Part 3 (1/2)
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.