The Balkans: A Short History (9 page)

—JOHN PINKERTON, MODERN GEOGRAPHY (1802)

Our church is holy, but our priests are thieves.

—BYRON’S SERVANT

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Greek and Bulgarian patriots wrestled for the allegiance of the Orthodox Christian peasants of Ottoman Macedonia. It turned out to be unexpectedly difficult. “On my arrival in Salonika,” wrote one Greek activist, “the idea of Greek peasants and the people on the actual difference between the Greek Orthodox church and Bulgarian schismatics was rather shaky. I realized this because whenever I asked them, what they were
—Romaioi
[i.e., Greeks] or
Voulgaroi
[Bulgarians], they stared at me incomprehendingly. Asking each other what my words meant, crossing themselves, they would answer me naïvely: ‘Well, we’re Christians—what do you mean,
Romaioi
or Voulgaroi? ’ ”
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Similarly, the pro-Bulgarian Danil, “a town-made patriot of recent construction” as his English companion described him, “was vexed with the villagers’ apathy.” Round the Prespa Lake he tried to explain to them that by being forced to listen to the church service in Greek rather than in their own Slavic tongue, they were being exploited by an anti-Bulgarian clergy. “But they bolted raw cabbage and washed it down with mastic and only said it did not matter; many of them spoke Greek. The priest took a suck at the bottle and was of the same opinion. He spoke the local Slavic dialect himself for ordinary purposes, but he had learned all the services in Greek. It was a good service and what did it matter? Danil was very annoyed, and told me that they were very ignorant; really they were all Bulgarians, and ought to have Bulgarian priests, but they did not know. Nor as far as I could see, did they care here.”
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This indifference to nationalist categories among the Sultan’s Christian subjects reflected their sense of belonging to a community defined by religion, where the linguistic differences between Greek and Bulgarian mattered less than their shared belief in Orthodoxy. Such encounters marked the moment when the bearers of the concept of modern ethnic politics infiltrated the countryside and encountered a pre-national world. The linguistic, racial and religious diversity of the peoples inhabiting southeastern Europe dates back to the Slav invasions, if not earlier. Politically, however, this counted for little until recently. Neither the Byzantine nor the Ottoman empires were ethnically based polities. For centuries, conversion and acculturation opened up elite careers to men of different backgrounds.

Because the history of the Balkans has mostly been written by descendants of the nationalist patriots described above, the hesitant, ambivalent voices of the peasants they were trying to enlighten rarely make it into the archives. But one can detect, even fairly recently, the persistence of habits of mind that predate the triumph of ethnic politics. “I questioned some boys from a remote mountain village near Ochrida which had neither teacher nor resident priest, and where not a single inhabitant was able to read, in order to discover what amount of traditional knowledge they possessed,” wrote H. N. Brailsford in 1905. “I took them up to the ruins of the Bulgarian Tsar’s fortress which dominates the lake and the plain from the summit of an abrupt and curiously rounded hill. ‘Who built this place?’ I asked them. The answer was significant—‘The Free Men.’ ‘And who were they?’ ‘Our grandfathers.’ ‘Yes, but were they Serbs or Bulgarians or Greeks or Turks?’ ‘They weren’t Turks, they were Christians.’ And this seemed to be about the measure of their knowledge.”
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The question of whether they were Serbs, Bulgarians or Greeks meant little for Christian peasant boys in the Ottoman system, just as Muslims too attached relatively little importance to their ethnic background. “Hitherto, there has never been any separatist movement, either national or doctrinal, inside Islam,” noted a British diplomat in 1912, surprised by the novelty of an Albanian nationalist organization. “All Musulmans, whether Shia or Sunni, Turk, Arab or Kurd, are simply entered on the register as ‘Moslems.’ ” The consciousness of most of the Sultan’s subjects was shaped neither by school nor by the army—the two key institutions through which the modern state propagates national identities. The Ottoman state had treated them on the basis of religion, not language. Thus they had not had to encounter such novel forms of classification as were implied by Brailsford’s questions, though their grandchildren would take them for granted.
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One need not look far back into history to see the way in which human migrations have shaped the ethnography of the Balkans. In the twentieth century alone, millions of people have moved, or been moved, from one country to another. In the postwar period, Greek and Yugoslav workers settled in Australia, the United States and Western Europe looking for jobs; in the 1990s, new movements of peoples looking for work or fleeing war formed the latest chapter in a story that has been going on for millennia. Yet, despite this constant ebb and flow, the basic ethnographic composition of the peninsula was established as long ago as the seventh century A.D. Life in the Roman provinces south of the Danube had been disrupted before then by the incursions and raids of Germanic tribes and the Huns. But these invasions, though frequent and often destructive, were brief and usually ended with the raiders moving off elsewhere. The impact of the Slavic tribes was very different: over roughly 200 years, they settled permanently in large numbers to till the land and graze their flocks across the peninsula as far south as the Peloponnese. Their arrival in the Balkans marked the end of the ancient world and had the momentous effect of driving a wedge between the western and eastern halves of the Roman empire that would eventually contribute to the split between Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.
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The area’s existing inhabitants competed for land and power with the newcomers. In Albania they found refuge in the mountains, preserving their distinct language amid what became a largely Slavic-speaking zone of settlement. The Greeks—who described themselves as Romaioi (inhabitants of the Roman empire) in place of the older “Hellenes” (a term that had come to mean “pagan”)—were penned into isolated areas (islands, or into walled towns and depopulated cities) where they preserved the Greco-Roman civic culture of the empire. The Turkic Bulgars, who ruled over Slavic tribes in their khanate around the lower Danube, ended up—much like ruling elites in England, Normandy and Varangian Rus—adopting the language of the peoples they ruled. Right up to the early twentieth century the basic pattern of Slavic-speaking village and Greek-speaking town was preserved in Macedonia.

Initially the linguistic divide between Greeks and Slavs was also a religious one, between Christians and pagans. But in the ninth and tenth centuries, the Slavs were converted to Christianity, as the Greeks had been before them. Cyril and Methodius, the two brothers who undertook this mission, were from Salonika, where they had undoubtedly come into contact with the Slavic language spoken by local peasants: by developing an alphabet and a liturgy in Slavonic, they and their successors brought the Slavs under the sway of the Church at a time when much of eastern and northern Europe remained faithful to older gods. The price to be paid for this success was the sacrifice by the Church of the privileged position of the Greek language in the emergent Orthodox Balkan commonwealth, an attitude that contrasted with the papacy’s growing insistence upon Latin: many languages, one Church was the secret of Byzantine Orthodoxy.

The Balkans were too mountainous, too vulnerable and fragmented to make for an easy religious or linguistic homogenization. It was not only the Albanians who sought the protection of the hills. The Vlachs were a shepherding people who preserved their Romance language right up to this century amid Greek- and Slav-speaking majorities; the Sarakatsani were another even smaller nomadic group. Orthodoxy predominated but did not prevail everywhere. The kings of Croatia followed the Latin rite and Catholicism, despite their Slavic background, while in Bosnia a third, Bosnian church spread before disappearing with the arrival of the Turks. A Bulgarian tsar was crowned by the Pope in 1204 while Catholic and later Protestant missionaries devoted their energies—though with little reward outside Albania and the Aegean islands—to proselytizing for the true faith. Small Jewish communities too existed throughout the peninsula.

Greek, as the ruling language during the Byzantine period, and as the language of the Gospels, Christian culture and classical learning through Ottoman times as well, attracted ambitious young Vlach or Slav men—just as Venetian, German and later French would do as well. As late as the 1860s, according to the memoirs of one Ottoman official, Greek was still known to “all Romanians of distinction” and used in preference to Turkish when Ottoman and Romanian notables met. Jewish communities that dated back to classical times acquired Greek as their vernacular tongue. Western Europeans too could turn into Greeks. In 1833, several hundred Bavarian mercenaries accompanied King Otto to Athens: a century later, SS officials, scouring Europe for precious German blood, found their great-grandchildren living on farms in Attica. Most had forgotten German and become Greek-speaking and Orthodox. Of course, hellenization had its limits. North of the old Via Egnatia, Greek made few inroads among the Slavic-speaking villages. In northern Albania and the Danubian provinces, too, its use remained confined to higher church clergy, and in the latter case to the courts of native princes. Even within what would later become Greece, many peasants spoke Albanian until the 1950s. But in general, knowledge of Greek remained the main path to learning, religious authority and political power for as long as the Byzantine empire existed.
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The dominion of Greek culture over Balkan Christians was not ended by the collapse of Byzantium between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. But it was transformed through the arrival of a new people—Turkish-speaking, Muslim by religion. These Turks defeated the various Christian powers of southeastern Europe—not only the rulers of Byzantium, but also Serb, Genoese, Hungarian, Venetian and other dynasties—and in doing so, unified the region politically and economically in an empire that lasted for five centuries. Before their conquest of the Balkans, the Turks had been active in the region as allies and auxiliaries of the very Christian powers that they later ended up subjugating; after it, they continued to use Christian soldiers, notably in their military campaigns in Anatolia and the Middle East. Christian–Muslim relations were thus based on generations of interaction, and conquest and collaboration more closely resembled patterns evident in the British takeover of India than in the German invasion of Poland.

Even before the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Christians were turning to Islam for many reasons. A fifteenth-century Greek archbishop noted with disgust the voluntary conversion of those who were motivated by “the desire to win silver, become notables and live in luxury.” By the early sixteenth century several hundred thousand had probably converted. Members of the Bosnian and Byzantine nobility, including some of the imperial Paleologue family itself, served the Sultan loyally in high positions both as Christians and increasingly as Muslim converts: when the Ottoman Grand Vizier Mahmud Pasha Angelovic negotiated in 1457 with the Grand Voivode of the Serbian court, Michael Angelovic, he was in fact dealing with his own half brother. And later it was with his cousin, the Byzantine philosopher George Amiroutzis, that Mahmud Pasha negotiated the surrender of the Byzantine province of Trabizond. The Christian Amiroutzis subsequently found refuge at the Ottoman court and was favored by the Sultan; his two sons converted to Islam and became high court officials. The well-connected Mahmud Pasha was himself of Serbian and Byzantine descent; other grand viziers of Mehmed II (the conqueror of Constantinople in 1453) were Greeks or Albanians by birth. Many of these men were children from aristocratic Christian families trained at the imperial court. Others were recruited from low-born peasantry through the child tax levied on Balkan Christian communities.
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Until the early seventeenth century, the Ottoman court relied on its slave recruits. “Most of the inhabitants of the land of Rum are of mixed origin,” wrote Mustafa Ali in the seventeenth century. “Amongst the more prominent there are few whose genealogies do not go back to a convert to Islam, or whose ethnic origins, either on their mother’s or father’s side, do not go back to a filthy infidel, despite the fact that they themselves have grown up as upright and outstanding Muslims.” The imperial governing elite was admired throughout Europe for its meritocratic character, and observers noted with surprise that the most senior officials often came from families of humble birth. There was no Ottoman hereditary aristocracy—“no Nobilitie of Blood,” commented George Sandys in 1610 and “few Turks, generally a term of reproach.” Indeed the characterization of the Ottoman system as Turkish was very wide of the mark. As late as the nineteenth century, it was noted that “no Mussulman ever calls himself a Turk; further to call him so is to insult him.” (The term was used to refer to Anatolian peasants.) So prominent was the presence of converts at the Porte that for a time Slavic rivaled Turkish as a court language. “The better sort use the Slavonian tongue,” observed William Lithgow, “the vulgar speake the Turkish language, which being originally the tartarian speech, they borrow from the Persian their words of state, from the Arabicke, their words of Religion, from the Grecians, their termes of warre, and from the Italian their words and titles of navigation.” Lady Mary Wortley Montagu noted that in the capital “they speak Turkish, Greek, Hebrew, Armenian, Arabic, Persian, Russian, Sclavonian, Walachian, German, Dutch, French, English, Italian, Hungarian; and what is worse, there is ten of these Languages spoke in my own family.”
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