THE TURK IN THE BALKANS
It seems to be difficult to speak without violent prejudice on the
subject of the Turk in the Balkans. One school of prejudice insists that
the Turk is the finest gentleman in the world, who has been always the
victim and not the oppressor of the Christian peoples by whose side he
lives, and whose territories he invaded with the best of motives and
with the minimum of slaughter. The other school of prejudice credits the
Turk with the most abominable cruelty, treachery, and lust, and will
hear no good of him. In England the issue is largely a political one. A
great Liberal campaign was once founded on a Turkish massacre of
Bulgarians in the Balkans. That made it a party duty for Liberals to be
pro-Bulgarian and anti-Turk, and almost a party duty for Conservatives
to find all the Christian and a few ex-Christian virtues in the Turk.
Before attempting to judge the Turk of to-day, let us see how he stands
in the light of history. It was in the fourth century that the first
Saracens came to the Balkan Peninsula as allies of the Greek Empire
against the Goths. They were thus called in by a Christian Power in the
first instance. It was not until the fourteenth century that the Turks
made a serious attempt to occupy the Balkan Peninsula. They were helped
in their campaign considerably by the Christian Crusaders, who,
incidentally to their warfare against the Infidel who held the Holy
Sepulchre, had made war on the Greek Empire, capturing Constantinople,
and thus weakening the power of Christian Europe at its threshold.
Bulgaria, too, refused help to the Greeks when the Turkish invasion had
to be beaten off. The Turks' coming to the Balkans was thus largely due
to Christian divisions.
[Illustration: _Sébah & Joaillier_
SANCTA SOPHIA, CONSTANTINOPLE
Built by Justinian I, consecrated 538, converted into a Mohammedan
mosque 1453. It is now thought that the design of its famous architect,
Anthemius of Tralles, was never completed. The minarets and most of the
erections in the foreground are Turkish]
Without being able at the time to capture Constantinople, the invading
Turks occupied soon a large tract of the Balkan Peninsula. By 1362 they
had captured Philippopolis and Eski Zagora, two important centres of
Bulgaria. It was not a violence to their conscience for some of the
Bulgarian men after this to join the Turkish army as mercenaries. When
the sorely-beset Greeks sent the Emperor John Paleologos to appeal for
help to the Bulgarians, he was seized by them and kept as a prisoner.
A united Balkan Peninsula would have kept off the Turks, no doubt. But a
set of small nations without any faculty of permanent cohesion, and
hating and distrusting one another more thoroughly than they did the
Turk, could do nothing. The Balkan nations of the time, though united
they would have been really powerful, allowed themselves to be taken in
detail and crushed under the heels of an invader who was alien in blood
and in religion. In 1366 the Bulgarians became the vassals of the Turks,
and the Serbians were defeated at Kossovo. The fall of the Greek Empire
and the subjugation of Roumania followed in due course, and by the
seventeenth century the Turks had penetrated to the very walls of
Vienna. At one time it seemed as if all Europe would fall under the sway
of Islam, for, as elsewhere than in the Balkans, there were Christian
States which were treacherous to their faith. But that happily was
averted. For the Balkan Peninsula, however, there were now to be
centuries of oppression and religious persecution. It will be convenient
once again to set forth under three national headings the chief facts
regarding the Turkish conquest of the Balkans.
_Bulgaria._--By 1366 weakness in the field and civil dissensions had
brought Bulgaria to the humiliation of becoming the vassal of the Turk.
In 1393 the Turks, not content with mere suzerainty, occupied Bulgaria
and converted it into a Turkish province. In 1398 the Hungarians and the
Wallachians (Roumanians) made a gallant attempt to free Bulgaria from
the Turkish yoke, but failed. Some of the Bulgarians joined in with
their Turkish conquerors, abandoned the Christian religion for that of
Islam, and were the ancestors of what are known to-day as the Pomaks.
The rest of the people gave a reluctant obedience to the Turkish
conqueror, preserving their Christian faith, their Slav tongue, and
their sense of separate nationality. The Greeks, who had come to some
kind of terms with the Turkish invaders, assisted to bring the Bulgarian
people under subjection. The Greek church and the Greek tongue rather
than the Turkish were sought to be imposed upon the Bulgarians. The
subject people accepted the situation with occasional revolts, but more
tamely than some other Balkan nations. It was not a general meek
acquiescence, though it was--possibly by chance, possibly because of the
fact that a racial relationship existed between conqueror and
conquered--not so fierce in protest as that of the Serbians. In writing
that, I do not follow exactly the Bulgarian modern view, which
represents as much more vivid the sufferings and the protests of the
Bulgarian people, and ignores altogether the racial relationship which
existed between Bulgarian and Turk, and enabled a section of the
Bulgarian nation to fall into line with the conqueror and embrace his
religion and his habits of life, a relationship which to this day shows
its traces in the Bulgarian national life. But in Balkan history as
written locally, there is usually a certain amount of political
deflection from the facts. A modern Balkan historian, giving what may be
called the official national account of the times of the Turkish
domination, says (_Bulgaria of To-day_):
Had the rulers been of the same race and religion as the
vanquished, the subjection might have been more tolerable. Ottoman
domination was not, however, a simple political domination.
