Category Archives: Turkey

by Joel | 14 May 2024 · 6:02 am

Sicily Gets the Boot (of Italy)

From Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History, by John Julius Norwich (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 83-84:

When the news was brought to the Byzantine headquarters that the Sicilians, led by the King himself, were advancing in formidable numbers and strength, the Greeks saw their fellow fighters fall away. The mercenaries chose, as mercenaries will, the moment of supreme crisis to demand impossible increases in their pay; meeting with a refusal, they disappeared en masse. Robert of Loritello deserted, followed by his own men and most of his compatriots. The Sicilian fleet arrived first; then, a day or two later, the army appeared in the west. The battle that followed was short and bloody; the Greek defeat was total. The Sicilian ships effectively prevented any possibility of escape by sea. On that one day, May 28, 1156, all that the Byzantines had achieved in Italy over the past year was wiped out as completely as if they had never come.

William [the Bad] treated his Greek prisoners according to the recognized canons of war; but to his own rebellious subjects he was pitiless. This was a lesson he had learned from his father. Treason, particularly in Apulia where it was endemic, was the one crime that could never be forgiven. Of those erstwhile insurgents who fell into his hands, only the luckiest were imprisoned. The rest were hanged, blinded or tied about with heavy weights and hurled into the sea. From Brindisi he moved to Bari. Less than a year before, the Bariots had readily thrown in their lot with the Byzantines; now they too were to pay the price for their disloyalty. As they prostrated themselves before their King to implore his mercy, William pointed to the pile of rubble where until recently the citadel had stood. “Just as you had no pity on my house,” he said, “so now I shall have no pity on yours.” He gave them two clear days in which to salvage their belongings; on the third day Bari was destroyed. Only the cathedral, the great church of St. Nicholas and a few smaller religious buildings were left intact.

One lonely figure remained to face the coming storm. All Pope Hadrian’s allies were gone. Michael Palaeologus was dead and his army annihilated; the Norman barons were either in prison or in hiding. Hadrian himself was all too well aware that, if he were to save anything from the disaster, he would have to come to terms with the King of Sicily. The two met in the papal city of Benevento, and on June 18, 1156, an agreement was concluded. In return for an annual tribute, the Pope agreed to recognize William’s kingship not only over Sicily, Apulia, Calabria and the former principality of Capua, together with Naples, Salerno, Amalfi and all that pertained to them; it was now formally extended across the whole region of the northern Abruzzi and the Marches. William, negotiating as he was from a position of strength, obtained more than had ever been granted to his father or grandfather. He was now one of the most powerful princes of Europe.

Thus, in the three years separating the Treaty of Benevento from the death of Pope Hadrian [the only English Pope ever] on September 1, 1159, a curious change occurs in the relative positions of the three principal protagonists. Alignments were shifting. The Papacy, brought to its knees at Benevento, rediscovered a fact that its history over the past hundred years should have made self-evident—that its only hope of survival as a potent political force lay in close alliance with its neighbor, Norman Sicily. The German Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, impressed despite himself by the speed and completeness of William’s victories over the Byzantines in Apulia, looked upon him with undiminished hatred but a new respect, and decided on the indefinite postponement of the punitive expedition to the south that he had long been planning. Instead, he resolved on a campaign against the Lombard towns and cities of north Italy which, though technically part of his imperial dominions, had recently been showing a quite unacceptable tendency toward republicanism and independence. The result was the supreme paradox: the Lombard towns began to see the Sicilian monarchy—more absolutist by far than any other state in western Europe—as the stalwart defender of their republican ideals, hailing its King as a champion of civic liberty almost before the dust had settled on the ruins of Bari. And in the end they were victorious: on May 29, 1176, Frederick’s German knights were routed at Legnano by the forces of the Lombard League. It was the end of his ambitions in Lombardy. In Venice in the following year he publicly kissed Pope Alexander’s foot before the central door of St. Mark’s, and six years later, at Constance, the truce became a treaty. Though imperial suzerainty was technically preserved, the cities of Lombardy (and to some extent Tuscany also) were henceforth free to manage their own affairs.

William returned to Sicily with his international standing higher than it had ever been; but the last years of his reign were anything but happy. His Emir of Emirs—the title given to the Chief Minister of the kingdom—a certain Maio of Bari, was assassinated in 1160; and the following year saw a palace revolution in which the King’s young son and heir, Roger, was killed and William himself was lucky to escape with his life. The disorder spread through much of Sicily and into Apulia and Calabria, the King as always leading his army in person, captured rebels being punished with hideous brutality. Worst of all, when he returned to Sicily in 1162, he found Christians and Muslims at each other’s throats; the interreligious harmony which the two Rogers had worked so hard to achieve had been destroyed forever.

