A disputed succession soon ended in the enthronement of the late King’s illegitimate son, Stephen Urosh III, known in history by the epithet “Detchanski” from the famous monastery of Detchani which he founded. He had been blinded for conspiring against his father; but on his father’s death he recovered his sight, which perhaps he had never entirely lost. His reign is one of the most dramatic in Serbian history, for it affords an example of those sudden alternations of triumph and disaster characteristic of the Balkans, alike in the Middle Ages and in our own day. On June 28, 1330, he utterly routed the Bulgarians at Velbujd, as Köstendil was then called. Bulgaria became a vassal state of Serbia, which had thus won the hegemony of the Balkan peninsula. Next year, he was dethroned by his son, the famous Stephen Dushan, and strangled in the castle of Zvetchan near Mitrovitza. A contemporary, Guillaume Adam, Archbishop of Antivari, has left a description of Serbia during this period. The palaces of the King and his nobles were of wood, and surrounded by palisades; the only houses of stone were in the Latin coast-towns. Yet “Rassia” was naturally a very rich land, producing plenty of corn, wine and oil; it was well watered; its forests were full of game, while five gold mines and as many of silver were constantly worked.
The reign of Stephen Urosh IV, better known as Stephen Dushan (1331-55), marks the zenith of Serbia. As a conqueror and as a lawgiver, he resembled Napoleon; and his Empire, like that of Napoleon, crumbled to pieces as soon as its creator had disappeared. In the former capacity, he aimed at realising the dream of his grandfather, Stephen Urosh II, of forming a great Serbian Empire on the ruins of Byzantium. The civil war between the young Emperor John V Palaiologos, aided by his Italian mother, Anne of Savoy, and the ambitious John Cantacuzene, whose history is one of the most interesting sources for this period, was Dushan’s opportunity. Both parties in the struggle made bids for his support at the unfortified village of Prishtina, which had been the Serbian capital. His price was nothing less than the whole Byzantine Empire west of Kavalla, or, at least, of Salonika. Anne of Savoy, less patriotic than her rival, offered him what he asked, if he would send her Cantacuzene, then his guest, either alive or dead. But the Council of twenty-four great officers of state, whom the Serbian Kings were wont to consult, acting on the Queen’s advice, repudiated the suggestion of assassinating a suppliant. Dushan allowed the rival Byzantine factions to exhaust themselves; and, while they fought, he occupied one place after another, till all Macedonia, except Salonika, was his.
With little exaggeration he wrote from Serres to the Doge of Venice, which had conferred her citizenship upon him, styling himself “King of Serbia, Diokleia, the land of Hum, the Zeta, Albania and the Maritime region, partner in no small part of the Empire of Bulgaria, and lord of almost all the Empire of Romania.” But for the ruler of so vast a realm the title of King seemed insignificant, especially as his vassal, the ruler of Bulgaria, bore the great name of Tsar. Accordingly, on Easter Sunday 1346, Dushan had himself crowned at Skopje, whither he had transferred his capital, as “Emperor of the Serbs and Greeks.” Shortly before, he had raised the Archbishop of Serbia to the dignity of Patriarch with his seat at Petch; and the two Slav Patriarchs, the Bulgarian of Trnovo and the Serbian of Petch, placed the crown upon his head. At the same time, on the analogy of the Western Empire with its “King of the Romans,” he had his son, Stephen Urosh V, proclaimed King. Byzantine emblems and customs were introduced into the brand-new Serbian Empire; the Tsar assumed the tiara and the double-eagle, and wrote to the Doge, proposing an alliance for the conquest of Constantinople. In the papal correspondence with Serbia we read of a Serbian “Sebastocrator,” a “Great Logothete,” a “Cæsar,” and a “Despot”; the governors of important Serbian cities, such as Cattaro and Scutari, were styled “Counts”; those of minor places, like Antivari, “Captains.” Thus it is easy to see why the whole Serbian world was thrilled when, in the first Balkan war of 1912, the Crown Prince Alexander entered Skopje, the coronation-city of Dushan—at the invitation of the Austrian Consul, “to restore order”!
Dushan next extended his Empire to the south by the annexation of Epeiros and Thessaly; and assigned Ætolia and Akarnania to his brother, Symeon Urosh, and Thessaly and Joannina to the “Cæsar” Preliub. His dominions now stretched to the Corinthian Gulf, and he thought that it only remained to annex the independent Serb state of Bosnia, and to capture Constantinople, establishing what a poetic Montenegrin ruler of our day has called an “Empire of the Balkans.” This would have embraced all the races of the variegated peninsula, and perhaps kept the Turks—who, in 1353, had made their first permanent settlement in Europe, by crossing the Dardanelles and occupying the castle of Tzympe—beyond the Bosporus, and the Hungarians beyond the Save. On St Michael’s day, 1355, he assembled his nobles, and asked whether he should lead them against Byzantium or Buda-Pesth. To their answer, that they would follow him, whithersoever he bade them, his reply was “to Constantinople.” But on the way he fell ill of a fever, and at Diavoli, on Dec. 20, he died, aged 48. No Serbian ruler had ever approached so near the Imperial city; had he succeeded, and had another Dushan succeeded him, the Turkish conquest 98 years later might have been averted.
Great as were his conquests, the Serbian Napoleon was no mere soldier. His code of law, the “Zakonik,” like the “Code Napoléon,” has survived the vast but fleeting Empire of its author. Dushan’s law-book is, indeed, largely based on previous legislation, such as the canon law of the Greek Church, the statutes of Budua and other Adriatic coast-towns, and, in the case of trial by jury, on an enactment of Stephen Urosh II. For us, however, its chief value is the light which it throws upon Serbia’s political and social condition in the golden age of the Empire.
Mediæval Serbia resembled neither of the Serb states of our day. It was not, even under Dushan, an autocracy, like Montenegro before 1905, nor yet a democratic monarchy, like the modern Serbian kingdom; but the powers of the monarch were limited by the influence of the great nobles—a class stamped out at the Turkish conquest and never since revived. Society consisted of the Sovereign; the ecclesiastical hierarchy, ranging from the Patriarch to the village priest; the greater and lesser nobles; the peasants, some free, others serfs bound to the soil; slaves, servants for hire; and, at Cattaro and in a few inland places, small communities of burghers. But the magnates were the dominant section; on two occasions even Dushan had to cope with their rebellions, and they formed a privy council of twenty-four, which he consulted before deciding important questions of public policy. Their lands were hereditary; and they enjoyed the privilege of killing their inferiors with comparative impunity, for a graduated tariff (as in Saxon England) regulated the punishment for wilful murder—hanging for that of a priest or monk, burning for parricide, fratricide, or infanticide, the loss of both hands and a fine for that of a noble by a commoner, a simple fine for that of a commoner by a noble. But the law secured to the peasant the fruits of his labour; no village might be laid under contribution by two successive army-corps; but, if the peasant organised or even attended a public meeting, he lost his eyes and was branded on the face, while for theft or arson, the culprit’s village was held collectively responsible. Next to the nobles the Orthodox Church was the most influential class; indeed, the early Archbishops of Serbia were drawn from junior members of the Royal family, and their interests were consequently identical with those of the Crown, of which they were the apologists in literature, like the “official” journals of to-day.
