Essays on the Latin Orient

by William Miller

2. THE MEDIÆVAL SERBIAN EMPIRE

The late Professor Freeman once remarked during a great crisis in the Balkans, that it was the business of a Minister of Foreign Affairs “to know something of the history of foreign countries.” The demand, however unreasonable it may seem, derives special importance from the fact, that recent events have signally justified the forecasts of the eminent historian and signally falsified those of the Minister whom he was criticising. For in the Balkans, and especially in Greece and Serbia, history is not, as it is apt to be in some western countries, primarily a subject for examinations, but is, thanks to the popular ballads, an integral part of the national life and a powerful factor in contemporary politics. The glories of the Byzantine Empire exercise a continual fascination upon the Greeks; the conquests of the Tsar Stephen Dushan in Macedonia have been invoked as one of the Serbian claims to that disputed land; whereas no Englishman of to-day has been known to demand a large part of France on the ground that it belonged to the English Crown in the reign of Dushan’s contemporary, Edward III.

But there is a further reason for the study of Balkan history by practical men. Our judgments of the Balkan peoples are often harsh and unjust, because we do not realise the historic fact that they stepped straight out of the fifteenth century into the nineteenth (and in some cases into the twentieth), like Plato’s cave-dwellers who emerged suddenly from darkness into the full light of day. For the centuries of Turkish rule, interrupted in the case of Northern Serbia by the twenty-one years of Austrian rule between the treaties of Passarovitz and Belgrade in the eighteenth century, left them much as it found them—with their material resources undeveloped, their roads reduced to mule-tracks, their harbours undredged, their education neglected. Consequently, it was manifestly unfair to expect those who were practically contemporaries of our Wars of the Roses to enter the nineteenth century with the same ideas and the same culture as the gradually evolved states of Western Europe. The wonder rather is that so much progress has been accomplished in so short a time, especially when we remember that the eminent personages who direct the affairs of this world are apt to regard the Balkan peoples, with their deeply-rooted historical traditions and aspirations, and their extraordinarily keen sense of nationality, immensely stimulated by the victories of 1912-13, as pawns in a game, to be moved about the board as its exigencies demand. Let us Western Europeans, then, who have had no personal experience of Turkish rule, be less censorious of those who have lived under it for nearly four centuries at Semendria and for five at Skopje.

In the following pages I propose to give a general sketch of mediæval Serbian history, emphasising those points which may help us to understand the events of the last few years, and referring those who desire further details to the great (if unpolished and unfinished) work of the late Constantin Jireček, who for the first time has placed the history of the Serbs in the Middle Ages upon the impregnable rock of contemporary documentary evidence.

The Serbs, like the Bulgars, are not original inhabitants of the Balkan peninsula, where, at the dawn of history, we find three principal races—the Greeks, the Illyrians (who are perhaps the ancestors of the Albanians), and the Thracians. But a continuous residence of thirteen centuries qualifies the Serbs to be considered a Balkan people. The usually received account of their entry into the peninsula is that given by the Byzantine Emperor, Constantine Porphyrogenitus, in his treatise “De Administrando Imperio,” written some three centuries later. He tells us that the Emperor Herakleios (610-41) gave them the territory which was later called “Serblia”—a country bounded in the time of Porphyrogenitus by Croatia on the north, Bulgaria on the south, the river Rashka near Novibazar on the east, and the present Herzegovina on the west. But a chain of historical facts proves that Herakleios merely gave to the Serbs what they had already taken. About a century before his time the Slavs, whose oldest home was in Poland, had begun to cross the Danube, and about 578 had actually appeared before Salonika. Herakleios, occupied with the war against the Persians in the East, could not defend the Western Balkans. So he made a virtue of necessity, just as, in our own day, governments have granted autonomy to lost provinces which they could no longer protect. The Danubian principalities, Bulgaria, Eastern Roumelia, Crete, and the Lebanon are examples.

This arrangement suited both parties. The Byzantine Court could keep up a formal suzerainty, and Constantine Porphyrogenitus could point in proof of it to the quite unscientific etymology of the word “Serboi” from the Latin servi, because they had become the “slaves” of the Byzantine Emperor. This national name, which first occurs in the ninth century, when we find Eginhard, the biographer of Charlemagne, describing in 822 the “Sorabi” as “said to occupy a large part of Dalmatia,” is still applied not only to the Balkan Serbs but to those of Saxony, whose language, however, is so different that a Serb of Bautzen cannot understand a Serb of Belgrade. The later Byzantine historians, full of classical lore, sometimes call the Serbs Τριβαλλοί after the Thracian tribe, which occupied in antiquity part of modern Serbia, and the king of which is brought on the stage and made to talk broken Greek in the Birds of Aristophanes. Yet, despite this false etymology of their name, Constantine Porphyrogenitus himself admits what was doubtless the fact, that the Croats and Serbs were “subject to none.” “Thus,” in the words of Finlay[858], “the modern history of the eastern shores of the Adriatic commences with the establishment of the Sclavonian colonies in Dalmatia.” Of the two pre-existing elements in the population, the Romans, as Constantine Porphyrogenitus says, retired into the coast-towns, while the Illyrian aborigines were pushed southward into the country which since the eleventh century has borne the name of Albania from the district of Albanon near Kroja. Under the name of Ἀρβανῖται the Albanians are first mentioned in 1079.

The history of mediæval Serbia falls naturally into three sections: (1) from the entry of the Serbs into the Balkan peninsula to the close of the twelfth century—a period during which the Byzantine Empire, after finally crushing the Bulgarians, dominated the Near East, and the Serbs, divided into two separate states, played a subordinate but restive part; (2) from the rise of the Nemanja dynasty towards the close of the twelfth century to the battle of Kossovo in 1389—a period which saw Serbia rise to be for a brief space by far the greatest state in the peninsula; (3) the decline, when Danubian Serbia existed at the pleasure of the Turks, till in 1459 she received her death-blow.

During the first of these periods the only serious resistance to the Byzantine hegemony of the Balkan peninsula was offered by the Bulgarians—a Finnish, or, according to others, Tartar tribe, which entered it in 679, and became gradually absorbed in the Slavonic population, which it had conquered. The vanquished imposed their language upon the victors, but the victors, like the Angles in England, imposed their name upon the vanquished. Two powerful Bulgarian monarchs, Krum and the Tsar Symeon, in 813 and 913 threatened the very existence of Constantinople, as did the Tsar Ferdinand in 1913; and Krum was wont to pledge his nobles out of the silver-set skull of the Greek Emperor Nikephoros I, whom he had slain in battle. The Serbs, however, maintained friendly relations with these powerful neighbours till about the middle of the ninth century, when history registers the first of the long series of Serbo-Bulgarian wars, of which we have seen three in our own time. When the Serbs were united, they were able to defeat the Bulgars. But the rivalry of the hereditary princes, whom we find ruling over them at this period, led to the formation of pro-Bulgar and pro-Byzantine parties, so that the native ruler tended to become a Bulgarian or Byzantine nominee, while there was a pretender in exile at Prêslav or Constantinople only awaiting the opportunity to be restored by foreign aid. About 924, however, the Bulgarian Tsar Symeon, instead of placing a puppet of his own on the throne, carried away almost the whole Serbian people captive into Bulgaria. Serbia thus remained barren; and when, after Symeon’s death, the Serbian prince, Tchaslav, escaped from the Bulgarian court to Serbia, he found there only fifty men, and neither women nor children. By submitting to the Byzantine Emperor and with the latter’s help, he restored the scattered Serbs to their own country.

For the rest of the tenth century Serbian history is a blank, save for the survival of the leaden seal with a Greek inscription belonging to a Prince of Diokleia, the country called after the town of Doclea, whose ruins still stand near Podgoritza. This was the time of the great Bulgarian Tsar Samuel, under whom Bulgaria stretched to the Adriatic; and Durazzo, the key of the Western Balkans, as Byzantine statesmen considered it, became a Bulgarian port. In his days there lived on the lake of Scutari a saintly Serbian prince, John Vladimir. Samuel carried off this holy man to his own capital on the lake of Prespa. But the Tsar’s daughter, according to the story, was so greatly moved by his pious speeches and his beauty while engaged in washing his feet, that she begged her father to release him. The saint escaped prison but not matrimony; he married the love-sick Bulgarian princess; but not long after was murdered as he was leaving church by an usurper of the Bulgarian throne. His remains repose in the monastery of St John near Elbassan; his cross is still preserved in Montenegro and carried every Whitsunday in procession at dawn.

