No More Learning

His plan was shared by
his mother-in-law, the Empress Irene, who, as an Italian, was devoid of
Hellenic patriotism, and, as a second wife, knew that her sons could
never succeed to their father's throne. In the King of Serbia she saw
the means of acquiring the Byzantine Empire for her own progeny, if
not for the offspring of Simonis, then for one of her own sons. From
her retreat at Salonica she made Stephen Uroš the confidant of her
conjugal woes, loaded him with presents, and sent him every year
a more and more richly-jewelled tiara, almost as splendid as that of
the Emperor himself. When it became clear that Simonis was not
likely to have children, she persuaded the King of Serbia to adopt one
of her two surviving sons as his heir. · But the luxurious Byzantine
princeling could not stand the hard and uncomfortable life in Serbia,
and his brother also, after a brief experience of the Serbian court, was
thankful to return to the civilisation of northern Italy. Simonis herself,
when she grew up, disliked her adopted country quite as much as her
brothers had done. She spent as much of her time as possible at
Constantinople; and, when her husband threatened vengeance on the
Greek Empire unless she returned to him, she was sent back in tears to
his barbarous embraces. Obviously, then, Balkan capitals were even
less agreeable places of residence for luxurious persons of culture at that
period than they are now.
The Greek connexion had naturally given offence to the national
CH. XVII.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Accession of Stephen Dušan
539
Stephen Uroš III did not long enjoy the fruits of his triumph. His
worst enemies were those of his own household, and he fell a victim to
one of those domestic tragedies which were characteristic of his family.
He had married a second time, and his eldest son Stephen, then twenty-
two years of age but still unprovided with a wife, looked with suspicion on
the offspring of his Greek step-mother, a cousin of Andronicus III. He
had been carefully educated as a crown prince; indeed, his father had
had him crowned with himself, and had promised to make him ruler over
half his kingdom. The courtier-like Archbishop Daniel, anxious to please
his young master, asserts that Stephen Uroš had not kept this promise ;
an impartial Greek contemporary says that the prince's suspicions were
exploited by those Serbian nobles who were weary of his father's rule and
hoped to benefit by a change. They proclaimed him king; he was
crowned on 8 September 1331 ; the flower of the army, attracted by his
prowess at Velbužd, focked to his standard; the old king was easily
captured and imprisoned in the castle of Zvečan near Mitrovica. There,
two months later, he was strangled, either by the orders? or at least
with the tacit consent of his son, who durst not oppose the will of his
powerful followers? ; and the name of Dušan, by which Stephen Uroš IV
is known in history, is variously derived, according to the view taken of
his share in his father's murder, either from duša (“ soul ”), a pet name
given him by his fond parent, or from dušiti (“ to throttle”). The
epithet of “strong," which his countrymen applied to him, was fully
justified by the masterful character and the great achievements of this
most famous of all Serbian sovereigns.
His first care was to secure himself on the side of Bulgaria, where, a
few months before, a revolution organised by two court officials had
driven the Serbian Empress and her son from the throne, and had placed
upon it John Alexander, a nephew of the late Tsar, who assumed the
ever popular surname of Asên. Instead of attempting to restore his
aunt to Bulgaria against the will of the nobles, Dušan adopted the wiser
policy of marrying the sister of the usurper and thus attaching the
latter to his side, while John Stephen, after wandering as an exile from
one land to another, now a suppliant at Constantinople and now a :
prisoner at Siena, ended his days at Naples. Thus Bulgaria under
John Alexander was practically a dependency of Serbia.
But Dušan by his Bulgarian marriage disarmed the enmity, and
gained the support, of another powerful Balkan ruler, the Prince of
Wallachia, who was father-in-law of the Bulgarian Tsar, and who had
first made the land which was the nucleus of the present kingdom of
לל
1 Adam (Pseudo-Brochart) in Rec. hist. Crois. , Doc. Armén. 11. 438, 446, who
wrote in 1332, thus confirming the date of Dušan’s accession (cf. Rad. xix. 180;
Mon. spect. hist. Slav. Merid. xii. 337; xxv. 122), which Miklosich (Monumenta
Serbica, 115) had placed in 1336.
Nicephorus Gregorâs, 1. 457.
2
CH. XVII.