Ottoman tyranny was social as well as political. It was keenly and
painfully felt in private as well as in public life; in social
liberty, manners and morals; in the free development of national
feeling; in short, in the whole scope of human life. According to
our present notions, political domination does not infringe upon
personal liberty, which is sacred for the conqueror. This is not
the case with Turkish rule. The Bulgarians, like the other
Christians of the Balkan Peninsula, were, both collectively and
individually, slaves. The life, possessions, and honour of private
individuals were in constant peril. The bulk of the people, after
several generations, calmed down to passivity and inertia. From
time to time the more vigorous element, the strongest
individualities, protested. Some Bulgarian whose sister had been
carried off to the harem of some pasha would take to the mountains
and make war on the oppressors. The haidukes and voivodes,
celebrated in the national songs, kept up in mountain fastnesses
that spirit of liberty which later was to serve as a cement to
unite the new Bulgarian nation.
But it is a noteworthy fact that the Osmanlis, being themselves but
little civilised, did not attempt to assimilate the Bulgarians in
the sense in which civilised nations try to effect the intellectual
and ethnic assimilation of a subject race. Except in isolated
cases, where Bulgarian girls or young men were carried off and
forced to adopt Mohammedanism, the government never took any
general measures to impose Mohammedanism or assimilate the
Bulgarians to the Moslems. The Turks prided themselves on keeping
apart from the Bulgarians, and this was fortunate for our
nationality. Contented with their political supremacy and pleased
to feel themselves masters, the Turks did not trouble about the
spiritual life of the _rayas_, except to try to trample out all
desires for independence. All these circumstances contributed to
allow the Bulgarian people, crushed and ground down by the Turkish
yoke, to concentrate and preserve its own inner spiritual life.
They formed religious communities attached to the churches. These
had a certain amount of autonomy, and, beside seeing after the
churches, could keep schools. The national literature, full of the
most poetic melancholy, handed down from generation to generation
and developed by tradition, still tells us of the life of the
Bulgarians under the Ottoman yoke. In these popular songs, the
memory of the ancient Bulgarian kingdom is mingled with the
sufferings of the present hour. The songs of this period are
remarkable for the oriental character of their times, and this is
almost the sole trace of Moslem influence.
In spite of the vigilance of the Turks, the religious associations
served as centres to keep alive the national feeling.
A conquered people which was allowed to keep up its religious
institutions (with "a certain amount of autonomy"), and later to found
national schools ("to keep alive the national feeling"), was not exactly
ground to the dust. And truth compels the admission that Bulgaria under
Turkish rule enjoyed a certain amount of material prosperity. When the
Russian liberators of the nineteenth century came to Bulgaria they
found the peasants far more comfortable than were the Russian peasants
of the day. The atrocities in Bulgaria which shocked Europe in 1875 were
not the continuance of a settled policy of cruelty and rapine. They were
the ferocious reprisals chiefly of Turkish Bashi-Bazouks (irregulars)
following upon a Bulgarian rising. The Turks felt that they had been
making an honest effort to promote the interests of the Bulgarian
province. They had just satisfied a Bulgarian aspiration by allowing of
the formation of an independent Bulgarian church, though this meant
giving grave offence to the Greeks. Probably they felt that they had a
real grievance against the Bulgars. After the Bulgarian atrocities of
1875 there ended the Turkish domination of the country.
_Serbia._--In December 1356 the great Serbian king, Stephen Dushan,
soldier, administrator, and economist, died before the walls of
Constantinople, and the one hope of the Balkan Peninsula making a stand
against the Turks was ended. Shortly after, the Turks had occupied
Adrianople, their first capital in Europe, defeating heavily a combined
Serbian and Greek army. Later the Serbian forces were again defeated by
the great Turkish sultan Amurath I., and the Serbian king was killed on
the battle-field. King Lazar, who succeeded to the Serbian throne, made
some headway against the invaders, but in 1389, at the Battle of
Kossovo, the Serbian Empire came tumbling to ruins. The Turkish leader,
Amurath, was killed in the fight, but his son Bajayet proved another
Amurath and pressed home the victory. Serbia became a vassal state of
Turkey.
