On April 30, 1896, King Nasser al-Din—Iran’s third-longest serving monarch, in the 48th year of his reign—visited the Sha¯h Abdol Azı¯m Shrine in Ray. As he prayed, a gunman approached and shot al-Din at point-blank range with a rusty antique revolver. The wound proved fatal, though physicians claimed a thicker coat might have saved al-Din’s life from the underpowered bullet.
Before succumbing on May 1, King al-Din reportedly said, “I will rule you all differently if I survive!”
The son of Persian king Mohammad Shah Qajar, born on July 16, 1831, Nasser al-Din assumed his father’s “Peacock Throne” at age 17, with aid from his premier-to-be, Amir Kabir. Hailed by some historians as “Iran’s fi rst re-former,” Kabir infl uenced the young shah, but could not sway him from ruling
8 A L - D I N S H A H Q A J A R , N A S S E R
dictatorially. Encouraged by his queen mother Malek Jahan Kha-nom, al-Din demoted Kabir to a military rank, then ordered his death in January 1852 based on allegations that Kabir was a secret ally of Russia.
Relieved of Kabir’s restrain-ing infl uence, al-Din perse-cuted followers of Bábism and the offshoot Bahá’í faith as her-etics, killing an estimated 2,000 victims in various purges. In 1856, he also sparked a war with Britain, sending Persian troops to seize Hera¯t, Afghan-istan. The resultant Anglo-Persian War climaxed with Persia’s defeat in April 1857, whereupon al-Din was forced to recognize the kingdom of Afghanistan. Al-Din’s relation-ship with Britain stabilized in time for him to visit London in 1873, where Queen Victoria appointed him a knight of the Order of the Garter.
He returned in 1878, for the Royal Navy fl eet review, and in 1890 granted Brit-ish merchant Gerald Talbot a virtual monopoly over Persia’s tobacco industry (canceled after Ayatollah Mirza Mohammed Hassan Husseini Shirazi issued a fatwa¯ banning cultivation, trading, or consumption of tobacco).
Ultimately, Nasser al-Din’s attempts to westernize Iran cost him his life. Is-lamic activist Sayyid Muh.ammad ibn S.afdar Husaynı¯, known as “The Afghan,”
despite his apparent birth in Iran, was expelled in 1891 on orders from al-Din, for agitating against the shah’s reforms. Although frequently embroiled in bit-ter arguments even with Muslims who supported him, historians agree that Husaynı¯ “reserved his strongest hatred for the Shah.” Al-Din, in turn, blamed Husaynı¯ for the fatwa¯ against tobacco, which cost him a small fortune and, on a personal note, prompted his wives to insist that he stop smoking.
The gunman who killed al-Din, Mirza Reza Kermani, was an ardent follower of Husaynı¯. Captured at the scene of the attack, Kermani endured months of interrogation telling jailers, “I had a chance to kill him before, but I didn’t be-cause the Jews were celebrating their picnic after the eighth day of Passover.
I did not want the Jews to be accused of killing the Shah.” Kermani’s wife
Nasser al-Din Shaa Qajar, shot while praying at a shrine in April 1896. (Getty Images)
A L E X A N D E R I O F S E R B I A 9
divorced him prior to his execution on August 10, 1896, while his son was re-duced to being a slave.
Further Reading
Amanat, Abbas. Pivot of the Universe: Nasir al-Din Shah and the Iranian Monarchy, 1831–1896. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
Axworthy, Michael. A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind. New York: Basic Books, 2010.
Katouzian, Homa. The Persians: Ancient, Mediaeval and Modern Iran. New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2010.
ALEXANDER I OF SERBIA (1876–1903)
On the night of June 10–11, 1903, a group of Serbian army offi cers led by Captain Dragutin Dimitrijevi´c stormed the royal palace in Belgrade, battling guards, before they captured and summarily executed King Albert I and his wife, Queen Draga Mašin. That “May Overthrow”—so called because it oc-curred on May 28–29 under the obsolete Julian calendar, still used in Serbia at the time—extinguished the House of Obrenovi ´c that had ruled from 1815 to 1842, and again since 1858, passing Serbia’s throne to the House of Kara ¯dor ¯devi ´c under King Peter I.
