and courage.178
The failure provoked bitter recriminations. Fethi and Mustafa Kemal criticized Enver sharply, Ahmed İzzet regretted having trusted him, and only Mahmud Şevket's protection saved his career; the two majors sent the grand vizier a memorandum urging that the X Corps be shipped to Çatalca for a direct advance on Edirne instead.179 For Tetik and Aksu, the editors of the Turkish staff officer Hüsnü Ersü's study of the operation, the foremost cause of the failure was the lack of coordination between the forces involved.180 It was nevertheless the first combined amphibious operation in Ottoman history, and many of the officers who took part would meet again on the Gallipoli peninsula two years later.181
Fall of Edirne and the End of the First Balkan War
Ioannina
Meanwhile, following the repulsion of Esat Pasha's forces in Epirus, the Greeks initiated a siege on the city of Ioannina, the capital of Epirus, whose fortified line around the heights of Bizani was defended by the Ioannina Corps under Esat Pasha (later General Esat Bülkat), with his brother, Colonel Vehib Bey, as commander of the fortress. Vehib was the officer who had proclaimed the constitution from a gun carriage in Monastir in July 1908.182 The Epirus Army endeavoured to capture the city through a significant offensive but failed, incurring substantial losses. General Sapountzakis bore the consequences of this setback and was subsequently replaced by Crown Prince Constantine on 20 January. Although fresh Greek troops landed on the Epirote coast at Preveza and Santi Quaranta (Sarandë), they encountered resistance from the Albanian militia, halting their advance.183
The siege of Ioannina, while robust, did not parallel the intensity of the Bulgarian siege of Edirne. Vehib Bey's forces effectively defended the city, facing no shortages of supplies. Surprisingly, Vehib Bey chose to surrender. Ottoman forces and the Albanian militia relinquished control of the city to Constantine on 6 March.
The rationale behind this unexpected surrender was later disclosed in a letter from the German chargé d'affaires in Athens to Berlin, dated 10 March. According to the information received, the Sublime Porte intended to exploit the discord between Bulgarians and Greeks to navigate the war with minimal losses. Vehib Bey, acting on orders from the Ottoman government, evacuated the city to foster goodwill with Greece and encourage a joint alliance against Bulgaria.184 The Turkish military account of the siege tells a very different story. According to Ertuna, the Greeks launched a general assault in three columns early on 5 March, and by the evening the garrison had come to the end of a "superhuman resistance" of 138 days, with its last ammunition and food exhausted and its Albanian soldiers deserting with their weapons at the critical moment. Esat Pasha asked the consuls of Russia, Austria, France and Romania to mediate in order to prevent a massacre, and at four in the morning of 6 March a letter was sent through the Orthodox metropolitan; Constantine, in a note written in pencil in French, authorized Captains Metaxas and Stratigos to negotiate the surrender of "the army under the command of Esat Pasha." The guns fell silent at 05:30, General Soutzos's cavalry entered the city at 11:00, and the Turkish flag that had flown over Ioannina since 9 October 1431 was lowered.185 Some 6,697 sick and wounded were left in the city's hospitals; a column of 2,300 sick and wounded sent north was caught near the Liskotoma bridge, where many were bayoneted, and only three officers and 1,997 men eventually returned.186 Erickson, using Greek figures, puts the Ottoman losses in the final battle at about 2,800 dead and 8,600 prisoners, and the total loss with the fall of the fortress at more than 26,000 men and 108 guns, against 284 Greek dead; Esat Pasha, despite his defeat, was received as a hero on his return.187 Five days later, on 18 March, King George I of Greece was assassinated in Salonica.188
The Second Battle of Çatalca
On 17 March, the Turks attempted another offensive at Çatalca, but it proved futile. Neither side displayed a willingness to engage in combat on a large scale: after a series of local attacks between 16 and 19 March, the Bulgarians, anticipating the capture of Edirne, preferred to await the resolution of events there.189 When the Bulgarians did attack the line again in the last days of March, their assaults were crushed by the skilful use of fortifications and centralised fire support; Uyar dates this Second Battle of Çatalca to 24 March–3 April 1913. In a report to the grand vizier, Ahmed İzzet Pasha estimated that the Çatalca line was held by 165,000 men and 550 guns against 400,000 allied troops and 1,800 guns: Istanbul was safe, but the army had no strength for an offensive to retake lost territory.190
The siege and fall of Edirne
What was feared by the Turks, was to materialize soon. A Serbian contingent arrived in Edirne to reinforce the Bulgarians' siege. The participating units included the Serbian Second Army under the command of General Stepa Stepanović, some 48,000 men, accompanied by French Creusot artillery dispatched due to the Bulgarians' deficiency in heavy artillery. General Nikola Ivanov held the overall command of the Bulgarian forces, with General Georgi Vazov overseeing the eastern sector of the fortress.191
The defender of Edirne, Mehmed Şükrü Pasha, was an artillery officer who had trained in the 3rd Guard Field Artillery Regiment at Potsdam from 1880 to 1884 and taught at the War Academy; known in the army as "Deli" (Mad) Şükrü, he had been promoted to marshal in 1908 and reduced to lieutenant-general in the army purge of 1909. Hostilities surrounding Edirne commenced on 3 February, marked by the Bulgarian Second Army initiating artillery fire; the Bulgarians believed that the garrison had food for only three or four more days.192 Despite Şükrü Pasha's heroic defense of the city, the combined strength of the Bulgarian and Serbian forces in the final offensive on March 24 proved overwhelming. The key to the breakthrough was a night attack by Bulgarian infantry on the fort of Bağlarönü; the French military attaché called the victory "a victory of the guns."193 Edirne succumbed on 26 March 1913, concluding a siege lasting 155 days. Şükrü Pasha sent Captain Eyüp (Durukan) to negotiate, Bulgarian guards cavalry entered the city at 10:30, and at 13:30 Şükrü handed over his command to General Ivanov.194 The garrison had begun the war with some 61,250 men. During this period, the Turks incurred losses of 13,000 men killed or wounded, with an additional 28,500 taken prisoner. In contrast, the Bulgarians suffered 16,000 casualties, while the Serbs recorded 1,900 men lost.195
The following day, Tsar Ferdinand entered Edirne, returning Şükrü Pasha's sword, which had been seized by Ivanov the day prior. All Turkish officers, including Şükrü Pasha himself, were relocated to Sofia, while the Turkish prisoners of war remained in the city for an additional month before being transferred to prisoner camps in Bulgaria. Many of them died of cholera and dysentery on the island of Sarayiçi, where they were first held.196 Bulgarian troops and irregulars treated the city's Muslims, Greeks and Jews harshly; according to Öztuna, they looted the city and shot some 350 Turks.197 In Istanbul, the government feared a popular outbreak against the Christian quarters when the news arrived, and the Unionist daily Tanin declared that the liberation of Edirne had never been the government's aim.198 Şükrü Pasha, who lived freely in Sofia, returned after six months' captivity; amid rumours that he would be lynched for surrendering, he was brought from the frontier in a curtained carriage and quietly retired.199
Shkoder
The only city that remained under siege was Shkoder, staunchly defended by Colonel Hasan Rıza Bey. Hasan Rıza had trained in the German army from 1899 to 1903 and, like Şükrü, had been demoted in 1909; in 1911 he took command of the independent 24th Division at Shkoder, and his defense of the Taraboš heights against the Montenegrins became one of the epics of the war.200 Despite his steadfast resistance spanning seven months, Shkoder's inevitable demise loomed. On 30 January 1913, Hasan Rıza sought an audience with the archbishop of Albanian Catholics. Upon his return home that evening, he fell victim to a ruthless assault by three assailants, succumbing to the sustained injuries inflicted; before he died he asked that there be no blood feud, and he was promoted to brigadier general the same day. Subsequent to his demise, the mantle of Shkoder's defense was assumed by Esat Toptani Pasha, an Albanian feudal lord who had garnered favour from Abdülhamid II and who, as a deputy in 1909, had been one of the delegation that informed the sultan of his deposition. Hasan Rıza Bey, in a bid to secure the support of the Malissori and the Muslim Albanians, had appointed him as the commander of the fortified zone in Shkoder.201
Meanwhile, after a collective note of the Powers on 31 March, which the Porte accepted the next day, an armistice was brokered between Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire on 4 April. The Great Powers, intent on resolving the situation in Shkoder, which they had allocated to the future Albanian state, commenced exerting pressure on Montenegro to lift its siege. An Allied fleet, commanded by British Admiral Cecil Burney, anchored off the Montenegrin coast at Antivari on 10 April to intensify this pressure. However, just as King Nikola was preparing to lift the siege, an unexpected turn of events transpired. On 22 April, Esat Toptani capitulated, surrendering the city to the Montenegrins in exchange for safe passage for Ottoman troops and the Muslim populace, with their arms and baggage. By then the Serbian contingent had begun to withdraw (from 10 April) under pressure from the Powers, and food, ammunition and medicines in the fortress were running out.202 According to the Turkish official history, Esat called his sector commanders together on 19 April and, after a reading of the fortress regulations on surrender, they concluded that a starving fortress with no hope of relief had to capitulate; the agreement, negotiated with Crown Prince Danilo and General Janko Vukotić, was signed around midnight on 22–23 April, and the evacuation began at eight in the morning of 23 April. The garrison marched out with its rifles, machine guns, mountain and quick-firing field guns, and those of the townspeople who wished to follow.203 Esat left the city with some 12,000 men, Christians among them, and Crown Prince Danilo made his entry on 27 April. This act of surrender not only irked the Sublime Porte but also drew condemnation from the Great Powers.204
According to reports from the German ambassador in Cetinje and the Austrian military attaché in Paris, Russia had played a role in encouraging the accord between Esat Toptani and King Nikola. Nikola had pledged to bestow upon Esat Toptani the title of King of Albania and had also secured Russian financial assistance; Esat did proclaim himself ruler of Albania under Ottoman sovereignty a few weeks later, and the Western Army's remnants under Cavid Pasha initially sided with him.205 Following a series of diplomatic endeavours, Shkoder was eventually handed over to international forces on 8 May.
