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Croatia
Croatia
A Nation Forged in War
SECOND EDITION

Marcus Tanner

Yale Nota Bene

Yale University Press
New Haven and London
Copyright 199 7, 2 0 0 1 , 2 0 1 0 by Marcus Tanner

First published in 1 9 9 7
Second edition published in 2 0 0 1
Third edition published in 2 0 1 0

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduce, in whole or in part,
including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by
Sections 1 0 7 and 108 of the U. S. Copyright law and except by reviewers
for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

For information about this and other Yale University Press publications,
please contact:
U. S. office: sales.press@yale.edu www.yalebooks.com
Europe office: sales@yaleup.co.uk www.yaleup.co.uk

Printed in Great Britain by

Library of Congress card number: 2 0 1 0 9 2 7225

ISBN 9 7 8 -0 -3 0 0 -1 6 3 9 4 -0

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
Contents

List of Illustrations vi
Note on Spelling viii
Preface ix
1 ‘The Unfaithful Croats' 1
2 Croatia Under the Hungarians 16
3 The Ramparts of Christendom 28
4 ‘The Remains of the Remains’ 41
5 From Liberation to the French Revolution 52
6 ‘Still Croatia Has Not Fallen’ 66
7 1848 82
8 ‘Neither with Vienna Nor with Budapest’ 94
9 ‘Our President’ 108
10 The Sporazum 127
11 The Ustashe 141
12 ‘My Conscience Is Clear’ 168
13 Croatian Spring 184
14 ‘Comrade Tito Is Dead’ 203
15 God in Heaven and Tudjman in the Homeland 221
16 ‘Serbia Is Not Involved’ 241
17 ‘Danke Deutschland’ 261
18 Thousand-Year-Old Dream 275
19 ‘Freedom Train’ 299
20 La Dolce Vita 314
Notes 340
Selected Bibliography 358
Index 361
Illustrations
Rights were not granted to include these illustrations in electronic
media. Please refer to print publication.

1. Plaitwork above the doorway of the Church of the Holy Cross, Nin (M.
Reid)
2. Grgur of Nin, a copy of the original cast in Split made in 1929, by Ivan
Mestrovic (M. Reid)
3. St Donat’s Church, Zadar (M. Reid)
4. Frankopan fortress at Kostajnica, on the Bosnian-Croatian border (M.
Reid)
5. An eighteenth-century print of a Croat (Hrvatski Povijesni Muzej)
6. An eighteenth-century print of a Morlach (Hrvatski Povijesni Muzej)
7. A print of Ban Jelacic’s entry into Zagreb in lune 1848 (Hrvatski
Povijesni Muzej)
8. The funeral of Stjepan Radic in Zagreb in August 192 8 (Hrvatski
Povijesni Muzej)
9. Alojzije Stepinac
10. Ante Pavelic inspecting troops at Zagreb airport in November 1942
(Hrvatski Povijesni Muzej)
11. Pavelic and Slavko Kvaternik in Venice for the signing of the Rome
Agreement on the NDH’s frontiers in May 1941 (Hrvatski Povijesni
Muzej)
12. A Ustashe poster from 1943 (Hrvatski Drzavni Arhiv, Zagreb)
13. A Partisan poster from 1 9 4 4 (Hrvatski Povijesni Muzej)
14. A Partisan ‘congress of cultural workers’ near Topusko in June 1944
(Hrvatski Povijesni Muzej)
15. A Communist election poster in 1 9 4 6 (Hrvatski Povijesni Muzej)
16. Memorial to Cardinal Stepinac, 1960, in Zagreb cathedral, by Ivan
Mestrovic (M. Reid)
17. Vladimir Bakaric, in conversation with his master (Tito-Partiza, vol. 3)
18. An election poster for Tudjman’s HDZ in 1 9 9 0 (Hrvatski Politicki Plakat.
1 9 4 0 -5 0 , published by Hrvatski Povijesi Muzej)
19. The restored statue of Jelacic in the centre of Zagreb (M. Reid)
20. The devastated centre of Vukovar in 1992 (H. Sheehan)
21. An eighteenth-century monastery in Kostajnica, destroyed by the
Krajina Serbs in 1991 (M. Reid)
22. A banner in November 1992 celebrating the first anniversary of the
Serbian capture of the town (H. Sheehan)
23. The old bridge at Mostar, destroyed by Bosnian-Croat artillery in 1993
(H. Sheehan)
 Illustrations vii

24. Croats celebrating the centuries-old Sinjska Alka festival in Sinj in 1994
(Chris Helgren)
25. Croat troops near Biograd bombarding Serb positions in Benkovac in
August 1995 (Chris Helgren)
26. Croat soldier celebrating the recapture of the Krajina ‘capital’ of Knin in
Operation Storm (Chris Helgren)
2 7. Croats fleeing Serb-held Drnis are reunited with their relatives in Sibenik
in 1993 (Chris Helgren)
28. A Church in Dubrovnik being boarded up in readiness for Bosnian-Serb
shelling in August 199 5 (Chris Helgren)
29. Serbs streaming out of Croatia near Petrinja after the fall of the Krajina
(Chris Helgren)
30. Tudjman and his defence minister Gojko Susak during the election cam­
paign in October 1 995 (Chris Helgren)
31. Mr and Mrs Tudjman voting in the election of October 199 5 (Chris
Helgren)
3 2. The History of the Croats, 19 3 2, by Ivan Mestrovic (M. Reid)

M aps

The regions of Croatia 3

Croatia at the end of the fifteenth century 26
Croatia at the end of the sixteenth century 36
Croatia in Austria-Hungary 96
The formation of Yugoslavia in 1 918 118
The Independent State of Croatia 143
Changes to Croatia’s borders, 1 9 3 9 -4 5 173
Federal Yugoslavia, 1 9 4 5 -9 1 276
The wars in Croatia and Bosnia, 1 9 9 1 -2 2 77
Note on Spelling

In any book about a country that has been ruled by several other coun­
tries there are bound to be problems over spelling. In the interests of
simplicity I have used the modern Croatian version for all towns and
places that lie inside, or partly inside, the present borders of the Republic
of Croatia. Thus at all times I have used Rijeka, rather than the Italian
word Fiume, Zadar, rather than Zara, Dubrovnik, not Ragusa, Zagreb,
not the German word Agram, and Srijem rather than the Serbian word
Srem, except where the word is used in a purely Serbian context, that is
the Autonomous Region of Slavonia, Baranja and Western Srem. For
places and people outside Croatia I have opted for whatever form
seemed to be most appropriate or most familiar to an English-speaking
reader. For the joint kings of Hungary-Croatia I have used English ver­
sions of the names wherever possible, for example Charles Robert, and
the Hungarian name elsewhere, e.g. Kalman. Maria is perfectly well
known, however, so I have not used Mary when referring to the
Hungarian queen. On the same principle I have kept Charles V and
Prince Paul in English, but used Franz-Jozef and Karl for the last two
Habsburg emperors. I have generally referred to the Habsburgs as
emperors, even though the Habsburgs were the kings of Hungary and
Croatia.
Preface

In 1 9 9 2 Croatia joined the club of sovereign European states. It was,

said President Franjo Tudjman, the fulfilment of ‘the Croats’ thousand-
year-old dream of independence’. Few dreams have been fulfilled in
such unpromising circumstances. Recognition of the country’s inde­
pendence was enmeshed in controversy, for while Germany supported
it, Britain and France were strongly opposed. And while Europe’s states­
men quarrelled over whether Croatia should be recognised at all, the
country remained in the throes of a bloody war of independence against
the Yugoslav army, the army of the Croatian Serbs and a variety of
Serbian paramilitary groups. Fighting had devastated the country and
left it effectively partitioned. From Karlovac in the north to the outskirts
of Zadar on the Adriatic Sea, a long swathe of hilly territory had fallen
under Serb control. Alongside two smaller chunks of land which the
Serbs held in eastern and central Croatia, the Serbs had siezed almost a
third of the republic’s territory.
The fighting had ruined the economy of what had once been the rich­
est of Yugoslavia’s six republics. The main railway lines running east
and south of Zagreb were cut; likewise the Autoput Bratstvo i Jedinstvo,
the Motorway of Brotherhood and Unity, which ran in a straight line
across the flat plains of Slavonia from Zagreb towards Belgrade. Oil pipe­
lines, refineries, power stations and water supplies had been blown up,
or had been put out of action, because they lay partly in Serb-held terri­
tory. The once prosperous tourist resorts on the Dalmatian coast had
been abandoned by holidaymakers, their rooms now crammed with
refugees. Most suffered from a chronic shortage of electricity. Even the
‘Pearl of the Adriatic’, Dubrovnik, had been badly damaged by Yugoslav
army shelling. People had been driven from their homes. About
3 0 0 ,0 0 0 Croats had fled westwards from the Serbs to take refuge on the
Adriatic islands, in deserted coastal hotels or in improvised camps. A
smaller number of Serbs had gone east, either to Serb-held territory in
Croatia, or to Serbia proper. Hundreds of villages had been bombed and
burned beyond repair and recognition. On the banks of the Danube the
eastern town of Vukovar ressembled a smaller version of post-war
Dresden or Warsaw. The town had been pounded almost to the ground
x Preface

in a punishing three-month siege by the Yugoslav army and Serb para­

militaries, which ended only with the town’s surrender to the Serbs in
mid-November 1 9 9 1 .
Warfare has been the lot of the Croats since they migrated south
across the Carpathians and settled along the shores of the Adriatic in
the seventh century. In the tenth and eleventh centuries the cities along
the Dalmatian coast were ransacked and torched by the Venetians,
while the wooden fortress-towns of Slavonia felt the pressure of the ter­
ritorial ambitions of the Magyars. Union between Croatia and Hungary
was compacted in 1 1 0 2 , but provided no defence against the Mongols
who swept in from the east in the thirteenth century and devastated
Zagreb, or against the Ottomans who reached Croatia in the fifteenth
century and annihilated the country’s nobility in 1 4 9 3 . In the 1 5 20s,
as the Ottoman armies overwhelmed more territory, the Pope sent a
message to the Croatian parliament, urging them to continue to resist
the tide of Islam and referring to the Croats as the ‘Ramparts of
Christendom’. This generous title availed them nothing. The Turks
swept on, almost to the gates of Zagreb, destroying almost all the traces
of the seven-century-old civilisation that they encountered.
Croatia is border land. It lies on the geographical border between
Central Europe and the Balkans, and between the Mediterranean world
and continental Europe. It lies also on a cultural and religious border,
between Eastern, Byzantine Christendom and the Latin West. The very
shape of the country reinforces the impression of a frontier. Nothing
compact, square or secure. Instead the country curves round Bosnia in
a narrow arc, in the shape of a crescent moon, or a boomerang. At no
point is Croatia more than a few hundred miles wide: at most points it is
much less. In the far south, both north and south of Dubrovnik it is only
a few miles wide, hemmed in between the Adriatic Sea on one side and
the mountains of Bosnia on the other.
The fate of border land is always to be precarious and frequently to
move, shrinking and expanding across the generations to an astonish­
ing degree. The fate of border land is also to be buffeted in one direction
or the other, to be trampled on, crossed over, colonised, defended and
abandoned in turn by stronger neighbouring powers.
The Croats are Slavs. But they bear the genetic footprints of countless
invaders and settlers, and of those shadowy inhabitants of the land
before the Croats themselves arrived. The blood of ancient Illyrians,
Greeks, Romans, Serbs, Vlachs, Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks,
Jews and others flows in the veins of contemporary Croats. The results
are marked physical differences between the peoples of different
regions, and differences of temperament as well. The inhabitants of
Dalmatia are for the most part tall, lean, dark-haired, tempestuous and
somewhat combative: the people of northern Croatia and Slavonia are
 Preface xi

shorter, rounder, often blond-haired, and generally of a quieter and

more reflective disposition.
Although a small country, there are stark contrasts in the look of the
land. Northern Croatia and Slavonia are green and hilly, a land of
woods, vineyards, fruit trees, prosperous farms and tidy villages.
Imposing castles and baroque churches are just part of the legacy of
centuries of Habsburg rule, which lasted from 1 5 2 7 to 1 9 1 8 . The capi­
tal, Zagreb, has the cut and air of a grand, provincial Austrian city, and
along these cobbled streets, in the high-ceilinged cafés, in the formal
parks and on the imposing squares decked with solemn monuments the
air is heavy with memory of the ordered, prosperous world of the
Habsburg monarchy. South of the Gvozd mountains and across the
wild moors of Lika one descends into a very different world. In Dalmatia
the sunlight is strong and harsh, the hills barren and studded with olive
groves. The cities are wholly Mediterranean in appearance, dotted with
the remains of ancient Rome and of Dalmatia’s later rulers, the
Venetians. A few miles inland, beside the eery and silent mudflats at
Nin, rise the humble squat turrets of the churches of the first Croat
settlers.
Because they inhabit the rim, or the ramparts, never the middle, the
people of border land are not relaxed about their heritage or culture.
There is always the lurking danger that the rest of Europe may forget
about them or - worse - confuse them with the people to the east and
south. Pick up any recent publication by the Croatian authorities, even
a tourist brochure, and count the number of times such words as
‘Western’, ‘Catholic’, ‘Central Europe’ or even ‘civilisation’ appear. Or
try dropping the word ‘Balkan’ into a conversation with a Croat and
wait for the inevitable protest: Croatia is not part of the Balkans, but part
of the West!
The people of the border land are always aware that beyond their
narrow boomerang of territory, beyond that river, on the other side of
that mountain, their world stops and that of the Eastern Orthodox
Serbs, or the Muslim Bosnians, begins. When I asked a seminarian in
Zagreb in 1 9 9 1 what the fall of Vukovar to the Yugoslav army in
November 1 9 9 1 meant to him, he referred to it not as a hum an tragedy,
though he surely felt it, but as a civilisational defeat. ‘It means that the
East has advanced into the West,’ he answered.
Croatia has often but not always been at war. After the Habsburgs’
historic victory over the Ottomans in the 1690s, northern Croatia
enjoyed the benefits of peace and orderly government with few interrup­
tions until the First World War. The twentieth century has undone those
gains. The last three generations have known warfare on a scale not
seen since the Middle Ages. After the carnage of the First World War,
there followed the disastrous ‘Independent State of Croatia’ in 1 9 4 1 , a
xii Preface

poisoned chalice, tainted with a Fascist ideology and an alliance with

Hitler’s Germany. The result was to plunge Croatia into civil war
between left-wing Partisans and the Fascist Ustashe. And, after emerg­
ing into independent statehood once again in the 19 9 0 s, the Croats
have continued to be dogged by the legacy of the past. The fighting of
the 1 9 4 0 s and the mass killings of Croatia’s Serb community came back
to haunt the country fifty years on.
Croatia remains virtual terra incognita to most English-speaking
people. Although a great deal of literature has been published on the
former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, most of the new books have dwelled on
Yugoslavia as a whole, or on the war in Bosnia, which followed so
quickly on the conflict in Croatia and which soon eclipsed it in terms of
material devastation, the scale of atrocities and the forced movement of
peoples. The betrayal of Bosnia’s secular Muslims is a subject that will
long continue to haunt the West, and the very nature of the war in
Bosnia, between a government committed, at least nominally, to a
multi-ethnic society, and the forces of ethnic and religious totalitarian­
ism, made it a more attractive cause for Western liberals than Catholic
Croatia, a country tagged with a peculiar reputation as having been
‘pro-Hitler’ in the Second World War. Indeed, the prevailing impression
of Croatia in Britain and France was encapsulated by President François
Mitterrand of France, who, at the height of the Yugoslav army’s savage
assault on the town of Vukovar in November 1 9 9 1 , could only com­
ment: ‘Croatia belonged to the Nazi bloc, not Serbia.’
It was out of a desire to remedy a certain gap in our understanding of
the former Yugoslavia, and from a conviction that Croatia warrants
study on its own, and not as a bit-player in a wider drama, that I
attempted a brief account of the war in Croatia in 1 9 9 1 . But it was
impossible to write about the war in the 1 9 9 0 s without referring to the
war of the 1940s, and impossible to write about that without referring
to the first Yugoslavia and the political climate of the 1 9 2 0 s and 1930s,
which then threw me back to the national awakening of the 1840s. In
the end I decided to start with the first Croat principalities in the Dark
Ages.
The attempt to cover such a broad canvas with a few brush strokes
lays me open to the charge of missing out an enormous amount. It must
also be made clear that this is not a book about Croats but about the
country of Croatia. I am aware that the complaint may be raised that
talk of Croatia is anachronistic - an attempt to read back into past cen­
turies a country whose borders were only fixed finally by Tito in 19 4 5 .
Of course this is true in part; Croatia has shifted like ectoplasm across the
board of south-eastern Europe. But the school of thought, taking its cue
from Belgrade, which holds that modern Croatia was simply ‘invented’
by Tito as a part of an anti-Serb conspiracy does not commend itself to
 Preface xiii

me. Nor does the nationalist Croat school which holds that povijesna
Hrvatska - historic Croatia - must be always be understood as Croatia at
its greatest extent. By Croatia I mean the Triune Kingdom of Croatia,
Slavonia and Dalmatia, which formed the core of the early Croat king­
dom from the ninth to eleventh centuries, to which virtually every
parliament and ban (viceroy) of Croatia laid claim from the Middle Ages
till 1 9 1 8 , which were united in the autonomous Croat banovina shortly
before the Second World W ar and then incorporated (with various
additions and subtractions) into the Republic of Croatia at the end of
the war.
Of all the countries which have emerged after the collapse of
Communism and the second ‘springtime of nations’, Croatia has per­
haps the richest, most tangled and most turbulent history. The
country’s strategic position, as well as its cultural and artistic heritage,
should not be ignored. Along with the Serbs, the Croats hold the keys to
peace in Bosnia and to the future stability of the Balkan peninsula. It is
important to know more about the Croats. Theirs is a controversial and
compelling history.
There are several people who have been key figures in the writing of
this book. I would particularly like to thank Branko Franolic, without
whose help and comments at every stage along the way this book
would never have been written. Thanks also to Mike Reid for travelling
round Croatia with me and taking many of the photographs; to Chris
Helgren for supplying photographs from his own coverage of the war;
to Dessa Trevisan, for her unrivalled knowledge of Yugoslavia; to Tim
Judah and Inès Sabalic, for making many useful corrections to the
manuscript and arranging copyright for the photographs; and to
Branko Magas, Rosa Grce, and Mark Hayman for the maps.
1
‘The Unfaithful Croats’

