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Partition by Ottoman Conquest

The Turkish conquest stabilized the social structures of the Slav peoples included within the frontiers of the Ottoman empire. The Turks interfered hardly at all with the lives of their Christian subjects, demanding only that they pay their taxes and supply recruits for the Turkish army. Holding down the country with fortresses which in many cases were the nuclei of future towns, they ruled by means of a feudal administration consisting of pashas and beys living on enormous estates, and an army of cavalry (spahis) and infantry (janissaries) which was originally composed of Christians who had adopted Turkish ways, but in which Turks also began serving in the second half of the sixteenth century.

Conversion to Islam, which to a Christian represented a means of rising in the social scale, skimmed off the best elements among the subject peoples. The administration and army, in fact, were run by these 'Turki-cized' Europeans, many of whom were Slavs. Even the Sultan's immediate circle - his grand vizir, the highest officer of the state, and the vizirs com-posing his 'Divan' - consisted of foreigners. Between 1453 and 1623 there were twnety-one grand vizirs, of whom eleven were Yugoslavs, five Albanians and only three true Osmanli Turks.

Bosnia was where Islamization went furthest, doubtless because persecu-tion of the Bogomils had swayed the people in favour of the invaders, who were more tolerant in religious matters. Towards 1600 Bosnia was three-quarters Muslim, and a long process of Christian reconquest, which was never fully successful, was required to reduce this proportion. There were also many renegades from Christianity in Macedonia, which was nearer the Turkish capital and in which the Turks themselves, outside the towns, constituted a substantial fraction of the population. Thus a minority of the Slavs had adopted the victors' culture and had supplied it not only with officials and soldiers but also writers and poets, such as Suzi Celebri, of Prizren, and Sudi, who came from near Sarajevo.

On the other hand, the Turkish invasion across the Danube, by which Vienna was threatened in the sixteenth century, caused migrations which intensified the preponderance of Slav settlement on the plain of Hungary.

In addition to the northward flight of Serbian peasants and petty land-owners, an exodus soon checked by the victorious advance of the Turks, there was voluntary resettlement of Vlach herdsmen along the road to Buda, and of peasants from Bosnia between the Save and Drave. Syrmia, Banat, Batschka and Slavonia were thus colonized by Serbs, and the ethno-graphic limit of the South Slav peoples was permanently fixed. The Slav character of the coastal zone, moreover, was accentuated by the fact that the Turks shifted the Bosnian Vlachs into the Dalmatian hinterland, where they became farmers and beekeepers.

The population along the fluctuating frontiers organized their own militia bands to resist the advancing Turks, and were supported on

D E P E N D E N T AND SUBJECT NATIONS 243

occasion by the imperial forces. The Turks, when their first impetus had spent itself, fell back a little; the Turkish and Austro-Hungarian frontier was defined under the Treaty of Karlovci (1699); and a 'march' was estab-lished, consisting of some three hundred and seventy-five miles of territory, from the Velebit to the Carpathians, inhabited by those of the Serbs and Croats who were still subjects of the Hapsburg empire. The peasants in these 'military confines' were also soldiers; they were provided with little freehold estates and made responsible for guarding the frontier. There was a high degree of ethnic homogeneity, the inhabitants' lively patriotism was made all the keener by the struggle against the Turks, and they enjoyed greater freedom than their brothers under Ottoman domination, south of the Danube; with the consequence that the 'military confines' were to be-come one of the leading areas in the national revival movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Dubrovnik, a Gateway to the West

Dubrovnik (Ragusa) was the only large town on the east coast of the Adriatic to escape Turkish rule, which it bought off with an annual in-demnity. Through its patrician traders and its fleet it connected the Balkan territories with Italy and Spain, from both of which there was a continuous influx of western influences. As the intermediary between the Ottoman empire, which constituted a vast unified market, with customs duties to be paid only at the frontiers, and the Western countries, which in the sixteenth century were looking for outlets for their textiles, Ragusa was well repre-sented in the ports of the Balkan peninsula, where her merchants' colonies enjoyed fiscal privileges and from which they sent home the wheat and animal products on which Ragusa depended. Ragusa, with two hundred ships, totalling 25,000 tons, and thousands of sailors, had a very consider-able carrying trade; and there was a Ragusan consul in every large port in the western Mediterranean. The city's government was aristocratic, but economic power was shared by the nobles and middle class; in the six-teenth century Ragusa experienced great prosperity, but this was later much reduced by the displacement of the trade routes following the great discoveries, and by competition from the French, English and Dutch fleets in the Mediterranean, and from Muslim, Armenian and Jewish merchants in the Balkan towns. Although ruined by the earthquake of 6 April 1667, which killed between 3,000 and 4,000 people (over half the population), Ragusa regained her commercial vigour in the eighteenth century, and contrived to flourish by remaining neutral in the conflict between France and England. In the Napoleonic era the Ragusan republic was occupied by the French and lost its independence in 1808.

