Download PDF | The Balkans_ From Constantinople to Communism (2002).
503 Pages
Praise for Dennis P. Hupchick’s The Balkans
“In The Balkans, Dennis Hupchick has produced a creative, balanced, objective, well-written, and at times even inspiring synthesis of the peninsula’s convulsive history. It is a masterful synthesis that covers the history of the individual Balkans peoples at the best moments of their history, while also giving due recognition to those external powers—the Byzantine Empire, the Ottoman Turkish Empire, and to a lesser degree the Habsburg Empire—that have had a controlling influence over the Balkans ever since the fifth century. It is a book that is a joy to read. Dennis Hupchick’s The Balkans will undoubtedly join the ranks of those time-honored volumes that stretch from Ferdinand Schevill’s The History of the Balkan Peninsula (1933), through Robert Lee Wolff's The Balkans in Our Time (1956) and L.S. Stavrianos’s The Balkans since 1453 (1958), to Barbara Jelavich’s History of the Balkans (1983).” Steven Béla Vardy, Ph.D. McAnulty Distinguished Professor of European History Duquesne University
“Dennis Hupchick’s history of the Balkans is an expertly researched and excellently written text that fills a vital need in historical scholarship. It is the first single volume English language comprehensive history of the Balkans covering the peninsula from the Middle Ages to the post Communist period. Hupchick gives us a readable look at the complexities of this crucial world crossroads for over fifteen centuries allowing us to understand the problems which are still making headlines in the contemporary world. He concludes with a valuable bibliography in each chapter for further exploration. This is a vital work for every student of history and political science and for those who are simply interested in understanding the crises of today.” Frederick B. Chary Professor of History at Indiana University Northwest
Preface
O, a late-September evening in 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain went on radio to address the nation regarding the growing international crisis surrounding events in Czechoslovakia. The Nazi-influenced Sudeten German minority in that state had precipitated a situation that threatened to result in a German invasion of the country. France had signed an alliance guaranteeing Czechoslovakia’s security, and Britain was closely allied with France in case of any future hostilities. An invasion by Hitler’s Germany would force both to live up to their treaty responsibilities. The frightening possibility of a costly and bloody European war loomed large, and naturally the British people were concerned. In the course of his address, Chamberlain, desperate to avoid a conflict, made the following comment: “How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.” The next day Hitler notified Chamberlain that he was willing to discuss a diplomatic solution to the crisis. The day after that, the British prime minister flew off to Munich, where he and French Premier Edward Daladier, under the delusion that peace thus would be assured, essentially caved in to Hitler’s demands to dismember France’s East European ally. Fear of spilling British blood to uphold Britain’s moral responsibilities and ignorance of East European realities led Chamberlain to the Munich appeasement. Far from preventing the war he feared, his actions ultimately guaranteed its outbreak a year later.
One cannot help but be struck by similarities between Chamberlain’s reaction to the Sudeten crisis sixty-odd years ago and those of Western leaders to the war in Bosnia-Hercegovina that raged between 1992 and 1995. The same ignorance, befuddlement, and fear reflected in Chamberlain’s telling remark characterized their efforts to end the Bosnian debacle. Apparently lacking any concrete understanding of the situation on the ground, caught off guard by the rapid and violent disintegration of Yugoslavia, and afraid that the resulting regional instability would threaten relationships in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union (EU), the Western powers vacillated among inactivity, half measures, and appeasement of nationalist aggressors—anything to avoid costly, and potentially bloody, direct intervention—before finally manipulating the parties involved in the war into signing a tenuous agreement at Dayton, Ohio.
Later, in 1999, fear of casualties and, once again, a lack of understanding of Balkan realities led the West to resort to an airwar half measure against Serbia in an avowed effort to protect the Albanian minority in the Serbian province of Kosovo from Serbian ultranationalist “ethnic cleansing.” NATO’s bombing campaign did not spare the Kosovar Albanians from the atrocities that it supposedly sought to prevent. Ultimately Serbia’s leadership was bludgeoned into submission and most of the Kosovar Albanian refugees originally forced out of the region by the Serbs returned to their devastated homes, whereupon they began perpetrating their own round of atrocities on those Kosovar Serbs who did not flee when Serbian forces withdrew.
The befuddlement and fear demonstrated by Western leaders during the Bosnian and Kosovo crises were a direct reflection of an ignorance of Balkan history. But the leaders merely mirrored the more widespread ignorance of their respective constituencies. The majority of westerners had little knowledge of, or interest in, Balkan affairs beyond a rudimentary, generalized, and frequently oversimplified awareness of assorted cold war-related situations: Yugoslavia was a “good” Communist country ever since Marshal Josip Tito broke with Joseph Stalin in 1948 and mixed capitalism with socialism; Bulgaria was the blind puppet and lackey of the Soviet Union; Romania under Nicolae Ceausescu was a “friendly” Communist state that frequently opposed Soviet imperialism; rarely noticed Albania was akin to Tibet, isolated in its mountains and in its affinities to Red China; Greece was part of NATO, a member of the West that was not considered part of the Balkans; and Turkey, another NATO ally, was Middle Eastern and not a part of Europe. When Yugoslavia disintegrated in 1992, unfamiliarity with pre-cold war Balkan history made it easy for Western politicians and journalists to blame the resulting warfare on “centuries-old” ethnic or religious conflicts—again, an oversimplification rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of Balkan history—and to tag the fighting inaccurately as the “Third” Balkan War (assuming, of course, that their Western audiences were aware that there once had been two others).
Perhaps the unfamiliarity with Balkan history displayed by English speakers can be blamed partly on a certain lack of general education dealing with the region. Except for a few occurrences that have played important roles in determining the course of Western European developments (such as the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 and the 1914 assassination of the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo), events in the Balkans rarely have found their way into English-language secondary education textbooks. At the level of higher education, the same often holds true for courses in general European and world history.
This “Balkan gap” in recent English-language education can be attributed in some measure to continuing vestiges of Western European cultural antipathy toward the Orthodox European and Islamic civilizations that have held historical sway in the region as well as to a certain lack of available, sound general studies of Balkan history. When discussing Orthodox Europe and Islam, westerners frequently portray them as either threatening or as inferior with regard to the West. As threats, both provide westerners with their most long-standing cultural bogymen: Orthodox Europe spawned the Byzantine Empire, Russia, and the Soviet Union; Islam begot the Arab Caliphate, the Spanish Moors, the Saracens, the Ottoman Empire, and, most currently, Islamic “fundamentalism,” Libya, Iran, and Iraq. Less concrete (but more insidious because of their casualness) are the consistent Western portrayals of Orthodox European and Islamic inferiority in texts and in the media by using culturally negative or pejorative descriptive terms (such as “underdeveloped,” “backward,” “Asiatic,” “fossilized,” among others) when discussing them and by categorizing their political and social structures as innately flawed (such as being politically “autocratic” or “authoritarian” and socially “inequitable” or “tradition-bound”).
