The rise of nationality in the Balkans

Front matter

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Chapter I

The master of Constantinople, said Napoleon, will rule the world, and his reputation for political prophecy has given an unnatural lease of life to what is merely a dangerous half-truth. In a conjunction of circumstances such as ten centuries may not bring, and under the guidance of some universal genius of peace and war, Byzantium may resume that supremacy which it enjoyed under its Imperial founder and to a lesser degree under the great Justinian. But even then it will be tor the future historian to consider whether other causes, such as undermined the fighting powers of Kome and diverted the trade routes of the Middle Ares were not the main factors in the revival with which he will be concerned, and whether Constantine would have been any the less supreme had he refrained from founding a New Rome upon the shores of the Bosphorus. 1 hat it may in the future dominate the European situation none would be rash enough to deny; to assert that it must of necessity do so would be little short of an open defiance of the past. For history shows us that despite its commercial importance and its ancient traditions of culture, Constantinople has for many centuries played a purely negative part in the politics of Europe, and that even under such great and war-like sovereigns as Basil II., Mohammed II., and Suleiman the Magnificent, Europe, though it rang with their victories, was never the tool of their policy. To-day, more than ever, the straits between Europe and Asia possess a potential rather than an actual importance, which is intimately connected with the fate of the territory separating them from the Balkans and the Taurus. On the other hand, for purposes of defence, communication, and administration, its strategic position is unrivalled and bears witness to the genius of its founder. Geography, indeed, goes far to explain alike the stubborn survival of the Eastern Empire as a trunkless head and the frequent recoveries of the Sick Man from a seemingly hopeless illness. In a word, Constantinople is a key which, in the right hands, may work wonders, but which only acquires full value when key and lock are in the same possession. For the past two years history has been writing the proof of this assertion in letters of fire across Europe, and the fate of Constantinople is one of the most decisive issues of the Great War. The definite establishment of German control would at once convert the dream of "Berlin to Bagdad" into the most practical of realities, while its acquisition by Russia would change the whole centre of gravity in Eastern Europe by assuring to the greatest of Slavonic Powers its access to the sea and removing the chief incentive to political activity in Persia or the Middle East.

The victories of Belisarius and Narses in Italy and Africa (533-554) were the last serious acts of aggression in the West committed by the so-called "Byzantine" Empire. Henceforward its military resources were devoted on the one hand to retaining or reasserting its hold upon the Balkan Peninsula, and on the other to holding back the advancing tide of Islam from its Asiatic provinces. For ten centuries after the fall of the West before the repeated onslaughts of the barbarians (476), the East held Asia at bay. While the rest of Europe was sunk in the depths of barbarism and anarchy, Constantinople preserved, with much that was corrupt and decadent, many of the great traditions of the ancient world. Recent research and a wider conception of history have restored it to its place as the true centre of culture during the Dark Ages. Indeed, for a long time the Moorish Court of Cordova was its only serious rival as a repository of learning and science; it was only later that the great scholastic centres of Bologna and Paris, of Oxford and Prague, began to assume a real importance in the history of thought and civilisation.

It is true that in the sultry atmosphere of Byzantine ceremonial all initiative had long been stifled; but the West was now ready to receive the treasures so long hoarded on the Bosphorus, and it is hard to exaggerate the impetus which their dispersal after the Turkish conquest gave to the Italian renaissance, and the consequent revival of art and learning throughout Europe.

Internal decay and stagnation had rendered the fall of the Byzantine State inevitable, nor need its dissolution have been a cause for regret, had its conquerors possessed either the inclination or the capacity to accept its great traditions and transfuse them with their own fierce virility. Unhappily, the very opposite occurred. Religious fanaticism and military prowess combined to inspire the Turk with contempt for the conquered Greeks. By a glorious death the last Constantine vindicated his own honour, but could not conceal the craven spirit of his subjects, while the corruption of

B 2 the Eastern Church served to render the art and culture which centred round it peculiarly abhorrent to a race which followed the purer tenets of Mohammed.

