THE independent principality of RhodopÉ lies, as everyone knows, on the wooded coast-line of Albania. Its territory, no greater than the area of the English counties palatine, is triangular in shape, the base of the triangle (a line some twenty miles long if measured as the crow flies, but more like a hundred if we follow the indentations and promontories of that superbly fertile land), being washed by the waters of the Adriatic. It is bounded on the south by the kingdom of Greece, and up to its northern border extends the benign rule of that most pitiful and Christian monarch the Sultan of Turkey.

RhodopÉ preserved during the GrÆco-Turkish War of 1897 (I am almost ashamed to remind my readers of events so recent) a strict neutrality, though the offers made it by both one side and the other might well have been enough to turn a less level head than that of Prince Leonard, the ruling sovereign. For an Imperial IradÉ, with promise of a definite Hatt (I think I have the terms correctly), arrived from the most Christian monarch, prospectively granting the cession of Corfu to the Prince, when Greece lay crushed beneath the heel of the Sultan, if only his beloved brother (so the Sultan was pleased to say) would join the cause of the imminently victorious Turks; while from the other side a cleverly worded sketch pictured the immense advantage it would be to RhodopÉ if by an extension of its territory it was so arranged that the Upper Valley of the river Strypos—the Golden River, as it is not inaptly named—a plain of surpassing fertility, and odorous with the finest growths of tobacco, should pour its revenues into the coffers of the Prince.

Indeed, Prince Leonard, when these two propositions, which arrived almost simultaneously, were under his consideration, must have had a strong head not to have been overcome by the intoxication of one or the other prospect. He knew—and sober and bald politicians tell me that he did not overestimate the importance of his position (a malady most incident to autocrats)—that the balance of power, inevitably determining the result of the war, as he sided with Turkey or Greece, was in his hands; also he would have the singular pleasure of perhaps playing the deuce with that wonderfully harmonious comic opera the Concert of the Powers. A scribbled word from him would—and he was not too sanguine in so believing—give him Corfu if the envelope of his reply was addressed to Yildiz Kiosk, or, if to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at Athens, the nicotic valley of the Upper Strypos.

A glance at the map is sufficient to show that the key of the crisis was assuredly his. If he allied himself with Greece, in a few hours his artillery could be coolly shelling the fortress of Janina, the slow, inevitable advance of the Turkish army down the defiles of the Melouna Pass would be checked, and their overwhelming superiority of numbers against a vastly inferior force would be neutralized. They could not possibly advance into Greek territory leaving so important a town as Janina in the hands of their enemy’s ally, and, indeed, the Sultan, with his world-famous frankness, had confessed as much in his letter. His Imperial Majesty might advance, if he pleased, through Thessaly; meantime Prince Leonard, with his very adequate force of Albanians, men of the mountain and the sea, and the best-drilled soldiers in the world, would be quietly eating their way eastward, and at the end the Turks would infallibly find themselves cut off in the enemy’s country. If, on the other hand, the Sultan directed his first advance against RhodopÉ, the Greeks would stream through the eastern passes, attacking instead of defending, and again take him in the rear. Besides, to advance into RhodopÉ much resembled an attempt to take a hornets’ nest by daylight. For a score of years Prince Leonard had lavished the revenues of the country on its army and navy; English and German officers had drilled his men into a perfect machine of war; the steel of the great workshops of the world had been perched in the mountainous and almost impregnable passes into the principality; French engineers had exalted his valleys, and brought low his hills, flinging down military roads east, west, north, and south—the whole kingdom, a man might say, had been forged into one cannon. Nor had the Prince neglected the defence of the sea-board, though from the Turk there was little to fear in this regard. The only two ports on that rocky coast—MavromÁti and BÚlteck—have long been the admiration of nautical Europe, and Gibraltar itself might learn a lesson from the concealed galleries which defend these fire-belching jaws of death.

On the other hand, supposing he allied himself with Constantinople, the conclusion of the war, as it actually took place, was much easier of demonstration, and quite as inevitable as the Pons Asinorum. Greece had not the sinews to check the Turkish advance from the north-east. What, then, would be her plight if Prince Leonard’s armed cruisers battered Patras, and landed troops in the Peloponnese? A nut in a hinge, a shuttlecock between two battledores, were in a more enviable position.

