Chapter IV: Introduction: The Tragedy of a Frontier (2)

After Kossovo some of the Serbian nobles had fled to Hungary, to Bosnia and to Montenegro. It was among the almost inaccessible, bleak rocks of Montenegro that a few thousand Serbs managed to retain their liberty. Various Serbian tribes or clans thus found a refuge, and owing to their isolation from each other they preserved their differences. They have, in fact, preserved them, as well as the tribal organization, down to the present day. And then there was Dubrovnik, the stalwart little republic. Now that she stood alone she needed all her acumen. Yet if she paid necessary tribute to the powerful, she would not give up helping the fallen. From this Catholic town in 1390, the following message was sent to the Serbian Prince Vuk Brankovi['c]: "If--and God forbid that it should be so--Gospodin Vuk should not succeed in saving Serbia, and should be driven thence either by the Magyars or the Turks or anyone else, we will receive the Gospodin Vuk and the Gospodja Mara his wife, together with their children and their treasure, in all good faith in our city; and if Gospodin Vuk desire to build a church of his own faith here for his use, he shall be at liberty to do so."[19]

Darkness lay over the world of the Southern Slav--under the Turk there was no history. Generation followed generation, but the day of Kossovo does not seem to the Serbs as though it were a distant day. Do not we who go about our business in the brilliance of the morning sometimes linger to recall the frightful setting of the sun? And every year the Serbian people sing the Mass for the repose of them who died at Kossovo.... When, after more than five hundred years, the Serbian soldiers in the Balkan War came back to this historic plain one saw them halting, without being ordered to do so, crossing themselves and presenting arms.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 4: From the word _sloviti_, to speak--meaning those
who can speak to and comprehend one another.]

[Footnote 5: Premrou quotes from the account of this
ambassador's journey in the year 965, which was published at
Petrograd in 1898.]

[Footnote 6: Cf. _Serbia_, by L. F. Waring. London, 1917.]

[Footnote 7: The sources of the ancient history of Croatia
have been collected by F. Ra[vc]ki in his _Documenta historiae
Croaticae periodum antiquam illustrantia_, Zagreb, 1877. Cf.
also his well-known and excellent essays in _Rad. jugoslav.
Akad._; the _Poviest Hrvata de Vjekoslav Klai[vc]_, Zagreb,
1899-1911, and a short but very good account by F.
Si[vs]i['c] in _Pregled povijesti hrv. naroda_, Zagreb, 1916.
I am indebted for these references to Dr. Yovan Radoni['c],
who is regarded as among the first of Croat historians.]

[Footnote 8: This book, dating from 1395, is in the town
library of Reims.]

[Footnote 9: "The Bulgarians, in their historical,
ethnographical and political frontiers." Text in four
languages. Berlin, 1917.]

[Footnote 10: _La Macedoine_, by Simeon Radeff. Sofia, 1918.]

[Footnote 11: _Obzor Chronografov_, published by Professor
Popov in 1863.]

[Footnote 12: _Pester Lloyd_, June 21, 1917.]

[Footnote 13: _Introduction a l'Histoire de l'Asie._ Paris,
1896.]

[Footnote 14: In a monograph on the 600th anniversary of the
Church of St. Mary at Celje (Celje, 1910) there is reproduced
a contemporary narrative of the funeral of Count Ulrich.
After describing how the widow, the noble lady Catharine, had
with dire wailing gone round the altar and offered sacrifice,
being followed by all the congregation, it proceeds: "Da diss
geschehen gieng wieder herfuer ein geharnischter Mann, der
Namb zu sich Schilt, Helmb, Wappen, legte sich auf die Erden,
vnd striche gar lauth, ganz erbaermlich vnd gar Claeglich mit
heller stimbe drei mahl nacheinander Graffen zu Cilli, vnd
Nimmehr zerreiss die Panier, Zerbrach die Wappen da war
Allererst ein Clagen, dass es nicht einen Menschen, sondern
ein harten stain hete Erbarmen Moegen."]

[Footnote 15: Cf. A lecture delivered by Sir Arthur Evans
before the Royal Geographical Society, January 10, 1916.]

[Footnote 16: Cf. _La Fine della Serenissima_, by Ricciotti
Bratti. Milan, 1919.]

[Footnote 17: _Suedosteuropaeische Fragen_, by Hermann Wendel.
Berlin, 1918.]

[Footnote 18: His equipment, as M. Charles Loiseau (in _Le
Balkan Slave et la Crise Autrichienne_, Paris, 1898) remarks
very truly, "n'est pas banal." One of his historians relates
that he was furnished with a sword, a lance, javelins and
arrows trimmed with falcons' feathers, sometimes also with a
sabre and a small axe. He was garbed in a cloak of wolf's
skin, using the same skin for his cap, round which was wound
a dark piece of cloth. On his saddle was a scarf of silk. The
reins of his horse were gilded, and he carried in his right
hand a javelin of iron, gold and silver, weighing 150 lb.
(?), and this he balanced on the left side with a large skin
of wine. On his back was a magnificent cloak, and behind him
there was a folded tent.]

[Footnote 19: _Monumenta Serbica_, edited by F. Miklosi['c].]

