Europe: A History (80 page)
Serbia suffered a similar fate. Pressed by the neighbouring kingdom of Hungary, where their south Slav relations had joined the Catholic fold, the Serbs balanced between their Roman and their Orthodox connections. The country was first united under Stefan I Nemanya (1114–1200), who had obliged Byzantium to
concede his independence. Nemanya’s youngest son, St Sava (1175–1235), a monk of Athos, had emancipated the Serbian Church from the Greek archbishop at Okhrid. He persuaded his brother, Stefan II, to accept a royal crown from the Pope. Medieval Serbia reached its apogee under the ferocious Stefan IV Dushan (1308–55). In 1346, when Dushan was crowned Tsar, Serbia controlled several former Bulgarian and Byzantine provinces in the south; a Serbian Patriarch ruled from Pec (Ipek); and an imperial
Zakonnik
or Codex regulated the administration. Dushan exercised suzerainty over the young Vlach principalities, and even made plans to conquer Constantinople. But Serbia was no match for the advancing Ottomans. On 15 June 1389, at Kosovo, on the ‘Field of the Blackbirds’, the Serbian host was humbled. The last Serbian king was slain and the Ottoman sultan treacherously murdered. Serbia joined Bulgaria as an Ottoman province.
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ZADRUGA
]
North of the Danube the Latin-speaking Vlachs, strengthened by migrants from the mountains of Transylvania, succeeded in creating independent principalities of their own. Henceforth Wallachia and Moldavia became the frontier posts of Christian rule in the Balkans. The plight of the Balkan Christians reawakened the crusading traditions of the West. In 1344 a naval league headed by Venice and the Hospitallers retook Smyrna from the Ottomans for a season. In 1365 Amadeus VI of Savoy briefly recaptured Gallipoli, and released the emperor imprisoned by the Bulgars. In 1396 a crusading army led by Sigismund of Hungary met disaster at Nikopolis on the Danube. In 1402 a garrison of crusaders under the French knight Boucicault manned the walls of Constantinople, awaiting the Sultan’s imminent assault. Beyond the Black Sea, the Orthodox Christians of the former Rus’ gradually eased the grip of the Tartar yoke. In this they were assisted by the two rising power-centres of the north-east—the Grand Duchy of Moscow and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania,
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NIKOPOLIS
]
The princes of Moscow grew from obscurity to prominence in the two centuries following the Mongol invasion. First, by a combination of valour and treachery, they established their supremacy over numerous Rurikid princelings in the surrounding region of Vladimir-Suzdal. The hereditary title of Grand Prince of Vladimir was theirs from 1364. Secondly, by currying favour with the Khan of the Golden Horde, they obtained the
yarlyk
to act as the Mongols’ chief tribute-gatherers, accepting responsibility for the payments, and arrears, of all other princes. Ivan I (r. 1301–40), known as Kalita or ‘the Money-Bag’, spent more of his reign on the road to Sarai than he did in Moscow. Karl Marx wrote that he blended ‘the characters of the Tartars’ hangman, sycophant, and slave-in-chief‘.
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Thirdly, by lavishly patronizing the Orthodox Church they added an aura of religiosity to their political supremacy. In 1300 the Metropolitan Archbishop of Kiev moved to Vladimir, and from 1308 resided in Moscow. Monasteries were planted far and wide in the forest wilderness, forming new centres for commercial and territorial expansion. Despite the Mongol blockade, and a long river and sea journey of two months, close contact was maintained with the Patriarch of Constantinople. Muscovy was a patrimonial state
par excellence
, where the
prince’s subjects and their possessions could be treated with total disregard. The hold over the resources of the apanage princedoms inexorably strengthened Muscovite hegemony. In 1327 Ivan Kalita helped the Mongols to suppress a rebellion by his chief rival, the city of Tver’ on the Volga. Yet in 1380–2 Prince Dmitri Donskoy (r. 1350–89) challenged the military might of the Mongols for the first time. At Kulikovo, on 8 September 1380, he won a famous victory over the invincible horde, only to see Moscow burned in revenge two years later. In 1408 Dmitri’s son, Vasili I (r. 1389–1425), was tempted to withhold the tribute but, with Moscow besieged, relented. The Muscovites were waxing powerful, but were still vassals.
ZADRUGA
A
RTICLE
70 of the law code of Stefan Dushan, published c.1349–54, makes a clear reference to the existence of extended families and of joint patrilinear households.
‘A father and son, or brothers, who live in the same house and share the same hearth’
, it states,
‘but who have separate food and property, should work like the other peasants.’
