A century ago today, the Balkan Wars began. On Oct. 8, 1912, the tiny Kingdom of Montenegro declared war on the weak Ottoman Empire, launching an invasion of Albania, then under nominal Turkish rule. Three other Balkan states in league with the Montenegrinsâ??Bulgaria, Greece and Serbiaâ??rapidly followed suit, waging war on the old imperial enemy while drawing upon a wellspring of national sentiment in each of their homelands. By March 1913, their blood-soaked campaigns had effectively pushed the enfeebled Ottomans out of Europe. Yet by July, Greece and Serbia would clash with Bulgaria in whatâ??s known as the Second Balkan Warâ??a bitter month-long struggle that saw more territory change hands, more villages razed and more bodies dumped into the earth.
The peace that followed was no peace at all. A year later, with Europeâ??s Great Powers entwined in the fate of the Balkans, a Yugoslav nationalist in the Bosnian city of Sarajevo killed the crown prince of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Europe plunged into World War I.
â??The Balkans,â? goes one of the many witticism attributed to Winston Churchill, â??generates more history than it can locally consume.â? To Churchill and many Western observers of his era, this rugged stretch of southeastern Europe was a headache, a geo-political mess that had for centuries been at the crossroads of empires and religions, riven by ethnic tribalisms and the meddling of outside powers. Half a century earlier, Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarckâ??the architect of the modern German stateâ??expressed his disgust with this nuisance of a region, scoffing that the whole of the Balkans was â??not worth the bones of one Pomeranian grenadierâ? in his employ.
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