Chapter III: The Kings of Bosnia (1376-1463) (1)

Tvrtko’s first care was to provide himself with an heir to his kingdom, and he chose a Bulgarian princess as his queen, by whom he had a son, afterwards King Stephen Tvrtko II. But, not content with the dignity and the territory which he now possessed, the Bosnian monarch aspired to found a sea power. He had, as we have seen, already gained a long strip of seaboard from the mouth of the Cetina up to the walls of Cattaro. But Ragusa, with its harbour Gravosa, the gem of the whole coast, was not, and never seemed likely to be, his. He accordingly resolved, as he could not capture Ragusa, to found at the entrance of the lovely Bocche di Cattaro a new station, which should become its rival and the outlet of all the inland trade. The picturesque little town of Castelnuovo stands on the spot to-day, a place over which for a brief period in the last century there floated the British flag. Tvrtko next obtained from Venice an Admiral for his future fleet, and ordered galleys to be built there. And, amidst the confusion which followed the death of Louis the Great of Hungary, he obtained from the little Queen Maria, as the price of his friendship, the ancient city of Cattaro, which, after having enjoyed the protection of the Serbian Tsars, had lately acknowledged the Hungarian rule. The finest fiord in Southern Europe was in his hands.

But Tvrtko did not rest here. True to his policy of making profit out of the misfortunes of others, he availed himself of the disturbances which now broke out in Croatia to take the side of the Croats against their Queen and his friend Maria. Croatia was soon in his hands, and the Dalmatian towns began to surrender. Spalato and Traù, unable to obtain help from Hungary, agreed to submit to him by a certain day; but when that day arrived Tvrtko was occupied elsewhere. For on the same day on which Spalato was to have opened its gates, June 15, 1389, the battle of Kossovo was fought, that battle which decided for five centuries the fate of the Balkan peninsula. In that memorable conflict, the name of which will never be forgotten by the Southern Slavs, a Bosnian contingent aided the Serbian army against the Turks. It was not the first time that the Bosniaks had faced their future masters in battle. Two years earlier they had helped Prince Lazar to rout a Turkish force, and they hoped for the same result on the plain of Kossovo. Tvrtko himself was not present at the fight; but his trusty lieutenant Vlatko Hranich inflicted heavy losses on the left wing of the Turkish host, which was commanded by the Sultan’s second son. But, according to the traditional account, when the Serbian traitor Vuk Brankovich rode off the field the faithful Bosniaks gave way. All was lost, and the Turkish supremacy was assured. Tvrtko at first believed that his army had been successful. There is extant a letter in which the city of Florence congratulated him on the glad tidings of victory which he had sent. “Happy the kingdom of Bosnia,” says this document, “to which it was granted to fight so famous a fight, and happiest of all your majesty, for whom, as the victor, the true and eternal glory of the heavenly kingdom is appointed[897].”

Even when he had discovered the terrible truth Tvrtko continued his Dalmatian campaign instead of concentrating all his energies upon the defence of his realm against the Turks. He used the brief respite which they gave his land to press on with his operations in the west. Here he was speedily successful. All the Dalmatian coast towns, except Zara and Ragusa, surrendered to him, as well as the large islands of Brazza, Lesina and Curzola. Overjoyed at their submission, he confirmed the privileges which they had previously enjoyed, and treated them with the utmost consideration. Master of Dalmatia and Croatia in all but the name, he assumed in 1390 the title of King of those countries, just as fourteen years earlier he had proclaimed himself King of Bosnia and Serbia. Tvrtko had now reached the summit of his power. He had achieved the difficult feat of uniting Serbs and Croats under one sceptre; he had made Bosnia the centre of a great kingdom, which possessed a frontage on the Adriatic, from the Quarnero to Cattaro, save for the enclaves of Zara and Ragusa, which embraced the territory inland as far as the river Drina and included part of the modern _sandjak_ of Novibazar, as well as other originally Serbian territories. The beginnings of a sea power had been formed under his auspices, and Dalmatia in union with Bosnia was no longer “a face without a head.” Even now Tvrtko’s ambition was not appeased. He was anxious to conclude a political alliance with Venice and a matrimonial alliance—for his wife had just died—with the great house of Habsburg. But death prevented the accomplishment of his designs. On March 23, 1391, the great Bosnian monarch expired without even being able to secure the succession for his son.

It has been the fortune of each of the various Balkan races to produce some great man, who for a brief space has made himself the foremost figure of the peninsula. Bulgaria can point to her mighty Tsars Symeon and Samuel, Serbia cherishes the memory of Stephen Dushan, the Albanians have found a national hero in Skanderbeg, Bosnia attained her zenith under Tvrtko I. But in each case with the death of the great man the power which he had rapidly acquired as rapidly waned. Tvrtko’s realm was no exception to this rule. Its founder had not lived long enough to weld his conquests into an harmonious whole, to combine Catholic Croats with Orthodox Serbs, Bosnian Slavs with the Latin population of the Dalmatian coast towns, Bogomile heretics with zealous partisans of Rome. The old Slavonic law of succession, which did not recognise the custom of primogeniture, added to the difficulties by multiplying candidates; and thus foreign princes found an excuse for intervention and the great barons an excuse for independence. Deprived of his authority, the King was unable to cope with an enemy like the Turk, whose vast hosts were absolutely united in their obedience to the rule of one man, and the Kings of Hungary, instead of assisting their brothers of Bosnia against the common foe, turned their forces against a country which might have been the bulwark of Christendom.

