ashley26ph2003
Prince
why great powers fight over it
if it has resources to fight for
what its importance
why it is flashpoint of WW1
if it has resources to fight for
what its importance
why it is flashpoint of WW1
Balkans
- Thread starter ashley26ph2003
- Start date
Mongoloid Cow
Great Khan
Also, the Balkans was also relatively strategic. Austria-Hungary had no external empire and so was confined to the constant meddlings of France, Russia, Britain, etc. Most of the world was already conquered by them, and the Balkans were pretty much free. The Ottoman Empire was declining, and they wanted to reconquer the Balkans as a show of strength. Russia wanted the Balkans as it always saw itself the protector and greatest of the Slavic nations.
PS: Why have you started about 10 threads?
PS: Why have you started about 10 threads?
I don't know about the reconquering part... Did the Hapsburgs really control the region before the Ottomans came? I doubt so.
Before the Ottomans, the region was Byzantine but somewhat overran later by other tribes, like the Bulgars, Serbs etc, no?
Oo! Oo! I know this one! I know this one! An Eastern European question! The first on CFC!
Ashley26ph2003 wrote:
why great powers fight over it
if it has resources to fight for
what its importance
why it is flashpoint of WW1
The Balkans are named after a chain of mountains that run through modern Bulgaria, Macedonia and Greece. The peninsula is strategically important because it forms a land bridge between Europe and Asia, and has several critical ports on the Black and Mediterranean seas.
Donald Rumsfeld notwithstanding, the term "Old Europe" among paleo-archaeologists means the Balkans and a thin slice of Central Europe (modern Croatia, Hungary, Italy) because this was the first part of Europe that ancient hominids lived in, crossing from Anatolia (modern Turkey). The noted Lithuanian anthropologist Marija Gimbutas has done several books on the societies of these first Europeans in the Balkans. The Balkans became a barbarian morass in the last millennium B.C. except of course for Greece. Massive movements of peoples came through the Balkans or, coming from the eastern Russian Steppes, settled in the Balkans. This has made the Balkans a very messy patchwork of ethnic and religious groups, with migrations and competing empires moving peoples all over the place. Western Europe's ethnic map is very simple compared to Eastern Europe, and within Eastern Europe the Balkans take the prize. Thracians, Illyrians, Greeks, Dacians, Cumanians, Bulgars, Gepids, Huns, Avars, Pechenegs, Slavs, Hungarians, various Iranian groups, Romans, Goths, various Turkish groups, etc. etc. etc.
The Romans conquered much of the Balkans and established order, laying the foundations that would aid later states in the Balkans just as Roman infrastructure aided Western Europe in the Dark Ages. When Constantinius founded Constantinople in the early 4th century A.D., leading to the split in the Roman Empire, the Balkans became a competing ground between the Eastern and Western Roman (Christian) traditions and churches. Bohemia (modern Czech Republic), Hungary, Croatia, Bulgaria and Serbia all switched sides a few times between the influence of Rome or Constantinople in the 10th-16th centuries. After the collapse of Byzantium in the 15th century the Ottomans (Turks) took over much of the Balkans. In the Ottoman period there were various Western "crusades" in the Balkans (Varna 1444, etc.), and a few smaller states were able to maintain a certain level of autonomy or even independence from the Turks (Montenegro, Moldavia, Transylvania), which led to many wars. This ended with the bloody 1683-1690 Austro-Ottoman wars (involving Poland and Venice on the Austrian side) in which the Austrians tried, partially successfully, to push the Turks out of Europe. (Hungary, Croatia and part of Serbia were "liberated".) The true fireworks started however with the rise of Russia in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.
