CHAPTER ONE
The Balkans
Nationalism, War and the Great Powers, 1804-1999
By MISHA GLENNY
Viking
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A CONFEDERACY OF PEASANTS
Rebellion and revolution, 1804-66
The slaughter of the knezes: the Serbian Uprisings and the Ottoman Empire, 1804-30
On a freezing morning in late January 1804, Mehmed-aga Focic saddled one of his Arabian horses and headed south-west out of Belgrade in the direction of Valjevo. Focic would not risk travelling alone so he left with a retinue of 200 janissaries, nominally members of the Sultan's elite guard. In reality, these janissaries eschewed loyalty to Selim III in far-off Istanbul in favour of their local masters, the four dahi — Focic, Kucuk-Alija Djevrljic, Mula Jusuf and Aganlia. The unrestrained brutality with which these janissary commanders ruled over the northern edge of the Ottoman Empire had made them many enemies among the Christian Serb peasants and even among their fellow Muslims. By 1804, the dahi never left the fortress of Belgrade without armed protection.
The province of Belgrade was sparsely populated and covered with thick forest where Serbian farmers grazed their pigs. But the forest also hid bandits, Serbs who had given up working the land to live off plunder. In the first years of the nineteenth century, the ranks of these outlaws had grown steadily as men fled the misrule of the dahi.
Focic's first stop was the village of Ljubenino Polje, thirty miles south-west of Belgrade. Here he was greeted warily by Aleksandar Nenadovic, the knez or local Serb chieftain. The two men then set off for Valjevo. Relations between them seemed friendly enough, but Nenadovic had fallen into an elaborate trap. The janissaries had received intelligence that he and his family were smuggling weaponry across the Sava from the Habsburg Empire, and were preparing for rebellion. On the way to Valjevo from the village, Focic's men seized Nenadovic and his companion, Ilija Bircanin, and clapped them in irons.
Valjevo was the centre of conspiracy among the Serb peasantry, and Focic had in his possession a letter from Nenadovic's son that proved the chieftain's complicity in the gun-running. The janissary commanders had agreed amongst themselves to strike against the leadership of the Christian revolt before it started, and the Nenadovic clan was the first target. Aleksandar and Bircanin were hauled in front of a large crowd of onlookers, Christian and Muslim. 'This letter has killed Aleksa', cried Focic, holding up the incriminating document. `He conspired with the Germans [Habsburgs] and denounced us, the janissaries, to our own sultan. It would be a sin to leave his head upon his shoulders. Cut it off!' After the decapitations, the bodies were dumped on an open meadow by the River Kolubara. Panic seized the Muslim and Christian populations of Valjevo. The Muslims locked their doors, fearing the reaction of Serb villagers; the Serbian men grabbed their weapons and took to the forest.
Many more heads rolled in the next few days. One outlaw, the Serbian monastic priest, Had�i-Ruvim, escaped Focic's squadron of executioners and sought refuge with the Greek bishop of Belgrade, Leontius. Under pressure the bishop handed him over to Focic's most sadistic colleague, Aganlia. In an attempt to extract details of the rebellion, Aganlia stripped the flesh from Ruvim's body with a pair of pliers. When the priest still refused to talk, his head was cut off in a public ceremony at the city gate. This was the beginning of the `slaughter of the knezes' (seca knezova). The pre-emptive assault `precipitated what the Janissaries most hoped to avoid — a general uprising of the Serbs'. The rebellion marked the beginning of modern history on the Balkan peninsula.
In late 1801, the four janissary commanders had murdered the popular governor of Belgrade province, Haci Mustafa, a trusted lieutenant of the reformist Sultan, Selim III (1789-1807). His death was no isolated incident; the Sultan's authority over the Empire's peripheral territories had declined so dramatically in the second half of the eighteenth century that soldiers, governors and landowners had scrambled to fill local power vacuums as they appeared.
The Ottoman elite's refusal to adjust its social and military structures to the economic and technological developments in other European empires had caused this sclerosis. Cocooned in privilege, the conservative majority — the `wise men' of the Islamic hierarchy, the ulema; and the bloated officer classes in the army — resisted the encroachment of European ideas and administrative systems, seeing in them a threat to Ottoman tradition. Although the Empire was a well-established prop on the international stage, its sultans and viziers declined to play an active role in the drama. Watching from the wings as Spain, Britain, Holland and France developed their great commercial empires, they ignored the influx of large amounts of gold and silver into European markets. Such fundamental shifts in the global economy, they assumed, were of no concern to the protected markets of the empire. This was a serious miscalculation. In the two centuries since the colonization of the New World, the impact of European mercantilism promoted inflation, famine and political instability in the Ottoman Empire.
There were voices at the Sublime Porte advocating modernization. They argued that if the leadership refused to adopt the latest advances in science and engineering, then the army, the key to Ottoman power, would corrupt beyond repair. In the last decade of the eighteenth century and the first six years of the nineteenth century, the young Selim III allowed these voices to be heard.
