Government, the translation of the Scriptures was forbidden
without the consent of the Church. Expropriation was denned,
thus enabling Venizelos to settle (April 2) on a basis of voluntary
sale an agitation among the peasant cultivators of Thessaly
against speculative landlords who had bought up the estates of
Turkish feudal beys after the annexation of 1881. No soldiers,
mayors or other public servants were to be eligible for the Cham-
ber, the quorum of which was to be one-third of the total number
of deputies. The Council of State (instituted in 1864 and abol-
ished in the following year) was revived; and security of tenure
was enjoined for judges and other public officials (in order to
put an end to the " spoils " system, which however was still
prevalent in 1921). In March diplomatic relations, suspended
since 1905, were resumed with Rumania; and better relations
of the Christian communities in Macedonia, where their " dis-
armament " had been carried out with great severity since 1910
by Shevket Torgut Pasha, led to an Easter visit of 300 Bulgarian
students to Athens, and enabled Venizelos to put forward in
April the first suggestions of a defensive alliance against Turkey
which on Sept. 29 became involved in war with Italy.
On Jan. 3 1912 the National Assembly was dissolved, and at the elections for an ordinary Chamber on March 25 Venizelos won 150 seats out of 181. To this Chamber 69 members were elected by a Cretan revolutionary assembly, which, assuming the government of the island on the outbreak of Turkey's war with Italy, had already tried to send a number of deputies to the National Assembly; these had been arrested by the international forces (Dec. 15 1911) and detained at Suda Bay till the dis- solution. Of the 69 Cretans elected to the new Chamber 19 were arrested by H.M.S. " Minerva " and detained at Suda (April 28-June 6 1912) ; others made their way to Athens and attempted to take their seats on June i. Venizelos however, by troops and persuasion, succeeded in excluding them from the opening sitting and then adjourned the Chamber, thus avoiding an inop- portune and premature provocation of Turkey.
Meanwhile more definite and official approaches had been made to Bulgarian friendship. The Crown Prince had visited Sofia on Feb. 2 for the coming of age of Prince Boris. The Serbo-Bulgarian Treaty of Alliance had been signed at Sofia on March 13. On May 29 a secret treaty of alliance between Greece and Bulgaria was signed at Sofia, by which the two Powers bound themselves to act together " with all their armed forces " for the defence and preservation of equal rights and privileges for their nationals in the Turkish Empire. A special clause however declared that the stipulations of the Treaty should not be binding in case of an outbreak of war between Greece and Turkey in consequence of the admission of Cretan deputies to the Greek Chamber. The military convention annexed to this Treaty was not signed till Oct. 5. During the summer the condition of the Macedonian races had become desperate. A revolt had broken out in Albania; the Turkish troops had mutinied at Monastir; and bombs thrown at Kochana had succeeded in provoking them to massacre. On Sept. 30 the Balkan States, beginning to mobilize, made an united demarche at Constantinople, in the nature of an ultimatum, demanding immediate reforms in Macedonia. On Oct. 8 1912, the Powers, who with the exception of Russia had remained unaware of the new grouping in the Balkans, addressed to Sofia, Belgrade and Athens a severe warning, promising that they themselves, " relying on Article 23 of the Treaty of Berlin, would take in hand the restoration of administrative reforms in European Turkey, in the interest of the populations concerned, on the understanding that such reforms should not infringe the sov- ereignty of the Ottoman Empire." But on the same day King Nicolas of Montenegro declared war against Turkey. On Oct. 14 the Greek Chamber met, and the Cretan deputies were admitted, an act which denoted the formal annexation of the island, to which the ex-premier S. Dragoumes was sent as governor.
Balkan War. Turkey declared war on the following day against Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegro, but not against Greece, who was offered the island of Crete and the long-refused permission for the construction of the railway between Salonika
and the Thessalian frontier which should connect Athens with Europe, if she would remain neutral. The offer is said to have tempted King George. But Venizelos, who before making the arrangement with Bulgaria had done all that was possible to arrive at a friendly settlement with the Turks, actually offering to pay a small tribute and acknowledge Turkish sovereignty over Crete if the Porte would recognize the right of the Cretan deputies to sit in the Greek Chamber, realized that it was now of supreme importance that Greece should not be left out of the new grouping; and he proved his country's loyalty to the Balkan Alliance by declaring war against Turkey (Oct. 18).
The Greek forces immediately crossed the frontier, and on Oct. 22 sharply defeated the Turkish army, which made a first serious attempt to resist the invasion at Sarandoporon. After occupying southern Macedonia the Crown Prince, who was in command, intended to march towards Monastir, but was diverted by urgent instructions from the Government that for political reasons the primary objective of his army must be Salonika. He accordingly wheeled his forces towards the north-east and fought another two days' battle at Yenitsa. Three days later, on Nov. 8, the feast of its patron saint Demetrius, the town of Salonika, after negotiations inaugurated by the foreign consuls, surrendered to him with the whole Turkish garrison of 30,000 men. Four days afterwards the Greek army again turned westward in order to clear western Macedonia of the Turkish forces which had been threatening their left flank, and on Nov. 20 at Fiorina they joined hands with the Serbians who had now taken Monastir. The successes of the army gave the Greek people a new self-confidence. But a delicate situation arose when, two days after the occupation of Salonika, a Bulgarian army, after a forced march over the mountains, entered the town, claimed a sort of condominium, displaying an increasing hostility towards the Greek authorities. Meanwhile the Bulgarians had swept through Thrace and invaded Adrianople but had been held up by the lines of Chatalja. By the end of the month the Turks, holding nothing in Europe, outside those lines, but the fortified towns of Adrianople, Scutari and Yannina, signed an armistice (Dec. 3) with Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegro, but not with the Greeks, who were thus enabled to maintain the blockade of the Dardanelles and to transfer their major activity to Epirus, where an army under General Sapundzakes had driven the Turks into Yannina.
The Greeks took part, however, in the conference which met in London on Dec. 16, when the Balkan allies met the Turks and demanded the surrender of all that they held, together with the fortresses invested. Under pressure of a note from the Powers the Grand Council at Constantinople (Jan. 22 1913) had finally decided to accept these terms, when the extreme Nationalists under Enver Bey expelled the Grand Vizier Kiamil Pasha and murdered Nazim Pasha, the commander-in-chief. Hostilities were resumed on Feb. 3. The Greek army in Epirus, now heavily reinforced and under the immediate command of the Crown Prince, carried Yannina by storm (March 6); and 12 days later the victor acceded to the throne as King Constantine, his father having been assassinated at Salonika.
Bulgarians and Serbians stormed Adrianople at the end of the month, and on April 22 Scutari surrendered to Montenegro. Negotiations between the belligerents were reopened in London on May 20, and by the Treaty of London (May 30) Turkey ceded collectively to the Balkan allies all her European territory west of a line drawn from Enos on the Aegean to Midia on the Black Sea, leaving the questions of Albania and the Aegean islands (except Crete, which was at last to be definitely annexed to Greece) to be settled by the Powers. Unlike Bulgaria's treaty with Serbia, the Greco-Bulgarian Treaty contained no ter- ritorial provisions. A friendly division of the surrendered territory, however, could probably have been arranged between the three allies, had not England been induced, with the object of setting up an independent kingdom of Albania, to support the Austrian proposal to exclude Serbia from the Adriatic. This unexpected exclusion caused Serbia to reconsider the provisional partition of Macedonia arranged in the treaty with Bulgaria;
