[1] This is not the place to discuss the question of earlier Sclavonic immigrations.
[2] De Administrando Imperio, capp. xxx., xxxi., xxxii.
[3] Chorvat, one of the supposed Croatian leaders, is evidently the eponymus of the whole race of Croats, whose own name for themselves, Charvati or Hrvati, seems to signify ‘mountaineers,’ and to be connected with the name of the Carpathian mountains, and the Carpi of Roman historians. Hilferding points out that of the names of Chorvat’s four brothers, as given by Constantine Porphyrogenitus, two are equivalent in meaning to ‘Delay’ or ‘Tarrying,’ and Chorvat’s two sisters bear the Sclavonic names of ‘Joy’ and ‘Sorrow.’ The names are perhaps allegorical of the gradual character of their conquests, and of defeats sustained as well as victories won.
[4] This seems to me far more probable than the poetic derivation of Župa from the same word in the sense of ‘sunny land.’
[5] Presbyteri Diocleatis, Regnum Slavorum (in Lucius, De Regno Dalmatiæ et Croatiæ, libri sex. Amst: 1676: p. 291.)
[6] See Codex Diplomaticus Regni Croatiæ, Dalmatiæ et Slavoniæ, p. 188 (u Zagrebu, 1874). Sub Anno 1100. The seven Bans appear in the following order:—1, the Ban of Croatia; 2, the Ban of Bosnia; 3, of Slavonia; 4, of Posega; 5, Podravia; 6, Albania; 7, Syrmia.
[7] According to the Presbyter of Dioclea, Basil subdued the whole of Bosnia, Rascia, and Dalmatia, including what is now Herzegovina. But this subjection, if it was ever effected, must have been of the most temporary character. From 1018 to 1076 the diadem of the Croatian Prince was received from Byzantium.
[8] The allied Serbian troops, under Dobroslav and Niklas, overwhelmed the army of Michael the Paphlagonian’s general in the gorge of Vranja in Zenta, and, subsequently, that of Michael the Logothete, Governor of Durazzo under Constantine Monomachus, in the defiles between Cattaro and the lake of Scutari, which form at present the heart of Montenegro. See Maximilian Schimek’s Politische Geschichte des Königreichs Bosnien und Rama. Wien, 1787, p. 21.
[9] See p. 317. Perhaps this stream once formed the boundary of Croatia in this direction. Evidently the name must first have been applied to Bosnia by Dalmatian borderers. The name Rama at first comprised the territory between this river and the Adriatic.
[10] Hilferding, Serben und Bulgaren, p. 150.
[11] The Ban Borić. The passages relating to Bosnia in Cinnamus are in his Historiar. lib. iii. c. 7 and 19.
[13] At Novibrdo, in Serbia, the most flourishing of the Saxon colonies, spoken of rapturously by an old Serbian writer as ‘a city of silver and gold,’ the Teutonic word for ‘Burgher’ became naturalised, and a letter of the Ragusans is extant addressed in 1388 to the Captain and Burghers, Kefalii i Purgarom, of the town. See Jireček, Gesch. der Bulgaren, p. 401.
[14] See the Synodic ‘written in the Bulgarian language by command of the Czar Boris in the year 1210,’ a translation of which from the original manuscript is given by the Russian historian Hilferding (in the German translation of his History of the Serbs and Bulgarians, part i. p. 118).
[15] Excerpted in Sam. Andreæ, Disquisitio de Bogomilis.
[16] Recent Sclavonic writers accept the Bulgarian traditions as to the Pope Bogomil; but they seem to me not to allow sufficient weight to Byzantine evidence. It is right, however, to note that ‘Bogomil’ is a possible Bulgarian personal name, and exactly answers, as Jireček observes, to the German ‘Gottlieb.’ It is remarkable that the heretics never called themselves Bogomiles, but simply ‘Christians,’ as did the Patarenes and Albigensians of the West. By the orthodox Sclaves they were called Bogomiles, Babuni, Manicheji, and in Bosnia also Patareni, and, apparently from a corrupted form of that word, Potur.
