by Rebecca West
In a dark and cramped treasury are some untidy ancient manuscripts, on which a Tauchnitz edition of The Hound of the Baskervilles has curiously intruded, and certain possessions of the Tsar Lazar: the icon on which he swore his nobles to loyalty before the battle, the beaker from which he drank, the model of one of his cities. There is no reason to doubt that any of these are genuine. The Turks let Lazar’s widow take his corpse and all his private treasures, and in the course of time she placed them in the monastery of Ravanitsa, which he himself had founded, in Serbia, far south of Belgrade on the way to Nish. It was often attacked and damaged by the Turks, and the migrants of 1683 took away its relics and built this new monastery, which for this reason is often also called Ravanitsa, to house them. I went down on my knees to peer at the precious objects through the glass case of the cupboard. The icon was damaged but enormously beautiful: in the background was a soaring close-pressed assembly of saints, conceived by an imagination disciplined and formalized by experience of ceremonial. There was also a panel of velvet, once crimson, now maroon, which was embroidered in silver-gilt thread with words, many words, a prayer, a poem.
It was sewn by the Princess Euphemia, the widow of a Serbian prince killed by the Turks, who had found refuge at the court of the Tsar Lazar. After Lazar had fallen at Kossovo she went with his widow Militza to the monastery of Lyubostinya, where they both became nuns. She was an embroideress of great genius. Two of the most famous pieces of early embroidery in Europe are her work: the curtain for the sanctuary doors in the church of Hilandar, the Serbian monastery on Mount Athos, and a cloth for laying on the altar during Lent, now in the monastery of Putna in Roumania. In the silence of the monastery she worked a pall to cover the severed head of the Tsar Lazar, and on it she wrote him a letter with her needle.
‘You were brought up among all the good things of this earth, O Prince Lazar, O new-made martyr,’ she begins. ‘The power of the Lord made you strong and famous among all the kings of the world. You ruled over the land of your fathers and in all right ways did you give happiness to the Christian folk who were laid in your hands. In courage and piety did you go out to do battle against the snake Murad, the enemy of God’s church, because your heart could not bear to see the hosts of Ismail ruling in Christian lands. You were determined that if you failed you would quit this crumbling fortress of earthly power and, red in your own blood, be one with the hosts of the Heavenly King.
‘You had both your desires fulfilled. You slew the snake and you won from God the martyr’s crown. So do not now forget your beloved children, who are left desolate by your death, while you are enjoying the everlasting delights of Heaven. Many troubles and sufferings have fallen on your beloved children, and their lives are passed in sorrow, for the sons of Ismail rule over them, and we sorely need your help. Therefore we beg you to pray the Ruler of Mankind for your beloved children and all who serve them in love and faith. For your children are girt about with many ills, and have forgotten, O martyr, your goodness to them. But though you have quitted this life, you know the troubles and sufferings of your children, and since you are a martyr, you can take certain freedoms with the Lord.
‘So bow your knee before the Heavenly King who bestowed on you the martyr’s crown; beg Him that your beloved children may live long and be happy and do His will; beg Him that the Orthodox Church may stand firm in the land of our fathers; beg Him, who is the Conqueror of All, that He give your beloved sons, Prince Stephen and Prince Vuk, the victory over all their enemies, seen and unseen. If the Lord gives us His help, we shall give you praise and thanks for it. Gather together the company of your fellows, the Holy Martyrs, and with them pray to the God that glorified you. Call St George, rouse St Demetrius, persuade the saintly Theodores, take with you St Mercurius and St Procopius; forget not the forty martyrs of Sebaste, in which town your beloved sons, Prince Stephen and Prince Vuk, are now vassals in the army of the Sultan. Pray that they may be given help from God, come, you, too, to our aid, wherever you may be.
