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TWENTY-FIVE LECTURES ON MODERN

BALKAN HISTORY

(THE BALKANS IN THE AGE OF NATIONALISM)

by Steven W. Sowards

Original Location:

http://www.lib.msu.edu/sowards/balkan /


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Table of contents

TOPIC 1: Defining the "Balkans:" An other EuropeLecture No. 1: Introduction to the course: The geography and ethnic geography of the Balkans to1500Lecture No. 2: "Asia begins at the Landstrasse:" Comparing Eastern European and Europeanhistories

TOPIC 2: The "Old Regimes" in the Balkans before 1790Lecture No. 3: The principles of Ottoman rule in the BalkansLecture No. 4: Hungary and the limits of Habsburg authority

TOPIC 3: The earliest national revolutions, 1804-1830Lecture No. 5: The Serbian Revolution and the Serbian stateLecture No. 6: The Greek Revolution and the Greek state

TOPIC 4: The Revolution of 1848 and its legacyLecture No. 7: Nationalism in Hungary, 1848-1867Lecture No. 8: National revival in Romania, 1848-1866

TOPIC 5: The impact of the wider world: Economic, social, politicalLecture No. 9: Economic and social changes in Balkan life

Lecture No. 10: The Great Powers and the "Eastern Question"

TOPIC 6: The failure of change from above: Reform in Macedonia and Bosnia-HercegovinaLecture No. 11: Macedonia and the failure of Ottoman reformsLecture No. 12: Bosnia-Hercegovina and the failure of reform in Austria-Hungary

TOPIC 7: Balkan nationalisms: Serbia and GreeceLecture No. 13: Serbian nationalism from the "Nacertanije" to the Yugoslav KingdomLecture No. 14: Greek nationalism, the "Megale Idea" and Venizelism to 1923

TOPIC 8: World War I: Causes and legaciesLecture No. 15: The Balkan causes of World War ILecture No. 16: The legacies of 1917 and 1919

TOPIC 9: Limitations of Western models in the interwar periodLecture No. 17: Nation without a state: The Balkan JewsLecture No. 18: Balkan politics drifts to the Right

TOPIC 10: Balkan politics during World War IILecture No. 19: The traditional regimes and the challenge of Nazism: Collaboration vs. resistanceLecture No. 20: The traditional regimes and the challenge of Communism: Patriotism vs.opportunism

TOPIC 11: The coming of the Cold WarLecture No. 21: Forging the Iron Curtain in the Balkans, 1944-1956

TOPIC 12: The Balkans in the age of bi-polar politicsLecture No. 22: Balkan politics in the Cold War yearsLecture No. 23: Social and economic change in the Balkans

TOPIC 13: Explaining the revolutions of the 1980sLecture No. 24: The failure of Balkan Communism and the causes of the Revolutions of 1989Lecture No. 25: The Yugoslav civil war


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Twenty-Five Lectures on Modern Balkan History

Lecture 1: Geography and ethnic geography of the Balkans to 1500

One can't understand the Balkans without understanding its ethnic groups, and one can'tunderstand the ethnic groups and their history without knowing the influence of the region'sgeography.

Even the geographic extent of the "Balkan" region is a matter of controversy. Many scholars,especially those writing in the Cold War era, have included only the Communist states and linkedthem with Czechoslovakia, Poland and East Germany, while omitting Greece and ignoring Turkeyand the Ottoman era. Other historians exclude Hungary, Croatia and other Habsburg lands, becauseof their "central" European character, supposedly contrary to Balkan themes. But the presence of contradictory themes is itself characteristically Balkan.

For the purposes of this course of lectures, the Balkan area includes Greece, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia,Romania, Albania and Hungary. Most of this area was once under Ottoman Turkish rule; the restunder the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The lectures will not deal with all of the Ottoman Empire, whichextended into Asia and Africa, or other former Habsburg lands such as Czechoslovakia and parts of Poland.

Physical geography

Balkan geography revolves around three features: the area's situation as a peninsula, itsmountains, and its rivers.

Map: GENERAL REFERENCE MAP OF EUROPE[Clicking here will display a general reference map of Europe -- including the Balkans, with physicalfeatures and 1999 borders -- in another browser window, while leaving this lecture text in theoriginal browser window.]

The Balkan region is a triangular peninsula with a wide northern border, narrowing to a tip as itextends to the south. The Black, the Aegean, the Mediterranean and the Adriatic Seas surround it;they have served as both barriers and entry points. Unlike some peninsulas, the Balkan area has

not been physically isolated from nearby regions. In the northeast, Romania is exposed to thesteppe regions of the Ukraine, an easy invasion route from prehistoric times to the present. In thenorthwest, the valley of the Danube and the flat Hungarian plain are easy points of entry. Most (butnot all) of the ethnic groups in the region entered by one of these paths.

While it is surrounded on three sides by water, the peninsula is not cut off from neighboring regionsto the east, west or south. To the east, the narrow straits of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles area natural pathway between the Balkans and Anatolia, and Asia beyond. To the west, the Italianpeninsula is only forty miles away across the Adriatic from Albania, and influence from that directionhas been another constant. Finally, the Aegean and Mediterranean islands to the south are steppingstones to the eastern Mediterranean and Egypt. Not surprisingly, the Balkan region has been acrossroads for traffic passing to and from all these destinations.

The mountains which divide the region are a prominent internal physical characteristic. The region

takes its name from the "Balkan" mountain range in Bulgaria (from a Turkish word meaning "achain of wooded mountains"). On a larger scale, one long continuous chain of mountains crosses theregion in the form of a reversed letter S, from the Carpathians south to the Balkan range proper,before it marches away east into Anatolian Turkey. On the west coast, an offshoot of the DinaricAlps follows the coast south through Dalmatia and Albania, crosses Greece and continues into thesea in the form of various islands.

The first effect of these mountains is to divide the region into small units within which distinct ethnicgroups have been able to sustain themselves. This area, a little smaller in size than France and


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Germany or the states of Texas and Oklahoma, is home to a dozen or more prominent ethnicgroups.

Second, the mountains have been physical obstacles, hampering efforts at regional combination,whether political, economic or cultural. The ethnic groups have tended toward distinct nationalcultures, local economies and political autonomy.

Third, the mountains have subdivided every district into vertical ecological zones, ranging frommore valuable lowland farming areas to less valuable wooded or rocky uplands. This variety of ecological niches supports various cultures in close proximity: traders, farmers, transhumantherders, forest dwellers. In general, the higher up the zone, the less productive the land, and so theupper regions of the mountains act as places of exile and refuge for defeated ethnic groups expelledfrom more desirable coast and valley lands. In general, then, the mountain features of the Balkanshave contributed to the continued fragmentation of human groups in the area.

The rivers of the region are short; their influence is usually local, with one exception. The smallrivers of the area typically rise in coastal mountains and drop into the nearest sea after a shortcourse. They are too small to carry water traffic; instead they cut ravines that block travel along thecoasts. The great exception is the Danube. It enters from the northwest, passes through theHungarian plain, skirts the south Slavic states, and exits through Romania into the Black Sea on theeast. Despite its size, the Danube also fails to be a source of regional integration. Several factors

prevent easy use of the Danube for regular communication and trade: low water in the summer,marshes obstructing access to the river bank, the narrow passage of the Iron Gates between Serbiaand Romania (fully opened to shipping by modern engineering techniques only in 1896), and thetendency of the Black Sea delta to silt up. Instead, the Danube acts to introduce outside influences.The western reaches of the river point to the German world; the eastern reaches lead to a dead endin the Black Sea, and leave travel at the mercy of Russia and Turkey. The Danube serves the needsof powerful external forces far more than it helps the internal needs of the Balkan peoples. Like themountains, the Balkan rivers have done little to foster unity in the area.

Ethnic geography

The Balkans have been inhabited since prehistoric times. but today's ethnic groups descend fromIndo-European migrants or ethnic groups that arrived in historical times. The pre-Indo-Europeaninhabitants left little behind except for archaelogical remnants and a few place names (like Knossos

on the island of Crete).

Knowledge of the area's national and ethnic groups is fundamental to Balkan history: they are thealphabet, the periodic table of elements. At a minimum this means recognizing a dozen major ethnicgroups, where they live (now and in the past), and how their religions, languages and culturescompare and interconnect.

Map: MAJOR ETHNIC GROUPS IN THE BALKANS CIRCA 1990[Clicking here will display a map indicating major ethnic groups in the Balkans in another browserwindow, while leaving this lecture text in the original browser window.]

Placing these ethnic groups on the map in the order in which they came to the region is a simpleway to introduce them. It has the virtues of the chronological and helps explain how some laterarrivals affected their neighbors.

Unfortunately the early history of some groups is incomplete and the evidence is controversial. Thequestion of who has lived where, when and for how long is critical for several modern political andterritorial disputes. The story of the Albanians illustrates these points about evidence, and thecontroversies about its use.

