The Russo-Turkish War (1877-1878)

 

 

The last Russo-Turkish War came as a result of the long running Russian antipathy towards the Turks whom they had been at war with since the previous century.  Turkish territory simply provided the outlet to the Mediterranean Sea that they had long sought for naval and mercantile reasons.  The anti-Ottoman uprising of 1875 in Bosnia and Herzegovina proved to be an easy pretext for Russian involvement in the region.  Serbia and Montenegro joined the rebels in their war on the Ottoman Empire at the suggestion of the Russians who sought to take advantage of Ottoman weakness.  Yet before the Tsar could directly intervene he had to be assured that no other great power would object.  His envoys approached Austria to determine their reaction to the Russian intervention.  After securing Austrian neutrality in 1877, Russia went to war with the Ottoman Empire.

The military reforms that the Russian Empire had undertaken during the previous decades played an important role in the Russian victory.  Even so, the war caught the Russians in the middle of the planned transitions.

When the war ended in 1978, Russia sought to redraw the map of South-Eastern Europe in his favor.  Treaty of San Stefano in 1878 was largely successful in this, as Russia and Russian influenced Bulgaria gained a great deal of power and influence under its terms.  Other European powers felt that the terms of the treaty were disproportionately one-sided and declared that a new treaty would have to be signed in order to ensure a more equitable outcome.  This second conference, the Congress of Berlin, revised the terms of the Ottoman defeat and would do much to prop up the ageing empire for several more decades.  Other European alliances would shift after the signing of the treaty, ultimately setting up the powder keg that would become the Great War.