Note 203 — Chapter VI · THE SPREAD OF ISLAM AMONG THE CHRISTIAN NATIONS IN EUROPE UNDER THE TURKS.

The spread of Islam among the Servians began immediately after the battle of Kossovo, when a large part of the old feudal nobility, such as still remained alive and did not take refuge in neighbouring Christian countries, went over voluntarily to the faith of the Prophet, in order to keep their old privileges undisturbed.203 In these converted nobles the sultans found the most zealous propagandists of the new faith.204 But the majority of the Servian people clung firmly to their old religion through all their troubles and sufferings, and only in Stara Serbia or Old Servia,205 which now forms the north-eastern portion of modern Albania, has there been any very considerable number of conversions. Even here the spread of Muhammadanism proceeded very slowly until the seventeenth century, when the Austrians induced the Servians to rise in revolt and, after the ill-success of this rising, the then Patriarch, Arsenius III Tsernoïevich, in 1690 emigrated with 40,000 Servian families across the border into Hungary; another exodus in 1739 of 15,000 families under the leadership of Arsenius IV Jovanovich, well nigh denuded this part of the country of its original Servian population.206