But this Bulgarian Empire was doomed to as short a life as its predecessor, though for a brief while it held out the illusionary hope of permanency. Bulgaria, from the Danube to the Rhodope Mountains, was won from the Greeks, and John a.s.sen was powerful enough to dream of entering into alliance with the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. An a.s.sa.s.sin's sword, however, ended John a.s.sen's life prematurely. He was followed on the throne by his brother Peter. He, too, was a.s.sa.s.sinated, and was succeeded by his brother Kalojan, who had all the warlike virtues of John a.s.sen, and re-established the Bulgarian Empire with territories which embraced more than half the whole Balkan Peninsula.

Seeking to add to the reality of power some validity of t.i.tle, Kalojan entered into negotiations with the Pope of Rome, made his submission to the Roman Church, and was crowned by a Papal nuncio as king.

It was about this time that Constantinople was captured by the Crusaders, and Count Baldwin of Flanders ascended the throne of the Caesars. The Greeks, driven from their capital but still holding some territory, made an alliance with Kalojan, and once again Greek and Bulgar fought side by side, defeating the Franks and taking the Emperor Baldwin prisoner. Then the alliance ended--never, it seems, can Bulgar and Greek be long at peace--and a war raged between the Greek Empire and Bulgaria, until in 1207 Kalojan was a.s.sa.s.sinated.

A brief period of prosperity continued for Bulgaria while John a.s.sen II. was on the throne. He was the most civilised and humane of all the rulers of ancient Bulgaria, and there is no stain of a ma.s.sacre or a murder remembered against his name. He made wars reluctantly, but always successfully. An inscription in a church at Tirnova records his prowess:

In the year 1230, I, John a.s.sen, Czar and Autocrat of the Bulgarians, obedient to G.o.d in Christ, son of the old a.s.sen, have built this most worthy church from its foundations, and completely decked it with paintings in honour of the Forty holy Martyrs, by whose help, in the 12th year of my reign, when the church had just been painted, I set out to Roumania to the war and smote the Greek army and took captive the Czar Theodore Komnenus with all his n.o.bles. And all lands have I conquered from Adrianople to Durazzo, the Greek, the Albanian, and the Servian land. Only the towns round Constantinople and that city itself did the Franks hold; but these too bowed themselves beneath the hand of my sovereignty, for they had no other Czar but me, and prolonged their days according to my will, as G.o.d had so ordained. For without Him no word or work is accomplished. To Him be honour for ever. Amen.

John a.s.sen II. was a great administrator as well as a great soldier.

Whilst he declared the Church of Bulgaria independent, repudiating alike the Churches of Rome and of Constantinople, he tolerated all religions and gave sound encouragement to education. With his death pa.s.sed away the last of the glory of ancient Bulgaria. Her story now was to be of almost unrelieved misfortune until the culminating misery of the Turkish conquest.

Internal dissensions, wars with the Venetians, the Hungarians, the Serbs, the Greeks, the Tartars,--all these vexed Bulgaria. The country became subject for a time to the Tartars, then recovered its independence, then came under the dominion of Servia after the battle of Kostendil (1330). The Servians, closely akin by blood, proved kind conquerors, and for some years the two Slav peoples of the Balkans kept peace by a common policy in which Bulgaria, if dependent, was not enslaved. But the Turk was rapidly pouring into Europe. In 1366 the Bulgarian Czar, Sisman III., agreed to become the va.s.sal of the Turkish Sultan Murad, and the centuries of subjection to the Turk began. After the battle of Kossovo the grip of the Turk on Bulgaria was tightened.

Tirnova was captured, the n.o.bles of the nation ma.s.sacred, the national freedom obliterated. The desire for independence barely survived. But there was one happy circ.u.mstance:

"It is a noteworthy fact," writes a Bulgarian authority, "that the Osmanlis, being themselves but little civilised, did not attempt to a.s.similate the Bulgarians in the sense in which civilised nations try to effect the intellectual and ethnic a.s.similation of a subject race. Except in isolated cases, where Bulgarian girls or young men were carried off and forced to adopt Mohammedanism, the Government never took any general measures to impose Mohammedanism or a.s.similate the Bulgarians to the Moslems. The Turks prided themselves on keeping apart from the Bulgarians, and this was fortunate for our nationality.

