Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 2.djvu/322

 gQg THE SLAVIC CATHAEI. crusade against the Turks, the apostate Arians, and the Manichae- ans Under these auspices, in 1408, he led a force of sixty thou- sand Hungarians and Poles into Bosnia, defeated and captured Tvrtko II and recovered Croatia and Dalmatia, but the Bosni- ans were obstinate, and replaced Ostoja on the throne. Another expedition, in 1410-1411, drove Ostoja to the south, and Sigismund, for a while, retained possession of Bosnia, but when, in 1415, he released Tvrtko 11. and sent him to Bosnia as king, a civil war immediately ensued. Tvrtko at first was successful, supported with a large Hungarian army, but Ostoja called the Turks to his assistance, and in a decisive battle the Hungarians were defeated The Turks penetrated to Cillei in the Steyermark, devastating and plundering everywhere, and on their return carried with them thousands of Christian captives.* This shows the new factor which had injected itself into the already tangled problem. In 1389 the fatal day of the Amselfeld had thrown open the whole Balkan peninsula to the Turks, who since then had been steadily winning their way. In 1392 we hear of their first incursion in southern Bosnia, after which they had constantly taken a greater part in the affairs of the Banate The condition of the country was that of savage and perpetual civil war There was no royal power capable of enforcing order, and the magnates were engaged in tearing each other to pieces. De- void of all sentiment of nationaUty, no one had any scruple m calling in the aid of the infidel, in paying allegiance to him or in subsidizing him to prevent his joining the opposite party. It was the same with Catholic, Catharan, and Greek. No sense of the ever-approaching danger served to make them abandon their inter- necine quarrels, and if a temporary petty advantage was to be ..ained there was no hesitation in aiding the Turk to a farther ad- vance. The only wonder is that the progress of the Moslem con- quest was so slow ; there can be little doubt that it could have been arrested by united effort, and it may be questioned whether the rule of Islam was not, after all, an improvement on the state of virtual anarchy which it replaced. To the peasantry it offered itself rather as a deliverance. When, in 1461, Stephen Tomasevic ascended the throne, in his appeal for aid to Pius II. he describes • Klaic, pp. 375, 387-8, 391, 307--S, 304-5, 313-13, 334.