Through Bosnia and the Herzegóvina on foot during the insurrection, August and September 1875

by Sir Arthur Evans

HISTORICAL REVIEW OF BOSNIA.

‘Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.’

About the middle of the fifth century, when Britain was passing definitely into the hands of the English, and when on the Continent the hordes of Attila were dealing the most tremendous blow that had yet fallen on the Roman Empire, Sclavonic tribes overran Mœsia, Thrace, Macedonia, and Illyricum, and pushed on to the Adriatic shores. From this period the final settlement of the Sclaves in the area of what is now known as Turkey-in-Europe may be safely dated.[1] Their first ravages over, the Sclaves, who from their communal family-organisation were little capable of formidable combination, appear to have easily accepted Roman suzerainty. The new settlers were soon among the most trusted troops of the Eastern Emperor, and at the beginning of the sixth century the Sclavonic colony of Dardania gives Eastern Rome one of its most renowned Emperors and its greatest general. The Sclave Upravda, the son of Istok, is better known as the Emperor Justinian, and Veličaŕ as Belisarius.

Thus were first cemented those peculiar relations between the Sclaves and Byzantium which are still of supreme importance in considering ‘the Eastern Question.’ The Byzantine government saw itself so capable of dealing with the Sclaves, that when the Avar nomads, at the beginning of the seventh century, devastated Illyricum, massacring alike Sclavonic settler and Roman provincial, and sacking even the coast cities of Dalmatia, Heraclius, as a masterstroke of policy, called in two new Sclavonic tribes from beyond the Danube as a counterpoise to the Avars; and the corner of the Balkan peninsula between the Save, the Morava, and the Adriatic, was divided among the Sclavonic tribes, the Serbs, and the Croats, who still throughout this area form the bulk of the population.

The account given of this settlement by Constantine Porphyrogenitus[2] is so mixed up with mythical elements that we can only accept the general outlines. As might be expected from the analogy of our own history of the conquest of Britain, the Sclavonic sagas, which seem to form the basis of the Byzantine version, bring into the field certain leaders with eponymic names;[3] but the old family life of the Sclaves asserts itself even in these legends, and we read that the Croats were led to the conquest of the Avars by a family of brothers and sisters.

The Croatian settlement seems to have been the earlier. The Croats came from the countries beyond the Carpathians, and colonized the countries now known as Austrian and Turkish Croatia, and the northern part of Dalmatia. The Save formed a rough boundary to the Croatian nationality on the north, the Verbas on the east, and to the south the Cetina.

The Serbs, then inhabiting a part of what is now Galicia, hastened to imitate the example of the Croats, and took for their share the lands to the east and south of that occupied by their brother race. They occupied the whole, or nearly the whole, of the area now occupied by Free Serbia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Montenegro, Old Serbia, and the northern half of Albania, and stretched themselves along the Adriatic coasts from the neighbourhood of Spalato, where the river Cetina runs into the sea, to Durazzo, then still Dyrrhachium. Thus, with the exception of the barren corner called the Kraina, or Turkish Croatia, the whole of what is now known as Bosnia, with which we have particularly to deal, belongs to the Serbian branch of the Sclaves.

For long the history of what later became the Bosnian kingdom is indistinguishable from that of the rest of the Serbs. The whole Illyrian triangle was divided into a great number of small independent districts, somewhat answering to the Teutonic ‘Gaus,’ called Župy. Župa means ‘bond’[4] or confederation, and each Župa was simply a confederation of village communities, whose union was represented by a magistrate or governor, called a Župan. The Župans in turn seem to have chosen a Grand-Župan, who may be looked on as the President of the Serbian Federation. We know little about the early Županships of the Bosnian area, but a few of the petty commonwealths of the Serbian coastland, and what later on became the Herzegovina, are mentioned by the Byzantine Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus, who wrote about 950, and the names and situation of some in the Bosnian interior may be gathered from ecclesiastical diplomas. Here and there we read of a ‘Ban’ (translated, in Diocleas, by the Latin word ‘Dux’), who was rather higher than an ordinary Župan.

These Serbian ‘Archons,’ as the Byzantine historians speak of them, acknowledged the suzerainty of the Eastern Empire, and even, in some cases (though doubtless to a less extent than the Croats), accepted Byzantine dignities. Thus a Ban of Zachlumia accepted the titles of Proconsul and Patrician. Later on, when Czar Simeon erected the new Bulgarian Empire, Serbia was forced for a while to bow to the dominion of the conqueror of Leo Phocas. In the tenth century the Serbs shake off the Bulgarian yoke, and we now begin to hear of four Grand-Župans, whose jurisdictions answer to Serbia proper, Rascia, Dioclea, and Bosnia. The power of the lesser Župans was during this period being diminished for the benefit of these greater potentates, who in Bosnia are generally known as Bans. ‘The Bans,’ says the contemporary Serbian historian,[5] ‘ruled each of them in his own province, and subjugated the Župans, receiving from them the taxes which beforetime had been paid to the King,’ i.e. the sole Grand-Župan.

During the ninth and tenth centuries, while Bosnian-Serbian history is still so obscure, that of the Croats had achieved some prominence. The settlement of the Croats had, as we have seen, somewhat preceded the Serbian. They bordered on the coast-cities of Dalmatia, where Roman nationality and something of Roman civilization still lingered. Their relations with Byzantium were more defined, and they had also for a moment entered into the system of the renovated Empire of the West. Thus the Croats were earlier imbued with Christianity than the Serbs, and external influences were earlier at work to give their too acephalous government greater unity than their inland neighbours, still under the full sway of Sclavonic communism, could attain to. In the year 914 a Croatian Grand-Župan, Tomislav, who, in virtue of his relations to the Byzantine government and the Roman population of the Dalmatian cities, had assumed the title of ‘Consul,’ begins to be known to foreign princes as ‘King of the Croats.’ The successor of Tomislav is said to have conquered the neighbouring Serbian Banat, which from the principal river within its confines begins about this time to be known as Bosona, or Bosnia. It even became a constitutional principle in Croatia that, when the king died childless, a new king should be elected by the seven Bans of the crown-lands, one of whom was the Ban of Bosnia.[6]

But this Croatian suzerainty was, as yet, premature. At the beginning of the eleventh century the Greek Emperor Basil having completed the slaughter of the Bulgarians succeeded in subjugating the Croats, and the introduction of Byzantine Governors and Protospathars into Dalmatia threw back Bosnia on to the support of her Serbian neighbours.[7] The Bosnian Ban Niklas not only accepted the Serbian Grand-Župan Dobroslav as his overlord, but aided him most efficaciously in annihilating two Byzantine armies[8] in those gorges of the Black Mountain which, from time immemorial, have been so fatal to the ambition of Stamboul.

Thus down to nearly the middle of the twelfth century, Bosnia continued to own allegiance to her Serbian suzerains, and the claims of the Croats to Bosnia continued to be little more than nominal till their own country fell into hands more capable of enforcing them. But at the beginning of the twelfth century the Magyars overthrew the kingdom of the Croats, and in 1141 Geiza II. of Hungary completed the conquest of Bosnia, or, as it is generally known in the Hungarian annals, of Rama, from the little river of that name, flowing into the Narenta.[9] Still, the Hungarian dominion does not seem as yet to have been much more than a vague suzerainty. Bosnia, indeed, throughout the whole of this period, seems to have stood aloof from all its neighbours. It might own a nominal allegiance, now to Serbia, now to Croatia, now to Hungary, but it enjoyed a practical independence. Its general isolation from the main current of Serbian history may be gathered from the chronicler of Dioclea; and when Manuel Comnenus reduced Hungary to a temporary subjection, his historian Cinnamus was struck with the same phenomenon. ‘The Drina,’ says he, ‘divides Bosthna from the rest of Serbia. For Bosthna is not subject to the Grand-Župan of Serbia, but the people were at that time under their own magistrates, and used their own customs.’ The recent Russian historian of the Serbs and Bulgarians[10] traces many of the later misfortunes of Bosnia to this fatal estrangement from the other Sclavonic lands.

The Hungarian alliance now makes this alienation irrevocable. Cinnamus shows the close relations existing between Bosnia and Hungary at the date of Manuel’s invasion when he goes on to say that ‘Boritzes,[11] Exarch of Bosthna,’ aided the King of Hungary against the Greeks; and, indeed, we know from other sources that the Bosnian Ban was himself an illegitimate son of the Magyar king, Coloman. Manuel reduced Bosnia, with Croatia and other parts of Hungary, for a while; but the Ban was not long in recovering the province. The Hungarian connection was only cemented the more firmly, and on Borić’s death, in 1168, his son, the new Ban Culin, accepted his investiture from Bela III., and subscribed himself henceforth Fiduciarius Regni Hungariæ.

The rule of Ban Culin is justly regarded as the brightest period in the annals of Christian Bosnia. His first care on his accession was to surround himself with trustworthy Župans and Voivodes, and during the thirty-six years of his reign Bosnia enjoyed a profound peace. Under his auspices and protection the merchants of Ragusa began to plant their factories in Bosnia, and open out anew the rich mines which had been left unworked since the days of the Romans. The very year after Culin’s accession, two Ragusan brothers built a factory and opened mines on the site of what has since become the capital of Bosnia.[12] Other mines were shortly opened in the neighbourhood, and a fortress, called after the Sclavonic name of their mother city, Dubrovnik, was built by the same enterprising merchants to protect their industries. The same wise policy encouraged another immigration, this time, of Saxon miners, who, like the Ragusans, did much to lay bare the great mineral wealth of this and the other Serbian lands, and who have left their traces in several old German mining expressions still current among the miners and mountaineers of Bosnia. These Saxons, or Sasi, settled chiefly in the towns, where their influence was valuable in instilling something of the civic unity of the free Teutonic burghs into the loosely compacted aggregation of hovels that clustered round the fortified ‘grad’ of the Bosnian lord.[13] Culin is said to have been the first Bosnian prince who struck coins, and the general prosperity was such that to this day ‘the times of good Ban Culin’ are invoked by the Bosniac when he wishes to express the golden age.

But the patronage which Culin afforded to a religious sect that now becomes prominent in Bosnia makes his rule of still greater importance, and leads us to the consideration of a subject which has its bearings even on English history.

The doctrine of the Two Principles of Good and Evil, which had its origin perhaps in the sublime mythology of Persia and the eternal conflict of Light and Darkness, held its own amongst the various Gnostic sects of Christianity, scattered throughout the Eastern world, while the West was content to slumber in comparative orthodoxy. In Armenia, where these doctrines had certain affinities with the earlier religion, they seem to have taken especially firm root; and here, as in the other border states of the Byzantine Empire, heterodoxy went hand in hand with patriotism. Considering the hostile relations in which both nations stood to Byzantium, it is not at all surprising that friendly communications should have subsisted between the Armenians and the Bulgarian Sclaves whose country lay to the east of the Serbians. Further, it was extremely natural that Armenians, for national as well as sectarian reasons, should view with jealousy the progress of orthodox missionaries among the Bulgarians, and should attempt to counteract it by organising a propaganda of their own Manichæism.

Such was actually set on foot. How early this proselytism was first commenced is doubtful, but it is certain that the Danubian Sclaves were converted from heathenism pari passu by Manichæan and orthodox missionaries. The Byzantine Emperors, by their transplantation system, gave the Armenians every facility for their work. In the middle of the eighth century Constantine Copronymus, who had perhaps some sympathies with the heretics, transplanted a body of Paulicians from Armenia into Thrace, who we learn, on the authority of Cedrenus, spread the Paulician heresy through those parts, then largely inhabited by the Bulgarian Sclaves. At the end of the ninth century, when the persecution of Byzantium had provoked the Paulicians of Armenia to assert their independence, when ‘the Roman Emperor fled before the heretics whom his mother had condemned to the flames,’ and Tephricé became the capital of a free-state devoted to Gnostic Christianity, the missionary efforts of the Armenians among the Sclaves was prosecuted with still greater vigour. Petrus Siculus, who in 870 resided nine months at Tephricé as legate of the Byzantine Government, to arrange for an exchange of prisoners, discovered that a Manichæan mission was about to start from Tephricé to the Bulgarians, and addressed his ‘Historia Manichæorum’ to the Bulgarian Patriarch, with the express purpose of counteracting these baneful efforts.

The fall of the Paulician free-state of Tephricé synchronizes with the rise of the first Bulgarian Empire, and we can well imagine that the refugees of vanquished Armenia found shelter among their Manichæan co-religionists in the dominions of Czar Simeon, the hero of the Achelous. From this period onwards the Paulician heresy may be said to change its nationality, and to become Sclavonic. According to the Bulgarian national traditions,[14] a certain priest named Bogomil spread the Manichæan doctrines among the subjects of the Bulgarian Czar who succeeded Simeon, Peter Simeonović. A more enlightened criticism will perhaps see in the name ‘Bogomil’ only another instance of that ‘eponymic’ tendency of barbarous minds which refers to individuals events and institutions which have really a more national character. In the same Bulgarian document which professes to give the origin of their name, they are connected with the Massalian heresy; by Harmenopulos and other Byzantine writers they are made almost or quite identical with these same Massalians, and with the Euchites, their Greek equivalent, and there seems to be no reasonable doubt that the name Bogomile is really nothing but a Sclavonic translation of the Greek and Syriac names for the sect. The name of Massalians is derived from a Syriac word, signifying ‘those who pray,’ and the Greek Euchites have of course the same derivation. The Byzantine writer Epiphanius[15] has the credit of giving the right etymology of the word Bogomile, in that he derives it from the Bulgarian words Bog z’milui, signifying ‘God have mercy,’ an etymology which fits in with that peculiar devotion to prayer which was characteristic of the Bogomilian religion, which harmonizes with that of the allied sectaries, the Massalians and Euchites, and which would be still intelligible to all Sclavonic peoples, from the White Sea to the Ægean.

We need not, however, go so far as to deny that the Bogomilian heresy took its characteristic shape under the direction of a Bulgarian heresiarch. The historic existence of the first Bogomilian pope seems sufficiently attested,[16] but the Bulgarian traditions name him indifferently Jeremias and Bogomil, and it is quite possible that the latter name was added at a later time by a confusion with the Sclavonic homonym for Massalians and Euchites.

Through all the varying phases of Bulgarian history the Bogomiles, as these Sclavonic Manichæans are now known, hold their own. It seems certain that the Bulgarian Czars, in their struggle with Byzantium, did not wish to alienate a powerful party at home, and we hear occasionally ominous whispers that Bulgarian Emperors themselves leaned towards the doctrine of the Two Principles.[17] The Bulgarian heresy was perpetually fed from its Oriental sources by new Byzantine transplantations, and in the tenth century the Emperor John Zimisces did much for the propagation of Gnosticism among the Sclaves by transporting a more powerful colony of Armenians than any that had gone before ‘from the Chalybian hills to the valleys of Mount Hæmus.’ It is now that the Bogomilian heresy begins to spread beyond the limits of Bulgaria, among the kindred Serbian tribes to the west. Bulgaria, earlier civilized from her closer contact with Byzantium, was exercising during these centuries a predominating influence over the less cultured Serbs. From the Bulgarian missionaries Serbia first received the seeds of her orthodox Christianity, and there can be no doubt that proselytism was at work on the Manichæan side as well. Add to this that a large part of Serbia fell at different times under the Bulgarian dominion.

By the end of the tenth century the Bogomiles have taken firm root among the Serbs. In the legend of the Serbian prince, St. Vladimir,[18] one of his highest merits is that he was the zealous enemy of the Bogomiles. St. Vladimir certainly included in his dominions parts of what is now the Herzegovina, and, according to some accounts, Bosnia as well.

