It was the necessities of the Hungarian Kingdom and the Empire, when they had to bear the brunt of still encroaching Islâm, that some three hundred years ago created the Military Frontier—the Granitza, as it is known to its Slavonic denizens. The Hungarian and Imperial statesmen of the sixteenth century had just the same immense problem set before them as the Romans of the earlier empire—how to defend a long line of frontier from the perpetual incursions of barbarians—and they solved it much in the same way as the Western Cæsars of yore. The Roman Emperors, under parallel circumstances, parcelled out the march-lands of that awkward angle between the Rhine and the Danube among rude Allemannic tribes, to be held of the Emperor on condition of military service in their defence. So now the Hapsburgh Cæsars divided out the provinces bordering on the Turks among primitive Sclavonic house-communities, each of which held its allotment in common of the King of Hungary on condition that it provided, in proportion to the number of men in the family, one or more soldiers for watch and ward against the Infidel. The frontier was divided into territorial divisions known by the military appellation, Regiments. Every soldier when not on active service might change his sword for a spade, and sank into a peasant like the rest; and the officer, or ‘Ober,’ left the camp to preside as judge in the law courts. It was a peasant militia. To this day the Grenzer uniform is but an adaptation of old Croat costume; the military waggons are the simple village carts; the soldier transforms himself into a boor, the boor into a soldier, at a moment’s notice. Thus it was an organisation economical, self-supporting—and who would not fight bravely when his neighbouring homestead was at stake?—but military over-pride was tempered by the peaceful instincts of husbandry. Thus the Turk was successfully fended off, and a long watch-service sentinelled along the whole frontier. The watch-towers at intervals, with their wooden clappers, may be still seen in places, as well as the now unused beacons whose telegraphic chain could once rouse to arms the whole population from the Adriatic to the easternmost Carpathians in a few hours.

Thus the Military Frontier was originally the outwork of Christendom, the political sea-wall of her provinces painfully reclaimed. But the force of that flood had long been spent—Islâm had ceased to be militant. What had once been a military became merely a sanitary cordon, or was turned to account to protect the absurd tariffs of slow Swabian finance. Nay, it had even ceased in part to mark the boundary line between Frank and Osmanlì. Free Serbia had risen beyond it. It was superannuated—a mere survival. The Military Frontier, as it existed a few years ago, might be compared to an old Roman dyke that once marked the limits of the chafing North Sea, but now runs inland across the flats of Ouse—a monument of a vanquished ocean perverted to hedgerows, given over to the plough. And, indeed, about three years ago it at last struck the Austro-Hungarian Government that this unproductive rampart might be resigned to cultivation; for human culture in the Granitza was at a very low ebb, and the artificial clogs to social development produced industrial depression. Accordingly the military organisation was assimilated to that of the rest of the Empire, and by the Theilungsgesetze, which facilitates the transfer of land and the break-up of families, the old communal system has received its death-blow.

The Military Frontier has ceased to exist, but the old order of things has not yet passed away; and we were the more anxious to catch if but a glimpse of that antique society, so long artificially preserved from change by the military needs of the monarchy, before it dies away from the memory of man. For to cross the Military Frontier is to survey a phase of society so primitive that it was already antiquated when the forefathers of the English sate among the heaths and fens and forests of the Elbelands. It is to go back, not indeed into Feudal times—for to call this frontier organisation Feudal shows an ignorance of what Feudalism really means—but to wander beyond the twilight of history, and take a lantern as it were into the night of time.

If the Turkish invasion can be likened to the encroachment of an ocean, it resembled it in nothing more than its denuding action. Throughout the whole of Eastern Europe there set in a great levelling of baronial peak-lands. The South-Sclavonic nobility fell at Kóssovo or Mohatch and a hundred other fields, or skulked away into foreign lands; and, indeed, this Feudal overgrowth was always more or less of an exotic among Serbs and Croats. The Turkish conquest was a fiery trial, in truth, and yet it had the effect of purging the sterling democratic ore of society from all this hæmatitic dross. The semi-feudal organisation which had sprung up in these lands—partly owing to the imperfect devices of an acephalous society to gain the unity of action required in war, partly to infiltrations of Western ideas viâ Hungary or the Empire—was now levelled away by the Turks, where it was not, as in Bosnia, assimilated. Society reverted to that almost patriarchal form which the Sclavonic settlers had carried with them into the Illyrian triangle when they settled here in the days of Heraclius. Vlastela and magnates now make way once more for simple house-fathers, distinctions of rank are merged in the old equality and fraternity that reign within the paling of the house-community. We have seen an Imperial ukase work much the same result among the Sclaves of Russia as was wrought by the Turkish scimitar for their brethren of the south.

