Download PDF | Schmitt (ed.), The Ottoman Conquest of the Balkans: Interpretations and Research Debates, Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2016.
291 Pages
Introduction:
The Ottoman Conquest of the Balkans. Research Questions and Interpretations
Oliver Jens Schmitt
The Ottoman conquest of the Balkans constitutes a major change in European history. Scholarship on the topic is extensive, yet the evidence produced by decades of research is very scattered and lacking comprehensive synthesis, not to mention consensual interpretation. Although major political and military milestones seem to have been investigated thoroughly, there is a notable absence of more theoretical and interpretative approaches that overarch the entire phenomenon rather than merely individual aspects.
Scholars have hitherto addressed the topic from various perspectives and employing a wide range of methods, but Byzantine studies, Ottoman studies, Eastern Mediterranean studies and national historiographies in the Balkan countries have yet to establish either a coherent collaboration or a consistent model of interpretation.1 Dissemination too has proved somewhat problematic; the vast number of detailed studies is often only known to a restricted circle of specialists, and even among these scholars, there are just a few who make use of the evidence available for the entire Balkan Peninsula.
This also explains the lack of a general model or models of explanation for the fall of the Balkan-Orthodox Commonwealth. It is not uncommon for historians to offer a narrative of facts they simply take to be self-explanatory. While Ottoman studies focuses on the emergence of a new empire, Byzantine studies and Balkan national historiographies adopt different perspectives. Narratives are therefore often contradictory or fragmentary.
At best they partially overlap, but they usually do not reflect competing perspectives. Fragmentation runs along spatial, chronological and disciplinary lines; the extreme specialization of most scholars in the field and a bibliography in many languages also constitute considerable obstacles for what is needed: a perspective that encompasses the entire Balkan area in a long-term analysis stretching from the second half of the fourteenth century until the beginning of the sixteenth, and use of all sources available in Greek, Latin, Slavonic, Ottoman and European vernacular languages such as Italian, German or French.
This alone however would not substantially improve the state of the art in the field. A key to assessing the Ottoman conquest of Balkans as a long-term process of violence-induced change is comparison, i.e. an enlargement of the heuristic frame both in time and in space. Constant synchronic comparison with Ottoman expansion in Anatolia and the Arab world (cf. the contribution of Reinkowski in this volume), but also with other major processes of expansion and change in European and Mediterranean history, such as the Spanish Reconquista or the conquest of the khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan by the Grand Duchy of Moscow (1552–1556), would open a Eurasian horizon. Important insights could be gained moreover by shaping a diachronic frame of comparison: the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans must also be analyzed in the light of historical transformation studies.
The most sophisticated field is certainly Late Antique/Early Medieval studies, which since the end of the eighteenth century have discussed explanatory models for what Edward Gibbon famously called the “fall and decline of the Roman Empire”.2 Key models for interpreting historical change and a controversial discussion of violence-induced discontinuity of cultural, social and administrative patterns – or in a competing perspective their continuity in spite of political and demographic change – lie at the core of a debate that shares with the interpretation of the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans a high degree of ideologization and politicization and the very fact that there is still no consensus in assessing the character of long-term historical change.
While after 1945 scholars tended to emphasize transitional elements from the Late Antique Roman to the Early Modern medieval world in the vein of Romano-Germanic socio-cultural and political symbiosis, reflecting the project of European unification after the Second World war, advocates of rupture still put forward powerful arguments such as the clearly visible decline of material culture between the second and the seventh century AD.3 In the Balkans, negative judgments concerning Ottoman rule and especially its beginnings had to legitimize the emergence of the modern Christian national state on the territory of the Ottoman Empire in the long nineteenth century.
