The Balkans: A Short History (17 page)

Macedonia was a region with no clear borders and not even a formal existence as an administrative Ottoman entity. A bewildering mix of different peoples, hemmed in by newly created states (Greece to the south, Serbia and Bulgaria to the north) it became the focus for their expansionist ambitions at the century’s close. Its ethnography, however, posed a challenge for the most ardent Balkan nationalist and had changed out of all recognition since the days of Alexander the Great. The peasantry of the region were predominantly Orthodox, and mostly Slavs; Greek speakers fringed coastal areas and inhabited the towns. The capital, Salonika, which one commentator called the “coveted city,” was a typical polyglot Ottoman port whose bootblacks could make themselves understood in half a dozen languages, but it had one unique feature: of the ethnic kaleidoscope that made up its population, the largest single group were not Greeks, Turks, Albanians or Slavs but Sephardic Jews. Inside and outside the city, no single ethnic group prevailed. Nationalism could offer a basis for rule over such a land only with the aid of extreme violence and a good deal of wishful thinking.

“In one sense,” wrote the British diplomat Sir Charles Eliot in 1900, “a race in Macedonia is merely a political party.” The struggle for the loyalties of the Slav Orthodox peasantry was waged between pro-Greek and pro-Bulgarian factions. Both sides founded schools to propagate their national ideals, established churches loyal to “their” bishops, produced maps and ethnographies to justify their claim and financed armed bands of patriots—some local, some supported by outside agents—to gain peasant adherents to their cause where more peaceful methods could not be guaranteed to bring success. Serbs and Romanians also propagandized, though more halfheartedly. The Greeks took a while to organize themselves, while the Bulgarians were weakened by a murderous split in their own ranks between those who fought for a Greater Bulgaria, and the members of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO), who wanted autonomy for Macedonia. For the most part, the Turkish authorities sat back and watched the Christians fight among themselves, occasionally sending in Albanian irregulars when matters threatened to boil over.
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Ethnicity was as much the consequence as the cause of this unrest; revolutionary violence produced national affiliations as well as being produced by them. The unfortunate peasants themselves were concerned more to regain some stability in their lives than to die for nationalism. “Our fathers were Greeks and none mentioned the Bulgarians,” confessed one. “We became Bulgarians, we won. If we have to be Serbs, no problem. But for now it is better for us to be Bulgarians.” Caught between hard-line revolutionaries and the unpredictably repressive Ottoman state, many immigrated—to Bulgaria, Greece, central Europe or across the Atlantic. Those who remained were pawns in a political struggle between sides that were relying increasingly on violence to secure their loyalty.
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When pro-Bulgarian activists organized a rising at Djumaya to which local villagers reacted with indifference, the latter were rewarded by having their homes burned down by the Ottoman authorities and their cattle sold off. The following spring, IMRO bombed targets in Salonika and in the autumn unleashed the Ilinden revolt, this time triggering off a larger peasant uprising and another Turkish reprisal. Their purpose, like that of so many insurrectionaries before and since, was to embroil the Great Powers on the side of their demands for autonomy. But in this they failed: for the last time, the Russian Tsar Nicholas II and Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Josef were able to agree upon a reform program for the Ottoman province.
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These Murzsteg reforms were the last real cooperation between the two major powers involved in the Balkans. Austria was alarmed by Serbia’s assertiveness after the murder of the pro-Austrian King Alexander Obrenovic
. When Serbia and Bulgaria established a secret customs union in 1905, the Austrians made them dissolve it. The following year there was a new quarrel after the Serbs purchased arms in France rather than from the Habsburg empire. In the “Pig War” the Austrians again tried to coerce the Serbs, this time through economic sanctions. Given that 80 to 90 percent of Serbian exports went via the empire, the Serbs might have been expected to knuckle under. Instead they rerouted their trade south and moved closer to Russia. The Austrians began to fear, in Sorel’s words, that “when the Eastern Question appears to have been resolved, Europe will inevitably face the Austrian question.” In the middle of the nineteenth century, the small independent state of Piedmont had created Italy by taking over the Habsburgs’ Italian provinces; now Vienna feared that Serbia might do the same thing with the empire’s South Slavs.

In 1908 reformist army officers in Macedonia, angry at Ottoman weakness and continued Western intervention, led a revolt against the Porte. When Sultan Abdul Hamid II declared that he was restoring the 1876 Ottoman constitution, a wave of euphoria swept the province and it looked as if the empire might transform itself under the revolutionaries into a multiethnic state with religious equality and civic rights for all. In Macedonia there was a brief moment of celebration. “The Mullahs offered up prayers, the Greek bishop and representatives of the League of Union and Progress made speeches,” came the reports from one town in July. “Officers and civilians have been haranguing the crowd from the steps of the government buildings,” reported a British diplomat in Salonika, the center of the revolt, on July 23. “They speak in favor of liberty and representative government and assert that the Constitution has already been formally proclaimed.”
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But there were those who had reason not to welcome the salvation of the Ottoman empire. The Ottoman dynasty feared that reform would be more likely to lose it support among its Muslim population than to win it among Christians. When Abdul Hamid first traveled by train, the reaction of Muslim bystanders had been scathing: “The Padishah has become a
giaour
[Christian].” Like railways, constitutionalism marked the disruptive intrusion of Christian values into the hierarchal world of Ottoman Islam. Equally fearful, however, of this constitutional revolution was Austria-Hungary, which had occupied the Ottoman province of Bosnia-Hercegovina in 1878. Worried lest the Young Turks try to extend voting rights there, Vienna moved quickly to annex the province outright.
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At least one Habsburg expert on the South Slavs saw trouble ahead. To many Bosnian peasants in 1908, the Habsburg emperor was still “our old father” (
stari otac
). But this traditional deference to dynastic authority was waning. The roads, railways and schools the Austrians were building in their new province facilitated the spread of Serbian nationalism among the Bosnian Orthodox. And Serb nationalism was linked to the agrarian question. While peasants were free in Croatia, Hungary and Serbia, in Bosnia-Hercegovina four fifths awaited emancipation and existed under an Ottoman feudal order preserved by the Austrians. “Plainly no one has ever stopped to consider the impression bound to be made . . . on the minds of a population which knows that across the Drina and Sava rivers, there is no sub-pasha to appropriate a third of the harvest every year for Beg or Aga.” Habsburg efforts to inculcate a sense of Bosnian nationhood had failed.
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The only alternative seemed to save Bosnia for the empire by “placing the center of the South Slav world inside Austria.” Throughout the nineteenth century, Hungary’s increasingly autocratic rule over Serbs and Croats had provoked the emergence of a movement for South Slav cooperation. Bishop Josip Strossmayer, a member of the Vienna Reichsrat, was among those who sought to build closer ties among Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, and through institutions such as the Yugoslav Academy and Zagreb University laid the foundations for a movement that might win rights for the South Slavs within the Habsburg system. But even inside the empire this policy encountered the adamant opposition of the Hungarians, who did not wish to share power with the South Slavs.

