Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

by Rebecca West

  Prishtina

  ‘This is Prishtina,’ said Constantine. Prishtina was one of the capitals of the Serbian monarchs; for they had a peripatetic court to cope with the immensity of their new country, as was the custom in early Hungary and Germany, and held it now at Skoplje, now at Tetovo, now here, now in some northern town nearer the Danube. We blinked at a dull and dusty little village. ‘Here we must have lunch,’ continued Constantine, ‘for it will be too late when we get to Trepcha. You can throw away your flowers,’ he added, with the melancholy and unaggressive malice of an invalid, ‘they are all dead.’ We sat down at a table outside a hotel in the principal square. Near us a horse, angular as a Euclidean diagram, seemed to be holding up and to be held up by a greenish cab. Rickety little wooden shops, like hencoops on an ill-found small-holding, leaned up against each other, proffering at their oblique doors and in their tiny windows the smallest and most ingenuous specimens conceivable of the goods it was their business to sell.

  A waiter took our order. Because the Turks were in the Balkans, and where Turks were there were coffee-houses, the smallest town here-abouts is familiar with the waiter, who in Western countries is the sign of a sophisticated centre. There came to stand beside us the hotel-keeper, very complacent about his position. Around us sat men in Western clothes more fantastic than any peasant costume could be, because they and their tailors had never seen a suit till they were grown men. It did not take us long to order lunch, for the bill of fare was short. ‘Chicken and rice,’ the waiter said, and the hotel-keeper echoed plumply, ‘Chicken and rice.’ He bent down, and shifted the tablecloth so that there fell at my place a particularly fine wine-stain, large and of a decorative shape, which the sunlight of some days had mellowed to a delicate mauve. With such an air, on days when I have been looking my best or have been companioned by the great, the maîtres d’ hôtel of famous restaurants have greeted me with gardenias.

  ‘When you go back to England,’ said Constantine sourly, ‘you will despise us for this, and say that we are all like pigs, and you will forget that we have had no advantages like you in your country who have always been rich.’ ‘Nonsense,’ I said, ‘I know quite well that this means nothing more than that people hereabouts have not yet heard about the convention that tablecloths should be clean. They know in most places that the world has made up its mind that bedclothes must not be dirty, they have learned it only too well. In a hotel at Nish I once spent a most wretched night, coughing and choking myself awake every time I fell asleep, because the sheets had been boiled in a powerful disinfectant. It was like going to bed in a bottle of smelling salts. Those people will be far cleaner than the English once they begin.’

  ‘There is one thing, I notice,’ said my husband, ‘and that is that whether Prishtina is clean or dirty, and in spite of the fact that it is extremely poor, I think poorer than any other town that we have visited—though not of course poorer than some of the villages—the people are not downcast. The hotel-keeper is very proud of being what he is and where he is. He does not dream of apologizing for his surroundings, as I have known hotel-keepers do in places that struck me as simple and beautiful. And the people who go by look very cheerful, though their faces are lined and their bodies marrowless and bent.’ ‘It is because they were worse before,’ said Constantine. ‘This district was the worst of any place in the Christian provinces of Turkey, because there was nothing here but the simplest agriculture, there were neither urban centres of trade and industry, nor even any luxury crops like tobacco. They raised nothing here but grain and animals.’ ‘In fact,’ said my husband, ‘they raised the most necessary things there are, therefore they were desperately poor. You need not trouble to tell us that. It is so in our country also, and indeed all over the world. That is perhaps the fault for which we are going to be punished.’

  ‘It is perhaps the fault for which Byzantium was punished,’ I said; ‘the two classes, the “powerful” and the “poor,” fought hard from the ninth century. The small landowners and the free peasants were so constantly harried by invasion and civil war that they bartered their liberty in return for the protection of the great nobles, who took advantage of the position to absorb the small landowners’ estates and to make serfs of the free peasants. At first the monarchy fought these great nobles, and even appeared to have vanquished them. Feudalism, the exploitation of a country by its large landowners, could not exist in a declared theocracy, which implied the conception of divinely impartial justice for all individuals and every class. But when the Latins invaded the Byzantine Empire they brought with them the feudal system which was established in their own countries, and it could not be driven out with them, because the Byzantine nobles, like all the rich, would rather choke than not have their mouths full, and applauded the idea of any extension of their wealth and their power, however dangerous. Therefore Byzantine society became inconsistent. Its claim to theocracy was no longer a holy myth, but a glutton’s lie.

  ‘Yes,’ I continued, delighted to speak on a subject of which my husband knew less than I did, ‘that sowed the seed of ruin in the state. The poor were thereafter so poor that the aggressive among them became mercenary soldiers with no loyalty save to the nobles who paid them. I fancy that the centre of power was shifting towards Serbia in these last days because the peasant, though he was nearly everywhere bound to his land and forbidden to sell it, had his definite legal rights on which the nobles were not allowed to encroach, and he could very easily, if he showed ability in managing his land and in his general conduct, join the ranks of the lesser nobility. One got, in fact, an expanding country that gave its citizens no reason to foment civil disorder and every reason to resist invasion. Had it not been for the Turks, Byzantine civilization could have retreated here and known a second flowering in the Serbian Empire, just as a considerable part of our European civilization has retreated to America and lives there in universities and art galleries and concert-rooms and laboratories planned on an ampler scale than we can afford.’

