Vanished Kingdoms

by Norman Davies

  † Sir John Conroy.

  * The three other ‘discontinued peers’ were the crown prince of Hanover (the duke of Cumberland), the duke of Brunswick and Viscount Taafe.

  12

  Tsernagora

  Kingdom of the Black Mountain

  (1910–1918)

  I

  Montenegro is the 192nd member of the United Nations, received into membership on 28 June 2006. It is one of only three states to have been so inducted in the twenty-first century, the others being the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 2000 and Switzerland in 2002. To make matters suitably confusing, Montenegro had formed part of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia between 1992 and 2002, until the Federation changed its name to ‘Serbia and Montenegro’.1 It can at least take comfort from being one important step ahead of its neighbour, the self-styled Republic of Kosovo, which declared its independence on 17 February 2008, but which has not gained full international recognition.

  The establishment of state sovereignty is a complex business. For practical purposes, a political entity may gain its independence by its own efforts, but to enjoy sovereign status in international law it needs to be recognized as such by others. Similarly, a recognized state may cease to function de facto, but its disappearance does not become an established fact de jure until accepted internationally. In the twenty-first century, the international body that usually confirms a candidate state’s full sovereignty by admitting it to membership, or crosses it off the list, is the United Nations. UN procedures require that membership is granted or withdrawn by a decision of the General Assembly acting on the advice of the Security Council. Montenegro, however, has made it. Today, together with five other post-Yugoslav republics, it looks forward to a brighter future than at any time in the last generation.

  Montenegro has a population of 620,000 living in a territory of 5,332 square miles. As in neighbouring Bosnia and Albania, the population has traditionally been divided along religious lines, although proportions differ. According to the last census (2003), three-quarters are Orthodox Christians. The remainder are either Roman Catholics, living mainly on the coast, or Muslims. All speak a dialect of the same language, which is variously designated as Serbian, Serb-Croat or Montenegrin, and is written in Montenegro in modified forms either of the Cyrillic or the Latin alphabet.

  After the dismemberment of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and the consequent humbling of Serbia, Montenegro is no longer overshadowed by its overweening Serbian neighbour. Democratization of a sort is afoot, and a market economy is taking root. A fully fledged diplomatic service has been established. There are Montenegrin embassies to the UN in New York, to the EU in Brussels, to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in Vienna, to all the other post-Yugoslav republics, to the Holy See and to a dozen major capitals on all continents, including the United Kingdom and the United States.2

  Tourism is professionally promoted. Montenegro can be reached by road, rail, sea and air. Frontier crossings are open with Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, Serbia and, most recently, with Kosovo (which Montenegro recognized in October 2008). The bus-line Autosaobracaj links Croatian Dubrovnik with Herceg-Novi. A railway link runs from Podgorica to Bar, a regular ferry sails to Bar from Bari in Italy, and two international airports function at Podgorica and Tivat. Flights to the majority of European capitals are assured by two national carriers: Montenegro Airlines and Adria Airways. The well-established Croatian airport at Dubrovnik lies only 20 miles from the border. It is no longer true that Montenegro is remote or inaccessible.

  The tourist brochures and websites gush with superlatives about the ‘Pearl of the Adriatic’:

  The sea, the lakes, the canyons, the mountains enable everyone to decide on the best way to enjoy quality vacation. In one day, a traveller can have a coffee on one of the numerous beaches of the Budva Riviera, eat lunch with the song of the birds on the Skardar Lake, and dine beside the fireplace on the slopes of the Durmitor mountain…

  Turbulent history… has left behind an invaluable treasure in numerous historic monuments throughout this proud country. The blue sea with endless beaches, restless waters of the clear rivers and beautiful mountain massifs, mixed with the spirits of the old times, have given Montenegro everything one needs for an unforgettable vacation.

