Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam

by Andrew Wheatcroft

  Creagh politely demurred, saying that was not his experience. The lawyer rounded on him, saying that “he never heard such an opinion in the whole course of his life, and it was the duty of all Christians to hate the Musselmans.”18

  These travelogues—and there were many others like them—are neither diaries nor documented history, but kinds of polemic. Each writer was telling a tale that he had made up for himself. Characters such as the verdant Montenegrin advocate or the fiery-eyed Orthodox nun were selected for a narrative purpose, to tell a particular story. Kaplan wanted to show that the Balkans were fixed in ancient hatreds: Mother Tatiana obliged. Creagh, who had come rather to like the “gentlemanly” qualities of the Ottomans, presented his Slavic popinjay who would condemn himself as in essence a “coarse mountaineer” and whose God was called, Creagh claimed, the “Old Murderer.”19 Within the Balkan lands it seemed possible, in the space of a short journey, to piece together almost any view of the past and, hence, of the present. One prolific modern writer on the region goes so far as to suggest that “The Balkans … is the unconscious of the world. It is here that the repressed memories of history, its traumas and fears and images reside.”20

  In such a shadow world nothing could be taken on trust. Even the image of the barren and precipitous Balkan peninsula so often depicted in engravings was only partly true.21 Hills and mountains covered much of the land south of the Danube, and the Carpathian chain to the north. But there was no massive chain of towering peaks (catena mundi) that ran continuously from the Black Sea to the Alps and then continued on to the Atlantic as some geographers had once asserted.22 In reality, Italy is more precipitous than much of the Balkans.23 In many parts of Serbia, the “summits are often below 2,000 feet and seldom exceed 3,000 feet.” Even in Montenegro, “like a sea of immense waves turned to stone,” the peaks rarely exceed 6,000 feet.24 But the idea of an extreme landscape was deeply rooted. The origins of the word “Balkans” was Old Turkish, meaning simply highland, and more specifically, a heavily forested mountain slope.

  Since Westerners erroneously perceived the whole region as wild uplands, the entire area between the Aegean Sea and the Danube—mountains, hills, and open plains—was defined as “highlands.” Maria Todorova has found that the first use of the word “Balkans” in any Western language came at the end of the fifteenth century, in a description sent by the Italian humanist Philippus Callimachus to Pope Paul II. The local people, he observed, called the mountains “Bolchanum.”25 Yet this misconception was also revealing, for well into the nineteenth century geography was often as much about perception as scientific measurement. So, in Scotland, “Highland” signified savagery and barbarity, while “Lowland” was equated with cultivation, both in the sense of agriculture and of civilization.26 In reality, there was much wild high ground south of the Highland Line; some mapmakers logically marked both “Northern” and “Southern” Highlands.27

  Mountains were an emblem of risk, and in that sense the Balkans were indeed vertiginous. The uplands of Bosnia, Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Albania were filled, Western travelers learned, not with colorful peasants but with brigands and bandits. These categories were, however, mutable. Often local people’s perception was a mirror image of the visitor’s viewpoint, although the former gave it a different slant. Balkan to the Easterner, like montaña to the Spaniards far away in the West, meant a home to outlaws, monfies, and thieves. But it was also the heartland of tribal honor and, latterly, of patriotism. The harsh terrain bred doughty fighters, and in the more impenetrable recesses of the Balkans, wild men—called variously armatoli, hajduks, klephts—preserved their ancient customs, vendettas, and myths of a heroic past.28 They were simultaneously feared and admired: a murderer and robber could also be perceived as a man of honor. They were epic characters, whose fame (rather than infamy) lay in exacting vengeance from their enemies. The historian Branimir Anzulovic recounts how in one folktale Grujo punished his wife for her act of betrayal to the Turks:

  He smeared his wife with wax and tar

  And sulphur and fast powder

  Wrapped her in soft cotton,

  Poured strong brandy over her,

  Buried her up to the waist

  Lit the hair on her head

  And sat down to drink cool wine

  While she cast light like a bright candle.29

  Other European cultures have possessed similarly ambiguous folk heroes.30 But the Balkans possessed an especially rich vein of mythmaking, with each village or family telling stories of its own local heroes. Slav and Albanian pride in their languages was considerable. Slavs traced its written form back to two early Orthodox missionaries from Salonika, Cyril and Methodius, who created a version of the Christian liturgy in a Slavonic idiom, and wrote it in a unique script called Glagolitic, from the Old Serbian “to speak.” This later became known as Church Slavonic, and this sacralized the Slavic tongues over all other vernaculars, raising it in Slav eyes to the same level of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew as a worthy vehicle for transmitting the word of God.

