The Balkans. Nevill Forbes
Serbia to its inadequate limits of those day.
On November 13 King Milan declared war, and began to march on Sofia, which is not far from the Serbo-Bulgarian frontier. Prince Alexander, the bulk of whose army was on the Turkish frontier, boldly took up the challenge. On November 18 took place the battle of Slivnitsa, a small town about twenty miles north-west of Sofia, in which the Bulgarians were completely victorious. Prince Alexander, after hard fighting, took Pirot in Serbia on November 27, having refused King Milan's request for an armistice, and was marching on Nish, when Austria intervened, and threatened to send troops into Serbia unless fighting ceased. Bulgaria had to obey, and on March 3, 1886, a barren treaty of peace was imposed on the belligerents at Bucarest. Prince Alexander's position did not improve after this, indeed it would have needed a much more skilful navigator to steer through the many currents which eddied round him. A strong Russophile party formed itself in the army; on the night of August 21, 1886, some officers of this party, who were the most capable in the Bulgarian army, appeared at Sofia, forced Alexander to resign, and abducted him; they put him on board his yacht on the Danube and escorted him to the Russian town of Reni, in Bessarabia; telegraphic orders came from St. Petersburg, in answer to inquiries, that he could proceed with haste to western Europe, and on August 26 he found himself at Lemberg. But those who had carried out this coup d'état found that it was not at all popular in the country. A counter-revolution, headed by the statesman Stambulóv, was immediately initiated, and on September 3 Prince Alexander reappeared in Sofia amidst tumultuous applause. Nevertheless his position was hopeless; the Emperor Alexander III forced him to abdicate, and on September 7, 1886, he left Bulgaria for good, to the regret of the majority of the people. He died in Austria, in 1893, in his thirty-seventh year. At his departure a regency was constituted, at the head of which was Stambulóv.
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The Regeneration under Prince Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg, 1886–1908
Stambulóv was born at Tirnovo in 1854 and was of humble origin. He took part in the insurrection of 1876 and in the war of liberation, and in 1884 became president of the Sóbraniye (Parliament). From 1886 till 1894 he was virtually dictator of Bulgaria. He was intensely patriotic and also personally ambitious, determined, energetic, ruthlessly cruel and unscrupulous, but incapable of deceit; these qualities were apparent in his powerful and grim expression of face, while his manner inspired the weak with terror and the strongest with respect. His policy in general was directed against Russia. At the general election held in October 1886 he had all his important opponents imprisoned beforehand, while armed sentries discouraged ill-disposed voters from approaching the ballot-boxes. Out of 522 elected deputies, there were 470 supporters of Stambulóv. This implied the complete suppression of the Russophile party and led to a rupture with St. Petersburg.
Whatever were Stambulóv's methods, and few would deny that they were harsh, there is no doubt that something of the sort was necessary to restore order in the country. But once having started on this path he found it difficult to stop, and his tyrannical bearing, combined with the delay in finding a prince, soon made him unpopular. There were several revolutionary outbreaks directed against him, but these were all crushed. At length the, at that time not particularly alluring, throne of Bulgaria was filled by Prince Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg, who was born in 1861 and was the son of the gifted Princess Clémentine of Bourbon-Orleans, daughter of Louis-Philippe. This young man combined great ambition and tenacity of purpose with extreme prudence, astuteness, and patience; he was a consummate diplomat. The election of this prince was viewed with great disfavour by Russia, and for fear of offending the Emperor Alexander III none of the European powers recognized him.