But there was to be still a period of fierce resistance to the Turk. In
1413 the Turks, dissatisfied with the attitude of the Serbs, entered
upon a new invasion of the territory of Serbia. In 1440 Sultan Amurath
II. again overran the country and conquered it definitely, imposing not
merely vassalage but armed occupation on its people. John Hunyad, "the
White Knight of Wallachia," came to the rescue of the Serbs, and Amurath
II. was driven back. An alliance between Serbs and Hungarians kept the
Turk at bay for a time, and in 1444 Serbia could claim to be free once
again. But the respite was a brief one. In 1453 Constantinople fell to
the Turks, and the full tide of their strengthened and now undivided
power was turned upon Serbia. A siege of Belgrade in 1457 was repulsed,
but in 1459 Serbia was conquered and annexed to European Turkey. Lack of
unity among the Serbs themselves had contributed greatly to the national
doom, but on the whole the Serbs had put up a gallant fight against the
Turks. And even now a section of them, the Montenegrins, in their
mountain fastnesses kept their liberty, and through all the centuries
that were to follow never yielded to the Crescent.
The condition of the Serbs in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was
very unhappy. They could come to no manner of contentment with Turkish
rule, and sporadic revolts were frequent. At times the Hungarians from
the other side of the Danube came to the aid of the revolters, but never
in such strength as to shake seriously the Turkish power. Very many of
the Serbs left their country in despair and sought refuge under the
Austrian flag. To-day a big Serb element, under the flag of
Austro-Hungaria, is one of the racial difficulties of the Dual
Monarchy.
[Illustration: _Underwood & Underwood_
KING PETER OF SERBIA]
The Serb exiles carried to their new homes their old sympathies, and
largely because of their efforts Austria in 1788 went to the rescue of
Serbia, and for a brief while the land again was free. But the Turkish
power returned and Serbia stumbled blindly, painfully through years of
reprisals, which culminated in the great massacre of Serbs by Turks in
1804, which, like the Turkish massacre of Bulgarians in 1875, really
declared the doom of the Turkish power in the country. Following this
massacre George Petrovic, "Black George," or "_Kara_ George," as the
Serbians knew him, raised the standard of revolt among his countrymen.
He was a fierce blood-stained man, this first liberator of the Serbs, a
man on whose head was the blood of his father and his brother. His grim
character was fitted for his grim task. The story of that task will come
better within the scope of a following chapter, which will tell of the
liberation of the Balkans from the Turks.
_Roumania._--It was not until 1391 that the Turks crossed the Danube and
attacked the kingdoms of Wallachia and Moldavia, and reduced Wallachia
to the position of a tributary state. King Mirtsched made a gallant
fight against the invaders, but the Turks proved too strong. That was
the beginning of a Turkish dominance of Roumania, which was never so
complete as that exercised over Bulgaria and Serbia, but left the two
Roumanian kingdoms of Wallachia and Moldavia as vassal states. Mutual
jealousy between them prevented effective operations against the Turk,
and helped to make their vassalage possible. In the fifteenth century
both kingdoms had great rulers. Wallachia was ruled by Vlad the Impaler,
an able but cruel man, who seems to have earned the infamy of inventing
a form of torture still practised in the Balkans as a matter of
religious proselytising, that of sitting the victim on a sharp stake,
and leaving him to die slowly as the stake penetrated his body. Moldavia
had as king Stephen the Great, who has no such ghastly reputation of
cruelty. But able princes could effect little with communities weakened
by the luxury of the nobles and the helpless poverty of the serfs.
Still, the Roumanians had intervals of victory. In the sixteenth century
Michael the Brave (whose memory is commemorated by a statue in
Bucharest) drove the Turks back as far as Adrianople, liberating
Roumania and Bulgaria. He annexed Moldavia and Transylvania to
Wallachia, and was in a sense the founder of modern Roumania. But the
union thus effected was not enduring and the Turkish ascendancy grew
stronger. The Turkish suzerain forced upon the Roumanian peoples
governors of the Greek race, who carried on the work of oppression and
spoliation with an industrious effectiveness quite beyond the capacity
of the Turk, who at his worst is a fitful and indolent tyrant.
In the last quarter of the seventeenth century the Russian Power began
to take a close interest in Roumania. In 1711 there was a definite
Russian-Roumanian alliance. By this time the Roumanians were resolutely
hostile to the Turkish domination. True, they had been spared most of
the cruelties which were in Servia a customary and in Bulgaria an
occasional concomitant of Turkish rule. But they were deeply injured by
the corrupt, the luxurious, the exacting administration of the Greek
rulers forced upon them by the Turkish government. Though they suffered
little from massacre they suffered much from "squeeze." There was not
only the greed of the Turk but the greed of the intermediate Greek to be
satisfied. From 1711 until the final liberation of Roumania, Roumanian
sympathies were generally with the Russians in the frequent wars waged
by them against Turkey. In 1770 the Russians occupied Roumania and freed
it for a time from the Turk, but in 1774 the Roumanians went back to
the Turkish suzerainty. During the Napoleonic wars Russia gave Roumania
some reason to doubt the disinterestedness of her friendship by annexing
the rich province of Bessarabia, a part of the natural territory of the
Roumanian people. The year 1821 saw the outbreak of the Greek war of
independence, in which Roumania took no part, having as little love for
the Greek as for the Turk. She won one advantage for herself from the
war, the right to have her native rulers under Turkish suzerainty. In
1828, as a result of a Russo-Turkish war, Roumania won almost complete
freedom, conditional only on tribute being continued to be paid to the
Sultan. She found a new master, however, in Russia, and was forced to
keep up a Russian garrison within her borders, nominally as a protection
against Turkey, really as a safeguard against the growth in her own
people of a spirit of national independence. The Crimean War (1853)
freed Roumania from this Russian garrison, and in 1856 the Treaty of
Paris declared Roumania to be an independent principality under Turkish
suzerainty.
