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reproduce gender stereotypes, and ends up being repressive of the women in
the very societies within which it is enacted. I will return to this point in the
Conclusion.
In a pioneering early study of wartime rumors, Albert Dauzat stressed their
collective nature and stated that they do not have a single assignable author. Rather,
he argued, they are transformed as they circulate from mouth to mouth: “Each
narrator can introduce variants, but these are only accepted if they correspond to
the general state of mind.”6 This emphasis on the collective authorship of wartime
rumors is typical of the period, with its growing interest in social psychology,
collective memory, and other aspects of mass behavior. The great historian Marc
Bloch spoke of “the magnificent plenitude that only a lengthy time period and
innumerable mouths can bestow” upon wartime legends, stressing that “falsehood
propagates itself, is amplified, indeed lives, on one condition only: that it finds, in
the society into which it is spreading, a favorable cultural stew.” He argued that
[f]alse news are always born of collective representations that pre-exist
their birth; it is fortuitous only in its appearance, or, more precisely, what is
fortuitous in it is the initial—and entirely arbitrary—incident that triggers
the operation of the imaginations; but this setting in motion only takes place
because the imaginations are already prepared and are silently fermenting…
[F]alse news are the mirror where the “collective consciousness”
contemplates its own features.7
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There is no doubt that wartime rumors and legends owe their existence to beliefs
held by broad segments of society: like folklore, they are born and evolve through
the very process of their diffusion. But just as an army must act in concert to be
most effective on the battlefield, a public must enjoy a significant commonality
of thought and belief if it is to provide support for as trying and traumatic an
undertaking as war. It is here, I would argue, that cultural products as diverse as
poetry, painting, and postcards play a crucial standardizing role. To appreciate
the importance of this point, it is only necessary to give a moment of thought
to the tremendous influence of the various false stories that circulated during
World War I—the Belgian snipers, the German body factories, the babies with
their hands cut off, the murdered nurses—in mobilizing public opinion behind the
government and against the enemy.8 These stories gave discernible form to what
would have otherwise been at most a diffuse negative feeling, and in so doing,
they made it possible for the governments to manipulate their populations at will.
In the heat of the war, Fernand van Langenhove wrote, in his cool-headed and
methodical dismantling of the myth of the Belgian snipers:
Thus does one find, in this lower-tier literature, the principal legendary
episodes whose origins we have studied, and whose development we have
followed; appropriated into fiction, woven onto the weft of intrigue, they
have undergone new transformations; they are transposed into new imagined
circumstances; they have generally been dissociated from the circumstances
that individualize them, and fix them within time or space. The thematic
motifs from which they derive, however, remain clearly recognizable.9
In the next section, I will give some examples of the depiction of Turkish
men as a sexual threat and of the Christian women of the Balkans as victims in
urgent need of protection. As Justin McCarthy has noted in connection with the
“Bulgarian Horrors” of 1876,
one of the stories that most titillated British readers was the tale of Christian
girls sold into slavery or their forcible inclusion into Muslim harems. What
fantasies such accounts engendered in the minds of citizens of Manchester
and Birmingham can only be guessed. Indignation ran high. However, no
sales of women had taken place. European consuls, who searched at length
for such sales and abductions, found nothing. The dictates of politics and
newspaper circulation had, however, made such stories attractive, and they
were widely believed. They were well-publicized in Europe, especially in
England, and touched a great vein of sympathy for Bulgarian Christians
among the English.
Had the Bulgarian Horrors not engaged the sympathies of the British, the
war would probably not have taken place.10
Barely two decades after the Anglo-Ottoman alliance brought about by the Crimean
War—an alliance that had deeply captivated and seduced the British public at all
levels through the many photographs, newspaper accounts, and memorabilia it
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279
had engendered—the Turcophile government of Benjamin Disraeli was virtually
paralyzed by the outcry sparked by these and other accounts of atrocities, and
could not prevent the catastrophic Russo-Ottoman war of 1877–78.