Dubrovnik, whose Latin population had been rapidly submerged by

"^migration from the interior, was a Slav town by the fifteenth century.

*rom then until the eighteenth century it was the only centre of high cul-ture in the countries of south-east Europe. The educated inhabitants spoke Italian, which was also the official language and remained so until the

244 MODERN STATES

nineteenth century. But Dubrovnik's literature was Slavic, owing to patriotic spirit and a sense of Slav community.

The republic's independence, and its relations with Italy at the time of the Renaissance, led to the development of a humanist literature and, in the comedies of Marin Drzic, of a theatre of manners depicting Ragusan life. But the power of the Ottoman empire, and the necessity of nursing the republic's commercial connections, also made it desirable to cultivate friendly relations with the Sultan, whose fame inspired the poet Mavro Vetranovic (1482-1576). In the seventeenth century, when Turkey had entered on decline and Catholicism was energetically advancing, stamping its imprint both on baroque architecture and on literature, Ragusa's greatest poet, Ivan Gundulic, wrote his epic, Osman, in which he cele-brated the Poles' great victory over the Turks at Chocim (1621) as a victory for Catholicism, and wove a connection between Slav popular tradition and western Christian civilization.

The Slavs in the Holy Roman Empire

Three nuclei of Slav population had survived in the rich Pannonian basin north of the Danube, which the Mongols had invaded in the tenth century:

Banat, Batschka and Baranja (map 14). These were added to in the fif-teenth century by a wave of fugitives from the Ottoman conquest, and again, in the sixteenth, when the Turks got as far north as the gates of Vienna, by peasants from the poorer, southern districts. In Batschka, eighty per cent of the population at that time were Serbs. At the beginning of the eighteenth century the frontier - the Ottoman front line, as it were, on the Hungarian sector - was fixed before Belgrade; meanwhile, however, Austrian troops had made a brief penetration into Serbian territory, with the result that, after their final withdrawal north of the Danube, the 'great emigration of 1690' further intensified the Serbian character of southern Pannonia. Despite considerable Hungarian and German colonization, the Serbs in this area (which at a later period, in 1848, became autonomous for a few years, when it was known as the Voivodina) presented a fairly homo-geneous mass which played a leading role in the developmentof Serbian nationalism. Because they were obliged to defend their Orthodox faith against a Catholic regime, they were never lulled by the contemptuous tolerance displayed by the Turks towards their brothers across the Danube;

moreover, their land being more fertile, they benefited from the general development of the Hapsburg empire.

Slav Unity and the Reformation

The Reformation produced profound repercussions in Croatia and Slovenia; it stimulated the opposition of the leading classes to imperial rule, and that of the peasants to the landowners; and it encouraged the written use of the popular dialects, thereby making the various sections of the Slav population more aware of their regional individuality.

Slovenia became, for a time, the platform of Protestant heresy. In

DEPENDENT AND SUBJECT NATIONS

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Croatia the Reformation swept the board in the coastal areas, the military confines and the country between the Mur and the Drave, but met strong resistance, based on Zagreb, from the Croatian nobles, who supported their Catholic sovereigns on account of the Turkish danger.

The Reformation, whose history in Slovenia is linked with the name of Primoz Trubar, was responsible for the creation of literary Slovenian, used in catechisms and translations of sacred history. But the Slovenian parti-sans of the Reformation were far from confining their activities to Slovenia;

their zeal for conversion took them into Croatian and Serbian districts and even into Muslim Herzegovina. The fact that Reformation supporters in these different Slav environments were working for a single objective, though by various means, endowed their common undertaking, essentially religious though it was, with a pan-Slav character. And while the multipli-city of scripts (Glagolitic, Cyrillic and Latin) and languages (various dialectal forms of Slovenian, Croatian and Serbian) emphasized what a multiplicity of different nationalities was involved, it also emphasized their common features, the closeness with which their cultures were related.

The Counter-Reformation, unleashed by the arrival of the Jesuits in Graz in 1573 and carried on under the violent leadership of the sovereigns

KINGDOM OF POLAND J^Kiev

R U S S I A

Miles Extent of the Ottoman Empire prior to the Treaty of Karlovci, 1699

14 The Ottoman Empire in 1699

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and the Church, rapidly demolished heresy, which was defeated by the beginning of the seventeenth century. The reconquest was even accom-panied by pressure on the Orthodox Croatians, who were urged to go over to the Uniates. But the Reformation's linguistic legacy remained; the vernacular was accepted by the Church, and the Jesuits, by employing the 5fo-dialect of Croatian (the most widely used, and the most similar to Serbian) for their written propaganda, were in effect supporting one of the current ideas of the time, that of an 'Illyrian' linguistic unity.

As early as the sixteenth century, indeed, the idea of an ethnic and linguistic community of the south Slav peoples had been increasingly voiced by a number of writers and other cultivated people, mostly churchmen.

