aid. About 924, however, the Bulgarian Tsar Symeon, instead of placing a puppet of his own on the throne, carried away almost the whole Serbian people captive into Bulgaria. Serbia thus remained barren; and when, after Symeon's death, the Serbian prince, Tchaslav, escaped from the Bulgarian court to Serbia, he found there only fifty men, and neither women nor children. By submitting to the Byzantine Emperor, and with his help, he restored the scattered Serbs to their own country. For the rest of the 10th century Serbian history is a blank, save for the survival of the leaden seal with a Greek inscription belonging to a Prince of Diókleia, the country which took its name from the town of Doclea, whose ruins still stand near Podgoritza. This was the time of the Great Bulgarian Tsar Samuel, under whom Bulgaria stretched to the Adriatic; and Durazzo, the key of the Western Balkans, as Byzantine statesmen considered it, became a Bulgarian port. In his days there lived on the lake of Scutari a saintly Serbian prince, John Vladimir. Samuel carried off this holy man to his own capital on the lake of Prespa. But the Tsar's daughter, according to the story, was so greatly moved by his pious speeches and his beauty while engaged in washing his feet, that she begged her father to release him. The saint escaped prison but not matrimony; he married the love-sick Bulgarian princess, but not long after was murdered as he was leaving church by an usurper of the Bulgarian throne. His remains repose in the monastery of St John near Elbassan; his cross is still preserved in Montenegro and carried every Whitsunday in procession at dawn. The complete destruction of the first Bulgarian Empire by the Byzantine Emperor Basil II, 'the Bulgarslayer,' in 1018, removed the danger of a Bulgarian hegemony in the Balkans, and made the Danube again the frontier of the Byzantine dominions, which surrounded on three sides the Serbian lands. Manuel I added Zepẞikóç to the Imperial style; Serbian pretenders were kept ready at Constantinople or Durazzo, in case the Serbian rulers showed signs of independence, while high-sounding Court titles rewarded their servility. The internal condition of the Serbian people favoured Byzantine policy. For then, as in our own day, there were two Serb states, and two national dynasties, one ruling over the South Dalmatian coast, the present Herzegovina, and Dioklitia, modern Montenegro, with Scutari and Cattaro for its capitals; the other governing the more inland districts from a central point in the valley of the Rashka (near Novibazar), whence Serbia obtained the name of 'Rassia,' by which she was largely described in the West of Europe during the Middle Ages. Of these two dynasties the former assumed the royal title-Hildebrand addressed a letter to Michael, King of the Slavs'-but the latter became the more important, although its head contented himself with the more modest designation of 'Great Jupan,' that is, the first among the Jupani, or Counts. Whenever opportunity offered, however, the Serbs endeavoured to emancipate themselves from Byzantium, Kedrenós informs us that after the death of the Emperor Romanós III (in 1034) Serbia threw off the yoke of the Greeks'; Stephen Vojislav, ruler of Dioklitia, not only seized a cargo of gold, which was thrown up on the Illyrian coast, but saw a Byzantine army perish in the difficult passes of his country. A second Imperial invasion, which started from Durazzo, met with the same fate as that which befell the Austrian punitive expedition' in December 1914. The Serbs allowed the invaders to penetrate into the Zeta valley, occupied the heights and utterly routed them as they returned, laden with booty, through a narrow gorge. Michael, Vojislav's son, made peace with the Emperor, and received the title of protospathários, or 'sword-bearer,' at the Byzantine court, while he assumed at home the title of king. But, after the crushing defeat of the Byzantines by the Seljuks in Asia at the battle of Manzikert in 1071, the temptation to rise was too strong for the Balkan Slavs to resist. Accordingly, at the invitation of the Bulgarians, Michael sent them a leader in the person of his son, Constantine Bodin, who was proclaimed at Prizren Peter, Emperor of the Bulgarians.' Bodin was, however, captured by the Byzantines, but escaped and married the daughter of a citizen of Bari-the first example, but not the last, of a Serbo-Italian union. At his request Pope Clement III confirmed the rights of the Archbishopric of Antivari, the ancient see, which is mentioned as an Archbishopric so early as 1067, and on the holder of which Leo XIII in 1902 conferred the title of Primate of Serbia.' But Bodin, bellicose and crafty as Anna Comnena describes him, fell again into the power of the Byzantines. Our countryman, Ordericus Vitalis, describes him as 'treating in a friendly fashion' the Crusaders who passed through his territory. The excellent Archbishop, who was sent in 1168 on an embassy to Monastir, remarks that Serbia was a country of difficult access'; and that the Serbs were 'an uncultured and undisciplined people, inhabiting the mountains and forests, and not practising agriculture, but possessed of much cattle great and small. . . . Sometimes their jupani obey the Emperor; at other times all the inhabitants quit their mountains and forests. . . to ravage the surrounding countries.' * Yet the oldest piece of Serbian literature-a book of the Gospels in Cyrillic letters-dates from this very period; and a priest of Antivari composed in Latin a history of the rulers of Diókleia, who were gradually ousted by the 