Background
Constantine I of Greece was born in Athens, July 12, 1868, son of the reigning Greek monarch, King George I. Despite his father's pro- Briitish inclination, Crown Prince Constantine came quickly under German influence.
Constantine I of Greece was born in Athens, July 12, 1868, son of the reigning Greek monarch, King George I. Despite his father's pro- Briitish inclination, Crown Prince Constantine came quickly under German influence.
Educated at Heidelberg, he graduated from the War Academy in Berlin and then served as an infantry officer in the Prussian army. His years in Germany left him with a deep admiration for the German military system and its values.
Trained as a soldier, Constantine had an inauspicious combat debut: he led the Greek army to disaster in the 1897 war against Turkey. This military humiliation nearly shook his father from the throne and blackened Constantine's reputation as a military leader for a decade. In 1909 he was compelled to go into exile, purged from the armed forces along with other royal princes by a coup directed by disgruntled professional officers. Constantine returned with the advent of the Cretan revolutionary Eleutherios Venizelos to power in 1910. The prince's reputation and popularity were partly healed by his work as the army's inspector general during the military reform era, 1910-1912. His creditable role as commander in chief in the First Balkan War this time he defeated the Turks and seized the valuable city of Salonika for Greece made him a national hero. The assassination of George I in March 1913 brought Constantine to the throne.
With the outbreak of the Great War, Constantine and his country were plunged into a period of prolonged crises. The older view of Constantine as merely a crowned pro-German subversive no longer convinces some historians. But his concern for Greek interests had to be applied under the shadow of a conviction that Germany would win the war. Family pressures, personified by his influential wife, Queen Sophia, drew him close to Berlin, even as Greece's vulnerability to Allied naval power pulled him the other way. In Venizelos, the vacillating monarch found himself facing a partisan convinced of joining the Entente. Exacerbating their policy differences was an explosive constitutional question: did power rest with Venizelos and his mass party's parliamentary majority? Or did it center on a traditional oligarchy made up of the royal family and the General Staff?
The first round went to Venizelos. In early August 1914, Constantine rejected a personal appeal from the kaiser to join the Central Powers. Venizelos soon ousted George Streit, the Germanophile foreign minister. But Streit remained a major influence on Constantine, as did the dominant figure on the General Staff, Colonel John Metaxas. In September, Constantine avoided a direct confrontation with Venizelos over joining the Entente. Bulgaria, not Greece, seemed the most promising Balkan ally to London and Paris. The Greek premier's talks with the half-interested Allies were still far from provoking crisis in Athens.
In early 1915 the issue sharpened. The focus of the war moved to the Mediterranean; and Britain offered tempting territorial concessions in return for Greek military aid at the Dardanelles. Venizelos hoped to send three army divisions, an investment that would pay rich territorial dividends in Asia Minor when the war ended. Constantine vacillated. Then, in early March, he refused, thereby provoking Venizelos to resign. Behind the facade of the new premier, Dimitrios Gounaris, Constantine and the army began to constitute a state within a state." Constantine's private messages to the authorities in Berlin, through his wife and German diplomatic channels, made it clear that state policy would favor the Central Powers.
The smouldering constitutional issue grew into a conflagration by the autumn. Venizelos, after a convincing electoral victory in June 1915, returned to office. He soon confronted Constantine with the reality of Bulgarian mobilization and the likely invasion of Serbia. A defense treaty dating from 1913 obligated Greece to aid Serbia against a Balkan opponent. Constantine saw Venizelos' efforts to implement the treaty, especially by inviting a large Anglo-French army into Macedonia to help defend Serbia, as the certain road to general war. The monarch sanctioned Greek mobilization, and he was unable to prevent the Entente from landing in Salonika in early October. But he threw Venizelos from office; once more, the monarch took real power himself behind a parade of nonentities in the premier's chair.
