The Balkans: A Short History (7 page)

Yet political autonomy came at the price of a constant struggle to make a living. In the nineteenth century, mountain communities started for the first time to face overpopulation. Their basic diet was healthy, and on average people grew taller than in the plains. But the parched mountains did not generate enough food to last the year round—at Metsovo, the local harvest was reckoned to be good for barely one or two months—forcing their inhabitants to find other supplementary livelihoods. Forests provided berries and mushrooms for picking (another skill now dying out), charcoal and timber for sale. Hill villagers also sold snow to the lowlands; as late as the 1920s—before the advent of mass refrigeration—snow was being sold in Jannina, and was still profitable despite a 65 percent meltage rate. They needed something to sell in order to buy the salt from the lowlands that alone made life possible in these food-deficit communities.

Brigandage offered a more “heroic” way of making money. The typical mid-nineteenth-century bandit, according to the author of an illuminating study of the phenomenon, was “a young mountaineer, between twenty and thirty years old or younger, and, more often than not, a migratory shepherd.” Pushed outside the law, often by his own violent actions, the brigand’s primary purpose was usually to secure an amnesty and if possible an official appointment in the service of the state as local watchman. In the meantime, he talked tough and tried to make himself as intimidating as possible. “Your coffee is ours, your money is ours, and your blood is ours,” one Albanian brigand reminded his British captive. “Everyone is in debt to the robber. I am sultan here; I am king of England here.”
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Robbers and sheep stealers were a growing problem in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As the Ottoman empire shrank and disintegrated, frontiers proliferated across which brigands could roam, fleeing pursuers and often enjoying political protection in neighboring states as self-proclaimed patriots. In reality, they were as likely to prey on poor Christian farmers as on Muslims, often taking the self-serving and self-righteous line that Christians who remained under Turkish rule were no better than Turks themselves. “Great alarm prevailed in all directions respecting the robbers,” noted the intrepid David Urquhart traveling to Mount Athos in the 1830s. “They had been guilty of fearful atrocities, and had, by attacking on several occasions the peasantry, aroused the feelings of the people against them.” These brigands were neither social bandits—robbing the rich to aid the poor—nor national heroes; rather, they were a symptom of high-altitude poverty and one way of trying to ameliorate it. Their sense of honor was highly developed; raiding sheep or cattle was considered a more heroic pursuit than conventional and sedentary ways of earning a living. Yet the brigand’s lot, stripped of the mystique, was a miserable one. The Greek chief of the band that seized Urquhart tried to excuse himself to his captive: “Look at those men, some of them barefoot, with clothes of string rather than cloth, with empty tobacco bags, and empty stomachs; what makes them lead such a life, and what restraint can you place on men who live so . . . driven like oxen in the fields, or hunted like bears in the mountains?”
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Alongside the brigands—putting up with them, suffering from them and sometimes joining them—were the shepherds whose way of life had profited most from the collapse of settled farming in the plains. Between the seventeenth and the early twentieth centuries was the golden age of the pastoral economy in the Balkans. Military men, according to a 1609 document from Rumelia, were taking over abandoned holdings, settling slaves on them and converting the properties to livestock grazing. With their huge flocks of sheep, the shepherds wintered in the valleys on St. Dimitrios’s Day (November 8) and moved camp again on St. George’s Day (May 6) to spend the summers on mountain pasture, often traveling hundreds of miles in the process. The fact that their taxes had to be paid in cash made shepherds familiar with the demands of a money economy. They sold their livestock, sheepskins, woolen goods and cheeses in village markets or at the great annual fairs that were the motors of Balkan commerce until the early twentieth century. Gradually some settled as merchants: a small hill town like Metsovo high in the Pindos was in fact surprisingly wealthy by the middle of the nineteenth century thanks to the business ventures of these men.
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Occasionally hill settlements enjoyed the right mix of seclusion, water and raw materials to permit what economic historians call proto-industrialization. “The villages which are least favored in respect of soil,” wrote Leake, “have resources in the manufacture of cotton and wool.... It is reckoned that one third of the inhabitants of Agrafa gain a living by weaving. There are also many workers in gold and silver; and at Skatina is a fabric of swords-blades, gun barrels and locks of pistols.” Textile production in small factories in Greek and especially Bulgarian upland settlements spread in the decades before these regions won independence. But by the early nineteenth century, competition from Western imports was hitting them hard, and previously prosperous mountain manufacturers such as Ambelakia fell on hard times. Thereafter, such activities—where they survived—descended to the towns and cities.
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The coming of Ottoman rule had perhaps a greater impact upon the town dweller than on the peasant. Where a town surrendered without a fight during the period of conquest, the Porte usually refrained from sacking it. Nevertheless, many Byzantine towns from the capital downward were ruined and devastated by the conquerors. But the Ottomans knew that towns were vital for the administration of the empire; for Mehmed the Conqueror, their renewal was the “mightiest war” compared with which military victory had been merely the “lesser war.” The Ottomans quickly repopulated major urban centers like Constantinople through the forced resettlement of Christians, Jews and Muslims. For similar reasons, Sultan Bayezid II welcomed Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain, Portugal and southern Italy in the late fifteenth century, and prominent Sephardic communities took root in the towns of the empire.
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By the end of the fifteenth century, the Porte had made a determined effort to revivify urban life. High court officials were encouraged to finance complexes of public buildings—caravanserais, covered markets, public baths, mosques and schools, hospitals, aqueducts—in order to provide the services required by an urban population. Many former Byzantine cities—notably, the capital—recovered their strength, while a number of new settlements emerged, including Bosna Seraj (Sarajevo), Banja Luka and Mostar in Bosnia, Tirana (the future capital of Albania) and smaller towns such as Elbasan and Yannitsa. The population of these towns was often overwhelmingly Muslim, while the countryside remained largely Christian. According to the tax registers of 1520–1530, more than 80 percent of the inhabitants of the Balkans were Christians. Yet Muslims outnumbered Christians in most major Balkan urban settlements.
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Historians are divided as to whether the overall impact of Ottoman rule marked a disjuncture or a continuation of city life. One thing is clear, however: there was no overall decline. It was only under the sultans that walled fortresses such as Belgrade developed into larger commercial and administrative centers with extensive suburbs. Major urban projects, such as large mosques, were completed rapidly by European standards, testifying to the empire’s ability to mobilize labor effectively even in small market towns such as Serres and Prizren. Overall, the degree of urbanization in the Balkans increased in the early phases of Ottoman rule, and coastal trading cities such as Salonika and Dubrovnik (effectively an Ottoman vassal) prospered. By 1600, Constantinople was the largest city in Europe; even if we accept a low estimate of 250,000 inhabitants, it still overshadowed London (200,000), Paris (220,000) and Rome (105,000). Berlin (25,000), Madrid and Vienna (both 50,000) were unremarkable towns of the middling rank. Cairo, on the other hand, was bigger even than the imperial capital: “the most admirable and greatest City seene upon the earth,” according to William Lithgow, who could compare it with most of its rivals. As for Edirne, the occasional seat of the Ottoman court, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu who visited it in 1717 and was not overly impressed, nonetheless admitted to “365 shops furnish’d with all sorts of rich Goods expos’d to sale in the same manner as at the New Exchange in London, but the pavements kept much neater, and the shops all so clean they seem’d just new painted. Idle people of all sorts walk here for their Diversion or amuse themselves with drinking coffee or sherbet.” These were staples of Ottoman urban life before they were implanted into the cities of Western Europe.
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Towns were favored precisely because they were indispensable to the government of the empire. They were centers of administration from which the state could collect taxes, supervise trade and extract its monopoly of vital commodities such as salt. They existed in the shadow of Constantinople, which they fed through the food purchase quotas and elaborate provisioning system that lay at the heart of the Ottoman empire. Even after the central Ottoman state weakened in the course of the seventeenth century, the barriers to private capital accumulation on a West European model remained high. Trade and hence capital was gradually passing from Muslims and Jews into the hands of Christian Orthodox merchants, who did constitute an incipient bourgeoisie of sorts. But the latter were well aware of their vulnerability in the empire, and made sure that affiliates existed beyond its reach—in Vienna, Odessa or Marseilles—whither funds could be safely transferred. The cities themselves remained chiefly centers of commerce and handicrafts. They were also acutely prone to plague, suffering from what T. Stoianovich calls “exceptional pestilences,” on an average of once every dozen years throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And because the slow movement of the brick/stone frontier from northern to southeast Europe meant that houses were still mostly built of wood, fires devastated towns as late as the early twentieth century.
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By the early nineteenth century, it was the silence of Turkish towns that struck the Western visitor—the lack of church bells, the absence of wheeled vehicles and horseshoes, all of which testified to the lack of blacksmiths, metalworkers and machinery. “Amid the novelties that strike the European on his arrival,” wrote William Turner in 1812, “nothing surprises him more than the silence that pervades so large a capital.” If no real industrialization took place in towns under Ottoman rule, it was for the same reasons that commercial agriculture also made little progress in the empire: the lack of well-kept, well-secured roads; bureaucratic obstruction; religious objections to the spread of printed media and scientific knowledge; and levels of public disorder that, if anything, probably increased over time as the political struggle for Macedonia intensified. Lack of security for the rural population was a long-standing problem. “All the territory of the Gran Signor is dispeopled for want of justice, or rather by violent oppressions,” Sir Thomas Roe had noted in 1622. But the problem did not disappear. Romania in the 1840s had “estates of monstrous size almost completely devoid of inhabitants.” Having heard from Greeks in one lowland village how they were abused by the Turkish authorities, one British visitor understood better the rudimentary security system they had adopted. “We found the dogs very troublesome,” wrote Captain J. J. Best in 1842. “No wonder they keep such fierce dogs when the inhabitants are liable to such treatment.” But dogs were little use against the tax collector. “The first act of a Greek Bishop,” wrote a local observer, “after his arrival at his post, is plunder.” Tax farmers and moneylenders exploited the peasants’ vulnerability to fluctuations in the harvest and their helplessness in the face of armed force. “The Wallachian is idle,” wrote an observer of the Romanian lands, “because he knows he could not enjoy the fruits of industry, since they would be extorted from him under the name of tithes.” The ensuing depopulation led to the abandonment of land, extensive farming and the use of arable land for pasture. Deforestation—a consequence of population strain up in the hills—accelerated soil erosion, the silting up of alluvial valleys and the spread of malaria.
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This depressing picture did not apply everywhere, to be sure. In the valley of the Morava, there were “rich crops of Indian corn . . . under good cultivation, and . . . a smooth expanse of fertile fields.” In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the large landowners who had begun to amass land included a few “improving” provincial rulers and notables. Ali Pasha of Jannina introduced silkworms, mulberries and rice cultivation into his domains. Before he was toppled by the Sultan, he “proceeded with the greatest severity” against the large bands of robbers who had infested his lands and “by opening the country to merchants and securing their persons and goods, has not only increased his own revenues, but bettered the condition of his subjects.” The Bushatlis, another Albanian notable family of the eighteenth century, cultivated rice and cotton in their domains, which they exported to Italy; around Serres as well, cotton cultivation spread very fast. Some reforming Ottoman civil servants also sought to modernize the countryside and the towns. Midhat Pasha, who was probably the greatest Ottoman civil servant of the nineteenth century and was called Giaour Pasha by the Turks for his supposed partiality to the Christians, increased tax revenues and boosted agricultural production in Danubian Bulgaria. But Midhat Pasha did not last long, falling victim to the political insecurity that soon undid his work.

If the Ottoman lands never felt the full impact of improving landowners of the kind found in Western and central Europe, they could not escape the growing impact of Western capitalism, especially as trade linked the empire with markets in central Europe, France and farther afield. As the crisis of government deepened, the need for urgent reforms, intermittently tried since the early eighteenth century, became obvious to the Porte. For nearly a century, the power of the Sultan’s household had been undermined by its inability to control the janissary corps, the court militia that had once been an integral part of the Ottoman machinery of conquest. Over time the janissaries evolved from an elite, loyal military cohort into a badly paid, independent and unruly interest group that on occasion even deposed sultans. By the eighteenth century, their defense of their privileges posed a far greater threat to the empire’s own inhabitants than the corps did to its enemies. They were feared by their Christian neighbors, whom they attacked with impunity in the streets, by their fellow Muslims and by the Porte itself. After the defeat of Napoleon and the rise of the breakaway Mehmet Ali in Egypt, the central Ottoman state reasserted its authority in a bid to modernize its military and restore its own prestige: in 1826 the janissary corps in the capital was massacred and replaced by a professional army. Shortly afterward, British pressure compelled the Porte to liberalize trade and to promise equality before the law for all subjects of the empire. In the 1850s it finally became possible—at least in theory—to buy and sell land (a change not very much later, it should be noted, than that occurring in the Hungarian countryside). All this meant a weakening of the old intrusive regulatory imperial economy and permitted the expansion of commercial agriculture—cotton and tobacco, Serbian pigs and Romanian wheat—within an international market. Foreign capital, goods and investors followed.