The Albanians


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The Albanians, or more accurately their ancestors the Illyrians, "appeared" in the western Balkansaround 1200 BC (or BCE, Before Christian Era). More precisely, we can say that around 1200 BC thearchaeological record shows a "discontinuity," a significant break in material culture during a shortspan of time. Objects left in graves and the structure of grave sites changed. Nineteenth centurywriters explained this (and similar events, especially among the Greeks) by describing supposedwaves of Indo-European invaders: men, women and children travelling in wagons out of thesteppes, driving their herds before them and wiping out the existing population. Modern scholars

argue for scenarios with less drama. Alterations in burials can mean a total change in population,but they can also mean that an existing population adopted new customs, with or without thearrival of large numbers of new people. For example, future archaelogists should not see the suddenappearance of Japanese VCRs in late twentieth century American landfills as evidence of migrationor invasion, but only of trade and cultural contact. The same thing is true in Balkan prehistory. In1200 BC, people in the Western Balkans took up the cultural practices that we call "Illyrian". Somenew people probably entered the area, and some of the old population probably remained.

After 1200 BC, classical Greek records describe the Illyrians as a non-Greek people to the north andwest. The Illyrians left no "historic" or written records of their own. We have to use linguistic andarchaeological evidence to trace their story. Based on this evidence, scholars will say that theIllyrians inhabited the region which today makes up Albania and the former Yugoslavia. Theirdescendants have remained in the mountains of present-day Albania continuously since 1200 BC:today's Albanians are in fact linked to the Illyrians. In the rest of former Illyria, other peoples tooktheir place.

Albanian is an Indo-European language, but one without relatives; it is believed to be the onlysurviving language descended from ancient Illyrian. The linguistic evidence is not simple. ModernAlbanian is obviously very different from the language of its neighbors, but we have nothing writtenin the language before the year 1555 of the Christian era, unlike Greek and the Slavic languages,for which we have classical and/or medieval writings dating back to a very early period. Directlinguistic descent is easy to trace in those kinds of records, but not for Illyrian/Albanian. Thelinguistic evidence here relies on fields like "onomastics", the study of place names and the namesfor everyday objects, and complex reasoning from meagre facts.

Archaeology is the second source for Albanian prehistory. Scholars can trace a continuous evolutionof burial goods, ornamentation on costumes, and cultural practices (deduced from materialremains) from 1200 BC forward to the historic Middle Ages. Based on that, and on the lack of recorded migration to the area by other groups, scholars believe the Illyrians became the modernAlbanians.

The Albanians today number about five million. Three and a half million live within Albania, another1.7 million in the adjacent Kosovo region of Serbia, and half a million in the new state known as the"Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia." Historically most Albanians have been Muslim since thetime of the Ottoman conquest, with Eastern Orthodox and smaller Catholic minorities. The Kosovoregion is a good example of competing historical claims to Balkan lands. Kosovo is a region of greatcultural significance for Serbia, the site of important medieval events. At the same time, it has amajority Albanian population today, and the Illyrian evidence says that proto-Albanians were therelong before the Serbs. Both nations claim it. In cases like this, scholarship is mixed with nationalistpolitics: that is why controversy accompanies history here.

The Greeks

The Greeks are as ancient as the Albanians in their Balkan ties. The 19th century model for Greekentry to the area involved three "waves" of invaders riding in carts, driving cattle and overwhelmingthe pre-Indo-European inhabitants. Each wave was associated with historic sites and a later dialectgroup -- Achaeans, Ionians and Dorians -- with intricate dating squabbles. The current view issimpler. Scholars now see a single immigration, with the dialects evolving later. The image of the"tribal mass" in motion has been discarded in favor of two competing theories. According to the firstmodel, the "invasion" consisted of individuals, families and small groups blending into theindigenous population. The second model sees a small clique of well-armed conquerors, who usedthe innovation of the chariot to defeat and displace the existing rulers. In either case, the old


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inhabitants simply took on the new culture, adopting new tools and a new religion, and creating amix which is classical "Greek" culture.

Ancient Greece encompassed not only today's Greek state but the Aegean islands and lands inAnatolia. Greek colonies appeared all around the coasts of the eastern Mediterranean, and followedAlexander the Great all over the Middle East.

We have copious historic records about Greece, but there are still some questions. The mostmysterious episode in Greek national history takes place at the end of the Roman period. The Greekworld was part of Rome, but Greek culture survived under Roman rule. Greek was the language of the earliest Christian gospels. The eastern half of the Roman Empire was culturally Greek andsurvived as the Byzantine Empire until 1453 AD (or CE, Christian Era). Between 600 and 800 AD,Slavic invaders washed over Greece as far south as the Peloponessus. These "barbarians" created a"dark age" in the Balkans during which written Greek records cease. In 800 AD Greek writtenculture reappears. Apparently these "invasions" can also be characterized as an intermingling of peoples. Greek civilization seems to have survived in small cities, and ultimately the newly arrivedSlavs became Hellenized. Are we then dealing with the same Greek identity? It persists in a culturalsense, but the 19th century notion of "blood" might say that these are not quite the same people.This is worth keeping in mind later as one wrestles with questions of ethnic identity.

In 1453, the Byzantine Empire fell under Ottoman rule, but Greek culture and language once again

survived. Today there are over ten million Greeks in Europe. Most Greeks live in the Greek state.However, until the 1920s there were substantial Greek populations in Anatolia. Today the chief "irredenta" (or minority populations outside the borders of Greece) are in Istanbul, on Cyprus and insouthern Albania (excluding Greeks in America, and others abroad).

The Greeks are overwhelmingly Eastern Orthodox, under the authority of the Patriarch of Constantinople. Many Americans fail to know that there are a dozen independent branches of theEastern Orthodox church, identified with separate Balkan and East European ethnic groups. Just asthe Roman Catholic Pope in Rome and the Greek Patriarch in Constantinople split over issues of doctrinal authority in 1054 AD, the other national Orthodox churches have often rejected theauthority of the Greek patriarch. The Greek Orthodox Church has to be distinguished from theSerbian Orthodox Church, the Bulgarian Church, and so on.

The Greek language has continued to evolve since classical times. Today it includes a formal written

version called katharevousa, a less formal spoken version called dimotiki, and an archaic versionused in church services. Until this century, notable Greek communities elsewhere in the Balkans orin Anatolia spoke other languages (such as Turkish) but this is not common today.

The Romanians

The Romanians also have origins in the classical era, but their history is complicated andcontroversial. Romanian and Hungarian nationalists disagree fundamentally about the origin of themodern Romanians. The Romanian position is this. In 106 AD Rome conquered the kingdom of theGetes, in what is today Transylvania (this event is the subject matter of Trajan's Column). TheGetes, Roman settlers, administrators and merchants mixed to form a new Latin-speaking Dacianethnic group. In 271 AD, Dacia was evacuated in the face of barbarian invasions. Soldiers,townspeople, merchants and administrators fled south. Peasants and country folk probably did notleave, but moved to safety in the wooded Carpathians during the barbarian invasions. During this

period the Magyars (Hungarians) settled in parts of Transylvania. In a document of 1247 AD,Romanians reappear in historical records, both in Transylvania and in Moldavia and Wallachia.Romanian nationalists say that this shows the descent of the original Daco-Roman population fromthe Carpathians. Hungarian nationalists say instead that the Romanians of 1247 are remnantDacians who fled south and survived for a millenium as herdspeople in Serbia and northern Greecebefore migrating north again. A Romanian-speaking Vlach ethnic group does live by herding in thesouthern Balkans. In the Magyar view, the Dacians who remained behind were wiped out. Byimplication, Romania thereby loses any claim to Transylvania.


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Western scholars tend to accept the Romanian interpretation. The linguistic evidence supports theRomanian position: Romanian lacks Greek loan words for religious or pastoral terms, which shouldhave come into use if Romanians spent such a long time in a Balkan exile. Romanian includes manyTurkish and Slavic loanwords, but its basic grammar and vocabulary are recognizable as based onLatin.

Twenty million ethnic Romanians live in the Romanian state. Outside the state, there are nearly 3million "Moldovans" in that part of the former Soviet Union. Romania in turn has substantialminorities within its own borders: some one and a half million Hungarians in Transylvania and atleast half a million Gypsies. There is a distinct Romanian Orthodox Church, but there are otherreligions present, especially in Transylvania.

The Slavs

Migrating Slavs reached the Balkans during the waves of "barbarian" invasions at the end of theRoman Empire. Many groups entering at that time left no mark. The South Slavs, as well as thenon-Slavic Magyars, concern us here.

