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THE BALKAN PENINSULA
AGENTS
AMERICA THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
64 & 66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK
AUSTRALASIA THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
205 FLINDERS LANE, MELBOURNE
CANADA THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA, LTD.
ST. MARTIN'S HOUSE, 70 BOND STREET, TORONTO
INDIA MACMILLAN & COMPANY, LTD.
MACMILLAN BUILDING, BOMBAY
309 BOW BAZAAR STREET, CALCUTTA
[Illustration: A BALKAN PEASANT]
THE BALKAN PENINSULA
BY
FRANK FOX
AUTHOR OF
"AUSTRALIA," "BULGARIA," "SWITZERLAND," ETC.
PUBLISHED BY A. & C. BLACK, LTD.
4, 5, & 6 SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W.
1915
PREFACE
This book was written in the spring of 1914, just before Germany plunged
the world into the horrors of a war which she had long prepared, taking
as a pretext a Balkan incident--the political murder of an Austrian
prince by an Austrian subject of Serb nationality. Germany having
prepared for war was anxious for an occasion which would range Austria
by her side. If Germany had gone to war at the time of the Agadir
incident, she knew that Italy would desert the Triple Alliance, and she
feared for Austria's loyalty. A war pretext which made Austria's
desertion impossible was just the thing for her plans.
It would be impossible to reshape this book so as to bring within its
range the Great War, begun in the Balkans, and in all human probability
to be decided finally by battles in the Balkans. I let it go out to the
public as impressions of the Balkans dated from the end of 1913. It may
have some value to the student of contemporary Balkan events.
My impressions of the Balkan Peninsula were chiefly gathered during the
period 1912-13 of the war of the Balkan allies against Turkey, and of
the subsequent war among themselves. I was war correspondent for the
London _Morning Post_ during the war against Turkey and penetrated
through the Balkan Peninsula down to the Sea of Marmora and the lines of
Chatalja. In war-time peoples show their best or their worst. As they
appeared during a struggle in which, at first, the highest feelings of
patriotism were evoked, and afterwards the lowest feelings of greed and
cruelty, the Balkan peoples left me with a steady affection for the
peasants and the common folk generally; a dislike and contempt, which
made few exceptions, for the politicians and priests who governed their
destinies. Perhaps when they settle down to a more peaceful
existence--if ever they do--the inhabitants of the Balkan Peninsula
will come to average more their qualities, the common people becoming
less simple-minded, obedient, chaste, kind: their leaders learning
wisdom rather than cunning, and getting some sense of the value of truth
and also some sense of ruth to keep them from setting their countrymen
at one another's throats. But at the present time the picture which I
have to put before the reader, with its almost unbelievable
contradictions of courage and gentleness on the one side and cowardly
cruelty on the other, is a true one.
The true Balkan States are Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro, and Albania.
Roumania is proud to consider herself a Western State rather than a
semi-Eastern Balkan State, though both her position and her diplomacy
link her closely with Balkan developments. Turkey, of course, cannot be
considered in any sense as a Balkan State though she still holds the
foot of the Balkan Peninsula. Greece has prouder aspirations than to be
considered one of the struggling nationalities of the Balkans and dreams
of a revival of the Hellenic Empire. But in considering the Balkan
Peninsula it is not possible to exclude altogether the Turk, the Greek,
the Roumanian. My aim will be to give a snapshot picture of the Balkan
Peninsula, looking at it as a geographical entity for historical
reference, and to devote more especial attention to the true Balkan
States.
