fused to discontinue
hostilities against Montenegro, on April 24, 1877, war was declared by the
Emperor Alexander II, whose patience had become exhausted; he was joined
by Prince Charles of Rumania, who saw that by doing so he would be
rewarded by the complete emancipation of his country, then still a
vassal-state of Turkey, and its erection into a kingdom. At the beginning
of the war all went well for the Russians and Rumanians, who were soon
joined by large numbers of Bulgarian insurgents; the Turkish forces were
scattered all over the peninsula. The committee of Bucarest transformed
itself into a provisional government, but the Russians, who had undertaken
to liberate the country, naturally had to keep its administration
temporarily in their own hands, and refused their recognition. The Turks,
alarmed at the early victories of the Russians, brought up better generals
and troops, and defeated the Russians at Plevna in July. They failed,
however, to dislodge them from the important and famous Shipka Pass in
August, and after this they became demoralized and their resistance
rapidly weakened. The Russians, helped by the Bulgarians and Rumanians,
fought throughout the summer with the greatest gallantry; they took
Plevna, after a three months' siege, in December, occupied Sofia and
Philippopolis in January 1878, and pushed forward to the walls of
Constantinople.

The Turks were at their last gasp, and at Adrianople, in March 1878,
Ignatiyev dictated the terms of the Treaty of San Stefano, by which a
principality of Bulgaria, under the nominal suzerainty of the Sultan, was
created, stretching from the Danube to the Aegean, and from the Black Sea
to Albania, including all Macedonia and leaving to the Turks only the
district between Constantinople and Adrianople, Chalcidice, and the town
of Salonika; Bulgaria would thus have regained the dimensions it possessed
under Tsar Simeon nine hundred and fifty years previously.

This treaty, which on ethnological grounds was tolerably just, alarmed the
other powers, especially Great Britain and Germany, who thought they
perceived in it the foundations of Russian hegemony in the Balkans, while
it would, if put into execution, have blighted the aspirations of Greece
and Serbia. The Treaty of Berlin, inspired by Bismarck and Lord Salisbury,
anxious to defend, the former, the interests of (ostensibly)
Austria-Hungary, the latter (shortsightedly) those of Turkey, replaced it
in July 1878