The Balkans: A Short History (4 page)

Above all, in June 1914, came the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand by the Serbian nationalist student Gavrilo Princip. The second Bosnian crisis, and the third Balkan war, of the twentieth century turned into the continental bloodbath that finally destroyed Europe’s old order. For this, if nothing else, the Balkans were henceforth cursed in the European consciousness. Only those most committed to one or other of these small nations continued to argue that they were worth supporting. Even fewer bothered to argue that they should not be loaded down with the cultural assumptions of the West but understood on their own terms. A truer and less jaundiced understanding of the Balkans requires us to try to unravel the ways in which attitudes to the region have been shaped not only by events that took place there but by more sweeping narratives of the development of European identity and civilization. The basic historiographical challenge is how to fit the centuries of Ottoman rule into the story of the continent as a whole. For many eminent scholars of Europe the answer has been obvious. Sir John Marriott begins his sober history of the Eastern Question with the stark assertion that “the primary and most essential factor in the problem is the presence, embedded in the living flesh of Europe, of an alien substance. That substance is the Ottoman Turk.” Ottoman rule, in other words, sundered the Balkans from the rest of the continent and ushered in a new dark ages for the region, since—in the words of Polish historian Oskar Halecki—“throughout the whole course of European history in its proper sense, Europe was practically identical with Christendom.” The fact that before the Turks, the region formed part of the only marginally less despised Byzantine empire simply reinforced this way of looking at the problem.
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Not everyone buys this straightforward equation of Europe with (Catholic) Christianity. Arnold Toynbee and Nicolae Iorga, the eminent Romanian historian, have both argued—following, after all, the claims of Mehmed the Conqueror himself—that it was actually the Ottoman empire which was the successor to the “universal state” of Byzantine Orthodoxy. Iorga in particular suggested that there had been a “Byzantium after Byzantium” surviving under the rule of the sultans. But this assertion of the affinities that might bind Christianity and Islam has largely fallen on deaf ears. Many more scholars—and probably the mass of popular opinion—have followed Halecki, who insists that “from the European point of view, it must be observed that the Ottoman empire, completely alien to its European subjects in origin, tradition and religion, far from integrating them in a new type of culture, brought them nothing but a degrading foreign dominance which interrupted for approximately four hundred years their participation in European history.”

