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Modulating the universally familar
story of the hunter hunted, the Serbo-Croatian
tradition had a multitude of ways to tell of would-be
bride captors captured. The would-be captor who
instead fell into captivity himself was frequently
named Ali, and his unexpected capturer was often
the ruler or ban (king) of Zadar.
Murat Žunić’s captive of this sort, Za(j)im Ali Bey,
has no patronymic, but is distinguishable from other
Alis in two ways. First, he has as part of his name
the honorific epithet zaim, which means
“champion [of the Sultan],” and his home is in
Glasinac. Glasinac is in reality a widely (and very
anciently) inhabited high plateau east of Mount
Romanija, but it was sometimes treated in the
poetry as though it were only a single town.
Žunić’s epic about Zaim Ali Bey’s captivity and
rescue from Zadar by his wife Zlata is a true
multiform of the tradition without any antecedent
in the various songbooks of either Žunić’s own
era or before. Since however the story of a
bride captor captured and of his release from
captivity through the agency of his (other) wife
was well established in the tradition as a whole,
it would have been an unusual lapse on the part
of the songbook compilers had they not found and
included epics of that kind too in their printed
texts. And indeed, although he printed only one
of them, Kosta Hörmann had at least three such
poems in his collection of manuscripts. All
three bear witness to the independence of Žunić’s
story, and show by contrast how analogically
‘original’ it was.
The text that Hörmann printed in 1889 as poem
LIX in the second volume of his published
collection is a little longer (1,758 vv.) than
Žunić’s epic. Hörmann indicated
the origin of his text as having been in the
town of Jajce. But since the manuscript has been
lost, it is not known who collected the text
from Jajce, when, or from what singer. Its
bride-thief is differently denominated and has
his home in a different locality than Žunić’s.
He is Ali Bey Čengić of the Zagorje, and when
the story about him begins, he is not yet
captive.
23.
Ali Bey Čengić rides down one day to the Ban of
Zadar’s enclosed garden pleasance. Within its
fence is an elevation surrounded with a
gold-washed balustrade. This luxurious belvedere
is bestrewn with pillows of silk and soft bolsters.
A maiden of fifteen reposes at her leisure amongst
them, resplendent in necklaces of gold coin. She
is Biserka (Pearl), the Ban of Zadar’s daughter,
and when Ali Bey greets her, she asks him whether
the business that has brought him to Zadar is
sweet dalliance with her.
He confesses that it
is, and she tells him news which his present
visit—obviously not his first—suggests that he
has not yet heard: since their last interview,
her father has betrothed her to Matthew, the Ban
of Korfu’s son, whose arrival at Zadar to take
Biserka away is expected momentarily. She
accordingly asks Ali to return to her the precious
necklaces, bracelets, diadem, pearls, and other
jewelry which she has previously given him as
tokens of her love. Ali asks her whether she
is really prepared to give him up and consign
herself to another man in accord with her
father’s wishes.
She does not answer his question directly, but
instead invites him into her garden to drink with
her in order that, as she says, they may not
subsequently blame each other for the present
course of events. Ali enters, reclines amongst
the pillows in the gazebo, and Biserka seats
herself on his knee, where she proceeds to put
delicacies into his mouth with her two fingers
and hold a golden cup to his lips for him to
drink.
In the midst of this tender scene, Juriša
tamničar (Geordie the Gaoler) bursts
into the garden to claim reward as a bearer
of good tidings: Matthew of Korfu has just
arrived, says he, with the company of his
wedding escort. Ali Bey and Pearl look forth
from their belvedere to observe Matthew’s
wedding party of 5,000 men as it disembarks
on Zadar’s waterfront. Biserka asks Juriša
to indicate which of the men is Prince Matthew,
since she has never seen him before. Geordie
does, and she comments to Ali Bey that Matthew
is so sickly jaundiced in complexion that not
even carrion crows would deign to pick his
bones, much less would any maiden make love
with him.
But now bad luck overtakes Ali Bey. A certain
Captain Ivan (John), whilst strolling about the
gun emplacements on Zadar’s battlements,
glimpses Ali billing with Biserka in the gazebo
of the Ban’s pleasance, recognizes him, and
announces his discovery to the gunners on the
wall. They immediately bring their cannon to
bear on the belvedere and put match to
touch-holes. Their shots go high and wide of
the mark while Ali and Biserka run to Ali’s
white courser. A horserace ensues, with Ali
and Biserka in the saddle behind him on Ali’s
white, and Matthew with all his men in pursuit.
The white easily maintains its lead to midpoint
on the great plain east of Zadar, but it comes
to a complete stop—exhausted by the unaccustomed
weight of its second rider, Biserka—before it
can cross the second half of the plain and reach
the safety of the mountains beyond.
While it stands stock-still, the men from Korfu
overtake and bypass the two fugitives, occupying
the mouth of the nearest mountain pass through
which Ali and Biserka might have hoped to escape.
Surrounded now by his enemies, Ali tells his
mount that because it would not continue to run
while there was still some hope of salvation,
it must presently charge into an entrenched mass
of foemen, even though they may probably kill it.
It does, and they do. It falls on Ali Bey,
who extricates himself however, and lodges with
Biserka in a rocky fastness. There he fights
off his assailants with the hundred and twenty
rounds of ammunition in his kit. Biserka
loads and Ali fires until it is spent; then
Matthew and his men close in to grapple with
Ali hand-to-hand. Matthew finally leaps upon
him from behind, but Ali frees himself long
enough to slay Matthew with a single stroke
of his saber. This is however his last act
of defiance, for even as he delivers the fatal
blow, the multitude of Matthew’s men overwhelms
and binds him. Poltroon that he is, from
astride his horse the Ban of Zadar beats the
unhorsed and bound Ali Bey until the latter,
unflinching, calls him coward, and so both
shames and further angers his captor.
The Ban returns Pearl to her quarters in his
palace, and assembles a panel of judges in
the courtyard under her window to pass
judgment on Ali Bey. The judges condemn him
to death, and an executioner is about to
carry out their sentence when four of Pearl’s
maids-in-waiting come running to the Ban,
begging him to notice their mistress’s
posture in the window overhead. She is
poised to stab herself in the stomach at the
moment when the headman’s blade falls on
Ali’s neck.
Checked in this way from swift retaliation
against Ali Bey, the Ban consigns him
instead to the keeping of Geordie the Gaoler,
with orders that the prisoner be thrust down
into the deepest donjon, where water stands
ever seething with vipers and scorpions to
the height of a man’s knees, and where no
ray of sun nor moon ever penetrates. There
Ali Bey is to be left until he rots away
and his bare, unstrung bones may be gathered
up, beaten to powder in a mortar, and so
scattered upon the sea for the fish to eat,
lest any so terrible adversaries as he
otherwise somehow be bred of him.
Their wedding party having been brought to
grief, the men of Korfu return in mourning to
their own land, while for two weeks Ali Bey
sits in the misery of his wet subterranean
confinement. He is not disconsolate however,
since he expects that Pearl will soon find
means nocturnally to release him. In this he
is mistaken, for the Ban keeps Biserka under
a close curfew. So in the third week Ali Bey
cries out to the Ban, beseeching him either
to put a ransom on his head or to kill him,
since he can no longer abide the intolerable
pit. The Ban accordingly commands his gaoler
to conduct Ali Bey to the palace courtyard,
where the two men, captor and captive,
negotiate the terms of a ransom.
Ali promises to pay to the Ban his brother Hasan
Čengić’s black horse and trophy-saber, the one
with the Imperial Seal on it, and to give the
Ban his sister Zlata Čengić as a bride for the
Ban’s son Matthew. He then asks to be set free
so that he may go to the Zagorje to fetch the
agreed articles of ransom. But the Ban balks
at this, insisting instead that Ali send a
letter home explaining the ransom and remain
in the donjon in Zadar until his relatives
deliver
it.1
So Marko, one of the Ban’s footmen, is
dispatched to the Zagorje with Ali’s letter.
Hasan Čengić receives the message from Marko
and immediately shows it to his and Ali Bey’s
unwed sister Zlata. She in turn carries the
news of Ali’s captivity to Ali’s wife in
another room of the Čengić mansion, and the
latter writes to her father, Mahmut Agha
Babahmetović of Cetina, begging him either
to secure Ali Bey’s release or take her home
again to Cetina to spend the rest of her life
tending the fireplace in her father’s house.
She reproaches Babahmetović bitterly for
having given her as a bride to Ali Bey Čengić,
who, she says, she always knew would one day
go looking for a second wife amongst the
infidels.
Having written this
letter, the lady puts it into the hands of the
Čengićes’ footman Luke, instructing him to ride
with it at the gallop on Hasan Bey’s black
courser. As Luke is about to depart, Hasan
angrily stops him, demanding to know where he
proposes to go on Hasan’s horse without Hasan’s
consent. Ali Bey’s lady intervenes, telling
Hasan that it is she who has dispatched Luke,
whereupon Hasan seconds the command, and Luke
is off to Cetina. Meanwhile, Hasan himself
writes to the Ban of Zadar, accepting the
Ban’s terms of ransom for Ali Bey.
When Luke arrives at Cetina, he is amazed to
find two hundred armed horsetroopers already
mounted and awaiting their marching orders at
the Babahmetović mansion. Luke supposes that
old Mahmut Agha Babahmetović has somehow
independently heard of Ali Bey’s captivity,
and has gathered the present troop for an
assault on Zadar. This proves however not
to be Babahmetović’s intention; the cavalry
are a wedding escort about to accompany him
to the Čengić house in the Zagorje to fetch
Ali Bey’s and Hasan Bey’s sister Zlata as a
bride for Mahmut Agha’s son Omer Bey. The
Babahmetović and Čengić families are about
to close the circle of intermarriage with
each other.
Luke delivers the letter from Omer Bey’s sister
to her father, Mahmut Agha. Having read it,
Mahmut Agha ponders for a moment which action
to take: an uncertain venture to Zadar with
so small a force, or the surer one of
fulfilling his son Omer’s nuptials. He chooses
the latter, but does it with proper ritual
expressions of feeling for his daughter’s
misfortune: he forbids the usual musical
exercises in the wedding procession, and makes
the journey to the Zagorje by night rather
than in daylight. Instead of transporting
Zlata to Cetina in a palanquin as first
planned, he mounts her on a black horse.
At the procession’s departure from the
Čengić mansion, Mahmut Agha promises his
weeping daughter that either her Ali Bey
will return to her safely, or he himself
and her eight brothers in Cetina will
perish in the struggle to bring that to
pass.
When Omer and Zlata are finally alone in the
bridal chamber, he invites her to the pleasures
of the couch, but Zlata is too tearful with
sympathy for her bereaved sister-in-law to
think of love-making. Omer respects his new
bride’s feelings, and promises her that there
will be no further talk of connubial matters
from him until her tears are at an end. True
to his word, he disguises himself immediately
in the panoply of an infidel chevalier and,
without old Mahmut Agha’s knowledge or
permission, he takes his father’s prized
chestnut courser from the stable. On it he
rides by night over the mountains to Zadar,
where he arrives at daybreak. Meanwhile
Zlata abides alone in the bridal chamber
in Cetina, in the same limbo of uncertainty
now as is her sister-in-law in the Zagorje:
neither knows whether she is finally to be
a wife or a widow.
Instead of the tranquil scene he had expected
to witness when surveying Zadar so early in
the morning, Omer is surprised to see a great
commotion of men and of horses, and to hear
strains of music all along the seashore
outside the city walls. He rides toward the
busy strand and learns from passers-by that
the Ban of Zadar is expecting Zlata Čengić
to be delivered to him at any moment as
ransom for Ali Bey. In anticipation of so
gratifying a victory, the Ban has announced
a great horserace to be holden on the morrow,
with one of his female Turkish captives as
the prize. She is the maiden Šaha, a
daughter of Hasan Agha Kablić of Livno.
Omer Bey decides to enter the race, relying
on the speed of his father’s wonderful
chestnut mount, a horse which the elder
Babahmetović has won from the infidel
Captain Vučan as a spoil of combat in
time past.
Omer passes the entire day amongst the Ban
of Zadar’s revelers, and the entire night
drinking in Angelia’s inn. His prodigious
capacity suggests to Angelia that her client
must in reality be a Muslim and not the
Christian warrior he appears to be, though
she does not recognize him by name. Next
morning, Omer pays his host more liberally
for the night’s entertainment than any of
her guests has ever done before, then he
goes to the starting line with his
chestnut.
There he is accosted by one of the Ban of
Zadar’s peers, the Ban of Novi [another
pagan town on the Adriatic littoral].
All the other contestants in the coming
race have mounted jockeys on their
entries; only Omer proposes to ride for
himself. The Ban of Novi marvels at this,
but he considers even so that Omer will
win the race and its prize, the Muslim
girl Šaha. The Ban wants the girl for
himself, offers Omer a hundred ducats for
her, and Omer agrees to the sale. The
horses are then called to the starting
wire, but Omer holds himself aloof and
behind the throng of other racers both
at the start and through the first half
of the course. From that point on,
however, he presses forward with
determination, and so crosses the finish
line a full half hour before the next
best horse, which is the Ban of Zadar’s
own entry.
When it crosses the finish, the girl Šaha
runs to Omer’s chestnut, repeatedly kisses
its muzzle, and begs Omer not to sell her
to anyone else, but to keep her instead
as his own prize. Fearing however lest
he burst into tears on her account and
start a fight with her oppressors that
he cannot win, Omer turns away from her
without comment.
The Ban of Zadar is not however ready in
any case to surrender Šaha to Omer. He
cannot believe that his superb white horse
has lost to Omer’s chestnut unless Omer
somehow fouled it during the race, and
so he insists that Omer wait to claim Šaha
until the rest of the field finishes the
race. But the Ban of Zadar’s jockey
bluntly tells his master that no foul has
occurred, and that Omer’s chestnut is
simply the better horse. The Ban of
Novi is at hand to remind Omer of their
bargain as the Ban of Zadar reluctantly
surrenders Šaha to the winner. Omer
honors their agreement, and exchanges
Šaha for the Ban of Novi’s hundred ducats.
As he walks away leading his chestnut by
its bridle, it—unlike all the other,
spent entries of the race—gives no
indication of fatigue, frisking about
and neighing merrily instead. The Ban
of Zadar now recognizes the horse, and
questions Omer closely as to how he came
by it. Omer tells him an intricate lie.
He says that he won it in a recent skirmish
on the border when he killed its rider,
Mujo of Kladuša’s younger brother Omer
Hrnjica. The Ban asks how Omer Hrnjica got
possession of it, and Omer Bey explains
that it was a gift from Mahmut Agha
Babahmetović when Omer Hrnjica escorted
Mujo’s sister to Cetina as a bride for
one of Babahmetović’s sons. The Ban is
satisfied with this story, but demands now
that Omer sell him the horse for the price
of five hundred ducats and a gold-adorned
tunic which is part of the Ban’s own dress
at that moment. Omer hitches the horse to
a tree and accepts the payment. But when
the Ban’s liverymen try to untie and lead
the horse away to stable, it kicks three
of them to death and chews a fourth to
bits. The Ban demands that Omer return
the purchase price and take back his
ungovernable horse, but Omer Bey declines
to rescind the sale.
The Ban of Novi happens by at this moment
and advises the Ban of Zadar to take back
his payment from Omer by force. Omer
warns both of them that if that happens,
he will fly to Vienna and indict them both
to his (alleged) master, the Kaiser.
Forestalled thus from a quick and easy
recovery of the Ban of Zadar’s loss, the
two Bans plead with Omer to make
restitution voluntarily. Omer asks the
Ban of Zadar why he had been so eager to
purchase the chestnut horse in the first
place; the Ban says that it was meant for
his son Matthew, so that Matthew would
always be able to run down a Muslim in
combat, but never be overtaken himself.
Omer seems mollified by the Ban’s
explanation, and offers instead of keeping
the horse and returning the price paid for
it to teach Matthew how to ride it. He
lyingly confesses to the Ban that it was
initially so difficult a horse to control
he himself was not able to ride it until
his friend Ramo Kovačević of Kladuša
taught him how.
The Ban agrees to this proposal, and tells
Matthew to mount the chestnut behind Omer
Bey. But instead of instructing Matthew,
Omer rides away with him toward Cetina.
Watching the ostensible riding lesson
from his accustomed post on the battlements
of Zadar, the same Captain Ivan who earlier
recognized Zajim Ali Bey (whilst the latter
dallied with Pearl in the Ban’s garden) now
sees through Omer Bey Babahmetović’s
disguise as he recedes into the distance
with the hapless Matthew. He sounds the
alarm; but to Omer’s great surprise, no
posse gives chase from Zadar, where
instead a deafening noise of general
gunfire breaks out.
