68), and “ Duke” in a dubious
inscription
of that year (Wiss.
Cambridge Medieval History - v4 - Eastern Roman Empire
Law and order ceased ;
members of the royal family took to highway robbery, and the
Ragusans complained that even among the heathen Turks their traders
met with less harm than in Christian Bosnia. The climax was reached
when Sigismund, occupied with the religious quarrels of Western Europe,
released Tvrtko in 1415, and sent him with a Hungarian army to
recover the Bosnian crown. Hard pressed by this formidable combina-
tion (for Tvrtko's was a name to conjure with) his rival and Hrvoje,
who had now rallied to Ostoja, committed the fatal mistake of summoning
the Turks to their aid, thus setting an example which ultimately caused
the ruin of Bosnia. The immediate result of this policy was, indeed,
successful; the Magyars were routed, but the victors could not rid
themselves of their Turkish allies so easily. In the very next year
Mahomet I appointed his general Isaac governor of the district of
Vrhbosna, which took its name from the “sources of the Bosna," and
occupied the heart of the country. From the like-named castle, on the
site of the present fortress of Sarajevo, the low-born Turkish viceroy
could dominate the plain at his feet and confirm great Bosnian nobles in
their fiefs by the grace of his, and their, master, the Sultan.
The joint authors of this Turkish occupation did not long survive
the evil which they had inflicted on their country.
In the same year
that saw the Turkish garrison installed in Vrhbosna Hrvoje died. No
Balkan noble is better known to us than this remarkable man. An
ancient missal has preserved for us his features, and we are told of his
gruff voice and rough manners which so greatly disgusted the courteous
magnates of Hungary. The coins which he struck for his duchy of
Spalato have survived, and the loveliest town in all Bosnia, the fairy-like
Jajce (“the egg” of the Southern Slavs) will ever be connected with his
There, on the egg-shaped hill above the magnificent waterfall,
he had bidden an Italian architect build him a castle on the model of
name.
## p. 567 (#609) ############################################
Mircea “ the Great” of Wallachia
567
the famous Castel dell' Uovo at Naples, and there he dug out those
catacombs which still bear his arms and were intended to serve as his
family vault? . But the influence of this Bosnian king-maker perished
with him; his widow became the wife of Ostoja, who, two years later,
died himself; another great noble, the grand voivode Sandalj Hranić
of the house of Kosača, once Hrvoje's most formidable rival, for nearly
two decades wielded from his stronghold in the land of Hum the pre-
dominant authority over the south. He did not scruple, during the
brief reign of Ostoja's feeble son and successor, Stephen Ostojić, to
increase his estates by the aid of the Turkish garrison in Vrhbosna.
Fortunately the death of “king ” Isaac on a Hungarian raid ended for
the moment the Turkish occupation. Stephen Ostojić did not, however,
long profit by the liberation of his country from this terrible foe.
Tvrtko II, who had disputed the throne with Ostoja, now once more
arose to wrest it from Ostoja's son. His attempt succeeded ; in 1421
Ostojić is heard of for the last time. Tvrtko II wore again the crown
of his father, a crown which had, however, just lost that bright jewel
which the first Tvrtko had added to it, the city of Cattaro and its
splendid fiord. Only the “ new castle” which the great king had built
to command the mouth still remained in Bosnian hands, the powerful
hands of Sandalj Hranić, and survived in those of his successors the
downfall of the kingdom itself.
Wallachia, like Bosnia, had suffered from the armies of Mahomet I.
After the defeat of Mūsà, the victorious Sultan sent an army to
ravage
the land of Mirčea, who had previously sheltered his rival, and Mirčea
was forced to purchase peace by the promise of a tribute. The spirit of
the Wallachian ruler chafed, however, at this fresh degradation. He
welcomed the advent of a self-styled son of Bāyazīd, who claimed the
Turkish throne, and supported his claim. The pretender was defeated,
and Mirčea paid for his temerity by a fresh Turkish inroad. In order
to have a base for future action against Wallachia, Mahomet occupied
the two Roumanian towns, Turnu-Severin and Giurgevo. Not long
afterwards, in 1418, Mircea “the Great," as his countrymen call him,
died, the first commanding figure in their troubled history. Un-
fortunately, “the Great” prince had won his crown by the murder of
his elder brother, and his crime was now visited upon his heirs and his
country. Wallachia was distracted by the civil wars of the rival cousins,
who appealed with success to the jealousies of the nobles and to those
misguided feelings of local patriotism which tended towards the separation
of the smaller western from the larger eastern portion of the principality.
In their eagerness to gain the throne, the hostile candidates called in
now the Hungarians and now the Turks to their aid, and thus the
resources of the country were weakened by almost constant bloodshed.
Meanwhile, the sister-principality of Moldavia, after a number of
1 Wiss. Mitt. 11. pp. 94-107.
בל
CH. XVIII.
## p. 568 (#610) ############################################
568
Condition of Moldavia and Serbia
ephemeral reigns, found in Alexander the Good a prince who managed
to maintain himself on the throne, albeit under the suzerainty of Poland,
for nearly a whole generation. His administration, which lasted from
1401 to 1433, was devoted to the internal organisation of Moldavia and
to the development of its resources. He regulated the tariff, prevented
the export of the famous Moldave horses, upon which the defence of the
country largely depended, established the official hierarchy of the Moldave
nobles, and recognised the long-disputed authority of the Ecumenical
Patriarch over the Moldavian Church. Hitherto both the Roumanian
principalities had, with rare intervals, depended in ecclesiastical matters
upon the ancient Church of Ochrida, an arrangement dating from the
time of the first Bulgarian Empire, which had had the natural result
of introducing Old Slavonic as the language of the Roumanian church
services. Even at a time when Ochrida had long ceased to be
Bulgarian and a Patriarchate, the jurisdiction of this archiepiscopal see
over the distant Roumanian lands beyond the Danube was revived, and
the literature of the Church and the official language of the princely
chanceries still remained Slav. After Alexander's time the archbishopric
of Ochrida recovered its authority, which Wallachia did not shake off
till the end of the fifteenth, and Moldavia till the seventeenth century,
when the Roumanian language, alike in Church and State, replaced the
archaic idiom of the alien Slavs.