The events which now follow must have largely increased the number of Manichæans in these and the other Serbian lands. Basil, ‘the slayer of the Bulgarians,’ at the beginning of the eleventh century, finally overthrew the first Bulgarian Empire. Towards the end of the same century the Bulgarian heretics, now under Byzantine rule, were hunted down by the orthodox Emperor. The Princess Anna Comnena[19] has left us an account of the persecution of the Bogomiles by her father Alexius. The Byzantine princess unblushingly relates the trap which the Emperor condescended to set for the chief apostle of the sect, at that time a certain Basil; how he artfully led on the heresiarch by holding out hopes of conversion; how he invited him to the imperial table, and in his closet wormed out of him the secrets of his sect; and then, suddenly throwing aside the arras on the wall, revealed the scribe who had taken down the confession of his heresy, and beckoned to his apparitors to throw his victim into irons. The account which Anna Comnena gives of this sect is valuable in spite of its scurrility. The princess calls the Bogomiles ‘a mixture of Manichees and Massalians.’ She laughs at their uncombed hair, their low origin,[20] and their long faces, ‘which they hide to the nose, and walk bowed, attired like monks, muttering something between their lips.’ Basil himself was ‘a lanky man, with a sparse beard, tall and thin.’ From the account given of his confession we have intimations of a belief in the phantastic doctrine, and what was more shocking still, ‘He called the sacred churches—woe is me!—the sacred churches, fanes of demons!’ When he saw himself betrayed by the Emperor, he declared that he would be rescued from death by ‘angels and demons.’ Anna Comnena would like to say more of this cursed heresy, ‘but modesty keeps me from doing so, as beautiful Sappho says somewhere; for though I am an historian, I am also a woman, and the most honourable of the purple, and the first offshoot of Alexius.’ The ‘most honourable of the purple,’ however, feels no hesitation in describing the holocaust which her father made of all the Bogomiles he could catch, and more particularly the roasting of Basil. This delicately sensitive princess gloats over the preparations in the hippodrome, the crackling of the fire, the breaking out of poor human nature as the victim comes nearer to the scorching, the turning away of his eyes, and finally the quivering of his limbs. One asks, in amazement, whether any religion that has ever existed in the world has produced such monsters of humanity as Christianity calling itself orthodox!

It may readily be believed that these persecutions drove the Bogomiles to take refuge more and more in the Serbian regions, out of the way of the orthodox savagery of Byzantium. There were moreover reasons which diverted the current of heresy from that part of Serbia which became afterwards the nucleus of the Empire of the Némanjas. The Serbian princes who ruled over the territory now occupied by old Serbia and Montenegro were faithful sons of the orthodox church, and directed their utmost efforts to keep the shrine of St. Vladimir and the national patriarchate of Dioclea free from the contamination of Manichæism. Thus a variety of causes combined to direct the course of the new movement to the Serbian races of Western Illyricum; and in the twelfth century—the century immediately preceding the outbreak of Gnostic Puritanism in Western Europe—Bosnia had become the head-quarters of what we may now call the great Sclavonic Heresy.

Thanks to the publication of many South-Sclavonic archives, we are now in a position to arrive at the tenets of the Bogomiles, from native as well as from Byzantine sources; and, as I hope to show, both the Greek and Sclavonic accounts of the sect which now plays such an important part in Bosnian history harmonize to a very great extent. The best native account that we possess of the Bogomilian heretics is to be found in the works of a Bulgarian writer, one Presbyter Cosmas, who lived at the end of the tenth century, just at the period when the heresy was striking root among the Serbs and Bosniacs, and who wrote (in his native tongue) two of his most important works against the Bogomiles—whom he considers ‘worse and more horrible than demons!’[21]

One of the fundamental doctrines of the Bogomiles was, as has been already implied, the belief in two Principles of Good and Evil. ‘I hear,’ says the worthy Presbyter Cosmas, ‘many of our orthodox congregation ask, “Wherefore does God permit the Devil to exercise sway over man?” Verily this is the first question which prepares the weak in belief for the reception of the Manichæan heresy.’ The Bogomiles satisfied their reason by supposing two conflicting self-existent principles of Good and Evil. Matter and the visible world belong to the Spirit of Evil. ‘Everything,’ says Cosmas, ‘exists, according to the Bogomiles, of the will of the Devil. The sky, the sun, the earth, men, churches, crosses, and all that is God’s, they give over to the Devil.’ The evil in the world is thus accounted for by supposing the Creation to be the work of the Evil One, and it consequently followed that the Bogomiles looked on the book of Genesis and the other Mosaic writings as inspired by this evil God, or, as they knew him, Satanael. But beyond this visible world, of which they could see only the dark and melancholy side, there existed, according to the Bogomiles, another, invisible, heavenly and perfect, the creation of the Spirit of Goodness and Light—Himself a perfect triune Being, from whom proceeded nothing incomplete or temporary.

Cosmas distinguishes, however, two branches of the Bogomilian heretics.

According to the earlier sect, dualism in its most uncompromising form prevailed.[22] According to a later offshoot of the Bogomiles, the Spirit of Good had two sons, the elder of whom, Satanael, rebelled and created matter, and that to rescue the world thus created from the dominion of the Prince of Evil, God the Father sent down his younger son Christ to enable men to combat the Ruler of this world.[23] Both sects, however, were agreed in accepting the Phantastic theory of the Incarnation. The antagonism between spirit and matter was too great to admit of the union of the two. The body of Christ was a phantom, left in the clouds at his ascension; and the Virgin was an angel and not the mother of God.

Cosmas denies generally their belief in any of the books of the Old Testament or the Gospels; but this does not agree with the circumstantial account of Euthymius Zygabenus, who from having been commissioned by the Emperor to extract the tenets of his sect from the Bogomilian heresiarch Basil, is certainly one of the best authorities. Further, it is disproved by the whole conduct of the Bogomiles, which, as Cosmas himself shows, was based on a too literal interpretation of the Gospels. According to Euthymius,[24] the Bogomiles accepted seven holy books, which he enumerates as follows:—1, the Psalms; 2, the Sixteen Prophets; 3, 4, 5, and 6, the Gospels; 7, the Acts of the Apostles, the Epistles, and the Apocalypse. So far, indeed, as the New Testament was concerned, they clung to the version of the orthodox Sclavic apostle, in which they altered not a word.[25]

Touching baptism again, accounts are contradictory. Harmenopulos says that the Bogomiles practised the rite, but did not attribute to it any perfecting[26] virtue. On the other hand, the most recent investigations into the observances of the Bogomiles of Bosnia show that strictly speaking the rite did not exist among them at all, though they observed something analogous to it. Only adults could be admitted into the communion of the faithful; and, after they had first qualified themselves for admission by prayer and fasting, the mystery of initiation was performed, not by water—for did not water itself appertain to the evil realm of matter?—but by the laying on of St. John’s Gospel. Thus Cosmas is technically right in saying that the Bogomiles rejected baptism altogether, though it is probable that he was merely calumniating them when he added as a reason, that ‘they are afraid of the children to be baptized; and if by chance they see small children, they turn away from them as from carrion, and spit, and call them children of mammon, as being creations of the Devil;’ still under the sway, that is, of the Evil Creator Spirit. As regards Bosnia, at any rate, this is a foul slander. So far were the Bosnian Bogomiles from spurning little children, that the instruction of the young was considered a work worthy of the most saintly of the sect.

They were staunch opponents of the prevailing Mariolatry. ‘They pay no honour to the Mother of God.’[27] ‘As to the cross,’ says the Presbyter, they say: ‘Wherefore should we bow to that which dishonoured God?’ and they ask further, ‘if any man slew the son of a king with a bit of wood, how could this bit of wood be dear to the king?’[28] They considered it idolatry to bow down before the icons of saints. ‘They further revile the ceremonies of the church and all church dignities, and they call orthodox priests blind Pharisees, and bay at them as dogs at horses.’[29] ‘As to the Lord’s Supper,’ continues the Bulgarian champion of orthodoxy, ‘they assert that it is not kept according to God’s commandment, and that it is not the body of God, but ordinary bread.’[30]

Their belief in the evilness of matter was productive, as such a belief always has been, of much asceticism; which, if the concurrent testimony of their enemies is to be believed, they carried at times to deplorable excesses. ‘They show themselves,’ says Cosmas, ‘strong ascetics, for they call the Devil the Creator of all things, and declare that it is his Commandment that men should take wives, eat flesh, and drink wine. Everything as it exists with us (the orthodox) is utterly rejected. They give themselves up to a celestial life, insomuch that they call married men and those living in the way of the world “Mammon’s Children.”’ The descriptions of Anna Comnena and the monk Cosmas bring before us the familiar Puritan type, as it has reproduced itself in all ages. They bowed their heads and groaned and pulled long faces, in the true Roundhead style. ‘You will see heretics,’ quoth Cosmas, ‘quiet and peaceful as lambs without, silent, and wan with hypocritical fasting, who do not speak much nor laugh loud, who let their beard grow, and leave their person incompt.’

These descriptions of their enemies must, however, be taken with this reserve: they apply, as a rule, only to a small minority of the sect. The Bogomiles, like most ascetic sects, were divided into two castes: the simple believers, the Credentes of the West, who formed the large majority; and ‘the perfect,’ or those who by a long course of asceticism had successfully mortified the flesh. In the thirteenth century, at the most blooming period of their history, among the millions of these sectaries were reckoned less than 4,000 of ‘the perfect.’[31] These ‘perfect’ called themselves in Bosnia Krstjani, dobri Bošniani, Svršiteli, ‘Christians,’ that is, ‘good Bosnians,’ or ‘the elect,’ terms which reappear in a Romance guise in Italy and the Languedoc. The ‘perfect’ were clad like monks in long black gowns; they condemned themselves to perpetual celibacy; they abjured wine, nor tasted aught but vegetables, fish, and oil; they forsook the ‘pomps and vanities of this wicked world,’ and gave themselves up to devotion and good works. The women (for this saintly minority included both sexes) taught children or tended the sick, while the men acted as the spiritual guides of their weaker brethren or preached the Gospel among unbelievers.

But it stood to reason that the great bulk of the Bogomilian flock could never attain to this higher standard. In the abstract, no doubt, the simple ‘believer’ accepted the doctrine which his spiritual guides were careful to instil into him, that his soul was an angel fallen from above and fettered in the prison-house of his body, and that only by perpetual mortification of the flesh could he hope to set the celestial captive free at last. But the laws of nature and society are perpetually holding back religious extravagance from its logical consequences, and the simple ‘believer’ was content to govern himself by the more ordinary standard of mankind. As in Provence and Italy, so in Bosnia, he dispensed himself from the prohibition against drinking wine; and though the ‘perfect’ refused to bear arms and preached against war as devilish, the mass of the heretics, Sclavonic as well as Romance, showed that on occasion they could measure swords with the most orthodox. Though marriage was contrary to their tenets, the Bogomiles took wives, the man, however, in Bosnia only taking the woman on the condition that she was good and true to him, reserving the right of dismissing her if he thought her conduct unsatisfactory; an arrangement productive of laxity, and giving occasion to the orthodox adversary of which he was not slow to take advantage.[32] Yet, though in his manner of life falling short of the extreme asceticism of ‘the perfect,’ the ordinary Bogomile, on the showing of his enemies themselves, distinguished himself by his superior industry and thrift, and put to shame the saintly idleness of more orthodox professors by refusing to neglect his work on feast-days. Among the Bogomiles, beggars were looked on with contempt.[33] The ‘perfect’ themselves abhorred what was slothful in a monastic life, and the ‘heresiarch’ Basil set a good example by earning his living as a doctor. The simple believer devoted part of the worldly goods thus acquired to the relief of sick and indigent brothers, and also to the support of Gospellers among unbelievers, but neither his industry nor his good works could satisfy his conscience. The higher life of the ‘perfect’ was a perpetual reproach to him. His soul seemed clotted with the contagion of a too sensual existence, nor did his theology allow him a purgatory for the imbodied and imbruted spirit. Standing on the threshold of another world, and forced to choose between heaven and hell, the simple ‘believer’ considered it essential to his salvation that he should be admitted into the ranks of the ‘perfect’ by a death-bed ceremony of initiation, which reappears as la Convenenza among the more Western Patarenes of Italy and Provence.

The Bogomiles, in spite of their hatred of orthodox priests and temples, possessed ministers and even conventicles of their own. In the earliest accounts that have reached us we find at the head of the sect an elder or teacher surrounded by twelve disciples, answering to Christ and the Apostles. The half legendary accounts of the ‘pope’ Bogomil surround him with such disciples; and Basil ‘the heresiarch’ has his twelve. But as the Bogomiles spread beyond the limits of Bulgaria, each new province, if we may so term it, added to the dominion of the faithful, required a new elder or bishop. At the head of the Bogomilian flock in Bosnia stood a Djed or elder, answering to the Episcopus or Senior of the Albigensians, and under him came the Apostles, the Strojniks (Western Magistri), of which there were two grades, the Gosti and the Starci, who again reappear as the Filii and Diaconi of Italy. But there was no hierarchy, and nothing at all answering to a papacy; ‘the ecclesiastical officers were simply the representatives of the congregation, and were chosen by their votes.’[34] Every one who ranked among the ‘perfect,’ whether a man or woman, had the right of preaching.

Although in some parts the Bogomiles seem to have had no recognized place of worship, and performed their devotions in their own huts, or on some lonely heath beneath the open canopy of heaven, we have yet sufficient evidence, both Byzantine and Sclavonic, that they often possessed meeting-houses of their own. Their churches, according to Epiphanius, were like boats turned keel uppermost, but some were of a more ecclesiastical form. It appears that in Bosnia, as in the Languedoc, their prayer-houses were plain sheds without tower, or bells, which they called the trumpets of demons,—devoid of ornament or icons, containing neither chancel nor altar, but a simple table covered with a clean white linen cloth, on which was laid a copy of the Gospels.[35] Here they assembled by torchlight and sang hymns of their own, called by the Greek writer ‘Euphemies.’ Their service chiefly consisted of prayer, which according to their creed was the only means of resisting the demon within them, or of attaining salvation. The Lord’s Prayer was the only form used by them, and this they repeated in their own house with closed doors, five times every day and five times every night.[36]

Such are some of the main features of the Bogomilian heresy, as they have come down to us, to a great extent, from the writings of their bitterest opponents. Nor will anyone marvel that these doctrines should have spread as they did among those Sclavonic races, who acted as the missionaries of the first Reformation in Western Europe. It can hardly be considered fanciful if we detect certain remarkable analogies between the belief and observances of the Bogomiles and the primitive institutions, and even the heathen religion, of the Sclaves. It has already been mentioned that the Manichæan conversion began among the Bulgarians when they were still to a great extent pagan. The same is true with regard to the spread of the Bogomilian heresy among the Serbs, with whom heathendom held its own in parts till the thirteenth century.[37] A remarkable uniformity presents itself in the languages, beliefs, and institutions of all Sclavonic nations; and if we may assert, from the analogy of the Baltic Sclaves, that the Bulgarians and Serbs also divided their worship between their Black God or Spirit of Evil, and their White God or Spirit of Good, it follows that the Manichæan missionaries found the dualistic theology, which lies at the bottom of so much of their doctrine, already existing among the people they wished to convert;[38] while the propagandists of orthodoxy must have discovered to their vexation that the Sclavonic mind had been trained by superstition, as well as by what mother-wit it possessed, to rebel against their stupendous dogma, that an All-powerful Spirit of Good could create and tolerate the Spirit of Evil. Our Presbyter Cosmas notices that this difficulty presented itself, even to the ‘orthodox’ Bulgarians, and so lost is he in indignation at these profane inquiries as to the devil’s paternity, that he forgets to answer them.

An equally marked parallel is presented between the customs and church government, if the expression is allowable, of the Bogomiles, and the primitive institutions of the Sclaves. Their Presbyters answer to the Sclavonic Starescina, the elders of the primitive family-community. The Communistic doctrines which these heretics discovered in the New Testament fitted in well with the equality and fraternity of the Sclavonic home-life. They were essentially levellers, and their evangelic religion was mixed up, as among the Puritans of Western Europe, with political insurgency. In Bulgaria we seem to trace, in the opposition of the Bogomiles to the powers that be, an alliance between them and the champions of the Sclavonic democracy against the usurpations of the Ugrian dynasty and nobles. ‘They rail,’ says Cosmas, ‘at the magistrates and boljars (or nobles), and hold it a crime to do service for the Czar. They say, moreover, to every servant that he should not serve his master.’ The Bogomiles, it must be remembered, become a political power in Bosnia just at the time when the ‘elders’ and Župans, who represented the free institutions which the Sclavonic settlers brought with them, are bowing before the Bans and a new, semi-feudal, nobility.

