OLD SERBIA

Grachanitsa: Helene of Anjou

The insularity of these Byzantines was further alarmed when they came on a manifestation of the West with which they were unfamiliar. King Stephen Urosh was married to a French princess, Helene of Anjou, who was a Roman Catholic zealot of an austere type. She is said to have been an admirable woman of great benevolence and intelligence, who did much excellent work in restoring the lands which had teen laid waste by the Mongols, but she practised that extreme type of Catholic asceticism which is the root of Puritanism. Under her influence her elder son, Dragutin, who was a cripple, formed a habit of sleeping in a grave lined with thorns and sharp flints. Her husband, although he remained within the Orthodox Church, was governed by her ideas. When the officials and the Bishop arrived at his palace he received them coldly, and on hearing that they were part of Princess Anna's train and that many more were following, he said sourly that he was sorry to hear it, for he and his family were not accustomed to such luxury. Then in a spirit with which we are all familiar, particularly if we were young before the war, he took them to see the wife of his elder son Dragutin, who was the daughter of the King of Hungary. She was plainly dressed and was spinning wool. "Now that," said King Stephen, "is the sort of wife that we like here." The touch can be recognized by those of us who were brought up on relays of princesses who were all but dropping dead under the continuous effort of public simplicity, who wore shirt-blouses unusual for gauntness, who had no fires in their bedrooms, who went to bed so early that, even allowing for the early hour at which they rose, their slumbers must have been inordinate.

But the Byzantines did not understand. Leaving a had impression behind them by their obvious perturbation, they rode back hastily and stopped the Princess at Ochrid. Not certain what to do, whether to take her straight back to Constantinople or wait for orders or let her go on and be recalled, they hung about die district till there arrived a Serbian ambassador named in the chronicles George, simple George. He seems to have been a person of great resource. He had plainly been sent to discourage the expedition from proceeding, since the Serbian court had liked the Byzantine emissaries as little as they had liked it. He began by telling them that on the way he had been robbed, and they naturally asked themselves what mercy they as foreigners could expect from robbers who did not spare notables of their own country. George also started a conversation in ambiguous teens which led them to question him sharply as to whether the conditions of the marriage contract to be signed between Michael Paleologus and Stephen Urosh were likely to be faithfully observed. He answered with transparent evasiveness. And in the night the Byzantine emissaries' horses were stolen. They found the local police unhelpful in the search for them, though ready enough to provide extremely inferior substitutes. Princess Anna and her train left in haste for home.

This incident cannot have pleased Milutin, though he probably liked the bit about the horses. He had a marked distaste for his family's ideas. Simplicity he abhorred, and throughout his life he showed that Roman Catholicism was to him simply a means of winning the support of a man called the Pope who exercised an enviable amount of power. He worked to become inarguably great, in terms that would be understood across a continent, that would be understood even by gorgeous Byzantium. There was a certain amount of preliminary waiting m be done, while his family life broke into curious blooms. His pious elder brother Dragutin rebelled against his father King Stephen; with the help of his brother-in-law, King Ladislas IV of Hungary, bear him thoroughly in a great battle in Herzegovina, and seized the throne for himself. He was so completely under his Roman Catholic mother's influence that it cannot be doubted she was in sympathy with his revolt, which they both probably justified by Stephen Urosh's fidelity to the Orthodox Church, although King Ladislas, a notorious scoundrel descended from an unlovable Asiatic tribe, was an odd ally in a Holy War. When Dragutin had won he threw his father into prison and proceeded to manoeuvre his country towards the abandonment of the Orthodox Church and conversion to Roman Catholicism. These plots were detected and resented by his people, and after he and King Ladislas had made an unsuccessful attempt on Byzantine territory, for which he had to male amends by the surrender of a large tract of Serbian land, he abdicated in favour of Milutin. He then settled in Bosnia, which his Hungarian wife had brought him in her dowry, became a Roman Catholic, and asked the Pope to send him a mission of Franciscan friars to convert the Bogomil heretics and the members of the Orthodox Church within his territory. Thus there was initiated the period of savage religious persecution which made the distracted Bosnians prefer Islam to Roman Catholicism, and enabled the Turk to entrench himself in a key position in South-East Europe. This was a truly lamentable rascal.

When Milutin ascended the throne he felt under no necessity to set his father free. He, a Lear who really had something to worry about, died in an Albanian prison a year lacer. Thereafter Serbia prospered steadily, for no other apparent reason than that Milutin was a fortunate ruler, like a garden whose owner has the "green finger." The mines gave up their riches, wine and wheat and oil and livestock flowed out of the country in a fat river of well-being. Abroad, he carried on a continuous policy of expansion at his neighbour's weakest points. He ate southwards into the disordered Byzantine Empire, his first marriage helping him. He had married the daughter of Duke John of Neopatras, the most powerful of the despots who mere setting up for themselves here and there on the Greek islands in defiance of Constantinople. Then Byzantium sent the Tartars against Milutin, and on the plea of consolidating his position in the West he sent Duke John's daughter packing, quite in the manner of Henry VIII, and married Elizabeth, the sister of Dragutin's wife and his old ally, the Asiatic King Ladislas of Hungary. But this new marriage was remarkable for the number of ways in which it was bound to displease people. The Roman Catholics outside and inside the Serbian Empire were scandalized, not only because Milutin was divorced but be- cause the bride was a nun. The members of the Orthodox Church were equally scandalized because she was the sister of Milutin's brother's wife, thus falling within the prohibited degrees. She was also unpopular with Milutin's party because she was Hungarian, and the alliance between Dragutin and her brother had meant a defeat for Serbia and the loss of territory. It is impossible to believe that this marriage can have secured more support for him than it lost, and that the motive was not passion. One must compare it to henry's impolitic and impassioned marriage with Anne Boleyn. It resembled it too in brevity. Before long Milutin dismissed her and married Anna Terteri, the daughter of George Terteri, a fierce and able Emperor of Bulgaria, who was part Slav, part Asiatic. East and West found it not at all impossible to meet in South-East Europe after the barbarian invasions.

