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way for the Turkish conquest, and the obscure battles in the Bosna and Drina valleys formed the prelude to the fatal day of Kossovo and the bondage of the South-Slavonic race. The Banus Kotroman died in 1353, and was succeed by his nephew, Stephen Tvrtko, who was the first King of Bosnia. He too was friendly to the Ragusans, and granted them important privileges.
    The conditions of Venice in the middle of the fourteenth century were far from prosperous. The plague of 1348 had carried off three-fifths of the population, in spite of the most stringent precautions.1 In 1350 the fratricidal war with Genoa was again renewed in consequence of disputes about the Black Sea trade. The battle of the Bosporus (1353) was indecisive; in that of Cagliari the Venetians were successful, but dared not attack Genoa, because the city had placed itself under the protection of the Visconti. But in the same year they were totally defeated at Sapienza in the Greek Archipelago and their whole fleet captured. In 1354 the conspiracy of Marin Faliero broke out, and kept the whole State in a turmoil for many months, until the execution of the Doge and his accomplices.2 His successor, Giovanni Gradenigo, made peace with Genoa, and the Venetians set to work to rebuild their fleet and restore their exhausted treasury by means of new commercial enterprises in the Levant. But their possession of Dalmatia and the land frontier north of Treviso were now threatened by Lewis of Hungary. The latter allied himself with the Count of Gorizia and the Carraresi of Padua against Venice, and invaded the Trevisan march, 1 Horatio Brown, Venice, p. 196.	2 Ibid., pp. 198-205.