The Birth of Arkcadis

Arrival of the Southern Slavs-Their unfortunate democratic ways-Two early States-Ecclesiastical rocks-The Slavs and their neighbours-Simeon the Bulgar-What are the Bulgars?-Stephen Nemania-The Slovenes are submerged-The fate of the Croats-The glory of Dubrovnik-A gallant republic-The glorious Du?an-Evil days and the people's hero-The "Good Christians" of Bosnia-Kossovo-Gathering Darkness.

ARRIVAL OF THE SOUTHERN SLAVS

The Slavs who in the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries came down from the Carpathian Mountains were known, until the ninth century, as Slovenes (Sloventzi);[4] and if, as is natural, the Serbs and Croats wish to preserve their time-honoured names, they will perhaps agree to call their whole country by the still more ancient name of Slovenia, instead of the merely geographical and not wholly popular term Yugoslavia. Considering that this name (Slovenija) found favour in the eyes of their great Emperor Stephen Du?an, one would imagine that the Serbs might adopt it in preference to the cumbrous "Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes," with its unlovely abbreviation into three letters of the alphabet. The Croats would be glad of this solution, and thus the Yugoslavs would, unlike their relatives the Russians, the Poles and the Czechs, have the satisfaction of living in a country called Slovenia, the land of the Slavs.... But, although this would be a happy solution, it seems much more probable that eventually the name Yugoslavia will be adopted. Everyone is agreed that one inclusive word, answering to Britain and British, is necessary. "Evo na?ih!" ["Here are our men!"] were the words used by the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes as their troops marched past them in Paris during the Allied celebration of July 1919. The Serbian Colonel of the Heiduk Velko regiment, which was stationed at Split in 1920, and of which the other officers were chiefly Croats, the men Moslem and Catholic, used in his public addresses to speak of "Our kingdom." There are various objections to the word Yugoslavia; in the first place, it was introduced by the Austrians, who did not wish to call their subjects Serbs and Croats; in the second place, the term is a literal translation from the German and is against the laws of the Serbo-Croatian language. Another, and more important objection, is that the Bulgars, though Yugoslavs, are not included in Yugoslavia; and perhaps the name will be officially adopted when the Bulgars join the other Southern Slavs.

THEIR UNFORTUNATE DEMOCRATIC WAYS

These Southern Slavs did not display the same genius for organization as the Germanic peoples or the Magyars at the period of their respective migrations. In communities of brethren (or bratsva, from the word brat, a brother) they had not raised up a king; but as a compensation they possessed a lofty moral code, a religion inspired by the worship of nature and by the principle of the immortality of the soul. Occupying themselves with agriculture and the rearing of cattle, it was not until they came into contact, that is to say hostile contact, with their more organized neighbours that they were compelled to join together under the authority of a prince, a knez. The bad result of this profoundly democratic spirit was that the Slavs, not knowing how to keep united, fell under the yoke of other nations. From the interesting series of documents, Latin, Arabic, Byzantine and others, which have been collected in Monimenta Sclavenica by Miroslav Premrou, notary public at Caporetto, and published in 1919 at Ljubljana (Laibach), we can see that the Slovenes occupied a much greater extent of territory than do their descendants of our day-"ab ortu Vistul? ... per immensa spatia..." (cf. Jordanis de orig. Goth. c. 5)-to beyond the Tagliamento, and from the Piave (cf. Ibrahim Ibn-Jakub[5]) to the Adriatic, the ?gean and the Black Sea.

One of the earliest of the above-named Slovene princes was Samo, a Slovene by adoption, who struggled in Pannonia against the Avars in the first half of the seventh century; it happened also in the year 626 that other Slovenes, as well as the Avars, attacked Constantinople. Both of them withdrew, the former being defeated at sea and the latter failing under the city walls. The Avars, having thus shown that they were vulnerable, had to bear an attack on a grand scale made upon them by the Slovenes, this attack being more shrewdly organized than any other transaction in which the Slovenes had as yet engaged. And they still appeared to be reluctant to form even a loosely knit State; they roamed about the Balkans and the adjacent countries to the north-west, seeking for lands that were adapted to their patriarchal organization. Not until the ninth century did they set up what might be called Governments on the Adriatic littoral, where they had no hostility to fear from the last remaining Romans, who were refugees in certain towns and islands.

