Or what fitter repository for such a monument than this Minorite monastery? Here, perhaps, better than anywhere else, one perceives how it is among these Franciscan brotherhoods that the traditions of the old Bosnian kingdom most live on. The genealogic lore evinced by the monks with regard to the old nobility was quite surprising to us; they seemed to have the pedigrees by heart; they betrayed sources of information not open to the outside world. To understand how this happens one need only call to mind that for the most part the royal race and magnates were in fact but a Roman Catholic minority, holding sway over heretics and Greeks, and that next after the Magyar battle-axe, their mainstay lay in the influence and organisation of these very monks. Thus it befell that, when the crash came, these Franciscan brotherhoods emerged, the only stable remnant from the wreck of the old _régime_. It was in their cloisters that the surviving supporters of Bosnian loyalty rallied; and those who in that supreme moment of national prostration would neither fly nor play the renegade, found safety in the bosom of the Church. The monks confided to us that two of the noble families of Bosnia were still represented in the fraternity—the Aloupović and Radieljević. Others, without actually taking the cowl, seem to have found retirement from generation to generation, under shadow, as it were, of the monastery. In the village of Foinica below, a poor rayah family perpetuates the noble race of Kristić; and—more interesting still—the Christian inmates of another Foinican hovel still exult in the royal name of Tvrdkoiević, and preserve the lineage of those Bosnian kings whose mighty castles we have seen at Doboj, Tešanj, and Travnik. The Franciscans were, in fact, put forward to make terms for Catholic Bosnia with the conqueror; and it was the head of the Foinica brotherhood, Angelo Zvizdović, who took the lead; and advancing like a new Leo to the camp of the terrible Sultan, gained from Mahomet II., on the field of Milodraz in 1463, the great charter of the Franciscans. This was the _Atname_.[221] The Sultan, in this firman, orders that no one shall in any way molest the Bosnian brothers, either in their person, or their property, or their churches; that those who have fled the realm may return, and that the brothers may bring any person they choose from foreign parts into the country. ‘And I swear by the great God, the creator of heaven and earth, by the seven books, by the great prophets, by the 124,000 prophets, and by the sabre which I wear, that no one shall act counter to these commands so long as these monks do my bidding and are obedient to my service.’