Then, too, not only were the higher ranks of society cleared away, but influences were at work to make even the communistic village government go back a step in archaism. Vast tracts of land were depopulated and were parcelled out amongst new settlers, chiefly immigrant families from beyond the Turkish frontier. But the single farms of those backwoodsmen could not grow into villages all at once, and so it would happen that the mark—as we may call the allotment—reverted to a very primitive stage, being held in common, not so much by a village-community, as by a single household. Thus the Starescina, or alderman of the community, was often literally the elective elder of the household.

But it was evident that if the new military organisation was to be self-supporting, each family must contain several adult male members—for how else could men be spared from the tillage necessary for the support of the household? And how else could contributions in kind be afforded to the military chest—the cassa domestica—for the keep of soldier house-brothers?

Therefore it was that the Government thought well to strengthen the Sclavonic family tie, always strong, by legal fetters which forcibly bound the household together and artificially checked the development of individual proprietorship. It was forbidden, as far as possible, to alienate the property of a house-community, or to subdivide it among its members; and so literally was this enforced that, near Siszek for example, we heard of families still existing containing over three hundred members all living within the same palisaded yard, and forming a village of themselves; nor is it by any means rare to find villages in the Granitza consisting of a couple of households.

Aug. 7.—It was to survey this primitive régime that we now sallied forth from Karlovac, and, crossing the bridge over the Kulpa, found ourselves, as was manifested still by a conspicuous sign-board, in what was once the Sluin Regiment of the Military Frontier—a suburban street of Karlovac, in fact, belonging to the ex-military district. It must, however, be remembered that side by side with this military communism exists a civil population: clergy, teachers, artizans, tradesmen, innkeepers, and so forth, who enjoy exceptional liberties; so there was not much to notice of special interest in military Karlovac, except a spacious government school for Granitza children. A pretty country walk brought us to the little village of Radovac, where we lighted on a native, an intelligent young fellow, who acted as a guide, and interpreter of primitive institutions.

We looked into several of the cottages, each in its yard, with due complement of outbuildings, garden and orchard for common use. The households here are not so large as in other parts of the frontier, and it is evident that in former times the inhabitants must have found some means of evading the law, and dividing their property. The old order of things still exists; each cottage has its house-father and house-mother, and everything is held in common. But the effects of the Theilungsgesetze are beginning to be felt, and the right of any family to claim an equal division of the property among its members is being taken advantage of. We were shown one house where the family had just quarrelled and split up. In this case the old house-father and house-mother still retained their military exemption; but the heads of the new family offshoots were liable to service, and were not recognised as house-fathers and house-mothers by the eye of the law; though some of them still arrogate the time-honoured titles. In other parts of the Frontier the overgrown households are availing themselves of the new permissive law to escape from the imprisonment of the common paling. We heard of instances of partition near Siszek, and further east, near Brood in Slavonia. Thus the old communal life is dying a natural death.

But let us examine one of these homesteads where the house-fathers and house-mothers still preside—and the description of the one we saw first will serve for all. In order to find our way to the dwelling-house we had to enter by a yard, enclosed by a rough wooden fence, called the ‘plot.’ Within this, to the right, was the ‘Kucica’ or common cottage, and then followed in order the pig-sty, the barn, the hay-loft and cart-shed, the round conical-peaked hay-stack, and another store-house. This homestead square reminded one of old English, Norse,[160] and Franconian farms; and we found the dwelling-houses trisected into a sleeping-room, a kitchen, and a store-room, like the homesteads of Scandinavian backwoods. The centre room of the three is the kitchen, in one corner of which is a flat stone hearth, a small paved square for cooking on, such as is universal in Illyria. In the other corner there was a stove of a kind which also occurs throughout all these lands; it was of baked clay, square below, and bell-shaped above, bayed all over with circular pigeon-holes, which in Bosnia, where still ruder forms of this stove occur, are actually pots embedded into the clay; though whether this practice arose from a scientific desire to gain a greater heating surface, or whether for the celebration of certain culinary mysteries, or whether for ornament, or, what is more probable, by reason of some exigencies of structure—we were never able to determine.

