Among all the heroes of the guslars the favorite has always been Prince Marko. Although much of the career of the Marko of the pesmas was fabulous, this prince had a real existence in the latter part of the fourteenth century--the son of Vukashin, who tried to usurp the throne of young Urosh after the death of Stephen Dushan, and Queen Helen, unless one prefers to account for Marko's glittering qualities by making him the offspring of a dragon and a fairy queen. The real Marko was not a great man, as the world counts greatness. He ruled a small territory in Macedonia, and Prilip was his capital. He is said to have been friendly with the Turks and to have died fighting for the Sultan. This was after Kossovo, when Serbia was sleeping. Yet he must have had qualities that made him rise above this in popular estimation, for his local reputation grew with time and became national. Certainly for five centuries he has been a living personality, not only in Serbian but in Croatian, Bulgarian, and Roumanian tradition. It is worth considering--this theory that in Prince Marko the Serbian nation projects itself; that his sufferings and successes are the sufferings and successes of the whole nation; that it beholds its own virtues and weaknesses in his; its own individuality in his popular personality; its own doom in his tragic fate. Athletic, keen-minded, quickly reading the designs of his foes, he, as an individual, was what Serbia would like to have been as a political entity. Even as he triumphed over Magyar, Venetian or Turk, so would the Serb have triumphed. When Serbia was sunk in poverty the guslar brought before his hearers visions of splendid things they could never hope to see, but whose beauties satisfied their imagination. Marko is the knight without fear, without reproach--the lover of justice, the hater of all oppression. He is kind and dutiful, the protector of the poor and abused. His pity extends even to animals, who in turn often helped him. "He feared no one but God." Courteous to all women, tender and dutiful to his mother, Marko could be savage and cruel beyond belief toward the Turks. Human weapons never harmed him, and he wielded a war club weighing one hundred pounds, composed of sixty pounds of steel, thirty pounds of silver, and ten pounds of gold. One touch of this mace beheaded a foe, as one stroke of his saber ripped him open.