While the great Serbia of Dushan, like the smaller Serbia of our days, was pre-eminently an agricultural state, it possessed the enormous advantage of a coastline, which facilitated trade. Dushan allowed foreign merchants to circulate freely, and showed special favour to those of Ragusa whose argosies (or ragusies) were welcomed in his ports. He allowed a Saxon colony to work the silver-mines of Novo Brdo, and to burn charcoal. His bodyguard was composed of Germans, whose captain, Palmann, obtained great influence with him. He sent missions to foreign countries to obtain information; with Venice, of which he was a citizen, his relations were particularly close—as those of Italians and Serbs ought by nature to be; while foreign ambassadors were favourably impressed with his hospitality by receiving free meals in every village through which they passed. Already—so Nikephoros Gregoras tells us—the Serbs had begun to commemorate the great deeds of their champions in their national ballads, which attained their full development after the fatal battle of Kossovo and have inspired the Serbian soldiers in their three last wars. We hear, too, of architects from Cattaro, which was the Serbian mint in the reigns of Dushan and his son. The Queen of Italy possesses a collection of the coinage of the mediæval Serbian monarchy.
Dushan’s Empire crumbled away at his death. Like that of Napoleon, it had been made too fast to weld together the four races which it contained—Serbs, Greeks, Albanians and Koutso-Wallachs. The creation of a Serbian Patriarchate alienated the Greek Church, just as the creation of a Bulgarian Exarchate in 1870 sowed the seeds of disunion between Greeks and Bulgarians in Macedonia. Thus to the four different races there were added four different creeds—the Serbian Patriarchists, the Greek Patriarchists, the Albanian Catholics, and the Bogomile heretics, these last always ready to invoke a foreign invader against domestic persecution, even though that foreigner were a Mussulman. Even this strongest of Serbian monarchs, whose foot every one who entered his presence must kiss and who was “of all men of his time the tallest, and withal terrible to look upon,” as the papal legate called him, was barely equal to the task of checking the great nobles; and it was doubtless distrust of them which led him to surround himself with a foreign guard. The eminent Serbian historian and statesman, the late M. Novakovich, sums up the failure of Dushan to found a permanent state in the judgment: “Everything about his Empire was personal; the Serbian creations were only personal.”
The dying Tsar had made his nobles swear to maintain the rights of his son, Stephen Urosh V, then a boy of nineteen. But the lad’s uncle, Symeon Urosh, the viceroy of Akarnania and Ætolia, disputed the succession; some nobles supported him, while others, availing themselves of the family quarrel, set up as independent princes in their particular satrapies. Symeon made Trikkala the capital of a brief Greco-Serbian Empire; and his son ended as abbot of the famous monastery of Meteoron. After four decades Serbian sway over Thessaly and Epeiros ceased to exist. An inscription at Trikkala and a church at Meteoron are now almost its only memories. Of the independent satraps the most important were the brothers Balsha (by some erroneously connected with the French house of Baux), who established themselves in the Zeta, the present Montenegro, with a seaboard on the Adriatic at Budua and Antivari, and with Scutari as their “principal residence”—“principale eorum domicilium,” as a Latin document of 1369 says. This is the historical basis of the Montenegrin claim to Scutari, where the Balsha family remained till (in 1396) it sold that city to Venice. The rest of Albania was occupied by native chiefs, the most famous of them being Carlo Topia at Durazzo, who boasted his descent from the Angevins—a fact commemorated by the French lilies on his still extant tomb near Elbassan—and from whom Essad Pasha Toptani derived his origin.
Still more famous was Vukashin, guardian and cup-bearer of the young Tsar, who drove his master from the throne in 1366, and assumed the title of king, with the government of the specially Serbian lands and Prizren as his capital. A later legend makes the usurper murder his sovereign during a hunting-party on the plain of Kossovo. But it has now been proved that Stephen Urosh V survived his supposed murderer, who fell by the hand of his own servant, fighting against the Turks at the battle of the Maritza in 1371—the first great blow that Serbia received from her future conqueror. His son, Marko Kraljevich, “the King’s son, Marko,” that great hero of South Slavonic poetry, whose exploits were portrayed by M. Meshtrovich in the Serbian pavilion of the Rome exhibition in 1911, retained Prilip; and it is recorded that, when in 1912 the Serbian army attacked that place, their officers appealed to them in the name of the national hero to liberate his residence from the Turks. Two months after Vukashin Stephen Urosh V died also, and Lazar Grbljanovich, a connection of the Imperial family, ascended the throne of an Empire so diminished that he preferred the style of “Prince” to that of Tsar, which was conferred upon him in the ballads. Serbia was no longer the leading Slav state of the peninsula—for the great Bosnian ruler Stephen Tvrtko I (1353-91) had won the hegemony of the Southern Slavs, and in 1376 had himself crowned on the grave of St Sava at Mileshevo as “King of the Serbs, and of Bosnia, and of the coast.” To secure the latter, he founded the present fortress of Castelnuovo at the entrance of the Bocche di Cattaro; and in 1385 Cattaro itself was his.
Meanwhile the nation destined to destroy both the Serbian and the Bosnian Kingdoms was rapidly advancing. The Turks took Nish in 1386, and in 1389 Lazar set out, attended by all his paladins, from his capital of Krushevatz—for the Serbian royal residence had receded within the limits of Danubian Serbia—to do battle with Murad I on the fatal field of Kossovo.
A Serbian ballad tells how on the eve of the battle the prophet Elijah in the guise of a falcon flew with a letter from the Virgin into Lazar’s tent, offering him the choice between the Empire of this world and the Heavenly kingdom, and how he chose the latter. The armies met on St Vitus’ day, June 15 (O.S.), 1389. Seven nationalities composed that of the Christians; at least one Christian vassal helped to swell the smaller forces of the Turks. While Murad was arraying himself for the fight, a noble Serb, Milosh Kobilich[862], presented himself as a deserter and begged to have speech of the Sultan. His request was granted, he entered the royal tent, and stabbed Murad to the heart, paying with his own life for this act, but gaining thereby immortality in Serbian poetry. None the less, the Turks went undismayed into battle. At first, the Bosniaks drove back one Turkish wing; but Bayezid I, the young Sultan, held his own on the other, and threw the Christians into disorder. A rumour of treachery increased their confusion; whether truly or no, it is still the popular tradition that Vuk Brankovich, Lazar’s son-in-law, betrayed the Serbian cause at Kossovo. Lazar was taken prisoner, and slain in the tent where the dying Murad lay, and with him fell the Serbian Empire.
At first Christendom believed that the Turks had been defeated. A Te Deum was sung in Paris to the God of battles; Florence wrote to congratulate the Bosnian king, Tvrtko, on the supposed victory. But Lazar’s widow, Militza, as a ballad beautifully tells the tale, soon learnt the truth in her “white palace” at Krushevatz from the crows that had hovered over the battlefield. The name of Kossovo is remembered throughout the Serbian lands, as if it had been fought but yesterday. Every year the anniversary is kept, in 1916, for the first time in England; and it was the fact that the late Archduke Franz Ferdinand chose this day of all days to make his entry into Sarajevo, which perhaps contributed to his assassination. Although the battle of Kumanovo in 1912 avenged Kossovo, yet the Montenegrins still wear a black band on their caps in sign of mourning for it; in many a lonely village the minstrel sings to the sound of the gusle the melancholy legend of Kossovo. On the field itself Murad’s heart is still preserved, while the Hungarian Serbs treasure in the monastery of Vrdnik the shroud of Lazar.
