The Russo-Turkish War of 1877 to 1878 was one of the most consequential conflicts of the nineteenth century — a struggle whose outcome redrew the map of southeastern Europe, shattered the Ottoman Empire's remaining grip on the Balkans, and brought several nations into formal existence after centuries of foreign domination.
The war pitted the Russian Empire and a coalition that included Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro against the Ottoman Empire. Russia's motivations were multiple and deeply felt. The Crimean War of 1853 to 1856 had ended in humiliating defeat and the loss of Russian influence in the Black Sea region. Recovery of those losses, reassertion of Russian power in the Black Sea, and support for the pan-Slavic movement seeking to liberate Balkan peoples from Ottoman rule were all driving imperatives behind the decision to go to war.
The background to the conflict was shaped by decades of Ottoman decline and European intervention. Article 9 of the 1856 Paris Peace Treaty, which had ended the Crimean War, obliged the Ottoman Empire to grant Christians equal rights with Muslims. In response, the Ottoman government had issued the Edict of Gülhane, proclaiming the equality of Muslims and non-Muslims and introducing reforms including the abolition of the jizya tax — a levy that had historically been imposed on non-Muslims — and permission for non-Muslims to serve in the Ottoman army.
But the gap between proclaimed reform and lived reality remained wide. In 1858, Maronite peasants in northern Lebanon revolted against their predominantly Druze feudal overlords, establishing a peasant republic. In the southern Beirut vilayet, where both Maronite and Druze peasants worked under Druze overlords, Druze peasants sided with their co-religionists and turned the conflict into a civil war. Although both sides suffered casualties, approximately 10,000 Maronites were massacred by Druze forces. Fearing European intervention, the Ottoman foreign minister Mehmed Fuad Pasha was dispatched to Syria to restore order swiftly, executing agitators on all sides including the governor and other officials. His efforts were insufficient to prevent outside involvement, however, and France deployed a fleet in September 1860. Britain, concerned that unilateral French action would expand French influence in the region at British expense, joined the expedition. Under European pressure, the Sultan agreed to appoint a Christian governor in Lebanon, whose candidacy was to be submitted by the Sultan and approved by the European powers.
Ottoman financial difficulties compounded these political strains. The empire had been forced to take a series of foreign loans at steep interest rates to cover the costs of military campaigns and reform programs, pushing it into unpayable debts. The need to absorb more than 600,000 Muslim Circassians expelled by Russia from the Caucasus to Black Sea ports in northern Anatolia and to Balkan ports including Constanța and Varna added further costs and social disorder to an already overstretched administration.
The Concert of Europe, established in 1814 to manage great power relations, had been shaken in 1859 when France and Austria clashed over Italy, and came apart entirely with the wars of German unification in the 1860s and 1870s. Prussia under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck defeated Austria in 1866 and France in 1870, replacing Austria as the dominant power in Central Europe and creating a new Germany whose emergence reshuffled all prior calculations about European balance of power.
When Russia went to war against the Ottoman Empire in April 1877, its forces pushed deep into Ottoman territory. The coalition advanced on multiple fronts, pressing the Ottomans back across the Balkans and the Caucasus. By early 1878, Russian forces had advanced all the way to the gates of Constantinople, prompting alarm among the Western European great powers — particularly Britain — who feared that Russian dominance of the Ottoman capital would upend the balance of power in the eastern Mediterranean.
The intervention of the Western powers produced the Treaty of Berlin in 1878, which modified the more expansive Russian gains initially agreed to at San Stefano. Under the final settlement, Russia gained provinces in the Caucasus — Kars and Batum — and annexed the Budjak region. The principalities of Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro, each of which had maintained de facto sovereignty for years, formally proclaimed independence from the Ottoman Empire. After nearly five centuries of Ottoman domination stretching from 1396 to 1878, Bulgaria emerged as an autonomous state with Russian support and military backing. Greece also benefited, annexing parts of Thessaly and Arta.
The war marked a watershed in the long unraveling of Ottoman power in Europe and set the stage for the further convulsions — the Balkan Wars, the First World War, and the eventual dissolution of the Ottoman Empire — that would follow in the next four decades.
