first time of the unseen
forces which were at work in the Balkans. What these forces were we
must now consider. Since the end of the seventeenth century Russia
and Austria had competed for expansion into the Balkans. Each had
gone to war nominally, "to free Christians from the Turkish yoke,"
but actually in order to annex these populations themselves. Each,
by promoting risings in Turkish territory and by financing rival
Balkan sovereigns, had silently and ceaselessly worked towards the
same goal.

In the great game Montenegro, as we have seen, hall been Russia's
pawn since the days when Peter the Great sent his Envoy to Vladika
Danilo. Montenegro had become Russia's outpost in the West. Russia
was Montenegro's God--and her paymaster. "The dog barks for him that
feeds him!" says an Albanian proverb. Montenegro barked, and bit
too, at Russia's behest.

Serbia throughout the nineteenth century was rent by the ceaseless
blood-feud between the Karageorgevitches and the Obrenovitches, a
history bloody as that of the Turkish Sultans, the results of which
are not yet over--one that has so largely influenced the fate of yet
unborn generations that we must understand its outlines in order to
follow modern events.

Serbia, at the end of the eighteenth century, was bitterly
oppressed, not so much by the Turkish Government, as by the
Jannisaries, the insolent and all powerful military organization
which had broken loose from restraint and was now a danger to the
Turkish Empire. The Jannisaries actually elected their own chiefs
and were semi-independent. And of all the Jannisaries of the Empire
none were more opposed to the Sultan than those of Belgrade. Their
commanders called themselves Dahis and aimed at complete government
of the province.

It is a singular fact, and one which should be emphasized, that the
Jannisaries were themselves to a very large extent, of Balkan
origin. Their ancestors had been either forcibly converted or had,
as was not infrequent, voluntarily adopted Islam. The Moslem Serb
was a far greater persecutor of the Christian Serb than was the
Turk. We find that the leading Dahis of Belgrade hailed from Focha
in the Herzegovina.

Sultan Selim in, terrified of the growing power of these
Jannisaries, sided with his Christian subjects, sent troops against
them, and forcibly evicted them from Belgrade. A Turkish Pasha,
Hadji Mustafa, was appointed as Governor, whose rule was so just and
beneficent that the