The End of Ottoman Rule in Bosnia

Conflicting Agencies and Imperial Appropriations

Hannes Grandits

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367109370
• eBook ISBN: 9780429656941
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Eastern European History
• Index: History

This book focuses on the end of four centuries of Ottoman rule in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1870s. After an introduction to the region and the political zeitgeist of the late 1860s and early 1870s, it examines in detail the dramatic years beginning in the summer of 1875, when the outbreak of violent unrest in the eastern Herzegovinian region bordering Montenegro led to a massive refugee catastrophe. The study traces the surprising further political and social dynamics to the summer and fall of 1878, when a Habsburg army finally invaded the Bosnian Vilayet and took control of the province - but only after months of fighting against massive local resistance throughout the province.

This book cannot be viewed in isolation from larger political dynamics, which are also constantly present in this study as they unfolded. However, as this book attempts to show, it is hardly possible to understand the often contradictory effects of these larger political dynamics without delving deeper into the complex local rationalities and constraints on the action of the actors involved in them.

The End of Ottoman Rule in Bosnia will appeal to students, teachers, and researchers in late Ottoman and Bosnian history.

1Townsmen, peasants and the reformed society in Ottoman Bosnia

DOI: 10.4324/9780429023989-1

It became a dominant discursive feature in the political regimes that followed Ottoman rule (Habsburg and then Yugoslav) to retrospectively portray socio-economic relations in the Bosnian Vilayet as having been caught by long-lasting “stagnation”. “Stagnation” in Ottoman Bosnia was explained first and foremost as the Ottoman's or regional Muslim elite's unwillingness to reform. Meanwhile, for more than a century, historiography on the focused period and region of this book was most often written within such an underlying premise. Explicitly or inherently an alleged “backwardness” of the political system in the Bosnian Vilayet was juxtaposed with an Ottoman “incapability” to reform – the latter was also part of Great Power's interventionist zeitgeist with regard to Ottoman rule in Europe in the period under study. In such a tradition of thinking, “modernity” for the (Christian) people who lived – among others – in Ottoman Bosnia was only to be achieved by overcoming Ottoman rule. Was this really the case? Did conservativism and fear of reform indeed characterise the final decades of Ottoman rule in Bosnia? Was Ottoman rule opposed to (economic, administrative and social) “modernisation” in Bosnia of the 1860s/1870s?

It is inevitable for a book that is going to discuss the end of Ottoman rule in the Bosnian Vilayet in the 1870s to critically address these widespread tropes and basic premises. This book is guided by the conviction that it was not “stagnation” or Ottoman unwillingness to reform that characterised the last decade(s) of the Ottoman rule in Bosnia. Actually, quite the contrary has been the case. Far-reaching administrative, economic and social transformations were major elements, in particular of the 1860s and 1870s, when Ottoman Bosnia was highly affected by various trends of accelerated change.

This chapter will show how this change was triggered by a state-induced reform process, known in Ottoman studies as the Tanzimat. In Ottoman Bosnia, the Tanzimat particularly intensified during the 1860s and early 1870s. It significantly transformed the organisation of administration and expanded the presence of an increasingly bureaucratic state which was very much in line with the general European political development of the time.¹ It also considerably affected the hierarchies of the religion-based political order by aiming to introduce a more “emancipated” system of rule against the resistance of a hitherto privileged regional Muslim elite. The Tanzimat likewise affected economic relations – both in the towns and in the countryside. The townspeople experienced an exponential exposure of their local economy to transregional and international trade. These were developments from which some benefitted, but many others did not. At the same time, life in the countryside, where more than 80 percent of the population made their livelihood, comprised different types of rural economies in this very mountainous province. The Ottoman reformers started to intervene in the traditional economic dominance of the landowning class by granting more rights to the rural tenants. Insights into these – sometimes contradictory – developments will be given in this chapter.