In this case, historians insisted on invasion by Asian barbarians, resistance, disruption, the de-Europeanization and orientalisation of Balkan society and cultures, mass flight and deportation of the population and centuries of anti-Ottoman resistance. The competing narrative developed mainly by Turkish historians and extra-regional Ottomanists close to the formers´ interpretation underline accommodation (istimalet policy, a term coined by Halil İnalcık), incorporation, pax ottomanica, general improvement of the fiscal status and living standards of the peasant masses, and privileges for the Orthodox Church.4
This discourse however is marked by several nuances emphasizing the Seldjuk heritage in administration (negating continuity of Byzantine and Balkan Christian structures; Fuad Köprülü5 ) or disagreeing over the impact of Jihad and Gaza as the driving force of the Conquest movement (see below, p. 14–16). There is an obvious need for a more coherent approach that includes discussions from several fields of research: medieval Balkan history, Byzantine studies, Eastern Mediterranean studies and Ottoman studies.
The striking discrepancy between often meticulously detailed research and an impressive progress of knowledge, due not least to recent local and regional studies by Ottomanist scholars and the lack of more general explanatory models stood at the beginning of a discussion process which eventually led to the preparation of this volume. A decisive point in this process were the discussions with colleagues at the University of Sofia, notably Grigor Boykov and Mariya Kiprovska, in October 2012. Contributors were invited thus to engage in a cross-reading of disciplinary perspectives of Medieval Balkan studies, Ottoman studies and Late Medieval Mediterranean studies representing both regional and extra-regional historiographies.
It was however quite evident right from the outset that a single volume would not offer an exhaustive panorama of the period in question and that even a new methodological approach could not be implemented in one single step. This volume therefore rather aims at opening and structuring a new heuristic approach and at coordinating a field of studies that is of crucial importance for understanding change in European history. The aims of the introductory remarks that follow are twofold: they try to clarify some essential terms, and in a second step, they provide explanation of the historiographical context of this volume.
The time frame is probably most easily explained: the focus lies on the roughly two centuries between the conquest of Thrace (starting in 1352) and the stabilization of direct Ottoman rule in the area south of the Danube and the Sava River. Ottoman expansion continued at the periphery of this space, mainly in East Central Europe, directed against Hungary, the Habsburg Realm and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and one might argue that the Ottoman Conquest was eventually only stopped by Süleyman’s débâcle at Güns (Kőszeg) in 1532, which did not of course prevent the Sultan from expanding in areas where the Habsburgs could not offer military shelter, such as Moldavia (1538).6
Likewise there is consensus that the consolidation of Ottoman rule was a process with huge time lags between Thrace and Bulgaria, conquered between 1352 and 1396, and the Western and Northern border zone of the Ottoman Empire, subdued between 1463 and 14937 , not to speak of the Ottoman vassal principalities north of the Lower Danube. The definition of space is more complex.
The title of this volume contains the term ‘Balkans’, the manifold meanings of which have been the object of an intensive and sometimes redundant research debate for several decades.8 This debate has produced as its smallest common denominator the importance of the Byzantine and Ottoman heritage as defining patterns: the area that can be circumscribed by these elements stands at the core of the volume. It coincides with the “Byzantine Commonwealth” outlined by Dimitri Obolensky,9 but it includes with Bosnia a historical region that had remained at the margins or even outside the Byzantine Commonwealth. It is integrated into our concept because Ottoman expansion firmly anchored Bosnia in a socio-cultural and political context whose centre lay in the Southeast. Massive migrations of štokavian-speaking Muslims (mainly from Bosnia) and Orthodoxs temporarily also altered social patterns in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Central Hungary.10
The Balkans serves in this context as a spatial heuristic tool with flexible border zones. The volume does not however include purely maritime regions such as the Aegean archipelago or the Dodecanese.11 While time and space might be thus explained without major theoretical difficulties, the terminology and concepts for analysing events and long-term processes prove much more controversial, both inside and outside the scholarly debate. Conquest, transition, integration or, as recently proposed by Machiel Kiel,12 incorporation, convey different and not seldom contradictory meanings, although they are meant to describe the same historical process of change. Like other major moments of change in history, the establishment of Ottoman rule in the Balkans defies any terminological simplification. Our discussion can learn much from comparable discussions mentioned above: did the Western Roman Empire slowly fade away in a long transition process or was it murdered, as the French historian André Piganiol put it?13
Were the Germanic communities “barbarian invaders” or an integral part of a new Romano-Germanic political and socio-cultural symbiosis that stands at the roots of medieval or even modern Europe? The choices of research topics, theories and terminology do not occur in a purely neutral scholarly context. This does not mean that they are not legitimate. The point is that they should be explained. For the sake of clarity, the editor wishes to define his own standpoint, which is not necessarily shared by the contributors to this volume: he approaches the topic as a trained Byzantinist who sees himself as a Balkan medievalist with a great interest in Ottoman studies, whose results he tries to follow as a non-specialist. He is also interested in the use and abuse of medieval history by modern European societies and élites, especially in Southeastern Europe (which does not imply that this phenomenon does not occur elsewhere as well).