He cursed the unfaithful Croats and their descendants before God and all the
saints for his violent death , saying the Croats should never again have a
ruler of their own tongue but should always be under foreign rule.
Legend of King Zvonimir’s death1

In the village of Nin, where the dry rocky Karst of the Dalmatian hinter­
land meets the Adriatic Sea, stands a small, cruciform church. Squat
and of simple dimensions it looks ancient and indeed is so, dating from
the ninth century at the earliest and the eleventh century at the latest.
It is said that the Church of the Holy Cross of Nin was built in such a way
that the rays of the setting sun would fall on the baptismal font on the
feast day of St Ambrose, the patron saint of the Benedictines of Nin. The
font, known as Viseslav’s font after the ninth-century Croatian ruler
who was baptised in it, and inscribed in Latin ‘Here the weak man is
brought to light’, has been removed to a museum. But the dedicatory
inscription to a local ruler or zupan by the name of Godecaj, or Godezav,
remains by the entrance.
If a nation can be said to have a centre, then the Church of the Holy
Cross of Nin has a good claim to fulfil that function for the Croats. In this
region the Croats settled in the seventh century. Here its first rulers built
their homes and fashioned houses of worship. Here the Croat leaders
accepted the Christian religion from Rome that has been a continuous
thread running through the vicissitudes of their history. The Holy Cross
of Nin, the much larger church of St Donat in Zadar, the Church of St
Nicholas on the island of Brae and perhaps a hundred chapels or funeral
monuments are practically all that remain to bear witness to the life
and vitality of the old kingdom of Croatia which came to an end at the
close of the eleventh century and whose architectural legacy was
largely destroyed in the Mongol invasion of the thirteenth century.2
Those early dukes and kings we glimpse through a glass darkly, in frag­
ments of sculpture on church walls, on fonts and on tombs. They are
shadowy figures moving in and out of focus, occasionally falling under
the spotlight at a moment of brilliant clarity, only to recede back into
2 Croatia

the darkness of which we know nothing. They have left few traces of
their turbulent reigns. To our eye they would appear colourful indeed.
This we know from opened funeral caskets of early Croatian women­
folk. Byzantine-looking in heavy gold earrings and jewellery. Among
their relics are the grave of Queen Jelena in the Church of Our Lady of
the Islands near Split and the font of Duke Viseslav In the Church of St
Michael of Ston is a rare surviving portrait of one of these early Croatian
rulers - a depiction of the church’s royal patron with his donation in the
palm of his hand. But Croatian history did not begin with the baptism of
Viseslav in about 8 0 0 . By that time Croats had been settled in the
Balkan peninsula and on the shores of the Adriatic for almost a century
and a half.
The Croats are a Slav people in spite of their name, which points
to a separate Iranian source. At the beginning of the fourth century,
when the Roman Empire was falling into decay, the Croats lived
alongside other Slavic tribes in the marshy, flat lands north of the
Carpathian mountains, between the Dnieper, the Dniester, the Pripet
and the Vistula, an area covered today approximately by the Ukraine,
Poland and Belarus. In this swampy domain, later called White Croatia,
they had little contact with Roman civilisation, for they were several
hundred miles north of the nearest Roman provinces of Dacia, Moesia,
Scythia and Pannonia. As far as is known the Slavs of that region were
a settled, pastoral people who hoed fields with ploughs, raised livestock,
kept bees and lived in clans - plemena. Some may have lived com­
munally in extended families, for the southern Slavs for centuries clung
to the system of extended families and property held in common, known
as the zadruga. The Slavs appear to have had their own princely rulers
and to have respected the principle of primogeniture, as the notion of
hereditary succession was established among the Croats by the time
they settled in Pannonia and Dalmatia. The Croats also divided their
new country rapidly into zupe (counties), which suggests they brought
these administrative divisions with them from White Croatia.
Little is known about their religion, as the pre-Christian Croats did
not write and therefore left no written evidence. Nor did they leave
behind religious monuments. Speculation about early Slav belief sys­
tems is based on fragmentary evidence from Byzantine and Arab
sources. But this relates to Bulgars or Russians, and there is no certainty
that pagan Russians and Bulgars held the same beliefs, or practised the
same rites, as did the Croats. No one is even sure which was the chief
deity in their pantheon. Perhaps it was not much more than an affair of
rituals carried out in groves and on hilltops with the odd sacrifice.
The Croats may have lived under the lordship of nomadic Hunnic.
Germanic or Asiatic rulers in their old homeland, from whom they got
their name, for the word Horvat or Hrvat is not of Slavic origin - a source
The regions of Croatia

of frequent scholastic controversy. Some Croat scholars have opted for

the Iranian theory, pointing to Greek accounts of the Horvatos, or
Horoatos, a community of Iranians who lived at the mouth of the Don
around 2 0 0 BC. Partisans of this theory refer also to a region of Iran
that the ancient Persians called Harahvatis. Others believe the Croats
are an amalgam of Slavs and Ostrogoths, as the Ostrogoths certainly
were present in Dalmatia before the Slavs arrived. All agree, more or
less, that the Croats were a Slavic, or mostly Slavic, tribe by the time
they left their old homeland, moved south across the Danube and the
Sava in the seventh century and settled in the Balkan peninsula.
The Croats migrated into the Roman province of Illyricum, which
was later divided into the provinces of Dalmatia and Pannonia, during
the decay of the Roman Empire, when Avars and other barbarian tribes
were laying waste the cities of the empire. By 3 9 6 St Jerome, whose
home in Stridon may have been the town of Zrenj, in Istria, was com­
plaining of Goths rampaging in the vicinity, saying, ‘bishops have been
captured, priests killed, horses tied to Christ’s altars and martyrs’ relics
4 Croatia

cast around. Everywhere there is sorrow, horror and the image of

death.’3
After the division of the empire into two halves in 39 5 , the province
of Dalmatia (which extended north beyond the modern borders of
Dalmatia to the River Sava and eastwards to the Drina) was assigned
first to the western portion of the empire. But from 4 8 0 it belonged to
the eastern Byzantine Empire. Byzantine lordship over Dalmatia did
little to protect the coastal cities of Dalmatia from attacks by nomadic
Avars, who had made their base in the Pannonian plain. It was during
the time of these Avar invasions that the Slavs, Croats among them,
made their first tentative moves south of the Danube into the Balkans.
At first they came for the purpose of raiding. Later they came in greater
numbers with a view to permanent settlement. Sometimes the Croats
and other Slav tribes joined the Avars in their destructive rampages. On
other occasions Byzantium’s hard-pressed rulers persuaded the Slavs to
attack the Avars. There is no agreement over the date and pace of the
Croats’ 1,000-m ile migration to the south. The uncovering of convin­
cing evidence for the existc ~ce of White Croatia has discredited the
ninteenth-century theory that this great migration never occurred at
all, but there are still disagreements over whether it took place after the
fall of Salona, between 6 1 4 and 6 3 0 , or around 795, at the time of the
war between the Franks and the Avars.
It was probably a very long-drawn-out movement of peoples. Huw
Evans’ exhaustive study of the archaeological remains of the early
Croats notes that:

the Slavic migration, or invasion, has the quality of seeping treacle, a

slow, steady and unordered advance, a movement that had no specific
objective, but nonetheless continuously moved forward .... The rate of
arrival of the Slavs may have been such that the first-comers, although
facing a largely collapsed civilisation, were strongly affected by the con­
tact [with it, whereas] groups of Slavs who arrived later would have been
less subject to the influence of late antique culture. ...4

The Croats migrated into a deteriorating landscape. Until then, the

Roman cities on the Dalmatian coast had been largely bypassed by bar­
barian raiders, thanks to the high mountains of the Dalmatian interior.
In the long period of peace that followed Rome’s piecemeal subjugation
of the Illyrian inhabitants of Dalmatia, between 2 4 0 BC and the failed
Illyrian revolt in the first decade AD, some of these cities grew large.
Chief among them was Salona, near Split, which the Byzantine
Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus ( 9 0 5 - 5 9 ) 5 described as being
half the size of Constantinople.
By the time the Croats moved into the Balkans, Salona had evolved
 ‘The Unfaithful Croats’ 5

into the principal Christian bishopric in the region, becoming an arch­

bishopric in about 52 7 . Jadera, or Diadora (Zadar), certainly had
become a bishopric by the fourth century, when Felix represented the
see at the Council of Milan. The other towns, Epidaurum, near
Dubrovnik, Trogir, Aenona (Nin) and Julia Parentium (Porec), were
also towns of substance, enriched with amphitheatres, forums, basili­
cas and triumphal arches. The countryside around these towns was not
Romanised, however. The inhabitants of the interior were either
Illyrians or members of other tribes who were settled in the region by
the Roman government.
The attacks of the Avars and the Slavs dealt a severe blow to these
besieged outposts of a dying civilisation. In 6 0 0 Pope Gregory wrote an
anguished letter to Maximus, the Bishop of Salona, near Split, express­
ing his sorrow and impotence over the continual raids, and saying that
he ‘shared his grief about the Slavs’. But the Pope’s commiserations
availed Salona nothing. Between 6 1 4 and 6 3 0 the Avars descended on
the city and sacked it before moving down the Adriatic coast to destroy
Epidaurum, Narona (Metkovic) and other towns.
The Latin inhabitants of these ruined cities fled for sanctuary to the
Adriatic islands off the coast. As a peace of sorts returned, many of them
made their way back to the mainland, where they laid the foundations
of two new cities. In central Dalmatia, the refugees from Salona moved
into the vast, ruined palace of the Emperor Diocletian,6 located a few
miles away from Salona at Spalato.
In this giant hulk with its vast walls, sixteen towers, huge mau­
soleum, reception halls, libraries, cavernous underground cellars and
hundreds of other rooms, the survivors of the barbarian onslaught
created the city of Split. They converted the mausoleum of this notor­
ious persecutor of Christians into a cathedral and dedicated it to St Duje,
after Bishop Domnius of Salona, one of the victims of Diocletian’s
purges. The watchtower over the main entrance was converted into
small churches, two of which, St M artin’s and Our Lady of the Belfry,
survive. The refugees from Epidaurum moved a short distance down the
coast and founded another new city, which was to become known as
Ragusa, or Dubrovnik.
It was during this time of upheavals that the Croats settled in
Pannonia and Dalmatia. It seems certain they had settled in Dalmatia
by the middle of the seventh century, as Pope John IV despatched an
abbot named Martin to Dalmatia with money to ransom the Latin
Christian refugees and instructions to engage the region’s new Slav set­
tlers in dialogue. Martin returned to Rome after visiting several areas of
Dalmatia, which suggests that the region was already safe enough to
travel around in. Abbot M artin’s journey tallies with the tenth-century
account of the Emperor Porphyrogenitus, De Administrando Imperio,
6 Croatia

which was intended as a briefing on the empire for the attention of his
son and heir. Porphyrogenitus said that the Croats had not come as
invaders, but had been invited, indeed ordered, into the Balkans by his
predecessor, the Emperor Heraclius, following the sacking of Salona,
and with the purpose of relieving the empire of the murderous assaults
of the Avars.
The Emperor claimed that the Croats had been led by seven siblings.
He also said the Croats had been heretics or Arians until their reception
into mainstream Christianity later in the seventh century. Porphyro-
genitus’ claim that the Croats were invited into Dalmatia is
contradicted by the fact that the Byzantine-controlled cities of the coast
were forced to pay tribute to them. The story of the ‘invitation’ was most
probably an attempt to rationalise an invasion that the empire had been
unable to prevent.
The Croats fanned out over a wide area when they crossed the
Danube. Some remained on the Pannonian plain and mingled with
other, earlier Slav settlers, from which the terms Slovinska Zemlja
(Slovenia) and Slavonija (Slavonia) eventually developed.7 The
majority, grouped in seven or eight clans, journeyed south towards
the Adriatic, into Dalmatia and Istria. There, on the coast, they
encountered the wrecked remains of Salona and Epidaurum and the
newer Latin communities which were rising out of the marshes at
Ragusa and the old imperial palace at Spalato, or Split. The other
Dalmatian towns, Jadera (Zadar), Aenona (Nin) and Tragurium
(Trogir), appear not to have been destroyed by barbarian invaders. In
the anarchic conditions of the seventh century these towns had been
left to fend for themselves. They would still have appeared highly
civilised to the Slav immigrants settling outside their walls.
The new Slav settlers were not simple barbarians in the way the
Avars appear to have been. They did not attack these enfeebled outposts
of imperial civilisations, even though they probably could have done.
Instead, they imitated and tried to absorb them. They took up the
Roman names for towns and modified them. Thus Senia became Senj,
and Salona - what was left of it - Solin. In the interior of Dalmatia the
Slavs would have come across the remnants of the Illyrians and the
tribes who had been settled there by the Romans. These natives were
pushed out of the coastal areas and forced into the hills. They may have
been the ancestors of the Vlachs, nomadic pastoral communities which
reappeared in the Middle Ages and were not related to the Croats.
As the Byzantine Empire recovered its strength from the sixth
century under Justinian, its influence revived over the Dalmatian cities
of Dubrovnik, Split, Zadar and the Adriatic islands, which formed a
Byzantine unit of administration known as the archonate. The growing
influence of Byzantium was also felt among the Croatian clans which
 T h e Unfaithful Croats’ 7

had settled in the interior of Dalmatia, for they accepted the lordship of
the Emperor Constantine II Pogonatus in 67 8 .
The seven or eight Croat clans in Dalmatia each occupied a certain
region, which they subdivided into zupe (counties) ruled by a zupan
(ruler or sheriff). The overall ruler of several zupe was the knez (prince).
The southernmost area of Croat settlement, which became known as
Red Croatia, comprised three such dukedoms or principalities. One of
these, Dioclea, evolved into Montenegro, while a second, Zahumlya, or
just Hum, was later called Herzegovina. According to the great Croat
historian, Vjekoslav Klaic,8 it was the clan that occupied the heartland
of Dalmatia, between the River Cetina in the north, the Velebit moun­
tains in the west and the plain of Duvno in the south, which carried the
clan name Hrvat (Croat), on account of which the region was known as
White Croatia - Bijela Hrvatska. The names of the other Slav clans were
lost.9 Not every local prince was known as a knez. Klaic maintained that
the ruler of the region surrounding Bihac appears to have held the title
of ban 10 and that, after the victory of the Croat knez over the banf the
term was absorbed into Croat political culture, the ban henceforth occu­
pying a position second only to the prince. ‘When in subsequent
centuries the Croat princes and kings spread their authority into other
regions, throughout the conquered regions they introduced bans as
their deputies/ he wrote.11
In 8 0 0 the Frankish armies of Charlemagne added Dalmatia to their
domains. Byzantium recognised this change of lordship in the Treaty of
Aachen in 8 1 2 , retaining the cities of Zadar, Trogir and Split and the
islands of Krk, Rab and Osor, which were governed as a theme
(province) by a Byzantine representative in Zadar. In Dalmatia the
principal result of Frankish rule was the evangelisation of the Croat
rulers; some may have become Christian before the ninth century, but
if they did so they left no trace in the form of stone churches, although
it is possible they built wooden structures which have completely per­
ished. Some Croats must have been Christian already, for the worlds of
the Croats and the Latin cities were not hermetically sealed off from
each other. But the rulers were either not Christian or of no fixed reli­
gion until the mass baptisms of the Frankish era, which are
commemorated in Viseslav’s baptismal font.
The Croat princes did not resist Charlemagne’s rule. But when he
died in 81 4 , and was succeeded by his son, Louis the Pious, northern,
Pannonian Croatia revolted unsuccessfully between 8 1 9 and 822
under the local ruler, Ljudevit. The Dalmatian ruler, Borna, opposed the
rebellion, which suggests that the local Croat rulers were politically
divided at the time. And it was Dalmatia, with its adjacent seaboard net­
work of civilised Latin towns, which led the way towards the creation of
a more modern state. One sign of the development of Croat society in
8 Croatia

