This ambition of Ferdinand’s, to possess Constantinople and make it the capital of a new Bulgarian Empire, has only to be grasped to enable the reader to gain a full comprehension of the policy which has thrown Ferdinand into the field of battle on the side of the Central Powers, and allied the Bulgarians in arms with their ancient and hereditary enemies the Turks. It must be remembered that the difficulty of disposing of Constantinople when the Turks shall have been deprived of its possession has remained for nearly a century the sole reason why the crescent still floats over the minarets of Stamboul. The inevitable end of Ottoman rule in Europe, though hastened by the fatal blunder which threw Turkey into the fray with the Teuton races, was none the less inevitable in the sight of all thinking men long before the first Balkan war. Men all over Europe conceived a new Eastern Empire, which was to spring from the union of the Christian races in the Balkans. It was to have its centre in Constantinople, the centre of a beneficent rule, where all the Balkan States were working to a common end to remove from their countries the reproach that is held in the oft-repeated phrase, the “Plague-spot of Europe.” Russia saw it as the triumph of the Slav race. France saw the Latin idea conquering Teuton “kultur.” Great Britain dreamed of the victory of Christianity over the heathen. And all the time Ferdinand stood by his throne at Euxinograd, and dreamed and schemed and plotted. Races and creeds alike were of no account to Ferdinand, the man of no race who had committed apostasy in the person of his own infant son. He, the fop, the scented darling of French drawing-rooms, saw himself the heir to Constantine, the successful imitator of the great Bulgarian Czars Samuel and Simeon. They were stopped only at the walls of Constantinople; but Ferdinand did not plan to stop there. That insane ambition governed every step he has taken for fifteen years. It brought him and Bulgaria perilously near to annihilation in the Balkan wars. It made treaties for him the veriest scraps of paper. It moulded his conduct and dictated his alliances. How he has conducted the Bulgarian people along the path which leads away from their racial ties as well as from the obligations imposed upon them by their indebtedness for their very existence as a nation will shortly be told. But first it will be interesting to know something more of the man who is obsessed by this wild ambition, always unattainable, but rendered doubly unattainable now by the deeds of men more ambitious, more unscrupulous, and a hundred times more powerful than he. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ FERDINAND THE FUTILE “_The Prince is undoubtedly a clever man; but he wastes his cleverness on petty matters._”—STAMBULOFF. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XV FERDINAND THE FUTILE