Montenegro

MONTENEGRO. - Today one of the six federated Republics in the Yugoslav State.

I. GEOGRAPHY

Montenegro (or Cernagora) is formed by the southern strip of the Dinaric Alps, at the boundary between Herzegovina and the Albanian Alps, and is a mountainous and rugged country, where broad karst "dolines" and "poljes" alternate with deep furrows and valleys (Zeta, Moraca); it is therefore as a rule arid and often bare and desolate. The short coast on the Adriatic opens into the winding indentation of the Bay of Kotor and ends at the mouth of the Bojana, which drains Lake Scutari, partly Albanian. The economy has a pastoral-agricultural character (vines, olives, fruit and tobacco). There are few notable inhabited centers. The capital of the present Republic (13,967 sq km with 376,573 inhabitants; density 27 per sq km), Podgorica (today Titograd, 12 thousand inhabitants), has replaced the old capital Cetinje.

Giuseppe Caraci

II. CIVIL HISTORY

The present-day M. assumed this name and a definite physiognomy only in the first half of the 15th century, as the development of one of the earliest state formations of the Serbs (whose schism under Michael Cerularius the majority of the Montenegrins followed), the so-called Zeta (12th century), a territory which, having remained substantially immune — because of its rugged and mountainous character — from invasions, was later to retain for a long time a Western and Latin imprint. And indeed M. enters history in 1452 under the aegis of Venice, which entrusted to Stephen Crnojević the office of captain and duke of Upper Zeta. As such, M. long represented in the Balkans the outpost of Venice and of Christendom against the Turk who, after many assaults and extremely hard struggles, in 1499 overcame the resistance of the Montenegrins and occupied Cettigne, driving out the Crnojević. From this moment and for about two centuries the Montenegrins lived in isolation on their mountains without in fact submitting to Ottoman rule, recognizing their own spiritual and at the same time political unity in the vladika (bishop) of Cettigne, dependent on the patriarch of Peć, and in the "Orthodox" religion. Those who remained faithful to Rome gathered around Antivari, which had succeeded Dioclea in 1024 as metropolitan see of Upper Dalmatia or Prevalitana, with the primatial right recognized by Alexander II in 1067 and by Clement III in 1083. When, after Vienna (1683),

Christendom resumed along the Danube the offensive against the Ottoman Empire, the first to rise up were the Montenegrin tribes under the aegis of Venice, which, however, failed at Carlowitz (1699) to withdraw them from Ottoman subjection.

In this struggle, which was at once religious and national, the vladika now emerged with a physiognomy and tasks that were also political and military, besides religious and ecclesiastical. Thus, from 1700 onward, with the election of Danilo Petrović-Niegoš as hereditary vladika — to whose religious dignity political power also came to be joined — M. was governed by a kind of hereditary theocratic monarchy from uncle to nephew which continued, without quarter, to fight against the Turks. From 1711, when they rose up in response to the exhortation of Peter the Great of Russia, a sentimental and practical connection with tsarist Russia began for the Montenegrins, against whose influence that of Venice naturally set itself; but the decline of Venice now caused the emphasis to be placed on the great Slavic and "Orthodox" power which looked to the "small Slavs" and presented itself as contending with the Turks for the Byzantine heritage.

After figures of lesser account, between the end of the 18th century and the early years of the 19th there emerged the strong personality of the vladika Peter I, who, besides reorganizing the administration and strengthening his own power, succeeded in annihilating the pasha of Scutari (1706); but despite all his efforts he did not obtain the Bocche di Cattaro, assigned to Austria by the Congress of Vienna. With his successor Peter II (1830-51), called Vladika Rade, M. enjoyed a period of peace and prosperity, of which the wise government of the vladika — an inspired poet, a cultivated man and a patron — took advantage to bring a breath of modernity into the patriarchal life of the Black Mountain, with interventions in every field. His nephew Danilo II gave up the dignity of vladika and was the first to assume the princely title of gospodar. The struggle against the Turks saw him victorious at Grahovo (1858), but he fell assassinated that same year in a private vendetta. He was succeeded by Nicholas I (1860-1918), and from the Congress of Berlin (1878) M. saw its independence recognized, expanding as far as the Bojana and Lake Scutari in the south, and as far as roughly including the valleys of the Lim and the Piva, up to the Drina, in the east and north-west. Thus enlarged in territory, M. also grew in international importance as a consequence of the marriages of Nicholas's daughters, who allied him with the court of Russia, through Anastasia and Milica, married to two grand dukes; with that of Serbia, through the marriage of Zorka to Peter Karageorgević, later raised to the throne of Serbia; and finally with that of Italy, through the marriage of Elena, in 1896, to Victor Emmanuel, who later became king of Italy. Having entered into alliance with Serbia, Greece and Bulgaria against Turkey, it took part in the first Balkan war, obtaining by the peace of Bucharest (10 Aug. 1913) a part of the Sanjak of Novi Bazar. In the course of the First World War Nicholas I maintained a very equivocal and rather Austrophile attitude, which contributed to the estrangement of the dynasty from M., which on 12 Nov. 1918 proclaimed its annexation to Serbia.