As birthplace for the Orthodox European civilization and dominated for close to half a millennium by Islamic civilization, the Balkan Peninsula suffers accordingly. Its very name seems unconsciously associated in Western minds with “otherness,” since it derives from a colloquial Turkish term for mountain. This perceptual foreignness has been reinforced further by the late-nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century chaos and divisiveness characterizing the rise of modern nationstates in the region, epitomized in the term “balkanization.” So tangible is the negative perception of the Balkans in Western minds that many peoples native to the region—Greeks, Romanians, Croats, and Slovenes, in particular—adamantly reject the use of the term, thus hoping to escape the impression of inferiority in the West. Some Western scholars of the region do so as well because of an awareness of the cultural implications of the word. Instead, the term “Southeastern Europe” has become a common substitute.
One might posit that, if the Balkans received the volume of English-language general historical coverage approaching that given most areas of Western Europe, then at least westerners’ ignorance of the region would be mitigated and the cultural biases dampened. This, of course, is conjecture. As it stands, few book-length general studies of Balkan history have been published in English. Even if the comparison is limited to English-language books specifically treating Eastern Europe, the Balkans place far behind those devoted to Central-Eastern and Northeastern European topics. It would appear that the Balkans enjoy copious coverage only when events in the region cause some sense of crisis in the West. Both the “Eastern Question” (1875-78) and the Balkan Wars (1912-13) produced outpourings of predominantly superficial or subjective publications on the Balkans that ceased once the crises ended. The current rash of mostly journalistic and memoir publications generated by the collapse of Yugoslavia, the war in Bosnia-Hercegovina, and the humanitarian debacle in Kosovo follows in their mold.
Because the prospects are likely that post-Communist turmoil in the Balkans will continue for some time to come, raising serious security and foreign policy issues for the United States and Europe, westerners will need to know as much as possible about the region, especially about its history. The number of reliable and comprehensive general histories of the Balkans readily available in English at present can be counted on one’s fingers and toes, and most of these are limited in scope, dated, or written almost exclusively for specialists. Supplementing these works are some English-language studies devoted to important stages in Balkan history, such as the Byzantine, Ottoman, and modern national periods. For much of the later national and Communist periods in Balkan history, the reader is forced to cull information from general studies of Eastern Europe. Augmenting such general studies are a number of English-language, national-oriented histories spanning all of the periods. Taken as a whole, however, their coverage is uneven because English-language histories of states that have been of intrinsic cultural or political interest to the West (such as Greece and Yugoslavia) far outstrip in number those of the other Balkan states (including pre-Yugoslavia Bosnia-Hercegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia). Also, most of these works have as their focus the modern national and, especially, Communist periods rather than the Byzantine or Ottoman, and many of them suffer from nationalist or ideological biases. In any case, their total numbers are few relative to those available for the rest of Eastern Europe, let alone to those treating with Western European states.
On the whole, few comprehensive studies of the Balkans exist. More narrowly directed general works of all kinds tend to emphasize periods in which Western influences play a significant role. Times in which non-Western forces predominated in Balkan history are de-emphasized or ignored. Yet it is precisely the non-Western influences that have made the Balkans “the Balkans”—that region of Europe that has proven so befuddling to westerners over the years.
The historical survey that follows is an attempt to assist the English-speaking student and general reader in gaining a basic introductory understanding of Balkan history in all of its varied cultural stages, from the end of antiquity through the collapse of communism (but without the usual pro-Western biases) and to provide them with a resource for launching further, more in-depth study should they so desire. As the title proclaims, it is a survey history of the Balkans. The term intentionally and consistently is used throughout the text to emphasize the region’s cultural and historical uniqueness relative to Western Europe without any implied qualitative connotation—and nothing more.
The text constitutes an interpretive narrative organized into large, subdivided sections corresponding to important developmental periods—“eras”—in Balkan history, beginning with the advent of Slav and Turk settlement in the region and ending with the collapse of Communist governments in 1991. Post-1991 developments have not been included, since the “facts” surrounding them are still too sketchy, or partisan, or not at present fully understood regarding their future significance to provide any definitive insight into the fundamental nature of the new, post-Communist era. The text represents an interpretive synthesis of ideas and observations gained by years of extensive reading and research in the fields of history and Balkan studies and by extended periods of firsthand experience in the region itself.
In an effort to aid those interested in pursuing study of the Balkans at greater length, extensive lists of further readings and a selected general bibliography supplement the text. Rather than fill the text with footnote references to general data that essentially are well known to specialists, a detailed list of reference readings pertinent to the material presented is appended at the end of each major text division. Selected listing of general studies as well as some collections of primary sources translated into English immediately follow the body of the text. Each of the listings is organized topically, first by general works and then by state/region.
The references included in the listings are extensive but selective. First, since this study is targeted specifically at English-speaking introductory students and general readers, the works listed are published exclusively in English. Thus, many important source studies have been omitted because they are available only in nonEnglish languages. Those possessing the ability to read foreign languages will find more than adequate references to such studies in the notes and bibliographies of the works cited.
Second, for reasons both of intent and space, only book titles have been included, most of which represent monographs. It seems unlikely that this book’s intended readership will be able to jump immediately into digesting the narrowly focused and highly specialized literature represented by scholarly articles. The titles listed provide the general in-depth exposure to various issues in Balkan history usually needed before plunging into the available periodical literature.
Asa final, personal note, I wish to extend acknowledgment and thanks to those who lent support and assistance over the time involved in bringing the following study to fruition. The completion of the manuscript’s final draft was facilitated through a sabbatical leave granted me by President Christopher N. Breiseth and the trustees of Wilkes University. President Breiseth’s enthusiastic support for the project was inspirational and greatly appreciated. A number of colleagues and friends at Wilkes University were particularly helpful. Harold E. Cox, a historian who contributed expert cartographic collaboration on three of my previous book projects, once again produced the maps supplementing this text. I feel truly fortunate to enjoy his willing cooperation. J. Michael Lennon, vice president for academic affairs, and Robert J. Heaman, expert in literary culture, kindly gave of their time to critique portions of the manuscript to help make it more readable for nonspecialists, for which I am grateful. Kathleen J. Diekhaus, departmental secretary, rendered useful clerical aid, and Brian R. Sacolic, reference and database librarian, provided valuable bibliographic search assistance. At Palgrave Press, Michael J. Flamini and Amanda Johnson demonstrated genuine tolerance and great understanding over delays caused by unforeseen health problems and revisions. Finally, I wish to thank my wife, Anne-Marie, for suffering through three years of her husband’s assorted preoccupations, obsessions, and agonies surrounding the project.
