Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [133]
Since Westerners erroneously perceived the whole region as wild uplands, the entire area between the Aegean Sea and the Danube—mountains, hills, and open plains—was defined as “highlands.” Maria Todorova has found that the first use of the word “Balkans” in any Western language came at the end of the fifteenth century, in a description sent by the Italian humanist Philippus Callimachus to Pope Paul II. The local people, he observed, called the mountains “Bolchanum.”25 Yet this misconception was also revealing, for well into the nineteenth century geography was often as much about perception as scientific measurement. So, in Scotland, “Highland” signified savagery and barbarity, while “Lowland” was equated with cultivation, both in the sense of agriculture and of civilization.26 In reality, there was much wild high ground south of the Highland Line; some mapmakers logically marked both “Northern” and “Southern” Highlands.27
Mountains were an emblem of risk, and in that sense the Balkans were indeed vertiginous. The uplands of Bosnia, Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Albania were filled, Western travelers learned, not with colorful peasants but with brigands and bandits. These categories were, however, mutable. Often local people’s perception was a mirror image of the visitor’s viewpoint, although the former gave it a different slant. Balkan to the Easterner, like montaña to the Spaniards far away in the West, meant a home to outlaws, monfies, and thieves. But it was also the heartland of tribal honor and, latterly, of patriotism. The harsh terrain bred doughty fighters, and in the more impenetrable recesses of the Balkans, wild men—called variously armatoli, hajduks, klephts—preserved their ancient customs, vendettas, and myths of a heroic past.28 They were simultaneously feared and admired: a murderer and robber could also be perceived as a man of honor. They were epic characters, whose fame (rather than infamy) lay in exacting vengeance from their enemies. The historian Branimir Anzulovic recounts how in one folktale Grujo punished his wife for her act of betrayal to the Turks:
He smeared his wife with wax and tar
And sulphur and fast powder
Wrapped her in soft cotton,
Poured strong brandy over her,
Buried her up to the waist
Lit the hair on her head
And sat down to drink cool wine
While she cast light like a bright candle.29
Other European cultures have possessed similarly ambiguous folk heroes.30 But the Balkans possessed an especially rich vein of mythmaking, with each village or family telling stories of its own local heroes. Slav and Albanian pride in their languages was considerable. Slavs traced its written form back to two early Orthodox missionaries from Salonika, Cyril and Methodius, who created a version of the Christian liturgy in a Slavonic idiom, and wrote it in a unique script called Glagolitic, from the Old Serbian “to speak.” This later became known as Church Slavonic, and this sacralized the Slavic tongues over all other vernaculars, raising it in Slav eyes to the same level of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew as a worthy vehicle for transmitting the word of God.
This subtle and mellifluous tongue soon developed many forms and variants. The most fragmented zone—in language, and in ethnic and religious terms as well—lay along the westernmost part of the Balkans, all along the Adriatic littoral, through what are now Herzegovina, Montenegro, and down into modern Albania and Greece.31 Across the limestone escarpment of the Dinaric Alps in Bosnia there was an even greater variety and complexity. There Catholicism existed alongside Orthodoxy and Islam, but even within the Catholic community there were divisions. Some Catholics worshiped God in Latin and wrote in the Latin script, as they had been taught by missionaries