No More Learning

Meanwhile, the Turks were rapidly spreading their sway over Thrace.
Demotika, Hadrianople, Philippopolis, marked the progress of their arms; ;
the city of Philip became the residence of the first Beglerbeg of Rumelia,
that of Hadrian the capital of the Turkish Empire. In vain the chivalrous
Count of Savoy recovered Gallipoli; despite the appeal of Kydónis, that
important position was surrendered to the Sultan. One place after
another in Bulgaria fell before him; their inhabitants were exempted
from taxes on condition that they guarded the baggage of the Turkish
army. Popular legends still preserve the memory of the stand made by
the imperial family in the neighbourhood of Sofia; the disastrous
attempt of the Serbs to repulse the Turks in the valley of the Maritza
is one of the landmarks of Balkan history. Alarmed at the progress of
the enemy, Vukašin and his brother Uglješa collected a large army of
Serbs and Wallachs, which marched as far as Chirmen between Philip-
popolis and Hadrianople. There, at dawn on 26 September 1371, a
greatly inferior Turkish force surprised them; most of the Christians
perished in the waters of the river; both the King of Serbia and his
brother were slain, and poetic justice made the traitor Vukašin the
victim of his own servant. So great was the carnage that the battlefield
is still called “the Serbs' destruction. ” Macedonia was now at the
mercy of the conqueror, for the leaders of the people had been killed,
and their successors and survivors were compelled to pay tribute and
render military service to the Turks. On these ignominious terms
“the king's (Vukašin's] son Marko," that greatest hero of South Slavonic
poetry, was able to retain Prilep and Skoplje, and his friend Constantine
the district round Velbužd, whose modern name of Köstendil contains a
reminiscence of the time when the borderland between Bulgaria and
Macedonia was still known as “Constantine's
“ Constantine's country. ” Even the
Bulgarian Tsar could only save himself by promising to follow the
Sultan to war and by sending his sister Thamar to Murād's seraglio,
where “the white Bulgarian " princess neither forswore her religion nor
yet forgot her country.
Two months after the Serbian defeat on the Maritza, Stephen Uroš V
died “as Tsar and in his own land,” the last legitimate male descendant
of the house of Nemanja. The adherents of the national dynasty
naturally fixed their eyes at this critical moment upon Lazar Hrebeljano-
vić, who was connected with the imperial family and had led the
opposition to Vukašin. Lazar ascended the throne of the greatly
diminished Serbian Empire, and either a sense of proportion or his
native modesty led him to prefer the style of “ Prince” to the title of
Tsar which was conferred upon him. But the hegemony of the
Southern Slavs now passed from Serbia to Bosnia, whose ruler, Tvrtko,
after a long and desperate struggle for the mastery of his own house,
יר
יל
CH. XVIII.


