The Birth of Yugoslavia. Henry Baerlein
of printing-presses was not greatly felt: in Bulgaria there was now no press at all, in Serbia a few prayer-books were roughly printed in the monasteries; but in the sixteenth century the monks, for the copying of these books, had reverted to the use of pen and ink.
There had been in the bygone days, in the empires of Simeon and Dušan, for example, a privileged class, commonly called an aristocracy, which as elsewhere had arisen from the people having been obliged to submit themselves to military discipline. … And it was in those dreary days when all the raia felt themselves as brothers[24] that the Serb and Bulgar planted that democracy which flourishes among them now. They saw what dangers threatened in the towns. Vuk Karajič, the reformer of the Serbian language, tells of certain merchants there who, by assuming Turkish apparel and customs, came to be no longer counted as Serbs. And more numerous by far were the townsfolk, nobles and merchants and others, who went to live among the countryfolk and intermarried with them, and produced a people which is better described not as a democracy, but as an aristocracy.
GOOD LIVING IN HUNGARY
And always we hear that those in the Banat and those in the still more fertile province of Bačka, to the west of it, or those who had gone even farther west, into the wine-growing hills of Baranja, had no reason to regret their enterprise. King Matthew Corvinus of Hungary writes to the Pope on the 12th of January 1483, informing him that 200,000 Serbs have come into the Banat and Bačka since 1479. He adds that he is favourably disposed towards them, as they are a fighting race of the first order, so that he can trust them to defend those provinces against the Turk. … Not only, therefore, did he bestow upon them exceptional privileges, but in 1471 he appointed Vuk, the grandson of George Branković, to be Serbian despot of southern Hungary. This newly organized dominion on the left bank of the Danube and the Save was much more important than those of Transylvania or of Szekeliek, which were held by Hungarian magnates and which, in the event of war, had to furnish, each of them, four hundred horsemen, whereas the Serbian despot undertook to furnish a thousand.
The earliest Serbian settlement in Baranja appears to have consisted of natives of the Morava valley who came in 1508 to a district near Ciklos. The king made over the castle of Ciklos to their leader, Stephen Stiljanović, called the Just, and when the Turks broke into Baranja they murdered him. History[25] relates that some years after this on the 14th of August the pasha, a man of Serbian origin, commanded that the corpse be exhumed; whereupon a ring on the dead man's finger proved that he was related to the pasha. According to the Turkish rules of that period it was illegal to celebrate the Mass except at night, and in the open air. Now every year on the night of the 14th of August a Mass is sung, with the congregation holding torches and candles, out on the side of a hill. Afterwards they dance, and so forth.
However, it was the Banat to which the Serbs chiefly rallied, and after the fall of the fortress of Belgrade in 1521 they came in such multitudes that large portions of it had an exclusively Serbian character. And they were given the sole charge of defending it, while the Hungarians retired to the north. But Hungary herself went down at the terrific battle of Mohács—10,000 Serbs under their voivoda, Paul, fought in the Hungarian ranks—and after the fall of Buda-Pest the political organization of the Serbs, with a despot as their ruler, came to an end, being replaced by a religious organization, at the head of which was the restored Patriarchate of Peć. The diocese which the Patriarchs from their not very accessible monastery were supposed to administrate included all the Serbs between Monastir and Buda-Pest, and from the Adriatic to the Struma River. It was at this time that in the other Yugoslav lands, to the west and north, there came a breath of wind from the Reformation.
THE PROTESTANT INFLUENCE
When the German reformers tried, by way of the Yugoslavs, to reach Rome, they found a printing-press at Urach, from which, between 1561 and 1564, a number of books in Glagolitic characters (and in Cyrillic, a special form thereof) were issued. The most cultivated of the Glagolitic clergy in Istria and the Croatian littoral, such as Antony Dalmatin, Primus Trubar the Slovene and George Jurišić, were enthusiastic in seconding the press and in seeking, as writers, to disseminate Protestantism in the Slav world. One of their most notable fellow-workers was Matthew Vlacić (Mathias Flacius Illyricus), professor at the Universities of Wittenberg, Jena, Strassbourg and Antwerp, a veritable encyclopædist of the Reformation, and, with Luther and Melanchthon, one of its leaders. A very distinguished man, who had already, about 1550, joined the Protestant Church, was Peter Paul Vergerius; before 1550 he had twice been Papal Nuncio in Germany, a bishop in Croatia and afterwards in Istria. The rank and file of the Glagolitic clergy received these books with joy, for the Roman hierarchy, which had small liking for this truly national Church, would have been glad to see it perish in ignorance, with no books and no culture. By the way, the lower clergy remained what they had been—a national clergy. They availed themselves of these Glagolitic books from the Protestant press, but for that reason were not going to become Protestants. Theological subtleties were repugnant to them, and before and after the Council of Trent they married and lived a family life.
DUBROVNIK, REFUGE OF THE ARTS
The intellectual life of the Yugoslavs would, but for Dubrovnik, have died out altogether. And even at Dubrovnik, of which the Southern Slav thinks always with pride and gratitude, there was a movement to turn away from the Slav world. This was certainly one of the periods, which reappear not seldom in the story of Dubrovnik, when it seemed that miracles of wisdom would be wanted for the steering of the ship of State. Venice and the Turkish Empire were as two tremendous waves that rose on either side. By a very clever show of yielding, the little Republic had for a time disarmed the Turks, and, later on, when the Venetians declared that all the commercial treaties existing between the Dalmatian towns and Turkey were void, it was necessary for Dubrovnik also to accommodate herself to this enactment and to restrict her trade to Spain and the African coast. It would under these circumstances be most imprudent, so urged some of the citizens of Dubrovnik, if they were officiously to advertise their relationship to the hapless Slavs, who were enslaved to the Republic's mighty neighbours. And in 1472 the Senate had directed that within its walls no speeches should henceforth be made in Slav. But as the Senate consisted of forty-five nobles, and these were obliged to be over forty years of age, one may say that they did not represent what was most virile in the State; at all events, this isolated tribute to expediency may for a time have been observed in that assemblage, in the world of letters it was disregarded. And this is the more wonderful when we remember that Dubrovnik had from Italy a language that was already formed, she had Italian models and printers and even their literary taste. But Šiško Menčetic and Džore Držić—both of them nobles, by the way—started at once to write verses in Slav; not very sublime verses, as they were principally love-songs of the school that imitated Petrarch, but it is pleasing to recall that they were written in spite of the thunders of Elias Crijević, a contemporary renegade. Under the name of Elias di Cerva this gentleman travelled to Rome, where he made himself a disciple of Pomponius Lætus and once more modified his good Slav name into Ælius Lampridius Cerva, and received at the Quirinal Academy the crown of Latin poetry. Having thus qualified himself to be a schoolmaster, he went back to Dubrovnik and settled down to that profession. He was likewise very active as a publicist on the "barbaric" Slav language, which, as he was never tired of screaming, was a menace both to Latin and Italian. One is apt to call those persons reasonable, among other things, whose opinions coincide with one's own; but is there anybody willing to assert that because the Slav culture of that epoch was, like many another culture, inferior to the Italian; because the Italian towns were in the rays of artistic glory, whereas the Slav world was not; because on that account the Slavs were wise enough to profit from the Italian masters; is there anyone who, because some of the Slavs were and are unwise enough to be more Italian than the Italians, will assert that the Slav has no right to develop a national art, a national State?
It is superfluous to make a catalogue of those Ragusan writers who were more or less successful in purging their Slav language of Italianisms. Luckily they had at their doors the language of Herzegovina, which is unanimously