Montenegro’s status in 1860, therefore, can best be described as disputed. In the eyes of the outside world, it was still an integral part of the Ottoman Empire. But since it had enjoyed self-rule under its prince-bishops for nearly two centuries, increasing numbers of its people tended to think of it as an independent, sovereign state. In the age of the Risorgimento, which was blossoming just across the Adriatic, they were not alone in harbouring nationalist ideas. On the other hand, thanks to the Orthodox connection, the Russian Empire began to act as if Montenegro were some sort of informal protectorate. Prince Nikola’s main aim during his reign was to gain full international recognition for the independence from both these behemoths which he and many of his subjects took to be their birthright.
Nikola’s fervent sense of a national mission was fostered by the romantic literature of the day, and in particular by the writings of the last of the ecclesiastical vladikas, Petar II Petrović-Njegoš (r. 1830–51), a man whom he would have known before departing for Paris. Prince-Bishop Petar’s Gorski Vijenac, ‘The Mountain Wreath’, is counted a jewel of Serbian poetry and by some as a major engine in what has been called the ‘slavic myth-making factory’; it was certainly a work of great popularity that helped cement nineteenth-century Serbian identity. Published in 1847, it runs on through 2,819 epic verses, celebrating the people’s struggle for freedom and describing the cultural interplay of the Montenegrin tribes with Ottoman Muslims and decadent Venetians. It centres on a period in the early eighteenth century, when significant numbers of Montenegrins had converted to Islam and the survival of Christian Slavs was perceived to be in danger. Petar was rousing his countrymen to fight for their traditions or to see them perish:
… After the storm the sky grows clearer;
The soul grows serene after sorrow’s pain;
The song waxes joyous after tears have been shed.
Oh that mine eyes could be opened to watch
As our homeland regains all that which was lost,
As Tsar Lazar’s crown shines bright in my face
And Milos returns to his Serbian kin.
Then would my soul be truly content,
Like a peaceful morn at the height of Spring
When the winds of the sea and the darkest clouds
Sleep calm o’er the heaving waves…
Let the struggle continue without respite,
Let it bring what men thought never could be.
Let Hell and the Devil devour us all.
Flowers will grow and bedeck our graves,
For the sake of those who are still to come…23
In recent times, Petar’s poetry has been judged incendiary, accused of inciting conflict between Christian and Muslim;24 in its day, it gave heart to a weak Christian community that felt oppressed by a powerful Ottoman and Muslim establishment.
At all events, the Montenegrins faced a formidable task. In the late nineteenth century they were surrounded on all sides by stronger neighbours. In 1862, when the prince’s father, Prince Mirko, took an army into neighbouring Herzegovina to help some fellow Christian rebels, the incursion ended in defeat and a punitive peace. Bosnia and Herzegovina were ruled by Austria after 1878, but both the Sandžak of Novi Pazar* and Albania (to which the coastal Primore belonged) remained integral parts of the Ottoman Empire. The strategic environment was taut.25
For fifteen years, therefore, awaiting more favourable international circumstances, Prince Nikola applied his mind to domestic reforms in the spirit of Petar II, who had been devoted not only to poetry but also to constitutionalism and to popular education; regarded as the father of his people, he had been buried on the very summit of Mount Lovćen. Prince Nikola drove his reforms forward. He surrendered some of his prerogatives to the Senate, initiated a programme of general primary education and, with notable assistance from Russia (which he was quite willing to accept), restructured and re-equipped the army.
Much effort was put into public relations, and a number of foreign tours were staged. In 1867 Nikola returned to Paris to meet Napoleon III, and the following year he toured St Petersburg, Berlin and Vienna. As a champion of Orthodoxy he was well favoured by the Romanovs, who sent military missions and supplies to Cetinje and who strengthened their own dynasty with an influx of Montenegrin brides.