## p. 556 (#598) ############################################

556
Hegemony of Bosnia
לל
had become the leading statesman of the Balkan peninsula. Threatened
by Louis the Great of Hungary, who forced him to surrender part of
the land of Hum and sought to make him a mere puppet without
power; deposed at one moment by his rebellious barons and his ambitious
brother, and then restored by Hungarian arms; he was at last able to
think of extending his dominions. The moment was favourable to his
plans. The King of Hungary was occupied with Poland; the Bosnian
nobles were crushed ; his brother was an exile at Ragusa ; while Lazar
was glad to purchase his aid against his own refractory magnates by
allowing him to take from them and keep for himself large portions
of Serbian territory, which included a strip of the Dalmatian coast from
the Cetina to the Bocche di Cattaro and the historic monastery of
Mileševo in the district of Novibazar. There in 1376, on the grave
of St Sava, Tvrtko had himself crowned with two diadems“ King of
the Serbs, and of Bosnia, and of the coast. ” Not a voice was raised
against this assumption of the royal authority and of the Serbian
title, which he could claim as great-grandson of Stephen Dragutin.
All his successors bore it, together with the kingly name of Stephen.
Ragusa was the first to recognise him as the rightful wearer of the
Serbian crown, and promptly paid him the so-called “Serbian tribute,"
which the republic had been accustomed to render to the Kings of
Serbia on the feast of St Demetrius. Venice followed suit, and the
King of Hungary was too busy to protest. Tvrtko proceeded to live
up to his new dignities. His court at Sutjeska and Bobovac, where the
crown was kept, was organised on the Byzantine model. Rough Bosnian
barons held offices with high-sounding Greek names, and the sovereign
became the fountain of hereditary honours. Hitherto Bosnian coins
had been scarce except some of Stephen Kotromanić, and Ragusan, Hun-
garian, and Venetian pieces had fulfilled most purposes of trade. But now
money, of which many specimens still exist, was minted from the silver
of Srebrenica and Olovo, bearing Tvrtko's visored helmet surmounted
by a crown of fleur-de-lis with a hop-blossom above it. Married to a
princess of the Bulgarian imperial house, representing in his own person
both branches of the Serbian stock, Stephen Tvrtko took his new office
of king by the grace of God very seriously, for he was animated, as he
once wrote, “with the wish to raise up that which is fallen and to restore
that which is destroyed. "
Tvrtko had gained the great object of all Serbian rulers, medieval
and modern—a frontage on the sea. But the flourishing republic of
Ragusa interrupted his coast-line, while he coveted the old Serbian
city of Cattaro, hidden in the remotest bend of its splendid fiord; both
of them were then under Hungarian protection, and the former was too
strong to be conquered by one who had no navy. The death of Louis
the Great of Hungary in 1382 and the subsequent confusion were his
i Miklosich, Mon. Serb. p. 187.
"1


## p. 557 (#599) ############################################

The Turkish advance
557
opportunity. In the same year he founded the picturesque fortress
of Novi, or Castelnuovo, at the entrance of the Bocche, to be the rival
of Ragusa and the outlet of all the inland trade, as it is the port
of the new Bosnian line. Three years later Cattaro was his. Thus
possessed of the fiord which is now a Jugoslav naval station, he sought
to make Bosnia a maritime power and thereby conquer the Dalmatian
coast-towns. One after another they were about to surrender, and
15 June 1389 had been fixed as the date on which Spalato was to have
opened its gates. But when that day arrived, Tvrtko was occupied
elsewhere, and the fate of the Southern Slavs for centuries was decided
on the field of Kossovo.
The successes of the Turkish arms had thoroughly alarmed the
leaders of the Serbian race, for the Turks had been coming nearer and
nearer to the peculiarly Serbian lands. In 1382 the divided Bulgarian
Empire had lost Sofia, the present capital; in 1386 Niš was taken from
the Serbs and Lazar forced to purchase a craven peace by the promise
to pay an annual tribute and to furnish a contingent of horsemen to the
Sultan. Upon this the Bosnian king made common cause with his
Serbian neighbour ; a Pan-Serbian league was formed against the Turks,
and in 1387 on the banks of the Toplica the allies won a great victory,
their first and last, over the dreaded foe. This triumph at once
decided the waverers: John Shishman joined the league; Mircea, the first
Prince of Wallachia who received the epithet of “Great,” took his
share in the defence of the peninsula. Croatians, Albanians, and even
Poles and Hungarians, furnished contingents to the army which was
intended to save the Balkans for the Balkan peoples. On his side,
Murād made long preparations to crush the Christians who had dared
to combine against their destined masters.
Bulgaria, being the nearest, received the first blow. The capital
of the Tsars offered but a feeble resistance ; Shishman, after a stubborn
defence of Great Nicopolis between Trnovo and the Danube, obtained
peace from the Sultan on condition that he paid his arrears of tribute
and ceded the fortress of Silistria. Scarcely had Murād left, when he
refused to carry out this humiliating cession; whereupon the Turkish
commander captured his castles on the Danube, besieged him again in
Great Nicopolis, and forced him a second time to beg for mercy. Murād
was long-suffering; he allowed Shishman to retain a throne from which
he knew full well that he could remove him at his own good pleasure.
Sracinir, too, remained in his “royal city of Vidin ” by accepting the
suzerainty of the Sultan, instead of signing himself “ vassal of the King
of Hungary. "
. " Having thus disposed of Bulgaria, Murād marched into
Old Serbia by way of Köstendil, where his tributary, Constantine,
entertained him splendidly and joined his army. Lazar's messenger,
1 The Serbian is more probable than the Turkish date of 1375.
2 Archiv f. slav. Phil. xvii. pp. 544-7.
ול
CH. XVIII.