‘Look on my humble offerings and magnify them with your regard, for the praise I offer is not worthy of you, but is only the little that I can do. But as you, my dear Ruler and Holy Martyr, were ever generous of temporal and passing things, how much more freely so will you give us of those great and everlasting things which you have received from God. You abundantly gave me what my body needed when I came to you as a stranger in exile, and now I pray you both that you will save me and that you will calm the wild storm in my soul and in my body. Euphemia offers this from her heart, O blessed saint!’
Belgrade III
What has made modern Belgrade, though no one could guess it by looking at the town, is a conscious attempt to restore the glories of the medieval Serbian Empire. The nostalgic frescoes of Oplenats truly reveal the dominating fantasy not only of the Karageorgevitches but of the Serbian people. The memory of the Nemanyas and their wealth and culture was kept alive among the peasants, partly by the Orthodox Church, which very properly never ceased to remind them that they had once formed a free and Christian state, and also by the national ballads. These poems are not quite so artless as they seem. They were composed by the Serbs, more or less collectively, quite a century after the battle of Kossovo, on the model of the chansons de geste, which reached the Balkan Peninsula through Dalmatia at a very early date. Thereafter the full force of the artistic genius of the nation, denied all other outlet, poured into this medium; and the late eighteenth century, which marked the decline of folk-song in the West, here brought it new strength, for the nationalist and liberal ideas popularized by the French Revolution found their perfect expression ready-made in the laments of this enslaved people. The Serbs who took part in the first rising against the Turks in 1804 were, therefore, nothing like primitives who were simply revolting against an immediate injustice. That revolt they were making; but also they were the heirs of a highly developed civilization, which they intended from the first to create anew.
It is possible that the monasteries of the Frushka Gora, the blackened body of the Tsar Lazar, exerted a direct influence on this rising. Karageorge, after the flight from Serbia during which he killed his stepfather, joined the Austrian Army; and though he deserted for a time and became a Haiduk in the mountains, because he believed that he was unfairly neglected in a distribution of medals, he ultimately rejoined his regiment and was accepted by his colonel, who was greatly impressed by his personality, and got him employment after the end of the Turco-Austrian War as a forest ranger in the Frushka Gora. He was there for some years before the mildness of the new Pasha of Belgrade, Hadji Mustapha, ‘the Mother of Serbia,’ tempted him to return to Serbia. He had therefore an ideological experience which is not conveyed in the usual description of him as a swine-herd; and indeed even his material circumstances are not what the term suggests. He was a dealer in swine on such a large scale that his income was probably equivalent to about a thousand pounds a year at the time when he was chosen as the Commandant of Serbia. Though the common lot of the Christian inhabitants of the Ottoman provinces was poverty-stricken, a certain number of exceptions enjoyed quite a handsome degree of prosperity; and according to the usual paradox of revolutions it was these exceptions and not the oppressed multitude who revolted.
It is not clear why the Serbs chose Karageorge for this office. He was over forty. Though he had served in the Austrian Army he does not seem to have won any particular distinction. He was of definitely unstable temperament: he was subject to fits of abstraction that lasted for days, and to gusts of violence caused by flimsy suspicion. But he had a superb physique. He was tall even for a race of tall men, with burning eyes, wild coal-black hair, a face that was still handsome though deeply scared, and a strange vibrant voice. He was a born warrior, and war was the breath of life in his nostrils. More than all else he liked to take part in a cavalry charge, spring from his horse at the climactic moment, and use his rifle in close combat; he shot with his left hand because his right had been smashed to pieces i
n one of his early campaigns. He had the prestige of high courage, and also that other strange, almost mystical prestige which is accorded to a wealthy man who renounces the more obvious enjoyments that his money might buy. It was the habit of these prosperous Serb rebels to practise a certain imitation of the Turkish pashas, to dress in silks and use gold harness and chased arms, and keep a certain degree of state in their homes. Karageorge dressed and lived and worked with his hand like a peasant.
