In that year, Islamic armies defeated the combined defenses of Serbs, Albanians, and Hungarians, and began an extended military occupation of the Balkans and of southeastern Europe in general.
In the 14th century, the various ethnic groups of southeastern Europe fell under the oppression of the Muslims. For almost five hundred years, they were geographically and politically isolated from the scientific and cultural advancements of Europe.
With the help of numerous rebellions and their own intellectual advancements, first the Serbs, and then the Greeks, returned to the larger cultural community of Europe. The British poet Lord Byron died helping in Greece’s successful effort to throw off the tyranny of the Islamic occupational armies in 1824.
In 1876, the Bulgarians also began to assert their desire for freedom. The first major step in this liberation was the in April of that year: although many of them died in this rebellion, the Bulgarians began to believe more and more in the possibility that they could stop the Muslim aggression and be free.
Many Europeans cheered the Bulgarian desire for liberty: Victor Hugo, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Otto von Bismarck, William Gladstone, Charles Darwin, Konstantin Jirecek, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ivan Turgenev, Dmitri Mendeleev, and others.
A glance over that list of names will see that Christians and atheists, scientists and poets, Englishmen, Russians, and Germans all united in their desire to see Bulgaria liberated from Islamic oppression.
Six months after this April uprising, the nations of the region gathered at a conference in Constantinople and saw that the Bulgarian question was one of the central matters in the diplomacy of the era.
One of the many heroic Bulgarians who died in the quest for freedom was Hristo Botev (also spelled Khristo Botev), who demonstrated that his poetry was backed up by his selfless actions as he sought liberty for his fellow countrymen.
