Mahommedan Slavs

Extract

Turkish dominance may have been curbed in Europe by the Great War—we know that it is being allowed to run riot in Asia—but it would be a mistake to think that the canker of Islamism has been removed. The new kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes has in its midst approximately one million Sons of the Prophet. Their main stronghold is in Bosnia, together with Herzegovina, where Moslem bigotry and cruelty earned for it a title of which it was proud until yesterday : ‘The Lion that guards Stambul against the West.’ Yet Bosnia was a Christian land five centuries ago, and the story of Bosnian heroism in religious fidelity, after the lapse of its Christian leaders, has not yet been given to the world. The landlords, forebears of the present arrogant and tyrannous Begs, became apostates to Islam for the sake of their lands and titles. Their Christianity had been already undermined at the time of the Turkish invasion by the heretical tenets of the Bogumiles, a sect that had much in common with the Protestantism of later days. English writers are found who excuse the Bosnian chieftains for their preference of the Sultan’s jurisdiction to that of the Pope. The harsh measures meted out to heretics in the Middle Ages were here intensified by rivalry between Bosnian chiefs who denounced each other to the King of Hungary, or the Rulers of Venice and Ragusa, and were perverts or converts as the situation required, now submitting to Rome, next day repudiating submission.