by Rebecca West
This conservative politician, shining smooth, smooth as water as it slips over the lip of a precipice, came to Prishtina at a time when he should have been doubtful about his fate, being a new-fledged and not popularly acclaimed usurper; and indeed he was diffident as a Member of Parliament who for the sake of holding office has just crossed the floor of the House. He perhaps never knew a deeper diffidence. The town he entered, the town in which Constantine and my husband and I were lunching, was then very proud. It was built of wood, which some historians have mentioned as proof that it was primitive; but the Slav, like the Scandinavian, always builds in timber when he can, and the Mediterranean habit of using stone was determined by the lack of forest and the abundance of quarries in the south. Between the wooden houses the Serbian nobles and their ladies rode out to meet him, themselves handsome in red cloaks lined with fur and embroidered in gold, and their horses as handsome with silver trappings, often brought from Venice. They were not greatly divided by their Slavdom from their visitor. Many of them spoke Greek, and to Stephen Dushan it was as a second mother-tongue, since he had lived in Constantinople from his eighth to his fifteenth year; and the protocol of the court was definitely Byzantine, which pleased Cantacuzenus very much.
It was the Serb custom, he tells us, that when an eminent foreigner came to visit their King they both descended from their horses and the foreigner kissed his host on his face and breast. But Stephen Dushan ordered that when Cantacuzenus came he was to be greeted as he would have been within his own Empire; so all the nobles dismounted as soon as they saw him in the distance and when he approached them they stepped forward to kiss his knee where it was crooked against the saddle. Then he was taken to the palace, and was received very graciously by the Emperor and Empress, and when it was time for banqueting he was taken into a great hall and set at a table in a chair higher than Stephen Dushan’s own. Byzantine though he was, this banquet impressed him. The nobles and their ladies wore their ceremonial costume of green or yellow tunics, studded with diamonds and precious stones and the cut gems of ancient Greece, and belted with silver and gold. Then men carried magnificent daggers and wore jewelled rings and bracelets and crosses suspended from the neck, and the women were crowned with intricately wrought diadems of gold and silver, from which fine chains ran down to take part of the weight of their immense and gorgeous earrings. To the music of flutes they drank great quantities of mead and wine, and ate game and venison and fish which had come in snow from the Danube, with many kinds of vegetables and fruits and sheep’s milk and honey; and there was also about the table the orchestral murmur of a great cosmopolitan court. Many Italians and Spanish and Asiatics had come to Serbia to seek their fortune, and Stephen Dushan had for his personal guard a company of German soldiers, in imitation of the Byzantine Emperor’s famous Varangian guard of Scandinavians and English. But Cantacuzenus was not more impressed by the wealth and cosmopolitan quality of the court than by its fine and formal manners. He was hardly ever suffered, he says, to remain alone in his tent. Nearly every day Stephen Dushan sent a deputation of the most distinguished old nobles and the most charming young pages, to beg him to come to the palace and give the court more of his delightful company; and when Cantacuzenus obeyed the summons Stephen Dushan would come to meet his guest at the door of his great apartment, and sometimes even at the place where he dismounted.
When enough time had passed to satisfy the convention that there was nothing behind the visit save pure sociability, Stephen Dushan asked Cantacuzenus whether he had come to ask any favour of him, and expressed the hope that if this were so he would be able to accede. Cantacuzenus answered by a reference to the myth of the gods gone avisiting, and said that he had come to gain Stephen Dushan’s friendship, since the wise esteemed nothing so highly as a faithful friend. But he went on to admit that he sought his host’s aid in restoring order to the Byzantine Empire. He added that if Stephen Dushan did not want to help him he would like to be told so at once, in order that he could look for other means of salvation; and one perceives in his account of his own conversation how clever a performing flea he was. He made his appeal in terms that enmeshed Stephen Dushan by the twin assumptions that they were gentlemen talking together, and that the one who altered the tone of the conversation from the tenor determined by himself would prove himself no gentleman, and by a strong hint that if help were refused the refusal would be taken as proceeding from impotence.
