No More Learning

The close of the twelfth century witnessed the birth of Slavonic
independence in the Balkan peninsula. The death of Manuel I in 1180
freed the Southern Slavs from the rule of Byzantium, and in the following
decade were laid the foundations of those Serbian, Bosnian, and Bulgarian
states which, after a brief period of splendour acquired at the expense
of one or other Christian nationality, fell before the all-conquering Turk
to rise again in modified form and on a smaller scale in our own time.
As has usually happened in the history of the Balkans, the triumph
of the nation was in each case the work of some powerful personality,
of Stephen Nemanja in Serbia, of Kulin in Bosnia, and of the brothers
Peter and John Asên in Bulgaria.
The founder of the Serbian monarchy was a native of the Zeta, the
older Serbian kingdom of Dioclea and the modern Montenegro. Starting
from his birthplace on the banks of the Ribnica, Nemanja made Rascia,
later the Sanjak of Novibazar, the nucleus of a great Serbian state, which
comprised the Zeta and the land of Hum, as the Herzegovina was then
called, with outlets to the sea on the Bocche di Cattaro and at Antivari,
North Albania with Scutari, Old Serbia, and the modern kingdom before
1913 as far as the Morava. Of the Serbian lands Bosnia alone evaded
his sway, for there his kinsman Kulin, ignoring the authority alike
of the Hungarian crown and of the Byzantine Empire, governed with
the title of ban a rich and extensive country, then “ at least a ten days'
journey
in circumference,” and became the first great figure in Bosnian
history, whose reign was regarded centuries afterwards as the golden
age. Italian painters and goldsmiths found occupation in his territory,
and Ragusans exploited its trade. Miroslav, Nemanja's brother and
Kulin's brother-in-law, whom the former made prince of the land of
Hum, formed the link between these two separate yet kindred Serbian
communities.
Before the time of Nemanja the chiefs of the various Serbian districts,
or župy, who were thence styled župans, had considered themselves as
practically independent in their own dominions, merely acknowledging
the more or less nominal supremacy of one of their number, the so-called
CH. XVII.


## p. 518 (#560) ############################################

518
The Bogomile heresy
לר
יל
“Great Župan. ” Nemanja, while retaining this traditional title, con-
verted the aristocratic federation as far as possible into a single state,
whose head in the next generation took the corresponding name of king.
Further, to strengthen his position with the majority of his people,
he embraced the Orthodox faith, and endeavoured to promote ecclesias-
tical no less than political unity. With this object he laboured to extir-
pate the Bogomile or Manichaean heresy, which was then rife in the Balkan
lands and had attained special prominence in Bosnia. The simple worship
of the Bogomiles, the Puritans of south-eastern Europe, was sometimes
encouraged and sometimes proscribed by the Bosnian rulers, according as
they wished to oppose the pretensions, or invoke the aid, of the Papacy.
Thus Kulin at one time found it expedient to join the Bogomile com-
munion with his wife, his sister, and several other members of his family,
whose example was followed by more than 10,000 of his subjects; while
at another, the threat of Hungarian intervention, supported by the
greatest of the Popes, led him to recant his errors. On 8 April 1203
the ban and the chief Bogomiles met the papal legate on the “ white
plain ” by the river Bosna, and renounced their heretical practices and
beliefs. The oldest Bosnian inscription tells us how Kulin and his wife
proved the sincerity of their re-conversion by restoring a church? .
While Kulin thus ended his career as a devout Roman Catholic,
Nemanja, at the instigation of his youngest son, the saintly Sava,
retired from the world in 1196 to the monastery of Studenica, which he
had founded, leaving to his second son Stephen the bulk of his dominions
with the dignity of “Great Župan,” and to his eldest son Vukan his
native Zeta as an appanage, a proof that the unification of the Serbian
monarchy was not yet completely accomplished. From Studenica he
moved to Mount Athos, where, on 13 February 1200, he died as the monk
Simeon in his humble cell at Chiliandarion. After his death he received
the honours of a saint, and his tomb is still revered in his monastery
of Studenica. Just as the lineage of the ban Kulin is said to linger
on in the Bosnian family of Kulenović, just as later rulers regarded the
customs and frontiers of his time as a standard for their own, so the
Serbs look back to Nemanja as the author of the dynasty with which
their medieval glories alike in Church and State are indissolubly
connected.
Meanwhile, in 1186, a third Slavonic nation had asserted its inde-
pendence of the Byzantine Empire. The unwise imposition of taxes
to furnish forth the wedding festivities of the Emperor Isaac II
Angelus aroused the discontent of the Bulgarians and Wallachs (Vlachs)
of the Balkans. The rebels found leaders in the brothers Peter and John
Asên, descendants of the old Bulgarian Tsars, who summoned the
hesitating to a meeting in the chapel of St Demetrius which they had
built at Trnovo, and by means of a pious fraud persuaded them that
1 Wissenschaftliche Mittheilungen, vii. 215-20.


## p. 519 (#561) ############################################

Second Bulgarian Empire
519
the saint had migrated thither from his desecrated church at Salonica,
and that providence had decreed the freedom of Bulgaria. Peter at
the outset assumed the imperial symbols and the style of “ Emperor
of the Bulgarians and Greeks"; but his bolder brother soon took the
first place, while he contented himself with the former capital of Prêslav
and its region, which in the next century still bore the name of “ Peter's
country. " Three Byzantine commanders in vain strove to stamp out
the insurrection : John Asên, driven beyond the Danube, returned at
the head of a body of Cumans, the warlike race which then occupied
what is now Roumania; Nemanja availed himself of the Bulgarian
rebellion to extend his dominions to the south; and the Serbian and
Bulgarian rulers alike hoped to find in Frederick Barbarossa, then on
his way across the Balkan peninsula to the Holy Land, a supporter
of their designs. Isaac Angelus barely escaped with his life near Stara
Zagora ; the victorious Bulgarians captured Sofia, and carried off the
remains of their national patron, St John of Rila, in triumph to their
capital of Trnovo. Such was the contempt of the brothers Asen for
their former masters that they rejected the terms of peace offered them
by the new Emperor, Alexius III, and advanced into Macedonia. But,
in the midst of their successes, two of those crimes of violence so common
in all ages in the Balkans removed both the founders of the second
Bulgarian Empire. John Asên I was slain by one of his nobles, a
certain Ivanko, after a nine years' reign; the assassin temporarily oc-
cupied Trnovo and summoned a Byzantine army to his aid ; but Peter
associated with himself his younger brother Kalojan, and carried on
the government of the Empire until, a year later, he too fell by the
hand of one of his fellow-countrymen, and Kalojan reigned alone as
Emperor of the Bulgarians and Wallachs. ”
The new Tsar continued to extend his dominions at the expense
of his neighbours: from the Greeks he captured Varna in the east,
from the Serbs, divided among themselves by a fratricidal struggle
between the two elder sons of Nemanja, he took Niš in the west; his
Empire extended as far south as Skoplje, as far north as the Danube,
while his relative, the savage Strêz, held the impregnable rock of Prosek
in the valley of the Vardar as an independent prince. Thus, on the
eve of the Latin conquest, Bulgaria had suddenly become the most
vigorous element in the Balkan peninsula, while Serbia lay dismembered
by the disunion of her reigning family and the foreign intervention
which it produced. For Vukan, not content with his appanage in the
Zeta, had invoked the aid of the Pope and the Hungarians in his struggle
to oust his brother from the Serbian throne; King Emeric of Hungary
occupied a large part of Serbia in 1202, with the object of allowing
Vukan to govern it as his vassal, while he himself assumed the style
of “King of Rascia," as his predecessors had long before assumed that
King of Rama” from a Bosnian river-two titles which ever
כי
of "
CH. XVII.


