Author.  “Your highness may rest assured that had I known that, I should not have failed to go.  At Tronosha I saw a similar festival, and I am firmly convinced that no peasantry in Europe is freer from want.”

Prince.  “Every beginning is difficult; our principle must be, ‘Endeavour and Progress.’  Were you pleased with your tour?”

Author.  “I think that your Highness has one of the most romantic principalities in Europe.  Without the grandeur of the Alps, Servia has more than the beauty of the Apennines.”

Prince.  “The country is beautiful, but I wish to see agriculture prosper.”

Author.  “I am happy to hear that:  your highness’s father had a great name as a soldier; I hope that your rule will be distinguished by rapid advancement in the arts of civilization; that you will be the Kara Georg of peace.”

This led to a conversation relative to the late Kara Georg; and the prince rising, led me into another apartment, where the portrait of his father, the duplicate of one painted for the emperor Alexander, hung from the wall.  He was represented in the Turkish dress, and wore his pistols in his girdle; the countenance expressed not only intelligence but a certain refinement, which one would scarcely expect in a warrior peasant:  but all his contemporaries agree in representing him to have possessed an inherent superiority and nobility of nature, which in any station would have raised him above his equals.

CHAPTER XXIX.

A Memoir of Kara Georg.

The Turkish conquest was followed by the gradual dispersion or disappearance of the native nobility of Servia, the last of whom, the Brankovitch, lived as despots in the castle of Semendria, up to the beginning of the eighteenth century; so that at this moment scarcely a single representative of the old stock is to be found.[22]

The nobility of Bosnia, occupying the middle region between the sphere of the Eastern and Western churches, were in a state of religious indifference, although nominally Catholic; and in order to preserve their lands and influence, accepted Islamism en masse; they and the Albanians being the only instances, in all the wars of the Moslems, of a European nobility embracing the Mohamedan faith in a body.  Chance might have given the Bosniacs a leader of energy and military talents.  In that case, these men, instead of now wearing turbans in their grim feudal castles, might, frizzed and perfumed, be waltzing in pumps; and Shakespear and Mozart might now be delighting the citizens assembled in the Theatre Royal Seraievo!

The period preceding the second siege of Vienna was the spring-tide of Islam conquest.  After this event, in 1684, began the ebb.  Hungary was lost to the Porte, and six years afterwards thirty-seven thousand Servian families emigrated into that kingdom; this first led the way to contact with the civilization of Germany:  and in the attendance on the Austrian schools by the youth of the Servian nation during the eighteenth century, were sown the seeds of the now budding civilization of the principality.