## p. 558 (#600) ############################################

558
Battle of Kossovo, 1389
answer.
the bearer of a haughty message, was sent back with an equally haughty
From his capital of Kruševac (for the Serbian royal residence
had receded within the recent limits of the modern kingdom) Lazar set
out attended by all his paladins to do battle on the field of Kossovo.
The armies met on 15 June 1389. Seven nationalities composed
that of the Christians; at least one Christian vassal helped to swell
the smaller forces of the Turks. While Murād was arraying himself
for the fight, a noble Serb, Miloš Kobilić, presented himself as a deserter
and begged to have speech of the Sultan, for whose ear he had important
information. His request was granted, he entered the royal tent, and
stabbed Murād to the heart, paying with his own life for this act of
daring and thereby gaining immortality in Serbian poetry. Though
deprived of their sovereign, the Turks, with the perfect discipline
once characteristic of their armies on the field of battle, went into action
without dismay. At first the Bosniaks under Vlatko Hranić drove
back one of the Turkish wings; but Bāyazīd I, the young Sultan, held
his own on the other, and threw the Christians into disorder. A rumour
of treachery increased their confusion; whether truly or no, it is still
the popular tradition that Vuk Branković, Lazar's son-in-law, betrayed
the Serbian cause at Kossovo. Lazar was taken prisoner, and slain in
the tent where the dying Murad lay, and Bāyazīd secured the succession
to his father's throne by ordering his brother to be strangled, thus
completing the horrors of that fatal day.
At first Christendom believed that the Turks had been defeated ;
a Te Deum was sung in Paris to the God of battles, and Florence wrote
to congratulate Tvrtko on the supposed victory, to which his Bosniaks
had contributed. But Lazar's widow Milica, as the ballad so beautifully
tells the tale, soon learnt the truth in her “white palace” at Kruševac
from the crows that had hovered over the battlefield. The name of
Kossovo polje (“ the plain of black birds "') is still remembered throughout
the Serbian lands as if the fight had been fought but yesterday. Every
year the sad anniversary is solemnly kept, and in token of mourning for
that great national calamity (the Waterloo of the Serbian Empire) the
Montenegrins still wear a black band on their caps. Murād's heart is
still preserved on the spot where he died ; Lazar's shroud is still treasured
by the Hungarian Serbs in the monastery of Vrdnik ; and in many a
lonely village the minstrel sings to the sound of the gusle the melancholy
legend of Kossovo. Kumanovo, 523 years later, avenged that day.
1 The other versions are that Murād was killed by a wounded Serb on the field,
and Lazar in the battle. Stanojević (Archiv, xviii. p. 416 n. 1) and Jireček (Gesch.
d. Serben, 11. i, 122) deny the tradition, universal since 1601, of Branković's treachery.
Cf. Ducas, pp. 15-7; Chalcocondyles, pp. 53–9, 327; Sa'd-ad-Din, 1. pp. 152-5; Maku-
scev, Monumenta, I. p. 528 (a contemporary document, which makes 12 Serbs force
their way to Murād's tent). The form “Kobilić,” which appears in the Italian version
of Ducas (p. 353), was altered in the eighteenth century to “Obilić,” because
“Kobilić” (i. l. "son of a brood-mare") seemed inelegant.