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by Joel | 14 March 2024 · 5:11 am

Germany’s Military Collapse in 1918

From The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918–1933, by Frank McDonough (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 26-28:

Victory in Russia gave the German people real hope of victory in the war. On 21 March 1918, Germany launched a spring offensive, better known as the Ludendorff Offensive, on the Western Front. It aimed to knock Britain and France out of the war before significant numbers of US forces arrived in Europe. Unfortunately, German expectations of victory proved illusory. Scarcely in the annals of military history has there been such a spectacular reversal of military fortune as Germany suffered towards the end of the war. By early June 1918, it was clear that the Ludendorff Offensive had failed. On 8 August, the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), spearheaded by tanks and supported by massive numbers of newly arrived American troops, launched a surprise attack between Amiens and St Quentin in northern France against the German Second Army. It punched a huge hole in the defensive line and captured 15,000 German soldiers. The significance of this decisive British breakthrough in the Battle of Amiens was not lost on Ludendorff, who called it ‘the blackest day of the German army in the history of this war’. He knew the Allies were now able to deploy thousands of tanks on the Western Front while the Germans had been able to manufacture only 20. Fritz Nagel, a German officer in the German anti-aircraft artillery, later recalled: ‘The German armies were in bad shape. Every soldier and civilian was hungry. Losses in material could not be replaced and the soldiers arriving as replacements were too young, poorly trained and often unwilling to risk their necks because the war looked like a lost cause.’

A two-day military conference on the critical situation on the Western Front was held on 13–14 August 1918 at the headquarters of the Supreme Military Command in Spa, Belgium. Hindenburg chaired it, and Paul von Hintze, the new Foreign Minister, and Ludendorff were present. Ludendorff said Germany now needed to adopt a purely defensive strategy, but he thought it might still be possible to sue for peace with the western Allies on favourable terms. Hindenburg agreed with Ludendorff’s judgement about continuing with strategic defence, while Hintze thought the German Army was in no condition to fight a successful strategic defence, and he felt diplomatic steps had to be taken to bring the war to an end.

When Kaiser Wilhelm II was apprised of these discussions in a Grand Council meeting, he seemed blinded by the optimism of Hindenburg and Ludendorff, and instructed Hintze to refrain from making a direct peace offer to the Allies and to wait for a more favourable moment. This proved wishful thinking, as Germany’s Central Power allies now began to collapse. On 24 September 1918, the Bulgarian Army was defeated when the Allied armies based in Greece broke through the Macedonian Front. The Bulgarian government, which had previously been under German control, requested an armistice and accepted it five days later. This placed the Austro-Hungarian empire, Germany’s principal ally, in a precarious position. Emperor Charles I of Austria, desperate to end the war, sent a circular diplomatic note inviting all the belligerents in the war to send representatives to Vienna to a confidential conference to discuss the basic principles of a peace settlement. On 27 October, Austria-Hungary ended its formal alliance with Germany, and the subject nationalities of the Habsburg Empire all declared their independence. On 30 October, the Ottoman Turks signed a regional armistice. Germany was now left without any allies.

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by Joel | 12 December 2023 · 5:15 am

Royal Hungary, Religious Battleground

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 72-74:

After the Battle of Mohács, the old Hungary split into three. The Turks kept direct control of Buda, the other fortress towns downriver along the Danube, and a broad swathe of central and southern Hungary (Transdanubia) that gave them an unimpeded route back through the Balkans to Constantinople. Transylvania – then comprising a vast area much bigger than Hungary now – was semi-independent, but the Ottomans demanded ultimate authority and large amounts of money and goods every year as tribute. If the Ottomans received those, they left the Transylvanians alone to govern themselves. The third part, so-called Royal Hungary, was Habsburg-ruled and comprised most of western Hungary, Slavonia, around two-thirds of Croatia, Slovakia and part of eastern Hungary, including the ancient city of Debrecen – altogether about 1.2 million people.

