IN SOUTHERN and south-eastern Europe the Serbs and Bulgars, under the domination, sometimes real, sometimes shadowy, of Byzantium, strove to organize themselves into bodies politic on the Byzantine model. But the Slavs of the western fringe, along the Adriatic, had their own way of life;
one manifestation of it was the little kingdom of Dioclea, governed from Zeta, its capital; another was the emergence of Montenegro, whose record down the centuries is one of perpetual resistance to outside interference.
Other, larger political entities, which proved ephemeral, depended for their existence on Byzantine toleration or recognition. In the tenth century, Simeon the Great set up a Bulgarian empire which covered the greater part of the Balkans until it was destroyed by Byzantium; it was partially built up again by Samojlo, with Macedonia as its basis. In the eleventh, it was the state of Dioclea on the Adriatic coast which held out against Byzantium. In the twelfth, Serbian history began; originating with the local chieftains (Knez) of the Nemania family, and benefiting from the con-flict between the Byzantines and Hungarians, the Serbian state in the thirteenth century included Dioclea, the country behind Ragusa, and Macedonia. Surviving invasion by the crusaders and the Mongols, and warring with Hungary, Byzantium and the reconstituted power of Bulgaria, the Serbia of the Nemania dynasty reached its zenith under Tsar Dushan (: 331 -53)5 who styled himself, 'emperor of the Greeks and Serbs' and ruled over Albania, Thessaly, Macedonia and Epirus.
A Hardworking Peasant People
•The Turks brought progress to a standstill, and even in some cases caused retrogression, in the regions they conquered in the fifteenth century; this has created a false idea of those regions, an impression of deep-seated,
lneradicable backwardness. In reality, fourteenth-century Serbia was not backward and uncouth. Less frequently ravaged than its neighbour Bulgaria, and situated on lines of commercial communication leading to the Mediterranean, the Adriatic ports, Germany and Hungary, Serbia Under Tsar Dushan made remarkable economic progress and entered a Phase of social development to which the Turkish conquest called a halt.
THE BALKANS IN TURKISH HANDS
Rural activities flourished: pig-farming in the oak forests; cattle, sheep and goats (managed on the seasonal migratory system); lumbering (espe-cially in the western districts, close to the coast); cereal cultivation (wheat, oats, millet); fishing; hunting; bee-keeping. Gold was extracted near Novipazar and Prizren; iron, which was commoner, in a number of places;
lead, at Olovo and Kucevo; and silver at Rudnik. The mining and smelt-ing of all these were carried out by Saxon miners who started entersmelt-ing the country in the thirteenth century. Transport - by pack-horses and mules on sketchy, ill-maintained tracks - was slow and inconvenient; communi-cation was nevertheless maintained between the market towns of the in-terior, such as Pec and Prizren, and the seaports, outstanding among which was Cattaro (Kotor), whose leading merchants were admitted to the royal council and were sometimes employed as diplomats by the king.
The merchant class, among whom partnerships were not uncommon, and who gave visiting foreign merchants a privileged reception as gosti (hosts), did not belong exclusively to the Greek and Dalmatian (especially Ragusan) bourgeoisie: the rapid growth of small towns and mining centres created the nucleus of a Serbian bourgeoisie, whose subsequent develop-ment was arrested by the unpromising economic conditions imposed by Turkish domination.
The Serbian population seems to have increased rapidly, to judge by the large number of village settlements dating from this period; it consisted mainly of farmers and stock-breeders, all of whom lived under the domina-tion of feudal lords to whom the king had given estates as a reward for their services. The Vlach stock-breeders had their own special way of life and enjoyed greater liberty from compulsion. The ordinary peasants were less fortunate; a few were serfs, the rest owned small hereditary properties to which various obligations were attached, and were compelled to give a corvee of two days per week to their seigneurs. An even heavier imposition may have been the corvee devoted to public works, a task allotted by a royal administration whose resources consisted mainly of taxes on mining and trade, and which was intent on maintaining the country's security by keep-ing the forts and roads in good repair. Serbia's economic progress in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was of greater benefit to the king, the feudal grandees and the merchants of Ragusa than to the peasantry. Hence the sharp social contrasts which, at that period, were the price to be paid for the political and social organization of the state.
