The Slovenes became a part of the Austrian possessions of the Habsburgs; the Croats fell under the dominion of the Hungarian crown and the republic of Venice; and the Serbs succumbed to the Turks by the middle of the fifteenth century. The loss of political independence brought with it ultimately the loss of the native nobility, the sole guardians of the constitutional and historical rights of the nations down into the nineteenth century in central Europe. In addition, many towns were Germanized and the middle class disappeared. The Jugo-Slavs, like the Czecho-Slovaks, appeared in modern times as a nation which had lost its native nobility and had been reduced to a disarmed, untutored, and enserfed peasantry. In the absence of these leaders, the nation turned to its clergy who in order to retain their hold on the peasantry must needs ever remain national. But here again the misfortune which awaited the Jugo-Slavs was that historically three religions had taken deep root, the Catholic among the Slovenes and Croats, and the Mohammedan and Orthodox among the Serbs. We may therefore conclude the first half of the historical evolution of the Jugo-Slavs with the observation that political, economic, social, and geographical divisions led to their downfall as a nation and that if they ever desired to become one, each one of these chasms would have to be bridged. A solution for each of these problems--the most difficult which ever faced a nation--would have to be found; meanwhile the policy of the four masters, the German, Venetian, Magyar, and Turk, would always be "divide and rule," in other words, to perpetuate the divergencies. II The history of the evolution of the Jugo-Slavs from the sixteenth to the twentieth century has been an effort to find the means of melting down these differences until finally one--nationalism--accomplished the purpose. Unity came first in the imagination and the mind, next in literature and speech, and finally in political action. The four hundred years beginning with the fifteenth and ending with the eighteenth century will be remembered by the Jugo-Slavs as the age of humiliation. Only Slavicized Ragusa and indomitable Montenegro kept alive the imagination of the nation which was brought back to life by the half-religious, half-national Slovene poets of the sixteenth century, by the Ragusan epic poet [Gundulic], by the incessant demands of successive diets of the ever-weakening Croatia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and by the progressive and zealous Serbs of Hungary, who ever since the fifteenth century in increasing numbers made their home there, refugees from the oppression of the Turk, but who ever longed to push out from the frontier and rebuild Serbia anew. [Krizanic], a Croat Catholic Dalmatian priest, a firm believer in Jugo-Slav and Slavic unity in general, appealed to the rising Russian empire to help save dying Slavdom.