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Wanted news of free Albania, and asked when the Prince would arrive. At the han, when paying for my horse, I asked for Turkish money as change, for we were leaving the Serb zone. The hanjee and those in the inn burst into sudden joy: "Ah, she too does not want anything Serb!" I was alarmed lest a prowling Serb should overhear and make them pay dearly for patriotism.
King Alexander proposed at this time to visit Queen Victoria, but was informed by Lord Salisbury that Her Majesty's health had already obliged her to decline other visits and she was therefore unable to receive him. The Serb Government then complained that Queen Victoria had conferred a high Order on Prince Nikola, who was but a vassal of Russia, and had given nothing to the King of Serbia.
In 1496, Venice having wisely made peace with the Sultan some years previously, this last independent scrap of Serb territory was finally incorporated in the Turkish dominions. At the end of the fifteenth century the Turks were masters of all the Serb lands except Croatia, Slavonia, and parts of Dalmatia, which belonged to Hungary, and the Dalmatian coast and islands, which were Venetian.
Religion in the Middle Ages was a far greater force than race. Nationality was hardly developed. Bosnia, into which the Orthodox faith seems to have penetrated but little, if at all, was thus cut off from the Serb Empire, for the bulk of the Bosniaks were either Bogumil or Roman Catholic. We find a great many monuments of the Bogumils scattered through Bosnia and the Herzegovina.
Macedonia had been successively under Greek, Bulgar, and Serb, before Turkish, rule, but the Macedonian Slavs had, under the last, been so cut off both from Bulgars and Serbs, that ethnologically and linguistically they did not develop the characteristics of either of these two races, which originally belonged to the same southern Slav stock, but remained a primitive neutral Slav type.
Every peasant in the Slavonic South naturally contrasted Magyar misrule in Croatia with the splendid achievements of his Serb kinsmen across the frontier. I know of poor villagers in the mountainous hinterland of Dalmatia who, having no money to give to the cause of the Balkan Red Cross, offered casks of country wine or even such clothes and shoes as they could spare from their scanty belongings.
The hatred between Serb and Albanian was increased a hundredfold, and the survivors and their descendants struggled continuously to gain complete control over the lands still theirs and to regain, if possible, those that they had lost. The adoption of Lord Fitzmaurice's plan would have spared the Balkans and possibly Europe much bloodshed and suffering.
I learnt in Macedonia the strange truth that, on the contrary, it was the Christian Churches of the Balkans that kept the Turk in power. Greek and Serb were both organizing komitadjis bands and sending them into Macedonia, not to "liberate Christian brethren" no. That was the last thing they wanted. But to aid the Turk in suppressing "Christian brethren."
He was due for an attack coming down the main street and from alleys to the right and left. In this situation he must temporarily accept the defensive. Meanwhile, he foresaw the battalions of "chocolate soldiers" beating themselves to pieces against the breastworks of his garrisons, and Greek turning on Serb and Serb on Bulgar after a taste of real war.
The Serbs everywhere were in very much of a minority, and their headmen the Bishop of Prizren, the Archimandrite of Grachanitza, the master of the Serb theological school at Prizren, and others frankly lamented the Turkish revolution, and looked on it only as a frustration of all their schemes.
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