It is impossible to give any adequate description of the horrors of
Turkish rule in these Christian countries of the Balkans. Their
people, disqualified from holding even the smallest office, were
absolutely helpless under the oppression of their foreign masters, who
ground them down under an intolerable load of taxation and plunder.
The culminating cruelty was the tribute of Christian children from ten
to twelve years of age who were sent to Constantinople to recruit the
corps of janissaries. It is not surprising that for the protection of
their wives and children and the safeguarding of their interests the
nobles of Bosnia and the {14} Pomaks of Southeastern Bulgaria embraced
the creed of their conquerors; the wonder is that the people as a whole
remained true to their Christian faith even at the cost of daily
martyrdom from generation to generation. Their fate too grew worse as
the Turkish power declined after the unsuccessful siege of Vienna in
1683. For at first Ottoman troops ravaged Bulgaria as they marched
through the land on their way to Austria; and later disbanded soldiers
in defiance of Turkish authority plundered the country and committed
nameless atrocities. Servia was to some extent protected by her remote
location, but that very circumstance bred insubordination in the
janissaries, who refused to obey the local Turkish governors and gave
themselves up to looting, brigandage, and massacre. The national
spirit of the subject races was completely crushed. The Servians and
Bulgarians for three or four centuries lost all consciousness of a
fatherland. The countrymen of Simeon and Dushan became {15} mere
hewers of wood and drawers of water for their foreign masters. Servia
and Bulgaria simply disappeared. As late as 1834 Kinglake in
travelling to Constantinople from Belgrade must have passed straight
across Bulgaria. Yet in "Eothen," in which he describes his travels,
he never even mentions that country or its people.
It is easy to understand that this history of Turkish horrors should
have burned itself into the heart and soul of the resurrected Servia
and Bulgaria of our own day. But there is another circumstance
connected with the ruthless destruction and long entombment of these
nationalities which it is difficult for foreigners, even the most
intelligent foreigners, to understand or at any rate to grasp in its
full significance. Yet the sentiments to which that circumstance has
given rise and which it still nourishes are perhaps as potent a factor
in contemporary Balkan politics as the antipathy of the Christian
nations to their former Moslem oppressors.
{16}