For much of his youth, Selim had been literally locked up in the Golden Cage at the Imperial Palace; but he was permitted contact with a few peers who convinced him of the need for reform and innovation. When Selim emerged from his seclusion, he had no practical experience of the world, but he was already a zealous proponent of change. He was determined to restore the domestic authority of the state and to rehabilitate it as a great power.
During the first four years of his reign, the Ottoman Empire was at war with the Habsburgs. This was not the time for Selim to introduce reforms. He waited until 1794 before revealing his plans to establish the Nizam-i-Cedid (New Order). This had at its core a small, modern army trained in the latest techniques, mainly by French officers. Led by the janissaries and senior army officers, the Empire's privileged classes launched a sustained campaign to undermine the New Order. Western influence in the military, they believed, was the thin end of the wedge that would crack open and eventually destroy their privileged world.
The janissaries were the Sultan's most resolute opponents. Three and a half centuries earlier, the military prowess of this imperial guard was the foundation upon which the great Ottoman Empire had been built. The janissaries, who were culled as boys from the Sultan's subject peoples, were not permitted to marry or have children to ensure they remained loyal to the Sultan. But by the time Selim assumed the throne in 1794, the force had degenerated into a corporation dedicated to self-aggrandizement. Its members now took wives and built up minor dynasties. Friends, relations and hangers-on shared the privileges of a once exclusive organization. Of 12,000 names registered in the janissary rolls of Istanbul in 1790, only 2,000 rendered the military service that in theory entitled them to membership. The New Order directly threatened their interests; an efficient competitor would expose their indolence. To undermine the reform, they signed up new members in huge numbers, for which the Sultan was obliged to pay. By 1809, there were almost 110,000 registered janissaries in the Empire, a fourfold increase since the creation of the New Order.
Had the janissaries been the only problem facing Selim, the Sultan could have dealt with them. But at the turn of the century, he had to confront the pashas, a much more serious challenge to his authority. These regional governors formed the crucial link in the chain of command between Istanbul and the mass of imperial subjects. The Ottoman Empire stretched from Bosnia, Belgrade and Bucharest in the north to the Maghreb, Mesopotamia and Palestine in the south; the Sultan's control over these enormous holdings had always been guaranteed by the pashas and the janissaries. At the turn of the nineteenth century, Selim III found he could no longer rely on either as they accrued ever greater autonomy at the expense of a weak Porte. Two men proved a particular threat — Pasvanoglu Osman Pasa of Vidin (now in north-western Bulgaria) and Ali Pasa of Ioaninna (in the north-western Greek province of Epirus). On the surface, both Ali and Pasvanoglu were despots whose unrestrained rule merely reflected the extent of Ottoman decay. But they also constructed proto-modern states that acted as a bridge between the Ottoman Empire and the nation states which eventually emerged on the peninsular.
Pasvanoglu Osman was still in his teens when his father lost the family's hereditary estates around Vidin in a vendetta. Pasvanoglu saw service in the imperial army during the Austro-Turkish war of 1789-92 before returning to Vidin, determined to avenge his family's loss. Within a year, he had built up an army of brigands, janissaries and disaffected imperial troops. When the governor of Vidin, who was loyal to Selim, sent a force to deal with them, Pasvanoglu's men routed it.
The rebellion at Vidin had an electrifying impact on the Ottoman Empire. Mercenaries and militants flocked to join Pasvanoglu — Albanian irregulars, janissaries from Bosnia and Serbia, and perhaps the wildest units of all, the kircali, nomadic bandits who offered their services to the highest bidder. Their horses, decorated with gold and silver, and their female slaves, who dressed as men and were forced to satisfy their captors sexually as well as accompany them to the battlefield, added a touch of freakish theatricality to the Vidin enclave.
Pasvanoglu organized raiding parties across the Danube from Vidin into Wallachia (now southern Romania) where the wretched population were already suffering the extortionate practices of their local prince. Pasvanoglu's proto-state penetrated into southern Bulgaria, where he disrupted the imperial collection of grain and tax; and in 1795, he declared his independence from the Sultan. This challenge provoked a swift response. Selim sent a powerful army to besiege Vidin, but just as he appeared to be restoring his grip on domestic affairs and preparing to consolidate his reform programme, Napoleon Bonaparte betrayed him.
The French invasion of Egypt in 1798 took most in Europe by complete surprise. For Selim and his circle of reformers, it was a psychological and practical disaster. The Sultan was a great admirer of France and its progressive intelligentsia, and had developed a warm relationship with the revolutionary government in the last decade of the eighteenth century to counter the territorial ambitions of Austria and Russia in the Balkans. Although the logic of the French Revolution undermined everything that the Ottoman Empire stood for, the Sultan and his advisers presumed that this far-away struggle between republicans and monarchists would have no impact on Ottoman power.
The invasion of Egypt, however, was a warning to Selim that France under Napoleon remained an opportunistic power. The Sultan diverted troops from Vidin to meet this new challenge. With the main Ottoman armies engaged in Egypt, Haci Mustafa could no longer enforce the expulsion order on the janissaries that he had proclaimed earlier, with Selim's approval. They returned to Belgrade from their refuge in Vidin in 1798. For three years, the dahi attempted to undermine Mustafa's authority, finally avenging themselves on the governor by murdering him.
