Introduction

Military historians now consider the 1912–1913 events in the Balkans—when the Ottomans fought Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia—as the crucible of WWI, equally as important as the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 that prompted Austria to declare war on Serbia. The Ottomans were obligated to concede “rights” to their subjects, sometimes willingly, but more often as coerced by increasingly extractive colonial powers. The process began with the Greek revolution in 1821 and accelerated until 1878, when disputed settlement lines were mapped out to create Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia. The end of the Ottomans for this author came in 1913, when a real coup of the Central Committee of the Unionists brought down the government and radicalized the remaining years of the Ottoman Empire, beginning with the complete collapse of the barely reformed army in the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913.