a Vida (Grandmother Vida), of
the dusty, old rambling town of Vidin on the Danube. Having won his
way into the fortress he was elected governor, and a year later he
became Pasha. His independence was remarkable even at a period when
Mahmud Bushatli Pasha flourished at Scutari and Ali Pasha at Jannina,
so that Lamartine described Turkey in Europe as "une confederation
d'anarchies." Pasvantooelu coined his own money, and, amongst other
exploits, placed on the outside of a mosque his own monogram instead
of the Caliph's emblem. Therefore the outraged Sultan sent against him
three armies in succession, and each of them went back from Vidin
vanquished. The pasha was a brave and energetic man of iron will, a
great soldier and an expert architect. He built famous places of
worship, whose gilded arabesques, whose fountains in the silent courts
may bring us to meditate on one who died in 1807, three years after
the first insurrection of his fellow-Yugoslav, Kara George. In
Pasvantooelu's great library at Vidin there are one hundred and twelve
books on scientific and literary matters. The Pasha was venerated and
was regarded almost with dread for having managed to assemble so many
volumes dealing with other than spiritual affairs.

THE SLAVS WHO MIGRATED

But, apart from the Bogomiles, the number of those who of their own
free will went over to the Turks was scanty. Far more numerous were
those who abandoned their country and crossed the Danube to Hungary,
to Transylvania, to Wallachia, to Bessarabia, thus returning with
weary hearts to some of the places which, a thousand years before, had
seen their shaggy ancestors come trooping westward. What they heard in
the Banat, the part of southern Hungary they came to first, must have
induced a large proportion of them to remain, for they were told by
those who had migrated after Kossovo, in the days of old George
Brankovi['c] and of Stephen the son of Du[vs]an, that this was a good
land and that the masters of it, the Hungarians, were much more easy
to live under than the Turks. Not that it was necessary to live under
them, because one could settle in the lands or in the towns which had
been given by some arrangement to Stephen and to George Brankovi['c].
These were lands so wide that all the Slav wanderers could make a home
on them; they extended to the river Maro[vs] and even beyond it. If
they settled in one of those districts it would be under one of their
own leaders and judg