Besides the star and crescent, the Bosnian arms consisted of two crossed stakes, sable on ground or, each surmounted by the head of a Moorish king. These trophies appeared in the arms of several of the nobles contained in the volume, and recalled the long struggles of the Sea Serbs with the African corsairs. The early annals of Ragusa—or, as the Serbs call her, Dubrovnik, who often stood in peculiarly close relations with Bosnia, being practically her seaport and emporium—are much occupied with these Saracenic infestations, which extended along the whole Serbian coastland to Albania, and at one time desolated the Bocche di Cattaro. These trophies bear interesting witness to the deep impression left by those struggles on the national mind; and point to those early days when Trajekto on the Bocche di Cattaro was the residence of a Bosnian Ban.[218]

The scimetar on the arms of Primorie, or Serbia-on-the-Sea, seems to refer to these same struggles, and I cannot help suspecting that here is also to be found the true clue towards solving the mystery of the appearance of the star and crescent on the Illyrian escutcheon. The Moslems had early appropriated the old Byzantine half-moon,[219] and Richard Cœur de Lion, on returning from his wars in Palestine, added it as a Saracenic trophy to his royal seal. The moon and stars appear on the Irish coins of John. Nothing could have been more natural than for the Illyrian Serbs engaged in the long contests with the Saracen corsairs to have added this device to their shields for the same reason.

Following the escutcheons of the various Illyrian kingdoms come those of the nobility—there being no less than 126 families whose armorial bearings are blazoned in this book. How much is here to throw a light on the extension of Western ideas over the old Serbian area! How much to illustrate the national history, the national customs—aye, even the old Sclavonic mythology; how much to recall the origin of illustrious dynasties! I have spoken of the Némanjić ensigns; here, too, were the Castriotić, belonging to the family of Scanderbeg—again, a double-eagle, sable on or, and eagle crest to the helm—the arms of the royal house of Bosnia that was to be—the Tvartkoević shield semé of golden fleurs de lys. In many of the arms might be detected a curious play on words. The Kopiević arms, for example, had four lances, in allusion to the Bosnian word for a lance, Kopje. Brzo is the native word for ‘quick,’ and the device of the Barzoevic family is a fish in water. More interesting still is the occasional cropping up of the heathen Sclavonic mythology—chiefly seen in the frequent appearance of zmaje or dragons, who play so important a part in Serbian folk-lore; and—more fascinating than these fire-drakes—the Vila herself appears on the shield of the Mergnjavić—long-haired and devoid of raiment as in Serbian poetry: the guardian nymph of the race, holding aloft the eagle banner of empire.

The book appropriately concluded with a shield charged with the armorial bearings of the united Bosnian Nobility; and the monks, with an enthusiasm worthy of record, pointed out the motto—read by the light of after events, not without its pathos—Semper Spero.

As this heraldic pageant passes before us—these knightly shields and helms, with their crests, supporters, and accoutrements—the imagination is kindled to realize how these isolated regions fitted once into the polity of mediæval Europe. Here, too, in these barbarous neglected lands, the romantic brilliance of chivalry has once held sway. For a moment the Paynim surroundings are forgotten—we wake, and find ourselves still within the limits of Christendom militant. We hear the herald’s trump. The barriers that to-day wall off Bosnia from the West sink at the potent blast like the towers of some Eastern magician. The names, the armorial bearings, recall the European cousin-hood of that hierarchy of birth. In due order among the escutcheons of Bosnian nobles appears the shield of the Frangepani; that of the Rusciević family reproduces the oriflamme of France: next in order, by a curious coincidence, follows that of the Sestrićić, strewn with Tudor roses.[220] Perhaps it would be impossible for any other monument to recall more vividly than this Book of Arms, at once the futile dreams of Serbian empire, the wreck of Bosnian kingship, and that dastardly abjuration by her nobles of country and belief.

