In 1463 Mahomet crossed the Drina and poured into Bosnia an army, the cavalry alone of which was exaggerated by the terror of the natives into 150,000 horsemen. On June 14 a Turkish Pashà appeared at the head of a large force beneath the walls of Bobovac, the ancient seat of Bosnian Bans and Kings. The Sultan himself came up next day, and the governor[111]—a ‘Manichee,’ we are told, ‘who had feigned to be a Christian’—forthwith, with the consent of the garrison, who it is to be supposed were equally disaffected against the Catholic rulers, opened the gates to the Turk. Thus passed into the hands of Mahomet a fortress of the greatest strength, and supplied with provisions for a two-years’ siege. The King of Bosnia, panic-stricken at the loss of his royal city, and seeing himself betrayed by his own subjects, shut himself up with his treasures in Jaycze, another royal city, as strong by its position and fortifications as Bobovac; but feeling himself still insecure, at the approach of the Pashà fled with his treasures to Clissa on the coast of Primorie, where, after forty days’ siege, on condition of his life being spared, he surrendered himself to Mahomet, together with his treasures, the accumulated hoards of five kings, amounting, it is said, to a million of ducats.[112]
The crafty Sultan utilized, we are told, the King’s authority to obtain possession of the remaining strongholds of Bosnia. He extorted from him writs to the governors of the different cities, ordering them to give up their keys to the Turks. All obeyed. The Protestant population of Bosnia did not need the royal mandate; they looked on the Turks rather as deliverers than foes, and in the short space of eight days seventy cities, ‘defended by nature and art,’ opened their gates to the Sultan’s officers.[113] Then at last the Christians of Bosnia discovered that they had betrayed one tyranny to make room for a worse. The King, Stephen Tomašević, having served his turn, was barbarously executed by his perfidious captor. Accounts differ as to the exact manner of his death; but it matters little whether he suffered the fate of Marsyas, St. Sebastian, or Charles I.; and poetic justice is satisfied, if we may believe the statement that the parricide king met his doom on the same field of Bielaj where he murdered his father.[114] The most eminent nobles who had not escaped to Dalmatia were transported to Asia, thirty thousand of the picked youth of Bosnia were taken to recruit the Janissaries, and two hundred thousand of the inhabitants were sold as slaves.
By a strange irony of fate the blow fell hardest on the cities, where the Bogomilian faction lay.[115] How terrible was their calamity the example of Jaycze, the chief city of the realm, and Clissa, the last refuge of Bosnian royalty, abundantly display. The burghers of Jaycze, relying on the Sultan’s pledge to respect their municipal freedom, their ancient privileges and their property, had gone forth to welcome him within their gates. But no sooner was the city in his possession than the treacherous Osmanlì, not content with arresting the chief nobility of the realm and the king’s brother and daughter whom he found within the walls, seized on the children of the leading citizens for distribution among his Pashàs and Agas, and enrolment in his new body-guard. The fate of Clissa (or Kliuć) was still more overwhelming. The Turkish Beglerbeg divided the townspeople into three parts. One of them he adjudicated to his troops as booty; another portion, the youths and children, he set apart for enrolment in the Janissary guard; and the remainder, but not, we may be assured, either the young or the beautiful, he left to pay tribute for their desolated homes.
