The First Balkan War of 1912, in which several states participated against the Ottomans and Montenegro fired the first shot, ended the age-old dominance of the Ottoman Empire. The Second Balkan War of 1913, in which 10,000 Montenegrin troops were sent to the Bulgarian Front, ended with Montenegro winning a common border with Serbia. But it also led to disputes with the Great Powers. King Nikola had captured the Albanian port of Shkoder (Scutari) in defiance of Western advice, only pulling out after vociferous Austrian protests.36 Vienna viewed Montenegro as a Russian surrogate.
As if on cue, as soon as peace was declared, King Nikola’s play, Balkanska Carica, was published in London in an English translation. A signed portrait of the author faced the title page:
THE EMPRESS OF THE BALKANS: A DRAMA IN THREE ACTS
BY NICHOLAS I PETROVITCH-NIEGOSH,
KING OF MONTENEGRO
Adapted from the Servian…
London
(Eveleigh Nash)
1913
The text was preceded by a detailed ‘Description of the Characters’, one or two quite recognizable:
PRINCE EEVAN, the Ruler of Montenegro, age 70 – a majestic old man, a warrior and a stern ruler, but kind-hearted.
PRINCE GEORGE, the Heir-Apparent, age 26 – young and strong, very polite and kind, and of a quiet disposition.
PRINCE STANKO, the second son, age 24 – strong and very ambitious: vigorous, fearless and brave, but of changeable moods, easy to persuade.
VOIVODA DEHAN, age 65 – old, but bears his age well, being full of life: a great hero and warrior, yet not vain.
VOIVIDA PERUN, Prince Eevan’s guest, age 60.
DANITZA, Perun’s daughter, aged 20 – a firm character and very patriotic: in love with Stanko: full of pluck, very resolute, and of pleasant manners.
IBRAHIM AGA, Envoy of the Sultan, aged 50 – slight and medium height, dark yellowish complexion, and cunning looking, full of compliments and a very deceitful character.37
The time of the action is given as ‘the end of the Fifteenth Century’. The American, who had brought the original text to London, thought that the royal drama lacked ‘imaginative charm’. ‘It did not make me very anxious to adapt the play for Broadway,’ he wrote. ‘It had been written in fair verse, under the influence of Schiller, [but] had no “punch”… It might have proved the germ of a good musical comedy.’38 Unfortunately, musical comedy was the image which Europeans as well as Americans continued to have of Montenegro:
There was a whiff of the Middle Ages about King Nicholas: his insistence on leading his troops into battle, his dispensing of justice under an ancient tree, and the magnificent medals he awarded himself and his friends… His capital, Cetinje, was merely a large village, the Bank of Montenegro a small cottage, and the Grand Hotel a boarding-house… [The king’s] new palace was more like a German pension, with the royal children doing their homework in folk costume… and the King sitting on the front steps waiting for visitors. Franz Lehár used Montenegro as the model for The Merry Widow.39
Lehár’s operetta, first performed in Vienna in December 1905, was a popular sensation in the years before the Great War; between 1907 and 1910 it received nearly 800 performances in London alone. In the libretto, the scene of action is barely disguised as the Principality of ‘Pontevedro’, and its capital as Letigne. The Pontevedran ambassador is Baron Zeta, his first secretary – Count Danilo, and his assistant – Njegus. ‘Vilya’s Song’ is presented as an ‘old Pontevedran melody’:
Vilja, O Vilja! Du Waldmägdelein,
Fass’ mich und lass’ mich
Dein Trautliebster sein.
(‘Vilya, O Vilya, you forest maiden, / take me and let me / be your own truest love.’)40 If Europeans thought about Montenegro at all before the war, most of them would have done so in terms of Lehár’s happy romp.