Dalmatia was the adoption of more sophisticated titles. Vladislav, who

ruled from 8 21 to 83 0 , styled himself Duke of the Croatians and
Dalmatians,12 and it was during his rule that we hear for the first time
of a new bishopric being founded at Nin.
The Nin bishopric was a crucial development for the Croats. Later, it
took centre-stage in a struggle between champions of an autonomous
Croat national Church and those who favoured subordination in all
matters to Rome. In the early days, Nin was a small, Latin town and the
first bishop, Theodosius, was from Syria. But it developed quickly into a
centre of Slav resistance to the centralising tendencies of Rome. The
remarkable Bishop Grgur, or Gregory, promoted Nin as an ecclesiastical
capital for the embryonic Croatian state, contesting the claims of the
Latin bishoprics on the coast, and especially those of the archbishopric
of Split.
Under Vladislav’s successors, Mislav ( 8 3 5 -4 5 ) and Trpimir
(8 4 5 -6 4 ), the Dalmatian-Croatian dukedom expanded, although it
remained under the ultimate sovereignty of the Franks. A Bulgarian
army was defeated at Zvornik, in eastern Bosnia, which secured the
wildernesses and forests of the interior of Dalmatia (what we would
now call central Bosnia), for the Croat state. Another sign of the
developing civilisation of the Croat rulers, and of their desire to
strengthen ties with the West, was the decision by Trpimir to invite the
Benedictine order into his domains. A Saxon Benedictine, Gottschalk,
spent two years at Trpimir’s court between about 8 4 6 and 8 4 8 before
being summoned to Mainz on charges of heresy, and it was probably
thanks to Gottschalk’s influence that in 8 5 0 - 2 the first Benedictine
monastery in the Croat lands was built at Rizinice, near Klis.
The Croats in Dalmatia were building their own churches by this
stage and the few structures that survived the Mongol invasion of the
fourteenth century, such as St Donat in Zadar, illustrate the vigour of
the new culture. These were not only crude imitations of the structures
they saw in the Latin cities but displayed considerable originality of
design. A characteristic feature of early Croat art was the decorative use
of winding and interwoven patterns carved on to stone, above door­
ways, on fonts and on other precious objects. This art form, which is
known as plaitwork, bears a strong resemblance to early Celtic art. The
Croats may have brought it with them from White Croatia, or learned it
from the old Illyrian inhabitants of Dalmatia.
Little is known of life at the courts of the Croatian dukes, though the
charters they handed to various bishops and monasteries cast light on
Croatia’s progress towards a feudal society.
Duke Trpimir’s presentation of the Church of the Blessed George to
the Archbishop of Split refers very precisely to the amount of land that
was being presented along with the church, and to gifts of slaves, for
 ‘The Unfaithful Croats’ 9

example. Other documents, concerning a dispute over the ownership of

that church between the Bishop of Nin and the Archbishop of Split, refer
to Mutimir’s ( 8 9 2 -9 1 0 ) retinue of cup-bearers, chamberlains and
chaplains. It is clear from these documents that Croat society had
already developed a class structure and that the Croats now had a
strong sense of land ownership.
Trpimir’s son, Zdeslav (8 7 8 -9 ), succeeded to the throne with the
support of the Byzantine Emperor Basil I. Zdeslav launched the first and
last attempt by a Croat ruler to detach the Croat Church from Western
Christendom and accept Byzantine jurisdiction. The move was not pop­
ular. Although the Croat dukes and the Dalmatian cities acknowledged
the political sovereignty of the Byzantine emperors, their ecclesiastical
loyalty was to Rome. Zdeslav was murdered within a year. His succes­
sor, Branimir (8 7 9 -9 2 ), reversed the decision and returned Croatia to
the Roman obedience.
Under Mutimir’s successor, Tomislav ( 9 1 0 - C.9 2 9 ), the early
Croatian state reached its zenith. Tomislav united Dalmatia with
Pannonia and upgraded his title from that of duke to king with the
permission of the Pope. As a result he becam e lord of a substantial
state, roughly covered by modern Croatia, Bosnia and the coast of
Montenegro. After allying with Byzantium and defeating Bulgaria,
Byzantium then ceded Tomislav sovereignty over the theme of
Dalmatian cities and islands.
The rise of Croatia under Tomislav excited the admiration of his con­
temporaries; Porphyrogenitus described Croatia as a great military
power, which was capable of fielding more than 1 0 0 ,0 0 0 footsoldiers
and a fleet little smaller than that of Venice. The reference to 1 0 0 ,0 0 0
soldiers must have been a great exaggeration, but it suggests that
Croatia was seen as a substantial military power.13 Considering the
scale of his alleged achievements, Tomislav is a curiously opaque figure.
It is not known when, where or how he died. And another curious
matter is that although Porphyrogenitus lauded the Croats’ military
strength, De Administrando Imperio does not refer to Tomislav by name.
According to legend he was crowned on the Field of Duvno
(Tomislavgrad) in 9 2 5 . But no one knows precisely when, or whether
this event really took place. Like many early Croat rulers, Tomislav
fades in and out of the picture. He was certainly present at the height of
the power struggle between Grgur of Nin and the archbishopric of Split,
which was to have such important consequences for the future of the
Croatian Church. Yet, in this crucial dispute, Tomislav’s role is
unknown and no one knows whether he influenced the outcome.
The conflict between the bishops of Nin and Split was no mere turf
battle. It involved vital ethnic, cultural and geo-political issues, pitting
Slavs against Latins, and the primitive semi-democratic traditions of the
10 Croatia

Slavs against the rigid feudal system of Western Europe. At the core of
the dispute was the use of the Glagolitic script and the Slav tongue in the
Mass. According to popular legend, the Glagolitic script was invented
by St Jerome. It is more probable that Glagolitic, like its more successful
rival, Cyrillic, originated in the south-east Balkans, most probably from
the region of Thessaloniki. The route by which the script reached
Croatia was tortuous and is a subject of scholastic controversy. One
theory is that it was introduced to Western Europe by the Byzantine
missionaries, Constantine (St Cyril) and Methodius, who arrived in
Moravia in 8 6 3 at the invitation of the local ruler, Rastislav, bringing
with them liturgical books written in the Glagolitic script. Three years
later they escorted the first batch of prospective clergy from Moravia to
Rome for ordination. Their activities aroused furious opposition from
the Latin party, supported by the Germans, who resented any support
being given to Slav culture and insisted that the only languages per­
missible for divine service were Latin, Greek or Hebrew. Nevertheless,
Pope Hadrian received them cordially and ordained the Slav clergy.
Cyril remained in Rome, where he died in 8 6 9 . As the German clergy
gained the upper hand in Moravia it became impossible for Methodius
to return to Moravia, but the Pope appointed him to the revived Roman
see of Sirmium (Srijem). Methodius’ troubles at the hands of the
Germans were no concern of the Croats. Yet it appears that his script
somehow reached Croatia and gained a foothold in Dalmatia, especially
in the Slav bishopric of Nin.
In Dalmatia the use of the Glagolitic script and the Mass in the ver­
nacular became very popular among the expanding number of Croat
priests, championed by Grgur of Nin. As with King Tomislav, there are
disappointingly few personal details about Bishop Grgur. We know that
he defended the use of Glagolitic script and the Mass in the vernacular,
and that his ambition was for Nin to become the leading see in a
Croatian Church which included the cities of Dalmatia. But the Latin
bishops on the coast cherished their direct ties to the see of Rome, and
reinforced their claim to ecclesiastical independence from the Croats by
putting forward a variety of new spiritual claims. The archbishops of
Split began to insist on the ‘apostolic’ status of their see on the strength
of a claim that St Peter had sent St Domnius, known as St Duje, to
Salona. The political agenda of the archbishops of Split was ambitious.
Their goal was to revive the metropolitical jurisdiction of the old Roman
bishops of Salona on behalf of the new city of Split, and so dominate
what they considered were the upstart, inferior Slav bishops of the
interior.
Pope John X, naturally, sided with the Latin bishops and the principle
of uniformity. Everything that Grgur stood for - the Mass in the ver­
nacular, married clergy, beards and local scripts - contradicted the
 ‘The Unfaithful Croats’ 11

centralising tendencies at work in early medieval Christendom. But

rather than alienate the Slavs by banning the practices of the Croat
Bishop on his own authority, the Pope called a synod in Split in 9 2 5 to
decide the issue. Given that there were several Latin bishops, that Grgur
was on his own and that Tomislav had no vote in the debate, the result
was a foregone conclusion. The synod endorsed Split’s claim to become
the metropolitan see. Nin was humiliated. The bishopric was simply
abolished, on the ground that it was a modern, Slav creation, which did
not correspond to a former Roman see. Services in the vernacular were
prohibited except in areas where there were no clergy who knew Latin.
The rather extreme nature of the conclusions may have perturbed even
the Pope, as he then invited both parties to hold another meeting.
At a second synod in 9 2 8 , held again in Split, the result was exactly
the same. This time Bishop Grgur was offered the revived Roman see of
Skradin or that of Siscia (Sisak) in exchange for Nin. It was just an
insult, as the old Roman town of Siscia had been a wilderness for cen­
turies. Frustratingly, no more is heard of the defeated Grgur.
After the rupture between Rome and Constantinople in 1 0 5 4 the
papacy became ever more hostile towards the kinds of ideas represented
by Grgur of Nin. The imposition of Latin services was divisive in
Dalmatia, for in 1 0 5 7 , according to the Historia Salonitana, written by
Thomas, Archdeacon of Split (1 2 0 0 -6 8 ), the Slav clergy revolted on the
island of Krk, expelled the Latin Bishop and installed one of their own.
The rising was put down with the help of the Croat King Petar Kresimir
IV (1 0 5 8 -7 4 ), who had clearly decided to throw in his lot with the great
civilisational force of Rome rather than back the Slav clergy. The rebel
cleric leader, named Vulf, probably not a Croat, was brought to Dalmatia
for the special entertainment of the Latin bishops, who had him tortured
and killed. In 1 0 6 0 a third synod, again held in Split, ordered yet more
draconian measures against clergy who wore beards, who said the Mass
in the vernacular or who used the ‘gothic’ (Glagolitic) script, in line with
the decrees of the Lateran Council of 1 059.
In spite of persecution, Glagolitic continued to survive in opposition
to the Romanising Latin culture of the coastal cities. Rome relented a
little. In 1 2 4 8 Innocent IV permitted the bishops ofSenj to use Croatian
in the liturgy, and the Glagolitic script. As late as the sixteenth century
Glagolitic enjoyed a final burst of activity as the preferred script of a
school of exiled Croat Protestants, who produced, among other things,
a Glagolitic New Testament in the German city of Tübingen in 15 6 2 .14
But Glagolitic had lost the battle to become the national script of the
Croats, and in the seventeenth century this hardy Dalmatian survivor
withered in the face of the cultural onslaught of Venice.
The Kulturkampf in Croatia over Glagolitic weakened the cause of the
embryonic Croatian state. If Grgur of Nin had won his battle, the whole
12 Croatia

of Croatia would have come under a single ecclesiastical jurisdiction, a

development that would have greatly boosted royal authority. As it
was, the most powerful ecclesiastics in Dalmatia remained outside the
Croat King’s control.
The other shadow that cast a pall over Tomislav’s reign was the rise
of Hungary in the north. The Magyars had ensconced themselves in the
sixth century on the Pannonian plain, which earlier had been held by
the Avars. They soon made their influence felt. Like the Avars they
started out as a roaming, destructive force, conquering Basel in 9 1 7 ,
burning Bremen a year later and criss-crossing the Alps, the Rhone,
Bavaria and Burgundy, leaving a trail of havoc behind them. Once they
settled down in their stronghold on the Danube and the Tisza it was
inevitable that they would cast a covetous eye on the Croatian lands to
the south. Tomislav beat off a Hungarian attack on northern Croatia in
the 92 0s. But the Hungarians were only deterred, not permanently
repulsed.
The cracks that appeared under Tomislav widened after his death,
exposing fundamental weaknesses at the heart of this large and impres­
sive-looking state. One problem was the quarrel between the Latin and
Slav clergy. Another was that the crown lacked a strong territorial
power-base. Unlike more advanced kingdoms in Western Europe, the
Croat kings did not own vast tracts of land which they could lease, or
bestow on courtiers. They had no great cities. There was no equivalent
to London or Paris - centres of ecclesiastical and secular authority as
well as commercial activity. The kings moved peripatetically around
their domains, shuttling between the small towns of Nin, Biograd and
Knin. The large cities, such as Split and Zadar, were virtually indepen­
dent states, electing their own bishops and governors and jealously
guarding their liberty.
The first major crisis followed soon after the death in 9 4 5 of
Tomislav’s son. Kresimir. His successor, Miroslav, was murdered by
Pribina, the Ban of Dalmatia. This unleashed a period of anarchic war­
fare during which Red Croatia, a substantial territory in the south, was
lost to the Croats.
The signs of Croatia’s weakness were not lost on Hungary, or on
Venice. In the ninth and tenth centuries, Byzantium granted Venice
administration by proxy over the theme of Dalmatian cities and islands.
In the 1 0 0 0 s the Doge of Venice, Peter II Orseolo, ominously assumed
the title Duke of Dalmatia, and backed his claim with a seaborne
invasion. Venice’s territorial gains were not permanent. Nevertheless,
the ease with which it occupied Zadar, Biograd, Split and Korcsula did
not bode well for Croatia’s future integrity.
Under Petar Kresimir IV (1 0 5 8 -7 4 ) the Croatian crown recovered
much of the authority it had enjoyed under Tomislav. The King regained
 ‘The Unfaithful Croats’ 13

control over the Dalmatian cities, partly thanks to the close alliance he
forged with the papacy, which was cemented by the help KreSimir lent
to suppressing the revolt of Glagolitic clergy on the island of Krk. Under
Kresimir the capital was moved from Knin to the coastal town of
Biograd and the country divided into three regions - Pannonia in the
north, Dalmatia in the west and Bosnia in the east - each of which was
placed under the regional authority of a ban. Kresimir also founded
Sibenik, a new city on the Dalmatian coast which was established as a
Slav rival to the older and more independent Latin cities.
From the period just after the death of Petar Kresimir there survives
an informative account of life in the medieval Croat kingdom from the
deeds of donation of Petar Crni of Split in 1 0 8 0 . Crni was a rich
nobleman who, following the custom of the time, was investing some of
his money in the foundation of a new church in the nearby village of
Jesenice, dedicated to St Peter. ‘We invited the the Archbishop [of Split]
to consecrate the church on 11 October. Many people from Split and
many Croats attended the celebration,’ he wrote. ‘I bought a slave called
Dragaca from a priest in Orihovo for five solidi ...w e gave him 1 0 0
sheep, two cows and a pair of oxen, which he will keep to satisfy the
needs of the church. Besides, we bought a small boy named Zloba from
his father and sent him to be educated and to become a priest and serve
permanently in this church.’15
The fact that Crni placed ‘people from Split’ and ‘Croats’ in separate
categories suggests there was still a sharp difference between the
inhabitants of the old Dalmatian cities and the ‘Croatians’, even though
Slavs had long been migrating into the cities and diluting the ethnic
Latin element. Indeed, Crni himself was a Slav who lived in the city.
The death of Kresimir IV exposed all the weaknesses that resulted
from the lack of a strong, royal administrative base. Again the kingdom
was plunged into anarchic warfare between the faction leaders, the
winner being the Dmitar, the governor, or Ban, of northern. Pannonian
Croatia. As king he took the name of Zvonimir. Like his predecessor
Kresimir, Zvonimir (1 0 7 5 -8 9 ) was determined to strengthen Croatia
through an alliance with the papacy. He was crowned by a papal legate
and repaid Pope Gregory VII’s support with a declaration at his corona­
tion, placing Croatia under papal sovereignty. In his coronation oath he
said he was ‘King of Croatia by the Grace of God and the will of the
Apostolic see’ and he promised the Pope a symbolic tribute of 2 0 0 gold
coins each Easter. Zvonimir was criticised strongly by historians in the
Communist era for this supposed ‘betrayal’ of Croat independence. In
fact it was a purely pragmatic move that posed no threat to Croatia’s
independence and bolstered his hold on the throne. Zvonimir died in
1 0 8 9 , most probably of natural causes. It was not until long after his
death that chroniclers sought to explain the end of the independent
14 Croatia

Croat kingdom by claiming that he had been murdered and had cursed
his fellow countrymen, condemning them to rule by foreigners. Thus,
according to the thirteenth-century Chronicle of the Priest of Dioclea,
Zvonimir died at the hands of his own nobles at an assembly at Petih
Crkava (Five Churches), near Knin, after failing to persuade them to
support him on a papal crusade.
After Zvonimir’s death, King Laszlo of Hungary invaded northern
Croatia, claiming his right to succeed to the Croatian crown on the
grounds that he was the brother of Queen Jelena, while Zvonimir’s only
son Radovan had predeceased him. Jelena naturally supported her
brother’s claim, as did many of the nobles in northern Croatia. So Laszlo
was able to advance across the flat plains of northern Croatia in 1091
without meeting any resistance. However, he could not cross the Gvozd
mountains and advance south into Dalmatia. In the Dalmatian heart­
land of the Croat kingdom the nobles were strongly opposed to a foreign
king, and elected one of their own number, Petar Svacic, as the next
king. Laszlo did not live long enough to pursue his claim south of the
Gvozd mountains. Nevertheless, he reinforced his claim to the lands of
the north by founding a bishopric in the small settlement of Zagreb.16
This he attached to the see of Ostrogon in Hungary, and not to the arch­
bishopric of Split as tradition dictated.
After Laszlo’s death, the crown of Hungary passed to his younger
brother Kalman (1 0 9 5 -1 1 1 6 ) . The new King was a resourceful states­
man who was determined to gain through diplomacy what could not be
obtained by brute force. In 109 7 he assembled a large army in northern
Croatia and moved south across the Gvozd mountains. There he met
the army of Petar Svacic.
His victory was total and Petar died in battle, lending his name to the
mountain called Petrova Gora - Peter’s mountain. But, although the
threat to his title was now extinguished, Kalman felt that the task of
crushing all resistance to his rule in the mountainous interior of
Dalmatia might be beyond him. Wisely, he invited the leaders of the
twelve largest clans of the south, the Kacic, Kuka, Subic, Cudomeric,
Svacic, Mogorovic, Gusic, Karinjan, Polecic, Lisnicic, Jamometic and
Tugometic, to treat with him. The result was a historic agreement in
1 1 0 2 signed in the northern town of Krizevci and called the Pacta
Conventa.17 Under the terms of the pact, the great Croat families recog­
nised Kalman as king. In return, he granted Croatia virtual
self-government under a ban. He pledged not to settle Croatia with
Hungarians, to be crowned separately in Croatia and to visit his new
kingdom regularly in order to convoke the Sabor (parliament).
After the Pacta Conventa had been signed, Kalman moved south into
Dalmatia to Biograd, where he was crowned. Although he had solved
the dispute over the crown with the great Croat clans, his problems
 ‘The Unfaithful Croats’ 15

were not over. Several Dalmatian cities had fallen under the control of
Venice during the brief rule of Petar Svacic. At Split he was angered to
find the gates of the city were closed to him and he had to camp outside
with his army for several days before the city could be persuaded to let
him enter. This frosty welcome did not dissuade Kalman from his pacific
course, and the charters he issued to Split and Trogir were very concil­
iatory in tone. The Charter given to Trogir stated: ‘I shall allow the
ancient laws to con tin u e... and I shall not allow any Hungarian or for­
eigner to live in the city unless your gracious love accepts him .’18 Zadar
put up much more resistance and it was not until 1 1 0 5 that Kalman
persuaded the city to open its gates and recognise him as king. The inde­
pendent kingdom of Croatia had come to an end. For the next eight
centuries Croatia was to be ruled as a part of the kingdom of Hungary,
albeit under the Habsburgs from 1 5 2 7 . As the centuries wore on, the
Hungarians began to take a less generous view of the provisions of the
Pacta Conventa than had King Kalman.
2 _________________________________________

