THE BIRTH OF
YUGOSLAVIA

BY

HENRY BAERLEIN

VOLUME I

LONDON
LEONARD PARSONS
DEVONSHIRE STREET

First Published 1922
[All Rights Reserved]
Leonard Parsons Ltd.

Portions of this book which deal with Yugoslav-Albanian affairs have appeared in the Fortnightly Review and, expanded from there, in a volume entitled A Difficult Frontier.

NAMES AND PRONUNCIATION

The original Serbo-Croat names of the Dalmatian towns and islands have been commonly supplanted on the German-made maps by later Italian names. But as the older ones are those which are at present used in daily speech by the vast majority of the inhabitants, we shall not be accused of pedanticism or of political bias if we prefer them to the later versions. We therefore in this book do not speak of Fiume but of Rieka, not of Cattaro but of Kotor, and so forth. In other parts a greater laxity is permissible, since no false impression is conveyed by using the non-Slav version. Thus we have preferred the more habitual Belgrade to the more correct Beograd, and the Italian Scutari to the Albanian Shqodra. The Yugoslavs themselves are too deferential towards the foreign nomenclature of their towns. Thus if one of them is talking to you of Novi Sad he will almost invariably add, until it grows rather wearisome, the German and the Magyar forms: Neu Satz and Uj Videk.

These names and those of persons have been generally spelt in accordance with Croat orthography—that is to say, with the Latin alphabet modified in order to reproduce all the sounds of the Serbo-Croatian language. This script, with its diacritic marks, was scientifically evolved at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The chief points about it that we have to remember are that c is pronounced as if written ts, ć as if written tch, č is pronounced ch, š is pronounced sh, and j is pronounced y. So the Montenegrin towns Cetinje, Podgorica and Nikšić are pronounced as if written Tsetinye, Podgoritsa and Nikshitch, while Pančevo is pronounced Panchevo. It will be seen that this matter is not very complicated. But we have not in every case employed the Croat script. We have not spoken in this book of Jugoslavia but of Yugoslavia, since that has come to be the more familiar form.

The full list of Croat letters, in so far as they differ from the English alphabet, is as follows:

PREFACE

On a mild February afternoon I was waiting for the train at a wayside station in north-western Banat. So unimportant was that station that it was connected neither by telegraph nor telephone with any other station, and thus there was no means of knowing how long I would have to wait. The movements of the train in those parts could never, so I gathered, be foretold, and on that afternoon it was uncertain whether a strike had prevented it from leaving New-Arad, the starting-point. Occasionally the rather elegant stationmaster, and occasionally the porter with the round, disarming face, raised their voices in prophecy, but they were increasingly unable—so far, at least, as I was concerned—to modify the feelings of dullness that were caused by the circumstances and by the dreary nature of the surroundings: a plain with several uninteresting little lakes upon it. There was time enough for meditation—I was wondering if I would ever understand the people of the Balkans. One hour and then another slipped away, and the lakes began to be illuminated by the setting sun. A handful of prospective travellers and their friends were also waiting, and as one of them produced a violin we all began to dance the Serbian Kolo, which is performed by an indefinite number of people who have to be hand-in-hand, irrespective of sex, forming in this way a straight line or a circle or a serpent-like series of curves. They go through certain simple evolutions, into which more or less energy and sprightliness are introduced. The stationmaster looked on approvingly and then decided to join us, and after a little time he was followed by the porter. Our violinist was in excellent form, so that we continued dancing until some of us were as crimson as the sun, and presently, while I was resting, what with the beauty of the scene and the exhilaration of the dance, I found myself thinking that, after all, I might within a reasonable time understand these people. Then a new arrival, a middle-aged, benevolent-looking woman with a basket on her arm, came past me.

"Dobro veče," said I. ["Good-evening.">[

"Živio," said she. ["May you live long.">[

Nevertheless, I hope in this book to give a description of how the Yugoslavs, brothers and neighbours and tragically separated from one another for so many centuries, made various efforts to unite, at least in some degree. But for about fifteen centuries the greater number of Yugoslavs were unable to liberate themselves from their alien rulers; not until the end of the Great War were these dominations overthrown, and the kindred peoples, the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, put at last before the realization of their dreams—the dreams, that is to say, of some of their poets and statesmen and bishops and philologists, as well as of certain foreigners. But listen to this, by the censorious literateur who contributes the "Musings without Method" to Maga: "We do not envy the ingenious gentlemen," says he, "who invented the two new States Czecho-Slovakia and Jugo-Slavia. Their composite names prove their composite characters. That they will last long beneath the fanciful masks which have been put upon them we do not believe." Even so might some uninstructed person in Yugoslavia or South Slavia proceed to wash his hands of that ingenious man who invented Maga's home, North Britain. I see that our friend in the following number of Maga (March 1920) says that foreign affairs are "a province far beyond his powers or understanding." But he is talking of Mr. Lloyd George.

Our account of mediæval times will be brief, only so much in fact as is needed for a comprehension of the present. In approaching our own day, the story will become more and more detailed. If it be objected that the details, in so far as they detract from the conduct of Yugoslavia's neighbours, might with advantage have been painted with the hazy, quiet colours that you give to the excursions and alarms of long ago, one may reply that this book is intended to depict the world in which the Yugoslavs have, after all these centuries, joined one another and the frame of mind which consequently glows in them.

One cannot on this earth expect that a new State, however belated and however inevitable, will be formed without a considerable amount of friction, both external and internal. Perhaps, owing to the number of not over-friendly States with which they are encompassed, the Yugoslavs will manage to waive some of their internal differences, and to show that they are capable, despite the confident assertions of some of their neighbours and the croakings of some of themselves, of establishing a State that will weather for many a year the storms which even the League of Nations may not be competent to banish from South-Eastern Europe. A certain number of people, who seem to expect us to take them seriously, assert that an English writer is disqualified from passing adverse comment on Italy's imperialistic aims because the British Empire has received, as a result of the War, some Turkish provinces and German colonies. It is said that, in view of these notorious facts, the Italian Nationalists and their friends cannot bear to be criticized by the pens of British authors and journalists. The fallacy in logic known as the argumentum ad hominem becomes a pale thing in comparison with this new argumentum ad terram. If a passionless historian of the Eskimos had given his attention to the Adriatic, I believe he would have come to my conclusions. But then it might be said of him that as for half the year his land is swathed in darkness, it would be unseemly for him to discuss a country which is basking in the sun.

Another consummation—though this will to-day find, especially in Serbia, a great many opponents, whose attitude, following the deplorable events of the Great War, can cause us no surprise—is the adhesion, after certain years, of Bulgaria to the Yugoslav State. I wrote these words a few months ago; they are already out of date. The general opinion in Serbia is voiced by a Serbian war-widow, who, writing in Politika, one of the newspapers of Belgrade, replied to Stamboulüsky, the Bulgarian peasant Premier, who was always uncompromisingly opposed to the fratricidal war with Serbia. He had been saying that the Serbs and other Yugoslavs prefer to postpone the reconciliation until "the grass grows over the graves of their women and children whom our officials destroyed"; and this war-widow answered that it was not necessary for the grass to grow, but that they should condemn the culprits by a regular court, as prescribed in the treaty. "Fulfil the undertaking you have assumed, for only so shall we know that you will fulfil other undertakings in the future." If it had not been for the Great Powers, especially Russia and Austria, the union of Serbia and Bulgaria might have occurred long ago. Wise persons, such as Prince Michael of Serbia and the British travellers, Miss Irby (Bosnia's lifelong benefactress) and her relative, Miss Muir Mackenzie, had this aim in view during the sixties of last century. So had a number of other excellent folk, who recognized that the two people were naturally drawn to one another. "The hatred between the two people is a fact which is as saddening in the thought for the future as in the record of the past, but it is a fact to ignore which is simply a mark of incompetence. The two nations are antipathetic ..." says Mr. A. H. E. Taylor in his The Future of the Southern Slavs, a painstaking if rather clumsy book (London, 1917), in which we are shown that the writer is well acquainted with general history. But in the opinion of an erudite Serb, to whom I showed this passage, Mr. Taylor knows nothing of Serb and Bulgar under the Turks. There is no single document nor anything else that speaks of hatred between them. On the contrary, they were always on friendly terms. The antagonisms of the Middle Ages, as Mr. Taylor surely knows, were the work of rulers who paid no attention to the national will; there was at that time no national consciousness, and just as a Serbian would wage war with a Bulgarian prince, so would he do battle with a Croat or with another Serbian ruler. Mr. Taylor talks of "the almost constant state of warfare between Serbs and Bulgars...," but he does not mention that there were many cases during the late war in which the men showed friendliness to one another. He may argue that if a soldier calls out "Brother" to his foe and subsequently slays him there is not much to be said for his friendliness, but surely that is to draw no distinction between what is the soldier's pleasure and his business. "Nothing," observes Mr. Taylor very truly, "nothing in the Balkan Peninsula is so desirable as the laying aside of the feud." He may take it that this feud has been aroused and maintained among the intelligentsia and for political reasons, with Macedonia in the forefront. I think he would not be so severe on those who are "ignorant apparently that the mutual animosity has its roots deep down in the history and historical consciousness of Serb and Bulgar" if he remembered that the Bulgars wanted Michael for their prince, and if he had been present at the siege of Adrianople, where the Serbian and Bulgarian soldiers, in their eagerness to fraternize, took to speaking their respective languages incorrectly, the Serb dropping his cases and the Bulgar his article, in the hope that they would thus make themselves more easily understood. It seems to me not only more advisable but more rational to ponder upon such incidents than upon the idle controversies as to which army was the most deserving; and I do not think it is evidence of any widespread Bulgarian animosity because a certain official decided to charge the Serbian Government a fee for conveying back to Serbia the corpses of their soldiers.

With regard to the two languages, the differences between them will matter no more than does the difference between Serbo-Croatian and Slovene. The Serb-Croat-Slovene State has been astonishingly little incommoded by the fact that the Slovene language is quite distinct, the two tongues being only in a moderate degree mutually intelligible. The Slovenes have never been exposed to the influence either of Byzantium or of the Turks, so that their language is free from the orientalisms which abound in the southern dialects. But it is curious to note[1] that many of the Slovene archaisms of form and structure, such as the persistence of the "v" for "u" and the final -l of the past participle, which have disappeared from Serbo-Croat, have been preserved in the dialects of Macedonia. The Bulgarian language, the south-eastern Serbian dialects, as well as Roumanian and Albanian, have certain grammatical peculiarities, through being influenced by the language of the Romanized Thraco-Illyrian peoples with whom they merged. Even Montenegro was to some degree influenced by this process, having lost one or two cases, such as the locative. In Serbia one uses seven cases, the Montenegrin generally contents himself with about five, and in some dialects they are all discarded.... The amount of Turanian, Petcheneg and other undesirable blood in the Bulgars does not—let the two or three eccentric Bulgars say what they will—prevent them being far more Yugoslav than anything else. Professor Cvijić, the famous Rector of Belgrade University, has made personal examinations in Bulgaria, and is of the opinion that a great part of that people, for instance, at Trnovo in the middle of Bulgaria, is physically and spiritually very near to the Serbs. The Mongol influence, he thinks, is so scattered that it is very difficult to see.

Unhappily, however, in the last thirty or forty years an enormous amount of hatred has been piled up between Serb and Bulgar; things have happened which we as outsiders can more easily forget than those and the orphans of those who have suffered. Atrocities have taken place; international commissions have recorded some of them and non-Balkan writers have produced a library of lurid and, almost always, strictly one-sided books about them. I suggest that these gentlemen would have been better employed in translating the passages wherein Homer depicts precisely the same atrocities. Whatever may seem good to Balkan controversialists, let us of the West rather try, for their sake and for ours, to bring these two people together. We have good foundations on which to build; every Bulgar will tell you that he is full of admiration of the Serbian army, and the Serbs will speak in a similar strain of the Bulgars. Also the Serbs will tell you that, no matter what else they may be able to do, they are, as compared with the Bulgars, quite incompetent in the diffusion of propaganda; while the Bulgars will explain to you that in propaganda the Serbs are immensely their superiors. (Balkan propaganda does not confine itself to using, with violence, the sword and the pen. In its higher flights it will, in a disputed district, bury ancient-looking stones with suitable inscriptions. It will go beyond the simple changes in the termination of the surnames of those who come under its dominion; the name upon a tombstone will be made to end, according to circumstances, in "off" or "vitch," sometimes in the Roumanian "esco" or the Greek "opoulos." If this is known to the departed, one would like to learn how it affects them. A great deal of energy has been brought to bear in the production of official books which place on record the repugnant details of all the crimes that have ever been imagined by men or ghouls, which crimes, so say the books of nation A, have been committed by the incredible monsters of nation B. At times, from motives of economy, the same photographs have been used by both nations—an idea which in 1920 was adopted in Hungary, where an artist conceived a poster showing a child with uplifted finger saying to its mother in solemn warning: "Mother, remember me; vote for a Social Democrat." This poster was forbidden by the censor, and, a few days afterwards, appeared on all street corners as that of the Christian Socialist party. People of the Balkans found that Western Europeans were impressed by figures, so that they issued lists of schools whose pupils were more numerous than the total population of the villages in which they were situated. Frequently a village would be stated, on the sworn testimony of its most respected inmates, to be exclusively filled with persons say of nation A. Not for a moment would it be admitted that the population might perhaps be mixed. And very possibly, on going to investigate, the Western European would discover that the village was entirely uninhabited and had been so for many years.... We must also have some understanding of the old Balkan humour if we are not to resent, for example, that story which they tell of a Bulgarian Minister who happened to be sojourning last year in Yugoslavia at a time when a great memorial service was being held for ninety-nine priests whom the Bulgars had assassinated during their occupation of Serbia in the European War. This Minister cherishes the hope that his country and Yugoslavia will bury the hatchet. "How unfortunate," said he, "are these recriminations. I shall have pleasure in sending them ninety-nine priests, whom they can kill, and then we can be good friends.")

Thus we have two points of mutual esteem. The vast majority of people in Belgrade and Sofia are not chauvinist; let them close their ears to the wild professors who, in their spare time, busy themselves with writing books and discoursing on politics, a task for which they are imperfectly fitted. One must naturally make allowances for these small countries which have been so sparsely furnished hitherto with men of education that the Government considered it must mobilize them all. Thus the professors found themselves enlisted in the service of the State. Unluckily—to give examples would be painful—it too often happened that the poor professor damaged irretrievably his reputation and held up the State to ribald laughter. Those who belong to an old, cultured nation are not always cognizant of the petty atmosphere, to say nothing of the petty salaries, which is to-day the common lot of Balkan professors. (A really eminent man, who, for twenty years has been a professor, not merely a teacher, at Belgrade University receives a very much smaller salary than that which the deputies have voted for themselves.) Occasionally these professors must be moved by feelings similar to those that were entertained by the Serbs of 1808, who, having thrown off the Turkish yoke which they were resolved never to bear again, "earnestly expressed, and more than once," according to Count Romanzoff,[2] "their own will which induced them to beg the Emperor Alexander to admit them to the number of his subjects." A resolute old man, a Balkan savant of my acquaintance—he told me he was a savant—said one day that before all else he was a patriot, meaning by this that if in the course of his researches he came across a fact which to his mind was injurious for the past, present or future of his native land he would unhesitatingly sweep that fact into oblivion, and he seemed to be amazed that I should doubt the morality of such a procedure. Bristling with scorn, he refused to give me a definition of the word "patriotism," and I am sure that, if he knows his Thoreau, he does not for a moment believe that he is amongst those who "love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay. Patriotism is a maggot in their heads." May the people of Serbia and Bulgaria rather listen to such men as Nicholai Velimirović, Bishop of Žiča,[3] who—to speak only of his sermons and lectures in our language—lives in the memory of so many in Great Britain and the United States on account of his wonderful eloquence, his sincerity, his profound patriotism, and the calm heights from which he surveys the future. For those who think with him, the Serbs, in uniting with the Croats, have already surmounted a more serious obstacle. They believe that for three reasons their union with the Bulgars is a more natural one: they practise the same religion, they use the same Cyrillic alphabet and their civilization, springing from Byzantium, has been identical. The two people are bound to each other by the great Serbian, Saint Sava, who strove to join them and who died at Trnovo in Bulgaria. Vladislav, the Serbian prince, asked for his body; Assen begged that the Bulgars might be allowed to keep it, but, when the Serbs insisted, a most remarkable procession set out from Trnovo, bearing to his homeland the remains of him whom the Bulgars called "our Saint." ... If, then, the two people will for a few years demand that the misguided professors shall confine themselves to their original functions—and, likewise, those students who sit at the professors' feet—one may hope that in a few years the miserable past will be buried and all the Yugoslavs united in one State. The time has vanished when Serbia and Bulgaria stood, as it were in a ring, face to face with one another, paying far more attention to the disputes of the moment than to those great unifying forces which we have mentioned. But now Serbia is a part of Yugoslavia, which has to deal with a greater Italy, a greater Roumania and others. And the question as to whether a certain town or district is to be Serbian or Bulgarian sinks into the background.

Fortunately, in the Balkans—where one is nothing if not personal—you can express yourself concerning another gentleman with a degree of liberty that in Western Europe would be thought unpardonable. And so, if the Serbs and the Bulgars will in the main follow the tracks of their far-sighted leaders, they need not quite suppress their criticism of each other. No great animosity is aroused by such a statement as was made to me with regard to a dispossessed Macedonian prelate, who had told me that he had appealed to the Archbishop of Canterbury in the hope that he would assist him to return to his diocese. I asked a member of another Balkan nationality whether he knew this ancient cleric of the extremely venerable aspect, and whether he knew what kind of political and religious propaganda had brought about his downfall. "I know all about that old ruffian," he replied. "He stole over fifty pigs and one hundred sheep, and about twenty-five cows and 200 lb. of fat." Anyhow, if his lordship had heard that these accusations had been repeated in many places, he would have been far less indignant than if they had been printed in some unread newspaper or obscure pamphlet.

Now if the local writers cease from indulging their national partisanship—and God knows they have no lack of material—then perhaps the time will come when foreign publicists and politicians, who keep one eye upon the Balkans, will be able to speak well about the particular country which they affect without speaking ill about the neighbouring countries, concerning which, it is possible, they know less. Of course, there are a number of real Balkan experts in various countries, judicious writers who will be gratefully mentioned in this book. And there are people, such as Mr. Harold E. Goad, the vehement pro-Italian writer, who are quite amusing. This gentleman said in the Fortnightly Review (May 1922) that once he used to hold romantic views of Balkan politics, but now has ascertained that they are "usually plotted, move by move, in the coffee-shops of petty capitals. Intrigue, bribery and calumny, personal jealousy and racial prejudice are the ordinary means with which the game is played." How different from the rest of Europe, where intrigue, etc., are conspicuously absent; and the explanation seems to be that wine and beer are unlike coffee, which it may be quite impossible to drink without remembering the poison which so many furtive fingers have dropped into it. And it would be rank ingratitude if I omitted the Italian Admiral Millo, though he was injudicious. After he had been at his post for four months, with the resounding title of Governor of Dalmatia and of the Dalmatian Islands and of the islands of Curzola, he told me that he had found it most fascinating to motor through Dalmatia's rocky hinterland, where the natives had the dignified air of ancient Roman senators and even greeted you in Latin. This was rather a startling statement. "Oh yes," said the Admiral, with his aristocratic, bearded face wearing an expression of even keener intelligence than usual, "I can assure you," quoth he, "that the peasants say 'Ave.' I heard them quite distinctly." It was perhaps inconsiderate of those worthy Croats not to shout with greater clearness the word "Zdravo!" ["Good luck!">[ in order to prevent the Admiral from riding off with a confused hearing of the second syllable. A certain excellent dispatch of his—of which more anon—makes him a writer on the Balkans. I know not whether he addressed to his Government a dispatch on the above discovery, thus intensifying the Italian resolve to cling to Dalmatia. In that case his knowledge was unfortunate, but otherwise it is surely as delightful as, up here among the tree-clad mountains, are the glow-worms that go darting through the night.

Blagoveštenje Monastery,
Central Serbia.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Cf. The Near East, October 6, 1921.

[2] Observations of Count Romanzoff,—Petrograd, March 16, 1808,—Concerning the negotiations for the division of Turkey, as to which he treated with the French Ambassador; being Document No. 263 of the Excerpts from the Paris Archives relating to the History of the first Serbian Insurrection. Collected (Belgrade, 1904) by the learned statesman and charming man, Dr. Michael Gavrilović, now the Minister of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes at the Court of St. James.

[3] This, the most ancient diocese in Serbia, takes its name from the monastery of Žiča, near Kraljevo, which was built by St. Sava between 1222 and 1228. He made it his archiepiscopal residence, and here the Serbian sovereigns were crowned. It is now partly in a ruined condition, the encircling wall having almost entirely vanished. For each coronation a new entrance was made through this structure and was afterwards walled up. Bishop Nicholai has now been transferred to the more difficult diocese of Ochrida and is, at the same time, Bishop of the Serbs in America.

CONTENTS OF VOLUME I

THE BIRTH OF YUGOSLAVIA

INTRODUCTION

THE TRAGEDY OF A FRONTIER

Kiepert, the famous geographer, was able, as the result of his diligent researches and explorations, to correct many errors in former ethnological maps; but in the map of the Balkan Peninsula, which he published in 1870, the country between Kustendil, Trn and Vranja is represented by a white space. And if the people who dwell in these wild, narrow valleys had been overlooked as thoroughly by subsequent Congresses and Frontier Commissions they would have been most grateful. They only asked—this well-built, stubborn race—that one should leave them to their own devices in their homes among the mountains where the lilac grows. They asked that one should leave them with their ancient superstitions, such as that of St. Petka, who inhabited a cavern high above the present road from Trn, while St. Therapon, so they say, lived by himself upon a neighbouring rock. Inside the cavern now the water drips continuously and is collected in large bowls; these are St. Petka's tears, which are particularly beneficial, say the natives, for afflicted eyes. But though this region is so poor that, towards the end of the Turkish régime and during the war of Bulgarian liberation and also in the winter of 1879-80, the people were compelled, through lack of flour, to use a sort of "white earth," bela zemja, yet this land was coveted, and now the maps no longer show an empty space but a variety of names and a frontier line. From the nomenclature we perceive that the region was visited of old by people who were not Slavs—such were those who gave to a mountain the name of Ruj, to a village the name of Erul, and to a river the name of Jerma, which has been explained as being derived from the Lydian Hermos, the river of St. Therapon's birthplace. The names of Latin colouring may either be memorials of the Romanized Thracians or else may refer to the mediæval Catholics, whether Saxon miners or travelling merchants. But there does not seem in the veins of the present population to be much trace of these other settlers or wayfarers; at any rate, the Slavs do not differ appreciably among themselves, and the drawing of a frontier line has been a peculiar hardship.

One of the greatest misfortunes of the nineteenth century was the creation of separate Serbian and Bulgarian kingdoms, wherein there was so small an ethnological difference between these two branches of the Yugoslavs; and in those districts where a frontier runs one sees especially how criminal it was to make this separation. Balkan philologists to-day will tell you—and even those who are in other respects the most rabid Serbs or Bulgars—that there is really no such thing as a Serbian and a Bulgarian language, but only groups of Yugoslav dialects. And yet it pleased the Great Powers to prevent the union of the two Balkan brothers. In that region with which we are dealing the Berlin Congress attempted to draw, with very inadequate maps, a frontier line along the watershed; and the Commissioners who were sent to mark out this line, observing that many of the indicated points did not coincide with the watershed, thought it would be preferable to trace the frontier along the saddle, between the tributaries of the Morava on one side and of the Struma and the river of Trn on the other. As the region was, however, not uninhabited the farmers were frequently cut off, as at Topli Dol and Preseka, from the meadows and the forests which they had regarded always as their own. Bismarck, speaking with indifference of "the fragments of nations that inhabit the Balkan Peninsula," could see in the national yearning of the Yugoslavs only a yearning for lawlessness and tumult. So he laboured at his plan of dominating Europe with the mighty structure of the German, Austro-Hungarian and Russian conservative empires; and if he built it over a stream of democracy, with results that are to-day apparent, who knows whether the statesmen of our day are not somewhere constructing a house which to our descendants will appear equally ridiculous? And anyhow, as we shall see, he was far from being the only offender at the Berlin Congress. If that particular strip of frontier had been drawn in the most unimpeachable fashion it would still have been iniquitous.

One may object that even if the people were divided by rough-and-ready methods, that was no reason why they should oppose each other, and indeed a number of frontier incidents which occurred between the time of the Congress and 1885 were not regarded, either by Serbs or by Bulgars, as being serious obstacles to a union. But Russia and Austria, revelling in the intrigues, continued to pull the two States now this way and now that, and all too frequently against each other. It can thus not be a matter of surprise if the rather inexperienced statesmen of those little countries fell into line with the two Great Powers and spent a good deal of their energies in assailing each other. So blind, alas! were these statesmen that all the tears of St. Petka would not have cured them, and now the two kindred people, so progressive in many ways, are—to speak of each people as a whole—further apart than when their shaggy forefathers came over the Carpathians. It has been the fate of the Yugoslavs—Slovenes, Croats, Serbs and Bulgars—to live for centuries beside each other and be kept always, by foreign masters, isolated from each other. At rare intervals, as we shall see in following their history, a person has arisen who has tried, with altruistic or with selfish motives, to make some sort of union of the Yugoslavs. And now we will go back to the time when Slavs first wandered westward to the Balkans.

I

GLORY AND DISASTER

Arrival of the Southern Slavs—Their unfortunate democratic ways—Two early States—Ecclesiastical rocks—The Slavs and their neighbours—Simeon the Bulgar—What are the Bulgars?—Stephen Nemania—The Slovenes are submerged—The fate of the Croats—The glory of Dubrovnik—A gallant republic—The glorious Dušan—Evil days and the people's hero—The "Good Christians" of Bosnia—Kossovo—Gathering Darkness.

ARRIVAL OF THE SOUTHERN SLAVS

The Slavs who in the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries came down from the Carpathian Mountains were known, until the ninth century, as Slovenes (Sloventzi);[4] and if, as is natural, the Serbs and Croats wish to preserve their time-honoured names, they will perhaps agree to call their whole country by the still more ancient name of Slovenia, instead of the merely geographical and not wholly popular term Yugoslavia. Considering that this name (Slovenija) found favour in the eyes of their great Emperor Stephen Dušan, one would imagine that the Serbs might adopt it in preference to the cumbrous "Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes," with its unlovely abbreviation into three letters of the alphabet. The Croats would be glad of this solution, and thus the Yugoslavs would, unlike their relatives the Russians, the Poles and the Czechs, have the satisfaction of living in a country called Slovenia, the land of the Slavs.... But, although this would be a happy solution, it seems much more probable that eventually the name Yugoslavia will be adopted. Everyone is agreed that one inclusive word, answering to Britain and British, is necessary. "Evo naših!" ["Here are our men!">[ were the words used by the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes as their troops marched past them in Paris during the Allied celebration of July 1919. The Serbian Colonel of the Heiduk Velko regiment, which was stationed at Split in 1920, and of which the other officers were chiefly Croats, the men Moslem and Catholic, used in his public addresses to speak of "Our kingdom." There are various objections to the word Yugoslavia; in the first place, it was introduced by the Austrians, who did not wish to call their subjects Serbs and Croats; in the second place, the term is a literal translation from the German and is against the laws of the Serbo-Croatian language. Another, and more important objection, is that the Bulgars, though Yugoslavs, are not included in Yugoslavia; and perhaps the name will be officially adopted when the Bulgars join the other Southern Slavs.

