Finally, I have found it useful to indicate the most valuable textbooks on the history of the Slavonic Law and legal antiquities, with some critical remarks for students more advanced or more interested in the study of the Slavonic world. An exhaustive bibliography could certainly not be aimed at, because it would render the whole work too cumber

some.

While composing my lectures, I have been wholly penetrated by the wish to justify the confidence of the Curators, and to promote as much as possible the knowledge of the Slavonic world among the English people, so great and so worthy of praise for the spreading of civilization. I thank most heartily the Curators of the Taylor Institution for the opportunity given to me to speak at Oxford, in one of the oldest and most celebrated universities in the world, and also for their generosity in supplying means for printing my lectures. But especially I express my sincere thanks to Professor W. R. Morfill, who was the first promoter of my invitation and has taken so much interest in revising these pages, which are published at such a distance from their author.

F. SIGEL.

WARSAW, July 1, 1901.

LECTURE I

INTRODUCTION

BULGARIA: SERVIA

THE comparative method occupies a very large place

in the investigations of the laws of social development. The information of travellers about the manner of life of savages accumulates more and more; even the soil is broken for discovering the remnants of the written and architectural monuments of Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon. But notwithstanding all this, a remarkable gap in the picture of social transformations must be felt in the West on account of the insufficient knowledge of the Slavonic political and social institutions. Meanwhile a little more information on Slavonic countries is very useful even for a good understanding of Western Europe. The peculiarities of the enormous influence of the Roman Catholic Church during the Middle Ages cannot be well grasped without comparison with states which never acknowledged her power. The importance of the inhabitants of cities in the social evolution can be only conceived, if we have before our eyes a country, like Poland, where the people of the towns, being considered as foreigners for centuries, were for that reason not admitted into the Diet. The feudal institutions, spread over the whole West, had almost no part in the history of the Slavonic lands. Thus the great forces, moving the

B

Western mediaeval society, can be either only partially (Roman Catholic Church) or not at all observed among the Slavs. The Slavonic society at its outset scarcely differed from that of the other Aryans; its organization was the same as that of the Greeks, the Romans, and the Celts, so vividly described by the late Prof. Freeman in his Comparative Politics. The essential difference in the growth of Western and Eastern European Aryans is therefore due to the difference of the various later influences. Their action can be established perfectly well by comparison.

Besides, if we examine only the Slavs themselves, without comparison with other Aryans, we find that this society, at the outset with the same political and social organization, in the course of centuries was subject to very different influences, moral and material. One part, the Slavs living on the shores of the Baltic, remained true to their heathen religion and disappeared; another assumed the occidental political and social ideas, with some modifications in different countries, and evolved states that seemed powerful and flourishing, but fell in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the third portion was permeated by Byzantine influence, and underwent a different fate. Bulgaria and Servia vanished after a short splendour; Russia from the fifteenth century considered herself as a third Rome, and manifests in our times a vigorous life. The material surroundings are also extremely diverse. What a great difference between the plains of the Russian black soil and the arid, rocky Dalmatian shores of the Adriatic! between Bohemia, closed round by mountains, and the open frontiers of old Poland! What a variety of climates, of flora and fauna! As if nature