While such was the dubious plight of the Latins of the lower
Danube, their neighbours, the Serbs, were being driven back upon that
river under the pressure of the Turkish advance to the north. Originally
a mountainous, and at its zenith a Macedonian state, Serbia under
George Branković, except for a few places on the Adriatic, was essentially
a Danubian principality, even to a greater degree than was till lately the
case. The new despot, a fine, tall man of sixty when he at last succeeded
his uncle, was an experienced diplomatist, whose life had been spent in
those tortuous political maneuvres which passed in the Near East for
the height of statesmanship. But something more than diplomacy was
needed to defend the Balkan Christians from the Turks, now that a
warlike Sultan in the person of Murād II directed their undivided
forces. As soon as Murād had leisure to attend to Serbian affairs, he
sent an embassy to the despot, demanding the whole of Serbia for him-
self, on the pretext that a sister of the late prince had married his father.
George saw that his best policy was to “pacify the dragon” by making
some concessions, and thus to save at least a portion of his territory?
He promised to sever all connexion with Hungary, to pay an annual tribute
(not a difficult undertaking for a man of his great wealth), to furnish the
usual military contingent to the Sultan's armies, and to give to the latter
the hand of his daughter Maria with a dowry of Serbian land. Delay in
the performance of this last condition brought upon Branković a Turkish
1 Ducas, p. 205.
## p. 569 (#611) ############################################
Branković at Semendria
569
invasion. Kruševac, the residence of Prince Lazar, fell before the invaders,
and ceased to be the Serbian capital; and the despot, when he had
secured a respite by the betrothal of his daughter, humbly but astutely
asked from her all-powerful suitor permission to build a new fortress at
Smederevo, or Semendria, on the right bank of the Danube. The site
was well chosen ; for, if the Sultan was induced to approve of the
construction of Semendria as a bulwark against Hungary, the despot
could easily escape thence across the river, should his suzerain attack
him there. The noble towers and ramparts of George Branković's
castle, thenceforth the Serbian capital till the Turkish conquest, still
stand by the brink of the great river; the cross of red brick which the
master-builder defiantly built into the walls has survived the long
centuries of the Crescent's domination ; and the coins which the despot
minted there commemorate the foundation of this great Danubian
stronghold. In our own day, when Serbia feared the Austrian more
than the Turk, it was a disadvantage to have the capital on the northern
frontier ; in the fifteenth century, when the Hungarian was the only
hope of safety, it was the best choice. Branković, in order to secure for
himself a comfortable refuge beyond the Danube, did not hesitate to
hand over Belgrade itself, which his uncle had rendered even stronger
than it was by nature, to the King of Hungary in exchange for a
goodly list of towns and estates in that sovereign's territory. This act
of enlightened selfishness was a sore blow to the Serbian people; it was
a bitter humiliation to them to see “the white city” transferred to the
authority of a Magyar commander. Nature herself seemed to protest
against the cession of Belgrade; thunder rolled over the betrayed
fortress; a tempest swept the roofs off the houses; and the citizens wept
at the surrender of their homes to the foreigner from beyond the Save.
More serious still, Murād was angry that so valuable a position should
be in Hungarian hands. For the present, however, he contented himself
with sending for his betrothed, who still lingered at her father's court.
Branković, who had just received from the Greek Emperor the dignity
and the emblems of despot, gave the bride a splendid outfit worthy
of a king's daughter. The charms of the Serbian princess captivated
the heart of the Sultan ; but this matrimonial alliance, from which the
Serbs might have expected much, availed nothing against reasons of
state. Branković, as a French traveller? who visited him said, was “in
daily fear of losing Serbia. ” His only safeguard was the Sultan's belief
that tributary states were more profitable to Turkey than annexation.
Murād had not been many months married to the fair Serbian when
one of those fanatics so common in Muslim lands accused him of sinning
against Allāh by allowing the unbelievers to live in peace.
The
building of Semendria, so this man insisted, had been not only a crime
but a blunder, for it barred the way to the conquest of Hungary and
1 Bertrandon de la Brocquière, in Recueil de voyages et de documents, xii. 209–10.
CH. XVIII,
## p. 570 (#612) ############################################
570
The loss of the last Serbian ports
.
ביי
of Italy beyond it—the ultimate goal of Musulman endeavour, which
might be reached by means of the immense riches of the Serbian Despot.
Murād listened to this counsel, and sent an ultimatum to his father-in-
law, demanding the surrender of Semendria. Branković left his capital
in charge of his eldest son Gregory and one of his Greek relatives, and
crossed over with his youngest son Lazar into Hungary to obtain
assistance. Semendria, strong as were its defences, had, however,
provisions for no more than three months, so that before the pedantic
bureaucracy of the Magyar army could be put in motion the garrison
was compelled to yield. Gregory and his next brother Stephen, who
had been forced to accompany Murād to the siege, were blinded at the
instigation of the Sultan's fanatical adviser and deported to Asia Minor.