THEIR UNFORTUNATE DEMOCRATIC WAYS

These Southern Slavs did not display the same genius for organization as the Germanic peoples or the Magyars at the period of their respective migrations. In communities of brethren (or bratsva, from the word brat, a brother) they had not raised up a king; but as a compensation they possessed a lofty moral code, a religion inspired by the worship of nature and by the principle of the immortality of the soul. Occupying themselves with agriculture and the rearing of cattle, it was not until they came into contact, that is to say hostile contact, with their more organized neighbours that they were compelled to join together under the authority of a prince, a knez. The bad result of this profoundly democratic spirit was that the Slavs, not knowing how to keep united, fell under the yoke of other nations. From the interesting series of documents, Latin, Arabic, Byzantine and others, which have been collected in Monimenta Sclavenica by Miroslav Premrou, notary public at Caporetto, and published in 1919 at Ljubljana (Laibach), we can see that the Slovenes occupied a much greater extent of territory than do their descendants of our day—"ab ortu Vistulæ ... per immensa spatia..." (cf. Jordanis de orig. Goth. c. 5)—to beyond the Tagliamento, and from the Piave (cf. Ibrahim Ibn-Jakub[5]) to the Adriatic, the Ægean and the Black Sea.

One of the earliest of the above-named Slovene princes was Samo, a Slovene by adoption, who struggled in Pannonia against the Avars in the first half of the seventh century; it happened also in the year 626 that other Slovenes, as well as the Avars, attacked Constantinople. Both of them withdrew, the former being defeated at sea and the latter failing under the city walls. The Avars, having thus shown that they were vulnerable, had to bear an attack on a grand scale made upon them by the Slovenes, this attack being more shrewdly organized than any other transaction in which the Slovenes had as yet engaged. And they still appeared to be reluctant to form even a loosely knit State; they roamed about the Balkans and the adjacent countries to the north-west, seeking for lands that were adapted to their patriarchal organization. Not until the ninth century did they set up what might be called Governments on the Adriatic littoral, where they had no hostility to fear from the last remaining Romans, who were refugees in certain towns and islands.

TWO EARLY STATES

The two most important of these Slav States were, firstly, that one, the predecessor of our modern Croatia, which extended from the mouth of the Raša (Arša) in Istria to the mouth of the Cetina in central Dalmatia, and, secondly, to the south-east a principality, afterwards called Raška, in what is now western Serbia. In a little time the Slavs began to have relations with the towns of the Dalmatian coast and with the islands which were nominally under the sway of Byzantium, but in consequence of their remoteness and their exposed position had succeeded in becoming almost independent republics.

ECCLESIASTICAL ROCKS

Now Christianity had been definitely introduced into Dalmatia in the fourth century, but it was not until several centuries later that it made any headway with the Slavs, of whom the Croats, in the ninth century, were baptized by Frank missionaries. The arrival of the Slavs, by the bye, had been sometimes looked upon with scanty favour by the Popes: in July of the year 600 we find Gregory I. saying in a letter to the Bishop of Salona that he was much disturbed at the news he had just received "de Sclavorum gente, quæ vobis valde imminet, affligor vehementer et conturbor." Similarly, the Council of Split branded the Slav missionaries as heretics and the Slav alphabet as the invention of the devil.[6] ... While the Croats were falling[7] under the dominion of the Franks, the holy brothers St. Cyril and St. Methodus, who had been born at Salonica in 863, were carrying the first Slav book from Constantinople to Moravia, whither they travelled at the invitation of the Prince of Moravia, Rastislav, St. Cyril going as an apostle and theologian, St. Methodus as a statesman and organizer. This famous book was a translation from the Greek, but it was written in Palæo-Slav characters, the Glagolitic that were to become so venerated that when the French kings were crowned at Reims their oath was sworn upon a Glagolitic copy of the Gospels;[8] and the spirit of that earliest book was also Slav: it expresses the political and cultural resistance of Prince Rastislav against the State of the Franks, that is, against the German nationality, of whom it was feared that with the Cross in front of them they would trample down for ever the political liberties of the young Slav peoples. German theologians were giving a more and more dogmatic character to Western Christianity, whereas the Christianity of the East was at that time more liberal; it gathered to itself the Slavs of Raška and of the neighbouring regions, such as southern Dalmatia, while the influence which it exerted was so powerful that when the Croats, after vacillating between the two Churches, finally joined that of Rome, they took with them the old Slav liturgy that is used by them in many places on the mainland and the islands down to this day. Thus their Church became a national institution, and that in spite of all the long-continued efforts of the Vatican, as also of the Venetian Republic. The Roman Catholic hierarchy, by the way, is endeavouring to have this liturgy made lawful in the whole of Yugoslavia; the only opponent I met was a Jesuit at Zagreb who foresaw that the priests, being no longer obliged to learn Latin, might indeed omit to do so. Pope Pius X. was likewise an opponent of the Slav liturgy, because a Polish priest told him that it would lead to Pan-Slavism and hence to schism; but it is thought—among others by the patriotic Prince-Bishop Jeglić of Ljubljana—that the late Pope would have given his consent, had it not been for Austria, which recoiled from what would have probably strengthened the Slav element. One of the cherished policies of Austria was to utilize in every possible way the religious differences between the Southern Slavs.

THE SLAVS AND THEIR NEIGHBOURS

But the two States formed beside the Adriatic and in Raška were not only separated from early days by their religion; they had quite different neighbours to deal with. In 887 the Croats imposed their will on the Venetians, against whom they had been for some time waging war—and not merely a defensive war—the Venetians having attacked the country in order to despoil it of timber and of people, whom they liked to sell in the markets of the Levant. In 887, however, after the defeat and death of their doge, Pietro Candiano, the Venetians were forced to pay—and paid without interruption down to the year 1000—an annual tribute to the Croats, who in return permitted them to sail freely on the Adriatic. Beside that sea the Croats founded new towns, such as Šibenik (of which the Italian name is Sebenico), and carried on an amicable intercourse with the autonomous Byzantine towns: Iader, the picturesque modern capital which they came to call Zadar and the Venetians Zara; Tragurium, the delightful spot which is their Trogir and the Venetian Traù, and so forth. These friendly relations existed both before 882 and subsequently, when the towns agreed to pay the Croats an annual tribute, in return for which the local provosts were confirmed in office by the rulers of Croatia. We have plentiful evidence from the ruins of royal castles and of the many churches built by the Slavs in this period, as well as from the discoveries of arms and ornaments, that the people had attained to a condition of prosperity. At the beginning of the tenth century, so we are told by the learned emperor and historian Constantine Porphyrogenetos, the Croatian Prince Tomislav could raise 100,000 infantry and 60,000 cavalry; he had likewise eighty large vessels, each with a crew of forty men, at his disposal, and a hundred smaller ships with ten to twenty men in each of them.

As for the State of Raška, protected on the south and west by formidable mountains, and in the very centre of the Serbian tribes, it is there that the lore and customs of the people have survived in their purest form. Raška was the land in which the love of liberty was always kept alive and from there the expeditions used to sally forth whose aim, frustrated many times, it was to found a powerful Serbian State. The chieftain, Tshaslav Kronimirović, did, as a matter of fact, succeed in uniting his State with two others, one being in Bosnia and the other in Zeta, which is now Montenegrin. He even added three other provinces on the Adriatic coast; but after his death the State was dissolved and in the course of the conflicts which followed, the State of Zeta assumed the leadership. It had been necessary for these Serbian rulers of Raška and Zeta to resist the frequent assaults not only of the Byzantines but of the Bulgars.

SIMEON THE BULGAR

"Frequent assaults" is probably a correct description of what the Serb of that period had to endure at the hands of this particular opponent, the Bulgar. Having swarmed across the Peninsula, the Bulgar was now in the act of consolidating a great kingdom, for this was the magnificent epoch of the Bulgarian Tzar Simeon, whose word ran far and wide from the Adriatic. The Bulgarian map[9] which exhibits the Tzardom at the death of Simeon is painted in the same brown colour from opposite Corfu right across to the Black Sea and up as far as the mouths of the Danube, which signifies that in those parts (including, of course, Macedonia) the word of Simeon was supreme. But the Serbian provinces of Raška, Zeta, Bosnia and some adjoining lands are painted brown and white, being hatched with white diagonal lines; and this indicates very candidly that in the north-west Simeon was not omnipotent. We are indeed told in the letterpress that "on the other hand Simeon meanwhile took the opportunity to settle accounts with the Serbians because of their perfidious policy, and he subjected them in the year 924"; but doubtless this was a kind of subjection which in 925 would have to be repeated, and this would account for one of Simeon's faithful chroniclers having made that allusion to perfidious policy. Of the Tzar himself we are given an attractive picture: unlike his father, Boris, who patronized Slav literature for the reason that it made his State less permeable to Byzantine influence, Simeon had no political object in his encouragement of native literature.[10] He was himself a man of letters, having studied at Constantinople. He was acquainted with Aristotle and Demosthenes, he discussed theology with the most eminent doctors of the Church, and of positive science—or of what was then regarded as such—he possessed everything which had survived the great shipwreck of ancient thought. Not only did he found monasteries and schools, but he gathered writers round him; and, in order to stimulate them, he himself wrote original books and translations, thus ennobling, we are told, the literary vocation in the eyes of his rude and warlike race. He would probably have smiled if he had known that one of his writers had attributed to him the subjection of the Serbs; but what one would like to learn is whether Macedonia, even then a kaleidoscope of races, was more or less completely under the shadow and the brilliance of his sword, more or less completely subjugated. Four centuries later the Serbs were to have a Macedonian empire which, like Simeon's, dissolved on the death of its founder. To these old empires the Serb and the Bulgar of our day are looking back, and it would be interesting to know if harassed Macedonia was calmly content to be first Bulgarian and then Serbian, or whether it was a calm of that Eastern kind which means that a ruler's assaults upon the people are infrequent.

WHAT ARE THE BULGARS?

And now, as the matter is in dispute, it is necessary to examine the origin of the Bulgarian people. A band of Turanian or Bulgarian warriors, probably not over 10,000 in number and led by one Asperouch or Isperich, had crossed the Danube in the year 679, had subdued the Slav tribes in those parts—for the newcomers reaped the advantage of being a well-disciplined people—and by the end of the eighth century had settled down in their tents of felt along the banks of the Danube. Then, after another hundred years, in the district bounded by Varna, Rustchuk and the Balkans, one may say that the original Turanians, a branch of the Huns, had been absorbed by the Slavs. "The forefathers of the Bulgars," says the great Slavist, Dr. Constantine Jireček of Prague, in his History of the Bulgars, "are not the handful of Bulgars who conquered in 679 a part of Mœsia along the Danube, but the Slavs who much earlier had settled in Mœsia, as well as in Thrace, Macedonia, Epirus and almost the whole Peninsula." With regard to the retention of the name there is an analogy in France, where the Gauls came under the subjection of German Franks, who ultimately disappeared, but left their name to the country. So, too, the Greeks in Turkey who call themselves Romei, the name of their former rulers, and their language Romeica, though they are not Romans and do not speak Latin. To such an extent have the original Bulgars been absorbed by the Yugoslavs that even the most ancient known form of the Bulgarian language, dating from the ninth century, retains hardly any relics of the original Bulgarian tongue; and this tongue has in our time, with the exception of a word or two, been entirely lost: there is a celebrated old MS. in Moscow[11] which orientalists and historians have pondered over and which has now been explained by the Finnish professor Mikola and the Bulgarian professor Zlatarski to be a chronology of Bulgarian pagan princes, of whom the first are rather fabulous. Here and there, amid the old Slav, are strange words which are supposed to signify Turanian chronology, cycles of lunar years. And in a village between Šumen and Prjeslav there was found an inscription of the Bulgarian prince Omortag (?802-830), where in the Greek language, for the Bulgars had at that period no writing of their own, he says that he built something; and amid the Greek there is the word σιγορ-αλεμ, which occurs also in the above-mentioned document and is regarded as Turanian.... What we do know about this race is by no means so discreditable; it is true that they are reputed to have had no great esteem for the aged, and, according to a Chinese chronicle of the year 545, "the characters of their writing are like those of the barbarians." They held it to be glorious to die in battle, shameful to die of sickness. For the violation of a married woman, as well as for the hatching of plots and rebellion, the penalty was death, and if you seduced a girl you were compelled to pay a fine and also to marry her. Their sense of discipline, which served them so well in their contact with other people, was remarkably applied to their social life; thus a stepson was under an obligation to marry his father's widow, a nephew the widow of his uncle, and a younger brother the widow of an elder. It may be that the two much-quoted writers who claim that the modern Bulgars are of this race were moved more by their admiration of such customs than by scientific scrutiny. One of them, Christoff, who assumed the name of Tartaro-Bulgar to show that he believed in his theories, is usually thought nowadays to have been more of a poet than a devotee of erudition; if he had been still more of a poet, approaching, say, Pencho Slaveikoff, we would take less objection to his waywardness. The other champion of that ancestry is Theodore Paneff, who showed himself a brilliant and courageous officer during the war of 1912-1913. The fact that he was himself of Armenian origin—he changed his name—would, of course, not invalidate his Bulgarian studies; but even as he spoke Bulgarian with a Russian accent, so is he looked upon as writing like certain Russians; and his other literary work, such as that on the psychology of crowds, is held to be of more value. At all events in 1916 when a number of Bulgarian deputies made a joyous progress to the capitals of their allies, under the leadership of the Vice-President of the Sobranje, Dr. Momchiloff, renowned at the time as a Germanophil, they were welcomed with great pomp at Buda-Pest and declared in ceremonial orations to be brothers of the Turanian Magyars; but Momchiloff deprecated this idea. "We are brothers," he said, "of the Russians, and see what we have done to them!" It was also during the War that Dr. Georgov, Professor of Philosophy and Rector of Sofia University, wrote a dissertation in a Buda-Pest newspaper,[12] which demonstrated very clearly to the Hungarians that the Bulgars are Slavs; the Professor points out that the Turanians had so rapidly been absorbed that Prince Omortag bestowed Slav names upon his sons, and this complete mingling of the radically different peoples was assisted, says the Professor, by the fact that those Bulgarian hordes in the days before they crossed the Danube were already partly mixed with Slavs, since they had been wandering for decades to the north of the Danube, around Bessarabia, in which country the Slavs were members of the same Slovene race as those whom they were afterwards to meet. So thoroughly were the original Bulgars submerged in the Slavs that when their sons set out from the district between Varna, Rustchuk and the Balkans, proceeding west and south, they met with no resistance from the unorganized Slavs of Mœsia and Thrace, owing to the circumstance that these latter did not feel that the new arrivals were strangers. In fact, says the Professor, there are in the present Bulgarian people far fewer and far fainter traces of the original Bulgars than there are of the old Thracians, as also of the Greeks and of the different people who in the course of the great migrations probably left here and there some stragglers. Sir Charles Eliot says of the Bulgars that "though not originally Slavs they have been completely Slavized, and all the ties arising from language, religion and politics connect them with the Slavs and not with Turkey or even Hungary." Professor Cvijić, by the way, who in 1920 received the Patron's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society for his researches into Balkan ethnology, regards the author of Turkey in Europe as a greater authority in this field than himself.... It is not easy, away from Montenegro and a few remote valleys, to find communities on the Balkan mainland that are altogether free from alien blood; Turks have come and gone, Crusaders of all nationalities have passed this way, with their hangers-on, here was the road from Europe to Asia, and here amid the ruin of empires lay much that was worth gathering. No doubt the Serbs, whose land was not so much a thoroughfare, have in their veins some Illyrian and other, but on the whole much less non-Slav blood than the Bulgars; still, when we consider some subsequent invasions of Bulgaria, we must ascertain how far they spread. For example, the Kumani who arrived in the thirteenth century were, according to Leon Cahun,[13] Turks of the Kiptchak nation, speaking a pure Turkish dialect; they—that is to say, the Gagaous who are supposed to be their descendants—are now Christians, they speak modern Turkish and inhabit the shores of the Black Sea and the region of Adrianople; they have kept much to themselves and are recognizable by their dark faces, large teeth and hirsute appearance. There are people who assert that all Bulgars have a physical divergence from other Yugoslavs, but, except if they happened to come across one of these Gagaous or some such person, it appears more likely that they saw what they went out to see. Naturally, if not very logically, those who regard the Bulgars in a hostile fashion have often brandished the arguments of Messrs. Tartaro-Bulgar and Paneff; if they will be so good as to accept what I honestly believe is the truth with regard to this people, they may have the pleasure of denouncing the Bulgar even more, seeing that his Yugoslav blood gives him less excuse for being what he has been. We shall have occasion, later on, to discuss his primitive as well as his more refined vices, endeavouring to ascertain how far they are not shared by his neighbours and whether he has any virtues peculiar to himself.

STEPHEN NEMANIA

After this long excursion into troubled waters we will go back to the Serbian States of Raška and Zeta. In the year 1168 the former of these was under the rule of Stephen Nemania (1168-1196), who bore the title of "Grand Župan," which means chief of a province. He was on friendly terms with the "Ban," or governor, of Bosnia, and with his assistance he added Zeta to his possessions. It was in his beneficial reign that the Bogomile heresy was propagated in Serbia—later on to spread through Bosnia and thence, under the name of Albigensian heresy, to France. Nemania summoned an assembly to decide on a plan of action; they resolved that this heresy should be exterminated by force of arms, seeing that most of the population belonged to the Orthodox religion. But Nemania was tolerant towards the Catholic Church, which had a considerable following in the Serbian provinces of the Adriatic coast, and this attitude became him well, for although he was the son of Orthodox parents he was born in a western part of the country where there was no Orthodox priest, so that he was baptized according to the Catholic rite and only joined the Orthodox Church at a considerably later date. A suggestive incident occurred in the year 1189, when Frederick Barbarossa, on his way to Constantinople and Jerusalem, was met at Niš by the Grand Župan, who presented him with corn, wine, oxen and various other commodities, placed the Serbs under his protection, and concluded with him and with the Bulgars a military convention for the taking of Constantinople. When at last Nemania was tired of fighting and administration he withdrew to the splendid monastery of Studenica, which he had built, and afterwards to the promontory of Mt. Athos, where his younger son, who called himself Sava and was to become the great St. Sava, had from his seventeenth year embraced the monastic life.

THE SLOVENES ARE SUBMERGED

Meanwhile the Slavs of Croatia and those farther to the north and west, with whom was kept alive the old name of Slovene, had been at grips with various neighbours. It has been said of the Slovenes that, shepherds and peasants for the most part, they have practically no national history, seeing that when the realm of Samo, who was himself a Frank, came to an end, they were subjected to the Lombards, to the Bavarians and finally to Charlemagne and his successors. Unlike the Serbs and the Croats, they had no warlike aristocracy; in fact, the only two Slovene magnates who displayed any national zeal were two Counts of Celje (Cilli) of whom the first rose to be Ban of Croatia and the second, Count Ulrich, the last of his race, was in 1486 assassinated by Hungarians in Belgrade, thus causing his domains to fall to the Habsburgs.[14] But if the little, scattered Slovene people had to bend before the storm, if they withdrew from their outposts in the two Austrias, in northern Styria, in Tirol, in the plains of Frioul and in Venetia, they settled down, thirteen centuries ago, in a region which they still inhabit. This is bounded to the north approximately by the line extending from Villach—Celovec (Klagenfurt)—Spielfeld—Radgona (Radkersburg)—and the mouth of the river Mur, although there are noteworthy fragments at each end: about 65,000 on the hills to the west of the Isonzo (of whom 40,000 have been since 1866 under Italy), and about 120,000, partly Catholics and partly Protestants, who live on the other bank of the Mur. Anyone who wished to follow the fortunes of the Slovenes through the Middle Ages would have chiefly to consult the chronicles of the Holy Roman Empire; he would find them in their old home at Gorica, but with a German Count placed over them, he would find them being gradually supplanted by the Germans in such towns as Maribor (Marburg) and Radgona, being thrust out to the villages and the countryside; nowhere except in the province of Carniola would he find a homogeneous Slovene population. It is an interesting fact[15] that in the fifteenth century theirs was the "domestic language" of the Habsburgs, even as in our time the Suabian-Viennese; but until the era of Napoleon they took practically no part in the world's affairs, and the part which they were wont to take was to fight other people's battles: for example, when the Venetians, in the midst of all their hectic merriment, were making the last stand, it was largely to the Schiavoni, that is Slovene, regiments that they entrusted their defence. We are told that there was no question of the loyalty and the fighting qualities of the Schiavoni and of their sturdy fellow-Slavs, the Morlaks of Dalmatia. It was not possible for the authorities to provide ships enough to bring over sufficient resources to maintain all those who were eager to fight.[16] In spite of all the centuries of political suppression the little Slovene people, which to-day only numbers 1,300,000, retained its identity with even more success than a certain frog in Ljubljana, their capital; for that wonderful creature, though preserving its shape in the middle of a black-and-white marble table at the Museum, has allowed itself to become black-and-white marble. We shall see how Napoleon awoke the Slovenes, how Metternich put them to sleep again, how they roused themselves in 1848 and what a rôle they have played in the most recent history.

THE FATE OF THE CROATS

The Croats were to be much more prominent in the Middle Ages. They did not, it is true, always manage to hold their heads above water; but they can now look back with more gratification than regret on the interminable conflicts which they had to sustain against the Hungarians on the one hand, the Venetians on the other. The Hungarian monarch, anxious to have an outlet on the Adriatic, attempted to cajole the Croats into electing him as their king, on the score of his being the brother of the wife of a late Croatian ruler. He secured by force what his pleadings had not gained him, and subsequently the link between Croatia and Hungary was more than once broken and reunited within the space of a few years; at last it was arranged that there was to be a purely personal union under the vigorous King Kolomon, and so it continued, with varying interference on the part of the Hungarians, until the dynasty of Arpad became extinct in 1301. The functionary who represented the central power in Croatia—there being for part of this period a similar official for Slavonia, the adjoining province—had the title of Ban. He was at the head of the Croatian army, he pronounced sentences in the name of the king and had other functions, so that the office came to be regarded with profound respect by the Croats, and many of its holders tried to deserve this sentiment.... Among the duties assumed by King Kolomon was that of recovering from the Venetians those coastal towns and islands which had fallen to them, owing to the chaos in Croatia. For more than two hundred years—that is, until the middle of the fourteenth century—this warfare between the Hungaro-Croatian kings and Venice raged without interruption; apparently the Dalmatian towns and islands were most unwilling to come under the sway of Venice. We read everywhere of how they themselves put up a strenuous resistance. At Zadar, the capital, where Pope Alexander III. had in the year 1177 been welcomed by the people with rejoicings and Croatian songs, a chain was drawn across the harbour in 1202, for the people hoped in this way to keep out the Venetians, who, with a number of Frenchmen, were starting out on the famous Fourth Crusade—that enterprise which ended, on the outward journey, underneath the walls of Constantinople. The Venetians forced their way into Zadar, plundered and devastated it; and in order to mollify the Pope, who was indignant at Crusaders having behaved in this fashion against a Christian town, they subscribed towards the building of the cathedral, but retained possession of the place—this time for over a hundred and fifty years. Yet the holding of Zadar did not imply that of other Dalmatian towns: during this period when Venice clung to the chief place there were a good many changes in the not-distant town of Šibenik, which was now under the Hungarians, now under Paul Subič, Prince of Bribir, now under the Ban Mladen ii., now an autonomous town under Venice.

A GALLANT REPUBLIC

The most renowned, as it is the most beautiful, of Dalmatian towns, Dubrovnik (Ragusa), was always more preoccupied with commerce and letters than with warfare. It managed to maintain itself in glory for a very long time, thanks to the astuteness of the citizens, who were ever willing to give handsome tribute to a potential foe. On occasion the Ragusans could be nobly firm, refusing to deliver a political refugee to the Turks, and so forth. In such tempestuous times the little State was forced to trim its sails; there was the gibe that they were prepared to pay lip service to anyone, and that the letters S.B. on the flag (for Sanctus Blasius, their patron saint) indicated the seven flags, sette bandiere, which they were ready to fly. But the Republic of Dubrovnik—a truly oligarchic republic, until the great earthquake of 1667 made it necessary to raise a few other families into the governing class—the republic can say, with truth, that when darkness was over the other Yugoslavs it kept a lamp alight. As yet the Serbian State was rising in prosperity and Dubrovnik made a treaty of commerce with Stephen (1196-1224), who had succeeded his father Nemania. During this reign St. Sava, the king's brother, came back to Serbia and organized the national Church, founding also numerous monasteries and churches, as well as schools. Of the successors of Stephen we may mention Uroš, whose widow, a French princess, Helen of Anjou, is venerated in Serbia for her good deeds and has been canonized. King Milutine (1281-1321) made Serbia the most united and the leading State in Eastern Europe; under Dušan, who has been called the Serbian Charlemagne, success followed success, and under his sceptre he gathered most of the Serbian people, as well as many Greeks and Albanians. He had the idea—and it was not beyond his strength—to group together all the Serbian provinces.

THE GLORIOUS DUŠAN

It is facile for people of the twentieth century, and particularly so for non-Slavs, to say that this Serbian Empire of Dušan, Lord of the Serbs and Bulgars and Greeks, whom the Venetian Senate addressed as "Græcorum Imperator semper Augustus," resembled the earlier Bulgarian Empire of Simeon, who called himself Emperor of the Bulgars and the Vlachs, Despot of the Greeks, in that we would consider neither of them to be an empire; and that therefore, in celebrating their glories, with pointed reference to their Macedonian glories, the Serbs and the Bulgars are living in a fool's paradise. No doubt a great many persons dwelt in this Macedonia of Simeon and Dušan without being aware of the fact, for those who called themselves Bulgars or Serbs appear to have been chiefly the warriors, the nobles and the priests; a large part of the people were—as they are to-day—indifferent to such niceties. But there is latent in the Slav mind a longing for the absolute, which, except it be in some way corrected, inclines towards a moral anarchy, a social nihilism and indifference as to the destinies of the State. Looking merely at the consequence, it does not greatly seem to matter how this attitude is brought about.... One must admit that these two realms occupied in their world most prominent positions—positions to which they would not have attained if Simeon and Dušan had not been altogether exceptional men, for on their death there was not anybody great enough to keep the great men of the State together. We have spoken of Simeon's peaceful labours—we might cultivate more than we do the literature of that age if it were less dedicated to religious topics, which anyhow at that time gave little scope for originality—his consummate ability as a soldier and statesman is revealed in the existence of his empire; we find in the Code of Dušan, before such a thing flourished in England, the institution of trial by jury, while Hermann Wendel[17] has pointed out that the peasants were protected from rapacious landowners much more effectively than in the Germany of that age.... We need not try to establish whether the simple Macedonian desired to be under Simeon or Dušan; but even if these two monarchs had, each of them, as far as was then possible, complete control of the country, one would scarcely urge that after all these centuries this is any reason why Macedonia should fall to Bulgaria or to Serbia. We shall have to see whether by subsequent merits or activities either of them has acquired the right to absorb these outlying Slavs who, be it noted, if in our day they are questioned as to their nationality, will often reply—and even to an enthusiastic, armed person from one of the interested States—the worried Macedonian Slavs, of whom a quarter or maybe a third do really not know what they are, will reply that they are members of the Orthodox Church.

Dušan perceived that an alliance with Venice would serve his ends; he did not cease trying to persuade the Venetians that such an arrangement was also in their interest. After having sent an army to Croatia, in the hope of liberating that people from the Hungarians, he conquered Albania, and in 1340 asked to be admitted as a citizen of the Most Serene Republic. In 1345 he informed the Senate that it was his intention to be crowned in imperio Constantinopolitaneo, and at the same time suggested an alliance pro acquisitione imperii Constantinopolitani. But Venice, while reiterating her protestations of friendship, declined his offers; for she could not bring herself to join her fortunes to those of an ally who might become a rival.