His academic training, linguistic competencies, the archives accessible to him, explain why he privileges at the outset a Southeastern European perspective complemented by a Byzantine view. As a term, conquest contains the dimensions of warfare and violence, but it also points to political and socio-cultural consequences of military events – it does not refer to a single event, but to a long-term violence-induced process. To Ottomanists, it is certainly more direct and more emotional than e.g. integration, not to mention transition or incorporation, which only at first glance appear less emotional – in fact, they convey a strong ideological strand and might cause uneasiness in other, i.e. non-Ottomanist, circles, since they deliberately downplay the violent aspect of change and focus very much on the outcome of a process which is interpreted in essence as positive.
From the wide range of terminological possibilities for describing what happened in the Balkans between ca. 1350 and ca. 1500, conquest certainly fits better than invasion (which does not fully take into account the massive participation of local actors in the conquest and which is not a appropriate term for describing a period of ca. 150 years) or subjugation (the famous “Ottoman yoke”), which for a long time served as key concepts of national historiographies in Southeastern Europe. Conquest is understood as a multi-layered concept encompassing military history and its wider consequences. Its choice expresses the conviction that military history and the socio-cultural and political disruption caused by Ottoman warfare should return to the research agenda. In the context of fourteenth and fifteenth-century Ottoman history, military history or, more precisely, warfare, violence and its consequences has been rather neglected for many years, having earlier been the object of nationalist discourses for quite a long time in Balkan historiographies.
When dealing with military history, Ottomanists are more interested in army organization, logistics and military technology than in the disrupting effects that military machinery provoked.14 Analysing the Ottoman conquest however cannot begin after warfare had ended – warfare and its consequences are an essential part of the major social and cultural changes in the Balkans in the late Middle Ages.15 To give just one example: the first larger number of Bosnians in Ottoman Anatolia were not refugees after 1878, but probably those Bosnian slaves who were sold at the slave market in Bursa after devastating Ottoman raids in Bosnia.16
These reflections have made clear one important element of this volume: Since the topic is so politically and emotionally loaded in many societies, historians cannot avoid keeping in mind this socio-political meta-level of their research. This does not mean that they should refrain from working on medieval history and restrict their interest to the analysis of scholarly discourses.
This meta-level has however an enormous impact on the main goal of this volume, i.e. assessing approaches to and explanatory models for the Ottoman conquest, and therefore cannot be neglected or bypassed. Interpretative models do not emerge ex nihilo, but are based on previous research debates. In order to structure the overview, it might be useful to ask which discussions have marked the developments in the field so far. It is certainly no exaggeration to state that Ottoman studies has a far more developed tradition of theoretical debate on this period than Byzantine and Balkan Medieval studies.17 The latter in fact still focuses on mostly narrative approaches and small-detail research, and the question as to why these states fell is rarely asked – it seems that the scholarly mainstream took the fall of the Eastern Empire much more for granted than the fall of the Western Empire 1000 years earlier. In this perspective, Byzantium was doomed, and with it its Commonwealth in the Balkans.
