Principality of Bulgaria

The Principality of Bulgaria was the Third Bulgarian State, the Ottoman vassal that behaved like a kingdom, lasting from 1878 to 1908. Russia's victory over the Ottomans first drew a giant Bulgaria at San Stefano; Britain and Austria shrank it at Berlin to a small principality north of the Balkans plus autonomous Eastern Rumelia to the south, both still the sultan's on paper. Paper vassalage fooled nobody: Bulgaria wrote its own constitution, flew its own flag, taxed, coined and made foreign policy, acknowledging Istanbul only in formal phrases. In 1885 the Rumelians rose bloodlessly for union, Serbia attacked to stop it and was beaten back, and Europe swallowed the fait accompli. The Battenberg prince who fronted the adventure was kidnapped by his own officers and abdicated; Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg took his place and waited. In 1908, as the Young Turk revolution shook Istanbul, Ferdinand proclaimed full independence in Tarnovo's old coronation church, and the principality became the Kingdom of Bulgaria, thirty years after Berlin had invented it.