Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 133.djvu/620

 Napoleon, seemingly under a generous impulse, took an interest in their fortunes, and made a further addition to the revenues of the prince, which raised them in all to an amount such as would equip a well-to-do English country gentleman, provided that he did not bet, or aspire to a deer-forest, or purchase Sèvres or even Chelsea porcelain.

The most romantic and stirring passages of other histories may be said to grow pale, if not by the side of the ordinary life of Tsernagora, at least when brought into comparison with that life at the critical emergencies, which were of very constant recurrence. What was the numerical strength of the bishop-led community, which held fast its oasis of Christianity and freedom amidst the dry and boundless desert of Ottoman domination? The fullest details I have seen on this subject are those given by Frilley and Wlahoviti. The present form of the territory exhibits the figure which would be produced if two roughly-drawn equilateral triangles, with their apices slightly truncated, had these apices brought together, so that the two principal masses should be severed by a narrow neck or waist of territory. The extreme length of the principality from the border above Cattaro on the west to Mount Kom, the farthest point eastwards of Berda, is about seventy miles; the greatest breadth from north to south is a good deal less; but the line at the narrow point from Spuz on the south to Niksich on the north, both of them on ground still Turkish, does not exceed twenty miles. The reader will now easily understand the tenacity with which a controversy seemingly small has just been carried on at Constantinople between the delegates of Prince Nicholas and the Porte; with andirivieni almost as many as marked the abortive conference of December and January, or the gestation of the recent protocol. At these points, the plain makes dangerous incisions into the group of mountains; and from them the Turk has been wont to operate. The population of his empire is forty millions; and I believe his claims for military service extend over the whole, except the five millions (in round numbers) of free people, who inhabit the Serbian and Roumanian principalities. Let us now see what were the material means of resistance on the other side. About 1600, there are said to have been thirty-five hundred houses and eight thousand fighting men in Montenegro. The military, age is from twelve to fifty; and these numbers indicate a population not much, if at all, over thirty thousand. This population was liable to be thinned by renegadism and constant war; but, since the early siftings, the operation of the baser cause appears to have been slight. On the other hand, freedom attracts the free; and tribes, or handfuls, of Turkish subjects near Montenegro have had a tendency to join it. Until a few years back, it never had a defined frontier; it is only in recent times that its eastern triangle, that of Berda, has been added to Tsernagora proper. About 1800, the population had risen to fifty-five thousand. In 1825, to seventy-five thousand. In 1835, the official calendar of Cettinjé placed it at one hundred thousand, and in 1865 at one hundred and ninety-six thousand. This included the districts of Grabovo, Rudine and Joupa, conquered under Prince Danilo. For the mere handful of mountaineers has been strong enough, on the whole, not only to hold but to increase its land. Yet, on the establishment of free Serbia, a tendency to emigrate from the sterile rocks into that well-conditioned country was naturally exhibited; and two battalions composed of the children of Montenegrins helped to make up that small portion of the army of General Tchernaieff, on which alone, in the operations of the recent war, he could confidently rely.

While the gross population of Montenegro, in men, women, and children, was slowly growing through three centuries from thirty to fifty thousand, we must inquire with curiosity what amount of Turkish force has been deemed by the Porte equal to the enterprise of attacking the mountain. And here, strange as it may seem, history proves it to have been the general rule not to attack Montenegro except with armies equalling or exceeding, sometimes doubling or more, in numbers, all the men, women, and children that it contained. In 1712, under the vladika Danilo, fifty thousand men crossed the Zeta between Podgoritza and Spuz, Some accounts raise this force beyond one hundred thousand. Danilo assailed their camp before dawn on the 29th of July, with an army, in three divisions, which could hardly have reached twelve thousand men. With a loss of three hundred and eighteen men, he slew, at the lowest estimate, twenty thousand. And in these alone, so far as I know, of all modern 