Chapter 14

This one would translate as follows: 'Thou shalt no longer be, O my country, a poor stretch of land between the mountains and the sea, with some bare scattered islands; but Serbia reborn, that is now sicklied o'er with Turkish lethargy, shall make one life and one desire with thee and with all these fields that sprung into being under an Italian smile.' If you really think that this proves that Tommaseo contemplated a harmonious coexistence in Dalmatia of the two countries, Serbia and Italy, then I beg you to read the passage once again." This Mr. Antonio Cippico, by the way, is a native of Dalmatia with most Italian sympathies; another Cippico from Dalmatia, a cousin of his, has for years been a well-known littérateur in Belgrade, and according to him the great majority of the Cippico family are of his way of thinking.

THE SOUTHERN SLAV HOPES ARE CENTRED ON CETINJE

While Tommaseo foresaw this union, his contemporaries of the Omladina strove for another one. Prince Michael Obrenovi['c] had, in 1860, again succeeded his father, and as it was not known if he had undergone a change in exile, the young patriots of the Omladina did not look upon him as the saviour of the Serbian people. There was again a poet on the throne of Montenegro, a youth of whom they heard romantic things. Not only had Prince Nicholas borne arms against the Turk, but he had sung in moving verse the glory of the Serbian heritage, the triumphant union of the Serbs that was to be. Since 1860 he had guided Montenegro's destinies--his uncle, the first purely temporal ruler, Danilo, having been assassinated in the Bocche di Cattaro after a reign of warfare against the Turk, and his own subjects, who resented the deposition of the tribal chiefs, the imposition of terrific taxes, based on the number of cattle they possessed, and occasional seduction of their wives. The Omladina knew that Michael had been visiting the West, that he had frequented the masters of science and politics in London, Paris and Berlin; but he would probably forget their precepts and in any case he was much duller than the splendid youth whom they affectionately called Nikita.... Some historians have wondered why this young man did not alienate the affection of his people by the slaughter of the Kadi['c] clan, whereof a member had assassinated Prince Danilo. But it was the Senate which punished the murderer by exiling him, with seven families of his kindred, to Turkey. Danilo had been aware of his intention, while the man was waiting--in obedience to Austria's orders--at Kotor. And the Prince, acting on a local custom, sent word that if Kadi['c] did not return to Montenegro he would bestow Mrs. Kadi['c] on some one else. After two weeks she became the wife of a neighbour. The story that Kadi['c] was avenging her seduction is an Austrian invention, for Danilo seems never to have met her.

One day in 1862 the Turks, who still were in the Belgrade fortress, started, for some foolish reason, to bombard the town. Prince Michael in the subsequent negotiations showed that he had qualities one could not but respect. Still he was unsuccessful (until 1867) in obtaining the removal of the Turkish garrisons--Great Britain, fearing Russian influence, and Austria, hostile to the total independence of the Serbs, supported Turkey. And Michael governed with so firm a hand that there were many who believed that the material improvement he was introducing, schools of agriculture, schools of forestry and what not, could be just as well inaugurated by the far more sympathetic Prince Nikita. And when in 1866 Michael and Nikita made a grand convention for the union of the Serbs in Serbia and in Montenegro, and Nikita undertook to step aside, if necessary, so that all the independent Serbs might be united under Michael's sceptre, then indeed the Omladina talked of him with rapture. And Nikita made allusions to this "grand refusal" all his life and with a face of honest pride. He never mentioned anything about clause 3, which was not published. By that clause Nikita was to be Prince Michael's heir, in case he had no son. There was not much likelihood that he would have one, for the Hungarian wife from whom he was divorced[46] had given him no children, and the girl with whom he was overpoweringly in love was a cousin, whom the Church, because of their relationship, prevented him from marrying. It was with this girl that the Prince was always said to have been walking in the park near Belgrade on June 10, 1868, when he was mysteriously murdered.[47] After Michael's death the Skup[vs]tina, not acting in accordance with the secret clause, placed on the throne a grandson (?) of a brother of Prince Milo[vs], who was a minor and the nearest in the order of succession. By this time the _Omladina_ had perceived that in the character of their romantic prince lay certain lamentable traits. The friendship, which he had inherited, with Russia he continued, and the Russian Court rewarded him in no half-hearted fashion. When the Italians proposed in 1866 that he and they should share the Bocche di Cattaro, he said the moment was not opportune; the Austrians for this bestowed on him a pension which they paid until the outbreak of the World War. One could understand, of course, that Nikita did not wish to rouse the enmity of Austria; it must have hurt him to refrain from going to the Bocche, where the population was most Slav and had endured a great deal for the cause, but other men were hurt by his acceptance of the pension.

