Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam

by Andrew Wheatcroft

  8. See Franjo Tudjman, Horrors of War: Historical Reality and Philosophy, New York: M. Evans and Company, 1996. The original version was entitled Bespuća povisjesne zbiljnosti: Rasprava o povijesti i filozofiji zlosija (Wastelands of Historical Reality: Discussion on History and Philosophy of Aggressive Violence) and was published in May 1989, and the second edition in November 1989, then a third and fourth in April and October 1990. On each occasion, Tudjman changed the emphasis of the book, often using his own neologisms to present his ideas. The English-language text published in 1996 was, in the words of his translator, “substantially revised” to appeal to a U.S. audience. I am very grateful to my colleague Dr. Dejan Jović for talking to me in detail on the issues embodied in this chapter, and letting me see the text of his own book prior to publication.

  9. See Vesna Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania. The Balkans’ relationship to Europe was essentially detached, sandwiched between West and East, or even between the West and Africa.

  10. Harry de Windt, Through Savage Europe, Being a Narrative of a Journey Undertaken as Special Correspondent of the “Westminster Gazette” Throughout the Balkan States and European Russia, London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1907, pp. 15–16. His book was a considerable success, with the first edition sold out in less than a month.

  11. Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History, New York: Vintage, 1994, pp. 33–4.

  12. Creagh observed that the “very pretty girl of about nineteen” who came to his room at Neusatz “was not the least abashed at my Highland costume.” See Creagh, Over the Borders, p. 52.

  13. Ibid., p. 15.

  14. Ibid., p. 38.

  15. Ibid., p. 82.

  16. Ibid., p. 88.

  17. Ibid., pp. 124–5.

  18. Ibid., pp. 274–5.

  19. Ibid., p. 276. Creagh misunderstood or misread a Montenegrin tradition. It was considered among the mountain warriors dishonorable to die “in bed like a woman.” To the news of a tribesman’s death the proper response was, “Who killed him?” If he had not died honorably at the hands of an enemy, the euphemism was “God, the old executioner.” See Alan Ferguson, “Montenegrin Society 1800–1830,” in Clogg (ed.), Balkan Society, p. 209.

  20. Sam Vaknin, www.balkanland.com/index.html, December 20, 2001.

  21. From the German Balkanhalbeiland, used by the German geographer August Zeune in the first decade of the nineteenth century. See Todorova, Imagining, pp. 25–6.

  22. In Imagining the Balkans, Maria Todorova cites Jobus Veratius, who believed that mountains stretched in a chain from Mesembria on the Black Sea to the Pyrenees. See ibid., pp. 26–7.

  23. Four-fifths of Italy is taken up by mountains or hills. See Stuart Woolf, A History of Italy 1700–1860: The Social Constraints of Political Change, London: Methuen, 1986, p. 15.

  24. W. G. Blackie, The Comprehensive Atlas and Geography of the World, London: Blackie and Son, 1882.

  25. Cited in Todorova, Imagining, p. 22.

  26. See Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837, New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1992, p. 15.

  27. The Scottish wilderness where John Buchan set his novel The 39 Steps was not some barren northern glen but the bare and desolate mountains of Galloway, just north of the English border.

  28. Armatoli were a form of occasional militia; hajduks were bandits.

  29. Cited in Anzulović, Heavenly Serbia, p. 50.

  30. For example, Spain’s bloodthirsty “El Cid,” or the murderous Celtic anger of Rob Roy MacGregor’s vengeful wife, as described by Sir Walter Scott in his novel Rob Roy, or the folktales of Sicily and Calabria.

  31. Albanians took pride in the roots of both dialects (Gegë and Töske/Arvanitika) in the ancient Illyrian language. From the latter dialect name came the title “Arnauts,” by which they were usually known. It was a Latinate tongue, as was the language of the Vlachs, a people displaced by the advance of the Slavs from the sixth century onward.

  32. The majority of Orthodox believers used the Cyrillic script, brought by missionaries dispatched by Bulgarian rulers after their nation had abandoned pagan beliefs.

  33. A further element of linguistic diversity was that the Bulgars, with a different ethnic origin, adopted Slavic speech.

  34. See, for example, the catalogue of claims for Bulgaria in Stephanove, Bulgarians. The construction of unitary nationalism owed much to R. W. Seton-Watson, both in his academic writing and as adviser to the 1919 Peace Conference. See H. Seton-Watson et al. (eds.), R. W. Seton-Watson and the Yugoslavs: Correspondence 1906–1941, 2 vols., London: British Academy, 1976.

