All events · Empire, Clearance and Removal

The April Uprising, the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78 and the Muhacir Migrations

1876–1881 · Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus

Displacement Territory Seized Mass Killing Sexual Violence

Displaced

1.2 million

The figures for the Muslim exodus come from Ottoman refugee commission registers and modern reconstructions and vary widely. Nedim Ipek's count, cited by Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky in Past & Present, is that by 1879 the Ottoman Empire hosted 1,230,000 Muslim refugees from the Balkans; Kemal Karpat puts total war refugees at about 1.5 million; Justin McCarthy calculates 515,000 Muslims leaving Bulgaria specifically, and Milos Jagodic about 71,000, mainly Albanians, leaving Serbian territory. A medical commission in Istanbul recorded over half a million refugees passing through the capital alone. Bulgarians were also displaced in 1876-78, principally within the region, and were not separately enumerated.

Share of the population affected

82%

of the Muslim population of the Ottoman Balkan territories that became Bulgaria, Eastern Rumelia and the enlarged Serbian, Montenegrin and Romanian states, 1876

Killed

15,000–300,000

excess mortality incl. disease and starvation

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What happened

In April 1876 a Bulgarian rising was crushed by Ottoman regular and irregular forces. The Bulgarian News Agency's account records that estimates of Bulgarian deaths range from the 12,000 reported by the British diplomat Walter Baring and the 15,000 reported by the American consul Eugene Schuyler to later nineteenth-century figures of 25,000-40,000, with modern scholarship generally accepting 15,000-30,000; eighty settlements were burned, two hundred more sacked, and around 10,000 Bulgarians imprisoned. Gladstone's pamphlet on the 'Bulgarian horrors' and the European press campaign that followed made intervention politically possible, and Russia declared war in April 1877. The Russian advance and the establishment of Bulgaria, and the enlargement of Serbia and Montenegro, then produced the largest single displacement in Ottoman history: on Nedim Ipek's count the empire was hosting 1,230,000 Balkan Muslim refugees by 1879. Refugee property left behind was appropriated under land laws that the new Balkan states inherited from the Ottoman code of 1858.

Parties

Ottoman irregulars suppressed the Bulgarian April Uprising of 1876, and the Russian invasion and the creation of Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro and Romania then drove the Muslim population of the Balkans into the Ottoman Empire

Disputed

The Bulgarian death toll of 1876 was disputed at the time between the Ottoman inquiry and the British and American consular investigations and is still given in a wide range; Justin McCarthy's much larger estimates of Muslim civilian deaths in 1877-78 are contested by other historians on grounds of method and of his use of Ottoman population figures.

The denominator

Justin McCarthy's reconstruction from Ottoman population registers (nüfus defterleri) puts the Muslim population of the Danube and Edirne provinces at roughly 1.5 million before the war; Bulgarian and Russian sources give lower Muslim shares and higher Christian ones, and the ethnic arithmetic of these registers is contested on all sides. The figure should be read as an order of magnitude within a disputed range.

The affected figure combines Muslims who fled or were expelled with those who died, and also includes Bulgarian Christians killed in the suppression of the April Uprising, so numerator and denominator do not describe the same population.

Where the baseline comes from

Muhacir — Wikipediaopen-edited
Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878) — Wikipediaopen-edited

On the death toll

The range covers two different bodies of dead. The lower figure is the modern consensus range of 15,000-30,000 Bulgarian civilians killed in the suppression of the April Uprising in 1876, reported by BTA and derived from the Baring and Schuyler consular investigations against the much lower Ottoman inquiry figures. The upper figure reflects estimates of Muslim civilian deaths during and after the war of 1877-78, of which the best known is Justin McCarthy's calculation of roughly 260,000 dead among the Muslim population of Bulgaria, arrived at by comparing Ottoman population registers with post-war Bulgarian censuses; McCarthy's method and his conclusions are disputed by other historians of the period. Deaths in flight from disease, cold and hunger dominate the upper figure.

Documented forms of violence

Mass KillingSexual ViolenceDestruction of PropertyArbitrary Detention

BTA's account, drawing on the Baring and Schuyler investigations and on later scholarship, documents the burning of eighty settlements and sacking of two hundred more, killings of civilians, rape, looting and the imprisonment of some 10,000 Bulgarians in 1876; comparable acts against Muslim villagers during the Russian advance are documented in the Ottoman refugee commission records used by Hamed-Troyansky.

Formal findings

British Foreign Office (Walter Baring's consular report to Parliament) and the United States consulate (Eugene Schuyler) (1876) — Official investigations into the suppression of the April Uprising reported roughly 12,000 and 15,000 Bulgarians killed respectively, against much lower figures from the Ottoman government's own inquiry — source