  This subtle and mellifluous tongue soon developed many forms and variants. The most fragmented zone—in language, and in ethnic and religious terms as well—lay along the westernmost part of the Balkans, all along the Adriatic littoral, through what are now Herzegovina, Montenegro, and down into modern Albania and Greece.31 Across the limestone escarpment of the Dinaric Alps in Bosnia there was an even greater variety and complexity. There Catholicism existed alongside Orthodoxy and Islam, but even within the Catholic community there were divisions. Some Catholics worshiped God in Latin and wrote in the Latin script, as they had been taught by missionaries from Italy; others learned their Catholic liturgy in Church Slavonic in the Glagolitic script; still others read it in a Bosnian variant of the Cyrillic. In Bosnia there also was (in Catholic eyes) a “heretical” Bosnian church. In many areas there were pockets of Orthodox believers. Thus, western Balkan Christendom contained not merely the binary division between Orthodoxy and Catholicism, but a bewildering variety of dialect and scriptural forms, all fiercely defended by their adherents. Farther east, in Serbia, Orthodoxy dominated, but even there there were still many subtle dialectal differences.32 Among the Slavs, national labels like “Serb” or “Bulgar” did not adequately denote identity.33 Placing strangers as friend or foe meant knowing which village or town they came from, of which community or kin they were part.

  The extreme diversity is difficult to relate to the clearly defined “homelands” presented by nineteenth-century nationalist historians and propagandists.34 A similar fragmentation existed outside the Slavic populations. The land that became Albania in 1913 had never been occupied by the Slavs. The native Illyrians who lived there successfully maintained both a distinct culture and a Latinate language incomprehensible to the Slavs. Within the ethnic category of “Albanian,” there were marked divisions, both in religion and social structures. In the south, close to the Greek lands, Orthodox Christianity predominated, while in the north some of the tribes were Catholic. But the Albanian communities were further divided between southern lowlanders (Tosks) and northern high-landers (Ghegs). After the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans, the Tosk and Gheg communities still retained Christian and Muslim enclaves. But despite these Christian communities, being Albanian soon became almost synonymous with being Muslim. In Bosnia, too, there was an additional religious mélange, with numerous conversions to Islam among local Slavs, so that they called themselves “Turks” (Turci). They continued to use their Slavic mother tongue, but with a distinctly Bosnian tinge. Other Muslims, “true Turks,” whether from Anatolia or Circassian Tartars settled by the Ottoman rulers in the Balkans, were always distinguished from local “Turks” and called Turkuse.35

  Any map of the Balkans that truly showed the extraordinary diversity of languages and religious faiths and ethnic distribution in the region looked nothing like one of the twentieth-century frontiers. If anything, the pattern resembled more closely the maritime chart of an archipela
go, such as the northern Aegean or the Cyclades. So, rather than “peninsula”—the traditional description of the region—perhaps a better metaphor for the Balkans is an archipelago, a pattern of separate islands, some large, others small. An archipelago society, however, especially one set in an ethnic and linguistic landscape as convoluted as the Balkans, will of necessity become acutely aware of local differences, and will not take easily to the ordered structures of more traditional polities.36 Edith Durham, traveling in Macedonia in 1905, was surprised that in some isolated areas Christian customs seemed strongly tinged with ancient folk beliefs.

