Chapter IX Ragusa and Epidaurus
Marvels of the Valle d’Ombla—Port of Gravosa—Rocky Coves and Gardens of Ragusa—Ragusa Vecchia; Remains of Epidaurus—Monument of a Roman Ensign—Mithraic Rock-sculpture—Plan of Canali and the Roman Aqueduct—Antique Gems: the Lapidary Art in Ancient Illyria—Epidauritan Cult of Cadmus and Æsculapius—Phœnician Traces on this Coast—Syrian Types among modern Peasants—Grotta d’Escolapio and Vasca della Ninfa—Cavern, and Legend of St. Hilarion and the Dragon—Mediæval Sculpture in Ragusa Vecchia—The Founding of Ragusa—The Roman City on the Rock, and the Sclavonic Colony in the Wood—Orlando saves the City from the Saracens, and St. Blasius from the Venetians—Ragusa as a City of Refuge—Visit of Cœur-de-Lion—Government of the Republic—Sober Genius of Ragusans—Early Laws against Slavery—Hereditary Diplomatists—Extraordinary Bloom of Ragusan Commerce—The ‘Argosies’—Commercial and other Relations with England—Literature of Ragusa; she creates a Sclavonic Drama—Poets and Mathematicians: Gondola and Ghetaldi—The great Earthquake—End of the Republic—A Walk in Ragusa—Porta Pille—Stradone—Torre del Orologio—Zecca and Dogana—Ancient Coinage of Ragusa—Palazzo Rettorale—A Mediæval Æsculapius—Monuments to Ragusan Peabody and Regulus—The Cross of Stephen Uroš—Silver Palissy-ware by a Ragusan Master—Cappella delle Reliquie—Discovery of St. Luke’s Arm!—The Narrow Streets of Ragusa: Case Signorili, and Hanging Gardens—A Bird’s-eye View of the City—The Herzegovinian Refugees—A jewelled Ceinture from Nevešinje—The Fugitives taken!—Turkish Influence on Ragusan Costume—Contrast between Ragusan Peasants and ‘Morlacchi’—Refinement of the Citizens—Blending of Italian and Sclave—The Natural Seaport of Bosnia—A Vision of Gold and Sapphire—On the Margin of the Hellenic World.
As we entered the harbour of Gravosa we passed on our left an enticing watery gorge, which I am doubtful whether to call sea or river. This is known as the Valle d’Ombla; and as it presents one of the most extraordinary natural phenomena in the whole of Dalmatia, and is withal a most favourite pleasaunce of Ragusan citizens, I did not omit to pay my devoirs to it during my stay in the city of the Argosies.
For two miles and a half after leaving the harbour of Gravosa our boat (for it is best approached by water) sailed up a broad and winding channel of the most exquisite crystalline blue, reflecting on either side rocky heights, and lower slopes covered with cypresses and olives, and here and there dotted with white villas and cottages. About two miles and a half from the point where this inlet debouches into the harbour of Gravosa, the channel suddenly narrowed, and the boat had to be propelled up the river proper, which is rapid and of considerable volume. Its whole course was not more than a mile.
A little way beyond a church called Rosgiatto, rose before us a precipitous limestone mountain, whose ridge forms the boundary of the Herzegovina, and beyond which we heard distinctly the noise of an engagement then going on between the insurgents and the Turks. At the foot of this mountain the river Ombla springs from the bowels of the earth, with sufficient energy to work a mill at its very source, and in such volume that we may safely echo the words of the Ragusan poet, Elio Cervino:—
Danubio et Nilo non vilior Ombla fuisset
Si modo progressus posset habere suos.
At the mill, which has several large water-wheels, we landed, and from beneath the shadow of a fig-tree, then laden with golden fruit, surveyed this stupendous spring.
The source itself is nearly forty yards in breadth, squaring off against a wall of naked limestone rock which rises above it nearly perpendicularly, some fifteen hundred feet. So untroubled is the pool, so still is all around, that you can hardly realise that a river is welling up from far below. Here and there, however, the glassy surface seems to swell and heave, and in places the waters take a mysterious intensity of sapphire that speaks of unfathomable depths. For centuries indeed the sources remained unfathomed, and it needed a line eighteen hundred feet long before the bottom was reached at last!320 The mystery of the Ombla’s origin has been solved by observing the sympathy in ebb and flow which it shows with an inland river, the Trebinjštica, on which lies the old Herzegovinian city of Trebinje. This river is absorbed by Mother Earth in two several places, and one of its swallow-holes is distant about seven miles, as the crow flies, from the source of the Ombla. Thus the river must pass right under a mountain chain, and accomplish many miles of underground meanderings before it again emerges.
The Ombla appears to have been known to the ancients as the Arion, and Virgil might well have given it a preference of immortality over the Timavus, whose springs are too scattered and of too small a volume to impress the spectator. Doubtless Arion had his nymphs, and certainly in mediæval times they seem to have found their successor, even as the mossy cell of nymph Egeria became the heritage of Santa Rosalia. Just above the source, amidst a shady grove of fig-trees, I came upon the ruins of a chapel with some fair fifteenth-century mouldings, and, carved over a doorway, an angel and St. Mary with the inscription AVE GRACIA PLENA, which would indicate the Christian Nymph of the Source to have been no other than Our Lady.
But let us leave this pleasant resort, and resume our way to Ragusa herself.
As we mounted upwards over the neck of land which separates the modern port of Ragusa from the ancient city, a magnificent view of the land-locked harbour of Ragusa, and the shipping anchored on its tranquil waters, opened out behind us. The stern rocky heights which keep watch and ward over this fiord of Southern sea, and shield it from the fierce blasts of Bora and Scirocco, soften down perforce as they approach that wondrous ultramarine margin. This old historic shore—it too has ‘espoused the everlasting sea,’ and clothes itself in raiment worthy of the consort that slumbers in its ample bosom! Luxuriant vines, pale olive woods, and thickets of stately cypresses overspread the lower slopes; and this Southern vegetation, with its alternating gloom and pallor, embosoms the red-tiled roofs and white walls, of the pretty little villas, perfumed by gardens where roses and verbenas mingle with the citron and myrtle of a more tropical flora. Here and there was a less pleasing spectacle—a foretaste of that melancholy flavour which will assert itself in the Ragusa of to-day. Once or twice we came upon the deserted shell of what had been the country seat of one of the merchant princes of the palmier days of the republic, standing with ruinous walls and charred rafters just as it was left seventy years ago, when the barbarous Black Mountaineers and Russians sacked the suburbs of Ragusa.
The road by which we ascended was lined with laburnums and acacias. We passed two exquisite rocky coves, revealing glimpses of blue sea far below us, and now began to descend towards the city itself. We marvelled to see amongst the rocks and gardens by the roadside, thickets of rosy oleander, the spiry flowers of aloes, and here and there a palm-tree flourishing in the open air. Then we passed an open public garden with a brilliant array of flowers; and just outside the Porta Pille, the land-gate of Ragusa, we discovered, in a pleasant grove of plane-trees, a small hotel, the Albergo al Boschetto, where we settle down once more into civilized life, in a room overlooking a beautiful gully of sea.
But how tenfold delightful are all these varying beauties of sea and land to pilgrims like ourselves, fresh from the terrible limestone wilderness of the interior! What balm in this tropical luxuriance of flowers and foliage to eyes dazed with the pitiless glare of naked rocks! What peace in the rhythmic murmur of the waves and ‘the unnumbered smile’ of the ocean below us! And hardly less refreshing is it to the spirits of those—who, like Childe Harold, have penetrated
From the dark barriers of that rugged clime,
Even to the centre of Illyria’s vales,
Through lands scarce noticed in historic tales,
—to find ourselves once more among associations as great as any that ennoble the haunts of man.
Here, at last, after painfully exploring some of the turbid streams and runnels of the mediæval civilisation of Bosnia, we take our seat beside the fountain-head of Illyrian culture. This is the city which claims as her proudest title that she has been ‘the Athens of Illyria.’ This is the sweet interpreter between the wisdom of the ancients and the rude Sclavonic mind, who acclimatized on Dalmatian soil the flowers of Greek and Italian genius. This is the nursing mother of those enterprising merchants who in the Middle Ages laid bare the mineral wealth of the Bosnian mountains, and infused the spirit of commerce into their inmost recesses. This is ‘the Palmyra between great empires,’ the City of Refuge which received, within walls that never betrayed a fugitive, the hunted remnants of Christian chivalry who, when Bosnia was trodden down beneath the hoofs of the Infidel, preferred exile to renegation.
For her allotted part of interpreter between Italian and Sclave, Ragusa was fitted by her very origin.321 Her citizens can trace their lineal descent from the inhabitants of the Greco-Roman Republic of Epidaurus. When the Sclavonic barbarians, descending from the mountains of the interior, destroyed the ancient city of Epidaurus, the Roman survivors emigrated in a body to the present site of Ragusa, then a peninsular rock. Ragusa thus stands to Epidaurus in the same filial relation in which Venice stands to Aquileja and Patavium, and Spalato to Salona.
The site of the ancient Epidaurus, to exploring of which I devoted a day of my sojourn here, lies on the south-eastern horn of the bay on which Ragusa herself is situated. The site is covered by a small modern town called, by a strange transference of names, Ragusa Vecchia; for the same pride of origin which induced the citizens of mediæval Ragusa to style their city ‘Epidaura,’ led them further to speak of their ancient Epidauritan seats as ‘Old Ragusa.’
I took my place in the capacious trabaccolo which fulfils the function of ferry-boat between New and Old Ragusa, and a friendly Maestro filling our lateen sail as we glided beyond the shelter of the Isle of Lacroma and the haven of the Argosies, we had soon accomplished our eight miles’ voyage, and were entering the harbour of Ragusa Vecchia. This little town, in which most of the relics of the ancient Epidaurus are discovered, lies on a small two-humped peninsula, and is so nearly an island that at one point the two seas are separated only by a neck of land some dozen yards broad, and raised not more than a foot or two above sea level. This answers very well to the accounts of ancient Epidaurus which have come down to us; for we read that the original city was on an island till it was joined to the mainland by an earthquake; and Procopius, writing in the sixth century, tells us that Epidaurus had two harbours. Everywhere around one seems to trace the volcanic activity which, to the Greco-Roman city as well as to her offspring Ragusa, was ever the most terrible foe. The rocks that start up from the sea at the nose of the present peninsula are but so many fragments from the wreck of the old Epidauran site. Indeed, it is evident that Epidaurus covered a much larger area than the site of Ragusa Vecchia can supply; besides the remains on the peninsula, many, and amongst them the tomb of a P. Cornelius Dolabella, have come to light on the plain to the east about the modern village of Obod, which, I take it, preserves, in a Sclavonic disguise, the first two syllables of Epidaurus. In the adjoining bay of St. Ivan the walls of the Roman houses are, I was assured, distinctly visible beneath the surface of the sea, which proves that here a great subsidence of land has taken place within historic times.
At Ragusa Vecchia I found an intelligent peasant, who took me round to show me all the old stones that were known of in the place; and as others of the Ragusa Vecchian inhabitants showed a good-natured readiness to aid my search, and nobody minded my entering their abode, I had soon seen quite a museum of Roman antiquities scattered among old walls and cottage yards, and was so far successful as to come upon some inscriptions that have not been hitherto described,322 and at least one piece of sculpture on which the antiquary’s eye had never gazed. There were two antique bas-reliefs walled into the houses of the quay—a Cupid, and a female figure, by a chariot, perhaps intended for Amphitritè, but very badly executed. On a column in another part of the town was a comic head of good workmanship; and walled into a cottage yard a very fine effigy of a Roman Signifer, holding an ensign, and coifed in a lion-skin cap, like many standard-bearers on Trajan’s Column, which this figure much recalled. Our soldier was shod in curious sandals, and wore at his side a short sword with a curved handle, much resembling a modern Dalmatian knife.
On the peninsula I also saw nine more or less perfect Roman inscriptions, one of considerable interest, as it bore witness to the existence here of an Ordo decurionatus or municipal senate. Other inscriptions were to be seen on the mainland towards the village of Sveti Ivan, and the owner of some oliveyards here showed me some mortuary inscriptions engraved on the huge scattered blocks with which the heights, which here rise above the sea, are everywhere strewn. How terrible is the nakedness of this land, where monuments stand ready for the graver!
Overlooking the bay of St. Ivan, and the peninsula of Ragusa Vecchia, rises a rocky hill known as the Colle San Giorgio, up which I ascended to investigate a monument which had accidentally been found there, not long since, by a party of sailors belonging to the Greek communion. The way in which in which it was discovered is interesting, as it was due to the not altogether chance coincidence of two superstitions. Just below the hill to the east is a Greek church, duly oriented; and the sailors, standing against the wall at the west end, were gazing idly at the hill in front, when a curious rock facing due east caught their eye; and climbing up to examine it more closely, they found that an ancient bas-relief was sculptured on it, which they presently laid completely bare by pulling away some rocks which had fallen against it. Nobody could give me a clearer account of the design than that it represented a man and a bull; but on arriving at the spot, I found that it was, as I expected, a Mithraic monument of a not unfrequent kind. The carving on the slab, which was much mutilated and of very inferior art, represented Mithra, in flowing mantle and tunic, sacrificing a bull, on which he was kneeling in the usual attitude. To the left and right of this central subject was an attendant—he to the left holding out one arm, apparently to hold the bull’s horn. Below this device the slab seemed hollowed out, and though the rocks in front were too large to remove without artificial aid, it seemed quite possible that there might be a Mithraic cavern underneath.
From this hill were pointed out to me the traces of the ancient aqueduct of Epidaurus, which ran right across the plain to the limestone mountain beyond. Here out of the rock gushes a glacier-cool underground stream, one of the effluents, it is supposed, of the Trebinjštica, which the aqueduct once conveyed to the Greco-Roman city. The plain through which it ran is still known as Canali from this Roman work, and this whole district was known to its early Sclavonic conquerors as the Župa Canawlovska. Some remains of this work are to be seen where it abuts on the rocky peninsula of Ragusa Vecchia, but there is nothing here to remind one of the soaring arches of Salona.
The point where the aqueduct abuts on the rock of Ragusa Vecchia is, however, remarkable for other reasons. It is just about here that quantities of antique gems have been discovered, and one would suppose that this was the lapidaries’ quarter of ancient Epidaurus. I have looked through a great number of these, and have been so fortunate as to obtain many, some here and some at Ragusa. It is remarkable that the habit of wearing engraved gems has survived among the peasants who occupy the modern site of Epidaurus. The Ragusa-Vecchians and Canalese take the ancient intaglios that they from time to time pick up, and exchange them with the jewellers of Ragusa for new gems of coarse Italian fabric! The engraved stones found here are mostly carnelian, agate, sard, bloodstone, onyx, and a few carbuncles. They are of various qualities and dates; some, as can be told not only from their execution, but from the Greek letters which appear on them, dating back to the Hellenic period of Epidaurus; but most are Roman, and of inferior workmanship.
Nor, as I have already pointed out, does Epidaurus stand alone in this fecundity of gems. The same phenomenon, to a greater or less extent, characterises the remains of all the Roman sites in Illyria with which I am acquainted. The sites of the ancient Narona, Salona, and Ænona are equally prolific. From Salona there is a fine selection in the museum at Spalato, and the Direttore, Signor Glavinich, showed me one there which he believes to represent an early king of Illyria.
Yet, as stones adapted for these ornamental purposes are not to be found on the Dalmatian shores, it seems difficult to account for their abundance on the Roman sites of the coast-land. Whence were they derived?
The clue towards solving the mystery is, I think, to be found in the abundance, in the interior of Bosnia and the Herzegovina, of just the same stones engraved as Turkish amulets and talismans, to which attention has been called already. In parts of the Herzegovina these stones are accounted so cheap that they are worn for merely ornamental purposes. Some of the rayah women, who had taken refuge in Ragusa from Nevešinje and the neighbouring districts of the Herzegovina, wore broad belts studded like ephods with suchlike stones. These were mostly, like the antique gems of Epidaurus, carnelian and agate, but I also noticed a few amethysts and one or two roots-of-emerald; they were rudely cut, and none, as far as I saw, engraved. On enquiring whence they came, the women told me that they picked them up in their own country, especially in a valley near Nevešinje. Here, it seems to me, is the true clue to the origin of the Roman intaglios. The raw material must have been gathered in these inland valleys, and thence carried to Narona, Epidaurus, and the other great coast cities, there to be engraved with the elegant designs of classical mythology. That there was a regular manufacture of such bijouterie in the Roman cities of Dalmatia seems to be proved not only by the great abundance of these gems on their sites, but also by the fact that a very large proportion of these had evidently never been set in rings and other articles of jewellery, which would certainly be their ultimate destination. In those found near the head of the aqueduct in Ragusa Vecchia, we have doubtless the stock-in-trade of some lapidary, probably lost during one of the earthquakes from which the ancient city suffered; and Signor Glavinich told me that he was convinced that Salona had been the seat of a regular manufacture of Roman gems.323 Doubtless, were there sufficient evidence forthcoming, it would be found that Roman Dalmatia was the seat of an export trade in such articles with other provinces of the empire.
Some of the gems which I obtained from the site of Epidaurus bore allusion to the Mithraic cult, the existence of which is witnessed to by the monument on the Colle S. Giorgio. Two gems, one a bloodstone representing Æsculapius with his serpent-staff; and another, a carnelian, on which the same god of medicine stands side by side with his companion Salus, were especially interesting as bearing allusion to another Epidauritan cult of which we have historic evidence.
The Illyrian Epidaurus laid equal claim with her two Peloponnesian namesakes to be the chosen seat of the god of healing, from whom the inhabitants of this part are even said to have called themselves Asklepitani. The temple of Æsculapius at the Saronic Epidaurus was indeed of more world-wide celebrity among the ancients, and it was from this that the cult was grafted on to Rome itself; but perhaps if we knew more, it would be found that this Illyrian city could boast a greater antiquity for her worship. Here, at least, this form of serpent-worship seems to fit on to another, the Phœnician origin of which is beyond question, and which is intimately connected with the earliest historic traditions of this coast.
This district has been identified with that of the Encheleans, the Illyrian people with whom Cadmus and his wife took refuge according to the legend. Near here, according to ancient geographers, rose the rocks of Cadmus and Harmonia, where was the sacred cavern in which they were metamorphosed into dragons. Cadmus—whose very name is equivalent to ‘the East’—was recognised by the Greeks themselves as of Phœnician origin, and the whole myth is generally accepted as bearing reference to the civilising influence of Phœnician colonies on the Hellenic border.
It certainly seems more than a coincidence that the mythic account of Cadmus should connect him with this part of Illyricum, where we know not only from historical sources, but from actual remains, that Phœnician settlements existed in very early times. One account of the origin of the neighbouring city of Narona or Narbona makes it a Phœnician colony; the island of Meleda, whose ancient name is identical with that of the Phœnician Malta, the island of Lagosta, and others contain Phœnician inscriptions. What more natural than that the serpent-worship of these coasts should have been derived from the votaries of Esmun?
At the present day the Canalese peasants who inhabit the district about the site of ancient Epidaurus differ so essentially in face and form from the surrounding Sclavonic races whose language they speak, and are so Oriental in their appearance, that Appendini, the historian of Ragusa, has recorded an opinion that they are nothing else than descendants of the old Phœnician colonists of this coast. He would be indeed a bold man who should accept this theory without reserve, but I can bear the most emphatic testimony to the existence of a strikingly Oriental type in this neighbourhood. In Ragusa Vecchia itself the countenances struck me as of ordinary Serbian or Italian types. But in the market-place of Ragusa I noticed three peasant women whose faces bespoke, as plainly as faces can speak, an entirely different origin. On enquiring whence they came I found them to be natives of the Golfo di Breno, a cove about three miles distant from the site of Epidaurus. The faces were strikingly alike. They were long and narrow, the nose thin and long, very finely chiselled, and inclined to be aquiline, their eyes black, and their tresses to match. The big gold beads of her necklace, and the brilliant red and orange kerchief that coifs her head, are the same as those worn by her Serbo-Italian neighbours; but, assuredly, the face of the girl I sketched is that of a Syrian rather than a Serbian beauty!
But to return to Cadmus. The modern Ragusa-Vecchians and Canalese cling with obstinacy to the tradition that a capacious cavern which opens beyond the Pianusa Canalitana, on the limestone steep of Mt. Sniesnica, is the very subterranean shrine where Cadmus and Harmonia were metamorphosed into serpents, and where afterwards Æsculapius kept his. It is still known as the Grotta d’Escolapio. Being four hours distant from Ragusa Vecchia, I had not opportunity to visit it; but Appendini, who explored it, has left a curious account of the cavern, which is very beautiful. Most interesting is the way in which Sclavonic mythology has appropriated the haunts of classical legend. The Vila herself, under a thin Italian disguise, has taken up her abode in the cavern of Cadmus and Æsculapius, and a religious awe falls on the Canalese peasant as he points out the Vasca della Ninfa. This is a natural vase formed by the stalagmite, looking into which, Appendini descried beneath the water three coins—offerings, doubtless, made to the goddess of the grot by her peasant votaries; but when this impious mortal would have put forth his hand and taken them up, his terrified guide restrained him—he knew that the cavern would close its jaws on whoever should attempt to carry off the Vila’s treasure.
I heard of another cave also associated with Æsculapius in the peninsula of Ragusa Vecchia itself, and as there is a strange fascination about caverns, with or without legendary associations, I hastened to explore it. A corps of observation was soon organised among the natives, so that, guided by a party armed with candles and torches, I presently found myself at the opening of the cavern. To arrive at the actual entrance you have to drop a few feet into a crevice of the rocks, which are overgrown with a profusion of beautiful true maidenhair fern.324 We then penetrated through a narrow mouth, and the light of the torches revealed a spacious rock chamber with a rapidly descending floor. The descent was now rather risky; the men had to feel carefully every step, as the slightest slip sets in motion a miniature avalanche, and pebbles set rolling bound down to an unfathomed pool below, in which several people have been drowned. We were not able to reach the water, but it is quite possible that there exist other once accessible pools, the avenues to which have been blocked up with breccia. If so, this may well have been the cavern from which, in the fourth century, the Epidauritans (whose aqueduct we may suppose had already been cut off by earthquakes or barbarian foes) were wont to obtain their supply of fresh water. In that case I had been exploring the haunts of another most terrific serpent—this time of Christian mythology.
