If the Turkish invasion can be likened to the encroachment of an ocean, it resembled it in nothing more than its denuding action. Throughout the whole of Eastern Europe there set in a great levelling of baronial peak-lands. The South-Sclavonic nobility fell at Kóssovo or Mohatch and a hundred other fields, or skulked away into foreign lands; and, indeed, this Feudal overgrowth was always more or less of an exotic among Serbs and Croats. The Turkish conquest was a fiery trial, in truth, and yet it had the effect of purging the sterling democratic ore of society from all this hæmatitic dross. The semi-feudal organisation which had sprung up in these lands—partly owing to the imperfect devices of an acephalous society to gain the unity of action required in war, partly to infiltrations of Western ideas viâ Hungary or the Empire—was now levelled away by the Turks, where it was not, as in Bosnia, assimilated. Society reverted to that almost patriarchal form which the Sclavonic settlers had carried with them into the Illyrian triangle when they settled here in the days of Heraclius. _Vlastela_ and magnates now make way once more for simple house-fathers, distinctions of rank are merged in the old equality and fraternity that reign within the paling of the house-community. We have seen an Imperial ukase work much the same result among the Sclaves of Russia as was wrought by the Turkish scimitar for their brethren of the south. Then, too, not only were the higher ranks of society cleared away, but influences were at work to make even the communistic village government go back a step in archaism. Vast tracts of land were depopulated and were parcelled out amongst new settlers, chiefly immigrant families from beyond the Turkish frontier. But the single farms of those backwoodsmen could not grow into villages all at once, and so it would happen that the mark—as we may call the allotment—reverted to a very primitive stage, being held in common, not so much by a village-community, as by a single household. Thus the Starescina, or alderman of the community, was often literally the elective elder of the household. But it was evident that if the new military organisation was to be self-supporting, each family must contain several adult male members—for how else could men be spared from the tillage necessary for the support of the household? And how else could contributions in kind be afforded to the military chest—the _cassa domestica_—for the keep of soldier house-brothers?