The Balkans: A Short History (15 page)

Had Russia lent her support, as Ypsilantis had hoped, the Danubian uprising might have heralded the Byzantine imperial renaissance of which the Phanariots dreamed. But in fact the Tsar was anxious to preserve the peace in Europe. “The emperor has highly disapproved of those [means] which Prince Ipsilanti appears to wish to employ to deliver Greece,” wrote Capodistrias to a friend. “At a time when Europe is menaced everywhere by revolutionary explosions, how can one not recognize in that which has broken out in the two principalities the identical effect of the same subversive principles, the same intrigues which attract the calamities of war . . . the most dreadful plague of demagogic despotism.” The rebels were easily crushed by the Turkish army after Romanian peasants refused their support as well. “I am not prepared to shed Romanian blood for Greeks,” stated the Romanian insurgent leader Tudor Vladimirescu. The main consequence of this failure was the collapse of Phanariot influence north of the Danube, and the eventual disappearance of an important center of Greek learning.
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A month later, as spring ushered in a new fighting season, a second Greek revolt occurred far to the south in the Peloponnese—where the peasantry were mostly Greek-speaking, and where a major insurrection had already taken place at Russian prompting in 1770, with bloody consequences. The eventual success of this rising rather than Ypsilantis’s meant that when a Greek state did emerge, it was not as a new Byzantium spread across Europe and Anatolia, but as a modest little kingdom with a capital eventually based in the small Ottoman market town of Athens. But success was far from assured there either.

At first, all eyes were on the struggle between the Porte and the rebellious and wily Ali Pasha to the north. In the Peloponnese port of Patras, Greeks were still hoping that the Muslim Albanian ruler of Jannina would “win and deliver them” from Ottoman rule. In fact, the local Ottoman authorities feared the same thing. Unwittingly they triggered off the Greek revolt by imprisoning those notables they could find as a preemptive move against Ali’s Christian supporters. Faced with the choice of arrest or rebellion, many Greeks chose the latter and began to attack Muslim settlements. “The cloud of Darkness which overspread the Westward for so many a year, seems now to commence by casting its shadow of desolation and horror in this country,” was how one British onlooker in Macedonia greeted news of the outbreak of revolt. “This revolutionary spirit of independence seems to gain in other parts of Greece also.” Perhaps fifteen thousand of the forty thousand Muslim inhabitants of the Peloponnese were killed by insurgent bands in the first few months; survivors fled to the safety of towns and forts. That summer Greek forces besieged and eventually sacked the provincial capital of Tripolis. “The host which entered it,” recollected one of the Greeks, “cut down and were slaying men, women and children from Friday until Sunday. Thirty two thousand were reported to have been slain. . . . About a hundred Greeks were killed; but the end came; a proclamation was issued that the slaughter must cease.”
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At the end of 1821, the leaders of the Greek revolt met in assembly, proclaimed a constitution and appealed to Europe for help. Their sympathizers declared that Ottoman control of European territory was “an eternal shame to enlightened governments.” But the Greeks—like the Serbs earlier—were disorganized and quarrelsome. They fought among themselves and frittered away their early successes; after 1825 a well-organized Turco-Egyptian invasion force laid waste to the Peloponnese. History would at this point merely have recorded one more failed insurgency had not Europe come to the rescue. Fearful that Ibrāhīm Pasha’s army would enslave the Christians of the Peloponnese, George Canning, the British prime minister, warned that he “would not permit the execution of a system of depopulation.” Ibrāhīm was told “to disavow or formally renounce . . . the intention of converting the Morea [the Peloponnese] into a Barbary State by transporting the population to Asia and Africa and replacing them by the populations of those countries.” Ottoman reprisals three years earlier on Chios, which had left thousands of Greeks dead and thousands more sold into slavery, had shocked the liberal conscience of Europe (and been immortalized by Delacroix). To keep an eye on the situation, the Great Powers sent a naval flotilla to the Peloponnese, which at the battle of Navarino destroyed the Turkish fleet. The Egyptian army then withdrew under the watchful gaze of a French expeditionary force. In this way, thanks largely to outside intervention, an independent Greek state was formed in 1830, and two years later the powers bestowed the youthful Prince Otto of Bavaria, a seventeen-year-old Catholic, upon the country as its king.
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Historians often explain why what happened had to happen. In the case of the rise of the Balkan nation-state, their grand explanatory schemes attribute the success of Christian nationalism to emergent merchant diasporas and the impact of Western ideology. None of this would have counted had it not been for Ottoman military and administrative weakness—especially at the empire’s fringes—and the changing international balance of power. The Serbs were militarily defeated by 1810, the Greeks by 1827, but they won their statehood nonetheless. “It is doubtful,” writes one scholar, “that the Serbs could have won independence from the Ottoman Empire without the full support of one or more major powers.” The same was true for the Greeks. In both cases, the outcomes were tiny, insecure polities, pale shadows of the grand visions of resurrected empires whose prospect animated Balkan revolutionaries.