The Treaty of London
In the interim, Romania posed an additional query, aspiring to acquire Silistria and a strategically more advantageous military frontier for its Dobrudja region, from Balchik to Silistria. Bulgaria rebuffed these proposals as compensation for maintaining neutrality. The brink of war loomed, yet a crisis was averted through a conference of ambassadors in St Petersburg, whose protocol of 9 May granted Silistria to Romania sans fortifications. In Istanbul, meanwhile, the defeat prompted remarkable proposals: Colmar von der Goltz, writing in the Neue Freie Presse on 18 May, advised the Ottomans to move their capital to Aleppo and to rebuild their state as a Turco-Arab dual monarchy on the Austro-Hungarian model.206
The culmination of the Balkan War materialized with the signing of the Treaty of London at St. James's Palace on 30 May 1913. Consequently: (1) The Ottoman Empire relinquished its European territories beyond a delineated line from Enos, situated near the mouth of the Maritza River on the Aegean Sea, to Midia on the Black Sea, in favor of the Balkan allies; (2) The determination of the status and boundaries of Albania was entrusted to the Great Powers; (3) Ottoman Empire ceded Crete to the Balkan allies in whose favour all rights of sovereignty were renounced; (4) The fate of the islands in the Aegean Sea (excluding Crete) and the status of Mount Athos were deferred to the discretion of the Great Powers.207 For the regime that had come to power by promising to keep Edirne at all costs, Uyar notes, the treaty was a serious blow.208
Intra-Balkan Conflict
Quarrels over Macedonia
During the Balkan War, Serbia, Montenegro, Greece, and Bulgaria successfully annexed the European territories of the Ottoman Empire, leaving the Ottoman Empire with only Çatalca and the Gallipoli peninsula. Nevertheless, the Balkan states found themselves dissatisfied. No prior agreement had been reached concerning the post-war division of the former Ottoman territories beyond the Serbo-Bulgarian partition scheme of 1912, which the war had overtaken, and the London Conference merely acknowledged the existing status quo. The most profound disappointment was felt in Sofia, where Bulgaria perceived its territorial gains, particularly in Macedonia, as inadequate and pressed its claim to the city of Salonica. In February 1913 Venizelos had offered Bulgaria southern Macedonia, including Drama, Kavala and Serres, in exchange for recognition of Greek Salonica; the Bulgarians refused. Meanwhile, Greece and Serbia remained unwilling to relinquish their respective claims on Macedonia; Serbia, denied an outlet to the Adriatic by the creation of Albania, now demanded compensation in the territory the 1912 treaty had promised to Bulgaria. Simultaneously, Romania, not involved in the war, sought to exploit discord among the Balkan states to secure advantages in Dobrudja.209
The Second Balkan War
Recognizing the renewed tensions in the Balkans, Russian Tsar Nicholas II endeavored to intervene, albeit too late: on 9 June he telegraphed the kings of Bulgaria and Serbia offering his arbitration, and invited their prime ministers to St Petersburg. Bulgaria aspired to encompass the entirety of Bulgarian Macedonia, establishing Bulgarian dominance in the Balkans, while Serbia and Greece sought larger portions of Macedonia to counteract Bulgarian hegemony. Stoyan Danev became Bulgarian prime minister in late June, and on the night of 29–30 June 1913, on orders issued by General Savov with Tsar Ferdinand's approval, Bulgarian troops attacked Serbian and Greek positions, marking the commencement of the Second Balkan War.210
The Bulgarian strategy aimed to swiftly overcome the Serbs and Greeks before potential intervention from Russia or Turkey, followed by a northward advance towards Romania. However, this plan did not materialize as rapidly as desired. Tsar Ferdinand relieved General Savov of his command on 3 July, appointing General Dimitriev as the new commander-in-chief amidst a political upheaval in Sofia. The Bulgarian government opposed war, while the Tsar favoured it, resulting in conflicting orders for the army. Compounding the challenges for Bulgaria, Romania mobilized on 3 July and declared war on 10 July, and Danev resigned on 13 July. With engagements on three different fronts, the Bulgarian army became divided, culminating in a comprehensive disaster within a mere three weeks.211
Liberation of Edirne and the Aftermath of the Balkan Wars
The return to Edirne
Meanwhile, the discord among the victors of the initial conflict presented a significant opportunity for the Ottoman Empire to reclaim some of the previously lost territories. Grand Vizier Mahmut Şevket Pasha met his demise through assassination in his car on 11 June, and his position was assumed by the conservative Sait Halim Pasha, aligning with Unionist principles. The government used the murder to crush the opposition: twelve men were hanged, among them Damad Salih Pasha, son of the former Tunisian statesman Hayreddin Pasha; Prince Sabahaddin and others were sentenced to death in absentia, and more than 300 opponents, including the writers Refik Halit and Refi Cevat, were exiled to Sinop.212 With the Committee of Union and Progress now firmly in control in Istanbul, they sought a military triumph to solidify their ascendancy. The civilian leaders and the generals, who bore the full weight of Great Power pressure, hesitated; it was the hawkish young officers of the General Staff, led by Enver, who pressed for action and carried the day.213 Consequently, on 6 July, the Sublime Porte decided for the army to advance towards the Enos-Midia line, which was traversed by an army of approximately 200,000 troops on 12–13 July, from Çatalca and Bolayır, in spite of a British protest.214
On 21 July the Bulgarians evacuated Edirne, leaving only a small rearguard of some 4,000 men, and on the morning of 22 July the Ottoman forces peacefully entered the city without a single shot being fired. The initial contingent to enter the city, a cavalry regiment, was led by Enver Bey, who reported at 10:30 to Ahmed İzzet Pasha: "I have just entered Edirne. The Bulgarians are retreating towards Mustafa Paşa," and who famously declared, "We are here, and we will stay here." Kırk Kilise was retaken the same day.215 For his part in the campaign, Enver became known as the second "Conqueror of Edirne."216
The liberation of Edirne not only bolstered the morale of the Ottoman army but also had a profound impact on the entire nation. The ceremonies that followed, with the young Enver at their center and members of the dynasty prominently on display, built the image of a victorious army reborn; the purification of the Selimiye Mosque became the focus of the celebrations, and special trains took visitors to see the recovered city.217 Ottoman officials also courted the city's non-Bulgarian non-Muslims: on 28 July the Ladino newspaper El Tiempo reported that the Greek archbishop, the mufti, the chief rabbi and the Armenian representative had jointly condemned Bulgarian atrocities and pledged their loyalty, and a multi-faith delegation funded by the National Defense Committee was sent to Europe to plead the Ottoman case. From September 1913, collaborators, all of them non-Muslims, were prosecuted; the damage done by the Bulgarian requisitions was estimated at some 33 million francs.218 Uyar sees the liberation as a turning point: the officer corps established itself as the nation's saviour and new governing elite, while the old political cadres lost what prestige they had left.219 Simultaneously, the Great Powers promptly voiced their objections to the liberation of Edirne, citing violations of the provisions of the London Treaty; on 25 July Austria-Hungary and Russia demanded the city's return. Nevertheless, the prevailing optimism in Istanbul rendered these protests and Russian threats to dispatch a fleet to Istanbul and invade Eastern Anatolia ineffectual. King Carol of Romania remarked that evicting the Ottomans from Edirne was a problem for the Powers, not for Romania.220 Meanwhile, Romanian troops had seized Southern Dobrudja and were advancing through Northern Bulgaria, with the aim of posing a threat to Sofia.
