The Balkans: A Short History (3 page)

For all the religious antipathy between Christian and Muslim, sixteenth-century Europeans respected and feared the power, reach and efficiency of the Turks. The “Gran Signore,” as the Ottoman Sultan was commonly known, was regarded as perhaps the most powerful ruler in the known world. Renaissance observers described him as the successor to Alexander the Great and the Roman emperors, and drew unfavorable contrasts with the disorganized state of Christian armies. In 1525, Christendom’s always shaky united front broke down when Francis I, the king of France and “Eldest Son of the Church” sought an alliance with Suleiman the Great against the Holy Roman Emperor. “The sacrilegious union of the Lily and the Crescent” was the beginning of a long association between Catholic France and the Turks. The Venetians too were impressed by the seemingly boundless territorial and human resources of an imperial machine built for war. Their ambassador Marco Minio had already warned in 1521 that the “Gran Signore seems to have in his grasp the keys to all Christendom.”
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For Thomas Fuller in 1639, the Sultan’s empire was “the greatest and best-compacted that the sunne ever saw. Take sea and land together . . . and from Buda in the West to Tauris in the East, it stretcheth about three thousand miles.... It lieth in the heart of the world, like a bold champion bidding defiance to all his borderers, commanding the most fruitfull countreys of Europe, Asia and Africa.” With two metropolises—Constantinople and Cairo—which awed visitors by their size and dwarfed London, Paris, Amsterdam and Rome, its magnificence overshadowed its squabbling neighbors in Christendom. And its power attracted as well as repelled Europeans. “Seeing how many goe from us to them,” commented Sir Henry Blount on Christian converts to Islam, “and how few of theirs to us; it appeares of what consequence the prosperity of a cause is to draw men unto it.”
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Gradually this tone of respect for the Ottoman regime began to disappear. From the second half of the seventeenth century onward, even before Montesquieu’s writings on the theme appeared, Ottoman rule was increasingly described as a “tyranny” or a “despotism”; earlier allusions to its religious tolerance diminished; and there was a growing emphasis on its lack of legitimacy, its reliance on corruption, extortion and injustice, and the inevitability of its eventual decline.

This shift in sentiment took place at a time when the balance of power between the Turks and their opponents was visibly altering and it looked as though Ottoman armies were approaching their limits. Christian Europe itself was growing stronger thanks to the growth of trade and empires across the Atlantic, the emergence of mercantile capitalism and the construction of a new state system after the Thirty Years War. In particular, the rise of Russia and Habsburg Austria as military threats capable of going on the offensive against the Ottomans fundamentally altered the balance of power in eastern Europe and the Black Sea region. From the second siege of Vienna in 1683, Ottoman power in Europe waned: Habsburg armies captured Hungary, Croatia and adjacent areas, which they repopulated with Christian settlers and turned into a military frontier zone. The empire was also becoming weaker internally. Ottoman officials themselves noted the central state’s growing loss of control over the provinces; mourning for the golden age of the sixteenth century turned into a topos in Ottoman political literature. Life in much of the empire, and certainly in the Balkans, became less secure.
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Broad shifts in values accompanied these political and economic developments. After the religious wars of the seventeenth century, the rise of science and the Enlightenment brought a new secularism to Europe that unified elite culture and made the politico-religious structure of the Ottoman empire seem old-fashioned. From this point on there emerges a Western condemnation of overweening religious power—applied to corrupt Orthodox prelates as much as to Islamic “fanatics”—which has lasted into the present. In the writings of travelers, pundits and philosophers, powerful new polarities emerge—between civilized West and barbarous East, between freedom-loving Europe and despotic Orient. Sensual, slow-moving, dreamlike, the latter acted as a mirror to the self-regarding Western visitor.