As we will see, all these reforms – which encompassed administration, religion, education, trade, transport as well as rural property relations – significantly influenced daily life in the Bosnian Vilayet during the period covered here. Contrary to later widespread assumptions, there is no evidence of a “steady decline” of Ottoman state rule in provincial life. In particular, there seems to be little evidence of major hostility against and opposition to Ottoman rule, although reforms and social changes naturally always brought with them the potential for conflict. A belief in progress and the dawn of a new, “modern” era was unmistakably present in the urban flair – especially in the provincial capital of Sarajevo – and this disposition, as we shall see, undoubtedly transcended confessional boundaries. It is important to keep this in mind when, in the course of this book, we turn to the question of how the overall situation (rapidly) deteriorated in the mid-1870s and violent conflict arose in the peripheral rural mountain regions towards the Montenegrin border.

Implementing Tanzimat and the challenge of emancipation

Approximately in the mid-nineteenth century, the Ottoman province of Bosnia was considered by the Sultan's governing bureaucracy as a problematic domain. Here the regional Muslim elite had withheld the Tanzimat for many years. After years of obstruction, the Porte finally sent a large military force led by the rigorous Ottoman commander Omer Pasha Latas to Bosnia. In the early 1850s, on strict order of the Ottoman centre and by punitive military force, Omer Pasha broke the resistance to the Tanzimat of the leading Muslim beys, by far the most dominant group in exerting local power at that time. Most of the actively resistant beys were even sent for long years of exile to Anatolia and other places within the Ottoman Empire that were far away from Bosnia. Omer Pasha Latas also commanded another military expedition a few years later. This time it was against Montenegro, a principality within Ottoman suzerainty but with already lasting rights to self-rule. Montenegrin leadership and fighters heavily supported rural insurgent leaders in the neighbouring Ottoman Eastern Herzegovina border region and in this way had destabilised Ottoman rule directly in the Herzegovinian Montenegrin border regions for years in the late 1850s and early 1860s. In 1862, this resistance was also crushed when a massive Ottoman military campaign temporarily conquered even large parts of then Montenegro.

Ahmed Cevdet's mission and the patriotic response

In summer 1863, Ahmed Cevdet arrived with a special mission to the Bosnian province. Ahmed Cevdet's assignment was to resolve the difficult political situation on the border between Herzegovina and Montenegro, to supervise the further implementation of the ongoing and far-reaching administrative reforms and – in particular – to accomplish the start of the new public conscript recruitment system to the Ottoman army now also foreseen for the Bosnian province. Ahmed Cevdet was a prominent man and was sent to several other provinces on the same mission during his career. He was a member of the Central Council of the Tanzimat at the Sublime Porte and in this way belonged to the inner circle of the reform elite of the Ottoman Empire (at this time he had already been an official imperial chronicler and was considered as being among the leading legal scholars of the empire).² When in summer 1863 Ahmed Cevdet came to Sarajevo (Saraybosna), the situation in the province was regarded as again relatively stable in the eyes of the Ottoman administration. After the military campaign against Montenegro in the first half of 1862, the situation across the border in Eastern Herzegovina was brought under control again.³ This was also the case in those places throughout Eastern and Northern Bosnia where sporadic peasant unrest – specifically in some districts of Zvornik (İzvornik), Banja Luka (Banaluka) and Bihać (Bihke) – had accompanied the implementation of the reformed Land Code of 1858 for several years.⁴ Ahmed took the time to do this. He stayed in Bosnia for more than a year, travelled with a capable staff to all corners of the province and tried to find solutions for all kinds of problems that he became aware of.⁵

In his many long letters and reports, one can read in detail about the individual stages and challenges of his mission.⁶ While these letters often focused on obstacles Cevdet encountered, they also displayed how the Tanzimat began to take effect. With the war campaign of 1862, the situation at the Herzegovinian-Montenegrin border was stable again after years of unrest. A special administrative arrangement in which local Christian leaders were incorporated into the Ottoman border defence system (something that was rather exceptional in the Bosnian Vilayet – although not uncommon, for instance, in the Scutari Sanjak) played an important role in this regard.⁷ New administrative procedures and modes were institutionalised in all sanjaks and lower administrative entities.⁸ After this had been achieved, the most delicate remaining task in Ahmed Cevdet's mission was to begin with the new military conscription system. There had been fierce resistance from the Bosnian Muslim elite to this earlier. Several attempts had been made in the directive central Ottoman policy without really achieving anything.⁹ But Ahmed Cevdet did long preparations and obviously began to convince the Muslim elite that this (further) change was a “patriotic duty” as well as also an inevitable step towards “modernity”. All European Powers already had made this turn to a public compulsory military service earlier or were in the process of implementing it in the 1860s. The Ottoman Empire would have no alternative in this regard – as Ahmed repeatedly explained this to the local elites throughout the Bosnian province.