The evil effects of Tvrtko’s death were soon felt. His younger brother, or cousin[898], Stephen Dabisha, who succeeded him, felt himself too feeble to govern so large a kingdom, and in 1393 ceded the newly won lands of Dalmatia and Croatia to King Sigismund of Hungary. The two monarchs met at Djakovo, in Slavonia, and concluded an agreement by which Sigismund recognised Dabisha as King of Bosnia, while Dabisha bequeathed the Bosnian crown after his death to Sigismund. A combination of Bosnian magnates and Croatian rebels, however, refused to accept these terms, and Dabisha himself broke the treaty which he had made. An Hungarian invasion of his Kingdom and the capture of the strong fortress of Dobor, on the lower Bosna, at once reduced him to submission, and a battle before the walls of Knin, in Dalmatia, finally severed the brief connection between that country and the Bosnian throne. To complete Dabisha’s misfortunes, the Turks, who had been in no undue haste to make use of their victory at Kossovo, invaded Bosnia for the first time in 1392, and gave that country a foretaste of what was to come.

On Dabisha’s death in 1395 the all-powerful magnates, disregarding the treaty of Djakovo, made his widow, Helena Gruba, regent for his son. But they retained for themselves all real power, governing their domains as almost independent princes, maintaining their own courts and issuing charters, coining their own money and negotiating on their own account with foreign states, such as the Republics of Venice and Ragusa. One of their number, Hrvoje Vuktchich, towered above his fellows, and his career may be regarded as typical of his troublous times. For the next quarter of a century Bosnian history is little else than the story of his intrigues, and the neighbouring lands of Dalmatia and Croatia felt his heavy hand. Even Sigismund, King of Hungary, and his Neapolitan rival, Ladislaus, were bidding against one another for his support, and at the end of the fourteenth century he was “the most powerful man between the Save and the Adriatic, the pillar of two Kings and Kingdoms.” The shrewd Ragusans wrote to him that “whatsoever thou dost command in Bosnia is done”; the documents of the period style him _regulus Bosnensis_, or “Bosnian kinglet”; he called himself “the grand _voivode_ of the Bosnian Kingdom and vicar-general of the most gracious sovereigns King Ladislaus and King Ostoja, the excellent lord, the Duke of Spalato.” The three great islands of Brazza, Curzola, and Lesina, and the city of Cattaro owned his overlordship, and his name will always be connected with the lovely town of Jajce, at the confluence of the Pliva and the Vrbas, the most beautiful spot in all Bosnia. Here, above the magnificent waterfall on the hill, for which in olden times the Bosnian _bans_ and the Croatian Kings had striven, Hrvoje bade an Italian architect build him a castle. Whether the town of Jajce, “the egg,” derives its name from the shape of the hill or from the fact that the castle was modelled on the famous Castello dell’ Uovo at Naples, is doubtful. But he is now regarded as the founder of the catacombs, which still bear his arms and were intended to serve as his family vault[899]. For his capital of Spalato he even issued coins, which circulated in Bosnia as freely as the currency of the puppet kings whom he put on the throne. What Warwick the king-maker is in the history of England, what the mayors of the palace are in the history of France, that is Hrvoje in the annals of mediæval Bosnia. An ancient missal has preserved for us the features of this remarkable man, whose gruff voice and rough manners disgusted the courtly nobles of the Hungarian court. But the uncouth Bosniak took a terrible revenge on his gentle critics. When a wit made fun of his big head and deep voice by bellowing at him like an ox, the company laughed at Hrvoje’s discomfiture. But when, a little later, the fortune of war put the jester in his power, Hrvoje had him sewn into the skin of an ox and thrown into the river, with the words, “Thou hast once in human form imitated the bellowing of an ox, now therefore take an ox’s form as well.”

The great Turkish invasion, which took place in 1398 and almost entirely ruined Bosnia, convinced the great nobles that a woman was unfitted to rule. Headed by Hrvoje, they accordingly deposed Helena Gruba, and elected Stephen Ostoja, probably an illegitimate son of Tvrtko, as their King. So long as Ostoja obeyed the dictates of his all-powerful vassal he kept his throne. Under Hrvoje’s guidance he repulsed the attack of King Sigismund of Hungary, who had claimed the overlordship of Bosnia in accordance with the treaty of Djakovo, and endeavoured to recover Dalmatia and Croatia for the Bosnian crown under the pretext of supporting Sigismund’s rival, Ladislaus of Naples. But the latter showed by his coronation at Zara as King of both those lands that he had no intention of allowing them to become Bosnian possessions, as in the days of Tvrtko. Ostoja at this changed his policy, made his peace with Sigismund, and recognised him as his suzerain. But he had forgotten his maker. Hrvoje, aided by the Ragusans, laid siege to the royal castle of Bobovatz, where the crown was preserved, and when Sigismund intervened on behalf of his puppet summoned an “assembly” or “congregation of the Bosnian lords” in 1404 to choose a new King. This great council of nobles, at which the _djed_, or primate of the Bogomile church, and his suffragans were present, is frequently mentioned at this period, and contained in a rude form the germs of those representative institutions which in our own country sprang from a like origin. Hrvoje easily persuaded the council to depose Ostoja and elect Tvrtko II, the legitimate son of Tvrtko I, in his place. But Sigismund was not so lightly convinced. After a first futile attempt he sought the aid of the Pope in a crusade against “the renegade Arians and Manichæans” and marched into Bosnia in 1408 at the head of a large army. Tvrtko II met him beneath the walls of Dobor, on the same spot where, fourteen years before, another great battle had been fought. Once again the Bosnian forces were defeated. Sigismund took Tvrtko as his prisoner to Buda-Pesth, after beheading 126 captive Bosnian nobles and throwing their bodies into the yellow waters of the Bosna. The victory had decisive results. Hrvoje humbled himself before the King of Hungary, and Ladislaus of Naples sold all his rights to Dalmatia to the Venetians in despair. But the national party in Bosnia was not so easily dismayed. Nothing daunted by the defeat of Tvrtko and the desertion of Hrvoje, they restored Ostoja to the throne. Utter confusion followed. Sigismund dismembered the country, placing Usora and Soli again under Hungarian _bans_, bestowing the valuable mining district of Srebrenitza upon the Despot of Serbia to be an apple of discord between the two Serb states, and leaving Ostoja the Herzegovina and South Bosnia alone, while even there every one did what was right in his own eyes, and members of the royal family lived by highway robbery. Well might the Ragusans complain that “our people travel among the Turks and other heathen, yet nowhere have they met with so much harm as in Bosnia.” Yet one step lower was Ostoja to fall. Hard pressed by the Hungarians and his released rival Tvrtko, he summoned in 1415 the Turks to his aid, and thus set an example which was ultimately fatal to his country.

