The Balkans: A History of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—TurkeyHogarth, D. G. (David George)
History
The Balkans: A History of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey
Hogarth, D. G. (David George)
Balkan Peninsula -- History; Eastern question (Balkan)
Sultan Mohammed temporarily raised the hopes of the mountaineers, and
founded Cetinje and made it his capital. His son George, who succeeded
him and ruled from 1490 till 1496, is famous as having set up the first
Serbian printing-press there. Its activities were naturally not
encouraged by the Turkish conquest, but it was of great importance to
the national Serbian Church, for which books were printed with it.
In 1496, Venice having wisely made peace with the Sultan some years
previously, this last independent scrap of Serb territory was finally
incorporated in the Turkish dominions. At the end of the fifteenth
century the Turks were masters of all the Serb lands except Croatia,
Slavonia, and parts of Dalmatia, which belonged to Hungary, and the
Dalmatian coast and islands, which were Venetian. The Turkish conquest
of Serbia, which began in 1371 at the battle of the Maritsa, and was
rendered inevitable by the battle of Kosovo Polje, in 1389, thus took a
hundred and twenty-five years to complete.
16
_The Turkish Dominion_, 1496–1796
The lot of the Serbs under Turkish rule was different from that of
their neighbours the Bulgars; and though it was certainly not enviable,
it was undoubtedly better. The Turks for various reasons never
succeeded in subduing Serbia and the various Serb lands as completely
as they had subdued, or rather annihilated, Bulgaria. The Serbs were
spread over a far larger extent of territory than were the Bulgars,
they were further removed from the Turkish centre, and the wooded and
mountainous nature of their country facilitated even more than in the
case of Bulgaria the formation of bands of brigands and rebels and
militated against its systematic policing by the Turks. The number of
centres of national life, Serbia proper, Bosnia, Hercogovina, and
Montenegro, to take them in the chronological order of their conquest
by the Turks, had been notoriously a source of weakness to the Serbian
state, as is still the case to-day, but at the same time made it more
difficult for the Turks to stamp out the national consciousness. What
still further contributed to this difficulty was the fact that many
Serbs escaped the oppression of Turkish rule by emigrating to the
neighbouring provinces, where they found people of their own race and
language, even though of a different faith. The tide of emigration
flowed in two directions, westwards into Dalmatia and northwards into
Slavonia and Hungary. It had begun already after the final subjection
of Serbia proper and Bosnia by the Turks in 1459 and 1463, but after
the fall of Belgrade, which was the outpost of Hungary against the
Turks, in 1521, and the battle of Mohacs, in 1526, when the Turks
completely defeated the Magyars, it assumed great proportions. As the
Turks pushed their conquests further north, the Serbs migrated before
them; later on, as the Turks receded, large Serb colonies sprang up all
over southern Hungary, in the Banat (the country north of the Danube
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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