From Semendria, where he left a Turkish guard, Murād marched to the
rich mining town of Novobrdo, which a Byzantine historian calls “ the
mother of cities,”? and the minerals of which had been rented by the
Ragusans for a large sum. Novobrdo was captured, and nearly all
Serbia was in 1439 a Turkish province. Her lawful ruler was forced
to seek refuge in the maritime towns of Antivari and Budua, which
were still Serbian. Even there, however, the long arm of the Sultan
menaced him; he Aed with his vast treasures to the neighbouring
republic of Ragusa, where he hoped to find a shelter on neutral
ground. But Murād was still inexorable ; he bade the embarrassed
republicans banish their guest, and suggested that they might salve
their consciences for this breach of hospitality by appropriating the
500,000 ducats which his father-in-law had deposited for safety in their
public coffers. The Ragusans boldly refused to tarnish their honour
at the Sultan's bidding, but they none the less hinted to their guest
that he had better return to Hungary. Warned by this example, his
last possessions on, or near, the Adriatic (Budua, Drivasto, and Anti-
vari) sought and obtained from Venice that protection which he could
no longer give them. Many noble Serbs settled at Ragusa, and that
artistic city owes one of her most treasured relics, the cross of Stephen
Uroš II, to this troubled period of South Slavonic history.
Belgrade, however, with its Hungarian garrison, still rose above the
Ottoman food which had swept over the rest of Serbia, and in 1440
Murād accordingly laid siege to it by land and water. The fortress
was commanded by a Ragusan and provided with excellent artillery,
which wrought such terrible havoc among the besiegers that neither
the Turkish flotilla nor the janissaries could prevail against it. After
wasting six months before the town, Murād reluctantly raised the siege
with the sinister threat that sooner or later “ the white city” must be
his. It was not till eighty-one years after this first Turkish siege that
his threat was accomplished by one of his greatest successors.
A new figure now arose to check for a time the Ottoman advance.
1 Ducas, p. 209.
## p. 571 (#613) ############################################
John Hunyadi
571
John Hunyadi, “ the white knight of Wallachia," a Roumanian in the
service of Hungary, began his victorious career with his appointment
as voivode of Transylvania in 1441. After several preliminary defeats
of the Turks on the slopes of the Carpathians and in the neighbourhood
of Belgrade, he undertook with King Vladislav I in 1443 a great
expedition across Serbia and Bulgaria. Both Pope Eugenius IV and
Branković subsidised the undertaking, Vlad “ the Devil ” of Wallachia
joined his countryman, while the exiled despot placed his local knowledge
at the disposition of the dashing Roumanians. The Christian army rapidly
traversed Serbia, burning Kruševac and Niš on the way, and entered
Bulgaria, whose inhabitants received the Polish King of Hungary and
the Slavs in his force as brothers. Leaving Sofia behind him, Hunyadi
pressed on with his colleagues towards Philippopolis ; but he found the
pass near Zlatica already occupied by the janissaries whom Murād had
assembled, and he had to retreat. On the return march, the despot, who
was in command of the rear, was attacked by the Turks at Kunovica
near Niš, but the cavalry came to his aid and completely routed his
assailants. Murād, dismayed at this first great Hungarian raid across
the Danube, and threatened by troubles in Asia, signed, in July 1444,
the humiliating peace of Szegedin, which restored to Branković the
whole of Serbia and his two blinded sons, on condition of his handing
half the revenue of the land as tribute to the Sultan. Bulgaria remained
a portion of the Turkish Empire, and the citizens of Sofia, which ten
years earlier had been the most flourishing town in the whole country,
lamented among the ashes of their ruined houses the vain attempt of
the Christians to set them free. Their city, famous for its baths,
became the residence of the “Beglerbeg of Rumelia," the viceroy of
the Sultan in the Balkans. Wallachia, under Vlad “the Devil,” con-
tinued to pay tribute to Turkey while acknowledging the suzerainty
of Hungary, whose sovereign pledged himself not to cross the Danube
against the Turks, just as the Sultan vowed likewise not to cross . it
against the Magyars. The only real gainer by the campaign of 1443
was George Branković, who received the congratulations of Venice on
his fortunate restoration to the throne of Serbia? . Honour and policy
alike suggested the maintenance of this solemn treaty with the Turks.
But the parchment bond had scarcely been signed when the evil
counsels of Cardinal Julian Cesarini, the papal legate, caused the
Hungarian monarch to break it. The moment seemed to the statesman-
ship of the Vatican to have come for driving the Turks out of Europe.
Murād was occupied in Asia, and it was thought that the fleets of the
Duke of Burgundy and the Pope could prevent his return. In vain
Branković argued against this impolitic act of treachery ; Hunyadi, the
soul of this new crusade, was eager to free Bulgaria in order to revive
in his own person the Empire of the Tsars; the legate was ready to
1 Mon. spect. hist. Slav. Merid. xxi. pp. 186-7 ; Makuscev, 11. pp. 81-4.
CH, XVIII.
## p. 572 (#614) ############################################
572
Battle of Varna, 1444
absolve Vladislav from the oath which he had so lately sworn. Not
without forebodings of his approaching doom, the perjured King of
Hungary re-crossed the forbidden river, set fire to Vidin, and, flushed
by easy successes gained at the expense of the helpless peasantry whom
he had come to liberate, disregarded the warning of the astute voïvode
of Wallachia and pushed on to the Black Sea. Thus far his expedition
had been a triumphal march ; but among the gardens and vineyards of
Varna, the district which still preserves the name of the former Bulgarian
Despot Dobrotich, he suddenly found himself confronted by the Turkish
army. Murād had made peace with his enemies in Asia, and, thanks
to a strong wind which had prevented the Christian vessels from leaving
the Dardanelles, had crossed over to Europe at his ease where the
Bosphorus is narrowest, and had reached Varna by forced marches. The
battle which decided the fate of this last attempt of Christendom to
free Bulgaria was fought on 10 November 1444. It is only a later, if
picturesque, legend that Murād displayed before him on a lance his
copy of the broken treaty', but when night fell the scattered remnant
of the Christian army had good cause to lament alike the perjury and
the rashness of its leader. At first the prowess of Hunyadi seemed to
have broken the Ottoman ranks; but the young king, envious of the
laurels of his more experienced commander, insisted on exposing his
valuable life at a critical moment. His death was the signal for the
defeat of his army; his evil adviser, the cardinal, perished in the
carnage; the survivors Aled either across the Danube into Wallachia,
or westward to the fastnesses of Albania, where Skanderbeg a year
earlier had begun to defy the Turks in his native mountains. Hunyadi
was treacherously captured by the Wallachian “Devil,” whom he had
accused of double-dealing during the campaign, but was released on
the arrival of a Hungarian ultimatum. Two years later he wreaked
his vengeance upon his captor, whom he deprived of both crown and life,
restoring the elder branch of the Wallachian princely house to the throne
which Mirčea and his descendants had usurped from his brother and his
brother's children.