Since their great invasion in 1398 the Turks had not molested Bosnia. Their struggle with Timour the Tartar in Asia and the confusion which followed his great victory at Angora had temporarily checked their advance in Europe, and it was not till their reorganisation under Mohammed I that they resumed their plans. They were accordingly free to accept the invitation of Ostoja and Hrvoje, who was now in opposition to the Hungarian court, and aided them to drive out the Hungarian army. The decisive battle was fought near the fortress of Doboj, the picturesque ruins of which command the junction of the rivers Bosna and Spretcha. A stratagem of the Bosniaks, who cried out at a critical moment, “The Magyars are fleeing,” won the day. But they could not rid themselves of their Turkish allies so easily. In the very next year Mohammed appointed his general Isaac governor of the castle of Vrhbosna (“the source of the Bosna”), which stood in the heart of the country, on the site of the present capital of Sarajevo, and even great Bosnian nobles were not ashamed to hold their lands by grace of the Sultan and his governor. Under Ostoja’s son, Stephen Ostojich, who succeeded as King in 1418, the country obtained a brief respite from the Turkish garrison, which quitted Vrhbosna. But three years later the restoration of Tvrtko II, after further years of exile, gave the Sultan another opportunity for intervention. For Tvrtko’s title was disputed by Ostoja’s bastard son, Radivoj, who called in the Turks to his aid, and was seen by the traveller, De la Brocquière[900] as a suppliant of the Sultan at Adrianople in 1433. Tvrtko purchased a temporary peace by the surrender of several towns to them; but the fatal secret had been divulged that the Sultan was the arbiter of Bosnia, and to him two other enemies of the King turned, the Despot of Serbia and Sandalj Hranich, a great Bosnian magnate of the house of Kosatcha, who was all-powerful in the Herzegovina, so that Chalkokondyles calls it “Sandalj’s country[901].” The two partners bought the Bosnian Kingdom from the Sultan for hard cash, and Tvrtko was once more an exile. In 1436 the Turks again occupied Vrhbosna, which from that time became a place of arms, from which they could sally forth and ravage the land, and when Tvrtko returned in the same year it was as a mere tributary of the Sultan Murad II, who received an annual sum of 25,000 ducats from his vassal, and issued charters as the sovereign of the country. Soon Murad overran Serbia, and occupied the former Bosnian towns of Zvornik and Srebrenitza, which the Serbian Despot still held, so that it seemed as if the independence of Bosnia was over. Tvrtko knew not which way to turn. He implored the Venetians, who twenty years before had taken the former Bosnian haven of Cattaro under their protection, and were now masters of nearly all Dalmatia, to take over the government of his Kingdom too. But the crafty Republic declined the dangerous honour with many complimentary phrases. With Ladislaus IV of Hungary he was more fortunate. He did not, indeed, survive to see the fulfilment of the Hungarian King’s promise, for he was murdered by his subjects in 1443. But the help of John Hunyady, the great champion of Christendom, enabled his successor to stave off for another twenty years the final blow which was to annihilate the Bosnian Kingdom.

With Tvrtko II the royal house of Kotromanich was extinct, and the magnates elected Stephen Thomas Ostojich, another bastard son of Ostoja, as their King. Ostojich, whose birth and humble marriage diminished his influence over his proud nobles, came to the conclusion that it would enhance his personal prestige, and at the same time strengthen his Kingdom against the Turks, if he embraced the Roman Catholic faith. His father and all his family had been Bogomiles, like most Bosnian magnates of that time, but Tvrtko II was a Catholic and a great patron of the Franciscans, who had suffered severely from the Turkish inroads. The conversion of Ostojich was full of momentous consequences for his Kingdom; for, although he was personally disinclined to persecute the sect to which he had belonged, and which had practically become the established church of the land, the pressure of his protector Hunyady, the Franciscans, and the Pope soon compelled him to take steps against it. He was convinced that by so doing he would drive the Bogomiles, who formed the vast majority of the people, into the arms of the Turks, and the event justified his fears. But he had little choice, for the erection of Catholic churches did not satisfy the zeal of the Franciscans. Accordingly in 1446 an assembly of prelates and barons met at Konjitza, the beautiful town on the borders of the Herzegovina, through which the traveller now passes on the railway from Sarajevo to Mostar. The document embodying the resolutions of this grand council has been preserved, and bears the name and seal of the King[902]. It provided that the Bogomiles “shall neither build new churches nor restore those that are falling into decay,” and that “the goods of the Catholic Church shall never be taken from it.” No less than 40,000 of the persecuted sect emigrated to the Herzegovina in consequence of this decree, and found there a refuge beneath the sway of the great magnate Stephen Vuktchich, of the house of Kosatcha, who had succeeded his uncle Sandalj in 1435, made himself practically independent of his liege lord of Bosnia and was at the same moment on good terms with the Turks and a strong Bogomile. Thus the old Bosnian realm was practically divided in two; Stephen Vuktchich, by posing as a defender of the national faith, received a considerable accession of subjects, and the Emperor Frederick III bestowed upon him in 1448 the title of _Herzog_, or Duke, of St Sava, from which his land gradually derived its present name of Herzegovina[903]. But both Bosnia and the sister land were soon to feel the hand of the Turk.