A diminished Serbian principality lingered on for another seventy years. Bayezid recognised the late ruler’s eldest son, Stephen Lazarevich, with the title of “Prince” (exchanged in 1404 for that of “Despot,” thenceforth borne by the Serbian princes) on condition that he paid tribute and came every year with a contingent to join the Turkish troops, and gave him the hand of his youngest sister; while Vuk Brankovich received the reward of his treachery by holding the old capital of Prishtina as a vassal of the Sultan. For a time the Turkish defeat at Angora by the Tartars in 1402 enabled the Serbian Despot to play off one Turkish pretender against another, while he purchased domestic peace by making Brankovich’s son George his heir. Thus he could devote himself to organising his country and patronising literature in the person of Constantine “the Philosopher,” who repaid his hospitality by writing his biography. He appointed a species of Cabinet, with which he discussed affairs of state, founded the monastery of Manassia, obtained Belgrade by diplomacy from the Hungarians, fortified it and adorned it with churches. In his time Venice began her colonies in Albania and what is now Montenegro—at Durazzo in 1392, Alessio in 1393, Drivasto and Scutari in 1396, Antivari and Dulcigno in 1421 (the former, however, not definitely till 1444), while in 1420 Cattaro placed herself under the protection of the Lion of St Mark, then master of most of the Dalmatian coast, save where the Ragusan Republic formed an enclave in his territory.
Serbia under George Brankovich, who succeeded as “Despot” in 1427, was thus practically a Danubian principality. The new Despot, a man of sixty years, was an experienced diplomatist; but there are times in the Balkans when force is more valuable than the subtlest diplomacy. A warlike Sultan, in the person of Murad II, sat on the Turkish throne; and he soon showed his intentions by demanding the whole of Serbia, and invading that country. Brankovich had to move his capital from Krushevatz to the bank of the Danube, where at Semendria he built the fine castle with the red brick cross in its walls which is still a memorial of Serbia’s past, while in order to secure himself an eventual refuge in Hungary, he handed over Belgrade to the Hungarian monarch, notwithstanding the protests and tears of its citizens. Brankovich in vain tried to purchase peace by giving his daughter with a regal outfit to the Sultan. Ere long, however, the Sultan, incited by a fanatic who accused him of sinning against Allah by allowing the Serbian unbeliever to bar the way to Hungary and Italy, demanded the surrender of Semendria. Brankovich fled to Hungary, thence to his last maritime possessions of Antivari and Budua, and thence to Ragusa; but the victories of John Hunyady, “the white knight of Wallachia,” induced Murad in 1444 to restore to the Despot the whole of Serbia, on payment of half its annual revenue.
Brankovich by his “enlightened egoism” managed to maintain a precarious autonomy till after the capture of Constantinople (1453). Then, Mohammed II resolved to end what remained of Serbian independence, and to capture the famous silver mines of Novo Brdo, which, as his biographer, Kritoboulos, remarked, had not only largely contributed to the splendour of the Serbian Empire, but had also aroused the covetousness of its enemies. Indeed, the picture which the Imbrian writer draws of Serbia on the eve of the Turkish conquest is almost idyllic, with her “cities many and fair,” her “strong forts on the Danube,” her “productive soil, swine and cattle, and abundant breed of goodly steeds.” But the flower of the Serbian youth had been drafted into the corps of Janissaries to fight against their fellow-Christians, the prince was a man of ninety and a fugitive, while Mohammed, like the Germans of to-day, had marvellous artillery. Still Belgrade, then a Hungarian fortress, resisted, thanks to the skill of Hunyady and the fiery eloquence of the Franciscan Capistrano. But the nonagenarian Despot was wounded in a quarrel with the Hungarian governor, and on Christmas-eve, 1456, died. Of his sons the two elder had been blinded by the late Sultan, so that his third son, Lazar III, succeeded him. His speedy death resulted, at this eleventh hour of Serbian history, in the union of both Serbia and Bosnia by the marriage of one of his daughters with the Bosnian Crown Prince, Stephen Tomashevich—an arrangement which even Dushan, in all his glory, had never achieved. The Bosnian Despot of Serbia took up his abode at Semendria; but the inhabitants, regarding their new master with disfavour, as a Catholic and a Hungarian nominee, opened their gates to the Turks; before the summer of 1459 was over, all Serbia had become a Turkish pashalik, except Belgrade, which remained a Hungarian fortress till 1521. Four years after the fall of Serbia her last Despot, then King of Bosnia, was beheaded at Jajce, and his kingdom annexed by the Turks. Twenty years after Bosnia, the Duchy of St Sava, the modern Herzegovina, met with the same fate.
Thus the history of mediæval Serbia was closed. But members of the Brankovich family continued to bear the title of Despot in their Hungarian exile, whither many of their adherents had followed them, till the extinction of their house two centuries ago; the Serbian Patriarchate, abolished in 1459, but revived by the Turks in 1557, existed till 1767; but from the time of Mohammed II to that of Black George in 1804, when Danubian Serbia rose from her long enslavement, the noblest representatives of the Serbs maintained their freedom in the Republics of Ragusa, “the South Slavonic Athens,” and Poljitza, “the South Slavonic San Marino,” and among the barren rocks of free Montenegro.
AUTHORITIES
1. Geschichte der Serben. Von Constantin Jireček, Erster Band (Bis 1371); Zweiter Band, erste Hälfte (1371-1537). Gotha: Perthes, 1911, 1918.
2. Serbes, Croates et Bulgares. Par Louis Leger. Paris: Maisonneuve, 1913.
3. Les problèmes serbes. Par Stojan Novakovich. In Archiv für slavische Philologie, Bände XXXIII.-IV. Berlin, 1912.
4. Listine. By S. Ljubich. In Monumenta spectantia historiam Slavorum Meridionalium. Eleven vols. Agram, 1868-93.
5. Acta et Diplomata Res Albaniæ mediæ ætatis illustrantia. Ed. L. de Thallóczy, C. Jireček, E. de Sufflay. Vol. I. (344-1343); Vol. II. (1344-1406). Vindobonæ, 1913-18.
6. Poésies populaires serbes. Tr. by A. Dozon. Paris, 1877.
APPENDIX
THE FOUNDER OF MONTENEGRO
The parentage of Stephen Crnojevich, the founder of the like-named Montenegrin dynasty, has hitherto rested merely on conjecture. The two oldest writers on South Slavonic history, Orbini[863] and Luccari[864], identified him with Stefano Maramonte, an adventurer from Apulia, who is known from Venetian sources[865] to have been a totally different person. Subsequent writers, such as Ducange[866], Fallmerayer[867], Milakovich[868], and Lenormant[869], have usually adopted without question this identification; while the first native historian of Montenegro, the Vladika Vasilj Petrovich[870], made him the son of a certain John Crnojevich, who was descended from the Serbian royal family of Nemanja. According to these respective theories, he first appeared in Montenegrin history in 1419, 1421 or 1423. Hopf[871], and Count de Mas Latrie[872], who were far nearer the truth, asserted him to have been a son of Raditch Crnoje, who is described as “lord of the Zeta and Budua and of the other parts of Slavonia” in 1392, as “baron of the parts of the Zeta” in 1393, and as having fallen in battle in 1396, after having been a “very powerful man” and an honorary citizen of Venice[873].
The Venetian documents, published by Ljubich, prove beyond all doubt that Stephen Crnojevich was the son of George Jurash, or Jurashevich—a name first mentioned[874] in a Ragusan document of 1403. Three years later George Jurashevich and his brother Alexius dominated the Upper Zeta; in 1420 they were “barons of the Zeta” and were promised the possession of Budua[875]—the very same places that Raditch Crnoje had held. These facts might have suggested that they were his next-of-kin, not, as Hopf[876] and Miklosich[877] supposed, members of a distinct clan. The identity of the two families is proved by a document[878] of 1426, which mentions for the first time Stefaniza fiol del Zorzi Juras, while subsequent documents prove conclusively that this Stefaniza was none other than Stephen Crnojevich. He had three brothers, one “lately dead” in 1443, and in the next year mention is made of the three survivors as Jurassin, Stefanice, et Coicini, fratrum de Zernoievich[879].