Contented with their political supremacy and pleased to feel themselves masters, the Turks did not trouble about the spiritual life of the _rayas_, except to try to trample out all desires for independence. All these circ.u.mstances contributed to allow the Bulgarian people, crushed and ground down by the Turkish yoke, to concentrate and preserve their own inner spiritual life. They formed religious communities attached to the churches. These had a certain amount of autonomy, and, beside seeing after the churches, could keep schools. The national literature, full of the most poetic melancholy, handed down from generation to generation and developed by tradition, still tells us of the life of the Bulgarians under the Ottoman yoke. In these popular songs, the memory of the ancient Bulgarian kingdom is mingled with the sufferings of the present hour. The songs of this period are remarkable for the Oriental character of their tunes, and this is almost the sole trace of Moslem influence.

"In spite of the vigilance of the Turks, the religious a.s.sociations served as centres to keep alive the national feeling. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Russia declared war against Turkey (1827), Bulgaria awoke."

From 1366 to 1827 Bulgaria had been enslaved by the Turk. Now within the s.p.a.ce of a few days and with hardly an effort on her own behalf, she was suddenly to be restored to independence.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ROUSTCHOUK, ON THE DANUBE]

CHAPTER V

THE LIBERATION OF BULGARIA

Significantly enough, the first sign of a renaissance of Bulgarian national feeling was an agitation not against the Turks but the Greeks.

Patriotic Bulgarians, under the Sublime Porte, sought to re-establish their old National Church and shake it free from its subjection to the Greek Patriarch at Constantinople. The Sublime Porte was induced to look upon this demand with favour. A step which promised to emphasise the divisions between the Christians evidently should be of advantage to the Turks. The Greek Patriarch was urged to consent to the appointment of a Bulgarian bishop. He refused. In the face of that refusal Turkey acted as the creator of a new Christian Church, and in 1870 a firman of the Sultan created the Bulgarian Exarchate, and Bulgaria had again a national ecclesiastical organisation. Two years later the first Exarch was elected by the Bulgarian clergy. But grat.i.tude for this religious concession did not extinguish the longings for political independence of the Bulgarian people. When a Christian insurrection broke out in Herzegovina against Turkey in 1875, the Bulgarian patriots rose in arms in different parts of their country. The ma.s.sacres of Batak were the Turkish response, those "Bulgarian atrocities" which sent a shudder through all Europe and set a term to Turkish rule over the Christian populations in her European provinces.

I have been recently in the Balkans with the veteran war artist, Mr.

Frederick Villiers, who has personal recollections of those times of ma.s.sacre and atrocity. Speaking with him, an eye-witness of the devastation then wrought, it was possible to understand the fierce indignation with which the English-speaking world was stirred as the details of the horrors in the Balkans were unveiled. In all about 12,000 Bulgarian people perished, mostly butchered in cold blood. Turkish anger, it seems, was inflamed against the Bulgarians, because, in spite of the recent church concession, some of them had dared to strike for freedom; and this display of Turkish anger made the full freedom of Bulgaria certain.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "MYSTERY"--A STUDY IN THE ROUSTCHOUK DISTRICT]

At first an attempt had been made by the Powers to exert peaceful pressure upon Turkey, so that her Christian provinces should be granted local autonomy. The project of the Powers for Bulgaria proposed that the districts inhabited by Bulgarians should be divided into two provinces; the Eastern Province, with Tirnovo as capital, was to include the Sandjaks of Roustchouk, Tirnovo, Toultcha, Varna, Sliven, Philippopolis (not including Sultan-Eri and Ahi-Tchelebi), the kazas of Kirk Kilisse, Mustapha Pasha and Kasilagatch; and the Western Province, with Sofia as capital, the Sandjaks of Sofia, Vidin, Nisch, Uskub, Monastir, the three kazas of the north of Seres, and the kazas of Stroumitza, Tikvesch, Veles, and Kastoria. Districts of from five to ten thousand inhabitants were to stand as the administrative unit. Christian and Mohammedans were to be settled h.o.m.ogeneously in these districts. Each district was to have at its head a mayor and a district council, elected by universal suffrage, and was to enjoy entire autonomy as regards local affairs.