The complete destruction of the first Bulgarian Empire by the Byzantine Emperor Basil II, “the Bulgar-slayer,” in 1018, removed the danger of a Bulgarian hegemony in the Balkans, and made the Danube again the frontier of the Byzantine dominions, which surrounded on three sides the Serbian lands. Manuel I added Σερβικός to the Imperial style; Serbian pretenders were kept ready at Constantinople or Durazzo, in case the Serbian rulers showed signs of independence, while high-sounding court titles rewarded their servility. The internal condition of the Serbian people favoured Byzantine policy. For them, as in our own day, there were two Serb states, and two national dynasties, one ruling over the South Dalmatian coast, the present Herzegovina, and Dioklitia, modern Montenegro, with Scutari and Cattaro for its capitals; the other governing the more inland districts from a central point in the valley of the Rashka (near Novibazar), whence Serbia obtained the name of “Rassia,” by which she was largely described in the West of Europe during the Middle Ages. Of these two dynasties the former assumed the royal title—Hildebrand addressed a letter to “Michael, King of the Slavs”—but the latter became the more important, although its head contented himself with the more modest designation of “Great jupan,” that is, the first among the jupani, or Counts (Serbian jupa = county).

Whenever opportunity offered, however, the Serbs endeavoured to emancipate themselves from Byzantium. Kedrenos informs us that “after the death of the Emperor Romanos III (in 1034) Serbia threw off the yoke of the Greeks”; Stephen Vojislav, ruler of Dioklitia, not only seized a cargo of gold, which was thrown up on the Illyrian coast, but saw a Byzantine army perish in the difficult passes of his country. A second Imperial invasion, which started from Durazzo, met with the same fate as that which befell the Austrian “punitive expedition” in December 1914. The Serbs allowed the invaders to penetrate into the Zeta valley, occupied the heights and utterly routed them as they returned, laden with booty, through a narrow gorge. Michael, Vojislav’s son, made peace with the Emperor, and received the title of protospathários, or “sword-bearer,” at the Byzantine court, while he assumed at home the title of king. But, after the crushing defeat of the Byzantines by the Seljuks in Asia at the battle of Manzikert in 1071, the temptation to rise was too strong for the Balkan Slavs to resist. Accordingly, at the invitation of the Bulgarians, Michael sent them a leader in the person of his son, Constantine Bodin, who was proclaimed at Prizren “Peter, Emperor of the Bulgarians.” Bodin was, however, captured by the Byzantines, but escaped and married the daughter of a citizen of Bari—the first example but not the last of a Serbo-Italian union. At his request Pope Clement III confirmed the rights of the Archbishopric of Antivari, the ancient See, which is mentioned as an Archbishopric so early as 1067, and on the holder of which Leo XIII in 1902 conferred the title of “Primate of Serbia.” But Bodin, bellicose and crafty as Anna Comnena describes him, fell again into the power of the Byzantines. Our countryman, Ordericus Vitalis, describes him as “treating in a friendly fashion” the Crusaders who passed through his territory. Usually, however, the Crusaders had difficulty with the Serbs; and William of Tyre tells how at Nish, then a “fortified town, filled with a valiant and numerous population,” certain “Germans, sons of Belial,” set fire to the mills, thus provoking the retaliation of the natives.

The excellent Archbishop, who was sent in 1168 on an embassy to Monastir, remarks that Serbia was a country “of difficult access”; and that the Serbs, whose name he also derives from their supposedly original state of servitude, were “an uncultured and undisciplined people, inhabiting the mountains and forests, and not practising agriculture, but possessed of much cattle great and small.... Sometimes their jupani obey the Emperor: at other times all the inhabitants quit their mountains and forests ... to ravage the surrounding countries.” Yet the oldest piece of Serbian literature—a book of the Gospels in Cyrillic letters[859]—dates from this very period; and a priest of Antivari composed in Latin a history of the rulers of Diokleia, who were gradually ousted by the “Great jupani” of Rascia, who in their turn were forced to submit to the chivalrous Byzantine Emperor, Manuel I. A court poet of the period, Theodore Prodromos, represents the Serbian rivers Save and Tara, red with blood and laden with corpses, addressing the conqueror, and the Serbian jupani trembling at the roar of the lion from the Bosporus.

The death of Manuel I, in 1180, freed the Southern Slavs from Byzantine rule; and the following decade saw the foundation of the great Serbian state, which reached its zenith in the middle of the fourteenth century, and then fell before the all-conquering Turk. As has usually happened in Balkan history, this national triumph was the work of one man—Stephen Nemanja, the first great name in Serbian history.

The founder of the Serbian monarchy was a native of what is now Podgoritza, whence he built up a compact Serbian state, comprising the Zeta (modern Montenegro), and the Land of Hum (the “Hill” country, now the Herzegovina), Northern Albania and the modern kingdom of Serbia, with a sea-frontage on the Bocche di Cattaro, whose municipality in 1186 passed a resolution describing him as “Our Lord Nemanja, Great jupan of Rascia.” Of the Serbian lands Bosnia alone evaded his sway, forming a separate state, which, first under bans, and then under kings, survived the Serbian monarchy till it, too, fell before the Turks; while in the land of Hum he set up his brother, Miroslav, as prince. Thus, he substituted for the aristocratic Serbian federation a single state, embraced the Orthodox faith, which was that of the majority of his people, and strove to secure its religious as well as ecclesiastical union by extirpating the heresy of the Bogomiles, or Babuni (whence the name of the Babuna pass near Monastir, so famous in the fighting of 1915), then rife in the Balkans. At the same time he sent presents to St Peter’s in Rome and St Nicholas’ at Bari.

When Frederick Barbarossa stopped at Nish on the third Crusade in 1189, Nemanja met him with handsome gifts; but we may doubt the statement of a German chronicler that he did homage for his lands to the Teutonic ruler. No German Emperor ever set foot in Nish again till the recent visit of the Kaiser to King Ferdinand, when a modern chronicle, the Wolffbureau, revived the memory of Barbarossa’s presence there. In 1195 Nemanja retired from the world, at the instigation of his youngest son, who is known in Serbian history as St Sava; and he died in 1200 as the monk Symeon in the monastery of Chilandar on Mount Athos. He, too, received the honours of a saint; his tomb is still revered in the monastery of Studenitza, which he founded; and his life was written by his eldest son and successor Stephen, and by Stephen’s brother St Sava—the beginning of Serbian historical biography.

Nemanja had never assumed the title of king, continuing to style himself as “Great jupan”; but Stephen won for himself the title of “the first-crowned king,” by obtaining, in 1217, a royal crown from Pope Honorius III. There were diplomatic reasons for the assumption of this title. The Byzantine Empire had now fallen before the Latin Crusaders; Frankish principalities had arisen all over the Near East; and the Latin ruler of Salonika had assumed the royal style. Bulgaria had arisen again, and her sovereigns had revived the ancient title of Tsar; and the King of Hungary had presumed to call himself king of “Rascia” also. To show his connection with the former kings of Diokleia, Stephen added that country to his style; to complete the independence of his kingdom, he obtained through his saintly and diplomatic brother from the Œcumenical Patriarch at Nice the recognition of a separate Serbian Church under Sava himself as “Archbishop of all the Serbian lands.” Sava was buried in the monastery of Mileshevo in the old sandjak of Novibazar, whence his remains were removed and burned by the Turks near Belgrade in 1595. Many a pious legend has grown up around the name of the founder of the national Church; but, through the haze of romance and beneath the halo of the saint, we can descry the figure of the great ecclesiastical statesman, whose constant aim it was to benefit his country and the dynasty to which he himself belonged, and to identify the latter with the national religion.