## p. 559 (#601) ############################################

Zenith of Turtko I
559
The Serbian Empire had fallen, but a diminished Serbian principality
lingered on for another 70 years. Bāyazid I recognised Stephen Lazarević,
the late ruler's eldest son, a lad not yet of age, on condition that he paid
tribute, came every year with a contingent to join the Turkish troops,
and gave him the hand of his youngest sister. The Sultan then with-
drew, leaving the Serbs weakened and divided. Vuk Branković, likewise
his vassal, held the old capital of Priština and styled himself “ lord of
the Serbs and of the Danubian regions"; the dynasty of Balša ruled over
the Zeta. Tvrtko, instead of using this brief respite to concentrate all his
energies for the defence of his realm against the Turks, continued his
Dalmatian campaign; made himself master of all the coast-towns, except
Zara and Ragusa, as well as of some of the islands; and assumed, in
1390, the additional title of “King of Dalmatia and Croatia. " The
first King of Bosnia had now reached the summit of his power. He had
achieved the difficult feat of uniting Serbs and Croats under one sceptre;
he had made Bosnia the centre of a great kingdom, which possessed a
frontage on the Adriatic from the Quarnero to Cattaro, save for the two
enclaves of Zara and Ragusa; he had laid the foundations of a sea-power;
and under his auspices Dalmatia, in union with Bosnia, was no longer
what she has so often been- a face without a head. ” Even thus his
ambition was not appeased. He was anxious to conclude a political
alliance with Venice, and a matrimonial alliance (for his wife had just
died) with the house of Habsburg. Then, on 23 March 1391, he died,
without even being able to secure the succession for his son, and the vast
power which his country had so rapidly acquired as rapidly waned. The
Bosnian kingdom had been made too fast. Its founder had not lived
long enough to weld his conquests into an harmonious whole, to combine
Catholic Croats with Orthodox Serbs, Bosnian Slavs with the Latin popula-
tion of the Dalmatian coast-towns, Bogomile heretics with zealous partisans
of Rome. The old Slavonic law of succession, which did not recognise the
custom of primogeniture, added to these racial and religious difficulties
by multiplying candidates to the elective monarchy; and thus foreign
princes found an excuse for intervention, and the great barons an excuse
for independence. Deprived of all real authority, which lay in the
hands of the privy council of nobles, Tvrtko's successors were unable to
cope with the Turkish autocracy, while the Kings of Hungary, instead of
assisting them, turned their arms against a land which from its geograph-
ical position might have been the bulwark of Christendom.
The evil effects of Tvrtko's death were soon felt. His brother, or cousin,
Stephen Dabiša, who succeeded him, felt himself too feeble to govern so
large a kingdom. The Turks invaded Bosnia ; the King of Naples was
plotting to obtain Dalmatia and Croatia. Accordingly, at Djakovo in
Slavonia, in 1393, Dabiša ceded the two valuable and neighbouring
lands, which his brother had so lately won, to King Sigismund of
Hungary, who recognised him as King of Bosnia, and to whom he
CA. XVIJI.


## p. 560 (#602) ############################################

560
End of the Bulgarian Empire
bequeathed the Bosnian crown after his death. A combination of
Bosnian magnates and Croatian rebels refused, however, to accept this
arrangement, which Dabiša thereupon repudiated. A Hungarian in-
vasion and the capture of the strong fortress of Dobor on the lower
Bosna reduced him to submission, and a battle before the walls of
Knin in Dalmatia finally severed the brief connexion between that
country and the Bosnian crown. On Dabiša's death, in 1395, the royal
authority was further weakened by the regency of his widow, Helena
Gruba, in the name of his infant son. All power was in the hands of
the magnates, who had elected her as their nominal sovereign, but who
were practically independent princes in their own domains. One of their
number, the Grand-Duke Hrvoje Vukčić, towered above his fellows, and
his figure dominates Bosnian history for the next quarter of a century.
Meanwhile the Turks had gained fresh triumphs in the Eastern
Balkans. Mirčea of Wallachia, who like his modern representative
ruled over the Dobrudzha with the strong fortress of Silistria (a precedent
invoked in 1913), was carried off a prisoner to Brūsa and only released
on payment of tribute in 1391—the first mention of Wallachia as a
tributary province of Turkey. Two years later Bāyazīd resolved to
make an end of Bulgaria. On 17 July 1393 Trnovo was taken by
storm after a three months' siege; the churches were desecrated, the
castle and the palaces were set on fire, the leading nobles were treacher-
ously summoned to a consultation and then butchered; the last
Bulgarian Patriarch was stripped of his sacred garb and led to execution
on the city wall. At the last moment, however, a miracle (so runs the
legend) arrested the headsman's arm; the Patriarch's life was spared;
and he lived to conduct a band of sorrowful exiles across the Balkans,
where he was ordered to bid his flock farewell. Their path led to Asia
Minor, his to Macedonia, where he ended his days; the Bulgarian
national Church was suppressed, and from 1394 to 1870 Bulgaria
remained under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Ecumenical
Patriarch. Thus alike in politics and religion the Bulgars became the
slaves of foreigners; the Turks governed their bodies, the Greeks
ministered to their souls. It is no wonder that many abjured their
faith in order to reap the advantages of the Turkish colony which
settled on the castle hill among the blackened walls of the imperial
palaces, and offered up prayer in the mosque that had once been the
church of the Forty Martyrs, over the graves of the Bulgarian Tsars.
John Shishman had been absent when his capital fell, but he did not
long survive its fall. Local tradition connects his death with the
mound which still bears his name near Samokov, where seven fountains
mark the successive bounds of his severed head. A Bulgarian chronicle
states, however, that Bāyazīd killed the captive Tsar on 3 June 1395.
One of his sons became a Musulman; another settled in Hungary;
1 Archiv f. slav. Phil. xii. p. 539.


