Stephen, the
youngest
of old Duke Stephen's three sons, had a far more
remarkable career.
remarkable career.
Cambridge Medieval History - v4 - Eastern Roman Empire
But the diplomatic republic declined the dangerous honour with
complimentary phrases, while Tvrtko did not live long enough to witness
the fulfilment of the Hungarian monarch's promise to aid him. In 1443
he was murdered by his subjects, and with him the royal house of Ko-
tromanić became extinct. In his place the magnates elected another
bastard son of Ostoja, Stephen Thomas Ostojić, as their king.
Stephen Thomas began his reign by taking a step which had
momentous consequences for his kingdom. Although his predecessor
had been a Roman Catholic, his own family was, like most of the
Bosnian nobles of that time, devoted to the Bogomile heresy, which
had come to be regarded as the national religion. The new king came,
however, to the conclusion that he would not only enhance his personal
prestige at home, diminished by his illegitimate birth and his humble
marriage, but would also gain the assistance of the West against the
Turks, if he embraced the Roman Catholic faith. But, although he
had none of the fervour of a convert from conviction, he soon found
that the erection of Roman Catholic churches did not satisfy the zeal
of the Franciscans, of his protector Hunyadi, and of the Pope. Ac-
cordingly in 1446 an assembly of prelates and barons met at Konjica,
1 It is usually supposed that Vukčić received the ducal title either from
Frederick III in 1448, or from the Pope in 1419, when he turned Roman Catholic,
or else from the King of Aragon (Wiss. Mitt. In. pp. 503–9; x. p. 103 n. ; Klaić, p. 382).
But he is styled dux terre Huminis as early as 23 August 1445 (Mon. spect. hist. Slav.
Merid. xxi. p. 226), “Duke of St Sava in a document of 1446 (Farlati, Illyricum
Sacrum, iv. p. 68), and “ Duke” in a dubious inscription of that year (Wiss. Mitt.
111. p. 502). A less probable theory (ib. 1. p. 434) derives the name of the Herzegovina
from a Turkish word meaning “the land of stoues. ” Thallóczy (Studien zur Gesch.
Bosniens u. Serbiens, pp. 146–59) thinks that he took the title himself with the con-
nivance of the Porte.
## p. 575 (#617) ############################################
Policy of Mahomet II
575
לל
בי
the beautiful town on the borders of the Herzegovina through which
the traveller now passes on the railway from Sarajevo to Mostar. It
was there decided that the Bogomiles “shall neither build new churches
nor restore those that are falling into decay,” and that “the goods of
the Catholic Church shall never be taken from it. "? No less than 40,000
of the persecuted sect emigrated to the Herzegovina in consequence of this
decree, and found there a refuge beneath the sway of Duke Stephen, who,
although he had allowed his daughter Catherine to embrace Catholicism
and marry Stephen Thomas, remained himself a Bogomile. Thus, if the
King of Bosnia had, by his conversion, gained a divorce from his low-
born consort and had become the son-in-law of the powerful magnate
whose sovereign he claimed to be, if he had been taken under the
protection of the Holy See and had secured the support of the famous
Wallachian hero, he had estranged a multitude of his own subjects,
whose defection involved him in a war with his heretical father-in-law,
and hastened the downfall of Bosnian independence. Moreover, the old
Despot of Serbia continued to harass his eastern frontier, so long a
source of discord between the two sister-states; while, as if that were
not enough, this embarrassed successor of the great Tvrtko must needs
try to make good his mighty predecessor's title of “King of Dalmatia
and Croatia,” regardless of the hard fact that what should have been
in theory the natural sea-frontage of his inland kingdom had become
a long and practically unbroken line of Venetian colonies. Such was
the behaviour of the Balkan leaders when in 1451 their destined
conqueror, Mahomet II, ascended the throne.
It was the policy of the new Sultan to humour the Balkan princes
until the capture of Constantinople left him free to subdue them one
by one. He not only renewed his father's treaty with Serbia, but sent
his Serbian stepmother back to her father with every mark of distinction,
assigning her sufficient estates to support her in her widowhood. The
consequence was that George Branković assisted him to amuse the
Hungarians till the capital of the Byzantine Empire fell, and contributed
nothing to the defence of those walls which only five years before he
had helped to repair? When the fatal news arrived, the wily despot
and the terrified King of Bosnia hastened to send envoys to make the
best terms that they could with the conqueror. For the moment
Mahomet contented himself with a tribute of 12,000 ducats from
Serbia ; but he had already made up his mind to put an end to the
autonomy which that rich and fertile country, the stepping-stone to
Hungary and Wallachia, had been permitted to enjoy for the last two
generations. In the spring of 1454 he sent an ultimatum to the despot,
bidding him, under threat of invasion, surrender at once the former land
of Stephen Lazarević, to which he had no right, and promising him in
1 Farlati, l. c.
2 Inscription on the walls of Constantinople. Miklosich, Monumenta Serbica,
p. 441.
CH. XVIII.
## p. 576 (#618) ############################################
576
Siege of Belgrade, 1456
return the ancestral territory of the Branković family with the city of Sofia.
Only twenty-five days were allowed for the receipt of his answer. George
was, however, absent in Hungary when the ultimatum reached Semendria,
and his crafty officials managed to detain its bearer until they had had
time to place the fortresses on a war footing. Before the Sultan could
reach the Serbian frontier, Hunyadi had made a dash across the Danube,
had penetrated as far as the former Bulgarian capital, and had retired
with his plunder beyond the river. Mahomet's main object was the
capture of Semendria, the key of Hungary, but that strong castle resisted
his attack, and he withdrew to Hadrianople. In the following year he
repeated his invasion, and forced Novobrdo to surrender after a vigorous
and protracted bombardment. A portion of the inhabitants he left
there to work the famous silver mines, which, as his biographer remarks,
had not only largely contributed to the former splendour of the Serbian
Empire but had also aroused the covetousness of its enemies. Indeed,
the picture which Critobulus' has drawn of Serbia in her decline might
kindle the admiration of her modern statesmen as they read of the
cities
many
and fair in the interior of the land, the strong forts on
the banks of the Danube," the “ productive soil,” the "swine and cattle
and abundant breed of goodly steeds,” with which this little Balkan
state, so blessed by nature, so cursed by politics, was bountifully endowed.
But the “ numerous and valiant youths” who had been the pride of the
old Serbian armies had been either drafted into the corps of janissaries
to fight against their fellow-Christians, or were helpless, in the absence
of their aged and fugitive prince, against the artillery of Mahomet.
The summer was, however, fast drawing to a close; Serbia gained
another brief respite, and George to his surprise obtained peace on the
basis of uti possidetis and the payment of a smaller tribute for his
diminished territory.
In June 1456 Mahomet appeared with a large park of heavy
artillery before the gates of Belgrade, boasting that within a fortnight
the city should be his. So violent was the bombardment that the noise
of the Turkish guns was heard as far off as Szegedin, and the Sultan
hoped that all succour from that quarter would be prevented by his
fleet, which was stationed in the Danube. But Hunyadi routed the
unwieldy Turkish ships, and made his way into the beleaguered town
with an army of peasant crusaders, whom the blessing of Calixtus III
and the preaching of the fiery Franciscan Capistrano had assembled for
this holy war.
Enthusiasm compensated for their defective weapons ;
when the janissaries took the outer city, they not only drove them back,
but, headed by the inspired chaplain, charged right up to the mouths
of the Turkish cannon ; Mahomet himself was wounded in the struggle,
and retreated in disorder to Sofia, while the Serbian miners from
Novobrdo fell upon his defeated troops. Unfortunately, the pestilence
1 1. ch. 7.
## p. 577 (#619) ############################################
Death of George Branković, 1456
577
that broke out in the Hungarian camp and the death of Hunyadi
prevented the victors from following up their advantage. Belgrade
was saved for Hungary, but the rest of Serbia was doomed. Even at
this crisis, the quarrels of the despot and Hunyadi's brother-in-law
Szilágyi, the governor of Belgrade, demonstrated the disunion and
selfishness of the Christian leaders. The despot, who tried to entrap
his enemy, was himself captured ; and, although he was released, died
not long afterwards on 24 December 1456, of the effect of a wound which
he had received in the encounter. His ninety years had been spent
in a troublesome time; his character had been rather of the willow
than of the oak, and the one principle, if indeed it was not policy,
which he consistently maintained, was his refusal to gain the warmer
support of the West by abandoning the creed of his fathers and his
subjects, as he had abandoned the cause of the other Balkan Christians
to keep his own throne.
George Branković had bequeathed the remnant of his principality
to his Greek wife Irene and his youngest son Lazar; for his two elder
sons, Gregory and Stephen, had been blinded by Murād II. But the
new despot chafed at the idea of sharing his diminished inheritance
with his mother; indeed, he had refused to ransom his old father from
captivity, in order to anticipate by a few months his succession to the
throne. The death of Irene occurred at such an opportune moment
and under such suspicious circumstances that it was attributed to poison
administered by her ambitious son; and his eldest brother and his
sister, the widow of the late Sultan, were so greatly alarmed for their
own safety that they fled the selfsame day with all their portable
property to the court of Mahomet II. That great man treated the
fugitives with generosity; they obtained a home near Seres, where the
former Sultana became the good angel of the Christians, obtaining
through her influence permission for the monks of Rila to transport
the remains of their pious founder from Trnovo to the great Bulgarian
monastery which bears his name. Lazar III was now sole ruler of
Serbia, for his second brother Stephen soon followed the rest of the
family into exile, and became a pensioner of the Pope. But he did not
long profit by his cruelty. While he allowed the internal affairs of his
small state to fall into confusion, he was lax in paying the tribute which
he had promised to his suzerain. Mahomet was preparing to attack
this weak yet presumptuous vassal, when, on 20 January 1458, the latter
died, leaving a widow and three daughters. Before his death, Lazar
had provided for the succession by affiancing one of his children to
Stephen Tomašević, son and heir of the King of Bosnia—an arrangement
which would have united the two Serbian states in the person of the
future Bosnian ruler, and seemed to promise a final settlement of the
disputes that had latterly divided them.
Three candidates for the Serbian throne now presented themselves,
37
c.
ED. H. VOL. IV. CH. XVIII.
## p. 578 (#620) ############################################
578
End of medieval Serbia
Stephen Tomašević, a son of Gregory Branković, and Mahomet II.
None could doubt which of the three would be ultimately successful ;
but at first the Bosniak gained ground. In December 1458 King
Matthias Corvinus of Hungary in a parliament at Szegedin formally
recognised him as Despot of Serbia, that is to say of as much of that
country as was not occupied by the Turks. Meanwhile, in order to
strengthen herself, as she thought, against the latter, the widowed
princess, a daughter of the Despot Thomas Palaeologus, had offered
the principality as a fief to the Holy See.
as a fief to the Holy See. The marriage of the Serbian
heiress and the Bosnian crown-prince took place; the commandant of
Semendria was sent in irons to Hungary; and Stephen Tomašević took
up his abode in the capital of George Branković. But the inhabitants
of Semendria regarded their new master, a zealous Catholic and a
Hungarian nominee, as a worse foe than the Sultan himself. They
opened their gates to the Turks; the other Serbian towns followed
their example; and, before the summer of 1459 was over, all Serbia,
except Belgrade, had become a Turkish pashalik.
