ollected round them were astonished to hear
them speaking the same language as themselves and to learn that many
of them had the same names as the Dalmatians.[36]

Incidents of this character were, for more reasons than one, most
galling to von Thurn. In July the archbishop and municipality of Split
petitioned that they might belong to Hungary. One presumes that these
officials were moved less by the sympathetic ways of one Hungarian
than by the knowledge that Croatia was under the Hungarian crown. Very
powerless, indeed, like themselves, Croatia might be--at that moment
reduced to the rank of a Hungarian county, with her Ban no longer able
to convoke the Diet--nevertheless, a Croatia still existed. Then Count
Raymond took hold of the matter; he sent reports on Rukavina to the
Viennese authorities, and he and they seem to have cared little
whether these reports contradicted one another. He exhibited his
adversary as a man of unbounded violence, as a man of the most
pusillanimous nature; General Rukavina was despicable, said these
documents, he was an absolute nonentity; but no, shrieked von Thurn on
the next day, this man Rukavina was imbued as no other with the
abominable spirit of Machiavelli. To bring about the fall of the
Hungarian party in Dalmatia, Count Raymond's police set themselves the
task of laying by the heels such Hungarian agents as Count Miaslas
Zanovi['c], one of the four sons of Count Anthony, who for being
implicated in a more than usually flagrant scandal had been expelled
from Venice. And his sons lived agitated lives, although it is untrue
that the second one, Stephen, before dying in prison in Amsterdam, had
governed Montenegro and is known to history as Stephen the Little.
[That mysterious person was a contemporary, who appearing in
Montenegro when the land was in a state of barbarism and destitution,
gave it out that he was the Russian Tzar Peter III., who had been
strangled to death in 1762. The Montenegrins accepted him; and from
1768 to 1773 he showed himself a most competent and zealous ruler,
carrying out so many reforms that he was clearly not Peter III. It has
not as yet been ascertained from where he came, but judging from his
accent he was either a Dalmatian Serb or a native of the Military
Confines. He was very taciturn; only one Montenegrin, a priest called
Markovi['c], is believed to have been privy to his secret. Markovi['c]
had visited Russia ten years previously and had celebrated