[17] According to the Armenian Chronicle of Acogh’ig (iii. 20-22) the Czar Samuel himself embraced the Manichæan religion. According to the legend of St. Vladimir his son Gabriel and his wife were Bogomiles. See Hilferding, op. cit.
[18] Cited in Hilferding, op. cit.
[19] Alexiados, lib. xv.
[20] Though she afterwards admits that the heresy had infected high families.
[21] One, Slovo na Eretiki, against the heretics; and the other, Slovo o Cerkovnom Cinu, on church government. The works of Cosmas are the only monuments of Bulgarian literature dating from the epoch of Czar Samuel. The passages relating to the Bogomiles are excerpted in Hilferding.
[22] Hilferding, op. cit. i., identifies this original sect with a division of the Bogomiles known as ‘The Church of Dregovišce,’ and the later with ‘the Church of Bulgaria.’ These two Churches are among the thirteen Churches of the Cathari reckoned by the Italian Reniero Sacconi, a renegade member of that sect, in the thirteenth century. The two divisions are traceable in the Western heresies.
[23] The statements of Cosmas with reference to the existence of these dualistic tenets among the Bogomiles are attested by the ‘Synodic of Czar Boris,’ already referred to; by Euthymius Zygabenus, Panoplia; and, as regards the Bogomiles of Bosnia, by Raphael of Volaterræ, Geographia; and by the recent researches of Raški.
[24] Euthymius Zygabenus, Panoplia.
[25] It is remarkable that the only Bogomilian version of the Gospels which has been preserved, a Bosnian Codex written in 1404, contains, in spite of its late date, most primitive forms of speech; proving the care with which the Bogomiles copied from their older manuscripts. See Daničic’s account of the Bosnian Chval Codex in the Starine of the South-Sclavonic Academy, III. 1-146. Cited by Jireček, op. cit. p. 177.
[26] τελειοῦν.
[27] Cosmas, corroborated by the ‘Synodic’ and Harmenopulos.
[28] For their aversion to the cross see also Euthymius, Panoplia, Anna Comnena, and Harmenopulos. See also p. 176.
[29] Cosmas. Their aversion to images, churches, and a hierarchy, is borne out by the testimony of Euthymius and Anna Comnena.
[30] So too Anna Comnena and Euthymius.
[31] Rački (in Jireček, op. cit.)
[32] Thus Pope Gregory XI. writes in 1376: ‘Cum Bosnenses uxores accipiant cum condicione, si eris bona, et intentione dimittendi, quando sibi videbitur’ (MS. of the South Sclavonic Academy, cited in Jireček, op. cit. p. 183).
[33] Cosmas is again slanderous when he says that the Bogomiles begged from door to door.
[34] Jireček, op. cit. p. 180.
[35] Jireček, op. cit. p. 181.
[36] So Cosmas, ‘At the fifth time, however, they have the door open.’ According to Euthymius, who also bears witness to the Paternoster being their only form, they prayed five times during the day and seven at night. Euthymius (see also Epiphanius) says that they prayed also to demons to avert evil, and that Basilius, their heresiarch, declared that in their gospels was the text, ‘Worship demons, not that they may do good to you, but that they may not do you harm.’ On this charge of devil-worship, however even Cosmas is silent.
[37] This is illustrated by the missionary work of St. Sava in that century. At the end of the ninth century the Narentines, living in the immediate neighbourhood of Spalato and Ragusa, the two focuses of Roman Christianity, were still unconverted, and their country, according to Constantine Porphyrogenitus, was still known as Pagania. See p. 367. How much more must this have been the case with the inland districts of Bosnia!
[38] I find that this explanation of the rapid advance of the Manichæan heresy among the Sclaves has suggested itself, quite independently, to Herr Jireček in his recent history. He says (Gesch. der Bulgaren, p. 175): ‘Es war für Bogomil keine schwere Aufgabe, das unlängst erst dem Heidenthüme entrückte Volk für eine Glaubenslehre zu gewinnen, welche, gleich dem alten slawischen Mythus von den Bosi und Bêsi, lehrt, dass es zweierlei höhere Wesen gebe, nämlich einen guten und einen bosen Gott.’ Herr Jireček, however, seems to forget that Armenian missionaries were at work in Bulgaria considerably before even the reputed date of Bogomil. If we remember that at the time when Manichæism first sought a footing among the Bulgarians a great part of the nation was still pagan, these considerations become still more cogent.
