Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/80

 the Turk was supported not only by Clephts and Armatoles, but also by many Roumanians and Slavs. If the first Greek king, the Bavarian Otto, disdained to consider as his equals the princes of the larger Roumanian principalities, who were the vassals of the Sultan, the relations between these latter and the Serbian hospodar were of the most cordial, irrespective of the fact that the dynasty of Karageorge or of Milosh might reign in Belgrade. Rakovsky who, like most Bulgarian agitators, worked in Roumania (for long years the cultural centre of the Bulgarians), dreamed of a Yugoslav state comprising his country as well as an enlarged Serbia; he did not discover in Macedonia the apple of discord because of the doubtful relation subsisting between the Slav races. Under the first Roumanian prince to reign after the union of the Principalities, Alexander Cuza, offers of a general move against the Turk were made to him by Greek, Serbian and Montenegrin emissaries alike, the young prince of Montenegro declaring himself ready to keep watch « at the gates » of the Serbian palace, as that puissant prince, Michael — all too prematurely sacrificed to a family feud — reigned in Belgrade. Serbians and Roumanians gained their independence at the same time (1877—1878) that Bulgarian insurgents, on the road to the creation of a free Bulgaria, joined the armies of the Czar Alexander II on their way to Constantinople. The first Serbian king, Milan, was the son of a Roumanian lady and the first prince of the Bulgarians was the intimate friend of the prince — later King — Charles of Roumania.

Only after the fratricide Serbo-Bulgarian war, provoked by Russo-Austrian rivalry in the Balkans, after the insane strife for the bleak valleys of Macedonia, coveted by all the more probably because it is no-man’s-land and for the most part of no use to anyone, the