But soon Anna also was dismissed. Under Milutin's government Serbia had become so rich and his disingenuous statesmanship so notoriously successful that the Byzantine Empire regarded its power with alarm. But the Turks, massing decade by decade in Asia Minor, were a graver danger. So the Emperor Andronicus II, who had succeeded his father Michael Palaologus, .signed a treaty of peace with Milutin, and offered to seal it with the hand of his widowed sister Eudocia. This offer could not have been made unless Milutin had composed a masterly fantasia on legalist themes comparable to Henry VIII's divorce of Katherine of Aragon. On the face of it Milutin could not marry anybody, because the canon law of the Orthodox Church definitely forbids fourth marriages. But Milutin overcame that difficulty. He now claimed that his first divorce had been illegal. In support of this he brought it forward that the Orthodox Church officials would never permit the name of his second queen to be mentioned in the liturgy, though the real reason for this had been that she was connected to him within the prohibited degrees. This pretence that his first divorce had been invalid meant that not only his second but his third wife had never been really married to him, and that their children were all bastards. That did not distress him, for though he had two sons who were affected by this decision, a mere heir was not what he wanted. He wanted an heir who should have a title through himself to the Serbian crown and through his mother to one of the Byzantine crowns. Also there was at last to be won revenge for the sneers of Michael Paleologus's eunuchs, sent to see if he were a fit bridegroom for Princess Anna. The precise moment had arrived when he could pursue these ends because his first wife, the very first of all, had died; and although the Orthodox Church looks on the remarriage of widows and widowers hardly more favourably than if they had been parted from their spouses by divorce, now chat he had succeeded in wiping out his second and third marriages, the one he contemplated counted as only his second, and he was free to make it after performing a slight penance.

The Emperor's sister Eudocia, however, refused this opportunity. She put in the alternative pleas drat she dearly loved the memory of her husband and would not for the world marry again, and that when she married again she wanted a more respectable bridegroom than Milutin. For public opinion was profoundly shocked by his matrimonial casuistries. It is to be noted, however, that there is nothing in Milutin's reign comparable to the beheading of Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard. In certain respects Milutin was far more civilized than Henry VIII, though he lived a hundred and fifty years earlier in a country that had been Christianized three hundred years later. Few would care to say that Henry VIII might not have forgotten the duties of filial piety if he had had an energetic mother who led a campaign against all his divorces, and never ceased to act as a Roman Catholic propagandist in both his own realm and neighbouring territories. But although Helene of Anjou denounced all Milutin's marriages bur the first, and not only supported her Roman Catholic son in Bosnia on the western frontier of Serbia, but tried to convert the Emperor of Bulgaria on its east, she outlived Milutin. We know also what happened to Sir Thomas More; better luck attended the Archbishop Jacob, who was fearless in his opposition to Milutin's tortuous matrimonial policy, yet lost neither his life nor his archiepiscopate. Still, sufficient unto the day was Milutin's barbarity. It was in sorrow and shame that the Emperor Andronicus resolved to buy Serbian adherence at a higher price than he had meant to pay. Since his sister Eudocia refused to be sacrificed he had to offer up his daughter Simonis, who was only six years old.

Their services are insufficiently recognized, those girl children who Geld together the fabric of history by leaving their nurseries and going into far lands to experience the pains of rape and miscarriage, among strangers talking unknown tongues and practising unhomely customs. The practice has not been so long in desuetude that we can despise it as a remote barbarity; it was thought a pity that the Belgian Princess who married the Crown Prince Rudolph of Habsburg had not shown the signs of womanhood at the time fixed for her wedding, but the ceremony was nor for that reason postponed. Nor is it necessary, in order to feel its horror, to exaggerate the infamy of early sexual activity; it is sheer humbug to pretend that a girl of twelve who is married to a kindly young bridegroom is in worse case than a woman in her forties, of the kind that would like to marry, who is not married. If child marriage were as fearful as the modern world pretends, the white race would be extinct by now. Erasmus declared in a sermon that, though it was usual for-little girls of ten to marry and straightway have children, he himself thought it too young; and our own Henry VII was born of a thirteen-year-old mother who lived to be a vigorous woman with scholarly interests.