About the year of grace 365—St. Jerome be my witness!—Epidaurus and its inhabitants were in a very bad way.
Now hard-by Epidaurus was a certain cave called Scipum, in which they of that city were wont to draw water. And in this cave a grievous dragon325 called Boas had taken his abode, and wrought much slaughter both of men and cattle. And it came to pass that St. Hilarion entered the city, and when he saw that they of that place quaked and feared, for the dragon was of huge and monstrous size, he bade them be of good heart, for that he would slay the fiend. Now Epidaurus was yet pagan. Therefore St. Hilarion gat him to the mouth of the cavern, and having made the sign of the holy cross, he cried with a loud voice and saith unto the monster, ‘Come forth.’ But when the dragon Boas heard the voice of the holy man, then quailed his heart within him, and he came forth. Then saith St. Hilarion unto the dragon, ‘Follow me.’ And the dragon followed him, and he went on foot till he came to a place called ‘the mills,’ which is distant from the city three miles and fifty paces. And when they were come there, St Hilarion saith unto them of Epidaurus that went with him, ‘Make now a pyre that we may consume the monster and his works.’ And the pyre being now made, St. Hilarion saith unto the dragon Boas, ‘Get thee on to the pyre.’ And the dragon gat him on to the pyre. Then was fire set to the pyre that the dragon was utterly consumed. But they of Epidaurus, when they saw what salvation was wrought for them by the holy man, rejoiced in spirit. And at that spot which is called ‘the mills’ they built a temple to the honour and praise of St. Hilarion. And once in every year, at a set season, there went thither much people from Epidaurus, and offered worship unto St. Hilarion, singing pagan hymns, and before sundown returned to their own city.
So much for the true and faithful legend of St. Hilarion; and if anyone doubts its veracity, let him know that the mills are to be seen unto this day, and that the village hard-by them, S. Ilarione, preserves the name326 of the saintly dragon-slayer, who, I may add, is still held in great veneration by the Ragusan church. But how interesting is this personified triumph of Christianity over the Cadmean and Æsculapian serpent-worship of earlier Epidaurus!—how suggestive is this annexation of local mythology by the new religion!
It may be believed that after this miracle the faith grew in Epidaurus, especially when, twenty years afterwards, St. Hilarion followed up his first success by once more appearing as saviour of the city. In the year 385, we are told there was a grievous earthquake, and the waves were piled up like mountains, and threatened to engulf Epidaurus. But the saint graved three crosses in the sand of the seashore, and the ocean, which hearkened not to Cnut, obeyed Hilarion. Christian bishops of Epidaurus are mentioned in the sixth and seventh centuries, and we hear of one nine years before the final overthrow and transplantation of the city. I did not notice any Christian monuments on the site of Epidaurus of Roman date; but I was pleased to find in a cottage of Ragusa Vecchia, built into the interior wall of an upper room, a very beautiful monument of mediæval Christian art, which I have here attempted to represent. It was known to the cottagers as the ‘Bambino,’ and represents the Mother and Child; but the influence of classical art is strongly marked, and though the tenderness of the whole design is Italian, the head of the Virgin might have been mistaken for a heathen goddess.
As early as A.D. 550 the Sclaves had begun to annoy Epidauras, but it was not till the year 656 that the city finally yielded, it is said to a combined attack, on land by the heathen Narentines and Terbunians, and from the sea by Saracen corsairs from Africa. Then it was that the survivors of the Roman population fled to the rocky site on the other horn of the gulf on which Ragusa stands. Every morning the same migration from Old to New Ragusa takes place on a smaller scale. A bevy of bright Canalese market-women, in their clean white crenellated caps, and their more sombre husbands—who, with their black turbans, jackets, and trouser-leggings, look like Turks in mourning—embark before dawn in the broad trabaccolo, that they may sell their fruit and vegetables in the Ragusan market. In their company I will return to Ragusa and her history.
The rock on which the refugees from Epidaurus laid the foundations of what is now Ragusa, is said originally to have been an island, though it is now only a peninsula. Ragusa herself owes her name, according to Constantine Porphyrogenitus,327 to the Greek word Λαῦ, signifying ‘rock,’ and the fact that the rock on which the original city was built was known long afterwards as ‘Lavve’ is rather favourable to the Byzantine etymology. Thus, both her name and origin are representative of the rôle which the city was to play throughout her earlier history, and to which she owes so much of her greatness. Like ancient Rome, Ragusa began life as an asylum. She was at first a rock of refuge for the survivors from the wrecks of Roman coast-cities of Dalmatia. The fugitives from Epidaurus obtained citizen recruits from those inhabitants of Salona who, when their city was destroyed, did not trust to the walls of Diocletian’s palace for security, or could not find room there. Later on, when the Roman cities that occupied the sites of the present towns of Rizano, Cattaro, Budua, and other places on the Bocche di Cattaro and the Albanian coast, were ravaged by the Saracen corsairs, a new influx of Roman refugees set in to Ragusa.
Ragusa was thus originally Roman. Her necessities led her to ally with the Eastern Empire against the Saracen corsairs, and, however little real authority the Byzantine Emperors possessed within her walls, Constantine Porphyrogenitus places Rausium among the imperial cities on the Dalmatian coast. But this Roman coast-city, with her inheritance of ancient civilisation, was already consummating that alliance with the ruder energies of the Sclavonic mainland, to which her future eminence was so largely due.
The barren mountain which frowns so abruptly over Ragusa on the land-side, was once covered with an immemorial pinewood,328 which stretched over a large part of what is now included in the mediæval walls of Ragusa. It was in this wood that a Sclavonic colony settled, outside the Roman rock stronghold, and as in process of time the two populations blended, Dubrava—which signifies ‘the wood,’ and had been the name given by the Sclaves to their colony outside the walls—was attached to the whole city, so that Ragusa is still known to the Sclavonic world as Dubrovnik—the forest town.
For long the new rock asylum is engaged in a life-and-death struggle with the Saracen corsairs, who desolated the Dalmatian and Albanian coasts. Generally, still Roman Ragusa turns to the Byzantine Empire as her natural protector; but for a moment we see dimly reflected in her saga the influence of the revived Empire of the West; and one may, perhaps, be allowed to see in it a witness to the authority which for a while the great Carl succeeded in extending over the Illyrian Sclaves. We were surprised to find in the more classic court of the Palazzo Rettorale here, a colossal statue such as one meets with often enough beneath the quaint gables of a North-German Rathhaus. It was, in fact, a Ragusan Rolandsäule. According to the Ragusan annalists, Orlando, or Rolando, the sister’s son of Carl the Great, and a brave Paladin, had heard in Bretagne, where he was governor, that Saracen corsairs were ravaging the Roman towns of the Adriatic. Orlando at once set out for Ragusa, embarked on board a Ragusan galley, won a sea-victory over the Saracen pirates off the island of Lacroma opposite, took their Emir Spucento captive, and cut off his head in Ragusa. Thereupon the grateful Ragusans set up then and there a marble statue of Orlando, which remains unto this day.329
Another time the treacherous Venetians prepare to surprise Ragusa under the pretence of provisioning their ships. But St. Blasius, of Armenia, appears to a priest in a dream and warns him of the danger to the city. The priest gave the alarm, the walls were manned in time, and Ragusa showed her gratitude to her preserver by choosing him as her patron saint. A church was reared to St. Blasius, his effigy was placed on the great seal, the banners, and coins of the Republic, and his miraculous interposition was commemorated every year at the feast of the Purification.
This is not the place to trace out all the ‘dim complicacities’ of Ragusa’s earlier history. Ragusa was by birthright a City of Refuge, and her rise was mainly due to the wise and heroic policy of defending at any cost her rights of hospitality. Whether it be the children of the rightful king of Serbia, or the widowed queen of Dalmatia, or the Bosnians who had fled from the wrath of their Ban, all alike obtain shelter from their pursuers within these hospitable walls. Again and again Ragusa consented to see her territory ravaged and her walls beleaguered for the protection which her Senate accorded to the unfortunate. When Bodin, the Grand Župan of Serbia, Rascia, and Bosnia, then at the height of his power, demanded the extradition of the sons of the Serbian prince whose dominion he had usurped,330 and threatened in case of refusal ‘to fly his eagle to the destruction of Ragusa,’ the Senate nobly replied ‘that it was the custom of their city to refuse asylum to no man, but to protect everyone who fled to them in misfortune.’ On this occasion Ragusa underwent a seven years’ siege.
Even those who had been the bitterest enemies to the Republic were glad in less prosperous days to throw themselves on a hospitality that never failed. Bogoslave, the king of Dalmatia, had besieged Ragusa with 10,000 men for sheltering the widowed queen, Margarita; but when, on his death, his widowed queen and son were driven forth from their country, Ragusa did not hesitate to give them shelter, too. Stephen Némanja, the Grand Župan of Serbia and Rascia, who had twice laid siege to Ragusa, once with an army of 20,000 horse and 30,000 foot, seeing himself likely to be worsted in his struggle with the Byzantine Emperor, sent to ask the senate of Ragusa if he, too, should be allowed to claim their right of asylum, and obtained permission to retire here with his family if defeated; and that, though his adversary was allied to the republic.
A city strong enough and generous enough to shelter the unfortunate on either side could not fail to find many well-wishers among the neighbouring peoples and princes; and though Ragusa suffered much in defence of her privilege of asylum, she won more. Silvester, a king of Dalmatia, who had found shelter within her walls, on recovering power, testified his gratitude by presenting Ragusa with the islands of Calamotta, Mezzo, and Giupan. Stephen, a former king, in return for hospitality conferred on him as a voluntary guest, made over to the Republic the neighbouring coast-lands from the Val-di-noce to Epidaurus. The good relations which she cultivated with the Bosnians, and the gratitude of the Némanjas, enabled Ragusa to lay the foundations of her commercial eminence in the heart of Illyria; and in 1169 two Ragusan merchants built a factory on the site of what has since become the capital of Bosnia.
But Ragusa obtained one reward for hospitality to a royal stranger which must claim an especial interest from Englishmen. Richard Cœur-de-Lion, during his ill-fated voyage from the Holy Land, overtaken by a storm in the Adriatic, vowed that he would build a church at the spot where he should reach land in safety. He landed on the small rocky island of Lacroma, which lies opposite the old port of Ragusa. But he was conducted to the neighbouring city of Ragusa with great pomp by the Senate, and entertained with such profuse hospitality and magnificent shows, that he yielded to the prayers of the Ragusans, and obtained a dispensation from the Pope, to build the promised church in Ragusa itself, though it appears that his Holiness made him build a small church on Lacroma as well. The church which was now built with English money (though Richard had to borrow for the purpose), was the old cathedral of Ragusa. For beauty it was unrivalled in Illyria,331 but unfortunately no trace of it now remains, as it was entirely destroyed by the earthquake of 1667.
The year 1203 marks a new epoch in the history of Ragusa. In this year the Rector of the Republic, Damiano Juda, endeavoured to prolong his government beyond the year for which he had been elected. By the help of the popular party he succeeded in retaining the supreme authority for two years, and became so obnoxious to the nobles, that considering the suzerainty of a foreign state to be preferable to the tyranny of a fellow-citizen, they held a secret conclave in which it was decided to invoke the aid of Venice. The Venetians, whose power from the recent conquest of Constantinople was then at its zenith, accepted the overtures of the Ragusan nobles. Damiano was decoyed on board a Venetian ship, where, on finding himself a prisoner, he committed suicide; and Lorenzo Quirini, the nominee of Venice, was introduced as Count of the Republic. But Ragusa never sank like Zara or Spalato, and the other Dalmatian cities, under Venetian domination. Quirini had only been received on condition that Ragusa should preserve her ancient liberties. When the Ragusans began to perceive an intention on the part of the Venetian Count to violate this agreement they turned him out; and though they once more received a nominee of Venice in 1232, the relation of the Ragusans to Venice was rather that of a free ally than that of a dependent. It was indeed stipulated that the Doge and a majority of the Venetian Senate should nominate the Count of Ragusa, that her archbishop should be born on Venetian territory, and that her citizens should swear fealty to the Doge; but Ragusa retained the right of conducting her own affairs by means of her Senate, of which the Count was only president; she was still governed by her own laws; her own flag floated from her walls, and she struck her own coins with the effigy of St. Blasius. The treaty stipulates that both states are to have the same friends and foes; but towards Venetian expeditions beyond the Adriatic, Ragusa was only to contribute one thirtieth. So free indeed was Ragusa, that in fact she never accepted Venetian archbishops; and in 1346 the Venetian Conte was forced to look on and see the republic transfer its suzerainty to the new Serbian empire of Czar Dūshan.
Thus it was that Ragusa, though for a while under Venetian overlordship, never, like the other Dalmatian cities, saw her native institutions swept away by Venice. At the present day, at Cattaro or Spalato, along the Dalmatian coast-land on each side of Ragusa, you hear the Venetian dialect; at Ragusa the language is pure Tuscan. St. Blasius, and not the lion of St. Mark, adorns the mediæval walls and gates of Ragusa. On the other hand, in costume, manners, and the form of government, the Venetian influence here has been very perceptible.
It is about the time of the Venetian suzerainty that the government becomes finally fixed.
Ragusa had doubtless originally inherited her aristocratic-republican institutions332 from the municipales of ancient Epidaurus. Her Senate, which we hear of in very early days, is doubtless, like the Senates of Arles, Nismes, Vienne, and the other great cities of Languedoc and Provence, but a continuation of the Roman Curia, of whose existence in Epidaurus we have both historic and epigraphic proof. Her patricians could no doubt trace back their ancestry to the late Roman Honorati; they were twitted, indeed, with tracing it back to Jupiter!
From the time of the Venetian suzerainty onwards, the government is vested in three councils, and the city divided into three orders: the Nobili or Patrizj, the Cittadini, divided into the two Confraternite of S. Antonio and S. Lazzaro; lastly the Artigiani, who appear to have stood to the Cittadini much as our craft-guilds to the merchant-guilds. The government was entirely aristocratic; the Cittadini could indeed fill some public offices,333 but the appointments were reserved for the Senate.
The body in which the sovereignty ultimately rested was the Gran Consiglio,334 including all the members of the nobility who had reached the legal age of eighteen, and whose names were registered in the Specchio di Maggior Consiglio, a Ragusan Libro d’Oro. This body elected, every month, the Rector of the Republic, and, annually, all the great magistrates, imposed the customs and ordinary taxes, confirmed or abolished laws, and possessed the power of pardoning and passing sentence of death.
The more ordinary functions of government were in the hands of two smaller bodies. The Senate, or Consiglio de’ Pregati, composed of forty-five members, drew up the laws and imposed extraordinary and indirect taxes, appointed ambassadors and consuls, decided on peace or war, treated of important state affairs, and acted as a court of appeal. The Senate met four times a week, and on occasions of emergency. The members were elected for life from its body by the Gran Consiglio, but were confirmed in their office every year by this greater council, and sometimes a Senator was suspended by it from his functions.
Lastly, the Minor Consiglio, consisting of seven senators and the Rettore of the Republic, acted as the executive of the greater council, exercised judicial authority on greater cases, received ambassadors, and treated with foreign Powers.335 The Rettore of the Republic, who presided over this body, held office only a month, during which time he was bound to reside perpetually in the Palazzo Rettorale, only leaving it on public occasions.336 He was clad in a long red robe, with a black stole over his shoulders as a sign of supreme authority, kept the keys of the city, the archives of the Republic, and convoked the Gran Consiglio and Senate. As a further constitutional precaution, thoroughly Venetian, three magistrates, called Provveditori della Repubblica, were chosen, who were superior to all but the Senate and Greater Council, and who possessed the right of suspending laws and decrees, and their execution till the Senate had re-examined them.337
Truly, from a constitutional point of view, Ragusa deserved her title of Piccola Venezia! But the aristocratic government at Ragusa worked with even greater smoothness than at Venice. Though the rule of the Ragusan patricians had endured for nigh seven centuries before the time of Damiano Juda, and was prolonged for over five centuries after his date, it was only broken by this solitary revolution.338 Take into consideration the small size of the city, and the stability of the Ragusan constitution becomes the more remarkable. Here there was no room for feudal lords living on their own domains, amidst their own retainers, protected and secluded by moats and castle walls. The nobles of Ragusa elbowed their fellow-citizens in the same narrow streets; and these fellow-citizens, far from being ignorant serfs, were often their equals in education and their superiors in wealth. Yet the Cittadini and Artigiani of Ragusa were content to leave the reins of government in the hands of an aristocratic caste, and that caste was so exclusive that during eight hundred years there is no single instance recorded of a mésalliance with the bourgeoisie.
The secret lies in the sober genius of both the nobles and people of Ragusa, and in that elevated conception of patriotism which linked it with their religion. A judicial gravity presides over the whole constitutional history of Ragusa. The governing classes looked on their authority, not as a mere prize of birth, but as a sacred trust. The prayer for the magistrates of the Republic, which opens the Ragusan Libro d’Oro, breathes that exalted spirit which animated all classes of Ragusan citizens from first to last. ‘O Lord, Father Almighty, who hast chosen this Commonwealth to Thy service, choose, we beseech Thee, our governors according to Thy will and our necessity; that so, fearing Thee and keeping Thy holy commandments, they may cherish and direct us in true charity. Amen.’339
Turn where we will among the pages of Ragusan history, we find ourselves amongst a grave and sober people—a people who are never carried away with success, and who support adversity with calm endurance. The heroes of Ragusa are of the majestic Roman type, and her greatest is a second Regulus. Her peculiar genius reflects itself in her arts and sciences, which are severe and practical. Her Senate forbids the erection of a theatre. The fine arts here fall into the background, and mathematics, mechanics, and astronomy take the lead. Ragusan nobles are mathematicians, and her poets are also merchants; the masterpieces of her muse are stately epics. Her sympathies are with the dignified spirit of the East, and the noblest homage of her bards is rendered to a Turkish Grand Signior. But Ragusa nowhere displayed the severe gravity of her manners more conspicuously than in the education of her children. Palladius,340 writing in the middle of the fifteenth century, says of the Ragusans: ‘To make manifest how great is the severity and diligence of the Ragusans in the bringing up of their children, one thing I will not pass over, that they suffer no exercises to exist in the city, but literary. And if jousters or acrobats approach they are forthwith cast out, lest the youth (which they would keep open for letters or for merchanding) be corrupted by such low exhibitions.’ Truly, in mediæval Ragusa, Jack must have been a dull boy!
The same sober and religious spirit asserts itself in the laws, and the philanthropic and industrial institutions of mediæval Ragusa. Few indeed were the towns which could boast of a City Police and Sanitary Board in the middle ages! There was a ‘Curates’ Augmentation Fund’ here in the fourteenth century;341 this city lays claim to having possessed the first foundling hospital342 and the first loan-bank in the civilised world, and the annual revenues of the pious institutions of Ragusa amounted to 800,000 ducats. If we except the early English legislation which put a stop to the human exports of Bristol, Ragusa was the first state to pass laws abolishing the slave trade. In the year 1416 the great council of Ragusa, hearing that several Ragusan merchants residing on the Narenta were in the habit of selling those under them as slaves, passed a law—by a majority of seventy-five in a house of seventy-eight—that anyone who henceforth sold a slave should be liable to a fine and six months’ imprisonment: ‘Considering such traffic to be base, wicked, and abominable, and contrary to all humanity, and to redound to the no small disgrace of our city—namely, that the human form, made after the image and similitude of our Creator, should be turned to mercenary profit, and sold as if it were brute beast.343 During the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, large sums were left by philanthropic citizens of Ragusa to be spent in purchasing the freedom of slaves.
Perhaps the stability of the Ragusan government is due as much to her peculiar situation as to the sobriety of her citizens. Ragusa is well described by mediæval writers as a ‘Palmyra between great empires.’ She had to preserve her independence in turn from Byzantine Cæsars, the pirate state of the Narentines, the queen of the Adriatic, the Serbian Czar, the kings of Hungary, and finally from the Turks and Spaniards. She had to be perpetually on her guard against the ambitious designs of the most powerful states of the mediæval world. When her neighbours quarrelled, she was continually placed in the most difficult position, and the ramifications of her trade put her at the mercy of the most remote assailant. Thus it was that in her government foreign affairs were of supreme importance; there was constant necessity for secret discussion, prompt decision, and the wisdom of a hereditary caste of statesmen. A state whose empire is mercantile must be mighty indeed to afford the luxury of popular government. Ragusa was too small, too closely bordered by powerful empires; and the sterling sense of her citizens acquiesced in the necessity of an aristocratic constitution.
