Throughout this period of utter gloom only two things served to keep alive the Serb tradition—their splendid popular ballads, unequalled in Europe for directness and imagination, save, perhaps, by the ballads of the Anglo-Scottish Border; and the clergy of the Orthodox Church, poor ignorant despised peasants like their flock, yet bravely keeping the national flame burning. The one bright spot was the tiny mountain eyrie of Montenegro, which stubbornly maintained its freedom under a long succession of warrior-priests.
The Serb Patriarchate, which had long had its seat in Ipek, migrated to Austria in 1690, at the special invitation of the Emperor Leopold I., and has ever since been established (though the title of patriarch lapsed for a time) at Karlowitz on the Danube. Large settlements of refugee Serbs from Turkey followed their spiritual chief to Croatia, Slavonia and the southern plains of Hungary between 1690 and 1740. The special privileges granted to them by the emperor were, however, gradually undermined and revoked by the Hungarian Estates. Meanwhile the "Military Frontiers" were extended on essentially democratic lines: a land-tenure subject to military service bred a hereditary race of soldiers and officers devoted to the Imperial idea, and it has taken many long long years of bungling on the part of Viennese and Magyar diplomacy to efface that devotion.
Thus the Habsburg dominions became the centre of culture for the Serbs, whose literary revival came from Neusatz, Karlowitz and even Buda. It was not only under Prince Eugene that they looked to the Habsburgs for aid. Kara George, who led their first serious rising in 1804 more than once offered himself to Vienna.
In the Balkans the Serbs were the first to revolt, and won their own freedom, with less help than Greeks, Roumanians or Bulgarians, and under far less favourable circumstances. Thus Serbia is essentially a self-made man among States, built from the foundations upwards, and possessing no aristocracy and hardly even a middle class. Her curse has been the rivalry of two, or rather three native dynasties, the Karageorgevitch, the Obrenovitch and the Petrovitch; and this rivalry has borne fruit in three dastardly political crimes—the murder of the heroic Black George in 1817, by order of his rival Milosh Obrenovitch; of Prince Michael, Serbia's wisest ruler, by the adherents of George's son; and finally of King Alexander and his wife in June 1903. The history of the Southern Slavs for the last century has been a slow movement towards national unity, overshadowed, sometimes hastened, sometimes paralysed, by the rivalry of Austria and Russia for the hegemony of the Balkan Peninsula. Till 1875 the influence of the two Powers alternated in Belgrade, and there was nothing definite to suggest which influence would win, though of course Russia may be said to have possessed an advantage in her position as the foremost Orthodox power and as the greatest among the Slavonic brotherhood of races. That year, however, brought a fresh rising of Bosnia and Herzegovina against Turkish rule, and in defence of this purely Serbo-Croat province public opinion in Serbia and Montenegro rose. Side by side the two little principalities fought the Turks and risked their all upon the issue. The provinces were to the last man friendly and welcomed their action. Then, when the battle seemed won, Austria-Hungary at the Congress of Berlin stepped in and occupied Bosnia and Herzegovina—with the active approval of Disraeli and Salisbury. The inhabitants resisted stoutly, but were overcome. Thus was realised the first stage upon the road of the Austrian advance towards Salonica. Serbia received compensation at Nia, Pirot, and Vranja; Montenegro acquired the open roadstead of Antivari and a scrap of barren coast-line; but the hearts of both still clung to Bosnia.
Henceforth the friction between Vienna and Belgrade has been permanent, though often latent. It was accentuated by the fact that King Milan was little better than an Austrian agent, the most notorious example of this being the ill-considered and ill-managed war with Bulgaria into which he plunged Serbia at the instigation of the Ballplatz[1](1885). Afterwards, it is true, Vienna intervened to rob the Bulgarians of the fruits of victory and argued that Serbia was thus under her debt; but this crass application of the principle of divide et impera could not deceive any one. Milan was a man of great ability, but vicious and corrupt. The ceaseless scandals of his private life, the frequent political coups d'etat in which he indulged, tended to confirm the dislike of his subjects for the Austrophilism with which he was identified. Alexander, his son and successor, was even worse; indeed, it is not too much to say that he was the most "impossible" monarch whom Europe has known since the days of the Tsar Paul. His court was characterised by gross favouritism and arbitrary revisions of the constitution; and his position became finally untenable when he committed the fatal error of marrying Draga Mashin, a woman of no position and notorious private character. Two incidents in her tragic story remind us of similar scandals in English history—the fond delusion of Mary Tudor and the legend of Mary of Modena's warming-pan. The last straw was the design, widely attributed to her and the infatuated king, for securing the succession to her brother, who had as little claim to the throne as any other Serbian subject. On June 10, 1903, Alexander and Draga were assassinated by a gang of Serbian officers, under circumstances of the utmost brutality such as nothing can excuse. In the light of recent events, however, it is important to note that both Austria and Russia knew of the plot at least ten days before the murder and did nothing to stop it.[2] On the day after the crime the Fremdenblatt, the organ of the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Office, published a leading article couched in terms of the utmost cynicism, and declaring that it mattered little to Austria-Hungary which dynasty reigned in Serbia. The Serbian Government might have been excused for enclosing a copy of this article in its reply to the Austrian Note of July 23, 1914!
