The Balkans: A History of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—TurkeyHogarth, D. G. (David George)
History
The Balkans: A History of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey
Hogarth, D. G. (David George)
Balkan Peninsula -- History; Eastern question (Balkan)
convolutions, and that Greece and Bulgaria could only divide the spoils
by both making up their minds to give and take. The actual lines this
necessary compromise would follow, obviously depended on the degree of
the allies’ success against Turkey in the common war that was yet to be
fought, and Venezelos rose to the occasion. He had the courage to offer
Bulgaria the Greek alliance without stipulating for any definite
minimum share in the common conquests, and the tact to induce her to
accept it on the same terms. Greece and Bulgaria agreed to shelve all
territorial questions till the war had been brought to a successful
close; and with the negotiation of this understanding (another case in
which Venezelos achieved what Trikoupis had attempted only to fail) the
Balkan League was complete.
The events that followed are common knowledge. The Balkan allies opened
the campaign in October, and the Turks collapsed before an impetuous
attack. The Bulgarians crumpled up the Ottoman field armies in Thrace
at the terrific battle of Lule Burgas; the Serbians disposed of the
forces in the Macedonian interior, while the Greeks effected a junction
with the Serbians from the south, and cut their way through to
Salonika. Within two months of the declaration of war, the Turks on
land had been driven out of the open altogether behind the shelter of
the Chataldja and Gallipoli lines, and only three
fortresses—Adrianople, Yannina, and Scutari—held out further to the
west. Their navy, closely blockaded by the Greek fleet within the
Dardanelles, had to look on passively at the successive occupation of
the Aegean Islands by Greek landing-parties. With the winter came
negotiations, during which an armistice reigned at Adrianople and
Scutari, while the Greeks pursued the siege of Yannina and the
Dardanelles blockade. The negotiations proved abortive, and the result
of the renewed hostilities justified the action of the Balkan
plenipotentiaries in breaking them off. By the spring of 1913 the three
fortresses had fallen, and, under the treaty finally signed at London,
Turkey ceded to the Balkan League, as a whole, all her European
territories west of a line drawn from Ainos on the Aegean to Midía on
the Black Sea, including Adrianople and the lower basin of the river
Maritsa.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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