II

FIGHTING THE DARKNESS

THE VENETIANS IN DALMATIA--METHODS OF THE TURK--THE SLAVS WHO MIGRATED--THE CONSOLATION OF THOSE WHO REMAINED--GOOD LIVING IN HUNGARY--THE PROTESTANT INFLUENCE--DUBROVNIK, REFUGE OF THE ARTS--HOW SHE SMOOTHED HER WAY--HER COMMERCIAL ENTERPRISE--HER NORTHERN KINSMEN AND THE MILITARY FRONTIERS--THE OPPRESSIVE OVERLORDS OF THE YUGOSLAVS--THE GREAT MIGRATION UNDER THE PATRIARCH--ACTIVITIES OF THE SOUTHERN SLAVS UNDER THE HABSBURGS--THE POSITION OF THEIR CHURCH--SERBS ASSIST THE BULGARIAN RENASCENCE--THE GERMAN COLONISTS IN THE BANAT--THE SOUTHERN SLAV COLONISTS AND THEIR RELIGION--BUNJEVCI, [vS]OKCI AND KRA[vS]OVANI.

THE VENETIANS IN DALMATIA

One might argue that the Slav of Dalmatia had no gratitude, because when Serbia and Bosnia were utterly under the Turk, when the Slovenes of Carniola, Carinthia and Southern Styria suffered between 1463 and 1528 no less than ten Turkish invasions, when in the middle of that fifteenth century the crescent floated over all Croatia and only the fortified towns of the seacoast and the islands remained in the Christian hands of Venice, whom a fair number of these towns and islands had called in to protect them, surely one might argue that it was not seemly if the local population, Croats and Serbs, detested the Venetians. And on hearing that not long ago an orator in the Italian Parliament exclaimed, "I cani croati!"--a description that was greeted with a whirlwind of applause--you possibly might argue that the Speaker should have reprimanded him because ingratitude is not a quality associated with dogs.

As we gaze at the splendid structures, the palaces, the forts, the magnificent cathedral of [vS]ibenik that was begun in 1443, the loggia of Trogir and Hvar, the loggia of Zadar--"a perfect example," we are told, "of a public court of justice of the Venetian period"--the towers on the old town-walls of Kor[vc]ula, as we gaze at all those elegant and useful and robust and picturesque buildings which bear the sign of the Lion of St. Mark, do not the complaints of the disgruntled population of that period tax our patience?

We may waive the fact that the [vS]ibenik cathedral was left unfinished for centuries, being only completed by public subscription under the Austrians; we may overlook the fact that the Lion of St. Mark was sometimes placed on a building not erected by the Venetians. This we can see at the Frankopan Castle on Krk, and elsewhere. But it would be unjust if we held Venice up to blame on account of some exuberant citizens. There are many other buildings in Dalmatia which undoubtedly were built by the Venetians: palaces and forts and walls and loggia which are perfect examples of a Venetian court of justice.

Some one may ask why the Venetians built no churches that were half as beautiful as those--say, St. Grisogono at Zadar, the cathedrals of Zadar and Trogir, and so forth--which were constructed under the Croatian kings. Well, the possession of such churches would have been a source of pride to the Dalmatians (and have kept awake the national spirit more than did the forts and loggia), and the Venetians wanted to preserve the people from the sin of pride. There was also a feeling that the Dalmatian forests were a source of pride to the people. So the Venetians removed them. They were able to make use of the wood for their numerous vessels, for the foundations of their palaces, and as an article of export to Egypt and Syria.[20]

Then some one else may ask about the schools. One must confess that the Venetians built no schools. But, nay dear sir, contemplate the curious carving round the windows of that palace, and then there is that perfect example of a Venetian court of justice. Was it not unreasonable for some of the Dalmatians to be discontented it they and their countrymen were allowed no schools, seeing that one did not need a school in order to be eligible for the army or commercial navy, which were the professions open to the natives of Dalmatia? With regard to those natives who really wanted to have a University diploma--well, the University of Padua was prepared to grant one without an examination; the "overseas subjects" could become doctors of medicine or of law on the simple production of a certificate from two doctors or two lawyers of their country, stating that the candidate was a capable person. Thereupon he was allowed to practise--in Dalmatia. And Venice herself was disposed to grant privileges, such as an exemption from all taxes, to those noblemen and burgesses and highly placed clergy who were well disposed to her. But as for schools, she could not ignore an anonymous work of the end of the sixteenth century, which was attributed to Fra Paolo Sarpi, the learned councillor of the Republic; he warned them in this book that "if you wish the Dalmatians to remain faithful to you, then keep them in ignorance," and again: "In proportion as Dalmatia is poor and a wilderness, so will her neighbours be less anxious to seize her."

With regard to roads--how could Venice be expected to build roads? They might have been of service to the population of the interior, but they would have caused a certain number of those people to devote themselves to trade, and thus would have prevented them from guarding the land against the Turk, which was the unquestioned duty of a man who lived in the interior.

When the Venetians retired from Dalmatia in 1797, after holding it for three to four hundred years, the country as a country was not flourishing. The total of exports and imports was such as would now satisfy a single large trader. But, of course, the land possessed those buildings with the Lion of St. Mark upon them--which were possibly put up with the idea of enhancing the prestige of the Republic--and it possessed the loggia.

In 1797 when the Austrians arrived they found in the prisons of Zadar that, out of two hundred convicts, fifty were beyond human punishment, and of these one had been dead for five years. The system was that the Government allotted to the prisoners for their subsistence a sum that was so inadequate that they were obliged to borrow from the warders; and when the prisoner had served his sentence and was unable to repay the warder, this functionary kept him under lock and key. There in the same dungeon lay the untried and the convicts and the insane, for whom there was no separate habitation. It was impossible, said those who set them free, to describe the horrors of filth, the bare ground not being even covered with straw, the windows being permanently closed with blocks of wood, so that the poor inmates could never get a glimpse of the loggia, that perfect example of a Venetian court of justice. The hospital at Split was a damp cellar, and outside it was a ditch of stinking water. The foundling home, which was called _Pieta_, was a room so horrible that, out of six hundred and three new-born children who had been there in ten years, _not one had gone out alive_.

