Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam

by Andrew Wheatcroft

  The Morlacchi and others were forced to lead such desperate lives by the entropy that afflicted the Ottoman lands in Europe, and which spilled over into the domains of Venice or of the Habsburgs beyond the mountains. Life on the rugged frontier was different than in the towns and villages of the plain. The hajduks of the Dinaric Alps, like the uskok frontiersmen of Senj in the sixteenth century, were men “Who have no father and mother / Gun and sword are their father and mother.”52 The highlands—much of Greece, great tracts of Albania, Herzegovina, and Bosnia, the whole of Montenegro—were filled with armed men, both Christian and Muslim. The roads and passes were notionally protected by armed militia, armatoli, against the bandits known in the Greek-speaking areas as klephts. Raiding was an honorable profession, and some, like the famous “Lion of Janina,” Ali Pasha (immortalized by Dumas in his novel The Count of Monte Cristo), became powerful and successful by practicing these traditional skills. It was easy to romanticize them. Thomas Gordon, in his 1832 History of the Greek Revolution, rhapsodized:

  Extraordinary activity and endurance of hardships and fatigue made them formidable light troops in the native fastnesses; wrapped in shaggy cloaks they slept on the ground, defying the elements, and the pure mountain air gave them robust health. Such were the warriors that, in the very worst of times kept alive a remnant of Grecian spirit.53

  The hardships and fatigue had one simple cause. Without the heavy burden of the Turks, the old civic virtues of the ancient Hellenes could rise again. And so too could the Slavs.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Learning to Hate

  I HAVE NO INTEREST IN PROVIDING AN APOLOGIA FOR THE OTTOMANS. But making them the fons et origo of all evil is only a convenient myth. For the West, cruelty and the Turks had become more or less synonymous. The Turks exhibited all the traditional Muslim flaws. So however much the Ottomans might intrigue and preoccupy their European neighbors, however much admiration and envy they might inspire, the Turks’ evil heritage was unquestioned. The Venetian ambassador to the Grand Signior Murad IV wrote of this mighty seventeenth-century prince that “he turned all his thoughts to revenge, so completely that, overcome by its seductions, stirred by indignation, and moved by anger, he proved unrivalled in savagery and cruelty. On those days he did not take a human life, he did not feel that he was happy and gave no sign of gladness.”1 A century later another Venetian ambassador, Giovanni Emo, wrote of the vizier Topal Osman’s courage and generosity; however, he was also flawed by the inherent defects of his faith. “Cruelty and avarice were his vices; strong will, mental capacity and practical knowledge his virtues.” Osman “punished every light transgression of the law with death, which covered his cruelty with the mantle of justice.”2

  This presumption, that Turkish or Muslim virtue was outweighed by vice, had distant origins, as I have outlined in earlier chapters. In plays, novels, and poems all through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Muslim world, usually depicted as the Turk, became the natural locus for portraying unbridled passion or ingenious cruelty.3 Even the enthusiastic eighteenth-century Turcomania, which reveled in Oriental costumes and exotic scenarios, had an echo of these darker aspects. However joyous and lighthearted Mozart’s Flight from the Seraglio appeared, its audience did not fail to feel the frisson of Turkish tyranny. Often Westerners seemed willing to believe any tale of injustice without question. “History shows us that Europe is always brave and always jealous of her freedom; it also shows us by contrast that Asia is always a slave and as feeble as a woman [efféminée].”4 This Western belief, that the East could escape from its essential flaws only if it became like the West, was also adopted by some Ottoman reformers. (Muslims who first visited western Europe in this period either were shocked by what they saw or might just as easily have become passionate Europhiles through the experience.)5

  It was extremely hard to negate attitudes that had been inculcated from the first lessons of childhood. In 1853, “A British Resident of Twenty Years in the East” (a diplomat called J. H. Skene) traveled along what he called “the Frontier Lands of the Christian and the Turk.” His account is lively and full of interest. Skene’s warm personality opened many doors. He met with a well-known general, Mustapha Pasha. They got on famously, and the general sent for his children to meet the visitor. Skene found them delightful, and “asked their father if they were all born of the same mother, which I thought a natural enough question [the children had the same features, but different-colored eyes], but it did not please the pasha, who answered dryly that he had been only once married and that his children were consequently all of the same mother.”6

