FOOTNOTES:

A Serbian historian, Mr. TomiÄ‡ of the Belgrade National Library, has now discovered that these uncompromising Muhammedan Albanians are notâ€”as previous Serbian and other historians have writtenâ€”descended from Albanians who flowed into the country because of its evacuation by the Patriarch Arsenius and his flock. When the Austrian armies penetrated to this region in the winter of 1689-1690, the Imperialists were on goodterms both with the Serbian Orthodox people whom they found there and with the Albanian Catholics; but after the death of Piccolomini on the 8th of December (which was followed by that of the Catholic Archbishop), his successor, the Duke of Holstein, alienated the people, and when they would not obey his commands he set fire to their villages, this alienating them completely. The fortune of war then turned against the Austrians, who were compelled to retreat, and the Serbian Patriarch, with his treasury and a number of priests and monks, fled with them. They hoped that this exodus was to be of a temporary character, but in 1690 the Imperialists had to continue their retreat, taking with them across the Save and the Danube not only the Serbs who had, like Arsenius, sought refuge in Serbia, but a far more numerous body whose domicile had always been Serbia itself. What tells against the theory of the 30,000 families from PeÄ‡ and Old Serbia is the fact that the Turkish troops followed so closely on the heels of the Austrians that the Patriarch and his clergy had great trouble in escaping themselves, and in addition to the Turk there was the difficulty of those mountain roads in the middle of winter. Thus it seems likely that most of the Serbian population of what is called Old Serbia remained there. The previous historians, who say that such a vast number followed the Patriarch and his priests, have based themselves, it appears, on the notes and chronicles of those priests. And the people, deprived of the guidance of their priestsâ€”who were then the spiritual and lay and military leadersâ€”found it difficult to stand out against conversion. Half a century before this a great many Catholic and Orthodox Serbs of those parts had embraced Islam, in order to escape the financial and military burdens which were laid on Christian men; the women and girls would continue to profess Christianity. This phenomenon is described by many travellers, such as Gregory Massarechi, a Catholic missionary for Prizren and the neighbourhood, who says in his report of 1651 that in the village of Suha Reka on the left bank of the White Drin there used to be one hundred and fifty Christian houses, but that he only found thirty-six or thirty-seven Christian women, the men having all gone over to Islam. People were wont tocome secretly to him for confession and to communicate; he tells how these converted men would marry Christian women, but would leave them Christian all their lives, and only on his deathbed would a man ask his wife to be converted also.

The Prophet had also found his way into many households of Montenegro, where the clans, with neither civil nor military government, had been compelled, for their protection, to live in a patriarchal fashion: the peopleâ€”that is, the chiefs of the clansâ€”elected a bishop and gathered round him as the champion of their religion against Islam. Until the time of Danilo (1697-1737) there had been fourteen bishops. During his reign the problem of Turkish penetration was taken in hand. It was intolerable that Montenegrin families should stand well with the Sultan because one of their members had gone over to Islam. The small, untidy village of Virpazar, by the Lake of Scutari, has got a certain fame, because the chosen men who were to purge the country of this evil started out from there on Christmas Eve in 1703. Those who participated in the "Montenegrin Vespers" were not likely to forget the incidents of that impressive ceremony. The Bishop celebrated Mass, and from the consecrated tapers in his hand the people lit their own. Every man was armed. They kneltâ€”their tapers hardly tremblingâ€”and they kissed the sacred image which the Bishop held. Then he blessed their weapons and they sallied forth, running round the lake and climbing up the rough, long road to Cetinje. Every house was visited in which there was a Moslem, and the choice was given of repudiation or of death. With such missionaries and with subjects such as these to work upon, you could not hope that the negotiations would be quite pacific. Many of the Moslem, young and old, were slaughtered, and when Mass was sung on Christmas morning in the rugged, little monastery of Cetinje, many of the chosen men assembled, weary but content, and gave whole-hearted thanks to God that Montenegro had been liberated from the scourge.

As for those who came under the influence of Islam in Old Serbia, they were left after 1737 even more to their own resources, as the zone which united them to the mainbody of Serbs was depleted by another great exodus, under Patriarch ArseniusIV., Å akabenta. But, although these men of Serbian origin preserve sometimes this or that peculiarly Serbian custom, yet, as Mr. TomiÄ‡ says:[32]"Living together with the Muhammedan Albanians, they have assumed the Albanian type and become the most savage foes of the Orthodox religion and of the people from which they are sprung. The popular saying," he adds, "is right which asserts that: 'A Christian become a Turk is worse than a real Turk.'" Of course, in order to make it appear that he was a real Albanian, there was always a tendency for an Albanized Serb to be preternaturally oppressive. And up to a short time ago it was very cold comfort for the Serbs to learn that many of these people are of Serbian ancestry. But, as we shall see further on, the old, mediÃ¦val friendship between the Serbian and Albanian rulers is extending to the people, and thisâ€”provided that a sinister external pressure can be warded offâ€”will bear good fruit.

On behalf of the afore-mentioned 30,000 families the Patriarch negotiated with the Habsburgs and obtained very far-reaching rights, which permitted the Serbian people to form in Hungary acorpus separatum. A point which to Serbian eyes had extreme importance was the institution of a National Congress, to sit at Karlovci on the Danube in Syrmia, and, amongst other functions, to designate the Patriarch, whose seat was to be (and remains to this day) Karlovci, where a friendly white village on the rising ground, which anyhow would make it famous for the red wine and plum brandy, has received in its midst the marble palace of the Patriarch, a gorgeous church and various magnificent red and white buildings which look like so many Government offices but are, in fact, devoted to Church affairs, the training of theological students and so forth. Their Patriarchate at Karlovci appeared to the Serbs as the rock of their nationality outside Serbia. The Constitution granted to them did not make them precisely a State within a State, but at least it set up a political-religious unityâ€”for the privileges included those of having a chief, the voivoda, and ofhaving a certain territory with autonomous internal organization and exemption from all taxes. Here the Serbs, forming a separate and distinct group, with their own religion, calendar and alphabet, and with their own aspirations, would be able to stretch out their handsâ€”prudently, of courseâ€”to their scattered brothers. So the Serbs began to whisper to the Croats of the ancient days; the Croats heard them gladly, but they could not stop another voice from whispering as well. They had lived for so long with another religion, another civilization, their eyes had been turned in other directions, their hearts been filled with other hopes. And now it was as if the modern voice was being interrupted by the ancient voice. The Croats were inclined to ask the interrupter to be silent, but they found they could not live without him.

ACTIVITIES OF THE SOUTHERN SLAVS UNDER THE HABSBURGS

In the Banat and elsewhere under Habsburg rule the Serbs were filling their accustomed part and fighting, now against the Turk and now against Rakoczi's insurrection, during which, between 1703 and 1711, they are said to have lost about a hundred thousand men. Prince Eugene of Savoy, in whose campaigns they took a large share, described them as "his best scouts, his lightest cavalry, his most trusted garrisons." And they are rewardedâ€”Josephi., making use of very chosen phrases, insists on the merits of the Serbs and confirms their privileges. And until the Treaty of Pojarevac these privileges are maintained immune. This treaty came at the conclusion of the 1716-1718 war against the Turks; it put the Banat in the hands of Austria, who made it a Crown-land, with military government and autonomous administration. From this time onward the country, which had had an exclusively Serbian colouring, begins to receive an influx of strangers. The German governing class introduce Germans from the Rhine, from Saxony, from WÃ¼rtemberg, Bavaria, Upper and Lower Austria and Tirol. Not only are these colonists settled in some of the most fertile parts, but Vienna also makes enormous grants of land in the Banat to lofty military personagesand to families of the aristocracy, and these in their turn assist the immigration of Germans.

But before the Habsburgs could continue in their efforts to assimilate, by one process or another, the Southern Slavs in the Empire, it was necessary to induce them to accept the Pragmatic Sanction, for CharlesVI., the reigning Emperor, had lost his only son and wished to secure the succession to Maria Theresa. It is interesting to see that Croatia negotiated independently of Hungary, that she recognized the Pragmatic Sanction in 1713, whereas the Magyars did not do so until 1733. Consequently, if the Emperor had died between these two dates Croatia would have been separated completely from Hungary. Maria Theresa would have become Queen of Croatia, but the Magyars would not have been obliged to place themselves under her. The Croats on this occasion declared that the crown of Croatia was to pass to that member of the House of Habsburg who should reign not only in Austria but also in the other hereditary Austrian lands, for the Croats wanted publicly to show that any separation from the Slovenes of Carniola, Carinthia and Styria would be far less endurable for them than separation from Hungary. "It is neither by force nor yet the spirit of slavery," they said, "that we have been put under the domination of Hungary; we have submitted ourselves voluntarily, and not to the royalty but to the king of the Hungarians."

