Indeed Constantinople has gained a hold of his fertile imagination that may account for the supreme and audacious treachery of his conduct during the past few years. He dreams, this Prince of a pot-house, of erecting his throne in the city which he last visited wearing the red fez of vassalage. The dream is no new one. When the great assembly had gathered at Tirnovo to witness the apostasy of the infant Boris, Ferdinand’s uncle, the witty old Duc d’Aumale, ventured on some satirical congratulations. “I congratulate you, Ferdinand,” he said, “your son is now orthodox, it will be your turn next.”
But Ferdinand, wrapped in his megalomania, failed to detect the jocularity. “I have been thinking about this for some time,” he answered earnestly; “I have fixed my baptism in a church, and in circumstances, which will certainly reconcile you to my act.”
“And where, and under what circumstances will it happen?”
“It will take place at St. Sophia, under the thunder of Bulgarian guns.”
This conversation, it must be remembered, took place soon after the fall of Stambuloff and the murder of that strong man, which removed from the path of Ferdinand the only obstacle in Bulgaria to the unchecked attainment of his wishes in that country. It is to be borne in mind as the predominating motive in all his acts from that time forward. It shaped his foreign policy, and affords the sole key to his method of dealing with the internal affairs of Bulgaria.
As I shall make clear later, it was the motive which caused him to form with his neighbours the Balkan League, ostensibly to free the Christians in Macedonia and Thrace from Turkish oppression. The real motive became apparent after the battle of Lule Burgas, when the Turks fled before the victorious Bulgarians.
When the Turks finally came to bay at the lines of Chatalja, a peace whereby the Allies would have gained all they ostensibly sought was offered by Kiamil Pasha. Ferdinand, without consulting his Allies, rejected it; and against the wish of his Army Council began the attack of Chatalja, which proved so disastrous to the Bulgarian arms.
Speaking in the Sobranje in 1914, the Bulgarian delegate Kosturoff said, “As was shown later on, the only purpose was to enter Constantinople. The ambition, the boundless ambition, was to place the Cross on the Mosque of St. Sophia, in order that history should some day write, ‘Simeon came once beneath the walls of Constantinople, but the Greek women broke his head there. It was Czar Ferdinand who entered Constantinople as victor.’”
This ambition of Ferdinand’s, to possess Constantinople and make it the capital of a new Bulgarian Empire, has only to be grasped to enable the reader to gain a full comprehension of the policy which has thrown Ferdinand into the field of battle on the side of the Central Powers, and allied the Bulgarians in arms with their ancient and hereditary enemies the Turks. It must be remembered that the difficulty of disposing of Constantinople when the Turks shall have been deprived of its possession has remained for nearly a century the sole reason why the crescent still floats over the minarets of Stamboul. The inevitable end of Ottoman rule in Europe, though hastened by the fatal blunder which threw Turkey into the fray with the Teuton races, was none the less inevitable in the sight of all thinking men long before the first Balkan war.
Men all over Europe conceived a new Eastern Empire, which was to spring from the union of the Christian races in the Balkans. It was to have its centre in Constantinople, the centre of a beneficent rule, where all the Balkan States were working to a common end to remove from their countries the reproach that is held in the oft-repeated phrase, the “Plague-spot of Europe.”