The history of medieval Serbia was thus closed ; but members of
the Branković family continued, with the assent of the kings of Hungary,
to bear the title of despot in their Hungarian exile, whither many of
their Serbian adherents had followed them and where their house became
extinct just 200 years ago. Belgrade was able, in Hungarian hands,
to resist repeated Turkish attacks till 1521, while the Serbian Patriarchs
did not emigrate from Ipek to Karlovic till 1690. But from the time
of Mahomet II to that of Black George in the early years of the
nineteenth century, the noblest representatives of the Serbs were to be
found fighting for their freedom among the barren rocks of what is now
Montenegro.
The kingdom of Bosnia survived by only four years the fall of
Serbia. In 1461 Stephen Thomas was slain by his brother Radivoj
and his own son Stephen Tomašević, who thus succeeded to the sorry
heritage of the Bosnian throne, of which he was to be the last occupant.
The new king depicted to Pope Pius II in gloomy but not exaggerated
colours the condition of his country, and begged the Holy Father to
send him a crown and bid the King of Hungary accompany him to the
wars, for so alone could Bosnia be saved. He told how the Turks had
built several fortresses in his kingdom, and how they had gained the
sympathy of the peasants by their kindness and promises of freedom.
He pointed out that Bosnia was not the final goal of Mahomet's
vaulting ambition; that Hungary and the Dalmatian possessions of
Venice would be the next step, whence by way of Carniola and Istria he
would march into Italy and perhaps to Rome. To this urgent appeal
the Pope replied by sending his legates to crown him king. The
coronation took place in the picturesque town of Jajce, Hrvoje's ancient
seat, whither the new sovereign had transferred his residence from
## p. 579 (#621) ############################################
Coronation of Stephen Tomašević
579
Bobovac for greater security. The splendour of that day, the first and
last occasion when a Bosnian king received his crown from Rome, and the
absolute unanimity of the great nobles in support of their lord (for
on the advice of Venice he had made peace with the Duke of St Sava,
whose son was among the throng round the throne) cast a final ray of
light over this concluding page of Bosnia's history as a kingdom.
Stephen Tomašević assumed all the pompous titles of his predecessors---
the sovereignty of Serbia, Bosnia, the land of Hum, Dalmatia, and
Croatia-at a time when Serbia was a Turkish pashalik, when a Turkish
governor ruled over the “Bosnian province" of Foča, and when the self-
styled “King of Dalmatia” was imploring the Venetians to give him a
place of refuge on the Dalmatian coast! There was still, too, one
Christian enemy whom he had not appeased. The King of Hungary
had never forgiven the surrender of Semendria, and had never forgotten
the ancient Hungarian claim to the overlordship of Bosnia. He resented
the Pope's recognition of Stephen Tomašević as an independent sovereign,
and was only appeased by pecuniary and territorial concessions, and by
a promise that the King of Bosnia would pay no more tribute to the
Sultan. This last condition sealed the Bosniak's fate.
When Mahomet II learnt that Tomašević had promised to refuse
the customary tribute, he sent an envoy to demand payment. The
Bosnian monarch took the envoy into his treasury, and shewed him the
money
collected for the tribute, telling him, however, at the same time
that he was not anxious to send the Sultan so much treasure, “ For in
case of war with your master,” he argued, “I should be better prepared
if I have money ; and, if I must flee to another land, I shall live more
pleasantly by means thereof. ". The envoy reported to Mahomet what
the king had said, and Mahomet resolved to punish this breach of
faith. In the spring of 1463 he assembled a great army at Hadrianople
for the conquest of Bosnia. Alarmed at the result of his own defiant
refusal, Tomašević sent an embassy at the eleventh hour to ask for a
fifteen years' truce. Michael Konstantinović, a Serbian renegade, who was
an eye-witness of these events, has preserved the striking scene of
Mahomet's deceit. Concealed behind a money-chest in the Turkish
treasury, he heard the Sultan's two chief advisers decide upon the plan
of campaign: to grant the truce and then forthwith march against
Bosnia, before the King of Hungary and the Croats could come to the
aid of that notoriously difficult and mountainous country. Their advice
was taken ; the Bosnian envoys were deceived; and even when the
eavesdropper warned them that the Turkish army would follow on their
heels, they still believed the word of the Sultan. Four days after their
departure Mahomet set out. Ordering the Pasha of Serbia to prevent
the King of Hungary from effecting a junction with the Bosniaks, he
marched with such rapidity and secrecy that he found the Bosnian
1 Laonikos Chalcocondyles, p. 532.
CH. XVIII.
37—2
## p. 580 (#622) ############################################
580
Turkish conquest of Bosnia, 1463
frontier undefended and met with little or no resistance until he reached
the ancient castle of Bobovac. The fate of the old royal residence was
typical of that of the land. Its governor, Prince Radak, a Bogomile
forcibly converted to Catholicism, could have defended the fortress for
years if his heart had been in the cause. But, like so many of his
countrymen, he was a Bogomile first and a Bosniak afterwards. On the
third day of the siege he opened the gates to Mahomet, who found
among the inmates the two envoys whom he had so lately duped.
Radak met with the fitting reward of his treachery, for when he claimed
his price the Sultan ordered him to be beheaded. The giant cliff of
Radakovica served as the scaffold, and still preserves the name, of the
traitor of Bobovac.
At the news of Mahomet's invasion, Stephen Tomašević had
withdrawn with his family to his capital of Jajce, hoping to raise an
army and get help from abroad while the invader was expending his
strength before the strong walls of Bobovac. But its surrender left him
no time for defence. He fied at once towards Croatia, closely pursued
by the van of the Turkish army. At the fortress of Kljuc (one of the
keys” of Bosnia) the pursuers came up with the fugitive, whose
presence inside was betrayed to them. Their commander promised the
king in writing that if he surrendered his life should be spared, where-
upon Tomašević gave himself up, and was brought as a prisoner to the
Sultan at Jajce. Meanwhile, the capital had thrown itself upon the mercy
of the conqueror, and thus, almost without a blow, the three strongest
places in Bosnia had fallen. The wretched king himself helped the
Sultan to complete his conquest. He wrote, at his captor's dictation,
letters to all his captains, bidding them surrender their towns and for-
tresses to the Turks. In a week more than seventy obeyed his commands,
and before the middle of June 1463 Bosnia was practically a Turkish
pashalik, and Mahomet, with the captive king in his train, was able
to set out for the subjugation of the Herzegovina. But the Turkish
cavalry was useless against the bare limestone rocks on which the castles
were perched, while the natives, accustomed to every cranny of the crags,
harassed the strangers with a ceaseless guerrilla warfare. The duke and
his son Vladislav, who only a few months before had intrigued with the
Sultan against his own father, now fought side by side against the common
foe, and Mahomet, after a fruitless attempt to capture the ducal capital
of Blagaj, withdrew to Constantinople. But before he left he resolved
to rid himself of the King of Bosnia, who could be of no further use
and might be a danger. It was true that the Sultan's lieutenant had
promised to spare the prisoner's life; but a learned Persian was found to
pronounce the pardon to be invalid because it had been granted without
Mahomet's previous consent. The trembling captive, with his written
pardon in his hands, was summoned to the presence, whereupon the lithe
Persian drew his sword and cut off Tomašević's head. The body of the last
## p. 581 (#623) ############################################
Hungarian banats of Jajce and Srebrenik
581
King of Bosnia was buried by the Sultan's orders at a spot on the right
bank of the river Vrbas only just visible from the citadel of Jajce, where,
in 1888, the skeleton was discovered, the skull severed from the trunk.
The remains of the ill-fated monarch are now to be seen in the Franciscan
church there, his portrait adorns the Franciscan monastery of Sutjeska,
but the fetva, which was carved on the city gate of Jajce to excuse the
Sultan's breach of faith by representing his victim as a traitor (“ the
true believer will not allow a snake to bite him twice from the same hole ")
vanished some seventy years ago. The king's uncle Radivoj and his
cousin were executed after him ; his two half-brothers were carried off
as captives; and his widow Maria became the wife of a Turkish officiall.
But his stepmother Catherine escaped to Ragusa and Rome, where she
received a pension from the Pope. There, in the midst of a little colony
of faithful Bosniaks, she died on 25 October 1478, after bequeathing her
kingdom to the Holy See, unless her two children, who had become con-
verts to Islām, should return to the Catholic faith. A monument with a
dubious Latin inscription in the church of Ara Coeli and a fresco in the
Santo Spirito hospital still preserve the memory of the Bosnian queen,
far from the last resting-place of her husband by the banks of the
Trstivnica.
Even although Bosnia had fallen, the Turks were not allowed
undisturbed possession. In the same autumn the King of Hungary
entered Bosnia from the north, while Duke Stephen's son Vladislav
attacked the Turkish garrisons in the south. Before winter had begun
Matthias Corvinus was master of Jajce, and even the return of Mahomet
in the following spring failed to secure its second surrender. Such was
the terror of the Hungarian king's arms that the mere report of his
approach made the Sultan raise the siege. Matthias Corvinus then
organised the part of Bosnia which he had conquered from the Turks
into two provinces, or banats, one of which took its name from Jajce,
and the other froin Srebrenik. Over these territories, which embraced
all lower Bosnia, he placed Nicholas of Ilok, a Hungarian magnate, with
the title of king, not however borne by his successors? . Under Hungarian
rule, these two Bosnian banats remained free from the Turks till 1528
and 1520 respectively-serving as a buffer-state between the Ottoman
Empire and the Christian lands of Croatia and Slavonia.
The Herzegovina, which had repulsed the conqueror of Bosnia, did
not long maintain its independence. The great Duke Stephen Vukčić,
after losing nearly all his land in another Turkish invasion caused by
the aid he had given in the recovery of Jajce, died in 1466, leaving all
his possessions to be divided equally between his three sons, Vladislav,
Vlatko, and Stephen? The eldest, however, whose quarrels with his
1 Hopf, Chroniques, p. 333; Historia Politica, p. 83; Wiss. Mitt. III. p. 384.
2 Makuscev, II. p. 95.
3 Ibid. II. p. 104; Hopf, Chroniques, pp. 333, 335.
CH. XVIII.
## p. 582 (#624) ############################################
582
Turkish conquest of the Herzegovina
father had wrought such infinite harm to his country, did not long
govern the upper part of the Herzegovina which fell to his share; he
entered the Venetian service, and thence emigrated to Hungary where
he died. Accordingly, the second brother, Vlatko, assumed the title of
Duke of St Sava, and re-united for a time all his father's estates under
his sole rule, relying now on Venetian and now on Neapolitan aid, but
only secure as long as Mahomet II allowed him to linger on as a
tributary of Turkey. In 1481 he even ventured to invade Bosnia, but
was driven back to seek shelter in his strong castle of Castelnuovo.
Two years later Bāyazīd II annexed the Herzegovina, whose last reigning
duke died in the Dalmatian island of Arbe. The title continued,
however, to be borne as late as 1511 by Vladislav's son Balša'.