The Serb and Croat element in the Austrian army was at this time greater than the sum of all the others, and, owing to the privileges which their services acquired for them, they came to be regarded with extreme suspicion by the Magyars. It was under Magyar influence that Maria Theresa abolished the Croatian council, confided its functions to the Hungarian Government, and, on the same occasion, in 1779, proclaimed the town of Rieka (Fiume), with its surroundings, to be "separatum sacrÃ¦ regni HungariÃ¦ coronÃ¦ adnexum corpus." Rieka, like Triest, had been a free town under the Habsburgs, the reason being that they were the chief arteries of trade, so that a greater freedom was desirable. Like Triest, Rieka does not appear up to this date to have shown any hankering for Venice, and Maria Theresa's diploma whichrenews the freedom is hardly evidence, as some people have asserted, that the town was throbbing with Italian sympathies.

THE POSITION OF THEIR CHURCH

More and more Germans were being brought into the Banat, and to make room for some between TemeÅ¡var and Arad the Roumanians, who had settled there, were transferred, in 1765, to the western county of Torontal. About half a century before this the Roumanian Bishop of Transylvania, with most of his clergy, passed from the Orthodox to the Greek Catholic Church; those of his flock who did not follow him attached themselves to the Serbian Church, and after a considerable time were given by JosephII.in 1786 a Roumanian bishopric, at Sibiu. This bishopric was placed under the administration of the Serbian Patriarch at Karlovci "in dogmaticis et pure spiritualibus," which seems to show that the other privileges of the Serbian Church did not extend to the Roumanians. The Serbs had, from the beginning of the thirteenth century, been founding monasteries, and, although about twenty were secularized or affiliated to others by Maria Theresa, yet there remained eleven in the Banat and one, Hodosh, to the north of the MaroÅ¡; and as the Roumanians had no monasteries at all they were received as guests in some of these. And so things continued for about a hundred years.

SERBS ASSIST THE BULGARIAN RENASCENCE

While the Serbs were flourishing, ecclesiastically, in the Banat, the Bulgars had been painfully keeping alive, until 1767, their lonely Patriarchate at Ochrida. Time and again the Greek Patriarch at Constantinople had tried to suppress it, at first on account of cupidity and afterwards, say the Bulgars, for fear lest it should help to arouse the Bulgarian national spirit; but that spirit had fallen to such a depth that the second edition of a comparative lexicon of the Slav languages, which was issued, at the behest of the Empress Catharine in 1791, makes no mention of Bulgarian, and in 1814 the Slavist Dobrovskyregarded Bulgarian as a form of Serbian. And yet, say the Bulgars, the national spirit survived so wonderfully by those far waters of Macedonia that even when the Greek language was introduced into the offices and the Church administration, and when Greeks had usurped the throne of St. Clement, they still found it possible to stand out for the independence of their Church, which handed on the memories of the Bulgarian past. We must be allowed to be scepticalâ€”the town of Ochrida in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is said by contemporary writers to be now in Serbian, now in Bulgarian, now in Macedonian territory. And the very observant Patriarch BrkiÄ‡ of the eighteenth century tells us, in a calm, passionless description of the diocese, which he wrote in exileâ€”he was the last Patriarch of PeÄ‡â€”that the inhabitants of a place called Rekalije, in the district of Djakovica, are not Albanians but Serbs and Bulgars who had been, a short time before, converted to Islam. It seems probable that the sharp divisions of Serb, Bulgar, and so on, did not then exist, and that the Greek Patriarch at Constantinople did himself not know what variety of reprehensible Slav it was that lived in those parts.... The last Patriarch of Ochrida, whose name was likewise Arsenius, spent the remainder of his life in exile at Mt. Athos, and there, in another monastery, was a pale, sickly monk, poring over crabbed MSS. This PaÃ¯ssu, a Bulgar, had entered, like his elder brother, the great Serbian monastery of Hilendar. We know from him that while the various Orthodox monks of Mt. Athosâ€”Greeks, Bulgars, Russians, Serbs and Vlachsâ€”were frequently at loggerheads, yet the others even more frequently combined to fall upon the Bulgars and to upbraid them because their history had not been glorious and because they had an insufficient number of saints. The Bulgar was nothing but a servant of the Greek; Bulgarian was no doubt written in a monastery here and there, but as for the spoken language, were not the townsfolk often ashamed of it? Did they not prefer to talk Greek? "I was filled with sadness," says PaÃ¯ssu, "on account of my race." There happened to be at Hilendar the monk ObradoviÄ‡, who was less enthusiastic about Glagolitic than about the songs sung by the peasant. With the fundamentalthought of working for the whole people, including the women, he clung to the idea of a literature in the popular, rather than in the old Church language. He was to set out, in pursuit of Western science, to France and Italy and Englandâ€”he spent six months in London. The whole people was dear to him; he looked beyond their differences of religion, their other differences, and saw the brotherhood, in race and speech, of all the Southern Slav countries. He was to become one of the great inspirers of modern Serbia and her first Minister of Education.[33]He urged young PaÃ¯ssu to travel among his countrymen in search of manuscripts and legends. If only he could find the buried splendour of his people and call it into life again. And before he diedâ€”he suffered from continual headaches and an internal maladyâ€”he had finished, in 1762, his book,Slav-Bulgarian History of the Bulgarian People and Rulers and Saints. This naif, imperfect book, more lyric than scientific, but sincere and impassioned, has played a part in reminding the Bulgars of their story; it is the fountain-head of the Bulgarian Renascence.

In Serbia the gallant Captain KotÄa also tried to begin for his country a Renascence. Russia and Austria declared war against the Turks in 1787. The Serbian volunteers, who included Kara George, crossed the Danube and fought with great courage. Yet the Austrians were beaten and KotÄa was captured, by treachery, in the Banat; he was brought back to Serbia and impaled with sixty of his comrades. But in the treaty of 1791 the Turks undertook to give autonomy to the Serbs of the Pashalik of Belgrade, and to keep from their lands in future the janissaries who had wrought so much mischief.

