The history of Bosnia now centres around the fortifications of Jaycze. The city was again and again besieged by Mahomet and Bajazet; but the citizens, amongst whom we learn were a large number of Bogomiles,[129] showed that, when under the inspiration of a sovereign like Mathias, they knew how to fight, and, while the town held out, Hungarian armies inflicted disastrous defeats on the Turks under its walls. In 1520 two generals of Sultan Solyman II., the Bey of Semendria and the Pashà of Turkish Bosnia, inflicted the severest blow on the Banat of Jaycze that it had yet experienced. The great stronghold of Zvornik, the key of the Podrinia, fell into the hands of the Turks, owing to the carelessness of the governor, who had failed to provision it; and two other important fortresses yielded to the panic, one Sokol, the other the rock citadel of Tešanj,[130] the key of the province of Ussora. Jaycze, however, at that time had for governor a stout old soldier, Peter Keglević, who had received wounds at Terentzin, and the successful defence of this city under his guidance is the last and perhaps the most romantic episode in the annals of Christian Bosnia.
The Turks, finding all their efforts to take the city by open assault futile, had planned a night surprise, and, to disarm the suspicions of the governor, had retired out of sight of the city, as if to raise the siege. But Keglević, who perhaps obtained his information from renegades in the Pashà’s army, was made aware by means of his spies that the Turks were constructing a large number of ladders. The governor accordingly doubled the watch on the walls, lining them, where they were too low, with foot soldiers; and was shortly made aware, by the same secret sources of information, that the retreating Turks had doubled round, and, making their way by stealth among the mountains and under cover of the forest, were encamped in a retired gorge not far from the town, intending to assault the walls by a sudden escalade in the hours before dawn. Peter showed himself quite equal to the occasion, and told off immediately a picked body of a hundred men to take their stand in the rear of the Turkish ambush, with orders to fall on the infidels at a signal given from a gun-shot.
Nor were Keglević’s resources exhausted by this stratagem. It happened to be the eve of a feast-day, when the women and maidens of the town would in times of security go forth, as they still do through the length and breadth of Bosnia, to dance and sing on the forest lawns. Old Peter called the girls and merry wives of Jaycze around him, and bade them at earliest dawn to go forth, as if no foe were nigh, into the King’s Mead,[131] as the meadowland about the town was known long afterwards, and sing and play their shrillest—disarming their fears by telling them that he would be at hand to help them.
Meanwhile the Turks, astir before sunrise for their planned attack, were shouldering their ladders for the escalade—when the distant sounds of the festal songs, and the Sclavonic dance-music, the plaintive note of the Ghuzla, and the shrill piping of the Svirala, broke the silence of the still morning air; and peering down between the forest trunks they espied by the first faint light of dawn the maidens of Jaycze tripping the light fantastic toe right merrily on the green slopes opposite. This was enough! Down fall the ladders from their backs, and forwards scurry the warriors, forgetful of everything but the sirens across the valley. Old Keglević saw his opportunity, and sallying forth from the city, attacked them with a picked body of men, while the ambushed horsemen, true to the signal, swept down upon their rear. The Turks, in utter confusion, distracted by the double onslaught, surprised, perhaps scarcely armed, offered no resistance, and were cut down almost to a man.
The Pashà, furious at this disaster, attacked Jaycze shortly afterwards with an army of 20,000 men, a long train of siege material, and eight cannon of large calibre;[132] but Keglević held out, and Frangepani advancing with an army of 16,000 men, defeated the Pashà and compelled him to raise the siege. Seven years, however, after his splendid defence of Jaycze, the brave old governor resigned his command, and his successor, a careless and unwarlike man, lost the fortress almost immediately. On the surrender of Jaycze in 1527 the remaining towns of the Banat opened their gates to the Turks, and the whole of Bosnia to the Save passed irrecoverably into the hands of the Sultan.