Montenegro’s story is well illustrated on its early postage stamps. The first issue of the Montenegrin post office, from 1874, was inscribed exclusively in Cyrillic and shows the head of Prince Nikola. A commemorative issue in 1893 marked the 400th anniversary of Montenegro’s oldest surviving printed book, and another in 1896 the 200th anniversary of the hereditary state of the vladikas. In 1910 a coronation issue appeared, and was followed by a set of definitive designs which showed the king sporting traditional regal headdress and which proved to be the country’s last.41
*
In August 1914, the assassination of Archduke Franz-Ferdinand in Sarajevo took place within thirty miles of the Montenegrin frontier, and fighting was started by the Austrian attack on Serbia. The Montenegrins rushed to bolster Serbian resistance, declaring war against Austria, only to find themselves caught up in a long and bitter conflict. They also hoped, as the Serbs did, to obtain hefty slices of the Adriatic coast and of northern Albania; indeed they were formally promised important acquisitions, including Dubrovnik, during negotiations preceding the Treaty of London (1915) which brought Italy into the war on the Allied side. But the outcome of the fighting was less favourable. In 1916–17 the Serbian army was forced to retreat, conducting a long march over the mountains into Albania, and eventually taking refuge on the island of Corfu. As the Austrians surged forward, Montenegro was cast into intense distress.42 At the Battle of Mojkovac in January 1916, the Montenegrin army made great sacrifices to enable their Serbian allies to escape, but their own country fell into enemy hands, and King Nikola was persuaded to go into exile in France. He left his kingdom to a plight that was as ambiguous as it was perilous. After complicated negotiations, he reached an agreement with Vienna whereby the royal administration and the authority of the clans would be left in place under the overall control of an Austrian commander. These negotiations in their turn provoked not only the unintended capitulation of the Montenegrin army but also a bitter split within the Montenegrin government-in-exile. Andrija Radović, who had served a further spell as prime minister, parted company with the king permanently. The exiled monarch was rapidly losing control of his destiny.
In the remaining years of the war, as Austrian power faded, political ferment accelerated. One part of Montenegrin opinion was drawn to the ‘Yugoslav Idea’, the scheme whereby all the southern Slavs – Serbs, Montenegrins, Croats, Slovenes and Macedonians – would join together to form a common state. Another part gave more attention to the ‘Pan-Serbian Idea’, which proposed that the existing Kingdom of Serbia should be expanded to draw in all ethnic Serbs, including those living in Bosnia, Montenegro, Kosovo and Macedonia. Crucially, though the concept of a united Yugoslavia and that of a ‘Greater Serbia’ each had their enthusiasts, they were not necessarily incompatible. Such, indeed, was the view of Andrija Radović. Henceforth, Monternegro’s best-connected politician contacted Serbia’s exiled government and made common cause with them.
The wider diplomatic framework was also changing shape. In 1914 Montenegro’s interests had been protected by Russia, and by Russia’s ally, France. After the Treaty of London, however, Italy entered the equation and King Nikola shared Italian aspirations for territorial reconstruction in the Adriatic region, as did Radović. Then in 1917 the Bolshevik Revolution knocked Russia off the chessboard; the French duly drew closer to Serbia; and Italian plans for the Adriatic lost Western support. The Americans, in particular, were opposed to the Treaty of London, which they saw as a wicked example of the old secret diplomacy. King Nikola was losing his international friends.
According to one witness, ‘the Austrian occupation was not a brutal one’; at least in its first phase. ‘Not a child was killed, not a woman violated.’42 Yet matters soon deteriorated. The Montenegrin army’s capitulation spread dismay, and the exiled government gave contradictory explanations. For example, it issued a declaration stating that the agreement with the Austrians had only been made to gain time; that the King was urging resistance, and that nobody had the right to negotiate an armistice, let alone make peace.43 As a result, many of the king’s loyal subjects were unclear as to whether they should co-operat
e with the occupying forces or not. The Austrians ordered the internment of all adult males as a precaution. This sparked acts of defiance, which in turn provoked reprisals. Austrian soldiers were shot, and the offenders were hanged. Worst of all, the clans broke ranks. Montenegrins started to skirmish with Montenegrins. As the international conflict drew to a close, civil war was looming.
