The Balkans

A HISTORY OF BULGARIA—SERBIA—GREECE—RUMANIA—TURKEY

BY NEVILL FORBES, ARNOLD J. TOYNBEE, D. MITRANY, D.G. HOGARTH

Contents

MAPS

PREFACE

The authors of this volume have not worked in conjunction. Widely separated, engaged on other duties, and pressed for time, we have had no opportunity for interchange of views. Each must be held responsible, therefore, for his own section alone. If there be any discrepancies in our writings (it is not unlikely in so disputed a field of history) we can only regret an unfortunate result of the circumstances. Owing to rapid change in the relations of our country to the several Balkan peoples, the tone of a section written earlier may differ from that of another written later. It may be well to state that the sections on Serbia and Bulgaria were finished before the decisive Balkan developments of the past two months. Those on Greece and Rumania represent only a little later stage of the evolution. That on Turkey, compiled between one mission abroad and another, was the latest to be finished.

If our sympathies are not all the same, or given equally to friends and foes, none of us would find it possible to indite a Hymn of Hate about any Balkan people. Every one of these peoples, on whatever side he be fighting to-day, has a past worthy of more than our respect and interwoven in some intimate way with our history. That any one of them is arrayed against us to-day is not to be laid entirely or chiefly at its own door. They are all fine peoples who have not obtained their proper places in the sun. The best of the Osmanli nation, the Anatolian peasantry, has yet to make its physical and moral qualities felt under civilized conditions. As for the rest—the Serbs and the Bulgars, who have enjoyed brief moments of barbaric glory in their past, have still to find themselves in that future which shall be to the Slav. The Greeks, who were old when we were not as yet, are younger now than we. They are as incalculable a factor in a political forecast as another Chosen Race, the Jews. Their past is the world’s glory: the present in the Near East is theirs more than any people’s: the future—despite the laws of corporate being and decline, dare we say they will have no part in it? Of Rumania what are we to think? Her mixed people has had the start of the Balkan Slavs in modern civilization, and evidently her boundaries must grow wider yet. But the limits of her possible expansion are easier to set than those of the rest.

We hope we have dealt fairly with all these peoples. Mediaeval history, whether of the East or the West, is mostly a record of bloodshedding and cruelty; and the Middle Age has been prolonged to our own time in most parts of the Balkans, and is not yet over in some parts. There are certain things salutary to bear in mind when we think or speak of any part of that country to-day. First, that less than two hundred years ago, England had its highwaymen on all roads, and its smuggler dens and caravans, Scotland its caterans, and Ireland its moonlighters. Second, that religious fervour has rarely mitigated and generally increased our own savagery. Thirdly, that our own policy in Balkan matters has been none too wise, especially of late. In permitting the Treaty of Bucarest three years ago, we were parties to making much of the trouble that has ensued, and will ensue again. If we have not been able to write about the Near East under existing circumstances altogether sine ira et studio, we have tried to remember that each of its peoples has a case.

D.G. HOGARTH.

November, 1915.

BULGARIA AND SERBIA

1
Introductory

The whole of what may be called the trunk or massif of the Balkan peninsula, bounded on the north by the rivers Save and Danube, on the west by the Adriatic, on the east by the Black Sea, and on the south by a very irregular line running from Antivari (on the coast of the Adriatic) and the lake of Scutari in the west, through lakes Okhrida and Prespa (in Macedonia) to the outskirts of Salonika and thence to Midia on the shores of the Black Sea, following the coast of the Aegean Sea some miles inland, is preponderatingly inhabited by Slavs. These Slavs are the Bulgarians in the east and centre, the Serbs and Croats (or Serbians and Croatians or Serbo-Croats) in the west, and the Slovenes in the extreme north-west, between Trieste and the Save; these nationalities compose the southern branch of the Slavonic race. The other inhabitants of the Balkan peninsula are, to the south of the Slavs, the Albanians in the west, the Greeks in the centre and south, and the Turks in the south-east, and, to the north, the Rumanians. All four of these nationalities are to be found in varying quantities within the limits of the Slav territory roughly outlined above, but greater numbers of them are outside it; on the other hand, there are a considerable number of Serbs living north of the rivers Save and Danube, in southern Hungary. Details of the ethnic distribution and boundaries will of course be gone into more fully later; meanwhile attention may be called to the significant fact that the name of Macedonia, the heart of the Balkan peninsula, has been long used by the French gastronomers to denote a dish, the principal characteristic of which is that its component parts are mixed up into quite inextricable confusion.

Of the three Slavonic nationalities already mentioned, the two first, the Bulgarians and the Serbo-Croats, occupy a much greater space, geographically and historically, than the third. The Slovenes, barely one and a half million in number, inhabiting the Austrian provinces of Carinthia and Carniola, have never been able to form a political state, though, with the growth of Trieste as a great port and the persistent efforts of Germany to make her influence if not her flag supreme on the shores of the Adriatic, this small people has from its geographical position and from its anti-German (and anti-Italian) attitude achieved considerable notoriety and some importance.

Of the Bulgars and Serbs it may be said that at the present moment the former control the eastern, and the latter, in alliance with the Greeks, the western half of the peninsula. It has always been the ambition of each of these three nationalities to dominate the whole, an ambition which has caused endless waste of blood and money and untold misery. If the question were to be settled purely on ethnical considerations, Bulgaria would acquire the greater part of the interior of Macedonia, the most numerous of the dozen nationalities of which is Bulgarian in sentiment if not in origin, and would thus undoubtedly attain the hegemony of the peninsula, while the centre of gravity of the Serbian nation would, as is ethnically just, move north-westwards. Political considerations, however, have until now always been against this solution of the difficulty, and, even if it solved in this sense, there would still remain the problem of the Greek nationality, whose distribution along all the coasts of the Aegean, both European and Asiatic, makes a delimitation of the Greek state on purely ethnical lines virtually impossible. It is curious that the Slavs, though masters of the interior of the peninsula and of parts of its eastern and western coasts, have never made the shores of the Aegean (the White Sea, as they call it) or the cities on them their own. The Adriatic is the only sea on the shore of which any Slavonic race has ever made its home. In view of this difficulty, namely, the interior of the peninsula being Slavonic while the coastal fringe is Greek, and of the approximately equal numerical strength of all three nations, it is almost inevitable that the ultimate solution of the problem and delimitation of political boundaries will have to be effected by means of territorial compromise. It can only be hoped that this ultimate compromise will be agreed upon by the three countries concerned, and will be more equitable than that which was forced on them by Rumania in 1913 and laid down in the Treaty of Bucarest of that year.

If no arrangement on a principle of give and take is made between them, the road to the East, which from the point of view of the Germanic powers lies through Serbia, will sooner or later inevitably be forced open, and the independence, first of Serbia, Montenegro, and Albania, and later of Bulgaria and Greece, will disappear, de facto if not in appearance, and both materially and morally they will become the slaves of the central empires. If the Balkan League could be reconstituted, Germany and Austria would never reach Salonika or Constantinople.

2
The Balkan Peninsula in Classical Times
400 B.C.–A.D. 500.

In the earlier historical times the whole of the eastern part of the Balkan peninsula between the Danube and the Aegean was known as Thracia, while the western part (north of the forty-first degree of latitude) was termed Illyricum; the lower basin of the river Vardar (the classical Axius) was called Macedonia. A number of the tribal and personal names of the early Illyrians and Thracians have been preserved. Philip of Macedonia subdued Thrace in the fourth century B.C. and in 342 founded the city of Philippopolis. Alexander’s first campaign was devoted to securing control of the peninsula, but during the Third century B.C. Thrace was invaded from the north and laid waste by the Celts, who had already visited Illyria. The Celts vanished by the end of that century, leaving a few place-names to mark their passage. The city of Belgrade was known until the seventh century A.D. by its Celtic name of Singidunum. Naissus, the modern Nish, is also possibly of Celtic origin. It was towards 230 B.C. that Rome came into contact with Illyricum, owing to the piratical proclivities of its inhabitants, but for a long time it only controlled the Dalmatian coast, so called after the Delmati or Dalmati, an Illyrian tribe. The reason for this was the formidable character of the mountains of Illyria, which run in several parallel and almost unbroken lines the whole length of the shore of the Adriatic and have always formed an effective barrier to invasion from the west. The interior was only very gradually subdued by the Romans after Macedonia had been occupied by them in 146 B.C. Throughout the first century B.C. conflicts raged with varying fortune between the invaders and all the native races living between the Adriatic and the Danube. They were attacked both from Aquileia in the north and from Macedonia in the south, but it was not till the early years of our era that the Danube became the frontier of the Roman Empire.

In the year A.D. 6 Moesia, which included a large part of the modern kingdom of Serbia and the northern half of that of Bulgaria between the Danube and the Balkan range (the classical Haemus), became an imperial province, and twenty years later Thrace, the country between the Balkan range and the Aegean, was incorporated in the empire, and was made a province by the Emperor Claudius in A.D. 46. The province of Illyricum or Dalmatia stretched between the Save and the Adriatic, and Pannonia lay between the Danube and the Save. In 107 A.D. the Emperor Trajan conquered the Dacians beyond the lower Danube, and organized a province of Dacia out of territory roughly equivalent to the modern Wallachia and Transylvania, This trans-Danubian territory did not remain attached to the empire for more than a hundred and fifty years; but within the river line a vast belt of country, stretching from the head of the Adriatic to the mouths of the Danube on the Black Sea, was Romanized through and through. The Emperor Trajan has been called the Charlemagne of the Balkan peninsula; all remains are attributed to him (he was nicknamed the Wallflower by Constantine the Great), and his reign marked the zenith of Roman power in this part of the world. The Balkan peninsula enjoyed the benefits of Roman civilization for three centuries, from the first to the fourth, but from the second century onwards the attitude of the Romans was defensive rather than offensive. The war against the Marcomanni under the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, in the second half of this century, was the turning-point. Rome was still victorious, but no territory was added to the empire. The third century saw the southward movement of the Germanic peoples, who took the place of the Celts. The Goths invaded the peninsula, and in 251 the Emperor Decius was killed in battle against them near Odessus on the Black Sea (the modern Varna). The Goths reached the outskirts of Thessalonica (Salonika), but were defeated by the Emperor Claudius at Naissus (Nish) in 269; shortly afterwards, however, the Emperor Aurelian had definitively to relinquish Dacia to them. The Emperor Diocletian, a native of Dalmatia, who reigned from 284 to 305, carried out a redistribution of the imperial provinces. Pannonia and western Illyria, or Dalmatia, were assigned to the prefecture of Italy, Thrace to that of the Orient, while the whole centre of the peninsula, from the Danube to the Peloponnese, constituted the prefecture of Illyria, with Thessalonica as capital. The territory to the north of the Danube having been lost, what is now western Bulgaria was renamed Dacia, while Moesia, the modern kingdom of Serbia, was made very much smaller. Praevalis, or the southern part of Dalmatia, approximately the modern Montenegro and Albania, was detached from that province and added to the prefecture of Illyria. In this way the boundary between the province of Dalmatia and the Balkan peninsula proper ran from near the lake of Scutari in the south to the river Drinus (the modern Drina), whose course it followed till the Save was reached in the north.

An event of far-reaching importance in the following century was the elevation by Constantine the Great of the Greek colony of Byzantium into the imperial city of Constantinople in 325. This century also witnessed the arrival of the Huns in Europe from Asia. They overwhelmed the Ostrogoths, between the Dnieper and the Dniester, in 375, and the Visigoths, settled in Transylvania and the modern Rumania, moved southwards in sympathy with this event. The Emperor Valens lost his life fighting against these Goths in 378 at the great battle of Adrianople (a city established in Thrace by the Emperor Hadrian in the second century). His successor, the Emperor Theodosius, placated them with gifts and made them guardians of the northern frontier, but at his death, in 395, they overran and devastated the entire peninsula, after which they proceeded to Italy. After the death of the Emperor Theodosius the empire was divided, never to be joined into one whole again. The dividing line followed that, already mentioned, which separated the prefecture of Italy from those of Illyria and the Orient, that is to say, it began in the south, on the shore of the Adriatic near the Bocche di Cattaro, and went due north along the valley of the Drina till the confluence of that river with the Save. It will be seen that this division had consequences which have lasted to the present day. Generally speaking, the Western Empire was Latin in language and character, while the Eastern was Greek, though owing to the importance of the Danubian provinces to Rome from the military point of view, and the lively intercourse maintained between them, Latin influence in them was for a long time stronger than Greek. Its extent is proved by the fact that the people of modern Rumania are partly, and their language very largely, defended from those of the legions and colonies of the Emperor Trajan.

Latin influence, shipping, colonization, and art were always supreme on the eastern shores of the Adriatic, just as were those of Greece on the shores of the Black Sea. The Albanians even, descendants of the ancient Illyrians, were affected by the supremacy of the Latin language, from which no less than a quarter of their own meagre vocabulary is derived; though driven southwards by the Romans and northwards by the Greeks, they have remained in their mountain fastnesses to this day, impervious to any of the civilizations to which they have been exposed.

Christianity spread to the shores of the peninsula very early; Macedonia and Dalmatia were the parts where it was first established, and it took some time to penetrate into the interior. During the reign of Diocletian numerous martyrs suffered for the faith in the Danubian provinces, but with the accession of Constantine the Great persecution came to an end. As soon, however, as the Christians were left alone, they started persecuting each other, and during the fourth century the Arian controversy re-echoed throughout the peninsula.

In the fifth century the Huns moved from the shores of the Black Sea to the plains of the Danube and the Theiss; they devastated the Balkan peninsula, in spite of the tribute which they had levied on Constantinople in return for their promise of peace. After the death of Attila, in 453, they again retreated to Asia, and during the second half of the century the Goths were once more supreme in the peninsula. Theodoric occupied Singidunum (Belgrade) in 471 and, after plundering Macedonia and Greece, settled in Novae (the modern Svishtov), on the lower Danube, in 483, where he remained till he transferred the sphere of his activities to Italy ten years later. Towards the end of the fifth century Huns of various kinds returned to the lower Danube and devastated the peninsula several times, penetrating as far as Epirus and Thessaly.

3
The Arrival of the Slavs in the Balkan Peninsula, A.D. 500–650

The Balkan peninsula, which had been raised to a high level of security and prosperity during the Roman dominion, gradually relapsed into barbarism as a result of these endless invasions; the walled towns, such as Salonika and Constantinople, were the only safe places, and the country became waste and desolate. The process continued unabated throughout the three following centuries, and one is driven to one of two conclusions, either that these lands must have possessed very extraordinary powers of recuperation to make it worth while for invaders to pillage them so frequently, or, what is more probable, there can have been after some time little left to plunder, and consequently the Byzantine historians’ accounts of enormous drives of prisoners and booty are much exaggerated. It is impossible to count the number of times the tide of invasion and devastation swept southwards over the unfortunate peninsula. The emperors and their generals did what they could by means of defensive works on the frontiers, of punitive expeditions, and of trying to set the various hordes of barbarians at loggerheads with each other, but, as they had at the same time to defend an empire which stretched from Armenia to Spain, it is not surprising that they were not more successful. The growing riches of Constantinople and Salonika had an irresistible attraction for the wild men from the east and north, and unfortunately the Greek citizens were more inclined to spend their energy in theological disputes and their leisure in the circus than to devote either the one or the other to the defence of their country. It was only by dint of paying them huge sums of money that the invaders were kept away from the coast. The departure of the Huns and the Goths had made the way for fresh series of unwelcome visitors. In the sixth century the Slavs appear for the first time. From their original homes which were immediately north of the Carpathians, in Galicia and Poland, but may also have included parts of the modern Hungary, they moved southwards and south-eastwards. They were presumably in Dacia, north of the Danube, in the previous century, but they are first mentioned as having crossed that river during the reign of the Emperor Justin I (518-27). They were a loosely-knit congeries of tribes without any single leader or central authority; some say they merely possessed the instinct of anarchy, others that they were permeated with the ideals of democracy. What is certain is that amongst them neither leadership nor initiative was developed, and that they lacked both cohesion and organisation. The Eastern Slavs, the ancestors of the Russians, were only welded into anything approaching unity by the comparatively much smaller number of Scandinavian (Varangian) adventurers who came and took charge of their affairs at Kiev. Similarly the Southern Slavs were never of themselves able to form a united community, conscious of its aim and capable of persevering in its attainment.

The Slavs did not invade the Balkan peninsula alone but in the company of the Avars, a terrible and justly dreaded nation, who, like the Huns, were of Asiatic (Turkish or Mongol) origin. These invasions became more frequent during the reign of the Emperor Justinian I (527-65), and culminated in 559 in a great combined attack of all the invaders on Constantinople under a certain Zabergan, which was brilliantly defeated by the veteran Byzantine general Belisarius. The Avars were a nomad tribe, and the horse was their natural means of locomotion. The Slavs, on the other hand, moved about on foot, and seem to have been used as infantry by the more masterful Asiatics in their warlike expeditions. Generally speaking, the Avars, who must have been infinitely less numerous than the Slavs, were settled in Hungary, where Attila and the Huns had been settled a little more than a century previously; that is to say, they were north of the Danube, though they were always overrunning into Upper Moesia, the modern Serbia. The Slavs, whose numbers were without doubt very large, gradually settled all over the country south of the Danube, the rural parts of which, as a result of incessant invasion and retreat, had become waste and empty. During the second half of the sixth century all the military energies of Constantinople were diverted to Persia, so that the invaders of the Balkan peninsula had the field very much to themselves. It was during this time that the power of the Avars reached its height. They were masters of all the country up to the walls of Adrianople and Salonika, though they did not settle there. The peninsula seems to have been colonized by Slavs, who penetrated right down into Greece; but the Avars were throughout this time, both in politics and in war, the directing and dominating force. During another Persian war, which broke out in 622 and entailed the prolonged absence of the emperor from Constantinople, the Avars, not satisfied with the tribute extorted from the Greeks, made an alliance against them with the Persians, and in 626 collected a large army of Slavs and Asiatics and attacked Constantinople both by land and sea from the European side, while the Persians threatened it from Asia. But the walls of the city and the ships of the Greeks proved invincible, and, quarrels breaking out between the Slavs and the Avars, both had to save themselves in ignominious and precipitate retreat.

After this nothing more was heard of the Avars in the Balkan peninsula, though their power was only finally crushed by Charlemagne in 799. In Russia their downfall became proverbial, being crystallized in the saying, ‘they perished like Avars’. The Slavs, on the other hand, remained. Throughout these stormy times their penetration of the Balkan peninsula had been peacefully if unostentatiously proceeding; by the middle of the seventh century it was complete. The main streams of Slavonic immigration moved southwards and westwards. The first covered the whole of the country between the Danube and the Balkan range, overflowed into Macedonia, and filtered down into Greece. Southern Thrace in the east and Albania in the west were comparatively little affected, and in these districts the indigenous population maintained itself. The coasts of the Aegean and the great cities on or near them were too strongly held by the Greeks to be affected, and those Slavs who penetrated into Greece itself were soon absorbed by the local populations. The still stronger Slavonic stream, which moved westwards and turned up north-westwards, overran the whole country down to the shores of the Adriatic and as far as the sources of the Save and Drave in the Alps. From that point in the west to the shores of the Black Sea in the east became one solid mass of Slavs, and has remained so ever since. The few Slavs who were left north of the Danube in Dacia were gradually assimilated by the inhabitants of that province, who were the descendants of the Roman soldiers and colonists, and the ancestors of the modern Rumanians, but the fact that Slavonic influence there was strong is shown by the large number of words of Slavonic origin contained in the Rumanian language.

[Illustration: THE BALKAN PENINSULA ETHNOLOGICAL]

Place-names are a good index of the extent and strength of the tide of Slav immigration. All along the coast, from the mouth of the Danube to the head of the Adriatic, the Greek and Roman names have been retained though places have often been given alternative names by the Slavonic settlers. Thrace, especially the south-eastern part, and Albania have the fewest Slavonic place-names. In Macedonia and Lower Moesia (Bulgaria) very few classical names have survived, while in Upper Moesia (Serbia) and the interior of Dalmatia (Bosnia, Hercegovina, and Montenegro) they have entirely disappeared. The Slavs themselves, though their tribal names were known, were until the ninth century usually called collectively S(k)lavini ([Greek: Sklabaenoi]) by the Greeks, and all the inland parts of the peninsula were for long termed by them ‘the S(k)lavonias’ ([Greek: Sklabiniai]).

During the seventh century, dating from the defeat of the Slavs and Avars before the walls of Constantinople in 626 and the final triumph of the emperor over the Persians in 628, the influence and power of the Greeks began to reassert itself throughout the peninsula as far north as the Danube; this process was coincident with the decline of the might of the Avars. It was the custom of the astute Byzantine diplomacy to look on and speak of lands which had been occupied by the various barbarian invaders as grants made to them through the generosity of the emperor; by this means, by dint also of lavishing titles and substantial incomes to the invaders’ chiefs, by making the most of their mutual jealousies, and also by enlisting regiments of Slavonic mercenaries in the imperial armies, the supremacy of Constantinople was regained far more effectively than it could have been by the continual and exhausting use of force.

BULGARIA

4
The Arrival of the Bulgars in the Balkan Peninsula, 600–700

The progress of the Bulgars towards the Balkan peninsula, and indeed all their movements until their final establishment there in the seventh century, are involved in obscurity. They are first mentioned by name in classical and Armenian sources in 482 as living in the steppes to the north of the Black Sea amongst other Asiatic tribes, and it has been assumed by some that at the end of the fifth and throughout the sixth century they were associated first with the Huns and later with the Avars and Slavs in the various incursions into and invasions of the eastern empire which have already been enumerated. It is the tendency of Bulgarian historians, who scornfully point to the fact that the history of Russia only dates from the ninth century, to exaggerate the antiquity of their own and to claim as early a date as possible for the authentic appearance of their ancestors on the kaleidoscopic stage of the Balkan theatre. They are also unwilling to admit that they were anticipated by the Slavs; they prefer to think that the Slavs only insinuated themselves there thanks to the energy of the Bulgars’ offensive against the Greeks, and that as soon as the Bulgars had leisure to look about them they found all the best places already occupied by the anarchic Slavs.

Of course it is very difficult to say positively whether Bulgars were or were not present in the welter of Asiatic nations which swept westwards into Europe with little intermission throughout the fifth and sixth centuries, but even if they were, they do not seem to have settled down as early as that anywhere south of the Danube; it seems certain that they did not do so until the seventh century, and therefore that the Slavs were definitely installed in the Balkan peninsula a whole century before the Bulgars crossed the Danube for good.

The Bulgars, like the Huns and the Avars who preceded them, and like the Magyars and the Turks who followed them, were a tribe from eastern Asia, of the stock known as Mongol or Tartar. The tendency of all these peoples was to move westwards from Asia into Europe, and this they did at considerable and irregular intervals, though in alarming and apparently inexhaustible numbers, roughly from the fourth till the fourteenth centuries. The distance was great, but the journey, thanks to the flat, grassy, treeless, and well-watered character of the steppes of southern Russia which they had to cross, was easy. They often halted for considerable periods by the way, and some never moved further westwards than Russia. Thus at one time the Bulgars settled in large numbers on the Volga, near its confluence with the Kama, and it is presumed that they were well established there in the fifth century. They formed a community of considerable strength and importance, known as Great or White Bulgaria. These Bulgars fused with later Tartar immigrants from Asia and eventually were consolidated into the powerful kingdom of Kazan, which was only crushed by the Tsar Ivan IV in 1552. According to Bulgarian historians, the basins of the rivers Volga and Don and the steppes of eastern Russia proved too confined a space for the legitimate development of Bulgarian energy, and expansion to the west was decided on. A large number of Bulgars therefore detached themselves and began to move south-westwards. During the sixth century they seem to have been settled in the country to the north of the Black Sea, forming a colony known as Black Bulgaria. It is very doubtful whether the Bulgars did take part, as they are supposed to have done, in the ambitious but unsuccessful attack on Constantinople in 559 under Zabergan, chief of another Tartar tribe; but it is fairly certain that they did in the equally formidable but equally unsuccessful attacks by the Slavs and Avars against Salonika in 609 and Constantinople in 626.

During the last quarter of the sixth and the first of the seventh century the various branches of the Bulgar nation, stretching from the Volga to the Danube, were consolidated and kept in control by their prince Kubrat, who eventually fought on behalf of the Greeks against the Avars, and was actually baptized in Constantinople. The power of the Bulgars grew as that of the Avars declined, but at the death of Kubrat, in 638, his realm was divided amongst his sons. One of these established himself in Pannonia, where he joined forces with what was left of the Avars, and there the Bulgars maintained themselves till they were obliterated by the irruption of the Magyars in 893. Another son, Asparukh, or Isperikh, settled in Bessarabia, between the rivers Prut and Dniester, in 640, and some years later passed southwards. After desultory warfare with Constantinople, from 660 onwards, his successor finally overcame the Greeks, who were at that time at war with the Arabs, captured Varna, and definitely established himself between the Danube and the Balkan range in the year 679. From that year the Danube ceased to be the frontier of the eastern empire.

The numbers of the Bulgars who settled south of the Danube are not known, but what happened to them is notorious. The well-known process, by which the Franks in Gaul were absorbed by the far more numerous indigenous population which they had conquered, was repeated, and the Bulgars became fused with the Slavs. So complete was the fusion, and so preponderating the influence of the subject nationality, that beyond a few personal names no traces of the language of the Bulgars have survived. Modern Bulgarian, except for the Turkish words introduced into it later during the Ottoman rule, is purely Slavonic. Not so the Bulgarian nationality; as is so often the case with mongrel products, this race, compared with the Serbs, who are purely Slav, has shown considerably greater virility, cohesion, and driving-power, though it must be conceded that its problems have been infinitely simpler.

5
The Early Years of Bulgaria and the Introduction of Christianity, 700–893

From the time of their establishment in the country to which they have given their name the Bulgars became a thorn in the side of the Greeks, and ever since both peoples have looked on one another as natural and hereditary enemies. The Bulgars, like all the barbarians who had preceded them, were fascinated by the honey-pot of Constantinople, and, though they never succeeded in taking it, they never grew tired of making the attempt.

For two hundred years after the death of Asparukh, in 661, the Bulgars were perpetually fighting either against the Greeks or else amongst themselves. At times a diversion was caused by the Bulgars taking the part of the Greeks, as in 718, when they ‘delivered’ Constantinople, at the invocation of the Emperor Leo, from the Arabs, who were besieging it. From about this time the Bulgarian monarchy, which had been hereditary, became elective, and the anarchy of the many, which the Bulgars found when they arrived, and which their first few autocratic rulers had been able to control, was replaced by an anarchy of the few. Prince succeeded prince, war followed war, at the will of the feudal nobles. This internal strife was naturally profitable to the Greeks, who lavishly subsidized the rival factions.

At the end of the eighth century the Bulgars south of the Danube joined forces with those to the north in the efforts of the latter against the Avars, who, beaten by Charlemagne, were again pressing south-eastwards towards the Danube. In this the Bulgars were completely successful under the leadership of one Krum, whom, in the elation of victory, they promptly elected to the throne. Krum was a far more capable ruler than they had bargained for, and he not only united all the Bulgars north and south of the Danube into one dominion, but also forcibly repressed the whims of the nobles and re-established the autocracy and the hereditary monarchy. Having finished with his enemies in the north, he turned his attention to the Greeks, with no less success. In 809 he captured from them the important city of Sofia (the Roman Sardica, known to the Slavs as Sredets), which is to-day the capital of Bulgaria. The loss of this city was a blow to the Greeks, because it was a great centre of commerce and also the point at which the commercial and strategic highways of the peninsula met and crossed. The Emperor Nikiphóros, who wished to take his revenge and recover his lost property, was totally defeated by the Bulgars and lost his life in the Balkan passes in 811. After further victories, at Mesembria (the modern Misivria) in 812 and Adrianople in 813, Krum appeared before the capital, where he nearly lost his life in an ambush while negotiating for peace. During preparations for a final assault on Constantinople he died suddenly in 815. Though Krum cannot be said to have introduced civilisation into Bulgaria, he at any rate increased its power and gave it some of the more essential organs of government. He framed a code of laws remarkable for their rigour, which was undoubtedly necessary in such a community and beneficial in its effect. He repressed civil strife, and by this means made possible the reawakening of commerce and agriculture. His successor, of uncertain identity, founded in 822 the city of Preslav (known to the Russians as Pereyaslav), situated in eastern Bulgaria, between Varna and Silistria, which was the capital until 972.

The reign of Prince Boris (852-88) is remarkable because it witnessed the definitive conversion to Christianity of Bulgaria and her ruler. It is within this period also that fell the activities of the two great ‘Slavonic’ missionaries and apostles, the brothers Cyril and Methodius, who are looked upon by all Slavs of the orthodox faith as the founders of their civilisation. Christianity had of course penetrated into Bulgaria (or Moesia, as it was then) long before the arrival of the Slavs and Bulgars, but the influx of one horde of barbarians after another was naturally not propitious to its growth. The conversion of Boris in 865, which was brought about largely by the influence of his sister, who had spent many years in Constantinople as a captive, was a triumph for Greek influence and for Byzantium. Though the Church was at this time still nominally one, yet the rivalry between Rome and Constantinople had already become acute, and the struggle for spheres of spiritual influence had begun. It was in the year 863 that the Prince of Moravia, anxious to introduce Christianity into his country in a form intelligible to his subjects, addressed himself to the Emperor Michael III for help. Rome could not provide any suitable missionaries with knowledge of Slavonic languages, and the German, or more exactly the Bavarian, hierarchy with which Rome entrusted the spiritual welfare of the Slavs of Moravia and Pannonia used its greater local knowledge for political and not religious ends. The Germans exploited their ecclesiastical influence in order completely to dominate the Slavs politically, and as a result the latter were only allowed to see the Church through Teutonic glasses.

In answer to this appeal the emperor sent the two brothers Cyril and Methodius, who were Greeks of Salonika and had considerable knowledge of Slavonic languages. They composed the Slavonic alphabet which is to-day used throughout Russia, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Montenegro, and in many parts of Austria-Hungary and translated the gospels into Slavonic; it is for this reason that they are regarded with such veneration by all members of the Eastern Church. Their mission proved the greatest success (it must be remembered that at this time the various Slavonic tongues were probably less dissimilar than they are now), and the two brothers were warmly welcomed in Rome by Pope Adrian II, who formally consented to the use, for the benefit of the Slavs, of the Slavonic liturgy (a remarkable concession, confirmed by Pope John VIII). This triumph, however, was short-lived; St. Cyril died in 869 and St. Methodius in 885; subsequent Popes, notably Stephen V, were not so benevolent to the Slavonic cause; the machinations of the German hierarchy (which included, even in those days, the falsification of documents) were irresistible, and finally the invasion of the Magyars, in 893, destroyed what was left of the Slavonic Church in Moravia. The missionary brothers had probably passed through Bulgaria on their way north in 863, but without halting. Many of their disciples, driven from the Moravian kingdom by the Germans, came south and took refuge in Bulgaria in 886, and there carried on in more favourable circumstances the teachings of their masters. Prince Boris had found it easier to adopt Christianity himself than to induce all his subjects to do the same. Even when he had enforced his will on them at the price of numerous executions of recalcitrant nobles, he found himself only at the beginning of his difficulties. The Greeks had been glad enough to welcome Bulgaria into the fold, but they had no wish to set up an independent Church and hierarchy to rival their own. Boris, on the other hand, though no doubt full of genuine spiritual ardour, was above all impressed with the authority and prestige which the basileus derived from the Church of Constantinople; he also admired the pomp of ecclesiastical ceremony, and wished to have a patriarch of his own to crown him and a hierarchy of his own to serve him. Finding the Greeks unresponsive, he turned to Rome, and Pope Nicholas I sent him two bishops to superintend the ecclesiastical affairs of Bulgaria till the investiture of Boris at the hands of the Holy See could be arranged. These bishops set to work with a will, substituted the Latin for the Greek rite, and brought Bulgaria completely under Roman influence. But when it was discovered that Boris was aiming at the erection of an independent Church their enthusiasm abated and they were recalled to Rome in 867.

Adrian II proved no more sympathetic, and in 870, during the reign of the Emperor Basil I, it was decided without more ado that the Bulgarian Church should be directly under the Bishop of Constantinople, on the ground that the kingdom of Boris was a vassal-state of the basileus, and that from the Byzantine point of view, as opposed to that of Rome, the State came first and the Church next. The Moravian Gorazd, a disciple of Methodius, was appointed Metropolitan, and at his death he was succeeded by his fellow countryman and co-disciple Clement, who by means of the construction of numerous churches and monasteries did a great deal for the propagation of light and learning in Bulgaria. The definite subjection of the Bulgarian Church to that of Byzantium was an important and far-reaching event. Boris has been reproached with submitting himself and his country to Greek influence, but in those days it was either Constantinople or Rome (there was no third way); and in view of the proximity of Constantinople and the glamour which its civilization cast all over the Balkans, it is not surprising that the Greeks carried the day.

6
The Rise and Fall of the First Bulgarian Empire, 893–972

During the reign of Simeon, second son of Boris, which lasted from 893 to 927, Bulgaria reached a very high level of power and prosperity. Simeon, called the Great, is looked on by Bulgarians as their most capable monarch and his reign as the most brilliant period of their history. He had spent his childhood at Constantinople and been educated there, and he became such an admirer of Greek civilization that he was nicknamed Hèmiargos. His instructors had done their work so well that Simeon remained spellbound by the glamour of Constantinople throughout his life, and, although he might have laid the foundations of a solid empire in the Balkans, his one ambition was to conquer Byzantium and to be recognized as basileus—an ambition which was not to be fulfilled. His first campaign against the Greeks was not very fruitful, because the latter summoned the Magyars, already settled in Hungary, to their aid and they attacked Simeon from the north. Simeon in return called the Pechenegs, another fierce Tartar tribe, to his aid, but this merely resulted in their definite establishment in Rumania. During the twenty years of peace, which strange to say filled the middle of his reign (894-913), the internal development of Bulgaria made great strides. The administration was properly organized, commerce was encouraged, and agriculture flourished. In the wars against the Greeks which occupied his last years he was more successful, and inflicted a severe defeat on them at Anchialo (the modern Ahiolu) in 917; but he was still unable to get from them what he wanted, and at last, in 921, he was obliged to proclaim himself basileus and autocratōr of all Bulgars and Greeks, a title which nobody else recognized. He reappeared before Constantinople the same year, but effected nothing more than the customary devastation of the suburbs. The year 923 witnessed a solemn reconciliation between Rome and Constantinople; the Greeks were clever enough to prevent the Roman legates visiting Bulgaria on their return journey, and thereby administered a rebuff to Simeon, who was anxious to see them and enter into direct relations with Rome. In the same year Simeon tried to make an alliance with the Arabs, but the ambassadors of the latter were intercepted by the Greeks, who made it worth their while not to continue the journey to Bulgaria.