By the beginning of the twelfth century the Bogomilian heresy had struck such firm root in Bosnia as to rouse the faithful sons of the Church in Hungary and Dalmatia to armed opposition, insomuch that in 1138 Bela II. was induced to make an incursion against the ‘Patarenes,’ in the country between the Cetina and Narenta.[39] It was not, however, till the end of this century that the progress of heresy in other parts turned the Pope’s serious attention to the fountain-head of the ‘Bulgarian heresy,’ then undoubtedly his Illyrian province. Nominally, Bosnia had long belonged to the Church of Rome, which claimed Western Illyricum as an inheritance from the Western Empire. Practically, what orthodox Christianity Bosnia and the other Serbian lands possessed was of a strongly national character, and derived, not from Roman sources, but from the missionary efforts of the Sclavonic apostles, Cyril and Methodius.[40] But the Church of Bosnia, though using the native liturgy and eschewing the Latin language, acknowledged some allegiance to Rome, and the bishops of Bosnia recognized the Archbishop of Salona[41] as their metropolitan. In the year 1180 Culin himself is still considered a dutiful son of the Church. But a few years later Culin ‘has degenerated from himself’ and fallen into heresy, and together with his wife[42] and his sister, the widow of the Count of Chelm, had given ear to the Patarenes, as Roman ecclesiastics begin to call the Bogomiles who have now spread their heresy into Italy and the West. The Pope, exerting pressure on Culin by means of the King of Hungary, had the satisfaction of seeing him recant in person at Rome.[43] But a few years later, in 1199, the Prince of orthodox Zenta, which we may almost translate Montenegro, informs the Pope by letter that Culin has relapsed into his errors, and that ten thousand of his subjects are already infected with the heresy.[44] A little later, we hear that Daniel, the bishop of Bosnia himself, has joined the Patarenes, who shortly after destroyed the orthodox-Roman Cathedral and Episcopal palace at Crescevo. From this time begins an ominous interregnum in the Roman Episcopate of Bosnia.

It was in vain that the Pope appealed to the King of Hungary to punish his heretic vassal. Culin was now too strong to fear even the Hungarian arms; and at the very period when the hordes of De Montfort were devastating Provence, the Banat of Bosnia offered an asylum to persecuted adherents of the Bulgarian heresy throughout Europe. This is hardly the place to show how essentially the first Protestants of Western Europe, the Bulgares as they are called by orthodox writers of the age, were spiritual children of the Sclavonic Bogomiles. The history of the Patarenes and Albigenses of Italy and Provence, of the ‘Ketzers’[45] of the Lower Rhine, who made their way even to our shores, lies of course beyond the scope of this essay. Word for word, nearly all that has been, with some pains, collected here, from Byzantine, Bulgarian, and Bosnian sources, regarding the tenets of the more Eastern heretics, might be paralleled by citations from Latin chronicles,[46] touching those who broke the harmony of Western Christendom. Enough if, while describing the belief and observances of the Bogomiles in Bosnia and Bulgaria, we have alluded, here and there, to such striking similarities in the details of church ministration and observances as show that the more Western sectaries clung to their original Bulgarian model in its minutest particulars. The doctrinal differences themselves which afflicted the more Western offshoots of the heresy had, as we have seen, their roots in a Bulgarian, perhaps an Armenian, soil.[47] Bulgarian elders sat in Provençal synods, Provençal bishops consulted with Bosnian Djeds on matters of faith. To the orthodox Sclave or Byzantine, there were only Bogomiles in the Languedoc, and the Romish hierarchy named the heretics of Bosnia from a suburb of Milan.[48] ‘The believers of the plains of Lombardy and the South of France,’ to quote the words of the recent Bohemian historian of Bulgaria, ‘kept up a regular intercourse with their co-religionists in the Byzantine Empire, Bosnia and Bulgaria, and long before the capture of Constantinople by the Crusaders or the Turks, a mighty but secret interchange of thought was at work between East and West.’[49]

It was during the reign of Culin that this great Puritan movement attained its widest dimensions, and it is from a contemporary of his, the Italian Reniero Sacconi, who from a heretic became an inquisitor, that we obtain the most satisfactory evidence as to the organization of this early Protestant Church, and the solidarity of its various members, Sclavonic, Greek, Romance, and Teutonic. The Church of the Cathari, as he calls them, numbered then as many as thirteen bishoprics, amongst which that of Bosnia or ‘Slavonia’ was not the least important. By Culin’s time, the Bogomilian missionaries had succeeded in disseminating their Armenian doctrines from Philippopolis to Bordeaux, and had formed, if we may so term it, a middle kingdom of their own—a Lotharingia of heterodoxy, extending in an unbroken zone through the centre of orthodox Europe, from the Black Sea to the Atlantic. Nay, the ark of the faithful, borne northwards and westwards on the free bosom of the Rhine, had crossed the Channel, and penetrated, as it were by our great English river, to the seat of English learning; and at the very time when Protestant Christendom looked to the Ban of Bosnia as its chief protector, his Angevin contemporary, our Henry II., was branding Paulicians at Oxford.[50]

Rapid and astonishing as was the spread of these Oriental doctrines through Latin Christendom, there seems no difficulty in accounting for it when we remember the missionary zeal which the Sclavonic Bogomiles had inherited from their Armenian teachers, and which led them, as we have seen, to set apart funds for the support of Gospellers among unbelievers. The same impulses which planted an Armenian faith among the Sclaves are sufficient to account for the success with which the new converts acclimatized what was now a Sclavonic faith amongst Greeks and Latins. It is certain that the Bulgarian propaganda made use of existing trade-routes by land and sea. This indeed is not the place to enquire what part Bulgaria and what part Bosnia, what part the Save, the Danube and the Rhine, the Po or the Adige, the commercial currents of the Adriatic and the Mediterranean—what part Durazzo and the Egnatian Way, what part Byzantium and Byzantine Lower Italy, may have severally and collectively played in conveying the Bogomilian heresy to Toulouse,[51] Milan and Cologne. On the whole the Bosnian influence may be regarded as later and secondary. It is probable that the first wave of propagandism was almost entirely Bulgarian, and followed in the wake of Greek merchantmen. The great part played by Bosnia was rather that of asylum for the persecuted, and promoter of the faith, in days when heresy had been stamped out elsewhere with fire and sword. We have, however, precise data as to the Bogomilian religion having been communicated to Dalmatia through commercial relations with the interior of Bosnia,[52] and doubtless, just as the Bulgarians, the South-Easternmost of the Sclavonic races of the Balkan peninsula, first received their Manichæan Puritanism from Armenia and the East, so the Bosnians, the North-Westernmost[53] of the Balkan Sclaves, played at least a part in first communicating it to Europe and the West.

It is from the pen of a St. Alban’s monk, and a letter of a bishop of Porto, that we gain the most convincing testimony as to the influence which, in the palmy days of Ban Culin, and the period immediately succeeding, was exercised by Bosnia in directing the great Protestant movement in Western Europe. Matthew Paris[54] relates that the Albigensians of Provence and Italy possessed a pope of their own, who resided in Bosnia.[55] This man created a vicar ‘in partibus Galliarum.’ The vicar of this Bosnian anti-pope, who resided at Toulouse, granted him some lands at a place called Porlos, and the Albigensian heretics betook themselves to their Bosnian pope to consult him on divers questions of faith. Matthew Paris and Ralph of Coggeshale are certainly wrong in converting this Bosnian elder into an anti-pope, and his vicar into the parody of an orthodox bishop,[56] hierarchy of any sort being, as we have seen, alien to the spirit of the Bogomilian as well as to the Albigensian sectaries. Yet it is quite possible that a kind of informal primacy was at this time accorded to the Bosnian Djed, and he may have fulfilled such moderating functions, as interpreter in matters doctrinal, as seem to have devolved, a century before, on the ‘heresiarch’ Basil. The fact that this vicar had been originally sent to the Albigenses by the Illyrian ‘antipope’ is a convincing proof of the direct missionary connection between Bosnia and Provence, and the whole incident shows that in the thirteenth century the Western heretics still looked to the Slavonic East for the sources of true belief.

It was in vain that on Culin’s death the King of Hungary appointed a Catholic Ban Zibisclave. It was in vain that in 1216 the Pope sent the sub-deacon Aconcius to labour at the conversion of the heretics. The Bogomiles only gained strength, and their faith struck firmer roots in the neighbouring countries of Croatia, Dalmatia, Istria, Carniola, and Slavonia. But Rome, in the Albigensian crusades, had already tasted Christian blood, and resolved to have recourse to the same weapons in Bosnia which she had employed so efficaciously in Provence. An Archbishop of Colocz was at hand to play the part of the Abbot of Citeaux. In 1222 he entered Bosnia at the head of an Hungarian host, and used the sword with such good effect that he had shortly possessed himself of the provinces of ‘Bosna, Ussora, and Soy.’ Zibisclav, who had defected from the true faith, saw himself reduced to abjure his errors and to fling himself at the toes of St. Peter, and the Pope was graciously pleased ‘to embrace sincerely in the arms of his charity both his person and his lands, and all the goods that he at the present possessed.’[57] But Zibisclav’s subjects were not inclined to follow the example of their Ban. On the contrary, they hardened their hearts, and in the very year, 1233, in which this fond embrace took place, a Bogomilian ‘pope’ or bishop continued to flourish and exercise a powerful authority in Bosnia. A new crusade was necessary. Coloman, the brother of the King of Hungary,[58] was the De Montfort of the occasion, and in 1238 entered Bosnia with a large army to exterminate the heretics. He extended his havoc through the whole country, and even ‘purged,’ we are told, the principality of Chelm, which answers to the south-western part of the Herzegovina. From this period onwards the history of Bosnia for centuries consists of little more than a series of such bloody inroads; but there are here none of those details which secure for the heretics of Alby the commiseration of mankind. Cities are sacked, but there is not here a Beziers or Carcassonne; the first germs of a civilization are trodden under foot, but these are not the full-blown roses of Provence; troubadours of a kind there doubtless were here, too, but it was in barbarous Sclavonic tongue, and not in the polished Langue d’Oc that they poured forth ‘their unpremeditated lay,’ and the sound of their lyre died away among the mountains that gave them birth.[59]

Gregory IX. congratulates Coloman on ‘wiping out the heresy and restoring the light of Catholic purity,’[60] but the Pope was quick in discovering that these congratulations were premature. The Tartar invasion which in 1241 weakened Hungary was the strength of the Bogomiles of Bosnia. Nor, perhaps, did the slaughter of Ban Zibisclav and many of his bravest adherents by the horde of Khan Ugadai much affect the subjects whose creed and interests he had deserted. In 1246 Pope Innocent IV.[61] had to stir up a third Bosnian crusade, the conduct of which was entrusted to the Archbishop of Colocz—‘a man skilled,’ as was fitting in an archbishop, ‘in all the science of war.’ He received a cross from the Pope to fix upon his heart, and aided by the King Bela, of Hungary, renewed the pious work. Many heretics were butchered, others were cast into dungeons; and so great were considered the deserts of the archbishop, that the Pope transferred the church of Bosnia from Spalato to Colocz. But once more it was discovered that fire and sword had raged in vain. Heresy continued to be so rampant in Bosnia that from 1256 the episcopate of Bosnia, which had been renewed after the first crusade, lapses a second time.[62] The papacy next resorted to persuasion, the more so as during the last part of the thirteenth century the Hungarian suzerainty was becoming less and less binding on Bosnia. About the year 1260 the Minorite brothers of the order of St. Francis of Assisi were sent into Bosnia to aid the Dominicans, who had been already established here.[63] At the end of the thirteenth century Bosnia passed for a while under the overlordship of the Prince of Serbia, and Stephen Dragutine, who was favourable to the Roman church, allowed two Franciscan brothers to establish the Inquisition here in 1291.[64]

But at the beginning of the fourteenth century the Hungarians had once more recovered their ascendency in Bosnia, and the Pope eagerly seized the weapon of orthodoxy at his service. John XXII. directed two letters, one to Charles, King of Hungary, and the other to Stephen, Ban of Bosnia. The letters are almost identical in scope, and are interesting as showing that Bosnia was still the stronghold and asylum of European heresy, and as illustrating the peculiar character of these sectaries. The letter to the Bosnian Ban is dated Avignon, June 1325.[65] ‘To our beloved son and nobleman, Stephen, Prince of Bosnia,’—‘Knowing that thou art a faithful son of the church, we therefore charge thee to exterminate the heretics in thy dominions, and to render aid and assistance unto Fabian, our Inquisitor, for as much as a large multitude of heretics, from many and divers parts collected, hath flowed together into the principality of Bosnia, trusting there to sow their obscene errors and to dwell there in safety. These men, imbued with the cunning of the Old Fiend, and armed with the venom of their falseness, corrupt the minds of Catholics by outward show of simplicity and lying assumption of the name of Christians; their speech crawleth like a crab, and they creep in with humility, but in secret they kill, and are wolves in sheeps’ clothing, covering their bestial fury as a means whereby they may deceive the simple sheep of Christ.’

The true believers still need to be warned against the apparent meekness and innocence of these men of the gospel! His Holiness seems almost to be repeating the description of the Bogomiles given by the Bulgarian Presbyter over three centuries before. ‘When men,’ says Cosmas, ‘see their lowly behaviour, then think they that they are of true belief; they approach them therefore and consult them about their souls’ health. But they, like wolves that will swallow up a lamb, bow their head, sigh, and answer full of humility, and set themselves up as if they knew how it is ordered in heaven.’[66] Hypocritical meekness has been a ready accusation in the mouths of opponents of puritanism in all ages; but we may be allowed to see, in the slanders of foul-mouthed popes and prelates, a tribute to the evangelic purity of the lives of those whom they persecuted and traduced.

Once more ‘the Lilies of the Field,’ as in their figurative parlance they loved to style themselves, are trampled under foot. In 1330 the King of Hungary and the Ban combined to assist the Inquisitor Fabian; many heretics were hounded from the realm, and the usual scenes of horror were repeated. In 1337, however, heresy is again as rampant as ever in Bosnia, and the Pope accordingly stirred up the neighbouring princes to another Bosnian crusade, which was only averted by the address of the Ban Stephen.

Sometimes the monks condescended to work miracles to forward the work of conversion. One, while addressing a congregation of heretics, ‘stepped,’ we are assured, ‘into a large fire, and with great hilarity stood in the middle of the flames while he recited the fiftieth Psalm.’ We hardly need the further assurance that many were turned from the error of their ways by miracles like this, especially when it is remembered that the heretics had the alternative of repenting, or repeating the experiment.

Nor were there wanting, we are told, miraculous tokens in the sky to manifest the displeasure of heaven itself at these scoffers at Catholic verity. The mountains whither the Bogomiles had been driven by the pious zeal of Ban Stephen were struck by celestial fire. ‘Upon the eve of St. Catharine, 1367, a mighty heavenly flame appeared in the East, with an intense light terribly apparent to the whole globe. At that time they say that the loftiest mountains of Bosnia, with all rocks, cattle, wild beasts, and fowls of the air, were miraculously consumed, so that they were reduced to a plain; and there dwell the Patarene Manichæans, and say that God burnt up those mountains for their convenience, because He loved their faith.’[67] In fact, neither the Bogomiles nor the new Ban Stephen Tvartko, who favoured them, seem to have been the least appalled by this phenomenon. Only two years after this miraculous conflagration, Urban V. writes to the King of Hungary to complain of the Ban of Bosnia, ‘who, following in the detestable footsteps of his fathers, fosters and defends the heretics who flow together into these parts from divers corners of the world as into a sink of iniquity.’[68] The Bans of Bosnia, even when Catholics themselves, seem to have been forced by the strength of national feeling into an attitude at least of toleration towards the Bogomiles, and their position in this respect has been aptly compared by Hilferding to that of the Bulgarian Czars.

During the troublous times of the Bosnian kingdom the Bogomiles increased in strength, and, what is extremely significant, the heretics of Bosnia begin to play a part in the revival of the Protestant movement throughout Europe. We do not know what part the Sclavonic heretics of Bosnia may have taken in preparing the minds of their Czechian brothers for the religious revolt of which Huss and Jerome of Prague were the leaders and exponents. But we do know that from the first intimate relations existed between the Bogomiles of Bosnia and the Hussites; in 1433 four Bogomilian or Patarene bishops made their way from Bosnia to the Council of Basil,[69] and shortly after, in 1437, the Romish bishop Joseph complains that Bosnia was swarming with Hussites and other heretics. We have, moreover, very strong indirect evidence that the movement in Bosnia was at this time directed by men of learning and ability. In 1462 Pius II., being much alarmed at the progress of heresy in Bosnia, and ‘hearing that there was a great want there of men skilled in philosophy, the sacred canons, and theology,’ sent thither ‘learned men from the neighbouring provinces,’ and especially the brother Peter de Mili, a native of Bosnia, and four fellows. These five ‘had studied in the best Cismontane and Transmontane Universities under the most learned doctors.’ The Pope, moreover, gave orders that some of the largest convents should be converted into schools for literary studies.[70] We may conclude with confidence that learning was required in Bosnia to cope with learning.

