It does not seem that any Roman remains had been discovered in this immediate neighbourhood before,[233] though the appearance of some of the other blocks of masonry made it probable that this was not the only classic monument concealed in the foundations of the Mahometan Han and its out-buildings. One would, indeed, expect to find Roman remains in this vicinity, not holy from the fact that in the neighbouring mountains about Foinica, and again to the east about Vareš, are traces of Roman gold-mines, and that a Roman road has been traced tending from Salona towards these centres of mineral wealth; but for another and still more cogent reason. This is the presence of hot-springs, which we passed to the right of us only a little way further on the road, at a place called Illidzje. The Romans, with their usual instincts, tracked out these natural baths among the Illyrian wilds; and Roman remains in Bosnia, when not connected with mining enterprise, seem especially to centre round such spas. At Novipazar,[234] in the province of Rascia, the sulphur springs still bubble up into an octagonal marble basin near eight yards in diameter, described as of Roman workmanship, and are still sheltered from the elements by an octagonal chamber, supporting a cupola, which also dates from the days of the Cæsars. At Banjaluka[235] on the Verbas the hot-springs are still housed in a similar edifice; and the curious may survey modern Mahometans taking their enjoyment in one of these very baths which have supplied the prototype of the early Christian baptistery. The name of Banjaluka[236] itself preserves a Roman element, Banja being no other than the Latin balnea. The Sclavonic settlers borrowed the word from the earlier Roman population of these lands—thus witnessing to the purely Roman associations of such spas; and so completely has the word passed into their language that Banja at the present day is applied by the Southern Sclaves to all hot-springs and baths. But though not necessarily, therefore, proof positive of a Roman connection, this derivative, when applied to local names, may perhaps afford presumptive evidence that the virtues of such spots were not unknown to the Romans. It is at least worth noticing that the thermal springs at Illidzje, not far from the place where we found the bas-relief of Cupid, are still known to the Bosniacs as ‘Banja.’
We now descended into the plain, passing the sources of the Bosna, not far distant, on our left. The river from which this whole country derives its name takes its origin from a number of small streams which, gushing forth from the limestone slope of Mt. Igman, unite almost immediately to form a full-volumed river of crystal purity, some fifty yards in breadth—an Illyrian Timavus. We crossed this new-born river by a wooden bridge of a form, if possible, more Roman than ordinary, and nearing the capital descried several country houses of Turkish dignitaries, embosomed in their shady gardens. Once or twice we met arabàs of state containing Mahometan ladies, screened from the vulgar gaze by a brilliant scarlet canopy supported by four posts; but feminine curiosity prompted them to lift up the corners of the drapery that they might observe the Giaour; and we should have seen more of their faces had they not been veiled as well as curtained!
But a turn in the road reveals to us the Damascus of the North—for such is the majestic title by which the Bosniac Turks, who consider it, after Stamboul, the finest city in Turkey-in-Europe, delight to style Serajevo. Seen, indeed, from above, in an atmosphere which the Bosniac historian has not inaptly compared to that of Misr and Sham,[237] it might well call up the pearl and emerald settings of Oriental imagery.[238] The city is a vast garden, from amidst whose foliage swell the domes and cupolas of mosques and baths; loftier still, rises the new Serbian Cathedral; and lancing upwards, as to tourney with the sky, near a hundred minarets. The airy height to the East, sceptred with these slender spires of Islâm and turret-crowned with the Turkish fortress (raised originally by the first Vizier of Bosnia on the site of the older ‘Grad’ of Bosnian princes), commands the rest of the city, and marks the domination of the infidel. Around it clusters the upper-town, populated exclusively by the ruling caste; but the bulk of the city occupies a narrow flat amidst the hills, cut in twain by the little river Miljaška, and united by three stone and four wooden bridges. Around this arena, tier above tier—at first wooded hills, then rugged limestone precipices—rises a splendid amphitheatre of mountains culminating in the peak of Trebović, which frowns over 3,000 feet above the city—herself near 1,800 above sea-level.
