Ottoman power attained its
greatest height; after the unsuccessful siege of Vienna (1683) it began to
decline. The period of decadence was marked in the latter half of the 18th
century by the formation of practically independent pashaliks or fiefs,
such as those of Scutari under Mahommed of Bushat, Iannina under Ali of
Tepelen, and Viden under Pasvan-oglu. The detachment of the outlying
portions of the empire followed. Owing to the uncompromising character of
the Mahommedan religion and the contemptuous attitude of the dominant race,
the subject nationalities underwent no process of assimilation during the
four centuries of Turkish rule; they retained not only their language but
their religion, manners and peculiar characteristics, and when the power of
the central authority waned they still possessed the germs of a national
existence. The independence of Greece was acknowledged in 1829, that of
Servia (as a tributary principality) in 1830. No territorial changes within
the Peninsula followed the Crimean War; but the continuance of the weakened
authority of the Porte tended indirectly to the independent development of
the various nationalities. The Ionian Islands were ceded by Great Britain
to Greece in 1864. The great break-up came in 1878. The abortive treaty of
San Stefano, concluded in that year, reduced the Turkish possessions in the
Peninsula to Albania, Epirus, Thessaly and a portion of southern Thrace. A
large Bulgarian principality was created extending from the Danube to the
Aegean and from the Black Sea to the river Drin in Albania; it received a
considerable coast-line on the Aegean and abutted on the Gulf of Salonica
under the walls of that town. At the same time the frontiers of Servia and
Montenegro were enlarged so as to become almost contiguous, and Montenegro
received the ports of Antivari and Dulcigno on the Adriatic. From a
strategical point of view the Bulgaria of the San Stefano treaty threatened
Salonica, Adrianople and Constantinople itself; and the great powers,
anticipating that the new state would become a Russian dependency, refused
their sanction to its provisions. The treaty of Berlin followed, which
limited the principality to the country between the Danube and the Balkans,
created the autonomous province of Eastern Rumelia south of the Balkans,
and left the remainder of the proposed Bulgarian state under Turkish rule.
The Montenegrin frontier laid down at San Stefano was considerably
curtail