Several districts would form a Sandjak with a prefect at its head who was to be Christian or Mohammedan, according to the majority of the population of the Sandjak. He would be proposed by the Governor-General, and nominated by the Porte for four years.

Finally, every two Sandjaks were to be administered by a Christian Governor-General nominated by the Porte for five years, with consent of the Powers. He would govern the province with the help of a provincial a.s.sembly, composed of representatives chosen by the district councils for a term of four years, at the rate of one deputy to thirty or forty thousand inhabitants. This a.s.sembly would nominate an administrative council of ten members. The provincial a.s.sembly would be summoned every year to decide the budget and the taxes. The armed force was to be concentrated in the towns and there would be local militia beside. The language of the predominant nationality was to be employed, as well as Turkish. Finally, a Commission of International Control was to supervise the working of these proposals.

The Porte promised reforms on these lines, but did not go beyond promising. The task of forcing her to end a cruel tyranny was one for the battlefield.

The Russo-Turkish War broke out on April 12, 1877, and what Turkey had refused to yield of her own accord was wrested from her by force of arms, in the preliminary treaty of San Stefano. By this treaty, Bulgaria was made an autonomous princ.i.p.ality subject to Turkey, with a Christian government and national militia. The Prince of Bulgaria was to be freely chosen by the Bulgarian people and accepted by the Sublime Porte, with the consent of the Powers. It was agreed that an a.s.sembly of notables, presided over by a Russian Commissioner and attended by a Turkish Commissioner, should meet at Philippopolis or Tirnovo before the election of the Prince to draw up a const.i.tutional statute similar to those of the other Danubian princ.i.p.alities agreed to after the Treaty of Adrianople in 1830.

The Treaty of San Stefano brought into being on paper a Bulgaria greater in area than the Bulgaria of 1912, and greater even than the Bulgaria of 1914. But the Treaty was not ratified. Other European Powers, alarmed at the prospect of Russia becoming supreme in the Balkans through the aid of a Bulgarian va.s.sal state, interfered, and the Congress of Berlin subst.i.tuted for the Treaty of San Stefano the Treaty of Berlin.

The Treaty of Berlin provided:

Bulgaria is to be an independent Princ.i.p.ality, subject to the Sultan, with a Christian government and a national militia; the Prince of Bulgaria will be freely chosen by the Bulgarian nation and accepted by the Sublime Porte, with the approval of the Great Powers; no member of a reigning European family can be elected Prince of Bulgaria; in case of a vacancy of the throne the election will be repeated under the same conditions and with the same forms; before the election of the Prince, an a.s.sembly of notables will decide on the const.i.tutional statute of the Princ.i.p.ality at Tirnovo. The laws will be based on principles of civil and religious liberty.

By the Treaty of Berlin the boundaries of Bulgaria were very greatly curtailed as compared with those of the Treaty of San Stefano, shrinking from an area as great almost as the Bulgarian Empire of Simeon down to a broad band of territory running between Eastern Roumelia and Roumania.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A BLIND BEGGAR WOMAN]

But the Bulgars kept the Treaty of San Stefano rather than the Treaty of Berlin before their eyes as their national charter. Almost from the first there were encroachments upon the provisions of the Treaty of Berlin. Its limitations of Bulgarian sovereignty were ignored little by little. Eastern Roumelia was united to Bulgaria proper by a bold and well-timed stroke. Another occasion was sought to get rid of the tribute to Turkey, and from a Prince, subject to a suzerain, the ruler of Bulgaria became a Czar, responsible to none but his subjects. Finally, when the war of 1912 against Turkey was entered upon to liberate further Christian provinces from the rule of the Turk, the Bulgarian people, if not the Bulgarian rulers, had clearly before their eyes the vision of the Bulgaria of the San Stefano Treaty. At one time it seemed as if that fond hope would be realised. But misfortunes and mistakes intervened, and as a final result of that and succeeding wars Bulgaria has been left with a comparatively small accession of territory, and is not much better off than she was in 1912.