Dennis P. Hupchick Wilkes-Barre, PA, 2001
Note on Spelling and Pronunciation
An attempt has been made in the following text to render most proper names and foreign terms in or near their native spellings. Exceptions to this approach are terms generally better known to English speakers in their Anglicized forms (such as the names of states, certain cities, and various geographic elements) and the first names of Greek, Russian, and Western European individuals. Place-names (other than Constantinople/Istanbul, Adrianople/Edirne, and Nicza/Iznik) are given in their contemporary forms, with variants provided in parentheses following their initial appearances in the text. In the case of languages written in non-Latin alphabets, a “phonetical” transliteration system, generally following that used by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, is employed for Bulgarian and Russian, while for Serbian and Macedonian a system based on the Latin, Croat form of Serbo-Croatian (utilizing diacritical marks and familiar in the West for transliterating “Yugoslav” languages), is used. Turkish terms are spelled in the Latin characters currently used in Turkey, with appropriate diacritics.
INTRODUCTION
Land, People, and Culture
Before launching directly into the survey of Balkan history, it is necessary to place the study into context by addressing the question: What are “the Balkans”?
They constitute the geographical region of Europe called the Balkan Peninsula and are often labeled Southeastern Europe. Although apparently straightforward, such a description suffers from the inability of geographers to separate definitively the so-called continent of Europe from that of Asia. Despite this problematic uncertainty, few would disagree that the Balkans are part of Eastern Europe. Most fundamentally, the Balkans are defined by the assorted human societies who live there, most especially by their culture. Culture is a particular society’s shared perception of reality, which is shaped by the people’s mundane physical and human environments and provides a common group identity that transcends individual personal traits. When treating particular societies that inhabit a specific region, one must consider their culture. Culture itself, however, is a complex issue, existing on the small-group level as ethnicity and on the large-group level as civilization. It makes little sense to concentrate primarily on ethnic culture when compiling a general history of the ethnically variegated Balkans. More useful is the focus on the three major civilizations—the “native” Orthodox Eastern European and the two “imposed” Islamic and Western European—that have thrived there over the course of the past two millennia. Their “origins” and unique interplay among the region’s inhabitants are what actually lend definition to “the Balkans.”
Land
The Balkan Peninsula is a rugged, irregular, inverted triangle of land jutting southward from the European landmass into the eastern Mediterranean Sea. It is bounded on the west by the Adriatic Sea, on the east by the Black Sea, and on the southeast by the Aegean Sea. The northern land border of the Balkan triangle is partially defined by mountain ranges. The Carpathian Mountains provide a limited boundary to parts of the north and northeast, while the Julian Alps delineate the peninsula’s extreme northwestern corner. Roughly 300 miles (480 kilometers) of open land carved by the Danube, Sava, and Drava rivers divide these two chains in the northwest while, in the northeast, the plains and tablelands of the Danube and Prut rivers separate the Carpathians from the Black Sea by some 125 miles (200 kilometers). In the northwest, the Sava River often has been designated a boundary because it once constituted the Ottoman Empire’s most stable border in the area. Likewise, the Drava River served the same function because it formed a border for Yugoslavia. Similarly, the Prut River has been used as a Balkan boundary in the northeast, since it delineated a border of Romania. Using the Drava and Prut rivers as part of the geographical boundaries, the Balkan Peninsula encompasses some 276,700 square miles (716,650 square kilometers) of territory. (See Map 1.)
Close to 70 percent of the Balkans is covered by mountains. The name “Balkan” derives from a colloquial Turkish word for a forested mountain. Now the term also is the name of a string of mountains just south of the Danube River in today’s Bulgaria, known in classical times as the Haimos (Hemus), that stretches from the Black Sea for half the east-west width of the peninsula. To their south stretch a densely grouped series of mountain ranges—the Rila (with the highest peak in the Balkans: 9,592 feet [2,926 meters]), the Rhodope, the Pindos, and the Taigetos—to the tip of the peninsula in the Greek Peloponnese. The peninsula’s west is dominated by the ruggedly limestone Dinaric and Albanian Alps, which run parallel to the Adriatic coastline but spread extensively inland. The mountains furnish an assortment of metal ores and minerals, especially in the central and northern regions. Iron, zinc, chrome, lead, antimony, copper, nickel, gold, and silver ores are present as well as such minerals as bauxite, lignite, and chromite. The oil deposits of the Carpathian foothills in the peninsula’s extreme north are the largest in continental Europe.
Except for the mostly narrow coastal plains, most of the peninsula’s lowlands are river valleys. The Danube’s is the largest, cutting a wide swath between the Dinaric Alps and the Carpathian Mountains, narrowing at the so-called Iron Gates east of Belgrade, where the river carves a gorge separating the Balkan and Carpathian mountains, before again widening into a broad plain extending to the Black Sea. Others, such as the Drava, Sava, Morava, and Iskiir river systems (important branches of the Danube watershed), the Aliakmon, Vardar, Struma, Mesta, and Maritsa river valleys (which run to the Aegean Sea), and the Neretva, Drin, Shkumbin, and Vijosé river valleys (which flow to the Adriatic), provide the interior with both a modicum of arable land and the primary natural lines of overland communication.
Climatically, the Balkan Peninsula is not a unit. It enjoys a Mediterranean climate along most of its seacoasts and a continental one throughout its interior.
Vegetation and land use vary with the natures of the dual climate. Along the Adriatic, Mediterranean, and Aegean coasts, the land mostly is rocky and denuded, supporting such crops as olives, grapes, figs, lemons, and oranges, and the herding of sheep and goats. In the interior, most of the mountains are forested; cereal crops predominate in the river valleys and lowlands; vineyards are found in some areas of the Danubian Plain, in the Maritsa River valley, and along the upper Sava; and livestock breeding mostly involves pigs and cows, although sheep and goats are fed on highland pastures. The line separating the two climate zones lies close to the coastline in most of the peninsula, since the mountains, which form the climatic border, push close to the seas almost everywhere. (See Map 1.)
Regarding political geography, the Balkan Peninsula historically is of strategic significance. Its location in the eastern Mediterranean makes it a crossroads of three continents—Europe, Asia, and Africa—and, since earliest recorded times, its accessibility by both sea and land opens it to political, military, and cultural incursions and contentions from all directions. In the past, six foreign empires— the Persian, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, Habsburg Austrian, and Russian— sought to possess, whole or in part, the benefits offered by the peninsula’s strategic location and natural resources with varying degrees of success.
Interspersed among the foreign imperial efforts were those of indigenous Balkan states. Because of the peninsula’s rugged geography and harsh climate, political life in the Balkans historically has been far from stable. Small states, beginning with the classical Greek city-states, have been the rule because of the mountainous topography, which tended to separate human habitation among isolated river valleys and highland plateaus, and resulted in centuries of fierce competition among the states for control of the geographically restricted available natural resources. The fact that Balkan states nearly always proved vulnerable to outside empires competing for sway in the region meant that those resources rarely benefited the inhabitants. Minerals and ores were either extracted directly by the foreigners or provided to them by regional states at their mercy.