THE GERMAN COLONISTS IN THE BANAT

Further down the Danube, though, there would be a janissary watching a frontiersman, a GraniÄar, on theopposite bank, waiting to kill himâ€”both of them Serbs, both standing on Serbian land.... The military frontier regiments were not only organized to defend, in a long line, Croatia, Slavonia, BaÄka and the Banat from Turkish inroads, they had also to fight for the Habsburgs wherever a war was toward. Two centuries ago, at the time when the Serbian regiments were in a privileged positionâ€”the entire regiment, officers and men, consisting of Serbs, and their own arms being on the flagâ€”it was their destiny to go to France, Italy and Spain, as afterwards to the battle of Leipzig and to Schleswig-Holstein. They may have grumbled a good deal on the way to all these battles, but once the fighting had begun they grumbled no more, thus resembling in two respects the French soldier. And this practice of going abroad on behalf of the Empire was continued till the frontier regiments, about fifty years ago, were broken up. Thus Joseph Eberle and George Huber were killed during the Italian campaign of 1848-1849. These men were German colonists, whose introduction had been so much encouraged in the eighteenth century. But, in order to separate Protestant Hungary from the Turks, so that the two should not unite against the Catholic Habsburgs, it was laid down by Prince Eugene that all the German colonists had to be Catholics. Some Protestants managed to settle in Lescovac, where they held secret services during the night; but in 1726 this was reported to the Prefect of Bela Crkva, whereupon he sent word that if they would not be converted they would each receive twenty-five strokes with a birch.... Of course, those who lived on the frontier lands were subject to the same conditions as their neighbours. German frontier regiments existed side by side with Serbian regiments, and the life of all those people can be studied in a book[34]written by the German frontier village of Franzfeld and published in 1893, a few months after Franzfeld had celebrated its centenary. There would, no doubt, be variations enough in the domestic arrangements of Franzfeld and those of Zrepaja, the neighbouring Serbian village, some miles away; but, as the inhabitants of Franzfeld have now been gathered into Yugoslavia, it isnot without interest if we see what sort of a life they have led. The tale of how these Lutherans from WÃ¼rtemberg laid out and constructed and painted their village, with all the tremendously broad, tremendously straight roads running parallel and at right angles to each other, with the churchâ€”whose decorations are a few stars on the ceilingâ€”the pastor's house and the lawyer's and the town hall and other important houses standing round a square of mulberry trees in the middle of the placeâ€”the tale of all this is told in as deliciously matter-of-fact a manner asRobinson Crusoe. The picturesque, as in that book, startles us now and then, with a vivid sceneâ€”until 1848, we are told, at the arrival of a staff-officer or of a general, every bell in the place had to be set ringing and gunpowder had to be fired off. One finds oneself revelling in the minuteness of the descriptions, one follows happily or sadly the fortunes of Ruppenthal and Kopp and Morgenstern. Everything is true, for the compilers of the book have felt, like Defoe, that "this supplying a story by invention is certainly a most scandalous crime." We are given all the names of those who at the beginning occupied the ninety-nine housesâ€”the hundredth being used as an innâ€”with their place of origin, the numbers of their male and female dependants, and by what means they had hitherto earned their bread. Many houses have been added since that time. Among all the Germans, house No. 79 was occupied by George SirÃ¡ky, a Hungarian who had been a peasant. Ten years afterwards another list is made and SirÃ¡ky still disposes of the same twenty-four "yoke"[35]of plough-land, ten of meadow and one of garden, which he had originally been given, whereas some of the others had increased or diminished their holdings. Then we lose sight of him, and his name does not become one of those which reappears in succeeding generations. Of course, the colony was established on a military basis; an officer, usually a lieutenant, with one or more non-commissioned officers, was stationed there,as the representative of a commandant who presided over several villages. The resident officer was supposed to maintain law and order, to see to it that the people sowed their land at the right season, and to inform the commandant of any delinquency, for the lieutenant was not allowed to punish anyone. As one or more of the able-bodied men belonging to a house might be absent for a long time on military service or in captivity, or else through sickness or wounds be unfit to work, and through lack of means the householder not be in a position to hire day-labourers, in that case his fellow-villagers, one after another, were obliged to assist him without payment. In order that all possible respect should be attached to the chief man and woman of a houseâ€”the house-father and house-motherâ€”these were not liable to punishment for small offences, and if a considerable offence made it necessary to punish them, then they were first of all deposed from their position. Various public posts were filled by the house-fathers or other men, and for refusing to accept such a post a man was commonly arrested; but this punishment, as well as that of so many strokes with a cane (which seems to have been the most usual penalty), was abolished by 1850. The military frontier system came to an end in 1872, at which time the communal life, which had been found to be very irksome, was also gradually done away with. Franzfeld is now a prosperous and peaceful place; their horses are well known, they breed excellent cattle and pigs and sheep, and they say of themselves that out of one Franzfeld man you can make a couple of Jews and there will still remain a Franzfeld man. They tell how once or twice a Hungarian Jew has opened a shop in the village, selling his goods very cheaply for two or three months, at a lower price, in fact, than he paid for them, and then putting up the prices; but as soon as he does that he is boycotted. The aliens who have settled in Franzfeldâ€”Hungarians, Slovaks and Roumaniansâ€”have come as servants, have married Franzfeld girls and are looked upon as Germans. The same German dialect is spoken as in WÃ¼rtemberg; troops from that country marched through Franzfeld during the War. But Serbian, the villagers told me, is the international language of at any rate western Banat,in spite of the Magyars who, as in other parts, made for the last few years of their domination extreme efforts on behalf of their unlovely language. They supplied Franzfeld with schoolmasters and mistresses who could speak no German and no Serbian, so that it was very difficult for both sides. And the authorities told the pastor that the chief truths of religion, they considered, should be taught in Hungarian. But the pastor did not agree with them and they let the matter drop. Franzfeld has seen wild days, particularly in 1848, and her one monument records a calamity of two of her sons who vanished down a well which they were sinking. Of itself the land is not very fertile, but the people have been so successful that they have founded a colony, Franzjosephsfeld, in Bosniaâ€”they multiplied too greatly for their own soil to support them. They speak, many of them, five languages, and they will not be the least worthy of Yugoslav subjects. [Their interests are much more agricultural than political.] With regard to their multiplication, by the way, it is related in this centenary book, among much curious information, that when another Franzfelder comes into the world it is usual to present certain largesse to the midwife, namely, one gulden (this was written in Austrian times), a loaf of bread, a little jar of lard and a few kilograms of white flour. In the old military period this personage was also, like the doctor and the schoolmaster, "on the strength." The last of those who bore the rank of Company-Midwife was Gertrude Metz; she was pensioned after thirty-eight years, and continued for a few years in private practice.

THE SOUTHERN SLAV COLONISTS AND THEIR RELIGION

The Magyars, being themselves of at least two religions, did not interfere in the religious matters of those whom they called "the nationalities" save to ask, with more or less firmnessâ€”it made a difference if they were dealing with Protestant Slovaks or with Protestant Germansâ€”that the language of the ruling race should be employed. This comparative toleration was, of course, tempered by exceptions. Thus in the very Catholic city of PeÄuj in Baranja the treatment applied to otherreligions depended on the individual bishop. Bishop Nesselrode, for instance, chased them all away, and until 1790 they were seldom permitted within fourteen kilometres of the town.

The Austrians in the eighteenth century constrained a good many Southern Slavs to enter the Church of Rome. Austria has always been rich in faithful sons of the Church. Some years ago, for example, I happened in various parts of Dalmatia and Herzegovina to be from time to time the travelling companion of an elderly Viennese. He told me how he had lately impressed upon the mother of his illegitimate son that the boy must receive a thoroughly Catholic education, and in every place this gentleman made his patronage of an hotel dependent on the proprietor's religion, which he frequently knew before we got there. I saw him last at Mostar in distress, because the only good hotel was administered by an Israelite of whose religion he disapproved, and the weather, as it often is at Mostar, was so oppressingly hot that I suppose he had not energy enough to try to convert him....

