Category Archives: Turkey

by | 7 November 2026 · 5:26 am

The Second Sick Man of Europe, 1914

From The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark (Harper, 2013), pp. 287-290:

For Austria-Hungary, the Balkan Wars changed everything. Above all, they revealed how isolated Vienna was and how little understanding there was at the foreign chancelleries for its view of Balkan events. St Petersburg’s hostility to the empire and its utter disregard for Vienna’s interests in the region could be taken for granted. More worrying was the indifference of the other powers. The reluctance of the international community to see that Austria faced genuine security threats on its southern periphery and had the right to counteract them reflected a broader shift in attitudes. The western powers had traditionally viewed Austria as the fulcrum of stability in central and eastern Europe and thus as a power that must be preserved at all costs. But by 1913, this maxim no longer appeared so compelling. It was undermined by the tendency – which swiftly gained ground among the Entente states after 1907 – to think of Europe in terms of alliance blocs, rather than as a continental geopolitical ecosystem in which every power had a role to play. The anti-Austrian animus of much political reportage in Britain and France during the last pre-war years reinforced this tendency by spreading the view that Austria-Hungary was an anachronistic and doomed entity, or, as the Serbian papers put it, the ‘second sick man of Europe’ (after the Ottoman Empire, to which this epithet was more commonly applied).

Particularly alarming was the lukewarm nature of German support. Berlin firmly endorsed a policy of confrontation with Serbia in October 1913 – at a time when support could be offered at little risk of a broader conflict – but its record was otherwise patchy. In February 1913, when troop strengths on both sides of the Galician border were so elevated that war seemed imminent, even the military urged caution. Moltke wrote to his colleague Conrad von Hötzendorf, assuring him that while Germany would not hesitate to support Austria-Hungary against a Russian attack, ‘it would be difficult to legitimate German intervention in a war provoked by Austria, for which there would be no understanding in the German people’.

One of Vienna’s chief concerns was the attitude of the German Kaiser, Wilhelm II. Far from urging his government to solidarity with the Austrians, Wilhelm forbade the Foreign Office in Berlin to participate in any action that ‘might impede the Bulgars-Serbs-Greeks in their victorious progress’. The Balkan Wars, he argued, were part of a world-historical development that was going to drive Islam back out of Europe. If one allowed the Balkan states to consolidate themselves at the expense of Turkey, this would create the basis for a stable array of entities that in due course might form a confederation of some kind, the ‘United States of the Balkans’. Nothing could be better suited to the preservation of the peace, the buffering of Austro-Russian tensions and the emergence of a new regional market for German exports. And Wilhelm continued to expatiate in this vein. During the crisis of November 1912 over Serbian access to the Adriatic, Wilhelm explicitly rejected the notion that the German government had any obligation to support Vienna against Belgrade. To be sure, the current changes on the peninsula were ‘uncomfortable’ for Vienna, but he would ‘under no circumstances consider marching against Paris and Moscow for the sake of Albania and Durazzo’. On 9 November, he even proposed to the Foreign Office that it should urge Vienna to place Albania under the suzerainty of a Serbian prince.

There was little comfort in these quixotic speculations for the harassed decision-makers in Vienna. At a secret conference with his friend Archduke Franz Ferdinand on 22 November 1912, Wilhelm did express his readiness to support Austria’s position on the Serbian troop presence in Albania, even at the risk of war with Russia, but only if it were certain that neither Britain nor France would intervene; an isolated Russia, he added, would be extremely unlikely to risk such a conflict. Yet even these mildly encouraging signals were cancelled out three days later by official messages from Bethmann Hollweg and Kiderlen-Wächter to the effect that Germany would seek a multilateral solution. In February 1913, when the Balkan winter crisis was at its height, Wilhelm wrote a letter to Franz Ferdinand urging that he seek a negotiated de-escalation with Russia on the grounds that the matters at issue were not important enough to justify a continuation of the current armed stand-off. On 18 October, when the Albanian crisis was seething, Wilhelm conceded in a conversation with Conrad that the situation might ‘finally’ have arrived ‘in which a great power can no longer look on but must reach for the sword’. Yet only ten days later, he was telling the Austrian ambassador in Berlin that Vienna should mollify Belgrade by bribing the leadership with large cash gifts (‘from the king downwards they can all be had for money’), military exchange programmes and improved terms of trade. In December 1913, Wilhelm assured the Austrian envoy in Munich that ‘a few millions’ would suffice to buy Berchtold a firm foothold in Belgrade.

In a report dispatched on 25 April 1914, Fritz Count Szapáry, a foreign ministry high-flyer and specialist in Austro-German relations now serving as minister in St Petersburg, painted a bleak picture of recent German Balkan policy. The solid German backing that had helped to bring the Bosnian annexation crisis to a close in March 1909 was a thing of the past, Szapáry declared. What had replaced it was – Szapáry quoted the mealy-mouthed jargon of the decision-makers in Berlin – a ‘conflict-free dialogue directed towards the consolidation of economic-cultural activity zones’. All of Berlin’s forward positions vis-à-vis Russia had been abandoned, and Berlin took no steps whatsoever without first consulting St Petersburg. During the Balkan Wars, Germany had compromised the Austrian position by joining the chorus of support for déinteressement, pressing Vienna to accept Serbian conquests and provocations. It all amounted to the wholesale ‘sacrifice of Austria-Hungary’s Balkan interests’. This was a rather histrionic view of the matter, coloured by Szapáry’s Hungarian apprehensions at Russia’s deepening support for Romania, but it captured a widely felt mood of frustration at the failure of Berlin to deliver any real leverage on the Balkan peninsula. Especially galling was the haste with which Berlin had endorsed the Treaty of Bucharest, thereby depriving Austria of the opportunity to better the position of Bulgaria, which the Austrians, but not the Germans, viewed as a potential counterweight to Serbian power.

