The Balkans: A Short History (5 page)

The same mountains that obstruct river passages to the sea precluded the construction of canals of the kind which helped commerce to flourish in eighteenth-century England and France. They also complicated the construction of railways. Rail moved across Europe like a frontier that replaced wooden towns with brick ones—in a slow and gradual movement from the north and west to the southeast of the continent. While the basic German network was in place by 1870, and had ramified to the Habsburg empire by the end of that decade, it was only after the late 1880s that key rail lines were laid south of the Danube. Both Habsburg and Ottoman authorities made a determined effort to modernize their Balkan domains, but political, strategic and topographical factors intervened and impeded rail construction. And while railways allowed goods to penetrate inland markets from the coastal areas, they did not help create a more unified or coherent regional economy. Rail networks themselves were less dense in the Balkans than anywhere else in Europe west of Brest Litovsk: 21.9 kilometers per thousand square kilometers in Greece in the 1920s, and 31.5 in the old prewar kingdom of Romania, compared with 97 in France, 123 in Germany and 370 in Belgium.
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Inheriting a rich network of paved interregional roads from the Romans, the Ottoman authorities developed an effective postal service using inns, caravanserais and post stations that allowed the Tartar government couriers to find fresh horses every few hours and a night’s lodging where necessary. By the eighteenth century, however, this system faced collapse—there were delays and not enough horses—though it still worked well enough in 1841 to impress one traveler as “perhaps the only public service reasonably organized which exists in this country.” By the mid-nineteenth century, the roads were so poor that some detected a deliberate policy by the Turkish authorities of keeping them in disrepair. “It is a favorite idea with all barbarous princes,” asserted one writer, “that the badness of the roads adds considerably to the natural strength of their dominions.” But mountain villagers had their own interest in bad roads too—they made it harder for the authorities to collect taxes. They made trade costlier as well. “Want of roads beyond the district makes exportation next to impossible” was one diagnosis why the fertile Monastir plain exported so little in the mid-nineteenth century. Bulgarian roads at the same time were in “a state of nature” and said to be “good enough in summer.” Bessarabian roads were notorious as among the worst in Europe well into the 1930s. Before the improvements ordered by Serbian Prince Miloš Obrenovic
, the one hundred kilometers from Belgrade to Kragujevac took a week to travel.

From the middle of the nineteenth century onward, schemes of road improvement were pursued throughout the Balkans; in the Ottoman domains, however, improvements initiated by one governor were often simply abandoned once he had been posted elsewhere; for want of upkeep, for instance, a new road laid near Serres in the 1860s was rendered impassable to wheeled transport in just five years. The Salonika Cycling Club, formed at the end of the nineteenth century, was unable to organize excursions beyond the city itself because the roads were so bad. The coming of the railways, which did form the object of Ottoman official concern, often resulted in reduced maintenance of local roads as goods and commerce shifted to the train.
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If well-kept roads had not been necessary to Ottoman patterns of conquest, it was largely thanks to the empire’s comparative advantage over its competitors in beasts of burden—the water buffalo, mule, donkey and, above all, its special weapon, the camel, whose novelty and significance astonished contemporary observers. In 1684, the year after the Turks had been beaten back from the gates of Vienna, Johann Christoph Wagner included in his sweeping survey of the Ottoman domains a long eulogy of the virtues of this “splendidly useful” animal, which was “especially reputed” as “the best creation of God.” “What shall I tell you of ?” Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote a friend in 1717. “You never saw Camels in your Life and perhaps the Description of them will appear new to you.” Rapid advances of the Ottoman armies, setting out from Edirne or Constantinople at the start of the campaigning season, relied especially upon these temperamental animals, capable of carrying huge loads over dirt roads, indifferent to mud and slower to tire or thirst than horses. “There are three hundred camels that carry weapons,” noted Konstantin Mihailovic, who saw service in the Ottoman army in the late fifteenth century, “for they have no wagons, so that they will not be delayed with them when they march to war.” For the acute Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, there were “two things from which, in my opinion, the Turks derive the greatest advantage and profit, rice among cereals and camels among beasts of burden; both are admirably adapted to the distant campaigns which they wage. . . . Camels can carry very heavy burdens, endure hunger and thirst, and require very little attention.” Camels continued to be employed in the region well after the heroic age was over; near Delphi in 1884, Agnes Smith spied farmers using some—perhaps descendants of the animals plundered by Greek revolutionaries from Ottoman troops in the Peloponnese during the War of Independence six decades earlier. By the 1920s they had become a curiosity for tourists.
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By contrast, the horses that were used by merchants for the fifty-day journey from Macedonia to Vienna—caravans of as many as one thousand conveyed goods from the Balkans to central Europe well into the nineteenth century—fared poorly on the rough tracks and irregular, stony ground. The horses of Rustchuk, in Danubian Bulgaria, which were specially bred for the army cavalry in the early nineteenth century, were prized for their endurance on rocky terrain. But horses were costly to feed, water and look after. Down on the plains, buffaloes and oxen drew carts, plows and even carriages; while in the hills themselves, mules remained the pack animal of choice as late as the 1940s, when trains of hundreds of mules—their drivers fluent in the recently defunct language of the muleteer—carried German and British arms across the mountains of Yugoslavia and Greece during the war.