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Life was no better for most of the people in Royal Hungary. Under both the rival empires survival was a struggle, as ‘Habsburg mercenaries and their Turkish adversaries marched and counter-marched through the borderlands, leaving devastation in their wake’, as a contemporary historian recorded. In some ways it was worse in Royal Hungary than in Buda, where at least the Turks left people to worship as they pleased: all Christians were infidel, though as ‘people of the book’ they were tolerated. But Hungary became one of the chief battlegrounds in the series of religious wars that split Christian Europe apart during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Reformation had gained ground in Hungary with astonishing speed – for obvious spiritual reasons, and liturgical ones because of the use of the vernacular language in worship and especially as an expression of resentment against foreign domination, whether Habsburg or Turkish. By 1600 more than three-quarters of the Hungarian population had embraced one or other of the reformist Churches – mostly Lutheran in Royal Hungary and in Transylvania a version of Calvinism, though not quite as rigorous. After Geneva the Transylvanian town of Kolozsvár (now Cluj in Romania) had the earliest Calvinist university in the world.

The Habsburgs saw themselves, in the words of Emperor Charles V, as the ‘spear point of the faith’ and they led the fight for the true Church: the Counter-Reformation. For the Austrians, the Holy Roman Empire, unity in Christendom under the papacy (and of course the Habsburgs) was more important than crusades against the Ottomans.

The Hungarians were regarded not only as heretics but as rebels against the Empire who needed to be put in their place. The prelate placed in charge of re-Catholicizing the troublemakers, Péter Pázmány, boasted of how he ‘would make of the Hungarian first a slave, then a beggar and finally a Roman Catholic’. The soldier put in charge of pacifying them was a famous Italian mercenary and Imperial general, Raimondo Montecuccoli, who loathed the Hungarians: ‘It is impossible to keep these ungrateful, unbending and rebellious people within bounds by reasoning with them, nor can they be won over by tolerance or ruled by law. One must fear a nation that knows no fear. That is why its will must be broken with a rod of iron and the people sternly kept in their place….’ It was a view shared by the majority of the Austrian Habsburgs and all the members of the Imperial council.

All of the wealthiest Hungarian magnates, who owned most of the land, abandoned Turkish-controlled Hungary and threw in their lot with the Habsburgs. In reward for staying loyal and Catholic they were given more lavish Imperial titles and allowed to keep their feudal prerogatives. The emperor made around sixty of them counts and turned some into super-magnates with the title ‘hereditary prince’, like the Pálffy, Nádasdy, Esterházy, Wesselényi, Forgách and Csáky families. This new upper class would be in charge in Hungary, apart from a very brief interlude of revolution, into the twentieth century. They paid no taxes, continued to own serfs and some increased their wealth vastly during the division of Hungary. The emperor gave the nobles rights to claim increased labour dues, or robot.

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by Joel | 10 December 2023 · 6:09 am

Ottoman Rule in Budun

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 64, 67-69:

Almost every time I visit Budapest, the first place I go is a quiet, out-of-the-way section of old cobbled streets, halfway up Rózsadomb (Rose Hill) on the Buda side of the river. Here is the graceful white mausoleum of Gül Baba, a Dervish Muslim holy man of the sixteenth century, a favourite of Suleiman the Magnificent, who oversaw the Bektashi order of monks entrusted with the spiritual welfare of the Janissaries. Mid-morning there is usually nobody about in the surrounding lanes – Ankara utca, Mecset (mosque) utca, Török (Turk) utca, Gül Baba utca – one of the most expensive residential neighbourhoods in Budapest. In April, after the frosts have melted away, the graceful stone tomb is surrounded by the scent of violets. A month or so later come the roses of Rózsadomb, pink damascenas mainly, said to have been brought to Buda by Gül Baba. Whether that is true or not, the flowers and their scent, along with bath houses, paprika – and of course coffee – are the few remaining physical reminders of the 150-year-long occupation of Buda by the Turks. Not a bad legacy when you consider the ways other imperial masters who conquered Hungary have left their mark on Budapest – Hitler’s Nazis, say, or Stalin’s commissars. Sitting on a bench at Rózsadomb gazing at the sweep of the Danube is a healthy place for a historian to loaf and think.

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Christians and Muslims (for much of the time the majority of the Hungarian population left in the town) rubbed along reasonably well. In the market, pork and wine were sold in the Christian-owned stalls, lamb, sherbet and coffee in the Turkish ones. The latter was one of the few things that the ‘infidel’ non-Muslims took a liking to straight away, though at first it was expensive; this was the birth of the Middle European coffee house that later would become so supremely important in the culture of Budapest.

