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Alexander II of Serbia was King of Serbia between the abdication of his father Peter I in 1918 over the signing of a separate peace with Austria-Hungary and his assassination during the Serbian Revolution of 1925. One of the most controversial figures in recent Serbian history, Alexander established a "Royal Dictatorship" with German and Austro-Hungarian backing in the aftermath of the Weltkrieg, an authoritarian regime dominated by himself and Prime Minister Vojislav Veljković, a leading colloborator with the Central Powers during the war.
After Alexander's death, which some claim to have been caused by a secret military plot in the midst of the revolution similar to the May Coup of 1903, the Serbian Republic was proclaimed. While it claims to honor the terms of the Treaty of Wartholz and maintains cordial relations with Austria, many are convinced that the young republic is secretly controlled by the same revanchist secret societies that were responsible for the assassinations of Alexander I, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and, most recently, Alexander II.
History[]
Early Life (1888-1903)[]
Alexander Karađorđević was born on 16 December 1888 in the Principality of Montenegro as the fourth child of Peter Karađorđević (the later King Peter I of Serbia, son of Prince Alexander of Serbia who was forced to abdicate and surrender power in Serbia to the rival House of Obrenović in 1858) and Princess Zorka of Montenegro, the 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 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 the 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 spent his childhood in Montenegro. He was two when his mother died from complications while giving birth to his younger brother Andrija, who died 23 days later. In 1894 his widower father took the four children, including Alexander, to Geneva, Switzerland, where the young men completed their elementary education. Alongside his older brother George, he later continued his schooling at the imperial Page Corps in St Petersburg.
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. This visit evoked feelings of admiration in Alexander, who later said that he also wanted to be a great military leader when grown-up.
Return to Serbia (1903-1912)[]
In June 1903, a bloody coup d'état happened in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia; King Alexander I, an Obrenović, and his wife Queen Draga were murdered and mutilated in a cloak-and-dagger action by officers of the Royal Serbian Army. However, unknown to the public, the murder was a secret conspiracy of the Black Hand, an ultra-nationalist secret military society, and the Karađorđević dynasty. After the coup, the whole Obrenović dynasty had gone extinct, and the House of Karađorđević thus retook the Serbian throne after forty-five years and Alexander's 58-year-old father Peter became king of Serbia. Due to this, Alexander and George returned to Serbia, where they enlisted in the Serbian Army.
A key event for Alexander occurred on 27 March 1909 when his older brother Crown Prince George publicly renounced his claim to the throne after strong pressure from influential political circles in Serbia. Many powerful political and military figures such as Prime Minister Nikola Pašić, Dragutin "Apis" Dimitrijević (the most prominent Black Hand member) and Petar Živković, another high-ranking conspirer of the 1903 coup did not appreciate the young man's impulsive nature and unstable, incident-prone personality and had long regarded George as unfit to rule. When George accidently killed one of his servants, he was forced to abdicate after enormous uproar in the Serbian and Austro-Hungarian press - he would be succeeded by Alexander.
In 1910, Prince Alexander nearly died from stomach typhus but barely survived. Throughout the early 1910s, he travelled through the Balkans as a Serbian diplomat, meeting Tsar Ferdinand I of Bulgaria, among others, for secret talks about setting up an anti-Ottoman Balkan League. Both Bulgaria and Serbia however had rival claims to the Ottoman region of Macedonia, which forced them to ask the Russian Emperor for mediation n certain points that were dividing the Serbs and Bulgarians. In March 1912 Serbia and Bulgaria signed a defensive alliance that was two months later joined by Greece. Alexander also met with high ranking South Slavic army commanders, who all agreed to end all internal conflicts in the army and fully commit to realizing national goals - the path towards war against the Turks was finally paved.
Balkan Wars and Aftermath (1912-1914)[]
Alexander served as commander of the Serbian First Army during the First Balkan War, fighting personally in the victorious battles at Kumanovo and Bitola. One of Alexander's most cherished moments came when he drove the Ottomans back into Albania and Coastal Macedonia and on 28 October 1912 led the Serb Army on a review on the holy grounds of Kosovo polje, the legendary battlefield of the historic Battle of Kosovo from 1389 between Serbian forces from Morava, Bosnia, Zahumlje, Zeta and Travunia and the Turks, during which the two opposing military leaders Knez Lazar Hrebeljanović and Sultan Murad I perished, an event that is still commemorated in Serbia at Vidovdan. For Alexander, it was a great honor to pay his respects to the Serbs who had fallen in this legendary 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 Serbian forces at the Battle of Bregalnica against the Bulgarians, which ended in a decisive Serbian victory; in August 1913, the Treaty of Bucharest was signed and Serbia finally gained control over the Sandjak of Novi Pazar and all of Vardar Macedonia. Upon arriving at Skopje, Alexander was met with flowers by the local people. He stopped and asked a seven-year-old girl "What are you?" (Pa shta si ti?) - when she replied "Bulgarian!" (Bugarka!), the crown prince slapped her. This news of the event spread quickly around Bulgaria, further worsening Serbian-Bulgarian tensions.