BUNJEVCI, Å OKCI AND KRAÅ OVANI

Perhaps Austria would not have displayed such fervour in creating Bunjevci, Å okci and KraÅ¡ovani if she had known that these Roman Catholic Slavs would remain, on the whole, very good Slavs. The Bunjevci, who live for the most part in BaÄka and Baranja, came originally from the Buna district of Herzegovina. The total population of the town of Subotica is 90,000, and 73,000 of these are Bunjevci, whose peculiarity is that the old father stays in the town house, while his sons, with their wives and children, drive out on Monday morning over that rather featureless landscape to the farm, which may be at a considerable distance, and there they remain till the end of the week. They are a quiet, industrious people who have lived withdrawn, as it were, from the world since the twenty-five or thirty families escaped from the Turks; and as they brought with them only that number of surnames it is now customary to add a distinguishing name. Thus the VojniÄ‡ family has divided into branches, such as VojniÄ‡-Heiduk, VojniÄ‡-KortmiÄ‡, VojniÄ‡-PurÄa.The Bunjevci seem, although Catholics, to incline less to the Croats than to the Serbs, some of whose customsâ€”those, for instance, of Christmasâ€”they share. But in merry-making they are a great deal more subdued, save that, in drinking to some one's health, you are expected to empty three glasses. In the intervals of a Bunjevci dance at Subotica men would promenade the room arm-in-arm with men and girls with girls. The faces of all of them express entire goodness of heart and absence of guile; many of the girls, who looked like early portraits of Queen Victoria, were arrayed in the local costume, which permits great variety of colour so long as the lady wears, I am told, about fifteen petticoats. These worthy people used to have nothing but their Church, and are now extremely religious. The man who has most influence over them is BlaÅ¡ko RajiÄ‡, a priest and deputy, who was not always able to prevent a Hungarian Archbishop from sending a priest to his church, where he held services in Magyar. During one night, at all events, this church caused the Magyars much annoyance. It was at the beginning of the Great Warâ€”they had accused RajiÄ‡ of making signals from the tower, which is very high; and in order to prove their accusation they sent a large body of soldiers, who surrounded the church, on a boisterous winter's night. Sure enough, the signals were seen to be flashing up there. The church was locked and a blast of the bugles had no effectâ€”save that a few Bunjevci looked out of their windowsâ€”for the flashes did not cease. Then the captain commanded his men to give a mighty shout: "Put out those lights! Put out those lights!" But not the least notice was taken. There was nothing to do but to wait until RajiÄ‡, or whoever it was, should finish his nefarious business and come down. About an hour later, though, the wind became so piercing that a non-commissioned officer suggested that the captain should send for the big drum; the noise of that, said he, would surely reach that devil in the tower. But the big drum, when it came, had no success. The noise it made, reinforced by those of the bugles and the men's shouting, was such that some Bunjevci dressed themselves and ventured out into the cold, to see what really all the turmoil was about. To one of them thefreezing captain yelled that he knew perfectly the criminal had heard them, and that he went on with his accursed flashes since he recognized that this would be the last base act that he would ever do on earth. For the remainder of that night the captain and his men, not with the hope that they would be obeyed but merely to warm themselves a little, kept on shouting now and then, "Put out those lights!" And in the dawn the non-commissioned officer discovered that the signals had been moonlight on some broken glass that was being shaken by the wind.... One sees in the very well-arranged archives of the town of Sombor that the Bunjevci were accustomed, like the Germans, to ally themselves with the Magyars and thus give them a majority. Only in the last ten years at Subotica (and not at all at Sombor) did they ask for their rights; they had seemed conscious of the religious difference between themselves and the Serbs, unconscious that they were of the same race and language. The Magyars attempted to show in Paris that the Bunjevci are not Slavs, but the remains of the Kumani (who died out in those parts about five to six hundred years ago and were not Magyars). In the census of twenty years ago the Bunjevci were called Serbo-Croats, in accordance with a monograph, "Sabotca Varosh TÃ¶rtÃ©nete," in which Professor Ivanji, a Magyar, said they were simply Catholic Serbs. In the census of 1910 the Bunjevci are put under the heading "Ã‰gyebek," which means "miscellaneous."

This census juggling by the Magyars was one of their milder methods of administration. The term Serbo-Croat came to be avoided, and, so that foreigners should be misled, the Yugoslavs in Baranja were classified as Serbs, Croats, Illyrians, Å okci, Bunjevci, Dalmatians and so forth. The Å okci, who were also converted in the eighteenth century to the Roman Catholic Church, are mostly found to-day in Baranja. The name by which they are known is derived from the Serbo-Croatian wordÅ¡aka, the palm of the hand, and refers to the fact that the Catholics cross themselves with the open hand, whereas the Orthodox join the tips of the thumb and first two fingers. The Å okci are considered a weaker people than the Bunjevci; the mothersâ€”they say it is loveâ€”areoften so weak that they allow their children to do anything they like at home, and would not think of remonstrating with them if they wear their caps in church. Among the Å okci none is of a higher than the peasant class, for which reason their priests have usually been Magyars. He who ministers to the village of SzalÃ¡nta, however, is a Croatian poet. The mayor of that villageâ€”I believe a typical specimen of the Å okciâ€”was a ragged, humorous-looking person with a very bushy moustache. He was in remarkable contrast with the young Magyar schoolmaster, whose remuneration is largely in kind. This gentleman looked as if he would be well content if the parents of his children sent him not eggs, butter and chickens, but armfuls of flowers. A month before the Hungarian revolution in 1918 an order had come from Buda-Pest to the effect that the lowest class in a school was to receive instruction solely in its own language, but the Hungarian Republic ordered that no history was to be taught, since it praises kings.

As for the KraÅ¡ovani, who inhabit five villages of the mining district of Resica in Caras-Severin, the eastern county of the Banat, they also were converted by Maria Theresa, in whose time they fled from Montenegro, Macedonia and the Bulgarian frontier. Gradually they have come to reckon themselves as Croats, owing to their priests who come from Croatia. They are all big men with luxuriant moustaches.

There is a district in southern Russia, near the Black Sea, which is called New Serbia. It is the fertile country that was chosen by 150,000 Southern Slavs when they preferred, in 1768, to go into exile rather than change their religion, like the Bunjevci, the Å okci and the KraÅ¡ovani. They preserve some traces of their origin, but can no longer be considered Yugoslavs.

In speaking of these converts and their descendants we have alluded to the Buda-Pest policy of enforcing the Magyar language. This movement may be studied from the close of the eighteenth century in Croatia, where Latin had hitherto been the official language. In 1790 the Croats were again delivered by LeopoldII.to the Magyars, who were bent upon executing their designs.

FOOTNOTES:[20]Cf.La Question Yougo-Slav, by Vouk Primorac. Paris, 1918.[21]When the Slav first arrived in these territories the Romans everywhere yielded to them, and while the more prosperous Romans settled on the coast, the others retired to the mountains. One of the sea-towns, by the way, to which the Romans fled was Split, where they could live in the ruins of Diocletian's enormous, decadent palace; and from extant lists of the mayors of that town we see that until the tenth century they all had Latin names, from then till the twelfth century we find partly Latin and partly Slav names, and during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries their names were nearly always Slav. Those Romansâ€”of course not implying by that word that their forbears had come from Rome or even from Italyâ€”those refugees who took to the mountains mingled with the Slavs and were also joined by wandering shepherds from Wallachia, owing to whom all this variegated population came to be called Black Vlachs, Mauro-Vlachs and in English Morlaks. The epithet "black" was attached to the Vlachs, so JireÄ‡ek thinks (cf.Bulletino di Archeologia Dalmata, Split, 1879), on account of the hordes of Black Tartars who until the beginning of the fourteenth century infested the plains of Moldavia. Gradually in this hinterland population the Roman and the Vlach died out, but the latter's name was retained. It had lost its ethnic meaning and among the Ragusan poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the word was used to signify a shepherd. The Venetians employed the word Morlacchi as a term of mockery, because it indicated people of the mountains, backward people. And this derogatory connotation has clung to it, so that to-day the Morlaks, who after all are Croats and Serbs, do not like to be called by that name.[22]The Serbian Archbishopric of PeÄ‡, which DuÅ¡an at his coronation had raised to the Patriarchate, was for the time being left intact.[23]This is a Pomak song. The Pomaks are the descendants of those who in the seventeenth century (perhaps also earlier) were forcibly converted to Islam. Their folk-songs, customs and language are Bulgarian. They speak the purest Bulgarian, save that the men count with Turkish numerals. (The women, who can count up to 100, use the Bulgarian language.) The Pomaks live for the most part in the Rhodope Mountains and in the Lovac district of northern Bulgaria. They are endowed, as a rule, with meagre intelligence, so that the educational endeavours of the Bulgarian Government had perforce to be abandoned, since very few of these reluctant pupils ever left the lowest class. The most exalted situation they aspire to is to serve as clerks to Muhammedan priests. Nevertheless, they despise the Turks and call their language the language of pigs.[24]To-day in Serbia when the King addresses his people, when the deputies address the Parliament, the mayor his fellow-citizens, the priest his parishioners, the officer his menâ€”all of them begin with the words "Moja bratÄo!" ["My brothers!"][25]Cf.Baranja multja es jelenje, 2 vols., by Francis Varady. Pecuj, 1898.[26]Die sÃ¼dslavischen Literaturen.Leipzig, 1908.[27]Cf.Le Balkan Slave, by Charles Loiseau. Paris, 1898.[28]La Dalmazia.Florence, 1915.[29]There is in the museum at Eger in Czecho-Slovakia a small painting of BrankoviÄ‡ dated 1711. It depicts him standing pensively outside a tent, clad in a red and yellow Turkish costume and with a beard that reaches to his knees. On the other hand, it seems to be established that he was an ordinary inmate of the prison, whose site is now occupied by the CafÃ© Astoria; and one's faith in the accuracy of the Eger Museum is rather dimmed by the exhibition of a number of pictures, each of them purporting to give the authentic details of the assassination at Eger of the great Wallenstein, and every picture is quite different from the others.[30]Macedonia.London, 1906.[31]This was far too sweeping a statement. Only thirty or forty Orthodox at Prizrenâ€”teachers, merchants and othersâ€”used to dress in European raiment (with a fez), but from of old the Serbs had a teachers' institute and a seminaryâ€”the young men educated there frequently went to Montenegro. And in view of what happened a few years later, Miss Edith Durham must regret that in her bookHigh Albania(London, 1909) she did not confine herself to recording of the men of Prizren that "of one thing the population is determined: that is, that never again shall the land be Serb"; but she adds, on her own account, that in this picturesque town and its neighbourhood the Serbs are engaged in a forlorn hope and that their claims are no better than those of the English on Normandy. Yet if, in her opinion, the Serbs have been rewarded beyond their deserts, she must acknowledge that they are not wholly undeservingâ€”in the days of her cherished Albanians it was necessary for a Catholic inhabitant to furnish himself with a loaded revolver before guiding her through the streets of Djakovica.[32]Cf.Les Albanais en Vieille-Serbie et dans le Sandjak de Novi-Bazar. Paris, 1913.[33]He worked for a long time at the monastery of Hopovo, among the Syrmian hills, and there his collection of books, in the two rooms just as he left them, was naturally treasured. Half of them were stolen in the course of this last war by the Austrians.[34]Geschichte der Franzfelder Gemeinde.PanÄevo, 1893.[35]This was originally as much land as a yoke of oxen could plough in a day. Until the introduction of the French metrical system this measurement was used in Austria. It still survives there, a "joch" or yoke being equivalent to 5754Â·6 square metres, or about 1Â·4 English acres. The Hungarian joch is three-quarters the size of this.