Croatia Under the Hungarians

Let it be known to Your Majesty that no ruler has ever subjugated Croatia
by force. Rather , after the death of our last king, Zvonimir, we of our free
will attached ourselves to the crown of the Hungarian kingdom, as we at
this time join ourselves to Your Majesty.1

The union of the kingdoms of Croatia and Hungary, like the union of
Poland and Lithuania, or of England and Scotland, was an unequal
affair. The Croats insisted they had entered into the arrangement of
their own volition and that the terms of the Pacta Conventa made them
an associated kingdom, and not a part of Hungary. The Hungarians
had a less exalted view of this dynastic arrangement. The kings of the
house of Arpad, who ruled until 1 3 0 1 , acknowledged Croatia’s
separate identity, continued to be crowned separately in Croatia at
Biograd, or Zadar, and left Croatia’s internal administration to the ban
and the Sabor. However, they drew a distinction between the lands of
northern Croatia, which had accepted King Laszlo’s rule in the 1090s,
and the lands south of the Gvozd mountains, which had accepted
Kalman’s rule on the basis of the Pacta Conventa. The liberties of Croatia
the Hungarians took as referring only to the lands of the south, and
when the Hungarians referred to Croatia or, as it was sometimes called,
Croatia-Dalmatia, they meant only the lands of the south. Northern
Pannonian Croatia was treated as a separate entity, which was neither
quite Croat nor part of Hungary. The Hungarians began to call this area
the Kingdom of Slavonia - simply, the land of the Slavs - and they
placed it under the jurisdiction of a separate ban and sabor.
The division between Slavonia and Croatia-Dalmatia was not merely
administrative. Although Hungary did not absorb Slavonia, it treated
the entire territory as a royal demesne and settled it with Hungarian or
Hungarianised Croat landlords. The new regime introduced Slavonia to
the full rigours of the feudal system as it had developed in Hungary. The
primitive democracy of the Croat clans, under which land belonged to
plemena who elected their local zupans, disappeared from the region.
There are no records of the proceedings of the parliaments of the old
 Croatia Under the Hungarians 17

Croat kingdom. It appears that they consisted of leaders of the big clans
and bishops and were summoned mainly for coronations, declarations
of war and the dedication of great churches. There was no fixed name
for these assemblies or a fixed meeting place. Under the Arpad kings of
Hungary, the power to call assemblies devolved from the king to the two
bans. The first assembly in Slavonia whose records survive, the
Congregatio Regni Totius Sclavoniae Generalis (General Assembly of
the Whole Kingdom of Slavonia), met in 1 2 7 3 in Zagreb and drew up
thirty-three articles for the approval of the Ban, concerning property,
judicial procedures and the payment of taxes.2 The statutes of the
Slavonian assembly became law after confirmation by the ban.
Parliaments in medieval Slavonia were peripatetic and met usually in
large churches and abbeys, at Zagreb, Krizevci and, later, at Varazdin.
They were unicameral, comprising bishops, magnates and representa­
tives of royal boroughs. In time the work of the assembly increasingly
involved the fine-tuning and defence of the prerogatives and obligations
of the noble estates with regard to their serfs and the king.
In the southern kingdom, Croatia-Dalmatia, the feudal system was
much slower to take root, because the Hungarians made no attempt to
displace the traditional Croat clan leaders. Serfdom was not widely
established. Kalm an’s interference south of the Gvozd mountains went
no further than inserting a Hungarian as the archbishop of Split and
insisting on his two-thirds share of the customs duties from the
Dalmatian ports. There are few records of the parliaments being sum­
moned in Croatia-Dalmatia in the thirteenth and early fourteenth
centuries, except for the purpose of coronations. Such parliaments as
there were met mostly in Knin, Zadar or Nin, usually under the presi­
dency of the bishop of Knin.
The Hungarians counted Bosnia - or Rama, as it was known in the
early medieval period - among their possessions under the terms of the
Pacta Conventa. But the Hungarians were only intermittently concerned
with enforcing their claim to this far-off land and the ban of Bosnia
behaved as an independent ruler. In the 1 1 6 0 s both Bosnia and Croatia
returned briefly to Byzantine sovereignty under the forceful Emperor
Manuel I Comnenus. But while Croatia-Dalmatia returned to Hungary
after the Emperor’s death in 1 1 8 0 , Bosnia continued to pursue an inde­
pendent course under its own bans, of whom Kulin ( 1 1 8 0 -1 2 0 4 ) was
the most celebrated.3
The Hungarians were not indifferent to Bosnia’s de facto indepen­
dence and in 12 3 8 they launched an invasion. But that ground to a halt
in 1 2 4 0 , when the Mongols invaded eastern Europe. The Hungarians
also attempted to assert their jurisdiction over Bosnia through the
Church. Bosnia contained only one bishopric, which had previously
been under the jurisdiction of the archbishops of Split and later those of
18 Croatia

Dubrovnik. But in 12 52 Hungary had spiritual jurisdiction over Bosnia

transferred to Djakovo, in Slavonia. The Bosnian rulers countered this
attempt to penetrate the country by fostering an independent and
allegedly heretical Bosnian Church. Bosnia had enjoyed great notoriety
as a nest of heretics, certainly since the time of Ban Kulin. Bosnia’s
rulers were in a state of schism from Rome in the thirteenth century,
but it is questionable whether they were truly heretics, or ever
embraced the dualist heresy known as Bogomilism. Most scholars now
believe that the Bosnian Church was simply independent, and that it
died out in the fourteenth century after the bans of Bosnia returned to
the Roman allegiance and the Francisians began to evangelise the
country through monasteries established in central Bosnia from the
1 3 4 0 s onwards. As Bosnia became richer through the development of
silver and lead mines, the Bosnian bans began to give themselves
grander titles. In 1 3 7 7 Ban Stephen Tvrtko made use of the extinction
of Serbia’s native Nemanja dynasty to have himself crowned king of
both Bosnia and Serbia at the monastery of Milesevo, in the Podrinje
region, which alternated between Bosnian and Serbian control. The
King of Bosnia also seized large parts of southern Dalmatia in 1 380,
after which Tvrtko styled himself King of Dalmatia as well.
The loss of Bosnia had important, negative consequences for Croatia.
W hat had formed a geographically solid land mass in Tomislav’s reign,
bordered by the Adriatic in the west and the River Drina in the east,
became a narrower, less defensible entity, arching around Bosnia in the
shape of a boomerang. Economically and culturally it was less of a loss,
as there were very few settlements of any importance east of Knin.
One of the main reasons why the Croats entered into union with
Hungary was the hope that the Hungarians would defend Dalmatia
against the assaults of Venice. For a while this held true, but soon after the
death of King Kalman in 1 1 1 6 Venice launched a new campaign, cap­
turing Sibenik. The Venetians then moved north to attack Zadar, much
the largest city on the Dalmatian coast and the real object of Venice’s
ambitions. The attack failed and the Doge died in the assault. But nine
years later there was a second, bigger invasion. This time Venice razed to
the foundations the town of Biograd, the Croats’ former capital and coro­
nation site. A Hungarian-Croatian force under King Bela II (1131-^14)
expelled the Venetians from Biograd, but the ruined town never recov­
ered from the onslaught. The bishopric died out and Biograd remained
what it is to this day, a mere village. During the brief period of Byzantine
rule over Dalmatia from 1163 to 1 1 8 0 Venice held off. But, as soon as
Dalmatia reverted to Hungary under Bela III (1 1 7 3 -9 6 ), Venice renewed
its assaults, concentrating on Zadar and the islands of Losinj, Pag and
Krk. A siege of Zadar that lasted almost ten years brought Venice little
benefit, but the island of Rab was lost to the Croats.
 Croatia Under the Hungarians 19

The Croat nobles who acquitted themselves well in the struggle

against Venice were rewarded with large estates from the Hungarian
crown. Two families which were to dominate Croatia for centuries, the
Subics (later called Zrinski) and the Frankopans, owed their rise to Bela
Ill’s patronage. The royal grants to the Frankopans were on the island
of Krk. The Subics were given land around the Dalmatian district of
Bribir.
The death of Bela III in 1 1 9 6 was followed by another Venetian
attempt to subdue Zadar, and, if all else failed, to mete out the same
vicious punishment that had befallen Biograd in 1 1 2 6 . On its own,
Venice lacked the resources to crush Zadar, which was a wealthy and
well-fortified city, backing on to flat and fertile hinterland. But the
longed-for opportunity appeared during the Fourth Crusade in 1 2 0 2 ,
approved by Pope Innocent III. The crusade suffered from poor organi­
sation and a lack of manpower. Of an expected 3 5 ,0 0 0 knightly
volunteers, only about 1 1 ,0 0 0 had turned up at the assembly point in
Venice in the summer of 1 2 0 2 , where delays and a lack of money led to
Venice threatening to turf them out or cut off their victuals. Enrico
Dandolo, the elderly Doge of Venice, then made use of the crusaders’
plight to further the city’s territorial ambitions at Dalmatia’s expense,
and offered to waive the payment of 3 4 ,0 0 0 silver marks for supplies
and refurbishments to the crusaders’ impressive armada if they would
attack and capture the city of Zadar for Venice. According to a French
account, the Doge slyly claimed that the Hungarian kings had ‘stolen’
Zadar from Venice, presenting the operation as a restitution of the sta­
tus quo ante. It was a description of affairs that would have been
indignantly rejected by the city’s inhabitants.
The expedition to Zadar was a grand affair, attended by ringing of
bells and chanting of prayers by the Venetians, who set off with 5 0
vessels of their own to accompany the 2 0 0 or so ships of the
crusaders. The Abbot of Vaux, one of the crusaders, was appalled by
this turn of events. ‘In the nam e of the Pope of Rome, I forbid you to
attack this city, for the people in it are Christians and you wear the
sign of the cross,’ he reportedly said. The Doge turned to the knights
and reminded them of the bargain. ‘You have given me your
promise, now I summon you to keep your word,’ he said.4
The assault began. Against this terrific armada, which included the
most up-to-date war machines such as catapults and drills, the city of
Zadar, in spite of its defences, had no chance. The King of Hungary pro­
vided no aid. For five days the city held out as the crusaders
manoeuvred around the wall, using vast catapults to bombard the
defences. On the fifth day, as the crusaders began to drill under the
towers, Zadar gave up the fight and hung crosses on the walls - a sign
of surrender by a Christian community which ought to have entitled
20 Croatia

the citizens to remain alive. Urged on by the Venetians, the crusaders

took no notice. On entering the city they massacred the inhabitants and
pillaged everything in sight. Churches were vandalised and torn apart
in the search for gold. These enormities carried on until the crusaders
departed from the empty husk to Corfu the following spring, from where
they intended to proceed to the biggest looting expedition of all, in
Constantinople itself. Before they left, they demolished Zadar’s sea­
ward-facing wall.
The sack of Zadar was a monstrous act of malice and the Pope was
distressed at this desecration of a Christian city and the perversion of the
crusade. He complained that the crusaders had commited a grave sin by
violating the sign of the cross displayed on Zadar’s walls and excom­
municated the entire expedition. He also called on Venice to
compensate the city for the damage. But the Pope’s regrets were not
much good to the ruined city and the bishops accompanying the
crusade soon persuaded him to lift the excommunication of the
crusaders. He did not, however, rescind the excommunication of the
Venetians, not that they appeared to care. Needless to say, Venice did
not pay any compensation to Zadar either. Unlike Biograd, which vir­
tually disappeared after Venice’s murderous assault, Zadar eventually
recovered. But the city did not regain its old vitality or its former Slav
Croatian character. After the fall to Venice, the peace terms stipulated
that Venice had the right to appoint the mayor, the comes, as well as the
Council. Hungary-Croatia recovered Zadar in 1 3 5 8 . But it proved to be
no more than an interlude, as Venice gained control of most of Dalmatia
between 1 4 0 9 and 1 4 2 0 and was not expelled from these lands until
the Napoleonic wars. Zadar reverted again to rule by Italians in 1 9 2 0
under the Treaty of Rapallo, which lasted until Tito’s Partisans drove
them out of the city at the end of the Second World War.
With the exception of the city-state of Dubrovnik, which was not an
integral part of Dalmatia, the period following the union with Hungary,
especially after the sackings of Biograd and Zadar, was one of a decline
in Dalmatia’s fortunes in comparison to those of Slavonia. The arch­
bishops of Split, for example, were progressively weakened. This had
started with the creation of a see in Zagreb in 1 0 9 4 under Hungarian
jurisdiction. It got worse after the see of Zadar was hived off from Split in
1 1 5 4 , and placed under the control of the patriarchs of Venice, as a
result of which Split lost control of the Dalmatian islands of Krk, Rab
and Cres as well. Shorn of so much of its territory, the archbishopric’s
income fell sharply and by the late thirteenth century it was much
poorer than either Zadar or Zagreb.5
For the new bishopric of Zagreb, the eleventh and twelfth centuries
were years of growth and prosperity, marked by the foundation of new
chapters in the Slavonian countryside at Cazma and Pozega. The rise of
 Croatia Under the Hungarians 21

Zagreb was checked, however, in 1 2 4 1 when a vast invading army

of Mongols swept in from the east. The terror that this invasion pro­
voked in the flat farmlands and marshes of Slavonia and southern
Hungary can easily be imagined, for the Croats had experienced
nothing like it in their history. According to the Archdeacon Thomas of
Split, who lived through the invasion, the invaders were short in
stature, bow-legged from lives spent on horseback, wore armour made
of cattle hides, iron helmets, ate no bread and lived on a diet of meat and
sour milk that was mixed with the blood of horses. Natural borders did
not stop them, he wrote, as they crossed rivers in boats made of
branches and animal hides.6
The invasion overwhelmed King Bela IV ( 1 2 3 5 -7 0 ) and halted his
campaign to subdue Bosnia. After the Mongols crushed a Hungarian
army at Miskolc, the King fled with his court to Zagreb. But he left the
town when it became clear that the Mongols were still in hot pursuit,
leaving the wretched inhabitants to cope with the onslaught as best
they could. The result was that the Mongols demolished the town. The
new cathedral, which had been consecrated in 1 2 1 7 in the presence of
a great company of Hungarian nobles and bishops, was flattened. Bela
IV hurried on to the Dalmatian coast, fleeing from one city to another in
an increasingly desperate attempt to evade capture by the Mongols.
Finally he took refuge in Trogir, as the Mongol army under its com­
mander Kadan camped outside the city walls. The Mongols demanded
the surrender of the King’s person. The proud rulers of Trogir rejected
the suggestion with contempt. The stage was set for a dramatic contest
of wills with potentially disastrous results. However, the outcome was
an anti-climax. As the news of the death of the Great Khan, Ogadai,
reached Trogir, the besieging horde simply vanished, galloping back
towards the steppes of the east as mysteriously and quickly as they had
arrived.
Thom as the Archdeacon recalled the arrival of the Hungarian
King and Queen in Trogir in his History o f Solin:

And so the Lord Kadan, having inspected all the surrounding positions,
tried several times to see if he could possibly pass on horseback under the
town walls. But when he saw that the water, by which the town was
divided from the mainland, was impassable because of the deep mud, he
withdrew from there.
Returning to his men, he sent a nuncio to the town, instructing him
in what to say. Having reached the bridge, the man cried out in a loud
voice, saying in Slavonic: ‘This tells you the Lord Kadan, leader of the
invincible army. Do not take upon yourselves the crime of alien blood
but deliver the enemy into our hands so that his punishment should
not fall on your heads and you should not perish in vain.
22 Croatia

But the defenders dared not answer these words, since the king had
commanded them not to respond a single word to the enemy. After this,
the whole multitude of them rose up from there and returned along the
path by which they had come.7

A legend grew up that a Croat army commanded by Fran Frankopan,

the lord of Krk, inflicted a defeat on the departing Mongols at Grobnicko
Poije, near Rijeka, although there is no archaeological evidence that a
battle took place there.
The Mongol invasion weakened the authority of the crown through­
out Croatia, This in turn inspired more internal conflict between
powerful nobles and the cities of the Dalmatian coast. Venice was able
to consolidate its hold over Zadar, and the King was at last forced to
recognise its title to the city. In Dalmatia, Split and Trogir went to war
with each other in a territorial struggle for control of the village of
Ostrog. Great feudal lords, such as the Frankopans and Subics, became
far more independent. After the Mongol invasion, they increased the
size of their estates and assumed the right to maintain fortified castles
and private armies.
The King tried to check these unfortunate developments. One solu­
tion was to give the larger towns the status of royal free cities, in the
hope that this might help revive their local economies and counterbal­
ance the overmighty nobles. The first beneficiaries in Croatia were
Zagreb, Samobor, Krizevci and Jastrebarsko. The royal bull confirming
Zagreb’s status as a free city was confirmed in 12 6 6 , as were the oblig­
ations of the citizens, which included presenting the ban with an ox,
1 ,0 0 0 loaves and a barrel of wine. But it was also left to the citizens of
Zagreb to pay for the cost of rebuilding the city’s wrecked fortifications
and a new cathedral.
In spite of the devastation wrought by the Mongols, Zagreb was
rebuilt quickly. The area under the bishops’ jurisdiction, known as the
Kaptol, was divided from the town, called Gradec, by the narrow stream
of the Medvescak. The proximity of the two settlements, one clerical, the
other lay, caused continual disputes over territory, which often ended in
blows. The street in Zagreb’s Upper Town called ‘Bloody Bridge’ was
given its name in memory of these disputes. On occasion mobs from
Gradec invaded the Kaptol, burning whatever documents and papal
bulls they could find and even showering the cathedral with arrows. One
very precise cause of friction between Gradec and the Kaptol was a quar­
rel over the use of the mills in the narow stream of the Medvescak, all of
which belonged to the Kaptol. But a more general factor was simply the
widening of class divisions in late medieval Slavonia. The bishops
became increasingly removed from contact with the population, and
entrenched at the head of the landowning, serf-owning classes.
 Croatia Under the Hungarians 23

