A History of the Balkans 1804-1945

Stevan K. Pavlowitch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317900160
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

The Balkans have often been a flashpoint of conflict in European history. The recent civil war has torn the country apart and the region faces an uncertain future. This authoritative study provides an account of the history of the whole area from the first major nationalist rising against its Ottoman rulers in 1804 to the aftermath of World War II. Covering the former Yugoslavia, Albania, Greece, Bulgaria and Romania, it provides a Balkan-wide overview as well as histories of specific states and sets the context to the recent conflict.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The geography and its impact on the history. Byzantium, the medieval monarchies, the Ottoman conquest and the Habsburg reconquest. The transition of the eighteenth century.

FROM THE ROMAN TO THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

The Balkan peninsula is characterized both by geographical unity and a unity imposed by history. The word ‘Balkanization’ is often used to mean fragmentation and turbulence, but historians of the peninsula¹ have pointed out that its history is no more turbulent than that of any other part of Europe before the First World War. Fragmentation and turbulence are, in any case, the result of its make-up, its place on the map, and the struggle for its control.

The Turkish word balkan means ‘wooded mountains’. Unlike the Iberian and Italian peninsulas, the Balkan peninsula is defined by the mountainous mass itself. The Dinaric mountains run from the Alps of Slovenia down the Adriatic coast to Albania, then turn inland as the Pindus range into central Greece, allowing only the most narrow of coasts to the west. The Carpathian chain forms a reverse ‘S’ that begins north of Romania, goes south to divide the plains of Moldavia and Wallachia from the uplands of Transylvania, before turning southwest to cross the Danube at the Iron Gates, then east through Bulgaria as the Balkan range proper. Finally, the ancient Macedonian and Thracian land mass thrusts fingers into northern Greece.

The discontinuous structure of these mountains has discouraged integration from within, but has formed no barrier to penetration. Connected valleys, plateaux and basins have provided access. They have fostered particularities and connexions, conquests and exchanges. The most important passageways have been the Danube and the Belgrade-Salonika road – forming between them a huge T-shaped interchange. While the great river has been a link to central Europe and to Russia, a vital road runs through depressions in the ancient land mass from the Danubian plains, by way of the Morava and Vardar valleys, to the Aegean.

The lasting influences came from the open north or from the south by the Eurasian link, and followed the north-south routes. The Romans conquered most of the Balkans, but did not settle except along the Adriatic coast and the Danube. By the beginning of the sixth century, there were two mainly urban linguistic areas – Roman north and west, Greek south and east. The Romanized zone comprised a coastal Adriatic and a Danubian bloc, separated by a more lightly Romanized mountainous interior, with a mixed zone fading into the Hellenized south.

The South Slavs, who had come from north of the Carpathians in the wake of the migrations originating from the central Asian steppes, then crossed the Danube. They swept over the Balkans from the Alps to the Peloponnese, completely modifying the ethnic structure of the peninsula as they settled. The natives – Hellenized, Romanized or otherwise – withdrew to mountain, coastal and island retreats, or were absorbed by the newcomers, who were themselves assimilated the further they penetrated into Greek lands.

Eventually a broad middle belt from the Adriatic to the Black Sea was Slavicized. The general name Slovene stuck to frontier populations where there was a distinct contrast with non-Slavs. Old names of leading tribes spread to those who had settled from the western plains to the Adriatic – Croat – and to those along the southern tributaries of the Danube and in the depressions – Serb. Germanic, Slav and Greek populations applied the name Vlach (variants such as Welsh and Walloon were used elsewhere), which may have come from a Romanized Celtic group, to the Romanized in their midst, but also to others who had a similar way of life.

A first effort at Christianization had been interrupted by the invasions. The further conversion of the Slavs by the overlapping influences of the papacy and of Byzantium led to the Latin variant prevailing in the west, with Greek forms in their vernacular adaptation spread well beyond the Hellenic cultural sphere by Byzantine missionaries.