Or what fitter repository for such a monument than this Minorite monastery? Here, perhaps, better than anywhere else, one perceives how it is among these Franciscan brotherhoods that the traditions of the old Bosnian kingdom most live on. The genealogic lore evinced by the monks with regard to the old nobility was quite surprising to us; they seemed to have the pedigrees by heart; they betrayed sources of information not open to the outside world. To understand how this happens one need only call to mind that for the most part the royal race and magnates were in fact but a Roman Catholic minority, holding sway over heretics and Greeks, and that next after the Magyar battle-axe, their mainstay lay in the influence and organisation of these very monks. Thus it befell that, when the crash came, these Franciscan brotherhoods emerged, the only stable remnant from the wreck of the old régime. It was in their cloisters that the surviving supporters of Bosnian loyalty rallied; and those who in that supreme moment of national prostration would neither fly nor play the renegade, found safety in the bosom of the Church. The monks confided to us that two of the noble families of Bosnia were still represented in the fraternity—the Aloupović and Radieljević.

Others, without actually taking the cowl, seem to have found retirement from generation to generation, under shadow, as it were, of the monastery. In the village of Foinica below, a poor rayah family perpetuates the noble race of Kristić; and—more interesting still—the Christian inmates of another Foinican hovel still exult in the royal name of Tvrdkoiević, and preserve the lineage of those Bosnian kings whose mighty castles we have seen at Doboj, Tešanj, and Travnik.

The Franciscans were, in fact, put forward to make terms for Catholic Bosnia with the conqueror; and it was the head of the Foinica brotherhood, Angelo Zvizdović, who took the lead; and advancing like a new Leo to the camp of the terrible Sultan, gained from Mahomet II., on the field of Milodraz in 1463, the great charter of the Franciscans. This was the Atname.[221] The Sultan, in this firman, orders that no one shall in any way molest the Bosnian brothers, either in their person, or their property, or their churches; that those who have fled the realm may return, and that the brothers may bring any person they choose from foreign parts into the country. ‘And I swear by the great God, the creator of heaven and earth, by the seven books, by the great prophets, by the 124,000 prophets, and by the sabre which I wear, that no one shall act counter to these commands so long as these monks do my bidding and are obedient to my service.’

Nor need it surprise us that it was to Foinica that Roman and aristocratic Bosnia turned in the hour of need. The local history of the district is bound up with that of the old kings and nobles. Foinica was originally a royal domain, and this monastery of the ‘Holy Spirit’ (Svéta Duša) in all probability owes its origin to the piety of the kings, whose usual residence, Sutiska, was not far off. From the royal race of the Tvartkos it passed to one of the noblest of the noble families whose shields we have been surveying; to that, namely, of Mergnjavić, they of the Vila crest. The hereditary possessions of this house lay at Naissus (Nissa) in Serbia; and coming from the birthplace of Constantine they modestly traced their descent from the fourth king of Rome! After the Turkish conquest of Bosnia, some members of the family fled, or, as they doubtless put it to themselves, returned, to the Eternal City. Here one of its scions, a certain John Tomko, published in 1632 the family archives—‘The Proofs of the Antiquity and Nobility of the Marcian Family, vulgarly known as Marnavić.’[222] Thus we possess, in Latin translations, some of the original deeds by which Foinica was given and confirmed to this Marcia gens; and as they are, I suppose, the only documents of the kind relating to Bosnia which have been preserved, I may be permitted to allude to them.

The first grant is by King Stephen Dabiscia, otherwise known as Tvartko II., to Goiko Mergnjavić. ‘Seeing that when Bajazet with the Turks came and stood in Naglasinci,’[223] and destroyed Bosnia, then came Goiko Mergnjavić and helped us to slay the Turks. And I, King Dabiscia, was with all the province of Bosnia, and with the Bosnians; and I acted in full council with all the province of the Bosnian realm, and gave and presented and confirmed to Goiko Mergnjavić, Foinica, and the plain of Godalie in the territory of Imoteschi, both to him and his heirs, and his latest posterity for ever. Amen.’[224] The original of this was in the old Cyrillian or Illyrian characters and in the Bosnian tongue.[225]