That the change was much regretted even by the Catholic population of the country may be doubted. The history of the Hungarian Banat of Jaycze is indeed less stained with religious persecutions than that of the earlier kingdom, but much of that feudal tyranny which had contributed in no unimportant manner to the conquest of Mahomet was still at work to alienate the wretched Bosnian peasants. We have the convincing testimony of an eyewitness, and a Doctor of the Roman Catholic University of Bologna, that the rule of the Moslem was at this time looked upon as less oppressive than that of the petty Christian Bans and Barons. ‘The Bosniacs,’ says Montalbano, ‘are not so badly treated by the Turks, but that those subject to Christian rule are not worse oppressed by their own lords. And I myself have often seen no small multitude of country people, having burnt their own houses in their despair, flee with their wives and children and cattle and all that they possessed, to the country under Turkish rule, for as much as the Turk extorteth little, save the tithe. And therefore has it happened oftentimes that our armies in the last Hungarian wars, when they have crossed the Ottoman border, find not the Christian countrymen who, as they supposed, would be their friends and helpers; or if so be they found them, they were hid in nooks, or intent upon their flight; for no sufficient prohibition against outrages and robberies is possible with the army. They think themselves well off if haply their property and the honour of their women be left them uninjured; whereas with the Turks, by reason of their great obedience, these securities can be readily obtained.’[133]
Several desultory attempts have since been made on the part of the Hapsburgs to recover it: by the Markgrave Ludwig of Baden, in 1688; by Prince Eugene, in 1697, who pushed on as far as Bosna Serai itself, but gained nothing by his hasty dash; and again in 1736 by the imperial troops under the Prince of Saxe-Hildburghausen, which ended in the utter rout of the Austrian army, amounting, it is said, to 80,000 men, and such complete discomfiture, that Ali Pashà could boast that ‘not a hoof of them was left behind.’[134] In 1790 Marshal Laudon took a few places in Bosnia, but the French Revolution put a stop to these operations, and all the towns captured in Bosnia were restored by the peace of Sistov.[135] These later efforts may show that though the Emperor-King had resigned his claim over Bosnia by the peace of Passarovitz in 1718, Austria, in the last century at all events, had not resigned all hopes of recovering the old fief of the Hungarian Crown.
There are very few materials[136] at hand for the history of Bosnia after the Turkish conquest, and we have little but theories to explain the extraordinary process of renegation which immediately set in, and which has given us a Sclavonic race of Mahometans. From the earliest days of the conquest the Turks inaugurated the policy of allowing all those natives who would accept the religion of Islâm to retain their lands and belongings, and we hear at once of a son of the King of Bosnia and another of the Duke of St. Sava turning Mahometan. It is certain that though the Catholic faction among the nobility was still powerful, a large number of even the highest rank in Bosnia were infected with the Bogomilian heresy; and it is probable that many rightful heirs of ancient houses had been dispossessed for heretical opinions by the dominant Romish caste, and were willing to recover their honours by at least nominally abjuring their religion. By most, perhaps, the renegation was intended to be only temporary; they ‘bowed in the house of Rimmon’ merely to retain their honours. Not a few of these renegade families have preserved even to the present day many of their old Christian and perhaps heretical observances; and it is whispered that there are still members of the old Bosnian aristocracy only waiting for a favourable opportunity to abjure Islâm. With the bulk of the people the desire of lording it over their former Romish oppressors would often outweigh every religious consideration. It has been hinted already that the Puritans of Bosnia might find little repugnant to them in the service of the mosques, and we may perhaps suspect that the Manichæism which looked on Christ as one Æon, might accept Mahomet as another. Certain it is that a large part of the population of Bosnia went over to Mahometanism, and those who would deny that the majority of the converts belonged to the persecuted sect of the Bogomiles, must account for the curious diminution since the Turkish conquest of the heretics who immediately before it formed, as far as we can judge, the majority, certainly the most influential portion, of the population.
Strange as seems the comparative disappearance of the Bogomilian religion since the Turkish conquest, throughout a large part of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the more minutely we enquire into Bosnian history the less insoluble does the problem appear. On the whole, the disappearance of the Bosnian Protestants was not so much due to voluntary renegation, though that played its part, as to a cause which I have already hinted at. In the days of the Bosnian kingdom the strength of these sectaries lay in the towns; and it was on the towns that the hand of the Turk fell heaviest. The citizens of Jaycze, and Jaycze was then a peculiar stronghold of the Bogomiles, like those of Kliuć, and like those of the other fenced cities throughout the land, saw their children snatched from them, to be forcibly converted to Islâm, and to return as Janissaries and Mahometans to claim their heritage. Nay, more, we have the direct evidence of an eyewitness and contemporary that the Janissaries were largely recruited from the children of the Bogomiles.[137] At the end of the fifteenth and in the sixteenth century there were still Bogomiles in Bosnia; but how many of them were wifeless and childless! We have historic proofs that the Bogomiles who existed in Jaycze in 1478 had lost their heirs; their children were already Moslemized;—how many, we may ask, outlived that generation? and how few could have survived the consequences of the second captivity of Jaycze in 1527! In Herzegovina, where at the moment of Turkish conquest the Bogomiles were proportionally more numerous, and where their attitude, in contradistinction to their Turcophile manifestations in Bosnia, had been one of open defiance to the conqueror, their calamity must have been even more overwhelming; and if the Turks bore so hardly on their Jayczan benefactors, what mercy could have been meted to the Bogomilian defenders of Mostar?[138]