The cathedral canons were also turning into feudal gentlemen of

leisure, as is illustrated by a fourteenth-century charter concerning the
obligations of serfs in the Zagreb archdiocese towards the canons of the
Kaptol. The list of duties was onerous, and included ploughing and sow­
ing the Church estates in spring, tending and harvesting the Church
vineyards in autumn, building fences, scything pastures and delivering
plenty of wood in winter. The canons’ stomachs were not forgotten.
‘First, for Christmas, each [serf] should bring us a capon, five eggs and
two flat cakes,’ the charter read. ‘For Easter, they should bring a piece of
cheese, two flat cakes and ten eggs and each village should give a lamb.
... And all the above tributes are exclusive of any punitive work that
may be sometimes demanded of wrongdoers.’8
In the interior of Dalmatia, where the old Croat clans held sway, serf­
dom scarcely existed. But, in the cities on the coast, class distinctions
were naturally much stronger. The bishops of the Dalmatian cities were
not feudal magnates drawing vast wealth from great estates and their
serfs, like the bishop of Zagreb. Instead they sat at the apex of an urban
hierarchy, were members of the city council and ranked in status above
the prior (mayor). Anti-clericalism in Dalmatia dovetailed with the
ethnic struggle between the Slav Croats of the countryside and the
coastal Latins, which had been expressed so vividly in the conflict sur­
rounding Grgur of Nin. There were a number of physical assaults on
leading clerics, of which the most spectacular was the murder in 1 1 8 0
of Archbishop Raineri, killed by the men of the powerful Kacic clan
when he made the mistake of venturing into the village of Poljice to
enforce an archiépiscopal claim to a slice of land. (The murdered prelate
was then proclaimed a saint.)
Another manifestation of medieval Dalmatian anti-clericalism was
heresy. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the popes feared that
the Dalmatians were scarcely less infected by heresy than the benighted
Bosnians, which was not surprising as Split was Bosnia’s principal trad­
ing outlet to the Mediterranean.
Split appears to have enjoyed an international fame - or infamy - as
a centre of unorthodox opinions, because an English heretic, one
W alter de Anglia, figures in the Split archdiocesan records as having
arrived in 1 3 8 3 . W alter may well have been a disciple of the English
heretic Wyclif, though the ecclesiastical authorities in Split are unhelp­
ful on this point, describing him only in the vaguest terms as ‘a son of
hell’ who opposed the clergy and the system of tithes, and whose inflam­
matory preaching had helped to stir up a popular revolt against the
authorities which it took four years to quell. It is most unlikely Walter
arrived in Split by accident, and more probable that he was drawn by
the city’s reputation for free thinking.9
The death of King Bela IV in 1 2 7 0 , after more than three decades on
24 Croatia

the Hungarian throne, opened up another debilitating crisis over the

succession. The struggle for the Hungarian crown enabled the great
Croatian clans, the Subics of Bribir and the Frankopans of Krk, to rule
Croatia without interference. In 1 2 7 2 they refused to recognise Laszlo
IV (1 2 7 2 -9 0 ) as king Bela IV’s successor, and Pavao Subic had himself
proclaimed hereditary ban. In effect, it was an attempt to re-establish an
independent Croatian monarchy. After the extinction of the Arpads and
the accession of the first Angevin king of Hungary, Charles Robert
( 1 3 0 8 -4 1 ), Subic remained the undisputed master of Croat affairs. In
his own words, he was ‘by the Grace of God and the approval of the
Sabor [parliament], Ban of Croatia and Dalmatia, and master of
Bosnia’.10
Ban Pavao’s reign over Croatia came to an end when he overreached
himself. In Rome, Pope Clement V encouraged him to attack Venetian-
held Zadar, and he died in 1 3 1 2 during an unsuccessful assault on the
city. His death ended the Subic family’s supremacy in southern Croatia;
Sibenik and Trogir joined Venice in a coalition against Pavao’s son and
heir, Ban Mladen, and the worsening lighting gave Charles Robert an
opportunity to re-establish the control of the Hungarian crown over
Croatia. The King moved into Dalmatia at the head of a large army and
after summoning a sabor in Knin, forced the Ban to return with him to
Hungary. But the King’s initiative in Croatia brought only short-term
results. The Croat nobles banded together against royal authority and,
as the crown and the nobles struggled for control, Venice took advan­
tage of the situation to add Sibenik and Trogir to its Dalmatian
possessions in 13 2 2. It then seized Split in 13 2 7 and Nin in 13 2 9.
The next attempt to assert royal control over Dalmatia was left to
Charles Robert’s son, Louis I ( 1 3 4 2 -8 2 ), who led an army to the seat of
noble resistance in Knin and enforced the surrender of the castle. Louis
missed an opportunity to recapture Zadar as well in 1 3 4 2 , when the
city revolted against Venetian rule, but fifteen years later the King’s
power was such as to persuade Venice to relinquish its possessions in
Dalmatia voluntarily. Dubrovnik, a nominal possession of Venice, also
switched allegiances, although it retained its self-government.
In contrast to ruined Biograd or ravaged Zadar, Dubrovnik enjoyed a
steady growth in prosperity, thanks to the diplomatic dexterity of its
merchant rulers as well as their trading skills. Since its foundation in
the seventh century, the city had been attacked seriously only once, by
the Normans in 1 0 7 1 . Occasionally it was besieged by Bosnian or
Serbian warlords who descended from the hinterland, but for the most
part Dubrovnik successfully played Bosnians, Croats, Venetians and -
later - the Ottomans off each other, periodically ceding sovereignty to
one or other of the powers that encircled it without ever surrendering
self-government or the right to conduct its own foreign policy.
 Croatia Under the Hungarians 25

Dubrovnik was never large. At its highpoint in the late Middle Ages the
population is thought not to have exceeded about 7 ,0 0 0 . Nominally
Byzantine for the first half-millennium of its existence, from 1 2 0 5 to
1 3 5 8 the city accepted the sovereignty of Venice, and a Venetian count
was the local head of state. Although the city was never a Venetian
colony, the government of Dubrovnik was modelled on the Venetian
pattern. Power was vested in two councils, the Grand Council and the
Minor Council, which elected the Senate; the equivalent of the doge, the
rector ( knez) had pomp but little power. Until the thirteenth century the
people had some role in government, granting popular assent to laws at
open-air assemblies. After that the popular element was excluded and it
became increasingly difficult to become ennobled - the prerequisite for
membership of the Grand Council.
The population of Dubrovnik was predominantly though not exclu­
sively Slav by the tenth or eleventh century, though a local Latin-based
dialect survived until the sixteenth century - one of two Latin dialects
in Dalmatia that survived the coming of the Slavs.11 There were also
Greeks, Albanians, Catalans and Jews in Dubrovnik, though not many
Italians. The inhabitants of medieval Dubrovnik had no political ties
with Hungary-Croatia before 1 3 5 8 and are unlikely in the Middle Ages
to have felt attracted to an ethnic connection with Croatia. In fact they
made every effort to keep their relationship with Hungary-Croatia on a
tenuous basis. This is highlighted by the oaths of allegiance which the
city enforced on new citizens. Until 1 3 5 8 , would-be citizens of
Dubrovnik made an oath of allegiance not only to the city but to Venice
as well. However, after the connection with Venice was severed and
references to that republic were deleted from the oaths, no reference to
the kingdom of Hungary-Croatia was put in its place. In other words,
Dubrovnik used its change of allegiance to maximise its independence,
and not to forge closer links with the Croats.
While the other cities of Dalmatia suffered from the almost constant
tug-of-war between Venice and Hungary-Croatia, Dubrovnik grew
rich undisturbed, exploiting its position on the crossroads between the
West and the half-barbarous but mineral-rich kingdoms of Bosnia and
Serbia, as well as its position between Europe and the Levant. In the
fourteenth century the mining industry expanded in Serbia, and much
of Serbia’s copper, iron, lead and silver was exported to Italy through
Dubrovnik. Bosnia joined in this lucrative trade. The Venetians also
had an eye on this growth industry but were reluctant to set foot in
the wilderness of Bosnia or Serbia, as the few travellers who ven­
tured in usually brought back horrible accounts of violence and
robbery. Instead the Venetian merchants turned to their col­
leagues in Dubrovnik, who had more experience of this virtually
uncharted territory.
 POLAND

AUSTRIA

Pozsony {Pressburg)
Buda

OTTOMAN EMPIRE
Dubrovnik

Venetian territory

M e d i t e r r a n e a n Sea

Croatia at the end of the fifteenth century

Those few Venetians who journeyed into Bosnia and Serbia them­
selves used Dubrovnik as a staging post. One surviving account
concerns Giacomo Grimani, a Venetian merchant of some substance
with business contacts in the Levant, who stopped in Dubrovnik on his
way to sell King Tvrtko of Bosnia a precious diamond in 1 3 9 0 . After
demanding several thousand ducats for his jewel, Grimani was forced to
settle for 4 0 0 . The affair ended in acrimony, after Grimani demanded
payment in cash and King Tvrtko offered only a consignment of lead
which the m erchant had no use for. His honour impugned, the King
angrily returned the diamond to Dubrovnik and no more is heard.12
The rustic monarchs of the Balkan hinterland were clearly fascinated
by Dubrovnik and its sophisticated citizenry. In 13 50 Stefan Dusan, the
 Croatia Under the Hungarians 27

ruler of Serbia who had proclaimed himself tsar after expanding his
realm, visited the city.
While Dubrovnik prospered, the fortunes of the Dalmatian cities to
the north declined. The death of Louis I in 1 3 8 2 ended the revival of
royal authority. The King had no male heir and the attempt of his
daughter Maria to share the crown with Charles of Durazzo triggered
revolts. After Charles was murdered in Buda, a long struggle developed
for the crown. The election of Sigismund of Luxembourg (1 3 9 5 -1 4 4 7 )
failed to unite the factions; in 1 3 9 6 a group of Croat nobles rebelled
against him and declared instead for the son of the murdered Charles,
Ladislas of Naples. Sigismund retaliated by inviting the Croat rebels to a
parliament in northern Croatia. It became known as the ‘bloody assem­
bly of Krizevci’ after he then had the Ban and his nephews murdered.13
The bloodshed failed to quell the Croat revolt. Instead, Hrvoje Vukcic
Hrvatinic, a supporter of Ladislas, seized most of southern Croatia,
enabling Ladislas to have himself crowned at Zadar in 1 4 0 3 .
Sigismund, however, remained in control of Hungary, Slavonia and
Bosnia, following a successful military campaign in 1 4 0 8 .
In his desperation for funds, Ladislas then sold his rights to Zadar and
its surroundings to Venice for 1 0 0 ,0 0 0 ducats. That which Venice had
fought for so often, it now received on a plate for a paltry fee. This time
the gain was more permanent, for a quarter of a century of anarchy had
reduced the Dalmatians’ will, or ability, to resist the Venetians. The bans
and assemblies of Croatia-Dalmatia continued to count the Dalmatian
cities as part of their jurisdiction, but it was an empty claim. Between
1 4 0 9 and 1 4 2 0 Venice consolidated control over Zadar and then over
the entire coastline from Zadar to Dubrovnik, and remained in control
of the region until 1 7 9 7 . For the Croats it was a disaster. The sale of
Dalmatia opened a breach that was to last for centuries. Even when
Dalmatia and Slavonia were reunited under the Habsburgs in the nine­
teenth century, they were not permitted to unite into one
administrative territory. Reunion had to wait until 1 9 3 9 , and the for­
mation of the autonomous Croatian banovina in royal Yugoslavia.
3 _____________________________________________

The Ramparts of Christendom

Today, before lunch and not having had any breakfast, seated at our
assembly, all o f us ... did accept, determine and proclaim and send
word to the streets, that the aforementioned most illustrious Lord
Ferdinand should be true, lawful, unchallenged and natural king and master
o f this whole glorious kingdom of Croatia.
Diet of Cetingrad, New Year’s Day, 152 7 1

A more determined foe than the Mongols appeared in the form of the
Ottoman Turks. In the 1 2 8 0 s Osman I, a minor Turkic ruler, estab­
lished a state in north-west Anatolia around the city of Bursa. From this
stronghold, his descendants carried on a campaign of territorial expan­
sion that was to consume the Byzantine Empire within a century and a
half, give the Ottomans control over the entire Balkan peninsula and
bring their armies to the gates of Vienna. By the mid-fourteenth
century, the Ottomans already had a toe-hold in Europe, around
Gallipoli. From there they subdued the Bulgarians and encircled
Constantinople from the west, as well as the east. The strategic city of
Adrianople, west of Constantinople, fell in 1361 and was soon pro­
claimed the Ottoman capital, illustrating the importance that they
attached to their conquests in Europe.
From Adrianople, Sultan Murat I began the conquest of Serbia.
Under the Nemanja dynasty, which had united the Serbian lands in the
1 1 60s, Serbia had expanded to the point where King Dusan (1 3 3 1 -5 6 )
controlled most of the Balkan peninsula between the Danube and the
Aegean. Dusan gave himself the title of tsar and in 1 3 4 5 elevated the
head of the Serbian Church, the Archbishop of Pec, to the status of
patriarch, as it took a patriarch to crown an emperor. The Serbian
Empire was short-lived, however, and scarcely outlasted Dusan’s
death. Under his son, Uros V, the tsardom dissolved into a patchwork of
petty lordships. Uros was driven from the throne in 1 3 6 6 and, after his
death in 13 71, the royal house of Nemanja died out. Serbia by then was
so divided that the most important Serbian princely ruler, Lazar, did not
even claim the title of tsar but remained a mere knez. As in Croatia in the
 The Ramparts of Christendom 29

1 0 90s, the extinction of the native dynasty gave powerful neighbours

the chance to invade. From the west, King Tvrtko of Bosnia claimed the
throne of Serbia for himself. But the most serious threat came from the
east. By 1 3 8 6 Ottoman armies had overrun southern Macedonia and
reached the city of Nis, north of Kosovo. Lazar attempted, too late, to
reunite the Serbian factions against a common enemy. On 28 June
1 3 8 9 , Vidov Dan - St Vitus’ Day - Lazar’s army encountered Murat’s
invaders on the undulating plain of Kosovo Polje. The Serbs were not
alone, and counted a substantial number of Bosnians, Bulgars, Croats,
W allachians and Albanians in their ranks. In the battle that followed,
Murat was killed along with Lazar. But the result was an Ottoman vic­
tory, which sounded the death knell of the Serbian state.
A much reduced Serbian principality survived the Battle of Kosovo by
several decades by paying tribute to the Ottomans, and was extin­
guished only by the fall of the fortress at Smederevo, near Belgrade, in
1 4 5 9 . But after 1 3 8 9 it was clear it would only be a matter of time
before Serbia eventually succumbed.
The defeat of the Serbs at Kosovo Polje opened the way to the rest of
the Balkans and allowed the Ottomans to transfer their attention to
Serbia’s western neighbour, Bosnia. This was an easier challenge.
Remote and sparsely inhabited, Bosnia was a kingdom divided against
itself owing to the unresolved tripartite struggle for supremacy between
Catholics, followers of the Bosnian Church and Serb Orthodox. The par­
tial return of many Bosnians to Catholicism through the efforts of
Franciscan missionaries in the mid-fourteenth century, and the annex­
ation of Catholic land in Dalmatia in the late fourteenth century,
boosted the Catholic element in Bosnia. But Bosnia remained a country
weakened by religious incoherence. In the south-east and east, along
the River Drina, much of the population was Serb Orthodox. In the
north and north-west and in the valleys of central Bosnia, where the
Franciscans had concentrated their efforts, Catholicism was the domi­
nant faith. In parts of the centre, at the core of the old Bosnian state,
were the depleted remnants of the Bosnian Church. It used to be
believed that disappointed followers of the Bosnian Church who
resented forced conversion to Catholicism opened the gates of Bosnia’s
fortresses to the invading Muslims. It is more likely that Bosnia col­
lapsed in the 1 4 5 0 s and 146 0 s because it was poor, underpopulated
and divided into virtually independent fiefdoms.
The Bosnians did not long outlast the fall of Constantinople in 1 453.
The capture of the Byzantine capital released more troops for the
Ottomans’ Balkan campaigns. Vrhbosna, later renamed Sarajevo, fell
in 1 4 5 1 . The rest succumbed almost without a fight in 1 4 6 2 -3 . Saptom
pade Bosna, it was said (Bosnia fell in a whisper). One by one the towns
opened their gates to the advancing Turks, forcing the wretched King,
30 Croatia

