Europe: A History (131 page)
Only solace of my heart and soul, my fairest, most beloved Marysienka!
Our Lord and God, Blessed of all ages, has brought unheard victory and glory to our nation. All the guns, the whole camp, untold spoils have fallen into our hands… There is enough powder and ammunition alone for a million men… The Vizir took such hurried flight that he had time to escape with only one horse… [The camp is] as extensive as the cities of Warsaw or of Lwow within their walls … I have all the tents, and cars,
et mille autres galanteries fort jolies et fort riches, mais fort riches
.… They abandoned their janissaries in the trenches, who were put to the sword during the night… They left behind a mass of innocent Austrian people, particularly women; but they butchered as many as they could… The Vizir had a marvellously beautiful ostrich … but this too he had killed… He had baths; he had gardens and fountains; rabbits and cats, and a parrot which kept flying about so that we could not catch it…
27
When Sobieski posted the green standard of the Prophet to the Pope, he appended Charles V’s comment after Mühlberg: ‘Veni, vidi, Deus Vicit’ (I came, I saw, God conquered).
The Ottoman retreat which began that day at Vienna continued by stages for the next 200 years. In the short term it inspired the leaders of the Holy League, organized by the Pope, to press on down the Danube into lands undisputed since crusading times. By the Peace of Carlowitz (1699) Hungary was returned to Austria, Podolia to Poland, Azov to Muscovy, and the Morea to Venice. In the long term it trapped the Ottomans’ European provinces between a concerted pincer movement, with the Habsburgs holding the line of their Military Frontier on the western flank and the Russians advancing relentlessly round the Black Sea on the eastern flank. In this regard the Austro-Russian treaty signed in 1726 played a long-standing strategic role (see Appendix III, p. 1284).
The fortunes of the Ottoman wars swung back and forth. In 1739 Austria was made to disgorge all the gains, including Belgrade, achieved at the earlier Treaty of Passarowitz (1718). But three extended Russo-Turkish Wars—in 1735–9, 1768–74, and 1787–92—left the entire northern coast of the Black Sea in Russian hands. The decisive Treaty of Kücük-Kainardji (1774) gave the Tsar a protectorate over all the Sultan’s Christian subjects, and commercial rights in the Ottoman Empire previously enjoyed only by the French. It marked the onset of the ‘Eastern Question’. Much of the Balkans, however, remained under Ottoman rule. The eighteenth century was a period of slowly rising national expectations, often among people whose first instinct was to support the Ottoman authorities.
Greece was brought into the political arena partly through a growing degree of autonomy, partly through Russian intervention. A class of Greek officials grew up, together with Greek schools to educate them. The tribute of children (the
devşirme)
fell into abeyance after 1676. Greek society became more consciously Greek. The Venetian presence in Corfu and, from 1699, in the Morea strengthened links with the West. In 1769 a Russian fleet sent to the Mediterranean against the Ottomans promised deliverance to Greece. The extension of Russian commercial privileges to Greek merchants was an important step.
Serbia was affected by similar developments. The battles over Belgrade, and the Austrian occupation of 1711–18, when many Serb volunteers flocked to the Habsburg colours, showed that the Ottomans were not invincible. Serbia’s Orthodox links with Russia were even closer than Greece’s. The activities of ‘Karađorđe’ or ‘Black George’ Petrović (1767–1817), who served both with Turkish brigands and with a Habsburg regiment, culminated in the rising of 1804–13 that was to bring the first taste of independence. A second rising in 1815–17 under Karađorđe’s assassin, Miloš Obrenović (1780–1860), was to pave the way for international recognition.
The two Romanian principalities, Moldavia and Wallachia, were ruled by the Porte through the medium of Phanariot Greeks—so-called from the Greek quarter of Phanar in Constantinople. The Phanariot regime, though corrupt and exploitative, encouraged immigration and Western cultural contacts. The Austrian seizure of Bukovina (1774) and still more the Russian occupations of 1769–74 and 1806–12 were catalysts of change. The notion of liberation from the Ottomans first gained ground among the dominant Greek minority.
Bulgaria suffered greatly from the passage of Ottoman armies, and from bands of deserters, known as
Krajlis
, who ravaged the countryside for decades. In 1794, one of the Krajli leaders, Pasvanoílu, established himself at Vidin on the Danube in a virtually independent robber republic. Like the Serbs, the Christian Bulgars looked increasingly towards Russia.
