Balkan Wars against the Ottoman Empire

Compiled By: Syed Ali Shahbaz
On April 24, 1877 AD, the Russian Empire declared war on the Ottoman Empire in alliance with the Christian communities of the Balkan Peninsula, and its troops entered Romania by crossing the Prut River. Fought in the Balkans and in the Caucasus for almost a year, the Russians, capitalizing on the weakness of the Ottomans, established control over the Black Sea and created new states in the Balkans.
The Turks, despite some initial success, suffered heavily as a result of lack of defence strategy. The Russian march on Istanbul was halted by the humiliating terms of the Treaty of San Stefano on March 3, 1987, by which the Ottoman Empire, after five centuries of Muslim rule, was forced to grant independence to its provinces of Romania, Serbia, Montenegro, and Bulgaria.
Russia also seized several Turkish provinces in the Caucasus, namely Kars and Batum in Georgia, in addition to occupying Erzurum near to the borders of Iran, with the help of Armenians, before eventual withdrawal. Taking advantage of the Ottoman defeat, the Austria-Hungarian Empire seized Bosnia-Herzegovina from the Turks, while Britain occupied Cyprus.
Many towns and cities which had distinct Turkish-Islamic features with mosques, tekkiyes, bazaars, baths, libraries, and public fountains (such as Sofia the capital of Bulgaria), were destroyed and later replaced with Christian churches. Of the 1.5 million Muslims in pre-war Bulgaria, half of them disappeared by 1879, with 200,000 massacred and the rest becoming permanent refugees in Ottoman territories. A large library containing books in Turkish, Arabic and Persian, was destroyed when a mosque in Turnovo was burned in 1877. This great setback for native European Muslims happened within half-a-century of their massacre, expulsion and forced Christianization in the province of Yunanistan, which West European powers detached from the Ottoman Empire and gave it the ancient pre-Christian name of Greece.
On 14th of the Islamic month of Jamadi as-Sani in 1152 AH, the trilateral Treaty of Belgrade was signed, according to which the Austrians returned Belgrade to the Ottoman Turks after 22 years of occupation. Russia for its part pledged to demolish the Fortress of Azak and leave the surrounding lands to the Ottomans, with a promise that no Russian ship will sail in the Black Sea.
On 15th of the Islamic month of Jamadi as-Sani in 1094 AH, an Ottoman Turkish army led by Hussein Pasha conquered Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia in Europe, with the crown of the Austrian emperor being among the spoils of war.
On 16th of the Islamic month of Jamadi as-Sani in 950 AH, the Ottoman Turks concluded a treaty with France to run the French Mediterranean port of Toulon. The Ottoman flag was hoisted in Toulon as almost all the French left the port. The Ottomans introduced the Azan for the five-times-daily prayers in this port, and turned the cathedral into a mosque during their 8-month stay. In this period under the command of the famous Turkish admiral, Khairoddin Pasha (known as Barbarossa or Redbeard to the Europeans), the Ottoman navy, equipped with 30,000 troops raided the Spanish and Italian coasts and defeated the combined attacks by Spanish-Italian navies. The Ottomans left after King Francis I of France paid a sum of 800,000 in the currency of those days and released all Turks and Arabs who were forced to work on French galleys. Khairoddin Pasha died two years later, but Toulon was again used as a safe harbour for several months, some three years later by another Ottoman admiral, Turgut Raees.
On 17th of the Islamic month of Jamadi as-Sani in 833 AH (1430 AD), the 6th Ottoman Sultan, Murad II, conquered the city and district of Thessalonica in Macedonia from the Byzantine Empire. Thessalonica and its adjoining districts were lost by the Turks almost five centuries later during the First Balkans War in 1330 AH (1912 AD) to the new state called Greece (set up on the Ottoman Province of Yunanistan), while the rest of Macedonia, which had a sizeable Muslim population, was split up between Greece and Serbia (the former Ottoman Province of Servistan). The Greek Christians, who destroyed mosques and other sites of the centuries-old Islamic heritage, continue to suppress the Muslims of Thessalonica and treat them as second class citizens.