Stephen, the youngest of old Duke Stephen's three sons, had a far more
remarkable career. Sent while still a child as a hostage to Constanti-
nople, he embraced the creed and entered the service of the conqueror.
Under the name of Aḥmad Pasha Hercegović, or “the Duke's son," he
gained a great place in Turkish history, and, after having governed
Anatolia and commanded the Ottoman fleet, attained to the post of
Grand Vizier. His name and origin are still preserved by the little town
of Hersek, on the Gulf of Izmid, near which, far from the strong duchy
of his father, he found a grave.
The fall of the Bosnian kingdom is full of meaning for our own time.
The country is naturally strong, and under the resolute government of
one man, uniting all creeds and classes under his banner, might have
held out like Montenegro against the Turkish armies. But the
jealousies of the too powerful nobles who overshadowed the elective
monarchy, and the still fiercer rivalries of the Roman Catholics and
the Bogomiles, prepared the way for the invader, and when he came
the persecuted heretics welcomed him as a deliverer, preferring “the
mufti's turban to the cardinal's hat. " Most of the Bogomiles embraced
İslām, and became in the course of generations more fanatical than the
Turks themselves; they had preferred to be conquered by the Sultan
rather than converted by the Pope; and, when once they had been
conquered, they did not hesitate to be converted also. The Musulman
creed possessed not a few points of resemblance with their own despised
heresy, while it conferred upon those who embraced it the practical
advantage of retaining their lands and their feudal privileges. Thus
Bosnia, in striking contrast to Serbia, presents us with the curious
phenomenon of an aristocratic caste, Slav by race yet Muslim by religion,
whose members were the permanent repositories of power, while the
Sultan's viceroy in his residencies of Vrhbosna, Banjaluka, or Travnik,
was, with rare exceptions, a mere fleeting figure, here to-day and gone
to-morrow. In fact, Bosnia remained under the Turks what she had
been in the days of her kings, an aristocratic republic with a titular
1 Orbini, Il regno degli Slavi, p. 388 ; Mon. spect. hist. Slav. Merid. vi. pp. 114, 126.
## p. 583 (#625) ############################################
לי
Venice in Albania
583
head, who was thenceforth a foreigner instead of a native; while the
Bosnian beys were in many cases the descendants of these medieval
nobles who had lived in feudal state within their grey castle walls,
whose rare intervals of leisure from the fierce joys of civil war were
soothed by the music of the piper and amused by the skill of the
jongleur, and who, unlike the rougher magnates of the more primitive
Serbian court, received some varnish of western civilisation from their
position as honorary citizens and honoured guests of Ragusa, “ the
South-Slavonic Athens. ” But, besides these converted Bogomiles, there
remained in the midst of Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats some who
adhered to the ancient doctrines of that maligned sect, and it is said that
only a few years before the Austrian occupation a family named Helež,
living near Konjica, abandoned the “Bogomile madness” for the Muslim
faith. Their bitter enemies, the Roman Catholics, at first emigrated in
numbers to the territories of adjacent Catholic Powers, till a Franciscan
prevailed upon Mahomet II to stop the depopulation of the country by
granting them the free exercise of their religion in what was thence-
forth for four centuries the border-land between the Cross and the
Crescent, the home of "the lion that guards the gates of Stamboul. ”
The Turkish conquest of Bosnia was followed, after a desperate
struggle, by that of Albania. That mysterious land, whose sons are
probably the oldest race in the Balkan peninsula, had been divided upon
the collapse of the great Serbian Empire between a number of native
chieftains, over whom Carlo Thopia exercised, with the title of “Prince
of Albania," a species of hegemony for a whole generation. After his
death, Albania was split up among rival clans who acknowledged no
common head, and seemed inevitably destined to one of two fates—that
of a Turkish province or that of a Venetian protectorate. At first there
appeared to be some hope of the latter alternative. The republic
began her career as an Albanian power with the acquisition of Durazzo
in 1392; Alessio, “its right eye,” was annexed as a matter of necessity
in the next year; then followed in succession Scutari and Drivasto,
Dulcigno and Antivari, all acquisitions from the Balša family, and
finally, in 1444, Satti and Dagno on the left bank of the Drin. At
that time the whole Albanian coast as far south as Durazzo was Venetian,
and the Albanian coast-towns were so many links in the chain which
united Venetian Dalmatia with Venetian Corfù. The Adriatic was,
what it has never been again, an Italian lake. It was not, however,
the policy, nor indeed within the power, of the purely maritime republic
to conquer the interior of a country so difficult and so unproductive.
It was her object to save expense alike of men and money, and she
saved the former by devoting a little of the latter to subsidising the
native chieftains in order that they might act as a bulwark against the
Turks. But the brute force of the Turkish arms proved to be too
strong even for such astute diplomatists as the Venetians and such
CA. XVIII.
## p. 584 (#626) ############################################
584
Career of Skanderbeg
splendid fighters as the Albanians. As early as 1414 the Turks began
to establish themselves as masters of Albania, and for nearly twenty
years the castle of Kroja, soon to be immortalised by the brave deeds
of Skanderbeg, was the seat of a Turkish governor. The national hero
of Albania, whose name is still remembered throughout a land which
has practically no national history except the story of his career, was
of Serbian origin! His uncle had, however, married an heiress of the
great Thopia clan, and had thus acquired, together with the fortress
of Kroja, some of the prestige attached to the leading family of Albania.
Then came the Turkish invasion, and George Castriota, the future
redeemer of his country, was sent as a youthful hostage to Constantinople.
The lad was educated in the faith of Islām, and received the Turkish
name of Iskander, or “ Alexander," with the title of beg, subsequently
corrupted by his countrymen into the form of Skanderbeg, under which
he is known as one of the great captains of history. For many years
he fought in the Turkish ranks against Venetians and Serbs, leaving to
Arianites Comnenus, a prominent Albanian chief, the futile task of
trying to drive out the Ottoman garrisons from his native land. At
last, in 1443, while serving in the Turkish army which had been defeated
by Hunyadi's troops near Niš, he received the news of a fresh Albanian
rising. Realising that his hour had come, he hastened to Kroja, made
himself master of the fortress, which was thenceforth his capital, abjured
the errors of Islām, and proclaimed a new crusade against the Turks.
His personal influence was increased by a marriage with the daughter
of Arianites; the other chiefs rallied round him ; the Montenegrins
flocked to his aid ; and at a great gathering of the clans held on
Venetian soil at Alessio he was proclaimed Captain-General of Albania.
Venice, at first hostile to this new rival of her influence there, took him
into her pay as a valuable champion against the common enemy,
and
soon Christendom heard with delighted surprise that an Albanian chief
had forced the victor of Varna and Kossovo to retreat from the castle-
rock of Kroja. The Pope and the King of Naples hastened to assist
the tribesmen, who were both good Catholics and near neighbours,
while the king dreamed of reviving the claims of the Neapolitan
Angevins beyond the Adriatic, and even received the homage of
Skanderbeg.
Mahomet II was, however, a more formidable adversary than his
predecessor. He played upon the jealousy of the other Albanian chiefs,
and his troops utterly routed an allied army of natives and Neapolitans.
For the moment Skanderbeg seemed to have disappeared, but he soon
rallied the Albanians to his side; fresh victories attended his arms,
until in 1461 the Sultan concluded with him an armistice for ten years,
and the land had at last a sorely-needed interval from war. But the
peace had lasted barely two years when Skanderbeg, at the instigation
Hopf, Chroniques, p. 334.
1
## p. 585 (#627) ############################################
Turkish conquest of Albania
585
of Pope Pius II, broke his plighted word and drew his sword against
the Turks. The death of the Pope caused the failure of the projected
crusade ; and Skanderbeg found himself abandoned by Europe and left
to fight single-handed against the infuriated Sultan whom he had deceived.
In the spring of 1466 Mahomet himself undertook the siege of Kroja;
but that famous fortress baffled him as it had baffled his father, and
Skanderbeg journeyed to Rome, where a lane near the Quirinal still
commemorates his name and visit, to obtain help from Paul II. With
the following spring the Sultan returned to the siege of Kroja, only
once again to find it impregnable. But his valiant enemy's career was
over; on 17 January 1468 Skanderbeg died in the Venetian colony of
Alessio. Thereupon the Turks easily conquered all Albania, with the
exception of the castle of Kroja, occupied by Venice after Skander-
beg's death, and of the other Venetian stations. Ten years later, the
disastrous war between the republic and the Sultan brought Kroja,
Alessio, Dagno, Satti, and Drivasto under Turkish rule until 1912; the
peace of 1479 surrendered Scutari ; in 1501 Durazzo, and in 1571
Antivari and Dulcigno, the two ports of modern Montenegro, were
finally taken by the Turks, and the flag of St Mark disappeared from
the Albanian coast. To-day, a part of the castle of Scutari, a mutilated
lion there, a Venetian grave and escutcheon at Alessio, and a few old
houses and coats-of-arms at Antivari and Dulcigno, are almost the sole
remains of that Venetian tenure of the Albanian littoral which modern
Italy was anxious to revive. Skanderbeg's memory, however, still
lives in his own land. Although his son and many other Albanian
chiefs emigrated to the kingdom of Naples, where large Albanian
colonies still preserve their speech, a soi-disant Castriota has in our own
day claimed the Albanian throne on the strength of his alleged descent
from the hero of Kroja. If his grave in the castle of Alessio has
disappeared, the ruins of the castle which he built on Cape Rodoni
still stand to remind the passing voyager that Albania was once a nation.
And, even under Turkish rule, the Roman Catholic Mirdites preserved
their autonomy under a prince of the house of Doda, still wearing
mourning for Skanderbeg, still obeying the unwritten code of Lek
Ducagin.
Serbia, Bosnia, and Albania had successively fallen, but there was
another land, barren indeed and mountainous, but all the more a
natural fortress, which sheltered the Orthodox Serbs in this, the darkest
hour of their history, and which the Turks have in vain tried to conquer
permanently. We saw how the Balša family had established a century
earlier an independent principality in what is now Montenegro, and
how upon the death of the last male of that house in 1421 his chief
cities had been partitioned between Venice and Stephen Lazarević of
Serbia. Even in the time of the Balšas, however, a powerful local
Phrantzes, p. 430; Mon. spect. hist. Slav. Merid. xxII. p. 404.
ܐ
CB. XVIII.
## p. 586 (#628) ############################################
586
History of Montenegro
family, that of the Crnojević, derived by some from the royal line of
Nemanja itself", had made good its claim to a part of the country, and
its head, Radič Crnoje, even styled himself “ lord of the Zeta. ” After
his death in battle against the Balšas in 1396, the family seems to have
been temporarily crushed; but early in the fifteenth century two
collateral members of it, the brothers Jurašević, had established their
independence in the upper, or mountainous, portion of the Zeta, the
barren sea of white limestone round Njeguš, which then began to be
called by its modern name of Crnagora? (in Venetian, Montenegro),
perhaps from the then predominant local clan, less probably from the
“ black” forests which are said to have once covered those glaring,
inhospitable rocks. Venice found the brothers so useful in her struggle
with the Balšas that she paid them a subsidy, and offered to recognise
one of them as “voïvode of the Upper Zeta,” although they were
supposed to be nominally subjects of the Despot of Serbia. A son 3
of this vożvode, Stephen Crnojević by name, revolted against the Serbian
sovereignty, then weakened by its conflict with the Turks, made himself
practically independent in his native mountains, but in 1455 admitted
the overlordship of Venice, which had appointed him her “ captain and
voïvode" in the Zeta. A solemn pact was signed, between the republic
and the 51 communities which then composed Montenegro, on the sacred
island of Vranina on the lake of Scutari : Venice swore to maintain the
cherished usages of Balša and to permit no Roman Catholic bishop to
rule over the Montenegrin Church ; while Stephen Crnojević, victorious
alike over Serbs and Turks, hoisted the banner of St Mark at Podgorica,
and made his capital in the strong castle of Žabljak“.
