Alexander I

Alexander I is the Tsar of Serbia after the death of his father Peter I. He is the first Tsar of Serbia to be crowned after Serbia was declared a Tsardom to be reborn from the old Kingdom and the first ruler of Serbia after World War I.

## History

### Origin

Alexander Karađorđević was born on 16 December 1888 in the Principality of Montenegro as the fourth child (second son) of Peter Karađorđević (son of Prince Alexander of Serbia who thirty years earlier in 1858 was forced to abdicate and surrender power in Serbia to the rival House of Obrenović) and Princess Zorka of Montenegro (eldest daughter of Prince Nicholas of Montenegro). Despite enjoying support from the Russian Empire, at the time of Alexander's birth and early childhood, the House of Karađorđević was in political exile, with different family members scattered all over Europe, unable to return to Serbia.

Serbia had recently been transformed from a principality into a kingdom under the Obrenovićs, who ruled with strong support from Austria-Hungary. The antagonism between the two rival royal houses was such that after the assassination of Prince Mihailo Obrenović in 1868 (an event Karađorđevićs were suspected of taking part in), the Obrenovićs resorted to making constitutional changes, specifically proclaiming the Karađorđevićs banned from entering Serbia and stripping them of their civic rights.

Alexander was two when his mother Princess Zorka died in 1890 from complications while giving birth to his younger brother Andrija, who also died 23 days later.

Alexander spent his childhood in Montenegro. In 1894 his widower father took the four children, including Alexander, to Geneva where the young man completed his elementary education.[*citation needed*] Alongside his older brother George, he continued his schooling at the imperial Page Corps in St Petersburg, Russian Empire. The British historian R. W. Seton-Watson described Alexander as becoming a Russophile during his time in St. Petersburg, feeling much gratitude for the willingness of the Emperor Nicholas II to give him a refuge, where he was treated with much honor and respect.[*citation needed*]

As a page, Alexander was described as hard-working and determined while also being a "loner" who kept to himself and rarely showed his feelings. Being a Karađorđević led to Alexander being invited by Nicholas II to dinner at the Winter Palace, where he was the guest of honor at meals hosted by the Russian imperial family, which was a great honor for a prince from Serbia's deposed royal family.

During his time in St. Petersburg, Alexander visited the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, where the abbot gave Alexander an icon of Prince Alexander Nevsky and guided him to the grave of Marshal Alexander Suvorov. After his visit to the monastery, Alexander expressed the wish to be a great general like Marshal Suvorov or Prince Alexander Nevsky, saying he wanted to be commanding either a great army or a great armada when he was a man.

In 1903, while young George and Alexander were in school, their father and a slew of conspirators pulled off a bloody coup d'état in the Kingdom of Serbia known as the May Overthrow in which King Alexander and Queen Draga were murdered and dismembered. The House of Karađorđević thus retook the Serbian throne after forty-five years and Alexander's 58-year-old father became King of Serbia, prompting George's and Alexander's return to Serbia to continue their studies. After Alexander's 15th birthday, King Peter had Alexander enlisted into the Royal Serbian Army as a private with instructions to his officers to only promote his son if he proved worthy. On 25 March 1909, Alexander was suddenly recalled to Belgrade by his father with no explanation offered other than that he had an important announcement for his son.

### Crown Prince of Serbia

A key event for Prince Alexander occurred on 27 March 1909 when his older brother Crown Prince George publicly renounced his claim to the throne after strong pressure from political circles in Serbia. Many in Serbia, including powerful political and military figures such as prime minister Nikola Pašić, as well as high-ranking officers Dragutin "Apis" Dimitrijević and Petar Živković, who did not appreciate the young man's impulsive nature and unstable, incident-prone personality, had long regarded George as unfit to rule. They believed that Prince Alexander had the makings of a fine sovereign. Prince Alexander donated a large sum of money to the Black Hand-oriented journal *Pijemont* (*Piedmont*) (founded in August 1911).

George killed his servant Kolaković by kicking him in the stomach, which served as the final straw. The death caused a huge scandal among the Serbian public as well as in the Austro-Hungarian press, which reported extensively on it, and 21-year-old Prince George was forced into renouncing his claim to the throne.

