But the two States formed beside the Adriatic and in Ra[vs]ka were not
only separated from early days by their religion; they had quite
different neighbours to deal with. In 887 the Croats imposed their
will on the Venetians, against whom they had been for some time waging
war--and not merely a defensive war--the Venetians having attacked the
country in order to despoil it of timber and of people, whom they
liked to sell in the markets of the Levant. In 887, however, after the
defeat and death of their doge, Pietro Candiano, the Venetians were
forced to pay--and paid without interruption down to the year 1000--an
annual tribute to the Croats, who in return permitted them to sail
freely on the Adriatic. Beside that sea the Croats founded new towns,
such as [vS]ibenik (of which the Italian name is Sebenico), and
carried on an amicable intercourse with the autonomous Byzantine
towns: Iader, the picturesque modern capital which they came to call
Zadar and the Venetians Zara; Tragurium, the delightful spot which is
their Trogir and the Venetian Trau, and so forth. These friendly
relations existed both before 882 and subsequently, when the towns
agreed to pay the Croats an annual tribute, in return for which the
local provosts were confirmed in office by the rulers of Croatia. We
have plentiful evidence from the ruins of royal castles and of the
many churches built by the Slavs in this period, as well as from the
discoveries of arms and ornaments, that the people had attained to a
condition of prosperity. At the beginning of the tenth century, so we
are told by the learned emperor and historian Constantine
Porphyrogenetos, the Croatian Prince Tomislav could raise 100,000
infantry and 60,000 cavalry; he had likewise eighty large vessels,
each with a crew of forty men, at his disposal, and a hundred smaller
ships with ten to twenty men in each of them.
As for the State of Ra[vs]ka, protected on the south and west by
formidable mountains, and in the very centre of the Serbian tribes, it
is there that the lore and customs of the people have survived in
their purest form. Ra[vs]ka was the land in which the love of liberty
was always kept alive and from there the expeditions used to sally
forth whose aim, frustrated many times, it was to found a powerful
Serbian State. The chieftain, Tshaslav Kronimirovi['c], did, as a
matter of fact, succeed in uniting his State with two others, one
being in Bosnia and the other in Zeta, which is now Montenegrin. He
even added three other provinces on the Adriatic coast; but after his
death the State was dissolved and in the course of the conflicts which
followed, the State of Zeta assumed the leadership. It had been
necessary for these Serbian rulers of Ra[vs]ka and Zeta to resist the
frequent assaults not only of the Byzantines but of the Bulgars.