On his death in 1466, his son and successor, Ivan the Black, was
confirmed by Venice in his father's command as her “captain and voivode”
in the Zeta. In this capacity he assisted with his brave Montenegrins in
the defence of the Venetian city of Scutari against the Turks in 1474,
an event still commemorated by a monument on a house in the Calle del
Piovan at Venice and by a picture by Paolo Veronese in the Sala del
Maggior Consiglio. Four years later he again aided the Venetian
governor of Scutari and the heroic Dominican from Epirus who was the
soul of the defence. But by the peace of 1479 the republic ceded
Scutari to the Turks after an occupation of 85 years, and Montenegro
lost this powerful obstacle to the Turkish advance from the south, the
quarter from which the principality has always been most vulnerable.
The conclusion of peace was a severe blow to the Montenegrin chief,
1 Petrović (trsl. Ciampoli), Storia del Montenegro, p. 23.
2 First found in a Ragusan document of 1362. (Mon. spect. hist. Slav. Merid,
xxvII. p. 212. )
3 Mon. spect. hist. Slav. Merid. xxi. pp. 10, 164, 205, 382, 384.
4 Ibid. xxII. pp. 67-8, 153.
6 Ibid. XXII. pp. 364, 383.
## p. 587 (#629) ############################################
End of the “ Black Princes”
587
especially of a peace on such terms. Abandoned by Venice, Ivan the
Black was now at the mercy of the invader. His capital was too near
the lake of Scutari to be any longer a safe residence; accordingly, he
set fire to Žabljak, and founded in 1484 his new capital at Cetinje,
which remained the seat of the Montenegrin government. There he
built a monastery and a church, and thither he transferred the
metropolitan see of the Zeta, hitherto established in the Craina', the
piece of the Dalmatian coast between the Narenta and the Cetina. The
Turks occupied the lower Zeta ; but a national ballad expresses the
belief that Ivan the Black would one day awake from his sleep in the
grotto of Obod near Rjeka, and lead his heroic Montenegrins to the
conquest of Albania. At Obod he erected a fortress and a building to
house a printing-press for the use of the church at Cetinje, and under
his eldest son George the first books printed in Slavonic saw the light
there in 1493, an achievement commemorated with much circumstance
four centuries afterwards. But George Crnojević was driven from
Montenegro in 1496 by his brother Stephen with the support of the
Turks. The exiled prince took refuge in Venice, the home of his wife,
whence, after a futile attempt to recover his dominions, he threw himself
upon the mercy of the Sultan, embraced Islām, and died, , a Turkish
pensioner, in Anatolia. Meanwhile, Montenegro was governed by
Stephen II till 1499, when’ it was annexed to the Sanjak of Scutari and
placed under a Turkish official who resided at Zabljak 3. But the
mountaineers resisted the Turkish tax-gatherers, and in 1514 Stephen II
was restored by the Sultan *. According to tradition, one of his
descendants, married to a Venetian wife who found residence at Cetinje
both monotonous and useless, abandoned the Black Mountain for ever
and retired to the delights of Venice in 1516, after transferring the
supreme power to the bishop, who was assisted by a civil governor
chosen from among the headmen of
the headmen of the Katunska district. The prince-
bishop, or Vladika, was elective, until in 1696 the dignity became
hereditary, with one interval, in the family of Petrović. Meanwhile, for
some years after the final abdication of the Crnojević family, another
brother of George, who had become a Musulman, held, under the name
of Skanderbeg, the post of Turkish “ governor of Montenegro," a
land which, although the Turks have often invaded and overrun it, they
never permanently conquered.
While Montenegro, the autonomous Mirdites, and the tiny republic
of Poljica alone remained free on the west of the Balkan peninsula, the
two Danubian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia retained a large
2
1 Mon, spect. hist. Slav. Merid. xxii. p. 67.
Sanudo, Diarii, 11. pp. 372, 504.
3 Ibid. xii. p. 153.
4 Ibid. xvii. p. 397.
CH. XVIII.
## p. 588 (#630) ############################################
588
The Danubian Principalities
וי
measure of domestic independence, under the forms of vassalage, on the
east. After a long period of civil war between rival claimants, who
called in their neighbours and partitioned their distracted dominions,
Wallachia acknowledged in 1456 a strong if barbarous ruler in the
person of Vlad “ the Impaler,” and Moldavia in 1457 a vigorous prince
in that of Stephen the Great. The Wallach's hideous cruelties do not
belie his name; he executed 20,000 of his subjects to consolidate his
throne; but he achieved by his savage punishments what his pre-
decessors had failed to obtain, the loyalty of his terrified nobles and the
suppression of brigandage. As soon as he felt secure at home, he defied
his Turkish suzerain, refusing to send him the contingent of 500 children
which Mahomet demanded in addition to the customary annual tribute.
He impaled the Sultan's emissaries, and when the Sultan himself marched
forth to avenge them in 1462 forced him to retire in disgrace. In th
same year, however," the Impaler” was driven from his throne by his
brother, a Turkish puppet, aided by the great Prince of Moldavia. For
the rest of the century Stephen overshadowed the petty rulers of the
sister-principality, and became the leading spirit of resistance to the
Turks in Eastern Europe. His father had, indeed, paid tribute to them
as far back as 1456; but he completely routed them at the battle of
Racova in 1475, the first time that a Turkish and a Moldavian army
had
met. Europe applauded his success; but, after in vain trying to form
a league of the Christian Powers against the enemy, he realised at the
end of his long reign that his efforts had only postponed the necessity
of recognising the suzerainty of the Sultan. His son Bogdan in 1513
made his submission and promised to pay tribute, on condition that the
Moldaves should retain the right of electing their own princes and that
no Turks should reside in their country-a condition modified in 1541
by the imposition of a guard of 500 Turkish horsemen upon the prince
of that period. Thus, largely owing to the fraternal quarrels of their
rulers, both the principalities had fallen within the sphere of Turkish
influence; their constantly changing princes, whether natives or
Phanariote Greeks, were the creatures of the Sultan; but, unlike
Bulgaria, Serbia, and Bosnia, they never came under his direct rule, were
never formally annexed to the Turkish Empire.
The medieval history of the Balkan states and the causes of their
fall are full of significance for our own time. In the Near East, and
in the Near East alone, the Middle Ages are but as yesterday to the
newly-emancipated nations, which look upon the centuries of Turkish
domination as a watch in the night, and aspire to take up the thread
of their interrupted national existence where it was left by their ancient
Tsars, each regardless of the other's overlapping claims to lands which
have been redeemed from the Turk. The medieval records of the motley
peninsula teach us to regard with doubt, in spite of 'Turkish vicinity,
the prospect of common action between Christian races, which, if small
=
## p. 589 (#631) ############################################
Jealousies of the Powers
589
individually, would, if united, have formed a powerful barrier against the
foreigner either from the East or from the West. But the greater
nations of Christendom cannot afford to criticise too harshly their weaker
brethren in the Balkans; for it was quite as much the selfishness and the
mutual jealousy of the Western Powers as the fratricidal enmities of the
Eastern States which allowed the East of Europe to be conquered by Asia,
and which has even in our own day retarded its complete emancipation.
CH. XVIII.
## p. 590 (#632) ############################################
TABLES OF RULERS.
590
SERBIA.
BULGARIAN TSARS.
John Asên 1}
1186
FRANKISH DUKES OF PHILIPPOPOLIS.
Renier de Trit
1204
Gerard de Stroem
1229
(Bulgarian : 1235]
Stephen Nemanja,"Great Zupan" 1143 (or
1159)_1196 + 1200
Stephen, “Great Župan
1196
King 1217
[Vukan, “King of Dioclea' 1195-1207]
Radoslav, King
1228
Vladislav, King
1234-43
+ 1263
Stephen Uroš I, King
1243
Stephen Dragutin, King 1276-81 + 1316
Stephen Uroš II, Milutin, King 1281
1321
Stephen Uroš III, Dečanski, King 1322
(Vladislav, King
1321-4]
Stephen Uroš IV, Dušan, King 1331
Tsar 1346
Stephen Uroš V, Tsar
1355-1371
Simeon Uroš, Tsar
1356–71
_Vukašin, King
1366-71]
Lazar I Hrebeljanović, Prince 1371
Lazar II, or Stephen Lazarević,
Despot
1389-1427
"Vuk Branković, Despot 1389
_George Branković, Prince 1398
George Branković, Despot 1427
Irene
1456
Lazar III Branković, Despot . . . )
Lazar III
alone 1457
Stephen Tomašević, Crown Prince
of Bosnia, Despot
1458-9
[Turkish : 1459)
Peter
Kalojan
Kalojan alone
Boril
John Asên II
Kaliman I
Michael Asên
Kaliman II
Constantine Asên
Ivailo
John Asen III.
George Terteri I
Smilec
Theodore Svętslav
George Terteri II
Michael Shishmanich
John Stephen
John Alexander
1196
1197
1207
1218
1241
1246
1257
1258
1277
1279
1280
1292
1295
1322
1323
1330 + 1373
1331
Tables of Rulers
. . .
John Shishman 1362
- 1393 +1395
(Trnovo) or 1365)
[Turkish : 1393]
John Sracimir
(Vidin)
1360-5; 1369-98
[Hungarian: 1366-9;
Turkish : 1398]
## p. 591 (#633) ############################################
. . . c. 1220
. . .
BOSNIA.
Borić
Ban. 1154-63
[Byzantine Empire: 1166–80]
Kulin
Ban. 1180-1204
Stephen
Bun, after 1204
Matthew Ninoslav
Ban. 1232-37 ; 1240-50
[Kingdom of Hungary: 1237-40)
Prijesda I, “the great
Ban. after 1250-87
Prijesda II and Stephen Kotroman Bans, 1287-90
Stephen Kotroman, alone
1290-1302
Paul Šubić
Ban. 1299-1312
Mladen Šubić
Ban. 1312-22
Hum. (Herzegovina. )
Miroslav, Prince.
1180-90
[Hungarian : 1198-1202]
Peter, Prince
[Hungarian: 1237]
Tolen, Prince
-1239
Andreas, Prince
1239
Radoslav, Župan
1254
[Hungarian: 1254]
[Serbian: c. 1284-1325]
[Bosnian : 1325–57]
(1 Hungarian : 1357-74]
Vojeslav Vojnov, Count 1357-71
2
Niccolò Altomanović 1371-4
[Bosnian*
1374–1435]
Stephen Vukčić
1435
“Duke of St Sava'
1445-66
Vladislav
Vlatko 3
1466–7
Vlatko, “Duke of St Sava 1467-83
[Turkish : 1483]
.
complimentary phrases, while Tvrtko did not live long enough to witness
the fulfilment of the Hungarian monarch's promise to aid him. In 1443
he was murdered by his subjects, and with him the royal house of Ko-
tromanić became extinct. In his place the magnates elected another
bastard son of Ostoja, Stephen Thomas Ostojić, as their king.