But, as we have seen, Prince Leonard held entirely aloof. He was an autocrat, his will was subject to no controlling House, and he possessed not only absolute authority over his principality, but commanded—which is even better worth having—their complete devotion. What seemed right in his never seemed otherwise than right in theirs; it was through his glasses (the Prince is a little short-sighted) that his ministers regarded the political outlook; and when it was known that he had decided not to move in the matter, and his decision was communicated to his Government, they were lost in admiration at this unique example of princely prudence displayed in his resolve to remain neutral, just as they would have seen a splendid flash of the old crusading spirit if he had determined to side with the Greeks, or nodded their heads in silent approval of his marvellous insight into practical politics if he had joined the cause of the Crescent. The leader in the principal paper of RhodopÉ—though not an official organ—printed in large type, commended in terms of the most extravagant praise the wisdom of their great Prince, who saw what so many less divinely-gifted rulers have failed to observe, that a nation’s first duty is to itself, and would not lightly plunge his people into the horrors of war. Yet, even as the first edition was cried through the streets, the staff of compositors were cheerfully making pie of another leading article, prematurely set up, which compared Prince Leonard to Coeur-de-Lion, and singled him out from the whole of apathetic Europe as the champion who embraced the cause of Christianity, as the only being to whom his religion was a reality, and who would not suffer the accursed race to make havoc of Greece.

This premature leader sufficiently indicated the reputed bias—if so well-balanced a mind can properly be said to have a bias—of the Prince. His private sympathies, it is true, were entirely on the side of the Greeks; he was twice related by marriage to their Royal Family, and he loved the people who were so largely of the same blood as his own inimitable Albanians—yet he would not take up the sword for them. The RhodopÉ Courier had hit the nail on the head in its second leader: he did not wish to plunge his people into a war which must be expensive and might cost many lives, while, considered as a practical question, his acute mind, with the aid of a Blue-book, a few jotted figures, a meditative cigarette, soon revealed to him the fact that the Upper Valley of the Strypos would not nearly repay him for the inevitable outlay of a war. Moreover, the acquisition of this delightful piece of country was not without its drawbacks. It would, he saw, have to be garrisoned and fortified, for it lay open to any attack that might be made (though strictly against the Sultan’s orders, as the Armenian massacres had been) from Turkey. Just now he had but little money to spend in such large operations, for a reason that will appear, and though the RhodopÉ Courier knew nothing of this reason, the main lines of its second leader were correct enough; war would be expensive both in lives and money, and there was no sufficient interest at stake.

The Prince’s reasons against espousing the cause of Turkey are easily and succinctly stated. He hated the Turks as warmly as he hated the devil, regarding the two as synonymous; and he looked on them and their deeds, their natures and their names with that quivering disgust with which a tired man about to get into bed sees some poisonous reptile coldly coiled in the sheets. He would as soon have allied himself with a tribe of cobras. And so RhodopÉ remained neutral.

This short disquisition about the GrÆco-Turkish War may, I am afraid, appear out of place to those who follow me to the end of this historical tale; but it seems not so to me. In the first place, it will be found to have introduced the indulgent reader to the principality of RhodopÉ, and the character of its eminent Prince, now in his middle age; in the second, it has rubbed up his memory about the Prince’s attitude with regard to the war, and given the true reason for a course of conduct which was so widely discussed and even so freely blamed; for it is true that the Prince was hurt, though not in his resolve, by the comments of the English Liberal press with which a news-cutting agency in the Strand has for years supplied him, and especially by a paper signed by a large majority of Liberal Members of Parliament. In the third place, it has led up to the one little sore place in his life, which contributed to his decision not to join his arms with those of Greece, indicated in his communication to the House under the question of expense. For three months before the war broke out, i.e., in December, 1896, he had paid at great sacrifice an enormous sum of money to his mother, the Princess Sophia, and temporarily, at least, the resources of his country were crippled. The Government had strongly approved his action in so doing, and sent him a message of affectionate sympathy and condolence when the reason was privately made known to them. For his mother’s debts were inexcusable; her jointure was ample to enable her to live as befitted her station, had it not been for the one life-long weakness of that enchanting woman: she was a gambler, hardened and inveterate.