But the export trade in these little princesses was indubitably and totally repulsive. For a child-wife to be happy she must have a gentle husband of her own kith, and familiar faces round her when she comes to childbirth. But these royal children were sent out into strange lands, not to see their kinsfolk again for years and perhaps for ever, to be handed over to men who would not have been able to compel such precious gifts if they had not proved themselves bloody in mind and deed. Often such marriages marled the signature of peace between powers that had been savagely at war, so that little girls were sent to the beds of enemies who had been the Bluebeards of their nursery tales. Every child in the Byzantine Empire in the thirteenth century must have shuddered at nights to think of the Tartars, the little yellow men that passed over the land like living flames from hell. But when Michael Paleologus needed the support of the Tartars against the Bulgars, he sent superb presents to their chief, Prince Chalaii. There was chosen as ambassador the priest and Abbot of the monastery of Christ Ruler of All, who took with him, among much else, a portable altar, screened with magnificent curtains and embellished with images of the saints and with a superbly worked cross, and furnished with costly chalices and plates for the celebration of the mysteries; and also an illegitimate daughter of the Emperor called Euphrosyne who had been promised to the Tartar chief as his bride. She was well under ten years of age. When the train arrived at the South Russian camp of the Tartars it was found that Prince Chalaii was dead, so his son Nogai married her instead. The bridegroom looked curiously at the pearls on the Byzantine bonnets of her suite and guessed them to be charms against thunder. Nothing is known of Euphrosyne's later life save that one of her sons was strangled in some convulsion of Bulgarian politics. Michael Paleologus had another illegitimate daughter, Marya, whom he sent even further afield on the same sort of errand. She went to marry the Khan of Tartary who lived at Baghdad, a grandson of Genghis Khan. It is to be remembered that these Asian invaders were as shocking to that age as they are to this, for in spite of the greater social violence of the Middle Ages there was a stricter chivalry observed in war. No prisoner was put to death or held to ransom unless he was royal or noble, captured common soldiers were disarmed and turned loose, and there was no killing save in actual battle. A society which held this code would plainly be appalled as we axe by the 'tartars' massacre of millions and their destruction of all property and disregard for all human rights in the territories they ravaged. It is not to be believed that Euphrosyne and Marya were unafraid, either as children or as grown women.

So Simonis, for a little girl born to a lofty place in the hierarchy of Byzantium, was not faring so badly; but she fared ill enough. A historian of her day has described the manner of her going out to her martyrdom. It was at the beginning of Lent that the Emperor Androuicus left Constantinople to take her to Milutin. There had been a long and cruel winter which had killed many trees and plants. The land was still under snow and the rivers were frozen. The imperial train travelled slowly towards Salonika, halting sometimes to attend to local matters of state. One night they stayed at the monastery where the Patriarch had his residence, and in the morning all attended Mass. Afterwards the Patriarch tried to rebuke the Emperor for the scandal of the marriage and asked if he might talk to Simonis about it. But Andronicus, with the curtness which is the weak man's substitute for strength, told him they must be on their way, asked him to give himself and his daughter the benediction, and set out on the northward journey through the frozen country. Later he wrote to the Patriarch and told him chat he would not take Communion from his hands at Easter, according to custom. The task must be deputed to another priest. Rut at the same time he sent hire the present of a thousand crowns which it was his habit to send him at that season.

His heart must have been heavy as he rode away from the monastery, for he knew well that the Patriarch was right. And the little girl was very dear to him, for she had been born after he had been greatly grieved by the loss of several other daughters in their infancy. Her name recorded his concern for her, since it was given her by reason of a magical device he had practised lest he lose her like her sisters. When she was born twelve candles of equal size and weight were lit before the images of the Twelve Apostles, and while these were burning prayers were said for the child, and she was put under the protection of the saint whose candle lasted longest. It was St. Simon who preserved her life, for the curious end that at the age of six she should be handed over to a bride- groom some forty years her senior who was, by consummating their marriage too soon, to render her barren. Yet Andronicus cannot be blamed. Over the sea, in Asia Minor, there were massing Turks, and more Turks, and yet more Turks, surpassing the Mongols in dreadfulness because of the reinforcement of their ferocity by persistence, in their stabilization of massacre by settlement. There was nothing a Christian king could do but swallow the vices of other Christian kings if they were possible allies in the defence of Europe against the Ottoman invaders.

At a gorgeous festival in Salonika the child and Milutin were married by the Archbishop of Ochrid; and hidden behind the crowds and the banners and the trumpeters and the processions of soldiers and eunuchs a second sombre and infestive ceremony took place. Two people were handed over to the Emperor Andronicus as some compensation for the loss of his daughter. One was a Byzantine deserter who had of late very successfully led King Milutin's troops against certain towns on the fringe of the Emperor's territory: Milutin had his Wolsey. The other was the daughter of the Bulgarian Emperor Terteri, till lately Milutin's wife. She was to be filed for reference with Andronicus, to be brought out or forgotten as political expediency was served. Hardly less than the bride she proved to what a limited degree it is possible, without falling into the most savage irony, to describe women as the protected sex. It is said that Milutin showed so little compunction in discarding her because her father had lately been driven from the Bulgarian throne: but he had been succeeded by her brother. For women, however, blood is constantly as thin as water, and nobody seems to have anticipated chat her family would come to her defence.