Born in Belgrade on August 14, 1876, Alexander I became Serbia’s king at age 13, with the surprise abdication of his father, King Milan I. Before retiring to private life in France, Milan named his queen consort and Alexander’s mother, Natalija Obrenovi ´c, to serve as regent until Alexander’s 18th birthday. Tired of waiting by April 1893, Alexander staged a coup d’état and proclaimed himself a qualifi ed adult at age 16. Although many Serbs admired that action, and his appointment of “radical” ministers, popular support waned in May 1894, when Alexander repealed his father’s liberal constitution of 1888, restoring a more conservative one from 1869. At the same time, Alexander named Milan as com-mander in chief of the army in 1897.
Relations between father and son soured in August 1900, when Alexander married Draga Mašin. Both royal parents—and, apparently, most Serbians at large—regarded Draga as a fortune-hunting seductress, whose father had died in a lunatic asylum while her mother descended into alcoholism. After the wedding, Milan resigned his military post and Alexander exiled his mother to mute her ongoing objections. Public opinion of Alexander, already damaged, plummeted further with the announcement that one of Queen Draga’s broth-ers, Lieutenant Nikodije Mašin, would be heir to Alexander’s throne. When senators opposed to Nikodije’s succession aired their criticism in March 1903, Alexander suspended the constitution for 30 minutes—just long enough to dismiss his detractors and replace them with compliant newcomers.
In that tense atmosphere, Captain Dimitrijevi ´c and other junior army offi -cers conspired to kill the king and queen. On the night of the coup, Lieutenant
10 A L E X A N D E R I O F Y U G O S L AV I A
Nikodije and his brother, Nikola Mašin, died defending the palace, their corpses tossed from a balcony onto a garden manure heap with Alexander’s and Dra-ga’s. Captain Dimitrijevi´c, badly wounded, survived and was proclaimed “the savior of the fatherland” by Serbia’s parliament, and appointed professor of tactics at the nation’s military academy. Subsequently, as a leader of the secret society Unifi cation of Death, also called the “Black Hand,” Dimitrijevi ´c plotted unsuccessfully to kill Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria in 1911, and played a leading role in the 1914 assassination of Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand.
The House of Kara ¯dor ¯devi ´c, established through Dimitrijevi´c’s conspiracy, ruled Serbia—and subsequently, Yugoslavia—until King Peter II was deposed and driven into exile in November 1945. Peter died in the United States in 1970, following a failed liver transplant to cure his longstanding cirrhosis.
Further Reading
Gildea, Robert. Barricades and Borders: Europe 1800–1914. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Glenny, Misha. The Balkans: Nationalism, War, and the Great Powers, 1804–1999. New York: Penguin, 2001.
Roberts, J. M. The European Empires. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Sulzberger, C. L. The Fall of Eagles. New York: Crown, 1977.
ALEXANDER I OF YUGOSLAVIA (1888–1934)
On October 9, 1934, King Alexander I arrived in Marseilles, beginning a state visit to the Third French Republic which he hoped would strengthen French ties to the “Little Entente”—an alliance of Yugoslavia, Romania, and Czecho-slovakia, formed 13 years earlier to block restoration of the Habsburg Empire.
As Alexander drove through Marseilles with French foreign minister Louis Bar-thou, Bulgarian revolutionary Vlado Chernozemski opened fi re with a pistol concealed in a bouquet of fl owers, killing Alexander and his chauffeur. A police offi cer fi red at Chernozemski and missed, fatally wounding Barthou. Vlado Chernozemski tried to shoot himself, but was cut down by a mounted police-man’s sword, then beaten to death by furious spectators.
Born in Montenegro on December 16, 1888, Alexander was the son of King Peter I of Serbia, who replaced assassinated King Alexander I of Serbia in 1903.
Almost killed by typhus in 1910, Alexander was not fi rst in line for the throne, but his elder brother, Crown Prince George, was forced to renounce his succes-sion rights after kicking a servant to death in 1909. Emerging as a military hero of the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913 and the Serbian Campaign of World War I, Alexander assumed the throne upon his father’s death, in August 1921. Eleven months later, he married Princess Maria of Romania, daughter of that nation’s King Ferdinand.