That it was nothing but the sheerest intolerance that drove the Bogomiles to welcome Turkish rule in Bosnia is conclusively shown by the different attitude adopted by their co-religionists of Herzegovina. This can be accounted for by no ties of personal loyalty to the reigning Duke. Stephen’s whole career might well have inspired the most vehement repugnance among subjects more tolerant to human weakness than is the wont of Puritans. Stephen Cosaccia was by all accounts a selfish voluptuary, careless of religion, described as fickle as the wind, and reckless as he was ambitious. He had seized his son’s wife, a beautiful Florentine, and when his son and the outraged Duchess saved themselves from perpetual insult by taking shelter within the hospitable walls of Ragusa, had brought disasters on the land by his insolent pretensions. The Ragusans, indignant at his demand for the extradition of the fugitives, his claims on part of their territory, his raising the salt-tax, did not content themselves with impeaching their rebellious senator of high treason, but invaded Herzegovina, took his treasure castle of Blagai and ducal city of Mostar, and hardly needed the double intervention of Pope and Sultan to reduce him to an humiliating peace and the payment of a war indemnity. Stephen Cosaccia changed his creed with as much facility as he changed his consort. In the beginning of his reign, when Bosnian kings leaned to Bogomilism, it had suited his policy to bid for Papal favour and raise his County into a Duchy by playing the part of a faithful son of the Church. But when the King of Bosnia had made his peace with Rome, when all hopes that he may have cherished of placing the Bosnian crown upon his own head were finally dashed, when further a Papal legate had presided at that diet of Coinica by which his dependence on the Bosnian kingdom was formally cemented, Stephen Cosaccia began to think that, after all, more might be gained by fishing in the troubled waters of Puritan disaffection. He veered round once more and henceforth poses as the protector of the oppressed Bogomiles of Bosnia. When the persecutions of Stephen Tomašević drove 40,000 of these sectaries from the kingdom, they found a refuge in the duchy; and, neither for the first nor the last time in history, a tyrant and a libertine became the acknowledged patron of Puritans and levellers.
Thus, when Mahomet turned his arms against Herzegovina, the Bogomiles showed their gratitude to their ducal benefactor, by rising en masse in his defence. They occupied the mountain passes, and while the craven Stephen shut himself up in his capital Mostar, and drowned his anxieties in his usual dissipation, his brave Puritan adherents kept the Turks at bay on the frontier. One pass, however, had remained unoccupied. The Turks burst through it and beleagured the ducal city. The Bogomiles, however, still fought bravely, and made such successful sallies and flank attacks upon the enemy that the Turk saw himself obliged to raise the siege. The rest of the country, however, was overrun, many castles of the Count of Popovo and Trebinje[116] taken, and this great magnate of the duchy slain. The Duke saw himself forced to raise his tribute and send his son Stephen as a hostage to the Sultan. Two years later, in 1466, Stephen Cosaccia died, and his duchy was shared by his two sons, Ladislav, who inherited the ducal title, and Vlatko. But Herzegovina had only gained a respite from complete subjugation.[117] Twenty years after the overthrow of the Bosnian kingdom, in 1483, the Beglerbeg of Bosnia fell upon the Duchy of St. Sava, the two Christian princes were dispossessed, and the whole country incorporated in the Sandjakate of Bosnia. A renegade member of the ducal house, that Stephen whom the first duke had sent as a hostage to Mahomet, rose under the name of Ahmed Pashà to be grand vizier, and is known in Turkish annals as Herzekoglu.[118]
Amidst the universal ruin, the wife of the last lawful king of Bosnia, Stephen Thomas, is singled out by the grandeur of her misfortunes, and I have been tempted to collect a few details which may shed some halo of romance round the unhappy Catharine. After the murder of her husband by his bastard son Stephen and her brother Radivoj, Queen Catharine had lingered near his tomb in the Church of St. John at Sutisca, the burial-place of Bosnian kings, sheltered in the adjoining convent which her own and her husband’s piety had reared,[119] and doubtful whether most to fear her husband’s murderer or the terrible Sultan, who was advancing, avowedly, to avenge her. In the sacristery of the Convent of Sutisca, the Franciscan monks still treasure an antique picture, in which Christ appears in person to the kneeling king Stephen Thomas; and legend says that it was in the monastery of his rearing that this vision befell the husband of Queen Catharine. Here, amidst all these sad and solemn memories, the widowed queen was engaged in embroidering some sacred vestments, when the news of the rapid advance of Mahomet, perhaps the sudden betrayal of the royal stronghold of Bobovac itself, only five miles distant, startled her from her pious task. In the sacristery of Sutisca, with the picture of King Thomas, the Franciscan monks showed long afterwards[120] ‘a stole and a part of a chasuble embroidered in gold threads by a needle in a wonderful way, and delectable to the sight, which is said by immemorial tradition to have been the handiwork of Queen Catharine, the wife of King Thomas, who sleeps at Rome, and which she left unfinished when she fled.’