FOR THEY KNOW NEITHER NICHOLAS OF MONTENEGRO NOR MICHAEL OF SERBIA

Michael in those few years had displayed such qualities that he might have united with his country Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria and Macedonia. His statesmanship, which made such a result seem very possible, may have induced some jealous partisans of the rival Karageorgevi['c] dynasty to murder him; the same reasons would have been sufficient for Austria. And Austria had given her formal consent to a diplomatic plan for the solution of the Bosnian question, whereby Michael was to administer the two distracted provinces as the Sultan's mandatory. The decapitation of the begs by Omar Pasha had by no means marked the dawn of a new era for the peasant. From 1856 till 1859 the country was in a condition of such anarchy, with pashas tyrannizing here and there, with villages obliged to take as their protector some marauding ruffian who had settled in their midst, with young men taking to the hills, that finally a conference was summoned, at Austria's instigation, in Constantinople, and of this the upshot was that the abuses practised hitherto by the great landlords were all sanctioned if they would inaugurate no new ones. The Franciscan monks, beloved by the people, had kept alive the people's hope that something would be done for them; they could not stop the people from attempting to obtain it by ill-organized revolts. From time to time there would be a concerted movement; thus Luka Vukalovi['c] in 1862 fired his own Herzegovina and also the Bocche di Cattaro, weapons and volunteers came from Montenegro, and Vukalovi['c] was recognized by Turkey as the military and civil head of an autonomous Herzegovina. But he was subsequently forced to fly to Serbia, while the Turks had such success against the Montenegrins that the Great Powers had to intervene. And that was one of the most fruitful of the insurrections. When the news was spread that Michael would arrive there were great popular rejoicings. Christians and Muhammedans were busy, till the time of his assassination, preparing for his solemn entry.

IF MICHAEL HAD LIVED!

Many of the Bulgars were as eager to associate themselves with Michael. In 1862, when Belgrade was bombarded by the Turks, Rakovski got together a Bulgarian legion which would fight in Serbia against the common foe; in 1867 the Bulgarian Revolutionary Committee at Bucharest, where these leaders of the people had sought sanctuary, proposed the union of Bulgaria and Serbia under Michael. "Between the Serbs and the Bulgars," says the first article, "there shall be established a fraternal union calling itself the Yugoslav Kingdom." If this idea had been put forward by any one but Rakovski one might consider it a mere fantastic notion, but the Bulgars who elected this extraordinary man to be their chief were, as is the habit of the Bulgars, nothing if not practical.