George Branković, wise in his generation, had refused to take part
in the expedition which had ended so disastrously at Varna. Like the
shrewd diplomatist that he was, he had made his calculations in the
event of either a Hungarian or a Turkish victory. In the former case
he relied on his money to shelter him from the consequences of his
neutrality; against the latter he made provision by sending news of
the Christian advance to the Sultan and by barring the road by which
Skanderbeg was to have traversed Serbia on his way to join the Christian
forces at Varna. He persisted in the same policy of enlightened selfish-
ness when, four years later, Hunyadi again attacked the Turks. On this
occasion, too, Branković betrayed the Christian cause by warning Murād
1 Zinkeisen, 1. p. 702, n. 3.
## p. 573 (#615) ############################################
Third Battle of Kossovo, 1448
573
of the coming Hungarian invasion, and refused to participate in an
expedition which he considered inadequate for the purpose intended.
Hunyadi stormed, and vowed vengeance upon him, but once more facts
proved the shrewd old Serb to be right. The armies met on the
fatal field of Kossovo on 17 October 1448, while the Serbs lurked in the
mountain passes which led out of the plain, ready to fall upon
and
plunder the fugitives. On the first and second days the issue was
uncertain; but, when the fight was renewed on the third, the Roumanian
contingent, whose leader owed his throne to Hunyadi, deserted in a body
to the Turks. Murād, however, suspecting this movement to be a feint,
ordered them to be cut to pieces. Nevertheless, their defection de-
moralised their chivalrous countryman, who fled for his life towards
Belgrade. His danger was great, for Branković, anxious to obtain
possession of a man whom he hated and whom he could then surrender
to the Sultan, had ordered the Serbs to examine and report to the
authorities every Hungarian subject whom they met, while the Turks
were also on his track. Once, like Marius, he hid himself among the
reeds of a marsh; then he narrowly escaped assassination at the
hands of two Serbian guides ; at last, driven by hunger, he was forced
to disclose his identity to a Serbian peasant. The peasant revealed the
secret to his brothers, one of the latter reported it to the local governor,
and Hunyadi was sent in chains to Semendria. The despot durst not,
however, provoke the power of Hungary by refusing to release so
distinguished a champion of Christendom, and his captive recovered
his freedom by promising to pay a ransom and never to lead an army
across Serbia again. Not only did these promises remain unfulfilled,
but, as soon as Hunyadi was free, he revenged himself by seizing the
Branković estates in Hungary and by devastating Serbian territory.
But the Serbian Despot's armed neutrality while others fought at
Varna and Kossovo was not his only crime against the common cause
of the Balkan Christians. Despite his years and the imminent Turkish
peril, he did not scruple to extend his frontiers at the expense of Bosnia
with the Sultan's permission. Tvrtko II had not long enjoyed in peace
his restoration to the Bosnian throne. His title was disputed by
Radivoj, a bastard son of Ostoja, who summoned Murād II to his aid,
and Tvrtko was forced to purchase peace by the cession of several towns
to the Sultan, already the real arbiter of Bosnia. In 1433 the puppet
king was overthrown by a combination between Branković and the
powerful Bosnian magnate, Sandalj Hranić, who paid the Sultan a lump
sum for his gracious permission to partition the Bosnian kingdom. The
despot thereupon annexed the district of Usora, watered by the lower
Bosna, while the grand voïvode ruled over the whole of what was soon
to be called the Herzegovina, and a part of what is now Montenegro.
Hranić might claim to be de facto, if not de jure, the successor of
the great Tvrtko, for the monastery in which the first Bosnian king
CH. XVIII.
## p. 574 (#616) ############################################
574
The “ Duchy of St Sava”
had been crowned, and the castle which he had built to command the
fiord of Cattaro, were both his. But the opposition of the barons
hindered, and his death in 1435 ended, his striving after the royal title.
His vast territories passed to his nephew, Stephen Vukčić, the last of
the three great Bosnian magnates whose commanding figures over-
shadowed the pigmy wearers of the crown. His land was now regarded
as independent of Bosnia ; ere long, despite a Bosnian protest, he
received, either from the Emperor Frederick III or from the Pope, the
title of “Duke of St Sava,” which, in its German form of Herzog, gave
to the Herzegovina its name'. Meanwhile, in 1436, a Turkish garrison
re-occupied Vrhbosna, and Tvrtko II, who had sought refuge in Hungary,
recovered his throne by consenting to pay a tribute of 25,000 ducats to
the Sultan. He had not, however, been long re-installed when the
Turkish invasion of Serbia up to the gates of Belgrade seemed to fore-
bode the annexation of Bosnia also. In his despair he implored now
Venice, now Vladislav I, the Polish King of Hungary, to take compassion
upon him. Venice he begged to take over the government of his do-
minions, Vladislav he urged to succour a land whose people were also
Slavs. 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.