It is not my purpose to attempt any detailed history of Bulgaria. I have designed, rather, an indication in broad outline of her national growth as a basis for, and an introduction to, an intimate picture of the country as it is to-day. All that is needed, then, to add to this chapter regarding the Liberation of Bulgaria, is that after the Treaty of Berlin had been ratified, the first task that faced the princ.i.p.ality of Bulgaria was to make it clear to Russia that, whilst she was grateful for the aid which had enabled her to become independent, she aspired to a real independence, and did not wish to exchange one master for another. The task was difficult, and caused some early trouble for the revived nation.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A YOUNG MARRIED SHoP WOMAN]

The first Prince chosen to be monarch of Bulgaria was Prince Alexander of Battenberg, a brave soldier but an indifferent statesman. He offended in turn both the Bulgarian patriots who wished him to lead their country to a complete freedom, and the Russians who would have her kept under a kind of tutelage to the "Little Father." Still Bulgaria, in his reign, made notable advances towards her national ideals. In 1885, obedient to the earnest wish of its inhabitants, Eastern Roumelia was incorporated with Bulgaria as a united princ.i.p.ality, and that much of the Treaty of Berlin torn up. Turkey, whose rights were chiefly affected, decided not to make war upon this issue. The Great Powers, other than Russia, which had insisted, in the first instance, on the separation of Bulgaria into Bulgaria Proper and Eastern Roumelia because they feared that Bulgaria would be a mere appanage of Russia and would in actual effect bring the Russian frontier so much nearer to Constantinople, were now fairly rea.s.sured on that point. They not only made no protest, but they prevented Greece from doing so. There remained to be reckoned with only Russia and Servia. Russia showed her displeasure by recalling every Russian officer then serving with the Bulgarian army; but she did not make war. Servia, fearful that this Bulgarian aggrandis.e.m.e.nt jeopardised her own future in the Balkans, made war. Prince Alexander took the field with his troops--made up of Bulgarians, Macedonians, and Turks living in Bulgaria--and in the battle of Slivnitza Bulgaria won a decisive victory. She was not allowed to reap any direct fruits from it, as Austria interfered on behalf of Servia. The Treaty of Bucharest made peace without penalty to Servia, and Bulgaria was left with a greatly enhanced prestige as her sole reward.

It was a sad sequel to Prince Alexander's courage and address in this campaign that the next year he was deposed by a conspiracy in which the moving figures were the chiefs of the pro-Russian party in Bulgaria. The majority of the Bulgarians were not friendly to this revolution, and after the kidnapping of the Prince by the rebels a counter-revolution under Stambuloff would have restored him to the throne had it not been for the fact that he was irresolute in council though brave in the field. He could have won back his Crown, but chose rather to surrender it to Russia.

For some time after it was difficult to find a Prince for Bulgaria. The Crown was offered in turn to Prince Waldemar of Denmark and King Carol of Roumania. Finally, Prince Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha consented to embark on the great adventure of ruling Bulgaria. Wealthy, descended from the old French royal house on his mother's side, and connected with the Austrian and German royal houses on his father's, handsome and youthful, Prince Ferdinand had splendid qualifications for his new responsibility. He showed, too, from the outset, a fine diplomatic skill and successfully steered his country through the perilous days which followed his accession. Russia at first refused to sanction the choice of him as Prince, and that involved the other Powers in a policy of refusing him "recognition." He was thus, in a sense, a boycotted monarch.

