by Theo Aronson
What he was hoping to recreate was the elegance and ritual, not of other contemporary European courts, but of the courts of his illustrious Bourbon ancestors. Before long, the palace in Sofia had become renowned for its stylishness.
'Entering the Palace,' writes Meriel Buchanan, daughter of the British minister in Sofia, 'one was greeted by a company of the [Tsar's] bodyguard, who stood on every step of the wide staircase, gorgeous in their scarlet, silver-braided uniforms, with the grey astrakan cap and the eagle's feather held in a jewelled clasp. Ushered into the white and gold room, one waited for the Tsar's entry before going on to the enormous dining-hall with its big horseshoe table covered with wonderful flowers. One ate off priceless china, gold and silver plates; the service was faultless, the food perfect; a concealed band played loud enough to cover any lull in the conversation, but never too loud to drown it. The glitter of decorations, the medley of uniforms . . . all these made a picture that was full of colour, a little unreal and fantastic, and gave one the feeling that one was on a stage, taking part in a musical comedy or a romance of Ruritania . . . '
To the lushness of this royal setting, Ferdinand could always be relied upon to provide a few more bizarre touches. The entrance hall to the palace was sprayed with pine essence. His study was decorated in that most modish of fin de siècle colours, mauve. The palace chapel, heavy with the scent of massed flowers and sweet incense, was kept at hot-house temperature. The holy water stoop was filled with violets.
In spite of being the ruler of an Orthodox country, Ferdinand had remained a Catholic. But his Catholicism, like that of the Tsaritsa Alexandra of Russia's Orthodoxy, was of a particularly flamboyant variety. He, too, was only too ready to steep himself in the shadowy fringes of religion: to merge it with all the manifestations of the Decadent Movement – spiritualism, clairvoyance, the occult. To him, religion and superstition were intertwined.
His country palaces and houses, whether overlooking the Black Sea or set among Bulgaria's spectacular mountains, were surrounded by beautiful gardens. Ferdinand was a passionate and knowledgeable gardener; few things gave him more pleasure than to stroll, stick in hand, among those banks of rhododendrons or terraces of roses or through his conservatories, stocked with exotic plants from all over the world. Seriously interested in the natural sciences, he wrote learned studies on birds and animals. 'The tiniest rock plant could thrill him for hours,' claims one of his mother's ladies-in-waiting.
Not all his pursuits were quite so erudite. Ferdinand had a taste for handsome young men, provided they were blond. Any muscular young soldier who happened to catch the Tsar's gimlet eye was quite likely to be appointed a palace orderly; any square-jawed chauffeur ('goodness, all those chauffeurs!' sighed one palace intimate) would find himself driving his monarch into the woods for a little dalliance on the pine needles. Ferdinand was said to have been a frequent visitor to that paradise for rich turn-of-the-century homosexuals, the island of Capri.
Yet, a Coburg to his fingertips, Ferdinand did not allow sexual preferences to stand in the way of royal obligations. For the sake of his dynasty and his country he married, not only once, but twice. His first wife, Princess Marie Louise of Bourbon-Parma, on whom he had never set eyes until the day they became engaged, was a long-nosed creature with quiet manners and a kindly nature. Having dutifully borne her husband four children, including an heir, Prince Boris, Marie Louise died, at the age of twenty-nine, in 1899.
Ferdinand did not think of marrying again until his adored mother, Princess Clementine, died in 1907. His second wife was chosen in a no more romantic manner than his first. He did not, he explained frankly to the friend whom he had commissioned to find him a consort, 'want a wife who would expect affection or even get attention'.5 Princess Eleonore von Reuss-Köstritz, whom he married in 1908, certainly got neither. A plain but practical woman, Princess Eleonore seems to have been fully informed about what were delicately referred to as her husband's 'foibles'. Even so, she must have been acutely embarrassed when, on being entertained by King Carol of Romania on the way back to Sofia after their wedding, her outraged husband insisted that the double bedroom assigned to them be exchanged for separate quarters.
