A Southern Slav patriot has said that no greater misfortune has befallen the Southern Slavs, than to pass under the dominion of civilized Austria. Had they been obliged to share the fate of their brothers, the Serbs and Bulgarians, they would certainly have tasted all the misery of the Turkish yoke, but to-day they would be free, as an independent State with a right to their own national and intellectual development. The one thing Turkey has left untouched in the Serbs and Bulgars—the heart of the people—is the very thing that Austria has sought to destroy in her Southern Slav subjects. Turkish captivity has steeled the hearts of the Slavs she oppressed, but Austrian captivity has cankered them and made them effete.
In many respects this pessimistic view is justified. The struggle of the Southern Slavs for national life has passed through many phases, and has exhausted itself in many more. For centuries the Southern Slav stood under the protection of “Heaven militant,” and his motto was “For Faith and Freedom,” for with him faith was always first. All his culture consisted in imaging the Christ as the “Otac i voyskovodya illyrskyh Kralyeva” (Father and leader of the armies of the Kings of Illyria). The Holy Cross was transformed into a standard of war, and his enthusiasm for this false ideal led him so far astray, that the baptized arch-enemy was nearer to him than his own unbaptized brother, and the Church dearer to him than his country. But these traits do not originate in the character of the Southern Slav. He was educated into them and impregnated with them from without, and always by his greatest enemies, the Germans or the Turks. The Germans made a national mission of the Crusades, and the Turks usually went to war on religious grounds and called their armies the Hosts of the Prophet. Following the example of the Turks, and imitating the Germans in their appropriation of the Deity, Slav Christianity was infected by the fanaticism of the Church of Rome, and became synonymous with militancy and the spirit of the condottieri. The heart of the nation grew vitiated, and the Illyrians callously neglected their lovely land, which ought to have been a Garden of Eden. And those who were so liberal with their promises of Heaven and constantly cried, “Thy Kingdom is not of this world!” were well pleased that these things should be so, for they coveted the lost Empire of the Southern Slavs for an earthly paradise of their own.
Unfortunately this dark page in the history of Southern Slavdom followed directly upon one of the most brilliant periods in the intellectual development of Southern Slav culture. It was a period when the national culture of the Southern Slavs put forth some of its most vigorous, fairest and sanest blossoms—the time of the Bogumili (“beloved of God”) whose work of enlightenment spread from Bulgaria over the whole of the Slav South. The Bogumili were strongly opposed to the poetic glorification of the Crusades, because they grasped the fact that the extolling of such an ideal can never open the mind to heretic culture—the culture based on free choice according to conscience—which was eventually to undermine the foundations of the sacrosanct Roman Empire and lay the first solid foundations of true culture. The Bogumili taught that true culture is not spread by crusades, but springs from Christian, human contemplation. They deprecated personal worship, and replaced it by a worship of ideals, of spirit, and of thought. Wyclif, Huss and Luther are always quoted as the foremost apostles of the heretical culture. But in the Hungarian Crusaders the Bogumili found bitter enemies. Bogumilist activity in Bosnia and Croatia was stifled in blood, and the people, who were beginning to protest against the lying cult of Cæsarism wedded to Papistry, were simply butchered in the name of the Cross. The blood-baths on the fields of Bosnia filled the people with consternation, but could not stifle Bogumilism. True, its progress was checked in the Southern Slav region, but it secretly penetrated westward, whence the Patarenes in Italy and the Catharists, Albigenses and Waldenses in France spread it all over the world. It is interesting to note that at the very moment when Bogumilist culture was destroyed among the Slavs themselves, they bequeathed this very Bogumilism to the rest of Europe—the first and only gift from the Southern Slav race as a whole to the spiritual life of Europe. It was the true “antemurale Christianitatis”—the outworks of Christianity—purified from Byzantine and Roman elements. What they gave was perhaps not so very much their own as the vigour with which they transplanted the ideal and the doctrine of a spiritual life, from the mountains of Asia Minor to the West. Theirs was the work of emissaries and outposts.
To resume, during the time of Turkish power, the Southern Slavs had ceased to be the “outworks of Christianity” and had become merely a soldatesca in the service of the foreigner, fighting indifferently for Cross or Crescent. It was a terrible time of national abasement, more especially because it followed so closely upon the great era of spiritual exaltation. The gradual loss of Southern Slav independence likewise dates from this period, and from that time until quite recently they were unable, as a race, to produce a truly Southern Slav culture. Only those among them who travelled westward, where Bogumilism continued to thrive and flourish, found the way of true culture. Among these exceptions were Marko Marulić (Marcus Marulus), a Spalatine noble, whose works were translated from the Latin into all the principal European tongues, and Flavius Illyricus, whom, after Luther, Germany considers one of her greatest teachers. In their souls these men were merely Bogumili and nothing more. With them we may also class John of Ragusa, who led the whole Council of Bâle against the Pope and proposed to negotiate calmly and justly with the Hussites and Manichees. Just such a man was Bishop Strossmayer in our own day, a man of whom I shall presently speak further.
