In June 1817 Kara-George, who had been in Russia after being released by the Austrians in 1814, returned surreptitiously to Serbia, encouraged by the brighter aspect which affairs in his country seemed to be assuming. But the return of his most dangerous rival was as unwelcome to Miloš as it was to the Turkish authorities at Belgrade, and, measures having been concerted between them, Kara-George was murdered on July 26,1817, and the first act in the blood-feud between the two families thus committed. In November of the same year a _skupština_, or national assembly, was held at Belgrade, and Miloš Obrenović, whose position was already thoroughly assured, was elected hereditary prince (_knez_) of the country. Meanwhile events of considerable importance for the future of the Serb race had been happening elsewhere. Dalmatia, the whole of which had been in the possession of Venice since the Treaty of Carlowitz in 1699, passed into the hands of Austria by the Treaty of Campo Formio in 1797, when the Venetian republic was extinguished by Napoleon. The Bocche di Cuttaro, a harbour both strategically and commercially of immense value, which had in the old days belonged to the Serb principality of Zeta or Montenegro, and is its only natural outlet on the Adriatic, likewise became Venetian in 1699 and Austrian in 1797, one year after the successful rebellion of the Montenegrins against the Turks. By the Treaty of Pressburg between France and Austria Dalmatia became French in 1805. But the Montenegrins, supported by the Russians, resisted the new owners and occupied the Bocche; at the Peace of Tilsit in 1807, however, this important place was assigned to France by Russia, and Montenegro had to submit to its loss. In 1806 the French occupied Ragusa, and in 1808 abolished the independence of the ancient Serb city-republic. In 1812 the Montenegrins, helped by the Russians and British, again expelled the French and reoccupied Cattaro; but Austria was by now fully alive to the meaning this harbour would have once it was in the possession of Montenegro, and after the Congress of Vienna in 1815 took definitive possession of it as well as of all the rest of Dalmatia, thus effecting the complete exclusion of the Serb race for all political and commercial purposes from the Adriatic, its most natural and obvious means of communication with western Europe.