Stjepan Tomasevic (1 4 6 1 -3 ), to flee from one redoubt to another. After

Jajce surrendered, the King took refuge in Kljuc; from there he was
dragged back to Jajce, on a promise he would not be harmed.
Notwithstanding his pledge, Sultan Muhammed II had the King
beheaded in his tent, outside Jajce. It was not quite the end of Christian
Bosnia. In the 1 4 6 0 s the energetic King of Hungary-Croatia, Mathias I
Corvinus ( 1 4 5 8 -9 0 ) , turned back the tide and reoccupied large parts of
northern and central Bosnia, including Jajce. In spite of this, the
Ottomans continued to stream into Bosnia and Croatia as well, provok­
ing desperate appeals from the Croat nobles for foreign support. Mathias
Corvinus resented the Frankopan Lord of Krk’s request for Venetian
support against the Turks and confiscated the Frankopans’ prize pos­
session - the town of Senj. Fearing that the King planned to confiscate
the island of Krk as well, the Frankopans surrendered it to Venice in
1480.
Many Christians in Bosnia converted to Islam over the course of
several generations. But many others refused, and emigrated from
Bosnia to Croatia. Among the refugees were hundreds of minor nobles,
who brought to Croatia little but their titles. Many settled in the
Turopolje district, south of Zagreb, where they formed a highly distinct
community with their own political privileges until the mid-nineteenth
century. The most enterprising Catholic refugees fled further afield, to
Italy and beyond. Take the career of the humanist Juraj Dragisic. Born
in Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia in 1 4 4 5 , his family fled when he was a
small child and took refuge in a Franciscan monastery in Dubrovnik.
Dragisic entered the order, studying in Rome, Padua, Paris and Oxford.
He spent most of his life in Florence, where he was close to the Medici
family, acting as tutor to Piero, son of Lorenzo the Magnificent.
Returning to Dubrovnik in the 1490s, he was later appointed Bishop of
Cagli in Umbria in 1 5 0 7 . His literary output was considerable, and
included works in defence of Savonarola and of humanism in opposi­
tion to the German Dominicans. In one of the last controversies of his
life (he died in 1 5 2 0 ) he strongly opposed moves to suppress Jewish
books that refuted the claims of Christianity.
After the fall of Bulgaria, Serbia and Bosnia, it was the turn of
Hungary and Croatia. As in Serbia and Bosnia, the final, decisive
onslaught was preceded by tentative raids, designed to soften up the
enemy. The crucial encounter for the Croats took place in 1 4 9 3 at the
Krbavsko Polje, in the hilly moorland of Lika, south-west of Zagreb. The
result, as in the Battle of Kosovo, was a rout. The leaders of several hun­
dred of Croatia’s noble families were killed, wiping out the country’s
leadership at a stroke. The way was now open for the Turks to penetrate
the rest. A year after Krbavsko Polje, the Turks captured Ilok, a strate­
gic fortress in eastern Slavonia. By 1 5 0 0 they had taken the Dalmatian
 The Ramparts of Christendom 31

port of Makarska. From 1 5 0 3 to 1 5 1 2 an uneasy peace held between

the Turks on one side and the Hungarians and Croats on the other. But
it was only a breathing space while the Ottomans regrouped. After the
accession of Sultan Selim in 1 5 1 2 , they launched new offensives. In
1 5 1 3 the Ottomans overran the town of Modrus, an episcopal see in
Lika. By this time the lines of defence of the Hungarians and Croats were
shot to pieces, and towns fell in rapid succession. Modrus was followed
by Doboj, Tuzla and Bijeljina, the three principal Croat and Hungarian
outposts in the north of Bosnia. The Bishop of Modrus, Simon Kozicic,
described the atmosphere of despair in contemporary Croatia to the
bishops of the Lateran Council, recalling how he had been ‘often forced,
while celebrating divine offices, to discard ecclesiastical garments, take
weapons, run to the city gates and ... incite the scared population to
heroically resist the bloody enemy’.2
The ecclesiastical and civil authorities in Zagreb were acutely aware
that their city was also threatened and set to work surrounding the
cathedral with high walls and towers. Work began under Bishop Osvald
Thuz ( 1 4 6 6 -9 9 ), who was given a. new home in the Kaptol by King
Mathias after his old residence in Cazma, in western Slavonia, became
too close to the Ottoman frontline. Osvald’s work was followed up by his
successor, Luka Baratin, who used the legacy of 1 0 ,0 0 0 florins left by
Osvald to continue work on the new fortifications. In 1 5 1 0 the Bishop
had to apply to Pope Julian II for permission to demolish the Church of
St Emerika, which lay in the path of the proposed west-facing defences,
in front of the cathedral. The Bishop told Rome of the urgent need to put
up the fortifications, as the cathedral lay ‘near the land of the Turks who
attack these regions with frequent incursions. It is to be feared that the
church, if not secured by the erection of good defences, could in a short
time be destroyed by the attacks of the said Turks.’3 The work of build­
ing a ring of towers was extremely dangerous, as the nearest Ottoman
forces were only a few miles south of Zagreb on the southern bank of the
River Sava. While the building was in progress the canons paid a scout,
Simun Horvat, to spy on the Ottoman positions south of the river.
However, the Turks held off during the vital period of construction and
the work was virtually finished by 1 5 2 0 . The battlements gave Zagreb
cathedral the appearance of a fortified castle as much as a church of
God, an appearance it retained until the disastrous modernisation of the
cathedral district at the end of the nineteenth century; the towers were
equipped with guns and cannons that remained ready for use until the
early eighteenth century, when they were removed finally to a
museum.
The Croats did not accept the conquest of the country with resigna­
tion. Several notable nobles and ecclesiastics held up the Turkish
advance for a while and earned the admiration of Christendom for their
32 Croatia

valour. In 1 5 1 9 Pope Leo X described Croatia as Antemurale

Christianitatis - the ramparts, or bulwark, of Christendom. Petar
BerislaviC, who was both bishop of Zagreb and ban, stemmed the tide of
the Turkish advance with particular effect by uniting Croatia’s quarrel­
some noble families in defence of the realm. Although the Turks were
checked by such charismatic figures as Berislavic, they were never
pushed back. Each hard-earned victory left the Croats exhausted and
more vulnerable to the next assault.
Ban Berislavic s death in 1 5 2 0 in battle with the Turks at Vrazja
mountain, near Korenica, coincided with the accession of the greatest
of the Ottoman sultans. Suleyman the Magnificent, and from the first
year of Suleyman’s reign the Croats endured one defeat after another.
In 1 5 2 1 the crucial Hungarian fortress on the Danube at Belgrade fell.
One year later the Ottomans took another highly strategic town, the old
royal seat of Knin, which held the pass from northern Croatia to
Dalmatia. Although still subjects of the King of Hungary, most Croats
had given up hope of receiving military aid from Hungarians after the
death of Mathias Corvinus in 1 4 9 0 . He had proved an able defender of
Hungary’s frontiers against the Turks, but the Hungarian nobles
resented his attempts to build up the crown and on his death elected the
pliant Ladislas of Bohemia as king. Under Ladislas, who died in 1 5 1 6 ,
and his son, Louis II Jagellion (1 5 1 6 -2 6 ), the powers of the crown
evaporated and the aristocracy gained almost total control over the
affairs of state. One consequence was a marked deterioration in the sta­
tus of the peasants. Lacking royal protection, the system of robota (forced
labour) on noble estates became more burdensome and the peasants
were reduced to the status of chattels of the nobles, a development that
diminished their interest in defending the country from the Turks.
As Hungary crumbled from within, the Croat nobles pondered trans­
ferring their loyalty to the Habsburg emperors. After the fall of Knin,
delegations of Croat and Hungarian nobles attended the Imperial Diets
at Worms and Nuremberg in 1521 and 1 5 2 2 in search of men. At the
Diet of Nuremberg. Bernardin Frankopan, the leader of the Croat dele­
gation, made a personal appeal to the Emperor Charles V, reminding
him that the Pope had only recently referred to Croatia as the bulwark
of Christendom. ‘Think how much evil will happen to the Christian
world if Croatia should fall,’ he urged. The Diet offered to raise and fund
troops to defend Croatia’s exposed southern flank, partly because the
Estates of Inner Austria were becoming increasingly worried about
their own defences if Croatia should fall. But the Croats were not the
only item, or even the main one, on the Imperial Diet’s agenda. Charles
V was preoccupied with dividing his empire between the Spanish and
Austrian branches of the Habsburg family and with the storm stirred up
by Martin Luther. At Worms in 1 5 2 1 Luther was placed under an
 The Ramparts of Christendom 33

imperial ban and the Emperor was more interested in suppressing

heresy in his dominions than in bolstering the King of Hungary’s
neglected Croatian subjects.
The Ottoman invasion of Croatia was no ordinary war of conquest. It
was not like the Pacta Conventa of 1 1 0 2 , when the country had
exchanged one dynasty for another. It entailed the almost complete
destruction of civilised life, the burning of towns, villages and their
churches and monasteries, the murder of the leading citizens, the mass
flight of the peasants, the laying waste of the countryside and the
enslavement of thousands of those who failed to flee in time. The terror
aroused by the Turks induced many petty Balkan princes to sue for
peace, in the hope of salvaging something by accepting Turkish over­
lordship. The Croat and Hungarian nobles were not immune to the
temptation of dealing with the Turks. Some acted out of plain fear,
others out of suspicions about the Habsburgs’ motives.
But the Hungarian crown did not sue for peace and so the Ottoman
juggernaut rolled on. The consequences were frightful for ordinary
people. In 1 5 0 1 , officials in Venetian-ruled Zadar reported that about
1 0 ,0 0 0 people in the countryside around the city had simply disap­
peared, presumably dragged off into slavery, during the course of three
big Turkish raids. In 1 5 2 2 the Renaissance poet and scholar of Split,
Marko Marulic ( 1 4 5 0 -1 5 2 4 ) , author of the first epic on a secular
theme in Croatian, Judith, gave this graphic account of the miserable air
of uncertainty in the Dalmatian cities. In a letter to Pope Hadrian VI he
wrote: ‘They harass us incessantly, killing some and leading others into
slavery. Our goods are pillaged, our cattle led off, our villages and set­
tlements are burned. Our Dalmatian cities are not yet besieged or
attacked due to some, I know not what, alleged peace treaty. But only
the cities are spared and all else is open to rapine and pillage.’4
Dubrovnik escaped this fate by conceding nominal sovereignty,
though not real independence, to the Sultan, paying an annual tribute.
Lying on the southern tip of Dalmatia, the city’s merchant princes had
sensed the danger that the Ottomans presented early on. They had tried
without much success to rouse the rest of Europe to throw back the
Turks before they advanced too far. In 1 4 4 1 the city sent an appeal to
the Pope and the King of Hungary urging them to combine to stop the
Turks in their tracks. The appeal did not go unanswered and in 1 4 4 2
Pope Eugene IV urged all the Christian powers to collect ships for an
expedition to the Straits of Constantinople to save the city from collapse
and prevent the free flow of Turkish armies across the Bosphorus into
Europe.
Surviving records throw light on the way that the crusade was
organised in Dubrovnik. A committee consisting of three procurators
was appointed by the Senate to meet with a papal representative twice
34 Croatia

daily for the purpose of collecting money at a point near the Rector’s
palace. There were two keys to the cash box, one in the control of the
city’s representatives and the other in the hands of the Pope’s represen­
tative. In October 1 4 4 3 , the authorities gave out alms to the poor with
instructions that they should pray for victory over the Turks, and in
December of that year the city organised three days of religious proces­
sions to give thanks for the victories of the Hungarian King over the
Turks at battles near Nis and Sofia. In 1 4 4 4 the money collected in
Dubrovnik for the expedition was handed over to a papal legate, and the
ships supplied by Venice and the Duke of Burgundy arrived in the har­
bour. Unfortunately it was all wasted effort. At Varna, on 10 November,
the Turks gained a crushing victory over the Hungarians and the hope
of stopping the Turkish advance into Europe was dashed. The expedi­
tionary fleet trailed back to Dubrovnik, its mission unaccomplished. It
was the failure of the last papal crusade that made Dubrovnik rethink
its allegiance to Hungary-Croatia. Hitherto, the city had banked on the
Christian powers co-ordinating their efforts to halt the Turkish
advance. From then on Dubrovnik pragmatically accepted Ottoman
domination over south-east Europe and marshalled its efforts towards
preserving its independence under Ottoman protection.
The Croats had made their stand at Krbavsko Polje in 1 4 9 3 . The turn
of the Hungarians came in August 1 5 2 6 when the news reached Buda
of a large Turkish army moving northwards towards Hungary. The
reports triggered fresh appeals to the Habsburgs and the papacy for aid,
but there was no answer. Although Queen Maria of Hungary was the
sister of Charles V ’s younger bother. Archduke Ferdinand of Austria,
Ferdinand himself seems not to have been unduly concerned about the
fate of his brother-in-law. The Pope’s treasury was empty.
The Ottomans had waited longer than they needed. After the capture
of Belgrade in 1 5 2 1 , they could have marched north immediately, as
there was little to stop them on the flat plains north of the Danube.
Instead they turned back. After the fall of Belgrade, the Hungarians did
nothing to shore up their tottering defences. Conventional wisdom is
that Louis II would have done best to fall back with his small army on
Buda. Instead he raced south to meet the Ottomans on an exposed plain
at Mohacs, in southern Hungary. Suleyman crossed the River Drava on
21 August with a force of at least 5 0 ,0 0 0 men. The result was annihi­
lation. Louis II had mustered only about 2 0 ,0 0 0 Hungarians. A small
supporting army of 6 ,0 0 0 Croats on horseback - among them the
bishops of Zagreb, Senj and Djakovo - and 3 ,0 0 0 infantry failed to
arrive. The fighting was over within one hour. The King perished: it
was believed by drowning in a stream.
The outcome of Mohacs held great significance for the future of
Central Europe. The Battle of Kosovo had opened up the Balkans to the
 The Ramparts of Christendom 35

Ottomans; Mohacs opened the road to the heart of the continent.

Within a week the Sultan was in Buda.
Hungary was then torn by civil war. On one side was an anti-
Habsburg faction, led by Janos Zapolya, an ambitious Transylvanian
nobleman who was prepared to become the Sultan’s vassal in order to
prevent foreigners from taking the throne. On the other side were the
supporters of the Archduke Ferdinand, backed by the Queen Maria.
Ferdinand had no problem in confirming his rights to Louis’
Bohemian kingdom, where he was elected king by an assembly in
Prague in October 1 5 2 6 . But the feud in Hungary was not so easily
solved, even after he was elected king of Hungary in Pressburg on 17
December. In the east, Zapolya held a rival coronation. The struggle
between the Habsburg and Zapolya factions enabled the Ottomans to
consolidate their hold over most of Hungary. The Habsburgs were left in
control of a sliver of land in the west and in the north, in the territory
that comprises modern Slovakia.
The rout at Mohacs was a momentous event for the Croats. The joint
kingdom established in 1 1 0 2 was ended. The Croats were without a
ruler. A few days after Ferdinand’s coronation in Pressburg the Sabor
assembled at Cetingrad, near B ihac, to elect him as king of Croatia. Most
Croats backed the Habsburg candidate, although they were determined
to make use of the choice to reaffirm Croatia’s privileges and its status
as a kingdom.
On New Year’s Day 1 5 2 7 the Sabor met at the Church of the
Visitation of St Mary in the Monastery of the Transfiguration under the
presidency of the Bishop of Knin and the heads of the Zrinski and
Frankopan families.
Following final negotiations with three Habsburg plenipotentiaries,
they elected Ferdinand as king of Croatia. The Sabor made it clear to
Ferdinand that they had elected him in the hope of gaining more mili­
tary aid against the Ottomans - ‘taking into account the many favours,
the support and comfort which, among the many Christian rulers, only
his devoted royal majesty graciously bestowed upon us, and the king­
dom of Croatia, defending us from the savage Turks ...’. The ceremony
closed with a Te Deum and ‘a tumultuous ringing of bells’.5 The docu­
ment of allegiance was sealed with the red-and-white coat of arms of
Croatia, which marks the first known occasion on which the chequer-
board symbol was used as Croatia’s emblem.
The Sabor of Slavonia, which was dominated by Hungarian mag­
nates, did not share the Croats’ enthusiasm for the Habsburgs. In 150 5
it had pledged never to accept another foreign (non-Hungarian) prince,
and supported Zapolya.
Krsto Frankopan, the brother of Bernardin, emerged as a powerful
supporter of Zapolya in Slavonia and joined him in flirting with the
Croatia at the end of the sixteenth century

Turks, although he was killed in the early days of the civil war. Simon
Erdody, the Bishop of Zagreb, was another pillar of the pro-Zapolya fac­
tion, laying siege to his own diocesan capital in 1 5 2 9 and burning the
outlying hamlets. A force loyal to Ferdinand raised the siege of Zagreb,
destroyed the Kaptol, and extinguished this threat to the Habsburg
claim. In 1 5 3 3 a joint session of the Sabors of Slavonia and
Croatia-Dalmatia confirmed Ferdinand’s title to all the Croat lands.
Croat hopes of recovering large tracts of the country with the aid of
the Habsburgs were disappointed. As an election sweetener, before the
assembly in Cetingrad, Ferdinand had promised to pay for 1 ,0 0 0
cavalry and 1 ,2 0 0 infantry to defend the Croatian border, while the
Estates of Inner Austria, Carinthia, Carniola and Styria voted money to
supply garrisons in the frontline cities of Bihac, Senj, Krupa and Jajce in
Bosnia. But this investment was insufficient to keep the Ottomans at
bay. The Habsburgs’ pockets were not deep enough, and the compli­
cated arrangement of their possessions, in which there were many
estates with overlapping jurisdictions, made it difficult to harness their
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
"They are called diversely by divers writers as Consolida regulis,
Calearis flos, Flos regius, Buccinum Romanorum, and Cuminum
silvestre alterum Dioscoridis; but the most usual name with us is
Delphinium. But whether it be the true Delphinium of Dioscorides, or
the Poet's Hyacinth, or the Flower of Ajax, another place is fitter to
discuss than this. We call them in English Larks-heels, Larkspurs,
Larkstoes, or claws, and Monks-hoods. There is no use of any of
these in Physicke in these days that I know, but are wholly spent for
their flowers sake."
A modern botanist remarks:
"The gardener's ideal has been the full-flowered spike with a goodly
range of colors on the chord of blue. We think of larkspur as blue.
Some of these blues are pale as the sky, some pure cobalt, others
indigo and still others are a strange broken blue, gorgeous and
intense, yet impure, glittering on the surface as if it were strewn
with broken glass, and sometimes darkened into red. The center of a
larkspur is often grotesque; the hairy petals suggest a bee at the
heart of a flower, and the flower itself looks like a little creature
poised for flight. In structure the garden race has changed very little
from the primitive type, though that type has wandered far from the
simplicity of the buttercup, which names the Ranunculacæ.
Whatever path of evolution the larkspur has trod, it is very clear that
the goal at which it has arrived is cross-fertilization by means of the
bee. At some time along the path the calix took on the duties of the
corolla, became highly colored, developed a spur, while at the same
time the corolla lessened both in size and in importance. The
stamens mature before the pistil and are so placed that the bee
cannot get at the honey without covering its head with pollen which
it then bears to another flower."
The name of Monk's-hood is also given to the Blue Helmet-flower, or
aconite.[67]
[67] See p. 248.
Yellow Lark's-heels is a name our Elizabethan forefathers gave to the
Nasturtium Indicum, a plant found in the West Indies and taken by
the early Spanish explorers to Spain, whence it traveled to all parts
of Europe.
"It is now very familiar in most gardens of any curiosity," says
Parkinson. "The likeness of this flower, having spurs, or heels, is of
so great beauty and sweetness withall that my Garden of Delight
cannot be unfurnished of it. The flowers are of an excellent gold
yellow color and grow all along the stalks. In the middle of each of
the three lower leaves there is a little long spot, or streak, of an
excellent crimson color, with a long heel, or spur, behind, hanging
down. The whole flower hath a fine small scent, very pleasing,
which, being placed in the middle of some Carnations, or
Gilloflowers (for they are in flower at the same time), make a
delicious Tussiemussie, as they call it, or Nosegay, both for sight and
scent. Monardus and others call it Flos sanguineus of the red spots
in the flower, as also Nastnerzo de las Indias, which is Nasturtium
Indicum; and we thereafter in English, Indian Cresses. Yet it may be
called from the form of the flowers Yellow Lark's heels."
This flower is phosphorescent and is said to emit sparks, which are
visible in the dark.
 VII
Pansies for Thoughts and Poppies
for Dreams
PANSY (Viola tricolor). "Pansies—that's for thoughts," exclaims
Ophelia, as she holds out the flower that the French call pensée
(thought). And it is the pansy that is "the little western flower" upon
which "the bolt of Cupid fell" and made "purple with love's wound"
and which "maidens call Love in Idleness,"—the flower that Oberon
thus described to Puck when he sent him to gather it. The juice of it
squeezed by Oberon upon Titania's eyelids and by Puck upon the
Athenian youths and maidens, who were also sleeping in the
enchanted wood on that midsummer night, occasioned so many
fantastic happenings.
The pansy in those days was the small Johnny-Jump-Up, a variety of
the violet, according to the old writers, "a little violet of three colors,
blue, white and yellow." Milton noted that it was "freaked with jet."
Michael Drayton showed its close relationship to the violet in the
lines:

The pansy and the violet here

As seeming to descend
Both from one root and very fair
For sweetness yet contend.