The South Slav (Yugo-Slav) groups that became the Slovenes, Croatians, Serbians and Bulgariansentered the Balkans from the north between 500 and 700 AD. They settled in an arc stretching fromthe head of the Adriatic in the north, southward and eastward to the Black Sea. These groups weredivided into tribes before they arrived, but there was little variation between one group and itsneighbors. The hard and fast distinctions among them, especially in languages, are largely aproduct of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Ethnic maps that draw neat lines around thesegroups tend to oversimplify.

The Slovenes arrived first, in the 500s AD. Slovene resembles Slovak in some ways, and is quitedistinct from Serbo-Croatian. Some 1.7 million Slovenes live in the northwest corner of the formerRepublic of Yugoslavia. Austrian and Italian influences have created a Central European culture andSlovenes are chiefly Roman Catholic.

The other south Slavic peoples arrived in the 600s AD. Slavs probably occupied parts of theHungarian plain and Greece as well, but those Slavs later were absorbed into other cultures.

The south Slavic Croatians reached the Balkans in the late 500s and early 600s AD (arriving at thesame time as the Serbs). In the 800s, they fell under the nominal control of Charlemagne and hisheirs. The chief result was not political, but religious. Western Frankish missionaries followed andbegan the process by which Croatia became a Catholic country (while the Serbs became Orthodox).In 879 AD a Croatian state was recognized by the Pope. The acceptance of Christianity by theBalkan nations tends to follow similar patterns, worth pointing out here. South Slav tribes lackedanything like a strong king: they were organized into smaller units under warlords or village chiefs,who evolved into a nobility. A strong central figure like a king generally arose when the tribe unitedin response to some outside military threat. Once that threat receded, the nobles ceased to obeythe control of the central authority. The early kings adopted Christianity because in return forleading mass conversions, the pope (or the patriarch) would grant a stamp of religious authority tothe monarch of the country. Thus conversion to Catholicism or Orthodoxy tended to take place atthe same time as the creation of an enduring monarchy.

Croatia reached its medieval pinnacle under Tomislav in the 900s, but the kings were still weakrelative to the nobility. In 1102 AD a coalition of nobles made a deal with the Hungarian king,whose remote power was more attractive than the nearby king's authority. In return for Magyarrecognition of their control of local administrative and judicial affairs, the nobles pledged theirmilitary service, and the Hungarian king also gained the right to approve all the laws of the CroatianDiet of nobles. Thereafter Croatia existed as a feudal state under the kings of Hungary.

Today, some three and a half million Croatians or Croats live within the traditional borders of theCroatian state, with perhaps 700,000 others in nearby Slovenia and Bosnia. Croatian culture hasCentral European and Roman Catholic features. The Croatian language, made up of several distinctdialects, overlaps with Serbian; in the former Yugoslavia a combined Serbo-Croatian was an official


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language. The most obvious difference is the use of the Roman alphabet for Croatian, and theCyrillic for Serbian. There are also notable distinctions in vocabulary, some of them deliberatelyfostered by nationalists (for example, the Croation listopad or "leaf-fall" for the month of October,vs. the Serbian oktobar).

The south Slavic Serbians arrived at the same time as the Croatians, with an essentially identicalculture and language. The Serbs were closer to Byzantium so Serbian culture took on Byzantinefeatures (just as Croatian culture came to resemble that of the Franks) with Eastern Orthodoxmissionaries at work (rather than Catholic ones) and a central state modelled on Byzantine forms.Serbian feudalism also followed Byzantine patterns. All land was owned by the ruler, parcelled outas "usufruct fiefs" (which were not heritable) for the support of feudal vassals, churches andmonasteries. The chief impetus for state-building was protection from the Bulgarians. The Serbianmedieval state peaked in the 1300s under Stefan Dushan. When Serbia was conquered by the Turksin the 1400s, the impact of the Ottoman conquest was reduced for most peasants because theOttomans had already accepted and preserved the same Byzantine practices being used by theSerbs. Serbs not only survived physically, but were able to preserve much of their culture as well astheir lives.

The 1981 Yugoslav census counted 9 million Serbs, some 7 million of them concentrated in theSerbian Republic and Montenegro, but with important communities in Bosnia and Croatia (many of them subsequently displaced by civil war during the 1990s). There is a separate Serbian Orthodox

Church which has always helped define Serbian ethnic identity.

"Bosnia" is a geographic, not an ethnic or linguistic entity. Medieval Bosnia was a border zonebetween Croatia and Serbia, just as it is today. The chief ethnic marker of the so-called "Bosnians"today is their Islamic faith, and this came about only later. In terms of language and descent, themodern Bosnians are of the same origin as Croats and Serbs.

The south Slavs who became the Bulgarians also reached the Balkans in the early 600s AD. TheTurkic and nomadic "Bulgars" later conquered the area. They were few in numbers and after a fewcenturies the more numerous Slavs absorbed them in terms of culture and language. In 886 AD themissionary saints Methodius and Cyril (for whom the Cyrillic alphabet is named) converted tsarBoris to Orthodox Christianity. In the 900s, Tsar Symeon's First Bulgarian Empire defeatedByzantine and Serbian armies. The Second Bulgarian Empire was a rival of Byzantium around 1200AD, but Bulgaria absorbed and adopted Byzantine culture, law, land use patterns and political

organization. Today some six and a half million Bulgarians live in the Bulgarian state. The BulgarianOrthodox Church has been a leading factor in national identity.

There are also 1.4 million Macedonians in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, whichachieved independence after the collapse of Yugoslavia in 1989. These South Slavs reachedMacedonia in the 600s AD. Citing historical, cultural or linguistic grounds, Serbia, Greece andBulgaria often have advanced claims to Macedonia in terms of both territory and ethnic affiliationwith the population. Macedonian history illustrates the complicated relationship between ethnicidentity, language and national independence.

The Hungarians

The Hungarians or Magyars came to Europe in 895 AD, crossing the Carpathians from the Ukraineand conquering the Slavs who lived in the Pannonian basin (and thereby dividing the south Slavs

from the Czechs, Slovaks and Poles). Hungarian is a Finno-Ugric language, the only one in theBalkans, with connections to Turkish and the languages of Central Asia. For many years, the Magyarcavalry raided Europe but in 955 it was decisively defeated. Believing that their "luck" had ended,superstitious Magyar rulers accepted Christian missionaries and in 1000 AD King Stephen convertedto Catholicism. In return, the Pope recognized Hungarian rule over the so-called "lands of the Crownof St. Stephen." This term now stands for the maximum geographic possessions of the Hungarianstate, including Slovakia, Transylvania and Croatia.

More than 10 million people live in Hungary. Hungary has a smaller proportion of ethnic minoritiesthan most of the Balkan states, with over 90% of the population consisting of ethnic Magyars (the


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separate as miniature kingdoms that were easy pickings for the Turks. There was little or noWestern aid when the Ottoman challenge appeared, and the Byzantine Orthodox Greeks regardedthe Western Catholic Franks with hatred, further preventing any cooperation against the Ottomans.In 1453 the Turks took Constantinople by siege. In 1526 at Mohacs they destroyed the Hungarianarmy, killing the king and most of the Hungarian nobles. This was their high water mark, althoughthey were still strong enough to besiege to Vienna in 1683. The story of their gradual withdrawalfrom "Rumeli" or Europe is a major part of this course.

In 1831, about a third of the population of the Balkans was "Muslim," including Turks and Albanians.The present population of Turkey is over sixty million, but only about seven million Turks l ive inEuropean Turkey, around Istanbul. 700,000 Turks form a prominent minority in Bulgaria, despiteefforts since the early 1980s to Slavicize their names and pressure them to leave the country.

Turks have historically been Sunni Muslims, although in the 20th century the modern TurkishRepublic is secular. Turkish is a Turkic language, and thus related to other Altaic languages of central Asia.


Lecture 2: "Asia begins at the Landstrasse:" Comparing Eastern European and Europeanhistories

In a Spring 1995 newspaper story about the shelling of Zagreb in Croatia, the city was described as"more European than Balkan." This idea -- that the Balkans should be distinguished from the rest of Europe -- is a common sentiment when we read about Southeastern Europe. In the 1820s, theAustrian statesman Metternich said, "Asia begins at the Landstrasse," the royal highway leadingfrom Vienna east into Hungary. Why aren't the Balkans seen as part of Europe? If they are not,where does Europe end? What makes us think of one country as part of Europe, and another as partof the Balkans?

While this is in part a semantic game, it is also a significant discussion. For one thing, this kind of thinking colors much scholarship and political planning that deals with the Balkans. For another, themodern history of the Balkans involves a series of encounters with influences and conceptsoriginating in the western parts of Europe: nationalism, liberalism capitalism, Communism and soforth. The encounter is not unilateral: when these ideas and movements enter the Balkanenvironment, they are changed by it. If we are going to write and talk accurately about "Balkannationalism," then we need to be sure that we know what is meant by each word. And in return,Balkan experiences can shed meaningful light on concepts associated with Western Europeanculture and ideology, by revealing unexpected attributes which come into view only in the lessfamiliar setting of Southeastern Europe.

The society, culture and history of Romania or Yugoslavia does differs from that of Britain or France,of course. What then are the key differences which define the Balkans, which account for thedifferences, and which are shared in the region?

Defining Eastern European and Balkan difference

It is helpful to answer a related, larger question first: is there such a thing as Eastern Europe? Thecountries west of the old Soviet Union and east of Germany are often lumped together. How do weequate places as different from one another as Greece, with its Mediterranean islands and olivegroves, and Finland, wrapped in ice and roamed by reindeer?

It may be helpful to define our terms. In terms of geography, we can say that Eastern Europe is abelt of land extending from Greece in the south to Finland in the north, bounded on the west bycentral European Italy and Germany, and on the east by Russia. It has been called the"Zwischenlaender," the "lands between": neither Western European nor Russian. Such a definitionby negation -- what the region is not -- fails to tell us much about what it is. Are the Baltic statessuch as Finland or Latvia usefully considered together with Greece or Hungary? Are Poland,Czechoslovakia, and Austria part of Eastern Europe, or part of Central Europe? Should Hungary be


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analyzed along with Austria, or with the Balkan states? And should our answer to that question varywith the century, so that Habsburg-ruled Hungary differs from Soviet-ruled Hungary?

Without a knowledge of Eastern European history, it is easy to simply define the area as a transitionzone between the better-defined countries of Western or Central Europe on the one side, and Russiaon the other. By that line of reasoning, anything which clearly is neither Western nor Russian is"Eastern European" by process of elimination. What is objectionable here is the tendency to define aregion purely on the basis of outside points of reference. It would be better, and more valid, to lookfor points of definition from within the region itself.

Since 1945, it has been deceptively easy to define Eastern Europe in terms of Soviet Communistdomination. By this method, Eastern Europe is synonymous with the "satellites" set up by Stalinafter the Second World War: it is the region on the far side of the Iron Curtain. Now that the IronCurtain has disappeared, it is easier to see the flaws in this approach, but for students of the area italways offered problems. For example, Greece was frequently excised from the area on the groundsthat it was not a Communist country, and lumped into something called the "Mediterranean." But toassert that Greece and Spain share more in their historical backgrounds than do Greece andRomania, one has to forget a great deal of Greek history. At the opposite end of the scale, EastGermany suddenly falls into "Eastern" Europe despite all of its Central European connections, andthen presumably falls back out again in 1989. Yet East Germany doesn't share many points of experience with Romania or with Greece. It is also an erroneous oversimplification to lump together

Communist Poland with Communist Yugoslavia or Communist Albania: if the criterion here is"satellite" status, more than one Communist state fails to meet most casual meanings of that term.

If we want to understand the history and development of Eastern Europe, including the Balkans, wewill get much farther by using a definition that is rooted in the local characteristics of the region. Itis easy but facile to say what the Balkan region is not: it is not the West, and it is not Russia. It isharder but more useful to try to say what it is. What can we say about the similarities anddifferences between the Balkans and the rest of Europe? Just what is different?

A number of things clearly are not very different. The population of the Balkans, like the rest of Europe, is basically Indo-European: ethnic differences abound, but racial differences are minimal.The Balkans, even more than East Central European areas like Bohemia, are tied to the classicalheritage of the Greco-Roman world. In terms of physical nearness, the distance from Athens toParis is no greater than that from Copenhagen to Madrid, or from Boston to Miami. Eastern Europe

experiences weather much like that in adjacent zones of Western Europe; most of the same animalsand plants grow there wild or are raised on farms. Why then do Athens and Paris appear to be somuch more remote from each other culturally and historically?

Despite much shared geography, there is certainly much that is different. Even after the revolutionsof 1989, it is easy to note that the Eastern European, and especially the Balkan, states remain lessurban than Western countries. We can see less industry. Until 1989, there were far fewer Western-style parliamentary regimes. The Renaissance, the Reformation, the scientific revolution and variousliberal political revolutions appear to have had less impact on society. Religion retains a deeper rolein life than in secular Western states. However, we could observe that these matters are better seenas the results of difference, not its cause or true character, because Eastern European developmentalready had diverged from that of the West before many of these events and trends.

Some deeper differences: ethnic identity remains more of a factor, one could say a problem, inEastern Europe -- despite decades of Marxism, differences in ethnicity and not difference in classare driving events there [in 1995]. In the region's history the "nation-state" is absent, or absentuntil rather recently, and in many cases is still imperfectly formed. Admittedly, even the so-callednation-states of Western Europe contain many minorities, but in Eastern Europe multi-national andmulti-lingual states dominated the map until little more than a century ago. The national states of recent vintage are small, and in some cases breaking up into even smaller units. These ethnicdifferences are expressed by a greater variation in regional languages. The Romance and Germaniclanguages cover most of the West; in the East one finds chiefly Slavic languages, but alsospecimens of Turkic languages and others. Catholicism, Protestantism and Judaism are present, butso are Islam and Eastern Orthodox Christianity. There is a greater multiplicity of alphabets: not onlythe Roman alphabet but Cyrillic -- and until recently Arabic and Hebrew scripts were also commonly


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used. It is easy to overlook the minority problems and exceptional cases troubling WesternEuropean states, but one still has a sense in Eastern Europe that variation is greater.

Despite their earnest desire to base their definitions in the local character of the region, scholarsstill frequently get entangled in discussions that start with reference points outside the Balkan area.This is understandable: until relatively recently, there was little tradition of objective historicalscholarship in the region itself. During periods of foreign domination, the study of national self-awareness often was too political to be permitted by the ruling state. The scholarly apparatusnecessary for academic study often was absent until some time in the nineteenth century. Evenafter the appearance or revival of autonomous local universities and investigators, the realities of national political life often deformed scholarship along the lines of national chauvinism and lateralong lines of conformity with Communism doctrine. For these reasons, most of the foundation workin modern academic study of the region was conducted by Western scholars, or indigenous scholarswhose educations were grounded in Western traditions and perspectives.

For these observers, Eastern Europe was first of all an "Other" to be recognized by its differentnessfrom their own cultural milieu, and that differentness was something to be explained away. At itsworst, this perspective fell into the kind of trap described by Edward Said in 1978, writing about"Orientalism" in the study of the Arab world. Said describes "Orientalism" as a discourse -- that is, asystem of talking about something -- which, to quote, "puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand." [Orientalism,

p. 7] That is, if the Orient is mystical, then the West is rational; if the Orient is backward, the Westis progressive; if the Orient is despotic, the West is democratic. In short, if the Orient is exotic, thenthe West is normal, and the Orient is not merely different but abnormal, defective and inferior.Much the same can be said about certain approaches to Eastern European or Balkan studies. This isa faulty approach to knowledge which has infected not only Western, but also Eastern Europeanwriters.

At the same time, the fact remains that Eastern Europe -- and the Balkans -- are different fromWestern Europe, and a recognition of this fact is basic to understanding what is going on in EasternEuropean history and Eastern European societies. It is no good to apply Western models andchronologies casually to the Balkans. Looking for traces of the "bourgeoisie" or the industrialworking-class in the nineteenth century Balkans is a nearly pointless task, and explaining eventsalong those familiar lines is flat out incorrect. Something different is going on.

What then have observers said about this differentness? Prince Metternich, the German-bornchancellor of the Austrian Empire during much of the early nineteenth century, made a stab atdefining the Balkans which is so brilliantly wrong-headed that it is instructive. "Asia," he said,"begins at the Landstrasse" -- in other words, on the high road which led south and east away fromthe city of Vienna into the flat plains of Hungary. By Metternich's lights the Balkans were not reallya part of Europe, and could be dismissed accordingly as intractable, mysterious, backward, corruptand so on. What he says tells us a good deal about the attitude of the nineteenth century rulingclass toward the people of the Balkans. In the same vein, Bismarck said that the Balkans were notworth the bones of one Pomeranian infantryman, and the same Franz Ferdinand whose murdertriggered World War I in 1914 remarked that "it was an act of bad taste for the Hungarians to havecome to Europe" in the first place. Western leaders today are finding out that the Balkans -- andcrises in Bosnia -- are as frustrating in 1993 as they were in 1893, 1875, or many other years. Ourleaders might agree on some gut level with Metternich or Bismarck. But these little explosions of picque can't make the Balkans go away.

How "Asian" were the Balkans when viewed from the West? Nineteenth century diplomats employeda set of convenient and Euro-centric geographic expressions which clearly removed the Balkansalong a spectrum leading away from Europe. In nineteenth century parlance, the "Far East" meantmuch the same territory as it does today, but the "Middle East" and the "Near East" -- two conceptsthat have collapsed into interchangeability for us today -- constituted distinct territories. The MiddleEast encompassed the lands between Egypt and Iran. The Near East referred to the quite separatearea of the Eastern Mediterranean, and this included the Balkans. Kipling believed that "east waseast and west was west" and by European imperial lights, Southeastern Europe was "east."


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Today we would disagree. The European connectedness of Eastern European and Balkan historywith the West is too well established to dismiss with Metternich's bon mot. The Balkans were part of the Roman world: the imperial border ran along the line of the Danube, and the emperor Diocletian(who ruled from 284-305 AD) was a Dalmatian who came to the throne through a career in thearmy. Eastern Europeans in general have played a role in European life which is often overlooked.Everyone knows today that Pope John Paul II is a Pole -- fewer people realize that so was theastronomer Copernicus. The Western European urbanization which underlay the Industrial

Revolution was built in part upon imports of Eastern European grain. Both World Wars began inEastern Europe. If we forget that this area is a part of Europe, we do so at our peril.

Explaining the divergence of Eastern European history

Consider the area as a part of Europe, then. The question remains, how to explain the very differentpath which Eastern European -- and specifically Balkan -- history has taken, relative to the West.Simply saying that West and East are alike after all, is as inadequate as saying merely that they arenot alike. Modern scholars have begun their investigations by searching for explanations for thedifferent path. We can pick out several threads in the ongoing discussion.

In general, when scholars try to explain why Eastern Europe took a different course from the West,they adopt one of two perspectives, selecting between what we might call "external" or "internal"causes. According to one view, Eastern European societies have suffered from a series of damaging

interventions from outside the region, and this has been the dominant feature in determining theregion's history. Therefore external forces prevented East European or Balkan societies from makingthe same progress as Western societies. According to the other view, internal factors are the mostimportant in explaining retarded development. The geography of the region, or inefficient featuresof the local cultures themselves, are said to have blocked progress. Because these internal factorsare essential and unavoidable parts of the region and its culture, this view implies that EasternEuropean society has itself to blame for most of its problems.

Argument has ranged back and forth between these two positions. Earlier stages of the debatetended to look at political institutions and developments among the most prominent elements insociety: kings, bishops and so forth. With improved study of economic and social history,sometimes down to the village level, economic institutions have attracted more attention in recentyears: political institutions are still of interest but are now being explained from the bottom up.

Halecki's view

In 1952 Oscar Halecki published a "history of East Central Europe" under the title Borderlands of Western Civilization -- that is a good example of the earlier school of thought. [ footnote 1 ] Haleckistates up front that he believes he is writing about countries which "contributed to the generalprogress of European civilization" [p. 3]. He says that a European history in which "Western Europeis identified with the whole continent" is incomplete. Writing at the height of the early Cold War, hegoes on to say that there will be no "permanent peace" in Europe until the states of East CentralEurope resume "their traditional place in the European community, now enlarged as the Atlanticcommunity" [p. 4].

What is this "traditional place" according to Halecki's view? It is as a "frontier" zone, a "borderland"in which the forms and characteristics of Western European life encounter the contrasting forms andcharacteristics of Eastern European civilizations such as Russia's. In Halecki's view it is the

geographic accident of being intermediate between West and East that has set the characteristicstamp on Eastern Europe. Reading between the lines of his book, it seems that Halecki considerssome of the signs of Western civilization to be ethnic homogeneity, the legacy of Catholicism,secularization, constitutionalism and nationalism -- in other words, some of the characteristicfeatures or trends familiar to us from a Western European context, and which also can be traced inthe history of Poland in particular. While the Balkans is not Halecki's real subject, he neverthelessmakes some interesting comments in passing. He sees the Balkans as a region distinct from EastCentral Europe, chiefly because of its geographic form as a peninsula leading to the south and notonly to the east. The two regions (Balkan and East Central European) are also connected bygeography and by similar historical experiences, including roles as connecting paths leading fromWestern civilization with its Roman legacy across the European plain toward Asia. In the case of the


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Balkans, the dominant flow of influence became east to west as a result of the Ottoman invasions,and therefore Balkan history diverged from East Central European history to the north. Regardlessof the outcome, however, it is the contact, conflict and tribulation brought on by being on the edgeof the West that makes Eastern Europe what it is.

McNeill's view

In 1964 the prominent world historian William McNeill published a book called Europe's SteppeFrontier, 1500-1800 which looked at the same phenomenon of the borderland from a contrastingperspective. Remember that Halecki thought of Eastern Europe was an exceptional form of Westerncivilization, rendered thus by its geographic remoteness from the centers of Western European life.For McNeill, Eastern Europe (and in particular the Balkans) has been shaped instead by anexceptional form of a fundamentally Asian culture, that of the steppe nomad, altered here by itsencounter with woods and mountains where the steppe terminates at the Carpathian and Balkanmountains. Second, McNeill is less interested in geography per se, and more interested in thecultures that are created by humans as adaptations to geography.

Like Halecki, McNeill refers to "pioneers from Western Europe" as players on the Balkan stage, buthe is interested primarily in pioneers from the steppes acting as an engine to drive historicaldevelopment. At the foundation of his book is the conception of the "steppe empire" created by a"great war captain" who temporarily pulls together separate pastoral groups whose ecological

adaptations make them more naturally suited to autonomy. Armed, mounted and not tied tofarmlands, these warrior groups were free to pursue plunder where they wished. Such nomadsbegan by living off their herds of stock animals, but they were also capable of living off humanconquests. Such empires are inherently "fragile," says McNeill, because their individual parts canfunction alone and are apt to move away from the central authority. The Mongols created such anempire, so did the Magyars who came to Hungary in the 900s AD, and so did the Turks whoconquered the Balkans shortly thereafter.

Two things combined in Eastern Europe to make these cultures diverge from the nomadic patternwhile still remaining different from Western European models. First, the presence of mountains andforests instead of limitless steppe reduced the fragility of empires like those of the Ottomans or theMagyars in a particular way: no longer surrounded by limitless horizons, the constituent parts of these empires were more likely to remain in a permanent relationship with their leaders, perhapseven to settle down and replace animal husbandry with agriculture. Second, during the period

between 1500 and 1800, Europe's political, economic and military institutions took on modernforms, so that the balance of power shifted away from the nomad on horseback and in favor of thestable, urban and industrial populations living west of the steppes, populations which McNeill is notafraid to call "civilized."

Such a shift in the balance of power against the interests of the nomad would normally have brokena nomadic empire apart into its separate units. In Eastern Europe, McNeill believes that the effect of greater group cohesiveness (based on geography) instead turned the basically predatory habits of the ruling group inward: instead of preying on far flung communities across the steppe, Magyarnobles and Ottoman ghazis began to prey upon their own sedentary peasant populations. Becausethe growth of urbanized states in Europe was accompanied by an increased demand for grainswhich could be grown by those peasant populations, this form of predation became what has beencalled "neo-serfdom." Neo-serfdom was a new imposition of harsh controls over the land, labor,produce and freedom of movement of Eastern Europe's peasant families, at a time when WesternEuropean peasants were casting off the remains of the older medieval serfdom. When the formernomadic warrior class turned its attention inward, it retained its arms and its mobility, and remaineda significant local force especially in times of crisis. When the central authority was weak, these"men of prowess" were ideally situated to exploit their peasants thoroughly, and to retain most of the proceeds of taxation for their own local consumption. Enough of the "fragility" of the "steppeempire" remained to promote weakness at the center and insubordination at the periphery of Balkan states, and the internal troubles of the later regimes can be seen in this light. According toMcNeill, then, the characteristic political culture of the Balkans emerged rather recently in Balkanhistory, and was a logical consequence of the juxtaposition of a particular steppe culture onto thegeographic characteristics of the area. McNeill's Eastern Europe is far less like Western Europe thatthat of Halecki.


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Theories of economic backwardness

The most recent examinations of the uniqueness of Balkan and Eastern European history takeadvantage of better economic research to explain "backwardness" in the Balkans. Terms like"relative economic backwardness" or "economic underdevelopment" are now invoked to explain awhole range of associated social, political and economic developments. At the same time, there isfurious debate about the timing and the causes of backwardness in Eastern Europe and the Balkans.

To talk about "backwardness" without defining it is merely to put a different name on "difference".When we say the Balkans or Eastern Europe are backward, what are we trying to express? Incontemporary terms, it means fewer doctors per capita than the West, or fewer VCRs; it meanslower GNPs or lower per-capita incomes; it means high rates of unemployment in rural areas. Thesefacts really are observed consequences of backwardness: behind these descriptions of the results,we need to also look at structures in societies and economies that lead to these consequences. Forexample, when compared to urbanized countries, "backward" countries usually have aproportionally smaller bourgeoisie (in the simple sense of an urban middle-class) and a lack of industry. This lack of industry leads to "dependency" on outside industrial suppliers for certain kindsof goods, and places the dependent country in a position of selling raw materials at a disadvantagein return for processed goods. Most of the prerequisites for Industrial Revolutions are absent too.There is insufficient demand for new goods, based on the absence of a rising population andespecially a rising urban population. There are no modern transportation systems to connect

potential new industrial producers with markets. Financial institutions and practices that mightchannel economic surpluses into investment are absent. And there is a general lack of the modernsocial institutions and ways of thinking associated with rationalism, science, the enlightenment,liberalism and the rule of law, that lead to innovation and change from traditional patterns.

If this is a description of conditions in the Balkans, when did conditions there diverge from those inWestern Europe? Scholars have discussed four time periods and advanced particular explanations of backwardness for each. The four periods are 1) the nineteenth century, during the period of Western imperialism; 2) the centuries of decline in the Ottoman system; 3) the time of the originalOttoman conquest; and 4) the pre-Ottoman Middle Ages.Divergence in the nineteenth centuryThose who see Balkan history diverging from Western European history at a rather late date, in thenineteenth century, tend to place the blame for backwardness on "external" rather than "internal"factors. For that reason Western institutions, as well as Balkan ones, play a part in the explanation.

According to one view, it is not very useful to discuss "backwardness" in the Balkans in isolationbecause economic conditions in the modern Balkans resemble conditions in most of the modernworld. It is better to describe the Balkans (and similar regions) as "normal" and to consider theindustrialized West to be the exception. By this line of reasoning, the clues to relative disparitiesbetween standards of living in the two parts of Europe lie outside the Balkans, and are better foundin the peculiar conditions which led to the Industrial Revolution in England and elsewhere.

This observation is true as far as it goes, but it doesn't help us to understand much about thenature of Eastern Europe. It may be true that rural populations in both Romania and CentralAmerica became "dependent" on Western capitalist markets, but that is a far cry from saying thatCentral America and Romania are alike. For that matter, rural populations were "dependent" in bothRomania and Bulgaria, but socio-economic conditions in these two adjacent Balkan states differed agreat deal. In Romania, late nineteenth century peasants worked as sharecroppers on large estatesmanaged by absentee landlords pursuing the export of cash crops. In Bulgaria, late nineteenthcentury peasants owned dwarf farms and practiced subsistence agriculture. Both were "dependent"but reached that condition by following very different historical and cultural paths. It would seembetter to work with an explanation that lends itself to exploring the details of actual conditions.

Another view holds that Western intervention, especially imperialist economic and political activity,is responsible for conditions in the Balkans (and in other parts of the world). The impetus behindBalkan underdevelopment under this model is external, but the impact of external exploitation onlocal conditions is important. Those adopting this explanation would look toward the repeatedpolitical and military interventions conducted by the European Great Powers into the affairs of Balkan states. The late nineteenth century saw many unfair trade agreements forced onto weaker


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Balkan trading partners. Western governments and exporters aggressively pursued Balkan marketson behalf of Western manufacturers, so that budding Balkan industries were smothered before theycould compete. Western investors holding bonds and railroad shares demanded profits even if thismeant that construction and investment took place along lines that did not serve the best needs of local peoples. Total Western control of state treasuries was not unknown when bondholders requiredit: both the Turkish and the Greek state budgets were subject for many years to detailed control byrepresentatives of Western banks and investors. The West was not above the use of force to get its

way, either: temporary armed invasions by gunboats and marines were commonly used to enforceWestern demands, and when local states resisted, war could follow. One can argue that all of theseactivities added up to exploitation of the area, an exploitation that forced Balkan economicdevelopment into channels that perpetuated and ensured underdevelopment.

These kinds of "external" explanations, all focussed on fairly recent events, share someimplications. First, they imply that differences in local conditions mattered less than the externalforces. However true it might be that Greece and Hungary had very different economies, whatmatters is not their differences but their shared exploitation by outsiders. Second, such a viewimplies that the peculiar circumstances of Ottoman rule were not all that important. After all, by thelate nineteenth century Hungary was a partner state in the Austro- Hungarian Monarchy; andGreece, Serbia and Romania were virtually independent from Ottoman rule. Yet all parts of theBalkans -- Ottoman, independent or otherwise -- shared the condition of backwardness.

Decline under Ottoman rule

For a great many scholars, explanations of Balkan underdevelopment which look at the nineteenthcentury alone fail to account for too much prior Balkan history. They would argue that the particularevents and problems of the nineteenth century inevitably flowed from earlier developments duringthe Ottoman period, a period in which misrule set up the imbalances between the Western andEastern European economies under which imperialism could take place. But how far back must onelook to find the critical period?

Many traditional explanations of Balkan economic and social backwardness, including those offeredby the first wave of scholars interested in the revival of national states in the Balkans, blamed theOttoman Empire (and to a lesser extent the Habsburgs) for the relative stagnation of the area. Thecauses of poverty and so forth were blamed on misrule by these multi-national states, so differentfrom the nation-states of Western Europe. Underlying these arguments, made also by mainline

economists, is the notion that progress amd growth are normal for societies: where they are notpresent, local institutions may be blocking normal progress.

In its simplest form, this argument is advanced in daily conversations in many Balkan countries, inexchanges like this:A tourist asks, "Why is the elevator out of order today (or why is there no milk or coffee orgasoline)?"To which a local citizen replies, "Pet sto godina pod igotom" (in Bulgarian, or its Greek or Romanianor Serbian equivalent) -- five hundred years under the Turkish yoke.

In other words: in the centuries since the arrival of the Turks in the 1400s, everything has gonebad. In contrast to views that blame backwardness on Western imperialism, it is worth noting thatin this analysis Western contact and intervention function as the antidote, not the problem.Beginning with the Ottoman conquest, the forces behind decline are essentially internal in this view,although driven by forces carried into the area by an invader.

Records do indeed show that the population of the Balkans declined during the period of Ottomanrule. There was a growing tendency for local authorities to abuse their peasants. Taxes were toohigh, the legal system was corrupt or absent, and Christians were subject to methodicalpersecution. At the same time, local landlords failed to invest the surplus that they squeezed out of their peasants, so that economic development lagged and led to permanent backwardness.Peasants of courese were unwilling to invest their efforts in improvements to farmland that might bestolen away from them at any time, directly or through taxes, and landlords preferred to waste theirincome on luxuries. Where change came to rural areas, it often came in the form of a "secondserfdom" that institutionalized harmful trends. Some landlords turned to stock raising and made do


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without peasants, while the growth of agricultural exports (traded for imported industrial goods)ensured that towns remained backwaters. In the case of the Habsburg parts of the Balkans, thereligious division between ruler and ruled was muted or absent, but the abuse of peasants by alandholding nobility had much the same result. In either society, rigid value systems led to a fear of change and placed too many obstacles in the way of innovators.

Marxist historians of the early modern period tend to reach some similar conclusions although theyfollow a slightly different line of reasoning. As society develops, socialism has to be preceded by anearlier and inferior stage of nationalist and middle-class society. In the Balkans, this stage begins inthe nineteenth century and continues into the twentieth, up to 1945. However, there is also anearlier pre-national and pre-bourgeois period which is in turn inferior to the national period: whilesuch an analysis of Ottoman and Habsburg society relies more on class arguments, it reaches moreor less the same conclusion held by nationalist historians. Local society is blamed.

The Ottoman and Habsburg Empires took a terrible beating in popular and scholarly WesternEuropean writing during the years before and after World War I. In recent years, however, therehas been a tendency to separate the Ottoman period into an early, prosperous period and a laterperiod of decline, and to seek the causes of backwardness in this later period. The period of Ottoman decline is usually seen as beginning in the 1600s and continues through the eighteenthand nineteenth centuries right up to the founding of modern Turkey in 1923. Scholars of theHabsburg Empire have also devoted much talk to the issue of when the Austrian Empire went into

decline.

One group interested in this period accepts the prime role of outside factors, especially the relativesuperiority of the Western economies, but sees critical events taking place well before thenineteenth century. Under this view, the crucial factor is the rise of relatively advanced urbancenters in the West in the 1700s, during the period before and during the Industrial Revolution. Assoon as the new prominent towns in the West outstripped older urban centers in the East, theplaying field began to tilt in favor of Western economies. The appearance of large cities in the Westmeant a heightened demand for agricultural goods, especially bulk grains which could be raised onlarger tracts of land and then shipped by sea from the Balkans to the West. The result was asharpened interest in agricultural production for sale by the ruling class in Eastern Europe, whoresponded by increasing the taxes, labor dues and other tributes paid to them by their peasants. Atthe same time, the ruling class was able to restrict the movement of peasants who lacked urbancenters as alternative markets for their labor or as refuges from noble oppressors: hence the"second serfdom, exploiting peasants in the East just at the time when their Western counterpartswere able to use the growth of cities as a lever to reduce their obligations and increase theiropportunities. Western demand for grain thus had profound results for both the rich at the top andthe poor at the bottom of societies in Eastern Europe.

