Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (104 page)

Like all EU candidates, Montenegro faced a long process of verifications and negotiations. Formal application was made in 2008, and candidate status granted in December 2010. When negotiations opened in the following New Year, an assessment of Montenegro’s chances of meeting the criteria for the thirty-five chapters of the Union’s
acquis communautaire
was issued by the EU team in Brussels. Reading very much like an old-fashioned school report, their statement listed the current position regarding each chapter under one of five categories: 1. ‘No major difficulties expected’, 2. ‘Further effort needed’, 3. ‘Considerable effort needed’, 4. ‘Nothing to adopt’, and 5. ‘Totally incompatible with the acquis’. It placed eight subjects starting with ‘Taxation’ into the first category; thirteen starting with ‘Labour Mobility’ into the second; eighteen starting with ‘Free Movement of Goods’ into the third; two including ‘Institutions’ into the fourth; and only one, ‘Environment’, into the fifth. Why exactly policy to the environment should be judged ‘totally incompatible’ in Montenegro, which has declared itself ‘an ecological state’, would now have to be investigated. It may have something to do with the plan for multiple dams on the Moraca river.
¹³
An overall Action Plan was proposed and accepted on 23 February 2011. All applicants must pass through this mill, and a final result cannot be expected for some years.
¹⁴
For the time being, the world watches and waits, pondering the well-known television advertisement broadcast alongside ‘Incredible India’ and ‘Malaysia Truly Asia’ – ‘Montenegro – Experience the Wild Beauty’.
¹⁵

II

The Lycée Louis-le-Grand is one of France’s most prestigious boys’ schools. Once a Jesuit college, it changed its name when it received the royal patronage of Louis XIV, but still stands on the rue St Jacques in the heart of Paris, in the
Quartier Latin
, surrounded by the hallowed halls of the Sorbonne and the Collège de France. Its graduates, named ‘
magnoludoviciens
’, are envied for their success in gaining competitive entry to the elite ‘
grandes écoles
’. They include some of the best-known names of French culture and politics, from Molière and Voltaire to presidents Pompidou, Giscard d’Estaing and Chirac. They also include a number of sons of distinguished foreign families who have been sent to Paris to be subjected to an educational experience of international renown.
¹⁶

One of the latter, Nikola Mirkov Petrović-Njegoš (1841–1921) studied at Louis-le-Grand in the second part of the 1850s. He was a Balkan prince from a country which most of his classmates could hardly have marked on the map, heir to a near-legendary line of hereditary and celibate prince-bishops or
vladikas
, who traditionally passed their sovereign titles to their nephews. He had been raised in the Serbian Orthodox Church, schooled both in the martial arts and in poetry, and was not well suited to his academic hothouse. He undoubtedly regarded himself as a Serb, and belonged to a dynasty that openly spoke of the restoration of the ‘tsardom of Stefan Dušan’, destroyed by the Ottoman Turks nearly 500 years earlier. Like all his compatriots, he had been brought up to believe that the Ottoman victory over the Serbs at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 was the greatest catastrophe in world history. Now he was living in an age when the Ottoman Empire was the ‘Sick Man of Europe’. Serbia, Greece and Romania had already broken free of its grip. Hopes were rising that others would soon follow.

In 1860, when his country’s call came, Prince Nikola was just nineteen years old. His uncle, Danilo I, had been assassinated. There was no time to finish his baccalaureate. The ex-schoolboy hurried to Marseille, took ship and sailed home to become the crowned head of a state whose future was as uncertain as its past was obscure.
¹⁷

Č
rnagora
, as its inhabitants call it, the ‘land of the Black Mountain’, lay inland from the Adriatic coast, squeezed between Bosnia and Albania. It took its name from the dark, pine-clad massif of Mount Lovćen (5,653 feet), which rises to the west of Cetinje; when the country first made the headlines during Prince Nikola’s long reign, Victorian newspapers often transliterated the Cyrillic form of the name as ‘Tsernagora’. Today, it best known to the outside world by the old Venetian name of Montenegro. Its total area is smaller than that of Wales or of Connecticut. The fertile landscape of the northern district contrasts sharply with the sterile, calcinated mountains of the centre and south, known as the
Brda
or ‘Highlands’. At the prince’s accession, landlocked Montenegro was separated from the Adriatic by a long coastal strip known to locals as
Primore
and to others as
Albania veneziana
.
¹⁸

In the distant past, the Principality-Bishopric of Montenegro had been ruled by non-hereditary clerics; Prince Nicola’s family established the right of hereditary succession in 1696, and Nicola was the seventh of the Petrović-Njegoš line. His uncle and immediate predecessor, however, had secularized the state, separating it from the Orthodox Church in 1852 and changing the ruler’s title from ‘prince-bishop’ to ‘prince’. This meant that Nicola’s duties were entirely non-ecclesiastical, and that the headship of the Church was no longer joined to the headship of the principality.