Early Russia as a great power had a basic problem; its main ports froze over part of the year, leaving the Russian navy useless. This had an impact on Russian behavior in the Baltic but we're looking at the Balkans now, and the significance was that after Russia managed to conquer the Crimea it finally had warm-water ports that never freeze, this time on the Black Sea. Good news! But there was a problem: the Black Sea's outlet to the crucial and critical Mediterranean was through the narrow Bosphorus Strait, controlled by the Ottomans. This meant that Russia was unable to project its naval power out of the Black Sea. From the first Russian Romanov tsars right up to Mikhail Gorbachov, Russia has been trying to deal with the frustration of having a powerful fleet in the Black Sea but being unable to apply it outside the Black Sea - where it was most needed. The Soviet Union maintained a naval presence in the Mediterranean, but it had to sail from the Baltic, through the North Sea and the Strait of Gibraltar. 18th and 19th century Russia therefore tried to expand its influence into the Balkans as a way of flanking Constantinople, hoping to take that city one day and freeing up the Straits for Russian use. The other European powers, in contrast, were not happy about Russian influence anywhere in Europe and devised their different strategies to thwart Russia in its Balkan endeavors. Britain and France, for instance, supported the Ottomans in their various wars with Russia, including going to war against Russia (The Crimean War) in 1854-56 to limit the impact of a crushing Russian victory over the Turks. (You may know that Britain and Russia had a mini Cold War of their own in the mid-19th century as both vied for control of Central Asia: modern India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran. The British were developing the Suez Canal through Egypt at the time as a critical connection between the British European and Asian fleets, which is why the British did not want Russian ships in the Mediterranean, threatening the Suez. Remember that it was only in the 1890s that Britain began to see Germany as its main rival; beforehand London saw Berlin as a natural ally against Russia.) Similarly, Germany in 1878 initiated a Great Power conference in Berlin to thwart yet another Russian victory over the Turks, in which the Russians tried to create a massive puppet client state (Bulgaria) in the Balkans.
Constantinople also had a special significance to the Russians as "The Second Rome". The Eastern Orthodox Christian theory goes like this, that when Constantinius moved the capital of the Roman empire from Rome to Constantinople (sort of) in A.D. 324, Constantinople became "The Second Rome"; i.e., the new capital for all of Christendom - even if those barbarian louts in the West didn't recognize it. The theory goes on (for Russians, anyway) that when Constantinople fell in 1453, Moscow became the "Third Rome".
Germany (Prussia) and the Austrians had fought a war against one another in 1866 but the prospect of new Russian advances into the Balkans drove them back together as allies, and in the 1870s both signed a system of treaties with many of the new Balkan states (Italy, Romania, Bulgaria) to block Russian influence from the Balkans. One state refused and remained a Russian ally: Serbia. Nationalism in the Balkans was a critical factor in all 19th and 20th century politics, beginning with the Serbian revolt of 1815 against Turkish rule, and the subsequent Greek, Romanian and Bulgarian revolts in the Ottoman realm. Each of these new states were unstable, threatened from within by factional politics and from without by land-hungry enemies. They were all therefore seeking Great Power sponsorship to prop up their governments and protect them against enemies. Bulgaria had been very pro-Russian because of Russian help in the revolts against the Ottomans but Bulgarians felt abandoned by Russia at the Berlin Conference of 1878, and also were aware that Russia was playing Bulgaria off Serbia (both Eastern Orthodox Christian Slavs), both of whom coveted Macedonia. This is why Bulgaria was willing to sign an accord with the Germans and Austrians in the 1880s. By 1900, Germany and Austria had effectively (combined with vigorous British efforts to maintain the Ottoman Empire) pushed Russia out of the Balkans, with the exception of Serbia.
The final act before the First World War came in 1912-13, when Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece and Montenegro ganged up to drive Turkey out of Europe. At first all went well (the First Balkan War) and the allies drove the Turks back very far indeed. However, the Great Powers feared a total Ottoman collapse (Think Iraq in 1991 ) so they created Albania on the Adriatic coast to block Serbia from the sea. The Serbs and Greeks then started taking land that had been promised the Bulgarians, and this led to the Second Balkan War in which the Bulgarians were defeated by the Serbs, Greeks and Turks (with threats from Romania). The Western Powers settled this war through a conference that left everyone unhappy and land-hungry which had a direct impact on what Balkan countries chose which side in World War I the next couple years. (Some historians today have been referring to the 1990s wars of the break-up of Yugoslavia as the 3rd (Serbia-Croatia), 4th (Bosnia), and 5th (Kosovo) Balkan Wars.)
