The Balkans: A Short History by Mark Mazower Read Free Book Online

families as a single living and working unit) which earlier scholars assumed were of great antiquity (perhaps because they are inclined to assume that the family itself is an institution which changes little in rural society), turn out to have been relatively recent innovations. In short, even though the farming smallholder remained the mainstay of the Balkan world for more than a millennium—outlasting the Byzantine and Ottoman empires—he and his family did not do this by standing still. And ironically it was just when Westerners were discovering these living fossils—in the last two hundred years—that peasants were changing the most to meet the challenges of capitalism and cash production. 20
    The coming of the Turks is often seen as ushering in a new dark age from which Balkan Christians never fully recovered. In fact, Ottoman rule probably benefited the peasantry. For more than two hundred years they had suffered from the political instability of the late Byzantine world and infighting among their lords and masters. Christian landowners—Greek, Slav, French, Venetian and Catalan—had ruled over them with increasing harshness in the preceding centuries; it was this domineering class that Ottoman conquest swept away. Only in the Danubian Principalities (and in parts of Bosnia) did an indigenous landowning class survive—thanks to more indirect Ottoman rule—with the result that through into the twentieth century peasants there were more harshly exploited than anywhere else in southeast Europe. Everywhere else, the Balkan peasant found his old oppressor gone (thanks to the Turks) and a freedom of movement (thanks to the mountains) denied to the serfs of Prussia, Hungary and Russia. Centuries later, when the Balkan states won independence they would be “peasant democracies,” with no aristocracy of their own, a fundamentally different form of society from that found almost everywhere in Europe. 21
    Of course, new masters replaced the old. Ottoman soldiers (both Muslim and Christian) were rewarded with estates, and some of the old Byzantine labor duties were kept in force. Greek and Serbian notable families converted to Islam and moved into the Ottoman elite; a few, for a time, held on to their estates without converting. But the crucial break with the past was legal: under the regime instituted by the new empire, almost all arable land belonged to the ruler. In the words of an Ottoman document: “The land which was in the hands of the reaya [peasantry] at the time of the conquest was settled upon them once more with the ownership held in trust for the Muslim community.” 22
    In the classical Ottoman model the central state, through its courts and bureaucracy, monitored and regulated relations between peasant and master. Unable easily to pass on their possessions to their heirs, the new estate holders never formed an aristocratic class capable of threatening the power of the ruling dynasty. They oppressed their peasant farmers, but never owned them; what they owned was the right to their produce. Moreover, they were registered by the state as ruthlessly and effectively as their peasants were. Overall tax burdens on farmers were probably no higher than before the Ottomans came. And the peasants themselves enjoyed more control over their lives than their counterparts in most of Europe. The almost endless wars that had ravaged parts of the Balkans in the fourteenth century were replaced by the stability brought by an organized imperial state pursuing a deliberate policy of repopulation. In the first century after the conquest, there was an increase in the area under cultivation. The spread of what we might call politically sensitive crops such as oranges, tomatoes, mulberries and later cotton and apricots—all of which require investment in expensive irrigation systems—is one indicator of stability on the land. So too is the rapid growth in the population of Constantinople (and other, smaller cities), which