The peace settlements
MapMapClick to view full screen and zoom in
Following a series of diplomatic initiatives involving the Great Powers and the Balkan states, the Second Balkan War concluded with the signing of the Treaty of Bucharest on 10 August 1913.221 Romania emerged as the principal beneficiary in proportion to its losses, acquiring the entire Southern Dobrudja region from Bulgaria, as well as Silistria and Turtucaia south of the Danube. Bulgaria, unable to secure Macedonia and possessing only a limited outlet to the Aegean via the minor port of Dedeağaç (modern-day Alexandroupoli), had to abandon its aspirations of Balkan hegemony; it kept only the Pirin region of Macedonia, and Kutlu calls it the "Poland of the Balkans." Greece retained Salonica and was additionally granted control over the port of Kavala and the adjoining territory eastward, after a dispute in which Germany and France backed Greece and Russia, Austria-Hungary and Italy Bulgaria. Serbia gained some half a million Macedonians and half a million Albanians.222 At the Conference of Ambassadors in London, meanwhile, Prince Wilhelm zu Wied was chosen as ruler of Albania, which was placed under an international commission with a gendarmerie officered by the Dutch; according to Kutlu, the conference broke up on 2 August without even holding a closing session; the French ambassador Paul Cambon joked that it would go on "until six skeletons sit at the table."223
A consequential outcome of the Second Balkan War manifested in the establishment of the Provisional Government of Western Thrace (Garbî Trakya Hükûmet-i Muvakkatesi) on 31 August 1913. This political entity emerged through a Turkish and Pomak (Muslim Bulgarian) rebellion led by Kuşçubaşı Eşref Bey, which opposed the withdrawing Bulgarian forces in the region; Eşref's irregulars took Gümülcine on 31 August and İskeçe the next day, and Süleyman Askerî Bey headed the new government. The ephemeral republic was instituted with Gümülcine (modern-day Komotini) as its capital, complete with an autonomous state bureaucracy and military apparatus. Nevertheless, following the conclusion of the Treaty of Istanbul, the republic was dissolved, and its territory was ceded to Bulgaria. Its leaders asked bitterly why the Porte had been raided and Nazım Pasha killed if Western Thrace was to be abandoned; they declared independence, and it took Cemal Bey's personal intervention in October to persuade them to give up.224
The Ottoman Empire engaged in three peace treaties with the Balkan states. The initial accord, the Treaty of Istanbul, was signed with Bulgaria on 29 September 1913. According to its provisions, the Enos-Midia line was maintained but modified to incline northward from the Black Sea and westward across the River Maritza. Consequently, the Ottoman Empire acquired not only Edirne but also Kırk Kilise and Didymoteicho. Additionally, the treaty granted the Muslim populace within Bulgaria's borders the option to migrate to Ottoman territories within four years, while those opting to remain were afforded freedom of worship, under a chief mufti in Sofia appointed with the approval of the Şeyhülislam, with their own schools and pious foundations.225 Subsequently, the Treaty of Athens, signed on 14 November 1913, recognized Greek sovereignty over Ioannina, Crete, and Salonica, yet left the matter of the Aegean islands unresolved. A further treaty, concluded with Serbia in Istanbul on 14 March 1914, pertained solely to the status of the Muslim population in Serbia, given the absence of a shared frontier between the Ottoman Empire and Serbia.226
The balance sheet
During the Balkan Wars, the Ottoman military incurred approximately 250,000 casualties, encompassing fatalities in combat, injuries, and those deemed missing in action. The empire, having forfeited 83 percent of its European territories, which held considerable economic significance, and experienced a 69 percent reduction in the European-dwelling population, ceased to maintain its "European" identity; its lands in Europe shrank from some 167,000 to 26,000 square kilometres.227 Conversely, Bulgaria expanded its territorial holdings by 29 percent, Greece by 68 percent, Montenegro by 62 percent, and Romania by 5 percent.228 The wars also saw the first use of aircraft for bombing in the Balkans and the first combined amphibious operation in Ottoman history, and in Ginio's words they were the first "total war" the Ottomans experienced, mobilizing civilians and the economy and confronting the state with prisoners of war, blockade, trench warfare and mass flight.229
Refugees and the civilian toll
The most significant toll of the Balkan Wars was exacted upon the civilian populace. Compelled to migrate, they were compelled to flee the encroaching armies and marauding groups, resulting in loss of life and property. The strategies employed by Russia during the Turco-Russian War of 1878 to depopulate the Balkan Peninsula of its Muslim inhabitants were replicated by Bulgarian, Serbian, and Greek bands during this conflict. Concurrent with the confrontations between regular armies at the front, the Muslim populace was either killed or compelled to abandon their residences in towns and villages. The cry "The Bulgarians are coming!" emptied whole districts, and Crimean Tatars and Circassians who had found refuge in the Balkans after earlier Russian wars were uprooted once again; a Bulgarian officer reportedly told a French observer that Macedonia had been left to the bands in order to break the Turks' will to stay.230 According to Ottoman archival records, 242,807 refugees reached the empire from Macedonia alone between November 1912 and March 1914, and by another count 300,000; some 177,352 refugees were resettled in 1912–13 and another 120,556 in 1914–15.231 Yet the government, anxious not to prejudice the peace negotiations, at first tried not to encourage Muslims to leave the occupied provinces: an Interior Ministry instruction of April 1913 ordered that no measures be taken to facilitate emigration until the matter had been examined and peace concluded.232
It was not solely the Muslim populace that endured adversity. Throughout the Second Balkan War, belligerent factions perpetrated analogous cruelties upon each other's Christian communities, and Jews shared the fate of their Muslim neighbours in several towns. Istanbul bore the brunt of the refugee influx during the initial conflict, while in the subsequent war, Bulgaria assumed this unenviable distinction, receiving some 500,000 Bulgarians; Bulgarians were expelled from Edirne and Kırk Kilise, and between 130,000 and 300,000 Ottoman Greeks of Thrace and the western Anatolian coast came under pressure to emigrate.233
From Ottomanism to Turkism
The predominant catalyst behind the treatment of civilians stemmed from the prevailing "ideology of exclusionary nationalism" that permeated the Balkans in the early 20th century. Post-war, this same ideology exerted its influence on the Ottoman Empire. Leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress attributed the Balkan defeat to the non-Muslim population, prompting a shift from the ideology of Ottomanism to the advocacy of Turkism, notably championed by figures such as Enver Bey. Ottoman intellectuals searched for deeper causes in education and national character: echoing the old saying that German schoolmasters had won the battle of Sedan, they called for a new education that would prepare the nation for the next war.234 Postcards, poems and pamphlets urged the reader "not to forget" Rumelia, and Ahmed Cevad, the most prolific chronicler of the disaster, warned that there would be no second chance.235 As the conflict descended into a profound catastrophe, the Ottoman Empire's leadership redirected its focus towards safeguarding the region between Edirne and Aleppo, roughly corresponding to present-day Turkey, the very geography Goltz had pointed to.236 The recapture of Edirne, Uyar notes, angered Russia and annoyed Britain and France, and pushed the empire's new rulers further towards Germany, a path that led, within little more than a year, to the First World War.237
Notes
- The preface to the Ottoman state archives' document collection notes that in older Turkish balkan could also mean marshy ground, as well as a steep or forested mountain chain, and that Ottoman usage long preferred Avrupa-i Osmânî ("Ottoman Europe") or Rumeli before "Balkan Peninsula" came into use: T.C. Başbakanlık Devlet Arşivleri Genel Müdürlüğü, Osmanlı Belgelerinde Balkan Savaşları / Balkan Wars in Ottoman Documents, vol. 1 (Istanbul, 2013), "Önsöz" [Preface], n.p. ↩
- Yılmaz Öztuna, Avrupa Türkiyesi'ni Kaybımız (Istanbul: Babıali Kültür Yayıncılığı, 2006), 19–20. Öztuna, a popular historian, gives no source for his population figures, which should be treated as rough estimates. ↩
- Reşat Hallı, Türk Silahlı Kuvvetleri Tarihi: Balkan Harbi (1912–1913), vol. 1, Harbin Sebepleri, Askerî Hazırlıklar ve Osmanlı Devletinin Harbe Girişi, 2nd printing (Ankara: Genelkurmay Basımevi, 1993), 14–16; Osmanlı Belgelerinde Balkan Savaşları, vol. 1, "Önsöz," n.p. ↩
- Hallı, Harbin Sebepleri, 14–16. Hallı treats the so-called "testament of Peter the Great," often cited in Turkish literature as proof of a long-term Russian plan to seize Istanbul, as a legend. ↩
- This is the pattern described in Sacit Kutlu, Milliyetçilik ve Emperyalizm Yüzyılında Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti (Istanbul: İstanbul Bilgi Üniversitesi Yayınları, 2007), 318–19 and Hallı, Harbin Sebepleri, 17–20, both of which trace it through the crises of 1875–78. It should be read as a summary of the Ottoman perspective: Western historians generally give more weight to the agency of the Balkan national movements themselves. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 46–49, 56. Kutlu dates the start of the uprising to late 1803; most accounts give February 1804. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 50–52. Kutlu, like the original text of this page, presents Ypsilanti as the founder of the Philiki Etaireia; the society was in fact founded in Odessa in 1814 by three merchants, Nikolaos Skoufas, Emmanouil Xanthos and Athanasios Tsakalof, and Ypsilanti became its leader only in 1820. The rising in the Principalities began in Moldavia (Iași), not Wallachia, although Ypsilanti's army later moved into Wallachia. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 55–56; Hallı, Harbin Sebepleri, 32. The dates in the literature differ: the London Protocol of 3 February 1830 declared Greek independence; Kutlu gives 21 July 1832 for the Kalender Köşkü agreement by which the Porte accepted the new kingdom and its borders, while Hallı dates the first Greek frontier (the Arta–Volos line) to 21 July 1833, apparently in error for 1832. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 58, 92–93, 153; Hallı, Harbin Sebepleri, 35. Kutlu dates the recognition of the Catholic millet to 1831 (the original text of this page has 1830, for the Armenian Catholic Church). Kutlu argues that by approving the Exarchate shortly before Âli Pasha's death the Porte hoped both to wean the Bulgarians away from Russia and to deepen the rift between Bulgarians and Greeks. ↩