When Balkan states managed to survive for any length of time, they did so mostly in the peninsula’s interior, where the geographic division between coast and mountains had economic consequences. Often the coast, with its important seaports, was controlled by foreign states that frequently were at odds with those in the interior, thus effectively barring the latter from secure outlets to the seas. For this reason, the economies of Balkan states primarily remained agricultural long into the twentieth century.
Today the Balkan Peninsula is home to nine states as well as a small portion of a tenth—Turkey. (See Map 2.)
Albania lies in the west, along the Adriatic Sea, and encompasses 11,097 square miles (28,489 square kilometers) of territory divided into two zones: The north and central coastal plains and the much more extensive interior and south coastal highlands (Albanian Alps), which in places reach heights of over 6,550 feet (2,000 meters). Most river systems run from the highlands to the sea; chief among them are the Drin, Shkumbin, and Vijosé. Cereal production and some Mediterranean-type agriculture take place on the coastal plains, while forests and livestock pasturing predominate in the highlands. Chromium and copper represent the most important mineral resources. The capital for the state’s population of 3.3 million people is Tirané.
Bosnia-Hercegovina, with its capital at Sarajevo, was home, before the war of 1992 to 1995, to an ethnically and religiously mixed population of 4.6 million people inhabiting 19,776 square miles (51,233 square kilometers) in the peninsula’s northwest. The state lies almost completely within the folds of the Dinaric Alps, some peaks of which are over 6,550 feet (2,000 meters) high. Most of the sparsely available arable land lies in the valleys of the Neretva, Bosna, and Drina rivers and in scattered small mountain basins and plateaus. Much of the terrain is covered by forest, making timber products economically important. Livestock is herded in upland pastures. Lignite, iron, and manganese are mined in Bosnia, while bauxite and lignite are worked in Hercegovina. In former times, eastern Bosnia was an important gold and silver mining region.
Bulgaria, encompassing 42,855 square miles (110,994 square kilometers), controls nearly half of the eastern Balkans and is home to 8.8 million people. Geographically, it is fairly well defined: Most of the northern border is determined by the Danube River, but the extreme northeastern portion that crosses the Dobrudzhan Plain is undefined; the Black Sea coast serves in the east; the southern slopes of the Rhodope Mountains partially define the southern frontier, but the line is arbitrary on the Thracian Plain in the southeast; and the western slopes of the Struma River valley, along with the northern bend in the Balkan Mountains, roughly form the western border. Within these boundaries lie the Balkan, Rila, and Rhodope mountain ranges and an extensive network of river systems, which generally flow north into the Danube or south to the Aegean. The plain and tablelands of Thrace and the Danube are excellent for cereal and fruit cultivation. A uniquely important crop is roses, grown in one particular mountain valley, the attar of which is a crucial and expensive ingredient in many top-of-the-line perfumes. Pigs, sheep, cows, and goats commonly are herded. Coal (both black and brown), iron, copper, zinc, and lead are important mineral resources. The capital city of Sofia has been an urban settlement since pre-Roman times.
Croatia is populated by 4.7 million people residing on 21,824 square miles (56,538 square kilometers) of territory in the northwest of the peninsula. Its crescent-shape physical configuration consists of three regions: Croatia Proper, with the state’s capital of Zagreb, serves as the central core, from which stretch the two horns, composed of Slavonia, the northern lowlands lying between the Sava and Drava rivers, and Dalmatia in the south, which comprises the Adriatic coastline and the adjoining Dinaric highlands. Peaks in the mountains exceed elevations of 4,950 feet (1,500 meters) in a few areas. The Sava and Drava are the primary river systems. Much of the land is forested in Croatia Proper and in the Dalmatian highlands. Livestock is herded on upland pastures while grains are sown in depressions and valleys. Mediterranean-type cultivation and scrub evergreens proliferate along the Dalmatian coast. In the lowlands of Slavonia, cereal and fruit crops predominate. Mineral resources are limited, consisting of relatively small pockets of iron, natural gas, oil, and bauxite.
Greece, including its Aegean island holdings and Crete, encompasses 50,962 square miles (131,990 square kilometers) and 10 million people. Its capital at Athens is built around the remains of the famous ancient acropolis. Mountains cover 80 percent of the triangular-shape mainland, which forms the southern tip of the Balkan Peninsula, making less than a third of the land suitable for cultivation. The Pindos Mountains, whose highest peak—Mt. Parnassos—tises to 8,059 feet (2,457 meters), run the north-south length of the central and southeastern regions, breaking at the Gulf of Corinth, only to be continued in the Peloponnese by the Taigetos range. The mountainous interior is linked to the surrounding seas through deep valleys cut by the Aliakmon and Achelods river systems. Most cultivation is restricted to the narrow coastlines, where typical Mediterranean-type crops, including citrus fruits, are produced. Cereal crops are grown in scattered upland plateaus, the Thessalian Plain, and in the northern Macedonian-Thracian coastal plain, which is the most extensive lowland in the state. In the mountains, Mediterranean-type scrub and pasture predominate. Although a variety of mineral ores are present—bauxite and magnesite, especially, along with deposits of iron, copper, lead, zinc, and silver— they exist in such small amounts that they are of little economic benefit. Given the ruggedness of the terrain, the great extent of irregular coastline, and the paucity of natural resources, it is little wonder that the Greek economy historically has depended on maritime trade rather than on agriculture and manufacturing.
Macedonia, situated in the center of the peninsula, today covers 9,778 square miles (25,333 square kilometers) of territory and boasts a population of 2.2 million people, governed from the capital at Skopje. It is a mountainous region where the southern Dinaric and eastern Albanian Alps meet the northern projections of the Pindos Mountains. While a few peaks in the western, Albanian Alp range can top 6,600 feet (2,000 meters) in elevation, elsewhere summits rarely exceed 4,950 feet (1,500 meters). The Vardar River system, which bisects the state from north to south, provides it with its principal lowlands. On these are grown cereals, tobacco, cotton, and some fruits as well as wine-producing vines. Close to half of the total territory is heavily forested, but there is some upland pasture for sheep and goats, along with localized cultivation in valleys and depressions. Mineral resources include small deposits of zinc, lead, iron, chrome, and manganese. In times past, gold was mined in the eastern regions.