Ottoman studies perceive the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as the period of the foundation and emergence of the Ottoman Empire. Territorial expansion is a crucial element of this process, but as such it too is rather taken for granted. Detailed descriptions of political and military events are much less the focus of research than structural history. Classical debates in the field concentrate a) on religion as a driving force of the conquest (the debate on Gaza and on conversion to Islam); b) the theory of accommodation (istimalet) as major tool for integrating the Orthodox (but not the Catholic) societies of the Balkans and the related debate on continuity or discontinuity of administrative structures; c) on demographic consequences of the conquest (catastrophe theory vs. demographic expansion; the question of Turkish and Yürük immigration). a) Powerful theories and the scarcity of contemporary sources offer a fascinating contrast in the debate about the meaning of “gazi” and the importance of the religious dimension in the process of conquest, certainly the most important debate in Early Ottoman studies in the last ca. 90 years (cf. the contributions by Kiprovska and Krstić in this volume).18
Like most classical debates in historiography, it reflects very much the weltanschauung of the scholars involved, from the influence of Stefan George´s “Kreis”19 to Turkish nationalism of the pure Kemalist style, the political rehabilitation of Ottoman studies, Edward Saids Orientalism, post-modernism and recently the instrumentalization of the Ottoman past for Neo-Ottoman foreign policy.20 Was the Jihad, the Islamic Holy War and the gazis as God’s warriors at the core of the conquest (Paul Wittek’s famous thesis21) – or is it more accurate to speak of plundering communities of Muslims and Christians under the leadership of the House of Osman and of regional uc bey dynasties well into the fifteenth century (Heath Lowry)?22 Research has demonstrated how difficult it is to use Ottoman chronicles, mostly dating from the end of the fifteenth century, to reconstruct the ideas of Ottoman warriors in the fourteenth century. Scholars such as Colin Imber radically dismiss the chronicles for scholarly purposes.23
Linda Darling has recently proposed a differentiated model: while in the first half of the fourteenth century “Ottoman culture was formed from an amalgamation between Turkish/Seldjukid/Islamic and Byzantine/Christian influences”, in the second half of the century “the eclecticism […] seems to have given way […] to a growth of popular Islam that may have been particularly powerful among the military forces in Europe […] If we are not simply to discard the concept of the Ottoman warriors as gazis, then perhaps it was in the second half of the century – not in the days of Osman – that that label became truly appropriate”24.
After almost nine decades of debate, Ottoman studies still have not reached consensus on this crucial question. There is no counterpart to this important debate in Balkan history, e.g. the impact of hesychasm on Orthodox political elites in the frame of the Ottoman conquest (this does not imply that the subject is not studied in detail, but it is rarely linked with the question of Ottoman conquest).25 There was almost no Orthodox counterpart to the Catholic Crusades, although there are hints that the Serbian rulers of Southern Macedonia, Uglješa and Vukašin, who visited Mount Athos before attacking Turkish forces at the Marica (1371), may have been inspired by the idea of religious warfare.26
Byzantine intellectual and theological reactions to the Ottoman advance (most prominently those of Gregorios Palamas and Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos) that clearly reflect the religious dimension of the conquest have however been thoroughly researched by Byzantinists, while Steven Reinert offers an insightful interpretation of Manuel’s treatise from an Ottomanist perspective. It is evident that for contemporary Byzantine intellectuals, who looked back on centuries of confrontation and cohabitation with Islamicate states, religion mattered, and they possessed the theological instruments to address the religious dimension of Ottoman expansion.27
A Byzantine perspective that is contemporary to Early Ottoman history would certainly allow the Ottomanists to elaborate a nuanced view on the impact of religion in the early stages of the conquest process, long before Ottoman court chroniclers embarked on distorting the past in order to shape a unified narrative ad maiorem Ottomanorum gloriam. b) Istimalet: Rapid conquest and the necessity of integrating subdued societies had not been a new experience in the Muslim world. The Ottomans could rely on Near Eastern state models when dealing with areas without any notable Muslim population. For more than a century scholars have debated the impact of the Balkano-Byzantine administrative heritage on the Ottoman state system. While regional scholars such as Nicolae Iorga insisted on an Orthodox-Ottoman symbiosis in which the Byzantine imperial tradition prevailed (“Byzance après Byzance”), Kemalist scholars such as Fuad Köprülü rejected any major Byzantine influence on Ottoman state building.28
In recent decades, scholars have greatly refined the analysis, and the “symbiosis” theory has gained much ground.29 “The fact that the Ottoman presence was little more than a thin coating superimposed over existing practices accounts for the relative ease with which their rule was accepted by peoples who shared littler in common with their new rulers”, concludes Heath Lowry in his study of the Aegean island of Lemnos in the fifteenth century.30 c) There is consensus that the Ottoman conquest provoked considerable demographic change in the Balkans. Scholars hardly agree however in the way they emphasize particular elements of this complex process, their overall interpretations insisting either on the destruction of a demographic web or the repopulation of an area that, due to plague and warfare in the fourteenth century, was almost unhabited (cf. the contributions by Boykov and Krstić in this volume). Traditional Balkan historiography (e.g. in Bulgaria, Greece and Serbia) underlined demographic disruption, mass flight to mountain areas which became nuclei of resistance, deportation and general depopulation as a direct consequence of Ottoman warfare. The influx of Turkish settlers especially in the Eastern and Southern Balkans was interpreted as deliberate colonization.
