and Greeks at Kustendil in Macedonia in 1330.  The following year his son, Stephen Du[)s]an, rebelled against him and deposed him.  Stephen Du[)s]an, who reigned from 1331 till 1355, was Serbia’s greatest ruler, and under him the country reached its utmost limits.  Provincial and family revolts and petty local disputes with such places as Ragusa became a thing of the past, and he undertook conquest on a grand scale.  Between 1331 and 1344 he subjected all Macedonia, Albania, Thessaly, and Epirus.  He was careful to keep on good terms with Ragusa and with Hungary, then under Charles Robert.  He married the sister of the Bulgarian ruler, and during his reign Bulgaria was completely under Serbian supremacy.  The anarchy and civil war which had become perennial at Constantinople, and the weakening of the Greek Empire in face of the growing power of the Turks, no doubt to some extent explain the facility and rapidity of his conquests; nevertheless his power was very formidable, and his success inspired considerable alarm in western Europe.  This was increased when, in 1345, he proclaimed his country an empire.  He first called together a special Church council, at which the Serbian Church, an archbishopric, whose centre was then at Pe[’c] (in Montenegro, Ipek in Turkish), was proclaimed a Patriarchate, with Archbishop Joannice as Patriarch; then this prelate, together with the Bulgarian Patriarch, Simeon, and Nicholas, Archbishop of Okhrida, crowned Stephen Tsar of the Serbs, Bulgars, and Greeks.  Upon this the Patriarch of Constantinople gave himself the vain satisfaction of anathematizing the whole of Serbia, as a punishment for this insubordination.

In 1353 the Pope, Innocent VI, persuaded King Louis of Hungary to undertake a crusade against Serbia in the name of Catholicism, but Stephen defeated him and re-established his frontier along the Save and Danube.  Later he conquered the southern half of Dalmatia, and extended his empire as far north as the river Cetina.  In 1354 Stephen Du[)s]an himself approached the Pope, offering to acknowledge his spiritual supremacy, if he would support him against the Hungarians and the Turks.  The Pope sent him an embassy, but eventually Stephen could not agree to the papal conditions, and concluded an alliance, of greater practical utility, with the Venetians.  In 1355, however, he suddenly died, at the age of forty-six, and thus the further development and aggrandisement of his country was prematurely arrested.

Stephen Du[)s]an made a great impression on his contemporaries, both by his imposing personal appearance and by his undoubted wisdom and ability.  He was especially a great legislator, and his remarkable code of laws, compiled in 1349 and enlarged in 1354, is, outside his own country, his greatest title to fame.  During Stephen Du[)s]an’s reign the political centre of Serbia, which had for many years gradually tended to shift southwards towards Macedonia, was at Skoplje (Ueskueb in Turkish), which he made his