Before the kitchen was a kind of fore-hall, as in a Northern cottage; but, in this warm climate, open to the air, and forming a verandah, which in the larger houses runs along the upper storey, where the family live. We peeped into the dormitory, which was the largest room of the three, and saw beds ranged round the room, and a picture of a saint suspended from the wall. The house itself was of wood, and showed in parts the rich time-stains of an Alpine chalet. Yet in places one might notice the Sclavonic tendency towards whitewash and mud plaster. The roof was double; first a shingling of short wooden planks, and above that a substantial thatch.

As to the inmates, they were engaged in the yard in a very curious occupation. Just outside the store-house was the most greedy-looking machine we ever set eyes on—all teeth and jaw, without even the decency of a stomach. It turned out to be a stamping-mill for beating flax, which we had already noticed on our way, going through preliminary processes of water-retting and grassing. At first sight the masticator looked like a monstrous variety of the trap which children use for ‘bat and ball;’ it was all of wood, except a metal pivot or axis, on which the upper jaw worked, and its motive power was supplied by two Croats, a man and a woman, who took their stand on the upper jaw, and, placing one foot on each side of the pivot, imparted a see-sawing motion to it, by throwing their weight simultaneously first on one foot and then on the other, from which treading the mill gains the Croatian name Stupa or tread-mill. Meanwhile another woman took a wisp of the ready retted and dried flax, and fed the wooden crocodile with it; and when it had been sufficiently chewed, and the useless stem or boom separated from the useful bark or harl, she handed the wisp on to another woman, who combed out the fibres in a heckle, made by the simple process of sticking iron nails through a paw of wood fixed into the fence, and being now both clawed and chewed, the flax was laid in a heap, and the preparation was concluded. The mill seems a very primitive form of the Scotch foot-brake, but it is at least better than the hand-mill of our forefathers, for the principle of co-operation of labour is invoked, and the flax therefore prepared more expeditiously.

One would think that the fact that the rude Croats of the Granitza have arrived at a stage of manufacture even so comparatively advanced as this, may be due to an advantageous influence of the Communistic system. For if self-interest is in the long run the best spur to industry, yet it sometimes keeps it back, owing to a want of readiness to combine with others. But here we find the common interest of the house-community in the results of labour, teaching the great economic lesson of combination, though it certainly discourages extraordinary energy in individuals. Thus the land is tilled in common, the harvest gathered in in common, and, ceteris paribus, it is far more probable that agricultural machinery could be introduced in one of the large Granitza families, containing some three hundred members, than in a village of the same population tenanted by the small, selfish peasant-farmers of France or Germany.

Besides this readiness to combine, another favourable aspect of this Communistic society was especially striking to one fresh from among the somewhat churlish, close-fisted Nether-Saxons. This was a certain geniality, an open-handed readiness of good cheer, whether of homely apples or homelier wine. Nothing here of that jealous attitude towards strangers so characteristic of your peasant-farmer or petty ‘Eigenthümer.’ You have only to muster up unabashed intrusiveness enough, and you may spy out the land and all the ins and outs of a Granitza dwelling-house without let or hindrance. You may rove at your sweet will through yard and garden, take stock of horned and feathered, seat yourself on the three-legged stool before the culinary hearth—and pray do not let false delicacy or closed doors deter you from unclewing the inmost mysteries of the bed-chamber! The inmates are only too proud to see a visitor. A comfortable sense of co-partnership grows upon you. You find yourself arguing some post-liminal right of adoption as you cross the threshold, and end by asking yourself whether after all there can be any gulf ’twixt meum and tuum when every potsherd and goosequill is common property?

‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity!’ Let this, then, be the motto of the stranger who visits the Granitza homesteads. Obviously new rules of social decorum must be invented for the occasion, and our code was simple—‘Make yourself at home.’ The idea that we could be intruding became really too preposterous; and as for the truly insular notion that a house could be a castle, we laughed it to scorn! We were Communists for the nonce. The Genius loci inspired us. We penetrated without the introduction of a guide into yards and houses; or if we came to larger farms, where the ground-floor of the house is apportioned to cows and the dwelling-rooms of the scansorial part of the family are above, only approachable by external ladders, we hesitated not to effect entrance by escalade, and the inmates were as little taken aback, and received us with as hearty a good-day as if they had been expecting us for weeks.

