The following is based on Mark Mazower's The Balkans. While the book is highly informative, condensing a tremendous amount of information into about 150 pages, I found that its broad, casual organization of the material was not conducive to retention of the information by the reader. Everything felt disparate and necessitated especially detailed and organized notes. My difficulty with the material was of course partly, perhaps largely, on account of this being the first book I have ever read on the Balkan region. Misha Glenny’s The Balkans is also referenced.
If the following is mostly new to you, as it was to me, it will probably be impossible to follow without reference to maps.
Etymology of the term "Balkans"
The Balkan mountain range stretches from one end of present-day Bulgaria to the other, from the Black Sea to the northeast of Serbia. (This is the simplest representation I could find online: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:BGBalkangebirge2.PNG.) It was across this range that one must pass if traveling from central Europe to Constantinople in centuries past. A common assumption among Europeans--until, evidently, approximately the beginning of the twentieth century--was that the Balkan mountain range stretched across the entire north of the peninsula of southeastern Europe, from the Black Sea to the Adriatic, which it does not. The peninsula of southeastern Europe was first referred to as the Balkan peninsula in 1808 by a German geographer. (Mazower, xxvii-xxviii; Glenny, xxii) Prior to this, Europeans had referred to the region as "Turkey in Europe". However, throughout the nineteenth century nation-states emerged in the Balkan region that asserted their independence from the Ottomans. As Ottoman power declined in the second half of the nineteenth century, "Turkey in Europe" lost favor to "the Balkans". (Mazower, xxvii)
Geography and its Consequences
The Balkan region forms a peninsula extending southeastward out from Europe, bounded on the east by the Black Sea, bounded on the west by the Adriatic.
In every dimension the Balkan region is less propitious to agriculture than the Eurasian lowlands to its north. Some areas are not dissimilar: the climates of Serbia, northern Bulgaria, the Albanian uplands, and Romania are reminiscent of that of Europe's continental climatic zone. However, the region as a whole receives significantly less rainfall than almost any other place in Europe, which contributes to recurrent droughts. Even fertile plains experience droughts in the Balkan region. In the Mediterranean portions of the peninsula rivers run dry in summer. The reduced rainfall of the region relative to the region to its north is at least in part attributable to rain shadows resulting from the ubiquity of mountains throughout the peninsula.
Mountains also impeded movement and communication between settlements. Terrain presumably dictated long, indirect roadways and, in time, railways. Moreover, the rivers of the region are either unnavigable or "they meander idly in curves and loops away from the nearest coastline." Canals--an important contributor to the affluence of eighteenth-century France and England--were not possible in the Balkan region because mountains obstructed access to the sea. (Mazower, 3, 5, 6)
The costs to development produced by such convoluted geography were not offset by a defensive advantage against invading armies. While the Pyrenees and the Alps provided barriers to the invasion of the Iberian peninsula and the Italian peninsula, respectively, the Balkan mountain range was traversable by invading armies.
And while the mountains of the Balkan region evidently provided no defensive advantages against invading armies, they did however inhibit domestic policing. The Balkan region has historically been reputed to be a place of lawlessness and violence and this is perhaps attributable to the difficulty experienced by the states of the region in asserting their supremacy even within their borders. Brigandage flourished in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries along with a sort of mythologization of the outlaws, among whom emerged a "highly developed" sense of honor. Yet, "These brigands were neither social bandits--robbing the rich to aid the poor--nor national heroes; rather, they were a symptom of high-altitude poverty and one way of trying to ameliorate it." (Mazower, 9, 22)
The mountainous terrain of the Balkan region provided its inhabitants with a unique source of leverage over their rulers, who knew that too oppressive a tax burden would send entire villages fleeing for the hills. Many simply settled in the hills where imperial reach was weak or even non-existent. In this way too the mountains of the peninsula contributed to the perennial political fragmentation and general weakness of central government of southeastern Europe. (Mazower, 20-21)
Incidentally, Mazower points out that the introduction of corn cultivation into the region--apparently in the eighteenth century--allowed upland settlements to support greater numbers of people. Hill dwellers were also forced to rely on mushrooms and berries, and to sell goods such as timber and coal: limited access to water meant that mountainside plots could not produce adequate sustenance to provide for the inhabitants of the hills year round. As late as the 1920s hill villagers sold snow to lowlanders. (Mazower, 20-21)
Mazower also touches on the "proto-industrialization" that occurred in some hill settlements. Prior to independence, upland settlements might produce textiles, gun barrels, or swords-blades. Mazower simply states that competition from Western imports forced these "proto-industrial" activities down from the mountainside and into the towns, which begs questions which Mazower does not directly address.