In this aspect, this interpretation meets a Turkish nationalist reading of demographic change: state controlled immigration of Turkophone Muslim settlers and seminomads (Yürüks). Ottomanists such as Machiel Kiel demonstrated for many regions (Thessaly, Lokris, Bulgaria) that the traditional catastrophe theory cannot be upheld in its entirety, and that important parts of the Balkans had been affected by the general demographic crisis in Europe in the fourteenth century.31 Recent research contradicts the idea of premeditated Turkish colonization and discusses the spontaneous influx of Muslims Turks from Anatolia (cf. the contribution by Krstić in this volume).32 There is, moreover, extensive scholarship on the emergence of a new urbanistic landscape in Ottoman style.33 As Grigor Boykov demonstrates in his chapter of this volume, demographic consequences that were interpreted as negative by the elites of modern national states were and sometimes still are highly politicized.
Scholars, especially in Ottoman studies, are therefore rather reluctant to assess the mass flight, deportation and enslavement of the Christian population.34 Justified criticism of nationalist narratives has thus led directly to the other extreme: ignoring or underplaying demographic disruption caused by Ottoman warfare. Not all scarcely inhabited areas were depopulated by plague and warfare between Christian rulers however. The classical Ottoman strategy of constant raids on target areas had devastating consequences from Bithynia to Thrace, Macedonia, Albania, Serbia and Bosnia. As Grigor Boykov demonstrates in his contribution to this volume, it is almost impossible to quantify these changes. What we need at the present stage of research is a sober overview of all conquered areas.
The foundation of new towns such as Sarajevo and the demographic upheaval in Bosnia and Hercegovina are part of the same history, but usually they are not told together.35 The same is true for the spectacular foundation of Elbasan or the history of Muslim Shkodra and the utter destruction of Scanderbeg’s rebellious nearby heartland of Dibra and Mati, where almost 75% of the population did not survive the Ottoman onslaught – or the fact that the defenders of Shkodra preferred to emigrate to Venice and to continue their struggle against the Ottomans in the Venetian fleet or as settlers in Friuli rather than to submit to Ottoman rule.36 Ottomanist mainstream narratives show comparably little interest in those migration waves of Balkan Christians who crossed the borders to Christian states.37 One may compare this state of the art with the two sides of a coin.
Unfortunately, one-sided narratives are still powerful. As mentioned above, in Byzantine and Late Medieval Balkan studies, theory building and theorey orientation are considerably weaker. Recent research has concentrated on the centenaries of key events, such as the fall of the Serbian Despotate (1459) or the Bosnian kingdom.38 Explanations are given mostly for “national cases”, and there are almost no attempts to link the Byzantine to the Bulgarian, Serbian, Bosnian, Herzegovinian, Croatian, Montenegrin or Albanian experience of conquest. Case studies for Bosnia and Albania have underlined however that the Bosnian crown and Scanderbeg both joined planned Papal crusades, and that the Papacy aimed at establishing two Catholic crusader kingdoms (the last Bosnian king actually received a crown from Pius II, while Scanderbeg seems to have accepted a similar promise). This radical change of confessional orientation in the Western Balkans prompted Mehmed’s II harsh reaction in both regions (1463, 1466/1467).39 Most scholarship is devoted to regional territorial lordships whose complexity and instability constitute a serious challenge for any specialist in the field.