A L E X A N D E R I O F Y U G O S L AV I A 11
Alexander’s reign was marked by alienation between Serbs and Croatians, exacerbated in June 1928 when Montenegrin Serb politician Puniša Racˇi´c shot several members of the Croatian Peasant Party (CPP) in parliament, fatally wounding CPP leader Stjepan Radi´c. Radi´c died in August, and escalating turmoil prompted Alexander to abolish Yugoslavia’s constitu-tion on January 6, 1929, estab-lishing one-man rule known as the “January 6th Dictatorship.”
Ten months later, he formally changed the country’s name to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, re-ducing its political subdivisions from 33 oblasts (zones) to 9 ba-novinas (provinces). At the same time, he banned use of Serbian Cyrillic, replacing it with the Latin alphabet. A new constitu-tion, imposed by fi at in 1931, transferred all executive power to Alexander, while granting
him power to appoint half the members of parliament’s upper house. Hence-forth, legislation could be enacted by one house alone, if the king approved.
Opposition to Alexander was particularly strong in Vardar Macedonia (to-day’s Republic of Macedonia), where the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) agitated for secession from Yugoslavia. Alexander’s as-sassin, Vlado Chernozemski, was an IMRO member linked to rebel skirmishes with Yugoslavian police. Sentenced to die for killing a fellow IMRO member in 1930, he was pardoned in 1932 and went to Italy, where he trained Croa-tian Ustaše guerrillas at a camp near Borgetoro. Although ostensibly CroaCroa-tian nationalists, the Ustaše were also fascists sponsored by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. During World War II the group ruled part of occupied Yugoslavia as the Independent State of Croatia, in fact an Axis puppet state, collaborating in the Holocaust.
Peter II Kara ¯dor ¯devi ´c followed his father to the throne at age 11, with Al-exander’s cousin Prince Paul named as regent. In defi ance of Peter and his
Alexander I of Yugoslavia, shot by revolutionary Vlado Chernozemski in 1934. (Getty Images)
12 A L E X A N D E R I I O F R U S S I A
antifascist advisors, Paul announced Yugoslavia’s alliance with Germany and Italy on March 25, 1941, forming a new tripartite pact. Peter led a coup two days later, prompting a fascist retaliatory campaign dubbed “Operation Pun-ishment.” Peter fl ed and Yugoslavia surrendered on April 17, with its territory divided between among the victors.
Further Reading
Chaliand, Gérard, and Arnaud Blin. “The ‘Golden Age’ of Terrorism.” In The History of Terrorism: From Antiquity to Al Qaeda. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
Graham, Stephen. Alexander of Yugoslavia. North Haven, CT: Shoe String Press, 1972.
Roberts, Allen. The Turning Point: The Assassination of Louis Barthou and King Alexander I of Yugoslavia. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1970.
Singleton, Fred. A Short History of the Yugoslav Peoples. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 1989.
ALEXANDER II OF RUSSIA (1818–1881)
Each Sunday without fail, Russian tsar Alexander II attended military roll call at the Mikhailovsky riding academy in St. Petersburg, accompanied by a large entou-rage. The traditional procession always traveled by the same route from the pal-ace, crossing the Catherine (now Griboyedov) Canal via Pev-chesky Bridge. On March 13, 1881, the street-side audience to Alexander’s ritual included several members of the revolu-tionary group Narodnaya Volya (“People’s Will”), armed with bombs. Terrorists Nikolai Ry-sakov and Timofey Mikhaylov lobbed their charges fi rst, but both missed the tsar’s carriage, killing one Cossack guard and wounding several more. When Alexander emerged to aid the injured men, bomber Ignacy Hryniewiecki set off another blast, fatally wounding the tsar and himself. A fourth would-be assassin, Ivan Emelyanov, fl ed without detonating his device.