## p. 540 (#582) ############################################

540
Foundation of Wallachia and Moldavia
יל
came.
Roumania a factor in Balkan politics. During the former half of the
thirteenth century, while Serbia and Bulgaria were already independent
states, the opposite bank of the Danube had been traversed by successive
barbarian tribes, the Cumans and the Tartars, who had driven the
Roumanian population before them to the mountains. A Slav popula-
tion dwelt in the plains, the banat of Craiova, or "little Wallachia," was
Hungarian, while here and there the fortresses of the Teutonic Knights
and the Knights of St John availed but little to stem the tide of
invasion. But about 1290 the Roumanians descended from Transylvania
into Wallachia to escape the religious persecutions of the Catholic Kings
of Hungary, and the generally received account ascribes the foundation
of the principality to a colony from Fogaras, which, under the leadership
of Radou Negrou, or Rudolf the Black, established itself at Campulung,
and
gave to the essentially flat country of Wallachia the local name of
“ land of mountains," in memory of those mountains whence the founder
His successor, Ivanko Basaraba, the ally of the Bulgarians in the
campaign of 1330, extended his authority over "little Wallachia,”
completely routed the Hungarians, and strengthened his position by
marrying his daughter to the new Tsar of Bulgaria. About the same
time as the foundation of the Wallachian principality, a second princi-
pality, dependent however on the Hungarian crown, was created in
Moldavia by another colony of Roumanians from the north of
Transylvania under a chief named Dragoche. This vassal state threw
off its allegiance to Hungary about 1349, and became independent.
Such was the origin of the two Danubian principalities, which thenceforth
existed under various forms till their transformation in our own day into
the kingdom of Roumania,
Thus connected with the rulers of Bulgaria and Wallachia, Dušan
was able to begin the realisation of that great scheme which had been
cherished by his grandfather of forming a Serbian Empire on the ruins
of Byzantium. While his ally, the Bulgarian Tsar, recaptured the
places south of the Balkans which Andronicus III had so recently
occupied, Dušan, assisted by Sir Janni, a political adventurer who had
abandoned the Byzantine for the Serbian court, easily conquered nearly
all Western Macedonia. The assassination of Sir Janni by an emissary
of the Byzantine Emperor and the threatening attitude of the King of
Hungary led him, however, to make peace with the Greeks and even to
seek their aid against this dangerous enemy. The Greek and the
Serbian monarchs met and spent a very pleasant week in one another's
society; and this meeting had important results, because it gave Dušan
an opportunity of making the acquaintance of the future Emperor
John Cantacuzene, then in attendance on Andronicus. Thus, for the
moment, peace reigned between the Greeks and the Balkan Slavs;
Dušan was content to bide his time ; John Alexander obtained the
hand of the Emperor's daughter for his eldest son, and could afford


## p. 541 (#583) ############################################

Dušan and Cantacuzene
541
to ignore the appeal which the Pope made to him to join the Church
of Rome.
Dušan availed himself of this peace with the Greeks to attack the
Angevin possessions in Albania. Durazzo, however, the most important
of them, resisted all his efforts, and the Angevin rule there survived the
great Serbian conqueror. But this aggressive policy had made him an
object of general alarm. The King of Hungary, himself an Angevin,
and the powerful Bosnian ban, Stephen Kotromanić, who had succeeded
the family of Šubić in 1322, regarded him with suspicion, and their
attitude so greatly alarmed him that he wrote to Venice in 1340,
begging for a refuge there in the event of his being defeated by his
numerous enemies, offering to assist the republic in her Italian wars,
and guaranteeing her merchants a safe transit across his dominions on
their
way to Constantinople. Venice bestowed the rights of citizenship
upon the serviceable Serbian monarch and his family.
The death of Andronicus III in 1341 and the rebellion of John
Cantacuzene against the rule of the young Emperor John V and his
mother Anne of Savoy were Dušan's opportunity. He at once dis-
regarded his treaty with the Greeks, and overran the whole of Macedonia.
Soon this barbarian, as the elegant Byzantine authors considered him,
had the proud satisfaction of receiving at Priština, which, though it had
been the Serbian capital, was still only an unfortified village, bids for his
alliance from both parties in the struggle for the dominion of the
Empire. Cantacuzene, in the hour of need, sought a personal interview
with him there; the King and Queen of Serbia welcomed their dis-
tinguished suppliant with every mark of respect; but, when it came to
business, Dušan demanded as the price of his assistance the whole of the
Byzantine Empire west of the pass of Christópolis near Kavala, or, at
any rate, of Salonica. Cantacuzene informs us that he indignantly
declined to give up even the meanest of Greek cities; the utmost
concession which he could be induced to make was to recognise Dušan's
rights over the Greek territory which he already held. Anne of Savoy,
as a foreigner, was less patriotic; she more than once promised Dušan
that, if he would send her Cantacuzene alive or dead, she would give him
what her rival had refused, so that the Serbian Empire would stretch
from the Adriatic to the Aegean. The matter was referred to the Council
of twenty-four officers of State whom the Serbian kings were wont to
consult, and this Council, acting on the advice of the queen, repudiated
the suggestion of assassinating an honoured guest, and advised Dušan to
be content with a formal oath from Cantacuzene that he would respect
the territorial status quo. Baffled in her negotiations with the King of
Serbia, Anne of Savoy did not scruple to purchase the aid of the
Bulgarian Tsar by the cession of Philippopolis and eight other places,
the last aggrandisement of the Bulgarian Empire. Thus, the divisions
of the Greeks benefited Serbia and Bulgaria alike, while both Canta-
CH. XVII.


