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2 18
230 THE PEACE OF BUKHAREST [chap. xiii.
near future. Nothing of this sort existed in Ferdinand’s
favour. After his reprehensible conduct during the last
Balkan events, none of us dreamt any longer of the
possibility of sacrificing one of the daughters of the
Emperor by placing her under the despotic yoke of a
hostile and extremely disagreeable father-in-law. In
this matter also Ferdinand had lost his stake, and was
once again the cause of the definite check to Bulgarian
ambitions.
Far less comprehensible were the reasons by virtue
of which we allowed M. Sazonoff s project and the
stipulations of the Conference of London on the subject of
Mt. Athos to drop completely. In our country the
chief reason was supposed to be the regrettable
dissensions that broke out among the Russian monks of
the Monte Santo in the spring and early summer of this
same year 1913. These dissensions, which arose out of
a theological controversy of an essentially secondary
and unimportant nature, unfortunately attracted the
exaggerated attention of the Universal Patriarchate,
and even drew forth cries of heresy! I have no doubt
that in doing this the Patriarchate was submitting to
the influence of a few politicians who wished Mt.
Athos, with its hallowed spots for pilgrimages, to
become simply Greek territory. It was most important
for the intriguing politicians—for those very men who,
clustering round Constantine XIV. two years later,
sold Greece to William II.—to be able to prove the
danger there would be in allowing the monks of Monte
Santo a complete independence without precedent in
the history of the Orthodox East. And the disputes of
the Russian monks happened most opportunely to
support their theory.
All this game was so apparent that even now I
do not understand how our Foreign Office, and our
Embassy in Constantinople, could have been taken in
and have attached such exaggerated importance to the
differences of opinion of a few cenobites !
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