  Was it a “natural enough question”? It violated both Western and Ottoman codes of courtesy. Skene would never have asked so indelicate a question of a fellow Englishman whom he had just met.7 But to ask such a question of a Muslim trespassed into the private domain of the family, which was definitely out of bounds. However, it was natural to Skene because he thought that all well-bred Ottomans would be polygamists, indulging themselves with more than one wife at a time. His question was a solecism and not a crime, and Skene certainly did not assume that all Ottomans were cruel or vicious. Indeed, he held many whom he met on his travels to be fine men. But perhaps “A British Resident of Twenty Years” should have known better before following his knee-jerk response.8 Western travelers who did not have his wealth of experience in the region could not be blamed for coming to a similar conclusion: their upbringing and Christian culture had given them preconceptions about what they might see and hear.9

  The essential moral behind Skene’s little story was that he had a typology in mind, and believed the Ottomans would invariably revert to type. This same theme of reversion runs through Kaplan and others who present the history of the Balkans as a kind of collective psychosis. The Balkan peoples of the 1990s, in the Balkan Ghosts scenario, were simply reliving their brutal heritage. Or rather, they were enabled to regain this contact with their past, their collective cultural memories, through the efforts of propagandists. These were recovered memories, which recalled their ruination or perversion by the Ottoman occupation.10 Then, in some unspecified manner, Serbs and Croats, distant descendants of those who had been violently abused by the Turk, somehow became violent abusers themselves. The tangle between myth and reality is almost inextricable.11

  What was the source of these social memories? We need to begin (at least) with the seventeenth century, if not further back. In 1683, the Ottomans, supposedly in a state of “declination,” suddenly surprised western Europe by launching a huge army toward Vienna and threatening the city. Their bold effort failed and they were driven off. Thereafter the Austrian Habsburgs took full advantage of the Ottomans’ disarray. In a series of campaigns extending over thirteen years, they pursued them, first through Hungary, then beyond the Danube, and ultimately far south into the heart of the Balkan archipelago. In 1689, an Austrian army even pushed into the region of Kosovo and proclaimed that Christianity had triumphed over Islam. The Serbs of Kosovo were happy to swear allegiance to the emperor Leopold, only to see the Austrians retreat in the following year, leaving them at the mercy of the returning Ottomans.

  As an Ottoman army and their Tartar allies reentered Kosovo, they regarded many of the Serbs as traitors and rebels who had sided with their enemy. Village after village was ravaged, and, wisely, many families decided not to take the risk of remaining under Turkish rule. Led by the respected Patriarch Čarnojević of the Orthodox holy sites at Pec, they abandoned their farms and villages to trek north, then crossed the Danube with the retreating Austrians into Habsburg-ruled Hungary. In what was thereafter called Vojvodina, from the Slavonic for “duchy,” the emperor gave the Serbs a charter to establish their own community. The Habsburgs used these exiles as the first line of defense against Ottoman incursions. The “Great Migration” became the mythical equivalent of the Israelites’ Exodus from Egypt. The patriarch was their Moses.12 Like the children of Israel, whose identity was forged first by the
ir slavery in Egypt, and then annealed by their later Babylonian captivity, their lost lands became a totem of a vanished golden age for the Serbs in exile.

  The migration of 1690 was the second great Serb loss at the hands of the Ottomans. Exile and defeat joined to form a diptych of Serb identity, with catastrophe becoming a necessary prelude to triumph. As mentioned earlier, three centuries before, in 1389, in the heart of Kosovo, at Kosovo Polje, the army of the Serbs had been massively defeated by the Ottoman forces of Sultan Murad I. The precise factual history of the battle and its aftermath was less important than the dense network of legends and epic poems that was woven around it. From the early eighteenth century onward, few children in the Vojvodina cannot have known of saintly Prince Lazar who led the Serbs and of the many fine men slaughtered after the fight by the cruel and implacable Ottomans. They would also have learned of the evil Turkish sultan stabbed on the battlefield, in an act of divinely inspired retribution. An early Serbian chronicler began his account of the “noble and gentle Lazar” with how he

  Fought the good fight

  For the godliness of the land

  Not allowing during his lifetime

  The cursed, arrogant and cruel beast

  To destroy your [Christ’s] flock

  Which you gave him.

