What caught my eye however, was the Russian’s insistence on saving Istanbul from the Bulgarians, twice.
Review of Eugene Rogan’s ‘The Fall of the Ottomans’
[…]Far from setting their sights on Ottoman lands, the European powers had consistently shored up the ailing Muslim empire for well over a century, saving it time and again from assured destruction – from Muhammad Ali’s imperialist bid of the 1830s, to the Balkan crises of the 1870s, to the Balkan war of 1912-13.And it was none other than Russia that acted as the Ottoman Empire’s latest saviour, halting its former Bulgarian subject at the gates of Istanbul, not once but twice: in November 1912 and March 1913. Several months later St Petersburg joined London and Berlin in underscoring‘ the necessity of preserving the Turkish Realm in its present form’.
