el of the true
religious spirit and of the hopeful optimism of the nation. That can be
said especially for the kings since Saint Sava's time until the definite
conquest of Serbia by the Sultans, _i.e._ since Richard and John's time
until the time of the Black Prince and Wycliffe, and from the Black
Prince and Wycliffe till the end of the Wars of the Roses in England.
Our kings did what all the kings in the world do; they fought and ruled,
they ate and drank, and danced and played, and still the majority of
them took monastic vows and died in solitude and asceticism, and a great
part of them were recognised by the people as saints and invoked by the
oppressed in the dark times as the advocates of national justice, before
God. They built beautiful churches and monasteries in the towns and
forests. They strove always to build the "Houses of God" more solid and
more costly than their own houses. Their castles and palaces they built
to their own glory, and their pleasures no longer exist, but the
churches they built to the glory of God still exist. In these churches
our pious kings of old prayed; in these churches afterwards our hard
oppressed people wept during the time of slavery; in these "Houses of
God" the fanatic Turks enclosed their cattle, their goats and sheep,
their horses and donkeys, thus abasing and ridiculing our sanctuaries.
But the more these sanctuaries have been abased and ridiculed by the
enemy, the more they have been respected and adored by the people.

We Serbs cannot complain that our Middle Ages were as dark as the people
in Europe are accustomed to represent their own. During the three
hundred years of the reign of Neniania's dynasty not one of our kings
was killed. The importance of this fact only the historian can
understand who knows well the history of our neighbours, the Byzantines
and Venetians of that time, who in many other respects had been our
teachers. We learnt many useful as well as perilous things from them,
but we did not learn their art of poisoning kings, of torturing them,
suffocating them, making them blind, cutting out their tongues, etc. It
is only in modern times that we committed the great sins of the Middle
Ages, namely, killing our kings and making civil wars. During the last
hundred years we killed only three of our kings: Karageorge, Michael and
Alexander. In modern times three have been killed in a hundred years,
and in the Middle Ages not one in three hundred years!--a fac