members of the royal family took to highway robbery, and the
Ragusans complained that even among the heathen Turks their traders
met with less harm than in Christian Bosnia. The climax was reached
when Sigismund, occupied with the religious quarrels of Western Europe,
released Tvrtko in 1415, and sent him with a Hungarian army to
recover the Bosnian crown. Hard pressed by this formidable combina-
tion (for Tvrtko's was a name to conjure with) his rival and Hrvoje,
who had now rallied to Ostoja, committed the fatal mistake of summoning
the Turks to their aid, thus setting an example which ultimately caused
the ruin of Bosnia. The immediate result of this policy was, indeed,
successful; the Magyars were routed, but the victors could not rid
themselves of their Turkish allies so easily. In the very next year
Mahomet I appointed his general Isaac governor of the district of
Vrhbosna, which took its name from the “sources of the Bosna," and
occupied the heart of the country. From the like-named castle, on the
site of the present fortress of Sarajevo, the low-born Turkish viceroy
could dominate the plain at his feet and confirm great Bosnian nobles in
their fiefs by the grace of his, and their, master, the Sultan.
The joint authors of this Turkish occupation did not long survive
the evil which they had inflicted on their country.
In the same year
that saw the Turkish garrison installed in Vrhbosna Hrvoje died. No
Balkan noble is better known to us than this remarkable man. An
ancient missal has preserved for us his features, and we are told of his
gruff voice and rough manners which so greatly disgusted the courteous
magnates of Hungary. The coins which he struck for his duchy of
Spalato have survived, and the loveliest town in all Bosnia, the fairy-like
Jajce (“the egg” of the Southern Slavs) will ever be connected with his
There, on the egg-shaped hill above the magnificent waterfall,
he had bidden an Italian architect build him a castle on the model of
name.
## p. 567 (#609) ############################################
Mircea “ the Great” of Wallachia
567
the famous Castel dell' Uovo at Naples, and there he dug out those
catacombs which still bear his arms and were intended to serve as his
family vault? . But the influence of this Bosnian king-maker perished
with him; his widow became the wife of Ostoja, who, two years later,
died himself; another great noble, the grand voivode Sandalj Hranić
of the house of Kosača, once Hrvoje's most formidable rival, for nearly
two decades wielded from his stronghold in the land of Hum the pre-
dominant authority over the south. He did not scruple, during the
brief reign of Ostoja's feeble son and successor, Stephen Ostojić, to
increase his estates by the aid of the Turkish garrison in Vrhbosna.
Fortunately the death of “king ” Isaac on a Hungarian raid ended for
the moment the Turkish occupation. Stephen Ostojić did not, however,
long profit by the liberation of his country from this terrible foe.
Tvrtko II, who had disputed the throne with Ostoja, now once more
arose to wrest it from Ostoja's son. His attempt succeeded ; in 1421
Ostojić is heard of for the last time. Tvrtko II wore again the crown
of his father, a crown which had, however, just lost that bright jewel
which the first Tvrtko had added to it, the city of Cattaro and its
splendid fiord. Only the “ new castle” which the great king had built
to command the mouth still remained in Bosnian hands, the powerful
hands of Sandalj Hranić, and survived in those of his successors the
downfall of the kingdom itself.
Wallachia, like Bosnia, had suffered from the armies of Mahomet I.
After the defeat of Mūsà, the victorious Sultan sent an army to
ravage
the land of Mirčea, who had previously sheltered his rival, and Mirčea
was forced to purchase peace by the promise of a tribute. The spirit of
the Wallachian ruler chafed, however, at this fresh degradation. He
welcomed the advent of a self-styled son of Bāyazīd, who claimed the
Turkish throne, and supported his claim. The pretender was defeated,
and Mirčea paid for his temerity by a fresh Turkish inroad. In order
to have a base for future action against Wallachia, Mahomet occupied
the two Roumanian towns, Turnu-Severin and Giurgevo. Not long
afterwards, in 1418, Mircea “the Great," as his countrymen call him,
died, the first commanding figure in their troubled history. Un-
fortunately, “the Great” prince had won his crown by the murder of
his elder brother, and his crime was now visited upon his heirs and his
country. Wallachia was distracted by the civil wars of the rival cousins,
who appealed with success to the jealousies of the nobles and to those
misguided feelings of local patriotism which tended towards the separation
of the smaller western from the larger eastern portion of the principality.
In their eagerness to gain the throne, the hostile candidates called in
now the Hungarians and now the Turks to their aid, and thus the
resources of the country were weakened by almost constant bloodshed.
Meanwhile, the sister-principality of Moldavia, after a number of
1 Wiss. Mitt. 11. pp. 94-107.
בל
CH. XVIII.
## p. 568 (#610) ############################################
568
Condition of Moldavia and Serbia
ephemeral reigns, found in Alexander the Good a prince who managed
to maintain himself on the throne, albeit under the suzerainty of Poland,
for nearly a whole generation. His administration, which lasted from
1401 to 1433, was devoted to the internal organisation of Moldavia and
to the development of its resources. He regulated the tariff, prevented
the export of the famous Moldave horses, upon which the defence of the
country largely depended, established the official hierarchy of the Moldave
nobles, and recognised the long-disputed authority of the Ecumenical
Patriarch over the Moldavian Church. Hitherto both the Roumanian
principalities had, with rare intervals, depended in ecclesiastical matters
upon the ancient Church of Ochrida, an arrangement dating from the
time of the first Bulgarian Empire, which had had the natural result
of introducing Old Slavonic as the language of the Roumanian church
services. Even at a time when Ochrida had long ceased to be
Bulgarian and a Patriarchate, the jurisdiction of this archiepiscopal see
over the distant Roumanian lands beyond the Danube was revived, and
the literature of the Church and the official language of the princely
chanceries still remained Slav. After Alexander's time the archbishopric
of Ochrida recovered its authority, which Wallachia did not shake off
till the end of the fifteenth, and Moldavia till the seventeenth century,
when the Roumanian language, alike in Church and State, replaced the
archaic idiom of the alien Slavs.
