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

THE VENETIANS IN DALMATIA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

METHODS OF THE TURK

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

THE SLAVS WHO MIGRATED

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

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

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

THE CONSOLATION OF THOSE WHO REMAINED

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

I.

II.

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

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

GOOD LIVING IN HUNGARY

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

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

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

THE PROTESTANT INFLUENCE

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

DUBROVNIK, REFUGE OF THE ARTS

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

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

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

HOW SHE SMOOTHED HER WAY

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

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

HER COMMERCIAL ENTERPRISE

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

HER NORTHERN KINSMEN AND THE MILITARY FRONTIERS

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

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

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

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

THE OPPRESSIVE OVERLORDS OF THE YUGOSLAVS

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

THE GREAT MIGRATION UNDER THE PATRIARCH

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

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

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

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

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

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

ACTIVITIES OF THE SOUTHERN SLAVS UNDER THE HABSBURGS

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

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

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

THE POSITION OF THEIR CHURCH

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

SERBS ASSIST THE BULGARIAN RENASCENCE

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

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

THE GERMAN COLONISTS IN THE BANAT

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

THE SOUTHERN SLAV COLONISTS AND THEIR RELIGION

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

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

BUNJEVCI, ŠOKCI AND KRAŠOVANI

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

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

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

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

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