FRANK FOX.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. The Vexed Balkans 1
II. The Turk in the Balkans 19
III. The Fall of the Turkish Power 37
IV. The Wars of 1912-13 53
V. A Chapter in Balkan Diplomacy 78
VI. The Troubles of a War Correspondent in
the Balkans 94
VII. Jottings from my Balkan Travel Book 124
VIII. The Picturesque Balkans 149
IX. The Balkan Peoples in Art and Industry 162
X. The Future of the Balkans 175
Index 207
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING PAGE
A Balkan Peasant _Frontispiece_
Trajan's Column in Rome 7
The Walls of Constantinople from the Seven Towers 10
Sancta Sophia, Constantinople 21
King Peter of Serbia 28
King Nicolas of Montenegro 33
Montenegrin Troops: Weekly Drill and Inspection of
Weapons 35
The King of Roumania 39
The Shipka Pass 42
King Ferdinand of Bulgaria 46
King Ferdinand's Bodyguard 48
Bulgarian Infantry 53
Bulgarian Troops leaving Sofia 60
General Demetrieff, the Conqueror at Lule Burgas 69
Adrianople: A General View 76
Roumanian Soldiers in Bucharest 85
Adrianople: View looking across the Great Bridge 88
General View of Stara Zagora, Bulgaria 92
Sofia: Commercial Road from Commercial Square 101
Bucharest: The Roumanian House of Representatives 108
General Savoff 117
Bulgarian Infantry 124
Ox Transport in the Balkans 133
A Balkan Peasant Woman 136
A Bagpiper 140
Some Serbian Peasants 149
General View of Sofia 156
Bucharest 161
A Bulgarian Farm 166
Albanian Tribesmen 176
Greek Infantry 181
Podgorica, upon the Albanian Frontier 188
_Sketch Map on page xii._
[Illustration: SKETCH MAP OF THE BALKAN PENINSULA]
THE BALKAN PENINSULA
CHAPTER I
THE VEXED BALKANS
The Fates were unkind to the Balkan Peninsula. Because of its position,
it was forced to stand in the path of the greatest racial movements of
the world, and was thus the scene of savage racial struggles, and the
depositary of residual shreds of nations surviving from great defeats or
Pyrrhic victories and cherishing irreconcilable mutual hatreds. As if
that were not enough of ill fortune imposed by geographical position,
the great Roman Empire elected to come from its seat in the Italian
Peninsula to die in the Balkan Peninsula, a long drawn-out death of many
agonies, of many bloody disasters and desperate retrievals. For all the
centuries of which history knows a blood-mist has hung over the Balkans;
and for the centuries before the dawn of written history one may
surmise that there was the same constant struggle of warring races.
It seems fairly certain that when the Northern peoples moved down from
their gloomy forests towards the Mediterranean littoral to mingle their
blood with the early peoples of the Minoan civilisation and to found the
Grecian and the Roman nations, the chief stream of these fierce hordes
moved down by the valley of the Danube and debouched on the Balkan
Peninsula. Doubtless they fought many a savage battle with the
aborigines in Thessaly and Thrace. Of these battles we have no records,
and no absolute certainty, indeed, that the Mediterranean shore was
colonised by a race from the North, though all the facts that we are
learning now from the researches of modern archaeologists point to that
conclusion. But whatever the prehistoric state of the Balkan Peninsula,
the first sure records from written history show it as a vexed area
peopled by widely different and mutually warring races, and subject
always to waves of war and invasion from the outside. The Slav historian
Jirecek concludes that the Balkan Peninsula was inhabited at the
earliest times known to history by many different tribes belonging to
distinct races--the Thraco-Illyrians, the Thraco-Macedonians, and the
Thraco-Dacians. At the beginning of the third century, the Slavs made
their first appearance and, crossing the Danube, came to settle in the
great plains between the river and the Balkan Mountains. Later, they
proceeded southwards and formed colonies among the Thraco-Illyrians, the
Roumanians, and the Greeks. This Slav emigration went on for several
centuries. In the seventh century of the Christian era a Finno-ugric
tribe reached the banks of the Danube. This tribe came from the Volga,
and, crossing Russia, proceeded towards ancient Moesia, where it took
possession of the north-east territory of the Balkans between the Danube
and the Black Sea. These were the Bulgars or Volgars, near cousins to
the Turks who were to come later. The Bulgars assumed the language of
the Slavs, and some of their customs. The Serbs or Serbians, coming from
the Don River district had been near neighbours of the Volgars or
Bulgars (in the Slav languages "B" and "V" have a way of interchanging),
and were without much doubt closely allied to them in race originally.