## p. 520 (#562) ############################################

520
Kalojan's success
since then remained attached to the Hungarian crown. His brother had
already made the subsequent Herzegovina a Hungarian duchy, and
Bosnia was only saved from premature absorption by Kulin's politic
conversion to Catholicism. Even the Bulgarian Tsar was treated as
a usurper by the proud Hungarian monarch whose newly-won Serbian
dependency he had dared to devastate.
Menaced alike by his Hungarian neighbour and by the new Latin
Empire, which had now arisen at Constantinople and which claimed
authority over his dominions as the heir of the Greeks, Kalojan thought it
prudent, like other Slav rulers, to obtain the protection of the Papacy.
He begged Innocent III to give him an imperial diadem and a Patriarch;
the diplomatic Pope sent him a royal crown and ordered his cardinal
legate to consecrate the Archbishop of Trnovo as “Primate of all
Bulgaria and Wallachia”; two archbishops and four bishops completed
the Bulgarian hierarchy, and on 8 November 1204 Kalojan was crowned
by the cardinal at Trnovo.
But the crafty Bulgarian was not restrained by respect for the Papacy
from attacking the Latins as soon as occasion offered. His old enemies
the Greeks of Thrace, who had at first welcomed the erection of
Philippopolis into a Flemish duchy for Renier de Trit, speedily offered
to recognise Kalojan as Emperor if he would aid them against their new
masters. He gladly accepted their offer, and soon the heads of some
thirty Frankish knights testified to the savagery of the Bulgarian Tsar.
The Latin Emperor Baldwin I set out with Count Louis of Blois to
suppress the rebellion and relieve the isolated Duke of Philippopolis.
On 14 April 1205 a decisive battle was fought before Hadrianople.
The Count of Blois was killed; Baldwin fell into the hands of the
Bulgarian victor. Even now the end of the first Latin Emperor of
Constantinople is not known with certainty. Two months after the
battle he was reported to be still alive and treated as a prisoner of
distinction. But he soon fell a victim to the rage of his barbarous
captor. Nicetas tells us that the desertion of the Greeks of Thrace to
the Latins infuriated Kalojan, who vented his indignation on his prisoner,
ordered his hands and feet to be cut off, and then cast him headlong into
a ravine, where on the third day he expired. A Flemish priest, however,
who was passing through Trnovo, heard a Bulgarian version of the story
of Potiphar's wife, according to which the virtuous Baldwin was sacrificed
to the injured pride of Kalojan's passionate Cuman consort, and cut
down in the presence of the Tsar. Twenty years later a false Baldwin
was hanged in Flanders, and tradition attaches the name of the first
Latin Emperor to a ruined tower of the medieval Bulgarian capital.
Kalojan did not long survive his victim. For a time his career was
a series of unbroken successes over Franks and Greeks alike. Renier de
Trit was driven from Philippopolis; King Boniface of Salonica was slain
in a Bulgarian ambush and his head sent to the Tsar; so fatal were


## p. 521 (#563) ############################################

Stephen the “ First-crowned”
521
Kalojan's raids to the native population that he styled himself “the
slayer of the Greeks," and they called him “ the dog John. ” He was
about to attack Salonica in the autumn of 1207, when pleurisy, or more
probably a palace revolution prompted by his faithless wife, ended his
life. The popular imagination ascribed the deed to St Demetrius, the
patron-saint of the city, but the usurpation of the dead Tsar's nephew
Boril and his speedy marriage with the widowed Empress pointed to the
real authors of the deed. Kalojan's lawful heir, his son John Asên II,
fled to Russia, while Boril reigned at Trnovo. At first he pursued his
predecessor's policy of attacking the Franks, only to receive a severe
defeat near Philippopolis. Later on, we find him receiving the visit of
a cardinal sent him by the Pope, persecuting the Bogomiles as the
Serbian and Bosnian rulers had done, doubtless for the same reason, and
marrying his daughter to his former enemy, the Latin Emperor Henry,
a striking proof of the growing importance of Bulgaria. But there was
a large party which had remained faithful to the legitimate Tsar; John
Asên II returned with a band of Russians and besieged the usurper in
his capital. · Trnovo long resisted but, at last, in 1218 Boril was
captured while attempting to escape, and blinded by his conqueror's
orders.
A year earlier Serbia had been raised to the dignity of a kingdom.
The Hungarian monarchs, occupied elsewhere, could no longer interfere
in the domestic quarrels of the Serbs. Sava reconciled his brothers and
persuaded the ambitious Vukan, the self-styled “King of Dioclea and
Dalmatia,” to recognise Stephen's right to the position of " Great Župan. ”
An Italian marriage, the example of Bulgaria, the desire of papal
support, and the absence of the jealous King of Hungary in Palestine,
prompted Stephen to ask the Pope once more for a royal crown, an act
for which the negotiations of the Serbian ruler of Dioclea with Gregory
VII furnished a precedent. In 1217 Honorius III sent a legate to
perform the coronation, and the “first-crowned ” King “ of all Serbia”
connected himself with the former royal line by styling himself also
King of Dioclea,” adding Dalmatia and the land of Hum as a flourish
to his other titles. But it has always been a dangerous experiment for
a Balkan ruler to purchase the political support of the Western Church,
at the risk of alienating the Eastern, to which the majority of his
subjects belong. The King of Serbia recognised his mistake; his brother
Sava availed himself of the critical position of the Greek Empire of
Nicaea to obtain from the Ecumenical Patriarch, who then resided
there, his own consecration in 1219 as “ Archbishop of all the Serbian
lands” together with the creation of a separate Serbian Church; and on
his return home he crowned Stephen in 1222 in the church of Žiča,
which the “first-crowned ” king and his eldest son had founded, and
which remains to our own day the coronation church of the Serbian
kings. Thanks to Sara's influence the anger of the King of Hungary at
IN
CH. XVII.


## p. 522 (#564) ############################################

522
Zenith of Bulgaria
this assumption of a royal crown was averted; and, when Stephen died
in 1228, his eldest son Radoslav succeeded to his title. But the second
King of Serbia was of weak character and feeble understanding. His
next brother Vladislav, a man of more energy, was a dangerous rival ;
public opinion favoured the latter; Radoslav became a monk, and
Vladislav in turn was crowned by the reluctant Sava. Together the new
king and the archbishop built the monastery of Mileševo in the Sanjak
of Novibazar, where their bones? were laid to rest. St Sava's memory
is still held in reverence by the Serbs as the founder of their national
Church; many a pious legend has grown up around his name, but
through the haze of romance and beneath the halo of the saint we
can descry the figure of the great ecclesiastical statesman whose constant
aim it was to benefit the country and the dynasty to which he himsel
belonged, and to identify the latter with the national religion.
One of Sava's last acts had been to promote a matrimonial alliance
between the Serbian and the Bulgarian courts, and it was at Trnovo,
then the centre of Balkan politics, that he died. Under John Asên II
the second Bulgarian Empire attained its zenith, and became for a time
the strongest power in the peninsula. The Latin Empire of Constanti-
nople was already growing weaker; the vigorous Greek Empire of
Salonica, which had arisen on the ruins of the Latin kivgdom of the
same name, received from the Bulgarian Tsar a crushing blow at the
battle of Klokotinitza in 1230, and its Emperor, Theodore Angelus,
became his captive; the new Emperor Manuel had married one of his
daughters; the King of Serbia had married another; his own wife was a
daughter of the King of Hungary. Of the two Bulgarian princelings
who had made themselves independent of his predecessors in Macedonia,
Strêz of Prosêk had long before died a violent death, in which the
superstitious saw the hand of St Sava; Slav of Melnik, who had played
fast and loose alike with Latins, Greeks, and Bulgarians, had been
swallowed up in the Greek Empire of Salonica. On a pillar of the
church of the Forty Martyrs, which he built in 1230 at Trnovo, the
Tsar placed an inscription, still preserved, in which he boasted that
he had “captured the Emperor Theodore ” and “conquered all the lands
from Hadrianople to Durazzo, the Greek, the Albanian, and the Serbian
land. ” His mild and statesmanlike demeanour endeared him to the
various nationalities included in his wide dominions; even a Greek
historian admits that he was beloved by the Greeks (a very rare
achievement for a Bulgarian), while a Bulgarian monk praises his piety,
his generous ecclesiastical foundations, and his restoration of the
Bulgarian Patriarchate. During the first Bulgarian Empire the Patriarch
had resided first at Prêslav and then at Ochrida. When that Empire
fell, the Greeks reduced the Patriarchate to an Archbishopric; and,
i Those of St Sava were burned by the Turks at Vračar in 1595 (Arch. f. slav.
Philologie, xxvIII. 90–93).
לי


