The Routledge Handbook of Balkan and Southeast European History

John R. Lampe, Ulf Brunnbauer, John R. Lampe, Ulf Brunnbauer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429876691
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

Disentangling a controversial history of turmoil and progress, this Handbook provides essential guidance through the complex past of a region that was previously known as the Balkans but is now better known as Southeastern Europe. It gathers 47 international scholars and researchers from the region. They stand back from the premodern claims and recent controversies stirred by the wars of Yugoslavia's dissolution.

Parts I and II explore shifting early modern divisions among three empires to the national movements and independent states that intruded with Great Power intervention on Ottoman and Habsburg territory in the nineteenth century. Part III traces a full decade of war centered on the First World War, with forced migrations rivalling the great loss of life. Part IV addresses the interwar promise and the later authoritarian politics of five newly independent states: Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Separate attention is paid in Part V to the spread of European economic and social features that had begun in the nineteenth century. The Second World War again cost the region dearly in death and destruction and, as noted in Part VI, in interethnic violence. A final set of chapters in Part VII examines postwar and Cold War experiences that varied among the four Communist regimes as well as for non-Communist Greece. Lastly, a brief Epilogue takes the narrative past 1989 into the uncertainties that persist in Yugoslavia's successor states and its neighbors.

Providing fresh analysis from recent scholarship, the brief and accessible chapters of the Handbook address the general reader as well as students and scholars. For further study, each chapter includes a short list of selected readings.

Part I

The early modern Balkans as imperial borderlands

OVERVIEW

The Balkans divided between three empires

John R. Lampe

Map 0.1The Balkans, ca. 1475.

Imperial borders and warfare

By the early seventeenth century, the Balkan Peninsula was divided between the Ottoman, Habsburg, and Venetian empires. Their imperial regimes had largely settled on the borders between them after a century of warfare with each other and an earlier struggle to overcome the native Greek, South Slav, and Albanian regimes, as noted in the introduction. The Muslim Ottoman regime served to separate the religious conflict between Rome’s Latin Church and the Greek-led Byzantine empire which had spread Orthodox Christianity across the peninsula. Its mountain ranges and predominant uplands, while encouraging native division and discouraging trade, were not high or consistent enough to prevent the Ottoman Turkish conquest that began, as seen in Map 0.1, in the fourteenth century. Already controlling most of the peninsula, two Ottoman campaigns had reached the gates of Vienna in 1529 and 1683. Once a Habsburg army had driven the Ottoman forces back from historic Hungary, Transylvania, and Croatia-Slavonia, the two empires signed a treaty at Karlowitz in 1699 and another one at Passarowitz in 1718. It fixed the border between them for the next century, changed only by the brief Habsburg incursion into Serbia and Kosovo (1718–39). Population grew, and by 1780, as seen in Map 0.2, the two empires and Venice’s Dalmatian coast were at least connected by a considerable number of trade routes. Muslim converts had multiplied only in Albania, Bosnia, and mountain areas of Bulgaria. With full Ottoman credentials, they could rise in military and administrative positions but were also open to branding as Turks by the Serb and Croat population.

Between the Balkans and the Black Sea, the two Romanian Principalities of Wallachia and Moldovia forged a brief union with Habsburg Transylvania at the start of the seventeenth century. Then the advancing Ottoman forces obliged the ruling Romanian Princes to pay increasing tribute. By the eighteenth century, a series of Phanariot (Orthodox Greek) overseers from Constantinople were allowed to bid for the position of Prince and keep enough of the tribute to profit from their bid. A less formal practice of tribute allowed more local autonomy in Montenegro. Most of the Istrian Peninsula, the Dalmatian coast, and the Adriatic islands remained under Venetian rule. The nearby upland peasantry were tied to Italian coastal merchants by share-cropping. The one exception was the independent city-state of Dubrovnik. Good trade relations across the Ottoman border helped to preserve the Venetian-style regime there from Habsburg incursion, if only until the end of the century. By then, Habsburg incursions into Serbia had resumed with the warfare of 1788–91, as discussed below.

