The Trigger (7 page)

After Ottoman forces had battled through Serbia they advanced into Bosnia, occupying the entire country in the year 1463. Their progress was swift, only easing when they reached the northern arrowhead of the Dinaric Alps. As the Ottomans consolidated their hold on Bosnia – they would stay for another 400 years – the mountain range evolved into a topographical watershed between two great rival blocs, the Muslim Turks and the Catholics from Hungary, Venice and Austria. That is not to say it was a stable or even well-marked international border. For hundreds of years it was more of a wild frontier, violated routinely by raiding parties from either side, garrisoned by troops deployed from far-off corners of empire and sluiced over by civilians fleeing a cycle of friction between the Islamic and Catholic worlds.

At different times over the centuries it suited both sides to allow a third party – Serb adherents to Orthodox Christianity – to settle in large numbers around this border zone. The Princip family then bore the name of Jovićević, a long-established Serb clan from Montenegro, and their migration northwards was part of this deliberate policy of seeding an Orthodox buffer between the Muslim Ottoman and Catholic Habsburg empires. These new arrivals on the Ottoman side were rewarded with land that they could farm as feudal serfs and, in time, with positions of responsibility in local defence forces raised on behalf of the Turkish occupiers. The new arrivals from the Jovicevic family changed their name shortly after reaching the Obljaj area to Čeka, a word meaning ‘to lie in wait’, because they proved to be particularly adept at patiently preparing ambushes for smugglers, brigands and other raiders.

As Mile told this part of the story he struggled with a detail, gesturing with his hand as if tugging an unripe apple on a tree. ‘What was the name of those really violent raiders from the coastline of Dalmatia?’

‘They were known as Uskoks,’ Nikola said coldly. ‘Our people sorted out plenty of them.’

Through Arnie I tried to ask how they viewed today the historical reality of their forebears working as militia for the Ottomans. Could their ancestors be regarded as collaborators? But this was not one of the beads on the family rosary, so my question was passed over. Instead Miljkan wanted to explain the early nineteenth-century origins of the family’s current surname.

‘Our name did not become Princip until the time of Gavro’s great-grandfather, a man called Todor,’ Miljkan said. ‘He was a big man, a strong man, and he rode a huge white horse. He was so untouchable he could cross the frontier whenever he wanted, and one day the Venetians over towards the coast of Dalmatia said his clothes were so smart and his manners so royal that they called him The Prince. We have been called Princip ever since.’

The name might sound regal, but the reality of life for the Princip clan throughout the late nineteenth century was very much at the other end of the social scale. They were serfs struggling under dire conditions of feudal exploitation.

When the Ottomans first added Bosnia to their European land holdings they valued it highly for its importance as a strategic bridgehead in their long-running battle against the Habsburgs. Turkish raids in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries would several times reach all the way to the walls of Vienna, although the city never fell. Bosnia’s value to the empire at the time earned it a glowing Ottoman epithet, ‘the Lion that guards the gates of Istanbul’. And the talents of Bosnians were in great demand in the Ottoman imperial capital, at a time when it was routine for the young men of occupied lands to be forcibly removed to Istanbul for what might today be called ‘reprogramming’. Far from their homes, they underwent an intense programme of education, technical training and, where necessary, conversion to Islam, creating a cadre that owed and gave everything to the empire. Although ruled by a Sultan descended from the original Turkish Osmanli dynasty, the Ottoman Empire was run by supreme administrators known as Grand Viziers and there was no dogma that these must be Turks. Through the long history of the Ottoman Empire children snatched from the Slav communities of the Balkans earned a reputation for intelligence, diplomacy and resourcefulness, so much so that they regularly succeeded in navigating the tortuous route to the very top of the Ottoman governmental machine. Several of the Grand Viziers were originally Slavs from Bosnia.

Perhaps the most famous of these was a Serb born in the village of Sokolović, close to Sarajevo, who served as Grand Vizier after converting and adopting the name of Mehmed-paša Sokolović. He held power for fourteen years during the late sixteenth century and is credited with seeking to advance his homeland through the building of bridges, mosques and other infrastructure. His most famous structure, an elegant arched bridge which spans to this day the Drina River at the town of Višegrad, has long been regarded as a symbol of Bosnia’s intertwined ethnic matrix. Bosnia’s greatest twentieth-century novelist, Ivo Andrić, who was just two years ahead of Princip at the same Sarajevo grammar school and would win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1961, used the structure as a symbol for communal linkages in his historical fiction The Bridge on the Drina. During the war of the 1990s the old bridge was notoriously used by Bosnian Serb paramilitaries to dispose of civilians they had murdered, with bodies tipped over the edge in such large numbers that they clogged the turbines of a hydroelectric power plant downstream.

By the nineteenth century the age of Ottoman expansionism had passed, reducing considerably Bosnia’s value to Istanbul. Along with other areas on the periphery of the empire, Bosnia became a remote and increasingly troublesome backwater. As part of my research I visited the imperial archive in Istanbul, seeking a flavour of the late Ottoman rule that the Princips would have known. There were no references in the entire collection to the family under any of its three names, unsurprising given their lowly peasant status. But there were several written reports that referred to the area surrounding Obljaj, painting a picture of imperial decline: the desertion of Arab troops deployed to Bosnia from the empire’s Middle East holdings in Arabistan, the escape of a rebel leader, the routine execution of ‘a Jew and a Christian’.

The ebbing influence of imperial authorities in Istanbul was counterbalanced in Bosnia by a rise in the power of local proxies, the south-Slav converts to Islam. To hold on to power the Ottomans had long employed ‘divide and rule’, the stalwart strategy of imperial regimes; and to deal with the large Christian population, local Muslim leaders had been favoured with higher social status as feudal lords known as begs. Furthermore, to keep the local Serb followers of Orthodox Christianity in check, Istanbul had given permission to Franciscan missionaries to work in Bosnia, maintaining monasteries and ministering to the local Catholic Croat congregation.

Down near the bottom of the pecking order were serf families such as the Princips, exploited by punitive demands for tax that rose each year, along with ever more onerous periods of military service demanded from their men. The local begs increasingly answered to nobody, ignoring occasional half-hearted attempts from Istanbul to legislate an improvement in the rights of Christians and setting their own arbitrary local taxes, which would routinely leave serfs destitute at the end of a working year. Peasant resentment erupted in a series of rebellions throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, led mostly by local Serbs overtaxed into penury and inspired by successful rebellions to the south-east, where the new, independent country of Serbia was being created, a modern recasting of the medieval nation.

When four centuries of Ottoman rule in Bosnia came to an end, it was through one of these uprisings – a rebellion that began in 1875 not far from where the Princip family lived. It would drag on for three years, tapping into the anger felt by those at the bottom of a regime of feudal exploitation. Several of the men from the Princip clan, including Gavrilo’s father, Petar, joined the rebel groups and took to the mountains around Obljaj with their long-barrelled guns and intimate knowledge of the terrain. From there they defied not just the Ottoman troops, but also the Bosnian Muslim elite who were fighting to protect their pre-eminent social position. Violence flared across the community’s fault lines that had been so artfully maintained by the Ottomans. Bosnian Muslim forces, supported from fortress towns, would launch reprisal raids deep into the countryside, burning Christian villages and slaughtering peasants suspected of giving succour to the rebels. The violence was so sweeping, Miljkan explained, that all the remaining Princip non-combatants were forced to flee from Obljaj, along with tens of thousands of other Serbs, mostly women, children and the elderly, heading west across the frontier, seeking sanctuary in Habsburg-occupied territory.

‘The begs were so ruthless it was not safe for our family here,’ Nikola said in support of his older brother. ‘And when our people came back, once the Turks had finally left, they found all the houses here had been burned. So for the first time, but not the last, they had to rebuild everything.’

The mountainous region around Obljaj, including the forests cloaking the lower reaches of the tent-like Mount Šator, were rebel hot zones, close enough to the frontier to attract the attention of outsiders. They included Adeline Irby, a redoubtable Englishwoman from Norfolk whose Victorian sense of Christian charity drove her to come to the assistance of Serb refugees in this remote corner of south-eastern Europe during the rebellion of 1875. Miss Irby, as she is still referred to affectionately in Bosnia, was a pioneer aid worker, a nineteenth-century prototype for the legions spread across the world’s combat zones today. Her doggedness in battling through winter snowstorms, sleeping in vermin-infested hovels and defying Ottoman attempts to hinder aid deliveries won her a huge following among Bosnian Serbs. It also generated wide publicity in Britain, especially when her cause was publicly endorsed by her good friend, Florence Nightingale. Miss Irby would dedicate the rest of her life to the advancement of Bosnian Serbs, running a school for Orthodox Christian girls in Sarajevo, where she would make her home for more than thirty years. She died there in 1911 at the age of seventy-nine and is buried today just a few yards from Princip’s tomb. Her gravestone bears a carving in profile of her doughty – some might say battleaxe – face, with an inscription describing her as ‘a great benefactress of the Serbian people in Bosnia-Herzegovina’.

The uprising that began in 1875 brought an end to Ottoman rule in Bosnia but, as became clear from the Princip family’s reminiscences, this did not herald freedom for its south-Slav population. The Great Powers, gathering in 1878 for the Congress of Berlin, which was convened to decide the fate of territory lost by the weakening Ottoman Empire, still viewed Europe as a chequerboard of land parcels to be occupied, exploited and occasionally bartered. The interests of local populations were not nearly as important as higher, strategic concerns balancing the interests of the established powers: the Russians, the Austro-Hungarians, the Germans, the British, the Ottomans, the Italians and the French.

The imperial Habsburg rulers were deeply hostile to the establishment of a new, stand-alone country in Bosnia where south Slavs might enjoy self-rule. The Habsburg Empire already had a significant south-Slav population in territory it had long ruled across the Northern Balkans. Independence for Bosnia, Vienna believed, threatened to destabilise the empire by fomenting similar calls for self-rule from Slavs within the empire. Instability was a threat that all the Great Powers shared an aversion for, so Vienna’s representatives were able to convince the other statesmen gathered at the Berlin conference that she should be allowed to occupy Bosnia. Within weeks Austro-Hungarian troops had crossed the old frontier and marched on Sarajevo.

The Foreign Minister of Austria–Hungary, Gyula Andrassy, boasted at the time that Bosnia would be taken ‘with a company of men and a brass band at their head’, but events proved him guilty of hubris. It would ultimately require the deployment of 300,000 troops by Austria–Hungary to fulfil the occupation and, later, the full annexation of Bosnia. They took the towns quickly enough, but out in the rural areas they came across entrenched hostility, mostly from the Bosnian Muslim community. Official figures showed that in the first few months alone 5,198 men from the invading Austro-Hungarian force were killed or wounded. In keeping with its history of resistance, Herzegovina was one of the last regions to fall to the new occupiers.

The Austro-Hungarians claimed their occupation of Bosnia was a philanthropic act of civilisation, a ‘cultural mission’, as they put it rather prosaically. Like so much colonialism of the era – the Scramble for Africa was taking place at the same time – outsiders routinely presented themselves as being committed to upliftment, promising to modernise, reform and advance the local population. But, just as in Africa, the philanthropy turned out to be largely a sham. Furthermore, the Ottoman legacy in Bosnia brought out many Western prejudices against Islam, the implicit message being that a Christian nation would necessarily make good the cruel, corrupt, conservative incompetence of Muslim rule.

The supposed altruism of the Habsburgs did not reach far in Bosnia. A few hundred miles of road were built by the new occupiers, but mostly out of the simple military necessity for swift mobilisation and the deployment of troops. Railway lines were laid but, again, the primary motivator was hardly to help the local community. The railway was needed in order for Austro-Hungarian investors to profit from commercial exploitation. Timber from Bosnia’s rich forests was a target of this new trade, so within a few years narrow-gauge railway tracks snaked across the country and up into the forests, where felled trunks could be loaded for export. The character of town centres and cityscapes changed dramatically as European architects were encouraged to express themselves through new buildings of modern Western design. Within a few years the ancient hans, caravanserais, souks and turbes left by the Ottomans had been overshadowed, symbolically and literally, by an architectural avalanche of governors’ palaces, military barracks, university buildings, cathedrals, museums and the occasional brewery.