This sense of isolation, coupled with the repeated provocations of 1912–13, in turn heightened the readiness in Vienna to resort to unilateral measures. There were signs that the resistance to militant solutions among the key decision-makers in Vienna was waning. The most conspicuous sign of the change in mood was the decision to recall Conrad at the height of the Russian mobilization scare. ‘You must again become Chief of the General Staff,’ the Emperor wearily informed the general at an audience on 7 December 1912. After his reinstatement Conrad continued, of course, to counsel war, but that was nothing new. More worrying was the diminishing resistance to extreme measures among the other key actors. During the autumn of 1912, nearly everyone (including the Hungarian prime minister Tisza) at one point or another favoured a policy of confrontation backed up by the threat of military action. A notable exception was Franz Ferdinand, who warned Berchtold in a forceful letter of 12 October against allowing the monarchy to be dragged into Conrad’s ‘witches’ kitchen of war’. There was also Russia to think of, and Bulgaria, and the Germans, who would presumably shrink from any high-risk démarche. As for Belgrade, Franz Ferdinand added, the only people there who sought a conflict were the regicide war party (the party that, unbeknown to him, would slay him eight months later). He did not, he concluded, believe there ‘existed any necessity’ for war. The pressure to wage it came exclusively from those servants of the Austro-Hungarian crown who ‘consciously or unconsciously worked to damage the monarchy’. And yet, on 11 December 1912, during a meeting of senior officials with the Emperor at Schönbrunn palace, even Franz Ferdinand broke with his accustomed support for peace at any price to advocate a military confrontation with Serbia.

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by | 5 November 2026 · 5:02 am

War on Ottomans Began World War I

From The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark (Harper, 2013), pp. 243-244, 249-250:

The cascade of wars that brought mayhem to the Balkans began in Africa. It was the Italian attack on Libya in 1911 that flashed the green light for the all-out Balkan assault on the Ottoman periphery. Unlike Egypt (now British) and Morocco (now effectively French), the three vilayets later known as Libya were integral provinces of the Ottoman Empire. The totally unprovoked Italian attack on these last Ottoman African possessions ‘broke the ice’, as one contemporary British observer put it, for the Balkan states. There had been talk for some years of a joint campaign to drive the Turks out of the Balkans, but nothing in the way of practical measures. Only after Italy’s assault were the Balkan states emboldened to take up arms. Looking back on these events in 1924, Miroslav Spalajković, the former political head of the Serbian foreign ministry in Belgrade, recalled that it was the Italian attack on Tripoli that had inaugurated the process that had led to the war: ‘all subsequent events are nothing more than the evolution of that first aggression’.

Italian diplomacy had been trying to secure an Italian sphere of interest in North Africa since before the turn of the century. In the summer of 1902, under the terms of the Prinetti–Barrère Accord, Rome and Paris had secretly agreed that in the event of a major redistribution of territory, France would take Morocco, while Italy would be granted a free hand in Libya. The agreement ratified a process of rapprochement with France, the arch-rival in northern Africa, that had been underway since 1898. A note from London in March 1902 helpfully promised that Britain would ensure that ‘any alteration in the status of Libya would be in conformity with Italian interests’. These agreements exemplify a policy of concessions that was designed to loosen the hold of the Triple Alliance on Italy, its most unreliable component. It was in keeping with this approach that Tsar Nicholas II agreed the ‘Racconigi Bargain’ of 1909 with King Victor Emmanuel III, in which Russia acknowledged Italy’s special interest in Libya in return for Italian support for Russian policy on access to the Turkish Straits.

Selling a policy of invasion and annexation to the politically active part of the Italian public was not difficult. Colonialism was on the march in Italy, as it was elsewhere, and the ‘memory’ of Roman Africa, when Libya had been the bread basket of the empire, assured Tripolitania a central place on the kingdom’s colonial horizons. In 1908, the modest Ufficio Coloniale in Rome was expanded and upgraded to the Direzione Centrale degli Affari Coloniali, a sign of the growing weight of African concerns within government. From 1909 onwards, the nationalist Enrico Corradini, supported by the nationalist organ L’Idea Nazionale, campaigned energetically for an imperialist enterprise focused on Libya; by the spring of 1911 he was openly demanding a policy of invasion and seizure. It was widely believed within the political elite that Italy needed somewhere ‘fruitful’ in which to plant her departing emigrants. Even the socialists were susceptible to these arguments, though they tended to shroud them in the language of economic necessity.

Until the summer of 1911, however, Italy’s leading statesmen remained faithful to the country’s ancient axiom that Italy must not provoke the break-up of the Ottoman Empire. As late as the summer of 1911, Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti was still firmly rejecting calls to adopt a more aggressive position vis-à-vis Constantinople on a range of issues relating to the governance of Ottoman Albania. It was the French intervention in Morocco that changed everything. The Italian foreign ministry believed it had excellent grounds for demanding a quid pro quo in Libya. In view of France’s ‘radical modification’ of the situation in the Mediterranean, it would now be impossible, an Italian foreign ministry senior official pointed out, to ‘justify’ a policy of continuing inaction ‘before public opinion’.

It was Britain, France and Russia, the powers of the Entente, rather than Italy’s allies within the Triple Alliance, that encouraged Rome to take action.

…

Underlying the disarray of the Triple Alliance was a development of even more fundamental importance. In mounting her assault on Libya, Italy had the more or less reluctant support of most of Europe. This in itself was a noteworthy state of affairs, for it revealed how comprehensively the pro-Ottoman European coalition had dissolved. In the 1850s, a concert of powers had emerged to contain Russian predations against the Ottoman Empire – the result was the Crimean War. This grouping had reconstituted itself in different form after the Russo-Turkish War at the Conference of Berlin in 1878 and had regrouped during the Bulgarian crises of the mid-1880s. It was now nowhere to be seen. In the opening phase of the Italian war, the Ottoman Empire had sought an English alliance, but London, reluctant to alienate Italy, did not respond. The two Balkan Wars that followed then broke the concert beyond repair.

