The Balkan Peninsula

Summary

The nationalistic ideals of the nineteenth century were still unsatisfied at the beginning of the twentieth, not only in Austria-Hungary and in German and Russian Poland but also throughout the Balkan peninsula; indeed they could only be satisfied there at the expense both of the Dual Monarchy and the Turkish Empire. The latter, ruled by the notorious Abdul Hamid, although in retreat for many years, still dominated the Balkans as it did North Africa; in theory the Turks still ruled Bosnia and Bulgaria. The Greeks were desperately dissatisfied on account of turbulent Crete and because Macedonia was still under Turkey. Macedonia was the Gordian knot of the peninsula; it was inhabited by a confusion of races each claiming the mastery. In the south there were Greeks, in the west Serbs and Albanians, in the north some Rumanians, and there were Turks scattered here and there. The biggest single group of Macedonians was considered by Bulgarians to be Bulgarian, and, ever since the abortive Treaty of San Stefano in 1878, Bulgaria had considered Macedonia to belong to her by right. The most famous Macedonian nationalist body, the terroristic ‘Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation’ (I.M.R.O.), had been founded in 1893 to fight the Turks. In 1903 at Mürzsteg Austria-Hungary and Russia agreed to a programme for the administrative reform of Macedonia, and the other great powers supported them with the Turks.