No More Learning

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.
The first result of his weakness was a Hungarian invasion. The
two powerful magnates whose provinces adjoined the Danube, Vukašin
and Lazar, quarrelled with one another, the latter invoked the aid of
the King of Hungary, and a Hungarian arıny forced the Serbs to retire
to the impregnable forests which then covered their mountains. Ragusa,
1 Wiss. Mitt. x. p. 67.
2 Ducas, p. 15.
CH. XVIII.


## p. 554 (#596) ############################################

554
Vukašin's usurpation
לל
since 1358 a Hungarian protectorate, was involved in this dispute, with
the natural result that Serbian trade suffered. Peace had not long been
restored when a revolution broke out in Serbia. Vukašin, a man of
boundless ambition and marked ability, was no longer content with the
rank of despot, which he had received from his young master, now
emancipated from his control. Supported by his brother and a
strong party among the nobles, he drove Stephen Uroš V from the
throne in 1366, assumed the title of king with the government of the
specially Serbian lands whose centre was Prizren, and rewarded Uglješa
with the style of “despot” and the Greek districts round Seres, where
the latter wisely endeavoured to strengthen his hold upon the Hellenic
population in view of the Turkish peril, by restoring to the Ecumenical
Patriarch all the churches and privileges which Dušan had transferred
to the newly-created Serbian Patriarchate. A later legend makes the
usurper complete his act of treachery by the murder of his sovereign
during a hunting-party on the plain of Kossovo. But it has now been
proved that Stephen Uroš survived his supposed murderer. For the
rest of his life, however, he was a mere cypher in the history of his
country, glad to accept a present from the Ragusans, who, in spite of
his former war with them, alone remained faithful to him and continued
to pay him the customary tribute, even suffering losses for his sake.
The Bulgarian Empire was almost as much divided as the Serbian.
The Jewish marriage of John Alexander had created bitter enmity
between his favourite son, John Shishman, whom he had designed as his
successor at Trnovo, and John Sracimir, the surviving offspring of his
first wife, to whom he had assigned the family castle of Vidin as an
appanage, while on the Black Sea coast an independent prince had
established himself and has perpetuated his name, Dobrotich, in the
dismal swamps of the Dobrudzha. Thus weakened by internal divisions,
Bulgaria was further crippled by the attacks of her Christian neighbours,
at a time when all should have united their resources against the Turks.
John V Palaeologus invaded the Black Sea coast, and extorted a war
indemnity from the Tsar, and when the latter died? in 1365 the Hun-
garians seized Vidin, carried off Sracimir and his wife, and retained
possession of that famous fortress for four years. The new Tsar, John
Shishman, revenged himself on the Greek Emperor, who had come to ask
his aid in repelling the common enemy of Christianity, by throwing him
into prison, whence he was only released by the prowess of the famous
"green count,” Amadeus VI of Savoy. Well might the rhetorician
Demetrius Kydónis point out the futility of an alliance with a nation
which was so fickle and now so feeble, and which dynastic marriages had
failed to bind to Byzantine interests. The Ecumenical Patriarch tried
1 Sitzungsberichte der k. böhm. Gesellschaft (1885), pp. 115, 131, 136–7; Archiv
f. slav. Phil. 11. p. 108.
2 Ibid. XIII. p. 538; xiv. pp. 265-6.
רי


## p. 555 (#597) ############################################

Battle on the Maritza, 1371
555
indeed to form a Greco-Serbian league to check the Ottoman advance,
but died at the moment when his diplomacy seemed to be successful.
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.