Thus, at the edge of the plain east of
Zadar where Ali Bey Čengić was captured,
Omer Bey Babahmetović approaches the
mountains unharrassed. Instead of
enemies, he encounters friends:
distressed by his son’s unannounced
departure alone for Zadar, Mahmut Agha
has gathered a troop of cavalry and come
down with it to assist Omer. When father
and son meet on the verge of the plain,
the elder asks the younger Babahmetović
about Ali Bey Čengić. Omer tells his
father that the youth in the saddle
behind him is Ali Bey, or as nearly so
as makes no difference; for with the Ban
of Zadar’s son as hostage, it is only a
matter of time until Ali Bey will be
free. Mahmut Agha is so delighted that
he covers Prince Matthew with kisses.
Then he exchanges rôles with his son.
While Mahmut Agha returns to Cetina with
Prince Matthew, Omer wishes to go at the
head of his father’s cavalry to learn
what all the noise of gunfire at Zadar
signifies.
Omer Bey, his eight brothers, and their
little band of three hundred horse discover
as they approach Zadar that it is under siege
by a Muslim force of 6,000. These are Hasan
Bey Čengić’s men, whom Hasan has led there
in a desperate frontal attempt to liberate
his brother Ali Bey. But Zadar’s artillery
is too daunting; it kills a hundred of
Hasan’s warriors and wounds another two
hundred before Omer Bey arrives and persuades
him to withdraw. Safe within his battlements,
the Ban of Zadar is untouchable by direct
assault, and meanwhile all his Christian
allies from up and down the coast rise in arms
to support Zadar, threatening to envelope and
annihilate Hasan Čengić’s would-be liberators
of his brother Ali Bey.
So, after some local
pillaging of its neighbourhood to punish
Zadar, Hasan returns otherwide empty-handed
to the Zagorje, and Omer Bey goes home to
Cetina to supervise the exchange of
prisoners with Zadar’s king. In this matter
Omer drives a hard bargain, demanding in
return for Prince Matthew not only Ali Bey
Čengić but also the Ban’s daughter Pearl, the
girl Šaha from Livno, a dozen other, less
notable Muslim prisoners from Zadar’s donjon,
and a sum of five hundred ducats to pay for
a feast of celebration in Cetina. The Ban
accedes to all these exactions, and receives
his son Matthew home again mounted on a fine
black horse from the Babahmetović stables.
In this way Ali Bey Čengić regains his liberty
and brings home a second, exogamous bride to
live with him and his first, endogamic wife
in the Zagorje, while Omer and Zlata
consummate their marriage in Cetina. The
girl Šaha returns to her mother in Livno,
thereafter to choose for herself whom she
will wed.
Here again weddings and sieges of cities succeed
one another in a chain of cause and effect, and
only those who stand to gain a marriage by their
exertions can prevail against the beleaguered
walls. So Hasan Bey Čengić has no effect in
assailing Zadar despite his army of 6,000,
while Omer Bey, whose marriage depends upon
breaching the city’s defenses, does it easily
by cunning. Similarly the ancient Odysseus
alone could cunningly imagine a method for
breaching the walls of Troy, because of all
marriages his was most perfect and most
worthy to be consummated.
The Price of Foolhardy
Impetuosities
Zajim Ali Bey and Ali Bey Čengić both fall into
captivity because they attempt in broad daylight, singlehandedly, and by brute force to steal the
Ban of Zadar’s daughter as a second, exogamous
wife for themselves. The girl is willing, but
Ali Bey is reckless. Impetuous, devoid of
subtlety or strategem, and without seeking the
advice or help of his countrymen beforehand,
he fights frontally and alone against an
overwhelmingly numerous enemy, who despite his
initial heroic slaughter of them are still
plenteous enough to subdue and bind him. His
first, endogamous wife (Alibegovica) meanwhile
remains at home in the house where Ali Bey has
left her, ignorant both of her husband’s mishap
and of the mission that occasioned it; childless
too, and longing for a renewal of conjugal life
with him.
For a time, Ali silently endures a prison
that is meant to destroy him by privation; but
then one day he despairs and gives voice to a
hopeless misery. The devilish Ban of Zadar
hears his complaint, and because he is willing
to sell the man his freedom at the price of
embroiling Ali’s countrymen too in Ali’s
disaster, he gives the prisoner an audience.
During their conversation, Ali desires the Ban
either to release him for ransom, or else put
him to death quickly. Other epics tell of the
Ban’s agreement to kill Ali without delay, but
they end badly for the Ban, and so once again,
as though prescient of such alternative
dénouements, the Ban shuns that choice and
instead names a specific price for Ali’s
release.
In its cardinal articles his stipulation
consists however of property that is no longer
Ali Bey’s to give, since Ali has already (with
a generosity typical of the Shi‘ite Ali) given
it to someone else. Thus, Zlata Čengić, Ali
Bey’s sister and erstwhile ward, whom he might
formerly have bestowed upon whatever husband
he wished for her, has by the time the Ban of
Zadar demands her already been betrothed to
Omer Bey Babahmetović; and correspondingly,
the treasures formerly won by Žunić’s Zajim
Ali Bey as prizes of war have already been
donated by him to the Sultan in Istanbul.
Contingent upon these modulations in the details
of the ransom sought by the Ban of Zadar,
further modulations in the identity of the
ransom’s present rightful owner determine the
severity of the punishment ultimately inflicted
on the Ban by that owner. For the story pattern
in this group of epics specifies that when a
messenger from Zadar informs Alibegovica, Ali
Bey’s endogamous wife, of her husband’s plight,
she will in turn appeal to the rightful owner(s)
of the ransom property to secure her husband’s
release from his alien captor’s donjon. Those
owners—Hasan Čengić and Omer Bey Babahmetović
in Hörmann’s text, and the Imperial Sultan
himself in Žunić’s poem—subsequently constrain
the Ban of Zadar not only to release Ali Bey,
but also to pay a forfeit for disturbing them
in the tranquil enjoyment of property which
they have earlier received from Ali Bey.
By demanding that particular property, the Ban
of Zadar oversteps the ethical limits of
male warfare, and oppresses not only his
Muslim captive Ali Bey (as he has every
conventional right to do), but also Ali Bey’s
wife (which he has no right to do).
Accordingly, those same Muslim men who might
otherwise accept Ali Čengić’s captivity as
a natural, unexceptionable consequence of
Ali’s own concupiscence and impetuosity take
pity upon the injured innocence of his
wonderfully loyal wife, and punish the Ban
of Zadar for it: Omer Bey Babahmetović by an
extortionate ransom for Prince Matthew in
Hörmann’s text from Jajce, and the Sultan of
Istanbul by issuing a death warrant against
the Ban in Žunić’s epic.
Women of Spirit
Hörmann’s version of the story from Jajce
features an Alibegovica—Lady Ali Bey—with
strong family ties. She has a wealth of
consanguineous male kin, namely the ten
Babahmetović men of Cetina (Mahmut Agha
and his nine sons), who are strong enough
to champion her cause in securing her
uncircumspect husband’s release from
foreign bondage. Žunić makes his
equivalent character the daughter not of
Mahmut Agha Babahmetović but rather of
Bey Ljubović of Hercegovina. According
to prevalent legend about that famous
person, he too was a man of many sons,
who might through them have afforded his
daughter the same kind of assistance that
Mahmut Agha’s daughter enjoys in Hörmann’s
text from Jajce.
But Žunić makes his Alibegovica turn instead
to Mahmut Agha Babahmetović of Cetina, giving
no reason in her case why she might have
expected him to help her, since according to
Žunić he was no relative of hers in any way.
This particular episode, comprising vv. 764-929
of Žunić’s poem, seems to have been borrowed
from some other telling and infused into the
Žunić version by one of Murat’s precursors.
To be sure, Mahmut Agha’s assistance to
Žunić’s Alibegovica is limited to provision
of a second disguise for her, but even this
small boon is more than his counterpart in
Hörmann’s text will grant directly to Ali
Bey’s wife, even when she is his own
daughter.
Cetina, where the Babahmetović demesne lies,
happens to have been located precisely on the
old frontier between the Turkish and Habsburg
Empires, and so it is fitting that Ali’s wife
should have stopped there to obtain a disguise
on her way from Glasinac to Zadar. Cetina lay
moreover on the most direct route from
Glasinac to Zadar, and so it was the last
possible friendly resting place before the
lady had to cross the border into enemy
territory. Had she in Žunić’s version elected
instead to go to her own father’s estate, it
would have been necessary to narrate for her
a lengthy detour from Glasinac to Odžak in
Hercegovina to the south, and then northward
again from Odžak to Zadar.
Conceivably there was some such excursion in
the Žunić family’s tradition of this epic
before Murat Žunić’s time; but even if there
were, nothing essential was sacrificed in
substituting an interview at Cetina between
Lady Ali Bey and Mahmut Agha for one between
the elder Bey Ljubović’s reigning heir and
his daughter at Odžak, since the underlying
story pattern in this group of epics called
for the same result in any case. For
Alibegovica’s father, no matter who he was,
steadfastly shunned helping her directly
with the liberation of her husband, leaving
that task in every instance to interested
men of Ali Bey’s and Alibegovica’s own
generation.
So even if Žunić’s Alibegovica had gone to
Odžak, the senior Bey Ljubović himself would
certainly not have become her champion, if
for no other reason than that Žunić
understood him to have deceased before the
events of this epic even begin. Alibegovica’s
avoidance of Odžak thus spares Murat the
necessity of explaining either why her
famous brothers did not help her on this
occasion, or how specifically they
did help her (which would of course
have been inconsistent with the entire tenor
of Žunić’s story about Alibegovica’s singular
heroism and self-reliance in liberating her
husband).
So epics of this sort demonstrated that a
woman would surely find no remedy for the
disability of her husband in her father,
and they displayed a rich variety of ways
in which she and her interests could
alternatively enter into the character of
male contemporaries other than her husband
to make them the instruments of her purpose.
Marriage and disguise were prominent in the
catalogue of such avenues, but were not the
only ones.
For Lady Ali Bey in Hörmann’s text from
Jajce, the fortuitously timely marriage
of her sister-in-law provided avenue enough
into the character of Omer Bey Babahmetović,
and it made the disguise which he wore to
Zadar her disguise as well because, unlike
Ali Bey Čengić before him, Omer Bey
Babahmetović went to Zadar purely in the
character of Lady Ali Bey’s agent. Žunić’s
Alibegovica has however no such easily
co-optable male surrogate, and so must herself
don the likeness of a male not once but twice
over.
First, she disguises herself as a Bosnian
grandee visiting Istanbul in order to obtain
male surrogates at the court of the Sultan
who will liberate Zajim Ali Bey from Zadar
for her. Then, having accomplished that
infusion of her first purpose into their
male characters, she disguises herself in
masculine garb a second time in order to
achieve her second purpose, which is to
secure for her too blunt and blundering
husband the same second wife for which he
was willing if need be to sacrifice his
first marriage. The tradition in these
epics minced no words about the uses of
polygyny; a first, childless wife had no
hope of keeping her husband except to the
extent that she might be able to unite
him in her own home with a second mate
even more deftly than he himself could
do.
Thus the disguised lady’s policy is really
twofold: not only to liberate Ali from an
involuntary alien bondage, but also to bind
him in a willing domestic attachment to her
in the house where she has chosen to make
her home. When she herself must assume a
male character to accomplish her design,
she routinely dissembles her identity twice;
once in order to evade recognition by
Muslims in her homeland, and a second time
to conceal herself from infidels in the
alien land of her husband’s captivity.
In Hörmann’s poem, Ali Bey Čengić writes
about his ransom to his brother, Hasan Bey.
But when, like Žunić’s Zajim Ali Bey, the
prisoner has no such able male relative at
home to turn to, he writes instead to his
childless wife, absolving her of a fidelity
to him which he in his straitened
circumstances can only suppose will do him
no good and be ruinous to her should she
continue in it. He may tell her in his
message what the price of his ransom is,
but only in order to impress upon her the
impossibility of its ever being paid, and
so encourage her to seek her own happiness
without him.
Typically, she accepts his lifting of the
conventional restraints of marriage (which thus
becomes the license for her male disguises); but
instead of seeking her own fulfillment apart
from him as he has recommended, she uses her
peculiar new liberty to regain her own happiness
by restoring his. The modulations of this story
supplied her with many and ingenious ways of
accomplishing such a restoration.
One of Hörmann’s manuscripts
that he never published tells of a Muslim
prisoner’s wife more combative than either
Bey Ljubović’s or Mahmut Agha Babahmetović’s
daughter, a high-spirited woman who ultimately
made herself rather than some foreigner the
bride of her liberated husband’s second
marriage. Her husband was a certain Alija
Alagić. Riza-beg Kapetanović recorded the
text for Kosta Hörmann from an unknown singer
at an unknown date, apparently in the town of
Konjic. It is 864 verses in length, and the
story it tells begins with Ali Alagić already
in the Ban of Zadar’s dungeon, for reasons
that are never explained.
24.
Thirty prisoners have lain for twelve years
in the Ban of Zadar’s gaol. Two of them are
Ali(ja) Alagić and his sororal nephew,
Ancient Nukić. Seven hours after nightfall
on the day when twelve full years of their
captivity have elapsed, the thirty raise an
unceasing wail at the top of their voices.
Their prison is near the Queen of Zadar’s
apartment and the nursery of her twin
children.
Next morning, Queen Euphemia tells her husband
the Ban what she thinks of a palace built
overlooking a prison, and demands that he
either release his thirty Muslim captives or
execute them. To emphasize her determination
that he do this, she carries his and her two
infant sons to the palace window and stands
ready to cast them out to their deaths on the
pavement below. The Ban promises her that he
will remove Ali Alagić and Ali’s nephew
Ancient Nukić from the pit, and he sends
his George the Gaoler to convey them to his
audience chamber.
There the Ban specifies the price for Ali’s
ransom, demanding a thousand ducats, all Ali’s
panoply and war horse, and his wife Fatima,
daughter of Old Father Babahmed (Dedo
Babahmed). Ali replies that his family
in Otoka would never surrender the required
property, and he himself will not give up
Fatima to buy his own life or freedom.
Irritated by this reply, the Ban commands
George the Gaoler to reincarcerate Ali in
a worse dungeon, one where fenny water with
reeds growing in it stands to a prisoner’s
knees and snakes and scorpions sting.
Alagić’s nephew however, Ali Nukić, who is
both a lesser adversary of the Ban’s people
than Ali Alagić and undefiant towards the
Ban personally, wins better treatment from
him. The Ban offers Nukić a choice: either
to remain as a citizen in Zadar, or to
return to his former home on the Turkish
Border. Nukić chooses the latter, the Ban
releases him, and after three days’
recuperation in a Zadarian hostel, the
ancient sets out on a walking journey
homeward. On the way, he pauses at the
window of his uncle Ali Alagić’s dungeon
to receive from him a letter addressed to
Alagić’s old mother.
Nukić delivers Alagić’s message, and Dame
Alagić leaves her house with it to roam
about the town looking for someone to
read it to her, there being no male creature
of any kind remaining in her household except
Ali’s chestnut stallion. Ali’s wife observes
her mother-in-law’s distracted behaviour, and
goes to her to learn its cause. Told that a
letter has arrived from Ali, Fatima protests
to the old dame that far from having been a
mere shepherdess when she was a girl in the
house of her father, old Babahmed of Cetina,
she attended school during those years and
learned to read. So she reads Ali’s letter,
wherein he releases her from their marriage
and dowers her for a second husband. He
directs also that his brace of golden pistols
be given to the brothers Đulić, and his
military insignia to Mujo of Kladuša, so
that they may remember him.
Lady Alagić sends a servant, Husein, to
deliver the articles named in her husband’s
letter. But Husein finds neither household
in any mood to receive visitors or gifts.
The Đulić and Hrnjica brothers are all abed
with grave wounds from recent failed attempts
to liberate Ali. So Husein returns to Lady
Alagić, who this time sends him to her
father in Cetina with five hundred ducats
and a request to old Babahmed to use the
money for the hire of someone who can
liberate her husband for her.
Babahmed flies into a rage when Husein
tenders this message and money to him.
He demands to know what right his daughter
thinks she has to waste her husband’s
fortune, and sends Husein back to her in
Otoka with the news that he himself will
soon follow. He instructs his daughter
not to wait for his arrival, but to go
to the top of her house and leap off as
soon as Husein returns to her, since her
injuries from that fall will be less
painful than those her father will
inflict on her if he finds her still
at home when he arrives.
She resolves not to wait, and sends Husein
by night to fetch white-bearded old Joseph
(Jusuf) the Barber, who cuts her hair
according to the fashion current among
warriors. Then, by the light of the dawn
star, she disguises herself as a Magyar
officer and leaves her house, wondering as
she rides away on Ali’s magnificent chestnut
who the house’s next occupants will be.
The first day of her journey takes her as
far as her father’s house in Cetina. He
observes her as she approaches and
recognizes her by her mount. He sends
his guardsmen to welcome their supposedly
foreign visitor, who lodges in Babahmed’s
house for the night and resumes his
journey early next morning. As (s)he
recedes into the distance, Babahmed asks
his men whether any of them recognized
the foreigner during his stay. He is
relieved to hear that no one but himself
saw through Fatima’s excellent disguise,
because that fact bodes well for her
reception by the infidels in Zadar.