By 1876, Nikola felt strong enough to declare war on the Ottomans, and in conjunction with Serbia to wage what amounted to a war of independence. Like his father, he personally led his troops into battle. Initial fortunes were meagre, but when the Russian army opened up a front on the Black Sea, the Ottomans were forced to withdraw their troops to defend Bulgaria, and the Montenegrins were free to conquer their seaboard. They were praised by the British prime minister, William Gladstone, who called them ‘a bunch of heroes… whose braveries surpass those of the ancient Hellenes at Thermopylae and Marathon’.26 They were rewarded at the Congress of Berlin, convened in 1878 to terminate the Russo-Turkish War, with a declaration by the Great Powers of Montenegro’s sovereign status. Its frontiers were extended, and Prince Nikola announced that the Battle of Kosovo had been revenged. The date of the Berlin Declaration – 13 July – was adopted as Monte-negro’s National Day.
Gladstone’s concern for Montenegro derived from his long-standing crusade in defence of the Ottoman Empire’s Slav and Christian subjects, and was a natural sequel to his denunciation of the ‘Bulgarian Horrors’. In 1877 he wrote a learned but highly romantic article about Monte-negrin history, stressing its centuries-old record of resistance and the ‘honourable sentiment of gratitude’ owed by Western nations. ‘Among the Serbian lands’, he wrote of the fifteenth century, ‘was the flourishing Principality of Zeta’:
It took its name from the stream which flows southward… toward the Lake of Scutari. It comprised the territory now known as Montenegro, or Tsernagora, together with the seaward frontier… and the rich and fair plains encircling the irregular outline of the inhospitable mountain. Land after land had given way; but Zeta ever stood firm. At last, in 1478, Scutari was taken on the South, and in 1483… Herzegovina on the north submitted to the Ottomans. Ivan Tchernoievitch, the Montenegrin hero of the day, applied to the Venetians for the aid he had often given, and was refused. Thereupon he, and his people with him, quitted the sunny tracts in which they had basked for some seven hundred years, and sought, on the rocks and amidst the precipices, surety for the two gifts most precious to mankind – their faith and their freedom. To them, as to the Pomaks of Bulgaria and the Bosnian Begs, it was open to purchase by conformity a debasing peace. Before them, as before others, lay the trinoda necessitas: the alternatives of death, slavery or the Koran. They were not to die, for they had work to do. To the Koran or slavery, they preferred a life of cold, want, hardship and perpetual peril. Such is their Magna Charta; and without reproach to others, it is, as far as I know, the noblest in the world.
Then and there, [they] voted unanimously their fundamental law, that, in time of war against the Turk, no son of Tsernagora would quit the field without the order of his chief: that a runaway would be forever disgraced and banished; that he should be dressed in woman’s clothes… and that the women striking him with their distaffs should hunt the coward away from the sanctuary of freedom. And now for four centuries wanting only seven years they have maintained the covenant of that awful day, through an unbroken series of trials and exploits, to which it is hard to find a parallel in the annals of Europe, perhaps even of mankind.27
Gladstone was especially impressed by the fact that, when fleeing to the interior mountains in 1484, only seven years after Caxton had produced England’s first book, the Montenegrins had carried a printing-press with them. More critically, he noted two uncivilized practices: the public display of severed Turkish heads, and the mutilation of prisoners. The former was dismissed, since the British government had done the same to Jacobite rebels not long previously, but the latter found no excuse.28
Not to be outdone, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Gladstone’s exact contemp
orary, penned a sonnet:
They rose to where their sovran eagle sails,
They kept their faith, their freedom, on the height,
Chaste, frugal, savage, arm’d by day and night
Against the Turk; whose inroad nowhere scales
Their headlong passes…
O smallest among peoples! rough rock-throne
Of Freedom! warriors beating back the swarm
Of Turkish Islam for five hundred years,
Great Tsernogora! never since thine own
Black ridges drew the cloud and brake the storm
Has breathed a race of mightier mountaineers.29
*
Owing to the publicity generated by his tours, the prince of Montenegro could only grow in political stature. In 1891 he visited the Ottoman sultan, who implicitly, though not formally, relinquished all rights over his former province. In 1896, he attended the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II in St Petersburg, and on his way home won the ultimate accolade of taking afternoon tea with Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle. In line with other progressive monarchs, he was preparing a constitution, launched a national currency, the perper, and promoted the idea of a national Church.
