First Balkan War
Four Balkan states attacked the Ottoman Empire in October 1912 and took almost all of its European territory in seven weeks. The alliance of Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece and Montenegro was assembled with Russian encouragement, and it worked because the participants postponed the question of how to divide the winnings. The Ottoman position had been weakened by the Italian war over Libya, by the Young Turk coup and counter-coup, and by an Albanian revolt. The campaigns were fast and one-sided. Bulgaria destroyed the Ottoman armies in Thrace at Kirk Kilisse and Lule Burgas and reached the Chatalja lines outside Constantinople; Serbia took Kumanovo and Macedonia; Greece took Salonica hours before the Bulgarians arrived; and Montenegro besieged Shkodra. By December the empire held three besieged fortresses and the ground behind the Chatalja lines. The London settlement of May 1913 gave up everything west of a line near Enez, and created Albania — which Austria-Hungary insisted on, principally to keep Serbia off the Adriatic. That insistence produced the second war six weeks later, when Bulgaria, cheated of the Macedonian territory it had been promised because Serbia had been cheated of Albania, attacked its own allies and was beaten by everyone including the Ottomans and Romania. The wars killed some 200,000 people and displaced hundreds of thousands more. Serbia doubled in size and became the object of Austrian policy, and the great powers spent 1913 discovering that they could not control their own clients. The wars also emptied whole districts of their populations. Muslims fled or were driven from Macedonia and Thrace in hundreds of thousands, and the Carnegie commission that investigated in 1913 documented atrocities by every army involved and predicted, accurately, that nothing had been settled.
- Year: 1912 CE
- Category: Military
