immigrant Serbs were organized as military colonists with special
privileges, on the analogy of the Cossacks in southern Russia and Poland.
In Dalmatia the Serbs played a similar role in the service of Venice,
which, like Austria-Hungary, was frequently at war with the Turks. During
the sixteenth century Ragusa enjoyed its greatest prosperity; it paid
tribute to the Sultan, was under his protection, and never rebelled. It
had a quasi monopoly of the trade of the entire Balkan peninsula. It was a
sanctuary both for Roman Catholic Croats and for Orthodox Serbs, and
sometimes acted as intermediary on behalf of its co-religionists with the
Turkish authorities, with whom it wielded great influence. Intellectually
also it was a sort of Serb oasis, and the only place during the Middle
Ages where Serbian literature was able to flourish.

Montenegro during the sixteenth century formed part of the Turkish
province of Scutari. Here, as well as in Serbia proper, northern Macedonia
(known after the removal northwards of the political centre, in the
fourteenth century, as Old Serbia), Bosnia, and Hercegovina, the Turkish
rule was firmest, but not harshest, during the first half of the sixteenth
century, when the power of the Ottoman Empire was at its height. Soon
after the fall of Smederevo, in 1459, the Patriarchate of Pe['c] (Ipek)
was abolished, the Serbian Church lost its independence, was merged in the
Greco-Bulgar Archbishopric of Okhrida (in southern Macedonia), and fell
completely under the control of the Greeks. In 1557, however, through the
influence of a Grand Vizier of Serb nationality, the Patriarchate of
Pe['c] was revived. The revival of this centre of national life was
momentous; through its agency the Serbian monasteries were restored,
ecclesiastical books printed, and priests educated, and more fortunate
than the Bulgarian national Church, which remained under Greek management,
it was able to focus the national enthusiasms and aspirations and keep
alive with hope the flame of nationality amongst those Serbs who had not
emigrated.

Already, in the second half of the sixteenth century, people began to
think that Turkey's days in Europe were numbered, and they were encouraged
in this illusion by the battle of Lepanto (1571). But the seventeenth
century saw a revival of Turkish power; Krete was added to their empire,
and in 1683 they very nearly captured Vienna. In the war which followed
their repulse, and in which the