It has been the fate of the Southern Slavs to fulfil a mission in European history; Serbia and the Serbo-Croat race constituted a bulwark for Europe and Christianity against the invasion of Turkish barbarians and Islam. The martyrdom of the Southern Slavs lasted for centuries; it was a most humiliating thraldom to the barbarous Mongolism of the Ottoman Turks, and a hard, incessant fight for the dignity of humanity. It was a period of indescribable suffering from the barbarities of a lower race, one of the hardest struggles for existence the world has known. It was impossible to continue or to realize the plans of the great Nemanjić rulers. All attempts at union between the peoples of Croatia and Bosnia were fruitless: _never in the history of Europe has a nation lived for so many centuries in such terrible political impotence and disunion as the Serbo-Croat and Slovene nation_. Italy at the time of the Renaissance, and Germany before the liberation, were, in comparison with the Southern Slavs, in a well-organized and healthy condition. Thus it has come about that we have no Serbian history of art, only various provincial histories—Old Serbian, Macedonian, Dalmatian, Bosnian, History of Serbian art in Hungary, Slovene and New Serbian. The bitter enmity of Austria-Hungary towards Serbia, which deepened steadily, and finally became the direct cause of the European War, began with the Russophile and Southern Slav trend of Serbian policy after the series of Southern Slav Congresses, which took place in Belgrade at the time of the coronation of King Peter in 1904. Serbia’s new policy, after the suicidal and humiliating pro-Austrian policy of the Obrenović dynasty had been abolished, was a _racial policy_, pro-Russian, pro-Bulgarian and democratic, which restored the stability and order of the State, and led to the foundation of the Balkan Alliance in 1912. Serbia regenerated, sought to consolidate a scattered, provincial culture into one great culture of a Greater Serbia, or of all the Southern Slavs. For this reason it has only quite recently become possible to speak of the united cultural efforts of the Serbo-Croats.