In the seventeenth century one of these was a Croat who spent much of his life in Russia, Krizanic, who urged the union of Catholicism and Orthodoxy and also propounded the idea that Russia had a mission to fulfil among the southern Slav peoples. But the most important advocacy came from the Franciscans. Their propaganda was more effective among the country people than that of the Jesuits, and it was they who were chiefly responsible for restoring Catholicism in such Slav-speaking territories as had not fallen into Turkish hands; thereafter they extended their efforts to the whole of the Balkans, where their establishments were tolerated by the Turks; and by encouraging resistance to the highly unpopular Greek clergy, they helped to crystallize a national spirit which at that time was still compatible with a nebulous pan-Slavism. It was a Franciscan, Andrew Kacic Miosic, who, in his Discourses for the Slav People (1756), extolled the joint past of the Serbs, Croats and Bulgars.

The Slavs in the Ottoman Empire

Apart from religious works of no originality, almost nothing of a literary kind was produced in the countries under Turkish rule. But national feel-ing was kept alive by a rich and colourful folk-poetry, orally transmitted, whose themes were everyday life and distant or legendary memories of the past and of resistance to the Turks. In Serbia this grew into the great treasury of the pesme, ballads and lyrics which were accompanied on the guzla (a sort of guitar; figure 39, p. 373), and which caused Mieckiewicz to declare that the Serbian people was destined to be the bard and musician of the whole Slav race. These songs immortalized the haiduks, those heroes of the Balkan maquis, half brigands, half patriots, in the Turkish-occupied areas, and the uskoks, who set out from Croatia or the Dalmatian coast to raid the Turks and who, after spending some time as privateers in the emperor's interest, were given official status and transferred to the Confines

(map 14).

In their struggle to preserve their national identity, moreover, the Serbs had to fight on two fronts. At the beginning of the sixteenth century the Greek Church, through the archbishopric of Okhrid, had tried to take over the Serbian Church, which had remained autonomous in northern Serbia

DEPENDENT AND SUBJECT NATIONS ²⁴⁷

and in Bosnia, Herzegovina and Montenegro. This was resisted by those of the Serbs who had gone over to the Turkish way of life but were still mind-ful of their family loyalties, and who now made use of their high positions in the sultan's personal service to favour the Serbian Church. The latter extended its influence southward; in 1557 the grand vizier Mehmed Sokolovitch re-established the former patriarchate of Pec, to which he appointed his brother, the monk Macarius; for the next two centuries the patriarchate of Pec (abolished as a result of Greek pressure in 1767) was the religious focus of the Serbs' national life.

The cultural life of the Bulgars, like that of the Serbs, was severely restricted. They were nearer the hub of things and had the Turks right on top of them; Turkish domination was particularly oppressive in the western Bulgarian-speaking areas. At popular level, an obscure national conscious-ness was expressed by veneration of St John of Rila and admiration for demotic heroes, the leaders of armed bands on the mountains at the time of the Turkish invasion. But Turkish was the language of administration;

Greek, of education and refinement; the Bulgarian dialects were merely what the peasants spoke, and were despised accordingly.

The literary works produced when the Ottoman empire was at the height of its power, in the sixteenth century, owe such interest as they possess to the anti-Turkish feeling expressed in them; examples are the writings of the monk Pomen, who was also an icon painter, and those of the priest Peio and of Matthew 'the Grammarian'. After this the failure of the insurrection at Tarnovo (1595), which had been fomented by the Ragusans, initiated a peculiarly tragic period, the dark night of Bulgarian history.

There was armed resistance on the mountains and passive resistance else-where. In these areas close to Constantinople the Turks appear to have pursued what was for them a quite exceptional policy of compulsory con-version to Islam (which may perhaps account for the Muslim Bulgars,the Pomaks). The higher clergy, as foreigners (Greeks), were hated by the people, who nevertheless continued in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to find a focal point for their national feelings in the worship of the popular saints - George, Nicholas, and John of Rila.

The rich, corrupt Greek clergy looked down on the Bulgarian lower clergy and had little contact with the people. It was the Bosnian and Croatian missionaries of the Franciscan Order who took most interest in the latter and who, in the seventeen century, operating like commandos in advance of the great Catholic offensive, carried the faith to the Bulgars. A Bulgarian Catholic;, Philip Stanislavov, bishop of Nicopolis, wrote what appears to be the first work in the Bulgarian vernacular, Abagar.

In the late seventeenth century, when the Austrians were penetrating deeply into Serbia, the Bulgarians rebelled (1688). When the rebellion failed they began looking to Russia as their possible future liberator. Seven hundred years earlier, religious life in Russia had been initiated by the

•Bulgarian monasteries, and it had been nourished by them ever since; now they in their turn, during the eighteenth century, received from Russia not

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only books in Russian Slavonic (itself originally an offshoot from Bulgarian) but also a new spiritual impetus. The treaty of Kutchuk-Kainardji (1744) placed them under Russian protection. Pioneered by the monk Paissi, a cultural renewal took place; but from this time forward Russia became the Bulgars' intellectual and spiritual guardian.