Nevertheless, he expects that she will
probably be killed and Ali’s horse
captured before she can succeed in her
difficult mission, and so he weeps
continuously as he watches his unfortunate
daughter make her way towards the frontier.
After a fearful passage through the upland
wilderness of no-man’s land, Fatima comes
to Zadar by night. The night watchman at
first refuses to admit her, but she claims
to be travelling on the business of a
vendetta against the city's enemies Mujo
and Halil Hrnjica, and so persuades him.
Once inside the city walls, Fatima has no
idea which way to turn; but her chestnut
mount, which has often passed this way
before under its master Alagić, takes the
bit in its teeth and conveys the lady to
an inn where Ali was wont to lodge.
The woman who keeps the inn is sitting at
dinner when Fatima arrives. Summoned to
the gate, the innkeeper rises from her meal,
civilly admits her late-arriving guest,
and instantly recognizes the chestnut horse.
As Ali Alagić’s fictive sister and his
frequent hostess in times past, she knows
the chestnut well. First she stables and
tends the horse, then conveys Fatima to a
chamber upstairs. There she settles
Fatima on a comfortable cushion and stands
in the doorway staring fixedly at her.
Fatima manfully sends her to fetch wine
and brandy, saying that she is nearly dead
with thirst from her arduous and
unsuccessful hunt for Mujo and Halil
Hrnjica. To bolster the manliness of her
demand for strong drink, Fatima swears as
obscenely as any good horsetrooper might.
But the innkeeper, manifestly undeceived,
only stares at her the harder and declares
that Fatima must either be a Turk in the
flesh, Turkish born, or at the very least
a near neighbour of Turks in their own
country. Fatima replies bravely that she
is neither a Turk nor Turkish born, but
admits to being their neighbour on the
Border. She claims that her mother was
an innkeeper whose inn was much frequented
by young Turkish braves, some one of whom
must have been her father.
By now the hostess has had enough of
Fatima’s lies, and draws forth from her
bosom a little album of portraits. From
among the pictures in it she quickly
picks out Fatima’s own. Confronted with
this proof, Babahmed’s daughter is forced
to admit who she really is, whereupon the
innkeeper embraces and kisses her like a
sister. She then warns Lady Alagić that
the chestnut horse is too easily
recognized in Zadar, and that she will
be killed and the horse captured by the
infidels if she and the horse are seen
together in public. So for one week
Lady Alagić lodges safely in the inn,
keeping the chestnut out of sight.
At week’s end, Fatima, who has visited
the Ban’s palace, informs the innkeeper
that she has learned of the Ban’s plan
to execute a sentence of death on Ali
Alagić next day by impalement. The place
of execution is to be the Church of Ružorić
outside the city’s walls. The mistress of
the inn advises Fatima to ride after
nightfall to the edge of the meadows
beneath the mountain. There the festive
crowd of witnesses to Ali’s execution must
pass with the condemned man next day on
their way to the Church of Ružorić. If
she is of an heroic stamp, says the
innkeeper, Fatima will be able from that
position of ambush to make a sally against
the infidel procession. Fatima follows
these directions, but prefixes to them
a precautionary action of her own
devising.
She goes by night to the church and demands
of the monks within that they admit her
despite their rule of not accepting
nocturnal visitors (just as she did with
the watchman at the city gate on the night
of her first arrival at Zadar). Her trick
to gain entrance is also the same now as
it was then. To the watchman’s fear of
being surprised by dangerous Turks she
counters with the information that she is
on a mission to punish Turks: in this case,
bringing instructions from the Ban of Zadar
about arrangements that he wants the monks
to make for the execution of Ali Alagić on
the morrow.
So for the second time a watchman is
persuaded to admit Fatima, although this
time with instantly fatal results for
himself and the other keepers of the
church: as soon as Fatima is inside the
gates, she slaughters all of them. Then
she secures the churchyard portal and
goes to her place of ambush. In this
way she inverts the Ban’s intentions:
where he intended to kill Muslims, she
kills infidels, and then locks him
out of the safety of the church
(which he will soon need in her
onslaught against him personally),
just as he has locked Ali Alagić and
his other Muslim captives in the
donjon of Zadar. Thus confinement inside
the Ban’s walls is ultimately no threat
to Ali’s life, while being free to move
about outside the Ban’s walls is deadly
to the Ban.
For as soon as the Ban’s procession appears
on the road to the Church of Ružorić,
Fatima attacks it and slashes the hempen
bonds of her Ali. Thus unbound, Ali takes
up the stake of cornel wood upon which the
infidels had meant to impale him, and using
it as a club, he fells every enemy within
reach. Fatima meanwhile gives chase to the
Ban himself, who has fled towards the refuge
of his walls at the first sign of trouble.
Mounted as she is on Ali’s wonderful
chestnut courser, she readily wins this
impromptu race, overtakes the man, and cuts
him in two with a single saber-stroke.
Then she turns and attacks the remaining
mass of the Ban’s soldiers.
Now from the mountainside overlooking these
events a troop of Turkish horse led there
by Fatima’s father spills down to join the
fight. During the resultant battle, Fatima
receives eleven body-wounds and withdraws
to the shade of a fir tree, where she
tethers the chestnut and lies down to
suffer. The other Turks defeat the
infidels and capture thirty Magyar maidens
(a number equal exactly to the number of
Turkish prisoners held by the Ban of Zadar).
After the battle, Old Father Babahmed goes
tearfully about the field examining corpses
in a search for his unfortunate daughter.
Finally he discovers her lying unconscious
in the meadow, but even then he can do
nothing for her himself. Instead he sends
the servant Husein to fetch Mujo Hrnjica
(one of Ali Alagić’s earlier would-be
rescuers, a coeval of Ali, whom Husein
found wounded nearly to death when he had
hoped to enlist him as a champion for
Fatima). So recently injured himself in
Ali’s cause, Mujo knows how to treat such
wounds as Fatima’s. He stuffs them with
fuse-tow and binds them tightly with a
zone, whereupon Babahmed’s daughter
regains consciousness. Then the Turks
mount her on Ali’s chestnut and take her
home to her own country. There, after
six months’ recuperation, Fatima
celebrates (re)marriage with her Ali
Alagić.
For Old Father Babahmed’s daughter in this
text from Konjic, for Zajim Ali Bey’s wife
in Žunić’s poem, and for Lady Ali Čengić’s
agent Omer Babahmetović in Hörmann LIX,
a good disguise is the sine qua non
of success.
Contrastingly, frontal attacks against alien
captors in which an attacker does nothing to
hide his or her own identity injure the
assailant at least as much as they do the
assailed. So Zajim Ali Bey fought openly
to gain the Ban of Zadar’s daughter Ruža,
but instead of winning marriage with her by
force of arms, he lost by his own captivity
the marriage that he already had with Bey
Ljubović’s daughter. Ali Bey Čengić’s
brother Hasan fought openly to rescue Ali
from captivity, but succeeded only in
decimating his own troops; whereas, by
virtue of a good disguise, Ali’s
brother-in-law accomplished the same task
singlehandedly and without any casualties.
Similarly, Ali Alagić’s wife in Hörmann’s
text from Konjic easily liberates her
husband by keeping her identity secret;
but when, after she has set him free, she
rashly assaults a mass of Zadarian soldiery
as its overt enemy, she is sorely wounded
and nearly loses the very thing she has
come to Zadar to achieve, namely her own
remarriage with Ali.
The disguises of militant wives are therefore
typically not only twofold, as has previously
been observed, but also twice tested: once by
their own people, and then again by aliens.
So Lady Zajim Ali Bey first gains an audience
with the Sultan in Istanbul by deceiving
Stambolis and Bosnians alike as to her
identity; then she deceives the Ban and his
men in order to penetrate the royal
household in Zadar and enable her husband
to marry from it. Omer Bey Babahmetović
similarly deceives the Ban of Zadar and
kidnaps the crown prince; then, when Omer
and his father meet at the foot of the
mountain, old Mahmut Agha himself cannot
recognize his son, even though he suspects
the unknown rider approaching him may have
something to do with the Babahmetović
family, since the horse on which he is
mounted seems like one from the stable at
Cetina that Omer was accustomed to ride.
Correspondingly, Old Father Babahmed’s
daughter lodges in the house of her
nativity overnight, and so good is her
disguise that she deceives every one of
its inmates except Babahmed himself;
and even he was able to detect his
daughter’s true identity only because
he recognized the chestnut courser of
his son-in-law, the horse on which his
disguised daughter presented herself
to him. Nor does anyone in Zadar
subsequently recognize Fatima except
the surprisingly friendly mistress of
the inn, who also knows the chestnut
stallion, and who warns Fatima to guard
the secret of her identity well by never
showing the horse to anyone else in
Zadar during daylight.
The Muslim liberator’s disguise is thus
admirably effective so long as no one notices
the horse, which is essential to its rider’s
success, but also a dangerous clue to its
rider’s real identity. Good as it is
however, the Muslim’s disguise in these
stories is still not so excellent as that
of another, alien character, in whom the
art of dissimulation is truly perfected.
Because this person really is an
alien, no outward sign of any sort about
him can alarm the captor whom he labors
to undo, or can threaten him with the same
captivity or death from which he would
liberate a Muslim friend.
Often there is both a male and a female
representative of this most superbly
disguised character, as in Žunić’s poem:
Nikola the water carrier, and the Ban of
Zadar’s own daughter Ruža. The two
innkeeping women of Hörmann’s comparable
poems from Jajce and from Konjic similarly
harbor and assist the Muslim liberators
whom they know very well to be Turks, but
whom they will not betray. Water
carriers, wine-pourers, and limininal
pariahs all, these most perfectly
disguised of all the captive Muslims’
sympathizers are habitually connected
with drinking and with drink. This
second, alien helper and purveyor of
liquids is particularly vital to the
militant disguised wife’s safe passage
in and out of her husband’s captor’s
stronghold.2
The songbook-compilers of the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries seem to have
been embarrassed by the tales of women
warriors in this tradition. Even when they
had multiple manuscripts of such poems on
hand, as Kosta Hörmann did, they published
none or disproportionately few of them.
Yet the number and variety of such epics
were quite extensive. Hörmann possessed
texts of at least three such poems,
although he published neither of the two
in which there was actually a transvestite
wife disguised with the coiffure, the
clothes, and the weapons of a man. The
second of Hörmann’s texts in which that
happened came from Sarajevo, but the name
of its maker and his amanuensis are both
unknown. Đenana Buturović has published
both this manuscript and the one from
Konjic as nos. 9 and 10 in her edition of
Narodne pjesme Muslimana u Bosni i
Hercegovini iz rukopisne ostavštine Koste
Hörmanna, Sarajevo, 1966.
The text from Sarajevo is
990 verses in length, and it modulates the
narrative found in other epics about armed
wives partly by assigning a different reason
for the husband’s imprisonment. Whereas
Hörmann’s text from Konjic gave no reason
whatever for it, nearly the first half of
the text from Sarajevo is occupied with a
circumstantial account of how Alija Alagić
fell into the hands of the Ban of Zadar.
It was not his bungled quest for a second,
exogamic bride that cost Ali his freedom
in this telling, but rather his mismanaged
acquisition of a first, endogamic bride...
25.
On the fourth anniversary of his
imprisonment in Zadar, a certain Mujo of
Gabela complains to his cellmates in the
Ban’s donjon that in the days before his
capture he had often sought out and
liberated other such unfortunates as he
now is; would that other Muslims were
presently so solicitous of his freedom
as formerly he was of theirs, says he.
From a far corner of the cell another
prisoner answers him, saying that the
four years’ misery of which Mujo
complains is as nothing compared with
the four-and-twenty years that the
speaker has lain unrescued in the same
prison. Both prisoners speak of
themselves as men whose very identities
have been erased by their long
captivities: Mujo of Gabela and Alija
Alagić were once upon a time so called
in their own land, but they hardly
think anyone remembers any longer to
speak their names at all, so abandoned
are they by their own people.
Ali says that he was a wealthy man
twenty-four years ago. He owned a
thousand prosperous serfs, a bridge on
the Drava River with five hundred
textile-producing workshops clustered
about it, and mills for finishing the
fabrics which they wove. In Kaniža city
he possessed also three great commercial
hotels, each with thirty depositories for
wares and thirty stokeholes in its basement.
Sustained by the income from these several
enterprises, he began to build himself a
mansion in Kaniža twenty storeys high, with
balconies, a copper roof, an elegant
courtyard, and a servants’ lodge.
Then he wanted a wife, and public opinion
in that era held Hankija (= Hanka), the
daughter of the Alaj Bey of Klis, in high
esteem as an eligible damoiselle. So Ali
dressed himself and his horse in a suitably
grand fashion and rode to the Alay Bey’s
mansion by way of Cetinje and the spring
thereof. He arrived in mid-afternoon, and
found Hankija assisting her father’s ablutions
before prayer. In this way Ali was able to
survey the girl before asking her father’s
permission to marry her.
Finishing his devotions, the Bey personally
stabled and tended Ali’s chestnut, then gave
its rider dinner and lodging for the night.
Next day Ali disclosed the reason for his
visit, and the Bey deferred to his daughter’s
and his wife’s wishes. They consented, and
their slave-woman Kumrija came to convey Ali
to the women’s apartment, presenting him a
pair of embroidered slippers to wear as he
entered the audience chamber of Hankija’s
mother.
After he had appropriately expressed his
respects to her, the lady suggested that she
ought to provide a host of escorts for his
wedding party when he returned to Klis to
claim his bride and convey her to Kaniža.
This was because a certain infidel Captain
Raven (Gavran kapetan) had already
thrice interfered with Hanka’s earlier
attempts to marry, intercepting her wedding
processions on Hare’s Field (Zečevo Polje)
and slaying her three former would-be
bridegrooms. Hanka herself had however been
mounted each time on a fleet horse, and so
escaped out of the fray home to the Spring at
Cetina.3
Ali however declared himself unintimidated
by such a history, and told her mother that
if Hankija were not indeed the kind of girl
(kavgali djevojka) who provoked such
rivalry, he himself would not be a suitor
to her.
Only then did he notice that his fiancée was
also present in the room, standing silently
in a corner, richly dressed, ornamented, and
veiled. He begged her to remove her wimple
in order that he might see what prize it was
for which he had just declared to her mother
that he was ready to risk his life. She
complied instantly, and inspired by the
vision of her beauty, Ali said his adieux,
then left the ladies’ chamber. A maid met
him in the courtyard with traditional
engagement gifts of linen. He reciprocated
with a largesse of specie, then departed
for Kaniža.
At home, Ali summoned up the requisite
company of well-armed bridesmen, and sent
them with his chestnut courser to fetch
Hanka to him while he remained in Kaniža.
They brought the girl to him without
incident, and he settled her in his
mansion. Then he returned to the
courtyard to tend the chestnut horse
that had carried the girl to him from
Klis.
But while he was about this business, a
letter carrier rushed into the yard to
announce that a raiding party of infidels
had just struck the house at the edge of
the plain, sacked and set fire to it, and
taken captive Ali’s maternal uncle, old
Numen Agha, amongst others. His own
chestnut courser being still fully
accoutred, Ali instantly mounted it and
rushed to the crest of Mount Velebit,
over which the infidel raiders had
already retreated with their booty.
There he discovered who they were: the
Ban of Zadar and Captain Raven, with
their respective cohorts. They had by
this time tied their male captives to
fir trees, and commanded their female
captives to perform a ring dance for
their amusement while they sat
drinking cool wine.
Alone and incompletely armed though he was,
Ali nevertheless made a singlehanded attack
on the marauders. But the exertion of
wielding his cutlass made his arm sore, and
his horse got into such a lather that he
had to withdraw and rest before he was able
to liberate any of the Muslim captives. He
realized that he might at this point
reasonably desist and save himself, but
pity drove him to a second futile attack,
and then a third.
At the third attempt, he was able to slay
Captain Raven and cut the Muslim men free
from the fir trees. But while he was
herding his own people homeward and fighting
off the residue of the enemy, the Ban of
Zadar instructed his men to forego their
useless shooting at Ali and tumble stones
and baulks of wood at him instead. By
these means they succeeded in unhorsing
and binding him. While Ali’s chestnut
made its way back to the stable in Kaniža,
the Ban conveyed Ali to his donjon in Zadar.
There each spring for twenty-four years a
band of Magyar maidens has thrown nosegays
into the pit of his bondage to apprise him
of the season, and come to apostrophize
him again at the onset of each winter.
Depressed beyond further endurance by
his own story, Ali wails in the donjon
cell for an entire week, demanding that
the Ban transport, execute, or ransom
him, since the iron fetter about his
neck has at last worn its way through
his flesh and rests now upon bare bone.
Unable to sleep because of Ali’s
perpetual outcry, the Ban’s consort
prevails upon her husband to stop the
noise, and he sends George the Gaoler
to conduct Ali to an audience. There
the Ban proposes a ransom consisting
of a thousand ducats, the chestnut
horse, Ali’s damascene sword, and
Hankija. Ali agrees to surrender all
but Hankija. Angered by this refusal,
the Ban commands that Ali be taken to
the public square and that a great
stone weighing two hundred and eighty
pounds be fixed about his neck to
replace the present fetter of iron.