By the middle of the fourteenth century the collapse of the Empire had become a mere question of time, and in the year 1355 we find a Venetian diplomat treating it as the certain prey of the Turks.1 Yet the great strength of its strategic position enabled the imperial city to postpone its downfall for a whole century after the Turks had gained their first foothold in Europe. The additional respite afforded by the onslaught of the Mongols on the Turkish rear came too late to save either the Empire itself or the loosely-knit Slavonic states of the peninsula, to whom the triumph of the Crescent meant national ruin. In the ninth and tenth centuries (807-1018) the Bulgars, under the leadership of the savage Krum and his great successors, Boris and Simeon, had seemed more than once on the point of sweeping all before them, but the ferocious energy and military prowess of Basil II. reduced them to complete subjection for 170 years. The second, or Roumano- Bulgar, Empire of the Asenid dynasty,2 and the still more formidable Serb Empire of Stephen Dushan, both proved unequal to the task of uniting the peninsula against the infidel. The fatal battle of Kosovo (1389) — the Flodden of the Southern Slavs — which has been immortalised by a wonderful cycle of popular ballads, assured to the Turks a dominant position in the Balkans. It was followed in a few years by the subjection of Bulgaria (1393), while Serbia and Bosnia were reduced to the defensive, and were only permitted to survive in uncertain vassalage, until .the Sultan, after planting the Crescent upon the Golden Horn, was ready for an advance into the heart of Europe. Even to-day the

2 See Chapters III and VI.

claims of rival propagandists are based upon the doubtful and fluctuating frontiers of mediaeval times. Each race naturally tends to exaggerate the achievements of its ancestors and to ignore the claims of its neighbours. But even upon a perfectly sound historical basis it is possible to make out a good case for at least three mutually exclusive and irreconcilable programmes. Meanwhile, it may safely be asserted that none of the three states referred to was so exclusively national in character as those who read the present into the past would have us believe. During the fifteenth century the indifference and disunion of Christendom favoured Turkish ambitions. The disastrous battles of Nicopolis (1396) and Varna (1444) crushed what were at best isolated, if gallant, efforts. In the West, Pius II. alone showed some perception of the issues at stake; but his noble enthusiasm and personal example, while shedding a dying lustre upon the pre-Reformation Papacy, produced no tangible result. For a whole century the Magyars and Roumanians were left virtually unaided to stem the Turkish tide. Their heroic leaders, John Hunyady and Stephen the Great, proved in many a desperate battle that the Crescent was not invincible ; but their efforts would have been more effectual had Stephen been a contemporary, not a successor, of the great Roumanian voivode, and had the two nations acted conjointly instead of on parallel lines. Even Hunyady's son, King Matthias Corvinus, admittedly one of the greatest figures of the fifteenth century, would seem to have under-estimated the Turkish danger, for his campaigns in the south were mere spasmodic efforts compared with the energy and resources squandered in repeated aggression against Austria and Bohemia.

The writers of historical text-books have often selected purely arbitrary dates for the opening of some new era, but it was a sure instinct which fixed upon the fall of Constantinople in 1453 as a decisive landmark in European history. Henceforth a barbarous Asiatic Power, to whom law and administration were a sealed book and the argument of the sword the sole reality, was to make its capital in the city of Constantine and Justinian. The Imperial tradition of the Caesars, which had survived within narrower limits, but in a more recognisable form, in Byzantium than in the shadowy Empire of the West, was rudely shattered by the might of the Crescent. The fragments of its literary treasures were transferred to Italy and Germany, and gave added strength and a new direction to the humanistic current which is known as the Renaissance, and which, on its spiritual side, was to merge in the reforming movement of Luther, Calvin, and Knox.