Outside the empire, the Serbs saw themselves as a Balkan Piedmont with a mission to free the remaining South Slavs from captivity. They interpreted Austria-Hungary’s annexation of Bosnia as a move against them. The Russians too opposed it, especially as they knew the Austrians wanted to construct a railroad southward to the Aegean. A British diplomat commented, “The struggle between Austria and Russia in the Balkans is evidently now beginning.” Both Russia and Serbia demanded compensation from the Austrians, but neither got it. The Serbs expected Russian support, even to the point of a declaration of war against Austria. “All think of revenge which is only to be carried out with the help of the Russians,” the Austrian ambassador reported from Belgrade. But the Russians backed down when Berlin warned that Germany would mobilize in turn in support of Vienna. “Russia is not yet ready with her army and cannot now make war,” the Russian foreign minister informed the Serbs. In 1914, they would receive a different answer.
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In Serbia and Bosnia itself secret societies sprang up opposed to Habsburg rule—among them Union or Death, the organization implicated in the Sarajevo shooting in 1914. Serb success in the Balkan wars turned “what was only a hope a year ago,” reported an Austrian observer of pro-Serb sentiment in Bosnia in October 1913, into “a deep-rooted political movement.” The dilemma for Austria-Hungary sharpened. “We have got either to annihilate Serbia or, if we cannot do that, learn to love it,” commented one analyst. The assassination of Franz Ferdinand led the Austrian government to take the road to the first alternative, and unleashed an almost identical sequence of events to that of 1908; in 1914, however, the Russians felt they could not back down a second time. Hence Europe’s second Bosnian crisis led to its First World War.
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But by then the map of the Balkans had already been drastically altered by the almost total collapse of Ottoman power in Europe. The Young Turk revolution, far from reconciling Balkan subjects to Ottoman rule, had hastened the empire’s disintegration. As the Habsburg empire was also to find, nationalism dissolved the old imperial bonds. Turkish nationalism—which was the basis on which the revolutionaries of the Committee of Union and Progress hoped to modernize the empire—simply increased Christian emnity. By 1911 there were more than two hundred guerrilla bands operating in Macedonia and the outlook was grimmer than for many years.

In particular, the government’s efforts to modernize the Ottoman state alienated the one people traditionally loyal to the regime, the Albanians. Christians and Muslims, they had served the Sultan as irregular soldiers and bodyguards, their loyalty secured by the Porte’s willingness to allow them arms and autonomy. Edith Durham, a sympathetic observer, described villages whose men “when called on for military service . . . will often declare themselves Christians and exempt, and afterward repel with guns the men sent to collect army tax on the grounds that they are Moslems and not liable.” In 1910 an uprising in northern Albania was defeated only with the aid of 20,000 Ottoman troops. And the next year—as Italy went to war with the Ottoman empire in Libya and contemplated an invasion of Albania—an even larger revolt saw the rebels call for the first time for the recognition of Albania as a separate nation and for virtual self-government. “The formation of a commission at Dibra to consider a demand for the recognition of Albanians in official registers as ‘Albanians’ and not as ‘Moslems’ or ‘non-Moslems’ is especially significant,” noted the British ambassador in Constantinople. “The notables forming the commission are apparently themselves Moslems and that they should even consider a proposal to demand a national instead of a religious status is an entirely new and very remarkable development.”
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The Albanian rebellion presaged radical changes in the balance of power in the Balkans. It showed that armed revolt against the Turkish authorities could succeed, spurring the Balkan states to assert their own claims to Ottoman territory. It marked the emergence of organized and militant Albanian nationalism, to the intense alarm of Serbia and Greece, both of which claimed territories with substantial Albanian-speaking populations. And it encouraged both Austria-Hungary and Italy to dream of new footholds in southeastern Europe, which alarmed the Balkan states still more.

In March 1912, therefore, Serbia and Bulgaria agreed to “unite in defense of their independence and integrity and in opposition to any attempt by a great power to invade the Balkan territories of the Ottoman empire.” Greece and Montenegro soon joined them. Russian diplomats believed they had fostered a defensive bloc against Austria, but they woke up too late to see the Balkan League attack Turkey. “Russia tries to put on the brake,” observed French Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré, “but it is she who has started the motor.” “For the first time in the history of the Eastern Question,” noted another French diplomat, “the small states have acquired a position of such independence of the Great Powers that they feel able to act completely without them and even to take them in tow.”
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