Three years after the annexation crisis, the Balkans began to convulse. It is a measure of just how far the decay of the Ottoman Empire had advanced that in 1912 the minuscule nation of Montenegro launched an attack on the once-invincible Turks. Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece all joined in, and in a single stunning month the Turks were driven from a region they had dominated for more than five hundred years. The map of the Balkans was redrawn. Immediately the victors doubled in size. Serbia was now big enough to be, not a major power certainly, but a real military problem for Austria.
