Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire food shortages and hundreds of thousands of refugees haunted the empire. After the war there was a violent expel of the Muslim peasants of eastern Thrace. The Anglo-Ottoman Convention of 1913 was a short-lived agreement signed in July 1913 between the Ottoman sultan Mehmed V and the British over several issues. However the status of Kuwait that came to be the only lasting result, as its outcome was formal independence for Kuwait. Albania had been under Ottoman rule in about 1478. When Serbia, Montenegro, and Greece laid claim to Albanian-populated lands during Balkan Wars, the Albanians declared independence. The European
Rise of the Ottoman Empire while others remained Christian. Of great symbolic importance for Ottoman centralization was the practice whereby Ottoman rulers would customarily stand upon hearing the sound of martial music, indicating their willingness to participate in "gaza". Shortly after the Conquest of Constantinople in 1453, Mehmed II discontinued this practice, indicating that the Ottoman ruler was no longer a simple frontier warrior, but the sovereign of an empire. The empire's capital was shifted from Edirne, the city symbolically connected with the frontier warrior ethos of "gaza", to Constantinople, a city with deeply imperial connotations due to its long history as the capital of