- Hallı, Harbin Sebepleri, 22. Hallı dates the union to 19 August 1858, the date of the Paris Convention that created the "United Principalities," and speaks of independence in 1866, when the Porte recognized Carol as hereditary prince; Romania became fully independent only in 1878. ↩
- Hallı, Harbin Sebepleri, 17. Hallı dates the outbreak of the uprisings in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Montenegro to 13 April 1875; most accounts date the Herzegovina rising to July 1875. ↩
- Hallı, Harbin Sebepleri, 18. The original text of this page dated the Reichstadt Agreement to 8 July 1875; it was concluded on 8 July 1876, a week after Serbia and Montenegro had gone to war. Hallı gives 1 July for the Serbian declaration of war. ↩
- Hallı, Harbin Sebepleri, 19. The original text credits this victory to Gazi Osman Pasha. Hallı names no commander; Osman Pasha commanded the Vidin corps in the Serbian war, while the main army that broke through at Aleksinac and Đunis was under Abdülkerim Nadir Pasha. This attribution should be checked. ↩
- Hallı, Harbin Sebepleri, 18–19. ↩
- Hallı, Harbin Sebepleri, 19–20. ↩
- Hallı, Harbin Sebepleri, 20. ↩
- Öztuna, Avrupa Türkiyesi, 54–55. Öztuna, whose great-grandfather was among those killed at Eski Zağra, writes that civilians suffered more in this war than the army itself. ↩
- Hallı, Harbin Sebepleri, 20–21. ↩
- Hallı, Harbin Sebepleri, 22–23. ↩
- Justin McCarthy, Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821–1922 (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1995), 89–91. The figures are McCarthy's demographic estimates for the territory of the Bulgarian principality and Eastern Rumelia; the exact page reference could not be checked against a copy of the book and should be verified. McCarthy's estimates are contested by Bulgarian historians and some Western demographers, who argue for lower figures. Öztuna, Avrupa Türkiyesi, 54, writes that more than a million refugees from present-day Bulgaria reached Istanbul. ↩
- Hallı, Harbin Sebepleri, 23–25. ↩
- Hallı, Harbin Sebepleri, 26. ↩
- Hallı, Harbin Sebepleri, 27–28. ↩
- Hallı, Harbin Sebepleri, 23, 32–33. ↩
- Hallı, Harbin Sebepleri, 33–34. Hallı calls the war of 1897 "the last war the empire fought alone and won." ↩
- Hallı, Harbin Sebepleri, 27. The original text describes "Rhodopi" as a town; the territory retained by the Ottomans was the district (kaza) of Kırcaali and several Pomak villages of the Rhodopes. Hallı dates the agreement to 1 January 1886; the Tophane conference completed it on 5 April 1886. ↩
- Hallı, Harbin Sebepleri, 34. ↩
- Hallı, Harbin Sebepleri, 35–37. ↩
- Hallı, Harbin Sebepleri, 35, 41. Hallı dates the foundation of the Supreme Committee to 1890; it is usually dated to 1895. ↩
- Hallı, Harbin Sebepleri, 36. ↩
- Hallı, Harbin Sebepleri, 38. Hallı quotes the memorandum of 21 January 1899 from Turkish archival material; the ransom paid for Ellen Stone is usually given as 14,000 Turkish lira (about $66,000), whereas Hallı has 400,000 francs. ↩
- Hallı, Harbin Sebepleri, 39. Hallı also gives a figure of 5,328 Turks killed, which is not supported by other sources and should be treated with caution. ↩
- Hallı, Harbin Sebepleri, 39–40. ↩
- The source of this quotation could not be traced in the material consulted for this page. Aydemir wrote about his childhood in Edirne in his autobiography Suyu Arayan Adam (1959) and about Macedonia in Makedonya'dan Ortaasya'ya Enver Paşa, vol. 1 (1970); the quotation should be checked against one of these before it is relied upon. ↩
- Hallı, Harbin Sebepleri, 37. ↩
- These figures are widely cited in the literature, usually on the authority of Feroz Ahmad; they could not be checked in the sources consulted for this page, and other counts give slightly different numbers (for example 288 deputies in total). ↩
- Hallı, Harbin Sebepleri, 42–44. ↩
- Mesut Uyar, The Ottoman Army and the First World War (London: Routledge, 2020), 13. ↩
- Hallı, Harbin Sebepleri, 44. Hallı notes that the crisis turned Serbia decisively towards Russia. ↩
- Hallı, Harbin Sebepleri, 44–45; Uyar, Ottoman Army, 13. Uyar stresses that Albanian unrest and the war in Libya, together with active Russian mediation, removed the last obstacles to the alliance. ↩
- Hallı, Harbin Sebepleri, 45; Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 318–19. Kutlu notes that Wilhelm II learned of the treaty through King Carol of Romania on 15 April 1912, and that its text was published in the French press in early June. ↩
- Hallı, Harbin Sebepleri, 46–49; Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 322. ↩
- Hallı, Harbin Sebepleri, 48. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 318–21. ↩
- Hüseyin Kabasakal, Balkan Harbi (1912–1913) (Ankara: Genelkurmay Basımevi, 1979), 63; Hallı, Harbin Sebepleri, 52. ↩
- Kabasakal, Balkan Harbi, 63–64. ↩
- Kabasakal, Balkan Harbi, 64. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 320. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 320, 326; Kabasakal, Balkan Harbi, 64. The original text of this page has the Serbian guns bought from Germany; both Kutlu and Kabasakal make clear that they were French Creusot guns, transported via Salonica until the day of mobilization. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 320; Uyar, Ottoman Army, 14; Abdullah Paşa, Abdullah Paşa'nın Balkan Harbi Hâtırâtı, ed. Tahsin Yıldırım and İbrahim Öztürkçü (Istanbul: Dün Bugün Yarın Yayınları, 2012), 52; Mesut Çapa, "Balkan Savaşı'nda Kızılay (Osmanlı Hilâl-i Ahmer) Cemiyeti," OTAM 1 (1990): 89–115, 89; Kabasakal, Balkan Harbi, 64; Hallı, Harbin Sebepleri, 55. The figures vary considerably: Kutlu has 120,000 men (the figure in the original text of this page); the editors of Abdullah Pasha's memoirs 120 battalions or 75,000 trained soldiers; Çapa, citing Aydemir, 75,000–80,000; Kabasakal 70,000, discharged about 25 days before the war; Uyar "over 70,000"; and Hallı a quarter of the army's peace strength. Çapa adds that the discharge was not simply a blunder, since the army also faced unrest and supply difficulties. Kutlu, 337, gives 100,000 when summarizing the post-war criticism of Ahmed Muhtar Pasha's government. ↩
- Edward J. Erickson, Büyük Hezimet: Balkan Harpleri'nde Osmanlı Ordusu, trans. Gül Çağalı Güven (Istanbul: Türkiye İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 2013), originally published as Defeat in Detail: The Ottoman Army in the Balkans, 1912–1913 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 81; Uyar, Ottoman Army, 14. The original text has 35 battalions sent to Yemen; Erickson's figure of 28 battalions refers to the First Army alone and to several destinations. ↩
- Hallı, Harbin Sebepleri, 53; Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 104–6. At that meeting the staff estimated that if war came within 25 days, only 400,000 Ottoman troops would be in place against a fully mobilized Balkan strength of 750,000. ↩
- Ahmed Cevad, Balkan Faciaları (1912–1913), ed. Fatma Ürekli and Ebul Faruk Önal (Istanbul: İdeal Kültür & Yayıncılık, 2013), 79–81; Aram Andonyan, Balkan Harbi Tarihi, trans. Zaven Biberyan (Istanbul: Sander Yayınları, 1975), 189, 193; Osmanlı Belgelerinde Balkan Savaşları, vol. 1, 37. The French officer's report is quoted by Ahmed Cevad from a French journalist, and dates the bombing to 11 August 1912 (most accounts give 1 August). The original text of this page has 28 killed by the bomb and 21 Bulgarians killed in the reprisals. A report of the Ottoman legation in Sofia, dated 7 September 1912, warned that the "extraordinary excitement" caused by the Kočani incident had led the Bulgarian government to go ahead with postponed army manoeuvres, and that the apparent calm in Bulgaria should not be trusted. ↩
- Andonyan, Balkan Harbi Tarihi, 197; Hallı, Harbin Sebepleri, 52. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 322–23, 325. The original text calls Poincaré president; he became president of the Republic only in February 1913. ↩
- Andonyan, Balkan Harbi Tarihi, 206; Uyar, Ottoman Army, 16. Andonyan describes two rallies that day, one by the opposition Entente in the morning and one by the CUP in the afternoon. Uyar names Talat and Hallaçyan among the CUP leaders who saw the mobilization as an opportunity to rally opinion against the government, and notes that similar demonstrations were organized in most of the provinces. ↩
- Andonyan, Balkan Harbi Tarihi, 205. ↩
- Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 104–6; Andonyan, Balkan Harbi Tarihi, 206. The original text describes the Ottoman mobilization of 1 October as limited; Erickson distinguishes the limited mobilization of 23 September from the general mobilization of 1 October. Montenegro had mobilized on 28 September. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 325; Genelkurmay Askerî Tarih ve Stratejik Etüt Başkanlığı, Balkan Harbi Kronolojisi (Ankara: Genelkurmay Basımevi, 1999), 2; Çapa, "Balkan Savaşı'nda Kızılay," 89. ↩
- Hallı, Harbin Sebepleri, 51; Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 325. The original text of this page dates the Powers' note to 10 October; Kutlu reports Sazonov's assurance that the borders would not change on 9 October. The Austro-Russian note was in fact delivered on 8 October, the day Montenegro declared war. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 326; Hallı, Harbin Sebepleri, 51; Balkan Harbi Kronolojisi, 2–3. Hallı and Çapa date the joint note to 13 October. ↩
- Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 97. ↩
- Hallı, Harbin Sebepleri, 51; Çapa, "Balkan Savaşı'nda Kızılay," 89; Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 326. The dates of the declarations differ from source to source. Hallı has the Ottoman declaration against Bulgaria and Serbia on 16 October and against Greece on 18 October, with Bulgaria and Greece declaring war on 18 October and Serbia on 20 October; Çapa has Bulgaria and Serbia on 17 October and Greece on 19 October; Kutlu writes that the envoys of Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia handed in a joint note declaring war on 17 October and left Istanbul. Kutlu also reports the offer of Suda Bay mentioned below. Most international accounts give 17 October for the Ottoman declaration against Serbia and Bulgaria and 18 October for the Greek declaration. ↩
- Hallı, Harbin Sebepleri, 54; Andonyan, Balkan Harbi Tarihi, 206. Andonyan gives a shorter version of the foreign minister's words, spoken to a foreign correspondent at the start of the war: "This war will be relentless, but for our part we will do all we can to see that it is not savage... If we enter enemy territory we will behave like guests entering a stranger's house. Europe may be sure that there will be no massacres." The longer version quoted above could not be traced in the sources consulted. Andonyan adds that Nazım Pasha's order of the day threatened soldiers who broke the laws of war in enemy territory with execution. ↩