The destruction of the Eastern Empire involved the establishment of an essentially barbarous Power cemented by military organisation and an insatiable lust of conquest. The records of Turkish rule in Europe are one long catalogue of bloodshed and rapine, at first directed by the genius of one of the most remarkable dynasties which the world has seen,1 but never from first to last inspired by the faintest traditions of culture. In marked contrast to other Moslem Powers, the Turks have never shown a trace of creative genius; when not actively engaged in the cause of destruction, they have remained sunk in the lethargy of fatalism. The learning and culture of Bagdad and Cordova, the architectural and artistic triumphs of the Indian Moguls or the Fatimite Caliphs of Egypt, were never rivalled by the Turks. Even their literature, despite its

1 From Osman ( + 1325) to Suleiman I. ( + 1566) are ten generations in lineal descent; and with the possible exception of the two Bayezids, all were men of commanding ability, and at least two of rea1 genius.

numerous votaries, is in the main an imitation of Persian and Arabic models.1

The Turks entered Europe endowed with the savage virtues of the primitive warrior; confronted with so utterly alien a civilisation as that of Byzantium, they could only assimilate its worst qualities, which acted upon their martial spirit as a slowly corroding poison. Their apologists are fully entitled to extol the dignity and the virtues of the individual Turkish peasant, and even to contrast them with the unlovely qualities of the enslaved rayah ; but no effort can conceal the supremely negative nature of the Turkish character, the utter incapacity for constructive work or probity of administration displayed by the governing class. The essential distinction between Islam and the Turks cannot be emphasised too strongly in a book dealing with Balkan problems, for there is at the present day a foolish and unfounded tendency to assume that severe criticism of the latter necessarily involves hostility towards the former.

The final and unanswerable condemnation of Turkish rule in Europe consists, not in recounting the periodic massacres and outbreaks which its discontented subjects have provoked, but in contrasting the material and moral condition of the various provinces before and after the conquest, and still more their condition a generation before and a generation after the expulsion of the Turks. Every province which they have held has become a desert under their blighting influence, and has only blossomed again when the blight has been

1 Even the historian, Hammer-Purgstall, who in his monumental work on Ottoman poetry introduces over 2,000 " poets and versifiers" to the West, has to admit that the Turks "are not inspired by any native and peculiar poetical genius, like the Arabs and Persians," though they have assimilated the literary treasures of those two peoples. See Gesch. des osmanischen Reiches, Bd. II., S.683.

removed. The rose garden replaces the dung hill, and flourishing modern cities the foul and mouldering hamlets of a century ago. Whether it be Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Greece, Roumania, Bosnia, or Bulgaria, the story is invariably the same. The proverb which declares that grass does not grow where the Ottoman hoofs have trod, merely gives poetical expression to a fact which is as indisputable as the law of gravity.

With the triumph of the Turks the Eastern Question — which has its root in the secular rivalry of Europe and Asia — assumed a new phase, in the course of which there was a faint revival of the old conception of European solidarity, which the Crusades had kindled into flame but which the decay of the Holy Roman Empire had done so much to obscure. But it was only with the decline of Ottoman power that it entered upon the stage which has been so familiar to recent generations, and which ended amid the cataclysms of 191 2.

A period of 550 years separates the day on which the Turks, still flushed with their conquest of Adrianople, routed the allied Serb and Bulgar armies on the Maritza near that city (1371), and the day on which Adrianople surrendered to the victorious Bulgars and their Serbian Allies. This period falls naturally into two divisions : one of expansion and aggrandisement (1357— 1595), in which the capture of the Dardanelles was the first and the conquest of Cyprus (1571) the last of an unbroken series of military triumphs,1 and one of slow but constant decline (1595-1912), in which province after province was severed from the decaying trunk of the

1 A further period of expansion occurred under the great Viziers of the later seventeenth century. The conquest of Crete from the Venetians (1669), and of Podolia and the Ukraine from Poland (1676) marked the high water line of Turkish conquest. This revival closed dramatically with the unsuccessful siege of Vienna in 1683.

Ottoman state. At the height of its power Turkish pashas ruled in Buda, Belgrade, Sarajevo, and Athens; Wallachia, Moldavia, Transylvania, and Ragusa paid annual tribute to the Porte; while the Empire and Poland felt the menace of the Sultan's power.

