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 wives and children and the
safeguarding of interests the nobles of Bosnia and the 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 spirt 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 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 as potent a factor in
contemporary Balkan politics as the antipathy of the Christian
nations to their former Moslem oppressors.