Recently, Ottoman studies have joined this field with one of the most remarkable re-interpretations of Early Ottoman history (cf. the contribution by Kiprovska in this volume). Ottoman historiography and in its vein many Ottomanists depict a centralized Ottoman state apparatus right from the beginnings of the House of Osman. In recent years, interpretations put forward by Irène Beldiceanu-Steinherr41 since the 1960s have been taken up by several scholars, who conclude that even powerful rulers such as Bayezid I were rather primi inter pares among influential Muslim and Orthodox regional rulers in Anatolia and the Balkans.42 Marcher lord dynasties such as the Mihaloğlu had an Orthodox background, and until Mehmed II started a process of centralization, the Balkans and Anatolia consisted of numerous regional vassal states of the Ottoman rulers.
Marcher lordships often acted independently or in loose dependency on the Ottoman rulers.43 Regional Orthodox rulers, but also major Catholic powers, often were confronted with Muslim regional rulers whose military strength did not surpass the power resources of Christian noblemen, unlike the Sultan’s army. The political behaviour of regional Orthodox lords has to be re-interpreted in the light of the very fact that they sought to deal with Islamised strongmen with a regional background. Thorough monographs on these Marcher lordships are one of the most urgent tasks in the field.It has become clear from this necessarily sketchy overview that competing narratives have so far excluded a coherent interpretation of major socio-cultural and political processes.
It is therefore imperative to analyse these narratives in more detail and to assess their impact on scholarly practices and discourses. Historical interpretations indeed vary from the glorifying of a new Golden Age, the beginning of a new imperial era of peace, prosperity and tolerance44 – sometimes depicted against the background of an allegedly intolerant, socially oppressive and politically fragmented Occident – and even liberation from national or religious oppression by neighbours (as in the case Bosnian-Muslim and Albanian-Muslim historiography45) to apocalyptic descriptions of destruction, violence, political and socio-cultural breakdown, a millenarian vision of catastrophe.
The first narrative is often encountered in Ottomanist, Bosniak and Albanian-Muslim historiographies, the latter in historiographies of Balkan Christian successor states of the Ottoman Empire. Between these extremes of white and black (which for the sake of our argument are presented here in a rather pointed way), there are numerous varieties of grey; there is no single interpretation by those whose ancestors eventually “won”, nor by those whose forefathers were defeated. Modern Serbian, Bulgarian, Croatian (in Bosnia: also Bosnian Catholic) and Albanian (secular-nationalist and Christian) narratives are far from homogenous, nor has there been a common Balkan Muslim narrative.47 Most interpretations have in common a lack of contextualization in the sense that many authors rarely define their own theoretical and, more importantly, ideological standpoint, although they mostly, consciously or subconsciously, pursue goals related to their weltanschauung. Balkan national historiographies have been much criticized because of their predominantly negative view on Ottoman conquest and more generally on Ottoman rule in the Balkans. This criticism however has in recent years unfortunately become part of official Turkish foreign policy exercising pressure on several Balkan states to change chapters on Ottoman history in school textbooks.48 Much of the scholarly criticism was certainly justified – e.g. of the politicization of Bulgarian Ottoman studies in the so-called Rebirth process, i.e. the forced Bulgarisation of Bulgarian Turks in the second half of the 1980s,49 and many historians in Balkan countries have adopted much more sophisticated and better balanced perspectives.50 Balkan Ottomanists who had in some countries at least partially contributed to a politicized distortion of Ottoman history started after 1989 a process of critical self-reflection; this is especially true for Bulgarian and Albanian Ottoman studies51 – while in Bosnia Ottoman studies underwent a process of politicization in the 1990s because of their importance for the Bosniak nation- and state-building.52 Extra-regional Ottoman studies, however, has so far not undergone a similar process of self-reflection. While institutions and single actors in Balkan national historiographies and the scholarly discourses produced by them have been analyzed in detail, extra-regional Ottoman studies obviously feels no need to start a similar process of questioning its own theoretical