The accession of Mohammed II to the Turkish throne in 1451 was the beginning of a new era for the Balkan peoples. Since the battle of Kossovo the Sultans had been content to allow the Serbs the shadow of independence under Despots of their own, while Bosnia had bought off invasion by a tribute, more or less regularly paid, according to the vicissitudes of the Ottoman power. But the new Sultan resolved to bring the whole peninsula under his immediate sway, and lost no time in putting his plans into execution. The capture of Constantinople startled the whole of Christendom, and the great victory of Hunyady before the walls of Belgrade was small compensation for that hero’s death. There was no one left to champion the cause of the Balkan Christians, who were still occupied with their own miserable jealousies. Bosniaks and Serbs were disputing the possession of the frontier towns, which the Kings of Hungary had long ago made an apple of discord between them, and Duke Stephen of the Herzegovina was invoking the aid of the Turks at the very moment when all religious and racial enmities should have been silenced in the presence of the common foe. But it has been the misfortune of the Balkan peoples to have, like the Bourbons, learnt nothing and forgotten nothing in their centuries of suffering. They have never, save during the Balkan war of 1912-13, learnt the lesson of their mutual jealousies, and have never forgotten their historic aspirations from which those jealousies spring.

The King of Bosnia in this extremity sought aid from the west of Europe. As an obedient son of the Roman Church, he had a right to expect the help of the Pope; as a friend of the Venetians, he felt entitled to the support of the Doge. But he met with little response to his appeals. Venice, selfish as ever, was not anxious to embroil herself in Bosnian affairs, and the Pope contented himself with proclaiming a new crusade, addressing the King as the “warrior of Christ,” and promising him “a glorious victory,” in which no one else seemed desirous to share. Under these circumstances Ostojich had no alternative but to pay the tribute, which he had refused in the first flush of Hunyady’s victory at Belgrade. The one bright speck on the dark horizon was the possibility of the union of Bosnia and Serbia under one ruler by the marriage of Stephen Tomashevich, eldest son of Ostojich, with the eldest daughter of the Serbian Despot[904]. On the latter’s death in 1458, the King of Hungary acknowledged Stephen Tomashevich as Despot of all Serbia as far as the river Morava, and it seemed for the moment as if the ancient jealousies of the two neighbouring States had been finally settled and a new bulwark erected against the Turks. But the aggrandisement of the Bosnian royal family only increased its responsibilities. The important town of Semendria, which the Despot George Brankovich had founded on the Danube years before as a refuge from his enemies, and the two-and-twenty square towers of which still stand out defiant of all the ravages of Turks or Time, was strongly fortified, but its inhabitants regarded their new master, a zealous Catholic and a Hungarian nominee, as a worse foe than the Sultan himself. It is not, therefore, necessary to assume, with Pope Pius II and the King of Hungary, that Bosnian treachery betrayed them. When Mohammed II arrived at their gates they surrendered without a blow. The other Serbian towns followed the example of Semendria, and in 1459 Serbia had ceased to exist as a State and became a Pashalik of the Turkish Empire. It was the turn of Bosnia next. But Ostojich was spared the spectacle of his country’s fall. Two years later he fell in an obscure quarrel in Croatia by the hands of his brother Radivoj and his own son, Stephen Tomashevich, who succeeded to the sorry heritage of the Bosnian throne, of which he was to be the last occupant.

Stephen, son of Thomas, lost no time in seeking the aid of the Pope against the impending storm. “I was baptized as a child,” he said through the mouths of his envoys, “and have learnt to read out of Latin books. I wish, therefore, that thou wouldst send me a crown and holy bishops as a sign that thou wilt not forsake me. I pray thee also to bid the King of Hungary to go with me to the wars, for so alone can Bosnia be saved. For the Turks have built several fortresses in my kingdom and are very friendly to the peasants, to whom they promise freedom; and the limited understanding of the peasant observes not their deceit, for he believes that this freedom will last for ever. And Mohammed’s ambition knows no bounds; after me, he will attack Hungary and the Dalmatian possessions of Venice, and then march by way of Carniola and Istria into Italy, which he means to subdue; even of Rome he ofttimes speaks, and yearns to have it. But I shall be his first victim. My father foretold to thy predecessor and the Venetians the fall of Constantinople, and now I prophesy that if ye help me I shall be saved; but if not, I shall fall, and others with me.” To this eloquent appeal, which so exactly depicted the position of affairs, the Pope replied by sending his legates to the coronation—the first and last instance of a Bosnian King receiving his crown from Rome. The ceremony took place in the lovely citadel of Jajce, Hrvoje’s ancient seat, whither the new King had transferred his residence from Bobovatz for greater security. The splendour of that day and the absolute unanimity of the great nobles in support of their lord cast a final ray of light over the last page of Bosnia’s history as a Kingdom. Tomashevich made peace with all his own and his father’s enemies—with the King of Hungary, with his stepmother, Queen Catherine, and with her father, the proud Duke Stephen Vuktchich of the Herzegovina, now seriously alarmed at the advance of the Turks, who had placed a governor at Fotcha and had carved what was called the “Bosnian province” out of the district round it. The King assumed all the pompous titles of his predecessors—the sovereignty of Serbia, Dalmatia and Croatia—at a time when he could not defend his own land, and made liberal grants of privileges to Ragusa at the moment when he was imploring the Venetians to grant him a castle on the coast as a place of refuge.