'Great Jupani' of Rascia, who in their turn were forced to submit to the chivalrous Byzantine Emperor, Manuel I. A court poet of the period, Theodore Pródromos, represents the Serbian rivers Save and Tara, red with blood and laden with corpses, addressing the conqueror, and the Serbian jupani trembling at the roar of the lion from the Bosporus. The death of Manuel I, in 1180, freed the Southern Slavs from Byzantine rule; and the following decade saw the foundation of the great Serbian state, which reached its zenith in the middle of the 14th century, and then fell before the all-conquering Turk. As has usually happened in Balkan history, this national triumph was the work of one man-Stephen Nemanja, the first great name in Serbian history. The founder of the Serbian monarchy was a native of what is now Podgoritza, whence he built up a compact Serbian state, comprising the Zeta (the modern Montenegro) and the land of Hum (the 'Hill' country, now the Herzegovina), Northern Albania and the modern * Lost in 1903, but lately rediscovered; 'Morning Post,' July 25, 1916. kingdom of Serbia, with a sea-frontage on the Bocche di Cattaro, whose municipality in 1186 passed a resolution describing him as 'Our Lord Nemanja, Great Jupan of Rascia.' Of the Serbian lands Bosnia alone evaded his sway, forming a separate state, which, first under bans, and then under kings, survived the Serbian Monarchy till it, too, fell before the Turks; while in the land of Hum he set up his brother, Miroslav, as prince. Thus, he substituted for the aristocratic Serbian federation a single state, embraced the Orthodox faith, which was that of the majority of his people, and strove to secure its religious as well as ecclesiastical union by extirpating the heresy of the Bogomiles, or Babuni (whence the name of the Babuna pass near Monastir, so famous in the fighting of last year), then rife in the Balkans. When Frederick Barbarossa stopped at Nish on the third Crusade in 1189, Nemanja met him with handsome gifts; but we may doubt the statement of a German chronicler that he did homage for his lands to the Teutonic ruler. No German Emperor ever set foot in Nish again till the recent visit of the Kaiser to King Ferdinand, when a modern chronicle, the Wolffbureau, revived the memory of Barbarossa's presence there. In 1195 Nemanja retired from the world, at the instigation of his youngest son, who is known in Serbian history as St Sava; and he died in 1200 as the monk Symeon in the monastery of Chilandar on Mount Athos. He, too, received the honours of a saint; his tomb is still revered in the monastery of Studenitza, which he founded; and his life was written by his eldest son and successor Stephen, and by Stephen's brother St Sava-the beginning of Serbian historical biography. Nemanja had never assumed the title of king, continuing to style himself 'Great Jupan'; but Stephen won for himself the title of the first-crowned king,' by obtaining, in 1217, a royal crown from Pope Honorius III. There were diplomatic reasons for the assumption of this title. The Byzantine Empire had now fallen before the Latin Crusaders; Frankish principalities had arisen all over the Near East; and the Latin ruler of Salonika had assumed the royal style. Bulgaria had arisen again, and her sovereigns had revived the ancient title of Tsar; and the King of Hungary had presumed to call himself king of 'Rascia' also. To show his connexion with the former kings of Diókleia, Stephen added that country to his style; to complete the independence of his kingdom, he obtained through his saintly and diplomatic brother from the Ecumenical Patriarch at Nice the recognition of a separate Serbian Church under Sava himself as 'Archbishop of all the Serbian lands.' Sava was buried in the monastery of Mileshevo in the old Sanjak of Novibazar, whence his remains were removed and burned by the Turks near Belgrade in 1595. Many a pious legend has grown up around the name of the founder of the national Church; but, through the haze of romance and beneath the halo of the saint, we can descry the figure of the great ecclesiastical statesman, whose constant aim it was to benefit his country and the dynasty to which he himself belonged, and to identify the latter with the national religion. While Stephen's successor was a feeble character, the second Bulgarian Empire reached its zenith under the great Tsar John Asên II, who boasted in a still extant inscription in his capital of Trnovo, then the centre of Balkan politics, that he had conquered all the lands from Adrianople to Durazzo.' The next Serbian King Vladislav was his son-in-law; St Sava died as his guest. But the hegemony of Bulgaria disappeared at his death in 1241; there, too, the national resurrection had been the work of one man. The Greeks regained their influence in Macedonia, and in 1261 recaptured Constantinople from the Latins. We have an interesting description of life at the Serbian court during the reign of the next King, Stephen Urosh I (c. 1268), from the Byzantine historian Pachyméres. There was a project for a marriage between a daughter of the Greek Emperor, Michael VIII Palaiológos, and a son of Stephen Urosh. First, however, two envoys were sent to report; and the Empress specially charged one of them to let her know what sort of a family it was into which her daughter was about to marry. The pompous Byzantines were horrified to find 'the great King,' as he was called, living the simple life in a way which would have disgraced a modest official of Constantinople, his Hungarian daughter-in-law working at her spindle in an inexpensive gown, and his |