The eldest son of Tsar Nicholas I, Alexander II was
Tsar Alexander II of Russia, slain in a terrorist bombing on March 13, 1881. (Getty Images)
A L E X A N D E R I I O F R U S S I A 13
born in Moscow on April 29, 1818. He was a liberal by Russian standards in the 19th century, known during his reign as Alexander the Liberator.
Succeeding to the throne in March 1855, after pneumonia claimed his fa-ther’s life, Alexander inherited a kingdom rife with corruption, defeated and exhausted by the Crimean War. He embarked on a course of reform, emancipating Russia’s serfs, including sons of wealthy families in military conscription, remodeling the judiciary, and establishing a new penal code, instituting local self-government by elective assemblies for rural districts, increasing Finland’s autonomy from Russia, and fattening the treasury with
$7 million ($200 million today) from the sale of Alaska to the United States.
Still, Alexander was not universally admired. His reforms did not extend to territories of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, where martial law suppressed the “January Uprising” of 1863–1864, with some 10,000 reb-els slain and an equal number exiled to Siberia. Before his murder in 1881, Alexander survived four assassination attempts. Dmitry Karakozov, a member of the revolutionary Ishutin Society, tried to shoot Alexander at St. Petersburg’s Summer Garden on April 4, 1866, but was captured and subsequently hanged, with 10 alleged accomplices imprisoned. On April 20, 1879, revolutionist Alexander Soloviev fi red fi ve shots at the tsar in Palace Square but missed each time, and was sent to the gallows on May 28. Seven months later, Narodnaya Volya dynamited the railroad line between Moscow and Livadia, but missed Alexander’s train. A bomb set in the Winter Palace dining room exploded on February 5, 1880, killing 11 persons and wounding 30, but Alexander was late for dinner and escaped the blast. In that case, bomber Stepan Khalturin—
another Narodnaya Volya member—escaped to participate in other revolu-tionary acts, but was captured and hanged for the murder of a high-ranking Odessa police offi cer in March 1882.
Agents of Russia’s secret police, the Okhrana, learned of the latest plot against Alexander in February 1881. They arrested ringleader Andrei Zhe-lyabov, but under torture he vowed that nothing could save the tsar’s life.
After the fatal March bombing, authorities jailed fi ve more conspirators.
Bomber Nikolai Rysakov and Timofey Mikhaylov were hanged on April 3, 1881, with Zhelyabov, Sophia Perovskaya, and Nikolai Kibalchich. Gesia Gelfman died in prison, while fugitive Nikolai Sablin killed himself to avoid capture.
Tsar Alexander III, a witness to his father’s slaying, soon revoked the vari-ous reforms instituted since 1855. He was convinced that Russia could only be saved by strict adherence to “Offi cial Nationality,” “embodied” in strict autoc-racy and adherence to tenets of the Russian Orthodox Church, including overt anti-Semitism. Successive pogroms and the “May Laws” of 1882 and restrict-ing areas of Jewish habitation and fi elds of occupation, set the stage for future Russian revolutionary movements.
14 A L I , M U H A M M A D M A N S U R
A curious footnote to Alexander’s reign is his appearance in the opening chapters of Jules Verne’s adventure novel Michael Strogoff: The Courier of the Czar. Regarded by many critics as one of Verne’s best books, Michael Strogoff is a tale of espionage, rather than the more familiar science fi ction. Published while Alexander II was still alive, the story fi nds him embroiled with a Tatar rebellion threatening to separate the Russian Far East from tsarist control.
Alexander sends the eponymous hero to aid his (Alexander’s) brother, be-sieged at Irkutsk. Portraying Alexander in a very positive way, Michael Strogoff was adapted as a play by Verne himself, and decades later into several fi lms and cartoon series.
Further Reading
Graham, Stephen. A Life of Alexander II: Tsar of Russia. London: Ivor Nicholson &
Watson, 1935.
Moss, Walter. Alexander II and His Times: A Narrative History of Russia in the Age of Alexander II, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky. London: Anthem Press, 2002.
Radzinsky, Edvard. Alexander II: The Last Great Tsar. New York: The Free Press, 2005.
Van Der Kiste, John. The Romanovs 1818–1959: Alexander II of Russia and His Family.
St. Albans, United Kingdom: Sutton Publishing, 1998.