THE SICK MAN OF EUROPE 123The war ended with the signing of the Peace of Paris on March 29,- Although the war emptied the Ottoman treasury and forced it to
take on heavy loans, the Russians abandoned their conquests in eastern
Anatolia and the Allies left the Crimea and Black Sea. The signatories
declared their joint guarantee of the territorial integrity and independence
of the Ottoman Empire, promising to mediate jointly any quarrels that
might arise. The Strait of Dardanelles was to be closed to warships of all
foreign powers, and the Black Sea was to be neutralized, open only to
merchant shipping. The Ottomans and Russians would keep only such
small warships as needed to defend their coasts. The larger warships would
be removed and all naval shipyards on the Black Sea would be closed.
The Danube and the Strait were also opened to the merchant shipping of
the world. Thus now Europe was the protector of the sultan. The 200 years
since the Great Siege of Vienna had wrought wondrous changes indeed.
With the European safeguards in place, the Ottoman Empire might have
enjoyed a respite, but revolts sprang up in Montenegro and Crete between
1858 and 1869. These confused affairs merely diverted attention that
might have been given to widespread reforms. The Turkish government,
however, simply lacked the energy to implement reforms on anything
more than a local basis. But some reforms did occur, and the Turkish army
was finally modernized to the point that it was once again able to compete
with European forces—at least those forces that could be sent into the
Ottoman frontiers. This was fortunate, for Russia was not yet satisfied.
The Russians had been pushing back against the Ottomans in southern
Russia and the Balkans for centuries. Historically, the czars had sought to
extend their hegemony into the Balkans under the guise of pan-Slavism.
Provocations occurred on both sides, as well as considerable propaganda
where the truth was often lost.
The last Ottoman outpost in the Balkan Peninsula had long been an
unstable dominion of the Ottoman Empire and frequent revolts were bru-
tally suppressed. In the summer of 1876 rumors began to flow out of
Bulgaria that whispered of unspeakable atrocities committed by the Turks
against the Christian Bulgarians. Disraeli, the British prime minister, was
anxious to preserve the Near Eastern status quo and to keep Russia from
an excuse to intrude, yet again, into the Balkans, so he discounted the
stories in the press. He suggested that a few Bulgarian insurgents had been
killed, but nothing more. He was probably correct in his judgments. There
were certainly murders, but probably no more than normal for those trou-
bled lands.
Inspired and intrigued by the rumors, J. A. MacGahan, an American
journalist with the LondonDaily News,was, at that time, working in Is-