Later Simonis was to face for some time the destiny of her predecessor. She was to survive Milutin, as Catherine Parr survived Henry VIII; but both were to have moments when it seemed that they too were going down into the abyss chat suddenly fissured the uxorious ground on which they had seemed secure. Time brought certainty that Simonis could never bear Milutin an heir to the Byzantine throne; it also brought evidence that her father, the Emperor Andronicus, was an incompetent ruler who year by year became a less valuable ally. So Milutin entered into negotiations with Charles de Valois, titular Emperor of the Latin Empire and brother of Philip the Fair, with the purpose of forming an alliance to depose Andronicus. As a necessary prelude Milutin had to rake steps towards being converted and converting his country to Roman Catholicism, and to that end entered upon a long correspondence with the Pope; and he also proposed marriage to a relative, and possibly any relative, of Charles de Valois. The project failed, because Charles lost interest. Had it succeeded Simonis would have been sent home to her father's court, which would probably itself have been removed to exile, to be despised as a failure as diplomat and breeder; and this disgrace would have befallen her because the hateful old man who had married her had abandoned himself to the Roman Catholic Church, which she, like every Byzantine since the sack of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204, regarded as a band of criminal enemies. Simonis had always loathed Serbia, and it is no wonder char she attempted to escape. When her mother died she took the body home to Constantinople and refused to return, and Milutin, to whom her flight must have recalled the contemptuovs withdrawal of Michael Paleologus's ambassadors in his youth, forced her back by threats of military action and would not listen to the plea which she reiterated through the years, that he should allow her to become a nun. In the routine of daily life he appears to have treated her kindly, and even with devotion. But it is no wonder chat she leaves the same ugly mark on the fabric of Serbian history as Mary Tudor on our English record. She presents the same spectacle of piteous martyrdom not flowering into sanctity but withering into peevishness and hate. A fresco here at Grachanitsa shows her being crowned by an angel, tense as a cat under an .undesired caress, full of that lack of peace which passes all understanding, recognizable in the shrew and the prisoner. She left behind her an undying legend of hatred and malice. Any Serbian peasant will tell one that Queen Simonis was an evil woman though he may know nothing else about her. The name "Bloody Mary" has a similar independent existence in the English popular mind.

It is probable that Simonis caused this ill fame by the part she played in alienating her husband from his son Stephen. In the popular calendar of the old Serbian saints and kings which was reprinted from ancient sources for the first time about a hundred years ago, it is definitely stated that that was her offence. The story as it is told there cannot be true, for it represents her as trying to oust Stephen from his position as heir to the throne, and replace him by a son of her own, whereas she had no son, and not until she was rnanifestly barren did Milutin acknowledge Stephen as his heir. But the outline of the story seems to be correct. This Stephen was probably the son of Milutin's second wife, Elizabeth of Hungary, the nun of Asiatic descent. When he was quite young he had seen his mother displaced by the daughter of George Terteri the Bulgarian Emperor, but he himself remained at court and did valorous work for the state. He went as hostage to Nogai, the Prince of the Tartars, who had married the little Byzantine Euphrosyne, and he remained there in that dangerous capacity for some years. When he returned he was given as bride the daughter of Smilatz, a Bulgarian noble who for some years was the emperor, like many of his fellow-countrymen, fox the Bulgarian throne was then as often and diversely occupied as the last chair in musical chairs. Stephen was also given a part of his father's kingdom as his own principality.

Then civil war broke out between Milutin and Stephen. It is possible that the son rebelled against the father, for there was a party in the state which thought that Milutin showed unpatriotic weakness in his relations with the Byzantine Empire, and it would have supported Stephen. But in a solemn document connected with the foundation of a monastery Stephen accused Simonis of having lied about him to his father; and it is significant that the campaign began by an invasion of Stephen's principality Milutin. If this first guilt lies on Sunonis, then later and blacker guilt lies on her too. For at the behest of his Byzantine advisers Milutin ordered his son to be banished to Constantinople, and to be blinded before he went. This was not a Serbian punishment; there the code punished criminals either by simple banishment or by the confiscation of their goods. But the Byzantines used mutilation of one sort and another as a penalty for many crimes, and blindness was often inflicted on persons of high position who might be dangerous to the state if left in possession of all their faculties. So Stephen, with his son Dushan and his daughter Dushitza, was taken by guards from his father's palace, and borne along the road to Constantinople. Before they left Serbian territory, at that same Sheep's Field where I saw the slaughter of the lamb at the rock, the guards halted and put out his eyes with red-hot irons. I do not know why they chose that particular spot, but tradition is certain chat they did. The legend runs that that night St. Nicholas came to him in a dream and said, "Fear not, Chine eyes are in my hand." In fact, as quite often happened when the men who used the irons were merciful or clumsy or bribed, the sight had not been destroyed. But Stephen said nothing.

At Constantinople the Emperor Andronicus received him with a kindness hard to explain, save that to such a gentle temperament as his to do a gracious act in this bloodthirsty age must have been like an hour of rest under a shady tree. Stephen was comfortably lodged in the Monastery of Christ Ruler of All, where he sat in affected blindness, facing the sunshine as if it were the night for more than five years. Such virtuosic performances of fearful cunning did the Tudors inspire in the flesh of their flesh; so did Mary Tudor hold her breath to keep it while her father lived, so did Elizabeth when she was Mary Tudor's prisoner. At last Stephen dared tell Andronicus chat he could see; and Andronicus bade him continue to bandage his eyes and to tell no one else.