After an ephemeral independence, proclaimed on 12 July 1941 in the course of the Second World War (when M. was occupied by Italian troops), M. returned to form part of Yugoslavia, of which it now constitutes the sixth federated Republic.

Angelo Tamborra

III. ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY

Among the dioceses of the Roman province of Praevalitana subject to the metropolitan of Scutari, that of Dioclea is remembered in the 6th century, a city later destroyed by the Avars in 602, whose ruins are found 5 km north of Podgorica.

The city then gave its name to the medieval Slavic kingdom of Dioclea (in Slavic Duklja), later called Zeta, whose rulers are often called "filii carissimi beati Petri." The Annales presbyteri Diocleatis, the oldest Slavic chronicle in the South, written at Antivari by an anonymous Catholic priest of the 12th century, speaks of Dioclea as a completely Catholic land, belonging to Croatia Rubea. Likewise, several Byzantine historiographers repeatedly call the leaders and the people of Dioclea Croats. Even the founder of the Serbian dynasty Stefan Nemanja, father of St. Sava, received Latin Baptism at Ribnica, today Podgorica, because only Latin priests were to be found there.

At that time there existed the dioceses of Svacium (Svač), Olcinium (Dulcigno, Ulcinj) and Antibarum (Antivari, Bar), at first suffragans of the metropolitan of Durazzo, then of that of Ragusa from 1022, and finally of that of Spalato until in 1087 Antivari became a metropolitan see, first temporarily and afterwards, from 1178, permanently, with about ten suffragan sees. In the 13th century Antivari, thanks to some of its zealous prelates, played the principal part in the reconquest of northern and central Albania to Catholicism. It did not, however, have equal success in defending the Catholic positions in the territory of Duklja, from the time this was incorporated into Serbia around 1180. Shortly afterwards this land felt the invasion of the Serbian national Church, an invasion facilitated by the existence, so it seems, of various rites and liturgical languages among the Catholics of the place (monasteria Latinorum, Graecorum et Slavorum). Sava Nemanja, the Serbian national saint, immediately after the foundation of the Serbian autocephalous Church in 1219, erected several Eastern episcopal sees also in the Catholic provinces of Zeta and Chelmo-Hum (today Herzegovina). Later, particularly under King Uroš II Milutin, there came open persecutions of Catholics. With the disintegration of the Serbian Kingdom, after the death of King Stefan Dušan (1331-55), the Church

Catholic of Dioclea recovered somewhat, especially with the conversion of the Balšić brothers, then reigning (1368).

With the Turkish invasions, only the diocese of Antivari (v.) remained in the country, which from then on bears the title of "primas Serbiae." When this too fell under the Turks in 1571, Cettigne began to acquire greater importance, where in 1485 Prince Ivan Crnojević, to fulfill a vow made at Loreto, erected the church of the Nativity of the Most Holy Mary with the monastery as the residence of the Orthodox vladika of Zeta. He, a friend of the Catholic Church and son of the sister of George Castriota Scanderbeg, the Catholic hero, would never have thought that these bishops would later eliminate Catholicism from his land. While a minority of Catholics and small groups of "Orthodox" embraced the faith of the new Turkish masters, the great majority of Catholics, left without priests, passed over to "Orthodoxy" in the 16th-17th centuries, especially through the work of the vladika Rufino I. The last groups still remaining Catholic, such as the Bjelopavlić, Piperi, Bratonožići and most of the Kući (who are so still today), fell into schism almost without noticing it. This phenomenon of Montenegro is not an isolated fact. "Orthodoxy" throughout the whole zone into which Serbia, as a result of later conquests, pushed as far as the Adriatic, drove back the Catholic element, when it could not absorb it, thus creating a strong "Orthodox" wedge between the Catholic regions of southern Croatia and northern Albania. The dioceses of Antivari, Svacia, Budua, Cattaro, Trebinje and Stagno retained only a small, sometimes insignificant number of faithful. The vladika of Cettigne, together with the leaders of the people, succeeded in settling the question of the Islamization of the country with the bloody massacre of the Islamized on the eve of Christmas 1702, later extolled by another vladika, Petar Petrović Njegoš, in the celebrated Mountain Wreath (Gorski Vijenac). The hopes of the Church seemed to revive when, toward the middle of the 17th century, the Montenegrin bishop Mardario, his successor Bessarione, as well as the most venerated national saint, held to be a thaumaturge, the vladika Basil of Ostrog, were reunited with the Apostolic See. This fact, confirmed by the profession of the Catholic faith of the regional Councils of the monastery of Morača of 1648 and 1653, did not, however, produce a lasting result.

The juridical conditions of the Church were definitively settled by the Concordat between the Holy See and the Kingdom of Montenegro (1886).