  Montenegro is an ecological state… A large number of sunny days in the summer months and a large quantity of snow in the winter, determine the two most developed forms of tourism… In recent times, following global trends, Montenegro is developing extreme sports that the tourists can enjoy as well.3

  Rafting down the Tara Riva in the Durmitor National Park is strongly recommended.4

  Montenegro’s two inland capitals, Podgorica and Cetinje, compete for visitors, but the main destinations for holidaymakers lie on the coast, where they are regaled with stunning natural beauty and historical charm. Ulcinj has ‘the longest sandy beach on the Adriatic’. Kotor is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Petrovać hosts Roman and Venetian remains. The island-hotel of Sveti Stefan, joined to the mainland by a causeway, boasts a long list of famous guests from Sophia Loren and Princess Margaret to Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Yuri Gagarin, Alberto Moravia, Sidney Poitier, the president of Outer Margolia and Willy Brandt (which says something of its vintage); it has recently re-opened after renovation, its monastic-style rooms blended with modern luxury and costing from £770 per night upwards.5 The port of Bar contains both the Turkish fortress of Haj Nehaj and the Castle of King Nikola.

  Podgorica is the country’s largest town, with 135,000 inhabitants, and is the present-day capital. It stands near the site of a prehistoric Illyrian settlement, and developed during the Middle Ages as a commercial centre. Razed to the ground during the Second World War, its most dynamic period of growth occurred during post-war industrialization, when it was renamed Titograd.6 Cetinje is barely one-tenth the size of Podgorica but it is the country’s historical and religious centre. Founded in the fifteenth century at the foot of the imposing Mount Lovćen, it provided a secure refuge against Ottoman power spreading from the interior and Venetian power dominating the coast. Its long record of resistance earned it the nickname of the ‘Serbian Sparta’. Its principal monuments include the Cetinje Monastery, the Lokanda Hotel and the Biljarda House (1838), formerly the Royal Palace, which contains the ultimate symbol of nineteenth-century Europeanization, a billiard room. The plentiful iron railings in Cetinje were cast from captured Ottoman cannon.7

  Not everything in Montenegro, however, is quite as transparent as the crystal waters of the Adriatic. The economy conceals some very murky sectors; the citizens continue to be torn by a fundamental identity problem, and the political system is decidedly Putinesque.

  One of the strongest arguments for Montenegro’s withdrawal from Yugoslavia was to protect the economy from rampant hyperinflation, which in 1994 reached a world record level of 3.13 million per cent per month. In 1999, therefore, the dinar was dropped in favour of the Deutschmark, and in 2002 the Deutschmark was replaced by the euro. Montenegro, in the view of informed commentators, was already preparing to separate.8 Even so, the economy has struggled to recover. It is buoyed up by endemic smuggling, by widespread money-laundering and by dubious foreign investors, especially Russians, who have found a safe haven for their activities. On the international Corruption Chart Index, Montenegro occupies 85th position out of 179 countries listed.9

  The core of the identity problem lies in the issue of whether or not Montenegrins are really Serbs. In the census of 2003, only 270,000 or 43 per cent declared themselves to be ethnic Montenegrins; 200,000 or 32 per cent preferred self-designation as Serbs. Several surveys were undertaken, and the percentages fluctuated wildly according to the questions asked – in the view of an émigré website, Montenegrins constitute 62 per cent of the population, and Serbs only 9 per cent.10 The distinction rests less on religious practice and more on attitudes towards the Serbian state and to the highly politicized Serbian Orthodox Churc
h, which insists that all its adherents are Serbs whether they like it or not. In 1993, when the first referendum on independence was held in a setting dominated by the Serbia of Slobodan Milošević, and by his campaign to maintain Yugoslav unity by force, the vote unsurprisingly produced a pro-Serbian majority. But it also provoked the appearance of a breakaway Montenegrin Orthodox Church, which rejects the automatic association of its members with Serb identity, and which was restored after an interval of seventy-five years. This showed that strong resentments persisted against Serbian domination, and not only in the political sphere. In 2006, when a second referendum was held after Milošević had been deposed, a pro-independence majority was returned by the modest margin of 55.5 per cent for and 44.5 per cent against.11