All in all, by the period immediately preceding the First World War, Tsar Ferdinand had established himself as both the most fascinating and important monarch in the Balkans. Since assuming the title of Tsar in 1908, he had been received as an equal by almost every sovereign in Europe. In 1911, the aged Emperor Franz Joseph presented him with the most coveted order in Christendom and one after which he had long hankered: the Golden Fleece. Never one to pass up an opportunity of drawing attention to his own importance on the international stage, Ferdinand declared that 'the highest order of Christianity for the first time sheds its radiance this side of the Balkans: it is an auspicious omen for the future!'
The formation of the Balkan League in the summer of 1912 was a step towards the realisation of this radiant future. For no less than any other Balkan ruler was Ferdinand determined on the aggrandisement of his realm.
Until now, his main concern had been for the continued existence of Bulgaria as an independent state. This had depended, very largely, on his ability to play off Russia against Austria–Hungary. With both powers regarding a strong, independent and prosperous Bulgaria as a bar to their hopes of expansion in the Balkans, Ferdinand had to keep them sweet without seeming to favour one at the expense of the other. It was a game at which he had always excelled.
In time, this was to become magnified into a balancing act between the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente. Either group would have been happy to welcome Tsar Ferdinand as a fully committed ally. But it had suited him better to remain uncommitted.
Ferdinand's machinations were aimed at more than just the preservation of his country and his crown. Not even the fact that he, this least military of men, had built up his army into the most effective fighting force in the Balkans, was enough to satisfy his ambitions. His wish was to see his country extended south into Turkish-owned Thrace and Macedonia, so that his southern border would be the sparkling waters of the Aegean sea. By overcoming his distaste for his Balkan neighbours and by joining them in their war against Turkey, he hoped to achieve this.
But Ferdinand had a still more fervent wish. This was to claim the greatest prize of all – Constantinople.
For many years now, Tsar Ferdinand had been obsessed with a 'dream of Byzantium'. 'Think of me,' he would murmur meaningfully to anyone about to visit Constantinople. Maurice Paléologue, the French minister, once found himself left, deliberately, in a room in Ferdinand's palace in which the most prominent feature was a vast allegorical painting of a triumphant Ferdinand riding a charger high above the domes and minarets of this fabled city. Another painting, elsewhere in the palace, was a full-length portrait of Ferdinand dressed in the robes of a Byzantine emperor.
For the strongest ambition of this strange, complex and highly romantic monarch was to have himself crowned, as the new Emperor of Byzantium, beneath the great dome of Saint Sophia.
It was an ambition that was to come astonishingly close to realisation with the outbreak of the First Balkan War.
9
The Balkan Wars
'THERE HAS BEEN no fighting in our time', writes Rebecca West, 'that has the romantic quality of the Balkan wars that broke out in 1912.' Compared with the war which loomed just ahead, these Balkan campaigns had an almost amateur air. Everyone – the officers in their lavishly braided tunics and aigrette-sprouting fur caps, the mustachioed and bandoliered men, even the peasant women who helped haul the heavy guns – was fired with enthusiasm for the cause. Resolutely they marched beside the lumbering bullock carts and loaded mule trains, singing as they went.
And few aspects of this first Balkan war were more romantic than the advance of Tsar Ferdinand of Bulgaria towards Constantinople. While the armies of his allies, the kings of Serbia, Montenegro and Greece, crossed the northwestern and southern borders of Macedonia
, his troops poured into neighbouring Thrace and headed towards Constantinople.
To the histrionic Ferdinand, this was more than just a war. It was a crusade. He had always been proud of the fact that through his veins ran the blood of St Louis – the canonised King Louis IX of France who had died while leading the last Crusade to the Holy Land. Ferdinand now declared that this, too, was a crusade: 'a just, great and sacred struggle of the Cross against the Crescent'.1 Whether or not he really believed this is another matter.
The campaign was extraordinarily successful. Within two weeks every Turkish army in Europe had been defeated. Ferdinand's troops proved especially efficient. Although pockets of Turkish resistance remained, the armies of all four members of the Balkan League made rapid advances. By 23 October 1912, the victorious Bulgarians had driven the Turks back to their last line of defence, a mere twenty miles from Constantinople.
Ferdinand was jubilant. In a matter of days, the effeminate bon viveur had been transformed into an all-conquering hero. His fellow sovereigns stood amazed. The excitable Kaiser, quite forgetting that the defeated Turks had been German-trained, claimed that here was the new 'blood and spirits' that Europe needed. 'Perhaps we shall see Ferdinand as Tsar of Byzantium? Or as supreme leader of the Balkan Confederation?'