TWO EARLY STATES

The two most important of these Slav States were, firstly, that one, the predecessor of our modern Croatia, which extended from the mouth of the Ra?a (Ar?a) in Istria to the mouth of the Cetina in central Dalmatia, and, secondly, to the south-east a principality, afterwards called Ra?ka, in what is now western Serbia. In a little time the Slavs began to have relations with the towns of the Dalmatian coast and with the islands which were nominally under the sway of Byzantium, but in consequence of their remoteness and their exposed position had succeeded in becoming almost independent republics.

ECCLESIASTICAL ROCKS

Now Christianity had been definitely introduced into Dalmatia in the fourth century, but it was not until several centuries later that it made any headway with the Slavs, of whom the Croats, in the ninth century, were baptized by Frank missionaries. The arrival of the Slavs, by the bye, had been sometimes looked upon with scanty favour by the Popes: in July of the year 600 we find Gregory I. saying in a letter to the Bishop of Salona that he was much disturbed at the news he had just received "de Sclavorum gente, qu? vobis valde imminet, affligor vehementer et conturbor." Similarly, the Council of Split branded the Slav missionaries as heretics and the Slav alphabet as the invention of the devil.[6] ... While the Croats were falling[7] under the dominion of the Franks, the holy brothers St. Cyril and St. Methodus, who had been born at Salonica in 863, were carrying the first Slav book from Constantinople to Moravia, whither they travelled at the invitation of the Prince of Moravia, Rastislav, St. Cyril going as an apostle and theologian, St. Methodus as a statesman and organizer. This famous book was a translation from the Greek, but it was written in Pal?o-Slav characters, the Glagolitic that were to become so venerated that when the French kings were crowned at Reims their oath was sworn upon a Glagolitic copy of the Gospels;[8] and the spirit of that earliest book was also Slav: it expresses the political and cultural resistance of Prince Rastislav against the State of the Franks, that is, against the German nationality, of whom it was feared that with the Cross in front of them they would trample down for ever the political liberties of the young Slav peoples. German theologians were giving a more and more dogmatic character to Western Christianity, whereas the Christianity of the East was at that time more liberal; it gathered to itself the Slavs of Ra?ka and of the neighbouring regions, such as southern Dalmatia, while the influence which it exerted was so powerful that when the Croats, after vacillating between the two Churches, finally joined that of Rome, they took with them the old Slav liturgy that is used by them in many places on the mainland and the islands down to this day. Thus their Church became a national institution, and that in spite of all the long-continued efforts of the Vatican, as also of the Venetian Republic. The Roman Catholic hierarchy, by the way, is endeavouring to have this liturgy made lawful in the whole of Yugoslavia; the only opponent I met was a Jesuit at Zagreb who foresaw that the priests, being no longer obliged to learn Latin, might indeed omit to do so. Pope Pius X. was likewise an opponent of the Slav liturgy, because a Polish priest told him that it would lead to Pan-Slavism and hence to schism; but it is thought-among others by the patriotic Prince-Bishop Jegli? of Ljubljana-that the late Pope would have given his consent, had it not been for Austria, which recoiled from what would have probably strengthened the Slav element. One of the cherished policies of Austria was to utilize in every possible way the religious differences between the Southern Slavs.

