Alexander I Karađorđević (Serbo-Croatian: Александар I Карађорђевић, Aleksandar I Karađorđević, 16 December [O.S. 4 December] 1888 – 9 October 1934) was King of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes from 16 August 1921 to 3 October 1929 and King of Yugoslavia from 3 October 1929 until his assassination. His thirteen-year reign was the longest of the kingdom's three monarchs. He served as the de facto head of state of the Kingdom of Serbia from 1914 to 1918 and of Yugoslavia from 1918 to 1921 as prince regent for his father, Peter I.
Born in Cetinje, Montenegro, Alexander was the second son and fourth child of Peter and Zorka Karađorđević. The House of Karađorđević had been deposed in Serbia 30 years earlier by the rival House of Obrenović, and Alexander spent his early life in exile with his father in Montenegro and later Switzerland. He subsequently moved to the Russian Empire and enrolled in the imperial Page Corps. Following the May Coup and the assassination of King Alexander I Obrenović in 1903, Peter ascended the Serbian throne. In 1909, Alexander's elder brother, Prince George, renounced his succession rights, making Alexander heir apparent. Alexander distinguished himself as a field commander during the Balkan Wars, leading Serbian forces to victories over the Ottoman Empire and the Bulgarians. In 1914, he was appointed prince regent after his father transferred his royal duties due to ill health. During the First World War, he held nominal supreme command of the Royal Serbian Army.
In 1918, Alexander oversaw the unification of Serbia and the former Austro-Hungarian provinces of Croatia-Slavonia, Slovenia, Vojvodina, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Dalmatia into the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, in accordance with the Corfu Declaration. He subsequently became known as Alexander the Unifier. Alexander continued as prince regent and de facto head of state until ascending the throne upon his father's death in 1921. An extended political crisis followed, culminating in the assassination of Croat political leader Stjepan Radić. In response, Alexander abolished the Vidovdan Constitution in 1929, prorogued parliament, renamed the state the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and instituted a royal dictatorship. The 1931 Constitution formalised his personal rule and established Yugoslavia as a unitary state, increasing resentment among the non-Serb population. Domestic tensions were further exacerbated by the onset of the Great Depression, which severely affected the country's agrarian economy. In foreign policy, Alexander promoted the Balkan Pact with Greece, Romania, and Turkey, and sought closer relations with Bulgaria.
In October 1934, Alexander made an official visit to the French Republic to consolidate support for the Little Entente against Hungarian revanchism and Italian expansionism. While travelling through Marseille, he was assassinated by Vlado Chernozemski, an operative of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization acting with support from the Ustaše, led by Ante Pavelić. French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou was also killed in the attack. Alexander was succeeded by his eleven-year-old son, Peter II, under a regency council headed by his cousin Prince Paul.
Early life
Alexander Karađorđević was born on 16 December 1888 [O.S. 4 December] in the Principality of Montenegro as the fourth child and second son of Peter Karađorđević and his wife, Princess Zorka of Montenegro. His paternal grandfather, also named Alexander, had been forced to abdicate as prince of Serbia and surrender power to the rival House of Obrenović. Alexander's maternal grandfather was Nicholas I, Prince 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 due to their rivalry with the House of Obrenović.
Serbia had recently been transformed from a principality into a kingdom under the Obrenovićes, who ruled with strong support from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The antagonism between the two rival royal houses was such that, after the assassination of Prince Mihailo Obrenović in 1868 (an event in which the Karađorđevićes were suspected of taking part), the Obrenovićes made constitutional changes banning the Karađorđevićes 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, Andrej, who died 23 days later. Alexander spent his childhood in Montenegro. In 1894, his widowed father took the four children, including Alexander, to Geneva, Switzerland, where he completed his elementary education. Alongside his older brother George, he continued his schooling at the imperial Page Corps in Petrograd, Russian Empire. The British historian Robert Seton-Watson described Alexander as becoming a Russophile during his time in Petrograd, feeling deep gratitude for the willingness of the Russian emperor Nicholas II to grant him refuge, where he was treated with great honour and respect.
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. Nicholas II invited Alexander to dinners at the Winter Palace, where he was the guest of honour at meals hosted by the Russian imperial family, which was a great privilege for a prince from Serbia's deposed royal family. During his time in Petrograd, Alexander visited the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, where the abbot gave him 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 command either a great army or a great armada when he was a man.
In 1903, while young George and Alexander were in school, a group of conspirators carried out a bloody coup d'état in the Kingdom of Serbia, in which King Alexander and Queen Draga were murdered and dismembered. The House of Karađorđević thus retook the Serbian throne after 45 years, and Alexander's 58-year-old father became King of Serbia, prompting George and Alexander to return to Serbia to continue their studies. After Alexander's 15th birthday, King Peter had him enlisted in the Royal Serbian Army as a private, with instructions to his officers to promote his son only 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.