Then Ali is to be returned to the
dungeon pit, and a steady stream of
water is to be directed in upon him
through the bars.
This new torment persists for a week, after
which Ali again raises his wail of protest,
and the Ban again imposes the same ransom
that he had stipulated at their first
audience. This time Ali accepts the whole
of it, telling his tormentor to write
announcing this fact to Ali’s people on the
Turkish Border. But the Ban objects, saying
that no one on the Border would be able to
read his scription, and he urges Ali himself
to write the letter in a manner that will be
understood by Muslims. This Ali does,
distorting the message however in the way a
knowledgeable listener would expect: rather
than stating the specific terms of his ransom,
he instructs his old mother to sell his civil
property for the funds necessary to sustain
her in her old age, and to deliver his
military possessions to Halil Hrnjica and to
Talâ of the Lika.
Conveying this message to Kaniža, the Ban’s
letter carrier finds Hankija and Ali’s
mother at home, but with no male person of
quality in their household. Emphasizing
the inadmissability of males, Hankija
threatens to shoot the letter carrier
dead if he attempts to pass her courtyard
gate.4
She receives and reads Ali’s letter to her
mother-in-law, then summons the servant
Husein. To him she entrusts a purse of a
thousand ducats, with instructions to ride
round the forty cities of the Border and
pay the purse to any man who will undertake
the liberation of Ali from Zadar. A month
later, Husein returns the purse to Hanka
intact, having found no one to accept the
commission.
So Hankija sends Husein to fetch the barber
Omer, who shortens her hair and plaits it
into thirty braids with Christian crosses
and clasps entwined in them, in the style
presently fashionable amongst
generals-of-the-sea. Thus coiffed, she
dresses herself in a disguise to match, and
rides away towards Zadar on Ali’s chestnut.
The barber meanwhile goes to the men’s
clubhouse and tells the assemblage there
that, having found no one in all the land
who is man enough to act on her behalf,
Hankija has gone to reckon with the Ban
herself. Shamed by this turn of events,
the men disperse to gather their henchmen
and follow her to Zadar in force.
Hanka finds forty-four of Zadar’s
highest-ranking military officers gathered
with their troops under tents beneath the
city walls. They have camped in the field
outside the city to await the Muslim
bearers of Ali’s ransom. Pretending to
outrank all of them as General Duke, Hanka
is deferentially received by the Ban and
his men and given lodging for the night.
Next morning, the Muslims who have followed
Hanka to Zadar troop down from the eastern
mountains onto the far apron of the plain.
Observing them through a spyglass, the Ban
remarks that they have not brought any women
with them, and he says that he accordingly
will not surrender Ali Alagić to them this
day. Hankija, alias General Duke, asks him
what woman the Ban had expected them to
bring, and when he tells her that Ali’s
wife Hanka is a principal article of Ali’s
ransom, she draws Ali’s pistols (which she
has worn to Zadar as part of her disguise),
and shoots the Ban dead where he stands.
The Muslims take the report of Hanka’s
pistols as a signal for their attack, and
they join battle with the infidels on the
field before Zadar for two hours. Hanka
meanwhile makes her way to the city gate
and seizes control of it so that the
citizenry of Zadar will not be able to bar
entry to her countrymen. When they reach
the gate, she enters the city with them,
gives her chestnut mount its head, and
rides forward on it until it delivers her
to the Ban’s palace.
The Ban’s daughter
Rose hails her from one of the palace
windows and invites her to come in.
When she complies, Rose takes her by
the hand and leads her (still
masquerading as General Duke) to a room
upstairs where she sets wine and brandy
before her ‘handsome’ guest. Hanka
declines to drink any of it however,
protesting now, as earlier she did in the
same situation with the Ban, that she
once shed blood while under the influence
of strong drink, was reproached for it by
Mujo Hrnjica, and so has foresworn strong
drink ever
since.5
Smitten with attraction to the handsome man
before her, Rose offers herself to General
Duke. ‘He’ promises Rose that although he
will not himself take her to wife, he will
make a present of her to one of the Muslim
men who is more fit to be her husband. At
just this moment the inveterate ladies’ man
Halil Hrnjica appears beneath the palace
window, and ‘General Duke’ summons him to
dally with Rose and drink her wine and
brandy.
Having brought the two together and seeing
them content with each other, Hankija
instructs Rose to fetch the keys to the
dungeon and release all the Muslim
prisoners, and to provide each of them
with a mount and panoply. A hundred
prisoners emerge from each of the first
two pits of the dungeon when Rose unlocks
them, and Alija Alagić issues from the
reedy, snake- and scorpion-infested water
that is stagnated at the bottom of the
third pit. Rose arms and puts a mount
under each man.
Then all the Muslims depart together for
the frontier, where Mujo Hrnjica halts the
march and distributes the booty from the
sack of Zadar fairly to all. Ali Alagić
however asks Mujo to excuse him from his
share in the spoils, and to let him go
straight home to Kaniža just as he is,
mounted on the late Ban’s bedouin mare.
Mujo consents, and Ali sets out alone
for home. Hankija soon overtakes him
however, still dressed as the Magyar
general, and still mounted on Ali’s own
chestnut. Ali cannot recognize the
rider, but knows the horse, and asks the
suppositious Magyar how he came by it.
Only now does Hanka reveal her identity
to him, whereupon Ali rides off at the
gallop, back to Mujo and the other
Muslims, to invite all of them to attend
a celebration of his (re)marriage in
Kaniža.
Like Zajim Ali Bey’s warrior-wife in
Žunić’s poem, Hankija slays the Ban, a
feat none of her male compatriots is able
to perform. She accomplishes this by
first beguiling the Ban and his men into
acceptance of her as their ally and guest,
and after the Ban has proposed an act of
sexual congress with the lady in violation
of her religion and her loyalty to a
previous marriage. In Žunić’s narrative,
the Ban correspondingly sends Alibegovica
to be gratified alone with the Ban’s
daughter Rose in Rose’s private chamber
in every way that ‘he’ may desire; while
in Hörmann’s two texts from Konjic and
Sarajevo, the Ban names Ali’s wife as
part of Ali’s ransom, intending to make
her his concubine, although he already
has a proper wife of his own religion in
his palace at Zadar.
Judith by Another Name
The Ban’s sudden death on his own territory
at the hands of the militant woman whom he
has so fatally misjudged initiates a general
rout of his people by hers, who are
assembled and led to victory in a pitched
battle by their established but heretofore
unsuccessful male military leader. Out of
this victory comes not only liberation for
her people, but also their memorable
enrichment by the plunder they take from
their erstwhile oppressors. Thus, by first
risking her marital honour, and then
murderously preserving it and the religion
on which it is grounded, the lady not only
saves herself and her marriage, but also
liberates the other members of her people
whom the Ban has immured and tormented until
the time when she intervenes. In this way,
the present group of modulations in the
South Slavic epos has replicated and
perpetuated the same pattern of story found
in the narrative about Judith, Manasseh,
Holofernes, Uzziah, and the mountain-dwelling
people of Bethulia in the Hebrew Old Testament.
An essential element in the pattern of story
shared by the biblical Judith and Ali’s wife
is accordingly the other prisoner or group
of prisoners who, although not so long captive
nor so severely abused in their captivity as
Ali or Manasseh, nevertheless benefits even
more than Ali or Manasseh does from the
warrior-wife’s intervention. Thus, Mujo of
Gabela in Hörmann’s manuscript from Sarajevo
has no such remarkable wife as does Alagić,
and so is dependent on the courageous spouse
of the more miserable Ali for his own
salvation coincidentally with Ali’s.
Remarkable loyalty to her husband [even
though he is dead, or as good as dead],
guile, and pluck in dealing with the local
commander of her people’s infidel enemy,
are common characteristics of the South
Slavic Alibegovica and the biblical Judith.
But in the South Slavic epics Lady Ali Bey
has an additional asset denied to Judith.
This is her husband’s wonderful horse,
which habitually escapes capture when its
master is taken prisoner, returns
faithfully to its accustomed stable, and
later acts as a unique pathfinder for
his guileful wife. Without its peculiar
knowledge of the way to Ali’s hidden
location in enemy territory, his wife
would have no means (as Judith did not)
of finding him, or of joining forces with
his most deeply disguised, foreign
sympathizer(s) in the alien land of his
captivity. Other South Slavic epics tell
of horses that are captured and of their
masters left at liberty to find and
rescue them; in either modulation, the
cooperation of man and animal in saving
each other from perdition in a far land
is an element of this tradition
conspicuously at one with the actions
of men and horses on behalf of one
another in Central Asian Turkic epos.
Baulks of Wood and
Big Stones
The occasion of Alija Alagić’s imprisonment
in Hörmann’s manuscript from Sarajevo is
an impetuosity of the same kind as Zajim
Ali Bey’s in Žunić’s poem: both assail the
Ban of Zadar’s troops alone three times,
succeeding twice, but themselves overcome
the third time. The poet of Hörmann’s
manuscript used a pregnant little formula,
drvlje i kamenje ([baulks of] wood
and [big] stones) to express the
underlying reason for their failure.
Zajim Ali Bey and Alija Alagić alike
mount their attacks on enemy soil without
first propitiating other powerful persons
who have an interest at stake in their
attacks; the epic tradition habitually
provided for the hurling of wood and
stones at such rash, defectively allied
attackers.
So in Avdo Međedović’s tale about
Alija
Vlahinjić
(v. 2543 seqq.), the Korava River tumbles
boles of wood and boulders at a hero who has
undertaken a singlehanded attack on a mass
of aliens without the cooperation of his
compatriots, and the river thereby sweeps
him off his feet. Without beforehand
securing the goodwill of Xanthos (either
the horse or the river god), Achilles in
the Iliad (21:311-14) also
single-handedly attacked a multitude of
Trojans in the waters of the Skamandros
River, which called its brother stream,
the Simoeis, to join in sweeping the
assailant off his feet with a resounding
tumble of boles and boulders:
...ἐμπίπληθι ῥέεθρα
ὕδατος ἐκ πηγέων πάντας δ’ ὀρόθυνον ἐναύλους,
ἵστη δ μέγα κῦμα, πολὺν δ’ ὀρυμαγδὸν ὄρινε
φιτρῶν καὶ λάων, ἵνα παύσομεν ἄγριον ἄνδρα
...engorge thy streams
with water from the springs, scrub all the gullies
of thy course,
cast up a great wave, and raise a voluminous din
of boles and boulders, so that we may halt the
uncouth man.
Without the goodwill and help of his fellow
Muslims, Ali Alagić is correspondingly also
battered down and subdued by a tumble of wood
and
stones.6
Emulation of the Sexes
In Ibro Topić’s epic no.
32,
the protagonist observes that he must accept
Marko Puškarić’s challenge to a duel on neutral
ground, because if he does not, Marko will
surely pursue their quarrel to the protagonist’s
own door in Turkish Kaniža itself, where he will
do much injury to innocent Muslims. So he
himself travels with the company of his bride’s
escort rather than wait at home for them to
deliver his bride to him.
When singers mooted such alternatives as this,
it was because the tradition entertained
modulations of a present narrative in which
those other possibilities were realized.
So in Hörmann’s text of the Alija Alagić story
from Sarajevo, Alija stays at home in Kaniža
waiting for his bridesmen to deliver the girl
from Klis to him. But the girl’s habitual
tormentor, Captain Raven, carries his dispute
with Ali as her would-be bridegroom into
Ali’s own country, where he inflicts much
injury on innocent Muslims. Without the
organized assistance of his bridesmen, who
have already discharged their duty to him
as escorts for his bride between Klis and
Kaniža, Ali must go alone to confront
Captain Raven’s booty-laden raiding party
on the far slope of Mount Velebit. The
immediate reason for Ali’s capture by the
Ban of Zadar is thus his rashness in
attempting by himself to save his unfortunate
countrymen; but underneath that obvious cause
lies a more basic one in Ali’s bungled
management of his new bride’s transportation
from Klis to Kaniža, which he ought to have
accompanied and defended in person together
with the supporting band of his bridesmen.
So ultimately Hörmann’s Ali Alagić in the
text from Sarajevo and Žunić’s Zajim Ali Bey
both come to grief for the same reason: neither
of them fought for and won his bride in the
field with the support of his countrymen
against an alien claimant; and that claimant,
catching him alone, takes him captive.
From
this captivity no one can liberate him except
another, former bride: either a second bride
who is literally another person (endogamic and
heroically strong-minded) distinct from the
bride (exogamic and girlishly alluring) whom
Ali failed to win in the prescribed fashion;
or else a later phase of the same bride
(endogamic, formerly an alluring girl but now
heroically strong-minded) in whom twenty-four
years later the bloom of girlish youth has
been replaced with a fortitude greater than
any man’s. A stock formula in the tradition
defined the finest flower of heroic young
manhood as ljepši od svake djevojke
(handsomer than any girl). Between these
two paradoxical extremes of male and female
perfection, the tradition thus discovered a
common humanity, wherein the best of heroic
manhood had a physique more excellent to
look upon than any woman’s, and the most
admirable of women had a mind more resolute
and more cunning than any man’s.
Of the two virtues therefore, the warlike
and the ravissant, the present group
of epics treasures the former and discounts
the latter; the stories display a lively
trade in females who are merely pretty,
while for the man who can rightly call her
his own, no price—not even a permanent loss
of liberty or death—is too great for him
to pay in order that he may keep his
singular warrior-wife.
So the Ban of Zadar in Žunić’s epic trades
his dewy daughter Rose’s virtue for his own
political survival as a satrap of the Kaiser
in Vienna; Omer Agha Babahmetović
unhesitatingly sells the pretty Muslim slave
girl Šaha to the Ban of Novi for a hundred
ducats rather than betray himself as an
agent of the two more valuable, militant
women in Cetina and the Zagorje; and the
famous voluptuary Halil Hrnjica gets the
liquid-dispensing Rose, daughter of Zadar’s
king, who in Hörmann’s poem from Sarajevo
is casually traded away as mere surplus by
the warrior-wife herself in exchange for
male assistance in the liberation of her
Ali.
A Cascade of Prestations
The pretty girl ceded to Halil is not only
an expendable sex-object; she is also a
modulation upon the other gifts which Ali
and his strong first wife make, or attempt
to make, to various powerful Muslims in
the other epics of this group. Zaim Ali
Bey’s several gifts to the Sultan before
his capture, Ali Alagić’s instructions to
his wife after he is captured to donate
his golden pistols to the Đul(ag)ić
brothers, and Hankija’s gift of Rose to
Halil after she has liberated Ali, are
all pledges made to male contemporaries
and countrymen of the prisoner whose help
is needed by his warrior-wife in liberating
him. But the man who makes no such pledges,
should he be taken captive, will be as
helpless in his captivity as is the man
with no warlike wife. Forms of the Alija
Alagić epic that told more about Ali’s
fellow prisoners than Žunić or Hörmann’s
singers did dwelt particularly on the
helplessness of such men.
Such, for example, was the epic sung for
Milman Parry twice by Ibro Bašić in the town
of Stolac in the summer of 1934 and the
following winter, 1935. Ibro Bašić was
a native of Vranjevići, a village in the
vicinity of Mostar, and he had learned his
song there in the late 1870s. It came to
him therefore out of the same region—Sarajevo
and the Neretva Valley—that produced Hörmann’s
two manuscripts about Alagić Alija. Parry
recorded the song from Bašić twice by
phonograph, and then again a third time by
dictation, in order to study the textual
discrepancies in a typical singer’s repeated
tellings of one and the same tale.
Composing for the American collector in what
he said was his sixty-eighth year of life,
Bašić correctly evaluated himself as an
ordinary singer of no special excellence; he
accordingly took few liberties—was not,
indeed, able to take much liberty—with the
content of his thrice repeated epic, and so
he did not considerably elaborate parts of
it from one telling to another as a more
skillful singer could have done.
Bašić’s three poems still did nevertheless
diverge one from another in some details of
their common narrative, occasionally even
contradicting one another. All three texts
tell the now familiar tale of how Ali
Alagić’s wedding was interrupted by his
term of imprisonment in the infidel’s
donjon; but they inserted additionally into
the Alagić story a lengthy framed tale,
namely an excursus about a fellow-prisoner
with Ali in the Ban’s gaol, one Selim
Velagić.
This inserted narrative makes Ali Alagić a
feckless would-be male rescuer of Selim
Velagić, an ineffectual liberator of the
same kind as Hasan Čengić was with respect
to his captive brother Ali Čengić in
Hörmann’s poem no.
LIX.
And so, correspondingly, in place of the
blood-brotherhood of Hasan and Ali Čengić,
Bašić’s story presents a fictive,
‘sworn-brotherhood’ (pobratimstvo)
between Ali Alagić and Selim Velagić. But
whereas Alagić has a warlike wife and makes
highly symbolic pledges and gifts to his
countrymen, Velagić has a wife who is only
pretty, and he makes prestations only to
his enemies.