In June 1903 Montenegro’s royal court was deeply shaken by a crisis in neighbouring Serbia. The king of Serbia, Aleksandar I Obrenović, had caused great offence among his subjects by arbitrary acts such as suspending the constitution for half an hour in order to dismiss some unwanted senators, and in the teeth of fierce criticism had recently married a commoner, Queen Draga. A dispute then arose over the naming of an heir apparent. King Aleksandar wanted to elevate Queen Draga’s brother, against whom the twenty-four-year-old Prince Mirko of Montenegro, Prince Nikola’s second son, who was married to an Obrenović, was put forward as a counter-candidate. Senior members of the Serbian military were so incensed that they plotted a royal assassination, and in Belgrade on 11 July Aleksandar and Draga were shot, mutilated and disembowelled. The assassins then rejected Prince Mirko, choosing the exiled Serbian Prince Petar Karadjeordjević in his stead. King Petar I, as he became (r. 1903–21), had lived in Cetinje during his exile and had married Nikola’s eldest daughter, Zorka; he was a mild and liberal man, who had translated John Stuart Mill into Serbian. Even so, fear and suspicion entered into relations between the courts of Cetinje and Belgrade.
In February 1904 the Russo-Japanese conflict broke out in the Far East, and Prince Nikola felt obliged to declare war on Japan in support of the tsar; several hundred Montenegrins travelled to Manchuria to join the ranks. Among them was the prince’s godson, Dr Anto Gvozdenović (1853–1935), who rose to be a general in the Russian, and later the French, armies. After the fighting ceased, no steps were taken to end the state of war between Montenegro and Japan.
Also in 1904, the traditional system of tribes and clans was reorganized. Four nahija – ‘provinces’ or ‘captaincies’ – were created, the tribes were redistributed within them, and every province received its state-appointed elder. Prince Nikola was smoothing the ground for the introduction of more modern state structures.
In 1905, Montenegro became a constitutional monarchy following the adoption of an elaborate constitution of 222 articles, modelled in large part on its Serbian equivalent. A British Foreign Office Handbook would use Serbian terminology to describe the arrangements:
The Prince continued to represent the State in all its foreign relations; primogeniture in the male line was declared to be the law of succession; the Senate was preserved; the country was divided into departments (oblasti), districts (capitanie) and communes (opshtine); a free press and free compulsory elementary education, a Council of State of six, and a Court of Accounts of six members formed part of the Charter. A National Assembly of sixty-two deputies (the Narodna Skupshtina), partly elected by universal suffrage and partly composed of ex officio nominees of the Prince, was to meet annually on 31 October… Deputies must be 30 years of age and pay 15 kronen in taxes annually.30
The first general election was held in November of the same year. There were no established political parties; deputies mainly represented local or tribal interests; and the National Assembly’s recommendation required the approval of the prince.
After 1907, however, two embryonic parties did arise. One, the Naradna Stranka or ‘People’s Party’ (NS), was organized by and Italian-educated engineer, Andrija Radović (1872–1947), who aimed to introduce a more modern and democratic system. The other, the ‘True People’s Party’ (PNS) or ‘Rightists’, was organized by Prince Nikola himself, who resented the challenge to his prerogatives. Radović survived for barely a year as prime minister, and briefly found himself in prison. Yet in 1913 his People’s Party won a landslide victory and he retuned to favour. Prospects for constititional evolution were improving.