The strength of the Turks lay in their skilful combination of the military and feudatory systems, in the still more ingenious adaptation of slavery by the blood tax, and in the position of the Sultan as the spiritual head of Islam.1 From the very first the whole organisation of the conquering race rested on a military basis; war was their true profession, and foreign aggrandisement was the surest road to fame and advancement. The child tribute, by which the famous corps of Janissaries was recruited, was a double source of strength, for on the one hand it made good the comparative sterility of the Turks, and on the other drained the best forces of the subject population. Thus, by a refinement of cruelty, the unhappy Christians saw the flower of their youth converted into the deadliest instrument for prolonging their subjection. It was only when, towards the end of the sixteenth century, the Janissaries were permitted to marry, and under the degenerate successors of the great Suleiman were appeased at each fresh accession by extravagant largesse, that the first symptoms of decay became apparent. When marriage was once allowed to them, the admission of their children to service in the same corps became a mere question of time; and from the moment that this practice became common, the blood tax inevitably fell into disuse, and the drain upon the Christian population ceased. The growing lack of discipline among the Janissaries coincided with the transformation of the old military tenure of the Timars : the luxury and extravagance of

1 Cf. Ranke, Fiirsten und V biker Siideuropas im XVI. u. XVII. Jahrhundert, cursim.

the Court kept pace with the rapacity of the troops. The incapacity of the later Sultans naturally increased the influence of the harem, and all these causes combined to deplete the Treasury and thus weaken the offensive power of the Empire.

Like a vampire, the Ottoman state could only flourish by draining the life blood of its victims ; and this process still further whetted its appetite, until at length the overgrown body fell an easy prey to decay and corruption. The art of government has always been a sealed book to the Turks, whose peculiar talent has been strictly limited to war and diplomacy ; and nothing illustrates this more strikingly than the circumstance that so many of their greatest statesmen have been of other than Turkish origin, owing their advancement, not to race, but to the unifying bond of Islam.

Chapter II

That the inevitable process of Turkish dissolution has been prolonged over several centuries is due, not so much to the patient's powers of resistance (though these must not be underestimated) as to the mutual distrust and animosities of the Christian States of Europe. The same short-sighted indifference, the same selfish calculation on their part which permitted the fall of Constantinople, left the Turks in undisturbed possession of their prey, and on more than one occasion actively supported their designs of aggression.1 It is an unhappy fact that one of the central events of European progress, the German Reformation, should have contributed materially to this result. The clash of warring religious systems and the. bigotry displayed on both sides gave rise to the conviction that the Papacy was a deadlier enemy than the Turk, and led for the first time to co-operation between a Protestant and a Mohammedan Power. Nowhere was this more marked than in Hungary, where the opponents of the Habsburg dynasty and its Jesuit allies often preferred the rule of Islam to that of a rival Christian sect. During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries their very

1 Cf. the encouragement given by Francis I. to Suleiman's invasion of Hungary, inspired by the French King's desire to injure the House of Habsburg.

zeal for the Catholic faith proved to be the chief handicap of the Habsburgs in their great designs for the recovery of Christian territory from the Turks, The Thirty Years' War, in which the Protestant North linked hands with Gabriel Bethlen and the Calvinists of Hungary, served as a diversion in favour of the Turks and delayed the Christian advance for at least two generations. But if the Bethlens, the Tokolis, and the Rakoczys, instead of following their ancestors' example as the foremost champions of Christendom, were content to remain the vassals of the Porte, this is to be explained and condoned by the gross intolerance and persecuting zeal displayed by the House of Habsburg towards the Hungarian Protestants — a frame of mind which coincided with a despotic tendency to override all constitutional traditions. Despite this stain upon its scutcheon, however, it is to the House of Habsburg that we must assign the chief glory in the task of turning the tide against the Turks. For a century and a half ( 1 526-1687) the great central plains of Hungary remained in Turkish possession, and for the greater part of that period the Habsburgs were forced to act upon the defensive. The exigencies of German politics, involving the future of the dynasty and of the Roman Church, and at the same time Magyar hostility to a foreign king and the strategic value of Transylvania as a focus of national resistance, all combined to render an aggressive policy virtually impossible. But defence at least was not neglected, and the sixteenth century saw the organisation of the Croatian Military Frontiers, which at once stemmed back the Turks from the hereditary provinces and threatened their flank in the open Hungarian plain. This frontier work was an essential preliminary to the task of reconquest, and its success was demonstrated by the gradual extension of the system of soldier-settlers along the whole northern bank of the Save and Danube as far east as the Transylvanian Alps.

