Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam

by Andrew Wheatcroft

  As they were told more and more about their noble heritage, of the great Christian rulers and heroes of the past, of a time before the coming of the Turks, the instinctive response of the Christian peasants was to think that their Muslim neighbors’ possessions should rightly belong to them. Paper icons in the home, patriotic legends retold in the family and the village, books and pamphlets, even education itself, all helped to foster a sense of identity. This turned into a sense of injustice feeding upon deeply rooted (if latent) antagonisms. Christians resented that they had to pay a capitation tax, although they were exempted from paying the zakat, the religious charitable tithe due from all Muslims. There were other duties that fell upon the Muslim raya, and not upon the Christians and Jews, just as there were payments that the latter had to make and their Muslim neighbors did not. Some of the inequities were either imaginary, or tales from the distant past.29

  However, the financial burden on the subject peoples of the Balkans increased inexorably through the eighteenth century. Little of the money reached the central state treasury. Instead, it stuck to the hands of intermediaries. Since the conquest, the Ottomans had ruled their Balkan provinces by using various forms of indirect rule and a small body of state officials.30 They had co-opted many of the leaders of the various Christian communities into the governmental system, so that the most senior figure, the Orthodox patriarch in Constantinople, had the exalted status of a pasha and was entitled to an official Ottoman standard. But indirect rule functioned effectively only when it was controlled and constrained by honest governors sent from the capital, with the power of life and death over local officials. It was these who were ultimately responsible for enforcing the law, and ensuring that the highways and public buildings were kept in repair. Terrorized from above, they terrified those below them, and by such means the apparently ramshackle structure functioned with a degree of equity.

  From the early eighteenth century the whole system began to fail. Powerful regional interests, both Muslim and Christian, sensed a weaker hand in Constantinople and began to treat the law with impunity, increasing taxes and requisitions on peasants of all faiths. In Bosnia, local lords known as beys ignored the authority of the state officials. They even prevented the pasha of the region from residing in the capital, Sarajevo, and made him stay in the smaller town of Travnik. The janissaries, who had originally been stationed for limited periods in the Balkans to defend the sultan’s realm, refused to return to Constantinople and acquired land and property, as well as a fearsome reputation among the Christian villagers around their camps. They turned a deaf ear to commands issued from Constantinople, becoming in the regions the effective power within the state, like their fellow janissaries in the capital, who deposed and even murdered sultans. The janissaries based in the fortress of Belgrade were especially notorious for their exactions.

  Eighteenth-century Ottoman rulers were concerned not with the internal condition of the Balkans (provided the tax revenues were remitted) but with the increasing pressure from the Habsburg empire and Russia on the borders of their domains. In the East, Iran had once more become a competitor for local loyalties where previously Ottoman power had been unquestioned. In the period of Ottoman expansion, warfare had been productive, bringing booty, territories, slaves, and taxes. In the eighteenth century the pattern was reversed. War now drained away the state’s resources. It also made increasing demands on manpower, with villagers taken away under guard to fight the Russians or the Austrians.31 The pressures on the empire grew steadily, and leading Ottomans came to believe that they would need to adopt the military systems of the West if they were to defend their domains.32

  We should not exaggerate Ottoman incapacity, since it was often a metaphor for their perceived moral inadequacies rather than real military weakness—the Ottomans could still surprise Western armies with their skill and tenacity. The Turks had been consistently portrayed as in a state of precipitous decline since the late seventeenth century. Many of the eighteenth-century writers who presented the same picture were revealing their own frustrations at the impenetrable veneer of Ottoman conservatism. In reality, the process of decay was quite slow. Ironically, it was the strongest autocratic state of western Europe, France, which first imploded, rather than the allegedly decrepit Turkish empire. But thereafter the Turks could no more resist the shock waves emanating from the French Revolution than any of the countries of Europe. Blown away in a Napoleonic whirlwind, small states reemerged as new republics under French tutelage. Even empires such as Austria and Russia were forced to accommodate the new French imperial power. France first intervened in the East with the invasion of the Ottoman pashalik of Egypt in 1798, which led to the defeat of the ruling Mamluks at the battle of the Pyramids outside Cairo. French action ultimately brought about the dominance of Mehmed Ali, the Albanian pasha appointed by Sultan Selim III. Egypt under Mehmed Ali created a powerful army and navy and became the greatest buttress for the Ottoman state but also the greatest threat to the continuing power of the sultans.

  French involvement in the Adriatic had a more immediate influence. Centuries of Venetian occupation on the Adriatic coast of the Balkans was replaced by French domination, first (briefly) in the Ionian Islands, and later, after 1809, in the Illyrian provinces, from the head of the Adriatic to the south of Dalmatia, creating a single state from former Habsburg and Venetian possessions.33 Revolutionary France undermined the Ottoman position.34 In 1797 Napoleon ordered his commander in the Ionian Islands to “flatter the inhabitants … and to speak of the Greece of Athens and of Sparta in the various proclamations that you will issue.”35 This approach appears very similar in intention to the French attempts to pander to Muslim opinion in their first proclamations in Egypt in 1798. But in the case of Greece it had a deeper resonance. The identification of the people of Greece with the civilization of ancient Hellas was common among educated circles in many western European countries, but especially so in France, Britain, and many of the German-speaking states. It was a connection actively fostered by what has fairly been called the “Greek intelligentsia”—mostly expatriate Greeks living outside the Ottoman dominions, or in the independent principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, north of the Danube. Revolutionary France had an important lesson for these Balkan protoliberators. There could be no limits to the pursuit of liberty.36 No sacrifice was too great if it led, ultimately, to the nation.