We could not help thinking of the contrast they presented to the people of the same Sclavonic race, and almost the same language, beyond the mountains that fringed the north-western horizon; to the Wends, namely, and Slovenes, of Carinthia and Carniola. For when Goldsmith tells how

he is only stating what we knew by actual experience to be still true. It is not so soon forgotten—that chilly night, when, for want of a single hospitable roof in a whole village to shelter midnight travellers, we were fain to stall ourselves in the creepiest of church porches—and had we not sundry other reminiscences of slammed doors and long parleyings to boot in the moonlight of the Julians? There was always something morose in the temperament of those Slovenes; something too much in harmony with the prevailing black of the Upper-Carinthian costume, with the sad weirdness of their music—what a dirge it was that accompanied our way to that ghostliest of shelters! The Granitza folk, on the contrary, are light in heart as in garment; sociable, hospitable; finding their poetic portraiture rather among those Acadians of whom it is written that

Is it that these Croats of the Marches still retain the old Sclavonic communism, which the Wends and Slovenes have lost?

It is most delightful, too, to come upon a place where ‘charity’ in its mischievous, oriental form, is kept from the door. Here every community is of its very essence a kind of benefit club; the common homestead is the only asylum for the old, infirmary for the sick; in times of war it was not the least important advantage of the Military Frontier, that each house-community formed a hospital for disabled soldier house-brothers. The communal system prevents moreover the rise of an actual proletariate; the flunkeyism of service is absent where all are alike fellow-helps and fellow-masters; and no doubt if a brother be disproportionately lazy, moral suasion of an unmistakable kind is brought to bear on him by the rest of the community. Here we have a kind of industrial police organisation.

Endued with all this brotherly co-operation, these social advantages and virtues, Granitza life cannot be said to be without its brighter aspects; but alas that it should have shadow as well as sunshine! After all we must own that those earnest staid Slovenes, likened by the German to his Mecklenburgers and Nether-Saxons, possess, with all their moroseness, a more solid civilization. It was admitted to us here—who, indeed, could not see it?—that education was far behind-hand, and the children unkempt and neglected; indeed, the mortality among Granitza infants is said to be outrageous. Why, indeed, should they be better cared for? Why in the name of Fortune should the celibate portion of the community be mulcted for the sake of philoprogenitive brothers? Agriculture here is at a standstill, and the fields undunged.

This wretched wind-wry shanty before us, how little does it answer to the richness of the soil! The inmates, like those around, are poor in the midst of plenty. Dame Nature certainly would fain be bounteous; you have only to look at the luxuriant wild flowers that crowd along the garden skirts to see that; they are at least quite as good as the niggard garden patches, themselves half-wild, of sunflower, marigold, and zinnia,—just see! how scornfully yon aspiring tufts of saffron meadow-sweet climb above the paling, or peep between the rickety bars as if to make fun of those cockered garden favourites within! The apples and plums in the orchard to the side are, as such, puny and poor of flavour; but the hedgerow which fences it round is loaded with sloes very nearly as fat as damsons; and as to the rose hips, you might take them for filberts, scarlet-mantled. Further beyond you catch a glimpse of the contours of Mt. Capella masted with oak-woods, now mere pannage for swine, but fit to timber a hundred fleets.

The truth is, that the incentives to labour and economy are weakened by the sense of personal interest in their results being subdivided. Even the social virtues engendered by this living in common are apt to run off into mere reckless dissipation. One may think their fruit poor, and their wine abominable; but their maxim is none the less, ‘Eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.’ True, a man has a legal right to lay by his share of the profits; but who does? To do so would be to fly in the face of public opinion, and this Granitza way of life is favourable to the growth and influence of public opinion of a kind. At Radovac there is a well-known yearly market, and the peasants, as we heard from an innkeeper’s son, drink away their whole earnings on this greatest of money-making occasions in the four inns which compose the moiety of this little village. In short, the house-communities have been weighed in the balance and found wanting. One may regret the Military Frontier from an antiquarian point of view. Some pleasant features of this unique society may be lost; but on the whole no one can quarrel with the government for passing that permissive bill which entails its speedy self-immolation.