While Stephen’s successor was a feeble character, the second Bulgarian Empire reached its zenith under the great Tsar John Asên II, who boasted in a still extant inscription in his capital of Trnovo, then the centre of Balkan politics, that he had “conquered all the lands from Adrianople to Durazzo.” The next Serbian King Vladislav was his son-in-law; St Sava died as his guest. But the hegemony of Bulgaria disappeared at his death in 1241; there, too, the national resurrection had been the work of one man. The Greeks regained their influence in Macedonia, and in 1261 recaptured Constantinople from the Latins.

We have an interesting description of life at the Serbian court in the time of the next King, Stephen Urosh I[860] (c. 1268), from the Byzantine historian Pachymeres. There was a project for a marriage between a daughter of the Greek Emperor, Michael VIII Palaiologos, and a son of Stephen Urosh. First, however, two envoys were sent to report, and the Empress specially charged one of them to let her know what sort of a family it was into which her daughter was about to marry. The pompous Byzantines were horrified to find “the great King,” as he was called, living the simple life in a way which would have disgraced a modest official of Constantinople, his Hungarian daughter-in-law working at her spindle in an inexpensive gown, and his household eating like a pack of hunters or sheep-stealers. The lack of security for travellers deepened the unfavourable impression of the envoys, and the marriage was broken off. Stephen Urosh II (1281-1321), surnamed Milutin (“the child of grace”), greatly increased the importance of Serbia. We have different pictures of this monarch from his Serbian and his Greek contemporaries. One of the former extols his qualities as a ruler, one of the latter portrays him as anything but an exemplary husband. But these characters are not incompatible, as we know from the case of Henry VIII, whom Stephen Urosh II resembled not only in the number of his wives, but in his opportunist policy. His chief object was to enlarge his dominions at the expense of Byzantium; he occupied Skopje, and established his capital there—the Serbian residence had hitherto fluctuated between Novibazar, Prishtina and Prizren—and so greatly impressed the Emperor Andronikos II with his advance towards Salonika that the latter sacrificed his only daughter, Simonis, to the already thrice-divorced monarch, giving as her dowry the territories which his son-in-law had already taken from him. Simonis, however, when she grew up—she was only a child at the time of her engagement—preferred Constantinople to the society of her husband; and nothing but his threat to come and take her by force induced her to return.

Behind this marriage of convenience there lay the project of uniting the Greek and Serbian dominions under a Serbian sceptre—a project to which the national party was resolutely opposed. At the same time, he not only had—what all Serbian rulers have coveted—an outlet on the sea, but actually occupied for a few years the port of Durazzo, that much-debated spot, which during the Middle Ages was alternatively Angevin, Serbian, Albanian and Venetian, till in 1501 it became Turkish. Nor was this astute ruler only a diplomatist and a politician; he offered the Venetians to keep open and guard the great trade route which traversed his kingdom, and led across Bulgaria to the Black Sea. A munificent founder of churches, his generosity is evidenced in Italy by the silver altar, bearing the date 1319, which he gave to St Nicholas’ at Bari, and on which he described himself as ruling from the Adriatic to the Danube; but his name is better known by the verses of Dante, who has given him a place in the Paradiso among the evil kings for his issue of counterfeit Venetian coin[861]—a common offence in the Levant during the Middle Ages:

e quel di Rascia

Che male ha visto il conio di Vinegia.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AUTHORITIES

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

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

3. Les problèmes serbes. Par Stojan Novakovich. In Archiv für slavische Philologie, Bände XXXIII.-IV. Berlin, 1912.

4. Listine. By S. Ljubich. In Monumenta spectantia historiam Slavorum Meridionalium. Eleven vols. Agram, 1868-93.

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

6. Poésies populaires serbes. Tr. by A. Dozon. Paris, 1877.

APPENDIX
THE FOUNDER OF MONTENEGRO

The parentage of Stephen Crnojevich, the founder of the like-named Montenegrin dynasty, has hitherto rested merely on conjecture. The two oldest writers on South Slavonic history, Orbini[863] and Luccari[864], identified him with Stefano Maramonte, an adventurer from Apulia, who is known from Venetian sources[865] to have been a totally different person. Subsequent writers, such as Ducange[866], Fallmerayer[867], Milakovich[868], and Lenormant[869], have usually adopted without question this identification; while the first native historian of Montenegro, the Vladika Vasilj Petrovich[870], made him the son of a certain John Crnojevich, who was descended from the Serbian royal family of Nemanja. According to these respective theories, he first appeared in Montenegrin history in 1419, 1421 or 1423. Hopf[871], and Count de Mas Latrie[872], who were far nearer the truth, asserted him to have been a son of Raditch Crnoje, who is described as “lord of the Zeta and Budua and of the other parts of Slavonia” in 1392, as “baron of the parts of the Zeta” in 1393, and as having fallen in battle in 1396, after having been a “very powerful man” and an honorary citizen of Venice[873].

The Venetian documents, published by Ljubich, prove beyond all doubt that Stephen Crnojevich was the son of George Jurash, or Jurashevich—a name first mentioned[874] in a Ragusan document of 1403. Three years later George Jurashevich and his brother Alexius dominated the Upper Zeta; in 1420 they were “barons of the Zeta” and were promised the possession of Budua[875]—the very same places that Raditch Crnoje had held. These facts might have suggested that they were his next-of-kin, not, as Hopf[876] and Miklosich[877] supposed, members of a distinct clan. The identity of the two families is proved by a document[878] of 1426, which mentions for the first time Stefaniza fiol del Zorzi Juras, while subsequent documents prove conclusively that this Stefaniza was none other than Stephen Crnojevich. He had three brothers, one “lately dead” in 1443, and in the next year mention is made of the three survivors as Jurassin, Stefanice, et Coicini, fratrum de Zernoievich[879].

The exact relationship of Stephen’s father, George Jurashevich, to Raditch Crnoje can only be surmised. We know however that Raditch had several brothers[880]; if we assume that one was called George, or Jurash, this man’s son would then be called Jurashevich; thus Stephen would be Raditch’s grand-nephew—a degree of relationship which would correspond with his death[881] in 1466, two generations after that of his great-uncle. As the legitimate heirs of Raditch, the Jurashevich naturally reverted to the more distinguished surname of Crnojevich, a name found in that region in 1351, while Crnagora, the Serb name for Montenegro, occurs in a Ragusan document[882] of 1362. There is a tradition[883] that the family came originally from Zajablje in the Herzegovina.

3. BOSNIA BEFORE THE TURKISH CONQUEST[884]

I. The History of Bosnia down to 1180.

The earliest known inhabitants of Bosnia and the Herzegovina belonged to that Illyrian stock which peopled the western side of the Balkan peninsula at the close of the fifth century B.C. At that period we find two Illyrian tribes, the Ardiæi and the Autariatæ, in possession of those lands. The former occupied West Bosnia, while the latter extended to the south and gave their name to the river Tara, which forms for some distance the present frontier between Montenegro and the Herzegovina. Few characteristics of these remote tribes have been preserved by the Greek and Roman writers, but we are told that the Ardiæi were noted even among the Illyrians for their drunken habits, and that they were the proprietors of a large body of slaves, who performed all their manual offices for them. Of the Autariatæ we know nothing beyond the fact of their power at that epoch.

But the old Illyrian inhabitants had to acknowledge the superiority of another race. About 380 B.C. the Celts invaded the peninsula, and, by dint of continual pushing, ousted the natives of what is now Serbia, and so became neighbours of the Ardiæi. Their next step was to drive the latter southward into the modern Herzegovina, and to seize their possessions in North Bosnia. Instead of uniting against the Celtic invaders the Illyrian tribes fell to quarrelling among themselves over some salt springs, which were unfortunately situated at the spot where their confines met. This fratricidal struggle had the effect of so weakening both parties that they fell an easy prey to the common foe. The victorious Celts pursued their southward course, and by 335 B.C. both Bosnia and the Herzegovina were in their power, and the Illyrians either exiles or else subject to the Celtic sway. This is the first instance of that fatal tendency to disunion which has throughout been the curse of these beautiful lands. The worst foes of Bosnia and the Herzegovina have been those of their own household.