[20]Cf.La Question Yougo-Slav, by Vouk Primorac. Paris, 1918.

[21]When the Slav first arrived in these territories the Romans everywhere yielded to them, and while the more prosperous Romans settled on the coast, the others retired to the mountains. One of the sea-towns, by the way, to which the Romans fled was Split, where they could live in the ruins of Diocletian's enormous, decadent palace; and from extant lists of the mayors of that town we see that until the tenth century they all had Latin names, from then till the twelfth century we find partly Latin and partly Slav names, and during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries their names were nearly always Slav. Those Romansâ€”of course not implying by that word that their forbears had come from Rome or even from Italyâ€”those refugees who took to the mountains mingled with the Slavs and were also joined by wandering shepherds from Wallachia, owing to whom all this variegated population came to be called Black Vlachs, Mauro-Vlachs and in English Morlaks. The epithet "black" was attached to the Vlachs, so JireÄ‡ek thinks (cf.Bulletino di Archeologia Dalmata, Split, 1879), on account of the hordes of Black Tartars who until the beginning of the fourteenth century infested the plains of Moldavia. Gradually in this hinterland population the Roman and the Vlach died out, but the latter's name was retained. It had lost its ethnic meaning and among the Ragusan poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the word was used to signify a shepherd. The Venetians employed the word Morlacchi as a term of mockery, because it indicated people of the mountains, backward people. And this derogatory connotation has clung to it, so that to-day the Morlaks, who after all are Croats and Serbs, do not like to be called by that name.

[22]The Serbian Archbishopric of PeÄ‡, which DuÅ¡an at his coronation had raised to the Patriarchate, was for the time being left intact.

[23]This is a Pomak song. The Pomaks are the descendants of those who in the seventeenth century (perhaps also earlier) were forcibly converted to Islam. Their folk-songs, customs and language are Bulgarian. They speak the purest Bulgarian, save that the men count with Turkish numerals. (The women, who can count up to 100, use the Bulgarian language.) The Pomaks live for the most part in the Rhodope Mountains and in the Lovac district of northern Bulgaria. They are endowed, as a rule, with meagre intelligence, so that the educational endeavours of the Bulgarian Government had perforce to be abandoned, since very few of these reluctant pupils ever left the lowest class. The most exalted situation they aspire to is to serve as clerks to Muhammedan priests. Nevertheless, they despise the Turks and call their language the language of pigs.

[24]To-day in Serbia when the King addresses his people, when the deputies address the Parliament, the mayor his fellow-citizens, the priest his parishioners, the officer his menâ€”all of them begin with the words "Moja bratÄo!" ["My brothers!"]

[25]Cf.Baranja multja es jelenje, 2 vols., by Francis Varady. Pecuj, 1898.

[26]Die sÃ¼dslavischen Literaturen.Leipzig, 1908.

[27]Cf.Le Balkan Slave, by Charles Loiseau. Paris, 1898.

[28]La Dalmazia.Florence, 1915.

[29]There is in the museum at Eger in Czecho-Slovakia a small painting of BrankoviÄ‡ dated 1711. It depicts him standing pensively outside a tent, clad in a red and yellow Turkish costume and with a beard that reaches to his knees. On the other hand, it seems to be established that he was an ordinary inmate of the prison, whose site is now occupied by the CafÃ© Astoria; and one's faith in the accuracy of the Eger Museum is rather dimmed by the exhibition of a number of pictures, each of them purporting to give the authentic details of the assassination at Eger of the great Wallenstein, and every picture is quite different from the others.

[30]Macedonia.London, 1906.

[31]This was far too sweeping a statement. Only thirty or forty Orthodox at Prizrenâ€”teachers, merchants and othersâ€”used to dress in European raiment (with a fez), but from of old the Serbs had a teachers' institute and a seminaryâ€”the young men educated there frequently went to Montenegro. And in view of what happened a few years later, Miss Edith Durham must regret that in her bookHigh Albania(London, 1909) she did not confine herself to recording of the men of Prizren that "of one thing the population is determined: that is, that never again shall the land be Serb"; but she adds, on her own account, that in this picturesque town and its neighbourhood the Serbs are engaged in a forlorn hope and that their claims are no better than those of the English on Normandy. Yet if, in her opinion, the Serbs have been rewarded beyond their deserts, she must acknowledge that they are not wholly undeservingâ€”in the days of her cherished Albanians it was necessary for a Catholic inhabitant to furnish himself with a loaded revolver before guiding her through the streets of Djakovica.

[32]Cf.Les Albanais en Vieille-Serbie et dans le Sandjak de Novi-Bazar. Paris, 1913.

[33]He worked for a long time at the monastery of Hopovo, among the Syrmian hills, and there his collection of books, in the two rooms just as he left them, was naturally treasured. Half of them were stolen in the course of this last war by the Austrians.

[34]Geschichte der Franzfelder Gemeinde.PanÄevo, 1893.

[35]This was originally as much land as a yoke of oxen could plough in a day. Until the introduction of the French metrical system this measurement was used in Austria. It still survives there, a "joch" or yoke being equivalent to 5754Â·6 square metres, or about 1Â·4 English acres. The Hungarian joch is three-quarters the size of this.

Slavs weep for the fall of Veniceâ€”They hear the voice of their brothersâ€”Measures to keep them apartâ€”By encouraging the Italianized partyâ€”And the Orthodox Churchâ€”And by fatherly legislationâ€”In Serbia the people are fighting for freedomâ€”The Montenegrin authorities are otherwise engagedâ€”Napoleon favours the Southern Slavsâ€”Russia and Britain oppose him on the Adriaticâ€”Illyria, Napoleon's great work for the Southern Slavsâ€”Napoleon's schemes are roughly interruptedâ€”The Montenegrin Bishop incites against himâ€”Disaster for Napoleon and the Southern Slavsâ€”Austria's repressive policyâ€”The work of Vuk KaraÅ¾iÄ‡â€”The methods of Serbia's MiloÅ¡â€”The Slav soul of Croatiaâ€”The Magyars and Croatia's portâ€”The Sultan reigns in Bosniaâ€”A sorry period for the Southern Slavsâ€”Some who turn from politics grow prosperousâ€”But the Croats strive for political libertiesâ€”The Austrians, the Magyars and the Croatsâ€”The Croats, struggling for freedom, incidentally help Austriaâ€”How Montenegro reformed herselfâ€”The Prince-Bishop gives a lead to the Southern Slavsâ€”Austria pours out a German floodâ€”The Croat peasants and their clergyâ€”What the Czechs are doing to-dayâ€”Strossmayerâ€”The Turk in Montenegro and Macedoniaâ€”The cheerless state of Serbiaâ€”the Slav voice in Macedoniaâ€”The Macedonian Slavs are undividedâ€”Dawn of Italian unityâ€”How Cavour would have treated the Slavsâ€”Italianv.Slav: Tommaseo's adviceâ€”Austria leans on Germans and Italianistsâ€”The Southern Slav hopes are centred on Cetinjeâ€”For they know neither Nicholas of Montenegro nor Michael of Serbiaâ€”If Michael had lived!â€”The strange career of Rakovskiâ€”The Yugoslav nameâ€”Russia and Austria sow discord in the Balkansâ€”The Macedonian Slavs under their Greek clergyâ€”The affair of KukuÅ¡â€”The Exarchate is establishedâ€”1867: Austria delivers the Slavs to the Magyarsâ€”The "Krpitsa"â€”Rieka's history, as two people see itâ€”And the Slovenes are coerced.