We might ask why industrial activity moved toward the towns at all. Answers to this seem obvious and not unique to the region. Towns were connected to other towns and could trade; denser populations meant more potential workers, consumers, and investors.
We might also ask why Western competition began to affect the upland industrial activity at this particular time. Clearly because parts of Western Europe were experiencing rapid industrialization. But that would have been less relevant had not the Ottoman empire begun to loosen trade restrictions in the first half of the nineteenth century in response to British pressure. (Mazower, 29)
Finally, we might wonder what the relationship of independence was to the movement of proto-industrial activity from the uplands to the towns, particularly in light of their apparent coincidence. For one thing, Mazower makes clear that independence brought hill dwellers down into the lowlands. (Mazower, 31) Mazower refers to the descent of people from the hills to the plains with the intention of bringing land under cultivation. Perhaps many of these people found their ways to the towns, increasing the labor pool available in towns for industrial activity. The drift down the mountainside would anyway suggest a dwindling of the available labor pool upland.
We might wonder why Balkan states, once independent, adopted or retained, counterintuitively, liberal trade policies. It might be thought that newly independent, the states would have been inclined to protect nascent industry. The explanation may lie in the fact that prior to the emergence of independent Balkans states there existed throughout Europe "powerful and influential" lobbies advocating for "Bulgarian, Serbian, and Greek liberation from Ottoman rule." (Mazower, xxxix) The existence and strength of powerful lobbies throughout Europe for the overthrow of Ottoman rule in the Balkans suggests that powerful Europeans believed they had an interest in the independence of the Balkan peoples from Ottoman rule. Cultural and economic elites of Europe presumably had ties to those groups that sought to become the cultural and economic elite of a post-Ottoman southeastern Europe. Or perhaps the existence of the lobbies simply suggests a continuity of cultural links between the peoples of the Balkan region and the rest of Europe that remained unbroken by centuries of Ottoman domination. These links would in turn perhaps contribute to explaining the seemingly counterintuitive adoption or retaining of liberal trade policies by the newly independent Balkan states in the nineteenth century.
Problems of poor roads, laggard development and lawlessness were augmented by the particular style of administration practiced by the Ottoman Turks. However, as Ottoman power declined in the nineteenth century and successor states, such as Serbia, Montenegro, and Greece, emerged, these conditions continued to afflict the region and were even exacerbated by the conditions created by Ottoman decline.
The Ottoman Empire
The term "Ottoman" is rooted in the name Osman, as in Osman I. Osman I was the leader of a tribe of who spoke a language of the Turkic family. He was the founder of a dynasty that ruled over, among other places, modern day Turkey and southeastern Europe, or portions of it.
The Ottoman Turks emerged in the 14th century and began absorbing former territory of the Byzantine Empire, whose influence had been waning for centuries. Ottoman rule would bring stability to a region previously plagued by incessant wars and internal power struggles.
Balkan peasants were not owned by their masters as were their counterparts in Prussia, Russia or Hungary. Almost all farmland was property of the Ottoman sultan ("the ruler" Mazower simply writes). Peasants were still legally obliged to provide a portion of their produce to local "estate holders". As Mazower writes, "new masters replaced the old." (Mazower, 17)
While two-thirds of Ottoman empire tax revenue was provided by the Balkan peasantry, their tax burden was probably no higher than before the arrival of the Ottomans. And, although Mazower does not explicitly say so, it was presumably lighter than in the rest of Europe. This is because of the larger degree of local autonomy permitted Balkan peasants as opposed to their counterparts elsewhere in Europe. In addition, Mazower refers to, "the bureaucracy's traditional argument for treating the peasants well and keeping an eye on the provincial beys." (A “bey” was a provincial governor.) (Mazower, 18, 19)
While Western economies began to practice commercial banking and private investment and to promote manufacturing growth and trade, the Ottoman empire continued to discourage private investment. In addition, "Ottoman methods of tax farming hindered rather than promoted expansion." (Mazower 18, 19)
On the other hand, during the nineteenth century, "the older Ottoman land regime was passing away and being replaced by one in which privately owned estates encroached on former common lands and dispossessed the peasants." These chiflik estates contributed to a decline in the condition of the peasantry, although Mazower is quick to point out that the southeastern European peasantry remained better off than many of their counterparts elsewhere in Europe. (Mazower, 19)
The consequences of Ottoman rule were greater for that minority of the population that occupied the towns of the Balkan region. Initially, many towns had been devastated by Ottoman conquerors. But the Ottomans considered the rebuilding and repopulating of towns to be of the highest priority. Cities recovered, new towns emerged and urbanization increased with the commencement of Ottoman domination. Coastal trading cities flourished, and the seventeenth century opened with Constantinople the largest city in all of Europe. The Muslim Ottomans so sought the development of towns and cities--the administrative centers of the empire--that they repopulated them via forced resettlements and even the welcoming of Sephardic Jews expelled from elsewhere in Europe. Sephardic communities thus took root in the Balkans. However, during the Ottoman period, cities and towns would primarily be Muslim islands in a sea of Christian Orthodoxy.