## p. 523 (#565) ############################################

John Asên II
523
רר
when the second Empire arose, the Pope, as we saw, could not be
persuaded to grant more than the title of Primate to the Archbishop of
Trnovo. In 1235, however, as the price of his aid against the Latins of
Constantinople, John Asên II obtained from the Emperor Vatatzes of
Nicaea and the Ecumenical Patriarch the recognition of the autonomy
of the Bulgarian Church and the revival of the Bulgarian Patriarchate,
whose seat thenceforth remained at Trnovo until the Turkish conquest
placed the Bulgarian Church once more under the Greeks, from whom
the creation of the Exarchate in 1870 has again emancipated it.
But John Asên II did not confine his energies to politics and religion.
Like his contemporaries in Serbia, Bosnia, and the adjacent land of
Hum, he granted to the Ragusan merchants, who during a large part of
the Middle Ages had the chief carrying-trade of the Balkan peninsula
in their hands, permission to do business freely in his realm. He called
these intermediaries between Italy and the East his “dear guests,” and
they repaid the compliment by recalling his “true friendship. ” Gold,
silver, richly-worked garments, and salt entered the Bulgarian Empire
through the medium of the South Slavonic commonwealth on the
Adriatic, while the centralisation of Church and State at Trnovo gave
that city an importance which was lacking to the shifting Serbian
capital, now at Novibazar, now at Priština, now at Prizren. There was
the treasury, there dwelt the great nobles who occupied the court posts
with their high-sounding Byzantine names, and there met the synods
which denounced the Bogomiles and all their works. The stranger who
visited the “castle of thorns ” (Trnovo) on the festival of Our Lord's
Baptism, when the Tsars were wont to display their greatest pomp, went
away impressed with the splendour of their residence on the hill above the
tortuous Jantra, a situation unique even among the romantic medieval
capitals of the different Balkan races.
The conflict with the Greek Empire of Salonica had been forced
upon the Tsar, and it was not till 1235 that he joined the Greek
Emperor of Nicaea in an attack upon the Latins of Constantinople,
of which the union of their children was to be the guarantee. In two
successive campaigns the allies devastated what remained of the Latin
Empire in Thrace, where the Frankish duchy of Philippopolis, then
held by Gerard de Stroem, fell to the share of Asên, and they advanced to
the walls of Constantinople. Defeated in the attempt to capture the
Latin capital, the allies drifted apart; Asên saw that it was not his
interest to help a strong Greek ruler to recover Byzantium; he removed
his daughter from the court of Nicaea, and transferred his support to
the Franks against his late ally. Suddenly the news that his wife, his
and the Patriarch had all died filled him with remorse for his broken
vows; he sent his daughter back, and made his peace with Vatatzes, a
fact which did not prevent him from giving transit through Bulgaria to
a Frankish relief force on its way to Constantinople. His last acts were
וי
son,
CH. XVII.


## p. 524 (#566) ############################################

524
Decline of Bulgaria
to marry the fair daughter of the old Emperor Theodore of Salonica,
whom he had previously blinded, and then to aid his blind captive
to recover Salonica. In the following year, 1241, on or about the feast
of his patron saint, St John, the great Tsar died, leaving his vast
Empire to his son Kaliman, a lad of seven.
The golden age of Bulgaria under the rule of John Asên II was
followed by a period of rapid decline. Kaliman I was well-advised to
renew the alliance with the Greek Emperor of Nicaea and to make
truce with the Franks of Constantinople. But his youth and inex-
perience allowed Vatatzes to become the arbiter of the tottering Empire
of Salonica, and his sudden death in 1246, at a moment when that
ambitious ruler chanced to be in Thrace, tempted the latter to attack
the defenceless Bulgarian dominions. Kaliman's sudden end was
ascribed by evil tongues to poison; but, whether accidental or no,
it could not have happened at a more unfavourable moment for his
country. Michael Asên, his younger brother, who succeeded him, was
still a child; the Empress-mother, who assumed the regency, was a
foreigner and a Greek; and the most powerful monarch of the Orient
was at the head of an army on the frontier. One after another John
Asên’s conquests collapsed before the invading forces of Vatatzes. The
Rhodope and a large part of Macedonia, as well as the remains of the
Greek Empire of Salonica, formed a European appendage of the Empire
of Nicaea, while at Prilep, Pelagonia, and Ochrida, the Nicene frontier
now marched with that of another vigorous Greek state, the despotat of
Epirus. In the south old blind Theodore Angelus still retained a
small territory; thus Hellenism was once more the predominant force
in Macedonia, while the new Bulgarian Tsar was forced to submit to the
loss of half his dominions.
So long as Vatatzes lived, it was impossible to think of attempting
their reconquest. But in 1253 a quarrel between the Ragusans, his
father's “dear guests,” and the adjacent kingdom of Serbia, seemed to
offer an opportunity to Michael Asên for obtaining compensation from
his fellow-Slavs for his losses at the hands of the Greeks. A coalition
was formed between the merchant-statesmen of Ragusa, their neighbour,
the Župan of Hum, and the Bulgarian Tsar, against Stephen Uroš I, who
had ousted, or at least succeeded, his still living brother Vladislav in
1243. It was agreed that, in the event of a Bulgarian conquest of
Serbia, the Ragusans should retain all the privileges granted them by the
Serbian kings, while they promised never to receive Stephen Uroš or his
brother, should they seek refuge there. The King of Serbia, however,
came to terms with the Ragusans at once, and Michael Asên's scheme of
expansion was abandoned. One result was the removal of the Serbian
ecclesiastical residence to Ipek.
When, however, Vatatzes died in the following year, the young Tsar
Miklosich, Monumenta Serbica, 35, 561.


## p. 525 (#567) ############################################

Constantine 4sên
525
יי
thought that the moment had come to recover from the new Emperor of
Nicaea, Theodore II Lascaris, what the Greeks had captured. At first
his efforts proved successful; the Slavonic element in the population of
Thrace declared for him ; and the Rhodope was temporarily restored
to Bulgaria. But his triumph over his brother-in-law was not for long;
the castles of the Rhodope were speedily retaken ; in vain the mountain-
fastness of Chêpina held out against the Greek troops ; in vain the Tsar
summoned a body of Cumans to his aid; he was glad to accept the
mediation of his father-in-law, the Russian prince Rostislav? , then a
prominent figure in Balkan politics, and to make peace on such terms as
he could. Chêpina was evacuated; the Bulgarian frontier receded to the
line which had bounded it before this futile war. The failure of his
foreign policy naturally discontented Michael Asên's subjects. His
cousin Kaliman with the connivance of some leading inhabitants of
Trnovo, slew him outside its walls, seized the throne, and made himself
master of the person of the widowed Empress. But Rostislav hastened
to the rescue of his daughter, only to find that the usurper, fleeing for
safety from place to place, had been slain by his own subjects. With
the death of Kaliman II in 1257 the dynasty of Asên was extinct.
Rostislav in vain styled himself “Emperor of the Bulgarians. ”
The nobles, or boljare, convoked a council for the election of a new
Tsar. Their choice fell upon Constantine, a man of energy and ability
settled near Sofia, but descended through the female line from the
founder of the Serbian dynasty, whom he vaunted as his grandfather.
In order to obtain some sort of hereditary right to the crown, he
divorced his wife and married a daughter of Theodore II Lascaris,
who, as the granddaughter of John Asên II, would make him the
representative of the national line of Tsars. To complete his legitimacy,
he took on his marriage the name of Asên. Another competitor,
however, a certain Mytzês, who had married a daughter of John Asên II,
claimed a closer connexion with that famous house, and for a time
disputed the succession to the throne. But his weakness of character
contrasted unfavourably with the manly qualities of Constantine; he
had to take refuge in Mesembria, and by surrendering that city to the
Greeks obtained from them a peaceful retreat for himself and his family
near the site of Troy.
Constantine's marriage with a Greek princess had benefited him
personally ; but it soon proved a source of trouble to his country. The
Tsaritsa, as the sister of the dethroned Greek Emperor John IV,
nourished a natural resentment against the man who had usurped her
brother's throne, and urged her husband to avenge him. Michael
Palaeologus had, indeed, foreseen this effect of his policy; and in the
winter before the recapture of Constantinople from the Latins, he
had sent his trusty agent, the historian Acropolita, to Trnovo with
1 Archiv für slavische Philologie, xxi. 622–6.
CH. XVII.