The storm was not long in breaking. Mohammed II, learning that Tomashevich had promised the King of Hungary to refuse the customary tribute to the Turk, sent an envoy to demand payment. The Bosnian monarch took the envoy into his treasury and showed him the money collected for the tribute. “I do not intend,” he said, “to send the Sultan so much treasure and so rob myself of it. For should he attack me, I shall get rid of him the easier if I have money; and, if I must flee to another land, I shall live more pleasantly by means thereof[905].” So the envoy returned and told his master, and his master vowed vengeance upon the King. In the spring of 1463 he assembled a great army in Adrianople for the conquest of Bosnia. Alarmed at the result of his own defiant refusal Tomashevich sent an embassy at the eleventh hour to ask for a fifteen years’ truce. Konstantinovich, a Serbian renegade, who was an eye-witness of these events, has fortunately preserved the striking scene of Mohammed’s deceit. Concealed behind a money-chest in the Turkish treasury, he heard the Sultan’s two chief advisers decide upon the plan of campaign. “We will grant the truce,” said one of them, “and forthwith march against Bosnia, else we shall never take it, for it is mountainous, and besides, the King of Hungary and the Croats and other princes will come to its aid.” So Mohammed granted the envoys the truce which they desired, and they prepared to return and tell the good news to the King. But early next day the eavesdropper went and warned them that in the middle of the next week the Turkish army would follow on their heels. But they laughed at his tale, for they believed the word of the Sultan. Yet, sure enough, four days after their departure, Mohammed set out. One detachment of his army he sent to the Save to prevent the King of Hungary from effecting a junction with the Bosniaks, while the rest he led in person to Sjenitza, on the Bosnian frontier. His march had been so rapid and so secret that he encountered little or no resistance, until he reached the ancient castle of Bobovatz, which had stood so many a siege in Bosnia’s stormy history. The fate of this old royal residence was typical of that of the land. Its governor, Prince Radak, had been converted by force from the Bogomile faith to Catholicism. He could have defended the fortress for years even against the great Turkish army, if his heart had been in the cause. But he was, like so many of his countrymen, a Bogomile first and a Bosniak afterwards. On the third day of the siege he opened the gates to Mohammed, who found among the inmates the two envoys, whom he had so lately duped. Radak met with the fitting reward of his treachery. When he claimed from Mohammed the price for which he had stipulated, the conqueror asked him how he could keep faith with a Turk when he had betrayed his Christian master, and had him beheaded. The giant cliff of Radakovitza served as the scaffold, and still preserves the name, of the traitor.

The fall of the virgin fortress filled the Bosniaks with dismay. At the news of Mohammed’s invasion, Stephen Tomashevich had withdrawn with his family to his capital of Jajce, hoping to raise an army and get help from abroad while the invader was expending his strength before the walls of Bobovatz. But its surrender left him no time for defence. He fled at once towards Croatia, closely followed by the van of Mohammed’s army. At the fortress of Kljuch (rightly so-called, as being a “key” of Bosnia) the pursuers came up with the fugitive. The secret of the King’s presence inside was betrayed to the Turks; and their commander, anxious to avoid a lengthy siege, promised Tomashevich in writing that, if he surrendered, his life should be spared. The King relied upon the pardon and gave himself up to Mohammed’s lieutenant, who brought him as his prisoner to the Sultan at Jajce. Meanwhile, the capital, like the King, had thrown itself upon the mercy of the conqueror, and thus, almost without a blow, the three strongest places in Bosnia had fallen. Tomashevich himself helped the Sultan to complete his conquest. He wrote, at his captor’s direction, letters to all his generals and captains, bidding them surrender their towns and fortresses to the Turk. In a week more than seventy obeyed his commands, and before the middle of June, 1463, Bosnia was a Turkish Pashalik, and Mohammed, with the captive King in his train, set out for the subjection of the Herzegovina. But the “heroic Herzegovina” offered greater obstacles to the invader than “lofty Bosnia.” Against those bare limestone rocks the Turkish cavalry was useless, while the natives, accustomed to every cranny of the crags, harassed the strangers with a ceaseless guerilla warfare. Duke Stephen and his son, Vladislav, who in better days had wasted their energies in civil war, now joined hands against the common foe, and Mohammed, after a fruitless attempt to capture his capital of Blagaj, withdrew to Constantinople. But before he left he resolved to rid himself of that encumbrance, the King of Bosnia, who could now be no longer of use to his conqueror. Mohammed was bound by the solemn promise of his lieutenant to spare his prisoner’s life. But, as soon as his wishes were known, a legal excuse was invented for his inexcusable act of treachery. A learned Persian in his camp, Ali Bestami by name, pronounced the pardon to be invalid because it had been granted without the previous consent of the Sultan. Mohammed thereupon summoned Tomashevich to his presence on the “Emperor’s meadow,” near Jajce, whereupon the lithe Persian drew his sword, and, with a spring in the air, cut off the head of the last Bosnian King. According to another version, Tomashevich was first flayed alive. By the command of the Sultan, the _fetva_, in which Ali Bestami had composed the captive monarch’s sentence, was carved on the gate of Jajce, where as late as the middle of the last century could be read the words, “The true believer will not allow a snake to bite him twice from the same hole,” an allegory by which the pliant Persian strove to excuse his master’s treachery by representing his victim as the traitor. The body of Tomashevich was buried by order of the Sultan at a spot only just visible from the citadel of Jajce. In 1888 Dr Truhelka, the distinguished archæologist and custodian of the museum of Sarajevo, discovered on the right bank of the river Vrbas the skeleton of the King, the skull severed from the trunk just as history had said, with two small silver Hungarian coins, current in Bosnia in the fifteenth century, on the breast-bones. When the present writer visited Jajce, he found the skeleton set up in the Franciscan church there—a sad memorial of Bosnia’s past greatness. His portrait adorns the Franciscan monastery of Sutjeska. His uncle, Radivoj, and his cousin were executed after him; his half-brother and half-sister carried off as captives, and his widow, Maria, became the wife of a Turkish official[906].

