The Balkans: A Short History Read Online Free

Islamic and Christian peoples. It reflected the reasoning that had created powerful and influential lobbies in the rest of Europe for Bulgarian, Serbian and Greek liberation from Ottoman rule. But it was precisely this attitude that bred the almost inevitable disappointment which followed. As early as 1836, after Balkan nationalism’s first triumph, a French traveler to Greece had registered the emotional shift. “The Greeks as slaves of the Turks were to be pitied,” he wrote. “The Greeks once free merely horrify. Their life is a sequence of thefts and assaults, fires and assassinations their pastime.” In similar fashion, the liberal optimism of 1912 was quickly and even more rudely to be dashed. The victorious Balkan states, fresh from beating the Ottoman army, immediately turned on one another in the Second Balkan War. News emerged of the brutality waged by their regular armies against civilians, especially in Macedonia, Kosovo and the borders of Montenegro. “That’s how all this looks when you see it close up,” reported Trotsky. “Meat is rotting, human flesh as well as the flesh of oxen; villages have become pillars of fire; men are exterminating ‘persons not under twelve years of age’; everyone is being brutalized, losing their human aspect.” 21
    Above all, in June 1914, came the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand by the Serbian nationalist student Gavrilo Princip. The second Bosnian crisis, and the third Balkan war, of the twentieth century turned into the continental bloodbath that finally destroyed Europe’s old order. For this, if nothing else, the Balkans were henceforth cursed in the European consciousness. Only those most committed to one or other of these small nations continued to argue that they were worth supporting. Even fewer bothered to argue that they should not be loaded down with the cultural assumptions of the West but understood on their own terms. A truer and less jaundiced understanding of the Balkans requires us to try to unravel the ways in which attitudes to the region have been shaped not only by events that took place there but by more sweeping narratives of the development of European identity and civilization. The basic historiographical challenge is how to fit the centuries of Ottoman rule into the story of the continent as a whole. For many eminent scholars of Europe the answer has been obvious. Sir John Marriott begins his sober history of the Eastern Question with the stark assertion that “the primary and most essential factor in the problem is the presence, embedded in the living flesh of Europe, of an alien substance. That substance is the Ottoman Turk.” Ottoman rule, in other words, sundered the Balkans from the rest of the continent and ushered in a new dark ages for the region, since—in the words of Polish historian Oskar Halecki—“throughout the whole course of European history in its proper sense, Europe was practically identical with Christendom.” The fact that before the Turks, the region formed part of the only marginally less despised Byzantine empire simply reinforced this way of looking at the problem. 22
    Not everyone buys this straightforward equation of Europe with (Catholic) Christianity. Arnold Toynbee and Nicolae Iorga, the eminent Romanian historian, have both argued—following, after all, the claims of Mehmed the Conqueror himself—that it was actually the Ottoman empire which was the successor to the “universal state” of Byzantine Orthodoxy. Iorga in particular suggested that there had been a “Byzantium after Byzantium” surviving under the rule of the sultans. But this assertion of the affinities that might bind Christianity and Islam has largely fallen on deaf ears. Many more scholars—and probably the mass of popular opinion—have followed Halecki, who insists that “from the European point of view, it must be observed that the Ottoman empire, completely alien to its European subjects in origin, tradition and