## p. 526 (#568) ############################################

526
History of Bosnia
the object of securing the neutrality of the Tsar during the accomplish-
ment of that great design. The re-establishment of the Greek Empire
at Byzantium, which had been the goal of the Bulgarian Tsars, offended
the national susceptibilities of the nobles, and a sovereign who owed
his election to that powerful class and who was half a foreigner would
naturally desire to shew himself more Bulgarian than the Bulgarians.
Thus a conflict with the Greeks was inevitable. Its only result was the
loss of all Bulgaria south of the Balkans.
Constantine Asên was also occupied in the early years after the
recapture of Constantinople with resisting Hungarian invasions from
the north. The Kings of Hungary had always resented the resurrection
of the Bulgarian Empire and the independence of Bosnia ; and the
patronage of the Bogomile heresy by the rulers of both those countries
gave them, as the champions of the Papacy, an excuse for intervention.
The history of Bosnia during the half-century which followed the death
of Kulin in 1204 mainly consists of Hungarian attempts to acquire the
sovereignty over the country by means of its theological divisions. First
the King of Hungary and the Pope granted Bosnia to the Hungarian
Archbishop of Kalocsa, on condition that he purged the land of the
“ unbelievers ” who infested it. Then, when the Bosniaks retorted by
making Ninoslav, a born Bogomile, their ban, the king took the still
stronger step of bestowing their country upon his son Koloman, who
in 1237 made himself master of not only Bosnia but of Hum also. The
great defeat of the Hungarians by the Tartars four years later tem-
porarily rid Bosnia of Hungarian interference, and the Papacy tried
concessions instead of crusades, allowing Ninoslav, now become a
Catholic, to reign unmolested, and the priests to use the Slavonic
tongue and the Glagolitic characters in the services of the Church.
At last, however, in 1254 religious differences and a disputed
succession caused both Bosnia and Hum to fall beneath Hungarian
suzerainty. Bosnia was then divided into two parts; while the south
was allowed to retain native bans, the north, for the sake of greater
security against Bulgaria and Serbia, was at first entrusted to Hungarian
magnates, and then combined with a large slice of northern Serbia,
which under the name of the bunat of Mačva was governed by the
Russian prince Rostislav, whose name has been already mentioned
in connexion with Bulgaria, and who, as son-in-law of the King of
Hungary, could be trusted to carry out his policy. This enlarged
(and in 1264 reunited) banat or duchy of Mačva and Bosnia, as it was
officially called, thus formed, like Bosnia in our own time, an advanced
post of Hungary in the Balkan peninsula.
Bulgaria was stronger and less exposed than Bosnia ; but it was
equally coveted by the Hungarian sovereigns. One of them had
already assumed the title of “ King of Bulgaria”; another, after a
series of campaigns in which the Hungarian armies reached the walls
יל


## p. 527 (#569) ############################################

Stephen Uroš I
527
יר
וי
of Trnovo and temporarily captured the “ virgin fortress” of Vidin,
not only adopted the same style, but handed down to his successors
a shadowy claim to the Bulgarian crown. Thus, in the second half
of the thirteenth century, the Hungarian monarchs were pleased to
style themselves “ Kings of Bulgaria, Rascia, and Rama," sovereigns
(on paper) of all the three South Slavonic States.
When the Hungarian invaders retired, Constantine Asên bethought
him of revenge upon the Greeks.
the Greeks. He did not scruple to call the Sultan
of Iconium and the savage Tartars to his aid ; Michael Palaeologus
narrowly escaped capture at their hands, and it was long before the
rich plain of Thrace recovered from their ravages. These exhausting
campaigns caused the Greek Emperor to propitiate so active an enemy.
Constantine's wife was now dead, and Michael VIII accordingly en-
deavoured to attach the Bulgarian Tsar to the new dynasty at
Constantinople by offering him the hand of his own niece Maria,
with Mesembria and another Black Sea port as her dowry. No sooner,
however, had the marriage been celebrated than Michael refused to
hand over those places, on the plea that their inhabitants, being Greeks,
could not be fairly transferred to Bulgaria against their will. To his
surprise, his niece, as soon as she had become a mother, threw in her lot
entirely with her adopted country, and urged her husband to assert his
claims. The Greek Emperor only avoided a Bulgarian invasion by
another diplomatic marriage, that of his natural daughter to the powerful
Tartar chief Nogai Khan, who from the steppes of southern Russia kept
Bulgaria quiet.
The great design of Charles of Anjou, now established on the throne
of Naples, for the recovery of the Latin Empire, affected both Bulgaria
and Serbia. Stephen Uroš I had married a daughter of the exiled
Latin Emperor Baldwin II, and Queen Helena, whose name is still
preserved in the cathedral at Cattaro and in a ruined church on the
river Bojana, played as important a part as the Bulgarian Empress in
advocating an attack upon the Greeks. In vain the Greek Emperor
tried to win over the Serbian monarch by a marriage between one of
his daughters and a son of Stephen Uroš. But the pompous Byzantine
envoys, who were ordered to report upon the manners and customs of
the Serbian court, were horrified to find “the great” king, as he was
called, living in a style which would have disgraced a modest official
of Constantinople, his Hungarian daughter-in-law working at her spindle
in an inexpensive gown, and his household eating like a pack of hunters
or sheep-stealers. The lack of security for property, which was to be char-
acteristic of the Serbian lands under Turkish rule, deepened this bad
impression, and the projected marriage was broken off. Negotiations
were resumed between Naples and the Serbian and Bulgarian monarchs,
and the Greek Emperor sought to save himself by accepting the union
of the Churches at the Council of Lyons, and by repudiating the rights
CB. XVII.