The Celtic supremacy left few traces behind it. While in the south a powerful Illyrian state was formed, which offered a stubborn resistance to Rome herself, the Celtic and Illyrian inhabitants of Bosnia and the Herzegovina remained in the happy condition of having no history. But when the South Illyrian state fell before the Romans, in 167 B.C., and the legionaries encamped on the river Narenta, upon which the present Herzegovinian capital stands, the people who dwelt to the north felt that the time had come to defend themselves. One of their tribes had already submitted to the Romans, but the others combined in a confederation, which had its seat at Delminium, a fortress near the modern town of Sinj, in Dalmatia, from which the confederates took the common name of Dalmatians. The first struggle lasted for nearly a century, in spite of the capture and destruction of Delminium by Scipio Nasica in 155 B.C., and it was reserved for Caius Cosconius in 78 B.C. to subdue the Dalmatian confederates and bring Bosnia and the Herzegovina for the first time beneath the Roman sway. Those lands were then merged in the Roman province of Illyricum, which stretched from the Adriatic to the western frontier of modern Serbia and from the Save into North Albania. But the spirit of the brave Dalmatians was still unbroken, and they never lost an opportunity of rising against their Roman masters. Aided by their winter climate, they resisted the armies of Cæsar’s most trusted lieutenants, and the Emperor Augustus was twice wounded in his youthful campaign against them. One of their revolts in the early years of the Christian era was, in the words of Suetonius, “the greatest danger which had threatened Rome since the Punic wars.” Under their chiefs Bato and Pines they defied the legions of Tiberius for four long years, and it was only when their last stronghold had fallen, and Bato had been taken captive, that they submitted. Their power as an independent nation was broken for ever, their country was laid waste, and in A.D. 9 finally incorporated with the Roman Empire. North Bosnia became part of the province of Pannonia; the Herzegovina and Bosnia south of a line drawn from Novi through Banjaluka and Doboj to Zvornik, were included in the province of Dalmatia. The Romans divided up the latter in their usual methodical manner into three districts, grouped round three towns, where was the seat of justice, and whither the native chieftains came to confer with the Roman authorities. Thus Salona, near Spalato, once a city half as large as Constantinople, but now a heap of ruins, was made the centre of government for South Bosnia, while the Herzegovina fell within the jurisdiction of Narona, a fortress which has been identified with Vid, near Metkovich.

The Roman domination, which lasted till the close of the fifth century, has left a permanent mark upon the country. The interior, it is true, never attained to such a high degree of civilisation as the more accessible towns on the Dalmatian coast, and no such magnificent building as the palace at Spalato in which Diocletian spent the evening of his days adorned the inland settlements. But the conquerors developed, much as the Austrians have done in our own time, those natural resources which the natives had neglected. Three great Roman roads united Salona and the sea with the principal places up country. One of these highways skirted the beautiful lake Jezero, traversed the now flourishing town of Banjaluka, which derives its modern name, “the Baths of St Luke,” from the ruins of a Roman bath, and ended at Gradishka, on the Save. Another connected Salona with the plain of Sarajevo, even then regarded as the centre of the Bosnian trade, and the valley of the Drina, while a branch penetrated as far as Plevlje, in the sandjak of Novibazar, then a considerable Roman settlement. The third, starting also from Salona, crossed the south of the Herzegovina, where traces of it may still be seen. Then, too, the mineral wealth of Bosnia was first exploited—the gold workings near the source of the river Vrbas and the rich deposits of iron ore in the north-west. The natives, hitherto occupied in fighting or farming, were now forced to work at the gold diggings. Roman authors extolled the Bosnian gold, the “Dalmatian metal” of Statius, of which as much as 50 lbs. were obtained in a single day, and a special functionary presided at Salona over the administration of the Bosnian gold mines. The salt springs of Dolnja Tuzla, now a busy manufacturing town, were another source of wealth, and the numerous coins of the Roman period discovered up and down the country show that a considerable amount of money was in circulation there. Many a Roman colonist must have been buried in Bosnian soil, for numbers of tombstones with Latin inscriptions have been found, and the national museum at Sarajevo is full of Roman cooking utensils, Roman vases, and Roman instruments of all kinds. Most important of all, it was during the Roman period that the first seeds of Christianity were sown in these remote Balkan lands. The exact date of this event, which was to exercise paramount influence for evil as well as good upon the future history of Bosnia, is unknown, but we may safely assume that the Archbishopric of Salona was the seat of the new doctrine, from which it rapidly spread throughout the Dalmatian province. Several bishoprics, which are mentioned as subordinate to the archiepiscopal See of Salona in the sixth century, are to be found in Bosnia, and one in particular, the bishopric of Bistue, lay in the very heart of that country.

But the power of Rome on the further shore of the Adriatic and in the mountains behind it did not long survive the break-up of the Western Empire in 476. Bosnia and the Herzegovina experienced the fate of the provinces of Pannonia and Dalmatia, of which they had so long formed a part. Twenty years earlier Marcellinus, a Roman general, had carved out for himself an independent principality in Dalmatia, and his nephew and successor, Julius Nepos, maintained his independence there for a short space after the fall of the Empire. But Odoacer soon made himself master of the old Roman province, and in 493 the Ostrogoths under Theodoric overran the country, and for the next forty years Bosnia and the Herzegovina owned their sway. This change of rulers made little difference in the condition of the people. The Ostrogoths did not interfere with the religious institutions which they found already in existence. Under their government two ecclesiastical councils were held at Salona, and two new bishoprics founded, bringing the total number up to six. Theodoric, like the Romans before him, paid special attention to the mineral wealth of Bosnia, and a letter is extant in which he appoints an overseer of “the Dalmatian iron ore mines.” But in 535 began the twenty years’ war between the Ostrogoths and the Emperor Justinian. These lands at once became the prey of devastating armies, the battle-field of Gothic and Byzantine combatants. In the midst of the general confusion a horde of new invaders appeared, probably at the invitation of the Gothic King, and in 548 we hear of the Slavs for the first time in the history of the country. Further Slavonic detachments followed in the next few years, and before the second half of the sixth century was far advanced there was a considerable Slav population in the western part of the Balkan peninsula. Even when the war had ended with the overthrow of the Gothic realm, and Bosnia and the Herzegovina had fallen under the Byzantine sway, the inroads of the Slavs did not cease. Other savage tribes came too, and the Avars in particular were the terror of the inhabitants. This formidable race, akin to the Huns, whom they rivalled in ferocity, soon reduced the once flourishing province of Dalmatia to a wilderness. During one of their marches through Bosnia they destroyed nearly forty fortified places on the road from the Save to Salona, and finally reduced that prosperous city to the heap of ruins which it has ever since remained, while the citizens formed out of Diocletian’s abandoned palace the town which bears the name of Spalato, or the Palace, to this day. But the Avars were not to have an unchallenged supremacy over the country. In the first half of the seventh century the Emperor Herakleios summoned to his aid two Slavonic tribes, the Croats and Serbs, and offered them the old Illyrian lands as his vassals if they would drive out the Avars. Nothing loth they at once accepted the invitation, and, after a fierce struggle, subdued the barbarians, whose hands had been as heavy upon the Slavonic as upon the Roman settlers. The Croats, who came somewhat earlier than the Serbs, took up their abode in what is still known as Croatia, and in the northern part of Dalmatia, as far as the river Cetina; the Serbs occupied the coast line from that river as far south as the present Albanian town of Durazzo, and inland the whole of modern Serbia (as it was before 1912), Montenegro, Bosnia, the Herzegovina, and the sandjak of Novibazar. From that time onwards these regions have, under various alien dominations, never lost their Slavonic character, and to this day even the Bosniaks who profess the faith of Islâm, no less than their Orthodox brothers, are of Serbian stock.