- Hallı, Harbin Sebepleri, 52; Uyar, Ottoman Army, 14. ↩
- Kabasakal, Balkan Harbi, 62. ↩
- Uyar, Ottoman Army, 14; Hallı, Harbin Sebepleri, 52. ↩
- Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 79–81. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 328–30. The question of how far the non-Muslim soldiers contributed to the early routs was hotly debated after the war; Hafız Hakkı Pasha, who was no friend of the Christian conscripts, nevertheless concluded that the worst routs occurred in Muslim reserve divisions such as those of Afyonkarahisar and İzmit: Hafız Hakkı Paşa, Bozgun (Istanbul: Tercüman 1001 Temel Eser, n.d.), 94. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 339. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 338; Uyar, Ottoman Army, 14. ↩
- Uyar, Ottoman Army, 15. ↩
- Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 101–4; Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 330. ↩
- Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 104–6. ↩
- Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 82–85, 102; Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 331. ↩
- Abdullah Paşa, Balkan Harbi Hâtırâtı, 120; Sait Pertev Demirhan, Balkan Savaşı'nda Büyük Genel Karargâh, trans. Sema Demirtaş (Istanbul: Alfa, 2012), 20–22; Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 77. Kutlu dates Ahmed İzzet's departure to 15 February 1911; Erickson to the end of January, with his arrival in Yemen on 13 March 1911. ↩
- Uyar, Ottoman Army, 14–15; Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 88. The Supreme Military Council had warned on 25 June 1912 that 25 days were unrealistic and that 45–50 days would be needed for full concentration: Hallı, Harbin Sebepleri, 54. Abdullah Pasha recorded that the Oriental Railway Company, which was to run 19 trains a day, ran only three on the first day of mobilization: Abdullah Paşa, Balkan Harbi Hâtırâtı, 59. ↩
- Uyar, Ottoman Army, 18; Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 212–13. ↩
- Kabasakal, Balkan Harbi, 28–31; Hallı, Harbin Sebepleri, 133, 136. Kabasakal's figures put the Balkan armies facing the Ottomans at 468,000 (213,275 Bulgarians in Thrace and about 255,000 Serbs, Bulgarians and Montenegrins in the west), a gap of 165,000; the Greek army is not included in that total, which probably explains the higher figure of 610,000 in the original text of this page. Hallı gives the Eastern Army's field strength on 21 October as 86,200 men, plus 26,000 in Edirne and 2,800 in the Kırcaali Detachment. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 331. Kutlu describes Lossow as a colonel. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 338; Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 126. Bulgaria alone had mobilized some 460,000 men from a population of 4.3 million: Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 88–89. ↩
- Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 126. ↩
- Abdullah Paşa, Balkan Harbi Hâtırâtı, 57, 153. Abdullah's memoirs, written in self-defense, must be read with caution, but on this point Erickson, Uyar and the Turkish official history agree that the decision to attack came from Nazım Pasha's headquarters. ↩
- Uyar, Ottoman Army, 17. ↩
- Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 126–31. Erickson puts the Bulgarian losses at Petra at about 1,000. ↩
- Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 129–31. ↩
- Mahmud Muhtar Paşa, Balkan Harbi: Üçüncü Kolordu'nun ve İkinci Doğu Ordusunun Muharebeleri, ed. A. Basad Kocaoğlu (Istanbul: Parola Yayınları, 2016), 29–30; Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 332. ↩
- Mahmud Muhtar, Balkan Harbi, 40. ↩
- Gustav von Hochwächter, Mit den Türken in der Front im Stabe Mahmud Muchtar Paschas (Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1913). The passage could not be checked against the German original or its Turkish translation, neither of which was among the sources consulted for this page; the page reference should be added once it has been verified. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 332. ↩
- Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 131, 134. ↩
- Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 135–36. Erickson calls the resulting chain of command unworkable; in practice Nazım dealt directly with Mahmud Muhtar, who soon took tactical control of the whole Second Eastern Army, while Nazım himself became the de facto commander of the First: Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 144–45. Uyar similarly speaks of three "wilfully independent" commanders, Nazım, Abdullah and Mahmud Muhtar: Uyar, Ottoman Army, 18. ↩
- Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 138; Uyar, Ottoman Army, 18. Uyar also calls the five-day battle the largest and costliest of the war. ↩
- Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 140–44. ↩
- Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 159. ↩
- Mahmud Muhtar, Balkan Harbi, 120–21. The original text of this page describes the passage as a diary entry; it comes from Mahmud Muhtar's memoirs, first published in 1913. ↩
- Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 159–60. ↩
- Uyar, Ottoman Army, 18. ↩
- Uyar, Ottoman Army, 19; Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 219–20. ↩
- Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 223; Uyar, Ottoman Army, 19. The original text of this page says that the Ottomans outnumbered the Serbs; Erickson and Uyar both put the odds at roughly two to one in the Serbs' favor. ↩
- Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 229–31; Uyar, Ottoman Army, 19. ↩
- Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 232. Zeki Pasha himself later wrote that he and the Western Army commander had no choice in the matter, since the high command, which should have seen the situation better, had ordered an offensive against Serbia and Bulgaria; in his view the Ottoman army in the west should have sought a decision first against the Greeks, concentrating around Monastir: Zeki Paşa [Kolaç], Zeki Paşa'nın Balkan Savaşı Hatıratı, trans. Sema Demirtaş (Istanbul: Alfa, 2012), 18, 21. ↩
- Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 235–36. ↩
- Uyar, Ottoman Army, 20; Fehmi Özatalay, Türk Silahlı Kuvvetleri Tarihi: Balkan Harbi (1912–1913), vol. 3, pt. 3, Garp Ordusu: Karadağ Cephesi (Ankara: Genelkurmay Askerî Tarih ve Stratejik Etüt Başkanlığı, n.d.), 71–73; Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 237–40. ↩
- Özatalay, Karadağ Cephesi, 82–83. ↩
- Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 277; Hamdi Ertuna, Balkan Harbi'nde Yanya Savunması ve Esat Paşa (Korg. Bülkat) (Ankara: Genelkurmay Basımevi, 1983), 128. ↩
- Piotr Nykiel, "Some Reflections on the Effectiveness of the Ottoman Navy in the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913," in The Centenary of the Balkan Wars (1912–1913): Contested Stances, ed. Mustafa Türkeş, vol. 2 (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2014), 923–28, 924; Uyar, Ottoman Army, 15. ↩
- Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 277–78. ↩
- Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 279. ↩
- Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 280–84. Erickson rates Hasan Tahsin's planning highly, and argues that the defeat at Yenice was probably unavoidable given the Greek superiority. ↩
- Necmettin Alkan, Ve Selanik Düştü: 1912–1913 Balkan Savaşı ve Hezimeti (Istanbul: Timaş Yayınları, 2014), 200–205. Alkan reconstructs the transfer from Ottoman and German documents: the cabinet first planned to lodge the former sultan at Beykoz, and the Loreley left Istanbul for Salonica on the night of 26–27 October. ↩
- Raif Yaşar and Hüseyin Kabasakal, Türk Silahlı Kuvvetleri Tarihi: Balkan Harbi (1912–1913), vol. 3, pt. 2, Garp Ordusu: Yunan Cephesi Harekâtı (Ankara: Genelkurmay Basımevi, 1981), 263; Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 284–85. The original text dates the sinking of the Feth-i Bülend to 5 November; both the Turkish official history and Erickson place it on the night of 31 October–1 November. Erickson gives six sailors killed. ↩
- Kabasakal, Balkan Harbi, 66; Salim Aydın, "Balkan Savaşı'nda (1912–1913) Selânik'in Teslimi," Türk Kültürü İncelemeleri Dergisi 38 (2018): 127–62, 135. ↩
- Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 285; Aydın, "Selânik'in Teslimi," 135. ↩
- Aydın, "Selânik'in Teslimi," 136–37, 153; Alkan, Ve Selanik Düştü, 195; Andonyan, Balkan Harbi Tarihi, 400; Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 341; Uyar, Ottoman Army, 20. Aydın, on the basis of Ottoman and Greek archival documents, gives 9 November for the Greek entry; Kutlu and Uyar date it to 10 November. The number of prisoners is also disputed: Alkan, citing the Neue Freie Presse, and Andonyan give about 25,000 men and 1,000 officers, while an Ottoman commission of September 1913, cited by Aydın, put the total number of men, officers and commanders who surrendered at about 46,200, including the scattered and unarmed soldiers in the city and the Struma Corps. Aydın also shows that the Greeks did not respect several clauses of the protocol; some 1,700 gendarmes and 36 officers were shipped to Kuşadası. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 341. ↩
- F. Rezzan Ünalp, "Balkan Savaşlarına İlişkin Örneklerle Askeri ve Psikolojik İncelemeler," in The Centenary of the Balkan Wars (1912–1913): Contested Stances, ed. Mustafa Türkeş, vol. 2 (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2014), 815–38, 823. ↩
- Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 285; Uyar, Ottoman Army, 20. ↩
- Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 240–41; Reşat Hallı, Türk Silahlı Kuvvetleri Tarihi: Balkan Harbi (1912–1913), vol. 3, pt. 1, Garp Ordusu: Vardar Ordusu ve Ustruma Kolordusu (Ankara: Genelkurmay Basımevi, 1979), 257. ↩
- Uyar, Ottoman Army, 20; Hallı, Vardar Ordusu, 265, 270. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 341; Uyar, Ottoman Army, 20. ↩
- Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 250–56. ↩
- Uyar, Ottoman Army, 20; Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 253; Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 350. Erickson notes that the independence declaration was signed on 24 November and proclaimed four days later; the new provisional government, with four Muslim and four Christian ministers, promised to keep up good relations with the Ottoman army, and in practice had little choice but to do so. Kutlu points out that the Porte was prepared to accept Albanian autonomy, but not independence. ↩