The Serbian Tsar was evidently trying to ensure that every peasant household could be taxed on the same basis.
The Article has been invoked, however, to justify the assumption that the
zadruga
or ‘joint patrilinear household’ has been the standard form of social organization among the Balkan Slavs since time immemorial. It is now commonplace for overenthusiastic scholars to discuss the role of the
zadruga
in Slavonic kinship patterns at all points between prehistory and contemporary Europe. Yet expert comment has recently exploded some of the grosser generalizations. It turns out that the term
zadruga
is an academic neologism first recorded in a Serbian dictionary in 1818. It has never been current in the speech of the people who are supposed to practise it. Moreover, it is not actually mentioned in the text of Stefan Dushan’s law code. Although one may conclude from Article 70 that some form of joint household did exist in medieval Serbia, there is no reason to assume that the
zadruga
was the standard or prevalent form in all parts of the realm.
In modern times, the distribution of the
zadruga
across the Balkans is extremely patchy. It is common in the mountainous stock-breeding zone that runs from Bosnia and Hercegovina to Montenegro, Macedonia, and central Albania. It is frequently encountered in the Rhodopes and the Balkan Range. But it is not known on the Adriatic littoral or in most of Bulgaria. It is present in sectors of the old Military Frontier or
Krajina
settled by Serb immigrants to Croatia in the sixteenth century, and among the non-Slavic Vlachs. It is largely absent from Greece and Romania.
Most seriously, a cursory survey of recent scholarship on the subject, especially in the West, shows that the
zadruga
is employed for any number of contradictory purposes. Above all it is used, with very little foundation of fact or detailed research, to bolster spurious assertions either about the collectivist inclinations of all Slav peoples, or about the uniform structure of a (non-existent) pan-Slav society, or about the backwardness of the Balkans, the
Volksmuseum
of Europe. In short, it is in real danger of becoming a sort of racial myth, a worthy partner to that other figment of the Western imagination, ‘the Slav soul’.
1
NIKOPOLIS
O
N
the evening of 25 September 1396 a great French champion, the Sire de Coucy, was dragged before the victorious Sultan Bajazet on the field of Nikopolis. Together with some other rich crusaders, including Jean de Nevers, the future Duke of Burgundy, who were being held for ransom, he watched as the scimitars of the Sultan’s guards decapitated several thousand lesser Christian captives. (The crusaders had recently treated their Muslim captives likewise.) He was marched in chains over the 350 miles to Gallipoli, then taken to Bursa in Asia, where he wrote his last will and died, heirless.
Nikopolis is forever associated with this last great catastrophe of the crusading movement. The principal fortress of Bulgaria, it commanded the lower Danube; and its capture by the Ottomans had provoked the expedition raised by the King of Hungary. An army of Latin knights had assembled at Buda to avenge the Sultan’s boast that he would ‘feed his horse oats on the altar of St Peter’s’. They brought wine and silks, but no catapults. So the siege of Nikopolis failed; and they had to face the Ottomans in the open. A premature assault by the French, as at Crécy, was exploited by the cavalry of the Sultan’s Serbian allies: and the main body of crusaders was encircled. Sigismund of Hungary escaped, and a Polish knight famously swam the Danube in full armour. But most of the survivors were captured. Their defeat left Bulgaria in Muslim hands for 500 years, ended the Latin challenge in the East, and presaged the fall of Constantinople.
Enguerrand de Coucy VII (1340–97), Count of Soissons, has been taken as a man whose biography encapsulates the ‘crisis of Christendom’. Lord of the largest castle in Europe, at Coucy in Picardy, and a patron both of Froissart and Chaucer, he was personally involved in almost all the catastrophes of a catastrophic age. His father was probably killed at Crécy. His mother, a Habsburg, died of the Black Death. After Poitiers he spent five years as a hostage in England, where he married the King’s daughter. He fought alongside Hawkswood, the
condottiere
, in Savoy, against the ‘Free Companies’ which infested France, and in the Swiss campaign of 1375–6. He was the first ashore at Tunis (1390). He loyally served a rotten French monarchy in all the contortions of imperial rivalry and the papal schism. When Hungarian envoys arrived in Paris, calling for a crusade ‘in the name of kinship and the love of God’, he eagerly volunteered.
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It was in this period that the Muscovites began to call their state by the Greek name for Rus’,
Rossiya
(Russia), and to call themselves Russians. These Muscovite-Russians had never ruled over Kiev; but the disability did not prevent them from regarding Moscow as the sole legitimate heir of the Kievan succession. It was their variant of east Slav speech that provided the roots of the modern Russian language. Their tendentious version of history, which persisted in confusing Muscovy-Russia with the whole of Rus’, was not accepted by those other east Slavs who remained beyond Moscow’s rule for centuries to come.
