"For the love of God restore to me, I beseech you, my blood! obtain my pardon from my sovereign, and no longer retain in your memory my past offences; and I promise that I will then leave your subjects in tranquillity, and even serve them as a friend when necessary.
"If you refuse this favour, expect from me all that despair can prompt! I shall assemble my friends, carry destruction wherever you reside, pillage your property, plunder your merchants; and from this moment, if you pay no attention to my entreaties, I swear that I will massacre every Turk that falls into my hands."
As Socivisca had been doing this for so many years past, perhaps the pacha thought compliance would not make much difference; so this letter, like its preceding messages, he received with contempt, swearing by the "beard of the sultan to listen neither to the threats nor entreaties of a common robber." So Socivisca performed to the full all that he had named and threatened. At the head of a body of Greeks and Montenegrins he ravaged all the Bosnian frontier, slaying and decapitating every Mussulman who fell into his hands. Seeking no quarter and giving none, as before, flames and rapine marked his path wherever he went.
Many of his forays were made near the Lake of Scutari, in concert with the Montenegrins, whom the Russians supplied with arms and artillery to add to the troubles of the Pacha of Bosnia, whose people ere long on their knees besought him to yield up the wife and children of Socivisca, and save them from a scourge so terrible.
Still the pacha refused; but suddenly the indomitable Socivisca appeared with his hardy Aiducos before the walls of Traunick, and, by a wonderful combination of force and stratagem, the gates were stormed, the guards dispersed, and he carried off his wife, his son, and daughter to a place of safety beyond the frontier.
In retiring from Traunick, at a wild place near Razula, his people captured one of the Turkish Timariots, in the service of the pacha, and would instantly have put him to death had not the brother of Socivisca recognized in him the man who had favoured his escape a short time before,—Nouri Othman. These Timariots were soldiers, who clothed, armed, and accoutred themselves out of their pay, and were under the immediate command of the sanjiac or bey, and each maintained under him a certain number of militiamen, as they were, in fact, high-class Turkish cavaliers. Those on the Hungarian frontier had each an income of 6000 aspres, a coin then worth one shilling and threepence British money.
In gratitude the mountain warrior permitted Othman to escape; and while Socivisca was at prayers—a duty which he never omitted before a meal—the prisoner was set at liberty, a fleet horse was given him, and from the camp of the outlaws he spurred towards Traunick. Against this act of generosity the Aiducos of the band exclaimed loudly; and a nephew of Socivisca went so far as to draw from his girdle a long brass-butted pistol, with which he struck his uncle on the face; the latter, infuriated by such an insult from a junior, shot him through the heart, and was compelled to fly from the troop.
The nephew was buried as his grandfather had been, in a grave by the wayside; but this family quarrel and double misfortune affected Socivisca so much that he returned to Karlovitz, relinquishing alike his life of war and outrage for a time, but for a time only; for, fired with enthusiasm on hearing that Stephano Piciola (known as Di Montenero), so often victorious over the Turks, had made himself master of all Albania, in 1770, he issued forth again at the head of his Aiducos, and scoured the Bosnian frontier, shooting down every Turk whom he met.
In his fiftieth year, after having led a life of such danger and strife—after shedding so much blood, and during a period of thirty years since the slaughter of the three Turkish brothers at his father's farm, having plundered so much, so freely had he spent his cash among his friends and followers, that he found his exchequer reduced to only six hundred sequins.
To secure these, he entrusted three hundred to the care of a kinsman and the rest to a friend, both of whom absconded with their trust to the shelter of the pacha, and left him in abject poverty in the small town of Grachaez, in the province of Carlstadt, on the military frontier of Croatia.