Romania, with a territory in the peninsula’s northeast covering 91,699 square miles (237,499 square kilometers) and containing 23.1 million inhabitants, is the largest Balkan state. It is divided topographically into two basic arable zones—the plains and tablelands of the Danube and Prut rivers in the south and east and the rolling, forested Transylvanian Plateau—by the boomerang-shape and territorially extensive Carpathian Mountains. Geographically, and for the most part historically, Transylvania and its neighboring regions, situated north and west of the Carpathians, lie outside of the Balkan Peninsula. The southern arm of the Carpathians, often called the Transylvanian Alps, is higher and more precipitous than the eastern, with some peaks reaching elevations of over 6,500 feet (2,000 meters). All of the river systems draining the southern Wallachian Plain and eastern Moldavian Tableland flow from the Carpathians to the Danube, while those of the Transylvanian Plateau mostly run westward, emptying into the Tisza River on the Pannonian Plain of Hungary. The Carpathians and the Transylvanian highlands are thickly forested, providing pastureland for sheep and goats and some cultivation in depressions and valleys. The extensive Wallachian and Moldavian lowlands, as well as the western edge of Transylvania, are heavily cultivated, with grains, flax, hemp, tobacco, and grape-producing vines among the important crops. Romania possesses the richest and most diverse mineral resources in the Balkans. Europe’s largest continental oil fields lie in the foothills of the southern Carpathians, and Transylvania is rich in natural gas. Large deposits of salt, lignite, black and brown coal, copper, and iron, supplemented by zinc, manganese, silver, gold, and mercury, are mined in the Carpathians and in the Transylvanian Plateau. Bucharest, the capital, sits on the Wallachian Plain.
Slovenia, with a territory of 7,834 square miles (20,296 square kilometers) and a population of 1.9 million people, edges out Macedonia as the smallest state in the peninsula. Governed from the capital at Ljubljana, it lies in the extreme northwest within the terminal ranges of the Julian Alps, among which the highest peak reaches 9,400 feet (2,863 meters). The mountains lend the state a truly “alpine” appearance reminiscent of Switzerland. Most all of the land not covered by mountains consists of highly forested foothills and depressions, cut through by the upper courses of the Sava and Drava rivers. The largest area of lowland is the Drava Basin in the east, where grains and some fruits and vines are grown. Elsewhere, cultivation is undertaken in the numerous depressions and valleys. Livestock pasturing and lumbering are widespread. Mineral resources include modest deposits of oil and natural gas, brown coal, lignite, zinc, lead, and mercury.
Yugoslavia, a federation today uniting the republics of Serbia and Montenegro that together comprise 39,507 square miles (102,350 square kilometers) of territory and 10.7 million people, occupies the north-central regions of the peninsula. Its capital at Belgrade is situated strategically at the confluence of the Danube and Sava rivers. The Dinaric Alps dominate the landscape in the south and southwest of the state, and Montenegro lies almost completely within their folds. Similar to the situation of Bosnia-Hercegovina, the state is landlocked, possessing only a short length of Adriatic coastline in Montenegro, although the Morava River, which originates in the extreme south, close to Macedonia, provides a relatively direct access route linking the interior to the Aegean Sea by way of the Vardar River valley. Serbia, much the larger of the two state partners, is only partially defined by geographic features. These exist only for its southern half. The Dinaric ranges mark out the boundaries to the south and west, while the northern bend of the Balkan Mountains and the Danube River delineate the east. The northern half of Serbia’s borders is mostly drawn over lowlands (Vojvodina and Srem) forming part of the Pannonian Plain and generally bisects river lines, making it geographically arbitrary. South of Belgrade the land rises into somewhat forested hill country, known as Sumadija, which is drained by the extensive Morava River system. The full range of continental crops are cultivated on the Pannonian lowlands and in the valleys of Sumadija. The more densely forested mountain regions offer pasturing and some grain cultivation. In areas of mountainous and highly barren Montenegro, Mediterranean-type cultivation takes place. In terms of mineral resources, Montenegro boasts only bauxite as significant, while Serbia is endowed with numerous deposits of brown coal, lead, and zinc, along with lesser amounts of black coal and copper.
People
The Balkans’ harsh and divisive geography played an important role in shaping the lives of its inhabitants. Mountainous terrain generally fragmented human settlement among the scattered lowlands and highland plateaus, contributing to the rise of strong ethnic group identities. In a rugged land where natural resources often were limited, group cohesiveness was crucial for survival. Competitive conditions bred ethnic cultures frequently typified by extremes in expression—communal generosity and stubborn territoriality; overt hospitality and brutal atrocity; bouts of fun-loving enjoyment and irrational violence. All Balkan peoples traditionally have exhibited one common characteristic: A sense of passionate, tenacious group pride.
While the ethnographic map of the Balkans is diverse, the peninsula’s population of approximately 69.3 million people (not including the inhabitants of European Turkey and the millions who reside in Istanbul) essentially is comprised of three primary groupings: Historically ancient peoples, South Slavs, and Turks. In addition, there exist a smattering of numerically smaller groups of Gypsies, Jews, and an assortment of other ethnics, such as Italians, Hungarians, Germans, Ukrainians, and Russians. (See Map 2.)
Contrary to the common perception that South Slavs form the majority in the Balkans’ total population, ancient peoples (that is, those who reasonably can trace the presence of ethnic ancestors in the peninsula at least back to classical antiquity) account for some 50 percent (roughly 35 million). The ancestors of these peoples spoke Indo-European languages. The most familiar are the Greeks, who populate the southern extremity of the peninsula as well as the Aegean and Ionian islands and Crete. Their ancient origins are so well known, and their classical cultural impact on Western Europe so recognized, that they need not be described here.
Today the Greeks generally occupy the same territories as they did in antiquity, despite the sixth- and seventh-century Slavic invasions and settlements of their mainland Balkan possessions, which forced most Greek speakers to the coastal peripheries for survival. Only a long process of military reconquest by the Greekspeaking Byzantine Empire, conducted over the subsequent two centuries, permitted the Greeks to regain control of their ancient homeland’s interior. Even then, pockets of Slavic-speaking populations survived as far south as the Peloponnese and in the region of Macedonia. Although speculative arguments have been advanced that the lengthy Slavic incursions into Greek-inhabited regions probably diluted the direct genetic link between modern Greeks and their classical ancestors, these arguments are irrelevant since language, and the self-identity that it conveys (not DNA), is the fundamental measure of ethnic culture.
Albanians speak a unique language that is thought to have descended from ancient Illyrian. If so, they then possess an ethnic heritage equaling that of the Greeks. This heritage would place them among the oldest existing non-Greek ethnic groups in all of Europe, akin in time to the Basques of Western Europe. Although today they are confined mostly to a small territory hugging the western Balkan coastline and its mountainous interior, in antiquity the Illyrians occupied a large swath of the western Balkans lying to the north of the Greeks, which included present-day Albania, northwestern Greece, Montenegro, part of Serbia, most of Bosnia-Hercegovina, and a good part of western Macedonia.
Waves of Roman, Goth, Avar, and Slav invasions and settlements pushed the Illyrians into the generally mountainous regions that the Albanians inhabit today. In that rough and isolating environment, their Albanian descendants evolved as a mostly tribalized, pastoral society divided into two distinct subgroups identified by dialect: Ghegs and Tosks. The Ghegs, who inhabit the rugged northern regions, developed as archetypical wild mountaineer tribes—pastoral, warlike, prone to feuding, and resentful of outside authority. The Tosk tribes, who occupy the less intimidating southern lowlands and their highland interior, are milder in temperament and more amenable to central authority. Four and a half centuries of Ottoman rule over the Albanians did little to weaken the structure of their society or to moderate their deep-rooted outlooks. Traditional aversion to unified, central political authority retarded the growth of national consciousness among them until late into the nineteenth century, a situation that made them vulnerable to threats from highly nationalist neighbors. Only intervention by the European Great Powers in the early twentieth century preserved the Albanians as a nation and a state, and they have persisted as the least modernized of all Balkan peoples into the present.