In general, trade in everything was poor, for demand was so low. Vineyards in the Buda Hills rotted, so locals learned to use varieties of vegetable, for example corn, which flourished from the sixteenth century on. The main problem was that Buda’s population fell continuously over the 150 years of Ottoman occupation: the birth rate went down sharply, and over generations families left in order to better themselves, whether to Royal Hungary or to Transylvania. The drop was dramatic immediately after Mohács, and continued. Turkish figures registered a fall in tax-paying households throughout their Hungarian domains from 58,742 in 1577 to only 12,527 in 1663. At one point in the 1620s the German and Magyar population of Budun was not much more than 2,000. The Turkish garrison rose and fell depending on military operations in the Balkans, but the average was around 4,000. There were never more than 1,000 Turkish officials, traders and craftsmen living in the town. Besides the pashas, who were army commanders, magistrates and chief executives rolled into one, the most important Turkish official was the defter – the tax collector. As time went on, during the occupation they learned to be flexible. They did not wish to destroy the westernmost and most prosperous colony in Europe, but wanted to profit from it. They had no interest in overturning habits and customs.

One group benefited greatly from Ottoman rule. The Turkish occupation brought benefits for the Jews. Many sought refuge from the neighbouring Habsburg lands, where pogroms were common – or Transylvania, where Calvinism grew strong and the Jews were treated equally badly, if not worse. Many families had come from much further away in the Balkans, which were even poorer. In the 1580s the Jews formed around 20 per cent of Buda’s ‘Hungarian’ population. By the 1680s there were more than 1,000 Jews in Buda. The Turks allowed them freedom to worship – there were three synagogues in Buda by the middle of the seventeenth century – freedom to form communal groups and a measure of legal autonomy. The Ottomans, though, demanded high taxes, even higher than the Christian rulers had imposed. The Turks used the Jews for commerce; they ran the lucrative trade routes along the Danube eastwards from Buda across Turkish domains. The pashas of Buda often intervened on the side of Jews in cases where they had been wronged by Hungarian Christians. Jews would repay the Turks by aiding their defence of Buda against the Habsburgs in sporadic attempts to retake the town. And when the Austrians eventually succeeded, the Jews would pay a heavy price.

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by Joel | 9 December 2023 · 5:55 am

Hungary’s Largest Peasant Revolt, 1514

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 59-60:

Finally, in 1514, after Ottoman troop movements into Serbia, the Pope, Leo X, and Tamás Bakócz, the Archbishop of Esztergom, declared a crusade against the Ottomans and money was raised from most of the European capitals to finance an army to halt the Turks’ advance. King Louis II of Hungary [incl. Croatia] raised a force reported to be 40,000-strong, mostly peasants untrained in warfare, under an experienced soldier from the lesser nobility, György Dózsa. He was joined by a number of evangelical priests and friars. Most of the Hungarian barons had no appetite for the campaign, resented the loss of the serfs’ labour on their land at harvest time and were deeply suspicious about permitting a peasant army to roam around Hungary. Rightly so as it turned out.

The majority of the peers in the royal council pressed the archbishop and the Vatican to call off the crusade even before it had properly begun. But Dózsa’s army refused to disband and the crusade against the infidels turned into the biggest peasants’ revolt in Hungarian history.

There had occasionally been eruptions of unrest among peasants, but Hungary’s feudalism was among the most entrenched anywhere. In the sixteenth century, when in most of Western Europe serfdom had all but disappeared, it remained strong in Hungary. Dózsa was a skilful soldier and titular leader of the rebellion. But the real inspiration that under Catholic dogma would condemn the rebels’ souls to eternal perdition were revolutionary priests, the best known of whom was a fiery preacher, Lőrinc Mészáros. After months of savage fighting, burning and looting on the way, Dózsa’s army seized control of the Great Hungarian Plain and a few towns in south-eastern Hungary and in Transylvania. For months they lay siege to Temesvár (present-day Timișoara in Romania), but never managed to capture and hold the town. That was the high point of their success. They were finally beaten in the autumn of 1514 by an army led by János Zápolya, the voivode (chieftain) of Transylvania.

The magnates, safely back in untrammelled power, exacted vicious revenge. Dózsa was hauled to Buda in chains, enthroned on a flaming stake and a red-hot crown was placed on his head – as ‘King’ of the peasants. Several of his leading supporters were forced to eat his roasting flesh before they too were executed, as a warning to any others who might want to ‘destroy the natural order’, as the Archbishop of Esztergom put it. Several of the priests who took part in the rebellion were hanged, including Mészáros.

