Part 51

The Turks neglected Valona, as they neglected all their Albanian possessions. Sinan Pasha had been so good and popular a governor that, although a native of Konieh, he was nicknamed “the Arnaut,” and his descendants long held the appointment as almost a family fief; indeed, as late as the middle of the eighteenth century, the natives of Valona besieged and cut to pieces a certain Ismail Pasha, who had endeavoured to wrest the governorship of the town from one of Sinan’s descendants[854]. A generation later, however, a sanguinary feud, which broke out between the members of this governing family, led the other notables of Valona to invoke the intervention of the famous Ali Pasha of Joannina, who had already cast covetous eyes on the place, then ruled by Ibrahim Pasha. But the treacherous “Lion of Joannina” carried off not only Ibrahim but also the notables of Valona to the dungeons of his lake-fortress, where they were subsequently put to death. Ibrahim, however, lingered on, and was forced to address a petition to the Turkish government begging it, in consideration of his age and infirmities, to bestow the governorship of Valona and Berat upon his gaoler’s eldest son, Mouchtar Pasha, who appointed a Naxiote Christian, Damirales, as his representative in the former town. In 1820 the Turkish authorities, resolved to crush the too-powerful satrap of Joannina, easily induced the people of Valona to drive out Mouchtar’s partisans. But the population repeatedly gave the Turks cause for alarm, and in 1828 Rechid Pasha treacherously executed a powerful Bey of Valona, who had come to pay his respects to him at Joannina. Nevertheless the local people continued to resist any obnoxious Turkish authority[855].

During the first Balkan war, on November 28, 1912, Albanian independence was proclaimed at Valona, and an Albanian government formed, of which Ismail Kemal Bey was President[856]. But when an Albanian principality was created in the following year, and Prince William of Wied was chosen as its ruler, Valona recognised Durazzo as the capital. Meanwhile, Italy had intimated that she could not consent to the inclusion of Valona, to which she attached special importance, within the new Greek frontier; and insisted on the islet of Saseno, which had formed part of the Hellenic kingdom since 1864, being ceded to the Albanian principality. Greece complied with this demand, and on July 15, 1914, the Greek garrison abandoned Saseno at the order of the Venizelos Cabinet. When the European war broke out, Italy took the opportunity, on October 30, to occupy Saseno by troops under the command of Admiral Patris, who found it inhabited by twenty-one persons, and re-christened the highest point “Monte Bandiera” from the Italian flag which was hoisted there[857]. She had sent a sanitary mission to Valona itself and, on December 25, occupied that town. Then, as in 1690 and as in the days of Manfred and his successors, Kanina was likewise in Italian hands, while for the first time in its long history Valona has been connected with Great Britain, for the new jetty there was the work of the British Adriatic Mission, sent to rescue the retreating Serbian army. But, by the Tirana agreement of August 3, 1920, Italy renounced Valona (assigned to her by the treaty of London in 1915), and now holds Saseno alone.

RULERS OF VALONA

Byzantine Empire -1081 Normans of Sicily 1081-4 Byzantine Empire 1084-1204 Despotat of Epeiros 1204-57 Manfred 1257-66 Chinardo 1266 Giacomo di Balsignano 1266-73 Angevins of Naples 1273-(?)97 Byzantine Empire (?) 1297-1345/6 Serbs 1345/6-1417 Turks 1417-1690 Venetians 1690-1 Turks 1691-1912 Albanians 1912-14 Italians Dec. 25, 1914-Aug. 3, 1920 Albanians 1920-

2. THE MEDIÆVAL SERBIAN EMPIRE

The late Professor Freeman once remarked during a great crisis in the Balkans, that it was the business of a Minister of Foreign Affairs “to know something of the history of foreign countries.” The demand, however unreasonable it may seem, derives special importance from the fact, that recent events have signally justified the forecasts of the eminent historian and signally falsified those of the Minister whom he was criticising. For in the Balkans, and especially in Greece and Serbia, history is not, as it is apt to be in some western countries, primarily a subject for examinations, but is, thanks to the popular ballads, an integral part of the national life and a powerful factor in contemporary politics. The glories of the Byzantine Empire exercise a continual fascination upon the Greeks; the conquests of the Tsar Stephen Dushan in Macedonia have been invoked as one of the Serbian claims to that disputed land; whereas no Englishman of to-day has been known to demand a large part of France on the ground that it belonged to the English Crown in the reign of Dushan’s contemporary, Edward III.