[39] See Schimek, Pol. Gesch. des Königreichs Bosnien u. Rama, p. 36.
[40] This is Hilferding’s conclusion.
[41] Or Spalato. Ragusa also laid claim to be the Metropolitan Church of Bosnia in Culin’s time.
[42] Culin had married a sister of Stephen Némanja of Serbia, whose Bogomilian opinions were notorious before her marriage. See Schimek, op. cit. p. 48.
[43] This we learn from a letter of the Apostolic Legate of Alexander III., then in Dalmatia, directed ‘Nobili et potenti viro Culin Bano Bosniæ.’ The Legate writes to say that he is in very good favour with the Pontiff; that he would like for himself a couple of slaves and a pair of martens’ skins; and ‘if you have anything to signify to the Pontiff we will benignantly listen to it.’ (!)
[44] Farlati, Episcopi Bosnenses. (In his Illyricum Sacrum, t. iv. p. 45.)
[45] The German word ‘Ketzer’ is derived from ‘Cathari,’ another name for the sect.
[46] As an example of the doctrinal identity of the Bogomilian and Albigensian creeds, I may be allowed to recall a few main features of the heresy about Toulouse as they struck the Roman Inquisitors in 1178. The heretics, we are told, declared that there were two Principles: one Good Spirit, who had created invisible things alone, and only those that were not susceptible of change and corruption; the other Evil, who had created the sky, earth, man, and all things visible. That the sacramental bread and wine were not transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ. That they rejected priests, monks, bishops, and sacerdotalism generally. That churches were an abomination to them. That the laying on of hands, and that, on adults, was the only true baptism. As to marriage—‘virum cum uxore non posse salvari si alter alteri debitum reddat.’ That beggars deserved no alms. That they made use of the vernacular in their prayers: they were so ignorant of Latin ‘that they could not speak a couple of words.’ ‘It was necessary,’ says the Cardinal of St. Chrysogonus, ‘to condescend to their ignorance, and to speak of the sacraments of the Church, though this was sufficiently absurd, in the vulgar tongue.’ Their preachers seem to have styled themselves, in the figurative language common to the Bogomiles as well, ‘Angels of Light.’ The Abbot of Clairvaux states that one of them, doubtless in the same figurative sense, called himself John the Baptist. This man, their chief leader, was an aged man, who presided at the nocturnal prayer-meetings of the sectaries, clad in a tunic or dalmatic. See Roger of Hoveden’s Chronicle, (Prof. Stubbs’s edition, in the Rolls Series, vol. ii. p. 153, &c.)
[47] Of the two divisions of the original Bulgarian Church, that of Dragoviče, with its more uncompromising dualism, was followed in the West by the Churches of Toulouse and Albano on the Lake of Garda. The other Western Churches accepted the modified monotheism of what was known as ‘The Bulgarian Church’ par excellence. This was in the thirteenth century. At an earlier period, however, the absolute dualism of the Dragovician Church had triumphed at the heretical Council of St. Felix de Caraman, near Toulouse. See Jireček, op. cit. p. 213.
[48] ‘Patarenes,’ the name by which the Bogomiles of Bosnia and other Sclavonic lands are always called by Roman writers, was derived from ‘Pataria,’ a suburb of Milan where heresy first raised its head in Italy.
