Читать книгу The Lands of the Tamed Turk; or, the Balkan States of to-day онлайн

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Only three years later Prince Michael was compelled to resign and Alexander, son of Karageorge, was elected in his stead. The year 1859 witnessed the enforced resignation of Alexander and the re-instalment of old Prince Milosh Obrenovitch, who had answered the fickle summons to return to his people. He died the following year, and Prince Michael was, for the second time, made the reigning head of Servia.

The fact that Michael’s wife, who was Princess Julia, a descendant of a royal Hungarian family and maid of honour to the Empress of Austria, was childless gave rise to the dastardly Karageorgevitch plot to put an end to the Obrenovitch dynasty by the murder of her husband. Milosh Obrenovitch, junior, so to speak, a grand-nephew of Prince Michael, was the only heir to the Servian throne and the would-be regicides were confident that a new constitution might be proclaimed in favour of Peter Karageorgevitch, the present ruler and a grandson of the peasant, Black George. The sooner this should be attempted the better, for was not Prince Michael even then contemplating the divorce of his wife, in order that he might marry Katrine Constantinovitch, his cousin, and so insure an heir to the throne in the birth of a son?