The Balkans: A Short History (10 page)

If conversion was the prerequisite for individual advancement and a career in government, Islamicization on a mass scale was observable only in a few areas of the Balkans. In Thrace and Macedonia, the first provinces conquered by the Ottomans, villagers from Anatolia were resettled among the Christian inhabitants. But imperial resettlement was not the most important force for Islamicization: in Bosnia, in parts of Bulgaria and later in Cyprus, Albania and Crete, Christian peasants converted in substantial numbers and often en masse. From Bulgaria we read that “all the unbelievers in a village have converted to Islam.” “All the inhabitants of a big village of unbelievers have gradually converted to Islam,” begins another Ottoman
fatwa,
decreeing the building of a new mosque to serve the community. “More than 40,000 people abandoned Christianity,” the bishop of Zagreb wrote in alarm in November 1536. “More and more people are doing so, hoping they will enjoy more peaceful times in what remains of their lives.”
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Mass conversion continued into the late Ottoman period. In Albania, Christians adopted Islam in the eighteenth century. Around the Drina valley, a traveler in the middle of the nineteenth century observed that the mostly Roman Catholic villagers “have been so persecuted of late years that a large number have become Mussulmans.”
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A compelling argument for conversion was the second-class status of non-Muslims in the Ottoman world. Christians (and Jews) were tolerated as “people of the Book,” but they faced discrimination and ill treatment on the grounds of their religion: they were not allowed to ride horses, wear the color green or build churches above a certain height. Their word counted for less than that of a Muslim in Ottoman courts, and they bore heavier taxes, supposedly for not performing military service. Despite these hardships, however, the Balkans retained their predominantly Christian and non-Turkish-speaking character; this stood in sharp contrast to the Ottoman domains in Anatolia, where Turkish and Islam came to prevail over the long centuries from the Seljuk domination onward.
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In Ottoman Europe the vast bulk of the population—probably around 80 percent—remained Christian. Even where Islam made inroads into the countryside, it rarely carried the Turkish language along with it: Bosnian Muslims still spoke their native Slavic; the Muslim Ali Pasha of Jannina spoke Albanian and Greek but not Turkish; the Muslim peasants of Crete spoke Greek and enjoyed the Erotokritos, the island’s epic poem, as much as the Christians, from whom, after all, most of them were descended. Outside the original heartlands around Edirne, the Turkish language in the Balkans remained an administrative lingua franca confined to urban centers. Cities like Bosna Seraj, Skopje and Sofia were heavily Islamic and Turkish-speaking islands of imperial governance in a mostly Christian sea—much as German-speaking cities functioned in Slavic eastern Europe at the same time.
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If the Balkans did not become another Islamic land, one reason was that the sultans had no interest in making this happen. Christians paid higher taxes, and mass conversion would have impoverished the empire. “Very many [Greeks],” reported seventeenth-century travelers, “unable to bear any longer this cruel tyranny, wish to turn Turk; but many are rejected, because (say their lords), in receiving them into the Moslem faith, their tribute would be so much reduced.” Less material factors also played a part. On the two occasions (in 1517 and again in 1647) when the Porte seriously considered the forced Islamicization of the Balkan Christians, there was religious opposition to the idea on Koranic grounds. In general, there was no Muslim analogue to the widespread Christian impulse to drive out the infidel and the heretic. On the contrary, Islamic law prescribed the toleration of Christian and Jewish communities of believers. It prohibited Muslims from converting to other religions, but did not insist upon conversion in the other direction. Indeed many a convert was obliged to demonstrate that the desire to embrace the true faith was not prompted by materialistic or ignoble motives.

For Orthodoxy, therefore, Islamic rule was far less damaging than Roman Catholic. Catholic armies had brought destruction to Balkan Christians in the crusades of 1204 and 1444; Venetian rule had been harsh and repressive in Crete and the Peloponnese. After the brief occupation of Chios by the Venetians in 1694, islanders said “they were better off under the Turks.” “I’d rather turn Turk than join you Latins who hate and persecute us,” an Orthodox monk told a Catholic missionary in 1641. In fact, Orthodox–Catholic relations were often more harmonious inside the empire than outside: in the seventeenth-century Cyclades, for instance, where there was a small Catholic population, Catholics and Orthodox islanders often attended each other’s services and built adjacent churches. As late as 1749, the Orthodox patriarchate reprimanded the folk of Sifnos and Mikonos for failing to recognize any difference between the two rites. But on the whole few peasants converted from Orthodoxy to Catholicism, despite the activity of Jesuits and other missionaries across the Balkans. Turkish rule tilted the balance of power between patriarchate and papacy in favor of the former, not least because the patriarchate—unlike the papacy—was a servant of the Porte.
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In the middle of the eighteenth century, a dispute over appointments in Antioch suddenly brought home to the Patriarch the dangers of too relaxed an attitude toward Catholic activity in the empire. It was at this point that—in parallel with the Porte’s own efforts at administrative reform—the Ecumenical Patriarchate tightened its control over the community of believers, laying the basis for that system of centralized ecclesiastical rule which would come to be known as the “millet” system. In looser fashion, however, the Orthodox Church had been brought into the system of Ottoman government much earlier, at least from the time when Sultan Mehmed II established new guidelines for the administration of his Christian “flock” (
re’aya
). Christians, like Jews, were recognized as
zimmi
(a protected people) permitted to govern themselves according to their own customs, provided that they remained loyal and paid their taxes. The Orthodox patriarchs—preeminent among them the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople—were guarantors on both counts and over time came to be regarded as the heads of “the groups of the infidel.” In return, they received the authority to tax the Orthodox flock for communal purposes, and to administer justice to Christians through Church courts. Their representatives enjoyed official privileges, such as the use of Turkish soldiers to accompany them when collecting taxes. The Sultan thus handed the Church hierarchy a new role; in addition to the spiritual functions it had carried out in the Byzantine world, it was now gradually drawn into politics and administration as a voice for the empire’s Orthodox subjects.
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In this way, the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans, far from crushing Christian Orthodoxy, brought it many advantages, as both the patriarchate and its enemies and rivals realized. After the chaos of the final fragmented phase of Byzantine rule, the Church was now able to recover and indeed expand its power both in the Balkans and in Anatolia. Thanks to the Turks, it was largely freed from the threat of Catholicism presented by the Venetians and the Genoese in the eastern Mediterranean. Ottoman power in effect unified the Balkans for the first time in centuries. In the late sixteenth century it was reported from the Ottoman capital that the Christians there “do not want any other domination in preference to the Turks.” And when Turkish troops reconquered the Peloponnese from the Venetians in 1715, the Greek peasants welcomed and supported them.
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Ottoman rule was bringing Balkan Christians not only religious autonomy but increasing prosperity as well. Right from the start, Christian control of some revenue collecting allowed a few individuals to amass extraordinary wealth. In the fifteenth century, Michael Kantakuzinos, a maker and breaker of patriarchs, was said to consort with pashas and viziers and to be addressed by them in terms of respect. Later, Orthodox merchants took advantage of the collapse of old trading rivals like Venice and the opening up of new markets in central Europe and southern Russia. They built fortunes in trade and created a substantial shipping fleet. Moneyed and Western-educated Greek families in Constantinople—known as Phanariots, after the area of the city where they resided—became go-betweens at the highest levels of the Ottoman administration, and started to dominate the lay offices of the patriarchate. Greek dragomans (translators) played crucial roles in negotiating the Venetian surrender of Crete in the mid-seventeenth century as well as at the 1698 peace conference of Carlowitz with the Habsburgs, where the remarkable Alexandros Mavrokordatos served alongside the main negotiator, Rami Mehmed Efendi. Mavrokordatos’s son was appointed prince in the Danubian autonomous provinces, the first of those Greek princes who, during the eighteenth century, turned Bucharest and Jassy into centers of Hellenic learning and culture, a crucial intersection of Ottoman, Russian, Italian and central European influences. Greek Christians by birth, Ottoman by allegiance and through self-interest, the Phanariots were, in the refined and ambiguous words of one of their most illustrious figures, “as Greek as it is possible to be.” Being Greek, for them, meant prestige, wealth and glory in the imperial service of the Sultan. “We conform to the prescription of the Gospel, ‘Render unto Caesar’s the things which are Caesar’s,’ ” Alexandros Mavrokordatos wrote. “It is not the custom of us Christians to confuse what is temporary and corruptible with what is divine and eternal.”