Nothing, indeed, is more wonderful in the history of the Republic than the tact with which these hereditary diplomatists conducted foreign affairs. In an earlier stage of her history, and a ruder state of society, we have seen the obstinacy with which the Senate clung to the Ragusan rights of asylum. In a later and more diplomatic age the City of Refuge becomes the champion of the rights of neutrals. We are lost in wonder at the skill with which the Republic preserves its neutrality between Venice and the Greeks, Venice and the Narentines, Venice and the Hungarians; between the Serbian Czar and Byzantine Cæsar, between the Turks and the Hungarians, the Turks and the Venetians, the Turks and the fleets of Charles V. It appears to have been a secret of Ragusan policy to yield a certain suzerainty to that Power which was strong on the mainland. While Venice is omnipotent in Dalmatia, Ragusa recognizes the overlordship of the Doge; Czar Dūshan stretches the Serbian empire to the sea, and Ragusa transfers to him her homage. The Serbian empire breaks up; the Hungarian flag floats on the walls of the Dalmatian cities in place of the lion of St. Mark; and from 1358 to 1483 Ragusa accepts the suzerainty of the kings of Hungary. But with admirable perception the statesmen of Ragusa turn towards the rising sun; and already, in 1370, when the rest of Eastern Europe was hardly conscious of the existence of its future conquerors, the Ragusans sent an embassy to Broussa, in Asia Minor, to the successor of Orchan,344 Emir of the Turks, in which, in return for a yearly payment of 500 sequins, they obtained a firman of trade privileges, still preserved in the archives of Ragusa, and laid the foundations of a friendship which afterwards saved the small Republic when the empire of Byzantium, the despotates of Serbia and Albania, and the kingdoms of Hungary and Bosnia, were swept away. The treaty was renewed with Bajazet, and on his final conquest of the Herzegovina in 1483, Ragusa, true to her policy, transfers her suzerainty to the Porte.
It was the vast commerce of Ragusa with the interior of the Balkan peninsula which made her government so sedulous in securing friendly relations with the dominant power of the mainland. The citizens were repaid tenfold for their deference to the ruling caste by the benefits which their trade reaped from the keen foresight and the marvellous powers of negotiation displayed by their government. The friendship of Serbian, Bosnian, Hungarian, and later on of Turkish potentates, enabled them to plant their factories throughout the Sclavonic lands that lie between the Adriatic and the Black Sea. At the time of the Turkish conquests the Ragusans possessed mercantile colonies at the Serai in Bosnia, Novipazar in Rascia, Novibrdo and Belgrade in Serbia, at Bucharest and Tirgovisce in Wallachia, at Widdin, Rustchuk, Silistria, and Sophia in Bulgaria, and in the original capital of Turkey-in-Europe, Adrianople. To these colonies the Turks conceded a special jurisdiction, and even the right to build cathedral churches. Ragusan caravans passed without let or hindrance throughout all these lands; and the Pope himself granted the Ragusans permission to trade with the infidels. An astounding monument of the industry of these colonists is found in a treaty between George Branković, despot of Serbia, and the Republic, by which the Ragusan government leased the working of the three gold mines of Novibrdo, Janovo, and Kratovo, for a yearly rent of 300,000 ducats—an enormous sum for those days.
Besides this trade with the Sclavonic interior, Ragusa conducted a maritime traffic with the Levant, and as early as the beginning of the fourteenth century had concluded treaties of commerce with the sultans of Egypt, Syria, Iconia, and Bythinia. Ragusan factories existed in the great Italian cities of the Romagna, the Marches, and Abbruzzo, and throughout Sicily and Naples, and much of the transit trade between those countries and the Levantine ports was conducted in Ragusan bottoms. Of these commercial colonies in Italy, the most important was that which gave the name Strada de’ Ragusei to a street of Florence, and the Messinese, established at Syracuse, which gave the name of Ragusa to a castle that rose above the ruins of Camarina. Her merchants penetrated not only to France and Spain, but even to our shores, whence they transported English wares, especially cloths and woollens, to the south and east.345 Ragusan merchants were settled in England in the sixteenth century, and later on Cromwell granted the Ragusans trade privileges in English ports. The mighty merchantmen of Ragusa ‘with portly sail, like signiors and rich burghers of the flood,’346 have added a word to the English language. Our ‘argosy,’347 once written ‘Ragosie,’ meant originally nothing but a Ragusan carrack. Nor was it only in the peaceful paths of commerce that our forefathers made acquaintance with the stately vessels of Ragusa. As the price of many trade privileges, the Republic was forced to recruit the navies of Spain with her ships and take part in her enterprises. The loftiest carracks in the Spanish Armada sailed forth from the old harbour of Ragusa, and in 1596 twelve Ragusan three-masters fought the English in the Indian Ocean.
By the end of the fifteenth century the commercial bloom of Ragusa had reached its prime, and the city must have been amongst the most flourishing in Europe. As early as 1450 the merchant navy of Ragusa consisted of 300 vessels. ‘There is no part of Europe,’ says the contemporary Palladius, ‘so hidden or so hostile to strangers that you will not find there merchants of Ragusa.’ And this commercial prosperity abroad was supplemented by manufacturing enterprise at home.
In 1490 a Florentine weaver was called in to instruct the Ragusans in cloth-weaving. Mills were built, a Neapolitan constructed a conduit to aid the dyeing, machinery was set in motion by water-power, and in five years a new manufacture was in full operation. A few years later348 the silk manufacture was introduced by an enterprising citizen of Ragusa from Tuscany. Besides these and such minor industries as supplied the neighbouring Turkish provinces with wax, hides, salt, and sandals, there was the cannon foundry, the powder mill, the docks, the coral fishery, the glass manufactory, and the production of that filagree work of gold and silver, in which the Ragusans excelled, to divide the energies of the citizens. At the end of the fifteenth century the population of Ragusa is reckoned at 40,000, the treasury of the Republic is said to have contained a reserve of seven million sequins, and the merchants of a single quarter of the city, called Prieko, were possessed of capital amounting to two hundred million ducats.
At this time an additional lustre is shed over the ancient City of Refuge by the nobility of those who sought refuge within her walls. After the fall of Constantinople and the overthrow of the Sclavonic kingdoms of the interior, Ragusa was thronged with fugitive princes of Eastern Europe. Scions of the imperial houses of Byzantium, the families of Lascaris and Cantacuzene, the Comneni and Palæologi, the wife of the Despot of Serbia, the widowed Queen of Bosnia, with a host of lesser rank, sought and found a haven in these hospitable streets; and the name of Stephen, duke of St. Sava, is still to be seen inscribed on the roll of Ragusan nobility in the Specchio del Maggior Consiglio.
But the greatest glory of Ragusa lies neither in her wealth nor her princely hospitality, but rather in the civilizing influence which she exercised over the most barbarous European member of our Aryan family. It is the literature of Ragusa that lives still in the minds of men in days when her commerce has deserted her, and her own nobility has been extinguished with her liberty.
We have seen Ragusa by her very birth partly Roman and partly Sclave. Bit by bit the ‘city of the rock’ becomes fused with the forest-town outside. In her vast and varied intercourse with the Sclavonic interior Roman Ragusa becomes Serbian Dubrovnik. From the beginning of the fourteenth century the Serbian language, so vigorously proscribed by earlier laws, may be considered the mother-tongue of Ragusa. In 1472 the Sclavonic language became so dominant that even the Senate had to pass a law enforcing Italian as the language of their deliberations. Thus Ragusa became a Sclavonic city at the very moment when her extended connection with the rest of Europe, and especially with Italy, brought her into the full current of the Western Renascence. She had become Sclavonic, but she never lost the Italian side to her character. Her wealthy citizens, though they spoke the Serbian dialect of Dubrovnik in their family circles, sent their children to the Florentine schools, and, just as educated Irishmen and Welshmen often speak the best English, so, to this acquired knowledge of Italian, is largely due that purity of accent which has preserved the Italian of Ragusa from the Venetian and Dalmatian barbarisms of the other cities of this coast, and which makes it still the lingua Toscana in bocca Ragusea.
Ragusa was thus fitted by her very composition to be the interpreter between the Italian and Sclavonic minds, and to give birth to that literature which has won for her the title of ‘the Sclavonic Athens.’ The magistrates of the Republic, true to the same wise policy which had founded her schools, invited hither the most learned men of Italy, and towards the end of the fifteenth century many were enticed to Ragusa as professors, chancellors, and secretaries. Nascimbeno di Nascimbeni, the celebrated philologist, was invited here as rector of the school, and Demetrius Chalcochondylas deserted Florence herself to accept the chair of Greek at Ragusa. For Ragusan culture was something more than a mere reflection of the Italian Renascence, and the exiled scholars of Byzantium flocked hither as to a city which had held literary communion with their own, centuries before the days of its captivity, and whose inhabitants were in some sort their fellow-citizens. As early as the year 1170 the Ragusans had been admitted citizens of Constantinople by Manuel Comnenus, and the Imperial Chamber had undertaken to defray the expense of educating a certain number of Ragusan youths in Greek learning. By the beginning of the fourteenth century Ragusa herself had become a school of Greek for the Serbian mainland. Sclavonic Kings and Czars sent hither the young barons of their realms to be instructed in learning and manners; and the Serbian Czar, Stephen Dūshan, presented the city with a precious collection of codices, Greek and Latin, discovered in the Illyrian interior.349 Thus the citizens of Ragusa were in every way well fitted to play a leading part in the revival of letters in Western Europe; it is said that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries there was not one of her families but could boast its man of letters; her scholars toiled eagerly at the new learning, and emended the texts of Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, and other classical authors. It is extremely significant of the position held by Ragusa in the world of letters at the end of the fifteenth century, that Aldus Manutius sent his son Paolo here for his classical schooling.
But this erudition was but the prelude to an outburst of original genius such as has been paralleled by few cities of the globe. Perhaps, indeed, no other people had brought before them so vividly every stirring aspect of the most romantic age that the world has seen. The Ragusans had sat at the feet of Byzantine masters in days when learning was their insolent monopoly; they had already been familiarised in the schools of Florence with the masterpieces of Italian genius; they had caught from Virgil and Ovid an inspiration of antiquity; and the dramas of Sophocles had been translated by a fellow-citizen into their Serbian mother-tongue. To these creations of exotic fancy they added, what they had never lost, a heritage of Serbian poetry, enshrining a mythology that had felt in some mysterious way the spell of Arabian genii—a mythology still so real that, to the last days of the Commonwealth, effigies of fantastic Serbian deities, and amongst them the ‘flowery-kirtled’ Vila, were borne in procession at Ragusan carnivals.350 The merchant-citizens of the Republic had already enlarged their sympathies with the acquaintance of every European people. They had now seen the boundaries of the Old World broken through, and sailed forth to explore the New. They had rounded the Cape in the wake of the Portuguese; their argosies had touched at the port of Goa, and trafficked in the Persian Gulf. They had sailed with the Spaniards to Peru and Mexico; they had marvelled with the followers of Cortes at the temple-pyramids of the Aztecs, and plucked roses in the gardens of Yucay. Nearer home, their imagination had been kindled by the overthrow of an empire which Julius had founded. They were surveying from their very walls the tragedy of nations, and their streets were thronged with discrowned sovereigns. The most beautiful creations of the Hellenic muse had sprung Aphroditè-like from the spray of the self-same sea that sparkled in the havens of Ragusa.
Living in this poetic world, one can hardly wonder that Ragusa caught the inspiration of her surroundings; that she ‘awoke to ecstasy the living lyre,’ in the tones of her mother-tongue; that, surveying the catastrophe of the Serbian race, she created a Serbian drama. From the commencement of the last quarter of the fifteenth century onwards, Ragusa produces a long succession of poets and dramatists,351 who are great and valuable almost in proportion as they are unknown to the West. For their pre-eminent value lies in their having composed in a Sclavonic tongue. Amongst the most celebrated works of Ragusan poets may be mentioned the ‘Dervishiade’ of Stephen Gozze, a comic epos; the ‘Jegyupka’ or gipsy-woman, a satiric poem by Andreas Giubronović; and the lyrics of Dominico Zlatarić, also known as a painter, and as translator of Tasso and of some plays of Sophocles. Nor was Ragusa wanting in poetesses to rival her poets; the epigrams of Floria Zuzzeri, who wrote in Italian as well as Sclavonic, are still of renown. But the most celebrated names in the long annals of Ragusan literature are those of Junius Palmotta and Giovanni Gondola.352 It is a high merit of Palmotta’s dramas that the subjects are taken from the history of Southern-Sclaves.353 The master-work of Gondola is the ‘Osmanide,’ an epic poem recording the prowess of Sultan Osman against the Poles. This is a strange witness to the Turkish sympathies of the Republic, and the noblest monument of Ragusan genius. The poems of Gondola are still, among all South-Sclavonic peoples, ‘familiar in their mouths as household words;’ and though Ragusa has lost her wealth and liberty, her most golden memories live still in the bard—
Whose tuneful lyre,
Resounding sweet from Save to Drave,
Forbids Illyrian nations to expire,
Vibrates immortal airs, to kindle patriot fire.354
Ragusa also produced Latin poets, and a race of historians, among whom may be mentioned Cervario Tuberone, Nicolas Ragnina, and, greatest of all, Anselmo Banduri, whose name is of European renown. The breadth of the Ragusan genius is illustrated by the fact that her additions to the exact sciences are as splendid as the works of her imagination. Her citizens Gazoli, Antonius Medus, Ghetaldi, and at a later period Boscović, rank among the patriarchs of astronomy and mathematics. Marino Ghetaldi, born at Ragusa in 1566, anticipated Descartes in the application of algebra to geometry, and lays a claim to the invention of the telescope. Amongst other feats he tested the experiment of Archimedes, and is said to have consumed a boat with his burning-glass. On the shore of a bay to the south of Ragusa is still pointed out the fern-valanced cavern where Ghetaldi loved to pursue his discoveries; and such was the impression wrought by the man of science on the popular mind, that to this day the sailor, as he passes the mouth of Ghetaldi’s cave, invokes St. Blasius to frustrate the incantations of the magician.
The literary and commercial bloom of Ragusa continued to the middle of the seventeenth century, little abated by a plague, which in 1526 destroyed twenty thousand of the population in six months; or by the loss of many ships in the Spanish service. But Ragusa had already received warnings of a more tremendous catastrophe, such as had befallen her Roman ancestress Epidaurus. In 1520, 1521, 1536, and 1639, the city had suffered from shocks of earthquake.
It was half-past eight o’clock on the morning of April the 6th, the Wednesday in Holy Week, 1667. The Maggior Consiglio was about to hold a session, for the purpose of according grace to delinquents, and the Rector of the Republic, Simeon Ghetaldi, and some of the councillors, were already preparing to take their places. The inhabitants of Ragusa were mostly at home, or in the churches at morning prayer, when, without a moment’s warning, a tremendous shock of earthquake overwhelmed the whole city and entombed a fifth of the population in the ruins. The Rector of the Republic, five-sixths of the nobles, nine-tenths of the clergy, a Dutch ambassador with his suite of thirty, then on his way to Constantinople, and six thousand citizens, were buried. Marble palaces—the accumulated embellishments of ages of prosperity—valuable libraries, archives, irreplaceable manuscripts—all alike perished. The sea left the harbour dry four times, and rising to a mountainous height, four times threatened to engulf the land. The ships in the port were sucked into the vortex of the deep, or dashed to pieces against each other or the rocks. The wells were dried up. Huge cliffs were split from top to bottom. The sky was darkened by a dense cloud of sand. The earthquake was succeeded by a fire, and a strong gale springing up spread the flames over every quarter of the ruins. Finally, to complete the catastrophe, the wild Morlachs descended from the mountains and pillaged what remained.
Ragusa never recovered from the blow. Her commerce was for long reduced to the coast-traffic of small trabaccoli. Her literature, indeed, partly revived; and during the early years of the French war the neutrality of Ragusa secured for her once more much of the Mediterranean carrying trade, and by the end of the last century her population amounted to 15,000. But, in 1806, Napoleon seized Ragusa, and two years later an adjutant of General Marmont announced that the Republic of Ragusa had ceased to exist. It yet remained for the diplomatists of the Allied Powers to consummate in cold blood what Buonaparte had perpetrated in the frenzy of his ambition; and at the Congress of Vienna an English plenipotentiary set his signature to a document by which the ancient Republic was handed over to what was then the most brutal and despotic government in Europe. Since that date Ragusa has been the head town of a ‘circle,’ and the stately palace of her Rectors has sunk into the ‘bureau’ of an Austrian ‘Kreis-chef!’
And yet how fascinating is Ragusa still! It far surpassed our most sanguine expectations. We entered the once sovereign city by the Porta Pille, one of two gates which form the north and south poles of the little town, and are the only public openings in the circuit of its massive walls. From a niche above this portal the old saviour of the Republic, St. Blasius, looked down upon us benignantly, with finger raised aloft in the act of benediction; and the same figure of his saintship occurs at intervals all round the walls, which have been likened to a girdle of amulets. The Porta Pille passed, we found ourselves in the Stradone or Corso, the main street of Ragusa, and the finest and widest in Dalmatia.
From the student of Ragusan history this street claims a peculiar interest. Originally it was nothing else than a narrow channel of sea—the ‘silver streak’ that moated off the Roman rock asylum of Lavve from the more rustic dwellings of Serbian Dubrovnik, scattered among the pine-trees on the rocky steep of the adjoining mainland. But in the thirteenth century, when the antagonism between Serb and Roman had already ceased, and the Serbian language had become the mother-tongue of the descendants of the Epidauritan refugees, the channel was filled in and the site levelled to make room for an airy piazza,355 where, in the succeeding age, stately palaces of four or five storeys rose on either side, and rivalled those of Venice in their magnificence. Thus what had originally been a barrier between two hostile nationalities, has since become a bond of union, as the favourite meeting place and social promenade for all classes of Ragusan citizens. The lofty palaces of the original Piazza were overwhelmed by the great earthquake, and their loftiness made them terribly destructive of life, so that when the Senate rebuilt this part of the city the height of the new houses was limited to two, or at most three, storeys. The Piazza itself shrank into the present Stradone, in sympathy with the straitened circumstances of New Ragusa; but, shadow as it is of its former majesty, it still forms a noble thoroughfare.
Every building on either side, as indeed throughout the town, is of fine stone, and the street—like all other streets of Ragusa—is paved with large deftly squared slabs, which take the polish of marble, and caused us to slip more than once. Immediately on entering we passed on the right a fifteenth-century cistern356 decorated with quaint heads of dragons; it is from this that Ragusa derives her water supply, brought hither by a conduit from a mountain source fifteen miles off. Opposite is the Chiesa del Redentore, in classic Venetian style, the elaborate carvings of its façade thrown into exquisite reliefs by the golden colours of the stone; and above its portal an inscription recording the building of the church (legend says that the matrons of Ragusa brought hither the material) after the earthquake of 1536—ad avertendam cœlestem iram in maximo terræ tremore. Alas! it averted not a greater ruin, though by some strange irony of fortune it survived the earthquake of 1667, to stand a monument of disregarded piety. Next is the Franciscan convent in several tastes, and then, on either side of the road, a vista of solid stone houses, built with great regularity in a plain but dignified style, with classic cornices.
A five minutes’ walk—such a little place is this!—brought us to the other end of the city, the street terminating abruptly in the Porta Plocce, the sea-gate, and otherwise the south-pole of Ragusa. But just before reaching this, the Stradone opens on the right on to a small Piazza, where the most beautiful and interesting edifices in Ragusa are congregated.
Everywhere around is something which takes us back to the most glorious days of the Republic. Opposite is a living monument of that mechanical genius which shines in the great works of Ghetaldi and Boscović. This is the Torre del Orologio, with a domical cupola containing a wonderful clock, in which a revolving globe shows the moon’s age, and two bronze figures of men in armour strike a bell to tell the hours. Upon the bell are the Latin lines:—
Acta velut Phoebus distinguit tempora cursu
Terrigenis, peragens signa superna poli;
Sic sonitu nostro numeratur civibus hora
Nocte monens requiem, luce, laboris opus.357
To the left is a beautiful Moresco-Gothic building, the Dogana and Zecca or Mint of the Republic—at present serving as the Ricevitoria principale of the Emperor and King. From here issued forth those half Byzantine pieces with their saintly Blasius and ‘Tuta Salus’ scroll, of which we had seen so many examples on the former sites of Ragusan industry in Bosnia. The Mint, which is behind the Dogana, I visited in company with Signor Vincenzo Adamović, who is one of the representatives of numismatics in modern Ragusa, and who, besides possessing a considerable collection, has published some interesting essays on the medallic history of the Republic. The coins of Ragusa date back, according to Signor Adamović, at least to the ninth century. The earliest coin is of brass, bearing the Byzantine name ‘Follaris’ or ‘Obolus,’ and displaying on the obverse a laureated head, evidently, like some of our Anglo-Saxon monetary effigies of the same date, copied from the fourth-century coinage of the Roman Empire. The earliest silver coin, the Grosso or Denaro, dates from the end of the thirteenth century,358 and is the first coin on which St. Blasius makes his appearance. The Mint is at present converted into a granary for oats, so that there is little to remark inside the building except an inscription over the massive arch of the standard office of weights and measures:—
Fallere nostra vetant et falli pondera, meque
Pondero dum merces, ponderat ipse Deus.
The present Zecca and Dogana were built in the year 1520, and are among the few buildings which by their massive construction withstood the shock of the great earthquake of 1667. But there is another building hard by, of greater antiquity and more absorbing interest, which has also happily come down to us uninjured. The Palazzo Rettorale, the residence of the old Rectors of the Republic, whose rich colonnade faces the Piazzetta on the left, is a monumental epitome of Ragusan history—the grandest relic of the ancient commonwealth. An inscription on the exterior records that it was founded in 1435 ‘by the nobles and most prudent citizens of Ragusa, under the divine auspices of Blasius, martyr and most holy priest, being patron of this city of Epidaura Ragusa.’359 The date of its completion, 1452, takes us back to the period when the commerce and literature of Ragusa were first bursting into bloom. The style of the architecture, Florentine, and not Venetian, is typical of the Tuscan source whence Ragusan literature drew its earliest inspiration, and bids a kind of architectural defiance to the Lion of St. Mark. This is not so huge a pile as the palace of the Doges, but neither has it that element of barbaresqueness. These massive arches and the backbone of iron girders within, which enabled the building to withstand the terrific ordeal of the earthquake, characterise well the sober sense and heroic endurance of the citizens who reared it.