But the preparation of this polemic artillery was cut short by an event, the effects of which are even now distracting Christendom. In the year following that in which his Holiness laments over the continued progress of heresy in Bosnia, the whole country passed in the short space of eight days irrevocably under the dominion of the Infidel. The continued crusades, the persecutions of the Inquisition—fire, sword, exile, and dungeon—had done their work. The Protestant population of Bosnia had at last deliberately taken its choice, and preferred the dominion of what it believed to be the more tolerant Turks to the ferocious tyranny of Catholic kings, magnates, and monks. There never was a clearer instance of the Nemesis which follows on the heels of religious persecution. Europe has mainly to thank the Church of Rome that an alien civilisation and religion has been thrust into her midst, and that Bosnia at the present day remains Mahometan.

At the very moment when the Turks were threatening the existence of the Bosnian kingdom, the King, then Stephen Tomašević, and priests, aided by the magnates and aristocratic party in the State, were pushing the persecution of the Bogomiles to an extreme which perhaps it had never reached before. In the year 1459 King Stephen turned his feudal arms against the inoffensive Bogomiles at home, and hounded out as many, it is said,[71] as forty thousand, who took refuge in the Herzegovina, with their co-religionist, the Duke of St. Sava. Others he sent in chains to Rome, where it appears they were ‘benignantly converted’—whatever that means. But the expulsion of forty thousand did little to diminish the strength of the Bogomiles in Bosnia. In 1462, as we know from the Roman archives, heresy was as powerful as ever in Bosnia. Already, twelve years before,[72] the Bogomiles had invited the Turks into Bosnia as their deliverers; in 1463 the invitation was repeated, a successful negotiation was opened with the Sultan, and, on Mahomet II.’s invasion, the Catholic king found himself deserted by his people. The keys of the principal fortress, the royal city of Bobovac, were handed over to the Turk by the ‘Manichæan’ governor;[73] the other fortresses and towns hastened to imitate its example, and within a week ‘seventy cities defended by nature and art’ passed into the hands of Mahomet. Bosnia, which may be described as one vast stronghold, refused to strike a blow in defence of her priestly tyrants.

Perhaps enough has been said to show the really important part played by Bosnia in European history. We have seen her aid in interpreting to the West the sublime puritanism which the more Eastern Sclaves of Bulgaria had first received from the Armenian missionaries. We have seen her take the lead in the first religious revolt against Rome. We have seen a Bosnian religious teacher directing the movement in Provence. We have seen the Protestants of Bosnia successfully resisting all the efforts of Rome, supported by the arms of Hungary, to put them down. We have seen them offering an asylum to their persecuted brothers of the West,—Albigensians, Patarenes, and Waldenses. We have seen them connected with the Reformation in Bohemia, and affording shelter to the followers of Huss. From the twelfth century to the final conquest of the Turks in the sixteenth, when the fight of religious freedom had been won in Northern Europe, Bosnia presents the unique phenomenon of a Protestant State existing within the limits of the Holy Roman Empire, and in a province claimed by the Roman Church. Bosnia was the religious Switzerland of Mediæval Europe, and the signal service which she has rendered to the freedom of the human intellect by her successful stand against authority can hardly be exaggerated. Resistance, broken down in the gardens of Provence, buried beneath the charred rafters of the Roman cities of the Langue d’Oc, smothered in the dungeons of the Inquisition, was prolonged from generation to generation amongst the primeval forests and mountain fastnesses of Bosnia. There were not wanting, amongst those who sought to exterminate the Bogomiles, Churchmen as dead to human pity as the Abbot of Citeaux, and lay arms as bloodthirsty as De Montfort; but the stubborn genius of the Serbian people fought on with rare persistence, and held out to the end. The history of these champions of a purer religion has been written by their enemies, and ignored by those who owe most to their heroism. No Martyrology of the Bogomiles of Bosnia has come down to us. We have no Huss or Tyndale to arrest our pity. ‘Invidious silence’ has obscured their fame,

Illachrymabiles

Urgentur, ignotique longâ

Nocte, carent quia vate sacro.

Protestant historians, fearful of claiming relationship with heretics whose views on the Origin of Evil were more logical than their own, have almost or entirely ignored the existence of these Sclavonic Puritans. Yet of all worn-out devices of ad captandum argument this assuredly is the most threadbare, to ignore the transitions of intervening links, and pointing to the extremes of a long concatenation of causes and effects, to seize upon their differences as a proof of disconnection. In the course of ages the development of creeds and churches is not less striking than that of more secular institutions. Bogomilism obeyed an universal law; it paid the universal tribute of successful propagandism; it compromised; or, where it did not compromise, it was ruthlessly stamped out. The Manichæan elements, most distasteful to modern Protestants, were in fact the first to disappear.[74] In its contact with the semi-pagan Christianity of the West, the puritanism of the Gnostic East became, perforce, materialized; just as, ages before, Christianity itself, an earlier wave of the same Eastern puritanism had materialized in its contact with the undiluted heathendom of the Western empire. To a certain extent Bogomilism gained. It lost something of its dreamy transcendentalism, something of its anti-human vigour, and by conforming to the exigencies of Western society, became to a certain extent more practical. Thus by the sixteenth century the path had been cleared for a compromise with orthodoxy itself. The Reformation marks the confluence of the two main currents of religious thought that traverse the middle ages, in their several sources, Romish and Armenian. No doubt, from the orthodox side, which refused to reject all that was beautiful in the older world, which consecrated Greco-Roman civilization and linked art with religion, the West has gained much; but in days of gross materialism and degrading sacerdotalism, it has gained perhaps even more from the purging and elevating influence of these early Puritans. The most devout Protestant need not be afraid to acknowledge the religious obligations which he owes to his spiritual forefathers, Manichæan though they were; while those who perceive in Protestantism itself nothing more than a stepping-stone to still greater freedom of the human mind, and who recognize the universal bearings of the doctrine of Evolution, will be slow to deny that England herself and the most enlightened countries of the modern world may owe a debt, which it is hard to estimate, to the Bogomiles of Bulgaria and Bosnia.

After the Turkish conquest of Bosnia the history of the Bogomiles in those parts becomes obscure. That they still existed in the revived Banat of lower Bosnia we may gather from a passage in the ‘Annals of the Minorites,’[75] to the effect that in 1478 the city of Jaycze was ‘polluted by heretics and schismatics.’ Many who had resisted the propaganda of Rome appear to have found in the iconoclastic puritanism of Islâm a belief less incompatible with their own. We have direct evidence that it was the Bogomiles who chiefly swelled the ranks of the renegades.[76] Many, doubtless, when they found how hard were the masters they had called in, were provoked to their old attitude of resistance, and perished for their obstinacy. They are generally said to have died out, and the Bosnian monks of the order of St. Francis, who, in 1769, supplied the author of ‘Illyricum Sacrum’ with an account of the present state of that country, declare that there are no traces left of them. This, however, is not the case. During the recent insurrection, over 2,000 Bogomiles from Popovo, a single district of the Herzegovina, took refuge in the hospitable territory of what was once the Republic of Ragusa.[77]

To return to the more secular aspects of Bosnian history. Much still remains to be elucidated by Sclavonic historians with regard to the inner government of the country, the rise of the semi-feudal nobility, and the complicated relations of parties. Here it would be hopeless to attempt anything more than the merest outline, giving prominence only to a few episodes of general interest. The Hungarian overlordship is occasionally broken by a Serbian, and Stephen Dūshan, who, in the middle of the fourteenth century, revived the Czardom among the Balkan Sclaves, seized the pretext of a claim on the Principality of Chelm to overrun Bosnia, and add its dominion to his titles. For an interesting monument of this period I may refer the reader to the account of the Book of Arms of Bosnian Nobility, drawn up in the year 1340 by order of the Serbian Czar, which we saw in the Franciscan Monastery of Foinica.[78]

But this Serbian suzerainty vanishes with the dreams of Stephen Dūshan. Shortly after his date the Bans of Bosnia become so powerful that they are able to annex the two important Serbian provinces of Rascia and Zenta, which answers to the modern Montenegro, and to proclaim themselves virtually independent both of the Serbian and Hungarian monarchies. In 1376 the Ban, Stephen Tvartko, was strong enough to extort from his uncle, King Louis of Hungary, permission to assume the royal style—the King of Hungary only reserving the suprema dominatio.[79] After half a year spent in preparations, Tvartko, accompanied by his lords spiritual and temporal, and by four representatives from each important town, progressed from his residence of Sutiska to the Monastery of Mileševo, the foundation and burial-place of his uncle and predecessor, but the greater glory of which was that it contained the tomb of the Serbian Apostle, St. Sava. There he was crowned by the hands of the Metropolitan, and assumed the title of Stephen Tvartko, by the grace of God King of Rascia, Bosnia, and Primorie.[80]

Stephen Tvartko distinguished his rule by his wisdom and toleration. Though himself leaning in his belief alternately to Greek orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, he displayed a generous toleration of the Bogomiles; he did much to encourage trade and commerce, and was indeed, after Culin, the first Bosnian prince who struck coins.[81] He succeeded in quelling the insolence of his great nobles who had burst out into rebellion, under the leadership of his brother, and the attendance at his coronation of four representatives from each of his great cities would alone be a striking proof that Bosnia was advancing on the path of constitutional liberty, and was not by any means alien to the civic and industrial impulses of fourteenth-century Europe. Nay, it is certain that, in spite of the prevalence of Bogomilism among the masses, and of the artistically blighting influence of an iconoclastic religion on a rude society, arts of a more æsthetic kind were penetrating among the Bosnian mountains. Nor was it only in the illuminations of heraldry, the embellishment of gold and silver work, and the superb embroidery of sacred vestments that these more refined influences asserted themselves. That munificent patron of South-Sclavonic Art, the present Roman Catholic bishop of Bosnia, has collected in his palace of Diakovar, a series of paintings by Bosnian artists of this and the succeeding century, which reflect the Giottesque revulsion from the wooden Byzantinism which preceded it, and show that Bosnia bade fair to produce a school of artists who might hold a place in the galleries of Europe.[82]

Dîs aliter placitum! Already, through the passes of the Balkan the storm was howling nearer and nearer that was to annihilate the budding gems of culture and free government in Bosnia. In 1353,—five years before Tvartko’s accession to the Banat,—under Suleiman, the son of Orchan, the Turks had first set foot in Europe. In twelve more years their ravages had spread to Attica, the Palæologi had pawned their crown jewels, and the Turkish Sultan had transferred his residence from Broussa to Adrianople. The tide of invasion poured along the Pontic shores, across the plains of Thrace, and was bursting through the iron gates of Hæmus. The Crescent already floated on the holy city of Bulgaria, the Marica had run red with the blood of Serbian chivalry, and turbaned warriors had scaled the salt steppes of Albania; the people, in the plaintive words of their heroic poetry, ‘were scattered abroad like the fowls of the air,’ and Macedonia was resigned to wolves and vultures. Meanwhile, Bulgaria, already half conquered, was split up into the two rival Czardoms of Tirnovo and Widdin; Serbia, by the death of Czar Dūshan, had lost the one man capable of restraining anarchy at home, or of marshalling the forces of the nation against the Turkish invaders, and the great empire of the Némanjas had shivered into a hundred fragments.

Thus it was that in the hour of disunion and despair Serb and Bulgar alike turned to the new and rising kingdom that their Bosnian kinsmen had established in the Illyrian West. Tvartko was now at the height of his power, and included under his sceptre more extensive dominions than any Bosnian Ban, or King, before or after. He had seized the land of Chelm, the later Herzegovina, which had belonged to former Bans of Bosnia, till exchanged for Primorie with the King of Hungary; and added to it the two old Serbian Župas of Canali[83] and Tribunja; he had extended at least a suzerainty over the Principality of Zenta or the Black-Mountain; and by 1382 appears to have reduced the whole of Dalmatia, with the single exception of the city of Zara. Tvartko ruled already from beyond the Drina to the islands of the Adriatic, and from the Save to the lake of Skodra, but his ambition aimed at nothing short of re-establishing the empire of the Balkan Sclaves under a Bosnian sceptre, and of ruling, it might be, over wider realms than the greatest of the Némanjas. For these mighty schemes not only did he seem qualified by his personal abilities, but by connection and descent. His first wife, Dorothea, was the daughter of the Bulgarian Czar, Sracimir of Widdin; on his mother’s side he traced his descent from Stephen Dragutin; and, on the extinction of the Némanjids, claimed to be the rightful heir of the Serbian Kings and Czars.[84] In Croatia he had allied himself with the nobility in their opposition to their Hungarian suzerain, with the object of incorporating that province in his own dominions, and extending his frontier to the Drave.[85] Thus the appeal of the Sclavonic princes, Serbian and Bulgarian, who felt themselves powerless to repel the Turks, not only roused the Bosnian King to a sense of his own impending danger, but flattered his ambition. He hastened to respond to the appeal, by gathering an army of 30,000 men and advancing in person against the Infidel. For a moment that fatal spell of isolation which had held Bosnia so long aloof from the fortunes of neighbouring and kindred people is broken through, and she stands forth against the Turks at the head of a great confederacy of the Southern Sclaves, whose members were scattered from Silistria to Durazzo, and from Thessalonica to Belgrade. Joining his forces to the Serbian host collected by the ill-starred Knez Lazar, King Tvartko took advantage of the absence of Sultan Amurath in Asia, to fall upon his army near Pločnik on the Toplica, and inflicted on it such an annihilating defeat that scarce a fifth escaped the sword or captivity.

Amurath was furious, and hurried from Asia to avenge the disaster. Tirnovo fell, and the sight of a captive Czar struck terror into the Bulgarians. Tvartko despatched an army under his brave General, Vlatko Hranić, to the aid of the Sclavonic confederates, and for the last time Bosniac, Serb, Croat, and Bulgarian, joined their forces against the Infidel. Only two years after the rout of Pločnik, on June 15, St. Vitus’ day, 1389, on the ill-omened field of Kóssovo was fought one of the great battles of the world, decisive even in its indecisiveness.

Nothing but a brilliant victory could have galvanized into unity the ill-compacted alliance of the Sclaves. We need not dwell upon the incidents of the fight.[86] How the hero Miloš met the wassail taunts of treachery by rushing to his doom and stabbing ‘the Turkish Czar Murad’ in his pavilion; how the head of the Serbian Knez Lazar was held aloft by its grey hairs to glut the glazing eyes of the Turkish Sultan; how the Bosnian Voivode, metamorphosed into his Herzegovinian successor,—‘ducal Stephen,’ struck down nine Pashàs and sank himself before the tenth; of the lightning charge of Bajazet, the thunder-stroke of his iron mace, the crowning treachery of Vuk; or how, long afterwards, the Serbian wayfarers on the Field of Thrushes found the body of their sainted King, and Knez Lazar was borne at last by priestly hands ‘to beauteous Ravanica in the mountain forest,’ there to lie amidst his kindred in the convent of his rearing: all this, with many a legendary aftergrowth, lives as fresh in the minds of the Southern Sclaves as if it were of yesterday. There is not a name in that heroic muster-roll which is not a household word wherever the Serbian tongue is spoken. Epic lays of the fatal day of Kóssovo are still sung every day to throngs of peasant listeners by minstrels of the people, whose rhapsodies, set to the dolorous strains of the ghuzla, resound in a great national dirge along the willowed banks of Save and Danube, through the beechwood glens of Bosnia, the dark recesses of the Balkan, the mountain strongholds of the Czernagora, till, far away across the Illyrian desert, they find an echo in that caverned waste of rock that frowns above the blue waters of the Adriatic. The battle of Kóssovo has grown and grown on the imagination of oppressed peoples who only realized its full significance long afterwards. Tragic and romantic as were the actual incidents of that great contest, they stand out against the disastrous twilight that succeeded, in fantastic and supernatural relief, lit up by the lurid conflagrations of after ravages. At the time, we have the most direct evidence that the battle was regarded by one at least of the principal actors as a great victory for Christendom. Amurath was slain, the Turks had retired from the field of battle, and the brave Bosnian General had returned to his sovereign with unbroken forces. Tvartko wrote word to the citizens of Traù and Florence that he had once more triumphed over the Infidel, and Te Deums of thanksgiving for the success of the Christian arms were celebrated in the cathedral of Notre Dame and in the presence of the king of France.[87] Yet the death-knell of the Serbians and Bulgarians had already sounded, the last confederacy of the Southern Sclaves was broken up, the imperial aspirations of the Bosnian King were dashed for ever, and the doom of Bosnia itself was but postponed.