EVIL DAYS AND THE PEOPLE'S HERO

On the death of Dušan his dominions fell apart, so that the conquering Turk, who now appeared, was only met with isolated resistance. At a battle on the river Maritza in 1371 the Christians were utterly routed and, among other chieftains, King Vukašin was slain. His territories had included Prizren in the north, Skoplje, where Dušan had been crowned, Ochrida and Prilep. It was Prilep, amid the bare mountains, which passed into the hands of Marko, the king's son, Marko Kraljević, and thereabouts are the remains of his churches and monasteries. But for the Serbs and the Bulgars Marko is associated with deeds of valour; he has become the protagonist of a grand cycle of heroic songs, wherein his wondrous exploits are recalled. Although he was, by force of circumstances, a Turkish vassal, and, fighting under them, he perished in Roumania in 1394, so that historically he may not have played a very helpful part, yet it is to him that numerous victories over the Turk are ascribed. He is said to have been engaged in combat against the three-headed Arab, to have waged solitary and triumphant warfare against battalions of Turks, to have passed swiftly on his faithful charger Šarac from one end of the country to another, to have defended the Cross against the Crescent, to have succoured the poor and the weak, to have conversed with the long-haired fairies, the "samovilas," of the forest lakes, who gave him their protection, and he is said to have assisted girls to marry by abolishing the Turkish restrictions. They say that he is still alive, and when he reappears, gloriously seated on Šarac, then will the people be free, at last, and united.[18] Through the long centuries of Turkish oppression he—who personifies many of the traits in the national character, with Christian and with pagan attributes—he, in these legends, many of which have a high poetic value, was able to keep alive the hope of deliverance. From one end of the Balkans to the other, from Varna to Triest, the popular hero is Marko Kraljević. He is as much the personage of Bulgarian as of Serbian folk-songs, and this is well, seeing that he was a Serbian prince while many of his adoring subjects were Bulgars—the noble Albanian chronicler, Musachi, for instance, calls his father Re di Bulgaria. As Marko is dear to them in song the Bulgars have come to think that he was a Bulgar; thereupon the Serbs point out that he was the son of Vukašin, that Marko is an admittedly Serbian name, and that Kralj (King) and Kraljević are titles so unknown in Bulgaria that when the Sofia newspapers alluded to Louis Philippe, Ferdinand's grandfather, they spoke of him—him of all people—as Tzar Louis Philippe. Thereupon the Bulgars retort that, anyhow, Marko was cruel and perfidious and a braggart and a drunkard and a fighter against Christians, and a fighter remarkable for cowardice. But if we are going to look at the private character of all the world's national heroes, we shall be the losers more than they. Let Marko, who joins the Serb and the Bulgar in song, find them engaged, when he comes back, in drinking together and not in making him the subject of antiquarian and acrimonious debate.

THE "GOOD CHRISTIANS" OF BOSNIA

While Serbia was listening to the Turkish cavalry, the Ban of Bosnia, Tvertko, raised that province to its greatest eminence. Being a collateral heir of the old house of Nemania, and having wide Serbian lands under his rule, he had himself proclaimed king on the tomb of St. Sava in 1377. He called his banat "the kingdom of Serbia," and allied himself to Prince Lazar, the most powerful of the Serbian rulers who were still independent. In Bosnia at this time the Bogomile heresy, after winning the people of Herzegovina, that wild and mournful province, attracted not only the peasants but the bans. Just as Dušan and other Balkan princes had made of an autocephalous Church the surest foundation of their States, so did the Bans of Bosnia, beginning with Kulin at the close of the twelfth century, see in the Bogomile movement a national Church that would render their subjects more intractable to outside influences, to religious suggestions emanating from Rome, and to political ambitions that came from Hungary. The people, for their part, flocked to the ranks of the "good Christians," as the sect was called, on account of the Bogomile humility, the democratic organization of a Church that was in such contrast with the formalism of Byzantine ceremonial, and also on account of some pagan superstitions that were mingled with this Christianity and made to these simple, recently converted Christians a most potent appeal. It was in vain that the Popes preached a crusade against the Bogomiles, in vain that the Kings of Hungary descended on their heretical vassals; for the ban, in one way or another, would divert that wrath—sometimes, if no other choice presented itself, he became the temporary instrument of this wrath while standing at the people's back. From all the world, so say contemporary records, there was a constant stream of heretics to Bosnia, where now the Bogomiles were found in the most exalted positions. Ceaselessly the Popes persecuted them, and when at last in Sigismund of Hungary an ardent extirpator visited the land there came about a terrible result, which has made Bosnia so different from other Serbian territories.

KOSSOVO

Tvertko did his utmost to make of Bosnia the kernel of another great Slav State. The death of Lewis of Hungary freed him from his most redoubtable adversary; Dalmatia, Croatia and other lands were joining him—but then in 1389 came Kossovo, the fatal field of blackbirds, where a disloyal coalition of Serbian, Croatian, Albanian and Bulgarian chieftains went down in irretrievable disaster. Milos Obilić, who is now one of Serbia's popular heroes, had been suspected of lukewarmness; he answered his accusers by gaining access to the Sultan's camp and slaying the Sultan. Not only did the Turks put him to death, but they decapitated their prisoner, Prince Lazar, and all the other chiefs.

The Slavs along the Adriatic were now also on the eve of dire misfortune: protracted wars of succession, in consequence of the death in 1382 of Lewis of Hungary, had ravaged that country and Croatia, so that in their enfeebled condition they could give no assistance to the towns and islands of Dalmatia which for so long had been struggling to elude the grip of Venice. But even so—and with many places handing themselves over voluntarily, in disgust at the almost incredible treason of their elected monarch, Ladislas of Naples, who, after long bargaining, sold his rights to Venice for a hundred thousand ducats, and with many places, in dread of the Turks, placing themselves under the protection of Venice—even so the Venetians had a great deal of trouble in occupying Dalmatia, and a hundred years elapsed before they had the whole of it. As for the two ports, Triest and Rieka (Fiume), they had passed through various episcopal or aristocratic hands. Triest had been in a position to set her face against falling to Venice, of whom she had had, from the tenth to the twelfth centuries, an adequate experience. Both Triest and Rieka were now to pass into the power of the Habsburgs.

GATHERING DARKNESS

For a few years after Kossovo the Serbs resisted; but their efforts, now at Belgrade, which was made the capital and fortified by Stephen the chivalrous son of Prince Lazar, now at Smederevo on the Danube, were spasmodic. Bands of Turks and also of Magyars were terrorizing the country; and the sagacious old despot George Branković was the last to offer opposition to the Turk at Smederevo. Meanwhile in Bosnia, the Bogomiles, driven to despair by persecution, had been calling to the Turk. Constantinople fell in 1453, Serbia laid down her arms in 1459, while in 1463 Muhammed ii. appeared before Jajce, Bosnia's capital, where one can still see the skeleton of Stephen Tomažević, the last king, who was executed by the Sultan's order. And now in this land of heresy, which had become so hostile to the established Churches, hundreds of those who professed the Bogomile faith went over eagerly to Islam; they hoped that in this way they would triumph at the expense of their late persecutors. Those who had worldly possessions were the first to embrace Islam, in order to safeguard them. Those who had neither wealth nor much accumulated hatred remained Christians. One would expect that people who had adopted a religion under these impulses would be even more uncompromising than the usual convert, and indeed, as a general rule, the ex-Christian begs and aghas displayed until recent times not only a more than Turkish observance of the outward forms of Islam but a tyranny over the wretched raias, their slaves, that was much more than Turkish.

Fortune had turned her back upon the Southern Slavs. In the north the Slovenes were imprisoned in the Holy Roman Empire, while the Croats—save for the time when they were under Tvertko—had a succession of alien rulers, such as the aforementioned Ladislas, whom they naturally disliked.

After Kossovo some of the Serbian nobles had fled to Hungary, to Bosnia and to Montenegro. It was among the almost inaccessible, bleak rocks of Montenegro that a few thousand Serbs managed to retain their liberty. Various Serbian tribes or clans thus found a refuge, and owing to their isolation from each other they preserved their differences. They have, in fact, preserved them, as well as the tribal organization, down to the present day. And then there was Dubrovnik, the stalwart little republic. Now that she stood alone she needed all her acumen. Yet if she paid necessary tribute to the powerful, she would not give up helping the fallen. From this Catholic town in 1390, the following message was sent to the Serbian Prince Vuk Branković: "If—and God forbid that it should be so—Gospodin Vuk should not succeed in saving Serbia, and should be driven thence either by the Magyars or the Turks or anyone else, we will receive the Gospodin Vuk and the Gospodja Mara his wife, together with their children and their treasure, in all good faith in our city; and if Gospodin Vuk desire to build a church of his own faith here for his use, he shall be at liberty to do so."[19]

Darkness lay over the world of the Southern Slav—under the Turk there was no history. Generation followed generation, but the day of Kossovo does not seem to the Serbs as though it were a distant day. Do not we who go about our business in the brilliance of the morning sometimes linger to recall the frightful setting of the sun? And every year the Serbian people sing the Mass for the repose of them who died at Kossovo.... When, after more than five hundred years, the Serbian soldiers in the Balkan War came back to this historic plain one saw them halting, without being ordered to do so, crossing themselves and presenting arms.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] From the word sloviti, to speak—meaning those who can speak to and comprehend one another.

[5] Premrou quotes from the account of this ambassador's journey in the year 965, which was published at Petrograd in 1898.

[6] Cf. Serbia, by L. F. Waring. London, 1917.

[7] The sources of the ancient history of Croatia have been collected by F. Rački in his Documenta historiæ Croaticæ periodum antiquam illustrantia, Zagreb, 1877. Cf. also his well-known and excellent essays in Rad. jugoslav. Akad.; the Poviest Hrvata de Vjekoslav Klaič, Zagreb, 1899-1911, and a short but very good account by F. Sišić in Pregled povijesti hrv. naroda, Zagreb, 1916. I am indebted for these references to Dr. Yovan Radonić, who is regarded as among the first of Croat historians.

[8] This book, dating from 1395, is in the town library of Reims.

[9] "The Bulgarians, in their historical, ethnographical and political frontiers." Text in four languages. Berlin, 1917.

[10] La Macedoine, by Simeon Radeff. Sofia, 1918.

[11] Obzor Chronografov, published by Professor Popov in 1863.

[12] Pester Lloyd, June 21, 1917.

[13] Introduction à l'Histoire de l'Asie. Paris, 1896.

[14] In a monograph on the 600th anniversary of the Church of St. Mary at Celje (Celje, 1910) there is reproduced a contemporary narrative of the funeral of Count Ulrich. After describing how the widow, the noble lady Catharine, had with dire wailing gone round the altar and offered sacrifice, being followed by all the congregation, it proceeds: "Da diss geschehen gieng wieder herfür ein geharnischter Mann, der Namb zu sich Schilt, Helmb, Wappen, legte sich auf die Erden, vnd striche gar lauth, ganz erbärmlich vnd gar Cläglich mit heller stimbe drei mahl nacheinander Graffen zu Cilli, vnd Nimmehr zerreiss die Panier, Zerbrach die Wappen da war Allererst ein Clagen, dass es nicht einen Menschen, sondern ein harten stain hete Erbarmen Mögen."

[15] Cf. A lecture delivered by Sir Arthur Evans before the Royal Geographical Society, January 10, 1916.

[16] Cf. La Fine della Serenissima, by Ricciotti Bratti. Milan, 1919.

[17] Südosteuropäische Fragen, by Hermann Wendel. Berlin, 1918.

[18] His equipment, as M. Charles Loiseau (in Le Balkan Slave et la Crise Autrichienne, Paris, 1898) remarks very truly, "n'est pas banal." One of his historians relates that he was furnished with a sword, a lance, javelins and arrows trimmed with falcons' feathers, sometimes also with a sabre and a small axe. He was garbed in a cloak of wolf's skin, using the same skin for his cap, round which was wound a dark piece of cloth. On his saddle was a scarf of silk. The reins of his horse were gilded, and he carried in his right hand a javelin of iron, gold and silver, weighing 150 lb. (?), and this he balanced on the left side with a large skin of wine. On his back was a magnificent cloak, and behind him there was a folded tent.

[19] Monumenta Serbica, edited by F. Miklosić.

II

FIGHTING THE DARKNESS

The Venetians in Dalmatia—Methods of the Turk—The Slavs who migrated—The consolation of those who remained—Good living in Hungary—The Protestant influence—Dubrovnik, refuge of the arts—How she smoothed her way—Her commercial enterprise—Her northern kinsmen and the military frontiers—The oppressive overlords of the Yugoslavs—The great migration under the Patriarch—Activities of the Southern Slavs under the Habsburgs—The position of their Church—Serbs assist the Bulgarian Renascence—The German colonists in the Banat—The Southern Slav colonists and their religion—Bunjevci, Šokci and Krašovani.

THE VENETIANS IN DALMATIA

One might argue that the Slav of Dalmatia had no gratitude, because when Serbia and Bosnia were utterly under the Turk, when the Slovenes of Carniola, Carinthia and Southern Styria suffered between 1463 and 1528 no less than ten Turkish invasions, when in the middle of that fifteenth century the crescent floated over all Croatia and only the fortified towns of the seacoast and the islands remained in the Christian hands of Venice, whom a fair number of these towns and islands had called in to protect them, surely one might argue that it was not seemly if the local population, Croats and Serbs, detested the Venetians. And on hearing that not long ago an orator in the Italian Parliament exclaimed, "I cani croati!"—a description that was greeted with a whirlwind of applause—you possibly might argue that the Speaker should have reprimanded him because ingratitude is not a quality associated with dogs.

As we gaze at the splendid structures, the palaces, the forts, the magnificent cathedral of Šibenik that was begun in 1443, the loggia of Trogir and Hvar, the loggia of Zadar—"a perfect example," we are told, "of a public court of justice of the Venetian period"—the towers on the old town-walls of Korčula, as we gaze at all those elegant and useful and robust and picturesque buildings which bear the sign of the Lion of St. Mark, do not the complaints of the disgruntled population of that period tax our patience?

We may waive the fact that the Šibenik cathedral was left unfinished for centuries, being only completed by public subscription under the Austrians; we may overlook the fact that the Lion of St. Mark was sometimes placed on a building not erected by the Venetians. This we can see at the Frankopan Castle on Krk, and elsewhere. But it would be unjust if we held Venice up to blame on account of some exuberant citizens. There are many other buildings in Dalmatia which undoubtedly were built by the Venetians: palaces and forts and walls and loggia which are perfect examples of a Venetian court of justice.

Some one may ask why the Venetians built no churches that were half as beautiful as those—say, St. Grisógono at Zadar, the cathedrals of Zadar and Trogir, and so forth—which were constructed under the Croatian kings. Well, the possession of such churches would have been a source of pride to the Dalmatians (and have kept awake the national spirit more than did the forts and loggia), and the Venetians wanted to preserve the people from the sin of pride. There was also a feeling that the Dalmatian forests were a source of pride to the people. So the Venetians removed them. They were able to make use of the wood for their numerous vessels, for the foundations of their palaces, and as an article of export to Egypt and Syria.[20]

Then some one else may ask about the schools. One must confess that the Venetians built no schools. But, nay dear sir, contemplate the curious carving round the windows of that palace, and then there is that perfect example of a Venetian court of justice. Was it not unreasonable for some of the Dalmatians to be discontented it they and their countrymen were allowed no schools, seeing that one did not need a school in order to be eligible for the army or commercial navy, which were the professions open to the natives of Dalmatia? With regard to those natives who really wanted to have a University diploma—well, the University of Padua was prepared to grant one without an examination; the "overseas subjects" could become doctors of medicine or of law on the simple production of a certificate from two doctors or two lawyers of their country, stating that the candidate was a capable person. Thereupon he was allowed to practise—in Dalmatia. And Venice herself was disposed to grant privileges, such as an exemption from all taxes, to those noblemen and burgesses and highly placed clergy who were well disposed to her. But as for schools, she could not ignore an anonymous work of the end of the sixteenth century, which was attributed to Fra Paolo Sarpi, the learned councillor of the Republic; he warned them in this book that "if you wish the Dalmatians to remain faithful to you, then keep them in ignorance," and again: "In proportion as Dalmatia is poor and a wilderness, so will her neighbours be less anxious to seize her."

With regard to roads—how could Venice be expected to build roads? They might have been of service to the population of the interior, but they would have caused a certain number of those people to devote themselves to trade, and thus would have prevented them from guarding the land against the Turk, which was the unquestioned duty of a man who lived in the interior.

When the Venetians retired from Dalmatia in 1797, after holding it for three to four hundred years, the country as a country was not flourishing. The total of exports and imports was such as would now satisfy a single large trader. But, of course, the land possessed those buildings with the Lion of St. Mark upon them—which were possibly put up with the idea of enhancing the prestige of the Republic—and it possessed the loggia.

In 1797 when the Austrians arrived they found in the prisons of Zadar that, out of two hundred convicts, fifty were beyond human punishment, and of these one had been dead for five years. The system was that the Government allotted to the prisoners for their subsistence a sum that was so inadequate that they were obliged to borrow from the warders; and when the prisoner had served his sentence and was unable to repay the warder, this functionary kept him under lock and key. There in the same dungeon lay the untried and the convicts and the insane, for whom there was no separate habitation. It was impossible, said those who set them free, to describe the horrors of filth, the bare ground not being even covered with straw, the windows being permanently closed with blocks of wood, so that the poor inmates could never get a glimpse of the loggia, that perfect example of a Venetian court of justice. The hospital at Split was a damp cellar, and outside it was a ditch of stinking water. The foundling home, which was called Pietà, was a room so horrible that, out of six hundred and three new-born children who had been there in ten years, not one had gone out alive.

But were not these abuses general at that epoch? And can we demand that the Venetians of that time shall answer the reproaches which it pleases us to make? And what answer did they give to the reproaches of their subjects, illustrious Dalmatians, such as Tommaseo and Pietro Alessandro Paravia, who, although belonging to the Italophil party, passed the sternest judgment on the authorities? What excuse could there be in 1797, seeing that, the wars having concluded at the beginning of the eighteenth century, Venice was free to undertake a humanitarian and civilizing work? Venice was by no means in a disarming state of decrepitude. On her own lands she had brought her stock-raising, her agriculture and her industries to such a pitch of development that she had the experience, as well as the initiative and the means, to do something for the Dalmatians who, and especially in the interior, knew no other trade than that of arms. Terrible was the desolation of those days; over large areas there was no drinking-water; the land was merely used to pasture the herds of almost wild cattle; instead of the superb forests were hundreds of miles of naked rock; and nowhere had the Venetian families, to whom the Government had given great holdings, come to settle down among their peasants. Nothing at all had been done in the way of canalization or of drainage, so that the land was devastated with malarial fever. In 1797 only 256,000 inhabitants remained; a hundred years later the number had doubled. It had much more than doubled if we take into account those who emigrated from a land which could no longer support the population of the early Middle Ages.

In 1797 the Venetian democrats begged Napoleon not to take Dalmatia from them, since the harbours and the population were indispensable to them. They made no allusion to the sentiments of affection which united these provinces to the Mother Country.

But are we unfair to the Venetians? Are we omitting the salient fact that, even if they were not model administrators, they at all events kept out the Turk, who would possibly have been more nefarious than themselves?... When troops were needed to fight the Turk these were for the most part provided, in the several long campaigns, by the Croats and Serbs of Dalmatia.

And what has been the fruit of all this? Let us take an Italian writer's observations on the people of the interior, the Morlaks.[21] In his book I Morlacchi (Rome, 1890), Signor Francesco Majnoni D'Intignano says that they are "endowed with courage and, like all courageous people, with frankness. They say what they think and their sentiments are openly displayed. Thus, for example, they do not attempt to conceal their antipathy against the Italians. They are no longer mindful of the benefits which they received in the past nor of the fact that the Venetians freed them from the Turkish yoke; and this is so not only because of the lapse of years, but because under the Venetian rule they did not feel themselves independent; they saw in the Italian merely that astuteness which knows how to profit from other people's toil, and which has no thought of making any payment. In the Italian they have no faith, and so their 'Lazmansko Viro' (Italian fidelity) is equivalent to the Romans' expression 'Greek fidelity.' But all this does not prevent them, when they have occasion to offer hospitality to an Italian, from offering it with every courtesy."

It is hardly worth while inquiring whether the Venetians or the Turks wrought more evil against their Yugoslav subjects. But though the modern Italian claim to Dalmatia and the islands may appear to us—in so far as it is based on historical grounds—to have small weight, nevertheless we must not allow it to make us insensible to the Venetian's good qualities. It may not nowadays be reckoned as meritorious that, after her own interests had been safeguarded, she did not interfere with the privileges of the small class of nobles, the "magnifica communità nobile," but at any rate it could be said of her that she left intact the local privileges. One must also bear in mind that the majority of her subjects in those parts had, through one cause or another, a prejudice against innovations which could only be broken down very gradually.

Nor were the Turks altogether vicious. Those who came first into the Yugoslav lands were under a severe discipline, and, preserving the austere habits of a warlike race, they were not guilty—generally speaking—of excesses. As the first comers were not very numerous, they contented themselves with occupying the strategic points; and as the Yugoslavs were accustomed to the life of a State not being very prolonged, they were cheered by the thought that their subjugation to the Turk would fairly soon come to an end.

METHODS OF THE TURK

After the Turk had made himself master of Bosnia and Herzegovina he enrolled among his janissaries 30,000 of the young men, and in other parts of Yugoslavia showed himself inclined at first to permit the people to follow their own traditions, their religion,[22] their language and their customs, so long as he was maintained in luxury and so long as a sufficient supply of young men was forthcoming. The abominable acts of cruelty, by which he is now remembered in the Balkans, appear to have started at a later period, when he had himself degenerated, when his lawless soldiery provoked the people, when the people rose and he suppressed them in a manner that would make them hesitate to rise again. But from the first he saw to it that there should be recruits; many a young Slav taken early from his home was transformed at Constantinople into a redoubtable janissary who fought against Europeans; these troops, who were not allowed to marry, gave an absolute obedience. They were perhaps the finest infantry in the world—for two hundred years they formed the strongest prop of the Turkish Empire. Paulus Jovius, the historian, says that in 1531 nearly the whole corps of janissaries spoke Slav. Other young men were received into the Government offices—the Porte, until the end of the seventeenth century, used the Serbian language for its international transactions; its treaties with the Holy Roman Empire, for example, were all made out in Serbian and Greek. Finally there were not wanting Southern Slavs who rose to high distinction in the Sultan's service, such as Mehemet Sokolović, who, after being thrice pasha of Bosnia, was elevated to the post of grand vizier; Achmet Pasha Herzegović (son of the last chief of Herzegovina), whose conversion was followed by an appointment as Bey of Anatolia; he became brother-in-law of Sultan Bajazet ii. and likewise grand vizier. There was Sinan Pasha, a Bosnian, who constructed in Čajnica, his native place, the handsome mosque that still exists, and there was the renowned Osman Pasvantoölu Pasha, also of Bosnian origin, who appeared in 1794 outside the historic fortress called Baba Vida (Grandmother Vida), of the dusty, old rambling town of Vidin on the Danube. Having won his way into the fortress he was elected governor, and a year later he became Pasha. His independence was remarkable even at a period when Mahmud Bushatli Pasha flourished at Scutari and Ali Pasha at Jannina, so that Lamartine described Turkey in Europe as "une confédération d'anarchies." Pasvantoölu coined his own money, and, amongst other exploits, placed on the outside of a mosque his own monogram instead of the Caliph's emblem. Therefore the outraged Sultan sent against him three armies in succession, and each of them went back from Vidin vanquished. The pasha was a brave and energetic man of iron will, a great soldier and an expert architect. He built famous places of worship, whose gilded arabesques, whose fountains in the silent courts may bring us to meditate on one who died in 1807, three years after the first insurrection of his fellow-Yugoslav, Kara George. In Pasvantoölu's great library at Vidin there are one hundred and twelve books on scientific and literary matters. The Pasha was venerated and was regarded almost with dread for having managed to assemble so many volumes dealing with other than spiritual affairs.

THE SLAVS WHO MIGRATED

But, apart from the Bogomiles, the number of those who of their own free will went over to the Turks was scanty. Far more numerous were those who abandoned their country and crossed the Danube to Hungary, to Transylvania, to Wallachia, to Bessarabia, thus returning with weary hearts to some of the places which, a thousand years before, had seen their shaggy ancestors come trooping westward. What they heard in the Banat, the part of southern Hungary they came to first, must have induced a large proportion of them to remain, for they were told by those who had migrated after Kossovo, in the days of old George Branković and of Stephen the son of Dušan, that this was a good land and that the masters of it, the Hungarians, were much more easy to live under than the Turks. Not that it was necessary to live under them, because one could settle in the lands or in the towns which had been given by some arrangement to Stephen and to George Branković. These were lands so wide that all the Slav wanderers could make a home on them; they extended to the river Maroš and even beyond it. If they settled in one of those districts it would be under one of their own leaders and judges, not those of the Hungarians. There did not seem to be many Hungarians, and perhaps that was why they wanted other people in the country, especially now that the Turk was not far off. If anyone decided to live under the Hungarians, that also was much better than under the Turks; in this country of fine horses you were not prevented from going on horseback. Then it was much easier to speak to the Hungarians, because a great many words in their language, particularly the words which had to do with agriculture, seemed to be Slav. So alluring, in fact, was the state of things in the Banat, as these people painted it, that many of the immigrants, in their relief and happiness, wanted to hear no more. They scarcely listened while they were being told about the Slav settlers, in pretty large numbers, who had been there longer still, people who said that they had lived there always, even before the building of the Slav monasteries, and some of these were three or four hundred years old, as could be proved by rescripts of the Popes. Likewise those who had always lived there reported that some of their own race had been great men—one had been the Palatine of Hungary in the days when King Stephen ii. was a child, another was the Palatine Belouch, brother to Queen Helen; and were not the monasteries there to remind one of the leaders, the voivodas, who liked to raise such temples so that prayers could be said for the repose of their souls?

It was known that a people which professed the same religion as themselves—"a people of shepherds," as King Andrew II. called them in a decree dated 1222, the time of their first appearance in Hungary—it was known that these Roumanians from Wallachia were just advancing from Caras-Severin, the most easterly of the three counties of the Banat, into Temes, which is the central one. But even if they came farther west it did not seem to matter; one had a kindly feeling for them, since there was a good deal of Slav in their language, and if they were averse from building monasteries, that was their own affair. They had, it was interesting to learn, invited a Serb, the same man who had erected Krushedol monastery in Syrmia, to build one at least as imposing for them at a place called Argesu, to the north of Bucharest.

Thus one cannot be surprised that hundreds and thousands of Serbs and Bulgars quitted their native lands—they were not known to the Turks as Serbs and Bulgars, but merely as raia of the province of Rumili—and crossed the Danube, the Serbs going chiefly to their own countryfolk in Banat and the lands to the west of it, while the Bulgars went partly to the Banat, where their descendants have won fame as market-gardeners, but chiefly to Roumania, settling in villages round Bucharest.

THE CONSOLATION OF THOSE WHO REMAINED

Those who preferred to take arms against the Turk had the choice either of leaving their country and entering the service of one which was at war with Turkey or else abiding in their own land, gathering in bodies of fifty to a hundred men, massacring as many Turks as possible, protecting and avenging their own people, sometimes being killed themselves, otherwise returning to the mountains every spring. The "heiduks," as they were called, had the people's unbounded devotion. Their achievements, perhaps a little touched with romance, were celebrated in the people's songs, and as it may be of interest to know what kind of song this people made in the period of uttermost depression, I give overleaf a couple that are concerned with heiduks; they are translations from a book of mine, The Shade of the Balkans, which is out of print.

I.

Go now and tell them,
Tell your companions
That, O Heiduk,
I have cut off your hands.

Cut away, cut away,
For I did curse them
When, O Buljuk Pasha,
They trembled on the gun.

Go now and tell them,
Tell your companions
That, O heiduk,
I have pricked out your eyes.

Prick away, prick away,
For I did curse them
When, O Buljuk Pasha,
They failed along the gun.

Go now and tell them,
Tell your companions
That, O heiduk,
I have hacked off your head.

Hack away, hack away,
For I did curse it
When, O Buljuk Pasha,
It compassed not your end.

II.

O Mechmed,[23] my beloved son,
Have you come wounded back to me?
Where is your pipe and your heiduk garb?
—Ask me not, ask me not.
Ask me rather where are my comrades.
With six hundred I went to the mountains—
Six of them live and brought me hither,
Brought me though themselves were wounded.
A little time and I must die,—
Call everyone of those I love,
For I would take my leave of them.