Their liberation from the Crescent put an end to the period of religious militancy among the Southern Slav people. The warlike element is perhaps of great historic moment. It certainly fended the Southern Slavs over the abysses of Turkish barbarism to freedom in the Christian sense of the word, but by no means to national freedom. When the Turkish invasion was rolled back and the everlasting wars were over, the symbol of the sword was exchanged for that of the plough, and God as God was no longer adorned with weapons, but imaged in a nobler spirit as the highest conception of peace. And, as the people accustomed themselves to peace, and once more came in touch with the soil, a new spirit grew up within them, or rather it was the re-awakening of an old spirit that for a while had been silenced by the clamour of weapons—the spirit of love for the homestead and the community. Nationalism still slumbered but, like a guardian angel, the national tongue watched over its slumbers. Through storm and stress, in spite of travels and intercourse with foreign-speaking mercenaries, this language has remained pure and unalloyed. This was the seed of the future from which sprang the great awakening; for so long as a people preserves its language it possesses a Nationality.
Liberty of conscience, and the transformation of the warrior into a husbandman, were also the beginning of a change in the souls of the people, which, while groping its way back towards its own essential beauty, began to feel the hidden wounds within, and strove to rid itself of the canker. The old beautiful mode of life, the patriarchal family feeling and the bond of union in the community were restored, and the gentle, plaintive melodies echoed once more in farm and field. And this regeneration grew and expanded until it brought the revelation of national union, patriotism, and finally the love for all that belongs to the Slav race.
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The Napoleonic era found this people already fully developed. They had found their soul and knew what they wanted. Napoleon, who treated most of the people he conquered without much consideration, was filled with unusual admiration for the Southern Slavs that came under his rule. By the peace of Schönbrunn (October 14th, 1809) he acquired Triest, Görz, Carniola, part of Carinthia, Austrian Istria, the Croat seaboard with Fiume, and all Croatia south of the Save. Napoleon united all these countries with French Istria, Dalmatia and Ragusa into one “Province of Illyria,” and thus for one short moment fulfilled the dearest wish of all the Southern Slavs. Illyria was organized as one military province divided into six civil provinces; Maréchal Marmont was appointed Governor and in the name of Napoleon carried out sweeping reforms throughout the country. Trade and industry were signally improved and the people were granted far-reaching national liberties. The use of German as the official language was abolished in the schools and law courts and Serbo-Croatian introduced in its place. Special attention was devoted to road-making and education, and the Croats were permitted to edit their own newspapers in the Croat tongue, which would have been considered high treason under Austria. Although the French rule was only of short duration (till 1817) it did more for the Southern Slav lands in three years than Austria did during the century that followed. But the main thing was that this rule aroused the national thought so effectively that henceforth it ceased to be a dream and became a factor to be reckoned with. From that time dates the unremitting struggle against Germanism and Magyarism, and the agitation for a national union of all the Southern Slavs.
The first-fruits of the complete national regeneration were seen in the great movement started in 1835 and known by the name of Illyrism. Illyrism began with a small group of patriots and poets whose leaders were Ljndevit Gaj and Count Janko Drašković. They founded newspapers and periodicals, published patriotic books and poems, and roused the national enthusiasm of the people to the highest pitch. In this mission they successfully sought help and advice from other Slavs, especially the Csechs and Serbs; they were also the first to come into touch with Russia. Austria-Hungary tried sharply to repress this movement, and for the first time found herself confronted by a united nation bent on going its own way. The Illyrist movement cannot point to any positive political results, but it laid a foundation for future political and national activity and did an incalculable amount of pioneer work which would have been most difficult to carry out under the conditions that followed. In 1843 the name of Illyrism was prohibited by an Imperial edict, and it was hoped by the Austrian authorities that this would be the end of the patriotic movement. But their labour was lost. In fact, under the spur of persecution the patriots passed from their idealistic literary campaign to more tangible activities. By the prohibition of the Illyrian name the motto of the poetic propaganda was lost, and it became the duty of the patriots to lead their politics into less sentimental paths, and enter upon a campaign of cold reasoning in place of poetic sentiment. This was all the more necessary as the national cause was greatly endangered by several new regulations. Following closely upon the prohibition of the Illyrian name came an order for the introduction of the Magyar tongue in the Croatian law courts. When the Croatian counties protested in Vienna that Croatia was privileged to choose her own official language, and that no one had the right to interfere with this privilege, they met with a brusque rebuff. Up to now the Government had hardly dared to attempt the Magyarization of Croatia, but now they decided to enforce it in spite of the newly-awakened national consciousness. The Croats now realized that it was a case of war to the knife. The Hungarian Government proclaimed that all countries and nationalities subjected to the crown of St. Stephen must be made one people, one state, and be taught to speak one language—in short, they were to become Magyars. They were determined to break the national resistance of the Serbs and Croats by force, or preferably, by corruption. In this enterprise Hungary found an able assistant in Ban Haller. A “Magyar party” was organized in Croatia with a view to reconciling the people to Magyar demands, but, unfortunately, it consisted chiefly of adventurers and social riff-raff; the work of Magyarization made no progress, but only further incensed the Southern Slavs. One of the consequences of this hatred was that in 1848 the Croats and Serbs enthusiastically followed Ban Jellacić in the campaign against Hungary.
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