  I DO NOT PROPOSE TO FOLLOW ALL THE TWISTED PATHS THAT LED toward national liberation for the different peoples of the Balkans.37 Over the century from 1804, when the Serbs rose against the banditry practiced by the janissary garrison of Belgrade, until the end of the Balkan Wars in 1913, the Balkans were in a more or less steady state of strife. Sometimes the Balkan peoples fought against one another, sometimes they battled against the Turks, either singly or in alliance. The other major European states played an active role, backing one party or another. But in that long conflict two horrific episodes epitomized “the Balkans” for all outsiders: the massacres that accompanied the beginning of the Greek Revolution in 1821–2 (which I shall discuss here), and the “Bulgarian Horrors” of 1876 (which will be looked at in detail in the next chapter). In both cases, what actually happened and what was written at the time diverged sharply. We can see how the new Balkan myths were formed and then disseminated like the dragon’s teeth of Greek mythology.

  It is indisputable that, like most highland zones, the lands south of the Danube had inherited long traditions of social violence. Life seemed cheap. In Montenegro taking heads was a common practice, as it was among the Ottomans. This was a world in which individual life expectancy was short, but where the community lived on in all its members, bound together by common bonds. The demands of honor extended throughout a whole family, or in the mountains to an entire clan. In highland Albania, honor crimes, feuds, and vendettas would survive through many generations until the wrong was avenged.38 The only security against a knife in the back or an unexpected bullet lay in killing anyone who co
uld be linked into the chain of vengeance. This was the unspoken thought behind the cry “Kill all the Turks in the Morea” that echoed in Greek village after village in the spring of 1821.

  The Ottomans too had a culture of revenge. Justice was based on summary punishment and terror. One man or a whole community would die to expiate a crime. Individual responsibility and collective responsibility were equally valid justifications for capital punishment. If a miscreant had fled, a judge would order the punishment of someone from the same family, the same village, or even from the same millet.39 This was the case when Suleiman Pasha, the governor of Belgrade, was restored to his capital after the Serb revolt in 1807. He had “men roasted alive, hanged by their feet over smoking straw … castrated, crushed with stones, bastinadoed … Outside the Stamboul Gate in Belgrade … [were] corpses of impaled Serbs being gnawed by packs of dogs.”40 When Belgrade had fallen to the insurgents, most of the men had been killed. But Muslim women and children were kept alive, to be forcibly baptized.41 It is highly unlikely that the Turks tortured to death the actual men who had committed the offenses, firing buildings and burning all inside alive. Others suffered for the community’s crimes, to discourage further acts of rebellion. Ottomans, Slavs, Greeks, and Albanians all observed the unwritten law of slaughter and reprisal.

  There are many candidates for the “precipitants” and “triggers” of the Greek Revolution but none of them fully explain why, suddenly, around Easter 1821, the Greek peasants of the Peloponnese began to kill all the Muslims in the land—men, women, and children alike. Almost 20,000 were slaughtered in a few months. This killing of Muslims, and not the Turkish massacres of Christians on the island of Chios in the following year, was the starting point of atrocity in the War of Liberation. There were antecedents for slaughter on this scale, but not in the Balkans. In the three decades before 1821, indeed, it was western Europe and not the torpid East that provided the most fearsome examples of mass murder. “Terror” was elevated to a principle of government during the first years of the French Revolution. The Paris mob hideously mutilated some of its victims, while in the French provinces ingenious means, such as mass drowning, were devised to speed up the process of disposing of the enemies of the people. Goya’s etchings of the Disasters of War, showing the incomparably savage cruelty of Spain’s Peninsular War guerrilla, were long considered too shocking to publish. In the early-nineteenth-century Balkans, killings were on a lesser scale, until, that is, the sudden and unparalleled atrocities of 1821–2.

  The bloody hands of the Greeks were an uncomfortable fact for the Western supporters of Hellenism. No one epitomized this acute dilemma better than the courageous soldier and fine writer Thomas Gordon. In his preface to the History of the Greek Revolution, published in 1832, he apologized for writing on a “hackneyed and apparently exhausted subject.”42 Forty writers, he said, had published on the topic, of whom he judged only three or four worthy of attention. His own book was a model work of history: Gordon had researched it thoroughly, with the added advantage of knowing the ground and many of the participants. He wrote while the events were still fresh in his mind. The Turks disgusted him but not to the point of obsession.43 The “grand causes” of the revolt in Gordon’s eyes were “religious zeal, patriotism, and national pride, deeply wounded by insult and injury.”44 He recorded how in 1821 the Greeks were shipping arms and gunpowder into the Peloponnese and rebellion was in the air. To some later historians it seemed as though the rising had been planned.