  I do not think I ever saw a picture of a saint in any of these houses. The icon and the lamp, so conspicuous in the houses of the Serbs, the Montenegrins and the Orthodox Albanians, was wanting. Nor did the people invoke Christ or the saints, or cross themselves at mealtimes, or before going to rest for the night. They seemed to possess none of the religious fervour that is so marked a characteristic of Orthodox peasants. They had more faith, it seemed, in the amulets they wore than in anything else. Some of these were very odd. One was a green glass heart, two pink beads, and an English sixpence.37

  She quickly realized that easy generalizations in so idiosyncratic a land were meaningless. People saw themselves as possessing multiple loyalties and identities. Ascribing hatred to ethnic origin was too limiting a classification: as everywhere, antipathy had manifold causes and manifestations. Neighbors warred with one another; men and women were at odds; strangers were all devils and dangerous. Sturdy individualism was perhaps the only quality that characterized the Balkans as a whole, true of the people of the plains almost as much as those occupying mountainous ground.38

  NO ONE IS QUITE SURE WHERE THE BOUNDARIES OF THE BALKANS should be drawn. Were the Carpathians—the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, peopled by “Romanians” speaking a Latinate language—part of the Balkans? The Transylvanian monk who in 1779 published a prayer book, Carte de rogacioni, in Latin instead of in Cyrillic script thought not. He made “a declaration of the Romanians” ethnic distinctiveness and an affirmation of the bond with Europe.”39 Most of this chapter is concerned with the lands south of the Danube. The majority of internal nationalist historians tend to minimize the role of external forces, while many historians writing from an outside perspective look upon the Balkans as a natural field for their involvement. But both approaches to the region’s past histories share a common premise: the long Ottoman occupation had been the source of all the region’s problems. Remove that malign influence and the Christian East could be redeemed.

  The Austrian and the Russian plans for this redemption were far from disinterested. Russia in particular had huge ambitions. There is a popular eighteenth-century cartoon of the empress Catherine II making the great imperial stride (l’enjambée impériale) between the solid rock of Russia onto the sharp Islamic crescent atop the minarets of Constantinople. The crowned heads of Europe stand underneath, looking lewdly up her voluminous skirts and commenting on what they see. The great empress looks uncomfortable at her exposure.40 But the cartoon makes a serious point: neither Russia nor the Habsburg empire believed they could afford to ignore the Islamic power in the Balkans, any more than they (and Prussia) could have left Poland alone. The partitions of Poland in the late eighteenth century foreshadowed the treatment of the Balkans in the nineteenth century, although, unlike the case of Poland, only the Habsburgs made major additions to their territory from the carve-up of the Balkans. But Russia gained a dominant role if not land, becoming a symbolically menacing bear, looming suggestively over her Balkan protégés or puppets. Justifying both the eighteenth-century dismemberment of Poland and nineteenth-century approaches to reshaping the Balkans was the belief that their barbaric peoples would benefit from “Enlightenment.”41 These perceptions had deep roots. In 1572 a French prince, Henry de Valois, had ruled briefly in Warsaw. His court poet could see nothing good about the Poles and their land:

  Farewell Poland

  Farewell deserted plains

  Eternally covered with snow and ice

  Oh savage people, arrogant and thieving

  Boastful, verbose and full of words

  Who wrapped night and day in shaggy furs

  Takes its only pleasure playing with a wine glass

  By snoring asleep and falling to sleep on the floor

  And who then, like Mars, wishes to be famous.

  It is not your great grooved lances

  Your wolf’s clothing, your misleading coats of arms

  Spread all over with wings and feathers

  Your muscular limbs, nor your redoubtable deeds,

  Dull-witted Poles, that saved you from defeat.

  Your miserable condition alone protects you.42

  Writers in the eighteenth century, in the era of the Enlightenment, appeared just as preoccupied with the East as their predecessors in earlier centuries. The focus of interest had shifted, but not the underlying assumptions. Larry Wolff’s groundbreaking studies, Inventing Eastern Europe and Venice and the Slavs, have presented a new and convincing interpretation of Western preconceptions of the Slavic world. Reading both books, I was struck by how the negative attitudes I had hitherto associated specifically with the Muslim and Ottoman East were extended in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment to the Slavic world as well.43 The differences between the two worlds were still profound. The Slav world was (largely) Christian and the Ottoman world was predominantly Muslim; yet Western travelers saw both of them as sunk in ignorance, lust, and violence.

  Wolff quotes the comte de Ségur writing of Catholic Poland as a void, with vast forests punctuated by open plains, and “a poor population, enslaved; dirty villages; cottages little different from savage huts; everything makes one think one has been translated back ten centuries and that one finds oneself amid hordes of Huns, Scythians, Veneti, Slavs, and Sarmatians.” An English visitor, William Coxe, traveling in Russia and Poland, also found the sources of Eastern barbarities in the primitive peoples of the region, which could be subsumed under the broad heading of the “Tartar Yoke.” In Moscow, he encountered “an Armenian, recently arrived from Mount Caucasus.” He was the very image of a barbarian, and Coxe described him in much the same way as others portrayed the wild ghazi, akinji, bashibazouks, or dervishes in Ottoman service.