With steady and patient skill Prince Ferdinand worked to overcome the obstacles which stood in the way of Bulgarian national aspirations, aided much by the masterful statesmanship of Stambuloff. A good understanding was come to with Turkey, still Bulgaria's suzerain power, and in 1890 Turkey made the important concession to Bulgaria of appointing Bulgarian bishops in Macedonia. In 1893 Prince Ferdinand married Princess Marie Louise of Parma, and the next year an heir was born to them, Prince Boris. A reconciliation with Russia followed.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A BULGARIAN MARKET TOWN]

Bulgaria now made steady and peaceful progress, the only cloud on her sky the sorrows of her co-religionists in Macedonia. In 1908 advantage was taken of the "Young Turk" revolution in Turkey for the Bulgarian Prince to denounce all allegiance to Turkey, and Bulgaria was declared fully independent and Ferdinand was crowned at Tirnovo as Czar of the Bulgarians. Turkey was not able to protest, and her confessed weakness nourished to powerful strength the general desire of the Christian peoples in the Balkans to free their co-religionists in Thrace and Macedonia from the rule of the Moslem. "The Balkan League" was formed, and Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro, and Servia prepared to force from Turkey by war what the Great Powers had so far failed to secure by diplomacy--the relief of Macedonia from oppression and misrule. It was during the war of 1912-1913 that I had an opportunity of studying the Bulgarian people at close hand, as I accompanied the Bulgarian forces as war correspondent.

CHAPTER VI

THE WAR OF 1912-1913

I can still recollect the glad surprise which a first sight of Sofia gave to me. With the then conventional view of the Balkan states, I had expected, on leaving Buda-Pesth, to cut away altogether from civilisation. Paved streets; solid and good, if not exactly handsome, buildings; first-cla.s.s hotels and cafes; electric trams and comfortable, cheap cabs; luxurious public baths; well-stocked stores; a telephone system, water-supply, drainage--each one of these was a surprise. I had expected a semi-barbaric Eastern town. I found a modern capital, small but orderly, clean, and well managed.

That enthusiastic friend of the Balkan nationalities, Mr. Noel Buxton, M.P., writing of Sofia and other Balkan capitals, becomes quite lyrical in his praise:

"Their capitals," he writes, "have at all times an aspect of reality, industry, and simplicity. There is little needless wealth to show, and nothing which, in the West, would be called luxury. Every one is a worker, and every one a serious politician. There are no drones, and none who spend their lives in the pleasures, refinements, luxuries, vices, the idle amus.e.m.e.nts of the great cities of Europe. The buildings represent utility, means fairly adapted to ends, but with no c.u.mbrous decoration or ponderous display. These capitals are bureaucratic settlements, devoted to the deliberate ends of national government with a minimum of waste, strictly appropriated to use alone, rendering their service to the nation as a counting-house renders its service to a great factory.

Peasants walk their streets in brilliant village dresses. No one thinks a rational country costume inappropriate to the pavement of the capital. This is an index to the idea of purpose which pervades the town; there is none of the sense that a different costume is needed for urban life, an idea which arises from the a.s.sociation of towns with pleasure and display.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BLESSING THE LAMB ON ST. GEORGE'S DAY]

"Few sights can be more inspiring to the lover of liberty and national progress than a view of Sofia from the hill where the great seminary of the national church overlooks the plain. There at your feet is spread out the unpretentious seat of a government which stands for the advance of European order in lands long blighted with barbarism. Here resides, and is centred, the virile force of a people which has advanced the bounds of liberty. From here, symbolised by the rivers and roads running down on each side, has extended, and will further extend, the power of modern education, of unhampered ideas, of science and of humanity. From this magnificent view-point Sofia stretches along the low hill with the dark background of the Balkan beyond. Against that background now stands out the new embodiment of Bulgarian and Slavonic energy, genius, and freedom of mind, the great cathedral, with its vast golden domes brilliantly standing out from the shade behind them. In no other capital is a great church shown to such effect, viewed from one range of hills against the mountainous slopes of another. It is a building which, with its marvellous mural paintings, would in any capital form an object of world interest, but which, in the capital of a tiny peasant State, supremely embodies that breadth of mind which

"... rejects the lore Of nicely calculated less or more."

I confess humbly that I could not see all that in Sofia. But the city was a welcome surprise, recalling Turin in its situation beneath a great range of mountains, in its size and its general disposition. With closer acquaintance, which came to me during the armistice that followed the first phase of the war, Sofia showed as still clean, well managed, admirable, but, oh, so deadly dull. The system of partial seclusion of the women-folk kills all social life, and the absence of a feminine element in the restaurants and other places of social resort deprives them of all convivial charm. One could eat, drink, work in Sofia, and that was all.