This is the Lararium of the Republic. Within are the effigies of her greatest heroes and benefactors, the archives of her history,360 the rolls of her nobility. This is a treasure-house of the associations of every age of Ragusan story. The stone benches in the porch beneath the spacious arcade are the same on which the senators and patricians of old used to discuss the gravest affairs of state. The massiveness of the Roman arches and that classic colonnade may well be taken to betray the spirit of that race to which the ancient rock of asylum owed her first foundations; the too imaginative patriotism of Ragusa has even gone farther, and claims the capitals themselves to have been transported hither from the Epidauritan mother-city. On one of these is carved an alchemist, seated book in hand amidst his crucibles and alembics, and a Latin inscription361 of apparently the same date as the sculpture, informs the spectator that he is viewing the inventor of medical arts—Æsculapius, ‘the glory of his birth-place, Ragusa.’ At least it records the pious devotion of mediæval Ragusa to her Roman penates; and though the Cupids that sport amidst the acanthus-leaves of the other capitals were certainly never carved at Epidaurus, we may yet see in them an interesting tribute of Ragusa to the beautiful paganism of the Renascence.
In a corner of the fine columniated court within the palace lies the monument of Orlando, whose exploits in slaying the Saracen Emir have been already recorded. Near it stood of old the banner of the second saviour of the Republic—San Biagio. In the middle of the court is a patinated bronze bust of a man with peaked beard and somewhat careworn expression, and, on the pedestal, the inscription ‘Michaeli Prazzato benemerito Civi ex S.C. MDCXXXVIII.’ Michael Prazzato was a well-deserving citizen indeed! He left no less than 200,000 Genoese doubloons to the Republic—a sum equivalent to 600,000l. of our money—but the actual equivalent of which in the present day would have to be reckoned in millions. Such were the merchant princes of Ragusa! But the monument, curiously enough, recorded the catastrophe as well as the prosperity of the city. On the back of the pedestal was a further inscription commemorating the overthrow of the bust by ‘the great earthquake,’ and its setting up anew. The head had been seriously caved in behind.
In the ‘Mother Church’ of the neighbouring, formerly Ragusan, island of Mezzo, is another memorial of Michele Prazzato, a napkin which once belonged to Charles V. At a time when Spain was desolated by a famine, Prazzato earned the gratitude of her sovereign by transporting there large cargoes of grain in his huge carracks. Hearing of Prazzato’s presence, the Emperor called him in, it is said, while he was shaving, and offered him a large sum of money,—titles, and office under his government. ‘Sire,’ replied our merchant prince, ‘if I am satiated with riches it is that I never took them as a gift; if I am king on board my carracks, it is that I never sought for honours; if I am a free citizen of my fatherland, Ragusa, it is that I have never sought for titles. As a remembrance of your sovereign favour, grant me rather this napkin.’362 Charles V., struck at such greatness of soul, took what was asked for from beneath his beard and handed it to Prazzato.
But walled into a doorway at the side of Prazzato’s monument is another inscription recording patriotic devotion of a still higher order. Nicola Bunić363 has well deserved the title of the Ragusan Regulus. It was after the great calamity of 1667, when Ragusa was beginning a new start in life, that Kara Mustapha, intent on strangling her new birth, sent in a monstrous claim for 146,000 dollars. The senate and citizens of Ragusa, who knew the personal animosity of Mustapha against the Republic, were in despair. At this critical juncture two citizens, who had already rendered themselves eminent by their efforts in remedying the effects of the earthquake and in repulsing the Morlach incursions, volunteered to risk their lives in averting the storm. One was Marino Caboga364 and the other Nicola Bunić. On their arrival the Grand Vizier attempted to extract from them a treaty surrendering Ragusa to the Turk. They refused, and were thrown into noisome dungeons. Caboga, after languishing several years in captivity, was enabled to return to Ragusa and receive the acclamations of his fellow-citizens. This slab was the only homage which the Republic could offer to Bunić. The inscription, Englished, is as follows:—‘To Nicola Bunić, a Senator of singular discreetness, who, in the most perilous times of the Commonwealth, undertook of his own accord a most perilous embassy to the neighbouring Pashà of Bosnia, and being sent on by him by way of Silistria to the Turkish Sultan, there, after long imprisonment, died in chains for the liberty of his country, and who by his death and constancy of soul hath earned an immortal name through all posterity; to the honour and memory of whom this monument is by decree of the Senate set up, in the year 1678.’365
Near the Palazzo Rettorale rises the Duomo of St. Mary—but alas! except the foundations on which the present building rests, not one stone has been left upon another of Cœur-de-Lion’s original cathedral. In the present eighteenth-century Italian edifice there is little to arrest the attention; but the Reliquiario366 is wonderful! When Ragusan commerce was at its acmè, ‘the merchants of the Republic,’ we read, ‘collected the precious relics of the saints from all parts of Thrace, Bulgaria, Bosnia, Albania, and Greece, where they had business, following the promptings of their piety; sometimes at their own expense, sometimes at the expense of the Republic, rescuing them from barbarism and ignorance.’ Hither, too, when the Infidel overran the South-Sclavonic lands, pious votaries carried for safety what was more precious to them than worldly goods or life itself. Here, in the City of Refuge, are gathered together the penates of the Serbian people. Among the most interesting of these national relics was the silver cross of Czar Dūshan, which is double, like the Hungarian. It is set in front with crystals, and covered with volute filigree work; at the back with vine ornaments. As to St. Blasius, there seemed enough relics of the patron saint of the Republic to make several originals, if pieced together! An Oriental crown enclosing a piece of his cranium, brought hither from the East in the eleventh century, is a master-piece of Byzantine art. Then there is a very choice fragment of John the Baptist’s arm, which was added to the collection in 1452; under, to say the least of it, remarkable circumstances. The Ragusans had taken care of it for a sick Bosniac, who had promised his precious relic to the Florentines. The Bosniac recovered his health; but, as neither Papal thunders nor Tuscan threats availed him to recover the smallest fraction of St. John the Baptist, he turned for help to Bajazet. Bajazet referred the matter to one of his Pashàs, and the Turk, no doubt richly bribed by the Ragusans, cut the matter short by observing to the claimant that if he was in want of Christian bones he might pick up plenty on the field of Kóssovo!
Although as Englishmen we could get up no particular enthusiasm for St. Blaze’s collar bones, the cases were magnificent, and the ancient filigree work of Ragusa particularly struck us. In general appearance the later specimens of the Ragusan silversmith’s art resemble Maltese work, and effloresce into the same flowers and foliage. But the taste for the natural, which followed on the revived study of antiquity, displays itself here still more conspicuously in the development of a kind of silver Palissy-ware by the hands of a great Ragusan master. The most wonderful objects in the Reliquiario are a silver basin and ewer, wrought in the fifteenth century by a Ragusan artist, Giovanni Progonović,367 in a style so original, that I doubt if anything at all resembling it has even been attempted elsewhere. These are covered with all kinds of shells, creeping things, flowers, and foliage—elegant lizards, not like those that the great potter moulded at his best, but perfectly animate—such as the Neapolitan casts from the living creature. Nay, more, the most perfect mechanism is added to perfect art, and if water be poured into the basin the little creatures move as if they were alive! Everything is enamelled of its natural colour, and though now somewhat diminished in brightness, you have actually to touch the plants and animals to realize that they are not real lizards or fern-leaves preserved in some way. In the vase is a nosegay of silver grasses, each delicate thread, each minutest seed, perfectly reproduced and coloured; among them I recognised a beautiful three-spiked grass that I had noticed growing in the neighbourhood of Ragusa—so true, so indigenous, is this art!
The kindness of Signor Adamović enabled me to see the Reliquiario of the Dominican monastery here. Chief amongst the relics was the silver cross of another Serbian monarch, Stephen Uroš, son of his greater namesake and father of Czar Dūshan, with remains of angular ornamentation, and the following inscription:—368
‘Isus Hristos Nika.’
‘This venerable cross was made by the Lord King Stephen Uroš, for the church of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul: that it may be unto him for a safeguard and for remission of sins. And the bishop of Rascia, Gregory II., made this venerable cross in like manner as that widow who gave her two mites. Whosoever shall presume to carry off this cross, let him be accursed of the holy Apostles and of the venerable wood. Of this Cross am I defended; I oppose myself to demons, fearing neither their toils nor their deceits, even as the proud was made foolish and crushed beneath the force of Christ crucified.’
Such is superstition!
There were also many early specimens of filigree work with floral tendencies, and a head—I dare not call it unique—of St. Stephen of Hungary. There was one arm the attribution of which was unknown to the monks, but having succeeded in deciphering a mediæval inscription at the base, I was pleased to be able to inform them that they were the happy possessors of St. Luke’s arm! In the Dominican church and adjoining chapels are many interesting monument of Ragusan citizens, amongst others the tomb of Ghetaldi. There are many family vaults of the Ragusan nobles with Jure hereditario inscribed on them; but one slab inscribed in Italian as ‘the Common Sepulchre of the Confraternity of the Carpenters,’ was peculiarly interesting as a memorial of the guild-brotherhoods of the old Artigiani, which formed such a prominent feature in the early history of the commonwealth.
One may spend days in wandering about Ragusa—exploring her streets, her churches and monasteries, her palaces, and the private houses of her citizens—and always lighting on some interesting memorial of the past. In the meanest houses, in the old walls, in the pavement beneath your feet, you stumble against fragments of sculptured marble—waifs from the wreck of Ragusa as she existed before the earthquake. Of the clean sweep wrought by that terrible calamity, the streets themselves, laid out at right angles, are an eloquent witness; and yet it is surprising how many vestiges of the mediæval city are still to be traced. Not one of the narrow side streets but has its sculptured doorways and mouldings—its ogee window-arches, and luxuriant, half classical, half Gothic foliage. Here and there you pass one of the palaces of the old nobility—the Case Signorili, as they are called—with the family scutcheon carved over the portal, and dignified projecting balconies. So marvellous is this climate that the most beautiful garden and hothouse flowers grow wherever there is a chink in an old wall. In the narrowest alleys the stately shadows of bygone magnificence are lighted up by hanging gardens of scarlet geraniums, golden zinnias, balsams, and fragrant carnations clinging to the crevices of ancient palaces and houses, while here and there a vine-spray joins the opposite sides of the street.
On the landside of the Stradone or high-street the city extends in terraces on the lower flank of the limestone mountain which dominates it. The streets here are prolonged flights of steps, of the usual slippery marble, up which we made our way with difficulty, to obtain a bird’s-eye view of the city from the upper wall. The view was well worth the pains. The whole of Ragusa lay below us, circled on three sides by a sapphire ring of sea. To the north was the fine rock of Fort Lorenzo, whose very foundations saved the infant Commonwealth from the Venetians, and, beneath it, the narrow cove of sea which almost threatens to cut off the land gate of the city. To the south opened the old port of Ragusa, the haven of the Argosies; beyond, rose the gardens and convent of the isle of Lacroma, where Cœur-de-Lion landed, and from whose western precipices malefactors were cast headlong into the sea in the days of the Republic. The colours were simply marvellous—the roofs, the walls, the domes, the campaniles, of the city below, took the rose and orange hues of a ripe apricot; the sea beyond was of the most wondrous ultramarine—and Ragusa with her lofty Oriental walls, rose from its now tranquil bosom like Jerusalem the golden from some crystal sea above. But it is the smallness of Ragusa that strikes one almost more than anything. It seems almost impossible to realize that this little town below should have maintained its independence for centuries amidst surrounding empires; that the wealth of what is now Turkey-in-Europe was once hoarded beneath these closely huddled roofs; that the mightiest carracks of the Spanish navy sailed forth from this petty haven. Ragusa looks the mere plaything of the ocean; and indeed they say that in storms the sea surges up these narrow gorges, and flings its spray right over the cliff-set walls on to the house-tops within, frosting roofs and windows with crystalline brine.
Ragusa is still, as ever, a city of asylum. At the present moment a number of houseless Christian refugees from the Herzegovina have sought shelter here. A colony of these is domiciled outside the Porta Plocce, or sea-gate, in some stable-like buildings which once served as the Lazaretto. On our way there we passed the Turkish market, where a number of Turks were purchasing salt, corn, and fodder for the starving troops of the Sultan in the revolted districts.
The condition in which we found the refugees did great credit to the hospitality of the Ragusans.369 We had expected to find a set of half-starved miserable wretches, clad in rags and worn with anxiety for absent fathers, husbands, sons. Quite the contrary! They were well fed; they did not seem at all forlorn, and with their light white kerchiefs and chemises they presented a picture of cleanliness which would have put to shame the squalor of many an Italian-Dalmatian. Among the Bosnian refugees of the Save-lands were to be seen many able-bodied men. Here it was far otherwise. The Herzegovinians are made of sterner stuff, and we noticed among the refugees no boys over thirteen, and no men, except one cripple, under seventy, and there were few enough even of these. The women, too, showed something of the spirit of the matrons of old. They had sold their silver trinkets to buy arms for their husbands. Most of them were already stripped of the coins with which they love to bespangle their fez—of the silver brooches of their belt, shaped like two convolvulus leaves—of the broad girdle studded like an ephod with rudely cut carnelians, agates, amethysts, and roots-of-emerald, set like the mediæval gems in the neighbouring Reliquiario. One woman who still possessed this superb ceinture offered it me for twenty gulden—rather less than two pounds. The gems came, she told us, from the Herzegovinian valleys about Nevešinje—she did not know that the agates and carnelians of these prolific sites were exported of old to the sea-ports of Roman Dalmatia, there to be set, as now, in rings and trinkets, and carved with classical devices!370 Attire so neat and graceful needed not, however, the embellishment of barbaric jewellery; the bright crimson fez, the light white kerchief drawn over it and falling about the shoulders in artistic folds, the dark indigo jacket harmonising with the deep reds and oranges of the apron—these were amply sufficient to make the little groups highly picturesque as they sat or leant before their new homes, plying their spindles most industriously. Little children were playing before the women—such frank pleasant faces!—many with hair as fair as ever that of young Angles.
There were about sixty families on this spot, as we found out on distributing a small largess of ten kreutzers a family; and there is another colony of fugitives at Gravosa. The Austrian Government allows each family on an average twenty kreutzers a day, and the commune of Ragusa makes up the amount to thirty-six kreutzers—not more than eightpence of our money, but sufficient to support life out here. To-day (September 3) there is a three days’ truce between the Turks and the insurgents, and a proclamation has been issued by the Turkish governor of the Herzegovina, in which the Pashà promises full indemnity and freedom from molestation to any of the refugees who may consent during this period to return home. Very few, however, have accepted the kind invitation, and for one very good reason—that they have no homes left them to return to.
We were very anxious to secure some memorial of the fugitives; so bringing down the photographer of Ragusa to their colony, we induced the Herzegovinians, by promises of largess, to form a series of groups. As may be easily imagined, there was great difficulty in getting them to keep quiet. The children kept moving about, the women always wanted to set their caps a little differently at the last moment, and one gentleman was very particular about the posture of his wooden leg. However, we succeeded at last, and for a glimpse at the Herzegovinian refugees, as we saw them at Ragusa, I can refer the reader to the frontispiece of this work.
The turbaned figure to the right of the illustration, and the elegant damsel with whom he is walking arm in arm, are not refugees, but peasants from the immediate neighbourhood of Ragusa. The man’s costume, so closely approaching the Turkish, is an interesting example of the influence wrought by the peculiar relations in which, of old, Ragusa stood to the Turks.371 Nowhere else in Dalmatia does the costume of the peasant so nearly approach that of the true-believer. Here we have not only the same jacket and vest with their gorgeous gold embroidery, the same sash and schalvars, but even a turban on the head; and were it not for his white stockings and a certain preference for crimson jackets, the Ragusan peasant might easily be mistaken for a Moslem. This habit of dress is not confined to the peasants; it is still to be seen among the servants and lower classes in Ragusa itself, and was doubtless originally adopted by the Ragusan merchants to avoid raising the susceptibilities of the infidels with whom they traded, by appearing in the garb of a Giaour. In the seventeenth century, as may be gathered from the relation of an English traveller, the Ragusan merchant who travelled in Turkey in European costume did so at his peril. Blunt, who voyaged himself ‘clad in Turkish manner,’ tells us,372 in his quaint style, how ‘foure Spahy-Timariots’ met his caravan, ‘where was a Ragusean, a Merchant of quality, who came in at Spalatra to goe for Constantinople, he being clothed in the Italian fashion and spruce, they justled him: He not yet considering how the place had changed his condition, stood upon his termes, till they with their Axes, and iron Maces (the weapon of that country) broke two of his ribs, in which case, we left him behinde, halfe dead, either to get backe as he could, or be devoured of beasts.’
‘If I appeared,’ says Blunt a little farther on, ‘in the least part clothed like a Christian, I was tufted like an Owle among other birds.’
Be pleased to observe the elegant pose of the Ragusan damsel who has condescended to visit these unfortunates arm in arm with our turbaned signior! There is a marked contrast between these refined peasant gentle-folk—these ‘Nostrani,’ as the Ragusans call all those who dwell within the limits of the old Republic—and yonder ‘Morlacchi’—the ruder sons and daughters of the Herzegovinian mountains. Ragusa, even in her days of mourning, has inherited something of her former civilization; a peculiar refinement, both in her peasants and citizens, not to be met with anywhere else throughout these lands, must strike the most unobservant traveller. Not here the rude stare, the pestering beggary, the meanness and mendacity—the painful relics of that barbarous Venetian policy which condemned Dalmatia to perpetual poverty and ignorance. The lion of St. Mark has never weighed like an incubus on Ragusa. It needs to have visited Spalato and other Dalmatian cities to appreciate the extraordinary exception in favour of cleanliness and good manners that presents itself here.
The language here, not counting the German spoken by the Austrian soldiery, is partly Italian and partly Sclavonic, but the bulk of the population speak only Sclavonic. Here you hear the Serbian language at its best; it, too, seems to have felt the influence of the literary Italian which was once the official and scholastic language of the Republic, and falls from the lips of Ragusan citizens with Tuscan elegance and softness. The two elements of which Dubrovnik-Ragusa was originally composed, the Serbian and the Roman, blend to form the typical Ragusan features—now and again separating themselves in all their individuality. In the streets of Ragusa the turquoise eyes of the true Sclave peep out often enough from beneath the raven locks and lashes of the Italian.
Is the time, one asks oneself, to arrive once more when Ragusa shall take up anew the work for which by her very birth she is so eminently fitted—will she once more take her place as the pioneer of South-Sclavonic literature and civilisation? Her ‘gift of tongues,’ her sober industry, her position, still remain. Though the old haven of the Argosies has become too small for the leviathans of modern days, she has at hand in Gravosa the finest harbour on the Dalmatian coast—the nearest port to the point where the Narenta debouches on the sea after cleaving a path through the Dinaric Alps towards the Drina and the commercial basin of the Danube. The old trade route of Ragusan merchants only waits for the demolition of artificial barriers to be opened out anew. Already we hear of the improvement of the navigation of the lower Narenta, and a new steam service is planned between Stagno and Ragusa.
Ragusa is the natural port of the Illyrian interior—the born interpreter between the Italian and Sclave. Those only who have traversed the barbarous lands between the Adriatic and the Save can adequately realise how intimately the future of Bosnia and Herzegovina is bound up with the future of Ragusa. The plodding genius of the Serbs needs to be fanned into energy by these fresh sea-breezes—their imagination languishes for want of this southern sunshine!
Here at last, after groping among the primeval shadows of the mighty beech and pinewoods of the Bosnian midlands, we take our ease in one of the gorgeous rock-girt coves which beautify the environs of Ragusa. Overhead are hanging groves and gardens of rosy oleander, ferny palms, myrtles, and creepers with flame-coloured trumpets. On the steep, a spiry aloe leans forward, stretching towards the south; beneath us the cliffs sink precipitously into the blue-emerald waters—intensified in the deeper pools into a vinous purple—stretching away to the horizon in marvellous ultramarine—on either side of the cove, fretting in a silvery line of foam against walls of orange rock whose natural brilliance is glorified now into refined gold by the setting sun. This is not the light of common day!—it stands to it as some gorgeous mediæval blazoning to a modern chromo-lithograph. It dazzles our dull northern eyes. We are on the borders of another world. We catch an inspiration of the South. The waters of the next sea-bosom lap the ruins of Hellenic Epidaurus.
But the gold on the rocks melts into more sombre browns and greys; the western steeps of the cove lose their outlines in vague shadow; the intense azure of sea and sky dies into a dark sapphire; the plashing of the waves below asserts itself in tones more solemn with the gathering twilight, and the darkness deepens into night.
Footnotes
1 This is not the place to discuss the question of earlier Sclavonic immigrations.
2 De Administrando Imperio, capp. xxx., xxxi., xxxii.
3 Chorvat, one of the supposed Croatian leaders, is evidently the eponymus of the whole race of Croats, whose own name for themselves, Charvati or Hrvati, seems to signify ‘mountaineers,’ and to be connected with the name of the Carpathian mountains, and the Carpi of Roman historians. Hilferding points out that of the names of Chorvat’s four brothers, as given by Constantine Porphyrogenitus, two are equivalent in meaning to ‘Delay’ or ‘Tarrying,’ and Chorvat’s two sisters bear the Sclavonic names of ‘Joy’ and ‘Sorrow.’ The names are perhaps allegorical of the gradual character of their conquests, and of defeats sustained as well as victories won.
4 This seems to me far more probable than the poetic derivation of Župa from the same word in the sense of ‘sunny land.’
5 Presbyteri Diocleatis, Regnum Slavorum (in Lucius, De Regno Dalmatiæ et Croatiæ, libri sex. Amst: 1676: p. 291.)
6 See Codex Diplomaticus Regni Croatiæ, Dalmatiæ et Slavoniæ, p. 188 (u Zagrebu, 1874). Sub Anno 1100. The seven Bans appear in the following order:—1, the Ban of Croatia; 2, the Ban of Bosnia; 3, of Slavonia; 4, of Posega; 5, Podravia; 6, Albania; 7, Syrmia.