THE SLAVS AND THEIR NEIGHBOURS

But the two States formed beside the Adriatic and in Ra?ka were not only separated from early days by their religion; they had quite different neighbours to deal with. In 887 the Croats imposed their will on the Venetians, against whom they had been for some time waging war-and not merely a defensive war-the Venetians having attacked the country in order to despoil it of timber and of people, whom they liked to sell in the markets of the Levant. In 887, however, after the defeat and death of their doge, Pietro Candiano, the Venetians were forced to pay-and paid without interruption down to the year 1000-an annual tribute to the Croats, who in return permitted them to sail freely on the Adriatic. Beside that sea the Croats founded new towns, such as ?ibenik (of which the Italian name is Sebenico), and carried on an amicable intercourse with the autonomous Byzantine towns: Iader, the picturesque modern capital which they came to call Zadar and the Venetians Zara; Tragurium, the delightful spot which is their Trogir and the Venetian Traù, and so forth. These friendly relations existed both before 882 and subsequently, when the towns agreed to pay the Croats an annual tribute, in return for which the local provosts were confirmed in office by the rulers of Croatia. We have plentiful evidence from the ruins of royal castles and of the many churches built by the Slavs in this period, as well as from the discoveries of arms and ornaments, that the people had attained to a condition of prosperity. At the beginning of the tenth century, so we are told by the learned emperor and historian Constantine Porphyrogenetos, the Croatian Prince Tomislav could raise 100,000 infantry and 60,000 cavalry; he had likewise eighty large vessels, each with a crew of forty men, at his disposal, and a hundred smaller ships with ten to twenty men in each of them.

As for the State of Ra?ka, protected on the south and west by formidable mountains, and in the very centre of the Serbian tribes, it is there that the lore and customs of the people have survived in their purest form. Ra?ka was the land in which the love of liberty was always kept alive and from there the expeditions used to sally forth whose aim, frustrated many times, it was to found a powerful Serbian State. The chieftain, Tshaslav Kronimirovi?, did, as a matter of fact, succeed in uniting his State with two others, one being in Bosnia and the other in Zeta, which is now Montenegrin. He even added three other provinces on the Adriatic coast; but after his death the State was dissolved and in the course of the conflicts which followed, the State of Zeta assumed the leadership. It had been necessary for these Serbian rulers of Ra?ka and Zeta to resist the frequent assaults not only of the Byzantines but of the Bulgars.

SIMEON THE BULGAR

"Frequent assaults" is probably a correct description of what the Serb of that period had to endure at the hands of this particular opponent, the Bulgar. Having swarmed across the Peninsula, the Bulgar was now in the act of consolidating a great kingdom, for this was the magnificent epoch of the Bulgarian Tzar Simeon, whose word ran far and wide from the Adriatic. The Bulgarian map[9] which exhibits the Tzardom at the death of Simeon is painted in the same brown colour from opposite Corfu right across to the Black Sea and up as far as the mouths of the Danube, which signifies that in those parts (including, of course, Macedonia) the word of Simeon was supreme. But the Serbian provinces of Ra?ka, Zeta, Bosnia and some adjoining lands are painted brown and white, being hatched with white diagonal lines; and this indicates very candidly that in the north-west Simeon was not omnipotent. We are indeed told in the letterpress that "on the other hand Simeon meanwhile took the opportunity to settle accounts with the Serbians because of their perfidious policy, and he subjected them in the year 924"; but doubtless this was a kind of subjection which in 925 would have to be repeated, and this would account for one of Simeon's faithful chroniclers having made that allusion to perfidious policy. Of the Tzar himself we are given an attractive picture: unlike his father, Boris, who patronized Slav literature for the reason that it made his State less permeable to Byzantine influence, Simeon had no political object in his encouragement of native literature.[10] He was himself a man of letters, having studied at Constantinople. He was acquainted with Aristotle and Demosthenes, he discussed theology with the most eminent doctors of the Church, and of positive science-or of what was then regarded as such-he possessed everything which had survived the great shipwreck of ancient thought. Not only did he found monasteries and schools, but he gathered writers round him; and, in order to stimulate them, he himself wrote original books and translations, thus ennobling, we are told, the literary vocation in the eyes of his rude and warlike race. He would probably have smiled if he had known that one of his writers had attributed to him the subjection of the Serbs; but what one would like to learn is whether Macedonia, even then a kaleidoscope of races, was more or less completely under the shadow and the brilliance of his sword, more or less completely subjugated. Four centuries later the Serbs were to have a Macedonian empire which, like Simeon's, dissolved on the death of its founder. To these old empires the Serb and the Bulgar of our day are looking back, and it would be interesting to know if harassed Macedonia was calmly content to be first Bulgarian and then Serbian, or whether it was a calm of that Eastern kind which means that a ruler's assaults upon the people are infrequent.