The Lithuanians were the last pagans of Europe. Secure in their remote Baltic forests, they escaped both the initial advance of the Teutonic Knights and the Mongol conquest. They were ruled by Baltic warrior princes who recognized a historic opportunity in the disintegration of the Kievan state. Hence, at the same time that Moscow was consolidating the northern and eastern remnants of Rus’, Lithuania began its takeover of the western and southern remnants. Three great leaders stand out in a state-building exercise that, in the period, outstripped even the Muscovite effort—Grand Duke Gediminas (c.1275–1341), his son Algirdas (r. 1345–77), and Jogaila (r. 1377–1434), who launched the historic union with Poland. A century of raiding, castle-building, and tribute-gathering brought spectacular results throughout the vast Dnieper basin. White Ruthenia (now Belarus’) was absorbed whole. Red Ruthenia (or Galicia) was carved up in 1349 with the Poles. Kiev was taken in 1362, after Algirdas had broken the Mongol grip at the Battle of the Blue Water in the Dnieper bend. In 1375 he took Polotsk. The Lithuanians were not checked until in 1399 they were defeated by the Tartars in the far south, on the River Vorksla. By that time Lithuania stretched virtually ‘from sea to shining sea’, from the Baltic to the Black Sea approaches. From 1386 its ruling circles were converted to Roman Catholicism (see p. 430), and were increasingly polonized. But the mass of the population, in White Ruthenia and Ukraine, were Orthodox Slavs. They called themselves
rusini
or ‘Ruthenes’; and it is the Ruthenian variants of east Slav speech from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania that provided the roots of the modern Byelorussian and Ukrainian languages. Until 1700 the official language of the Grand Duchy, which was largely administered by literate Christian Slavs, was not Lithuanian but Ruthenian.
At first sight the Orthodox Church was necessarily more passive than its Catholic counterpart. Its head, the Patriarch of Constantinople, was closely
bound to the fate of the Byzantine Empire. Yet its role was not trivial. It was the stubborn determination of the Orthodox Church in the East, where Christendom was under attack from Mongols and Turks, which sowed the seeds of modern nationhood among the Serbs, Bulgars, and Romanians of the Balkans, among the Russians of Muscovy, and among the Ruthenes of Lithuania.
At the other end of the Peninsula, in Spain, the
Reconquista
was virtually suspended. (See Appendix III, p. 1241.) After 1248 the Moorish armies had retreated to the Sierra Nevada, in whose shadow the emirate of Granada could flourish for two centuries more. Thenceforth it was the only Muslim-ruled state in Iberia. Beyond its borders local Muslim leaders, notably Ibn-Hud, had overthrown their African Moorish overlords and had established themselves in ‘Al-Andaluz’ as dependents of Castile. The result was a broad frontier region, whose countryside was dominated by the estates of the military orders and whose towns were swelled by Muslim and Jewish migrants. The majority of the population were Spanish speakers, irrespective of their religion. The kingdom of Portugal, independent since 1179, controlled the Atlantic seaboard, where it conquered the Algarve in 1250. The kingdom of Navarre, which straddled the Basque districts of the northern Pyrenees, was subject from 1234 to French rulers, who maintained their independence until 1516.
The victorious kingdom of Leon and Castile, having swept from the northern to the southern coast, where it surrounded Granada on all sides, was left in a state of internal anarchy. The first race of
conquistadores
grew rich from the plunder of the south and from the establishment of great latifundia. The successors of Ferdinand III the Saint (r. 1217–52), who was eventually canonized for his part in the
Reconquista
, were plagued by disputed successions, by fractious nobles, by the vagaries of the
Cortes
or ‘diets’, and by the
hermandades
or ‘armed leagues’ of the cities. Alfonso X (r. 1252–84) competed unsuccessfully for the imperial crown in Germany. In 1340 at Salado, Alfonso XI (r. 1312–50) achieved the first Castilian victory over the Moors for almost a century, and crossed the Straits to Algeciras. Pedro the Cruel (r. 1350–69) deserved the epithet. Henry III (r. 1390–1406) combined a talent for administration with an alliance with the Lancastrian kings of England. But he died young; and Castile passed under the despotic rule of the Constable, and Master of the Order of St James, Alvaro de Luna. Thanks to the sturdy, African merino sheep which grazed on the uplands of the
Meseta
or Plateau, Castile became Europe’s principal exporter of wool, which was carried from Bilbao and Santander to Flanders.