The famous siege of Vienna in 1683 marks the last serious effort of the Turks at European conquest. The danger was averted by the joint efforts of the Imperialists and their Polish allies under the great Sobieski, and the moment of extreme peril was immediately followed by the heroic era of Habsburg advance. In a series of glorious campaigns under the Duke of Lorraine and Stahremberg, and their still greater successor, Prince Eugene, the Imperialist armies drove back .the Turks from the greater part of Hungary and Transylvania (1685-1699), and at length — after an interval caused by European and Hungarian opposition l — not merely expelled them from their last foothold on Hungarian soil, the Banat of Temesvar, but also occupied the fortress of Belgrade and large portions of the modern Serbia and Roumania (1716-1718).2

The designs entertained by the Court of Vienna for the extension of Austrian power in the Balkans took practical form in the manifesto addressed in 1690 to the Christian subjects of the Porte, and as a result the Serb Patriarch Arsenius abandoned the ancient metropolitan see of Ipek and settled with many thousand Serb families in the Southern plains of Hungary under the protection of a special Imperial charter. Nine years later the Treaty of Karlowitz recognised the Emperor's right to intervene on behalf of the Christian subjects of the Porte, who in their turn looked more and more to Vienna for their political salvation. In the Eastern policy of Leopold I. an almost equal share may be assigned to the traditional theories of the Holy

1 The War of Spanish Succession (1702-1713), and the rising and prolonged resistance of Francis Rak6czy (1703-1711).

2 The north of Serbia as far as the Morava, Drina and Una rivers, and Little Wallachia as far as the Aluta (Olt) river.

Crown of St. Stephen and to the fanatical desire for the advancement of Catholicism. The ambitious dream of Leopold's counsellors, who set Constantinople as the goal of their endeavour, appeared to be no longer so fantastic under Prince Eugene as in the preceding century. The Treaty of Passarowitz1 (1718) seemed to render Austria's complete absorption of Serbia and Bosnia a mere matter of time.2 But the fatal dual tendency which has so often paralysed Austria's action — the sure outcome of her geographical position between east and west — prevented more than a very partial fulfilment of these designs. The double-headed Eagle, facing both ways, had already become the symbol of Habsburg rule. The mirage of universal dominion — the tradition of their ancestor, Charles V. — fascinated the gaze of Leopold I. and his successors, and tempted them to waste the favourable moment when a determined concentration might have crushed the Ottoman power in Europe, and when there was as yet no serious rival to dispute the spoils. The Spanish War of Succession had left its legacy of exhaustion, financial embarrassment, and the fear of Western complications; and the Treaty of Passarowitz, though it marked the farthest point of Austrian advance to the south, bore no relation to the expectations which had been aroused.

The incapable successor of Prince Eugene failed to

1 Pozarevac.

2 It is instructive to note the claims put forward by Austria as the result of her victorious campaign with her actual achievement. She demanded Serbia with Ni§ and Vidin, Western Bosnia as far as the Una river, all Wallachia and the greater part of Moldavia. She actually acquired the Banat of Temesvar, Belgrade with the western districts of Serbia, a frontier revision in Bosnia, and Little Wallachia. In 1736 Austria hoped to acquire all Bosnia and Albania to the river Drin, Wallachia as far as Braila and Moldavia as far as "the Pruth ! Cf. Beer, Die Orientalische Politik Oesterreichs, p. 16.

hold what he had won, and the shameful Treaty of Belgrade (1739) restored to the Turks all the territorysouth of the Danube. But there can be little doubt that the position would have been retrieved but for the cruel diversion created by Frederick the Great's invasion of Silesia and the desperate struggle which alone preserved Maria Theresa's throne. As so often in their subsequent history, events in the West afforded respite to the rapidly decaying Ottoman state. The history of Austria is a record of wasted opportunities. The brief period in which expansion to the south could have been effected almost without a challenge was destined never to recur. Parallel with the decline of Turkey came the rise of a new Colossus in the North ; the two great historical processes which were to transform the political system of Europe interacted more and more closely upon each other. While Austria, France, and Prussia filled the middle of the century with their rivalry, Russia, building upon the sure foundations laid by the genius of Peter the Great, consolidated her power under Anne and Elizabeth, and by the time Maria Theresa had finally assured her dynastic position, was already firmly established as a dangerous rival in what is now known as the Near East, but then seemed, save to our empirebuilders in India, "the East" par excellence.