Montenegrin society was organized round a traditional system of tribes or clans, which had led the struggle against Ottoman domination from the sixteenth century onwards. The clans were contemptuous of all outside government, and resistant to taxation. They also cultivated the inimitable Montenegrin code of chivalry, summarized by the slogan ‘
Cˇojstvo i Junastvo’
– ‘Humanity and Bravery’ – that characterized the ideals of a warrior people. Vendettas and feuding were an integral part of their way of life.
¹⁹

The distinction between tribes and clans is simple in theory, but less easy to make in practice. In essence, the clans were patrilineal kinship groups similar to those in Scotland, each claiming descent from a historical or legendary ancestor. Petrović, for example, meaning ‘Son of Peter’, was Prince Nikola’s clan name; some of the larger clans were divided into sub-clans, which used separate names. Men and women from the same clan were forbidden to marry. The tribes, in contrast, were larger groupings made up of all the clans inhabiting a particular territorial district. Each of them held regular gatherings or
zbory
in traditionally designated villages, where matters of common interest were discussed and tribal chiefs were elected. The Njeguši tribe, for example, to which the Petrovíci clan belonged, took its name from the village where it held its tribal meetings. In districts inhabited by a single clan, the tribe and the clan became indistinguishable. In Prince Nikola’s lifetime, some thirty tribes were active in Old Montenegro or in the adjacent Highlands and Coastland.
²⁰

Once the tribes had liberated the most remote mountain districts from the Ottomans in the sixteenth century, a proto-national movement began to form round the authority of the Orthodox metropolitan of Cetinje. This movement, partly religious and partly political, gave rise to the independent principality of the
vladikas
.
²¹
Such at least is the romantic version of history that became popular in Prince Nikola’s day. Later historians have grown increasingly cautious about declarations of the country’s ‘age-old freedom’. They now paint a picture in which the principality did indeed enjoy a large measure of self-government but only in close association with the Ottomans. As elsewhere in the Balkans, the Sublime Porte was willing to arrange special rules for taxation and military service, but not to resign its claim to overlordship.
²²

Montenegro’s status in 1860, therefore, can best be described as disputed. In the eyes of the outside world, it was still an integral part of the Ottoman Empire. But since it had enjoyed self-rule under its prince-bishops for nearly two centuries, increasing numbers of its people tended to think of it as an independent, sovereign state. In the age of the Risorgimento, which was blossoming just across the Adriatic, they were not alone in harbouring nationalist ideas. On the other hand, thanks to the Orthodox connection, the Russian Empire began to act as if Montenegro were some sort of informal protectorate. Prince Nikola’s main aim during his reign was to gain full international recognition for the independence from both these behemoths which he and many of his subjects took to be their birthright.

Nikola’s fervent sense of a national mission was fostered by the romantic literature of the day, and in particular by the writings of the last of the ecclesiastical
vladikas
, Petar II Petrović-Njegoš (r. 1830–51), a man whom he would have known before departing for Paris. Prince-Bishop Petar’s
Gorski Vijenac
, ‘The Mountain Wreath’, is counted a jewel of Serbian poetry and by some as a major engine in what has been called the ‘slavic myth-making factory’; it was certainly a work of great popularity that helped cement nineteenth-century Serbian identity. Published in 1847, it runs on through 2,819 epic verses, celebrating the people’s struggle for freedom and describing the cultural interplay of the Montenegrin tribes with Ottoman Muslims and decadent Venetians. It centres on a period in the early eighteenth century, when significant numbers of Montenegrins had converted to Islam and the survival of Christian Slavs was perceived to be in danger. Petar was rousing his countrymen to fight for their traditions or to see them perish:

… After the storm the sky grows clearer;

The soul grows serene after sorrow’s pain;

The song waxes joyous after tears have been shed.

Oh that mine eyes could be opened to watch

As our homeland regains all that which was lost,

As Tsar Lazar’s crown shines bright in my face

And Milos returns to his Serbian kin.

Then would my soul be truly content,

Like a peaceful morn at the height of Spring

When the winds of the sea and the darkest clouds

Sleep calm o’er the heaving waves…

Let the struggle continue without respite,

Let it bring what men thought never could be.

Let Hell and the Devil devour us all.

Flowers will grow and bedeck our graves,

For the sake of those who are still to come…
²³

In recent times, Petar’s poetry has been judged incendiary, accused of inciting conflict between Christian and Muslim;
²⁴
in its day, it gave heart to a weak Christian community that felt oppressed by a powerful Ottoman and Muslim establishment.

At all events, the Montenegrins faced a formidable task. In the late nineteenth century they were surrounded on all sides by stronger neighbours. In 1862, when the prince’s father, Prince Mirko, took an army into neighbouring Herzegovina to help some fellow Christian rebels, the incursion ended in defeat and a punitive peace. Bosnia and Herzegovina were ruled by Austria after 1878, but both the Sandžak of Novi Pazar
*
and Albania (to which the coastal
Primore
belonged) remained integral parts of the Ottoman Empire. The strategic environment was taut.
²⁵

For fifteen years, therefore, awaiting more favourable international circumstances, Prince Nikola applied his mind to domestic reforms in the spirit of Petar II, who had been devoted not only to poetry but also to constitutionalism and to popular education; regarded as the father of his people, he had been buried on the very summit of Mount Lovćen. Prince Nikola drove his reforms forward. He surrendered some of his prerogatives to the Senate, initiated a programme of general primary education and, with notable assistance from Russia (which he was quite willing to accept), restructured and re-equipped the army.