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)
It must at this time be recalled in what an extraordinary way the Serb
race had fortuitously been broken up into a number of quite arbitrary
political divisions. Dalmatia (three per cent. of the population of
which is Italian and all the rest Serb or Croat, preponderatingly Serb
and Orthodox in the south and preponderating Croat or Roman Catholic in
the north) was a province of Austria and sent deputies to the
Reichsrath at Vienna; at the same time it was territorially isolated
from Austria and had no direct railway connexion with any country
except a narrow-gauge line into Bosnia. Croatia and Slavonia,
preponderatingly Roman Catholic, were lands of the Hungarian crown, and
though they had a provincial pseudo-autonomous diet at Agram, the
capital of Croatia, they sent deputies to the Hungarian parliament at
Budapest. Thus what had in the Middle Ages been known as the triune
kingdom of Croatia, Slavonia, and Dalmatia, with a total Serbo-Croat
population of three millions, was divided between Austria and Hungary.
Further, there were about 700,000 Serbs and Croats in the south of
Hungary proper, cast and north of the Danube, known as the Banat and
Bačka, a district which during the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries was the hearth and home of Serb literature and education, but
which later waned in importance in that respect as independent Serbia
grew. These Serbs were directly dependent on Budapest, the only
autonomy they possessed being ecclesiastical. Bosnia and Hercegovina,
still nominally Turkish provinces, with a Slav population of nearly two
million (850,000 Orthodox Serbs, 650,000 Mohammedan Serbs, and the rest
Roman Catholics), were to all intents and purposes already imperial
lands of Austria-Hungary, with a purely military and police
administration; the shadow of Turkish sovereignty provided sufficient
excuse to the _de facto_ owners of these provinces not to grant the
inhabitants parliamentary government or even genuine provincial
autonomy. The Serbs in Serbia numbered nearly three millions, those in
Montenegro about a quarter of a million; while in Turkey, in what was
known as Old Serbia (the _sandjak_ of Novi-Pasar between Serbia and
Montenegro and the vilayet of Korovo), and in parts of northern and
central Macedonia, there were scattered another half million. These
last, of course, had no voice at all in the management of their own
affairs. Those in Montenegro lived under the patriarchal autocracy of
Prince Nicholas, who had succeeded his uncle, Prince Danilo, in 1860,
at the age of nineteen. Though no other form of government could have
turned the barren rocks of Montenegro into fertile pastures, many of
the people grew restless with the restricted possibilities of a career
which the mountain principality offered them, and in latter years
migrated in large numbers to North and South America, whither
emigration from Dalmatia and Croatia too had already readied serious
proportions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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