## p. 528 (#570) ############################################

528
Ivailo the Swineherd
כי
had only
of the Bulgarian and Serbian ecclesiastical establishments to autonomy.
But here again the crafty Palaeologus over-reached himself. By his
concessions to the Ecumenical Patriarch he aroused the national pride
of the two Slav States; by his concessions to the Pope he alienated
the Orthodox party in his own capital. At the Bulgarian court the
Empress Maria, who was in constant communication with the opposi-
tion at Constantinople, worked harder than ever against him, and even
tried to incite the Sultan of Egypt to attack the Byzantine Empire in
conjunction with the Bulgarians.
This ambitious woman now wielded the supreme power in Bulgaria,
for the Tsar was incapacitated by a broken leg, and their son Michael,
whom she caused to be crowned and proclaimed as his colleague, was
still a child. One powerful chieftain alone stood in her path, a certain
James Svętslav, who in the general confusion had assumed the style
of “ Emperor of the Bulgarians. ” A Byzantine historian has graphically
described the sinister artifice by which his countrywoman first deluded,
and then destroyed, this possible but ingenuous rival. She invited him
to Trnovo, and there, in the cathedral, amidst the pomp and circumstance
of the splendid eastern ritual, adopted the elderly nobleman as her son.
Svętslav's suspicions were disarmed by this solemn act of adoption, but
he found when it was too late that his affectionate “mother
embraced him in order the better to kill him. Even this assassination
did not, however, leave her mistress of Bulgaria. A new and popular
hero arose in the place of the murdered man. Ivailo (such seems to
have been his real name) had begun life, like some much more famous
Balkan heroes, as a swineherd, and his nickname of “the lettuce," from
which the Greeks called him Lachanâs, may have been given him from
his habitual diet of herbs. Saintly forms appeared to him in visions
as he tended his herd, urging him to seize the throne of the nation
which he was destined to rule.
His credulous comrades flocked to the
side of the inspired peasant; two victories over the Tartar hordes,
which were devastating the country with impunity, convinced even the
better classes of his mission to deliver their country; and the lawful
Tsar, crippled by his malady and deprived by his wife's cruel machinations
of his most faithful adherents, fell, in a forlorn attempt to save his
crown, by the hand of the triumphant swineherd.
The success of this adventurer disturbed the calculations of the
Greek Emperor, whose recent attempts at obtaining influence over
Bulgarian policy had so signally failed. His first idea was to attach the
peasant ruler to his person by giving him one of his own daughters in
marriage. But on second thoughts he came to the conclusion that the
swineherd would doubtless fall as rapidly as he had risen, and that it
would be therefore wiser to set up a rival candidate to the Bulgarian
throne. He readily found an instrument for this purpose in the person
of the son of the former claimant, Mytzês, whom he married to his


## p. 529 (#571) ############################################

The Dowager-Empress Maria
529
daughter Irene and proclaimed Emperor of the Bulgarians under the
popular name of John Asên III. Meanwhile the Dowager-Empress
Maria was placed in a position of the utmost difficulty in the capital.
Menaced on three sides-by the citizens of Trnovo, by the swineherd,
and by the Byzantine candidate -she saw that she must come to terms
with one of the two latter. Self-interest suggested Ivailo as the more
likely to allow her and her son to share the throne with him, especially
if she offered to become his wife. At first the peasant was disinclined to
accept as a favour what he could win by force; but he was sufficiently
patriotic to shrink from a further civil war, agreed to her proposal,
and early in 1278 celebrated the double festival of his marriage and
coronation with her at Trnovo. But this unnatural union failed to
secure her happiness or that of her subjects. The savage simplicity of
the swineherd was revolted by the luxury of the Byzantine princess, and
when their conjugal discussions became too subtle for his rude intelligence,
he beat her as he would have beaten one of his own class. Another
Tartar inroad increased the perils of the situation; the Byzantine
claimant, at the head of a Greek army, invested Trnovo; and, though
the cruelty of Ivailo struck terror into the hearts of the besiegers,
accustomed to obey the recognised rules of civilised warfare, the report
of his defeat at the hands of the Tartars in 1279 caused the wearied
citizens to deliver both the Empress Maria and her son to the Greeks
and to recognise John Asên III as their lawful sovereign.
Maria was
led away enceinte to Hadrianople, and ended her career, so fatal to her
adopted country, unlamented and unsung.
But the removal of this disturbing element did not bring peace to
Bulgaria. John Asên III ascended the throne as a Greek nominee,
supported by a foreign army, while the most popular man in the country
was a certain George Terteri, who, though of Cuman extraction, was
connected with the native nobility and was well known for his energetic
character and shrewd intelligence. Byzantine diplomacy saw at once
the danger ahead, and sought to avoid it by the usual method, a
matrimonial alliance between the dangerous rival and the reigning Tsar.
Terteri consented to wed John Asen's sister, even though he had to
divorce his wife, who had already borne him an heir, in order to make
this political marriage. But it was not long before circumstances made
him the inevitable ruler of Bulgaria. Ivailo, supposed to have disap-
peared finally from the scene, suddenly reappeared in the summer of
1280 with a Tartar general at his side. In vain the Greek Emperor
sent two armies to defend the throne of his minion; two successive
defeats convinced John Asên that it was time to flee alike before the
enemy outside and the rival within. He took with him all the portable
contents of the Bulgarian treasury, including the imperial insignia which
the founders of the Empire had captured from Isaac Angelus ninety
years earlier, and which thus returned with their unworthy successor
C. MED. H. v0L. IV. CH. XVII.
31


## p. 530 (#572) ############################################

530
The Tartars in Bulgaria
to Constantinople. Such was the indignation of Michael VIII at the
cowardly flight of the man whom he had laboured to make the instru-
ment of his policy for the reduction of Bulgaria to a vassal state, that he
at first refused him admission to the city. Meanwhile, George Terteri
was raised to the vacant throne by the general desire of the military and
the nobles. Such was his reputation that Ivailo at once retired from
a contest to which he felt himself unequal single-handed.
Ivailo betook himself to the court of Nogai Khan, the Tartar chief
who had once before been the arbiter of Bulgaria. There he found his
old rival, John Asên III, well provided with Byzantine money, and
calculating on the fact that the chief's harem contained his sister-in-law.
For some time the wily Tartar was equally willing to receive the
presents and listen with favour to the proposals of both candidates, till
at last one night in a drunken bout he ordered Ivailo to be killed as the
enemy of his father-in-law, the Greek Emperor. Asên only escaped a
like fate thanks to the intervention of his wife's sister, who sent him back
in safety to Constantinople. Thenceforth, he abandoned the attempt to
recover the Bulgarian crown, preferring the peaceful dignity of a high
Byzantine title and founding a family which played a prominent part in
the medieval history of the Morea. His rival, even though dead, still
continued to be a name with which to conjure; several years later, a
false Ivailo caused such alarm at Constantinople that the Dowager-
Empress Maria was asked to state whether he was her husband or no;
even her disavowal of his identity availed nothing with the credulous
peasants, who regarded him as their heaven-sent leader against the
Turks. For a moment Byzantine statecraft thought that he might be
utilised for that purpose ; but, as his followers became more numerous
and more fanatical, caution prevailed, and the pretender vanished in one
of the Greek prisons.
Andronicus II, who had now succeeded to the Byzantine throne,
realising the hopelessness of any further attempt to restore John Asên,
not only made peace with Terteri, but sent back to him his first wife on
condition that he divorced his second. Thus, the Tsar was able to
pacify the scruples of the Bulgarian hierarchy, which had regarded him
as excommunicated, nor could the united efforts of Pope Nicholas IV
and Queen Helena of Serbia induce him to abandon the national Church.
But the founder of the new dynasty was soon forced to flee before
another Tartar invasion. In vain he had tried to prevent that calamity
by a matrimonial alliance; Nogai Khan ravaged Bulgaria ; and, while
the Tsar was a suppliant at the Greek court, one of his nobles,“ prince
Smilec," was appointed by will of the Tartar chief to rule the country as
his vassal. Smilec's reign was, however, brief; upon the death of Nogai,
his son Choki claimed Bulgaria as the son-in-law of Terteri and was
ostensibly supported by the latter's son, Theodore Svętslav. The allies
were successful; Smilec disappeared, leaving as the one memorial of his