The battle of Kóssovo was the turning-point in Tvartko’s fortunes. His intrigues in Croatia, and a victory obtained over the Hungarian arms in Dalmatia, roused the Magyar King, Sigismund, to vengeance, and Tvartko, prevented himself by bodily weakness from taking an active part in the hostilities, saw his allies defeated, his province of Ussora overrun,[88] and himself reduced to renew his homage.

In 1391 Tvartko dies, of vexation, it is said, at these reverses, and is succeeded by Stephen Dabiscia, otherwise known as Tvartko II., and he again in 1396 by Tvartko III.[89] The greater part of the long reign of this King, which lasted forty-seven years, is distracted by perpetual wars, connected with the disputed succession of the Hungarian crown. It is extremely difficult to trace out the aims of the different parties who are now disputing for mastery in Bosnia. At one time Tvartko III., who seems, like his father, Tvartko I., to have aimed at Croatian annexations, appears at the head of an insurrection of Bosnian and Croatian magnates against Sigismund of Hungary, and in 1408 is defeated and captured under the walls of his historic Castle of Doboj,[90] where the conqueror executed 180 Bosnian and Croatian nobles. Tvartko, though forced to resume his allegiance, was suffered to retain his crown, and for many years we find him maintaining his position in league with the party of Sigismund among the Magyars, and generally by the support of the Bogomiles, and the popular party who seem to be identical with them. When the Magnates and their auxiliaries of the Neapolitan and Dalmatian faction sought to oppose him and set up a rival king, Tvartko carried out his national policy still further by sending a message to Vladislaus Jagellon, the Polish claimant of the Hungarian throne, in which he offered him his homage and begged for assistance on the plea of the common origin of the Poles and Bosniacs.[91]

In this universal confusion the Turks first make good a footing in Bosnia. Already in the reign of Stephen Dabiscia, Bajazet had advanced into the county of Chelm and established stationary quarters at a spot become memorable in the most recent times as the scene of the first outbreak of a revolt which has shaken Turkish dominion in Bosnia to its foundations—Nevešinje.[92] But in the factious contests which distracted the reign of the third Tvartko, each of the competitors for dominion outbade the other for Turkish help, and it was by the direct invitation and under the actual leadership of a turbulent noble that the Turks first gained sufficient footing in Bosnia to establish there a Sandjakate. The whole story is worth repeating, as it singularly illustrates the state into which this unhappy country had fallen. At the time there were two kings in Bosnia; Tvartko, who had now made his peace with Sigismund and ruled over the parts of Bosnia along the Drina and the Serbian frontier, and Ostoja, who owed his elevation to the Neapolitan faction of Ladislaus, and whose territory embraced the maritime parts and a tract roughly answering to the later Herzegovina. Between the Eastern and the Western kingdom lay a more or less neutral wedge of country which had been carved out by King Sigismund and formed into a Hungarian Banat under the great Croatian noble Hervoja Horvatić, whose dominion included the city of Jaycze, and anticipated in its extent that Banat of lower Bosnia which, at a later time, Mathias Corvinus recovered from the Turkish conqueror. Hervoja, who assumed the title of Chief Voivode, and even Prince, of Bosnia,[93] and who shifted his allegiance, as the whim seized him, from Tvartko and Sigismund to Ostoja and Ladislaus, happened on one occasion to have honoured King Sigismund with his presence at his court. Hervoja, who added a bullying manner to a body of bovine dimensions, was haranguing the assembled magnates, Hungarian and Bosnian, in his usual tones, when a certain Paul Chupor, Ban of Slavonia, broke in upon his lordship by bellowing like a bull. This was too much for the gravity of court ceremonial, and King Sigismund himself could not help joining in the general laugh. But Hervoja, in a frantic rage, left the court, and hurried back to his Banat, vowing vengeance against the Hungarian King, his Bosnian liegeman King Tvartko, and every baron who followed their banners. Seizing the opportunity when both of them were away in Germany, he called in the Turks and took the command of the invading horde in person. In the absence of the two Kings, the magnates of the country, with his mortal enemy, Paul Chupor, at their head, united their retainers to oppose him. Hervoja defeated their army, and having the luck to take his old insulter prisoner, had him sewn up alive in a bull’s hide and thrown into the river, with the characteristic jest, ‘When thou wert a man thou didst speak with a bull’s voice; take now thy bull’s hide as well!’

The Turks after devastating the country, destroying Varch Bosna near the site of Serajevo and penetrating into the district of Sala in lower Bosnia, refused this time to content themselves with plunder, and established their first Sandjakate in Bosnia. Hervoja, seeing himself thrown over by the Turks, who found him no longer useful as a cat’s-paw, and deserted by his own adherents, shut himself up in his family castle at Cattaro, and worn with vexation, perhaps remorse, died the same summer. The two Kings, Tvartko and Sigismund, succeeded on their return in gaining a victory over the Turks, slaying the Sandjak Ikach, and freeing Bosnia for a while from the occupation of the Infidel. But the anarchy within continued, and in 1430 culminated in the spectacle of three rival princes, each of them claiming to be King of Bosnia! In 1435 the death of his two rivals left Tvartko III. once more sole king; but shortly after that date the part of his dominions which answers to the modern Herzegovina separates itself from the rest of Bosnia, and forms for a while an independent principality.

The County of Chelm, variously designated as the Banat of Zachlumje and the land of Humska, had been originally incorporated in the Banat of Bosnia by the Ban Stephen[94] in 1326. We have seen it exchanged for Primorie with the King of Hungary, and re-annexed by the first King of Bosnia, who granted it as a fief to his brave general Vlatko Hranić. His grandson, who from his birthplace Cosac, was known as Stephen Cosača, or Cosaccia,[95] took advantage of the weakness of Tvartko III. to transfer the immediate suzerainty of his county to the Emperor Frederick IV., who in 1440 created him Duke, or, as his Sclavonic subjects who had borrowed the German word expressed it, Herzega, of St. Sava.[96] This, and the further title of ‘Keeper of St. Sava’s Sepulchre,’ he derived from the tomb of the patron saint of Serbia in his monastery of Mileševo.

The Herzegovina, or Duchy, as this country now begins to be called,[97] included, besides the old county of Chelm, the coastland district known as Primorie, and extended from the borders of Rascia to the neighbourhood of Zara.[98] Stephen Cosaccia fixed as the seat of his government the important point where the old Roman bridge still spans the river Narenta, and the City of Mostar still looks back to Radivoj Gost, his Curopalata or ‘Mayor of the Palace,’ as its founder.[99]

During the last years of Tvartko’s reign Bosnia enjoyed the peace she so much needed. The King who had inherited many of the good qualities, though not perhaps the martial ardour and masterful ambition of his father, the first Tvartko, won the hearts of his people by his even-handed justice. He heard complaints himself, sitting in the gate, as the Prince of Montenegro does at the present day, and decided the cases set before him with wisdom. Before punishment could be inflicted on anyone judgment had first to be pronounced by the Starosts or Elders of the realm, and the verdict had first to be submitted to the approval of the people. Business of state was conducted by the King in Council, and his chief advisers were the Bans of Jaycze and Bosna. In Tvartko’s days, we are told, no flatterer dare approach the Court. The Bogomiles enjoyed toleration, and Tvartko himself and the chief barons of the realm, including the Count of Popovo and Trebinje, the despot George of Serbia, and Sandalj Hranić were adherents of the sect. The Franciscan Missionaries, to whom directly or indirectly a very large share of the troubles of the Bosnian kingdom was due, were confined to the districts where they were already settled, and compelled to limit their exactions to a more restricted sphere; Tvartko even profited by a quarrel that broke out between them and the superior of their order, to place them under his direct jurisdiction.[100]

Stephen Thomas succeeded Tvartko ‘the Just’ on the throne of Bosnia in 1443. He was an illegitimate son of Ostoja and a Ragusan lady, Voiacchia, and was raised to the throne by the Bogomiles to whose communion he belonged. True to the policy which prompted the Puritan population of Bosnia to seek a counterpoise against Catholic Hungary in their fellow Puritans, the champions of Islâm, King Stephen Thomas began his reign by promising a yearly tribute to the Sultan. But the Papal party had rightly reckoned on the weakness of Thomas’s character; and the subtle genius of the Apostolic legate, Thomasini, whom the Pope had sent to effect his conversion, knew only too well how to play upon his fears and cupidity. Stephen Thomas was illegitimate; the lawful son of Ostoja, Radivoj (or Gaudenzo) had returned from Turkish exile and put in a claim on the Bosnian crown; the Papal party had powerful weapons at their command in the Duke of St. Sava, then a staunch Catholic, who refused allegiance and invaded Thomas’s territory, and in the King of Hungary, who as suzerain, declined to recognize the title of a heretic prince. Thomasini offered to legitimate Thomas and his heirs, to obtain for him a consecrated crown, to reconcile his rivals and his suzerain. The King of Bosnia yielded, abjured his Bogomilian heresy, and was baptized into the Catholic fold. Thomas, who had hitherto hesitated to take the style of King in his official acts,[101] was formally crowned in 1444. His homage was accepted by the Hungarian King Ladislaus, and his rival Radivoj was pacified with the grant of the Banat of Jaycze.

In Bosnia itself this abjuration of the national faith produced the most deplorable effects. The Inquisition raised its head, the Franciscans were again rampant. The Bogomiles saw themselves betrayed by the King of their own creation. The great vassal of the Bosnian crown, Stephen Cosaccia, Duke of St. Sava, who in the first blush of Thomas’s conversion had been induced to return to his allegiance, and whose goodwill had been further courted by Thomas taking his daughter Catharine to wife, now began to find it politic to cut himself adrift from the Papal party, and to bid for complete independence of the Bosnian Crown by posing as the protector of the Bogomiles. Meanwhile, beyond the border, the great battle of Varna had been fought, the Hungarians routed, and their King slain. As the danger of Turkish conquest drew nearer and nearer, the most bigoted champions of the Roman Church might see the danger of throwing the Protestant population into the arms of the invader; and the most sanguine of the Christian Puritans, viewing the fate of their brothers in Bulgaria, might shrink from accepting the dominion of their Mahometan counterparts. In the Diet, or Great Council of the Realm, which King Stephen Thomas assembled at Coinica, we may see a last effort to check the growing anarchy, and unite the discordant elements of the realm. I have given an account of the great charter of King Stephen Thomas while describing the scene of the ‘Conventus’ of Coinica.[102] In it the constitutional relation of the Duke of St. Sava will be found defined, and the clause which enacts ‘that the Manichæans build no new church nor restore the old,’ but which omits to prescribe any further penalties or to fulminate any of the usual anathemas against them, seems to me to imply that even the Bogomiles were to be accorded comparative toleration.[103] But passions ran too high, anarchy was too inveterate in Bosnia, for this attempt at internal pacification to succeed. In the Papal legate, Thomasini, King Stephen Thomas had ever at his side an evil genius, who inclined him more and more towards the path of persecution. With the Turk at the door King Thomas, who was known to the Roman Catholics as the ‘pious,’ once more lent the support of the civil arm to the Inquisition. The Bogomiles turned for protection to the Turks, their only possible ally, and, four years after the ‘Conventus’ of Coinica, invited them into the country. Stephen Thomas, a tyrant towards his own subjects, showed himself a craven before the foe, and purchased an ignominious peace from Amurath by agreeing to pay him 25,000 ducats a year. But the Turkish suzerainty became more and more galling, and the fall of Constantinople in 1453 finally roused him from his lethargy. Four years after that event he issued from his Palace of Sutisca, near the Castle of Bobovac, an appeal to the whole Christian world for help against the Infidel.[104] This was addressed to the Pope, the King of Arragon, the Doge of Venice, the Duke of Burgundy, and other Christian princes. But the days of the Crusades were gone by, and the appeal of the King of Bosnia met with no response, save that the Pope sent him a consecrated standard and a cross.

Meanwhile the death of the brave John Hunyadi, and the paralysing civil war in Hungary, left the Bosnian King without his one ally. The Turkish ravages now extended to the heart of Bosnia. Already, in 1449, Turks were settled in the country between the Drina and Ukrina stream,[105] on the main line of communication between Bosnia and Hungary; now, the neighbouring Pashàs and Agas begin to drive a regular traffic in Bosnian slaves. A half mythical atmosphere surrounds the last days of the Bosnian kingdom. It is said that the craven Thomas, fearing to resist the Turks, entered into a secret league with them. We are told by contemporary writers that Mahomet himself, disguised as a Morabite, made his way in company with two real members of that order, into the royal palace of Sutiska,[106] that King Thomas showed him all honour, and solemnly entered with him into that sworn brothership so hallowed amongst the Southern Sclaves, the Pobratimstvo. Whether such a meeting actually occurred, or whether the whole story was the invention of domestic enemies, there can be no doubt that the poltroonery and tergiversation of Thomas had alienated even that Catholic faction on which since his abjuration of Bogomilism he had relied. Signs of defection already appeared, and the King turned the arms that he should have employed against the national enemy, to reduce a refractory Croatian vassal. It was while besieging his castle, encamped on the field of Bielaj, that King Stephen Thomas was assassinated, if report spoke truly, by his step-brother Radivoj and his illegitimate son Stephen.

The parricide Stephen Tomašević at once usurped the throne, though Stephen Thomas is often regarded by Bosnians as their last king. The Catholic and anti-Turkish party were now triumphant, and the new King began his reign by an appeal to the feudal nobility of Bosnia to meet him with their retainers equipped for battle against the Infidel, on the field of Kóssovo. This summons is dated Pristina, June 3, 1459, and is one of the last records of feudal Bosnia. The Barons, Prelates, Nobles, Voivodes, and magnates of the realm,[107] are summoned by name. The Župans[108] of Rascia and of Serbia, with their banners and retainers, the Ban of Jaycze, the Ban of Ussora, the Duke of St. Sava, and the lesser nobles, are marshalled before us on parchment. The King appeals to their orthodox bigotry, and seems to take an illustration from the fire-drakes of Sclavonic folk-lore. ‘What faithful Christian,’ he asks, ‘and zealous lover of the orthodox faith can restrain his tears when considering the capture of Constantinople?’ He calls on the Barons aforesaid ‘to meet us on the field of Kóssovo in June, for we ought in a body to advance against the dragon, lest he spit forth over us his venom.’[109] But King Stephen Tomašević inherited his father’s poltroonery, with more than his father’s bigotry. We do not know that he ever met the Turks at Kóssovo; but we know that this same year he turned the arms of his orthodox Magnates against his unoffending Bogomile subjects, and hounded 40,000 of them from the realm. His brave generals, Paul Kubretić and Tomko Mergnjavić, defended severally the line of the Drina and the Rascian frontier with success, but the surrender of Semendria which the Hungarians had intrusted to his safe-keeping, to the Turks, had irritated Mathias Corvinus and the powerful Hungarian faction among the Magnates, and this dissatisfaction was intensified by Tomašević throwing himself and his kingdom at the feet of the Papacy, which, however, wisely refused to accept it. Meanwhile it was no secret that Mahomet was preparing for his great invasion of Bosnia.