## p. 542 (#584) ############################################

542
Dušan crowned Emperor, 1346
cuzene and his rival found ere long that their Slav allies only looked to
their own advancement. In the general confusion, both parties invoked
the assistance of the Turks, who had taken Brūsa (Prusa) in 1326 and
Nicaea in 1330, and who now appeared sporadically in Europe. Brigand
chiefs formed bands in the mountains, changing sides whenever it suited
their purpose, and one of these guerrilla leaders, a Bulgarian named
Momchilo, not only survives in the pages of the imperial historian but
is still the hero of Slavonic ballads.
It was the policy of Dušan to allow the two Greek factions to
exhaust themselves, and to strengthen his position at the expense of
both. While they fought, he occupied one place after another, till, by
1345, he had acquired all that he had originally asked Cantacuzene to
cede, and the whole of Macedonia, except Salonica, was in his power.
It was scarcely an exaggeration when he described himself in a letter to
the Doge, written from Seres in this year, as “ King of Serbia, Dioclea,
the land of Hum, the Zeta, Albania, and the Maritime region, partner
in no small part of the Empire of Bulgaria, and lord of almost all the
Empire of Romania. " But for the ruler of so vast a realm the title of
King seemed insignificant, especially as his vassal, the ruler of Bulgaria,
bore the great name of Tsar. Accordingly, early in 1346, Dušan had
himself crowned at Skoplje, whither he had transferred the Serbian capital,
as “Emperor of the Serbs and Greeks,” soon to be magnified into “Tsar
and Autocrat of the Serbs and Greeks, the Bulgarians and Albanians.
Shortly before, with the consent of the Bulgarian, and in defiance of the
Ecumenical, Patriarch, he had raised the Archbishop of Serbia to that
exalted dignity with his seat at Ipek, and the two Slav Patriarchs
of Trnovo and Ipek placed the crown upon his head. At the same
time, on the analogy of the Western Empire with its “King of
the Romans," he had his son Stephen Uroš V proclaimed king, and
assigned to him the old Serbian lands as far as Skoplje, reserving for
himself the new conquests from there to Kavala. Byzantine emblems
and customs were introduced into the brand-new Serbian Empire; the
Tsar assumed the tiara and the double-eagle as the heir of the great
Constantine, and wrote to the Doge proposing an alliance for the
conquest of Constantinople. The officials of his court received the
high-sounding titles of Byzantium, and in the papal correspondence
with Serbia we read of a “Sebastocrator,” a “Great Logothete," a
“Caesar," and a “Despot. ” The governors of important Serbian cities,
such as Cattaro and Scutari, were styled “Counts,” those of minor
places, like Antivari, were called “Captains. ” In vain did Cantacuzene,
as soon as the civil war was over, demand the restitution of the Greek
territory which Dušan had conquered since their meeting in 1342. The
Tsar had no intention of keeping his word or of returning to the status
quo of that year.
יל
1 Mon. spect. hist. Slav. Merid. 11. 278–9.
בל
לל


## p. 543 (#585) ############################################

Serbo-Greek treaty of 1350
543
ול
On the contrary, he still further extended his frontiers to the south,
where they marched with the former despotat of Epirus. That important
state, founded on the morrow of the Latin conquest of Constantinople,
had maintained its independence till, in 1336, it had been at last re-united
with the Byzantine Empire. Cantacuzene had appointed one of his
relatives as its governor; but upon his death in 1349 the Serbian
Tsar, who had already occupied Joánnina, annexed Epirus and Thessaly,
assuming the further titles of “Despot of Arta and Count of Vlachia. "
His brother, Simeon Uroš, was sent to rule Acarnania and Aetolia as
his viceroy, while the Serbian “Caesar,” Preljub, governed Joánnina
and Thessaly. Thus a large part of northern Greece owned the sway
of the Serbs. Cantacuzene resolved at once to punish this culminating
act of aggression. The moment was favourable to his plans, for Dušan
was engaged on the Bosnian frontier, and several of the Serbian nobles,
always intolerant of authority, deserted to the popular Greek Emperor,
whom they knew and liked. Such was his success (for even the Serbian
capital of Skoplje offered to surrender in the absence of the Tsar) that
Dušan hastened back and came to terms with his enemy. The two
Emperors met outside Salonica ; Cantacuzene reproached the Tsar with
his breach of the treaty made between them eight years earlier; and, if
we may judge from the speeches which he composed for himself and
his opponent, Dušan was completely dumbfounded by his arguments.
A fresh treaty was drawn up between them, by which Acarnania,
Thessaly, and the south-east of Macedonia as far as Seres, were to be retro-
ceded to the Greeks, and five commissioners were appointed on either side
for the transfer of this territory.
But the renewal of the unhappy quarrel
between Cantacuzene and John V thwarted the execution of this agree-
ment. Emissaries of the young Emperor advised Dušan to resist, telling
him that he would obtain better terms by aiding their master against
Cantacuzene. The Tsar thereupon repudiated the treaty which he had
just signed, promised his assistance to John V, and urged him to divorce
Cantacuzene's daughter and marry the sister of the Serbian Empress.
Cantacuzene in vain warned his young rival to beware of Serbian
intrigues ; in vain did Anne of Savoy endeavour to prevent the unholy
league; a new triple alliance was formed between John V and the two
Serbian and Bulgarian Tsars. Thus Dušan was able to retain his Greek
conquests, with a flagrant disregard for the treaty of 1350 which recalls
the futility of such instruments in the settlement of Balkan questions.
It was not, however, only the other Christian races of the Near East
who profited by the fatal dissensions between the two Greek Emperors.
The nation, which a century later was destined to grind them all to
powder, owed its first permanent settlement in Europe to their divisions.
The Ottoman Turks from their capital of Brūsa could aid either party,
according as it suited their convenience, nor did Cantacuzene hesitate to
buy the support of the Sultan Orkhān by giving him his daughter
CH. XVII.