The direct consequences of Dózsa’s revolt lasted well into the nineteenth century. Extreme measures were taken by the landlords and gentry against the peasantry ‘to punish them for their faithlessness’. They were condemned to ‘perpetual servitude’, banned from any right to migration, any access to legal rights and denied the right to own land. A new tax was imposed of one gold florin, twelve chickens and two geese a year as compensation for the damage the rebellion had caused. Landlords were given the right to claim one day a week’s unpaid labour. Serfdom continued in Hungary until 1848.

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by Joel | 14 October 2023 · 6:14 am

Bessarabian German Food Names

From Bessarabia: German Colonists on the Black Sea, by Ute Schmidt, trans. by James T. Gessele (Germans from Russia Heritage Collection, 2011), pp. 382-83:

Arbuse, harbus (Turkish/Russian) = watermelon

Baklashan, patletshane (Turkish/Russian), blue patletshane = eggplant (In some places tomatoes were referred to as red patletshane.)

Bliny (Russian) = blintzes, leavened pancakes

Borsch (Russian) = Russian cabbage and vegetable soup (red, white or green borsch)

Brynza (Romanian/Russian) = sheep’s milk cheese

Kalva, halva, “halvik” (Turkish/Russian) = sweet made from pressed hazelnuts or sesame seed with honey

Kolbasa, kalbas (Russian) sausage (“kolbasniki” = Russian nickname for Germans)

Makhorka, “makhorke” (Russian) = strong tobacco

Mamaliga, mamalig, mamlik (Romanian) = corn meal gruel, polenta

Maslina, masline (Russian) = olive

Pirogi, piroshki (Russian) = meat-filled pastries

Plachinta, plachenta (Romanian) = flat cake, baked dough with fruit filling (e.g., pumpkin, “pumpkin plachinta“)

Pomidori, pomadoren (French/Italian/Russian) = tomatoes

Popshoi, popshe (Romanian) = corn (popshoi pratzeln = to shell corn)

Shassla (French) = a wine variety (chasselas)

Tsibeben (Arabic/Italian) = raisins

Varenye (Russian) = fruit preserves, marmalade

Vereniki (Russian) = crescent pocket dumplings filled with meat, berries or curd cheese, also Maultaschen

Zakuska (Russian) = snack, hors d’oeuvre

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by Joel | 24 March 2023 · 5:00 am

Smear Campaign vs. Vlad the Impaler

From The Making of Eastern Europe: From Prehistory to Postcommunism, by Philip Longworth (Lume Books, 2020), Kindle pp. 308-310:

The nickname Dracul (‘the Dragon’) probably derives from his father’s membership of the Hungarian chivalric Order of the Dragon, although in Romanian it takes on the meaning of a devil, and Vlad was certainly to earn the name with his draconian behaviour. A member of the ruling house of Basarab, he had, like Skanderbeg, been a hostage of the Turks, then turned against them, serving with John Hunyadi, and he was related by blood to King Matthias. Becoming Hospodar (lord) of Wallachia in 1448, he was promptly ousted by a rival, but in 1456 he regained power and this time took better care to keep it.

He built up a personal army of retainers, executed a number of hostile boiars [nobles] and took harsh measures against anyone else who opposed his will. He also tried to promote commerce, established Bucharest as the country’s capital, and in 1459 responded positively to Pius II’s call for a Crusade against the Turks. He withheld the Sultan’s tribute, killed Ottoman emissaries sent to deal with him, and then, in the winter of 1461–2, carried out a devastating assault into Ottoman territory. In a night attack, he routed an Ottoman force that had driven him back across the Danube – an occasion marked by a great slaughter of Turks.

At this point Vlad’s luck began to change. The Turks supported a bid by his half-brother Radu the Handsome to replace him and the movement gained increasing support within Wallachia, partly because of party interests, not least because it promised peace. Then, late in 1462, when the reluctant crusader King Matthias at last reached the ‘Saxon’ city of Brasov in Transylvania at the head of his troops, Vlad went to meet him, expecting, as did the Pope himself, that they would launch a joint operation against the Turks. Instead, Matthias arrested Vlad, took him back to Buda and kept him imprisoned there for thirteen years.