But were not these abuses general at that epoch? And can we demand that the Venetians of that time shall answer the reproaches which it pleases us to make? And what answer did they give to the reproaches of their subjects, illustrious Dalmatians, such as Tommaseo and Pietro Alessandro Paravia, who, although belonging to the Italophil party, passed the sternest judgment on the authorities? What excuse could there be in 1797, seeing that, the wars having concluded at the beginning of the eighteenth century, Venice was free to undertake a humanitarian and civilizing work? Venice was by no means in a disarming state of decrepitude. On her own lands she had brought her stock-raising, her agriculture and her industries to such a pitch of development that she had the experience, as well as the initiative and the means, to do something for the Dalmatians who, and especially in the interior, knew no other trade than that of arms. Terrible was the desolation of those days; over large areas there was no drinking-water; the land was merely used to pasture the herds of almost wild cattle; instead of the superb forests were hundreds of miles of naked rock; and nowhere had the Venetian families, to whom the Government had given great holdings, come to settle down among their peasants. Nothing at all had been done in the way of canalization or of drainage, so that the land was devastated with malarial fever. In 1797 only 256,000 inhabitants remained; a hundred years later the number had doubled. It had much more than doubled if we take into account those who emigrated from a land which could no longer support the population of the early Middle Ages.

In 1797 the Venetian democrats begged Napoleon not to take Dalmatia from them, since the harbours and the population were indispensable to them. They made no allusion to the sentiments of affection which united these provinces to the Mother Country.

But are we unfair to the Venetians? Are we omitting the salient fact that, even if they were not model administrators, they at all events kept out the Turk, who would possibly have been more nefarious than themselves?... When troops were needed to fight the Turk these were for the most part provided, in the several long campaigns, by the Croats and Serbs of Dalmatia.

And what has been the fruit of all this? Let us take an Italian writer's observations on the people of the interior, the Morlaks.[21] In his book _I Morlacchi_ (Rome, 1890), Signor Francesco Majnoni D'Intignano says that they are "endowed with courage and, like all courageous people, with frankness. They say what they think and their sentiments are openly displayed. Thus, for example, they do not attempt to conceal their antipathy against the Italians. They are no longer mindful of the benefits which they received in the past nor of the fact that the Venetians freed them from the Turkish yoke; and this is so not only because of the lapse of years, but because under the Venetian rule they did not feel themselves independent; they saw in the Italian merely that astuteness which knows how to profit from other people's toil, and which has no thought of making any payment. In the Italian they have no faith, and so their 'Lazmansko Viro' (Italian fidelity) is equivalent to the Romans' expression 'Greek fidelity.' But all this does not prevent them, when they have occasion to offer hospitality to an Italian, from offering it with every courtesy."

It is hardly worth while inquiring whether the Venetians or the Turks wrought more evil against their Yugoslav subjects. But though the modern Italian claim to Dalmatia and the islands may appear to us--in so far as it is based on historical grounds--to have small weight, nevertheless we must not allow it to make us insensible to the Venetian's good qualities. It may not nowadays be reckoned as meritorious that, after her own interests had been safeguarded, she did not interfere with the privileges of the small class of nobles, the "magnifica communita nobile," but at any rate it could be said of her that she left intact the local privileges. One must also bear in mind that the majority of her subjects in those parts had, through one cause or another, a prejudice against innovations which could only be broken down very gradually.

Nor were the Turks altogether vicious. Those who came first into the Yugoslav lands were under a severe discipline, and, preserving the austere habits of a warlike race, they were not guilty--generally speaking--of excesses. As the first comers were not very numerous, they contented themselves with occupying the strategic points; and as the Yugoslavs were accustomed to the life of a State not being very prolonged, they were cheered by the thought that their subjugation to the Turk would fairly soon come to an end.

METHODS OF THE TURK

After the Turk had made himself master of Bosnia and Herzegovina he enrolled among his janissaries 30,000 of the young men, and in other parts of Yugoslavia showed himself inclined at first to permit the people to follow their own traditions, their religion,[22] their language and their customs, so long as he was maintained in luxury and so long as a sufficient supply of young men was forthcoming. The abominable acts of cruelty, by which he is now remembered in the Balkans, appear to have started at a later period, when he had himself degenerated, when his lawless soldiery provoked the people, when the people rose and he suppressed them in a manner that would make them hesitate to rise again. But from the first he saw to it that there should be recruits; many a young Slav taken early from his home was transformed at Constantinople into a redoubtable janissary who fought against Europeans; these troops, who were not allowed to marry, gave an absolute obedience. They were perhaps the finest infantry in the world--for two hundred years they formed the strongest prop of the Turkish Empire. Paulus Jovius, the historian, says that in 1531 nearly the whole corps of janissaries spoke Slav. Other young men were received into the Government offices--the Porte, until the end of the seventeenth century, used the Serbian language for its international transactions; its treaties with the Holy Roman Empire, for example, were all made out in Serbian and Greek. Finally there were not wanting Southern Slavs who rose to high distinction in the Sultan's service, such as Mehemet Sokolovi['c], who, after being thrice pasha of Bosnia, was elevated to the post of grand vizier; Achmet Pasha Herzegovi['c] (son of the last chief of Herzegovina), whose conversion was followed by an appointment as Bey of Anatolia; he became brother-in-law of Sultan Bajazet II. and likewise grand vizier. There was Sinan Pasha, a Bosnian, who constructed in [vC]ajnica, his native place, the handsome mosque that still exists, and there was the renowned Osman Pasvantooelu Pasha, also of Bosnian origin, who appeared in 1794 outside the historic fortress called Baba Vida (Grandmother Vida), of the dusty, old rambling town of Vidin on the Danube. Having won his way into the fortress he was elected governor, and a year later he became Pasha. His independence was remarkable even at a period when Mahmud Bushatli Pasha flourished at Scutari and Ali Pasha at Jannina, so that Lamartine described Turkey in Europe as "une confederation d'anarchies." Pasvantooelu coined his own money, and, amongst other exploits, placed on the outside of a mosque his own monogram instead of the Caliph's emblem. Therefore the outraged Sultan sent against him three armies in succession, and each of them went back from Vidin vanquished. The pasha was a brave and energetic man of iron will, a great soldier and an expert architect. He built famous places of worship, whose gilded arabesques, whose fountains in the silent courts may bring us to meditate on one who died in 1807, three years after the first insurrection of his fellow-Yugoslav, Kara George. In Pasvantooelu's great library at Vidin there are one hundred and twelve books on scientific and literary matters. The Pasha was venerated and was regarded almost with dread for having managed to assemble so many volumes dealing with other than spiritual affairs.

