Now, at a turn of the road, opens our first glimpse of the ancient duchy of St. Sava—or, as it is now more generally known, the Herzegovina—a magnificent vista of rocky mountains rising beyond the yet unseen valley of the Narenta, their dark blue shadows golden-fringed by the setting sun. The trees become more southern in their character; here and there are fine Spanish chestnuts; on a height to the right are the pines of an Italian landscape; wild vine becomes plentiful once more; we pass a Herzegovinian peasant in a peaked cap of Dalmatian character; and finally come in sight of Coinica, the first Herzegovinian town, with mosque and minaret reflected on the silvery waters of the Narenta; and behind, in a glorious amphitheatre, those barren limestone peaks, which, stretching away in unbroken chains to the Black Mountain on the south-east, form the Switzerland of Turkey, and are ringing even now with the battle-cry of freedom. Across the river, and connecting the few houses on the Bosnian shore, known as Neretva, with Coinica on the other, is stretched a fine stone bridge, the finest we had seen in Bosnia, and indeed the only one that we had seen outside the walls of the capital. This is one of the oldest historic monuments in the country, and is said to have been the work of Hralimir,[268] King of the Serbs, though it has doubtless been restored by the Turks. Thus it is a living witness of the ancient connection between Bosnia and Serbia, in its wider sense, with which the history of Herzegovina, originally under Serbian princes, begins; and it forms a fitting avenue of approach to Coinica itself, which is celebrated in the history of the Bosnian kingdom as the scene of one of the few peaceful events in that unhappy national story that have become memorable. Coinica was in a certain sense the Runnymede of Bosnia. At the ‘Conventus’ or diet of Coinica in 1446, Thomas, last lawful king of this country, set his seal to a charter, which, though rather framed to protect royalty and the feudal _régime_, was in this sense a popular measure, that it was designed to check violence and abuses in days of anarchy, and that it was presented to the king for signature by an assembly of prelates and barons, who in a certain sense were representative. Its preservation is due to monks of the order of St. Francis, one of whom supplied a Latin copy of it to Farlato, who was thus able to insert it in his ‘Illyricum Sacrum.’[269] As we are on the spot, and as this is an unique constitutional memorial of the old Bosnian kingdom, and illustrates amongst other things the relation in which the two countries on whose borders we now are stood to one another in the days of Christian government, I have ventured to subjoin a translation:—