The contrast between the two men is a study
in how different characters produce different
destinies, and it further illuminates how,
as in Žunić’s epic, Ali captivus is
able through his warrior-wife and his
calculated donations to make his own
captivity together with that of his less
capable fellow-prisoners a captation also
for such of his countrymen as are still
free, enjoying liberty comfortably at home
in their own land. Thus does the soterial
character of Islam’s aboriginal Ali persist
also in the character of his later namesakes
in the present group of South Slavic epics.
Here is a saviour with soterial talents
sufficient to save not only his
co-religionists but also himself
from perdition at the hands of an alien
captor—and one able to do so, moreover,
without any estrangement between him and
them, or any retreat on his part out of
the same troubled world in which they all
struggle alike to survive.
The longest of Bašić’s texts
is song no. 6597 in the Parry
Collection, which numbers 1,622 verses; the
other, earlier sung text was no. 291b,
with 1,358 verses. The manuscript of the
dictated text is 1,363 verses in length,
and it is no. 1283 in the registry of the
Collection. In synopsizing, I follow the
fullest of the three texts, no. 6597,
with specification of the divergences in
291b and 1283 where they occur.
26-28.
The Ban celebrates with a salvo of cannon
in Zadar because he has captured a great
prize, Alija Alagić of Udbina, and dumped
him down the stone steps of his dungeon
into the bottom of a shaft that is more
than two hundred feet deep and only eight
feet wide. There water stands to the
height of a prisoner’s knees, with
biting serpents and stinging scorpions
teeming in it. As his vision adjusts
to the darkness of the pit, Ali becomes
aware of an apparition on the wall of
the prison cell with hair grown down
past its waist, clothed only in a cape,
and with fingernails like the talons
of a wingèd horse.
Terrified, Ali asks the ghastly form
whether it is daemonic, spectral, or
perchance just another prisoner long
resident in this dreadful place. It
reassures him that despite its appearance
it is human: it is Selim Velagić, tenant
of this dungeon wall for lo these twelve
years past, who detects the turning of
the seasons only by the advent above his
pit each spring of a band of Magyar
maidens who cast nosegays down the shaft
to him (and snowballs each winter,
according to 291b).
Selim is clamped vertically to the wall
of the donjon, with a shackle of steel
round his neck and chains running from
it to fixtures in the four corners of
the cell. Ali tells him that throughout
the twelve years of Selim’s captivity he
has visited every pagan city and town
searching for him, but heard nothing of
him anywhere. Selim replies that for
as long as he has supposed Ali was
free, hope has never failed in him that
he would someday be rescued; but now,
with Ali captive too, he despairs of
ever seeing the light of day again.
Then Selim asks Ali a series of questions
to establish whether it might matter any
longer to anyone whether Selim is dead or
alive. He asks Ali about their homeland,
the city of Udbina and its people. Is the
men’s clubhouse still in its wonted place
at the city gate? Do the Thirty Peers
still gather there, and does the Dizdar
of Udbina still preside as they pass the
great common cup from man to man? And
when they have all drunk from it, do
they fall to boasting, and do they still
mention Selim Velagić? Are their
mansions still standing where formerly
they stood, and still white against the
sky [i.e., still unblackened by the fires
which raiders would have set had they
broken into the town]? Does Velagić’s
own house still stand, and is his mother
still living in it? Has Selim’s wife yet
remarried, and is his horse still in its
accustomed stall in the stable?
Alagić affirms that all things are still
as formerly they were in the public sphere
of life in Udbina; but Selim’s own house
is overgrown with vines, his mother has
grown grey with worry over who will supply
her daily crust of bread, and his wife is
about to sell Selim’s horse and marry Halil
Hrnjica. Velagić weeps to hear these evil
tidings, but Alagić offers to comfort him
with the story of his own misfortune,
which he says will make even Selim forget
his troubles.
Alagić’s disaster began when he betrothed
Fatima, daughter of the ninety-year-old
Mumin Agha. When the customary period of
engagement had elapsed and Ali had gathered
his five hundred bridesmen, he sent them
with his chestnut horse to bring him his
bride. They accomplished their mission
without incident, and after settling the
girl in the keeping of his mother upstairs
in the women’s quarters of his house, Ali
was about to unsaddle and stable the
chestnut horse, when a letter carrier
whose clothes had all been burned away
by gunfire rode through the gate into his
courtyard.
The courier bore an urgent letter to Ali
from Mustay Bey of the Lika. Mustay Bey’s
castle was under siege by
General-Peter-from-The-Sea, and in his
letter Mustay Bey, who had heard of Ali’s
wedding band of five hundred men, begged
Alagić to bring them forthwith to relieve
the beleagured castle. The courier
having departed again as suddenly as he
came, and Alagić having read Mustay Bey’s
message, he spoke to himself aloud as
though he were addressing the imperiled
castellan: “No, by my faith, Bey, I
shan’t do it. Today’s my wedding day!”
But all the while, Ali’s bride Fatima had
been observing the scene in the courtyard
from her window on the upper storey. From
the courier’s appearance and Ali’s petulant
remark, she easily deduced the content of
the letter and spoke to Ali, telling him
that she had heard him much praised in her
father’s house as one so quick in battle
that the enemy’s bullets could not overtake
him or his mount. If he were truly a man,
said she, he would go forthwith to the
relief of the Bey, and take his five
hundred bridesmen with him as the Bey had
asked. Alagić tells Selim that he was
still of no mind to do it, but Fatima
shamed him into it, and so he tightened
again the very girth straps which he had
just loosened, mounted, and made for the
bridesmen’s campsite outside his courtyard
wall.
Telling them of the Bey’s plight, he found
them loath to risk their borrowed finery
and their lives in such unexpected warfare,
and so he rode off alone through the city
gate and across the plain, going alone to
the aid of Mustay Bey. But midway over
the level ground outside the city, Ali
felt the ground tremble with the beat of
many horses’ hooves: having had second
thoughts, his bridesmen came to join him
in his mission to relieve the beleaguered
Bey.
They travelled all day to the Lika, where
they found General Peter closely investing
Mustay Bey’s castle. Ali marshalled his
bridesmen for a cavalry attack, then
charged with them into the thick of the
enemy. He was able to beat the infidels
back from the walls (as he circled the
castle on horseback according to
291b), because as long as he kept
the saddle he was able to move too quickly
to be hit by the enemy’s firearms. But
one of their number advised General Peter
to command his men to cease firing and
instead tumble baulks and boulders at
Alagić in order perchance to unhorse him.
This tactic succeeded, and while his horse
escaped to its stable in Udbina, Ali
continued to run around the castle on
foot, defending himself as best he could
with his sword.
He hoped that Mustay Bey might open the
castle’s portal and admit him to sanctuary
within, but the press of infidels about
Ali was so great that the Bey dared not
unbar the gate for fear they would enter
with Ali, and so destroy not only Ali
but all the others too who were sheltered
within the walls. So the unbelievers in
the strength of their numbers had isolated
and overwhelmed Ali, especially the seven
brothers Zakarić and the nine brothers
Cmiljanić. Here he is consequently,
united with Selim in the depths of the
Ban’s donjon. The thought that he has
left a new bride at home in a still
unconsummated marriage torments Ali
most of all.
The two Turks suppose that their
conversation is overheard by no one,
but the Ban has been eavesdropping,
and he now opens the trapdoor at the
mouth of the pit to address Ali Alagić.
He first compliments Ali, saying that he
esteems him as a hero without equal.
Then he proposes a ransom-price that
would not only buy Ali his freedom and
consummate Ali’s interrupted union with
Fatima, but also establish a lasting
familial alliance between Ali and the
Ban. The Ban wants Ali to give him,
namely, a hundred ducats, Ali’s fancy
clothes, Ali’s own sword (the
trophy-saber which the Sultan himself
gave Ali), the chestnut horse, and Ali’s
sister Ajkuna to be the Ban’s wife.
Alagić refuses to surrender his sword or
Ajkuna, and his refusal infuriates the Ban,
who raises a second trapdoor in the bottom
of the two-hundred-foot shaft where Alagić
and Velagić presently are, and drops Ali
into a still lower cell, one that lies
another two hundred feet below the first.
There the Ban causes Ali to be
spread-eagled face down, with chains
running from each of his limbs to
attachments in each corner of the chamber,
and a stream of water is channeled to fall
continuously from above onto Alagić’s back.
The Ban informs Ali that as retribution for
his defiance, Ali is to lie thus for a year
unvisited by anyone, until, at the end of
that time, the Ban himself will descend
into the pit, gather up Ali’s bare bones,
have them pounded to dust in a mortar, mix
the dust with gunpowder, and fire it from
a cannon so that no progeny may ever issue
from so unsubmissive an enemy. Then the
Ban goes away into his castle, leaving
Alagić to ponder the paradoxical cause
of his evident perdition. For Ali’s
refusal, although he owns numerous coveted
goods, to make prestations involving either
his kin or his militant religion to an
infidel who has asked to live in friendship
with him precipitates the bitterest
imaginable degree of enmity between them,
and plunges Alagić into an absolute
isolation and sterility among aliens that
is completely antithetical to the marriage
with its fertile social ties and its
natural expectation of progeny among his
own people in his own land which had been
Ali’s original ambition.
Contrarily therefore to what any newly
married man might reasonably have hoped
for, Ali’s marriage has not brought him
a multitude of new social allies whom he
might call upon for help in time of
personal trouble, nor a steady increase
of life and perpetuity; against all
reasonable expectation, it has only
brought him utter solitude, a steady
waning of life, and a prospect of
ineluctable termination.
That night a prisoner wails so atrociously
in the bowels of the dungeon that all Zadar
is disturbed by the sound, and in the palace
the Ban’s infant son Marijan, who is a babe
still at its mother’s breast, is so
terrified that he refuses to nurse. His
mother tries all night to humor the child
with sugar and honey, but to no avail.
She goes to her husband the Ban next morning,
asks him what peculiar kind of prisoner he
has taken captive that would make such a
fearsome noise, and threatens to throw baby
Marijan out the window unless the Ban kills,
sells, or returns the offending prisoner to
his own land; the Ban is, she tells her
husband irritably, too old a man to have
any hope of begetting another son if he
ignores her demand and she destroys
Marijan.
So the Ban enters the pit and asks the
prisoner Velagić whether he is the one who
has wailed all night; he says he is.
(In 291b, Velagić here addresses
the Ban as Janokliću Bane, and in that text
Bašić continued to call him Ban of Janok
rather than Ban of Zadar from this point
onward.) Velagić tells the Ban that
although the donjon is dreadful, it is not
any physical privation that has made him
howl, but rather a social one. He wants
to see his mother and his wife again.
(In 1283, a further reason is adduced:
Selim explains to the Ban that his wife
is about to remarry and give his horse to
her new husband. In the same text, Alagić
has however informed Selim only that the
horse is to be sold, without any suggestion
that the wife’s second husband would get
possession of it.)
Velagić asks the Ban for a furlough from
confinement of a month’s duration so that
he may go home and put his family affairs
in order. He promises to return to the
Ban’s prison voluntarily at month’s end.
As a guarantee that he will in fact
re-enter the dungeon at the appointed
time, Velagić pledges to his captor the
only thing that he still possesses in
person after all these years of
incarceration: his religious faith. The
Ban accepts this gage and releases Selim,
but with a steel shackle still afixed about
his neck as a badge denoting that he is the
Ban’s property.
Selim goes from the dungeon to a wine stoop
in Zadar for a draught of wine before
beginning his journey on foot to Udbina.
(According to 291b, Velagić has no
clothing when he leaves Zadar except a cape,
i.e., a bugar kabanica. The
shoulders of the cape are overgrown with
moss in which venomous serpents wriggle
about.) Long unaccustomed to walking,
Selim finds the journey across three
mountain ranges to Udbina difficult, and
he stops to rest on the eastern slope of
the third cordillera, Jadija Planina—Mount
Lamentation. From that vantage he is able
to survey Udbina, and sees that it is as
Alagić described it to him, with one
difference. A wedding band has pitched
camp on the ground outside the wall of
Selim’s unkempt mansion. Mustay Bey of
the Lika and Mujo Hrnjica are the leaders
of the wedding party, and the bridegroom,
Halil Hrnjica, conducting himself
differently than Ali Alagić did in
similar circumstance, is present as a
member of his own wedding escort.
Having comprehended the scene from a
distance, Selim descends into it,
presenting himself to Mustay Bey as an
itinerant beggar who is collecting alms
to pay ransom to a pagan prince. Mustay
Bey asks the beggar who he is, but Selim
evades the question by averring that he
is a man whose identity is meaningless,
since he has no living relatives nor any
property anywhere. Then the Bey asks
whether during his confinement and
subsequent begging he has ever heard
anything about Selim Velagić. He
replies that he has not, and then Mustay
Bey together with all his entourage give
alms to Selim one by one. No member of
the wedding party recognizes him.
The bridegroom, Halil Hrnjica, and the
other, younger men of the company are
meanwhile disporting themselves in
athletic contests: standing broad jumps
and stoneshot putting. Halil surpasses
all his bridesmen in these, but Selim
asks permission to join the games, and
when permission is given, he defeats
Halil.
Then he proposes to Halil that the two of
them race from the city gate to Velagić’s
house, and he assays cunningly to disarm
Halil by offering a wager on the race:
Halil’s breastplates against the hundred
ducats of ransom money Selim has collected
by begging in the bridesmen’s camp. (In
text no. 1283, Selim urges Halil to mount
his famous roan and ride horseback in the
race while Selim runs on foot. Halil
dismisses this challenge of horse against
footman as an arrogant insult, and tells
Velagić to begone lest he kill him.) With
or without competitors, Selim wins the race,
but instead of stopping at the courtyard
gate he enters the courtyard, where he
encounters his wife.
She is frightened by Selim’s appearance
and runs indoors. He begs alms from her,
as earlier he did from Mustay Bey and the
other men of the wedding party. She
makes a generous donation to him, then
asks where he has been gaoled. When he
declares that it was in Zadar, she asks
him whether from his experience in
prison he has come into possession of
any knowledge about her husband, Selim
Velagić. He tells her a version of the
same lie that Osman Bey Omerbegović tells
his relatives at his son’s wedding in
Nuhanović’s
tale:
he says that Velagić died in prison a
year ago, and he himself buried the dead
man. (In text no. 1283, she bursts into
tears on hearing this news.) His wife
then gives her still unrecognized
collocutor another sum of money as a fee
for his putative performance of Velagić’s
funeral rites.
Selim asks the lady whether she intends
her second gift to honor the soul of the
deceased Velagić, or in honour of her
marriage with Halil Hrnjica. (In
291b, she replies that she means
the gift “not for the health of Halil,
but for the sake of ‘her Velagić.’”)
She bursts into tears and retires into
her private chamber. Selim follows her
as far as the hearth, where he discovers
his agèd mother still alive, and reveals
to her his true identity. (In 1283, she
is ninety years old, and is terrified of
his appearance.) His wife then emerges
from the inner chamber bearing Selim’s
sword, which she presents to him with an
invitation to behead her if he wishes
(as penalty for her willingness to marry
another man before she knew Selim
certainly to be dead). He
declines.7
Mustay Bey hears Velagić’s old mother
weeping for joy and noisily apostrophizing
her returned son; deducing from this that
the mendicant prisoner is really Selim
Velagić, he tells Mujo Hrnjica to take his
younger brother Halil and decamp
immediately, else there will soon be
man-meat for crows’ and vultures’ dining.
The wedding party disbands in all directions.
Indoors meanwhile, Selim puts off his prison
cape and dresses in full panoply, then goes
to his chestnut in the stable. He saddles
and rides it to the wedding party’s
encampment intending to fight Halil, but
finds the Hrnjica brothers gone and the
camp deserted. So he returns the horse to
stable, remains at home putting his affairs
in order for a month, and at the expiry of
his furlough honorably returns to the Ban’s
prison in Zadar to redeem the gage of his
religion.8
Meanwhile, Ali Alagić has suffered all that
he can bear of the Ban’s water torture, and
he shrieks in the donjon. The Ban enters
it and asks whether dwelling in his gaol
has occasioned the outcry. Ali replies
that he is about to die and wants to write
home.
(In 291b, the reason he gives is
that he wants to instruct his mother to
pay his ransom. In 1283, Bašić named the
Ban of Karlovo as the captor who visits
Alagić in the gaol after his fit of
shrieking. This Ban asks Ali whether he
is ready now to pay the previously stated
ransom. Ali evades a direct answer to
the question, seeming to answer it
implicitly by asking for paper, pen, and
ink. But in the resulting letter, Ali
instructs his mother to prestate his
panoply to the flagbearers of Udbina,
and to sell his horse. Neither she
however, nor Fatima, does either of
these things in any of the three texts.)
The Ban supplies paper, pen, and ink, and
undertakes to have Ali’s letter delivered
to Udbina. The letter authorizes Ali’s
mother to sell his property for the funds
needed to provide for her support, and
dowers his bride for remarriage.
Taking the finished letter from Ali, the Ban
disregards its author’s abusive parting words
to him, and puts it into the hands of a Magyar
courier, telling the courier that he will be
able to recognize Alagić’s house in Udbina by
the absence from it of any male, since Ali’s
mother and wife are its only inhabitants.
