For a while, war between England and Russia seemed imminent. Gladstone offered naval support to the Turks, as well as a British squadron anchored near Constantinople in February 1878. Hence it was that Russia saw it as its duty to intervene to save the Slavs in the Balkans, and in April 1877 Czar Alexander II declared war on the Ottoman Empire.Īlthough British prime minister William Gladstone condemned the Turkish atrocities, he was keenly aware of the change in the European balance of power should the Russians win the war. Furthermore, they all professed the same Christian Orthodox faith. In addition to having designs on the Balkans, Russia also embraced the philosophy of Pan-Slavism, which held that all Slavs were mystically united as a brotherhood. The atrocities caused the rebellion to spread throughout the Balkans. When the rebellion began in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sultan Abdul Hamid II reacted with a savagery that resulted in the deaths of thousands of peoples. In 1875 the new league had its first major test when the Christians of the Balkans rebelled against their Turkish overlords. The League of Three Emperors, ratified by the three parties in 1873, was essentially a secret agreement, and none of the three signatories were in any way anxious for the other Great Powers in Europe to learn about it. Since both Austria and Russia had ambitions in the Balkans, both were concerned that their desire to profit from Turkish misfortune did not lead to a clash between them. In addition, all three empires were concerned about the continuing disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. Thus for Bismarck, the paramount reason for soliciting the League of Three Emperors was that, should Germany become involved in another war with France, it would not have to fear either Russia or Austria joining in an alliance with France against the Germans. Bismarck’s plans were helped by foreign ministers Julius Andrassy of Austria and Prince Alexander Gorchakov of Russia.īismarck realized that France was seething in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War. Anarchist and communist groups, inspired by the Paris Commune, were becoming internal security problems for all three empires, which needed to focus their energies at home.ĭespite these efforts, Czar Alexander II was still killed by anarchists in Russia in 1881. The emperors were Wilhelm I of Germany, Franz Josef of Austria, and Czar Alexander II of Russia.Īll three empires desired stability for diplomatic and domestic reasons. Bismarck’s solution to this problem was the League of the Three Emperors, or the Dreikaiserbund.

It had only been in 1866 that Bismarck’s Prussia had defeated Austria-Hungary for leadership of the German peoples, and Bismarck was anxious that hostilities not be renewed. With France effectively neutralized by the war and the Paris Commune uprising in 1871 that followed, Bismarck set to make peace with Germany’s two traditional rivals in central Europe, Austria-Hungary and Russia. After the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck united Germany in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, he desired peace in which the new unified Germany could mature and prosper.

The league of three emperors