its peak with the April Uprising of 1876 in several Bulgarian districts in Moesia, Thrace, and Macedonia. The suppression of the uprising and the atrocities committed by Ottoman soldiers against the civilian population increased the Bulgarian desire for independence. Albanians, 1870s Because of the religious ties of the Albanian majority of the population with the ruling Ottomans and the lack of an Albanian state in past, nationalism was less developed among Albanians in the 19th century than among other southeast European nations. Only from the 1870s and onwards did a movement of ‘national awakening‘ evolve among them - greatly delayed, compared to the Greeks and the Serbs. The 1877–1878 Russo-Turkish War dealt a decisive blow to Ottoman power in the Balkan Peninsula. The Albanians' fear that the lands they inhabited would be partitioned among Montenegro, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece fueled the rise of Albanian nationalism. Debt default After the taking of its first loans, the Empire had taken further loans out in 1858, 1860, 1862, 1863, 1865, and every year between 1869 and 1874. But economic trouble loomed. The Panic of 1873 depressed the economy, and poor harvests followed. Palace intrigues diverted political attention from the debt crisis. Finally, on October 6, 1875, the Empire suspended interest payments on its loans, and formally defaulted on October 30. The amount defaulted on was estimated at 224.5 million British Pounds (). But the entire income of the Empire had been a mere 21.7 million British pounds (), a ratio of 10.3. For comparison, the modern debt to income ratio of the United States was around 7.8 in 2022. The default on the Ottoman debt was met by outrage in European nations, to whom the debts were owed. The concerted efforts of the United Kingdom and France, whose citizens were the chief bondholders on the Ottoman debt, would lead to the creation of the Ottoman Public Debt Administration in 1881. It would function as an independent arm of the Ottoman Bureaucracy, whose goal was to secure tax revenue to send back home to its citizen bondholders. Other represented nations were Germany, Italy, Austria, the Netherlands, as well as internal Ottoman bondholders. The Ottoman debt would prove to be a heavy weight on the Empire and only added to the other crises that emerged in the 1870s. Ottoman Constitution, 1876 The reformist period peaked with the Constitution, called the Kanûn-u Esâsî (meaning "Basic Law"