THE SLAVS WHO MIGRATED

But, apart from the Bogomiles, the number of those who of their own free will went over to the Turks was scanty. Far more numerous were those who abandoned their country and crossed the Danube to Hungary, to Transylvania, to Wallachia, to Bessarabia, thus returning with weary hearts to some of the places which, a thousand years before, had seen their shaggy ancestors come trooping westward. What they heard in the Banat, the part of southern Hungary they came to first, must have induced a large proportion of them to remain, for they were told by those who had migrated after Kossovo, in the days of old George Brankovi['c] and of Stephen the son of Du[vs]an, that this was a good land and that the masters of it, the Hungarians, were much more easy to live under than the Turks. Not that it was necessary to live under them, because one could settle in the lands or in the towns which had been given by some arrangement to Stephen and to George Brankovi['c]. These were lands so wide that all the Slav wanderers could make a home on them; they extended to the river Maro[vs] and even beyond it. If they settled in one of those districts it would be under one of their own leaders and judges, not those of the Hungarians. There did not seem to be many Hungarians, and perhaps that was why they wanted other people in the country, especially now that the Turk was not far off. If anyone decided to live under the Hungarians, that also was much better than under the Turks; in this country of fine horses you were not prevented from going on horseback. Then it was much easier to speak to the Hungarians, because a great many words in their language, particularly the words which had to do with agriculture, seemed to be Slav. So alluring, in fact, was the state of things in the Banat, as these people painted it, that many of the immigrants, in their relief and happiness, wanted to hear no more. They scarcely listened while they were being told about the Slav settlers, in pretty large numbers, who had been there longer still, people who said that they had lived there always, even before the building of the Slav monasteries, and some of these were three or four hundred years old, as could be proved by rescripts of the Popes. Likewise those who had always lived there reported that some of their own race had been great men--one had been the Palatine of Hungary in the days when King Stephen II. was a child, another was the Palatine Belouch, brother to Queen Helen; and were not the monasteries there to remind one of the leaders, the voivodas, who liked to raise such temples so that prayers could be said for the repose of their souls?

It was known that a people which professed the same religion as themselves--"a people of shepherds," as King Andrew II. called them in a decree dated 1222, the time of their first appearance in Hungary--it was known that these Roumanians from Wallachia were just advancing from Caras-Severin, the most easterly of the three counties of the Banat, into Temes, which is the central one. But even if they came farther west it did not seem to matter; one had a kindly feeling for them, since there was a good deal of Slav in their language, and if they were averse from building monasteries, that was their own affair. They had, it was interesting to learn, invited a Serb, the same man who had erected Krushedol monastery in Syrmia, to build one at least as imposing for them at a place called Argesu, to the north of Bucharest.

Thus one cannot be surprised that hundreds and thousands of Serbs and Bulgars quitted their native lands--they were not known to the Turks as Serbs and Bulgars, but merely as raia of the province of Rumili--and crossed the Danube, the Serbs going chiefly to their own countryfolk in Banat and the lands to the west of it, while the Bulgars went partly to the Banat, where their descendants have won fame as market-gardeners, but chiefly to Roumania, settling in villages round Bucharest.

THE CONSOLATION OF THOSE WHO REMAINED

Those who preferred to take arms against the Turk had the choice either of leaving their country and entering the service of one which was at war with Turkey or else abiding in their own land, gathering in bodies of fifty to a hundred men, massacring as many Turks as possible, protecting and avenging their own people, sometimes being killed themselves, otherwise returning to the mountains every spring. The "heiduks," as they were called, had the people's unbounded devotion. Their achievements, perhaps a little touched with romance, were celebrated in the people's songs, and as it may be of interest to know what kind of song this people made in the period of uttermost depression, I give overleaf a couple that are concerned with heiduks; they are translations from a book of mine, _The Shade of the Balkans_, which is out of print.

I.

Go now and tell them,
Tell your companions
That, O Heiduk,
I have cut off your hands.

Cut away, cut away,
For I did curse them
When, O Buljuk Pasha,
They trembled on the gun.

Go now and tell them,
Tell your companions
That, O heiduk,
I have pricked out your eyes.

Prick away, prick away,
For I did curse them
When, O Buljuk Pasha,
They failed along the gun.