  35. Also as Poturice. On identity, see Ivo Banac, “Bosnian Muslims: From Religious Community to Socialist Nationhood and Post-Communist Statehood 1918–2002,” in Pinson (ed.), Muslims, pp. 132–3.

  36. I have adapted some of the ideas developed by Mark Patton in Islands, pp. 179–90. These same concepts can also be applied, I believe, to the stages of Balkan development. Banac, National Question, also uses the “island” or “pocket” vocabulary, and it is implicit in his analysis; pp. 43 sq.

  37. Durham, Burden, p. 153.

  38. Individualism was also ascribed to many other groups elsewhere: Highlanders in Scotland, fishermen in the Adriatic, muleteers in Iberia. But outsiders were certainly strongly conscious of this quality in southeastern Europe.

  39. See Hitchins, Romanians, p. 1.

  40. Depicted in Mraz, Maria Theresia, p. 315. The cartoon was widely circulated, especially in Austria and Germany.

  41. The status of Russia was ambivalent. In this context she was part of the West, and not of Slavic “barbarism.” Russia showed what could be achieved from the raw material by the application of the values of the Enlightenment.

  42. Translated in Davies, God’s Playground, p. 419.

  43. His second chapter in Inventing Eastern Europe is entitled “Possessing Eastern Europe: Sexuality, Slavery and Corporal Punishment.”

  44. For Ségur and Coxe, see Wolff, Inventing, chapter 1.

  45. This is my interpretation. Larry Wolff, in correspondence, was cautious about taking it too far.

  46. Macbeth (1606), act 4, scene 1, line 26.

  47. St. Louis of France in 1270: “Either we shall push them back into Tartarus whence they came or they will bring us all into heaven.” Cited in OED under “Tartar.”

  48. Cited and translated in Wolff, Inventing, p. 318. Wolff sees the role of the Tartars as seminal: “The most overwhelming eastern vector of influence upon Russia, viewed unequivocally as a force of barbarism, was that of Tartary and the Tartars. China, Persia and Turkey could be regarded in the age of Enlightenment as possessing their own Oriental civilisations, but the Tartars received no such concession. If Russia belonged to the Tartar empire in the age of Batu Khan, Tartary belonged to the Russian empire in the age of Peter [the Great], but the relation, even reversed, still weighed in the balance between Europe and Asia, civilisation and barbarism”; pp. 190–91. Conversely, the Spaniards had always regarded the Tartars as noble savages by comparison with the greater evil of the Ottomans. See Bunes Ibarra, Imagen, pp. 91–2.

  49. Cited in Wolff, Inventing, pp. 192–3.

  50. Abbé Fortis cited and translated in Wolff, Venice, pp. 126–7.

  51. Ibid., pp. 152–3.

  52. Cited in Bracewell, Uskoks, p. 188.

  53. Gordon, History, vol. 1, p. 31.

  CHAPTER 10: LEARNING TO HATE

  1. “Relationi di Petro Foscarini,” in Nicolò Barozzi and Guglielmo Bercht (eds.), Le relazioni degli stati Europei lette al senato dagli ambasciatori Veneziani nel secolo decimosettino, 5th series, Turchia (Venice, 1866), part 2, pp. 89–90; cited and translated in Lucette Valensi, Venice and the Sublime Porte: The Birth of the Despot, trans. Arthur Denner, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993, pp. 1–2.

  2. Cited in Mary Lucille Shay, The Ottoman Empire from 1720–1734 as Revealed by the Dispatches of the Venetian Baili, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press,
1944, p. 34.

  3. For example, successful plays on the London stage included The Christian Hero (1735), Zoraida (1780), and The Siege of Belgrade (1791), all of which deployed these themes.

  4. The writer of these words, Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger, was a skeptical young French civil engineer and savant much admired by Diderot. He died at the age of thirty-seven in 1759, but one of his last works, published secretly after his death, tackled the controversial topic of despotism. His treatise Recherches sur l’origine du despotisme oriental was considered seditious in France, and so was published in the Netherlands in 1761. Although Boulanger considered that Europe had its own share of despotisms, and despite his well-honed critical sensibilities, nonetheless he held to the traditional and unquestioning view about the East, which included the Near East as well as the Far East. My text source can be found at http://www.vc.unipmn.it/~mori/e-texts/.

