brought back to Serbia and impaled with sixty of his comrades. But
in the treaty of 1791 the Turks undertook to give autonomy to the
Serbs of the Pashalik of Belgrade, and to keep from their lands in
future the janissaries who had wrought so much mischief.

THE GERMAN COLONISTS IN THE BANAT

Further down the Danube, though, there would be a janissary watching a
frontiersman, a Grani[vc]ar, on the opposite bank, waiting to kill
him--both of them Serbs, both standing on Serbian land.... The
military frontier regiments were not only organized to defend, in a
long line, Croatia, Slavonia, Ba[vc]ka and the Banat from Turkish
inroads, they had also to fight for the Habsburgs wherever a war was
toward. Two centuries ago, at the time when the Serbian regiments were
in a privileged position--the entire regiment, officers and men,
consisting of Serbs, and their own arms being on the flag--it was
their destiny to go to France, Italy and Spain, as afterwards to the
battle of Leipzig and to Schleswig-Holstein. They may have grumbled a
good deal on the way to all these battles, but once the fighting had
begun they grumbled no more, thus resembling in two respects the
French soldier. And this practice of going abroad on behalf of the
Empire was continued till the frontier regiments, about fifty years
ago, were broken up. Thus Joseph Eberle and George Huber were killed
during the Italian campaign of 1848-1849. These men were German
colonists, whose introduction had been so much encouraged in the
eighteenth century. But, in order to separate Protestant Hungary from
the Turks, so that the two should not unite against the Catholic
Habsburgs, it was laid down by Prince Eugene that all the German
colonists had to be Catholics. Some Protestants managed to settle in
Lescovac, where they held secret services during the night; but in
1726 this was reported to the Prefect of Bela Crkva, whereupon he sent
word that if they would not be converted they would each receive
twenty-five strokes with a birch.... Of course, those who lived on the
frontier lands were subject to the same conditions as their
neighbours. German frontier regiments existed side by side with
Serbian regiments, and the life of all those people can be studied in
a book[34] written by the German frontier village of Franzfeld and
published in 1893, a few months after Franzfeld had celebrated its
centenary. There would, no doubt, be variations enough in the domestic
arrangements