Ferdinand was born on 26 February 1861 in Vienna, a prince of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha-Koháry. His father was Prince Augustus of the German house of Saxe-Coburg; his mother was the daughter of the former French king, Louis-Philippe.
Ferdinand served in the Austrian army and, in 1887, the Bulgarian National Assembly chose him to become Bulgaria's monarch. The former ruler, Prince Alexander of Battenberg, had been overthrown and the crown had gone begging. Ferdinand accepted it in the face of disapproval by the great powers. It was years before he was formally recognized by his fellow monarchs. At home, the young prince was at first under the thumb of the Bulgarian politician Alexander Stambulov. By 1895, however, Ferdinand forced Stambulov out of office and probably conspired to have his former leading minister murdered.
Ferdinand led his country into the First Balkan War in October 1912. Already widely distrusted by European leaders, Ferdinand's policies heightened concern about his lack of principle and sweeping territorial ambitions. Bulgarian armies won impressive initial victories but failed to carry Ferdinand, as he had dreamed, all the way to Constantinople. Relations between Bulgaria and its allies Greece and Serbia deteriorated in the spring of 1913. The division of the war spoils, especially the contested region of Macedonia, proved unachievable.
In late June the Bulgarian army suddenly attacked the Serbs, and therewith set off the Second Balkan War. Ferdinand's role in the attack has remained a center of controversy. Ernst Christian Helmreich claims that the tsar himself ordered the attack, without bothering to inform most of the Bulgarian government. Ferdinand was doubtless swayed by the wishes of the army and public opinion, not to mention Macedonian revolutionaries who threatened to assassinate him if he failed to unite their homeland with Bulgaria. The war brought first military, then diplomatic disaster. The peace treaty, signed at
Bucharest on August 10, 1913, cost Bulgaria most of its wartime gains. Rumors circulated that Ferdinand might be forced to abdicate. Instead he changed course.
Even before the fighting ended, Ferdinand had appointed the Austrophile Vasil Radoslavov to form a new government. This indicated a shift in foreign policy from friendship with Russia to a set of links with the Central Powers. In November 1913, Ferdinand traveled to central Europe shopping for an alliance. He found a cool reception in Vienna and a frigid one in Berlin. His attack on Serbia had confirmed the widespread view that even by the standards of the time for Balkan political leaders Ferdinand, "the Richelieu of the Balkans," was utterly untrustworthy.
The outbreak of World War I placed Ferdinand in the more comfortable role of receiving a crowd of diplomatic suitors. The tsar saw the advantages of waiting, since Bulgaria was certain to receive competing offers from both sides. A clear delineation of his relationship with Radoslavov is difficult to draw. Ferdinand held and apparently exercised final control over Bulgarian policies; Radoslavov stood beside him as a trusted adviser and skillful executor. Since the final decision to enter the war had to come from the monarch, Radoslavov could use one of Ferdinand's timely "illnesses" to evade pressing foreign demands.
By the summer of 1915 Radoslavov's adroit diplomacy had drawn the Central Powers into sweeping territorial concessions, notably concerning the future of Macedonia. The German victories on the eastern front following the May breakthrough at Gorlice allayed Ferdinand's fears of a vengeful Russia. In September 1915, Bulgaria agreed to throw its military weight onto the scales. Ferdinand immediately faced bitter domestic opposition; critics like the Agrarian party leader Stamboliski were jailed. Initial military successes held dissidents in check, but the victories became fewer after 1915.
During the years 1916/1917 Ferdinand found himself reduced to the ruler of a satellite kingdom. Bulgaria was picked clean of its food reserves and left to shift for itself on the battlefield. Although rumors often flew concerning a separate peace, Ferdinand saw no choice for himself but to remain alongside Germany and Austria. In a gesture to muffle domestic unrest, he ousted Radoslavov in June 1918; but the new minister-president, Alexander Malinov, was not permitted to alter the main lines of foreign policy. When the Macedonian front collapsed in September 1918, mutiny struck the army and Malinov moved to obtain an armistice. Ferdinand called in German troops to help save his throne, but he won only a few more days. At the insistence of the victorious Entente, Ferdinand was forced into exile and departed for Germany. The former "Balkan Richelieu" spent the remaining years of his life immersed in his old hobbies of ornithology and entomology. He died in Berlin, September 10, 1948.
Ferdinand then dominated Bulgarian politics. He encouraged the fragmentation of the party system, played one set of venal political leaders off against another, and showed a preference for appointing ministers whose clouded reputations made them his personal dependents. In R. W. Seton-Watson's often quoted words, Ferdinand managed the course of affairs in Bulgaria with "his skill in calculating the psychological moment for driving each batch of swine from the trough of power."
Ferdinand's foreign policy was avowedly expansionist. It centered on the acquisition of the Turkish province of Macedonia, to which Bulgaria could make ethnic and historical claims. In October 1908, Ferdinand took advantage of the Young Turk revolt to throw off the vestiges of foreign sovereignty, declaring Bulgaria legally independent of Turkey. His old title of "prince" he replaced with the ambitious, medieval one of "tsar."
In his private relations, Ferdinand was a somewhat hedonistic individual. Bisexual throughout his life, up until early middle age his inclination was more towards women. He enjoyed affairs with a number of women of humble position, siring a number of illegitimate children whom he then supported financially.
Ferdinand entered a marriage of convenience with Princess Marie Louise of Bourbon-Parma, daughter of Robert I, Duke of Parma and Princess Maria Pia of Bourbon-Two Sicilies, on 20 April 1893 at the Villa Pianore in Lucca. The marriage produced four children:
Boris III (1894–1943)
Kyril (1895–1945)
Eudoxia (1898–1985)
Nadezhda (1899–1958).
Marie Louise died on 31 January 1899 after giving birth to her youngest daughter. Ferdinand did not think again about marriage until his mother, Princess Clémentine died in 1907. To satisfy dynastic obligations and to provide his children with a mother figure, Ferdinand married Eleonore Reuss of Köstritz, on 28 February 1908. Neither romantic love or physical attraction played any role, and Ferdinand treated her as no more than a member of the household, and showed scant regard.