The exact relationship of Stephen’s father, George Jurashevich, to Raditch Crnoje can only be surmised. We know however that Raditch had several brothers[880]; if we assume that one was called George, or Jurash, this man’s son would then be called Jurashevich; thus Stephen would be Raditch’s grand-nephew—a degree of relationship which would correspond with his death[881] in 1466, two generations after that of his great-uncle. As the legitimate heirs of Raditch, the Jurashevich naturally reverted to the more distinguished surname of Crnojevich, a name found in that region in 1351, while Crnagora, the Serb name for Montenegro, occurs in a Ragusan document[882] of 1362. There is a tradition[883] that the family came originally from Zajablje in the Herzegovina.
3. BOSNIA BEFORE THE TURKISH CONQUEST[884]
I. The History of Bosnia down to 1180.
The earliest known inhabitants of Bosnia and the Herzegovina belonged to that Illyrian stock which peopled the western side of the Balkan peninsula at the close of the fifth century B.C. At that period we find two Illyrian tribes, the Ardiæi and the Autariatæ, in possession of those lands. The former occupied West Bosnia, while the latter extended to the south and gave their name to the river Tara, which forms for some distance the present frontier between Montenegro and the Herzegovina. Few characteristics of these remote tribes have been preserved by the Greek and Roman writers, but we are told that the Ardiæi were noted even among the Illyrians for their drunken habits, and that they were the proprietors of a large body of slaves, who performed all their manual offices for them. Of the Autariatæ we know nothing beyond the fact of their power at that epoch.
But the old Illyrian inhabitants had to acknowledge the superiority of another race. About 380 B.C. the Celts invaded the peninsula, and, by dint of continual pushing, ousted the natives of what is now Serbia, and so became neighbours of the Ardiæi. Their next step was to drive the latter southward into the modern Herzegovina, and to seize their possessions in North Bosnia. Instead of uniting against the Celtic invaders the Illyrian tribes fell to quarrelling among themselves over some salt springs, which were unfortunately situated at the spot where their confines met. This fratricidal struggle had the effect of so weakening both parties that they fell an easy prey to the common foe. The victorious Celts pursued their southward course, and by 335 B.C. both Bosnia and the Herzegovina were in their power, and the Illyrians either exiles or else subject to the Celtic sway. This is the first instance of that fatal tendency to disunion which has throughout been the curse of these beautiful lands. The worst foes of Bosnia and the Herzegovina have been those of their own household.
The Celtic supremacy left few traces behind it. While in the south a powerful Illyrian state was formed, which offered a stubborn resistance to Rome herself, the Celtic and Illyrian inhabitants of Bosnia and the Herzegovina remained in the happy condition of having no history. But when the South Illyrian state fell before the Romans, in 167 B.C., and the legionaries encamped on the river Narenta, upon which the present Herzegovinian capital stands, the people who dwelt to the north felt that the time had come to defend themselves. One of their tribes had already submitted to the Romans, but the others combined in a confederation, which had its seat at Delminium, a fortress near the modern town of Sinj, in Dalmatia, from which the confederates took the common name of Dalmatians. The first struggle lasted for nearly a century, in spite of the capture and destruction of Delminium by Scipio Nasica in 155 B.C., and it was reserved for Caius Cosconius in 78 B.C. to subdue the Dalmatian confederates and bring Bosnia and the Herzegovina for the first time beneath the Roman sway. Those lands were then merged in the Roman province of Illyricum, which stretched from the Adriatic to the western frontier of modern Serbia and from the Save into North Albania. But the spirit of the brave Dalmatians was still unbroken, and they never lost an opportunity of rising against their Roman masters. Aided by their winter climate, they resisted the armies of Cæsar’s most trusted lieutenants, and the Emperor Augustus was twice wounded in his youthful campaign against them. One of their revolts in the early years of the Christian era was, in the words of Suetonius, “the greatest danger which had threatened Rome since the Punic wars.” Under their chiefs Bato and Pines they defied the legions of Tiberius for four long years, and it was only when their last stronghold had fallen, and Bato had been taken captive, that they submitted. Their power as an independent nation was broken for ever, their country was laid waste, and in A.D. 9 finally incorporated with the Roman Empire. North Bosnia became part of the province of Pannonia; the Herzegovina and Bosnia south of a line drawn from Novi through Banjaluka and Doboj to Zvornik, were included in the province of Dalmatia. The Romans divided up the latter in their usual methodical manner into three districts, grouped round three towns, where was the seat of justice, and whither the native chieftains came to confer with the Roman authorities. Thus Salona, near Spalato, once a city half as large as Constantinople, but now a heap of ruins, was made the centre of government for South Bosnia, while the Herzegovina fell within the jurisdiction of Narona, a fortress which has been identified with Vid, near Metkovich.
The Roman domination, which lasted till the close of the fifth century, has left a permanent mark upon the country. The interior, it is true, never attained to such a high degree of civilisation as the more accessible towns on the Dalmatian coast, and no such magnificent building as the palace at Spalato in which Diocletian spent the evening of his days adorned the inland settlements. But the conquerors developed, much as the Austrians have done in our own time, those natural resources which the natives had neglected. Three great Roman roads united Salona and the sea with the principal places up country. One of these highways skirted the beautiful lake Jezero, traversed the now flourishing town of Banjaluka, which derives its modern name, “the Baths of St Luke,” from the ruins of a Roman bath, and ended at Gradishka, on the Save. Another connected Salona with the plain of Sarajevo, even then regarded as the centre of the Bosnian trade, and the valley of the Drina, while a branch penetrated as far as Plevlje, in the sandjak of Novibazar, then a considerable Roman settlement. The third, starting also from Salona, crossed the south of the Herzegovina, where traces of it may still be seen. Then, too, the mineral wealth of Bosnia was first exploited—the gold workings near the source of the river Vrbas and the rich deposits of iron ore in the north-west. The natives, hitherto occupied in fighting or farming, were now forced to work at the gold diggings. Roman authors extolled the Bosnian gold, the “Dalmatian metal” of Statius, of which as much as 50 lbs. were obtained in a single day, and a special functionary presided at Salona over the administration of the Bosnian gold mines. The salt springs of Dolnja Tuzla, now a busy manufacturing town, were another source of wealth, and the numerous coins of the Roman period discovered up and down the country show that a considerable amount of money was in circulation there. Many a Roman colonist must have been buried in Bosnian soil, for numbers of tombstones with Latin inscriptions have been found, and the national museum at Sarajevo is full of Roman cooking utensils, Roman vases, and Roman instruments of all kinds. Most important of all, it was during the Roman period that the first seeds of Christianity were sown in these remote Balkan lands. The exact date of this event, which was to exercise paramount influence for evil as well as good upon the future history of Bosnia, is unknown, but we may safely assume that the Archbishopric of Salona was the seat of the new doctrine, from which it rapidly spread throughout the Dalmatian province. Several bishoprics, which are mentioned as subordinate to the archiepiscopal See of Salona in the sixth century, are to be found in Bosnia, and one in particular, the bishopric of Bistue, lay in the very heart of that country.
