51. Ibid., p. 192.
52. “Those who are best acquainted with the Greeks cannot fail to remark the numerous and striking features of resemblance that connect them with their ancestors … The Grecian character was, however, long tried in the furnace of misfortune, that the sterling metal had mostly evaporated and little but dross remained; having obliterated whatever was laudable in the institutions of their forefathers, their recent masters had taught them only evil”; ibid., p. 32. It was the “worthiest” of the Athenians who sought to prevent the deliberate massacre of the civilian Turks in the city, while “the system of the worst and most degraded Greeks, of exterminating, per fas et nefas [by fair means and foul] every disciple of Islam who fell into their hands”; ibid., pp. 414–15.
53. Ibid., p. 4.
54. Ibid., p. 231.
55. Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, canto 2, stanza 84.
56. Ibid., stanza 77.
57. For a new insight into Byron’s attitudes, see Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism, pp. 136–7: He notes Byron’s comment: “The Ottomans are not a people to be despised. Equal, at least, to the Spaniards, they are superior to the Portuguese. If it be difficult to pronounce what they are, we can at least say what they are not: they are not treacherous, they are not cowardly, they do not burn heretics, they are not assassins …”
58. On the pamphlet literature see St. Clair, That Greece, pp. 372–3. At that time the publications in English and German diminished. He also noted how there was a flood of books on Greece after Byron’s death, and in a number of these Byron and Missolonghi were mentioned in the title; see ibid., pp. 386–7.
59. The stronghold of the revolution was not in Greece itself, but in the Danubian provinces of the Ottoman Empire, where the ruling class was made up of Greeks from Constantinople, many of whom patronized secret Hellenic patriotic societies. The role of the Greek secret society, or “Friendly Association” (Filiki Etairia) is still unclear. At most individual members orchestrated, rather than provided a detailed plan for, the killings in the Peloponnese in 1821.
60. See Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, French Images, pp. 11–12.
61. Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer draws a strong connection between the two: “By joining regular to irregular, and classical to expressive, Delacroix’s cartoons reveal a balanced dualism—sublime and grotesque … the prints are significant as early exemplars of similar solutions observed in Delacroix’s painting. In … Massacres on Chios for example conventionally constructed scenes are punctuated by elements of the grotesque … possibly derived from graphic satire.” Part of the success of this picture was that it appealed to “the street.” See Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, Eugène Delacroix, p. 112.
62. Massacre of the Greeks at Missolonghi (1827).
63. François-Emile de Lansac, Scene from the Siege of Missolonghi (1828), in Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, French Images, p. 81.
CHAPTER 11: “A BROAD LINE OF BLOOD”
1. The words are Gladstone’s in Bulgarian Horrors.
2. Skene describes how this was decreed for the Ottoman navy, but in theory to be extended more generally: “Everything had, however, been done to eradicate these apprehensions [Christian fears of Muslims], even to the prohibition of the terms Raya and Ghiaur, which were made punishable offences in the navy, where Christians and Turks were thrown together, and it can now only be the effect of time.” The legislation was not effective. See Skene, A British Resident, vol. 2, p. 332.
3. Perhaps “Turcophilia” implies too much amity. Most of those who sympathized with the Turks were also fierce critics of what they considered their deep and inherent weaknesses.
4. I suggest that through most of the eighteenth century, attraction rather than repulsion was the rule, while the balance shifted early in the nineteenth century; but in the second half a degree of attraction had returned.
5. Gladstone, Bulgarian Horrors, p. 15.
6. Ussama Makdisi has convincingly shown how the traditional acceptance by Druze, Maronite Christians, and Muslims of their neighbors of other faiths was overthrown by the external pressures of Ottoman modernization and Western missionaries (with the consuls and navies ever present in the background). See Ussama Makdisi, The Culture of Sectarianism.
7. See Kamil S. Salibi, “The 1860 Upheaval in Damascus,” in William R. Polk and Richard L. Chambers (eds.), The Beginnings of Modernization in the Middle East: The Nineteenth Century, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1968, pp. 185–202. The Ottomans held Arab Muslim notables responsible in exactly the same way that they had Christians and Jews in other incidents. Sixty-one were hanged and 111 shot in a meadow outside the city. Other leading Damascenes were exiled. Others complained that after 1860 “Christians and Europeans, patriarchs and bishops were given undue precedence.”