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by | 27 October 2026 · 6:14 am

Europe’s Shifting Alliances, 1887-1907

From The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark (Harper, 2013), pp. 122-123, 157-159:

If you compare a diagram of the alliances among the European great powers in 1887 with a similar map for the year 1907, you see the outlines of a transformation. The first diagram reveals a multi-polar system, in which a plurality of forces and interests balance each other in precarious equilibrium. Britain and France were rivals in Africa and South Asia; Britain confronted Russia in Persia and Central Asia. France was determined to reverse the verdict of the German victory of 1870. Conflicting interests in the Balkans gave rise to tensions between Russia and Austria-Hungary. Italy and Austria were rivals in the Adriatic and quarrelled intermittently over the status of Italophone communities within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, while there were tensions between Italy and France over the latter’s policy in northern Africa. All these pressures were held in check by the patchwork of the 1887 system. The Triple Alliance between Germany, Austria and Italy (20 May 1882) prevented the tensions between Rome and Vienna from breaking into open conflict. The defensive Reinsurance Treaty between Germany and Russia (18 June 1887) contained articles deterring either power from seeking its fortunes in war with another continental state and insulated the Russo-German relationship against the fallout from Austro-Russian tensions.* The Russo-German link also ensured that France would be unable to build an anti-German coalition with Russia. And Britain was loosely tied into the continental system through the Mediterranean Agreement of 1887 with Italy and Austria – an exchange of notes rather than a treaty – whose purpose was to thwart French challenges in the Mediterranean and Russian ones in the Balkans or the Turkish Straits.

…

Move forward twenty years to a diagram of the European alliances in 1907, and the picture has changed utterly. You see a bipolar Europe organized around two alliance systems. The Triple Alliance is still in place (though Italy’s loyalty to it is increasingly questionable). France and Russia are conjoined in the Franco-Russian Alliance (drafted in 1892 and ratified in 1894), which stipulates that if any member of the Triple Alliance should mobilize, the two signatories will ‘at the first news of this event and without any previous agreement being necessary’ mobilize immediately the whole of their forces and deploy them ‘with such speed that Germany shall be forced to fight simultaneously on the East and on the West’. Britain is linked to the Franco-Russian Alliance through the Entente Cordiale with France (1904) and the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907. It will be some years before these loose alignments tauten into the coalitions that will fight the First World War  in Europe, but the profiles of two armed camps are already clearly visible.

The polarization of Europe’s geopolitical system was a crucial precondition for the war that broke out in 1914. It is almost impossible to see how a crisis in Austro-Serbian relations, however grave, could have dragged the Europe of 1887 into a continental war. The bifurcation into two alliance blocs did not cause the war; indeed it did as much to mute as to escalate conflict in the pre-war years. Yet without the two blocs, the war could not have broken out in the way that it did. The bipolar system structured the environment in which the crucial decisions were made. To understand how that polarization came about, it is necessary to answer four interlinked questions. Why did Russia and France form an alliance against Germany in the 1890s? Why did Britain opt to throw in its lot with that alliance? What role did Germany play in bringing about its own encirclement by a hostile coalition? And to what extent can the structural transformation of the alliance system account for the events that brought war to Europe and the world in 1914?

…

The Convention of 1907 was not driven by hostility towards, or fear of, Germany. It was rather the other way around: since Russia posed the greater threat to Britain across a greater range of vulnerable points, it was Russia that must be appeased and Germany that must be opposed. This had been the dominant British thinking on a rapprochement with Russia since before the turn of the century and it remained valid after the Convention was signed. In March 1909, Sir Charles Hardinge put the matter succinctly. ‘We have no pending questions with Germany except that of naval construction,’ he told Sir Arthur Nicolson, who would soon succeed him, ‘while our whole future in Asia is bound up with maintaining the best and most friendly relations with Russia. We cannot afford to sacrifice in any way our entente with Russia, even for the sake of a reduced naval programme.’ The same point can be made for the Russian decision-makers who agreed the Convention: this was not, for them, a policy directed against Germany, but rather a retrenching move designed to secure breathing space for domestic consolidation or (depending on whom you asked) greater freedom of external action. Of particular interest was the link between a deal over Persia and the prospect of British support for improved Russian access to the Turkish Straits. For Izvolsky and his ambassador in London, Count Benckendorff, the Straits question was ‘the core of the Convention’ and the key to securing favourable revision of Russian access rights at a ‘suitable time’ in the near future.

In other words: while the new international system that emerged from 1907 chiefly disadvantaged Germany, we should not assume that this outcome faithfully reflected the designs that brought it about. Only in the case of France can one speak of a policy that consistently assigned a high priority to containing Germany. It makes more sense to think of this array of agreements as the European consequence of world-historical transitions – the Sino-Japanese War and the emergence of Japan as a regional power, the fiscal burdens imposed by African conflicts and the Great Game in Central Asia, the retreat of Ottoman power in Africa and south-western Europe, and the rise of the China Question, meaning not just the great-power competition there but also the high levels of Chinese domestic turbulence that resulted. Germany’s ‘restlessness’ and its parvenu importuning were part of the picture, but they were perceived within a field of vision that encompassed broader concerns. The once widely held view that Germany caused its own isolation through its egregious international behaviour is not borne out by a broader analysis of the processes by which the realignments of this era were brought about.

In fact the causal relationship between antagonism to Germany and the new alliance system ran to some extent in the other direction: it was not that antagonism to Germany caused its isolation, but rather that the new system itself channelled and intensified hostility towards the German Empire. In Russia’s case, for example, the victory of Japan in the East and the provisional settlement of the imperial quarrel with Britain in Central Asia inevitably refocused foreign policy on the sole remaining theatre in which it could still pursue an imperial vision – the Balkans, an area where conflict with Austria-Hungary and, by extension, Germany was going to be difficult to avoid. The old factional divide within the Russian foreign policy community between ‘Asianists’ and ‘Europeanists’ was resolved in the latter’s favour. Under Izvolsky and Sazonov, Europeanists, who tended to distrust Germany and to favour good relations with Britain and France, always occupied a majority of the key positions. The Anglo-French Entente likewise neutralized the anti-British sentiment that before 1904 had intermittently diluted the Germanophobia of French statesmen.

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by | 21 October 2026 · 4:17 am

Serbian Dynastic Change, 1903

From The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark (Harper, 2013), pp. 3-4:

Shortly after two o’clock on the morning of 11 June 1903, twenty-eight officers of the Serbian army approached the main entrance of the royal palace in Belgrade.* After an exchange of fire, the sentries standing guard before the building were arrested and disarmed. With keys taken from the duty captain, the conspirators broke into the reception hall and made for the royal bedchamber, hurrying up stairways and along corridors. Finding the king’s apartments barred by a pair of heavy oaken doors, the conspirators blew them open with a carton of dynamite. The charge was so strong that the doors were torn from their hinges and thrown across the antechamber inside, killing the royal adjutant behind them. The blast also fused the palace electrics, so that the building was plunged into darkness. Unperturbed, the intruders discovered some candles in a nearby room and entered the royal apartment. By the time they reached the bedroom, King Alexandar and Queen Draga were no longer to be found. But the queen’s French novel was splayed face-down on the bedside table. Someone touched the sheets and felt that the bed was still warm – it seemed they had only recently left. Having searched the bedchamber in vain, the intruders combed through the palace with candles and drawn revolvers.