Go now and tell them,
Tell your companions
That, O heiduk,
I have hacked off your head.

Hack away, hack away,
For I did curse it
When, O Buljuk Pasha,
It compassed not your end.

II.

O Mechmed,[23] my beloved son,
Have you come wounded back to me?
Where is your pipe and your heiduk garb?
--Ask me not, ask me not.
Ask me rather where are my comrades.
With six hundred I went to the mountains--
Six of them live and brought me hither,
Brought me though themselves were wounded.
A little time and I must die,--
Call everyone of those I love,
For I would take my leave of them.

When all were come young Mechmed said:
Mother, how long will you mourn for me?
--Till I step down to you in darkness.
Father, how long will you mourn for me?
--Till the raven's wing is white
And I see grapes on the willow-tree.
Sisters, how long will you mourn for me?
--Till we have babes to sing asleep.
How long will you mourn, my beloved?
--Till I go down among the flowers
And bring a nosegay back for him.

The Turk had thrown aside any toleration he started with. The Patriarchate of Pe['c], which they had for a time left intact, was now abolished and was not again permitted until 1557, when its re-establishment was due to the efforts of Mehemet Sokolovi['c], the grand vizier from Bosnia, who raised to the Patriarchate his brother the monk Macarius. Every school in Serbia and Bulgaria was closed, so that no teaching could be given anywhere save in the monasteries; it is said to be a fact--I have it from Dr. Zmejanovi['c], lately Bishop of Ver[vs]ac--that when Kara George, the beloved and illiterate heiduk, made his first insurrection, there were, in addition to the monks, precisely eight individuals in Serbia--their names are recorded--who could read and write. Thus the absence of printing-presses was not greatly felt: in Bulgaria there was now no press at all, in Serbia a few prayer-books were roughly printed in the monasteries; but in the sixteenth century the monks, for the copying of these books, had reverted to the use of pen and ink.

There had been in the bygone days, in the empires of Simeon and Du[vs]an, for example, a privileged class, commonly called an aristocracy, which as elsewhere had arisen from the people having been obliged to submit themselves to military discipline.... And it was in those dreary days when all the raia felt themselves as brothers[24] that the Serb and Bulgar planted that democracy which flourishes among them now. They saw what dangers threatened in the towns. Vuk Karaji[vc], the reformer of the Serbian language, tells of certain merchants there who, by assuming Turkish apparel and customs, came to be no longer counted as Serbs. And more numerous by far were the townsfolk, nobles and merchants and others, who went to live among the countryfolk and intermarried with them, and produced a people which is better described not as a democracy, but as an aristocracy.

GOOD LIVING IN HUNGARY

And always we hear that those in the Banat and those in the still more fertile province of Ba[vc]ka, to the west of it, or those who had gone even farther west, into the wine-growing hills of Baranja, had no reason to regret their enterprise. King Matthew Corvinus of Hungary writes to the Pope on the 12th of January 1483, informing him that 200,000 Serbs have come into the Banat and Ba[vc]ka since 1479. He adds that he is favourably disposed towards them, as they are a fighting race of the first order, so that he can trust them to defend those provinces against the Turk.... Not only, therefore, did he bestow upon them exceptional privileges, but in 1471 he appointed Vuk, the grandson of George Brankovi['c], to be Serbian despot of southern Hungary. This newly organized dominion on the left bank of the Danube and the Save was much more important than those of Transylvania or of Szekeliek, which were held by Hungarian magnates and which, in the event of war, had to furnish, each of them, four hundred horsemen, whereas the Serbian despot undertook to furnish a thousand.

The earliest Serbian settlement in Baranja appears to have consisted of natives of the Morava valley who came in 1508 to a district near Ciklos. The king made over the castle of Ciklos to their leader, Stephen Stiljanovi['c], called the Just, and when the Turks broke into Baranja they murdered him. History[25] relates that some years after this on the 14th of August the pasha, a man of Serbian origin, commanded that the corpse be exhumed; whereupon a ring on the dead man's finger proved that he was related to the pasha. According to the Turkish rules of that period it was illegal to celebrate the Mass except at night, and in the open air. Now every year on the night of the 14th of August a Mass is sung, with the congregation holding torches and candles, out on the side of a hill. Afterwards they dance, and so forth.

However, it was the Banat to which the Serbs chiefly rallied, and after the fall of the fortress of Belgrade in 1521 they came in such multitudes that large portions of it had an exclusively Serbian character. And they were given the sole charge of defending it, while the Hungarians retired to the north. But Hungary herself went down at the terrific battle of Mohacs--10,000 Serbs under their voivoda, Paul, fought in the Hungarian ranks--and after the fall of Buda-Pest the political organization of the Serbs, with a despot as their ruler, came to an end, being replaced by a religious organization, at the head of which was the restored Patriarchate of Pe['c]. The diocese which the Patriarchs from their not very accessible monastery were supposed to administrate included all the Serbs between Monastir and Buda-Pest, and from the Adriatic to the Struma River. It was at this time that in the other Yugoslav lands, to the west and north, there came a breath of wind from the Reformation.