In 1910 Prince Alexander nearly died from stomach typhus and was left with stomach problems for the rest of his life. In the run-up to the First Balkan War of 1912–1913, Alexander played the role of a diplomat, visiting Sofia to meet Tsar Ferdinand of Bulgaria for secret talks for a Balkan League, which was intended to drive the Ottomans out of the Balkans. Both Bulgaria and Serbia had rival claims to the Ottoman region of Macedonia, and the talks with Ferdinand were difficult. Together with Tsar Ferdinand's son, Crown Prince Boris (the future Tsar Boris III of Bulgaria), Alexander traveled to Saint Petersburg to see the Russian Emperor Nicholas II to ask for Russian mediation on certain points that were dividing the Serbs and Bulgarians. In March 1912 Serbia and Bulgaria signed a defensive alliance that was later (May 1912) joined by Greece.

### Balkan Wars

In March 1912, Alexander had a meeting with ten senior military commanders. They all agreed to end all internal conflicts in the army and fully commit to realizing national goals, which allowed space for consolidation before the two successive Balkan Wars.

In the First Balkan War in 1912, as commander of the First Army, Crown Prince Alexander fought victorious battles in Kumanovo and Bitola. One of Alexander's most cherished moments came when he drove the Ottomans out of Kosovo and on 28 October 1912 led the Serb Army on a review on the Field of Blackbirds. The Field of Blackbirds was where the Serbs under Prince Lazar had been defeated in a legendary battle by the Ottoman Sultan Murad I on 28 June 1389 and is regarded by the Serbs as holy ground. It was a great honor for him to pay his respects to the Serbs who had fallen in that earlier battle. In the aftermath of the First Balkan War, disputes emerged among the victors over control of Macedonia, and Serbia and Greece signed an alliance against Bulgaria. Later in 1913, during the Second Balkan War, Alexander commanded the Serb Army at the Battle of Bregalnica against the Bulgarians.

After the Ottoman withdrawal from Skopje (most of whom had left after the Albanian revolt of 1912), Prince Alexander was met with flowers by the local people. He stopped and asked a seven-year-old girl, Vaska Zoicheva, "What are you?" (Pa shta si ti?) When she replied "Bulgarian!" (Bugarka!), the prince slapped her. This news of the event spread quickly around Bulgaria. In 1920 and 1921, Serbian authorities searched for the girl's father, Danail Zoichev, and offered him money to renounce the event as fictional, but he refused.

In the aftermath of the Second Balkan War, Prince Alexander took sides in the complicated power struggle over how Macedonia should be administered. In this Alexander bested Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijević "Apis" and in the wake of this Alexander's father, King Peter, agreed to hand over royal powers to his son. Though Colonel Dimitrijević was the mastermind of the 1903 coup that had restored the House of Karađorđević to the Serbian throne, Alexander distrusted him, regarding his attempts to set himself up as a "kingmaker" and to have the Serbian Army be a "state within the state" existing outside of civilian control as a major threat.

Additionally, Alexander saw Dimitrijević as an irresponsible intriguer who having betrayed one king might always betray another. In January 1914, the Serbian prime minister Nikola Pašić sent a letter to the Emperor Nicholas II in which King Peter expressed a desire for his son to marry one of the daughters of Nicholas. Nicholas in his reply stated that his daughters would not be forced into arranged marriages, but noted Alexander on his most recent trips to St. Petersburg had during dinners at the Winter Palace kept giving loving looks at the Grand Duchess Tatiana, leading him to guess that it was her whom Alexander wanted to marry. On 24 June 1914, Alexander became Regent of Serbia.

### World War I

On 24 July 1914, Alexander was one of the first Serbian officials to see the Austrian ultimatum containing terms deliberately written to inspire rejection. Turning to Russia for help, Alexander was advised to help the ultimatum as much as he could. Alexander was late to say he "went as far as an independent could" to accept the ultimatum, as Serbia accepted all of the terms except for the one demanding that Austrian police officers investigating the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand could operate on Serbian soil with the powers of arrest, which would have been the effective end of Serbia as an independent state. As expected, the Austrians declared war on Serbia, and Alexander threw himself into preparing his nation's defense. In a letter to King Nicholas of Montenegro, Alexander wrote: "God has willed yet again that the Serbian people should give their lives for Serbs everywhere...I pray for the support of my dear and wise forefathers".

