Balkan Wars

The Balkan Wars were two conflicts fought in 1912 and 1913 that dramatically reshaped southeastern Europe on the eve of the First World War. In the First Balkan War, from October 1912 to May 1913, the Balkan League of Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece and Montenegro attacked the Ottoman Empire and, in a rapid and largely successful campaign, stripped it of nearly all its remaining European territory outside Constantinople itself, a result confirmed by the Treaty of London. Disputes over dividing the newly won territory, especially Macedonia, triggered the Second Balkan War in June and July 1913, when Bulgaria attacked its former allies Serbia and Greece and was in turn defeated by their combined forces along with Romania and a reentering Ottoman Empire. The Treaty of Bucharest that ended the fighting in August 1913 left Bulgaria stripped of most of its earlier gains and Serbia significantly enlarged, and the unresolved nationalist tensions the wars intensified in the region, particularly around Serbia and Austria-Hungary, contributed directly to the outbreak of the First World War the following year.