[49] Jireček, loc. cit. The Armenian influence on Bulgaria and Bosnia, and the Bogomilian influence on the West, is connected with the spread of a curious heretical literature, derived from Oriental sources; of phantastic Apocrypha and spurious Gospels, as well as of works of Oriental magic, which, disseminated by the more corrupt adherents of the sect, entered into the mediæval mythology of the West, and have still left their traces on its folklore as well as on that of the Russians, Bulgarians, and Serbs. Jireček cites, among other such works, the favourite Bulgarian legend of St. John Bogoslov, containing a vision of the Dies iræ, which was brought from Bulgaria in 1170 by Nazarius, bishop of the Upper Italian Patarenes, and translated by him into Latin. Another such work is the account of the wanderings of the Mother of God in hell; but perhaps the most interesting of all, and one which in its origin seems to be almost purely Sclavonic, is the account—reflecting the primitive Sclavonic custom of the ‘Pobratimstvo’—of how the Sirmian Emperor, Probus, made Christ his sworn brother.
[50] Radulphi de Coggeshale, Chronicon Anglicanum (in the Rolls Series, p. 121, &c.) The name ‘Publicani,’ by which the Essex chronicler alludes to them, is a common name for the Bogomiles in the West, and is, of course, a corruption of Pauliciani, or, perhaps, of a Sclavonic form of that word. The heretics seem to have spread to England from Flanders, where they were much oppressed by the Count. From the fragmentary details which Ralph has given us, they seem to have preserved their Bogomilian faith in a very pure form. They believed in the Two Principles and the evilness of matter, rejected Purgatory, prayers for the dead, invocation of saints, infant baptism, and accepted no scriptures but the Gospels and Canonical Epistles. Some went so far as to charge them (as Euthymius had done long before) with praying to Lucifer in their subterranean meeting-houses. They were ‘rusticani,’ and therefore not amenable to the argument of authority; by which, I suppose, the preference of the early Protestants for the vulgar tongue is alluded to. They observed a vegetable diet, and condemned marriage. From a shameless relation of Gervase of Tilbury which Ralph reports, it appears that there were holy women of the sect under vows of perpetual chastity. Gervase himself, a clerk of the Archbishop of Rheims, coolly related to his monkish friend, who chronicled the story with pleasing gusto, how, having failed to seduce a beautiful country girl, he perceived her heresy, accused her successfully of being a ‘Publican’ before the Inquisition, and feasted his eyes with her dying agonies at the stake. Girl though she was, she died without a groan, ‘instar,’ as even the monk cannot refrain from adding, ‘martyrum Christi (sed dissimili causa) qui olim pro Christiana religione a paganis trucidabantur.’ The tragedy, even as told by Ralph, is of an intense pathos, and deserves immortalising. How beautiful is that innocence and how unutterable the villainy which provokes an under-current of humanity even in a monkish narrator! After relations like this, the conduct of Henry II. to the Oxford ‘Publicans’ will appear almost merciful: he merely gave orders that they should be branded on the forehead with a red-hot key and thrust forth from the city, and that nobody should give them food or shelter. The notices of the Publicani, Albigenses, and other Bogomilian sects who gained a footing in England, both by way of Flanders and Guienne, never seem to have attracted the attention they deserve from English historians. Yet the hatred born by the orthodox against these Bulgarian intruders has added a word of reproach to the language.
[51] Nor is this the place to enquire how far, in the Languedoc at all events, the spread of these doctrines may have been aided by survivals of an earlier Gnosticism. What, for example, became of those Gnostici who had established themselves in the end of the fourth century in Spain and parts of the south of Gaul? (See Sulpicius Severus, Sacræ Historiæ, lib. ii.)
[52] By means of two merchants of Zara, Matthew and Aristodius, who brought the Patarene doctrines from Bosnia to Spalato. Thomas Archidiaconus, c. 24, quoted in Wilkinson’s Dalmatia.
[53] With the exception of the Croats, who perhaps hardly came under the denomination of Balkan Sclaves.
[54] Hist. Maj. ad annum 1223 (Rolls Series, vol. iii. p. 78); and compare Ralph of Coggeshale’s account (Rolls Series, p. 195). Jireček (op. cit p. 214) refers to a diploma of Innocent IV. in 1244, which reveals an intercourse between Bosnia and the Waldenses he cites Palacky and Brandl in the Čas. matice moravské, 1, 2.
