Treaty of London ends the First Balkan War

On 30 May 1913 (17 May in the Julian calendar), at St James’s Palace (PL) in London, the delegates of Turkey and of Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece and Montenegro signed the peace treaty (PL) that ended the First Balkan War. According to the New York Times correspondent, it was signed at 12.40 p.m., and the ceremony lasted exactly one hour. The treaty had only seven short articles, but it closed more than five centuries of Ottoman rule in the Balkans. In Article II the Sultan ceded “to their Majesties the Allied Sovereigns all the territories of his Empire on the continent of Europe to the west of a line drawn from Enos on the Aegean Sea to Midia on the Black Sea, with the exception of Albania”. All Turkey kept in Europe was Constantinople and a narrow strip of Thrace.

From armistice to treaty

The war that Montenegro had begun in October 1912 drove the Turks back to the very walls of their capital within a few weeks. At the beginning of December Turkey concluded an armistice with Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegro, and the delegates of the warring states gathered in London. Alongside them the ambassadors of the great powers met under the chairmanship of the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey. The talks foundered on Adrianople, which the Turks refused to give up and the Bulgarians demanded. On 23 January 1913 the Young Turks led by Enver overthrew the government, which had been ready to give way, and the Minister of War, Nazım Pasha, was killed in the coup. Fighting resumed. On 6 March the Greeks took Janina, on 26 March the Bulgarians, helped by the Serbs, stormed Adrianople, and on 23 April Essad Pasha Toptani surrendered Scutari to the Montenegrins. The powers, which had assigned the town to Albania, forced King Nicholas I to give it up, however, and on 14 May landed an international force there.

Exhausted, Turkey had to accept the powers’ terms. The talks resumed in London dragged on, however, because, according to the Carnegie commission, the Serbs and Greeks were playing for time. Grey opened the ceremony on 30 May by inviting the delegates to sign. The Bulgarian delegate Stoyan Danev thanked him for his “untiring mastery” in diplomacy. The Montenegrin Popović was more candid: “We have signed the preliminary treaty because nothing else remained for us to do.” He added that Montenegro had been made the whipping boy of Europe. The Bulgarians and Turks also signed a protocol on the withdrawal of their armies.

What was settled

The exact line of the Enos–Midia frontier was to be drawn by an international commission. The borders of Albania and “all other questions concerning Albania” were entrusted to six powers: Germany, Austria-Hungary, France, Great Britain, Italy and Russia. The Albanians had already proclaimed independence (PL) at Vlorë on 28 November 1912, but it was Austria-Hungary, backed by Italy, that settled the existence of their state. According to Schurman, Vienna wanted above all to cut Serbia off from the Adriatic. The Sultan also gave up Crete, the fate of the other Aegean islands and of the Mount Athos peninsula was left to the powers, and financial questions to a commission in Paris.

The treaty, on the other hand, said not a word about how the allies would divide their conquests. That was its weakest point. Serbia, kept away from the Adriatic, sought compensation in Macedonia, much of which had been promised to Bulgaria. On 25 May Prime Minister Nikola Pašić demanded in Sofia a revision of the Serbo-Bulgarian agreement, and according to the commission Serbia and Greece concluded a secret convention against the Bulgarians in those very days. The Bulgarians, for their part, the commission writes, hurried to make peace with Turkey so as to move their armies from Adrianople and Chatalja to Macedonia. Peace with Turkey had been signed, but war between the victors was already in the air.