Later, they diverged, tending more to the Slav type, whilst the Bulgars
approached nearer to the Turk type.
There may be traced, then, in the racial history of the Balkans these
race types: a Mediterranean people inhabiting the sea-coast and
possessing a fairly high civilisation, the records of which are being
explored now in the Cretan excavations; an aboriginal people occupying
the hinterland of the coast, not so highly cultivated as the coast
dwellers (who had probably been civilised by Egyptian influences) but
racially akin to them; a Northern people coming from the shores of the
Baltic and the North Sea before the period of written history and
combining ultimately with the people of the coast to found the Grecian
civilisation, leaving in the hinterland, as they passed towards the sea,
detachments which formed other mixed tribes, partly aboriginal, partly
Nordic; various invading peoples of Semitic type from the Levant; the
Romans, the Goths and the Huns, the Slavs and the Tartars, the Bulgars
and the Serbs, the Normans, Saracens, and Turks. Because the Balkan
Peninsula was on the natural path to a warm-water port from the north to
the south of Europe; because it was on the track of invasion and
counter-invasion between Asia and Europe, all this mixture of races was
forced upon it, and as a consequence of the mixture a constant clash of
warfare. There was, too, a current of more peaceful communication for
purposes of trade between the Levant and the Black Sea on the one side
and the peoples of the Baltic Sea on the other side, which flowed in
part along the Balkan Peninsula.
In _Italy and her Invaders_ Mr. T. Hodgkin suggests:
During the interval from 540 to 480 B.C. there was a brisk
commercial intercourse between the flourishing Greek colonies on
the Black Sea, Odessos, Istros, Tyras, Olbia and
Chersonesos--places now approximately represented by Varna,
Kustendjix, Odessa, Cherson, and Sebastopol--between these cities
and the tribes to the northward (inhabiting the country which has
been since known as Lithuania), all of whom at the time of
Herodotus passed under the vague generic name of Scythians. By this
intercourse which would naturally pass up the valleys of the great
rivers, especially the Dniester and the Dnieper, and would probably
again descend by the Vistula and the Niemen, the settlements of the
Goths were reached, and by its means the Ionian letter-forms were
communicated to the Goths, to become in due time the magical and
mysterious Runes.
One fact which lends great probability to this theory is that
undoubtedly, from very early times, the amber deposits of the
Baltic, to which allusion has already been made, were known to the
civilised world; and thus the presence of the trader from the
South among the settlements of the Guttones or Goths is naturally
accounted for. Probably also there was for centuries before the
Christian Era a trade in sables, ermines, and other furs, which
were a necessity in the wintry North and a luxury of kings and
nobles in the wealthier South. In exchange for amber and fur, the
traders brought probably not only golden staters and silver
drachmas, but also bronze from Armenia with pearls, spices, rich
mantles suited to the barbaric taste of the Gothic chieftains. As
has been said, this commerce was most likely carried on for many
centuries. Sabres of Assyrian type have been found in Sweden, and
we may hence infer that there was a commercial intercourse between
the Euxine and the Baltic, perhaps 1300 years before Christ.
A few leading facts with dates should give a fairly clear impression of
the story of the Balkan Peninsula. About 400 B.C. the Macedonian Empire
was being founded. It represented the uprise of a hinterland Greek
people over the decayed greatness of the coast-dwelling Greeks. At that
time the northern part of the Balkan Peninsula was occupied by the Getae
or Dacians. Phillip of Macedon made an alliance with the Getae.
Alexander the Great of Macedonia thrashed them to subjection and carried
a great wave of invasion into Asia from the Balkan Peninsula.
[Illustration: TRAJAN'S COLUMN IN ROME
Commemorates the victories which brought all the Balkan Peninsula under
the Roman sway]
About the year 110 B.C. the Romans first came to the Balkan Peninsula,
finding it inhabited as regards the south by the Greek peoples, as
regards the north by the Getae or Dacians. The southern people were
quickly subdued: the northern people were never really subdued by the
Romans until the time of Trajan (the first century of the Christian
era). He bridged the Danube with a great military bridge at the spot now
known as Turnu-Severin, and Trajan's Column in Rome commemorated the
victories which brought all the Balkan Peninsula under the Roman sway.