[55] His residence is fixed as ‘on the borders of the Hungarians and between the limits of Bulgaria, Croatia, and Dalmatia,’ which indicates the position of Bosnia with sufficient exactitude.
[56] The style of Bartholomew, the vicar of the Roman antipope, was, according to Matthew Paris, ‘servus servorum sanctæ fidei;’ according to Ralph of Coggeshale, ‘servus servorum hospitalis sanctæ fidei.’ Ralph writes ‘Poios’ instead of ‘Porlos.’
[57] Raynaldus, Annal. Eccles. sub anno 1233.
[58] The Prince himself is described as ‘King of the Ruthenians, and Ban of Sclavonia.’ See Farlati, op. cit. and Spicilegium Observationum Historico-Geographicarum de Bosniæ Regno, Lugd. Bat. 1737.
[59] Yet the historian of Latin Christianity might have spared a line to chronicle the struggles and sufferings of these early Protestants of Bosnia, to whom even the cultured sons of Provence turned for spiritual guidance.
[60] Raynaldus, Annal. Eccles. s. a. 1238.
[61] Raynaldus, s. a. 1246. Ninosclav had succeeded Zibisclav as Ban.
[62] Farlati, Episcopi Bosnenses.
[63] Under the Franciscan ‘Vicar of Bosna’ we now read of the following Custodiæ, viz. Dulmna, Greben, Bosna Civitas, Ussora, Machovia, Bulgaria, Corvinum, and Rascia.
[64] Farlati, Ep. Bosn.
[65] Waddingus, Annales Minorum (Ed. Fonsecæ), tom. vii. sub. anno 1325.
[66] Presbyter Cosmas. Just the same account of the apparent innocence of the Bogomiles appears in Euthymius: ‘They bid those who listen to their doctrines to keep the commandments of the gospel, and to be meek and merciful, and of brotherly love. Thus they entice men on by teaching all good things and useful doctrine, but they poison by degrees and draw to perdition.’
[67] Anonym. Acutheanus (in Farlati).
[68] Raynaldus, Annal. Eccles. sub anno 1369. The Franciscan Mission had complained to the Pope of Tvartko the same year, as protector of the Patarenes and ‘persecutor of that true son of the Church,’ his brother, Stephen Wuk. In 1370 the Pope writes to the bishops of Ragusa, Spalato, and ‘Dirrhachio’ to put the Patarenes under ban. In 1372, from a letter of Pope Gregory XI. to the Vicar of the Minorites in Bosnia, we learn that, in view of the continuance of the heresy in Bosnia, Rascia, ‘Bassarat,’ and the neighbouring regions, he granted them many privileges of building religious houses in those countries; ‘Bourich, belonging to the noble Nicolas de Altomanich’ in Rascia, and the ‘Contrata de Glas’ in the dominion of the King of Hungary, being specified. Waddingus, Annales Minorum, sub anno 1372.
[69] Farlati, Ep. Bosn.
[70] Waddingus, Annales Minorum, tom. xiii. sub anno 1462.
[71] See Farlati, Ep. Bosn.; and Spicilegium, &c. de Regno Bosniæ.
[72] Raynaldus, Annal. Eccles. sub anno 1450.
[73] Laonicus, de Rebus Turc. lib. x.; Gobelinus, lib. ii.; and Johannes Leunclavius. The Sultan is said to have made use of the authority of the captured king to obtain the seventy cities, but the account given of the betrayal of Bobovac shows that the Bogomiles were the real cause of the quick submission.
[74] I have already noticed the early branching off of a Bogomilian church which rejected Dualism pure and simple. Herr Jireček remarks this compromising tendency, and observes that an Italian adherent of the sect, Giovanni di Lugio, taught the real humanity of Christ and accepted the Old Testament: while others conceded free will.
[75] Waddingus, Annales Minorum, sub anno 1478. There is also a curious passage in Raphael of Volaterra, who appears to have written his Geographia towards the end of the fifteenth century. He says (Geog. p. 244, ed. Lyons, 1599), ‘In Bosnia, Rascia, and Serbia the sect of the Manichees is still followed. They say there are two Principia Rerum—one good, one evil. Nor do they acknowledge the Roman Pope, nor Christ “Omousion.” They have monasteries (cœnobia) in hidden mountain valleys, where go matrons who have escaped from certain diseases.’ These matrons say that for a certain period they act as menials to holy men in accordance with a vow: ‘Atque ita inter monachos mixtæ una vivunt; quæ quidem labes adhuc durat.’
[76] Besides the evidence on this point which I have gathered from other sources, I may notice a most interesting allusion to the Bogomiles or Patarenes who had turned renegades, and a direct testimony that they went over wholesale to Islâm, in J. Bapt. Montalbano, Rerum Turcarum Commentarius, written certainly before the year 1630 (when it was published in the Elzevir Turci Imperii Status). After mentioning the Catholic inhabitants, the writer goes on to say, ‘Est aliud eo in regno (sc. Bosnæ) hominum genus Potur appellatum, qui neque Christiani sunt, neque Turcæ, circumciduntur tamen, pessimique habentur.’ ‘Potur’ is evidently a Sclavonised form of Patarene. The writer goes on to say of these ‘Poturs’ that they, ‘to the number of many thousand,’ offered to renegade from the Christian faith to that of Mahomet if Sultan Soliman would grant them indemnity, and release them from tribute. Soliman, says the writer (a Bolognese Doctor), thereupon doubled their tribute, and enrolled their children among the Janissaries, and ‘hence they are despised by both Turks and Christians.’ But this whole account evidently bears witness to the wholesale renegation of the Bogomiles. Further on the same writer, who had visited the country, bears witness to the continuance of Protestantism in Turkish Bosnia in the sixteenth century. ‘Eos inter,’ says he, of the inhabitants, ‘Calvinistæ Arrianique multi.’
[77] I am indebted for this fact to Mr. W. J. Stillman, the excellent correspondent of the Times in the Herzegovina, who gives an account of these refugees in a letter from Ragusa dated Oct. 19, 1875, which I may be allowed to quote as illustrating the more recent sufferings of this interesting sect, and the sad case of the Christian refugees of Bosnia and the Herzegovina generally. ‘The people of Popovo were tranquilly engaged in their fields and houses, when the troops—Regulars and Bashi-Bazouks—came up; the latter killed the first they came upon where they found them (one of them, the brother of a villager who had appealed successfully to the Pashà at Trebinje against the extortions of the Agas some months ago, being cut to pieces alive), and all the rest fled in panic. The good curé of Ossonich is doing all he can for them; but there are only eighty-five houses in this village, and he has 2,125 souls of the Popovites on his register for succour. Of these 300 were out on the mountain-side on the night of the worst storm we have had this season. One woman with a new-born babe was so exhausted in her flight that she went to sleep, sitting on a rock nursing her child, fell off in her sleep, and was found by one of the other peasants next morning still sleeping, with her babe at her bosom, in a pool of water which had fallen during the storm. The curé tells me that these people are mainly Bogomilites, remains of an ancient sect once widely spread in Bosnia and identical with the Albigenses.’ I observe that Jireček, quoting Kosanović (Glasnik 29, (1871), 174), alludes to a rumour that in the valley of the Narenta and near Creševo, ‘there are still Christians who neither submit to Franciscans, nor Popes, nor Imâms, but govern themselves according to old traditions, which an Elder delivers to the rest.’ I hope at some future period to be able to say more on the present state of the Bogomiles.
[78] See p. 214. There seems, however, to be some discrepancy as to dates. According to Schimek (op. cit. p. 76), Czar Dūshan only annexed Bosnia in 1347, whereas the date of the Armorial is 1340. The Ban, Stephen Kotromanović, retained a small part of his dominions on the Hungarian frontier. Dūshan placed the rest under the despot Lazar of Rascia. On Dūshan’s death in 1355 the Ban recovered the whole of Bosnia, including a part of Serbia beyond the Drina and the grave of St. Sava at Mileševo, where he built a Franciscan Monastery, and where he himself was buried in 1357.