Vlad’s diminishing support in Wallachia no doubt prompted Matthias to have second thoughts about the crusading action he had promised the Pope, though there was another consideration: in an attempt to enrich Wallachia, Vlad had tried to regain territories that had been lost and wrest control of the profitable oriental trade away from the ‘Saxon’ cities of Transylvania (which supported pretenders to his throne) and even attacked them. A new Turkish-backed regime in Wallachia promised to restore the old pattern of trade and, for his part, Matthias was anxious to reassure them, for Transylvania, and the prosperous Saxon cities in particular, constituted an important source of income to the Hungarian treasury. However, he now had to justify his actions to the Pope. This he did so by mounting a highly effective campaign of disinformation against Vlad, incidentally drawing our attention to a facet of humanist activity that is sometimes overlooked: the manufacture of propaganda. In fact the Dracula legend was largely the creation of humanist officials at Matthias’s court.

The motive was both strong and simple: Pope Pius had to be convinced that, so far from being a doughty Crusader, Vlad was an oppressor, a murderer, a sadist – a disgrace to the Christian cause, from whom he should at all costs distance himself. To this end Janos Vitez, who was to become Primate as well as Chancellor of Hungary, Janus Pannonius, later Bishop of Pecs, and other literary talents at the court of Matthias were set to work. They used the complaints made by the Saxon merchants and stories put about by Vlad’s enemies in Wallachia in their apparently successful attempts to convince Pius; and these stories were essentially true. Vlad had undoubtedly had many people impaled (it was a commonplace form of execution in the region); he had fired many villages (as part of a scorched earth policy in the war against the Turks) and put many Ottoman subjects to death (though Matthias’s own father had once slaughtered a thousand Turkish prisoners).

However, by carefully ignoring the reasons for his actions, and by inventing new tales (for example about his allegedly favourite pastime in prison: slowly picking off the limbs of live insects) they were able to create the impression that Vlad was a traitor, a capricious despot, a sadist and a psychopath. A Latin poem by Pannonius picturing Vlad as a tyrant gained wide currency, and in 1463, as part of a wider propaganda effort, the printing, in German, of the ‘Story of Prince Dracula’ was arranged. It proved highly popular and was subsequently republished many times with embellishments and in several languages. Ultimately it was to provide Bram Stoker with the inspiration to invent a modern, fictional, Dracula. Opinion manipulators of our own times would have had little new to teach a Renaissance humanist.

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by Joel | 17 March 2023 · 9:59 am

Early Ottoman Rule in the Balkans

From The Making of Eastern Europe: From Prehistory to Postcommunism, by Philip Longworth (Lume Books, 2020), Kindle pp. 302-305:

There had been a good deal of peaceful interchange as well as fighting between Byzantium and the Ottomans in the decades preceding 1453; and not a little intermarriage. Mehmet’s own ancestors included Byzantine Christians. Besides he entertained considerable respect for some aspects of the Byzantine tradition; he was invited to think of himself as ‘Emperor of the Romans’, like the Byzantine Emperors of old, and came to believe that he could unite all Christendom under his rule. More immediately he used certain Byzantine institutions as models for the system he set up to run his Empire. Thus the Byzantine fief seems to have been the inspiration of the sipahi system; Byzantine offices, taxes and even ceremonials became bases for Ottoman administrative and court practices, and certain posts, particularly those involving foreign affairs, became almost a monopoly of Greeks. This is not to suggest, however, that much about the new regime was not alien and burdensome.

The Ottoman state was run by a system of slavery, even though the Sultan’s slaves constituted an administrative and military elite. Furthermore, the Turks took an irregular levy of children (devshirme) from their subject Christian population and made Muslims of them, even though they also trained them for their service and set them on ladders of opportunity which enabled them to reach the highest offices of state. Furthermore, Christians were made to feel their inferiority. They were forbidden to wear green or to paint their houses in bright colours, forbidden to ride horseback in the presence of Muslims, and restricted in the number and the height of their churches. On the other hand there was freedom of worship; non-Muslims were not obliged to do military service; and they were largely subject to their own justice within their own religious millets, of which by far the largest was the Orthodox, administered by the Patriarchate of Constantinople whose latest incumbent was invested in office by the Sultan himself. The Great Church was largely in captivity, but it retained most of its autonomy. The monasteries of Mount Athos were not disturbed, and the Turks did not distract the monk Gabriel of Rila from his life’s work, a vast compilation of the sayings of St John Chrysostomos.

