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

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    Safe from pirates, malaria, plagues, tax collectors and marauding militias, hill people were able to negotiate more advantageous tax terms with the imperial government. In remote regions such as the Agrafa (i.e., “the unregistered lands”), the Albanian uplands and Montenegro, autonomous—indeed virtually free—peasant communities were able more or less to disregard their nominal masters. “They pay an annual tribute,” wrote Dmitry Kantemir of the Moldavian mountain “republic” near Suceava in the early eighteenth century. “If the prince decides to beat them harshly they do not spend time in negotiating but refuse the tribute altogether and retire to the more inaccessible parts of the mountains. For this reason the princes never ask them for more than their due.” Other villages won tax exemptions by agreeing to serve as “pass defenders” against brigands, guaranteeing security of passage. In August 1715, after a successful summer campaign against the Venetians in the Peloponnese, the Grand Vezir Ali Pasha negotiated over this issue with a delegation of Greeks from the mountainous Mani peninsula, whose villages “form a kind of Republic,” according to the campaign’s chronicler. 27
    Yet political autonomy came at the price of a constant struggle to make a living. In the nineteenth century, mountain communities started for the first time to face overpopulation. Their basic diet was healthy, and on average people grew taller than in the plains. But the parched mountains did not generate enough food to last the year round—at Metsovo, the local harvest was reckoned to be good for barely one or two months—forcing their inhabitants to find other supplementary livelihoods. Forests provided berries and mushrooms for picking (another skill now dying out), charcoal and timber for sale. Hill villagers also sold snow to the lowlands; as late as the 1920s—before the advent of mass refrigeration—snow was being sold in Jannina, and was still profitable despite a 65 percent meltage rate. They needed something to sell in order to buy the salt from the lowlands that alone made life possible in these food-deficit communities.
    Brigandage offered a more “heroic” way of making money. The typical mid-nineteenth-century bandit, according to the author of an illuminating study of the phenomenon, was “a young mountaineer, between twenty and thirty years old or younger, and, more often than not, a migratory shepherd.” Pushed outside the law, often by his own violent actions, the brigand’s primary purpose was usually to secure an amnesty and if possible an official appointment in the service of the state as local watchman. In the meantime, he talked tough and tried to make himself as intimidating as possible. “Your coffee is ours, your money is ours, and your blood is ours,” one Albanian brigand reminded his British captive. “Everyone is in debt to the robber. I am sultan here; I am king of England here.” 28
    Robbers and sheep stealers were a growing problem in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As the Ottoman empire shrank and disintegrated, frontiers proliferated across which brigands could roam, fleeing pursuers and often enjoying political protection in neighboring states as self-proclaimed patriots. In reality, they were as likely to prey on poor Christian farmers as on Muslims, often taking the self-serving and self-righteous line that Christians who remained under Turkish rule were no better than Turks themselves. “Great alarm prevailed in all directions respecting the robbers,” noted the intrepid David Urquhart traveling to Mount Athos in the 1830s. “They had been guilty of fearful atrocities, and had, by attacking on several occasions the peasantry, aroused the feelings of the people against them.” These brigands were neither social bandits—robbing the rich to aid the poor—nor national heroes; rather, they were a symptom of high-altitude poverty and one way of trying to