Crowns in Conflict

by Theo Aronson

  By that summer the four monarchs had announced the formation of the Balkan League. Secretly, it was agreed that their combined armies would launch an attack on Turkey later that year. War was to be declared by the least of the four sovereigns – King Nicholas of Montenegro.

  Born in 1841, King Nicholas of Montenegro had ruled his mountainous country since the age of nineteen, in 1860. He was the latest representative of the long line of Vladikas, or Prince-Bishops, in whom civil and ecclesiastical power had been combined for several centuries. His youthful accession was due – as was only to be expected in as volatile a country as Montenegro – to the assassination of his predecessor, an uncle. Yet not until the fiftieth anniversary of his accession, in August 1910, had Nicholas assumed the title of King. Until then, he had been a reigning prince.

  In his seventy-second year, at the time of the formation of the Balkan League, King Nicholas was generally regarded as a highly romantic figure: the very personification of a poetic, picturesque and warlike people. He certainly looked like everyone's idea of a Montenegrin ruler. Tall, heavily built, luxuriantly bewhiskered and eagle-eyed, he invariably wore his country's colourful national dress. With his military reputation and commanding presence Nicholas was able to play the role of simple patriarch for all that it was worth.

  But he was not quite as simple as he liked to make out. As a young man Nicholas had been educated abroad. He could speak French, German, Italian, Russian and some English. In a country where, on his accession, not even the President of the Council could read or write, his literacy was a distinct advantage. It contributed to his reputation as a poet and playwright or, as contemporary writers preferred it, a 'warrior-bard'. It certainly encouraged him in the conviction that his subjects were utterly unfitted to manage their own affairs. As a result, Nicholas had always ruled his country as a fairly benevolent despot. And this in spite of the fact that, in 1905, he had granted his subjects a constitution.

  Yet for all his despotism, Nicholas was never unapproachable. Instead of using the council chamber or the audience room, he conducted much of his official business under a huge oak that stood opposite his palace in the little capital, Cetinje. Here, in mid-morning or late afternoon, the old monarch would sit, gossiping, advising or even judging civil and criminal cases. A shrewd as well as an able man, Nicholas was very much alive to the advantages to be gained from the guise of a genial father-figure; particularly to those western statesmen or diplomats to whom all things Montenegrin were suffused in an oriental glamour. Politicians, who would have been shocked by such authoritarianism in London or Paris, were charmed by it in Cetinje. 'He carried well into the twentieth century', wrote one Englishman, 'the essence of Balkan medievalism at its best.'

  His fellow royals were hardly less approving. 'I liked his air of jovial bonhomie, the firm grip of his hand, his keen, dark eyes and rugged bronzed face,' enthused Prince Nicholas of Greece. He also enjoyed the old monarch's fund of anecdotes. King Nicholas unfailingly recounted the one about the visit to Montenegro of the British King, George V, in the days when he was still a midshipman. Unable to make the servants at Nicholas's primitive court understand that he wanted an egg for breakfast, Prince George was reduced to miming a hen laying an egg. He did it so convincingly that the servants brought him his egg.

  By the time Nicholas came to power, the centuries-old tradition, whereby the reigning – and celibate – Prince-Bishops named their nephews as their successors, had happily come to an end. In 1860, he had married a dark-haired beauty by the name of Milena Vukotić, by whom he had no less than twelve children. In the palace, which was a simple, two-storied villa on the dusty main street of the capital (itself hardly more than an overgrown village) the royal family lived an almost bourgeois life. The equerries might be dashingly uniformed, the furnishings ornate and the walls covered with portraits of foreign monarchs, but the atmosphere was anything but regal. Younger members of the family were quite likely to be found leaping from chair to chair in competition to see who could travel furthest without touching the floor. The garden was hardly more than an area of hard-packed earth, to allow the children to use it as a playground.

  Yet most members of this exuberant tribe made very advantageous marriages. When a foreign visitor once regretted that Montenegro had no exports, the old King countered with a smiling, 'Ah, but you forget my daughters.' Known as 'the black pearls', several of these Montenegrin princesses had been packed off to the Russian court to be groomed and educated. Far from giving these girls ideas above their station, this foreign polishing made them appreciate their father's mountain kingdom all the more.