The Eastern Question, which for the first quarter of the eighteenth century seemed to be a monopoly of Austria, enters upon a new stage in the year 1726. For the remainder of the century Austria is content to seek, in alliance with Russia, what she had lacked the energy to secure single-handed, and, indeed, only too often to leave all initiative to her Ally. The Austro- Russian alliance of that year was renewed on four separate occasions,1 but for the greater part of the reign

1 1756 against Prussia, 1772 against Poland, 1781 against Turkey, 1795 against the French Revolution.

of Maria Theresa — indeed, until the influence of her son upon public affairs became apparent — its motive power, so far as Austria is concerned, is directed northwards and westwards rather than southwards. Kaunitz, who towards the middle of the century described Turkey and Prussia as the two worst enemies of the House of Habsburg,1 appears to have soon come to regard the former as more or less innocuous. Indeed, his neglect of Near Eastern problems in favour of Germany and Italy set an example which many of his successors in office have imitated.

Characteristic of the negative policy adopted by Austria, under Maria Theresa and her Chancellor, was the indifference which they showed alike towards the Swabian and the Serbian settlers in the Banat andBacka. The latter especially had to face the double hostility of the Magyars, who regarded their reception as a violation of the Hungarian Constitution, and of the Ultramontanes, who actively disapproved of the favoured position secured to the Orthodox Church. But even though Austria failed to realise the potential value of her new Serb subjects as a weapon of central authority, the Habsburg dominions remained for over a century to come the centre of such Southern Slav culture as had survived the Turkish flood. Nowhere was the Habs-

1 Cf. Beer, op. cit. p. 17. In a long and highly interesting memorandum submitted to the Empress in 1776 Kaunitz lays down as the first of 27 " speciale Staatsgrundsatze" the axiom that Prussia " is in the meantime the most dangerous neighbour and secret enemy" (dermalen der gefahrlichste Nachbar und heimliche Feind), who is "never and under no circumstances to be entirely trusted " (niemalen und in keinem Fall vollkommen zu trauen). "According to this system our entire state system is to be weighed." See Denkschriften des Fiirsten Kaunitz, in Archiv fur osterreichische Geschichte, vol. 48, p. 78. This conviction Kaunitz carried to his grave. How different is the attitude of Austrian Statesmen towards Berlin to-day !

burg tradition stronger than in the Croat, Serb, and Roumanian Military Frontiers, where a system of military land-tenure, organised on remarkably democratic lines, gave rise to numerous fighting families inspired from generation to generation by keen personal devotion to the Emperor and his house.

The process of historic evolution to which we have alluded above — the decline of Turkey and the corresponding rise of Russia — brought with it as one of its chief symptoms the destruction of the Polish "Republic." For many generations the policy of the Porte had been deliberately to encourage the growing anarchy in Poland, with a view to paralysing a probable ally of the Imperialists in their advance southwards. The success of Russian intrigue at the Court of Warsaw, and the dominant position acquired by Catherine II. through the election of her lover Stanislas to the Polish throne, at length aroused the Turks to a belated sense of the intimate connection of their own fate and that of Poland. But Turkey's espousal of the cause of Polish independence led to the war with Russia (1768), and precipitated the very catastrophe which it had sought to avert.

The alarm with which Vienna regarded the first appearance of a Russian fleet in the Mediterranean (1769-70), the ineradicable distrust with which Frederick the Great inspired Maria Theresa and Kaunitz, and Frederick's insistent view that the survival of Turkey was Prussia's best guarantee against Russian or Austrian aggression — these three main threads of policy and the numerous complications introduced by the attitude of the Western Powers seemed to many observers to be the precursors of a fresh European struggle. But common dynastic interests overshadowed national, religious, and economic jealousies, and Poland was sacrificed to avert a rupture. At the first partition

c

(1772) Catherine the Great consoled herself with the lion's share and with a knowledge that a further partition had been rendered inevitable.