WHAT ARE THE BULGARS?

And now, as the matter is in dispute, it is necessary to examine the origin of the Bulgarian people. A band of Turanian or Bulgarian warriors, probably not over 10,000 in number and led by one Asperouch or Isperich, had crossed the Danube in the year 679, had subdued the Slav tribes in those parts-for the newcomers reaped the advantage of being a well-disciplined people-and by the end of the eighth century had settled down in their tents of felt along the banks of the Danube. Then, after another hundred years, in the district bounded by Varna, Rustchuk and the Balkans, one may say that the original Turanians, a branch of the Huns, had been absorbed by the Slavs. "The forefathers of the Bulgars," says the great Slavist, Dr. Constantine Jire?ek of Prague, in his History of the Bulgars, "are not the handful of Bulgars who conquered in 679 a part of M?sia along the Danube, but the Slavs who much earlier had settled in M?sia, as well as in Thrace, Macedonia, Epirus and almost the whole Peninsula." With regard to the retention of the name there is an analogy in France, where the Gauls came under the subjection of German Franks, who ultimately disappeared, but left their name to the country. So, too, the Greeks in Turkey who call themselves Romei, the name of their former rulers, and their language Romeica, though they are not Romans and do not speak Latin. To such an extent have the original Bulgars been absorbed by the Yugoslavs that even the most ancient known form of the Bulgarian language, dating from the ninth century, retains hardly any relics of the original Bulgarian tongue; and this tongue has in our time, with the exception of a word or two, been entirely lost: there is a celebrated old MS. in Moscow[11] which orientalists and historians have pondered over and which has now been explained by the Finnish professor Mikola and the Bulgarian professor Zlatarski to be a chronology of Bulgarian pagan princes, of whom the first are rather fabulous. Here and there, amid the old Slav, are strange words which are supposed to signify Turanian chronology, cycles of lunar years. And in a village between ?umen and Prjeslav there was found an inscription of the Bulgarian prince Omortag (?802-830), where in the Greek language, for the Bulgars had at that period no writing of their own, he says that he built something; and amid the Greek there is the word σιγορ-αλεμ, which occurs also in the above-mentioned document and is regarded as Turanian.... What we do know about this race is by no means so discreditable; it is true that they are reputed to have had no great esteem for the aged, and, according to a Chinese chronicle of the year 545, "the characters of their writing are like those of the barbarians." They held it to be glorious to die in battle, shameful to die of sickness. For the violation of a married woman, as well as for the hatching of plots and rebellion, the penalty was death, and if you seduced a girl you were compelled to pay a fine and also to marry her. Their sense of discipline, which served them so well in their contact with other people, was remarkably applied to their social life; thus a stepson was under an obligation to marry his father's widow, a nephew the widow of his uncle, and a younger brother the widow of an elder. It may be that the two much-quoted writers who claim that the modern Bulgars are of this race were moved more by their admiration of such customs than by scientific scrutiny. One of them, Christoff, who assumed the name of Tartaro-Bulgar to show that he believed in his theories, is usually thought nowadays to have been more of a poet than a devotee of erudition; if he had been still more of a poet, approaching, say, Pencho Slaveikoff, we would take less objection to his waywardness. The other champion of that ancestry is Theodore Paneff, who showed himself a brilliant and courageous officer during the war of 1912-1913. The fact that he was himself of Armenian origin-he changed his name-would, of course, not invalidate his Bulgarian studies; but even as he spoke Bulgarian with a Russian accent, so is he looked upon as writing like certain Russians; and his other literary work, such as that on the psychology of crowds, is held to be of more value. At all events in 1916 when a number