  Most married well. Princess Elena married the future King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy; Princess Zorka the future King Peter I of Serbia. Two others married Russian grand dukes, cousins to Tsar Nicholas II; yet another married a Battenberg prince, the brother-in-law of one of Queen Victoria's daughters. It was the two Montenegrin princesses Grand Duchess Militsa and Grand Duchess Anastasia who first introduced the infamous Rasputin to the Tsaritsa Alexandra of Russia.

  With the majority of his daughters so gratifyingly well placed, and with him being a key figure in Balkan politics, Nicholas came to enjoy considerable international prestige. He found himself in the happy position of being courted by the great powers. Fellow sovereigns showered him with decorations and orders, foreign governments were always ready to lend him money, every second house in his capital was a legation.

  Although, as a nation of Slavs, Montenegro felt a close kinship with Russia, Nicholas was not above indulging in traditional Balkan diplomatic practices. He is said to have 'approached diplomacy in the spirit of a farmer playing off the cattle dealers one against the other at a market'.1 Ich bin ein alter Fechter was one of his boasts, using Fechter in its old-fashioned slang sense of 'borrower'; and a borrower – of subsidies from whatever country was ready to pay them and with which he is rumoured to have lined his own pockets – he certainly was. He was astute enough, though, even at the risk of his popularity, to prevent his hot-headed subjects from precipitately taking up arms to avenge any insult – real or imagined – from the country's traditional enemies, Turkey and Austria–Hungary.

  It was this national hatred of the Turks that made Nicholas's carefully planned declaration of war against the Ottoman empire in October 1912 so popular. Wilhelm II, regarding the formation of the Balkan League as a triumph for Russian ambitions, might denounce Nicholas as 'a cattle thief', but to his exultant subjects gathered round his palace in Cetinje, their old monarch was nothing less than a hero.

  The crowds that gathered around the Belgrade palace of Nicholas's ally, neighbour and son-in-law, King Peter of Serbia, that October night, were equally enthusiastic. To the Serbs, their King was no less of a hero, and the Turks no less of an enemy.

  Unlike Nicholas I, Peter I had ruled his country for a mere decade. But if the assassination of an uncle had brought Nicholas to the throne of Montenegro in 1860, a far more horrific murder had brought Peter to the throne of Serbia in 1903.

  The rivalry between two Serbian families, Obrenović and Karadjordjević, who had ruled the country in turn for almost a century, came to one of its bloodiest climaxes on a sultry night in 1903. The Obrenović King and Queen, Alexander and Draga, were hacked to death by a party of rebellious, pro-Karadjordjević officers, and their bodies flung out of the palace window. That successfully accomplished, Peter Karadjordjević, then living in exile in Geneva, was elected King by the Serbian National Assembly.

  'Nothing', as one observer drily remarked, 'succeeds like success, especially in the East, and the triumphant extirpation of the Obrenović dynasty has conveniently won all hearts to the cause of Karadjordjević.'2

  A fortnight or so after the murders, King Peter I of Serbia entered Belgrade in triumph.

  The message of welcome from the new Serbian King's neighbour and father-in-law, Nicholas of Montenegro, was particularly fulsome. But King Peter was the last man to be impressed by this flowery rhetor
ic. For one thing, there was not much rapport between him and his father-in-law; for another, he was a man of few words. Indeed, the only similarity between these two mountain kings was of age and status. Peter certainly did not have Nicholas's piratical appearance or swashbuckling manner. In his late sixties at the time of the First Balkan War, Peter I was a small, slightly built man whose vigorously curling silver moustache did not really compensate for the frailty of his appearance. 'His features, though somewhat emaciated, wear an agreeable and intellectual expression,' wrote one observer, 'but are scarcely suggestive of native force of character.' Stricken with rheumatism, he walked with a limp.

