The Balkans: A Short History (12 page)

Conversion offered Christian women trapped in unhappy marriages particular advantages. By converting to Islam, they automatically obtained an annulment of their marriage, unless their Christian spouse converted too. There was a special formula for this. “Cako was honored with Islam in the presence of Muslims,” a
cadi
court heard, “and she took the name Fatma. Her husband was offered a chance to go to Islam but he declined.” In a similar case, a woman named Fatma bint Abdullah registered her conversion to Islam, and it was noted that “my husband Yanno bin Manolya was invited to submit to Islam but he did not become a Muslim. He acknowledges that he has no claim against Fatma.” It is striking that Muslim marriages too were affected by the merest suggestion of apostasy. As we read in an eighteenth-century Islamic legal compendium:

QUESTION: Zeyd and his wife Hind go to church and approve certain actions of the infidels, which entail unbelief. Must Zeyd and Hind undergo a renewal of Faith and a renewal of marriage? ANSWER: Yes.
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In an article written in 1993, Samuel Huntington, an American political scientist, discerned in the war in Bosnia a “clash of civilizations” and situated the Balkans on one of the global fault lines of this clash. Whatever the merits of this as a vision of the future, it must now be evident that it cannot serve as a model of the region’s past. The Ottoman state and its religious leaders marked out clear distinctions among Islam, Orthodoxy and Catholicism; but in daily life these distinctions were less pronounced. In this border zone in the Eurasian balance of power, many potential frictions, whether indigenous or brought in by outsiders, were blunted or defused by shared local practices.

Customs evolved to offer security and insurance across the religious divides. In the ceremony of blood brotherhood, young men of different families, and even different religions, swore loyalty to each other. From Livno—where Venetian, Habsburg and Ottoman power collided—we have a Turkish account of a battle in the mid-seventeenth century that ended with the capture of numerous Christian prisoners. When, as was customary, the victorious pasha ordered the execution of his share of the captives, one of his own soldiers pleaded for the life of one of the prisoners to be spared. Asked for an explanation, the soldier replied: “During the battle, I gave this infidel my religion and I took his. We have claimed each other as brothers. If you kill him he will go to paradise with my religion and it will be too bad for poor me.” When the bewildered pasha turned to his other troops, they clarified the custom for him:

When one of our yunaks [auxiliary soldiers] on these frontiers falls captive to the infidels, while eating and drinking with them, one infidel may pledge to save him from captivity, and the Muslim, too, promises to rescue him from the Turks if he falls captive to us. They make a pact, saying: “Your religion is mine and my religion is yours.” They lick each other’s blood and the infidel and the Muslim become “brothers in religion.” . . . True, nothing of this sort is found in the books of the Muslims, or of the infidels. Nevertheless, this heresy is quite common in these frontier regions.