The break between Constantine and Venizelos had now become a chasm. Moreover, the king's relationship to the Entente at best resembled a cold war. Constantine and Metaxas urged the Germans to invade Greek territory to throw the Anglo-French forces at Salonika into the sea! The Entente pressed the Athens regime for port facilities, communications lines, and other privileges to secure the expeditionary force. For the moment, Anglo-French naval power mediated the dispute: Constantine bowed to Allied wishes.
The year 1916 began with the Allied seizure of Corfu as a refuge for the defeated Serbian army. Further demands from London and Paris followed, evoked by Constantine's clear preference for the Central Powers. The May surrender of Fort Rupel to the Bulgarians set the final crisis in motion. Rupel guarded the main route from Bulgaria into eastern Macedonia; in Bulgarian hands, it imperiled the Anglo-French front. A new Bulgarian offensive, begun in August, led to the capture of the Aegean port of Kavalla. The Greek IV Corps surrendered without resistance and went off to internment in Germany. Rupel plus Kavalla drove Venizelos into open revolt. In late September he slipped off to form a pro-Allied government in Crete and Salonika. Allied recognition followed by the close of the year. On December 1, "the Battle of Athens" (in which a landing party of French and British sailors and marines was attacked by Greek royalist troops) blackened Constantine's reputation in London and Paris for the duration of the war. His role in the attack remains uncertain, but contemporaries considered him an accomplice to a treacherous ambush of Allied troops.
Lingering monarchist sensibilities in Britain, Russia, and Italy deferred Constantine's fall. So too did the influence of French Premier Aristide Briand, a firm friend of the Greek royal family. By June 1917, Briand had fallen from office, and the Russian monarchy was long gone. The Greek king was forced to abdicate and depart for exile. Within two weeks, Venizelos was back as prime minister.
In Swiss exile, Constantine cherished dreams of obstructing the Greek war effort. He imagined a combined German offensive and popular insurgency driving Venizelos out and restoring royal authority. But the war had passed him by. German military and diplomatic circles based their Balkan diplomacy on the alliance with Bulgaria. To reward the Bulgarian ally meant to slice territory from Greece more easily done with Greece on the side of the Entente. Constantine's pathetic overtures went unheard.
The exiled king played a final tragic round in Greek political life. He returned to Athens in late 1920, in the wake of Venizelos' stunning electoral defeat. A population wearied by eight years of war in the Balkans and Asia Minor had turned and repudiated the great parliamentary leader. Constantine took the throne left vacant by his son Alexander's death. By continuing the military gamble to establish Greek power in western Asia Minor, Constantine sealed his own fate. A resurgent Turkey inflicted first military defeat, then, in mid-1922, military calamity on Constantine's forces. In September 1922, he abdicated for the second time. He died in Palermo less than six months later, on January 11,1923.
The issue of Constantine versus Venizelos has agitated Greek historians for more than five decades. Given his education, family ties, and military background, Constantine was drawn to a pro-German policy that placed him and his country under the gun muzzles of the Allied Mediterranean fleets. So long as the war remained some distance away, Constantine managed to balance his personal sympathies and strategic realities. With the defeat of Serbia and the Allied landing at Salonika, the balancing process had to end. It now seems clear that Constantine ceased to be merely a tragic figure in late 1915; rather he became virtually a participant in the war effort of the Central Powers. Popular anger at the Anglo-French landing at Salonika gave the king some fleeting support. But in the longer run, his actions probably overstepped the dim line between individual sympathy for Berlin and Vienna and open disloyalty to his people and their constitution. Nonetheless, the debate over this monarch's motives and behavior in the Great War seems destined to continue.
As Crown Prince of Greece, Constantine married Princess Sophia of Prussia, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria and sister of Kaiser Wilhelm II, on 27 October 1889 in Athens. They had six children. All three of their sons ascended the Greek throne. Their eldest daughter Helen married Crown Prince Carol of Romania; their second daughter married the 4th Duke of Aosta; whilst their youngest child Princess Katherine married a British commoner.