Trajan found that the manners and customs of the Dacians were similar to
those of the Germans. These sturdy Dacians were conquered but not
exterminated by the Romans. Dacia across the Danube was made into a
Roman colony, and the present kingdom of Roumania is supposed to
represent the survival of that colony, which was a mixture of Roman and
Dacian blood.
In the third century of the Christian era the Goths made their first
appearance in the Balkan Peninsula. The Roman Empire had then entered
into its period of decline. The invasions of the Visigoths, the Huns,
the Vandals, the Ostrogoths, and the Lombards were to come in turn to
overwhelm the Roman civilisation. The Gothic invasion of the Balkan
Peninsula was begun in the reign of the Roman Emperor Phillip. Crossing
the Danube, the Goths ravaged Thrace and laid siege to Marcianople (now
Schumla) without success. In a later invasion the Goths attacked
Philippopolis and captured it after a great defeat of the Roman general,
Decius the younger. Then the Roman Emperor (Decius the elder) himself
took the field and was defeated and killed in a great battle near the
mouth of the Danube (A.D. 251). That may be called the decisive date in
the history of the fall of the Roman Empire. It was destined to retrieve
that defeat, and to shine with momentary glory again for brief
intervals, but the destruction of the Emperor and his army by the Goths
in 251 was the sure presage of the doom of the Roman Power.
One direct result of the battle in which Decius was slain was to bring
the headquarters of the Roman Empire to the Balkan Peninsula. It was
found that a better stand could be made against the tide of Gothic
invasion from a new capital closer to the Scythian frontier.
Constantinople was planned and built, and became the capital of the
Roman Empire (A.D. 330), and thus brought to the Balkan stage the death
throes of the mightiest world-power that history has known. From that
date it is wise for the sake of clearness to speak of the Roman Empire
as the Greek Empire, though it was some time after its settlement in
Constantinople before it became rather Greek than Roman in character.
With the issue between the Goths and the Greek Empire, in which peaceful
agreements often interrupted for a while fierce campaigns, I cannot deal
here at any length. It soaked the Balkan Peninsula deep in blood. But it
was only the first of the horrors that were to mark the death of the
Empire. Late in the fourth century of the Christian Era there burst into
the Balkans from the steppes of Astrakhan and the Caucasus--from very
much the same district that was afterwards to supply the Bulgars and the
Serbs--the Tartar hordes of the Huns. Of these Huns there is a vivid
contemporary Gothic account.
We have ascertained that the nation of the Huns, who surpassed all
others in atrocity, came thus into being. When Filimer, fifth king
of the Goths after their departure from Sweden, was entering
Scythia, with his people, as we have before described, he found
among them certain sorcerer-women, whom they called in their native
tongue Haliorunnas (or Al-runas), whom he suspected and drove forth
from the midst of his army into the wilderness. The unclean spirits
that wander up and down in desert places, seeing these women, made
concubines of them; and from this union sprang that most fierce
people [of the Huns], who were at first little, foul, emaciated
creatures, dwelling among the swamps, and possessing only the
shadow of human speech by way of language.
With the Alani especially, who were as good warriors as themselves,
but somewhat less brutal in appearance and manner of life, they had
many a struggle, but at length they wearied out and subdued them.
For, in truth, they derived an unfair advantage from the intense
hideousness of their countenances. Nations whom they would never
have vanquished in fair fight fled horrified from those
frightful--faces I can hardly call them, but rather--shapeless
black collops of flesh, with little points instead of eyes. No hair
on their cheeks or chins gives grace to adolescence or dignity to
age, but deep furrowed scars instead, down the sides of their
faces, show the impress of the iron which with characteristic
ferocity they apply to every male child that is born among them,
drawing blood from its cheeks before it is allowed its first taste
of milk. They are little in stature, but lithe and active in their
motions, and especially skilful in riding, broad-shouldered, good
at the use of the bow and arrows, with sinewy necks, and always
holding their heads high in their pride. To sum up, these beings
under the form of man hide the fierce nature of the beast!