Europe's other leading monarchs were distinctly less ecstatic. George V muttered about Ferdinand's 'vanity' and 'theatricality'. If the vainglorious Bulgarian sovereign were to carry out his promise of setting up the cross on the dome of Saint Sophia, there would be repercussions throughout the Moslem world. 'I have eighty million Mohammedan subjects,' grumbled the worried British King.
The old Emperor Franz Joseph was even more put out. At an earlier stage he had favoured the formation of a Balkan alliance. He imagined that an alignment of Bulgaria, Romania and Greece (but excluding Austria's bête noire, Serbia) would be a shot in the eye for Russian Pan-Slav ambitions. But by now the victories of the Balkan League and the deliverance of the Macedonians had merely led to an increased restlessness among the nationalist minorities of Franz Joseph's polyglot empire.
Most worried of all was Tsar Nicholas II. Although his support for his fellow Slavs – and particularly the Serbs – in the Balkan League was unquestioned, he did not relish the idea of Constantinople falling into the hands of Tsar Ferdinand. For control of Constantinople meant control of the Dardanelles. In a conversation with Prince Henry of Prussia, Wilhelm II's brother, Nicholas II, pretended that the matter of whether or not Ferdinand entered Constantinople was of supreme indifference to him. In the meantime, though, his diplomats were scurrying about the foreign ministries of his Entente allies, begging them to stop the Bulgarian advance.
But nothing, it seems, was going to stop Ferdinand. His moment was at hand. He was determined to enter Constantinople in triumph and to celebrate mass in Saint Sophia. To this end he sent an order from his headquarters to the capital for the state coach and six white horses, the parade uniforms of the royal guard and, it was claimed, his Byzantine emperor's costume. To a Turkish request for an armistice, he gave a ringingly blunt refusal.
'We shall dictate the peace', he declared, 'in Constantinople.'
But it was not to be. Rain, cholera and a sudden stiffening of the Turkish resistance checked the Bulgarian advance. With his troops bogged down in the mud and muddle of the defences outside Constantinople, Ferdinand's dream of Byzantium began to fade. In the meantime, though, his allies had been making rapid advances into Macedonia. The Serbs proved especially successful. To the consternation, not only of Tsar Ferdinand but of the Emperor Franz Joseph, Serbia was soon occupying great areas of Turkish territory. And, in spite of her pre-war agreements with Bulgaria, she clearly intended to hang on to them.
To prevent the no less victorious Greeks from likewise laying claim to territory which he coveted, Ferdinand hurried some of his forces southwards to take the Aegean port of Salonika. But the Greeks beat him to it. When, on 19 December 1912, Tsar Ferdinand arrived in Salonika by train, it was to find his ally, King George of the Hellenes, already established there.
But Ferdinand was equal to the occasion. Determined that he should not be received by the Greek King in the humbling position of a guest, Ferdinand left his train just before it steamed into Salonika and drove swiftly, and in secret, to the Bulgarian consulate in the city. The Greek royal family, lined up in triumph at the station to greet the Bulgarian ruler, were greatly put out to discover that their guest was not on the train. They were obliged to drive to the Bulgarian consulate where, to their annoyance, they found the Tsar calmly reviewing a detachment of Bulgarian troops.
Kaiser Wilhelm II, his initial admiration for the victorious Ferdinand having by now cooled, had become seriously alarmed at the success of the Russian-backed Balkan League. He felt sure that it would lead to a conflict between Russia and Austria–Hungary which, in turn, would mean a general European war. In the course of a meeting with his friend, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Wilhelm assured him of German support in any such eventuality.
Two weeks later he convoked a 'war council' at the Neues Palais at Potsdam, to which various members of the army and navy staff, but no civilian members of the government, were invited. At this meeting, they discussed their London ambassador's report that Britain would definitely side with France in the event of some future European war.