THE STRANGE CAREER OF RAKOVSKI

Rakovski was born at the picturesque little town of Kotel in the eastern Balkans, and was educated at Constantinople, but his ebullient temperament did not allow him to pursue his studies to the end. He turned up at Braila in 1841 and, being hardly twenty years of age, was dreaming of a revolution of the Orient. With a group of insurgents he tried to cross the Danube and to rouse the Bulgars. A Roumanian patrol opens fire, on each side there are several killed and wounded. He is captured and condemned to death, but having a Greek passport he is rescued by the Greek Consul and put on board a boat which lands him at Marseilles. For eighteen months he lives in France--it is not known where--and is imbued with democratic doctrine. Passing through Constantinople in 1843 he accepts a post as schoolmaster at Trnovo, but is immediately at loggerheads with the Greek bishop and departs. Returning to his birthplace he is irritated by the pride and harshness of the upper class, and he attempts to make the people rise against them. They charge him with being a disturber of the peace. "He has travelled through Europe," says their complaint to the Government, "and now in this town he bestrides a horse, brandishes his sword and overwhelms the Turks with insults, both their race and their religion." In consequence Rakovski and his father are arrested and dispatched to Constantinople, where they both of them remain in prison until 1847. After being liberated, he forms a secret society which is to take advantage of the approaching Russo-Turkish conflict. Its members are to have themselves enrolled among the Turks, with the double object of protecting the Bulgarian population from excesses on the part of the soldiery and also, at the propitious moment, to stir them up and so assist the Russians. He himself is appointed to the Turkish staff at Shumen, as first dragoman. His plot being discovered, he is arrested and sent to Constantinople; on the way he escapes, but he proceeds to Constantinople and organizes there a company of heiduks. Turkey's entrance into the European concert fills him with pessimism. The Bulgars at Constantinople believe that the civilizing influence of the West will not be in vain. He foresees a more evil despotism masked by the pseudo-liberal manoeuvres of the Powers, and henceforward he joins those Bulgars who agitate from Roumania or from Serbia. He goes to the Banat, where he is not only made most welcome but is enabled to publish _The Bulgarian News_, which is political, and a literary supplement, _The Swan of the Danube_. The Turks are uneasy; they ask the Austrians to suppress these papers. The Austrians comply and expel the editor. He is persecuted by the Porte in Moldavia and flies to Russia, where he devotes himself seriously to a long poem in honour of the heiduks. The first part of this very long work, the _Gorski Patnik_, had appeared at Novi Sad. It brought him considerable fame--he was compared with Virgil--but modern readers find this poem tedious. He likewise wrote a dissertation which established, by comparative philology, that the Bulgars are the most direct descendants of the Aryans, that their language is the nearest to Sanskrit, and that the other European languages, including Greek and Latin, are derived from it. Rakovski next appears in Belgrade, where he leads a life of splendour; he had carriages and wonderful horses, he was arrayed in a princely kind of uniform and was surrounded by a kind of guard. The source of his revenues, which always seemed to fluctuate, was never fathomed; but they may at this period have accrued from his literary labours, which--although the present generation smile--produced among the Bulgars a vast, patriotic pride. At Belgrade the visionary historian and whimsical philologist becomes a most sagacious politician. He is the first Bulgarian publicist to talk of a free press, and he refuses, unlike many others, to seek help from Russia only. "We must help ourselves," he cries. "As we are Orthodox, Russia will desire to keep us under the authority of the Greek Church; as we are Slavs, she will try to make the Western Powers suspicious of us." When there was a wave of emigration to Russia he frantically tried to stop it. "For you it will be suicide," he exclaimed, "for your children assassination and for Bulgaria ruin!" He painted Russia in appalling colours, and the would-be emigrants repented. His personal affairs oppressed him for a time in 1862, when he left Belgrade to the imprecations of his creditors. The Serbian statesmen, while appreciating his exalted patriotism, would have sooner had amongst them a more typical and stable Bulgar. Yet they declined the Porte's request for extradition. At the beginning of 1863 Rakovski is in Athens, magnificent once more and now accompanied by an aide-de-camp, a Montenegrin captain, whom he introduces as related to Nikita. He is forming an alliance of the Balkan States, which, according to his calculations, will exterminate the Turk in Europe. He promises himself to furnish 20,000 volunteers--to start with. In the previous year when he had planned to liberate Bulgaria with 12,000 volunteers, of whom a hundred were to be cavalry and another hundred gunners, he could gather only 500. And now again he is disillusioned and leaves Athens.

It was during his stay there that he met the well-known Balkan travellers, Miss Irby and Miss Muir Mackenzie. They had been up and down the Peninsula in 1862 and 1863, making very exhaustive inquiries that were the basis of their book.[48] In 1917 Professor Ivan Shishmanoff discovered two letters of Miss Muir Mackenzie's in Sofia and published them in _Sbornik_. The first is dated May 12, and is in German. "Since we have been here we have made the acquaintance of Mr. Rakovski," she writes. "He has been so kind as to teach me Serbian, during Miss Irby's illness. We like him very much, and I know of no one among the Slavs with whose opinion we so entirely agree; because he does not think as a Serbian or yet a Montenegrin or a Croat or a Bulgar, but as a Slav.... I can't tell you how much I fear that their internal divisions will make impossible the realization of a Yugoslav country. One can't hope for much from the Greeks; they have exorbitant ambitions and neither private nor public integrity. Those are bad faults to find in an ally. And they speak openly of a Byzantine Empire! And reckon that all the Southern Slavs, Serbs as well as Bulgars, belong to them.... I hope that England will some day assure herself that there are other Christians in the East besides the Greeks."

THE YUGOSLAV NAME

Miss Muir Mackenzie's other letter, of June 23, is addressed to Rakovski from Bolsover Castle, Chesterfield. It is written in French. "We attach great importance," she says, "to the name Yugoslav. By means of crying that word in the ears of the Greeks one will succeed in making them understand that the Bulgars are Slavs. By means of crying it in the ears of the European diplomats one will succeed by making them comprehend that one cannot ignore a people of ten or twelve million souls. By means of crying 'We are Yugoslavs,' the Yugoslavs themselves will succeed in forgetting their little distinctions of environment and race, and in conducting themselves as a nation worthy of the name. Let us therefore cry that word--we will make people speak of it sooner or later."

In June 1863 Rakovski was at Cetinje, but as he was requesting subsidies he did not find a very sympathetic audience in Nikita. Thence he passed to Bucharest, where he issued--for ten numbers--a Bulgaro-Roumanian newspaper; the Bulgars in Bucharest had grown too prosperous to be interested either in his journalistic or his military schemes, and he found the Bulgarian colonies in Russia equally obtuse. He was attacked by consumption while he was at work upon the _Provisional Law for the National Bands in the Forests_--a sort of written constitution for the heiduks, and in the intervals of his last sufferings he wrote a history of the heiduks from the days of the Turkish conquest. He died on October 20, 1867.

The statesmen who then governed the Great Powers may have deprecated Rakovski as much as he deprecated them. It must have been exasperating for those solid persons subsequently to acknowledge--if they did so--that this unbalanced agitator weighed them very well. But the Balkan countries were too weak; they had to suffer being thrown aside, pushed here and there, and trampled on; for when the Great Powers came down to the Balkans they could really not pay much attention to the little peoples of the country and at the same time keep their eyes upon each other. Afterwards the Balkan countries found that it was better for them when the Great Powers fought each other there than when they came to friendly understandings. It was profitable and diverting for Albania when the Austrians and the Italians glowered at each other in that silent land: it was terrible in 1878 for Bosnia and Herzegovina when the Great Powers were on such good terms with one another that they allowed one of themselves to make off with those two waifs of whom he was not even the wicked uncle.

Russia had been taking a keen interest in the Balkans after Austria's disaster in 1859 at Sadowa. It was then that Prince Gortchakoff and his colleagues in the Ministry were inspired by the doctrines of Katkoff, who in his _Moscow Gazette_ exercised much authority over public opinion and even over the Tzar. Panslavism, according to Debidour,[49] which a short time ago had been shivering in the background, lifted its head proudly and spoke of the new era which holy Russia was about to inaugurate, of the sacred mission that was incumbent on the Tzar. And the sanctity was greater in that it was not to be defined by merely mediæval but by modern language; the Tzar must not alone protect all those who practised his religion, he must be a patron saint who patronizes.

RUSSIA AND AUSTRIA SOW DISCORD IN THE BALKANS

To this end committees, in Moscow and in Petrograd, deliberated; newspapers and pamphlets spread their views; agile agents propagated them throughout the Balkans, calling on the Bulgars and the Bosniaks to rise, promising aggrandizements to Serbia and Montenegro, spurring on the fiery Cretans to make their revolt of 1866. All promised well. There was to be a Balkan federation formed at the expense of Austria and the Porte: Serbia would receive the Voivodina and Bosnia, Montenegro would acquire Herzegovina, the Croats would at least annex Dalmatia, and the Slovenes and the Bulgars would come naturally into this united Yugoslavia, under Michael's sceptre. He was at the time not only in most cordial relations with the Bulgars, but in 1867 he began _pourparlers_ to ally himself with Greece, and he made overtures to the new sovereign of Roumania, Charles of Hohenzollern. And after this plan also had been nullified by Michael's death, the Russians still continued with their task, but now they had to deal with a convalescent Austria. It came to pass that the Bulgars found themselves in Russia's sphere, the Serbs in that of Austria. The little countries were thus violently pulled apart, and naturally each of them began to stretch their hands out to the neighbouring Slavs who were in servitude, but yet they managed to keep hand in hand with one another. The young men, such as Karaveloff and Tzankoff, whom Prince Michael sent to Western Europe to be educated, the young Bulgarian priests who had studied in that branch of the Belgrade seminary which Prince Michael opened for them, and all the Serbs and Bulgars who considered their two countries knew that, for political and economic reasons, they must not be kept apart. But there was always a Great Power to frustrate these designs. Yet even after they had been flung at each other in the fratricidal days of 1885, even after their attempt in 1905 to found a Customs union had been vetoed, even after some of their so-called _intelligentsia_ had done what injury they could by harping on the limitations from which they naturally, like the older peoples, are not exempt--nevertheless, as it was seen in 1912, when the demonstrations of delight in Belgrade and in Sofia were touching, they are only too glad to fulfil their destiny. Since 1912 that misguided _intelligentsia_ has been given a large store of fresh ammunition. They will go on firing and firing, while the people, including the real _intelligentsia_, will be better engaged.

THE MACEDONIAN SLAVS UNDER THEIR GREEK CLERGY