The Genesis of a Great Power. 



517 



emigrants meadows and pastures in Servian vil- 

 lages, and finally they took to moving the 

 Christian Servian tenants from the lands when- 

 ever requested or allowed by the " begs," and 

 in their stead they brought Mohammedan 

 colonists, contrary to the law of 1859, whereby 

 the relations between the Servian tenants and 

 the " agas " had been pretty well regulated. 

 Then they broke up the compact masses of 

 Servians and established oases formed by a 

 mixed population of Mohammedans and Chris- 



the course of one exodus 37,000 Servian families 

 left Old Servia. The Servian Academy of 

 Science has for twenty years been studying, 

 for various scientific purposes, the movements 

 and the origins of Servia's population, and it 

 has been established that during the eighteenth 

 and nineteenth centuries half a million souls 

 have left Old Servia and settled in the free king- 

 dom of Servia. The most numerous migrations 

 are bound up with the wars between Servia and 

 Turkey in the beginning of the nineteenth cen- 



Why the Balkan League was created — Turkish Troops in a Macedonian or Old Servian Village. 



tians. These torments of the Christians in Old 

 Servia have lasted for centuries, since the 

 battle of Kossovo in 1389. Until that date the 

 regions of Old Servia as the centres of the 

 ancient Servian State were the most cultured 

 and the most thickly populated. Turkish rule 

 introduced misery and devastation. 



HALF A MILLION REFUGEES. 



In the fifteenth century began the migration of 

 the Servians from Old Servia, but the greatest 

 and most important of these migrations occurred 

 towards the close of the seventeenth and the 

 beginning of the eighteenth centuries, when in 



tury and during the years 1876-78. It has 

 already been shown that a result of the crimes 

 and ojDpression in Old Servia is the adoption 

 of Islamism by Servians. I can only cite a few 

 instances in this brief article. During the course 

 of the eighteenth and in the first decades of the 

 nineteenth century the whole region of Gora in 

 the Shar Planina was Islamised, and its inhabi- 

 tants (about 2,000) to-day retain their Servian 

 tongue. It was at the same period, or a little 

 earlier, that the fertile region of Drenitsa, west 

 of Kossovo, was Islamised, and also the regions 

 of Prekoruplse and Medsuvode, in Metochia. 

 Here the inhabitants speak Servian as well as 