The identities of Balkan peoples and communities were rooted in religious beliefs and affiliations during the Ottoman period, and the Ottoman administrative apparatus was composed of religious institutions or staffed by religious figures. But the Ottomans did not compel the conversion of Balkan Christians to Islam, as this would have contradicted Islamic insistence upon the sincerity of those who sought conversion. In addition, Christians were taxed more heavily than Muslims, providing an economic incentive for the empire to tolerate the infidelity of the Balkan population. Separate courts existed for different religious communities. Tax collection might be the responsibility of religious figures. “Separate but parallel religious institutions were fundamental to the Ottoman governing machine.” Mazower regularly contrasts the relative tolerance of the Ottomans for non-Muslims with the militant intolerance of infidels practiced by Christian Europe. But of course religious equality did not reign in the Balkans either, where non-Muslims were relegated to second-class status. (Mazower, 48, 54)
While the Balkans were overwhelmingly Christian Orthodox prior to the arrival of the Ottomans and remained so through the Ottoman period, the ascendancy of the Ottomans created incentives for the ambitious to seek conversion. And of course during the Ottoman period itself, conversion was a virtual prerequisite for those who aspired to positions of power or status. In addition, during the Ottoman period, whole villages might convert to Islam, presumably to escape second-class citizenship or heavier tax burdens. Such occurrences highlight the pragmatism, or malleability, of early modern Balkan peoples’ religious affiliations and beliefs. Mazower describes a peasantry, and even often a priesthood, absorbing various beliefs and practices of separate faiths into a contradictory and convoluted spiritual world.
If the following is mostly new to you, as it was to me, it will probably be impossible to follow without reference to maps.
Etymology of the term "Balkans"
The Balkan mountain range stretches from one end of present-day Bulgaria to the other, from the Black Sea to the northeast of Serbia. (This is the simplest representation I could find online: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:BGBalkangebirge2.PNG.) It was across this range that one must pass if traveling from central Europe to Constantinople in centuries past. A common assumption among Europeans--until, evidently, approximately the beginning of the twentieth century--was that the Balkan mountain range stretched across the entire north of the peninsula of southeastern Europe, from the Black Sea to the Adriatic, which it does not. The peninsula of southeastern Europe was first referred to as the Balkan peninsula in 1808 by a German geographer. (Mazower, xxvii-xxviii; Glenny, xxii) Prior to this, Europeans had referred to the region as "Turkey in Europe". However, throughout the nineteenth century nation-states emerged in the Balkan region that asserted their independence from the Ottomans. As Ottoman power declined in the second half of the nineteenth century, "Turkey in Europe" lost favor to "the Balkans". (Mazower, xxvii)
Geography and its Consequences
The Balkan region forms a peninsula extending southeastward out from Europe, bounded on the east by the Black Sea, bounded on the west by the Adriatic.
In every dimension the Balkan region is less propitious to agriculture than the Eurasian lowlands to its north. Some areas are not dissimilar: the climates of Serbia, northern Bulgaria, the Albanian uplands, and Romania are reminiscent of that of Europe's continental climatic zone. However, the region as a whole receives significantly less rainfall than almost any other place in Europe, which contributes to recurrent droughts. Even fertile plains experience droughts in the Balkan region. In the Mediterranean portions of the peninsula rivers run dry in summer. The reduced rainfall of the region relative to the region to its north is at least in part attributable to rain shadows resulting from the ubiquity of mountains throughout the peninsula.