While the officers strode from room to room, firing at cabinets, tapestries, sofas and other potential hiding places, King Alexandar and Queen Draga huddled upstairs in a tiny annexe adjoining the bedchamber where the queen’s maids usually ironed and darned her clothes. For nearly two hours, the search continued. The king took advantage of this interlude to dress as quietly as he could in a pair of trousers and a red silk shirt; he had no wish to be found naked by his enemies. The queen managed to cover herself in a petticoat, white silk stays and a single yellow stocking.

…

The events of 11 June 1903 marked a new departure in Serbian political history. The Obrenović dynasty that had ruled Serbia throughout most of the country’s brief life as a modern independent state was no more. Within hours of the assassination, the conspirators announced the termination of the Obrenović line and the succession to the throne of Petar Karadjordjević, currently living in Swiss exile.

Why was there such a brutal reckoning with the Obrenović dynasty? Monarchy had never established a stable institutional existence in Serbia. The root of the problem lay partly in the coexistence of rival dynastic families. Two great clans, the Obrenović and the Karadjordjević, had distinguished themselves in the struggle to liberate Serbia from Ottoman control. The swarthy former cattleherd ‘Black George’ (Serbian: ‘Kara Djordje’) Petrović, founder of the Karadjordjević line, led an uprising in 1804 that succeeded for some years in driving the Ottomans out of Serbia, but fled into Austrian exile in 1813 when the Ottomans mounted a counter-offensive. Two years later, a second uprising unfolded under the leadership of Miloš Obrenović, a supple political operator who succeeded in negotiating the recognition of a Serbian Principality with the Ottoman authorities. When Karadjordjević returned to Serbia from exile, he was assassinated on the orders of Obrenović and with the connivance of the Ottomans. Having dispatched his main political rival, Obrenović was granted the title of Prince of Serbia. Members of the Obrenović clan ruled Serbia during most of its existence as a principality within the Ottoman Empire (1817–78).

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by | 20 October 2026 · 4:43 am

Balkan Wars Before World War

From The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark (Harper, 2013), pp. 42-45:

At the end of September 1911, only six months after the foundation of Ujedinjenje ili smrt!, Italy launched an invasion of Libya. This unprovoked attack on one of the integral provinces of the Ottoman Empire triggered a cascade of opportunist attacks on Ottoman-controlled territory in the Balkans. A loose coalition of Balkan states – Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria and Greece – mounted parallel assaults on Ottoman territory, thereby starting the First Balkan War (October 1912–May 1913). The result was a momentous victory for the Balkan allies over the Ottoman forces, who were driven out of Albania, Macedonia and Thrace. In the Second Balkan War (June–July 1913), the belligerents fought over the spoils of the first: Serbia, Greece, Montenegro and Romania fought Bulgaria for territories in Macedonia, Thrace and the Dobrudja.

The impact of these two wars is discussed in more detail in chapter 5. For the moment, it suffices to note that their most conspicuous beneficiary was Serbia, which acquired central Vardar, including Ohrid, Bitola, Kosovo, Štip and Kočani, plus the eastern half of the Sanjak of Novi Pazar (the western half fell to Montenegro). The kingdom’s territorial extent increased from 18,650 to 33,891 square miles and its population grew by more than one and a half million. The acquisition of Kosovo, the mythscape of Serbian national poetry, was a cause for great rejoicing, and since the kingdom now shared a border with Montenegro to the west, there was the prospect that Serbia might, through a political union with its neighbour, secure a permanent access to the Adriatic coast. Moreover, Serbia’s conduct of the war appeared to show that the years of military investment financed by French loans (there was another big one from a consortium of French banks in September 1913) had not been in vain. Three hundred thousand troops had been put into the field within three weeks of the first mobilization order. The Serbian army was now, as one foreign observer noted, ‘a factor to be reckoned with’, and Serbia itself a major regional power. Dayrell Crackanthorpe, the British minister in Belgrade, reported on the mood of public elation: ‘Serbia feels that she has, so to speak, attained her majority and [. . .] can pursue a national policy of her own.’ The kingdom’s political elites were currently ‘passing through a phase of extreme self-satisfaction’; everywhere in the press and in public debate, Serbian successes in the field were contrasted with ‘the failures of Austrian diplomacy’.

For many of those in the territories newly conquered by Belgrade, the imposition of Serbian rule brought harassment and oppression. The freedom of association, assembly and the press guaranteed under the Serbian constitution of 1903 (Articles 24, 25 and 22) were not introduced into the new territories; nor was Article 13 revoking the death penalty for political crimes. The inhabitants of the new areas were denied active or passive voting rights. In other words, the conquered areas acquired, for the moment, the character of a colony. The government justified these decisions on the grounds that the cultural level of the new territories was so low that granting them freedom would endanger the country. In reality the chief concern was to keep the non-Serbs who constituted the majority in many areas out of national politics. Opposition newspapers such as Radičke Novine and Pravda were quick to point out that the ‘new Serbs’ had actually enjoyed better political rights under the Turks than they did under Serbian administration.

On the Serbian side, this was a war in two kinds, fought not only by regular army units, but also, as so often in the past, by partisan bands, comitatjis, and other freelance fighters. In the newly conquered areas, the collusion between official authorities and informal groups had appalling consequences. There was much arbitrary destruction of Turkish buildings, such as schools, baths and mosques. British consuls managed to limit the damage in some instances by persuading the local Serbian military commanders that this or that building dated back to the empire of Stepan Dušan and was thus a part of the Serbian national patrimony; this ruse succeeded, for example, in the case of the beautiful sixteenth-century Turkish bridge in Macedonian Skopje (Üsküb).