models, terminology, possible biases and its closeness or distance to political agencies.53 Many actors in the field still cultivate not a neutral, but a predominantly positive image of the Ottoman Empire that is of course no less exposed to ideologies and extra-scientific concepts than politicized interpretations of Balkan national historiographies. The attempt to revise nationalist stereotypes in Balkan historiographies may also lead to equally problematic interpretations that downplay warfare, violence and mass destruction or virtually “cut out” the “other” from research and master narratives. The reasons are certainly manifold. They are at least partially a reaction to traditional narratives of national historiographies (the “Turkish yoke”), which depicted a caricature of Asian bloodthirsty Turkish invaders who had nothing to do to with the Christian civilisation that they ruthlessly destroyed. Violence and death are however unavoidable consequences of warfare, and this is even the more true for processes of conquest that stretch over several decades or even more than a century (in the case of Bosnia, from the 1380s until the 1530s, or in the case of Albania from the 1380s to the 1480s) and for an Empire whose raison d´être was for centuries territorial expansion, i.e. conquest. In fact, leading textbooks by Ottomanists tend to marginalize violence and to focus rather on the technique and logistics of warfare in the period of conquest.54 This “buffered” narrative of conquest is contrasted by an impressive body of scholarship on Muslim victims of Balkan Christian violence at the end of the Empire.55 The latter is a good example of a victimization discourse; the former reflects an uncritical approach to the beginnings of the Ottoman state. There is therefore not a general reluctance in Ottoman studies to address violence as a historical phenomenon, but to name Muslims as perpetrators and Christians as victims of violence, a perspective running contrary to current political correctness. As nationalism in the Balkans contributed to dark myths of Ottoman rule, Turkish nationalism and the rise of Islamist movements equally distort scholarly perspectives. While scholars in Balkan countries felt they were obliged or indeed were obliged to address this dimension of their research, extra-regional Ottomanists do not openly discuss various forms of pressure or self-censorship. This discrepancy has to be addressed in academia in order to overcome clichés and prejudices that still linger sometimes unconsciously in disciplinary discourses. Ottomanist mainstream narratives concentrate on enumerating battles, conquered fortresses and kingdoms and rather seldom invest much scholarly energy in investigating the “other”, i.e. those who did not surrender and were eventually defeated.56 Violence and terror as a means of warfare is equally seldom addressed explicitly by Ottomanists, but often constitutes an important element of narratives by specialists in Mediterranean and Balkan studies. There is to my knowledge no Ottomanist narrative that mentions that some of Scanderbeg’s followers committed suicide out of despair (a fact recorded by the Ottoman court historiographer Critobulos).57 Heath Lowry lists some of the massacres committed by Mehmed II during his campaign in Morea, but in an overall perspective, discussion of mass violence and terror as a tactical instrument is conspicuously lacking in the Ottomanist mainstream discourse. The reaction to this deliberate silence should certainly not be an updated list of “Ottoman atrocities”, but an assessment of the demographic, political and socio-cultural consequences of Ottoman warfare. Another sensitive issue is the accommodation policy – istimalet – of the Ottoman elites towards their new subjects. It is usually described as a key to Ottoman success in rapidly conquered territories.58 After decades of meticulous research in this field, there is no doubt that Orthodox Christians of all social strata joined the Ottoman military and administrative apparatus and played an essential role in Ottoman expansion in Europe, the Near East and Northern Africa. Heath Lowry, a leading specialist in the field, circumscribed istimalet with the trivialising metaphor of “stick and carrot”.59 There are however very few Ottomanists who are interested in analysing in detail what the “stick” really meant for those who refused the “carrot” (which is not true for Lowry himself, who gave some examples of Ottoman massacres in Morea). Since Ottoman sources reproduce the perspective of the “winning side”, a more balanced interpretation would be gained from careful reflection on the discourses these sources contain not only relating to the Ottomans, their state and their policy (cf. the discussion on the “Barkan” and the “Köprülü” thesis in the contribution by Krstić in this volume), but also concerning those whose lands were conquered and their perspectives.60 Scholars emphasizing istimalet and patterns of Ottoman-Balkan symbiosis obviously study those parts of the Christian population who had survived the Ottoman onslaught and had not sought shelter outside the Ottoman territory. This very basic fact has to be made plain. They usually omit destruction, mass flight movements within the Balkans and to the Danubian principalities, Hungary, Italy and the Holy Roman Empire (which play, however, an important – and often distorted – role in Albanian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Greek, and Serbian national historiographies). While Ottomanists underline the readiness of Balkan Christians to integrate into the Ottoman military and administrative system, traditional national historiographies insist on various forms of resistance.61 Ottomanists are interested in migration within the Empire (e.g. Yürüks, Vlachs62), but less in migration as a consequence of decades of Ottoman raids and ultimate conquest. Demographic history is certainly one of the most loaded issues in Balkan history and the kind of divided history that currently prevails does not contribute to filling this gap. The recent Cambridge History of Turkey, a representative endeavour of extraregional Ottoman studies, summarizes the chapter on “the incorporation of the Balkans into the Ottoman Empire” with the statement that until 1912 the Balkans east of a line stretching from Nikopol to Kavala was as Turkish as Anatolia, adding that “the comprehensive work of how much of the Balkans became truly Turkish will take a long time to be written”63. The author, Machiel Kiel, a leading scholar in the field of demographic history and the history of architecture who in recent decades has contributed signficantly to our knowledge of the early Ottoman Balkans,64 does not explain however how Turkish Anatolia was in 1912 – before the Armenian and Assyrian genocide and the flight, expulsion, population exchange and eventually pogroms which reduced the Orthodox population – nor does he define what the term Turkish means in the fifteenth and the early twentieth centuries. The text unfortunately, but not untypically,65 mixes Late Medieval history with the traumatic last decades of the Ottoman Empire. It furthermore constructs a millenarian PreOttoman Turkish Balkan by mingling Kutrigurs, Onogurs, Kumans and even Székler and does not explain that many of these groups were Christianized and that they did not support Ottoman expansion.
On the contrary, the Székler community in Transylvania served as a bulwark against Ottoman raiders66 and the Gagauz communities are characterized by the very fact that they never embraced Islam even though they were Turkish speakers.67 Distortion of facts and a primordial vision of ethnicity are usually seen as typical of Balkan historiographies, but unfortunately they also exist in extra-regional Ottoman studies. The very fact that the first volume of this prestigious series contains a chapter on Byzantium (1071–1453) as a mere prehistory of the Ottoman Empire is telling. Since the editor does not provide an introduction to the volume, her scholarly programme remains unclear. Even scholars who do their best to avoid these traps often do not reflect on how much they stick to disciplinary traditions (including the author of these lines). A Byzantinist, a Balkan Medievalist and an Ottomanist inevitably will write different histories of this period, and these differences are often source-driven. In fact, cross-reading of sources occurs only partially, and disciplinary and philological pride frequently constitute a serious barrier for discussion. One may discern several nuclei of communication: cross-reading of Byzantine and Latin/Italian sources has been established since the nineteenth century.
Cross-reading of Ottoman and Byzantine sources characterizes a small but influential group of scholars (e.g. Irène Beldiceanu-Steinherr – also together with Raúl Estanguï Gómez –, Elizabeth Zachariadou, Nevra Necipoğlu, and Stephen W. Reinert). 68 Latin sources are used by Ottomanists with strong Mediterranean research interests such as Marie-Matilde Alexandrescu-Dersca,69 Elizabeth Zachariadou or Nicolas Vatin. Combining Ottoman and Slavonic sources is a particular skill of regional scholars dealing with continental parts of the Balkans. The highly complex but necessary cross-reading of all text cultures rarely occurs however. Things are at least equally complicated where Balkan national historiographies are concerned. Only few extra-regional Ottomanists read Balkan languages;
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