  5. See Lewis, Discovery.

  6. See A British Resident, p. 308.

  7. With so many young women dying in childbirth or from disease, many Western widowers made a series of marriages. (Thus the wicked stepmother became a literary stereotype.)

  8. Possibly Skene’s experience of many years had not been with Constantinople sophisticates like the general, but with more traditionally minded provincials.

  9. Skene was the British consul in Aleppo.

  10 The concept of “recovered memory” was developed in the 1990s as a means of enabling children and adults to recall memories of events they had forgotten or repressed. The use of these powerful psychotherapeutic methods also elicited recollections of events that had never taken place, or manipulated recollection to produce a desired outcome. While most of the research has focused on sexual abuse in childhood, the wider implication of this research sheds light on the process of generating social “memories” about the distant past. See Elizabeth F. Loftus, “Imagining the Past,” The Psychologist 14 (November 2001), 11, pp. 584–7. Moreover, “memories that have had time to fade are particularly susceptible to distortion” by imprinting ideas; see Kathryn A. Braun, Rhiannon Ellis, and Elizabeth F. Loftus, “Make My Memory: How Advertising Can Change Our Memories of the Past,” Psychology and Marketing 19 (January 2002), pp. 1–23.

  11. The concept of collective memory derives from the work of Maurice Halbwachs in the 1920s–30s; born in 1877, he died in Buchenwald in 1945. His principal work has now been translated as On Collective Memory, edited, translated, and with an introduction by Lewis A. Coser, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Halbwachs asserted (page 50) that “if certain memories are inconvenient or burden us, we can always oppose to them the sense of reality inseparable from our present life. We are free to choose.” Part of the lesson of the Balkans in the 1990s is that this freedom to choose may well be heavily constrained.

  12. The number who actually migrated is, like most other elements of this history, still violently contested. For a reasoned revisionist view, see Malcolm, Kosovo, pp. 139–40.

  13. “An Abbreviated Biography of Prince Lazar,” translated and cited in Emmert, Serbian Golgotha, pp. 62–3.

  14. The Serbian capacity to transmute disaster into victory had deep cultural roots and carried through into the twentieth century. The retreat of the Serbian army through Montenegro before the Austrian army in 1915, losing 100,000 killed or wounded, was followed at the end of the war with the creation of a South Slav kingdom.

  15. Il regno degli Slavi hoggi corrottamente detti Schiauoni historia di Don Macro Orbini in Peso: Appraise Girolamo Concordia, 1601.

  16. The translator was a native of Herzegovina named Sava Vladislavic; see Ante Zadic, “Strossmayer y los Búlgaros,” Studia Croatica 1971, no. 42–3.

  17. Emmert observes that the Austrian authorities tried without success to prevent copies entering the Habsburg domains.

  18. See Bringa, Being Muslim, p. 165. Her fine book encapsulates the tragedy of modern Bosnia.

  19. Thomson, The Outgoing Turk, p. 156.

  20. Balkan Muslim cultural traditions were expressed in almost all the languages of the region, for most of the Muslim communities used an Albanian, Slavic, or Greek dialect, although some of the Tartar and Anatolian migrants used Turkish among themselves. Greek and Albanian were more or less interchangeable in many areas. At the court of the most successful (and certainly best-known) local Ottoman ruler in the Balkans—Ali, pasha of Janina—Greek was the official language, not Ottoman Turkish; Ali himself preferred his native Albanian. Indeed, it is uncertain that he was at all proficient in the complexities of Ottoman, for when he made corrections to documents, he used the Greek script. See Fleming, The Muslim Bonaparte, pp. 24–5.

  21. Albert B. Lord, “The Effect of the Turkish Conquest on Balkan Epic Tradition,” in Birnbaum and Vryonis (eds.), Aspects, pp. 298–9.

  22. The Albanian traditional hero Skendarbeg was shared by both Muslim and Christian communities, but each tribal group constructed “its” hero in different ways.

  23. See Banac, National Question, pp. 46–9.

  24. I have found Lawrence Stone’s categories—presuppositions, preconditions, precipitants, triggers—a very useful matrix for tracing a way through the complex history of events in the Balkans. See Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution 1529–1642 (2nd ed.), London and New York: Routledge, 2002.