There is no need to give special descriptions of the other villages that we saw in this part, as Radovac has been made the peg on which to hang wider generalisations. The village of Trn may be noticed, as there we came upon peasants belonging to the Greek Church, called ‘Vlachs,’ like the Sluin folk, but not like them a peculiar people, and indeed differing in nothing from their Roman Catholic neighbours, except that Greek icons were hung in their rooms in place of Romish saints. But in the villages about Karlovac the house-communities are generally small, division has already been at work, and I will therefore ask the reader to accompany us per saltum to a more easterly part of the Granitza which we explored a few days later, namely to the neighbourhood of Brood in Slavonia.

Making our way through a country as smiling as that which we had left behind, through common-fields of the family communities, a-bloom with sky-blue flax, and enclosed by old-world hedges overgrown with clustering wild vines, or through the common meadowland—the old English ing—we came to the village of Bukovje, and were introduced to the largest family community of the place by the kind Roman Catholic vicar.

Some idea of the arrangement of the homestead will be given by the accompanying diagram. We made our way into the premises by the yard-gate and found ourselves in a spacious farmyard fenced in by a stout palisade. To the left was the common dwelling-house, and around the skirts of the enclosure ranged in order the common barn, cow-house, stables, maize-garner, goat-shed, and pig-stye; the common stillery for making slivovitz or plum-brandy, which here has succeeded sour wine as the favourite drink of the peasantry; the common well, with its bucket attached to a monster fishing-rod; the common oven; and last, not least, the common goose-house. In one corner was a small patch of maize, and beyond the bottom of the yard was the common orchard with its usual crop of poor plums, pears, and apples.

We were received in the yard by a member of the family, voted unanimously to be the house-father, who cordially invited us in, and having satisfied our curiosity as to the various outbuildings, bade us enter the common dwelling-houses, of which there were two; one a long wooden erection with the usual verandah, used as a summer abode, and divided into compartments for each sub-family; the other, a palatial residence compared with the Radovac hovels, brick-built and whitewashed, and with its porch and double tiers of massive arches which open on long corridors as in some old monasteries (for there is something conventual too about these closes), and entered withal by an imposing flight of steps, was not without its dignity. The family consisted of some three dozen individuals, mostly absent at the time on field-work, insomuch that the garrison consisted of our house-father and two house-sisters all told. Thus it was scarcely more than a tenth as big as those monster families we heard of near Siszek with their three hundred members; but it afforded a good example of the house arrangements, nevertheless; for in these larger family communities, such as we saw higher up the Save, you may see several dwelling-houses ranged in a row within the common ‘plot,’ so that really only a little multiplication is needed to gain an idea of the family community on its grandest scale from a view of this Bukovje homestead. There is, however, this difference, that in the larger families the common hall and kitchen are often separate buildings.

The house consisted of two floors. Ascending the porch-steps at the house-father’s bidding, we found ourselves in a ground-floor with the fore-hall and usual tripartite division of the ruder Granitza cottages, consisting of a common hall or refectory, a kitchen and another room, used in this case, I believe, as a bedroom for the house-father. These three rooms opened on to the front corridor; and ascending some stairs, at the end of this airy arcade we found ourselves on the second storey, divided exclusively into bedrooms, of which there were thirteen, one for each sub-family. Above this again was a loft running under the whole length of the roof, and set apart for stores.

In the middle of the kitchen, whose besooted rafters were supported by a massive beam as swarthy as themselves, was the large common hearth, the wonted square of flat stones, the logs on which were kept in place by two quaint fire-dogs; while by their embers a large green jar of earthenware was simmering with a savoury mess of chopped bean-pods, eyed from time to time lovingly by the house-sister, she who had welcomed us on entering with a bountiful apronful of apples. By the side walls were three other lesser hearths, communicating with the honeycombed stoves in the other rooms, so that one fire fed both a hearth and a stove. On these hearths reposed cylindrical pots with curious lids, and above the fire great iron caldrons, capable of providing for many mouths, were hung from the wooden arms of primitive jacks, such as I remember having seen in Finnish cottages.