## p. 544 (#586) ############################################

544
First Turkish settlement in Europe
to wife. For some years the Turks were content to raid the neigh-
bouring coast; then their marauding bands penetrated farther inland,
and so severely devastated Bulgaria that John Alexander complained to
Cantacuzene of the depredations of his savage allies. Cantacuzene was
sufficient of a statesman to foresee the coming Turkish triumph; he
replied by offering to keep up a fleet at the Dardanelles for the
protection of the European coast, if the Bulgarian Tsar would con-
tribute towards its maintenance. A popular demonstration at Trnovo
in favour of common action against the Turks convinced the Tsar of the
wisdom of accepting Cantacuzene's proposal. But at the last moment
Dušan wrecked the scheme by remonstrating with his vassal for paying
what he scornfully called “tribute” to the Greek Empire. In vain
Cantacuzene warned the offended Bulgarian that Bulgaria would one
day, when it was too late, rue his decision. Not long after, in 1353
according to the Greek, or in 1356 according to the Turkish account,
Orkhān's son crossed the Dardanelles and occupied the castle of Tzympe,
the first permanent settlement of the Turks in Europe. Cantacuzene
had offered them money to quit, and they were preparing to go when a
sudden convulsion of nature tempted them to break their bargain; the
great earthquake of 2 March 1354 laid the neighbouring towns in
ruins'; and Gallipoli, the largest of them, was colonised and re-fortified
by these unwelcome guests, who had now come to stay and conquer.
It has been mentioned that Cantacuzene's successes in 1350 were
favoured by Dušan's absence in Bosnia. That Napoleonic ruler could
not be expected to acquiesce in the co-existence of another Serb state
adjacent to, yet independent of, his own. He had an old grudge
against Stephen Kotromanić, the Bosnian ban, because the latter had
annexed, in 1325, the land of Hum, which for the previous two genera-
tions had been a dependency of the Serbian crown and furnished one
of Dušan's many titles. Kotromanić had further gained for Bosnia
what she had never had before, an outlet on the Adriatic, and both
Hungary and Venice were glad of the aid of so powerful a ruler, who
thus laid the foundations of the future kingdom built up by his
As soon as he had sufficient leisure from his Macedonian
conquests, Dušan demanded the hand of the ban's only daughter for
his son and, as her dowry, the restitution of the Serbian territory which
his rival had annexed ; and, though Venetian intervention prevented
an immediate conflict, a collision between the two Serb potentates was
clearly inevitable. The Bosnian ban thought it wiser to begin the
successor.
1 The Byzantine chronicle (in Sitzungsberichte der k. Akademie, ix. 392) gives
the date of the earthquake; the Turkish settlement was, according to N. Gregorâs
(11. 224) “ about two years earlier,” and due to Cantacuzene (11. 202); the latter
(111. 242, 276) puts it in 1353, and is confirmed by the Bulgarian Chronicle (in
Archiv für slav. Philologie, xii. 537) which narrates it immediately after his
embassy to John Alexander.


## p. 545 (#587) ############################################

Dušan invades Bosnia
545
attack; he availed himself of Dušan's Greek campaign of 1349 to
invade the Serbian Empire and to menace the town of Cattaro. Dušan,
as soon as the subjugation of Epirus and Thessaly was complete, marched
into Bosnia, and laid siege to the strong castle of Bobovac, whose
picturesque ruins still recall the memory of the many Bosnian rulers
who once resided within its walls. The invader found valuable allies
in the Bogomiles, whose support Kotromanić had alienated by embracing
Catholicism, and who, as has usually happened in the history of Bosnia,
flocked to the standard of anyone who would free them from their
persecutor. Their power had greatly increased ; they possessed a
complete organisation ; their spiritual head, or djed, resided at Janjići
in the Bosna valley, and twelve “teachers ” formed a regular hierarchy
under his orders. Moreover, the conflicts of the Dominicans and
Franciscans for the exclusive privilege of persecuting the Bosnian heretics
had naturally favoured the growth of the heresy. Bobovac, however,
resisted all attacks, for the chivalry of its garrison no less than the zeal
of the besiegers was aroused by the presence of the ban's beautiful
daughter within the castle. Dušan was recalled by the troubles in his
own Empire, nor did the few remaining years of his reign leave him
time for repeating this invasion. The death of Kotromanić in 1353,
and the succession of his young nephew Tvrtko I under the regency
of a woman, might otherwise have been the Serbian Tsar's opportunity;
for the Bosnian magnates, many of whom were zealous Bogomiles, were
contemptuous of a ban who was not only a child but a Catholic, nor
could his mother have opposed a second Serbian attack. But Dušan
was occupied with greater schemes; the moment passed for ever, and
it was reserved for the despised Tvrtko to make for himself the greatest
name in Bosnian history, to found a kingdom, and to unite Serbia,
Croatia, and Dalmatia beneath the sceptre of the first Bosnian king.
At the moment of Tvrtko's accession, Dušan was engaged in war
with Hungary. Louis the Great, who now sat on the Hungarian throne,
had aided Kotromanić against the Serbs and had married his fair
daughter, whose hand Dušan had demanded for his son, and whom he
had besieged in Bobovac. The two monarchies had long been rivals,
as they were yesterday; the Serbian Tsar marched to the Danube and
the Save ; Belgrade, the future Serbian capital, lost a generation earlier
and already beginning to be an important fortress, was recovered. But
in the following year the Catholic king made such formidable prepara-
tions for an attack upon the schismatic Tsar, that the latter considered
it prudent to revert to the time-honoured diplomacy of his predecessors
in such cases, and to affect a desire for conversion to Catholicism, so as
to secure the intervention of the Pope on his behalf. He therefore wrote
offering to restore to the Catholics of his dominions most of the
monasteries and churches which he had taken from them, and begging
the Pope to send him some men learned in the Catholic faith. At the
C. MED, H. VOL. IV, CA. XVII.
35