The disgusted pasha set both men free.
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The blurring of the divide among the three great monotheistic faiths was a feature of one of the fastest-growing religious movements of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Balkans—the strain of Islamic mysticism known as Bektashism. Bektashi doctrine, counterposed to the formal hierarchies of Sunni Islam, asserted that “a saint belongs to the whole world.” According to a late-nineteenth-century pamphlet, “The Bektashi believe in the Great Lord and in the true saints Mohammed Ali, Kadije, Fatima, and Hasan and Husain. . . . They also believe in all the saints, both ancient and modern, because they believe in Good and worship it. And as they believe in these and love them, so also do they in Moses and Miriam and Jesus and their servants.” The Bektashi adapted Christian saints’ shrines and renamed them after their own; other sites, which genuinely were founded by the Bektashi, were visited by Christians as sanctuaries of their saints. In such a setting, religious boundaries dissolved easily. “I thought you were all Moslems here,” a British traveler asked the priests at one Bektashi
tekke.
“So we are,” they told her, “but of course we keep Saint George’s Day.” Linked for centuries to the slave converts at the Ottoman court, Bektashism spread throughout southeastern Europe with the empire and became popular in much of southern Albania, where it remains entrenched even after the fall of communism.
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Albania was perhaps a special case from the point of view of religion. “We Albanians have quite peculiar ideas,” one notable told Edith Durham. “We will profess any form of religion which leaves us free to carry a gun. Therefore the majority of us are Moslems.” “The light way religion hangs on an Albanian” was familiar to many in the nineteenth century, but leaving the “world of ignorance” of “the infidel religion” for “the true faith” was for many in the Ottoman world a less momentous or sudden step than it has come to seem to us, for whom conversion summons up images of apostasy, existential angst and personal and national betrayal. Movement into a new faith was often an accretion of new beliefs to older ones rather than an act of renunciation and immersion. Indeed, converts frequently preserved older religious practices and habits, though they often had to keep these secret, to avert the suspicion that their attachment to Islam was not entirely sincere: they painted red eggs at Easter, while Muslim converts from Judaism—the mysterious Donmeh—were said to preserve their old religious practices in the privacy of their homes.
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The uses of secrecy also lay behind the custom of double naming, in which a Suleiman turns out also to be known as Constantine, Hussein as Giorgi. A double name allowed one to dodge between inconvenient official categories, also serving to keep a man’s real name hidden: Franciscan priests in Albania threw up their hands in horror when their charges persisted in calling themselves not by the baptismal Christian name, but by an assumed Muslim one, but the young men who did this could not be brought to abandon the practice. What better way, they urged in self-defense, to prevent a witch laying a curse on one than concealing one’s real name? Whether against sorcery, or tax farmers or in some cases against the investigators of the Venetian Inquisition, multiple names were a weapon of the weak against the strong, of the private individual against the greater powers of the divine and the secular world. Revelation of one’s real name thus marked a decisive moment of individual assertion against power. The life of Saint Elias preserves the fateful conversation that preceded his martyrdom. Having been led to embrace Islam, as we are told, by his desire to escape heavy taxation, the saint is asked: “Are you not Moustafa Ardouris?” “Yes, it is I,” he replied. “But I am not Moustafa, rather I am Elias, the Orthodox Christian.”
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The boundaries among religions were not completely permeable, however, and coexistence did not mean toleration. “The Armenian (and the Greek) were dogs and pigs . . . to be spat upon,” notes a British ethnographer in the late nineteenth century. Even before then, members of the ruling religion were often contemptuous in daily speech of the “infidel dogs.” Travelers were impressed by the variety of insults in general use:

Pera is called the hog’s quarter, perhaps because contrary to the custom of the Turks, the Franks inhabiting it eat hog’s flesh; and the Turkish soldiers (who are appointed to attend on foreign ambassadors) are termed swine herds. They call the Italians, people of a thousand colors, that is to say, cheats; the English, linendrapers; the French knaves; the Germans roistering swearers; the Spaniards, idlers; the Russians cursed ones, the Poles chattering infidels, the Venetians fishermen, the Wallachians rats, the Moldavians sheep without horns or stupid boors, the Greeks hares, the Armenians dirt eaters, the Jews dogs, the Arabians silly fellows, the Persians red-heads or heretics, the Tartars carrion-eaters.

“Abdi called me infidel, son of an infidel,” complained Mustafa bin Mehmed in a seventeenth-century Ottoman court, outraged at suffering the kind of abuse routinely inflicted upon the “false believers.” “Mehmed [Bey] called me a Jew,” asserted another.
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Christians could not so easily complain. Their second-class status was brought home in the widespread conversion of many of their churches into mosques. They rarely obtained permission to build new churches, especially in areas inhabited also by Muslims, and they could not ring church bells in such areas but had to call the faithful by beating wooden boards with clappers. (“In Servia [
sic
],” a French traveler from the Levant noted in 1836, “the Christian religion is entirely unrestricted. We were agreeably surprised by the sounds of bells which we had not heard for so long.”) But even this was sometimes regarded as a provocative demonstration of “infidelity” and banned.
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In the countryside, the differences between Muslim and Christian were not hidden, and the two communities lived side by side. Nor were their daily interactions always characterized by tension or conflict. A Bulgarian memoir of life in the 1870s recollected:

Turks and Bulgarians got on well together. The women of a village quarter bordering on Turkish houses mixed with the Turkish women in a neighborly way, while the children played with the little Turks as with their own playmates. The Turkish women and children spoke Bulgarian quite well and the Bulgarians, like their children, managed to get by in Turkish, the result being a sort of mixed patois. Those Turks who worked at Bulgarian houses were accepted as close friends. . . . We were used to the Turks. We Bulgarians lived our own life, to be sure, we had our own dress, our own customs and stuck to our own faith, while they lived another way, had other customs and other costume, their faith was different too. But all this we took as being in the order of things.
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In the cities, where the Muslim presence was stronger, the dynamics of interaction were often rather different, marked by concentrations of rumor, of fanaticism and of violence against non-Muslims. Constantinople was a dangerous place for non-Muslims until the early nineteenth century; at Ramadan they kept off the streets if they were prudent. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the janissaries often attacked Christians and Jews with impunity. After the elimination of the janissary corps, this threat declined and modernization brought the emergence of a new, shared bourgeois culture, which again ran across religious boundaries. For the first time, patterns of settlement in the larger urban areas were based on class rather than religion. The houses of prosperous Christians, which before the liberalizing Tanzimat reforms usually had a deliberately unprepossessing exterior so as not to attract attention, became more grand and ostentatious in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. Muslims, Christians and Jews mingled in the labor unions, guilds and bourgeois clubs of Salonika. Class distinctions may not have effaced religious categories, but they created other bonds of solidarity and interest.

Or might have done had the empire appeared more stable. The condition of intercommunal relations was a matter of time as well as space. The rise of Catholic Austria and Orthodox Russia brought new tensions to the empire’s religions. Relations between the Orthodox and Catholic Church worsened markedly from the middle of the eighteenth century; earlier they had been surprisingly cordial and cooperative. And in the nineteenth century, of course, the emergence of Greek and Serbian nationalist movements challenged Ottoman attitudes toward Orthodoxy. Hence the moment of apparent constitutional liberalism in the empire was also that of growing Muslim unease at Christian hostility. Hundreds of thousands of embittered Tartar and Circassian refugees, fleeing Russia’s advance to the Black Sea, arrived in Ottoman lands and settled in the Danubian provinces and Bulgaria.

In particular, the reign of Abdul Hamid II from 1876 saw the Ottoman reaction against Western meddling in the empire’s affairs. The 1876 constitution defined Islam as the “religion of state,” and increasingly popular and official anger against Great Power intervention took the form of mob violence, which exploded in massacres of Armenians in 1895 and Greek Christians on Crete the following year. As a recent historian has remarked, the Ottomans interpreted the Western demand for “freedom of religion” as freedom to defend their religion from the insult of Christian disrespect. The decline of Ottoman power intensified the sense of defensiveness among Muslims in this newly assertive Christian world. Modernity was thus sharpening the religious boundaries between communities in the last phase of imperial rule and giving them a new political edge.
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The older attitudes that were disappearing are evoked in the story of the martyrdom of a seventeenth-century bishop of Larissa. “Being of evil mind and evil conduct,” we are told, he “was beguiled by the words and promises of certain Europeans and with the cooperation of the devil, and having gathered a sufficient multitude, he declared war upon the Turks, who reigned then. . . . After a short space of time he was captured and paid the just price of his deeds, being miserably put to death by the Turks, with the permission of God, he having done that which was unworthy of his calling.”
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This story describes a world of rebellious Christian bishops and merciless Turks. But the Christian cleric is not a hero in the eyes of the (Christian) narrator, as he would be to later nationalist historians; he is a man led astray by the devil. The Turks may be cruel, but they kill the bishop in accordance with God’s will. This story does not, then, describe a society free of conflict or religious antagonism. It depicts a violent and restless world, but also a world where Christians owe loyalty to a Muslim state, above all where human action is still understood in religious, not national terms.