The common hall contained little but a long table and two long benches, recalling, except for its honeycombed stove, the furniture of an Oxford College hall. It is here that the whole family take their meals; and in the winter time, when the stoveless summer dwellings are uninhabitable, it is here that the men take shelter from the blast to make or mend their rude implements of husbandry, and the women ply their homely looms. They told us further that this was the room in which the family met to choose their house-father or house-mother, and to transact all common business; and, since dinner is the natural time for all the family to be assembled together, it is after dinner that these matters of household economy are mooted, and the house-father, who represents the family in dealings with the authorities, and the house-mother, who shares with her consort[161] his patriarchal sway over the rest of the house-community, are elected. It is here, too, that the domestic government is thrown out if it does not continue to give satisfaction to its constituents. In short, this is their little Parliament-House, and these the earliest germs of Constitutional Government.

But we must leave Slavonia for the present, and transport ourselves back in some aërial fashion to Karlovac, from which town we are about to make our way to Siszek by the last strip of railway we were to see for many a long day. It may be that it was lucky that such a means of transit was still at our disposal, since, if we had been obliged to foot it, we must have run the gauntlet of a band of robbers then infesting the country near Petrinia. As a rule our Croatian friends were never tired of assuring us that it was beyond the frontier that these gentry flourished; and the hilly country that rose to the south-west—the Kraina, as the promontory of Turkish territory is known, which acts as a thorn in the side of Austria—was pointed out as a regular asylum for wild characters, and in fact was long the only part of the frontier where the watch-service was still needed. At the present moment, however, even the Croats were fain to admit that Bosnia was free from robbers, while their own country was insecure; and, indeed, I am afraid that this was not such an exceptional state of things as they would have had us believe, for when we arrived two days later in the Slavonian lands of the lower Save we found the whole country under martial law, owing to the murderous infestations of brigands in the Syrmian highlands; and though several had been hanged, the reign of terror was such that the military government was still continued. Indeed, just after the Austro-Prussian war, the state of Croatia had become so deplorable by reason of the increasing brigandage, that ‘Standrecht’ had to be proclaimed there, and no less than forty robbers were hung. For some time a gibbet with its ghastly appendages was to be seen from the train on nearing Agram.

On the whole, then, it was more comfortable to indulge in such reflections as we shot through the mighty oak-forest in a railway-carriage bound for Siszek, than to sneak through these mysterious shadows on foot with the feelings of one of our great-grandfathers, when doomed to traverse Hampstead Heath on a dark night. These Croatian highwaymen, however, immediately under notice, had hitherto conducted the business of the road on the most gentlemanly principles; and though a kind of ‘commercial’ with whom we travelled seemed a bit scared, even he could report no thrilling tales of bloodshed. There were sixteen of these Hajduks,[162] as the Croats called them, who had taken to outlawry to avoid the military conscription, which has just superseded the older organisation of the Granitza. Soldiers have been in pursuit, but fruitlessly, since not only are the hills about covered with unfathomable forest and hollowed—so we were told—with caverns, but the peasants, like those of Greece and Southern Italy, are in league with the brigands, supplying them with food, and refusing to reveal their hiding-places. The gendarmes, indeed, express hopes of seizing their quarry when the leaves have fallen and the snow is on the ground. Meantime they are at large. Nor let us judge too harshly of their profession, for in this old world East of Europe the Hajduk is often a gentleman in his way. ’Tis Robin Hood and his merry men who still live on, roughly redressing their wrongs in a vicarious fashion against that society which refuses them legal requital, but capable none the less of much tenderness to women and children, and discriminating their friends from the class that oppresses them. Across the Turkish frontier the cause of national freedom, hopelessly lost centuries ago on the battlefield, has been championed from generation to generation by the Hajduks of the forest mountain, in achievements not unsung by Sclavonic bards; and, likely enough, these Croatian brothers are striving too for ancient liberties, as they understand them.

It was late at night by the time we arrived at Siszek, so we were glad enough to avail ourselves of a car bound for the ‘White Ship’ inn on the Kulpa Quay, in company with a Serbian lady and her child—she disdaining not either for herself or boy the national costume of Free Serbia. And verily she had her reward. For what could be more appropriate than the rich silver embroidery flowered on the purple-velvet field of her mantle—efflorescent with the poetic yearning of the race for that gorgeous Orient, a yearning as lively as the abhorrence from its yoke—an echo from the Serbian lyre—a protest against your cold foggy West—but subdued withal by a Roman-matronly coiffure wondrously becoming to the tranquil grace of Serbian motherhood?

