The first beginnings of Serajevo, or Bosna as it was formerly called, are said to have been due to the mining enterprise of the Ragusans in the neighbouring mountains;[239] but though in 1236 (after the destruction of Mileševo by the Patarenes) it was made the seat of the Roman Catholic bishops, it appears to have been little more than a stronghold till the year 1463, when it finally fell into the possession of the Turks. It was in the year succeeding this event that the present town was founded by the two Bosnian magnates, Sokolović, and Zlatarović, who claim the doubtful honour of having been the first of the native nobility to renegade to Islâm; and the Serai on the hill was shortly after erected, and the upper town walled, by Khosrev Pashà, first Vizier of Bosnia. It was from this Serai or fortress that the town began to be called Bosna Serai, and finally, by the Sclaves, Serajevo. That it early attained to some majesty is shown by the fact that it was given by Grand Signiors as a dowry to widowed Sultanas; and early in the sixteenth century our English traveller, Blunt, though he describes it as ‘but meanely built and not great,’ yet reckons here ‘about four-score Mescheetoes and twenty thousand houses.’[240] When Prince Eugene, during his twenty days’ dash into Bosnia in 1697, penetrated to the capital, he found the upper town so strong that, despairing of reducing it by a siege with the small means at his disposal, he contented himself with burning the lower town, and rode back to the Save. His chroniclers estimate the population of Serajevo at 30,000, and set down the houses and mosques then destroyed by the Imperialists as six thousand and a hundred and fifty respectively.[241] In the middle of the next century the monks who supplied the author of ‘Illyricum Sacrum’ with an account of ‘the present state of Bosnia,’ speak of the Serai as being, though a decayed city, the ‘seat of Turkish commerce and the most renowned staple of the realm.’ Serajevo early became the head-quarters of the Bosnian Janissaries. That in the seventeenth century it was hardly an eligible place for a Giaour to find himself in, may be gathered from our English traveller’s relation. Blunt is setting out for ‘Saraih,’ as he calls the city, ‘with the Bashaw of Bosnah, his troopes going for the warre of Poland,’ and his account gives a very pretty picture of the military turbulence that must then have reigned within the walls. The soldiers, it appears, were ‘spirited many with drinke, discontent, and insolency: which made them fitter companie for the Divell then for a Christian; my selfe after many launces, and knives threatned upon me, was invaded by a drunken Janizary, whose iron Mace entangled in his other furniture gave mee time to flee among the Rocks, whereby I escaped untoucht.’