In October and November 1913, the British vice-consuls in Skopje and Monastir [now renamed Bitola] reported systematic intimidation, arbitrary detentions, beatings, rapes, village-burnings and massacres by the Serbs in the annexed areas. ‘It is already abundantly evident,’ Vice-Consul Greig of Monastir reported, ‘that Moslems under Servian rule have nothing whatsoever to expect but periodical massacre, certain exploitation and final ruin.’ Eleven days later, he filed a further report warning that the ‘Bulgarian and especially the Moslem populations in the districts of Perlepe, Krchevo and Krushevo [were] in danger of extermination by the very frequent and barbarous massacres and pillage to which they are subjected by Servian bands’. By the end of the month, ‘pillages, murder and outrages of other kinds by bands of Servian comitajis and persons in league with them’ had created conditions of near-anarchy. Albanians and other Muslims, Bulgars, Vlachs and Jews, the vice-consul reported in December, dreaded the prospect of subjection to ‘a penniless state’ that seemed bent on ‘draining every community of its means of existence to an extent unknown in the blackest days of the Turkish regime’. From Bitola in the south, near the Greek border, the British vice-consul reported that the old municipal officials had been replaced by a new cohort of corrupt ‘Servian ex-propagandists’ whose ringleaders were ‘(1) an ex-barber, spy and Serbian agent [. . .] and (2) a local Serboman of unmentionable profession called Maxim’. ‘Nothing,’ Greig concluded, ‘could be more favourable to the enemies of Servia than the reign of terror set up by this clique.’

What is interesting about these reports is not merely their disturbing content, but the scepticism with which they were received by the British minister Crackanthorpe, a man of pronounced Serbophile sentiment. Crackanthorpe, whose most important source on the events unfolding in the annexed areas was ‘a Servian officer of his acquaintance’, accepted the official denials of the Belgrade government at face value and tried to mute the impact of Greig’s dispatches from Monastir by suggesting to the Foreign Office that the vice-consul was the dupe of hysterical refugees and their tall tales. Already, one might argue, the events unfolding in the Balkans were being viewed through the geopolitical lens of the alliance system, in which Serbia figured as a friendly state locked in a gallant struggle with fearsome neighbouring Austria-Hungary. It was only the cumulative detail of the reports emerging from the annexed areas, combined with corroborating accounts from Romanian, Swiss and French officials that persuaded the British Foreign Office that the news of Macedonian atrocities should not be dismissed as Austrian propaganda.

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by | 19 October 2026 · 5:21 am

When Serbia Forsook Austria for France

From The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark (Harper, 2013), pp. 28-30:

In June 1881, Austria-Hungary and Serbia agreed a commercial treaty. Three weeks later, it was supplemented by a secret convention, negotiated and signed by Prince Milan himself, which stipulated that Austria-Hungary would not only assist Serbia in its efforts to secure elevation to the status of a kingdom but would also support Serbian claims to territorial annexations in Macedonia. Serbia, for its part, agreed not to undermine the monarchy’s position in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Article II stated that Serbia ‘would not permit any political, religious or other intrigue to be directed from her territory against the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, including Bosnia, Herzegovina and the Sanjak of Novi Pazar’. Milan reinforced these agreements with a personal engagement in writing not to enter into ‘any kind of treaty’ with a third state without first consulting Vienna.

These agreements were, to be sure, a fragile foundation for good Austro-Serbian relations: they had no anchorage in the sentimental life of the Serbian public, which was deeply anti-Austrian; they symbolized a relationship of economic dependency which was increasingly unacceptable to Serbian nationalist opinion; and they depended on the cooperation of an erratic and increasingly unpopular Serbian monarch. But as long as Milan Obrenović remained on the throne, they at least ensured that Serbia would not side with Russia against Austria, and that the sharp end of Belgrade’s foreign policy would stay pointed in the direction of Macedonia and the coming contest with Bulgaria, rather than at Bosnia and Herzegovina. A new trade treaty was signed in 1892 and the Secret Convention was renewed for ten years in 1889; it was allowed to expire thereafter, though it continued to be the operative platform for Serbian policy vis-à-vis Vienna.

The change of dynasty in 1903 signalled a major realignment. Austria was quick to recognize the Karadjordjević coup, partly because Petar had assured the Austrians beforehand that it was his intention to keep Serbia on an Austrophile course. But it was soon evident that Serbia’s new leaders planned to push towards greater economic and political independence. During 1905–6, a crisis unfolded in which trade policy, armaments orders, high finance and geopolitics were closely intertwined. Vienna pursued a threefold objective: to secure a commercial treaty with Serbia, to ensure that Serbian armaments orders would continue to be placed with Austrian firms, and to contract a major loan to Belgrade.

The failure to achieve agreement on any of these questions produced a drastic cooling of relations between the two neighbours, and the outcome was an unmitigated disaster for Vienna. The Serbian armaments orders went to the French firm Schneider-Creusot instead of to the Austrian rival, Škoda of Bohemia. The Austrians reacted by closing the border to Serbian pork, triggering a customs conflict that came to be known as the ‘pig war’ (1906–9). But this was a counter-productive measure, since Serbia quickly found other export markets (especially in Germany, France and Belgium) and at last began to build slaughterhouses on a substantial scale, thus emancipating itself from its long-standing dependence on Austro-Hungarian processing facilities. Finally, Belgrade secured a major loan again not from Vienna, but from Paris (offered in return for the placement of armaments orders with French firms).

It is worth pausing for a moment to consider the larger significance of this French loan. Like all the emergent Balkan states, Serbia was an inveterate borrower, totally dependent on international credit, most of which was used to finance military expansion and infrastructural projects. Throughout the reign of King Milan, the Austrians remained willing lenders to Belgrade. But since these loans outran the debtor state’s financial resources, they had to be hypothecated against various pledges: for each loan some definite revenue was pledged, or some railway property mortgaged. It was agreed that pledged revenues from railways, stamp and liquor taxes should be paid into a special treasury controlled jointly by the representatives of the Serbian government and the bondholders. This arrangement kept the Serbian state afloat during the 1880s and 90s, but did nothing to restrain the financial profligacy of the Belgrade government, which had managed to accumulate an indebtedness of over 350 million francs by 1895. With bankruptcy looming, Belgrade negotiated a new loan through which almost all of the old debts were consolidated at a lower rate of interest. The pledged revenues were placed under a separate administration run partly by the representatives of the creditors.