(Only once in the closing events of 291b
is any further mention made of Ajkuna, Alagić’s
putative sister, after the Ban’s original
inclusion of her in his ransom demand.)
Having travelled all night, the Magyar courier
hands Ali’s letter to Fatima at the Alagić
house in Udbina at daybreak. Her
mother-in-law tells her to take it to Mujo
of Kladuša (whose younger brother still needs
a wife) to be read, but Fatima is able to
avoid this danger; she declares herself
literate, opens the letter, and reports its
contents to the elder woman. Then Fatima
writes a letter of her own to her father,
Mumin Agha, asking him to go to Zadar and
rescue her husband.
She summons Alagić’s longtime henchman Husein
to ride to Mumin Agha with her message, but
he demurs, saying that in all twelve years of
his service to Ali he has never been paid his
monthly wages. Fatima pays him from her
dowry, then warns him to conduct himself
cautiously in Mumin Agha’s presence. After
he has presented Fatima’s letter to the old
agha, Husein must observe closely how he
reacts to it. If Mumin Agha tucks it under
his prayer rug after he has read it, all
will be well; but if he throws the letter
away into the room, Husein is to run for
his life, because that will be a sign of
the old man’s deadly wrath, and he will
surely kill Husein on the spot if the
latter stands his
ground.9
Having read his daughter’s letter, old Mumin
Agha throws it away from him and, spryly
leaping up, takes a sword in hand and gives
chase to Husein. As he pursues, Mumin Agha
explains his anger: his daughter should be
stouthearted enought to abide her husband’s
absence for at least twelve years (the
length of time Selim’s wife waited),
whereas Alagić has been in prison for
hardly a
month.10
Husein escapes to Udbina and reports to
Fatima both the reason for Mumin Agha’s rage
and the old man’s threat to come to Udbina
in person next Friday and behead her for the
shame she has brought on her father. She
takes the threat seriously, and prefers to
join Ali in a pagan prison rather than await
death at the hands of the irate Mumin Agha.
So she sends her mother-in-law to bake flour
cakes, and Husein to ready Ali’s chestnut
horse for a journey. She in the meantime
disguises herself in the garments and arms
of a Magyar military
officer.11
Descending into the stable, Fatima surprises
Husein, who says that were he to meet her in
some narrow mountain pass on the frontier,
he would surely take off her head for a
trophy, so perfectly is she disguised in the
appearance of a Magyar warrior; but she
affirms that she would be quicker than he,
and have his head first.
Fatima pays Husein a sum of money to tend
her mother-in-law during her absence, then
sets out on the chestnut toward Zadar,
passing the men’s clubhouse in Udbina as
she leaves the city. The men who are
gathered in the clubhouse marvel at the
ferocious warlike aspect of the man mounted
on Alagić’s chestnut, whom they take to be
Gazi Mumin Agha himself, or else someone
hired by him to rescue Ali. (In 291b,
as Fatima leaves Udbina she draws Ali’s
sword, throws it high in the air, and
deftly catches it by its handle as it
falls, to the amazement of the thirty men
in the clubhouse, who recognize the horse
but not the rider.)
She travels fearlessly all night through the
wild mountains of no-man’s land, and stops
only to feed the chestnut on the eastern
verge of the plain of Zadar at daybreak.
Then she remounts and rides to the gates of
the city, where Gatekeeper Matthew stops her
to learn her identity. She claims to be
Ensign Vitus (Vido bajraktar), pays
Matthew a bribe of a hundred ducats, and so
gains admission to the city. There she
gives her chestnut its head and tells it to
carry her to Ali’s usual lodgings.
(In 291b, Matthew commands a detachment
of a hundred soldiers at the gate. He asks
Fatima for her passport, but she gives him the
hundred ducats instead, which satisfy his
curiosity about her identity. In 1283, when
she remounts it before approaching the city,
Fatima asks her horse how they can pass
Matthew. As though in answer to her question,
the animal makes boldly for the gate. When
Matthew asks her identity, Fatima says that
(s)he is Ancient Vitus from Janok, and has
come to visit his fictive sister the innkeeper.
Matthew admits her on the strength of this
declaration alone, and Fatima then gives him
ten ducats.)
Ali’s chestnut knowingly delivers Fatima to
a hostel tended by Mary the Innkeeper. Mary
receives the disguised Turkish woman with
perfect hospitality, setting wine and brandy
before her. Fatima rejects wine as a cause
of headache and brandy as a cause of
heartache, whereupon the mistress of the inn
asks her identity. (In 291b, Mary
comments on the fact that Fatima is the
first Magyar warrior she has ever
entertained who has refused an offer of
wine and brandy.) Fatima tells her that
(s)he is from Janok city, and is one of the
ancients of that town’s Ban. Mary laughs
at this, and tells her to her face that she
is really Fatima, daughter of Mumin Agha.
Fatima indignantly denies it, but her
hostess insists that she knows Fatima too
well to be deceived.
For twelve years, says Mary, she was a slave
girl in Mumin Agha’s house. (In 291b,
Mary says that Mumin Agha captured her during
a raid on Sibinj, and put her to work as
Fatima’s personal servant. Being of the same
age as Fatima, Mary was raised with Fatima in
the women’s quarters of Mumin Agha’s house;
text no. 1283 adds that Mumin Agha dressed
and kept Mary with the same care that he
accorded to his own daughter.) So the two
girls dwelt together, until one day the
Agha’s ancient Osman proposed to lie with
Mary out of wedlock. She was unwilling, and
Osman then correctly sought her in marriage
from Mumin Agha, who conveyed Osman’s offer
to her in good form. Still she would not,
and Mumin Agha therefore paid her the sum of
her accumulated wages and released her. She
settled in Zadar, where she used her capital
to establish the present inn. She is able
therefore to recognize Fatima infallibly,
but assures Fatima that she will not betray
her to Alagić’s enemies in Zadar city.
(291b describes Mary’s encounter with
Osman as having happened once when she went
on an errand to the
stable.12
Osman properly desisted when Mary refused him,
but she nevertheless reported the incident to
Mumin Agha. He asked her to accept Islam,
and promised her that if she would, she might
have any ancient in his service for her
husband. When she refused this offer too,
her continued membership in the household of
course became impossible; the Agha supposed
that she desired to return to her native
hearth, so he paid her and sent her away
with an escort to protect her from mishap
during her journey home. She went however
to Janok rather than to Sibinj, and built
the present inn for outlanders. Having
told her story, Mary promises not to betray
Fatima, and declares that she knows
Alagić’s chestnut on sight.)
Foregoing any further attempt to conceal her
identity, Fatima asks her newfound friend
how she may come to Ali; but Mary tells her
it is not possible. Fatima declares that if
that is true she will go just as she is to
the Ban’s stronghold, since she would prefer
a miserable imprisonment with Ali to a
comfortable separation from him.
Recognizing the implication in Fatima’s words
that appearances are crucial, Mary urges
Fatima to put off her Magyar warrior’s garb,
and put on instead the finery of an alluring
Magyar maiden. Fatima complies in all but
one particular: against Mary’s advice, she
insists upon wearing Ali’s sword concealed
in the folds of her dress.
The two young women then attend a soirée in
the apartment of the Ban’s daughter Angelia.
(When Fatima meets Angelia in 291b,
she says that until this time she has
supposed there was no woman in the world
lovelier than herself, but Angelia is.
Angelia asks Mary who her companion is,
and Mary tells her that she is a
kinswoman from the country.) During
the evening, Angelia detects the sword
hidden in Fatima’s clothes, and threatens
to hand the stranger over to her father.
But Mary intercedes, and swearing Angelia
to secrecy, divulges Fatima’s real
identity to her. Fatima begs Angelia to
secure Ali’s release, promising in return
to accept Angelia as Ali’s first wife,
and to content herself with a servant’s
duties in the house of Ali and Angelia
when they shall all have escaped to
Udbina.13
Without describing it expressly as such,
Angelia now proposes an extremely dangerous
strategem: to precipitate her father’s
execution of a sentence of death on Ali
Alagić in order to raise him from the
donjon, and to place him in circumstances
outside the Ban’s stronghold where it
might be possible to rescue him by force
of arms. She will [says Angelia] ask her
father the Ban next day for the use of a
coach in which to make an outing to
Mandušić Cathedral, and to have Ali
Alagić and Selim Velagić harnassed to
the coach as draft
animals.14
But Angelia does not know how to accomplish
the two Muslims’ release from their bonds
and from the harnass of the coach once they
are outside the city; consequently she asks
Fatima whether any of Fatima’s Turkish
countrymen will be on hand to help her.
Fatima replies that she herself will be
equal to the task of cutting the two men
free (the sword presently concealed in her
clothing being sufficient warrant of that),
and she ventures to say too that she has
some hope of other help from her father,
who she believes may yet find a way to assist
her.15
Having thus agreed upon Angelia’s plan for
the morrow, Mary and Fatima return to
Mary’s inn for the night, where they find
sleep impossible.
Next morning the coach that is pivotal to
Angelia’s plot appears in the streets of
Zadar, drawn as she planned by Alagić and
Velagić in the rôle of draught animals,
but also heavily guarded by an armed
escort consisting of the Ban himself,
Captain Ivan, and nine heathen ancients,
each at the head of a squadron of horse.
Having resumed her disguise as a Magyar
officer, Fatima says goodbye to Mary the
Innkeeper, mounts her husband’s chestnut
horse, leaves the inn, and follows the
procession out of Zadar. She overtakes
the coach in the middle of the plain
outside the city. Recognizing his horse
and his own panoply worn by its rider,
Ali bursts into tears. Selim asks him
why he weeps. He says that his
misguided mother has apparently paid the
Ban a ransom for him, and yet the Ban,
having gotten possession of Ali’s horse
and arms and passed them on to some
thegn of his, is nevertheless now about
to execute both his Muslim prisoners
despite the payment.
On the heights overlooking the plain from
the east, Mumin Agha has meanwhile arrived
with five hundred Muslim horse-troopers.
They watch intently as Fatima (alias the
Magyar officer) accosts the Ban, draws her
saber, and swiftly beheads both him and
his Captain Ivan. As the two fallen
infidels’ subalterns turn on Fatima, she
cuts Ali and Selim free and presents them
the Ban’s and Ivan’s mounts and sabers.
While the two liberated Muslims fight off
the infidels, Fatima pulls Angelia out of
the carriage and into the saddle behind
herself on the chestnut horse. And as
these events transpire, Mumin Agha’s
troops gallop onto the field and put the
remainder of the infidels to
flight.16
As the Muslims make their way back onto
the uplands, Mumin Agha asks Alagić whether
the ‘man’ on the chestnut horse who rescued
him was Fatima. As Ali turns in surprise
to look closely at the still-disguised rider,
Halil Hrnjica steps up to the chestnut and
takes hold of the reins. Fatima asks him
rhetorically what gift she should give him
for his help as best man in this, her
second (and this time successful) wedding
procession; then she hands Angelia to him
as his prize. This done, she dismounts
from the chestnut and presents it to Ali,
throwing herself finally into the lap of
her father. After resting for a time,
the entire party rises and makes its way
homeward into the mountains.
(Text no. 1283 colors
the ending a little differently. Mumin
Agha asks Ali where his daughter Fatima
is. Ali does not know. Then Velagić
tells Ali to look closely at the
suppositious Magyar mounted on Ali’s own
horse, the one who freed them. Mumin
Agha laughs, and asks Alagić whether he
can now recognize the ‘Magyar.’ But Ali
is still at a loss. While the others
thus tease the bridegroom Ali, the
‘Magyar’ approaches; Halil rises to his
feet and stops the horse, asking its
rider how ‘he’ came by it. Fatima tells
him truthfully who she is, and explains
to him about the pretty girl who is
riding in the saddle behind her. Halil
asks Fatima to give Angelia to him, and
she complies. A double wedding takes
place when all have returned to Turkish
soil: Ali and Fatima tranquilly united
at last, and Halil with the more eligible
Angelia rather than Lady Velagić.)
Ibro Bašić’s story of Ali Alagić and Murat
Žunić’s about Zajim Ali Bey share a common
hypothesis: it is the caption of a destiny
that is always providentially the opposite
of what its owner expects. When Ali
supposed that marriage was at hand
peacefully amongst his own people, he was
torn away from it by the superior cunning
and strength of an alien power that cast
him down doubly into a lingering
subterranean perdition, alone in a far
land. And when he later supposed that his
own extinction was at hand violently
amongst a pagan people in an alien place,
he was torn away from it by the superior
cunning and strength of his own people,
who escorted him up again to an enduring
marriage surrounded by family and friends
in his own highland home. Not until he
had in Zadar utterly despaired of his
survival did the mechanism of his rescue
begin to operate in Udbina; not until he
thought his own execution was at hand at
Mandušić Cathedral did a complete stranger
cut him free and give him once again the
means for defending himself. And when he
tried solely with his own resources to
bring home a bride, he could not
consummate the marriage; not until the
bride, relying perforce entirely upon
her resources, brought him
home, could their marriage become an
institution.
From all this
tribulation, Ali and his valiant bride
gain nothing but what any ordinary man
or woman might experience except unusual
hardship and the chance to salvage
ordinary pleasures by extraordinary toil
and risk. But others whose lives are
touched by their self-sacrificing
determination are saved by it [the
water carrier Nikola, the Ban’s
misused daughter Rose, and the two
Velagićes, husband and wife], all
plucked out of an endless misery, and
given new lives to lead as though by
a miracle.
So by the lucky happenstance of his
proximity to Ali, and although he and
his own family contribute nothing to its
restoration, Selim Velagić’s marriage
is automatically included in a general
affirmation of marriage that flows
from the unique union of Ali and
Fatima. Indeed even Selim Velagić’s
marital competitor and most dangerous
domestic enemy, Halil Hrnjica, is also
incorporated into a marriage free of
social rivalry by the same happy
accident of nearness to Ali and
Fatima when they are reunited.
Thus, in an
implicit affirmation of Islamic
ideals, the inscrutable ordination of
a merciful and comforting Providence
works itself out in the lives of the
faithful as it manipulates the
disappointed hopes and the superfluous
fears of the strong for the salvation
of both strong and weak together.
Such providence, realizing its hidden
purposes by such an ordainment,
demands no less monumental a
generosity in its human tools than
it displays itself towards them and
their weaker compatriots alike.
Those, on the other hand, who ungenerously
demand what they want with an unyielding
exigency, expecting immediate gratification
and absolute obedience to their will, are
by definition infidels, and are typically
destroyed by the very fact of getting what
they want when they want it. Brooking no
denial and acknowledging no constraints
of decency in his demands, the Ban is laid
low by the very person who comes to him
bringing the horse, fine clothes, and
panoply which he has demanded as ransom
for Ali. The heathen Ban in Žunić’s poem
similarly gave no quarter to the natural
mating impulse of his man Nikola, in
stark contrast to Mumin Agha’s
understanding negotiation in Bašić’s
story with Mistress Mary on behalf of
his lusty ancient Osman when Osman was
moved by the same urge.
The selfsame Nikola thereafter introduced
the Ban’s nemesis into the Ban’s stronghold
in Zadar—the disguised Lady Ali Bey, who
would behead the Ban with her own hand
while he slept, as Judith did to
Holofernes. But at the same critical
moment when Mumin Agha’s daughter draws
her sword to behead the Ban, it is the
same Ancient Osman who watches over her
through his spyglass from the treetop,
and so enables Mumin Agha’s troops to
save her from an otherwise certain
retributory death, alone as otherwise
she is against whole squadrons of the
enemy.
Thus, intransigent toward his own subjects
and his captive enemies alike, the Ban
soon loses the advantage which superior
power initially gave him, while even the
deadliest peril harmlessly bypasses
generous men such as Ali Alagić and his
father-in-law Mumin Agha while they
patiently minister to the needs of others
in their own society who are both greater
persons (Mustay Bey) and lesser persons
(Ancient Osman) than they. Only for the
month of time while the Ban with a
similarly generous patience holds the
gage of Selim Velagić’s sole remaining
possession, his Muslim faith, and lets
the poor Selim enjoy a furlough from his
misery, for just so long and no longer
does the Ban himself enjoy a time of
respite—though in his ignorance of the
true faith he does not recognize it as
such—from the retribution which he
surely brings down upon his own head
by his failure to act with a comparable
moderation in Alagić’s case. Providence
favors the generous in this tradition,
and as in Islam itself, Ali personifies
generosity.
The generous patience of the faithful
and the crabbed impatience of heathens
are contrasted not only in their
different manners of dealing with other
men, but also in their uses of women.
The Ban of Zadar in Žunić’s poem is
eager to trade his daughter’s chastity
for his own personal benefit; but Bašić’s
Mumin Agha will not compromise even a
slave girl’s virtue in his different
régime. Again, in Bašić’s narrative
the wife of the Ban tells her pagan
husband for the sake of his own family
to remove from his dungeon the most
recently captured new prisoner; but
her husband stops short of his wife’s
prescription of prudent mercy as he
descends into the dungeon and furloughs
instead only the old prisoner Velagić.