But the power of Rome on the further shore of the Adriatic and in the mountains behind it did not long survive the break-up of the Western Empire in 476. Bosnia and the Herzegovina experienced the fate of the provinces of Pannonia and Dalmatia, of which they had so long formed a part. Twenty years earlier Marcellinus, a Roman general, had carved out for himself an independent principality in Dalmatia, and his nephew and successor, Julius Nepos, maintained his independence there for a short space after the fall of the Empire. But Odoacer soon made himself master of the old Roman province, and in 493 the Ostrogoths under Theodoric overran the country, and for the next forty years Bosnia and the Herzegovina owned their sway. This change of rulers made little difference in the condition of the people. The Ostrogoths did not interfere with the religious institutions which they found already in existence. Under their government two ecclesiastical councils were held at Salona, and two new bishoprics founded, bringing the total number up to six. Theodoric, like the Romans before him, paid special attention to the mineral wealth of Bosnia, and a letter is extant in which he appoints an overseer of “the Dalmatian iron ore mines.” But in 535 began the twenty years’ war between the Ostrogoths and the Emperor Justinian. These lands at once became the prey of devastating armies, the battle-field of Gothic and Byzantine combatants. In the midst of the general confusion a horde of new invaders appeared, probably at the invitation of the Gothic King, and in 548 we hear of the Slavs for the first time in the history of the country. Further Slavonic detachments followed in the next few years, and before the second half of the sixth century was far advanced there was a considerable Slav population in the western part of the Balkan peninsula. Even when the war had ended with the overthrow of the Gothic realm, and Bosnia and the Herzegovina had fallen under the Byzantine sway, the inroads of the Slavs did not cease. Other savage tribes came too, and the Avars in particular were the terror of the inhabitants. This formidable race, akin to the Huns, whom they rivalled in ferocity, soon reduced the once flourishing province of Dalmatia to a wilderness. During one of their marches through Bosnia they destroyed nearly forty fortified places on the road from the Save to Salona, and finally reduced that prosperous city to the heap of ruins which it has ever since remained, while the citizens formed out of Diocletian’s abandoned palace the town which bears the name of Spalato, or the Palace, to this day. But the Avars were not to have an unchallenged supremacy over the country. In the first half of the seventh century the Emperor Herakleios summoned to his aid two Slavonic tribes, the Croats and Serbs, and offered them the old Illyrian lands as his vassals if they would drive out the Avars. Nothing loth they at once accepted the invitation, and, after a fierce struggle, subdued the barbarians, whose hands had been as heavy upon the Slavonic as upon the Roman settlers. The Croats, who came somewhat earlier than the Serbs, took up their abode in what is still known as Croatia, and in the northern part of Dalmatia, as far as the river Cetina; the Serbs occupied the coast line from that river as far south as the present Albanian town of Durazzo, and inland the whole of modern Serbia (as it was before 1912), Montenegro, Bosnia, the Herzegovina, and the sandjak of Novibazar. From that time onwards these regions have, under various alien dominations, never lost their Slavonic character, and to this day even the Bosniaks who profess the faith of Islâm, no less than their Orthodox brothers, are of Serbian stock.
The history of Bosnia and the Herzegovina from this Slavonic settlement in the first half of the seventh down to the middle of the tenth century is very obscure. We have few facts recorded, and nothing is gained by repeating the names of mythical rulers, whose existence has been disproved by the researches of critical historians. But it is possible to form some general idea of the state of the country during this period of transition. Nominally under the suzerainty of the Byzantine Empire, much in the same sense as modern Bulgaria was till 1908 under that of the Sultan, Bosnia and its neighbouring lands were practically independent and formed a loose agglomeration of small districts, each of which was called by the Slavonic name of jupa and was governed by a headman known as a jupan. The most important of these petty chiefs was awarded the title of great jupan, and the various districts composed a sort of primitive confederation under his auspices. Two of the districts received names which attained considerable importance in subsequent history. The Slavonic settlers in the valley of the Upper Bosna adapted the Latin designation of that river, Basante, to their own idiom by calling the stream Bosna and themselves Bosniaks, and the name of the river was afterwards extended to the whole country, which from that time onwards was known as Bosnia—a term first found in the form “Bosona,” of Constantine Porphyrogenitus[885]. Similarly Mount Hum, above the present town of Mostar, gave its name to the surrounding district, which was called the Land of Hum, or Zahumlje, until in the middle of the fifteenth century it was re-christened the “Land of the Duke,” or the Herzegovina, from the German Herzog. These derivations are much more probable than the alternatives recently offered, according to which Bosnia means the “land of salt” in Albanian, and the Herzegovina means the “land of stones” in Turkish[886].
The Slavs, with the adaptability of many other conquerors, soon accepted the religion which they found already established in these countries. The Serbs, who settled at the mouth of the Narenta, alone adhered to paganism, and erected on the ruins of the old Roman town of Narona a shrine of their god Viddo, from whom the modern village of Vid derives its name. Here heathen rites were celebrated for more than two hundred years, and as late as the beginning of the last century the inhabitants of Vid cherished ancient idols, of which the original significance had long passed away.
The political history of Bosnia was determined for many generations by its geographical position on the boundary line between the Croatian and Serbian settlements. It was here that these two branches of the Slavonic race met, and from the moment when two rival groups were formed under Croatian and Serbian auspices Bosnia became the coveted object of both. That country accordingly submitted to Croatian and Serbian rulers by turns. Early in the tenth century it seems to have acknowledged the sway of Tomislav, first King of the Croats, and was administered as a dependency by an official known as a ban, the Croatian name for a “governor,” which survived to our own day. A little later the Serbian Prince Tchaslav incorporated it in the confederation which he welded together, and defended it against the Magyars, who now make their first appearance in its history. Under a chieftain named Kés these dangerous neighbours had penetrated as far as the upper waters of the river Drina, where the Serbian Prince inflicted a crushing defeat upon them. But, in his zeal to carry the war into the enemy’s country, he perished himself, and with his death his dominions fell asunder, and Bosnia became for a brief period independent. But Kreshimir, King of the Croats, recovered it in 968, and for the next half-century it belonged to the Croatian crown. But about 1019 the Emperor Basil II restored for a time the dormant Byzantine sovereignty over the whole Balkan peninsula. After the bloody campaigns which earned him the title of “the Bulgar-slayer” and ended in the destruction of the first Bulgarian Empire, he turned his arms against the Serbs and Croats, forcing the latter to receive their crown from Constantinople and reducing Bosnia to more than nominal subjection to his throne.
Meanwhile the Herzegovina, or the “Land of Hum,” as it was then called, had had a considerable history of its own. Early in the tenth century, at the time when the Croatian King Tomislav was extending his authority over Bosnia, we hear of a certain Michael Vishevich, who ruled over the sister land and held his court in the ancient fortress of Blagaj, above the source of the river Buna. Vishevich was evidently a prince of considerable importance. The Pope addressed him as “the most excellent Duke of the people of Hum”; the Byzantine Emperor awarded him the proud titles of “proconsul and Patrician.” The Republic of Ragusa paid him an annual tribute of thirty-six ducats for the vineyards of her citizens which lay within his territory. His fleet, starting from the seaport of Stagno, then the seat of a bishopric as well as an important haven, ravaged the Italian coast opposite, and made the name of “Michael, King of the Slavs,” as a chronicler styles him, a terror to the inhabitants of Apulia. The great Bulgarian Tsar Symeon was his ally, and on two occasions during his struggle with the Byzantine Empire he received aid or advice from him. We find him seconding Tomislav’s proposal for summoning the famous ecclesiastical council which met at Spalato in 925 and prohibited the use of the Slavonic liturgy. In short, nothing of importance occurred in that region during his reign in which he had not his say[887]. But after his death his dominions seem to have been included, like Bosnia, in the Serbian confederation of Tchaslav; and, when that collapsed, they were annexed by the King of Dioklitia, whose realm derived its name from the town of Doclea in what is now Montenegro, and took its origin in the valley of the Zeta, which divides that kingdom in two. About the end of the tenth century however, the powerful Bulgarian Tsar Samuel established his supremacy over the Kingdom of Dioklitia, and the treacherous murder of its King a few years later completed the incorporation of Dioklitia, and consequently of the Herzegovina, in the Bulgarian Empire. But its connexion with Bulgaria was short-lived. When Basil “the Bulgar-slayer” destroyed the sovereignty of the Bulgarian Tsars he added the Herzegovina as well as Bosnia to his own domains. Thus the twin provinces fell at the same moment beneath the Byzantine sway, and from 1019 remained for a space parts of that Empire, governed sometimes by imperial governors, sometimes by native princes acting as imperial viceroys. Bosnia was the first to raise the standard of revolt, and no sooner was the Emperor Basil II dead than it regained its independence under bans of its own, who raised it to an important position among the petty states of that time. The Herzegovina, less fortunate, only exchanged the sovereignty of the Emperor at Constantinople for that of the King of Dioklitia, who in 1050 made himself master of the land. For exactly a century it remained an integral portion of that kingdom, and had therefore no separate history. Even Bosnia succumbed a generation later to the monarchs of Dioklitia, for about 1085 all the three neighbouring lands, Serbia, Bosnia and the Herzegovina, had to accept governors from King Bodin of the Zeta, and thus a great Serb state existed under his sceptre.