## p. 546 (#588) ############################################

546
Dušan's death, 1355
792 he was
same time he asked to be appointed “ Captain of the Church” against
the Turks. Innocent VI, with the ingenuousness characteristic of the
Papacy in its negotiations with the Balkan Slavs, imagined that Dušan
was in earnest, and sent two bishops to his court, while he diverted the
King of Hungary's projected attack upon so hopeful a proselyte. When,
however, the papal legate and his companion arrived in 1355 at the
Serbian court, they found that the Tsar had no longer any interest in
becoming a Catholic. Cantacuzene had just been deposed; the Byzantine
Empire had fallen into the hands of John V; and there was a party
among the Greeks themselves who thought that the only way of saving
the remnant from the Turks was to invoke the protection of the
powerful Serbian Emperor', whose chances would naturally be all the
greater if he remained a member of the Orthodox Church. Accordingly,
when the legate was introduced into the presence of the Tsar, “of all
men of his time the tallest, and withal terrible to look
upon,
expected to conform to the usual custom of the Serbian court and kiss the
Emperor's foot. On his refusal, Dušan ordered that none of his Catholic
subjects should attend the legate's mass under pain of losing his eyesight;
but neither the orders nor the savage mien of the insistent tyrant availed
against the fervid faith of his German guard, whose captain, Palmann,
boldly told him that they feared God more than they feared the Tsar.
Dušan might well believe that the moment had come for completing
his conquests by that of Constantinople, and establishing what a poetic
Serbian prince of our own day once called a “Balkan Empire,” which
should embrace all the races of the variegated peninsula within its
borders, and keep the Turks beyond the Bosphorus, the Hungarians
beyond the Save. The former were threatening his enemies, the Greeks ;
the latter were about to attack his friends, the Venetians. On St
Michael's Day, 1355, if we may believe the native chronicler, he
assembled his nobles, and asked whether he should lead them against
Byzantium or Buda-Pesth. To their answer, that they would follow
him whithersoever he bade them, his reply was “to Constantinople,”
from which Thrace alone separated his dominions. But on the way he
fell ill of a fever, and at Diavoli, on 20 December, he died. By a
strange irony, the very site of his death is uncertain ; for, while some
think that he had not yet left his own dominions, others place Diavoli
within a few leagues of the imperial city. No Serbian ruler has ever
approached so near it; possibly, had he succeeded and had another
Dušan succeeded him, the Turkish conquest might have been averted.
i Mon. spect. hist. Slav. Merid. III. 266.
2 ASBoll. , Januarius, 11. 998.
3 Miklosich (Monumenta Serbica, 155) gives the day. The year must be 1355,
not 1356, because a Venetian document of 23 Jan. 1356, alludes to his death (Mon.
spect. hist. Slav. Merid. m. 308). Similarly the Serbian and Bosnian Chronicles in
Arch. f. slav. Philologie, xii. 520; xxIII. 631, 633, and in Wiss. Mitt. iv. 377.


## p. 547 (#589) ############################################

Dušan's Code
547
Great as were his conquests, the Serbian Napoleon was no mere
soldier. Like the French Emperor, he was a legislator as well as a
commander, and he has left behind him a code of law, the so-called
Zakonnik, which, like the Code Napoléon, has survived the vast but
fleeting empire which its author too rapidly acquired. Dušan's law-book
consists of 120 articles, of which the first 104 were published in 1349
and the remaining 16 five years later. It is not an original production,
but is largely based on previous legislation ; the articles dealing with
ecclesiastical matters are derived from the canon law of the Greek
Church, others are taken from the statutes of the Adriatic coast-towns,
notably those of Budua, while the institution of trial by jury is borrowed
from Stephen Uroš II. For the modern reader its chief importance
lies in the light which it throws upon the political and social condition
of the Serbian Empire at its zenith.
Medieval Serbia resembled neither of the two Serb states of our own
day. Unlike Montenegro, it was never an autocracy, even in the time of
its first and greatest Tsar, but the powers of the monarch were limited,
as in medieval Bulgaria, by the influence of the great nobles, a class
which does not exist in the modern Serbian kingdom. Society consisted
of the sovereign ; the ecclesiastical hierarchy, ranging from the newly-
created Patriarch to the village priest; the greater and lesser nobles,
called respectively vlastele and vlasteličići ; the peasants, some free and
some serfs bound to the soil; slaves; servants for hire; and, in the
coast-towns, such as Cattaro, and at a few places inland, small com-
munities of burghers. But the magnates were throughout the dominant
section ; one of them established himself as an independent prince at
Strumitsa in Macedonia; on two occasions Dušan had to cope with their
rebellions. The leading men among them formed a privy council of twenty-
four which he consulted before deciding important questions of policy ;
his legal code was approved by a sabor, or parliament of nobles, great and
small, at which the Patriarch and the other chief officials of the Church
were present; and its provisions defined their privileges as jealously as
Their lands were declared hereditary, and their only feudal
burdens consisted of a tithe to holy Church and of military service to the
Tsar during their lifetime, a compulsory bequest of their weapons and
their best horse to him after their death. If they built a church on their
estates, they became patrons of the living; they exercised judicial
powers, with a few exceptions, over their own serfs; they enjoyed the
privilege of killing their inferiors with comparative impunity, for a
graduated tariff regulated the punishment for premeditated murder-
hanging for that of a priest or monk, burning for parricide, fratricide,
or infanticide, the loss of both hands and a fine for that of a noble by a
common man, a simple fine for that of a commoner by a noble. Two
days a week the peasant was compelled to work for his lord ; once a year
he had to pay a capitation-tax to the Tsar. But the law protected him
his own.
CB. XVII.
35-2


