The next trouble was Bulgaria’s declaration of independence.[154] Bulgaria had been a principality since 1878, and had been paying annual tribute to the Turkish government. Then came the resistless demand of the Greeks of Crete to unite with Greece. Then the war between Turkey and Italy in 1911-1912. Still worse than the above incidents was the Balkan war between Turkey on one side and the Balkan States and Greece on the other side. The Balkan allies were Greece, Bulgaria, Servia, and Montenigro. The causes of this war were just the same: the Turkish oppression and massacres, and the ineffectual meddling of the European powers. “Macedonia was ceded by Turkey to Bulgaria in 1878 pursuant to the Treaty of San Stefano, but the Congress of Berlin in the same year revised (substituted) this treaty through the insistence of Great Britain and Austria, and restored the province to Turkey. In article XXIII of the Treaty of Berlin, the signatory powers bound themselves to establish an organic law providing for good government in Macedonia and to see that it was applied. During thirty-four years that followed, this promise was unfulfilled, despite the frequent complaints of the Christian peoples--Bulgars, Greeks, and Serbs--of Turkish misgovernment and atrocities.”[155] It is the same old story. The Great Powers who made the treaty, article by article, and signed the instrument, then turned and left the Turks to do the rest. That “rest” was for them to go on as usual until the four Balkan states formed an alliance and declared war against Turkey in October of 1912. The war was fortunately of short duration, but it was the most decisive and humiliating defeat that the Turks had received for a long time. Macedonia was freed from the bloody reign of the Turks, who for nearly five hundred years had held that beautiful country under their iron heel. Nearly two millions of people, three-fourths of whom were Christians, were emancipated from a worse form of slavery. The defeat of the Turkish armies was not due to lack of courage of the Ottoman soldiers. It was solely due to the Turkish unpreparedness, their lack of organization and arrangements for food supply for the army, and to the inferiority of the Turkish artillery. The non-Moslem soldiers for the first time fought alongside of the Moslem soldiers. “The bravery and loyalty of the Armenian soldiers in the Turco-Balkan war were commended by Nazim Pasha, then minister of war.” This Turco-Balkan war ended in May, 1913.