  ‘What is this?’ asked my husband. This was no rhetorical question. He really wanted to know. ‘It is your chicken and rice,’ said the waiter. ‘Yes, it is your chicken and rice,’ chirruped the hotel-keeper. The dish regarded as a whole was not unpalatable, for the rice was well cooked; with some good bread, butter, sheep’s cheese, white wine, and cherries, we did not do so badly. But the bird itself was a ghastly prodigy, lean and twisted in its leanness, like one of El Greco’s fasting saints. In these parts, because the poverty of the land forbids the peasants to fatten their stock for more than a few weeks, one often eats very young meat, the stuff the germ plasm puts out into the world however its adult transmitter has been nourished, part of the continuous belt of animal life. The lamb and the sucking-pig are made on such a scale that their birth-right of flesh amounts to something, but on the small and complicated bone structure of a bird it is hardly more than a flavour. This being the only kind of poultry that the hotel-keeper knew, he beamed at us as we worried the carcass. A plump chicken that was easy to eat would have seemed to him wrong in the same way as a golf-course with no hazards.

  ‘It does not matter at all, my dear,’ said my husband. ‘I have really done very well.’ But the chicken had perhaps some part in making him say, ‘Perhaps you are right in thinking that Serbia could have carried on the work of Byzantium, but I doubt it. I seem to remember that there were Byzantine writers who recorded their impressions of visits to Serbia with positive disgust at its barbarity. There was, I think, a writer called Gregoras.’ ‘There was indeed,’ I replied, ‘but he was an ass.’ That was apt to be the character of Byzantine writers. There could be no effective literature, because there was no integrated language. Three kinds of Greek were known in Byzantium. There was first the childish and degenerate Greek spoken by the poor, and secondly the supple and developed Greek used by the wealthy, and there was a vast difference between these two languages because there was a wide gulf between these two classes. There was also classical Gree
k which all educated people had to learn; and the professional man of letters felt that to keep up his dignity he must either write this third form of language or the wealthy man’s Greek distorted to resemble it as much as possible. That is to say he wrote as a conscious snob and dilettante, which is never a good prescription; and Gregoras brought to the task a fatuity which we can recognize in its full distastefulness, because it flourishes unchanged today.

  He wrote with that verbosity which results not from exuberance but from destitution. ‘The sun had crossed half our meridian,’ he writes somewhere, ‘it was now on its way to hide itself and was descending as it does every day, towards the horizon.’ Through millions of such phrases there emerges the horrid fact that he exactly resembled the more tiresome type of well-to-do Englishman. He wrote a letter to a friend about his visit on a diplomatic mission to Serbia at the end of the thirteenth century which has been widely quoted by historians, particularly by those who are anti-Slav; and in this the resemblance is stark. This expedition which, as he put it, ‘comprised a sevenfold decade of man and beast,’ began badly by starting at night, for no respectable reason, and blundering along a path by a river through a forest, where they became embroiled with a number of armed men whom they assumed to be bandits, but who turned out to be a frontier police maintained by the Serbian Empire. There is something very English in the circumstance that none of the party knew more than a few words of Serbian, although for a hundred years it had been of vital importance to Byzantium to have good commercial and diplomatic relations with Serbia. When they got to the Serbian court at Skoplje, Gregoras and his friends had no eyes for anything native to the country, for they were so enormously impressed by the Serbian King Stephen’s mother-in-law, who had been married to the Byzantine Emperor John Palaeologus and had recently been bereaved of her husband. He himself took enormous snob-pleasure in her grief which took the form of magnificent purple Gummidgery, and felt flattered at being allowed to watch her apostrophizing her husband as ‘Oh, thou heir to numerous Emperors, who wert adorned with all the virtues,’ while tearing at her cheeks till her nails were red with blood.

  The insufficiently diplomatic mission clustered round her for ten days, comforting her for her loss and for bearing it in his savage country. The Serbian King, they whispered, was not showing nearly enough respect to the Queen Mother in the arrangements he was making for her return to Constantinople, but what could one expect? Monkeys, they tartly agreed, must act like monkeys and ants like ants, and neither can be expected to behave like eagles and lions. In a typical sentence Gregoras says, ‘He was truly a sage who first conceived in his mind, and expressed it in his words, whether he was Thales of Mileto or Plato son of Aristo, or both, the second having borrowed from the first, that he was grateful from the bottom of his heart because he had been born a Greek and not a barbarian.’ Really, he titters, when he and his party remembered how things were done in Constantinople, they felt as if here in Serbia they had fallen among beetles that were decked out with necklaces and bracelets.

