Hello, my name is Card Riot, and this is a History of Europe Key Battles podcast.

This is part seven on the series on the Great War, 1914 to 1918, and its origins.

This episode will cover a conflict called the Balkan Wars, to the First World War is a tinderbox, awaiting a flame to ignite it and set off a major conflagration across Europe.

In fact, the region suffered a large-scale conflict already two years before the First World War began.

Even when a settlement was found, there was still a widespread fear that the region was still left with unresolved issues,

and low-level violence continued into 1914.

This is the story of the precursor to the Great War, the Balkan Wars of 1912 to 1913.

Each of the Balkan states, Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegro had acquired their independence from the Ottoman Empire over the course of the previous century.

None of them, however, were happy with the territory under their control. Each aspired to land still under Ottoman rule in Albania,

Macedonia and Thrace. The Ottomans, for their part, had grown dismissive of their former

Balkan subject people's claims and underestimated the danger they posed to their rule in the

empire's last remaining European provinces.

Much to the surprise of many European diplomats, familiar with the perennial squabbling in the region,

a coalition of Balkan states emerged in 1912 with the purpose of coordinating together against the Ottoman Empire.

They observed the weakness of the Ottoman Empire in the conflict with Italy, and so decided to take advantage.

To summarize briefly the Italian-Ottoman War of 1911 to 12, in 1911 the Italian Navy invaded Libya and at first met with success and took control of several ports on the coast.

However, they encountered much fiercer resistance further inland.

Gradually superior Italian numbers and weaponry drove back the Turkish army and local Libyan fighters.

The government in Constantinople was forced into negotiation when the Italian fleet

defeated the Ottomans near the port of Beirut and occupied the Dedecanese Islands in the

Gnc in the summer of 1912.

The first agreement between Balkan states was signed in March 1912 between the Bulgarians and

...