64 KINDS AND DATES

discover their 'politic' metre in much use at that date. By way of
contrast, the ballads of the mainland are rather late. Those of an
historical cast open with a fragment on a siege of Adrianople,
which may be the siege of 1361; then follow some laments for the
fall of Constantinople in 1453, and for other disasters of that kind;
but the full flow of historical ballads only begins with the klephts
of the seventeenth century and later. Among the adventure ballads,
also, there is a marked Anatolian priority.

Yugoslav men's songs (junacke pesme) are older than the
'tragoudia' of the mainland Greeks, but younger than those of
Asia Minor. The oldest strata concern the disaster at Kosovo in
1389; they are the Kosovo ballads proper, and the ballads of Marko
Kraljevic, who was a contemporary of the battle. M. Braun1
believes that one ballad report was heard by the Russian pilgrim
Ignatil in that very year. It is, at any rate, virtually certain that the
substance of such ballads was rendered into Italian towards the end
of the fifteenth century, and also into Polish; while there are bal-
lad traces in Constantine the Philosopher's life of Despot Stepan
Lazarevic, composed in 1431-2. There is no evidence of 'junacke
pesme* before the great disaster. Women's songs are a century
older, but they also had a definite beginning. As for the neigh-
bouring countries, existing Bulgarian ballads are younger than the
Serbian, and Rumanian historical ballads began under Serbian
influence in the sixteenth century.

Russian 'byliny* are more difficult to date. The Thidrekssaga
acknowledges *Ilias jarl af Greka* among well-known epic heroes
of the thirteenth century, though the reference is not such as to
exclude the chance that his name appeared in poems unlike the
extant 'byliny'. Il'ja of Murom is unhistoric. There are various
suggested prototypes of Dobrynja Nikitic and Aljosa Popovic, and
the two most plausible perished at the rout on the Kalka in 1224.
The ballad Vladimir combines the characteristics of the tenth- and
eleventh-century princes of that name, but the wife assigned to
him (Apraksia) was one of Batu's victims in 1237. In the Novgorod
cycle, Vasili? Buslaevic was, doubtless, the governor Vaska Bus-
laevic mentioned in the chronicle for 1171. The historical assur-
ance is marred by the statement in the ballad that his father lived
900 years. The principal names mentioned in Russian 'byliny' are
thus historic, but their adventures are wholly fantastical, and suit
1 M. Braun, Kosovo: die Schlacht auf dem Amselfelde, Leipzig, 1937.