The King of Bosnia who had already secured the alliance of the Venetians and Scanderbeg, turned once more to the Pope, if not to gain him fresh allies, at least to sanctify his efforts, and to breathe into his followers the enthusiasm of a new crusade. The ambassadors of Tomašević appeared at Rome in 1463, and were received in solemn conclave by the Pope. They read to him and the spiritual senators assembled an appeal drawn up by the Bosnian King’s own hand. The speech, for it is nothing less, has been preserved, and is the last monument of Christian Bosnia. In turns it is argumentative, insinuating, and solemn; selfish personal ambition is blended in a remarkable way with a real appreciation of the gravity of the situation, and the far-reaching consequences of a Turkish conquest of Bosnia to Hungary and Christendom; and the King as he warms with his harangue forgets the official plural of a royal style and lapses into the impressive individuality of a prophet.

‘Most Holy Father, we, Stephen Tomašević, King of Bosnia, send this embassy unto thee, for that Mahomet hath conceived this summer to fall upon our realm. Already hath he gathered together his array of war; nor is our strength sufficient that we should stand against him. In our grievous necessity we have turned to the Hungarians and the Venetians for succour; and George, the Prince of Albania, hath promised us his help. Now, therefore, have we also turned to thee, O most Holy Father. No mountains of gold do we ask of thee, but this alone, that our enemies and our true friends should know that we have thy protection. If so be that the Bosnians know that they fight not alone, then will their courage be the keener; whereas the Barbarian will fear to attack our land, the passes wherein are difficult, and the fenced cities well nigh impregnable. Eugenius, thy predecessor, promised our father the throne, and that he would establish some bishoprics in Bosnia; but our father refused to accept this treaty, lest peradventure he should magnify the hatred of the Turks against him; for that he himself was newly converted, and the Manichæans were not yet pursued the realm. But I was christened in the true faith, I learned Latin in my childhood, and have remained steadfast in my Christian belief. I fear not therefore what my father feared, and therefore do I entreat thee that thou wouldest send me a crown and the holy bishops. Let this be for a monument that thou wilt not forsake me or my realm. If the enemy breaks in, a crown received from thy hands will be unto my friends as an earnest of victory, and for a terror to my foes. In my father’s lifetime, thou didst issue thy commands that the Crusaders, assembled in Dalmatia under the overseeing of the Venetians, should help him, but this pleased not the Venetian Senate. Bid them now that they come to my aid, if haply thou shalt find more obedience, forasmuch as they have turned from their former designs, and they shall make war against the Turks. This moreover do I pray, that thou send thy legate unto Hungary, that so he may set before the King my grievous necessity, and may spur him on to join his arms with mine.

‘By such means the realm of Bosnia may yet be preserved; otherwise it falls to pieces: for insatiable ambition knows no bounds. But if so be that I am subjugated, the hereditary foe will fall upon the Hungarians, and having subdued the Dalmatians, Istrians, and Carinthians, will turn his arms also against Italy. The first fury of the storm threatens me, after me the Hungarians and Venetians and other peoples must bend before it, nor will Italy remain secure. Such are the foe’s designs. I have learnt them, and therefore do I communicate to thee this intelligence that thou mayest not lay drowsiness to my charge, nor say that these things were not foretold. My father too had foretold to thy predecessor and to the Venetians the fall of Constantinople. He was not believed, and Christendom lost one city of the Cæsars, the Patriarch’s seat and the pride of Greece. Of myself only do I now prophesy. Believest thou me? then succour me, and I am delivered; otherwise I perish. O thou who art the father of Christendom, give counsel and help!’

The Pope in reply recognised the truth of King Stephen’s warnings, and promised to place the arms in Dalmatia at his disposal, to build the desired cathedrals in Bosnia, and send the bishops. The consecrated crown he held in readiness, but would not send it without the consent of Mathias, Stephen’s suzerain, with whom he recommended him to make friends. Let Stephen prevent Mahomet’s invasion by occupying the passes; Hungary and Venice would fly to his assistance.

But while King Stephen Tomašević was pleading for new bishops from the Pope, another negociation was being transacted between his oppressed subjects and the Sultan. While the infatuated king was boasting that he had purged his realm of the Manichæan heretics; these very sectaries who, in spite of the expulsion of 40,000 three years before, still formed apparently the large majority of the population, though forced to dissemble their opinions, seeing themselves threatened on the one hand by a new Romish influx, on the other by invaders indeed, but Puritans at least like themselves, turned to the Turks. By the mouth of their spiritual chiefs the negociation with Mahomet was successfully completed. The Bogomiles promised to transfer their allegiance from their Romish sovereign to the Sultan, Mahomet on the other hand engaging to insure them free toleration for their religion, freedom from taxation, and other privileges.[110]

In 1463 Mahomet crossed the Drina and poured into Bosnia an army, the cavalry alone of which was exaggerated by the terror of the natives into 150,000 horsemen. On June 14 a Turkish Pashà appeared at the head of a large force beneath the walls of Bobovac, the ancient seat of Bosnian Bans and Kings. The Sultan himself came up next day, and the governor[111]—a ‘Manichee,’ we are told, ‘who had feigned to be a Christian’—forthwith, with the consent of the garrison, who it is to be supposed were equally disaffected against the Catholic rulers, opened the gates to the Turk. Thus passed into the hands of Mahomet a fortress of the greatest strength, and supplied with provisions for a two-years’ siege. The King of Bosnia, panic-stricken at the loss of his royal city, and seeing himself betrayed by his own subjects, shut himself up with his treasures in Jaycze, another royal city, as strong by its position and fortifications as Bobovac; but feeling himself still insecure, at the approach of the Pashà fled with his treasures to Clissa on the coast of Primorie, where, after forty days’ siege, on condition of his life being spared, he surrendered himself to Mahomet, together with his treasures, the accumulated hoards of five kings, amounting, it is said, to a million of ducats.[112]

The crafty Sultan utilized, we are told, the King’s authority to obtain possession of the remaining strongholds of Bosnia. He extorted from him writs to the governors of the different cities, ordering them to give up their keys to the Turks. All obeyed. The Protestant population of Bosnia did not need the royal mandate; they looked on the Turks rather as deliverers than foes, and in the short space of eight days seventy cities, ‘defended by nature and art,’ opened their gates to the Sultan’s officers.[113] Then at last the Christians of Bosnia discovered that they had betrayed one tyranny to make room for a worse. The King, Stephen Tomašević, having served his turn, was barbarously executed by his perfidious captor. Accounts differ as to the exact manner of his death; but it matters little whether he suffered the fate of Marsyas, St. Sebastian, or Charles I.; and poetic justice is satisfied, if we may believe the statement that the parricide king met his doom on the same field of Bielaj where he murdered his father.[114] The most eminent nobles who had not escaped to Dalmatia were transported to Asia, thirty thousand of the picked youth of Bosnia were taken to recruit the Janissaries, and two hundred thousand of the inhabitants were sold as slaves.

By a strange irony of fate the blow fell hardest on the cities, where the Bogomilian faction lay.[115] How terrible was their calamity the example of Jaycze, the chief city of the realm, and Clissa, the last refuge of Bosnian royalty, abundantly display. The burghers of Jaycze, relying on the Sultan’s pledge to respect their municipal freedom, their ancient privileges and their property, had gone forth to welcome him within their gates. But no sooner was the city in his possession than the treacherous Osmanlì, not content with arresting the chief nobility of the realm and the king’s brother and daughter whom he found within the walls, seized on the children of the leading citizens for distribution among his Pashàs and Agas, and enrolment in his new body-guard. The fate of Clissa (or Kliuć) was still more overwhelming. The Turkish Beglerbeg divided the townspeople into three parts. One of them he adjudicated to his troops as booty; another portion, the youths and children, he set apart for enrolment in the Janissary guard; and the remainder, but not, we may be assured, either the young or the beautiful, he left to pay tribute for their desolated homes.

That it was nothing but the sheerest intolerance that drove the Bogomiles to welcome Turkish rule in Bosnia is conclusively shown by the different attitude adopted by their co-religionists of Herzegovina. This can be accounted for by no ties of personal loyalty to the reigning Duke. Stephen’s whole career might well have inspired the most vehement repugnance among subjects more tolerant to human weakness than is the wont of Puritans. Stephen Cosaccia was by all accounts a selfish voluptuary, careless of religion, described as fickle as the wind, and reckless as he was ambitious. He had seized his son’s wife, a beautiful Florentine, and when his son and the outraged Duchess saved themselves from perpetual insult by taking shelter within the hospitable walls of Ragusa, had brought disasters on the land by his insolent pretensions. The Ragusans, indignant at his demand for the extradition of the fugitives, his claims on part of their territory, his raising the salt-tax, did not content themselves with impeaching their rebellious senator of high treason, but invaded Herzegovina, took his treasure castle of Blagai and ducal city of Mostar, and hardly needed the double intervention of Pope and Sultan to reduce him to an humiliating peace and the payment of a war indemnity. Stephen Cosaccia changed his creed with as much facility as he changed his consort. In the beginning of his reign, when Bosnian kings leaned to Bogomilism, it had suited his policy to bid for Papal favour and raise his County into a Duchy by playing the part of a faithful son of the Church. But when the King of Bosnia had made his peace with Rome, when all hopes that he may have cherished of placing the Bosnian crown upon his own head were finally dashed, when further a Papal legate had presided at that diet of Coinica by which his dependence on the Bosnian kingdom was formally cemented, Stephen Cosaccia began to think that, after all, more might be gained by fishing in the troubled waters of Puritan disaffection. He veered round once more and henceforth poses as the protector of the oppressed Bogomiles of Bosnia. When the persecutions of Stephen Tomašević drove 40,000 of these sectaries from the kingdom, they found a refuge in the duchy; and, neither for the first nor the last time in history, a tyrant and a libertine became the acknowledged patron of Puritans and levellers.

Thus, when Mahomet turned his arms against Herzegovina, the Bogomiles showed their gratitude to their ducal benefactor, by rising en masse in his defence. They occupied the mountain passes, and while the craven Stephen shut himself up in his capital Mostar, and drowned his anxieties in his usual dissipation, his brave Puritan adherents kept the Turks at bay on the frontier. One pass, however, had remained unoccupied. The Turks burst through it and beleagured the ducal city. The Bogomiles, however, still fought bravely, and made such successful sallies and flank attacks upon the enemy that the Turk saw himself obliged to raise the siege. The rest of the country, however, was overrun, many castles of the Count of Popovo and Trebinje[116] taken, and this great magnate of the duchy slain. The Duke saw himself forced to raise his tribute and send his son Stephen as a hostage to the Sultan. Two years later, in 1466, Stephen Cosaccia died, and his duchy was shared by his two sons, Ladislav, who inherited the ducal title, and Vlatko. But Herzegovina had only gained a respite from complete subjugation.[117] Twenty years after the overthrow of the Bosnian kingdom, in 1483, the Beglerbeg of Bosnia fell upon the Duchy of St. Sava, the two Christian princes were dispossessed, and the whole country incorporated in the Sandjakate of Bosnia. A renegade member of the ducal house, that Stephen whom the first duke had sent as a hostage to Mahomet, rose under the name of Ahmed Pashà to be grand vizier, and is known in Turkish annals as Herzekoglu.[118]

Amidst the universal ruin, the wife of the last lawful king of Bosnia, Stephen Thomas, is singled out by the grandeur of her misfortunes, and I have been tempted to collect a few details which may shed some halo of romance round the unhappy Catharine. After the murder of her husband by his bastard son Stephen and her brother Radivoj, Queen Catharine had lingered near his tomb in the Church of St. John at Sutisca, the burial-place of Bosnian kings, sheltered in the adjoining convent which her own and her husband’s piety had reared,[119] and doubtful whether most to fear her husband’s murderer or the terrible Sultan, who was advancing, avowedly, to avenge her. In the sacristery of the Convent of Sutisca, the Franciscan monks still treasure an antique picture, in which Christ appears in person to the kneeling king Stephen Thomas; and legend says that it was in the monastery of his rearing that this vision befell the husband of Queen Catharine. Here, amidst all these sad and solemn memories, the widowed queen was engaged in embroidering some sacred vestments, when the news of the rapid advance of Mahomet, perhaps the sudden betrayal of the royal stronghold of Bobovac itself, only five miles distant, startled her from her pious task. In the sacristery of Sutisca, with the picture of King Thomas, the Franciscan monks showed long afterwards[120] ‘a stole and a part of a chasuble embroidered in gold threads by a needle in a wonderful way, and delectable to the sight, which is said by immemorial tradition to have been the handiwork of Queen Catharine, the wife of King Thomas, who sleeps at Rome, and which she left unfinished when she fled.’

She, a woman of delicate health, the widowed Queen of Bosnia, the daughter of the Duke of St. Sava, on her mother’s side[121] tracing her lineage from the imperial race of the Comneni, fled away on foot through the passes of the Dinaric Alps, down the valley of the Narenta, across the inhospitable limestone desert that stretches, now as then, between her father’s stronghold of Mostar and the sea, to Stagno, the old seaport of Bosnia. There she found a small boat, which carried her across the gulf to the hospitable haven of Ragusa. At Ragusa she seems to have resided several years; but in 1475[122] she set forth on her pilgrimage once more, and passed the closing years of her life in the shelter of a Roman convent, distinguished by her charitable works, her meekness, and the patience with which she bore her misfortunes,[123] but haunted even there by the craven conduct of her son Sigismund, who had renegaded to the creed of Mahomet. In 1477 Queen Catharine died, and was buried in the Church of the Virgin of Ara Cœli, in which by her orders a monument was reared to her memory.[124] There, beside the feudal escutcheons of her husband’s kingdom and her father’s principality, on a foreign soil, and in a Roman sanctuary, reposes, as is fitting, the effigy of the exiled Queen of Bosnia, the last monument of the feudal kingdom, and of a dynasty essentially alien to the people over whom it ruled.

After her death two of her family appeared before Pope Sextus IV., and presented to him her will, in which she bequeathed her kingdom of Bosnia to the Holy Roman Church; adding, however, the condition that if her son should return from the Turks, ‘and the vomit of Mahomet,’ he should be restored to his father’s throne. As a token, her representatives handed over the Sword of the Realm, and the Royal Spurs, ‘which the Pontiff benignantly received, and ordered them to be placed, with the will, in the Apostolic archives.’[125]

Meanwhile Mathias Corvinus was taking more effectual measures to recover at least a part of Bosnia for Christendom and Hungary. Within three months after the execution of Stephen Tomašević he had taken the field, and in a short time recovered twenty-seven cities with almost the same rapidity as that of Mahomet’s conquest. The whole of lower Bosnia, including what is now Turkish Croatia, the valley of the Verbas, the Bosnian Possávina, the old Bosnian Banats of Ussora and Podrinia, were for a while recovered.[126] In Jaycze the spirit of the citizens had not been utterly crushed out even by the rigour of Mahomet and the Janissary tribute. Wifeless and childless for the most part, her burghers had not lost the hopes of vengeance and recovered liberty: they called on the Magyars to deliver them, and after a seventy days’ siege the Turkish garrison yielded to the combined efforts of the besieging army and the citizens within. The great stronghold of the realm now received a Hungarian governor, and was forthwith made the capital of the new Banat of Jaycze, or as Mathias called it, to preserve the jus of the Hungarian Crown, the titulary kingdom of Bosnia.[127]

The ancient city of Jaycze, which now for many years becomes the Ilion of Turk and Hungarian, and the bulwark of the Christian world, derives its name, it is said, from its resemblance in form to an egg, the Bosniac word for which is Jaica,[128] and it has thus been compared with the Neapolitan fortress Castello del Ovo, reared by the Normans. Its high walls are still to be seen, rising on a rocky height at the confluence of the Pliva and Verbas; and during the days of the Bosnian kingdom it was recognised as the capital of the realm, sharing with Bobovac the honour of being the favourite residence of the Bosnian kings. Nor did Jaycze owe this royal preference solely to an almost impregnable position. As a pleasance the site is equally alluring, being environed by some of the most romantic mountain and forest scenery in the country, and overlooking not only the one Bosnian lake, but a waterfall which may compare with those of Norway. Here rose the Minorite convent of St. Catharine, enriched by many indulgences, obtained from Rome by the namesake of the saint, the Queen whose melancholy fortunes we have just been tracing; and here, after the fall of Constantinople, the body of St. Luke (the greatest glory of Bosnia’s latter days!) had found shelter till the invasion of Mahomet, when pious hands succeeded in transporting it to Venice. There it was deposited by the Doge Cristoforo Moro in the Church of St. Job: to the no small scandal of the neighbouring city of Padua, which possessed a rival trunk of the Evangelist.