These were intimations of a certain distinction, but not of the degree or kind which Karageorge afterwards manifested. He showed himself for nine years as one of the most remarkable men in European history. He was brilliant not only as a fighting soldier but as a strategist; his use of his forces to harass an enemy that outnumbered them sometimes by three to one is among the most amazing triumphs of military genius, and it is the more amazing since he had seen the inside of no staff college. He was also a skilful diplomatist, both in dealing with his own people, whom he had to educate in the primal idea of unity, and in playing off Austria and Russia against Turkey without compromising Serbian independence. In the task of setting up some sort of governmental system to oust Turkish maladministration he acted like a farseeing statesman. There, indeed, he showed the first and most unexpected qualities of his genius.
It was evident that the strong individualities of the rebels threatened the country with another form of the anarchy they were seeking to correct. There was every possibility that it might be split up under regional military chiefs, who would wrangle among themselves and reduce the Balkan Christians to the same state of disunity that had left them helpless before the Turks four hundred years before. To control this situation Karageorge founded a Skupshtina or Parliament, of Chiefs, which met each New Year to settle all military matters, tactical, strategic, political, financial, and disciplinary. But this was obviously not a complete government, and shortly after a visit of certain Serbian chiefs to the Tsar led to the formation of another body. In the course of their journey they went to Kharkov, in Poland, and there they met a lawyer named Filipovitch, who was a native of Novi Sad, a descendant of the seventeenth-century Serb migrants. He suggested that he should accompany them home and found a legislative and judicial system in Serbia. They agreed, and took him back with them to Karageorge, who, loyal to the influences of the Frushka Gora, made him welcome and told him to get on with the job.
Filipovitch then sat down and drafted a constitution for the Serbian state. He invented a Soviet, or Council, of twelve persons elected and paid by different districts to manage the general affairs of the country. He inaugurated it, and became its Secretary. There is extant the correspondence in which he made financial provision for the Army by selling the houses and land owned by Turks in Serbian territory, fixed the taxes, organized a system of magistrates, and instructed the Soviet delegates in the exact nature of their rights while warning them against corruption. He also promulgated a legal code based on the Code Napoleon. It is difficult to think of any man in all history who undertook a more comprehensive labour single-handed; and it is interesting to find that Filipovitch was never a vociferous patriot. He appears to have accepted the post largely to escape the climate of Kharkov, which he found extremely disagreeable. But he had a truly legalist mind, in the highest sense, and he delighted in the task of imposing order on a disorderly society for order’s sake; and it is quite apparent that that delight found a response in Karageorge’s very different nature.
He supported Filipovitch enthusiastically in his educational schemes, which were ambitious. Till that time the only schools in Serbia were held in the monasteries, and attendance at them involved great inconvenience, for the monks could not afford to house pupils who did not help in the cultivation of their lands, and a scanty education took several years. The Soviet was instructed by Filipovitch to found an elementary school in every big town, and a secondary school of ambitious curriculum in Belgrade. This greatly pleased Karageorge, for though he himself could not read or write he was a great believer in education, and he was always impressing on his followers, who were for the most part as illiterate as himself, the advantages of having all business recorded in writing.
Even after Filipovitch’s premature death Karageorge continued to work on his high plans. It became obvious as time went on that the Senate did not counterbalance the Skupshtina as had been hoped. The power of the rebel chiefs was, in fact, the only real power in the land, and soon it controlled the Soviet indirectly just as it directly controlled the Skupshtina. They seemed likely not only to split up the country so that it would be helpless before external aggression, but also to become greedy and oppressive despots not to be distinguished from the Turkish pashas. Karageorge met this threat by deposing two of the most powerful chiefs, and by using his prestige as national Commandant to dominate the Soviet and force on it regard for the interests of the whole people. He took this attitude partly, no doubt, because the democratic tradition of the Slavs was working in him, but chiefly because he knew as a soldier the importance of national unity to a country perpetually threatened by foreign dominance.