But in the early years of the twelfth century a new force made itself felt in South Slavonic lands, a force which even in our own day has till lately exercised a powerful influence over the fortunes of the Balkan peninsula. Since their unsuccessful incursion in the time of Tchaslav the Hungarians had never abandoned their cherished object of gaining a foothold there. But it was not till the union of Croatia in 1102, and of Dalmatia in 1105, with the Hungarian Crown by Koloman, that this object was attained. The Hungarian Kings thus came into close contact with Bosnia, and were not long in extending their authority over that country. So far from meeting with opposition they were regarded by the people as valuable allies in the common struggle against the Byzantine Emperors of the family of the Comnenoi, who aimed at restoring the past glories and dimensions of their realm. Accordingly in 1135 we find an Hungarian King, Béla II, for the first time styling himself “King of Rama”—the name of a river in Bosnia, which Magyar chroniclers applied first to the surrounding district and then to the whole country. From that time onward, whoever the actual possessors of Rama, or Bosnia, might be, it was always included among the titles of the Hungarian monarchs, and, till our own time, the Emperor Francis Joseph in his capacity of King of Hungary called himself also “King of Rama.” In his case the phrase had certainly a more practical significance than it possessed in earlier centuries.
The precise manner in which this close connexion between Hungary and Bosnia was formed is obscure. According to one theory Béla received the country as the dowry of his Serbian wife; according to another the Bosnian magnates, seeing the increasing power of Hungary and the revived pretensions of the Byzantine Emperors, decided to seek the protection of the former against the latter. At any rate a little later Béla assigned Bosnia as a duchy to his second son, Ladislaus, leaving, however, the actual government of that land in the hands of native bans. It is now that we hear the name of one of these rulers for the first time. Hitherto the Bosnian governors have been mere shadowy figures, flitting unrecognised and almost unnoticed across the stage of history. But ban Borich, who now comes into view, is a man of flesh and blood. In the wars between the Emperor Manuel Comnenos and the Hungarians he was the staunch ally of the latter, and when a disputed succession to the Hungarian throne took place he aspired to play the part of a king-maker and supported the claims of Ladislaus, the titular “duke” of Bosnia. But he made the mistake of choosing the losing side and, after being conquered by the troops of the successful candidate, disappeared mysteriously in 1163. Short, however, as was his career, he had extended the eastern borders of Bosnia to the river Drina, and we learn from the contemporary Greek historian Cinnamus[888] that his country was “independent of Serbia and governed in its own fashion.” Three years after his disappearance from the scene Bosnia shared the fate of Croatia and Dalmatia, and fell into the hands of Manuel Comnenos. But upon the death of that powerful Emperor in 1180 the fabric which he had laboriously erected collapsed; the Balkan peoples had nothing more to fear from the Byzantine Empire, and Bosnia under her famous ban Kulin attained to greater freedom and prosperity than she had yet enjoyed. But the same period which witnessed this political and material progress witnessed also the development of that ecclesiastical schism which was one day destined to cause the loss of all freedom and the suspension of all progress by facilitating the Turkish conquest of the land.
II. The Great Bosnian Bans (1180-1376).
Kulin is the first great figure in Bosnian history. By nature a man of peace, he devoted his attention to the organisation of the country, which in his time was a ten days’ journey in circumference, the development of its commerce, and the maintenance of its independence. He allowed foreigners ready access to his dominions, employed two Italian painters and goldsmiths at his court, and gave liberal mining concessions to two shrewd burghers of Ragusa, which during the middle ages was the chief emporium of the inland trade. He concluded in 1189 a treaty of commerce with that city—the earliest known Bosnian document—in which he swore to be its “true friend now and for ever, and to keep true peace and genuine troth” with it all his life. Ragusan merchants were permitted to settle wherever they chose in his territory, and no harm was to be done them by his officials. Agriculture flourished under his rule, and years afterwards, whenever the Bosnian farmer had a particularly prosperous year, he would say to his fellows, “The times of Kulin are coming back again.” Even to-day the people regard him as a favourite of the fairies, and his reign as a golden age, and to “talk of ban Kulin” is a popular expression for one who speaks of the remote past, when the Bosnian plum-trees always groaned with fruit and the yellow corn-fields never ceased to wave in the fertile plains. Kulin’s position was strengthened too by his powerful connections; for his sister was the wife of Miroslav, Prince of the Herzegovina, which, as we have seen, had formed part of the Kingdom of Dioklitia down to 1150, when it was conquered by the Serbian great jupan, Desa. Some twenty years later Stephen Nemanja made his brother Miroslav its prince, and thus was closely connected with Kulin. The latter, like Nemanja in Serbia, threw off all ties of allegiance to the Byzantine Empire on the death of Manuel Comnenos, and at the same time ignored the previous relations which had existed between the Kings of Hungary and the Bosnian bans.
But it was Kulin’s ecclesiastical policy which rendered his reign most memorable in the after history of Bosnia. In the tenth century there had appeared in Bulgaria a priest named “Bogomil,” or the “Beloved of God,” who preached a mystical doctrine, peculiarly attractive to the intellect of a Slavonic race. From the assumption that there existed in the universe a bad as well as a good deity the Bogomiles, as his disciples were called, deduced a complete system of theology, which explained all phenomena to their own satisfaction. But the Bogomiles did not content themselves with metaphysics alone. They descended from the serene atmosphere of abstract reasoning to the questions of ritual and the customs of society. Appropriating to themselves the title of “good Christians,” they regarded the monks as little short of idolators, set at naught the authority of bishops, and defied the thunders of the popes. Their worship was characterised by extreme simplicity and often conducted in the open air, while in their lives they aimed at a plain and primitive ideal. A “perfect” Bogomile, one who belonged to the strictest of the two castes into which they were divided, looked upon marriage as impure and bloodshed as a deadly sin; he despised riches, and owned allegiance to no one save God alone, while he had the quaker’s objection to an oath. No wonder that popes, trembling for their authority, branded them as heretics and pursued them with all the horrors of fire and sword; no wonder that potentates found them sometimes intractable subjects, and sometimes useful allies in a struggle against ecclesiastical pretensions.