  Throughout this period, Montenegro’s political scene was dominated by one party and by one man. The party, the Democratic Socialist Party of Montenegro (DSPM), was a reconstructed continuation of the Montenegrin branch of Tito’s old League of Yugoslav Communists. The man was Milo Djukanović (b. 1962), the party leader and a prime example of an ex-Communist who knew how to adapt to the post-Communist era. Djukanović is a former basketball player, with the tall stature of a natural leader, the face of a film star and the eloquence of a practised populist. He first came to prominence as a close associate of Milošević, who helped him to apply Serbia’s ‘anti-bureaucratic revolution’ and to remove the party’s Old Guard. He then elbowed his colleagues aside, and in 1991 entered office at the age of twenty-nine in the first of his six terms as prime minister. Except for a four-year break in 1998–2002, when he served as president, his premiership continued until December 2010. He parted company with Milošević in the mid-1990s over the Dayton Accords, which he considered too conciliatory, and was slowly converted to the movement for independence round the turn of the century. He stepped down as premier at the end of the decade, being replaced by his deputy, Igor Lukšić, but retained the key post of Chairman of the DSPM. He is said to be concentrating on Montenegro’s bid to join the European Union; still only forty-nine, he has by no means bowed out of politics.

  The power of the Montenegrin political elite is said to rest on a seamless alliance between the ruling Party and members of the former Yugoslav security services; their wealth is certainly connected to a number of family-controlled banks and businesses, such as Capital Invest, Primary Invest and Select Investment. The international reputation of Djukanović stood high, especially with American representatives, during the Bosnian and Kosovo crises, but passed temporarily under a cloud when Italian police laid charges laid against him over alleged links with the Mafia and the Camorra; the charges have since been dropped. Djukanović has been described as ‘the kind of Marxist who keeps a picture of Margaret Thatcher on his desk’ and as ‘the Smartest Man in the Balkans’.12

  Like all EU candidates, Montenegro faced a long process of verifications and negotiations. Formal application was made in 2008, and candidate status granted in December 2010. When negotiations opened in the following New Year, an assessment of Montenegro’s chances of meeting the criteria for the thirty-five chapters of the Union’s acquis communautaire was issued by the EU team in Brussels. Reading very much like an old-fashioned school report, their statement listed the current position regarding each chapter under one of five categories: 1. ‘No major difficulties expected’, 2. ‘Further effort needed’, 3. ‘Considerable effort needed’, 4. ‘Nothing to adopt’, and 5. ‘Totally incompatible with the acquis’. It placed eight subjects starting with ‘Taxation’ into the first category; thirteen starting with ‘Labour Mobility’ into the second; eighteen starting with ‘Free Movement of Goods’ into the third; two including ‘Institutions’ into the fourth; and only one, ‘Environment’, into the fifth. Why exactly policy to the environment should be judged ‘totally incompatible’ in Montenegro, which has declared itself ‘an ecological state’, would now have to be investigated. It may have something to do with the plan for multiple dams on the Moraca river.13 An overall Action Plan was proposed and accepted on 23 February 2011. All applicants must pass through this mill, and a final result cannot be expected for some years.14 For the time being, the world watches and waits, pondering the well-known television advertisement broadcast alongside ‘Incredible India’ and ‘Malaysia Truly Asia’ – ‘Montenegro – Experience the Wild Beauty’.15

  II

  The Lycée Louis-le-Grand is one of France’s most prestigious boys’ schools. Once a Jesuit college, it changed its name when it received the royal patronage of Louis XIV, but still stands on the rue St Jacques in the heart of Paris, in the Quartier Latin, surrounded by the hallowed halls of the Sorbonne and the Collège de France. Its graduates, named ‘magnoludoviciens’, are envied for their success in gaining competitive entry to the elite ‘grandes écoles’. They include some of the best-known names of French culture and politics, from Molière and Voltaire to presidents Pompidou, Giscard d’Estaing and Chirac. They also include a number of sons of distinguished foreign families who have been sent to Paris to be subjected to an educational experience of international renown.16

  One of the latter, Nikola Mirkov Petrović-Njegoš (1841–1921) studied at Louis-le-Grand in the second part of the 1850s. He was a Balkan prince from a country which most of his classmates could hardly have marked on the map, heir to a near-legendary line of hereditary and celibate prince-bishops or vladikas, who traditionally passed their sovereign titles to their nephews. He had been raised in the Serbian Orthodox Church, schooled both in the martial arts and in poetry, and was not well suited to his academic hothouse. He undoubtedly regarded himself as a Serb, and belonged to a dynasty that openly spoke of the restoration of the ‘tsardom of Stefan Dušan’, destroyed by the Ottoman Turks nearly 500 years earlier. Like all his compatriots, he had been brought up to believe that the Ottoman victory over the Serbs at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 was the greatest catastrophe in world history. Now he was living in an age when the Ottoman Empire was the ‘Sick Man of Europe’. Serbia, Greece and Romania had already broken free of its grip. Hopes were rising that others would soon follow.

