A series of tenuous political alliances formed over the next months by rival groups which had often unclear links to neighboring states.
#EUROPEAN WAR 4 LEIPZIG CAMPAIGN FULL#
In full recognition of both the dangers and opportunities presented by the legal and diplomatic vacuum created by the collapse of the Ottoman Balkans in late 1912, a number of talented Ottoman-Albanian intellectuals and officers attempted to fill the void. The consequences of these disruptions were clear at the commencement of war: the Ottoman armies, without a local population to rely on for supplies and auxiliary forces, collapsed within a matter of weeks.įilling the Ottoman Void: The Scramble for Albania in 1912-1914 ↑
The result was a fracturing of local/state relations, a disruption of local life in strategically important frontier regions-the Malësi and western and central Kosovo-and ultimately, the pauperization of the entire region. These areas saw a flood of force as the Ottoman state and its local allies adopted particularly harsh anti-rebellion measures. Most vital for a better appreciation of the subsequent political chaos that left Albania, and much of the Ottoman Balkans, exposed during the 1912 Balkan War, are the seasonal uprisings in parts of Kosovo, Macedonia, and northern Albania between 19. With rebellious pockets within Ottoman Albania fueled by domestic populist themes including nationalist irredentism, much of the post-1908 western Balkans fell into civil war. Often ruling through politically weak coalitions, the elite of Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, and Montenegro saw territorial expansion at the expense of neighboring Ottoman lands as an expedient way to shore up vulnerable political positions at home. The resulting clash of interests left all the peoples of the region scrambling to form new constituencies and neighboring states exploited these fissures. A struggle followed between the CUP government and “reactionary” forces both loyal to the old order – personified by the deposed Sultan Abdülhamid II, Sultan of the Turks (1842–1918) – and hostile to the increased central state power imposed by Istanbul’s new rulers in the name of modernization.
Dominated by natives of the Balkans, the ruling party of the new Ottoman government, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), adopted a platform for significant reform that directly threatened certain landed interests in the western Balkans. While it is true that such instability took the form of violence between opposing armies, this volatility also reflected the domestic socio-economic, as much as political, challenges caused by imperial disintegration.įundamental change came to the region with the so-called Young Turk coup in 1908. In the case of Albanian inhabited lands, the various administrations seeking to impose order throughout the 1910-1920 period - from Ottoman and innumerable short-lived locally-run regimes, to French, Dutch, French, Italian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Habsburg, and Greek occupation forces - contributed to the region’s long-term instability. It was during the slow process of Ottoman disaggregation, which began in the 1870s and culminated in the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, that the peninsula witnessed large scale demographic and political change. Crucially, the first phase of occupations began prior to the larger European powers’ entry into the war. One outstanding feature of the Balkans during World War I is the extent to which its inhabitants lived under changing administrations. The following initiates this refocus by highlighting that occupation administrations played a role that impacted the quality of life for civilian populations (and thus shaped their political ambitions) as much as did the actual performance of the larger war.Ī Genealogy of Occupation ↑ Precursors to the War, Ottoman Collapse, 1908-1912 ↑ However, in order to fully appreciate these long-term consequences, historians must expand their understanding of the non-military components of the war. In this respect, these lands deserve close inspection as the disparate processes of administering Albanians-under-occupation both took very different forms than elsewhere and shaped the long-term fortunes of the entire Balkans. A backwater in this period, Albanian-inhabited lands experienced an inimitable form of violence brought on by the war. In Albanian populated lands, the Christian and Muslim population witnessed a period of territorial disaggregation between 19 that pitted the interests of locals against each other as their desires to live in a unified state remained of little consequence in the larger world. The collapse of two major empires at the end of 1918 had a considerable impact on the inhabitants of the Balkans.