On the other hand, some scholars point to the eventual benefits of this capitalization of Easternagriculture: without Western markets, there would have been no incentive to improve productivityand no way to amass capital. "Second serfdom" -- in this view -- was a cruel but necessary steptoward economic and technological progress.

The Ottoman conquest as disaster

The other school of thought blaming Balkan decline on Ottoman culture is even more critical. In thisview, the disasters of the Ottoman period begin at the first moment of the Turkish conquest. Thereis no scope for distinguishing good and bad periods of Ottoman control. In this view, the violence of the conquest wiped out important political institutions and destroyed normal patterns of settlement,village life and the economy.

Note that blame here falls not on the period of decline alone but on the entire period of Turkishcontrol. The argument postulates that basic, essential features of the Turkish system werebackward even when the Ottoman Empire worked at its best. A key part of this analysis is thealleged inability of the Muslim ruling class to pursue science, industry and new ideas. The Ottomanfeudal system, especially the Ottoman land tenure system, also is seen as fundamentally flawed:this analysis rejects the idea that the system began as a reasonable one and only later became a


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problem due to various abuses. We will spend some time on Ottoman feudalism next week, but fornow you need to know some of its most basic features in order to follow this debate about decline.

Ottoman feudalism was based on the idea that all land belonged to the sultan as the earthlyrepresentative of God. The sultan in turn granted temporary use of specific plots of land tosubordinate institutions and individuals. In particular, the Ottoman cavalry consisted of armedhorsemen (called variously timariots or spahis) who were supported by the produce of plots of land(timars or spahiliks) in exchange for pledges of military service in time of war. When the centralauthorities were strong, feudal landholders were required to treat their peasants well because thepeasants' welfare was important to the sultan, as the ultimate landlord, and landholders couldforfeit their use of the land if they abused the system.

However, when the central authorities were weak, these local feudal figures took advantage of conditions to squeeze excess revenue from their peasants, evade their obligations to thegovernment and sometimes to make permanent claims to land. By various legal devices, a timar orspahilik could be converted to a chiftlik, a plot of land owned permanently by a landlord, and such achiftlik could then be passed down in his family. When land was converted to chiftlik status, thecentral government lost influence, revenue and the ability to protect the peasants. At the local level,peasants living on chiftlik land also were less likely to treat their land well or to try to improve it.Under the original feudal system, they enjoyed some guarantees of retaining the fruits of theirefforts but this was lost when landlords secured full claims on land.

Recent scholarship on problems in Ottoman society pays a great deal of attention to the creation of chiftliks. The causes of chiftlik formation are also causes of economic decline in general. For onething, the so-called "price revolution" of the period after 1550 brought serious inflation that madethe fixed income of a timar too low to live on: feudal landholders found that they had to abuse theland tenure system merely to survive. At the same time, the rise of infantry made the timariot andspahi cavalry less important to the central authorities, who lost interest in maintaining the oldfeudal system used for raising horse troops.

Meanwhile, Eastern Europe was sharing in a general "crisis" in late feudal Europe. Overpopulation of many rural areas, combined with a worsening climate and the exhaustion of marginal soils, led tofamine and this led in turn to increased susceptibility to disease. In many areas of Europe, ruralpopulation went into a long decline. According to this view, the decline of Balkan population wasneither unusual nor a sign of local Ottoman misadministration. However, it did have very different

results in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, as compared to the West. In the West, the decline of rural regions was accompanied by a growth in the relative power of towns. Rural decline alsostrengthened central governments and weakened rural nobles. These were important steps on theway to industrialization and nation-building.

In the Balkans, however, a healthy new kind of urban-rural economic relationship failed to appear.Marginal farmland was abandoned and converted to stock-raising (sometimes in the hands of newlyarrived Turkish pastoralists migrating from Anatolia into the interior of the Ottoman Empire).Instead of selling produce to local towns, Balkan landlords sold products like wool (and later, grain)to the West. Balkan towns were not important for this traffic. Cut off from commerce and sources of capital, the towns later could not compete as industrial centers when faced with cheaper, moreadvanced imports from the West.

At one time, scholars believed that chiftliks came to dominate the Ottoman Balkans. It is nowbelieved that landlords used only about 10% of farmland to support agriculture for export: to beprofitable, such land had to be both productive and rather close to ports to allow export in theabsence of a decent internal road net. Elsewhere, Balkans farmland remained in the hands of peasants in small plots: however, these peasants were themselves an obstacle to development,because they lacked the resources or the motives for improvements and remained interested insubsistence farming only.

Analysts who seek the sources of backwardness in the era of Ottoman decline describe a morecomplicated interplay of external and internal forces.Backwardness before the OttomansOne further perspective remains: scholars like John Lampe place the causes of backwardness even


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farther back in Balkan history, before the Ottomans or Habsburgs ever came to the area. Advocatesof this view point to indications that the area had been characterized by low population densities(relative to the rest of Europe) as far back as the Middle Ages. Low population density in turn led toa greater role for pastoralism in the rural economy, which in turn led to the weakness of towns andan inability to compete with Western European urban industry in later centuries.

The specific processes and consequences of geographic weakness are these. First, farming land inSoutheastern Europe was handicapped by poorer soils, less rainfall and a division into smaller areasbecause of mountains and other wastelands. Second, the "border" status of the region led towarfare that ate up surpluses which otherwise might have been invested in improvements or townbuilding: the greater risk of loss made costly improvements less attractive as investments for allmembers of society. Third, the presence of powerful and sophisticated nearby civilizations to thesouth -- as far back as the classical world -- forced native industries into failed competition withmanufactures from the Byzantine empire and other centers.

To the extent that border disruptions caused medieval economic backwardness, we could expect the"Pax Ottomanica" to bring improvements: with an end to active warfare, the climate for investmentwould seem more attractive. There are several reasons why this did not occur.

First, the Ottoman conquest disrupted townlife for a long time and prompted many peasants toabandon village agriculture for mountain herding.

Second, foreign trade ceased during long periods of warfare between Turkey and Venice, amongothers.

Third, internal trade remained hampered by geographic barriers like mountains and poor coastalaccess. No net of good roads or ports was created. Thus trade remained local in focus.

Fourth, while the timar system brought stable taxes and ownership, other aspects of Ottoman lawand administration artificially hurt rural productivity. For example, grain sales to the state at lowcosts were mandated to support the poor of Istanbul and the cities, and to reduce the cost of feeding armies. The decline of timars in favor of chiftliks and other forms of illegal land ownershipalso added to the burden on the peasants.

This analysis ends with the same observations about the relative weakness of the Balkan economywhen Western urban industry came into the picture. However, blame falls more on naturalconditions and less on inept or evil leaders. This is a rather pessimistic perspective, and also onewhich is unattractive for political purposes. It undercuts the position of local authorities who wouldlike to blame current problems on specific foreign or class enemies. In addition, such a view impliesa harder road for future Eastern European and Balkan modernization because it indicates thatregional economic and social problems are rooted in geographic realities, not historical or politicalmistakes subject to human remedy.

Such are some explanations for the characteristics that make Eastern Europe, and especially theBalkans, different from the rest of Europe. It is an area with a unique and challenging physicalgeography. As a borderland, it has experienced more than its share of political disruption. Thelegacy of being a border also has meant ethnic diversity and ethnic strife, and these have preventednation building of the kind seen in other parts of Europe. The area has had its own cultures and itsown special history: Balkan culture and history are not just footnotes or exceptions when comparedto the history of the West.


Lecture 3: The principles of Ottoman rule in the Balkans

Introduction To make sense of the rapid changes during the last two hundred years of Balkan history, we needsome sense of what went before, by looking at the Habsburg and Ottoman "old regimes" in the


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Early Modern period. The Ottoman Empire and the Habsburg Empire are often (and usefully)presented together as natural rivals: one Catholic, the other Muslim; one western and European,the other eastern and Asian. You should already have some sense of the limits and pitfalls in suchpaired dichotomies. Also, such an approach misses the fact that these two countries had a greatdeal in common. Both were products of the late medieval period, and neither was well positioned toadjust to the driving forces of "modern" history: forces like nationalism, and the industrialrevolution. They operated on the basis of pre-modern assumptions and institutions. We can begin to

understand both countries and their histories by identifying a few key principles that shaped them.Those principles dictated the form of Ottoman and Habsburg history and when those principlesreached their limits these states fell apart.

Ottoman principles

If we make a list of the principles behind a modern Western European state, we might includenationalism and a notion that the state and the ethnic nation are ideally identical; the rule of lawand the accompanying idea of a constitution; and the fundamental place of the citizens as theembodiment of the country. In the Ottoman Empire, wholly different principles were at work. In itsprime the Ottoman Empire was defined by its ruler, by its faith and by its military, all actingtogether. If we understand these forces, we can see reasons for its great successes and later for itsgreat failures.

