ung
rival. Rada, with no further training, was at once consecrated as
Vladika Petar II by the Bishop of Prizren and this strange
consecration was confirmed later at Petersburg, whither the young
Petrovitch duly went.

Russia has all along consistently furthered her influence and plans
in the Balkans by planting suitable Bishops as political agents.
Russia was now powerful in Montenegro. A Russian officer led the
clans a-raiding into Turkey and returned with so many decapitated
heads to adorn Cetinje, that the Tsar thought fit to protest. The
tug between Austria and Russia continued. Vuko, the Gubernator, and
his party, finding the youthful Archbishop taking the upper hand
with Russian aid, entered into negotiations with Austria. The plot
was, however, detected. Vuko fled to Austria. His brother was
assassinated; the family house at Nyegushi was burnt down and the
family exiled. Russia would tolerate no influence but her own and
had begun in fact the same policy she afterwards developed in
Serbia. From that date--1832--the office of Gubernator was
abolished. Imitation is the sincerest flattery. The Petrovitches
began to model themselves on their patrons, the Tsars, and strove
for absolutism.

Petar II ranks high as author and poet. He further organized the
laws against the blood-feuds which were sapping the strength of the
nation and ingeniously ordered a murderer to be shot by a party made
up of one man from each tribe. As the relatives of the dead man
could not possibly avenge themselves on every tribe in the land the
murder-sequence had perforce to end. To reconcile public opinion to
this form of punishment he permitted the condemned man to run for
his life. If the firing party missed him, he was pardoned. The point
gained was that the murder became the affair of the central
government, not of the local one.

Petar also did much to start education in the land. He died before
he was forty of tuberculosis, in 1851, one of the early victims of
the disease which shortly afterwards began to ravage Montenegro and
has killed many Petrovitches.

He named as his successor his nephew Danilo.

Danilo's accession is a turning point in Montenegrin history. He at
once stated that he did not wish to enter holy orders and would
accept temporal power only. He was, in fact, about to marry a lady
who was an Austrian Slav. For this, the consent of Russia had to be
obtained, for till now it was through the Church that Russia had