Serbia was, even by Balkan standards, an unstable state. Two rival clans dating from the 1815 revolt, the Obrenovices and the Karadordevices (The Black Georges), had fought throughout the 19th century for control of Serbia. In 1903 the Obrenovices were in power but a very bloody coup led by the army ousted them (with the royal family literally getting hacked to pieces in the royal palace), and the Karadordevices were installed. Think of Serbia in 1903-1915 as a state like Afghanistan in 1996-2001; a failed state with extremists in power who supported terrorism in the name of their ideology abroad. Because of the messy Balkan history Ive already mentioned, ethnic Serbs were scattered all over the place, including in some places a Serbian state had never ruled. Well, Belgrade got it into its head at this time that it wanted to rule all of these places that Serbs lived, whether they had historically been a part of Serbia or not. The Serbian government did little directly itself but it turned a blind eye as numerous terrorist groups within the army and intelligence services committed terrorist acts abroad. Serbia was not the only Balkan country supporting terrorism Bulgaria also had a powerful terrorist organization it supported, IMRO and all Balkan states dreamed of great empires, but Serbia was by far the most extreme. It was a string of these terrorist groups, led by Crna Ruka (The Black Hand), that trained and armed a small group of Bosnian Serb student radicals in 1914 to attack the Habsburg imperial heir when he reviewed troops during war games around Sarajevo in June.
Gavrilo Princip fired the shots that killed Franz Josef and his wife, Sophie. Austria was quickly able to trace this act to at least some elements within the Serbian military, and it prepared to act. What happened over the next month is something that many historians study, trying to understand how a small local event turned from a brief local war into a four-and-a-half year gala of horrors. Austria wanted to go to war against Serbia immediately but it had a partner in the empire, Hungary, who feared that Serbia would be conquered and brought into the empire which would mean that Slavs would outnumber the Hungarians within their own country. The Hungarians dragged their feet, and in the meantime the Serbians were able to convince the Russians to support them against Austria. Austria then went to the Germans for support against Russia, and this brought Russias ally France (still angry about the defeat in 1870-71) against Germany. The British had been developing closer military ties with the French in the years before 1914 but didnt have any treaty to help France just yet until the Germans let it be known that in a war against France the German army would invade through Belgium, a country Britain did have a treaty obligation to protect (along with the Prussians, ironically). Some modern historians wonder if Austria had been able to act swiftly in June 1914 against Serbia before the Great Powers could do anything, if World War I might not have happened at all but thats speculation.
The point of that last paragraph is that although the war started in the Balkans, it didnt really involve Balkan peoples. It started because the Great Powers wanted the war, and the Serbian act of terrorism was as good an excuse as any for a war. Austria wanted to finish off the troublesome Serbian state, France wanted revenge against Germany for 1870-71, Germany feared growing Russian power and wanted to destroy the Russian army before it was too late, Britain wanted to do the same to German power especially the new German navy. Once the war started, there was little actual fighting in the Balkans; the main fronts were along the borderlands of the Great Powers in Flanders, Poland and Galicia.
Oddly enough, during the Great War the Western Powers reversed their traditional policy of trying to keep the Russians out of the Mediterranean and tried to let them in, as allies against the Germans and Turks of course. Churchill conceived of a plan to seize the Straits which would keep Constantinople safely in Western hands but open up the Straits to supply ships for Russia. Unfortunately this adventure was very badly planned, ending disastrously at Gallipoli in 1915. After the war, with Russia in the grip of the Bolsheviks, the Western Powers reverted to their usual practice of blocking Russian ships from the Straits, and this practice was kept up during the post-World War II Cold War with NATO member Turkey keeping Soviet ships neatly blocked from the Mediterranean. Old habits die hard
Hope this helps. Feel free to bounce any questions off me -
Ashley26ph2003 wrote:
why great powers fight over it
if it has resources to fight for
what its importance
why it is flashpoint of WW1
The Balkans are named after a chain of mountains that run through modern Bulgaria, Macedonia and Greece. The peninsula is strategically important because it forms a land bridge between Europe and Asia, and has several critical ports on the Black and Mediterranean seas.