Serbia's achievement during the fourteenth century was, although short-lived, something original, something all her own. The constant aim of her ruling line, the Nemania family, was to set up a centrally administered state on the Byzantine model, based on a land-owning aristocracy and de-fending its existence alike against Hungarians and Byzantines before suc-cumbing to the advancing Turks. The king governed Serbia proper (Russia, Rascie) - the interior of the country, including Greek provinces wrested from Byzantium - and part of the Adriatic coast; the latter being divided into provinces of which one, Dioclea (the coast of Montenegro), was
allo-THE SERBS ON allo-THE CREST OF allo-THE WAVE 105 cated to the heir to the throne, who also ranked as joint sovereign of the whole country. Unlike the Russian and Bulgarian sovereigns, the king of Serbia had no fixed capital but led a nomadic existence between various castles and monasteries which were his summer and winter residences up and down the kingdom. In 1346 King Stephen Dushan proclaimed him-self'emperor of the Serbs and Greeks' and made his court adopt Byzantine titles, functions and ceremonial dress. He governed through high-ranking officials, the Knez (comes] who represented his authority down to village level, and Diets (%bor} whose members were representatives of the nobility and of the clergy, both Serbian and Greek. His decrees and charters were drawn up in Serbian, Greek and Latin. The Serbian used in these docu-ments was the sto dialect, the diplomatic language of the Balkans at that time.
His reign saw the establishment of a Code of Peace and Justice whose two hundred articles laid down the structure of feudal society, the privi-leges of the Church, the rights and duties of the nobles and their dependent peasants, and the scale of penalties for offences against the law. This 'code of Dushan' is a valuable source of information on Serbian society on the eve of the Ottoman invasion.
The king's authority was exercised not only through the lay administra-tion but also through the Serbian Church, which was independent of Rome after 1219 and became the national church. Okhrid remained an autocephalous archbishopric; under Dushan its archbishop was even ele-vated to the rank of 'Patriarch of the Serbs and Greeks'. After Zica, the residence of the archbishops was at Pec until the eighteenth century. The network of churches and monasteries, many of which were of royal founda-tion (examples are Studenica and St George of Rin or Nemania), covered the whole country; they were particularly numerous in the south, where the Serbian clergy were anxious to force out their Greek rivals. The mon-asteries, which, unlike the Bulgarian monmon-asteries, were large, owned much land and by the fourteenth century had become powerful feudal manors, and remained so until overtaken by the ruinous consequences of Turkish invasion. Along the coast, the Serbian sovereigns in their age of greatness extended their friendly protection to the Roman Catholic churches of Cattaro and Ragusa.
Serbian Art
The kings and emperors of Serbia in the thirteenth and fourteenth cen-turies were prolific builders of churches; according to G.Millet, their archi-tectural heritage is 'the richest of all those bequeathed to us by ancient Christian art in the East'. The explanation is that monastery and royal residence both served a dual purpose, at once political and religious. The founder of the Nemania dynasty became a monk, ruled under the name of k v a and instigated the building of the famous monasteries of Studenica d Chilandari (on Mount Athos). It was during his reign that work started on the building of the cathedral of 2ica, the Serbian Rheims. For a
io6 THE BALKANS IN TURKISH HANDS THE SERBS ON THE CREST OF THE WAVE 107
hundred years, Romanesque art, with local adaptations, became a national art.Sixteen magnificent churches were built in Serbia between the thir-teenth century and the end of the fourthir-teenth, a notable instance being Serbia's national religious sanctuary, St Nahum, on Lake Okhrid, which has a Byzantine ground-plan and Serbian vaulting.
The interior walls of these churches were covered with frescoes, most of which have unfortunately disappeared; we have at any rate almost none which are as old as the twelfth century. The most important are those in the church of St Michael, near Ston, Sancta Sophia, at Okhrid, and the monastery of Nerezi, near Skoplje (i 164); in the last-named, the faces have an individuality which is scarcely to be found elsewhere than in Italian frescoes of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Surviving examples from a later period are those in the churches at Gracanica and Nagorica (1337), whose bright colours and supple drawing recall Sienese painting, and at Liubostinja, which date from Dushan's reign.
