Serbia: A Sketch

by Helen Leah Reed

Serbia, younger sister of the Nations, has indeed had a younger sister's portion. In her early years she grew up with little guidance from older and wiser members of the family. She did not have the advice that she needed. Perhaps she would not have followed it, though on occasion she has shown more docility than many of the family.

It took her a long time to find herself; she had troubles in her household, and it was her first endeavor to get the factions to unite and let her be the acknowledged head of the house. She believed it was her ultimate destiny to govern them all—that this was for their good.

When she had made herself mistress of her own house, she tried to stand alone—to be independent of her neighbors. She had no wish to dominate them. She did not try to aggrandize herself at their expense, nor did she take up weapons against them. But she wished them to acknowledge her head of her own household, just as those within her house had done. She even was willing to be called a Princess—providing she governed her household well. But almost hidden from the rest of Europe by her mountains, kept by barriers from easy access to the rest of the world, the other Nations paid little attention to her. She grew up almost unnoticed by the world—proud and strong, simple in her tastes, pious in her own way (for her church was not the church of most of her neighbors), and thoughtful, if ill educated.

She was not bookish in those early days; she was too indifferent, perhaps, to letters. Had she kept a journal, we could now embroider her story with more brilliant threads. Her lack of education was perhaps rather her misfortune than her fault. Those who knew her realized her many fine qualities, yet she made few friends beyond her own borders,—and because she was independent and poor, her richer neighbors were suspicious of her and jealous. This one and that one set upon her. They were jealous when she first put on regal robes. They were afraid that she wished to enlarge her possessions at their expense, and one of them, who had assumed complete lordship over Serbia and all her sisters, was constantly threatening her, pretending at times that if she could help him against the foe from Asia who was threatening them both, she should be acknowledged of royal rank. This did not wholly satisfy her. Her ambitions had grown. She herself was reaching out for the Imperial purple. She felt that if she wore it, she might better defend herself and her relatives beyond the mountains from the Asiatic hordes.

Then came the great test—and from then almost until to-day Kossovo has been a day of mourning!

When the fair, gray-eyed ancestors of the modern Serb came south from their home in Galicia, moving westward from the shores of the Black Sea, along the left bank of the Danube, they crossed the river and occupied the northwest corner of the Balkan Peninsula. How long they had lived in Galicia we need not ask, but they bore with them traditions of a catastrophe in India that was probably the cause of their remote fathers' leaving that country.

Pliny and Ptolemy mention the Serbs, and we know that for one hundred years at least previous to 625 a.d. they were at war with the Empire. The Roman Empire was then slowly disintegrating, and in the Balkans there was no power to protect the Romanized Illyria from the northern invaders who in prehistoric times had driven away the aboriginal inhabitants.

It matters little whether the Emperor Heraclius invited the Serbs to settle down in the northwest Byzantine provinces lately devastated by barbarians, on condition that they would defend the Empire against the Tartar Avars, or whether he merely accepted the fact that they had entered these provinces and must stay there. He made an agreement of peace with the Serbs—and this marks the beginning of their known history. He desired a buffer State, as the neighbors of the Serbs so often have desired in later times. The lands the newcomers then occupied are the Serb lands of to-day—Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Old Serbia, Macedonia, Dalmatia, the Banat, and to an extent Croatia and Western Bulgaria—practically the ideal Pan-Serbia, but in this little sketch, so far as it is possible, by "Serbia" is meant the Kingdom of Serbia, at the north of the Balkan Peninsula.