[Illustration: _Underwood & Underwood_
KING NICOLAS OF MONTENEGRO]
_Montenegro._--The existence of Montenegro as a separate Balkan state
dates back to the Battle of Kossovo. The Montenegrin is a Serbian
Highlander, and whilst the Serbian Empire flourished, claimed for
himself no separate national entity. When, however, the rest of Serbia
was subjugated by the Turks, "the Black Mountain" held out, and there
gathered within its little area of rocky hill fastnesses the free
remnants of the Serbian race. The story of that little nation is quite
the most wonderful in all the world. It transcends Sparta, and makes the
fighting record of the Swiss seem tame. At the height of its power
Montenegro had a population of perhaps 8000 males, and little source of
riches from mines, from trade, or even from fertile agricultural land.
Yet Montenegro kept the Turks from her own territory, and was able at
times to give valuable help to the rest of Europe in withstanding the
invasion of Islam.
The system of government instituted was that of a theocratic despotism:
the head of the nation was its chief bishop, and he had the right to
nominate a nephew (not a son--as a bishop of the Greek Communion he
would be celibate) to succeed him. The Montenegrin dynasty was founded
in 1696 by King Danilo I., and has endured to this day, though recently
the functions of the chief priest and king have been separated, and the
present monarch is purely a civil ruler.
It is not possible here to give even the barest mention of the leading
facts in the proud history of little Montenegro. In the seventeenth
century she was the valued friend of Venice against the Turks; in the
eighteenth century she was aided by Peter the Great of Russia; later she
met without being subdued the warlike power of Napoleon. All the time,
during every century, every year almost, there was constant warfare with
the Turks. One campaign lasted without interruption from 1424 to 1436,
and was marked by over sixty battles. The little population of the patch
of rocks in the mountains was worn down by this incessant fighting, but
was recruited by a steady flow of exiles from other parts of the Balkan
Peninsula, anxious for freedom and for revenge on the Turk. Sometimes
the tide of battle went sorely against the mountaineers, and almost all
their country was put under the heel of the Moslem. But always one eyrie
was kept for the free eagles, and from it they swooped down with renewed
strength to send the invader once again across their borders. Repeatedly
the Turk levied great armies for the conquest of Montenegro (once the
Turkish force reached to the number of 80,000). Repeatedly great
European Powers which had proffered help or had been begged for help
failed little Montenegro at a crisis. But never were the stout hearts of
the Black Mountain quelled. In 1484, when Zablak had to be evacuated and
the whole nation was confined to the little mountain fortress of
Cettinje, Ivan the Black offered to his people the choice of ending the
war and making peace with the Turks. They rejected the idea, and swore
to stand by the freedom of Montenegro until the last. The oath was never
broken. Right down to 1832 a free Montenegro faced Turkey. In that year
the Turks, despairing of an occupation of the country, suggested that
Montenegro should agree at least to pay tribute. That offer was rejected
and yet another war entered upon. A war against Austria followed, in
which the desperate Montenegrins used the type of their printing presses
to make bullets for the soldiers.
[Illustration: MONTENEGRIN TROOPS
Weekly Drill and Inspection of Weapons]
That there was lead type to be so used shows that the Montenegrins had
not altogether neglected the arts of peace. In 1493 a printing press had
been set up in Cettinje and the first Montenegrin book printed in the
Cyrillic character. During the next century this printing press was
kept busy with the issue of the Gospels and psalters under the rule of
the brave Bishop Babylas. The state of Montenegro at this time aroused
the admiration of the Venetians, and there is extant a book in praise of
Montenegro written in 1614 by a Venetian noble, Mariano Bolizza.
When the time came for the other Balkan States to throw off the Turkish
yoke Montenegro was not reluctant to join in the movement for
liberation, and she was later first in the field in the campaign of
1912.
This very brief record of the leading facts of Balkan history has now
brought each of the peoples up to the stage at which the final and
successful effort was made with the help of Russia to drive the Turks
out of Balkan territory. The story of that effort will be told in the
succeeding chapter.