The history of Bosnia and the Herzegovina from this Slavonic settlement in the first half of the seventh down to the middle of the tenth century is very obscure. We have few facts recorded, and nothing is gained by repeating the names of mythical rulers, whose existence has been disproved by the researches of critical historians. But it is possible to form some general idea of the state of the country during this period of transition. Nominally under the suzerainty of the Byzantine Empire, much in the same sense as modern Bulgaria was till 1908 under that of the Sultan, Bosnia and its neighbouring lands were practically independent and formed a loose agglomeration of small districts, each of which was called by the Slavonic name of jupa and was governed by a headman known as a jupan. The most important of these petty chiefs was awarded the title of great jupan, and the various districts composed a sort of primitive confederation under his auspices. Two of the districts received names which attained considerable importance in subsequent history. The Slavonic settlers in the valley of the Upper Bosna adapted the Latin designation of that river, Basante, to their own idiom by calling the stream Bosna and themselves Bosniaks, and the name of the river was afterwards extended to the whole country, which from that time onwards was known as Bosnia—a term first found in the form “Bosona,” of Constantine Porphyrogenitus[885]. Similarly Mount Hum, above the present town of Mostar, gave its name to the surrounding district, which was called the Land of Hum, or Zahumlje, until in the middle of the fifteenth century it was re-christened the “Land of the Duke,” or the Herzegovina, from the German Herzog. These derivations are much more probable than the alternatives recently offered, according to which Bosnia means the “land of salt” in Albanian, and the Herzegovina means the “land of stones” in Turkish[886].

The Slavs, with the adaptability of many other conquerors, soon accepted the religion which they found already established in these countries. The Serbs, who settled at the mouth of the Narenta, alone adhered to paganism, and erected on the ruins of the old Roman town of Narona a shrine of their god Viddo, from whom the modern village of Vid derives its name. Here heathen rites were celebrated for more than two hundred years, and as late as the beginning of the last century the inhabitants of Vid cherished ancient idols, of which the original significance had long passed away.

The political history of Bosnia was determined for many generations by its geographical position on the boundary line between the Croatian and Serbian settlements. It was here that these two branches of the Slavonic race met, and from the moment when two rival groups were formed under Croatian and Serbian auspices Bosnia became the coveted object of both. That country accordingly submitted to Croatian and Serbian rulers by turns. Early in the tenth century it seems to have acknowledged the sway of Tomislav, first King of the Croats, and was administered as a dependency by an official known as a ban, the Croatian name for a “governor,” which survived to our own day. A little later the Serbian Prince Tchaslav incorporated it in the confederation which he welded together, and defended it against the Magyars, who now make their first appearance in its history. Under a chieftain named Kés these dangerous neighbours had penetrated as far as the upper waters of the river Drina, where the Serbian Prince inflicted a crushing defeat upon them. But, in his zeal to carry the war into the enemy’s country, he perished himself, and with his death his dominions fell asunder, and Bosnia became for a brief period independent. But Kreshimir, King of the Croats, recovered it in 968, and for the next half-century it belonged to the Croatian crown. But about 1019 the Emperor Basil II restored for a time the dormant Byzantine sovereignty over the whole Balkan peninsula. After the bloody campaigns which earned him the title of “the Bulgar-slayer” and ended in the destruction of the first Bulgarian Empire, he turned his arms against the Serbs and Croats, forcing the latter to receive their crown from Constantinople and reducing Bosnia to more than nominal subjection to his throne.

Meanwhile the Herzegovina, or the “Land of Hum,” as it was then called, had had a considerable history of its own. Early in the tenth century, at the time when the Croatian King Tomislav was extending his authority over Bosnia, we hear of a certain Michael Vishevich, who ruled over the sister land and held his court in the ancient fortress of Blagaj, above the source of the river Buna. Vishevich was evidently a prince of considerable importance. The Pope addressed him as “the most excellent Duke of the people of Hum”; the Byzantine Emperor awarded him the proud titles of “proconsul and Patrician.” The Republic of Ragusa paid him an annual tribute of thirty-six ducats for the vineyards of her citizens which lay within his territory. His fleet, starting from the seaport of Stagno, then the seat of a bishopric as well as an important haven, ravaged the Italian coast opposite, and made the name of “Michael, King of the Slavs,” as a chronicler styles him, a terror to the inhabitants of Apulia. The great Bulgarian Tsar Symeon was his ally, and on two occasions during his struggle with the Byzantine Empire he received aid or advice from him. We find him seconding Tomislav’s proposal for summoning the famous ecclesiastical council which met at Spalato in 925 and prohibited the use of the Slavonic liturgy. In short, nothing of importance occurred in that region during his reign in which he had not his say[887]. But after his death his dominions seem to have been included, like Bosnia, in the Serbian confederation of Tchaslav; and, when that collapsed, they were annexed by the King of Dioklitia, whose realm derived its name from the town of Doclea in what is now Montenegro, and took its origin in the valley of the Zeta, which divides that kingdom in two. About the end of the tenth century however, the powerful Bulgarian Tsar Samuel established his supremacy over the Kingdom of Dioklitia, and the treacherous murder of its King a few years later completed the incorporation of Dioklitia, and consequently of the Herzegovina, in the Bulgarian Empire. But its connexion with Bulgaria was short-lived. When Basil “the Bulgar-slayer” destroyed the sovereignty of the Bulgarian Tsars he added the Herzegovina as well as Bosnia to his own domains. Thus the twin provinces fell at the same moment beneath the Byzantine sway, and from 1019 remained for a space parts of that Empire, governed sometimes by imperial governors, sometimes by native princes acting as imperial viceroys. Bosnia was the first to raise the standard of revolt, and no sooner was the Emperor Basil II dead than it regained its independence under bans of its own, who raised it to an important position among the petty states of that time. The Herzegovina, less fortunate, only exchanged the sovereignty of the Emperor at Constantinople for that of the King of Dioklitia, who in 1050 made himself master of the land. For exactly a century it remained an integral portion of that kingdom, and had therefore no separate history. Even Bosnia succumbed a generation later to the monarchs of Dioklitia, for about 1085 all the three neighbouring lands, Serbia, Bosnia and the Herzegovina, had to accept governors from King Bodin of the Zeta, and thus a great Serb state existed under his sceptre.

But in the early years of the twelfth century a new force made itself felt in South Slavonic lands, a force which even in our own day has till lately exercised a powerful influence over the fortunes of the Balkan peninsula. Since their unsuccessful incursion in the time of Tchaslav the Hungarians had never abandoned their cherished object of gaining a foothold there. But it was not till the union of Croatia in 1102, and of Dalmatia in 1105, with the Hungarian Crown by Koloman, that this object was attained. The Hungarian Kings thus came into close contact with Bosnia, and were not long in extending their authority over that country. So far from meeting with opposition they were regarded by the people as valuable allies in the common struggle against the Byzantine Emperors of the family of the Comnenoi, who aimed at restoring the past glories and dimensions of their realm. Accordingly in 1135 we find an Hungarian King, Béla II, for the first time styling himself “King of Rama”—the name of a river in Bosnia, which Magyar chroniclers applied first to the surrounding district and then to the whole country. From that time onward, whoever the actual possessors of Rama, or Bosnia, might be, it was always included among the titles of the Hungarian monarchs, and, till our own time, the Emperor Francis Joseph in his capacity of King of Hungary called himself also “King of Rama.” In his case the phrase had certainly a more practical significance than it possessed in earlier centuries.

The precise manner in which this close connexion between Hungary and Bosnia was formed is obscure. According to one theory Béla received the country as the dowry of his Serbian wife; according to another the Bosnian magnates, seeing the increasing power of Hungary and the revived pretensions of the Byzantine Emperors, decided to seek the protection of the former against the latter. At any rate a little later Béla assigned Bosnia as a duchy to his second son, Ladislaus, leaving, however, the actual government of that land in the hands of native bans. It is now that we hear the name of one of these rulers for the first time. Hitherto the Bosnian governors have been mere shadowy figures, flitting unrecognised and almost unnoticed across the stage of history. But ban Borich, who now comes into view, is a man of flesh and blood. In the wars between the Emperor Manuel Comnenos and the Hungarians he was the staunch ally of the latter, and when a disputed succession to the Hungarian throne took place he aspired to play the part of a king-maker and supported the claims of Ladislaus, the titular “duke” of Bosnia. But he made the mistake of choosing the losing side and, after being conquered by the troops of the successful candidate, disappeared mysteriously in 1163. Short, however, as was his career, he had extended the eastern borders of Bosnia to the river Drina, and we learn from the contemporary Greek historian Cinnamus[888] that his country was “independent of Serbia and governed in its own fashion.” Three years after his disappearance from the scene Bosnia shared the fate of Croatia and Dalmatia, and fell into the hands of Manuel Comnenos. But upon the death of that powerful Emperor in 1180 the fabric which he had laboriously erected collapsed; the Balkan peoples had nothing more to fear from the Byzantine Empire, and Bosnia under her famous ban Kulin attained to greater freedom and prosperity than she had yet enjoyed. But the same period which witnessed this political and material progress witnessed also the development of that ecclesiastical schism which was one day destined to cause the loss of all freedom and the suspension of all progress by facilitating the Turkish conquest of the land.