Soon after the end of the war, in 1914, Serbia was hit by yet another crisis caused by the Black Hand. King Peter's health had drastically worsened and the National Assembly was in open conflict with the Black Hand-dominated military. Acting from within the government and the military, members of the Black Hand forced the sickly Peter to disband the government of Prime Minister Nikola Pašić, even though the Radical Party held most of the seats in the National Assembly. Only after Russian mediation, the crisis was solved in Pašić's favor. King Peter had to withdraw, allegedly because of his failing health, and, on 24 June 1914, he passed his royal powers to his heir, Crown Prince Alexander, while nominally remaining King without powers.
From the very beginning, Alexander distrusted the highly influential Black Hand that secretly dominated Serbia's military and domestic politics, even though Colonel Dimitrijević had been the mastermind of the 1903 coup that had restored the House of Karađorđević to the Serbian throne in the first place. He deemed Dimitrijević's 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 a major threat that could potentially endanger his own rule; after all, someone who already betrayed a king once might always betray another - Alexander should be right about that and feel the consequences around a decade later himself.
Weltkrieg[]
In the summer of 1914, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, another secret plot orchestrated by the Black Hand, led to the beginning of the Weltkrieg. Alexander became the nominal supreme commander of the Serbian army, but the actual command was in the hand of the Chief of Staff of the Royal Serbian Army. Despite some initial victories against the invading Austro-Hungarians at Cer and at the Drina, which hindered the enemy from taking Belgrade as early as 1914, the Serbians soon began to suffer from equipment shortages and in 1915, a joint offensive of German, Austro-Hungarian and Bulgarian forces completely overran the small country. By November, all of Serbia except Kosovo was occupied by enemy forces.
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 invading forces, which greatly delayed the movement of the Serb Army as masses of refugees flocked towards the south. Alexander and King Peter were determined to engage the invaders in one last battle at Kosovo polje just like in 1389, but Field Marshal Radomir Putnik was able to persuade them that keeping the Serbian army intact and retreating into Allied-controlled territory would be the better solution. What followed was the infamous Great Retreat, a strategic withdrawal of the Royal Serbian Army accompanied by hundred thousands of refugees over the mountains in the cold winter through the gorges of Montenegro and northern Albania, with the eventual goal to reach the Greek island of Corfu, at that time occupied by French and British forces. On their way, the Serbian forces were attacked by by hostile Albanian tribes and had to battle the Central Powers forces in pursuit.Upon reaching the sea, the surviving Serbs who numbered about 140,000 were rescued by British and French ships, which took them to Corfu.
Alexander's health had declined drastically during the retreat. Nonetheless, the struggle continued - the surviving Serbian soldiers were ultimately taken to Thessaloniki to join the Allied forces at the Macedonian Front. Alexander would fight in several battles against the Bulgarians, for example during the Battle of Kaymakchalan in September 1916. However, around the same time, Alexander's long-standing dispute with the Black Hand group came to a head, when Colonel Dimitrijević began to criticize his leadership. Suspecting a threat to the throne, Alexander promptly had officers who were members of the Black Hand arrested in December 1916 and tried for insubordination; after their convictions, Dimitrijević and several other Black Hand leaders were executed by firing squad on 23 June 1917. Alexander would once again regret this decision a few years later.
Throughout 1917, the Serbian government-in-exile led by Prime Minister Nikola Pašić entered into talks with the Yugoslav Committee, a group of anti-Habsburg Croats and Slovenes which strived for the unification of all South Slavic peoples into one "Yugoslav" state. In June 1917, the Corfu Declaration was signed by Pašić and the Croatian president of the Yugoslav Committee Ante Trumbić, which laid the groundwork for the formation of a Yugoslav state in case of an Allied victory and the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire. Alexander however had ambivalent feelings towards this plan; throughout the war, he only spoke in terms of liberating Serbia and was more in favor of the establishment of a "Greater Serbia" after the war, which would at most include Bosnia, a few territories of the Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia and maybe Montenegro.
WIP
Royal Dictatorship and Assassination (1918-1925)[]
WIP!!
Marriages[]
He had married Maria of Romania (b. 1900) on 8 June 1922. They had one son before Alexander II's assassination and the proclamation of the Serbian Republic. This son is Peter of Serbia, (b. 1922) and he is the titular King of Serbia who is currently in exile in Canada.