Hugh Chisholm

“ In October 1875 King Milan had married Natalie, the sixteen-years-old daughter of Peter Ivanovich Ketchko, a Moldavian Boyar, who was a colonel in the Russian army, and whose wife, Pulcheria, was by birth Princess Sturdza. A son, Alexander, was born in 1876, but the king and queen showed signs of friction. Milan was anything but a faithful husband. Queen Natalie was greatly influenced by Russian sympathies ”

“ Eugene Schuyler, who saw him about this time, found him “a very remarkable young man . . . singularly intelligent and well-informed.” By a careful balancing of the Austrian and Russian parties in Servia, with a judicious leaning towards the former, Prince Milan was enabled in 1878, at the end of the Turkish War, to induce the Porte to acknowledge his independence, and was proclaimed king in 1882. (The history of his reign is told in detail under Servia.) ”