  In 1860, when his country’s call came, Prince Nikola was just nineteen years old. His uncle, Danilo I, had been assassinated. There was no time to finish his baccalaureate. The ex-schoolboy hurried to Marseille, took ship and sailed home to become the crowned head of a state whose future was as uncertain as its past was obscure.17

  Črnagora, as its inhabitants call it, the ‘land of the Black Mountain’, lay inland from the Adriatic coast, squeezed between Bosnia and Albania. It took its name from the dark, pine-clad massif of Mount Lovćen (5,653 feet), which rises to the west of Cetinje; when the country first made the headlines during Prince Nikola’s long reign, Victorian newspapers often transliterated the Cyrillic form of the name as ‘Tsernagora’. Today, it best known to the outside world by the old Venetian name of Montenegro. Its total area is smaller than that of Wales or of Connecticut. The fertile landscape of the northern district contrasts sharply with the sterile, calcinated mountains of the centre and south, known as the Brda or ‘Highlands’. At the prince’s accession, landlocked Montenegro was separated from the Adriatic by a long coastal strip known to locals as Primore and to others as Albania veneziana.18

  In the distant past, the Principality-Bishopric of Montenegro had been ruled by non-hereditary clerics; Prince Nicola’s family established the right of hereditary succession in 1696, and Nicola was the seventh of the Petrović-Njegoš line. His uncle and immediate predecessor, however, had secularized the state, separating it from the Orthodox Church in 1852 and changing the ruler’s title from ‘prince-bishop’ to ‘prince’. This meant that Nicola’s duties were entirely non-ecclesiastical, and that the headship of the Church was no longer joined to the headship of the principality.

  Montenegrin society was organized round a traditional system of tribes or clans, which had led the struggle against Ottoman domination from the sixteenth century onwards. The clans were contemptuous of a
ll outside government, and resistant to taxation. They also cultivated the inimitable Montenegrin code of chivalry, summarized by the slogan ‘Cˇojstvo i Junastvo’ – ‘Humanity and Bravery’ – that characterized the ideals of a warrior people. Vendettas and feuding were an integral part of their way of life.19

  The distinction between tribes and clans is simple in theory, but less easy to make in practice. In essence, the clans were patrilineal kinship groups similar to those in Scotland, each claiming descent from a historical or legendary ancestor. Petrović, for example, meaning ‘Son of Peter’, was Prince Nikola’s clan name; some of the larger clans were divided into sub-clans, which used separate names. Men and women from the same clan were forbidden to marry. The tribes, in contrast, were larger groupings made up of all the clans inhabiting a particular territorial district. Each of them held regular gatherings or zbory in traditionally designated villages, where matters of common interest were discussed and tribal chiefs were elected. The Njeguši tribe, for example, to which the Petrovíci clan belonged, took its name from the village where it held its tribal meetings. In districts inhabited by a single clan, the tribe and the clan became indistinguishable. In Prince Nikola’s lifetime, some thirty tribes were active in Old Montenegro or in the adjacent Highlands and Coastland.20

  Once the tribes had liberated the most remote mountain districts from the Ottomans in the sixteenth century, a proto-national movement began to form round the authority of the Orthodox metropolitan of Cetinje. This movement, partly religious and partly political, gave rise to the independent principality of the vladikas.21 Such at least is the romantic version of history that became popular in Prince Nikola’s day. Later historians have grown increasingly cautious about declarations of the country’s ‘age-old freedom’. They now paint a picture in which the principality did indeed enjoy a large measure of self-government but only in close association with the Ottomans. As elsewhere in the Balkans, the Sublime Porte was willing to arrange special rules for taxation and military service, but not to resign its claim to overlordship.22