ABSTRACT

World War I might have been seen at first as a “Third Balkan War” designed to secure Bosnia-Herzegovina. Austria-Hungary had taken this territory from the Ottomans in 1878, but only formally annexed it in 1908 just after the Young Turk Revolution. The end of an Ottoman presence in the Balkans after the First and Second Balkan Wars had caused all the European powers to reassess the strategic balance of the Eastern Mediterranean region. Germany had been building stronger economic ties to the Ottoman Empire for some time as well. The competition between European powers to influence the Ottomans had been intensifying for a long time. The government also took the unusual step of having the Ottoman Shaykh al-Islam issue a fatwa to legitimize the war as a jihad that all Muslims around the world were invited to join. The real clashes in the region that would define its modern boundaries were just starting or about to begin.