Chapter VII: Miscellanea From the Near East (2)

A disputed succession soon ended in the enthronement of the late King’s illegitimate son, Stephen Urosh III, known in history by the epithet “Detchanski” from the famous monastery of Detchani which he founded. He had been blinded for conspiring against his father; but on his father’s death he recovered his sight, which perhaps he had never entirely lost. His reign is one of the most dramatic in Serbian history, for it affords an example of those sudden alternations of triumph and disaster characteristic of the Balkans, alike in the Middle Ages and in our own day. On June 28, 1330, he utterly routed the Bulgarians at Velbujd, as Köstendil was then called. Bulgaria became a vassal state of Serbia, which had thus won the hegemony of the Balkan peninsula. Next year, he was dethroned by his son, the famous Stephen Dushan, and strangled in the castle of Zvetchan near Mitrovitza. A contemporary, Guillaume Adam, Archbishop of Antivari, has left a description of Serbia during this period. The palaces of the King and his nobles were of wood, and surrounded by palisades; the only houses of stone were in the Latin coast-towns. Yet “Rassia” was naturally a very rich land, producing plenty of corn, wine and oil; it was well watered; its forests were full of game, while five gold mines and as many of silver were constantly worked.

The reign of Stephen Urosh IV, better known as Stephen Dushan (1331-55), marks the zenith of Serbia. As a conqueror and as a lawgiver, he resembled Napoleon; and his Empire, like that of Napoleon, crumbled to pieces as soon as its creator had disappeared. In the former capacity, he aimed at realising the dream of his grandfather, Stephen Urosh II, of forming a great Serbian Empire on the ruins of Byzantium. The civil war between the young Emperor John V Palaiologos, aided by his Italian mother, Anne of Savoy, and the ambitious John Cantacuzene, whose history is one of the most interesting sources for this period, was Dushan’s opportunity. Both parties in the struggle made bids for his support at the unfortified village of Prishtina, which had been the Serbian capital. His price was nothing less than the whole Byzantine Empire west of Kavalla, or, at least, of Salonika. Anne of Savoy, less patriotic than her rival, offered him what he asked, if he would send her Cantacuzene, then his guest, either alive or dead. But the Council of twenty-four great officers of state, whom the Serbian Kings were wont to consult, acting on the Queen’s advice, repudiated the suggestion of assassinating a suppliant. Dushan allowed the rival Byzantine factions to exhaust themselves; and, while they fought, he occupied one place after another, till all Macedonia, except Salonika, was his.

With little exaggeration he wrote from Serres to the Doge of Venice, which had conferred her citizenship upon him, styling himself “King of Serbia, Diokleia, the land of Hum, the Zeta, Albania and the Maritime region, partner in no small part of the Empire of Bulgaria, and lord of almost all the Empire of Romania.” But for the ruler of so vast a realm the title of King seemed insignificant, especially as his vassal, the ruler of Bulgaria, bore the great name of Tsar. Accordingly, on Easter Sunday 1346, Dushan had himself crowned at Skopje, whither he had transferred his capital, as “Emperor of the Serbs and Greeks.” Shortly before, he had raised the Archbishop of Serbia to the dignity of Patriarch with his seat at Petch; and the two Slav Patriarchs, the Bulgarian of Trnovo and the Serbian of Petch, placed the crown upon his head. At the same time, on the analogy of the Western Empire with its “King of the Romans,” he had his son, Stephen Urosh V, proclaimed King. Byzantine emblems and customs were introduced into the brand-new Serbian Empire; the Tsar assumed the tiara and the double-eagle, and wrote to the Doge, proposing an alliance for the conquest of Constantinople. In the papal correspondence with Serbia we read of a Serbian “Sebastocrator,” a “Great Logothete,” a “Cæsar,” and a “Despot”; the governors of important Serbian cities, such as Cattaro and Scutari, were styled “Counts”; those of minor places, like Antivari, “Captains.” Thus it is easy to see why the whole Serbian world was thrilled when, in the first Balkan war of 1912, the Crown Prince Alexander entered Skopje, the coronation-city of Dushan—at the invitation of the Austrian Consul, “to restore order”!