In other words, fragile debtors like Serbia (the same applied to the other Balkan states and to the Ottoman Empire) could secure loans on reasonable terms only if they agreed to concessions of fiscal control that amounted to the partial hypothecation of sovereign state functions. For this reason among others, international loans were a political issue of the highest importance, inextricably wound up with diplomacy and power politics. French international lending in particular was highly politicized. Paris vetoed loans to governments whose policies were deemed unfriendly to French interests; it facilitated loans in return for economic or political concessions; on occasion it reluctantly conceded a loan to unreliable but strategically important clients in order to prevent them from seeking relief elsewhere. It pursued potential clients aggressively – in Serbia’s case the government were given to understand in the summer of 1905 that if they did not give France first refusal on the loan, the Paris money markets would be closed altogether to Serbia. Acknowledging this nexus between strategy and finance, the French foreign ministry merged its commercial and political divisions in 1907.

Seen against this background, the Serbian loan of 1906 was an important turning point. French financial relations with Belgrade became, in the words of an early American analyst of pre-war high finance, ‘more intimate and dominant’.66 The French came to own more than three quarters of all Serbian debt. These were vast commitments for the Serbian state – repayment schedules extended forwards to 1967 (in fact Belgrade defaulted on the greater part of its obligations after 1918). The lion’s share of this money went into military purchases (especially fast-firing artillery), most of which were transacted in France, much to the annoyance not just of Austrian, but also of British diplomats and armaments suppliers. The loan of 1906 also enabled Serbia to resist Vienna’s commercial pressure and to wage a protracted tariff war. ‘The undoubtedly successful issue of [Prime Minister] Mr Pašić’s resistance to [Austrian] demands,’ the British envoy in Belgrade reported in 1906, ‘marks a distinct step in the economic and political emancipation of Servia.’

These successes in the field of high finance should not distract us from the parlous condition of the Serbian economy as a whole. This had much less to do with Austrian tariff policy than with a process of economic decline that was deeply rooted in the country’s history and agrarian structure. The emergence and subsequent expansion of Serbia were accompanied by a process of drastic de-urbanization, as the mainly Muslim towns were depopulated through decades of harassment and deportations. What replaced the relatively urbanized and cosmopolitan imperial structures of the Ottoman periphery was a society and an economy entirely dominated by smallholding Christian peasants, a consequence in part of the absence of a home-grown Serbian aristocracy and in part of the ruling dynasty’s efforts to prevent the emergence of such a ruling class by blocking the consolidation of latifundial estates. While the cities shrank, the population grew at an awesome rate; hundreds of thousands of hectares of marginal land were opened up for exploitation by young families, loosening social constraints on marriage and fertility. But this rampant growth in the production of people did nothing to reverse the cycle of underperformance and decline that gripped the Serbian economy between the middle of the nineteenth century and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Per capita output in farming fell by 27.5 per cent between the early 1870s and 1910–12, partly because the expansion of arable land led to large-scale deforestation and thus to a decline in the pasture lands needed to sustain large-scale pig-husbandry, traditionally the most profitable and efficient arm of Serbian agricultural production. By the 1880s, the beautiful forested wilderness of the Šumadija – perfect pasture land for swine – had all but disappeared.

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by | 21 June 2026 · 3:17 am

Poles & Cossacks vs. Ottomans

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 127-131:

The Ukrainian Cossacks, who had begun their international career in the 1550s by serving the tsar of Muscovy, Ivan the Terrible, paid an unsolicited visit to Moscow during the first decade of the seventeenth century. Muscovy was then in turmoil because of an economic, dynastic, and political crisis known as the Time of Troubles. It began at the turn of the seventeenth century with a number of devastating famines caused in part by what we today call the Little Ice Age—a period of low temperatures that lasted half a millennium, from about 1350 to 1850, peaking around the beginning of the seventeenth century. The crisis afflicted Muscovy at a most inopportune time, when its Rurikid dynasty had died out and a number of aristocratic clans contested the legitimacy of the new rulers. The dynastic crisis came to an end in 1613 with the election to the Muscovite throne of the first Romanov tsar. But before the crisis was resolved, a number of candidates for the throne, some of them “pretenders” claiming to be surviving relatives of Ivan the Terrible, tried their political luck, opening the door to foreign intervention.

During the lengthy interregnum, the Cossacks supported the two pretenders seeking the Muscovite throne, False Dmitrii I and False Dmitrii II. Up to 10,000 Cossacks joined the army of Field Crown Hetman Stanisław Żółkiewski of Poland when he marched on Moscow in 1610. The election to the Muscovite throne three years later of Tsar Mikhail Romanov, founder of the dynasty that lasted until the Revolution of 1917, did not end Cossack involvement in Muscovite affairs. In 1618, a Ukrainian Cossack army of 20,000 joined Polish troops in their march on Moscow and took part in the siege of the capital. The Cossacks helped end the war on conditions favorable to the Kingdom of Poland. One of them was the transfer to Poland of the Chernihiv land, which the Grand Duchy of Lithuania had lost in the early sixteenth century. By the mid-seventeenth century, Chernihiv would become an important part of the Cossack world. As always, however, the Cossacks both helped and hindered the Polish kings in advancing their foreign-policy agenda. In its war with Muscovy, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth never got the support it hoped for from the Ottoman Empire, partly because of continuing Cossack seagoing expeditions and attacks on the Ottoman littoral.

In 1606, descending the Dnieper and entering the Black Sea on their longboats, called “seagulls” (chaiky), the Cossacks stormed Varna, one of the strongest Ottoman fortresses on the western Black Sea shore. In 1614 they pillaged Trabzon on the southeastern shore, and in the following year they entered the Istanbul harbor of the Golden Horn and pillaged the suburbs, much as the Vikings had done some 750 years earlier. But whereas the Vikings had also traded with Constantinople, the Cossack expeditions were akin to pirate attacks on seashores from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean. They came to rob, take revenge, and, as Ukrainian folk songs related, liberate long-suffering slaves. In 1616, they attacked Kaffa, the main slave-trading center on the Crimean coast, and liberated all the captives.

The sultan, his court, and the foreign ambassadors who witnessed one Cossack attack after another on the mighty Ottoman Empire were stunned. The Christian rulers could now take the raiders seriously as potential allies in a war against the Ottomans. The French ambassador in Istanbul, Count Philippe de Harlay of Césy, wrote to King Louis XIII in August 1620, “Every time the Cossacks are near here on the Black Sea, they seize incredible booty despite their weak forces and have such a reputation that strokes of the cudgel are required to force the Turkish soldiers to do battle against them on several galleys that the grand seigneur [the sultan] sends there with great difficulty.”