Stephen Thomas began his reign by taking a step which had
momentous consequences for his kingdom. Although his predecessor
had been a Roman Catholic, his own family was, like most of the
Bosnian nobles of that time, devoted to the Bogomile heresy, which
had come to be regarded as the national religion. The new king came,
however, to the conclusion that he would not only enhance his personal
prestige at home, diminished by his illegitimate birth and his humble
marriage, but would also gain the assistance of the West against the
Turks, if he embraced the Roman Catholic faith. But, although he
had none of the fervour of a convert from conviction, he soon found
that the erection of Roman Catholic churches did not satisfy the zeal
of the Franciscans, of his protector Hunyadi, and of the Pope. Ac-
cordingly in 1446 an assembly of prelates and barons met at Konjica,
1 It is usually supposed that Vukčić received the ducal title either from
Frederick III in 1448, or from the Pope in 1419, when he turned Roman Catholic,
or else from the King of Aragon (Wiss. Mitt. In. pp. 503–9; x. p. 103 n. ; Klaić, p. 382).
But he is styled dux terre Huminis as early as 23 August 1445 (Mon. spect. hist. Slav.
Merid. xxi. p. 226), “Duke of St Sava in a document of 1446 (Farlati, Illyricum
Sacrum, iv. p. 68), and “ Duke” in a dubious inscription of that year (Wiss. Mitt.
111. p. 502). A less probable theory (ib. 1. p. 434) derives the name of the Herzegovina
from a Turkish word meaning “the land of stoues. ” Thallóczy (Studien zur Gesch.
Bosniens u. Serbiens, pp. 146–59) thinks that he took the title himself with the con-
nivance of the Porte.
## p. 575 (#617) ############################################
Policy of Mahomet II
575
לל
בי
the beautiful town on the borders of the Herzegovina through which
the traveller now passes on the railway from Sarajevo to Mostar. It
was there decided that the Bogomiles “shall neither build new churches
nor restore those that are falling into decay,” and that “the goods of
the Catholic Church shall never be taken from it. "? No less than 40,000
of the persecuted sect emigrated to the Herzegovina in consequence of this
decree, and found there a refuge beneath the sway of Duke Stephen, who,
although he had allowed his daughter Catherine to embrace Catholicism
and marry Stephen Thomas, remained himself a Bogomile. Thus, if the
King of Bosnia had, by his conversion, gained a divorce from his low-
born consort and had become the son-in-law of the powerful magnate
whose sovereign he claimed to be, if he had been taken under the
protection of the Holy See and had secured the support of the famous
Wallachian hero, he had estranged a multitude of his own subjects,
whose defection involved him in a war with his heretical father-in-law,
and hastened the downfall of Bosnian independence. Moreover, the old
Despot of Serbia continued to harass his eastern frontier, so long a
source of discord between the two sister-states; while, as if that were
not enough, this embarrassed successor of the great Tvrtko must needs
try to make good his mighty predecessor's title of “King of Dalmatia
and Croatia,” regardless of the hard fact that what should have been
in theory the natural sea-frontage of his inland kingdom had become
a long and practically unbroken line of Venetian colonies. Such was
the behaviour of the Balkan leaders when in 1451 their destined
conqueror, Mahomet II, ascended the throne.
It was the policy of the new Sultan to humour the Balkan princes
until the capture of Constantinople left him free to subdue them one
by one. He not only renewed his father's treaty with Serbia, but sent
his Serbian stepmother back to her father with every mark of distinction,
assigning her sufficient estates to support her in her widowhood. The
consequence was that George Branković assisted him to amuse the
Hungarians till the capital of the Byzantine Empire fell, and contributed
nothing to the defence of those walls which only five years before he
had helped to repair? When the fatal news arrived, the wily despot
and the terrified King of Bosnia hastened to send envoys to make the
best terms that they could with the conqueror. For the moment
Mahomet contented himself with a tribute of 12,000 ducats from
Serbia ; but he had already made up his mind to put an end to the
autonomy which that rich and fertile country, the stepping-stone to
Hungary and Wallachia, had been permitted to enjoy for the last two
generations. In the spring of 1454 he sent an ultimatum to the despot,
bidding him, under threat of invasion, surrender at once the former land
of Stephen Lazarević, to which he had no right, and promising him in
1 Farlati, l. c.
2 Inscription on the walls of Constantinople. Miklosich, Monumenta Serbica,
p. 441.
CH. XVIII.
## p. 576 (#618) ############################################
576
Siege of Belgrade, 1456
return the ancestral territory of the Branković family with the city of Sofia.
Only twenty-five days were allowed for the receipt of his answer. George
was, however, absent in Hungary when the ultimatum reached Semendria,
and his crafty officials managed to detain its bearer until they had had
time to place the fortresses on a war footing. Before the Sultan could
reach the Serbian frontier, Hunyadi had made a dash across the Danube,
had penetrated as far as the former Bulgarian capital, and had retired
with his plunder beyond the river. Mahomet's main object was the
capture of Semendria, the key of Hungary, but that strong castle resisted
his attack, and he withdrew to Hadrianople. In the following year he
repeated his invasion, and forced Novobrdo to surrender after a vigorous
and protracted bombardment. A portion of the inhabitants he left
there to work the famous silver mines, which, as his biographer remarks,
had not only largely contributed to the former splendour of the Serbian
Empire but had also aroused the covetousness of its enemies. Indeed,
the picture which Critobulus' has drawn of Serbia in her decline might
kindle the admiration of her modern statesmen as they read of the
cities
many
and fair in the interior of the land, the strong forts on
the banks of the Danube," the “ productive soil,” the "swine and cattle
and abundant breed of goodly steeds,” with which this little Balkan
state, so blessed by nature, so cursed by politics, was bountifully endowed.
But the “ numerous and valiant youths” who had been the pride of the
old Serbian armies had been either drafted into the corps of janissaries
to fight against their fellow-Christians, or were helpless, in the absence
of their aged and fugitive prince, against the artillery of Mahomet.
The summer was, however, fast drawing to a close; Serbia gained
another brief respite, and George to his surprise obtained peace on the
basis of uti possidetis and the payment of a smaller tribute for his
diminished territory.
In June 1456 Mahomet appeared with a large park of heavy
artillery before the gates of Belgrade, boasting that within a fortnight
the city should be his. So violent was the bombardment that the noise
of the Turkish guns was heard as far off as Szegedin, and the Sultan
hoped that all succour from that quarter would be prevented by his
fleet, which was stationed in the Danube. But Hunyadi routed the
unwieldy Turkish ships, and made his way into the beleaguered town
with an army of peasant crusaders, whom the blessing of Calixtus III
and the preaching of the fiery Franciscan Capistrano had assembled for
this holy war.
Enthusiasm compensated for their defective weapons ;
when the janissaries took the outer city, they not only drove them back,
but, headed by the inspired chaplain, charged right up to the mouths
of the Turkish cannon ; Mahomet himself was wounded in the struggle,
and retreated in disorder to Sofia, while the Serbian miners from
Novobrdo fell upon his defeated troops. Unfortunately, the pestilence
1 1. ch. 7.
## p. 577 (#619) ############################################
Death of George Branković, 1456
577
that broke out in the Hungarian camp and the death of Hunyadi
prevented the victors from following up their advantage. Belgrade
was saved for Hungary, but the rest of Serbia was doomed. Even at
this crisis, the quarrels of the despot and Hunyadi's brother-in-law
Szilágyi, the governor of Belgrade, demonstrated the disunion and
selfishness of the Christian leaders. The despot, who tried to entrap
his enemy, was himself captured ; and, although he was released, died
not long afterwards on 24 December 1456, of the effect of a wound which
he had received in the encounter. His ninety years had been spent
in a troublesome time; his character had been rather of the willow
than of the oak, and the one principle, if indeed it was not policy,
which he consistently maintained, was his refusal to gain the warmer
support of the West by abandoning the creed of his fathers and his
subjects, as he had abandoned the cause of the other Balkan Christians
to keep his own throne.
George Branković had bequeathed the remnant of his principality
to his Greek wife Irene and his youngest son Lazar; for his two elder
sons, Gregory and Stephen, had been blinded by Murād II. But the
new despot chafed at the idea of sharing his diminished inheritance
with his mother; indeed, he had refused to ransom his old father from
captivity, in order to anticipate by a few months his succession to the
throne. The death of Irene occurred at such an opportune moment
and under such suspicious circumstances that it was attributed to poison
administered by her ambitious son; and his eldest brother and his
sister, the widow of the late Sultan, were so greatly alarmed for their
own safety that they fled the selfsame day with all their portable
property to the court of Mahomet II. That great man treated the
fugitives with generosity; they obtained a home near Seres, where the
former Sultana became the good angel of the Christians, obtaining
through her influence permission for the monks of Rila to transport
the remains of their pious founder from Trnovo to the great Bulgarian
monastery which bears his name. Lazar III was now sole ruler of
Serbia, for his second brother Stephen soon followed the rest of the
family into exile, and became a pensioner of the Pope. But he did not
long profit by his cruelty. While he allowed the internal affairs of his
small state to fall into confusion, he was lax in paying the tribute which
he had promised to his suzerain. Mahomet was preparing to attack
this weak yet presumptuous vassal, when, on 20 January 1458, the latter
died, leaving a widow and three daughters. Before his death, Lazar
had provided for the succession by affiancing one of his children to
Stephen Tomašević, son and heir of the King of Bosnia—an arrangement
which would have united the two Serbian states in the person of the
future Bosnian ruler, and seemed to promise a final settlement of the
disputes that had latterly divided them.
Three candidates for the Serbian throne now presented themselves,
37
c.
ED. H. VOL. IV. CH. XVIII.
## p. 578 (#620) ############################################
578
End of medieval Serbia
Stephen Tomašević, a son of Gregory Branković, and Mahomet II.
None could doubt which of the three would be ultimately successful ;
but at first the Bosniak gained ground. In December 1458 King
Matthias Corvinus of Hungary in a parliament at Szegedin formally
recognised him as Despot of Serbia, that is to say of as much of that
country as was not occupied by the Turks. Meanwhile, in order to
strengthen herself, as she thought, against the latter, the widowed
princess, a daughter of the Despot Thomas Palaeologus, had offered
the principality as a fief to the Holy See.
as a fief to the Holy See. The marriage of the Serbian
heiress and the Bosnian crown-prince took place; the commandant of
Semendria was sent in irons to Hungary; and Stephen Tomašević took
up his abode in the capital of George Branković. But the inhabitants
of Semendria regarded their new master, a zealous Catholic and a
Hungarian nominee, as a worse foe than the Sultan himself. They
opened their gates to the Turks; the other Serbian towns followed
their example; and, before the summer of 1459 was over, all Serbia,
except Belgrade, had become a Turkish pashalik.