The Romanians claim an ethnic heritage as old as that of the Albanians. They speak a Latin-based language that, in Romanian national thinking, derives from the Roman occupation of ancient Dacia during the second and third centuries. Dacia once included the territories of present-day Romania and the Danubian Plain in northern Bulgaria. It was conquered and occupied by the Roman Emperor Trajan (98-117) in the early second century. According to Romanian ethnic theory, when Emperor Aurelian (270-75) withdrew his legions south of the Danube in 270, the Latinized native Dacians remained behind, surviving successive waves of Germanic, Slavic, and Turkic invaders by taking refuge in the Carpathian Mountains, from which they reemerged in the thirteenth century ethnically unscathed to occupy the Wallachian Plain, the Moldavian tablelands, and the Transylvanian Plateau, where they have remained to the present. This contention is contested by many nonRomanians, who reject the possibility of Latin-Dacian survival under the adverse ethnic conditions that held in the area during the centuries of foreign invasions. They suggest that the Romanians originated south of the Danube as nomadic pastoral Latin speakers who migrated into present-day Romania some time after the arrival of the Turkic Magyars in the Danubian Basin during the late ninth century. This contention partly is based on the continued widespread existence of pastoralists in every area of the Balkans known as Vlahs, who also speak a Latin-based language. In fact, the name of the Romanian region of Wallachia is derived from that of those wanderers, meaning “Land of the Vlahs.” The Romanians counter this argument by insisting that the Vlahs spread south into the Balkans from Romania. The question of Romanian ethnic origins is not yet definitively settled.
As for the Vlahs themselves, the theory of their Dacian origin is contested by one that considers them descendants of Latinized Thracians, an ancient people contemporaneous with the Greeks, Illyrians, and Dacians, who inhabited the Thracian Plain (to which they lent their name), the southern and western regions of today’s Bulgaria, and the eastern portions of present-day Macedonia. They were a tribal people active in livestock breeding, farming, and ore mining. Close and continuous commercial contacts with ancient Greek colonies along the Black Sea coast initially led to their early partial Hellenization, but conquest by Rome in the first century B.C.E. and six centuries of continuous Roman imperial presence resulted in the Thracians’ Latinization. The inundation of South Slavs into the Thracians’ homelands during the sixth and seventh centuries led to their absorption into Slavic culture or their taking to the high mountains, where they subsisted as scattered, small groups of primitive pastoralists. By the thirteenth century they acquired the name Vlah. Their wandering lifestyle, small numbers, and wide geographical dispersion prevented them from forming a nation during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Today they constitute an ethnic minority in all of the central and southern Balkan states, and their total number is dwindling (perhaps less than 100,000) because of their continual assimilation into the dominant ethnic groups of those states.
South Slavs constitute the second major ethnic component of the Balkan population, numbering some 29 million people (over 41 percent of the peninsula’s inhabitants), divided today among seven major groups: Bosnians, Bulgarians, Croats, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Serbs, and Slovenes. The South Slavs form one of the three primary branches of the Slavic-speaking family of peoples in Europe, the others being the West and the East Slavs. The ancestors of all three entered Eastern Europe during the fifth through seventh centuries from a common homeland thought to have been located somewhere in the vicinity of the great Pripet Marshes, which straddle the border separating today’s Ukraine and Belarus. They came as part of the lengthy human migratory process that is commonly called the Barbarian invasions of Europe. Initially all of the Slav tribes must have spoken dialects of a common Slavic language shaped in the Pripet homeland. But the tribal migrations in three generally different directions and into three separate environments, coupled with the passage of time and the later intrusion and settlement of non-Slavic peoples into the central areas of Eastern Europe, resulted in the formation of three distinct subgroups of Slavic speakers, corresponding to the western, southern, and eastern tribal groups.
The South Slavic tribal groups moved south and southwest from their Pripet homeland, eventually entering the Byzantine-controlled Balkan Peninsula as either allies of or refugees from the invading Turkic Avars during the second half of the sixth century. Their search for a new, permanent homeland proved successful. Today their descendants solidly inhabit virtually all of the northwestern, central, and southeastern regions of the Balkans.
Turks comprise a third ethnic component of the Balkan population. Although today numerically small—a little over 1 million people (about 2 percent of the total population)—they have played a role in shaping the history of the Balkans far beyond their numbers.
In late antiquity the rolling plains of the Danube and Prut rivers in the Balkans’ northeast served Turkic tribes from the Eurasian steppes as an open door into the heart of the peninsula and the riches of the Eastern Roman Empire. Huns and related tribes swept through the Balkans in the fifth and sixth centuries, followed by the Avars and their allies in the sixth and seventh. Among these latter were the Bulgars, who established a state south of the Danube. Unlike the Avars, whose settlements in the Balkans proved transitory, the Bulgar state persisted in the face of concerted Byzantine pressures. By the ninth century the Bulgars were challenging the Byzantine Empire for political hegemony in the Balkans, but by that time they also were well on the way toward ethnic assimilation into their Slavic-speaking subject population. The conversion of the Turkic Bulgar ruling elite to Orthodox Chris- tianity at midcentury opened the gate to their rapid and total Slavic assimilation. Within a hundred years of the Bulgar conversion, most traces of their Turkic origins had disappeared, except for their name—the Bulgars had been transformed into Slavic Bulgarians.
Oguz, Pecheneg, and Cuman Turkic tribes appeared in the Balkans between the ninth and eleventh centuries. Most of them eventually suffered an ethnic fate similar to the Bulgars and left little lasting impression, although the Gagauz Turks of Bessarabia, a region lying east of the Prut River (now known as Moldova), and some Turks living today in the eastern Balkans may be direct ethnic descendants of those medieval Turkic interlopers. Additionally, the Ottoman Turks’ five-century rule over most of the Balkans established numerous scattered enclaves of Turkishspeaking groups throughout much of the southern portion of the peninsula, with a heavy concentration in the southeastern region of ancient Thrace.
Among the scattered additional ethnic groups that individually populate the Balkans in small numbers but cumulatively total a bit over 4 million people (usually lumped together under the category of “Other” in demographic statistical tables and accounting for approximately 6 percent of the peninsula’s inhabitants), the Jews deserve notice. The Balkan Jews are predominantly of southern, Sephardic origin. While some are descendants of ancient Mediterranean Jewish merchant colonists, most are the heirs of Spanish Jews who were expelled from Spain following the late fifteenth century. Numerous Spanish Jews settled in the Ottoman eastern Mediterranean, where they were granted recognition of self-government (on an equal footing with the Christians of the empire) and additional privileges, primarily within the Ottoman commercial class. Centered on the old Byzantine Greek port of Thessaloniki, the Sephardic Jews came to play an important role in the international maritime commerce of the Ottoman Empire in the eastern Mediterranean.
