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MONTENEGRO..

A SKETCH.

1. Le Monténégro Contemporain. Par G. FRILLEY, Officier de la Légion d'Honneur, et JOVAN WLAHOVITI, Capitaine au Service de la Serbie. Paris: 1870.

2. Montenegro und die Montenegriner geschildert von SPIRIDION GOPTCHEVITCH. Leipzig: 1877.

Ir is sometimes said, in relation to individuals, that the world does not know its greatest men. It might at least as safely be averred, in speaking of large numbers, that Christendom does not know its most extraordinary people. The name of Montenegro, until within the last two years, was perhaps less familiar to the European public than that of Monaco, and little more than that of San Marino. And yet it would, long ere this, have risen to world-wide and immortal fame, had there been a Scott to learn and tell the marvels of its history, or a Byron to spend and be spent on its behalf. For want of the vates sacer, it has remained in the mute inglorious condition of Agamemnon's predecessors. I hope that an interpreter between Montenegro and the world has at length been found in the person of my friend Mr. Tennyson, and I gladly accept the honour of having been invited to supply a commentary 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 civilised, 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.

Hor. Od. IV. ix, 25.

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 honourable, 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.2 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 rich and populous metropolis of England; and when there was no printing-press in Oxford, or in Cambridge, or in Edinburgh. It was only sixteen years after the first printing-press had been established (1468) in Rome, the capital of Christendom: only twenty-eight years after the appearance (1456) of the earliest printed book, the first-born of the great discovery. Then and there,

They few, they happy few, they band of brothers

voted unanimously their fundamental law, that, in time of war against the Turk, no son of Tsernagora could quit the field without the order of his chief; that a runaway should be for ever disgraced, and banished from his people; that he should be dressed in woman's clothes, and presented with a distaff; and that the women, striking him with their distaffs, should hunt the coward away from the sanctuary of freedom.

And, now for four centuries wanting only seven years, they have maintained in full force the covenant of that awful day, through an unbroken series of trials, of dangers, and of exploits, to which it is hard to find a parallel in the annals of Europe, perhaps even of mankind.

It was not to be expected that the whole mass of any race or people should have the almost preterhuman energy, which their lot required. All along, from time to time, the weaker brethren have fallen away; and there were those who said to Ivan, as the Israelites said to Moses, 'Wherefore have ye made us to come up out of Egypt, to bring us unto this evil place?' The great Ivan died in 1490, and was succeeded by his eldest son George, who in 1499 was persuaded by his Venetian wife to go back into the habitable world; Shakespeare, Henry V.

2 Frilley and Wlahoviti, p. 18.

• Numbers xx. 5.

not of Islam, however, but at Venice. Worse than this, his younger brother Stephen had gone with a band of companions to Constantinople and proposed to Bajazet the Second the betrayal of his country. He, and those whom he took with him, were required to turn Mahometans, and they did it. None could be so fit, as traitors, to be renegades. They then set out with an Ottoman force for the work of conquest. They were met by George, and utterly defeated. But these victors, the men of the printing-press as well as of the sword, were no savages by nature, only afterwards when the Turks in time made them so. They took back their renegade fellow-countrymen into Montenegro, and allowed them the free exercise of their religion."

On the retirement of George, which seems only to have become final in 1516,6 the departing prince made over the sovereign power to the Metropolitan. And now began, and lasted for 336 years, an ecclesiastical government in miniature over laymen, far more noble than that of the Popes in its origin and purer in its exercise, as well as in some respects not less remarkable.

The epithet I have last used may raise a smile. But the greatness of human action, and of human character, do not principally depend on the dimensions of the stage where they are exhibited. In the fifth century, and before the temporal power arose, there was a Leo as truly Great as any of the famous mediaval Pontiffs. The traveller may stand upon the rock of Corinth, and look, across and along the gulf, to the Acropolis of Athens; and may remember, with advantage no less than with wonder, that these little States, of parochial extension, were they that shook the world of their own day, and that have instructed all posterity. But the Basileus, whom Greece had to keep at arm's length, had his seat afar; and, even for those within his habitual reach, was no grinding tyrant. Montenegro fought with a valour that rivalled, if it did not surpass, that of Thermopyla and Marathon; with numbers and resources far inferior, against a foe braver and far more terrible. A long series of about twenty prelates, like Moses, or Joshua, or Barak, or the son of Jesse, taught in the sanctuary, presided in the council, and fought in the front of the battle. There were among them many, who were admirable statesmen. These were especially of the Nicgush family, which came in the year 1687 to the permanent possession of power: a power so little begirt with the conveniences of life, and so well weighted with responsibility and care, that in the free air of these mountains it was never coveted, and never abused.

Under the fourteen Vladikas, who had ruled for 170 years before this epoch, the people of Montenegro not only lived sword in hand, for this they have since done and still do, but nourished in their bosom an enemy more deadly, say the historians,' than the Pashas and their Goptchevitch, p. 6.

5 F. and W., p. 19.

F. and W., p. 21.

armies. Not only were they ever liable to the defection of such as had not the redundant manhood required in order to bear the strain of their hard and ever-threatened existence; but the renegades on the banks of the Rieka, whom they had generously taken back, maintained disloyally relations with. the Porte, and were ever ready to bring its war-galleys by the river into the interior of the country. At last the measure of patience was exhausted. Danilo, the first Vladika of the Nicgush dynasty, had been invited, under an oath of safe conduct from the Pasha of Scutari, to descend into the plain of Zeta, among the homes of his ancestors, for the purpose of consecrating a church. While engaged on this work, he was seized, imprisoned, and cruelly tortured. At last he was released on a ransom of 3,000 ducats, a sum which the hillsmen were only enabled to make up by borrowing in Herzegovina. It was felt that the time had arrived for a decisive issue; and we come now to a deed of blood which shows that for those human beings with whom the Turk forced himself into contact, and who refused to betray their faith, there were no alternatives but two: if not savages they must be slaves, if not slaves they must come near to being savages.

It was determined to slay by night every one of the renegades, except such as were willing to return to the faith of their fathers. The year was 1702, and the night chosen was that which divided Christmas Eve from Christmas Day. The scale was not large, but the operation was terrible; and the narrative, contained in an old volkslied, shows that it was done under that high religious exaltation which recalls the fiery gloom of the Agamemnon, and the sanguinary episodes of the Old Testament.

The hallowed eve draws onwards. The brothers Martinovitch kindle their consecrated torches. They pray fervently to the new-born God. Each drains a cup of wine; and seizing the sacred torches, they rush forth into the darkness. Wherever there was a Turk, there came the five avengers. They that would not be baptised were hewn down every one. They that embraced the Cross were taken as brothers before the Vladika. Gathered in Cettinjé, the people hailed with songs of joy the reddening dawn of the Christmas morning; all Tsernagora now was free !?

The war had been a standing rather than an intermittent war, and each party to it was alternately aggressor and defender. The Turk sought to establish his supremacy by exacting the payment of the haradsch, the poll or military service tax, paid in kind, which sometimes, in the more open parts, as we may suppose, of the territory, he succeeded in obtaining. Once the collector complained that the measure used was too small. The tax-payer smashed his skull with it, and said: "That is Tsernagora measure.' 10 But the Montenegrins were aggressive as well as the Turks. Of the fair plains they had been compelled to deliver to the barbarian, they still held them9 G., p. 9.

8 F. and W., p. 22. G., p. 8.

10 Ibid.

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