Start of the Congress of Berlin in which the major powers of Europe revise the Treaty of San Stefano, signed on March 3 the same year, that Russia had imposed on a defeated Ottoman Empire.

At the Congress of Berlin, the major European powers revised the territorial and political terms imposed by the Russian Empire on the Ottoman Empire by the Treaty of San Stefano, which had ended the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878. The Congress was the result of escalating tensions; particularly British opposition to Russian hegemony over the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans, through the creation of a Russian-aligned 'Greater Bulgaria'. To secure the European balance of power in favour of its splendid isolation achieved after the Crimean War, Britain stationed the Mediterranean Fleet near Constantinople to enforce British demands. To avoid war, Otto von Bismarck, Chancellor of the newly formed German Empire, was asked to mediate a solution that would restore the Ottoman Empire's position as a counterbalance to Russian influence in the Mediterranean and the Balkans, in line with the principles of the 1856 Treaty of Paris.