## p. 531 (#573) ############################################

Peaceful development of Serbia
531
name the monastery which he founded near Tatar-Pazardzhik; and Choki
and Svętslav entered Trnovo in triumph. Then the Bulgarian appeared in
his true colours; a sudden stroke of fortune enabled him to spend money
freely among his countrymen, who naturally regarded him as the rightful
heir to the throne ; at last, when he thought that the moment had come
for action, he ordered his Tartar ally to be seized and strangled, and the
Bulgarian Patriarch, who had long been suspected of intrigues with the
Tartars, to be hurled from the cliffs. Two attempts to drive out the
new ruler failed. There was a small Grecophil party in Bulgaria which
proclaimed Michael, the son of Constantine Asên and the Empress
Maria; but the reception with which he met on his arrival convinced
him that his cause was hopeless. The Byzantine Court then supported
the brother of Smilec, who was in his turn defeated, and the number of
Byzantine magnates who were captured on that occasion enabled Svetslav
to ransom his father from the custody in which the Greeks had placed
him. His filial piety did not, however, so far prevail over his ambition
as to make him yield the throne to the founder of his dynasty. He
placed him in honourable confinement in one of his cities, where he was
allowed to live in luxury provided that he did not meddle with affairs of
state.
The Bulgarian Empire no longer occupied the great position in
Balkan politics which it had filled half a century earlier. The rivalries
of pretenders, foreign intrigues, and the sinister influence of a woman
had weakened the fabric so rapidly raised by the energy of the previous
Tsars. In contrast with the feverish history of this once dominant
Slavonic State, that of Serbia during the same period shews a tran-
quillity which increased the resources of that naturally rich country
and thus prepared the way for the great expansion of the Serbian
dominions in the next century. The “great king,” Stephen Uroš I,
whose simple court had so profoundly shocked the Byzantine officials,
after a long and peaceful reign, only disturbed by a Tartar inroad, was
ousted from the throne in 1276 by his elder son Stephen Dragutin (or
“the beloved "), assisted by the latter's brother-in-law, the King of
Hungary. The old king fled to the land of Hum, where he died of a
broken heart, but his cruel son did not long wear the Serbian crown.
Disabled by an infirmity of the foot from the active pursuits necessary
to a Balkan sovereign in the Middle Ages, he abdicated in favour of
his brother Stephen Uroš II, called “Milutin" (or “the child of
grace "). But, like other monarchs who have resigned, he soon grew
weary of retirement, and returned to the throne, till his malady,
combined with qualms of conscience, compelled him, at the end of
1281', to withdraw definitely from the government of Serbia.
As some
compensation for this loss of dignity and as occupation for his not
too active mind, he received from his brother-in-law, the King of
1 Miklosich, Monumenta Serbica, 54, 55, 561.
сH, хуІІ.
34-2


## p. 532 (#574) ############################################

532
Stephen Uroš II
Hungary, the Duchy of Mačva and Bosnia, and also governed Belgrade.
There he busied himself entirely with religious questions; while he
mortified his own flesh, to atone for his unfilial conduct, he and his
son-in-law and vassal, Stephen Kotroman, the founder of the subsequent
Bosnian dynasty, persecuted the Bogomiles with a zeal which became
all the greater after his conversion to the Roman Church. At his
request, the Franciscans, who have since played such an important part
in Bosnian history, settled in the country; but, even with their aid, the
fanaticism of Dragutin could make no headway against the stubborn
heretics. At his death in 1316, the bishopric of Bosnia had been
“almost destroyed,” despite all the efforts of the Popes.
Stephen Uroš II has been judged very differently by his Serbian and
by his Greek contemporaries. One of the former, who owed everything
to him, extols his qualities as a ruler; one of the latter, who was naturally
opposed to him, depicts him as a savage debauchee. The two characters
are, however, by no means incompatible; and if this “ pious king,” the
founder of churches and the endower of bishoprics, was anything but an
exemplary husband, he left Serbia in a stronger position than she had
ever held before. The chief object of his foreign policy was to enlarge
his kingdom at the expense of the Byzantine Empire, which, he bitterly
complained, had annexed foreign territory without being able to defend
its own. Some two years before his accession, the Serbian troops under
the guidance of a Greek deserter had penetrated as far as Seres; and the
first act of his reign was to occupy Skoplje and other places in Macedonia,
an undertaking all the easier in that his father-in-law, the bold Duke
John of Neopatras, at that time the leading figure of Northern Greece,
was at war with the Byzantine Emperor. Michael VIII died before he
could punish the confederates, and his successor contented himself with
sending the Tartar auxiliaries whom his father had collected to glut
their desire for plunder in Serbia, and thus incidentally to weaken a
nation which caused constant vexation to his subjects. The Tartars
came and went, but the Serbian raids continued; Serbian standards
approached the holy mount of Athos, and the Greek commander of
Salonica confessed that his orthodox tactics were no match for the
guerrilla warfare of these marauders. He therefore advised the Em-
peror, especially in view of the Turkish peril in Asia Minor, to make
peace
with the Serbs. Andronicus II took his advice and, to render
the treaty more binding upon the volatile Serbian temperament, re-
solved to give the hand of one of the imperial princesses to Stephen
Uroš. Such marriages were not, as a rule, happy; had not the gossips
told how the “first-crowned” king had turned his Greek wife out
of doors ali but naked ? Stephen Uroš II, it was pointed out, had
an even worse reputation. That uxorious monarch, the Henry VIII
of the Balkans, had already, it was true, had three wives, and had
divorced two of them, while the third was still his consort. But


## p. 533 (#575) ############################################

His Greek marriage
533
Byzantine sophistry declared the second and third marriages null, as
having been contracted during the first wife's lifetime; as she was now
dead, it followed that her husband could put away his third wife and
marry again without offending the canons of the Church. Stephen Uroš
was nothing loth; he wanted an heir, and had no further use for his
third wife, a daughter of the dethroned Tsar Terteri; the only difficulty
was that the widowed sister of Andronicus vowed that she, at any rate,
did not share her brother's views as to the legality of such a second
marriage. The Greek Emperor was not, however, discouraged by her
refusal ; he sacrificed his only daughter Simonis, though not yet six
years of age, to the exigencies of politics and the coarseness of a
notorious evil-liver who was older than her father and in Greek eyes
his social inferior. The scruples of the Ecumenical Patriarch, increased
by the theological flirtations of Stephen Uroš with the Roman Church,
availed as little as the opposition of the Queen-Dowager Helena, who, as
a good Catholic, regarded her son's marriage with abhorrence. The
parties met on an island in the Vardar; the King of Serbia handed over
his Bulgarian consort together with the Greek deserter who had for
so long led his forces to victory, and received in exchange his little bride
with all the humility of a parvenu marrying into an old family.
This matrimonial alliance with the imperial family suggested to the
ambitious mind of Stephen Uroš the possibility of uniting the Byzantine
and Serbian dominions under a single sceptre. His plan was shared by
his mother-in-law, the Empress Irene, who, as an Italian, was devoid of
Hellenic patriotism, and, as a second wife, knew that her sons could
never succeed to their father's throne. In the King of Serbia she saw
the means of acquiring the Byzantine Empire for her own progeny, if
not for the offspring of Simonis, then for one of her own sons. From
her retreat at Salonica she made Stephen Uroš the confidant of her
conjugal woes, loaded him with presents, and sent him every year
a more and more richly-jewelled tiara, almost as splendid as that of
the Emperor himself. When it became clear that Simonis was not
likely to have children, she persuaded the King of Serbia to adopt one
of her two surviving sons as his heir. · But the luxurious Byzantine
princeling could not stand the hard and uncomfortable life in Serbia,
and his brother also, after a brief experience of the Serbian court, was
thankful to return to the civilisation of northern Italy. Simonis herself,
when she grew up, disliked her adopted country quite as much as her
brothers had done. She spent as much of her time as possible at
Constantinople; and, when her husband threatened vengeance on the
Greek Empire unless she returned to him, she was sent back in tears to
his barbarous embraces. Obviously, then, Balkan capitals were even
less agreeable places of residence for luxurious persons of culture at that
period than they are now.
The Greek connexion had naturally given offence to the national
CH. XVII.


