Stock Photo - Greek Fleet bombarding Turkish Positions. The First Balkan War, which lasted from October 1912 to May 1913, pitted the Balkan League (Serbia, Montenegro, Greece, and Bulgaria) against the Ottoman Empire. The combined armies of the Balkan states overcame the numerically inferior and strategically disadvantaged Ottoman armies, and achieved rapid success. As a result of the war, almost all remaining European territories of the Ottoman Empire were captured and partitioned among the allies, and an independent Albanian state set up. Despite their success, the Balkan states were unsatisfied with the peace settlement, and the tensions among them, with the unifying Ottoman threat gone, would soon result in the Second Balkan War.