The lack of Ottoman anti-Semitism carried over into the post-Ottoman Balkan world. The independent Balkan states of the twentieth century continued to demonstrate a tolerance for Jews that was exceptional compared to conditions elsewhere in Europe. Anti-Semitism in Romania between the second half of the nineteenth century and the 1940s was caused by an inundation of Ashkenazi Jewish refugees fleeing rising Russian nationalist chauvinism during the first half of that period, the effects of the Bolshevik revolution and civil war in Russia, and the rabid Polish nationalism of newly refounded Poland. The influx of these Jews mixed with abominable social conditions in Romania to create a volatile situation. The difference in Romanian perceptions between these northern Jews, many of whom arrived as land managers for wealthy Romanian absentee landlords, and the southern Jews, who were considered traditionally benevolent trading partners, sparked a radical reaction on the part of the Romanian peasantry, who were then suffering under the region’s most inequitable land distribution system. Of all the peoples of the Balkans, only the Romanians and the Croats (who historically were tied to Catholic Central-Eastern Europe) spawned native neofascist, anti-Semitic movements before World War II and conducted Nazi-style anti-Semitic policies during that conflict. After the German takeover of the Balkans in 1941, tens of thousands of Jews in the peninsula perished, especially in Greece and Serbia, where German occupation freed the Nazis to work their will. As happened elsewhere in Eastern Europe following the war, the majority of the surviving Balkan Jews emigrated to the newly founded state of Israel.
All “Other” ethnic groups exist as minorities in the present Balkan states. Gypsies, who number around 400,000, are found in every state, predominantly as members of the more economically strapped social classes, often earning meager livelihoods as beggars, peddlers, musicians, or black marketeers. In the past, Ottoman and Habsburg defense policies resulted in settling thousands of military colonists, hailing from disparate ethnic backgrounds, on their borders to guard against possible enemy incursions. Today close to half a million Hungarians reside in the northern Serbian province of Vojvodina, where they are joined by fewer numbers of Czechs and Slovaks, to name just two groups. Significant numbers of Hungarians and Germans also are present in the Transylvanian regions of Romania. A large Italian population is found in the Istrian Peninsula of Croatia. Descendants of Mongol-Tatars live on the tableland of Dobrudzha in both Bulgaria and Romania. Russians, Ukrainians, Ruthenians—the list can go on—join those already mentioned in a crazy-quilt pattern of small enclaves scattered throughout all of the northern Balkan states, from Slovenia to Romania. The striking ethnic diversity that the “Other” group lends the Balkans provide the peninsula with one of its most distinctive characteristics.
Culture
Although consideration of ethnicity inescapably deals with culture on the most basic level, concentrating on ethnic culture alone offers historical study little more than a localized spotlight for comprehending the human past. An exclusively ethnic historical approach is acceptable if focused on a single society. Any attempt to understand the broader historical reality by relying exclusively on ethnicity becomes bogged down in the complexities of ethnic diversity, raising the problem of differentiating the proverbial forest from the trees. General history must approach ethnic diversity within a context that makes the development and interactions of numerous ethnic groups comprehensible. This approach can be achieved by dealing with human culture on the higher level of civilization. Civilization represents the cultural forest; its member ethnic cultural groups constitute the trees.
Three civilizations coexist among the peoples of the Balkans today: The Orthodox Eastern European, the Western European, and the Islamic, of which the Orthodox European is primary. Orthodox civilization was born in the Byzantine Empire, in which the Balkans played an integral role. Following the Islamic Turkish conquest of Byzantine Anatolia in the eleventh century, the Balkans became the chief repository of Orthodoxy, seconded by Russia, to which the Balkan version of Orthodox civilization had been exported a century earlier. So ingrained was Orthodox civilization among the Balkan peoples that it survived, with some modifications, centuries of official Islamic preeminence during the era of Ottoman domination. The same can be said regarding the import of Western European civilization, which held firm sway in the region’s northwestern corner since medieval times but entered the Orthodox lands in force with the national movements of the nineteenth century, movements with which the Orthodox Balkan populations still are contending.
That two European civilizations exist may strike some as odd. When westerners speak of Europe in cultural terms, they commonly apply certain assumptions. These assumptions are based on the historical developmental phases or periods that occurred in Western Europe, such as the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the rise of modern liberal democracy, nationalism, and the nation-state. If such assumptions are not applied, then economic ones, once again based on Western experiences, are—progression from slaveholding, through feudalism and mercantilism, to the Industrial Revolution and market capitalism.
In the Balkans, only the Slovenes and Croats who inhabit the northwestern corner can be included as European because of their lengthy ties to Western European developments. As for the other Balkan peoples, their historical experiences do not coincide with the Western pattern. Their heritage is bound directly to the Byzantine Empire, which was nothing less than the eastern half of the Roman Empire that survived the “decline and fall” of the western by a thousand years and in which the living traditions of the classical world never disappeared. Thus, they did not experience a Dark Ages or a Renaissance similar to that of the Western Europeans. The close partnership of church and state in Byzantine society precluded the emergence of a Western-style Reformation and Counter-Reformation, while the theocratic society imposed on the Byzantine Balkans by centuries of Ottoman Islamic rule hindered any sort of secular Scientific Revolution or Enlightenment. When in the nineteenth century the peoples of the Byzantine-Ottoman Balkans embraced Western European concepts of nationalism, the nation-state, and liberal democracy, along with their scientific industrial-capitalist economic foundations, they did so like botanists attempting to produce new plant strains—by grafting them onto a different but closely related cultural trunk. They could do so because neither they nor the Western Europeans doubted that they were European, despite their developmental differences.
A certain set of unique cultural attributes are European. One obviously is the Greco-Roman heritage. The hyphenation of the term is important. It expresses the cultural reality of the Hellenic legacy, in that it is composed of two related but different traditions. At its base lies the sense of human reality created by the classical Greeks: The perception that the individual human is the supreme expression of universal perfection, serving as a standard against which all elements of creation are measured. That reality was reflected in every manifestation of classical Greek culture, explaining its emphasis on ideal realism and sense of timeless universality in every art form; establishing the context for mythological and philosophical development; and spawning traits of humaneness and rationality in seeking to understand the physical world. It also created in the Greek mentality deep-seated propensities toward mysticism, ritualism, and symbolism concerning the human relationship with the supernatural world.
