Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/139

 1920 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 131 mittelalterlichen Serbien, published in the Transactions of the Viennese Academy of Sciences in 1912-14, and thanks to him and to Novakovich's article, Les froblemes serbes,^ we have ample materials for forming a judge- ment upon medieval life in Serbia. Especially interesting is the informa- tion about the Serbian mines and the foreigners in Serbian employ, of whom the fourteenth-century Italian novel, Uavventuroso Ciciliano, gave a curious picture. We hear of a small Serbian fleet, composed of ships from Dulcigno, Budua, and Cattaro, and find the country much richer than at the time of the crusades and some parts of it more thickly populated than to-day. Cattaro was Serbia's chief mart under the Nemanjids (p. 59), and often provided their minister of finance in the person of some member of the powerful Buchia family, whose authority gave rise to the proverb : ' if the Tsar gives, yet Buchia does not give.' But in Cattaro and the other coast-towns female influence was less than in the interior, while in Serbian Macedonia Greek marriages and culture soon hellenized society. Three chapters are occupied with the political history of Serbia from the battle of the Maritza in 1371 down to the fall of Semendria and the end of the Danubian state, of which it was the capital, in 1459. In his account of the battle of Kosovo, the author brings evidence to show (p. 120, n. 2) that the real name of the Serb who slew Murad I was Kobilich (* Cobi- lichio' of the Italian version of Doukas^), not Obilich, a more elegant name substituted in the eighteenth century, and that the legendary story of Vuk Brankovich's treachery is not found before Orbini, writing in 1601. He mentions the recent discovery in the village of Psatcha of portraits of the Tsar Stephen Urosh V, King Vukashin, and the * Caesar ' Ugljesha. A fourth chapter relates the fall of Bosnia and the duchy of Stephen Vuktchich, the present Herzegovina, and describes the rule of the Crnoje- vich family in Montenegro and the career of the Serb despots in south Hungary. The author adopts the view that the first duke conferred the ducal title on himself (p. 190), and considers as legendary the usual state- ment that the first Montenegrin printing-press was at Obod (p. 237, n. 3). This chapter contains curious information about the blind Serbian despot Stephen's castle of Belgrad in Friuli and the Belgrad forest near Constan- tinople, so called from the captives taken at the present Serbian capital in 1521. The last chapter gives a brief sketch of Serbia's internal condition and culture between 1371 and 1459. He shows how the despots, whose title was conferred by the Greek emperor and was not hereditary, were more absolute than the house of Nemanja, whereas in contemporary Bosnia the great nobles overshadowed the feeble monarch, who from the time of Tvrtko I also styled himself king of Serbia, though in fact the two Serb monarchies were never united except for a few months under the Bosnian crown prince, Stephen Tomashevich. A few corrections may be made. The name of Crna Gora (p. 171) occurs as early as 1362 ; the last representatives of the Tocco family at Naples (p. 222), the duke of Regina and his only son, are dead. There is in the Santo Spirito hospital in Rome a picture of the titular king of Bosnia, Nicholas of Ilok, visiting Sixtus IV in 1475 ; and an allusion • Archiv fur slavische Pliilologie, xxxiii. 438-66 ; xxxiv. 203-33L » p. 353 (ed. Bonn). K2