While such was the dubious plight of the Latins of the lower
Danube, their neighbours, the Serbs, were being driven back upon that
river under the pressure of the Turkish advance to the north. Originally
a mountainous, and at its zenith a Macedonian state, Serbia under
George Branković, except for a few places on the Adriatic, was essentially
a Danubian principality, even to a greater degree than was till lately the
case. The new despot, a fine, tall man of sixty when he at last succeeded
his uncle, was an experienced diplomatist, whose life had been spent in
those tortuous political maneuvres which passed in the Near East for
the height of statesmanship. But something more than diplomacy was
needed to defend the Balkan Christians from the Turks, now that a
warlike Sultan in the person of Murād II directed their undivided
forces. As soon as Murād had leisure to attend to Serbian affairs, he
sent an embassy to the despot, demanding the whole of Serbia for him-
self, on the pretext that a sister of the late prince had married his father.
George saw that his best policy was to “pacify the dragon” by making
some concessions, and thus to save at least a portion of his territory?
He promised to sever all connexion with Hungary, to pay an annual tribute
(not a difficult undertaking for a man of his great wealth), to furnish the
usual military contingent to the Sultan's armies, and to give to the latter
the hand of his daughter Maria with a dowry of Serbian land. Delay in
the performance of this last condition brought upon Branković a Turkish
1 Ducas, p. 205.
## p. 569 (#611) ############################################
Branković at Semendria
569
invasion. Kruševac, the residence of Prince Lazar, fell before the invaders,
and ceased to be the Serbian capital; and the despot, when he had
secured a respite by the betrothal of his daughter, humbly but astutely
asked from her all-powerful suitor permission to build a new fortress at
Smederevo, or Semendria, on the right bank of the Danube. The site
was well chosen ; for, if the Sultan was induced to approve of the
construction of Semendria as a bulwark against Hungary, the despot
could easily escape thence across the river, should his suzerain attack
him there. The noble towers and ramparts of George Branković's
castle, thenceforth the Serbian capital till the Turkish conquest, still
stand by the brink of the great river; the cross of red brick which the
master-builder defiantly built into the walls has survived the long
centuries of the Crescent's domination ; and the coins which the despot
minted there commemorate the foundation of this great Danubian
stronghold. In our own day, when Serbia feared the Austrian more
than the Turk, it was a disadvantage to have the capital on the northern
frontier ; in the fifteenth century, when the Hungarian was the only
hope of safety, it was the best choice. Branković, in order to secure for
himself a comfortable refuge beyond the Danube, did not hesitate to
hand over Belgrade itself, which his uncle had rendered even stronger
than it was by nature, to the King of Hungary in exchange for a
goodly list of towns and estates in that sovereign's territory. This act
of enlightened selfishness was a sore blow to the Serbian people; it was
a bitter humiliation to them to see “the white city” transferred to the
authority of a Magyar commander. Nature herself seemed to protest
against the cession of Belgrade; thunder rolled over the betrayed
fortress; a tempest swept the roofs off the houses; and the citizens wept
at the surrender of their homes to the foreigner from beyond the Save.
More serious still, Murād was angry that so valuable a position should
be in Hungarian hands. For the present, however, he contented himself
with sending for his betrothed, who still lingered at her father's court.
Branković, who had just received from the Greek Emperor the dignity
and the emblems of despot, gave the bride a splendid outfit worthy
of a king's daughter. The charms of the Serbian princess captivated
the heart of the Sultan ; but this matrimonial alliance, from which the
Serbs might have expected much, availed nothing against reasons of
state. Branković, as a French traveller? who visited him said, was “in
daily fear of losing Serbia. ” His only safeguard was the Sultan's belief
that tributary states were more profitable to Turkey than annexation.
Murād had not been many months married to the fair Serbian when
one of those fanatics so common in Muslim lands accused him of sinning
against Allāh by allowing the unbelievers to live in peace.
The
building of Semendria, so this man insisted, had been not only a crime
but a blunder, for it barred the way to the conquest of Hungary and
1 Bertrandon de la Brocquière, in Recueil de voyages et de documents, xii. 209–10.
CH. XVIII,
## p. 570 (#612) ############################################
570
The loss of the last Serbian ports
.
ביי
of Italy beyond it—the ultimate goal of Musulman endeavour, which
might be reached by means of the immense riches of the Serbian Despot.
Murād listened to this counsel, and sent an ultimatum to his father-in-
law, demanding the surrender of Semendria. Branković left his capital
in charge of his eldest son Gregory and one of his Greek relatives, and
crossed over with his youngest son Lazar into Hungary to obtain
assistance. Semendria, strong as were its defences, had, however,
provisions for no more than three months, so that before the pedantic
bureaucracy of the Magyar army could be put in motion the garrison
was compelled to yield. Gregory and his next brother Stephen, who
had been forced to accompany Murād to the siege, were blinded at the
instigation of the Sultan's fanatical adviser and deported to Asia Minor.