Dushan next extended his Empire to the south by the annexation of Epeiros and Thessaly; and assigned Ætolia and Akarnania to his brother, Symeon Urosh, and Thessaly and Joannina to the “Cæsar” Preliub. His dominions now stretched to the Corinthian Gulf, and he thought that it only remained to annex the independent Serb state of Bosnia, and to capture Constantinople, establishing what a poetic Montenegrin ruler of our day has called an “Empire of the Balkans.” This would have embraced all the races of the variegated peninsula, and perhaps kept the Turks—who, in 1353, had made their first permanent settlement in Europe, by crossing the Dardanelles and occupying the castle of Tzympe—beyond the Bosporus, and the Hungarians beyond the Save. On St Michael’s day, 1355, he assembled his nobles, and asked whether he should lead them against Byzantium or Buda-Pesth. To their answer, that they would follow him, whithersoever he bade them, his reply was “to Constantinople.” But on the way he fell ill of a fever, and at Diavoli, on Dec. 20, he died, aged 48. No Serbian ruler had ever approached so near the Imperial city; had he succeeded, and had another Dushan succeeded him, the Turkish conquest 98 years later might have been averted.

Great as were his conquests, the Serbian Napoleon was no mere soldier. His code of law, the “Zakonik,” like the “Code Napoléon,” has survived the vast but fleeting Empire of its author. Dushan’s law-book is, indeed, largely based on previous legislation, such as the canon law of the Greek Church, the statutes of Budua and other Adriatic coast-towns, and, in the case of trial by jury, on an enactment of Stephen Urosh II. For us, however, its chief value is the light which it throws upon Serbia’s political and social condition in the golden age of the Empire.

Mediæval Serbia resembled neither of the Serb states of our day. It was not, even under Dushan, an autocracy, like Montenegro before 1905, nor yet a democratic monarchy, like the modern Serbian kingdom; but the powers of the monarch were limited by the influence of the great nobles—a class stamped out at the Turkish conquest and never since revived. Society consisted of the Sovereign; the ecclesiastical hierarchy, ranging from the Patriarch to the village priest; the greater and lesser nobles; the peasants, some free, others serfs bound to the soil; slaves, servants for hire; and, at Cattaro and in a few inland places, small communities of burghers. But the magnates were the dominant section; on two occasions even Dushan had to cope with their rebellions, and they formed a privy council of twenty-four, which he consulted before deciding important questions of public policy. Their lands were hereditary; and they enjoyed the privilege of killing their inferiors with comparative impunity, for a graduated tariff (as in Saxon England) regulated the punishment for wilful murder—hanging for that of a priest or monk, burning for parricide, fratricide, or infanticide, the loss of both hands and a fine for that of a noble by a commoner, a simple fine for that of a commoner by a noble. But the law secured to the peasant the fruits of his labour; no village might be laid under contribution by two successive army-corps; but, if the peasant organised or even attended a public meeting, he lost his eyes and was branded on the face, while for theft or arson, the culprit’s village was held collectively responsible. Next to the nobles the Orthodox Church was the most influential class; indeed, the early Archbishops of Serbia were drawn from junior members of the Royal family, and their interests were consequently identical with those of the Crown, of which they were the apologists in literature, like the “official” journals of to-day.

While the great Serbia of Dushan, like the smaller Serbia of our days, was pre-eminently an agricultural state, it possessed the enormous advantage of a coastline, which facilitated trade. Dushan allowed foreign merchants to circulate freely, and showed special favour to those of Ragusa whose argosies (or _ragusies_) were welcomed in his ports. He allowed a Saxon colony to work the silver-mines of Novo Brdo, and to burn charcoal. His bodyguard was composed of Germans, whose captain, Palmann, obtained great influence with him. He sent missions to foreign countries to obtain information; with Venice, of which he was a citizen, his relations were particularly close—as those of Italians and Serbs ought by nature to be; while foreign ambassadors were favourably impressed with his hospitality by receiving free meals in every village through which they passed. Already—so Nikephoros Gregoras tells us—the Serbs had begun to commemorate the great deeds of their champions in their national ballads, which attained their full development after the fatal battle of Kossovo and have inspired the Serbian soldiers in their three last wars. We hear, too, of architects from Cattaro, which was the Serbian mint in the reigns of Dushan and his son. The Queen of Italy possesses a collection of the coinage of the mediæval Serbian monarchy.