- Ömer Seyfettin, Balkan Harbi Hatıraları, ed. Tahsin Yıldırım (Istanbul: Dün Bugün Yarın Yayınları, 2011), entry for 5 Kânunuevvel 1328 [18 December 1912]. The edition has no continuous pagination for the diary; entries are cited by date. Ömer Seyfettin was taken prisoner by the Greeks early in 1913 and released from captivity at Nafplion only in November 1913. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 337. ↩
- Uyar, Ottoman Army, 14. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 338. ↩
- Mahmud Muhtar, Balkan Harbi, 40. ↩
- [Ali İhsan Sabis], Balkan Harbinde Neden Mağlup Olduk?, ed. Hasip Saygılı (Istanbul: İlgi Kültür Sanat, 2014), 9–12, 145–46. The book appeared in 1913 under the initial "A." (Elif); it has been attributed both to the publisher Tüccarzade İbrahim Hilmi and, following Hüseyin Kazım Kadri, to Ali İhsan. Its editor notes that the American embassy sent a copy to Washington. ↩
- Andonyan, Balkan Harbi Tarihi, 375–76. ↩
- Hafız Hakkı, Bozgun, 115. ↩
- Ahmet Tetik and Çiğdem Aksu, "Bir Çıkarma Harekâtının Hikâyesi," introduction to Hüsnü Ersü, 1912–1913 Balkan Savaşı'nda Şarköy Çıkarması ve Bolayır Muharebeleri, ed. Ahmet Tetik and Çiğdem Aksu (Ankara: Genelkurmay Basımevi, 2006), v. Tetik and Aksu quote this remark from mid-1918. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 338–39; Ünalp, "Askeri ve Psikolojik İncelemeler," 828. Ünalp describes how political conflict within the command, combined with personal jealousies and grudges, multiplied unrest and indiscipline. ↩
- M. Kadri Alasya, Türk Silahlı Kuvvetleri Tarihi: Balkan Harbi (1912–1913), vol. 2, pt. 2, bk. 1, Şark Ordusu: Birinci Çatalca Muharebesi (Ankara: Genelkurmay Basımevi, 1983), 13, 27; Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 162–66. ↩
- Çapa, "Balkan Savaşı'nda Kızılay," 95; Şükran Cengiz, Fatma Başalan İz, Tangül Aytur Özen, and İhsan Erdinçli, "Balkan Savaşları'nda Kolera Mücadelesi," Askerî Tarih Araştırmaları Dergisi 11, no. 21 (February 2013): 103–20, 106. ↩
- Cengiz et al., "Kolera Mücadelesi," 106. Cengiz and her co-authors cite Zekeriya Türkmen's figure of 29 officers and 3,301 men dead of cholera, and Hikmet Özdemir's estimate of 40,000; by the end of November 11,257 sick and wounded had passed through the hospital at Hadımköy alone, of whom 3,101 died. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 343; Mehmet Kaya, "Balkan Savaşları Sırasında Anadolu'ya Göçler ve Karşılaşılan Sorunlar," Journal of History Culture and Art Research 5, no. 6 (November 2013): 1–16, 3. On 11 November the grand vizier's office warned the Interior Ministry that refugees arriving with their carts and animals from Tekirdağ and the surrounding area were sleeping on the stones of the streets because there were not enough ferries to carry them to Üsküdar, and asked that their entry into the city be limited to what the ferries could carry: T.C. Başbakanlık Devlet Arşivleri Genel Müdürlüğü, Osmanlı Belgelerinde Balkan Savaşları / Balkan Wars in Ottoman Documents, vol. 2 (Istanbul, 2013), 204–5. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 345; Cengiz et al., "Kolera Mücadelesi," 106. Of the 26,734 patients and suspected cases sent to Istanbul, 8,371 were housed in mosques. ↩
- Çapa, "Balkan Savaşı'nda Kızılay," 91, 95. ↩
- Wilhelm Feldmann, İstanbul'da Savaş Günleri: Bir Alman Gazetecinin Balkan Savaşı Hatıratı, trans. Necmettin Alkan (Istanbul: Selis Kitaplar, 2004); Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 347. The passage from Feldmann could not be checked against his book, which is cited here from the Turkish translation; the page reference should be added once verified. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 340–41; Öztuna, Avrupa Türkiyesi, 109. ↩
- Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 170; Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 347. ↩
- Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 175; Nykiel, "Ottoman Navy in the Balkan Wars," 925. Nykiel considers the fire of the two ex-German battleships vital in breaking the Bulgarian assault. ↩
- Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 175. ↩
- Alasya, Birinci Çatalca, 190–96. ↩
- Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 176–77. Erickson gives the official Ottoman estimate as about 10,000, but the figures for individual divisions suggest a much lower total. The 9th Division, which bore the brunt of the fighting, lost 21 officers and 317 men killed and 32 officers and 434 men wounded: Alasya, Birinci Çatalca, 193. ↩
- Uyar, Ottoman Army, 18. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 347. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 347, 349. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 349; Uyar, Ottoman Army, 21. ↩
- Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 254, 307. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 350. As the General Staff chronology points out, the armistice made no provision at all for feeding the garrison and population of Edirne: Balkan Harbi Kronolojisi, 2–3. ↩
- Çapa, "Balkan Savaşı'nda Kızılay," 92. ↩
- Uyar, Ottoman Army, 21. ↩
- Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 308–9; Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 352, 354. A photograph of the delegation reproduced by Erickson shows Osman Nizami Pasha, Mustafa Reşid Pasha and Salih Pasha. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 354–55. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 355. ↩
- Nykiel, "Ottoman Navy in the Balkan Wars," 923–24. ↩
- Afif Büyüktuğrul, Türk Silahlı Kuvvetleri Tarihi: Balkan Harbi (1912–1913), vol. 7, Osmanlı Deniz Harekâtı 1912–1913, 2nd printing (Ankara: Genelkurmay Basımevi, 1993), 144–47; Nykiel, "Ottoman Navy in the Balkan Wars," 925. Nykiel counts four hits on the Averof, and notes that the Ottoman destroyers missed their chance to attack. Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 355, dates the battle to 17 December. ↩
- Nykiel, "Ottoman Navy in the Balkan Wars," 926. ↩
- Ozan Tuna, "Balkan Savaşı'nda Hamidiye Kruvazörünün Yunan Donanmasına Karşı Ege Denizi, Adriyatik Denizi ve Doğu Akdeniz'deki Faaliyetleri," OTAM 49 (Spring 2021): 125–38, 128–29; Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 355. The original text of this page, following Kutlu, implies that Hamidiye broke out in late December; Tuna, using the ship's records, dates the breakout to 13 January 1913. Nykiel, "Ottoman Navy in the Balkan Wars," 925, gives the raid as lasting from January to September 1913. ↩
- Tuna, "Hamidiye Kruvazörünün Faaliyetleri," 129, 136; Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 378, 400. ↩
- Büyüktuğrul, Osmanlı Deniz Harekâtı, 173, 178–79; Nykiel, "Ottoman Navy in the Balkan Wars," 925. Nykiel attributes the failure largely to the worn barrels of the Ottoman guns. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 356. The proposal was reported by Reuters on 28 December. Danev's reaction, according to Kutlu, was to remind his colleagues that "Orientals sit at this table." ↩
- Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 308; Öztuna, Avrupa Türkiyesi, 121–22. ↩
- Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 308; Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 357. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 357, 363; Andonyan, Balkan Harbi Tarihi, 528; Balkan Harbi Kronolojisi, 2–3. Kutlu describes a majority in favor of peace rather than a unanimous decision. The General Staff chronology dates the Powers' terms to 22 January. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 363. ↩
- Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 315–16; Uyar, Ottoman Army, 21. Erickson rejects the widespread story that Enver himself shot Nazım Pasha, since he was with the grand vizier at the time. Uyar describes the raid as a well-planned coup, smoothly executed by a small number of officers "demonstrating a high level of staff planning and courage, albeit not without bloodshed." ↩
- Uyar, Ottoman Army, 21; Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 317. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 365–66. Wilhelm II's marginal comment on Wangenheim's report was "stupid." A British proposal to make old Edirne a neutral city under an Ottoman prince was rejected; the Bulgarians offered only a mufti to look after the holy places. According to Öztuna, the new government informed London through Tevfik Pasha on 23 February, exactly a month after the raid, that it would leave Edirne to Bulgaria: Öztuna, Avrupa Türkiyesi, 152. ↩
- The strength figures of 200,000 and 150,000 could not be checked in the sources consulted for this page and should be treated as approximate. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 367–68; Uyar, Ottoman Army, 21. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 368; Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 322–23. Uyar praises the plan as ambitious and innovative, and its staff work as "state-of-the-art": Uyar, Ottoman Army, 22. Erickson notes that the Ottomans had neither experience nor doctrine for such an operation. ↩
- Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 327–28. The Turkish official history gives no total for the Ottoman losses at Bolayır; Richard Hall, cited by Erickson, puts them at 6,000 dead and some 18,000 wounded, which Erickson considers too high for an attacking force of about 15,000 men. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 369. The original text of this page names the Mecidiye; Kutlu writes that Hurşid Pasha called the Mesudiye to Şarköy, leaving Bolayır without naval support (Erickson's map shows the Mecidiye among the ships at Şarköy as well). Kutlu speaks of four battalions landed at Şarköy instead of İnceburun; the original text has four regiments. ↩
- Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 337–39. ↩
- Uyar, Ottoman Army, 22. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 369; Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 358–61. ↩
- Tetik and Aksu, "Bir Çıkarma Harekâtının Hikâyesi," v. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 403–4; Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 328. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 372; Ertuna, Yanya Savunması, 128–33. The original text of this page describes the city as held by Vehib Bey; Ertuna shows that the defense was directed by Esat Pasha as corps commander, while Vehib signed the surrender protocol as fortress commander. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 372. The original text, following Kutlu, has the Greek troops landing "on the Dalmatian shores"; the landings took place on the coast of Epirus and southern Albania, far south of Dalmatia. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 373. Kutlu bases this account on reports of the German legation in Athens. ↩