When all were come young Mechmed said:
Mother, how long will you mourn for me?
—Till I step down to you in darkness.
Father, how long will you mourn for me?
—Till the raven's wing is white
And I see grapes on the willow-tree.
Sisters, how long will you mourn for me?
—Till we have babes to sing asleep.
How long will you mourn, my beloved?
—Till I go down among the flowers
And bring a nosegay back for him.

The Turk had thrown aside any toleration he started with. The Patriarchate of Peć, which they had for a time left intact, was now abolished and was not again permitted until 1557, when its re-establishment was due to the efforts of Mehemet Sokolović, the grand vizier from Bosnia, who raised to the Patriarchate his brother the monk Macarius. Every school in Serbia and Bulgaria was closed, so that no teaching could be given anywhere save in the monasteries; it is said to be a fact—I have it from Dr. Zmejanović, lately Bishop of Veršac—that when Kara George, the beloved and illiterate heiduk, made his first insurrection, there were, in addition to the monks, precisely eight individuals in Serbia—their names are recorded—who could read and write. Thus the absence of printing-presses was not greatly felt: in Bulgaria there was now no press at all, in Serbia a few prayer-books were roughly printed in the monasteries; but in the sixteenth century the monks, for the copying of these books, had reverted to the use of pen and ink.

There had been in the bygone days, in the empires of Simeon and Dušan, for example, a privileged class, commonly called an aristocracy, which as elsewhere had arisen from the people having been obliged to submit themselves to military discipline.... And it was in those dreary days when all the raia felt themselves as brothers[24] that the Serb and Bulgar planted that democracy which flourishes among them now. They saw what dangers threatened in the towns. Vuk Karajič, the reformer of the Serbian language, tells of certain merchants there who, by assuming Turkish apparel and customs, came to be no longer counted as Serbs. And more numerous by far were the townsfolk, nobles and merchants and others, who went to live among the countryfolk and intermarried with them, and produced a people which is better described not as a democracy, but as an aristocracy.

GOOD LIVING IN HUNGARY

And always we hear that those in the Banat and those in the still more fertile province of Bačka, to the west of it, or those who had gone even farther west, into the wine-growing hills of Baranja, had no reason to regret their enterprise. King Matthew Corvinus of Hungary writes to the Pope on the 12th of January 1483, informing him that 200,000 Serbs have come into the Banat and Bačka since 1479. He adds that he is favourably disposed towards them, as they are a fighting race of the first order, so that he can trust them to defend those provinces against the Turk.... Not only, therefore, did he bestow upon them exceptional privileges, but in 1471 he appointed Vuk, the grandson of George Branković, to be Serbian despot of southern Hungary. This newly organized dominion on the left bank of the Danube and the Save was much more important than those of Transylvania or of Szekeliek, which were held by Hungarian magnates and which, in the event of war, had to furnish, each of them, four hundred horsemen, whereas the Serbian despot undertook to furnish a thousand.

The earliest Serbian settlement in Baranja appears to have consisted of natives of the Morava valley who came in 1508 to a district near Ciklos. The king made over the castle of Ciklos to their leader, Stephen Stiljanović, called the Just, and when the Turks broke into Baranja they murdered him. History[25] relates that some years after this on the 14th of August the pasha, a man of Serbian origin, commanded that the corpse be exhumed; whereupon a ring on the dead man's finger proved that he was related to the pasha. According to the Turkish rules of that period it was illegal to celebrate the Mass except at night, and in the open air. Now every year on the night of the 14th of August a Mass is sung, with the congregation holding torches and candles, out on the side of a hill. Afterwards they dance, and so forth.

However, it was the Banat to which the Serbs chiefly rallied, and after the fall of the fortress of Belgrade in 1521 they came in such multitudes that large portions of it had an exclusively Serbian character. And they were given the sole charge of defending it, while the Hungarians retired to the north. But Hungary herself went down at the terrific battle of Mohács—10,000 Serbs under their voivoda, Paul, fought in the Hungarian ranks—and after the fall of Buda-Pest the political organization of the Serbs, with a despot as their ruler, came to an end, being replaced by a religious organization, at the head of which was the restored Patriarchate of Peć. The diocese which the Patriarchs from their not very accessible monastery were supposed to administrate included all the Serbs between Monastir and Buda-Pest, and from the Adriatic to the Struma River. It was at this time that in the other Yugoslav lands, to the west and north, there came a breath of wind from the Reformation.

THE PROTESTANT INFLUENCE

When the German reformers tried, by way of the Yugoslavs, to reach Rome, they found a printing-press at Urach, from which, between 1561 and 1564, a number of books in Glagolitic characters (and in Cyrillic, a special form thereof) were issued. The most cultivated of the Glagolitic clergy in Istria and the Croatian littoral, such as Antony Dalmatin, Primus Trubar the Slovene and George Jurišić, were enthusiastic in seconding the press and in seeking, as writers, to disseminate Protestantism in the Slav world. One of their most notable fellow-workers was Matthew Vlacić (Mathias Flacius Illyricus), professor at the Universities of Wittenberg, Jena, Strassbourg and Antwerp, a veritable encyclopædist of the Reformation, and, with Luther and Melanchthon, one of its leaders. A very distinguished man, who had already, about 1550, joined the Protestant Church, was Peter Paul Vergerius; before 1550 he had twice been Papal Nuncio in Germany, a bishop in Croatia and afterwards in Istria. The rank and file of the Glagolitic clergy received these books with joy, for the Roman hierarchy, which had small liking for this truly national Church, would have been glad to see it perish in ignorance, with no books and no culture. By the way, the lower clergy remained what they had been—a national clergy. They availed themselves of these Glagolitic books from the Protestant press, but for that reason were not going to become Protestants. Theological subtleties were repugnant to them, and before and after the Council of Trent they married and lived a family life.

DUBROVNIK, REFUGE OF THE ARTS

The intellectual life of the Yugoslavs would, but for Dubrovnik, have died out altogether. And even at Dubrovnik, of which the Southern Slav thinks always with pride and gratitude, there was a movement to turn away from the Slav world. This was certainly one of the periods, which reappear not seldom in the story of Dubrovnik, when it seemed that miracles of wisdom would be wanted for the steering of the ship of State. Venice and the Turkish Empire were as two tremendous waves that rose on either side. By a very clever show of yielding, the little Republic had for a time disarmed the Turks, and, later on, when the Venetians declared that all the commercial treaties existing between the Dalmatian towns and Turkey were void, it was necessary for Dubrovnik also to accommodate herself to this enactment and to restrict her trade to Spain and the African coast. It would under these circumstances be most imprudent, so urged some of the citizens of Dubrovnik, if they were officiously to advertise their relationship to the hapless Slavs, who were enslaved to the Republic's mighty neighbours. And in 1472 the Senate had directed that within its walls no speeches should henceforth be made in Slav. But as the Senate consisted of forty-five nobles, and these were obliged to be over forty years of age, one may say that they did not represent what was most virile in the State; at all events, this isolated tribute to expediency may for a time have been observed in that assemblage, in the world of letters it was disregarded. And this is the more wonderful when we remember that Dubrovnik had from Italy a language that was already formed, she had Italian models and printers and even their literary taste. But Šiško Menčetic and Džore Držić—both of them nobles, by the way—started at once to write verses in Slav; not very sublime verses, as they were principally love-songs of the school that imitated Petrarch, but it is pleasing to recall that they were written in spite of the thunders of Elias Crijević, a contemporary renegade. Under the name of Elias di Cerva this gentleman travelled to Rome, where he made himself a disciple of Pomponius Lætus and once more modified his good Slav name into Ælius Lampridius Cerva, and received at the Quirinal Academy the crown of Latin poetry. Having thus qualified himself to be a schoolmaster, he went back to Dubrovnik and settled down to that profession. He was likewise very active as a publicist on the "barbaric" Slav language, which, as he was never tired of screaming, was a menace both to Latin and Italian. One is apt to call those persons reasonable, among other things, whose opinions coincide with one's own; but is there anybody willing to assert that because the Slav culture of that epoch was, like many another culture, inferior to the Italian; because the Italian towns were in the rays of artistic glory, whereas the Slav world was not; because on that account the Slavs were wise enough to profit from the Italian masters; is there anyone who, because some of the Slavs were and are unwise enough to be more Italian than the Italians, will assert that the Slav has no right to develop a national art, a national State?

It is superfluous to make a catalogue of those Ragusan writers who were more or less successful in purging their Slav language of Italianisms. Luckily they had at their doors the language of Herzegovina, which is unanimously considered by philologists to be the purest of the Serbo-Croat dialects. The most considerable of these writers was Gundulić, although he never could forget that his productions must be pious, and, beyond all other aims, present a moral. It was in Poland that he saw the liberator of the Southern Slavs, and what he sings in Osman, his chief work, is the overthrow of Sultan Osman ii. by Vladislav, heir to the Polish throne. As this poem of the seventeenth century, this flowering of the Slav spirit, might be looked upon as assailing "the integrity of the Turkish Empire," it was only allowed to circulate in MS. until 1830. According to Dr. Murko,[26] Professor of Slav Language and Literature at the University of Leipzig, this work surpasses Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered; but it is commonly thought that there is more literary merit in Gundulić's Dubravka, a lovely, patriotic pastoral. The worthy Franciscan Kačić,[27] who followed him with a work—Familiar Conversations on the Slovene Nation—would perhaps be regarded by us as more remarkable for his originality; but this patriotic production, in verse and in prose, didactic, chronological, allegorical and epic, has made him immortal. Beginning with Teuta, the first king of the Slovene nation, who flourished, says the author, about the year 3732 B.C., he proceeds imperturbably and sometimes in moving numbers to relate the lives and virtues of all the other Slovene kings, be they Bosnian, Croat, Serbian, Bulgarian; it may well be that the secret of his vogue is, in the words of the critic Lucianović, that "he was less a minstrel of the past than of the future." On the fruitful island of Hvar (Lesina) there arose an exquisite lyric poet, Lucić, whose romantic drama Robinja (The Female Slave) is said to have great importance in the history of the modern theatre; but the most famous of Hvar's poets was Hektorović (1487-1572). "This nobleman with his democratic ideas," says the Russian savant Petrovski in speaking of his Ribanje (Fishing), "is the intimate friend of his fisher-folk, the singers of national songs, and with his remarkable realism he was three centuries before his time." When we finally note that at Zadar in the sixteenth century there was written Planine (The Mountains), in which Zoranić gave us the most patriotic work of mediæval Yugoslav literature, we may say at least that the Dalmatian Yugoslavs did not abandon hope.

By the way, these remarks on the Slav literature of Dalmatia may be thought otiose, for the national aspirations would not have been less fervent if they had been expressed in Italian. One is reminded by the well-known Italian writer, Giuseppe Prezzolini,[28] that until last century the ruling classes of Piedmont spoke French; Alfieri and Cavour had to "learn Italian," but who would on this account pretend that Piedmont is a French province? There is really nothing strange in the fact that the Pan-Slavist newspaper L'Avenire, published at Dubrovnik from August 1848 until March 1849 by Dr. Casnačić, was written in Italian, or that those Irish who desire to be free from their hated oppressor have not completely given up the use of his language.

HOW SHE SMOOTHED HER WAY

We have alluded to the caution of Dubrovnik, and one must confess that in her story are such parlous situations, out of which there was apparently no rescue, that in reading of them one is more and more astonished at her customary enterprise. How did she succeed, for instance, in contributing thirteen vessels to the fleet which Charles V. sent against Tunis in 1535 without disturbing in the slightest her good relations with the Sultan? All that she asked for was peace, and so she paid a large sum to the Sultan every year, as also to the pirates of Barbary, so that she could continue to navigate freely; in the fifteenth century she had three hundred ships that were seen in all parts of the Mediterranean and even in England. She had been wont to pay five hundred ducats a year to the Kings of Hungary, and now and then, when it was opportune, she sent this tribute to the Austrian Archdukes, the rightful heirs of Hungary. To the captain of the Gulf of Venice she dispatched every year a piece of plate, to the King of the Two Sicilies she presented a dozen falcons, with a very respectful letter, and the Pope, who was not forgotten, overlooked her annual tribute to the Turk and proclaimed her to be the outer defences of Christianity. (Let it not be forgotten that in 1451, four centuries before Wilberforce's anti-slavery campaign, the Republic by a vote of 75 out of a total of 78 forbade its citizens to traffic in slaves, and declared all slaves found on its territory to be free. "Such traffic," it said, "is base and contrary to all humanity ... namely, that the human form, made after the image and similitude of our Creator, should be turned to mercenary profit and sold as if it were brute beast.")

But of all the markets of the merchants of Dubrovnik, those which from the days of old they most frequented, were the markets of the Balkans. To Bulgaria and Serbia, Albania and Bosnia, they brought the products of the West and of their own factories: the cloth and metal goods, the silver and gold ornaments, the weapons, axes, harness, glass, soap, perfumes, southern fruits, fish oil and herbs; and most of all they valued their monopoly of salt, a most remunerative privilege. As they could not obtain sufficient of it in their own immediate territory, the Senate made a regulation that each vessel which came back after a voyage of four years must bring a cargo of salt. This was Dubrovnik's chief source of revenue until the end of her independence in 1808, and efforts that were made by others to break down this monopoly led to bitter conflicts. With regard to the goods which they carried home with them from the Balkans, these comprised cattle and cheese, dried fish from the Lake of Scutari, hides of the wolf and fox and stag, wax, honey, wool and rough wood-wares, and unworked metals. Some of the Balkan mines, such as the silver mines of Novo Brdo in Serbia, they worked themselves, even as the Saxons whom we find thus engaged in various parts of these lands. Under the Turkish domination it must have been with joy that the caravans from Dubrovnik were welcomed, bringing news of the one Southern Slav State which remained free and prosperous. A good many of these wandering merchants took Serbian or Bulgarian wives.

HER COMMERCIAL ENTERPRISE

If the men from Dubrovnik were able to bring happy tidings of their own Republic, such as the report, perhaps a little exaggerated, that the wealth of those who lived in the street of merchants, which runs parallel to the stately thoroughfare, the Stradone, amounted to a hundred million ducats, they were able to give very little news of the more distant Southern Slavs. The Serbs had not forgotten that brothers of theirs were living in the north-west. If in the days of the Turkish oppression they had been inclined to be oblivious of the Croats, yet they could not but remember that Dušan's sister had married the Croatian prince, Mladen III. There is no incident connected with Dušan that is not treasured in the memory of the Serbs.

HER NORTHERN KINSMEN AND THE MILITARY FRONTIERS

For a long time the Habsburgs had been planning to employ the Croats, who were excellent troops, as a bulwark against the Turks. And although Ferdinand of Habsburg, on being elected to the throne of Croatia on the 1st of January 1527, had sworn to respect the ancient rights and traditions of the realm, his heirs favoured more and more a policy of centralization; and in 1578, taking advantage of a serious agrarian conflict between nobles and peasants in Croatia, the Habsburgs instituted the Military Frontiers, the famous Vojna Krajina, one for Croatia proper, with Karlovac as capital, the other for the adjacent Slavonia, with the capital at Varazdin. Croatia's autonomy was ignored.

This method of guarding the frontiers had been employed by the Romans, who made over lands to non-commissioned officers and men on condition that their male descendants rendered military service. Those men who had no children received no lands. Alexander Severus, who introduced this arrangement, used to say that a man would fight better if at the same time he were defending his own hearth. Under Diocletian the "miles castellani" or "limitanei," as they were termed, had slaves and cattle allotted to them, so that the land's development should not be hindered through lack of labour or on account of the owners losing the physical capacity for work.

The Habsburgs were assisted in their scheme by various causes, one of which was the poverty of the soil in certain parts of Croatia, so that it came as a relief to many of the struggling inhabitants that for the future they would be provided for. The greatest misery was also prevalent at this time in consequence of the plague which desolated parts of Croatia and Istria. The distress was particularly acute in Istria, where between the years 1300 and 1600 the plague was rampant on thirty-nine occasions, the town of Triest being visited in ten different years between 1502 and 1558; and in the year 1600 the port of Pola was reduced to four hundred inhabitants. Venice attempted to colonize the desert places with Italian farmers, but having failed on account of malaria and the lack of water, she called in a more vigorous element, the Slav from Dalmatia and Bosnia. Meanwhile the towns, in which were the descendants of those who had come from Italy in the days of the Roman Empire, fell more profoundly into decay. Those western towns looked on the Slav with disdain, they would not mingle with the rural population; but as these were much more active and were often strengthened by fresh immigrants, one thought that they would gradually swamp the more effete men of the towns. And, on the other hand, the townsmen weakened their position by continually breaking, on account of economic disputes, the ties between themselves and Venice. And as example of their frequent attitude towards Venice, we may take the words which the deputies of Triest used in 1518 in the presence of the Emperor Maximilian: "We would all of us prefer to die," they said, "rather than to fall under the domination of Venice." Such language may, of course have been a compliment; and yet it does not seem unlikely that the people of Triest had some knowledge of the ruin and death that were overtaking all the Dalmatian towns with the one exception of Dubrovnik, which was independent.

Allusion has been made to the Slavs who came from Bosnia; one may ask how it was that the Turks allowed them to depart. On such an extensive frontier it would not be difficult for people to escape; that they did so is made evident by all the solemn treaty clauses which declared that they should be forthwith delivered to their rightful owners. The Turks were quite as ready to bind themselves in this fashion. There is, for example, the treaty which settles what travelling expenses the Venetians are to pay to the emissary of the Pasha of Travnik on his way to Zadar, how much velvet, how many loaves of sugar and how many pots of theriac must be provided for each member of his entourage; and in the same treaty it is laid down that the Turks are to give up all those who have deserted to them, yea even if they have become Muhammedans. But the Turkish authorities never heard of any such people. And the Slavs were passing to and fro from one Yugoslav land to another, always thinking that in the new land life must be more tolerable.

THE OPPRESSIVE OVERLORDS OF THE YUGOSLAVS

Now and then we hear of insurrections; thus the Serbs of the Banat revolted in 1594, allied themselves to Prince Batthory of Transylvania and offered him the Serbian crown. With an army of Serbs and Hungarians the Prince appeared on the Danube with the intention of aiding the Bulgars. He won a splendid victory over the Turk, but in gaining it he had exhausted himself, and the Turk took his usual revenge. In Croatia the absolutist policy of Leopold I. exasperated the people to such an extent that they forgot their quarrels with the Magyars in order to be able to defend their rights against the attacks of Vienna. The Hungarian-Croatian magnates, amongst whom were the Croats Peter Zrinsky, the Ban, and Christopher Frankopan, conspired to overthrow the Habsburgs. When the plot was discovered the conspirators were executed in 1671 at Wiener Neustadt. In the spring of 1919, when the bones of these two patriots were brought back to Croatia and buried after a series of imposing and most moving ceremonies, Austria was in such a state of hunger that she waived her good taste and received what she had exacted for the bones, namely, five hundred trucks of meat and potatoes. After the battle of Vienna in 1683 both Serbs and Bulgars rose, for it seemed to many hopeful people that the Turk was on the point of dissolution. There was an outbreak in the Bulgarian mountain village of Čiprovtsi, but this was suffocated with such ferocity that for more than a hundred years the Bulgar would not make another effort. The spirit of the Slav appeared to have gone out of him. Wars that were disastrous to Turkey brought the Russians to the Danube and the Austrians to within twelve leagues of Sofia, but the Bulgar stayed at home with his black memories. A better fortune attended the Serbs who flocked to the standard of George Branković, a descendant of the old despots, in the Banat. With the goodwill of Leopold I. they fought by the side of his own troops, and after these latter were withdrawn, in consequence of the new campaign against Louis XIV., the Serbs continued to wage war with the Turks, and so successfully that Leopold became anxious lest Branković should found an independent Serbian State. He therefore caused him and the leaders of his army to be captured. Branković was brought, a prisoner, to Vienna. He survived in captivity at Eger for twenty-two years.[29]

THE GREAT MIGRATION UNDER THE PATRIARCH

In the year 1690 there happened the vast exodus of 30,000 Serbian families who migrated across the Danube and the Save under the leadership of the Patriarch of Peć, Arsenius Čarnoević. An oleograph of a picture illustrating this event is found in almost every Serbian house, be it private house or Government building. These refugees settled in Syrmia, Slavonia, the Banat and Bačka, and received from the Emperor certain rights, such as that of electing their voivoda (duke), of owning land, and so forth; their privileges were not always respected, but the Serbian immigrants remained faithful to Austria.... The land of Peć, from which the Patriarch fled, with the neighbouring Djakovica and Prizren, became Muhammedan Albanian territories.

[Mr. Brailsford[30] in 1903 found that in these parts the Albanian was overwhelmingly predominant, and that he refused to tolerate the claims of the Serbian minority. Saying that his race, descended from the Illyrians, was the most ancient in the Peninsula, he objected to this particular region being called Old Serbia simply because it was once upon a time conquered by Dušan. In 1903 the Serbs of the district of Prizren and Peć numbered 5000 householders against 20,000 to 25,000 Albanians. As for the towns: "In Prizren," said an Albanian, "there are two European families, while the soil of Djakovica is still clean."[31] The life which these people led was one of misery—tribute in some form or other had to be given to an Albanian bravo, who made himself that family's protector, and, in spite of that, the holding of any property, house or land or chattels, seems to have depended on Albanian caprice, and the physical state of the Serbs was wretched, through lack of nourishment and disease. Various efforts had been made to render the land more endurable for those who were not Muhammedan Albanians; for example, a Christian gendarmerie was introduced, but as they were not allowed to carry arms they spent their useless days in the police stations. They filled the Albanians with scorn, and made them shout more vociferously their cry of "Albania for the Albanian tribes!" Under these conditions it says much for the stamina of the Serbs that they persisted in their old faith; a certain number—Mr. Brailsford came across some of them in the district of Gora, near Prizren—have been converted to Islam, but in secret observe their old religion.]

A Serbian historian, Mr. Tomić of the Belgrade National Library, has now discovered that these uncompromising Muhammedan Albanians are not—as previous Serbian and other historians have written—descended from Albanians who flowed into the country because of its evacuation by the Patriarch Arsenius and his flock. When the Austrian armies penetrated to this region in the winter of 1689-1690, the Imperialists were on good terms both with the Serbian Orthodox people whom they found there and with the Albanian Catholics; but after the death of Piccolomini on the 8th of December (which was followed by that of the Catholic Archbishop), his successor, the Duke of Holstein, alienated the people, and when they would not obey his commands he set fire to their villages, this alienating them completely. The fortune of war then turned against the Austrians, who were compelled to retreat, and the Serbian Patriarch, with his treasury and a number of priests and monks, fled with them. They hoped that this exodus was to be of a temporary character, but in 1690 the Imperialists had to continue their retreat, taking with them across the Save and the Danube not only the Serbs who had, like Arsenius, sought refuge in Serbia, but a far more numerous body whose domicile had always been Serbia itself. What tells against the theory of the 30,000 families from Peć and Old Serbia is the fact that the Turkish troops followed so closely on the heels of the Austrians that the Patriarch and his clergy had great trouble in escaping themselves, and in addition to the Turk there was the difficulty of those mountain roads in the middle of winter. Thus it seems likely that most of the Serbian population of what is called Old Serbia remained there. The previous historians, who say that such a vast number followed the Patriarch and his priests, have based themselves, it appears, on the notes and chronicles of those priests. And the people, deprived of the guidance of their priests—who were then the spiritual and lay and military leaders—found it difficult to stand out against conversion. Half a century before this a great many Catholic and Orthodox Serbs of those parts had embraced Islam, in order to escape the financial and military burdens which were laid on Christian men; the women and girls would continue to profess Christianity. This phenomenon is described by many travellers, such as Gregory Massarechi, a Catholic missionary for Prizren and the neighbourhood, who says in his report of 1651 that in the village of Suha Reka on the left bank of the White Drin there used to be one hundred and fifty Christian houses, but that he only found thirty-six or thirty-seven Christian women, the men having all gone over to Islam. People were wont to come secretly to him for confession and to communicate; he tells how these converted men would marry Christian women, but would leave them Christian all their lives, and only on his deathbed would a man ask his wife to be converted also.

The Prophet had also found his way into many households of Montenegro, where the clans, with neither civil nor military government, had been compelled, for their protection, to live in a patriarchal fashion: the people—that is, the chiefs of the clans—elected a bishop and gathered round him as the champion of their religion against Islam. Until the time of Danilo (1697-1737) there had been fourteen bishops. During his reign the problem of Turkish penetration was taken in hand. It was intolerable that Montenegrin families should stand well with the Sultan because one of their members had gone over to Islam. The small, untidy village of Virpazar, by the Lake of Scutari, has got a certain fame, because the chosen men who were to purge the country of this evil started out from there on Christmas Eve in 1703. Those who participated in the "Montenegrin Vespers" were not likely to forget the incidents of that impressive ceremony. The Bishop celebrated Mass, and from the consecrated tapers in his hand the people lit their own. Every man was armed. They knelt—their tapers hardly trembling—and they kissed the sacred image which the Bishop held. Then he blessed their weapons and they sallied forth, running round the lake and climbing up the rough, long road to Cetinje. Every house was visited in which there was a Moslem, and the choice was given of repudiation or of death. With such missionaries and with subjects such as these to work upon, you could not hope that the negotiations would be quite pacific. Many of the Moslem, young and old, were slaughtered, and when Mass was sung on Christmas morning in the rugged, little monastery of Cetinje, many of the chosen men assembled, weary but content, and gave whole-hearted thanks to God that Montenegro had been liberated from the scourge.

As for those who came under the influence of Islam in Old Serbia, they were left after 1737 even more to their own resources, as the zone which united them to the main body of Serbs was depleted by another great exodus, under Patriarch Arsenius IV., Šakabenta. But, although these men of Serbian origin preserve sometimes this or that peculiarly Serbian custom, yet, as Mr. Tomić says:[32] "Living together with the Muhammedan Albanians, they have assumed the Albanian type and become the most savage foes of the Orthodox religion and of the people from which they are sprung. The popular saying," he adds, "is right which asserts that: 'A Christian become a Turk is worse than a real Turk.'" Of course, in order to make it appear that he was a real Albanian, there was always a tendency for an Albanized Serb to be preternaturally oppressive. And up to a short time ago it was very cold comfort for the Serbs to learn that many of these people are of Serbian ancestry. But, as we shall see further on, the old, mediæval friendship between the Serbian and Albanian rulers is extending to the people, and this—provided that a sinister external pressure can be warded off—will bear good fruit.

On behalf of the afore-mentioned 30,000 families the Patriarch negotiated with the Habsburgs and obtained very far-reaching rights, which permitted the Serbian people to form in Hungary a corpus separatum. A point which to Serbian eyes had extreme importance was the institution of a National Congress, to sit at Karlovci on the Danube in Syrmia, and, amongst other functions, to designate the Patriarch, whose seat was to be (and remains to this day) Karlovci, where a friendly white village on the rising ground, which anyhow would make it famous for the red wine and plum brandy, has received in its midst the marble palace of the Patriarch, a gorgeous church and various magnificent red and white buildings which look like so many Government offices but are, in fact, devoted to Church affairs, the training of theological students and so forth. Their Patriarchate at Karlovci appeared to the Serbs as the rock of their nationality outside Serbia. The Constitution granted to them did not make them precisely a State within a State, but at least it set up a political-religious unity—for the privileges included those of having a chief, the voivoda, and of having a certain territory with autonomous internal organization and exemption from all taxes. Here the Serbs, forming a separate and distinct group, with their own religion, calendar and alphabet, and with their own aspirations, would be able to stretch out their hands—prudently, of course—to their scattered brothers. So the Serbs began to whisper to the Croats of the ancient days; the Croats heard them gladly, but they could not stop another voice from whispering as well. They had lived for so long with another religion, another civilization, their eyes had been turned in other directions, their hearts been filled with other hopes. And now it was as if the modern voice was being interrupted by the ancient voice. The Croats were inclined to ask the interrupter to be silent, but they found they could not live without him.

