_Dîs aliter placitum!_ Already, through the passes of the Balkan the storm was howling nearer and nearer that was to annihilate the budding gems of culture and free government in Bosnia. In 1353,—five years before Tvartko’s accession to the Banat,—under Suleiman, the son of Orchan, the Turks had first set foot in Europe. In twelve more years their ravages had spread to Attica, the Palæologi had pawned their crown jewels, and the Turkish Sultan had transferred his residence from Broussa to Adrianople. The tide of invasion poured along the Pontic shores, across the plains of Thrace, and was bursting through the iron gates of Hæmus. The Crescent already floated on the holy city of Bulgaria, the Marica had run red with the blood of Serbian chivalry, and turbaned warriors had scaled the salt steppes of Albania; the people, in the plaintive words of their heroic poetry, ‘were scattered abroad like the fowls of the air,’ and Macedonia was resigned to wolves and vultures. Meanwhile, Bulgaria, already half conquered, was split up into the two rival Czardoms of Tirnovo and Widdin; Serbia, by the death of Czar Dūshan, had lost the one man capable of restraining anarchy at home, or of marshalling the forces of the nation against the Turkish invaders, and the great empire of the Némanjas had shivered into a hundred fragments. Thus it was that in the hour of disunion and despair Serb and Bulgar alike turned to the new and rising kingdom that their Bosnian kinsmen had established in the Illyrian West. Tvartko was now at the height of his power, and included under his sceptre more extensive dominions than any Bosnian Ban, or King, before or after. He had seized the land of Chelm, the later Herzegovina, which had belonged to former Bans of Bosnia, till exchanged for Primorie with the King of Hungary; and added to it the two old Serbian Župas of Canali[83] and Tribunja; he had extended at least a suzerainty over the Principality of Zenta or the Black-Mountain; and by 1382 appears to have reduced the whole of Dalmatia, with the single exception of the city of Zara. Tvartko ruled already from beyond the Drina to the islands of the Adriatic, and from the Save to the lake of Skodra, but his ambition aimed at nothing short of re-establishing the empire of the Balkan Sclaves under a Bosnian sceptre, and of ruling, it might be, over wider realms than the greatest of the Némanjas. For these mighty schemes not only did he seem qualified by his personal abilities, but by connection and descent. His first wife, Dorothea, was the daughter of the Bulgarian Czar, Sracimir of Widdin; on his mother’s side he traced his descent from Stephen Dragutin; and, on the extinction of the Némanjids, claimed to be the rightful heir of the Serbian Kings and Czars.[84] In Croatia he had allied himself with the nobility in their opposition to their Hungarian suzerain, with the object of incorporating that province in his own dominions, and extending