The Bogomiles appear to have entered Bosnia about the middle of the twelfth century, and speedily gained a hold upon the country. Kulin at first remained uninfluenced by their teachings. Thus, in 1180, we find the papal legate writing to him in the most courteous terms, and addressing him as the “noble and powerful man, the great ban of Bosnia.” The legate sends him a letter and the Holy Father’s blessing, and begs him to give him in return, as a token of his devotion, “two servants and marten skins.” But Kulin found it politic later on to secede from the Roman Church. For some time past the rival Archbishoprics of Spalato and Ragusa had striven for ecclesiastical supremacy over Bosnia. Béla III, King of Hungary, who had now time to devote to his ambitious schemes against that country, warmly supported the claims of the See of Spalato, to which he had appointed a creature of his own. Kulin was naturally on the side of Ragusa, and was encouraged by his sister, whose late husband, Miroslav, Prince of the Herzegovina, had had a similar contest with the Archbishop of Spalato, and had concluded a treaty with the Ragusans. The Pope took the part of Spalato, and Kulin retorted by defying him, as Miroslav had done before. The latter had probably been a Bogomile for some time before his death; the former now formally abandoned the Roman Church, with his wife, his sister, his whole family, and ten thousand of his subjects. The force of so potent an example was at once felt. The Bogomile or Patarene heresy, as it was called by the Bosniaks of other creeds, now spread apace, not only over Bosnia, but in the neighbouring lands. The two Italian painters, whom we have mentioned as residing at Kulin’s court, carried it to Spalato, where it extended to the other Dalmatian coast towns; and the destruction of Zara by the crusaders in 1202 was regarded by pious chroniclers as a judgment upon that city for its heretical opinions.
King Béla III was not slow to make Kulin’s defection the excuse for posing as defender of the true faith. But his death and the quarrels between his heirs gave Kulin a little breathing space, and it was not till 1200 that he was in actual danger. By that time Béla’s sons, Emerich and Andrew, had established themselves respectively as King of Hungary and Duke of the Herzegovina, and accordingly threatened Bosnia from two sides. Emerich, following his father’s policy, endeavoured to induce the Pope to preach a crusade against the Bosnian heretics, and Innocent III, who then occupied the chair of St Peter, hailed the King of Hungary as overlord of Bosnia, and bade him summon Kulin to recant, or if the latter remained obdurate invade Bosnia and occupy it himself. Thus menaced by a combination of the spiritual and the temporal power, Kulin bowed before the storm. He felt that at all costs Hungarian intervention must be avoided, so he made the rather lame excuse that he had “regarded the Patarenes not as heretics, but as Catholics,” and begged the Pope to send him some safe adviser, who should guide his erring feet into the right way. Innocent, pleased at Kulin’s submission, sent two ecclesiastics to Bosnia to inquire into the religious condition of the country and to bring back its ruler to the true fold. The mission was temporarily successful. Early in the spring of 1203 the ban, his great nobles, and the heads of the Bogomile community met in solemn assembly in the “white plain,” or Bjelopolje, on the river Bosna, confessed their errors, and drew up a formal document embodying their recantation. “We renounce the schism of which we are accused”—so runs the deed—“we promise to have altars and crosses in all our churches, to receive the sacrament seven times a year, to observe the fasts ordained by the church, and to keep the festivals of the saints. Henceforth we will no more call ourselves ‘Christians,’ but ‘brothers,’ so as not to cast a slur upon other Christians.” The oath thus taken was renewed by representatives of the Bogomiles in the presence of the King of Hungary, who bade Kulin observe his promises for the future. The cloud had passed away, but with its disappearance Kulin too disappears from the scene. An inscription, said to be the oldest in the country and ascribed to the year 1203-04, which was found in 1898 at Muhashinovichi, on the river Bosna, refers to a church erected by him to prove the sincerity of his re-conversion, and prays God to grant health to him and his wife, Voyslava. We hear no more of him after 1204; but his memory was not soon forgotten[889]. Two centuries later a Bosnian King desired to have confirmed to him all the “customs, usages, privileges and frontiers, which existed in the time of Kulin,” and the rich Bosnian family of Kulenovich of our own time (whose ancestral castle of Jaskopolje may be seen near Jajce, almost on the spot where, in 1878, the great fight between the Austrians and the insurgents took place) is said to derive its name and lineage from him.
But the recantation of Kulin did not check the growth of the Bogomile heresy. Under his successor, Stephen, the numbers of the sect increased, and the efforts of Pope Honorius III and his legate to preach a crusade against the heretics remained fruitless. The Holy Father might exclaim that “the unbelievers in Bosnia, just as witches in a cave nourish their offspring with their bare breasts, publicly preach their abominable errors, to the great harm of the Lord’s flock”; but even this mixture of metaphors failed to stimulate the flagging zeal of the Hungarian Catholics. Even when the King of Hungary had pacified his rebellious nobles by the golden bull, and was therefore able to turn his attention to Bosnian affairs, the proposed crusade fell flat. The King worked upon the cupidity of the Archbishop of Kalocsa by granting him spiritual authority over Bosnia; but the only result was to stiffen the backs of the recalcitrant Bosniaks. Imitating their neighbours in the Herzegovina, who had lately made a Bogomile their Prince, they deposed the weak-kneed Stephen and put Matthew Ninoslav, a Bogomile by birth and education, in his place. The new ban proved, however, more pliant than his poorer subjects. Alarmed at the threatening attitude of the King of Hungary, he recanted, as Kulin had done before him, and placed his country under the protection of St Peter. But the conversion of their Prince had little effect upon the masses. The monks of the Dominican order might boast that they had converted, if not convinced, Ninoslav, but it was felt that stronger measures must be taken against his people. In 1234 a crusade was at last organised, and for the next five years the Bogomiles of Bosnia experienced all those horrors of fire and sword which their fellows, the Albigenses, had suffered in the south of France. Under different names and in widely different spheres the two bodies of heretics had adopted similar doctrines. Indeed, the Albigenses had looked to the Bogomile “pope,” or primate, of Bosnia for spiritual instruction and advice, and accepted their “vicar” at his hands. But while historians and poets of renown have cast lustre upon the struggles and sufferings of the martyrs of Provence the probably equally heroic resistance of the Bosnian Bogomiles has made little impression upon literature. Yet it is clear that they possessed all the stubborn valour of our own puritans. In spite of the conquest of both Bosnia and the Herzegovina in 1237 by the Hungarian King’s son, Koloman, who received the former country from the King and the Pope as the reward of his labours, in spite of the erection of forts and a Catholic Cathedral to keep the unruly passions and heretical inclinations of the people in order, the spirit of the Bogomiles remained unbroken. Ninoslav, furious at the arbitrary substitution of Koloman for himself, once more appeared as their champion, and the great defeat of the Hungarians by the Tartars in 1241 not only rid him of his rival, Koloman, but freed his land from all fear of Hungarian intervention for some time to come. Even the incursion of the Tartars into Bosnia was a small disadvantage as compared with the benefits which that country had derived from their previous victory over its foes. Ninoslav now felt himself strong enough to assist Spalato in its struggle against the King of Hungary and to offer an alliance to Ragusa against the growing power of the Serbian monarchy. A second crusade in Bosnia in 1246 was not more successful than the first, and the Pope in placing the Bosnian See under the authority of the Archbishop of Kalocsa, expressly gave as his reason “the utter hopelessness of a voluntary conversion of that country to the true faith.” Even the papal permission to use the Slavonic tongue and the Glagolitic characters in the Catholic service did not win over the Bogomiles to Rome. Crusades and concessions had alike failed[890].