ACTIVITIES OF THE SOUTHERN SLAVS UNDER THE HABSBURGS

In the Banat and elsewhere under Habsburg rule the Serbs were filling their accustomed part and fighting, now against the Turk and now against Rakoczi's insurrection, during which, between 1703 and 1711, they are said to have lost about a hundred thousand men. Prince Eugene of Savoy, in whose campaigns they took a large share, described them as "his best scouts, his lightest cavalry, his most trusted garrisons." And they are rewarded—Joseph i., making use of very chosen phrases, insists on the merits of the Serbs and confirms their privileges. And until the Treaty of Pojarevac these privileges are maintained immune. This treaty came at the conclusion of the 1716-1718 war against the Turks; it put the Banat in the hands of Austria, who made it a Crown-land, with military government and autonomous administration. From this time onward the country, which had had an exclusively Serbian colouring, begins to receive an influx of strangers. The German governing class introduce Germans from the Rhine, from Saxony, from Würtemberg, Bavaria, Upper and Lower Austria and Tirol. Not only are these colonists settled in some of the most fertile parts, but Vienna also makes enormous grants of land in the Banat to lofty military personages and to families of the aristocracy, and these in their turn assist the immigration of Germans.

But before the Habsburgs could continue in their efforts to assimilate, by one process or another, the Southern Slavs in the Empire, it was necessary to induce them to accept the Pragmatic Sanction, for Charles VI., the reigning Emperor, had lost his only son and wished to secure the succession to Maria Theresa. It is interesting to see that Croatia negotiated independently of Hungary, that she recognized the Pragmatic Sanction in 1713, whereas the Magyars did not do so until 1733. Consequently, if the Emperor had died between these two dates Croatia would have been separated completely from Hungary. Maria Theresa would have become Queen of Croatia, but the Magyars would not have been obliged to place themselves under her. The Croats on this occasion declared that the crown of Croatia was to pass to that member of the House of Habsburg who should reign not only in Austria but also in the other hereditary Austrian lands, for the Croats wanted publicly to show that any separation from the Slovenes of Carniola, Carinthia and Styria would be far less endurable for them than separation from Hungary. "It is neither by force nor yet the spirit of slavery," they said, "that we have been put under the domination of Hungary; we have submitted ourselves voluntarily, and not to the royalty but to the king of the Hungarians."

The Serb and Croat element in the Austrian army was at this time greater than the sum of all the others, and, owing to the privileges which their services acquired for them, they came to be regarded with extreme suspicion by the Magyars. It was under Magyar influence that Maria Theresa abolished the Croatian council, confided its functions to the Hungarian Government, and, on the same occasion, in 1779, proclaimed the town of Rieka (Fiume), with its surroundings, to be "separatum sacræ regni Hungariæ coronæ adnexum corpus." Rieka, like Triest, had been a free town under the Habsburgs, the reason being that they were the chief arteries of trade, so that a greater freedom was desirable. Like Triest, Rieka does not appear up to this date to have shown any hankering for Venice, and Maria Theresa's diploma which renews the freedom is hardly evidence, as some people have asserted, that the town was throbbing with Italian sympathies.

THE POSITION OF THEIR CHURCH

More and more Germans were being brought into the Banat, and to make room for some between Temešvar and Arad the Roumanians, who had settled there, were transferred, in 1765, to the western county of Torontal. About half a century before this the Roumanian Bishop of Transylvania, with most of his clergy, passed from the Orthodox to the Greek Catholic Church; those of his flock who did not follow him attached themselves to the Serbian Church, and after a considerable time were given by Joseph II. in 1786 a Roumanian bishopric, at Sibiu. This bishopric was placed under the administration of the Serbian Patriarch at Karlovci "in dogmaticis et pure spiritualibus," which seems to show that the other privileges of the Serbian Church did not extend to the Roumanians. The Serbs had, from the beginning of the thirteenth century, been founding monasteries, and, although about twenty were secularized or affiliated to others by Maria Theresa, yet there remained eleven in the Banat and one, Hodosh, to the north of the Maroš; and as the Roumanians had no monasteries at all they were received as guests in some of these. And so things continued for about a hundred years.

SERBS ASSIST THE BULGARIAN RENASCENCE

While the Serbs were flourishing, ecclesiastically, in the Banat, the Bulgars had been painfully keeping alive, until 1767, their lonely Patriarchate at Ochrida. Time and again the Greek Patriarch at Constantinople had tried to suppress it, at first on account of cupidity and afterwards, say the Bulgars, for fear lest it should help to arouse the Bulgarian national spirit; but that spirit had fallen to such a depth that the second edition of a comparative lexicon of the Slav languages, which was issued, at the behest of the Empress Catharine in 1791, makes no mention of Bulgarian, and in 1814 the Slavist Dobrovsky regarded Bulgarian as a form of Serbian. And yet, say the Bulgars, the national spirit survived so wonderfully by those far waters of Macedonia that even when the Greek language was introduced into the offices and the Church administration, and when Greeks had usurped the throne of St. Clement, they still found it possible to stand out for the independence of their Church, which handed on the memories of the Bulgarian past. We must be allowed to be sceptical—the town of Ochrida in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is said by contemporary writers to be now in Serbian, now in Bulgarian, now in Macedonian territory. And the very observant Patriarch Brkić of the eighteenth century tells us, in a calm, passionless description of the diocese, which he wrote in exile—he was the last Patriarch of Peć—that the inhabitants of a place called Rekalije, in the district of Djakovica, are not Albanians but Serbs and Bulgars who had been, a short time before, converted to Islam. It seems probable that the sharp divisions of Serb, Bulgar, and so on, did not then exist, and that the Greek Patriarch at Constantinople did himself not know what variety of reprehensible Slav it was that lived in those parts.... The last Patriarch of Ochrida, whose name was likewise Arsenius, spent the remainder of his life in exile at Mt. Athos, and there, in another monastery, was a pale, sickly monk, poring over crabbed MSS. This Païssu, a Bulgar, had entered, like his elder brother, the great Serbian monastery of Hilendar. We know from him that while the various Orthodox monks of Mt. Athos—Greeks, Bulgars, Russians, Serbs and Vlachs—were frequently at loggerheads, yet the others even more frequently combined to fall upon the Bulgars and to upbraid them because their history had not been glorious and because they had an insufficient number of saints. The Bulgar was nothing but a servant of the Greek; Bulgarian was no doubt written in a monastery here and there, but as for the spoken language, were not the townsfolk often ashamed of it? Did they not prefer to talk Greek? "I was filled with sadness," says Païssu, "on account of my race." There happened to be at Hilendar the monk Obradović, who was less enthusiastic about Glagolitic than about the songs sung by the peasant. With the fundamental thought of working for the whole people, including the women, he clung to the idea of a literature in the popular, rather than in the old Church language. He was to set out, in pursuit of Western science, to France and Italy and England—he spent six months in London. The whole people was dear to him; he looked beyond their differences of religion, their other differences, and saw the brotherhood, in race and speech, of all the Southern Slav countries. He was to become one of the great inspirers of modern Serbia and her first Minister of Education.[33] He urged young Païssu to travel among his countrymen in search of manuscripts and legends. If only he could find the buried splendour of his people and call it into life again. And before he died—he suffered from continual headaches and an internal malady—he had finished, in 1762, his book, Slav-Bulgarian History of the Bulgarian People and Rulers and Saints. This naif, imperfect book, more lyric than scientific, but sincere and impassioned, has played a part in reminding the Bulgars of their story; it is the fountain-head of the Bulgarian Renascence.

In Serbia the gallant Captain Kotča also tried to begin for his country a Renascence. Russia and Austria declared war against the Turks in 1787. The Serbian volunteers, who included Kara George, crossed the Danube and fought with great courage. Yet the Austrians were beaten and Kotča was captured, by treachery, in the Banat; he was brought back to Serbia and impaled with sixty of his comrades. But in the treaty of 1791 the Turks undertook to give autonomy to the Serbs of the Pashalik of Belgrade, and to keep from their lands in future the janissaries who had wrought so much mischief.

THE GERMAN COLONISTS IN THE BANAT

Further down the Danube, though, there would be a janissary watching a frontiersman, a Graničar, on the opposite bank, waiting to kill him—both of them Serbs, both standing on Serbian land.... The military frontier regiments were not only organized to defend, in a long line, Croatia, Slavonia, Bačka and the Banat from Turkish inroads, they had also to fight for the Habsburgs wherever a war was toward. Two centuries ago, at the time when the Serbian regiments were in a privileged position—the entire regiment, officers and men, consisting of Serbs, and their own arms being on the flag—it was their destiny to go to France, Italy and Spain, as afterwards to the battle of Leipzig and to Schleswig-Holstein. They may have grumbled a good deal on the way to all these battles, but once the fighting had begun they grumbled no more, thus resembling in two respects the French soldier. And this practice of going abroad on behalf of the Empire was continued till the frontier regiments, about fifty years ago, were broken up. Thus Joseph Eberle and George Huber were killed during the Italian campaign of 1848-1849. These men were German colonists, whose introduction had been so much encouraged in the eighteenth century. But, in order to separate Protestant Hungary from the Turks, so that the two should not unite against the Catholic Habsburgs, it was laid down by Prince Eugene that all the German colonists had to be Catholics. Some Protestants managed to settle in Lescovac, where they held secret services during the night; but in 1726 this was reported to the Prefect of Bela Crkva, whereupon he sent word that if they would not be converted they would each receive twenty-five strokes with a birch.... Of course, those who lived on the frontier lands were subject to the same conditions as their neighbours. German frontier regiments existed side by side with Serbian regiments, and the life of all those people can be studied in a book[34] written by the German frontier village of Franzfeld and published in 1893, a few months after Franzfeld had celebrated its centenary. There would, no doubt, be variations enough in the domestic arrangements of Franzfeld and those of Zrepaja, the neighbouring Serbian village, some miles away; but, as the inhabitants of Franzfeld have now been gathered into Yugoslavia, it is not without interest if we see what sort of a life they have led. The tale of how these Lutherans from Würtemberg laid out and constructed and painted their village, with all the tremendously broad, tremendously straight roads running parallel and at right angles to each other, with the church—whose decorations are a few stars on the ceiling—the pastor's house and the lawyer's and the town hall and other important houses standing round a square of mulberry trees in the middle of the place—the tale of all this is told in as deliciously matter-of-fact a manner as Robinson Crusoe. The picturesque, as in that book, startles us now and then, with a vivid scene—until 1848, we are told, at the arrival of a staff-officer or of a general, every bell in the place had to be set ringing and gunpowder had to be fired off. One finds oneself revelling in the minuteness of the descriptions, one follows happily or sadly the fortunes of Ruppenthal and Kopp and Morgenstern. Everything is true, for the compilers of the book have felt, like Defoe, that "this supplying a story by invention is certainly a most scandalous crime." We are given all the names of those who at the beginning occupied the ninety-nine houses—the hundredth being used as an inn—with their place of origin, the numbers of their male and female dependants, and by what means they had hitherto earned their bread. Many houses have been added since that time. Among all the Germans, house No. 79 was occupied by George Siráky, a Hungarian who had been a peasant. Ten years afterwards another list is made and Siráky still disposes of the same twenty-four "yoke"[35] of plough-land, ten of meadow and one of garden, which he had originally been given, whereas some of the others had increased or diminished their holdings. Then we lose sight of him, and his name does not become one of those which reappears in succeeding generations. Of course, the colony was established on a military basis; an officer, usually a lieutenant, with one or more non-commissioned officers, was stationed there, as the representative of a commandant who presided over several villages. The resident officer was supposed to maintain law and order, to see to it that the people sowed their land at the right season, and to inform the commandant of any delinquency, for the lieutenant was not allowed to punish anyone. As one or more of the able-bodied men belonging to a house might be absent for a long time on military service or in captivity, or else through sickness or wounds be unfit to work, and through lack of means the householder not be in a position to hire day-labourers, in that case his fellow-villagers, one after another, were obliged to assist him without payment. In order that all possible respect should be attached to the chief man and woman of a house—the house-father and house-mother—these were not liable to punishment for small offences, and if a considerable offence made it necessary to punish them, then they were first of all deposed from their position. Various public posts were filled by the house-fathers or other men, and for refusing to accept such a post a man was commonly arrested; but this punishment, as well as that of so many strokes with a cane (which seems to have been the most usual penalty), was abolished by 1850. The military frontier system came to an end in 1872, at which time the communal life, which had been found to be very irksome, was also gradually done away with. Franzfeld is now a prosperous and peaceful place; their horses are well known, they breed excellent cattle and pigs and sheep, and they say of themselves that out of one Franzfeld man you can make a couple of Jews and there will still remain a Franzfeld man. They tell how once or twice a Hungarian Jew has opened a shop in the village, selling his goods very cheaply for two or three months, at a lower price, in fact, than he paid for them, and then putting up the prices; but as soon as he does that he is boycotted. The aliens who have settled in Franzfeld—Hungarians, Slovaks and Roumanians—have come as servants, have married Franzfeld girls and are looked upon as Germans. The same German dialect is spoken as in Würtemberg; troops from that country marched through Franzfeld during the War. But Serbian, the villagers told me, is the international language of at any rate western Banat, in spite of the Magyars who, as in other parts, made for the last few years of their domination extreme efforts on behalf of their unlovely language. They supplied Franzfeld with schoolmasters and mistresses who could speak no German and no Serbian, so that it was very difficult for both sides. And the authorities told the pastor that the chief truths of religion, they considered, should be taught in Hungarian. But the pastor did not agree with them and they let the matter drop. Franzfeld has seen wild days, particularly in 1848, and her one monument records a calamity of two of her sons who vanished down a well which they were sinking. Of itself the land is not very fertile, but the people have been so successful that they have founded a colony, Franzjosephsfeld, in Bosnia—they multiplied too greatly for their own soil to support them. They speak, many of them, five languages, and they will not be the least worthy of Yugoslav subjects. [Their interests are much more agricultural than political.] With regard to their multiplication, by the way, it is related in this centenary book, among much curious information, that when another Franzfelder comes into the world it is usual to present certain largesse to the midwife, namely, one gulden (this was written in Austrian times), a loaf of bread, a little jar of lard and a few kilograms of white flour. In the old military period this personage was also, like the doctor and the schoolmaster, "on the strength." The last of those who bore the rank of Company-Midwife was Gertrude Metz; she was pensioned after thirty-eight years, and continued for a few years in private practice.

THE SOUTHERN SLAV COLONISTS AND THEIR RELIGION

The Magyars, being themselves of at least two religions, did not interfere in the religious matters of those whom they called "the nationalities" save to ask, with more or less firmness—it made a difference if they were dealing with Protestant Slovaks or with Protestant Germans—that the language of the ruling race should be employed. This comparative toleration was, of course, tempered by exceptions. Thus in the very Catholic city of Pečuj in Baranja the treatment applied to other religions depended on the individual bishop. Bishop Nesselrode, for instance, chased them all away, and until 1790 they were seldom permitted within fourteen kilometres of the town.

The Austrians in the eighteenth century constrained a good many Southern Slavs to enter the Church of Rome. Austria has always been rich in faithful sons of the Church. Some years ago, for example, I happened in various parts of Dalmatia and Herzegovina to be from time to time the travelling companion of an elderly Viennese. He told me how he had lately impressed upon the mother of his illegitimate son that the boy must receive a thoroughly Catholic education, and in every place this gentleman made his patronage of an hotel dependent on the proprietor's religion, which he frequently knew before we got there. I saw him last at Mostar in distress, because the only good hotel was administered by an Israelite of whose religion he disapproved, and the weather, as it often is at Mostar, was so oppressingly hot that I suppose he had not energy enough to try to convert him....

BUNJEVCI, ŠOKCI AND KRAŠOVANI

Perhaps Austria would not have displayed such fervour in creating Bunjevci, Šokci and Krašovani if she had known that these Roman Catholic Slavs would remain, on the whole, very good Slavs. The Bunjevci, who live for the most part in Bačka and Baranja, came originally from the Buna district of Herzegovina. The total population of the town of Subotica is 90,000, and 73,000 of these are Bunjevci, whose peculiarity is that the old father stays in the town house, while his sons, with their wives and children, drive out on Monday morning over that rather featureless landscape to the farm, which may be at a considerable distance, and there they remain till the end of the week. They are a quiet, industrious people who have lived withdrawn, as it were, from the world since the twenty-five or thirty families escaped from the Turks; and as they brought with them only that number of surnames it is now customary to add a distinguishing name. Thus the Vojnić family has divided into branches, such as Vojnić-Heiduk, Vojnić-Kortmić, Vojnić-Purča. The Bunjevci seem, although Catholics, to incline less to the Croats than to the Serbs, some of whose customs—those, for instance, of Christmas—they share. But in merry-making they are a great deal more subdued, save that, in drinking to some one's health, you are expected to empty three glasses. In the intervals of a Bunjevci dance at Subotica men would promenade the room arm-in-arm with men and girls with girls. The faces of all of them express entire goodness of heart and absence of guile; many of the girls, who looked like early portraits of Queen Victoria, were arrayed in the local costume, which permits great variety of colour so long as the lady wears, I am told, about fifteen petticoats. These worthy people used to have nothing but their Church, and are now extremely religious. The man who has most influence over them is Blaško Rajić, a priest and deputy, who was not always able to prevent a Hungarian Archbishop from sending a priest to his church, where he held services in Magyar. During one night, at all events, this church caused the Magyars much annoyance. It was at the beginning of the Great War—they had accused Rajić of making signals from the tower, which is very high; and in order to prove their accusation they sent a large body of soldiers, who surrounded the church, on a boisterous winter's night. Sure enough, the signals were seen to be flashing up there. The church was locked and a blast of the bugles had no effect—save that a few Bunjevci looked out of their windows—for the flashes did not cease. Then the captain commanded his men to give a mighty shout: "Put out those lights! Put out those lights!" But not the least notice was taken. There was nothing to do but to wait until Rajić, or whoever it was, should finish his nefarious business and come down. About an hour later, though, the wind became so piercing that a non-commissioned officer suggested that the captain should send for the big drum; the noise of that, said he, would surely reach that devil in the tower. But the big drum, when it came, had no success. The noise it made, reinforced by those of the bugles and the men's shouting, was such that some Bunjevci dressed themselves and ventured out into the cold, to see what really all the turmoil was about. To one of them the freezing captain yelled that he knew perfectly the criminal had heard them, and that he went on with his accursed flashes since he recognized that this would be the last base act that he would ever do on earth. For the remainder of that night the captain and his men, not with the hope that they would be obeyed but merely to warm themselves a little, kept on shouting now and then, "Put out those lights!" And in the dawn the non-commissioned officer discovered that the signals had been moonlight on some broken glass that was being shaken by the wind.... One sees in the very well-arranged archives of the town of Sombor that the Bunjevci were accustomed, like the Germans, to ally themselves with the Magyars and thus give them a majority. Only in the last ten years at Subotica (and not at all at Sombor) did they ask for their rights; they had seemed conscious of the religious difference between themselves and the Serbs, unconscious that they were of the same race and language. The Magyars attempted to show in Paris that the Bunjevci are not Slavs, but the remains of the Kumani (who died out in those parts about five to six hundred years ago and were not Magyars). In the census of twenty years ago the Bunjevci were called Serbo-Croats, in accordance with a monograph, "Sabotca Varosh Története," in which Professor Ivanji, a Magyar, said they were simply Catholic Serbs. In the census of 1910 the Bunjevci are put under the heading "Égyebek," which means "miscellaneous."

This census juggling by the Magyars was one of their milder methods of administration. The term Serbo-Croat came to be avoided, and, so that foreigners should be misled, the Yugoslavs in Baranja were classified as Serbs, Croats, Illyrians, Šokci, Bunjevci, Dalmatians and so forth. The Šokci, who were also converted in the eighteenth century to the Roman Catholic Church, are mostly found to-day in Baranja. The name by which they are known is derived from the Serbo-Croatian word šaka, the palm of the hand, and refers to the fact that the Catholics cross themselves with the open hand, whereas the Orthodox join the tips of the thumb and first two fingers. The Šokci are considered a weaker people than the Bunjevci; the mothers—they say it is love—are often so weak that they allow their children to do anything they like at home, and would not think of remonstrating with them if they wear their caps in church. Among the Šokci none is of a higher than the peasant class, for which reason their priests have usually been Magyars. He who ministers to the village of Szalánta, however, is a Croatian poet. The mayor of that village—I believe a typical specimen of the Šokci—was a ragged, humorous-looking person with a very bushy moustache. He was in remarkable contrast with the young Magyar schoolmaster, whose remuneration is largely in kind. This gentleman looked as if he would be well content if the parents of his children sent him not eggs, butter and chickens, but armfuls of flowers. A month before the Hungarian revolution in 1918 an order had come from Buda-Pest to the effect that the lowest class in a school was to receive instruction solely in its own language, but the Hungarian Republic ordered that no history was to be taught, since it praises kings.

As for the Krašovani, who inhabit five villages of the mining district of Resica in Caras-Severin, the eastern county of the Banat, they also were converted by Maria Theresa, in whose time they fled from Montenegro, Macedonia and the Bulgarian frontier. Gradually they have come to reckon themselves as Croats, owing to their priests who come from Croatia. They are all big men with luxuriant moustaches.

There is a district in southern Russia, near the Black Sea, which is called New Serbia. It is the fertile country that was chosen by 150,000 Southern Slavs when they preferred, in 1768, to go into exile rather than change their religion, like the Bunjevci, the Šokci and the Krašovani. They preserve some traces of their origin, but can no longer be considered Yugoslavs.

In speaking of these converts and their descendants we have alluded to the Buda-Pest policy of enforcing the Magyar language. This movement may be studied from the close of the eighteenth century in Croatia, where Latin had hitherto been the official language. In 1790 the Croats were again delivered by Leopold II. to the Magyars, who were bent upon executing their designs.

FOOTNOTES:

[20] Cf. La Question Yougo-Slav, by Vouk Primorac. Paris, 1918.

[21] When the Slav first arrived in these territories the Romans everywhere yielded to them, and while the more prosperous Romans settled on the coast, the others retired to the mountains. One of the sea-towns, by the way, to which the Romans fled was Split, where they could live in the ruins of Diocletian's enormous, decadent palace; and from extant lists of the mayors of that town we see that until the tenth century they all had Latin names, from then till the twelfth century we find partly Latin and partly Slav names, and during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries their names were nearly always Slav. Those Romans—of course not implying by that word that their forbears had come from Rome or even from Italy—those refugees who took to the mountains mingled with the Slavs and were also joined by wandering shepherds from Wallachia, owing to whom all this variegated population came to be called Black Vlachs, Mauro-Vlachs and in English Morlaks. The epithet "black" was attached to the Vlachs, so Jirećek thinks (cf. Bulletino di Archeologia Dalmata, Split, 1879), on account of the hordes of Black Tartars who until the beginning of the fourteenth century infested the plains of Moldavia. Gradually in this hinterland population the Roman and the Vlach died out, but the latter's name was retained. It had lost its ethnic meaning and among the Ragusan poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the word was used to signify a shepherd. The Venetians employed the word Morlacchi as a term of mockery, because it indicated people of the mountains, backward people. And this derogatory connotation has clung to it, so that to-day the Morlaks, who after all are Croats and Serbs, do not like to be called by that name.

[22] The Serbian Archbishopric of Peć, which Dušan at his coronation had raised to the Patriarchate, was for the time being left intact.

[23] This is a Pomak song. The Pomaks are the descendants of those who in the seventeenth century (perhaps also earlier) were forcibly converted to Islam. Their folk-songs, customs and language are Bulgarian. They speak the purest Bulgarian, save that the men count with Turkish numerals. (The women, who can count up to 100, use the Bulgarian language.) The Pomaks live for the most part in the Rhodope Mountains and in the Lovac district of northern Bulgaria. They are endowed, as a rule, with meagre intelligence, so that the educational endeavours of the Bulgarian Government had perforce to be abandoned, since very few of these reluctant pupils ever left the lowest class. The most exalted situation they aspire to is to serve as clerks to Muhammedan priests. Nevertheless, they despise the Turks and call their language the language of pigs.

[24] To-day in Serbia when the King addresses his people, when the deputies address the Parliament, the mayor his fellow-citizens, the priest his parishioners, the officer his men—all of them begin with the words "Moja bratčo!" ["My brothers!">[

[25] Cf. Baranja multja es jelenje, 2 vols., by Francis Varady. Pecuj, 1898.

[26] Die südslavischen Literaturen. Leipzig, 1908.

[27] Cf. Le Balkan Slave, by Charles Loiseau. Paris, 1898.

[28] La Dalmazia. Florence, 1915.

[29] There is in the museum at Eger in Czecho-Slovakia a small painting of Branković dated 1711. It depicts him standing pensively outside a tent, clad in a red and yellow Turkish costume and with a beard that reaches to his knees. On the other hand, it seems to be established that he was an ordinary inmate of the prison, whose site is now occupied by the Café Astoria; and one's faith in the accuracy of the Eger Museum is rather dimmed by the exhibition of a number of pictures, each of them purporting to give the authentic details of the assassination at Eger of the great Wallenstein, and every picture is quite different from the others.

[30] Macedonia. London, 1906.

[31] This was far too sweeping a statement. Only thirty or forty Orthodox at Prizren—teachers, merchants and others—used to dress in European raiment (with a fez), but from of old the Serbs had a teachers' institute and a seminary—the young men educated there frequently went to Montenegro. And in view of what happened a few years later, Miss Edith Durham must regret that in her book High Albania (London, 1909) she did not confine herself to recording of the men of Prizren that "of one thing the population is determined: that is, that never again shall the land be Serb"; but she adds, on her own account, that in this picturesque town and its neighbourhood the Serbs are engaged in a forlorn hope and that their claims are no better than those of the English on Normandy. Yet if, in her opinion, the Serbs have been rewarded beyond their deserts, she must acknowledge that they are not wholly undeserving—in the days of her cherished Albanians it was necessary for a Catholic inhabitant to furnish himself with a loaded revolver before guiding her through the streets of Djakovica.

[32] Cf. Les Albanais en Vieille-Serbie et dans le Sandjak de Novi-Bazar. Paris, 1913.

[33] He worked for a long time at the monastery of Hopovo, among the Syrmian hills, and there his collection of books, in the two rooms just as he left them, was naturally treasured. Half of them were stolen in the course of this last war by the Austrians.

[34] Geschichte der Franzfelder Gemeinde. Pančevo, 1893.

[35] This was originally as much land as a yoke of oxen could plough in a day. Until the introduction of the French metrical system this measurement was used in Austria. It still survives there, a "joch" or yoke being equivalent to 5754·6 square metres, or about 1·4 English acres. The Hungarian joch is three-quarters the size of this.

III

BUILDING THE FOUNDATIONS: NAPOLEON AND STROSSMAYER

Slavs weep for the fall of Venice—They hear the voice of their brothers—Measures to keep them apart—By encouraging the Italianized party—And the Orthodox Church—And by fatherly legislation—In Serbia the people are fighting for freedom—The Montenegrin authorities are otherwise engaged—Napoleon favours the Southern Slavs—Russia and Britain oppose him on the Adriatic—Illyria, Napoleon's great work for the Southern Slavs—Napoleon's schemes are roughly interrupted—The Montenegrin Bishop incites against him—Disaster for Napoleon and the Southern Slavs—Austria's repressive policy—The work of Vuk Karažić—The methods of Serbia's Miloš—The Slav soul of Croatia—The Magyars and Croatia's port—The Sultan reigns in Bosnia—A sorry period for the Southern Slavs—Some who turn from politics grow prosperous—But the Croats strive for political liberties—The Austrians, the Magyars and the Croats—The Croats, struggling for freedom, incidentally help Austria—How Montenegro reformed herself—The Prince-Bishop gives a lead to the Southern Slavs—Austria pours out a German flood—The Croat peasants and their clergy—What the Czechs are doing to-day—Strossmayer—The Turk in Montenegro and Macedonia—The cheerless state of Serbia—the Slav voice in Macedonia—The Macedonian Slavs are undivided—Dawn of Italian unity—How Cavour would have treated the Slavs—Italian v. Slav: Tommaseo's advice—Austria leans on Germans and Italianists—The Southern Slav hopes are centred on Cetinje—For they know neither Nicholas of Montenegro nor Michael of Serbia—If Michael had lived!—The strange career of Rakovski—The Yugoslav name—Russia and Austria sow discord in the Balkans—The Macedonian Slavs under their Greek clergy—The affair of Kukuš—The Exarchate is established—1867: Austria delivers the Slavs to the Magyars—The "Krpitsa"—Rieka's history, as two people see it—And the Slovenes are coerced.