The history of Bosnia now centres around the fortifications of Jaycze. The city was again and again besieged by Mahomet and Bajazet; but the citizens, amongst whom we learn were a large number of Bogomiles,[129] showed that, when under the inspiration of a sovereign like Mathias, they knew how to fight, and, while the town held out, Hungarian armies inflicted disastrous defeats on the Turks under its walls. In 1520 two generals of Sultan Solyman II., the Bey of Semendria and the Pashà of Turkish Bosnia, inflicted the severest blow on the Banat of Jaycze that it had yet experienced. The great stronghold of Zvornik, the key of the Podrinia, fell into the hands of the Turks, owing to the carelessness of the governor, who had failed to provision it; and two other important fortresses yielded to the panic, one Sokol, the other the rock citadel of Tešanj,[130] the key of the province of Ussora. Jaycze, however, at that time had for governor a stout old soldier, Peter Keglević, who had received wounds at Terentzin, and the successful defence of this city under his guidance is the last and perhaps the most romantic episode in the annals of Christian Bosnia.

The Turks, finding all their efforts to take the city by open assault futile, had planned a night surprise, and, to disarm the suspicions of the governor, had retired out of sight of the city, as if to raise the siege. But Keglević, who perhaps obtained his information from renegades in the Pashà’s army, was made aware by means of his spies that the Turks were constructing a large number of ladders. The governor accordingly doubled the watch on the walls, lining them, where they were too low, with foot soldiers; and was shortly made aware, by the same secret sources of information, that the retreating Turks had doubled round, and, making their way by stealth among the mountains and under cover of the forest, were encamped in a retired gorge not far from the town, intending to assault the walls by a sudden escalade in the hours before dawn. Peter showed himself quite equal to the occasion, and told off immediately a picked body of a hundred men to take their stand in the rear of the Turkish ambush, with orders to fall on the infidels at a signal given from a gun-shot.

Nor were Keglević’s resources exhausted by this stratagem. It happened to be the eve of a feast-day, when the women and maidens of the town would in times of security go forth, as they still do through the length and breadth of Bosnia, to dance and sing on the forest lawns. Old Peter called the girls and merry wives of Jaycze around him, and bade them at earliest dawn to go forth, as if no foe were nigh, into the King’s Mead,[131] as the meadowland about the town was known long afterwards, and sing and play their shrillest—disarming their fears by telling them that he would be at hand to help them.

Meanwhile the Turks, astir before sunrise for their planned attack, were shouldering their ladders for the escalade—when the distant sounds of the festal songs, and the Sclavonic dance-music, the plaintive note of the Ghuzla, and the shrill piping of the Svirala, broke the silence of the still morning air; and peering down between the forest trunks they espied by the first faint light of dawn the maidens of Jaycze tripping the light fantastic toe right merrily on the green slopes opposite. This was enough! Down fall the ladders from their backs, and forwards scurry the warriors, forgetful of everything but the sirens across the valley. Old Keglević saw his opportunity, and sallying forth from the city, attacked them with a picked body of men, while the ambushed horsemen, true to the signal, swept down upon their rear. The Turks, in utter confusion, distracted by the double onslaught, surprised, perhaps scarcely armed, offered no resistance, and were cut down almost to a man.

The Pashà, furious at this disaster, attacked Jaycze shortly afterwards with an army of 20,000 men, a long train of siege material, and eight cannon of large calibre;[132] but Keglević held out, and Frangepani advancing with an army of 16,000 men, defeated the Pashà and compelled him to raise the siege. Seven years, however, after his splendid defence of Jaycze, the brave old governor resigned his command, and his successor, a careless and unwarlike man, lost the fortress almost immediately. On the surrender of Jaycze in 1527 the remaining towns of the Banat opened their gates to the Turks, and the whole of Bosnia to the Save passed irrecoverably into the hands of the Sultan.

That the change was much regretted even by the Catholic population of the country may be doubted. The history of the Hungarian Banat of Jaycze is indeed less stained with religious persecutions than that of the earlier kingdom, but much of that feudal tyranny which had contributed in no unimportant manner to the conquest of Mahomet was still at work to alienate the wretched Bosnian peasants. We have the convincing testimony of an eyewitness, and a Doctor of the Roman Catholic University of Bologna, that the rule of the Moslem was at this time looked upon as less oppressive than that of the petty Christian Bans and Barons. ‘The Bosniacs,’ says Montalbano, ‘are not so badly treated by the Turks, but that those subject to Christian rule are not worse oppressed by their own lords. And I myself have often seen no small multitude of country people, having burnt their own houses in their despair, flee with their wives and children and cattle and all that they possessed, to the country under Turkish rule, for as much as the Turk extorteth little, save the tithe. And therefore has it happened oftentimes that our armies in the last Hungarian wars, when they have crossed the Ottoman border, find not the Christian countrymen who, as they supposed, would be their friends and helpers; or if so be they found them, they were hid in nooks, or intent upon their flight; for no sufficient prohibition against outrages and robberies is possible with the army. They think themselves well off if haply their property and the honour of their women be left them uninjured; whereas with the Turks, by reason of their great obedience, these securities can be readily obtained.’[133]

Several desultory attempts have since been made on the part of the Hapsburgs to recover it: by the Markgrave Ludwig of Baden, in 1688; by Prince Eugene, in 1697, who pushed on as far as Bosna Serai itself, but gained nothing by his hasty dash; and again in 1736 by the imperial troops under the Prince of Saxe-Hildburghausen, which ended in the utter rout of the Austrian army, amounting, it is said, to 80,000 men, and such complete discomfiture, that Ali Pashà could boast that ‘not a hoof of them was left behind.’[134] In 1790 Marshal Laudon took a few places in Bosnia, but the French Revolution put a stop to these operations, and all the towns captured in Bosnia were restored by the peace of Sistov.[135] These later efforts may show that though the Emperor-King had resigned his claim over Bosnia by the peace of Passarovitz in 1718, Austria, in the last century at all events, had not resigned all hopes of recovering the old fief of the Hungarian Crown.

There are very few materials[136] at hand for the history of Bosnia after the Turkish conquest, and we have little but theories to explain the extraordinary process of renegation which immediately set in, and which has given us a Sclavonic race of Mahometans. From the earliest days of the conquest the Turks inaugurated the policy of allowing all those natives who would accept the religion of Islâm to retain their lands and belongings, and we hear at once of a son of the King of Bosnia and another of the Duke of St. Sava turning Mahometan. It is certain that though the Catholic faction among the nobility was still powerful, a large number of even the highest rank in Bosnia were infected with the Bogomilian heresy; and it is probable that many rightful heirs of ancient houses had been dispossessed for heretical opinions by the dominant Romish caste, and were willing to recover their honours by at least nominally abjuring their religion. By most, perhaps, the renegation was intended to be only temporary; they ‘bowed in the house of Rimmon’ merely to retain their honours. Not a few of these renegade families have preserved even to the present day many of their old Christian and perhaps heretical observances; and it is whispered that there are still members of the old Bosnian aristocracy only waiting for a favourable opportunity to abjure Islâm. With the bulk of the people the desire of lording it over their former Romish oppressors would often outweigh every religious consideration. It has been hinted already that the Puritans of Bosnia might find little repugnant to them in the service of the mosques, and we may perhaps suspect that the Manichæism which looked on Christ as one Æon, might accept Mahomet as another. Certain it is that a large part of the population of Bosnia went over to Mahometanism, and those who would deny that the majority of the converts belonged to the persecuted sect of the Bogomiles, must account for the curious diminution since the Turkish conquest of the heretics who immediately before it formed, as far as we can judge, the majority, certainly the most influential portion, of the population.

Strange as seems the comparative disappearance of the Bogomilian religion since the Turkish conquest, throughout a large part of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the more minutely we enquire into Bosnian history the less insoluble does the problem appear. On the whole, the disappearance of the Bosnian Protestants was not so much due to voluntary renegation, though that played its part, as to a cause which I have already hinted at. In the days of the Bosnian kingdom the strength of these sectaries lay in the towns; and it was on the towns that the hand of the Turk fell heaviest. The citizens of Jaycze, and Jaycze was then a peculiar stronghold of the Bogomiles, like those of Kliuć, and like those of the other fenced cities throughout the land, saw their children snatched from them, to be forcibly converted to Islâm, and to return as Janissaries and Mahometans to claim their heritage. Nay, more, we have the direct evidence of an eyewitness and contemporary that the Janissaries were largely recruited from the children of the Bogomiles.[137] At the end of the fifteenth and in the sixteenth century there were still Bogomiles in Bosnia; but how many of them were wifeless and childless! We have historic proofs that the Bogomiles who existed in Jaycze in 1478 had lost their heirs; their children were already Moslemized;—how many, we may ask, outlived that generation? and how few could have survived the consequences of the second captivity of Jaycze in 1527! In Herzegovina, where at the moment of Turkish conquest the Bogomiles were proportionally more numerous, and where their attitude, in contradistinction to their Turcophile manifestations in Bosnia, had been one of open defiance to the conqueror, their calamity must have been even more overwhelming; and if the Turks bore so hardly on their Jayczan benefactors, what mercy could have been meted to the Bogomilian defenders of Mostar?[138]

Whatever were the favouring causes of this wide-spread renegation, its effect has been to afford us the unique phenomenon of Mahometan feudalism and the extraordinary spectacle of a race of Sclavonic Mahometans. This must be borne in mind at the present moment, for nothing is more liable to confuse the questions at issue than to look on the Mussulman inhabitants of Bosnia and the Herzegovina as Turks. Conventionally, perhaps, one is often obliged to do so, and I must plead guilty in this respect in the course of this work. But it should always be remembered that, with the exception of a handful of officials and a certain proportion of the soldiery, the Mahometan inhabitants of Bosnia and the Herzegovina are of the same race as their Christian neighbours, speak the same Serbian dialect, and can trace back their title-deeds as far. It is a favourite delusion to suppose that the case of Bosnia finds a parallel in that of Serbia; that here, too, an independent Christian principality could be formed with the same ease, and that the independence of Bosnia has but to be proclaimed for the Mussulman to take the hint and quit the soil, as he has already quitted the soil of Serbia.

But, as I have said, the cases of the two provinces are altogether different; in Serbia the Mahometans were an infinitesimal minority of Osmanlì foreigners, encamped; in Bosnia, on the contrary, they are native Sclaves, rooted to the soil, and forming over a third of the population. Under whatever government Bosnia passes, it is safe to say that the Mahometans will still form a powerful minority, all the more important from having possession of the towns.

Nor must we omit another characteristic which marks off the Christian Bosniacs from their Serbian neighbours. As Bosnia of old was the debateable ground between the Roman Catholics and the Bogomiles, so, to-day, she is distracted between the adherents of the Eastern and Western Churches, who hate each other more cordially than the infidel. It might have been thought that the disappearance of Bogomilism would have resigned the country to the Catholics and Mahometans, for the orthodox Greek element is conspicuous by its absence in the general current of mediæval Bosnian history. But it was there nevertheless, and in the eastern parts of the country was even then the dominant creed. The conquest of Rascia by Tvartko I. brought a Greek province under the Bosnian sceptre, and though the Bosnian hold on Rascia was slight, the Greek Metropolitan appears at the Conventus of Coinica among the great magnates of the realm. Since the Turkish conquest the Sandjakate of Rascia or Novipazar has been incorporated in the Vilajet of Bosnia, and by this means alone a large Greek-Church element has been added to the present province. Nor, if we consider the history of Bosnia since the Turkish conquest, is it difficult to trace the process by which even in Bosnia proper and the Herzegovina, the Eastern Church has risen to a dominant position. The Roman Catholics of Bosnia have at different times during the last three centuries migrated in large numbers into Dalmatia, Croatia, and Slavonia, where they found shelter among their co-religionists, and it appears that the Greek population to the South and East, who had less temptation to cross the borders of Latin Christendom, have largely colonized the country thus vacated.[139] The Roman Catholic population who remained, their ecclesiastical organization broken up by these migrations, must in many cases have been absorbed in the congregation of the intrusive Serbs, and indeed, as has been already pointed out, the Roman Church in Illyria was to a great extent only Roman in its higher organization.

The extraordinary phenomenon that presents itself in the history of Bosnia under Turkish rule, is that till within the last few years it has been simply the history of the feudal Kingdom, under altered names and conditions. A Mahometan caste has tyrannised in place of a Popish—a Turkish Vizier has feebly represented the Suzerainty of the Osmanlì Grand Signior, just as of old we find Hungarian Bans or Kings representing the Overlordship of a Magyar King. The survival of the feudal nobility has been perfect. The great Bosnian lords, now calling themselves Begs or Capetans, resided still in the feudal castles reared by their Christian ancestors; they kept their old escutcheons, their Sclavonic family names, their rolls and patents of nobility inherited from Christian Kings; they led forth their retainers as of old under their baronial banners, and continued to indulge in the chivalrous pastime of hawking. The common people, on the other hand, have clung to their old Sclavonic institutions, their sworn brotherhoods, their village communities, their house-fathers; and have paid, and pay still, the same feudal dues to their Mahometan lords as they did to their Christian ancestors.

But though in political affairs, language, and customs, so much of the Præ-Turkish element has survived—though there are still to be found many secret observances of Christian rites among Mahometans in high places,—it would be a grievous error to suppose that the influence of Islâm is superficial in Bosnia, or that their religious convictions are not deep-rooted. On the contrary, the Sclavonic Mahometans of Bosnia, occupying an isolated corner of the Sultan’s dominions, have not been so liable to those external influences which at Stamboul itself have considerably modified the code of true believers. The Bosniac Mussulmans have had their religious antagonism perpetually roused by wars with the unbelievers who compass them round about; they, more than the Levantine Moslems, have borne the brunt of the long struggle with Christendom.

Add to this what the reader will have already perceived, that in Bosnia fanaticism is an inheritance from Christian times; that the renegaded Bogomiles have inherited the hatred they bear to the Christian rayah both of the Eastern and Romish Churches, from the days when these rival sectaries persecuted them without mercy.

Thus it is that Bosnia is the head-quarters of Mahometan fanaticism, and that when, at the beginning of this century, Sultan Mahmoud II. endeavoured to introduce his centralising innovations and reforms into Bosnia, which also promised the Christians a certain amount of religious liberty, he found himself opposed here not only by the feudal caste, who rallied round the Janissaries, but by a race of Mahometans whose religion had assumed a national character of a more fanatical hue than was fashionable in the capital. The wars between the Giaour Sultan, as the Bosniac Mussulmans contemptuously called the head of their faith, and his refractory vassals, have been described by Ranke,[140] and need not be dwelt on here. It was not till 1851 that Omer Pashà finally succeeded in breaking the resistance of Mahometan feudalism in Bosnia, and re-subjugated the country for the Sultan. Since that date the privileges of the native nobility have been greatly curtailed, and Sclavonic Mussulman and Sclavonic Christian alike have bowed before a new Osmanlì bureaucracy.

That the state of the country has not improved since that date may perhaps be gathered from the following pages. That at the moment of Omer Pashà’s conquest some good was done by breaking the strength of Bosnian feudalism, and setting a limit on the exactions of the native Mahometan landholders, is undeniable. The most turbulent of the native aristocracy were proscribed; the most galling of their feudal privileges were taken from them, and the Christians who had helped the Osmanlì in this second Turkish conquest of Bosnia received at the moment some partial compensation at the expense of their former lords. But when the Osmanlì ceased to garrison the country and prolonged his occupation in a bureaucratic form, it lay in the very nature of things that he should conciliate as far as possible those whose opposition was most formidable to him, his co-religionists, namely, the Bosniac Mahometans. Thus it is that since the period immediately succeeding Omer Pashà’s conquest the state of the Christian population has suffered a relapse, while in the Herzegovina, more especially, as I have shown elsewhere, the tyranny of the old feudal caste has recrudesced, and the misera contribuens plebs of those countries has to bear a double burden of extortion, from the landowner who represents the old régime and the Turkish officials and middle-men who represent the new; so that now the Christian rayah sees himself forced to serve two masters where he served one before. The present Government of Bosnia consists of a small body of foreign Osmanlì officials, speaking, in many cases, a language which is unintelligible to the native Sclaves; ill educated, totally unable to check the malpractices of their agents even when they themselves have honest intentions. Though often, let it be said to their credit, less bigoted themselves, they are altogether unable to place a restraint on the fanaticism which is the sad characteristic of the native Mussulman, and are well aware that, were they to attempt to introduce those reforms which look so well on paper, the native Mussulmans would hound them out of the country.

