The Siege of Plevna, 1877. Balkan Pan-Slavic Dream Stopped by Ottomans, but Planted Seeds for WWI.

Though the Ottomans fell at the end, their five-month stand shattered Russia’s momentum so completely that the road to Constantinople was never taken. The Tsar’s armies, bloodied and exhausted, were forced to settle for negotiation instead of conquest. The treaty that followed carved up what remained of European Turkey, stripping the empire of its Balkan dominions and accelerating its long, agonizing collapse. The siege had delayed defeat, but in doing so, it had also ensured that the Ottoman Empire would never recover.

Plevna. July 19 - December 10, 1877.
Russian Forces: 110,000 Men, 500 Cannon.
Turkish Forces: 40,000 Men, 77 Cannon.

Additional Reading and Episode Research:

• Stavrianos, L.S. The Balkans Since 1453.
• Shaw, Stanford. History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey.
• Menning, Bruce. Bayonets Before Bullets: The Russian Imperial Army, 1861-1914.

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Transcript

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of History's Greatest Battles. Season 2, where we explore History's Greatest Sieges. If you know anybody that enjoys this genre of history, please share the podcast with them.

In the late 19th century, the Ottoman Empire was dying. For centuries, it had ruled vast territories stretching from North Africa to the Balkans, but by the 1870s, its grip was slipping. Nationalist movements surged across its European provinces, fueled by the growing ambitions of the great powers, Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Britain, each waiting for their moment to carve up what remained. The Balkans, long a fault line between empires, had become the focus of a new struggle, one that would determine the balance of power in southeastern Europe for generations.

Russia saw itself as the guardian of the Slavic world, determined to push southward and dismantle Ottoman rule over the Christian populations of the Balkans. Austria-Hungary, ever wary of Russian expansion, sought to counterbalance Moscow’s ambitions while securing its own influence in the region. Britain, watching from afar, understood that the fate of the Balkans would shape the strategic future of the Mediterranean and the vital trade routes that flowed through the Ottoman-controlled Straits.

What followed was not just a battle, nor merely another war between empires. It was a moment that reshaped military strategy, exposed the brutal realities of modern firepower, and altered the geopolitical landscape of Europe. The war that erupted between Russia and the Ottoman Empire in 1877-78 was meant to be a decisive victory for the Tsar, a swift campaign to break Ottoman resistance and establish Russian dominance over the Balkans. But what should have been a simple conquest turned into a grinding war of attrition, where entrenched defenses, rapid-fire rifles, and the cold calculations of logistics began to dictate the outcome of battle more than the raw numbers of attacking armies.

The consequences extended far beyond the battlefield. Russia’s inability to achieve a clean, rapid victory frustrated its long-term ambitions in the region. Austria-Hungary, though neutral during the war, secured Bosnia and Herzegovina as a result, expanding its influence in a region already teetering on instability. The Ottomans, though bloodied and humiliated, demonstrated to the world that their decline would not come without a fight. And the Balkans, fractured, resentful, and still ruled by outsiders, became a breeding ground for future conflicts, setting the stage for the nationalist uprisings and imperial rivalries that would culminate in the First World War.

This was not a forgotten battle in a forgotten war. Its lessons shaped modern warfare, its political aftermath redrew the borders of Europe, and its legacy ensured that the next great conflict would be even more catastrophic.

 Let's now experience the Siege of Plevna

Welcome to History's Greatest Battles, Season Two, Episode 16: The Siege of Plevna, from the 19th of July to the 10th of December, 1877.

Russian Forces: 110,000 Men, 500 Cannon.

Turkish Forces: 40,000 Men, 77 Cannon.

Though the Ottomans fell at the end, their five-month stand shattered Russia’s momentum so completely that the road to Constantinople was never taken. The Tsar’s armies, bloodied and exhausted, were forced to settle for negotiation instead of conquest. The treaty that followed carved up what remained of European Turkey, stripping the empire of its Balkan dominions and accelerating its long, agonizing collapse. The siege had delayed defeat, but in doing so, it had also ensured that the Ottoman Empire would never recover.

When Abdulhamit II seized the Ottoman throne in 1876, the empire’s northwestern frontier was already a battlefield in waiting. The Balkans, Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia, and Herzegovina, were simmering with unrest, their Slavic populations impatient and defiant, eager to carve out independence from an empire they saw as fading. The Christian Slavs of the Balkans had long sought to break free from Ottoman rule, their hopes pinned on the one power willing to wield the sword on their behalf, Russia. The pan-Slavic dream burned in their hearts, and in Moscow, their cause was treated as destiny.

When Ottoman troops crushed a Serbian rebellion in Alexinatz, Russia’s response was immediate, a threat of war, barely veiled, echoing from St. Petersburg. But the Tsar’s ambitions had a complication: Austria. Vienna had no intention of watching Russia expand into the Balkans unchecked. The chessboard was set, and the great powers of Europe were eyeing their next move.

