A History of Montenegro

Francis Stevenson

• Publisher: Ozymandias Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781531289836
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Eastern European History
• Index: History

The historical interest that attaches to Montenegro is utterly out of proportion to the space that country occupies on the surface of the earth. With the exception of the politically insignificant republics of San Marino and Andorra, and of the principalities of Monaco and Liechtenstein, it is the smallest unit in the aggregate of European states; and yet it is able to exhibit in the pages of its annals a record of persistent heroism to which not one of them can furnish a parallel. For nearly five centuries its hardy mountaineers have carried on a struggle for existence against an enemy many times superior to them in point of numbers; and, whilst the remaining Slavs of the Balkan peninsula have been compelled, during the greater part, at least, of that period to submit to an alien domination, the Montenegrins alone have succeeded in preserving intact their national independence..

PART I. THE ZETA.

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CHAPTER I.

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INTRODUCTORY

The historical interest that attaches to Montenegro is utterly out of proportion to the space that country occupies on the surface of the earth. With the exception of the politically insignificant republics of San Marino and Andorra, and of the principalities of Monaco and Liechtenstein, it is the smallest unit in the aggregate of European states; and yet it is able to exhibit in the pages of its annals a record of persistent heroism to which not one of them can furnish a parallel. For nearly five centuries its hardy mountaineers have carried on a struggle for existence against an enemy many times superior to them in point of numbers; and, whilst the remaining Slavs of the Balkan peninsula have been compelled, during the greater part, at least, of that period to submit to an alien domination, the Montenegrins alone have succeeded in preserving intact their national independence.

Yet the history of Montenegro should not be regarded as consisting merely in a series of heroic achievements. The superficial observer may, perhaps, adopt that view; but the more philosophical historian, though tempted to linger longest over those scenes of the protracted struggle for Faith and Freedom which appeal most strongly to the imagination, and which will ever so appeal, as long as human nature remains the same, will endeavour rather to trace their connection with the course of general history. He will show how the inhabitants of the Black Mountain cooperated, in a measure unconsciously, with the greater military powers of Venice, Hungary and Poland, in the work of saving the civilization of Eastern Europe from being entirely and irreparably withered and blasted by the barbarism of its Turkish invaders. He will point out how Montenegro occupies a place of paramount importance among the South Slavonic nations, and more especially among those that belong to the Serbian branch of that great family, inasmuch as, by maintaining its own liberty, it has at the same time kept up the continuity of their history, and rendered it possible for them to acquire again the position to which they are naturally entitled; how it forms, in fact, the connecting link between their greatness in the past and the greatness to which they may someday attain. Lastly, if from the external relations of the principality he turns to the consideration of its internal development, he will note the peculiar type of its institutions, and explain their existence with reference to the special circumstances by which their character has been determined.

It would be impossible to fix with any degree of accuracy the date at which Montenegrin history may be said to have commenced. The year 1389, in which was fought the great battle of Kossovo, has frequently been adopted as a convenient starting-point. The choice of that date, however, is, in more than one respect, unsatisfactory and misleading. On the one hand, it seems to imply that Montenegro arose at that moment, in all the fullness of its national independence, out of the ruins of the Serbian Kingdom. On the other hand, it loses sight of the fact that the Duklja, or Zeta, the district out of which the modern Montenegro was formed, possessed extensive liberties of its own long before the time when Serbs and Turks were brought face to face. In the course of human events there is nothing abrupt, nothing isolated; and the history of Serbia passes into that of Montenegro by a gradual process of transition. It is impossible to say where the one terminates and the other begins; and the truest view would seem to be that of a recent historian, who declares that the independence of the Montenegrin people extends in reality over a period of twelve hundred years. It will be necessary, therefore, in the following pages, to trace, first, the history of the Zeta in its origin and development, and, secondly, the manner in which it became transformed into Montenegro.

CHAPTER II.

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ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE Serbian people—Importance of the House Community in their history—The Zupans and Grand-Zupans—Greatness and fall of the Serbian Empire—Importance of the Zeta throughout the period.

The Slavonic migration which resulted in the permanent settlement of numerous Croatian and Serbian tribes, belonging to the same race and speaking the same language, within the confines of Illyria, took place during the reign and at the instigation of the Emperor Heraclius, who wished to re-people a region the old inhabitants of which had been driven by the Avars into the highlands of which is now called Albania, and at the same time to erect a durable bulwark against any who should attempt to penetrate from the north-west into the heart of the Eastern Empire. The Avars disappeared, in their turn, with a rapidity which has passed into a proverb; and the new settlers soon occupied the whole country that extends from the Save to the Drin, from the Adriatic to the Morava, with the exception of the majority of the towns upon the Dalmatian sea-coast, which still remained in the possession of the Romans, or Romanized Illyrians, whom neither Turanian nor Slavonic invaders were able entirely to dislodge. The river Zentina, which falls into the sea at a point opposite the island of Brazza, may be said to form the boundary between Serbs and Croats. With the latter we are not at present concerned. Various circumstances have contributed to isolate them, to a great extent, from those with whom they were connected by the closest ties of race and of language. The Croats adhered to the Latin, the Serbs to the Orthodox Church; and the difference of their creeds finds a parallel in the diversity of their destinies, inasmuch as the history of Croatia is connected with the Empire of the West, that of Serbia with the Empire of the East. This being so, it is only natural that Dalmatia, inhabited as it was both by Serbs and by Croats, should have fluctuated for several centuries between the kingdom of Hungary, which owed allegiance to the Holy Roman Empire, and the Venetian Republic, which acknowledged, in a certain measure, the supremacy of the Basileus ton Romaion residing at Byzantium.