## p. 561 (#603) ############################################

Battle of Nicopolis, 1396
561
while Sracimir was allowed to linger as a Turkish vassal in his palace at
Vidin—the last remnant of the Bulgarian Empire.
Bāyazīd's next object was to crush Mirčea. Followed by his unwilling
Serbian dependents, “ the king's son, Marko," and Constantine, he
invaded Wallachia, and at Rovine on 10 October 1394 gained a victory
with heavy loss of life. Marko Kraljević had said to his friend Con-
stantine that he prayed that the Christians might win and that he
himself might fall among the first victims of their swords. Half the
prayer was heard ; the two comrades perished in the battle. Mirčea fled
to Sigismund of Hungary, who restored him to his throne and prepared
to recover Bulgaria, which he had demanded from the Sultan as an
ancient possession of the Hungarian crown. Bāyazīd's reply was to lead
the envoy into his arsenal, and there to shew him hanging on the walls
the weapons that were the Turkish title-deeds of Bulgaria.
Sigismund assembled an army of many nationalities, which was to
drive the Turk from Europe and revive the memory of the Crusades.
The first act of his soldiers in the Balkan peninsula was to attack the
Christian vassals of the Sultan, to plunder the Serbs, and to force
Sracimir of Vidin to acknowledge for the second time the Hungarian
suzerainty. Nicopolis on the Danube? resisted for 15 days, until
Bāyazīd had time to come up. There, on 25 September 1396, a great
battle was fought which sealed the fate of this brilliant but ill-planned
expedition. The rashness of the proud French chivalry, the retreat of
the Wallachian prince, and the strategy of the Sultan, were responsible
for the overwhelming defeat of the Christians, while it was reserved for
Stephen Lazarević and his 15,000 Serbs? , at a critical moment, to strike
the decisive blow for the Turks. Immediately after the battle, or at most
two years later, the victor ended the last vestige of the Bulgarian
Empire at Vidin, and the whole of Bulgaria became for nearly five
centuries a Turkish province. The last Tsar's son, like Constantine“ the
Philosopher” and other Bulgarian men of letters (for the Empress
Anne of Vidin had patronised learning:), found a refuge at the court of
the literary Serbian prince, whose hospitality Constantine repaid by
writing the biography which is so valuable a record of this period.
Unfortunately South Slavonic literature only began to flourish when the
Balkan States were already either dead or dying.
Stephen Lazarević was well aware that he only existed upon the
sufferance of the Sultan, and for the first thirteen years of his long
reign he thought it prudent to follow a Turcophil policy, even at the
cost of his own race and his own religion. Content with the modest
title of “Despot,” which he received from the Byzantine Emperor, he
aimed at the retention of local autonomy by the strict observance of his
1 Archiv f. slav. Phil. XIJI. p. 539, xiv. p. 274.
2 Schiltberger, Bondage, p. 3.
3 Archives de l'Orient latin, 11. pp. 389-90.
C. MED. H. VOL. IV. CH. XVIII.
36
=
it