  Everywhere, as though at a preconceived signal, the peasantry rose and massacred all the Turks—men, women and children—on whom they could lay hands.

  In the Morea [Peloponnese] shall not Turk be left,

  Nor in the whole wide world.

  Thus rang the song, which from mouth to mouth, announced the beginning of a war of extermination.45

  It was neither planned nor organized. Once Bishop Germanos and the leaders of the Orthodox Church had “raised the standard of the cross” in April 1821, the insurrection

  gained ground with wonderful rapidity, and from mountain to mountain, and village to village, propagated itself to the farthest corners of the Peloponessus. Every where the peasants flew to arms, and those Turks who resided in the countryside or in unfortified towns, were either cut to pieces or forced to fly into strongholds.46

  Gordon made rather more of Greek deaths. Several Greek hostages were, by order of the Turkish general, “led forth and beheaded; their blood tinged the threshold of his residence, and their bones were long allowed to bleach in the court.”47 Others they threw “naked and headless” over the battlements of the Acropolis in Athens.

  But Gordon was horrified at what he saw of Greek barbarity. At the city of Tripolitsa, crammed with Muslim refugees from the surrounding countryside, he watched as the Greeks stormed the walls.

  The conquerors, mad with vindictive rage, spared neither age nor sex—the streets and houses were inundated with blood, and obstructed with heaps of dead bodies. Some Mohammedans fought bravely and sold their lives dearly, but the majority was slaughtered without resistance … Flames blazing out from the palace and many houses lighted up after a night spent in rapine and carnage.48

  Gordon, as a soldier, could understand the bloodlust of the first moment of victory, but vengeance went far beyond that.49

  It was the image of Tripolitsa—of 2,000 women and children “massacred in a defile of Mount Maenalion,” where their bloated corpses filled a vast open grave—that filled Gordon’s mind when he described the subsequent Ottoman atrocities on Chios. He wrote of an idyllic island, seven miles off the coast of Asia Minor, with sixty-eight villages, 300 convents, 700 churches. Chios had a population of 100,000 Greeks, 6,000 Turks, and a few Catholics and Jews. It was notable for its fine climate, the mutual tolerance among its various communities, and (Westerners averred) the easy morals of its women. It was also a center of Greek education and literature, with a college, library, printing presses, and a museum.

  A small raiding party of Hellenic revolutionaries from Samos had briefly brought the insurrection to the island. They had burned buildings and looted all the movable property they could find. Then they left. But a few weeks later, a larger invading force arrived and then the revolution began in earnest. Local Muslims were killed and mosques burned. When the news arrived in Constantinople, the government feared that the rising would spread to the other Greek-dominated islands close to the Turkish coast, and then across the water and on into the cities of Asia Minor. In this crisis the Ottoman ruler called for a general levy among the Muslim raya to recapture Chios.50 Yet, as Gordon observed, the sultan hinted the island was to be attacked not only because of “affection for … religion and empire”; there was a baser motive: Christian Chios promised rich plunder.

  A motley horde of Anatolians crossed over the calm sea in an armada of small boats. Ottoman soldiers broke into the island’s capital, and the scene, as the Scot put it, “might be aptly compared to the sack of Tripolitsa. Nine thousand were massacred in a single day. Every Greek they could find was put to the sword, even the inmates of the madhouse, the patients in the hospital, and the deaf and dumb institution.” More than 30,000 Muslims from Asia Minor swarmed into the island, killing and plundering as they went, capturing women and children for the slave markets. By the end of May 1822, 25,000 had been killed and 45,000 taken captive. The huge number of slaves swamped the markets of Constantinople, and many who were not sold easily were simply killed off like old sheep, and their bodies left on the streets to rot.

  Yet Gordon still refused to damn one side and condone the other. “Did we write,” he observed, “for the purpose of rendering exclusively odious one nation or party, it would be easy to prolong this catalogue of slaughters, sometimes springing from the systematic cruelty of a barbarous government, but oftener from the blind rage of an infuriated populace.”51 I have concentrated on his account partly because he was an accurate and truthful witness, but also for this rare capacity to j
udge dispassionately, despite favoring the cause of Greece. But while he could understand the Turkish cruelties, the callous butcheries of the Hellenes were more disturbing to him. Eventually Gordon came to the conclusion that true Greeks of his day had inherited their finer feelings from their ancient ancestors, while those who had been corrupted by Eastern barbarism exhibited its cruelty and treachery.52 This process had begun, he suggested, with the Easterners perverting the Greeks in the age of Alexander the Great. Alexander’s men were already no angels, but “their native vices were aggravated by Oriental softness, and by mingling with subjects still more corrupt than themselves.”53 By this circular logic, the Greeks of his own day had become “like the Eastern nations in every age.”54