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The Balkans themselves occupied an intermediate cultural zone between Europe and Asia—in Europe but not of it. Nineteenth-century travelers had a far sharper and more value-laden sense than their predecessors that they were leaving Europe for Asia the minute they crossed into Ottoman lands. Standing in 1875 on the banks of the river Sava, the border between Habsburg Croatia and Ottoman Bosnia, the youthful Arthur Evans began “to realize in what a new world we were. The Bosniacs themselves speak of the other side of the Save [
sic
] as ‘Europe’ and they are right; for to all intents and purposes a five minutes’ voyage transports you into Asia. Travelers who have seen the Turkish provinces of Syria, Armenia, or Egypt, when they enter Bosnia, are at once surprised at finding the familiar sights of Asia and Africa reproduced in a province of European Turkey.” Westerners noted the insecurity of private property, the mysteries of Ottoman law and the sharp and all-important distinction between ruling and subject religions. Above all, they were struck by a set of aesthetic, almost theatrical impressions—the unexpected colors, smells, mixtures of peoples. Landing in Préveza, opposite the Ionian islands, in 1812, the young Henry Holland wrote: “Entering these regions, the scene is suddenly shifted, and you have before your eyes a new species of beings, with all those gaudy appendages of oriental character and scenery which have so long delighted the imagination in the tales of the East. The uniform habits of the Turk, derived from his religion and other circumstances, render this change almost as remarkable in the first Turkish town you may enter, as in those much further removed from the vicinity of the European nations.” One century later, a young Russian journalist—later to achieve fame as Leon Trotsky—looked out of his carriage window as he traveled by rail from Budapest to Belgrade on the eve of the First Balkan War, and enthused: “The East! The East!—what a mixture of faces, costumes, ethnic types and cultural levels!”
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The disconcerting interpenetration of Europe and Asia, West and East, finds its way into most descriptions of the Balkans in modern times. Europe is seen as a civilizing force, a missile embedding itself in the passive matter of the Orient. Travelers routinely comment on signs of “European” life, such as houses with glass windows, cutlery, cabarets or hotels with billiard rooms. Balkan cities are usually described as having a European façade behind which hides an oriental—meaning picturesque but dirty, smelly, wooden and unplanned—reality. Railways are European, cart tracks are not; technology is definitely European, but not religious observance. The social fabric is almost always divided into a modernizing surface and a traditional substance. Oriental realities—the power of religion, the prevalence of agrarian poverty—are assumed to be phenomena that have not changed for centuries. By the end of the nineteenth century, as numerous accounts testify, it was virtually impossible for Western travelers—exposed to the heady delights and sensuous Orientalism of writers such as Pierre Loti
—not
to see the Balkans in this way.

Diplomatically—and despite the link with France—the Ottoman empire was long regarded as lying outside the European concert of powers. It had not been represented at the Congress of Vienna, for instance, in 1815 and was excluded by commentators on international law from “the Christian family of nations.” Only
realpolitik—
produced by the empire’s own evident decline, and the worrying rise of Russia—brought it in. Having essentially fought the Crimean War to save the Turks from the Russians, the victorious powers in 1856 finally declared “the Sublime Porte admitted to participate in the advantages of the Public Law and System of Europe.” But in return the Porte was compelled to introduce reforms with regard to property, justice and religious equality that the Christian powers insisted were necessary for a modern, civilized state.
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The Turks themselves were never accepted as Europeans. In the increasingly racialized vocabulary of the nineteenth century, they were “Asiatics,” “nomads” and “barbarians” ruling over the “lands where European civilization had its birth.” “The Turks,” wrote Lord John Russell in 1828, “appear to be distinguished from the nations which occupy the rest of Europe in nearly every circumstance.” Even for R. G. Latham, among the most levelheaded of Victorian ethnographers, “the Turk is European, as the New Englander is American, i.e. not strictly.” While Latham poured scorn on the idea that the Turks were “newcomers” to Europe, or “Asiatic” in any meaningful sense, he felt their religion made them “impracticable members of the European system.” Muslims were widely regarded as more prone to acts of barbarism than their Christian subjects. “No war, ancient or modern,” wrote an American diplomat in 1842, “was ever carried on with such unrelenting fury and such cruelty as the war against the Greeks by the Turks. It is a matter of astonishment that the Christian nations of Europe could have so long remained silent spectators of its atrocities.” Despite the writings of men like George Finlay, whose history of the Greek War of Independence pulled no punches in describing a mutual “war of extermination,” in the popular imagination the violence ran only one way. This one-sided outrage was harnessed effectively by Gladstone in his denunciations of the “Bulgarian horrors”: it proved, on the whole, impervious to any evidence that Christians too committed atrocities, or on occasions deliberately provoked them. “When a Moslem kills a Moslem, it does not count,” was how Edith Durham summed up Western attitudes. “When a Christian kills a Moslem, it is a righteous act; when a Christian kills a Christian it is an error of judgment better not talked about; it is only when a Moslem kills a Christian that we arrive at a full-blown atrocity.”
