The 19th-century Ottoman Empire's economic hardships prompted its personification as the "sick man of Europe". The reforms planned by the sultans faced insuperable difficulties. Bulgarian nationalism gradually emerged during the mid-19th century with the economic upsurge of Bulgarian merchants and craftsmen, the development of Bulgarian-funded popular education, the struggle for an autonomous Bulgarian Church and political actions towards the formation of a separate Bulgarian state. The First and Second Serbian Uprisings had laid the foundation of an autonomous Serbia during the late 1810s, and Greece had been established as an independent state in 1832, in the wake of the Greek War of Independence. However, support for gaining independence through an armed struggle against the Ottomans was not universal. Revolutionary sentiment was concentrated largely among the more educated and urban sectors of the populace. There was less support for an organized revolt among the peasantry and the wealthier merchants and traders, who feared that Ottoman reprisals would jeopardize economic stability and widespread rural land ownership.