II. The Great Bosnian Bans (1180-1376).

Kulin is the first great figure in Bosnian history. By nature a man of peace, he devoted his attention to the organisation of the country, which in his time was a ten days’ journey in circumference, the development of its commerce, and the maintenance of its independence. He allowed foreigners ready access to his dominions, employed two Italian painters and goldsmiths at his court, and gave liberal mining concessions to two shrewd burghers of Ragusa, which during the middle ages was the chief emporium of the inland trade. He concluded in 1189 a treaty of commerce with that city—the earliest known Bosnian document—in which he swore to be its “true friend now and for ever, and to keep true peace and genuine troth” with it all his life. Ragusan merchants were permitted to settle wherever they chose in his territory, and no harm was to be done them by his officials. Agriculture flourished under his rule, and years afterwards, whenever the Bosnian farmer had a particularly prosperous year, he would say to his fellows, “The times of Kulin are coming back again.” Even to-day the people regard him as a favourite of the fairies, and his reign as a golden age, and to “talk of ban Kulin” is a popular expression for one who speaks of the remote past, when the Bosnian plum-trees always groaned with fruit and the yellow corn-fields never ceased to wave in the fertile plains. Kulin’s position was strengthened too by his powerful connections; for his sister was the wife of Miroslav, Prince of the Herzegovina, which, as we have seen, had formed part of the Kingdom of Dioklitia down to 1150, when it was conquered by the Serbian great jupan, Desa. Some twenty years later Stephen Nemanja made his brother Miroslav its prince, and thus was closely connected with Kulin. The latter, like Nemanja in Serbia, threw off all ties of allegiance to the Byzantine Empire on the death of Manuel Comnenos, and at the same time ignored the previous relations which had existed between the Kings of Hungary and the Bosnian bans.

But it was Kulin’s ecclesiastical policy which rendered his reign most memorable in the after history of Bosnia. In the tenth century there had appeared in Bulgaria a priest named “Bogomil,” or the “Beloved of God,” who preached a mystical doctrine, peculiarly attractive to the intellect of a Slavonic race. From the assumption that there existed in the universe a bad as well as a good deity the Bogomiles, as his disciples were called, deduced a complete system of theology, which explained all phenomena to their own satisfaction. But the Bogomiles did not content themselves with metaphysics alone. They descended from the serene atmosphere of abstract reasoning to the questions of ritual and the customs of society. Appropriating to themselves the title of “good Christians,” they regarded the monks as little short of idolators, set at naught the authority of bishops, and defied the thunders of the popes. Their worship was characterised by extreme simplicity and often conducted in the open air, while in their lives they aimed at a plain and primitive ideal. A “perfect” Bogomile, one who belonged to the strictest of the two castes into which they were divided, looked upon marriage as impure and bloodshed as a deadly sin; he despised riches, and owned allegiance to no one save God alone, while he had the quaker’s objection to an oath. No wonder that popes, trembling for their authority, branded them as heretics and pursued them with all the horrors of fire and sword; no wonder that potentates found them sometimes intractable subjects, and sometimes useful allies in a struggle against ecclesiastical pretensions.

The Bogomiles appear to have entered Bosnia about the middle of the twelfth century, and speedily gained a hold upon the country. Kulin at first remained uninfluenced by their teachings. Thus, in 1180, we find the papal legate writing to him in the most courteous terms, and addressing him as the “noble and powerful man, the great ban of Bosnia.” The legate sends him a letter and the Holy Father’s blessing, and begs him to give him in return, as a token of his devotion, “two servants and marten skins.” But Kulin found it politic later on to secede from the Roman Church. For some time past the rival Archbishoprics of Spalato and Ragusa had striven for ecclesiastical supremacy over Bosnia. Béla III, King of Hungary, who had now time to devote to his ambitious schemes against that country, warmly supported the claims of the See of Spalato, to which he had appointed a creature of his own. Kulin was naturally on the side of Ragusa, and was encouraged by his sister, whose late husband, Miroslav, Prince of the Herzegovina, had had a similar contest with the Archbishop of Spalato, and had concluded a treaty with the Ragusans. The Pope took the part of Spalato, and Kulin retorted by defying him, as Miroslav had done before. The latter had probably been a Bogomile for some time before his death; the former now formally abandoned the Roman Church, with his wife, his sister, his whole family, and ten thousand of his subjects. The force of so potent an example was at once felt. The Bogomile or Patarene heresy, as it was called by the Bosniaks of other creeds, now spread apace, not only over Bosnia, but in the neighbouring lands. The two Italian painters, whom we have mentioned as residing at Kulin’s court, carried it to Spalato, where it extended to the other Dalmatian coast towns; and the destruction of Zara by the crusaders in 1202 was regarded by pious chroniclers as a judgment upon that city for its heretical opinions.

King Béla III was not slow to make Kulin’s defection the excuse for posing as defender of the true faith. But his death and the quarrels between his heirs gave Kulin a little breathing space, and it was not till 1200 that he was in actual danger. By that time Béla’s sons, Emerich and Andrew, had established themselves respectively as King of Hungary and Duke of the Herzegovina, and accordingly threatened Bosnia from two sides. Emerich, following his father’s policy, endeavoured to induce the Pope to preach a crusade against the Bosnian heretics, and Innocent III, who then occupied the chair of St Peter, hailed the King of Hungary as overlord of Bosnia, and bade him summon Kulin to recant, or if the latter remained obdurate invade Bosnia and occupy it himself. Thus menaced by a combination of the spiritual and the temporal power, Kulin bowed before the storm. He felt that at all costs Hungarian intervention must be avoided, so he made the rather lame excuse that he had “regarded the Patarenes not as heretics, but as Catholics,” and begged the Pope to send him some safe adviser, who should guide his erring feet into the right way. Innocent, pleased at Kulin’s submission, sent two ecclesiastics to Bosnia to inquire into the religious condition of the country and to bring back its ruler to the true fold. The mission was temporarily successful. Early in the spring of 1203 the ban, his great nobles, and the heads of the Bogomile community met in solemn assembly in the “white plain,” or Bjelopolje, on the river Bosna, confessed their errors, and drew up a formal document embodying their recantation. “We renounce the schism of which we are accused”—so runs the deed—“we promise to have altars and crosses in all our churches, to receive the sacrament seven times a year, to observe the fasts ordained by the church, and to keep the festivals of the saints. Henceforth we will no more call ourselves ‘Christians,’ but ‘brothers,’ so as not to cast a slur upon other Christians.” The oath thus taken was renewed by representatives of the Bogomiles in the presence of the King of Hungary, who bade Kulin observe his promises for the future. The cloud had passed away, but with its disappearance Kulin too disappears from the scene. An inscription, said to be the oldest in the country and ascribed to the year 1203-04, which was found in 1898 at Muhashinovichi, on the river Bosna, refers to a church erected by him to prove the sincerity of his re-conversion, and prays God to grant health to him and his wife, Voyslava. We hear no more of him after 1204; but his memory was not soon forgotten[889]. Two centuries later a Bosnian King desired to have confirmed to him all the “customs, usages, privileges and frontiers, which existed in the time of Kulin,” and the rich Bosnian family of Kulenovich of our own time (whose ancestral castle of Jaskopolje may be seen near Jajce, almost on the spot where, in 1878, the great fight between the Austrians and the insurgents took place) is said to derive its name and lineage from him.