Thus, after an existence of eighty-seven years, fell the Bosnian Kingdom. Mainly by the faults of her people and the mistakes of her rulers, mediæval Bosnia lost her independence. The country is naturally strong, and under the resolute government of one man, uniting all creeds and all classes beneath his banner, might have held out, like Montenegro, against the Turkish armies. But the jealousies of the nobles, and the still fiercer rivalries of the Roman Catholics and the Bogomiles, prepared the way for the invader, and when he came the persecuted heretics welcomed him as a deliverer, preferring “the mufti’s turban to the cardinal’s hat.” This lesson of Bosnia’s fall is full of meaning for our own time, and those who meditate on her future destinies should not forget her past mistakes. She is perhaps the best and the saddest example of what boundless mischief religious persecution can accomplish.

Bosnia had entered upon her four centuries of submission to the Turks. Her King was dead, his consort and his step-mother, Queen Catherine, in exile, and his people at the mercy of the conqueror. Many of them were enlisted in the Turkish corps of Janissaries; many more fled to Croatia, Istria and the Dalmatian towns; a few took to the mountains, like the more or less mythical hero Toma, the Robin Hood of the Bosnian ballads, and lived as brigands and outlaws; most of the Bogomiles embraced the faith of Islâm, and became in the course of generations more fanatical than the Turks themselves. It seemed as if they would be left in sole possession of the land, but the earnest appeal of a Franciscan monk induced Mohammed to grant the Christians the free exercise of their religion and thus stay the tide of emigration from the country. But, though Bosnia could not defend herself, the Turks were not allowed undisturbed possession. Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary, had been outwitted by the rapid march of Mohammed, but in the autumn of the very year in which Bosnia fell he set out to her rescue. The campaign was successful, and, aided by Duke Stephen’s eldest son Vladislav[907], and a Herzegovinian contingent, the Hungarians recovered Jajce, Banjaluka, and about twenty-five other towns. Even the return of Mohammed in the next spring failed to secure the second surrender of Jajce. Such was the terror of the Hungarian arms that the mere report of the King’s approach made him throw his cannon into the Vrbas and raise the siege. Matthias Corvinus now organised the part of Bosnia which he had conquered from the Turks into two Duchies or _banats_, one of which took its name from Jajce and the other from Srebrenik. Over these territories, which embraced all Lower Bosnia, he placed Nicholas of Ilok, a Hungarian magnate, with the title of King. Thus, under Hungarian rule, two portions of the old Bosnian Kingdom remained free from the Turks for two generations more, serving as a “buffer State” between the Ottoman Power and the Christian lands of Croatia and Slavonia.

The Herzegovina, which had repulsed the conqueror of Bosnia, did not long survive the sister state. The great Duke Stephen Vuktchich died in 1466 and his three sons Vladislav, Vlatko and Stephen, divided his possessions between them. The eldest, however, whose quarrels with his father had wrought such infinite harm to his country, did not long govern the northern part of the Herzegovina, which fell to his share. He entered the Venetian service, and thence emigrated to Croatia, where he died. The second brother, Vlatko, assuming the title of Duke of St Sava re-united for a time the remains of the Duchy under his sole rule, relying now on Venetian, now on Neapolitan aid, but only secure as long as Mohammed II allowed him to linger on as a tributary of Turkey. In 1481 he ventured to invade Bosnia, but was driven back to seek shelter in his stronghold of Castelnuovo. Two years later Bayezid II annexed the Herzegovina, whose last reigning Duke died on the island of Arbe. The title continued, however, to be borne by Vladislav’s son, Peter Balsha, as late as 1511. The youngest embraced the creed and entered the service of the conqueror. Under the name of Ahmed Pasha Herzegovich[908], or, “the Duke’s son,” he gained a great place in Turkish history, and after having governed Anatolia and commanded the Ottoman fleet, attained to the post of Grand Vizier. His name and origin are still preserved by the little Turkish town of Hersek, on the Gulf of Ismid, near which he was buried.