[79] Spicilegium, &c., De Bosniæ Regno, p. 51; Farlati, Ep. Bosn. &c. Schimek (op. cit. p. 84).
[80] Henceforth he is generally known as Stephen Myrza.
[81] Thoemmel, Vilajet Bosnien, p. 12.
[82] For an account of the collection of Bishop Strossmayer I am entirely indebted to Canon Liddon, who visited Diakovar in the summer of this year. As a slight monument of mediæval art in Bosnia I may refer the reader to the Great Seal of King Tvartko III. engraved on the title-page of this book.
[83] See p. 384 for the Župa Canawlovska and the Roman aqueduct from which it derived its name. Tribunja or Terbunja is, of course, Trebinje, the Roman Terbulium.
[84] Jireček (op. cit. p. 338), who brings out clearly the prominent part played by King Tvartko in the last great South-Sclavonic struggle against the Turks.
[85] Rački, Pokret na Slavenskom jugu, koncem XIV. i pocetkom XV. stolieca (cited in Jireček, loc. cit.)
[86] The English reader will find a full and graphic account of the battle of Kóssovo Polje (or the field of Thrushes) in The Slavonic Provinces of Turkey in Europe, by G. Muir Mackenzie and A. P. Irby, ch. xv. Some extracts from some of the Servian Pjesme on this subject are translated by Sir John Bowring in his Servian Popular Poetry. There is also an interesting account of the battle in Knolles’ Turkish History, 1610, which shows how great was already the poetic influence on the story. ‘The brightness of the Armor and Weapons,’ writes our English historian, ‘was as it had been the Lightning, the multitude of Launces and other horsemen’s staves shadowed the light of the Sun. Arrows and darts fell so fast that a man would have thought they had poured down from Heaven. The noise of the Instruments of War, with the neighing of Horses and outcries of men was so terrible and great that the wild Beasts of the mountains stood astonied therewith; and the Turkish Histories, to express the terror of the day (vainly say) that the Angels of Heaven amazed with that hideous noise for that time forgot the heavenly hymns wherewith they always glorifie God.’ It is possible that the thunder of cannon was now heard for the first time in the Balkan peninsula. In 1383 the Venetians had sold King Tvartko a Falconus.
[87] Zinkeisen, (I. 290) cited in Jireček (op. cit. p. 344).
[89] Also known as Tvartko II.
[90] See pp. 105, 106.
[91] Spicilegium, &c., De Bosniæ Regno, p. 7.
[92] See deed of Stephen Dabiscia to Goiko Mergnjavić (translated on p. 223) in return for services performed: ‘Quando venit Paiasit cum Turcis et stetit in Naglasincis et destruxit Bosnam.’
[93] According to the Spicilegium he assumed the title Princeps Bosnæ et dominus Jayczæ. When under Ostoja’s suzerainty he styled himself ‘Supremus Vayvoda Regni Bosnæ et Vicarius Regum Vladislai et Ostojæ.’ According to Schimek (op. cit. p. 25) his land extended from the middle of the vale of Bosna along the Croatian border.
[94] Stephen assumed the style Liber Princeps et Dominus Bosnæ, Ussoræ, Salæ atque plurium aliorum locorum, atque Chelmi Comes.
[95] From him the noble Venetian family of Cozzas derives its origin.
[96] It seems to me probable that the title accorded by Frederick was Duke of Primorie (which is now incorporated in the County of Chelm), and that the name Duke of St. Sava was rather a popular piecing together of this and his other title of ‘Keeper of the Sepulchre of St. Sava.’ In 1446 he is called Herzegh Sancti Sabbæ by the Bosnian king in the account of the Conventus of Coinica; but if we may judge from the Italian style used by his son, the refugee duke, he called himself Duke of Primorie. Stephen Cosaccia’s son calls himself ‘Duca Primorschi, Signor di Hum, e Guardiano del Sepolchro del beato Sava.’
[97] Herzegovina, the adjectival form of Herzega—literally ‘the ducal’—land being understood.