Karageorge kept at his task with unremitting grimness; and indeed he must have seemed a grim figure, for the essence of his struggle was austerity. He was fighting against the Turks, the practitioners of pagan luxury; and in the first part of his struggle he engaged those among the Turks who were the most skilful in that practice, the rebellious Janizaries who had given Sarajevo its intoxicating air of pleasure, and were rebelling against the reformist Sultan Selim because he was endeavouring to brace them to a new and Spartan dispensation. One of his followers has left us an account of a night the Serbian Army spent during the campaign of 1805 on the heights above the town of Parachin, which was occupied by the Turks. When the trenches had been dug and Karageorge had inspected them and seen that all was prepared for the morrow’s battle, he sat down on a cannon and asked his officers if there was any plum brandy about. They fetched him a flask of plum brandy and some corn-pone, and he drank and passed the flask to them, and shared the corn-pone out. They looked down on Parachin, which was blazing with light in the darkness below. It seemed almost to be in flames, such was the brightness. Light was streaming out from the Pasha’s palace, and they could hear the sound of pipes and flutes and drums. One of Karageorge’s suite, a man who was called Stephen the Scribe and was kept simply as a secretary, being notoriously no good as a soldier, looked down on the town and said, ‘Do let me fire off this gun at the Turks!’ Karageorge laughed at him, but he went on begging. ‘Do let me take one shot—just one—at the palace!’ Karageorge jeered, ‘But you might kill the Pasha!’ ‘Well, why not?’ asked Stephen the Scribe. ‘Well,’ said Karageorge, ‘you mustn’t do that. You might make his children orphans, and they’d have nobody to buy them shoes, and then they might catch cold running round barefoot and die of fever.’ But Stephen the Scribe teased him till he got his way, and very unskilfully pointed the gun and fired it. The ball cut through the air like lightning, and went straight for the Pasha’s palace. In one instant the flutes and pipes and drums came to a stop, the lights went out, and there was darkness and silence. Very often Karageorge’s rebellion must have seemed just such a murderous cannon-ball, that put an end to brightness and music, and established the night.
His end was not to be deduced from his beginning. After a time the war he had to conduct changed its form. The Serbs had begun their insurrection to rid themselves of the Dahis, the rebel Janizaries who had set themselves up as independent despots in defiance of the Sultan; but when they had beheaded the four chiefs they began to dream of freeing themselves from Turkey. Indeed, the treachery with which the Sultans treated them in spite of their services made them realize this as a necessity. This raised a problem which differed from year to year according to the situation of Europe. When Napoleon defeated Austria and the Turks were harried by Britain and Russia, then Serbia had reason for hope. But Napoleon’s star waned, Russia was a preoccupied and often disloyal ally, and T
urkey was reorganized by the great Sultan Mohammed II. Finally in 1813 a Serbian army of fifty thousand faced an army of treble that number. Defeat was certain, but the Serbians knew what it was to be outnumbered and could quite well have put up enough resistance to gain them a negotiated peace, had not Karageorge, quite simply and shamefully, run away. He fell back, when he should have been bringing up reinforcements to support a harassed body of troops who were making a magnificent stand before the main Turkish army. His officers suddenly found he had deserted them without a word of explanation. For a time he wandered about the country, and then fled over the Danube back to Novi Sad and the Frushka Gora.
Nobody knows the reason for Karageorge’s conduct. He never published any justification of it. Till then his worst enemies had never charged him with cowardice or lack of care for his country. It is possible that fatigue had released that unstable element which had caused his early fits of melancholy and abstraction. His family life had been tragic. The murder of his stepfather had not been the only act of violence which he had been obliged to commit against his family. He had a ne‘er-do-well brother who had crowned his career by committing rape. This was an offence which was regarded as being at least as serious as murder; it was so often committed by Moslems on Christians that for a Christian to rape a Christian was not only a sexual crime, it had a renegade flavour. So Karageorge ordered his brother to be hanged at the door of his house, and forbade his mother to mourn her son. This was the appointed procedure, and there was nothing remarkable about it, but the relationship of brother and brother among Slavs is peculiarly close, and even if his individual sensibility was calloused his racial self must have been appalled.