The dominant power in the region was still the Ottoman empire. After losing Greece (and Egypt), the Porte finally smashed the obstructive janissary corps, modernized its army and undertook a series of reforms. Ali Pasha was killed in 1822, the Bosnian beys were defeated in 1831 and the imperial state centralized its power. The reforms led to some efforts to reduce arbitrary oppression of Balkan Christians by local beys. “The
rayah
have hitherto sufficiently suffered,” stated an Ottoman official in 1837, reproving landowners for forcing peasants to work on Sunday. “It is the will of the Sultan that they should be protected and allowed the full enjoyment of their religion.”
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There was still life in the “Sick Man of Europe”: Turkish troops defeated the Greek army in battle as late as 1897. There was economic vitality too: many Greeks and Serbs remained Ottoman citizens and showed little inclination to immigrate into their new “mother country”; some, on the contrary, fled the high tax rates and poor prospects of the new kingdom of Greece for Ottoman Anatolia or the ports of the Black Sea. The markets of the empire continued to attract Christian merchants, and Orthodox Christians still served the Porte as ambassadors and counselors.
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The two new states were impoverished, rural countries. Serbia was, in Lamartine’s words, “an ocean of forests,” with more pigs than humans. Serbian intellectual life in the Habsburg lands was far more advanced than in Belgrade. Perhaps 800,000 Greeks inhabited the new Greek kingdom, while more than 2 million still remained subjects of the Porte. No urban settlement in Greece came close to matching the sophistication and wealth of Ottoman cities such as Smyrna, Salonika and the capital itself. There were, to be sure, impressive signs of revitalization for those who wished to look: the rapidly expanding new towns built on modern grid patterns that replaced the old Ottoman settlements in Athens, Patras, Tripolis and elsewhere, for example, or the neoclassical mansions and public buildings commissioned by newly independent governments. “Some barracks, a hospital, a prison built on the model of our own,” wrote Adolphe Blanqui from Belgrade in 1841, “announce the presence of an emergent civilization.” In fact, similar trends of town planning and European architecture were transforming Ottoman cities as well.
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The inhabitants of the new states were as viciously divided among themselves in peace as they had been in war. In Serbia adherents of the Karajordje and Obrenovic
factions tussled for power, locals vied with the so-called Germans (Serb emigrants from the Habsburg lands), Turcophiles fought Russophiles. In Greece there were similar struggles between regional factions, between supporters of the various Great Powers, who each sponsored parties of their own, and between “autochthones” and “heterochthones.” These divisions embittered politics from the start. The new states enjoyed liberty from Muslim rule but the pride they took at having won a place of their own in the world was tempered by a keen sense of inferiority vis-à-vis the powers. Nor did their triumph mean that people in the Balkans immediately started thinking in terms of nation-states. On the contrary, “Romania” and “Bulgaria” were notions that as late as 1830 animated only a handful of intellectuals and activists, “Albania” and “Macedonia” in all likelihood next to none. In southeastern Europe, far from the Nation winning itself an independent state—as romantic nationalists imagined—the leaders of new states had to create the Nation out of a peasant society that was imbued with the worldview of its Ottoman past. “Serbia,” noted Blanqui, “owes to Miloš the first routes penetrating its forests, order re-established in its finances, the creation of Serbian nationality.”
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The Danubian Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia—the future Romania—were home to a miserably impoverished Romanian-speaking peasantry, ruled by an indigenous landowning boyar class and governed by Greek princes who owed allegiance to the Sultan. Fought over by Turkey and Russia for most of the eighteenth century, they were the most important example of those autonomous provinces that inhabited an intermediate space between total incorporation within the empire and independence. After the failure of the 1821 Greek revolt there, the decline of Phanariot power left the way open for the princes of the provinces to be elected from among the Romanian boyars themselves, an important step toward the creation of a native governing elite. The Porte was obliged to accept this change, thanks to Russian prodding, in 1826. In 1829, after a campaign that took its armies to within three days’ march of Constantinople, Russia imposed military rule, although the provinces—like Serbia—remained nominally under the Sultan. According to the treaty of Adrianople, which marked the peace, the principalities were to “enjoy the free exercise of their worship, perfect security, an independent national government and full liberty of commerce.”
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But the promise of national independence did not square with the reality of Russian military occupation. The modernizing Russian administrators, influenced by contemporary British and French theories of agrarian reform, intervened far more in the provinces’ internal affairs than the Turks or the Phanariots had done. The church was subjected to the state, as in Russia. Bucharest was transformed by town planners, acquiring numbered houses and street names (just two decades after Berlin), lighting and new drains. Like the Bavarians running Otto’s kingdom of Greece, the Russians based their reforms upon theories of enlightened conservative bureaucracy. With the Organic Regulations of 1832, they introduced a cash economy into the landed estates, boosting grain production, formalizing the boyars’ legal ownership of the land and exacerbating class tensions in the countryside.
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Before long, the Romanians’ new masters were as unpopular as the old. In the revolutionary year of 1848, Russian and Turkish troops acted together to suppress liberal nationalist uprisings in Bucharest and Jassy. Like that of the Greeks before them, the Russians’ influence among the Romanians waned, and the latter began to embrace Latinism—in particular, the culture of their Latin “sister nation,” France. French replaced Greek in fashionable circles and was used in official bulletins. Some dreamed of turning Bucharest, the capital of Wallachia, into the “Paris of the Balkans.”
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After Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War, the French encouraged the idea of a union of the two principalities as a barrier to further Tsarist penetration toward Constantinople. French support and smart maneuvering by local Romanian elites brought this about. In 1859, the two provincial assemblies elected the same man, Alexandru Cuza, “a card player who preferred Jamaica rum to public affairs,” as ruler, and the two assemblies voted for unification. In this strange way, Romania came into existence (even so, it had to wait till 1878 for formal international recognition). Cuza’s reign—like that of most rulers of the new Balkan states—was brief, though he at least avoided assassination. He made enemies among the landowners by his agrarian reforms and was pushed from power in 1866. As in Greece earlier, local elites failed to accept a native head of state, and a monarchical house had to be imported from abroad. Prince Karl of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, a cousin of the king of Prussia, was said never to have heard of Romania before his nomination as its king. Nevertheless, like his contemporary King George of Greece (a “good boy but not overbright and a very plain youth” was Queen Victoria’s comment), as King Carol I, he enjoyed a long and successful reign, until his death in 1914.