The confusion resulting from the onslaught of new populations, followed by changes in the west, enabled South Slav feudal organizations to emerge in the interstices between the Byzantine Roman Empire in the east and the successive claimants to the Roman inheritance in the west. Originating from beyond the Sea of Azov, the Bulgars were encamped on both sides of the Danube by the ninth century. They were assimilated by the local Slavs, but not before they had given them their name and an organization, and welcomed Christian missionaries. The peak of their realm came when their ruler Simeon assumed the title of tsar (Caesar), as he tried to take Constantinople in 925. The Bulgarian Empire subsequently raised tribute from territories that ranged, at one time or another, from the Danube to the northern Greek lands and to the Adriatic.

To the north, as the Magyars or Hungarians settled in the Pannonian plains and adopted Christianity, feudalism was carried out under Germanic rule in the Slovene lands, but a native development emerging out of Slav tribal structures enabled a Croatian realm to dominate the roads from the northern Adriatic to the plains. The crown that King Tomislav secured from the pope in 925 (at the same time as Simeon become tsar) came into the possession of the king of Hungary in 1102. This was when Hungary also first acquired control of Transylvania, an upland territory within the arc of the Carpathians with a mixed but probably basically Romanized population, which retained, like Croatia, an autonomous position.

It was only under her first Hungarian king that Croatia extended over her full ‘historic’ range, but this did not obliterate what came to be called her ‘tri-unity’ – the nucleus of inner Croatia with its institutions, the plains of Slavonia subjected to Hungarian influence earlier and more intensively, and the Dalmatian coast whose towns struggled to uphold their autonomy. Embryonic political structures also formed in the southern Dinaric uplands in the ninth century. Venice and Hungary were obstacles which diverted the Serbian rulers’ ambitions from the Adriatic and the plains, to the nominally Byzantine lands of the Morava-Vardar corridor. As the Empire started on its long decline, the Serbian realm moved on to the greatest political development attained by the Balkan Slavs in the Middle Ages.

It exploited the fascination of the west with Byzantium and the Holy Land which had hardened the differences between Rome and Constantinople. When the Fourth Crusade carved up the empire and plundered its capital, the Nemanjić rulers played off Latin against Greek, and Greek against Greek. They expanded at the expense of Bulgars and Byzantines, took the title of kralj (Carolus), obtained a royal crown from the pope in 1217, and ecclesiastical independence from the exiled patriarch in Nicaea. When King Dušan had himself crowned emperor of Serbs and Greeks in 1346 at Skopje, his dominions stretched from the Save and the Danube to the Adriatic and the Gulf of Corinth. At the time of his death ten years later, he appeared on the brink of achieving his twin ambitions of setting himself up in the ‘Emperor’s City’ (as the Slavs called Constantinople), and of leading Europe’s defence against the Turks as the pope’s ‘captain’.

Modelled on Byzantium though it was, medieval Bulgarian and Serbian civilization was not turned exclusively to the east. Rulers had looked to both centres of Christendom until they realized the potent force of integration provided by the Byzantine concept in its local adaptation, and obtained auto-cephalous (independent) patriarchates in exchange for their support of the Church of Constantinople, but they were also strongly influenced by their links with the west. Between the twelfth and the fifteenth century the whole peninsula was a bridge between east and west.

Heresies had flourished as long as Christianity had been dependent on distant centres, and they continued to do so in areas of late development of an institutionalized church and in remoter mountains, but also where east and west overlapped, and along major routes of communication. They challenged authority, prevented the stabilization of the Bulgarian monarchy, and sank roots in the feudal class of Bosnia as it initiated an autonomous development in the twelfth century under the loose suzerainty of Hungary. Hungary was also involved in the struggle for supremacy over the gradually Slavicized trading cities of Dalmatia. Only the richest of these, Ragusa – better known nowadays by its Slav name of Dubrovnik – survived by scheming among the powers, to develop into an intermediary between Italy and the Balkans.

Areas of Romanized populations remained here and there, but essentially in present-day Romania, in the lower Danubian plains and over the Carpathians. Invasions and migrations had passed through on their way to the south, but not stopped in the plains where the first native polities appeared in the thirteenth century – the Romance-speaking, Slav-writing and Eastern Christian ‘Valachiae’ of Moldavia and Wallachia. Other pre-Slav populations had been pushed back into mountains, notably in Albania, a region many had raided and attempted to control from Italy and from the Balkans, and eventually included in Dušan’s empire.