Thanks to the Austrian occupation and King Nikola’s exile, Montenegro played little part in the rapidly moving but ill co-0rdinated plans to create a united state of Yugoslavia. The principal protagonist in this venture was a Dalmatian Croat, Ante Trumbić (1864–1938), sometime mayor of Split, further up the Adriatic coast from Kotor. Trumbić’s Yugoslav Committee had been launched in London, working closely with the scholar R. W. Seton-Watson and his journal New Europe; but in 1917–18 it was engaged in its key task of finding suitable Serb partners in order to outflank the alternative project of a Greater Serbia. On 17 July 1917, in conjunction with the slippery Serb politician Nikola Pašić (1845–1926), sometime mayor of Belgrade, Trumbić signed the Corfu Declaration, which envisaged a future Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. The Declaration named the House of Karadjeordjević as the future ruling dynasty, and it made no mention of Montenegro. This was ominous. And Pašić proved himself to be thoroughly unreliable. Seton-Watson said of him: ‘The old man changes his mind every few hours, and cannot be trusted for five minutes with his word of honour or anything else.’44 Pašić was soon indicating that the Corfu Declaration had been a passing dalliance, and as late as July 1918 appeared to be paying attention exclusively to pan-Serbian aspirations. ‘Serbia’, he told Trumbić opaquely, ‘internationally represents our nation of three names.’
Following the Corfu Declaration, Radović surfaced in Switzerland, where he established the Central Montenegrin Committee of National Reunification. The extent of his support cannot be gauged, but one should note that the nation which he aimed to reunite was not Montenegro; it was the nation of all Serbs wherever they lived. For practical purposes, he was campaigning against Montenegro’s restoration.
Inside Montenegro, therefore, confusion reigned. Contact with the exiled king had virtually been lost. There was no Montenegrin radio service, the telephones were controlled by the Austrians, and the illiterate majority of the population could not make sense of the few foreign newspapers that crept past the censors. The Yugoslav project was left in the hands of distant outsiders. There can be little doubt that the Montenegrins, like most Europeans, were expecting change. They knew that King Nikola’s chief patron, the Russian tsar, had been overthrown, and that parts of his Empire, like Ukraine, had broken away. But for the most part they were waiting patiently for the king to return and for the international situation to stabilize.
The last fortnight of the war caused the greatest confusion of all. On 28 October 1918, the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed, the Emperor Charles withdrew from government, and the Austrian occupation forces pulled out from Montenegro. In all the great cities of the dying Empire – in Vienna and Budapest, in Zagreb, Ljubljana, Prague, Lemberg and Sarajevo – national committees sprang up to demand the formation of new states. Then, on 4 November, revolution broke out in Berlin. The Kaiser abdicated, German forces on the Western Front retreated, and the Central Powers, which had appeared invincible only six months earlier, cracked. The Western Allies, ‘who were not expecting victory when it came’,45 emerged triumphant. They dictated the terms of the Armistice of 11 November, and announced that a general Peace Conference would convene in Paris on 31 January. Montenegrins were not the only ones to wonder what the fast-moving events would bring.
At the very end of the Great War, in the interval between the Armistice and the start of the Peace Conference, Montenegro was hit by the cruellest of blows. The war had apparently been won. The country was freeing itself from the Central Powers. As a member of the victorious Allies, it was looking forward to receiving its due rewards. Yet a completely different scenario arose. A hastily convened meeting of a ‘Grand National Assembly’ calling itself the Skupština voted in favour of union with the nascent Yugoslav kingdom. Executive decisions passed immediately to Belgrade. King Nikola lost his throne. His kingdom, a Serbian Sparta only eight years old, was put out on the mountainside like a Spartan child, and left to die in its infancy. It was the only Allied state to disappear from the map.
The sequence of events whereby Montenegro lost its statehood deserves closer examination. After all, the standard procedure for an occupied Allied country would have seen the state and its territory restored as soon as victory was assured. Belgium, for example, which had been occupied by Germany between 1914 and 1918, was fully restored to the king of the Belgians and his government at the end of hostilities. Albert I made his triumphal re-entry into Brussels on 22 November 1918, two days before the ‘Grand National Assembly’ of Montenegro convened. Allied declarations had consistently bracketed Montenegro with Belgium and Serbia as countries whose restoration was guaranteed. What in 1918 made Montenegro different?