In 924 Simeon determined on a supreme effort against Constantinople and as a preliminary he ravaged Macedonia and Thrace. When, however, he arrived before the city the walls and the catapults made him hesitate, and he entered into negotiations, which, as usual, petered out and brought him no adequate reward for all his hopes and preparations. In the west his arms were more successful, and he subjected most of the eastern part of Serbia to his rule. From all this it can be seen that he was no diplomat, though not lacking in enterprise and ambition. The fact was that while he made his kingdom too powerful for the Greeks to subdue (indeed they were compelled to pay him tribute), yet Constantinople with its impregnable walls, well-organized army, powerful fleet, and cunning and experienced statesmen, was too hard a nut for him to crack.

Simeon extended the boundaries of his country considerably, and his dominion included most of the interior of the Balkan peninsula south of the Danube and east of the rivers Morava and Ibar in Serbia and of the Drin in Albania. The Byzantine Church greatly increased its influence in Bulgaria during his reign, and works of theology grew like mushrooms. This was the only kind of literature that was ever popular in Bulgaria, and although it is usual to throw contempt on the literary achievements of Constantinople, we should know but little of Bulgaria were it not for the Greek historians.

Simeon died in 927, and his son Peter, who succeeded him, was a lover of peace and comfort; he married a Byzantine princess, and during his reign (927-69) Greek influence grew ever stronger, in spite of several revolts on the part of the Bulgar nobles, while the capital Preslav became a miniature Constantinople. In 927 Rome recognized the kingdom and patriarchate of Bulgaria, and Peter was duly crowned by the Papal legate. This was viewed with disfavour by the Greeks, and they still called Peter only archōn or prince (knyaz in Bulgarian), which was the utmost title allowed to any foreign sovereign. It was not until 945 that they recognized Peter as basileus, the unique title possessed by their own emperors and till then never granted to any one else. Peter’s reign was one of misfortune for his country both at home and abroad. In 931 the Serbs broke loose under their leader Časlav, whom Simeon had captured but who effected his escape, and asserted their independence. In 963 a formidable revolt under one Shishman undermined the whole state fabric. He managed to subtract Macedonia and all western Bulgaria, including Sofia and Vidin, from Peter’s rule, and proclaimed himself independent tsar (tsar or caesar was a title often accorded by Byzantium to relatives of the emperor or to distinguished men of Greek or other nationality, and though it was originally the equivalent of the highest title, it had long since ceased to be so: the emperor’s designations were basileus and autocratōr). From this time there were two Bulgarias—eastern and western. The eastern half was now little more than a Byzantine province, and the western became the centre of national life and the focus of national aspirations.

Another factor which militated against the internal progress of Bulgaria was the spread of the Bogomil heresy in the tenth century. This remarkable doctrine, founded on the dualism of the Paulicians, who had become an important political force in the eastern empire, was preached in the Balkan peninsula by one Jeremiah Bogomil, for the rest a man of uncertain identity, who made Philippopolis the centre of his activity. Its principal features were of a negative character, and consequently it was very difficult successfully to apply force against them. The Bogomils recognized the authority neither of Church nor of State; the validity neither of oaths nor of human laws. They refused to pay taxes, to fight, or to obey; they sanctioned theft, but looked upon any kind of punishment as unjustifiable; they discountenanced marriage and were strict vegetarians. Naturally a heresy so alarming in its individualism shook to its foundations the not very firmly established Bulgarian society. Nevertheless it spread with rapidity in spite of all persecutions, and its popularity amongst the Bulgarians, and indeed amongst all the Slavs of the peninsula, is without doubt partly explained by political reasons. The hierarchy of the Greek Church, which supported the ruling classes of the country and lent them authority at the same time that it increased its own, was antipathetic to the Slavs, and the Bogomil heresy drew much strength from its nationalistic colouring and from the appeal which it made to the character of the Balkan Slavs, who have always been intolerant of government by the Church. But neither the civil nor the ecclesiastical authorities were able to cope with the problem; indeed they were apt to minimize its importance, and the heresy was never eradicated till the arrival on the scene of Islam, which proved as attractive to the schismatics as the well-regulated Orthodox Church had been the reverse.

The third quarter of the tenth century witnessed a great recrudescence of the power of Constantinople under the Emperor Nikiphóros Phokas, who wrested Cyprus and Crete from the Arabs and inaugurated an era of prosperity for the eastern empire, giving it a new lease of vigorous and combative life. Wishing to reassert the Greek supremacy in the Balkan peninsula his first act was to refuse any further payment of tribute to the Bulgarians as from 966; his next was to initiate a campaign against them, but in order to make his own success in this enterprise less costly and more assured he secured the co-operation of the Russians under Svyatoslav, Prince of Kiev; this potentate’s mother Olga had visited Constantinople in 957 and been baptized (though her son and the bulk of the population were still ardent heathens), and commercial intercourse between Russia and Constantinople by means of the Dnieper and the Black Sea was at that time lively. Svyatoslav did not want pressing, and arriving with an army of 10,000 men in boats, overcame northern Bulgaria in a few days (967); they were helped by Shishman and the western Bulgars, who did not mind at what price Peter and the eastern Bulgars were crushed. Svyatoslav was recalled to Russia in 968 to defend his home from attacks by the Tartar Pechenegs, but that done, he made up his mind to return to Bulgaria, lured by its riches and by the hope of the eventual possession of Constantinople.

The Emperor Nikiphóros was by now aware of the danger he had imprudently conjured up, and made a futile alliance with eastern Bulgaria; but in January 969 Peter of Bulgaria died, and in December of the same year Nikiphóros was murdered by the ambitious Armenian John Tzimisces,[1] who thereupon became emperor. Svyatoslav, seeing the field clear of his enemies, returned in 970, and in March of that year sacked and occupied Philippopolis. The Emperor John Tzimisces, who was even abler both as general and as diplomat than his predecessor, quietly pushed forward his warlike preparations, and did not meet the Russians till the autumn, when he completely defeated them at Arcadiopolis (the modern Lule-Burgas). The Russians retired north of the Balkan range, but the Greeks followed them. John Tzimisces besieged them in the capital Preslav, which he stormed, massacring many of the garrison, in April 972. Svyatoslav and his remaining troops escaped to Silistria (the Durostorum of Trajan) on the Danube, where again, however, they were besieged and defeated by the indefatigable emperor. At last peace was made in July 972, the Russians being allowed to go free on condition of the complete evacuation of Bulgaria and a gift of corn; the adventurous Svyatoslav lost his life at the hands of the Pechenegs while making his way back to Kiev. The triumph of the Greeks was complete, and it can be imagined that there was not much left of the earthenware Bulgaria after the violent collision of these two mighty iron vessels on the top of it. Eastern Bulgaria (i.e. Moesia and Thrace) ceased to exist, becoming a purely Greek province; John Tzimisces made his triumphal entry into Constantinople, followed by the two sons of Peter of Bulgaria on foot; the elder was deprived of his regal attributes and created magistros, the younger was made a eunuch.

[Footnote 1: John the Little.]

7
The Rise and Fall of ‘Western Bulgaria’ and the Greek Supremacy, 963–1186

Meanwhile western Bulgaria had not been touched, and it was thither that the Bulgarian patriarch Damian removed from Silistria after the victory of the Greeks, settling first in Sofia and then in Okhrida in Macedonia, where the apostate Shishman had eventually made his capital. Western Bulgaria included Macedonia and parts of Thessaly, Albania, southern and eastern Serbia, and the westernmost parts of modern Bulgaria. It was from this district that numerous anti-Hellenic revolts were directed after the death of the Emperor John Tzimisces in 976. These culminated during the reign of Samuel (977-1014), one of the sons of Shishman. He was as capable and energetic, as unscrupulous and inhuman, as the situation he was called upon to fill demanded. He began by assassinating all his relations and nobles who resented his desire to re-establish the absolute monarchy, was recognized as tsar by the Holy See of Rome in 981, and then began to fight the Greeks, the only possible occupation for any self-respecting Bulgarian ruler. The emperor at that time was Basil II (976-1025), who was brave and patriotic but young and inexperienced. In his early campaigns Samuel carried all before him; he reconquered northern Bulgaria in 985, Thessaly in 986, and defeated Basil II near Sofia the same year. Later he conquered Albania and the southern parts of Serbia and what is now Montenegro and Hercegovina. In 996 he threatened Salonika, but first of all embarked on an expedition against the Peloponnese; here he was followed by the Greek general, who managed to surprise and completely overwhelm him, he and his son barely escaping with their lives.

From that year (996) his fortune changed; the Greeks reoccupied northern Bulgaria, in 999, and also recovered Thessaly and parts of Macedonia. The Bulgars were subjected to almost annual attacks on the part of Basil II; the country was ruined and could not long hold out. The final disaster occurred in 1014, when Basil II utterly defeated his inveterate foe in a pass near Seres in Macedonia. Samuel escaped to Prilip, but when he beheld the return of 15,000 of his troops who had been captured and blinded by the Greeks he died of syncope. Basil II, known as Bulgaroctonus, or Bulgar-killer, went from victory to victory, and finally occupied the Bulgarian capital of Okhrida in 1016. Western Bulgaria came to an end, as had eastern Bulgaria in 972, the remaining members of the royal family followed the emperor to the Bosphorus to enjoy comfortable captivity, and the triumph of Constantinople was complete.

From 1018 to 1186 Bulgaria had no existence as an independent state; Basil II, although cruel, was far from tyrannical in his general treatment of the Bulgars, and treated the conquered territory more as a protectorate than as a possession. But after his death Greek rule became much more oppressive. The Bulgarian patriarchate (since 972 established at Okhrida) was reduced to an archbishopric, and in 1025 the see was given to a Greek, who lost no time in eliminating the Bulgarian element from positions of importance throughout his diocese. Many of the nobles were transplanted to Constantinople, where their opposition was numbed by the bestowal of honours. During the eleventh century the peninsula was invaded frequently by the Tartar Pechenegs and Kumans, whose aid was invoked both by Greeks and Bulgars; the result of these incursions was not always favourable to those who had promoted them; the barbarians invariably stayed longer and did more damage than had been bargained for, and usually left some of their number behind as unwelcome settlers.

In this way the ethnological map of the Balkan peninsula became ever more variegated. To the Tartar settlers were added colonies of Armenians and Vlakhs by various emperors. The last touch was given by the arrival of the Normans in 1081 and the passage of the crusaders in 1096. The wholesale depredations of the latter naturally made the inhabitants of the Balkan peninsula anything but sympathetically disposed towards their cause. One of the results of all this turmoil and of the heavy hand of the Greeks was a great increase in the vitality of the Bogomil heresy already referred to; it became a refuge for patriotism and an outlet for its expression. The Emperor Alexis Comnenus instituted a bitter persecution of it, which only led to its growth and rapid propagation westwards into Serbia from its centre Philippopolis.

The reason of the complete overthrow of the Bulgarian monarchy by the Greeks was of course that the nation itself was totally lacking in cohesion and organization, and could only achieve any lasting success when an exceptionally gifted ruler managed to discount the centrifugal tendencies of the feudal nobles, as Simeon and Samuel had done. Other discouraging factors wore the permeation of the Church and State by Byzantine influence, the lack of a large standing army, the spread of the anarchic Bogomil heresy, and the fact that the bulk of the Slav population had no desire for foreign adventure or national aggrandizement.

8
The Rise and Fall of the Second Bulgarian Empire, 1186–1258

From 1186 to 1258 Bulgaria experienced temporary resuscitation, the brevity of which was more than compensated for by the stirring nature of the events that crowded it. The exactions and oppressions of the Greeks culminated in a revolt on the part of the Bulgars, which had its centre in Tirnovo on the river Yantra in northern Bulgaria—a position of great natural strength and strategic importance, commanding the outlets of several of the most important passes over the Balkan range. This revolt coincided with the growing weakness of the eastern empire, which, surrounded on all sides by aggressive enemies—Kumans, Saracens, Turks, and Normans—was sickening for one of the severe illnesses which preceded its dissolution. The revolt was headed by two brothers who were Vlakh or Rumanian shepherds, and was blessed by the archbishop Basil, who crowned one of them, called John Asen, as tsar in Tirnovo in 1186. Their first efforts against the Greeks were not successful, but securing the support of the Serbs under Stephen Nemanja in 1188 and of the Crusaders in 1189 they became more so; but there was life in the Greeks yet, and victory alternated with defeat. John Asen I was assassinated in 1196 and was succeeded after many internal discords and murders by his relative Kaloian or Pretty John. This cruel and unscrupulous though determined ruler soon made an end of all his enemies at home, and in eight years achieved such success abroad that Bulgaria almost regained its former proportions. Moreover, he re-established relations with Rome, to the great discomfiture of the Greeks, and after some negotiations Pope Innocent III recognized Kaloian as tsar of the Bulgars and Vlakhs (roi de Blaquie et de Bougrie, in the words of Villehardouin), with Basil as primate, and they were both duly consecrated and crowned by the papal legate at Tirnovo in 1204. The French, who had just established themselves in Constantinople during the fourth crusade, imprudently made an enemy of Kaloian instead of a friend, and with the aid of the Tartar Kumans he defeated them several times, capturing and brutally murdering Baldwin I. But in 1207 his career was cut short; he was murdered while besieging Salonika by one of his generals who was a friend of his wife. After eleven years of further anarchy he was succeeded by John Asen II. During the reign of this monarch, which lasted from 1218 till 1241, Bulgaria reached the zenith of its power. He was the most enlightened ruler the country had had, and he not only waged war successfully abroad but also put an end to the internal confusion, restored the possibility of carrying on agriculture and commerce, and encouraged the foundation of numerous schools and monasteries. He maintained the tradition of his family by making his capital at Tirnovo, which city he considerably embellished and enlarged.

Constantinople at this time boasted three Greek emperors and one French. The first act of John Asen II was to get rid of one of them, named Theodore, who had proclaimed himself basileus at Okhrida in 1223. Thereupon he annexed the whole of Thrace, Macedonia, Thessaly, and Epirus to his dominions, and made Theodore’s brother Manuel, who had married one of his daughters, viceroy, established at Salonika. Another of his daughters had married Stephen Vladislav, who was King of Serbia from 1233-43, and a third married Theodore, son of the Emperor John III, who reigned at Nicaea, in 1235. This daughter, after being sought in marriage by the French barons at Constantinople as a wife for the Emperor Baldwin II, a minor, was then summarily rejected in favour of the daughter of the King of Jerusalem; this affront rankled in the mind of John Asen II and threw him into the arms of the Greeks, with whom he concluded an alliance in 1234. John Asen II and his ally, the Emperor John III, were, however, utterly defeated by the French under the walls of Constantinople in 1236, and the Bulgarian ruler, who had no wish to see the Greeks re-established there, began to doubt the wisdom of his alliance. Other Bulgarian tsars had been unscrupulous, but the whole foreign policy of this one pivoted on treachery. He deserted the Greeks and made an alliance with the French in 1237, the Pope Gregory IX, a great Hellenophobe, having threatened him with excommunication; he went so far as to force his daughter to relinquish her Greek husband. The following year, however, he again changed over to the Greeks; then again fear of the Pope and of his brother-in-law the King of Hungary brought him back to the side of Baldwin II, to whose help against the Greeks he went with a large army into Thrace in 1239. While besieging the Greeks with indifferent success, he learned of the death of his wife and his eldest son from plague, and incontinently returned to Tirnovo, giving up the war and restoring his daughter to her lonely husband. This adaptable monarch died a natural death in 1241, and the three rulers of his family who succeeded him, whose reigns filled the period 1241-58, managed to undo all the constructive work of their immediate predecessors. Province after province was lost and internal anarchy increased. This remarkable dynasty came to an inglorious end in 1258, when its last representative was murdered by his own nobles, and from this time onwards Bulgaria was only a shadow of its former self.

9
The Serbian Supremacy and the Final Collapse, 1258–1393

From 1258 onwards Bulgaria may be said to have continued flickering until its final extinction as a state in 1393, but during this period it never had any voice in controlling the destinies of the Balkan peninsula. Owing to the fact that no ruler emerged capable of keeping the distracted country in order, there was a regular chassé-croisé of rival princelets, an unceasing tale of political marriages and murders, conspiracies and revolts of feudal nobles all over the country, and perpetual ebb and flow of the boundaries of the warring principalities which tore the fabric of Bulgaria to pieces amongst them. From the point of view of foreign politics this period is characterized generally by the virtual disappearance of Bulgarian independence to the profit of the surrounding states, who enjoyed a sort of rotativist supremacy. It is especially remarkable for the complete ascendancy which Serbia gained in the Balkan peninsula.

A Serb, Constantine, grandson of Stephen Nemanja, occupied the Bulgarian throne from 1258 to 1277, and married the granddaughter of John Asen II. After the fall of the Latin Empire of Constantinople in 1261, the Hungarians, already masters of Transylvania, combined with the Greeks against Constantine; the latter called the Tartars of southern Russia, at this time at the height of their power, to his help and was victorious, but as a result of his diplomacy the Tartars henceforward played an important part in the Bulgarian welter. Then Constantine married, as his second wife, the daughter of the Greek emperor, and thus again gave Constantinople a voice in his country’s affairs. Constantine was followed by a series of upstart rulers, whose activities were cut short by the victories of King Uroš II of Serbia (1282-1321), who conquered all Macedonia and wrested it from the Bulgars. In 1285 the Tartars of the Golden Horde swept over Hungary and Bulgaria, but it was from the south that the clouds were rolling up which not much later were to burst over the peninsula. In 1308 the Turks appeared on the Sea of Marmora, and in 1326 established themselves at Brussa. From 1295 to 1322 Bulgaria was presided over by a nobleman of Vidin, Svetoslav, who, unmolested by the Greeks, grown thoughtful in view of the approach of the Turks, was able to maintain rather more order than his subjects were accustomed to. After his death in 1322 chaos again supervened. One of his successors had married the daughter of Uroš II of Serbia, but suddenly made an alliance with the Greeks against his brother-in-law Stephen Uroš III and dispatched his wife to her home. During the war which ensued the unwonted allies were utterly routed by the Serbs at Kustendil in Macedonia in 1330.

From 1331 to 1365 Bulgaria was under one John Alexander, a noble of Tartar origin, whose sister became the wife of Serbia’s greatest ruler, Stephen Dušan; John Alexander, moreover, recognized Stephen as his suzerain, and from thenceforward Bulgaria was a vassal-state of Serbia. Meanwhile the Turkish storm was gathering fast; Suleiman crossed the Hellespont in 1356, and Murad I made Adrianople his capital in 1366. After the death of John Alexander in 1365 the Hungarians invaded northern Bulgaria, and his successor invoked the help of the Turks against them and also against the Greeks. This was the beginning of the end. The Serbs, during an absence of the Sultan in Asia, undertook an offensive, but were defeated by the Turks near Adrianople in 1371, who captured Sofia in 1382. After this the Serbs formed a huge southern Slav alliance, in which the Bulgarians refused to join, but, after a temporary success against the Turks in 1387, they were vanquished by them as the result of treachery at the famous battle of Kosovo in 1389. Meanwhile the Turks occupied Nikopolis on the Danube in 1388 and destroyed the Bulgarian capital Tirnovo in 1393, exiling the Patriarch Euthymus to Macedonia. Thus the state of Bulgaria passed into the hands of the Turks, and its church into those of the Greeks. Many Bulgars adopted Islam, and their descendants are the Pomaks or Bulgarian Mohammedans of the present day. With the subjection of Rumania in 1394 and the defeat of an improvised anti-Turkish crusade from western Europe under Sigismund, King of Hungary, at Nikopolis in 1396 the Turkish conquest was complete, though the battle of Varna was not fought till 1444, nor Constantinople entered till 1453.

10
The Turkish Dominion and the Emancipation, 1393–1878

From 1393 until 1877 Bulgaria may truthfully be said to have had no history, but nevertheless it could scarcely have been called happy. National life was completely paralysed, and what stood in those days for national consciousness was obliterated. It is common knowledge, and most people are now reasonable enough to admit, that the Turks have many excellent qualities, religious fervour and military ardour amongst others; it is also undeniable that from an aesthetic point of view too much cannot be said in praise of Mohammedan civilization. Who does not prefer the minarets of Stambul and Edirne[1] to the architecture of Budapest, notoriously the ideal of Christian south-eastern Europe? On the other hand, it cannot be contended that the Pax Ottomana brought prosperity or happiness to those on whom it was imposed (unless indeed they submerged their identity in the religion of their conquerors), or that its Influence was either vivifying or generally popular.

[Footnote 1: The Turkish names for Constantinople and Adrianople.]

To the races they conquered the Turks offered two alternatives—serfdom or Turkdom; those who could not bring themselves to accept either of these had either to emigrate or take to brigandage and outlawry in the mountains. The Turks literally overlaid the European nationalities of the Balkan peninsula for five hundred years, and from their own point of view and from that of military history this was undoubtedly a very splendid achievement; it was more than the Greeks or Romans had ever done. From the point of view of humanitarianism also it is beyond a doubt that much less human blood was spilt in the Balkan peninsula during the five hundred years of Turkish rule than during the five hundred years of Christian rule which preceded them; indeed it would have been difficult to spill more. It is also a pure illusion to think of the Turks as exceptionally brutal or cruel; they are just as good-natured and good-humoured as anybody else; it is only when their military or religious passions are aroused that they become more reckless and ferocious than other people. It was not the Turks who taught cruelty to the Christians of the Balkan peninsula; the latter had nothing to learn in this respect.

In spite of all this, however, from the point of view of the Slavs of Bulgaria and Serbia, Turkish rule was synonymous with suffocation. If the Turks were all that their greatest admirers think them the history of the Balkan peninsula in the nineteenth century would have been very different from what it has been, namely, one perpetual series of anti-Turkish revolts.

Of all the Balkan peoples the Bulgarians were the most completely crushed and effaced. The Greeks by their ubiquity, their brains, and their money were soon able to make the Turkish storm drive their own windmill; the Rumanians were somewhat sheltered by the Danube and also by their distance from Constantinople; the Serbs also were not so exposed to the full blast of the Turkish wrath, and the inaccessibility of much of their country afforded them some protection. Bulgaria was simply annihilated, and its population, already far from homogeneous, was still further varied by numerous Turkish and other Tartar colonies.

For the same reasons already mentioned Bulgaria was the last Balkan state to emancipate itself; for these reasons also it is the least trammelled by prejudices and by what are considered national predilections and racial affinities, while its heterogeneous composition makes it vigorous and enterprising. The treatment of the Christians by the Turks was by no means always the same; generally speaking, it grew worse as the power of the Sultan grew less. During the fifteenth century they were allowed to practise their religion and all their vocations in comparative liberty and peace. But from the sixteenth century onwards the control of the Sultan declined, power became decentralized, the Ottoman Empire grew ever more anarchic and the rule of the provincial governors more despotic.

But the Mohammedan conquerors were not the only enemies and oppressors of the Bulgars. The rôle played by the Greeks in Bulgaria during the Turkish dominion was almost as important as that of the Turks themselves. The contempt of the Turks for the Christians, and especially for their religion, was so great that they prudently left the management of it to them, knowing that it would keep them occupied in mutual altercation. From 1393 till 1767 the Bulgarians were under the Greco-Bulgarian Patriarchate of Okhrida, an organization in which all posts, from the highest to the lowest, had to be bought from the Turkish administration at exorbitant and ever-rising prices; the Phanariote Greeks (so called because they originated in the Phanar quarter at Constantinople) were the only ones who could afford those of the higher posts, with the result that the Church was controlled from Constantinople. In 1767 the independent patriarchates were abolished, and from that date the religious control of the Greeks was as complete as the political control of the Turks. The Greeks did all they could to obliterate the last traces of Bulgarian nationality which had survived in the Church, and this explains a fact which must never be forgotten, which had its origin in the remote past, but grew more pronounced at this period, that the individual hatred of Greeks and Bulgars of each other has always been far more intense than their collective hatred of the Turks.

Ever since the marriage of the Tsar Ivan III with the niece of the last Greek Emperor, in 1472, Russia had considered itself the trustee of the eastern Christians, the defender of the Orthodox Church, and the direct heir of the glory and prestige of Constantinople; it was not until the eighteenth century, however, after the consolidation of the Russian state, that the Balkan Christians were championed and the eventual possession of Constantinople was seriously considered. Russian influence was first asserted in Rumania after the Treaty of Kuchuk-Kainardji, in 1774. It was only the Napoleonic war in 1812 that prevented the Russians from extending their territory south of the Danube, whither it already stretched. Serbia was partially free by 1826, and Greece achieved complete independence in 1830, when the Russian troops, in order to coerce the Turks, occupied part of Bulgaria and advanced as far as Adrianople. Bulgaria, being nearer to and more easily repressed by Constantinople, had to wait, and tentative revolts made about this time were put down with much bloodshed and were followed by wholesale emigrations of Bulgars into Bessarabia and importations of Tartars and Kurds into the vacated districts. The Crimean War and the short-sighted championship of Turkey by the western European powers checked considerably the development at which Russia aimed. Moldavia and Wallachia were in 1856 withdrawn from the semi-protectorate which Russia had long exercised over them, and in 1861 formed themselves into the united state of Rumania. In 1866 a German prince, Charles of Hohenzollern, came to rule over the country, the first sign of German influence in the Near East; at this time Rumania still acknowledged the supremacy of the Sultan.

During the first half of the nineteenth century there took place a considerable intellectual renascence in Bulgaria, a movement fostered by wealthy Bulgarian merchants of Bucarest and Odessa. In 1829 a history of Bulgaria was published by a native of that country in Moscow; in 1835 the first school was established in Bulgaria, and many others soon followed. It must be remembered that not only was nothing known at that time about Bulgaria and its inhabitants in other countries, but the Bulgars had themselves to be taught who they were. The Bulgarian people in Bulgaria consisted entirely of peasants; there was no Bulgarian upper or middle or ‘intelligent’ or professional class; those enlightened Bulgars who existed were domiciled in other countries; the Church was in the hands of the Greeks, who vied with the Turks in suppressing Bulgarian nationality.

The two committees of Odessa and Bucarest which promoted the enlightenment and emancipation of Bulgaria were dissimilar in composition and in aim; the members of the former were more intent on educational and religious reform, and aimed at the gradual and peaceful regeneration of their country by these means; the latter wished to effect the immediate political emancipation of Bulgaria by violent and, if necessary, warlike means.

It was the ecclesiastical question which was solved first. In 1856 the Porte had promised religious reforms tending to the appointment of Bulgarian bishops and the recognition of the Bulgarian language in Church and school. But these not being carried through, the Bulgarians took the matter into their own hands, and in 1860 refused any longer to recognize the Patriarch of Constantinople. The same year an attempt was made to bring the Church of Bulgaria under that of Rome, but, owing to Russian opposition, proved abortive. In 1870, the growing agitation having at last alarmed the Turks, the Bulgarian Exarchate was established. The Bulgarian Church was made free and national and was to be under an Exarch who should reside at Constantinople (Bulgaria being still a Turkish province). The Greeks, conscious what a blow this would be to their supremacy, managed for a short while to stave off the evil day, but in 1872 the Exarch was triumphantly installed in Constantinople, where he resided till 1908.

Meanwhile revolutionary outbreaks began to increase, but were always put down with great rigour. The most notable was that of 1875, instigated by Stambulóv, the future dictator, in sympathy with the outbreak in Montenegro, Hercegovina, and Bosnia of that year; the result of this and of similar movements in 1876 was the series of notorious Bulgarian massacres in that year. The indignation of Europe was aroused and concerted representations were urgently made at Constantinople. Midhat Pasha disarmed his opponents by summarily introducing the British constitution into Turkey, but, needless to say, Bulgaria’s lot was not improved by this specious device. Russia had, however, steadily been making her preparations, and, Turkey having refused to discontinue hostilities against Montenegro, on April 24, 1877, war was declared by the Emperor Alexander II, whose patience had become exhausted; he was joined by Prince Charles of Rumania, who saw that by doing so he would be rewarded by the complete emancipation of his country, then still a vassal-state of Turkey, and its erection into a kingdom. At the beginning of the war all went well for the Russians and Rumanians, who were soon joined by large numbers of Bulgarian insurgents; the Turkish forces were scattered all over the peninsula. The committee of Bucarest transformed itself into a provisional government, but the Russians, who had undertaken to liberate the country, naturally had to keep its administration temporarily in their own hands, and refused their recognition. The Turks, alarmed at the early victories of the Russians, brought up better generals and troops, and defeated the Russians at Plevna in July. They failed, however, to dislodge them from the important and famous Shipka Pass in August, and after this they became demoralized and their resistance rapidly weakened. The Russians, helped by the Bulgarians and Rumanians, fought throughout the summer with the greatest gallantry; they took Plevna, after a three months’ siege, in December, occupied Sofia and Philippopolis in January 1878, and pushed forward to the walls of Constantinople.

The Turks were at their last gasp, and at Adrianople, in March 1878, Ignatiyev dictated the terms of the Treaty of San Stefano, by which a principality of Bulgaria, under the nominal suzerainty of the Sultan, was created, stretching from the Danube to the Aegean, and from the Black Sea to Albania, including all Macedonia and leaving to the Turks only the district between Constantinople and Adrianople, Chalcidice, and the town of Salonika; Bulgaria would thus have regained the dimensions it possessed under Tsar Simeon nine hundred and fifty years previously.

This treaty, which on ethnological grounds was tolerably just, alarmed the other powers, especially Great Britain and Germany, who thought they perceived in it the foundations of Russian hegemony in the Balkans, while it would, if put into execution, have blighted the aspirations of Greece and Serbia. The Treaty of Berlin, inspired by Bismarck and Lord Salisbury, anxious to defend, the former, the interests of (ostensibly) Austria-Hungary, the latter (shortsightedly) those of Turkey, replaced it in July 1878. By its terms Bulgaria was cut into three parts; northern Bulgaria, between the Danube and the Balkans, was made an autonomous province, tributary to Turkey; southern Bulgaria, fancifully termed Eastern Rumelia (Rumili was the name always given by the Turks to the whole Balkan peninsula), was to have autonomous administration under a Christian governor appointed by the Porte; Macedonia was left to Turkey; and the Dobrudja, between the Danube and the Black Sea, was adjudged to Rumania.

11
The Aftermath, and Prince Alexander of Battenberg, 1878–86

The relations between the Russians and the Bulgarians were better before the liberation of the latter by the former than after; this may seem unjust, because Bulgaria could never have freed herself so decisively and rapidly alone, and Russia was the only power in whose interest it was to free her from the Turks, and who could translate that interest so promptly into action; nevertheless, the laws controlling the relationships of states and nationalities being much the same as those which control the relationships of individuals, it was only to be expected.

What so often happens in the relationships of individuals happened in those between Russia and Bulgaria. Russia naturally enough expected Bulgaria to be grateful for the really large amount of blood and treasure which its liberation had cost Russia, and, moreover, expected its gratitude to take the form of docility and a general acquiescence in all the suggestions and wishes expressed by its liberator. Bulgaria was no doubt deeply grateful, but never had the slightest intention of expressing its gratitude in the desired way; on the contrary, like most people who have regained a long-lost and unaccustomed freedom of action or been put under an obligation, it appeared touchy and jealous of its right to an independent judgement. It is often assumed by Russophobe writers that Russia wished and intended to make a Russian province of Bulgaria, but this is very unlikely; the geographical configuration of the Balkan peninsula would not lend itself to its incorporation in the Russian Empire, the existence between the two of the compact and vigorous national block of Rumania, a Latin race and then already an independent state, was an insurmountable obstacle, and, finally, it is quite possible for Russia to obtain possession or control of Constantinople without owning all the intervening littoral.

That Russia should wish to have a controlling voice in the destinies of Bulgaria and in those of the whole peninsula was natural, and it was just as natural that Bulgaria should resent its pretensions. The eventual result of this, however, was that Bulgaria inevitably entered the sphere of Austrian and ultimately of German influence or rather calculation, a contingency probably not foreseen by its statesmen at the time, and whose full meaning, even if it had, would not have been grasped by them.

The Bulgarians, whatever the origin and the ingredients of their nationality, are by language a purely Slavonic people; their ancestors were the pioneers of Slavonic civilization as expressed in its monuments of theological literature. Nevertheless, they have never been enthusiastic Pan-Slavists, any more than the Dutch have ever been ardent Pan-Germans; it is as unreasonable to expect such a thing of the one people as it is of the other. The Bulgarians indeed think themselves superior to the Slavs by reason of the warlike and glorious traditions of the Tartar tribe that gave them their name and infused the Asiatic element into their race, thus endowing them with greater stability, energy, and consistency than is possessed by purely Slav peoples. These latter, on the other hand, and notably the Serbians, for the same reason affect contempt for the mixture of blood and for what they consider the Mongol characteristics of the Bulgarians. What is certain is that between Bulgarians and Germans (including German Austrians and Magyars) there has never existed that elemental, ineradicable, and insurmountable antipathy which exists between German (and Magyar) and Slav wherever the two races are contiguous, from the Baltic to the Adriatic; nothing is more remarkable than the way in which the Bulgarian people has been flattered, studied, and courted in Austria-Hungary and Germany, during the last decade, to the detriment of the purely Slav Serb race with whom it is always compared. The reason is that with the growth of the Serb national movement, from 1903 onwards, Austria-Hungary and Germany felt an instinctive and perfectly well-justified fear of the Serb race, and sought to neutralize the possible effect of its growing power by any possible means.

It is not too much to say, in summing up, that Russian influence, which had been growing stronger in Bulgaria up till 1877-8, has since been steadily on the decline; Germany and Austria-Hungary, who reduced Bulgaria to half the size that Count Ignatiyev had made it by the Treaty of San Stefano, reaped the benefit, especially the commercial benefit, of the war which Russia had waged. Intellectually, and especially as regards the replenishment and renovation of the Bulgarian language, which, in spite of numerous Turkish words introduced during the Ottoman rule, is essentially Slavonic both in substance and form, Russian influence was especially powerful, and has to a certain extent maintained itself. Economically, owing partly to geographical conditions, both the Danube and the main oriental railway linking Bulgaria directly with Budapest and Vienna, partly to the fact that Bulgaria’s best customers for its cereals are in central and western Europe, the connexion between Bulgaria and Russia is infinitesimal. Politically, both Russia and Bulgaria aiming at the same thing, the possession of Constantinople and the hegemony of the Balkan peninsula, their relations were bound to be difficult.

The first Bulgarian Parliament met in 1879 under trying conditions. Both Russian and Bulgarian hopes had been dashed by the Treaty of Berlin. Russian influence was still paramount, however, and the viceroy controlled the organization of the administration. An ultra-democratic constitution was arranged for, a fact obviously not conducive to the successful government of their country by the quite inexperienced Bulgarians. For a ruler recourse had inevitably to be had to the rabbit-warren of Germanic princes, who were still ingenuously considered neutral both in religion and in politics. The choice fell on Prince Alexander of Battenberg, nephew of the Empress of Russia, who had taken part in the campaign of the Russian army. Prince Alexander was conscientious, energetic, and enthusiastic, but he was no diplomat, and from the outset his honesty precluded his success. From the very first he failed to keep on good terms with Russia or its representatives, who at that time were still numerous in Bulgaria, while he was helpless to stem the ravages of parliamentary government. The Emperor Alexander III, who succeeded his father Alexander II in 1881, recommended him to insist on being made dictator, which he successfully did. But when he found that this only meant an increase of Russian influence he reverted to parliamentary government (in September 1883); this procedure discomfited the representatives of Russia, discredited him with the Emperor, and threw him back into the vortex of party warfare, from which he never extricated himself.

Meanwhile the question of eastern Rumelia, or rather southern Bulgaria, still a Turkish province, began to loom. A vigorous agitation for the reunion of the two parts of the country had been going on for some time, and on September 18, 1885, the inhabitants of Philippopolis suddenly proclaimed the union under Prince Alexander, who solemnly announced his approval at Tirnovo and triumphantly entered their city on September 21. Russia frowned on this independence of spirit. Serbia, under King Milan, and instigated by Austria, inaugurated the policy which has so often been followed since, and claimed territorial compensation for Bulgaria’s aggrandisement; it must be remembered that it was Bismarck who, by the Treaty of Berlin, had arbitrarily confined Serbia to its inadequate limits of those day.

On November 13 King Milan declared war, and began to march on Sofia, which is not far from the Serbo-Bulgarian frontier. Prince Alexander, the bulk of whose army was on the Turkish frontier, boldly took up the challenge. On November 18 took place the battle of Slivnitsa, a small town about twenty miles north-west of Sofia, in which the Bulgarians were completely victorious. Prince Alexander, after hard fighting, took Pirot in Serbia on November 27, having refused King Milan’s request for an armistice, and was marching on Nish, when Austria intervened, and threatened to send troops into Serbia unless fighting ceased. Bulgaria had to obey, and on March 3, 1886, a barren treaty of peace was imposed on the belligerents at Bucarest. Prince Alexander’s position did not improve after this, indeed it would have needed a much more skilful navigator to steer through the many currents which eddied round him. A strong Russophile party formed itself in the army; on the night of August 21, 1886, some officers of this party, who were the most capable in the Bulgarian army, appeared at Sofia, forced Alexander to resign, and abducted him; they put him on board his yacht on the Danube and escorted him to the Russian town of Reni, in Bessarabia; telegraphic orders came from St. Petersburg, in answer to inquiries, that he could proceed with haste to western Europe, and on August 26 he found himself at Lemberg. But those who had carried out this coup d’état found that it was not at all popular in the country. A counter-revolution, headed by the statesman Stambulóv, was immediately initiated, and on September 3 Prince Alexander reappeared in Sofia amidst tumultuous applause. Nevertheless his position was hopeless; the Emperor Alexander III forced him to abdicate, and on September 7, 1886, he left Bulgaria for good, to the regret of the majority of the people. He died in Austria, in 1893, in his thirty-seventh year. At his departure a regency was constituted, at the head of which was Stambulóv.

12
The Regeneration under Prince Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg, 1886–1908

Stambulóv was born at Tirnovo in 1854 and was of humble origin. He took part in the insurrection of 1876 and in the war of liberation, and in 1884 became president of the Sóbraniye (Parliament). From 1886 till 1894 he was virtually dictator of Bulgaria. He was intensely patriotic and also personally ambitious, determined, energetic, ruthlessly cruel and unscrupulous, but incapable of deceit; these qualities were apparent in his powerful and grim expression of face, while his manner inspired the weak with terror and the strongest with respect. His policy in general was directed against Russia. At the general election held in October 1886 he had all his important opponents imprisoned beforehand, while armed sentries discouraged ill-disposed voters from approaching the ballot-boxes. Out of 522 elected deputies, there were 470 supporters of Stambulóv. This implied the complete suppression of the Russophile party and led to a rupture with St. Petersburg.

Whatever were Stambulóv’s methods, and few would deny that they were harsh, there is no doubt that something of the sort was necessary to restore order in the country. But once having started on this path he found it difficult to stop, and his tyrannical bearing, combined with the delay in finding a prince, soon made him unpopular. There were several revolutionary outbreaks directed against him, but these were all crushed. At length the, at that time not particularly alluring, throne of Bulgaria was filled by Prince Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg, who was born in 1861 and was the son of the gifted Princess Clémentine of Bourbon-Orleans, daughter of Louis-Philippe. This young man combined great ambition and tenacity of purpose with extreme prudence, astuteness, and patience; he was a consummate diplomat. The election of this prince was viewed with great disfavour by Russia, and for fear of offending the Emperor Alexander III none of the European powers recognized him.

Ferdinand, unabashed, cheerfully installed himself in Sofia with his mother in July 1886, and took care to make the peace with his suzerain, the Sultan Abdul Hamid. He wisely left all power in the hands of the unattractive and to him, unsympathetic prime minister, Stambulóv, till he himself felt secure in his position, and till the dictator should have made himself thoroughly hated. Ferdinand’s clever and wealthy mother cast a beneficent and civilizing glow around him, smoothing away many difficulties by her womanly tact and philanthropic activity, and, thanks to his influential connexions in the courts of Europe and his attitude of calm expectancy, his prestige in his own country rapidly increased. In 1893 he married Princess Marie-Louise of Bourbon-Parma. In May 1894, as a result of a social misadventure in which he became involved, Stambulóv sent in his resignation, confidently expecting a refusal. To his mortification it was accepted; thereupon he initiated a violent press campaign, but his halo had faded, and on July 15 he was savagely attacked in the street by unknown men, who afterwards escaped, and he died three days later. So intense were the emotions of the people that his grave had to be guarded by the military for two months. In November 1894 followed the death of the Emperor Alexander III, and as a result of this double event the road to a reconciliation with Russia was opened. Meanwhile the German Emperor, who was on good terms with Princess Clémentine, had paved the way for Ferdinand at Vienna, and when, in March 1896, the Sultan recognized him as Prince of Bulgaria and Governor-General of eastern Rumelia, his international position was assured. Relations with Russia were still further improved by the rebaptism of the infant Crown Prince Boris according to the rites of the eastern Church, in February 1896, and a couple of years later Ferdinand and his wife and child paid a highly successful state visit to Peterhof. In September 1902 a memorial church was erected by the Emperor Nicholas II at the Shipka Pass, and later an equestrian statue of the Tsar-Liberator Alexander II was placed opposite the House of Parliament in Sofia.

Bulgaria meanwhile had been making rapid and astonishing material progress. Railways were built, exports increased, and the general condition of the country greatly improved. It is the fashion to compare the wonderful advance made by Bulgaria during the thirty-five years of its new existence with the very much slower progress made by Serbia during a much longer period. This is insisted on especially by publicists in Austria-Hungary and Germany, but it is forgotten that even before the last Balkan war the geographical position of Bulgaria with its seaboard was much more favourable to its economic development than that of Serbia, which the Treaty of Berlin had hemmed in by Turkish and Austro-Hungarian territory; moreover, Bulgaria being double the size of the Serbia of those days, had far greater resources upon which to draw.

From 1894 onwards Ferdinand’s power in his own country and his influence abroad had been steadily growing. He always appreciated the value of railways, and became almost as great a traveller as the German Emperor. His estates in the south of Hungary constantly required his attention, and he was a frequent visitor in Vienna. The German Emperor, though he could not help admiring Ferdinand’s success, was always a little afraid of him; he felt that Ferdinand’s gifts were so similar to his own that he would be unable to count on him in an emergency. Moreover, it was difficult to reconcile Ferdinand’s ambitions in extreme south-eastern Europe with his own. Ferdinand’s relations with Vienna, on the other hand, and especially with the late Archduke Francis Ferdinand, were both cordial and intimate.

The gradual aggravation of the condition of the Turkish Empire, notably in Macedonia, the unredeemed Bulgaria, where since the insurrection of 1902-3 anarchy, always endemic, had deteriorated into a reign of terror, and, also the unmistakably growing power and spirit of Serbia since the accession of the Karageorgevich dynasty in 1903, caused uneasiness in Sofia, no less than in Vienna and Budapest. The Young Turkish revolution of July 1908, and the triumph of the Committee of Union and Progress, disarmed the critics of Turkey who wished to make the forcible introduction of reforms a pretext for their interference; but the potential rejuvenation of the Ottoman Empire which it foreshadowed indicated the desirability of rapid and decisive action. In September, after fomenting a strike on the Oriental Railway in eastern Roumelia (which railway was Turkish property), the Sofia Cabinet seized the line with a military force on the plea of political necessity. At the same time Ferdinand, with his second wife, the Protestant Princess Eleonora of Reuss, whom he had married in March of that year, was received with regal honours by the Emperor of Austria at Budapest. On October 5, 1908, at Tirnovo, the ancient capital, Ferdinand proclaimed the complete independence of Bulgaria and eastern Rumelia under himself as King (Tsar in Bulgarian), and on October 7 Austria-Hungary announced the annexation of Bosnia and Hercegovina, the two Turkish provinces administered by it since 1879, nominally under Turkish suzerainty.

13
The Kingdom, 1908–13

(cf. Chaps. 14, 20)

The events which have taken place in Bulgaria since 1908 hinge on the Macedonian question, which has not till now been mentioned. The Macedonian question was extremely complicated; it started on the assumption that the disintegration of Turkey, which had been proceeding throughout the nineteenth century, would eventually be completed, and the question was how in this eventuality to satisfy the territorial claims of the three neighbouring countries, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Greece, claims both historical and ethnological, based on the numbers and distribution of their ‘unredeemed’ compatriots in Macedonia, and at the same time avoid causing the armed interference of Europe.

The beginnings of the Macedonian question in its modern form do not go farther back than 1885, when the ease with which eastern Rumelia (i.e. southern Bulgaria) threw off the Turkish yoke and was spontaneously united with the semi-independent principality of northern Bulgaria affected the imagination of the Balkan statesmen. From that time Sofia began to cast longing eyes on Macedonia, the whole of which was claimed as ‘unredeemed Bulgaria’, and Stambulóv’s last success in 1894 was to obtain from Turkey the consent to the establishment of two bishops of the Bulgarian (Exarchist) Church in Macedonia, which was a heavy blow for the Greek Patriarchate at Constantinople.

Macedonia had been envisaged by the Treaty of Berlin, article 23 of which stipulated for reforms in that province; but in those days the Balkan States were too young and weak to worry themselves or the European powers over the troubles of their co-religionists in Turkey; their hands were more than full setting their own houses in some sort of order, and it was in nobody’s interest to reform Macedonia, so article 23 remained the expression of a philanthropic sentiment. This indifference on the part of Europe left the door open for the Balkan States, as soon as they had energy to spare, to initiate their campaign for extending their spheres of influence in Macedonia.

From 1894 onwards Bulgarian propaganda in Macedonia increased, and the Bulgarians were soon followed by Greeks and Serbians. The reason for this passionate pegging out of claims and the bitter rivalry of the three nations which it engendered was the following: The population of Macedonia was nowhere, except in the immediate vicinity of the borders of these three countries, either purely Bulgar or purely Greek or purely Serb; most of the towns contained a percentage of at least two of these nationalities, not to mention the Turks (who after all were still the owners of the country by right of conquest), Albanians, Tartars, Rumanians (Vlakhs), and others; the city of Salonika was and is almost purely Jewish, while in the country districts Turkish, Albanian, Greek, Bulgar, and Serb villages were inextricably confused. Generally speaking, the coastal strip was mainly Greek (the coast itself purely so), the interior mainly Slav. The problem was for each country to peg out as large a claim as possible, and so effectively, by any means in their power, to make the majority of the population contained in that claim acknowledge itself to be Bulgar, or Serb, or Greek, that when the agony of the Ottoman Empire was over, each part of Macedonia would automatically fall into the arms of its respective deliverers. The game was played through the appropriate media of churches and schools, for the unfortunate Macedonian peasants had first of all to be enlightened as to who they were, or rather as to who they were told they had got to consider themselves, while the Church, as always, conveniently covered a multitude of political aims; when those methods flagged, a bomb would be thrown at, let us say, a Turkish official by an agent provocateur of one of the three players, inevitably resulting in the necessary massacre of innocent Christians by the ostensibly brutal but really equally innocent Turks, and an outcry in the European press.

Bulgaria was first in the field and had a considerable start of the other two rivals. The Bulgars claimed the whole of Macedonia, including Salonika and all the Aegean coast (except Chalcidice), Okhrida, and Monastir; Greece claimed all southern Macedonia, and Serbia parts of northern and central Macedonia known as Old Serbia. The crux of the whole problem was, and is, that the claims of Serbia and Greece do not clash, while that of Bulgaria, driving a thick wedge between Greece and Serbia, and thus giving Bulgaria the undoubted hegemony of the peninsula, came into irreconcilable conflict with those of its rivals. The importance of this point was greatly emphasized by the existence of the Nish-Salonika railway, which is Serbia’s only direct outlet to the sea, and runs through Macedonia from north to south, following the right or western bank of the river Vardar. Should Bulgaria straddle that, Serbia would be economically at its mercy, just as in the north it was already, to its bitter cost, at the mercy of Austria-Hungary. Nevertheless, Bulgarian propaganda had been so effectual that Serbia and Greece never expected they would eventually be able to join hands so easily and successfully as they afterwards did.

The then unknown quantity of Albania was also a factor. This people, though small in numbers, was formidable in character, and had never been effectually subdued by the Turks. They would have been glad to have a boundary contiguous with that of Bulgaria (with whom they had no quarrel) as a support against their hereditary enemies, Serbs in the north and Greeks in the south, who were more than inclined to encroach on their territory. The population of Macedonia, being still under Turkish rule, was uneducated and ignorant; needless to say it had no national consciousness, though this was less true of the Greeks than of the Slavs. It is the Slav population of Macedonia that has engendered so much heat and caused so much blood to be spilt. The dispute as to whether it is rather Serb or Bulgar has caused interminable and most bitter controversy. The truth is that it was neither the one nor the other, but that, the ethnological and linguistic missionaries of Bulgaria having been first in the field, a majority of the Macedonian Slavs had been so long and so persistently told that they were Bulgars, that after a few years Bulgaria could, with some truth, claim that this fact was so.

Macedonia had been successively under Greek, Bulgar, and Serb, before Turkish, rule, but the Macedonian Slavs had, under the last, been so cut off both from Bulgars and Serbs, that ethnologically and linguistically they did not develop the characteristics of either of these two races, which originally belonged to the same southern Slav stock, but remained a primitive neutral Slav type. If the Serbs had been first in the field instead of the Bulgars, the Macedonian Slavs could just as easily have been made into Serbs, sufficiently plausibly to convince the most knowing expert. The well-known recipe for making a Macedonian Slav village Bulgar is to add -ov or -ev (pronounced -off, -yeff) on to the names of all the male inhabitants, and to make it Serb it is only necessary to add further the syllable -ich, -ov and -ovich being respectively the equivalent in Bulgarian and Serbian of our termination -son, e. g. Ivanov in Bulgarian, and Jovanovit in Serbian = Johnson.

In addition to these three nations Rumania also entered the lists, suddenly horrified at discovering the sad plight of the Vlakh shepherds, who had probably wandered with unconcern about Macedonia with their herds since Roman times. As their vague pastures could not possibly ever be annexed to Rumania, their case was merely used in order to justify Rumania in claiming eventual territorial compensation elsewhere at the final day of reckoning. Meanwhile, their existence as a separate and authentic nationality in Turkey was officially recognized by the Porte in 1906.

The stages of the Macedonian question up to 1908 must at this point be quite briefly enumerated. Russia and Austria-Hungary, the two ‘most interested powers’, who as far back as the eighteenth century had divided the Balkans into their respective spheres of interest, east and west, came to an agreement in 1897 regarding the final settlement of affairs in Turkey; but it never reached a conclusive stage and consequently was never applied. The Macedonian chaos meanwhile grew steadily worse, and the serious insurrections of 1902-3, followed by the customary reprisals, thoroughly alarmed the powers. Hilmi Pasha had been appointed Inspector-General of Macedonia in December 1902, but was not successful in restoring order. In October 1903 the Emperor Nicholas II and the Emperor of Austria, with their foreign ministers, met at Mürzsteg, in Styria, and elaborated a more definite plan of reform known as the Mürzsteg programme, the drastic terms of which had been largely inspired by Lord Lansdowne, then British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs; the principal feature was the institution of an international gendarmerie, the whole of Macedonia being divided up into five districts to be apportioned among the several great powers. Owing to the procrastination of the Porte and to the extreme complexity of the financial measures which had to be elaborated in connexion with this scheme of reforms, the last of the negotiations was not completed, nor the whole series ratified, until April 1907, though the gendarmerie officers had arrived in Macedonia in February 1904.

At this point again it is necessary to recall the position in regard to this question of the various nations concerned. Great Britain and France had no territorial stake in Turkey proper, and did their utmost to secure reform not only in the vilayets of Macedonia, but also in the realm of Ottoman finance. Italy’s interest centred in Albania, whose eventual fate, for geographical and strategic reasons, could not leave it indifferent. Austria-Hungary’s only care was by any means to prevent the aggrandizement of the Serb nationality and of Serbia and Montenegro, so as to secure the control, if not the possession, of the routes to Salonika, if necessary over the prostrate bodies of those two countries which defiantly barred Germanic progress towards the East. Russia was already fatally absorbed in the Far Eastern adventure, and, moreover, had, ever since the war of 1878, been losing influence at Constantinople, where before its word had been law; the Treaty of Berlin had dealt a blow at Russian prestige, and Russia had ever since that date been singularly badly served by its ambassadors to the Porte, who were always either too old or too easy-going. Germany, on the other hand, had been exceptionally fortunate or prudent in the choice of its representatives. The general trend of German diplomacy in Turkey was not grasped until very much later, a fact which redounds to the credit of the German ambassadors at Constantinople. Ever since the triumphal journey of William II to the Bosphorus in 1889, German influence, under the able guidance of Baron von Radowitz, steadily increased. This culminated in the régime of the late Baron Marschall von Bieberstein, who was ambassador from 1897 to 1912. It was German policy to flatter, support, and encourage Turkey in every possible way, to refrain from taking part with the other powers in the invidious and perennial occupation of pressing reforms on Abdul Hamid, and, above all, to give as much pocket-money to Turkey and its extravagant ruler as they asked for. Germany, for instance, refused to send officers or to have a district assigned it in Macedonia in 1904, and declined to take part in the naval demonstration off Mitylene in 1905. This attitude of Germany naturally encouraged the Porte in its policy of delay and subterfuge, and Turkey soon came to look on Germany as its only strong, sincere, and disinterested friend in Europe. For the indefinite continuance of chaos and bloodshed in Macedonia, after the other powers had really braced themselves to the thankless task of putting the reforms into practice, Germany alone was responsible.

The blow which King Ferdinand had inflicted on the prestige of the Young Turks in October 1908, by proclaiming his independence, naturally lent lustre to the Bulgarian cause in Macedonia. Serbia, baffled by the simultaneous Austrian annexation of Bosnia and Hercegovina, and maddened by the elevation of Bulgaria to the rank of a kingdom (its material progress had hitherto been discounted in Serbian eyes by the fact that it was a mere vassal principality), seemed about to be crushed by the two iron pots jostling it on either side. Its international position was at that time such that it could expect no help or encouragement from western Europe, while the events of 1909 (cf. p. 144) showed that Russia was not then in a position to render active assistance. Greece, also screaming aloud for compensation, was told by its friends amongst the great powers that if it made a noise it would get nothing, but that if it behaved like a good child it might some day be given Krete. Meanwhile Russia, rudely awakened by the events of 1908 to the real state of affairs in the Near East, beginning to realize the growth of German influence at Constantinople, and seeing the unmistakable resuscitation of Austria-Hungary as a great power, made manifest by the annexation of Bosnia and Hercegovina, temporarily reasserted its influence in Bulgaria. From the moment when Baron Aehrenthal announced his chimerical scheme of an Austrian railway through the Sandjak of Novi Pazar in January 1908— everybody knows that the railway already built through Serbia along the Morava valley is the only commercially remunerative and strategically practicable road from Berlin, Vienna, and Budapest to Salonika and Constantinople—Russia realized that the days of the Mürzsteg programme were over, that henceforward it was to be a struggle between Slav and Teuton for the ownership of Constantinople and the dominion of the Near East, and that something must be done to retrieve the position in the Balkans which it was losing. After Baron Aehrenthal, in January 1909, had mollified the Young Turks by an indemnity, and thus put an end to the boycott, Russia in February of the same year liquidated the remains of the old Turkish war indemnity of 1878 still due to itself by skilfully arranging that Bulgaria should pay off its capitalized tribute, owed to its ex-suzerain the Sultan, by very easy instalments to Russia instead.

The immediate effects of the Young Turk revolution amongst the Balkan States, and the events, watched benevolently by Russia, which led to the formation of the Balkan League, when it was joyfully realized that neither the setting-up of parliamentary government, nor even the overthrow of Abdul Hamid, implied the commencement of the millennium in Macedonia and Thrace, have been described elsewhere (pp. 141, 148). King Ferdinand and M. Venezelos are generally credited with the inception and realisation of the League, though it was so secretly and skilfully concerted that it is not yet possible correctly to apportion praise for the remarkable achievement. Bulgaria is a very democratic country, but King Ferdinand, owing to his sagacity, patience, and experience, and also thanks to his influential dynastic connexions and propensity for travel, has always been virtually his own foreign minister; in spite of the fact that he is a large feudal Hungarian landlord, and has temperamental leanings towards the Central European Empires, it is quite credible that King Ferdinand devoted all his undeniable talents and great energy to the formation of the League when he saw that the moment had come for Bulgaria to realize its destiny at Turkey’s expense, and that, if the other three Balkan States could be induced to come to the same wise decision, it would be so much the better for all of them. That Russia could do anything else than whole-heartedly welcome the formation of the Balkan League was absolutely impossible. Pan-Slavism had long since ceased to be the force it was, and nobody in Russia dreamed of or desired the incorporation of any Balkan territory in the Russian Empire. It is possible to control Constantinople without possessing the Balkans, and Russia could only rejoice if a Greco-Slavonic league should destroy the power of the Turks and thereby make impossible the further advance of the Germanic powers eastward.

That Russia was ever in the least jealous of the military successes of the league, which caused such gnashing of teeth in Berlin, Vienna, and Budapest, is a mischievous fiction, the emptiness of which was evident to any one who happened to be in Russia during the winter of 1912-13.

The years 1908 to 1912 were outwardly uneventful in Bulgaria, though a great deal of quiet work was done in increasing the efficiency of the army, and the material prosperity of the country showed no falling off. Relations with the other Balkan States, especially with Serbia and Montenegro, improved considerably, and there was ample room for such improvement. This was outwardly marked by frequent visits paid to each other by members of the several royal families of the three Slavonic kingdoms of the Balkans. In May 1912 agreements for the eventual delimitation of the provinces to be conquered from Turkey in the event of war were signed between Bulgaria and Serbia, and Bulgaria and Greece. The most controversial district was, of course, Macedonia. Bulgaria claimed central Macedonia, with Monastir and Okhrida, which was the lion’s share, on ethnical grounds which have been already discussed, and it was expected that Greece and Serbia, by obtaining other acquisitions elsewhere, would consent to have their territories separated by the large Bulgarian wedge which was to be driven between them. The exact future line of demarcation between Serbian and Bulgarian territory was to be left to arbitration. The possible creation of an independent Albania was not contemplated.

In August 1912 the twenty-fifth anniversary of King Ferdinand’s arrival in Bulgaria was celebrated with much rejoicing at the ancient capital of Tirnovo, and was marred only by the news of the terrible massacre of Bulgars by Turks at Kochana in Macedonia; this event, however, opportune though mournful, tended considerably to increase the volume of the wave of patriotism which swept through the country. Later in the same month Count Berchtold startled Europe with his ‘progressive decentralization’ scheme of reform for Macedonia. The manner in which this event led to the final arrangements for the declaration of war on Turkey by the four Balkan States is given in full elsewhere (cf. p. 151).

The Bulgarian army was fully prepared for the fray, and the autumn manoeuvres had permitted the concentration unobserved of a considerable portion of it, ready to strike when the time came. Mobilisation was ordered on September 30, 1912. On October 8 Montenegro declared war on Turkey. On October 13 Bulgaria, with the other Balkan States, replied to the remonstrances of Russia and Austria by declaring that its patience was at length exhausted, and that the sword alone was able to enforce proper treatment of the Christian populations in European Turkey. On October 17 Turkey, encouraged by the sudden and unexpected conclusion of peace with Italy after the Libyan war, declared war on Bulgaria and Serbia, and on October 18 King Ferdinand addressed a sentimental exhortation to his people to liberate their fellow-countrymen, who were still groaning under the Crescent.

The number of Turkish troops opposing the Bulgarians in Thrace was about 180,000, and they had almost exactly the same number wherewith to oppose the Serbians in Macedonia; for, although Macedonia was considered by the Turks to be the most important theatre of war, yet the proximity of the Bulgarian frontier to Constantinople made it necessary to retain a large number of troops in Thrace. On October 19 the Bulgarians took the frontier town of Mustafa Pasha. On October 24 they defeated the Turks at Kirk-Kilissé (or Lozengrad), further east. From October 28 to November 2 raged the terrific battle of Lule-Burgas, which resulted in a complete and brilliant victory of the Bulgarians over the Turks. The defeat and humiliation of the Turks was as rapid and thorough in Thrace as it had been in Macedonia, and by the middle of November the remains of the Turkish army were entrenched behind the impregnable lines of Chataldja, while a large garrison was shut up in Adrianople, which had been invested by the end of October. The Bulgarian army, somewhat exhausted by this brilliant and lightning campaign, refrained from storming the lines of Chataldja, an operation which could not fail to involve losses such as the Bulgarian nation was scarcely in a position to bear, and on December 3 the armistice was signed. The negotiations conducted in London for two months led, however, to no result, and on February 3, 1913, hostilities were resumed. These, for the Bulgarians, resolved themselves into the more energetic prosecution of the siege of Adrianople, which had not been raised during the armistice. To their assistance Serbia, being able to spare troops from Macedonia, sent 50,000 men and a quantity of heavy siege artillery, an arm which the Bulgarians lacked. On March 26, 1913, the fortress surrendered to the allied armies.

The Conference of London, which took place during the spring of that year, fixed the new Turco-Bulgarian boundary by drawing the famous Enos-Midia line, running between these two places situated on the shores respectively of the Aegean and the Black Sea. This delimitation would have given Bulgaria possession of Adrianople. But meanwhile Greece and especially Serbia, which latter country had been compelled to withdraw from the Adriatic coast by Austria, and was further precluded from ever returning there by the creation of the independent state of Albania, determined to retain possession of all that part of Macedonia, including the whole valley of the Vardar with its important railway, which they had conquered, and thus secure their common frontier. In May 1913 a military convention was concluded between them, and the Balkan League, the relations between the members of which had been becoming more strained ever since January, finally dissolved. Bulgaria, outraged by this callous disregard of the agreements as to the partition of Macedonia signed a year previously by itself and its ex-allies, did not wait for the result of the arbitration which was actually proceeding in Russia, but in an access of indignation rushed to arms.

This second Balkan war, begun by Bulgaria during the night of June 30, 1913, by a sudden attack on the Serbian army in Macedonia, resulted in its undoing. In order to defeat the Serbs and Greeks the south-eastern and northern frontiers were denuded of troops. But the totally unforeseen happened. The Serbs were victorious, defeating the Bulgars in Macedonia, the Turks, seeing Thrace empty of Bulgarian troops, re-occupied Adrianople, and the Rumanian army, determined to see fair play before it was too late, invaded Bulgaria from the north and marched on Sofia. By the end of July the campaign was over and Bulgaria had to submit to fate.

By the terms of the Treaty of Bucarest, which was concluded on August 10, 1913, Bulgaria obtained a considerable part of Thrace and eastern Macedonia, including a portion of the Aegean coast with the seaport of Dedeagach, but it was forced to ‘compensate’ Rumania with a slice of its richest province (the districts of Dobrich and Silistria in north-eastern Bulgaria), and it lost central Macedonia, a great part of which it would certainly have been awarded by Russia’s arbitration. On September 22, 1913, the Treaty of Constantinople was signed by Bulgaria and Turkey; by its terms Turkey retained possession of Adrianople and of a far larger part of Thrace than its series of ignominious defeats in the autumn of 1912 entitled it to.

In the fatal quarrel between Bulgaria and Serbia which caused the disruption of the Balkan League, led to the tragic second Balkan war of July 1913, and naturally left behind the bitterest feelings, it is difficult to apportion the blame. Both Serbia and Bulgaria were undoubtedly at fault in the choice of the methods by which they sought to adjust their difference, but the real guilt is to be found neither in Sofia nor in Belgrade, but in Vicuna and Budapest. The Balkan League barred the way of the Germanic Powers to the East; its disruption weakened Bulgaria and again placed Serbia at the mercy of the Dual Monarchy. After these trying and unremunerative experiences it is not astonishing that the Bulgarian people and its ambitious ruler should have retired to the remote interior of their shell.

Explanation of Serbian orthography

c = ts
č = ch (as in church)
ć = ” ” ” but softer
š = sh
ž = zh (as z in azure)
gj = g (as in George)
j = y

[Illustration: THE BALKAN PENINSULA]

SERBIA

14
The Serbs under Foreign Supremacy, 650–1168

The manner of the arrival of the Slavs in the Balkan peninsula, of that of the Bulgars, and of the formation of the Bulgarian nationality has already been described (cf. p. 26). The installation of the Slavs in the lands between the Danube, the Aegean, and the Adriatic was completed by about A.D. 650. In the second half of the seventh century the Bulgars settled themselves in the eastern half of the peninsula and became absorbed by the Slavs there, and from that time the nationality of the Slavs in the western half began to be more clearly defined. These latter, split up into a number of tribes, gradually grouped themselves into three main divisions: Serbs (or Serbians), Croats (or Croatians), and Slovenes. The Serbs, much the most numerous of the three, occupied roughly the modern kingdom of Serbia (including Old Serbia and northern Macedonia), Montenegro, and most of Bosnia, Hercegovina, and Dalmatia; the Croats occupied the more western parts of these last three territories and Croatia; the Slovenes occupied the modern Carniola and southern Carinthia. Needless to say, none of these geographical designations existed in those days except Dalmatia, on the coast of which the Latin influence and nomenclature maintained itself. The Slovenes, whose language is closely akin to but not identical with Serbian (or Croatian), even to-day only number one and a half million, and do not enter into this narrative, as they have never played any political rôle in the Balkan peninsula.

The Serbs and the Croats were, as regards race and language, originally one people, the two names having merely geographical signification. In course of time, for various reasons connected with religion and politics, the distinction was emphasized, and from a historical point of view the Serbo-Croatian race has always been divided into two. It is only within the last few years that a movement has taken place, the object of which is to reunite Serbs and Croats into one nation and eventually into one state. The movement originated in Serbia, the Serbs maintaining that they and the Croats are one people because they speak the same language, and that racial and linguistic unity outweighs religious divergence. A very large number of Croats agree with the Serbs in this and support their views, but a minority for long obstinately insisted that there was a racial as well as a religious difference, and that fusion was impossible. The former based their argument on facts, the latter theirs on prejudice, which is notoriously difficult to overcome. Latterly the movement in favour of fusion grew very much stronger among the Croats, and together with that in Serbia resulted in the Pan-Serb agitation which, gave the pretext for the opening of hostilities in July 1914.

The designation Southern Slav (or Jugo-Slav, jug, pronounced yug, = south in Serbian) covers Serbs and Croats, and also includes Slovenes; it is only used with reference to the Bulgarians from the point of view of philology (the group of South Slavonic languages including Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian and Slovene; the East Slavonic, Russian; and the West Slavonic, Polish and Bohemian).

In the history of the Serbs and Croats, or of the Serbo-Croatian race, several factors of a general nature have first to be considered, which have influenced its whole development. Of these, the physical nature of the country in which they settled, between the Danube and Save and the Adriatic, is one of the most important. It is almost everywhere mountainous, and though the mountains themselves never attain as much as 10,000 feet in height, yet they cover the whole country with an intricate network and have always formed an obstacle to easy communication between the various parts of it. The result of this has been twofold. In the first place it has, generally speaking, been a protection against foreign penetration and conquest, and in so far was beneficial. Bulgaria, further east, is, on the whole, less mountainous, in spite of the Balkan range which stretches the whole length of it; for this reason, and also on account of its geographical position, any invaders coming from the north or north-east, especially if aiming at Constantinople or Salonika, were bound to sweep over it. The great immemorial highway from the north-west to the Balkan peninsula crosses the Danube at Belgrade and follows the valley of the Morava to Nish; thence it branches off eastwards, going through Sofia and again crossing all Bulgaria to reach Constantinople, while the route to Salonika follows the Morava southwards from Nish and crosses the watershed into the valley of the Vardar, which flows into the Aegean. But even this road, following the course of the rivers Morava and Vardar, only went through the fringe of Serb territory, and left untouched the vast mountain region between the Morava and the Adriatic, which is really the home of the Serb race.

In the second place, while it has undoubtedly been a protection to the Serb race, it has also been a source of weakness. It has prevented a welding together of the people into one whole, has facilitated the rise of numerous political units at various times, and generally favoured the dissipation of the national strength, and militated against national organization and cohesion. In the course of history this process has been emphasized rather than diminished, and to-day the Serb race is split up into six political divisions, while Bulgaria, except for those Bulgars claimed as ‘unredeemed’ beyond the frontier, presents a united whole. It is only within the last thirty years, with the gradual improvement of communications (obstructed to an incredible extent by the Austro-Hungarian government) and the spread of education, that the Serbs in the different countries which they inhabit have become fully conscious of their essential identity and racial unity.

No less important than the physical aspect of their country on the development of the Serbs has been the fact that right through the middle of it from south to north there had been drawn a line of division more than two centuries before their arrival. Artificial boundaries are proverbially ephemeral, but this one has lasted throughout the centuries, and it has been baneful to the Serbs. This dividing line, drawn first by the Emperor Diocletian, has been described on p. 14; at the division of the Roman Empire into East and West it was again followed, and it formed the boundary between the dioceses of Italy and Dacia; the line is roughly the same as the present political boundary between Montenegro and Hercegovina, between the kingdom of Serbia and Bosnia; it stretched from the Adriatic to the river Save right across the Serb territory. The Serbo-Croatian race unwittingly occupied a country that was cut in two by the line that divides East from West, and separates Constantinople and the Eastern Church from Rome and the Western. This curious accident has had consequences fatal to the unity of the race, since it has played into the hands of ambitious and unscrupulous neighbours. As to the extent of the country occupied by the Serbs at the beginning of their history it is difficult to be accurate.

The boundary between the Serbs in the west of the peninsula and the Bulgars in the east has always been a matter of dispute. The present political frontier between Serbia and Bulgaria, starting in the north from the mouth of the river Timok on the southern bank of the Danube and going southwards slightly east of Pirot, is ethnographically approximately correct till it reaches the newly acquired and much-disputed territories in Macedonia, and represents fairly accurately the line that has divided the two nationalities ever since they were first differentiated in the seventh century. In the confused state of Balkan politics in the Middle Ages the political influence of Bulgaria often extended west of this line and included Nish and the Morava valley, while at other times that of Serbia extended east of it. The dialects spoken in these frontier districts represent a transitional stage between the two languages; each of the two peoples naturally considers them more akin to its own, and resents the fact that any of them should be included in the territory of the other. Further south, in Macedonia, conditions are similar. Before the Turkish conquest Macedonia had been sometimes under Bulgarian rule, as in the times of Simeon, Samuel, and John Asen II, sometimes under Serbian, especially during the height of Serbian power in the fourteenth century, while intermittently it had been a province of the Greek Empire, which always claimed it as its own. On historical grounds, therefore, each of the three nations can claim possession of Macedonia. From an ethnographic point of view the Slav population of Macedonia (there were always and are still many non-Slav elements) was originally the same as that in the other parts of the peninsula, and probably more akin to the Serbs, who are pure Slavs, than to the Slavs of Bulgaria, who coalesced with their Asiatic conquerors. In course of time, however, Bulgarian influences, owing to the several periods when the Bulgars ruled the country, began to make headway. The Albanians also (an Indo-European or Aryan race, but not of the Greek, Latin, or Slav families), who, as a result of all the invasions of the Balkan peninsula, had been driven southwards into the inaccessible mountainous country now known as Albania, began to spread northwards and eastwards again during the Turkish dominion, pushing back the Serbs from the territory where they had long been settled. During the Turkish dominion neither Serb nor Bulgar had any influence in Macedonia, and the Macedonian Slavs, who had first of all been pure Slavs, like the Serbs, then been several times under Bulgar, and finally, under Serb influence, were left to themselves, and the process of differentiation between Serb and Bulgar in Macedonia, by which in time the Macedonian Slavs would have become either Serbs or Bulgars, ceased. The further development of the Macedonian question is treated elsewhere (cf. chap. 13).

The Serbs, who had no permanent or well-defined frontier in the east, where their neighbours were the Bulgars, or in the south, where they were the Greeks and Albanians, were protected on the north by the river Save and on the west by the Adriatic. They were split up into a number of tribes, each of which was headed by a chief called in Serbian župan and in Greek archōn. Whenever any one of these managed, either by skill or by good fortune, to extend his power over a few of the neighbouring districts he was termed veliki (=great) župan. From the beginning of their history, which is roughly put at A.D. 650, until A.D. 1196, the Serbs were under foreign domination. Their suzerains were nominally always the Greek emperors, who had ‘granted’ them the land they had taken, and whenever the emperor happened to be energetic and powerful, as were Basil I (the Macedonian, 867-86), John Tzimisces (969-76), Basil II (976-1025), and Manuel Comnenus (1143-80), the Greek supremacy was very real. At those times again when Bulgaria was very powerful, under Simeon (893-927), Samuel (977-1014), and John Asen II (1218-41), many of the more easterly and southerly Serbs came under Bulgarian rule, though it is instructive to notice that the Serbs themselves do not recognize the West Bulgarian or Macedonian kingdom of Samuel to have been a Bulgarian state. The Bulgars, however, at no time brought all the Serb lands under their sway.

Intermittently, whenever the power of Byzantium or of Bulgaria waned, some Serb princeling would try to form a political state on a more ambitious scale, but the fabric always collapsed at his death, and the Serbs reverted to their favourite occupation of quarrelling amongst themselves. Such wore the attempts of Časlav, who had been made captive by Simeon of Bulgaria, escaped after his death, and ruled over a large part of central Serbia till 960, and later of Bodin, whose father, Michael, was even recognized as king by Pope Gregory VII; Bodin formed a state near the coast, in the Zeta river district (now Montenegro), and ruled there from 1081 to 1101. But as a rule the whole of the country peopled by the Serbs was split into a number of tiny principalities always at war with one another. Generally speaking, this country gradually became divided into two main geographical divisions: (1) the Pomorje, or country by the sea, which included most of the modern Montenegro and the southern halves of Hercegovina and Dalmatia, and (2) the Zagorje, or country behind the hills, which included most of the modern Bosnia, the western half of the modern kingdom of Serbia, and the northern portions of Montenegro and Hercegovina, covering all the country between the Pomorje and the Save; to the north of the Pomorje and Zagorje lay Croatia. Besides their neighbours in the east and south, those in the north and west played an important part in Serbian history even in those early days.

Towards the end of the eighth century, after the decline of the power of the Avars, Charlemagne extended his conquests eastwards (he made a great impression on the minds of the Slavs, whose word for king, kral or korol, is derived directly from his name), and his son Louis conquered the Serbs settled in the country between the rivers Save and Drave. This is commemorated in the name of the mass of hill which lies between the Danube and the Save, in eastern Slavonia, and is to this day known as Fruška Gora, or French Hill. The Serbs and Bulgars fought against the Franks, and while the Bulgars held their own, the Serbs were beaten, and those who did not like the rule of the new-comers had to migrate southwards across the Save; at the same time the Serbs between the rivers Morava and Timok (eastern Serbia) were subjected by the Bulgars. With the arrival of the Magyars, in the ninth century, a wall was raised between the Serbs and central and western Europe on land. Croatia and Slavonia (between the Save and the Drave) were gradually drawn into the orbit of the Hungarian state, and in 1102, on the death of its own ruler, Croatia was absorbed by Hungary and has formed part of that country ever since. Hungary, aiming at an outlet on the Adriatic, at the same time subjected most of Dalmatia and parts of Bosnia. In the west Venice had been steadily growing in power throughout the tenth century, and by the end of it had secured control of all the islands off Dalmatia and of a considerable part of the coast. All the cities on the mainland acknowledged the supremacy of Venice and she was mistress of the Adriatic.

In the interior of the Serb territory, during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, three political centres came into prominence and shaped themselves into larger territorial units. These were: (1) Raska, which had been Caslav’s centre and is considered the birth-place of the Serbian state (this district, with the town of Ras as its centre, included the south-western part of the modern kingdom of Serbia and what was the Turkish sandjak or province of Novi-Pazar); (2) Zeta, on the coast (the modern Montenegro); and (3) Bosnia, so called after the river Bosna, which runs through it. Bosnia, which roughly corresponded to the modern province of that name, became independent in the second half of the tenth century, and was never after that incorporated in the Serbian state. At times it fell under Hungarian influence; in the twelfth century, during the reign of Manuel Comnenus, who was victorious over the Magyars, Bosnia, like all other Serb territories, had to acknowledge the supremacy of Constantinople.

It has already been indicated that the Serbs and Croats occupied territory which, while the Church was still one, was divided between two dioceses, Italy and Dacia, and when the Church itself was divided, in the eleventh century, was torn apart between the two beliefs. The dividing line between the jurisdictions of Rome and Constantinople ran from north to south through Bosnia, but naturally there has always been a certain vagueness about the extent of their respective jurisdictions. In later years the terms Croat and Roman Catholic on the one hand, and Serb and Orthodox on the other, became interchangeable. Hercegovina and eastern Bosnia have always been predominantly Orthodox, Dalmatia and western Bosnia predominantly Roman Catholic. The loyalty of the Croatians to Austria-Hungary has been largely owing to the influence of Roman Catholicism.

During the first centuries of Serbian history Christianity made slow progress in the western half of the Balkan peninsula. The Dalmatian coast was always under the influence of Rome, but the interior was long pagan. It is doubtful whether the brothers Cyril and Methodius (cf. chap. 5) actually passed through Serb territory, but in the tenth century their teachings and writings were certainly current there. At the time of the division of the Churches all the Serb lands except the Dalmatian coast, Croatia, and western Bosnia, were faithful to Constantinople, and the Greek hierarchy obtained complete control of the ecclesiastical administration. The elaborate organisation and opulent character of the Eastern Church was, however, especially in the hands of the Greeks, not congenial to the Serbs, and during the eleventh and twelfth centuries the Bogomil heresy (cf. chap, 6), a much more primitive and democratic form of Christianity, already familiar in the East as the Manichaean heresy, took hold of the Serbs’ imagination and made as rapid and disquieting progress in their country as it had already done in the neighbouring Bulgaria; inasmuch as the Greek hierarchy considered this teaching to be socialistic, subversive, and highly dangerous to the ecclesiastical supremacy of Constantinople, all of which indeed it was, adherence to it became amongst the Serbs a direct expression of patriotism.

15
The Rise and Fall of the Serbian Empire and the Extinction of Serbian Independence, 1168–1496

From 1168 the power of the Serbs, or rather of the central Serb state of Raska, and the extent of its territory gradually but steadily increased. This was outwardly expressed in the firm establishment on the throne of the national Nemanja dynasty, which can claim the credit of having by its energy, skill, and good fortune fashioned the most imposing and formidable state the Serb race has ever known. This dynasty ruled the country uninterruptedly, but not without many quarrels, feuds, and rivalries amongst its various members, from 1168 until 1371, when it became extinct.

There were several external factors which at this time favoured the rise of the Serbian state. Byzantium and the Greek Empire, to which the Emperor Manuel Comnenus had by 1168 restored some measure of its former greatness and splendour, regaining temporary control, after a long war with Hungary, even over Dalmatia, Croatia, and Bosnia, after this date began definitively to decline, and after the troublous times of the fourth crusade (1204), when for sixty years a Latin empire was established on the Bosphorus, never again recovered as a Christian state the position in the Balkan peninsula which it had so long enjoyed. Bulgaria, too, after the meteoric glory of its second empire under the Asen dynasty (1186-1258), quite went to pieces, the eastern and northern parts falling under Tartar, the southern under Greek influence, while the western districts fell to Serbia. In the north, on the other hand, Hungary was becoming a dangerous and ambitious neighbour. During the thirteenth century, it is true, the attention of the Magyars was diverted by the irruption into and devastation of their country by their unwelcome kinsmen from Asia, the Tartars, who wrought great havoc and even penetrated as far as the Adriatic coast. Nevertheless Hungary was always a menace to Serbia; Croatia, Slavonia, and the interior of Dalmatia, all purely Serb territories, belonged to the Hungarian crown, and Bosnia was under the supremacy of the Magyars, though nominally independent.

The objects of the Magyars were twofold—to attain the hegemony of the Balkan peninsula by conquering all the still independent Serb territories, and to bring the peninsula within the pale of Rome. They were not successful in either of these objects, partly because their wars with the Serbian rulers always failed to reach a decision, partly because their plans conflicted with those of the powerful Venetian republic. The relations between Venice and Serbia were always most cordial, as their ambitions did not clash; those of Venice were not continental, while those of Serbia were never maritime. The semi-independent Slavonic city-republic of Ragusa (called Dubrovnik in Serbian) played a very important part throughout this period. It was under Venetian supremacy, but was self-governing and had a large fleet of its own. It was the great place of exchange between Serbia and western Europe, and was really the meeting-place of East and West. Its relations with Serbia were by no means always peaceful; it was a Naboth’s vineyard for the rulers and people of the inland kingdom, and it was never incorporated within their dominions. Ragusa and the other cities of the Dalmatian coast were the home during the Middle Ages of a flourishing school of Serbian literature, which was inspired by that of Italy. The influence of Italian civilization and of the Italian Church was naturally strong in the Serb province, much of which was under Venetian rule; the reason for this was that communication by sea with Italy was easier and safer than that by land with Serbia. The long, formidable ranges of limestone mountains which divide the Serbian interior from the Adriatic in almost unbroken and parallel lines have always been a barrier to the extension of Serb power to the coast, and an obstacle to free commercial intercourse. Nevertheless Ragusa was a great trade centre, and one of the factors which most contributed to the economic strength of the Serbian Empire.

The first of the Nemanja dynasty was Stephen, whose title was still only Veliki Župan; he extended Serb territory southwards at the expense of the Greeks, especially after the death of Manuel Comnenus in 1180. He also persecuted the Bogomils, who took refuge in large numbers in the adjacent Serb state of Bosnia. Like many other Serbian rulers, he abdicated in later life in favour of his younger son, Stephen, called Nemanjié (= Nemanya’s son), and himself became a monk (1196), travelling for this purpose to Mount Athos, the great monastic centre and home of theological learning of the Eastern Church. There he saw his youngest son, who some years previously had also journeyed thither and entered a monastery, taking the name of Sava.

It was the custom for every Serbian ruler to found a sort of memorial church, for the welfare of his own soul, before his death, and to decorate and endow it lavishly. Stephen and his son together superintended the erection in this sense of the church and monastery of Hilandar on Mount Athos, which became a famous centre of Serbian church life. Stephen died shortly after the completion of the building in 1199, and was buried in it, but in 1207 he was reinterred in the monastery of Studenica, in Serbia, also founded by him.

The reign of Stephen Nernanjić (1196-1223) opened with a quarrel between him and his elder brother, who not unnaturally felt he ought to have succeeded his father; the Bulgarians profited by this and seized a large part of eastern Serbia, including Belgrade, Nish, Prizren, and Skoplje. This, together with the fall of Constantinople and the establishment of the Latin Empire in 1204, alarmed the Serbs and brought about a reconciliation between the brothers, and in 1207 Sava returned to Serbia to organise the Church on national lines. In 1219 he journeyed to Nicaea and extracted from the Emperor Theodore Lascaris, who had fallen on evil days, the concession for the establishment of an autonomous national Serbian Church, independent of the Patriarch of Constantinople. Sava himself was at the head of the new institution. In 1220 he solemnly crowned his brother King (Kralj) of Serbia, the natural consequence of his activities in the previous year. For this reason Stephen Nemanjić is called ‘The First-Crowned’. He was succeeded in 1223 by his son Stephen Radoslav, and he in turn was deposed by his brother Stephen Vladislav in 1233. Both these were crowned by Sava, and Vladislav married the daughter of Tsar John Asen II, under whom Bulgaria was then at the height of her power. Sava journeyed to Palestine, and on his return paid a visit to the Bulgarian court at Tirnovo, where he died in 1236. His body was brought to Serbia and buried in the monastery of Mileševo, built by Vladislav. This extremely able churchman and politician, who did a great deal for the peaceful development of his country, was canonized and is regarded as the patron saint of Serbia.

The reign of Vladislav’s son and successor, Stephen Uroš I (1242-76), was characterized by economic development and the strengthening of the internal administration. In external affairs he made no conquests, but defeated a combination of the Bulgarians with Ragusa against him, and after the war the Bulgarian ruler married his daughter. In his wars against Hungary he was unsuccessful, and the Magyars remained in possession of a large part of northern Serbia. In 1276 he was deposed by his son, Stephen Dragutin, who in his turn, after an unsuccessful war against the Greeks, again masters of Constantinople since 1261, was deposed and succeeded by his brother, Stephen Uroš II, named Milutin, in 1282. This king ruled from 1282 till 1321, and during his reign the country made very great material progress; its mineral wealth especially, which included gold and silver mines, began to be exploited. He extended the boundaries of his kingdom in the north, making the Danube and the Save the frontier. The usual revolt against paternal authority was made by his son Stephen, but was unsuccessful, and the rebel was banished to Constantinople.

It was the custom of the Serbian kings to give appanages to their sons, and the inevitable consequence of this system was the series of provincial rebellions which occurred in almost every reign. When the revolt succeeded, the father (or brother) was granted in his turn a small appanage. In this case it was the son who was exiled, but he was recalled in 1319 and a reconciliation took place. Milutin died in 1321 and was succeeded by his son, Stephen Uroš III, who reigned till 1331. He is known as Stephen Dečanski, after the memorial church which he built at Dečani in western Serbia. His reign was signalized by a great defeat of the combined Bulgarians and Greeks at Kustendil in Macedonia in 1330. The following year his son, Stephen Dušan, rebelled against him and deposed him. Stephen Dušan, who reigned from 1331 till 1355, was Serbia’s greatest ruler, and under him the country reached its utmost limits. Provincial and family revolts and petty local disputes with such places as Ragusa became a thing of the past, and he undertook conquest on a grand scale. Between 1331 and 1344 he subjected all Macedonia, Albania, Thessaly, and Epirus. He was careful to keep on good terms with Ragusa and with Hungary, then under Charles Robert. He married the sister of the Bulgarian ruler, and during his reign Bulgaria was completely under Serbian supremacy. The anarchy and civil war which had become perennial at Constantinople, and the weakening of the Greek Empire in face of the growing power of the Turks, no doubt to some extent explain the facility and rapidity of his conquests; nevertheless his power was very formidable, and his success inspired considerable alarm in western Europe. This was increased when, in 1345, he proclaimed his country an empire. He first called together a special Church council, at which the Serbian Church, an archbishopric, whose centre was then at Peć (in Montenegro, Ipek in Turkish), was proclaimed a Patriarchate, with Archbishop Joannice as Patriarch; then this prelate, together with the Bulgarian Patriarch, Simeon, and Nicholas, Archbishop of Okhrida, crowned Stephen Tsar of the Serbs, Bulgars, and Greeks. Upon this the Patriarch of Constantinople gave himself the vain satisfaction of anathematizing the whole of Serbia, as a punishment for this insubordination.

In 1353 the Pope, Innocent VI, persuaded King Louis of Hungary to undertake a crusade against Serbia in the name of Catholicism, but Stephen defeated him and re-established his frontier along the Save and Danube. Later he conquered the southern half of Dalmatia, and extended his empire as far north as the river Cetina. In 1354 Stephen Dušan himself approached the Pope, offering to acknowledge his spiritual supremacy, if he would support him against the Hungarians and the Turks. The Pope sent him an embassy, but eventually Stephen could not agree to the papal conditions, and concluded an alliance, of greater practical utility, with the Venetians. In 1355, however, he suddenly died, at the age of forty-six, and thus the further development and aggrandisement of his country was prematurely arrested.

Stephen Dušan made a great impression on his contemporaries, both by his imposing personal appearance and by his undoubted wisdom and ability. He was especially a great legislator, and his remarkable code of laws, compiled in 1349 and enlarged in 1354, is, outside his own country, his greatest title to fame. During Stephen Dušan’s reign the political centre of Serbia, which had for many years gradually tended to shift southwards towards Macedonia, was at Skoplje (Üsküb in Turkish), which he made his capital. Stephen Dušan’s empire extended from the Adriatic in the west to the river Maritsa in the east, from the Save and Danube in the north to the Aegean; it included all the modern kingdoms of Serbia, Montenegro, Albania, and most of Greece, Dalmatia as far north as the river Cetina, as well as the fertile Morava valley, with Nish and Belgrade—the whole eastern part of Serbia, which had for long been under either Bulgar or Magyar control. It did not include the cities of Salonika or Ragusa, nor any considerable part of the modern kingdom of Bulgaria, nor Bosnia, Croatia, North Dalmatia, nor Slavonia (between the Save and Drave), ethnologically all purely Serb lands. From the point of view of nationality, therefore, its boundaries were far from ideal.

Stephen Dušan was succeeded by his son, known as Tsar Uroš, but he was as weak as his father had been strong. Almost as soon as he succeeded to the throne, disorders, rebellions, and dissensions broke out and the empire rapidly fell to pieces. With Serbia, as with Bulgaria, the empire entirely hinged on the personality of one man, and when he was gone chaos returned. Such an event for Serbia at this juncture was fatal, as a far more formidable foe than the ruler’s rebellious relations was advancing against it. The Turkish conquests were proceeding apace; they had taken Gallipoli in 1354 and Demotika and Adrianople in 1361. The Serbs, who had already had an unsuccessful brush with the advance guard of the new invaders near Demotika in 1351, met them again on the Maritsa river in 1371, and were completely defeated. Several of the upstart princes who had been pulling Stephen Dušan’s empire to pieces perished, and Tsar Uroš only survived the battle of the Maritsa two months; he was unmarried, and with him died the Nemanja dynasty and the Serbian Empire.

After this disaster the unity of the Serbian state was completely destroyed, and it has never since been restored in the same measure.

That part of the country to the south of Skoplje fell completely under Turkish control; it was here that the famous national hero, Marko Kraljević (or King’s son), renowned for his prowess, ruled as a vassal prince and mercenary soldier of the Turks; his father was one of the rebel princes who fell at the battle of the river Maritsa in 1371. North of Skoplje, Serbia, with Kruševac as a new political centre, continued to lead an independent but precarious existence, much reduced in size and glory, under a native ruler, Prince Lazar; all the conquests of Stephen Dušan were lost, and the important coastal province of Zeta, which later developed into Montenegro, had broken away and proclaimed its autonomy directly after the death of Tsar Uroš.

In 1375 a formal reconciliation was effected with the Patriarch of Constantinople; the ban placed on the Serbian Church in 1352 was removed and the independence of the Serbian Patriarchate of Peć (Ipek) recognised. Meanwhile neither Greeks, Bulgars, nor Serbs were allowed any peace by the Turks.

In 1389 was fought the great battle of Kosovo Polje, or the Field of Blackbirds, a large plain in Old Serbia, at the southern end of which is Skoplje. At this battle Serbian armies from all the Serb lands, including Bosnia, joined together in defence of their country for the last time. The issue of the battle was for some time in doubt, but was decided by the treachery and flight at the critical moment of one of the Serb leaders, Vuk Branković, son-in-law of Prince Lazar, with a large number of troops. Another dramatic incident was the murder of Sultan Murad in his tent by another Serbian leader, Miloš Obilić, who, accused of treachery by his own countrymen, vowed he would prove his good faith, went over to the Turks and, pretending to be a traitor, gained admission to the Sultan’s presence and proved his patriotism by killing him. The momentary dismay was put an end to by the energetic conduct of Bayezid, son of Murad, who rallied the Turkish troops and ultimately inflicted total defeat on the Serbians. From the effects of this battle Serbia never recovered; Prince Lazar was captured and executed; his wife, Princess Milica, had to give her daughter to Bayezid in marriage, whose son thus ultimately claimed possession of Serbia by right of inheritance. Princess Milica and her son Stephen continued to live at Kruševac, but Serbia was already a tributary of Turkey. In the north, Hungary profited by the course of events and occupied Belgrade and all northern Serbia, but in 1396 the Turks defeated the Magyars severely at the battle of Nikopolis, on the Danube, making the Serbs under Stephen fight on the Turkish side. Stephen also had to help Sultan Bajazet against the Tartars, and fought at the battle of Angora, in 1402, when Tamerlane captured Bayezid.

After Stephen returned to Serbia he made an alliance with Hungary, which gave him back Belgrade and northern Serbia; it was at this time (1403) that Belgrade first became the capital, the political centre having in the course of fifty years moved from the Vardar to the Danube. The disorders which followed the defeat of Bayezid gave some respite to the Serbs, but Sultan Murad II (1421-51) again took up arms against him, and invaded Serbia as far as Kruševac.

At the death of Stephen (Lazarević), in 1427, he was succeeded as Despot by his nephew, George Branković; but the Sultan, claiming Serbia as his own, immediately declared war on him. The Serbian ruler had to abandon Belgrade to the Magyars, and Nish and Kruševac to the Turks. He then built and fortified the town of Smederevo (or Semendria) lower down on the Danube, in 1428, and made this his capital. He gave his daughter in marriage to the Sultan, but in spite of this war soon broke out again, and in 1441 the Turks were masters of nearly the whole of Serbia. Later George Branković made another alliance with Hungary, and in 1444, with the help of John Hunyadi, defeated the Turks and liberated the whole of Serbia as far as the Adriatic, though he remained a tributary of the Sultan. The same year, however, the Magyars broke the treaty of peace just concluded with the Turks, and marched against them under their Polish king, Ladislas; this ended in the disastrous battle of Varna, on the Black Sea, where the king lost his life. In 1451 Sultan Murad II died and was succeeded by the Sultan Mohammed. In 1453 this sultan captured Constantinople (Adrianople had until then been the Turkish capital); in 1456 his armies were besieging Belgrade, but were defeated by John Hunyadi, who, unfortunately for the Serbs, died of the plague shortly afterwards. George Branković died the same year, and at his death general disorder spread over the country. The Turks profited by this, overran the whole of Serbia, and in 1459 captured Smederevo, the last Serbian stronghold.

Meanwhile Bosnia had been for nearly a hundred years enjoying a false security as an independent Serb kingdom. Its rulers had hitherto been known by the title of Ban, and were all vassals of the King of Hungary; but in 1377 Ban Tvrtko profited by the embarrassments of his suzerain in Poland and proclaimed himself king, the neighbouring kingdom of Serbia having, after 1371, ceased to exist, and was duly crowned in Saint Sava’s monastery of Mileševo. The internal history of the kingdom was even more turbulent than had been that of Serbia. To the endemic troubles of succession and alternating alliances and wars with foreign powers were added those of confession. Bosnia was always a no man’s land as regards religion; it was where the Eastern and Western Churches met, and consequently the rivalry between them there was always, as it is now, intense and bitter. The Bogomil heresy, too, early took root in Bosnia and became extremely popular; it was the obvious refuge for those who did not care to become involved in the strife of the Churches. One of the kings of Bosnia, Stephen Thomas, who reigned from 1444 till 1461, was himself a Bogomil, and when at the insistence of the Pope and of the King of Hungary, whose friendship he was anxious to retain, he renounced his heresy, became ostensibly a Roman Catholic, and began to persecute the Bogomils, he brought about a revolution. The rebels fled to the south of Bosnia, to the lands of one Stephen, who sheltered them, proclaimed his independence of Bosnia, and on the strength of the fact that Saint Sava’s monastery of Mileševo was in his territory, announced himself Herzog, or Duke (in Serbian Herceg, though the real Serb equivalent is Vojvoda) of Saint Sava, ever since when (1448) that territory has been called Hercegovina. In spite of many promises, neither the Pope nor the King of Hungary did anything to help Bosnia when the Turks began to invade the country after their final subjection of Serbia in 1459. In 1463 they invaded Bosnia and pursued, captured, and slew the last king; their conquest of the country was complete and rapid. A great exodus of the Serb population took place to the south, west, and north; but large numbers, especially of the landowning class, embraced the faith of their conquerors in order to retain possession of their property. In 1482 a similar fate befell Hercegovina. Albania had already been conquered after stubborn resistance in 1478. There remained only the mountainous coastal province of Zeta, which had been an independent principality ever since 1371. Just as inland Serbia had perished between the Turkish hammer and the Hungarian anvil, so maritime Serbia was crushed between Turkey and Venice, only its insignificance and inaccessibility giving it a longer lease of independent life. Ivan Crnojević, one of the last independent rulers of Zeta, who had to fly to Italy in 1480, abandoning his capital, Žabljak, to the Turks, returned in 1481, when the death of Sultan Mohammed temporarily raised the hopes of the mountaineers, and founded Cetinje and made it his capital. His son George, who succeeded him and ruled from 1490 till 1496, is famous as having set up the first Serbian printing-press there. Its activities were naturally not encouraged by the Turkish conquest, but it was of great importance to the national Serbian Church, for which books were printed with it.

In 1496, Venice having wisely made peace with the Sultan some years previously, this last independent scrap of Serb territory was finally incorporated in the Turkish dominions. At the end of the fifteenth century the Turks were masters of all the Serb lands except Croatia, Slavonia, and parts of Dalmatia, which belonged to Hungary, and the Dalmatian coast and islands, which were Venetian. The Turkish conquest of Serbia, which began in 1371 at the battle of the Maritsa, and was rendered inevitable by the battle of Kosovo Polje, in 1389, thus took a hundred and twenty-five years to complete.

16
The Turkish Dominion, 1496–1796

The lot of the Serbs under Turkish rule was different from that of their neighbours the Bulgars; and though it was certainly not enviable, it was undoubtedly better. The Turks for various reasons never succeeded in subduing Serbia and the various Serb lands as completely as they had subdued, or rather annihilated, Bulgaria. The Serbs were spread over a far larger extent of territory than were the Bulgars, they were further removed from the Turkish centre, and the wooded and mountainous nature of their country facilitated even more than in the case of Bulgaria the formation of bands of brigands and rebels and militated against its systematic policing by the Turks. The number of centres of national life, Serbia proper, Bosnia, Hercogovina, and Montenegro, to take them in the chronological order of their conquest by the Turks, had been notoriously a source of weakness to the Serbian state, as is still the case to-day, but at the same time made it more difficult for the Turks to stamp out the national consciousness. What still further contributed to this difficulty was the fact that many Serbs escaped the oppression of Turkish rule by emigrating to the neighbouring provinces, where they found people of their own race and language, even though of a different faith. The tide of emigration flowed in two directions, westwards into Dalmatia and northwards into Slavonia and Hungary. It had begun already after the final subjection of Serbia proper and Bosnia by the Turks in 1459 and 1463, but after the fall of Belgrade, which was the outpost of Hungary against the Turks, in 1521, and the battle of Mohacs, in 1526, when the Turks completely defeated the Magyars, it assumed great proportions. As the Turks pushed their conquests further north, the Serbs migrated before them; later on, as the Turks receded, large Serb colonies sprang up all over southern Hungary, in the Banat (the country north of the Danube and east of the Theiss), in Syrmia (or Srem, in Serbian, the extreme eastern part of Slavonia, between the Save and the Danube), in Bačka (the country between the Theiss and Danube), and in Baranya (between the Danube and the Drave). All this part of southern Hungary and Croatia was formed by the Austrians into a military borderland against Turkey, and the Croats and immigrant Serbs were organized as military colonists with special privileges, on the analogy of the Cossacks in southern Russia and Poland. In Dalmatia the Serbs played a similar rôle in the service of Venice, which, like Austria-Hungary, was frequently at war with the Turks. During the sixteenth century Ragusa enjoyed its greatest prosperity; it paid tribute to the Sultan, was under his protection, and never rebelled. It had a quasi monopoly of the trade of the entire Balkan peninsula. It was a sanctuary both for Roman Catholic Croats and for Orthodox Serbs, and sometimes acted as intermediary on behalf of its co-religionists with the Turkish authorities, with whom it wielded great influence. Intellectually also it was a sort of Serb oasis, and the only place during the Middle Ages where Serbian literature was able to flourish.

Montenegro during the sixteenth century formed part of the Turkish province of Scutari. Here, as well as in Serbia proper, northern Macedonia (known after the removal northwards of the political centre, in the fourteenth century, as Old Serbia), Bosnia, and Hercegovina, the Turkish rule was firmest, but not harshest, during the first half of the sixteenth century, when the power of the Ottoman Empire was at its height. Soon after the fall of Smederevo, in 1459, the Patriarchate of Peć (Ipek) was abolished, the Serbian Church lost its independence, was merged in the Greco-Bulgar Archbishopric of Okhrida (in southern Macedonia), and fell completely under the control of the Greeks. In 1557, however, through the influence of a Grand Vizier of Serb nationality, the Patriarchate of Peć was revived. The revival of this centre of national life was momentous; through its agency the Serbian monasteries were restored, ecclesiastical books printed, and priests educated, and more fortunate than the Bulgarian national Church, which remained under Greek management, it was able to focus the national enthusiasms and aspirations and keep alive with hope the flame of nationality amongst those Serbs who had not emigrated.

