The Balkans: A Short History (16 page)

The emergence of Bulgaria was relatively late—in the wake of the last Russian invasion into Ottoman Europe, in 1877—and highly contentious. Despite the presence of a small Bulgarian intelligentsia and a nationalist cultural and economic revival during the nineteenth century, proximity to Constantinople had made it relatively easy for the Turks and the patriarchate between them to control the Bulgarian Slavs. A peasant uprising in 1841 had been ruthlessly and effectively crushed by Albanian irregulars, and many Bulgarians had fled northward to the Danubian Principalities, to Russia and later to Serbia; what little revolutionary conspiracy as there was took place in the coffee shops and inns of Bucharest and Jassy. Armed Bulgarian bands who crossed the Danube were easily crushed by Ottoman troops. Bulgarian notables were mostly pro-Greek in culture and loyal to the Sultan. When the Russian scholar Yuri Venelin visited Bulgaria in 1830 to collect materials for his pioneering historical and ethnographic studies of the Bulgarian people, he found them apathetic and unresponsive to his inquiries. It was scarcely clear what it meant to call oneself Bulgarian. “Even forty years ago,” wrote an observer in 1900, “the name Bulgarian was almost unknown and every educated person coming from that country called himself Greek as a matter of course.”
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Disillusioned at the lack of patriotic feeling among peasants and merchants and at the failure of their efforts at armed insurrection, Bulgarian revolutionaries turned to nonmilitant strategies, and dreamed of creating an autonomous Christian–Orthodox confederation to share power with the Sultan. Hungary’s success in creating the Dual Monarchy out of the Habsburg empire in 1867 exemplified the benefits of a peaceful struggle. And for a moment, reform seemed possible under the Porte too: many Bulgarians lived in the model Danube
vilayet,
run by the reformist Midhat Pasha, who appointed Christian officials on an equal footing—at least in theory—with Muslims. But most of these Christians were in fact Polish, Hungarian and Croat émigrés rather than Bulgarians; and Midhat himself was replaced after three years, victim of the perennial instability inside the Ottoman administration.
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Religious changes did more than patriotic activism to shape an emergent Bulgarian consciousness. American Protestant missionaries translated the New Testament into a language Bulgarian peasants could understand, and thereby began to erode the dominance of Greek. Even so, the missionaries found that so few peasants could read their own language that they seriously contemplated printing Bibles instead in Turkish written in Slavonic characters. In 1849, following pressure from Bulgarian guilds in Constantinople, a Bulgarian church was consecrated in the grounds of the home of the remarkable Stefan Bogoridi—a counselor to the Sultan, prince of Sámos, and partly Bulgarian by origin. Further agitation against Greek dominance in the patriarchate, and against the exactions of Greek bishops in the countryside, led to the establishment of a separate Bulgarian church in 1870. Yet for long thereafter there were many Bulgarian-speaking peasants (as would become clear in Macedonia) who considered themselves Greeks—by which they meant not that they supported the expansionist schemes of the kingdom of Greece to the south, but that they worshiped in churches run by the patriarchate. A sense that speaking Bulgarian implied belonging to a Bulgarian nation was slow to emerge.
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In 1876 the latest in a line of Bulgarian revolts failed to elicit support among the peasantry or townspeople. “The April Uprising,” writes B. Jelavich, “which became the major event in later Bulgarian nationalist mythology, was a complete failure as a revolution.” Europe was not much preoccupied by the one hundred or so Turkish civilians killed by the rebels. However, the Sultan, who was engaged by a serious insurrection in the western Balkans, was alarmed at another insurgency so close to the center of the empire and ordered its swift and brutal suppression. News of the “Bulgarian horrors” committed by Ottoman irregulars—with perhaps 12,000 to 15,000 Christians killed—attracted European concern, and even became the focus of a British electoral campaign. When the Sultan rejected European calls for internal reform, Russia invaded the Balkans in 1877, and after encountering surprisingly stiff Turkish resistance, eventually advanced on Constantinople. The peace terms dictated to the Turks that year established independence for Romania, Serbia and Montenegro, and thus marked the end of Ottoman Europe as it had existed for centuries. But the clause that created the greatest stir was the establishment of a vast new autonomous Bulgarian state, which would have extended westward to Skopje and the Vardar valley, and south to Salonika and the Aegean. This was the so-called San Stefano Bulgaria, named after the treaty that gave it birth.
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San Stefano Bulgaria did not last more than a few months. The other powers, above all Britain, saw it as an unacceptable extension of Russian power into the Balkans. At the Congress of Berlin in 1878, Disraeli insisted that the new Bulgarian state be whittled down to an area less than half the size of that originally envisaged. Macedonia was returned to Ottoman rule, and a new area, the autonomous province of Eastern Rumelia, was created between Bulgaria and Constantinople. This province was soon annexed to Bulgaria, and it took a mere thirty years for the country to move from being an autonomous principality paying tribute to the Sultan to full independence. But Bulgarians never forgot the state the Russians had originally promised them, and the “lost lands” of Macedonia in particular became the object of their dreams of expansion.