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When it came to corruption, the Phanariots had experience. Their rise coincided with growing financial and ethical problems inside the patriarchate. In the century after 1495 there were just nineteen changes of patriarch; the following century there were sixty-one. The Church became notoriously corrupt as its highest offices were bought and sold through huge bribes to Ottoman officials. The money, often borrowed by candidates for office from wealthy Phanariots, could be recouped only through the Church’s taxation of Christian peasants. Growing centralization under the Ecumenical Patriarch increased the resources at stake and probably made the problem worse. “A saying common among the Greek peasants,” according to a British traveler, was that “the country labors under three curses, the priests, the
cogia bashis
[local Christian notables] and the Turks, always placing the plagues in this order.” In nineteenth-century Bosnia, “The Greek Patriarch takes good care that these eparchies shall be filled by none but Fanariots, and thus it happens that the . . . Orthodox Christians of Bosnia, who form the majority of the population, are subject to ecclesiastics alien in blood, in language, in sympathies, who oppress them hand in hand with the Turkish officials and set them, often, an even worse example of moral depravity.” The reason was clear: “They have to send enormous bribes yearly to the fountainhead.” This story of extortion and corruption spelled the end of the old Orthodox ecumenicism, created bitterness between the Church and its flock and, where the peasants were not Greek speakers, provoked a sense of their exploitation by the “Greek” Church that paved the way for Balkan nationalism.
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Yet even while corruption was eating into the institutions of the Church, there flourished a world of Balkan Orthodoxy whose horizons stretched from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea, from northern Italy to Russia. The freedom of movement and thought possible for educated and mobile Christians in this Orthodox Balkan commonwealth can be traced in the careers and travels of men such as Iossipos Mosiodax, a distinguished pedagogue and scholar, who was by origin a Vlach from the southern bank of the Danube in present-day Romania. Born in 1725, he was educated and hellenized at schools in Salonika, Smyrna and Mount Athos before studying at Padua and then teaching at the princely academies of Jassy and Bucharest, the centers of Greek learning in the Balkans. Having also traveled to Venice, Vienna and Budapest, he claimed to have seen “all the diasporas of the Greeks.” His contemporary, Constantine Dapontes, was born on the island of Skopelos, educated in Constantinople and traveled widely in Ottoman lands. In 1757 Dapontes began an eight-year journey across the Balkans carrying the True Cross of his monastery. He sailed from Athos, and crossed future Bulgarian lands to reach the Danube and Moldavia before returning south to Constantinople—thereby saving the city from a plague, according to his own account, which was raging elsewhere—and returning in triumph to the Holy Mountain in 1765.

Dapontes’s peregrinations took place in a world in which his “homeland” was his native island; the term “Greece” had no political or territorial meaning for him. Southeastern Europe was a region marked out not by nation-states but by the symbols of Orthodoxy. Time was measured by the rhythms of the Eastern Church rather than by any secular sense of history. The divine and the supernatural were omnipresent in daily life. Yet Balkan Orthodoxy also had its material rewards: sweet wines from Sámos and Cyprus, pistachios from Aleppo, figs from Smyrna, apples from Moldavia and Wallachian cheeses. When the historian Christopher Dawson asked why it was that the Byzantine empire, unlike the papacy in the West, failed to consolidate its cultural-religious hold in its part of Europe, he missed the point that a Byzantine culture
did
continue to evolve—under the guidance of Orthodoxy and Ottoman imperial rule. It evolved in the stilted writings of the Greek Phanariots of the Sultan’s capital, who oscillated between fidelity to the Porte and hopes for a rebirth of the Byzantine empire, but who remained throughout pious supporters of Orthodoxy and hellenism. And it evolved in the hands of a church intellectual like Eugenios Voulgaris—perhaps the most important figure of late-eighteenth-century Orthodoxy—who was educated in his native Corfu (under Venetian rule), in Turkish Jannina and at the University of Padua, before bringing his teachings to Athos, Constantinople and eventually to the Russia of Catherine the Great, to whom he preached the dangers of a new Catholic advance into eastern Europe.
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