Now Velagić is no threat to the Ban in
or out of gaol, whereas (though the Ban
cannot perceive it) Alagić is
immeasurably more dangerous to him in
gaol than out. Uncompliant as he thus
is toward his wife’s advice, the Ban
thinks himself a happy and successful
man until suddenly the peril which his
wife’s counsel would have averted
destroys him.
Alagić too hears unsolicited advice
from his wife, and thinks himself much
put upon by the consequences of his
compliance with it. But although the
results of his amenability are indeed
agonizing for the space of a month,
during which he thinks himself a most
singular failure, it is precisely his
compliance and the train of events set
in motion by it that finally end his
hitherto fruitless twelve-year-old
quest to find and liberate his lost
fictive brother Velagić.
So the infidel who thinks himself
clever and successful because he has
circumvented his wife’s morality is
destroyed by a sudden, unforeseen
disaster; while the true believer who
thinks himself foolish and ruined
because he has conformed to his wife’s
morality is saved by a sudden,
unforeseen liberation.
Some previous commentators have treated
the framed story of Selim Velagić’s
furlough as though it were a kind of echo
in the South Slavic Muslim tradition of
the ancient tale about Odysseus and
Penelope, and indeed a number of
comparable elements are present in both
stories: the disguised husband’s begging
his way into his own house after long
absence, unrecognized by either its
female inmates or his male competitors;
the beggar’s lying tales about his own
identity; the several athletic contests
joined finally by the disguised husband,
with his surprising victores in them;
and so forth.
It is however no
simple legacy but rather a modulation
of the ancient tale that we have in
Bašić’s three poems. For however much
Velagić may otherwise resemble Odysseus,
Selim’s wife is no Penelope. By design
she is, on the contrary, like the
impatient Fatima as her father Mumin
Agha mistakenly imagined her to be:
untenacious and uninventive in
resistance to her suitor’s plans,
and ineffective in preserving her
absent husband’s wealth.
Nor are Halil and his bridesmen like
Penelope’s divinely befuddled, predatory
suitors who cannot perceive their own
danger nor escape it; given fair warning,
Mustay Bey and his party promptly disperse,
as Penelope’s suitors would not. And far
from wishing him ill, the suitor encamped
at Velagić’s house no sooner learns that
Velagić is still alive than he joins Mumin
Agha’s party to assist in the liberation
of his unintended rival from foreign
captivity. Finally, the repeatedly
emphasized contrast between Odysseus and
his social superior Agamemnon in Homer’s
story is not at all the contrast between
Selim Velagić and his social superior Ali
Alagić in Bašić’s poems. Great
Agamemnon abandoned by Klytaimestra while
the lesser Odysseus’ Penelope remained
loyal to her marriage beyond reasonable
hope for her husband’s return is quite
the inverse of the relationship between
Velagić’s and Alagić’s marriages, which
teach on the contrary that the man
(Velagić) who has not released his wife,
giving her leave to marry another, is the
most likely to lose her; whereas he who
does release her (Alagić) is himself
rescued by her.
Women Who Bear Arms
Of course it was not his wife who rescued Odysseus
from foreign captivity, nor is a wife (or fiancée)
the only kind of militant female who rescues
captive Muslims in the South Slavic tradition.
Ali Alagić’s shadowy sister Ajkuna, who is a
person in Bašić’s epic of about the same magnitude
as Ktimene in the Odyssey, has however more
active counterparts in other modulations of the
female-liberator narrative. One particularly
revealing example of her kind in more developed
form is in poem no. 6 in the unpublished manuscript
collection of the early twentieth-century Serbian
collector Jovan Perović.
Perović
was a businessman and merchant in Bihać,
where he collected a number of very long epics,
seemingly all from a single singer. The singer’s
identity is not recorded. The sixth
poem in the Perović collection is once again about
legendary citizens of Udbina, but this time they
are members of the famous Dizdar of Udbina’s
family, namely the Dizdar’s son Meho (= Mehmed
Dizdarević) and Meho’s sister Fatima. Apart
from these, many characters in the Perović poem
are the same persons with the same names as found
in Žunić’s tale, but they are differently
articulated, and in ways that further illuminate
their characters and actions as seen in the Žunić
poem. Perović no. 6 is 3,600 lines long, and
tells the following story.
29.
Fatima, daughter of the Dizdar of Udbina, is
unwilling to marry before her elder brother
Meho does. For his part, Meho Dizdarević
(i.e., Meho the Dizdar’s son) is determined
to marry none other than Rose, sister of the
Ban of Zadar. Finally, the Ban wants only
to marry Meho’s sister Fatima.
But the Ban is as unwilling to give Rose
to Meho as Fatima is to marry the Ban.
Meho has attempted repeatedly in the past
to steal Rose from Zadar—i.e., to elope
with her—but has always failed. The story
begins as Meho sets out from Udbina to
Zadar to attempt bridetheft yet again.
Disguised and mounted on his black horse
(a weaker but safer animal than his
chestnut, because the latter is, as usual,
too well known in Zadar) Meho as he enters
the Ban’s courtyard in Zadar finds it full
of tables occupied by a multitude of
Zadarian braves and worthies, all of whom
have gathered there as suitors to Rose.
Being to all appearances just another
Magyar suitor, Meho joins the multitude
of drinkers as Rose moves amongst them
pouring their wine and inspecting them
one by one.
After a while the Ban bids his sister
chose a husband for herself from the
present company, since it is time for
her to marry. She refuses to designate
any of them as her fiancée definitively,
on the grounds that she is still too
young to wed; but she says that if she
were to choose, her preference would be
(the disguised) Meho.
Hearing her pronouncement, all the other
suitors depart, leaving only the Ban,
Rose, and Meho in the courtyard. The
Ban expresses some disappointment with
Rose’s merely tentative choice, since he
wants decisively to settle the question
of her marriage soon. Not until she is
married will he himself be free to press
his suit with Meho Dizdarević’s sister
Fatima. The Ban orders Rose to make a
bed for Meho in their mansion, and when
she has done so, the three retire each
to his own chamber. But after the Ban
has fallen asleep, Rose goes to Meho’s
room with wine and brandy, and as they
drink together the two make plans to
elope. Meho wants to leave immediately,
but Rose reminds him that the city gates
are sealed till dawn; they two have no
choice but to spend the night in sweet
dalliance where they are.
They abscond at dawn, but the clatter
of their horses’ hooves wakes the Ban, who
orders the city’s gatekeeper, Janko Lipušić,
to close the city, and the gunner Luke to
sound the alarm with a salvo of cannon. The
Ban’s troops corner Meho in a gateway. He
is invincible so long as he remains in the
saddle, but when his opponents stop fighting
him and concentrate on cutting the legs out
from under his black horse, they are able to
unseat him. He continues to fight on foot
until his sword breaks, whereupon they bind
him and convey him to the courtyard of the
Ban’s palace. There the Ban causes him to
be seated on a chair as though in the dock
of a kind of law court, and sets an
executioner over him to stand guard while
a panel of holy men gathers to act as Meho’s
judges in a trial.
The Ban presents a bill of indictment to
the panel, asking it to impose capital
punishment on Meho for attempted bridetheft;
but the panel advises him that if the girl
Rose had not been in complicity with Meho,
no elopement would have been attempted.
They inform the Ban also of an accord
concluded between the two Emperors
prohibiting the imposition of marriage on
women without their consent: if women are
given in marriage against their wishes,
they have the right to return to the homes
where they were born. The only avenue
that might lead to a death sentence for
Meho lies therefore through Meho’s
admission of some other crime for which
the court could convict and sentence him.
The Ban knows how to extract the necessary
confession from Meho: he conjures him by
his Muslim faith to admit his previous
offenses against Christendom. Bound thus
by his religion, Meho acknowledges having,
before his most recent attempt to abduct
Rose, killed singlehandedly three viceroys
of Zadar and sacked three monasteries;
killed five captains and participated with
fellow Muslims in four successful
bride-captures; and slain two Christian
holy men. Hearing this confession, the
panel of judges [who are themselves all
Christian men of the cloth] immediately
hand down the death sentence, which is
instantly presented to the executioner
for fulfillment.
The executioner is not willing however to
perform his duty straightway. He observes
that Meho’s clothing is very valuable, and
ought not to be defiled; he desires that
Meho be stripped of it before he beheads
him. But in order to achieve this, it would
be necessary to unbind Meho’s arms, and Meho
warns the court that he will not permit his
clothing to be removed from his living body.
The judges find Meho’s threat credible, and
declare themselves in a quandry.
The Ban now loses patience with the judges’
dubitations, and orders the executioner to
unbind Meho; if Meho prefers a nasty death
with unsubmissive struggling to the bitter
end, so be it. But Meho has still not
exhausted his resources: he warns the Ban
that if he is killed, vengeance for his
death will surely be exacted by Mustay Bey
and by the Muslims’ Christian liegemen,
Prince Miladin and Miladin’s seven sons,
not to speak of others. From her window
overlooking the courtyard, Rose also
speaks to the Ban, saying that she will
kill herself if any harm befalls Meho.
These several arguments perplex even the
headstrong Ban, and he calls the panel of
judges into session once more. They
commute their earlier sentence of death,
ordering that Meho be imprisoned in the
dungeon, where water stands to a man’s
knees, where satans and daemons call to
each other in the reeds, and snakes and
scorpions—the sting of any one of which
is fatal—bedrape the walls. No light
burns there but the flame of a single
candle to illumine the unspeakable
horrors of the place. Conveyed thither
at the bidding of the court, Meho
declines to accept confinement in such
a haunt, and calls on the Ban to set a
ransom for him instead.
Mindful of his own ambition to marry Fatima,
the Ban agrees to an audience with Meho for
the purpose of negotiating a ransom price.
First he enjoins Meho to be subjugated and
call himself the Ban’s thane. This Meho
refuses. Then he demands Meho’s chestnut
horse, Fatima, and a thousand ducats as
ransom. Considering these exactions, Meho
reflects to himself that the chestnut
belongs to his father, who is in Istanbul
on business for a year and a month.
Moreover, there is no one at home in the
absent Dizdar’s house in Udbina except
Fatima, and not even she knows where Meho
is or what has befallen him. For these
reasons, he directs the Ban to write to
Mustay Bey of the Lika rather than to
Fatima, informing him rather than her of
the ransom-price.
The Ban complies, and it remains only
for Meho to sign the letter. This he
does, but in Turkish, which the Ban
cannot read, and he includes in the
form of his signature a message
instructing the Bey not to pay
the Ban’s price.
Next Meho asks permission to write to
his sister Fata, explaining to the Ban
that if she receives no direct
confirmation from Meho of the
instructions which the Ban has penned
to Mustay Bey, she perhaps may not
cooperate with the Bey in making the
ransom payment; she might, that is,
refuse to surrender the chestnut horse,
the thousand ducats, and herself as
property payable to Zadar.
The Ban is suitably gulled by this argument,
and supplies the writing materials. What
Meho actually writes however—again in
Turkish—is only a reassurance to Fata that
although he has fallen into captivity in
Zadar, the Ban dares not harm him for fear
of reprisals from Meho’s fellow Muslims,
from the Muslims’ loyal raya, and
from Rose. He tells Fatima to ignore the
Ban’s claim on her as a part of the ransom
for her brother, and to find instead a
suitor for herself who will want her
enough to undertake Meho’s liberation.
These things having been done, the Ban
transfers Meho to a prison cell free
of water, reeds, demons, satans, vipers
and scorpions, leaving him there to await
the arrival at Zadar of the supposedly
agreed ransom; and he dispatches his
footman Sava to deliver the two letters
to Muslim territory. Following a route
across Mount Velebit, past Ribnik, and
over Rudine to Udbina, Sava delivers the
one letter to Fatima Dizdareva’s
coffee-steward Huso, and the other to
Mustay Bey’s tobacco-steward Omer.
Fatima and her mother are saddened to
tears by the news that Meho is in Zadar’s
gaol, but Fata bravely forbids crying
until they have paid Sava for his journey
and dismissed him. She returns a message
by him to the Ban, saying that the Ban
should expect either a subsequent letter
from her accepting the terms of Meho’s
ransom, or else a champion who will
challenge the Ban to single combat for
possession of Meho.
From the Dizdar’s house, the Ban's messenger
Sava passes on to Mustay Bey’s seat of
provincial government. The Bey also returns
a message by him to the Ban, instructing the
Ban to keep Meho comfortable, and to wait a
month for payment of the ransom. As soon as
Sava has departed, Mustay Bey reads Meho’s
cryptic Turkish “signature” aloud to his
court.
But no sooner has he finished announcing
Meho’s prohibition against the payment of
ransom for his release than the piercing
wail of Meho’s mother lamenting her son
disrupts the assembly. They adjourn in
a body to the Dizdar’s house, where
Mustay Bey and the Twelve Elders enter
to assure the keening woman that no harm
will come to Meho, who has himself saved
many another in times past from just such
trouble as has now befallen him. Fatima
declares in their hearing that she will
send a circular letter to her three
hundred suitors, offering herself as a
reward to whichever of them will liberate
her brother. This plan however stings
the pride of Mustay Bey and his men, who
recognize that they ought to be Meho’s
champions rather than leave that task
to some outsider; Mustay Bey therefore
forbids her plan (thus countermanding
Meho’s own instructions to his sister).
However, as soon as their visitors have
left them, Fata reveals to her mother
that she does not really intend to sell
herself for her brother’s release; she
only wants Mustay Bey and the other city
fathers to believe that is her intention.
What she really means to do is to dress
herself as a man, pose as her own suitor,
and rescue Meho herself. Fatima extracts
from her mother an oath of strict secrecy
about all this.
Following her plan, Fatima does indeed
advertise for a champion among her
suitors. All being valiant men, they
one by one offer their services. Even
the Christian Prince Miladin writes to
the Ban, warning him to forego his
ambition to marry Fatima and carefully
to avoid injuring Meho. He tells the
Ban that his actions will in the end cost
him not only his sister Rose but also his
life. The Ban’s subaltern, Captain Lazar,
who is present when the Ban reads Miladin’s
letter, remarks that even Christians such
as Miladin are loyal to the Sultan,
because he generously confers offices
and stipends on his loyal subjects even
if they are not Muslim.
Fatima accepts no offer of championship
from any of her suitors. Pretending
nevertheless that her search has yielded
its desired result, she writes to Mustay
Bey, using as her nom de plume
Omer Agha of Sarajevo. In her letter,
(s)he asks Mustay Bey to assemble an
army and be ready in fifteen days’ time
to attend a single combat between
himself (i.e., Omer of Sarajevo) and
the Ban of Zadar. Omer explains that
he will arrive in Udbina during that
interval and reside as a house guest
in the home of his intended
mother-in-law, Mrs. Dizdar Hasan Agha,
who, he says, has also agreed to lend
him Meho’s chestnut horse. He comments
that the chestnut is a notable
gesgadžija, dobar za majdana
(i.e., one that is gezginci
[much travelled], a good one for
single combat).
Fatima amazes the company of men
assembled in Mustay Bey’s hall by going
there in person to deliver Omer Agha’s
pseudepigraphical letter. Having read
it, the Bey asks Fatima whether she
wishes to go with the Muslim army and
witness the duel; if so, he is ready to
provide transportation for her. But
Fatima eludes the double snare in this
question: for she and the fictitious
Omer Agha can never both be present in
the same place at the same time; and if
the Ban were to defeat her champion in
single combat, Mustay Bey might
surrender Fatima to the victor. She
tells the Bey therefore that if Omer
Agha is defeated, she will need to be
at home in order immediately to
designate an alternate suitor as her
champion against the Ban, one who may
perhaps more successfully represent
her cause than the fallen Omer. Fatima
thus intends to make of herself a
classic kavgali djevojka
rather than contemplate a possibility
of matrimony with Zadar’s king in any
way.
Fatima returns home,
and Mustay Bey begins to levy the troops
called for in the factitious Omer Agha’s
letter. He raises four contingents by mail,
and a fifth column by aural proclamation.
His written letters of levy reliably
produce the desired results; but his
aural recruitment is fraught with
danger, uncertainty, and opportunity
for trickery.
In each of his four letters, Mustay
Bey calls upon one of his peers in
another part of the country to form
a battalion, and also to pass on
written word of the call-to-arms to
another, more remotely situated peer
in that vicinity.
The Bey’s first letter goes to Pasha
Radoslija at Hlivno, with a request to
him to notify also Ibro Jakirlić at
Glamoč. The second of the four pairs
are Bey Labudić of Jajce and the
Čengić brothers of Zagorlje and Upper
Skoplje. The third pair are Pasha
Uštuglija of Knin, and Babahmetović of
Cetina (who is to recruit at Vrljika,
Skradin, Klis, Vrana, and Drnjiš).
The fourth pair are Omer Agha
Poprženović of Bihar and Bihać, and
the Lord of the Krupa (who is to
secure in particular the help of
Mujo Hrnjica).
