Yet they were not wholly deaf to the call of their own race. When the
Austrians sent a general, the "Hungarian party," working against the
civil government of Count Raymond von Thurn, managed to have the post
given to General Rukavina, a Croat from the Military Frontier. An
eye-witness has left us an account of Rukavina's reception at Trogir.
The general mounted a chair, and asked the people in the Slav language
whether they would swear the oath of fidelity to His Majesty the
Emperor and King, Francis II., and his descendants and legal
successors. "Otchemo!" ["That is what we want!"] was the unanimous
reply. After the swearing of the oath, the general suddenly began a
vigorous speech: "Moi dragi Dalmatinci" ["My dear Dalmatians"], said
he.... And afterwards, when two companies of Croat infantry were
disembarked, the people collected round them were astonished to hear
them speaking the same language as themselves and to learn that many
of them had the same names as the Dalmatians.[36]
Incidents of this character were, for more reasons than one, most
galling to von Thurn. In July the archbishop and municipality of Split
petitioned that they might belong to Hungary. One presumes that these
officials were moved less by the sympathetic ways of one Hungarian
than by the knowledge that Croatia was under the Hungarian crown. Very
powerless, indeed, like themselves, Croatia might be--at that moment
reduced to the rank of a Hungarian county, with her Ban no longer able
to convoke the Diet--nevertheless, a Croatia still existed. Then Count
Raymond took hold of the matter; he sent reports on Rukavina to the
Viennese authorities, and he and they seem to have cared little
whether these reports contradicted one another. He exhibited his
adversary as a man of unbounded violence, as a man of the most
pusillanimous nature; General Rukavina was despicable, said these
documents, he was an absolute nonentity; but no, shrieked von Thurn on
the next day, this man Rukavina was imbued as no other with the
abominable spirit of Machiavelli. To bring about the fall of the
Hungarian party in Dalmatia, Count Raymond's police set themselves the
task of laying by the heels such Hungarian agents as Count Miaslas
Zanovi['c], one of the four sons of Count Anthony, who for being
implicated in a more than usually flagrant scandal had been expelled
from Venice. And his sons lived agitated lives, although it is untrue
that the second one, Stephen, before dying in prison in Amsterdam, had
governed Montenegro and is known to history as Stephen the Little.
[That mysterious person was a contemporary, who appearing in
Montenegro when the land was in a state of barbarism and destitution,
gave it out that he was the Russian Tzar Peter III., who had been
strangled to death in 1762. The Montenegrins accepted him; and from
1768 to 1773 he showed himself a most competent and zealous ruler,
carrying out so many reforms that he was clearly not Peter III. It has
not as yet been ascertained from where he came, but judging from his
accent he was either a Dalmatian Serb or a native of the Military
Confines. He was very taciturn; only one Montenegrin, a priest called
Markovi['c], is believed to have been privy to his secret. Markovi['c]
had visited Russia ten years previously and had celebrated Mass in the
presence of the Tzar. It was the priest who assured the mountaineers
that Stephen really was the Tzar. During his reign he repulsed the
Turks and organized the public security, so that a lost purse--the
people said--could easily be recovered. The Republic of Venice tried
on several occasions to poison this excellent ruler; he was ultimately
killed by a barber who came up to Cetinje at the bidding of the Pasha
of Scutari, and, being appointed court barber, cut Stephen's throat.]
As for the Zanovi['c], the elder brother, Count Premislas, was for a
long time in a Finnish prison, on account of his conduct in
gaming-houses; the two younger brothers, Hannibal and Miaslas, were in
Budva in southern Dalmatia in 1797, distributing Venetian
proclamations, after which they rearranged their minds and became
Hungarian agents.