While Count Philippe was informing his king about the inability of the Ottomans to curb the Cossack seagoing expeditions, advisers to sixteen-year-old Sultan Osman II were considering how to wage war on two fronts: against the Polish army on land and the Cossacks at sea. In the summer of 1620, the Ottoman army marched toward the Prut River in today’s Moldova against the commonwealth, whose troops included private Cossack armies of Polish and Ukrainian magnates. The campaign aimed ostensibly to punish the commonwealth for not curbing Cossack attacks on the Ottomans. In reality, the agenda was much broader. The Ottomans were trying to protect their vassals in the region from the growing influence of the commonwealth. The Polish army, numbering some 10,000 soldiers, and the Ottoman force, twice as large according to some estimates, clashed in September 1620 near the town of Ţuţora on today’s Moldovan-Romanian border. The battle went on for twenty days, ending with a crushing defeat for the commonwealth.

Since the commonwealth had no standing army, the court and the entire country panicked. Everyone expected the Ottomans to continue their march on Poland. Indeed they did. In the following year, a much larger Ottoman army, estimated at 120,000 soldiers and led by the sultan himself, passed through Moldavia on its way to the commonwealth. The Ottomans met a commonwealth force approximately 40,000 strong, half of it made up of Ukrainian Cossacks, led by Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachny, hero of the Cossacks’ raid of 1616 on Kaffa and commander of their march on Moscow two years later. The battle lasted a whole month, waged on the banks of the Dniester River near the fortress of Khotyn, which the Ottomans besieged.

The Battle of Khotyn ended with no clear victory for either side, but that uncertain outcome was regarded in Warsaw as a triumph for the Kingdom of Poland. The Poles had stopped the huge Ottoman army at their borders and signed a peace treaty that involved no territorial losses. Everyone understood that this result would have been all but impossible without the Cossacks. For the first time—and a short time at that—the Cossacks became the darlings of the entire commonwealth. Books that appeared soon after the battle would lionize Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachny, whose monument stands today in the Podil district of Kyiv at the head of the street named after him, as one of the greatest Polish warriors.

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by | 20 June 2026 · 12:35 am

Slave Trade on the Steppe

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 118-121:

IN THE COURSE of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Ukrainian steppes underwent a major political, economic, and cultural transformation. For the first time since the days of Kyivan Rus’, the line of frontier settlement stopped retreating toward the Prypiat marshes and the Carpathian Mountains and began advancing toward the east and south. Linguistic research indicates that two major groups of Ukrainian dialects, Polisian and Carpatho-Volhynian, began to converge from the north and west, respectively, shifting east and south to create a third group of steppe dialects that now cover Ukrainian territory from Zhytomyr and Kyiv in the northwest to Zaporizhia, Luhansk, and Donetsk in the east and extending as far to the southeast as Krasnodar and Stavropol in today’s Russia. This mixing of dialects reflected the movement of population at large.

The origins of that profound change were in the steppe itself. The struggle that began in the mid-fourteenth century within the Golden Horde, also known as the Kipchak Khanate, led to its disintegration by the mid-fifteenth century. The Crimean, Kazan, and Astrakhan khanates became successors to the Horde, none of them capable of uniting it and some even losing their independence. The Crimea became independent of the Golden Horde in 1449 under the leadership of a descendant of Genghis Khan, Haji Devlet Giray. The Giray dynasty, established by Haji Devlet, would last into the eighteenth century, but his realm would not remain independent. By 1478, the khanate had become a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire—the huge Turkic-dominated Muslim polity that replaced Byzantium as the major power in the western Mediterranean and Black Sea regions in the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Ottomans, who made Istanbul, the former Constantinople, their capital in 1453, took direct control over the southern shores of the Crimea, establishing their main center in the port city of Kaffa, today’s Feodosiia. The Girays controlled the steppelands of the Crimea north of the mountains, as well as the nomadic tribes of southern Ukraine, with the Noghay Horde becoming the most powerful of those tribes in the sixteenth century.

Security concerns and commercial interests attracted the Ottomans to the region. In particular they were interested in slaves. The slave trade had always been important in the region’s economy, but it now became dominant. The Ottoman Empire, whose Islamic laws allowed the enslavement only of non-Muslims and encouraged the emancipation of slaves, was always in need of free labor. The Noghays and the Crimean Tatars responded to the demand, expanding their slave-seeking expeditions to the lands north of the Pontic steppes and often going much deeper into Ukraine and southern Muscovy than the frontier areas. The slave trade supplemented the earnings that the Noghays obtained from animal husbandry and the Crimeans from both husbandry and settled forms of agriculture. Bad harvests generally translated into more raids to the north and more slaves shipped back to the Crimea.

All five routes that the Tatars followed to the settled areas on their slave-seeking raids went through Ukraine. Two of them east of the Dniester led to western Podolia and then to Galicia; two on the other side of the Southern Buh River led to western Podolia and Volhynia, then again to Galicia; the last passed through what would become the Sloboda Ukraine region around Kharkiv to southern Muscovy. If the demand for cereals led to the incorporation of the Ukrainian lands of the sixteenth century into the Baltic trade, their connection to the Mediterranean trade was due largely to Tatar raiding for slaves. Ukrainians, who constituted an absolute majority of the population of the steppe borderlands north of the Black Sea and moved into the steppes in search of grain, became the main targets and victims of the Ottoman Empire’s slave-dependent economy. Ethnic Russians northeast of the Crimea were a close second.

Michalon (Michael) the Lithuanian, a mid-sixteenth-century author who visited the Crimea, described the scope of the slave trade by quoting from his conversation with a local Jew who, “seeing that our people were constantly being shipped there as captives in numbers too large to count, asked us whether our lands also teemed with people, and whence such innumerable mortals had come.” Estimates of the numbers of Ukrainians and Russians brought to the Crimean slave markets in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries vary from 1.5 million to 3 million. Children and adolescents brought the highest prices. The fates of the slaves differed. Most of the male slaves ended up on Ottoman galleys or working in the fields, while many women worked as domestics. Some got lucky, but only in a matter of speaking. Talented young men made careers in the Ottoman administration, but most of them were eunuchs. Some women were taken into the harems of the sultans and high Ottoman officials.

