page_title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia
section_title: Balkan Wars and World War I
hierarchical_section_title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia / Balkan Wars and World War I
caption_attribution_description: English: Original caption: “Serbian Crown Prince Alexander.”
context_page_description: Alexander I, also known as Alexander the Unifier, was a prince regent of the Kingdom of Serbia from 1914 and later a King of Yugoslavia from 1921 to 1934. He was assassinated by the Bulgarian Vlado Chernozemski, during a 1934 state visit to France.
context_section_description: 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.
  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 hand
caption: A wartime postcard of Alexander
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