In the summer of 1875 revolts by Christians against Turkish rule in Herzegovina spread north into Bosnia, and then into Montenegro and Bulgaria. The revolts had been sparked by a sharp increase in taxes levied by the Turkish government on the Christian peasants after harvest failures had left the Porte in a financial crisis. But they soon took on the character of a religious war. The leaders of the uprisings looked to Serbia and Russia for support. Encouraged by Ignat′ev, Serbian nationalists in Belgrade called on their government to send in troops to defend the Slavs against the Turks and unite them in a Greater Serbia.
In Bulgaria, the rebels were badly armed and organized, but their hatred of the Turks was intense. In the spring of 1876 the revolt spilled over into massacres against the Muslim population, which had increased massively since the Crimean War as a result of the immigration of about half a million Crimean Tatars and Circassians fleeing from the Russians to Bulgaria. Tensions with the Christians were intensified when the newcomers reverted to a semi-nomadic way of life, launching raids on the Christian settlements and stealing livestock in a way not experienced before by the peasants in the area. Lacking enough regular troops to quell the Bulgarians, the Ottoman authorities used the Bashi Bazouks, irregulars mostly drawn from the local Muslim population, who brutally suppressed their Christian neighbours, massacring around 12,000 people in the process. In the mountain village of Batak, where a thousand Christians had taken refuge in a church, the Bashi Bazouks set fire to the building, burning to death all but one old woman, who survived to tell the tale.48
News of the Bulgarian atrocities spread throughout the world. The British press claimed that ‘tens of thousands’ of defenceless Christian villagers had been slaughtered by ‘fanatical Muslims’. British attitudes to Turkey changed dramatically. The old policy of promoting the Tanzimat reforms in the belief that the Turks were willing pupils of English liberal governance was seriously questioned, and for many Christians completely undermined, by the Bulgarian massacres. Gladstone, the leader of the Liberal opposition whose views on foreign policy were closely linked to his High Church Anglican moral principles, took the lead in a popular campaign for British intervention to protect the Balkan Christians against Turkish violence. Gladstone had only cautiously supported the Crimean War. He was hostile to the presence of the Turks in Europe on religious grounds, and had long wanted to use British influence to secure more autonomy for the Christians in the Ottoman Empire. In 1856 he had even advanced the idea of a new Greek empire in the Balkans to protect the Christians, not just against the Muslims of Turkey, but against the Russians and the Pope.49
The strongest reaction to the Bulgarian atrocities was in Russia. Sympathy for the Bulgarians engulfed the whole of educated society in a surge of patriotic feeling, intensified by a national desire for revenge against the Turks after the Crimean War. Calls for intervention to protect the Bulgarians were heard from all quarters: from Slavophiles, such as Dostoevsky, who saw in a war for the liberation of the Balkan Slavs the fulfilment of Russia’s historical destiny to unite the Orthodox; and from Westernizers, such as Turgenev, who thought it was the duty of the liberal world to liberate enslaved Bulgaria. Here was a golden opportunity for the pan-Slavs to realize their dreams.
Officially, the Russian government denounced the Christian revolts in the Balkans. It was on the defensive, having been accused by Western governments of instigating the revolts. But pan-Slav opinion, and in particular the journal
