SERVIA,
YOUNGEST MEMBER OF THE EUROPEAN FAMILY:
OR, A
RESIDENCE IN BELGRADE,
AND
TRAVELS IN THE HIGHLANDS AND WOODLANDS OF THE INTERIOR,
DURING THE YEARS 1843 AND 1844.
BY
ANDREW ARCHIBALD PATON, ESQ.
Milosh Obrenovitch.
At this period Milosh Obrenovitch appears prominently on the political tapis. He spent his youth in herding the famed swine of Servia; and during the revolution was employed by Kara Georg to watch the passes of the Balkan, lest the Servians should be taken aback by troops from Albania and Bosnia. He now saw that a favourable conjuncture had come for his advancement from the position of chieftain to that of chief; he therefore lost no time in making terms with the Turks, offering to collect the tribute, to serve them faithfully, and to aid them in the re-subjugation of the people: he was, therefore, loaded with caresses by the Turks as a faithful subject of the Porte. His offers were at once accepted; and he now displayed singular activity in the extirpation of all the other popular chiefs, who still held out in the woods and fastnesses, and sent their heads to the Pasha; but the decapitation of Glavash, who was, like himself, supporting the government, showed that when he had accomplished the ends of Soliman Pasha, his own turn would come; he therefore employed the ruse described in page 55, made his escape, and, convinced that it was impossible ever to come to terms with Soliman Pasha, raised the standard of open revolt. The people, grown desperate through the ill-treatment of the spahis, who had returned, responded to his call, and rose in a body. The scenes of 1804-5-6, were about to be renewed; but the Porte quickly made up its mind to treat with Milosh, who behaved, during this campaign, with great bravery, and was generally successful. Milosh consequently came to Belgrade, made his submission, in the name of the nation, to Marashly Ali Pasha, the governor of Belgrade, and was reinstated as tribute-collector for the Porte; and the war of mutual extermination was ended by the Turks retaining all the castles, as stipulated in the eighth article of the treaty of Bucharest.
Many of the chiefs, impatient at the speedy submission of Milosh, wished to fight the matter out, and Kara Georg, in order to give effect to their plans, landed in Servia. Milosh pretended to be friendly to his designs, but secretly betrayed his place of concealment to the governor, whose men broke into the cottage where he slept, and put him to death. Thus ended the brave and unfortunate Kara Georg, who was, no doubt, a rebel against his sovereign, the Sultan, and, according to Turkish law, deserving of death; but this base act of treachery, on the part of Milosh, who was not the less a rebel, is justly considered as a stain on his character.
M. Boué, who made the acquaintance of Milosh in 1836, gives a short account of him.
Milosh rose early to the sound of military music, and then went to his open gallery, where he smoked a pipe, and entered on the business of the day. Although able neither to read, write, nor [303]sign his name, he could dictate and correct despatches; and in the evening he caused the articles in the Journal des Débats, the Constitutionnel, and the Augsburg Gazette, to be translated to him.
The Belgrade chief of police1 having offended Milosh by the boldness of his language, and having joined the detractors of the prince at a critical moment, although he owed everything to him, Milosh ordered his head to be struck off. Fortunately his brother Prince Ievren met the people charged with the bloody commission; he blamed them, and wished to hinder the deed: and knowing that the police director was already on his way to Belgrade from Posharevatz, where he had been staying, he asked the momkes to return another way, saying they had missed him. The police director thus arrived at Belgrade, was overwhelmed with reproaches by Milosh, and pardoned.
A young man having refused to marry one of his cast-off mistresses, he was enlisted in the army, but after some months submitted to his fate.
He used to raise to places, in the Turkish fashion, men who were unprepared by their studies for them. One of his cooks became a colonel. Another colonel had been a merry-andrew. Having once received a good medical advice from his butler, he told him that nature intended him for a doctor, and sent him to study medicine under Dr. Cunibert.
“When Milosh sent his meat to market, all other sales were stopped, until he had sold off his own at a higher price than that current, on the ground of the meat being better.”
“The prince considered all land in Servia to belong to him, and perpetually wished to appropriate any property that seemed better than his own, fixing his own price, which was sometimes below the value, which the proprietor dared not refuse to take, whatever labour had been bestowed on it. At Kragujevatz, he prevented the completion of the house of M. Raditchevitch, because some statues of wood, and ornaments, which were not to be found in his own palace, were in the plan. An almanack having been printed, with a portrait of his niece Auka, he caused all the copies to be given back by the subscribers, and the portraits cut out.”
There can be no doubt, that, after the miserable end of Kara Georg, and the violent revolutionary wars, an unlimited dictatorship was the best regimen for the restoration of order. Milosh was, therefore, many years at the head of affairs of Servia before symptoms of opposition appeared. Allowances are certainly to be made for him; he had seen no government but the old Turkish régime, and had no notion of any other way of governing but by decapitation and confiscation. But this system, which was all very well for a prince of the fifteenth century, exhausted the patience of the new generation, many of whom were bred at the Austrian universities. Without seeking for democratic institutions, for which Servia is totally unfit, they loudly demanded written laws, which should remove life and property from the domain of individual caprice, and which, without affecting the suzerainty of the Porte, should bring Servia within the sphere of European institutions. They murmured at Milosh making a colossal fortune out of the administration of the principality, while he rendered no account of his intromissions, either to the Sultan or to the people, and seized lands and houses merely because he took a fancy to them.2 Hence arose the national party in Servia, which included nearly all the opulent and educated classes; which is not surprising, since his rule was so stringent that he would allow no carriage but his own to be seen in the streets of Belgrade: and, on his fall, so many orders were sent to the coach-makers of Pesth, that trade was brisk for all the summer.
The details of the debates of the period would exhaust the reader’s patience. I shall, therefore, at once proceed to the summing up.
1st. In the nine years’ revolt of Kara Georg nearly the whole sedentary Turkish population disappeared from Servia, and the Ottoman power became, according to their own expression, assassiz (foundationless).
2nd. The eighth article of the treaty of Bucharest, concluded by Russia with the Porte, which remained a dead letter, was followed by the fifth article in the treaty of Akerman, formally securing the Servians a separate administration.
3rd. The consummate skill with which Milosh played his fast and loose game with the Porte, had the same consequences as the above, and ultimately led to
4th. The formal act of the Sultan constituting Servia a tributary principality to the Porte, in a Hatti Sherif, of the 22nd November, 1830.
5th. From this period, up to the end of 1838, was the hard struggle between Milosh, seeking for absolute power, supported by the peasantry of Rudnik, his native district, and the “Primates,” as the heads of the national party are called, seeking for a habeas-corpus act and a legislative assembly.
Milosh was in 1838 forcibly expelled from Servia; and his son Michael having been likewise set aside in 1842, and the son of Kara Georg selected by the sublime Porte and the people of Servia, against the views of Russia, the long-debated “Servian Question” arose, which received a satisfactory solution by the return of Wucics and Petronievitch, the exiled supports of Kara Georgevitch, through the mediation of the Earl of Aberdeen.
- M, Boué, in giving this anecdote, calls him “Newspaper Editor:” this is a mistake. ↩︎
- It is very true that the present Prince of Servia does not possess anything like the power which Milosh wielded; he cannot hang a man up at the first pear-tree: but it is a mistake on the part of the liberals of France and England, to suppose that the revolutions which expelled Milosh and Michael were democratic. There has been no turning upside down of the social pyramid; and in the absence of a hereditary aristocracy, the wealthiest and most influential persons in Servia, such as Ressavatz, Simitch, Garashanin, &c. support Alexander Kara Georgevitch. ↩︎