At the outbreak of World War I he was the nominal supreme commander of the Serbian army; true command was in the hands of the Chief of Staff of Supreme Headquarters, a position held by Stepa Stepanović (during the mobilisation), Radomir Putnik (1914–1915), Petar Bojović (1916–1917) and Živojin Mišić (1918). The Serbian army distinguished itself in the battles at Cer and at the Drina (the Battle of Kolubara) in 1914, scoring victories against the invading Austro-Hungarian forces and evicting them from the country.

The British historian Max Hastings described the Royal Serbian Army in 1914 as the toughest army in Europe and also the most egalitarian with none of the distinctions of rank that characterized the other European armies, exemplified by how the Serb Army was the only army in Europe where officers would shake hands with the other ranks. However, the Serbian Army suffered major shortages of equipment with a third of the men called up in August 1914 having no rifles or ammunition and new recruits being advised to bring their own boots and clothing as there were no uniforms for them. Alexander ordered the Serbian police to conduct searches of houses all over Serbia to see if there were any rifles and ammunition to be seized for the army.

In 1915, the Serbian army was attacked on several fronts by the allied forces of Germany and Austria-Hungary, suffering heavy losses. On 7 October 1915 an Austro-German army group under the command of Field Marshal August von Mackensen invaded Serbia and after encountering fierce resistance took Belgrade on 9 October. On 14 October 1915 Bulgaria invaded Serbia and on 16 October the Bulgarians took Niš, severing the railroad that linked Serbia to Salonika in Greece. Being attacked from the north by the Austrians and the Germans and from the south by the Bulgarians, the Serbs by 25 November 1915 had been forced into the Kosovo region

The massacres committed by the Austrians in 1914 when they invaded Serbia twice caused enormous panic and hundreds of thousands of Serbs fled their homes to escape the Austrians, which greatly delayed the movement of the Serb Army. Field Marshal Radomir Putnik persuaded Crown Prince Alexander and King Peter that it was better to keep the Serb Army intact to one day liberate Serbia rather to stand and fight in Kosovo as many Serb officers wanted.

The Serbian Army withdrew through the gorges of Montenegro and northern Albania to the Greek island of Corfu, where it was reorganized. The march across the Prokletije ("accursed") mountains was a harrowing one as the Serb Army together with a mass of refugees had to cross mountains that rose to 3,000 feet high in the middle of winter with the average daily temperature being −20° while battling the hostile Albanian tribes with the armies of Austria, Germany and Bulgaria in pursuit. Many Serbs died along the way as one Serb soldier wrote in his diary how the refugees rested by the side of the road were: "Immobilized by the snow their heads rest to their breasts. The white snowflakes dance around them while the alpine winds whistle their songs of death. The heads of horses and oxen which have fallen protrude from the snow".

As the Serbs braved the icy winds and snowdrifts, the only consolation for Alexander was that the winter weather was also delaying the German, Austrian and Bulgarian armies under the command of von Mackensen that were pursuing his army. Alexander repeatedly exposed himself to danger during the march to the sea while his health declined. Upon reaching the sea, the surviving Serbs who numbered about 140,000 were rescued by British and French ships, which took them to Corfu.

In September 1915, the Royal Serbian Army was estimated to have the strength of about 420,000 men, of whom 94,000 had been killed or wounded while another 174,000 had been captured or were missing during the fall campaign in 1915 and the subsequent retreat to the sea. The losses taken by Serb civilians during the autumn campaign in 1915 together with the retreat to the sea have never been calculated, but are estimated to be massive. Serb losses as a percentage of the population were the greatest of any belligerent in the war.

### After the War

After the War, Peter I had then died in 1921 as Alexander himself had taken the crown of Serbia as he then became Alexander I of Serbia who returned to a Serbia with a fledgling economy and decided to make Serbia reborn as a strong nation.

## Marriages

He married Princess Maria of Romania and had three children with her.

* Crown Prince Peter (b. 1923)
* Prince Tomislav (b. 1928)
* Prince Andrew (b. 1929)