8. See Magris, Danube, p. 327.
9. See Engin Akarli, The Long Peace.
10. Public Record Office FO 78/1520, “Report of Cyril Graham Esq., on the Conditions of the Christians in the Districts of Hasbeya and Rasheya,” in Brant (consulate, Damascus) to Russell (London), August 13, 1860.
11. Shannon, Gladstone, p. 22. Shannon’s book is an exemplary study of the process by which publications generate political actions and attitudes.
12. E. A. Freeman, “The English People in Relation to the Eastern Question,” Contemporary Review, February 1877, cited in Shannon, Gladstone, p. 14.
13. In a letter from Stuart Poole to Henry Liddon, February 4, 1877; cited in Shannon, Gladstone, p. 33.
14. See Jane Robinson, Angels of Albion: Women of the Indian Mutiny, London: Penguin, 1997. The official investigation after the mutiny produced no evidence of sexual violation. Copulation with an Englishman would have caused a catastrophic loss of caste for a Hindu, and there is no record of Muslims raping Christian women in India. However, the implication of sexual molestation was omnipresent, in both text and image.
15. The revolutionary group that organized the uprising south of the Danube on May 3, 1876, at Panagurishte was disorganized and ill-coordinated. Apart from persuading a woman teacher who had learned embroidery to make them a flag showing a yellow lion with his paw on the crescent and the motto “Liberty or Death,” and holding a public meeting, they seemed to have no coherent plan. Nevertheless, the excited crowd that listened to fierce speeches and sang revolutionary songs went on to murder all the Turks they could find in the vicinity. These seem to have totaled about 1,000; see Stavrianos, Balkans, pp. 377–80. Mark Mazower suggests they found little support among the peasants, who had proved utterly resistant to the clarion call of Bulgarian nationality; see Mazower, Balkans, pp. 88–95. However, Justin Macarthy suggests that they deliberately targeted Circassian villages so as to engender reprisals; see Macarthy, Death, p. 60.
16. The excuse that the murders were committed by forces outside the control of the Ottoman authorities is unconvincing. The authorities in Constantinople were wont to use terror by whatever means came easily to hand.
17. Malcolm, Bosnia, pp. 131–3.
18. Cited and translated in Stavrianos, Balkans, p. 379.
19. Cited and translated in Harold Temperley, The Bulgarian and Other Atrocities 1875–8: The Light of Historical Criticism, London: Humphrey Milford, 1931, pp. 7–8.
20. Ibid., p. 9.
21. Eugene Schuyler (1840–90) was both a scholar and a diplomat. His biography of Peter the Great was the first in English based on Russian sources. His longest and most fruitful period was his years in Russia during the 1860s and 1870s. The book of his journeys through Turkestan is a classic work of travel literature.
22. MacGahan remarks that its prosperity had excited the envy and jealousy of its Muslim neighbors. “I elsewhere remark that, in all the Moslem atrocities, Chiot, Bulgarian, and Armenian, the principal incentive has been the larger prosperity of the Christian population”; from Sir Edwin Pears, Forty Years in Constantinople 1873–1915 (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1916), pp. 16–19. I have used the text from the Internet Modern History Source
book, in which the spelling has been modernized. Pears’s own report outlining the atrocities was sent to London in June 1876.
23. News began to appear in the Manchester Guardian and in reports to The Times from Gallenga, its correspondent in Constantinople.
24. For the composition of the pamphlet, see Shannon, Gladstone, pp. 106–9.
25. A second and wholly new pamphlet appeared in the following year.
26. Gladstone, Bulgarian Horrors, pp. 12–13.
27. Gladstone’s diaries, February 2, 1859. I have taken this account of Gladstone’s attitudes and presuppositions about the Ottomans both from Mark Nixon’s unpublished paper on the topic and from conversations. I am extremely grateful to him for allowing me to use his material.
28. Gladstone was preoccupied, as were many of his contemporaries, with the cruel eroticism of the Turks. Six pages of J. L. Farley’s pamphlet Cross or Crescent dealt in prurient detail with the ravishment and massacre of Christian women by the bestial Turks. Much of Gladstone’s copy of this text was, according to Mark Nixon, underlined or highlighted with marginal notes.
29. His second pamphlet, Lessons in Massacre or, The Conduct of the Turkish Government in and About Bulgaria, Since May, 1876, published in the spring of 1877, was vintage (and slightly sententious) Gladstone.
