A Zaptieh was now told off to escort us to the ‘best hotel in Travnik,’ and after a little more stumbling and slipping through streets so terribly cobbled that they made one sigh for the mountain-side again, we arrived at our destination, a miserable _han_, where we were ushered into an upper room, and our wants attended to with due dilatoriness by the squalid _hanjia_ and a boy rejoicing in the name of ‘Smily,’ who between them made up the whole personnel of the establishment. Here, while waiting for the pilaf and indescribables which compose our evening meal, we have leisure to reflect on the augustness of the town in which this is considered ‘first class accommodation.’ For Travnik, in the eyes of your Bosniac, is decidedly no mean city. Although at present, with its 12,000 inhabitants, only a quarter the size of Serajevo, and indeed at no period comparable to it either in populousness or commercial activity, Travnik was yet for nearly two centuries the political capital of Bosnia, and the seat of her Viziers. Their original seat was indeed Serajevo, but when the Vizierate of Bosnia stretched itself over Slavonia to the Drave, Banjaluka was fixed on as the city of residence, owing, it would seem, to the remoteness of the older capital from the new frontier. But when Buda was recovered in 1686, Banjaluka might be regarded as too much at the mercy of a _coup de main_, and the Divan of the Vizier was again transferred beyond the watershed and pitched at Travnik, as if the Turks were still loth to give up hopes of once more ruling on the Hungarian bank of the Save. At any rate they kept up the pleasing fiction that they ruled it still, for down to quite recent times the Vizier-Pashà who resided here clung to the vain title ‘Vizier of Hungary.’ The importance of Travnik is seen in the interesting ‘Account of the War in Bosnia,’ written in the first half of the last century by a native Bosnian historian.[204] Travnik is the seat of government and jurisdiction. It is here that a kind of parliament is ‘summoned by the Vizier, consisting of the magnates, judges, muftis, priests, and other learned effendis,’ to grant supplies in view of the invasion of Bosnia by the Austrians. It is outside the walls, on the ‘plains of Travnik,’ that the army of true believers assembles from all parts of the province. Serajevo, the seat of the native aristocracy, became indeed more and more the real seat of government, but the Sultan’s Lieutenant was obliged to content himself with his shadowy dignity at Travnik, till Omer Pashà in 1850 finally crushed the Capetans and transferred the Vizierial residence once more to the Serai.