7 According to the Presbyter of Dioclea, Basil subdued the whole of Bosnia, Rascia, and Dalmatia, including what is now Herzegovina. But this subjection, if it was ever effected, must have been of the most temporary character. From 1018 to 1076 the diadem of the Croatian Prince was received from Byzantium.
8 The allied Serbian troops, under Dobroslav and Niklas, overwhelmed the army of Michael the Paphlagonian’s general in the gorge of Vranja in Zenta, and, subsequently, that of Michael the Logothete, Governor of Durazzo under Constantine Monomachus, in the defiles between Cattaro and the lake of Scutari, which form at present the heart of Montenegro. See Maximilian Schimek’s Politische Geschichte des Königreichs Bosnien und Rama. Wien, 1787, p. 21.
9 See p. 317. Perhaps this stream once formed the boundary of Croatia in this direction. Evidently the name must first have been applied to Bosnia by Dalmatian borderers. The name Rama at first comprised the territory between this river and the Adriatic.
10 Hilferding, Serben und Bulgaren, p. 150.
11 The Ban Borić. The passages relating to Bosnia in Cinnamus are in his Historiar. lib. iii. c. 7 and 19.
12 See pp. 220, 241, 403.
13 At Novibrdo, in Serbia, the most flourishing of the Saxon colonies, spoken of rapturously by an old Serbian writer as ‘a city of silver and gold,’ the Teutonic word for ‘Burgher’ became naturalised, and a letter of the Ragusans is extant addressed in 1388 to the Captain and Burghers, Kefalii i Purgarom, of the town. See Jireček, Gesch. der Bulgaren, p. 401.
14 See the Synodic ‘written in the Bulgarian language by command of the Czar Boris in the year 1210,’ a translation of which from the original manuscript is given by the Russian historian Hilferding (in the German translation of his History of the Serbs and Bulgarians, part i. p. 118).
15 Excerpted in Sam. Andreæ, Disquisitio de Bogomilis.
16 Recent Sclavonic writers accept the Bulgarian traditions as to the Pope Bogomil; but they seem to me not to allow sufficient weight to Byzantine evidence. It is right, however, to note that ‘Bogomil’ is a possible Bulgarian personal name, and exactly answers, as Jireček observes, to the German ‘Gottlieb.’ It is remarkable that the heretics never called themselves Bogomiles, but simply ‘Christians,’ as did the Patarenes and Albigensians of the West. By the orthodox Sclaves they were called Bogomiles, Babuni, Manicheji, and in Bosnia also Patareni, and, apparently from a corrupted form of that word, Potur.
17 According to the Armenian Chronicle of Acogh’ig (iii. 20-22) the Czar Samuel himself embraced the Manichæan religion. According to the legend of St. Vladimir his son Gabriel and his wife were Bogomiles. See Hilferding, op. cit.
18 Cited in Hilferding, op. cit.
19 Alexiados, lib. xv.
20 Though she afterwards admits that the heresy had infected high families.
21 One, Slovo na Eretiki, against the heretics; and the other, Slovo o Cerkovnom Cinu, on church government. The works of Cosmas are the only monuments of Bulgarian literature dating from the epoch of Czar Samuel. The passages relating to the Bogomiles are excerpted in Hilferding.
22 Hilferding, op. cit. i., identifies this original sect with a division of the Bogomiles known as ‘The Church of Dregovišce,’ and the later with ‘the Church of Bulgaria.’ These two Churches are among the thirteen Churches of the Cathari reckoned by the Italian Reniero Sacconi, a renegade member of that sect, in the thirteenth century. The two divisions are traceable in the Western heresies.
23 The statements of Cosmas with reference to the existence of these dualistic tenets among the Bogomiles are attested by the ‘Synodic of Czar Boris,’ already referred to; by Euthymius Zygabenus, Panoplia; and, as regards the Bogomiles of Bosnia, by Raphael of Volaterræ, Geographia; and by the recent researches of Raški.
24 Euthymius Zygabenus, Panoplia.
25 It is remarkable that the only Bogomilian version of the Gospels which has been preserved, a Bosnian Codex written in 1404, contains, in spite of its late date, most primitive forms of speech; proving the care with which the Bogomiles copied from their older manuscripts. See Daničic’s account of the Bosnian Chval Codex in the Starine of the South-Sclavonic Academy, III. 1-146. Cited by Jireček, op. cit. p. 177.
26 τελειοῦν.
27 Cosmas, corroborated by the ‘Synodic’ and Harmenopulos.
28 For their aversion to the cross see also Euthymius, Panoplia, Anna Comnena, and Harmenopulos. See also p. 176.
29 Cosmas. Their aversion to images, churches, and a hierarchy, is borne out by the testimony of Euthymius and Anna Comnena.
30 So too Anna Comnena and Euthymius.
31 Rački (in Jireček, op. cit.)
32 Thus Pope Gregory XI. writes in 1376: ‘Cum Bosnenses uxores accipiant cum condicione, si eris bona, et intentione dimittendi, quando sibi videbitur’ (MS. of the South Sclavonic Academy, cited in Jireček, op. cit. p. 183).
33 Cosmas is again slanderous when he says that the Bogomiles begged from door to door.
34 Jireček, op. cit. p. 180.
35 Jireček, op. cit. p. 181.
36 So Cosmas, ‘At the fifth time, however, they have the door open.’ According to Euthymius, who also bears witness to the Paternoster being their only form, they prayed five times during the day and seven at night. Euthymius (see also Epiphanius) says that they prayed also to demons to avert evil, and that Basilius, their heresiarch, declared that in their gospels was the text, ‘Worship demons, not that they may do good to you, but that they may not do you harm.’ On this charge of devil-worship, however even Cosmas is silent.
37 This is illustrated by the missionary work of St. Sava in that century. At the end of the ninth century the Narentines, living in the immediate neighbourhood of Spalato and Ragusa, the two focuses of Roman Christianity, were still unconverted, and their country, according to Constantine Porphyrogenitus, was still known as Pagania. See p. 367. How much more must this have been the case with the inland districts of Bosnia!
38 I find that this explanation of the rapid advance of the Manichæan heresy among the Sclaves has suggested itself, quite independently, to Herr Jireček in his recent history. He says (Gesch. der Bulgaren, p. 175): ‘Es war für Bogomil keine schwere Aufgabe, das unlängst erst dem Heidenthüme entrückte Volk für eine Glaubenslehre zu gewinnen, welche, gleich dem alten slawischen Mythus von den Bosi und Bêsi, lehrt, dass es zweierlei höhere Wesen gebe, nämlich einen guten und einen bosen Gott.’ Herr Jireček, however, seems to forget that Armenian missionaries were at work in Bulgaria considerably before even the reputed date of Bogomil. If we remember that at the time when Manichæism first sought a footing among the Bulgarians a great part of the nation was still pagan, these considerations become still more cogent.
39 See Schimek, Pol. Gesch. des Königreichs Bosnien u. Rama, p. 36.
40 This is Hilferding’s conclusion.
41 Or Spalato. Ragusa also laid claim to be the Metropolitan Church of Bosnia in Culin’s time.
42 Culin had married a sister of Stephen Némanja of Serbia, whose Bogomilian opinions were notorious before her marriage. See Schimek, op. cit. p. 48.
43 This we learn from a letter of the Apostolic Legate of Alexander III., then in Dalmatia, directed ‘Nobili et potenti viro Culin Bano Bosniæ.’ The Legate writes to say that he is in very good favour with the Pontiff; that he would like for himself a couple of slaves and a pair of martens’ skins; and ‘if you have anything to signify to the Pontiff we will benignantly listen to it.’ (!)
44 Farlati, Episcopi Bosnenses. (In his Illyricum Sacrum, t. iv. p. 45.)
45 The German word ‘Ketzer’ is derived from ‘Cathari,’ another name for the sect.
46 As an example of the doctrinal identity of the Bogomilian and Albigensian creeds, I may be allowed to recall a few main features of the heresy about Toulouse as they struck the Roman Inquisitors in 1178. The heretics, we are told, declared that there were two Principles: one Good Spirit, who had created invisible things alone, and only those that were not susceptible of change and corruption; the other Evil, who had created the sky, earth, man, and all things visible. That the sacramental bread and wine were not transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ. That they rejected priests, monks, bishops, and sacerdotalism generally. That churches were an abomination to them. That the laying on of hands, and that, on adults, was the only true baptism. As to marriage—‘virum cum uxore non posse salvari si alter alteri debitum reddat.’ That beggars deserved no alms. That they made use of the vernacular in their prayers: they were so ignorant of Latin ‘that they could not speak a couple of words.’ ‘It was necessary,’ says the Cardinal of St. Chrysogonus, ‘to condescend to their ignorance, and to speak of the sacraments of the Church, though this was sufficiently absurd, in the vulgar tongue.’ Their preachers seem to have styled themselves, in the figurative language common to the Bogomiles as well, ‘Angels of Light.’ The Abbot of Clairvaux states that one of them, doubtless in the same figurative sense, called himself John the Baptist. This man, their chief leader, was an aged man, who presided at the nocturnal prayer-meetings of the sectaries, clad in a tunic or dalmatic. See Roger of Hoveden’s Chronicle, (Prof. Stubbs’s edition, in the Rolls Series, vol. ii. p. 153, &c.)
47 Of the two divisions of the original Bulgarian Church, that of Dragoviče, with its more uncompromising dualism, was followed in the West by the Churches of Toulouse and Albano on the Lake of Garda. The other Western Churches accepted the modified monotheism of what was known as ‘The Bulgarian Church’ par excellence. This was in the thirteenth century. At an earlier period, however, the absolute dualism of the Dragovician Church had triumphed at the heretical Council of St. Felix de Caraman, near Toulouse. See Jireček, op. cit. p. 213.
48 ‘Patarenes,’ the name by which the Bogomiles of Bosnia and other Sclavonic lands are always called by Roman writers, was derived from ‘Pataria,’ a suburb of Milan where heresy first raised its head in Italy.
49 Jireček, loc. cit. The Armenian influence on Bulgaria and Bosnia, and the Bogomilian influence on the West, is connected with the spread of a curious heretical literature, derived from Oriental sources; of phantastic Apocrypha and spurious Gospels, as well as of works of Oriental magic, which, disseminated by the more corrupt adherents of the sect, entered into the mediæval mythology of the West, and have still left their traces on its folklore as well as on that of the Russians, Bulgarians, and Serbs. Jireček cites, among other such works, the favourite Bulgarian legend of St. John Bogoslov, containing a vision of the Dies iræ, which was brought from Bulgaria in 1170 by Nazarius, bishop of the Upper Italian Patarenes, and translated by him into Latin. Another such work is the account of the wanderings of the Mother of God in hell; but perhaps the most interesting of all, and one which in its origin seems to be almost purely Sclavonic, is the account—reflecting the primitive Sclavonic custom of the ‘Pobratimstvo’—of how the Sirmian Emperor, Probus, made Christ his sworn brother.
50 Radulphi de Coggeshale, Chronicon Anglicanum (in the Rolls Series, p. 121, &c.) The name ‘Publicani,’ by which the Essex chronicler alludes to them, is a common name for the Bogomiles in the West, and is, of course, a corruption of Pauliciani, or, perhaps, of a Sclavonic form of that word. The heretics seem to have spread to England from Flanders, where they were much oppressed by the Count. From the fragmentary details which Ralph has given us, they seem to have preserved their Bogomilian faith in a very pure form. They believed in the Two Principles and the evilness of matter, rejected Purgatory, prayers for the dead, invocation of saints, infant baptism, and accepted no scriptures but the Gospels and Canonical Epistles. Some went so far as to charge them (as Euthymius had done long before) with praying to Lucifer in their subterranean meeting-houses. They were ‘rusticani,’ and therefore not amenable to the argument of authority; by which, I suppose, the preference of the early Protestants for the vulgar tongue is alluded to. They observed a vegetable diet, and condemned marriage. From a shameless relation of Gervase of Tilbury which Ralph reports, it appears that there were holy women of the sect under vows of perpetual chastity. Gervase himself, a clerk of the Archbishop of Rheims, coolly related to his monkish friend, who chronicled the story with pleasing gusto, how, having failed to seduce a beautiful country girl, he perceived her heresy, accused her successfully of being a ‘Publican’ before the Inquisition, and feasted his eyes with her dying agonies at the stake. Girl though she was, she died without a groan, ‘instar,’ as even the monk cannot refrain from adding, ‘martyrum Christi (sed dissimili causa) qui olim pro Christiana religione a paganis trucidabantur.’ The tragedy, even as told by Ralph, is of an intense pathos, and deserves immortalising. How beautiful is that innocence and how unutterable the villainy which provokes an under-current of humanity even in a monkish narrator! After relations like this, the conduct of Henry II. to the Oxford ‘Publicans’ will appear almost merciful: he merely gave orders that they should be branded on the forehead with a red-hot key and thrust forth from the city, and that nobody should give them food or shelter. The notices of the Publicani, Albigenses, and other Bogomilian sects who gained a footing in England, both by way of Flanders and Guienne, never seem to have attracted the attention they deserve from English historians. Yet the hatred born by the orthodox against these Bulgarian intruders has added a word of reproach to the language.
51 Nor is this the place to enquire how far, in the Languedoc at all events, the spread of these doctrines may have been aided by survivals of an earlier Gnosticism. What, for example, became of those Gnostici who had established themselves in the end of the fourth century in Spain and parts of the south of Gaul? (See Sulpicius Severus, Sacræ Historiæ, lib. ii.)
52 By means of two merchants of Zara, Matthew and Aristodius, who brought the Patarene doctrines from Bosnia to Spalato. Thomas Archidiaconus, c. 24, quoted in Wilkinson’s Dalmatia.
53 With the exception of the Croats, who perhaps hardly came under the denomination of Balkan Sclaves.
54 Hist. Maj. ad annum 1223 (Rolls Series, vol. iii. p. 78); and compare Ralph of Coggeshale’s account (Rolls Series, p. 195). Jireček (op. cit p. 214) refers to a diploma of Innocent IV. in 1244, which reveals an intercourse between Bosnia and the Waldenses he cites Palacky and Brandl in the Čas. matice moravské, 1, 2.
55 His residence is fixed as ‘on the borders of the Hungarians and between the limits of Bulgaria, Croatia, and Dalmatia,’ which indicates the position of Bosnia with sufficient exactitude.
56 The style of Bartholomew, the vicar of the Roman antipope, was, according to Matthew Paris, ‘servus servorum sanctæ fidei;’ according to Ralph of Coggeshale, ‘servus servorum hospitalis sanctæ fidei.’ Ralph writes ‘Poios’ instead of ‘Porlos.’
57 Raynaldus, Annal. Eccles. sub anno 1233.
58 The Prince himself is described as ‘King of the Ruthenians, and Ban of Sclavonia.’ See Farlati, op. cit. and Spicilegium Observationum Historico-Geographicarum de Bosniæ Regno, Lugd. Bat. 1737.
59 Yet the historian of Latin Christianity might have spared a line to chronicle the struggles and sufferings of these early Protestants of Bosnia, to whom even the cultured sons of Provence turned for spiritual guidance.
60 Raynaldus, Annal. Eccles. s. a. 1238.
61 Raynaldus, s. a. 1246. Ninosclav had succeeded Zibisclav as Ban.
62 Farlati, Episcopi Bosnenses.
63 Under the Franciscan ‘Vicar of Bosna’ we now read of the following Custodiæ, viz. Dulmna, Greben, Bosna Civitas, Ussora, Machovia, Bulgaria, Corvinum, and Rascia.
64 Farlati, Ep. Bosn.
65 Waddingus, Annales Minorum (Ed. Fonsecæ), tom. vii. sub. anno 1325.
66 Presbyter Cosmas. Just the same account of the apparent innocence of the Bogomiles appears in Euthymius: ‘They bid those who listen to their doctrines to keep the commandments of the gospel, and to be meek and merciful, and of brotherly love. Thus they entice men on by teaching all good things and useful doctrine, but they poison by degrees and draw to perdition.’
67 Anonym. Acutheanus (in Farlati).
68 Raynaldus, Annal. Eccles. sub anno 1369. The Franciscan Mission had complained to the Pope of Tvartko the same year, as protector of the Patarenes and ‘persecutor of that true son of the Church,’ his brother, Stephen Wuk. In 1370 the Pope writes to the bishops of Ragusa, Spalato, and ‘Dirrhachio’ to put the Patarenes under ban. In 1372, from a letter of Pope Gregory XI. to the Vicar of the Minorites in Bosnia, we learn that, in view of the continuance of the heresy in Bosnia, Rascia, ‘Bassarat,’ and the neighbouring regions, he granted them many privileges of building religious houses in those countries; ‘Bourich, belonging to the noble Nicolas de Altomanich’ in Rascia, and the ‘Contrata de Glas’ in the dominion of the King of Hungary, being specified. Waddingus, Annales Minorum, sub anno 1372.
69 Farlati, Ep. Bosn.
70 Waddingus, Annales Minorum, tom. xiii. sub anno 1462.
71 See Farlati, Ep. Bosn.; and Spicilegium, &c. de Regno Bosniæ.
72 Raynaldus, Annal. Eccles. sub anno 1450.
73 Laonicus, de Rebus Turc. lib. x.; Gobelinus, lib. ii.; and Johannes Leunclavius. The Sultan is said to have made use of the authority of the captured king to obtain the seventy cities, but the account given of the betrayal of Bobovac shows that the Bogomiles were the real cause of the quick submission.
74 I have already noticed the early branching off of a Bogomilian church which rejected Dualism pure and simple. Herr Jireček remarks this compromising tendency, and observes that an Italian adherent of the sect, Giovanni di Lugio, taught the real humanity of Christ and accepted the Old Testament: while others conceded free will.
75 Waddingus, Annales Minorum, sub anno 1478. There is also a curious passage in Raphael of Volaterra, who appears to have written his Geographia towards the end of the fifteenth century. He says (Geog. p. 244, ed. Lyons, 1599), ‘In Bosnia, Rascia, and Serbia the sect of the Manichees is still followed. They say there are two Principia Rerum—one good, one evil. Nor do they acknowledge the Roman Pope, nor Christ “Omousion.” They have monasteries (cœnobia) in hidden mountain valleys, where go matrons who have escaped from certain diseases.’ These matrons say that for a certain period they act as menials to holy men in accordance with a vow: ‘Atque ita inter monachos mixtæ una vivunt; quæ quidem labes adhuc durat.’
76 Besides the evidence on this point which I have gathered from other sources, I may notice a most interesting allusion to the Bogomiles or Patarenes who had turned renegades, and a direct testimony that they went over wholesale to Islâm, in J. Bapt. Montalbano, Rerum Turcarum Commentarius, written certainly before the year 1630 (when it was published in the Elzevir Turci Imperii Status). After mentioning the Catholic inhabitants, the writer goes on to say, ‘Est aliud eo in regno (sc. Bosnæ) hominum genus Potur appellatum, qui neque Christiani sunt, neque Turcæ, circumciduntur tamen, pessimique habentur.’ ‘Potur’ is evidently a Sclavonised form of Patarene. The writer goes on to say of these ‘Poturs’ that they, ‘to the number of many thousand,’ offered to renegade from the Christian faith to that of Mahomet if Sultan Soliman would grant them indemnity, and release them from tribute. Soliman, says the writer (a Bolognese Doctor), thereupon doubled their tribute, and enrolled their children among the Janissaries, and ‘hence they are despised by both Turks and Christians.’ But this whole account evidently bears witness to the wholesale renegation of the Bogomiles. Further on the same writer, who had visited the country, bears witness to the continuance of Protestantism in Turkish Bosnia in the sixteenth century. ‘Eos inter,’ says he, of the inhabitants, ‘Calvinistæ Arrianique multi.’
77 I am indebted for this fact to Mr. W. J. Stillman, the excellent correspondent of the Times in the Herzegovina, who gives an account of these refugees in a letter from Ragusa dated Oct. 19, 1875, which I may be allowed to quote as illustrating the more recent sufferings of this interesting sect, and the sad case of the Christian refugees of Bosnia and the Herzegovina generally. ‘The people of Popovo were tranquilly engaged in their fields and houses, when the troops—Regulars and Bashi-Bazouks—came up; the latter killed the first they came upon where they found them (one of them, the brother of a villager who had appealed successfully to the Pashà at Trebinje against the extortions of the Agas some months ago, being cut to pieces alive), and all the rest fled in panic. The good curé of Ossonich is doing all he can for them; but there are only eighty-five houses in this village, and he has 2,125 souls of the Popovites on his register for succour. Of these 300 were out on the mountain-side on the night of the worst storm we have had this season. One woman with a new-born babe was so exhausted in her flight that she went to sleep, sitting on a rock nursing her child, fell off in her sleep, and was found by one of the other peasants next morning still sleeping, with her babe at her bosom, in a pool of water which had fallen during the storm. The curé tells me that these people are mainly Bogomilites, remains of an ancient sect once widely spread in Bosnia and identical with the Albigenses.’ I observe that Jireček, quoting Kosanović (Glasnik 29, (1871), 174), alludes to a rumour that in the valley of the Narenta and near Creševo, ‘there are still Christians who neither submit to Franciscans, nor Popes, nor Imâms, but govern themselves according to old traditions, which an Elder delivers to the rest.’ I hope at some future period to be able to say more on the present state of the Bogomiles.
78 See p. 214. There seems, however, to be some discrepancy as to dates. According to Schimek (op. cit. p. 76), Czar Dūshan only annexed Bosnia in 1347, whereas the date of the Armorial is 1340. The Ban, Stephen Kotromanović, retained a small part of his dominions on the Hungarian frontier. Dūshan placed the rest under the despot Lazar of Rascia. On Dūshan’s death in 1355 the Ban recovered the whole of Bosnia, including a part of Serbia beyond the Drina and the grave of St. Sava at Mileševo, where he built a Franciscan Monastery, and where he himself was buried in 1357.
