Art. 10. THE MEDIEVAL SERBIAN EMPIRE.

1. Geschichte der Serben. Von Constantin Jireček. Erster Band (bis 1371). Gotha: Perthes, 1911.

2. Serbes, Croates et Bulgares. Par Louis Leger. Paris: Maisonneuve, 1913.

3. Les problèmes serbes. Par Stojan Novaković. In Archiv für Slavische Philologie, Bände xxxiii-iv. Berlin: Weidmann, 1912.

4. Listine.

By S. Ljubić. In Monumenta spectantia historiam Slavorum Slavorum meridionalium. Eleven vols. Agram, 1868-93.

5. Acta et Diplomata res Albania mediæ ætatis illustrantia. Ed. L. de Thallóczy, C. Jireček, E. de Sufflay. Vol. 1 (344-1343). Vindobonæ, 1913.

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 15th century into the 19th (and in some cases into the 20th), 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 18th 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 19th 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 four years, and referring those who desire further details to the great (if as yet unfinished) work of 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 Porphyrogénnetos, 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 Porphyrogénnetos 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 Porphyrogénnetos 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 Tpißaldoí 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 Porphyrogénnetos himself admits, what was doubtless the fact, that the Croats and Serbs were subject to none.' Thus, in the words of Finlay (i, 333), '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 Porphyrogénnetos says, retired into the coast-towns, while the Illyrian aborigines were

pushed southward into the country which since the 11th century has borne the name of Albania from the district of Albanon near Kroja. Under the name of 'Apẞavirai, 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 12th 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 12th century to the battle of Kossovo in 1389-a period which saw Serbia grow 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 Nikephóros I, whom he had slain in battle. The Serbs, however, maintained friendly relations with these powerful neighbours till about the middle of the 9th 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 proByzantine parties, so that the native ruler tended to become a Bulgarian or Byzantine nominee, while there was a pretender in exile at Preslav 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 his help, he restored the scattered Serbs to their own country.

For the rest of the 10th century Serbian history is a blank, save for the survival of the leaden seal with a Greek inscription belonging to a Prince of Diókleia, the country which took its name from 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 Bulgarslayer,' 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 Zepẞikóc 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 then, as in our own day, there were two