The struggle that erupted in the Belgrade pashalik in February 1804 did not, as might be expected, set Muslim overlord against Christian peasant. On the contrary, the peasantry and the sipahi, the established Ottoman landlords, cooperated openly with Selim's modernizing agents against the violence of janissary reaction.
So close were the ties binding the Christian peasantry and the murdered reformer, Haci Mustafa, that he was known reverently as the `mother of the Serbs'. This trust extended so far that in 1799 Selim issued an unprecedented firman (imperial decree), permitting the Christians to carry weapons — a rifle, two pistols and a yatagan, a long, curved Turkish knife. The peasants then formed armed units to aid the sipahi and supporters of Selim against the janissaries. This landmark decision by Selim offended the theological establishment in Istanbul for whom religious affiliation defined moral and legal rights; the janissaries considered it a declaration of war. Their leaders, the four dahi, launched a counter-attack against the Christians, unleashing the slaughter of the knezes in 1804. (The dahi, strange as it might seem in the light of modern ethnic nationalism, were probably all Slavs themselves: Aganlia had started life as a bargee in Bosnia, while Kucuk-Alija came from Rudnik in the central Serbian region of Šumadija.)
The alliance between the Muslim landlords, the sipahi, and their Christian peasantry was strong at first. Indeed, relations between them were much better in the Belgrade pashalik than elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire. The Serbs were organized in extended family units, the zadruga. A group of families would elect a representative to the kne�ina, a kind of district council that in turn elected the knez or chieftain. The knez dealt with the landlords and Ottoman administrators. This did not amount to political or economic autonomy but it encouraged the development of a tolerably stable agrarian system based on the sipahi rights as the owner of a timar. On these large estates, the peasants enjoyed hereditary rights and even some protection in law. In exchange, they would render labour services and pay a fixed tax every year. Beyond this, the peasants were at liberty to keep the produce they farmed. This was a relatively enlightened arrangement, even by west European standards.
During the late eighteenth century, however, the timar system was eroded by the more ruthless form of estate management known as the citluk, which reduced the peasant to the role of debt-ridden sharecropper. Vuk Karad�ic, the father of Serbia's literary revival, who was born in 1787, famously described the citluk as `the worst Turkish institution in Serbia'. The sipahi in the Belgrade pashalik sought to retain the timar system against the janissaries who began increasing their profits by introducing citluks.
The greed of the janissaries also impinged on the interests of a peasant aristocracy of pig farmers which had emerged among the Serbs during the late eighteenth century. The Belgrade pashalik had twice fallen under the control of Austria. The large Serb merchant community in Vojvodina (the mixed Serb/Hungarian province in the Habsburg Empire to the north of Belgrade) was a vital link in establishing this trade and satisfying the Habsburg Empire's insatiable desire for pork. Even after the pashalik reverted to Ottoman control in 1791, the pig trade continued to flourish.
The election of the knezes was an egalitarian tradition, but during the eighteenth century a barely perceptible shift saw the wealthier families, especially those associated with pig-farming, assuming the function of the knez in many regions. The knezes were also responsible for tax collection, which could yield attractive profits.
The dispute between the established sipahi and arriviste dahi was bitter, but it was the Serbian peasantry that bore the brunt of janissarial wrath. The regular weapons searches made by the Muslim police inspectors were often violent. But the dahi's most serious error was the imposition of draconian taxes on livestock, especially swine.
The dahi grew anxious as the flow of weapons coming across the Danube from the Habsburg Empire increased. By the end of January 1804, `cartloads of Christian weapons were reaching Belgrade'. Large numbers of the Serb bandits, the hajduci, had served in the Austro-Hungarian army during the Habsburgs' war with Turkey of 1789-92. Contacts between these men and the Habsburg military and police remained close, ensuring logistical support for Serbs at the turn of the century even though the government in Vienna was trying to cut the supply of arms to avoid the accusation that it was interfering in Ottoman affairs.
The dahi's pre-emptive strike did not go entirely according to plan. Although the janissaries succeeded in eliminating between 70 and 120 knezes and hundreds of hapless peasants, a large number of Serb notables escaped. One janissary unit failed to kill Djordje Petrovic, or Karadjordje (Black George), who soon assumed military command of the First Serbian Uprising.
A former member of the volunteer Habsburg forces, Karadjordje took to the forests of his native Šumadija on his return from the Austro-Turkish war to become a hajduk. He then became one of the most successful pig farmers in the Belgrade pashalik. Thanks to his connections in the Austrian Empire, he grew rich, at least by Serbian standards. His profession, his greed, his military skills and his foul temper would all have an impact on the emergence of modern Serbia.
Following the janissaries' attack, the Serbian Uprising assumed the form of a peasant rebellion. Its initial aim was to rid the countryside of the dahi's armed police. Afterwards, the Serbs turned on the janissary strongholds — the fortified towns — a military operation that required much greater coordination. The coalition of the sipahi and Christians sought the restoration of imperial authority and a return to the benign rule epitomized by the late Haci Mustafa. From May 1804 to July 1806, the leaders of the Uprising repeatedly petitioned the Sultan, expressing their unquestioning loyalty to the Porte.