When the Romans began their conquest of the eastern Mediterranean world in the second century B.C.E., they recognized the superiority of Greek culture in the more esoteric realms of human experience. Because of their agrarian roots, the Romans’ culture stressed the value of the individual but also of the need for the individual’s strong commitment to a central authority that represented the will of society and was charged with ensuring the community’s maintenance, territorial expansion, and defense. Individualism, coupled with civic responsibilities, nurtured in the Romans a practicality in dealing with the world. Out of those traits grew their highly developed predilections for legalism, organizational efficiency, militarism, administration—all of the qualities needed for upholding their centrally governed, agricultural world. Practicality also fostered in them superior engineering, planning, and technical skills unmatched by any of their contemporaries. The Greeks’ realism and rationality sat well with the Romans’ practicality and orderliness, so the Roman conquerors flung open the door to wholesale cultural partnership.
The combination of the two cultures was not completely harmonious. Roman copies of Greek originals displayed subtle but marked differences. The Roman copy had about it a noticeable sense of concrete photographic realism that was completely lacking in the elegant, refined, and idealized Greek original. This dual quality permeated all aspects of the Greco-Roman heritage. It was sustained through the use of both the Greek and the Latin languages in the Roman Mediterranean world, and the speakers of each considered those of the other culturally inferior. Latin speakers predominated in the western Roman provinces; Greek speakers did so in the eastern ones.
When the Emperor Diocletian (284-305) divided the Roman Empire into two administrative halves to stabilize the imperial succession and to better defend the empire’s far-flung borders against foreign enemies, he did so along the invisible line marking the human cultural divide in the northwestern corner of the Balkan Peninsula separating the Greek East and Latin West. (This line ran through the territory of today’s Bosnia-Hercegovina.) Although his administrative action failed to solve the grave military and administrative problems facing the empire, Diocletian’s splitting of the Roman state succeeded in institutionalizing the demarcation—creating the hyphen—between the two branches of Greco-Roman civilization. After him, the two branches developed along increasingly divergent lines.
A second common European attribute is the vital role played by peoples new to the classical Hellenic world—the so-called barbarians—in forging the birth of a European cultural reality. Without the fifth- through ninth-century barbarian migrations into Roman territories, one cannot imagine Europe as anything other than a geographical term. The incursions destroyed much of classical Hellenism, but that which survived was injected with large doses of the barbarians’ native cultures, creating a cultural mixture that became the alloy in which Europe was cast.
Mostly Germanic peoples inundated the western, Latin-speaking areas of the Greco-Roman world. Slavs and Turks settled in its eastern, Greek-speaking Balkan region. After the dust of the initial German invasions cleared, those interlopers established settled states of their own, loosely modeled after the Western Empire they had destroyed. The Germanic states retained a bastardized form of Latin Hellenism by means of the Roman Catholic church, which survived the disruption of the invasions to serve as the cultural cement that lent them a measure of cohesion.
The Slavs, who began entering the Eastern Roman Balkans in the sixth century, never managed to destroy that portion of the classical Hellenic state. Their inroads cost the empire some territory, but its political, military, and economic strength ensured its survival. The coming of the Slavs facilitated the transformation of the East Roman into the “Byzantine” Empire, and Hellenic continuity was preserved. When Slavic states developed in the Balkans, most did so under the strong cultural influence of neighboring Byzantium. A living Hellenic tradition was imposed on the newly settled Slavs by the sheer force of local Byzantine predominance. The Greek language gained sway over those Slavs whom the empire managed to incorporate directly within its borders. Those who remained outside of the empire were brought into close cultural association with it through the invention of a uniquely Slavic written language—the Cyrillic—which was inspired by Byzantine Christian missionaries and paralleled Greek literary forms.
One last and most crucial attribute defines Europe culturally: Christianity. Without it, the other two attributes are meaningless. Although Greco-Roman tradition and the input of new peoples are important components in Europe’s cultural definition, their combination with Christianity is necessary to delineate it completely.
No one today considers Syria, Jordan, Egypt, or Libya European states, yet their inhabitants once were as Hellenized and overrun by outsiders as were those of France, Italy, Greece, or Bulgaria. In the former case, the outsiders were seventhcentury Arabs, who brought with them the newly born worldview expressed by Islam. Although the Islamic civilization borrowed heavily from the Judeo-Christian and Hellenic traditions, equally heavy doses of Mesopotamian and native Arabic traditions ensured its unique core cultural identity. The stages of Islam’s historical development bore little resemblance to those of Europe until relatively recent times.
Christianity is the seminal factor in identifying Europe. In fact, the term “Europe,” as commonly used today, did not appear until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; prior to that time the traditional term was “Christendom.” Only those peoples who have assimilated the Christian worldview completely have ever been considered European. Since the early Middle Ages, those nonChristian peoples who entered geographical Europe and found themselves in contact with the region’s Christian societies were forced to choose between joining them by converting or risking possible annihilation at their hands. This fact explains the importance of Christian conversion for relative latecomers, such as Bulgarians, Czechs, Hungarians, Poles, and Russians, into the European world. Their conversions were their passkeys to membership in the European community. The borders of Europe became (and remain) synonymous with the limits of mainstream Christian culture.
Instead of a single European civilization stemming from the demise of Hellenism by Christianity and barbarian incursions, two basic European variants emerged because of the cultural division within the parent Greco-Roman civilization. They can be considered analogous to twins, since the two sibling civilizations share a preponderance of fundamental traits but are different enough in character and mentality to ensure their separate individuality. Both essentially express the same Christian perception of reality framed in common Hellenic terms, but the forms of expression differ. The difference depends on the branch of Greco-Roman tradition out of which each sprang.
That which emerged in the western part of the old Greco-Roman world couched Christianity in terms of the legality, practicality, and militancy peculiar to the Romans’ hierarchical Latin Hellenic culture. Latin-based Roman Catholicism, which institutionalized these basic traits in a Christian context, epitomized the cultural nature of Western Europe at its most elemental level. Every ethnic society that espoused the Catholic form of Christianity and adopted the Latin alphabet for its written language became a human component of Western Europe. Its twin emerged from the eastern, Greek half of the Hellenic world, where Christianity was expressed in the highly mystical, ritualized, and symbolic universality of Greek culture. The Christian institutionalization of those traits occurred in the Byzantine Empire’s Greek-based Orthodox Christianity. Unlike the Catholic West, which brooked no deviation from its Latin-based culture, more metaphysical Orthodoxy demonstrated a multicultural tolerance. Societies espousing Orthodox Christianity were free to do so in their various native languages, but collectively they constituted members of Orthodox Eastern Europe.
Today 64 percent (44.3 million) of the 69.3 million inhabitants of the Balkans are Orthodox Christians, constituting clear majorities in the populations of Bulgaria, Greece, Macedonia, Romania, and rump Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro), while in Albania and Bosnia-Hercegovina they represent the largest religious minority. Orthodox European civilization is the historically seminal civilized culture of the Balkan Peninsula’s majority population. This fact, not geography or ethnicity, definitively places the Balkans in Eastern Europe.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق