As this heraldic pageant passes before us—these knightly shields and helms, with their crests, supporters, and accoutrements—the imagination is kindled to realize how these isolated regions fitted once into the polity of mediæval Europe. Here, too, in these barbarous neglected lands, the romantic brilliance of chivalry has once held sway. For a moment the Paynim surroundings are forgotten—we wake, and find ourselves still within the limits of Christendom militant. We hear the herald’s trump. The barriers that to-day wall off Bosnia from the West sink at the potent blast like the towers of some Eastern magician. The names, the armorial bearings, recall the European cousin-hood of that hierarchy of birth. In due order among the escutcheons of Bosnian nobles appears the shield of the Frangepani; that of the Rusciević family reproduces the oriflamme of France: next in order, by a curious coincidence, follows that of the Sestrićić, strewn with Tudor roses.[220] Perhaps it would be impossible for any other monument to recall more vividly than this Book of Arms, at once the futile dreams of Serbian empire, the wreck of Bosnian kingship, and that dastardly abjuration by her nobles of country and belief.
Or what fitter repository for such a monument than this Minorite monastery? Here, perhaps, better than anywhere else, one perceives how it is among these Franciscan brotherhoods that the traditions of the old Bosnian kingdom most live on. The genealogic lore evinced by the monks with regard to the old nobility was quite surprising to us; they seemed to have the pedigrees by heart; they betrayed sources of information not open to the outside world. To understand how this happens one need only call to mind that for the most part the royal race and magnates were in fact but a Roman Catholic minority, holding sway over heretics and Greeks, and that next after the Magyar battle-axe, their mainstay lay in the influence and organisation of these very monks. Thus it befell that, when the crash came, these Franciscan brotherhoods emerged, the only stable remnant from the wreck of the old régime. It was in their cloisters that the surviving supporters of Bosnian loyalty rallied; and those who in that supreme moment of national prostration would neither fly nor play the renegade, found safety in the bosom of the Church. The monks confided to us that two of the noble families of Bosnia were still represented in the fraternity—the Aloupović and Radieljević.
Others, without actually taking the cowl, seem to have found retirement from generation to generation, under shadow, as it were, of the monastery. In the village of Foinica below, a poor rayah family perpetuates the noble race of Kristić; and—more interesting still—the Christian inmates of another Foinican hovel still exult in the royal name of Tvrdkoiević, and preserve the lineage of those Bosnian kings whose mighty castles we have seen at Doboj, Tešanj, and Travnik.
The Franciscans were, in fact, put forward to make terms for Catholic Bosnia with the conqueror; and it was the head of the Foinica brotherhood, Angelo Zvizdović, who took the lead; and advancing like a new Leo to the camp of the terrible Sultan, gained from Mahomet II., on the field of Milodraz in 1463, the great charter of the Franciscans. This was the Atname.[221] The Sultan, in this firman, orders that no one shall in any way molest the Bosnian brothers, either in their person, or their property, or their churches; that those who have fled the realm may return, and that the brothers may bring any person they choose from foreign parts into the country. ‘And I swear by the great God, the creator of heaven and earth, by the seven books, by the great prophets, by the 124,000 prophets, and by the sabre which I wear, that no one shall act counter to these commands so long as these monks do my bidding and are obedient to my service.’
Nor need it surprise us that it was to Foinica that Roman and aristocratic Bosnia turned in the hour of need. The local history of the district is bound up with that of the old kings and nobles. Foinica was originally a royal domain, and this monastery of the ‘Holy Spirit’ (Svéta Duša) in all probability owes its origin to the piety of the kings, whose usual residence, Sutiska, was not far off. From the royal race of the Tvartkos it passed to one of the noblest of the noble families whose shields we have been surveying; to that, namely, of Mergnjavić, they of the Vila crest. The hereditary possessions of this house lay at Naissus (Nissa) in Serbia; and coming from the birthplace of Constantine they modestly traced their descent from the fourth king of Rome! After the Turkish conquest of Bosnia, some members of the family fled, or, as they doubtless put it to themselves, returned, to the Eternal City. Here one of its scions, a certain John Tomko, published in 1632 the family archives—‘The Proofs of the Antiquity and Nobility of the Marcian Family, vulgarly known as Marnavić.’[222] Thus we possess, in Latin translations, some of the original deeds by which Foinica was given and confirmed to this Marcia gens; and as they are, I suppose, the only documents of the kind relating to Bosnia which have been preserved, I may be permitted to allude to them.