Arrived at our inn, we found ourselves plunged at once into Turkish society, for many Bosnian corn-merchants from Bihac, Serajevo, and other towns, betake themselves in the way of trade to Siszek. Among the group of Turks who, in various awkward and frog-like postures, were endeavouring to accommodate themselves to chairs, was an Effendi, a title which implies not only a certain grade of Turkish gentility, but an education for Bosnia most polite, namely, the ability to read and write; and, what is by no means ordinary among the Mussulman Sclaves of Bosnia, an acquaintance with Osmanlì. Thus it was with a conscious sense of superiority that our Effendi, learning our intentions in Bosnia, expressed a desire to see the pass which the Vali Pashà had been good enough to supply us with. He seemed extremely surprised to see that it was in the Vali’s own handwriting; but having convinced himself of the fact, he first read it aloud with pleasing gusto in the original Turkish, and then translated it into Bosniac for the benefit of the Sclavonic Mahometans and our Croatian landlord, with many assurances that with such an ‘open sesamé’ we should have no difficulty in unlocking the innermost fastnesses of Bosnia or even the Herzegovina, where the revolt had now broken out.

There was also a venerable Turk of singularly dignified mien, with patriarchal beard and capacious turban, who sat in mild contemplation, lulled by the measured purring of his narghilé, lost to all mundane concerns, sagely superior to the curiosity which our pass and travelling gear were exciting in less exalted bosoms, and benignantly indifferent even to the indignity of a chair. Our host told us that he was a Hadji, or pilgrim, then on his way from Buda, where he resided as a merchant, to Mecca.

Aug. 8.—Next morning we sallied forth to explore what might remain of ancient Siscia. For we are now on classic ground. Siszek is but the corruption of a name great in all ages of imperial Rome, and greatest in the twilight of her empire. There was a time when Siscia was one of the sovereign cities of the world. She was a bulwark against barbarians, an emporium of commerce, a seat of emperors, a mother of martyrs, a gathering point for Roman-Christian Saga. And her older name, Segestica, takes us back to times prior to the Roman conquest itself, when she formed part of that Celtic empire of race, dim, commercial, reaching from Gades to the swamps of Nether Rhine; from glacial Ierné to the mouths of Ister. Segestica! we have no record of her dealings with the Adriatic votaries of Belenus,[163] nor what Taurisk gold passed current in her streets; and yet her peasant citizens of to-day plough up an abundance of bronze-age sickles as if to bear witness of her old Celtic industry and her very name calls up golden harvests of antiquity ready garnered into her warehouses from rich Pannonian plains, with a side suggestion perchance of her

that twice withstood the arms of Rome successfully, till Augustus reduced her, and made of her a stationary camp for his cohorts.

She is now Siscia, a convenient point d’appui for Dacian campaigns; the winter quarters for Tiberius in his Pannonian war; by Septimius Severus made the seat of military government for his world, and so benefited by him that she took the name of Septimia Siscia. Probably under Vespasian,[164] a Roman colony had been already planted here, and Siscia became a Republic with municipal liberties modelled on those of the parent city. An inscription still recalls her Duumviri, who, in Rome’s provincial mirrors, reflected the two Consuls. Later on, Siscia becomes the chief city of Upper Pannonia; then, when Savia was made a province, the residence of its Corrector. She was the seat of an imperial treasury, and it was here that the ‘most splendid Provost of the Ironworkers’ received the revenue from Noric mines. Here, too, was established the Premier Mint of the Roman Empire; and Siscia shares with Rome herself the distinguished honour of first imprinting her name in full on the imperial currency. What numismatist does not know and covet that coin of Gallienus? or that choice piece of the Emperor who sprang from her Savian rival Sirmium (though from this legend one would think he was really of Siscia), with the proud inscription, ‘Siscia Probi Aug.’—the Siscia of Probus? On it is to be seen the personification of the queenly city, holding in her hands the laurel-wreath of empire, while at her feet her two subject rivers pour bounteously from their tributary urns.