Gerard wrote in 1587:

"The stalks are weak and tender, whereupon grow flowers in form
and figure like the Violet and for the most part of the same bigness,
of three sundry colors, whereof it took the surname Tricolor, that is
to say purple, yellow and white, or blue; by reason of the beauty
and bravery of which colors they are very pleasing to the eye, for
smell they have little, or none at all."
The pansy was beloved of Elizabethans: the great number of popular
names it had proves this. In addition to Pansy and Johnny-Jump-Up,
it was called Herb Trinity, because of the three distinct petals, which
made it a flower of peculiar religious significance. Another name was
Three-Faces-under-a-Hood because it had such a coquettish air.
Another name was Fancy Flamey, because its amethystine colors are
like those seen in the flames of burning wood; and because lovers
gave it to one another it had the pet names of Meet-me-at-the-
Garden-Gate, Kiss-me-at-the-Garden-Gate, Kiss-me-quick, Kiss-me,
Call-me-to-you, Cuddle-me-to you, Kiss-me-ere-I-rise, Pink-of-my-
John, Cupid's-flower, Love-in-Idleness, and Heartsease.
There were no "wine dark pansies" in Shakespeare's time to charm
the lover of flowers and none of the splendid deep purple velvets
and mauves and pale amethysts and burnt orange and lemon and
claret and sherry and canary hues that delight us to-day, and which
are, to use the quaint old expression, "nourished up in our gardens."
The modern beauties began to be developed about 1875, chiefly by
the French specialists, and, as a modern writer remarks:
"Such sizes, such combinations, such weirdness of expression in
quaint faces painted upon the petals were never known before. The
colors now run a marvellous range; pure-white, pure yellow,
deepening to orange, and darkening to brown, as well as a
bewildering variety of blues and purples and violets. The lowest note
is a rich and velvety shade that we speak of as black; but there is no
black in flowers.
"The pansy is the flower for all. It is cheap; it is hardy; it is beautiful;
and its beauty is of an unusual and personal kind. The bright,
cheerful, wistful or roguish faces look up to you with so much
apparent intelligence that it is hard to believe it is all a pathetic
fallacy and there is nothing there."
Whether the modern pansies should be included in a Shakespeare
garden is a question for each owner of a garden to decide; but there
should certainly be a goodly number of the little "Johnny-Jump-Ups."

POPPY (Papaver somniferum). Shakespeare introduces the poppy

only indirectly when he speaks of the "drowsy syrup" in "Othello."
The white poppy is the flower from which the sleeping potion was
made. "Of Poppies," says Parkinson, "there are a great many sorts,
both wild and tame; but our garden doth entertain none but those of
beauty and respect. The general known name to all is Papaver,
Poppie. Yet our English gentlewomen in some places call it by name
Joan's Silver Pin. It is not unknown, I suppose, to any that Poppies
procureth sleep." Other old names for the poppy were Corn Rose
and Cheese Bowl.
Scarlet poppies in the wreath of Ceres among the wheat-ears,
scarlet poppies mingled with large white-petaled daisies, and
Ragged Robins belong to everybody's mental picture of midsummer
days.
"We usually think of the Poppy as a coarse flower," says Ruskin, "but
it is the most transparent and delicate of all the blossoms of the
field. The rest, nearly all of them, depend on the texture of their
surface for color. But the Poppy is painted glass; it never glows so
brightly as when the sun shines through it. Whenever it is seen
against the light, or with the light, always it is a flame and warms in
the wind like a blown ruby."
"Gather a green Poppy bud, just when it shows the scarlet line at its
side, break it open and unpack the Poppy. The whole flower is there
compact in size and color, its stamens full grown, but all packed so
closely that the fine silk of the petals is crushed into a million of
wrinkles. When the flower opens, it seems a relief from torture; the
two imprisoning green leaves are shaken to the ground, the
aggrieved corolla smooths itself in the sun and comforts itself as
best it can, but remains crushed and hurt to the end of its days."
Delicate and fine as is the above description, the sympathetic tribute
to the poppy by Celia Thaxter does not suffer in proximity. She says:
"I know of no flower that has so many charming tricks and manners,
none with a method of growth more picturesque and fascinating.
The stalks often take a curve, a twist from some current of air, or
some impediment, and the fine stems will turn and bend in all sorts
of graceful ways, but the bud is always held erect when the time
comes for it to blossom. Ruskin quotes Lindley's definition of what
constitutes a poppy, which he thinks 'might stand.' This is it: 'A
Poppy is a flower which has either four or six petals and two or more
treasuries united in one, containing a milky stupefying fluid in its
stalks and leaves and always throwing away its calix when it
blossoms.'
"I muse over their seed-pods, those supremely graceful urns that are
wrought with such matchless elegance of shape and think what
strange power they hold within. Sleep is there and Death, his
brother, imprisoned in those mystic sealed cups. There is a hint of
their mystery in their shape of somber beauty, but never a
suggestion in the fluttering blossom: it is the gayest flower that
blows. In the more delicate varieties the stalks are so slender, yet so
strong, like fine grass stems. When you examine them, you wonder
how they hold even the light weight of the flower so firmly and
proudly erect; and they are clothed with the finest of fine hairs up
and down the stalks and over the green calix.
"It is plain to see, as one gazes over the poppy-beds on some sweet
evening at sunset, what buds will bloom in the joy of next morning's
first sunbeams, for these will be lifting themselves heavenward,
slowly and silently, but surely. To stand by the beds at sunrise and
see the flowers awake is a heavenly delight. As the first long, low
rays of the sun strike the buds, you know they feel the signal! A light
air stirs among them; you lift your eyes, perhaps to look at a rosy
cloud, or follow the flight of a carolling bird, and when you look back
again, lo! the calix has fallen from the largest bud and lies on the
ground, two half-transparent light green shells, leaving the flower-
petal wrinked in a thousand folds, just released from their close
pressure. A moment more and they are unclosing before your eyes.
They flutter out on the gentle breeze like silken banners to the sun."
It would be tempting in a Shakespeare garden to include many kinds
of this joyous, yet solemn, flower; and certainly as many were
common in Elizabethan gardens it would not be an anachronism to
have them. However, if the space be restricted and the garden lover
a purist then the white poppy only should be planted.
 VIII
Crow-flowers and Long Purples
CROW-FLOWERS (Scilla nutans). These are among the
flowers Ophelia wove into a wreath. The queen tells the court:

There is a willow grove ascaunt the brook,

That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream.
There, with fantastic garlands did she come
Of crow flowers, nettles, daisies and long purples
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name
But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them.[68]

[68] "Hamlet"; Act IV, Scene VII.

Shakespeare did not select Ophelia's flowers at random. They
typified the sorrows of the gentle victim of disappointed love whose
end was first madness, then suicide. The crow-flowers signified "fair
maiden"; the nettles, "stung to the quick"; the daisies, "her virgin
bloom"; and the long purples, "under the cold hand of Death." Thus
what Shakespeare intended to convey by this code of flowers was,
"A fair maiden, stung to the quick, her virgin bloom in the cold hand
of Death."
It is generally supposed that the wild blue hyacinth, or harebell
(Scilla nutans), a flower associated with pure and faithful love, is the
crow-flower; and authority is given to this theory in the old ballad,
which, of course, Shakespeare knew, called "The Deceased Maiden
Lover":
 Then round the meddowes did she walk
Catching each flower by the stalk,
Such as within the meddowes grew,
As dead man's thumb and harebell blue,
And as she pluckt them still cried she,
"Alas! there's none ere loved like me."

Some critics have objected to the blue harebell because it is a spring

flower, and it is midsummer when Ophelia drowns herself. These
authorities suggest the Ragged Robin for Ophelia's crow-flower, and
others again the buttercup, also called creeping crowfoot
(Ranunculus repens). Bloom writes:
"It is generally assumed that the flowers are those of the meadow
and that a moist one. Why? It is equally probable they are those of
the shady hedge bank and that the crow-flowers are the poisonous
rank Ranunculus reptans and its allies; that the nettles are the
ordinary Urtica dioica not necessarily in flower, or if this be objected
to on account of the stinging qualities which the distraught Ophelia
might not be insensible to, its place could be taken by the white
dead nettle Lamium album L. The daisies may be moon-daisies and
the long purples Arum masculatum, another plant of baleful
influence, with its mysterious dead white spadix bearing no very far
fetched resemblance to a dead man's finger wrapped in its green
winding-sheet and whose grosser name, cuckoo-pint, is ready at
hand. With this selection we have plants of the same situation
flowering at the same time and all more or less baneful in their
influence."
PLEACHING AND PLASHING, FROM "THE GARDENER'S LABYRINTH"
 SMALL ENCLOSED GARDEN, FROM "THE GARDENER'S LABYRINTH"

The crow has given its name to many flowers. There are, indeed,
more plants named for the crow than for any other bird: crowfoot,
crow-toes, crow-bells (for daffodil and bluebells) crow-berry, crow-
garlick, crow-leeks, crow-needles, and many others.

LONG PURPLE (Arum masculatam or Orchis mascula) is very

closely related to our woodland Jack-in-the-Pulpit. It has many
names: Arum; Cookoo-pint, Cookoo-pintle, Wake-Robin, Friar's-cowl,
Lords-and-Ladies, Cow-and-Calves, Ramp, Starchwort, Bloody-
men's-finger, and Gethsemane, as the plant is said to have been
growing at the Cross and to have received some drops of the
Savior's blood. This flower is mentioned in Tennyson's "A Dirge":
 Round thee blow, self-pleached deep,
Bramble roses, faint and pale,
And long purples of the dale.

Dr. Forbes Watson writes:

"I use the old name Wake Robin because it is so full of poetry—to
think of the bird aroused from sleep by the soundless ringing of the
bell. Arum, or Lords and Ladies, is the more usual name."
The plant is under the dominion of Mars, so the astrologers said.
 IX
Saffron Crocus and Cuckoo-flowers
SAFFRON CROCUS (Crocus verus sativus Autumnalis).
Shakespeare speaks of saffron as a color—"the saffron Wings of Iris"
and "saffron to color the Warden [pear] pies." He never mentions
the crocus from which the saffron was obtained, yet a Shakespeare
garden should have this plant represented. Saffron had long been
known in England; for in the time of Edward III a pilgrim from the
East had brought, concealed in his staff, a root of the precious
Arabic al zahafaran. In Shakespeare's time saffron was used for
soups and sauces and to color and flavor pies, cakes, and pastry-
confection. Saffron was also important medicinally, and for dyeing
silks and other materials. The beautiful orange-red stigmas, the
crocei odores of Virgil, were dried and the powder pressed into
cakes and sold in the shops.
"The true saffron," writes Parkinson, "that is used in meats and
medicines, shooteth out his narrow long green leaves first, and, after
a while, the flowers, in the middle of them, appear about the end of
August, in September and October, according to the soil and climate
where they grow. These flowers are composed of six leaves apiece,
of a murrey, or reddish purple color, having a show of blue in them.
In the middle of these flowers there are some small yellow chives
standing upright, which are unprofitable; but, besides these, each
flower hath two, three, or four greater and longer chives hanging
down, upon, or between, the leaves, which are of a fiery red color
and are the true blades of saffron which are used physically, or
otherwise, and no other."
The raising of saffron was a great industry. Old Tusser gave the good
advice to
 Pare saffron plot,
Forget it not.
His dwelling made trim,
Look shortly for him!
When harvest is gone,
Then Saffron comes on;
A little of ground
Brings Saffron a pound.

Saffron Walden in Essex and Saffron Hill in London received their

names because of the quantity of saffron crocus grown in those
places.
The saffron crocus is a handsome flower, but somewhat capricious.
Dr. Forbes Watson writes:
"We look at the few well selected flowers in our hand and let our
mind wander in the depths of those fair-striped cups, their color so
fresh, so cool, so delicate, and yet not too cool, with that central
yellow stamen-column and the stigma emerging from it like a fiery
orange lump. The Purple Crocus, partly from the full materials for
color-contrast afforded by its interior, partly from the exceeding
delicacy of tint, the lilac stripes and markings, the transparent veins
and the pale watery lake which lies at the bottom of the cup, seem
to bear us away to some enchanted spot, a fairy-land of color where
no shadow ever falls—a land of dim eternal twilight and never fading
flowers. Note, too, the differences between the Crocuses with regard
to the stigma. In the Purple Crocus, where it is needed to complete
the harmony of the flower, it rises long and flame-tipped out of the
tall bundle of yellow stamens. Notice also the curve of the outside of
the Purple Crocus cup in a well-selected flower, and observe how
quiet and solemnly beautiful it is in perfect harmony with the general
expression."
According to legend, the flower derived its name from a beautiful
youth, Crocus, who was transformed into the flower. His love,
Smilax, was changed at the same time into the delicate vine of that
name. Another legend says that the flower sprang from the blood of
the infant Crocus, who was accidentally killed by a disk thrown by
the god Mercury. The Egyptians encircled their wine-cups with the
saffron crocus; the Greeks and Romans adorned the nuptial couch
with the saffron crocus; the robes of Hymen, god of marriage, were
saffron-hued; and poets called the dawn saffron, or crocus-colored.
Shakespeare, therefore, had authority for "the saffron wings of Iris."
Saffron is an herb of the sun and is under the rule of Leo.

CUCKOO-FLOWER (Lychnis Flos cuculi): Shakespeare

mentions "cuckoo-flowers" in "King Lear,"[69] in company with
troublesome weeds. Cordelia remarks:

Crown'd with rank fumiter and furrow-weeds,

With burdocks, hemlocks, nettles, cuckoo-flowers,
Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow
On our sustaining corn.

[69] Act IV, Scene IV.