All Bosnia and the Herzegovina, with the exception of the two newly formed _banats_ of Jajce and Srebrenik, were now in the hands of the Turks. On the death of Nicholas of Ilok the meaningless title of “King of Bosnia” was dropped, and his successors contented themselves with the more modest name of _ban_, which had already been so familiar in Bosnian history. But the Turks did not allow the Hungarian viceroys undisturbed possession of their lands. Jajce became the great object of every Turkish attack, and against its walls the armies of Islâm dashed themselves again and again in vain. But after the capture of the _banat_ of Srebrenik in 1520, it was clear that the doom of Jajce could not be long delayed. Two great feats of arms, however, shed lustre over the last years of the royal city. Usref, the Turkish governor of Bosnia, who will always be remembered as the founder of the noble mosque which is the chief beauty of Sarajevo, had vowed that he would succeed where his predecessors had failed. So he collected a large army and invested Jajce. But, finding force useless, he pretended to raise the siege, so as to take the place unawares. But Peter Keglevich, who was at that time its _ban_, easily outwitted his crafty assailant. He bade the wives and daughters of the garrison sally forth and dance and sing—for it was the eve of a festival—on the “King’s meadow” outside the walls. Deceived by this feint, the Turks made a night attack upon the town. As they came near, they heard the sound of the _gusle_ and saw the feet of the maidens dancing in the moonlight on the green sward. The sight was more than they could bear. Casting their scaling ladders aside, they rushed upon the damsels instead of climbing the walls. At that moment Keglevich charged at the head of his men, while at the sound of the cannon a second detachment, which he had sent out into the woods, attacked the besiegers in the rear. Even the women bore their part in the fight, and not a Turk left the field alive. Once again Keglevich held his capital against the foe. Usref reappeared with a new army and laid siege to the city for a year and a half. Hunger began to make its appearance, even horse-flesh was unprocurable, and one mother threw her child into the Vrbas rather than see it die a lingering death; it seemed as if the garrison must surrender or starve. But Keglevich managed to despatch a trusty messenger to Buda-Pesth, where, in Count Frangipane he found a ready listener. Backed up by King Louis II of Hungary and the Pope, he raised an army and relieved the town, after a great battle. Frangipane received from the delighted King the title of “Defender and Protector of the Kingdoms of Dalmatia, Croatia, and Slavonia” in return for this signal service. But next year King Louis fell in the fatal battle of Mohács at the hands of the Turks, and from that moment Hungary was unable to protect her Bosnian outpost. Keglevich, weary of warfare and old in years, gave up the _banat_ of Jajce to King Ferdinand I, who put a German garrison into the capital. But the German soldiers had had no experience of Turkish warfare, and their new commanders lacked the spirit of old Keglevich. Usref saw that the moment had come to redeem his former failures. Hungary and Croatia were in the throes of civil war, and not a hand was stretched out to save the doomed city. A ten days’ siege by the allied forces of Usref and his colleague, the Vizier of Serbia, was sufficient to make Jajce surrender. Banjaluka held out a little longer, and its brave governor set fire to the town rather than give it up to the enemy. With its fall, in 1528, all Bosnia was in the possession of the Turks, and for the next 170 years the German Emperors, who were now also Kings of Hungary, could make no effort to substantiate the old Hungarian claims to the lands south of the Save. Bosnia served as the starting-point from which Turkish armies ravaged their adjoining territories, and until the Ottoman power began to wane at the end of the seventeenth century, the Habsburgs had quite enough to do in defending their own land.

Left to themselves, the Turks organised the conquered provinces, without interfering with the feudal system, which had struck its roots so deep in Bosnian soil. A Turkish governor, called at first by the title of _sandjak beg_ and then by those of Pasha and _Vali_, represented the majesty of the Sultan, and moved his residence according to the requirements of Turkish policy. In the early days his seat was at Vrhbosna, round which the city of Sarajevo grew up; but, as the Turkish arms advanced further, Banjaluka was chosen as the official capital, while, when they receded at the close of the seventeenth century, the Pasha moved to Travnik, whence he issued his proclamations as “_Vali_ of Hungary.” But, however high-sounding his titles, the Turkish governor was often, as the Bosnian Kings had been, the mere figure-head, while all real power was in the hands of the great nobles, who gradually became hereditary headmen or _capetans_ of the forty-eight divisions of the province. So strong was their influence that they long resisted all attempts to transfer the Turkish headquarters from Travnik back to Sarajevo, and permitted the Pasha to visit the present capital only on sufferance and to remain there no more than forty-eight hours. It was not till 1850 that Omar Pasha put down all resistance and re-established the seat of government at Sarajevo, where it has since remained. But throughout the Turkish period the native aristocracy of Bosnia merely tolerated the Sultan’s representatives, of whom there were no less than 214 in 415 years, or an average of one every twenty months, and at times even flatly refused to obey orders from Constantinople itself. In a word, Bosnia under the Turks was an aristocratic republic, with a titular foreign head.

The social condition of the country changed, indeed, very little with the change of government. The Bogomiles, who had formed the bulk of the old Bosnian aristocracy, hastened to embrace the faith of Islâm upon the Turkish invasion. They had preferred to be conquered by the Sultan than converted by the Pope; and, when once they had been conquered, they did not hesitate to be converted also. The Mussulman creed possessed not a few points of resemblance with their own despised heresy. It conferred, too, the practical advantage upon those who embraced it of retaining their lands and their feudal privileges. Thus Bosnia presents us with the curious phenomenon of an aristocratic caste, Slav by race yet Mohammedan by religion. Hence the country affords a striking contrast to Serbia. There the Mohammedans were never anything more than a foreign colony of Turks; here the Mohammedans were native Slavs, men of the same race as the Christians, whom they despised. But, while the Bosnian nobles, henceforth styled _begs_ or _agas_ according as they were of greater or less distinction, never forgot that they were Bosniaks, they displayed the customary zeal of converts, and out-Ottomaned the Ottomans in their religious fanaticism. On the one hand, they carefully preserved the heirlooms of their Bogomile forefathers, the Serb speech, and the old Glagolitic script; on the other, they were keener in the cause of Islâm than the Commander of the Faithful himself. The iron of papal persecution had entered into their ancestors’ souls, and the legacy thus inherited influenced the whole future of Bosnia. The Turks were not slow to recognise the merits of these new allies. It soon became a maxim of state that “one must be the son of a Christian renegade to attain to the highest dignities of the Turkish Empire.” In the long list of Pashas of Bosnia, we notice several who were called “the Bosniak” from their race. As early as 1470 we find mention of a native governor, Sinan Beg, who built the mosque at Tchajnitza, his birth-place. Just a century later a Herzegovinian renegade became Grand Vizier, and his successor was a member of the famous Bosnian family of Sokolovich, to whom tradition ascribes the foundation of Sarajevo. The natural aptitude of the Bosniaks for managing their own countrymen led the Sultans to choose their representatives from among them; for, in a highly aristocratic community like Bosnia, the head of an old family enjoyed far more respect, even though he were poor, than an upstart foreigner, who had nothing to commend him but his ostentation and his office. Now and again we hear of a Turkish governor like Usref, the conqueror of Jajce, whose word is supreme, and whose religious endowments are “richer than those in any other province of the Empire.” But the general rule is that the native nobles are the repositories of power, while the Sultan’s representative is a mere fleeting figure, here to-day and gone to-morrow.