## p. 548 (#590) ############################################

548
Dušan's ecclesiastical policy
and secured to him the fruits of his labour; no village might be laid
under contribution by two successive army corps; and, in case of trial
by jury, the jurors were always chosen from the class to which the
accused belonged. But the peasant was expressly excluded from all
share in public affairs; they were the business of his betters alone; and,
if he organised or attended a public meeting, he lost his ears and was
branded on the face. For theft or arson the village, for corveés or fines
the household, of the culprit were held collectively responsible; the
provinces had to build the palaces and maintain the fortresses of the
Tsar.
Next to the nobles, the Orthodox Church was the most influential
class of the community. Though on occasion Dušan coquetted with
Rome, his permanent policy was to strengthen the national Church, to
which he had given a separate organisation, independent of Constanti-
nople. The early archbishops of Serbia had been drawn from the junior
members of the royal family, and their interests were accordingly
identified with those of the Crown; their successors
were often the
apologists and the sycophants of royal criminals, just as, in our own day,
we have seen a Metropolitan of Belgrade condone successful regicide.
In return for their support, the established Church received special
privileges and exemptions : on the one hand, the Tsar protected the new
Patriarchate from Greek reprisals by ordering the expulsion of Greek
priests ; on the other, his code enjoined the compulsory conversion
of his Catholic subjects and the punishment of Catholic priests who
attempted to propagate their doctrines in Orthodox Serbia. A similar
phenomenon, the result of policy not of fanaticism, meets us in the
kindred Empire of Bulgaria. There we find John Alexander—a man
who was so little of a purist that he sent his Wallachian wife to a
nunnery and married a beautiful Jewess—consigning his ecclesiastical
conscience to an inspired bigot, half-hermit, half-missionary, and, at his
bidding, holding two Church Councils against the Bogomiles and similar
heretics, who sought salvation by discarding their clothes, and who paid
for their errors by branding or banishment. “The friend of monks, the
nourisher of the poor," he founded a monastery at the foot of Mt Vitoš,
and gave rich gifts to Rila, where one of Dušan's great officials ended his
career and built the tower which still
Even the
Jewish Tsaritsa, with all the zeal of a convert, restored churches and
endowed monasteries, but her munificence could not prevent the
restriction of the civil liberties of her own people, from whom the state
executioner was selected.
While the great Serbia of Dušan, like the smaller Serbia of our own
day, was pre-eminently an agricultural state, whose inhabitants were
chiefly occupied in tilling the land and in rearing live-stock, it possessed
the enormous advantage of a coastline, which thus facilitated trade.
Like the enlightened statesman that he was, Dušan had no prejudices
יל
name.
preserves his


## p. 549 (#591) ############################################

Contemporary Sluv culture
549
against foreign merchants. He allowed them to circulate freely, and to
the Ragusans, who were the most important of them, he shewed marked
favours. Thus, while Ragusan chroniclers complain of his father's
vexatious policy towards the South Slavonic republic, he vied with the
ban of Bosnia, in 1333, in giving her the peninsula of Sabbioncello, over
which both sovereigns had claims. The possession of this long and
narrow strip of land enormously reduced the time and cost of transport
into Bosnia, and amply repaid the annual tribute which Ragusa
prudently paid to both Serbia and Bosnia to ensure her title, and the
expense of the still extant fortifications which she hastily erected to
defend it, lest the king should repent of his bargain. He allowed a
colony of Saxons to work the silver mines of Novobrdo, and to exercise
the trade of charcoal-burners; but a wise regard for his forests led him
to limit the number of these relentless woodmen. His guard was
composed of Germans, and its captain obtained great influence with him.
He guaranteed the privileges of the numerous Greek cities in Macedonia
which he had conquered, and endeavoured to secure the support of the
natural leaders of the Hellenic element in his composite Empire by
including them among the ranks of the nobility. Anxious for informa-
tion about other, and more civilised, lands than his own, he sent
frequent missions to different countries, and sought the hand of a
French princess for his son ; but this great match was hindered by the
difference of religion, and Stephen Uroš V had to content himself with
a Wallachian wife. With no Western state were the relations of both
Serbia and Bulgaria closer than with Venice. Dušan more than once
offered her his aid; she on one occasion accepted his mediation ;
while John Alexander gave her merchants leave to build a church, and
allowed her consul to reside at Varna, whence she could dispute the
Black Sea trade with Genoa, whose colony of Kaffa had already brought
her into intercourse with Bulgaria. To shew his hospitality to foreigners,
Dušan decreed that ambassadors from abroad should receive free meals
in each village through which they passed.
Of literary culture there are traces in both the Slav Empires at
this period. Dušan, following the example of Stephen Uroš II, the
donor of books to the Serbian hospital which he founded at Constanti-
nople, presented the nucleus of a library to Ragusa. John Alexander
was, however, a patron of literature on a larger scale. For him was
executed the Slav translation of the Chronicle of Constantine Manasses,
the copy of which in the Vatican' contains coloured portraits: of the
Tsar; of his second son, John Asên, lying dead with the Emperor and
Empress standing by the bier, and the Patriarch and clergy performing
the obsequies ; of the boy's reception in heaven ; and of the Tsar, this
time surrounded by three of his sons. These extremely curious pictures,
rougher in design than Byzantine work, are of great value for the
i Codice Slavo II.
CH. XVII.