This last suggestion Stephen Dushan, whose security depended largely on his prestige, could not let pass. He had soldiers enough to give Cantacuzenus all the help he needed, he said, if Cantacuzenus proved that he really wanted it. Cantacuzenus expressed wonder at the phrase. What proof could be necessary? Stephen Dushan replied that he could believe in Cantacuzenus’s desire for help if he handed over to the Serbian crown all the towns of Thrace: that is to say, on the Greek seaboard east of Salonika. It was in fact not an exorbitant demand. The inhabitants of the Byzantine Empire were by this time mostly Slav and not Greek, so there was no racial reason why the Serbs and Bulgars and Byzantines should not coalesce, and it was imperative that the territory should fall under the shield of a strong government. Often aggressors have justified their thefts on such grounds, but here in South-East Europe, in the middle of the fourteenth century, they happened to be valid. Ungoverned towns on the seaboard meant a door unlocked to the robbers from the Catholic West.
Cantacuzenus answered Stephen Dushan very much as an English diplomat of the worst old type might speak to an American who was being tiresome about the debt settlement. The theme of gentlemanliness was recapitulated with frosty delicacy. ‘You speak very reasonably,’ he told him, ‘concerning the reward you want; for there is no wise man who does not expect a return when he goes to trouble and expense. So, if your instinct does not tell you that you ought to help me as an act of grace, you are right to ask me to buy your assistance. But if I buy it and pay for it, I shall be under no obligation to you, for who pays for what he buys feels under no obligation to the seller. But if you help me out of generous friendship, and out of ambition of a sort honourable to a sovereign, it will be a glory to you to have taken up arms for such noble motives, and not from greed, as low natures would. Moreover,’ he added, ‘if you have me as a friend while I enjoy the imperial power, you will possess all that I possess, since everything is shared among friends, as the philosophers say.’ He had made perfect use of his technique; he was now to show his perfect blindness to reality. ‘If your offer of help is conditional on the surrender of the towns you claimed, say so frankly,’ he ended coldly, ‘so that I can make other arrangements. For I swear to you that I will never surrender a single town; but I will guard them all as I have guarded my own children.’ They were not his children; they could not be guarded so long as he pretended they were.
Stephen Dushan then fell into a transport of rage, which must have been impressive enough. Foreigners who visited his court describe him as ‘the tallest of all men of his time,’ and a fresco portrait shows him sinewy, with black eyes burning over high cheek-bones. There was reason in his rage against Cantacuzenus, for the usurper was in his weakness a threat to the peace of the whole Balkan world. But Stephen Dushan was calmed by his wife, the Empress Helen, and he consented to summon the Diet of twenty-four of his most important nobles and discuss the issue with them. There an important part was played by Helen, in a fashion illustrating the ambivalence with which men regard women. They love them and they hate them; they pamper them and ill-treat them; and women are at once slaves and freer than men. In medieval Serbia women must have been chattels, for their evidence was not accepted in the law courts; and such a rule always implies that no woman is sufficiently assured of protection by society to risk giving evidence that has not been dictated to her by some man. Yet the Empress Helen was able to rise in the Diet and make a long speech urging a rejection or at least a modification of her husband’s policy, in terms which suggest that she was accustomed to using her mind vigorously and wi
thout fear.
This speech was extremely able. She affirmed that the Serbs were under no obligation to consider Cantacuzenus’s interests before their own, but warned them to judge carefully what was best for them. In cryptic phrases, which we now know to have referred to an offer made by Anne of Savoy to hand over an immense slice of Byzantine territory in return for Cantacuzenus alive or dead, she repudiated the possibility of harming their guest. That, she said, would be a crime displeasing to men and odious to God. She believed that they should aid Cantacuzenus; for he had in the past proved himself an able governor, and if he regained imperial power might be a dangerous enemy. She suggested that the price they should ask of him for their aid should be not new towns but recognition of their claim to the towns which they and their ancestors had already taken from the Byzantines. With shrewdness greater than was recognized by Cantacuzenus, she pointed out that he would probably accept these conditions since the loss of these towns brought no personal disgrace on him.