## p. 534 (#576) ############################################

534
Serbia and the Papacy
party in Serbia, which was opposed to foreign influence and suspicious
of feminine intrigues. Stephen Dragutin protested from his retirement
at an arrangement which might deprive his own son Vladislav of the
right, which he had never renounced for him, of succeeding to the
Serbian throne upon the death of Stephen Uroš. A more dangerous
rival was the king's bastard, Stephen, who had received the family
appanage in the Zeta, but was impatient of this subordinate position
and ready to come forward as the champion of the national cause against
his father's Grecophil policy. Stephen Uroš, however, soon suppressed
his bastard's rebellion ; the rebel fled to the banks of the Bojana, where
stood the church which still bears his father's name', and begged for
pardon. But the king was anxious to render him incapable of a second
conspiracy, and his Byzantine associates suggested to him that blinding
was the best punishment for traitors of the blood royal. The operation
was, however, only partially successful; but the victim had the sense to
conceal the fact, and lived unmolested in a monastery at Constantinople,
until his father in his old age, at the instigation of the historian Daniel,
recalled him to Serbia and assigned him the ancient royal city of Dioclea,
whose ruins may yet be seen near the modern Podgorica, as a residence.
The failure of his scheme for the union of the Serbian and Greek
realms under his dynasty by peaceful means led Stephen Uroš to enter
into negotiations, in 1308, with Charles of Valois, then seeking to
recover the lost Latin Empire of Constantinople in the name of his
daughter, the titular Empress. In order the better to secure the aid
of the West, the crafty Serb expressed to Pope Clement V the desire
to be received into that Roman Church of which his mother had been
so ardent a devotee, and which could protect him from a possible French
invasion. A treaty was then concluded between him and Charles,
pledging both parties to render mutual assistance to one another, and
securing for the King of Serbia the continued possession of Prilep, Stip,
and other Macedonian castles formerly belonging to the Byzantine
Empire. A further proposal for a marriage between the two families,
contingent on the conversion of Stephen Uroš, fell through, and the
feebleness and dilatoriness of the French prince convinced the shrewd
Serbian monarch that such an alliance would not further his designs,
and that he had nothing to fear from that quarter. He therefore
abandoned Western Europe and the Papacy, and was sufficient of a
Balkan patriot to assist the Greeks against the Turks.
The death of his brother Dragutin gave Stephen Uroš an opportunity
of expanding his kingdom in another direction. He imprisoned his
nephew, whom the royal monk had commended to his care, and made
himself master of his inheritance in Mačva. Stephen Uroš II was now
at the zenith of his power. It was no mere flourish of the
pen
which
made him sign himself “King of Serbia, the land of Hum, Dioclea,
1 Wissenschaftliche Mittheilungen, vii. 231.


## p. 535 (#577) ############################################

Policy of Stephen Uroš II
535
Albania, and the sea-coast,” for his authority really corresponded with
those titles, and under him Serbia had, what she has at last regained,
a sea-board on the Adriatic. But his unprincipled annexation of a
former Hungarian land brought down upon him the vengeance of the
King of Hungary, while his designs against the Angevin port of
Durazzo', which he had already once captured, aroused the animosity
of its owner, Philip of Taranto, now husband of the titular Empress
of Constantinople. The Pope bade the Catholic Albanians fight against
the schismatic Serb who had played fast and loose with the Holy See,
and the league was completed by the adhesion of the powerful Croatian
family of Šubić, which had latterly become predominant in Bosnia and
would brook no Serbian interference in their domain. Stephen Uroš
lost his brother's Bosnian duchy together with Belgrade; but to the
last he was bent on the extension of his dominions. Death carried
him off in 1321, as he was scheming to make political profit out of the
quarrel between the elder and the younger Andronicus.
Stephen Uroš II was an opportunist in both politics and religion.
His alliances were entirely dictated by motives of expediency, and he
regarded the filioque clause as merely a pawn in the diplomatic game.
If he delighted the Orthodox Church by his gifts to Mount Athos, and
his pious foundations at Salonica, Constantinople, and even Jerusalem ;
if a chapel near Studenica still preserves the memory of this “great-
grandson of St Simeon and son of the great King Uroš”—he was so
indifferent, or so statesmanlike, as to permit six Catholic sees within
his realm and to allow Catholic bishops and even the djed, or “grand-
sire," of the Bogomiles to sit in his Council at Cattaro. One of his
laws prevented boundary disputes between villages; he was anxious
to encourage commerce; and, though he more than once harassed Ragusa,
he wrote to Venice offering to keep open and guard the great trade
route which traversed his kingdom and then led across Bulgaria to
the Black Sea. But in commercial, as in other matters, his code of
honour was low, and his issue of counterfeit Venetian coin has gained
him a place among the evil kings in the Paradiso of Dante.
Upon the death of Stephen Uroš II the crown should have naturally
devolved upon his nephew Vladislav, who had now been released from
prison. But the clergy, always a dominant factor in Serbian politics,
favoured the election of the bastard Stephen, who, during his father's
later years, had borne all the royal titles 3 as a designation of his
ultimate succession, and had already once championed the national
idea. Stephen proclaimed that he was no longer blind, and astutely
ascribed to a miracle what was the result of the venality or clumsiness
בל
1 Angevin 1272, Serbian 1296, Angevin 1305, Serbian 1319, Angevin 1322,
Albanian 1368, Venetian 1392, Turkish 1501, Serbian 1912, Albanian 1913.
XIX. 140-1.
3 Mon. spect. hist. Slav. Merid. 1. 192.
2
CH. XVII.


## p. 536 (#578) ############################################

536
Stephen Dečanski and his court
of the operator. To cover his illegitimacy, he assumed the family name
of Uroš, already associated in the popular mind with two successful
kings, but posterity knows him by that of Dečanski from the monastery
of Dečani in Old Serbia, which he founded. With the ruthlessness of
his race, he speedily rid himself of his two competitors, Vladislav
and another natural son of the late king, a certain Constantine.
Vladislav died an exile in Hungary ; Constantine was nailed to a cross
and then sawn asunder; while the usurper tried yet further to strengthen
his position by wooing a daughter of Philip of Taranto and by obtaining
from the Pope a certificate of his legitimacy. To secure these objects
he surrendered Durazzo and offered to become a Catholic, only to
withdraw his offer when the support of the Orthodox clergy seemed
more valuable to him than that of Rome.
The civil war which was at that time threatening the Byzantine
Empire involved both the neighbouring Slav states, each anxious to
benefit by the struggle, which ultimately resulted in a pitched battle
between them. The dynasty of Terteri had become extinct in Bulgaria
a year after the accession of Stephen Uroš III to the Serbian throne.
Svętslav, although he had domestic difficulties with Byzantium, had kept
on good terms with the Serbs, and his warlike son George Terteri II, who
succeeded him in 1322, died after a single Greek campaign. Bulgaria
was therefore once more distracted by the claims of rival claimants,
of whom the strongest was Michael of Vidin, already styled “Despot
of Bulgaria," and founder of the last dynasty of Bulgarian Tsars. His
father had established himself as a petty prince in that famous Danubian
fortress; the son, as was natural in one living so near the Serbian
frontier, had married a half-sister of the new King of Serbia and owed
his success to Serbian aid. In order, however, to secure peace with
the Greeks and at the same time to consolidate his position at home,
he now repudiated his consort with her children, and espoused the
widow of Svętslav, who was a sister of the younger Andronicus. This
matrimonial alliance led to a political treaty between the Bulgarian
T'sar and the impatient heir of Byzantium ; they met in the autumn
of 1326, and came to terms which seemed favourable to both : Michael
promised to assist Andronicus to oust his grandfather from the throne;
Andronicus pledged himself to support Michael against the natural
indignation of the insulted Serbian king, and, in the event of his own
enterprise succeeding, to give money and territory to his Bulgarian
brother-in-law. On the other side, the elder Andronicus sent the
historian Nicephorus Gregorâs on a mission to the Serbian government,
with the object of conciliating Stephen Uroš III. The literary diplo-
matist has left us a comical picture of the peripatetic Serbian court,
then in the vicinity of Skoplje, as it struck a highly-cultured Byzantine.
The inadequate efforts of his barbarian majesty to do honour to the
high-born Greek lady whose daughter he had recently married, seemed
יי