The legend says that shortly afterwards Andronicus sent a mission to Milutin to consider common measures of defence against the Turks, and that he added to the train the Abbot of the Monastery of Christ Ruler of All, with instructions that he should find a chance to speak well of Stephen to his father. It is certainly true that two great Serbian church- men, the scholar Daniel and the statesman Nicodemus, worked on Milutin year after year rill he was reconciled to his son. We get here a hint regarding the nature of Simonis: her father Andronicus befriended her enemy Stephen, and though she was devout the ecclesiastics of her Church were not on her side. At last, thanks to these intercessions, Milutin asked Andronicus to send his son back to him. So Stephen travelled home with his little Dushan - his daughter had died during his captivity - and was taken to his father's palace. There he was led to the feet of his father, and he kneeled down and clasped his stiff, jewelled robes, and cried out that whatever his father said he had done he had indeed done, and had long repented of it. Then his father bowed down his bearded bluffness to him and raised him up, and gave him the kiss of forgiveness. But Stephen did not unloose the bandage over his eyes. When Milutin gave him another principality in place of the one he had lost, and bade him go to it and leave his son Dushan at court to be reared as a prince, he went blindfold to claim his possessions. A year or two later nobles came and told him Milutin was dead. But Stephen did not put aside the fiction of his sightlessness till he knew that his father was not only dead but buried. So would a child of Henry VIII have acted, had his father formed the intention to blind him and not succeeded at the first doing.

All this story is implicit in Grachanitsa, in the lavished treasure of its colours and the vigorous fertility of its form. "But," a Western reader may object, "it is a story of barbarism, it shows that it is perfectly correct to say that nothing worth grieving over perished at Kossovo." That judgment applies standards that have never been valid save in die reign of Queen Victoria, which must now be recognized as an oasis in the moral desert of ordinary time. If the amount of violence habitual to society is admitted it can be seen that the reign of Milutin was the great age that came before the greater age, as Henry VIII's morning came before the noon of England which is called Elizabethan. Milutin was a true king. He tilted his land towards the sun, wherever that might be in its course across the heavens. This can never be done without negotiation, the spirit must deny its appetite for principle. This is more of a sacrifice than would appear, for all men have a letch to live by principle; the good man would live by virtue, the bad man would live by vice, but both alike want a fixed rule for their happiness. The ruler, however must have none. He muse ask himself of every ace the opportunist question, whether it tilts his land towards the sun or the shadow, and abide by the answer. This obligation prevents him from being a bad or a good man, but it makes the people feel for him as if he were a loving father.

Hence such a king brings glory and confusion to his country. Conduct breaks its established bounds and covers the whole gamut of conceivable action, not because of laxity, but because of a spirit of inquiry. The king is bewildered by the effects of his own deeds, which work well on the bodies and minds of his subjects, although they are contrary to the accepted moral code. He imagines that he must have discovered a new principle of morality, and feels about for it by a number of experimental acts, of a kind not previously sanctioned or even anticipated. His subjects share his sense of triumph and bewilderment, knowing him to be right when he could be proven wrong by all the authority they know. So they too give all events their chance to happen, and since their land is tilted towards the sun all seeds planted in the soil come to a prodigious growth.

Such a crescent age can be distinguished from decadence by its discussion of fundamentals. The people that rots declares with every breath that all is already known; the people that is young falls into the other error of declaring that nothing is yet discovered. There is a testing of the capacity of women's bodies fox pleasure and pain, which might be pronounced simple voluptuousness, were it not for the simultaneous exploration of their minds and respect for their wills shown in the art of the time. There are excesses of loyalty and treachery which might be put down as mere animal reactions, were it not for the speculative inquiries into the bases of faith and conduct sometimes conceived in a head that was to fall for treason to the axe, sometimes written in the hand that had signed the headsman's warrant. Such an age is moral, not because it conforms to a moral code but because it is in search for one.

Doubtless Milutin was a murderer and a lecher, as red-fanged a husband and father as our Henry VIII; but like him he made war here and treaties there as it profited his country, nourished commerce, and built higher the fortress of the law. This last achievement was neither safe nor simple. He was surrounded by nobles who wore magnificently furred and jewelled garments made from the costliest stuffs sent out by Greece and Italy and Flanders, and practised an etiquette based on the exalted ceremonial of Byzantium, but for all that were apt to fall into common banditry when away from court. Milutin gentled them, diverted their ferocity to the service of the state, and opposed their lawlessness by an increasing elaboration of the lain. Here Serbia never took its inspiration from Byzantium. It drew on the juristic achievements of the kingdoms of the North, of Poland, Hungary, and Bohemia, and even borrowed here and there from the codes, which were not so simple as might be supposed, of the Mongol invaders. One sign of the Northern influence was the establishment of trial by jury, which under Milutin appeared and developed. We can see him dealing with a specifically Macedonian problem in arranging for the representation of the various races of the district on these juries.

In religion also he had renounced all animal simplicity, no matter what his sword arm and his loins might prefer. Though the Kingdom of Heaven will have to be broadminded indeed to receive him, he might even be called an adept in the Christian faith. With a dualism more often found in the realm of sexual relations, he constantly considered the advisability of betraying the Orthodox Church by capitulation to the Papacy, though he was loyal to it in his soul. His age found proof of his loyalty in his charity, which was indeed impressive; he maintained an army of what were then called lepers, which probably included some victims of true leprosy, but which would consist for the most part of those suffering from skin diseases and those appalling ulcerations due to the Puritan theory, still active and working incalculable harm in the Balkans, that to drive out an infection of the skin it is proper to apply a fiercely irritant ointment or lotion. But these good works may have been what Americans compactly call fire insurance, or even a mechanical continuance of the routine set up by his pious mother. His participation in the life of the Church, however, admits of no such rending. He was certainly not moved by fear of ecclesiastical power, for he never hesitated to defy it when it was a question of policy, of tilting his land towards the sun. Throughout his reign he ignored the hostility between the Orthodox Church and the Papacy by permitting six Roman Catholic sees in his kingdom. It is more likely that, after the strange fashion of Henry Vlll, he believed. Both of them, longing to be free for all possible courses of action, might have prayed, "Lord, I believe, help Thou my belief."