Donald Rumsfeld notwithstanding, the term "Old Europe" among paleo-archaeologists means the Balkans and a thin slice of Central Europe (modern Croatia, Hungary, Italy) because this was the first part of Europe that ancient hominids lived in, crossing from Anatolia (modern Turkey). The noted Lithuanian anthropologist Marija Gimbutas has done several books on the societies of these first Europeans in the Balkans. The Balkans became a barbarian morass in the last millennium B.C. except of course for Greece. Massive movements of peoples came through the Balkans or, coming from the eastern Russian Steppes, settled in the Balkans. This has made the Balkans a very messy patchwork of ethnic and religious groups, with migrations and competing empires moving peoples all over the place. Western Europe's ethnic map is very simple compared to Eastern Europe, and within Eastern Europe the Balkans take the prize. Thracians, Illyrians, Greeks, Dacians, Cumanians, Bulgars, Gepids, Huns, Avars, Pechenegs, Slavs, Hungarians, various Iranian groups, Romans, Goths, various Turkish groups, etc. etc. etc.
The Romans conquered much of the Balkans and established order, laying the foundations that would aid later states in the Balkans just as Roman infrastructure aided Western Europe in the Dark Ages. When Constantinius founded Constantinople in the early 4th century A.D., leading to the split in the Roman Empire, the Balkans became a competing ground between the Eastern and Western Roman (Christian) traditions and churches. Bohemia (modern Czech Republic), Hungary, Croatia, Bulgaria and Serbia all switched sides a few times between the influence of Rome or Constantinople in the 10th-16th centuries. After the collapse of Byzantium in the 15th century the Ottomans (Turks) took over much of the Balkans. In the Ottoman period there were various Western "crusades" in the Balkans (Varna 1444, etc.), and a few smaller states were able to maintain a certain level of autonomy or even independence from the Turks (Montenegro, Moldavia, Transylvania), which led to many wars. This ended with the bloody 1683-1690 Austro-Ottoman wars (involving Poland and Venice on the Austrian side) in which the Austrians tried, partially successfully, to push the Turks out of Europe. (Hungary, Croatia and part of Serbia were "liberated".) The true fireworks started however with the rise of Russia in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.
Early Russia as a great power had a basic problem; its main ports froze over part of the year, leaving the Russian navy useless. This had an impact on Russian behavior in the Baltic but we're looking at the Balkans now, and the significance was that after Russia managed to conquer the Crimea it finally had warm-water ports that never freeze, this time on the Black Sea. Good news! But there was a problem: the Black Sea's outlet to the crucial and critical Mediterranean was through the narrow Bosphorus Strait, controlled by the Ottomans. This meant that Russia was unable to project its naval power out of the Black Sea. From the first Russian Romanov tsars right up to Mikhail Gorbachov, Russia has been trying to deal with the frustration of having a powerful fleet in the Black Sea but being unable to apply it outside the Black Sea - where it was most needed. The Soviet Union maintained a naval presence in the Mediterranean, but it had to sail from the Baltic, through the North Sea and the Strait of Gibraltar. 18th and 19th century Russia therefore tried to expand its influence into the Balkans as a way of flanking Constantinople, hoping to take that city one day and freeing up the Straits for Russian use. The other European powers, in contrast, were not happy about Russian influence anywhere in Europe and devised their different strategies to thwart Russia in its Balkan endeavors. Britain and France, for instance, supported the Ottomans in their various wars with Russia, including going to war against Russia (The Crimean War) in 1854-56 to limit the impact of a crushing Russian victory over the Turks. (You may know that Britain and Russia had a mini Cold War of their own in the mid-19th century as both vied for control of Central Asia: modern India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran. The British were developing the Suez Canal through Egypt at the time as a critical connection between the British European and Asian fleets, which is why the British did not want Russian ships in the Mediterranean, threatening the Suez. Remember that it was only in the 1890s that Britain began to see Germany as its main rival; beforehand London saw Berlin as a natural ally against Russia.) Similarly, Germany in 1878 initiated a Great Power conference in Berlin to thwart yet another Russian victory over the Turks, in which the Russians tried to create a massive puppet client state (Bulgaria) in the Balkans.