- Ertuna, Yanya Savunması, 128–33. Ertuna puts the Ottoman garrison at about 15,000 against at least 60,000 Greeks, including Cretans, Epirote bands and Italian Garibaldini, and Greek losses at about 15,000. The two accounts are difficult to reconcile, and the question of whether Ioannina could have held out longer, and whether its surrender was influenced by political considerations in Istanbul, remains open: Kutlu relies on German diplomatic reports, Ertuna on Turkish military archives and Esat Pasha's papers. Andonyan, writing soon after the event, also states that the guns of Bizani were largely unusable and that food and ammunition had run out: Andonyan, Balkan Harbi Tarihi, 438. ↩
- Ertuna, Yanya Savunması, 129–32. ↩
- Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 384–85. Öztuna gives 30,000 Ottoman soldiers taken with the fortress: Öztuna, Avrupa Türkiyesi, 157. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 373. ↩
- Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 361. ↩
- Öztuna, Avrupa Türkiyesi, 161; Uyar, Ottoman Army, 22; Hikmet Süer, Türk Silahlı Kuvvetleri Tarihi: Balkan Harbi (1912–1913), vol. 2, pt. 2, bk. 2, Şark Ordusu: İkinci Çatalca Muharebesi ve Şarköy Çıkarması (Ankara: Genelkurmay Basımevi, 1981), "Önsöz," n.p. Süer's volume of the official history covers the second Çatalca battle and the Şarköy landing together. The original text of this page, which mentions only the Ottoman attack of 17 March, does not cover the Bulgarian assaults of late March. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 374. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 373–74. Ünalp gives his birth year as 1857, in Erzurum: Ünalp, "Askeri ve Psikolojik İncelemeler," 835. ↩
- Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 356–57. ↩
- Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 355–56; Hafız Hakkı, Bozgun, 22; Uyar, Ottoman Army, 22; Öztuna, Avrupa Türkiyesi, 160. Öztuna stresses that the starving soldiers could no longer hold their rifles and that men had begun to die of hunger. A Serbian unit, Kutlu notes, played a part in forcing Şükrü's surrender: Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 375. ↩
- Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 356–57. The figures are those of the Turkish official history; Erickson notes that they leave some 20,000 men of the original garrison unaccounted for, and that Richard Hall gives 15,000 Ottoman dead and 60,000 prisoners. Erickson puts Bulgarian losses for the whole Edirne campaign at 18,282, and in the final assault of 25–26 March alone at 1,591 dead and 9,558 wounded. ↩
- Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 356. ↩
- Öztuna, Avrupa Türkiyesi, 160–61. ↩
- Öztuna, Avrupa Türkiyesi, 160–61. ↩
- Ünalp, "Askeri ve Psikolojik İncelemeler," 835; Hafız Hakkı, Bozgun, 22; Öztuna, Avrupa Türkiyesi, 162. Öztuna writes that Cemal Bey had him taken home at night to forestall a public demonstration in his favor. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 376. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 376–77; Andonyan, Balkan Harbi Tarihi, 310. Many contemporaries suspected Esat Toptani of having instigated the murder; this has never been proven. Andonyan reports that when Montenegrin envoys entered the city on 5 February, Esat told them that Hasan Rıza was ill. Öztuna, Avrupa Türkiyesi, 162, dates the murder to the night of 22 April, on the eve of the surrender, which is clearly mistaken. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 378; Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 394. ↩
- Özatalay, Karadağ Cephesi, 207–11; Uyar, Ottoman Army, 22. Uyar dates the surrender to 23 April, the date of the signed agreement and the start of the evacuation; Kutlu gives 22 April, the day the terms were agreed. The defenders still had 96 guns, many of them obsolete, against some 145 Montenegrin and Serbian guns: Özatalay, Karadağ Cephesi, 204–6. Erickson's account of the terms differs: according to him, the Turks agreed to hand over their machine guns and artillery, Montenegrin troops entered the city on the evening of 24 April, and 1,220 sick and wounded too ill to travel were left behind: Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 394–95. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 377–79. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 379, 383–84. These reports are cited by Kutlu from German diplomatic documents; the Turkish official history, by contrast, attributes the surrender to the exhaustion of the food supply. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 385–86. The original text of this page dates the agreement to 7 May and places the conference in "Petrograd," a name the Russian capital adopted only in 1914; the St Petersburg Protocol is usually dated 9 May 1913 (26 April Old Style). Kutlu writes that the conference dispersed in mid-April without result, apparently referring to an earlier stage of the talks. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 386–87; Uyar, Ottoman Army, 22–23; Andonyan, Balkan Harbi Tarihi, 528–30. Kutlu observes that the terms were no different from those the Kâmil Pasha government had been debating when it was overthrown. ↩
- Uyar, Ottoman Army, 23. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 370, 385. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 391; Balkan Harbi Kronolojisi, 2–3. The General Staff chronology dates the Bulgarian attack to 29 June; the original text of this page has 30 June. Both dates are found in the literature, since the attack began during the night. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 392; Balkan Harbi Kronolojisi, 2–3. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 389–91; Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 407–8; Andonyan, Balkan Harbi Tarihi, 530. Erickson attributes the murder to members of the opposition Liberal Entente, whose leaders were then exiled; Ahmed İzzet Pasha became war minister on 18 June. ↩
- Uyar, Ottoman Army, 23. ↩
- Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 407–8; Balkan Harbi Kronolojisi, 2–3. Erickson and Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 392, date the crossing to 12 July, the General Staff chronology to 13 July; the bulk of the Çatalca Army moved off on 13 July. The figure of 200,000 men could not be checked in the sources consulted for this page. ↩
- Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 411–12; Uyar, Ottoman Army, 23; Öztuna, Avrupa Türkiyesi, 184; Andonyan, Balkan Harbi Tarihi, 531; Balkan Harbi Kronolojisi, 2–3; Eyal Ginio, Osmanlı Yenilgi Kültürü: Balkan Savaşları ve Sonrası, trans. Cumhur Atay (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2022), 362. The date of the liberation is given differently in the sources: Uyar, Öztuna and the General Staff chronology give 21 July, the day the Bulgarians left; Erickson, Andonyan, Kutlu and the original text of this page give 22 July, the day the troops entered, while Ginio dates the army's (ceremonial) entry to 23 July, the anniversary of the constitutional revolution of 1908 (10 July in the Rumi calendar), which made the day a "double national festival." Enver's words, quoted on this page as a pull quote, could not be traced to a contemporary source in the material consulted and should be treated as traditional. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 392. ↩
- Ginio, Osmanlı Yenilgi Kültürü, 362–64. ↩
- Ginio, Osmanlı Yenilgi Kültürü, 359–61. ↩
- Uyar, Ottoman Army, 23. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 393. ↩
- Balkan Harbi Kronolojisi, 2–3. The original text of this page, like Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 397, dates the treaty to 12 August; it was signed on 10 August 1913. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 397–99; Öztuna, Avrupa Türkiyesi, 188–89; Erickson, Büyük Hezimet, 407. Erickson notes that the negotiations in Bucharest opened on 30 July; Öztuna that the second war had lasted 42 days. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 395–96. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 400; Öztuna, Avrupa Türkiyesi, 184, 192. Öztuna, who claims that Western Thrace was 85 percent Turkish in 1913, writes that the war minister Ahmed İzzet Pasha offered to occupy it with the IX Corps but the grand vizier refused. The Powers had accepted that Edirne would remain Ottoman once Kavala was assigned to Greece, but Grey warned the Ottoman ambassador not to go beyond it, and the Porte promised not to cross the Maritsa. ↩
- Balkan Harbi Kronolojisi, 2–3; Öztuna, Avrupa Türkiyesi, 192–93; Andonyan, Balkan Harbi Tarihi, 531. Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 400, dates the treaty to 30 September. As Ginio points out, the agreements that followed the second war also provided for an exchange of the Ottoman and Bulgarian populations in the border zone, and in doing so legitimized the principle of population exchange that would be applied on a far larger scale in 1923: Ginio, Osmanlı Yenilgi Kültürü, 23. ↩
- Balkan Harbi Kronolojisi, 2–3; Öztuna, Avrupa Türkiyesi, 189; Andonyan, Balkan Harbi Tarihi, 531. The original text of this page dates the treaty with Serbia to 13 March 1914; Öztuna, Kutlu and the General Staff chronology give 14 March, while Andonyan describes the treaty of that date as one with Montenegro. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 403. ↩
- These percentages could not be traced in the sources consulted for this page. Öztuna gives different figures: territorial growth of 20 percent for Bulgaria, 80 percent for Serbia and Montenegro together and 100 percent for Greece, and population growth of 5, 43 and 67 percent respectively; he puts the military losses of the two wars at 150,000 for Bulgaria, 79,500 for Serbia and Montenegro and 50,000 for Greece: Öztuna, Avrupa Türkiyesi, 189. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 403–4; Ginio, Osmanlı Yenilgi Kültürü, 21–22. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 403–4. Ahmed Cevad's illustrated "Red-Black Book" of 1913, published by the Society for the Publication of Documents on the Balkan Atrocities that he founded with Satı (al-Husri), Bedi Nuri, İsmayıl Hakkı (Baltacıoğlu) and Ahmed Ferid (Tek), was one of a series of works that documented these events for Ottoman and European readers: Ahmed Cevad, Balkan Faciaları, 79–81; Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 406. ↩
- Kaya, "Anadolu'ya Göçler," 13–14. ↩
- Osmanlı Belgelerinde Balkan Savaşları, vol. 2, 242–43. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 404–6. Kutlu's claim (404) that the Greek army in Salonica killed more Jews than Muslims is not supported by other sources consulted for this page. The international Carnegie Commission, which investigated the wars in 1913, documented atrocities committed by all the belligerents. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 405, 407; [Sabis], Neden Mağlup Olduk?, 145–46. ↩
- Ginio, Osmanlı Yenilgi Kültürü, 24, 158. ↩
- Kutlu, Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti, 405. ↩
- Uyar, Ottoman Army, 23. ↩
Bibliography
Official histories and document collections
- Alasya, M. Kadri. Türk Silahlı Kuvvetleri Tarihi: Balkan Harbi (1912–1913). Vol. 2, pt. 2, bk. 1, Şark Ordusu: Birinci Çatalca Muharebesi. Ankara: Genelkurmay Basımevi, 1983.
