BUILDING THE FOUNDATIONS: NAPOLEON AND STROSSMAYER
Slavs weep for the fall of Venice—They hear the voice of their brothers—Measures to keep them apart—By encouraging the Italianized party—And the Orthodox Church—And by fatherly legislation—In Serbia the people are fighting for freedom—The Montenegrin authorities are otherwise engaged—Napoleon favours the Southern Slavs—Russia and Britain oppose him on the Adriatic—Illyria, Napoleon's great work for the Southern Slavs—Napoleon's schemes are roughly interrupted—The Montenegrin Bishop incites against him—Disaster for Napoleon and the Southern Slavs—Austria's repressive policy—The work of Vuk Karažić—The methods of Serbia's Miloš—The Slav soul of Croatia—The Magyars and Croatia's port—The Sultan reigns in Bosnia—A sorry period for the Southern Slavs—Some who turn from politics grow prosperous—But the Croats strive for political liberties—The Austrians, the Magyars and the Croats—The Croats, struggling for freedom, incidentally help Austria—How Montenegro reformed herself—The Prince-Bishop gives a lead to the Southern Slavs—Austria pours out a German flood—The Croat peasants and their clergy—What the Czechs are doing to-day—Strossmayer—The Turk in Montenegro and Macedonia—The cheerless state of Serbia—the Slav voice in Macedonia—The Macedonian Slavs are undivided—Dawn of Italian unity—How Cavour would have treated the Slavs—Italian v. Slav: Tommaseo's advice—Austria leans on Germans and Italianists—The Southern Slav hopes are centred on Cetinje—For they know neither Nicholas of Montenegro nor Michael of Serbia—If Michael had lived!—The strange career of Rakovski—The Yugoslav name—Russia and Austria sow discord in the Balkans—The Macedonian Slavs under their Greek clergy—The affair of Kukuš—The Exarchate is established—1867: Austria delivers the Slavs to the Magyars—The "Krpitsa"—Rieka's history, as two people see it—And the Slovenes are coerced.
SLAVS WEEP FOR THE FALL OF VENICE
Early in 1797 the weak French garrisons which had been left in certain towns of Italy were massacred by the Venetians, who displayed no mercy either to the wounded soldiers or the women who were with the troops. Napoleon would come back no more, thought the Venetians. But he heard of what had happened as he was engaged upon the clauses of the Treaty of Leoben. No sooner had that courier brought him the dispatches than the Venetian envoys were ushered into his presence. They had been entrusted by the Senate with the task of following the armies and congratulating Napoleon or the Archduke, according to which of them had won the last battle. These envoys may have taken a despondent view of what would be the fate of the Serene Republic; but when, a short time afterwards, the perfumed and dishevelled citizens, stamping on the masks of last night's ball, were weeping pitiably in their palaces, the Slovenes and the Morlaks, who had fought for them so well, were weeping in the streets. Sadly and solemnly at Zadar—la tanto disputata—the flag of Venice was lowered; at other parts of the Dalmatian coast the nobles scarcely had to say a word before the peasants had snatched arms to fight the French and their égalité. The Venetians had, after all, been there a long time, even if they had not risen to the heights of Dubrovnik, which, as we learn from a traveller in 1805, kept no secret police and no gendarmes, and where a capital sentence pronounced at the time was the first in twenty-five years. (The city went into mourning on account of this, and an executioner had to be imported from Turkey.) Such a moral height had not been reached by the Venetians; but they had been in Dalmatia, as people loved to repeat, for a long time, and they had been easy-going in the collection of taxes, they had supported the bishops and the holy Church, they had made the peasants feel that each one of them was helping to support Venice, the grand and ancient, and so the faithful people mourned when she was falling.