The collapse of Austria-Hungary in October 1918 left a vacuum in the territories which the Royal and Imperial Army had occupied. In Montenegro, no provision was made for an orderly transfer of power. The Montenegrin army had no time to reconstitute itself. After the capitulation of January 1916, some of its units had handed in their arms to the Austrians and disbanded; others had left the country and were serving under Serbian command. All the Balkan allies were subordinated in theory to the French General Franchet d’Espérey in distant Salonika; the western part of the Balkan theatre had been entrusted to his deputy, General Venel. Yet little direct control could be exercised and few military resources could be spared for the Montenegrin backwater. The coastal region was assigned to the French or to British and Italian units brought in by sea. The mountainous interior was assigned to the Serbian army, the only substantial ground force in the region, while the eastern border districts were infiltrated by Serbian ‘irregulars’. In short, in the weeks both before and after the Armistice, no coherent Montenegrin formation was on hand to defend Montenegro’s interests.46
The standing of the Montenegrin monarchy was definitely diminished. King Nikola’s wartime actions had provoked a wave of criticism. Some denounced him for treating with the enemy, others for deserting his country or betraying the Serbs, and a few for ‘behaving like a despot’ or for living well off Allied subsidies. He had quarrelled with some of the politicians, and calls for his abdication had emanated from his own entourage.47 Yet there had been no concerted campaign in the country to remove him, still less to abolish the institution of monarchy; a deal with the king’s Serbian relatives was still on the cards. A measure of qualified sympathy for the king can be found in an unexpected source. Milovan Djilas (1911–95), later one of Tito’s comrades and prisoners, and himself a Montenegrin, remembered the episode from his childhood. ‘There had actually been no betrayal,’ he wrote. ‘What could [the king] have done?… [He] did not betray the Serbs. If he betrayed anything – and he did – it was the Montenegrin Army and the Montenegrin state.’48
As for relations between the House of Petrović-Njegoš and the House of Karadjeordjević, little was known in public. The kings of Montenegro and Serbia were both old men; both were looking to the younger generation; both had been forced into exile, Nikola in Antibes, Petar in Corfu; and both hoped for co-ordinated policy. Crown Prince Aleksandar of Serbia, Nikola’s grandson, was a key figure; he was already the acting Serbian regent, and was obviously ambitious. In London in 1915, he had been the first person ever to talk about ‘our Yugoslav people’49 – though such sentiments did not necessarily indicate ill will to his grandfather. A highly impractical scheme floated by Radović foresaw the Montenegrin and Serbian dynasties reigning over Yugoslavia jointly, with a Petrović and a Karadjeordjević taking turns to mount the throne. Nobody took the idea seriously.
Montenegro’s isolation was increased by tensions in neighbouring Albania, which was the subject of acute intern
ational disagreements. The Serbian army had laid waste to large parts of northern Albania in late 1918, devastating over 150 villages in the Drin valley. The depredations were encouraged by the French, who wanted post-war Serbia to be strong and were hatching a plot to partition Albania. In order to undermine a fragile government in Tirana, an insurrection was then fomented among the Catholic Mirdite clan, which was to declare its mountainous retreat to be an independent republic. Far away in Paris, a French-dominated committee announced that Albania was to be partitioned (according to the provisions of the Treaty of London), while the United States recognized Albanian independence and received an Albanian ambassador to Washington. This complicated dispute distracted attention from developments elsewhere.
Inside Montenegro, two opposing political camps were forming but with no established forum in which to compete. The pan-Serbian camp inspired by Radović was pressing both for unification with Serbia and for the creation of a Yugoslav state under Belgrade’s leadership. It assumed that Montenegro’s pre-war constitution had lapsed, and sought to achieve its end by imposing its own unilateral procedures: a classic case of self-styled democrats impatient of democratic methods. The rival royalist camp aimed to restore the Kingdom of Montenegro first and to address the Yugoslav issue later. Its sympathizers, though badly organized, probably represented majority opinion; they certainly reflected the stated intentions of the Allied Powers.
It is worth quoting Clause 11 of President Wilson’s Fourteen Points of April 1917, which had gained the adherence of both Britain and France, and which was widely seen to embody the guidelines of Allied policy. ‘Romania, Serbia and Montenegro should be evacuated,’ it read, ‘occupied territory restored, Serbia accorded free and secure access to the sea, and the relations of the several Balkan states to one another determined by friendly counsel.’ Further: ‘International guarantees should be entered upon for the political and economic independence and territorial integrity of the several Balkan states.’50 From this, it is clear that the Allied leaders intended to restore the statehood of all their Balkan allies and to secure it by treaty.
Vanished Kingdoms Page 70