The Ottoman Turks also breathed new life into decrepit Byzantine cities and above all into Constantinople which they called Istanbul. Christians, Muslims, Armenians and Jews were brought from all over the Empire and settled there. Hence the population which had shrunk to about 10,000 in the immediate aftermath of its fall increased by as much as tenfold within thirty years. Most came voluntarily recognising opportunity or responding to concessions, though some were forcibly resettled; and huge building and rebuilding projects were soon under way. Water supplies, sewage disposal, street-paving and street furniture were soon renewed or supplied for the first time; ruined structures were rebuilt, others restored and new palaces, fountains, public baths and hospitals erected. Also a great bazaar – for the Ottomans had long recognized the importance of commerce.

In the Balkan countryside Ottoman domination replaced uncertainty and periodic anarchy with an orderly system that did not at first always unduly disturb existing social relationships. Local lords who submitted to the sultan were generally left in possession of their estates in fief provided they served the Ottomans as loyal vassals. They were encouraged to convert to Islam and embrace Ottoman culture, of course, but pressures to do so tended to be applied gradually over a period of two or three generations, by which time many had gravitated naturally to the ways of the new elite. Lower down the scale peasants could gain privileges such as certain tax exemptions by serving as military auxiliaries or local police; most monasteries that had not earned the Sultan’s displeasure continued in the possession of most of their estates; and the populations of some regions, notably the heretical Bogomils of Bosnia, positively welcomed the Turks.

In two other respects the Ottoman system can be regarded as superior to some others in the Europe of the time. It was unequivocal about the ultimate ownership of property belonging to the state, eliminating powerful lordships, bases of individual power which could be exercised capriciously; and it did not permit the military class to become too numerous. Christian servicemen surplus to requirements were reduced in status and lost their privileges. This was not the case in Poland and Hungary, where, as we have seen, a swollen nobility and the virtually unrestricted power of lords were to be conducive to great harm. Furthermore the Turks provided security for the great majority of the Balkan population to live in tranquility in accordance with a familiar culture. By uprooting and changing Byzantine institutions, it has been said to have decapitated Byzantine high culture. On the other hand, as we have seen, Byzantine civilization had made some impression on the Turks themselves; and its cultural legacies, to both Eastern and Western Europe, were particularly rich.

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by Joel | 14 March 2023 · 6:28 am

Eastern Europe After Mohacz

From The Making of Eastern Europe: From Prehistory to Postcommunism, by Philip Longworth (Lume Books, 2020), Kindle pp. 250-252:

The political consequences of the battle of Mohacz were also considerable. Louis II had died childless; and the Habsburgs of Austria, long-sighted dynastic politicians and shrewd diplomatists, became the leading contenders for the thrones of both Hungary and Bohemia, and soon gained both. But in Hungary there was strong backing for a local candidate, John Zapolyai, and he, too, was crowned king. This political division weakened resistance to the Turks, who by the end of 1541 had occupied the southern and central parts of the country, including the capital Buda; and gained suzerainty over the east, which became a largely autonomous principality, Transylvania.

The death of Louis had ended one Eastern European dynasty. Two others failed to survive the sixteenth century. The last Jagiellonian King of Poland-Lithuania died in 1572; the last of Russia’s ancient Riurikid dynasty in 1591. In both instances political hiatus encouraged tumults, though, as we have seen, the long-term outcomes were quite dissimilar. While Russia returned to dynastic rule, Poland abandoned it. In this respect she came to resemble the smaller polities in the region, the Danubian Principalities, self-governing tributaries to the Turk, which also lacked dynastic rule: The instability of their domestic politics is suggested by the fact that, in the course of one century Wallachia had twenty-four, and Moldavia no fewer than forty, changes of ruling prince, or hospodar.

These religious and political changes were obvious to contemporaries. But there were other shifts, no less profound in their effects, which were much less noticeable at the time, or recognized only in retrospect.

Europe’s centre of economic gravity had been moving from the Mediterranean to the countries bordering on the North Atlantic; from the basin of the River Po to that of the Rhine (where it has remained); and from the emporia of Istanbul and Venice to that of Amsterdam. Furthermore, a surge in the population of Western Europe, and in particular of its cities, was stimulating a sharply increasing demand, and hence higher prices, for imported foodstuffs which Eastern Europe was able to supply. This was to have marked social as well as economic effects, especially on those regions with access to the Baltic, not least in encouraging the rise of serfdom.

At the same time the importation of silver from the Americas was promoting a sharp increase in the money supply and hence serious inflation. This was to throw the finely-tuned mechanisms of the Ottoman state out of kilter and prove a major factor in its subsequent decline. And there was one change perceived by very few, if at all, the indirect effects of which were felt by almost everyone. This was ‘the little ice age’, a slight but insidious drop in the average temperature beginning late in the sixteenth century. By restricting the latitude and height at which agriculture was viable this precipitated famines, population movements and the great disorders which were to overtake most of Eastern Europe at the turn of the century, turning the frontier lands especially into a crucible of violence.