While most of the Bogomiles had gone over to Islâm, there still remained some who adhered to the ancient doctrines of that maligned sect. The question has been much discussed as to the existence of these sectaries in Bosnia to-day. That some of them were still to be found in the beginning of the seventeenth century is clear from the report of a traveller of that period. A century and a half later the Franciscans asserted that the sect was extinct. This sweeping assertion does not, however, accord with later discoveries. There are parts of the Herzegovina, almost inaccessible till the construction of the railway from Sarajevo to Mostar, where traditions of the Bogomiles still linger. Thus, in the neighbourhood of Jablanitza, a region covered with Bogomile tombstones, the women, although Mohammedans, go unveiled—a custom all the more remarkable because the Mussulmans of Bosnia are, as a rule, far more particular about veiling than their co-religionists at Constantinople. It is, therefore, thought that this may be an old Bogomile observance, and it is stated by a recent ecclesiastical historian that only a few years before the Austrian occupation a family named Helej, living near Konjitza, abandoned the “Bogomile madness” for the Mohammedan faith.

Bosnia, “the lion that guards the gates of Stambûl,” as the Turkish annalists called her, had to bear the full brunt of the struggle between Christendom and Islâm, as soon as the power of the Turks was beaten back from before the walls of Vienna, and driven out from within the walls of Buda-Pesth. The tide of Ottoman invasion began to ebb at the close of the seventeenth century from Hungary, Croatia and Slavonia, and the rivers Save and Una once more formed the boundaries between the domains of the Crescent and the Cross. Not without reason did the Bosniaks talk of “going to Europe” when they traversed the Save.

And now, after more than a century and a half of forgetfulness, the House of Habsburg remembered the ancient claims of the Hungarian Crown to the old Bosnian Kingdom. Henceforth, from being the starting-point of every Turkish attack upon the Hungarian dominions, Bosnia became the object of every expedition from beyond the Save and the Una. Ten times did the Imperial troops enter the country without permanent results, until at last in our own days the Austro-Hungarian forces occupied it with the consent of Europe. The first expedition, led by Prince Louis of Baden in 1688, entered Bosnia from the east, captured Zvornik, but collapsed before the strong fortifications of Banjaluka. Two years later an Imperial general beat the Turks near Dolnja Tuzla, and took back a number of Catholic Bosniaks with him to Croatia. In that year, indeed, the condition of the country was most miserable. Famine and pestilence raged unchecked, and the quaint old Franciscan monk who wrote a chronicle of that time, tells us how “blood-red snow fell upon the mountains,” and how the devil went about with bow and arrows to slay the people. One memorial of that _année terrible_ still remains in the shape of a Turkish copper coin, which was minted in Sarajevo to defray the expenses of the Turkish army, and is almost the only example of a separate Turkish currency for Bosnia. A third invasion from the side of Croatia in 1693, although fairly successful, pales beside the daring exploit of Prince Eugène in 1697. This twenty days’ campaign has never been forgotten, and it is all the more interesting, because the dashing Prince of Savoy took the same route which was followed by the main body of the Austro-Hungarian army in 1878. Crossing the Save at Brod with 6000 men, the Prince went straight up the valley of the Bosna, along the course of the present railway to Sarajevo, capturing on his way Doboj, Maglaj, Jeptche and the picturesque Vranduk, rightly named in Turkish “the gate” of the country. Sarajevo itself seemed at his mercy, but the Bosnian Christians did not respond to his appeals, there was no rising of the _rajah_ in his favour, and he retired with an immense booty and 40,000 Christian refugees, whom he settled in Slavonia. The peace of Carlovitz two years later ratified the old boundaries of the Turk and Christendom.

But the war between the Emperor and the Sultan, which broke out in 1716, and was terminated by the peace of Passarovitz, had favourable, if only temporary, results for Bosnia as well as for Serbia. The military efforts of the Imperial troops in Bosnia were unsuccessful, but at the peace, just as Belgrade and half Serbia were rescued from the Turk, so also north Bosnia was transferred to the Emperor in his capacity of King of Hungary and Croatia. But the disastrous peace of Belgrade in 1739 restored all that had been gained at Passarovitz in 1718. The strategy of the Duke of Hildburghausen and Baron Raunach, the Imperial commanders in Bosnia, utterly failed before Ostrvitza and Banjaluka, and the Save and the Una once more became the frontiers. No Imperial army crossed them again for half a century, and even then it merely crossed to return empty-handed. The peace of Sistova in 1791 ratified that of Belgrade, and Bosnia remained, in spite of Austrian victories, a Turkish province, in fact till 1878, in name till 1908.

4. BALKAN EXILES IN ROME