But in his conviction that princes were better diplomats than ambassadors, the Kaiser sent his brother, Prince Henry, to England to sound out George V on the matter. If Germany and Austria were to go to war against Russia and France, asked Henry, would Britain come to the aid of the two latter powers? Yes, answered George V, 'under certain circumstances'.2
This answer Prince Henry, never the most reliable of emissaries, interpreted as a half-promise of British neutrality. It was an interpretation which the Kaiser was only too ready to accept. That it was not up to the British monarch to decide whether or not his country went to war was something which Wilhelm II seemed unable to appreciate.
As it happened, that particular war scare blew over. In December 1912 an armistice was signed between the Balkan League and the Ottoman empire. While the various armies retained their respective positions, a peace conference opened in London. Not unexpectedly, it very soon degenerated into a squabble between the Balkan allies over their spoils. The peace treaty, signed in May 1913, was hardly worthy of the name.
On the very day after it was signed, Serbia and Greece concluded a secret alliance whereby they would act against their recent Bulgarian ally and divide Macedonia between themselves.
On the afternoon of 18 March 1913, the sixty-eight-year-old King George of the Hellenes was enjoying his daily walk through the streets of Salonika. He had been living there ever since the city had been won from Turkey four months before. As he and his equerry passed a squalid café near the harbour, a raggedly dressed man drew out a revolver and shot the King dead.
The assassin turned out to be mentally deranged. While awaiting trial, he committed suicide.
King George's eldest son, Crown Prince Constantine, was at Janina, another city which had recently fallen to the Greeks, when he heard the news of his father's death. He immediately set out for Athens to assume the crown.
Few monarchs were to prove more popular than King Constantine of the Hellenes during the early years of his reign. For one thing, he ascended the throne at a time when Greece was flushed with its victories during the First Balkan War; for another, he was a man of impressive appearance and exceptional qualities.
Born in 1868, Constantine was forty-four at the time of his accession. His father, one of the sons of King Christian IX of Denmark, had been invited to accept the Greek throne in 1863. His mother, Queen Olga, had been a Russian grand duchess. That no Greek blood flowed in Constantine's veins was only too apparent: he was a blond giant of a man, towering head and shoulders above most of his subjects. In earlier days he had been described as 'a young Hercules' and with his balding head, broad shoulders and great
height, King Constantine was still an imposing-looking man.
With this rugged appearance went a rugged manner. Constantine was an honest man – open, straightforward, incapable of insincerity or dissimulation. There were times when his frankness could lead to misunderstandings: he was often outspoken and intolerant. Yet he was never autocratic. King Constantine had a way of making people feel thoroughly at ease; his good nature was one of his most outstanding characteristics. In Greece, which at this time was still a relatively unsophisticated country, these qualities were greatly appreciated.
Constantine's years as Diadoch, or Crown Prince, had been devoted, largely, to the army. Educated in Germany (Greece, in the late nineteenth century, had boasted no suitable university) he had served in the 2nd Prussian Guards. In 1897 he had become Commander-in-Chief of the Greek army. And although his military career had often been subjected to the caprices of Greek politics (at one stage he had even had to resign his position) Constantine had proved to be an inspiring commander. Not only was he a man of considerable military ability who introduced many reforms, but he was extremely popular with the troops. His bluntness, even his occasional bursts of temper, were things which the men appreciated. His vocabulary of Greek oaths had to be heard, they said, to be believed.
And the fact that their Diadoch, unlike his Danish father, had been born in Greece and was a member of the Orthodox faith, counted for a great deal with the Greek soldiers. It imbued him with an almost mystical prestige. That their Commander-in-Chief should have become King at the very time that the Greek army had finally triumphed over the hated Turks, gave his accession an added significance.
Internationally, Constantine enjoyed an importance far in excess of his status as the King of humble Greece. For both he and his wife, Queen Sophie, were closely related to Europe's more illustrious monarchs. As Constantine's father, King George I, had been the brother of both Britain's Queen Alexandra and Russia's Empress Marie, the new Greek King was first cousin to George V and Nicholas II. Queen Sophie, one of that great tribe of Queen Victoria's grand-daughters who sat, or would one day sit, on European thrones, was sister to Kaiser Wilhelm II. Indeed, Constantine and Sophie's wedding, in Athens in 1889, had been one of those splendid late nineteenth-century royal jamborees: a coming together of that inter-related crowd that Queen Victoria always referred to as 'the Royal Mob' (than which, she would add, she disliked nothing more).