Constantinople also had a special significance to the Russians as "The Second Rome". The Eastern Orthodox Christian theory goes like this, that when Constantinius moved the capital of the Roman empire from Rome to Constantinople (sort of) in A.D. 324, Constantinople became "The Second Rome"; i.e., the new capital for all of Christendom - even if those barbarian louts in the West didn't recognize it. The theory goes on (for Russians, anyway) that when Constantinople fell in 1453, Moscow became the "Third Rome".
Germany (Prussia) and the Austrians had fought a war against one another in 1866 but the prospect of new Russian advances into the Balkans drove them back together as allies, and in the 1870s both signed a system of treaties with many of the new Balkan states (Italy, Romania, Bulgaria) to block Russian influence from the Balkans. One state refused and remained a Russian ally: Serbia. Nationalism in the Balkans was a critical factor in all 19th and 20th century politics, beginning with the Serbian revolt of 1815 against Turkish rule, and the subsequent Greek, Romanian and Bulgarian revolts in the Ottoman realm. Each of these new states were unstable, threatened from within by factional politics and from without by land-hungry enemies. They were all therefore seeking Great Power sponsorship to prop up their governments and protect them against enemies. Bulgaria had been very pro-Russian because of Russian help in the revolts against the Ottomans but Bulgarians felt abandoned by Russia at the Berlin Conference of 1878, and also were aware that Russia was playing Bulgaria off Serbia (both Eastern Orthodox Christian Slavs), both of whom coveted Macedonia. This is why Bulgaria was willing to sign an accord with the Germans and Austrians in the 1880s. By 1900, Germany and Austria had effectively (combined with vigorous British efforts to maintain the Ottoman Empire) pushed Russia out of the Balkans, with the exception of Serbia.
The final act before the First World War came in 1912-13, when Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece and Montenegro ganged up to drive Turkey out of Europe. At first all went well (the First Balkan War) and the allies drove the Turks back very far indeed. However, the Great Powers feared a total Ottoman collapse (Think Iraq in 1991 ) so they created Albania on the Adriatic coast to block Serbia from the sea. The Serbs and Greeks then started taking land that had been promised the Bulgarians, and this led to the Second Balkan War in which the Bulgarians were defeated by the Serbs, Greeks and Turks (with threats from Romania). The Western Powers settled this war through a conference that left everyone unhappy and land-hungry which had a direct impact on what Balkan countries chose which side in World War I the next couple years. (Some historians today have been referring to the 1990s wars of the break-up of Yugoslavia as the 3rd (Serbia-Croatia), 4th (Bosnia), and 5th (Kosovo) Balkan Wars.)
Serbia was, even by Balkan standards, an unstable state. Two rival clans dating from the 1815 revolt, the Obrenovices and the Karadordevices (The Black Georges), had fought throughout the 19th century for control of Serbia. In 1903 the Obrenovices were in power but a very bloody coup led by the army ousted them (with the royal family literally getting hacked to pieces in the royal palace), and the Karadordevices were installed. Think of Serbia in 1903-1915 as a state like Afghanistan in 1996-2001; a failed state with extremists in power who supported terrorism in the name of their ideology abroad. Because of the messy Balkan history Ive already mentioned, ethnic Serbs were scattered all over the place, including in some places a Serbian state had never ruled. Well, Belgrade got it into its head at this time that it wanted to rule all of these places that Serbs lived, whether they had historically been a part of Serbia or not. The Serbian government did little directly itself but it turned a blind eye as numerous terrorist groups within the army and intelligence services committed terrorist acts abroad. Serbia was not the only Balkan country supporting terrorism Bulgaria also had a powerful terrorist organization it supported, IMRO and all Balkan states dreamed of great empires, but Serbia was by far the most extreme. It was a string of these terrorist groups, led by Crna Ruka (The Black Hand), that trained and armed a small group of Bosnian Serb student radicals in 1914 to attack the Habsburg imperial heir when he reviewed troops during war games around Sarajevo in June.