Ninoslav passes out of sight in 1250, and the next two generations are, with the exception of the Turkish supremacy, the gloomiest period of Bosnian history. Religious differences and a disputed succession made the country an easy prey to the ambitious designs of the Hungarian monarchs, who, after a brief support of Ninoslav’s relative, the Catholic Prijesda I, in 1254 subdued not only Bosnia but the Herzegovina beneath their sway. While the latter about 1284 fell under Serbian influence the former was split up into two parts. The Upper, or hill-country, Bosnia properly so-called, was allowed to retain native bans—Prijesda I and his sons[891], Prijesda II and Stephen Kotroman, till 1302; Lower Bosnia, i.e. the “salt” district of Soli (the modern Tuzla) with Usora, for the sake of greater security, was at first entrusted to Hungarian magnates, and then combined with a large slice of northern Serbia, known as Matchva, in a compact duchy, which was conferred upon near relatives of the Hungarian King. During this period the history of this distracted land is practically a blank. Beyond the names of its successive rulers we have little handed down to us by the chroniclers. “A sleep as of death,” in the words of a Croatian writer, “had fallen upon the country. The whole national and religious life of Bosnia had perished beneath the cold blasts of the wind from beyond the Save.” Now and again we come upon traces of the old Bogomile spirit and the old zeal of the persecutors. Stephen Dragutin, who had been driven by lameness from the Serbian throne and had become under Hungarian auspices Duke of Matchva and Bosnia in 1284, was specially noted for his “conversion and baptism of many heretics,” and it was in answer to his request that the Franciscans, who have since played such an important part in Bosnian history, settled in the country. But still the Pope complained that “the churches were deserted and the priesthood uprooted.” Meanwhile two powerful families began to make their influence felt, the Croatian clan of Shubich and the race of Kotromanich, whose legendary founder (according to Orbini), a German knight, had entered Bosnia in the Hungarian service and was the ancestor of the Bosnian Kings. We now know, however, from a document of the great Tvrtko[892], quoted by Pope Gregory XI, that Tvrtko’s uncle, Stephen Kotromanich, was grandson of “the great” Prijesda I. The latest authority on the subject[893] accordingly believed the Kotroman family to have sprung from Upper Bosnia and to have been very probably related to Borich and Kulin. The legend of its German, or Gothic, origin arose out of its matrimonial connections with great families of Central Europe. The family of Shubich was at first in the ascendant, and became lords of part and then the whole of the land. In fact Paul Shubich, in 1299, styled himself “lord of Bosnia” and early in the fourteenth century his son, Mladen, ruled, under the title of “ban of the Croats and all Bosnia,” a vast tract of territory extending from the Save to the Narenta and from the Drina to the Adriatic. But in 1322 he fell before a combination of rivals, and young Stephen Kotromanich, who had been his deputy in Bosnia, became independent and united both Upper and Lower Bosnia under his sway[894].
Stephen Kotromanich proved himself to be the ablest ruler whom Bosnia had had since Kulin, and laid the foundations upon which his successor built up the Bosnian kingdom. His reign of over thirty years was marked by a series of successes. He began in 1325 by annexing the Herzegovina, which, as we have seen, had been under Serbian authority for the last two generations, as well as the sea-coast from the river Cetina as far south as the gates of Ragusa. Thus, for the first time in its history, Bosnia had gained an outlet on the sea, and was not entirely dependent upon foreigners for its imports. The Dalmatian coast with its fine harbours is the natural frontage of the country behind, which even under the Austrians touched the sea at only two small points. But in the first half of the fourteenth century Bosnia had gained a considerable coast-line. Kotromanich even coveted the islands as well, and specially Curzola, then under the overlordship of Venice. But here his plans failed, although the Ragusans were ready to lend him ships for the purpose. He rewarded them by confirming all their old trading rights in his country and granting them some territorial concessions near the mouth of the Narenta. He took an active, if somewhat insidious, part in the operations which King Charles Robert of Hungary and his successor, Louis the Great, conducted for the restoration of their authority in Croatia and Dalmatia. Charles Robert, who had bestowed upon Kotromanich a relative of his own wife in marriage, found him a useful ally; but in the war between Louis the Great and the Venetians for the possession of Zara the Bosnian ruler was desirous of standing well with both sides. At the famous siege of Zara in 1345 and the following year he went, at the bidding of Louis, to rescue the town from its Venetian besiegers. But the crafty Venetians knew their man. They gave him a heavy bribe, and offered him a much heavier one if he would persuade Louis to abandon the relief of the beleaguered city. The money was well spent. At a critical moment of the siege, when it had been arranged that the Hungarian and Bosnian army should support the besieged in a sally from the gates, Kotromanich and his Bosniaks hung back and the Venetians won the day. The quaint chronicle of this famous siege expressly ascribes the defeat of the allies to the perfidy of “that child of Belial, Stephen, ban of Bosnia,” and it was largely owing to his subsequent mediation that Zara ultimately surrendered to Venice. But Kotromanich soon found that he required the good offices of Venice himself. While he had been engaged in the west of the Balkan peninsula there had grown up in the east under the mighty auspices of Stephen Dushan the great Serbian Empire, which threatened at one moment to swallow up Constantinople itself. Dushan is the greatest name in the whole history of the peninsula, a name cherished to this day by every patriotic Serb. But just as the restoration of Dushan’s Empire, the daydream of Serbian enthusiasts, jeopardised the existence of Austrian Bosnia, so the conquests of the great Serbian Tsar alarmed the Bosnian ruler of that day. For the first half of his reign Dushan was too much occupied with his eastern conquests and his law reforms to interfere with his western neighbour. But he had not forgotten that the Herzegovina, which Kotromanich had annexed, had once belonged to the Serbian monarchy, and, as soon as he had leisure, he pressed his claims. Both parties accepted the mediation of Venice, and for a time peace was preserved. But in 1349 Kotromanich assumed the offensive, invaded Dushan’s dominions, and penetrated as far south as the beautiful town of Cattaro, at that time part of the Serbian Empire and now at last restored to its natural owners, the Southern Slavs. Dushan retaliated next year by descending upon Bosnia and laying siege to the strong castle of Bobovatz, the residence of many Bosnian rulers. As has usually happened in the history of the country, the persecuted Bogomiles flocked to the standard of the invader, and Bosnia seemed to be at his feet. But the walls of Bobovatz, behind which lay the lovely daughter of the ban, whom Dushan had demanded in marriage for his son, resisted his attacks, and he marched away southward through the Herzegovina to Cattaro. Next year the hostilities ceased, and as a further security Kotromanich found a husband for his daughter in King Louis the Great of Hungary, his old ally.
The internal condition of Bosnia was less fortunate, however, in the hands of Kotromanich than its external relations. The power of the Bogomiles had greatly increased before his accession; they had a complete organisation—a spiritual head called djed, or “grandfather,” with a seat at Janjichi, and twelve “teachers” under him—while there was not a single Catholic bishop living in the country. Moreover the rival orders of Dominicans and Franciscans had begun to fight for the exclusive privilege of applying the tortures of the Inquisition to the Bosnian heretics—a conflict which naturally favoured the growth of that heresy. Under these circumstances Kotromanich began his reign by openly favouring the Bogomiles, who formed the bulk of his armies and were his best bulwark against foreign aggression so long as he was their protector. But in 1340, on the persuasion of the King of Hungary, he committed the political blunder of embracing the Catholic faith and thus making his Bogomile subjects look upon Stephen Dushan as their legitimate champion. The evil results of his ecclesiastical policy were apparent when the great Serbian Tsar invaded his dominions.
Stephen Kotromanich, whose memory is preserved by his seal, the earliest Bosnian coins and seven documents issued in his name[895], died in 1353, and his nephew Tvrtko succeeded him. Tvrtko is the greatest name in Bosnian history, and his long reign of nearly forty years, first as ban and then as first King of Bosnia, marks the zenith of that country’s power. Beginning his career under circumstances of great difficulty, and even driven at one moment from his throne, he lived to make himself King not merely of Bosnia, but of Serbia, Croatia and Dalmatia as well, and to unite beneath his sceptre a vast agglomeration of territory, such as no other Bosnian ruler has ever governed.