e of
laws, and protected the church whose head--the Archbishop of
Ipek--he raised to the dignity of patriarch. On Easter Day 1346 he
had himself crowned at Uskub as "Emperor of the Greeks and Serbs." A
few years later he embarked on an enterprise by which, had he been
successful, he might have changed the course of European history. It
was nothing less than the capture of Constantinople and the union of
Serbs, Bulgarians, and Greeks into an empire which might defend
Christendom against the rising power of Islam. Dushan was within
forty miles of his goal with an army of 80,000 men when he died
suddenly in camp on the 20th of December, 1355. Thirty-four years
later Dushan's countrymen were annihilated by the Turks at Kossovo!
All the Slavonic peoples of the Balkan Peninsula save the brave
mountaineers of Montenegro came under Moslem subjection. And under
Moslem subjection they remained till the nineteenth century.

TURKISH OPPRESSION OF SLAVS

It is impossible to give any adequate description of the horrors of
Turkish rule in these Christian countries of the Balkans. Their
people, disqualified from holding even the smallest office, were
absolutely helpless under the oppression of their foreign masters,
who ground them down under an intolerable load of taxation and
plunder. The culminating cruelty was the tribute of Christian
children from ten to twelve years of age who were sent to
Constantinople to recruit the corps of janissaries. It is not
surprising that for the protection of wives and children and the
safeguarding of interests the nobles of Bosnia and the Pomaks of
Southeastern Bulgaria embraced the creed of their conquerors; the
wonder is that the people as a whole remained true to their
Christian faith even at the cost of daily martyrdom from generation
to generation. Their fate too grew worse as the Turkish power
declined after the unsuccessful siege of Vienna in 1683. For at
first Ottoman troops ravaged Bulgaria as they marched through the
land on their way to Austria; and later disbanded soldiers in
defiance of Turkish authority plundered the country and committed
nameless atrocities. Servia was to some extent protected by her
remote location, but that very circumstance bred insubordination in
the janissaries, who refused to obey the local Turkish governors and
gave themselves up to looting, brigandage, and massacre. The
national spirt of the subject races was completely crushed. The
Servians and Bulgarian