79 Spicilegium, &c., De Bosniæ Regno, p. 51; Farlati, Ep. Bosn. &c. Schimek (op. cit. p. 84).
80 Henceforth he is generally known as Stephen Myrza.
81 Thoemmel, Vilajet Bosnien, p. 12.
82 For an account of the collection of Bishop Strossmayer I am entirely indebted to Canon Liddon, who visited Diakovar in the summer of this year. As a slight monument of mediæval art in Bosnia I may refer the reader to the Great Seal of King Tvartko III. engraved on the title-page of this book.
83 See p. 384 for the Župa Canawlovska and the Roman aqueduct from which it derived its name. Tribunja or Terbunja is, of course, Trebinje, the Roman Terbulium.
84 Jireček (op. cit. p. 338), who brings out clearly the prominent part played by King Tvartko in the last great South-Sclavonic struggle against the Turks.
85 Rački, Pokret na Slavenskom jugu, koncem XIV. i pocetkom XV. stolieca (cited in Jireček, loc. cit.)
86 The English reader will find a full and graphic account of the battle of Kóssovo Polje (or the field of Thrushes) in The Slavonic Provinces of Turkey in Europe, by G. Muir Mackenzie and A. P. Irby, ch. xv. Some extracts from some of the Servian Pjesme on this subject are translated by Sir John Bowring in his Servian Popular Poetry. There is also an interesting account of the battle in Knolles’ Turkish History, 1610, which shows how great was already the poetic influence on the story. ‘The brightness of the Armor and Weapons,’ writes our English historian, ‘was as it had been the Lightning, the multitude of Launces and other horsemen’s staves shadowed the light of the Sun. Arrows and darts fell so fast that a man would have thought they had poured down from Heaven. The noise of the Instruments of War, with the neighing of Horses and outcries of men was so terrible and great that the wild Beasts of the mountains stood astonied therewith; and the Turkish Histories, to express the terror of the day (vainly say) that the Angels of Heaven amazed with that hideous noise for that time forgot the heavenly hymns wherewith they always glorifie God.’ It is possible that the thunder of cannon was now heard for the first time in the Balkan peninsula. In 1383 the Venetians had sold King Tvartko a Falconus.
87 Zinkeisen, (I. 290) cited in Jireček (op. cit. p. 344).
88 See p. 106.
89 Also known as Tvartko II.
90 See pp. 105, 106.
91 Spicilegium, &c., De Bosniæ Regno, p. 7.
92 See deed of Stephen Dabiscia to Goiko Mergnjavić (translated on p. 223) in return for services performed: ‘Quando venit Paiasit cum Turcis et stetit in Naglasincis et destruxit Bosnam.’
93 According to the Spicilegium he assumed the title Princeps Bosnæ et dominus Jayczæ. When under Ostoja’s suzerainty he styled himself ‘Supremus Vayvoda Regni Bosnæ et Vicarius Regum Vladislai et Ostojæ.’ According to Schimek (op. cit. p. 25) his land extended from the middle of the vale of Bosna along the Croatian border.
94 Stephen assumed the style Liber Princeps et Dominus Bosnæ, Ussoræ, Salæ atque plurium aliorum locorum, atque Chelmi Comes.
95 From him the noble Venetian family of Cozzas derives its origin.
96 It seems to me probable that the title accorded by Frederick was Duke of Primorie (which is now incorporated in the County of Chelm), and that the name Duke of St. Sava was rather a popular piecing together of this and his other title of ‘Keeper of the Sepulchre of St. Sava.’ In 1446 he is called Herzegh Sancti Sabbæ by the Bosnian king in the account of the Conventus of Coinica; but if we may judge from the Italian style used by his son, the refugee duke, he called himself Duke of Primorie. Stephen Cosaccia’s son calls himself ‘Duca Primorschi, Signor di Hum, e Guardiano del Sepolchro del beato Sava.’
97 Herzegovina, the adjectival form of Herzega—literally ‘the ducal’—land being understood.
98 Stephen Cosaccia’s father, Sandalj Hranić, in addition to his original heritage of Chelm, had been ceded lands beyond the Drina by Ostoja. Stephen himself succeeded in annexing from Tvartko’s successor the districts of Duvno, Rama, and Ljubuška. On the other hand Sandalj had parted with Ostrovizza to the Venetians, and the Župa Kanawlovska to Ragusa. See L’Herzégovine, Étude Géographique, Historique, et Statistique, par E. de Sainte-Marie.
99 For Mostar and its bridge see p. 347, &c.
100 Schimek (op. cit. p. 100).
101 This is illustrated by a curious fact. A deed (described by Schimek, op. cit. p. 117) is still extant in the Imperial Archives at Vienna, in which King Thomas, in return for services in reconciling him to his Hungarian suzerain, grants John Hunyadi an annuity of 3000 ducats. In this document, datum in Castro Bobovacz, feria quarta post festum Pentecostes (3 Junii) An. Dom. 1444, Thomas still makes use of the seal of his predecessor Tvartko III. A representation of this seal from Schimek is given on the title-page of this book.
102 See p. 307.
103 Schimek (op. cit. p. 119, note 2), on what authority I know not, asserts that the Electi omnium comitatuum regni nostri nobiles, who attended at the ‘Conventus,’ were the Elders of the Patarene (Bogomilian) clergy, ‘und die Edlen (nobiles) scheinen, nach der polnischen Art, die Landboten gewesen zu seyn.’
104 Datum sub castro nostro regali de Bobovatz in oppido Sutischæ, die xxiv Julii, A.D. 1457 (in Spic. De Bosniæ Regno).
105 This appears from a curious document, dated that year, by which King Stephen Thomas engages not to introduce the Turks into Hungary. ‘Nec iisdem Turcis in tenutis nostris, apud manus nostras existentibus a Drino usque fluvium Ukrina, vadum seu navigium præstabimus.’ It does not appear whether these were actual settlers, or a Turkish garrison quartered on the dominions of the Bosnian King.
106 Other accounts make Mahomet disguise himself as a merchant; others transfer the scene to Jaycze; and, according to another version, the Bosnian King was not Stephen Thomas, but his son Tomašević.
107 Proceres Regni.
108 Præfecti.
109 This summons is preserved in the monastery of the Holy Ghost at Foinica, and is given in Balthasar Kerselich, De Regnis Dalmatiæ, Croatiæ, Sclavoniæ, notitiæ præliminares, Zagrab, s. a. In my first edition I had followed the wrong chronology of Farlato and referred it to Stephen Thomas, but there can be no doubt that it is, as Schimek points out, the act of Tomašević.
110 Schimek (op. cit. p. 144).
111 Variously described as Radovil Večinćić, Radić, Radac, and, in latinised forms, Radazes and Rastizes.
112 For the fall of the Bosnian kingdom and the Banat of Jaycze I have compared the accounts of Johannes Leunclavius, Laonicus, De Reb. Turc, lib. x.; Gobelinus, lib. ii.; Isthvanfius, and Bonfinius.
113 A few towns on the Bosna and Save, where, as nearer Hungary, the strength of the Bogomilian malcontents would be weakest, are said (Schimek, op. cit. p. 109) to have resisted, but were soon reduced by the Beg Omer from Thessaly, and laid waste with fire and sword.
114 Schimek beheads Tomašević at Blagai after the Herzegovinian campaign.
115 So too in the Languedoc the strength of the heretics seems to have lain with the industrial population of the times, and one of the names applied to them, Tisserands, shews that they made many converts among the weavers. This illustrates what I have already noticed, the connexion between Bogomilian propagandism and commercial intercourse. It is interesting to notice that the Bogomiles who still survive in the district of Popovo have retained certain mechanic arts that have died out among the rest of the Bosnian and Herzegovinian population.
116 Including Ragatica, Cernica, Kecka, and Michiac.
117 The Venetians at different times succeeded in extending their dominion over parts of Herzegovina. The coast-land (Primorie), including Macarska, Castelnuovo, &c., passed definitely into their hands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to become at a later period the inheritance of Austria. The Venetians at one time extended their suzerainty over the Popovo Polje, Gacko and Piva. In 1694 their Proveditor-General in Dalmatia, Delfino, took Gabella Citluk (Počitelj); and their general, Marcello, pursued the Seraskier to Nevešinje. At this time the Christian inhabitants of the districts of Trebinje, Popovo, Klobuć, and Grahovo (i.e. of much the same area as that of the latest Herzegovinian outbreak) rose against the Pashàs and Agas, and the Mussulman inhabitants. By the peace of Carlovitz in 1699 the Herzegovinian towns of Citluk, Gabella, Cattaro, Castelnuovo, and Risano, with Knin and Zengg and other places, were left in the hands of the Venetians; and the only remaining strips of Herzegovinian coast-land, the narrow enclaves of Klek and Sutorina, were left to the Turks by English influence and Ragusan precaution, which feared Venetian contact.
118 The Duke’s son.
119 Possibly rather restored. A convent and royal residence (the two were generally combined by the Sclavonic princes) had certainly existed at Sutisca much earlier, and as far back as 1278 a Ban, Stephen Kotromanović, dates a diploma ‘from our palace of “Suttisca.”’ The convent reared by the pious Thomas and his Queen was destroyed by the Turks, but the Franciscans obtained permission to rebuild it, and set a great cross there, which according to their own account (Relation of Bosnian Monks in Farlati) was made by St. Bernardin, ‘and is most formidable to demons and drives off airy tempests.’ Perhaps it acted as a lightning-conductor.
120 This account is taken from the relation of Bosnian monks ‘On the Present State of Bosnia,’ supplied to Farlati in 1769. I have assumed above that the picture of King Thomas still exists.
121 Her mother was Helena Comnena, wife of Stephen Cosaccia.
122 Waddingus, Annales Minorum, sub anno 1475.
123 Waddingus, op. cit. sub anno 1478.
124 See frontispiece to this Historical Review of Bosnia. I have copied my illustration of the monument of Queen Catharine, from a representation of it as existing in 1677, in Alphonsi Ciacconii Vitæ et Res Gestæ Pontificum Romanorum et S. R. E. Cardinalium ab Augustino Oldoino recognitæ, &c., tom. iii. col. 41 (Romæ, 1677). I do not know whether the monument is still existent.
125 Ciacconius, loc. cit.
126 Foinica also appears to have belonged to Mathias. See the interesting diploma of 1469, by which he cedes it to Tomko Mergnjavić, given on p. 224.
127 Niklas Ujlak was made titulary king, and assumed the style Nicolaus Dei Gracia Rex Bosniæ. See diploma of 1464, given by Kerczelich, Histor. Eccl. Zagrab. cap. xiii. p. 183 (cited by Schimek). With Nicklas’ death even the titulary kingship of Bosnia died out, and his son, in a diploma of 1492, styles himself simply Dux Boznæ.
128 Literally ‘a little egg,’ the diminutive of ‘Jaje,’ an egg.
129 Waddingus, sub anno 1478.
130 See p. 115.
131 Kraljevo Polje, perhaps ‘Field’ in the old English sense, would be a better rendering of Polje. According to one account, it was the scene of the execution of the last king of Bosnia.
132 Tormenta Curulia.
133 J. Bapt. Montalbano, Rerum Turcicarum Commentarius, s.v. Bosnæ Regnum.
134 A very interesting account of ‘the War in Bosnia,’ during the years 1737-9, has been left us by a native Bosnian historian, Omer Effendi, of Novi, which was printed by Ibrahim in Turkish, and was translated into English by C. Fraser, and published by the ‘Oriental Translation Fund’ in 1830.
135 Thoemmel, Vilajet Bosnien.
136 Of course there are plenty of accounts of border warfare carried on between Bosnian Pashàs and Agas and the Imperialists and Venetians, many of which have been collected by Schimek, whose work—which professes to be a political history of Bosnia—is absolutely silent as to the inner relations of the province for the last two centuries of Bosnian history after the conquest, which he professes to describe. A more confused and purposeless tissue of wars and rumours of wars it is impossible to conceive. The difficulty of obtaining trustworthy materials for the history of Bosnia after the Turkish conquest has led me to confine my sketch of this period to a few general remarks. I hope to discuss the subject more fully at some future opportunity.
137 J. Bapt. Montalbano, loc. cit. The writer had visited Bosnia, apparently in the days of the Banat of Jaycze.
138 See p. lxxx.
139 To this westward and northward immigration of Serbs and Rascians I am inclined to attribute the peculiarity of many of the Bosnian Piesme, the half mythical heroes of which are taken rather from the history of the Serbs proper than of the Bosnians.
140 Die letzten Unruhen in Bosnien (translated into English by Mrs. Alexander Kerr, and published in Bohn’s series).
141 I am indebted to Canon Liddon for this valuable information. On such occasions the bishop generally takes his text from the Sermon on the Mount.
142 M. de Ste. Marie.
143 Ami Boué. In corroboration of this I may cite the testimony of an English traveller, Edmund Spencer:—‘While attending the Parliamentary debates of the Skuptchina, I was much struck with the self-possessed, dignified air of the almost unlettered orators, who were earnest without violence, impassioned without intemperance, depending rather on the force of their arguments than the strength of their lungs and theatrical gesticulations, to win the attention of their auditors. The Serbs resemble us in more than one particular: they have the same dogged resolution, the same love of fair play, the same detestation of the use of the knife, together with no inconsiderable portion of that mixture of the aristocratic and democratic in their character which so especially distinguishes the Anglo-Saxon race.’ The last remark is now peculiarly applicable to the Bosnian branch of the Serbs.
144 M. Yriarte, Bosnie et Herzégovine, p. 245.
145 Franz Maurer, ‘Reise durch Bosnien, die Saveländer und Ungarn.’ Berlin, 1870, p. 45.
146 See Brachet, ‘Dictionnaire Etymologique de la Langue Française,’ and Wedgewood’s ‘Dictionary of English Etymology.’
147 See, for instance, the Croat man in the engraving on p. 4.
148 The Italian Testo, the Spanish Tjesto, and French Têt, came rather from the Latin Testum; while Testa, among the Romance population of Gaul, supplied the word for a head, tête. But in East Europe Testa does not seem to have developed this secondary meaning, as the Wallacks use Cap (Caput) for ‘head;’ and therefore Testa may still have retained its sense of ‘a pot.’
149 ‘Fistula cui semper decrescit arundinis ordo,
Nam calamus cera jungitur usque minor.’
—Tibullus II. v. 31.
150 This, however, may be connected with the Croatian word Fuk, which is used to express the howling of the wind, the whirring of birds’ wings and other sounds, and can hardly be a derivative from Fistula.
151 γαμήλιον αὔλημα. See Chappell, ‘History of Music,’ vol. i. p. 277.
152 Chappell, loc. cit. p. 301.
153 See Diez, Etymologisches Wörterbuch der romanischen Sprachen.
154 Venice strove to make the connection political; from 1115 to 1358 A.D. her Doges maintained the title of Dukes of Croatia.
155 Vuk Karadjić was not a Croat, but a Serb.
156 Called by Germans and Germanizers, Carlstadt.
157 Thus our forefathers knew the Romans as Rom-Weallas. Wales and Welsh still preserve their name for Roman Britain and its inhabitants. The Romance population of the Netherlands is known as Walloon. Italy is still Welschland to the German. It is, however, quite wrong to suppose, as good writers do, that the Wallacks got their name from a German population. They certainly were first called Vlach by their Sclavonic borderers. Vlach is also said to be Sclavonic for shepherd.
158 Slavonia and Slavonian are used throughout this book to denote the Austro-Hungarian province and its people. The branch of the Aryan Family of which these, the Serbs, Croats, &c., are severally members, I call Sclaves, and their tongue Sclavonic.
159 For the charter of Rudolf to Karlovac, in 1581, and its confirmation by Ferdinand III., see Balthazar Kerselich, De Regnis Dalmatiæ, Croatiæ, Sclavoniæ, Notitiæ Præliminares, Zagreb. s. a. p. 392, &c.
160 If we understood the peasants correctly, it was called Terg; and if so, is almost identical in name with Torg, the Swedish for a market-place. Terg in Croatian means generally ‘wares;’ Tirgovac, a merchant or dealer; Tirgoviste, a market.
161 The house-father and house-mother are not necessarily man and wife; nor, though generally chosen with respect to age, are they always the oldest members of the community.
162 The usual word for brigand, &c., in Eastern Europe. The word is said to be Magyar originally, and to signify ‘the unmarried.’ It was originally applied to youthful Free-lances—‘Knights Bachelors’—and has been compared with the derivation of Cossack, which has the same meaning. In Hungary the population of certain towns are known as Hajduks, and the towns are called Hajduk towns.
163 Belenus, the Celtic Apollo, and tutelary god of Aquileja.
164 From whom the earlier title of the city Flavia Siscia may have been derived.
165 Ausonius, De Claris Urbibus. The order of eminence given by the rhetorician to the great cities of the empire is evidently perverted by pedantry and provincial favouritism. Neither Siscia, Sirmium, nor Nicomedia is mentioned. Illyria has, at least, as much right to be heard on this question of precedency as Aquitaine!
166 Very few tituli militares have been discovered at Siscia. The camps originally established here and at Pætovio were soon moved on to Aquincum and Brigetio. See Mommsen, Corpus Inscriptionum, vol. iii. pt. 1, where he insists on the civil character of Siscia.
167 Prudentius, Peristephanon vii.
168 The inscription was CERERI‖AVG SAC‖Q. IVLIVS‖MODERATVS‖B. PROC‖VSLM. It is given in the Corpus Inscriptionum, vol. iii. pt. I. No. 3944. The vase, however, beside the patera, is not mentioned there.
169 Balthasar Kerselich, De Regnis Dalmatiæ, Croatiæ, Sclavoniæ Notitiæ præliminares; and see Danubian Principalities, by a British Resident of Twenty Years in the East, vol. i. p. 88.
170 See p. 85.
171 The usual name given to the residence of a Turkish official.
172 According to some accounts Dobor, a village further down the Bosna, was the scene of this conspiracy and its dénouement. But Doboj, whose great castle was certainly the scene of the tragedy of 1408, seems the more probable reading. It seems to me possible that Doboj was first called Dobor like the lower village, and that the name Doboj or Dvoboj was afterwards affixed to it by reason of its having been the scene of these two struggles. Towns run a good deal in couples in Bosnia, and there may well have been a Veliki and Mali Dobor.
173 Martial, Ep. lib. iv. 64.
174 I assume that the Castrum Tessenii of the Chronicles mean Tešanj.
175 This curious impress of Mahometanism on Bosnian Christianity may be illustrated by other facts. Pilgrimages to Jerusalem are undertaken by Christians almost as frequently as pilgrimages to Mecca by Mahometans. The performance of such is reckoned as honourable among the rayahs as among the Turks, and the Christian pilgrims assume the same title of Hadji. The Holy Sepulchre is often known by the name Tjaba, which is nothing but the Arabian Caaba!—See Ranke, ‘Die letzten Unruhen in Bosnien, 1820-1832,’ (in Bohn’s translation, p. 314.)
176 For the story of Marko Kraljević or ‘Kings’ son Marko,’ and the Cycles of Serbian poetry, see ‘The Slavonic Provinces of Turkey in Europe,’ by G. Muir Mackenzie and A. P. Irby, p. 87, &c.
177 Wessely, quoted in Introduction to ‘Servian Popular Poetry,’ translated by Sir John Bowring.
178 Let any English reader who thinks these encomiums overdrawn procure the faithful and beautiful translations of Sir John Bowring, cited above, and judge for himself.
179 Miller.
180 ‘Servian Popular Poetry,’ translated by J. Bowring, p. 219.
181 ‘A Voyage into the Levant. A Briefe Relation of a Iourney lately performed by Master Henry Blunt, Gentleman, from England by the way of Venice into Dalmatia, Sclavonia, Bosnah, Hungary, Macedonia, Thessaly, Thrace, Rhodes, and Egypt, unto Gran Cairo.’ The Third Edition. London: 1638; p. 8. The giant size of the Bosniacs also struck the Bolognese doctor J. Bapt. Montalbans who visited Bosnia in the 16th century. v. Rerum Turcarum Commentarius,—Bosnæ Regnum.
182 An officer of the general staff who was employed by the Austrian Government to draw up a map of Bosnia, and followed this up by his ‘Studien über Bosnien und die Herzegovina,’ partly an itinerary, partly a statistical account, but meagre and disappointing. Franz Maurer, ‘Reise durch Bosnien,’ is equally loud in his denunciations of the Major’s map.
183 Had Milton viewed a scene like this? or was his sublime simile for the fallen Angels a pure creation of his imagination?
‘Yet faithful how they stood
Their glory withered; as when heaven’s fire
Hath scathed the forest oaks or mountain pines,
With singed top their stately growth, though bare,
Stands on the blasted heath.’—Par. Lost, i. 612.
184 Asplenium Trichomanes.
185 Clausilia laminata.
186 Omer Effendi of Novi, op. cit. p. 85.
187 Bryum ligulatum.
188 As, for instance, some rough Roman sarcophagi found at York, and now in the garden of the Philosophical Society of the town.
189 There are at present about 3,000 Jews in Bosnia, resident mainly in Serajevo, Travnik, Banjaluka, and Novipazar. See Thoemmel, Beschreibung des Vilajet Bosnien, p. 108.
190 Dalmatia and Montenegro, by Sir J. Gardner Wilkinson, F.R.S., vol. ii. p. 181, &c. For some in Narenta Valley, see p. 31.
191 The coincidence between the appearance of the moon on these monuments and on the Bosnian arms had already suggested itself to me before I was aware that it had also struck Sir Gardner Wilkinson.
192 The moon and stars were favourite symbols on Mithraic gems and monuments, which are nowhere more plentiful than in Illyria, if I may judge from personal experience. They were also in vogue with the Gnostics. According to Manes the moon was a purgatory of good spirits; their immediate haven after death. See King’s Gnostics and their Remains. But, for a more probable explanation of the moon and stars on Bosnian arms and monuments, see page 219.
