The view which now broke upon us was the most beautiful that we had yet set eyes on in Bosnia. It is best seen by climbing the high rocks which start up above the little Tešanška Rieka. Below you winds the gorge of the shallow stream, its steeps and narrow meadowland shaded with orchards and plum-woods, amongst which peep out the chalet-like roofs and slender minarets of the truly Alpine town of Tešanj. But all this only forms an avenue to a bold rocky height which leaves the town clinging to the two sides of the valley and towers up in the middle in isolated grandeur, crowned with the old castle of the Bans of Ussora, whose walls on one side frown over an overhanging precipice on to the sources of the rivulet several hundred feet below. It is more perfect, but not so open to investigation as that of Doboj, being still made use of by the Turks. Like the other it is triangular, and ends in a polygonal tower, which here is capped by a conical roof. Below this tower are some subsidiary fortifications and a solitary tower, in general effect not unlike the Campanile of St. Mark at Venice on a small scale. Parts of the castle are probably of great antiquity. Indeed the magnificence of the position would point it out as a stronghold in any age. Tešanj is in fact one of the earliest Sclavonic strongholds in Bosnia of which we possess any record, if we may be allowed to identify it with the Tesnec mentioned as a Serbian town by Constantine Porphyrogenitus in the tenth century. It was the residence of the Bans of Ussora, and probably of earlier Župans, the former area of whose jurisdiction seems to be still indicated by the name Župa, which clings to this mountainous triangle between the Bosna and the Verbas. When Ussora became a province of Bosnia, and Bosnia a kingdom, Tešanj was therefore a royal castle, and it was probably one of the seventy strongholds ‘defended by nature and art’ which fell into the hands of Mahomet II. during those terrible eight days which followed the capture of the last Bosnian king in 1463. Soon afterwards, however, when Matthias Corvinus restored Northern Bosnia to Hungary and Christendom, and made of it the Banat of Jaycze, Tešanj was again set free from the Paynim yoke. But it fell into the custody of the Voivode, whose carelessness lost Zvornik to the Pashà of Upper Bosnia in 1520. The Pashà, regardless of terms of capitulation which he had conceded, ‘keeping,’ as the Bosniacs bitterly expressed it, ‘Turkish faith,’ butchered all except the young or the beautiful, who might be useful for the harem or the Janissary camp. When the people of Tešanj, and they of Sokol, another fortress held by this Unready, heard of the miserable fate of the Zwornikers, a panic seized on them, and, setting fire to the castle, they fled to the mountains, though it is said that few escaped the Turkish sword. With Tešanj[174] one of the keys of Lower Bosnia was lost, and the Banat of Jaycze did not long survive this disaster.