The Balkans: A Short History (14 page)

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EASTERN QUESTIONS

The world’s great age begins anew
The golden years return . . .
Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.

—PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
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If we enquire into the causes of the internal decline of the Turkish Empire, and regard them under their most general manifestation, we must affirm that it is owing to the fact that the empire is opposed to another section of the world immeasurably superior to itself in power. That other section could crush it to atoms in a moment; and while suffering it to exist for reasons of its own, yet by a secret necessity, it exerts upon it an indirect and invisible influence.

—LEOPOLD VON RANKE
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Over the long nineteenth century, which stretched from the French Revolution to the final collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1923, the political map of the modern Balkans emerged. Independent states formed according to the principle of nationality replaced the five-hundred-year-old empire of the self-styled successor of the Romans, “God’s slave and sultan of this world,” the Ottoman Padishah. The triumph of nationalism was partly due to the efforts of the Balkan peoples themselves, who had helped shake off Ottoman rule through their uprisings and resistance. But their efforts alone were fruitless until Europe’s Great Powers intervened in their favor. The First World War was the culmination of this entangling of Balkan liberation struggles with the European state system.

Foreign schemes for ending Turkish dominion in the Balkans went back to the fifteenth century, but became plausible only once Christian states began to put the Porte on the defensive. After 1699, Austria conquered Hungary-Croatia. Russia reached the Black Sea, and in 1774, having destroyed the Turkish navy in a protracted war, gained treaty rights to intervene in Ottoman affairs to ensure orderly government in the Danubian Principalities, and also to act as protector of the Porte’s Christian subjects. It was Poland, not Turkey, that was ultimately the victim of these two predatory powers (together with Prussia) at the end of the eighteenth century. (One unintended consequence was that nation-states would emerge in southeastern Europe several generations earlier than elsewhere in eastern Europe.) The Polish partitions, however, did not sate the appetite of these monarchs.
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In a plan drawn up by Joseph II and Catherine the Great to divide the Balkans, Austria was to take over Bosnia and Hercegovina, part of Serbia, Dalmatia and Montenegro, while Russia would control the rest. Catherine’s grandson—the deliberately named Constantine—would eventually sit on the throne of a reconstituted Byzantine empire in Istanbul. In 1787, the Austrian and Russian monarchs traveled together through Russia’s newly won Black Sea territories, passing under a triumphal arch with the inscription “The Way to Byzantium.” But Catherine’s “Greek Project” never happened, for too many of the other Great Powers were interested in preventing it, and she had to rest content with annexing the Crimea.
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Far from supporting Balkan independence movements, these enlightened despots envisaged substituting Christian imperial rule for Muslim—the replacement of the Sultan by autocratic dynasties ruling over ever vaster polyglot realms of their own. The French Revolution, however, altered many of their assumptions. “According to my judgment,” wrote the Greek fighter Théodoros Kolokotrónis in his memoirs, “the French Revolution and the doings of Napoleon opened the eyes of the world. The nations knew nothing before, and the people thought that kings were gods upon the earth and that they were bound to say that whatever they did was well done. Through this present change it is more difficult to rule the people.” Indeed, while the Russians continued to see themselves as supporters of Orthodoxy against the Turks, the Habsburgs became increasingly conservative, and from Metternich on, disliked the Slav liberation struggles on their doorstep. France and Britain wavered between supporting oppressed Christians against Muslim despotism and preserving the Ottomans against Russia. Balkan aspirations for self-rule were thus constrained by the competing and clashing interests of the Great Powers. “The more one thinks about the immense question of the fall of the Turkish Empire,” wrote Karl Nesselrode, the Russian foreign minister in 1829, “the more one plunges into a labyrinth of difficulty and complications.” The international management of this unpredictable process of Ottoman decline and national insurgence became known as the Eastern Question.
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Despite the empire’s decay, Balkan Christians were too weak to win freedom without foreign support. They lacked the organization, leadership, ability or will to prevail against what remained one of the world’s major powers. It was not the unarmed infidels but the now largely forgotten powerful Muslim elites—Bosnian beys, Hercegovinan
kapetans,
Albanian provincial governors, the warlord Pasvanoglu in the Danube port city of Vidin—who posed the most serious internal challenge to the Istanbul government in the Napoleonic era. Constant rebellions in mid-eighteenth-century Bosnia led the Sultan to talk about the “reconquest” of the province. Over time, matters got worse. “The Pachas, or Governors of provinces, are yet more independent of the Sultan than were the great Barons of the Crown in the feudal times of Christendom,” wrote a British onlooker in June 1803. “Almost the whole extent of European Turkey presents a dreadful picture of anarchy, rebellion and barbarism.”
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As the Sultan struggled to bring Pasvanoglu in the north under control, insubordinate local Muslim janissary officers next door in the tiny border Pashalik of Belgrade, just across the river from Habsburg lands, were also carving out new fiefdoms for themselves. “Of all the Janissaries of the empire,” writes the nineteenth-century historian Leopold von Ranke, “none were more opposed to the Sultan than those at Belgrade.” Aiming to establish their own power base, they murdered the Sultan’s representative, the vizier of Belgrade, for being pro-Christian, and then began to massacre his supporters among the Christian notables (
knezes
) as well. The latter took up arms in the name of the Sultan; self-defense rather than the dream of independence was what drove them on initially. But the Sultan hesitated to accept their support. To arm Christians against Muslims—however loyal the former, however rebellious the latter—was an uncomfortable notion for the Porte.
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When as a result, the Serbian
knezes
appealed for help to the Russians in 1806, they thereby turned what had basically been a local insurgency into a liberation struggle. The Russians treasured the loyalties of Orthodox Christians, but they did not want the Ottoman empire to break up and fall into Napoleon’s hands. Moreover, once Napoleon invaded Russia, the Russians had their hands full, and a Turkish army regained control around Belgrade. Hence the First Serb Uprising ended in defeat, largely as a consequence of Great Power struggles in Europe. But it had taken the Ottoman empire nine years to put down a small border war against poorly armed and disorganized Christian farmers and traders. It was not a good omen, and it strengthened the modernizers’ arguments in Istanbul for wholesale reform of the Ottoman state. Even worse was to follow.