SLAVS WEEP FOR THE FALL OF VENICE

Early in 1797 the weak French garrisons which had been left in certain towns of Italy were massacred by the Venetians, who displayed no mercy either to the wounded soldiers or the women who were with the troops. Napoleon would come back no more, thought the Venetians. But he heard of what had happened as he was engaged upon the clauses of the Treaty of Leoben. No sooner had that courier brought him the dispatches than the Venetian envoys were ushered into his presence. They had been entrusted by the Senate with the task of following the armies and congratulating Napoleon or the Archduke, according to which of them had won the last battle. These envoys may have taken a despondent view of what would be the fate of the Serene Republic; but when, a short time afterwards, the perfumed and dishevelled citizens, stamping on the masks of last night's ball, were weeping pitiably in their palaces, the Slovenes and the Morlaks, who had fought for them so well, were weeping in the streets. Sadly and solemnly at Zadar—la tanto disputata—the flag of Venice was lowered; at other parts of the Dalmatian coast the nobles scarcely had to say a word before the peasants had snatched arms to fight the French and their égalité. The Venetians had, after all, been there a long time, even if they had not risen to the heights of Dubrovnik, which, as we learn from a traveller in 1805, kept no secret police and no gendarmes, and where a capital sentence pronounced at the time was the first in twenty-five years. (The city went into mourning on account of this, and an executioner had to be imported from Turkey.) Such a moral height had not been reached by the Venetians; but they had been in Dalmatia, as people loved to repeat, for a long time, and they had been easy-going in the collection of taxes, they had supported the bishops and the holy Church, they had made the peasants feel that each one of them was helping to support Venice, the grand and ancient, and so the faithful people mourned when she was falling.

THEY HEAR THE VOICE OF THEIR BROTHERS

Yet they were not wholly deaf to the call of their own race. When the Austrians sent a general, the "Hungarian party," working against the civil government of Count Raymond von Thurn, managed to have the post given to General Rukavina, a Croat from the Military Frontier. An eye-witness has left us an account of Rukavina's reception at Trogir. The general mounted a chair, and asked the people in the Slav language whether they would swear the oath of fidelity to His Majesty the Emperor and King, Francis II., and his descendants and legal successors. "Otchemo!" ["That is what we want!">[ was the unanimous reply. After the swearing of the oath, the general suddenly began a vigorous speech: "Moi dragi Dalmatinci" ["My dear Dalmatians">[, said he.... And afterwards, when two companies of Croat infantry were disembarked, the people collected round them were astonished to hear them speaking the same language as themselves and to learn that many of them had the same names as the Dalmatians.[36]

Incidents of this character were, for more reasons than one, most galling to von Thurn. In July the archbishop and municipality of Split petitioned that they might belong to Hungary. One presumes that these officials were moved less by the sympathetic ways of one Hungarian than by the knowledge that Croatia was under the Hungarian crown. Very powerless, indeed, like themselves, Croatia might be—at that moment reduced to the rank of a Hungarian county, with her Ban no longer able to convoke the Diet—nevertheless, a Croatia still existed. Then Count Raymond took hold of the matter; he sent reports on Rukavina to the Viennese authorities, and he and they seem to have cared little whether these reports contradicted one another. He exhibited his adversary as a man of unbounded violence, as a man of the most pusillanimous nature; General Rukavina was despicable, said these documents, he was an absolute nonentity; but no, shrieked von Thurn on the next day, this man Rukavina was imbued as no other with the abominable spirit of Machiavelli. To bring about the fall of the Hungarian party in Dalmatia, Count Raymond's police set themselves the task of laying by the heels such Hungarian agents as Count Miaslas Zanović, one of the four sons of Count Anthony, who for being implicated in a more than usually flagrant scandal had been expelled from Venice. And his sons lived agitated lives, although it is untrue that the second one, Stephen, before dying in prison in Amsterdam, had governed Montenegro and is known to history as Stephen the Little. [That mysterious person was a contemporary, who appearing in Montenegro when the land was in a state of barbarism and destitution, gave it out that he was the Russian Tzar Peter III., who had been strangled to death in 1762. The Montenegrins accepted him; and from 1768 to 1773 he showed himself a most competent and zealous ruler, carrying out so many reforms that he was clearly not Peter III. It has not as yet been ascertained from where he came, but judging from his accent he was either a Dalmatian Serb or a native of the Military Confines. He was very taciturn; only one Montenegrin, a priest called Marković, is believed to have been privy to his secret. Marković had visited Russia ten years previously and had celebrated Mass in the presence of the Tzar. It was the priest who assured the mountaineers that Stephen really was the Tzar. During his reign he repulsed the Turks and organized the public security, so that a lost purse—the people said—could easily be recovered. The Republic of Venice tried on several occasions to poison this excellent ruler; he was ultimately killed by a barber who came up to Cetinje at the bidding of the Pasha of Scutari, and, being appointed court barber, cut Stephen's throat.] As for the Zanović, the elder brother, Count Premislas, was for a long time in a Finnish prison, on account of his conduct in gaming-houses; the two younger brothers, Hannibal and Miaslas, were in Budva in southern Dalmatia in 1797, distributing Venetian proclamations, after which they rearranged their minds and became Hungarian agents.

MEASURES TO KEEP THEM APART

The more active of the pair was Miaslas, and by confounding his machinations and those of other Hungarian adherents von Thurn overthrew the Hungaro-Croatian party. Thenceforward his greatest care was diligently to suppress those aspirations of the people of Dalmatia for a union with their brothers. He had to build the house with the materials that he found on the spot; the most obvious corner-stone was that numerically small body of nobles and merchants who had for so long associated with Venetian officials that they hated to confess that they were Slavs.

BY ENCOURAGING THE ITALIANIZED PARTY

A minute number of this small body consisted of real Italians, people who very exceptionally had settled in Dalmatia; but among these rare families there was not any single one of that extensive class in Venice which had been presented by their Government with vast domains, with farms and forests in Dalmatia. Well, the Count of Thurn observed that this small body of Italianized Slavs would probably not help him very much, for the Italian culture and the education which they were so proud of were—it is not unjust to say—nearly always superficial and not such as to compensate for this party's lack of numbers. But yet, for what they were worth, he supported them. No doubt the project which the Archduke Charles evolved in 1880, to transplant German-Austrians to Dalmatia, would have been preferred by von Thurn. "These colonists," explained the Archduke, "by their culture and laboriousness, by their devotion to the House of Habsburg would give to the Dalmatians a most valuable example and would soon persuade them thoroughly to merge themselves among the mass of peoples faithful to the Emperor." But this plan could not be carried through, because the people of Dalmatia would have risen in revolt; moreover, the most fertile regions had been so neglected that too many of them were now marshes or through other causes uninhabitable. Thus von Thurn assisted the Italianized party; they would, at any rate, unlike the other Serbo-Croats of Dalmatia, not strive for union with anybody else. Before the French Revolution no one in Italy dreamed that it would be possible to bring about Italian unity, and the patriots of 1848 longed only for the liberation of their Peninsula; they spoke of Triest as "the port of the future Slavia" or as "a neutral zone, a transitional region between Slavia and Italy."

AND THE ORTHODOX CHURCH

It may be that when von Thurn also gratified a reasonable ambition of the Orthodox Church he was moved by the idea that the Roman Catholic Church of the Croats might thus to some extent be counteracted; he may, on the other hand, have been impelled by altruistic motives when he authorized the establishment of an Orthodox bishopric. Under Venice the Church had not been recognized; and after having several times almost succeeded in obtaining their bishop, a modus vivendi was at last reached in 1797, with the consent of the Senate and perhaps of Rome. Under this arrangement the Orthodox were free to profess their religion, but the Senate officially ignored their separation from the Roman Church; their priests had to obtain their rights from the Catholic bishops and allow the Catholic priests to cull certain of their legitimate revenues. And this, although the Orthodox formed one-half of the dioceses of Scardona and Šibenik, and two-thirds of that of Bocche di Cattaro. They were not more backward than the rest of the population. Von Thurn—who, they thought, knew nothing of the circumstances—was informed by them that the see of Dalmatia was vacant and that they had elected the Archmandrite Simeon Ivcović, a man universally esteemed for his prudence and wisdom. They begged von Thurn to confirm this election, and he did so.

AND BY FATHERLY LEGISLATION

But von Thurn seems to have relied largely on the gratitude which this neglected province would feel for the introduction of Austrian improvements. The happy-go-lucky Venetian methods were no longer to disfigure the country. Those people were logical indeed who did not care for a government which did not care for them. No such reproach should be levelled against the Austrian Government, if he could avoid it; for in Dalmatia it would now be by the side of its new subjects from their getting up in the morning until they lay them down at night. Henceforward there would be a set of reasonable rules for everything, and if anyone remarked that this was too much in the spirit of the late Joseph ii. who made the Kingdom of Prussia his model—what more excellent model could one imagine? Those people who had hitherto been troubled in their minds because they did not know how many flower-pots they might instal outside their windows, to those people it would be a boon to have a new list of detailed and complete regulations as to every aspect of this matter. People who had until now been nervous lest they would be punished if they started lotteries at Zadar, all these people would be glad to know that lotteries were legal if each person who manipulated one paid for the upkeep of a hundred lanterns in the streets. People had been bastinadoed in the past, not knowing if they would be smitten hard or gently; but the Austrian Government was far too civilized to leave such matters in the hands of chance. With regard to those who persisted in public smoking, von Thurn probably borrowed the rules which Baron Codelli, the mayor of Ljubljana, was elaborating at this time. "In the streets of the town and the suburbs," says the Baron, "smoking has become of late a general practice. The pleasure of smoking tobacco, which its partisans can sufficiently enjoy in their abodes, by the river and in the fields, makes them forget what is seemly, and, moreover, they disregard the peril that may arise from conflagrations, especially when their pipes are not shut. Several fires, due to this pipe-smoking, which is contrary to the police regulations, have not sufficed to lead the culprits back to the respect and precaution which they should preserve for the goods and property of their fellow-citizens. To satisfy the general well-being and to satisfy the police with regard to fires, it is forbidden to smoke tobacco, and especially cigars, in the streets and squares of this town and the suburbs, with the penalty of losing the pipe if a police-agent catches anyone with it in his mouth, and in the case of a repeated offence the penalty will be more serious."

IN SERBIA THE PEOPLE ARE FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM

This system of tutelage may have had its irksome moments; the Turkish rule in Serbia was such that any people with blood in their veins were bound to rebel. Sooner or later a race like the Serbs, who lived always with the songs of their old heroes and who gloried in their heiduks, were sure to dash themselves against this alien master. Kara George had seen that the Serbs in the Banat were prosperous, while in Serbia they were obliged to stand and watch the janissaries come back to the pashalik of Belgrade, though the Turks had sworn this should not be. Then the match was set to the fire—in January 1804 the Da-Hi, the chiefs of the janissaries, after having slain Mustapha Pasha, the enlightened Turkish Governor, who was known affectionately as "the mother of the Serbs," cut off the heads of a number of Serbian leaders; seventy-two of them on pikes were made into an awful avenue of trees. But even as the snowstorms beat against these Serbian heads, so Kara George and his companions from Šumadija, the heart of Serbia, flung themselves against the janissaries and vanquished them. This was what the Serbs had started out to do, and so for the moment Constantinople had been content to look on. However, when the Sultan was told that his unruly vassals had seized the whole of Šumadija and the departments of Valjevo and Pojarevac, he sent against them the Pasha of Bosnia, who demanded that they should lay down their arms. But now the Serbs had seen what some day they might struggle to—the liberation of their country. They had climbed a few steps up the stony path, they would not let themselves be lured back to the plain. Let Austria or some other one of the Great Powers guarantee their rights. The Pasha would not hear of it, and so these few undaunted men resolved to fight the Turkish Empire. An army came at once to stamp them out, and at Ivancovac they scattered it. From now they would fight on alone.[37] Their leader was the sort of man they wanted, a brave heiduk who was never weary, who had taken up one day a large rock and had flung it down a precipice, and who would do the same, they fancied, to a follower of his, if he saw fit.... The Serbs were left to fight alone, but the Great Powers took an interest in their future. We find in a report from the French Ambassador in Petrograd to his Minister of Foreign Affairs (No. 261 in the "Excerpts from the Paris Archives relating to the history of the first Serbian Insurrection," collected [Belgrade, 1904] by Dr. Michael Gavrilović, now the Minister in London) that the treaty of alliance stipulated for Russia to have Moldavia, Bessarabia, Vallachia and Bulgaria; France to have Albania, part of Bosnia, Morea and Candia; Austria to have Croatia and part of Bosnia; while Serbia was to be independent and given to a prince of the House of Austria or to any other foreign prince who married a Russian Grand Duchess. According to another scheme which the Ambassador forwarded, Austria was to have Serbia in complete possession as an Austrian province, and Croatia to belong to Austria or France, as Napoleon might decide.... Serbia had to fight alone, and unluckily her ranks were anything but closed. The lack of education brought about some childish jealousies, such as that of Mladen Milanović, who was ordered by Kara George to go to the relief of the Heiduk Veliko at Negotin, where 18,000 Turks were besieging him. "He may help himself!" quoth Mladen. "His praise is sung to him at his table by ten singers, mine is not. Let him hold out by himself, the hero." Veliko sent word to say that at the New Year (when Kara George and his chieftains were wont to meet in consultation) he would inquire as to how the country was being governed. But before then he was dead—shot by the Turks, who recognized him while he was going the rounds; and after five days his troops, in despair, made their escape across a morass and scattered.

THE MONTENEGRIN AUTHORITIES ARE OTHERWISE ENGAGED

There was no use in looking to the Montenegrin mountains, for that rallying-point of all the Serbs was in the midst of very delicate business. One year before the rising of Kara George, in 1803, the Montenegrin warriors had profited from the fact that they were fighting nobody and they had made a few reforms in their own country. The Bishop, Peter I., convoked an assembly at which the tribal chiefs approved of a Code and of the imposition of a tax, for State requirements. It was also decided to have a court of justice, the members of which should be elected by the people. Thus it will be seen that the patriarchal system still prevailed, and though the Bishop was regarded by the outside world—by the Turk whom with varying fortunes he was perpetually fighting, and by the Russian Tzar, whom he had visited at intervals from the time when Peter the Great called on the Montenegrins in 1711 to work with him in rescuing, if it was God's will, those Orthodox Christians who were oppressed by the yoke of the heathen—though the Bishop was regarded both by friend and foe as the sovereign of Montenegro, yet it was only round him that the tribal chiefs gathered as being the guardian of their religion, while the people, represented by their tribal chiefs, remained the real sovereign. If Kara George had risen one year earlier they would have flown immediately to help him—as, indeed, they did help him at a later period—they would have postponed, without a moment's hesitation, the establishing of Code and tax and court of justice. But in 1804 they found themselves in a most awkward situation. Since the death of the Tzar Paul the Russians had appeared to be indifferent to Montenegro, and for three years the annual subsidy of a thousand sequins had not been paid. This omission was made use of by the French Consul at Dubrovnik, who with the aid of a Dubrovnik priest, one Dolci, set himself to wean the Montenegrins from their Russian friendship. Fonton, Russia's Consul at Dubrovnik, demanded the sequestration and the scrutiny of Dolci's papers; the demand was rejected, and when force was tried Dolci leaped at the examiner's throat. It was proved that he was in the pay of France and the Montenegrins were obliged to disavow him. This exasperated the Bishop, who threatened to cut off Dolci's ears, but relented and only gave him a hundred blows with a stick and ordered him to be imprisoned in a monastery. The second half of Dolci's punishment was thought by many at the time to be unwise, as he might talk. And they were gladdened when they heard, soon afterwards, of his decease, though whether they were right in praising their bishop for this consummation we do not know. At all events, the hapless Dolci had not lived in vain, for Russia now resumed her good relations with the mountaineers, and she inaugurated them by paying the three thousand sequins.

The Treaty of Pressburg in 1805 allotted Dalmatia to Napoleon. A few months afterwards his armies landed on the coast. Although the high command and certain regiments were French, a large part of the force consisted of Italians, Germans, Spaniards and Dutchmen. The scheme Napoleon entertained was to secure for himself the gates of the Balkans and Albania, incidentally to take the Ionian Islands in the rear, with the great purpose of securing the roads to Constantinople; thence to India.

NAPOLEON FAVOURS THE SOUTHERN SLAVS

The provinces of Dalmatia and Istria were placed under the government of Milan, in their towns were hoisted the Italian colours; but if to Napoleon these lands were chiefly stepping-stones to India, he did not long stay in ignorance regarding their inhabitants. His representative, Vincenzo Dandolo, was a Venetian who, on account of his democratic principles, had been expelled in 1799 and had sought refuge in France. We will therefore not repeat the epithets he uses when he writes about the late Venetian overseas régime. But Napoleon had no cause to be prejudiced in favour of the Yugoslavs. His origin was Italian. His daughter reigned in Italy. And if he had disapproved of Dandolo starting at Zadar in 1806 an official newspaper—the Regio dalmato: Kraljski dalmatin, written partly in Italian, partly in Serbo-Croat—he would very soon have stopped the paper and Dandolo's career. But, on the contrary, this paper (the first one to be written at all in Serbo-Croat) was followed by the planning of secondary schools at Zadar, Šibenik, Trogir, Split, Makarska and the island of Hvar, twenty-nine elementary schools for boys and fourteen for girls, two academies at Zadar and Split, four seminaries for the education of priests and eight industrial schools. And in these the Serbo-Croatian language was to be largely employed.

Kara George had no leisure in which to learn to read and write. Another Turkish army, formed in Bosnia, had to be encountered near Šabac in 1806. It was routed, and on this occasion the Serbian cavalry was led with great distinction by a priest, Luka Lazarević. Yet another Turkish army suffered the same fate.

RUSSIA AND BRITAIN OPPOSE HIM ON THE ADRIATIC

It was not to be thought that France would be left tranquil on the Adriatic. Russia did not incommode her very greatly. After Kotor (Cattaro) had been delivered to the Muscovites by an Italian, the Marquis Ghislieri (who had concealed until that moment his antagonism to the French for having been removed by them from his Bologna home), the Russians made themselves obnoxious to a small extent upon the islands. They summoned the people of Hvar to recognize the Tzar as their overlord, and when the people declined to do so, the Russians bombarded them. For Dubrovnik this conflict between Russia and France was embarrassing; she wrote to Sankovski, the Russian Commissary, that if he exceeded his powers she would have recourse to the Tzar, "her beloved protector." But when in the summer of that year, 1806, she was besieged for twenty days, the French were in occupation of the town, while the Russians with their Montenegrin friends were trying to dislodge them. It is said that before the garrison was relieved, by the arrival of another French force, there had been so much damage done to the Republic's ancient walls and palaces and other buildings that the loss, to mention only the pecuniary loss, amounted to eighteen million francs. After the Treaty of Tilsit in 1807 the British undertook, and more effectively, those operations in the Adriatic which the Russians now abandoned. They tried to burn at Triest the Russian vessels which had been ceded to France, and for a few years they had command of the Adriatic, keeping sometimes as many as twenty-two ships in those waters, while the French are said to have had at no time more than seven frigates.

The old Republic was dissolved; but many other questions weighed upon Napoleon. It was the Austrian Emperor and not he whom many people in Dalmatia held to be their lawful monarch, for the Habsburg was the heir of the Croatian Kings. And so while England had the sea in her possession, Austria had the salt-lands of the isle of Pago, and the populace on the Quarnero Islands took the rudders off the boats which were to carry food to Zadar. The Austrians advanced on Split, with ordinary troops and volunteers. At Hvar the people kept Napoleon's birthday with apparent enthusiasm; on the next day they revolted and hoisted the Austrian flag. Then the peasants seized the town and for three days indulged in pillage, burning amongst other things the valuable libraries of those who favoured France.

ILLYRIA, NAPOLEON'S GREAT WORK FOR THE SOUTHERN SLAVS

With the Treaty of Schoenbrunn Napoleon secured possession of Carniola, the Austrian part of Istria, Croatia, the military frontiers from the Save to the sea, and also certain districts of Carinthia, Styria and Tirol. Now at last the Adriatic littoral, with large tracts of the interior, was united under one hand. We may note that Eugène Beauharnais in vain entreated that the frontier for the Slovenes should, on account of strategic necessities, be drawn to the east of the Isonzo, but Napoleon did not hesitate to make that river the boundary between the two countries, as it was between the two races. Mazzini in 1860 shared this opinion, which he had also maintained in 1831, in his book The Rights of Man, that Slavs and Italians should be divided by this river. And in 1860 Cavour expressed himself to the same effect in a letter to Laurent Valerio.

"Mes braves Croates," says Napoleon in his Memoirs; and for what he did in this Illyria, the forerunner of our Yugoslavia, they must be always thankful. Never had these people had such able administrators, such sympathetic governors. They governed it too much as if it were a part of France, but they were doing their utmost to understand the people and their customs. General Marmont acquired an excellent knowledge of the Serbo-Croat language; he intended to introduce the national tongue into all the public offices. But this naturally could not be carried through without an intervening period, and unluckily Marmont so far excelled his compatriots as a linguist, that when the newspaper Télégraphe officiel des Provinces Illyriennes appeared at Ljubljana, the capital (under the brilliant editorship of Charles Nodier, who came out from France for that purpose), and it was announced that there would be French, German, Italian and Slav articles, the latter do not appear to have been published. Illyria was under the influence of its neighbours, Italian, German and Hungarian, with regard to the spoken and still more with regard to the written language. A fundamental necessity was that the country should have one common language. Under French influence Joachim Stulli brought out his Vocabulario italiano-illyrico-latino in 1810, and at Triest in 1812 Starčević published his new Illyrian grammar. There was visible in these works an aspiration that some day the Yugoslavs would be united in one country and with various dialects, and the proviso that for public affairs and for schools and literature the so-called "Što" dialect, the most widely spread and the most perfect, should be given preference. If Napoleon had not fallen, his Illyria would no doubt have gradually attracted to herself the other Yugoslav provinces that still were under the Austrian, Hungarian or Turk; and in this way one of the great thorns would have been taken out of Europe's side. There was an official, Marcel de Serres, on Napoleon's staff, who was exclusively concerned with Yugoslav affairs; and it is probable that with a closer knowledge of the people there would have been less insistence on the radical reforms which were sometimes ill-adapted to the country and were often hated vehemently by the persons whom they shook out of their age-long comatose condition. Napoleon would have modified the methods of recruiting had he known how much resentment his conscription was arousing. Venice had obtained most faithful soldiers; this was one of the few trades that she permitted, but she had never said they were obliged to serve. Napoleon's system caused great numbers of desertions, while the men who stayed had little discipline and looked for opportunities to join the enemy. Perhaps in time the nobles would have been resigned to losing, if not all, at any rate a portion of their privileges; and the Catholic clergy would have moderated their strong views against the gaoler of Pius VII., the champion of liberal and emancipated France, the master of Dandolo, who wanted to reduce the number of bishoprics, oblige candidates for the priesthood to learn certain lay subjects and regulate the funds in the possession of the Orders, with the purpose of assisting the indigent clergy and benevolent institutions—much would have been forgiven by the clergy to the man who brought about national union.

NAPOLEON'S SCHEMES ARE ROUGHLY INTERRUPTED

The transactions of the British at Vis (Lissa) were such as to make the people of Illyria very discontented with Napoleon, not so much on account of his mischance at sea, as of the disagreeable effects thereof upon themselves. The British blockade had ruined the local merchant service, while the consequent state of a province which had necessarily to be revictualled by sea was compared with the flourishing fortunes of Vis. Before the British definitely occupied that island with its glorious harbour—2½ kilometres in length by 1 kilometre in breadth—they had to secure themselves by two naval engagements. In October 1810 the French-Italian attack was nearly successful, and in the following March came the great fight when Dubourdieu pitted himself against Commodore Hoste. Not counting a few smaller ships, the French had four frigates, each armed with 44 guns, and two corvettes of 32 guns. The British had the Amphion and the Cerberus, each armed with 60 guns, the Active with 44 and the Volage with 22. The Italians having slow ships, arrived late, but fought very well. What lost Dubourdieu his chances was the separation of his squadron, which allowed the British to engage them one after another. Dubourdieu on the Favorite, his captain and two lieutenants were killed; the captain of the Flore lost an arm; the captain of the Bellona had both legs amputated, and died on the next day; Pasqualijo, captain of the Corona, wished to surrender his sword to Hoste, but as he had fought so nobly Hoste refused to take it. Pasqualijo was removed to Malta, and after a few months set at liberty. On the British side the losses were also severe. Most of the crew of the Amphion were either killed or wounded, Hoste being among the latter. Of 254 on board the Cerberus only 26 were untouched. It is said that the French and Italians had about 200 killed and 500 wounded. Dubourdieu's fault was merely an excess of intrepidity; the French have called a cruiser after him. Their opinion at the time, according to their historians,[38] was that the British were superior in officers and men and ships—constant cruising on the Adriatic had brought them near perfection. Among the incidents recorded is that of one of the Amphion's cadets who was doing police work at the fort; in despair at being out of the battle he swam to his ship. A fusillade from the Favorite put some shot in his leg. On reaching the Amphion he was bandaged and went to his post. His name was Farell or Farewell.... After this the British made themselves at home upon that mountainous, rich isle of palm-trees and vineyards that were praised of old by Agatharchides. Sir G. D. Robertson, the Governor, had two companies of the 35th Regiment, besides Swiss, Corsican and Calabrian contingents. There was great prosperity. Sometimes a hundred corsairs would be in the harbour, waiting for a favourable wind. On their return they would have splendid cargoes, and the goods which cost so little were sold at absurd prices. Rent was high, there were not shops enough for the tailors, carpenters, goldsmiths, pastry-cooks who landed there, chiefly from Italy; the people therefore pulled old boats on to the shore and lived in them. There one could buy the best Turkish tobacco, and cigars were advertised as "the finest cigars for gentlemen and ladies." Italian and Dalmatian smugglers flocked to Vis in search of goods, and even French officers could sometimes not resist wearing the cool garments from the East Indies. In two years the population increased from four to eleven thousand.

Illyria's enemies on land were also aided by the British. In 1813, when the Austrians, under General Tomassich, penetrated into the Illyrian provinces, the Croat inhabitants threw in their lot with them. They and the British surrounded Zadar, which fell after a siege of six weeks. At Dubrovnik—whose merchantmen she had mostly captured or sunk—England assisted the population, nobles and commoners, in a revolt against the French. One object of the citizens was to restore the Republic, but in a democratic form.

THE MONTENEGRIN BISHOP INCITES AGAINST HIM

However, in the first days of 1814 the Austrians arrived and the French, in their reduced condition, could hold out no longer. 1813 had been a fatal year for Napoleon. The Montenegrin Bishop had addressed a stirring appeal to the Bocchesi and others in September. "Slavs!" he wrote. "Glorious and illustrious population of the Bocche di Cattaro, of Dubrovnik and Dalmatia! Behold the moment to seize arms against the destroyer of Europe, the universal foe who has attacked your religion, ruined your churches.... He has put his taxes on the blood of your veins and even on the corpses of your parents! What injustices has he not committed?... Behold the hour of vengeance.... Croatia is delivered, and Carniola, Triest, Istria, Rieka and Zengg. What else do you wait for, O valiant Slavs of Dalmatia, of Dubrovnik and of Kotor? By land the army of the Emperor of Austria, by sea that of the King of England enter Dalmatia. They have taken Zadar and have arrived at Makarska." ... [The Austrians, as a matter of fact, entered Dalmatia a month after this proclamation was issued. The Bishop has allowed the prophet in him to prevail over the chronicler.] "I am there," he continues, "with my Montenegrins, ready to go where peril has to be faced. The glory of the traitor Bonaparte has remained at Moscow and Smolensk: no longer need we tremble before the Tyrant....

"Given at our Headquarters at Budva, 12/24 September 1813. Peter, Bishop."

DISASTER FOR NAPOLEON AND THE SOUTHERN SLAVS

1813 was a fatal year for Napoleon and for this first attempt to build a Yugoslavia. It was a fatal year for the first effort to construct again a Serbian State. Burning with the hope of liberation, no less than four Serbian armies had assembled and advanced victoriously against the Turk. One of the most outstanding episodes was the heroic death of Stephen Sindjelinić at Tšegar, near to Niš. As he was in a hopeless case, no reinforcements having come, he told his men that they must die, but as the Turks outnumbered them so more of these must perish than of Christians. He waited till the Turks pressed closely round him and then fired the magazine. In vengeance for this deed the Turks piled up a pyramid of Serbian soldiers' heads; they called it Tchele-Koula (Tower of Skulls), and for many years it was at Niš a veritable Turkish monument. King Milan built a wall around it; afterwards it was removed. And so the Serbs continued their long fight. It seemed to some of them that the authority of Kara George had grown excessive. They convoked a national assembly, which decided to set up a Ministry of six and a tribunal. Kara George was—in agreement with his Ministers—to nominate the prefects of the various departments. While the Serbs were settling these internal matters, Russia made her peace in 1812 with Turkey. As for Serbia, it was arranged that the new fortresses would be demolished and the towns be occupied by Turkish garrisons. Thus all that Serbia had won, and at the cost of so much blood, would now be stolen from her. Once again did Kara George and his companions take the field, but this time they were overpowered. Many fled to Hungary, among them Kara George, and were imprisoned. Others stayed in Serbia, and of these a great many were slaughtered by the Turks. They say that sixty were impaled on each side of the road which enters Belgrade, among them priests and monks, whose bodies were consumed by dogs.

But Illyria and Serbia lived as inspirations.

Nearly thirty years after the Austrians came back to Illyria they, at the request of the Sultan, forbade the use of that name, except as one of their Emperor's string of titles. Turkish susceptibilities were not ruffled if he chose to call himself King of Illyria. Was he not also King of Jerusalem? There had been anxiety at Constantinople as to the effect which the name of Napoleon's province was producing on the Slavs of Bosnia. Considering the Austrian policy, this was not a glittering diplomatic triumph for the Turks. Had they approached the Austrians much earlier it is improbable that they would have been met with any very strenuous refusal. In their own phrase, a phrase that was used by Osman Pasha when he heard of the violent disputes between the Russians and Roumanians as to which of them had been the first to batter the defences down and take by storm the mighty Plevna—"Any pig," said he, "can walk in at an open door."

AUSTRIA'S REPRESSIVE POLICY

Another item of Austria's policy which it would not have been difficult to foretell was her refusal to countenance the union of Dalmatia and Croatia. Von Thurn's idea of favouring the harmless Italianized party was thought very admirable and was now once more put into action. This party was very much concerned to keep its head above water; the rising tide of nationalism and equality and of other pernicious French notions made as much appeal to them as they did to Metternich. What he stood out against, they also hated; for the national spirit, fostered by the union of the two Slav provinces, would swamp them. If Dalmatia, on the other hand, remained autonomous they would be much more likely to survive. So they became autonomists.

A fair number of those who for economical or social reasons gave themselves out as belonging to this little autonomous party were unable to speak Italian, being less cultivated than many of those who continued to be patriotic Serbo-Croats. But as Italian now became the language of the schools and offices, of the law-courts and of public life generally, these autonomous persons hastened to learn it.

THE WORK OF VUK KARAŽIĆ

But now we hear the steps of other Southern Slavs whose mission is to call the people to their own language and to make the language worthy of the people. With the encumbrances that in the centuries had so disfigured it, the archaisms and the pseudo-classicisms, it would never come to pass that one great Serbian nation would be formed. And that is what Vuk Karažić, throughout his life, was aiming at. While Miloš Obrenović in Serbia took up the arms which Kara George had dropped, and used some others of his own, Vuk Karažić was tramping with his wooden leg round Serbia and Montenegro, Macedonia and Bulgaria, Syrmia and the Banat. He longs to find out where his country lies and, having found his people, to use their own language as the spoken and the written language of the nation. For this purpose he had to reform the Cyrillic alphabet, as it contained, like Russian and Bulgarian, letters that are not pronounced; and the Serbian produced by him is a purely phonetic language. He had, of course, his enemies, particularly in the clergy, who were the most important class. What he was doing with the Palæo-Slav displeased them hugely. Here was he trying to substitute what they called "a language of ox-herds" for that one which had not alone a venerable tradition but was the hall-mark of their superiority. A certain Dr. Hajić wrote a monograph in which he demonstrated most emphatically that it was the enviable happiness of the Serbian people to have no grammar. It was hinted by some other opponents of Vuk that he might well be an Austrian agent, who, in order to disturb the people, was now raising questions of a most contentious nature, which had previously not been thought of. But when the great philologist died in 1861 in Vienna he had long been recognized as one of the most ardent patriots. His three volumes of national songs excited the enthusiasm of Jacob Grimm, who rushed off to learn this new language, and with essays and letters to reveal it to Goethe. Translators, commentators, expounders and editors flocked from all sides, and Vuk was regarded as Serbia incarnate.

THE METHODS OF SERBIA'S MILOŠ

One naturally judges a country of which one is ignorant by the little which one knows about the private life of its ruler. And it was fortunate for Serbia's reputation that Prince Miloš had a Vuk to throw a shadow over him. Kara George had been a hero, Miloš called himself a statesman. Anyhow, he walked in crooked paths, although the murders that he was accused of are now said to be not proven—with the exception of Archbishop Nikčić, one of his critics, and another prominent man whom he requested the Pasha to have strangled. Kara George—one finds in many books—was done away with when he came back to renew the fight against the Turks; most people say that Miloš, his arch-rival, had him murdered in his sleep. All that one knows for certain is that the assassin was a man in the employ of one of Miloš's prefects. As for Miloš sending the head to the Sultan, it is pointed out that as the Sultan's vassal he could not do otherwise. But the stories of his wife, the strong-minded Princess Liubica, are acknowledged to be true—how she would cry out to the warriors, if they seemed to waver, that they were but women, and how this induced them to attack again; how she would cook her husband's meals and wait on him; how when she discovered that any other lady had found favour in the Prince's sight she slew her, and retired into the mountains until her husband was appeased or had discovered a new lady. The court etiquette of that period was under the baneful influence of Turkey. Miloš used to live in Turkish houses—some of them are extant to this day—he gave audience as a Turkish pasha, seated amid cushions on the floor, his room was hung with captured Turkish flags, and on his head he wore a turban. It was often rumoured that when he had gained sufficient money he would not continue to forbid the working of the Serbian salt-mines, lest the profits of his own mines in Roumania should diminish; and it is not creditable that he should have made his subjects pay their contributions to the Turkish Tribute in the currency of Austria, while he would forward it in Turkish currency—of course less valuable—and keep the difference. He also tried to monopolize the swine trade, the most lucrative in the country; he seized whatever he coveted—lands, mills and houses—and even burned down a part of Belgrade in order to build a new Custom-House, whose takings would flow into his pocket. "Am I not the chief," he said, "the Gospodar, and shall I not do what I like with my own?" But he was a real Prince. After the Peace of Adrianople in 1829 an edict was issued by the Sultan, which recognized Serbia as an independent principality, with Miloš as hereditary prince. He organized a standing army and built roads and schools and churches. He abolished, in 1833, the old Turkish system of land-tenure and introduced that peasant proprietorship which causes the Serbs, down to this day, to go into battle in defence of their own lands. In 1836 he offered the bishopric of Šabac to the famous Bulgarian monk, Neophyte Rilski, who wrote the first Bulgarian grammar and translated the New Testament, of which the first edition was burned by the Greek Church at Constantinople, while the second edition sold to the then enormous extent of 30,000 copies. The modest monk, who was born in 1793 and died in 1881, preferred the life of a student and teacher;[39] he therefore declined an offer which was so creditable to him who made it.... Yet in spite of Miloš's great services to his country he had his detractors. It was one of them, perhaps, who painted the portrait that one usually sees of him—an incongruous portrait, because the uniform is most correct—he is holding in his hand the Serbian military headgear, not a turban—but the face, with its serpent-like moustaches, high cheek-bones and black eyes, looks more like that of a Tartar than anything else. Those who did not care for Miloš said that it was barbarism not to let the laws be put in writing; but to this he never would consent. In 1835 he announced in the official Gazette (Novine Srpski) that he was the "only master"; he set about gaining for his country the interest of foreign Powers. England, which in 1837 sent Colonel Hodges as her agent to Belgrade, was for having Serbia placed under the protection of the Great Powers. Constitutional England was backing Miloš and his despotism, while, on the other hand, Russia and Turkey came out, to their own surprise, as champions of a constitution. They demanded that the power of Miloš should be limited by something which they euphemistically called "an organic regulation." Finally, there was imposed on him a Senate consisting of members appointed for life, but when this body asked him to account for the manner in which he had spent the public funds the Prince found that he could not allow himself to be so hampered and, in 1839, he abdicated. ("If," he once said, "if Charles X. of France had understood how to govern as I myself did in Serbia, he would never have lost his throne.") Vutčić, his arch-enemy, flung a stone after him into the Save. "You will not return," he cried, "until a stone can float on these waters!" "I shall die as Serbia's ruler!" shouted Miloš. (And when he ultimately did come back Vutčić was cast into prison, where he died mysteriously—Miloš refusing the Turks permission to examine the body.)

THE SLAV SOUL OF CROATIA

His democracy, in spite of his agrarian reforms, was very far from that of Vuk, and far from that of a young noble of Croatia, Ljudevit Gaj, who one evening in the drawing-room of Count Drašković—the same Count Drašković who wrote in German, for such was the spirit of the time, his Exhortation to Croatian Maidens that they should be truly Croatian—well, in this gentleman's house at Zagreb Ljudevit Gaj recites some verses he has written for a dowager. They are in Slav. The audience is inclined to be amused. Of course they know something of the language because, like Anastasius Grün in the Slovene country, they talk it to the servants. But among themselves in Croatia the upper classes prefer to use Latin. There is no doubt, as Count Louis Voinović, a Yugoslav poet, has said, that this pursuit of Latin brought into the Slav world much that is indispensable in modern thought. It created among them an atmosphere of social courtesy, which, according to Saint Francis of Assisi, is the sister of Charity. It has humanized the Slav world and furnished it thus with formidable weapons. But, on the other hand, it cast a veil over the differences between the nations and caused people to be blind to their own national genius. The Croat nobility, with few exceptions, were at this time so much in harmony with the Magyar magnates, so anxious to prevent their peasants from hearing the Marseillaise, that they would, if need be, learn the Magyar language. But to use Slav in a drawing-room! This was a new idea. They smiled good-naturedly; but Gaj, with some other young men, some priests and some savants, founded a literary brotherhood that was to become famous under the name of "Danica." Famous also is an image he conceived. "The Southern Slavs," said he, in his programme of 1836, "are as a triangular lyre whose extremities are at Scutari, Villach and Varna." He said there was a time when the strings of this lyre resounded with harmonious sounds, but that the winds in their fury have torn them. Styria, Carinthia, Carniola, Croatia, Slavonia, Montenegro, Herzegovina, Serbia, Bulgaria and Southern Hungary are these broken strings, which it is necessary to repair. Let the people in these lands, he said, forget their religious differences and remember that they are the children of one mother. Let them write the same language. Gaj thus aimed at bringing Vuk's reforms to bear upon the Latin characters with which the Serbo-Croat language is written in Croatia. Before his party was victorious it had to vanquish most determined opposition. Pamphlet was hurled against pamphlet, grammar against grammar, Gaj and his men had to overcome not only those who were the guardians of tradition, but all those who thought it natural and proper that in syntax there should be some difference between the Croat and the Serb. Yet now the philologists are out and the poets; their business takes them between the legs of the Great Powers, where they sometimes come to grief, but they are striking all those fetters from their nation. Peter Preradović is born in the Military Frontier and he dies an Austrian General. At the beginning of his distinguished career he could speak nothing but German, and it was in emotional German poetry that he first expressed himself. But afterwards, carried away by the new winds that were cleansing the Croat language and sweeping from it the reproach of being a mere jargon for the servants, he became in his "Putnik" (The Traveller) and "Braca" (The Brothers) the greatest poet of the Croats. It is noteworthy that when this Austrian General writes a drama he takes for his hero the old legendary hero of the Serbs, Marko Kraljević. The Ban of Croatia, Ivan Mazuranić, is a Latin poet in his youth; but when this high official too comes under the stirring influence of Gaj he dedicates himself to his own people and composes in "The Death of Smail Aga"[40] a poem that among Serbian-speaking people has become so much the property of all that the poet has been lost in the shadow of his own work. Peasants who sing fragments of it as they toil in the fields, and the minstrel, the guslar, who chants it for them of an evening, believe that it is, like their folk-songs, the anonymous production of the Serbian people.

THE MAGYARS AND CROATIA'S PORT

With the General and the Ban there is the Bishop, Joseph George Strossmayer, one of the greatest men of the nineteenth century. But before he became Bishop of Djakovo he saw the Government suppress those aspirations which he laboured for throughout his life. The Austrian Government had presented Gaj, in recognition of his literary work, with a diamond ring; but when they saw that his Illyrian programme persisted in aiming at the union of Croatia and Dalmatia, then at last they vetoed his Illyrianism and the word Illyria. His friends thereupon called themselves the "National party," which was in the Croatian Diet more numerous than the "Magyarones," who—many of them unprogressive landlords—stood for the most absolute union with Hungary. The National party demanded that Rieka, which was still "separatum sacræ regni Hungariæ adnexum corpus," should be united with the rest of Croatia; but the Magyars would naturally not let their one small port be taken from them. Those among the Magyars who consented to discuss the matter with the Croats said that if indeed they had purloined one Croat port (for they confessed that 350 kilometres separate Rieka from the nearest place in Hungary), yet the Croatians could afford to treat them with generosity, since they possessed at least two other ports, Bakar and Zengg, that were every bit as good. It was quite true that till Rieka was connected by the railway to the valleys of the Save, the Drave and the Danube, she had no advantage over Zengg and Bakar. None of these are natural ports: at Rieka there is no protecting island, Zengg and Bakar are available for small ships only, and behind all three there is a barrier of mountains. All of them, moreover, suffer from the visitations of the bora, which blows from the north sometimes for weeks on end. Having pointed out their own necessities and all these limitations, the Magyars stayed at Rieka. But they cast about them for some means by which the inconvenient Croats could be countered, and of course the simplest plan was to protect, as Austria was doing in Dalmatia, that small party of the Slavs on whom the presence of a few Italians at Rieka and their knowledge of this language and perhaps their education at some school in Italy had made such a profound impression that they wished no longer to be looked upon as Slavs—and some of them quite honestly thought that they were not Slavs. Of such was the Autonomist party, whose sole purpose was to flourish at Rieka in alliance with Hungarians and to keep Rieka a free Hungarian town. Perhaps the Magyars had no choice of methods, but it does not look magnanimous to plant yourself in some one else's house and then proceed to make conspiracies with a disgruntled child. They succoured the Autonomists in every way. For instance, the Croats had, as elsewhere on the coast, been so unjustly kept from having schools. The two or three schools in existence were for those who turned their back on national ambitions and cultivated modern Italian, even as the nobles up at Zagreb had cultivated Latin. Now in 1838 the Croats of Rieka, who—it is needless to say—were much the more numerous part of the population, thought that Gaj's wonderful educational movement, which was spreading far and wide, should not find Rieka unresponsive. So they asked that the Croatian language should be taught, as well as the Italian, in the local schools. "This was the first attempt," says Mr. Edoardo Susmel,[41] who is, I gather, a schoolmaster or an ex-schoolmaster at Rieka. "But the people of Rieka," he says, "always with admirable tenacity resisted the brute force with which the Croats wanted to impose on the Italian city the rights of him who is strongest. The city arose as one man against this first attack and the schools remained Italian."

The conflict in the Croatian Diet between the National party and that of the Magyarones grew in violence. The latter, egged on from Buda-Pest, demanded in the most peremptory fashion that the Croat deputies should henceforward speak in Magyar instead of Latin. It was in the same year, 1843, that one of the deputies, Ivan Kukulejević, made the first speech in Croatian. Szemere, a Magyar, cried out furiously that Croatia was a land which had been conquered by force of arms, and the Hungarian Parliament went so far as to pass a law which made the teaching of Magyar obligatory in Croatian schools and for the Croatian delegates in the Hungarian Diet. The Croats replied by petitioning the Emperor to separate their country completely from Hungary. Ferdinand V. wavered between the two sides; in 1843 he annulled the decisions of the Hungarian Parliament, and in 1844 he laid it down that in six years the Croats would have to adopt Magyar as their official language. It seemed as if the questions between Magyar and Croat could be settled by no other method than by war.

THE SULTAN REIGNS IN BOSNIA

There was not in the other Southern Slav lands much consolation for the National party. In Bosnia the French Revolution and the Serbian wars of independence had an unfortunate effect, for in 1831 the Muhammedan Serbs of that province, under the leadership of Hussein Bey, the captain of Gradačac, began a holy war against the "giaour Sultan," because Mahmud thought it timely to promulgate a few reforms. Hussein assumed the title of "The Dragon of Bosnia"; and if it had not been for several other Moslem potentates who were not only inimical to the Sultan but to the Dragon and to each other, it would have taken the Sultan's army more than five years to assert itself. In 1839 the Sultan's representative at Gulhane had orders to reform the administration, and this time the chief of the indignant begs was Ali Pasha Rizvanbegović, a powerful personage in Herzegovina. The revolt was, after a good deal of bloodshed, suppressed by Omar Pasha, who was determined to break once and for all the arrogance of the Bosnian aristocracy. Hundreds of begs were executed, drowned in the Bosna or taken in chains to Constantinople. But all these transactions did nothing to improve the lot of the raia. They had been roundly told in 1832 by His Apostolic Majesty that any one of those Christians "who persist in venturing to raise the banner of revolt" would be sent back from the Imperial and Royal frontier. After all there was a courtesy which monarchs must maintain towards each other.

A SORRY PERIOD FOR THE SOUTHERN SLAVS

When the Croat National party looked at Serbia they saw a people torn in two by rival dynasties: Michael, the son of Miloš, had after a few years followed his father into exile, as he also could not grow accustomed to ruling with a Constitution. After him came Alexander, son of the assassinated Kara George. He was a cold, indifferent, slothful prince, and constantly the banished house of Obrenović was plotting to turn out this scion of the house of Kara George. But after sixteen years his people turned him out.... In the Banat the Serbs were going backward. For example, they were at the summit of their strength in Arad in the eighteenth century, and since then they had been unable to resist the German wave. Time was when Arad had a Serbian princess, the wife of blinded Bela; and they were much esteemed when from 1703-1711 the Serbian cavalry and infantry had fought so strenuously for Austria against the rebels. Afterwards the Austrians believed they could get on without the Serbs; they started to destroy their privileges and to persuade them to give up their Church—it was in consequence of this that many of the Serbs in Arad went to Russia. A certain Colonel Peter Szejadinac objected to the Austrian policy and came to Arad for the purpose of procuring some alleviation for the Serbs, but he was broken on the wheel. In Temešvar the Serbs had also basked in glory. Until 1818 they had owned all but seventeen houses of the inner town; they had their own magistrature. Until 1860 they remained the wealthiest community, but here also there was an influx of Germans against which they could not stand.

SOME WHO TURN FROM POLITICS GROW PROSPEROUS

However, owing to this endless struggle which the Serbs of Hungary were waging, they developed their activity and energy. The land was rich, particularly Bačka, and that province held the town of Novi Sad, which was not only prosperous but the home of learning. When Serbia was not in a position to devote herself to intellectual or to literary life, she was assisted always by the Serbs of Novi Sad. And thus in other parts of southern Hungary the Serb, by his continual efforts against other people, such as the industrious German, made to flower those aptitudes within himself which under Turkish domination had perforce been lying dormant.... It is no unusual thing in the Banat to find a Serbian farmer who is five or six times a millionaire in francs. And if, like a hearty one whom I found having lunch without a collar, they have no children, then they are even more anxious to build schools and churches and to support anything Serbian. This gentleman, who lived in his native place, had presented it with a very fine school, and then had gone there himself, to learn how to read and write.... The Serbs of southern Hungary took a most active part in the events of 1848. When they saw that a conflict with the Magyars was inevitable, owing to the new Hungarian Constitution which created an enormous and free Hungary, but only free for the Magyars—a State founded on a mixture of democratic and feudal principles, reserving always the chief places for the magnates, lay and ecclesiastic, while rejecting the idea of universal suffrage—then the Serbs of southern Hungary assembled at Karlovci at the beginning of May and conferred upon Archbishop Rajacsich the title of Patriarch, at the same time electing Colonel Stephen Čuplikac the voivoda or chief of the Serbian Voivodina, which was to comprise Syrmia, Baranja, Bačka and a part of the Banat.

BUT THE CROATS STRIVE FOR POLITICAL LIBERTIES

The Croats, whose last traces of independence had been wiped out by the Magyars, rallied round Colonel Joseph Jellačić. In the resounding and statesmanlike phrases of his proclamation on March 11, Jellačić had declared that a grand purpose was before them. "It is to attain," said he, "the renascence of our people! Alone I can do nothing, if among the sons of one same mother there is not peace and understanding and fraternity."

"We are," exclaimed Gaj at a sitting of the Diet—"we are one nation! There are no more Serbs nor Croats!" One has been too apt to consider that the Croats armed themselves merely in defence of their own wrongs; their leaders anyhow looked far beyond.

Two days after Jellačić had uttered these words the court of Vienna, aghast at the tempest that was blowing from everywhere, from Prague and Galicia and Hungary, from Lombardy and Venetia, and from their own easy-going capital, had destituted Metternich. On the next morning the Emperor made it known that he would grant his peoples all the liberties they wanted. He had not had time to ascertain whether this would gratify the Magyars. But as one of the Croatian liberties was the nomination of Jellačić as their Ban, the Emperor appointed him; Jellačić joined hands with the National party and proceeded to break all the chains that bound Croatia to Hungary. By his circular of April 19 he instructed the Croats to respect no other authority but his. Slavonia, Dalmatia, the Military Frontiers and Rieka were, according to his plan, to be reunited to Croatia.

THE AUSTRIANS, THE MAGYARS AND THE CROATS

The Emperor's plans were far less definite. Between Croat and Magyar he was unable to make up his mind. What he wanted most of all was recruits for his Italian armies, seeing that Radetzky had been forced back by the insurgents, and Venice, under the presidency of Daniel Manin, had separated herself from Austria. When the Hungarians declared themselves willing to help with their army in putting a stop to the national movement in Italy, then the grateful Ferdinand bestowed on them a mandate to put a similar stop to the "Croat separatism"; he also suspended the Ban and declared him a traitor to the Fatherland. This did not unduly depress Jellačić, for in the month of June he was solemnly installed by the Patriarch Rajacsich in the cathedral of Zagreb. On this occasion the Mass was sung in old Slavonic by the Bishop of Zengg, and on leaving the cathedral another service was held in the Orthodox Church. "We desire by this solemn manifestation," said the Croats, "to make it clear to all the world that the brothers who belong to the Catholic and to the Orthodox religions have one heart and one soul."

Meanwhile the citizens of Vienna had revolted, and the Court, although the Magyars offered their hospitality, considered it prudent to take shelter at Innsbruck. It was to that town that the Croats sent in June a deputation which explained to the Emperor that Croatia had for centuries and under various dynasties been an autonomous country, and that the Magyars had not only, by their new laws, abolished this state of things but had also abolished the link that joined them to his empire, for they would henceforward have a personage, the Palatine, at Buda-Pest wielding executive power at such times as the Emperor was absent. The Croats showed the Emperor that he could thus not rule both at Vienna and Buda-Pest except if he could be in both places simultaneously; and Ferdinand acknowledged that this was correct and that the Magyars had their foibles, but that they were on the point of sending him recruits. "We hoped," said the Croats, "that in a new world of liberty the Magyars would recognize the other races as their equals. We have been disillusioned, as you will be. And in July when Ferdinand announced, on the advice of Radetzky, that he would continue the operations in the Italian provinces until the bitter end, it became necessary for him to have these recruits. "We are prepared," said Kossuth, "to send a Hungarian army to Italy—in principle." But while they were debating whether this would not expose them to the Croats, they were called upon to put down a revolt in the Banat, where the Roumanian population was quiescent and the Serbs had risen to assert the rights of the non-Magyar peoples. There the Serbs advanced victoriously, as did the Austrian troops in Italy. This caused the Emperor to assume another tone when he addressed the Magyars. Let them send a deputation to Vienna, where the Croats would be represented also; and together they would come to an arrangement regulating their relations to each other. The Hungarians were obstinate, chose Kossuth to be their dictator and thus began the revolution.

THE CROATS, STRUGGLING FOR FREEDOM, INCIDENTALLY HELP AUSTRIA

Jellačić, on September 11, crossed the Drave with forty thousand Croats, annexed the territory between the Drave and the Mur, and advanced without opposition up to Lake Balaton. His commissary, General Joseph Brinjevac, occupied Rieka. They were confident that History would not misjudge them. "We demand," said Jellačić, in his declaration of war, "we demand equality of rights for all the peoples and for all the nationalities who live under the Hungarian crown." Before he left Zagreb he transformed the feudal Croatian Diet into an elective assembly. This new Parliament cancelled the institution of serfdom and proclaimed that one of their objects was to have the Habsburg monarchy a federation, on the model of Switzerland. One would suppose that it was clear to everyone that Jellačić was not fighting for the Habsburgs but for the subjected nationalities, and that if the vacillating Austrians who had outlawed him on account of his nationalist views later on joined him in his attacks on the Magyars, this does not show that he was fighting Austria's battles. "The banner which the Croats have unfurled," said Cavour in a great parliamentary speech a month later, "is a Slav banner, and in no way, as some people suppose, the banner of reaction and of despotism.... His [Jellačić's] chief, if not his only, aim was the redemption of the Slav nationality." This page would doubtless be more dignified if, after the dead lion, it did not refer to Mr. Edoardo Susmel; but since the autumn of 1918 a large number of people at Rieka have pinned their faith to Susmel rather than Cavour—his book was handed to me in a most impressive manner by the mayor. Let us see, therefore, what he says of 1848. "When the Croats," says he, "on account of national reasons"—so far we are with him—"and on account of their loyalty to Austria, on account of the desire of Jellačić and by order of the Emperor attacked Hungary, which was at that time fighting for freedom, they also threw themselves upon Rieka.... For the first and solitary time Rieka fell into the hands of the Croats. It was, wrote the contemporary Giacich, an enemy invasion." Mr. Susmel sails merrily ahead, for he knows that Truth is mighty and that it is said to prevail; but in order to convince the most captious he calls on Mr. Giacich to testify. I know nothing about Mr. Giacich except that he was a contemporary—and yet it seems that one ought not to wish that Mr. Susmel had rather put his faith in Cavour, who was also a contemporary, since that gentleman was far less capable and never could have proved that when a Croat army comes into a Croat town it is engaged upon an enemy invasion.

The Magyars were not to be repressed so easily, and Ferdinand made promise after promise to the Croats and the Serbs if they would help to overcome this people. From Serbia itself came many volunteers to aid their brothers who were trying to throw off the Magyar yoke; they came with the connivance of Prince Alexander, in fact, he sent one of his generals to lead them. And a great many hasty Kossuth enthusiasts in Western Europe, knowing only that the Magyars, a chivalrous nation, had been in arms against the despotic Habsburgs, and that the Serbs and Croats had a considerable share in subduing them, could not find invective virulent enough for this abominable brood of hell, whose one desire it was to be a tyrant's executioners. They were denounced as having not the least conception of independence; for a people of a disposition so abandoned there was not the faintest hope of any future; and the day would come when these outrageous little nations would be wiped away. Had not the noble Kossuth spoken like a prophet when he asked disdainfully where was Croatia, for he could not find it on the map?