It is difficult to estimate the value of a factor like this in its effect on any life, and when it has played so important a part in a career as it played in the case of Prince Leonard of RhodopÉ, almost impossible. Certain it is that now in his middle age he sees little of his mother, for by his orders, when he ascended the throne on her abdication a score of years ago, she was forbidden ever again to set foot in RhodopÉ, and the cares of State are so numerous and exigent to so conscientious a Prince that he leaves his country at the outside for a short month in the year, and sometimes not at all. Some ten days of this little holiday, it is true, he makes a rule of spending with his mother, the Princess Sophia, in her charming villa on the olive-clad hills above Monte Carlo; but one would think there could be no great intimacy between so diverse-minded a pair. But of this the reader will judge later. For the present it may be said that the Princess’s time is largely spent at the tables, while the Prince, on ascending the throne of RhodopÉ, suppressed once and for all the gambling which at one time threatened to undermine the very foundations of the State. Never has reformer started on so Herculean a task, and, indeed, the work of building up was less arduous than the work of pulling down, for it was easier for him to make a nation of warriors out of his Albanians than it was to turn a medley of gamblers into sober-minded citizens, and disprove to them that lying creed which says that in chance alone do we find the charm and the lord of life. Some say he went too far in this hunting out of the worship of the false and fickle goddess of luck, and in the destruction of her groves or gambling-houses. Even the comparatively unexciting game of knuckle-bones, the lineal descendant, or you might say the living incarnation, of the old Greek astragali (and thus of archÆological interest), he sternly suppressed. For this, however, there was another sufficient though somewhat quaint reason, since the son of one of the small farmers near MavromÁti, an idiot in all other respects, was so consummate a genius at the game that he had won the greater part of the copper currency of RhodopÉ at it, and there was literally a penny famine. Here his idiocy came in, for his mental deficiency, backed by his native Albanian obstinacy or firmness, caused him to refuse to part with any of his copper, even though offered 10 per cent. extra on the franc. The Prince dealt with the question with his accustomed acumen. He allowed the poor boy to keep his copper, but made the game of knuckle-bones illegal. This acted in the way he had foreseen it would. The hoard of copper, a bulky sackful, could no longer grow; the charm of amassing was gone, and before long the idiot was obliging enough to take gold and silver in exchange.

But such radical measures, if they erred at all, erred on the right side. The abuse was radical; the cure must be radical too. Step by step the gambling-houses were put down, one by one the gamblers were induced to turn to a pursuit in which they could enrich themselves without impoverishing others; the love of gain which is so deeply enrooted in the peasant races of East Europe found a less sensational fruition, and RhodopÉ was knit together into the principality it now is—a cannon, and yet a garden of the Lord.

When I think of its smiling valleys and multitude of renovating rivers, it often seems to me that Prince Leonard was certainly right in refusing to go to war even against the unspeakable Turk. Nature has printed in her boldest capitals her dictate to that happy kingdom not to concern itself with the quarrels of its neighbours, else why did she build those great ramparts of rocks on every side but one, where she has placed a rocky and hungry shore, a stern ‘Trespassers will be prosecuted’ against any who should dare attempt to violate this mountain sanctuary? It cannot have been by a blind and purposeless stir of forces that she ranged north and south of RhodopÉ those spear-heads of stone on which even the aspiring pine can fix no anchorage, and from which in winter the snow slips like a fallen coverlet down to the less violent slopes below. Surely some lesson was meant to be drawn from her disposition. And, indeed, Prince Leonard had set the seal on her policy of isolation, and it were an infirmity of purpose to go back on it; forts and batteries endorsed those impregnable rocks and guarded the passes, and it would be a regiment of steel who could win through. Nature’s lesson, too, is no less clearly inscribed on the fertile plains which the mountains guard, for the country is amply self-supporting. Broad pastures line the brimming rivers, and the alluvial soil yields its sixty-fold and hundred-fold in tobacco fields, and higher up in terraced vineyards of volcanic earth. The very cigarette you are smoking was born, I will be bold to say, in the fields of Prince Leonard, and only bears the stamp of Cairo to show where it was cut and enveloped and probably adulterated. Again, if you have never drunk the ChÂteau Vryssi of 1893, yellow seal, there is as yet no excuse for you to label this a sour world. A man might search for a month in RhodopÉ, yet never find a beggar, nor even one to whom old age brought indigence. Conscription obliges every male to serve in the army for five years, and after that he can retire on a pension large enough to keep want from the door and till his fields, and he must live extravagantly or very idly who does not save his pension. Nor are the dwellers on the coast less fortunate; mullet and sole are legion in that sea, and in ten fathoms of water grow the sponges with which the faces of half Europe are daily made comparatively clean.

The towns are few in number; MavromÁti and BÚlteck are the only ports, and, in consequence, the only places of consideration on the coast, Amandos, the capital, lying twelve miles inland, the only other city numbering ten thousand souls. For the rest the valleys are peopled with villages, each more clean and more like a box of toys than the last; and I have often, when travelling there, sitting in the little place of some such hamlet, with its church, its meeting-place, its barracks and its white-washed houses, momentarily expected that some paste-board door would open, and out would pour an operatic chorus of genuine shepherds and shepherdesses.

It was not always so. Twenty years ago each village would boast a score of gaming-houses, its hundred rich folk, and its five hundred poor ones. Even then few were beggars, owing to the immeasurable fertility of the land; but many were labourers on another’s ground who should have been lords of their own. And it is the events by which Prince Leonard came to the throne, and was enabled to rescue his kingdom from its imminent dissolution in the lifetime of his mother, the reigning Princess Sophia of RhodopÉ, that this story tells.