But the recantation of Kulin did not check the growth of the Bogomile heresy. Under his successor, Stephen, the numbers of the sect increased, and the efforts of Pope Honorius III and his legate to preach a crusade against the heretics remained fruitless. The Holy Father might exclaim that “the unbelievers in Bosnia, just as witches in a cave nourish their offspring with their bare breasts, publicly preach their abominable errors, to the great harm of the Lord’s flock”; but even this mixture of metaphors failed to stimulate the flagging zeal of the Hungarian Catholics. Even when the King of Hungary had pacified his rebellious nobles by the golden bull, and was therefore able to turn his attention to Bosnian affairs, the proposed crusade fell flat. The King worked upon the cupidity of the Archbishop of Kalocsa by granting him spiritual authority over Bosnia; but the only result was to stiffen the backs of the recalcitrant Bosniaks. Imitating their neighbours in the Herzegovina, who had lately made a Bogomile their Prince, they deposed the weak-kneed Stephen and put Matthew Ninoslav, a Bogomile by birth and education, in his place. The new ban proved, however, more pliant than his poorer subjects. Alarmed at the threatening attitude of the King of Hungary, he recanted, as Kulin had done before him, and placed his country under the protection of St Peter. But the conversion of their Prince had little effect upon the masses. The monks of the Dominican order might boast that they had converted, if not convinced, Ninoslav, but it was felt that stronger measures must be taken against his people. In 1234 a crusade was at last organised, and for the next five years the Bogomiles of Bosnia experienced all those horrors of fire and sword which their fellows, the Albigenses, had suffered in the south of France. Under different names and in widely different spheres the two bodies of heretics had adopted similar doctrines. Indeed, the Albigenses had looked to the Bogomile “pope,” or primate, of Bosnia for spiritual instruction and advice, and accepted their “vicar” at his hands. But while historians and poets of renown have cast lustre upon the struggles and sufferings of the martyrs of Provence the probably equally heroic resistance of the Bosnian Bogomiles has made little impression upon literature. Yet it is clear that they possessed all the stubborn valour of our own puritans. In spite of the conquest of both Bosnia and the Herzegovina in 1237 by the Hungarian King’s son, Koloman, who received the former country from the King and the Pope as the reward of his labours, in spite of the erection of forts and a Catholic Cathedral to keep the unruly passions and heretical inclinations of the people in order, the spirit of the Bogomiles remained unbroken. Ninoslav, furious at the arbitrary substitution of Koloman for himself, once more appeared as their champion, and the great defeat of the Hungarians by the Tartars in 1241 not only rid him of his rival, Koloman, but freed his land from all fear of Hungarian intervention for some time to come. Even the incursion of the Tartars into Bosnia was a small disadvantage as compared with the benefits which that country had derived from their previous victory over its foes. Ninoslav now felt himself strong enough to assist Spalato in its struggle against the King of Hungary and to offer an alliance to Ragusa against the growing power of the Serbian monarchy. A second crusade in Bosnia in 1246 was not more successful than the first, and the Pope in placing the Bosnian See under the authority of the Archbishop of Kalocsa, expressly gave as his reason “the utter hopelessness of a voluntary conversion of that country to the true faith.” Even the papal permission to use the Slavonic tongue and the Glagolitic characters in the Catholic service did not win over the Bogomiles to Rome. Crusades and concessions had alike failed[890].

Ninoslav passes out of sight in 1250, and the next two generations are, with the exception of the Turkish supremacy, the gloomiest period of Bosnian history. Religious differences and a disputed succession made the country an easy prey to the ambitious designs of the Hungarian monarchs, who, after a brief support of Ninoslav’s relative, the Catholic Prijesda I, in 1254 subdued not only Bosnia but the Herzegovina beneath their sway. While the latter about 1284 fell under Serbian influence the former was split up into two parts. The Upper, or hill-country, Bosnia properly so-called, was allowed to retain native bans—Prijesda I and his sons[891], Prijesda II and Stephen Kotroman, till 1302; Lower Bosnia, i.e. the “salt” district of Soli (the modern Tuzla) with Usora, for the sake of greater security, was at first entrusted to Hungarian magnates, and then combined with a large slice of northern Serbia, known as Matchva, in a compact duchy, which was conferred upon near relatives of the Hungarian King. During this period the history of this distracted land is practically a blank. Beyond the names of its successive rulers we have little handed down to us by the chroniclers. “A sleep as of death,” in the words of a Croatian writer, “had fallen upon the country. The whole national and religious life of Bosnia had perished beneath the cold blasts of the wind from beyond the Save.” Now and again we come upon traces of the old Bogomile spirit and the old zeal of the persecutors. Stephen Dragutin, who had been driven by lameness from the Serbian throne and had become under Hungarian auspices Duke of Matchva and Bosnia in 1284, was specially noted for his “conversion and baptism of many heretics,” and it was in answer to his request that the Franciscans, who have since played such an important part in Bosnian history, settled in the country. But still the Pope complained that “the churches were deserted and the priesthood uprooted.” Meanwhile two powerful families began to make their influence felt, the Croatian clan of Shubich and the race of Kotromanich, whose legendary founder (according to Orbini), a German knight, had entered Bosnia in the Hungarian service and was the ancestor of the Bosnian Kings. We now know, however, from a document of the great Tvrtko[892], quoted by Pope Gregory XI, that Tvrtko’s uncle, Stephen Kotromanich, was grandson of “the great” Prijesda I. The latest authority on the subject[893] accordingly believed the Kotroman family to have sprung from Upper Bosnia and to have been very probably related to Borich and Kulin. The legend of its German, or Gothic, origin arose out of its matrimonial connections with great families of Central Europe. The family of Shubich was at first in the ascendant, and became lords of part and then the whole of the land. In fact Paul Shubich, in 1299, styled himself “lord of Bosnia” and early in the fourteenth century his son, Mladen, ruled, under the title of “ban of the Croats and all Bosnia,” a vast tract of territory extending from the Save to the Narenta and from the Drina to the Adriatic. But in 1322 he fell before a combination of rivals, and young Stephen Kotromanich, who had been his deputy in Bosnia, became independent and united both Upper and Lower Bosnia under his sway[894].

Stephen Kotromanich proved himself to be the ablest ruler whom Bosnia had had since Kulin, and laid the foundations upon which his successor built up the Bosnian kingdom. His reign of over thirty years was marked by a series of successes. He began in 1325 by annexing the Herzegovina, which, as we have seen, had been under Serbian authority for the last two generations, as well as the sea-coast from the river Cetina as far south as the gates of Ragusa. Thus, for the first time in its history, Bosnia had gained an outlet on the sea, and was not entirely dependent upon foreigners for its imports. The Dalmatian coast with its fine harbours is the natural frontage of the country behind, which even under the Austrians touched the sea at only two small points. But in the first half of the fourteenth century Bosnia had gained a considerable coast-line. Kotromanich even coveted the islands as well, and specially Curzola, then under the overlordship of Venice. But here his plans failed, although the Ragusans were ready to lend him ships for the purpose. He rewarded them by confirming all their old trading rights in his country and granting them some territorial concessions near the mouth of the Narenta. He took an active, if somewhat insidious, part in the operations which King Charles Robert of Hungary and his successor, Louis the Great, conducted for the restoration of their authority in Croatia and Dalmatia. Charles Robert, who had bestowed upon Kotromanich a relative of his own wife in marriage, found him a useful ally; but in the war between Louis the Great and the Venetians for the possession of Zara the Bosnian ruler was desirous of standing well with both sides. At the famous siege of Zara in 1345 and the following year he went, at the bidding of Louis, to rescue the town from its Venetian besiegers. But the crafty Venetians knew their man. They gave him a heavy bribe, and offered him a much heavier one if he would persuade Louis to abandon the relief of the beleaguered city. The money was well spent. At a critical moment of the siege, when it had been arranged that the Hungarian and Bosnian army should support the besieged in a sally from the gates, Kotromanich and his Bosniaks hung back and the Venetians won the day. The quaint chronicle of this famous siege expressly ascribes the defeat of the allies to the perfidy of “that child of Belial, Stephen, ban of Bosnia,” and it was largely owing to his subsequent mediation that Zara ultimately surrendered to Venice. But Kotromanich soon found that he required the good offices of Venice himself. While he had been engaged in the west of the Balkan peninsula there had grown up in the east under the mighty auspices of Stephen Dushan the great Serbian Empire, which threatened at one moment to swallow up Constantinople itself. Dushan is the greatest name in the whole history of the peninsula, a name cherished to this day by every patriotic Serb. But just as the restoration of Dushan’s Empire, the daydream of Serbian enthusiasts, jeopardised the existence of Austrian Bosnia, so the conquests of the great Serbian Tsar alarmed the Bosnian ruler of that day. For the first half of his reign Dushan was too much occupied with his eastern conquests and his law reforms to interfere with his western neighbour. But he had not forgotten that the Herzegovina, which Kotromanich had annexed, had once belonged to the Serbian monarchy, and, as soon as he had leisure, he pressed his claims. Both parties accepted the mediation of Venice, and for a time peace was preserved. But in 1349 Kotromanich assumed the offensive, invaded Dushan’s dominions, and penetrated as far south as the beautiful town of Cattaro, at that time part of the Serbian Empire and now at last restored to its natural owners, the Southern Slavs. Dushan retaliated next year by descending upon Bosnia and laying siege to the strong castle of Bobovatz, the residence of many Bosnian rulers. As has usually happened in the history of the country, the persecuted Bogomiles flocked to the standard of the invader, and Bosnia seemed to be at his feet. But the walls of Bobovatz, behind which lay the lovely daughter of the ban, whom Dushan had demanded in marriage for his son, resisted his attacks, and he marched away southward through the Herzegovina to Cattaro. Next year the hostilities ceased, and as a further security Kotromanich found a husband for his daughter in King Louis the Great of Hungary, his old ally.

