The Birth Of Yugoslavia Volume I Part 5

The Austrians in the eighteenth century constrained a good many Southern Slavs to enter the Church of Rome. Austria has always been rich in faithful sons of the Church. Some years ago, for example, I happened in various parts of Dalmatia and Herzegovina to be from time to time the travelling companion of an elderly Viennese. He told me how he had lately impressed upon the mother of his illegitimate son that the boy must receive a thoroughly Catholic education, and in every place this gentleman made his patronage of an hotel dependent on the proprietor's religion, which he frequently knew before we got there. I saw him last at Mostar in distress, because the only good hotel was administered by an Israelite of whose religion he disapproved, and the weather, as it often is at Mostar, was so oppressingly hot that I suppose he had not energy enough to try to convert him....

BUNJEVCI, OKCI AND KRAOVANI

Perhaps Austria would not have displayed such fervour in creating Bunjevci, okci and Kraovani if she had known that these Roman Catholic Slavs would remain, on the whole, very good Slavs. The Bunjevci, who live for the most part in Backa and Baranja, came originally from the Buna district of Herzegovina. The total population of the town of Subotica is 90,000, and 73,000 of these are Bunjevci, whose peculiarity is that the old father stays in the town house, while his sons, with their wives and children, drive out on Monday morning over that rather featureless landscape to the farm, which may be at a considerable distance, and there they remain till the end of the week. They are a quiet, industrious people who have lived withdrawn, as it were, from the world since the twenty-five or thirty families escaped from the Turks; and as they brought with them only that number of surnames it is now customary to add a distinguishing name. Thus the Vojnic family has divided into branches, such as Vojnic-Heiduk, Vojnic-Kortmic, Vojnic-Purca. The Bunjevci seem, although Catholics, to incline less to the Croats than to the Serbs, some of whose customs--those, for instance, of Christmas--they share.

But in merry-making they are a great deal more subdued, save that, in drinking to some one's health, you are expected to empty three gla.s.ses. In the intervals of a Bunjevci dance at Subotica men would promenade the room arm-in-arm with men and girls with girls. The faces of all of them express entire goodness of heart and absence of guile; many of the girls, who looked like early portraits of Queen Victoria, were arrayed in the local costume, which permits great variety of colour so long as the lady wears, I am told, about fifteen petticoats.

These worthy people used to have nothing but their Church, and are now extremely religious. The man who has most influence over them is Blako Rajic, a priest and deputy, who was not always able to prevent a Hungarian Archbishop from sending a priest to his church, where he held services in Magyar. During one night, at all events, this church caused the Magyars much annoyance. It was at the beginning of the Great War--they had accused Rajic of making signals from the tower, which is very high; and in order to prove their accusation they sent a large body of soldiers, who surrounded the church, on a boisterous winter's night. Sure enough, the signals were seen to be flashing up there. The church was locked and a blast of the bugles had no effect--save that a few Bunjevci looked out of their windows--for the flashes did not cease. Then the captain commanded his men to give a mighty shout: "Put out those lights! Put out those lights!" But not the least notice was taken. There was nothing to do but to wait until Rajic, or whoever it was, should finish his nefarious business and come down. About an hour later, though, the wind became so piercing that a non-commissioned officer suggested that the captain should send for the big drum; the noise of that, said he, would surely reach that devil in the tower. But the big drum, when it came, had no success.

The noise it made, reinforced by those of the bugles and the men's shouting, was such that some Bunjevci dressed themselves and ventured out into the cold, to see what really all the turmoil was about. To one of them the freezing captain yelled that he knew perfectly the criminal had heard them, and that he went on with his accursed flashes since he recognized that this would be the last base act that he would ever do on earth. For the remainder of that night the captain and his men, not with the hope that they would be obeyed but merely to warm themselves a little, kept on shouting now and then, "Put out those lights!" And in the dawn the non-commissioned officer discovered that the signals had been moonlight on some broken gla.s.s that was being shaken by the wind.... One sees in the very well-arranged archives of the town of Sombor that the Bunjevci were accustomed, like the Germans, to ally themselves with the Magyars and thus give them a majority. Only in the last ten years at Subotica (and not at all at Sombor) did they ask for their rights; they had seemed conscious of the religious difference between themselves and the Serbs, unconscious that they were of the same race and language. The Magyars attempted to show in Paris that the Bunjevci are not Slavs, but the remains of the k.u.mani (who died out in those parts about five to six hundred years ago and were not Magyars). In the census of twenty years ago the Bunjevci were called Serbo-Croats, in accordance with a monograph, "Sabotca Varosh Tortenete," in which Professor Ivanji, a Magyar, said they were simply Catholic Serbs. In the census of 1910 the Bunjevci are put under the heading "egyebek," which means "miscellaneous."

This census juggling by the Magyars was one of their milder methods of administration. The term Serbo-Croat came to be avoided, and, so that foreigners should be misled, the Yugoslavs in Baranja were cla.s.sified as Serbs, Croats, Illyrians, okci, Bunjevci, Dalmatians and so forth. The okci, who were also converted in the eighteenth century to the Roman Catholic Church, are mostly found to-day in Baranja. The name by which they are known is derived from the Serbo-Croatian word _aka_, the palm of the hand, and refers to the fact that the Catholics cross themselves with the open hand, whereas the Orthodox join the tips of the thumb and first two fingers. The okci are considered a weaker people than the Bunjevci; the mothers--they say it is love--are often so weak that they allow their children to do anything they like at home, and would not think of remonstrating with them if they wear their caps in church. Among the okci none is of a higher than the peasant cla.s.s, for which reason their priests have usually been Magyars. He who ministers to the village of Szalanta, however, is a Croatian poet. The mayor of that village--I believe a typical specimen of the okci--was a ragged, humorous-looking person with a very bushy moustache. He was in remarkable contrast with the young Magyar schoolmaster, whose remuneration is largely in kind.

This gentleman looked as if he would be well content if the parents of his children sent him not eggs, b.u.t.ter and chickens, but armfuls of flowers. A month before the Hungarian revolution in 1918 an order had come from Buda-Pest to the effect that the lowest cla.s.s in a school was to receive instruction solely in its own language, but the Hungarian Republic ordered that no history was to be taught, since it praises kings.

As for the Kraovani, who inhabit five villages of the mining district of Resica in Caras-Severin, the eastern county of the Banat, they also were converted by Maria Theresa, in whose time they fled from Montenegro, Macedonia and the Bulgarian frontier. Gradually they have come to reckon themselves as Croats, owing to their priests who come from Croatia. They are all big men with luxuriant moustaches.

There is a district in southern Russia, near the Black Sea, which is called New Serbia. It is the fertile country that was chosen by 150,000 Southern Slavs when they preferred, in 1768, to go into exile rather than change their religion, like the Bunjevci, the okci and the Kraovani. They preserve some traces of their origin, but can no longer be considered Yugoslavs.

In speaking of these converts and their descendants we have alluded to the Buda-Pest policy of enforcing the Magyar language. This movement may be studied from the close of the eighteenth century in Croatia, where Latin had hitherto been the official language. In 1790 the Croats were again delivered by Leopold II. to the Magyars, who were bent upon executing their designs.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 20: Cf. _La Question Yougo-Slav_, by Vouk Primorac.

Paris, 1918.]

[Footnote 21: When the Slav first arrived in these territories the Romans everywhere yielded to them, and while the more prosperous Romans settled on the coast, the others retired to the mountains. One of the sea-towns, by the way, to which the Romans fled was Split, where they could live in the ruins of Diocletian's enormous, decadent palace; and from extant lists of the mayors of that town we see that until the tenth century they all had Latin names, from then till the twelfth century we find partly Latin and partly Slav names, and during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries their names were nearly always Slav. Those Romans--of course not implying by that word that their forbears had come from Rome or even from Italy--those refugees who took to the mountains mingled with the Slavs and were also joined by wandering shepherds from Wallachia, owing to whom all this variegated population came to be called Black Vlachs, Mauro-Vlachs and in English Morlaks. The epithet "black" was attached to the Vlachs, so Jirecek thinks (cf. _Bulletino di Archeologia Dalmata_, Split, 1879), on account of the hordes of Black Tartars who until the beginning of the fourteenth century infested the plains of Moldavia. Gradually in this hinterland population the Roman and the Vlach died out, but the latter's name was retained. It had lost its ethnic meaning and among the Ragusan poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the word was used to signify a shepherd. The Venetians employed the word Morlacchi as a term of mockery, because it indicated people of the mountains, backward people. And this derogatory connotation has clung to it, so that to-day the Morlaks, who after all are Croats and Serbs, do not like to be called by that name.]

[Footnote 22: The Serbian Archbishopric of Pec, which Duan at his coronation had raised to the Patriarchate, was for the time being left intact.]

[Footnote 23: This is a Pomak song. The Pomaks are the descendants of those who in the seventeenth century (perhaps also earlier) were forcibly converted to Islam. Their folk-songs, customs and language are Bulgarian. They speak the purest Bulgarian, save that the men count with Turkish numerals. (The women, who can count up to 100, use the Bulgarian language.) The Pomaks live for the most part in the Rhodope Mountains and in the Lovac district of northern Bulgaria. They are endowed, as a rule, with meagre intelligence, so that the educational endeavours of the Bulgarian Government had perforce to be abandoned, since very few of these reluctant pupils ever left the lowest cla.s.s. The most exalted situation they aspire to is to serve as clerks to Muhammedan priests. Nevertheless, they despise the Turks and call their language the language of pigs.]

[Footnote 24: To-day in Serbia when the King addresses his people, when the deputies address the Parliament, the mayor his fellow-citizens, the priest his parishioners, the officer his men--all of them begin with the words "Moja bratco!" ["My brothers!"]]

[Footnote 25: Cf. _Baranja multja es jelenje_, 2 vols., by Francis Varady. Pecuj, 1898.]

[Footnote 26: _Die sudslavischen Literaturen._ Leipzig, 1908.]

[Footnote 27: Cf. _Le Balkan Slave_, by Charles Loiseau.

Paris, 1898.]

[Footnote 28: _La Dalmazia._ Florence, 1915.]

[Footnote 29: There is in the museum at Eger in Czecho-Slovakia a small painting of Brankovic dated 1711. It depicts him standing pensively outside a tent, clad in a red and yellow Turkish costume and with a beard that reaches to his knees. On the other hand, it seems to be established that he was an ordinary inmate of the prison, whose site is now occupied by the Cafe Astoria; and one's faith in the accuracy of the Eger Museum is rather dimmed by the exhibition of a number of pictures, each of them purporting to give the authentic details of the a.s.sa.s.sination at Eger of the great Wallenstein, and every picture is quite different from the others.]

[Footnote 30: _Macedonia._ London, 1906.]

[Footnote 31: This was far too sweeping a statement. Only thirty or forty Orthodox at Prizren--teachers, merchants and others--used to dress in European raiment (with a fez), but from of old the Serbs had a teachers' inst.i.tute and a seminary--the young men educated there frequently went to Montenegro. And in view of what happened a few years later, Miss Edith Durham must regret that in her book _High Albania_ (London, 1909) she did not confine herself to recording of the men of Prizren that "of one thing the population is determined: that is, that never again shall the land be Serb"; but she adds, on her own account, that in this picturesque town and its neighbourhood the Serbs are engaged in a forlorn hope and that their claims are no better than those of the English on Normandy. Yet if, in her opinion, the Serbs have been rewarded beyond their deserts, she must acknowledge that they are not wholly undeserving--in the days of her cherished Albanians it was necessary for a Catholic inhabitant to furnish himself with a loaded revolver before guiding her through the streets of Djakovica.]

[Footnote 32: Cf. _Les Albanais en Vieille-Serbie et dans le Sandjak de Novi-Bazar_. Paris, 1913.]

[Footnote 33: He worked for a long time at the monastery of Hopovo, among the Syrmian hills, and there his collection of books, in the two rooms just as he left them, was naturally treasured. Half of them were stolen in the course of this last war by the Austrians.]

[Footnote 34: _Geschichte der Franzfelder Gemeinde._ Pancevo, 1893.]

[Footnote 35: This was originally as much land as a yoke of oxen could plough in a day. Until the introduction of the French metrical system this measurement was used in Austria.

It still survives there, a "joch" or yoke being equivalent to 57546 square metres, or about 14 English acres. The Hungarian joch is three-quarters the size of this.]

III

BUILDING THE FOUNDATIONS: NAPOLEON AND STROSSMAYER

SLAVS WEEP FOR THE FALL OF VENICE--THEY HEAR THE VOICE OF THEIR BROTHERS--MEASURES TO KEEP THEM APART--BY ENCOURAGING THE ITALIANIZED PARTY--AND THE ORTHODOX CHURCH--AND BY FATHERLY LEGISLATION--IN SERBIA THE PEOPLE ARE FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM--THE MONTENEGRIN AUTHORITIES ARE OTHERWISE ENGAGED--NAPOLEON FAVOURS THE SOUTHERN SLAVS--RUSSIA AND BRITAIN OPPOSE HIM ON THE ADRIATIC--ILLYRIA, NAPOLEON'S GREAT WORK FOR THE SOUTHERN SLAVS--NAPOLEON'S SCHEMES ARE ROUGHLY INTERRUPTED--THE MONTENEGRIN BISHOP INCITES AGAINST HIM--DISASTER FOR NAPOLEON AND THE SOUTHERN SLAVS--AUSTRIA'S REPRESSIVE POLICY--THE WORK OF VUK KARAIC--THE METHODS OF SERBIA'S MILO--THE SLAV SOUL OF CROATIA--THE MAGYARS AND CROATIA'S PORT--THE SULTAN REIGNS IN BOSNIA--A SORRY PERIOD FOR THE SOUTHERN SLAVS--SOME WHO TURN FROM POLITICS GROW PROSPEROUS--BUT THE CROATS STRIVE FOR POLITICAL LIBERTIES--THE AUSTRIANS, THE MAGYARS AND THE CROATS--THE CROATS, STRUGGLING FOR FREEDOM, INCIDENTALLY HELP AUSTRIA--HOW MONTENEGRO REFORMED HERSELF--THE PRINCE-BISHOP GIVES A LEAD TO THE SOUTHERN SLAVS--AUSTRIA POURS OUT A GERMAN FLOOD--THE CROAT PEASANTS AND THEIR CLERGY--WHAT THE CZECHS ARE DOING TO-DAY--STROSSMAYER--THE TURK IN MONTENEGRO AND MACEDONIA--THE CHEERLESS STATE OF SERBIA--THE SLAV VOICE IN MACEDONIA--THE MACEDONIAN SLAVS ARE UNDIVIDED--DAWN OF ITALIAN UNITY--HOW CAVOUR WOULD HAVE TREATED THE SLAVS--ITALIAN _V._ SLAV: TOMMASEO'S ADVICE--AUSTRIA LEANS ON GERMANS AND ITALIANISTS--THE SOUTHERN SLAV HOPES ARE CENTRED ON CETINJE--FOR THEY KNOW NEITHER NICHOLAS OF MONTENEGRO NOR MICHAEL OF SERBIA--IF MICHAEL HAD LIVED!--THE STRANGE CAREER OF RAKOVSKI--THE YUGOSLAV NAME--RUSSIA AND AUSTRIA SOW DISCORD IN THE BALKANS--THE MACEDONIAN SLAVS UNDER THEIR GREEK CLERGY--THE AFFAIR OF KUKU--THE EXARCHATE IS ESTABLISHED--1867: AUSTRIA DELIVERS THE SLAVS TO THE MAGYARS--THE "KRPITSA"--RIEKA'S HISTORY, AS TWO PEOPLE SEE IT--AND THE SLOVENES ARE COERCED.

SLAVS WEEP FOR THE FALL OF VENICE

Early in 1797 the weak French garrisons which had been left in certain towns of Italy were ma.s.sacred by the Venetians, who displayed no mercy either to the wounded soldiers or the women who were with the troops. Napoleon would come back no more, thought the Venetians. But he heard of what had happened as he was engaged upon the clauses of the Treaty of Leoben. No sooner had that courier brought him the dispatches than the Venetian envoys were ushered into his presence.

They had been entrusted by the Senate with the task of following the armies and congratulating Napoleon or the Archduke, according to which of them had won the last battle. These envoys may have taken a despondent view of what would be the fate of the Serene Republic; but when, a short time afterwards, the perfumed and dishevelled citizens, stamping on the masks of last night's ball, were weeping pitiably in their palaces, the Slovenes and the Morlaks, who had fought for them so well, were weeping in the streets. Sadly and solemnly at Zadar--_la tanto disputata_--the flag of Venice was lowered; at other parts of the Dalmatian coast the n.o.bles scarcely had to say a word before the peasants had s.n.a.t.c.hed arms to fight the French and their _egalite_.

The Venetians had, after all, been there a long time, even if they had not risen to the heights of Dubrovnik, which, as we learn from a traveller in 1805, kept no secret police and no gendarmes, and where a capital sentence p.r.o.nounced at the time was the first in twenty-five years. (The city went into mourning on account of this, and an executioner had to be imported from Turkey.) Such a moral height had not been reached by the Venetians; but they had been in Dalmatia, as people loved to repeat, for a long time, and they had been easy-going in the collection of taxes, they had supported the bishops and the holy Church, they had made the peasants feel that each one of them was helping to support Venice, the grand and ancient, and so the faithful people mourned when she was falling.

THEY HEAR THE VOICE OF THEIR BROTHERS

Yet they were not wholly deaf to the call of their own race. When the Austrians sent a general, the "Hungarian party," working against the civil government of Count Raymond von Thurn, managed to have the post given to General Rukavina, a Croat from the Military Frontier. An eye-witness has left us an account of Rukavina's reception at Trogir.

The general mounted a chair, and asked the people in the Slav language whether they would swear the oath of fidelity to His Majesty the Emperor and King, Francis II., and his descendants and legal successors. "Otchemo!" ["That is what we want!"] was the unanimous reply. After the swearing of the oath, the general suddenly began a vigorous speech: "Moi dragi Dalmatinci" ["My dear Dalmatians"], said he.... And afterwards, when two companies of Croat infantry were disembarked, the people collected round them were astonished to hear them speaking the same language as themselves and to learn that many of them had the same names as the Dalmatians.[36]

Incidents of this character were, for more reasons than one, most galling to von Thurn. In July the archbishop and munic.i.p.ality of Split pet.i.tioned that they might belong to Hungary. One presumes that these officials were moved less by the sympathetic ways of one Hungarian than by the knowledge that Croatia was under the Hungarian crown. Very powerless, indeed, like themselves, Croatia might be--at that moment reduced to the rank of a Hungarian county, with her Ban no longer able to convoke the Diet--nevertheless, a Croatia still existed. Then Count Raymond took hold of the matter; he sent reports on Rukavina to the Viennese authorities, and he and they seem to have cared little whether these reports contradicted one another. He exhibited his adversary as a man of unbounded violence, as a man of the most pusillanimous nature; General Rukavina was despicable, said these doc.u.ments, he was an absolute nonent.i.ty; but no, shrieked von Thurn on the next day, this man Rukavina was imbued as no other with the abominable spirit of Machiavelli. To bring about the fall of the Hungarian party in Dalmatia, Count Raymond's police set themselves the task of laying by the heels such Hungarian agents as Count Miaslas Zanovic, one of the four sons of Count Anthony, who for being implicated in a more than usually flagrant scandal had been expelled from Venice. And his sons lived agitated lives, although it is untrue that the second one, Stephen, before dying in prison in Amsterdam, had governed Montenegro and is known to history as Stephen the Little.

[That mysterious person was a contemporary, who appearing in Montenegro when the land was in a state of barbarism and dest.i.tution, gave it out that he was the Russian Tzar Peter III., who had been strangled to death in 1762. The Montenegrins accepted him; and from 1768 to 1773 he showed himself a most competent and zealous ruler, carrying out so many reforms that he was clearly not Peter III. It has not as yet been ascertained from where he came, but judging from his accent he was either a Dalmatian Serb or a native of the Military Confines. He was very taciturn; only one Montenegrin, a priest called Markovic, is believed to have been privy to his secret. Markovic had visited Russia ten years previously and had celebrated Ma.s.s in the presence of the Tzar. It was the priest who a.s.sured the mountaineers that Stephen really was the Tzar. During his reign he repulsed the Turks and organized the public security, so that a lost purse--the people said--could easily be recovered. The Republic of Venice tried on several occasions to poison this excellent ruler; he was ultimately killed by a barber who came up to Cetinje at the bidding of the Pasha of Scutari, and, being appointed court barber, cut Stephen's throat.]

As for the Zanovic, the elder brother, Count Premislas, was for a long time in a Finnish prison, on account of his conduct in gaming-houses; the two younger brothers, Hannibal and Miaslas, were in Budva in southern Dalmatia in 1797, distributing Venetian proclamations, after which they rearranged their minds and became Hungarian agents.

MEASURES TO KEEP THEM APART

The more active of the pair was Miaslas, and by confounding his machinations and those of other Hungarian adherents von Thurn overthrew the Hungaro-Croatian party. Thenceforward his greatest care was diligently to suppress those aspirations of the people of Dalmatia for a union with their brothers. He had to build the house with the materials that he found on the spot; the most obvious corner-stone was that numerically small body of n.o.bles and merchants who had for so long a.s.sociated with Venetian officials that they hated to confess that they were Slavs.

BY ENCOURAGING THE ITALIANIZED PARTY

A minute number of this small body consisted of real Italians, people who very exceptionally had settled in Dalmatia; but among these rare families there was not any single one of that extensive cla.s.s in Venice which had been presented by their Government with vast domains, with farms and forests in Dalmatia. Well, the Count of Thurn observed that this small body of Italianized Slavs would probably not help him very much, for the Italian culture and the education which they were so proud of were--it is not unjust to say--nearly always superficial and not such as to compensate for this party's lack of numbers. But yet, for what they were worth, he supported them. No doubt the project which the Archduke Charles evolved in 1880, to transplant German-Austrians to Dalmatia, would have been preferred by von Thurn.

"These colonists," explained the Archduke, "by their culture and laboriousness, by their devotion to the House of Habsburg would give to the Dalmatians a most valuable example and would soon persuade them thoroughly to merge themselves among the ma.s.s of peoples faithful to the Emperor." But this plan could not be carried through, because the people of Dalmatia would have risen in revolt; moreover, the most fertile regions had been so neglected that too many of them were now marshes or through other causes uninhabitable. Thus von Thurn a.s.sisted the Italianized party; they would, at any rate, unlike the other Serbo-Croats of Dalmatia, not strive for union with anybody else.

Before the French Revolution no one in Italy dreamed that it would be possible to bring about Italian unity, and the patriots of 1848 longed only for the liberation of their Peninsula; they spoke of Triest as "the port of the future Slavia" or as "a neutral zone, a transitional region between Slavia and Italy."

AND THE ORTHODOX CHURCH

It may be that when von Thurn also gratified a reasonable ambition of the Orthodox Church he was moved by the idea that the Roman Catholic Church of the Croats might thus to some extent be counteracted; he may, on the other hand, have been impelled by altruistic motives when he authorized the establishment of an Orthodox bishopric. Under Venice the Church had not been recognized; and after having several times almost succeeded in obtaining their bishop, a _modus vivendi_ was at last reached in 1797, with the consent of the Senate and perhaps of Rome. Under this arrangement the Orthodox were free to profess their religion, but the Senate officially ignored their separation from the Roman Church; their priests had to obtain their rights from the Catholic bishops and allow the Catholic priests to cull certain of their legitimate revenues. And this, although the Orthodox formed one-half of the dioceses of Scardona and ibenik, and two-thirds of that of Bocche di Cattaro. They were not more backward than the rest of the population. Von Thurn--who, they thought, knew nothing of the circ.u.mstances--was informed by them that the see of Dalmatia was vacant and that they had elected the Archmandrite Simeon Ivcovic, a man universally esteemed for his prudence and wisdom. They begged von Thurn to confirm this election, and he did so.