race had been happening elsewhere. Dalmatia, the whole of which had been
in the possession of Venice since the Treaty of Carlowitz in 1699, passed
into the hands of Austria by the Treaty of Campo Formio in 1797, when the
Venetian republic was extinguished by Napoleon. The Bocche di Cuttaro, a
harbour both strategically and commercially of immense value, which had in
the old days belonged to the Serb principality of Zeta or Montenegro, and
is its only natural outlet on the Adriatic, likewise became Venetian in
1699 and Austrian in 1797, one year after the successful rebellion of the
Montenegrins against the Turks.

By the Treaty of Pressburg between France and Austria Dalmatia became
French in 1805. But the Montenegrins, supported by the Russians, resisted
the new owners and occupied the Bocche; at the Peace of Tilsit in 1807,
however, this important place was assigned to France by Russia, and
Montenegro had to submit to its loss. In 1806 the French occupied Ragusa,
and in 1808 abolished the independence of the ancient Serb city-republic.
In 1812 the Montenegrins, helped by the Russians and British, again
expelled the French and reoccupied Cattaro; but Austria was by now fully
alive to the meaning this harbour would have once it was in the possession
of Montenegro, and after the Congress of Vienna in 1815 took definitive
possession of it as well as of all the rest of Dalmatia, thus effecting
the complete exclusion of the Serb race for all political and commercial
purposes from the Adriatic, its most natural and obvious means of
communication with western Europe.

Though Milo[)s] had been elected prince by his own people, it was long
before he was recognized as such by the Porte. His efforts for the
regularization of his position entailed endless negotiations in
Constantinople; these were enlivened by frequent anti-Obrenovi['c] revolts
in Serbia, all of which Milo[)s] successfully quelled. The revolution in