Enter Otto von Bismarck, the master strategist of Europe. He proposed carving up the Ottoman corpse before it was even dead, distributing its lands among the European empires. But his vision was met with hesitation, none of the great powers were quite ready to take that leap. Instead, bowing to British insistence, Bismarck agreed to a more diplomatic approach, an international conference to decide the fate of the Balkans.

The Istanbul Conference of November 1876 was a diplomatic theater with no real substance. The Ottomans, eager to deflect outside interference, unveiled a new Western-style constitution, declaring that internal unrest would be resolved within their own system. The great powers were unconvinced. The Tsar was not fooled. Without ironclad guarantees for the safety of Balkan Christians, Russia began massing its forces, preparing for war.

Russia moved swiftly to neutralize Austria as a threat. A bargain was struck, Vienna would stand aside in exchange for Bosnia and Herzegovina when the dust settled. It was cold, calculated diplomacy at its finest. The vultures circled. Each European power eyed a different slice of the Ottoman Empire, schemes forming behind closed doors. Russia needed a corridor to the battlefield. They turned to Rumania, a nominal Ottoman vassal, and demanded passage for their armies. For Rumania, this was an opportunity. They granted the Russians access, then seized the moment to declare independence from the Ottomans, even offering troops to the advancing Tsarist forces.

At first, Russia declined Rumanian assistance. But war has a way of forcing pragmatism, and soon enough, they would come to reconsider. By June, Russian boots were marching through Rumania, their target clear: the bridges over the Danube, the gateway to Bulgaria. The crossing was almost effortless. The Turks, spread thin, barely contested it. The Russian onslaught came fast, too fast for the Ottomans to hold their planned defensive lines along the Danube. Fortresses that should have withstood sieges fell before the defenders could properly react.

Russian forces pressed forward, seizing Tirnovo on July 1st and Nicopolis on July 16th. The Ottomans, reeling, scrambled to regroup. Osman Pasha, leading an Ottoman force toward Nicopolis, received the news of its loss mid-march. Wasting no time, he redirected his troops to the next viable stronghold, Plevna. There was no time to waste. Osman threw his men onto the high ground around Plevna, fortifying what would soon become one of the most fiercely contested positions of the war.

The moment Osman’s artillery was positioned, the cannons roared to life. Russian troops advanced, their own guns answering in kind, but the opening barrage was inconclusive, a mere taste of the bloodshed to come. Osman knew what was coming. There would be no retreat, no easy escape. He ordered his men to dig, carve, and fortify the land beneath their feet. Trenches were gouged into the earth with relentless urgency. His forces were divided into three defensive sectors: thirteen battalions and four batteries along the Janik Bair Ridge to the northeast, with forward positions at Bukovna and Opanetz. To the east, five battalions and ten guns formed a second line. The third position, four battalions and two batteries, covered the road to Bulgareni, reinforced by cavalry. A mobile reserve stood ready on the heights just outside the town, watching, waiting.

The first Russian assault came at dawn on July 20th, a brutal push from the north. Initial gains at Bukova and the eastern flank gave them hope, until Osman’s reinforcements counterattacked with unrelenting ferocity. By the time the battle ended, the Russians had lost nearly a third of their 8,000 men. The Ottomans suffered 2,000 casualties but held firm. Osman did not chase the retreating enemy. He had learned the brutal lessons of modern war, positions, not pursuits, would decide the battle. His men kept digging.

The defenses of Plevna grew into an iron wall of resistance. Redoubts rose with walls up to fourteen feet thick, trench lines cut deep before them. The men worked tirelessly, knowing survival depended on it. Supplies continued flowing, food, ammunition, and the tools to keep fortifying. As long as those lines held, Plevna stood. Osman understood the stakes. The supply line was his lifeline, and he would not let it be cut. He dispatched six battalions and an artillery battery to hold Lovcha to the south, the critical artery feeding Plevna.

The Russians attacked again on July 30th, this time with a thunderous artillery barrage to soften the defenses. It failed spectacularly. The Ottoman positions had only grown stronger. Every gun was precisely positioned, every trench reinforced. The Russian assault shattered against them, costing the Tsar’s forces another 7,300 men. The Turks lost only 2,000. This was the moment Osman could have broken them, chased the retreating Russians, driven them across the Danube in chaos. But he held back. Whether by his own calculation or orders from Constantinople, he refused to abandon his defensive strategy.

The Russians regrouped, called for reinforcements, and now Rumania joined the fight. Krüdener’s army swelled to an overwhelming force, 74,000 infantry, 10,000 cavalry, and 440 guns, including 24 massive siege pieces. By the time the reinforcements were counted, the Russian-led army had reached 100,000 men. Then, unexpectedly, Osman struck. On August 30th, he launched a limited attack on the Russians, its purpose unclear, its impact marginal. The battle raged for a day, both sides suffering over 1,000 casualties, before the Ottomans returned to their lines. But if Osman’s attack accomplished anything, it was provoking the Russians into action. They turned their fury toward Lovcha.