193 Euthymius Zygabenus, Panoplia. Presbyter Cosmas, Harmenopulus, and Anna Comnena give the same account. See my Historical Review of Bosnia.
194 Raph. Volat. 1-8.
195 See the introductory Historical Review of Bosnia.
196 The respective numbers at the last official return were:—Greeks, 576,756; Mahometans, 442,050.
197 See p. 222.
198 In Bosnia even the parochial duties are performed by monks of this order, who discard the monastic dress and wear the ordinary civil costume, including cutlasses and pistols. Every three years the chapter of the order (the Provincial, that is, of the Minorites, with a custos and four definitors) elects a ‘mission for the cure of souls,’ and the monks who are doing service an secular priests are either confirmed in their office or exchanged for others. The head or ‘Quardian’ of every monastery is also priest for his district. Thus the parish churches are completely dependent on the Franciscan brotherhood, each monastery possessing so many churches. This at Gučiagora has nine; that at Sutiska, the largest in Bosnia, as many as twenty-two churches. As parish priests, however, the brothers find their allegiance somewhat divided between the Vicar Apostolic of Bosnia and the Provincial of their order. See Thoemmel, Beschreibung des Vilajet Bosnien, p. 96, &c.
199 Gustav Thoemmel, op. cit. pp. 94-6, gives statistics showing the improved state of the Roman Catholic Church in Bosnia since the establishment of the Austrian Consulate-General in Serajevo. Writing in 1867, he says that in 1850 there were only forty-one parsonages in Bosnia, now sixty-nine. Up to 1860 only the three old monasteries of Sutiska, Foinica, and Kreševo existed; since then three more have been founded, namely this at Gučiagora, one at Gorica, near Livno, and one at Siroki-brieg, in the Herzegovina, six hours west of Mostar. In 1850 the Roman Catholic population was 160,000, in 1874 it had risen to 185,503.
200 Gustav Thoemmel, Beschreibung des Vilajet Bosnien. Wien, 1867, p. 101.
201 According to the last census there were 576,756 Bosniacs of the Orthodox Greek Church, and only 185,503 Roman Catholics.
202 I am indebted to Canon Liddon for this fact.
203 Since the new constitutional laws of July, 1865, Travnik has become the seat of Government for one of the seven circles, or Mutasarifliks, into which the Vilajet of Bosnia (including Herzegovina) is divided. The Mutasarìf is an officer superior to the Kaïmakàm as the Kaïmakàm to the Mudìr. The Mutasarifliks answer to the German Kreise, the Kaïmakamliks (districts under Kaïmakàm) to Bezirke.
204 Omer Effendi of Novi, whose writings were edited and printed by Ibrahim in Turkish, and were translated into English by C. Fraser in 1830.
205 See Roskiević.
206 I take this anecdote from the author of The Danubian Principalities (vol. ii. p. 326), to whom Omer Pashà related it.
207 See A. von Hilferding, Bosnien,—Reise-Skizzen aus dem Jahre 1857, p. 12 (translated from the Russian).
208 In the French translation (Paris, 1674), which is the only copy I have by me. P. 76.
209 The old name of Travnik appears to have been Herbosa. (See Farlato, Illyricum Sacrum, t. iv.) I notice a serious error in Dr. Spruner’s Historisch-Geographisches Hand-Atlas, where Travnik is made identical with Bobovac, the old seat of Bosnian bans and kings, which is 40 miles to the west, near Vareš.
210 It is curious that the Italian word should pass current in Bosnia.
211 See page 118.
212 Of what place I am uncertain. He was only visiting Foinica, which itself does not possess so exalted a functionary.
213 In the original Bosnian, as written into Latin characters for me by one of the monks, it ran—Rodoslovje Bosanakoga aliti Iliričkoga, i Srbskoga vladanja, zai edno postavlieno po Stanislaú Rubčiću popu, na slavu Stipana Nemanjiću, Cara Srblienak Bosniakak, (1340.)
214 Hunc codicem ab immemorabili tempore, nempe a captivitate Regni Bosniæ, studiose conservatum esse a Reverendis Fratribus Franciscanis Familiæ Foinicensis.
215 Query, a monastic error for St. Mark.
216 I refer to the Church of Giurgevi Stúpovi, whose dome still rises on a hill above Novipazar. A description of it will be found in Travels through the Slavonic Provinces of Turkey in Europe, by G. Muir Mackenzie and A. P. Irby. London, 1866, p. 309.
217 I find this erroneous theory put forth by the author of the Spicilegium Observationum Historico-Geographicarum de Bosniæ Regno, Lug. Bat. 1736, p. 84. He supposes that this change must have taken place about 1463, when Mahomet subdued the Duchy of St. Sava, and quotes Varennes to the effect that the original arms of Bosnia were an arm of offence—Varennes himself having mistaken the arms of Primorie for those of Bosnia. The Bosnian arms, however, appear to have changed. Thus, in a MS. armorial in the Bodleian Library, the date of which seems to be about 1506, they are given as—Quarterly, first and fourth, gules, a crown or; second and third, azure, a heart argent. This may have been the arms of the titulary Kingdom of Bosnia, erected by Mathias when Upper Bosnia was in the hands of the Turks. Compare also the arms on the monumental slab of Queen Catharine of Bosnia.
218 The Ban Legeth, who reigned at the end of the tenth century. Risano, Castelnuovo, &c., on the Bocche di Cattaro, belonged directly to Bosnia till King Tvartko ceded his immediate sovereignty over them to the Duke of St. Sava.
219 ‘There can be no doubt,’ says Sir Gardner Wilkinson, ‘that the crescent on the Turkish arms is an old Byzantine emblem copied by the Moslems on their invasion of the provinces of the empire.’ It had been chosen of old, so the story goes, by Byzantium because she had been saved from a night attack of Philip by the moon coming out and revealing the approach of the enemy. See Dalmatia, &c. vol. ii. p. 184. The Osmanlìs must have borrowed the device from their Saracenic predecessors.
220 Of course it is not meant to connect either family with the royal races of France or England.
221 This is given by Thoemmel, Vilajet Bosnien, p. 92, from whom I take its substance.
222 ‘Indicia vetustatis et nobilitatis familiæ Marciæ vulgo Marnavitzæ, Nissensis.’ Per Joannem Tomkum ejusdem generis collecta. Romæ typ. Vat. 1632. Whether this book is still attainable I know not; its contents are copied as curious by Balthasar Kerselich in the seventeenth century. See De Regnis Dalmatiæ, &c. p. 295, et seq.
223 ‘In Naglasincis:’ no doubt—Nevešinje, near Mostar. See ‘Historical Review of Bosnia.’
224 ‘Dedi et donavi et descripsi Goico Marnaitio, Voinicum et Godaliensem Campum in Imoteschio territorio prope Possussinam, et illi et illius posteritati, et postremæ posteritati in sæcula sæculorum. Amen.’ Posusje, near Imoschi, seems to be the ‘Possussina in territorio Imoteschio.’
225 It was translated into Latin in 1629, and witnessed by the Pope. To avoid fraud two translations of the original document were prepared, one by the interested Tomko, and the other by a certain Father Methodius Terlecki.
226 In Kerselich, ‘Pagus Huonice,’ a misprint for Foinicæ.
227 At the village of Dušina.
228 Gučiagora, which is the centre of another Roman Catholic district, may be added to these. The waters of the Lašva, which runs through this neighbourhood, contain gold, for which its sands were formerly washed. But I noticed another trace of Ragusan mining influence in the name of the spur of Mt. Vlašić, which overlooks the monastery. This is called Mt. Mossor, a name given in the Dalmatian coast-lands to mountains where gold existed, and which will recall the Mossor that rises above Almissa in Dalmatia. The derivation is simply ‘Mons Auri,’ the gold mountain.
229 Præpositus Thesaurorum Dalmaticorum.
230 The Serbs or members of the Greek Church are most imbued with patriotic ideas, it is true; but these aim rather at a re-establishment of a Serbian Empire, or a Democratic government of some kind, with, or without, a princely figure-head. The Provincially historic party are the Roman Catholics, or rather their instructors, the monks.
231 See, for the original French, Stubbs’ Select Charters, p. 461. I have followed Professor Stubbs’ translation, substituting only ‘wheresoever’ for ‘whereas.’
232 To such a conclusion I am led by an examination of several similar monuments given in Montfaucon—L’Antiquité Expliquée. A monument of this kind is alluded to by Isaac Disraeli (Curiosities of Literature) in ‘The Skeleton of Death,’ where the contrast between the Classical and Mediæval representations of death is drawn out.
233 Dr. Blau (formerly Prussian Consul at Serajevo), who has worked at the Roman remains in Bosnia, does not mention any in this vicinity, and even thinks it worthy of mention that he could hear of no Roman remains near Illidzje. See papers in Monatsbericht der k. preuss. Acad. der Wissensch. Dec. 1866, Nov. 1867, and Aug. 1870. Dr. Blau has especially explored the remains at Tašlidzje or Plevlje (about half way between Serajevo and Novipazar), where he has discovered twenty inscriptions and other antique fragments. The existence of a Roman Municipium here is shown by two monuments—one recording a decree of the Decuriones; another mentioning the Duumviri. On these and other Bosnian inscriptions one can trace the development of a kind of Illyrian Romance dialect. Masimile appears for Maximillæ, Amavilis for Amabilis, and another reads Filie defunte.
234 The Roman baths at Novipazar are briefly described by Roskiević, op. cit. p. 75.
235 Dr. Blau identifies Banjaluka with the Roman station AD LADIOS.
236 Banjaluka = Luke’s bath.
237 Omer Effendi, of Novi, compares the climate of Bosnia to that of Misr and Sham (Egypt and Syria). Op. cit. p. 85.
238 Damascus is described by Easterns as ‘a pearl set round with emeralds.’
239 Engel, Geschichte des Freistaates Ragusa. See Roskiević, p. 175. The Ragusans worked mines in Mt. Jagodina, where the present Turkish citadel of Serajevo is. Traces of these are still to be seen.
240 Blunt, Voyage into the Levant, p. 8. Anno 1634.
241 Eugenii Heldenthaten, cited in Spicilegium, &c.
242 See Ranke’s Bosnia, ch. 1, and especially ‘The Danubian Principalities,’ vol. ii. p. 345.
243 Miss Irby and Miss Johnston are at the present moment engaged, amid the barbarous wilds of Slavonia, in alleviating the urgent needs of the Bosnian refugees, with a philanthropy and devotedness worthy of the land which can number among its daughters a Mrs. Fry and a Florence Nightingale. Those who, by subscribing to the ‘Bosnian and Herzegovinian Fugitives’ Orphan Relief Fund,’ have aided their efforts, will be glad to learn that these practical manifestations of English sympathy have rescued hundreds from incalculable misery, and produced a profound impression on all South-Sclavonic peoples.
244 See ‘Bosnia in 1875,’ an interesting paper by Miss Irby in the Victoria Magazine for Nov. 1875.
245 The Cattle-tax is of three kinds: the Porez, or from fifteen to twenty piastres on every head of large cattle; the Resmi Agnam, of two piastres on every head of small cattle; and the Donuzia, or hog-tax. To these pastoral imposts may be added the Travarina or Herbatico, four piastres for every head of neat cattle pastured in mountain forests claimed by the State; four piastres levied on every plot of ground planted with Broc, a flower which produces a red dye much used in Bosnia; a tax of four piastres on every beehive; the Rad, or labour-tax, of about twenty-five piastres; Corvée on public roads; and the Komore, or forced loan of horses.
246 ‘The tax in lieu of military service, which is paid by all non-Mussulmans, weighs very heavily on the poor, who have to pay, equally with the rich, twenty-eight piastres for every male. In the poorest and most miserable family this sum must be paid for the male infant who has first seen the light a few hours before the visit of the tax-gatherer. I have heard the bitterest complaints of the cruelty of this tax on the young children of the rayah.’—Miss Irby, loc. cit. p. 79. In principle this tax (known as Bédélat Askarié) is only levied on males between the ages of sixteen and sixty. In practice it is levied on old men of eighty as well as infants in arms, and often amounts to thirty piastres. A round sum is demanded from every village, and the Knez, or Mayor, has to divide it as best he may; but the sum demanded by the Government is always out of all proportion to the number of those who are legally called on to pay it.
247 The tithe or ‘dime’ was converted into an eighth a few years ago, (to pay the expense of the Sultan’s European tour), by the imposition of an extra two-and-a-half per cent., which, by an artifice common to the thimble-rigging financiers of Stamboul, was called ‘a temporary aid.’ Since the revolt this aid has been given up by the Iradè of October 10, 1875.
248 See on this device of extortion, M. Yriarte’s Bosnie et Herzégovine, souvenirs de voyage pendant l’insurrection. Plon, Paris, 1876, p. 199.
249 To show that these and other tortures are by no means new in Bosnia, I may be allowed to cite a curious passage from a book on Turkish Manners and Customs, and having especial reference to the Turkish border-province of Dalmatia, written in the sixteenth century by a citizen of Zara, Messer Luigi Bassano, and entitled I Costumi et i Modi particolari de la vita de Turchi. Roma, 1545. Ch. xxxiii. is headed ‘Modo che usano d’impalare, e d’altre sorti de Morti, e torture che danno.’ After giving the most ghastly details as to the method of impalement, and instancing the case of a certain Capitan Lazero Albanese, who had been recently captured on the Dalmatian-Herzegovinian frontier, and had suffered in this way, the writer continues:
‘Usano oltro l’impalare anchora l’inganciare sopra le forche, dove sono tre ganci fatti à modo d’una falcetta da mietere il grano, ma grosse tanto che possin sostenere un’huomo, e qui s’appiccha chi v’è condennato, e vi pende per molti giorne miserabilmente. Appicchano anchora con una fune sottile e lunga, tal che l’appiccato tocca quasi terra co piedi, con tutto che la forcha sia alta. Soglion’ anchora ligare l’huomo tra due tavole, e con quelle dal capo dividerlo per il mezzo con una siega. Usano tormentare lardando, hor con pece hor con lardo, metter celate rouide in testa, metter’i temperatoi sotto l’ungna, cacciare un’ asciugatoio, di quei che loro usano da cingersi, bagnato d’aceto giu per la gola e retirarlo poi su à poco à poco, e questo è un tormento crudelissimo. Sogliono tal’hora ligare un’huomo per un piede nudo à una colonna, attorno la quale fanno assai buon fuoco, l’ultimo rimedio, poi che il ligato è caldo, è di muoversi hor di la, hor di qua, ma poi che non puo piu, stanco e sforzato mancare, e morire, arrostito e rosso, com’un Gambero.’
Recent accounts of impalement in Bosnia have been received with incredulity by a portion of the English public, and that although the Turkish denials were absolutely worthless. For my own part I am credulous enough to believe that the impaled figure seen by Canon Liddon and Mr. McColl was not a scarecrow; and further, that Bishop Strossmayer was well-informed in stating that this was by no means an isolated case. The recent instances attested by Miss Irby’s friends now set the matter beyond dispute. Impalement was common in Bosnia during the disturbed times immediately preceding the Crimean war, and the supposition that a time-honoured institution like this should in a few years’ time have died out in the most conservative country in Europe, is, à priori, extremely improbable. Barbarities like these are characteristic of a certain stage of society, and need excite no surprise. Many of the tortures still practised in Bosnia are an inheritance from præ-Turkish times, and should be considered in connection with the general survival there of feudalism under a Mahometan guise.
250 The Rev. W. Denton, The Christians in Turkey, p. 44. Hilferding (Ruskaja Besiéda, quoted by M. Yriarte, op. cit.) gives a frightful account of how a Bosnian landlord, a Beg, extorted money from six rayahs by suspending them over a fire of maize-stalks. ‘Les six raïas ne furent rendus la liberté qu’à moitié asphyxiés, après que la douleur leur eut arraché la promesse de donner tout ce qu’ils possédaient.’ In the forthcoming work of Mr. Stillman, the Times’ correspondent, on the ‘Insurrection in the Herzegovina,’ the reader will find (p. 9) an account of horrible instances of judicial torture perpetrated on a rayah family near Trebinje, in the period immediately preceding the revolt. Two were put in long wooden boxes like coffins and rolled down hill: others were stood upright with their heads in a hole in the floor of the prison which allowed them to rest on their shoulders, and splinters of wood were then driven under their finger-nails.
251 Dervish Pashà has since been removed from the Vilajet of Bosnia.
252 For the organisation of the Greek Church in Bosnia, see Thoemmel, op. cit. p. 102.
253 According to the official reports of 1874, there were 576,756 Christians of the Greek Church in the Vilajet of Bosnia (which includes the Herzegovina). The total population was 1,216,846, of whom 442,050 were Bosnian Mussulmans; 185,503 Roman Catholics; 3,000 Jews; 9,537 Gipsies.
254 Even in Greece, where the state of the Greek Church is said to be somewhat better, the simony is as rampant, and most humiliating disclosures are now (1876) taking place.
255 For these facts, and some further statistics, I am indebted to Thoemmel. The ordinary price of a cure of souls is from twenty to thirty ducats.
256 Lest this account of the Fanariote Hierarchy, as it exists in Bosnia should appear incredible to my readers, I may be allowed to appeal to Herr Kanitz’s description of the spiritual rule of these same gentry in Bulgaria, now happily terminated by the resolute action of their Bulgar flock. Herr Kanitz, who is a most candid and impartial observer, and has the advantage of twelve years’ residence in the country, finds no word for them but Spiritual Pashàs. Four thousand ducats (2,000l.) was a tolerably cheap price for a bishopric in Bulgaria, and the bishops, even of the poorest dioceses, sucked as much as 1,500l. a year from their flocks. When the Porte proposed the erection of school-houses for the Christians, the Fanariote Hierarchy stood out against this liberal measure, and embezzled their educational fund to build new churches in their usual swaggering style. ‘What need have you of better schools?’ asked the Archbishop of Nish of his congregation. ‘Do you want your children to become unbelieving heretics?’ True to their Grecizing policy, these Angels of Darkness burnt all the monuments of old Bulgarian literature that they could lay hands on, and imposed Greek services on congregations who could not understand a word. Of their moral influence I will let Herr Kanitz speak—in German:
‘Die schlimmste Demoralisation wurde in directester Weise in die Familien hineingetragen. Weder Frauen noch Jungfrauen waren vor den Gelüsten des höheren Klerus aus dem Fanar sicher. Die dem Grossvezier im Jahre 1860 vorgebrachten Anklagen in allen Städten, die er durchzog, überstiegen, was die Abscheulichkeit und Zahl betrifft, alle Begriffe. Unter vielen Thatsachen sei hier nur erwähnt, dass der Griechische Bischof von Sarköi von dem griechischen Arzte dieser Stadt beschuldigt wurde, 13- bis 14-jährige Mädchen der dortigen Schule geschändet zu haben. Zu diesen Verheerungen in der Unmündigen Jugend ihrer Sprengel gesellte sich ein anderer, nicht minder schwerer, sehr häufig gegen die fanariotische Geistlichkeit erhobener Vorwurf: ihre Begünstigung des Kindesmordes im Mutterschoosse.’—Donau-Bulgarien und der Balkan, I. Band, p. 129.
Herr Jireček, in his recent Geschichte der Bulgaren, corroborates these facts, and adds others even more gross (see p. 513). Brought to bay at last by the sturdy opposition of the Bulgarian people, the Fanariote bishops got rid of some of their principal opponents by poison. See Jireček, op. cit, p. 555.
257 Both Maurer and Roskiević were able to visit this mosque. For further details I will refer the reader to their descriptions, to which I am indebted.
258 I am indebted to Miss Irby for this fact. Were the Bosnian Jews to return to Spain, we should have a strange illustration of the fable of the ‘Seven Sleepers’!
259 Maurer, who gives an account of the commercial frauds practised by the Serajevan Jews.
260 ‘Bosnia in 1875.’ See Victoria Magazine for November, 1875.
261 Pretyla, which means originally fat, is also used for beautiful!—Hilferding.
262 King, op. cit., connects the abundance of Gnostic remains in the Gothic part of France, with the triumph of the Albigensian and other heresies of the same area. The same may perhaps be true of the Bogomiles of Bosnia.
263 This stone is now in the garden of the French Consulate. It reads I.O.M.‖TONITRA (T)‖RORI A/R‖MAXIMVS‖VI (?) P. AVGG‖SALVTI. The (?) means that an uncertain letter is missed out. The Saluti is doubtful. I saw several Roman coins in the silversmiths’ shops, and in some cases Ragusan coins found with them—another evidence of the way in which the Ragusans may be said to have stepped into the shoes of the Romans in these parts.
264 Bosnie et Herzégovine, p. 241.
265 Also a thunder-bolt. See King’s Gnostics and their Remains.
266 Ami Boué.
267 Fritillaria.
268 Hralimir in the first half of the eleventh century had married the sister of the Bosnian Ban Niklas, his vassal.
269 Farlato appears to have obtained this from a Vladmirović, a member of the same noble family as the bishop who, in the capacity of secretary, drew up the document for the king.
270 In pago nostro de Cogniz.
271 In generali congregatione.
272 Proceribus.
273 The Bogomiles are meant.
274 Sedis Regiæ.
275 Herzegh Sancti Sabbæ.
276 Castra.
277 Aulæ.
278 It is interesting to observe the Byzantine influence on the Bosnian court and civilization which this charter incidentally reveals. It seems connected with the flourishing state of the Eastern Church in Bosnia at this time, and is further evidenced by the titles of the court officials.
279 Or Dapifers.
280 The best stone houses in Turkey are said to be in the Herzegovina.
281 The little river Rama—which is the first stream in Bosnia, after crossing the frontier from the Herzegovina by the Narenta valley highway—is interesting from having given the name Rama to the whole country before it was known as Bosnia.
282 As a parallel instance to this, I may mention that in parts of Upper Albania, according to Ami Boué, the Mahometan women are to be seen unveiled.