The Empress convinced both the Diet and her husband. Stephen Dushan made a speech and thanked her for her care for his people, and then went to Cantacuzenus and said, smiling, ‘You have won, you have persuaded us to undertake all sorts of hardships and trials for your sake.’ When Cantacuzenus heard Helen’s proposals he accepted them eagerly and sat down happily to turn out more of his exquisitely accomplished paperwork. But his fortune was crumbling so fast that the basis of the treaty altered between its drafting and its signing. A military adventurer who was straddling the border between Serbia and Byzantium, acknowledging the allegiance of now one and now the other according to their fortunes, took another Byzantine town and hastened to drop it into Stephen Dushan’s lap. It was an ill omen. The fellow was an infallible barometer, and since it was his opinion that Cantacuzenus meant nothing, that probably was his real value, and alliance with him was of no service to Serbia. But Stephen Dushan went on with the treaty, insisting merely that the town should be added to the list of his possessions and the adventurer should be declared his subject, though Cantacuzenus fought hard to keep them under his impotence. Then the twenty-four members of the Diet were called together and told, by an admirable form of parliamentary procedure which has been insufficiently imitated, that since they had decided that military aid should be given to Cantacuzenus they must now provide it, and twenty of them were sent off at the head of troops with orders to obey their new general in all things. They must have left Stephen Dushan reflecting, as Elizabeth was so often forced to do, that no man has any reliable ally save in his own right hand.
Eight years later Cantacuzenus and Stephen Dushan met again: a long way from Prishtina, outside Salonika. By this time Cantacuzenus was far advanced in his competent and complacent pursuit of destruction, and Stephen Dushan had pushed out his strength to north, south, east, and west, gathering to himself mastery of the Balkans. He had made Skoplje a great city, and there he had been crowned one Easter Sunday Emperor and Autocrat of the Serbs and Byzantines, the Bulgars and the Albanians. His upbringing in Constantinople had always profoundly influenced the etiquette of his palace, and now he lived in an exact imitation of the Byzantine court; he had assumed the tiara and used the double eagle as his emblem, and his officials were called by the names borne by their originals in Byzantium, Sebastocrator and Grand Logothete, Grand Domestic and Sacellary. The imitation went deeper than nomenclature. He was not, of course, wholly free from care. When Cantacuzenus, in a last ill-considered effort to reclaim territory which he could not hold, had marched against him he had found it far from child‘s-play to repel the attack, for his Catholic enemies had stabbed him in the back on the Bosnian frontier. But he was magnificent, imperially magnificent. The land he stood on as he faced Cantacuzenus was to its further distances his, or about to become his, drawn to him by the magnetism of his true power, which all others lacked.
He had first to resist Cantacuzenus’s reproaches of perfidy. Like Elizabeth he awoke in his enemies an indignant sense that they had had to deal with an infinity of cunning and trickery; but any animal will run like a fox if it is hunted like a fox. Unquestionably he had broken treaties he had made with Cantacuzenus, but the alteration in the two men’s statuses must have made it difficult to observe them. It would be hard to execute a document signed by a living man and a phantom. The further rights and wrongs of this dispute cannot be judged, for at this stage of his memoirs Cantacuzenus had arrived at a decision, not unfamiliar in autobiography, that he could only be fair to himself by lying. But he tells us something of Stephen Dushan which we can believe because it is not credible. It struck the unimaginative Cantacuzenus as so odd that he put it down in the hope of discrediting his successful rival. He says that in the midst of their open conference, in the hearing of all the Byzantines and Serbs, Stephen Dushan suddenly confessed that he was very greatly frightened of Cantacuzenus and his forces. Yes, he said, he feared them horribly. If the thought of them came to him as he slept, he woke in a sweat; if it came to him before he slept, he stayed awake all night. This was a surprising note; and it was struck again later in the conversation. Cantacuzenus asked him how he had come to lower himself by paying a certain state visit to Venice and making obeisances to the republic unsuitable in the ruler of a kingdom so much more mighty and extensive; and he answered that he was well aware how much beneath his dignity his bearing had been, but fear had compelled him. He added that, considering what fear was, he wondered it had made him do nothing baser. Cantacuzenus naively said to himself that evidently he and the whole world had been acting on far too elevated a conception of Siephen Dushan’s character, and forthwith demanded from him the return of all the Byzantine territory he had conquered.