Grachanitsa: The Icone of Christ (16th C)

That Milutin was a believer is proved by the fiercely, passionately- it might almost be said unnecessarily-religious quality of the churches he built. Grachanitsa speaks first of all regarding the union of church and state. Its architect saw in his mind's eye, when there was but the bare site, the Godhead shining from the secret darkness behind the iconostasis; and he saw, advancing towards the iconostasis to draw power from the hidden Godhead, to derive authority for their rank, Mlilutin and Simonis and their courtiers, dressed in glowing purple, girt with belts of gold studded with pearls and precious stones, multicoloured as flowers of the field. He permitted earthly glory to state its case, to establish its value; but he demonstrated the supremacy of the Godhead's glory by a paradox of forms which were solid as the rock, yet light as the spread wings of a bird. It would he improbable that a society, particularly a small and coherent society, should cause such a church to be built and should afterwards frequent it, without participating in the passion which had engendered it and which it engendered; and its records prove that many among Milutin's courtiers became so enamoured of the hidden Godhead that they could no longer bear to be divided from it by the iconostasis. The Serbian aristocracy included, as well as many sheep-stealers, many saints. Young men fled from the court to become hermits and monks, taking irrevocable vows far stricter than those imposed in the Roman Catholic Church, in such numbers that dangerous gaps began to appear in the governing class; and a law was passed which forbade a religious order to accept any novice, male or female, save with the consent of a bishop.

Grachanitsa: The Last Judgment

In the church the ardour of these young men becomes comprehensible. About us were the thick pillars, cold with their great mass, so like virgin rock that we might have been standing deep under the earth, among the sources of rivers. Above us the light, dripping down through the narrow windows of the cupolas from the simple unmeaning amplitude of the sky, lay on the frescoes, and revealed an age of perception so delicate, of speculation so profound, that it is almost outside our Western understanding. They do not represent the perfect classical Byzantine art as it was seen in its two great periods, the fourth to the sixth and the ninth to the twelfth centuries. It is not classical in spirit: it does not celebrate the completely comprehended discoveries which a civilization has achieved by mastering all available information about its environment. But before classicism there must come a preparatory phase of romanticism, in which the age feels its way towards such discoveries, by formulating all conceivable theories and fantasies, to the end chat those which are not valid can be distinguished from those that are; and to such an experimental period, based on the remains of a substantial classicism, belong these frescoes. When Grachanitsa was built, Byzantium had already lost the firm and massive character of supremacy: too many of its forces were divested by apprehension of the Turks. The spirit of the Empire had therefore found several provincial lodgments, in such places as Salonika, Trebizond, Mistra, and Serbia, among populations too different and too distant to be able to carry on the Byzantine tradition without adapting it to their alien natures. Hence Serbo-Byzantine art is a fusion of classicism and romanticism and of two racial spirits, unlike in age, intensity, and experience. It is therefore not a unified and completely satisfying art: but it presents many beauties that have never been surpassed by later ages.

There is in these frescoes, as in the parent works of Byzantium, the height of accomplishment in technique and of ambition in content. The Mother of God prays, her lifted hands far apart, in the fashion of those born not far from Asia; and her nature is as prodigious as might be expected from the mother of a god, the destiny which perplexes her is as amazing as we know it to have been. Two women meet, and a strong wind blows their red and blue cloaks about them. It is the Visitation, and the wind is the Will of God, blowing them to marvellous fruitfulness. An angel stands before the young Mary and gives her a sharp military command; she shrinks basic, not in refusal, but because she realizes more fully than he does how the fulfilment of that order must affect destiny. This version of the Annunciation has an originality, what our grandfathers would have called piquancy, which is noticeable in others among these frescoes; for nothing here is not profoundly considered, and as the likeness of men lies on the surface and their uniqueness in their depths, this makes for unpredictable vision. Here and there this originality was exploited by the romantic element in this art till it substituted strangeness for beauty, and instead of making a revelation started a debate. It was so with the fresco that made my husband say, "Look, here is something extraordinary. Do you remember at Neresi the fresco of a woman washing the Infant Christ, which looked like a Blake illustration to The Mental Traveller? Well, here is another fresco that looks like a Blake illustration to Urizen or Los."