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Christian Europe’s blindness to Muslim victims overlooked the huge movements of populations triggered off by Ottoman decline. “People often talk in the West about transporting all the Turks, in other words Muslims, to Asia in order to turn Turkey in Europe into a uniquely Christian empire,” Ami Boué had written in 1854. “This would be a decree as inhumane as the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, or of Protestants from France, and indeed scarcely feasible since the Europeans always forget that in Turkey in Europe the Muslims are mostly Slavs or Albanians, whose right to the land is as ancient as that of their Christian compatriots.” Yet, according to one estimate, nearly 5 million Muslims were driven from former Ottoman lands in the Balkans and the Black Sea region in the century after 1821; from the Balkans themselves between 1.7 and 2 million Muslims immigrated voluntarily or involuntarily between 1878 and 1913 to what would later become the republic of Turkey. The Turkish language declined as a regional lingua franca, urban settlements were taken over by Christian incomers and Ottoman buildings were deliberately demolished or left to rot. The dynamiting of mosques and other architectural masterpieces in Bosnia-Hercegovina in the early 1990s was thus the continuation in an extreme form of a process of de-Islamicization that had begun decades earlier.
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When the Ottoman empire in the Balkans collapsed in 1912–1913, many in the West saw this as the final expulsion of “Asian” power from Europe and the triumph of the religious and racial vigor of Christendom. According to the American journalist Frederick Moore in the
National Geographic,
the Asiatic Turks had blighted their European subjects by imposing Islamic rule upon them. They had tried to invigorate their own racial stock through conversion, but had ultimately been unable to prevail over the biologically superior European breeds they ruled. Now “[the Turk] will make his way back to Asia as he came, centuries ago, little changed by his association with the peoples of Europe—whom he has kept as he found them, in a medieval condition, with all the barbarity of medieval Europe, with all its picturesqueness, its color, squalor and unthinking faith.” As for the future, Moore predicted little change among the empire’s former rulers since “[the Turk] is a Moslem, and the soul of the true Moslem is indifferent to progress.” But “for the enlarged Balkan States it seems safe to predict rapid development along modern lines, for we have seen how all of them under great difficulties have already fulfilled partially, at least, their aspirations to adopt the civilizing institutions of Europe.”
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Moore’s prediction was entirely in line with commonplace liberal expectations of the relative civilizational capacities of Islamic and Christian peoples. It reflected the reasoning that had created powerful and influential lobbies in the rest of Europe for Bulgarian, Serbian and Greek liberation from Ottoman rule. But it was precisely this attitude that bred the almost inevitable disappointment which followed. As early as 1836, after Balkan nationalism’s first triumph, a French traveler to Greece had registered the emotional shift. “The Greeks as slaves of the Turks were to be pitied,” he wrote. “The Greeks once free merely horrify. Their life is a sequence of thefts and assaults, fires and assassinations their pastime.” In similar fashion, the liberal optimism of 1912 was quickly and even more rudely to be dashed. The victorious Balkan states, fresh from beating the Ottoman army, immediately turned on one another in the Second Balkan War. News emerged of the brutality waged by their regular armies against civilians, especially in Macedonia, Kosovo and the borders of Montenegro. “That’s how all this looks when you see it close up,” reported Trotsky. “Meat is rotting, human flesh as well as the flesh of oxen; villages have become pillars of fire; men are exterminating ‘persons not under twelve years of age’; everyone is being brutalized, losing their human aspect.”
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