## p. 550 (#592) ############################################

550
Character of Dušan's Empire
son.
Bulgarian art and costume of the middle of the fourteenth century,
just as the frescoes at Boyana are for those of the thirteenth.
Three other treatises of a theological character were copied by order
of this same ruler, while his spiritual adviser, St Theodosius of Trnovo,
whose life was written in Greek, was the master of a school of literary
monks, whose works are the swan-song of the second Bulgarian Empire.
Boril, another much earlier Tsar, commanded the translation of a
Greek law-book directed against the Bogomiles. But the Serbian
sovereigns of the thirteenth and the early fourteenth centuries, more
fortunate than their Bulgarian contemporaries, found a biographer in the
Archbishop Daniel, whose partiality can only be excused by his depen-
dence upon their bounty, but whose work forms a continuation of the
various lives of Nemanja. Of Serbian music the sole contemporary
account is from the pen of a Greek, who found the singing of the Easter
hymns simply excruciating; but the same author mentions that the
Serbs already commemorated the great deeds of their national heroes
in those ballads which only attained their full development after the
fatal battle of Kossovo. Their best architects came from Cattaro,
where was also the Serbian mint in the reigns of both Dušan and his
It is noticeable that under the former's rival, Stephen Kotromanić,
began the series of Bosnian coins, a proof of the growing commercial
importance of that third Slav state.
The Serbs look back to the reign of Dušan as the most glorious epoch
of their history. But his name is more than a historical memory: it is a
political programme. The five centuries and more which have elapsed
since his death have seemed but as a watch in the night of Turkish domi-
nation to the patriots of Belgrade. They have regarded his conquests as
the title-deeds of their race to lands that had long ceased to be theirs,
and a Serbian diplomatist has been known to quote him to a practical
British statesman, to whom it would never have occurred to claim a
large part of France because it had belonged to the Plantagenets in the
time of Dušan. But, while the lost Empire of the great Tsar is still
à factor in Balkan politics, it must have been evident to those of his
contemporaries who were men of foresight that it could not last.
Medieval Serbia, like some modern states, was made too fast; at its
zenith it comprised five Balkan races-Serbs, Greeks, Albanians,
Koutzo-Wallachs, and that aboriginal tribe whose name still survived
in Dušan's code in the term neropch as a designation for a kind of serf.
Of these races, the Greeks were on a higher intellectual plane and were
the products of an older civilisation than that of their conquerors, who
recognised the fact by imitating the usages of the Greek capital, where
Dušan himself passed his boyhood. Moreover, the natural antipathy
between the Hellene and the Slav was accentuated by Dušan's creation
of a Serbian Patriarchate, a measure which produced similar bitterness
to that caused by the erection of the Bulgarian Exarchate in 1870, and


## p. 551 (#593) ############################################

Its lack of unity
551
which had a similar political object. The Greeks of the Serbian Empire
naturally regarded with suspicion and resentment a Tsar who was
excommunicated by the Ecumenical Patriarch and who had expelled
their priests; and the negotiations of the Serbian government shew
the importance which it attached to official Greek recognition of the
national Church. The Albanians, again, were first-class fighting men,
who then, as now, had little love for the Serbs, from whom they
differed in religion, while the hands of the Bogomile heretics were
always against the established order in their own country, although
they might side with a foreign invader of another faith. Thus, despite
Dušan's attempt to enforce theological uniformity, four religious bodies
yet further divided the five races of his Empire, and experience has
shewn, alike in India and in the Balkans, that such a mixture of
nationalities and creeds can only be governed by a foreign race which
stands outside them all. The Serbian element, even if united, was not
sufficiently numerous to dominate the others, nor did Dušan in all his
glory unite the whole Serbo-Croatian nor even the whole Serb stock
beneath his sceptre. The one unifying force in the Empire, the monarchy,
was weakened by its limitations, which in their turn corresponded with
the national traditions and character. Even the strongest of Serbian
monarchs was barely equal to the task of suppressing the great nobles,
and it was doubtless distrust of the native aristocracy which led him to
surround himself with a German guard and to give important posts to
foreigners who owed everything to him. While, therefore, Stephen
Dušan is justly considered to have been the ablest and most famous of
Serbian rulers, the vast Empire which he built up so rapidly was as
ephemeral as that of Napoleon. Still, short-lived as was that Serbian
hegemony of the Balkan races which was his work, it will be remembered
by his countrymen as long as the Eastern Question, in which these
historical reminiscences have played such an embarrassing part, continues
to perplex the statesmen of Western, and to divide the nationalities of
South-Eastern, Europe.
CH. XVII.


## p. 552 (#594) ############################################

552
CHAPTER XVIII.
THE BALKAN STATES.
II. THE TURKISH CONQUEST (1355-1483).
The great Serbian Empire broke into fragments on the death of
Dušan. The dying Tsar had made his magnates swear to maintain
the rights of his son, then a boy of nineteen. But even the most
solemn oaths could not restrain the boundless ambition and the mutual
jealousies of those unruly officials. Stephen Uroš V had scarcely been
proclaimed when his uncle Simeon Uroš, the viceroy of Acarnania and
Aetolia, disputed the succession. Many of the nobles were on the
latter's side; the Dowager-Empress, instead of protecting her son's
interests, played for her own hand; while the most powerful satraps
availed themselves of this family quarrel to establish theniselves as
independent princes, each in his own part of the country, sending aid
to either of the rival Emperors, or remaining neutral, according as it
suited their purpose. The civil war in Serbia and the death of Preljub, the
Serbian governor of Joánnina and Thessaly, suggested to Nicephorus II,
the exiled Despot of Epirus, the idea of recovering his lost dominions.
His former subjects received him gladly; he drove Simeon into Macedonia
and might have retained his throne, had he not offended the Albanians
by deserting his wife in order to marry the sister of the Serbian Empress.
An Albanian victory near the town of Achelous in 1358 ended his career
and with it the despotat of Epirus. Simeon then returned, and es-
tablished his authority in reality over Thessaly, in name over Epirus
also. Thenceforth, however, he confined his personal attention entirely
to the former province, making Trikala his capital and styling himself
Emperor of the Greeks and Serbs,” while he assigned Joánnina
to his son-in-law Thomas Preljubović, and left the rest of Epirus
to two Albanian chieftains, heads of the clans of Boua and Liosa.
From that time onward the Serbian possessions in Greece remained
separate from the rest of the Empire. Simeon Uroš was succeeded
in 1371 by his son John Uroš, who retired from the pomps of Trikala
to the famous monastery of Meteoron, where, long after the Turkish
conquest of Thessaly in 1393, he died as abbot. At Joánnina Thomas
Preljubović, after a tyrannical reign, was assassinated by his bodyguard,


## p. 553 (#595) ############################################

Break-up of the Serbian Empire
553
יל
and his widow, by marrying a Florentine, ended Serbian rule there in
1386. The four decades of Serbian sway over Thessaly and Epirus in
the fourteenth century are now almost forgotten. Its only memorials are
an inscription at the Serbian capital of Trikala ; the church of the
Transfiguration at Metéoron, founded by the pious “ King Joseph,” as
John Uroš was called by his fellow-monks; and perhaps the weird beasts
imbedded in the walls of the castle at Joánnina.
The Greek provinces of the Serbian Empire were naturally least
attached to Dušan's son. With a certain section of the Serbian nobles
John Cantacuzene had always been more popular than the great Tsar
himself, and accordingly Voijihna, who held the rank of “Caesar"
and governed Drama, invited Matthew Cantacuzene to invade Macedonia,
and promised that Seres, which contained the Empress, should be his.
Matthew engaged a body of Turkish auxiliaries for this enterprise; but
these turbulent irregulars disregarded his orders, and began to attack
and plunder his Serbian confederates. The latter retaliated, and
Matthew, forced to flee, was captured while hiding among the reeds
of the marshes near Philippopolis, and handed over by Voijihna to the
Greek Emperor. Seres, meanwhile, continued to be the residence of
the Serbian Empress, while from there to the Danube stretched the vast
provinces of the brothers John Uglješa and Vukašin, natives of the
Herzegovina, of whom the former was marshal, and the latter guardian
and cup-bearer, of the young Tsar. Between Seres and the Vardar lay
the domain of Bogdan, a doughty warrior whose name is still famous in
Serbian ballads. In the Zeta, the cradle of the dynasty, the family of
Balša, by some connected with the French house of Baux, by others
with the royal blood of Nemanja through the female line, from imperial
governors became independent princes, whose territory stretched down
to the Adriatic at Budua and Antivari and whose chief residence was
Scutari. Various native chiefs held the rest of Albania, most famous
among them Carlo Thopia, who in 1368 drove the Angevins, from
whom he boasted his descent, out of Durazzo, and whose monument
with the French lilies is still to be seen near Elbassan? . Finally, Lazar
Hrebeljanović, a young noble connected by marriage with the imperial
house (according to some he was a natural son of Dušanº), administered
Mačva on the Hungarian frontier. Central authority there was none
save the young and feeble Tsar, a mere figure-head, guided, like
Rehoboam of old, by the advice of men as young and inexperienced
as himself.