Following this logic, successor states in the Balkans look back to the medieval or classical past for their national roots, and encourage their historians to pass over the period of Ottoman rule as quickly as possible, as though nothing good can have come out of those years. “When at the end of the fourteenth century Bulgaria fell under Ottoman domination,” asserted Todor Zhivkov in 1981, “the natural course of her historical development was stopped and reversed.” Such a view predated Zhivkov’s Communist regime and survives it too. The Serbian legend of the battle of Kosovo in 1389 reflects the same obsession with the question of legacy. Greek historians and preservationists are much more likely to work on ancient, Byzantine or modern history than on the Ottoman period. Historians of Britain do not, on the whole, spend much time wondering how much their country owes to its Anglo-Saxon, Norman or Hanoverian heritage; but questions of continuity, rupture and historical legacy are inescapable in the Balkans since what Halecki calls “the European point of view” has shaped many of the preoccupations of scholars and popular opinion in the region itself. And this is not because people there have some peculiar propensity to lose themselves in the mists of time, but rather because to be European has meant nothing less than denying the legitimacy of the Ottoman past. Reconstructing a respectable record of nationalist struggle and resistance against imperial oppression became necessary for membership of the European club. Nationalist passions and anxieties are, in other words, expressions of the effort to produce the kind of historical pedigree once—if not still—required by Europe itself.
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Because the Balkans have had a bad press for so long in Europe, it has been hard for some scholars to resist bringing out the region’s virtues. National histories, until very recently, presented the past as the inevitable and entirely deserved triumph of the Nation over its enemies. More recently, a disillusionment with nationalism has bred nostalgia for the days of empire; a new trend in Ottoman historiography emphasizes ethnic and religious coexistence under the sultans and turns the empire into a kind of multicultural paradise
avant la lettre.
But the glossy version of Ottoman rule is not much of an improvement on the old negativity, except as a corrective to it. The truth is that while for many centuries religious coexistence was undoubtedly more accepted under the Ottomans than almost anywhere in Christendom, there was certainly no sense of religious equality. If there was no ethnic conflict, it was not because of “tolerance” but because there was no concept of nationality among the Sultan’s subjects, and because Christianity stressed the “community of believers” rather than ethnic solidarity.
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Normative history sets up one pattern of historical evolution as standard and then explains deviations from that. The nineteenth-century mind took it for granted that history worked in this way, and that what one was describing was the success or failure of any given society in climbing the path of progress from backwardness and barbarism to civilization. In preferring to talk about the path from tradition to modernity, twentieth-century scholars have changed the terms but retained much of the same linear view. They have drawn on supposedly universal models of economic development and political democratization in order to understand why Balkan states and societies have remained poor and unstable and have not turned out as they should have done. But it is questionable whether relative poverty in southeastern Europe—or indeed the politics of ethnic violence—can really be explained as marks of backwardness. Since the ethnic mix of the Balkans has remained remarkably unchanged for centuries—during most of which there was no ethnic conflict at all—why is it only in the last one or two centuries that the cocktail became politically volatile? Contemporary contingencies of mass politics and urban, industrial life, the rise of new state structures and the spread of literacy and technology may well turn out to be as important in the Balkans as the supposed eternal verities of religious fracture, peasant rootedness and ethnic cleavage. We might find then that the story we tell does not so much affirm as undermine any sense of European superiority. For just as Europe gave the Balkans the categories with which its peoples defined themselves, so it gave them also the ideological weapons—in the shape primarily of modern romantic nationalism—with which to destroy themselves. Trying to understand the Balkans, in other words, challenges us to look at history itself as something more than a mirror which we hold up, blocking out the past to reflect our own virtues.

1

THE LAND AND ITS INHABITANTS

Mountains come first.

—FERNAND BRAUDEL
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Over millions of years, the play of the earth’s tectonic plates pushed up a series of mountain ranges in the Mediterranean along the geological frontier between Europe and Africa. Stretching from the Iberian peninsula in the west to the ranges of southeastern Europe in the east, they eventually link up with the mountain chains of Asia Minor and central Asia. To their north, the great Eurasian lowlands extend with scarcely a break from Calais to the Urals. There rainfall is abundant, arable land is plentiful and numerous navigable rivers connect the interior with the sea. To the south, it is a different story: good farming land becomes scarcer, the ground is more broken and rainfall less frequent.

Unlike the mountain chains guarding the necks of the Iberian and Italian peninsulas, the Balkan ranges offer no barrier against invasion, leaving the region open to easy access and attack from north and east. On the other hand, their irregular formation hinders movement between one valley and the next. Communication is often easier with areas outside the peninsula than between its component parts, so that Dubrovnik, for instance, has had closer ties for much of its history with Venice than with Belgrade. In this way, mountains have made commerce within the region more expensive and complicated the process of political unification.

The effect of mountains is felt everywhere from the skies to the sea. Rain shadows deprive much of the peninsula of the moisture found in Europe’s continental climatic zone. Kolašin in Montenegro has an average annual rainfall of 104 inches, while a little way east, Skopje in Macedonia has only 18 inches per year. A tiny coastal strip running down the Dalmatian coast to western Greece enjoys sufficient rain to soften the impact of the harsh Mediterranean summers. On Corfu the vegetation is luxuriant; the Cyclades, by contrast, are parched and dry. The former is able to support itself, the latter—as wartime starvation revealed—relies on food imports to keep going. In general, the annual precipitation east of the mountains is at least 10 to 20 inches less than farther west, leading to recurrent droughts even in the fertile plains. “A dreary arid sandy level” was how the Vardar valley presented itself to an intrepid Englishwoman crossing it in the mid-nineteenth century. “For many miles the country is entirely without trees.”
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In the Mediterranean climatic zone, watercourses dry up during the summer, leaving rocky beds and canyons. The result is parched, broken upland with scarce water supplies—a harsh environment for human habitation that is suited chiefly to abstemious plants. “A curious feature in the mountains began to make itself painfully felt,” noted Arthur Evans in 1875, walking across the Hercegovinan karst. “There was no water.” He describes “a prospect of desolation. . . . In every direction rose low mountains, mere heaps of disintegrated limestone rock, bare of vegetation . . . aptly compared to a petrified glacier or a moonscape.” Where summer rain permits, mountain forests and woodland—with beeches, oaks and sweet chestnuts—testify to perennial supplies of running water. Even so, the peninsula suffers drought more than anywhere else in Europe, except southern Spain and Malta, and deaths caused by water scarcity were reported from Montenegro as late as 1917.
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Not everywhere in the Balkans is as dry as this. In the Rhodope mountains, rivers flow throughout the year; the Albanian uplands remind travelers of Alpine meadows. Farther east, large parts of former Yugoslavia, Romania and northern Bulgaria enjoy something closer to a central European weather pattern. Long cool winters and heavy rains nourished the impenetrable
Shumadija,
which once covered much of lowland Serbia in dense oak forest. “Endless and endless now on either side the tall oaks closed over us,” wrote Alexander Kinglake in
Eothen,
describing a ride toward Constantinople in 1834. “Through this our road was to last for more than a hundred miles.”
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To the east, the Danube estuary shares climatic features with the southern steppes and the Black Sea, though it suffers from a lack of rainfall where the rain shadow of the Carpathians makes itself felt. Mountains make the contrast between Mediterranean and these northern and eastern weather zones a sudden one, as anyone who has climbed the road from Kotor on the Dalmatian coast to the old Montenegrin capital Cetinje will know. “The climate had suddenly changed,” wrote a traveler after having traversed the Balkan mountains in Ottoman Bulgaria. “A warmer air surrounded us. The whole of European Turkey, from the southern declivities of the Haemus, lies in a delightful climate, which can display all the charms of the tropics as well as the vigor of the higher latitudes, without suffering their disagreeable effects.”
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For this sun-deprived northerner, not even the plague was enough to overshadow his sense of warmth and well-being as he came closer to the Mediterranean.

Rivers are generally crucial for prosperity because until modern times transportation was easier and cheaper by water than by land. Some historians explain the “European miracle” by the abundance of navigable waterways that connect coasts and the interior. But river systems that compare with the Rhine and Rhone in west Europe, or the Vistula–Dnieper trade route in east Europe, do not exist in the southeast of the continent. Balkan rivers, when more than winter torrents, descend too rapidly to be navigable, or else they meander idly in curves and loops away from the nearest coastline. Important rivers such as the Sava, the Vardar and the Aliákmon are thus of limited use for trade and communications. “Nothing can be more striking,” wrote Henry Tozer in 1867 as he traveled south down the Vardar, “than the entire absence of towns along this great artery of internal communication. . . . The river itself is a fine sight when it flows in one stream, but . . . the work of making it navigable would now be a difficult one.”
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Even the Danube has served the region less well than it might, blocked from the Mediterranean by the mountains and then heading north—in quite the wrong direction from the merchant’s point of view—before reaching the Black Sea. Before the Second World War, the lower Danube iced over for four to five months of the year. And before the early nineteenth century, while fought over by the Russians and the Turks, it was scarcely used for commerce at all; trade caravans between the Balkans and central Europe went by road, while travelers and diplomats en route to the Ottoman capital frequently left the river halfway along its course and completed their journey overland instead.