them only when either plunder was wanted or gangs of labourers to execute unpaid tasks for the oppressor. Generation after generation here died without ever having seen a town, because the most abject humbling of themselves could not save them from insult and injury at the hands of the Turks, and because it was too bitter to them to see the strongholds of their nation in the hands of enemies from whom it seemed hopeless to try to wrest them. The peasant life was simple. The head of the sadrooga apportioned the work among the men and women of the family, and the evenings served for the repetition or chanting of Servian poems, either handed down to keep the memory of empire and of heroes green, or newly composed by some of the many singers of the country, to commemorate more recent deeds of valour against the Turk among some neighbouring tribes. The life was simple, disciplined, and organized in away which gave the people regulated coherence enough to suffer long, and then, when opportunity came, to prove themselves strong. They did not give up their country without a struggle. The fatal battle of Kossova, now looked back upon as the last final field, did not at the time put an end to their hope and resolution. The young Lazarevitch, successor to Lazar who was killed in that battle, made a treaty with the sultan by which he was to hold his crown in fief; but at his death the Turks declared it was impious to allow a Christian ruler to possess lands so fair, and a Turkish garrison was sent to assert the direct authority of the sultan. The Servs allied themselves with Hungary, and Belgrade, the city of seven sieges, was strengthened, and a fortress built at Semendria, a little lower down the Danube. This great mass of grey stone walls, with its twenty-five towers, was built to command the junction of the Morava and the Danube, looking on the Danube in the direction from which the Turkish hosts must always approach it, and there was built through the whole thickness of the wall a red brick cross, which, the more furiously battered, has only shown the brighter in contrast to the gloomy strength of the stone. A fortress strangely typical of Servian, as of all other, persecuted Christianity, it still remains to remind the people by whose aid and by the help of whose arm they have now regained the freedom to worship God in Christ. For there can be no doubt that it has been the sobriety and patience of Christian faith, darkened and distorted though it has been, that has been the backbone of the people, and their eagerness now to learn the way of God more perfectly must not be hidden from our eyes by the stories we hear of political struggle and intrigue, nor of social disorder and impurity in Belgrade, whither people of all countries and opinions have flocked, eager to utilize the newly-risen power for their own ends. The heart of the people is sound and steady, and they are guided by a prince who, though young and inexperienced, has already shown himself patriotic, discreet, and firm, — a true Servian. The Bible Society finds ready sale for its wares, and schools have been multiplied over the country ever since it became fairly safe for children to be away from the immediate protection of warlike households.
The alliance with Hungary would probably have been a permanent one, and the Servians might have had no worse a history than the Slavonian provinces of Austria, had not Hunniades told the Servian leader that he should require them to acknowledge the supremacy of Rome — of which the Servians had an extreme horror — while the sultan promised absolute religious toleration and ecclesiastical self-government should they submit to him. The choice seemed easy, and would have been the right one had they had to deal with any but a treacherous power. They still struggled for civil liberty also, but in 1444 the battle of Varna made the sultan master of all but Belgrade, which was held against him by the Hungarians till 1522. The confidence of the Servians in the liberality of the Turks was misplaced. Mahometanism alone was tolerated; the Christian churches, monuments of the piety and architectural skill of generations of princes and people, were used as stables; the peasants were heavily taxed for the support of the spahis or military colonists of the sultan, and were subjected to continual corvées; every fifth year conscription took their most promising boys to be brought up in the Mussulman faith and fight in the sultan's armies; the land was used almost every year as the route for the Turkish armies in their wars with western Europe, and neither man, woman, nor child, nor houses, nor goods, were safe.
The fall of Belgrade, which marked the triumph of the Turks over the Hungarians, was the signal for even increased extortion and violence on the part of the spahis, committed not by virtue of law, but, as it was in the beginning and is now