This grant appears to have been renewed or confirmed to another Mergnjavić, in consideration of services equally distinguished, by King Tvartko III. The second grant, like the other, originally written in the native language, runs as follows:—

‘We, Stephen Tvartko Tvartkoević, King of Serbia, Bosnia, Primorie, Dalmatia, of the Western part of Lower Croatia, of Ussora, Sala, Podrinia, &c., with the consent of the realm, and according to the custom of the magnates of every grade, to the Prince John Mergnjavić, of Nissa, for the faithful services he rendered us in our need, when Murat (Amurath), the Turkish Czar, was wroth with us and wasted our dominions; for that then the said John Mergnjavić of Nissa went to the Porte, not sparing his own head for our sake, and found grace for us before the Czar, and rid our realm from his host: we, therefore, grant to him his own portion at Nissa, and Zvornik, and Nissava, and in the realm of Bosnia the country of Foinica,[226] and the land under Thum. And it is our will that this be not taken away from him for any breach of fealty which shall not first have been examined by the Bosnians and the Bosnian Church.’ As witnesses appear the Starosts (elders) of the kingdom, the Palatine with his brothers, the Župan Drina Driničić, the other palatines and Princes, and the Aulic marshal of the court. The whole is ‘written by the scribe Radoslav, Aulic of the great and glorious lord King Tvartko, in his residential seat of Sutiska, in the year 1426.’

To this was appended the great seal of King Tvartko, attached by red silk: on one side appeared the king seated on the throne of majesty crowned and sceptred; on the other as a knight on horseback, holding shield and lance.

When in 1448 the great Hungarian general, John Hunyadi, defeated by Sultan Amurath on the ill-omened field of Kóssovo, was seized in his flight by George, Despot of Serbia, and imprisoned in the fortress of Semendria, he owed his deliverance to another scion of the race, George Mergnjavić, perpetual Count of Zvornik and lord of Foinica, who hurried to his relief with a strong body of troops collected from his territories; and a deed in which Hunyadi confirms this George in his possession bears witness to his gratitude. George Mergnjavić is succeeded by his nephew Tomko, who, besides being lord of Foinica, appears in the deed in which Hunyadi and Ladislaus, king of Hungary, confirm his titles, to be ‘Chief Voivode of the Kingdom of Bosnia.’ The last donation to the ‘Marcian’ family is from Mathias Corvinus, who in 1460, six years after the overthrow of the Bosnian kingdom by the Turks, confirms to Tomko Mergnjavić, Magnificent Count of Zvornik, lord of Foinica, and Starost of the kingdom of Rascia, his ‘mills, mines, vineyards, fishpools, and weirs’ (aquarum decursus), of which the Ban of Slavonia was attempting to deprive him.

But we must attend to the lords of modern Foinica! A Zaptieh brings a message from the Kaïmakàm to say that he and the Kadi are about to drive to Kisseljak, our own destination, and to offer us a lift in one of their carriages; so, being for many reasons anxious to push on, we declined the pressing invitation of the monks to dine and pass the night with them, and descending once more to the village found an arabà waiting for us outside a Han, where we had ordered some eatables. The arabà—an ordinary country waggon, only provided with a better harness—belonged to the Kadi, but the Kaïmakàm had taken him into his carriage—a more sumptuous equipage—in order to provide room for us. We started therefore under good auspices, these two functionaries acting as our vanguard. Nor did the courtesy of the Turks stop here, for they had given our driver a supply of rosy apples and a sweet red-fleshed melon wherewith to serve us at intervals during the drive. About half-way down the Foinica valley our cortége stopped at a little roadside Han, where the Kaïmakàm motioned us to sit down by him on an open-air divan, canopied by shady branches and overhanging the stream; and while he treated us to coffee and water-melon both he and our Kadi reaped a quiet enjoyment by extending their hospitality to some fishes below.

