so that Lamartine described Turkey in Europe as "une confédération
d'anarchies." Pasvantoölu coined his own money, and, amongst other
exploits, placed on the outside of a mosque his own monogram instead
of the Caliph's emblem. Therefore the outraged Sultan sent against him
three armies in succession, and each of them went back from Vidin
vanquished. The pasha was a brave and energetic man of iron will, a
great soldier and an expert architect. He built famous places of
worship, whose gilded arabesques, whose fountains in the silent courts
may bring us to meditate on one who died in 1807, three years after
the first insurrection of his fellow-Yugoslav, Kara George. In
Pasvantoölu's great library at Vidin there are one hundred and twelve
books on scientific and literary matters. The Pasha was venerated and
was regarded almost with dread for having managed to assemble so many
volumes dealing with other than spiritual affairs.
THE SLAVS WHO MIGRATED
But, apart from the Bogomiles, the number of those who of their own
free will went over to the Turks was scanty. Far more numerous were
those who abandoned their country and crossed the Danube to Hungary,
to Transylvania, to Wallachia, to Bessarabia, thus returning with
weary hearts to some of the places which, a thousand years before, had
seen their shaggy ancestors come trooping westward. What they heard in
the Banat, the part of southern Hungary they came to first, must have
induced a large proportion of them to remain, for they were told by
those who had migrated after Kossovo, in the days of old George
Branković and of Stephen the son of Dušan, that this was a good
land and that the masters of it, the Hungarians, were much more easy
to live under than the Turks. Not that it was necessary to live under
them, because one could settle in the lands or in the towns which had
been given by some arrangement to Stephen and to George Branković.
These were lands so wide that all the Slav wanderers could make a home
on them; they extended to the river Maroš and even beyond it. If
they settled in one of those districts it would be under one of their
own leaders and judges, not those of the Hungarians. There did not
seem to be many Hungarians, and perhaps that was why they wanted other
people in the country, especially now that the Turk was not far off.
If anyone decided to live under the Hungarians, that also was much
better than under the Turks; in this country of fine horses you were
not prevented from going on horseback. Then it was much easier to
speak to the Hungarians, because a great many words in their language,
particularly the words which had to do with agriculture, seemed to be
Slav. So alluring, in fact, was the state of things in the Banat, as
these people painted it, that many of the immigrants, in their relief
and happiness, wanted to hear no more. They scarcely listened while
they were being told about the Slav settlers, in pretty large numbers,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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