One Ukrainian girl known in history as Roxolana became the wife of the most powerful of the Ottoman sultans, Suleiman the Magnificent, who ruled from 1520 to 1566. Her son became a sultan under the name Selim II. Under the name Hürrem Sultan, Roxolana sponsored Muslim charities and funded the construction of some of the best examples of Ottoman architecture. Among these is the Haseki Hürrem Sultan Hamamı, a public bathhouse not far from Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, constructed by the best-known Ottoman architect, Mimar Sinan. In the course of the last two hundred years, Roxolana has figured as the heroine of novels and a number of television dramas in Ukraine and Turkey. To be sure, her life and career were the exception, not the rule.

The Tatar attacks and the slave trade left deep scars in Ukrainian memory. The fate of the slaves was the subject of numerous dumas—Ukrainian epic songs that lamented the fate of the captives, described their attempts to escape from Crimean slavery, and glorified the men who saved and freed slaves. Those folk heroes were known as Cossacks. They fought the Tatars, undertook seagoing expeditions against the Ottomans, and, indeed, freed slaves from time to time.

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by | 15 June 2026 · 12:49 am

Kyiv as Byzantium North

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 65-66:

FROM THE VERY first reports about the Rus’ princes on the Dnieper River, we hear of their attraction to the Byzantine Empire. The same thing that had attracted the Huns and Goths to Rome drew the Viking merchant warriors to the Byzantine capital, Constantinople: earthly riches, along with power and prestige. The Vikings never set out to topple Byzantium, but they tried to get as close to the empire and its capital as possible, launching a number of expeditions to capture Constantinople.

Sviatoslav’s death in 972 closed an important period in the history of Rus’ and its relations with its powerful southern neighbor. To the next two generations of Kyivan rulers, association with Constantinople was no less desirable than it had been for Sviatoslav. But Sviatoslav’s successors were concerned not only with money and commerce but also with the power, prestige, and high culture emanating from Byzantium. Instead of conquering Constantinople on the Bosphorus, as their predecessors had attempted to do, they decided to reproduce it on the Dnieper. This turn in Rus’ relations with the Byzantine Greeks and the new expectations of the Kyivan princes came to the fore during the rule of Sviatoslav’s son Volodymyr and the latter’s son Yaroslav. The two ran the Kyivan realm for more than half a century and are often credited with turning it into a true medieval state—one with a more or less clearly defined territory, system of government, and, last but not least, ideology. Much of the latter came from Byzantium.

As a prince of Kyiv, Sviatoslav’s son, Volodymyr, was less bellicose and ambitious than his father but turned out to be more successful in achieving his goals. Fifteen years old when his father died near the Dnieper rapids, Volodymyr had brothers who wanted the throne for themselves, and a new wave of Scandinavian arrivals eased his path to power. Before wresting the Kyivan throne from one of his brothers, Volodymyr spent more than five years as a refugee in Scandinavia, the ancestral homeland of his clan. He returned to Rus’ with a new Viking army. The Kyivan chronicler tells us that after Volodymyr took Kyiv, his soldiers asked for payment. Volodymyr promised to give them tribute from the local tribes but was unable to deliver. Instead, he recruited the Viking commanders as his local administrators in forts that he built on the steppe frontier, allowing the rest of the army to engage in an expedition against Byzantium. He also ordered his people not to let that army into their towns and to prevent them from returning.

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by | 13 June 2026 · 1:09 am

Slavs Meet Byzantium

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 43-45:

THE SLAVS FIRST came to general attention in the early sixth century AD, when they showed up en masse on the borders of the Byzantine Empire, which had been weakened by the Goths and Huns, and moved into the Balkans. Jordanes, a sixth-century Byzantine author of Gothic descent, distinguished two major groups among the Slavs of his day. “Though their names are now dispersed amid various clans and places,” he wrote, “yet they are chiefly called Sclaveni and Antes.” He placed the Sclaveni between the Danube and the Dniester, reserving for the Antes the lands between the Dniester and the Dnieper, “in the curve of the sea of Pontus.” Linguistic data suggests that the ancestral homeland of the Slavs lay in the forests and forest-steppe zone between the Dnieper and the Vistula, mainly in Volhynia and the Prypiat marshes of today’s Ukraine. By the time Jordanes wrote, the Slavs must have moved from their forest recesses into the steppes, creating a serious problem for Emperor Justinian the Great.

Justinian ruled the Byzantine Empire between 527 and 567 and was ambitious enough to attempt a restoration of the Roman Empire in its entirety, both east and west. On the Danube frontier, where the empire faced unceasing attacks from local tribes, Justinian decided to take the offensive. Procopius, a sixth-century Byzantine author who left a detailed account of Justinian’s wars, writes that in the early 530s Chilbudius, a commander personally close to the emperor, was sent to wage war north of the Danube. He scored a number of victories over the Antes, which allowed Justinian to add “Anticus” (conqueror of the Antes) to his imperial title. But the success was short-lived. Three years later Chilbudius was killed in battle, and Justinian returned to the old policy of defending the border along the Danube instead of trying to extend it.

Justinian brought back the old Roman tactic of “divide and rule.” By the end of the 530s, not without Byzantine encouragement and incentives, the Antes were already fighting the Sclaveni, while Byzantine generals recruited both groups into the imperial army. Even so, the Slavic raids continued. While at war with the Sclaveni, the Antes managed to invade the Byzantine province of Thrace in the eastern Balkans. They pillaged the land and took numerous slaves, whom they brought back to the left bank of the Danube. Having manifested their destructive potential, the Antes offered their services to the empire. Justinian took them under his wing and designated the abandoned Greek city of Turris, north of the Danube, as their headquarters.

Like many other enemies of the empire, the Antes became its defenders in exchange for regular payments from the imperial treasury. They tried to enhance their status by claiming to have captured the emperor’s best general, Chilbudius, whom they wanted to recognize as their leader. Since Justinian had granted Chilbudius the title of magister militum, or commander of all the imperial troops in the region, such recognition would have made them legitimate citizens of the empire, not merely its gatekeepers. The plot did not succeed. The true Chilbudius was, of course, long dead, his impostor was captured and sent to Justinian, and the Antes had to accept the status of foederati—allies rather than citizens of the great empire.

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