Restricting our attention, therefore, to the Serbian group, we find that it extended over an area that corresponds approximately to the modern kingdom of Serbia, to Bosnia, Herzegovina, the district round Novibazar, Montenegro, and the northern part of Albania. It was divided into a certain number of districts, the names and boundaries of which have been preserved to us by the assiduity of the Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus. Yet it is not until the present century that the true significance of those districts has been understood. “Rascia”, or “Serbia proper”, “Bosnia”, “Zachlumje”, “Neretwa”, “Travunja”, “Konawlje”, and “Duklja”, are not merely geographical expressions, but denote that every tract of land called by one of these names was peopled by a separate aggregate of Zupas, which were themselves aggregates of House Communities, such as appear to have existed in most of the branches of the Aryan race at some period of their social development, but are found at present in a stereotyped form only among the Southern Slavs and a few Hindu tribes.

The tendency which arises, in proportion as knowledge becomes more accurate and more systematized, to investigate phenomena of every description, not only by viewing them in their formed and fully developed condition, but by examining their antecedents and instituting a search into their origin, has induced sociologists to devote special attention to the subject of the House Community. The conclusion at which their researches point would seem to be that this institution, consisting as it does in the association of several families all descended from the same ancestor, inhabiting a common dwelling or group of dwellings, governed by the authority of one Chief, and yielding the produce of their labour to a common fund, occupies an intermediate position between the single family, on the one hand, and, on the other, the village community, which is “essentially an assembly of separate houses, each ruled by its own chief”. “The House Community of the South Slavonians”, said Sir Henry Maine “corresponds to one or other of the larger Roman groups, to the Hellenic genos, the Celtic Sept, the Teutonic Kin, especially the Joint Family of the Hindus”. It would be out of place to inquire why it is that the organization of the House Community has lingered on down to the present time among the Southern Slavs, especially the Serbs of Montenegro, whereas among their northern kinsmen of Russia it has passed into the more developed stage. To whatever cause we attribute its continuance, there can be no doubt that the institution itself has exercised a most important influence upon the history of the Serbian people.

The Zupas, then, as is implied in the original signification of the word, which was tribal, not territorial, and denoted not a shire but a ga, were formed by the union of several House Communities, which placed themselves under the political and military leadership of one of their house-chiefs, in order to acquire additional security and power. But the centralizing process could not end at this point. The Zupas, in their turn, tended to coalesce, or at least to recognize the supremacy of the strongest among their number. Amid the haze that surrounds the first few centuries of Serbian history, we are able to discern the rise and progress of the Grand-Zupans, who resided, when we first hear of them, at Desnica in Serbia proper, and whose authority over the other zupans was symbolized by the title of Elder, starjesina.

It would be impossible, within the limits of this work, to deal in any detail with the process of transition by which the Grand-Zupans, as also, for the most part, the zupans, ceased to be elected, and tended to become the hereditary rulers of a dynastic state. The Grand-Zupan developed into the King; and though he still continued, in accordance with the principles of the House Community, to apportion his lands among his sons, and sometimes among his kinsmen or friends, granting to each a separate appanage, he no longer allowed them to retain the same independence of the central power which they had before possessed. They were reduced, in a measure, to the position of governors of the provinces of an united kingdom; and the King bequeathed his power to his eldest son. At the same time the nobles, who, like the Optimates at Rome, were originally elected for the purpose of performing certain definite functions, endeavored to hand down their official titles to their posterity; and thus the aristocracy of office-holders became an aristocracy of their descendants. Similarly the wordvoivode, which denoted originally a general, became a hereditary title. The principal change, however, in the position of the nobles, was due to the introduction of a new system of land-tenure. For the communistic arrangements of the House Community there was substituted in their case a special form of property, called bastina. The possession of land in fee simple became one of their attributes; and the introduction of absolute ownership, whilst it became one of the disruptive forces that tended to dissolve, or, at any rate, to weaken the tie by which the House Communities were bound together, imparted to the Serbian nobility a slightly feudal aspect foreign alike to their origin and to their nature. Their power increased rapidly, and displayed itself in the sbor, or national assembly, which was not organized then on as popular a basis as it had been in early times, and as it afterwards became in Montenegro, and in which nobles, whether they belonged to the higher or to the lower grades, voivodes, and leading warriors and dignitaries of the Church, met together to transact important affairs of state, including, in later times, the decision of questions relating to peace and war, and the election of bishops and even of the Serbian patriarch. Their growing power was a perpetual source of difficulty to the central authority. The new system diminished, in some degree, the power of the people, but the old order of things possessed too much vitality to be easily destroyed, and the persistency of the House Communities, free as they were from the evils that accompanied the feudal system, formed an effectual safeguard against any such wave of social discontent as that which passed over Western Europe in the course of the fourteenth century, and gave rise to insurrections both in the cities and among the peasants.