THE PROTESTANT INFLUENCE

When the German reformers tried, by way of the Yugoslavs, to reach Rome, they found a printing-press at Urach, from which, between 1561 and 1564, a number of books in Glagolitic characters (and in Cyrillic, a special form thereof) were issued. The most cultivated of the Glagolitic clergy in Istria and the Croatian littoral, such as Antony Dalmatin, Primus Trubar the Slovene and George Juri[vs]i['c], were enthusiastic in seconding the press and in seeking, as writers, to disseminate Protestantism in the Slav world. One of their most notable fellow-workers was Matthew Vlaci['c] (Mathias Flacius Illyricus), professor at the Universities of Wittenberg, Jena, Strassbourg and Antwerp, a veritable encyclopaedist of the Reformation, and, with Luther and Melanchthon, one of its leaders. A very distinguished man, who had already, about 1550, joined the Protestant Church, was Peter Paul Vergerius; before 1550 he had twice been Papal Nuncio in Germany, a bishop in Croatia and afterwards in Istria. The rank and file of the Glagolitic clergy received these books with joy, for the Roman hierarchy, which had small liking for this truly national Church, would have been glad to see it perish in ignorance, with no books and no culture. By the way, the lower clergy remained what they had been--a national clergy. They availed themselves of these Glagolitic books from the Protestant press, but for that reason were not going to become Protestants. Theological subtleties were repugnant to them, and before and after the Council of Trent they married and lived a family life.

DUBROVNIK, REFUGE OF THE ARTS

The intellectual life of the Yugoslavs would, but for Dubrovnik, have died out altogether. And even at Dubrovnik, of which the Southern Slav thinks always with pride and gratitude, there was a movement to turn away from the Slav world. This was certainly one of the periods, which reappear not seldom in the story of Dubrovnik, when it seemed that miracles of wisdom would be wanted for the steering of the ship of State. Venice and the Turkish Empire were as two tremendous waves that rose on either side. By a very clever show of yielding, the little Republic had for a time disarmed the Turks, and, later on, when the Venetians declared that all the commercial treaties existing between the Dalmatian towns and Turkey were void, it was necessary for Dubrovnik also to accommodate herself to this enactment and to restrict her trade to Spain and the African coast. It would under these circumstances be most imprudent, so urged some of the citizens of Dubrovnik, if they were officiously to advertise their relationship to the hapless Slavs, who were enslaved to the Republic's mighty neighbours. And in 1472 the Senate had directed that within its walls no speeches should henceforth be made in Slav. But as the Senate consisted of forty-five nobles, and these were obliged to be over forty years of age, one may say that they did not represent what was most virile in the State; at all events, this isolated tribute to expediency may for a time have been observed in that assemblage, in the world of letters it was disregarded. And this is the more wonderful when we remember that Dubrovnik had from Italy a language that was already formed, she had Italian models and printers and even their literary taste. But [vS]i[vs]ko Men[vc]etic and D[vz]ore Dr[vz]i['c]--both of them nobles, by the way--started at once to write verses in Slav; not very sublime verses, as they were principally love-songs of the school that imitated Petrarch, but it is pleasing to recall that they were written in spite of the thunders of Elias Crijevi['c], a contemporary renegade. Under the name of Elias di Cerva this gentleman travelled to Rome, where he made himself a disciple of Pomponius Laetus and once more modified his good Slav name into AElius Lampridius Cerva, and received at the Quirinal Academy the crown of Latin poetry. Having thus qualified himself to be a schoolmaster, he went back to Dubrovnik and settled down to that profession. He was likewise very active as a publicist on the "barbaric" Slav language, which, as he was never tired of screaming, was a menace both to Latin and Italian. One is apt to call those persons reasonable, among other things, whose opinions coincide with one's own; but is there anybody willing to assert that because the Slav culture of that epoch was, like many another culture, inferior to the Italian; because the Italian towns were in the rays of artistic glory, whereas the Slav world was not; because on that account the Slavs were wise enough to profit from the Italian masters; is there anyone who, because some of the Slavs were and are unwise enough to be more Italian than the Italians, will assert that the Slav has no right to develop a national art, a national State?

It is superfluous to make a catalogue of those Ragusan writers who were more or less successful in purging their Slav language of Italianisms. Luckily they had at their doors the language of Herzegovina, which is unanimously considered by philologists to be the purest of the Serbo-Croat dialects. The most considerable of these writers was Gunduli['c], although he never could forget that his productions must be pious, and, beyond all other aims, present a moral. It was in Poland that he saw the liberator of the Southern Slavs, and what he sings in Osman, his chief work, is the overthrow of Sultan Osman II. by Vladislav, heir to the Polish throne. As this poem of the seventeenth century, this flowering of the Slav spirit, might be looked upon as assailing "the integrity of the Turkish Empire," it was only allowed to circulate in MS. until 1830. According to Dr. Murko,[26] Professor of Slav Language and Literature at the University of Leipzig, this work surpasses Tasso's _Jerusalem Delivered_; but it is commonly thought that there is more literary merit in Gunduli['c]'s _Dubravka_, a lovely, patriotic pastoral. The worthy Franciscan Ka[vc]i['c],[27] who followed him with a work--_Familiar Conversations on the Slovene Nation_--would perhaps be regarded by us as more remarkable for his originality; but this patriotic production, in verse and in prose, didactic, chronological, allegorical and epic, has made him immortal. Beginning with Teuta, the first king of the Slovene nation, who flourished, says the author, about the year 3732 B.C., he proceeds imperturbably and sometimes in moving numbers to relate the lives and virtues of all the other Slovene kings, be they Bosnian, Croat, Serbian, Bulgarian; it may well be that the secret of his vogue is, in the words of the critic Lucianovi['c], that "he was less a minstrel of the past than of the future." On the fruitful island of Hvar (Lesina) there arose an exquisite lyric poet, Luci['c], whose romantic drama _Robinja_ (The Female Slave) is said to have great importance in the history of the modern theatre; but the most famous of Hvar's poets was Hektorovi['c] (1487-1572). "This nobleman with his democratic ideas," says the Russian savant Petrovski in speaking of his _Ribanje_ (Fishing), "is the intimate friend of his fisher-folk, the singers of national songs, and with his remarkable realism he was three centuries before his time." When we finally note that at Zadar in the sixteenth century there was written _Planine_ (The Mountains), in which Zorani['c] gave us the most patriotic work of mediaeval Yugoslav literature, we may say at least that the Dalmatian Yugoslavs did not abandon hope.

