Mürzsteg Agreement

The purpose of these reforms was to maintain the integrity of the Ottoman state, threatened by the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, and at the same time procure greater rights for Christians living under it.

[2] Late in the fall, Russia, supported by the United Kingdom and France, proposed to the Ottomans political reforms for the Macedonian vilayets.

In September Tsar Nicholas II of Russia visited the Emperor Francis Joseph of Austria-Hungary at the latter's castle in Mürzsteg, Austria.

The two rulers put their signatures to a new memorandum, substantially identical to the Vienna Program, which called for the appointment of one Russian and one Austro-Hungarian civil agent to oversee the reform of the administration, judiciary and local gendarmerie in the Macedonian vilayets.

The agreement was officially cancelled when the Ottoman government received permission to shut down the Commission for International Financial Control in Macedonia in May 1909.