The first beginnings of Serajevo, or Bosna as it was formerly called, are said to have been due to the mining enterprise of the Ragusans in the neighbouring mountains;[239] but though in 1236 (after the destruction of Mileševo by the Patarenes) it was made the seat of the Roman Catholic bishops, it appears to have been little more than a stronghold till the year 1463, when it finally fell into the possession of the Turks. It was in the year succeeding this event that the present town was founded by the two Bosnian magnates, Sokolović, and Zlatarović, who claim the doubtful honour of having been the first of the native nobility to renegade to Islâm; and the Serai on the hill was shortly after erected, and the upper town walled, by Khosrev Pashà, first Vizier of Bosnia. It was from this Serai or fortress that the town began to be called Bosna Serai, and finally, by the Sclaves, Serajevo. That it early attained to some majesty is shown by the fact that it was given by Grand Signiors as a dowry to widowed Sultanas; and early in the sixteenth century our English traveller, Blunt, though he describes it as ‘but meanely built and not great,’ yet reckons here ‘about four-score Mescheetoes and twenty thousand houses.’[240] When Prince Eugene, during his twenty days’ dash into Bosnia in 1697, penetrated to the capital, he found the upper town so strong that, despairing of reducing it by a siege with the small means at his disposal, he contented himself with burning the lower town, and rode back to the Save. His chroniclers estimate the population of Serajevo at 30,000, and set down the houses and mosques then destroyed by the Imperialists as six thousand and a hundred and fifty respectively.[241] In the middle of the next century the monks who supplied the author of ‘Illyricum Sacrum’ with an account of ‘the present state of Bosnia,’ speak of the Serai as being, though a decayed city, the ‘seat of Turkish commerce and the most renowned staple of the realm.’
Serajevo early became the head-quarters of the Bosnian Janissaries. That in the seventeenth century it was hardly an eligible place for a Giaour to find himself in, may be gathered from our English traveller’s relation. Blunt is setting out for ‘Saraih,’ as he calls the city, ‘with the Bashaw of Bosnah, his troopes going for the warre of Poland,’ and his account gives a very pretty picture of the military turbulence that must then have reigned within the walls. The soldiers, it appears, were ‘spirited many with drinke, discontent, and insolency: which made them fitter companie for the Divell then for a Christian; my selfe after many launces, and knives threatned upon me, was invaded by a drunken Janizary, whose iron Mace entangled in his other furniture gave mee time to flee among the Rocks, whereby I escaped untoucht.’
But the Janissaries who ruled the roast at the Serai were something more than a turbulent rabble of bravoes. They were Sclaves, descendants, most, of the ruling families of the older Bosnian kingdom. They spoke the native tongue. They were imbued with provincial patriotism. They were in close alliance with the haughty provincial aristocracy, who perpetuated feudalism under a Mahometan guise. These Sclavonic Janissaries refused to take to the celibacy and barrack-life of their order. They took wives. They became landed proprietors. They even settled down to mercantile pursuits. Thus, with their participation and patronage, Bosna Serai, the chosen seat of the Bosnian nobility, the Camp of her Prætorians, acquired rights and immunities which made her a Free City.
Nothing in this curious history is more interesting to observe than the way in which the primitive institutions of Sclavonic family life assert themselves in this municipal constitution. The Civic Communism—I use the word in its uncorrupted sense—grows out of the domestic. Just as the Bosnian family communities elected, and still elect, their elders, so now the families who owned the surrounding lands were represented by a hereditary Starešina; and the artisans and merchants bound themselves into Bratsva or brotherhoods, each guild electing its Starost or alderman. Thus arose a civic government, based on the possession of real property and prosperity in trade.[242]
Enjoying such a municipal constitution, actively protected by the Janissaries at Stamboul, the Serai rose to an almost sovereign position in Bosnia. So jealous was its senate of its privileges, and so irresistible its authority, that it actually established a municipal law by which the Vizier of Bosnia was forbidden to tarry more than a day at a time within the city walls. For a single night he was entertained at the public expense; next morning he was escorted without the gates. Even in the exercise of his shadowy authority at Travnik, the Sultan’s lieutenant stood in perpetual fear of the patriarchs of the real capital; for if he presumed to offend these haughty elders, they had but to lodge a complaint against him with the Odjak of the Janissaries at Stamboul, and the Vizier was forthwith recalled. The Porte, indeed, endeavoured to assert its sovereignty within the city by appointing two officers to decide disputes between Moslems and Rayahs, but the citizens retained the right of dismissing these at their pleasure.