Also challenging the imperial regimes of the early modern period were a set of internal divisions. The oppressive land regimes and religious divisions were storing up problems that would weaken imperial defenses against local unrest and national aspirations in the nineteenth century. At the same time, the towns and the trading networks of the imperial borderlands were not large enough to promote the economic growth and interconnection that would help the Habsburg center to hold through the next century. Nor could they overcome the religious divisions that urban commercial life typically set aside around the region. This Overview compares land regimes, trade relations, and religious divisions in the three imperial borderlands and reviews the Russian and French interventions that upset them at the turn into the nineteenth century.

The chapters below examine an important set of specific cases. Oliver Jens Schmitt follows the easier Ottoman conquest of Albania into Kosovo, and the harder relations between Serbs and Albanians created by Albanian conversion to Islam and religious antagonism with the Orthodox Serbs. Albanian advancement in the Ottoman military with the land rights noted below would seed a further ethnic antagonism. Josip Vrandečić finds more constructive trade relations and migration between Venice’s Dalmatian coastal holdings and the Ottoman borderlands into Herzegovina but details the repeated warfare and resulting military borders. Their forces also confronted each other with rival confessions, here Catholic and Muslim. Constantin Iordachi acknowledges the survival of the Romanian nobility and the Romanian Orthodox Church under the Greek Phanariot rulers sent from Constantinople to collect tribute from the two Romanian Principalities and examines the reputation for corruption and foreign imposition as the primary Phanariot legacies to Romanian historical memory. Although the Ottoman regime allowed the Serbian Orthodox Church to survive in Bosnia as in Kosovo, the Islamic conversion of large numbers placed Bosnian Muslims in positions of military and administrative advantage that would feed Orthodox resentment and their own ethnic identity as Serbs for Vlachs as well in the large Orthodox population. Leyla Amzi-Erdogdular traces the initially equitable landholding regime under Bosnian Muslims to its widespread abuse by the eighteenth century and the several failed efforts by the Ottoman regime to rein in the local autonomy of large landholders in the nineteenth century.

Land regimes

Land regimes for the region’s overwhelmingly rural population subjected most of them to a variety of feudal or military obligations. Within the remaining Ottoman borders from Bosnia to Bulgaria and Greece, the original system for the arable lowlands had broken in two by the eighteenth century. Arable land had been state, i.e. the Sultan’s land, divided into districts (timar) administered without inheritance by designated cavalry officers (sipahi). Sometimes locally recruited, they were to collect only a limited share of peasant crops for wider army use and leave the rest to the local population. Less was left to this peasant majority and to the state under the two successor regimes of chiftlik and ayan which in some regions predominated by the eighteenth century.

In the southern Balkans, cavalry and some infantry (janissary) officers became local warlords who took village lands as inheritable chiftlik, taking the largest part of peasant crops and some livestock for their own use or sale. Bosnian and Albanian Muslim as well as Turkish landholders took advantage of these chances. More broadly across the Ottoman Balkans and overlapping with chiftlik villages, were villages whose crops and livestock were raised by the communal zadruga of the extended local family. To recover its share for the state and the army from these villages, Ottoman authorities turned to communal non-Muslim notables as tax farmers. These ayan enjoyed intermediate authority between Ottoman oversight and the local population; then some abused their positions and became warlords themselves. Most of them took a share of the collection for themselves.

The lowland peasantry under the chiftlik regimes particularly in Macedonia fled to the ample but nonarable uplands. There they could at least raise livestock. Sheep and goats could be moved to avoid taxation and exploit the rocky, nonarable uplands, already the practice of Vlachs in of Herzegovina. Banned for Muslim consumption, pigs were especially favored in Serbia, where they might be traded across the border to Habsburg markets. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, over one third of the population converted to Islam in the decades following the Ottoman conquest. The Ottoman regime chose converted feudal landlords and village leaders instead of their cavalry officers to assure local and border security. These kapitanate appointments were also responsible for tax collection from the non-Muslim peasant majority in their district. They used their independence from central Ottoman authority as higher beg or lower aga landholders to impose chiftlik share-cropping on their peasantry by the eighteenth century. Supporting this transition to local authority was the original Ottoman practice of religious autonomy outside of the Muslim monopoly for positions of administrative and military authority. Orthodox or Jewish but not Catholic clergy could minister to their members and also acted as judges in cases not involving Muslims. This millet system was already in place to authorize local tax collection, sometimes by the clergy themselves, especially in southern Greece.

