April 24, 1877: The Tsar Declares War on the Ottoman Empire

On April 24, 1877 — April 12 by Russia's old calendar — Tsar Alexander II issued a manifesto declaring war on the Ottoman Empire. It was one in a centuries-long series of Russo-Turkish wars, and the one that finally broke Ottoman power in the Balkans and put new nations on the map of Europe.

The war had been brewing for years. In 1875, Christian peasants rose against Ottoman rule in Bosnia and Herzegovina; in the spring of 1876, Bulgaria erupted in the April Uprising, which Ottoman forces crushed with a severity that horrified Europe; then Serbia and Montenegro went to war with the Sultan and started losing. A last-ditch peace conference of the great powers at Constantinople collapsed in early 1877. Russia — casting itself as the protector of Orthodox Slavs — decided the sword would succeed where diplomacy had failed. Weeks before the declaration, Russia had signed a convention with Romania allowing its armies to cross Romanian territory to reach the Danube.

The campaign that followed was brutal and famous. Russia opened the war with some 185,000 men in its Army of the Danube and another 75,000 in the Caucasus, and Romanian, Serbian, and Montenegrin troops — plus Bulgarian volunteers — fought alongside the Russians. Russian armies crossed the Danube in June, stormed the Shipka Pass through the Balkan Mountains, and then bogged down for five months in the siege of Plevna, where the Ottoman commander Osman Pasha held off repeated assaults before surrendering that December. By January 1878 Russian troops were approaching Constantinople itself, and on March 3 the Sultan signed the Treaty of San Stefano.

The peace was revised almost immediately — Britain and Austria-Hungary forced a new settlement at the Congress of Berlin that summer — but the core results held: Bulgaria was restored after centuries under Ottoman rule, and Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro won full independence. Russia took Kars and Batum in the Caucasus; Britain occupied Cyprus; Austria-Hungary moved into Bosnia. The "Eastern Question" that had haunted European diplomacy for a century had a new answer: the Balkans would belong to the Balkan peoples.

The war of 1877–78 created the modern Balkans — and the settlement left a tangle of resentments, over Macedonia, over Bosnia, over great powers carving up small nations, that would outlive the peace. April 24, 1877, is one of those dates when the map of Europe visibly changed.

Photo: La Ilustración Española y Americana, public domain (via Wikimedia Commons).