Even he had done no more than impose a personal ascendancy on the feudatories of an empire which disintegrated on his death. The end of Serbian power created a vacuum in the Balkans. Hungary and Venice from the north, and more so the Ottoman Turks from the south, hastened to fill it. Freed from the overbearing shadow of Serbia, Bosnia managed a period of glory under King Tvrtko. Related to the Nemanjić dynasty, whose heir he wanted to appear, he expanded into Serbian lands, but also to Croatia, along the coast, with the title of king of Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia and Dalmatia, yet his rule remained poised between his Catholic Hungarian suzerain and his heretical vassals. After Tvrtko’s death in 1391, his realm in turn slid down the path of feudal anarchy, caught between Turks and Hungarians. The strength of her heresy had put Bosnia beyond the pale of Catholic Europe’s sympathies.

Since setting foot in Europe in 1357, the Ottomans had obtained the fealty of Dušcan’s magnates in Macedonia, of the fragmented Bulgarian monarchy, and even of the shadow that was the Byzantine emperor himself. The battle of Kosovo in 1389, in which the ruler of Serbia, allied to King Tvrtko of Bosnia, was defeated, did not seal the fate of the Balkans, but it was regarded as portentous because of the efforts to form a Christian alliance that had preceded it, and because of the slaughter it produced.

Pushed north against Hungary, the remains of the Serbian realm survived until 1459. In 1463 it was the turn of Bosnia to fall. Feudal society gradually dissolved, eliminated by battle and repression, included for a time in the new Ottoman order, taking refuge in mountain principalities, on the coast, or across the rivers in Hungary where feudal anarchy was rampant. By paying tribute and trading with everyone, only Ragusa was left in peace to turn into a fifteenth-century Switzerland where Balkan potentates kept their money and took refuge. The Hungarian-Croatian realm broke up as the Turkish threat grew near. In 1493 a big offensive went right up to Styria and back through the heart of Croatia, whose nobility overcame its rivalries at the battle of Krbava, only to be defeated in another great massacre. Most of the surviving nobles from the exposed southern regions left, and Croatia with its very name also moved north.

When Charlemagne’s renewed Holy Roman Empire had set up its ‘Eastern March’, Austria acquired the rôle, on the flank of Germany, of defender against dangers from the east. The ‘march’ fell to the Habsburgs, whose head was first elected emperor in 1273. They had already gathered into their family domains the feudal entities inhabited by the Slovenes, and their influence expanded in the lands of the Hungarian crown. When in 1526 the Turks routed the Hungarians at Mohács, where their heirless king met his death, the Habsburg takeover of what remained of his dominions was given sanction with the election of Ferdinand of Habsburg as king of Hungary, and then as king of Croatia.

Having entered the Balkans as mercenaries for the rival Christian rulers, the Ottoman Turks had slowly moved north between the fall of Gallipoli in 1357 and the battle of Mohács, by making the most of the peninsula’s crumbling feudal order and of its religious disunity. The conquest of the Greek lands was completed only after the fall in 1453 of Constantinople (Istanbul in Turkish, but usually called in Europe by its old Greek name until the twentieth century) and the death in action of the last emperor. Both the city and the emperor remained powerful symbols to the very end. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, with the defeat of Venetian naval power, the Turks had secured the sea approaches to their conquests, and had gone on to obtain the land approaches by crossing the Danube and defeating Hungary.

The medieval Balkan realms had extended over widely fluctuating territory. Their centres had shifted; they had overlapped. As they had grown, their rulers had assumed royal titles and then, in the case of Bulgaria and Serbia, the imperial title to set themselves up as successors to Byzantium, which although culturally Greek remained imperially Roman to the end. They had increasing links with one another and with the west. Their populations were no more ethnically homogeneous than their titles. Rulers were not interested in ethnicity, because they had higher aims.