Serbia's Independence Obliterated; the Turkish Conquest
The frailty of the Serbian state was demonstrated by its breaking up under Turkish pressure on the Balkans after the death of Dushan. The political structures set up by the Balkan Slavs were, indeed, dependent on contin-gent circumstances: they were the handiwork of a single princeling or family, they lacked economic and social foundation, they were resisted by the feudal landowners; and their crowning weakness was their inability to hold out for long against attacks from neighbours more powerful than themselves. The centrifugal tendencies which they contained, and which had been temporarily suppressed, broke out afresh to restore the anarchy which was the peninsula's chronic condition. Vestiges of authority re-mained only in limited sectors. As soon as Dushan was dead, Trvtko, the ban (ruler) of Bosnia, assumed the sovereign title and founded a new, toler-ably powerful kingdom, which, however, soon succumbed to the attacks of the Hungarians and the Turks.
The Ottoman conquest put the Balkans back into a state of political childhood and kept them there. Between 1371 (Turkish victory on the Marica) and 1526 (victory at Mohacs), Turkish raids penetrated farther and farther to the north, disorganizing the country and, after each fresh victory, leaving it to disintegrate for a while beyond the Turkish advanced positions. The battle of Kossovo (1389) reduced Serbia to Turkish vassal-age. Bulgaria and Macedonia were the next victims. In the following cen-tury, such Serbian districts as were still uncaptured were added to the list, the last autonomous 'despot' being removed in 1459; Bosnia fell in 1463, and Herzegovina in 1481. The Turks crossed the Danube, entered Hungary, sent raiding parties into Slovenia, and threatened Vienna.
The frontier was stabilized, however, and the lot of the Southern Slavs on both sides of the Danube was sealed for the next three centuries. The Slovenes and Croats placed themselves under Hapsburg protection.
Southern Hungary was peopled by Serbian refugees who joined forces with the Hungarians to fight the Turks. Venice possessed herself of Dalmatia.
Only the proud and independent republic of Ragusa, in its craggy home, held firm against all comers.
When the Turks invaded the Balkans, Serbia was a state on its way to-wards modern forms of political organization. The customs governing the succession were unfavourable to that fragmentation of the central power which, in Russia, had strengthened feudal divisions. Trade between the coast and the interior reinforced the royal authority by making the town-dwelling middle classes an important element in the kingdom and limiting the power of the large landowners. Turkish pressure in the fourteenth cen-tury, and the all but complete conquest of the peninsula in the fifteenth, brought this forward trend to a dead stop, revived old social patterns, and froze the fate of the Slav peoples of the Balkans into immobility for more than three hundred years.
The abolition first of the imperial and later of the royal title, a quarter of a century after the death of Stephen Dushan in 1355, is merely a symbol of a long process of disintegration which went on for over a century. The anarchy caused by the Turks' forays into the country was manifested by attempts at local self-defence and by profound changes in the patterns of political and social life.
The immediate consequences of the invasion were burnt, deserted vil-lages, rural indigence, decline of the manorial and ecclesiastical estates, and a withdrawal of the population to the mining communities and forti-fied towns, which were capable of self-defence or at least of maintaining a somewhat problematic survival. Later, there were peasant migrations from the great open plains to the shelter of the forests, to the powerful coastal towns, and over the frontier into Hungarian Pannonia. Self-governing communities were set up everywhere — groups of rich or noble families whose leading members became warlords, and which were allied to one another by ties of blood; this stage was followed by a grouping on a wider social scale - groups of villages, which soon fell under the domination of these new-made feudal lords; and these local combinations were quick to give birth to clans and tribes and to reconstitute a 'primitive democracy', in which ancient traditions were preserved and law was based on custom.
This turn of affairs constituted neither the rise of a new system nor the revival of an old one; it was an alignment of society with the social patterns of the Vlachs, who, even in the great days of the now defunct central authority, had been less affected by it than anyone else.