of Bulgarian deputies made a joyous progress to the capitals of their allies, under the leadership of the Vice-President of the Sobranje, Dr. Momchiloff, renowned at the time as a Germanophil, they were welcomed with great pomp at Buda-Pest and declared in ceremonial orations to be brothers of the Turanian Magyars; but Momchiloff deprecated this idea. "We are brothers," he said, "of the Russians, and see what we have done to them!" It was also during the War that Dr. Georgov, Professor of Philosophy and Rector of Sofia University, wrote a dissertation in a Buda-Pest newspaper,[12] which demonstrated very clearly to the Hungarians that the Bulgars are Slavs; the Professor points out that the Turanians had so rapidly been absorbed that Prince Omortag bestowed Slav names upon his sons, and this complete mingling of the radically different peoples was assisted, says the Professor, by the fact that those Bulgarian hordes in the days before they crossed the Danube were already partly mixed with Slavs, since they had been wandering for decades to the north of the Danube, around Bessarabia, in which country the Slavs were members of the same Slovene race as those whom they were afterwards to meet. So thoroughly were the original Bulgars submerged in the Slavs that when their sons set out from the district between Varna, Rustchuk and the Balkans, proceeding west and south, they met with no resistance from the unorganized Slavs of M?sia and Thrace, owing to the circumstance that these latter did not feel that the new arrivals were strangers. In fact, says the Professor, there are in the present Bulgarian people far fewer and far fainter traces of the original Bulgars than there are of the old Thracians, as also of the Greeks and of the different people who in the course of the great migrations probably left here and there some stragglers. Sir Charles Eliot says of the Bulgars that "though not originally Slavs they have been completely Slavized, and all the ties arising from language, religion and politics connect them with the Slavs and not with Turkey or even Hungary." Professor Cviji?, by the way, who in 1920 received the Patron's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society for his researches into Balkan ethnology, regards the author of Turkey in Europe as a greater authority in this field than himself.... It is not easy, away from Montenegro and a few remote valleys, to find communities on the Balkan mainland that are altogether free from alien blood; Turks have come and gone, Crusaders of all nationalities have passed this way, with their hangers-on, here was the road from Europe to Asia, and here amid the ruin of empires lay much that was worth gathering. No doubt the Serbs, whose land was not so much a thoroughfare, have in their veins some Illyrian and other, but on the whole much less non-Slav blood than the Bulgars; still, when we consider some subsequent invasions of Bulgaria, we must ascertain how far they spread. For example, the Kumani who arrived in the thirteenth century were, according to Leon Cahun,[13] Turks of the Kiptchak nation, speaking a pure Turkish dialect; they-that is to say, the Gagaous who are supposed to be their descendants-are now Christians, they speak modern Turkish and inhabit the shores of the Black Sea and the region of Adrianople; they have kept much to themselves and are recognizable by their dark faces, large teeth and hirsute appearance. There are people who assert that all Bulgars have a physical divergence from other Yugoslavs, but, except if they happened to come across one of these Gagaous or some such person, it appears more likely that they saw what they went out to see. Naturally, if not very logically, those who regard the Bulgars in a hostile fashion have often brandished the arguments of Messrs. Tartaro-Bulgar and Paneff; if they will be so good as to accept what I honestly believe is the truth with regard to this people, they may have the pleasure of denouncing the Bulgar even more, seeing that his Yugoslav blood gives him less excuse for being what he has been. We shall have occasion, later on, to discuss his primitive as well as his more refined vices, endeavouring to ascertain how far they are not shared by his neighbours and whether he has any virtues peculiar to himself.

