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

depended on a healthy agricultural economy for its sustenance. 23
    After two to three centuries of Ottoman rule, however, the empire began to confront new difficulties, facing tougher military opposition as it expanded and finding it harder and harder to raise the tax revenues to pay for incessant wars. Compared with other European powers—France, Spain, even Venice—Ottoman methods of tax farming hindered rather than promoted expansion. Western European economies moved in the direction of new commercial banking, colonial trade, the promotion of private property and manufacturing growth. Some provincial elites in the Ottoman empire did also emerge as private entrepreneurs, but the old economy continued to regulate the trade and production of most major commodities and discouraged private investment. To this stuttering Leviathan the Balkans were indispensable, since they provided roughly two thirds of the tax revenues of the entire empire. The bulk of these was paid by the peasantry.
    In the writings of an eighteenth-century Ottoman official, Sari Mehmed Pacha, we see the bureaucracy’s traditional argument for treating the peasants well and keeping an eye on the provincial beys. “Let them neither oppress the poor rayahs [peasants],” he states, “nor cause them to be vexed by the demand for new impositions in addition to the well-known yearly taxes which they are accustomed to give. All the experienced sages have likened the taking for inessential expenditures of more money than they can endure from the rayahs to taking from the foundation of a building and transferring it to the roof. . . . Such being the case, the poor peasants should not be troubled by any sort of evil innovation.” 24
    Yet on the land a major innovation was taking place: a new provincial elite—mostly Muslim, but including some Christian notables—was emerging, which owned villages and fields and passed these possessions on to the next generation. The older Ottoman land regime was passing away and being replaced by one in which privately owned estates encroached on former common lands and dispossessed the peasants. The causes of the rise of these chiflik estates—their nature and extent—is among the most bitterly contested issues in Ottoman historiography. Whether these estates were a response, as was once thought, to growing commercial opportunities in the international economy or, as now seems more likely, to the growing political power of a more exploitative class of tax-farming landlords, the outcome was a deterioration in the condition of the peasantry. 25
    Balkan peasants, however, were still more fortunate than the enserfed farmhands of the central and east European flat-lands. Many villages preserved their autonomy under the leadership of local notables, who collected the taxes and had their own interest in keeping the peasants’ fiscal burden bearable. For if it became too oppressive, the peasants fled in growing numbers from the plains to towns, to lands outside the region and, above all, to the hills. Entire villages were abandoned once those who had initially chosen to remain realized they were still liable for the taxes of those who had already departed. At the same time, the introduction and rapid spread of corn cultivation had in J. R. McNeill’s words “a revolutionary effect on the mountains,” as it allowed upland villages to support more people than in the past. Family and clan farming guaranteed the necessary hands for clearing woodland and tilling small upland plots. Females cost dowries to marry off but were reckoned to be able to carry half the load of a donkey, and provided cheap pack labor. Their bodies often reflected their arduous social position. “Women are early worn out,” Edith Durham noted. “Especially in Montenegro there is a very great difference in height between men and women. Women I found were usually shorter than I am [five foot three inches]; whereas men well over six foot are not uncommon.”