From Semendria, where he left a Turkish guard, Murād marched to the
rich mining town of Novobrdo, which a Byzantine historian calls “ the
mother of cities,”? and the minerals of which had been rented by the
Ragusans for a large sum. Novobrdo was captured, and nearly all
Serbia was in 1439 a Turkish province. Her lawful ruler was forced
to seek refuge in the maritime towns of Antivari and Budua, which
were still Serbian. Even there, however, the long arm of the Sultan
menaced him; he Aed with his vast treasures to the neighbouring
republic of Ragusa, where he hoped to find a shelter on neutral
ground. But Murād was still inexorable ; he bade the embarrassed
republicans banish their guest, and suggested that they might salve
their consciences for this breach of hospitality by appropriating the
500,000 ducats which his father-in-law had deposited for safety in their
public coffers. The Ragusans boldly refused to tarnish their honour
at the Sultan's bidding, but they none the less hinted to their guest
that he had better return to Hungary. Warned by this example, his
last possessions on, or near, the Adriatic (Budua, Drivasto, and Anti-
vari) sought and obtained from Venice that protection which he could
no longer give them. Many noble Serbs settled at Ragusa, and that
artistic city owes one of her most treasured relics, the cross of Stephen
Uroš II, to this troubled period of South Slavonic history.
Belgrade, however, with its Hungarian garrison, still rose above the
Ottoman food which had swept over the rest of Serbia, and in 1440
Murād accordingly laid siege to it by land and water. The fortress
was commanded by a Ragusan and provided with excellent artillery,
which wrought such terrible havoc among the besiegers that neither
the Turkish flotilla nor the janissaries could prevail against it. After
wasting six months before the town, Murād reluctantly raised the siege
with the sinister threat that sooner or later “ the white city” must be
his. It was not till eighty-one years after this first Turkish siege that
his threat was accomplished by one of his greatest successors.
A new figure now arose to check for a time the Ottoman advance.
1 Ducas, p. 209.
## p. 571 (#613) ############################################
John Hunyadi
571
John Hunyadi, “ the white knight of Wallachia," a Roumanian in the
service of Hungary, began his victorious career with his appointment
as voivode of Transylvania in 1441. After several preliminary defeats
of the Turks on the slopes of the Carpathians and in the neighbourhood
of Belgrade, he undertook with King Vladislav I in 1443 a great
expedition across Serbia and Bulgaria. Both Pope Eugenius IV and
Branković subsidised the undertaking, Vlad “ the Devil ” of Wallachia
joined his countryman, while the exiled despot placed his local knowledge
at the disposition of the dashing Roumanians. The Christian army rapidly
traversed Serbia, burning Kruševac and Niš on the way, and entered
Bulgaria, whose inhabitants received the Polish King of Hungary and
the Slavs in his force as brothers. Leaving Sofia behind him, Hunyadi
pressed on with his colleagues towards Philippopolis ; but he found the
pass near Zlatica already occupied by the janissaries whom Murād had
assembled, and he had to retreat. On the return march, the despot, who
was in command of the rear, was attacked by the Turks at Kunovica
near Niš, but the cavalry came to his aid and completely routed his
assailants. Murād, dismayed at this first great Hungarian raid across
the Danube, and threatened by troubles in Asia, signed, in July 1444,
the humiliating peace of Szegedin, which restored to Branković the
whole of Serbia and his two blinded sons, on condition of his handing
half the revenue of the land as tribute to the Sultan. Bulgaria remained
a portion of the Turkish Empire, and the citizens of Sofia, which ten
years earlier had been the most flourishing town in the whole country,
lamented among the ashes of their ruined houses the vain attempt of
the Christians to set them free. Their city, famous for its baths,
became the residence of the “Beglerbeg of Rumelia," the viceroy of
the Sultan in the Balkans. Wallachia, under Vlad “the Devil,” con-
tinued to pay tribute to Turkey while acknowledging the suzerainty
of Hungary, whose sovereign pledged himself not to cross the Danube
against the Turks, just as the Sultan vowed likewise not to cross . it
against the Magyars. The only real gainer by the campaign of 1443
was George Branković, who received the congratulations of Venice on
his fortunate restoration to the throne of Serbia? . Honour and policy
alike suggested the maintenance of this solemn treaty with the Turks.
But the parchment bond had scarcely been signed when the evil
counsels of Cardinal Julian Cesarini, the papal legate, caused the
Hungarian monarch to break it. The moment seemed to the statesman-
ship of the Vatican to have come for driving the Turks out of Europe.
Murād was occupied in Asia, and it was thought that the fleets of the
Duke of Burgundy and the Pope could prevent his return. In vain
Branković argued against this impolitic act of treachery ; Hunyadi, the
soul of this new crusade, was eager to free Bulgaria in order to revive
in his own person the Empire of the Tsars; the legate was ready to
1 Mon. spect. hist. Slav. Merid. xxi. pp. 186-7 ; Makuscev, 11. pp. 81-4.
CH, XVIII.
## p. 572 (#614) ############################################
572
Battle of Varna, 1444
absolve Vladislav from the oath which he had so lately sworn. Not
without forebodings of his approaching doom, the perjured King of
Hungary re-crossed the forbidden river, set fire to Vidin, and, flushed
by easy successes gained at the expense of the helpless peasantry whom
he had come to liberate, disregarded the warning of the astute voïvode
of Wallachia and pushed on to the Black Sea. Thus far his expedition
had been a triumphal march ; but among the gardens and vineyards of
Varna, the district which still preserves the name of the former Bulgarian
Despot Dobrotich, he suddenly found himself confronted by the Turkish
army. Murād had made peace with his enemies in Asia, and, thanks
to a strong wind which had prevented the Christian vessels from leaving
the Dardanelles, had crossed over to Europe at his ease where the
Bosphorus is narrowest, and had reached Varna by forced marches. The
battle which decided the fate of this last attempt of Christendom to
free Bulgaria was fought on 10 November 1444. It is only a later, if
picturesque, legend that Murād displayed before him on a lance his
copy of the broken treaty', but when night fell the scattered remnant
of the Christian army had good cause to lament alike the perjury and
the rashness of its leader. At first the prowess of Hunyadi seemed to
have broken the Ottoman ranks; but the young king, envious of the
laurels of his more experienced commander, insisted on exposing his
valuable life at a critical moment. His death was the signal for the
defeat of his army; his evil adviser, the cardinal, perished in the
carnage; the survivors Aled either across the Danube into Wallachia,
or westward to the fastnesses of Albania, where Skanderbeg a year
earlier had begun to defy the Turks in his native mountains. Hunyadi
was treacherously captured by the Wallachian “Devil,” whom he had
accused of double-dealing during the campaign, but was released on
the arrival of a Hungarian ultimatum. Two years later he wreaked
his vengeance upon his captor, whom he deprived of both crown and life,
restoring the elder branch of the Wallachian princely house to the throne
which Mirčea and his descendants had usurped from his brother and his
brother's children.