In all four of his letters, Mustay Bey
instructs his fellow leaders to so
balance their levies as to assure that
half of each battalion will be Muslim
(i.e., Turkish) and half raya
(i.e., Christian). Thus the Bey gathers
his army from four different directions,
one battalion from each direction; and
each battalion is composed in turn of
four regiments, two Turkish and two
Christian.
But to gather his own
fifth column of personal followers, the Bey
relies on aural rather than written summonses.
First, he causes his two great cannon to fire
a salvo as a call to arms for the region
within hearing of Udbina. Then, for more
remote districts beyond earshot of his
artillery, he dispatches Talâ as a herald
to ride about beating a drum and crying up
the levy by word of mouth.
On the day when the four battalions from
other regions are expected to convene in
Udbina, Mustay Bey’s courtiers ask him
whether he has written to Sarajevo and
to Bey Ljubović in Glasinac recruiting
contingents from that pair of places.
He tells them that he has not, since
Fatima’s fiancé, Omer Agha, will surely
have undertaken his own recruitment in
those parts. At the end of the day,
Mustay Bey sends his ancient Đulić to
learn from Mrs. Dizdar Hasan Agha
whether the young man from Sarajevo
has arrived. Fata replies that he has,
but that he is so fatigued by the
journey that her mother will not let
him out of the house that night. She
desires that Mustay Bey should not
wait however for Omer Agha’s
appearance; the time for the agreed
rendezvous with the Ban is fast
approaching (the meeting is on Sunday,
the combat on Monday), and the Muslim
army must accordingly depart Udbina
forthwith.
Receiving this message from Đulić,
Mustay Bey observes that it is not
only Fatima’s fiancé and personal
champion who has not materialized;
reinforcements have not come from
Sarajevo to support him either.
He goes on to say, with a certain
asperity, that perhaps the men
from Sarajevo will join the
expedition later, if indeed Omer
Agha has actually mustered
any allies from his own region.
But no time remains
for further speculation on that point;
the date set for confrontation with the
Ban is at hand, and no one yet knows
where precisely it is to take place.
The Bey therefore commands his man Ali
Seidić to go to Zadar at the gallop
with a letter proposing a location for
the single combat on a high plateau of
Mount Velebit. According to the terms
set forth in the Bey’s letter, each
side is to bring its stake [Meho
Dizdarević in the Ban’s party, and
Fatima Dizdareva in the Bey’s]. Thus
Mustay Bey commits himself to fixed
terms for an armed encounter with the
Ban, although he still has neither
troops of his own nor any of Omer
Agha’s at hand to support him.
To correct this deficit, the Bey sends
Gazi Ćejvan Agha to fire the two great
cannon Stubby and Old Green a second
time. (The first firing of these guns
gave notice that war was at hand, and
a time for arming; the second signals
an actual muster of ready soldiery at
the crossroads outside Udbina.) Next
morning, Talâ wakes Mustay Bey,
inviting him to survey the multitude
of troops who have gathered in response
to Talâ’s circuit ride and yesterday’s
firing of the cannon.
The cannon set Fatima in motion too.
She braids her hair, dresses as a
Turkish warrior, and obtains her
mother’s blessing as she leaves home,
just as any good male brave would do
(v. 1800). Then she joins Mustay Bey
and the other Muslim leaders at the
seat of the provincial government, and
rides with them from there to the
banks of the Crvač River. She
surprises the Bey and the several
pashas whom he has convened by failing
to kiss their hands [a gesture of
respect due all such dignitaries
whenever inferior or junior males
approach them]. The Bey lamely
apologizes to his peers for Omer
Agha’s bad manners, explaining that
hand-kissing is evidently not the
custom in Sarajevo. Fatima thus wears
her warrior-guise so well that no one
suspects she is not male, even though
all have seen her in Mustay Bey’s
court dressed as a woman only
yesterday, and even though her own
unconventional behaviour today
forcefully suggests that she may
not be what she seems.
Returning from his urgent mission to the
Ban, Mustay Bey’s courier Ali Seidić
(i.e., Ali Son of Seidija) meets the
commanders’ party by the Crvač, and tells
them the Ban’s response to Mustay Bey’s
proposal of terms for the single combat.
The Ban will, namely, meet the Muslims on
Sunday and fight on Monday, but he
refuses to bring the prisoner Meho with
him to the duelling-ground.
Mustay Bey’s fifth column of troops
(those whom he has mustered aurally
from his own province) now joins the
rest of the army; but unlike the other
four battalions, all of whom are from
other provinces, only the Bey’s lacks
the usual duplex organization. Its
other half was meant to be the missing
contingent from Sarajevo, and so
Mustay Bey asks Omer Agha where the
regiments of Bey Ljubović and of
Sarajevo city are.
(S)he replies that because (s)he knew
very well that Mustay Bey would raise
a substantial force—it already numbers
20,000 men—Omer Agha not only didn’t
muster up any troops from his own
province; he did not even bother to tell
any of his own countrymen that he was
going to Zadar. (In this behaviour,
Fatima as Omer Agha shows herself to be
a very defective endogamic bridegroom,
while at the same time precisely
duplicating her brother Meho’s behaviour
on the occasion of his most recent
attempt at exogamy.)
The two sides meet at the appointed time
and place in no-man’s land on Mount
Velebit. There the Muslims discover
that the Ban of Zadar has also adopted
a duplex military organization: he has
brought with him his peer, the Ban of
Novi, and that ban’s army merged under
a joint command with his own. Omer Agha,
the lad (momak) from Sarajevo, now
begs leave of Mustay Bey and the two
pashas to commence the single combat.
They give him permission, and he rides
gallantly to the Bans’ tent, where he
challenges both in proper warriors’
form.
Acting in the capacity of seconds, two
men from each side measure off the
dueling ground (sixty by twenty-four
spears’ lengths), and Ćejvan Agha’s
two sons take up positions on the
Turkish sideline to keep watch lest
the lad from Sarajevo be tricked by
his infidel opponent k’o Malata
prevari Musića [‘the way Malata
(Serdar) tricked Musić,’ a reference
to yet another modulation of this
narrative]. Following the example
set by the sons of Ćejvan Agha, other
Muslims and raya also press
forward one after another (including
all the brothers Babahmetović from
Cetina) until they form a veritable
wall of three hundred mounted men
along the whole length of the
sideline on the Muslim army’s side
of the dueling field. As he observes
these proceedings and surveys his
obviously redoubtable foe(wo)man, the
Ban of Zadar recognizes Meho
Dizdarević’s chestnut horse, but not
its rider.
True to type (because, that is, he has
no confidence in his own ability to
prevail in combat unless he enjoys
some special advantage), the Ban of
Zadar asks the Ban of Novi to suggest
some tactic by which he may hope to
defeat the Turk. His companion
instructs him to elect the part of
pursuer for his opening gambit (since
Turkish duelists always magnanimously
allow their opponents to choose an
initial posture of offence or defence,
whichever is more comfortable for them).
If when he attacks he cannot overtake
the Turk and deal him a lethal stroke
in the sixty spears’ length of the
dueling field, he should use his
firearms to defend himself as they
turn at the end of the field and
the Turk gives chase to the Ban.
Adopting this plan,
the Ban of Zadar finds his black horse
too slow racing downfield in pursuit of
the Dizdar’s chestnut. But when he in
turn is to be pursued by his Turkish
opponent, he forgets altogether about
meeting the Turk’s attack with his
firearms, and instead gallops away
panic-stricken. Fatima immediately
overtakes him. She could easily have
beheaded him at this moment, but instead
only struck him three times with the flat
of her lance, calling on him to surrender.
Even more terrified by her repeated tapping,
the Ban races headlong off the field into
the refuge of his massed troops. They take
aim at Fatima, but dare not fire for fear
of hitting their master, whom Fatima
follows too closely to be a clear target.
Seeing this turn of events, the Turkish
seconds charge en masse across
the field from their position on the
sideline, and a general battle begins.
In the confusion of the fighting, Fatima
is unable to locate the two bans or
their pavilion. A vila calls to
her however, explaining that the Ban of
Zadar has fled down the mountainside
towards his city with all the best
Muslims in hot pursuit of him. So a
great horserace develops, with the Ban
of Zadar in the lead and Fatima on the
Dizdar’s chestnut handicapped as the
last of all to leave the ‘gate.’
Needing to make up for lost time, the
Dizdar’s daughter fairly hurtles along
the track down the mountain, niti
pazi drvlja ni kamenja (v. 2532),
“paying no heed to baulk or boulder.”
As she races along, she meets an infidel
horseman in her path and casually
beheads him to clear the way. Certain
of her countrymen see this happen, and
insist that she go back and claim the
severed head, since it is an important
trophy: the pagan whom she has killed
is the Ban of Novi, a conquest which
any other Muslim warrior would value
as a crowning achievement of his
military career.
Fata does as she
is told, and is thus doubly handicapped
in her still ongoing race with the Ban
of Zadar. He is accompanied in his
flight by a troop of a hundred
horseguardsmen, who turn and fight
delaying actions with their Muslim
pursuers in each of the narrow passes
along the track down Mount Velebit.
As Fatima presses forward, she passes
one group after another of wounded Turks
and their raya who have been put
out of action in the running fights.
Each of these groups urges her to greater
speed for fear that if she does not
overtake and stop the Ban, he will
certainly slay Meho as soon as he comes
safely within his own city walls.
Prince Miladin, headman of the
raya, also points out to her that
the many wounds of her countrymen are
all her fault: if she had simply slain
the Ban on the dueling field when she
had him in her power, none of her own
people would presently be injured.
The last three Muslims whom Fatima meets
successively in her race after the Ban
attest however to the useful effect that
the other, wounded ones have had.
These last three—Talâ, Ali Vrhovac, and
Meho Bosnić—are unhurt, since the Ban’s
bodyguard have by now all fallen in the
preceding series of combats in the
mountain passes. The three remaining
male riders’ horses lack the training
of the Dizdar’s chestnut however, and
so cannot keep up with it in the race
to overtake the Ban. Accordingly only
the Ban and Fatima remain in the running.
Alone, but
screened from view as he now is by the
vegetation and roughness of the terrain,
the Ban’s best hope of escape is no
longer to outrun but rather to elude his
pursuer. He comes to the foot of Mount
Velebit, where he faces a choice of
various tracks across the remaining
barrier of Mount Šunjara. The tactical
skill needed in this situation is to
proceed so quietly along so obscure a
path that no eye nor ear can follow him.
But his horse is inexperienced in travel
over such difficult ground, and it makes
a frightful din.
Fatima’s chestnut follows so stealthily
that the Ban cannot detect its approach
as it closes the distance between them.
When she comes within range of him,
Fatima casts her spear at the Ban butt
foremost so that it will not kill him
but only knock him out of the saddle.
Then she recovers the lance, sits on
the supine king’s chest, and commences
to beat him with it till he begs her
for his life. She tells him that were
it a man who had thus pursued and caught
him, that man would now surely slay him;
fortunately for him, however, it is no
man but Fatima Dizdareva who has run him
down. She continues to beat him until
he agrees to obey her unconditionally.
Talâ, Ali Vrhovac, and Meho Bosnić come
onto the delightful scene of Fatima’s
riding the Ban in time to overhear her
revelation to him of her true identity.
They take charge of her prisoner, and
return with her towards the rest of the
Muslim force, whom they find still
valiantly pressing forward in their
direction despite assorted wounds.
Word spreads through the Muslim army
that “the lad from Sarajevo,” Fatima’s
supposed suitor Omer Agha, is really
Fatima herself.
The forward elements of the army finally
regroup around Mustay Bey and the two
pashas, who pay Fatima a rich dowry’s
worth of prize money for the Ban of
Novi’s head. She inquires who the
vila was that told her where to
seek the Ban of Zadar during the
confusion at the beginning of the
battle. Mustay Bey explains to her
that it was no daemon who advised her,
but rather Rade Đurđević (Mali Radovan)
who reported what he could see from his
lookout atop a high fir tree. In
gratitude for his help, Fatima donates
to Rade the whole sum of the prize money
that has just been given to her for the
Ban of Novi’s head. As she bestows this
gift on Mali Radovan, she says that she
will not need it for herself, since the
Ban of Zadar will soon make her rich.
Talâ begs Fatima to give the Ban to
Mustay Bey (who traditionally passes all
such ‘gifts’ on to Talâ for execution).
Fatima replies to this proposal that had
she wanted the Ban killed, she could
easily have done that herself time and
again. On the contrary, she wants the
Ban alive as a hostage to be exchanged
for her brother. And no sooner has she
said so to her own countrymen than she
turns to the Ban himself and fixes her
ransom price on him. It has four parts:
l) the Ban’s return of her brother Meho,
mounted on a good horse; 2) the Ban’s
sister Rose, also on a good mount; 3)
300 ducats as compensation to Meho for
his time in gaol; 4) the twelve other
Turkish prisoners out of the Ban’s
dungeon, delivered in new clothing of
the finest quality and seated on good
mounts. When he has agreed to this
price, Fatima releases the Ban under
oath to render payment in a week’s time.
Four thousand of the twenty-thousand-man Muslim
army have died in the battle, besides numerous
other casualties. Ali Agha of Novi and Luke
from Korjenički Buk present the Ban of Novi’s
white horse, which they have caught, to Fatima
as her property by right of conquest; but she
gives it back to them. All then return to
Udbina, where Fatima goes straight home to
her mother.
Next day, the foremost
warriors of the expedition decide that a
deposition must be sent to the Sultan in
Istanbul describing to him Fatima’s
exploit and her surpassing excellence in
warcraft. They advise Mustay Bey that they
intend to write and send it themselves,
since, they assume, he and the two Imperial
pashas won’t. But Mustay Bey assures them
that he himself wants nothing better, writes
a true account of Fatima’s remarkable deeds,
and adds to the deposition a special plea of
his own for the Sultan to confer privileges
and accord good treatment to the raya
as reward for their invaluable contribution
in quelling the two Bans’ oppressive power.
When the time comes for the Ban to pay his
ransom, Fata dresses in Muslim male disguise
once more and goes to Mustay Bey’s hall.
Not to be fooled a second time, he
recognizes her, and asks her to wait while
he makes himself ready. Then with a
thousand of the Bey’s guardsmen the two of
them go to meet the Ban. He honorably
delivers all the stipulated ransom for
himself, with an additional thousand ducats
as dowry for Rose. As the Turkish company
returns contentedly to Udbina, Fatima
reminds her brother Meho how in their
younger years she used to insist that she
was made of even better warrior-mettle than
he; now she has proven the truth of her
claim. Meho laughingly acknowledges her
right to the boast.
Mustay Bey presides over a weeklong
celebration at the Dizdar’s house, at the
end of which Rose accepts Islam and is
renamed Umija. Mustay Bey then journeys
to Istanbul to report to the Sultan
personally on the felicitous conclusion
of the matters set forth in his written
deposition. At court he finds Meho’s and
Fatima’s father, Dizdar Hasan Agha, to
whom he is able to narrate the entire
episode with the comforting assurance
that it has all turned out for the best.
The Sultan confers a high military rank
on Fatima in recognition of her valorous
deeds on behalf of the Empire.
The distinction between endogamic wife and sister
is exceedingly tenuous in this epic.
Some of the captive males who are liberated by
militant women in the group of modulations to
which this story belongs are like Žunić’s Zajim
Ali Bey: they end with two wives, one endogamous
and the other exogamous. But others, like
Bašić’s Ali Alagić, finally marry endogamously
after a second attempt that succeeds better
than the first; they nearly realize exogamous
marriages too, but for them exogamy ultimately
evaporates in the success of a hard-won endogamy.
More specifically, their endogamies are not old
ones, and hence may probably yield the desired
progeny in good time. For them, therefore,
exogamy is an unnecessary complication, and is
happily avoided at the last moment.
Perović’s poem no. 6 modulates the underlying
pattern yet again: here it is exogamy that finally
succeeds after repeated failures, while endogamy,
though there is but a single detail to prevent it,
is in the end not quite possible. Fatima
Dizdareva is Meho’s female coeval and housemate;
she refuses to contemplate any of three hundred
alternative paths to achieving her own happiness
in marriage apart from Meho, even after he has
expressly instructed her to marry away from him.
Quite to the contrary, she militantly insists
upon identifying her own fulfillment with his
marriage; and because her father will not help
her to liberate Meho, she is forced instead to
secure by cunning the assistance of other males
in her own age group.
She is, in short, everything that the militant
endogamous wife of the Lady Ali Bey type is in
other poems, modulated by only a single detail:
she is Meho’s sister, not his wife. Thus,
except for the barrier of the incest taboo,
Meho Dizdarević enjoys at the end of Perović’s
poem no. 6 not only a superb exogamy but an
almost perfect endogamic alliance too—an
endogamy prevented only by the peculiar fact
that were it to occur, it would be too
perfectly endogamic to be permissible. But
Meho’s exogamy is not an old or sterile one;
on the contrary, it is fresh and new, and so
it may probably yield the desired progeny in
good time. For him consequently endogamy
would be an unnecessary complication, and it
is happily averted in the end by Fatima’s
sisterhood.
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