The military principle

All countries have a military: why then focus on this as a defining force? Because without doing so,one can't explain the rapid Turkish conquest of the Balkans or the social institutions that wereplanted there.

The Turks are Muslims but not Arabs. There was a general migration of Turkish-speaking nomadssouth into the Arab world after 700 CE. In 1055 Turks captured Baghdad and created the SeljukEmpire, which remained Islamic but was no longer Arab-ruled. When the Mongols destroyed theSeljuk state in the 1200s, Turkish tribes scattered West into Anatolia. One of them came to benamed for Osman, its leader. They became involved in the wars of the Byzantine Empire againstBulgaria, Serbia and the Crusader states that had been set up in Greece after the sack of Constantinople in 1204. Ottoman Turkish soldiers first entered the Balkans around 1345 asByzantine mercenaries and later returned to conquer it. They soon defeated the Bulgars and the

Serbs.

Incidentally, that Serbian defeat (which took place at the field of Kosovo in 1389) was a definingmoment for Serbian history. First, there was a great killing which wiped out the nobility and knightsand left the Serbs as a peasant nation. The democratic, populist, often vulgar nature of Serbianpolitics in modern times owes something to Kosovo. Second, enshrined in national legends and epicpoetry, Kosovo encapsulated Serbian identity. The story of Kosovo allowed the Serbs to rememberwho they were by remembering their enemies. Kosovo as a place remains part of the present dayethnic strife in the Kosovo region. Even though its population today is mostly Albanian, the Serbsare as likely to give up this sanctified battle field as, say, Texans would be to return the Alamo toMexico.

In 1444 at Varna Sultan Murad II crushed an intervening force of Hungarian, Polish, French andGerman crusaders. In 1453, scarcely 100 years after the Turks entered Europe, Sultan Mohammed

II (known as "the Conqueror") took Constantinople by siege with an army of 100,000 and some of the world's most modern artillery. In taking the city, Mohammed II erased the last remnant of theRoman Empire and subjugated the Greek world. Symbolizing the transition, the great Church of theHoly Wisdom, Hagia Sophia, became a mosque.

After conquering Syria, Egypt, parts of the Arabian peninsula, Mesopotamia and North Africa as faras Algeria, Sultan Suleiman "the Magnificent" overran Moldavia and Bessarabia (in today's Romania)in the 1520s. At the Battle of Mohacs in 1526, his army killed 25,000 Hungarian knights and theirking. The Ottoman forces reached their European high water mark in 1529 when they failed to takeVienna by siege (although they repeated the siege in 1683).


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The "military principle" behind the Ottoman Empire helps explain how a tribal society of nomadicmercenary cavalry soldiers from the steppes of Central Asia did so well. The Ottomans weresuccessful conquerors for some good reasons:

First, by comparison with their feudal European rivals, the early Ottoman state and its armies weretightly organized and controlled.

Second, European rulers were divided amongst themselves, even at war with each other.

Third, Turkish armies were constantly reinforced by new waves of "ghazi" warriors from CentralAsia, who were motivated by both religion and the prospect of spoils.

Fourth, early Ottoman rule was not unattractive to the mass of its conquered Christian and Jewishsubjects. The Ottoman armies faced few threats from revolts in lands already conquered. Moreabout this later.

The dynastic principle

Dynastic rule was the second principle behind the Ottoman state. In this, Turkey reflected medievalpractice all over Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean. The country consisted of the accumulatedconquered lands of the Ottoman ruling house (named after the border lord Osman) and that landwas passed down in the family. By the time of the Balkan conquests, the Ottoman rulers were nolonger simply tribal "beys" but "sultans" who were full masters of secular life. A state treasury hadappeared, distinct from the leader's private purse. To create a sophisticated state apparatus, theOttomans freely adopted useful institutions from the societies they conquered. The Seljuk Turks hadaccepted Islamic religious, educational and legal institutions, and thus Ottoman society inheritedfrom the Seljuks a system of mosques, schools and courts. The Ottomans also adopted a wholearray of bureaucratic features from the Byzantines: taxes, court functions, feudal practices andsystems of land tenure. These institutions were strong tools supporting the dynasty.

The Islamic principle

Islam was the third key principle for Ottoman society. Political, cultural and legal forms followedIslamic law or "sheriat". The Turks were Sunni Muslims: in contrast to Shi'i Muslim societies,

religious institutions served the secular state. The sultan was recognized as God's agent in theworld. The state had three purposes:

First, the preservation and expansion of Islam.

Second, the defense and expansion of the ruler's power, wealth and possessions. Because thesultan was God's agent, his interests and those of Islam were believed to coincide. These first twopurposes acted in full agreement.

Third, justice and security for the sultan's subjects, as foundations of the first two purposes. Thesultan was regarded as a shepherd, and his subjects corresponded to the flock ("rayah"). In a well-run Islamic state, all elements functioned in a smooth cycle. The government dispensed justice, safeand secure subjects prospered, taxation flowed from their wealth, the state and its military weresustained at necessary strength, and good government was preserved to begin the cycle again.

This ideal helps explain the attractions of Ottoman rule in its early days. Jews, Christians andMuslims worshipped the same God. Jews and Christians were penalized only partially for failing toaccept God's most recent revelation through the prophet Mohammed. The Islamic conquerorstolerated the other two religions, at a time when toleration was rare in Europe. After the Frankishand Venetian sack of Byzantium in 1204, Orthodox Byzantine Greeks thought that Catholic WesternEuropeans were as bad or worse than the Turks. In the Ottoman administration, talented men of allfaiths could fulfill at least limited roles. For peasants, the finality of Ottoman victory also meant anend to centuries of wars between Serbs, Bulgars, Byzantines and Crusaders, and thus offeredstability. Ottoman taxes were lower than the taxes of the conquered Balkan Christian kingdoms.


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How the principles worked together

These three principles -- Islam, the dynasty and the military -- acted together in the OttomanEmpire. As head of state, the Sultan sat at the top of a pyramid. Just below him was a small rulingclass, his direct instruments. The mass of subjects were known as "rayah" or "protected flock." Thisincluded both Muslims and non-Muslims. Jews and Christians were entitled to protection, but couldnot join the military or the sultan's immediate ruling circle. However, if they chose to convert toIslam, men of talent from all religious or ethnic backgrounds potentially could wield great power.

Because of its divine foundation, the power of the sultan had no theoretical limit so long as Islamiclaw was upheld. The sultan was not just an absolute ruler in an abstract sense: many of hisoperatives were in fact his slaves. However, we have to distinguish Ottoman slavery from the formsof Western slavery with which we are more familiar. Ottoman slavery was based in the capture of military captives, who became the property of their captor. Once taken in, however, and providedthat they were loyal, slaves were protected from abuse and enjoyed opportunities for responsibilityand advancement as soldiers, statesmen and officials. Slaves were often given their freedom as areward for service and their children were born free, not into slavery.

The "Devshirme"

One of the most exotic Ottoman institutions used slavery to seek out persons of talent, withpotential advantages for both the state and the slave. This was the "devshirme" or child-contribution, established in the middle 1300s.

When recruits for the military were needed, Christian boys were confiscated from the population asslaves and converted to Islam. While there were no regular timetables or set quotas, perhaps athousand boys were taken on average per year. As slaves, these boys became absolute dependentsof the sultan. They were not used for the army alone: after growing up and being trained, they tookon all kinds of roles in the imperial establishment. They were treated well and could aspire to powerand wealth. The brightest of these children were educated in the law, foreign languages, thesciences, sports and administrative skills and then entered the sultan's "Inner Service". Promotedon the basis of skill, they could grow up to be provincial governors, treasury officials, physicians,architects, judges and high officials, and helped to run the empire. They could marry, if theircareers permitted it, and their children were free Muslims. So desirable were these positions duringthe Ottoman heyday, that some rural Christian families bribed officials to select their sons. Because

the "devshirme" was levied as a tribute on the conquered, it involved only the non-Muslimpopulation, but some Muslim families also bribed officials to select their children illegally, in thehope of placing relatives in powerful offices. Some members of the "ulema", the religion-based legaland educational system, came from this background. So did members of the "divan" or council of ministers and its supporting scribes and officials, including governors appointed to run provinces.

Levied children with less talent went into the military and formed the "janissary" infantry, the30,000 men kept under arms as garrisons in key fortresses and as the core of the sultan's army.The janissaries were supported by specialists such as armor makers and an Artillery Corpssupervised by experts, some of them renegades from Western Europe.

The "devshirme" was one way in which the military principle used prior conquests to strengthen thestate for more success. Another involved the feudal "timariots," who made up the rest of thesultan's army and also acted as the local arm of the Ottoman state. Land was the wealth of the

state. Just as the sultan's officials were his slaves, so also the country's land was t

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