## p. 562 (#604) ############################################

562
Battle of Angora, 1402
promises to his suzerain. Thus every year he accompanied the Turkish
troops; in 1398 his soldiers assisted in the first great Turkish invasion
of Bosnia ; in 1402 he stood by the side of Bāyazīd at the fatal battle of
Angora with 5,000 (according to others 10,000) lancers, all clad in armour.
When the fortune of the day had already decided against the Sultan, the
Serbian horsemen twice cut their way through the Tartar bowmen, whose
arrows rebounded from their iron cuirasses. Seeing that all was lost,
Stephen in vain urged Bāyazīd to flee ; and, when the latter refused to
leave the field, the Serbian prince saved the life of the Sultan's eldest son
Sulaimān, and escaped with him to Brūsa. There the Sultan's Serbian
wife, whose hand had been the price of Serbian autonomy thirteen years
before, fell into the power of Tamerlane. The brutal Mongol, flushed
with his victory, insulted both his captives by compelling the Serbian
Sultana to pour out his wine in the presence of her husband, no longer
66 the Thunderbolt” of Islām.
The Turkish defeat at Angora and the civil war between the sons of
Bāyazīd which followed it, removed for a time the danger which threatened
the Christian states of the Balkan peninsula. It was now the policy of
the Serbian Despot to play off one Turkish pretender against another.
At first he supported Sulaiman, who had been proclaimed Sultan at
Hadrianople; then, like Mirčea of Wallachia, he espoused the cause of
Mūsà, only, however, to desert him at a critical moment. But Stephen
was not the only Serb who sought to profit by the rivalry of the Turkish
claimants. George Branković, the son of the traditional traitor of
Kossovo, had succeeded his father in 1398, and, no longer content with
the lordship of Priština, had assumed the style of “ Prince of Serbia. ”
Branković undermined Stephen's influence at the court of Sulaimān, who
despatched him with a Turkish force to make good his pretensions.
A
second battle on the fatal field of Kossovo, fought on 21 November 1403,
resulted in so uncertain a victory for either side that Branković and
Stephen concluded peace. The two relatives were temporarily reconciled;
Branković contented himself with his paternal heritage and the expecta-
tion that one day he might succeed the childless Stephen ; Sulaiman was
occupied by the civil war in Asia, and sorely-tried Serbia enjoyed, under
her benevolent despot, a period of peace, while an attempt of the late
Tsar's sons to raise a revolt in Bulgaria failed.
Stephen Lazarević, secure against Turkish and domestic intrigue,
devoted his energies to the organisation of his country and the patronage
of literature. We are told that he appointed a species of Cabinet, with
which he was wont to discuss affairs of state ; a second class of officials
meanwhile attended in an outer room to receive the orders of his
ministers; while a third set of functionaries waited in an ante-chamber
to carry them out. Imaginative writers have seen in these arrangements
the germs of parliamentary government; but the description rather
suggests an elaborate system of bureaucracy. He obtained Belgrade