THEY HEAR THE VOICE OF THEIR BROTHERS
Yet they were not wholly deaf to the call of their own race. When the Austrians sent a general, the "Hungarian party," working against the civil government of Count Raymond von Thurn, managed to have the post given to General Rukavina, a Croat from the Military Frontier. An eye-witness has left us an account of Rukavina's reception at Trogir. The general mounted a chair, and asked the people in the Slav language whether they would swear the oath of fidelity to His Majesty the Emperor and King, Francis II., and his descendants and legal successors. "Otchemo!" ["That is what we want!">[ was the unanimous reply. After the swearing of the oath, the general suddenly began a vigorous speech: "Moi dragi Dalmatinci" ["My dear Dalmatians">[, said he.... And afterwards, when two companies of Croat infantry were disembarked, the people collected round them were astonished to hear them speaking the same language as themselves and to learn that many of them had the same names as the Dalmatians.[36]
Incidents of this character were, for more reasons than one, most galling to von Thurn. In July the archbishop and municipality of Split petitioned that they might belong to Hungary. One presumes that these officials were moved less by the sympathetic ways of one Hungarian than by the knowledge that Croatia was under the Hungarian crown. Very powerless, indeed, like themselves, Croatia might be—at that moment reduced to the rank of a Hungarian county, with her Ban no longer able to convoke the Diet—nevertheless, a Croatia still existed. Then Count Raymond took hold of the matter; he sent reports on Rukavina to the Viennese authorities, and he and they seem to have cared little whether these reports contradicted one another. He exhibited his adversary as a man of unbounded violence, as a man of the most pusillanimous nature; General Rukavina was despicable, said these documents, he was an absolute nonentity; but no, shrieked von Thurn on the next day, this man Rukavina was imbued as no other with the abominable spirit of Machiavelli. To bring about the fall of the Hungarian party in Dalmatia, Count Raymond's police set themselves the task of laying by the heels such Hungarian agents as Count Miaslas Zanović, one of the four sons of Count Anthony, who for being implicated in a more than usually flagrant scandal had been expelled from Venice. And his sons lived agitated lives, although it is untrue that the second one, Stephen, before dying in prison in Amsterdam, had governed Montenegro and is known to history as Stephen the Little. [That mysterious person was a contemporary, who appearing in Montenegro when the land was in a state of barbarism and destitution, gave it out that he was the Russian Tzar Peter III., who had been strangled to death in 1762. The Montenegrins accepted him; and from 1768 to 1773 he showed himself a most competent and zealous ruler, carrying out so many reforms that he was clearly not Peter III. It has not as yet been ascertained from where he came, but judging from his accent he was either a Dalmatian Serb or a native of the Military Confines. He was very taciturn; only one Montenegrin, a priest called Marković, is believed to have been privy to his secret. Marković had visited Russia ten years previously and had celebrated Mass in the presence of the Tzar. It was the priest who assured the mountaineers that Stephen really was the Tzar. During his reign he repulsed the Turks and organized the public security, so that a lost purse—the people said—could easily be recovered. The Republic of Venice tried on several occasions to poison this excellent ruler; he was ultimately killed by a barber who came up to Cetinje at the bidding of the Pasha of Scutari, and, being appointed court barber, cut Stephen's throat.] As for the Zanović, the elder brother, Count Premislas, was for a long time in a Finnish prison, on account of his conduct in gaming-houses; the two younger brothers, Hannibal and Miaslas, were in Budva in southern Dalmatia in 1797, distributing Venetian proclamations, after which they rearranged their minds and became Hungarian agents.
MEASURES TO KEEP THEM APART
The more active of the pair was Miaslas, and by confounding his machinations and those of other Hungarian adherents von Thurn overthrew the Hungaro-Croatian party. Thenceforward his greatest care was diligently to suppress those aspirations of the people of Dalmatia for a union with their brothers. He had to build the house with the materials that he found on the spot; the most obvious corner-stone was that numerically small body of nobles and merchants who had for so long associated with Venetian officials that they hated to confess that they were Slavs.
BY ENCOURAGING THE ITALIANIZED PARTY