On September 5th, the Russians seized Lovcha. The lifeline to Plevna was severed. Osman salvaged what he could, rallying the remnants of Lovcha’s garrison into a reserve force. In total, he still commanded around 30,000 men. The siege had begun in earnest. The noose tightened.

With Lovcha in their grasp, the Russians refused to pause. Momentum was theirs, and they intended to wield it like a weapon. At dawn on September 7th, the Russian artillery opened fire on Plevna. The barrage was relentless, stretching for days, pounding the Ottoman lines until the very ground itself seemed to tremble under the assault. By mid-afternoon on September 11th, the storm of fire finally ceased. For all its fury, the bombardment inflicted only a few hundred Ottoman casualties. But the real damage came with the assault that followed. The Rumanians stormed the eastern end of the Janik Bair defenses, seizing a key redoubt, while the Russians overran two fortifications on the southern front. The Ottoman lines were bleeding, but not yet broken.

Osman struck back the next day. The southern redoubts were retaken in a brutal counterattack, Turkish bayonets driving the Russians from their stolen ground. But the Rumanians, tenacious and unyielding, held their position, until their own commander, Krüdener, inexplicably ordered them to pull back. The cost of the attack had been staggering, 18,000 Russian and Rumanian dead and wounded littered the field.

With his men battered and his assaults repelled, the Russian high command changed tactics. There would be no more reckless charges into Ottoman fire. The siege would become a slow, suffocating death. To ensure victory, the Russians turned to a master of siege warfare. General Franz Todleben, the architect of Sevastopol’s legendary defense in 1854, took command. If anyone could grind Plevna into submission, it was him.

By October 24th, Plevna was completely encircled. Escape was impossible. More Russian siege guns arrived, their muzzles pointed at the dying town, ready to reduce it to rubble. For weeks, Osman and his men endured the unendurable, constant bombardment, dwindling supplies, the slow agony of starvation setting in. By December 9th, the situation was beyond hope. There was only one option left: break out or die in the ruins of Plevna. Under the cover of darkness, the Ottomans launched their final gamble, driving south with everything they had left. The Russians were waiting. The breakout collapsed in brutal close-quarters fighting. The next day, Osman Pasha, bloodied but unbroken, surrendered his sword.

Plevna was not just a battle, it was a lesson written in fire and blood. The first and most important truth? Modern defensive warfare had arrived. The Turks had proven that well-placed earthworks, trenches, and artillery could stop even the mightiest assaults in their tracks. No army in Europe had mounted such a fierce, prolonged defense in recent memory, not the Austrians in 1866, not the French in 1870. Plevna was something new. The Russians learned, at great cost, what the Americans had already discovered at places like Gettysburg and Cold Harbor, charging fortified positions was no longer warfare, it was slaughter. Rifles now reached farther, hit harder, and fired faster. Artillery rained death with terrifying speed. The old tactics of massed assaults belonged to a different era, one that had died in the killing fields before Plevna.

But there was another truth, one the Ottomans themselves had failed to grasp in time. Defense alone does not win wars. A fortress can hold, but without mobility, without aggression at the right moment, it will eventually fall. Yet for all its hardships, Osman’s defense had done something remarkable. He had held the Russian war machine in place for five long months, forcing them to bleed for every inch of ground. The grand Russian dream, to march into Constantinople and reclaim it for Orthodoxy, died outside Plevna. The delays, the staggering losses, the sheer exhaustion of the war ensured that the Tsar’s legions would never see the Golden Horn.

A few daring Cossack riders made it to the walls of Constantinople, but they were ghosts of a campaign that had already failed. The war was nearing its end. The world had watched Plevna with bated breath. Now, the great powers of Europe stirred, unwilling to let Russia claim dominance over the Bosporus and the Dardanelles. The war officially ended with the Treaty of San Stefano in 1878, but that treaty would not be the final word. The real decisions would be made in Berlin, where the great powers, under Bismarck’s watchful eye, began carving up southeastern Europe for themselves. The Ottomans retained control of the Straits, but little else. Their grip on the Balkans was shattered, their empire another step closer to its inevitable demise. But conquest does not mean peace. New masters took over the Balkans, and soon enough, fresh wars erupted in 1908 and 1912.

The fires of Plevna never truly died. They smoldered beneath the surface, festering in the bitter rivalries of empires, in the shifting borders of the Balkans, in the ambitions of men who refused to forget. And then, in 1914, the world ignited. The gunshots in Sarajevo were merely the spark, what followed was the true inferno. Nations were devoured in trenches that stretched for hundreds of miles, where flesh and steel were fed into the grinding maw of mechanized war. Machine guns tore men apart by the thousands. Artillery turned cities to dust. The very air became a weapon, as clouds of poison gas snuffed out life in choking agony. By the time the slaughter ended, over 40 million lay dead, empires had collapsed, and the 20th century awoke not to glory, but to the nightmare of total war.

Plevna never truly died. It was only the beginning.