Montenegro starts the First Balkan War

On 8 October 1912 the Montenegrin chargé d’affaires in Constantinople handed the Turkish government a declaration of war. The American ambassador reported to Washington that day that the Turks had at once ordered offensive action. In the Julian calendar, then in use in the Balkans, it was 25 September. The 1914 report of the Carnegie Endowment’s commission gives 9 October, probably the day of the first fighting. The smallest Balkan state, with some 250,000 inhabitants according to the American diplomat Jacob Schurman, thus began the First Balkan War. Within days it was to be joined by far stronger allies.

The Balkan League

The Balkan coalition was born of the Italo-Turkish War. According to the Carnegie report, when Italy attacked Turkey in the autumn of 1911, the Serbian Foreign Minister Milovan Milovanović (PL) went to the station in Belgrade to meet the Bulgarian Prime Minister Ivan Geshov on his way back to Sofia, got into his carriage, and in a two-hour conversation the two agreed the bases of an alliance. The secret Serbo-Bulgarian treaty was concluded in March 1912. It divided Macedonia in advance, with the Tsar of Russia to decide on a disputed strip. Joint action required St Petersburg’s consent, and the alliance was directed not only against Turkey but also against any great power that tried to seize territory in the peninsula, which in practice meant Austria-Hungary. In May Bulgaria concluded a defensive alliance with the Greece of Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos. Thus the Balkan League came into being.

King Nicholas I of Montenegro needed no persuading. According to the Carnegie report, as soon as the Tripolitanian war began he was the first to propose a joint attack to Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece. In the spring and summer of 1912 he made agreements with Bulgaria and, through its mediation, with Serbia, with which he had long been at odds because the two Serb states vied for leadership. His main goal was Scutari in northern Albania.

The signal for war

In the summer of 1912 a rising in Albania brought down the government in Constantinople and forced the Young Turks into concessions to the Albanians. The Balkan states saw this as proof of Turkey’s weakness and at the same time as a threat to the Christians of Macedonia. The massacres at Kočani and Berane also caused outrage. A proposal by the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister Leopold Berchtold to induce Turkey to decentralise changed nothing. The allies signed military conventions, and at the end of September they announced mobilisation.

On 8 October, at the last moment, Russia and Austria-Hungary declared on behalf of the powers that they themselves would carry out reforms in European Turkey and that, if war broke out, they would allow no change in the territorial status quo, whatever its outcome. That same day Montenegro declared war. Its army advanced on Scutari and into the Sanjak of Novi Pazar.

The other allies still held back. On 10 October the ambassadors of the powers delivered a joint note on reforms in Constantinople. The Porte replied that it would introduce them itself, without foreign interference. On 13 October Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece demanded autonomy for Turkey’s European provinces. The Turks, who on 15 October signed a preliminary peace with Italy, declared war on Serbia and Bulgaria on 17 October. The next day Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece declared war on Turkey.

The collapse of European Turkey

The powers’ assurances soon lost all meaning. The Serbs routed the Turks at Kumanovo, the Bulgarians at Kırk Kilise and Lüleburgaz, and on 8 November the Greeks entered Salonika. According to Schurman, within a few weeks Turkey lost almost all its lands in Europe except Constantinople and the besieged fortresses of Adrianople, Janina and Scutari, before which the troops of Nicholas I had arrived at the end of October.