[6] Njegoš spent his early years in Njeguši shepherding his father's flock, playing the gusle (a traditional one-stringed instrument) and attending family and church celebrations where stories of battles and past suffering were told.

[13][nb 4] Most physical labors was done by women; entertainment consisted of contests exhibiting feats of strength and evenings spent listening to songs recounting heroic exploits to the accompaniment of the gusle.

Montenegrin territory consisted of four small districts (Turkish: nahiye), the most important of which was the Katuni nahiya with its nine tribes (Cetinje, Njeguši, Ćeklići, Bjelice, Cuce, Čevo, Pješivci, Zagarač, and Komani).

Though the privileges granted the highlanders were meant to allay public dissatisfaction in these poor but strategically vital regions on the Venetian border, by the late 16th century, they ended up having the opposite effect.

[23] Figures such as Milutinović, Stanko S. Petrović, iguman Mojsije Zečević, serdar Mikhail Bošković, and the headman of Čevo, Stefan Vukotić, supported Njegoš's bid and urged the council to immediately proclaim him the next vladika.

Vuko Radonjić's conflict with Njegoš took on both a personal and a political dimension, not only because their clans were traditional rivals but because the Petrovićes were ardently pro-Russian, largely due to ecclesiastical ties between the vladika and the Russian Most Holy Synod.

[28][nb 5] Radonjić had failed to win over the chieftains; historian Barbara Jelavich asserts that the vast majority of chiefs backed the Petrovićes solely because they saw an ecclesiastical leader like Njegoš as posing less of a threat to their own power.

The relationship between the two countries was motivated by the Montenegrins' need to have a powerful ally who could provide political and financial support to their fledgling nation and Russia's desire to exploit Montenegro's strategic location in its ongoing geopolitical battle with Austria.

As Vukotić, Grujić and Njegoš all realized, without taxes the country had no chance of functioning as a centralized state, let alone one which could raise an independent army or survive without needing to rely on plunder or Russian charity.

As such, he chose to have his consecration occur in Saint Petersburg out of political necessity, as he desperately needed the czar to bend church canons in his favour in order to acquire total legitimacy at home and brush aside any theological objections.

"[41] The czar promised Njegoš that Russia would intervene on Montenegro's behalf as if it were one of its own gubernias, while the Holy Synod vowed to provide all the necessary equipment and funds needed to maintain regular religious services in the country.

As honour demanded, Njegoš sent a force led by his teenage brother Joko and his nephew Stevan to rescue the hostages while Ali Pasha was in Gacko waiting for reinforcements to address the Montenegrin advance.

They were initially successful in rescuing one of the imprisoned clan leaders and his followers, but were overwhelmed by the combined forces of Ali Pasha, Trebinje's Osman Pasha-beg and the cavalry reinforcements of Smaïl-aga Čengić in what became known as the Battle of Grahovo.

Grahovo's inhabitants fled to the Austrian-held territory on the Adriatic coast, but after being refused sanctuary, they were forced to return to the ruined town, swear an oath of loyalty to the Sultan and beg for forgiveness from the vizier.

[38] He promoted a pan-Serb identity among his people, persuading Montenegrins to show solidarity with Serbia and stop wearing the fez, a Turkish hat that was commonly worn throughout the Balkans by Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

Displeased by this state of affairs, and irritated by German press reports that described Montenegro as "primitive", Njegoš ordered the construction of a secular dwelling that was to serve as both a royal palace and seat of government.

Located just northeast of the Cetinje Monastery, and facing east towards Constantinople, it was soon dubbed the Biljarda, after the central room on the second floor which contained a billiard table that Njegoš had ordered transported to Montenegro from the Adriatic coast.

When Njegoš realized that its location was unsuitable for a fortress, he ordered that its construction be abandoned, and it was converted into a tower where the heads of decapitated Turkish warriors were impaled on spears and left exposed to the elements.

In early 1839, Njegoš sent a delegation consisting of Daković, vojvoda Radovan Piper, reverend Stevan Kovačević and several others to Bosnia to ascertain the exact amount that the people of Grahovo would be paying to the Sultan.

As Smaïl-aga's son-in-law, he blamed the Montenegrins for his grisly death, and also wished to follow in the footsteps of his father, Suleiman Pasha, who had played a key role in crushing the First Serbian Uprising in 1813.

Njegoš's travels to Austria and Italy exposed him to many of the concepts that eventually formed the backbone of the Illyrianist movement, notably that all South Slavs share common cultural and linguistic traits and are, as such, one people.

Painfully aware that Montenegro did not have a single trained physician, he travelled to Kotor in the spring and composed his last will and testament, intending for it to prevent the power struggle that had preceded his own accession to the position of vladika.

Not wishing for a monument to the Austrian Emperor to be located on the same perch as a symbol of South Slavic national feeling, Austro-Hungarian authorities demanded that Njegoš's remains be moved back to Cetinje.

He began writing poetry at the age of seventeen, and his literary opus includes Glas kamenštaka (The Voice of a Stone-Cutter; 1833), Lijek jarosti turske (The Cure for Turkish Fury; 1834), Ogledalo srpsko (The Serbian Mirror; 1835), Luča mikrokozma (The Ray of the Microcosm; 1845), Gorski vijenac (The Mountain Wreath; 1847), Lažni car Šćepan mali (The False Tsar Stephen the Little; 1851) and, posthumously, Slobodijada (The Freedom Song; 1854).

Multiple scholars have also noted similarities between the chorus of Ancient Greek tragedies and that of Gorski vijenac (the kolo, which represents the collective voice of Montenegro's inhabitants, reflecting their hopes, fears and desires.)

The epic also features similar character roles, such as that of the pensive ruler (Danilo), the hero (Vuk Mandušić), the blind prophetic monk (iguman Stefan) and the lamenting woman (Batrić's sister).

Following the establishment of a common South Slav state in 1918, scholars reinterpreted Njegoš in a Yugoslav light, despite some of his writings being decidedly anti-Muslim and having the potential to alienate Yugoslavia's Muslim citizens, who formed about ten percent of the new country's population.

[80] During the interwar period, future Nobel Prize winner Ivo Andrić wrote extensively about Njegoš and his works, and published several papers on the vladika's poetry after the war, as well.

[81] A former politician and leading Marxist theoretician, Djilas wrote a lengthy study of Njegoš's life and works in the late 1950s while serving a prison sentence after a row with Yugoslavia's communist leadership.

Thus, Djilas concludes that the Christmas Day massacre is either entirely fictional or that the elimination of Montenegrin Muslims occurred in stages over a long period of time, as opposed to a single atrocity eradicating them all.