  Then Lazar himself declared,

  I’d rather shed my blood

  Than draw near to or bow down

  To the cursed and evil

  Murderer, Hagar.13

  The traditional language used about Islam since the seventh century—“Hagar,” “the cruel beast”—was the natural idiom to describe the Turks. The trope of triumph through martyrdom, where defeat was transmuted into a glorious victory, becomes a recurrent theme and inspiration for the Serbs’ future. The patriarch Danilo, in his late-fourteenth-century Narrative About Prince Lazar, summed up the future for the army of the Serbs in the face of their monstrous enemy: “We have lived for a long time for the world; in the end we seek to accept the martyr’s struggle and live for ever in heaven. We call ourselves Christian soldiers, martyrs for godliness to be recorded in the book of life … Suffering begets glory and labours lead to peace.”14

  Such myths were first rooted in oral folktales. Later the account of these events was written down, but existed only in very few manuscript copies. In 1601, a Carthusian monk called Mavro Orbini in the Adriatic city of Ragusa (Dubrovnik) published the story of Lazar in Kingdom of the Slavs (Il regno degli Slavi).15 In 1722, on the orders of Peter the Great, this powerful advocacy of “the Slavic nation and language” was translated. 16 It was not, it seems, a full or faithful translation, but the Kosovo story had an increasing impact, especially among the Serb communities in the Habsburg lands whose ancestors had left in 1690.17

  Balkan Muslim communities, although they did not use written or visual materials to the same degree as the Christians, also developed their sense of cultural identity. These Muslim communities were as deeply rooted in the land as their Christian counterparts, for most of them were the descendants of local converts and not of migrants. As a result, Islam in the region developed many characteristics not found elsewhere in the Islamic world. These lasted to the end of the twentieth century. It was considered “being Muslim the Bosnian way,” according to Tone Bringa, who interviewed Bosnians in the 1980s. She describes an incident during the mandatory fast of Ramadan (Ramazan), which in Bosnia was thought suitable for women and old men, who did not have to work hard.

  One evening a couple had a rather typical dispute during Ramadan. The quarrel started when the wife urged her husband to come along for evening prayers in the mosque. It then developed into a row about past events of their twenty-year marriage, the husband asking his wife why she had not married a hodza [imam, or Islamic teacher] if that was what she wanted. He then summed up his miseries: “… I had no coffee all day and it is Ramadan, and [so] I may not drink brandy.”18

  Nor was this just a twentieth-century development. In 1897, H. C. Thomson, visiting Bosnia, had also noted this characteristic of Bosnian men: “He will not drink wine, but will drink beer, or brandy or whiskey, or any other form of alcohol, because the Prophet only forbad the drinking of wine.”19 Plainly, in many of these Muslim communities the strict religious law was quietly put to one side.20

  Storytelling reinforced the sense of community. Both Christians and Muslims shared a common tradition of stories, often about similar themes. But they had very different messages, each version changing subtly and distinctively over time. Some Christian tales were profoundly anti-Turkish: “The songs of the hajduks and the klephts have no substance or meaning without the Turks, and the Moslem counterparts would not have meaning without the hajduk songs. This whole genre depends upon the Turks. The Kosovo cycle is patently impossible without the Turks.”21 The Muslim tales were usually much longer than the Christian ones. Relating them might extend over several days. As with the stories told until recent times in modern Turkey, the entire village would settle down to listen, would interrupt, comment on the quality of the storytelling, and even add to the speaker’s account. These were oral epics in the Homeric style, experienced by the whole community. And in Bosnia this tradition of community was strong in other respects: Bosnians would rally to repel any enemies from outside. They resisted the armies of Austria who invaded the provinces in 1878 just as they had attacked marauding Ottoman janissaries a few years before.