George Branković, wise in his generation, had refused to take part
in the expedition which had ended so disastrously at Varna. Like the
shrewd diplomatist that he was, he had made his calculations in the
event of either a Hungarian or a Turkish victory. In the former case
he relied on his money to shelter him from the consequences of his
neutrality; against the latter he made provision by sending news of
the Christian advance to the Sultan and by barring the road by which
Skanderbeg was to have traversed Serbia on his way to join the Christian
forces at Varna. He persisted in the same policy of enlightened selfish-
ness when, four years later, Hunyadi again attacked the Turks. On this
occasion, too, Branković betrayed the Christian cause by warning Murād
1 Zinkeisen, 1. p. 702, n. 3.
## p. 573 (#615) ############################################
Third Battle of Kossovo, 1448
573
of the coming Hungarian invasion, and refused to participate in an
expedition which he considered inadequate for the purpose intended.
Hunyadi stormed, and vowed vengeance upon him, but once more facts
proved the shrewd old Serb to be right. The armies met on the
fatal field of Kossovo on 17 October 1448, while the Serbs lurked in the
mountain passes which led out of the plain, ready to fall upon
and
plunder the fugitives. On the first and second days the issue was
uncertain; but, when the fight was renewed on the third, the Roumanian
contingent, whose leader owed his throne to Hunyadi, deserted in a body
to the Turks. Murād, however, suspecting this movement to be a feint,
ordered them to be cut to pieces. Nevertheless, their defection de-
moralised their chivalrous countryman, who fled for his life towards
Belgrade. His danger was great, for Branković, anxious to obtain
possession of a man whom he hated and whom he could then surrender
to the Sultan, had ordered the Serbs to examine and report to the
authorities every Hungarian subject whom they met, while the Turks
were also on his track. Once, like Marius, he hid himself among the
reeds of a marsh; then he narrowly escaped assassination at the
hands of two Serbian guides ; at last, driven by hunger, he was forced
to disclose his identity to a Serbian peasant. The peasant revealed the
secret to his brothers, one of the latter reported it to the local governor,
and Hunyadi was sent in chains to Semendria. The despot durst not,
however, provoke the power of Hungary by refusing to release so
distinguished a champion of Christendom, and his captive recovered
his freedom by promising to pay a ransom and never to lead an army
across Serbia again. Not only did these promises remain unfulfilled,
but, as soon as Hunyadi was free, he revenged himself by seizing the
Branković estates in Hungary and by devastating Serbian territory.
But the Serbian Despot's armed neutrality while others fought at
Varna and Kossovo was not his only crime against the common cause
of the Balkan Christians. Despite his years and the imminent Turkish
peril, he did not scruple to extend his frontiers at the expense of Bosnia
with the Sultan's permission. Tvrtko II had not long enjoyed in peace
his restoration to the Bosnian throne. His title was disputed by
Radivoj, a bastard son of Ostoja, who summoned Murād II to his aid,
and Tvrtko was forced to purchase peace by the cession of several towns
to the Sultan, already the real arbiter of Bosnia. In 1433 the puppet
king was overthrown by a combination between Branković and the
powerful Bosnian magnate, Sandalj Hranić, who paid the Sultan a lump
sum for his gracious permission to partition the Bosnian kingdom. The
despot thereupon annexed the district of Usora, watered by the lower
Bosna, while the grand voïvode ruled over the whole of what was soon
to be called the Herzegovina, and a part of what is now Montenegro.
Hranić might claim to be de facto, if not de jure, the successor of
the great Tvrtko, for the monastery in which the first Bosnian king
CH. XVIII.
## p. 574 (#616) ############################################
574
The “ Duchy of St Sava”
had been crowned, and the castle which he had built to command the
fiord of Cattaro, were both his. But the opposition of the barons
hindered, and his death in 1435 ended, his striving after the royal title.
His vast territories passed to his nephew, Stephen Vukčić, the last of
the three great Bosnian magnates whose commanding figures over-
shadowed the pigmy wearers of the crown. His land was now regarded
as independent of Bosnia ; ere long, despite a Bosnian protest, he
received, either from the Emperor Frederick III or from the Pope, the
title of “Duke of St Sava,” which, in its German form of Herzog, gave
to the Herzegovina its name'. Meanwhile, in 1436, a Turkish garrison
re-occupied Vrhbosna, and Tvrtko II, who had sought refuge in Hungary,
recovered his throne by consenting to pay a tribute of 25,000 ducats to
the Sultan. He had not, however, been long re-installed when the
Turkish invasion of Serbia up to the gates of Belgrade seemed to fore-
bode the annexation of Bosnia also. In his despair he implored now
Venice, now Vladislav I, the Polish King of Hungary, to take compassion
upon him. Venice he begged to take over the government of his do-
minions, Vladislav he urged to succour a land whose people were also
Slavs. 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.