STEPHEN NEMANIA

After this long excursion into troubled waters we will go back to the Serbian States of Ra?ka and Zeta. In the year 1168 the former of these was under the rule of Stephen Nemania (1168-1196), who bore the title of "Grand ?upan," which means chief of a province. He was on friendly terms with the "Ban," or governor, of Bosnia, and with his assistance he added Zeta to his possessions. It was in his beneficial reign that the Bogomile heresy was propagated in Serbia-later on to spread through Bosnia and thence, under the name of Albigensian heresy, to France. Nemania summoned an assembly to decide on a plan of action; they resolved that this heresy should be exterminated by force of arms, seeing that most of the population belonged to the Orthodox religion. But Nemania was tolerant towards the Catholic Church, which had a considerable following in the Serbian provinces of the Adriatic coast, and this attitude became him well, for although he was the son of Orthodox parents he was born in a western part of the country where there was no Orthodox priest, so that he was baptized according to the Catholic rite and only joined the Orthodox Church at a considerably later date. A suggestive incident occurred in the year 1189, when Frederick Barbarossa, on his way to Constantinople and Jerusalem, was met at Ni? by the Grand ?upan, who presented him with corn, wine, oxen and various other commodities, placed the Serbs under his protection, and concluded with him and with the Bulgars a military convention for the taking of Constantinople. When at last Nemania was tired of fighting and administration he withdrew to the splendid monastery of Studenica, which he had built, and afterwards to the promontory of Mt. Athos, where his younger son, who called himself Sava and was to become the great St. Sava, had from his seventeenth year embraced the monastic life.

THE SLOVENES ARE SUBMERGED

Meanwhile the Slavs of Croatia and those farther to the north and west, with whom was kept alive the old name of Slovene, had been at grips with various neighbours. It has been said of the Slovenes that, shepherds and peasants for the most part, they have practically no national history, seeing that when the realm of Samo, who was himself a Frank, came to an end, they were subjected to the Lombards, to the Bavarians and finally to Charlemagne and his successors. Unlike the Serbs and the Croats, they had no warlike aristocracy; in fact, the only two Slovene magnates who displayed any national zeal were two Counts of Celje (Cilli) of whom the first rose to be Ban of Croatia and the second, Count Ulrich, the last of his race, was in 1486 assassinated by Hungarians in Belgrade, thus causing his domains to fall to the Habsburgs.[14] But if the little, scattered Slovene people had to bend before the storm, if they withdrew from their outposts in the two Austrias, in northern Styria, in Tirol, in the plains of Frioul and in Venetia, they settled down, thirteen centuries ago, in a region which they still inhabit. This is bounded to the north approximately by the line extending from Villach-Celovec (Klagenfurt)-Spielfeld-Radgona (Radkersburg)-and the mouth of the river Mur, although there are noteworthy fragments at each end: about 65,000 on the hills to the west of the Isonzo (of whom 40,000 have been since 1866 under Italy), and about 120,000, partly Catholics and partly Protestants, who live on the other bank of the Mur. Anyone who wished to follow the fortunes of the Slovenes through the Middle Ages would have chiefly to consult the chronicles of the Holy Roman Empire; he would find them in their old home at Gorica, but with a German Count placed over them, he would find them being gradually supplanted by the Germans in such towns as Maribor (Marburg) and Radgona, being thrust out to the villages and the countryside; nowhere except in the province of Carniola would he find a homogeneous Slovene population. It is an interesting fact[15] that in the fifteenth century theirs was the "domestic language" of the Habsburgs, even as in our time the Suabian-Viennese; but until the era of Napoleon they took practically no part in the world's affairs, and the part which they were wont to take was to fight other people's battles: for example, when the Venetians, in the midst of all their hectic merriment, were making the last stand, it was largely to the Schiavoni, that is Slovene, regiments that they entrusted their defence. We are told that there was no question of the loyalty and the fighting qualities of the Schiavoni and of their sturdy fellow-Slavs, the Morlaks of Dalmatia. It was not possible for the authorities to provide ships enough to bring over sufficient resources to maintain all those who were eager to fight.[16] In spite of all the centuries of political suppression the little Slovene people, which to-day only numbers 1,300,000, retained its identity with even more success than a certain frog in Ljubljana, their capital; for that wonderful creature, though preserving its shape in the middle of a black-and-white marble table at the Museum, has allowed itself to become black-and-white marble. We shall see how Napoleon awoke the Slovenes, how Metternich put them to sleep again, how they roused themselves in 1848 and what a r?le they have played in the most recent history.