SLAVS WEEP FOR THE FALL OF VENICE

Early in 1797 the weak French garrisons which had been left in certain towns of Italy were massacred by theVenetians, who displayed no mercy either to the wounded soldiers or the women who were with the troops. Napoleon would come back no more, thought the Venetians. But he heard of what had happened as he was engaged upon the clauses of the Treaty of Leoben. No sooner had that courier brought him the dispatches than the Venetian envoys were ushered into his presence. They had been entrusted by the Senate with the task of following the armies and congratulating Napoleon or the Archduke, according to which of them had won the last battle. These envoys may have taken a despondent view of what would be the fate of the Serene Republic; but when, a short time afterwards, the perfumed and dishevelled citizens, stamping on the masks of last night's ball, were weeping pitiably in their palaces, the Slovenes and the Morlaks, who had fought for them so well, were weeping in the streets. Sadly and solemnly at Zadarâ€”la tanto disputataâ€”the flag of Venice was lowered; at other parts of the Dalmatian coast the nobles scarcely had to say a word before the peasants had snatched arms to fight the French and theirÃ©galitÃ©. The Venetians had, after all, been there a long time, even if they had not risen to the heights of Dubrovnik, which, as we learn from a traveller in 1805, kept no secret police and no gendarmes, and where a capital sentence pronounced at the time was the first in twenty-five years. (The city went into mourning on account of this, and an executioner had to be imported from Turkey.) Such a moral height had not been reached by the Venetians; but they had been in Dalmatia, as people loved to repeat, for a long time, and they had been easy-going in the collection of taxes, they had supported the bishops and the holy Church, they had made the peasants feel that each one of them was helping to support Venice, the grand and ancient, and so the faithful people mourned when she was falling.

THEY HEAR THE VOICE OF THEIR BROTHERS

Yet they were not wholly deaf to the call of their own race. When the Austrians sent a general, the "Hungarian party," working against the civil government of Count Raymond von Thurn, managed to have the post givento General Rukavina, a Croat from the Military Frontier. An eye-witness has left us an account of Rukavina's reception at Trogir. The general mounted a chair, and asked the people in the Slav language whether they would swear the oath of fidelity to His Majesty the Emperor and King, FrancisII., and his descendants and legal successors. "Otchemo!" ["That is what we want!"] was the unanimous reply. After the swearing of the oath, the general suddenly began a vigorous speech: "Moi dragi Dalmatinci" ["Mydear Dalmatians"], said he.... And afterwards, when two companies of Croat infantry were disembarked, the people collected round them were astonished to hear them speaking the same language as themselves and to learn that many of them had the same names as the Dalmatians.[36]

Incidents of this character were, for more reasons than one, most galling to von Thurn. In July the archbishop and municipality of Split petitioned that they might belong to Hungary. One presumes that these officials were moved less by the sympathetic ways of one Hungarian than by the knowledge that Croatia was under the Hungarian crown. Very powerless, indeed, like themselves, Croatia might beâ€”at that moment reduced to the rank of a Hungarian county, with her Ban no longer able to convoke the Dietâ€”nevertheless, a Croatia still existed. Then Count Raymond took hold of the matter; he sent reports on Rukavina to the Viennese authorities, and he and they seem to have cared little whether these reports contradicted one another. He exhibited his adversary as a man of unbounded violence, as a man of the most pusillanimous nature; General Rukavina was despicable, said these documents, he was an absolute nonentity; but no, shrieked von Thurn on the next day, this man Rukavina was imbued as no other with the abominable spirit of Machiavelli. To bring about the fall of the Hungarian party in Dalmatia, Count Raymond's police set themselves the task of laying by the heels such Hungarian agents as Count Miaslas ZanoviÄ‡, one of the four sons of Count Anthony, who for being implicated in a more than usually flagrant scandal had been expelled from Venice. And hissons lived agitated lives, although it is untrue that the second one, Stephen, before dying in prison in Amsterdam, had governed Montenegro and is known to history as Stephen the Little. [That mysterious person was a contemporary, who appearing in Montenegro when the land was in a state of barbarism and destitution, gave it out that he was the Russian Tzar PeterIII., who had been strangled to death in 1762. The Montenegrins accepted him; and from 1768 to 1773 he showed himself a most competent and zealous ruler, carrying out so many reforms that he was clearly not PeterIII.It has not as yet been ascertained from where he came, but judging from his accent he was either a Dalmatian Serb or a native of the Military Confines. He was very taciturn; only one Montenegrin, a priest called MarkoviÄ‡, is believed to have been privy to his secret. MarkoviÄ‡ had visited Russia ten years previously and had celebrated Mass in the presence of the Tzar. It was the priest who assured the mountaineers that Stephen really was the Tzar. During his reign he repulsed the Turks and organized the public security, so that a lost purseâ€”the people saidâ€”could easily be recovered. The Republic of Venice tried on several occasions to poison this excellent ruler; he was ultimately killed by a barber who came up to Cetinje at the bidding of the Pasha of Scutari, and, being appointed court barber, cut Stephen's throat.] As for the ZanoviÄ‡, the elder brother, Count Premislas, was for a long time in a Finnish prison, on account of his conduct in gaming-houses; the two younger brothers, Hannibal and Miaslas, were in Budva in southern Dalmatia in 1797, distributing Venetian proclamations, after which they rearranged their minds and became Hungarian agents.

MEASURES TO KEEP THEM APART

The more active of the pair was Miaslas, and by confounding his machinations and those of other Hungarian adherents von Thurn overthrew the Hungaro-Croatian party. Thenceforward his greatest care was diligently to suppress those aspirations of the people of Dalmatia for a union with their brothers. He had tobuild the house with the materials that he found on the spot; the most obvious corner-stone was that numerically small body of nobles and merchants who had for so long associated with Venetian officials that they hated to confess that they were Slavs.

BY ENCOURAGING THE ITALIANIZED PARTY

A minute number of this small body consisted of real Italians, people who very exceptionally had settled in Dalmatia; but among these rare families there was not any single one of that extensive class in Venice which had been presented by their Government with vast domains, with farms and forests in Dalmatia. Well, the Count of Thurn observed that this small body of Italianized Slavs would probably not help him very much, for the Italian culture and the education which they were so proud of wereâ€”it is not unjust to sayâ€”nearly always superficial and not such as to compensate for this party's lack of numbers. But yet, for what they were worth, he supported them. No doubt the project which the Archduke Charles evolved in 1880, to transplant German-Austrians to Dalmatia, would have been preferred by von Thurn. "These colonists," explained the Archduke, "by their culture and laboriousness, by their devotion to the House of Habsburg would give to the Dalmatians a most valuable example and would soon persuade them thoroughly to merge themselves among the mass of peoples faithful to the Emperor." But this plan could not be carried through, because the people of Dalmatia would have risen in revolt; moreover, the most fertile regions had been so neglected that too many of them were now marshes or through other causes uninhabitable. Thus von Thurn assisted the Italianized party; they would, at any rate, unlike the other Serbo-Croats of Dalmatia, not strive for union with anybody else. Before the French Revolution no one in Italy dreamed that it would be possible to bring about Italian unity, and the patriots of 1848 longed only for the liberation of their Peninsula; they spoke of Triest as "the port of the future Slavia" or as "a neutral zone, a transitional region between Slavia and Italy."