  But King Peter was more forceful than he looked. In younger days he had proved himself a brave and resilient soldier and he was still capable of much physical endurance. His will was like iron. Until his family had been forced by their rivals to flee Serbia, he had been raised in almost peasant-like simplicity; in the forty-five-year-long exile which followed, much of it spent in Geneva, simplicity had become his dominant characteristic. That, and the particularly Swiss traits of honesty, industry, conscientiousness and puritanism. He had also imbibed a measure of liberalism. Sitting in his bleak rooms in Geneva, he had translated John Stuart Mill's Essay on Liberty into Serb.

  So it did not take the King long to realise that he would need all his strength of character to deal with his new subjects. Like all the Balkan people, the Serbs were a proud, touchy, militant race, not easily tamed or regimented. And, like all the Balkan monarchs, it was left, very largely, to King Peter to revitalise his country. By the time that he allied it to the Balkan League, Serbia was, if not the strongest, certainly the most aggressive state in the area.

  If King Peter did not exactly live like one of those peasants whom he professed to admire, his private life was undeniably spartan. After the raffishness of the previous regime, where the Queen had once been the King's mistress, the new Serbian court was austere, respectable and run on the simplest lines. 'Menus! Menus!' King Peter exclaimed to a startled majordomo who, on the day of the new King's arrival, had asked what sort of menus he preferred. 'I have no time for menus. Never speak of such things to me again.' The palace in Belgrade – the very one out of whose windows the bodies of the previous King and Queen had been tossed – was an undistinguished building standing on a busy street. All day long the trams hurtled past the front door; all night the crowds jabbered at the pavement café on the corner.

  Within the palace, with its small, dark rooms a-clutter with furniture from previous reigns, the atmosphere was uncompromisingly masculine. King Peter's wife, Princess Zorka of Montenegro, had died in 1890. His eldest son, Prince Djordje or George, was a violent, unbalanced creature who was eventually struck off the line of succession for kicking his valet to death. Not even in Serbia could he hope to get away with that. His younger son, Prince Alexander, was the opposite: a highly disciplined and imperturbable young man with a passion for the somewhat monastic quality of army life.

  Where King Peter (and his sons) differed most radically from his rival predecessors was in his aggressive patriotism. While the Obrenovićs had been prepared to come to terms with Franz Joseph's empire from time to time, King Peter remained hostile. And it was during his reign that the 'Serbian Dream' – the determination to unite, not only all Serbs, but all South Slavs under the Serbian crown – began to take on the air of an almost sacred mission. King Peter's accession promise, that he would realise the 'traditional aspirations of the Serbian people' had not been mere rhetoric: he aimed to preside over the freeing of his fellow Slavs from Turkish and Austro-Hungarian domination and to unite them all in a Greater Serbia.

  With the outbreak of the First Balkan War, the fulfilment of the dream seemed to come closer. Not only would those Serbs living under Turkish rule in Macedonia be delivered but their territory would be annexed to Serbia. It was no wonder that the Serbian troops set out for war 'as radiant', as one chronicler has put it, 'as lovers'.3

  That this outbreak of trouble in the Balkans could be contained was the best that the great powers could hope for. This was certainly the Kaiser's view. 'Let them get on with their war undisturbed,' he wrote. 'Then the Balkan states will show what they can do, and whether they can justify their existence. If they smash the Turks, then they will have right on their side and are entitled to some reward. If they are beaten, they will sing small: we shall have peace and quiet for a long time and the question of territorial changes will vanish. The Great Powers must keep the ring around the battlefield in which this fight will be conducted and to which it must be confined: we ourselves should keep cool and avoid overhasty action.'4

  It was sound reasoning, but not even the Kaiser was able to stick to it for long. This was because of the initial and quite unexpected successes of one of those four monarchs who made up the Balkan League: Tsar Ferdinand of Bulgaria. Almost overnight he was to reveal himself as the most ambitious of conquerors.

  Ferdinand of Bulgaria could hardly have differed more radically from his allies, the kings of Serbia and Montenegro. No one would ever have described him as an unpretentious mountain patriarch. On the contrary, he was the most outré crowned head in Europe.

  Tsar Ferdinand was fond of referring to himself as the latest Bourbon King. That was a characteristic piece of self-dramatisation. His mother had indeed been a Bourbon or, more precisely, a Bourbon–Orleans: her father had been the last Bourbon to reign in France – Louis Philippe, the Citizen King. But Ferdinand's father had been a Coburg: one of that tribe of princes of the house of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha who, by their judicious marriages into the leading royal families, had prompted Bismarck to refer scathingly to Coburg as 'the stud farm of Europe'.