Dushan’s Empire crumbled away at his death. Like that of Napoleon, it had been made too fast to weld together the four races which it contained—Serbs, Greeks, Albanians and Koutso-Wallachs. The creation of a Serbian Patriarchate alienated the Greek Church, just as the creation of a Bulgarian Exarchate in 1870 sowed the seeds of disunion between Greeks and Bulgarians in Macedonia. Thus to the four different races there were added four different creeds—the Serbian Patriarchists, the Greek Patriarchists, the Albanian Catholics, and the Bogomile heretics, these last always ready to invoke a foreign invader against domestic persecution, even though that foreigner were a Mussulman. Even this strongest of Serbian monarchs, whose foot every one who entered his presence must kiss and who was “of all men of his time the tallest, and withal terrible to look upon,” as the papal legate called him, was barely equal to the task of checking the great nobles; and it was doubtless distrust of them which led him to surround himself with a foreign guard. The eminent Serbian historian and statesman, the late M. Novakovich, sums up the failure of Dushan to found a permanent state in the judgment: “Everything about his Empire was personal; the Serbian creations were only personal.”

The dying Tsar had made his nobles swear to maintain the rights of his son, Stephen Urosh V, then a boy of nineteen. But the lad’s uncle, Symeon Urosh, the viceroy of Akarnania and Ætolia, disputed the succession; some nobles supported him, while others, availing themselves of the family quarrel, set up as independent princes in their particular satrapies. Symeon made Trikkala the capital of a brief Greco-Serbian Empire; and his son ended as abbot of the famous monastery of Meteoron. After four decades Serbian sway over Thessaly and Epeiros ceased to exist. An inscription at Trikkala and a church at Meteoron are now almost its only memories. Of the independent satraps the most important were the brothers Balsha (by some erroneously connected with the French house of Baux), who established themselves in the Zeta, the present Montenegro, with a seaboard on the Adriatic at Budua and Antivari, and with Scutari as their “principal residence”—“principale eorum domicilium,” as a Latin document of 1369 says. This is the historical basis of the Montenegrin claim to Scutari, where the Balsha family remained till (in 1396) it sold that city to Venice. The rest of Albania was occupied by native chiefs, the most famous of them being Carlo Topia at Durazzo, who boasted his descent from the Angevins—a fact commemorated by the French lilies on his still extant tomb near Elbassan—and from whom Essad Pasha Toptani derived his origin.

Still more famous was Vukashin, guardian and cup-bearer of the young Tsar, who drove his master from the throne in 1366, and assumed the title of king, with the government of the specially Serbian lands and Prizren as his capital. A later legend makes the usurper murder his sovereign during a hunting-party on the plain of Kossovo. But it has now been proved that Stephen Urosh V survived his supposed murderer, who fell by the hand of his own servant, fighting against the Turks at the battle of the Maritza in 1371—the first great blow that Serbia received from her future conqueror. His son, Marko Kraljevich, “the King’s son, Marko,” that great hero of South Slavonic poetry, whose exploits were portrayed by M. Meshtrovich in the Serbian pavilion of the Rome exhibition in 1911, retained Prilip; and it is recorded that, when in 1912 the Serbian army attacked that place, their officers appealed to them in the name of the national hero to liberate his residence from the Turks. Two months after Vukashin Stephen Urosh V died also, and Lazar Grbljanovich, a connection of the Imperial family, ascended the throne of an Empire so diminished that he preferred the style of “Prince” to that of Tsar, which was conferred upon him in the ballads. Serbia was no longer the leading Slav state of the peninsula—for the great Bosnian ruler Stephen Tvrtko I (1353-91) had won the hegemony of the Southern Slavs, and in 1376 had himself crowned on the grave of St Sava at Mileshevo as “King of the Serbs, and of Bosnia, and of the coast.” To secure the latter, he founded the present fortress of Castelnuovo at the entrance of the Bocche di Cattaro; and in 1385 Cattaro itself was his.

Meanwhile the nation destined to destroy both the Serbian and the Bosnian Kingdoms was rapidly advancing. The Turks took Nish in 1386, and in 1389 Lazar set out, attended by all his paladins, from his capital of Krushevatz—for the Serbian royal residence had receded within the limits of Danubian Serbia—to do battle with Murad I on the fatal field of Kossovo.