[Footnote 1: The Austro-Hungarian Foreign Office.]
[Footnote 2: In 1908 this was confirmed to me by a distinguished member of the then Austrian Cabinet, since dead, who was certainly in a position to know.]
The Obrenovitch dynasty was thus at an end. Its rival, the Karageorgevitch dynasty, returned to power—naturally under a black cloud of European disgust and suspicion. King Peter is not, however, as black as he has sometimes been painted. He fought gallantly in 1870 as a French officer; as a young man he translated Stuart Mill's Essay on Liberty into Serb, and for a generation he lived by preference in democratic Geneva and in Paris. Under him Serbia has for the first time enjoyed real constitutional government. Quietly, as occasion arose, the regicides were removed to the background, the old methods of favouritism were steadily discouraged, and it is not too much to say that an entirely new atmosphere has been created in Belgrade since 1903. Among the younger politicians in Serbia, as in other Slavonic countries, the moral influence of Professor Masaryk, the great Czech philosopher and politician, has grown more and more marked.
The depth of Serb aspirations in Bosnia has two obvious grounds—on the one hand, pure national sentiment of the best kind; on the other, the urgent economic need for a seaboard, Serbia being the only inland country in Europe save Switzerland, and not enjoying the latter's favoured position in the immediate vicinity of great world-markets. Austria-Hungary, on her part, set herself deliberately not merely to block this access to the sea, but also to keep Serbia in complete economic dependence. Under the new dynasty the little kingdom showed a keener desire to shake off its vassalage and find new markets. The so-called "Pig War"—the breeding of swine is Serbia's staple industry, and the founders of her two rival dynasties were wealthy pig-breeders—proved an unexpected success, for new trade outlets were found in Egypt and elsewhere. But the initial strain hit every peasant in his pocket and thus greatly accentuated the feeling against Austria-Hungary. At this stage came the Young Turk revolution and its sequel, the annexation of Bosnia. To any impartial observer it had been obvious from the first that those who dreamt of Austria-Hungary's voluntary withdrawal from the two provinces were living in a fool's paradise. The formal act of annexation merely set a seal to thirty years of effective Austrian administration, during which the Sultan's rule had been confined to the official celebration of his birthday. Educational and agrarian problems had been neglected, popular discontent had smouldered, but at least great material progress had been made. Roads, railways, public buildings had been created out of nothing, capital had been sunk, a new machine of government had been constructed. Austria had come to stay, and Aehrenthal, in annexing the provinces, felt himself to be merely setting the seal to a document which had been signed a generation earlier. He had failed to reckon with the outcry which this technical breach of international law evoked: like Bethmann-Hollweg, he had no blind faith in "scraps of paper," and had no scruple in tearing up the Treaty of Berlin on which the whole Balkan settlement had rested. Nowhere was the outburst of feeling so violent as in Serbia and Montenegro, who had never ceased to dream of the lost Serb provinces. For some months the two little States challenged the accomplished fact, and seemed bent on staking their very existence upon war with the great neighbouring Monarchy. Aehrenthal remained unmoved by their cries of impotent fury and settled down to a trial of strength with his rival Izvolsky, the Russian Foreign Minister, who encouraged the sister Slavonic States in their resistance. At length in March 1909 Germany stepped forward in "shining armour" to support her Austrian ally, and Russia, to avoid European war, gave way and abandoned the Serbs to their fate. Nothing was left but a humiliating submission: the Serbian Government was obliged to address a Note to the Great Powers, declaring that the annexation and internal condition of Bosnia did not in any way concern her.[1]
[Footnote 1: This declaration was made the basis of the Austrian Note to
Serbia in July 1914.]