Albania fell into the hands of local tribal chieftains. One such chief, Mehemet of Bushat, founded a dynasty c.1760, which ruled upper Albania from Scutari for several generations. Another, Ali Pasha of Tepelen, carved out a fiefdom centred on Joanina, which stretched from the Adriatic to the Aegean,
[SHQIPERIA]
Crna Gora, which was known to the outside world by its Venetian name of ‘Montenegro’, was the only part of the Balkans to escape Ottoman rule. According to legend, when God created the earth a lot of rocks were left over; so He made Montenegro. Though the Turks occupied the capital, Cetinje, for short periods, they never held onto it. ‘A small army is beaten’, they said, ‘and a large army dies of starvation.’ From 1516 to 1696 Montenegro had been a theocratic state, ruled by monkish bishops. From 1696 until 1918 it was ruled by hereditary princes of the Petrović dynasty.
By the late eighteenth century, when the Balkan élites first began to dream about independence, they had been living under Ottoman rule for four to five centuries. The experience had left its mark. The Orthodox Church had made its accommodation long since, instilling in its subjects profoundly conservative and anti-Western attitudes. From the time of the Crusades, the Orthodox looked on the West as the source of a subjugation worse than that of the infidel. As a result, none of the great civilizing movements that shook the Western world— Renaissance, Reformation, Science, Enlightenment, Romanticism—could effectively penetrate the Balkan countries. Political traditions owed little to rationalism, absolutism, or constitutionalism; kinship politics dominated at all levels; nepotism lubricated by bribery was a way of life. ‘Power is a trough,’ ran the Turkish proverb, ‘and he who does not feed is a pig.’ The border of the shrinking enclave of what came to be called ‘Turkey-in-Europe’ formed one of Europe’s most deep-seated cultural fault-lines.
SHQIPERIA
A
LBANIA
(Shqiperia
, ‘Land of the Eagles’) can fairly claim to be the least , familiar of all European states. Sailing down the coast in the 1780s, Edward Gibbon wrote of ‘a country within sight of Italy which is less known than the interior of America’. Yet no country has suffered more from the whims of international politics.
The insurrection of 1911, which was to free Albania from Ottoman rule, accelerated the creation of the Balkan League made up of Albania’s Christian neighbours. All the League’s members, except Bulgaria, possessed territories containing important Albanian populations; and none was prepared to see a ‘Greater Albania’ in which all Albanians would have been united. The Treaty of London (May 1913), which ended the War of the Balkan League, recognized Albanian sovereignty. But it insisted on the delimitation of frontiers by an international commission, and the introduction of a Western-style monarchy. (See Appendix III, p. 1310.)
Albanian society was deeply divided both by social structure and by religion. The highland clans of the north, the Gheg, who lived by the law of the blood feud, had little in common with the lowlanders, or Tosk, of the south. Two-thirds of the inhabitants were Muslim. The remaining third was equally divided between Catholics and Orthodox. Important minorities included the Vlach-speaking pastoralists of the east, Italians in the coastal cities, and Greeks, who were accustomed to regard southern Albania as ‘northern Epirus’.
[GAGAUZ]
During the First World War Albania was invaded both by Serbia and by Greece. By the second Treaty of London (1915), with Italy, the Allied powers secretly promised to turn Albania into an Italian protectorate. The Albanian monarchy suffered a chequered fate. The first
Mpret
or King, Wilhelm von Wied (r. 1914) landed in March and fled in September. After the War, General Ahmet Zogu was established as State President of an Albanian Republic, only to have himself proclaimed King in 1926.
During the Second World War, Mussolini established the Italian protectorate promised a quarter of a century earlier. Albanian territory was extended to include the district of Kossovo; and Victor Emmanuel X was declared King. There was a brief German occupation in 1944–5.
The Albanian People’s Republic was set up in 1946 by a group of communist Tosk partisans, who had gained wartime ascendancy thanks to Western support. Their leader, Enver Hodzha, resigned all interest in the Albanians living in Montenegro, Kossovo, and Macedonia, retreating into almost total isolation behind the pre-war frontiers. Two hundred years after Gibbon, tourists in the Adriatic were still sailing or flying past Albania with the same feelings of wonder and incomprehension.