THE FATE OF THE CROATS

The Croats were to be much more prominent in the Middle Ages. They did not, it is true, always manage to hold their heads above water; but they can now look back with more gratification than regret on the interminable conflicts which they had to sustain against the Hungarians on the one hand, the Venetians on the other. The Hungarian monarch, anxious to have an outlet on the Adriatic, attempted to cajole the Croats into electing him as their king, on the score of his being the brother of the wife of a late Croatian ruler. He secured by force what his pleadings had not gained him, and subsequently the link between Croatia and Hungary was more than once broken and reunited within the space of a few years; at last it was arranged that there was to be a purely personal union under the vigorous King Kolomon, and so it continued, with varying interference on the part of the Hungarians, until the dynasty of Arpad became extinct in 1301. The functionary who represented the central power in Croatia-there being for part of this period a similar official for Slavonia, the adjoining province-had the title of Ban. He was at the head of the Croatian army, he pronounced sentences in the name of the king and had other functions, so that the office came to be regarded with profound respect by the Croats, and many of its holders tried to deserve this sentiment.... Among the duties assumed by King Kolomon was that of recovering from the Venetians those coastal towns and islands which had fallen to them, owing to the chaos in Croatia. For more than two hundred years-that is, until the middle of the fourteenth century-this warfare between the Hungaro-Croatian kings and Venice raged without interruption; apparently the Dalmatian towns and islands were most unwilling to come under the sway of Venice. We read everywhere of how they themselves put up a strenuous resistance. At Zadar, the capital, where Pope Alexander III. had in the year 1177 been welcomed by the people with rejoicings and Croatian songs, a chain was drawn across the harbour in 1202, for the people hoped in this way to keep out the Venetians, who, with a number of Frenchmen, were starting out on the famous Fourth Crusade-that enterprise which ended, on the outward journey, underneath the walls of Constantinople. The Venetians forced their way into Zadar, plundered and devastated it; and in order to mollify the Pope, who was indignant at Crusaders having behaved in this fashion against a Christian town, they subscribed towards the building of the cathedral, but retained possession of the place-this time for over a hundred and fifty years. Yet the holding of Zadar did not imply that of other Dalmatian towns: during this period when Venice clung to the chief place there were a good many changes in the not-distant town of ?ibenik, which was now under the Hungarians, now under Paul Subi?, Prince of Bribir, now under the Ban Mladen ii., now an autonomous town under Venice.

