as soon torn to pieces. Albania split off from the mass
almost at once, and was a separate principality under the Balsha
chiefs. And from that time Albania has never again fallen completely
under Serb power. The Turkish conquest crushed the Serbs and the
Albanians grew in power. We cannot here detail the history, suffice
it to say that in 1679 the Serbs of Kosovo, finding themselves
unable to resist the advance of the Albanians and the power of the
Turks, evacuated that district. Led by Arsenius, the Serb Patriarch,
thousands of families emigrated into Austria, who saved the Serb
people. Since then the Albanians had poured down and resettled in
the land of their ancestors.

From Berani our route lay through Arnaoutluk. We passed through
Rugova; nor did I know till afterwards that this was reputed one of
the most dangerous districts in Turkish territory and that no
European traveller had been that way for some twenty years. There
was a rough wooden mosque by the wayside. We halted. The people were
friendly enough and some one gave us coffee. I little thought 'that
in a few years time the place would be the scene of a hideous
massacre by the Montenegrins modelled on the Moslem-slaying of
Vladika Danilo. We reached Ipek after some sixteen hours of very
severe travel and knocked at the gates of the Patriarchia long after
nightfall--the very place whose Bishop had led the retreating Serb
population into Austria over two centuries before.

My arrival was a thunderbolt, both for the Patriarchia and the
Turkish authorities, who had forbidden the entry of strangers into
the district and closed the main routes to it, but had never
imagined any one would be so crazy as to drop in over the
Montenegrin frontier by way of Rugova.

The whole district was under military occupation. About thirty
thousand Turkish troops were camped in the neighbourhood, and I
learnt that a great deal of fighting had recently taken place.
Briefly, the position was that for the past two and a half centuries
the Albanians had been steadily re-occupying the lands of their
Illyrian ancestors and pressing back the small remaining Serb
population, and since the time of the Treaty of Berlin had been
struggling to wrest autonomy from the Turks and obtain recognition
as a nation. The whole of this district had been included in the
autonomous Albanian state proposed and mapped out by Lord Goschen
and Lord Fitzmaurice in 1880. Ipek, Jakova and Prizren were centr