That was true, if one could imagine a Blake from whom there had been remowed that discordant element which obliged him to see the naked body as an unharmonized assembly of muscles and begin all the prophetic books, and indeed interpenetrate them, with terrific groaning family rows among the supernatural beings. This fresco takes the breath away by the unanticipated beauty of the represented natural forms; it says, "This is how you would see if you were not as bad as blind." Against a background of great architectural magnificence, such as one sees in the works of the early Italians, a supernatural youth stands naked on a high and narrow altar, an old man is prostrated in adoring shame before him, and a bishop stands a little way off, worshipping in less humble ecstasy. The nakedness of the youth is depicted with extreme solemnity, as if the human body were the copy of a divine image, and whosoever could completely realize it could completely realize the form of God. The garments of the old man are a thin clothing for his limbs, his limbs ace a dun clothing for his spirit s turmoil. The Bishop's cloak, a superb example of that early adventure in abstract art, the play that the Byzantine artists loved to make with the crosses on ecclesiastical garments, wraps an impressive man in greater impressiveness. The relations of these figures and their background are so proper that when we left the church we could not remember whether it was vast or minute, whether it covered half the chapel wall or only a fraction of it. Yet it lacked the effect of sufficiently great arc. It raised the question -What are these people, and what are they' doing? This would be asked by any spectator, however well he were acquainted with the subject, which is, in fact, an episode in the life of St. Peter of Alexandria, a martyr in the persecutions of Diocletian: Christ appeared to him in nakedness, to foretell that his garment, the Church, was to be refs from him by the Arian heresy. It remained true, after that historical fact was known, that these three people's strange demonstrations of their being, tire opinions they are expressing on divinity and humanity and the fusion of these in ecclesiastical authority, required an amplification which can only be made in language. This new and experimental age had not discovered the limits of each are, it had not learned that painting. must not touch a subject on which literature has still an essential word to say.

This resemblance of Serbo-Byzantine art to the work of Blake, which seems to me entirely mysterious, not to be explained by any conceivable theory, has nothing to do with romanticism; for it is strongly apparent in the most classical fresco in Grachanitsa. This depicts a mystic, and both the Orthodox Church and William Blake knew very well what mysticism was. The Orthodox Church had drawn its knowledge direct from Christ and the Apostles and had developed it in the monasteries of Mount Athos; and Blake was one of the long line of mystics which England finds it so much easier to produce outside the Church than inside. This fresco shows Elijah sitting in one of those caves to which El Greco has accustomed us, an enclosing womb of rock. Beyond it are signs of a forest that makes its own night in the day; and at its mouth are two highly stylized little trees, symbols of barrenness. The old man's clenched right hand supports his bearded chin; his head is thrown back in an ecstasy of thought; his left hand grips his bony knee. He is wrapped in a sheepskin, his tired feet are bare. "This is a study of what our people alone know," said Constantine, "this is mysticism without suffering"

In that he named a distinction between the modern Western world and this Byzantine world, which is at bottom a distinction between poverty and wealth. The West imagines a hermit in the desert as inconvenienced by lack of material objects. He is always assumed to have so few ideas about the spiritual world that he has difficulty in keeping his mind on them, and therefore has to regard die mere exclusion of physical comfort as a positive victory which has constantly to be rewon. This actually was the state of many of the Western mystics. St. Jerome shows in his letters that his animal preoccupations were always bursting into the sparsely populated area of his spiritual life; and St. Augustine describes in his Confessions how the sight of a lizard catching flies or a spider entangling them in his web was enough to distract him from contemplation. But in this fresco of Elijah and in another which shows St. John, wild-eyed with more wisdom than a man can carry, there is depicted the mystic who went into the desert because his head was so full of ideas about the spiritual world that everyday talk was in his ears as a barrel-organ playing outside a concert-hall is to a musician, the mystic who does not want to eat or drink or sleep with women because that is to take time off from the ecstatic pleasure of pursuing the ramifications of good and evil through his bosom and through the universe. There is a raven alighting in Elijah's cave, food in its beak; he will hardly thank it. If a naked woman appeared before him she would be not a temptation but an offence, offending as a person in a library who begins chatting to a student who has found a long-sought reference a few minutes before closing time. Life is not long enough for these men to enjoy the richness of their own perceptions, to transmute them into wisdom.

Their wealth is past our computation. Our cup has not been empty, but it was never full like those in this world, at a spot where Asia met Europe, at a time when the governing civilization had known success as well as failure, and there were these new Slav races to give the sensibility and vigour of their youth to exploiting this inherited treasure of experience. Across one of the walls of Grachanitsa is shown the Falling Asleep of the Virgin Mary, the state which preceded her Assumption, a subject often treated by the Byzantines. There is no man living today who, exploring his mind in the light of that idea, could draw out so much.

In the foreground of the fresco is the Virgin lying on her bier. By the lax yet immutable line is rendered the marvel of death, the death which is more than the mere perishing of consciousness, which can strike where there is no consciousness and annul a tree, a flower, an ear of corn. Above her bier there shines a star of light; within it stands Christ, taking into his arms his mother's soul in the likeness of a swaddled child. Their haloes make a peaceful pattern, the stamp of a super-imperial power, within the angles of the star. Abort them throngs a crowd of apostles and disciples, come hastily from the next world or from distant lands to attend the Virgin's death, wearing their haloes as bubbling yet serene spheres. On the edge of the crowd stand some bishops in their crosscovered mantles, rock-like with the endurance of the Church, which cannot be perturbed by the most lacerating grief, and still others, also in flowing garments but with bodies liquid with grief, and others, also in flowing garments but with bodies tautened by effort, low under the weight of the bier. One astonished man is attached to it by both arms; he is a Jew of the party that killed Christ, who has tried to upset the bier, and will be glued to it until an angel cuts off his hands with a sword. The background is full of angels as the Eastern Church loved to conceive them, ethereal messengers who are perpetually irradiated by the divine beauty and communicate its laws to flesh-bound man, who embody, in fact, a dream of perfect vision and unfrustrated will, unhampered by the human handicaps of incomplete information and clumsy faculties. Without a taint of labour but with immense force they throw open the doors of Heaven, and light blazes on its threshold, a light inhabited by welcoming saints.