## p. 563 (#605) ############################################

Reign of Stephen Lazarević
563
from the Hungarians by diplomacy in 1404, fortified it, and adorned it
with churches. But his most celebrated religious foundation was the
monastery of Manassia, still one of the glories of Serbia.
inclinations were in the direction of a monastic life, and he converted his
court into an abode of puritanical dullness, whence music and mirth
were banished and where literature was the sole relaxation of the pious
diplomatist who sat on the throne. Himself an author, he possessed
a rich library, and he strove to increase it by the translations of Greek
books which were made by his orders. Thus for five years the land had
rest.
Serbia had again and again suffered from the quarrels of the reigning
family; and even when it should have united to consolidate the state
against the inevitable Turkish revival, a fresh pretender arose in the
person of Stephen's next brother Vuk, who demanded half of the country
as his share and appeared at the head of a Turkish army to enforce his
demand. Stephen was compelled to retire to the strong frontier-fortress
of Belgrade, and to purchase domestic peace by ceding the south of
Serbia to his brother, under Turkish suzerainty, in 1409. Fortunately
for the national unity, Vuk did not long survive this arrangement.
Summoned to assist Mūsà in the civil war which still divided the
Turkish Empire, he played the part of traitor, after the fashion of the
day, thinking thereby to obtain the whole of Serbia from the gratitude
of Sulaimān. But on his way to seize his reward, he fell into the hands
of the Sultan whom he had betrayed. Mūsà sent him and the youngest
of the three Lazarević brothers to the scaffold; but, with characteristic
diplomacy, he spared the life of George Branković, who had shared the
treachery of the others, in order that Stephen might still have a rival,
and the Turks an ally, in his own household. Branković at first acted
as the Sultan had anticipated, and the latter, at last triumphant over
Sulaimān in 1410, invaded Serbia. In order to strike terror into the
hearts of the Serbs, the barbarous invader butchered the entire garrison
of three castles, and then ordered his meal to be spread upon their
reeking corpses. Acts of this kind made Branković revolt from contact
with such a monster. He abandoned the camp of Mūsà, was reconciled
with Stephen, and thenceforth regarded his uncle as a father whose
crown he would one day inherit. Together they aided Mahomet I,
the most powerful of the Turkish claimants, to overthrow his brother.
At the battle of Chamorlú near Samokov, on 10 July 1413, the fate of
the Turkish Empire and with it that of the Balkan Slavs was decided.
It was the lot of the two Serbian rulers, Stephen Lazarević and his
nephew, to contribute, the one by the assistance of his subjects the other
by his personal prowess, on that day to the consolidation of the Ottoman
power, and thus inadvertently to prepare the way for the complete
conquest of their country later on. Stephen, to whom some have
assigned the command of the left wing, is known to have returned home
CH. XVIII.
36--2


## p. 564 (#606) ############################################

564
Venice in Albania
before the battle? ; but Branković dealt Mūsà the blow which caused him
to flee from the field. The conqueror rewarded the Despot of Serbia
with an increase of territory, and assured his envoys of his pacific
intentions. Mahomet I was as good as his word; for the rest of his
reign Serbia remained unmolested. Nor did his warlike successor
Murād II attack that country as long as the diplomatic despot lived.
Another, and a Western, Power had now, however, obtained a footing
in Serbian lands, thus exciting the protests of the despot in his later
years. We saw that some fifty years earlier the family of Balša had
established itself in the Zeta, where it had formed an independent state,
the germ of the heroic principality of Montenegro, with Scutari as its
capital. In 1396, however, George II Balša, hard pressed by the Turks,
who had already once captured his residence, sold Scutari with its
famous fortress of Rosafa, whose legendary foundation is enshrined in
one of the most beautiful Serbian ballads and whose name recalls the
Syrian home of SS. Sergius and Bacchus, together with the neighbouring
castle of Drivasto, to the Venetian Republic. Three and four years earlier
Venice had obtained possession of Alessio and Durazzo respectively; a few
years later she occupied the sea-ports of Dulcigno, Antivari, and Budua;
in 1420 the citizens of Cattaro, long anxious for Venetian protection
against Balša on the one hand and the Bosnian barons, who had for a
generation been their lords, on the other, at last induced her to take
compassion upon their city; and that year found Venice mistress of
practically all maritiine Dalmatia, except where Castelnuovo, Almissa,
and the republic of Ragusa formed an enclave in her territory. Finally,
when in 1421 the last male representative of the Balša family died,
Venice declined to recognise his maternal uncle, the Despot of Serbia, as
his heir and cede to him the places which had once belonged to that
Hostilities broke out, but it was finally agreed that Venice should
keep Scutari, Cattaro, and Dulcigno, while Stephen should have Drivasto,
Antivari, and Budua. . The inhabitants of these three places found,
however, that the republic could give them support against the Turks,
which the Serbian rulers were unable to furnish. One after the other
they begged to share the good-fortune of Cattaro, until at last in 1444
we find them all Venetian colonies 2. In the same year, the tiny
republic of Poljica near Spalato, a “Slavonic San Marino," which had
been founded by Bosnian fugitives in 944 and had received Hungarian
bans from about 1350, placed herself under Venetian overlordship.
When Stephen Lazarević saw his end approaching, he recognised the
suzerainty of Hungary over his land, as the only means of securing it
from the Turks, and obtained from King Sigismund the formal con-
firmation of his nephew George Branković as his heir. Then, on
19 July 1427, he died, the last of his name. His tombstone at
1 Gelcich and Thallóczy, Diplomatarium, p. 226.
2 Mon. spect. hist. Slav. Merid. xvii. p. 249; XXI. pp. 156–7, 190.
race.


