Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [135]
NO ONE IS QUITE SURE WHERE THE BOUNDARIES OF THE BALKANS should be drawn. Were the Carpathians—the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, peopled by “Romanians” speaking a Latinate language—part of the Balkans? The Transylvanian monk who in 1779 published a prayer book, Carte de rogacioni, in Latin instead of in Cyrillic script thought not. He made “a declaration of the Romanians” ethnic distinctiveness and an affirmation of the bond with Europe.”39 Most of this chapter is concerned with the lands south of the Danube. The majority of internal nationalist historians tend to minimize the role of external forces, while many historians writing from an outside perspective look upon the Balkans as a natural field for their involvement. But both approaches to the region’s past histories share a common premise: the long Ottoman occupation had been the source of all the region’s problems. Remove that malign influence and the Christian East could be redeemed.
The Austrian and the Russian plans for this redemption were far from disinterested. Russia in particular had huge ambitions. There is a popular eighteenth-century cartoon of the empress Catherine II making the great imperial stride (l’enjambée impériale) between the solid rock of Russia onto the sharp Islamic crescent atop the minarets of Constantinople. The crowned heads of Europe stand underneath, looking lewdly up her voluminous skirts and commenting on what they see. The great empress looks uncomfortable at her exposure.40 But the cartoon makes a serious point: neither Russia nor the Habsburg empire believed they could afford to ignore the Islamic power in the Balkans, any more than they (and Prussia) could have left Poland alone. The partitions of Poland in the late eighteenth century foreshadowed the treatment of the Balkans in the nineteenth century, although, unlike the case of Poland, only the Habsburgs made major additions to their territory from the carve-up of the Balkans. But Russia gained a dominant role if not land, becoming a symbolically menacing bear, looming suggestively over her Balkan protégés or puppets. Justifying both the eighteenth-century dismemberment of Poland and nineteenth-century approaches to reshaping the Balkans was the belief that their barbaric peoples would benefit from “Enlightenment.”41 These perceptions had deep roots. In 1572 a French prince, Henry de Valois, had ruled briefly in Warsaw. His court poet could see nothing good about the Poles and their land:
Farewell Poland
Farewell deserted plains
Eternally covered with snow and ice
Oh savage people, arrogant and thieving
Boastful, verbose and full of words
Who wrapped night and day in shaggy furs
Takes its only pleasure playing with a wine glass
By snoring asleep and falling to sleep on the floor
And who then, like Mars, wishes to be famous.
It is not your great grooved lances
Your wolf’s clothing, your misleading coats of arms
Spread all over with wings and feathers
Your muscular limbs, nor your redoubtable deeds,
Dull-witted Poles, that saved you from defeat.
Your miserable condition alone protects you.42
Writers in the eighteenth century, in the era of the Enlightenment, appeared just as preoccupied with the East as their predecessors in earlier centuries. The focus of interest had shifted, but not the underlying assumptions. Larry Wolff’s groundbreaking studies, Inventing Eastern Europe and Venice and the Slavs, have presented a new and convincing interpretation of Western preconceptions of the Slavic world. Reading both books, I was struck by how the negative attitudes I had hitherto associated specifically with the Muslim and Ottoman East were extended in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment to the Slavic world as well.43 The differences between