But there is a further reason for the study of Balkan history by practical men. Our judgments of the Balkan peoples are often harsh and unjust, because we do not realise the historic fact that they stepped straight out of the fifteenth century into the nineteenth (and in some cases into the twentieth), like Plato’s cave-dwellers who emerged suddenly from darkness into the full light of day. For the centuries of Turkish rule, interrupted in the case of Northern Serbia by the twenty-one years of Austrian rule between the treaties of Passarovitz and Belgrade in the eighteenth century, left them much as it found them—with their material resources undeveloped, their roads reduced to mule-tracks, their harbours undredged, their education neglected. Consequently, it was manifestly unfair to expect those who were practically contemporaries of our Wars of the Roses to enter the nineteenth century with the same ideas and the same culture as the gradually evolved states of Western Europe. The wonder rather is that so much progress has been accomplished in so short a time, especially when we remember that the eminent personages who direct the affairs of this world are apt to regard the Balkan peoples, with their deeply-rooted historical traditions and aspirations, and their extraordinarily keen sense of nationality, immensely stimulated by the victories of 1912-13, as pawns in a game, to be moved about the board as its exigencies demand. Let us Western Europeans, then, who have had no personal experience of Turkish rule, be less censorious of those who have lived under it for nearly four centuries at Semendria and for five at Skopje.

In the following pages I propose to give a general sketch of mediæval Serbian history, emphasising those points which may help us to understand the events of the last few years, and referring those who desire further details to the great (if unpolished and unfinished) work of the late Constantin Jireček, who for the first time has placed the history of the Serbs in the Middle Ages upon the impregnable rock of contemporary documentary evidence.

The Serbs, like the Bulgars, are not original inhabitants of the Balkan peninsula, where, at the dawn of history, we find three principal races—the Greeks, the Illyrians (who are perhaps the ancestors of the Albanians), and the Thracians. But a continuous residence of thirteen centuries qualifies the Serbs to be considered a Balkan people. The usually received account of their entry into the peninsula is that given by the Byzantine Emperor, Constantine Porphyrogenitus, in his treatise “De Administrando Imperio,” written some three centuries later. He tells us that the Emperor Herakleios (610-41) gave them the territory which was later called “Serblia”—a country bounded in the time of Porphyrogenitus by Croatia on the north, Bulgaria on the south, the river Rashka near Novibazar on the east, and the present Herzegovina on the west. But a chain of historical facts proves that Herakleios merely gave to the Serbs what they had already taken. About a century before his time the Slavs, whose oldest home was in Poland, had begun to cross the Danube, and about 578 had actually appeared before Salonika. Herakleios, occupied with the war against the Persians in the East, could not defend the Western Balkans. So he made a virtue of necessity, just as, in our own day, governments have granted autonomy to lost provinces which they could no longer protect. The Danubian principalities, Bulgaria, Eastern Roumelia, Crete, and the Lebanon are examples.

This arrangement suited both parties. The Byzantine Court could keep up a formal suzerainty, and Constantine Porphyrogenitus could point in proof of it to the quite unscientific etymology of the word “Serboi” from the Latin _servi_, because they had become the “slaves” of the Byzantine Emperor. This national name, which first occurs in the ninth century, when we find Eginhard, the biographer of Charlemagne, describing in 822 the “Sorabi” as “said to occupy a large part of Dalmatia,” is still applied not only to the Balkan Serbs but to those of Saxony, whose language, however, is so different that a Serb of Bautzen cannot understand a Serb of Belgrade. The later Byzantine historians, full of classical lore, sometimes call the Serbs Τριβαλλοί after the Thracian tribe, which occupied in antiquity part of modern Serbia, and the king of which is brought on the stage and made to talk broken Greek in the _Birds_ of Aristophanes. Yet, despite this false etymology of their name, Constantine Porphyrogenitus himself admits what was doubtless the fact, that the Croats and Serbs were “subject to none.” “Thus,” in the words of Finlay[858], “the modern history of the eastern shores of the Adriatic commences with the establishment of the Sclavonian colonies in Dalmatia.” Of the two pre-existing elements in the population, the Romans, as Constantine Porphyrogenitus says, retired into the coast-towns, while the Illyrian aborigines were pushed southward into the country which since the eleventh century has borne the name of Albania from the district of Albanon near Kroja. Under the name of Ἀρβανῖται the Albanians are first mentioned in 1079.

The history of mediæval Serbia falls naturally into three sections: (1) from the entry of the Serbs into the Balkan peninsula to the close of the twelfth century—a period during which the Byzantine Empire, after finally crushing the Bulgarians, dominated the Near East, and the Serbs, divided into two separate states, played a subordinate but restive part; (2) from the rise of the Nemanja dynasty towards the close of the twelfth century to the battle of Kossovo in 1389—a period which saw Serbia rise to be for a brief space by far the greatest state in the peninsula; (3) the decline, when Danubian Serbia existed at the pleasure of the Turks, till in 1459 she received her death-blow.

During the first of these periods the only serious resistance to the Byzantine hegemony of the Balkan peninsula was offered by the Bulgarians—a Finnish, or, according to others, Tartar tribe, which entered it in 679, and became gradually absorbed in the Slavonic population, which it had conquered. The vanquished imposed their language upon the victors, but the victors, like the Angles in England, imposed their name upon the vanquished. Two powerful Bulgarian monarchs, Krum and the Tsar Symeon, in 813 and 913 threatened the very existence of Constantinople, as did the Tsar Ferdinand in 1913; and Krum was wont to pledge his nobles out of the silver-set skull of the Greek Emperor Nikephoros I, whom he had slain in battle. The Serbs, however, maintained friendly relations with these powerful neighbours till about the middle of the ninth century, when history registers the first of the long series of Serbo-Bulgarian wars, of which we have seen three in our own time. When the Serbs were united, they were able to defeat the Bulgars. But the rivalry of the hereditary princes, whom we find ruling over them at this period, led to the formation of pro-Bulgar and pro-Byzantine parties, so that the native ruler tended to become a Bulgarian or Byzantine nominee, while there was a pretender in exile at Prêslav or Constantinople only awaiting the opportunity to be restored by foreign aid. About 924, however, the Bulgarian Tsar Symeon, instead of placing a puppet of his own on the throne, carried away almost the whole Serbian people captive into Bulgaria. Serbia thus remained barren; and when, after Symeon’s death, the Serbian prince, Tchaslav, escaped from the Bulgarian court to Serbia, he found there only fifty men, and neither women nor children. By submitting to the Byzantine Emperor and with the latter’s help, he restored the scattered Serbs to their own country.

For the rest of the tenth century Serbian history is a blank, save for the survival of the leaden seal with a Greek inscription belonging to a Prince of Diokleia, the country called after the town of Doclea, whose ruins still stand near Podgoritza. This was the time of the great Bulgarian Tsar Samuel, under whom Bulgaria stretched to the Adriatic; and Durazzo, the key of the Western Balkans, as Byzantine statesmen considered it, became a Bulgarian port. In his days there lived on the lake of Scutari a saintly Serbian prince, John Vladimir. Samuel carried off this holy man to his own capital on the lake of Prespa. But the Tsar’s daughter, according to the story, was so greatly moved by his pious speeches and his beauty while engaged in washing his feet, that she begged her father to release him. The saint escaped prison but not matrimony; he married the love-sick Bulgarian princess; but not long after was murdered as he was leaving church by an usurper of the Bulgarian throne. His remains repose in the monastery of St John near Elbassan; his cross is still preserved in Montenegro and carried every Whitsunday in procession at dawn.