  His dress consisted of a long loose robe, tied with a sash, large breeches and boots: his hair was cut, in the manner of the Tartars, in a circular form; his arms were a poignard, and a bow of buffalo’s horn strung with the sinews of the same animal … he danced a Calmuc dance, which consisted in straining every muscle, and writhing his body into various contortions without stirring from the spot; he beckoned us into the garden, took great pleasure in showing us his tent and arms … We were struck with the unartificial character of this Armenian, who seemed like a wild man just beginning to be civilised.44

  This “Armenian” displayed the negative particulars—wildness and lack of control—that had been pinned to “Islam” since the early medieval period. The “backwardness” of the Slav East came from many distinct causes, but I wondered if one was the contact with the Eastern Muslim world.45 Islam had impinged on the Slav world along an extended frontier. In the fourteenth century, as the Ottomans were advancing into southern Europe, the Mongols of the Golden Horde, whose “Tartar yoke” had long overshadowed the northern Slav lands of Muscovy (Russia) and Poland, accepted Islam. In time, the rising power of Russia gradually freed itself from the suzerain power of the Golden Horde, but the Tartar horsemen merely regrouped farther east, thereafter raiding rather than ruling their former domain. In 1484, the Ottoman armies, pushing north, took the key fortified towns of Killia at the mouth of the Danube and Akkerman at the mouth of the Dniester and became a dominant force in the borderlands around the Black Sea. Crimean Tartars were allied to the Ottomans, and Tartars and Caucasian skirmishers became a valued element in the Ottoman armies, raiding on their fast ponies far beyond the Danube into Hungary and the A
ustrian duchies. They settled in many parts of the European Ottoman domains, and remained largely separate from the local Muslim population, who spoke a quite different language.

  In Western eyes, “Tartars” and “Turks” had both collective and separate identities. The hellish witches’ brew in Shakespeare’s Macbeth contained the twin elements of evil, “nose of Turk, and Tartar’s lips.”46 While the phrase “the Grand Turk” embodied the grudgingly admired “imperial” qualities of the Ottomans, the Tartars epitomized the unspeakable and fearsome savagery that was their other attribute. Some said that their name meant they were the denizens of hell (from the Latin Tartarus).47 The abbé Fortis became the West’s literary cicerone for the Balkan wilderness and its inhabitants. He wrote that he “saw customs, poetry, music, clothing, and habitations as Tartar as they could be in Siberia.”48 The chevalier Louis de Jaucourt, writing on “Tartars” in 1765 in Diderot’s Encyclopédie, observed that it was “humiliating that these barbaric peoples should have subjugated almost all our hemisphere” in the age of Genghis Khan. He assured his readers that although “this vast reservoir of ignorant, strong, and bellicose men [had] vomited its inundations in almost all our hemisphere … the polished nations are sheltered from the irruptions of these barbarous nations.”49 But not, however, in the rough and rugged lands of the Balkans.

  Which peoples were “polished” and which “barbarous” could never clearly be defined where Turks, Tartars, and Slavs had common boundaries. The precipitous Dinaric Alps, inland from the Adriatic, provided one such fracture zone. After his visits to Venice’s Balkan possessions, Fortis published his Travels in Dalmatia (Viaggio in Dalmazia) in 1774. He described the people of these mountains, the Morlacchi, as not at all the “race of ferocious men, unreasonable, without humanity, capable of any misdeed,” whom the people of the coast accused of “the most atrocious excesses of murder, arson and violence.”50 Fortis’s book and his many letters presented a much more positive image of these high-landers. He held that the violence for which the Morlacchi were sometimes justly blamed stemmed from the circumstances in which they lived. In a society where banditry and raiding were the norm, many Morlacchi perforce became hajduks, or border reivers. These men “lived the lives of wolves, wandering among rocky and inaccessible precipices, hanging from stone to stone … It would not be surprising if frequently one heard of strokes of atrocity by these men grown wild and irritated by the ever present sentiment of such a miserable situation.”51