National Conflict Sexualized
The sexualization of Islam in European polemical writings, and the depiction of
Muslims as a sexual menace to Christian women, dates from the Middle Ages; it
is, for instance, a recurring theme in the Chansons de Geste.11 The conflation of
sexual and military threats more specifically in the figure of “The Turk” goes back
at least as far as the conquest of Constantinople. The fiftenth-century chronicler
Jacques de Clerq, for example, wrote that upon entering the church of Haghia
Sophia, wherein many Byzantine noble ladies and their daughters had taken
refuge, Turks “enjoyed their carnal company, by force and against their consent
and will, and in contempt of God our creator and of the faith.” Another chronicler,
his contemporary Mathieu d’Escouchy, told the much-repeated (but apparently
apocryphal) story of the rape of the Byzantine princess Irene by Sultan Mehmed
the Conqueror who, failing to convince her to convert to Islam, led her to Haghia
Sophia, stripped her naked, and had her beheaded.12 Analogous accounts appear
in the works of German pamphleteers and hymn-writers; Johannes Brenz wrote
in 1537 that
[w]hen the Turks win a victory they conduct themselves not as honorable
warriors but as the worst miscreants on earth. After their conquest of
Constantinople the Turkish tyrant had the wives and children of the Emperor
and princes brought to a banquet, where he violated them and then had them
chopped to pieces while the banquet was still in progress. Such doings, far
from being rare among the Turks, are their customary way of celebrating a
military triumph… Let everyone consider what a terrible disgrace it is to
permit women and children to be subjected to such shame—I will not relate
the vile deeds committed by the diabolical people, involving all kinds of
unchastity.13
Indeed, while parallels were frequently drawn between “papists” and Turks in
Lutheran propaganda, in a militantly Catholic pamphlet published in 1527 it was
Luther himself who was compared to a Turk, in that while the latter “abuses
and treats lasciviously all female persons, both secular and
spiritual,” the former
“entices nuns and monks out of their monasteries and enjoins them to contract false,
impious marriages,” and while the latter practices polygamy, the former tolerates
infidelity and does not value chastity nor upholds the sanctity of marriage.14 As
might be expected, Ottoman campaigns into Europe, and particularly the sieges of
Vienna, also led to sexualized representations of the Turkish foe: Diane Wolfthal
has shown that images of lifeless bodies in sixteenth-century German woodcuts
involving Turks, conventionally interpreted by art historians simply as dead
women, actually feature representational codes that identify them specifically as
rape victims—notably skirts raised above the knees.15
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I will now briefly discuss two specific instances of the portrayal of Turks as
ravishers of Balkan women: philhellenic art and literature from the nineenth
century, and works focusing on the Macedonian insurrection of 1902–3. The
former mostly includes what might be called “high art,” the latter mostly popular
material; one purpose of these two case studies is to highlight the deep similarity
between the two categories.
Philhellenic Art and Literature
An important source of inspiration for romanticism, the Greek liberation movement
(1821–30) rallied some of the most prominent European and American artists of
the nineteenth century. And while heroes of the struggle for Greek independence
such as Alexandros Ypsilantis, Constantine Kanaris, and Markos Botzaris were
eulogized in many of their works, others used the motif of a Greek female captive
of the Turks—with all the sexual tensions this idea authorized—to mobilize public
opinion in support of the cause. Much has been written about the philhellenic
movement, and I could not possibly do justice to it in this short essay.16 Instead,
I will focus on a handful of examples from across a relatively broad spectrum
in order to highlight the ways in which the motif of the Turk as sexual predator
played into the political agenda of the day.
One of the towering figures of British philhellenism was, of course, Lord
Byron. In Childe Harolde’s Pilgrimage (1812–18), he speaks of
Lands that contain the monuments of Eld,
Ere Greece and Grecian arts by barbarous hands were quell’d. (I: 952–53)17
Having thus set the stage for contrasting an idealized classical Greece with the
oppressed and enslaved shadow it had become of its former self under Turkish
dominion, Byron turns his attention to its women. In “Tepalen” (Tepeleni), the
Albanian home town of the redoubtable Ottoman commander Ali Pasha (known
in Turkish as Tepedelenli Ali Paşa), Childe Harold witnesses men of every race
and creed going about their business; but
Here woman’s voice is never heard: apart,
And scarce permitted, guarded, veil’d, to move,
She yields to one her person and her heart,
Tamed to her cage, nor feels a wish to rove.
…
Ali reclined, a man of war and woes:
Yet in his lineaments ye cannot trace,
While Gentleness her milder radiance throws
Along that aged venerable face,
The deeds that lurk beneath and stain him with disgrace.
It is not that yon hoary lengthening beard
Ill suits the passions which belong to youth;
…
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But crimes that scorn the tender voice of Ruth,
Beseeming all men ill but most the man
In years, have mark’d him with a tiger’s tooth. (II: 541–44, 554–60, 563–65)
This is the classical conflation of harem/seraglio and oriental despotism
popularized by Montesquieu in his Lettres persanes (1721)—a conflation about
which Alain Grosrichard has written so eloquently.18 If the Turkish oppressor is
personified as a disgraceful old man who remains a slave to “the passions which
belong to youth,” the woman who is “tamed to her cage” and does not feel “a wish
to rove” is, of course, none other than Greece itself. As Byron goes on to write,
Fair Greece, sad relic of departed worth!
Immortal, though no more; though fallen, great!