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The dahi upset a social order in the Belgrade pashalik that had changed little during the previous three centuries. During this time, Christians and Muslims led separate lives, meeting only in the collection of taxes and tributes by the Ottoman ruling classes. The division between the two communities was stark. Almost all the 300,000 or so Serbs in the pashalik lived in the countryside whereas the 20,000 Muslim administrators, soldiers and tradesmen inhabited the towns. Aside from the different ethnic characteristics of Slavs and Muslims, who were mainly Turks, they were each easily identifiable by their dress. The Christians were forbidden to wear brightly coloured clothing, which explains in part why to this day Serb villagers, especially women, prefer long black dresses. To challenge such regulations, the hajduci took to wearing blue or green jackets adorned with silver coins. They also rode horses in defiance of the Ottoman rule which denied Christians the right to mount `horses or dromedaries.
Life in the villages was generally well ordered, patriarchal and monotonous. Men went out to work, while women stayed at home, although they were required to help in the fields at harvest time. The zadruge consisted of extended families who would share a central room used for work and recreation, with sleeping chambers leading off on all sides. Family ties were at the heart of Serbian society and the peasantry would be loath to break up a zadruga even when it became crowded, preferring to expand their dwellings so that it was `not unusual for one house to form an entire street'. The great nineteenth-century German historian of the Serbs, Leopold Ranke, summed up the central role of the family by noting how these households, `supplying all their own wants, and shut up each within itself — a state of things which was continued under the Turks, because the taxes were chiefly levied upon the households — formed the basis of Servian nationality. Individual interest was thus merged, as it were, in that of the family.'
Aside from marriage, Serbs could enter into a familial relationship in two other ways. Most important was the institution of the kum, whose first function was as the bride or groom's personal witness at the wedding. The kum immediately became an integral part of the new family and assumed special duties as a protector of the family's interests. The betrayal of kumstvo was an unpardonable sin.
Slightly less authoritative a bond than kumstvo, but imbued with mystical properties for obvious reasons, was the forging of blood brotherhood. This involved the actual exchange of blood (usually from the wrists) of two friends whose relationship was thus transformed. Like kumstvo, the blood brotherhood could be found throughout the Balkan peninsula in both Christian and Muslim communities (it was not, however, common among the ruling Turks). The vendetta and blood feud, however, which were common in the southern Balkans, were rare in the Belgrade pashaliks. Here, the Christian peasants were poor, but they enjoyed a relatively stable social and political organization, partly for geographical reasons. The blood feuds of Montenegro, Albania and Greece prevailed in mountainous areas dominated by pastoral farming. The zadruge and the knezine of the Šumadija, the forest land of central Serbia, provided a framework for the arbitration of disputes. An additional disincentive to taking the law into one's own hand was the hefty blood tax imposed by the Turkish authorities when a Christian murdered another Christian (murdering a Muslim brought swift and nasty capital punishment). Life was relatively less violent in the Belgrade pashalik than it was in some of the more remote areas of the Ottoman Balkans.
Above all, the zadruga preserved the social and cultural traditions of the Serbs and did so more effectively than the Orthodox Church. The Church is often erroneously assumed to have been the sole bearer of Serbian identity during the three and a half centuries of Ottoman rule that separated the collapse of the medieval Serbian empire and the First Serbian Uprising of 1804. In fact, its role was limited, especially since it did not use the vernacular but Slaveno-Serbian, a variation of Old Church Slavonic that none of the illiterate peasantry understood. The monasteries could at least lay claim to the guardianship of the iconic traditions of the medieval Serbian empire. But the senior hierarchy had been dominated by Greeks since the abolition of the Serb patriarchate in 1776, and the Greek hierarchy increased the alienation of Serbs from the official Church. During the First Serbian Uprising, the bishops, who were trapped in the besieged towns, supported the Turkish authorities, thus deepening resentment among Serbs.
The local priests in the pashalik were often uneducated appendages to the zadruge and kne�evine, doing little more than officiate at weddings, funerals and baptisms. They were usually appointed by the local knezes to whom they owed what standing they had. They exerted little doctrinal influence on the peasantry, if indeed they had the slightest understanding of doctrine themselves.
The most highly developed cultural form among the Serbs was the epic poem. Sung or recited by itinerant performers and shunned by the Church, the poems dwelt on the great themes of Serbia's pre-Ottoman history. The stories about the Serbian defeat at the battle of Kosovo Polje of 1389 and other events from the medieval period became the cornerstone of modern Serbia's national mythology. (Kosovo Polje is frequently presented as the end of the Serbian medieval empire, its army vainly defending Christendom. In fact, Serbian power splintered and collapsed gradually over the next sixty years. The fortress of Belgrade did not fall under Ottoman control until the early sixteenth century.) The uprisings at the beginning of the nineteenth century were represented as the revival of the Serbs' struggle against the all-conquering Ottomans at the end of the fourteenth century. Through these poems and songs, modern Serbia claimed a vital continuity with a romanticized past as a means of underscoring its claims to disputed territory. The singers were entertainers, but their tales also encouraged an imagined, mythicized historical consciousness. Rich in natural imagery, most of the songs contained stark moral messages. The epic poem bore evidence of cultural exchange, both in its musical base and as a literary form, especially with the literature of the Bosnian Muslims and to a lesser extent with the more stylized poetry of the Dalmatian coast and other parts of Croatia. The First Serbian Uprising signalled a change in the function of the epic poem. Singers such as the blind Filip Višnic, a Serb from Bosnia, used the medium to record and glorify the achievements of the rebels, most famously in The Beginning of the Revolt Against the Dahi which has been taught in Serbian schools ever since.
