Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [137]
Which peoples were “polished” and which “barbarous” could never clearly be defined where Turks, Tartars, and Slavs had common boundaries. The precipitous Dinaric Alps, inland from the Adriatic, provided one such fracture zone. After his visits to Venice’s Balkan possessions, Fortis published his Travels in Dalmatia (Viaggio in Dalmazia) in 1774. He described the people of these mountains, the Morlacchi, as not at all the “race of ferocious men, unreasonable, without humanity, capable of any misdeed,” whom the people of the coast accused of “the most atrocious excesses of murder, arson and violence.”50 Fortis’s book and his many letters presented a much more positive image of these high-landers. He held that the violence for which the Morlacchi were sometimes justly blamed stemmed from the circumstances in which they lived. In a society where banditry and raiding were the norm, many Morlacchi perforce became hajduks, or border reivers. These men “lived the lives of wolves, wandering among rocky and inaccessible precipices, hanging from stone to stone … It would not be surprising if frequently one heard of strokes of atrocity by these men grown wild and irritated by the ever present sentiment of such a miserable situation.”51
The Morlacchi and others were forced to lead such desperate lives by the entropy that afflicted the Ottoman lands in Europe, and which spilled over into the domains of Venice or of the Habsburgs beyond the mountains. Life on the rugged frontier was different than in the towns and villages of the plain. The hajduks of the Dinaric Alps, like the uskok frontiersmen of Senj in the sixteenth century, were men “Who have no father and mother / Gun and sword are their father and mother.”52 The highlands—much of Greece, great tracts of Albania, Herzegovina, and Bosnia, the whole of Montenegro—were filled with armed men, both Christian and Muslim. The roads and passes were notionally protected by armed militia, armatoli, against the bandits known in the Greek-speaking areas as klephts. Raiding was an honorable profession, and some, like the famous “Lion of Janina,” Ali Pasha (immortalized by Dumas in his novel The Count of Monte Cristo), became powerful and successful by practicing these traditional skills. It was easy to romanticize them. Thomas Gordon, in his 1832 History of the Greek Revolution, rhapsodized:
Extraordinary activity and endurance of hardships and fatigue made them formidable light troops in the native fastnesses; wrapped in shaggy cloaks they slept on the ground, defying the elements, and the pure mountain air gave them robust health. Such were the warriors that, in the very worst of times kept alive a remnant of Grecian spirit.53
The hardships and fatigue had one simple cause. Without the heavy burden of the Turks, the old civic virtues of the ancient Hellenes could rise again. And so too could the Slavs.
CHAPTER TEN
Learning to Hate
I HAVE NO INTEREST IN PROVIDING AN APOLOGIA FOR THE OTTOMANS. But making them the fons et origo of all evil is only a convenient myth. For the West, cruelty and the Turks had become more or less synonymous. The Turks exhibited all the traditional Muslim flaws. So however much the Ottomans might intrigue and preoccupy their European neighbors, however much admiration and envy they might inspire, the Turks’ evil heritage was unquestioned. The Venetian ambassador to the Grand Signior Murad IV wrote of this mighty seventeenth-century prince that “he turned all his thoughts to revenge, so completely that, overcome by its seductions, stirred by indignation, and moved by anger, he proved unrivalled in savagery and cruelty. On those days he did not take a human life, he did not feel that he was happy and gave no sign of gladness.”1 A century later another Venetian ambassador, Giovanni Emo, wrote of the vizier Topal Osman’s courage and generosity;