However, the hardy warriors of the mountains were scarcely content, like their countrymen in the eastern portions of Greece, to live on despised and unmolested for the payment of tribute; the worst and most humiliating feature of which was the number of children they were compelled to present yearly to the sultan for service in the seraglio, or in the ranks of the janissaries, where their identity soon became lost; and where in the end they realized what Voltaire termed "a great proof of the force of education and of the strange constitution of human affairs, that the most of those proud oppressors of Christianity should thus be born of Christian parents."
Socivisca, the subject of the following sketch, was born at Simiova in 1725, of Grecian parents, who reared and educated him in the profession and faith of the Greek church. He was strong, hardy, and athletic in form, and of a haughty and resentful spirit, that would ill brook the circumstances in which he found himself as he grew to manhood.
His father occupied a small sheep farm on the slope of those mountains whose forests of dark pine give a name to the people and the province. But the proprietors were Turks, who treated the family, which consisted of the old man and his four sons, with great severity, subjecting them to constant exactions, insults, and oppressions.
They were thus reduced to such extreme poverty that Socivisca, with all his industry, aided by that of his three brothers, Nicholas, Giurgius, and Adrian, found himself quite unable to marry a beautiful Greek girl, of whom he became enamoured in youth. His father, being of a peaceful and gentle nature, and being perhaps aware of the hopelessness of resistance, on perceiving that his sons writhed under their afflictions, besought them to submit with patience to the will of God; but the four young men, being alike of a fiery and haughty spirit, and, moreover, being trained to the use of those arms which the Montenegrin shepherds constantly wear (like the Scots Highlanders in the last century), they received his advice in reluctant silence, and not the less resolved to have a trial of strength some day with their Mahommedan oppressors.
Native hardihood and warlike spirit were in this instance added to national animosity and religious rancour; thus Socivisca, like Rob Roy, vowed that ere long those should tremble "on hearing of his vengeance, that would not listen to the story of his wrongs."
The Montenegrins, like most other mountaineers, are eminently patriotic, and the solemn and melancholy aspect of those dark hills of Illyria that look down on the Adriatic, to their eyes must seem well to harmonize with the fallen state of Greece:—
"And yet how lovely in thine age of woe,
Land of lost gods and god-like men, art thou!
Thy vales of evergreen, thy hills of snow,
Proclaim thee nature's varied favourite now."
Though not pure Greeks, but Zernagorzii, of half-Slavonian blood, the Montenegrins have the most extravagant ideas of independence and the past glories of their country. Inspired by its scenery, by the real and imaginary stories of its departed greatness and present degradation, Socivisca and his brothers registered at the altar a vow of vengeance on their oppressive Overlords! and as if fatality had a hand in the matter, it chanced soon after that the haughty Turk, the proprietor of their sheep farm, accompanied by two of his brothers, came, either by choice or necessity, to lodge at the farm. This was in 1744, when Socivisca was in his nineteenth year.
"We are four to three," said he, "so look to your pistols and yataghans, after these dogs have had their food and coffee."
Notwithstanding their vow, it is said that he wavered for a time before performing the terrible deed; but when he saw his father's face, sharpened more by want and privation than by age—when he looked on the rags and sheepskins that clad them all—they the true lords of the soil—and saw in contrast the rich flowing garments of fine silk and velvet, laced with gold, and the jewelled weapons of the three Mahommedans, in whose presence every wooden crucifix or gaudy little picture of a Greek saint had to be hidden—and perhaps when the youth thought of his bride, and all that might be if the land they trod on was indeed their own, every scruple gave way, and, inciting his brothers to the deadly work, they fell on the three Turks, as they lounged over their long pipes, and slew them by their pistols and yataghans, after a very brief resistance.