It was in this changing world that the Ottomans arrived. Their advance into Europe affected the whole of the peninsula. Even what remained outside their pale served as buffer zones into which they directed their raids, and from which their neighbours defended themselves. Turkish rule spread across the Balkans as part of what Traian Stoianovich has generically called the European Hundred Years’ War.²

The war to which we allude was not simply the war between France and England but the complex strife of Catholic against Catholic, Christian against Muslim, Orthodox against Catholic, Hussite against Imperial and Catholic, Taborite against Utraquist, Poland and Lithuania against the Teutonic Order, Ottoman against the kingdom of Hungary and the fragments of the empire of Byzantium and of Stephen Dušan, Muscovite against Tatar and Novgorodian, Venice and Milan against Genoa, Tamerlane against Bayezid, Denmark against the Hanse, one feudal lord against another, peasant against lord.

OTTOMAN AND HABSBURG RULE

Balkan society was a field of strife where nobles were trying to turn into a closed estate in alliance with foreign merchants, at the expense of native middle elements and peasants. The Turkish advance was motivated initially by the push of others. From the rocky uplands of Anatolia, the Turks were lured to the better lands of the Balkans. They had military superiority and they found support, with which they imposed the order and the unity that central monarchies came to impose in the west.

They did so gradually. The first period of the conquest was characterized by accommodation. The Ottomans themselves wanted to be considered as having taken up the inheritance of the Eastern Roman Empire, and Islam tolerated Jews and Christians. During its last throes, Byzantium had viewed itself as doomed, whether it fell to Latins or to Turks. To be rescued by the Latins meant loss of Orthodoxy, a danger which did not exist if the Turks took over, and most Greeks at any rate seem to have preferred the latter. On the eve of the fall of Constantinople, a desperate emperor had been ready to accede to the union of the churches under the pope. This was formally achieved in Florence in 1453, but was rejected at home, not to mention by the Orthodox elsewhere.

The emperor’s rule was by then no more than a shadowy symbol. The patriarch, however, remained religious head of many Christians already under Ottoman rule, while the Slav rulers of the Balkans were anxious to be in full communion with the Mother Church even if they did not want their bishops to be dependent on Constantinople. The holy Empire remained an ideal.

The Orthodox Church had been the commonwealth of the faithful of the Christian Roman Empire seen as the inhabited world (oikoumene). The emperor represented God on Earth, yet his authority was bound by law, by the tradition of the Church, and by public opinion. With a Graeco-Roman tradition of governance and a cultured lay political class, there was no need for a monolithic church organization. The head of the hierarchy was the bishop of the ecumenical capital, hence his dignity as ecumenical patriarch. The Eastern Church was never ‘clerical’ as in the west, where after the collapse of the Roman Empire the clergy in ordinary parlance became ‘the Church’, and one which was well organized to keep up civilization and defend itself.

Ottoman sovereignty was the right of the sultan to exploit and defend all sources of wealth, and to maintain harmony between social estates and religious-ethnic groups or ‘millets’ (now the modern Turkish word for ‘nation’). The first estate was that of the officeholders, the Ottomans; they shared in the revenues of the imperial possessions in return for service.

An important function of that tenurial system was to supply cavalry. The sipahi landlord was originally an officer who provided a number of men in proportion to the size of his timar holding. He had no claim to the land, but received an income from it and a few days of peasant labour. He collected the prescribed tithe of the farmers’ harvest to maintain the horsemen he had to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of maps
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The awakening of nationalities, 1804–30
• 3 Self-rule, constitutions and revolutions, 1830–56
• 4 The Balkan states under loosened power control, 1856–78
• 5 The imperial Balkans through crises and reforms, 1856–78
• 6 From the Congress of Berlin to 1900 – Part 1
• 7 From the Congress of Berlin to 1900 – Part 2
• 8 The tail end of the nineteenth century, 1900–14 – Part 1
• 9 The tail end of the nineteenth century, 1900–14 – Part 2
• 10 The First World War and the Paris peace settlement, 1914–20
• 11 The 1920s – Part 1: The Losers
• 12 The 1920s – Part 2: The winners
• 13 The 1930s – Part 1
• 14 The 1930s – Part 2
• 15 The Second World War, 1939–45
• 16 Conclusion
• Guide to further reading
• Glossary
• Maps
• Index