  That touches a chord familiar to those of us who are acquainted with the Transatlantic situation: ‘My dear, it was too awful, seeing all those wonderful jewels and marvellous clothes worn by these dreadfully vulgar people.’ It unfortunately happens that, though many nice little boys and girls die when young, the nasty child who spoils the Christmas party by jeering at the presents on the tree always grows up; and if he is a European he is certain, though not so certain as he would have been a hundred years ago, to despise the United States. Such as he affect to hate a new and expanding society for its ostentation and vulgarity, but the truth is that they can tolerate social ritual only when it has crystallized into an opaque form which conceals its inner meaning. Hospitality that is still determined by generosity and wealth that enjoys its own good fortune disturb them by recalling fundamental realities which their effeteness would prefer to forget. To this class Gregoras clearly belonged; and just as nothing that could be said against America by an English dowager duchess who had not done so well as she had hoped out of her lectures on her herb garden could avail against the known handsomeness of the continent, so Gregoras’s letter cannot prove its point against the genius of Grachanitsa.

  ‘But tell me,’ said my husband, ‘which King Stephen was it who had the Byzantine mother-in-law? For I thought that the Stephen who was Milutin’s son and was blinded by him and succeeded him had married a Bulgarian princess.’ But this was one of the occasions when life falls into a pattern, when the design repeats itself, Stephen did not come easily to his crown. In order to inherit it he had been obliged to keep up his pretence that he was blind until his father was dead, and therefore quite a number of people believed that he would be unable to defend it. His brother or half-brother, Constantine, who like himself had been bastardized by Milutin’s annulment of his earlier marriages when he married Simonis, and his cousin Vladislav, son of that crippled King Dragutin who had abdicated and become the Catholic King of Bosnia, both tried to snatch his throne. Vladislav he merely exiled to Hungary, but Constantine he had nailed to a cross and then sawn asunder. This was not an uncommon form of punishment in the fourteenth century, and Stephen, though humane, was no more than a man of his time. Then, and not until then, was he sure of his kingdom and free to live according to his own nature.

  But immediately Stephen became a faithful copy of his father, who had been his enemy and had been thought his antithesis. At the first possible moment he initiated just such overtures to the Papacy as Milutin had made in the earlier part of his reign, even going so far as receiving a Papal Legate to discuss the terms on which the Serbian Empire was to be handed over to Roman Catholicism. He had no need to imitate his father in divorce, for his first wife had died, but he attempted to follow him in matrimonial opportunism, for he tried to marry Blanche, the daughter of Philip of Taranto, a member of the house of Anjou exercising titular suzerainty over most of Greece and Albania, in order to ally himself with the Catholic Latin powers who were threatening Orthodox Byzantium. This was perfidy more monstrous than Milutin‘s, for it was the great Archbishop Nicodemus who had saved Stephen from exile by persuading his father to recall him and who had secured him his throne by throwing the influence of the Church against Constantine and Vladislav. It was also exceedingly imprudent, for the Serbs were fully as devoted to Orthodoxy as they had been in the previous reign, and the Papacy had lost much of its influence by leaving Rome for Avignon. When after five years he abandoned this policy it was only to imitate another of Milutin’s mistakes, for he then married a Byzantine princess. It is true that his bride, Marya Palaeologus, was a less sinister character than Simonis, but the marriage resembled its earlier prototype in two respects. It was unpopular with the Serbian nationalist party, who wanted the Byzantines to be united with them by military force rather than by family relations; and it sowed trouble between the King and his heir.

  Life is most apt to repeat a design and fall into a pattern when it is weak and diseased. When it is powerful and healthy it is always unpredictable. This means that timid people refuse to let it take its course and insist on provoking events with which they are already familiar, preferring the known evil to the unknown. Some of the repetition on which Stephen insisted added to the power and the glory of Serbia, for what he imitated was his father’s strength. He followed him in church-building; Dechani, the great monastery at Petch we were going to visit after we had seen Kossovo and the Trepcha mines, was his foundation. He followed him in military triumph; there was a new Bulgarian Tsar, Michael, who found the Byzantine Empire quite ready to combine with him against Serbia, in spite of the marital alliance made through Marya Palaeologus, and this invasion Stephen brilliantly defeated in a decisive battle at Kustendil, which was then known as Velbuzhd. But the weakness that made him an imitator made his imitations of strength of no avail.

  Milutin had raged against his son, blinded and exiled him, pardoned him and kept him impotent after the reconciliation, because he was the
stronger of the two. Even had Stephen had the power to revolt against him, his political wisdom had created a people so contented that they would never have considered supporting the son against the father. Milutin’s genius guaranteed him the right to sit in his throne till natural death removed him. But when Stephen raged against his son he invited a different destiny, for his son was a greater man than himself or Milutin, and against this menacing and prodigious heir he had built no bulwark of a people’s loyalty. He had indeed greatly alarmed and irritated the nobles by failing to consolidate his victory over Bulgaria by statesman-like action and leaving it a resentful and armed autonomous state. His son set himself at the head of the malcontents, conquered his father, and imprisoned him in a castle to the north of Kossovo. Then he had himself crowned king by the great scholar and statesman, Archbishop Daniel. It was necessary that this should be done soon, while his hands were still clean, since Daniel was incorruptible; for two months later, with his connivance if not by his actual orders, Stephen was strangled in prison.