page_title: Congress of Berlin
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Congress of Berlin / Background
caption_attribution_description: Ethnological map of Balkans in 1877.
context_page_description: The Congress of Berlin was a meeting of the representatives of the era's six great powers in Europe, the Ottoman Empire and four Balkan states. It aimed at determining the territories of the states in the Balkan Peninsula after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78 and came to an end with the signing of the Treaty of Berlin, which replaced the preliminary Treaty of San Stefano, which had been signed three months earlier between Russia and the Ottoman Empire.
  German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who led the Congress, undertook to stabilise the Balkans, recognise the reduced power of the Ottoman Empire and balance the distinct interests of Britain, Russia and Austria-Hungary. At the same time, he tried to diminish Russian gains in the region and to prevent the rise of a Greater Bulgaria. As a result, Ottoman lands in Europe declined sharply, Bulgaria was established as an independent principality within the Ottoman Empire, Eastern Rumelia was restored to the Ottoman Empire under a special administration and the region of Macedonia was returned outright to the Ottoman Empire, which promised reform.
context_section_description: In the decades leading up to the congress, Russia and the Balkans had been gripped by Pan-Slavism, a movement to unite all the Balkan Slavs under one rule. That desire, which evolved similarly to the Pan-Germanism and Pan-Italianism, which had resulted in two unifications, took different forms in the various Slavic nations. In Imperial Russia, Pan-Slavism meant the creation of a unified Slavic state, under Russian direction, and was essentially a byword for Russian conquest of the Balkan peninsula. The realisation of the goal would give Russia control of the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus, thus economic control of the Black Sea and substantially greater geopolitical power.
  In the Balkans, Pan-Slavism meant unifying the Balkan Slavs under the rule of a particular Balkan state, but the state that was meant to serve as the locus for unification was not always clear, as initiative wafted between Serbia and Bulgaria.  The creation of a Bulgarian exarch by the Ottomans in 1870 had been intended to separate the Bulgarians religiously from the Greek patriarch and politically from Serbia. From the Balkan point of view, unification of the peninsula needed both a Piedmont as a base and a corresponding France as a sponsor.
  Though the views of how Balkan politics should proceed differed, both began with the deposition of the sultan as ruler of the Balkans and the ousting of the Ottomans from Europe.  How and even whether that was to proceed would be the major question to be answered at the Congress of Berlin.
caption: Pro-Greek ethnic map of the Balkans by Ioannis Gennadius,[4] published by the English cartographer E. Stanford in 1877
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