Shakespeare's cuckoo-flower is identified as the Ragged Robin, so
called from its finely cut blue petals which have a ragged
appearance. It is also known as the meadow campion, or Meadow
Pink. Parkinson says: "Feathered Campions are called Armoraria
pratensis and Flos cuculi. Some call them in English Crow-flowers
and Cuckowe Flowers, and some call the double hereof The Fair
Maid of France."
From the above we see why it is that the Ragged Robin has been
identified by some authorities as Ophelia's crow-flower; for even
Parkinson seems to consider the crow-flower and cuckoo-flower as
identical. Some of the old herbalists give the name cuckoo-flower to
the lady-smock, which is called cuckoo-buds. The cuckoo's name is
given to many flowers: we have the cuckoo-flower, cuckoo-buds,
cuckoo's-bread (wood-sorrel), cuckoo's-meat, cuckoo-pint (Arum
maculatum), cuckoo-grass; cuckoo-hood (blue corn-flower), etc. The
cuckoo-flower (Ragged Robin) is dedicated to St. Barnabas.
 X
Pomegranate and Myrtle
THE POMEGRANATE (Punica) is a regal flower. Its burning
beauty appeals to every one who loves color, for the scarlet of the
pomegranate has a depth and a quality that is all its own. The
crinkled silken petals, rising from a thick, red calix and set off by
bright green leaves of wondrous glossy luster and prickly thorns,
delight those who love beauty. Moreover, there is something luscious
and strange about the pomegranate that makes us think of Oriental
queens and the splendors of Babylon and Persia, ancient Egypt and
Carthage. It is a flower that Dido might have worn in her hair, or
Semiramis in garlands around her neck!
Shakespeare knew perfectly well what he was doing when he placed
a pomegranate beneath Juliet's window, amid whose leaves and
flowers the nightingale sang so beautifully. The pomegranate was
exactly the flower to typify the glowing passion of the youthful
lovers.
"There are two kinds of pomegranate trees," writes Parkinson, "the
one tame or manured, bearing fruit; the other wild, which beareth
no fruit, because it beareth double flowers, like as the Cherry, Apple
and Peach-tree with double blossoms.
"The wild Pomegranate (Balustium maius sive Malus Punica) is like
unto the tame in the number of purplish branches, having thorns
and shining fair green leaves, somewhat larger than the former.
From the branches likewise shoot forth flowers far more beautiful
than those of the tame, or manured, sort, because they are double,
and as large as a double Province Rose, or rather more double, of an
excellent bright crimson color, tending to a silken carnation, standing
in brownish cups or husks, divided at the brims usually into four, or
five, several points like unto the former, but that in this kind there
never followeth any fruit, no not in the country where it is naturally
wild. The wild, I think, was never seen in England before John
Tradescant, my very loving good friend, brought it from the parts
beyond the seas and planted it in his Lord's Garden at Canterbury.
The rind of the Pomegranate is used to make the best sort of writing
Ink, which is durable to the world's end."
The pomegranate was from the dawn of history a favorite with
Eastern peoples. It is represented in ancient Assyrian and Egyptian
sculpture and had a religious significance in connection with several
Oriental cults.
The tree was abundant in ancient Egypt and the fruit was such a
favorite of the Israelites that one complaint against the desert into
which Moses led them was the charge that it was "no place of
pomegranates," and Moses had to soothe the malcontents by
promising that the pomegranate would be among the delights of
Canaan, "a land of wheat and barley, vines and fig-trees and
pomegranates, a land of olive oil and honey." The pomegranate was
one of the commonest fruits of Canaan, and several places were
named after it—Rimmon. The Jews employed the pomegranate in
their religious ceremonies. On the hem of Aaron's sacred robe
pomegranates were embroidered in blue and purple and scarlet
alternating with golden bells,—an adornment that was copied from
the ancient kings of Persia. The pomegranate was also carved on the
capitals of the pillars of the Temple of Jerusalem. Solomon said to
his bride, "I will cause thee to drink of spiced wine of the juice of my
pomegranates." There is a tradition that the pomegranate was the
fruit of the Tree of Life and that it was the pomegranate that Eve
gave to Adam.
The Romans called it the Carthaginian apple. The pomegranate
abounded in Carthage and derives its botanical name, Punica, from
this place. Pliny says that the pomegranate came to Rome from
Carthage; but its original home was probably Persia or Babylon. It
was early introduced into Southern Europe and was taken to Spain
from Africa. Granada took its name from the fruits and the Arms of
the province display a split pomegranate. Around Genoa and Nice
there are whole hedges of it—rising to the height sometimes of
twenty feet. It was introduced into England in Henry VIII's time,
carried there among others by Katharine of Aragon, who used it for
her device. Gerard grew pomegranates in his garden. Many legends
are connected with the pomegranate, not the least being that of
Proserpine. When the distracted Ceres found her daughter had been
carried off by Pluto, she begged Jupiter to restore her. Jupiter replied
that he would do so if she had eaten nothing in the realms of the
Underworld. Unfortunately, Pluto had given her a pomegranate and
Proserpine had eaten some of the seeds. She could not return. The
sorrow of Ceres was so great that a compromise was made and the
beautiful maiden thereafter spent six months in the Underworld with
her husband and six months with her mother above ground—a
beautiful story of the life of the seed!
In nearly all the legends of the East in which the word "apple" is
mentioned it is the pomegranate that is intended. It is said to have
been the fruit presented by Paris to Venus, and it is always
associated with love and marriage.
In Christian art the pomegranate is depicted as bursting open and
showing the seeds. This is interpreted as both a promise and an
emblem of hope in immortality. St. Catharine, the mystical bride of
Christ, is sometimes represented with a pomegranate in her hand.
The infant Savior is also often represented as holding the fruit and
offering it to the Virgin: Botticelli's "Madonna of the Melagrana" is a
famous example.
There is also a legend that because the pomegranate was planted
on the grave of King Eteocles, the fruit has exuded blood ever since.
The number of seeds has caused it to become the symbol of
fecundity, generation, and wealth.

MYRTLE (Myrtus latifolia) was looked upon in Shakespeare's time

as a delicate and refined rarity, emblem of charming beauty and
denoting peacefulness, plenty, repose, and love. Shakespeare makes
Venus and Adonis meet under a myrtle shade; he speaks of "the soft
myrtle" in "Measure for Measure"; and he alludes "to the moon-dew
on the myrtle leaf," which is as delicate a suggestion of the evening
perfume as the "morning roses newly washed with dew" is of the
scents at dawn.
"We nourish Myrtles with great care," says Parkinson, "for the
beautiful aspect, sweet scent and rarity, as delights and ornaments
for a garden of pleasure, wherein nothing should be wanting that
art, care and cost might produce and preserve.
"The broad-leafed Myrtle riseth up to the height of four or five foot
at the most with us, full of branches and leaves, growing like a small
bush, the stem and elder branches whereof are covered with a dark
colored bark, but the young with a green and some with a red,
especially upon the first shooting forth, whereon are set many fresh
green leaves very sweet in smell and very pleasant to behold, so
near resembling the leaves of the Pomegranate tree that groweth
with us that they soon deceive many that are not expert therein,
being somewhat broad and long and pointed at the ends, abiding
always green. At the joints of the branches, where the leaves stand,
come forth the flowers upon small footstalks, every one by itself,
consisting of five small white leaves, with white threads in the
middle, smelling also very sweet."
According to the Greeks, Myrtle was a priestess of Venus and an
especial favorite of the goddess, who, wishing to preserve her from
a too ardent suitor, turned her into this plant, which continues
odorous and green throughout the year. Having the virtue of
creating and preserving love and being consecrated to Venus, the
myrtle was symbolic of love. Consequently it was used for the
wreaths of brides, as the orange-blossom is to-day. Venus wore a
wreath of myrtle when Paris awarded her the Golden Apple for
beauty,—perhaps in memory of the day when she sprang from the
foam of the sea and, wafted ashore by Zephyrus, was crowned with
myrtle by the Morning Hours! Myrtle was always planted around the
temples dedicated to Venus.
Rapin writes:

When once, as Fame reports, the Queen of Love

In Ida's valley raised a Myrtle grove,
Young wanton Cupids danced a summer's night
Round the sweet place by Cynthia's silver light.
Venus this charming green alone prefers,
And this of all the verdant kind is hers:
Hence the bride's brow with Myrtle wreath is graced,
Hence in Elysian Fields are myrtles said
To favor lovers with their friendly shade,
There Phædra, Procris (ancient poets feign)
And Eriphyle still of love complain
Whose unextinguished flames e'en after death remain.

The Romans always displayed myrtle lavishly at weddings, feasts,

and on all days celebrating victories. With the Hebrews the myrtle
was the symbol of peace; and among many Oriental races there is a
tradition that Adam brought a slip of myrtle from the Garden of Eden
because he considered it the choicest of fragrant flowers.
The myrtle was early loved in England. In one of the old Roxburgh
Ballads of the Fifteenth Century a lover presses his suit by
promising:

And I will make the beds of Roses,

And a thousand fragrant posies;
A cap of flowers and a kirtle
Embroidered with leaves of myrtle.

In those days and long afterward there was a saying that "if you
want to be sure of your myrtle taking root, then you must spread
out your dress grandly and look proud" when you are planting your
slip. We can imagine one of the Fifteenth Century ladies spreading
her voluminous and flowing robes with majestic grace and holding
her head adorned with the tall pointed cap, or hennin, with veil
fluttering from its peak as she planted the little flower in her tiny
walled Garden of Delight!
There is a saying, too, that one must never pass a sweet myrtle
bush without picking a spray. The flowering myrtle is considered the
luckiest of all plants to have in the window, but it must be watered
every day.
 Autumn
"HERBS OF GRACE" AND "DRAMS OF
POISON"
 I
Rosemary and Rue

R
OSEMARY (Rosmarinus officinalis). Rosemary "delights in sea-
spray," whence its name. "The cheerful Rosemary," as Spenser
calls it, was in high favor in Shakespeare's day. The plant was not
only allowed a corner in the kitchen-garden; but it was trained over
arbors and allowed to run over the mounds and banks pretty much
at its own sweet will. "As for Rosemarie," said Sir Thomas More, "I
let it run all over my garden walls, not only because my bees love it,
but because it is the herb sacred to remembrance, and, therefore, to
friendship; whence a spray of it hath a dumb language that maketh it
the chosen emblem at our funeral-wakes and in our burial-grounds."
 "A CURIOUS-KNOTTED GARDEN," VREDEMAN DE VRIES

GARDEN WITH ARBORS, VREDEMAN DE VRIES

Ophelia handed a sprig of rosemary to her brother with the words:

"There's rosemary; That's for remembrance; pray you, love,
remember." Probably she knew the old song in the "Handful of
Pleasant Delights"[70] where occurs the verse:

Rosemary is for remembrance

Between us day and night,
Wishing that I might always have
You present in my sight.

[70] See p. 127.

Rosemary was used profusely at weddings among the decorations
and the strewings on the floor. A sprig of it was always placed in the
wine to insure the bride's happiness.
The herb was also conspicuous at funerals, naturally enough as the
herb was emblematic of remembrance. The Friar in "Romeo and
Juliet" exclaims:

Dry up your tears and stick your rosemary

On this fair corse.[71]

[71] Act IV, Scene V.

Sometimes the plant was associated with rue as when in "The
Winter's Tale"[72] Perdita says,

Give me those flowers, Dorcas:—reverend sirs,

For you there's rosemary and rue; these keep
Seeming and savour the whole winter through.

[72] Act IV, Scene III.

Most important was rosemary at Christmas-tide. It had a place
among the holly, bay, ivy, and mistletoe to which it added its peculiar
and delicious perfume. Moreover, it was said that rosemary brought
happiness to those who used it among the Christmas decorations.
Rosemary also garlanded that most important dish of ceremony—the
boar's head, which the butler (or sewer) bore into the hall of great
houses and famous institutions, like the colleges of Oxford and
Cambridge and the City Companies, on a silver dish, preceded by a
flourish of trumpets. The carol he sung began:

The boar's head in hand bring I,

With garland gay and rosemary.

Lyte said: "Rosemary comforteth the brain and restoreth speech,

especially the conserve made of the flowers thereof with sugar."
Worn on the person it was thought to strengthen the memory and to
make the wearer successful in everything. The famous Hungary-
water, so favorite a perfume in the days of Elizabeth and after, was
distilled from rosemary. The leaves were used as a flavor in cooking
(just as the Italians use it to-day). Placed in chests and wardrobes,
rosemary preserved clothing from insidious moth. According to
astrologers, rosemary was an herb of the sun.
"The common Rosemary (Libanotis Coronaria sive Rosmarinum
vulgare) is so well known," says Parkinson, "through all our land,
being in every woman's garden, that it were sufficient to name it as
an ornament among other sweet herbs and flowers in our gardens,
seeing every one can describe it; but that I may say something of it,
it is well observed, as well in this our Land (where it hath been
planted in Noblemen's and great men's gardens against brick walls)
as beyond the Seas in the natural places where it groweth, that it
riseth up unto a very great height, with a great and woody stem of
that compass that, being cloven out into thin boards, it hath served
to make lutes, or such-like instruments, and here with carpenter's
rules and to divers other purposes, branching out into divers and
sundry arms that extend a great way and from them again into many
other smaller branches whereon are set at several distances at the
joints, many very narrow long leaves, green above and whitish
underneath, among which come forth toward the tops of the stalks,
divers sweet gaping flowers, of a pale or bleak bluish color, many set
together, standing in whitish husks. The whole plant as well, leaves
as flowers, smelleth exceeding sweet.
"Rosemary is called by the ancient writers Libanotis, but with this
difference, Stephanomatica, that is Coronararia, because there were
other plants called Libanotis, that were for other uses, as this for
garlands, where flowers and sweet herbs were put together. The
Latins called it Rosmarinum. Some would make it to be Cueorum
nigrum of Theophrastus, as they would make Lavender to be his
Cueorum album, but Matthiolus hath sufficiently confuted that error.
"Rosemary is almost of as great use as Bays or any other herb, both
for inward and outward remedies and as well for civil as physical
purposes. Inwardly for the head and heart; outwardly for the sinews
and joints. For civil uses, as all do know, at weddings, funerals, etc.,
to bestow among friends; and the physical are so many that you
might be as well tired in the reading as I in the writing, if I should
set down all that might be said of it."
RUE (Ruta graveolus). Rue was a much valued plant in
Shakespeare's time. There were many superstitions about it which
seem to have been survivals from ancient days, for rue is supposed
to have been the moly which Homer says Mercury gave to Ulysses to
withstand the enchantments of Circe. Miraculous powers were
attributed to rue: it was said to quicken the sight, to stir up the
spirits, to sharpen the wit, to cure madness, and to cause the dumb
to speak. It was also an excellent antidote against poison and the
very smell of it insured preservation against the plague. Rue was,
therefore, very popular and was much used as a disinfectant.
Parkinson tells us:
Garden Rue (Ruta), or Herbe Grace, groweth up with hard whitish
woody stalks whereon are set divers branches of leaves being divided
into many small ones, which are somewhat thick and round pointed,
of a bluish-green color. The flowers stand at the tops of the stalks,
consisting of four small yellow leaves, with a green button in the
middle, and divers small yellow threads about it, which growing ripe,
contain within them small black seeds.
"The many good properties whereunto Rue serveth hath, I think, in
former times caused the English name of Herbe Grace to be given
unto it. For without doubt it is a most wholesome herb, although
bitter and strong. Some do wrap up a bead roll of the virtues of Rue,
as Macer the poet and others, in whom you shall find them set down
to be good for the head, eyes, breast, liver, heart, spleen, etc."
Gerard quaintly said:
"It is reported that if a man be anointed with the juice of rue, the
bitings of serpents, scorpions, wasps, etc., will not hurt him. When
the weasel is to fight with the serpent, she armeth herself by eating
rue against the might of the serpent."
Another quaint idea was that rue throve best if a clipping from the
plant was stolen from a neighbor's garden. Like rosemary, rue was
considered by the astrologers as an herb of the sun and was placed
under the sign of Leo.
Rue was also called the herb of grace and the "serving man's joy."
Shakespeare frequently refers to the herb o' grace: once in
connection with salad in "All 's Well That Ends Well."[73]
[73] See p. 237.
Ophelia has rue among her flowers when she distributes appropriate
blossoms to the courtiers. She says:

There's rue for you; and some for me;

We may call it herb of grace o' Sundays.
Oh, you must wear your rue with a difference.

Again we find rue in the Duke of York's garden in "King Richard II."
After the sad queen and her ladies have departed, bewailing the
news of the king's deposition, the gardener, looking after them,
exclaims:

Poor queen! So that thy state might be no worse,

I would my skill were subject to thy curse.—
Here did she fall a tear; here, in this place,
I'll set a bank of rue, sour herb of grace:
Rue, even for ruth, here shortly shall be seen,
In the remembrance of a weeping queen.[74]

[74] Act III, Scene IV.

 II
Lavender, Mints, and Fennel
LAVENDER (Lavendula Spica). "Hot lavender," Perdita calls it.
Why is this? Turning to Gerard for an explanation, we find he says:
"Lavender is hot and dry in the third degree and of a substance
consisting of many airy and spiritual parts." Gerard had lavender in
his garden and so did Parkinson, who says:
"It is called of some Nardus Italica and Lavendula, the greater is
called Fœmina and the lesser Mas. We do call them generally
Lavender, or Lavender Spike, and the Lesser Spike. Lavender is little
used in physic but outwardly: the oil for cold and benumbed parts
and is almost wholly spent with us for to perfume linen, apparrell,
gloves, leather, etc., and the dried flowers to comfort and dry up the
moisture of a cold brain.
"Our ordinary Garden Lavender riseth up with a hard woody stem
about the ground parted into many small branches whereon are set
whitish long and narrow leaves by couples; from among which riseth
up naked square stalks with two leaves at a joint and at the top
divers small husks standing round about them formed in long or
round heads or spikes with purple gaping flowers springing out of
each of them. The heads of the flowers are used to be put among
linen and apparrell."
Because of its scent, lavender was often included in the nosegay.
Lavender was much loved by sweethearts. In the "Handful of
Pleasant Delights" (1584) it is described thus:
 Lavender is for lovers true,
Whichever more be saine,
Desiring always for to have
Some pleasure for their pain.
And when that they obtainèd have
The Love that they require,
Then have they all their perfect joy
And quenched is the fire.

Lavender belongs to the crowfoot family, and therefore is related to

the columbine, buttercup, and monk's-hood (aconite). The ancients
used it in their baths, whence the name from the Latin lavare, to
wash. The Elizabethans loved, as we do to-day, to place bags of
dried lavender among the household linen.
MINTS (Mentha). Mints occur in Perdita's list with "hot lavender,
thyme and savory." Although many kinds of mint were cultivated in
gardens, Parkinson mentions only three:
"The Red Mint, or Brown Mint, with dark green nicked leaves,
reddish flowers and of a reasonable good scent; Speare Mint,
greener and paler leaves, with flowers growing in long ears, or
spikes, of a pale red, or blush, color; and Parti-colored, or White
Mint, with leaves more nicked, half white and half green, and flowers
in long heads, close set together of a bluish color.
"Mints are oftentimes used in baths with Balm and other herbs as a
help to comfort and strengthen the nerves and sinews, either
outwardly applied or inwardly drunk. Applied with salt, it is a good
help for the biting of a mad dog. It is used to be boiled with
mackerel and other fish. Being dried, it is often and much used with
pennyroyal to put into puddings, as also among pease that are
boiled for pottage."
In Elizabethan days it was the custom to strew churches with mint.
In an Elizabethan play, "Appius and Virginia," these lines occur: