The History of Yugoslavia. Henry Baerlein
From the interesting series of documents, Latin, Arabic, Byzantine and others, which have been collected in Monimenta Sclavenica by Miroslav Premrou, notary public at Caporetto, and published in 1919 at Ljubljana (Laibach), we can see that the Slovenes occupied a much greater extent of territory than do their descendants of our day—"ab ortu Vistulæ … per immensa spatia … " (cf. Jordanis de orig. Goth. c. 5)—to beyond the Tagliamento, and from the Piave (cf. Ibrahim Ibn-Jakub[5]) to the Adriatic, the Ægean and the Black Sea.
One of the earliest of the above-named Slovene princes was Samo, a Slovene by adoption, who struggled in Pannonia against the Avars in the first half of the seventh century; it happened also in the year 626 that other Slovenes, as well as the Avars, attacked Constantinople. Both of them withdrew, the former being defeated at sea and the latter failing under the city walls. The Avars, having thus shown that they were vulnerable, had to bear an attack on a grand scale made upon them by the Slovenes, this attack being more shrewdly organized than any other transaction in which the Slovenes had as yet engaged. And they still appeared to be reluctant to form even a loosely knit State; they roamed about the Balkans and the adjacent countries to the north-west, seeking for lands that were adapted to their patriarchal organization. Not until the ninth century did they set up what might be called Governments on the Adriatic littoral, where they had no hostility to fear from the last remaining Romans, who were refugees in certain towns and islands.
TWO EARLY STATES
The two most important of these Slav States were, firstly, that one, the predecessor of our modern Croatia, which extended from the mouth of the Raša (Arša) in Istria to the mouth of the Cetina in central Dalmatia, and, secondly, to the south-east a principality, afterwards called Raška, in what is now western Serbia. In a little time the Slavs began to have relations with the towns of the Dalmatian coast and with the islands which were nominally under the sway of Byzantium, but in consequence of their remoteness and their exposed position had succeeded in becoming almost independent republics.
ECCLESIASTICAL ROCKS
Now Christianity had been definitely introduced into Dalmatia in the fourth century, but it was not until several centuries later that it made any headway with the Slavs, of whom the Croats, in the ninth century, were baptized by Frank missionaries. The arrival of the Slavs, by the bye, had been sometimes looked upon with scanty favour by the Popes: in July of the year 600 we find Gregory I. saying in a letter to the Bishop of Salona that he was much disturbed at the news he had just received "de Sclavorum gente, quæ vobis valde imminet, affligor vehementer et conturbor." Similarly, the Council of Split branded the Slav missionaries as heretics and the Slav alphabet as the invention of the devil.[6] … While the Croats were falling[7] under the dominion of the Franks, the holy brothers St. Cyril and St. Methodus, who had been born at Salonica in 863, were carrying the first Slav book from Constantinople to Moravia, whither they travelled at the invitation of the Prince of Moravia, Rastislav, St. Cyril going as an apostle and theologian, St. Methodus as a statesman and organizer. This famous book was a translation from the Greek, but it was written in Palæo-Slav characters, the Glagolitic that were to become so venerated that when the French kings were crowned at Reims their oath was sworn upon a Glagolitic copy of the Gospels;[8] and the spirit of that earliest book was also Slav: it expresses the political and cultural resistance of Prince Rastislav against the State of the Franks, that is, against the German nationality, of whom it was feared that with the Cross in front of them they would trample down for ever the political liberties of the young Slav peoples. German theologians were giving a more and more dogmatic character to Western Christianity, whereas the Christianity of the East was at that time more liberal; it gathered to itself the Slavs of Raška and of the neighbouring regions, such as southern Dalmatia, while the influence which it exerted was so powerful that when the Croats, after vacillating between the two Churches, finally joined that of Rome, they took with them the old Slav liturgy that is used by them in many places on the mainland and the islands down to this day. Thus their Church became a national institution, and that in spite of all the long-continued efforts of the Vatican, as also of the Venetian Republic. The Roman Catholic hierarchy, by the way, is endeavouring to have this liturgy made lawful in the whole of Yugoslavia; the only opponent I met was a Jesuit at Zagreb who foresaw that the priests, being no longer obliged to learn Latin, might indeed omit to do so. Pope Pius X. was likewise an opponent of the Slav liturgy, because a Polish priest told him that it would lead to Pan-Slavism and hence to schism; but it is thought—among others by the patriotic Prince-Bishop Jeglić of Ljubljana—that the late Pope would have given his consent, had it not been for Austria, which recoiled from what would have probably strengthened the Slav element. One of the cherished policies of Austria was to utilize in every possible way the religious differences between the Southern Slavs.
THE SLAVS AND THEIR NEIGHBOURS
But the two States formed beside the Adriatic and in Raška were not only separated from early days by their religion; they had quite different neighbours to deal with. In 887 the Croats imposed their will on the Venetians, against whom they had been for some time waging war—and not merely a defensive war—the Venetians having attacked the country in order to despoil it of timber and of people, whom they liked to sell in the markets of the Levant. In 887, however, after the defeat and death of their doge, Pietro Candiano, the Venetians were forced to pay—and paid without interruption down to the year 1000—an annual tribute to the Croats, who in return permitted them to sail freely on the Adriatic. Beside that sea the Croats founded new towns, such as Šibenik (of which the Italian name is Sebenico), and carried on an amicable intercourse with the autonomous Byzantine towns: Iader, the picturesque modern capital which they came to call Zadar and the Venetians Zara; Tragurium, the delightful spot which is their Trogir and the Venetian Traù, and so forth. These friendly relations existed both before 882 and subsequently, when the towns agreed to pay the Croats an annual tribute, in return for which the local provosts were confirmed in office by the rulers of Croatia. We have plentiful evidence from the ruins of royal castles and of the many churches built by the Slavs in this period, as well as from the discoveries of arms and ornaments, that the people had attained to a condition of prosperity. At the beginning of the tenth century, so we are told by the learned emperor and historian Constantine Porphyrogenetos, the Croatian Prince Tomislav could raise 100,000 infantry and 60,000 cavalry; he had likewise eighty large vessels, each with a crew of forty men, at his disposal, and a hundred smaller ships with ten to twenty men in each of them.
As for the State of Raška, protected on the south and west by formidable mountains, and in the very centre of the Serbian tribes, it is there that the lore and customs of the people have survived in their purest form. Raška was the land in which the love of liberty was always kept alive and from there the expeditions used to sally forth whose aim, frustrated many times, it was to found a powerful Serbian State. The chieftain, Tshaslav Kronimirović, did, as a matter of fact, succeed in uniting his State with two others, one being in Bosnia and the other in Zeta, which is now Montenegrin. He even added three other provinces on the Adriatic coast; but after his death the State was dissolved and in the course of the conflicts which followed, the State of Zeta assumed the leadership. It had been necessary for these Serbian rulers of Raška and Zeta to resist the frequent assaults not only of the Byzantines but of the Bulgars.
SIMEON THE BULGAR
"Frequent assaults" is probably a correct description of what the Serb of that period had to endure at the hands of this particular opponent, the Bulgar. Having swarmed across the Peninsula, the Bulgar was now in the act of consolidating a great kingdom, for this was the magnificent epoch of the Bulgarian Tzar Simeon, whose word ran far and wide from the Adriatic. The Bulgarian map[9] which exhibits the Tzardom at the death of Simeon is painted in the same brown colour from opposite Corfu right across to the