It is clear, therefore, that the Zupas and the yet greater aggregate of Zupas co-extensive with the whole of the Serbian people, were organized on the analogy of the House Community, the principles of which permeated the whole framework of society, though modified as time went on and as new conditions came into being. The effect of these principles upon the history of the Serbs was partly beneficial and partly baneful. On the one hand they introduced into the political life of the nation the combined elements of democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy which are to be found coexisting, in a rudimentary form, in the House Community; on the other hand they multiplied and intensified the internal feuds and dissensions to which the Slavs have always been more or less prone. A close parallel might be drawn between the struggles in Serbia for the position of Grand-Zupan and the long-continued strife which followed the division of Jaroslav’s dominions among his five sons. The resemblance is instructive, for in both cases similar forces were at work and similar effects were produced.

It will now be possible to sketch briefly the various stages through which Serbian history passed during the four centuries and a half that preceded the battle of Kossovo, and in so doing to indicate the importance of the part performed by the Zeta throughout the period.

After the death, in 927, of the Bulgarian Czar Simeon, whose armies had spread desolation and death throughout the Serbian lands, at the time when he was endeavoring to wrest from the Byzantine Emperor the supremacy over the whole peninsula, the district of Duklja, of which Montenegro is the existing representative, rose gradually to a position of such preponderance that one of its Grand-Zupans, Michael, assumed the title of King of the Serbs, and induced Pope Gregory the Seventh to recognize him as such. Even during the period of Bulgarian supremacy the district had maintained a semi-independent attitude towards its conquerors; towards the close of the tenth century its ruler, Ivan Vladimir, who is described as possessing a “just, peaceable, and virtuous” disposition rarely to be met with in those days, had married the daughter of the Czar Samuel, and received as an appanage the northern part of Albania and, again, it was Michael’s father, Stephen Voislav, lord of Zeta and Travunja, who in 1040 annihilated a Greek army in the rocky defiles of Old Serbia, thus securing for the Serbs political and ecclesiastical immunity from Byzantine interference. But the strength of the kingdom which Michael bequeathed to his successors was undermined by dissensions which ripened, in many cases, into civil wars, and it was not until the year 1159 that a more powerful dynasty was founded by Stephen Nemanja, a prince connected by ties of blood with the kings who had reigned in Duklja, and himself born within that region. He made himself Grand-Zupan of Rassa, the district round the modern Novibazar, enforced his rule over all the Serbian lands, and left behind him a compact dominion of which his son Stephen was crowned King (1222).

It is unnecessary to relate how, during the century and a half that followed, the Serbian kingdom became consolidated; how under Milutin Uros II it entered upon a career of conquest, and how it extended its boundaries in different directions, at the expense of Greeks and Magyars, Shkipetars and Bulgarians, the power of the latter being crushed by the great battle of Velbuzd (1330). It will be sufficient to say that, in the middle of the fourteenth century, under the rule of Stephen Dusan, it formed the most considerable as well as the most powerful state in the Balkan peninsula. Sir Henry Maine has pointed out that, during the Middle Ages, owing to the twofold notion of sovereignty which then prevailed, “the Chieftain who would no longer call himself King of the tribe must claim to be Emperor of the world”.

Accordingly we find that, in his new capital of Skoplje on the Wardar, Dusan assumed an imperial crown to which, considering the extent of his domination, he was at least as fully entitled as the Emperors of Romania, Trebizond, and Nicaea ever were. The palmy days of Serbian greatness were, however, of short duration; and the death of the great Czar in 1355, as he was marching against Constantinople, was followed by the dismemberment of his Empire, a signal instance of the way in which “vaulting ambition overleaps itself”. If, instead of spreading his conquests far and wide, he had contented himself with the endeavour to establish a compact Slavonic power, based upon community of race, it is probable that the Kingdom thus created would have been sufficiently strong to defy not only the armies of Buda and of Byzantium, but the still more formidable forces of the approaching Osmanli.

As it was, the ruin of his Empire was caused by the incompatibility of its component elements, no less than by the disputes that arose in his family and by the insubordination of his voivodes. Bosnia acquired its independence, and attained to the culminating point of its greatness in the year 1388, when it possessed not only Zachlumje, but the greater part of Dalmatia, and was practically the head of a South Slavonian confederacy; Thrace and Macedonia, Aetolia and Thessaly, fell under the short-lived dominion of numerous petty princes, and Serbia itself dwindled again into a kingdom under Uros V, the last ruler of the Nemanjid dynasty.

(In one sense he was not the last ruler of the Nemanji dynasty. Dusan’s brother, Simeon Palaeologus Uros, who died in 1371, was lord of the greater part of Thessaly, Epirus, andAetolia. Epirus then passed into the hands of Thomas Preljubovic, whilst Thessaly fell to the lot of John Uros, Symeon’s son, who ended his days in 1410 in a monastery into which he had retired after the Turkish invasion. He too has been called the last of the Nemanjids).