## p. 537 (#579) ############################################

Condition of Serbia
537
ridiculous to a visitor versed in the etiquette of Constantinople. Still
,
as the historian complacently remarked, one cannot expect apes and
ants to act like eagles and lions, and he re-crossed the Serbian frontier
thanking Providence that he had been born a Greek. Similar opinions
with regard to the Balkan Slavs are still held by many of his countrymen.
After making, however, due allowance for the national bias of a
Greek author, it is clear that Serbia, then on the eve of becoming the
chief power of the peninsula, was still far behind both the Greek and
Latin states of the Levant in civilisation. The contemporary writer,
Archbishop Adam, who has left a valuable account of the country at this
period, tells us that it contained no walled and moated castles ; the
palaces of the king and his nobles were of wood, surrounded by palisades,
and the only houses of stone were in the Latin towns on the Adriatic
coast, such as Antivari, Cattaro, and Dulcigno, the residences of the
Catholic Archbishop and his suffragans. Yet Rascia was naturally a
very rich land, producing plenty of corn, wine, and oil, well-watered, and
abounding in forests full of game. Five gold mines and as many of silver
were being constantly worked, and Stephen Uroš II could afford a gift of
plate and a silver altar to the church of St Nicholas at Bari. But his
subjects were too heterogeneous to be united; the Latins of Scutari and
the coast-towns, as well as the Albanians, also Catholics, were oppressed
by the Serbs, whose priesthood was debased and whose bishops were
often in prison. As against this last statement, obviously caused by the
theological zeal of the archbishop, we may set the gloomy account of the
abuses in the six Roman churches of Serbia, which we have from Pope
Benedict XI some twenty years earlier, while, at the moment when
Adam wrote, the Orthodox Archbishop was no less eminent a man than
the patriotic historian Daniel. If, then, Serbia was still uncultured,
if the manners and morals of her rustic court still left much to desire,
she was obviously possessed of great natural energy and capacity, which
only awaited a favourable moment and the right man to develop them.
While the Serbian nobles, whose influence was usually predominant
in deciding questions of public policy, soon wearied of supporting the
elder Andronicus, and plainly said that if their sovereign insisted on
fighting he would fight alone, the Bulgarian Tsar suddenly changed
sides, warmly espoused the cause of the old Emperor, and sent 3000
horsemen under a Russian general with the object (so it was suspected)
of seizing Constantinople for himself and thus realising the dream of
his greatest predecessors. Self-interest and patriotism alike urged the
younger Andronicus to warn his grandfather of the danger which he
would incur if he entrusted the palace to the custody of these untrust-
worthy allies. Andronicus II acted on this timely hint from his rival;
for neither of them could desire to see a Bulgarian conquest of
Constantinople as the result of their family disputes. The Russian was
alone admitted within the gates, and the reproaches and bribes of the
CH. XVII.


## p. 538 (#580) ############################################

538
Battle of Velbužd, 1330
younger Andronicus speedily effected the recall of the Bulgarian force.
A few days later Andronicus III entered the city in triumph; Byzantium
never again so nearly fell beneath the Bulgarian yoke as in that me-
morable spring of 1328, until the famous campaign of 1912–13.
The same Bulgarian Tsar, who had thus all but achieved the ideal of
every Balkan nationality, was destined to bring his country to the verge
of ruin. Stephen Uroš III had never forgiven the insult to his sister,
and Michael therefore resolved to forestall a Serbian invasion by acting
first. He had no difficulty in forming a formidable coalition against the
rising Serbian state. Andronicus III, whose Macedonian frontier near
Ochrida had lately been ravaged by the Serbs, joined the league and
menaced Serbia from the south; the Prince of Wallachia and 3000 Tartar
mercenaries swelled the native army of Bulgaria, already 12,000 strong.
At the head of such forces, Michael boasted that he would be crowned
in his enemy's land, and set out down the valley of the Upper Struma to
cross the frontier a little to the north of Köstendil, then a Serbian but
now a Bulgarian town. On 28 June 1330, the most decisive battle in
the mutual history of the two Slav states was fought in the plain of
Velbužd, as Köstendil was then called. The Tsar was taken by surprise,
for he had expected no fighting that day; indeed, it was afterwards
stated that his opponent had given his word not to begin hostilities till
the morrow. Thus, at the moment when the Serbs charged from a
narrow defile into the plain, the bulk of the Bulgarian army was away
foraging. Aided by a body of several hundred tall German knights,
Stephen Uroš easily routed his distracted foes; Michael himself was
unhorsed, and died, either in the battle, or of his wounds a few days
afterwards; but the conquerors merely disarmed the fugitives, whom, as
men of their own race, it was not lawful to take captive. On the hill
where his tent had been pitched, the victor founded a church of the
Ascension, the ruins of which still serve as a memorial of this fratricidal
Bulgaria was now at his mercy, for the rest of the native army
had fled at the news of their sovereign's defeat, and Andronicus III at
once returned to Constantinople. The proud Bulgarian nobles, who had
deemed themselves their Tsar's “ half-brothers,” came to meet their
conqueror and hear his decision. Stephen Uroš might have united the
two Slav states under his own sceptre, and thus prevented those further
rivalries which have governed Balkan politics in our own time. But
he preferred to allow Bulgaria, then more than twenty days' journey in
extent, to remain as a dependency of his family; he contented himself
with restoring his sister and her young son John Stephen to the
throne of the Tsars. The immediate effect of this policy was the
expulsion of the late ruler's Greek consort, which gave her brother
Andronicus an excuse for annexing a large part of Southern Bulgaria.
Thus Greeks and Serbs alike had profited by the victory of Velbužd;
Serbia had won the hegemony of the Balkan States.
war.


## p. 539 (#581) ############################################

Accession of Stephen Dušan
539
Stephen Uroš III did not long enjoy the fruits of his triumph. His
worst enemies were those of his own household, and he fell a victim to
one of those domestic tragedies which were characteristic of his family.
He had married a second time, and his eldest son Stephen, then twenty-
two years of age but still unprovided with a wife, looked with suspicion on
the offspring of his Greek step-mother, a cousin of Andronicus III. He
had been carefully educated as a crown prince; indeed, his father had
had him crowned with himself, and had promised to make him ruler over
half his kingdom. The courtier-like Archbishop Daniel, anxious to please
his young master, asserts that Stephen Uroš had not kept this promise ;
an impartial Greek contemporary says that the prince's suspicions were
exploited by those Serbian nobles who were weary of his father's rule and
hoped to benefit by a change. They proclaimed him king; he was
crowned on 8 September 1331 ; the flower of the army, attracted by his
prowess at Velbužd, focked to his standard; the old king was easily
captured and imprisoned in the castle of Zvečan near Mitrovica. There,
two months later, he was strangled, either by the orders? or at least
with the tacit consent of his son, who durst not oppose the will of his
powerful followers? ; and the name of Dušan, by which Stephen Uroš IV
is known in history, is variously derived, according to the view taken of
his share in his father's murder, either from duša (“ soul ”), a pet name
given him by his fond parent, or from dušiti (“ to throttle”). The
epithet of “strong," which his countrymen applied to him, was fully
justified by the masterful character and the great achievements of this
most famous of all Serbian sovereigns.
His first care was to secure himself on the side of Bulgaria, where, a
few months before, a revolution organised by two court officials had
driven the Serbian Empress and her son from the throne, and had placed
upon it John Alexander, a nephew of the late Tsar, who assumed the
ever popular surname of Asên. Instead of attempting to restore his
aunt to Bulgaria against the will of the nobles, Dušan adopted the wiser
policy of marrying the sister of the usurper and thus attaching the
latter to his side, while John Stephen, after wandering as an exile from
one land to another, now a suppliant at Constantinople and now a :
prisoner at Siena, ended his days at Naples.