One year later, in summer 1864, it became clear that the mood of the Bosnian elites had changed. The earlier resistance had given way to a surprising eagerness for cooperation. Throughout the province, conscripts volunteered to fill the ranks.¹⁰ Within a few months, three Bosnian battalions (one more than planned for this phase) were conscripted and started military education. Ahmed described the day when the battalion's banner (sent by the Sultan by a special envoy) was handed over to the First Bosnian Battalion as the most emotional event. This took place during a festive event in Sarajevo on 21 September 1864.

This day became a hitherto unprecedented manifestation of patriotism for the Ottoman Empire and devotion to the Sultan. The big square (meydan) in front of the main garrison building was overcrowded with people. The houses surrounding the place were packed with many spectators, also with many women who as well gathered to watch the announced handover of the Sultan's banner and military parade from there. Then the recruits marched in, accompanied by the garrisons’ military brass band. It played a newly composed marsh. The text and patriotic refrain of this march, which was repeatedly sung by the recruits, was written by Sarajevo's Catholic parish priest Fra Grga Matić. Matić, who later became a member of the Grand Vilayet Meclis, in this way also manifested his loyalty to the Sultan and to Ottoman rule.¹¹ The capellmeister of the military brass band, Fuad Aga, had written the march music.¹² Ahmed Cevdet illustrates the appearance of the recruits to the square in the following way in a letter:

The imperial music band started to play the mentioned military march and then the musicians joined in singing with a thundering voice: ‘Come, come under the banner’. This happened in such an impressive way that the meydan got embraced and immediately all were caught in amazement. … So well trained were these soldiers that someone who did not know that they were fresh recruits and was watching from some distance might even think that it is the imperial guard. … The signee [of this letter] turned to the present Bosnian heads and leaders and said: ‘Bosnians, here you are watching the first Bosnian battalion, the result of just one month of training!’ This remark did as well induce so much on the present Bosnian leaders that some were beginning to weep so copiously that their tears ran down along their beards.¹³

Speeches praising the Sultan and acknowledging the patriotism of the “Bosnians” were held. And with the official handover of the Sultan's banner, the celebration reached its peak:

Afterwards the imam of the First Battalion spoke a prayer and the soldiers of the new army proclaimed three times: ‘Long live the Sultan!’ From the fortress followed twenty-one cannon salutes. Then the soldiers again marched in rank and file and performed a beautiful parade. … Later the banner was displayed in front of the barracks guarded by one soldier. The townspeople were now given the opportunity to pay their respects to the banner. Big crowds of people went to the flag. On this day the space in front of the barrack gate was stuffed with people rotating and greeting the flag.¹⁴

Honorary guests – first and foremost the consuls of the Powers – were also present and seemed to be impressed at the event.¹⁶ Ahmed Cevdet depicts a joyful atmosphere on this day when the First Bosnian Battalion was celebrated in the streets of Sarajevo. In many locations throughout the Bosnian province, the recruitment would conti...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of maps
• Notes on language, transliteration and toponyms
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Townsmen, peasants and the reformed society in Ottoman Bosnia
• 2 Upholding stability in the Bosnian Vilayet in turbulent political times
• 3 Crisis at Ottoman-Montenegrin borders escalates out of control (1874/1875)
• 4 Efforts for refugee return and pacification—and its obstruction in early 1876
• 5 War of the Principalities and the Ottoman constitutionalist's breakthrough
• 6 The Bosnian Vilayet during the devastating Russian-Ottoman War of 1877/1878
• 7 The making of a new imperialistic order in the Orient/the Bosnian Vilayet
• Conclusion
• Sources and bibliography
• Index