The huge imaginative space occupied by this small fresco is washed by two swinging tides. There is a wave of such sincere and childish grief as children feel when their mothers die, that breaks and falls and ebbs; there is a rising sea of exaltation in the Son who can work all magic and cancel this death or any other, making glory and movement where stillness and the end seemed to be ineluctable. The sides of the fresco are filled in with buildings, distorted with the most superb audacity in order to comply with the general pattern, yet solid and realistic in effect; we are amazed, as we all so often are during our lives, that our most prodigious experiences take place in the setting of the everyday world, that the same scenery should be used For the pantomime and the tragedy. Behind these buildings there is a firmament which evokes another recurrent amazement. It is the most astonishing of all the things which happen to us that anything should happen at all. It is incredible that there should be men and women, mothers and sons, biers and buildings, grief and joy; it would seem so much more probable that the universe should have as its sole packing empty nothingness. Existence in itself, taken at its least miraculous, is a miracle.

But this fresco, though it is inspired by these ideas and communicates them, is pure painting; it essays no task proper to another art. These ideas manifest themselves because they were part of the intellectual and spiritual wealth which the painter had inherited from Byzantium, and he could engage in only the most superficial activities without being reminded of them. But he was wholly loyal to his art. He restricted himself to dealing with certain problems of form and colour, but such was his command over his technique that these restrictions gave him as much liberty as most men's talents and allotment of time are likely to need. He knew how to put circle by straight line and straight line by circle, and pattern by pattern within an enfolding pattern, in a design which by a certain angularity never consented to renounce its nature, always refused to pretend to be a plain copy of material objects; he knew how to exploit the Near Eastern palette of strong colours which have had their strength eroded by stronger sunlight to pale virile essences, or obscured in the labyrinths of Byzantine palaces and only half revived by the glow from torches and candelabra. It is a convention of form and colour which we of the West know through its use by EI Greco, and which we are tempted to mistake for his self-made fortune, if we do not know the treasure house of tradition where he found it. In Grachanitsa, where the painting of these frescoes and the architecture of the church illustrate two arts proceeding from the same late Byzantine culture, we can see how inexhaustible were the treasures of this tradition. Here artists knew the supremest wealth their kind can know; they were rich in crea- tion and they worked for an audience rich in perception. These people were born into a kingdom which was as kingdoms of earth should be, yielding good grain and good meat and good wine; and they had had enough of everything for long enough to forget starvation and outgrow excess. Before their eyes was a kingdom of the mind, founded by another people, which, like all kingdoms of the mind, had never been completed, but was unique in beauty. Well nourished and full of power, the Serbs went forth to know the new pleasures of art and thought, and to complete this culture with a richness that should match the richness of its first intention.

And when we went out of the church there was nothing. Defeat had taken all. Across a dusty yard which had once been a garden, soldiers wheeled barrows full of stones, not to rear again the vanished palaces, but to put up a hostel to divert pence from peasants that might otherwise be spent at a poor inn. On the footboard of our car Dragutin sat smoking, and by him there stood a dull-eyed boy, wearing an unbuttoned shirt of stained linen, patched breeches, and broken sandals. A sore on his lip was smeared with sky-blue ointment. "Go now! Go now!" Dragutin said to him, and crushed his cigarette under-foot. "Look, he is foolish. He knows you are going on to the Trepcha mines, because most English people who come to Grachanitsa are on their way to Trepcha, or have been there. So he wants you to give him a letter to the manager, the great Gospodin Mac. But I ask you, what would they want with the likes of this poor little one? For everything there is fino, fino, vrlo fino, and they can have anyone they like to work fox them, for they pay well and are just people, all dukes." The boy said, "There is nothing for me to do here. I want to work in the mines. Lady, gentlemen, there is nothing at all for me to do here, I want to go to the mines."

Outside the walls of the compound rose the shabby, empty hills which in Milutin's time had been covered with villages. They receded into distances that were truly vast, for a traveller could penetrate them for many miles before he came on life that was gentle, where the meals were full and delicate, and there was clerly knowledge. Yet when Grachanitsa was built the people on these plains and hills had eaten game and fine fattened meats off gold and silver and pewter, and the noble men and women, of whom there were a great number, closely kin to the peasantry, spoke Greek as well as Serbian. But because the Christians had lost the battle of Kossovo all this life had perished. Only there remained the pious gravity of the soldiers, which is something the West does not know. An English soldier is more cynical than an English civilian; but when the Serbian puts on uniform he becomes quiet with a deep unformulated faith, which is perhaps a memory of a Casaropapist empire whose emperor was the Vicar of Christ. Also there was in Dragutin a kind of lordliness that might have been an inheritance From a nobility which, because it was half peasant, did not lose its force when its possessions were rapt from it. Nothing else was left on this scene of what had once been there; the residue was pitifully thin, thin as a shadow cast by a clouded sun. The boy shifted his weight from one leg to the other, and said, "There is nothing here for me to do."

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