In recaptured Croatia-Slavonia, the Habsburg rural regime was also divided. In “Civil” (or “Banal,” after the name of the governor’s office, Ban) Croatia, the land regime was typically feudal, with noble landlords and dependent peasants. However, to populate a newly established military border against Ottoman Bosnia from the sixteenth century onward, Austrian authorities had attracted Croat and Serb peasants to small upland grants with tax exemptions and no feudal overlords in return for 25 years of service in Habsburg border regiments. Croats were drawn to escape the weekly days of service and other feudal obligations on the noble estates, German and Hungarian as well as Croatian. These covered the fertile lowlands of civil Croatia-Slavonia. Serbs came from Bosnia to escape the share-cropping regimes of Bosnian Muslim landholders as noted above. From 1762, the Habsburg military border was extended to Transylvania’s border with the Romanian Principalities. There some Romanian peasants also left the feudal obligations on their nobles’ estates for the Habsburg land grants and regimental service.

The military advance to the border of Ottoman-held Serbia in 1699 prompted the only Habsburg land grants not tied to military service. To keep the large fertile lowlands known ever since as the Vojvodina from being taken over by Hungarian estates, the Austrian authorities offered land with tax exemptions that soon attracted a mixed population of migrants. Catholic Germans came from war torn Swabia, Protestant Slovaks fleeing the counter-reformation, and some Orthodox Serbs and Greeks from Ottoman territory. The major Serb migrations followed the Habsburg retreats in 1690 from Kosovo and in 1737–8 from Serbia.

Map 0.2Balkan imperial borders, 1682–1739.

Towns and trade networks

The eastern border between Ottoman and Habsburg territory at the Danube and Sava rivers, re-established after 1739, allowed more trade and transit than the mountainous western border between Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia-Slavonia. Their southern Habsburg borders with Venice’s Dalmatian coast gave them access to the Adriatic and hence the Mediterranean. The main ports reached from Trieste in the north down to Split and the city-state of Dubrovnik. Here and in other trading and fishing towns on the coast and the islands, Italian merchants mixed with some Croats and a few Serbs, while the Croatian cultural renaissance of the sixteenth century proceeded ahead. Missing in Austria, after the suppression of Slovene Protestants in the sixteenth century, was Ottoman religious tolerance. Its Bosnian regime had allowed the Serb Orthodox Church its own Patriarchate in Peć that facilitated the consolidation of a conscious Serb identity in Bosnia. Towns were typically small, at most a few thousand people, but their trading networks helped Sarajevo grow to some 50,000. Its population included Orthodox Serbs as well as Turks and Bosnian Muslims. Sephardic Jews fleeing persecution in Spain and Portugal were welcomed there and especially in Salonica in northern Greece. The port’s population of 70,000 was the peninsula’s largest, linked to the Mediterranean as well as the considerable Ottoman trade networks reflected in Map 0.2. Salonica’s Jewish population outnumbered Turks, Albanians, and also Greeks.

Elsewhere, through towns in Macedonia and into Bulgaria and Serbia, Greek merchants and Greek as a commercial language predominated. Yet urban numbers remained small and accounted for barely 10 percent of the population. For the Ottoman Balkans, the total population rebounded during the eighteenth century from less than 4 million to 5 million. Only Plovdiv and Belgrade approached half the populations of Sarajevo and Salonica. These towns all shared a mixed population, with Jews, Greeks, Armenians and South Slavs outnumbering Turks. They were centers for trade networks that grew along with the total population in the relatively greater security after 1700. Plovdiv’s textiles and tobacco could reach Salonica and Constantinople. Belgrade’s livestock could reach Novi Sad across the Ottoman-Habsburg border. Similar access attracted the wares of Greek, Armenian, and Jewish traders in Bucharest, its population already 60,000 by 1700. The textile trade moved across to Braşov in Transylvania and on to Leipzig, prompting its continuing designation for a district in Bucharest.

