Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/187

 Nemanides, which was destined gradually to absorb the other. The Hungarian conquest gave rise to a third Serbian province, corresponding to the Roumanian Moldavia, the Serbian Banate on the banks of the Bosna: and out of this Bosnia, by the revolt of a voevode, upon whom Frederick III, the Emperor of the West, had conferred the title of Duke in the 15th century, arose yet another Serbia, the «Serbia of the Dukedom» (or Herzegovina, derived from the Hungarian herczek, viz the German herzog, meaning «duke»). The Serbia on the Danube with its centre at Belgrade, the later Serbia of the Despots Stephen, George and his sons, is quite different from the Macedonian Serbia, and, when, in the 15th century, kings were reigning in the Macedonian districts, and a despot, the nominee of Byzantium, in Thrace, Thessaly (then a separate province) formed the ultimate stronghold of the race of Stephen Dushan, the King-Emperor.

The former small state of Zenta, afterwards became Črnagora, or Montenegro. In the same century, Ragusa, a Roman city and a former dependency of Venice, became the intellectual and commercial centre of the Serbian world.

This division was ill-starred and, indeed, fatal: it was impossible thereafter to form a new synthesis of culture. This was because none of these regions possessed any geographical unity.

Greece herself was divided in the Middle Ages into three parts: the Roman Greece of Byzantium, as an extension of the Eastern Roman Empire, the patriarchal Greece in the semi-autonomous province of Morea, and the Latinised Greece, under French, Catalans and Navarrese, whose work was carried on by the mightier Venetians from Corfu to Crete and by the Genoese to the shores