She, a woman of delicate health, the widowed Queen of Bosnia, the daughter of the Duke of St. Sava, on her mother’s side[121] tracing her lineage from the imperial race of the Comneni, fled away on foot through the passes of the Dinaric Alps, down the valley of the Narenta, across the inhospitable limestone desert that stretches, now as then, between her father’s stronghold of Mostar and the sea, to Stagno, the old seaport of Bosnia. There she found a small boat, which carried her across the gulf to the hospitable haven of Ragusa. At Ragusa she seems to have resided several years; but in 1475[122] she set forth on her pilgrimage once more, and passed the closing years of her life in the shelter of a Roman convent, distinguished by her charitable works, her meekness, and the patience with which she bore her misfortunes,[123] but haunted even there by the craven conduct of her son Sigismund, who had renegaded to the creed of Mahomet. In 1477 Queen Catharine died, and was buried in the Church of the Virgin of Ara Cœli, in which by her orders a monument was reared to her memory.[124] There, beside the feudal escutcheons of her husband’s kingdom and her father’s principality, on a foreign soil, and in a Roman sanctuary, reposes, as is fitting, the effigy of the exiled Queen of Bosnia, the last monument of the feudal kingdom, and of a dynasty essentially alien to the people over whom it ruled.
After her death two of her family appeared before Pope Sextus IV., and presented to him her will, in which she bequeathed her kingdom of Bosnia to the Holy Roman Church; adding, however, the condition that if her son should return from the Turks, ‘and the vomit of Mahomet,’ he should be restored to his father’s throne. As a token, her representatives handed over the Sword of the Realm, and the Royal Spurs, ‘which the Pontiff benignantly received, and ordered them to be placed, with the will, in the Apostolic archives.’[125]
Meanwhile Mathias Corvinus was taking more effectual measures to recover at least a part of Bosnia for Christendom and Hungary. Within three months after the execution of Stephen Tomašević he had taken the field, and in a short time recovered twenty-seven cities with almost the same rapidity as that of Mahomet’s conquest. The whole of lower Bosnia, including what is now Turkish Croatia, the valley of the Verbas, the Bosnian Possávina, the old Bosnian Banats of Ussora and Podrinia, were for a while recovered.[126] In Jaycze the spirit of the citizens had not been utterly crushed out even by the rigour of Mahomet and the Janissary tribute. Wifeless and childless for the most part, her burghers had not lost the hopes of vengeance and recovered liberty: they called on the Magyars to deliver them, and after a seventy days’ siege the Turkish garrison yielded to the combined efforts of the besieging army and the citizens within. The great stronghold of the realm now received a Hungarian governor, and was forthwith made the capital of the new Banat of Jaycze, or as Mathias called it, to preserve the jus of the Hungarian Crown, the titulary kingdom of Bosnia.[127]
The ancient city of Jaycze, which now for many years becomes the Ilion of Turk and Hungarian, and the bulwark of the Christian world, derives its name, it is said, from its resemblance in form to an egg, the Bosniac word for which is Jaica,[128] and it has thus been compared with the Neapolitan fortress Castello del Ovo, reared by the Normans. Its high walls are still to be seen, rising on a rocky height at the confluence of the Pliva and Verbas; and during the days of the Bosnian kingdom it was recognised as the capital of the realm, sharing with Bobovac the honour of being the favourite residence of the Bosnian kings. Nor did Jaycze owe this royal preference solely to an almost impregnable position. As a pleasance the site is equally alluring, being environed by some of the most romantic mountain and forest scenery in the country, and overlooking not only the one Bosnian lake, but a waterfall which may compare with those of Norway. Here rose the Minorite convent of St. Catharine, enriched by many indulgences, obtained from Rome by the namesake of the saint, the Queen whose melancholy fortunes we have just been tracing; and here, after the fall of Constantinople, the body of St. Luke (the greatest glory of Bosnia’s latter days!) had found shelter till the invasion of Mahomet, when pious hands succeeded in transporting it to Venice. There it was deposited by the Doge Cristoforo Moro in the Church of St. Job: to the no small scandal of the neighbouring city of Padua, which possessed a rival trunk of the Evangelist.