30. See Shannon, Gladstone, p. 110.
31. October 28, 1876.
32. May 5, 1877.
33. See Fabian, Time and the Other, pp. 80–87.
34. On the Balkan past, Mazower, Balkans, and Todorova, Imagining, provide the best introductions.
35. Banac, National Question, pp. 202–14.
36. Emmert, Serbian Golgotha, p. 132, citing and translating Duško KeČkemet, Ivan Meštrovic, Zagreb: 1970, pp. 1–3.
37. For the position of the Turks of Bulgaria, or Pomaks, see Karpat (ed.), Turks.
38. In my view, population transfer as practiced in the 1920s (and subsequently) exists along the same spectrum as ethnic cleansing by extermination. But they are not identical. For a good discussion of these issues, see McGarry and O’Leary (eds.), Politics. The Ottomans practiced forced resettlement, but the aim was usually to create colonies that would strengthen their hold on a region. For the origins of the term “ethnic cleansing,” Dražen Petrović writes in “An Attempt at Methodology,” European Journal of International Law, 1994: “Ethnic cleansing is a literal translation of the expression etnicko ciscenje in Serbo-Croatian/Croato-Serbian. The origin of this term … is difficult to establish … Analysis of ethnic cleansing should not be limited to the specific case of former Yugoslavia. This policy can occur and have terrible consequences in all territories with mixed populations, especially in attempts to redefine frontiers and rights over given territories. There is a new logic of conflict that relies on violent actions against ‘enemy’ civilian population on a large scale, rather than on war in the traditional sense, i.e. between armed forces. Examples of this logic and policy abound today (the extreme case being Rwanda).” The original use of the term was applied by Serbs to Albanian attacks on Serbs in Kosovo and only later was it used (by Croats and Bosnians) to describe actions taken by Serbs. I am grateful to Dejan Jović for explaining this complex etymology. Only Slovenia has been largely exempt, but the Slovenes suffered a great deal of suspicion and pressure from the Habsburg authorities and later from the new Austrian state in the 1920s.
39. See Sugar, Industrialization.
40. Incorporated in the Slav state, the Bosnian Muslims had an ambivalent status. It was only in the 1960s, when Bosnian Muslims were recognized as a national group by Tito, that their collective position began to improve. The appeal of a “Yugoslav” identity rather than Serb or Croat affiliation proved seductive. See Friedman, Bosnian Muslims.
41. See Andrić, Development.
42. “At the most critical stage of its spiritual development, at the time that the fermentation of [Bosnia’s] spiritual forces had reached a culmination, invasion by an Asian warrior people whose social institutions and customs meant the negation of Christian culture and whose faith—created under different climatic and social conditions and unfit for any kind of adjustment—interrupted the spiritual life of a country, degenerated it and created something quite strange out of it.” Cited and translated by Tomislav Z. Longinović, “East Within the West: Bosnian Cultural Identity in the Works of Ivo Andrić” in Wayne S. Vucinich (ed.), Ivo Andrić Revisited: “The Bridge Still Stands,” Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995, p. 124.
43. Vuk Stefanović Karadžić was born in 1787. The bulk of his active life was spent in Vienna. Petar Petrović Njegoš was born in Montenegro in 1813. His four main books of poetry were The Voice of Mountaineers (1833), The Cure for Turkish Fury (1834), The Song of Freedom (1835, published 1854), and The Serbian Mirror (1845). His major work The Mountain Wreath was published in Serbian in Vienna in 1847.
44. Tomislav Z. Longinović, “East Within the West: Bosnian Cultural Identity in the Works of Ivo Andrić,” in Wayne S. Vucinich (ed.), Ivo Andrić Revisited: “The Bridge Still Stands,” Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995, p. 126.
45. See Andrić, Bosnian Chronicle, pp. 262–3.
46. Emmert, Serbian Golgotha, p. 141. The famed “blackbirds” of Kosovo Polje were no doubt crows or similar scavengers.
47. See Wachtel, Making, pp. 129–34.
48. Cited and translated in Tanner, Croatia, p. 75.
49. Cited and translated in Banac, National Question, p. 59.
50. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, chapter 4. It is curious how Frankenstein, set in the original in Switzerland, was moved in one of the first filmic treatments (1931) to Bavaria. Then in Frankenstein Created Woman (1967), Frankenstein had moved east (into “Dracula territory”?) to a “nineteenth-century Balkan village.”
