an assembly to decide on a plan of
action; they resolved that this heresy should be exterminated by force
of arms, seeing that most of the population belonged to the Orthodox
religion. But Nemania was tolerant towards the Catholic Church, which
had a considerable following in the Serbian provinces of the Adriatic
coast, and this attitude became him well, for although he was the son
of Orthodox parents he was born in a western part of the country where
there was no Orthodox priest, so that he was baptized according to the
Catholic rite and only joined the Orthodox Church at a considerably
later date. A suggestive incident occurred in the year 1189, when
Frederick Barbarossa, on his way to Constantinople and Jerusalem, was
met at Ni[vs] by the Grand [vZ]upan, who presented him with corn,
wine, oxen and various other commodities, placed the Serbs under his
protection, and concluded with him and with the Bulgars a military
convention for the taking of Constantinople. When at last Nemania was
tired of fighting and administration he withdrew to the splendid
monastery of Studenica, which he had built, and afterwards to the
promontory of Mt. Athos, where his younger son, who called himself
Sava and was to become the great St. Sava, had from his seventeenth
year embraced the monastic life.

THE SLOVENES ARE SUBMERGED

Meanwhile the Slavs of Croatia and those farther to the north and
west, with whom was kept alive the old name of Slovene, had been at
grips with various neighbours. It has been said of the Slovenes that,
shepherds and peasants for the most part, they have practically no
national history, seeing that when the realm of Samo, who was himself
a Frank, came to an end, they were subjected to the Lombards, to the
Bavarians and finally to Charlemagne and his successors. Unlike the
Serbs and the Croats, they had no warlike aristocracy; in fact, the
only two Slovene magnates who displayed any national zeal were two
Counts of Celje (Cilli) of whom the first rose to be Ban of Croatia
and the second, Count Ulrich, the last of his race, was in 1486
assassinated by Hungarians in Belgrade, thus causing his domains to
fall to the Habsburgs.[14] But if the little, scattered Slovene people
had to bend before the storm, if they withdrew from their outposts in
the two Austrias, in northern Styria, in Tirol, in the plains of
Frioul and in Venetia, they settled down, thirteen centuries ago, in a
region which they still inhabit. This