The process of nation building in the Balkans occupied the entire nineteenth century. It was protracted and experimental and left many of the region’s “little people” still subjects of imperial power, whether under the Ottomans or—as in the case of the Croats, Slovenes, Serbs, Romanians and others—under the Habsburgs. Still, autonomy turned out not to be an alternative to full national independence, as many federalists inside and outside the Ottoman empire had hoped, but the preliminary to it: the passage from autonomy to independence took over a century in the case of the Danubian Principalities, decades for Serbia and Bulgaria, and less than three years for Greece. Crete and Sámos, which also won autonomy within the empire, became part of Greece before the First World War.

The Great Powers were heavily involved in the new states’ internal affairs. They appointed their kings from the unemployed scions of Europe’s princely houses, drew up their constitutions and selected teams of military and civilian advisers—from the Bavarians who ran Greece under King Otto in the 1840s to the Russians who ran Bulgaria, including its army and Ministry of War, in the 1880s. They defined borders and adjusted territories at diplomatic conferences and imposed their wishes on all parties through gunboat diplomacy and economic arm-twisting. Yet their control of the new states was not assured—as the Russians found in Romania and Bulgaria, and the Austrians in Serbia. The Great Powers had yielded to the forces of nationalism and created independent states. But thereafter they tried to preserve what remained of the Ottoman empire. What thwarted their efforts was the strength of expansionism as a major focus for popular politics in the countries they had themselves created. Here lay the fundamental instability of the new situation in the Balkans.

The sense of mission in Balkan politics was driven by the dream of territorial expansion. All states could point to “unredeemed” brethren or historic lands that lay outside the boundaries apportioned them by the powers: Romanians in Hungarian Transylvania; Serbs in Habsburg Croatia and Ottoman lands; Bulgarians in the lands of the San Stefano state they had been cheated of; Greeks—in thrall to the “Great Idea” of a new Byzantine empire—redeeming hellenism across the Ottoman empire from Crete to the Black Sea. Popular irredentism mobilized public opinion, financed cross-border incursions by bands of irregulars and often forced unwilling Balkan monarchs into rash adventures against the advice or wishes of the powers. Milan Obrenovic
was pushed against his own inclinations into declaring war on Turkey in 1876 to support insurgent Orthodox Christians in Bosnia, and in 1885 he invaded Bulgaria. Neither adventure was a success, and on both occasions the Serbs were saved further humiliation only by Great Power intervention. Greeks mounted a series of failed invasions of Ottoman lands from 1854 to 1897; the 1922 Asia Minor disaster was the last of a series of ill-thought-through Greek military expeditions, which were subsequently blamed on lack of support from the powers.
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But if the Balkan states overestimated their own irredentist capacities, the Great Powers failed to take them seriously enough. They had a low opinion of their new creations and often treated them as puppets. For Count Grula Andrássy, the Austro-Hungarian foreign minister, in 1873, Austria’s Near Eastern neighbors were “wild Indians who could only be treated like unbroken horses, to whom corn should be offered with one hand while they are threatened with a whip in the other.” Archduke Franz Ferdinand himself described Serbia as a land of “thieves and murderers and bandits and a few plum trees.” After the Habsburg army occupied Ottoman Bosnia in 1878, thereby acquiring a long new border with Serbia, diplomats at Vienna believed they had checked Serbian expansion and had the corrupt Obrenovic
s in their pocket. But Balkan public opinion resented subservience to the powers, and monarchs who behaved too much like puppets of powerful neighbors were likely to end up like Alexander Obrenovic
, who was murdered in 1903 by Serbian army officers and replaced by his rival, the less slavishly Austrophile King Peter.

Russia too believed that it enjoyed an unshakable grip on Slavic loyalties. Yet even though Romania and Bulgaria owed their very existence to Russia, both quickly came to resent the interference of their great northern neighbor. Perhaps the clearest expression of Russian overconfidence occurred in 1912: Russian diplomats encouraged the Balkan states to band together in the Balkan League to put pressure on Austria-Hungary. In fact the league turned instead on Turkey, driving it out of Europe—something the Russians had not bargained for—before turning on itself and splitting up. Neither Slavic nor Orthodox solidarity was ever as powerful a factor in Balkan–Russian relations as nervous Westerners feared.

If 1878 was the high point of Great Power control over the Balkans, the next thirty years marked the breakdown. European stability was ensured so long as Austria and Russia enjoyed good relations with each other. Under Bismarck, Germany acted as broker between the two, and the alliance of these three powers closed off the possibility of Balkan politicians exploiting any rivalry between them. But Bismarck departed the scene in 1890, and his successors in Berlin were increasingly anti-Russian. Austria itself looked toward the lands of the South Slavs as other major powers carved up Africa and expanded their empires overseas. Even so, in 1897, Austria and Russia reached an agreement to “eliminate the danger of a rivalry disastrous to the peace of Europe on the seething soil of the Balkan peninsula.” At this time, Russian foreign policy was turned toward the Far East rather than the Balkans. Only after its 1905 defeat by Japan would Russia return to southeastern Europe, and the tension with Austria-Hungary turn sour. The point of conflict was the heart of what remained of Ottoman Europe—Macedonia.