But this medallic fertility, which has scattered the coins of Siscia over the fields of remotest Britain, was only the natural result of her commercial eminence. She was the staple of trade between the Adriatic and the Danubian basin—old Celtic trade-routes probably surviving the Roman conquest. ‘Siscia,’ says Strabo, ‘lies at the confluence of many rivers, all navigable. It is at the foot of the Alps, whose streams bear to it much merchandise, Italian and other. These are borne in waggons from Aquileja over Ocra, the lowest part of the Alps, to Nauportus, and thence by the Corcoras into the Save,’—and so to Siscia. The wine and oil wafted from more southern climes into the havens of that Venice of Roman Adria; the carpets and woollens of Patavium that rumbled into her markets by the Æmilian Way; the furs and amber that the barbarian dealers bore her from the cold shores of the Baltic, and Fennic forests; perhaps, too, her own costly wine stored up in wooden barrels—all these, we may believe, and more, were piled on the Aquilejan waggons and dragged up the Alpine steep by oxen, thence to be floated down the Save to the Siscian wharves. In the markets of Siscia the Aquilejese merchants might lay in their stock of grain, or hides, or keen Noric steel, and take their pick of cattle, or tattooed Illyrian slaves. From the whole of Eastern Europe wares might flow together here; for not only was Siscia at the confluence of the Save and Kulpa, but she was at the junction of great roads, which, with their branches, connected her with the Upper and Lower Danube, with the interior of Dalmatia as well as her coast-land, and with Nauportus and Italy, overland.

Not long ago an interesting relic was found in Croatia, which perhaps speaks more clearly than anything else of the majesty to which Siscia ultimately attained. It is a cedarn chest, once gilt, on which are carved, by a late Roman hand, what are meant to be personifications of the five premier cities of the Roman world. In the centre—

Rome, with her usual attributes of helmet, spear, and shield, is enthroned as a goddess. To her right two more female figures, distinguished by scrolls as Constantinople and Carthage, hold wreaths in their hands and look towards Rome. On her left, two other goddess-cities do the same; one is Nicomedia, the other Siscia. The carving is probably fourth-century work; and certainly, exalted as is the position claimed on it for Siscia, it is almost borne out by her coinage of the same period, for the activity of her mint shows that her commercial splendour was still at its zenith down to at least the days of Theodosius the Great; while the coins of her rival Sirmium wax fewer and fewer, and finally cease altogether. For Sirmium may have been of greater value as a military station,[166] and perhaps a pleasanter residence for emperors and bishops, and therefore of greater administrative importance, and of more frequent mention by historians; but that she was a greater city than Siscia—as is so confidently assumed by some writers—may reasonably be doubted, and the very bustle of Siscian markets may have deterred princes from fixing here their court.

The comparatively high state of Siscian civilisation is also attested by her coins—those superb medallions of gold and silver—those gems of the fourth-century monetary art that stand out among the poorer products of mints Gallic and Britannic. But what distinguishes the Siscian coins as much as their workmanship is their peculiarly Christian character. It is here that the first purely Christian type—that, namely, which alludes to the vision of Constantine, first makes its appearance—indeed, during the fourth century the sacred monogram may almost be regarded as a Siscian mint-mark. And we know from other sources that Christianity had early struck root here; for not only is its existence attested by two sepulchral inscriptions of Roman date discovered here, but its vitality is celebrated by a relation of Jerome and a hymn of Prudentius,[167] recording the martyrdom of a Siscian citizen and bishop, Quirinus:—

It was during the persecution of Diocletian and ‘Duke’ Galerius, as Prudentius styles him, that Quirinus, bishop of Siscia, refused to burn incense on the heathen altar at the bidding of the Governor Maximus, on the plea—countenanced, indeed, by inspired writers, but which a little philology would have spared him—‘that all the gods of the Gentiles were demons.’ ‘If you will allow,’ said Maximus, ‘that the gods which the Roman Empire serves are powerful, you shall be made priest to the great god Jove, otherwise you shall be sent to Amantius, præfect of First Pannonia, and receive from him condign sentence of death.’ The stout-hearted bishop, refusing these terms, is sent to Sabaria, where he is tried and condemned in the theatre, and with a millstone round his neck is thrown from the bridge above into the river; when, lo! despite the weight of rock, the water miraculously supports him:—