In December the new Emperor, Francis Joseph, began to rule his variegated realm with justice. He confirmed the Serbian Patriarch and Voivoda, who had been chosen in the previous May, and he bestowed upon the Serbs of Syrmia and Bačka and the Banat a territory of their own, with their own organization and jurisdiction. Even a less extensive Serbian authority, namely, the Banat town of Velika Kikinda, with its ten dependent villages, raised its own taxes, had its own police and had the power of life and death. There was, indeed, a cloud which came across the Serbians' happiness when Čuplikac, the Voivoda, died suddenly. He was at Pančevo when he received from the Emperor the gracious edict and a box of cigars. No sooner had he mounted his horse, lit one of the cigars and uttered the word "Brother," than he fell down dead. As for the Croats, the Emperor made Jellačić governor of Dalmatia, which signified the union of that province to Croatia.

HOW MONTENEGRO REFORMED HERSELF

There was a poet on the throne of Montenegro, the greatest of Yugoslav poets, who now that the civil governor (to whom had been entrusted certain duties which it had been thought a bishop should not exercise)—now that this official was expelled, reigned over Montenegro as the first and last real Prince-Bishop. He was a magnificent person, even for a Montenegrin, since his height was no less than 6 feet 8 inches; and in his determination to establish order in the principality he had let nothing intervene. As Russia, after a longish interval, resumed her subsidies and paid Peter II. an annual allowance of nine thousand ducats, together with arms, ammunition and wheat, the Prince-Bishop was relieved of the necessity of taxing his people. This made it easier for him to build up a strong central power that would not be dependent on the tribal chiefs, though it is doubtful if a despotism was more suitable for Montenegro's economic circumstances than the patriarchal form of government. Peter surrounded himself with a senate of twelve members, whose salaries he paid, a bodyguard of a few dozen and a police force of several hundred. These men, who lived to execute his wishes, were the instruments by which he set about improving Montenegro. The vendetta was to give way to the law court; there was something to be said, though, for the people who withstood this innovation, since the court's decision was the will of Peter. But no arguments protected anyone who clung to the old-fashioned ways of the vendetta or of brigandage or theft from being placed before a file of the Prince-Bishop's men. Tales are still recited in the primitive, bleak homes of Montenegro touching the great number of his subjects whom the poet put to death. But that was not the only penalty, for of the two European institutions with which he had embellished his capital one was a prison. The other was a printing-press, in which he had a childish joy. Once when he was entertaining King Augustus of Saxony he composed a poem for him while they were at supper; it was printed in the night; the happy author, next morning, not a little proud of this achievement, gave a copy to the King. He issued an official paper from this printing-press; its name was Grlica, which means "The Turtle-Dove."

THE PRINCE-BISHOP GIVES A LEAD TO THE SOUTHERN SLAVS

Now Peter thought the moment had arrived for Jellačić to found at last an independent Yugoslav dominion. On December 20, 1848, he wrote to him: "An inscrutable destiny has placed you, O illustrious Ban, at the head of the Southern Slavs. You have preserved their throne, their destiny for the Habsburgs.... A grand mission is yours; from it may arise a new formation of Europe. Its accomplishment would absolve the Slavs from the shame of having been the miserable slaves or the paid creatures of others. As for me, I am free, at the head, it is true, of a handful of men, despite the double malediction of tyranny and espionage." [Here he is referring to his neighbours, Austria and Turkey.] "But what does that matter when I look round me at millions of brothers who are in alien bondage? Occupy Dalmatia immediately and let us join each other. That which one does not conquer with heroic right is worth nothing. I am ready to come to your help with my Montenegrins." To these overtures Jellačić gave an evasive reply. It may be that he did not deem the moment opportune, it may be that, as some have said, he came under the atavistic influence of the military traditions of the Croats, whose long years of fighting for the Habsburgs had made them as devoted to that House as the Dalmatians had been for so long to Venice. The Habsburgs had exploited them, but the Croats felt that they were bound by all the blood which they had shed and by the military glory they had won in Austria's service. Had not Tomasić and Milutinović been the Generals—both Croats—who were sent to change Napoleon's Dalmatia into a province of the Habsburgs? And the list is endless. Jellačić was very probably deceived by Francis Joseph, who kept dangling before his eyes a vision of a "Greater Croatia." But, by an irony of history, this hope of union of the Southern Slavs was for the time flung very much into the background by the action of the Tzar, who rescued Austria when in 1849 she was again at variance with the Magyars. Kossuth had been furious at the Constitution promulgated in the spring of that year, which not only made obsolete most of Hungary's privileges, but introduced the principle of equality among the various nationalities. The Hungarians had been too much accustomed to the classing of races as first-class people and second-class people. When they had been reduced—the Russian methods being drastic—and when their thirteen Generals had been executed at Arad, Francis Joseph thanked the Croats "for their ceaseless energy and for their numerous sacrifices in the interests of the State." But Jellačić did not move, and the Prince-Bishop wrote to Count Pozza, a friend of his at Dubrovnik. "I had hoped for an instant, my dear Count," he wrote, "but I am now convinced that Yugoslavism is, for the time being, merely an idle word. The Yugoslavs are unconscious of their own strength and sell themselves unconditionally to the strongest. It is a subject of profound grief for those who love them and for sensitive souls." Peter II. did not long survive. He may have wondered sometimes why the Croats did not call for him instead of Jellačić, since his methods of administration had been so successful in the principality. He may have meditated sometimes on the Russians, wondering how one nation could be both so highly meritorious and so bloodthirsty. He died, aged thirty-nine, a disappointed man. (His Turtle-Dove expired some time before.) And he was buried, as he wished, upon a lonely peak of Lovčen, that vast mountain over Kotor which, until the deed of his great-nephew's son, his namesake, was impregnable. Peter II. had always been a man apart—it was his opinion that his Church was being choked with formalism and with ceremonial, and though he was a Bishop he went to church infrequently. The poet in him was much more attracted to the Bogomile sect, which taught that God had two sons, of whom the elder was Satan and the younger Christ; and when the world was created, the elder, seeing how lovely it was, separated himself from his Father in order to rule the world; and afterwards God sent the younger son to punish him.... Peter had far greater merits as a poet than as a ruler. In fact, Pushkin is perhaps the only Slav poet who surpasses him, and his philosophy is more original than that of Tolstoi. There came to Montenegro one Ivanović, a Russian missionary, whom Peter appointed to be President of the Senate. Peter used to live chiefly in Venice, Rome or Naples, only coming to Montenegro as a guest, and it was during his residence in Naples that Ivanović introduced a number of reforms. According to the general opinion, Peter was the greatest Yugoslav that ever lived; as a ruler he was neither good nor bad.

AUSTRIA POURS OUT A GERMAN FLOOD

Now that the Austrians had escaped from all their perils, and Napoleon's coup d'état had removed the danger of another revolution in France, they took in hand the burying of the recent Constitution which had given so much umbrage to the Magyars and to the Croats no vast pleasure. In its place, in 1851, the policy of Bach, an absolutist and a German policy, was introduced. The Croats and the Serbs of southern Hungary were treated differently, the latter being given not the territory they had claimed but one much more extensive, so that they themselves were in a great minority.[42] The Croats found themselves, of course, no longer joined to the Dalmatians. Everywhere a flood of Germans, the "huzzars of Bach," was loosened on the population; German was erected to be the official language. But the Slovenes took advantage even of the German atmosphere. Their national consciousness, which Napoleon had awakened after centuries, was now aroused. They took small interest, as yet, in politics, but strove to make material progress, principally in agriculture, partly too in commerce, such as in the exploitation of their splendid forests. Like the Slavs of Istria, they had no educated class—except the clergy—which was strong enough and was sufficiently well organized to lead them. Consequently it was difficult to make much headway in the towns against the Germans here and the Italians there. But they were not discouraged; by means of organizations, political and economic, they fought this denationalizing effect of the towns. That they succeeded in arresting the tendency—for example at Gorica and Triest—is even more laudable in view of the serious educational handicap which for years they had to face, and which the Austrians continued to inflict upon them until 1914. The provincial administration of Carinthia, for instance, was in 1914 maintaining three Slovene schools and six hundred and twelve German schools, although the Slovenes formed one-third of the population. What the Austrians said was that German was a world-language and that it was a fad to want to learn Slovene. Perhaps the Slovenes told them that Welsh is not a world-language. Anyhow, being not only a patriotic but a very practical race, they built their own schools in the villages, with the result that they have to-day a far smaller proportion of illiterates—17-1/2 per cent.—than either the Croats or the Serbs. It was well that they were patriotic and practical; they would otherwise have reaped a bitter harvest. The Slavs of Istria, Croatia and Dalmatia were in contact with no German territories and were for that reason left in the cold shades. The Slovenes, having Germans near them and among them, had to have a share in what the Germans were enjoying and they reaped sagaciously. One must admit that it was practical on Austria's part to favour the Italian language in Dalmatia, for it was from there that she supplied herself with functionaries for the provinces of Lombardy and Venice.

THE CROAT PEASANTS AND THEIR CLERGY

The Croat peasants were in a much worse condition than the Slovenes, and the nobles who might have assisted them in building schools had recently been ruined by the Austrian agrarian policy, for when in 1853 the Austrians put into execution what the Diet of Croatia had resolved to do in 1848 and freed the peasants from their serfdom, the indemnity they gave the landlords was in Austrian State papers, which the landlords had to take at the face value, though this was far above what they were worth. The owners of the so-called latifundia, mostly German or Hungarian noblemen, lost very little; for their wide domains were cultivated mostly by hired labour, not by peasants settled on the land. But these big landlords were not eager to build schools for peasants. It is said these should have been provided by the Church. The Croatian clergy in the villages would stand in a much better light if they had, irrespective of the higher clergy, made more vigorous attempts to bring down the illiteracy figures which to-day are said to be, for Croatia and Slavonia, 65 per cent. The higher clergy worked, with very few exceptions, hand in hand with Austria's Government, which Government was, after the Concordat of 1855, the close ally of Rome. If it was the Government's desire to build no schools, the higher clergy for the most part acquiesced. It surely is a function of a Government to occupy itself with education and to turn away from the great landlords who are frightened that a peasantry more educated will be troublesome. But those who have to bear a good part of the criticism are the village clergy; it is human not to criticize them half so much for what they left undone as for some aspects of their private life. The usual old stories circulate to the effect that they refuse to exercise their office till the peasant who is asking them to baptize or to marry or to bury some one brings a suitable amount of produce, eggs or fowls or something else, in lieu of money; but what is a more serious matter is the question of women. Three-and-twenty priests in the diocese of Zagreb passed a resolution a year or two ago that they were in favour of a married clergy. A Yugoslav bishop told me that most, if not all, of these gentlemen had anticipated the Papal consent; but that in his diocese only 3 per cent. of the clergy lived in sin [hostile critics say he should have added the word "openly">[, whereas in two other Yugoslav dioceses, which he named, such clergy might amount to 50 per cent. An examination of this question, which exists in other countries, would be unprofitable, were it not that in Croatia, with a Roman Catholic and Orthodox population living very often side by side, the circumstances are peculiar. The people do not take up any narrow attitude towards the Church of which they are not members: a Roman Catholic will go to an Orthodox and an Orthodox to a Roman Catholic church if they have none of their own. They intermarry; and since their sacred days, such as Christmas, are not celebrated at the same time the non-celebrating congregation cease to work, out of sympathy. Even with the alteration of the Orthodox calendar there will be days which one community will keep as workless days, so that it may go visiting the others and congratulating them. But this bland behaviour of the people is unfortunately not maintained when they discuss their priests. And in the Lika, where the population leads a rough, laborious life, they are not satisfied to have an academical discussion. They hold that if a man is celibate he is not manly, and scenes have taken place which Hogarth might refuse to draw.

WHAT THE CZECHS ARE DOING TO-DAY

The twenty-three priests of the Zagreb diocese who were in favour of a married clergy and of several other reforms could not stand up against their ecclesiastical superiors. The movement has made no open progress and their leader has been constrained to abandon Holy Orders and become a timber merchant. Nevertheless the idea of a national Church has not vanished; a good deal depends for other countries on the degree of success which attends the newly established national Church in Czecho-Slovakia. It already possesses over half a million adherents out of a population of 13 millions. We may be going to witness the rise of a series of national Churches, a consummation which—a Roman Catholic might observe—will very likely be no more successful in bringing nearer the brotherhood of man than the wide-flung Catholic Church. The enthusiastic nationalism of such new Churches may, in fact, help to postpone that happy state of things. In any case, and whatever be the results, we shall do well not to ignore the beginnings of what may be a mighty Reformation.

Ever since 1848 the Czech clergy have been anxious to obtain reforms, not so much in dogma as in discipline. They assert that it is more in accordance with the democratic spirit of the age if a priest is selected not by some magnate but by his prospective parishioners; they desire to have their mother-tongue employed for the liturgy—in this respect they are in advance of most Catholic countries—and they wish to allow their priests to marry or not to marry, as each man prefers. This, one need hardly say, is the point which, almost to the exclusion of all others, is taken up by the hostile compatriots of the new believers. "It is nothing more nor less than this," said a portly Benedictine abbot to me one day in Prague, "there are priests who live in concubinage and they actually want to have it legalized!" But in Czecho-Slovakia, with her vivid memories of the Hussites in the fifteenth century—magnificent new monuments to John Huss decorate the principal towns—in Czecho-Slovakia the old régime has not the same power as in Croatia. At first the new Church was sneered at, being called a Churchlet, then they called it a sect, and now they say it may persist for fifty years. While its critics occupy themselves so largely with the topic of clerical celibacy, the founders of the Church themselves are much more interested in other questions. They do not greatly concern themselves with their priests' apparel, holding that this need not trouble them more than a little, since they are striving for something more weighty—the freedom of conscience. In this, as they say, they are carrying on the doctrines of Huss, which were so bloodily repressed by the dominant party. Under Charles IV. the Roman Catholic Church possessed about one-third of all the land in Bohemia, while in Prague alone there were some three thousand priests. And if the doctrines of Huss had not sunk deeply into the minds of the Bohemians this new Church would have found her task very much more difficult. The first three bishops were ordained last year by the Serbian Bishop of Niš. It was at one time thought that the Orthodox religion would be adopted, but this was found to be impossible, and after a year of negotiations it was settled that the Serbian Church should be regarded as a sister Church.

The significance of Czecho-Slovakia's new Church is to be found in the national idea. So much is it a thing of the people and not of the priests that several schoolmasters have had to be ordained, the clergy being otherwise too scanty. In June 1919 a delegation from 3000 dissatisfied priests went to Rome. The Pope rejected what he called their foolish novelties. In January 1920 a secret meeting of 200 priests was held in Prague and 144 of them declared themselves for a new national Church. But few of them possessed the necessary resolution, such as was displayed by Dr. Farsky, a very intelligent and earnest young man who was Professor of Religion in the University and has now been appointed the Head of this new Church, as Bishop of Prague and Patriarch. His opponent, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Prague, has the reputation of being one of the cleverest of Czech politicians, and it will be interesting to see how the position develops. Since the War the Roman Catholic Church has lost 25 per cent. of its members—during the War it was, in the opinion of many, though perhaps it had no option, very much the servant of the Habsburgs. And one imagines that the Archbishop is handicapped by the demands of his party that the State should unquestionably continue to pay the yearly interests of the large number of monasteries that were dissolved more than a century ago by Joseph II. "All England's troubles," said the Coadjutor-Archbishop to me, "emanate from the fact that she nowadays pays nothing to the Church for those monasteries that were suppressed by Henry VIII." It is doubtful whether the Czechs, exulting in their regained liberty, will for the most part take the side of Rome when the matter has been fully ventilated and discussed. "We are not monarchist at all," said the Abbot Zavoral, "we are true to the Republic, we are democratic. And discussion is democratic, but," said he, "it should not be unlimited."

STROSSMAYER

To such a degree did the Austrian Government neglect its duties that, ten years ago, Croatia and Slavonia were short of at least one thousand school buildings and twelve hundred teachers. Bishop Strossmayer, coming from a family[43] which had settled at the sprawling town of Osiek, in Slavonia, did what he could. His Yugoslav Academy at Zagreb, the Zagreb University and the Society for studying the history of the Yugoslavs are but a few of the national institutions to which he devoted the princely revenues of Djakovo. From there this most remarkable man worked for the intellectual advancement of all the Southern Slavs; he subsidized the brothers Miladinoff who made the first collection of Bulgarian folk-songs (and who, on account of this forbidden subject, were both subsequently strangled at Constantinople); he paid for the education of young students no matter from what Yugoslav country they came; when Rački, the well-known Croat historian, was persecuted by the Government and living in misery, Strossmayer begged him to come to Djakovo, and Rački was his closest friend for many years; he built a large gallery at Zagreb and filled it with pictures, sacred and profane, and was as ready to assist a young artist in Istria as in Macedonia. It may be that he caused a circular to be read in the Croatian churches which referred to the Orthodox as "lost sheep," but he never used a method other than by prayer and the example of his life to cause them to forsake their fold; to him the forcible conversions by the Turks were as abhorrent as a system that was used in Bačka, where a whole village near Sombor was ennobled—but not those who afterwards came to live there—for having joined the Roman Church. He was himself no blind follower of the Vatican; and when he went with a very princely retinue—in part the weakness of his humble origin—to Rome in order to explain why he was unable to subscribe to the dogma of Papal Infallibility, he ravished his audience with a marvellous Latin oration, for he spoke many modern languages but was most thoroughly at home in Latin. Often in conversation he passed from one language to another, in search of what would best express his meaning, and frequently he would have recourse to Latin. He became reconciled to the dogma and it was due to the hostility of Magyar potentates that he remained for more than fifty years the Bishop of Djakovo, was not promoted to Zagreb nor made a cardinal. His fervent and statesmanlike views can be seen in his correspondence[44] with Gladstone. His head, like Gladstone's, caused one not to notice that the rest of the body was unimpressive; they had the same brilliance of eye. This man who worked continuously for the Southern Slavs could not be always a persona grata to Francis Joseph. Two remarks of the Emperor's are handed down, but that one may be a legend which, with the preface that Strossmayer was the only man to whom the Emperor was ever rude, says that Francis Joseph accounted for some proceedings of the bishop, as head of the National party in Croatia, by telling him that he must have been drunk—and, overtaken by remorse, making him an "Excellency" on the following day. Yet that story is certainly true which recounts how in 1881 the Emperor at Belovar said to him that he would sooner be an unimportant German Duke than Emperor of all the Slavs.

THE TURK IN MONTENEGRO AND MACEDONIA

The Emperor of a great many Southern Slavs, the Sultan, had in his time been satisfied if he could squeeze out of the Montenegrins so much tribute as would every year pay for his slippers. He could send an army now and then to devastate Cetinje and destroy the monastery where the people's bishop lived, but in those mountains a large army ran the risk of being ambushed and a very large one would be starved. Besides, now that the European scientists and travellers were beginning to go up to Montenegro and were, among the few sights of Cetinje, always shown the shrivelled head of Kara Mahmud Pasha, who in 1796 had been defeated, it was not advisable, the Sultan thought, that any other Turkish head of prominence should have this fate.... In Macedonia it was very different; the population might have once been warlike, but had so successfully been governed that some German travellers of the sixteenth century, Hans Ternschwamm and Ritter Gerlach, had described them as a "conquered, down-trodden, imprisoned people" who did not dare to lift up their heads, a people who "without intermission must toil for the Turks." And if three hundred years of this life had not completely tamed them, the Sultan had every confidence that the Greek Patriarch would tell the Powers what they knew already, namely, that the Macedonian Christians only had to pay a tenth and sometimes only an eleventh part of certain crops and that in return they were protected by the Spahi from the ills which every humbler man is heir to, and that the Powers, who politically said they must respect the Sultan, must now morally respect him also. But in 1850 the Turkish Government made a change; in place of the old Spahi there was installed a landlord who retained the name of Spahi but who had none of his predecessor's careless benevolence. The property had been hired out to him for life and his one object was to get from it as much as possible. He made demands not only for a tenth but for a fifth and even a third part, and not only of the maize and wheat but of every product of the soil. Cattle, bees, vegetables, fruit—of all of these he had to have his share; the peasant often cut his fruit trees down as he could not afford to pay the various taxes that were put on them. In the old days the Spahi had an arrangement with a whole village, and a system so impersonal was much less onerous than when demands were made from every household individually. The new sort of Spahi was not only an evil product of the time, but as the progress of industry in other countries was supplying the Turkish market with many new commodities, so in order to acquire these articles for himself he exacted more and more tribute from the helpless peasants. Progress in Macedonia was not merely retarded—lands which had been under cultivation were abandoned, and the peasant, having been despoiled of everything, perhaps having borrowed money at 9 or 10 per cent., was no longer able to get his living from the land on which so many generations of his ancestors had laboured. It was no longer possible for him to get the mess of maize and miserable bread, the strips of repulsive-looking flesh that were his luxury, the medicine for his underfed children who were moaning on the naked earth of his cabin, and at the same time to make the necessary contributions to the landlord or the landlord's agent, whom the villagers had to furnish with a riding horse, with gun and ammunition, with furs and with clothing appropriate to his position, with special gifts whenever he or they were marrying, and with all the pretty girls on whom his eye had rested. Therefore the čifčija would lose the last shadow of freedom, he would become a serf. His sowing and his reaping would now be for another, and as it did not profit him at all to make the land more fruitful, he was content with any prehistoric implement, with little wooden ploughs and with a total absence of manure. And yet this pitiable serf would often be in a position less deplorable than that of one who had a little freedom left and who was called a free man, for the Turk would treat him no worse than the mule whose continual existence he desires. It does not seem surprising if these Christians wanted to be liberated from the Turk and did not greatly mind what uniform their rescuers would wear.

THE CHEERLESS STATE OF SERBIA

Meanwhile the Serbs of Hungary were saying that the state of things in Serbia was desperate. It seemed so to a number of young men who found the coldness of Prince Alexander and his anxiety to please the Austrians both very much out of harmony with the new Liberal ideas of Western Europe. They would have been horrified to see the plight of Macedonia, which after the Crimean War became, if possible, still worse, for during it the Porte took up the first loan; others followed, and in a surprisingly short time the Turk stood face to face with bankruptcy, so that in his dealings with the peasant he became still more extortionate. To be sure the Liberal young men who were publishing the Omladinac and all those Southern Slavs who listened to the voices which in Italy and Germany were craving union and freedom, all of them saw in their dreams the freedom of the Southern Slav, but Serbia and Montenegro were the only portions of his patrimony which had any kind of independence and the Serbia of Alexander was in a distressing state. The Prince had managed to stay neutral during the Crimean War, in spite of the solicitations very vehemently put by Austria and Russia and the Porte; this neutral attitude secured for Serbia at the peace the benefit of having all her rights henceforward guaranteed collectively by the Great Powers. Yet Alexander was so anxious not to rouse the animosity of Austria that he declined to summon the national assembly, the Skupština, in which the people's rising aspirations could be heard. And, although the family community, the "zadruga," was giving way to a more modern way of life—much to the misgiving of those persons who believed that strength lay rather in the union of thirty or forty people, under the authority of the head of the house, than in a more dispersed society which would encourage individual initiative—yet Serbia was still a semi-Turkish and a quite despotic country, with all the civil service largely filled by Serbs from Hungary and many of the higher offices in the possession of the relatives of the Princess, for Alexander's wife, a lady from the neighbourhood of Valjevo, was as celebrated for her cleverness as for her beauty. It is regrettable that she did not prefer to take in hand the women's legal status, which is still too much like that of minors. When the princely pair had been expelled in 1858 and Miloš, to his infinite delight, called back from Bucharest, his place of exile, there was yet a great deal for the Omladina enthusiasts to do. Miloš at the age of seventy-eight was senile; he would sit for hours outside his old, white Turkish house at Čačak, while the passers-by knelt down to kiss his hand; in church he would become oblivious to his surroundings and would garrulously talk in a loud voice to friends around him.

THE SLAV VOICE IN MACEDONIA

Assuredly the Omladina Society had some knowledge of affairs in Macedonia, for Dimitri Miladinoff, the elder of the two brothers, had been at Karlovci, where he was offered the professorship of Greek at the Serbian school. Miladinoff had been born at Struga in Macedonia and educated at Jannina, where he noticed that a number of the names of forests, rivers, villages and ruins sounded odd in Greek—they seemed to have much more resemblance to the language spoken by the Slavs who lived beyond his home, the Bulgars. This awoke a flame in him. At Ochrida, where he was presently appointed as a teacher in the school, he gave his lessons in the customary Greek, nor did he undervalue the advantages the Macedonian Slavs could draw, particularly at the stage they were in, from the study of Greek literature and from the contemplation of the patriotic virtues of old Greece. But at the same time he began to give his pupils a Bulgarian translation of what they were learning; and one day in 1845 while he was in the middle of a lesson, taught in that strange manner, on Thucydides, the Russian archæologist Grigorović appeared and in amazement cried, "But we are brothers!" It was to him a marvel that these people's mother-tongue was Slav. Miladinoff had a project to retain the Greek at college and to introduce Bulgarian in the elementary schools, but when in 1848 he spoke of this at Ochrida the notables had grown so hellenized that they considered an allusion to their Slav origin as most offensive. Far from giving up his plan, Miladinoff began a pilgrimage through Macedonia, pretending that his object was to gather funds for the construction at Constantinople of a Bulgar church. Everywhere he taught as he had done at Ochrida, and the elucidation, for example, of Demosthenes enabled him to plant his patriotic seeds. It was in the course of his travels that he (and afterwards his younger brother Constantine) collected the folk-songs that were published by the generosity of Strossmayer. He stayed for a time at Sarajevo and at Karlovci, where he was filled with emulation by the progress which the Serbs had made. On his return in 1857 to Macedonia the people of the town of Kukuš—near the future boundaries of Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece—invited him to be headmaster at their school. He was overjoyed that this town had the courage to have the Bulgarian language taught, and we have his reply. The Phanariote Greeks, he says, "will hurl their anathema against us! The Bulgarian script is contrary to God! It will not be the first time that they have proclaimed this! But those days are past! Already the rays of dawn...." This letter is written in Greek. "Oh, how I am ashamed," he says, "to express my sentiments in the Greek language!" But the literary form of Bulgarian is, as yet, undeveloped. One year after his arrival at Kukuš the population removed the Greek books from their cathedral and listened to the singing of the Mass in Slav by a Bulgarian monk from Mt. Athos. When he began to recite the Credo in the ordinary Bulgarian tongue, the congregation fell on their knees and burst into tears.

THE MACEDONIAN SLAVS ARE UNDIVIDED

Another Macedonian traveller was the highly distinguished Frenchman, Ami Boué. His great book La Turquie d'Europe, in four volumes of more than 500 pages each, appeared in Paris in 1840, and is a veritable encyclopædia with which no other publication of the same kind can be compared, either for the largeness of his scheme, the versatility of his interests or the profound knowledge of his subject. Well, he found that many Slavs of Macedonia, whom he calls Bulgars, had their hopes centred in Miloš, who was then the reigning Serbian Prince. The difference in their eyes between the two people was that the Serbs had gained their independence. It was not as great an independence as the Macedonians fancied, for in addition to the vexatious remains of Turkish suzerainty there was the Greek ecclesiastical rule. During the reigns of Kara George and Miloš the Greeks insisted on having their language used for the liturgy in all the Serbian towns, especially in Belgrade; after that period Greek and Slav were used for half the service each, and this practice was continued until 1858. Nevertheless for the unhappy Macedonians Serbia was a land of radiant liberty. And whether it was going to be a Serb or Bulgar who would rescue them—qu'importe? Ami Boué noted, as have many others, that the Macedonian Slav in his physical characteristics, in his language, in his outlook, in his native habits and in the expression of his sentiments is intermediate between the Serbs and Bulgars. And he says that as between the Serbs and Bulgars he does not recognize a greater difference than there is between the Istrians, the Dalmatians and the Croats, which is to say that there is none.