## p. 565 (#607) ############################################

The Bosnian King-maker
565
Drvenglave has survived the ravages of the foes whom he had seen
divided, but whose power he had unwittingly helped to consolidate;
his life is better known than that of far greater Serbian sovereigns,
thanks to the fact that he found a biographer among his contemporaries.
If, with pardonable exaggeration, the Ragusans' wrote of the just-
departed "despot as “the hammer and bulwark against the enemies
of the Christian faith," modern research has shewn him to have been
a stronger character than earlier historians had believed.
Meanwhile, the other surviving Slav state of the Balkan peninsula
had suffered more than Serbia from the Turks without and also from a
civil war within. The great Turkish invasion of 1398, which had “almost
entirely ruined Bosnia,” had convinced the Bosnian magnates that a
woman was unfit to rule over their land. Headed by Hrvoje Vukčić,
the king-maker of Bosnian history, they accordingly deposed Helena
Gruba and elected Stephen Ostoja, probably an illegitimate son
of the great Tvrtko, as their king. As long as Ostoja obeyed the
dictates of his all-powerful vassal, who proudly styled himself “the
grand voïvode of the Bosnian kingdom and vicar-general of the most
gracious sovereigns King Ladislas and King Ostoja,” he kept his
throne. Under Hrvoje's guidance he repulsed the attack of King
Sigismund of Hungary, who had claimed the overlordship of Bosnia in
accordance with the treaty of Djakovo, and endeavoured to recover
Dalmatia and Croatia for the Bosnian crown under the pretext of
supporting Sigismund's rival, Ladislas of Naples. But when the
latter shewed by his coronation at Zara as King of both those lands
that he had no intention of allowing them to become Bosnian posses-
sions, Ostoja changed his policy, made his peace with Sigismund, and
recognised him as his suzerain. The puppet-king had, however, for-
gotten his maker.
Hrvoje, the “Bosnian kinglet,” aided by the
Ragusans, laid siege to the royal castle of Bobovac, where the king
was residing; and, when Sigismund intervened on behalf of his vassal,
summoned an assembly of the nobles in "1404 to depose Ostoja and
choose a new sovereign. The assembled barons unanimously voted the
expulsion of Ostoja, and elected Tvrtko's legitimate son, who had been
passed over thirteen years before, under the title of Tvrtko II. All real
authority, however, lay as before in the hands of Hrvoje, whom the
grateful Ladislas had created Duke of Spalato and lord of Cattaro,
whom Sigismund regarded as his “chief rival,” whom a modern historian?
has described as “the most powerful man between the Save and the
Adriatic," and to whom the shrewd Ragusans wrote that “whatsoever
thou dost command in Bosnia is done. "3
A Hungarian invasion and a civil war followed the election of
לל
1 Gelcich and Thallóczy, Diplomatarium, p. 325.
2 Klaić, Geschichte Bosniens, p. 294.
3 Pucić, Spomenici srpski, 1. p. 59.
CH. XVIII.


## p. 566 (#608) ############################################

566
Civil war in Bosnia
Tvrtko II, for Sigismund was resolved to restore his influence, while
Ostoja still held out in Bobovac. After a first futile attempt, the
Magyar monarch entered Bosnia in 1408; once again the walls of
Dobor witnessed a Hungarian victory; the yellow waters of the Bosna
were reddened by the headless corpses of more than a hundred Bosnian
nobles, and Tvrtko II was led a prisoner to Buda. Hrvoje humbled
himself before the victor, and Ladislas of Naples sold all his Dalmatian
rights to Venice in despair. But Sigismund's schemes for extending
Hungarian authority over Bosnia encountered the stubborn resistance
of the national party, whose leaders came from the land of Hum, the
cradle of so many insurrections against the foreigner. They restored
Ostoja to the throne, and in their own stony country and in the south
of Bosnia their candidate held out against the Hungarian sovereign, who
dismembered the rest of the kingdom, and even bestowed Srebrenica, its
most important mining-district, upon the Despot of Serbia, thus sowing
discord between the two kindred peoples. 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.