The History of Yugoslavia. Henry Baerlein
the Bulgar in song, find them engaged, when he comes back, in drinking together and not in making him the subject of antiquarian and acrimonious debate.
THE "GOOD CHRISTIANS" OF BOSNIA
While Serbia was listening to the Turkish cavalry, the Ban of Bosnia, Tvertko, raised that province to its greatest eminence. Being a collateral heir of the old house of Nemania, and having wide Serbian lands under his rule, he had himself proclaimed king on the tomb of St. Sava in 1377. He called his banat "the kingdom of Serbia," and allied himself to Prince Lazar, the most powerful of the Serbian rulers who were still independent. In Bosnia at this time the Bogomile heresy, after winning the people of Herzegovina, that wild and mournful province, attracted not only the peasants but the bans. Just as Dušan and other Balkan princes had made of an autocephalous Church the surest foundation of their States, so did the Bans of Bosnia, beginning with Kulin at the close of the twelfth century, see in the Bogomile movement a national Church that would render their subjects more intractable to outside influences, to religious suggestions emanating from Rome, and to political ambitions that came from Hungary. The people, for their part, flocked to the ranks of the "good Christians," as the sect was called, on account of the Bogomile humility, the democratic organization of a Church that was in such contrast with the formalism of Byzantine ceremonial, and also on account of some pagan superstitions that were mingled with this Christianity and made to these simple, recently converted Christians a most potent appeal. It was in vain that the Popes preached a crusade against the Bogomiles, in vain that the Kings of Hungary descended on their heretical vassals; for the ban, in one way or another, would divert that wrath—sometimes, if no other choice presented itself, he became the temporary instrument of this wrath while standing at the people's back. From all the world, so say contemporary records, there was a constant stream of heretics to Bosnia, where now the Bogomiles were found in the most exalted positions. Ceaselessly the Popes persecuted them, and when at last in Sigismund of Hungary an ardent extirpator visited the land there came about a terrible result, which has made Bosnia so different from other Serbian territories.
KOSSOVO
Tvertko did his utmost to make of Bosnia the kernel of another great Slav State. The death of Lewis of Hungary freed him from his most redoubtable adversary; Dalmatia, Croatia and other lands were joining him—but then in 1389 came Kossovo, the fatal field of blackbirds, where a disloyal coalition of Serbian, Croatian, Albanian and Bulgarian chieftains went down in irretrievable disaster. Milos Obilić, who is now one of Serbia's popular heroes, had been suspected of lukewarmness; he answered his accusers by gaining access to the Sultan's camp and slaying the Sultan. Not only did the Turks put him to death, but they decapitated their prisoner, Prince Lazar, and all the other chiefs.
The Slavs along the Adriatic were now also on the eve of dire misfortune: protracted wars of succession, in consequence of the death in 1382 of Lewis of Hungary, had ravaged that country and Croatia, so that in their enfeebled condition they could give no assistance to the towns and islands of Dalmatia which for so long had been struggling to elude the grip of Venice. But even so—and with many places handing themselves over voluntarily, in disgust at the almost incredible treason of their elected monarch, Ladislas of Naples, who, after long bargaining, sold his rights to Venice for a hundred thousand ducats, and with many places, in dread of the Turks, placing themselves under the protection of Venice—even so the Venetians had a great deal of trouble in occupying Dalmatia, and a hundred years elapsed before they had the whole of it. As for the two ports, Triest and Rieka (Fiume), they had passed through various episcopal or aristocratic hands. Triest had been in a position to set her face against falling to Venice, of whom she had had, from the tenth to the twelfth centuries, an adequate experience. Both Triest and Rieka were now to pass into the power of the Habsburgs.
GATHERING DARKNESS
For a few years after Kossovo the Serbs resisted; but their efforts, now at Belgrade, which was made the capital and fortified by Stephen the chivalrous son of Prince Lazar, now at Smederevo on the Danube, were spasmodic. Bands of Turks and also of Magyars were terrorizing the country; and the sagacious old despot George Branković was the last to offer opposition to the Turk at Smederevo. Meanwhile in Bosnia, the Bogomiles, driven to despair by persecution, had been calling to the Turk. Constantinople fell in 1453, Serbia laid down her arms in 1459, while in 1463 Muhammed ii. appeared before Jajce, Bosnia's capital, where one can still see the skeleton of Stephen Tomažević, the last king, who was executed by the Sultan's order. And now in this land of heresy, which had become so hostile to the established Churches, hundreds of those who professed the Bogomile faith went over eagerly to Islam; they hoped that in this way they would triumph at the expense of their late persecutors. Those who had worldly possessions were the first to embrace Islam, in order to safeguard them. Those who had neither wealth nor much accumulated hatred remained Christians. One would expect that people who had adopted a religion under these impulses would be even more uncompromising than the usual convert, and indeed, as a general rule, the ex-Christian begs and aghas displayed until recent times not only a more than Turkish observance of the outward forms of Islam but a tyranny over the wretched raias, their slaves, that was much more than Turkish.
Fortune had turned her back upon the Southern Slavs. In the north the Slovenes were imprisoned in the Holy Roman Empire, while the Croats—save for the time when they were under Tvertko—had a succession of alien rulers, such as the aforementioned Ladislas, whom they naturally disliked.
After Kossovo some of the Serbian nobles had fled to Hungary, to Bosnia and to Montenegro. It was among the almost inaccessible, bleak rocks of Montenegro that a few thousand Serbs managed to retain their liberty. Various Serbian tribes or clans thus found a refuge, and owing to their isolation from each other they preserved their differences. They have, in fact, preserved them, as well as the tribal organization, down to the present day. And then there was Dubrovnik, the stalwart little republic. Now that she stood alone she needed all her acumen. Yet if she paid necessary tribute to the powerful, she would not give up helping the fallen. From this Catholic town in 1390, the following message was sent to the Serbian Prince Vuk Branković: "If—and God forbid that it should be so—Gospodin Vuk should not succeed in saving Serbia, and should be driven thence either by the Magyars or the Turks or anyone else, we will receive the Gospodin Vuk and the Gospodja Mara his wife, together with their children and their treasure, in all good faith in our city; and if Gospodin Vuk desire to build a church of his own faith here for his use, he shall be at liberty to do so."[19]
Darkness lay over the world of the Southern Slav—under the Turk there was no history. Generation followed generation, but the day of Kossovo does not seem to the Serbs as though it were a distant day. Do not we who go about our business in the brilliance of the morning sometimes linger to recall the frightful setting of the sun? And every year the Serbian people sing the Mass for the repose of them who died at Kossovo. … When, after more than five hundred years, the Serbian soldiers in the Balkan War came back to this historic plain one saw them halting, without being ordered to do so, crossing themselves and presenting arms.
FOOTNOTES:
[4] From the word sloviti, to speak—meaning those who can speak to and comprehend one another.
[5] Premrou quotes from the account of this ambassador's journey in the year 965, which was published at Petrograd in 1898.
[6] Cf. Serbia, by L. F. Waring. London, 1917.
[7] The sources of the ancient history of Croatia have been collected by F. Rački in his Documenta historiæ Croaticæ periodum antiquam illustrantia, Zagreb, 1877. Cf. also his well-known and excellent essays in Rad. jugoslav. Akad.; the Poviest Hrvata