The Emperor of a great many Southern Slavs, the Sultan, had in his
time been satisfied if he could squeeze out of the Montenegrins so
much tribute as would every year pay for his slippers. He could send
an army now and then to devastate Cetinje and destroy the monastery
where the people's bishop lived, but in those mountains a large army
ran the risk of being ambushed and a very large one would be starved.
Besides, now that the European scientists and travellers were
beginning to go up to Montenegro and were, among the few sights of
Cetinje, always shown the shrivelled head of Kara Mahmud Pasha, who in
1796 had been defeated, it was not advisable, the Sultan thought, that
any other Turkish head of prominence should have this fate.... In
Macedonia it was very different; the population might have once been
warlike, but had so successfully been governed that some German
travellers of the sixteenth century, Hans Ternschwamm and Ritter
Gerlach, had described them as a "conquered, down-trodden, imprisoned
people" who did not dare to lift up their heads, a people who "without
intermission must toil for the Turks." And if three hundred years of
this life had not completely tamed them, the Sultan had every
confidence that the Greek Patriarch would tell the Powers what they
knew already, namely, that the Macedonian Christians only had to pay a
tenth and sometimes only an eleventh part of certain crops and that in
return they were protected by the Spahi from the ills which every
humbler man is heir to, and that the Powers, who politically said they
must respect the Sultan, must now morally respect him also. But in
1850 the Turkish Government made a change; in place of the old Spahi
there was installed a landlord who retained the name of Spahi but who
had none of his predecessor's careless benevolence. The property had
been hired out to him for life and his one object was to get from it
as much as possible. He made demands not only for a tenth but for a
fifth and even a third part, and not only of the maize and wheat but
of every product of the soil. Cattle, bees, vegetables, fruit--of all
of these he had to have his share; the peasant often cut his fruit
trees down as he could not afford to pay the various taxes that were
put on them. In the old days the Spahi had an arrangement with a whole
village, and a system so impersonal was much less onerous than when
demands were made from every household individually. The new sort of
Spahi was not only an evil product of the time, but as the progress of
industry in other countries was supplying the Turkish market with many
new commodities, so in order to acquire these articles for himself he
exacted more and more tribute from the helpless peasants. Progress in
Macedonia was not merely retarded--lands which had been under
cultivation were abandoned, and the peasant, having been despoiled of
everything, perhaps having borrowed money at 9 or 10 per cent., was no
longer able to get his living from the land on which so many
generations of his ancestors had laboured. It was no longer possible
for him to get the mess of maize and miserable bread, the strips of
repulsive-looking flesh that were his luxury, the medicine for his
underfed children who were moaning on the naked earth of his cabin,
and at the same time to make the necessary contributions to the
landlord or the landlord's agent, whom the villagers had to furnish
with a riding horse, with gun and ammunition, with furs and with
clothing appropriate to his position, with special gifts whenever he
or they were marrying, and with all the pretty girls on whom his eye
had rested. Therefore the _[vc]if[vc]ija_ would lose the last shadow
of freedom, he would become a serf. His sowing and his reaping would
now be for another, and as it did not profit him at all to make the
land more fruitful, he was content with any prehistoric implement,
with little wooden ploughs and with a total absence of manure. And yet
this pitiable serf would often be in a position less deplorable than
that of one who had a little freedom left and who was called a free
man, for the Turk would treat him no worse than the mule whose
continual existence he desires. It does not seem surprising if these
Christians wanted to be liberated from the Turk and did not greatly
mind what uniform their rescuers would wear.