Already, in the second half of the sixteenth century, people began to think that Turkey’s days in Europe were numbered, and they were encouraged in this illusion by the battle of Lepanto (1571). But the seventeenth century saw a revival of Turkish power; Krete was added to their empire, and in 1683 they very nearly captured Vienna. In the war which followed their repulse, and in which the victorious Austrians penetrated as far south as Skoplje, the Serbs took part against the Turks; but when later the Austrians were obliged to retire, the Serbs, who had risen against the Turks at the bidding of their Patriarch Arsen III, had to suffer terrible reprisals at their hands, with the result that another wholesale emigration, with the Patriarch at its head, took place into the Austro-Hungarian military borderland. This time it was the very heart of Serbia which was abandoned, namely, Old Serbia and northern Macedonia, including Peć and Prizren. The vacant Patriarchate was for a time filled by a Greek, and the Albanians, many of whom were Mohammedans and therefore Turcophil, spread northwards and eastwards into lands that had been Serb since the seventh century. From the end of the seventeenth century, however, the Turkish power began unmistakably to wane. The Treaty of Carlowitz (1699) left the Turks still in possession of Syrmia (between the Danube and Save) and the Banat (north of the Danube), but during the reign of the Emperor Charles VI their retreat was accelerated. In 1717 Prince Eugen of Savoy captured Belgrade, then, as now, a bulwark of the Balkan peninsula against invasion from the north, and by the Treaty of Passarowitz (Požarevac, on the Danube), in 1718, Turkey not only retreated definitively south of the Danube and the Save, but left a large part of northern Serbia in Austrian hands. By the same treaty Venice secured possession of the whole of Dalmatia, where it had already gained territory by the Treaty of Curlowitz in 1699.

But the Serbs soon found out that alien populations fare little better under Christian rule, when they are not of the same confession as their rulers, than under Mohammedan. The Orthodox Serbs in Dalmatia suffered thenceforward from relentless persecution at the hands of the Roman Catholics. In Austria-Hungary too, and in that part of Serbia occupied by the Austrians after 1718, the Serbs discovered that the Austrians, when they had beaten the Turks largely by the help of Serbian levies, were very different from the Austrians who had encouraged the Serbs to settle in their country and form military colonies on their frontiers to protect them from Turkish invasion. The privileges promised them when their help had been necessary were disregarded as soon as their services could be dispensed with. Austrian rule soon became more oppressive than Turkish, and to the Serbs’ other woes was now added religious persecution. The result of all this was that a counter-emigration set in and the Serbs actually began to return to their old homes in Turkey. Another war between Austria-Hungary and Turkey broke out in 1737, in which the Austrians were unsuccessful. Prince Eugen no longer led them, and though the Serbs were again persuaded by their Patriarch, Arsen IV, to rise against the Turks, they only did so half-heartedly. By the Treaty of Belgrade, in 1739, Austria had to withdraw north of the Save and Danube, evacuating all northern Serbia in favour of the Turks. From this time onwards the lot of the Serbs, both in Austria-Hungary and in Turkey, went rapidly from bad to worse. The Turks, as the power of their empire declined, and in return for the numerous Serb revolts, had recourse to measures of severe repression; amongst others was that of the final abolition of the Patriarchate of Peé in 1766, whereupon the control of the Serbian Church in Turkey passed entirely into the hands of the Greek Patriarchate of Constantinople.

The Austrian Government similarly, perceiving now for the first time the elements of danger which the resuscitation of the Serbian nationality would contain for the rule of the Hapsburgs, embarked on a systematic persecution of the Orthodox Serbs in southern Hungary and Slavonia. During the reign of Maria Theresa (1740-80), whose policy was to conciliate the Magyars, the military frontier zone was abolished, a series of repressive measures was passed against those Serbs who refused to become Roman Catholics, and the Serbian nationality was refused official recognition. The consequence of this persecution was a series of revolts which were all quelled with due severity, and finally the emigration of a hundred thousand Serbs to southern Russia, where they founded New Serbia in 1752-3.

During the reigns of Joseph II (1780-90) and Leopold II (1790-2) their treatment at the hands of the Magyars somewhat improved. From the beginning of the eighteenth century Montenegro began to assume greater importance in the extremely gradual revival of the national spirit of the Serbs. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it had formed part of the Turkish dominions, though, thanks to the inaccessible nature of its mountain fastnesses, Turkish authority was never very forcibly asserted. It was ruled by a prince-bishop, and its religious independence thus connoted a certain secular freedom of thought if not of action. In the seventeenth century warlike encounters between the Turks and the Montenegrins increased in frequency, and the latter tried to enlist the help of Venice on their side but with indifferent success. The fighting in Montenegro was often rather civil in character, being caused by the ill-feeling which existed between the numerous Montenegrins who had become Mohammedans and those who remained faithful to their national Church. In the course of the eighteenth century the rôle which fell to Montenegro became more important. In all the other Serb countries the families which naturally took a leading part in affairs were either extinct or in exile, as in Serbia, or had become Mohammedan, and therefore to all intents and purposes Turkish, as in Bosnia and Hercegovina. Ragusa, since the great earthquake in 1667, had greatly declined in power and was no longer of international importance. In Montenegro, on the other hand, there had survived both a greater independence of spirit (Montenegro was, after all, the ancient Zeta, and had always been a centre of national life) and a number of at any rate eugenic if not exactly aristocratic Serb families; these families naturally looked on themselves and on their bishop as destined to play an important part in the resistance to and the eventual overthrow of the Turkish dominion. The prince-bishop had to be consecrated by the Patriarch of Peć, and in 1700 Patriarch Arsen III consecrated one Daniel, of the house (which has been ever since then and is now still the reigning dynasty of Montenegro) of Petrović-Njegoš, to this office, after he had been elected to it by the council of notables at Cetinje. Montenegro, isolated from the Serbs in the north, and precluded from participating with them in the wars between Austria and Turkey by the intervening block of Bosnia, which though Serb by nationality was solidly Mohammedan and therefore pro-Turkish, carried on its feuds with the Turks independently of the other Serbs. But when Peter the Great initiated his anti-Turkish policy, and, in combination with the expansion of Russia to the south and west, began to champion the cause of the Balkan Christians, he developed intercourse with Montenegro and laid the foundation of that friendship between the vast Russian Empire and the tiny Serb principality on the Adriatic which has been a quaint and persistent feature of eastern European politics ever since. This intimacy did not prevent the Turks giving Montenegro many hard blows whenever they had the time or energy to do so, and did not ensure any special protective clauses in favour of the mountain state whenever the various treaties between Russia and Turkey were concluded. Its effect was rather psychological and financial. From the time when the Vladika (= Bishop) Daniel first visited Peter the Great, in 1714, the rulers of Montenegro often made pilgrimages to the Russian capital, and were always sure of finding sympathy as well as pecuniary if not armed support. Bishops in the Orthodox Church are compulsorily celibate, and the succession in Montenegro always descended from uncle to nephew. When Peter I Petrović-Njegoš succeeded, in 1782, the Patriarchate of Peć was no more, so he had to get permission from the Austrian Emperor Joseph II to be consecrated by the Metropolitan of Karlovci (Carlowitz), who was then head of the Serbian national Church.

About the same time (1787) an alliance was made between Russia and Austria-Hungary to make war together on Turkey and divide the spoils between them. Although a great rising against Turkey was organised at the same time (1788) in the district of Šumadija, in Serbia, by a number of Serb patriots, of whom Kara-George was one and a certain Captain Koča, after whom the whole war is called Kočina Krajina (=Koča’s country), another, yet the Austrians were on the whole unsuccessful, and on the death of Joseph II, in 1790, a peace was concluded between Austria and Turkey at Svishtov, in Bulgaria, by which Turkey retained the whole of Bosnia and Serbia, and the Save and Danube remained the frontier between the two countries. Meanwhile the Serbs of Montenegro had joined in the fray and had fared better, inflicting some unpleasant defeats on the Turks under their bishop, Peter I. These culminated in two battles in 1796 (the Montenegrins, not being mentioned in the treaty of peace, had continued fighting), in which the Turks were driven back to Scutari. With this triumph, which the Emperor Paul of Russia signalized by decorating the Prince-Bishop Peter, the independence of the modern state of Montenegro, the first Serb people to recover its liberty, was de facto established.

17
The Liberation of Serbia under Kara-George (1804–13) and Miloš Obrenović (1815–30): 1796–1830

The liberation of Serbia from the Turkish dominion and its establishment as an independent state were matters of much slower and more arduous accomplishment than were the same processes in the other Balkan countries. One reason for this was that Serbia by its peculiar geographical position was cut off from outside help. It was easy for the western powers to help Greece with their fleets, and for Russia to help Rumania and, later, Bulgaria directly with its army, because communication between them was easy. But Serbia on the one hand was separated from the sea, first by Dalmatia, which was always in foreign possession, and then by Bosnia, Hercegovina, and the sandjak (or province) of Novi-Pazar, all of which territories, though ethnically Serb, were strongholds of Turkish influence owing to their large Mohammedan population. The energies of Montenegro, also cut off from the sea by Dalmatia and Turkey, were absorbed in self-defence, though it gave Serbia all the support which its size permitted. Communication, on the other hand, between Russia and Serbia was too difficult to permit of military help being rapidly and effectively brought to bear upon the Turks from that quarter. Bessarabia, Wallachia, and Moldavia were then still under Turkish control, and either they had to be traversed or the Danube had to be navigated from its mouth upwards through Turkish territory. The only country which could have helped Serbia was Austria, but as it was against their best interests to do so, the Austrians naturally did all they could not to advance, but to retard the Serbian cause. As a result of all this Serbia, in her long struggle against the Turks, had to rely principally on its own resources, though Russian diplomacy several times saved the renascent country from disaster.

Another reason for the slowness of the emancipation and development of modern Serbia has been the proneness of its people to internal dissension. There was no national dynasty on whom the leadership of the country would naturally devolve after the first successful revolution against Turkish rule, there was not even any aristocracy left, and no foreign ruler was ever asked for by the Serbs or was ever imposed on them by the other nations as in the case of Greece, Rumania, and Bulgaria. On the other hand the rising against Turkey was a rising of the whole people, and it was almost inevitable that as soon as some measure of independence was gained the unity the Serbs had shown when fighting against their oppressors should dissolve and be replaced by bitter rivalries and disputes amongst the various local leaders who had become prominent during the rebellion.

These rivalries early in the nineteenth century resolved themselves into a blood-feud between two families, the Karagjorgjević and the Obrenović, a quarrel that filled Serbian history and militated against the progress of the Serb people throughout the nineteenth century.

The same reasons which restricted the growth of the political independence of Serbia have also impeded, or rather made impossible, its economic development and material prosperity. Until recent years Austria-Hungary and Turkey between them held Serbia territorially in such a position that whenever Serbia either demurred at its neighbours’ tariffs or wished to retaliate by means of its own, the screw was immediately applied and economic strangulation threatened. Rumania and Bulgaria economically could never be of help to Serbia, because the products and the requirements of all three are identical, and Rumania and Bulgaria cannot be expected to facilitate the sale of their neighbours’ live stock and cereals, when their first business is to sell their own, while the cost of transit of imports from western Europe through those countries is prohibitive.

After the unsuccessful rebellion of 1788, already mentioned, Serbia remained in a state of pseudo-quiescence for some years. Meanwhile the authority of the Sultan in Serbia was growing ever weaker and the real power was wielded by local Turkish officials, who exploited the country, looked on it as their own property, and enjoyed semi-independence. Their exactions and cruelties were worse than had been those of the Turks in the old days, and it was against them and their troops, not against those of the Sultan, that the first battles in the Serbian war of independence were fought. It was during the year 1803 that the Serbian leaders first made definite plans for the rising which eventually took place in the following year. The ringleader was George Petrović, known as Black George, or Kara-George, and amongst his confederates was Miloš Obrenović. The centre of the conspiracy was at Topola, in the district of Šumadija in central Serbia (between the Morava and the Drina rivers), the native place of Kara-George. The first two years of fighting between the Serbians and, first, the provincial janissaries, and, later, the Sultan’s forces, fully rewarded the bravery and energy of the insurgents. By the beginning of 1807 they had virtually freed all northern Serbia by their own unaided efforts and captured the towns of Požarevac, Smederevo, Belgrade, and Šabac. The year 1804 is also notable as the date of the formal opening of diplomatic relations directly between Serbia and Russia. At this time the Emperor Alexander I was too preoccupied with Napoleon to be able to threaten the Sultan (Austerlitz took place in November 1805), but he gave the Serbs financial assistance and commended their cause to the especial care of his ambassador at Constantinople.

In 1807 war again broke out between Russia and Turkey, but after the Peace of Tilsit (June 1807) fighting ceased also between the Turks and the Russians and the Serbs, not before the Russians had won several successes against the Turks on the Lower Danube. It was during the two following years of peace that dissensions first broke out amongst the Serbian leaders; fighting the Turks was the sole condition of existence which prevented them fighting each other. In 1809-10 Russia and the Serbs again fought the Turks, at first without success, but later with better fortune. In 1811 Kara-George was elected Gospodar, or sovereign, by a popular assembly, but Serbia still remained a Turkish province. At the end of that year the Russians completely defeated the Turks at Rustchuk in Bulgaria, and, if all had gone well, Serbia might there and then have achieved complete independence.

But Napoleon was already preparing his invasion and Russia had to conclude peace with Turkey in a hurry, which necessarily implied that the Sultan obtained unduly favourable terms. In the Treaty of Bucarest between the two countries signed in May 1812, the Serbs were indeed mentioned, and promised vague internal autonomy and a general amnesty, but all the fortified towns they had captured were to be returned to the Turks, and the few Russian troops who had been helping the Serbs in Serbia had to withdraw. Negotiations between the Turks and the Serbs for the regulation of their position were continued throughout 1812, but finally the Turks refused all their claims and conditions and, seeing the European powers preoccupied with their own affairs, invaded the country from Bosnia in the west, and also from the east and south, in August 1813. The Serbs, left entirely to their own resources, succumbed before the superior forces of the Turks, and by the beginning of October the latter were again masters of the whole country and in possession of Belgrade. Meanwhile Kara-George, broken in health and unable to cope with the difficulties of the situation, which demanded successful strategy both against the overwhelming forces of the Turks in the field and against the intrigues of his enemies at home, somewhat ignominiously fled across the river to Semlin in Hungary, and was duly incarcerated by the Austrian authorities.

The news of Napoleon’s defeat at Leipsic (October 1813) arrived just after that of the re-occupation of Belgrade by the Turks, damped feu-de-joie which they were firing at Constantinople, and made them rather more conciliatory and lenient to the Serbian rebels. But this attitude did not last long, and the Serbs soon had reason to make fresh efforts to regain their short-lived liberty. The Congress of Vienna met in the autumn of 1814, and during its whole course Serbian emissaries gave the Russian envoys no peace. But with the return of Napoleon to France in the spring of 1815 and the break-up of the Congress, all that Russia could do was, through its ambassador at Constantinople, to threaten invasion unless the Turks left the Serbs alone. Nevertheless, conditions in Serbia became so intolerable that another rebellion soon took shape, this time under Miloš Obrenović. This leader was no less patriotic than his rival, Kara-George, but he was far more able and a consummate diplomat. Kara-George had possessed indomitable courage, energy, and will-power, but he could not temporize, and his arbitrary methods of enforcing discipline and his ungovernable temper had made him many enemies. While the credit for the first Serbian revolt (1804-13) undoubtedly belongs chiefly to him, the second revolt owed its more lasting success to the skill of Miloš Obrenović. The fighting started at Takovo, the home of the Obrenović family, in April 1815, and after many astonishing successes against the Turks, including the capture of the towns of Rudnik, Čačak, Požarevac, and Kraljevo, was all over by July of the same year. The Turks were ready with large armies in the west in Bosnia, and also south of the Morava river, to continue the campaign and crush the rebellion, but the news of the final defeat of Napoleon, and the knowledge that Russia would soon have time again to devote attention to the Balkans, withheld their appetites for revenge, and negotiations with the successful rebels were initiated. During the whole of this period, from 1813 onwards, Miloš Obrenović, as head of a district, was an official of the Sultan in Serbia, and it was one of his principles never to break irreparably with the Turks, who were still suzerains of the country. At the same time, owing to his skill and initiative he was recognized as the only real leader of the movement for independence. From the cessation of the rebellion in 1815 onwards he himself personally conducted negotiations in the name of his people with the various pashas who were deputed to deal with him. While these negotiations went on and the armistice was in force, he was confronted, or rather harassed from behind, by a series of revolts against his growing authority on the part of his jealous compatriots.

In June 1817 Kara-George, who had been in Russia after being released by the Austrians in 1814, returned surreptitiously to Serbia, encouraged by the brighter aspect which affairs in his country seemed to be assuming. But the return of his most dangerous rival was as unwelcome to Miloš as it was to the Turkish authorities at Belgrade, and, measures having been concerted between them, Kara-George was murdered on July 26,1817, and the first act in the blood-feud between the two families thus committed. In November of the same year a skupština, or national assembly, was held at Belgrade, and Miloš Obrenović, whose position was already thoroughly assured, was elected hereditary prince (knez) of the country.

Meanwhile events of considerable importance for the future of the Serb race had been happening elsewhere. Dalmatia, the whole of which had been in the possession of Venice since the Treaty of Carlowitz in 1699, passed into the hands of Austria by the Treaty of Campo Formio in 1797, when the Venetian republic was extinguished by Napoleon. The Bocche di Cuttaro, a harbour both strategically and commercially of immense value, which had in the old days belonged to the Serb principality of Zeta or Montenegro, and is its only natural outlet on the Adriatic, likewise became Venetian in 1699 and Austrian in 1797, one year after the successful rebellion of the Montenegrins against the Turks.

By the Treaty of Pressburg between France and Austria Dalmatia became French in 1805. But the Montenegrins, supported by the Russians, resisted the new owners and occupied the Bocche; at the Peace of Tilsit in 1807, however, this important place was assigned to France by Russia, and Montenegro had to submit to its loss. In 1806 the French occupied Ragusa, and in 1808 abolished the independence of the ancient Serb city-republic. In 1812 the Montenegrins, helped by the Russians and British, again expelled the French and reoccupied Cattaro; but Austria was by now fully alive to the meaning this harbour would have once it was in the possession of Montenegro, and after the Congress of Vienna in 1815 took definitive possession of it as well as of all the rest of Dalmatia, thus effecting the complete exclusion of the Serb race for all political and commercial purposes from the Adriatic, its most natural and obvious means of communication with western Europe.

Though Miloš had been elected prince by his own people, it was long before he was recognized as such by the Porte. His efforts for the regularization of his position entailed endless negotiations in Constantinople; these were enlivened by frequent anti-Obrenović revolts in Serbia, all of which Miloš successfully quelled. The revolution in Greece in 1821 threw the Serbian question from the international point of view into the shade, but the Emperor Nicholas I, who succeeded his brother Alexander I on the Russian throne in 1825, soon showed that he took a lively and active interest in Balkan affairs. Pan-Slavism had scarcely become fashionable in those days, and it was still rather as the protector of its co-religionists under the Crescent that Russia intervened. In 1826 Russian and Turkish delegates met at Akerman in Bessarabia, and in September of that year signed a convention by which the Russian protectorate over the Serbs was recognized, the Serbs were granted internal autonomy, the right to trade and erect churches, schools, and printing-presses, and the Turks were forbidden to live in Serbia except in eight garrison towns; the garrisons were to be Turkish, and tribute was still to be paid to the Sultan as suzerain. These concessions, announced by Prince Miloš to his people at a special skupština held at Kragujevac in 1827, evoked great enthusiasm, but the urgency of the Greek question again delayed their fulfilment. After the battle of Navarino on October 20, 1827, in which the British, French, and Russian fleets defeated the Turkish, the Turks became obstinate and refused to carry out the stipulations of the Convention of Akerman in favour of Serbia. Thereupon Russia declared war on Turkey in April 1828, and the Russian armies crossed the Danube and the Balkans and marched on Constantinople.

Peace was concluded at Adrianople in 1829, and Turkey agreed to carry out immediately all the stipulations of the Treaty of Bucarest (1812) and the Convention of Akerman (1826). The details took some time to settle, but in November 1830 the hatti-sherif of the Sultan, acknowledging Miloš as hereditary prince of Serbia, was publicly read in Belgrade. All the concessions already promised were duly granted, and Serbia became virtually independent, but still tributary to the Sultan. Its territory included most of the northern part of the modern kingdom of Serbia, between the rivers Drina, Save, Danube, and Timok, but not the districts of Nish, Vranja, and Pirot. Turkey still retained Bosnia and Hercegovina, Macedonia, the sandjak of Novi-Pazar, which separated Serbia from Montenegro, and Old Serbia (northern Macedonia).

18
The Throes of Regeneration: Independent Serbia, 1830–1903

During his rule of Serbia, which lasted virtually from 1817 till 1839, Prince Miloš did a very great deal for the welfare of his country. He emancipated the Serbian Church from the trammels of the Greek Patriarchate of Constantinople in 1831, from which date onwards it was ruled by a Metropolitan of Serb nationality, resident at Belgrade. He encouraged the trade of the country, a great deal of which he held in his own hands; he was in fact a sort of prototype of those modern Balkan business-kings of whom King George of Greece and King Carol of Rumania were the most notable examples. He raised an army and put it on a permanent footing, and organized the construction of roads, schools, and churches. He was, however, an autocratic ruler of the old school, and he had no inclination to share the power for the attainment of which he had laboured so many years and gone through so much. From his definite installation as hereditary prince discontent at his arbitrary methods of government amongst his ex-equals increased, and after several revolts he was forced eventually to grant a constitution in 1835. This, however, remained a dead letter, and things went on as before. Later in the same year he paid a prolonged visit to his suzerain at Constantinople, and while he was there the situation in Serbia became still more serious. After his return he was, after several years of delay and of growing unpopularity, compelled to agree to another constitution which was forced on him, paradoxically enough, by the joint efforts of the Tsar and of the Sultan, who seemed to take an unnatural pleasure in supporting the democratic Serbians against their successful colleague in autocracy, who had done so much for his turbulent subjects. Serbia even in those days was essentially and uncompromisingly democratic, but even so Miloš obstinately refused to carry out the provisions of the constitution or in any way to submit to a curtailment of his power, and in 1839 he left his ungrateful principality and took refuge in Rumania, where he possessed an estate, abdicating in favour of his elder son Milan. This Prince Milan, known as Obrenović II, was seriously ill at the time of his accession, and died within a month of it. He was succeeded by his younger brother Michael, known as Obrenović III, who was then only sixteen years of age. This prince, though young, had a good head on his shoulders, and eventually proved the most gifted ruler modern Serbia has ever had. His first reign (1840-2), however, did not open well. He inaugurated it by paying a state visit to Constantinople, but the Sultan only recognized him as elective prince and insisted on his having two advisers approved and appointed by the Porte. Michael on his return showed his determination to have nothing to do with them, but this led to a rebellion headed by one of them, Vučić, and, though Michael’s rule was not as arbitrary as his father’s, he had to bow to the popular will which supported Vučić and cross the river to Semlin. After a stormy interval, during which the Emperor Nicholas I tried to intervene in favour of Michael, Alexander Karagjorgjević, son of Kara-George, was elected prince (1843). No sooner was this representative of the rival dynasty installed, however, than rebellions in favour of Michael occurred. These were thrown into the shade by the events of 1848, In that memorable year of revolutions the Magyars rose against Austria and the Serbs in southern Hungary rose against the Magyars. Prince Alexander resolved to send military help to his oppressed countrymen north of the Save and Danube, and, though the insurgents were unsuccessful, Prince Alexander gained in popularity amongst the Serbs by the line of action he had taken. During the Crimean War, on the other hand, Serbia remained strictly neutral, to the annoyance of the Tsar; at the Congress of Paris (1856) the exclusive protectorate of Russia was replaced by one of all the powers, and Russian influence in the western Balkans was thereby weakened. Prince Alexander’s prudence, moreover, cost him his popularity, and in 1858 he in his turn had to bid farewell to his difficult countrymen.

In December of the same year the veteran Prince Miloš Obrenović I was recalled to power as hereditary prince. His activities during his second reign were directed against Turkish influence, which was still strong, and he made efforts to have the Turkish populations removed from the eight garrison towns, including Belgrade, where they still lived in spite of the fact that their emigration had been stipulated for in 1830. Unfortunately he did not live long enough to carry out his plans, for he fell ill at Topchider, the summer palace near Belgrade, in the autumn of 1860, and died a few days afterwards. He was again succeeded by his son Michael Obrenović III, who was already thirty-six years of age. This able prince’s second reign was brilliantly successful, and it was a disaster for which his foolish countrymen had to pay dearly, when, by their fault, it was prematurely cut short in 1868. His first act was with the consent of a specially summoned skupština to abolish the law by which he could only appoint and remove his counsellers with the approval of the Porte. Next he set about the organization and establishment of a regular army of 30,000 men. In 1862 an anti-Turkish rebellion broke out amongst the Serbs in Hercegovina (still, with Bosnia, a Turkish province), and the Porte, accusing Prince Michael of complicity, made warlike preparations against him.

Events, however, were precipitated in such a way that, without waiting for the opening of hostilities, the Turkish general in command of the fortress of Belgrade turned his guns on the city; this provoked the intervention of the powers at Constantinople, and the entire civilian Turkish population had to quit the country (in accordance with the stipulations of 1830), only Turkish garrisons remaining in the fortresses of Šabac, Belgrade, Smederevo, and Kladovo, along the northern river frontier, still theoretically the boundary of the Sultan’s dominions. After this success Prince Michael continued his military preparations in order to obtain final possession of the fortresses when a suitable occasion should arise. This occurred in 1866, when Austria was engaged in the struggle with Prussia, and the policy of Great Britain became less Turcophil than it had hitherto been. On April 6, 1867, the four fortresses, which had been in Serbian possession from 1804 to 1813, but had since then been garrisoned by the Turks, were delivered over to Serbia and the last Turkish soldier left Serbian soil without a shot having been fired. Though Serbia after this was still a vassal state, being tributary to the Sultan, these further steps on the road to complete independence were a great triumph, especially for Prince Michael personally. But this very triumph actuated his political opponents amongst his own countrymen, amongst whom were undoubtedly adherents of the rival dynasty, to revenge, and blind to the interests of their people they foolishly and most brutally murdered this extremely capable and conscientious prince in the deer park near Topchider on June 10, 1868. The opponents of the Obrenović dynasty were, however, baulked in their plans, and a cousin of the late prince was elected to the vacant and difficult position. This ruler, known as Milan Obrenović IV, who was only fourteen years of age at the time of his accession (1868), was of a very different character from his predecessor. The first thing that happened during his minority was the substitution of the constitution of 1838 by another one which was meant to give the prince and the national assembly much more power, but which, eventually, made the ministers supreme.

The prince came of age in 1872 when he was eighteen, and he soon showed that the potential pleasures to be derived from his position were far more attractive to him than the fulfilment of its obvious duties. He found much to occupy him in Vienna and Paris and but little in Belgrade. At the same time the Serb people had lost, largely by its own faults, much of the respect and sympathy which it had acquired in Europe during Prince Michael’s reign. In 1875 a formidable anti-Turkish insurrection (the last of many) broke out amongst the Serbs of Bosnia and Hercegovina, and all the efforts of the Turks to quell it were unavailing. In June 1876 Prince Milan was forced by the pressure of public opinion to declare war on Turkey in support of the ‘unredeemed’ Serbs of Bosnia, and Serbia was joined by Montenegro. The country was, however, not materially prepared for war, the expected sympathetic risings in other parts of Turkey either did not take place or failed, and the Turks turned their whole army on to Serbia, with the result that in October the Serbs had to appeal to the Tsar for help and an armistice was arranged, which lasted till February 1877. During the winter a conference was held in Constantinople to devise means for alleviating the lot of the Christians in Turkey, and a peace was arranged between Turkey and Serbia whereby the status quo ante was restored. But after the conference the heart of Turkey was again hardened and the stipulations in favour of the Christians were not carried out.

In 1877 Russia declared war on Turkey (cf. chap. 10), and in the autumn of the same year Serbia joined in. This time the armies of Prince Milan were more successful, and conquered and occupied the whole of southern Serbia including the towns and districts of Nish, Pirot, Vranja, and Leskovac, Montenegro, which had not been included in the peace of the previous winter, but had been fighting desperately and continuously against the Turks ever since it had begun actively to help the Serb rebels of Hercegovina in 1875, had a series of successes, as a result of which it obtained possession of the important localities of Nikšić, Podgorica, Budua, Antivari, and Dulcigno, the last three on the shore of the Adriatic. By the Treaty of San Stefano the future interests of both Serbia and Montenegro were jeopardised by the creation of a Great Bulgaria, but that would not have mattered if in return they had been given control of the purely Serb provinces of Bosnia and Hercegovina, which ethnically they can claim just as legitimately as Bulgaria claims most of Macedonia. The Treaty of San Stefano was, however, soon replaced by that of Berlin. By its terms both Serbia and Montenegro achieved complete independence and the former ceased to be a tributary state of Turkey. The Serbs were given the districts of southern Serbia which they had occupied, and which are all ethnically Serb except Pirot, the population of which is a sort of cross between Serb and Bulgar. The Serbs also undertook to build a railway through their country to the Turkish and Bulgarian frontiers. Montenegro was nearly doubled in size, receiving the districts of Nikšić, Podgorica, and others; certain places in the interior the Turks and Albanians absolutely refused to surrender, and to compensate for these Montenegro was given a strip of coast with the townlets of Antivari and Dulcigno. The memory of Gladstone, who specially espoused Montenegro’s cause in this matter, is held in the greatest reverence in the brave little mountain country, but unfortunately the ports themselves are economically absolutely useless. Budua, higher up the Dalmatian coast, which would have been of some use, was handed over to Austria, to which country, already possessed of Cattaro and all the rest of Dalmatia, it was quite superfluous. Greatest tragedy of all for the future of the Serb race, the administration of Bosnia and Hercegovina was handed over ‘temporarily’ to Austria-Hungary, and Austrian garrisons were quartered throughout those two provinces, which they were able to occupy only after the most bitter armed opposition on the part of the inhabitants, and also in the Turkish sandjak or province of Novi-Pazar, the ancient Raska and cradle of the Serb state; this strip of mountainous territory under Turkish administrative and Austrian military control was thus converted into a fortified wedge which effectually kept the two independent Serb states of Serbia and Montenegro apart. After all these events the Serbs had to set to work to put their enlarged house in order. But the building of railways and schools and the organization of the services cost a lot of money, and as public economy is not a Serbian virtue the debt grew rapidly. In 1882 Serbia proclaimed itself a kingdom and was duly recognized by the other nations. But King Milan did not learn to manage the affairs of his country any better as time went on. He was too weak to stand alone, and having freed himself from Turkey he threw himself into the arms of Austria, with which country he concluded a secret military convention. In 1885, when Bulgaria and ‘Eastern Rumelia’ successfully coalesced and Bulgaria thereby received a considerable increase of territory and power, the Serbs, prompted by jealousy, began to grow restless, and King Milan, at the instigation of Austria, foolishly declared war on Prince Alexander of Battenberg. This speedily ended in the disastrous battle of Slivnitsa (cf. chap. II); Austria had to intervene to save its victim, and Serbia got nothing for its trouble but a large increase of debt and a considerable decrease of military reputation. In addition to all this King Milan was unfortunate in his conjugal relations; his wife, the beautiful Queen Natalie, was a Russian, and as he himself had Austrian sympathies, they could scarcely be expected to agree on politics. But the strife between them extended from the sphere of international to that of personal sympathies and antipathies. King Milan was promiscuous in affairs of the heart and Queen Natalie was jealous. Scenes of domestic discord were frequent and violent, and the effect of this atmosphere on the character of their only child Alexander, who was born in 1876, was naturally bad.

The king, who had for some years been very popular with, his subjects with all his failings, lost his hold on the country after the unfortunate war of 1885, and the partisans of the rival dynasty began to be hopeful once more. In 1888 King Milan gave Serbia a very much more liberal constitution, by which the ministers were for the first time made really responsible to the skupština or national assembly, replacing that of 1869, and the following year, worried by his political and domestic failures, discredited and unpopular both at home and abroad, he resigned in favour of his son Alexander, then aged thirteen. This boy, who had been brought up in what may be called a permanent storm-centre, both domestic and political, was placed under a regency, which included M. Ristić, with a radical ministry under M. Pašić, an extremely able and patriotic statesman of pro-Russian sympathies, who ever since he first became prominent in 1877 had been growing in power and influence. But trouble did not cease with the abdication of King Milan. He and his wife played Box and Cox at Belgrade for the next four years, quarrelling and being reconciled, intriguing and fighting round the throne and person of their son. At last both parents agreed to leave the country and give the unfortunate youth a chance. King Milan settled in Vienna, Queen Natalie in Biarritz. In 1893 King Alexander suddenly declared himself of age and arrested all his ministers and regents one evening while they were dining with him. The next year he abrogated the constitution of 1888, under which party warfare in the Serbian parliament had been bitter and uninterrupted, obstructing any real progress, and restored that of 1869. Ever since 1889 (the date of the accession of the German Emperor) Berlin had taken more interest in Serbian affairs, and it has been alleged that it was William II who, through the wife of the Rumanian minister at his court, who was sister of Queen Natalie, influenced King Alexander in his abrupt and ill-judged decisions. It was certainly German policy to weaken and discredit Serbia and to further Austrian influence at Belgrade at the expense of that of Russia. King Milan returned for a time to Belgrade in 1897, and the reaction, favourable to Austria, which had begun in 1894, increased during his presence and under the ministry of Dr. Vladan Gjorgjević, which lasted from 1897 till 1900. This state of repression caused unrest throughout the country. All its energies were absorbed in fruitless political party strife, and no material or moral progress was possible. King Alexander, distracted, solitary, and helpless in the midst of this unending welter of political intrigue, committed an extremely imprudent act in the summer of 1900. Having gone for much-needed relaxation to see his mother at Biarritz, he fell violently in love with her lady in waiting, Madame Draga Mašin, the divorced wife of a Serbian officer. Her somewhat equivocal past was in King Alexander’s eyes quite eclipsed by her great beauty and her wit, which had not been impaired by conjugal infelicity. Although she was thirty-two, and he only twenty-four, he determined to marry her, and the desperate opposition of his parents, his army, his ministers, and his people, based principally on the fact that the woman was known to be incapable of child-birth, only precipitated the accomplishment of his intention. This unfortunate and headstrong action on the part of the young king, who, though deficient in tact and intuition, had plenty of energy and was by no means stupid, might have been forgiven him by his people if, as was at first thought possible, it had restored internal peace and prosperity in the country and thereby enabled it to prepare itself to take a part in the solution o£ those foreign questions which vitally affected Serb interests and were already looming on the horizon. But it did not. In 1901 King Alexander granted another constitution and for a time attempted to work with a coalition ministry; but this failed, and a term of reaction with pro-Austrian tendencies, which were favoured by the king and queen, set in. This reaction, combined with the growing disorganization of the finances and the general sense of the discredit and failure which the follies of its rulers had during the last thirty years brought on the country; completely undermined the position of the dynasty and made a catastrophe inevitable. This occurred, as is well known, on June 10, 1903, when, as the result of a military conspiracy, King Alexander, the last of the Obrenović dynasty, his wife, and her male relatives were murdered. This crime was purely political, and it is absurd to gloss it over or to explain it merely as the result of the family feud between the two dynasties. That came to an end in 1868, when the murder of Kara-George in 1817 by the agency of Miloš Obrenović was avenged by the lunatic assassination of the brilliant Prince Michael Obrenović III. It is no exaggeration to say that, from the point of view of the Serbian patriot, the only salvation of his country in 1903 lay in getting rid of the Obrenović dynasty, which had become pro-Austrian, had no longer the great gifts possessed by its earlier members, and undoubtedly by its vagaries hindered the progress of Serbia both in internal and external politics. The assassination was unfortunately carried out with unnecessary cruelty, and it is this fact that made such a bad impression and for so long militated against Serbia in western Europe; but it must be remembered that civilization in the Balkans, where political murder, far from being a product of the five hundred years of Turkish dominion, has always been endemic, is not on the same level in many respects as it is in the rest of Europe. Life is one of the commodities which are still cheap in backward countries.

Although King Alexander and his wife can in no sense be said to have deserved the awful fate that befell them, it is equally true that had any other course been adopted, such as deposition and exile, the wire-pulling and intriguing from outside, which had already done the country so much harm, would have become infinitely worse. Even so, it was long before things in any sense settled down. As for the alleged complicity of the rival dynasty in the crime, it is well established that that did not exist. It was no secret to anybody interested in Serbian affairs that something catastrophic was about to happen, and when the tragedy occurred it was natural to appeal to the alternative native dynasty to step into the breach. But the head of that dynasty was in no way responsible for the plot, still less for the manner in which it was carried out, and it was only after much natural hesitation and in the face of his strong disinclination that Prince Peter Karagjorgjević was induced to accept the by no means enviable, easy, or profitable task of guiding Serbia’s destiny. The Serbian throne in 1903 was a source neither of glory nor of riches, and it was notoriously no sinecure.

After the tragedy, the democratic constitution of 1888 was first of all restored, and then Prince Peter Karagjorgjević, grandson of Kara-George, the leader of the first Serbian insurrection of 1804-13, who was at that time fifty-nine years of age, was unanimously elected king. He had married in 1883 a daughter of Prince Nicholas of Montenegro and sister of the future Queen of Italy, but she had been dead already some years at the time of his accession, leaving him with a family of two sons and a daughter.

19
Serbia, Montenegro, and the Serbo-Croats in Austria-Hungary, 1903–8

It was inevitable that, after the sensation which such an event could not fail to cause in twentieth-century Europe, it should take the country where it occurred some time to live down the results. Other powers, especially those of western Europe, looked coldly on Serbia and were in no hurry to resume diplomatic intercourse, still less to offer diplomatic support. The question of the punishment and exile of the conspirators was almost impossible of solution, and only time was able to obliterate the resentment caused by the whole affair. In Serbia itself a great change took place. The new sovereign, though he laboured under the greatest possible disadvantages, by his irreproachable behaviour, modesty, tact, and strictly constitutional rule, was able to withdraw the court of Belgrade from the trying limelight to which it had become used. The public finances began to be reorganized, commerce began to improve in spite of endless tariff wars with Austria-Hungary, and attention was again diverted from home to foreign politics. With the gradual spread of education and increase of communication, and the growth of national self-consciousness amongst the Serbs and Croats of Austria-Hungary and the two independent Serb states, a new movement for the closer intercourse amongst the various branches of the Serb race for south Slav unity, as it was called, gradually began to take shape. At the same time a more definitely political agitation started in Serbia, largely inspired by the humiliating position of economic bondage in which the country was held by Austria-Hungary, and was roughly justified by the indisputable argument: ‘Serbia must expand or die.’ Expansion at the cost of Turkey seemed hopeless, because even the acquisition of Macedonia would give Serbia a large alien population and no maritime outlet. It was towards the Adriatic that the gaze of the Serbs was directed, to the coast which was ethnically Serbian and could legitimately be considered a heritage of the Serb race.

Macedonia was also taken into account, schools and armed bands began their educative activity amongst those inhabitants of the unhappy province who were Serb, or who lived in places where Serbs had lived, or who with sufficient persuasion could be induced to call themselves Serb; but the principal stream of propaganda was directed westwards into Bosnia and Hercegovina. The antagonism between Christian and Mohammedan, Serb and Turk, was never so bitter as between Christian and Christian, Serb and German or Magyar, and the Serbs were clever enough to see that Bosnia and Hercegovina, from every point of view, was to them worth ten Macedonias, though it would he ten times more difficult to obtain. Bosnia and Hercegovina, though containing three confessions, were ethnically homogeneous, and it was realised that these two provinces were as important to Serbia and Montenegro as the rest of Italy had been to Piedmont.

It must at this time be recalled in what an extraordinary way the Serb race had fortuitously been broken up into a number of quite arbitrary political divisions. Dalmatia (three per cent. of the population of which is Italian and all the rest Serb or Croat, preponderatingly Serb and Orthodox in the south and preponderating Croat or Roman Catholic in the north) was a province of Austria and sent deputies to the Reichsrath at Vienna; at the same time it was territorially isolated from Austria and had no direct railway connexion with any country except a narrow-gauge line into Bosnia. Croatia and Slavonia, preponderatingly Roman Catholic, were lands of the Hungarian crown, and though they had a provincial pseudo-autonomous diet at Agram, the capital of Croatia, they sent deputies to the Hungarian parliament at Budapest. Thus what had in the Middle Ages been known as the triune kingdom of Croatia, Slavonia, and Dalmatia, with a total Serbo-Croat population of three millions, was divided between Austria and Hungary.

Further, there were about 700,000 Serbs and Croats in the south of Hungary proper, cast and north of the Danube, known as the Banat and Bačka, a district which during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was the hearth and home of Serb literature and education, but which later waned in importance in that respect as independent Serbia grew. These Serbs were directly dependent on Budapest, the only autonomy they possessed being ecclesiastical. Bosnia and Hercegovina, still nominally Turkish provinces, with a Slav population of nearly two million (850,000 Orthodox Serbs, 650,000 Mohammedan Serbs, and the rest Roman Catholics), were to all intents and purposes already imperial lands of Austria-Hungary, with a purely military and police administration; the shadow of Turkish sovereignty provided sufficient excuse to the de facto owners of these provinces not to grant the inhabitants parliamentary government or even genuine provincial autonomy. The Serbs in Serbia numbered nearly three millions, those in Montenegro about a quarter of a million; while in Turkey, in what was known as Old Serbia (the sandjak of Novi-Pasar between Serbia and Montenegro and the vilayet of Korovo), and in parts of northern and central Macedonia, there were scattered another half million. These last, of course, had no voice at all in the management of their own affairs. Those in Montenegro lived under the patriarchal autocracy of Prince Nicholas, who had succeeded his uncle, Prince Danilo, in 1860, at the age of nineteen. Though no other form of government could have turned the barren rocks of Montenegro into fertile pastures, many of the people grew restless with the restricted possibilities of a career which the mountain principality offered them, and in latter years migrated in large numbers to North and South America, whither emigration from Dalmatia and Croatia too had already readied serious proportions. The Serbs in Serbia were the only ones who could claim to be free, but even this was a freedom entirely dependent on the economic malevolence of Austria-Hungary and Turkey. Cut up in this way by the hand of fate into such a number of helpless fragments, it was inevitable that the Serb race, if it possessed any vitality, should attempt, at any cost, to piece some if not all of them together and form an ethnical whole which, economically and politically, should be master of its own destinies. It was equally inevitable that the policy of Austria-Hungary should be to anticipate or definitively render any such attempt impossible, because obviously the formation of a large south Slav state, by cutting off Austria from the Adriatic and eliminating from the dual monarchy all the valuable territory between the Dalmatian coast and the river Drave, would seriously jeopardize its position as a great power; it must be remembered, also, that Austria-Hungary, far from decomposing, as it was commonly assumed was happening, had been enormously increasing in vitality ever since 1878.

The means adopted by the governments of Vienna and Budapest to nullify the plans of Serbian expansion were generally to maintain the political émiettement of the Serb race, the isolation of one group from another, the virtually enforced emigration of Slavs on a large scale and their substitution by German colonists, and the encouragement of rivalry and discord between Roman Catholic Croat and Orthodox Serb. No railways were allowed to be built in Dalmatia, communication between Agram and any other parts of the monarchy except Fiume or Budapest was rendered almost impossible; Bosnia and Hercegovina were shut off into a watertight compartment and endowed with a national flag composed of the inspiring colours of brown and buff; it was made impossible for Serbs to visit Montenegro or for Montenegrins to visit Serbia except via Fiume, entailing the bestowal of several pounds on the Hungarian state steamers and railways. As for the sandjak of Novi-Pazar, it was turned into a veritable Tibet, and a legend was spread abroad that if any foreigner ventured there he would be surely murdered by Turkish brigands; meanwhile it was full of Viennese ladies giving picnics and dances and tennis parties to the wasp-waisted officers of the Austrian garrison. Bosnia and Hercegovina, on the other hand, became the model touring provinces of Austria-Hungary, and no one can deny that their great natural beauties were made more enjoyable by the construction of railways, roads, and hotels. At the same time this was not a work of pure philanthropy, and the emigration statistics are a good indication of the joy with which the Bosnian peasants paid for an annual influx of admiring tourists. In spite of all these disadvantages, however, the Serbo-Croat provinces of Austria-Hungary could not be deprived of all the benefits of living within a large and prosperous customs union, while being made to pay for all the expenses of the elaborate imperial administration and services; and the spread of education, even under the Hapsburg régime, began to tell in time. Simultaneously with the agitation which emanated from Serbia and was directed towards the advancement, by means of schools and religious and literary propaganda, of Serbian influence in Bosnia and Hercegovina, a movement started in Dalmatia and Croatia for the closer union of those two provinces. About 1906 the two movements found expression in the formation of the Serbo-Croat or Croato-Serb coalition party, composed of those elements in Dalmatia, Croatia, and Slavonia which favoured closer union between the various groups of the Serb race scattered throughout those provinces, as well as in Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia, Hercegovina, and Turkey. Owing to the circumstances already described, it was impossible for the representatives of the Serb race to voice their aspirations unanimously in any one parliament, and the work of the coalition, except in the provincial diet at Agram, consisted mostly of conducting press campaigns and spreading propaganda throughout those provinces. The most important thing about the coalition was that it buried religious antagonism and put unity of race above difference of belief. In this way it came into conflict with the ultramontane Croat party at Agram, which wished to incorporate Bosnia, Hercegovina, and Dalmatia with Croatia and create a third purely Roman Catholic Slav state in the empire, on a level with Austria and Hungary; also to a lesser extent with the intransigent Serbs of Belgrade, who affected to ignore Croatia and Roman Catholicism, and only dreamed of bringing Bosnia, Hercegovina, and as much of Dalmatia as they could under their own rule; and finally it had to overcome the hostility of the Mohammedan Serbs of Bosnia, who disliked all Christians equally, could only with the greatest difficulty be persuaded that they were really Serbs and not Turks, and honestly cared for nothing but Islam and Turkish coffee, thus considerably facilitating the germanization of the two provinces. The coalition was wisely inclined to postpone the programme of final political settlement, and aimed immediately at the removal of the material and moral barriers placed between the Serbs of the various provinces of Austria-Hungary, including Bosnia and Hercegovina. If they had been sure of adequate guarantees they would probably have agreed to the inclusion of all Serbs and Croats within the monarchy, because the constitution of all Serbs and Croats in an independent state (not necessarily a kingdom) without it implied the then problematic contingencies of a European war and the disruption of Austria-Hungary. Considering the manifold handicaps under which Serbia and its cause suffered, the considerable success which its propaganda met with in Bosnia and Hercegovina and other parts of Austria-Hungary, from 1903 till 1908, is a proof, not only of the energy and earnestness of its promoters and of the vitality of the Serbian people, but also, if any were needed, of the extreme unpopularity of the Hapsburg régime in the southern Slav provinces of the dual monarchy. Serbia had no help from outside. Russia was entangled in the Far East and then in the revolution, and though the new dynasty was approved in St. Petersburg Russian sympathy with Serbia was at that time only lukewarm. Relations with Austria-Hungary were of course always strained; only one single line of railway connected the two countries, and as Austria-Hungary was the only profitable market, for geographical reasons, for Serbian products, Serbia could be brought to its knees at any moment by the commercial closing of the frontier. It was a symbol of the economic vassalage of Serbia and Montenegro that the postage between both of these countries and any part of Austria-Hungary was ten centimes, that for letters between Serbia and Montenegro, which had to make the long détour through Austrian territory, was twenty-five. But though this opened the Serbian markets to Austria, it also incidentally opened Bosnia, when the censor could be circumvented to propaganda by pamphlet and correspondence. Intercourse with western Europe was restricted by distance, and, owing to dynastic reasons, diplomatic relations were altogether suspended for several years between this country and Serbia. The Balkan States Exhibition held in London during the summer of 1907, to encourage trade between Great Britain and the Balkans, was hardly a success. Italy and Serbia had nothing in common. With Montenegro even, despite the fact that King Peter was Prince Nicholas’s son-in-law, relations were bad. It was felt in Serbia that Prince Nicholas’s autocratic rule acted as a brake on the legitimate development of the national consciousness, and Montenegrin students who visited Belgrade returned to their homes full of wild and unsuitable ideas. However, the revolutionary tendencies, which some of them undoubtedly developed, had no fatal results to the reigning dynasty, which continued as before to enjoy the special favour as well as the financial support of the Russian court, and which, looked on throughout Europe as a picturesque and harmless institution, it would have been dangerous, as it was quite unnecessary, to touch.

Serbia was thus left entirely to its own resources in the great propagandist activity which filled the years 1903 to 1908. The financial means at its disposal were exiguous in the extreme, especially when compared with the enormous sums lavished annually by the Austrian and German governments on their secret political services, so that the efforts of its agents cannot be ascribed to cupidity. Also it must be admitted that the kingdom of Serbia, with its capital Belgrade, thanks to the internal chaos and dynastic scandals of the previous forty years, resulting in superficial dilapidation, intellectual stagnation, and general poverty, lacked the material as well as the moral glamour which a successful Piedmont should possess. Nobody could deny, for instance, that, with all its natural advantages, Belgrade was at first sight not nearly such an attractive centre as Agram or Sarajevo, or that the qualities which the Serbs of Serbia had displayed since their emancipation were hardly such as to command the unstinted confidence and admiration of their as yet unredeemed compatriots. Nevertheless the Serbian propaganda in favour of what was really a Pan-Serb movement met with great success, especially in Bosnia, Hercegovina, and Old Serbia (northern Macedonia).

Simultaneously the work of the Serbo-Croat coalition in Dalmatia, Croatia, and Slavonia made considerable progress in spite of clerical opposition and desperate conflicts with the government at Budapest. Both the one movement and the other naturally evoked great alarm and emotion in the Austrian and Hungarian capitals, as they were seen to be genuinely popular and also potentially, if not actually, separatist in character. In October 1906 Baron Achrenthal succeeded Count Goluchowski as Minister for Foreign Affairs at Vienna, and very soon initiated a more vigorous and incidentally anti-Slav foreign policy than his predecessor. What was now looked on as the Serbian danger had in the eyes of Vienna assumed such proportions that the time for decisive action was considered to have arrived. In January 1908 Baron Achrenthal announced his scheme for a continuation of the Bosnian railway system through the sandjak of Novi-Pazar to link up with the Turkish railways in Macedonia. This plan was particularly foolish in conception, because, the Bosnian railways being narrow and the Turkish normal gauge, the line would have been useless for international commerce, while the engineering difficulties were such that the cost of construction would have been prohibitive. But the possibilities which this move indicated, the palpable evidence it contained of the notorious Drang nach Osten of the Germanic powers towards Salonika and Constantinople, were quite sufficient to fill the ministries of Europe, and especially those of Russia, with extreme uneasiness. The immediate result of this was that concerted action between Russia and Austria-Hungary in the Balkans was thenceforward impossible, and the Mürzsteg programme, after a short and precarious existence, came to an untimely end (cf. chap. 12). Serbia and Montenegro, face to face with this new danger which threatened permanently to separate their territories, were beside themselves, and immediately parried with the project, hardly more practicable in view of their international credit, of a Danube-Adriatic railway. In July 1908 the nerves of Europe were still further tried by the Young Turk revolution in Constantinople. The imminence of this movement was known to Austro-German diplomacy, and doubtless this knowledge, as well as the fear of the Pan-Serb movement, prompted the Austrian foreign minister to take steps towards the definitive regularization of his country’s position in Bosnia and Hercegovina—provinces whose suzerain was still the Sultan of Turkey. The effect of the Young Turk coup in the Balkan States was as any one who visited them at that time can testify, both pathetic and intensely humorous. The permanent chaos of the Turkish empire, and the process of watching for years its gradual but inevitable decomposition, had created amongst the neighbouring states an atmosphere of excited anticipation, which was really the breath of their nostrils; it had stimulated them during the endless Macedonian insurrections to commit the most awful outrages against each other’s nationals and then lay the blame at the door of the unfortunate Turk; and if the Turk should really regenerate himself, not only would their occupation be gone, but the heavily-discounted legacies would assuredly elude their grasp. At the same time, since the whole policy of exhibiting and exploiting the horrors of Macedonia, and of organizing guerilla bands and provoking intervention, was based on the refusal of the Turks to grant reforms, as soon as the ultra-liberal constitution of Midhat Pasha, which, had been withdrawn after a brief and unsuccessful run in 1876, was restored by the Young Turks, there was nothing left for the Balkan States to do but to applaud with as much enthusiasm as they could simulate. The emotions experienced by the Balkan peoples during that summer, beneath the smiles which they had to assume, were exhausting even for southern temperaments. Bulgaria, with its characteristic matter-of-factness, was the first to adjust itself to the new and trying situation in which the only certainty was that something decisive had got to be done with all possible celerity. On October 5, 1908, Prince Ferdinand sprang on an astonished continent the news that he renounced the Turkish suzerainty (ever since 1878 the Bulgarian principality had been a tributary and vassal state of the Ottoman Empire, and therefore, with all its astonishingly rapid progress and material prosperity, a subject for commiseration in the kingdoms of Serbia and Greece) and proclaimed the independence of Bulgaria, with himself, as Tsar of the Bulgars, at its head. Europe had not recovered from this shock, still less Belgrade and Athens, when, two days later. Baron Aehrenthal announced the formal annexation of Bosnia and Hercegovina by the Emperor Francis Joseph. Whereas most people had virtually forgotten the Treaty of Berlin and had come to look on Austria as just as permanently settled in these two provinces as was Great Britain in Egypt and Cyprus, yet the formal breach of the stipulations of that treaty on Austria’s part, by annexing the provinces without notice to or consultation with the other parties concerned, gave the excuse for a somewhat ridiculous hue and cry on the part of the other powers, and especially on that of Russia. The effect of these blows from right and left on Serbia was literally paralysing. When Belgrade recovered the use of its organs, it started to scream for war and revenue, and initiated an international crisis from which Europe did not recover till the following year. Meanwhile, almost unobserved by the peoples of Serbia and Montenegro, Austria had, in order to reconcile the Turks with the loss of their provinces, good-naturedly, but from the Austrian point of view short-sightedly, withdrawn its garrisons from the sandjak of Novi-Pazar, thus evacuating the long-coveted corridor which was the one thing above all else necessary to Serbia and Montenegro for the realization of their plans.

20
Serbia and Montenegro, and the two Balkan Wars, 1908–13 (cf. Chap, 13)

The winter of 1908-9 marked the lowest ebb of Serbia’s fortunes. The successive coups and faits accomplis carried out by Austria, Turkey, and Bulgaria during 1908 seemed destined to destroy for good the Serbian plans for expansion in any direction whatever, and if these could not be realized then Serbia must die of suffocation. It was also well understood that for all the martial ardour displayed in Belgrade the army was in no condition to take the field any more than was the treasury to bear the cost of a campaign; Russia had not yet recovered from the Japanese War followed by the revolution, and indeed everything pointed to the certainty that if Serbia indulged in hostilities against Austria-Hungary it would perish ignominiously and alone. The worst of it was that neither Serbia nor Montenegro had any legal claim to Bosnia and Hercegovina: they had been deluding themselves with the hope that their ethnical identity with the people of these provinces, supported by the effects of their propaganda, would induce a compassionate and generous Europe at least to insist on their being given a part of the coveted territory, and thus give Serbia access to the coast, when the ambiguous position of these two valuable provinces, still nominally Turkish but already virtually Austrian, came to be finally regularized. As a matter of fact, ever since Bismarck, Gorchakóv, and Beaconsfield had put Austria-Hungary in their possession in 1878, no one had seriously thought that the Dual Monarchy would ever voluntarily retire from one inch of the territory which had been conquered and occupied at such cost, and those who noticed it were astonished at the evacuation by it of the sandjak of Novi-Pazar. At the same time Baron Achrenthal little foresaw what a hornet’s nest he would bring about his ears by the tactless method in which the annexation was carried out. The first effect was to provoke a complete boycott of Austro-Hungarian goods and trading vessels throughout the Ottoman Empire, which was so harmful to the Austrian export trade that in January 1909 Count Achrenthal had to indemnify Turkey with the sum of £2,500,000 for his technically stolen property. Further, the attitude of Russia and Serbia throughout the whole winter remained so provocative and threatening that, although war was generally considered improbable, the Austrian army had to be kept on a war footing, which involved great expense and much popular discontent. The grave external crisis was only solved at the end of March 1909; Germany had had to deliver a veiled ultimatum at St. Petersburg, the result of which was the rescue of Austria-Hungary from an awkward situation by the much-advertised appearance of its faithful ally in shining armour. Simultaneously Serbia had to eat humble pie and declare, with complete absence of truth, that the annexation of Bosnia and Hercegovina had not affected its interests.

Meanwhile the internal complications in the southern Slav provinces of Austria-Hungary were growing formidable. Ever since the summer of 1908 arrests had been going on among the members of the Croato-Serb coalition, who were accused of favouring the subversive Pan-Serb movement. The press of Austria-Hungary magnified the importance of this agitation in order to justify abroad the pressing need for the formal annexation of Bosnia and Hercegovina. The fact was that, though immediate danger to the monarchy as a result of the Pan-Serb agitation was known not to exist, yet in the interests of Austrian foreign policy, the Serbs had to be compromised in the eyes of Europe, the Croato-Serb coalition within the Dual Monarchy had to be destroyed to gratify Budapest in particular, and the religious and political discord between Croat and Serb, on which the foundation of the power of Austria-Hungary, and especially that of Hungary, in the south rested, and which was in a fair way of being eliminated through the efforts of the coalition, had to be revived by some means or other. It is not possible here to go into the details of the notorious Agram high treason trial, which was the outcome of all this. It suffices to say that it was a monstrous travesty of justice which lasted from March till October 1909, and though it resulted in the ostensible destruction of the coalition and the imprisonment of many of its members, it defeated its own ends, as it merely fanned the flame of nationalistic feeling against Vienna and Budapest, and Croatia has ever since had to be governed virtually by martial law. This was followed in December 1909 by the even more famous Friedjung trial. In March 1909 Count Achrenthal had begun in Vienna a violent press campaign against Serbia, accusing the Serbian Government and dynasty of complicity in the concoction of nefarious designs and conspiracies against the integrity of Austria-Hungary. This campaign was thought to be the means of foreshadowing and justifying the immediate military occupation of Serbia. Unfortunately its instigator had not been sufficiently particular as to the choice of his tools and his methods of using them. Among the contributors of the highly tendencious articles was the well-known historian Dr. Friedjung, who made extensive use of documents supplied him by the Vienna Foreign Office. His accusations immediately provoked an action for libel on the part of three leaders of the Croato-Serb coalition who were implicated, in December 1909. The trial, which was highly sensational, resulted in the complete vindication and rehabilitation both of those three Austrian subjects in the eyes of the whole of Austria-Hungary and of the Belgrade Foreign Office in those of Europe; the documents on which the charges were based were proven to be partly forgeries, partly falsified, and partly stolen by various disreputable secret political agents of the Austrian Foreign Office, and one of the principal Serbian ‘conspirators’, a professor of Belgrade University, proved that he was in Berlin at the time when he had been accused of presiding over a revolutionary meeting at Belgrade. But it also resulted in the latter discrediting of Count Achrenthal as a diplomat and of the methods by which he conducted the business of the Austrian Foreign Office, and involved his country in the expenditure of countless millions which it could ill afford.

There never was any doubt that a subversive agitation had been going on, and that it emanated in part from Serbia, but the Serbian Foreign Office, under the able management of Dr. Milovanović and Dr. Spalajković (one of the principal witnesses at the Friedjung trial), was far too clever to allow any of its members, or indeed any responsible person in Serbia, to be concerned in it, and the brilliant way in which the clumsy and foolish charges were refuted redounded greatly to the credit of the Serbian Government. Count Achrenthal had overreached himself, and moreover the wind had already been taken out of his sails by the public recantation on Serbia’s part of its pretensions to Bosnia, which, as already mentioned, took place at the end of March 1909, and by the simultaneous termination of the international crisis marked by Russia’s acquiescence in the fait accompli of the annexation. At the same time the Serbian Crown Prince George, King Peter’s elder son, who had been the leader of the chauvinist war-party in Serbia, and was somewhat theatrical in demeanour and irresponsible in character, renounced his rights of succession in favour of his younger brother Prince Alexander, a much steadier and more talented young man. It is certain that when he realized how things were going to develop Count Achrenthal tried to hush up the whole incident, but it was too late, and Dr. Friedjung insisted on doing what he could to save his reputation as a historian. In the end he was made the principal scapegoat, though the press of Vienna voiced its opinion of the Austrian Foreign Office in no measured tones, saying, amongst other things, that if the conductors of its diplomacy must use forgeries, they might at any rate secure good ones. Eventually a compromise was arranged, after the defendant had clearly lost his case, owing to pressure being brought to bear from outside, and the Serbian Government refrained from carrying out its threat of having the whole question threshed out before the Hague Tribunal.

The cumulative effect of all these exciting and trying experiences was the growth of a distinctly more sympathetic feeling towards Serbia in Europe at large, and especially a rallying of all the elements throughout the Serb and Croat provinces of Austria-Hungary, except the extreme clericals of Agram, to the Serbian cause; briefly, the effect was the exact opposite of that desired by Vienna and Budapest. Meanwhile events had been happening elsewhere which revived the drooping interest and flagging hopes of Serbia in the development of foreign affairs. The attainment of power by the Young Turks and the introduction of parliamentary government had brought no improvement to the internal condition of the Ottoman Empire, and the Balkan peoples made no effort to conceal their satisfaction at the failure of the revolution to bring about reform by magic. The counter-revolution of April 1909 and the accession of the Sultan Mohammed V made things no better. In Macedonia, and especially in Albania, they had been going from bad to worse. The introduction of universal military service and obligatory payment of taxes caused a revolution in Albania, where such innovations were not at all appreciated. From 1909 till 1911 there was a state of perpetual warfare in Albania, with which the Young Turks, in spite of cruel reprisals, were unable to cope, until, in the summer of that year, Austria threatened to intervene unless order were restored; some sort of settlement was patched up, and an amnesty was granted to the rebels by the new Sultan. This unfortunate man, after being rendered almost half-witted by having been for the greater part of his life kept a prisoner by his brother the tyrant Abdul Hamid, was now the captive of the Young Turks, and had been compelled by them to make as triumphal a progress as fears for his personal safety would allow through the provinces of European Turkey. But it was obvious to Balkan statesmen that Turkey was only changed in name, and that, if its threatened regeneration had slightly postponed their plans for its partition amongst themselves, the ultimate consummation of these plans must be pursued with, if possible, even greater energy and expedition than before. It was also seen by the more perspicacious of them that the methods hitherto adopted must in future be radically altered. A rejuvenated though unreformed Turkey, bent on self-preservation, could not be despised, and it was understood that if the revolutionary bands of the three Christian nations (Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaria) were to continue indefinitely to cut each others’ throats in Macedonia the tables might conceivably be turned on them.

From 1909 onwards a series of phenomena occurred in the Balkans which ought to have given warning to the Turks, whose survival in Europe had been due solely to the fact that the Balkan States had never been able to unite. In the autumn of 1909 King Ferdinand of Bulgaria met Crown Prince Alexander of Serbia and made an expedition in his company to Mount Kopaonik in Serbia, renowned for the beauty of its flora. This must have struck those who remembered the bitter feelings which had existed between the two countries for years and had been intensified by the events of 1908. Bulgaria had looked on Serbia’s failures with persistent contempt, while Serbia had watched Bulgaria’s successful progress with speechless jealousy, and the memory of Slivnitsa was not yet obliterated. In the summer of 1910 Prince Nicholas of Montenegro celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of his reign and his golden wedding. The festivities were attended by King Ferdinand of Bulgaria and the Crown Prince Boris, by the Crown Prince Alexander of Serbia and his sister, grandchildren of Prince Nicholas, by his two daughters the Queen of Italy and the Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia, and by their husbands, King Victor Emmanuel and the Grand Duke Nicholas. The happiness of the venerable ruler, who was as respected throughout Europe as he was feared throughout his principality, was at the same time completed by his recognition as king by all the governments and sovereigns of the continent. The hopes that he would simultaneously introduce a more liberal form of government amongst his own people were unfortunately disappointed.

The year 1911, it need scarcely be recalled, was extremely fateful for the whole of Europe. The growing restlessness and irritability manifested by the German Empire began to make all the other governments feel exceedingly uneasy. The French expedition to Fez in April was followed by the Anglo-Franco-German crisis of July; war was avoided, and France was recognized as virtually master of Morocco, but the soreness of the diplomatic defeat rendered Germany a still more trying neighbour than it had been before. The first repercussion was the war which broke out in September 1911 between Italy and Turkey for the possession of Tripoli and Cyrenaica, which Italy, with its usual insight, saw was vital to its position as a Mediterranean power and therefore determined to acquire before any other power had time or courage to do so. In the Balkans this was a year of observation and preparation. Serbia, taught by the bitter lesson of 1908 not to be caught again unprepared, had spent much money and care on its army during the last few years and had brought it to a much higher state of efficiency. In Austria-Hungary careful observers wore aware that something was afoot and that the gaze of Serbia, which from 1903 till 1908 had been directed westwards to Bosnia and the Adriatic, had since 1908 been fixed on Macedonia and the Aegean. The actual formation of the Balkan League by King Ferdinand and M. Venezelos may not have been known, but it was realized that action of some sort on the part of the Balkan States was imminent, and that something must be done to forestall it. In February 1912 Count Aehrenthal died, and was succeeded by Count Berchtold as Austro-Hungarian Minister for Foreign Affairs. In August of the same year this minister unexpectedly announced his new and startling proposals for the introduction of reforms in Macedonia, which nobody in the Balkans who had any material interest in the fate of that province genuinely desired at that moment; the motto of the new scheme was ‘progressive decentralization’, blessed words which soothed the great powers as much as they alarmed the Balkan Governments. But already in May 1912 agreements between Bulgaria and Greece and between Bulgaria and Serbia had been concluded, limiting their respective zones of influence in the territory which they hoped to conquer. It was, to any one who has any knowledge of Balkan history, incredible that the various Governments had been able to come to any agreement at all. That arrived at by Bulgaria and Serbia divided Macedonia between them in such a way that Bulgaria should obtain central Macedonia with Monastir and Okhrida, and Serbia northern Macedonia or Old Serbia; there was an indeterminate zone between the two spheres, including Skoplje (Üsküb, in Turkish), the exact division of which it was agreed to leave to arbitration at a subsequent date.

The Macedonian theatre of war was by common consent regarded as the most important, and Bulgaria here promised Serbia the assistance of 100,000 men. The Turks meanwhile were aware that all was not what it seemed beyond the frontiers, and in August 1912 began collecting troops in Thrace, ostensibly for manoeuvres. During the month of September the patience of the four Governments of Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Montenegro, which had for years with the utmost self-control been passively watching the awful sufferings of their compatriots under Turkish misrule, gradually became exhausted. On September 28 the four Balkan Governments informed Russia that the Balkan League was an accomplished fact, and on the 30th the representatives of all four signed the alliance, and mobilization was ordered in Greece, Bulgaria, and Serbia. The population of Montenegro was habitually on a war footing, and it was left to the mountain kingdom from its geographically favourable position to open hostilities. On October 8 Montenegro declared war on Turkey, and after a series of brilliant successes along the frontier its forces settled down to the wearisome and arduous siege of Scutari with its impregnable sentinel, Mount Taraboš, converted into a modern fortress; the unaccustomed nature of these tasks, to which the Montenegrin troops, used to the adventures of irregular warfare, were little suited, tried the valour and patience of the intrepid mountaineers to the utmost. By that time Europe was in a ferment, and both Russia and Austria, amazed at having the initiative in the regulation of Balkan affairs wrested from them, showered on the Balkan capitals threats and protests, which for once in a way were neglected.

On October 13 Greece, Bulgaria, and Serbia replied that the offer of outside assistance and advice had come too late, and that they had decided themselves to redress the intolerable and secular wrongs of their long-suffering compatriots in Macedonia by force of arms. To their dismay a treaty of peace was signed at Lausanne about the same time between Turkey and Italy, which power, it had been hoped, would have distracted Turkey’s attention by a continuance of hostilities in northern Africa, and at any rate immobilized the Turkish fleet. Encouraged by this success Turkey boldly declared war on Bulgaria and Serbia on October 17, hoping to frighten Greece and detach it from the league; but on the 18th the Greek Government replied by declaring war on Turkey, thus completing the necessary formalities. The Turks were confident of an early and easy victory, and hoped to reach Sofia, not from Constantinople and Thrace, but pushing up north-eastwards from Macedonia. The rapid offensive of the Serbian army, however, took them by surprise, and they were completely overwhelmed at the battle of Kumanovo in northern Macedonia on October 23-4, 1912. On the 31st King Peter made his triumphal entry into Skoplje (ex-Üsküb), the ancient capital of Serbia under Tsar Stephen Dušan in the fourteenth century. From there the Serbian army pursued the Turks southward, and at the battles of Prilep (November 5) and Monastir (November 19), after encountering the most stubborn opposition, finally put an end to their resistance in this part of the theatre of war. On November 9 the Greeks entered Salonika.

Meanwhile other divisions of the Serbian army had joined hands with the Montenegrins, and occupied almost without opposition the long-coveted sandjak of Novi-Pazar (the ancient Serb Raška), to the inexpressible rage of Austria-Hungary, which had evacuated it in 1908 in favour of its rightful owner, Turkey. At the same time a Serbian expeditionary corps marched right through Albania, braving great hardships on the way, and on November 30 occupied Durazzo, thus securing at last a foothold on the Adriatic. Besides all this, Serbia, in fulfilment of its treaty obligations, dispatched 50,000 splendidly equipped men, together with a quantity of heavy siege artillery, to help the Bulgarians at the siege of Adrianople. On December 3 an armistice was signed between the belligerents, with the condition that the three besieged Turkish fortresses of Adrianople, Scutari, and Yanina must not be re-victualled, and on December 16, 1912, peace negotiations were opened between representatives of the belligerent countries in London. Meanwhile the Germanic powers, dismayed by the unexpected victories of the Balkan armies and humiliated by the crushing defeats in the field of the German-trained Turkish army, had since the beginning of November been doing everything in their power to support their client Turkey and prevent its final extinction and at the same time the blighting of their ambitions eventually to acquire the Empire of the Near East. During the conference in London between the plenipotentiaries of the belligerents, parallel meetings took place between the representatives of the great powers, whose relations with each other were strained and difficult in the extreme. The Turkish envoys prolonged the negotiations, as was their custom; they naturally were unwilling to concede their European provinces to the despised and hated Greek and Slavonic conquerors, but the delays implied growing hardships for their besieged and starving garrisons in Thrace, Epirus, and Albania. On January 23, 1913, a quasi-revolution occurred in the Turkish army, headed by Enver Bey and other Young Turk partisans, and approved by the Austrian and German embassies, with the object of interrupting the negotiations and staking all on the result of a final battle. As a result of these events, and of the palpable disingenuousness of the Turks in continuing the negotiations in London, the Balkan delegates on January 29 broke them off, and on February 3, 1913, hostilities were resumed. At length, after a siege of nearly five months, Adrianople, supplied with infinitely better artillery than the allies possessed, was taken by the combined Serbian and Bulgarian forces on March 26, 1913. The Serbian troops at Adrianople captured 17,010 Turkish prisoners, 190 guns, and the Turkish commander himself, Shukri Pasha.

At the outbreak of the war in the autumn of 1912 the Balkan States had observed all the conventions, disavowing designs of territorial aggrandizement and proclaiming their resolve merely to obtain guarantees for the better treatment of the Christian inhabitants of Macedonia; the powers, for their part, duly admonished the naughty children of south-eastern Europe to the effect that no alteration of the territorial status quo ante would under any circumstances be tolerated. During the negotiations in London, interrupted in January, and resumed in the spring of 1913 after the fall of Adrianople, it was soon made clear that in spite of all these magniloquent declarations nothing would be as it had been before. Throughout the winter Austria-Hungary had been mobilizing troops and massing them along the frontiers of Serbia and Montenegro, any increase in the size of which countries meant a crushing blow to the designs of the Germanic powers and the end to all the dreams embodied in the phrase ‘Drang nach Osten’ (‘pushing eastwards’).

In the spring of 1913 Serbia and Montenegro, instead of being defeated by the brave Turks, as had been confidently predicted in Vienna and Berlin would be the case, found themselves in possession of the sandjak of Novi-Pazar, of northern and central Macedonia (including Old Serbia), and of the northern half of Albania. The presence of Serbian troops on the shore of the Adriatic was more than Austria could stand, and at the renewed conference of London it was decided that they must retire. In the interests of nationality, in which the Balkan States themselves undertook the war, it was desirable that at any rate an attempt should be made to create an independent state of Albania, though no one who knew the local conditions felt confident as to its ultimate career. Its creation assuaged the consciences of the Liberal Government in Great Britain and at the same time admirably suited the strategic plans of Austria-Hungary. It left that country a loophole for future diplomatic efforts to disturb the peace of south-eastern Europe, and, with its own army in Bosnia and its political agents and irregular troops in Albania, Serbia and Montenegro, even though enlarged as it was generally recognized they must be, would be held in a vice and could be threatened and bullied from the south now as well as from the north whenever it was in the interests of Vienna and Budapest to apply the screw. The independence of Albania was declared at the conference of London on May 30, 1913. Scutari was included in it as being a purely Albanian town, and King Nicholas and his army, after enjoying its coveted flesh-pots for a few halcyon weeks, had, to their mortification, to retire to the barren fastnesses of the Black Mountain. Serbia, frustrated by Austria in its attempts, generally recognized as legitimate, to obtain even a commercial outlet on the Adriatic, naturally again diverted its aims southwards to Salonika. The Greeks were already in possession of this important city and seaport, as well as of the whole of southern Macedonia. The Serbs were in possession of central and northern Macedonia, including Monastir and Okhrida, which they had at great sacrifices conquered from the Turks. It had been agreed that Bulgaria, as its share of the spoils, should have all central Macedonia, with Monastir and Okhrida, although on ethnical grounds the Bulgarians have only very slightly better claim to the country and towns west of the Vardar than any of the other Balkan nationalities. But at the time that the agreement had been concluded it had been calculated in Greece and Serbia that Albania, far from being made independent, would be divided between them, and that Serbia, assured of a strip of coast on the Adriatic, would have no interest in the control of the river Vardar and of the railway which follows its course connecting the interior of Serbia with the port of Salonika. Greece and Serbia had no ground whatever for quarrel and no cause for mutual distrust, and they were determined, for political and commercial reasons, to have a considerable extent of frontier from west to east in common. The creation of an independent Albania completely altered the situation. If Bulgaria should obtain central Macedonia and thus secure a frontier from north to south in common with the newly-formed state of Albania, then Greece would be at the mercy of its hereditary enemies the Bulgars and Arnauts (Albanians) as it had previously been at the mercy of the Turks, while Serbia would have two frontiers between itself and the sea instead of one, as before, and its complete economic strangulation would be rendered inevitable and rapid. Bulgaria for its own part naturally refused to waive its claim to central Macedonia, well knowing that the master of the Vardar valley is master of the Balkan peninsula. The first repercussion of the ephemeral treaty of London of May 30, 1913, which created Albania and shut out Serbia from the Adriatic, was, therefore, as the diplomacy of the Germanic powers had all along intended it should be, the beginning of a feud between Greece and Serbia on the one hand, and Bulgaria on the other, the disruption of the Balkan League and the salvation, for the ultimate benefit of Germany, of what was left of Turkey in Europe.

The dispute as to the exact division of the conquered territory in Macedonia between Serbia and Bulgaria had, as arranged, been referred to arbitration, and, the Tsar of Russia having been chosen as judge, the matter was being threshed out in St. Petersburg during June 1913. Meanwhile Bulgaria, determined to make good its claim to the chestnuts which Greece and Serbia had pulled out of the Turkish fire, was secretly collecting troops along its temporary south-western frontier[1] with the object, in approved Germanic fashion, of suddenly invading and occupying all Macedonia, and, by the presentation of an irrevocable fait accompli, of relieving the arbitrator of his invidious duties or at any rate assisting him in the task.

[Footnote 1: This was formed by the stream Zletovska, a tributary of the river Bregalnica, which in its turn falls into the Vardar on its left or eastern bank about 40 miles south of Skoplje (Üsküb).]

On the other hand, the relations between Bulgaria and its two allies had been noticeably growing worse ever since January 1913; Bulgaria felt aggrieved that, in spite of its great sacrifices, it had not been able to occupy so much territory as Greece and Serbia, and the fact that Adrianople was taken with Serbian help did not improve the feeling between the two Slav nations. The growth of Bulgarian animosity put Greece and Serbia on their guard, and, well knowing the direction which an eventual attack would take, these two countries on June 2, 1913, signed a military convention and made all the necessary dispositions for resisting any aggression on Bulgaria’s part. At one o’clock in the morning of June 30 the Bulgarians, without provocation, without declaration of war, and without warning, crossed the Bregalnica (a tributary of the Vardar) and attacked the Serbs. A most violent battle ensued which lasted for several days; at some points the Bulgarians, thanks to the suddenness of their offensive, were temporarily successful, but gradually the Serbs regained the upper hand and by July 1 the Bulgarians were beaten. The losses were very heavy on both sides, but the final issue was a complete triumph for the Serbian army. Slivnitsa was avenged by the battle of the Bregalnica, just as Kosovo was by that of Kumanovo. After a triumphant campaign of one month, in which the Serbs were joined by the Greeks, Bulgaria had to bow to the inevitable. The Rumanian army had invaded northern Bulgaria, bent on maintaining the Balkan equilibrium and on securing compensation for having observed neutrality during the war of 1912-13, and famine reigned at Sofia. A conference was arranged at Bucarest, and the treaty of that name was signed there on August 10, 1913. By the terms of this treaty Serbia retained the whole of northern and central Macedonia, including Monastir and Okhrida, and the famous sandjak of Novi-Pazar was divided between Serbia and Montenegro. Some districts of east-central Macedonia, which were genuinely Bulgarian, were included in Serbian territory, as Serbia naturally did not wish, after the disquieting and costly experience of June and July 1913, to give the Bulgarians another chance of separating Greek from Serbian territory by a fresh surprise attack, and the further the Bulgarians could be kept from the Vardar river and railway the less likelihood there was of this. The state of feeling in the Germanic capitals and in Budapest after this ignominious defeat of their protégé Bulgaria and after this fresh triumph of the despised and hated Serbians can be imagined. Bitterly disappointed first at seeing the Turks vanquished by the Balkan League—their greatest admirers could not even claim that the Turks had had any ‘moral’ victories—their chagrin, when they saw the Bulgarians trounced by the Serbians, knew no bounds. That the secretly prepared attack on Serbia by Bulgaria was planned in Vienna and Budapest there is no doubt. That Bulgaria was justified in feeling disappointment and resentment at the result of the first Balkan War no one denies, but the method chosen to redress its wrongs could only have been suggested by the Germanic school of diplomacy.

In Serbia and Montenegro the result of the two successive Balkan Wars, though these had exhausted the material resources of the two countries, was a justifiable return of national self-confidence and rejoicing such as the people, humiliated and impoverished as it had habitually been by its internal and external troubles, had not known for very many years. At last Serbia and Montenegro had joined hands. At last Old Serbia was restored to the free kingdom. At last Skoplje, the mediaeval capital of Tsar Stephen Dušan, was again in Serbian territory. At last one of the most important portions of unredeemed Serbia had been reclaimed. Amongst the Serbs and Croats of Bosnia, Hercegovina, Dalmatia, Croatia, Slavonia, and southern Hungary the effect of the Serbian victories was electrifying. Military prowess had been the one quality with which they, and indeed everybody else, had refused to credit the Serbians of the kingdom, and the triumphs of the valiant Serbian peasant soldiers immediately imparted a heroic glow to the country whose very name, at any rate in central Europe, had become a byword, and a synonym for failure; Belgrade became the cynosure and the rallying-centre of the whole Serbo-Croatian race. But Vienna and Budapest could only lose courage and presence of mind for the moment, and the undeniable success of the Serbian arms merely sharpened their appetite for revenge. In August 1913 Austria-Hungary, as is now known, secretly prepared an aggression on Serbia, but was restrained, partly by the refusal of Italy to grant its approval of such action, partly because the preparations of Germany at that time were not complete. The fortunate Albanian question provided, for the time being, a more convenient rod with which to beat Serbia. Some Serbian troops had remained in possession of certain frontier towns and districts which were included in the territory of the infant state of Albania pending the final settlement of the frontiers by a commission. On October 18, 1913, Austria addressed an ultimatum to Serbia to evacuate these, as its continued occupation of them caused offence and disquiet to the Dual Monarchy. Serbia meekly obeyed. Thus passed away the last rumble of the storms which had filled the years 1912-13 in south-eastern Europe.

The credulous believed that the Treaty of Bucarest had at last brought peace to that distracted part of the world. Those who knew their central Europe realized that Berlin had only forced Vienna to acquiesce in the Treaty of Bucarest because the time had not yet come. But come what might, Serbia and Montenegro, by having linked up their territory and by forming a mountain barrier from the Danube to the Adriatic, made it far more difficult for the invader to push his way through to the East than it would have been before the battles of Kumanovo and Bregalnica.

GREECE

1
From Ancient to Modern Greece

The name of Greece has two entirely different associations in our minds. Sometimes it calls up a wonderful literature enshrined in a ‘dead language’, and exquisite works of a vanished art recovered by the spade; at other times it is connected with the currant-trade returns quoted on the financial page of our newspapers or with the ‘Balance of Power’ discussed in their leading articles. Ancient and Modern Greece both mean much to us, but usually we are content to accept them as independent phenomena, and we seldom pause to wonder whether there is any deeper connexion between them than their name. It is the purpose of these pages to ask and give some answer to this question.

The thought that his own Greece might perish, to be succeeded by another Greece after the lapse of more than two thousand years, would have caused an Ancient Greek surprise. In the middle of the fifth century B.C., Ancient Greek civilization seemed triumphantly vigorous and secure. A generation before, it had flung back the onset of a political power which combined all the momentum of all the other contemporary civilizations in the world; and the victory had proved not merely the superiority of Greek arms—the Spartan spearman and the Athenian galley—but the superior vitality of Greek politics—the self-governing, self-sufficing city-state. In these cities a wonderful culture had burst into flower—an art expressing itself with equal mastery in architecture, sculpture, and drama, a science which ranged from the most practical medicine to the most abstract mathematics, and a philosophy which blended art, science, and religion into an ever-developing and ever more harmonious view of the universe. A civilization so brilliant and so versatile as this seemed to have an infinite future before it, yet even here death lurked in ambush.

When the cities ranged themselves in rival camps, and squandered their strength on the struggle for predominance, the historian of the Peloponnesian war could already picture Athens and Sparta in ruins,[1] and the catastrophe began to warp the soul of Plato before he had carried Greek philosophy to its zenith. This internecine strife of free communities was checked within a century by the imposition of a single military autocracy over them all, and Alexander the Great crowned his father Philip’s work by winning new worlds for Hellenism from the Danube to the Ganges and from the Oxus to the Nile. The city-state and its culture were to be propagated under his aegis, but this vision vanished with Alexander’s death, and Macedonian militarism proved a disappointment. The feuds of these crowned condottieri harassed the cities more sorely than their own quarrels, and their arms could not even preserve the Hellenic heritage against external foes. The Oriental rallied and expelled Hellenism again from the Asiatic hinterland, while the new cloud of Rome was gathering in the west. In four generations[2] of the most devastating warfare the world had seen, Rome conquered all the coasts of the Mediterranean. Greek city and Greek dynast went down before her, and the political sceptre passed irrevocably from the Hellenic nation.

[Footnote 1: Thucydides, Book I, chap. 10.]

[Footnote 2: 264-146 B.C.]

Yet this political abdication seemed to open for Hellenic culture a future more brilliant and assured than ever. Rome could organize as well as conquer. She accepted the city-state as the municipal unit of the Roman Empire, thrust back the Oriental behind the Euphrates, and promoted the Hellenization of all the lands between this river-frontier and the Balkans with much greater intensity than the Macedonian imperialists. Her political conquests were still further counterbalanced by her spiritual surrender, and Hellenism was the soul of the new Latin culture which Rome created, and which advanced with Roman government over the vast untutored provinces of the west and north, bringing them, too, within the orbit of Hellenic civilization. Under the shadow of the Roman Empire, Plutarch, the mirror of Hellenism, could dwell in peace in his little city-state of Chaeronea, and reflect in his writings all the achievements of the Hellenic spirit as an ensample to an apparently endless posterity.

Yet the days of Hellenic culture were also numbered. Even Plutarch lived[1] to look down from the rocky citadel of Chaeronea upon Teutonic raiders wasting the Kephisos vale, and for more than three centuries successive hordes of Goths searched out and ravaged the furthest corners of European Greece. Then the current set westward to sweep away[2] the Roman administration in the Latin provinces, and Hellenism seemed to have been granted a reprieve. The Greek city-state of Byzantium on the Black Sea Straits had been transformed into the Roman administrative centre of Constantinople, and from this capital the Emperor Justinian in the sixth century A.D. still governed and defended the whole Greek-speaking world. But this political glamour only threw the symptoms of inward dissolution into sharper relief. Within the framework of the Empire the municipal liberty of the city-state had been stifled and extinguished by the waxing jungle of bureaucracy, and the spiritual culture which the city-state fostered, and which was more essential to Hellenism than any political institutions, had been part ejected, part exploited, and wholly compromised by a new gospel from the east.

[Footnote 1: About A.D. 100]

[Footnote 2: A.D. 404-476]

While the Oriental had been compelled by Rome to draw his political frontier at the Euphrates, and had failed so far to cross the river-line, he had maintained his cultural independence within sight of the Mediterranean. In the hill country of Judah, overlooking the high road between Antioch and Alexandria, the two chief foci of Hellenism in the east which the Macedonians had founded, and which had grown to maturity under the aegis of Rome, there dwelt a little Semitic community which had defied all efforts of Greek or Roman to assimilate it, and had finally given birth to a world religion about the time that a Roman punitive expedition razed its holy city of Jerusalem to the ground.[1] Christianity was charged with an incalculable force, which shot like an electric current from one end of the Roman Empire to the other. The highly-organized society of its adherents measured its strength in several sharp conflicts with the Imperial administration, from which it emerged victorious, and it was proclaimed the official religious organization of the Empire by the very emperor that founded Constantinople.[2]

[Footnote 1: A.D. 70.]

[Footnote 2: Constantine the Great recognized Christianity in A.D. 313 and founded Constantinople in A.D. 328.]

The established Christian Church took the best energies of Hellenism into its service. The Greek intellectuals ceased to become lecturers and professors, to find a more human and practical career in the bishop’s office. The Nicene Creed, drafted by an ‘oecumenical’ conference of bishops under the auspices of Constantine himself,[1] was the last notable formulation of Ancient Greek philosophy. The cathedral of Aya Sophia, with which Justinian adorned Constantinople, was the last original creation of Ancient Greek art.[2] The same Justinian closed the University of Athens, which had educated the world for nine hundred years and more, since Plato founded his college in the Academy. Six recalcitrant professors went into exile for their spiritual freedom, but they found the devout Zoroastrianism of the Persian court as unsympathetic as the devout Christianity of the Roman. Their humiliating return and recantation broke the ‘Golden Chain’ of Hellenic thought for ever.

Hellenism was thus expiring from its own inanition, when the inevitable avalanche overwhelmed it from without. In the seventh century A.D. there was another religious eruption in the Semitic world, this time in the heart of Arabia, where Hellenism had hardly penetrated, and under the impetus of Islam the Oriental burst his bounds again after a thousand years. Syria was reft away from the Empire, and Egypt, and North Africa as far as the Atlantic, and their political severance meant their cultural loss to Greek civilization. Between the Koran and Hellenism no fusion was possible. Christianity had taken Hellenism captive, but Islam gave it no quarter, and the priceless library of Alexandria is said to have been condemned by the caliph’s order to feed the furnaces of the public baths.

[Footnote 1: A.D. 325.]

[Footnote 2: Completed A.D. 538.]

While Hellenism was thus cut short in the east, a mortal blow was struck at its heart from the north. The Teuton had raided and passed on, but the lands he had depopulated were now invaded by immigrants who had come to stay. As soon as the last Goth and Lombard had gone west of the Isonzo, the Slavs poured in from the north-eastern plains of Europe through the Moravian gap, crossed the Danube somewhere near the site of Vienna, and drifted down along the eastern face of the Alps upon the Adriatic littoral. Rebuffed by the sea-board, the Slavonic migration was next deflected east, and filtered through the Bosnian mountains, scattering the Latin-speaking provincials before it to left and right, until it debouched upon the broad basin of the river Morava. In this concentration-area it gathered momentum during the earlier part of the seventh century A.D., and then burst out with irresistible force in all directions, eastward across the Maritsa basin till it reached the Black Sea, and southward down the Vardar to the shores of the Aegean.

Beneath this Slavonic flood the Greek race in Europe was engulfed. A few fortified cities held out, Adrianople on the Maritsa continued to cover Constantinople; Salonika at the mouth of the Vardar survived a two hundred years siege; while further south Athens, Korinth, and Patras escaped extinction. But the tide of invasion surged around their walls. The Slavs mastered all the open country, and, pressing across the Korinthian Gulf, established themselves in special force throughout the Peloponnesos. The thoroughness of their penetration is witnessed to this day by the Slavonic names which still cling to at least a third of the villages, rivers, and mountains in European Greece, and are found in the most remote as well as in the most accessible quarters of the land.[1]

[Footnote 1: For example: Tsimova and Panitsa in the Tainaron peninsula (Maina); Tsoupana and Khrysapha in Lakonia; Dhimitzana, Karytena, and Andhritsena in the centre of Peloponnesos, and Vostitsa on its north coast; Dobrena and Kaprena in Boiotia; Vonitza on the Gulf of Arta; Kardhitsa in the Thessalian plain.]

With the coming of the Slavs darkness descends like a curtain upon Greek history. We catch glimpses of Arab hosts ranging across Anatolia at will and gazing at Slavonic hordes across the narrow Bosphorus. But always the Imperial fleet patrols the waters between, and always the triple defences of Constantinople defy the assailant. Then after about two centuries the floods subside, the gloom disperses, and the Greek world emerges into view once more. But the spectacle before us is unfamiliar, and most of the old landmarks have been swept away.

By the middle of the ninth century A.D., the Imperial Government had reduced the Peloponnesos to order again, and found itself in the presence of three peoples. The greater part of the land was occupied by ‘Romaioi’—normal, loyal, Christian subjects of the empire—but in the hilly country between Eurotas, Taygetos, and the sea, two Slavonic tribes still maintained themselves in defiant savagery and worshipped their Slavonic gods, while beyond them the peninsula of Tainaron, now known as Maina, sheltered communities which still clung to the pagan name of Hellene and knew no other gods but Zeus, Athena, and Apollo. Hellene and Slav need not concern us. They were a vanishing minority, and the Imperial Government was more successful in obliterating their individuality than in making them contribute to its exchequer. The future lay with the Romaioi.

The speech of these Romaioi was not the speech of Rome. ‘Romaikà,’ as it is still called popularly in the country-side, is a development of the ‘koinè’ or ‘current’ dialect of Ancient Greek, in which the Septuagint and the New Testament are written. The vogue of these books after the triumph of Christianity and the oncoming of the Dark Age, when they were the sole intellectual sustenance of the people, gave the idiom in which they were composed an exclusive prevalence. Except in Tzakonia—the iron-bound coast between Cape Malea and Nauplia Bay—all other dialects of Ancient Greek became extinct, and the varieties of the modern language are all differentiations of the ‘koinè’, along geographical lines which in no way correspond with those which divided Doric from Ionian. Yet though Romaic is descended from the ‘koinè’, it is almost as far removed from it as modern Italian is from the language of St. Augustine or Cicero. Ancient Greek possessed a pitch-accent only, which allowed the quantitative values of syllables to be measured against one another, and even to form the basis of a metrical system. In Romaic the pitch-accent has transformed itself into a stress-accent almost as violent as the English, which has destroyed all quantitative relation between accented and unaccented syllables, often wearing away the latter altogether at the termination of words, and always impoverishing their vowel sounds. In the ninth century A.D. this new enunciation was giving rise to a new poetical technique founded upon accent and rhyme, which first essayed itself in folk-songs and ballads,[1] and has since experimented in the same variety of forms as English poetry.

[Footnote 1: The earliest products of the modern technique were called ‘city’ verses, because they originated in Constantinople, which has remained ‘the city’ par excellence for the Romaic Greek ever since the Dark Age made it the asylum of his civilization.]

These humble beginnings of a new literature were supplemented by the rudiments of a new art. Any visitor at Athens who looks at the three tiny churches [1] built in this period of first revival, and compares them with the rare pre-Norman churches of England, will find the same promise of vitality in the Greek architecture as in his own. The material—worked blocks of marble pillaged from ancient monuments, alternating with courses of contemporary brick—produces a completely new aesthetic effect upon the eye; and the structure—a grouping of lesser cupolas round a central dome— is the very antithesis of the ‘upright-and-horizontal’ style which confronts him in ruins upon the Akropolis.

[Footnote 1: The Old Metropolitan, the Kapnikaria, and St. Theodore.]

These first achievements of Romaic architecture speak by implication of the characteristic difference between the Romaios and the Hellene. The linguistic and the aesthetic change were as nothing compared to the change in religion, for while the Hellene had been a pagan, the Romaios was essentially a member of the Christian Church. Yet this new and determining characteristic was already fortified by tradition. The Church triumphant had swiftly perfected its organisation on the model of the Imperial bureaucracy. Every Romaios owed ecclesiastical allegiance, through a hierarchy of bishops and metropolitans, to a supreme patriarch at Constantinople, and in the ninth century this administrative segregation of the imperial from the west-European Church had borne its inevitable fruit in a dogmatic divergence, and ripened into a schism between the Orthodox Christianity of the east on the one hand and the Catholicism of the Latin world on the other.

The Orthodox Church exercised an important cultural influence over its Romaic adherents. The official language of its scriptures, creeds, and ritual had never ceased to be the Ancient Greek ‘koinè’ and by keeping the Romaios familiar with this otherwise obsolete tongue it kept him in touch with the unsurpassable literature of his Ancient Greek predecessors. The vast body of Hellenic literature had perished during the Dark Age, when all the energies of the race were absorbed by the momentary struggle for survival; but about a third of the greatest authors’ greatest works had been preserved, and now that the stress was relieved, the wreckage of the remainder was sedulously garnered in anthologies, abridgements, and encyclopaedias. The rising monasteries offered a safe harbourage both for these compilations and for such originals as survived unimpaired, and in their libraries they were henceforth studied, cherished, and above all recopied with more or less systematic care.

The Orthodox Church was thus a potent link between past and present, but the most direct link of all was the political survival of the Empire. Here, too, many landmarks had been swept away. The marvellous system of Roman Law had proved too subtle and complex for a world in the throes of dissolution. Within a century of its final codification by Justinian’s commissioners) it had begun to fall into disuse, and was now replaced by more summary legislation, which was as deeply imbued with Mosaic principles as the literary language with the Hebraisms of the New Testament, and bristled with barbarous applications of the Lex Talionis. The administrative organization instituted by Augustus and elaborated by Diocletian had likewise disappeared, and the army-corps districts were the only territorial units that outlasted the Dark Age. Yet the tradition of order lived on. The army itself preserved Roman discipline and technique to a remarkable degree, and the military districts were already becoming the basis for a reconstituted civil government. The wealth of Latin technicalities incorporated in the Greek style of ninth-century officialdom witnesses to this continuity with the past and to the consequent political superiority of the Romaic Empire over contemporary western Europe.

Within the Imperial frontiers the Romaic race was offered an apparently secure field for its future development. In the Balkan peninsula the Slav had been expelled or assimilated to the south of a line stretching from Avlona to Salonika. East of Salonika the empire still controlled little more in Europe than the ports of the littoral, and a military highway linking them with each other and with Constantinople. But beyond the Bosphorus the frontier included the whole body of Anatolia as far as Taurus and Euphrates, and here was the centre of gravity both of the Romaic state and of the Romaic nation.

A new Greek nation had in fact come into being, and it found itself in touch with new neighbours, whom the Ancient Greek had never known. Eastward lay the Armenians, reviving, like the Greeks, after the ebb of the Arab flood, and the Arabs themselves, quiescent within their natural bounds and transfusing the wisdom of Aristotle and Hippokrates into their native culture. Both these peoples were sundered from the Orthodox Greek by religion[1] as well as by language, but a number of nationalities established on his opposite flank had been evangelized from Constantinople and followed the Orthodox patriarch in his schism with Rome. The most important neighbour of the Empire in this quarter was the Bulgarian kingdom, which covered all the Balkan hinterland from the Danube and the Black Sea to the barrier-fortresses of Adrianople and Salonika. It had been founded by a conquering caste of non-Slavonic nomads from the trans-Danubian steppes, but these were completely absorbed in the Slavonic population which they had endowed with their name and had preserved by political consolidation from the fate of their brethren further south. This Bulgarian state included a large ‘Vlach’ element descended from those Latin-speaking provincials whom the Slavs had pushed before them in their original migration; while the main body of the ‘Rumans’, whom the same thrust of invasion had driven leftwards across the Danube, had established itself in the mountains of Transylvania, and was just beginning to push down into the Wallachian and Moldavian plains. Like the Bulgars, this Romance population had chosen the Orthodox creed, and so had the purely Slavonic Serbs, who had replaced the Rumans in the basin of the Morava and the Bosnian hills, as far westward as the Adriatic coast. Beyond, the heathen Magyars had pressed into the Danubian plains like a wedge, and cut off the Orthodox world from the Latin-Teutonic Christendom of the west; but it looked as though the two divisions of Europe were embarked upon the same course of development. Both were evolving a system of strongly-knit nationalities, neither wholly interdependent nor wholly self-sufficient, but linked together in their individual growth by the ties of common culture and religion. In both the darkness was passing. The future of civilization seemed once more assured, and in the Orthodox world the new Greek nation seemed destined to play the leading part.

[Footnote 1: The Armenians split off from the Catholic Church four centuries before the schism between the Roman and Orthodox sections of the latter.]

His cultural and political heritage from his ancient predecessors gave the Romaic Greek in this period of revival an inestimable advantage over his cruder neighbours, and his superiority declared itself in an expansion of the Romaic Empire. In the latter half of the tenth century A.D. the nest of Arab pirates from Spain, which had established itself in Krete and terrorized the Aegean, was exterminated by the Emperor Nikiphóros Phokas, and on the eastern marches Antioch was gathered within the frontier at the Arabs’ expense, and advanced posts pushed across Euphrates. In the first half of the eleventh century Basil, ‘Slayer of the Bulgars’, destroyed the Balkan kingdom after a generation of bitter warfare, and brought the whole interior of the peninsula under the sway of Constantinople. His successors turned their attention to the cast again, and attracted one Armenian principality after another within the Imperial protectorate. Nor was the revival confined to politics. The conversion of the Russians about A.D. 1000 opened a boundless hinterland to the Orthodox Church, and any one who glances at a series of Greek ivory carvings or studies Greek history from the original sources, will here encounter a literary and artistic renaissance remarkable enough to explain the fascination which the barbarous Russian and the outlandish Armenian found in Constantinople. Yet this renaissance had hardly set in before it was paralysed by an unexpected blow, which arrested the development of Modern Greece for seven centuries.

Modern, like Ancient, Greece was assailed in her infancy by a conqueror from the east, and, unlike Ancient Greece, she succumbed. Turkish nomads from the central Asiatic steppes had been drifting into the Moslem world as the vigour of the Arabs waned. First they came as slaves, then as mercenaries, until at last, in the eleventh century, the clan of Seljuk grasped with a strong hand the political dominion of Islam. As champions of the caliph the Turkish sultans disputed the infidels encroachment on the Moslem border. They challenged the Romaic Empire’s progress in Armenia, and in A.D. 1071—five years after the Norman founded at Hastings the strong government which has been the making of England—the Seljuk Turk shattered at the battle of Melasgerd that heritage of strong government which had promised so much to Greece.

Melasgerd opened the way to Anatolia. The Arab could make no lodgement there, but in the central steppe of the temperate plateau the Turk found a miniature reproduction of his original environment. Tribe after tribe crossed the Oxus, to make the long pilgrimage to these new marches which their race had won for Islam on the west, and the civilization developed in the country by fifteen centuries of intensive and undisturbed Hellenization was completely blotted out. The cities wore isolated from one another till their commerce fell into decay. The elaborately cultivated lands around them were left fallow till they were good for nothing but the pasturage which was all that the nomad required. The only monuments of architecture that have survived in Anatolia above ground are the imposing khans or fortified rest-houses built by the Seljuk sultans themselves after the consolidation of their rule, and they are the best witnesses of the vigorous barbarism by which Romaic culture was effaced. The vitality of the Turk was indeed unquestionable. He imposed his language and religion upon the native Anatolian peasantry, as the Greek had imposed his before him, and in time adopted their sedentary life, though too late to repair the mischief his own nomadism had wrought. Turk and Anatolian coalesced into one people; every mountain, river, lake, bridge, and village in the country took on a Turkish name, and a new nation was established for ever in the heart of the Romaic world, which nourished itself on the life-blood of the Empire and was to prove the supreme enemy, of the race.

This sequel to Melasgerd sealed the Empire’s doom. Robbed of its Anatolian governing class and its Anatolian territorial army, it ceased to be self-sufficient, and the defenders it attracted from the west were at least as destructive as its eastern foes. The brutal régime of the Turks in the pilgrimage places of Syria had roused a storm of indignation in Latin Europe, and a cloud gathered in the west once more. It was heralded by adventurers from Normandy, who had first served the Romaic Government as mercenaries in southern Italy and then expelled their employers, about the time of Melasgerd, from their last foothold in the peninsula. Raids across the straits of Otranto carried the Normans up to the walls of Salonika, their fleets equipped in Sicily scoured the Aegean, and, before the eleventh century was out, they had followed up these reconnoitring expeditions by conducting Latin Christendom on its first crusade. The crusaders assembled at Constantinople, and the Imperial Government was relieved when the flood rolled on and spent itself further east. But one wave was followed by another, and the Empire itself succumbed to the fourth. In A.D. 1204, Constantinople was stormed by a Venetian flotilla and the crusading host it conveyed on board, and more treasures of Ancient Hellenism were destroyed in the sack of its hitherto inviolate citadel than had ever perished by the hand of Arab or Slav.

With the fall of the capital the Empire dissolved in chaos, Venice and Genoa, the Italian trading cities whose fortune had been made by the crusades, now usurped the naval control of the Mediterranean which the Empire had exercised since Nikiphóros pacified Krete. They seized all strategical points of vantage on the Aegean coasts, and founded an ‘extra-territorial’ community at Pera across the Golden Horn, to monopolize the trade of Constantinople with the Black Sea. The Latins failed to retain their hold on Constantinople itself, for the puppet emperors of their own race whom they enthroned there were evicted within a century by Romaic dynasts, who clung to such fragments of Anatolia as had escaped the Turk. But the Latin dominion was less ephemeral in the southernmost Romaic provinces of Europe. The Latins’ castles, more conspicuous than the relics of Hellas, still crown many high hills in Greece, and their French tongue has added another strain, to the varied nomenclature of the country.[1] Yet there also pandemonium prevailed. Burgundian barons, Catalan condottieri, and Florentine bankers snatched the Duchy of Athens from one another in bewildering succession, while the French princes of Achaia were at feud with their kindred vassals in the west of the Peloponnesos whenever they were not resisting the encroachments of Romaic despots in the south and east. To complete the anarchy, the non-Romaic peoples in the interior of the Balkan peninsula had taken the fall of Constantinople as a signal to throw off the Imperial yoke. In the hinterland of the capital the Bulgars had reconstituted their kingdom. The Romance-speaking Vlachs of Pindus moved down into the Thessalian plains. The aboriginal Albanians, who with their back to the Adriatic had kept the Slavs at bay, asserted their vitality and sent out migratory swarms to the south, which entered the service of the warring princelets and by their prowess won broad lands in every part of continental Greece, where Albanian place-names are to this day only less common than Slavonic. South-eastern Europe was again in the throes of social dissolution, and the convulsions continued till they were stilled impartially by the numbing hand of their ultimate author the Turk.

[Footnote 1: e.g. Klemoutsi, Glarentsa (Clarence) and Gastouni—villages of the currant district in Peloponnesos—and Sant-Omeri, the mountain that overlooks them.]

The Seljuk sultanate in Anatolia, shaken by the crusades, had gone the way of all oriental empires to make room for one of its fractions, which showed a most un-oriental faculty of organic growth. This was the extreme march on the north-western rim of the Anatolian plateau, overlooking the Asiatic littoral of the Sea of Marmora. It had been founded by one of those Turkish chiefs who migrated with their clans from beyond the Oxus; and it was consolidated by Othman his son, who extended his kingdom to the cities on the coast and invested his subjects with his own name. In 1355 the Narrows of Gallipoli passed into Ottoman hands, and opened a bridge to unexpected conquests in Europe. Serbia and Bulgaria collapsed at the first attack, and the hosts which marched to liberate them from Hungary and from France only ministered to Ottoman prestige by their disastrous discomfiture. Before the close of the fourteenth century the Ottoman sultan had transferred his capital to Adrianople, and had become immeasurably the strongest power in the Balkan peninsula.

After that the end came quickly. At Constantinople the Romaic dynasty of Palaiologos had upheld a semblance of the Empire for more than a century after the Latin was expelled. But in 1453 the Imperial city fell before the assault of Sultan Mohammed; and before his death the conqueror eliminated all the other Romaic and Latin principalities from Peloponnesos to Trebizond, which had survived as enclaves to mar the uniformity of the Ottoman domain. Under his successors the tide of Ottoman conquest rolled on for half a century more over south-eastern Europe, till it was stayed on land beneath the ramparts of Vienna,[1] and culminated on sea, after the systematic reduction of the Venetian strongholds, in the capture of Rhodes from the Knights of St. John.[2] The Romaic race, which had been split into so many fragments during the dissolution of the Empire, was reunited again in the sixteenth century under the common yoke of the Turk.

[Footnote 1: 1526.]

[Footnote 2: 1522.]

Even in the Dark Age, Greece had hardly been reduced to so desperate a condition as now. Through the Dark Age the Greek cities had maintained a continuous life, but Mohammed II depopulated Constantinople to repeople it with a Turkish majority from Anatolia. Greek commerce would naturally have benefited by the ejection of the Italians from the Levant, had not the Ottoman Government given asylum simultaneously to the Jews expelled from Spain. These Sephardim established themselves at Constantinople, Salonika, and all the other commercial centres of the Ottoman dominion, and their superiority in numbers and industry made them more formidable urban rivals of the Greeks than the Venetians and Genoese had ever been.

Ousted from the towns, the Greek race depended for its preservation on the peasantry, yet Greece had never suffered worse rural oppression than under the Ottoman régime. The sultan’s fiscal demands were the least part of the burden. The paralysing land-tax, collected in kind by irresponsible middlemen, was an inheritance from the Romaic Empire, and though it was now reinforced by the special capitation-tax levied by the sultan on his Christian subjects, the greater efficiency and security of his government probably compensated for the additional charge. The vitality of Greece was chiefly sapped by the ruthless military organization of the Ottoman state. The bulk of the Ottoman army was drawn from a feudal cavalry, bound to service, as in the mediaeval Latin world, in return for fiefs or ‘timaria’ assigned to them by their sovereign; and many beys and agas have bequeathed their names in perpetuity to the richest villages on the Messenian and Thessalian plains, to remind the modern peasant that his Christian ancestors once tilled the soil as serfs of a Moslem timariot. But the sultan, unlike his western contemporaries, was not content with irregular troops, and the serf-communes of Greece had to deliver up a fifth of their male children every fourth year to be trained at Constantinople as professional soldiers and fanatical Moslems. This corps of ‘Janissaries’[1] was founded in the third generation of the Ottoman dynasty, and was the essential instrument of its military success. One race has never appropriated and exploited the vitality of another in so direct or so brutal a fashion, and the institution of ‘tribute-children’, so long as it lasted, effectually prevented any recovery of the Greek nation from the untimely blows which had stricken it down.

[Footnote 1: Yeni Asker—New soldiery.]

2
The Awakening of the Nation

During the two centuries that followed the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, the Greek race was in serious danger of annihilation. Its life-blood was steadily absorbed into the conquering community—quite regularly by the compulsory tribute of children and spasmodically by the voluntary conversion of individual households. The rich apostasized, because too heavy a material sacrifice was imposed upon them by loyalty to their national religion; the destitute, because they could not fail to improve their prospects by adhering to the privileged faith. Even the surviving organization of the Church had only been spared by the Ottoman Government in order to facilitate its own political system—by bringing the peasant, through the hierarchy of priest, bishop, and patriarch, under the moral control of the new Moslem master whom the ecclesiastics henceforth served.

The scale on which wholesale apostasy was possible is shown by the case of Krete, which was conquered by the Turks from Venice just after these two centuries had closed, and was in fact the last permanent addition to the Turkish Empire. No urban or feudal settlers of Turkish blood were imported into the island. To this day the uniform speech of all Kretans is their native Greek. And yet the progressive conversion of whole clans and villages had transferred at least 20 per cent. of the population to the Moslem ranks before the Ottoman connexion was severed again in 1897.

The survival of the Greek nationality did not depend on any efforts of the Greeks themselves. They were indeed no longer capable of effort, but lay passive under the hand of the Turk, like the paralysed quarry of some beast of prey. Their fate was conditional upon the development of the Ottoman state, and, as the two centuries drew to a close, that state entered upon a phase of transformation and of consequent weakness.

The Ottoman organism has always displayed (and never more conspicuously than at the present moment) a much greater stability and vitality than any of its oriental predecessors. There was a vein of genius in its creators, and its youthful expansion permeated it with so much European blood that it became partly Europeanized in its inner tissues—sufficiently to partake, at any rate, in that faculty of indefinite organic growth which has so far revealed itself in European life. This acquired force has carried it on since the time when the impetus of its original institutions became spent—a time when purely oriental monarchies fall to pieces, and when Turkey herself hesitated between reconstruction and dissolution. That critical period began for her with the latter half of the seventeenth century, and incidentally opened new opportunities of life to her subject Greeks.

Substantial relief from their burdens—the primary though negative condition of national revival—accrued to the Greek peasantry from the decay of Ottoman militarism in all its branches. The Turkish feudal aristocracy, which had replaced the landed nobility of the Romaic Empire in Anatolia and established itself on the choicest lands in conquered Europe, was beginning to decline in strength. We have seen that it failed to implant itself in Krete, and its numbers were already stationary elsewhere. The Greek peasant slowly began to regain ground upon his Moslem lord, and he profited further by the degeneration of the janissary corps at the heart of the empire.

The janissaries had started as a militant, almost monastic body, condemned to celibacy, and recruited exclusively from the Christian tribute-children. But in 1566 they extorted the privilege of legal marriage for themselves, and of admittance into the corps for the sons of their wedlock. The next century completed their transformation from a standing army into a hereditary urban militia—an armed and privileged bourgeoisie, rapidly increasing in numbers and correspondingly jealous of extraneous candidates for the coveted vacancies in their ranks. They gradually succeeded in abolishing the enrolment of Christian recruits altogether, and the last regular levy of children for that purpose was made in 1676. Vested interests at Constantinople had freed the helpless peasant from the most crushing burden of all.

At the same moment the contemporary tendency in western Europe towards bureaucratic centralization began to extend itself to the Ottoman Empire. Its exponents were the brothers Achmet and Mustapha Köprili, who held the grand-vizierate in succession. They laid the foundations of a centralized administration, and, since the unadaptable Turk offered no promising material for their policy, they sought their instruments in the subject race. The continental Greeks were too effectively crushed to aspire beyond the preservation of their own existence; but the islands had been less sorely tried, and Khios, which had enjoyed over two centuries[1] of prosperity under the rule of a Genoese chartered company, and exchanged it for Ottoman sovereignty under peculiarly lenient conditions, could still supply Achmet a century later with officials of the intelligence and education he required, Khiots were the first to fill the new offices of ‘Dragoman of the Porte’ (secretary of state) and ‘Dragoman of the Fleet’ (civil complement of the Turkish capitan-pasha); and they took care in their turn to staff the subordinate posts of their administration with a host of pushing friends and dependants. The Dragoman of the Fleet wielded the fiscal, and thereby in effect the political, authority over the Greek islands in the Aegean; but this was not the highest power to which the new Greek bureaucracy attained. Towards the beginning of the eighteenth century Moldavia and Wallachia—the two ‘Danubian Provinces’ now united in the kingdom of Rumania—were placed in charge of Greek officials with the rank of voivode or prince, and with practically sovereign power within their delegated dominions. A Danubian principality became the reward of a successful dragoman’s career, and these high posts were rapidly monopolized by a close ring of official families, who exercised their immense patronage in favour of their race, and congregated round the Greek patriarch in the ‘Phanari’,[2] the Constantinopolitan slum assigned him for his residence by Mohammed the Conqueror.

[Footnote 1: 1346-1566.]

[Footnote 2: ‘Lighthouse-quarter.’]

The alliance of this parvenu ‘Phanariot’ aristocracy with the conservative Orthodox Church was not unnatural, for the Church itself had greatly extended its political power under Ottoman suzerainty. The Ottoman Government hardly regarded its Christian subjects as integral members of the state, and was content to leave their civil government in the hands of their spiritual pastors to an extent the Romaic emperors would never have tolerated. It allowed the Patriarchate at Constantinople to become its official intermediary with the Greek race, and it further extended the Greek patriarch’s authority over the other conquered populations of Orthodox faith—Bulgars, Rumans, and Serbs—which had never been incorporated in the ecclesiastical or political organization of the Romaic Empire, but which learnt under Ottoman rule to receive their priests and bishops from the Greek ecclesiastics of the capital, and even to call themselves by the Romaic name. In 1691 Mustapha Köprili recognized and confirmed the rights of all Christian subjects of the Sultan by a general organic law.

Mustapha’s ‘New Ordinance’ was dictated by the reverses which Christians beyond the frontier were inflicting upon the Ottoman arms, for pressure from without had followed hard upon disintegration within. Achmet’s pyrrhic triumph over Candia in 1669 was followed in 1683 by his brother Mustapha’s disastrous discomfiture before the walls of Vienna, and these two sieges marked the turn of the Ottoman tide. The ebb was slow, yet the ascendancy henceforth lay with Turkey’s Christian neighbours, and they began to cut short her frontiers on every side.

The Venetians had never lost hold upon the ‘Ionian’ chain of islands— Corfù, Cefalonia, Zante, and Cerigo—which flank the western coast of Greece, and in 1685 they embarked on an offensive on the mainland, which won them undisputed possession of Peloponnesos for twenty years.[1] Venice was far nearer than Turkey to her dissolution, and spent the last spasm of her energy on this ephemeral conquest. Yet she had maintained the contact of the Greek race with western Europe during the two centuries of despair, and the interlude of her rule in Peloponnesos was a fitting culmination to her work; for, brief though it was, it effectively broke the Ottoman tradition, and left behind it a system of communal self-government among the Peloponnesian Greeks which the returning Turk was too feeble to sweep away. The Turks gained nothing by the rapid downfall of Venice, for Austria as rapidly stepped into her place, and pressed with fresh vigour the attack from the north-west. North-eastward, too, a new enemy had arisen in Russia, which had been reorganized towards the turn of the century by Peter the Great with a radical energy undreamed of by any Turkish Köprili, and which found its destiny in opposition to the Ottoman Empire. The new Orthodox power regarded itself as the heir of the Romaic Empire from which it had received its first Christianity and culture. It aspired to repay the Romaic race in adversity by championing it against its Moslem oppressors, and sought its own reward in a maritime outlet on the Black Sea. From the beginning of the eighteenth century Russia repeatedly made war on Turkey, either with or without the co-operation of Austria; but the decisive bout in the struggle was the war of 1769-74. A Russian fleet appeared in the Mediterranean, raised an insurrection in Peloponnesos, and destroyed the Turkish squadron in battle. The Russian armies were still more successful on the steppes, and the Treaty of Kutchuk Kainardji not only left the whole north coast of the Black Sea in Russia’s possession, but contained an international sanction for the rights of the sultan’s Orthodox subjects. In 1783 a supplementary commercial treaty extorted for the Ottoman Greeks the right to trade under the Russian flag. The territorial sovereignty of Turkey in the Aegean remained intact, but the Russian guarantee gave the Greek race a more substantial security than the shadowy ordinance of Mustapha Köprili. The paralysing prestige of the Porte was broken, and Greek eyes were henceforth turned in hope towards Petersburg.

[Footnote 1: 1699-1718.]

By the end of the eighteenth century the condition of the Greeks had in fact changed remarkably for the better, and the French and English travellers who now began to visit the Ottoman Empire brought away the impression that a critical change in its internal equilibrium was at hand. The Napoleonic wars had just extinguished the Venetian Republic and swept the Ionian Islands into the struggle between England and France for the mastery of the Mediterranean. England had fortified herself in Cefalonia and Zante, France in Corfù, and interest centred on the opposite mainland, where Ali Pasha of Yannina maintained a formidable neutrality towards either power.

The career of Ali marked that phase in the decline of an Oriental empire when the task of strong government becomes too difficult for the central authority and is carried on by independent satraps with greater efficiency in their more limited sphere. Ali governed the Adriatic hinterland with practically sovereign power, and compelled the sultan for some years to invest his sons with the pashaliks of Thessaly and Peloponnesos. The greater part of the Greek race thus came in some degree under his control, and his policy towards it clearly reflected the transition from the old to the new. He waged far more effective war than the distant sultan upon local liberties, and, though the elimination of the feudal Turkish landowner was pure gain to the Greeks, they suffered themselves from the loss of traditional privileges which the original Ottoman conquest had left intact. The Armatoli, a local Christian militia who kept order in the mountainous mainland north of Peloponnesos where Turkish feudatories were rare, were either dispersed by Ali or enrolled in his regular army. And he was ruthless in the extermination of recalcitrant communities, like Agrapha on the Aspropotarno, which had never been inscribed on the taxation-rolls of the Romaic or the Ottoman treasury, or Suli, a robber clan ensconced in the mountains Immediately west of Ali’s capital. On the other hand, the administration of these pacified and consolidated dominions became as essentially Greek in character as the Phanariot régime beyond the Danube. Ali was a Moslem and an Albanian, but the Orthodox Greeks were in a majority among his subjects, and he knew how to take advantage of their abilities. His business was conducted by Greek secretaries in the Greek tongue, and Yannina, his capital, was a Greek city. European visitors to Yannina (for every one began the Levantine tour by paying his respects to Ali) were struck by the enterprise and intelligence of its citizens. The doctors were competent, because they had taken their education in Italy or France; the merchants were prosperous, because they had established members of their family at Odessa, Trieste, or even Hamburg, as permanent agents of their firm. A new Greek bourgeoisie had arisen, in close contact with the professional life of western Europe, and equally responsive to the new philosophical and political ideas that were being propagated by the French Revolution.

This intellectual ferment was the most striking change of all. Since the sack of Constantinople in 1204, Greek culture had retired into the monasteries—inaccessible fastnesses where the monks lived much the same life as the clansmen of Suli or Agrapha. Megaspélaion, the great cave quarried in the wall of a precipitous Peloponnesian ravine; Metéora, suspended on half a dozen isolated pinnacles of rock in Thessaly, where the only access was by pulley or rope-ladder; ‘Ayon Oros’, the confederation of monasteries great and small upon the mountain-promontory of Athos—these succeeded in preserving a shadow of the old tradition, at the cost of isolation from all humane influences that might have kept their spiritual inheritance alive. Their spirit was mediaeval, ecclesiastical, and as barren as their sheltering rocks; and the new intellectual disciples of Europe turned to the monasteries in vain. The biggest ruin on Athos is a boys’ school planned in the eighteenth century to meet the educational needs of all the Orthodox in the Ottoman Empire, and wrecked on the reefs of monastic obscurantism. But its founder, the Corfiot scholar Evyénios Voulgáris, did not hesitate to break with the past. He put his own educational ideas into practice at Yannina and Constantinople, and contributed to the great achievement of his contemporary, the Khiot Adhamandios Koráis, who settled in Paris and there evolved a literary adaptation of the Romaic patois to supersede the lifeless travesty of Attic style traditionally affected by ecclesiastical penmen. But the renaissance was not confined to Greeks abroad. The school on Athos failed, but others established themselves before the close of the eighteenth century in the people’s midst, even in the smaller towns and the remoter villages. The still flourishing secondary school of Dhimitzána, in the heart of Peloponnesos, began its existence in this period, and the national revival found expression in a new name. Its prophets repudiated the ‘Romaic’ name, with its associations of ignorance and oppression, and taught their pupils to think of themselves as ‘Hellenes’ and to claim in their own right the intellectual and political liberty of the Ancient Greeks.

This spiritual ‘Hellenism’, however, was only one manifestation of returning vitality, and was ultimately due to the concrete economic development with which it went hand in hand. The Greeks, who had found culture in western Europe, had come there for trade, and their commercial no less than their intellectual activity reacted in a penetrating way upon their countrymen at home. A mountain village like Ambelakia in Thessaly found a regular market for its dyed goods in Germany, and the commercial treaty of 1783 between Turkey and Russia encouraged communities which could make nothing of the land to turn their attention to the sea. Galaxhidi, a village on the northern shore of the Korinthian Gulf, whose only asset was its natural harbour, and Hydhra, Spetza, and Psarà, three barren little islands in the Aegean, had begun to lay the foundations of a merchant marine, when Napoleon’s boycott and the British blockade, which left no neutral flag but the Ottoman in the Mediterranean, presented the Greek shipmen that sailed under it with an opportunity they exploited to the full. The whitewashed houses of solid stone, rising tier above tier up the naked limestone mountainside, still testify to the prosperity which chance thus suddenly brought to the Hydhriots and their fellow islanders, and did not withdraw again till it had enabled them to play a decisive part in their nation’s history.

Their ships were small, but they were home-built, skilfully navigated, and profitably employed in the carrying trade of the Mediterranean ports. Their economic life was based on co-operation, for the sailors, as well as the captain and owner of the ship, who were generally the same person, took shares in the outlay and profit of each voyage; but their political organization was oligarchical—an executive council elected by and from the owners of the shipping. Feud and intrigue were rife between family and family, class and class, and between the native community and the resident aliens, without seriously affecting the vigour and enterprise of the commonwealth as a whole. These seafaring islands on the eve of the modern Greek Revolution were an exact reproduction of the Aigina, Korinth, and Athens which repelled the Persian from Ancient Greece. The germs of a new national life were thus springing up among the Greeks in every direction— in mercantile colonies scattered over the world from Odessa to Alexandria and from Smyrna to Trieste; among Phanariot princes in the Danubian Provinces and their ecclesiastical colleagues at Constantinople; in the islands of the Aegean and the Ionian chain, and upon the mountains of Suli and Agrapha. But the ambitions this national revival aroused were even greater than the reality itself. The leaders of the movement did not merely aspire to liberate the Greek nation from the Turkish yoke. They were conscious of the assimilative power their nationality possessed. The Suliots, for example, were an immigrant Albanian tribe, who had learnt to speak Greek from the Greek peasants over whom they tyrannized. The Hydhriot and Spetziot islanders were Albanians too, who had even clung to their primitive language during the two generations since they took up their present abode, but had become none the less firmly linked to their Greek-speaking neighbours in Peloponnesos by their common fellowship in the Orthodox Church. The numerous Albanian colonies settled up and down the Greek continent were at least as Greek in feeling as they. And why should not the same prove true of the Bulgarian population, in the Balkans, who had belonged from the beginning to the Orthodox Church, and had latterly been brought by improvident Ottoman policy within the Greek patriarch’s fold? Or why should not the Greek administrators beyond the Danube imbue their Ruman subjects with a sound Hellenic sentiment? In fact, the prophets of Hellenism did not so much desire to extricate the Greek nation from the Ottoman Empire as to make it the ruling element in the empire itself by ejecting the Moslem Turks from their privileged position and assimilating all populations of Orthodox faith. These dreams took shape in the foundation of a secret society—the ‘Philikì Hetairía’ or ‘League of Friends’—which established itself at Odessa in 1814 with the connivence of the Russian police, and opened a campaign of propaganda in anticipation of an opportunity to strike.

The initiative came from the Ottoman Government itself. At the weakest moment in its history the empire found in Sultan Mahmud a ruler of peculiar strength, who saw that the only hope of overcoming his dangers lay in meeting them half-way. The national movement of Hellenism was gathering momentum in the background, but it was screened by the personal ambitions of Ali of Yannina, and Mahmud reckoned to forestall both enemies by quickly striking Ali down.

In the winter of 1819-20 Ali was outlawed, and in the spring the invasion of his territories began. Both the Moslem combatants enlisted Christian Armatoli, and all continental Greece was under arms. By the end of the summer Ali’s outlying strongholds had fallen, his armies were driven in, and he himself was closely invested in Yannina; but with autumn a deadlock set in, and the sultan’s reckoning was thrown out. In November 1820 the veteran soldier Khurshid was appointed to the pashalik of Peloponnesos to hold the Greeks in check and close accounts with Ali. In March 1821, after five months spent in organizing his province, Khurshid felt secure enough to leave it for the Yannina lines. But he was mistaken; for within a month of his departure Peloponnesos was ablaze.

The ‘Philikì Hetairía’ had decided to act, and the Peloponnesians responded enthusiastically to the signal. In the north Germanòs, metropolitan bishop of Patras, rallied the insurgents at the monastery of Megaspélaion, and unfurled the monastic altar-cloth as a national standard. In the south the peninsula of Maina, which had been the latest refuge of ancient Hellenism, was now the first to welcome the new, and to throw off the shadowy allegiance it had paid for a thousand years to Romaic archonts and Ottoman capitan-pashas. Led by Petros Mavromichalis, the chief of the leading clan, the Mainates issued from their mountains. This was in April, and by the middle of May all the open country had been swept clear, and the hosts joined hands before Tripolitza, which was the seat of Ottoman government at the central point of the province. The Turkish garrison attacked, but was heavily defeated at Valtetzi by the tactical skill of Theodore Kolokotrónis the ‘klepht’, who had become experienced in guerrilla warfare through his alternate professions of brigand and gendarme—a career that had increased its possibilities as the Ottoman system decayed. After Kolokotrónis’s victory, the Greeks kept Tripolitza under a close blockade. Early in October it fell amid frightful scenes of pillage and massacre, and Ottoman dominion in the Peloponnesos fell with it. On January 22, 1822, Korinth, the key to the isthmus, passed into the Greeks’ hands, and only four fortresses—Nauplia, Patras, Koron, and Modhon—still held out within it against Greek investment. Not a Turk survived in the Peloponnesos beyond their walls, for the slaughter at Tripolitza was only the most terrible instance of what happened wherever a Moslem colony was found. In Peloponnesos, at any rate, the revolution had been grimly successful.

There had also been successes at sea. The merchant marine of the Greek islands had suffered grievously from the fall of Napoleon and the settlement at Vienna, which, by restoring normal conditions of trade, had destroyed their abnormal monopoly. The revolution offered new opportunities for profitable venture, and in April 1821 Hydhra, Spetza and Psarà hastened to send a privateering fleet to sea. As soon as the fleet crossed the Aegean, Samos rid itself of the Turks. At the beginning of June the rickety Ottoman squadron issued from the Dardanelles, but it was chased back by the islanders under the lee of Mitylini. Memories of Russian naval tactics in 1770 led the Psariots to experiment in fire-ships, and one of the two Turkish ships of the line fell a victim to this attack. Within a week of setting sail, the diminished Turkish squadron was back again in the Dardanelles, and the islanders were left with the command of the sea.

The general Christian revolution thus seemed fairly launched, and in the first panic the threatened Moslems began reprisals of an equally general kind. In the larger Turkish cities there were massacres of Christian minorities, and the Government lent countenance to them by murdering its own principal Christian official Gregorios, the Greek patriarch at Constantinople, on April 22, 1821. But Sultan Mahmud quickly recovered himself. He saw that his empire could not survive a racial war, and determined to prevent the present revolt from assuming such a character. His plan was to localize it by stamping out the more distant sparks with all his energy, before concentrating his force at leisure upon the main conflagration.

This policy was justified by the event. On March 6 the ‘Philikì Hetairia’ at Odessa had opened its own operations in grandiose style by sending a filibustering expedition across the Russo-Turkish frontier under command of Prince Alexander Hypsilantis, a Phanariot in the Russian service. Hypsilantis played for a general revolt of the Ruman population in the Danubian Principalities and a declaration of war against Turkey on the part of Russia. But the Rumans had no desire to assist the Greek bureaucrats who oppressed them, and the Tsar Alexander had been converted by the experiences of 1812-13 to a pacifistic respect for the status quo. Prince Hypsilantis was driven ignominiously to internment across the Austrian frontier, little more than a hundred days after his expedition began; and his fiasco assured the Ottoman Government of two encouraging facts—that the revolution would not carry away the whole Orthodox population but would at any rate confine itself to the Greeks; and that the struggle against it would be fought out for the present, at least, without foreign intervention.

In the other direction, however, rebellion was spreading northward from Peloponnesos to continental Greece. Galaxídhi revolted in April, and was followed in June by Mesolonghi—a prosperous town of fishermen, impregnably situated in the midst of the lagoons at the mouth of the Aspropotamo, beyond the narrows of the Korinthian Gulf. By the end of the month, north-western Greece was free as far as the outposts of Khurshid Pasha beyond the Gulf of Arta.

Further eastward, again, in the mountains between the Gulf of Korinth and the river Elládha (Sperkheiòs), the Armatoli of Ali’s faction had held their ground, and gladly joined the revolution on the initiative of their captains Dhiakos and Odhyssèvs. But the movement found its limits. The Turkish garrison of Athens obstinately held out during the winter of 1821-2, and the Moslems of Negrepont (Euboía) maintained their mastery in the island. In Agrapha they likewise held their own, and, after one severely punished raid, the Agraphiot Armatoli were induced to re-enter the sultan’s service on liberal terms. The Vlachs in the gorges of the Aspropotamo were pacified with equal success; and Dramali, Khurshid’s lieutenant, who guarded the communications between the army investing Yannina and its base at Constantinople, was easily able to crush all symptoms of revolt in Thessaly from his head-quarters at Lárissa. Still further east, the autonomous Greek villages on the mountainous promontories of Khalkidhiki had revolted in May, in conjunction with the well-supplied and massively fortified monasteries of the ‘Ayon Oros’; but the Pasha of Salonika called down the South Slavonic Moslem landowners from the interior, sacked the villages, and amnestied the monastic confederation on condition of establishing a Turkish garrison in their midst and confiscating their arms. The monks’ compliance was assisted by the excommunication under which the new patriarch at Constantinople had placed all the insurgents by the sultan’s command.

The movement was thus successfully localised on the European continent, and further afield it was still more easily cut short. After the withdrawal of the Turkish squadron, the Greek fleet had to look on at the systematic destruction of Kydhonies,[1] a flourishing Greek industrial town on the mainland opposite Mitylini which had been founded under the sultan’s auspices only forty years before. All that the islanders could do was to take off the survivors in their boats; and when they dispersed to their ports in autumn, the Ottoman ships came out again from the Dardanelles, sailed round Peloponnesos into the Korinthian Gulf, and destroyed Galaxídhi. A still greater catastrophe followed the reopening of naval operations next spring. In March 1822 the Samians landed a force on Khios and besieged the Turkish garrison, which was relieved after three weeks by the arrival of the Ottoman fleet. A month later the Greek fleet likewise appeared on the scene, and on June 18 a Psariot captain, Constantine Kanaris, actually destroyed the Ottoman flag-ship by a daring fire-ship attack. Upon this the Ottoman fleet fled back as usual to the Dardanelles; yet the only consequence was the complete devastation, in revenge, of helpless Khios. The long-shielded prosperity of the island was remorselessly destroyed, the people were either enslaved or massacred, and the victorious fleet had to stand by as passively this time as at the destruction of Kydhonies the season before. In the following summer, again, the same fate befell Trikéri, a maritime community on the Gulf of Volo which had gained its freedom when the rest of Thessaly stirred in vain; and so in 1823 the revolution found itself confined on sea, as well as on land, to the focus where it had originated in April 1821.

[Footnote 1: Turkish Aivali.]

This isolation was a practical triumph for Sultan Mahmud. The maintenance of the Ottoman Empire on the basis of Moslem ascendancy was thereby assured; but it remained to be seen whether the isolated area could now be restored to the status quo in which the rest of his dominions had been retained.

During the whole season of 1821 the army of Khurshid had been held before Yannina. But in February 1822 Yannina fell, Ali was slain, his treasure seized, and his troops disbanded. The Ottoman forces were liberated for a counterattack on Peloponnesos. Already in April Khurshid broke up his camp at Lárissa, and his lieutenant Dramali was given command of the new expedition towards the south. He crossed the Sperkheiòs at the beginning of July with an army of twenty thousand men.[1] Athens had capitulated to Odhyssèvs ten days before; but it had kept open the road for Dramali, and north-eastern Greece fell without resistance into his hands. The citadel of Korinth surrendered as tamely as the open country, and he was master of the isthmus before the end of the month. Nauplia meanwhile had been treating with its besiegers for terms, and would have surrendered to the Greeks already if they had not driven their bargain so hard. Dramali hurried on southward into the plain to the fortress’s relief, raised the siege, occupied the town of Argos, and scattered the Greek forces into the hills. But the citadel of Argos held out against him, and the positions were rapidly reversed. Under the experienced direction of Kolokotrónis, the Greeks from their hill-fastnesses ringed round the plain of Argos and scaled up every issue. Dramali’s supplies ran out. An attempt of his vanguard to break through again towards the north was bloodily repulsed, and he barely succeeded two days later in extricating the main body in a demoralized condition, with the loss of all his baggage-train. The Turkish army melted away, Dramali was happy to die at Korinth, and Khurshid was executed by the sultan’s command. The invasion of Peloponnesos had broken down, and nothing could avert the fall of Nauplia. The Ottoman fleet hovered for one September week in the offing, but Kanaris’s fire-ships took another ship of the line in toll at the roadsteads of Tenedos before it safely regained the Dardanelles. The garrison of Nauplia capitulated in December, on condition of personal security and liberty, and the captain of a British frigate, which arrived on the spot, took measures that the compact should be observed instead of being broken by the customary massacre. But the strongest fortress in Peloponnesos was now in Greek hands.

[Footnote 1: Including a strong contingent of Moslem Slavs—Bulgarian Pomaks from the Aegean hinterland and Serbian Bosniaks from the Adriatic.]

In the north-west the season had not passed so well. When the Turks invested Ali in Yannina, they repatriated the Suliot exiles in their native mountains. But a strong sultan was just as formidable to the Suliots as a strong pasha, so they swelled their ranks by enfranchising their peasant-serfs, and made common cause with their old enemy in his adversity. Now that Ali was destroyed, the Suliots found themselves in a precarious position, and turned to the Greeks for aid. But on July 16 the Greek advance was checked by a severe defeat at Petta in the plain of Arta. In September the Suliots evacuated their impregnable fortresses in return for a subsidy and a safe-conduct, and Omer Vrioni, the Ottoman commander in the west,[1] was free to advance in turn towards the south. On November 6 he actually laid siege to Mesolonghi, but here his experiences were as discomfiting as Dramali’s. He could not keep open his communications, and after heavy losses retreated again to Arta in January 1823.

[Footnote 1: He was a renegade officer of Ali’s.]

In 1823 the struggle seemed to be lapsing into stalemate. The liberated Peloponnesos had failed to propagate the revolution through the remainder of the Ottoman Empire; the Ottoman Government had equally failed to reconquer the Peloponnesos by military invasion. This season’s operations only seemed to emphasize the deadlock. The Ottoman commander in the west raised an auxiliary force of Moslem and Catholic clansmen from northern Albania, and attempted to reach Mesolonghi once more. But he penetrated no further than Anatolikòn—the Mesolonghiots’ outpost village at the head of the lagoons—and the campaign was only memorable for the heroic death of Marko Botzaris the Suliot in a night attack upon the Ottoman camp. At sea, the two fleets indulged in desultory cruises without an encounter, for the Turks were still timid and incompetent, while the growing insubordination and dissension on the Greek ships made concerted action there, too, impossible. By the end of the season it was clear that the struggle could only definitively be decided by the intervention of a third party on one side or the other—unless the Greeks brought their own ruin upon themselves.