And there was a plethora of other factors which intervened at various points with varying intensity to influence the course things took. Linguistic differences, for example, sometimes fed into religious and political struggles; and social classes sometimes gained or lost constitutional rights according to the religion they embraced at a particular moment. Low population density in Poland-Lithuania contributed to the enserfment of the peasant; yet high population density in the Ottoman Empire contributed to the disruption of that state. Sometimes the effects seem paradoxical. The Turkish presence, so often assumed to be a wholly negative influence, slowed down and even reversed the process of enserfment in Hungary for a time. The Baltic grain boom had helped to promoted serfdom, yet the end of the boom around the turn of the century served not to remove serfdom, but to entrench it. And though Protestantism is often associated with the origins of modern science Copernicus was a priest whom Polish Protestants rejected, while the patron of Tycho Brahe and Kepler was a Habsburg. The interactions of circumstances and catalysts that shaped Eastern Europe in the period from 1526 to 1648 far exceeded in complexity the most complicated transmutation process in any alchemists’ laboratory.

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by Joel | 10 March 2023 · 9:08 am

Rough Road to Greek Nationhood

From The Making of Eastern Europe: From Prehistory to Postcommunism, by Philip Longworth (Lume Books, 2020), Kindle pp. 206-208:

It was difficult for Bulgarians to think in terms of liberation other than through the church, which was dominated by Greeks, so that Bulgarian national feeling emerged almost as much in reaction to the Greeks as to the Turks.

The Greeks themselves present a different case, for they included important mercantile and administrative classes. These elements formed a cultural community of sorts, but they were distanced from the common people, who had also built up a tradition of self-defence, especially in the mountain areas and some of the islands. The Greek elite was also widely dispersed geographically. Their trading network ramified throughout the Mediterranean, the Balkans and the Black Sea littoral, while the Phanariotes staffed much of the Ottoman diplomatic service and bureaucratic machine besides ruling the Romanian principalities (often corruptly, but sometimes in the spirit of enlightened despotism). The Greek elite constituted fertile ground both for conspiracy and manipulation by foreign powers.

The Greek diaspora extended to Paris, and beyond; and French agents had been active in the Greek world since the later 1790s. Revolutionary notions were to grip members of the merchant class (though not the more substantial of them), some Orthodox clergy (though few bishops), and even an occasional potentate in the Ottoman service. But it was on Russian, not French soil, that the Greek revolution got off the ground. In 1814 expatriate Greeks formed a friendly society (Philiki Etairia) in Odessa. Like others founded earlier in Paris and Vienna its aims were cultural; unlike them, however, it aimed to liberate ‘the motherland’.

In 1821 it mounted an attempt to do so, launching an invasion of the Danubian Principalities. But Vladimirescu’s followers provided none of the support they had hoped for, and the Turks soon mopped them up. The conspirators succeeded, however, in sparking an insurgency in the Peleponnese and some of the islands. Though the Russians withdrew their ambassador from Istanbul, and Metternich opined (quite rightly as it happened) that Greece was merely a geographical expression, the Powers supported neither side. Then the Turks executed the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople, even though he had roundly denounced the rebellion – and the idealists of Europe rallied to the cause of Greek independence. The volunteers (including Byron), the money, and, not least the publicity which they supplied contributed greatly to the success of the cause. Albeit indirectly, they also helped to ensure that the emergent state of Greece would adopt a Western-type constitution highly unsuitable for a society that was largely traditional and innocent of Western values. Events were to demonstrate that although the seeds of Western democratic ideas were to germinate in Eastern Europe, unlike the rampant bean-stalk of nationalism, the plants that grew out of them would be weak and spindly.

Greece’s first head of state, Capodistrias, understood the problem. He was an authoritarian in the mould of the enlightened despots. He set out to build sound administrative and educational systems, to improve communications and the economy. He also favoured land reform. Anticipating Stolypin, he regarded a free and prosperous peasantry as the foundation of a stable society. Traditional interest groups, whom he held in contempt, and idealists starry-eyed with Western ways, all hated him. In 1831 he was assassinated. When the ensuing anarchy finally subsided, independent Greece found herself (thanks to an agreement between Russia, France, and Britain) with a sizeable Western loan, a Bavarian King [Otto] and a small Bavarian army.