And at almost the same moment, as though to increase the irritation, Prince Ferdinand kicked over another theory--that his principality was under the suzerainty of the sultan--and declared himself king, or as he called himself, czar of the independent kingdom of the Bulgars and of all Bulgars elsewhere. Practically it meant nothing more than that he was making faces at the new régime in Turkey, but it served the purpose of irritating the masses of Islam.
But if the act of Austria in annexing Bosnia and Herzegovina irritated the Turks, it almost maddened the Serbians, who had no cards to play in this little game of diplomacy just at that moment. Serbia, like all her neighbors, had her dreams of empire; she aspired not only to the possession of Macedonia, but to the provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina as well, because of Serb population. Their annexation by Austria meant to Serbia that there could now be no rearrangement. And it meant, too, that Austria was still determined to work her way south, down to Saloniki, when time and opportunity were ripe. It was, in fact, as much of a threat to Serbia as to the Turks.
Meanwhile the Young Turks continued with their attempt to establish democracy in Constantinople. During the winter of 1908-9 the first Parliament met. And naturally, the deputies representing the backward and fanatical Mussulmans of Asia were in the majority, so that in the very beginning it became obvious that democracy itself was going to defeat its own ends. The reactionary elements, being in a majority in the empire as a whole, it was only natural that their representatives in the Parliament should be in a majority.
In the spring of 1910 there was a violent uprising of the more fanatical Albanian tribes, who resisted the efforts of the new Government to disarm the whole of the population, which was undertaken as a first step toward establishing that law and order which had never yet been known in the empire and which the committee had organized to establish, within the limits of its own communities, at least. The schools, too, were taken out of the hands of the priests of the respective peoples and put under the control of a Ministry of Education, and this roused bitter resentment on the part of the Greeks, who, unlike the Serbs and Bulgars, are under the complete domination of their church.