The pebbles in the bed of the stream are stained of a rich brown and orange with the iron ore in which the valley abounds. On the flanks of the mountains, on either side, might here and there be detected huge scars and traces of old excavations. These are the mines of gold and silver worked of old by the Romans, and later on by the Ragusans, but now untouched. We are in the very midst of the mineral treasury of Bosnia. This vale of Foinica contains, besides these precious metals, lead ore, arsenic, quarries (unworked) of slate; and in a tributary gorge which we had seen running south-east, cinnabar, rich in quicksilver.[227] A little lower down, just where the Foinica stream runs into the Lepenica, the valley opened out considerably and formed an alluvial plain. Here and there among the stunted vegetation a column of blue smoke marked out a rude forge, where a little iron, the only metal exploited, is smelted to be converted into shovels, horse-shoes, and sundry tools and weapons for Bosnian home consumption. A few miles further down the Lepenica debouches into the valley of the Bosna, which is described as one vast coal-field.

Were we, one kept asking oneself, passing through what some day may become one of the Black Countries of Europe? Would, as the world grew older, something of the tremendous energy of our Midlands burst forth upon this stagnant valley—blasting, boring, blackening, metamorphosing its every feature? Mountains rose around us overgrown with primeval forest—habitations were few and far between. What there were, were miserable hovels—each in its mangy patch of maize—more ruinous than any we remembered having seen in Bosnia. It was hard to transform such into the busy streets of a great city—the silence of the woods seemed too inveterate to be ever broken by the crash of a steam-hammer. The hornpipe performed by our waggon, over what the Turks were pleased to call a road, was a positive relief to such desolation; and yet what stretch of imagination could convert it into an iron-way, or our ambling Bosnian pony into a locomotive? We seemed, however, to detect one little omen of the future, and accepted the augury: at one spot the foliage of some neighbouring beech-trees had been browned away prematurely by the fumes of a primitive forge.

And why, it will reasonably be asked, is all this mineral wealth allowed to rust in the bosom of mother earth? Are there not miners in plenty who go further afield than Bosnia in search for precious metals? Yes. But in Australia, even in California, there is something like civilized government. There are railways—there are roads; those in authority do not look upon the successful digger as their natural prey. They are, at any rate, too canny to kill the goose with the golden egg.

But here, not only are there natural obstacles serious in any country, but before any mining can be set on foot a long stretch of road must first be made, to be kept up at the expense of the projectors; add to this, that even when an avenue to one of the highways of the country is thus opened out, it will probably be found impossible to conduct traffic of any magnitude along them; and that there is scarcely a bridge in the country which would support the weight of a heavy load of ores.

But even were these obstacles overcome, there are others of a political nature fatal at the very outset to such enterprises. To take a single instance. Over the hills to the south-east of Foinica, near the Franciscan monastery of Kreševo, are veins of cinnabar and quicksilver, which have been estimated to be as rich as any in Europe. So rich in fact are they, that a German company were tempted to believe that, despite the expenses of preliminary road-making and outlay of another kind, it might pay to work them. But a concession must first be obtained at Stamboul, and nothing can be obtained at that sink of all human corruption without copious bribery. The company began in good spirits; they made first one ‘present’ and then another; but months passed, the demands of the Sultan’s ‘advisers’ grew more and more exorbitant, and the prospect of obtaining the required permission more remote, till, seeing themselves in a fair way to be ruined before they could begin, they gave up their enterprise as hopeless. Precisely the same causes have prevented the working of the vast coal measures of the Bosna!

There is one remarkable phenomenon in connection with these ore-bearing districts, which must strike anyone who examines the distribution of population in Bosnia; and that is, that these former centres of mining activity are at the present day the strongholds of the Roman Catholic population of the country.