51. Njegoš’s Mountain Wreath; see http://www.rastko.org.yu/knjizevnost/umetnicka/njegos/mountain_wreath.html (the gusle is a traditional folk instrument).
52. In Lady Wilde, “Speranza,” Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms & Superstitions of Ireland with Sketches of the Irish Past, to Which Is Appended a Chapter on “The Ancient Race of Ireland” by the Late Sir William Wilde, London: Ward and Lock, 1888.
53. See Mertus, Kosovo.
54. Ibid., p. 100.
55. Andrić is quite specific that those who impaled the victim, the peasant Radisav, were Gypsies. Martus cites the source as M. Jankovic, “Zlocin kao u vreme Turaka” (“Crimes as in the Time of the Turks”), Politika Ekspres, January 14, 1991; see Martus, Kosovo, p. 119. The most moving account of the continuing plight of the Balkan Gypsies is Isabel Fonseca’s fine book, Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey, New York: Vintage, 1996.
56. Mertus cites the author as žirovad Mihajlović.
57. Mertus, Kosovo, p. 112.
58. Weine, When History, pp. 107–9. Weine was an American psychiatrist who spent five years interviewing in Bosnia on memories of ethnic cleansing.
59. He liked to carry the gusle, with which Njegoš and other poets are often depicted. One of his colleagues in the Kosovo Day Hospital at Sarajevo described how “I heard his first talks in the villages and on television. He was very familiar with the language. He was making jokes … He used much more his knowledge of the culture, of the spiritual archetypal needs of the Serbian people than psychiatry to seduce them. He was using stories, legends, gusle and religion”; Weine, When History, pp. 114–15.
60. Robert Browning, “The Pied Piper of Hamlin,” in Browning, Poetry and Prose, selected by Simon Nowell-Smith, London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1950, p. 110.
Part Five
CHAPTER 12: “TURBAN’D AND SCIMITAR’D”
1. The Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, writing with V. N. Volosinov in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1917, looked at the emblems of their own day. A hammer and a sickle were just tools. But put them together, and they become a symbol, the insignia of the nascent Soviet Union. “Any consumer good,” Bakhtin and Volosinov observed, “
can likewise be made into an ideological sign. For instance, bread and wine become religious symbols in the Christian sacrament.” There is a long-running debate as to whether this was written by Volosinov or by Mikhail Bakhtin under Volosinov’s name, or by them jointly. I have given them both credit. See Morris (ed.), Bakhtin Reader, p. 50.
2. It was first published in a large Latin folio at Basel in 1559, and in English in 1563. It went through four editions in Foxe’s lifetime: there was a corrected edition in 1570 and two more in 1576 and 1583. Six further editions appeared in 1596, 1610, 1632, 1641, 1684, and 1784. Further versions came out in 1837–41 and 1877, growing larger and more weighty. The edition of 1684 was published in three folio volumes of 895, 682, and 863 pages.
3. Impalement was a significant and evolving trope in Western depictions of the Muslim East. Impalement is a dominant visual element in Lamenta et ultima disperatione di Selim Gran Turco … Venice, 1575: see “Ahmad I and the Allegories of Tyranny in the Frontispiece to George Sandy’s Relation of a Journey Anno. Dom. 1610,” in Muqarnas: An Annual on the Visual Culture of the Islamic World, ed. Gülrü Necipoğlu, Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2001, p. 208. Later, in Jean de Thévenot, Voyages de M. de Thévenot tant en Europe qu’en Asie et en Afrique (Paris: Charles Angot, 1689), vol. 2, there is an image of impalement in Ottoman Egypt. It depicts an Arab on a camel with burning brands strapped to his arms (so that boiling fat would drip down and burn his skin). In the background are two pyramids, and in front of these two impaled men, one smoking a pipe. The text in chapter LXXIX, “The Punishments,” criticized Egypt. However, in the Dutch edition of 1723, illustrated by Jan Luyken, the image is changed. It now depicts a European or Anatolian setting (the dominant camel has vanished and the extraordinarily brutal visual details of the impalement appear in the foreground). See Alle de gedenkwaardige en zeer naauwkeurige reizen van den heere de Thevenot, trans. G. van Broekhuizen, 2nd impression, Amsterdam: N. ten Hoorn, 1723, p. 441.
4. The image is in Les chroniques de France ou de St. Denis, British Library, MS Roy, 16 G VI. f. 412.
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