A Serbian ballad tells how on the eve of the battle the prophet Elijah in the guise of a falcon flew with a letter from the Virgin into Lazar’s tent, offering him the choice between the Empire of this world and the Heavenly kingdom, and how he chose the latter. The armies met on St Vitus’ day, June 15 (O.S.), 1389. Seven nationalities composed that of the Christians; at least one Christian vassal helped to swell the smaller forces of the Turks. While Murad was arraying himself for the fight, a noble Serb, Milosh Kobilich[862], presented himself as a deserter and begged to have speech of the Sultan. His request was granted, he entered the royal tent, and stabbed Murad to the heart, paying with his own life for this act, but gaining thereby immortality in Serbian poetry. None the less, the Turks went undismayed into battle. At first, the Bosniaks drove back one Turkish wing; but Bayezid I, the young Sultan, held his own on the other, and threw the Christians into disorder. A rumour of treachery increased their confusion; whether truly or no, it is still the popular tradition that Vuk Brankovich, Lazar’s son-in-law, betrayed the Serbian cause at Kossovo. Lazar was taken prisoner, and slain in the tent where the dying Murad lay, and with him fell the Serbian Empire.

At first Christendom believed that the Turks had been defeated. A _Te Deum_ was sung in Paris to the God of battles; Florence wrote to congratulate the Bosnian king, Tvrtko, on the supposed victory. But Lazar’s widow, Militza, as a ballad beautifully tells the tale, soon learnt the truth in her “white palace” at Krushevatz from the crows that had hovered over the battlefield. The name of Kossovo is remembered throughout the Serbian lands, as if it had been fought but yesterday. Every year the anniversary is kept, in 1916, for the first time in England; and it was the fact that the late Archduke Franz Ferdinand chose this day of all days to make his entry into Sarajevo, which perhaps contributed to his assassination. Although the battle of Kumanovo in 1912 avenged Kossovo, yet the Montenegrins still wear a black band on their caps in sign of mourning for it; in many a lonely village the minstrel sings to the sound of the _gusle_ the melancholy legend of Kossovo. On the field itself Murad’s heart is still preserved, while the Hungarian Serbs treasure in the monastery of Vrdnik the shroud of Lazar.

A diminished Serbian principality lingered on for another seventy years. Bayezid recognised the late ruler’s eldest son, Stephen Lazarevich, with the title of “Prince” (exchanged in 1404 for that of “Despot,” thenceforth borne by the Serbian princes) on condition that he paid tribute and came every year with a contingent to join the Turkish troops, and gave him the hand of his youngest sister; while Vuk Brankovich received the reward of his treachery by holding the old capital of Prishtina as a vassal of the Sultan. For a time the Turkish defeat at Angora by the Tartars in 1402 enabled the Serbian Despot to play off one Turkish pretender against another, while he purchased domestic peace by making Brankovich’s son George his heir. Thus he could devote himself to organising his country and patronising literature in the person of Constantine “the Philosopher,” who repaid his hospitality by writing his biography. He appointed a species of Cabinet, with which he discussed affairs of state, founded the monastery of Manassia, obtained Belgrade by diplomacy from the Hungarians, fortified it and adorned it with churches. In his time Venice began her colonies in Albania and what is now Montenegro—at Durazzo in 1392, Alessio in 1393, Drivasto and Scutari in 1396, Antivari and Dulcigno in 1421 (the former, however, not definitely till 1444), while in 1420 Cattaro placed herself under the protection of the Lion of St Mark, then master of most of the Dalmatian coast, save where the Ragusan Republic formed an enclave in his territory.

