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15. The revolutionary group that organized the uprising south of the Danube on May 3, 1876, at Panagurishte was disorganized and ill-coordinated. Apart from persuading a woman teacher who had learned embroidery to make them a flag showing a yellow lion with his paw on the crescent and the motto “Liberty or Death,” and holding a public meeting, they seemed to have no coherent plan. Nevertheless, the excited crowd that listened to fierce speeches and sang revolutionary songs went on to murder all the Turks they could find in the vicinity. These seem to have totaled about 1,000; see Stavrianos, Balkans, pp. 377–80. Mark Mazower suggests they found little support among the peasants, who had proved utterly resistant to the clarion call of Bulgarian nationality; see Mazower, Balkans, pp. 88–95. However, Justin Macarthy suggests that they deliberately targeted Circassian villages so as to engender reprisals; see Macarthy, Death, p. 60.

16. The excuse that the murders were committed by forces outside the control of the Ottoman authorities is unconvincing. The authorities in Constantinople were wont to use terror by whatever means came easily to hand.

17. Malcolm, Bosnia, pp. 131–3.

18. Cited and translated in Stavrianos, Balkans, p. 379.

19. Cited and translated in Harold Temperley, The Bulgarian and Other Atrocities 1875–8: The Light of Historical Criticism, London: Humphrey Milford, 1931, pp. 7–8.

20. Ibid., p. 9.

21. Eugene Schuyler (1840–90) was both a scholar and a diplomat. His biography of Peter the Great was the first in English based on Russian sources. His longest and most fruitful period was his years in Russia during the 1860s and 1870s. The book of his journeys through Turkestan is a classic work of travel literature.

22. MacGahan remarks that its prosperity had excited the envy and jealousy of its Muslim neighbors. “I elsewhere remark that, in all the Moslem atrocities, Chiot, Bulgarian, and Armenian, the principal incentive has been the larger prosperity of the Christian population”; from Sir Edwin Pears, Forty Years in Constantinople 1873–1915 (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1916), pp. 16–19. I have used the text from the Internet Modern History Sourcebook, in which the spelling has been modernized. Pears’s own report outlining the atrocities was sent to London in June 1876.

23. News began to appear in the Manchester Guardian and in reports to The Times from Gallenga, its correspondent in Constantinople.

24. For the composition of the pamphlet, see Shannon, Gladstone, pp. 106–9.

25. A second and wholly new pamphlet appeared in the following year.

26. Gladstone, Bulgarian Horrors, pp. 12–13.

27. Gladstone’s diaries, February 2, 1859. I have taken this account of Gladstone’s attitudes and presuppositions about the Ottomans both from Mark Nixon’s unpublished paper on the topic and from conversations. I am extremely grateful to him for allowing me to use his material.

28. Gladstone was preoccupied, as were many of his contemporaries, with the cruel eroticism of the Turks. Six pages of J. L. Farley’s pamphlet Cross or Crescent dealt in prurient detail with the ravishment and massacre of Christian women by the bestial Turks. Much of Gladstone’s copy of this text was, according to Mark Nixon, underlined or highlighted with marginal notes.

29. His second pamphlet, Lessons in Massacre or, The Conduct of the Turkish Government in and About Bulgaria, Since May, 1876, published in the spring of 1877, was vintage (and slightly sententious) Gladstone.

30. See Shannon, Gladstone, p. 110.

31. October 28, 1876.

32. May 5, 1877.

33. See Fabian, Time and the Other, pp. 80–87.

34. On the Balkan past, Mazower, Balkans, and Todorova, Imagining, provide the best introductions.

35. Banac, National Question, pp. 202–14.

36. Emmert, Serbian Golgotha, p. 132, citing and translating Duško KeČkemet, Ivan Meštrovic, Zagreb: 1970, pp. 1–3.

37. For the position of the Turks of Bulgaria, or Pomaks, see Karpat (ed.), Turks.

38. In my view, population transfer as practiced