Despite their common language, the two kindred races have never all been united under a single ruler.  From the ninth to the end of the eleventh century the Duchy, then Kingdom, of Croatia was governed by native princes, upon whose extinction it was conquered by Hungary.  For eight centuries Croatia has enjoyed an autonomous position under the Holy Crown of St. Stephen; its scope has varied according to the political constellation, but till 1912 its constant tradition had remained unbroken.  Meanwhile the Dalmatian coast towns remained a bone of contention between Venice and Hungary; but the marble Lions on their battered walls are still the best proof of the triumph of Italian culture within them.  Ragusa alone resisted both Venetians and Turks, and preserved herself inviolate as the home of commerce and the muses, until her tiny Republic was destroyed by Napoleon in 1808.  The Kingdom of Serbia developed on more distinctively Slavonic lines.  During its great days in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries under the Nemanja dynasty it dominated the Balkan Peninsula, produced a code of law which is unique in mediaeval records, developed a prosperous commerce and mining industries, and seemed on the point of striking a new note in architecture.  Her greatest Tsar, Stephen Dushan, died mysteriously of poison, when his hosts were already thundering at the gates of Constantinople (1356).  But the greatness of his empire did not survive him, and only a generation later Serbian independence received its death-blow on the fatal field of Kosovo—­the Flodden of the Balkans, but an event far direr in its consequences than Flodden was to Scotland.  Bosnia and a fragment of Serbia lingered on under more or less independent rulers till the middle of the fifteenth century.  Then the Turkish night replaced the Turkish twilight.  From 1463 to 1804 the national life of the Serbs lay utterly crushed.  In Serbia their nobility was literally wiped out, in Bosnia it accepted Islam in order to save its lands.  The relations of conqueror and conquered are best characterised by the single fact that a Christian who failed to dismount from his horse on meeting a Turk was liable to be killed on the spot.

Throughout this period of utter gloom only two things served to keep alive the Serb tradition—­their splendid popular ballads, unequalled in Europe for directness and imagination, save, perhaps, by the ballads of the Anglo-Scottish Border; and the clergy of the Orthodox Church, poor ignorant despised peasants like their flock, yet bravely keeping the national flame burning.  The one bright spot was the tiny mountain eyrie of Montenegro, which stubbornly maintained its freedom under a long succession of warrior-priests.