By the way, these remarks on the Slav literature of Dalmatia may be thought otiose, for the national aspirations would not have been less fervent if they had been expressed in Italian. One is reminded by the well-known Italian writer, Giuseppe Prezzolini,[28] that until last century the ruling classes of Piedmont spoke French; Alfieri and Cavour had to "learn Italian," but who would on this account pretend that Piedmont is a French province? There is really nothing strange in the fact that the Pan-Slavist newspaper _L'Avenire_, published at Dubrovnik from August 1848 until March 1849 by Dr. Casna[vc]i['c], was written in Italian, or that those Irish who desire to be free from their hated oppressor have not completely given up the use of his language.

HOW SHE SMOOTHED HER WAY

We have alluded to the caution of Dubrovnik, and one must confess that in her story are such parlous situations, out of which there was apparently no rescue, that in reading of them one is more and more astonished at her customary enterprise. How did she succeed, for instance, in contributing thirteen vessels to the fleet which Charles V. sent against Tunis in 1535 without disturbing in the slightest her good relations with the Sultan? All that she asked for was peace, and so she paid a large sum to the Sultan every year, as also to the pirates of Barbary, so that she could continue to navigate freely; in the fifteenth century she had three hundred ships that were seen in all parts of the Mediterranean and even in England. She had been wont to pay five hundred ducats a year to the Kings of Hungary, and now and then, when it was opportune, she sent this tribute to the Austrian Archdukes, the rightful heirs of Hungary. To the captain of the Gulf of Venice she dispatched every year a piece of plate, to the King of the Two Sicilies she presented a dozen falcons, with a very respectful letter, and the Pope, who was not forgotten, overlooked her annual tribute to the Turk and proclaimed her to be the outer defences of Christianity. (Let it not be forgotten that in 1451, four centuries before Wilberforce's anti-slavery campaign, the Republic by a vote of 75 out of a total of 78 forbade its citizens to traffic in slaves, and declared all slaves found on its territory to be free. "Such traffic," it said, "is base and contrary to all humanity ... namely, that the human form, made after the image and similitude of our Creator, should be turned to mercenary profit and sold as if it were brute beast.")

But of all the markets of the merchants of Dubrovnik, those which from the days of old they most frequented, were the markets of the Balkans. To Bulgaria and Serbia, Albania and Bosnia, they brought the products of the West and of their own factories: the cloth and metal goods, the silver and gold ornaments, the weapons, axes, harness, glass, soap, perfumes, southern fruits, fish oil and herbs; and most of all they valued their monopoly of salt, a most remunerative privilege. As they could not obtain sufficient of it in their own immediate territory, the Senate made a regulation that each vessel which came back after a voyage of four years must bring a cargo of salt. This was Dubrovnik's chief source of revenue until the end of her independence in 1808, and efforts that were made by others to break down this monopoly led to bitter conflicts. With regard to the goods which they carried home with them from the Balkans, these comprised cattle and cheese, dried fish from the Lake of Scutari, hides of the wolf and fox and stag, wax, honey, wool and rough wood-wares, and unworked metals. Some of the Balkan mines, such as the silver mines of Novo Brdo in Serbia, they worked themselves, even as the Saxons whom we find thus engaged in various parts of these lands. Under the Turkish domination it must have been with joy that the caravans from Dubrovnik were welcomed, bringing news of the one Southern Slav State which remained free and prosperous. A good many of these wandering merchants took Serbian or Bulgarian wives.

HER COMMERCIAL ENTERPRISE

If the men from Dubrovnik were able to bring happy tidings of their own Republic, such as the report, perhaps a little exaggerated, that the wealth of those who lived in the street of merchants, which runs parallel to the stately thoroughfare, the Stradone, amounted to a hundred million ducats, they were able to give very little news of the more distant Southern Slavs. The Serbs had not forgotten that brothers of theirs were living in the north-west. If in the days of the Turkish oppression they had been inclined to be oblivious of the Croats, yet they could not but remember that Du[vs]an's sister had married the Croatian prince, Mladen III. There is no incident connected with Du[vs]an that is not treasured in the memory of the Serbs.

HER NORTHERN KINSMEN AND THE MILITARY FRONTIERS

For a long time the Habsburgs had been planning to employ the Croats, who were excellent troops, as a bulwark against the Turks. And although Ferdinand of Habsburg, on being elected to the throne of Croatia on the 1st of January 1527, had sworn to respect the ancient rights and traditions of the realm, his heirs favoured more and more a policy of centralization; and in 1578, taking advantage of a serious agrarian conflict between nobles and peasants in Croatia, the Habsburgs instituted the Military Frontiers, the famous Vojna Krajina, one for Croatia proper, with Karlovac as capital, the other for the adjacent Slavonia, with the capital at Varazdin. Croatia's autonomy was ignored.