1
Once the Ottoman threat was repulsed, the fortunes of the Habsburgs revived. Leopold I (r. 1658–1705) did not live to see the humbling of Louis XTV; but his sons, Joseph I (r. 1705–11) and Charles VI (r. 1711–40), succeeded to an inheritance greatly enlarged in Hungary, Italy, and the Netherlands. The principal political crisis arose once again from a problem of succession, which caused the outbreak of a major Continental war. Charles VI, like the Spanish namesake whom he had once nominally succeeded, had no male heir. A narrow-minded bigot, he devoted much of his life to enforcing religious conformity and, by the Pragmatic Sanction, to ensuring the succession of his daughter, Maria Theresa. In the event, the imperial throne was seized on his death by Charles Albert, Elector of Bavaria, who as Charles VII (r. 1742–5) briefly reigned with French collusion as the only non-Habsburg emperor in 400 years. It then reverted to Maria Theresa’s husband, Francis I (r. 1745–65), Grand Duke of Tuscany, and their elder son, Joseph II (r. 1765–90). In effect, in her various capacities as Empress-consort, Emperor’s mother, or Queen of Bohemia and Hungary, Maria Theresa (1717–80) held sway in Vienna for 40 years. She was a woman of conscience and restraint, devoted among other matters to agrarian reform and the relief of the serf-peasantry. Joseph II, in contrast, was an impatient radical, ‘a crowned revolutionary’, a convinced anticlerical and opponent of noble privilege. Jozefism—the name given to his policy of asserting state power against the traditional pillars of Church and nobility—was one of the more thorough variants of enlightened despotism.
In this period, Austria developed a bureaucratic system that is sometimes called
cameralism
, that is, a system based on an élite caste of professional office-holders. Together with an expanded and reorganized military system, it provided the cement which was to keep the Habsburg monarchy going long after the demise of the Empire in Germany. The University of Vienna possessed a special faculty for the training of such civil servants, who passed straight into the higher echelons of finance, justice, and education. (The University of Halle did the same for Prussia.) These highly educated, well-paid, German-speaking and loyalist bureaucrats were entirely dependent on the monarch’s favour. They formed a solid buffer against the divergent interests of the nobility, the Church, and the nationalities, and led the drive for disinterested rationalization and reform.
In this (as it proved) its terminal phase, the cohesion of the Holy Roman Empire was greatly undermined by the separate dynastic policies of its leading princes. Just as the Habsburg emperors could rely on their lands and possessions
beyond the Empire, so increasingly could the Electors. From 1697 to 1763 the Wettins, Electors of Saxony, ruled as kings of Poland-Lithuania (see below). From 1701 the Hohenzollerns, Electors of Brandenburg, ruled as kings in Prussia (see below). From 1714 the Electors of Hanover ruled as kings of Great Britain (see above). Throughout the century the Wittelsbach Electors of Bavaria sought to enlarge their fortunes through their traditional alliance with France. Because of their varied connections, all the ‘capital cities’ of ‘Germany’—Vienna, Dresden, Berlin, Hanover, and Münich—assumed very different flavours. The last two emperors—Leopold II (r. 1790–2), Grand Duke of Tuscany, and Francis II (r. 1792–1806)—had little chance of saving their Empire from the revolutionary deluge which destroyed it.
[FREUDE]
Hungary, liberated from the Turks, fell victim to the despotic designs of its Habsburg liberators. In 1687 the 700-year-old elective monarchy was abolished. Hereditary Habsburg rulers turned the noble Diets into mere registers of royal decrees. The ancient ‘right of resistance’ of the Magyar nobles was eliminated. From 1704 to 1711 a widespread rebellion under Francis Rákóczi II succeeded in exploiting the Habsburgs’ preoccupations with Spain and with the Turks. Many of the ancient liberties were restored first by the Peace of Szátmár (1711) and later as the Magyars’ price for acceding to the Pragmatic Sanction. Here were the basic laws which prevailed until 1848. Hungary escaped the fate of neighbouring Bohemia. Still, the compromise was not an easy one. Maria Theresa ruled after 1764 without recourse to the Hungarian Diet; whilst Joseph II rode roughshod over all the constitutional formalities, omitting even to be crowned. In 1784, treating Austria and Hungary as one united state, he introduced German as the official language. The storms of protest were defused by Leopold II, who in 1791 reconfirmed Hungary’s separate status, together with the use of Latin and Magyar. The deep conservatism of Hungarian life, centred on the patronage of the magnates and the dietines of the counties, was strengthened by the repeated Turkish wars and by the ethnic and religious divisions. It may well have been prolonged by Maria Theresa’s agrarian reforms which, in the so-called Urbarium of 1767, ended the peasants’ adscription to the land and reduced their revolutionary temper. Her educational reforms, together with the founding of the University of Buda and the Magyar literary revival at the turn of the century, laid the seeds of modern national consciousness. In due course, the groundswell of Magyar nationalism was to awaken corresponding reactions among the Slovak, Croat, and Jewish minorities.