  Whatever else Ferdinand might have inherited from the Coburgs, it was not their good looks. In appearance, he was almost all Bourbon. His doting and ambitious mother, Princess Clementine of Bourbon-Orleans, always maintained that not one of the living descendants of King Louis XIV resembled the Sun King more closely than did Ferdinand. Fifty-one in 1912, Ferdinand was a tall, portly, straight-backed, regally moustached and bearded figure whose most prominent feature was his huge Bourbon nose. Der Naseferdinand – the Nose-Ferdinand – was Wilhelm II's nickname for him.

  'An ardent lover of beauty,' says Crown Princess Marie of Romania, 'Uncle Ferdinand was well aware that his nose was too prominent a feature.' Did she not think, he once asked her, that with his tiny eyes and his nose like a trunk, he looked like an elephant? 'But, my dear niece,' he hastened to add, 'I also have all the sagacity of that venerable animal.'

  If Tsar Ferdinand had the nose, and the sagacity, of an elephant, he certainly had none of an elephant's ponderousness. On the contrary, he was the most amusing, irreverent and sarcastic coversationalist in any court in Europe. He dressed with great panache. No monarch, not even Wilhelm II, could cram more medals and orders on to a tunic. With his passion for precious stones, he covered his pale, long-nailed fingers with exotically jewelled rings; about his neck he always wore a gem-encrusted cross on a silver chain. His whole air was artistic, affected, sybaritic, decadent.

  'If I ever feel tired or depressed, I have only to look at a bunch of violets to become myself again,' was the sort of remark guaranteed to startle his less worldly listeners.

  The choice, by the Bulgarian government, in 1887, of this foppish prince as ruler of the recently created but still Turkish-dominated state of Bulgaria had sent a ripple of astonishment through the courts of Europe. 'He is totally unfit,' telegraphed an agitated Queen Victoria to her prime minister, 'delicate, eccentric and effeminate . . . Should be stopped at once.' And Lady Paget, wife of the British ambassador in Vienna, reported that 'his affectations are innumerable. He wears bracelets and powders his face. He sleeps in pink surah nightgowns trimmed with Valenciennes lace. His constitution is so delicate and his nerves so finely strung, that he only consults ladies' doctors.'

  Yet to the amazement of every one – other than his redoubtable mother, the widowed Prince
ss Clementine – the effete Prince Ferdinand not only accepted the Bulgarian challenge but made a brilliant success of his reign. For the truth was that behind that decorative façade lay a very shrewd mind. Ferdinand of Bulgaria proved himself to be far more intelligent, astute, unscrupulous and tenacious than he had ever been given credit for. That languid manner masked an iron resolve. Before many years had passed, he was being hailed as 'the new Machiavelli'. It was a description that pleased him inordinately. He would probably not even have minded that other, even less complimentary nickname, 'Foxy Ferdy'.

  Gradually, from being the mere reigning prince of an impoverished and barely recognised country, Ferdinand won the official acceptance and grudging respect of Europe's leading monarchs. And finally, in 1908, taking advantage of the fact that the rest of Europe was about to be distracted by Austria's annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, he boldly threw off Turkish suzerainty and proclaimed himself Tsar of a fully independent Bulgaria.

  His coup infuriated many of his fellow sovereigns. Nicholas II of Russia bitterly resented the fact that Ferdinand had styled himself 'Tsar': he called it 'the act of a megalomaniac'. Wilhelm II was no less resentful. How dare Ferdinand elevate himself to the same plane as the rest of Europe's major sovereigns?

  But however much Ferdinand might be resented or scoffed at abroad, he was generally appreciated at home. And the growing political and material stature of his country was reflected in his way of life. Convinced of the international advantages of a brilliant court, Ferdinand indulged his taste for luxury, splendour and ceremonial to the full. Always obsessed with such things as rank, precedence, titles, orders and decorations, he organised his court along the most punctilious lines.