Ferdinand, unabashed, cheerfully installed himself in Sofia with his mother in July 1886, and took care to make the peace with his suzerain, the Sultan Abdul Hamid. He wisely left all power in the hands of the unattractive and to him, unsympathetic prime minister, Stambulóv, till he himself felt secure in his position, and till the dictator should have made himself thoroughly hated. Ferdinand's clever and wealthy mother cast a beneficent and civilizing glow around him, smoothing away many difficulties by her womanly tact and philanthropic activity, and, thanks to his influential connexions in the courts of Europe and his attitude of calm expectancy, his prestige in his own country rapidly increased. In 1893 he married Princess Marie-Louise of Bourbon-Parma. In May 1894, as a result of a social misadventure in which he became involved, Stambulóv sent in his resignation, confidently expecting a refusal. To his mortification it was accepted; thereupon he initiated a violent press campaign, but his halo had faded, and on July 15 he was savagely attacked in the street by unknown men, who afterwards escaped, and he died three days later. So intense were the emotions of the people that his grave had to be guarded by the military for two months. In November 1894 followed the death of the Emperor Alexander III, and as a result of this double event the road to a reconciliation with Russia was opened. Meanwhile the German Emperor, who was on good terms with Princess Clémentine, had paved the way for Ferdinand at Vienna, and when, in March 1896, the Sultan recognized him as Prince of Bulgaria and Governor-General of eastern Rumelia, his international position was assured. Relations with Russia were still further improved by the rebaptism of the infant Crown Prince Boris according to the rites of the eastern Church, in February 1896, and a couple of years later Ferdinand and his wife and child paid a highly successful state visit to Peterhof. In September 1902 a memorial church was erected by the Emperor Nicholas II at the Shipka Pass, and later an equestrian statue of the Tsar-Liberator Alexander II was placed opposite the House of Parliament in Sofia.
Bulgaria meanwhile had been making rapid and astonishing material progress. Railways were built, exports increased, and the general condition of the country greatly improved. It is the fashion to compare the wonderful advance made by Bulgaria during the thirty-five years of its new existence with the very much slower progress made by Serbia during a much longer period. This is insisted on especially by publicists in Austria-Hungary and Germany, but it is forgotten that even before the last Balkan war the geographical position of Bulgaria with its seaboard was much more favourable to its economic development than that of Serbia, which the Treaty of Berlin had hemmed in by Turkish and Austro-Hungarian territory; moreover, Bulgaria being double the size of the Serbia of those days, had far greater resources upon which to draw.
From 1894 onwards Ferdinand's power in his own country and his influence abroad had been steadily growing. He always appreciated the value of railways, and became almost as great a traveller as the German Emperor. His estates in the south of Hungary constantly required his attention, and he was a frequent visitor in Vienna. The German Emperor, though he could not help admiring Ferdinand's success, was always a little afraid of him; he felt that Ferdinand's gifts were so similar to his own that he would be unable to count on him in an emergency. Moreover, it was difficult to reconcile Ferdinand's ambitions in extreme south-eastern Europe with his own. Ferdinand's relations with Vienna, on the other hand, and especially with the late Archduke Francis Ferdinand, were both cordial and intimate.
The gradual aggravation of the condition of the Turkish Empire, notably in Macedonia, the unredeemed Bulgaria, where since the insurrection of 1902–3 anarchy, always endemic, had deteriorated into a reign of terror, and, also the unmistakably growing power and spirit of Serbia since the accession of the Karageorgevich dynasty in 1903, caused uneasiness in Sofia, no less than in Vienna and Budapest. The Young Turkish revolution of July 1908, and the triumph of the Committee of Union and Progress, disarmed the critics of Turkey who wished to make the forcible introduction of reforms a pretext for their interference; but the potential rejuvenation of the Ottoman Empire which it foreshadowed indicated the desirability of rapid and decisive action. In September, after fomenting a strike on the Oriental Railway in eastern Roumelia (which railway was Turkish property), the Sofia Cabinet seized the line with a military force on the plea of political necessity. At the same time Ferdinand, with his second wife, the Protestant Princess Eleonora of Reuss, whom he had married in March of that year, was received with regal honours by the Emperor of Austria at Budapest. On October 5, 1908, at Tirnovo, the ancient capital, Ferdinand proclaimed the complete independence of Bulgaria and eastern Rumelia under himself as King (Tsar in Bulgarian), and on October 7 Austria-Hungary announced the annexation of Bosnia and Hercegovina, the two Turkish provinces administered by it since 1879, nominally under Turkish suzerainty.
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