Not all Serbs fled abroad like the insurrection’s leader, Djordje Petrovic
(Karajordje). “How will it profit the Sultan to have an empty land?” reasoned one of the rebels, who decided to stay and to throw himself upon the mercy of Ottoman officials. “What will Serbia be worth if all the Serbs are slaughtered?” The wily Serb leader Miloš Obrenovi
c also remained to serve the Sultan and was appointed grand knez in order to pacify the country. Two years later, he assumed the leadership of a second uprising. In the spring of 1815, he first conducted his Muslim blood brother, Aschin Bey, to safety, and then proclaimed the opening of a new “war against the Turks.” Messages were sent around the country that the inhabitants should kill anyone they encountered wearing green clothes—the sign of a Muslim.
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On this occasion the Serbs’ timing was better: Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo allowed the Russians to attend to their Balkan clients, and under Russian pressure the Turks were forced to make concessions to the Serbs. A Turkish garrison remained in Belgrade, but Muslims were confined to the towns of the Pachalik. In return for reaffirming his loyalty to the Sultan, Miloš became its de facto ruler. Governing the Serbs much as the pashas themselves had done, he sent the head of his political rival Karajordje to the Sultan, assassinated others who disputed his authority and hanged rebellious peasants. So far as the Porte was concerned, the arrangement bought peace in the tiny Pachalik at a time when far more serious challenges to Ottoman rule were afoot in Epirus and Bosnia, where well-armed local beys disputed the Sultan’s authority. When the Greek revolt broke out, Miloš stood prudently aside to demonstrate his loyalty to the Porte. His reward came in 1828–1829, when another Russo-Turkish war led to further Ottoman concessions: his recognition as hereditary prince of Serbia, and complete internal autonomy. From this point on, it was possible to see Serbia as a separate state. But before 1878, when it won formal independence at the Congress of Berlin, it could also be viewed more ambiguously as an autonomous Christian principality within the Turkish empire—much like the Danubian Principalities or the newly formed Principality of Sámos, all of which offered forms of Christian self-government within the Ottoman domains. The ultimate triumph of the nation-state was still some way off.
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Perhaps the most formidable and durable of the Sultan’s disobedient provincial governors in the early nineteenth century was the wily Ali Pasha, the venerable-looking but ruthless Albanian whose reach extended from his base in Jannina as far east as the Vardar River and as far south as the Gulf of Corinth. In the course of his lengthy struggle with the Porte, and amid complex double-dealings with British and French diplomats, Ali contemplated using the Greeks. He knew that a struggle for liberation had long been plotted in Greek revolutionary circles in Odessa, Vienna and elsewhere, and that the semisecret Friendly Society was laying the ground for insurrection. Ali spoke Greek, had a Greek Orthodox wife and employed Greek advisers who urged him to convert to Christianity and to whom he talked encouragingly of restoring the “empire of the Romans.” Greek schools flourished in his capital, Jannina, which was an important center of Christian learning and education.
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In 1821 the Porte mounted a campaign to crush Ali and sent troops against him in Jannina. As this was going on, not one but two Greek uprisings took place, hundreds of miles apart. The first and less successful occurred in the Danubian lands, close to the thriving Greek world of the Black Sea. Its leader was a Phanariot and former Russian army general named Alexandros Ypsilantis. Russia had become a major source of support for the Greeks—a center of wealth, conspiracy and sympathy in high diplomatic circles. Ypsilantis himself had been an aide-decamp to Tsar Alexander I; Ioannis Capodistrias, who turned down leadership of the insurgency and later became the first president of independent Greece, was an influential figure in Russian diplomatic circles. Writing from nearby Kishinev, Pushkin described how the Greeks

published proclamations which quickly spread everywhere—in them it is said that the Phoenix of Greece will arise from its own ashes, that the hour of Turkey’s downfall has come, and that a great power approves of the great-souled feat! The Greeks have begun to throng together in crowds under three banners; of these one is tricolored, on another streams a cross wreathed with laurels, with the text “By this sign conquer” [God’s promise to Constantine the Great], on a third is depicted the Phoenix arising from its ashes.
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