Milosh Obrenovitch.
At this period Milosh Obrenovitch appears prominently on the political
tapis. He spent his youth in herding the famed swine of Servia; and
during the revolution was employed by Kara Georg to watch the passes
of the Balkan, lest the Servians should be taken aback by troops from
Albania and Bosnia. He now saw that a favourable conjuncture had come
for his advancement from the position of chieftain to that of chief;
he therefore lost no time in making terms with the Turks, offering to
collect the tribute, to serve them faithfully, and to aid them in the
re-subjugation of the people: he was, therefore, loaded with caresses
by the Turks as a faithful subject of the Porte. His offers were at
once accepted; and he now displayed singular activity in the
extirpation of all the other popular chiefs, who still held out in the
woods and fastnesses, and sent their heads to the Pasha; but the
decapitation of Glavash, who was, like himself, supporting the
government, showed that when he had accomplished the ends of Soliman
Pasha, his own turn would come; he therefore employed the ruse
described in page 55, made his escape, and, convinced that it was
impossible ever to come to terms with Soliman Pasha, raised the
standard of open revolt. The people, grown desperate through the
ill-treatment of the spahis, who had returned, responded to his call,
and rose in a body. The scenes of 1804-5-6, were about to be renewed;
but the Porte quickly made up its mind to treat with Milosh, who
behaved, during this campaign, with great bravery, and was generally
successful. Milosh consequently came to Belgrade, made his submission,
in the name of the nation, to Marashly Ali Pasha, the governor of
Belgrade, and was reinstated as tribute-collector for the Porte; and
the war of mutual extermination was ended by the Turks retaining all
the castles, as stipulated in the eighth article of the treaty of
Bucharest.
Many of the chiefs, impatient at the speedy submission of Milosh,
wished to fight the matter out, and Kara Georg, in order to give
effect to their plans, landed in Servia. Milosh pretended to be
friendly to his designs, but secretly betrayed his place of
concealment to the governor, whose men broke into the cottage where he
slept, and put him to death. Thus ended the brave and unfortunate Kara
Georg, who was, no doubt, a rebel against his sovereign, the Sultan,
and, according to Turkish law, deserving of death; but this base act
of treachery, on the part of Milosh, who was not the less a rebel, is
justly considered as a stain on his character.
M. Boue, who made the acquaintance of Milosh in 1836, gives a short
account of him.
Milosh rose early to the sound of military music, and then went to his
open gallery, where he smoked a pipe, and entered on the business of
the day. Although able neither to read, write, nor sign his name, he
could dictate and correct despatches; and in the evening he caused the
articles in the _Journal des Debats_, the _Constitutionnel_, and the
_Augsburg Gazette_, to be translated to him.
The Belgrade chief of police[24] having offended Milosh by the boldness
of his language, and having joined the detractors of the prince at a
critical moment, although he owed everything to him, Milosh ordered
his head to be struck off. Fortunately his brother Prince Ievren met
the people charged with the bloody commission; he blamed them, and
wished to hinder the deed: and knowing that the police director was
already on his way to Belgrade from Posharevatz, where he had been
staying, he asked the momkes to return another way, saying they had
missed him. The police director thus arrived at Belgrade, was
overwhelmed with reproaches by Milosh, and pardoned.
A young man having refused to marry one of his cast-off mistresses, he
was enlisted in the army, but after some months submitted to his fate.
He used to raise to places, in the Turkish fashion, men who were
unprepared by their studies for them. One of his cooks became a
colonel. Another colonel had been a merry-andrew. Having once received
a good medical advice from his butler, he told him that nature
intended him for a doctor, and sent him to study medicine under Dr.
Cunibert.
"When Milosh sent his meat to market, all other sales were stopped,
until he had sold off his own at a higher price than that current, on
the ground of the meat being better."
"The prince considered all land in Servia to belong to him, and
perpetually wished to appropriate any property that seemed better than
his own, fixing his own price, which was sometimes below the value,
which the proprietor dared not refuse to take, whatever labour had
been bestowed on it. At Kragujevatz, he prevented the completion of
the house of M. Raditchevitch, because some statues of wood, and
ornaments, which were not to be found in his own palace, were in the
plan. An almanack having been printed, with a portrait of his niece
Auka, he caused all the copies to be given back by the subscribers,
and the portraits cut out."
There can be no doubt, that, after the miserable end of Kara Georg,
and the violent revolutionary wars, an unlimited dictatorship was the
best regimen for the restoration of order. Milosh was, therefore, many
years at the head of affairs of Servia before symptoms of opposition
appeared. Allowances are certainly to be made for him; he had seen no
government but the old Turkish regime, and had no notion of any other
way of governing but by decapitation and confiscation. But this
system, which was all very well for a prince of the fifteenth century,
exhausted the patience of the new generation, many of whom were bred
at the Austrian universities. Without seeking for democratic
institutions, for which Servia is totally unfit, they loudly demanded
written laws, which should remove life and property from the domain of
individual caprice, and which, without affecting the suzerainty of the
Porte, should bring Servia within the sphere of European
institutions. They murmured at Milosh making a colossal fortune out of
the administration of the principality, while he rendered no account
of his intromissions, either to the Sultan or to the people, and
seized lands and houses merely because he took a fancy to them.[25]
Hence arose the _national party_ in Servia, which included nearly all
the opulent and educated classes; which is not surprising, since his
rule was so stringent that he would allow no carriage but his own to
be seen in the streets of Belgrade: and, on his fall, so many orders
were sent to the coach-makers of Pesth, that trade was brisk for all
the summer.
The details of the debates of the period would exhaust the reader's
patience. I shall, therefore, at once proceed to the summing up.
1st. In the nine years' revolt of Kara Georg nearly the whole
sedentary Turkish population disappeared from Servia, and the Ottoman
power became, according to their own expression, _assassiz_
(foundationless).
2nd. The eighth article of the treaty of Bucharest, concluded by
Russia with the Porte, which remained a dead letter, was followed by
the fifth article in the treaty of Akerman, formally securing the
Servians a separate administration.
3rd. The consummate skill with which Milosh played his fast and loose
game with the Porte, had the same consequences as the above, and
ultimately led to
4th. The formal act of the Sultan constituting Servia a tributary
principality to the Porte, in a _Hatti Sherif_, of the 22nd November,
1830.
5th. From this period, up to the end of 1838, was the hard struggle
between Milosh, seeking for absolute power, supported by the peasantry
of Rudnik, his native district, and the "Primates," as the heads of
the national party are called, seeking for a habeas-corpus act and a
legislative assembly.
Milosh was in 1838 forcibly expelled from Servia; and his son Michael
having been likewise set aside in 1842, and the son of Kara Georg
selected by the sublime Porte and the people of Servia, against the
views of Russia, the long-debated "Servian Question" arose, which
received a satisfactory solution by the return of Wucics and
Petronievitch, the exiled supports of Kara Georgevitch, through the
mediation of the Earl of Aberdeen.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 24: M, Boue, in giving this anecdote, calls him "Newspaper
Editor:" this is a mistake.]
[Footnote 25: It is very true that the present Prince of Servia does
not possess anything like the power which Milosh wielded; he cannot
hang a man up at the first pear-tree: but it is a mistake on the part
of the liberals of France and England, to suppose that the revolutions
which expelled Milosh and Michael were democratic. There has been no
turning upside down of the social pyramid; and in the absence of a
hereditary aristocracy, the wealthiest and most influential persons in
Servia, such as Ressavatz, Simitch, Garashanin, &c. support Alexander
Kara Georgevitch.]