A GALLANT REPUBLIC

The most renowned, as it is the most beautiful, of Dalmatian towns, Dubrovnik (Ragusa), was always more preoccupied with commerce and letters than with warfare. It managed to maintain itself in glory for a very long time, thanks to the astuteness of the citizens, who were ever willing to give handsome tribute to a potential foe. On occasion the Ragusans could be nobly firm, refusing to deliver a political refugee to the Turks, and so forth. In such tempestuous times the little State was forced to trim its sails; there was the gibe that they were prepared to pay lip service to anyone, and that the letters S.B. on the flag (for Sanctus Blasius, their patron saint) indicated the seven flags, sette bandiere, which they were ready to fly. But the Republic of Dubrovnik-a truly oligarchic republic, until the great earthquake of 1667 made it necessary to raise a few other families into the governing class-the republic can say, with truth, that when darkness was over the other Yugoslavs it kept a lamp alight. As yet the Serbian State was rising in prosperity and Dubrovnik made a treaty of commerce with Stephen (1196-1224), who had succeeded his father Nemania. During this reign St. Sava, the king's brother, came back to Serbia and organized the national Church, founding also numerous monasteries and churches, as well as schools. Of the successors of Stephen we may mention Uro?, whose widow, a French princess, Helen of Anjou, is venerated in Serbia for her good deeds and has been canonized. King Milutine (1281-1321) made Serbia the most united and the leading State in Eastern Europe; under Du?an, who has been called the Serbian Charlemagne, success followed success, and under his sceptre he gathered most of the Serbian people, as well as many Greeks and Albanians. He had the idea-and it was not beyond his strength-to group together all the Serbian provinces.

THE GLORIOUS DU?AN

It is facile for people of the twentieth century, and particularly so for non-Slavs, to say that this Serbian Empire of Du?an, Lord of the Serbs and Bulgars and Greeks, whom the Venetian Senate addressed as "Gr?corum Imperator semper Augustus," resembled the earlier Bulgarian Empire of Simeon, who called himself Emperor of the Bulgars and the Vlachs, Despot of the Greeks, in that we would consider neither of them to be an empire; and that therefore, in celebrating their glories, with pointed reference to their Macedonian glories, the Serbs and the Bulgars are living in a fool's paradise. No doubt a great many persons dwelt in this Macedonia of Simeon and Du?an without being aware of the fact, for those who called themselves Bulgars or Serbs appear to have been chiefly the warriors, the nobles and the priests; a large part of the people were-as they are to-day-indifferent to such niceties. But there is latent in the Slav mind a longing for the absolute, which, except it be in some way corrected, inclines towards a moral anarchy, a social nihilism and indifference as to the destinies of the State. Looking merely at the consequence, it does not greatly seem to matter how this attitude is brought about.... One must admit that these two realms occupied in their world most prominent positions-positions to which they would not have attained if Simeon and Du?an had not been altogether exceptional men, for on their death there was not anybody great enough to keep the great men of the State together. We have spoken of Simeon's peaceful labours-we might cultivate more than we do the literature of that age if it were less dedicated to religious topics, which anyhow at that time gave little scope for originality-his consummate ability as a soldier and statesman is revealed in the existence of his empire; we find in the Code of Du?an, before such a thing flourished in England, the institution of trial by jury, while Hermann Wendel[17] has pointed out that the peasants were protected from rapacious landowners much more effectively than in the Germany of that age.... We need not try to establish whether the simple Macedonian desired to be under Simeon or Du?an; but even if these two monarchs had, each of them, as far as was then possible, complete control of the country, one would scarcely urge that after all these centuries this is any reason why Macedonia should fall to Bulgaria or to Serbia. We shall have to see whether by subsequent merits or activities either of them has acquired the right to absorb these outlying Slavs who, be it noted, if in our day they are questioned as to their nationality, will often reply-and even to an enthusiastic, armed person from one of the interested States-the worried Macedonian Slavs, of whom a quarter or maybe a third do really not know what they are, will reply that they are members of the Orthodox Church.

Du?an perceived that an alliance with Venice would serve his ends; he did not cease trying to persuade the Venetians that such an arrangement was also in their interest. After having sent an army to Croatia, in the hope of liberating that people from the Hungarians, he conquered Albania, and in 1340 asked to be admitted as a citizen of the Most Serene Republic. In 1345 he informed the Senate that it was his intention to be crowned in imperio Constantinopolitaneo, and at the same time suggested an alliance pro acquisitione imperii Constantinopolitani. But Venice, while reiterating her protestations of friendship, declined his offers; for she could not bring herself to join her fortunes to those of an ally who might become a rival.

EVIL DAYS AND THE PEOPLE'S HERO