The history of medieval Serbia was thus closed ; but members of
the Branković family continued, with the assent of the kings of Hungary,
to bear the title of despot in their Hungarian exile, whither many of
their Serbian adherents had followed them and where their house became
extinct just 200 years ago. Belgrade was able, in Hungarian hands,
to resist repeated Turkish attacks till 1521, while the Serbian Patriarchs
did not emigrate from Ipek to Karlovic till 1690. But from the time
of Mahomet II to that of Black George in the early years of the
nineteenth century, the noblest representatives of the Serbs were to be
found fighting for their freedom among the barren rocks of what is now
Montenegro.
The kingdom of Bosnia survived by only four years the fall of
Serbia. In 1461 Stephen Thomas was slain by his brother Radivoj
and his own son Stephen Tomašević, who thus succeeded to the sorry
heritage of the Bosnian throne, of which he was to be the last occupant.
The new king depicted to Pope Pius II in gloomy but not exaggerated
colours the condition of his country, and begged the Holy Father to
send him a crown and bid the King of Hungary accompany him to the
wars, for so alone could Bosnia be saved. He told how the Turks had
built several fortresses in his kingdom, and how they had gained the
sympathy of the peasants by their kindness and promises of freedom.
He pointed out that Bosnia was not the final goal of Mahomet's
vaulting ambition; that Hungary and the Dalmatian possessions of
Venice would be the next step, whence by way of Carniola and Istria he
would march into Italy and perhaps to Rome. To this urgent appeal
the Pope replied by sending his legates to crown him king. The
coronation took place in the picturesque town of Jajce, Hrvoje's ancient
seat, whither the new sovereign had transferred his residence from
## p. 579 (#621) ############################################
Coronation of Stephen Tomašević
579
Bobovac for greater security. The splendour of that day, the first and
last occasion when a Bosnian king received his crown from Rome, and the
absolute unanimity of the great nobles in support of their lord (for
on the advice of Venice he had made peace with the Duke of St Sava,
whose son was among the throng round the throne) cast a final ray of
light over this concluding page of Bosnia's history as a kingdom.
Stephen Tomašević assumed all the pompous titles of his predecessors---
the sovereignty of Serbia, Bosnia, the land of Hum, Dalmatia, and
Croatia-at a time when Serbia was a Turkish pashalik, when a Turkish
governor ruled over the “Bosnian province" of Foča, and when the self-
styled “King of Dalmatia” was imploring the Venetians to give him a
place of refuge on the Dalmatian coast! There was still, too, one
Christian enemy whom he had not appeased. The King of Hungary
had never forgiven the surrender of Semendria, and had never forgotten
the ancient Hungarian claim to the overlordship of Bosnia. He resented
the Pope's recognition of Stephen Tomašević as an independent sovereign,
and was only appeased by pecuniary and territorial concessions, and by
a promise that the King of Bosnia would pay no more tribute to the
Sultan. This last condition sealed the Bosniak's fate.
When Mahomet II learnt that Tomašević had promised to refuse
the customary tribute, he sent an envoy to demand payment. The
Bosnian monarch took the envoy into his treasury, and shewed him the
money
collected for the tribute, telling him, however, at the same time
that he was not anxious to send the Sultan so much treasure, “ For in
case of war with your master,” he argued, “I should be better prepared
if I have money ; and, if I must flee to another land, I shall live more
pleasantly by means thereof. ". The envoy reported to Mahomet what
the king had said, and Mahomet resolved to punish this breach of
faith. In the spring of 1463 he assembled a great army at Hadrianople
for the conquest of Bosnia. Alarmed at the result of his own defiant
refusal, Tomašević sent an embassy at the eleventh hour to ask for a
fifteen years' truce. Michael Konstantinović, a Serbian renegade, who was
an eye-witness of these events, has preserved the striking scene of
Mahomet's deceit. Concealed behind a money-chest in the Turkish
treasury, he heard the Sultan's two chief advisers decide upon the plan
of campaign: to grant the truce and then forthwith march against
Bosnia, before the King of Hungary and the Croats could come to the
aid of that notoriously difficult and mountainous country. Their advice
was taken ; the Bosnian envoys were deceived; and even when the
eavesdropper warned them that the Turkish army would follow on their
heels, they still believed the word of the Sultan. Four days after their
departure Mahomet set out. Ordering the Pasha of Serbia to prevent
the King of Hungary from effecting a junction with the Bosniaks, he
marched with such rapidity and secrecy that he found the Bosnian
1 Laonikos Chalcocondyles, p. 532.
CH. XVIII.
37—2
## p. 580 (#622) ############################################
580
Turkish conquest of Bosnia, 1463
frontier undefended and met with little or no resistance until he reached
the ancient castle of Bobovac. The fate of the old royal residence was
typical of that of the land. Its governor, Prince Radak, a Bogomile
forcibly converted to Catholicism, could have defended the fortress for
years if his heart had been in the cause. But, like so many of his
countrymen, he was a Bogomile first and a Bosniak afterwards. On the
third day of the siege he opened the gates to Mahomet, who found
among the inmates the two envoys whom he had so lately duped.
Radak met with the fitting reward of his treachery, for when he claimed
his price the Sultan ordered him to be beheaded. The giant cliff of
Radakovica served as the scaffold, and still preserves the name, of the
traitor of Bobovac.
At the news of Mahomet's invasion, Stephen Tomašević had
withdrawn with his family to his capital of Jajce, hoping to raise an
army and get help from abroad while the invader was expending his
strength before the strong walls of Bobovac. But its surrender left him
no time for defence. He fied at once towards Croatia, closely pursued
by the van of the Turkish army. At the fortress of Kljuc (one of the
keys” of Bosnia) the pursuers came up with the fugitive, whose
presence inside was betrayed to them. Their commander promised the
king in writing that if he surrendered his life should be spared, where-
upon Tomašević gave himself up, and was brought as a prisoner to the
Sultan at Jajce. Meanwhile, the capital had thrown itself upon the mercy
of the conqueror, and thus, almost without a blow, the three strongest
places in Bosnia had fallen. The wretched king himself helped the
Sultan to complete his conquest. He wrote, at his captor's dictation,
letters to all his captains, bidding them surrender their towns and for-
tresses to the Turks. In a week more than seventy obeyed his commands,
and before the middle of June 1463 Bosnia was practically a Turkish
pashalik, and Mahomet, with the captive king in his train, was able
to set out for the subjugation of the Herzegovina. But the Turkish
cavalry was useless against the bare limestone rocks on which the castles
were perched, while the natives, accustomed to every cranny of the crags,
harassed the strangers with a ceaseless guerrilla warfare. The duke and
his son Vladislav, who only a few months before had intrigued with the
Sultan against his own father, now fought side by side against the common
foe, and Mahomet, after a fruitless attempt to capture the ducal capital
of Blagaj, withdrew to Constantinople. But before he left he resolved
to rid himself of the King of Bosnia, who could be of no further use
and might be a danger. It was true that the Sultan's lieutenant had
promised to spare the prisoner's life; but a learned Persian was found to
pronounce the pardon to be invalid because it had been granted without
Mahomet's previous consent. The trembling captive, with his written
pardon in his hands, was summoned to the presence, whereupon the lithe
Persian drew his sword and cut off Tomašević's head. The body of the last
## p. 581 (#623) ############################################
Hungarian banats of Jajce and Srebrenik
581
King of Bosnia was buried by the Sultan's orders at a spot on the right
bank of the river Vrbas only just visible from the citadel of Jajce, where,
in 1888, the skeleton was discovered, the skull severed from the trunk.
The remains of the ill-fated monarch are now to be seen in the Franciscan
church there, his portrait adorns the Franciscan monastery of Sutjeska,
but the fetva, which was carved on the city gate of Jajce to excuse the
Sultan's breach of faith by representing his victim as a traitor (“ the
true believer will not allow a snake to bite him twice from the same hole ")
vanished some seventy years ago. The king's uncle Radivoj and his
cousin were executed after him ; his two half-brothers were carried off
as captives; and his widow Maria became the wife of a Turkish officiall.
But his stepmother Catherine escaped to Ragusa and Rome, where she
received a pension from the Pope. There, in the midst of a little colony
of faithful Bosniaks, she died on 25 October 1478, after bequeathing her
kingdom to the Holy See, unless her two children, who had become con-
verts to Islām, should return to the Catholic faith. A monument with a
dubious Latin inscription in the church of Ara Coeli and a fresco in the
Santo Spirito hospital still preserve the memory of the Bosnian queen,
far from the last resting-place of her husband by the banks of the
Trstivnica.
Even although Bosnia had fallen, the Turks were not allowed
undisturbed possession. In the same autumn the King of Hungary
entered Bosnia from the north, while Duke Stephen's son Vladislav
attacked the Turkish garrisons in the south. Before winter had begun
Matthias Corvinus was master of Jajce, and even the return of Mahomet
in the following spring failed to secure its second surrender. Such was
the terror of the Hungarian king's arms that the mere report of his
approach made the Sultan raise the siege. Matthias Corvinus then
organised the part of Bosnia which he had conquered from the Turks
into two provinces, or banats, one of which took its name from Jajce,
and the other froin Srebrenik. Over these territories, which embraced
all lower Bosnia, he placed Nicholas of Ilok, a Hungarian magnate, with
the title of king, not however borne by his successors? . Under Hungarian
rule, these two Bosnian banats remained free from the Turks till 1528
and 1520 respectively-serving as a buffer-state between the Ottoman
Empire and the Christian lands of Croatia and Slavonia.
The Herzegovina, which had repulsed the conqueror of Bosnia, did
not long maintain its independence. The great Duke Stephen Vukčić,
after losing nearly all his land in another Turkish invasion caused by
the aid he had given in the recovery of Jajce, died in 1466, leaving all
his possessions to be divided equally between his three sons, Vladislav,
Vlatko, and Stephen? The eldest, however, whose quarrels with his
1 Hopf, Chroniques, p. 333; Historia Politica, p. 83; Wiss. Mitt. III. p. 384.
2 Makuscev, II. p. 95.
3 Ibid. II. p. 104; Hopf, Chroniques, pp. 333, 335.
CH. XVIII.
## p. 582 (#624) ############################################
582
Turkish conquest of the Herzegovina
father had wrought such infinite harm to his country, did not long
govern the upper part of the Herzegovina which fell to his share; he
entered the Venetian service, and thence emigrated to Hungary where
he died. Accordingly, the second brother, Vlatko, assumed the title of
Duke of St Sava, and re-united for a time all his father's estates under
his sole rule, relying now on Venetian and now on Neapolitan aid, but
only secure as long as Mahomet II allowed him to linger on as a
tributary of Turkey. In 1481 he even ventured to invade Bosnia, but
was driven back to seek shelter in his strong castle of Castelnuovo.
Two years later Bāyazīd II annexed the Herzegovina, whose last reigning
duke died in the Dalmatian island of Arbe. The title continued,
however, to be borne as late as 1511 by Vladislav's son Balša'.
Stephen, the youngest of old Duke Stephen's three sons, had a far more
remarkable career. Sent while still a child as a hostage to Constanti-
nople, he embraced the creed and entered the service of the conqueror.