Who now shall lead thy scatter’d children forth,
And long accustom’d bondage uncreate? (II: 693–96)
The personification of Greece as a harem woman is repeated in Byron’s The
Giaour, a Fragment of a Turkish Tale (1813), which tells the story of a tragic love
triangle involving Leila, a beautiful Circassian; Hassan, a Turkish overlord; and
the Giaour [“infidel”], a Venetian renegade. The story is set in Ottoman-ruled
Greece:
Fair clime! where every season smiles
Benignant o’er those blessed isles,
Which, seen from far Colonna’s height,
Make glad the heart that hails the sight,
And lend to loneliness delight.
…
Strange—that where all is peace beside,
There passion riots in her pride,
And lust and rapine wildly reign
To darken o’er the fair domain. (7–11, 58–61)
Once again, then, the idyllic land of Greece has been defiled by “Turkish lust.”
And yet, rather than pitting Hassan and the Giaour against each other in a neat “us
against them” or “civilization against barbarism” dichotomy, Byron makes them
out to be more alike than different. He emphasizes, for instance, that though it was
Hassan who sentenced Leila to death and the Giaour who avenged her, the roles
could have just as easily been reversed. This ambivalence has been interpreted as
an allegory in which Leila herself represents Greece, squeezed between two rival
imperialisms equally to blame for its wretched state.19
Indeed, western indifference to the suffering of Greeks under the Turkish
yoke was one of the main thrusts of Byron’s philhellenic poetry, and he angrily
denounced his countrymen in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage:
What! shall it e’er be said by British tongue,
Albion was happy in Athena’s tears?
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Though in thy name the slaves her bosom wrung,
Tell not the deed to blushing Europe’s ears. (II: 109–12)
Representing Greece as a damsel in distress would be an effective means of
mobilizing chivalry in support of politics. In The Siege of Corinth (1816), yet
another Venetian renegade helps Turks capture a fortress in a scene that Byron
describes with words that unmistakably connote a sexual conquest:
But not for vengeance, long delay’d,
Alone, did Alp, the renegade,
The Moslem warriors sternly teach
His skill to pierce the promised breach.
Within these walls a maid was pent
His hope would win without consent
Of that inexorable sire,
Whose heart refused him in its ire,
When Alp, beneath his Christian name,
Her virgin hand aspired to claim. (177–86)
How could images of immured maidens and pierced breaches fail to convince
Byron’s countrymen to act?
Like Byron, Victor Hugo took up the cause of philhellenism in Les orientales
&n
bsp; (1829). There, the phantasm of the seraglio as a bloody site of incomprehensible,
peculiarly “oriental” despotism is taken to new heights. Les têtes du serail—
whose epigraph is Shakespeare’s “O horrible! O horrible! most horrible!”—is set
in İstanbul:
Le sérail!… Cette nuit il tressaillait de joie.
Au son des gais tambours, sur des tapis de soie,
Les sultanes dansaient sous son lambris sacré,
Et, tel qu’un roi couvert de ses joyeaux de fête,
Superbe, il se montrait aux enfants du prophète,
De six mille têtes paré! (II: 1–6)20
But who are these “sultanes” who danced on silk carpets? The spirit of Botzaris
speaks:
Quels sont ces cris?… —C’est l’heure où ses plaisirs infâmes
Ont réclamé nos sœurs, nos filles et nos femmes.
Ces fleurs vont se flétrir à son souffle inhumain. (IV: 55–57)
The bloody road to the seraglio was travelled—in one direction only, needless
to say—by countless captive Christian women.21 In Chanson de pirates, Hugo
writes of a young nun—a modern-day vestal virgin—who is abducted by Turkish
pirates and ends her days in the imperial harem. Though the pirates are said to
be traveling from Morocco to Sicily at the time, and she is therefore unlikely to
be Greek, the presence of this poem among so many that deal with specifically
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283
philhellenic themes makes such an identification inevitable. The same is true of
La ville prise, where the usual sexual imagery is used to conjure the fall of the
(presumably Christian) city:
Les mères ont frémi; les vierges palpitantes,
O calife! ont pleuré leurs jeunes ans flétris,
Et les coursiers fougeux ont traîné hors des tentes
Leurs corps vivants, de coups et de baisers meurtris. (9–12)
These heaving virginal bosoms are arguably more worthy of mass-circulation
bodice rippers than of the great master of French poetry, and that may well be
precisely the reason for the tremedous effectiveness of Hugo’s imagery on his
public. Once again, it was European hearts that the poet wished to rouse in Les
têtes du serail, as he conjures the memory of Louis IX, who died in Tunis leading
the eighth and last Crusade:
“Et toi, chrétienne Europe, entends nos voix plaintives.
Jadis, pour nous sauver, saint Louis vers nos rives