wrote, "upon whom far more than upon any other people in Europe it depends, to require and to insist that our government, which has been working in one direction, shall work in the other, and shall apply all its vigour to concur with the states of Europe in obtaining the extinction of the Turkish executive power in Bulgaria. Let the Turks now carry away their abuses in the only possible manner, namely, by carrying off themselves ..." Prominent Europeans, including Charles Darwin, Oscar Wilde, Victor Hugo, and Giuseppe Garibaldi, spoke against the Turkish behavior in Bulgaria. When war with Russia started in 1877, the Turkish Government asked Britain for help, but the British government refused, citing public outrage caused by the Bulgarian massacres as the reason. Political affairs and propaganda During the 19th century, British Empire typically supported Ottomans against their conflicts against Russian Empire, a common rival at the time, to curb its pan-Slavist and Orthodox Christian influence in Balkans. William Gladstone assumed a pro-Russian position on the conflict and was not concerned with the expansion of Russia's power projection. In contrast, the works of Frederick Burnaby present a pro-Turkish understanding of events. To investigate the accounts of massacres in British media, Burnaby embarked on a travel through Ottoman lands; his memoirs were published under the titles A Ride to Khiva: Travels and Adventures in Central Asia (1876) and On Horseback through Asia Minor (1877). According to Burnaby, many Western accounts of atrocities were exaggerated and sometimes fabricated and atrocities against Muslims were omitted from the press reports. The landlord of Burnaby in Ankara complains to him about this as such, Burnaby's goal was to present a counter-narrative to the general Russophile attitude in Britain. According to Turkish historian Sinan Akıllı, his attempts manifested mixed results and where only partially successful in reversing the public opinion. Aftermath The April uprising was not successful itself, but due to the publicity given to the reprisals that followed, it led directly to each nation's demands for reform of the Ottoman Empire, and the Russo-Turkish War, which ended in Turkish defeat, and the signing of the Treaty of San Stefano in March 1878, followed in July that year by the Treaty of Berlin. It thus ultimately achieved its original purpose, the liberation of Bulgaria from the Ottoman Empire . See also Razlovtsi insurrection Liberation of Bulgaria Kresna–Razlog uprising Bulgarian unification Edwin Pears References