The Balkans: A Short History (6 page)

This demographic pressure on the land was unprecedented. Even at the start of the nineteenth century, a British visitor to Wallachia was impressed by the “incredible richness of the soil”—grass came up to his elbow, the weeds were as tall as a man—and noted “the trifling population of Wallachia (about a million), which is not the tenth part of what the soil could nourish.” With independence, population densities rapidly increased—from 181 inhabitants per square kilometer in Serbia in 1834 to 55.7 in 1905, from 11.8 to 36.1 in Moldavia between 1803 and 1859. Major shifts in patterns of settlement and land use ensued.
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As human numbers rocketed, the number of sheep shrank and shepherding fell into decline. Brigandage (in the nineteenth century) and emigration (in the twentieth) were two responses to this demographic dilemma. “The inhabitants live by agriculture or in bad season brigandage, though of late the younger men have begun to emigrate to America,” wrote two British travelers to western Macedonia in 1910–1911. Quitting the countryside to look for work in the towns or specializing in cash crops were other options. But between the two world wars, the state stamped out brigandage (or tried to), the United States curtailed immigration and the economic depression made cash crops unprofitable. Only after the Second World War were solutions to Balkan “underemployment” found through rapid economic growth, renewed emigration and industrialization. After 1960, prosperity pushed birth rates down toward the European average in all but the poorest parts of the peninsula. In other words, the emergence in the Balkans of urban populations at a level close to the European norm, with its characteristic pattern of small families, high consumption, industry and services, is entirely a product of the last five or six generations. Until well into this century, the peasantry predominated, for few people lived in the towns, and few of those who did lacked close ties to the land.
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Looking at the peasants dressed in their picturesque costumes, foreign visitors were struck by the persistence of what they regarded as an antiquated life form. “In most ways the native seems to have changed little since Biblical days,” wrote two British students of Macedonia in 1921, “so that it may almost be said that in observing the modern Macedonian one is studying the type amongst whom St. Paul preached and traveled.” Their view that “the primitiveness of the native peasantry is their most marked feature” was one shared implicitly both by travel writers and by postwar modernization theorists and social anthropologists. Ethnographers, enthralled by the nineteenth-century romantic view of peasants as the repository of national tradition, charted what they took to be the pagan origins of their beliefs, ornaments and customs; American classicists heard in the oral epic poetry of Serbian
guslar
players the direct descendants of Homer. It is as though the emergence of the idea of modernity in nineteenth-century Europe, with its sharp sense of time moving ahead fast, encouraged a view of the Balkans as a place where “time has stood still.”
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Many farming and food technologies, it is true, changed little over time. The Bulgarian peasant huts made of plaited branches covered with foliage that Robert de Dreux saw outside Serres in the late seventeenth century can have scarcely differed from those of a thousand years earlier. Even more elementary were the hovels inhabited by nineteenth-century Romanian peasants: “the
ne plus ultra
of disgusting dirtiness and wretchedness,” wrote a traveler, “consisting of holes dug in the earth, over which a propped roof is thrown—covered rarely with straw, generally with turf.” Peasant tools—the wooden plows and cart wheels, the stone pestles—were slower to alter than elsewhere in Europe, as was a sense of time marked not by hours and minutes but by the passage of the sun and the saints’ days. Orthodox Christians regarded Catholic Europe’s move to the Gregorian calendar as an unacceptable innovation. The introduction of public clocks lagged behind the rest of the continent; as late as 1868 there were none in Montenegro.
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Yet the primitive, eternally unchanging peasant was a figment of the Western romantic imagination. Despite the large and ever growing gap that separated them from west European commercial farming, Balkan peasants were capable of rapid adaptation, movement and change. Their history is one not of stasis but of innovation and experimentation with new crops (as with corn, tobacco, citrus fruits, the potato and the tomato). In the mid-nineteenth century, when official dress codes lost their legal character, it was townspeople who began first to wear the new “Frankish” outfits, and the peasantry who remained faithful longest to the older distinctive costumes; yet they too changed, and umbrellas, sewing machines and black stockings infiltrated the most remote mountain passes faster than the Ottoman gendarmerie.

Far from being rooted to the spot, farming men and women often migrated surprising distances, whether to pasture herds, to look for seasonal work as inn hands or road builders, or as stonemasons and carpenters. Bulgarian peasant men, armed with two weeks’ supply of home-baked bread, were harvesting the wheat fields of central Europe in the 1920s. Baron Sina, one of the richest men in Habsburg Vienna, was the scion of Vlach villagers from the Pindos who had emigrated northward. Entire villages might relocate themselves in response to political, environmental or economic changes—border changes, natural catastrophes (such as drought) or abrupt fluctuations in crop prices were enough to prompt mass migration. Settlements would be moved up a mountain slope to get away from danger by sea or road, and then moved back down again as life became more secure. And some basic peasant institutions such as the Slavic
zadruga
(a form of collectivity that combined three or four related families as a single living and working unit) which earlier scholars assumed were of great antiquity (perhaps because they are inclined to assume that the family itself is an institution which changes little in rural society), turn out to have been relatively recent innovations. In short, even though the farming smallholder remained the mainstay of the Balkan world for more than a millennium—outlasting the Byzantine and Ottoman empires—he and his family did not do this by standing still. And ironically it was just when Westerners were discovering these living fossils—in the last two hundred years—that peasants were changing the most to meet the challenges of capitalism and cash production.
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The coming of the Turks is often seen as ushering in a new dark age from which Balkan Christians never fully recovered. In fact, Ottoman rule probably benefited the peasantry. For more than two hundred years they had suffered from the political instability of the late Byzantine world and infighting among their lords and masters. Christian landowners—Greek, Slav, French, Venetian and Catalan—had ruled over them with increasing harshness in the preceding centuries; it was this domineering class that Ottoman conquest swept away. Only in the Danubian Principalities (and in parts of Bosnia) did an indigenous landowning class survive—thanks to more indirect Ottoman rule—with the result that through into the twentieth century peasants there were more harshly exploited than anywhere else in southeast Europe. Everywhere else, the Balkan peasant found his old oppressor gone (thanks to the Turks) and a freedom of movement (thanks to the mountains) denied to the serfs of Prussia, Hungary and Russia. Centuries later, when the Balkan states won independence they would be “peasant democracies,” with no aristocracy of their own, a fundamentally different form of society from that found almost everywhere in Europe.
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Of course, new masters replaced the old. Ottoman soldiers (both Muslim and Christian) were rewarded with estates, and some of the old Byzantine labor duties were kept in force. Greek and Serbian notable families converted to Islam and moved into the Ottoman elite; a few, for a time, held on to their estates without converting. But the crucial break with the past was legal: under the regime instituted by the new empire, almost all arable land belonged to the ruler. In the words of an Ottoman document: “The land which was in the hands of the
reaya
[peasantry] at the time of the conquest was settled upon them once more with the ownership held in trust for the Muslim community.”
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In the classical Ottoman model the central state, through its courts and bureaucracy, monitored and regulated relations between peasant and master. Unable easily to pass on their possessions to their heirs, the new estate holders never formed an aristocratic class capable of threatening the power of the ruling dynasty. They oppressed their peasant farmers, but never owned them; what they owned was the right to their produce. Moreover, they were registered by the state as ruthlessly and effectively as their peasants were. Overall tax burdens on farmers were probably no higher than before the Ottomans came. And the peasants themselves enjoyed more control over their lives than their counterparts in most of Europe. The almost endless wars that had ravaged parts of the Balkans in the fourteenth century were replaced by the stability brought by an organized imperial state pursuing a deliberate policy of repopulation. In the first century after the conquest, there was an increase in the area under cultivation. The spread of what we might call politically sensitive crops such as oranges, tomatoes, mulberries and later cotton and apricots—all of which require investment in expensive irrigation systems—is one indicator of stability on the land. So too is the rapid growth in the population of Constantinople (and other, smaller cities), which depended on a healthy agricultural economy for its sustenance.
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After two to three centuries of Ottoman rule, however, the empire began to confront new difficulties, facing tougher military opposition as it expanded and finding it harder and harder to raise the tax revenues to pay for incessant wars. Compared with other European powers—France, Spain, even Venice—Ottoman methods of tax farming hindered rather than promoted expansion. Western European economies moved in the direction of new commercial banking, colonial trade, the promotion of private property and manufacturing growth. Some provincial elites in the Ottoman empire did also emerge as private entrepreneurs, but the old economy continued to regulate the trade and production of most major commodities and discouraged private investment. To this stuttering Leviathan the Balkans were indispensable, since they provided roughly two thirds of the tax revenues of the entire empire. The bulk of these was paid by the peasantry.

In the writings of an eighteenth-century Ottoman official, Sari Mehmed Pacha, we see the bureaucracy’s traditional argument for treating the peasants well and keeping an eye on the provincial beys. “Let them neither oppress the poor
rayahs
[peasants],” he states, “nor cause them to be vexed by the demand for new impositions in addition to the well-known yearly taxes which they are accustomed to give. All the experienced sages have likened the taking for inessential expenditures of more money than they can endure from the
rayahs
to taking from the foundation of a building and transferring it to the roof. . . . Such being the case, the poor peasants should not be troubled by any sort of evil innovation.”
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Yet on the land a major innovation was taking place: a new provincial elite—mostly Muslim, but including some Christian notables—was emerging, which owned villages and fields and passed these possessions on to the next generation. The older Ottoman land regime was passing away and being replaced by one in which privately owned estates encroached on former common lands and dispossessed the peasants. The causes of the rise of these
chiflik
estates—their nature and extent—is among the most bitterly contested issues in Ottoman historiography. Whether these estates were a response, as was once thought, to growing commercial opportunities in the international economy or, as now seems more likely, to the growing political power of a more exploitative class of tax-farming landlords, the outcome was a deterioration in the condition of the peasantry.
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Balkan peasants, however, were still more fortunate than the enserfed farmhands of the central and east European flat-lands. Many villages preserved their autonomy under the leadership of local notables, who collected the taxes and had their own interest in keeping the peasants’ fiscal burden bearable. For if it became too oppressive, the peasants fled in growing numbers from the plains to towns, to lands outside the region and, above all, to the hills. Entire villages were abandoned once those who had initially chosen to remain realized they were still liable for the taxes of those who had already departed. At the same time, the introduction and rapid spread of corn cultivation had in J. R. McNeill’s words “a revolutionary effect on the mountains,” as it allowed upland villages to support more people than in the past. Family and clan farming guaranteed the necessary hands for clearing woodland and tilling small upland plots. Females cost dowries to marry off but were reckoned to be able to carry half the load of a donkey, and provided cheap pack labor. Their bodies often reflected their arduous social position. “Women are early worn out,” Edith Durham noted. “Especially in Montenegro there is a very great difference in height between men and women. Women I found were usually shorter than I am [five foot three inches]; whereas men well over six foot are not uncommon.”
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Safe from pirates, malaria, plagues, tax collectors and marauding militias, hill people were able to negotiate more advantageous tax terms with the imperial government. In remote regions such as the Agrafa (i.e., “the unregistered lands”), the Albanian uplands and Montenegro, autonomous—indeed virtually free—peasant communities were able more or less to disregard their nominal masters. “They pay an annual tribute,” wrote Dmitry Kantemir of the Moldavian mountain “republic” near Suceava in the early eighteenth century. “If the prince decides to beat them harshly they do not spend time in negotiating but refuse the tribute altogether and retire to the more inaccessible parts of the mountains. For this reason the princes never ask them for more than their due.” Other villages won tax exemptions by agreeing to serve as “pass defenders” against brigands, guaranteeing security of passage. In August 1715, after a successful summer campaign against the Venetians in the Peloponnese, the Grand Vezir Ali Pasha negotiated over this issue with a delegation of Greeks from the mountainous Mani peninsula, whose villages “form a kind of Republic,” according to the campaign’s chronicler.
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