Becoming crown prince
In 1909, a scandal broke when Crown Prince George, Alexander's older brother, killed a servant by kicking him in the stomach. Following pressure from powerful figures such as Prime Minister Nikola Pašić and high-ranking officers Dragutin "Apis" Dimitrijević and Petar Živković, George publicly renounced his claim to the throne in March of that year in favour of Alexander.
In 1910, 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, Alexander played the role of a diplomat, visiting Sofia to meet Tsar Ferdinand I of Bulgaria for secret talks on forming a Balkan League to drive the Ottoman Turks out of the Balkans. Both Bulgaria and Serbia had rival claims to the Ottoman region of Macedonia, so Alexander, along with Ferdinand's son Crown Prince Boris, travelled to Petrograd to meet with Emperor Nicholas II and request Russian mediation. In March 1912, Serbia and Bulgaria signed a defensive alliance, which Greece joined in May.
Balkan Wars
In March 1912, Alexander met with ten senior military commanders. They agreed to end all internal conflicts in the Royal Serbian Army and fully commit to realising 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 at Kumanovo and Bitola. One of Alexander's most cherished moments came when he drove the Ottoman Turks out of Kosovo and, on 28 October 1912, led the Serbian army in 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 honour 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 the Kingdom of Bulgaria.
After the Ottoman defeat and withdrawal from Skopje, 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 šta si ti?) When she replied "Bulgarian!" (Bugarka!), the prince slapped her. 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.
Later in 1913, during the Second Balkan War, Alexander commanded the Serbian army at the Battle of Bregalnica against the Bulgarians. In the aftermath of the war, the Treaty of Bucharest assigned the region of Vardar Macedonia to Serbia. Prince Alexander took sides in the complicated power struggle over how Macedonia should be administered. Alexander bested Colonel Dragutin "Apis" Dimitrijević in this dispute, after which his father, King Peter, agreed to hand over royal powers to him. Although Colonel Dimitrijević had been the mastermind of the 1903 coup that restored the House of Karađorđević to the Serbian throne, Alexander distrusted him, regarding his attempts to set himself up as a "kingmaker" and to turn the Serbian army into a "state within the state" existing outside 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 Russian emperor Nicholas II in which King Peter expressed a desire for his son to marry one of the daughters of Nicholas II. In his reply, Nicholas II stated that his daughters would not be forced into arranged marriages, but noted that on his most recent trips to Petrograd, Alexander had kept giving loving looks to Grand Duchess Tatiana during dinners at the Winter Palace, leading him to guess that Alexander wanted to marry her. On 24 June 1914, Alexander became regent of Serbia.
On 24 July 1914, Alexander was one of the first Serbian officials to see the Austrian ultimatum issued the previous day as containing terms deliberately written to inspire rejection. Turning to Russia for help, Alexander was advised to accept the ultimatum as much as he could. Alexander would later 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 be allowed to operate on Serbian soil with 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 defence. In a letter to his maternal grandfather, King Nicholas I 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".
World War I
At the outbreak of World War I, Alexander 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 successively 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 Serbian army in 1914 as the toughest in Europe and also the most egalitarian, with none of the distinctions of rank that characterised other European armies, exemplified by the fact that it was the only army in Europe in which officers shook 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, Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria, suffering heavy losses. On 7 October 1915, an Austro-German army group under the command of German 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 railway that linked Serbia to Thessalonika in Greece. Attacked from the north by the Austrians and Germans and from the south by the Bulgarians, the Serbs were forced into the Kosovo region by 25 November 1915.
The massacres committed by the Austrians during their two invasions of Serbia in 1914 had caused enormous panic, and hundreds of thousands of Serbs fled their homes to escape the Austrians, which greatly delayed the movement of the Serbian army. Field Marshal Putnik persuaded Crown Prince Alexander and King Peter that it was better to keep the Serbian army intact to one day liberate Serbia rather than 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 reorganised. The march across the Accursed Mountains was harrowing, as the Serbian army, together with a mass of refugees, had to cross mountains rising to 3,000 feet in the middle of winter, with average daily temperatures of −20°, while battling hostile Albanian tribes and with the armies of Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Bulgaria in pursuit. Many Serbs died along the way. Alexander repeatedly exposed himself to danger during the march to the sea while his health declined. Upon reaching the coast, the surviving Serbs, who numbered about 140,000, were rescued by British and French ships, which took them to Corfu.