Serbia under George Brankovich, who succeeded as “Despot” in 1427, was thus practically a Danubian principality. The new Despot, a man of sixty years, was an experienced diplomatist; but there are times in the Balkans when force is more valuable than the subtlest diplomacy. A warlike Sultan, in the person of Murad II, sat on the Turkish throne; and he soon showed his intentions by demanding the whole of Serbia, and invading that country. Brankovich had to move his capital from Krushevatz to the bank of the Danube, where at Semendria he built the fine castle with the red brick cross in its walls which is still a memorial of Serbia’s past, while in order to secure himself an eventual refuge in Hungary, he handed over Belgrade to the Hungarian monarch, notwithstanding the protests and tears of its citizens. Brankovich in vain tried to purchase peace by giving his daughter with a regal outfit to the Sultan. Ere long, however, the Sultan, incited by a fanatic who accused him of sinning against Allah by allowing the Serbian unbeliever to bar the way to Hungary and Italy, demanded the surrender of Semendria. Brankovich fled to Hungary, thence to his last maritime possessions of Antivari and Budua, and thence to Ragusa; but the victories of John Hunyady, “the white knight of Wallachia,” induced Murad in 1444 to restore to the Despot the whole of Serbia, on payment of half its annual revenue.

Brankovich by his “enlightened egoism” managed to maintain a precarious autonomy till after the capture of Constantinople (1453). Then, Mohammed II resolved to end what remained of Serbian independence, and to capture the famous silver mines of Novo Brdo, which, as his biographer, Kritoboulos, remarked, had not only largely contributed to the splendour of the Serbian Empire, but had also aroused the covetousness of its enemies. Indeed, the picture which the Imbrian writer draws of Serbia on the eve of the Turkish conquest is almost idyllic, with her “cities many and fair,” her “strong forts on the Danube,” her “productive soil, swine and cattle, and abundant breed of goodly steeds.” But the flower of the Serbian youth had been drafted into the corps of Janissaries to fight against their fellow-Christians, the prince was a man of ninety and a fugitive, while Mohammed, like the Germans of to-day, had marvellous artillery. Still Belgrade, then a Hungarian fortress, resisted, thanks to the skill of Hunyady and the fiery eloquence of the Franciscan Capistrano. But the nonagenarian Despot was wounded in a quarrel with the Hungarian governor, and on Christmas-eve, 1456, died. Of his sons the two elder had been blinded by the late Sultan, so that his third son, Lazar III, succeeded him. His speedy death resulted, at this eleventh hour of Serbian history, in the union of both Serbia and Bosnia by the marriage of one of his daughters with the Bosnian Crown Prince, Stephen Tomashevich—an arrangement which even Dushan, in all his glory, had never achieved. The Bosnian Despot of Serbia took up his abode at Semendria; but the inhabitants, regarding their new master with disfavour, as a Catholic and a Hungarian nominee, opened their gates to the Turks; before the summer of 1459 was over, all Serbia had become a Turkish pashalik, except Belgrade, which remained a Hungarian fortress till 1521. Four years after the fall of Serbia her last Despot, then King of Bosnia, was beheaded at Jajce, and his kingdom annexed by the Turks. Twenty years after Bosnia, the Duchy of St Sava, the modern Herzegovina, met with the same fate.

Thus the history of mediæval Serbia was closed. But members of the Brankovich family continued to bear the title of Despot in their Hungarian exile, whither many of their adherents had followed them, till the extinction of their house two centuries ago; the Serbian Patriarchate, abolished in 1459, but revived by the Turks in 1557, existed till 1767; but from the time of Mohammed II to that of Black George in 1804, when Danubian Serbia rose from her long enslavement, the noblest representatives of the Serbs maintained their freedom in the Republics of Ragusa, “the South Slavonic Athens,” and Poljitza, “the South Slavonic San Marino,” and among the barren rocks of free Montenegro.

AUTHORITIES

1. _Geschichte der Serben._ Von Constantin Jireček, Erster Band (Bis 1371); Zweiter Band, erste Hälfte (1371-1537). Gotha: Perthes, 1911, 1918.

2. _Serbes, Croates et Bulgares._ Par Louis Leger. Paris: Maisonneuve, 1913.

3. _Les problèmes serbes._ Par Stojan Novakovich. In _Archiv für slavische Philologie_, Bände XXXIII.-IV. Berlin, 1912.

4. _Listine._ By S. Ljubich. In _Monumenta spectantia historiam Slavorum Meridionalium_. Eleven vols. Agram, 1868-93.

5. _Acta et Diplomata Res Albaniæ mediæ ætatis illustrantia._ Ed. L. de Thallóczy, C. Jireček, E. de Sufflay. Vol. I. (344-1343); Vol. II. (1344-1406). Vindobonæ, 1913-18.

6. _Poésies populaires serbes._ Tr. by A. Dozon. Paris, 1877.