Balkan Wars: A History from Beginning to End

“Trouble in the Balkans” was a familiar headline in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, as the European nations living under the rule of the Ottoman Empire simmered with nationalism, unrest, and a covetous yearning for one another’s territory. The Ottoman Empire had seen centuries of dominance, but by the start of the twentieth century, the once-powerful Turks were declining. As reformers within the empire sought routes to power, Ottoman subjects—denied access to the avenues of influence—sensed that the time was ripe for rebelling.

Finally, in 1912, the nations of Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro, and Greece formed the Balkan League and went to war against the Turks. The so-called Great Powers of Britain, France, and Russia, each with its own agenda regarding European boundaries and loyalties, had ignored the failure of the Ottomans to implement reforms and now watched with alarm as conflict broke out. The Balkan League won territory, the Ottomans lost territory—and then, irate because of displeasure at the re-drawn borders, Greece and Serbia promptly went to war against their former ally, Bulgaria.

Just a year after the Balkan Wars ended, a 19-year-old Bosnian Serb named Gavrilo Princip, filled with nationalist zeal and resentment, assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian imperial throne. The First World War that resulted would re-draw the boundaries of Europe and leave millions dead. As Chancellor Otto von Bismarck had predicted decades before, a major European war had come out of some “damned foolish thing” in the Balkans.