In 1910 Montenegro celebrated its prince’s golden jubilee. The court of St Petersburg raised him to the honorary rank of field marshal31 and, as befitted the occasion, the National Assembly petitioned him to assume the title of ‘king’, which he graciously accepted. The representatives of the Great Powers applauded and Montenegro took its place among the kingdoms of Europe on Proclamation Day, 28 August 1910 (15 August Old Style).*
In a parallel step, a decree gave effect to the decision to declare the Orthodox Church in Montenegro autocephalous, that is, independent of patriarchal jurisdiction. Previously the Church had operated under the nominal jurisdiction of the patriarch of Constantinople, as did its counterpart in Serbia. But the decree now asserted that Montenegro had never accepted the abolition of the Serbian patriarchate by the Ottomans in 1766, and hence that the Montenegrin Church was the only true successor of the tradition of St Sava, the founder of Serbian Orthodoxy. This was no trivial matter. The Orthodox clergy traditionally acted as guardians not only of religious practice but also of national identity. The Montenegrins now appeared to be claiming that their form of adherence to Serbian traditions was more correct than that practised in Serbia. This was asking for trouble.32
An official photograph of the royal family on Proclamation Day records the Petrović-Njegoš clan at the height of their success. The gentlemen are decked out in a variety of exotic military uniforms; the ladies in regulation ankle-length, white silk dresses and cartwheel hats. King Nikola sits in national costume in the centre alongside the matronly Queen Milena, a landowner’s daughter who had married him when she was only thirteen. They are surrounded by their seven surviving daughters, their three sons, one grandson and a collection of spouses. Their eldest son-in-law, Petar I of Serbia, is missing, but three others, including King Vittorio Emanuele III of Italy, are present. Crown Prince Danilo (1871–1939), their fifth child, stands in the middle of the back row; their twenty-one-year-old grandson, Crown Prince Aleksandar of Serbia, reclines in the foreground.33
In the summer of 1911 an American reporter, who was seeking a scoop on the current Albanian crisis but had heard of King Nikola’s love for poetry and plays, obtained an interview at the ‘Biljarda House’ by announcing that he was a New York literary critic. Fighting had flared on the nearby frontier, but ‘Nikita’ was not going to miss an opportunity to discuss literature. ‘There is no vanity so deep’, the reporter remarked, ‘as that of authorship’:
The King soon joined me – a fine, old, sturdy gentleman turned seventy, with rugged features, a coarse mouth, and a good forehead. A heavy moustache lent picturesqueness to a massive face, lit up by shrewd and rather kindly eyes… Nikita seemed oblivious of his Ministers… He plunged into literature, [speaking] in faultless French – the French of a professor… He touched on Lamartine, and eulogised Chateaubriand. From poetry we passed on to drama.
‘Yes,’ said the King, ‘I have written plays myself. The best known, produced in the Royal Theatre here, is a drama called the “Empress of the Balkans”. The heroine was suggested by my wife.’
I knew nothing of the ‘Empress’, but it seemed courteous to inquire if the King would not like to have the work performed in France or
England or America. The question seemed to change Nikita instantly from the ruler of a brave and restless land into an author… He gave me a copy of his play in Montenegrin (which resembles Serb or Russian). He also favoured me with his autographed photograph.
Being now in high good spirits, he obliged me quite spontaneously with his opinion on the impending crisis. To my distress, I found that he had resolved to avoid war, for the time, and to drop the Albanian cause.34
The Balkan Wars – wars of liberation from the Ottoman Empire, complicated by conflicts between the liberated for the spoils – erupted the very next year notwithstanding, and Montenegro found itself in a cauldron of swirling conflicts in which stronger parties always held the initiative. King Nikola plunged into the fray alongside Serbia. He still had his lyrical foreign admirers:
He speaks as straight as his rifle’s shot,
As straight as a thrusting blade,
Waiting the deed that shall trouble the truce
His savage guns have made…
Stern old King of the stark black hills,
Where the fierce lean eagles breed,
Your speech rings true as your good sword rings –
And you are a king indeed!35
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