This method of guarding the frontiers had been employed by the Romans, who made over lands to non-commissioned officers and men on condition that their male descendants rendered military service. Those men who had no children received no lands. Alexander Severus, who introduced this arrangement, used to say that a man would fight better if at the same time he were defending his own hearth. Under Diocletian the "miles castellani" or "limitanei," as they were termed, had slaves and cattle allotted to them, so that the land's development should not be hindered through lack of labour or on account of the owners losing the physical capacity for work.

The Habsburgs were assisted in their scheme by various causes, one of which was the poverty of the soil in certain parts of Croatia, so that it came as a relief to many of the struggling inhabitants that for the future they would be provided for. The greatest misery was also prevalent at this time in consequence of the plague which desolated parts of Croatia and Istria. The distress was particularly acute in Istria, where between the years 1300 and 1600 the plague was rampant on thirty-nine occasions, the town of Triest being visited in ten different years between 1502 and 1558; and in the year 1600 the port of Pola was reduced to four hundred inhabitants. Venice attempted to colonize the desert places with Italian farmers, but having failed on account of malaria and the lack of water, she called in a more vigorous element, the Slav from Dalmatia and Bosnia. Meanwhile the towns, in which were the descendants of those who had come from Italy in the days of the Roman Empire, fell more profoundly into decay. Those western towns looked on the Slav with disdain, they would not mingle with the rural population; but as these were much more active and were often strengthened by fresh immigrants, one thought that they would gradually swamp the more effete men of the towns. And, on the other hand, the townsmen weakened their position by continually breaking, on account of economic disputes, the ties between themselves and Venice. And as example of their frequent attitude towards Venice, we may take the words which the deputies of Triest used in 1518 in the presence of the Emperor Maximilian: "We would all of us prefer to die," they said, "rather than to fall under the domination of Venice." Such language may, of course have been a compliment; and yet it does not seem unlikely that the people of Triest had some knowledge of the ruin and death that were overtaking all the Dalmatian towns with the one exception of Dubrovnik, which was independent.

Allusion has been made to the Slavs who came from Bosnia; one may ask how it was that the Turks allowed them to depart. On such an extensive frontier it would not be difficult for people to escape; that they did so is made evident by all the solemn treaty clauses which declared that they should be forthwith delivered to their rightful owners. The Turks were quite as ready to bind themselves in this fashion. There is, for example, the treaty which settles what travelling expenses the Venetians are to pay to the emissary of the Pasha of Travnik on his way to Zadar, how much velvet, how many loaves of sugar and how many pots of theriac must be provided for each member of his entourage; and in the same treaty it is laid down that the Turks are to give up all those who have deserted to them, yea even if they have become Muhammedans. But the Turkish authorities never heard of any such people. And the Slavs were passing to and fro from one Yugoslav land to another, always thinking that in the new land life must be more tolerable.

THE OPPRESSIVE OVERLORDS OF THE YUGOSLAVS

Now and then we hear of insurrections; thus the Serbs of the Banat revolted in 1594, allied themselves to Prince Batthory of Transylvania and offered him the Serbian crown. With an army of Serbs and Hungarians the Prince appeared on the Danube with the intention of aiding the Bulgars. He won a splendid victory over the Turk, but in gaining it he had exhausted himself, and the Turk took his usual revenge. In Croatia the absolutist policy of Leopold I. exasperated the people to such an extent that they forgot their quarrels with the Magyars in order to be able to defend their rights against the attacks of Vienna. The Hungarian-Croatian magnates, amongst whom were the Croats Peter Zrinsky, the Ban, and Christopher Frankopan, conspired to overthrow the Habsburgs. When the plot was discovered the conspirators were executed in 1671 at Wiener Neustadt. In the spring of 1919, when the bones of these two patriots were brought back to Croatia and buried after a series of imposing and most moving ceremonies, Austria was in such a state of hunger that she waived her good taste and received what she had exacted for the bones, namely, five hundred trucks of meat and potatoes. After the battle of Vienna in 1683 both Serbs and Bulgars rose, for it seemed to many hopeful people that the Turk was on the point of dissolution. There was an outbreak in the Bulgarian mountain village of [vC]iprovtsi, but this was suffocated with such ferocity that for more than a hundred years the Bulgar would not make another effort. The spirit of the Slav appeared to have gone out of him. Wars that were disastrous to Turkey brought the Russians to the Danube and the Austrians to within twelve leagues of Sofia, but the Bulgar stayed at home with his black memories. A better fortune attended the Serbs who flocked to the standard of George Brankovi['c], a descendant of the old despots, in the Banat. With the goodwill of Leopold I. they fought by the side of his own troops, and after these latter were withdrawn, in consequence of the new campaign against Louis XIV., the Serbs continued to wage war with the Turks, and so successfully that Leopold became anxious lest Brankovi['c] should found an independent Serbian State. He therefore caused him and the leaders of his army to be captured. Brankovi['c] was brought, a prisoner, to Vienna. He survived in captivity at Eger for twenty-two years.[29]

THE GREAT MIGRATION UNDER THE PATRIARCH

In the year 1690 there happened the vast exodus of 30,000 Serbian families who migrated across the Danube and the Save under the leadership of the Patriarch of Pe['c], Arsenius [vC]arnoevi['c]. An oleograph of a picture illustrating this event is found in almost every Serbian house, be it private house or Government building. These refugees settled in Syrmia, Slavonia, the Banat and Ba[vc]ka, and received from the Emperor certain rights, such as that of electing their voivoda (duke), of owning land, and so forth; their privileges were not always respected, but the Serbian immigrants remained faithful to Austria.... The land of Pe['c], from which the Patriarch fled, with the neighbouring Djakovica and Prizren, became Muhammedan Albanian territories.