Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 133.djvu/617

  to his text. In attempting it I am sensible of this disadvantage — that it is impossible to set out the plain facts of the history of Montenegro (or Tsernagora in its own Slavonic tongue) without begetting in the mind of any reader strange, and nearly all are strange, to the subject, a resistless suspicion of exaggeration or of fable.

The vast cyclone of Ottoman conquest, the most formidable that the world has ever seen, having crossed the narrow sea from Asia in the fourteenth century, made rapid advances westward, and blasted, by its successive acquisitions, the fortunes of countries the chief part of which were then among the most civilized, Italy alone being excepted, of all Europe. I shall not here deal with the Hellenic lands. It is enough to say that Bulgaria, Serbia (as now known), Bosnia, Herzegovina, Albania, gradually gave way.

Before telling the strange tale of those who, like some strong oak that the lightning fails to rive, breasted all the wrath of the tempest, and never could be slaves, let me render a tribute to the fallen. For the most part, they did not succumb without gallant resistance. The Serbian sovereigns of the fifteenth century were great and brave men, ruling a stout and brave people. They reached their zenith when, in 1347, Stephen Dushan entitled himself emperor of Serbs, Greeks, and Bulgarians. In an evil hour, and to its own ruin, the Greek empire invoked against him the aid of the Ottoman Turks. In 1356, he closed a prosperous career by a sudden death. On the fatal field of Kossovo, in 1389, treachery allied itself with Ottoman prowess to bring about the defeat of the Serbian army; and again it was by treacherous advances that a qualified subjection was converted into an absolute servitude. The West, with all its chivalry, can cite no grander examples of martial heroism than those of Marko Kraljevitch, so fondly cherished in the Serbian lands, and of George Castriotes or Scanderbeg, known far and wide, and still commemorated by the name of a vicolo of Rome.

The indifference, or even contempt, with which we are apt to regard this field of history, ought to be displaced by a more rational, as well as more honorable, sentiment of gratitude. It was these races, principally Slavonian, who had to encounter in its unbroken strength, and to reduce, the mighty wave, of which only the residue, passing the Danube and the Save, all but overwhelmed not Hungary alone, but Austria and Poland. It was with a Slavonian population that the Austrian emperor fortified the north bank of the Save, in the formation of the famous military frontier. It was Slav resistance, unaided by the West, which abated the impetus of the Ottoman attack just to such a point, that its reserve force became capable of being checked by European combinations.

Among the Serbian lands was the flourishing principality of Zeta. It took its name from the stream, which flows southward from the mountain citadel towards the Lake of Scutari. It comprised the territory now known as Montenegro or Tsernagora, together with the seaward, frontier, of which a niggardly and unworthy jealousy had not then deprived it, and with the rich and fair plains encircling the irregular outline of the inhospitable mountain. Land after land had given way; but Zeta ever stood firm under the Balchid family. At last in 1478 Scutari was taken on the south, and in 1483 the ancestors of the still brave population of Herzegovina on the north submitted to the Ottomans. Ivan Tchernoievitch, the Montenegrin hero of the day, hard pressed on all sides, applied to the Venetians for the aid he had often given, and was refused. Thereupon he, and his people with him, quitted, in 1484, the sunny tracts in which they had basked for some seven hundred years, and sought, on the rocks and amidst the precipices, surety for the two gifts, by far the most precious to mankind, their faith and their freedom. To them, as to the pomaks of Bulgaria, and the Bosnian begs, it was open to purchase by conformity a debasing peace. Before them, as before others, lay the trinoda necessitas, the alternatives of death, slavery, or the Koran. They were not to die, for they had a work to do. To the Koran or to slavery they preferred a life of cold, want, hardship, and perpetual peril. Such is their Magna Charta; and, without reproach to others, it is, as far as I know, the noblest in the world.

To become a centre for his mountain home, Ivan had built a monastery at Cettinjé, and declared the place to be the metropolis of Zeta. What is most of all remarkable in the whole transaction is, that he carried with him into the hills a printing-press. This was in 1484, in a petty principality; they were men worsted in war, and flying for their lives. Again, it was only seven years after the earliest volume had been printed by Caxton in the 