g industries, and seemed on the point of striking a new
note in architecture. Her greatest Tsar, Stephen Dushan, died mysteriously
of poison, when his hosts were already thundering at the gates of
Constantinople (1356). But the greatness of his empire did not survive him,
and only a generation later Serbian independence received its death-blow
on the fatal field of Kosovo--the Flodden of the Balkans, but an event
far direr in its consequences than Flodden was to Scotland. Bosnia and a
fragment of Serbia lingered on under more or less independent rulers till
the middle of the fifteenth century. Then the Turkish night replaced the
Turkish twilight. From 1463 to 1804 the national life of the Serbs lay
utterly crushed. In Serbia their nobility was literally wiped out, in
Bosnia it accepted Islam in order to save its lands. The relations of
conqueror and conquered are best characterised by the single fact that
a Christian who failed to dismount from his horse on meeting a Turk was
liable to be killed on the spot.

Throughout this period of utter gloom only two things served to keep alive
the Serb tradition--their splendid popular ballads, unequalled in Europe
for directness and imagination, save, perhaps, by the ballads of the
Anglo-Scottish Border; and the clergy of the Orthodox Church, poor ignorant
despised peasants like their flock, yet bravely keeping the national flame
burning. The one bright spot was the tiny mountain eyrie of Montenegro,
which stubbornly maintained its freedom under a long succession of
warrior-priests.

The Serb Patriarchate, which had long had its seat in Ipek, migrated to
Austria in 1690, at the special invitation of the Emperor Leopold I., and
has ever since been established (though the title of patriarch lapsed for a
time) at Karlowitz on the Danube. Large settlements of refugee Serbs from
Turkey followed their spiritual chief to Croatia, Slavonia and the southern
plains of Hungary between 1690 and 1740. The special privileges granted to
them by the emperor were, however, gradually undermined and revoked by the
Hungarian Estates. Meanwhile the "Military Frontiers" were extended on
essentially democratic lines: a land-tenure subject to military service
bred a hereditary race of soldiers and officers devoted to the Imperial
idea, and it has taken many long long years of bungling on the part of
Viennese and Magyar diplomacy to efface that devotion.

Thus the Habsburg dominions became the centre of