The more we examine the character of the Osmanlì government in Bosnia, the more unstable, artificial and mischievous does it appear. The centralization introduced by the ‘New Turks’ has struck at the roots of many of the most promising elements which Bosnia had inherited from the past, and the substitution of the authority of Osmanlì préfets, in the place of the old municipal councils of the towns, may be cited as a single example of the mischievous tendency of these innovations. The chief argument of those who wish to see the rule of the Osmanlìs upheld in Bosnia is that they act as a police to keep the peace between the warring elements of the native population. It would not be difficult to cite isolated instances where the Osmanlì has acted this part, and some will be found in the following pages; but it will be found, as a rule, that the Turkish rulers in Bosnia never put themselves out to control the Mahometan element of Bosnia, except when under the surveillance of European Consuls, or in their dealings with Franciscan monks, who are virtually Austrian officials. On the whole, it would be more true to say that the Osmanlì has prolonged his rule in Bosnia by playing on the jealousies of castes and creeds.

The Osmanlì government in Bosnia is, and has been, a government of finesse. It has no elements of stability about it, and nothing has been more prominently brought out by the present insurrection than its utter impotence. The foreign bureaucracy in Bosnia has seen itself haughtily thrust aside by the native Mahometans. Its manœuvres have utterly failed to conciliate the one class whose affections they were designed to seduce, and at the present moment there is one point on which the Mahometans and Christians of Bosnia are both agreed, and that is in abhorrence of the rule of the Osmanlì. Nor should it be overlooked that two of the greatest evils that at present afflict Bosnia are intimately bound up with the continuance of Turkish rule. One is the use of the Osmanlì language in official documents and in the law-courts; the other is the direct contact into which Bosnia is brought with the corruption of Stamboul. It is impossible that the rayah should secure justice in the law-courts, or at the hands of the government officials and middle-men, when his case or the contract into which he enters with the tax-farmers must be drawn up in a language utterly unintelligible to him, and by the hands of those who are interested in perverting the instrument of the law to injustice and extortion. It is impossible that the material resources of Bosnia, magnificent as they are, should be developed to the good of her civilization, while the enterprise of Europe has first to satisfy what is insatiable—the avarice of the Divan. The Bosniacs themselves are still blessed with many of the virtues of a primitive people, and left to themselves might secure honesty and justice in their public officers. At present the Bosnian employés must first learn their Osmanlì language, and imbibe the secrets of Osmanlì government, at the source and seminary of Turkish demoralization; and the alien bureaucracy which results, acts in Bosnia as a propaganda of corruption.

Why not then sever a connection as malign as it is artificial? Why not divorce Stamboul from Bosnia, and erect an independent State under an European guarantee? The democratic genius of the people would suggest a Republic as the best form of government, but the divided state of the country would preclude such a government to begin with, and a Principality after the model of free Serbia might combine Parliamentary government with the coherence of a monarchy.

When it is recognised by what an extremely precarious tenure the Porte holds Bosnia at present, and it is remembered that the chief aim of the native Mahometans, as of the native Christians, is Provincial Independence, even Englishmen may be inclined to accept the conclusion that the present connection between Bosnia and the hated government of the Osmanlì must be severed; the more so as the geographical configuration and position of Bosnia—a peninsula connected only with the rest of Turkey by a narrow neck—make it almost impossible to hold out against a serious invasion, and put it always at the mercy of foreign agitators.

Such a revolution may seem an Utopian dream; but when the purely artificial character of the present government of Bosnia is realized, it would be an impertinence to the confederate statesmanship of Europe to suppose that it was unable to effect it. For the moment, however, the ultimate form of Bosnian government is a question of secondary importance to the paramount necessity of re-establishing order in that unhappy land. At the moment that I write this, nearly 3,000 Bosnian and Herzegovinian villages and scattered hamlets are blackened ruins, and over 200,000 Christian refugees are starving among the inhospitable ravines of the Dalmatian Alps. In the interests of humanity, as well as of European peace, in discharge of responsibilities which no adroitness of European statesmanship can disavow, an armed occupation of Bosnia by civilized forces has become indispensable. When the Christian population of Bosnia have been rescued from the grave that yawns before them, when the robber bands of fanaticism have been disarmed, and the remnant of the refugees enabled to return to what were once their homes; then it will be time for the governments of civilized Europe to turn their energies to securing the necessary reforms, and to re-establishing the administration of the country on a sounder basis.

Discordant as are the political materials in Bosnia, fanatic as are the Christians as well as the Mahometans, I feel convinced that there exist elements of union in that unhappy country which might be moulded together by wise hands. The wrongs of the Christians in Bosnia have been intolerable, and I have shown my abhorrence of the present tyranny with sufficient emphasis in the course of this book; but I may take this opportunity of deprecating any sympathy with those who propose to deal with the Mussulman population of Bosnia in a spirit of Christian fanaticism. The whole history of Bosnia from the beginning has been one long commentary on the evils of established religions. Whatever terms the Great Powers may wish to impose on Bosnia and the Turks, let England at all events exert her influence against any setting up of an ecclesiastical tyranny. In the interests of all the warring creeds which distract the country, let the secular character of the future government be beyond suspicion. Let an European guarantee secure to the Mahometan minority of Bosnia the free exercise of their religion and complete equality before the law, and half the battle of conciliation will have been won. But let it once be supposed that Greek popes under the tutelage of Russia, or Franciscan monks under the patronage of the Apostolic Monarchy which still sets at nought, in Tyrol, the first principles of religious liberty, are to be allowed to lord it over the true believers; once encourage the hopes of Christian bigotry and the fears of Islâm, and the miserable struggle will prolong itself to the bitter end.

So far indeed from the sway of Christian denominationalism being in any sense possible in Bosnia, it must be frankly admitted, distasteful as the admission may be to some, that if an autonomous or partially autonomous state be established, a preponderating share in the government, saving European control, must for many years remain in the hands of the Mahometan part of the population. True that much of the present oppression is due to them; but they are the only class in Bosnia at present capable of holding the reins of government; they are more upright, and certainly not more fanatically bigoted, than the Christian Bosniacs. The weight of hereditary bondage cannot be shaken off in a day, and the majority of the Christian population are still too ignorant and cringing to govern their hereditary lords. True, that the Bosniac Mahometans are a minority; but it must be remembered that the Christians are divided into two sects, the Greek and the Latin, each of which regards its rival with greater animosity than the Moslem; nor can there be any reasonable doubt that, in the event of the establishment of a representative Assembly, or Bosnian ‘Sbor’, the Mahometans would secure the alliance of the Roman Catholic contingent, and would by this means obtain a working majority.

European surveillance is in any case an absolute necessity for securing the introduction of reforms, but there are no other conditions more favourable to its successful working than those above indicated. To reinforce the government of the Osmanlì would of all solutions be the most deplorable. It would be to give a new lease of life to all that is worst in the present state of Bosnia. It would be a gage of future anarchy and a perpetuation of corruption. I have far too much confidence in the shrewdness of the Oriental mind to suppose for a moment that the desired reforms would not be temporarily introduced under the eyes of Europe. But the instant that supervision was removed, the instant that the forces necessary for the enforcements of the reforms were withdrawn, the Osmanlì government in Bosnia would relapse into what it is at present,—a foreign bureaucracy, which, powerless to support the Sultan’s authority against the Conservative opposition of native Mussulmans, is reduced to pander to it. The old game of playing with the antagonisms of castes and creeds would be revived, the reforms would disappear one by one, and the smouldering elements of Christian discontent would once more burst forth in a conflagration, which might eventually light up the ends of Europe.

The great difficulty that statesmen have to contend with at the present moment is how to obtain certain elementary securities for the honour and property of an oppressed class of ignorant peasants, in the teeth of a haughty and oppressive ruling caste. To reverse the positions of serf and lord would be impossible. To bolster up a Christian government in the country, and after depriving the dominant caste of what it considers its hereditary dues, and stripping it of part of its possessions, to place it forcibly beneath the yoke of those whom it despises as slaves and abominates as idolaters, would need more supervision than Europe would be willing to accord; nor is it likely that anything short of perpetual armed occupation would succeed in enforcing such reforms, or in preventing the prolongation of an exterminating civil war.

It is then of primary necessity to conciliate the Mahometan caste of landlords and retainers, still hungering for abolished feudal privileges, and the Mahometan bourgeoisie of the towns, who in days of bureaucratic centralization sigh for their municipal privileges suppressed by the Osmanlì. And such a means of reconciling the Mahometan population of Bosnia to the new order of things can be found,—by sacrificing the Osmanlì. Turn out the sowers of Bosnian discord. Do not prevent the Mahometan gentry from taking that position in the country to which by their territorial possessions, according to English ideas, they are entitled. Let a native magistracy succeed the satellites of a foreign bureaucracy; revive the civic institutions of the towns, and the native Begs and Agas, as well as the descendants of the old municipal Starescina, will be only too glad to come to terms with the Great Powers.

The dominant caste in this way compensated, European supervision, of whatever kind, would work with at least a possibility of success in introducing the necessary reforms; nor, the period of probation concluded, and European control removed, is there any need for taking the pessimist view that the government of Bosnia would lapse into the ‘autonomy of a cock-pit.’ In the very nature of things the present difficulties have brought the worst and most fanatical elements of Bosnia to the surface, and in face of the ferocious deeds of Bosnian Ahmed Agas and their feudal train of murderous Bashi Bazouks, the more sensible and kindly side of Bosnian Mahometanism is liable to be overlooked. I have already observed that it is wrong for Christians to build too great expectations on the fact that many of the Mahometan nobles of Bosnia still preserve some of their old Christian practices, and on occasion take Franciscan monks as their ghostly advisers. Still the fact remains, to show that from some points of view they are not irreconcilable, and that the gulf between Christianity and Islâm is not so wide among the more educated classes as it is no doubt among the town-rabble. The most influential Christian in the whole country, Bishop Strossmayer, whose liberalism commands European esteem, stands on a most friendly footing with many of the leading Mahometan families in Bosnia, and when he visits his Bosnian diocese has the satisfaction of seeing true-believers flock to hear his sermons.[141] The brutal contempt of the Mahometan lord for the rayah is by no means universal, and even in Herzegovina, he at times so far conforms to the kindly democratic usage of the race as to address his Christian serf as brat or brother.[142] A few years ago the native aristocracy of Bosnia showed by its secret negotiations with the Serbian government that at a pinch it was not altogether averse to making common cause with the Giaour. In the rural districts of Bosnia and the Herzegovina religious animosity has never been so embittered as in the towns. I have myself seen the tombs of the departed Christians and the departed Moslems of a Herzegovinian village gathered together in the same God’s acre, and separated only by a scarcely perceptible path. In many parts the Mahometan peasants have suffered almost as much oppression as their Christian neighbours, and during the present insurrection there have been instances in which they have made common cause with the Christian rayah.

If this religious antagonism can once be overcome, there seem to be many hopeful elements left us even in Bosnia. The temperament of the Southern Sclaves is preëminently kindly and easy-going, and nothing but the interested wiles of the Osmanlì, to whom Bosnian union meant his own expulsion, could have checked the development of a spirit of toleration. We have in Bosnia a common language and a common national character born of the blood; and that national character, whatever may be said to the contrary, is not prone to revolution. It is slow, it is stubborn, it is not easily roused, and it possesses a fund of common sense which has led a keen French observer to compare the Serbian genius with the English.[143] The Bosniacs are of a temperament admirably fitted for parliamentary government, and what is more, owing to their still preserving the relics of the free institutions of the primitive Sclaves, they are familiar with its machinery. In their family-communities, in their village councils, the first principles of representative government are practised every day. Orderly government once established by the commanding influence which powerful neighbours could exercise for pacification if they chose, the development of the natural resources of the country would follow as a matter of course. I have elsewhere alluded to the fact that, besides supplying the Romans and the Ragusans in the Middle Ages with incalculable wealth of gold and silver, the Bosnian mountains are known to contain some of the richest veins of quicksilver in Europe; that iron and other ores are abundant, and that the valley of the principal river is one vast coal-bed. All these sources of wealth and prosperity, and consequent civilization, are at present, as I show elsewhere, inaccessible, owing simply to the corruption of Stamboul.

Besides such decentralizing reforms in the provincial constitution as connect themselves with the discontinuance of the direct government of the Osmanlì, it may be well to cite some of the more obvious measures necessary to secure the order and well being of Bosnia. The present insurrection, as I have been at some pains to point out, was in its origin mainly agrarian, and no reform can be satisfactory which does not secure the tiller of the soil a certain portion of it for himself. The intolerance of all classes of the Bosnian population is the natural offspring of the gross ignorance in which they are steeped, and it must be confessed that the want of education is largely due to the clerical character of the schools where they exist and to the malign teachings of odium theologicum. ‘The result of the present system,’ says a recent observer, ‘is evident and it is fatal. The Greek children under the Higumen, the Catholics under the Franciscan priest, the Mussulmans under the Ulema, go to school to learn to hate each other, and in fact this is the only lesson which as men they take care to remember.’[144] That a certain part of the revenues of the province should be set apart for education of a purely secular kind is a crying necessity, and the establishment of high schools at Serajevo, Travnik, Banjaluka, Mostar, and other large towns under the auspices of the University of Agram, but equally secular in their character, might be suggested as a good way of remedying the want of higher culture. For the moral, as well as the material, elevation of the rayahs of the Greek Church it is of the highest importance that they should be liberated from the corrupt rule of the Fanariote hierarchy, and it might be well to revive the national Sclavonic patriarchate, not at Ipek but at Serajevo. To foster the development of the great resources of the country, greater facilities for obtaining concessions of mines should be accorded to foreign capitalists; the completion of the Bosnian railway, and its junction with Roumelian and Serbian lines, should be secured; and measures should be taken to overcome the selfish financial policy of Austria, which shuts off Bosnia and Herzegovina from the only two seaports, the narrow enclaves of Klek and Sutorina, which still remain to them.

A few vigorous strokes like these levelled by the united strength of Europe at the ignorance, bigotry, and industrial depression of this unhappy land, could not long be without their result. It is a mistake to suppose that Islâm really opposes itself to culture; and were the means of obtaining a liberal education, free from the taint of Christian bigotry, placed within the reach of the Mahometan Begs and burghers, there is no reason to suppose that they would refuse their sons the benefit of it.

On the whole, however, it is safe to assume that the influx of Western civilization into Bosnia would tend to strengthen the Christian element. The fatalistic temper of the Mahometan dominant caste cripples their commercial energies. As the natural resources of the country were developed, wealth would fall more and more into the hands of the Christians, and the balance of political power would infallibly incline in their favour. In the course of a generation they might assume the reins of government, which, as I have pointed out, in spite of their numerical superiority, they are at present incapable of holding. The way would thus be paved for a closer union with the Christian border-provinces of kindred blood, Serbia and Montenegro, and Bosnia might ultimately form a province of a great South-Sclavonic confederation, extending from the Black Sea to the Adriatic, which should act as a constitutional bulwark against the encroaching despotism of the North.

To suppose that the freedom of the Sclaves of the South, of the Bosniacs, the Serbs of Old Serbia, and Bulgarians, will, when accomplished—and sooner or later there is no doubt that it must be accomplished—add to the strength of Russia, because in language they are somewhat similar, is as if anyone should have opposed the liberation and unity of Italy on the score that it would be aggrandizing France. If the French ever had designs on Rome they are infinitely less likely to arrive at them now than when an Austrian Archduke governed in Lombardy, and Bomba ruled at Naples. Granted that the Russians have designs on Constantinople, are they more likely to gain it from a decrepit Power which can scarcely hold its own provinces, or from a new Power or Powers endued with all the vigour of young nationality? To leave a country like Bosnia, isolated from the rest of Turkey, surrounded by free States, to perpetuate agitation within its borders, is only to weaken what remains of Turkey, and to play into the hands of Russia. Cousinship is not always a gage of amity; and the day, perhaps, is not far distant when the Sclavonic races of the Balkan Peninsula will look upon Russia as their most insidious foe.