- Büyüktuğrul, Afif. Türk Silahlı Kuvvetleri Tarihi: Balkan Harbi (1912–1913). Vol. 7, Osmanlı Deniz Harekâtı 1912–1913. 2nd printing. Ankara: Genelkurmay Basımevi, 1993.
- Ersü, Hüsnü. 1912–1913 Balkan Savaşı'nda Şarköy Çıkarması ve Bolayır Muharebeleri. Edited by Ahmet Tetik and Çiğdem Aksu. Ankara: Genelkurmay Basımevi, 2006.
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- Hallı, Reşat. Türk Silahlı Kuvvetleri Tarihi: Balkan Harbi (1912–1913). Vol. 1, Harbin Sebepleri, Askerî Hazırlıklar ve Osmanlı Devletinin Harbe Girişi. 2nd printing. Ankara: Genelkurmay Basımevi, 1993.
- Hallı, Reşat. Türk Silahlı Kuvvetleri Tarihi: Balkan Harbi (1912–1913). Vol. 3, pt. 1, Garp Ordusu: Vardar Ordusu ve Ustruma Kolordusu. Ankara: Genelkurmay Basımevi, 1979.
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- Süer, Hikmet. Türk Silahlı Kuvvetleri Tarihi: Balkan Harbi (1912–1913). Vol. 2, pt. 2, bk. 2, Şark Ordusu: İkinci Çatalca Muharebesi ve Şarköy Çıkarması. Ankara: Genelkurmay Basımevi, 1981.
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Books and theses
- Abdullah Paşa. Abdullah Paşa'nın Balkan Harbi Hâtırâtı. Edited by Tahsin Yıldırım and İbrahim Öztürkçü. Istanbul: Dün Bugün Yarın Yayınları, 2012.
- Ahmed Cevad. Balkan Faciaları (1912–1913). Edited by Fatma Ürekli and Ebul Faruk Önal. Istanbul: İdeal Kültür & Yayıncılık, 2013. First published as Kırmızı-Siyah Kitap: 1328 Fecâyi'i. Istanbul, 1329 [1913].
- Alkan, Necmettin. Ve Selanik Düştü: 1912–1913 Balkan Savaşı ve Hezimeti. Istanbul: Timaş Yayınları, 2014.
- Andonyan, Aram. Balkan Harbi Tarihi. Translated by Zaven Biberyan. Istanbul: Sander Yayınları, 1975.
- Demirhan, Sait Pertev. Balkan Savaşı'nda Büyük Genel Karargâh. Translated by Sema Demirtaş. Istanbul: Alfa, 2012.
- Erickson, Edward J. Büyük Hezimet: Balkan Harpleri'nde Osmanlı Ordusu. Translated by Gül Çağalı Güven. Istanbul: Türkiye İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 2013. Originally published as Defeat in Detail: The Ottoman Army in the Balkans, 1912–1913. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003.
- Feldmann, Wilhelm. İstanbul'da Savaş Günleri: Bir Alman Gazetecinin Balkan Savaşı Hatıratı. Translated by Necmettin Alkan. Istanbul: Selis Kitaplar, 2004.
- Ginio, Eyal. Osmanlı Yenilgi Kültürü: Balkan Savaşları ve Sonrası. Translated by Cumhur Atay. Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2022. Originally published as The Ottoman Culture of Defeat: The Balkan Wars and Their Aftermath. London: Hurst, 2016.
- Hafız Hakkı Paşa. Bozgun. Istanbul: Tercüman 1001 Temel Eser, n.d.
- Hochwächter, Gustav von. Mit den Türken in der Front im Stabe Mahmud Muchtar Paschas. Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1913.
- Kutlu, Sacit. Milliyetçilik ve Emperyalizm Yüzyılında Balkanlar ve Osmanlı Devleti. Istanbul: İstanbul Bilgi Üniversitesi Yayınları, 2007.
- Mahmud Muhtar Paşa. Balkan Harbi: Üçüncü Kolordu'nun ve İkinci Doğu Ordusunun Muharebeleri. Edited by A. Basad Kocaoğlu. Istanbul: Parola Yayınları, 2016.
- McCarthy, Justin. Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821–1922. Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1995.
- Ömer Seyfettin. Balkan Harbi Hatıraları. Edited by Tahsin Yıldırım. Istanbul: Dün Bugün Yarın Yayınları, 2011.
- Öztuna, Yılmaz. Avrupa Türkiyesi'ni Kaybımız. Istanbul: Babıali Kültür Yayıncılığı, 2006.
- [Sabis, Ali İhsan]. Balkan Harbinde Neden Mağlup Olduk? Edited by Hasip Saygılı. Istanbul: İlgi Kültür Sanat, 2014. First published as Balkan Harbinde Neden Münhezim Olduk by "A." Istanbul, 1329 [1913].
- Uyar, Mesut. The Ottoman Army and the First World War. London: Routledge, 2020.
- Zeki Paşa [Kolaç]. Zeki Paşa'nın Balkan Savaşı Hatıratı. Translated by Sema Demirtaş. Istanbul: Alfa, 2012.
Articles and chapters
- Aydın, Salim. "Balkan Savaşı'nda (1912–1913) Selânik'in Teslimi." Türk Kültürü İncelemeleri Dergisi 38 (2018): 127–62.
- Çapa, Mesut. "Balkan Savaşı'nda Kızılay (Osmanlı Hilâl-i Ahmer) Cemiyeti." OTAM: Ankara Üniversitesi Osmanlı Tarihi Araştırma ve Uygulama Merkezi Dergisi 1 (1990): 89–115.
- Cengiz, Şükran, Fatma Başalan İz, Tangül Aytur Özen, and İhsan Erdinçli. "Balkan Savaşları'nda Kolera Mücadelesi." Askerî Tarih Araştırmaları Dergisi 11, no. 21 (February 2013): 103–20.
- Kaya, Mehmet. "Balkan Savaşları Sırasında Anadolu'ya Göçler ve Karşılaşılan Sorunlar." Journal of History Culture and Art Research 5, no. 6 (November 2013): 1–16.
- Nykiel, Piotr. "Some Reflections on the Effectiveness of the Ottoman Navy in the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913." In The Centenary of the Balkan Wars (1912–1913): Contested Stances, edited by Mustafa Türkeş, 2:923–28. Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2014.
- Tuna, Ozan. "Balkan Savaşı'nda Hamidiye Kruvazörünün Yunan Donanmasına Karşı Ege Denizi, Adriyatik Denizi ve Doğu Akdeniz'deki Faaliyetleri." OTAM 49 (Spring 2021): 125–38.
- Ünalp, F. Rezzan. "Balkan Savaşlarına İlişkin Örneklerle Askeri ve Psikolojik İncelemeler." In The Centenary of the Balkan Wars (1912–1913): Contested Stances, edited by Mustafa Türkeş, 2:815–38. Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2014.
Page last updated on 26 October 2026