[Illustration: _Sébah & Joaillier_
THE WALLS OF CONSTANTINOPLE FROM THE SEVEN TOWERS]
Not a lovable people the Huns clearly: and the modern peoples who have
some slight ancestral kinship with them hate to be reminded of the fact.
I remember the fierce indignation which a French war correspondent
aroused in Bulgarian breasts by his description--which had eluded the
censor--of the passage of a great Bulgarian train of ox wagons because
he compared it to the passage of the Huns.
The Huns were, with the exception of the Persians who had vainly
attacked the Greek States at an earlier period, the first successful
Asiatic invaders of Europe. For a full century they ravaged the Empire,
and the Balkan Peninsula felt the chief force of their barbarian rage.
By the fifth century the waves of the Hun invasions had died away,
leaving distinct traces of the Hunnish race in the Balkans. The Gepidae,
the Lombards, and later the Hungarians and the Tartars then took up the
task of ravaging the unhappy land which as the chief seat of power of
the Greek Empire found itself the first objective of every invader
because of that dignity and yet but poorly protected by that power.
Constantinople was never taken by these barbarians, but at some periods
little else than its walls stood secure against their ravages.
Meanwhile the first Saracens had appeared in the Peninsula, curiously
enough not as invaders nor as enemies, but as mercenary soldiers in the
army of the Greek Empire fighting against the Goths. To a Gothic
chronicler we are again indebted for a vivid picture of these Saracens,
"riding almost naked into battle, their long black hair streaming in the
wind, wont to spring with a melancholy howl upon their chosen victim in
battle and to suck his life-blood, biting at his throat." Perhaps the
Gothic war correspondent of the day studied picturesqueness more than
accuracy, like some of his modern successors. But, without a doubt, the
first contact with Asiatics, whether Huns or Saracens, gave to the
European peoples a horror and a terror which had never been inspired by
their battles among themselves--battles by no means bloodless or
merciful. As the Asiatic waves of invasion later developed in strength
the unhappy Balkan Peninsula was doomed to feel their full force as they
poured across the Bosphorus from Asia Minor, and across the Danube from
the north-eastern Asiatic steppes.
It would be vain to attempt to chronicle even in the barest outline all
the horrors inflicted upon the Balkans from the date of the first
invasion of the Huns in the fourth century to the first invasion of the
Turks in the fourteenth century. To say that those ten centuries were
filled with bloodshed suffices. But they also saw the development of the
Balkan nationalities of to-day, and cannot therefore be passed over
without some attention. Let us then glance at each Balkan nation during
that period.
_Roumania_, inhabited by the people of the old Roman-Dacian colony,
stood full in the way of the Northern invasions of Goths, of Huns, of
Hungarians, of Tartars. It was almost submerged. But in the thirteenth
century the country benefited by the coming of Teutonic and Norman
knights. The two kingdoms or principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia
(which, combined, make up modern Roumania) were founded in this century.
_Bulgaria._--In the seventh century Slavs had begun to settle in
Bulgaria. The Bulgars or Volgars followed. They were akin to the Tartars
and the Turks. Together Slavs and Bulgars formed the Bulgarian national
type and founded a very robust nation which was almost constantly at war
with the Greek Empire (with its capital at Constantinople). At times
Bulgaria seriously threatened Constantinople and the Greek Empire. A
boastful inscription in the Church of the Forty Martyrs at Tirnovo, the
ancient capital of Bulgaria, records:
In the year 1230, I, John Asên, Czar and Autocrat of the
Bulgarians, obedient to God in Christ, son of the old Asên, have
built this most worthy church from its foundations, and completely
decked it with paintings in honour of the Forty holy Martyrs, by
whose help, in the 12th year of my reign, when the Church had just
been painted, I set out to Roumania to the war and smote the Greek
army and took captive the Czar Theodore Komnenus with all his
nobles. And all lands have I conquered from Adrianople to Durazzo,
the Greek, the Albanian, and the Serbian land. Only the towns round
Constantinople and that city itself did the Franks hold; but these
too bowed themselves beneath the hand of my sovereignty, for they
had no other Czar but me, and prolonged their days according to my
will, as God had so ordained. For without him no word or work is
accomplished. To him be honour for ever. Amen.