Religious divisions

The mixed populations and religions in these few urban centers and the trade networks that linked them were not connecting rural majorities with each other. Locally, the countryside was separated by upland terrain and low population density. More broadly they were separated by the religious affiliations by which they identified themselves. Conscious ethnic identity would come later. In the Habsburg lands, the Latin Catholic hierarchy in Vienna was strong enough to suppress the German Protestants that tried to establish themselves in Slovene lands in the late sixteenth century. They were not able, however, to prevent the Romanian majority in Hungarian Transylvania from adopting the Uniate accommodation with Orthodoxy. Called Greek Catholics, they would be a base for later demands for unification with Romania. In Croatia and Bosnia, and down into Venetian Dalmatia, the original Christian conversion here with a non-Latin local alphabet with married priests struggled from the medieval through the early modern period to survive with its rural peasant base. On the landed estates, the Croatian nobility and their Hungarian and German counterparts, mainly in Slavonia, led the allegiance to the Latin church of Rome and Vienna. Down the Adriatic coast, Venetian dominance helped the Latin Catholic church incorporate Croats and some Albanians. Greek Orthodoxy had reached the Albanian coast as well, before the Christian rivalry helped to encourage conversion to Islam after the Ottoman conquest.

In the Ottoman lands, there was sizeable conversion to Islam only in Bosnia-Herzegovina and among the Albanians as well as in the Rhodopi mountain range in Bulgaria. For the large Orthodox population, their original tolerance relied on the privileged position given to the surviving Greek Patriarchate in Constantinople. In mainland Greece, its authority strengthened the position of the local clergy, and helped them to dominate local affairs through the millet rights also given to Jews and Armenians. The Patriarchate also accepted a Serbian Patriarch in Peć (in today’s Kosovo) to help consolidate religious control of Kosovo and Bosnia. Its clergy’s efforts became the base for a spreading Serbian identity in Bosnia, celebrating the medieval Serbian empire and its religious base in Kosovo. From 1766, the Greek Patriarchate in Constantinople denied South Slav Orthodox churches and their Patriarchates, including the Bulgarian one in Ohrid, their separate rights. The Serbian and Bulgarian clergy resisted the efforts to install Greeks and Greek liturgy in their place.

A nexus for Orthodox reform had emerged in the mid-eighteenth century from the Greek monasteries predominating on Mount Athos, a spit of land jutting into the Aegean Sea south of Salonica. An Athonite Academy promoted open study and discussion that included readings from the French Enlightenment. But by 1761 its leader had been forced to depart, and other Greek monks turned back to the Byzantine fundamentalism also endorsed by the Patriarchate. There were also rival Serb and Bulgarian monasteries on Mt. Athos. One Bulgarian monk defied the Patriarchate’s newly Greek hegemony just before it was imposed on the local South Slav churches. Father Paiisi’s history of pre-Ottoman Bulgaria, its own imperial heritage and a language separate from Orthodoxy’s Old Church Slavonic, would serve as a base for the promotion of the Bulgarian national identity and resistance, especially against the Greek Patriarchate’s and its Ottoman alliance. By the early nineteenth century, Greek monks on Mount Athos would defy the Patriarchate and join the Greek revolt against the Ottoman regime. Only Montenegro was free from this sort of division, insulated by its ties to the Russian Orthodox Church since the sixteenth century.

Overall, accommodating these religious divisions helped the Ottomans to maintain their political regime. The Habsburg efforts to impose a single religious regime under the Latin Catholic church were relaxed only in the Vojvodina and the Military Border. Retaken from the Ottomans in 1699 but seeking to prevent its reincorporation into Hungary, Vienna encouraged non-Hungarian immigration, including Slovak Protestants and Orthodox Serbs and Vlachs as well as German Catholics.

From Russian and French intervention to Balkan resistance and state-building

Tsarist Russia fought a series of wars with the Ottoman Empire to reach the Black Sea and by 1783 the Crimea, entering the Romanian Principalities four times from 1711 forward. A peace treaty with the Porte in 1774 established the precedent for Russia as a prim...