Stephen Dushan was amazed by the suggestion. He had merely been discussing the nature of fear and the occasional sick fancies to which he, like all born of woman, was subject; he had not had the slightest intention of acting weakly. It is as if a Dostoievsky character came marching to us through Cæsar’s De Bello Gallico. There could be no more curious proof of the identity of the Slav character through the ages, for he was plainly giving rein to the desire that governs the Slav of today, the desire to know the whole. Finding himself at the extremity of a condition, he leaned out of his destiny towards its opposite, trying to understand that also. Had he been defeated and hopeless, he would have talked of triumph till his hearers would have wondered at his boasting. So it was natural for him to explore his potentialities for terror, since, though danger still threatened him, it seemed that he had found a formula for its control.
The core of his power was his great strength, which enabled him to support the delicacy of his Slav mind. He was apparently a man of the explosive but easy temper which goes with perfect health and exceptional vitality. A glimpse of his habitual being is given in that part of the Acts of the Saints which deals with St Peter Thomas, a curiously stupid and tactless person who was very unsuitably employed as a Papal Legate. He was sent to the Serbian court to labour for its conversion, but for some mysterious reason refused to make the usual obeisance on being received by the Emperor. Not unnaturally Stephen Dushan was carried away by rage, and he forbade the Roman Catholics about the court to attend a Mass at which the Legate was to officiate on the following day, on pain of having their eyes put out. St Peter Thomas interpreted this to mean that he ran the risk of being killed, though blinding, which was a recognized penalty borrowed by the Serbs from the Byzantines, never entailed death. But he went ahead and celebrated the Mass, which was attended by many of the German guards and other Catholic courtiers. It was a singularly graceless act on their part, for there was complete religious freedom in the Serbian Empire, and they could have attended any Mass save that celebrated by the priest who had insulted their Emperor. But when Stephen Dushan sent for them, and they told him they were prepared to lose their lives as well as their eyes for their faith, he was shaken by sudden laughter and let them go unpunished as a reward for their spirit; and he treated St Peter Thomas for the rest of his sta
y with a special courtesy.
There shines through the story a reluctance to waste time on hatred and compulsion which is characteristic of Stephen Dushan. That may seem an odd testimonial to give a parricide; yet even that vast initial crime has aspects that warn us not to judge it as if it were a piece of our age. When Stephen Dushan murdered his father he neither killed nor imprisoned nor even exiled his stepmother. Six years afterwards he married her to the despot John Oliver and gave her a large dowry, including the Sheep’s Field and the town of Veles; and documents in which he called her his ‘well-beloved mother’ show that in the meantime she had been a respected figure at his court. We ask ourselves in vain how it can have been done, how the persons involved found it possible to go on breathing when they were in the same room, so great their reciprocity of fear and shame. But the situation is not shocking compared with Tudor practice, for Lady Jane Grey might well have sighed for some Nemanyan tolerance; and any comparison with the practice of modern times, though it would have been to our advantage thirty years ago, becomes less so with the, dawning of each day. It cannot be doubted that if Stephen Dushan failed to achieve the millennium it was not because he lacked the appetite for it. Like most of us, he would have used the means if he had known what they were.