AND THE ORTHODOX CHURCH

It may be that when von Thurn also gratified a reasonable ambition of the Orthodox Church he was moved by the idea that the Roman Catholic Church of the Croats might thus to some extent be counteracted; he may, on the other hand, have been impelled by altruistic motives when he authorized the establishment of an Orthodox bishopric. Under Venice the Church had not been recognized; and after having several times almost succeeded in obtaining their bishop, amodus vivendiwas at last reached in 1797, with the consent of the Senate and perhaps of Rome. Under this arrangement the Orthodox were free to profess their religion, but the Senate officially ignored their separation from the Roman Church; their priests had to obtain their rights from the Catholic bishops and allow the Catholic priests to cull certain of their legitimate revenues. And this, although the Orthodox formed one-half of the dioceses of Scardona and Å ibenik, and two-thirds of that of Bocche di Cattaro. They were not more backward than the rest of the population. Von Thurnâ€”who, they thought, knew nothing of the circumstancesâ€”was informed by them that the see of Dalmatia was vacant and that they had elected the Archmandrite Simeon IvcoviÄ‡, a man universally esteemed for his prudence and wisdom. They begged von Thurn to confirm this election, and he did so.

AND BY FATHERLY LEGISLATION

But von Thurn seems to have relied largely on the gratitude which this neglected province would feel for the introduction of Austrian improvements. The happy-go-lucky Venetian methods were no longer to disfigure the country. Those people were logical indeed who did not care for a government which did not care for them. No such reproach should be levelled against the Austrian Government, if he could avoid it; for in Dalmatia it would now be by the side of its new subjects from their getting up in the morning until they lay them down at night. Henceforward there would be a set of reasonablerules for everything, and if anyone remarked that this was too much in the spirit of the late Josephii.who made the Kingdom of Prussia his modelâ€”what more excellent model could one imagine? Those people who had hitherto been troubled in their minds because they did not know how many flower-pots they might instal outside their windows, to those people it would be a boon to have a new list of detailed and complete regulations as to every aspect of this matter. People who had until now been nervous lest they would be punished if they started lotteries at Zadar, all these people would be glad to know that lotteries were legal if each person who manipulated one paid for the upkeep of a hundred lanterns in the streets. People had been bastinadoed in the past, not knowing if they would be smitten hard or gently; but the Austrian Government was far too civilized to leave such matters in the hands of chance. With regard to those who persisted in public smoking, von Thurn probably borrowed the rules which Baron Codelli, the mayor of Ljubljana, was elaborating at this time. "In the streets of the town and the suburbs," says the Baron, "smoking has become of late a general practice. The pleasure of smoking tobacco, which its partisans can sufficiently enjoy in their abodes, by the river and in the fields, makes them forget what is seemly, and, moreover, they disregard the peril that may arise from conflagrations, especially when their pipes are not shut. Several fires, due to this pipe-smoking, which is contrary to the police regulations, have not sufficed to lead the culprits back to the respect and precaution which they should preserve for the goods and property of their fellow-citizens. To satisfy the general well-being and to satisfy the police with regard to fires, it is forbidden to smoke tobacco, and especially cigars, in the streets and squares of this town and the suburbs, with the penalty of losing the pipe if a police-agent catches anyone with it in his mouth, and in the case of a repeated offence the penalty will be more serious."

IN SERBIA THE PEOPLE ARE FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM

This system of tutelage may have had its irksome moments; the Turkish rule in Serbia was such that anypeople with blood in their veins were bound to rebel. Sooner or later a race like the Serbs, who lived always with the songs of their old heroes and who gloried in their heiduks, were sure to dash themselves against this alien master. Kara George had seen that the Serbs in the Banat were prosperous, while in Serbia they were obliged to stand and watch the janissaries come back to the pashalik of Belgrade, though the Turks had sworn this should not be. Then the match was set to the fireâ€”in January 1804 the Da-Hi, the chiefs of the janissaries, after having slain Mustapha Pasha, the enlightened Turkish Governor, who was known affectionately as "the mother of the Serbs," cut off the heads of a number of Serbian leaders; seventy-two of them on pikes were made into an awful avenue of trees. But even as the snowstorms beat against these Serbian heads, so Kara George and his companions from Å umadija, the heart of Serbia, flung themselves against the janissaries and vanquished them. This was what the Serbs had started out to do, and so for the moment Constantinople had been content to look on. However, when the Sultan was told that his unruly vassals had seized the whole of Å umadija and the departments of Valjevo and Pojarevac, he sent against them the Pasha of Bosnia, who demanded that they should lay down their arms. But now the Serbs had seen what some day they might struggle toâ€”the liberation of their country. They had climbed a few steps up the stony path, they would not let themselves be lured back to the plain. Let Austria or some other one of the Great Powers guarantee their rights. The Pasha would not hear of it, and so these few undaunted men resolved to fight the Turkish Empire. An army came at once to stamp them out, and at Ivancovac they scattered it. From now they would fight on alone.[37]Their leader was the sort of man they wanted, a brave heiduk who was never weary, who had taken up one day a large rock and had flung it down a precipice, and who would do the same, they fancied, to a follower of his, if he saw fit.... The Serbs were left to fight alone, butthe Great Powers took an interest in their future. We find in a report from the French Ambassador in Petrograd to his Minister of Foreign Affairs (No. 261 in the "Excerpts from the Paris Archives relating to the history of the first Serbian Insurrection," collected [Belgrade, 1904] by Dr. Michael GavriloviÄ‡, now the Minister in London) that the treaty of alliance stipulated for Russia to have Moldavia, Bessarabia, Vallachia and Bulgaria; France to have Albania, part of Bosnia, Morea and Candia; Austria to have Croatia and part of Bosnia; while Serbia was to be independent and given to a prince of the House of Austria or to any other foreign prince who married a Russian Grand Duchess. According to another scheme which the Ambassador forwarded, Austria was to have Serbia in complete possession as an Austrian province, and Croatia to belong to Austria or France, as Napoleon might decide.... Serbia had to fight alone, and unluckily her ranks were anything but closed. The lack of education brought about some childish jealousies, such as that of Mladen MilanoviÄ‡, who was ordered by Kara George to go to the relief of the Heiduk Veliko at Negotin, where 18,000 Turks were besieging him. "He may help himself!" quoth Mladen. "Hispraise is sung to him at his table by ten singers,mineis not. Let him hold out by himself, thehero." Veliko sent word to say that at the New Year (when Kara George and his chieftains were wont to meet in consultation) he would inquire as to how the country was being governed. But before then he was deadâ€”shot by the Turks, who recognized him while he was going the rounds; and after five days his troops, in despair, made their escape across a morass and scattered.

THE MONTENEGRIN AUTHORITIES ARE OTHERWISE ENGAGED

There was no use in looking to the Montenegrin mountains, for that rallying-point of all the Serbs was in the midst of very delicate business. One year before the rising of Kara George, in 1803, the Montenegrin warriors had profited from the fact that they were fighting nobody and they had made a few reforms in their owncountry. The Bishop, PeterI., convoked an assembly at which the tribal chiefs approved of a Code and of the imposition of a tax, for State requirements. It was also decided to have a court of justice, the members of which should be elected by the people. Thus it will be seen that the patriarchal system still prevailed, and though the Bishop was regarded by the outside worldâ€”by the Turk whom with varying fortunes he was perpetually fighting, and by the Russian Tzar, whom he had visited at intervals from the time when Peter the Great called on the Montenegrins in 1711 to work with him in rescuing, if it was God's will, those Orthodox Christians who were oppressed by the yoke of the heathenâ€”though the Bishop was regarded both by friend and foe as the sovereign of Montenegro, yet it was only round him that the tribal chiefs gathered as being the guardian of their religion, while the people, represented by their tribal chiefs, remained the real sovereign. If Kara George had risen one year earlier they would have flown immediately to help himâ€”as, indeed, they did help him at a later periodâ€”they would have postponed, without a moment's hesitation, the establishing of Code and tax and court of justice. But in 1804 they found themselves in a most awkward situation. Since the death of the Tzar Paul the Russians had appeared to be indifferent to Montenegro, and for three years the annual subsidy of a thousand sequins had not been paid. This omission was made use of by the French Consul at Dubrovnik, who with the aid of a Dubrovnik priest, one Dolci, set himself to wean the Montenegrins from their Russian friendship. Fonton, Russia's Consul at Dubrovnik, demanded the sequestration and the scrutiny of Dolci's papers; the demand was rejected, and when force was tried Dolci leaped at the examiner's throat. It was proved that he was in the pay of France and the Montenegrins were obliged to disavow him. This exasperated the Bishop, who threatened to cut off Dolci's ears, but relented and only gave him a hundred blows with a stick and ordered him to be imprisoned in a monastery. The second half of Dolci's punishment was thought by many at the time to be unwise, as he might talk. And they were gladdened when they heard, soon afterwards, of his decease, thoughwhether they were right in praising their bishop for this consummation we do not know. At all events, the hapless Dolci had not lived in vain, for Russia now resumed her good relations with the mountaineers, and she inaugurated them by paying the three thousand sequins.