Can it be merely accidental that three of the chief Roman Catholic monasteries in the country—Foinica, Kreševo, and Sutiska—are each placed in the very focus of the richest mineral areas in the province?[228]

No, surely, it is not fortuitous. It is rather the result of a chain of causes, reaching far back into the past, and which, if I read them rightly, are explanatory of much that is most characteristic and least intelligible in Bosnian history. Stated baldly, I cannot doubt that the presence of the Catholic population and their monastic seats in the mining districts of Bosnia is ultimately due to the Roman conquest, or—if we may single out a man—to Q. Asinius Pollio.

There seems no good reason for doubting that many of these deserted mines, such as those that scar the mountain sides about Foinica, were the work of Roman miners. A Roman road, for example, has been traced almost to the western foot of this range, connecting it with Dalmatia. In the time of the Romans no less than 50 lbs. of gold was turned out daily by these Illyrian miners, and despatched to Rome by the Provost of the Dalmatian treasury[229] at Salona.

When the Nations possessed themselves of the Western Empire, Epidaurus and the Dalmatian cities still continued to be islands of pure Romanity; and besides their Roman municipal institutions and their ecclesiastical connection with Rome, these cities may also have preserved some record of these inland deposits of precious metals, and some knowledge of where to look for them. This, at least, is certain, that when the Epidauran republic lived again at Ragusa, her sons sought out the vestiges of the older Roman mines of Illyria, and opened them out anew, so that the former scenes of Roman industry became the chief commercial centres in these barbarous lands. Nor would Ragusa fail to play her allotted part of interpreter between Rome and the southern Sclaves. It is not to be wondered at that in these neighbourhoods Christianity of a purely Roman character should have taken root: and in the days of heresy this connection with Catholic Ragusa would perpetually keep alive influences favourable to the Church.

We can well understand that the superior civilization and wealth of these mining districts would react on the indigenous nobility. Doubtless many noble families actually owed their position to wealth acquired from a mine opened on their lands by these enterprising traders. Many would naturally draw round these small civilised centres. To this Ragusan influence I would therefore refer, not only the peculiarly Roman Catholic character of the population of these mining districts, but also much of the Roman sympathies of the ruling caste. Thus it is not only the Roman Catholic monasteries that are found in connection with the scenes of old Ragusan activity, but also the favourite residences of the Bosnian kings; so that in the neighbourhood of the chief Ragusan castle and trading settlement—called Dubrovnik, after the Sclavonic name of the mother city—rose both the monastery of Sutiska, and the old town of Bobovac, where the Tvartkos once sate in majesty. They are over the hills, to the north-east of Foinica.

Nor is this far-reaching concatenation of causes and effects without its bearings on the future as well.

If in the course of time Bosnia should enter once more into the civilised system of Europe—if these now unused mines were to be opened out anew, it must be evident that such an industrial development would once more place the chief wealth, and therefore the chief influence, in the country in the hands of the Roman Catholic minority; in other words, in the hands of the only portion of the inhabitants who at the present day still treasure the memories[230] of the old Bosnian kingdom.

But we are entering Kisseljak, and stop at what is unquestionably the best hotel in Bosnia, and where, for the first time since our arrival in the country, we obtain—beds! Kisseljak is in fact the fashionable Bosnian Spa. Just outside our hostelry, under a kiosque, bubble up the waters celebrated throughout the length and breadth of the land. ‘In taste,’ as L— remarked, ‘it is like flat seltzer-water with a soupçon of flat-irons.’ Mixed, however, with red coinica wine, it becomes a livelier, and, as we thought, a very agreeable beverage. It is said to be very good for complaints of stomach and liver; and quite a colony had collected in the neighbourhood of the sources, not only to drink the waters, but to bathe in them—certain sheds containing wooden baths being built for the latter purpose. The wealthier people, who were chiefly Spanish-speaking Jews from Serajevo, were lodged at the almost European hotels; the other ranks of society sheltering themselves, according to their means, in humbler abodes, and the poorest, of all camping about the valley like gipsies.

It was while drinking the waters that we first became the recipients of tidings which, in our then position, might be considered somewhat sensational, which were calculated to cast a new light on some of our recent experiences, and which may fitly open a new chapter of our pilgrimage.