Mountains also impeded movement and communication between settlements. Terrain presumably dictated long, indirect roadways and, in time, railways. Moreover, the rivers of the region are either unnavigable or "they meander idly in curves and loops away from the nearest coastline." Canals--an important contributor to the affluence of eighteenth-century France and England--were not possible in the Balkan region because mountains obstructed access to the sea. (Mazower, 3, 5, 6)
The costs to development produced by such convoluted geography were not offset by a defensive advantage against invading armies. While the Pyrenees and the Alps provided barriers to the invasion of the Iberian peninsula and the Italian peninsula, respectively, the Balkan mountain range was traversable by invading armies.
And while the mountains of the Balkan region evidently provided no defensive advantages against invading armies, they did however inhibit domestic policing. The Balkan region has historically been reputed to be a place of lawlessness and violence and this is perhaps attributable to the difficulty experienced by the states of the region in asserting their supremacy even within their borders. Brigandage flourished in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries along with a sort of mythologization of the outlaws, among whom emerged a "highly developed" sense of honor. Yet, "These brigands were neither social bandits--robbing the rich to aid the poor--nor national heroes; rather, they were a symptom of high-altitude poverty and one way of trying to ameliorate it." (Mazower, 9, 22)
The mountainous terrain of the Balkan region provided its inhabitants with a unique source of leverage over their rulers, who knew that too oppressive a tax burden would send entire villages fleeing for the hills. Many simply settled in the hills where imperial reach was weak or even non-existent. In this way too the mountains of the peninsula contributed to the perennial political fragmentation and general weakness of central government of southeastern Europe. (Mazower, 20-21)
Incidentally, Mazower points out that the introduction of corn cultivation into the region--apparently in the eighteenth century--allowed upland settlements to support greater numbers of people. Hill dwellers were also forced to rely on mushrooms and berries, and to sell goods such as timber and coal: limited access to water meant that mountainside plots could not produce adequate sustenance to provide for the inhabitants of the hills year round. As late as the 1920s hill villagers sold snow to lowlanders. (Mazower, 20-21)
Mazower also touches on the "proto-industrialization" that occurred in some hill settlements. Prior to independence, upland settlements might produce textiles, gun barrels, or swords-blades. Mazower simply states that competition from Western imports forced these "proto-industrial" activities down from the mountainside and into the towns, which begs questions which Mazower does not directly address.
We might ask why industrial activity moved toward the towns at all. Answers to this seem obvious and not unique to the region. Towns were connected to other towns and could trade; denser populations meant more potential workers, consumers, and investors.
We might also ask why Western competition began to affect the upland industrial activity at this particular time. Clearly because parts of Western Europe were experiencing rapid industrialization. But that would have been less relevant had not the Ottoman empire begun to loosen trade restrictions in the first half of the nineteenth century in response to British pressure. (Mazower, 29)
Finally, we might wonder what the relationship of independence was to the movement of proto-industrial activity from the uplands to the towns, particularly in light of their apparent coincidence. For one thing, Mazower makes clear that independence brought hill dwellers down into the lowlands. (Mazower, 31) Mazower refers to the descent of people from the hills to the plains with the intention of bringing land under cultivation. Perhaps many of these people found their ways to the towns, increasing the labor pool available in towns for industrial activity. The drift down the mountainside would anyway suggest a dwindling of the available labor pool upland.
We might wonder why Balkan states, once independent, adopted or retained, counterintuitively, liberal trade policies. It might be thought that newly independent, the states would have been inclined to protect nascent industry. The explanation may lie in the fact that prior to the emergence of independent Balkans states there existed throughout Europe "powerful and influential" lobbies advocating for "Bulgarian, Serbian, and Greek liberation from Ottoman rule." (Mazower, xxxix) The existence and strength of powerful lobbies throughout Europe for the overthrow of Ottoman rule in the Balkans suggests that powerful Europeans believed they had an interest in the independence of the Balkan peoples from Ottoman rule. Cultural and economic elites of Europe presumably had ties to those groups that sought to become the cultural and economic elite of a post-Ottoman southeastern Europe. Or perhaps the existence of the lobbies simply suggests a continuity of cultural links between the peoples of the Balkan region and the rest of Europe that remained unbroken by centuries of Ottoman domination. These links would in turn perhaps contribute to explaining the seemingly counterintuitive adoption or retaining of liberal trade policies by the newly independent Balkan states in the nineteenth century.
Problems of poor roads, laggard development and lawlessness were augmented by the particular style of administration practiced by the Ottoman Turks. However, as Ottoman power declined in the nineteenth century and successor states, such as Serbia, Montenegro, and Greece, emerged, these conditions continued to afflict the region and were even exacerbated by the conditions created by Ottoman decline.
The Ottoman Empire
The term "Ottoman" is rooted in the name Osman, as in Osman I. Osman I was the leader of a tribe of who spoke a language of the Turkic family. He was the founder of a dynasty that ruled over, among other places, modern day Turkey and southeastern Europe, or portions of it.
The Ottoman Turks emerged in the 14th century and began absorbing former territory of the Byzantine Empire, whose influence had been waning for centuries. Ottoman rule would bring stability to a region previously plagued by incessant wars and internal power struggles.
Balkan peasants were not owned by their masters as were their counterparts in Prussia, Russia or Hungary. Almost all farmland was property of the Ottoman sultan ("the ruler" Mazower simply writes). Peasants were still legally obliged to provide a portion of their produce to local "estate holders". As Mazower writes, "new masters replaced the old." (Mazower, 17)
While two-thirds of Ottoman empire tax revenue was provided by the Balkan peasantry, their tax burden was probably no higher than before the arrival of the Ottomans. And, although Mazower does not explicitly say so, it was presumably lighter than in the rest of Europe. This is because of the larger degree of local autonomy permitted Balkan peasants as opposed to their counterparts elsewhere in Europe. In addition, Mazower refers to, "the bureaucracy's traditional argument for treating the peasants well and keeping an eye on the provincial beys." (A “bey” was a provincial governor.) (Mazower, 18, 19)
While Western economies began to practice commercial banking and private investment and to promote manufacturing growth and trade, the Ottoman empire continued to discourage private investment. In addition, "Ottoman methods of tax farming hindered rather than promoted expansion." (Mazower 18, 19)
On the other hand, during the nineteenth century, "the older Ottoman land regime was passing away and being replaced by one in which privately owned estates encroached on former common lands and dispossessed the peasants." These chiflik estates contributed to a decline in the condition of the peasantry, although Mazower is quick to point out that the southeastern European peasantry remained better off than many of their counterparts elsewhere in Europe. (Mazower, 19)
The consequences of Ottoman rule were greater for that minority of the population that occupied the towns of the Balkan region. Initially, many towns had been devastated by Ottoman conquerors. But the Ottomans considered the rebuilding and repopulating of towns to be of the highest priority. Cities recovered, new towns emerged and urbanization increased with the commencement of Ottoman domination. Coastal trading cities flourished, and the seventeenth century opened with Constantinople the largest city in all of Europe. The Muslim Ottomans so sought the development of towns and cities--the administrative centers of the empire--that they repopulated them via forced resettlements and even the welcoming of Sephardic Jews expelled from elsewhere in Europe. Sephardic communities thus took root in the Balkans. However, during the Ottoman period, cities and towns would primarily be Muslim islands in a sea of Christian Orthodoxy.
The identities of Balkan peoples and communities were rooted in religious beliefs and affiliations during the Ottoman period, and the Ottoman administrative apparatus was composed of religious institutions or staffed by religious figures. But the Ottomans did not compel the conversion of Balkan Christians to Islam, as this would have contradicted Islamic insistence upon the sincerity of those who sought conversion. In addition, Christians were taxed more heavily than Muslims, providing an economic incentive for the empire to tolerate the infidelity of the Balkan population. Separate courts existed for different religious communities. Tax collection might be the responsibility of religious figures. “Separate but parallel religious institutions were fundamental to the Ottoman governing machine.” Mazower regularly contrasts the relative tolerance of the Ottomans for non-Muslims with the militant intolerance of infidels practiced by Christian Europe. But of course religious equality did not reign in the Balkans either, where non-Muslims were relegated to second-class status. (Mazower, 48, 54)
While the Balkans were overwhelmingly Christian Orthodox prior to the arrival of the Ottomans and remained so through the Ottoman period, the ascendancy of the Ottomans created incentives for the ambitious to seek conversion. And of course during the Ottoman period itself, conversion was a virtual prerequisite for those who aspired to positions of power or status. In addition, during the Ottoman period, whole villages might convert to Islam, presumably to escape second-class citizenship or heavier tax burdens. Such occurrences highlight the pragmatism, or malleability, of early modern Balkan peoples’ religious affiliations and beliefs. Mazower describes a peasantry, and even often a priesthood, absorbing various beliefs and practices of separate faiths into a contradictory and convoluted spiritual world.
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