Now and then we hear of insurrections; thus the Serbs of the Banat
revolted in 1594, allied themselves to Prince Batthory of Transylvania
and offered him the Serbian crown. With an army of Serbs and
Hungarians the Prince appeared on the Danube with the intention of
aiding the Bulgars. He won a splendid victory over the Turk, but in
gaining it he had exhausted himself, and the Turk took his usual
revenge. In Croatia the absolutist policy of Leopold I. exasperated
the people to such an extent that they forgot their quarrels with the
Magyars in order to be able to defend their rights against the attacks
of Vienna. The Hungarian-Croatian magnates, amongst whom were the
Croats Peter Zrinsky, the Ban, and Christopher Frankopan, conspired to
overthrow the Habsburgs. When the plot was discovered the conspirators
were executed in 1671 at Wiener Neustadt. In the spring of 1919, when
the bones of these two patriots were brought back to Croatia and
buried after a series of imposing and most moving ceremonies, Austria
was in such a state of hunger that she waived her good taste and
received what she had exacted for the bones, namely, five hundred
trucks of meat and potatoes. After the battle of Vienna in 1683 both
Serbs and Bulgars rose, for it seemed to many hopeful people that the
Turk was on the point of dissolution. There was an outbreak in the
Bulgarian mountain village of [vC]iprovtsi, but this was suffocated
with such ferocity that for more than a hundred years the Bulgar would
not make another effort. The spirit of the Slav appeared to have gone
out of him. Wars that were disastrous to Turkey brought the Russians
to the Danube and the Austrians to within twelve leagues of Sofia, but
the Bulgar stayed at home with his black memories. A better fortune
attended the Serbs who flocked to the standard of George Brankovi['c],
a descendant of the old despots, in the Banat. With the goodwill of
Leopold I. they fought by the side of his own troops, and after these
latter were withdrawn, in consequence of the new campaign against
Louis XIV., the Serbs continued to wage war with the Turks, and so
successfully that Leopold became anxious lest Brankovi['c] should
found an independent Serbian State. He therefore caused him and the
leaders of his army to be captured. Brankovi['c] was brought, a
prisoner, to Vienna. He survived in captivity at Eger for twenty-two
years.[29]