  A sense of place and community was often as significant as language and religion. The people of one valley or one hillside would be set against those of another, even if they used the same language and shared the same faith. Moreover, while outsiders might see a unitary community defined by a common language and a common faith, those inside the community would more often perceive stark and unmistakable distinctions within these broader categories. The reality (if not the theory) of the Balkans was polysemic. Straightforward ethnic and religious differences—as between Slavs, Bulgars, Albanians, and Vlachs, or between Christians and Muslims—invariably noted by foreign writers, were not in practice the only marks of difference. Locals talked more readily of a plethora of distinct communities, each of which saw itself as separate from its neighbors. Individual communities also constructed their own versions of the traditional heroes.22 This endless process of fission was partly determined by geography. Even if the landscape was not Alpine in scale, the succession of hills, ridges, and valleys divided one settlement from another. Places separated by only a few miles in distance were often much farther apart in journey time over rough paths, and therefore contact was often limited. A remarkable diversity in language was one consequence. The Slavic languages used by Serbs and Croats were divided into a great variety of dialects: Ivo Banac identified ten main dialect groups in the period after 1700.23

  THIS MULTIPLICITY UNDERMINED ONE OF THE STRONGEST “PRESUPPOSITIONS” among Westerners about the Balkans.24 They assumed that for all purposes Muslims formed one community and non-Muslims another. It was a logical conclusion to draw, for this was the principle on which the Ottomans appeared to base their political structures. They divided their populations along simple pragmatic lines into millets, or religious communities, rather as other empires defined their subjects in terms of color or tribe.25 It was an effective and extremely economical arrangement. The non-Muslim millets policed themselves: Christians and Jews were largely self-governing, under the authority of their religious leaderships. Thus the patriarch in Constantinople was responsible for the good behavior of the Orthodox Christians anywhere in the Ottoman domains. If they rebelled, he might pay with his head. It was a refinement of the ancient Turkic nomadic practice of hostage taking.26 One consequence of this structure was that the Ottoman subject peoples, or raya, were, within set limits, permitted to run their own affairs. All who were not members of the Ottoman ruling caste were raya, whether they were Muslim, Christian, or Jewish by faith. It is very clear that Muslim raya were oppressed by the Ottoman authorities almost as much as non-Muslims. Th
e burden of Ottoman rule often lay heavily on all its subjects.

  However, the non-Muslims suffered more. There were infinitely greater, almost endless, opportunities to wheedle money for fees, licences, and bribes from Christians and Jews than from Muslims. Wherever Christians or Jews came into contact with officialdom, money usually changed hands. Repairs to non-Muslim religious buildings required a licence, and invariably officials profited from this. The right to build a new church or synagogue could sometimes be purchased, but at a high price. This pressure was not unique to the Ottoman domains: Protestants in Catholic European countries and Catholics in Protestant countries were frequently subject to even more systematic and opprobrious official sanctions, and the treatment of the Jews in Christian Europe had always been notorious. And there is little evidence that the central Ottoman state had any consistent policy of oppression. There was no gain for the Ottoman authorities in terrorizing the non-Muslim faiths in the Balkans. They wanted to take as much as possible in levies and taxes from the “flock.” Beyond that, they were usually content to leave the raya alone.27

  In areas of the Balkans where the communities were mixed, Muslims sometimes had a better chance of seeing their Christian neighbors at first hand, and they shared a language and a communal life. But how great a part their religious identities played in everyday life is hard to say. There is little evidence one way or another. Violent antagonisms between the different communities do not seem to have been common, or at least they went unrecorded. Neither population had much incentive to disturb the other since it would only bring down the unwelcome attention of Ottoman officialdom. Often when disputes appeared to be between Muslims and Christians, the real causes were rooted in more mundane issues: money, land, jealousy, and avarice.28 When arguments moved into the area of officialdom, courts, and legal decisions, non-Muslims were certainly at a disadvantage; yet a rich and powerful Christian or Jew might still secure a positive decision against a poor Muslim. However, given that the courts were stacked against them, Christians had even less interest than their Muslim neighbors in attracting the intrusive attentions of the authorities. There is no doubt that many Balkan Christians felt oppressed. In part this was because there was a sense of underlying resentment that developed from the late eighteenth century onward that the land and all its resources, which had once belonged to their people alone, was now occupied by Muslims.