Gavrilo Princip fired the shots that killed Franz Josef and his wife, Sophie. Austria was quickly able to trace this act to at least some elements within the Serbian military, and it prepared to act. What happened over the next month is something that many historians study, trying to understand how a small local event turned from a brief local war into a four-and-a-half year gala of horrors. Austria wanted to go to war against Serbia immediately but it had a partner in the empire, Hungary, who feared that Serbia would be conquered and brought into the empire which would mean that Slavs would outnumber the Hungarians within their own country. The Hungarians dragged their feet, and in the meantime the Serbians were able to convince the Russians to support them against Austria. Austria then went to the Germans for support against Russia, and this brought Russias ally France (still angry about the defeat in 1870-71) against Germany. The British had been developing closer military ties with the French in the years before 1914 but didnt have any treaty to help France just yet until the Germans let it be known that in a war against France the German army would invade through Belgium, a country Britain did have a treaty obligation to protect (along with the Prussians, ironically). Some modern historians wonder if Austria had been able to act swiftly in June 1914 against Serbia before the Great Powers could do anything, if World War I might not have happened at all but thats speculation.
The point of that last paragraph is that although the war started in the Balkans, it didnt really involve Balkan peoples. It started because the Great Powers wanted the war, and the Serbian act of terrorism was as good an excuse as any for a war. Austria wanted to finish off the troublesome Serbian state, France wanted revenge against Germany for 1870-71, Germany feared growing Russian power and wanted to destroy the Russian army before it was too late, Britain wanted to do the same to German power especially the new German navy. Once the war started, there was little actual fighting in the Balkans; the main fronts were along the borderlands of the Great Powers in Flanders, Poland and Galicia.
Oddly enough, during the Great War the Western Powers reversed their traditional policy of trying to keep the Russians out of the Mediterranean and tried to let them in, as allies against the Germans and Turks of course. Churchill conceived of a plan to seize the Straits which would keep Constantinople safely in Western hands but open up the Straits to supply ships for Russia. Unfortunately this adventure was very badly planned, ending disastrously at Gallipoli in 1915. After the war, with Russia in the grip of the Bolsheviks, the Western Powers reverted to their usual practice of blocking Russian ships from the Straits, and this practice was kept up during the post-World War II Cold War with NATO member Turkey keeping Soviet ships neatly blocked from the Mediterranean. Old habits die hard
Hope this helps. Feel free to bounce any questions off me -
rilnator
Emperor
The Balkans has oil and coal. It is the gateway to Russia and Eurasia also prominent in the western Medditeranian as well as Flanking Germany to her south east. Due to the fact that it is a collection of small countries other, larger nations have always tried to enforce their influence for reasons of similar religion, race, common enemies or just coz they could.
The Balkans was called a powderkeg prior to WWI- so many varying religons and nationalities with simmering age old hatreds as well as contentuous borders (which it still has). All the treaties triggered by the assasination of Arch Duke Ferdinand was the official reason WWI started. I think it would have started sooner or later anyway all the big guns were itching for a fight.
I was reading about the battle of Verdun the other day and was astounded by the staggering losses on the Western front. Were people mad in those days? The french lost 360,000 and the Germans 200,000 in a non decisive battle and they still decided to fight on!!! What stopped these idiots from talking peace after that kind of S*#@ was it pride???
The Balkans was called a powderkeg prior to WWI- so many varying religons and nationalities with simmering age old hatreds as well as contentuous borders (which it still has). All the treaties triggered by the assasination of Arch Duke Ferdinand was the official reason WWI started. I think it would have started sooner or later anyway all the big guns were itching for a fight.
I was reading about the battle of Verdun the other day and was astounded by the staggering losses on the Western front. Were people mad in those days? The french lost 360,000 and the Germans 200,000 in a non decisive battle and they still decided to fight on!!! What stopped these idiots from talking peace after that kind of S*#@ was it pride???