The Treaty of Pressburg in 1805 allotted Dalmatia to Napoleon. A few months afterwards his armies landed on the coast. Although the high command and certain regiments were French, a large part of the force consisted of Italians, Germans, Spaniards and Dutchmen. The scheme Napoleon entertained was to secure for himself the gates of the Balkans and Albania, incidentally to take the Ionian Islands in the rear, with the great purpose of securing the roads to Constantinople; thence to India.

NAPOLEON FAVOURS THE SOUTHERN SLAVS

The provinces of Dalmatia and Istria were placed under the government of Milan, in their towns were hoisted the Italian colours; but if to Napoleon these lands were chiefly stepping-stones to India, he did not long stay in ignorance regarding their inhabitants. His representative, Vincenzo Dandolo, was a Venetian who, on account of his democratic principles, had been expelled in 1799 and had sought refuge in France. We will therefore not repeat the epithets he uses when he writes about the late Venetian overseas rÃ©gime. But Napoleon had no cause to be prejudiced in favour of the Yugoslavs. His origin was Italian. His daughter reigned in Italy. And if he had disapproved of Dandolo starting at Zadar in 1806 an official newspaperâ€”theRegio dalmato: Kraljski dalmatin, written partly in Italian, partly in Serbo-Croatâ€”he would very soon have stopped the paper and Dandolo's career. But, on the contrary, this paper (the first one to be written at all in Serbo-Croat) was followed by the planning of secondary schools at Zadar, Å ibenik, Trogir, Split, Makarska and the island of Hvar, twenty-nine elementary schools for boys and fourteen for girls, two academies at Zadar and Split, four seminaries for the education of priests and eight industrial schools. And in these the Serbo-Croatian language was to be largely employed.

Kara George had no leisure in which to learn to read and write. Another Turkish army, formed in Bosnia, had to be encountered near Å abac in 1806. It was routed, and on this occasion the Serbian cavalry was led with great distinction by a priest, Luka LazareviÄ‡. Yet another Turkish army suffered the same fate.

RUSSIA AND BRITAIN OPPOSE HIM ON THE ADRIATIC

It was not to be thought that France would be left tranquil on the Adriatic. Russia did not incommode her very greatly. After Kotor (Cattaro) had been delivered to the Muscovites by an Italian, the Marquis Ghislieri (who had concealed until that moment his antagonism to the French for having been removed by them from his Bologna home), the Russians made themselves obnoxious to a small extent upon the islands. They summoned the people of Hvar to recognize the Tzar as their overlord, and when the people declined to do so, the Russians bombarded them. For Dubrovnik this conflict between Russia and France was embarrassing; she wrote to Sankovski, the Russian Commissary, that if he exceeded his powers she would have recourse to the Tzar, "her beloved protector." But when in the summer of that year, 1806, she was besieged for twenty days, the French were in occupation of the town, while the Russians with their Montenegrin friends were trying to dislodge them. It is said that before the garrison was relieved, by the arrival of another French force, there had been so much damage done to the Republic's ancient walls and palaces and other buildings that the loss, to mention only the pecuniary loss, amounted to eighteen million francs. After the Treaty of Tilsit in 1807 the British undertook, and more effectively, those operations in the Adriatic which the Russians now abandoned. They tried to burn at Triest the Russian vessels which had been ceded to France, and for a few years they had command of the Adriatic, keeping sometimes as many as twenty-two ships in those waters, while the French are said to have had at no time more than seven frigates.

The old Republic was dissolved; but many other questions weighed upon Napoleon. It was the Austrian Emperorand not he whom many people in Dalmatia held to be their lawful monarch, for the Habsburg was the heir of the Croatian Kings. And so while England had the sea in her possession, Austria had the salt-lands of the isle of Pago, and the populace on the Quarnero Islands took the rudders off the boats which were to carry food to Zadar. The Austrians advanced on Split, with ordinary troops and volunteers. At Hvar the people kept Napoleon's birthday with apparent enthusiasm; on the next day they revolted and hoisted the Austrian flag. Then the peasants seized the town and for three days indulged in pillage, burning amongst other things the valuable libraries of those who favoured France.

ILLYRIA, NAPOLEON'S GREAT WORK FOR THE SOUTHERN SLAVS

With the Treaty of Schoenbrunn Napoleon secured possession of Carniola, the Austrian part of Istria, Croatia, the military frontiers from the Save to the sea, and also certain districts of Carinthia, Styria and Tirol. Now at last the Adriatic littoral, with large tracts of the interior, was united under one hand. We may note that EugÃ¨ne Beauharnais in vain entreated that the frontier for the Slovenes should, on account of strategic necessities, be drawn to the east of the Isonzo, but Napoleon did not hesitate to make that river the boundary between the two countries, as it was between the two races. Mazzini in 1860 shared this opinion, which he had also maintained in 1831, in his bookThe Rights of Man, that Slavs and Italians should be divided by this river. And in 1860 Cavour expressed himself to the same effect in a letter to Laurent Valerio.

"Mes braves Croates," says Napoleon in his Memoirs; and for what he did in this Illyria, the forerunner of our Yugoslavia, they must be always thankful. Never had these people had such able administrators, such sympathetic governors. They governed it too much as if it were a part of France, but they were doing their utmost to understand the people and their customs. General Marmont acquired an excellent knowledge of the Serbo-Croat language; he intended to introduce the national tongue into all the public offices. But this naturally could not be carried through without an intervening period, and unluckily Marmont so far excelled his compatriots as a linguist, that when the newspaperTÃ©lÃ©graphe officiel des Provinces Illyriennesappeared at Ljubljana, the capital (under the brilliant editorship of Charles Nodier, who came out from France for that purpose), and it was announced that there would be French, German, Italian and Slav articles, the latter do not appear to have been published. Illyria was under the influence of its neighbours, Italian, German and Hungarian, with regard to the spoken and still more with regard to the written language. A fundamental necessity was that the country should have one common language. Under French influence Joachim Stulli brought out hisVocabulario italiano-illyrico-latinoin 1810, and at Triest in 1812 StarÄeviÄ‡ published his new Illyrian grammar. There was visible in these works an aspiration that some day the Yugoslavs would be united in one country and with various dialects, and the proviso that for public affairs and for schools and literature the so-called "Å to" dialect, the most widely spread and the most perfect, should be given preference. If Napoleon had not fallen, his Illyria would no doubt have gradually attracted to herself the other Yugoslav provinces that still were under the Austrian, Hungarian or Turk; and in this way one of the great thorns would have been taken out of Europe's side. There was an official, Marcel de Serres, on Napoleon's staff, who was exclusively concerned with Yugoslav affairs; and it is probable that with a closer knowledge of the people there would have been less insistence on the radical reforms which were sometimes ill-adapted to the country and were often hated vehemently by the persons whom they shook out of their age-long comatose condition. Napoleon would have modified the methods of recruiting had he known how much resentment his conscription was arousing. Venice had obtained most faithful soldiers; this was one of the few trades that she permitted, but she had never said they were obliged to serve. Napoleon's system caused great numbers of desertions, while the men who stayed had little discipline and looked for opportunities to join the enemy. Perhapsin time the nobles would have been resigned to losing, if not all, at any rate a portion of their privileges; and the Catholic clergy would have moderated their strong views against the gaoler of PiusVII., the champion of liberal and emancipated France, the master of Dandolo, who wanted to reduce the number of bishoprics, oblige candidates for the priesthood to learn certain lay subjects and regulate the funds in the possession of the Orders, with the purpose of assisting the indigent clergy and benevolent institutionsâ€”much would have been forgiven by the clergy to the man who brought about national union.

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