Under the name of Aḥmad Pasha Hercegović, or “the Duke's son," he
gained a great place in Turkish history, and, after having governed
Anatolia and commanded the Ottoman fleet, attained to the post of
Grand Vizier. His name and origin are still preserved by the little town
of Hersek, on the Gulf of Izmid, near which, far from the strong duchy
of his father, he found a grave.
The fall of the Bosnian kingdom is full of meaning for our own time.
The country is naturally strong, and under the resolute government of
one man, uniting all creeds and classes under his banner, might have
held out like Montenegro against the Turkish armies. But the
jealousies of the too powerful nobles who overshadowed the elective
monarchy, and the still fiercer rivalries of the Roman Catholics and
the Bogomiles, prepared the way for the invader, and when he came
the persecuted heretics welcomed him as a deliverer, preferring “the
mufti's turban to the cardinal's hat. " Most of the Bogomiles embraced
İslām, and became in the course of generations more fanatical than the
Turks themselves; they had preferred to be conquered by the Sultan
rather than converted by the Pope; and, when once they had been
conquered, they did not hesitate to be converted also. The Musulman
creed possessed not a few points of resemblance with their own despised
heresy, while it conferred upon those who embraced it the practical
advantage of retaining their lands and their feudal privileges. Thus
Bosnia, in striking contrast to Serbia, presents us with the curious
phenomenon of an aristocratic caste, Slav by race yet Muslim by religion,
whose members were the permanent repositories of power, while the
Sultan's viceroy in his residencies of Vrhbosna, Banjaluka, or Travnik,
was, with rare exceptions, a mere fleeting figure, here to-day and gone
to-morrow. In fact, Bosnia remained under the Turks what she had
been in the days of her kings, an aristocratic republic with a titular
1 Orbini, Il regno degli Slavi, p. 388 ; Mon. spect. hist. Slav. Merid. vi. pp. 114, 126.
## p. 583 (#625) ############################################
לי
Venice in Albania
583
head, who was thenceforth a foreigner instead of a native; while the
Bosnian beys were in many cases the descendants of these medieval
nobles who had lived in feudal state within their grey castle walls,
whose rare intervals of leisure from the fierce joys of civil war were
soothed by the music of the piper and amused by the skill of the
jongleur, and who, unlike the rougher magnates of the more primitive
Serbian court, received some varnish of western civilisation from their
position as honorary citizens and honoured guests of Ragusa, “ the
South-Slavonic Athens. ” But, besides these converted Bogomiles, there
remained in the midst of Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats some who
adhered to the ancient doctrines of that maligned sect, and it is said that
only a few years before the Austrian occupation a family named Helež,
living near Konjica, abandoned the “Bogomile madness” for the Muslim
faith. Their bitter enemies, the Roman Catholics, at first emigrated in
numbers to the territories of adjacent Catholic Powers, till a Franciscan
prevailed upon Mahomet II to stop the depopulation of the country by
granting them the free exercise of their religion in what was thence-
forth for four centuries the border-land between the Cross and the
Crescent, the home of "the lion that guards the gates of Stamboul. ”
The Turkish conquest of Bosnia was followed, after a desperate
struggle, by that of Albania. That mysterious land, whose sons are
probably the oldest race in the Balkan peninsula, had been divided upon
the collapse of the great Serbian Empire between a number of native
chieftains, over whom Carlo Thopia exercised, with the title of “Prince
of Albania," a species of hegemony for a whole generation. After his
death, Albania was split up among rival clans who acknowledged no
common head, and seemed inevitably destined to one of two fates—that
of a Turkish province or that of a Venetian protectorate. At first there
appeared to be some hope of the latter alternative. The republic
began her career as an Albanian power with the acquisition of Durazzo
in 1392; Alessio, “its right eye,” was annexed as a matter of necessity
in the next year; then followed in succession Scutari and Drivasto,
Dulcigno and Antivari, all acquisitions from the Balša family, and
finally, in 1444, Satti and Dagno on the left bank of the Drin. At
that time the whole Albanian coast as far south as Durazzo was Venetian,
and the Albanian coast-towns were so many links in the chain which
united Venetian Dalmatia with Venetian Corfù. The Adriatic was,
what it has never been again, an Italian lake. It was not, however,
the policy, nor indeed within the power, of the purely maritime republic
to conquer the interior of a country so difficult and so unproductive.
It was her object to save expense alike of men and money, and she
saved the former by devoting a little of the latter to subsidising the
native chieftains in order that they might act as a bulwark against the
Turks. But the brute force of the Turkish arms proved to be too
strong even for such astute diplomatists as the Venetians and such
CA. XVIII.
## p. 584 (#626) ############################################
584
Career of Skanderbeg
splendid fighters as the Albanians. As early as 1414 the Turks began
to establish themselves as masters of Albania, and for nearly twenty
years the castle of Kroja, soon to be immortalised by the brave deeds
of Skanderbeg, was the seat of a Turkish governor. The national hero
of Albania, whose name is still remembered throughout a land which
has practically no national history except the story of his career, was
of Serbian origin! His uncle had, however, married an heiress of the
great Thopia clan, and had thus acquired, together with the fortress
of Kroja, some of the prestige attached to the leading family of Albania.
Then came the Turkish invasion, and George Castriota, the future
redeemer of his country, was sent as a youthful hostage to Constantinople.
The lad was educated in the faith of Islām, and received the Turkish
name of Iskander, or “ Alexander," with the title of beg, subsequently
corrupted by his countrymen into the form of Skanderbeg, under which
he is known as one of the great captains of history. For many years
he fought in the Turkish ranks against Venetians and Serbs, leaving to
Arianites Comnenus, a prominent Albanian chief, the futile task of
trying to drive out the Ottoman garrisons from his native land. At
last, in 1443, while serving in the Turkish army which had been defeated
by Hunyadi's troops near Niš, he received the news of a fresh Albanian
rising. Realising that his hour had come, he hastened to Kroja, made
himself master of the fortress, which was thenceforth his capital, abjured
the errors of Islām, and proclaimed a new crusade against the Turks.
His personal influence was increased by a marriage with the daughter
of Arianites; the other chiefs rallied round him ; the Montenegrins
flocked to his aid ; and at a great gathering of the clans held on
Venetian soil at Alessio he was proclaimed Captain-General of Albania.
Venice, at first hostile to this new rival of her influence there, took him
into her pay as a valuable champion against the common enemy,
and
soon Christendom heard with delighted surprise that an Albanian chief
had forced the victor of Varna and Kossovo to retreat from the castle-
rock of Kroja. The Pope and the King of Naples hastened to assist
the tribesmen, who were both good Catholics and near neighbours,
while the king dreamed of reviving the claims of the Neapolitan
Angevins beyond the Adriatic, and even received the homage of
Skanderbeg.
Mahomet II was, however, a more formidable adversary than his
predecessor. He played upon the jealousy of the other Albanian chiefs,
and his troops utterly routed an allied army of natives and Neapolitans.
For the moment Skanderbeg seemed to have disappeared, but he soon
rallied the Albanians to his side; fresh victories attended his arms,
until in 1461 the Sultan concluded with him an armistice for ten years,
and the land had at last a sorely-needed interval from war. But the
peace had lasted barely two years when Skanderbeg, at the instigation
Hopf, Chroniques, p. 334.
1
## p. 585 (#627) ############################################
Turkish conquest of Albania
585
of Pope Pius II, broke his plighted word and drew his sword against
the Turks. The death of the Pope caused the failure of the projected
crusade ; and Skanderbeg found himself abandoned by Europe and left
to fight single-handed against the infuriated Sultan whom he had deceived.
In the spring of 1466 Mahomet himself undertook the siege of Kroja;
but that famous fortress baffled him as it had baffled his father, and
Skanderbeg journeyed to Rome, where a lane near the Quirinal still
commemorates his name and visit, to obtain help from Paul II. With
the following spring the Sultan returned to the siege of Kroja, only
once again to find it impregnable. But his valiant enemy's career was
over; on 17 January 1468 Skanderbeg died in the Venetian colony of
Alessio. Thereupon the Turks easily conquered all Albania, with the
exception of the castle of Kroja, occupied by Venice after Skander-
beg's death, and of the other Venetian stations. Ten years later, the
disastrous war between the republic and the Sultan brought Kroja,
Alessio, Dagno, Satti, and Drivasto under Turkish rule until 1912; the
peace of 1479 surrendered Scutari ; in 1501 Durazzo, and in 1571
Antivari and Dulcigno, the two ports of modern Montenegro, were
finally taken by the Turks, and the flag of St Mark disappeared from
the Albanian coast. To-day, a part of the castle of Scutari, a mutilated
lion there, a Venetian grave and escutcheon at Alessio, and a few old
houses and coats-of-arms at Antivari and Dulcigno, are almost the sole
remains of that Venetian tenure of the Albanian littoral which modern
Italy was anxious to revive. Skanderbeg's memory, however, still
lives in his own land. Although his son and many other Albanian
chiefs emigrated to the kingdom of Naples, where large Albanian
colonies still preserve their speech, a soi-disant Castriota has in our own
day claimed the Albanian throne on the strength of his alleged descent
from the hero of Kroja. If his grave in the castle of Alessio has
disappeared, the ruins of the castle which he built on Cape Rodoni
still stand to remind the passing voyager that Albania was once a nation.
And, even under Turkish rule, the Roman Catholic Mirdites preserved
their autonomy under a prince of the house of Doda, still wearing
mourning for Skanderbeg, still obeying the unwritten code of Lek
Ducagin.
Serbia, Bosnia, and Albania had successively fallen, but there was
another land, barren indeed and mountainous, but all the more a
natural fortress, which sheltered the Orthodox Serbs in this, the darkest
hour of their history, and which the Turks have in vain tried to conquer
permanently. We saw how the Balša family had established a century
earlier an independent principality in what is now Montenegro, and
how upon the death of the last male of that house in 1421 his chief
cities had been partitioned between Venice and Stephen Lazarević of
Serbia. Even in the time of the Balšas, however, a powerful local
Phrantzes, p. 430; Mon. spect. hist. Slav. Merid. xxII. p. 404.
ܐ
CB. XVIII.
## p. 586 (#628) ############################################
586
History of Montenegro
family, that of the Crnojević, derived by some from the royal line of
Nemanja itself", had made good its claim to a part of the country, and
its head, Radič Crnoje, even styled himself “ lord of the Zeta. ” After
his death in battle against the Balšas in 1396, the family seems to have
been temporarily crushed; but early in the fifteenth century two
collateral members of it, the brothers Jurašević, had established their
independence in the upper, or mountainous, portion of the Zeta, the
barren sea of white limestone round Njeguš, which then began to be
called by its modern name of Crnagora? (in Venetian, Montenegro),
perhaps from the then predominant local clan, less probably from the
“ black” forests which are said to have once covered those glaring,
inhospitable rocks. Venice found the brothers so useful in her struggle
with the Balšas that she paid them a subsidy, and offered to recognise
one of them as “voïvode of the Upper Zeta,” although they were
supposed to be nominally subjects of the Despot of Serbia. A son 3
of this vożvode, Stephen Crnojević by name, revolted against the Serbian
sovereignty, then weakened by its conflict with the Turks, made himself
practically independent in his native mountains, but in 1455 admitted
the overlordship of Venice, which had appointed him her “ captain and
voïvode" in the Zeta. A solemn pact was signed, between the republic
and the 51 communities which then composed Montenegro, on the sacred
island of Vranina on the lake of Scutari : Venice swore to maintain the
cherished usages of Balša and to permit no Roman Catholic bishop to
rule over the Montenegrin Church ; while Stephen Crnojević, victorious
alike over Serbs and Turks, hoisted the banner of St Mark at Podgorica,
and made his capital in the strong castle of Žabljak“.
On his death in 1466, his son and successor, Ivan the Black, was
confirmed by Venice in his father's command as her “captain and voivode”
in the Zeta. In this capacity he assisted with his brave Montenegrins in
the defence of the Venetian city of Scutari against the Turks in 1474,
an event still commemorated by a monument on a house in the Calle del
Piovan at Venice and by a picture by Paolo Veronese in the Sala del
Maggior Consiglio. Four years later he again aided the Venetian
governor of Scutari and the heroic Dominican from Epirus who was the
soul of the defence. But by the peace of 1479 the republic ceded
Scutari to the Turks after an occupation of 85 years, and Montenegro
lost this powerful obstacle to the Turkish advance from the south, the
quarter from which the principality has always been most vulnerable.
The conclusion of peace was a severe blow to the Montenegrin chief,
1 Petrović (trsl. Ciampoli), Storia del Montenegro, p. 23.
2 First found in a Ragusan document of 1362. (Mon. spect. hist. Slav. Merid,
xxvII. p. 212. )
3 Mon. spect. hist. Slav. Merid. xxi. pp. 10, 164, 205, 382, 384.
4 Ibid. xxII. pp. 67-8, 153.
6 Ibid. XXII. pp. 364, 383.
## p. 587 (#629) ############################################
End of the “ Black Princes”
587
especially of a peace on such terms. Abandoned by Venice, Ivan the
Black was now at the mercy of the invader. His capital was too near
the lake of Scutari to be any longer a safe residence; accordingly, he
set fire to Žabljak, and founded in 1484 his new capital at Cetinje,
which remained the seat of the Montenegrin government. There he
built a monastery and a church, and thither he transferred the
metropolitan see of the Zeta, hitherto established in the Craina', the
piece of the Dalmatian coast between the Narenta and the Cetina. The
Turks occupied the lower Zeta ; but a national ballad expresses the
belief that Ivan the Black would one day awake from his sleep in the
grotto of Obod near Rjeka, and lead his heroic Montenegrins to the
conquest of Albania. At Obod he erected a fortress and a building to
house a printing-press for the use of the church at Cetinje, and under
his eldest son George the first books printed in Slavonic saw the light
there in 1493, an achievement commemorated with much circumstance
four centuries afterwards. But George Crnojević was driven from
Montenegro in 1496 by his brother Stephen with the support of the
Turks. The exiled prince took refuge in Venice, the home of his wife,
whence, after a futile attempt to recover his dominions, he threw himself
upon the mercy of the Sultan, embraced Islām, and died, , a Turkish
pensioner, in Anatolia. Meanwhile, Montenegro was governed by
Stephen II till 1499, when’ it was annexed to the Sanjak of Scutari and
placed under a Turkish official who resided at Zabljak 3. But the
mountaineers resisted the Turkish tax-gatherers, and in 1514 Stephen II
was restored by the Sultan *. According to tradition, one of his
descendants, married to a Venetian wife who found residence at Cetinje
both monotonous and useless, abandoned the Black Mountain for ever
and retired to the delights of Venice in 1516, after transferring the
supreme power to the bishop, who was assisted by a civil governor
chosen from among the headmen of
the headmen of the Katunska district. The prince-
bishop, or Vladika, was elective, until in 1696 the dignity became
hereditary, with one interval, in the family of Petrović. Meanwhile, for
some years after the final abdication of the Crnojević family, another
brother of George, who had become a Musulman, held, under the name
of Skanderbeg, the post of Turkish “ governor of Montenegro," a
land which, although the Turks have often invaded and overrun it, they
never permanently conquered.
While Montenegro, the autonomous Mirdites, and the tiny republic
of Poljica alone remained free on the west of the Balkan peninsula, the
two Danubian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia retained a large
2
1 Mon, spect. hist. Slav. Merid. xxii. p. 67.
Sanudo, Diarii, 11. pp. 372, 504.
3 Ibid. xii. p. 153.
4 Ibid. xvii. p. 397.
CH. XVIII.
## p. 588 (#630) ############################################
588
The Danubian Principalities
וי
measure of domestic independence, under the forms of vassalage, on the
east. After a long period of civil war between rival claimants, who
called in their neighbours and partitioned their distracted dominions,
Wallachia acknowledged in 1456 a strong if barbarous ruler in the
person of Vlad “ the Impaler,” and Moldavia in 1457 a vigorous prince
in that of Stephen the Great. The Wallach's hideous cruelties do not
belie his name; he executed 20,000 of his subjects to consolidate his
throne; but he achieved by his savage punishments what his pre-
decessors had failed to obtain, the loyalty of his terrified nobles and the
suppression of brigandage. As soon as he felt secure at home, he defied
his Turkish suzerain, refusing to send him the contingent of 500 children
which Mahomet demanded in addition to the customary annual tribute.
He impaled the Sultan's emissaries, and when the Sultan himself marched
forth to avenge them in 1462 forced him to retire in disgrace. In th
same year, however," the Impaler” was driven from his throne by his
brother, a Turkish puppet, aided by the great Prince of Moldavia. For
the rest of the century Stephen overshadowed the petty rulers of the
sister-principality, and became the leading spirit of resistance to the
Turks in Eastern Europe. His father had, indeed, paid tribute to them
as far back as 1456; but he completely routed them at the battle of
Racova in 1475, the first time that a Turkish and a Moldavian army
had
met. Europe applauded his success; but, after in vain trying to form
a league of the Christian Powers against the enemy, he realised at the
end of his long reign that his efforts had only postponed the necessity
of recognising the suzerainty of the Sultan. His son Bogdan in 1513
made his submission and promised to pay tribute, on condition that the
Moldaves should retain the right of electing their own princes and that
no Turks should reside in their country-a condition modified in 1541
by the imposition of a guard of 500 Turkish horsemen upon the prince
of that period. Thus, largely owing to the fraternal quarrels of their
rulers, both the principalities had fallen within the sphere of Turkish
influence; their constantly changing princes, whether natives or
Phanariote Greeks, were the creatures of the Sultan; but, unlike
Bulgaria, Serbia, and Bosnia, they never came under his direct rule, were
never formally annexed to the Turkish Empire.
The medieval history of the Balkan states and the causes of their
fall are full of significance for our own time. In the Near East, and
in the Near East alone, the Middle Ages are but as yesterday to the
newly-emancipated nations, which look upon the centuries of Turkish
domination as a watch in the night, and aspire to take up the thread
of their interrupted national existence where it was left by their ancient
Tsars, each regardless of the other's overlapping claims to lands which
have been redeemed from the Turk. The medieval records of the motley
peninsula teach us to regard with doubt, in spite of 'Turkish vicinity,
the prospect of common action between Christian races, which, if small
=
## p. 589 (#631) ############################################
Jealousies of the Powers
589
individually, would, if united, have formed a powerful barrier against the
foreigner either from the East or from the West. But the greater
nations of Christendom cannot afford to criticise too harshly their weaker
brethren in the Balkans; for it was quite as much the selfishness and the
mutual jealousy of the Western Powers as the fratricidal enmities of the
Eastern States which allowed the East of Europe to be conquered by Asia,
and which has even in our own day retarded its complete emancipation.
CH. XVIII.
## p. 590 (#632) ############################################
TABLES OF RULERS.
590
SERBIA.
BULGARIAN TSARS.
John Asên 1}
1186
FRANKISH DUKES OF PHILIPPOPOLIS.
Renier de Trit
1204
Gerard de Stroem
1229
(Bulgarian : 1235]
Stephen Nemanja,"Great Zupan" 1143 (or
1159)_1196 + 1200
Stephen, “Great Župan
1196
King 1217
[Vukan, “King of Dioclea' 1195-1207]
Radoslav, King
1228
Vladislav, King
1234-43
+ 1263
Stephen Uroš I, King
1243
Stephen Dragutin, King 1276-81 + 1316
Stephen Uroš II, Milutin, King 1281
1321
Stephen Uroš III, Dečanski, King 1322
(Vladislav, King
1321-4]
Stephen Uroš IV, Dušan, King 1331
Tsar 1346
Stephen Uroš V, Tsar
1355-1371
Simeon Uroš, Tsar
1356–71
_Vukašin, King
1366-71]
Lazar I Hrebeljanović, Prince 1371
Lazar II, or Stephen Lazarević,
Despot
1389-1427
"Vuk Branković, Despot 1389
_George Branković, Prince 1398
George Branković, Despot 1427
Irene
1456
Lazar III Branković, Despot . . . )
Lazar III
alone 1457
Stephen Tomašević, Crown Prince
of Bosnia, Despot
1458-9
[Turkish : 1459)
Peter
Kalojan
Kalojan alone
Boril
John Asên II
Kaliman I
Michael Asên
Kaliman II
Constantine Asên
Ivailo
John Asen III.
George Terteri I
Smilec
Theodore Svętslav
George Terteri II
Michael Shishmanich
John Stephen
John Alexander
1196
1197
1207
1218
1241
1246
1257
1258
1277
1279
1280
1292
1295
1322
1323
1330 + 1373
1331
Tables of Rulers
. . .
John Shishman 1362
- 1393 +1395
(Trnovo) or 1365)
[Turkish : 1393]
John Sracimir
(Vidin)
1360-5; 1369-98
[Hungarian: 1366-9;
Turkish : 1398]
## p. 591 (#633) ############################################
. . . c. 1220
. . .
BOSNIA.
Borić
Ban. 1154-63
[Byzantine Empire: 1166–80]
Kulin
Ban. 1180-1204
Stephen
Bun, after 1204
Matthew Ninoslav
Ban. 1232-37 ; 1240-50
[Kingdom of Hungary: 1237-40)
Prijesda I, “the great
Ban. after 1250-87
Prijesda II and Stephen Kotroman Bans, 1287-90
Stephen Kotroman, alone
1290-1302
Paul Šubić
Ban. 1299-1312
Mladen Šubić
Ban. 1312-22
Hum. (Herzegovina. )
Miroslav, Prince.
1180-90
[Hungarian : 1198-1202]
Peter, Prince
[Hungarian: 1237]
Tolen, Prince
-1239
Andreas, Prince
1239
Radoslav, Župan
1254
[Hungarian: 1254]
[Serbian: c. 1284-1325]
[Bosnian : 1325–57]
(1 Hungarian : 1357-74]
Vojeslav Vojnov, Count 1357-71
2
Niccolò Altomanović 1371-4
[Bosnian*
1374–1435]
Stephen Vukčić
1435
“Duke of St Sava'
1445-66
Vladislav
Vlatko 3
1466–7
Vlatko, “Duke of St Sava 1467-83
[Turkish : 1483]
.