The complete destruction of the first Bulgarian Empire by the Byzantine Emperor Basil II, “the Bulgar-slayer,” in 1018, removed the danger of a Bulgarian hegemony in the Balkans, and made the Danube again the frontier of the Byzantine dominions, which surrounded on three sides the Serbian lands. Manuel I added Σερβικός to the Imperial style; Serbian pretenders were kept ready at Constantinople or Durazzo, in case the Serbian rulers showed signs of independence, while high-sounding court titles rewarded their servility. The internal condition of the Serbian people favoured Byzantine policy. For them, as in our own day, there were two Serb states, and two national dynasties, one ruling over the South Dalmatian coast, the present Herzegovina, and Dioklitia, modern Montenegro, with Scutari and Cattaro for its capitals; the other governing the more inland districts from a central point in the valley of the Rashka (near Novibazar), whence Serbia obtained the name of “Rassia,” by which she was largely described in the West of Europe during the Middle Ages. Of these two dynasties the former assumed the royal title—Hildebrand addressed a letter to “Michael, King of the Slavs”—but the latter became the more important, although its head contented himself with the more modest designation of “Great _jupan_,” that is, the first among the _jupani_, or Counts (Serbian _jupa_ = county).

Whenever opportunity offered, however, the Serbs endeavoured to emancipate themselves from Byzantium. Kedrenos informs us that “after the death of the Emperor Romanos III (in 1034) Serbia threw off the yoke of the Greeks”; Stephen Vojislav, ruler of Dioklitia, not only seized a cargo of gold, which was thrown up on the Illyrian coast, but saw a Byzantine army perish in the difficult passes of his country. A second Imperial invasion, which started from Durazzo, met with the same fate as that which befell the Austrian “punitive expedition” in December 1914. The Serbs allowed the invaders to penetrate into the Zeta valley, occupied the heights and utterly routed them as they returned, laden with booty, through a narrow gorge. Michael, Vojislav’s son, made peace with the Emperor, and received the title of _protospathários_, or “sword-bearer,” at the Byzantine court, while he assumed at home the title of king. But, after the crushing defeat of the Byzantines by the Seljuks in Asia at the battle of Manzikert in 1071, the temptation to rise was too strong for the Balkan Slavs to resist. Accordingly, at the invitation of the Bulgarians, Michael sent them a leader in the person of his son, Constantine Bodin, who was proclaimed at Prizren “Peter, Emperor of the Bulgarians.” Bodin was, however, captured by the Byzantines, but escaped and married the daughter of a citizen of Bari—the first example but not the last of a Serbo-Italian union. At his request Pope Clement III confirmed the rights of the Archbishopric of Antivari, the ancient See, which is mentioned as an Archbishopric so early as 1067, and on the holder of which Leo XIII in 1902 conferred the title of “Primate of Serbia.” But Bodin, bellicose and crafty as Anna Comnena describes him, fell again into the power of the Byzantines. Our countryman, Ordericus Vitalis, describes him as “treating in a friendly fashion” the Crusaders who passed through his territory. Usually, however, the Crusaders had difficulty with the Serbs; and William of Tyre tells how at Nish, then a “fortified town, filled with a valiant and numerous population,” certain “Germans, sons of Belial,” set fire to the mills, thus provoking the retaliation of the natives.

The excellent Archbishop, who was sent in 1168 on an embassy to Monastir, remarks that Serbia was a country “of difficult access”; and that the Serbs, whose name he also derives from their supposedly original state of servitude, were “an uncultured and undisciplined people, inhabiting the mountains and forests, and not practising agriculture, but possessed of much cattle great and small.... Sometimes their _jupani_ obey the Emperor: at other times all the inhabitants quit their mountains and forests ... to ravage the surrounding countries.” Yet the oldest piece of Serbian literature—a book of the Gospels in Cyrillic letters[859]—dates from this very period; and a priest of Antivari composed in Latin a history of the rulers of Diokleia, who were gradually ousted by the “Great _jupani_” of Rascia, who in their turn were forced to submit to the chivalrous Byzantine Emperor, Manuel I. A court poet of the period, Theodore Prodromos, represents the Serbian rivers Save and Tara, red with blood and laden with corpses, addressing the conqueror, and the Serbian _jupani_ trembling at the roar of the lion from the Bosporus.

The death of Manuel I, in 1180, freed the Southern Slavs from Byzantine rule; and the following decade saw the foundation of the great Serbian state, which reached its zenith in the middle of the fourteenth century, and then fell before the all-conquering Turk. As has usually happened in Balkan history, this national triumph was the work of one man—Stephen Nemanja, the first great name in Serbian history.

The founder of the Serbian monarchy was a native of what is now Podgoritza, whence he built up a compact Serbian state, comprising the Zeta (modern Montenegro), and the Land of Hum (the “Hill” country, now the Herzegovina), Northern Albania and the modern kingdom of Serbia, with a sea-frontage on the Bocche di Cattaro, whose municipality in 1186 passed a resolution describing him as “Our Lord Nemanja, Great _jupan_ of Rascia.” Of the Serbian lands Bosnia alone evaded his sway, forming a separate state, which, first under _bans_, and then under kings, survived the Serbian monarchy till it, too, fell before the Turks; while in the land of Hum he set up his brother, Miroslav, as prince. Thus, he substituted for the aristocratic Serbian federation a single state, embraced the Orthodox faith, which was that of the majority of his people, and strove to secure its religious as well as ecclesiastical union by extirpating the heresy of the Bogomiles, or _Babuni_ (whence the name of the Babuna pass near Monastir, so famous in the fighting of 1915), then rife in the Balkans. At the same time he sent presents to St Peter’s in Rome and St Nicholas’ at Bari.

When Frederick Barbarossa stopped at Nish on the third Crusade in 1189, Nemanja met him with handsome gifts; but we may doubt the statement of a German chronicler that he did homage for his lands to the Teutonic ruler. No German Emperor ever set foot in Nish again till the recent visit of the Kaiser to King Ferdinand, when a modern chronicle, the _Wolffbureau_, revived the memory of Barbarossa’s presence there. In 1195 Nemanja retired from the world, at the instigation of his youngest son, who is known in Serbian history as St Sava; and he died in 1200 as the monk Symeon in the monastery of Chilandar on Mount Athos. He, too, received the honours of a saint; his tomb is still revered in the monastery of Studenitza, which he founded; and his life was written by his eldest son and successor Stephen, and by Stephen’s brother St Sava—the beginning of Serbian historical biography.

Nemanja had never assumed the title of king, continuing to style himself as “Great _jupan_”; but Stephen won for himself the title of “the first-crowned king,” by obtaining, in 1217, a royal crown from Pope Honorius III. There were diplomatic reasons for the assumption of this title. The Byzantine Empire had now fallen before the Latin Crusaders; Frankish principalities had arisen all over the Near East; and the Latin ruler of Salonika had assumed the royal style. Bulgaria had arisen again, and her sovereigns had revived the ancient title of Tsar; and the King of Hungary had presumed to call himself king of “Rascia” also. To show his connection with the former kings of Diokleia, Stephen added that country to his style; to complete the independence of his kingdom, he obtained through his saintly and diplomatic brother from the Œcumenical Patriarch at Nice the recognition of a separate Serbian Church under Sava himself as “Archbishop of all the Serbian lands.” Sava was buried in the monastery of Mileshevo in the old _sandjak_ of Novibazar, whence his remains were removed and burned by the Turks near Belgrade in 1595. Many a pious legend has grown up around the name of the founder of the national Church; but, through the haze of romance and beneath the halo of the saint, we can descry the figure of the great ecclesiastical statesman, whose constant aim it was to benefit his country and the dynasty to which he himself belonged, and to identify the latter with the national religion.

While Stephen’s successor was a feeble character, the second Bulgarian Empire reached its zenith under the great Tsar John Asên II, who boasted in a still extant inscription in his capital of Trnovo, then the centre of Balkan politics, that he had “conquered all the lands from Adrianople to Durazzo.” The next Serbian King Vladislav was his son-in-law; St Sava died as his guest. But the hegemony of Bulgaria disappeared at his death in 1241; there, too, the national resurrection had been the work of one man. The Greeks regained their influence in Macedonia, and in 1261 recaptured Constantinople from the Latins.