The internal condition of Bosnia was less fortunate, however, in the hands of Kotromanich than its external relations. The power of the Bogomiles had greatly increased before his accession; they had a complete organisation—a spiritual head called djed, or “grandfather,” with a seat at Janjichi, and twelve “teachers” under him—while there was not a single Catholic bishop living in the country. Moreover the rival orders of Dominicans and Franciscans had begun to fight for the exclusive privilege of applying the tortures of the Inquisition to the Bosnian heretics—a conflict which naturally favoured the growth of that heresy. Under these circumstances Kotromanich began his reign by openly favouring the Bogomiles, who formed the bulk of his armies and were his best bulwark against foreign aggression so long as he was their protector. But in 1340, on the persuasion of the King of Hungary, he committed the political blunder of embracing the Catholic faith and thus making his Bogomile subjects look upon Stephen Dushan as their legitimate champion. The evil results of his ecclesiastical policy were apparent when the great Serbian Tsar invaded his dominions.

Stephen Kotromanich, whose memory is preserved by his seal, the earliest Bosnian coins and seven documents issued in his name[895], died in 1353, and his nephew Tvrtko succeeded him. Tvrtko is the greatest name in Bosnian history, and his long reign of nearly forty years, first as ban and then as first King of Bosnia, marks the zenith of that country’s power. Beginning his career under circumstances of great difficulty, and even driven at one moment from his throne, he lived to make himself King not merely of Bosnia, but of Serbia, Croatia and Dalmatia as well, and to unite beneath his sceptre a vast agglomeration of territory, such as no other Bosnian ruler has ever governed.

The first seventeen years of his reign were spent in a desperate but successful struggle for the mastery of his own house. He was a mere boy at the death of his uncle, and his mother, who acted as regent, was too weak to cope with the disorders of the time. The magnates, many of whom were zealous Bogomiles, were contemptuous of one who was both a child and a Catholic, while they would have welcomed the great Serbian Tsar Dushan, had he found time to repeat his invasion of Bosnia. But the death of that monarch on his way to the siege of Constantinople in 1355 broke up the Serbian Empire for ever and removed all fear of a Serbian occupation of Bosnia. But with the removal of this danger another arose. Louis the Great of Hungary had welcomed the growth and independence of Bosnia so long as the Serbian Empire existed as a menace to his own dominions; but, as soon as that Empire fell, he revived the ambitious designs of his predecessors upon the Bosnian realm. As the son-in-law of the late ban he had some claims to the succession, and accordingly set to work to humiliate Tvrtko and reduce him to a position of dependence upon the Hungarian crown. He compelled him to surrender the Herzegovina, as far as the Narenta, as the dowry of the Hungarian queen, and to take a solemn oath that he would persecute the Bogomiles, that he would support Hungary in war, and that either he or his younger brother Stephen Vuk would always reside at the Hungarian court. In return he allowed him to remain Bosnian ban—a mere puppet without power. But the crafty Louis, in his desire to be absolute master of Bosnia overreached himself. Determined to be doubly sure of his vassal, he incited the Bosnian magnates to revolt against their chief. But those proud nobles, who had never regarded their ban as anything more than the first of their order, had no intention of exchanging his easy sway for the iron hand of the Hungarian King. Louis saw his mistake, and supported Tvrtko against the barons and the Bogomiles. But the rebels would not recognise the authority of one who relied upon Hungarian swords to enforce it. Aided by his brother they deposed and drove out Tvrtko in 1365, and it cost him a desperate struggle to recover his power. Bosnia was given up to all the horrors of civil war, and, to crown all, a terrible conflagration, the like of which had never been seen before, broke out and destroyed everything that came in its way. “At that time,” writes a chronicler, “the highest mountains, with the stones, birds, and beasts upon them, were consumed with fire, so that the hills became plains, where new corn is sown and many a village stands. And in these villages dwell Bogomiles, who boast that God set these mountains ablaze for their sake.” At last Tvrtko prevailed, and in 1370 he was undisputed master of the country and his brother an exile.

Freed from all fear of Louis, whose eyes were turned northward to Poland, and master of his rebellious barons, Tvrtko began to extend his dominions. The decline of the Serbian Empire gave him the opportunity which he sought. Lazar, perhaps the most unfortunate name in Serbian history, governed a remnant of that realm, which was threatened by dissensions from within and the Turks from without. Tvrtko aided him against his domestic rivals and received in return large portions of Serbian territory, including a strip of coast as far as Cattaro and the famous castle and monastery of Mileshevo, in the modern sandjak of Novibazar, where lay the remains of St Sava, the apostle of the Serbs. In virtue of this territory, he considered himself the legitimate successor of the Serbian monarchs, and while Lazar contented himself with the modest title of knez, or “prince,” Tvrtko had himself crowned in 1376 on the grave of St Sava at Mileshevo with two diadems, that of Bosnia and that of Serbia. Henceforth he styled himself “Stephen Tvrtko, King of the Serbs and of Bosnia and of the coast.” All his successors retained the Serbian title which he could claim as great-grandson of Stephen Dragutin, and, like the Serbian monarchs, invariably adopted, as Tvrtko had done, the royal name of Stephen. Not a voice was raised against this assumption of kingly power. Ragusa, ever anxious to be on good terms with those in authority, was the first to recognise him as the legal successor of the Serbian sovereigns, and promptly paid him the annual tribute which she had rendered to them on the feast of St Demetrios, as well as a sum for trading privileges in Bosnia. Venice followed suit and addressed him as “King of Serbia,” and the King of Hungary was too busy to protest. Tvrtko proceeded to live up to his new dignities. He moved his residence from Srebrenik to Sutjeska and the strong castle of Bobovatz, the picturesque ruins of which still testify to the past glories of the first Bosnian King. Here Tvrtko organised a court on the Byzantine model, as the rulers of Serbia had done before him. Rough Bosnian barons held courtly offices with high-sounding Greek names, and privileges and honours were distributed from the throne. Hitherto Bosnian coins had been scarce, and Ragusan, Hungarian and Venetian pieces had fulfilled most purposes of trade. But now money, of which excellent specimens still exist, was minted bearing the proud title of “king” instead of that of ban, and displaying a visored helmet surmounted by a crown of fleurs-de-lis with a hop blossom above. Tvrtko took his new office very seriously as a King by the grace of God, animated, as he once wrote, “with the wish to raise up that which is fallen and to restore that which is destroyed[896].”

III. The Kings of Bosnia (1376-1463).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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