283 See p. 96.
284 This part of the road is known as Klanac, a name used in Bosnia to signify an ‘overhanging place,’ or a road hewn along the side of a precipice. At this point we re-cross the Herzegovinian frontier.
285 Their height above sea-level is circ. 6,000 feet.
286 See King’s Gnostics and their Remains, who cites Boccaccio.
287 For the benefit of any future traveller who may wish to sleep at the Casino, I may mention that a sure preservative against certain fauna of the country is to be found amongst its flora. Our Consul kindly supplied us with some Herzegovinian flea-plant, by scattering which, previously reduced to chaff, about the bed, a magic circle is formed round the body of the sleeper, which is fatal to every noxious insect that attempts to cross it.
288 See the report of a Foreign Consul in the Times of December 15, 1875, for a more detailed account of the insurrection and its causes. I must refer my readers to this. A personage who was also in a position to obtain authentic information on this subject, has communicated an interesting account of the origin of the insurrection in the Narenta Valley to the Pesther Lloyd; and many details, proving the falsity of these Turkish statements, have been published by the distinguished gentleman who has been acting as the Times’ correspondent in the Herzegovina.
289 See p. 256, &c.
290 The rayahs in their ‘Appeal’ say of these ‘Giumrukers’:—‘They go in procession from house to house, and from plantation to plantation, and prolong the time as they please, in order to feed gratuitously. But for fear they may have put down too little, the round is repeated twice again, on the pretext of correcting any mistake that may have been made. Then they are in the habit of sending other searchers after the first, on the pretence of finding out any trickery on the part of these, as if they were not all accomplices; and they give themselves airs of patronage, and would make it appear that they are acting with a scrupulous regard for justice and the public welfare. So that the people are ever in the midst of inconceivable injury and abuse of authority.’
The Herzegovinian rayahs have such a good cause that it is a pity that a tone of undignified vituperation should run through the greater part of their appeal to the civilized Powers. Indeed, I should have supposed that the document in question had been drawn up by an old woman, did I not find internal evidence of a monkish pen! The passage quoted above is comparatively moderate.
291 The Metayer system is mostly in vogue. In general the tiller of the soil has to furnish the implements of agriculture. See on this M. de Sainte Marie (who was for some time French Consul at Mostar), L’Herzégovine, étude géographique, historique et statistique, p. 102, &c.
292 M. Yriarte, who visited Bosnia and the Herzegovinian frontier shortly after our return, with the object of reporting on the causes and progress of the insurrection, estimates the total number of the insurgents in Bosnia and the Herzegovina at about 15,000 men, of which 2,000 were auxiliaries of kindred race from beyond the frontier. Of these he sets down 1,000 as Montenegrines, who had come in defiance of their own Government, and divides the rest among the Sclaves of Dalmatia, Croatia, Slavonia, and the Free Principality of Serbia; to which he adds a few Italians, and an infinitesimal contingent of Poles, Russians and Frenchmen.—Bosnie et Herzégovine, souvenirs de voyage pendant l’insurrection, p. 277. I am indebted to M. Yriarte for an account of the organization of the Čotas in Herzegovina.
293 Captured shortly after this was written by Austro-Hungarian authorities on Turkish soil, and now (1876) languishing, not in a Turkish, but an Austrian dungeon! Ljubibratić, however, was born in Lower Herzegovina.
294 Though, since this was written, many of the Roman Catholics have deserted the national cause. According to the consular report quoted, the sole wish of the Franciscan monks all along was to make a display of the extent, and consequent value, of their influence among the Latin population.
295 The lines in which Claudian (In Ruf. lib. ii. v. 45, &c.) describes the sufferings of the inhabitants of these lands (plaga Pannoniæ miserandaque mœnia Thracum, arvaque Mysorum) subject to the annual incursions of the barbarians, are hardly less applicable now than they were then! Claudian’s lines may, perhaps, be translated:—
The devastating course each year renews,
Each year his ravaged fields the peasant views,
Nor weeps he, now, the havoc of the foe—
Long use has stolen e’en the sense of woe!
296 This movement of Dervish Pashà may, however, have been not such a matter of his own discretion as he wished to make out. Its announcement synchronizes suspiciously with his removal from the Governor-generalship of Bosnia by the Porte, and this account may have been devised to conceal his discomfiture from the consular body.
297 Since writing this I observe that the derivation of Mt. Porim had also struck M. de St. Marie.
298 Though authorities differ as to whether it is the ancient Andetrium (otherwise Mandertium), Saloniana or Sarsenterum. By the Sclaves it was originally called Vitrinica.
299 The coins I saw were silver and brass. There were one or two Greek of Dyrrhachium, and besides Consular and Imperial Roman denarii, there were many third-brass coins dating from the time of Gallienus to that of Constantius II., but the series broke off so abruptly with Constantius, that one would think that the Roman settlement must have been destroyed about the middle of the fourth century. At Siscia, on the other hand, Roman coins were common till the time of Honorius.
300 I take this measurement from Sir Gardner Wilkinson, who visited Mostar about thirty years ago, and then took accurate plans of the bridge. See Dalmatia, vol. ii. p. 58, &c. On the piers of the abutment at the east end of the bridge Sir Gardner deciphered two Turkish inscriptions, one of them bearing the date 1087 A.H. (1650 A.D.), the second year of Sultan Mahomet, probably referring to repairs made in his reign.
301 ‘Virtus Romana quid non doman? sub jugum, ecce, rapitur et Danuvius,’ was the inscription on Trajan’s bridge over the Danube.
302 Most = bridge; Star = old.
303 Though it is probably hardly true to say that he founded Mostar.
304 Cokorilo. His account was originally published in Russian, and has since been translated into German in the Bautzen series entitled Türkische Zustände.
305 A village of Herzegovina, not the Cerna Gora or Montenegro.
306 This word is applied by the Mahometan Sclaves of the Herzegovina to the rayahs. For its other uses see p. 35.
307 But the monk should have mentioned that some, at least, of these were the trophies of war with the Montenegrines, who adorned their Vladika’s palace at Cettinje with the same barbarous spoil. The Bosnian arms, with their impaled Moors’ heads, are perhaps a witness to the antiquity of this practice in these countries. Sir Gardner Wilkinson tried to persuade Ali Pashà to give up the practice, and even attempted a mutual agreement between the Pashà and the Vladika on the subject, but Sir Gardner hardly appreciated the character of the man with whom he was dealing. When the author of Dalmatia and Montenegro visited Mostar he only saw five heads on the palace, but as these were over the tower, there may have been far more. The monk mentions that over 1,000 Christians were executed in the Herzegovina under Ali Pashà’s government, and, during the same space of time, only three Mahometans! Ali Pashà used also to impale rayahs.
308 For Vlach see p. 36. Here it is applied by a native Mahometan in the sense of a Giaour-Turk, or Christian generally. Omer Pashà was a renegade, the son of a Christian, and to this the taunt alludes.
309 Of these 3,000 to 3,500 are of the Greek communion, which possesses two churches; 400 to 500 are Roman Catholics, who have a chapel; the rest are Mahometans.
310 Sir Gardner Wilkinson, who made an excursion to Mostar during his Dalmatian travels, met with similar adventures. ‘Some,’ says he, ‘of the Mostar women go without their mask and pull the cloth feregi over their heads, holding it tight to their faces, and peeping out of a corner with one eye, who, when pretty, frequently contrive to remove it “accidentally on purpose.”... I am bound to say that they were often very pretty, and with very delicate complexions.’
311 See Sir J. Bowring, Serbian Popular Poetry, p. 36.
312 In a climate such as that of the lower Narenta the traveller must be careful to take abundant doses of quinine, or he will be struck down at once with malarious fever.
313 Slow! slow!
314 An account of these events, to which I am indebted, was communicated to the Pesther Lloyd.
315 I venture to assume an etymologic connexion between the Dalmatian Narbona and the Narbo Martius of Southern Gaul. If we had not the testimony of ancient writers to the fact that there was a Celtic ingredient in ancient Illyria, we should surely be justified in assuming it from the names of some of the cities. Orange seems to repeat itself in the Illyrian Arauso; Anderida in Andretium; and Corinium gives us a Cirencester in the neighbourhood of Zara. Epulus, the name of an Illyrian king, is curiously suggestive of the Eppillus of British coins. This Narbona has certain analogies of position with its Gallic homonym. Of course the ancient name of the Narenta—Naro—is also connected with that of the city. This city is called Narbona by both Ptolemy and Polybius, but accounts of its origin differ. According to one it was a Phœnician colony; according to others its founders were Phrygian or Thracian. The chief authority on Narbona or Narona is Dr. Lanza, in his Saggio storico-statistico-medico sopra l’antica Città di Narona, Bologna, 1842, which I only know through the summary in Neigebaur’s Süd-Slaven. For the inscriptions of course the Illyrian volume of the Corpus Inscriptionum is now the authority; but in elucidating and first calling attention to these much credit is due to Dr. Lanza, Major Sabljur, and Sir Gardner Wilkinson, who gives fac-similes of thirty-three in his work on Dalmatia. Some Naronan inscriptions were published at Ragusa, in 1811, in the Marmora Macarensia.
316 Viddo seems to answer to the Vid or Vit in the Rügen deities Sviantovid, Rugevit, and Porevit, in which names it is variously interpreted as ‘warrior’ or ‘sight,’ Sviantovid being ‘holy sight’ or ‘holy warrior.’ In Illyria Vid means ‘sight.’ It is possible that this Vid is connected with another Sclavonic god Woda, who has been compared with Woden.
317 San Vito is curiously like Sviantovid.
318 A tempest is also called Fortunale.
319 They were mostly oblate spheroids, formed of three layers, and when broken showing an agate-like section.
320 Kohl, Dalmatien.
321 In my account of Ragusan history I have chiefly followed Appendini, Storia di Ragusa, which is the chief authority; Engel, Geschichte des Freistaates Ragusa; Chiudina (as given in Neigebaur’s Süd-Slaven); and Kohl’s Dalmatien; and the most recent work on the subject, Ragusa, Cenni Storici, compilati da Stefano Skurla, Canon Onor., Profess. Ginnasiale (Zagabria, 1876). For English readers Sir Gardner Wilkinson in his Dalmatia, and Mr. A. A. Paton in his Danube and Adriatic, have given such excellent accounts of Ragusan history that I only give here a general sketch of it, in which I have tried as much as possible to avoid treading in the footsteps of English fellow-investigators.
322 Professor Mommsen visited Epidaurus and took down most of the inscriptions for the Illyrian volume of the Corpus Inscriptionum. I have no wish to give more than a general description of the antiquities of Epidaurus here, as I hope to give a full account of my epigraphic gleanings elsewhere.
323 In the Monumenta Macarensia, Rhacusæ, 1810, p. 47, is a votive inscription reading I.O.M.S. ‖ MAXIMVS ‖ LAPIDARI ‖ VS EX VOTO ‖ ARAM POS., found at Narona (Viddo). Is it possible that this was raised by a Lapidary in our sense of the word? May not the coarser craft have been combined with the more refined? Mediæval architects were often goldsmiths as well.
324 Adiantum Capillus-Veneris.
325 Or serpent.
326 It is, perhaps, worth noticing that the two St. Hilaries, of Arles and Poitiers, are signalised in ancient iconography as slayers of serpents or dragons.
327 De Administrando Imperio. The derivation Roccosa or Reclusa might be suggested. Ragusa appears in early writers under various forms, Lavusa, Labusa, Labuda, Labusædum, Rausium, Rangia, Rachusa, &c.
328 Sir Gardner Wilkinson and others called it ‘oak-wood,’ forgetting that Dubrava and Dub mean ‘oak-wood,’ and ‘oak’ only as their secondary meaning, and primarily signify a wood and tree generally. Remains of the original pine-wood still covered the mountain side till the French destroyed it about the year 1806, when they swept away the freedom of the Republic. See Kohl’s Dalmatien, vol. ii. p. 45.
329 Alas! that I should have to record that the statue dates at least eight centuries later than Orlando’s time. This statue, which originally stood before the Church of S. Biagio, was thrown down in 1825 by a hurricane, when the following inscription was found on a brass plate beneath its pedestal: MCCCC.... III. DI MAGGIO ‖ FATTO NEL TEMPO DI PAPA MARTINO QUINTO ‖ E NEL TEMPO DEL SIGNOR NOSTRO ‖ SIGISMONDO IMPERATOR ROMANORUM ‖ ET SEMPER AUGUSTUS ET RE D’ONGARIA ‖ E DALMATIA ET CROATIA ETC. FÒ MESSA ‖ QUESTA PIETRA ET STENDARDO QUI ‖ IN HONOR DI DIO E DI SANTO BLASIO ‖ NOSTRO GONFALON. LI OFFICIALI.... It is interesting to notice that the Ragusan account of Orlando as ‘Governor of Bretagne’ agrees with the contemporary Einhard’s account of the historical Roland. The historian of Charles the Great calls him ‘Hruodlandus Brittannici limitis præfectus.’ Orlando’s exploits are associated with other towns of the eastern coast of the Adriatic. Sir Gardner Wilkinson mentions that the magnificent harbour of Pola is called ‘Orlando’s house.’ The probable design of the statue of Roland at Ragusa was, as in the free German cities, to signify her independence of external authority.
330 A full account of these events is given by Sir Gardner Wilkinson from Appendini.
331 Giacomo da Evora, who published his poems in 1596, writes of Cœur-de-Lion’s Cathedral at Ragusa:
‘Aurea templa micant regis monumenta Britanni
Quo nullum majus Dalmata vidit opus.’
332 Perhaps the earliest testimony to the municipal government of Ragusa in the Middle Ages is a diploma of the Byzantine Emperors Basil and Constantine VI., dated 997, addressed ‘Vitali Archiepiscopo et Lampridio præsidi civitatis, una cum omnibus ejusdem civitatis nobilibus.’
333 As the Segretaria, Cancelleria, Notaria, Dogana, Tesoreria, and Annona.
334 Or Maggior Consiglio.
335 Decrees and letters to foreign princes from this body are signed ‘Il Rettore e Consiglieri della Repubblica di Ragusa.’
336 E.g., to head a procession to the Cathedral. Such days were scrupulously marked in the Ragusan almanacks—‘Oggi sua serenità si porta al duomo.’
337 For criminal causes there was a tribunal of four judges; for civil causes four consuls—consoli delle cause civili.
338 There was, indeed, a serious squabble in 1763 between the old and new nobility, the Salamanchesi and Sorbonnesi, but it evaporated in high words.
339 ‘Domine Pater Omnipotens, qui eligisti hanc Rempublicam ad serviendum tibi. Elige, quæsumus, gubernatores nostros secundum voluntatem Tuam et necessitatem nostram, ut Te timeant et tua sancta Præcepta custodiant, et nos verâ caritate diligant et dirigant. Amen!’ I take this from Kohl, who copied it from the beginning of the Specchio del Maggior Consiglio.
340 De situ oræ Illyrici, lib. i.
341 The Congregazione dei Preti was instituted here in 1391 for the relief of poor priests.
342 The senate erected a foundling hospital here in 1432. ‘Considerando di quanta abbominazione et inhumanità era il gettar delle creature humane piccole, le quali molte fiate non erano raccolte, nè secondo humanità e bisogno sovvenute.’ This institution was called ‘Ospitale della Misericordia.’ In 1347 the Republic built a Poor-house, ‘Ospitale ad consolationem et suffragium pauperum cunctorum.’ In 1540 an Infirmary for the poor was added.
343 This law had to be repeated in 1466 with graver penalties; and unless the slave-dealer could recover those he had sold from captivity within a fixed term, he was to be hanged.
344 Appendini makes it actually Orchan, but Engel’s account is the only one reconcilable with the date 1370.
345 There is an interesting correspondence between Ragusa and Cardinal Pole on the subject of Ragusan merchants settled in England, and a letter is extant from the cardinal to the Ragusan senate, dated July 11, 1558.
346 Merchant of Venice, Act I., sc. i., where Salarino is speaking of Antonio’s ‘argosies.’
347 Often wrongly derived from Argo. Possibly the word arrived to us by way of Spain.
348 Between 1530 and 1535.
349 See Skurla, op. cit. p. 54.
350 Representations of these effigies as they still existed in Appendini’s time, will be found in his Storia di Ragusa.
351 Appendini has occupied a volume of his Storia di Ragusa with the literary history of this single city.
352 Or in their Sclavonic forms Gundulić and Pulmotić.
353 As, for instance, ‘Danitza the daughter of Ostoja,’ ‘Paulimir and Zaptisclava.’
354 See Mr. A. A. Paton’s ode ‘To the Shade of Gondola,’ in his Researches on the Danube and Adriatic, where the English reader will find a brilliant notice of Gondola. Mr. Paton says:—‘The elastic vigour of Ariosto, and the smoothness, the elegance, and completeness of Tasso, seem to mingle their alternate inspirations in the genius of Gondola.’
355 Skurla, op. cit. p. 70.
356 An inscription on it shows that it was erected in 1438 by the Neapolitan architect Onofrio di Giordano: ‘Rhaguseorum Nobilium providentia et amplissimi Ordinis jussu, coacto argento publico.’
357 Below this is the date, 1506, and the name of the maker, Giambattista d’Arbe, who made it ‘to the honour and glory of St. Blasius.’
358 The date seems tolerably fixed from the resemblance of these coins to those of Stephen Uroš. See Della Monetazione Ragusea, Studi di Vincenzo Adamović, p. 17. The administration of the Mint was entrusted to three senators called Zecchieri.
359 Civitatis Raguseæ Nobiles Providentissimique Cives Blasii Martyris Pontif. q. SS. Præcl. hujus Epidauræ Raguseæ Patroni auspicante Numine, ad prid. Idium Sextilium Aug., Faustum Feliciss.que Diem, ex S.C. et Amplissimi Ordinis decretis, Atrium Prætorianum hoc Insigne ut Publ. Civit. aulam et Senatoriam Ædem Optumis Curanib. (sic) V. Vir. Optimm. in omnem opportunum præsentem et Posteritatis Usum Ære publico Dicandum Exornandumque Dedere. K. A. A.D. MCCCCXXXV SIGISMVNDI IMP. A. II.
360 Many of the Ragusan archives have been carried off by the Austrians to Vienna. What still remain are practically inaccessible, since, to obtain permission to view them, an order is required from the Governor of Dalmatia at Zara! Among the archives are the Rolls of the Consiglio de’ Pregati, for the years from 1301 to 1802; of the Maggior Consiglio, from 1415 to 1806; of the Minor Consiglio, from 1415 to 1805; Lettere e Commissioni di Levante, from 1339 to 1802; Lettere e Commissioni di Ponente, from 1566 to 1802; many Lettere e Relazioni of Ragusan nobles at foreign courts; and many Trattati Turchi, relations of ambassadors to the Sublime Porte, and negotiations with neighbouring Pashàs. There is also a kind of Ragusan Domesday book—the Libro Matizza.
361 Munera diva patris, qui solus Apollinis artes
Invenit medicas per secula quinque sepultas,
Et docuit gramen quod ad usum quodque valeret,
Hic Esculapius celatus, gloria nostra,
Ragusii genitus, voluit quem grata relatum
Esse deos inter veterum Sapientia patrum,
Humanas laudes superaret nata quod omnes:
Quo melius toti nemo quasi profuit orbi.
According to De Diversis (as cited by Signor Skurla) the conceit which originally identified the sculpture of the alchemist with Æsculapius is due to a Cremonese noble, Niccolò Lazziri, to whom the above lines are also attributed.
362 ‘Sire, io sono abbastanza ricco, per non accettar ricchezze; sono re sulle mie caracche, per non cercar onori; sono cittadino libero di Ragusa mia patria, per non cercar titoli; qual memoria della sovrana vestra grazia cedetemi quest’ asciugamano.’ Skurla, op. cit. p. 16.
363 Or Di Bona.
364 Of Marino Caboga and his embassy Mr. Paton gives an excellent account in his Danube and the Adriatic, vol. i. p. 224, &c.
365 D. O. M. Nicolao de Bona, Joannis filio, singularis prudentiæ senatori, qui, gravissimis Reip. temporibus, gravissimâ legatione sponte susceptâ, ad vicinum Bossinæ proregem per vim (sic) Silistriam ad Turcarum Imperatorem transmissus, ibi diuturno in carcere pro Patriæ Libertate catenatus obiit, morte ipsâ animique constantiâ immortalitatem nominis in omnem posteritatem promeritus. Hoc ex Sen. Con. monumentum honoris et memorie positum, Anno MDCLXXVIII. Underneath this is written: Qui lapis veterem Aulam Senatoriam incendio et variis casibus corruptam diu ornaverat in vestibulo ædium civicarum positus est ex Consilii Publici Sententiâ, MDCCCLXX.
366 We experienced some difficulty in obtaining access to the Cappella delle Reliquie, as three keys have to be obtained: one from the bishop, one from the commune, and one (I think) from the Government.
367 Progonović was commissioned to make it by the Archbishop, Timoteo Maffei, who wished to present it in person to Matthias Corvinus, but died in 1471 before he could accomplish his journey. The Archbishop left it to his grandson, who sold it to the Republic. See Skurla, op. cit. p. 100. We did not witness ourselves the effect of pouring water into the basin.
368 I have followed Signor Skurla’s Italian rendering of the old Serbian original.
369 I communicated this account of the refugees to the Graphic of Oct. 9, 1875, and with it the illustration of which the frontispiece is a reduced copy.
370 If my theory is correct (see p. 390). The peasants about Cattaro wear the same kind of girdle set with stones.
371 Another interesting evidence of the Turkish influence on Old Ragusa is to be found in the names and values of her coins under the Republic. Thus the Mischlin or Vižlin is derived from the Turkish Altmishlük; and the Altiluk or Artilucco is the Turkish Altilük.
372 Voyage into the Levant, p. 98.