who made up nearly half of Bosnia and Herzegovina's rural population at the time. During this period, Kočić was one of the two primary proponents of agrarian reform in the province, alongside Lazar Dimitrijević. Kočić also went about agitating against the Muslim landowning class. The Muslim landlords became one of the primary targets of his speeches, second only to the Austro-Hungarians. "Every kmet'''s income is taxed," Kočić complained, "while people in towns do not pay any taxes on the interest they get on their money in the banks nor do the feudal lords pay taxes on the one third they obtain from the kmets." Kočić's movement was one of four Bosnian Serb parties in the Sabor, and the only one representing the Serb peasantry. The other three represented city-dwelling Serb nationalists, pan-Slavic Serbs, and pro-Habsburg Serbs. The historian Ivo Banac describes Kočić's followers as "the most uncompromising anti-Austrian Serb nationalists in Bosnia-Herzegovina." Kočić and his followers also had extensive ties to Mlada Bosna (Young Bosnia), a South Slav nationalist student movement calling for an end to Austro-Hungarian rule. By 1912, the strains of politics were beginning to take a toll on Kočić's mental health, and he vacated his position on the Administrative and Cultural Council the following year. He spent the subsequent months at a resort near Mount Ivan, in central Bosnia, but the state of his mental health remained poor. In January 1914, Kočić was admitted to a Belgrade mental hospital, where he died on 27 August 1916, amid the chaos of World War I and the city's occupation by Austria-Hungary. By some accounts, Kočić committed suicide, but this has been denied by his family. He was survived by his wife Milka and daughter Dušanka, who went on to become a professor. The couple also had a son, Slobodan, who predeceased his father. Kočić's remains were buried at Belgrade's New Cemetery. Style and themes Like those of his contemporaries Aleksa Šantić, Vladimir Ćorović and Jovan Dučić, Kočić's writings were greatly influenced by the Nemanjić-Byzantine literary tradition, which was mainly taken up by Serb writers, and primarily dealt with themes from Serbian history, such as the medieval Serbian Empire and the Battle of Kosovo. His stories all bespeak the social and political beliefs to which he adhered. His primary sources of inspiration were Serbian epic poetry and Njegoš's Gorski vijenac (The Mountain Wreath; 1847). Kočić's works were written in his