In what was always a border zone of Europe, the costs to any state of exerting its authority over the region were thus raised further by the character of the terrain itself. Insecurity was endemic for centuries and took its toll on economic life. In the summer of 1997, after an uprising in southern Albania, armed gangs held up cars across the Greek border and made travel at night unsafe even for the local police. They were the most recent chapter in a much older story; a century earlier, the Ottoman state had been unable to guarantee the safety of travelers after dark. In some areas, of course, it could not protect them during the day either. “The Pasha, who was concerned for our safety, would not listen to our passing the Balcan at Shumla, as robberies and assassinations had occurred there,” wrote von Tietz in 1836, “but recommended us to go by Tirnovo which, although more inconvenient, was much more safe.” By sea, travelers faced the threat of pirates between the fifteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Pirates remained a menace in the Aegean until they were stamped out by joint Ottoman–Greek action in 1839.
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The Ottoman state could cope with this state of affairs. It was used to negotiating with, and often amnestying and bringing into official service those outlaws, rebels and brigands too powerful or elusive to punish and kill. Only with the rise of the modern state in the nineteenth and twentieth century—an entity defined in part by its insistence on preserving a monopoly of the use of armed force, and in part by the extent of its ambition to control its own population—were these challengers to its prestige sought out and hunted down. When a brigand band looted Sámos in 1925 and held the island’s capital for several days, the newspapers in Athens were loud in condemnation: “We should not spare any sacrifice, any means in order to eliminate by radical means the architects of acts which dishonor the country and provoke greater harm to its progress,” wrote one. “The State has not only the duty but also the highest interest to put a stop, without the slightest delay, to these misfortunes . . . and to show that its power stands above every individual and everything.” Modern policing, bureaucracies and roads altered the balance of power in favor of the central authorities; as a result, brigandage and piracy ceased in the twentieth century to plague commerce and travel. Only brief periods of acute destabilization—in the 1940s and 1990s—called up pale echoes of what had once been a chronic social problem.
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Push population figures very far back into history and you quickly come up with hypotheses rather than facts. Absolute numbers for populations anywhere in the world before the eighteenth century are largely a matter of guesswork. Even for the nineteenth century, estimates of the size, say, of the Bulgarian population have ranged from 500,000 to 8 million. On the one hand, Balkan statistics have long been manipulated for political purposes; on the other, official Ottoman figures were not designed for modern scholarly purposes. Even so, the long-run demographic trends in the Balkans are fairly clear. For much of its history, the southeast of Europe was a wilderness with large quantities of uncultivated land and relatively few people, especially in the lowlands. Depopulation probably occurred as a consequence of chronic political instability in the final stages of the Byzantine empire, and was evidently not remedied by the Ottoman efforts to resettle the Balkans with nomadic Turkic colonists. Population densities in 1600, when the Ottoman empire was flourishing, were still perhaps half those of France or Italy, and one third those of the Low Countries, though they were far higher than in the Ottoman domains in Asia. “The whole country from Ragusa [Dubrovnik] until within a few miles of Constantinople is for the most part uncultivated and horrible” noted Benedetto Ramberti, the Venetian ambassador to the Porte, “not by nature but by the negligence of the inhabitants, full of dangerous forests and terrible precipices, very unsafe on account of brigands, very wretched as to accommodation.” “In the Ottomans’ estate,” wrote William Lithgow in 1632, “there be great Forrests, and desartuous Countries, proceeding of the scarcity of people to inhabit there.”
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Still, population rose and fell in the peninsula apace with the European average until the seventeenth century. Not only did the Ottoman conquest in the fifteenth century
not
interrupt this trend, the sixteenth century was evidently a time of prosperity and high population growth in the Balkans, as elsewhere in Europe. Evidence from local studies indicates that even Christians who had fled the invading Turks returned from Venetian domains to reclaim their properties.
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The real crisis came later in the seventeenth century. Times were hard everywhere in Europe, but in the southeast they were disastrously affected by a combination of political instability, endless wars, frequent plagues and famine. Plague in particular could cut a city’s population by half or even more, and the Balkans were vulnerably located on the disease routes from the Near East to western Europe; some cities were afflicted almost every year. “The sickness rageth as if it would dispeople the citty,” noted Sir Thomas Roe in 1625 as he fled Constantinople. He estimated that the death toll was more than 1,000 daily at its height, and “neare 200,000” in all. In the plagues of 1781–1783, more than 300 a day died in Salonika—“reduced almost to a desert,” in the words of the Venetian consul there—while 16,000 died in Sarajevo. Visitations of the plague varied enormously in the number of their victims—not all had such catastrophic consequences—just as they did in the rest of Europe. London and Marseilles were also struck down by plague in the seventeenth century—Marseilles may have lost half its inhabitants in 1720. The difference was that by the start of the eighteenth century, most of western and central Europe had strict and effective quarantine measures in place (often applied against travelers from Ottoman domains)—indeed, control and management of contagious diseases were a major stimulus to the emergence of the modern bureaucratic state; in the Levant, by contrast, plagues recurred for another century and a half, and the last great epidemic struck as late as the years 1835–1838.
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Overall figures are unreliable but the trend is clear. Only at the beginning of the nineteenth century did the population of the Balkans begin to approach again the level it had reached in the late sixteenth century and start to move consistently upward. By 1831, at the time of the first Ottoman census, it was probably around 10 million—or just under 20 million when including the populations of Serbia and the future Croatia and Romania. Once the Balkan states won independence, their population began increasing very fast. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the old Ottoman problem of underpopulation had been replaced by the historically new pressure of high birth rates and falling death rates. In 1920 the population of the Balkans was roughly 42.5 million, and rising faster than anywhere else in Europe. “The cardinal facts,” according to one report of 1940, “are that [the Balkan states] are agricultural, overpopulated and poor.”
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