Through Bosnia and the Herzegóvina on foot during the insurrection, August and September 1875Evans, Arthur, Sir
History
Through Bosnia and the Herzegóvina on foot during the insurrection, August and September 1875
Evans, Arthur, Sir
Bosnia and Herzegovina -- Description and travel; Bosnia and Herzegovina -- History -- Rebellion of 1875
Perhaps enough has been said to show the really important part played
by Bosnia in European history. We have seen her aid in interpreting
to the West the sublime puritanism which the more Eastern Sclaves of
Bulgaria had first received from the Armenian missionaries. We have seen
her take the lead in the first religious revolt against Rome. We have
seen a Bosnian religious teacher directing the movement in Provence.
We have seen the Protestants of Bosnia successfully resisting all the
efforts of Rome, supported by the arms of Hungary, to put them down.
We have seen them offering an asylum to their persecuted brothers of
the West,—Albigensians, Patarenes, and Waldenses. We have seen them
connected with the Reformation in Bohemia, and affording shelter to
the followers of Huss. From the twelfth century to the final conquest
of the Turks in the sixteenth, when the fight of religious freedom had
been won in Northern Europe, Bosnia presents the unique phenomenon of a
Protestant State existing within the limits of the Holy Roman Empire,
and in a province claimed by the Roman Church. Bosnia was the religious
Switzerland of Mediæval Europe, and the signal service which she has
rendered to the freedom of the human intellect by her successful stand
against authority can hardly be exaggerated. Resistance, broken down in
the gardens of Provence, buried beneath the charred rafters of the Roman
cities of the Langue d’Oc, smothered in the dungeons of the Inquisition,
was prolonged from generation to generation amongst the primeval forests
and mountain fastnesses of Bosnia. There were not wanting, amongst those
who sought to exterminate the Bogomiles, Churchmen as dead to human pity
as the Abbot of Citeaux, and lay arms as bloodthirsty as De Montfort;
but the stubborn genius of the Serbian people fought on with rare
persistence, and held out to the end. The history of these champions of
a purer religion has been written by their enemies, and ignored by those
who owe most to their heroism. No Martyrology of the Bogomiles of Bosnia
has come down to us. We have no Huss or Tyndale to arrest our pity.
‘Invidious silence’ has obscured their fame,
Illachrymabiles
Urgentur, ignotique longâ
Nocte, carent quia vate sacro.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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