The Serbian peasantry at the beginning of the century lived, at least by modern standards, in a stable and self-contained society. When the janissaries disturbed it, they provoked a reaction so fierce that it swept away Muslim control of the countryside. By August 1804, the Serb rebels and a large army sent to Bosnia by the Sultan combined to destroy the armed resistance of the janissaries in the fortified towns. But the struggle had aroused new aspirations among the knezes, and in their leader Karadjordje in particular. With 20-30,000 men under arms, the Serbs had transformed themselves into an extraordinary anomaly — a powerful, Christian military force within the boundaries of the Islamic empire, fighting alongside the Sultan's regiments.
Karadjordje's soldiers were not organized as a regular army. They were made up of hundreds of small bands, herded together by the hajduci and the knezes, whose first operations involved burning and looting Turkish properties in the countryside and forcing the Turkish populations into the fortified towns. The brutality of this type of warfare was accentuated by the influx of Serb refugees from Bosnia and Vidin who were themselves the victims of reprisals in their home territories. They formed irregular units known as the beskucnici (the homeless), who, with nothing left to lose, became ferocious guerrillas.
Discipline was a permanent problem. The Serb commanders had difficulty motivating their irregular troops to sustain the sieges. Many regarded battles as moonlighting, a means of enriching themselves, albeit modestly: `One man would take a cauldron or something similar as booty, and go off home with it', Vuk Karad�ic observed during the siege of Šabac, a pivotal action during the first phase of the Uprising. `Someone else would capture a cow or mare from the Turks, and take that home; another would buy some of the booty and go away and sell it; yet another would get bored at just sitting with nothing to do, and go off home to reap the corn or look after the rest of the harvesting.'
To counter indiscipline and the reluctance of many peasants to risk their lives and livelihoods by going to war, the rebel leadership opted for coercion. Those who were not for the Uprising were against it, as Prota Matija Nenadovic described in his memoirs:
whatever knez does not stand firm and keep his army together that knez shall die in torments; and whatever soldier shall not be found in his place, that soldier shall be impaled before his door. So do not play with your lives; let each who can carry a gun go to his unit ... Gospodar George will send his men secretly through the villages and whomsoever they find at home they will kill him and break him on the wheel and burn his house.
In an attempt to forge loyalty and cohesion, Karadjordje and his followers appropriated the symbols and icons of the Serbian medieval empire. In speeches exhorting his followers to battle, he invoked the spirit of Kosovo Polje. He had a seal made, bearing the inscription `With the mercy of God, Georgije Petrovic, [in the name] of all the people of Serbia and Bosnia'. The cross decorated with four Cyrillic Cs — one of the symbols of the medieval Serbian — reappeared together with the double-headed eagle on Karadjordje's coat of arms.
The Serb rebels captured and executed the dahis by August 1804. Janissary units resisted for another year while the Sultan became increasingly concerned at the growing strength and independence of the Serb forces. The Sultan insisted on a restoration of his authority but the Serb leaders first demanded guarantees to insure themselves against the return of misrule. By the summer of 1805, Selim decided to deal with the Serbs as rebels, dispatching a large army to Nis where the Serbs won an unexpected victory. Karadjordje and his allies were no longer fighting miscreant janissaries; they were at war with the imperial order.
For the first time in Ottoman history an entire Christian population had risen up against the Sultan. As the military confidence of the Serbs grew, so did their political awareness. The agricultural elite among the Serb rebels, as typified by Karadjordje, gradually encroached on the economic privileges of the Muslim sipahi. In petitions to Istanbul, Karadjordje requested that he be recognized as chief of the Serbs with an exclusive right to administer and tax the country. Turks would be permitted to settle only in Belgrade unless they received the express permission of both the nominal Ottoman governor and Karadjordje himself. The customs service and judiciary would be staffed only by Serbs, while the fortresses of the pashalik would be garrisoned by equal numbers of Serb troops.
By the autumn of 1806, the Sultan was prepared to concede almost all the Serbian demands. At this point, however, war broke out between Turkey and Russia. Until then, the outside world had shown little interest in this regional Ottoman dispute. Suddenly, the Serb cause was thrust into the maelstrom of the Napoleonic Wars. This internationalization of a crisis within the Ottoman Empire set the pattern for the next two centuries in the Balkans — great-power politics has almost always decisively influenced the course of state formation. As a recent historian has said:
The entrenchment of French troops in the western Balkans, the incessant political crises in the Ottoman Empire, the growing intensity of the Austro-Russian rivalry in the Balkans, the intermittent warfare which consumed the energies of France and Russia and the outbreak of protracted hostilities between the Porte and Russia are but a few of the major international developments which directly or indirectly influenced the course of the Serbian insurrection. The Serbs frequently were put in the position of reacting to events over which they had absolutely no control. In a very real sense the fate of the Serbian people was placed in the hand of capricious rulers in the major capitals of Europe.