  25. See Davison, “Turkish Attitudes.”

  26. The Muslim communities had their own local officials who were likewise responsible for the good order of their own community.

  27. Halil Inalcik discussed some of the long-term causes of the deteriorating position of the raya in “The Ottoman Decline and Its Effects on the Reaya,” in Birnbaum and Vryonis, Aspects, pp. 338–53.

  28. One parallel in the West is how many accusations of witchcraft or heresy were eventually found to be rooted in wholly secular causes.

  29. There was a literature about the horror of the devshirme as though it took place within living memory, rather than centuries before. The devshirme was the forced recruitment of non-Muslims into imperial service. The males were taken as soldiers (janissaries) and some were trained as officials and administrators. It did not extend, at the latest, beyond the early eighteenth century. Most converted to Islam but often retained a loyalty to their native communities and kept contact with their families. Apart from the element of religious conversion, so abhorrent to Christians, it did not differ very greatly from military recruitment in Russia or the Habsburg lands.

  30. They governed Bosnia and Herzegovina with about 120 officials; the bureaucratic Austrians who took over from them in 1878 employed 600 by 1881. By 1897 this had risen to 7,379. See Sugar, Industrialization, p. 29.

  31. See Irwin T. Sanders, “Balkan Rural Society and War,” cited in Rhoads Murphy, Ottoman Warfare 1500–1700, London: UCL Press, 1999.

  32. See Ralston, Importing, pp. 43–68.

  33. Britain replaced the French in the Ionian Islands.

  34. At some points they sought to ally with the Ottomans, at other times to work against them. However, the French presence, their revolutionary ideology and activist government contrasted profoundly with Ottoman torpor, and undermined the Turkish position in the eyes of Christian subjects. The border was permeable, and Greeks, Albanians, and Serbs were well aware of what was taking place in the Ionian Islands and, later, in the Illyrian provinces.

  35. J. Savant, “Napoléon et la libération de la Grèce,” in L’Hellénisme Contemporain, July–October 1950, p. 321. Cited and translated in Stavrianos, Balkans, p. 211.

  36. Perhaps the best and most succinct statement of the libertarian viewpoint came much later, not from a left-wing ideologue, but from a conservative: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice!” Barry Goldwater, U.S. Republican presidential candidate, July 16, 1964.

  37. In the case of the Greek Revolution, I do not intend to discuss the uprising in Moldavia and Wallachia, or the later conduct of the war, but to focus on the events of 1821–22.

  38. As the
y could in other clan societies—the feud between the Campbells and the MacDonalds in Scotland originated in 1297.

  39. This too had its echo in local customary law, which assumed collective and clan responsibility for any act. This could be found just as readily among the Arabs of Jordan and the Arabian peninsula, in the Druze and Maronite Christian communities of Lebanon, and in Italy and Spain.

  40. See Petrovich, History, vol. 1, p. 84.

  41. See Stevan Pavlowitch, “Society in Serbia 1791–1830,” in Clogg (ed.), Balkan Society, p. 144.

  42. Gordon, History, vol. 1, pp. i–ii.

  43. He gave many examples of individual Turks who had behaved with a great sense of honor, better than the Greeks.

  44. Gordon, History, vol. 1, p. 143.

  45. See W. Alison Phillips, The War of Greek Independence 1821 to 1833, London: Smith Elder, 1897, p. 48.

  46. Gordon, History, vol. 1, p. 149.

  47. At Patras, on Palm Sunday, the Turks “amused themselves at their leisure in impaling or beheading prisoners and circumcising Christian children”; ibid., p. 156.

  48. Ibid., pp. 244–5.

  49. “Their [the Greeks’] insatiable cruelty knew no bounds, and seemed to inspire them with a superhuman energy for evil … Every corner was ransacked to discover new victims and the unhappy Jewish population (even more than the Turks an object of fanatical hatred) expired amid torments which we dare not describe. During the sack of the city, the air was close, dull and oppressively hot”; ibid.

  50. “Never were firmans obeyed with more alacrity; intelligence of the revolt of Scio [Chios] excited very strong feeling throughout Asia Minor, detachments of troops covered the roads, and the ancient fervour of Islamism seemed to revive. Old and young flew to arms, and a regiment composed entirely of Imams was seen to march through the streets of Smyrna”; ibid., p. 356.