n enemy or among themselves, hunting, hawking and
listening to the minstrels who celebrated their exploits. Their yearly
visits to Serajevo assumed in time the character of an informal
parliament, for the discussion of national questions; and their rights
tended always to increase, and to become hereditary, in fact, though not
in law. In every important campaign of the Turkish armies, these
descendants of the Bogomils were represented; they amassed considerable
wealth from the spoils of war, and frequently rose to high military and
administrative positions. Thus, in 1570, Ali Pasha, a native of
Herzegovina, became grand vizier; and he was succeeded by the
distinguished soldier and statesman, Mahomet Beg Sokolovic, a Bosnian.
Below the feudal nobility and their Moslem soldiers came the Christian
serfs, tillers of the soil and taxpayers, whose lives and property were
at the mercy of their lords. The hardships of their lot, and, above all,
the system by which the strongest of their sons were carried off as
recruits for the corps of janissaries (q.v.), frequently drove them to
brigandage, and occasionally to open revolt.

External history 1528-1821.

These conditions lasted until the 19th century, and meanwhile the
country was involved in the series of wars waged by the Turks against
Austria, Hungary and Venice. In the Krajina and all along the
Montenegrin frontier, Moslems and Christians carried on a ceaseless
feud, irrespective of any treaties concluded by their rulers; while the
Turkish campaigns in Hungary provided constant occupation for the nobles
during a large part of the 16th and 17th centuries. But after the
Ottoman defeat at Vienna in 1683, the situation changed. Instead of
extending the foreign conquests of their sultan, the Bosnians were hard
pressed to defend their own borders. Zvornik fell before the
Austro-Hungarian army in 1688, and the Turkish vali, who was still
officially styled the "vali of Hungary," removed his headquarters from
Banjaluka to Travnik, a more southerly, and therefore a safer capital.
Two years later, the imperial troops reached Dolnja Tuzla, and retired
with 3000 Roman Catholic emigrants. Serajevo was burned in 1697 by
Eugene of Savoy, who similarly deported 40,000 Christians. The treaties
of Carlowitz (1699) and Passarowitz (1718) deprived the Turks of all the
Primorje, or littoral of Herzegovina, except the narrow enclaves of Klek
and Suttorina, left to sunder the Ragusan dominion