Napoleon's victorious campaigns against the Third Coalition culminated in the battle of Austerlitz in December 1805. The peace treaty signed later that month in Pressburg (Bratislava) conferred on France the status of an Adriatic power for the first time. Austria was forced to hand over Venice and Istria, as well as the Dalmatian coast, including the bay of Kotor. As a result, Napoleonic expansion began to encroach on the Balkans, bestowing overnight a greater strategic importance on the pashalik of Belgrade.
In October 1806, Russia intervened in the Ottoman crisis. St Petersburg was unmoved by the struggle between the Serbs and the Porte — until the actual declaration of war in December 1806, the Russian Foreign Ministry was urging both Karadjordje and Selim to make peace within the framework of Ottoman sovereignty. Instead, the Russians were angered by events in the Danubian Principalities, Wallachia and Moldavia (roughly, present-day southern and eastern Romania and Moldova), where the Porte had engineered the dismissal of two Greek princes favoured by St Petersburg.
In the struggle for influence between Russia and Turkey in the Balkans during the nineteenth century, the Danubian Principalities played a key role. These border territories of the Ottoman Empire paid tribute to their sovereign, the Sultan, but enjoyed extensive administrative autonomy presided over by two princes. The princes, called hospodars, were drawn from the Greek Phanariot community, so-called because they originally hailed from the Phanar district of Constantinople. Elections to the office of Danubian prince were fiercely contested as the post invariably brought its holder rich rewards. Romania's indigenous aristocracy, the boyars, were jealous of the hospodars' political monopoly; the peasantry also loathed the Greek princes. Most Wallachians and Moldavians regarded them as self-seeking overlords, no better than the Turks.
Russia's influence in the Principalities grew steadily in the second half of the eighteenth century. In 1774, the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainardji between Russia and Turkey granted St Petersburg an unprecedented role as spiritual protector of the Ottoman Empire's Orthodox subjects, as well as increased diplomatic representation. A close relationship developed between the Russian Foreign Ministry and the princes of Wallachia and Moldavia. The Treaty of Iasi (now in north-eastern Romania) in 1792 then gave Russia control of the territory between the Bug and Dniestr rivers (now in southern Ukraine), thus bringing the Ottoman and Russian empires face to face in the north-eastern corner of the Principalities.
When the Porte replaced the two Russian-backed princes in Wallachia and Moldavia in the autumn of 1806, Tsar Alexander ordered the invasion of the Principalities. In December, the Porte declared war and the Serbs exploited the situation by pressing home their advantage in Belgrade which had been under siege for much of the Uprising. France encouraged the Ottomans to resist both the Serbs and the Russian incursion into the Principalities. The Serbs now found themselves in the middle of a dangerous Balkan sideshow just when Napoleon was planning another major campaign in the main European theatre of war. Karadjordje forged an alliance with St Petersburg — not an unreasonable choice, but henceforth, the success of the uprising was dependent entirely on the presence of Russian troops in the Balkans. By throwing in their lot with the Tsar and declaring their determination to cast off Ottoman domination, they became vulnerable to the fragile position of Russia within the broader context of the Napoleonic Wars.
When the Tsar finally decided to withdraw his forces in 1812 to face the looming threat of Napoleon's Grand Army, it was only a matter of time before the Serbians collapsed under attack from a reinvigorated Ottoman Empire. The end came in the autumn of 1813, when three mighty Ottoman armies converged on the pashalik. Karadjordje fled to Austria.
Karadjordje's political authority had been sustained for nine years by military success and Russian support. But his role in the pashalik never went unchallenged by other regional strongmen. He had been elected by an assembly of knezes held at Orašac (central Serbia) in the middle of February 1804, following the `slaughter of the knezes'. Eye-witness accounts suggest that the assembly was a tense theatrical event. Two knezes turned down the leadership of the rebellion before Karadjordje himself rejected the offer twice. He argued that his bad temper rendered him ill-suited for the job as he would order the death of those who crossed him. Apparently this admission made him all the more popular with his fellow chieftains.
Although the Serbs had a large number of men under arms, these were organized in strong regional units whose primary loyalty lay with their local knezes. The strongmen did not challenge Karadjordje's position as supreme military commander, but from the beginning, they resisted his attempts to centralize political and economic power. Jakov Nenadovic, who had replaced his brother Aleksander as Valjevo knez following the latter's murder by Mehmed-aga Focic, told Karadjordje that he was not welcome in western Serbia. Eventually, in 1810, his four main rivals organized a conspiracy and in the same year, Milenko Stojkovic, who ran both eastern Serbia and an extensive harem, organized a rebellion against Karadjordje. Although no rebellion succeeded during the First Serbian Uprising, Karadjordje never felt safe. None of the Serb leaders was literate and their arguments frequently ended in shooting matches. Karadjordje himself had a terrifying reputation. He justified the warning he issued at the time of his election in Orasac, executing among others his own stepfather and brother, whose body was left hanging in front of Karadjordje's house as an unambiguous reminder to others.
Behind the drama of intrigue, shoot-outs and murder lay a serious struggle concerning the constitutional nature of the Serbian proto-state. Karadjordje wanted to establish a system of monarchical centralism while his baronial opponents were fighting for an oligarchy in which each leader would reign supreme in his own locality. A third, weaker force was made up of tradesmen and intellectuals from Vojvodina in the Habsburg Empire. They argued for an independent judiciary and other institutions to curb the power of both Karadjordje and the regional commanders. The modernizing influence of the Vojvodina Serbs was restricted to the town of Belgrade where their brightest intellect, Dositej Obradovic, a writer and educationalist, founded the first Serbian high school in 1808. Karadjordje made sure, however, that their political influence was strictly limited. This was not only because the indigenous Serbs were uninterested in the revolutionary ideas of the Enlightenment fostered by Obradovic and his compatriots. The Vojvodina Serbs often alienated the Serbs of the pashalik who were risking their lives in armed conflict and had little time for the theorizing of intellectuals. As one of the most important writers on the Balkans has described:
The transriparian Serbs regarded themselves as distinguished bearers of Western culture, destined to administer the illiterate and `half-savage barbarians' of the Principality. Dress, language and outlook divided them from the native Serbs. The new `men of the pen' looked down upon agricultural or manual labour, demurred against teaching their sons a craft or marrying their daughters to a craftsman, and for several years wore `German' clothes instead of the Serbian national dress. Instead of the `thee and `thou' in the homespun manner of the Principality, they employed the German habit — ridiculous-sounding to Serbian ears — of addressing each other in the third person. Finally, they refused to call Serbians `brother' in the customary fashion of the patriarchal society in Serbia.
In 1807 the chieftains did bow to pressure from leading Vojvodina Serbs by consenting to a Governing Council. Like the new civilian courts, however, the Council never challenged the authority of the Serb military commanders, especially in time of war. In their own fiefdoms, the chieftains often ruled with unchecked brutality.
The peasantry began to view the squabbling knezes with contempt as having merely usurped the function of the dahi. The new elite adopted the dress style of the Turks, donning embroidered green silk and wearing turbans, and extracting profits just as their Turkish predecessors had. Building a strong, stable and balanced state out of such unrefined socio-economic material in a state of permanent warfare was to prove a daunting task.
After the failure of Milenko Stojkovic's rebellion in 1810, Karadjordje, a year later, engineered what amounted to a constitutional coup d'état with tacit Russian support. But his decision to emasculate several of his rivals backfired. The exile or disfranchisement of these chieftains critically weakened the Serbs' ability to resist the Ottoman army after St Petersburg and Istanbul assigned sovereignty over the pashalik of Belgrade to the Porte at the Treaty of Bucharest in 1812.
Within a few months, Ottoman forces had overrun the territory and many of the leaders of the Uprising had fled to Austria. The first attempt to build a Serbian state had foundered on a conflict between centralism and regional particularism. This would be a recurring problem for state-builders throughout the Balkans.
The Christian peasants of the Belgrade pashalik fought courageously when they could no longer tolerate the oppressive regime of the dahi. Despite the remarkable achievement of Karadjordje and his forces, the Uprising exposed the difficulties facing the backward and illiterate Christian communities of the Empire as they tried to invent new constitutional arrangements to replace the Sultan's waning power.
The final defeat of the First Serbian Uprising was signalled by Karadjordje's flight to Austria on 3 October 1813. Those of his peers who stayed in the pashalik were determined to make capital out of this apparent act of cowardice. At first the new Governor, Süleyman Papa, favoured reconciliation with the Serbs. With the exception of the most wanted chieftains, a general amnesty was granted, and many thousands of peasants who had fled from the Ottoman army returned. But Süleyman then ordered the reimposition of a harsh feudal regime. Opposition to these measures soon grew among a Serbian peasantry that had developed new aspirations since 1804. The Governor's attitude hardened and by the spring of 1804 the bad old days seemed to have returned:
Men were roasted alive, hanged by their feet over smoking straw until they asphyxiated, castrated, crushed with stones, and bastinadoed. Their women and children were raped and sometimes taken by force to harems... Outside Stambul Gate in Belgrade, there were always on view the corpses of impaled Serbs being gnawed by packs of dogs.
So vindictive was the restoration of the Porte's authority that within two years the Serbs launched the Second Serbian Uprising in 1815 under the leadership of Miloš Obrenovic. The younger brother of one of Karadjordje's fiercest rivals, Miloš was, like Karadjordje, an illiterate pig farmer. Born into extreme poverty in a village near Uzice in west-central Serbia, as a teenager he moved east to Rudnik to assist his brother in building up a livestock business. After the death of his brother in 1811, he replaced him as chieftain.
In 1814, assuming that Serbian resistance had been broken, Selim III's successor as Sultan, Mahmud II (1808-39), withdrew most of his army from the pashalik. Miloš took advantage of this to launch a new rebellion in spring 1815 and soon the chieftains controlled most of the pashalik. Miloš had learnt some important lessons from the course of the First Uprising. His political ambition was identical to Karadjordje's — he sought absolute power over all other Serbs in the Belgrade pashalik. But his tactics were very different. In contrast to Karadjordje, he made every effort to avoid sustained military confrontation with the Ottoman armies, putting all his energy into striking a bargain with Istanbul. The agreement reached with the Porte in October 1815 guaranteed Miloš's pre-eminence in Serbia in exchange for loyalty to the Porte. Any attempt by other Serbian Chieftains to unseat Miloš was henceforth to be seen as an attack on the Sultan.
In 1817' Karadjordje returned to Serbia in secret. His presence was betrayed to Miloš, who ordered his execution and then sent his rival's head to the Sultan to demonstrate his obeisance. The incident is often cited as an example of the Serbs' fratricidal barbarity, but this interpretation obscures the cold political calculations behind Miloš's action. Karadjordje was sent to Serbia as an agent of the Philiki Etairia (Friendly Society), the Greek revolutionary organization that aimed to destabilize Ottoman Europe in preparation for an armed rebellion. Karadjordje's presence not only threatened the internal stability of the pashalik, but his role as a Friendly Society agent could have undermined the entire basis upon which Miloš was building an independent Serbia - in agreement with his unwitting partner, the Sultan himself.
For Miloš was engaged in a complex and clever game. He was steadily chipping away at the foundations of Ottoman power in Serbia by making Istanbul ever more dependent on him economically. By the agreement of October 1815, large parts of the administration of the territory were handed over to Miloš. He used his control of the Serbian economy to buy further political and economic concessions from Istanbul. Within a decade he had become the largest livestock exporter in the province, using his political power to guarantee a virtual monopoly on the trade. He raked off vast sums from the population, having bought the rights to all tax revenue in exchange for a paltry annual tribute to the Sultan. As Miloš became richer, the Porte, engaged in debilitating wars first against the rebellious Greeks and then against Russia, turned to him with ever greater frequency for financial help. By 1830, he bought the right to hereditary rule for his family in perpetuity, an important step forward in the struggle for independence and an even more important step forward for the Obrenovic family. When he came to power in 1815, 'Miloš didn't have two pennies to rub together', Vuk Karad�ic noted in 1832. 'He has enriched himself to such a degree that... he can pay the Sultan a ton of sovereigns for the hereditary principle... build palaces all over Serbia, and live like some God on earth.' He had become one of the wealthiest men in Europe.
Although Miloš professed obedience to the Sultan, he maintained close relations with Russia, the official protector of Orthodox interests in Serbia since Miloš's agreement with the Porte in 1815. He also found he could use the relationship to put further political pressure on the Turks. The Russo-Turkish war of 1829 was fought to the east of Serbia in Wallachia, and along the Danube. The fighting cut off the rest of the Ottoman Empire from its main supply of salt in Wallachia. When Mahmud II asked Miloš to supply the Ottoman armies with grain, he did so in exchange for the exclusive right to import salt from Wallachia into the Empire. Because of his warm relations with Russia, he was permitted to load the barges that had carried grain to the Ottoman armies with salt from behind Russian lines for the return journey. This economic arrangement, which benefited both warring parties, permitted Miloš's agents to travel throughout the theatre of war. As an additional favour to St Petersburg, he supplied the Russian army with detailed information about Turkish troop movements. 'In this way, he was able to carry out his obligations to Russia, his protector, and his obligations to Turkey, his suzerain.'
The great loser in Miloš's dazzling diplomatic game was the Serbian peasantry. Although Obrenovic's rule restored order throughout the province, he was more systematic in his economic exploitation of the Serbs than the Ottomans had ever been. His reign, which lasted until his abdication in 1839, was punctuated by rebellions. At first these were organized by jealous chieftains like Karadjordje, but increasingly they attracted the support of the peasantry. The latter rose against Miloš for the first time under the leadership not of a chieftain, but of a trader, Miloje Popovic Djak:
Djak's rebellion.., was a massive demonstration of peasant opposition to a new order that they detested . . . The Serbs were discovering that rule by their own leaders did not in itself bring liberty and well-being. Djak's followers also discovered how weak a popular uprising could be when confronted by the organized power of a centralized state. Nor was the lesson lost on Miloš. As a result of this rebellion he devoted more effort than ever to the organization of a standing army and a larger state apparatus.
This vigilance against the people, the enemy within, was to be a constant preoccupation of Serbian rulers down to the present.
After surviving the Second Serbian Uprising, the Porte had to face rebellion among the Greeks of Thessaly and the Peloponnese. This crisis led to the first major conflict between the great powers after the Congress of Vienna, and drew the excited attention of the most prominent representatives of European Romanticism. It also led to the establishment of the first new nation-state in Europe, albeit under geat-power sponsership, since the French Revolution.
(Continues...)
(C) 1999 Misha Glenny All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-670-85338-0