The wars were carried on under conditions of mutual ferocity which still
rule in Bulgarian-Grecian conflicts. An incident of one campaign was
that the Greek Emperor, Basil, the Bulgar-slayer, having captured a
Bulgarian army, had the eyes torn out of all the men and sent them home
blinded, leaving, however, one eye to every centurion, so that the poor
mutilated wretches might have guides. In the early part of the
fourteenth century a Bulgarian Czar, Michael, almost captured
Constantinople. He formed a league with the Roumanians and the Greeks
against the Serbs, who were at the time promising to become the
paramount power of the peninsula. But Czar Michael was defeated by the
Serbs and Bulgaria became dependent upon Serbia, which was the position
of affairs at the time of the first serious Turkish invasion of the
Balkan Peninsula.
_Serbia._--Invading tribes of Don Cossacks began to come in great
numbers to the Balkan Peninsula in the sixth century. In the seventh
century they were encouraged by the Greek Empire to settle in Serbia, on
condition of paying tribute to Constantinople. They set up a kind of
aristocratic republic of a Slav type. In the ninth century they began to
fight with the neighbouring and kindred Bulgarians. Early in the tenth
century (A.D. 917) the Bulgarians almost effaced Serbia from the map;
but the Serbs recovered after half a century, only to come shortly
afterwards under the sway of the Greeks. In the eleventh century the
Serbians held a very strong position and were able to harass the Greek
Empire at Constantinople. They entered into friendly relations with the
Pope of Rome, and for some time contemplated following the Roman rather
than the Eastern Church. In the twelfth century King Stephen of Serbia
was a valued ally of the Greek Empire against the Venetians. He
established Serbia as a European "Power," and the Emperor Frederick
Barbarossa visited his court at Belgrade. This king was the first of a
succession of able and brave monarchs, and Serbia enjoyed a period of
stable prosperity and power unusually lengthy for the Balkans. Except
for the strife between the Eastern and Roman Catholic Churches for
supremacy in Serbia, the nation was at peace within her own borders, and
enjoyed not only a military but an economic predominance in the Balkans.
Mining and handicrafts were developed, education encouraged, and the
national organisation reached fully to the average standard of European
civilisation at the time. By 1275 the Serbs were the chief power in the
Balkans. They defeated the Greeks, marched right down to the Aegean and
reached the famous monastery of Mount Athos, to which the first King
Stephen (Nemanya) had retired in 1195 when he abdicated.
In 1303 the Serbians forgot their quarrel with the Greeks and helped
them against the Turks, undertaking an invasion of Asia Minor. In 1315
they again saved the Greek Empire from the Turks. When in 1336 Stephen
Dushan, the greatest of Serbian kings, who has been compared to Napoleon
because of his military genius and capacity for statesmanship, came to
the throne, Bulgaria was under the suzerainty of Serbia, and the Serb
monarch ruled over all that area comprised within the boundaries of
Bulgaria, Serbia, Albania, Montenegro, and Greece by the recent treaty
of Bucharest (1913). King Stephen Dushan was not only a great military
leader, he was also a law-maker and a patron of learning. His death on
December 13, 1356, at the Gates of Constantinople--he is said to have
been poisoned--opened the way for the Turkish occupation of the Balkan
Peninsula. That occupation was made possible in the first instance by
the mutual jealousies of the Christian peoples of the Balkans. It was
kept in existence for centuries by the same weaknesses arising from
jealousy. In 1912 it was swept away in a month because in a spasm of
common sense the Balkan Christian peoples had united. In 1913 it was in
part restored because internecine strife had broken out again among the
Balkan natives recently allied. It will probably continue until the
lesson of unity is learned again.