The first grant is by King Stephen Dabiscia, otherwise known as Tvartko II., to Goiko Mergnjavić. ‘Seeing that when Bajazet with the Turks came and stood in Naglasinci,’[223] and destroyed Bosnia, then came Goiko Mergnjavić and helped us to slay the Turks. And I, King Dabiscia, was with all the province of Bosnia, and with the Bosnians; and I acted in full council with all the province of the Bosnian realm, and gave and presented and confirmed to Goiko Mergnjavić, Foinica, and the plain of Godalie in the territory of Imoteschi, both to him and his heirs, and his latest posterity for ever. Amen.’[224] The original of this was in the old Cyrillian or Illyrian characters and in the Bosnian tongue.[225]
This grant appears to have been renewed or confirmed to another Mergnjavić, in consideration of services equally distinguished, by King Tvartko III. The second grant, like the other, originally written in the native language, runs as follows:—
‘We, Stephen Tvartko Tvartkoević, King of Serbia, Bosnia, Primorie, Dalmatia, of the Western part of Lower Croatia, of Ussora, Sala, Podrinia, &c., with the consent of the realm, and according to the custom of the magnates of every grade, to the Prince John Mergnjavić, of Nissa, for the faithful services he rendered us in our need, when Murat (Amurath), the Turkish Czar, was wroth with us and wasted our dominions; for that then the said John Mergnjavić of Nissa went to the Porte, not sparing his own head for our sake, and found grace for us before the Czar, and rid our realm from his host: we, therefore, grant to him his own portion at Nissa, and Zvornik, and Nissava, and in the realm of Bosnia the country of Foinica,[226] and the land under Thum. And it is our will that this be not taken away from him for any breach of fealty which shall not first have been examined by the Bosnians and the Bosnian Church.’ As witnesses appear the Starosts (elders) of the kingdom, the Palatine with his brothers, the Župan Drina Driničić, the other palatines and Princes, and the Aulic marshal of the court. The whole is ‘written by the scribe Radoslav, Aulic of the great and glorious lord King Tvartko, in his residential seat of Sutiska, in the year 1426.’
To this was appended the great seal of King Tvartko, attached by red silk: on one side appeared the king seated on the throne of majesty crowned and sceptred; on the other as a knight on horseback, holding shield and lance.
When in 1448 the great Hungarian general, John Hunyadi, defeated by Sultan Amurath on the ill-omened field of Kóssovo, was seized in his flight by George, Despot of Serbia, and imprisoned in the fortress of Semendria, he owed his deliverance to another scion of the race, George Mergnjavić, perpetual Count of Zvornik and lord of Foinica, who hurried to his relief with a strong body of troops collected from his territories; and a deed in which Hunyadi confirms this George in his possession bears witness to his gratitude. George Mergnjavić is succeeded by his nephew Tomko, who, besides being lord of Foinica, appears in the deed in which Hunyadi and Ladislaus, king of Hungary, confirm his titles, to be ‘Chief Voivode of the Kingdom of Bosnia.’ The last donation to the ‘Marcian’ family is from Mathias Corvinus, who in 1460, six years after the overthrow of the Bosnian kingdom by the Turks, confirms to Tomko Mergnjavić, Magnificent Count of Zvornik, lord of Foinica, and Starost of the kingdom of Rascia, his ‘mills, mines, vineyards, fishpools, and weirs’ (aquarum decursus), of which the Ban of Slavonia was attempting to deprive him.