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By Root 1277 0

unwelcome attention of Ottoman officialdom. Often when disputes appeared to be between Muslims and Christians, the real causes were rooted in more mundane issues: money, land, jealousy, and avarice.28 When arguments moved into the area of officialdom, courts, and legal decisions, non-Muslims were certainly at a disadvantage; yet a rich and powerful Christian or Jew might still secure a positive decision against a poor Muslim. However, given that the courts were stacked against them, Christians had even less interest than their Muslim neighbors in attracting the intrusive attentions of the authorities. There is no doubt that many Balkan Christians felt oppressed. In part this was because there was a sense of underlying resentment that developed from the late eighteenth century onward that the land and all its resources, which had once belonged to their people alone, was now occupied by Muslims.

As they were told more and more about their noble heritage, of the great Christian rulers and heroes of the past, of a time before the coming of the Turks, the instinctive response of the Christian peasants was to think that their Muslim neighbors’ possessions should rightly belong to them. Paper icons in the home, patriotic legends retold in the family and the village, books and pamphlets, even education itself, all helped to foster a sense of identity. This turned into a sense of injustice feeding upon deeply rooted (if latent) antagonisms. Christians resented that they had to pay a capitation tax, although they were exempted from paying the zakat, the religious charitable tithe due from all Muslims. There were other duties that fell upon the Muslim raya, and not upon the Christians and Jews, just as there were payments that the latter had to make and their Muslim neighbors did not. Some of the inequities were either imaginary, or tales from the distant past.29

However, the financial burden on the subject peoples of the Balkans increased inexorably through the eighteenth century. Little of the money reached the central state treasury. Instead, it stuck to the hands of intermediaries. Since the conquest, the Ottomans had ruled their Balkan provinces by using various forms of indirect rule and a small body of state officials.30 They had co-opted many of the leaders of the various Christian communities into the governmental system, so that the most senior figure, the Orthodox patriarch in Constantinople, had the exalted status of a pasha and was entitled to an official Ottoman standard. But indirect rule functioned effectively only when it was controlled and constrained by honest governors sent from the capital, with the power of life and death over local officials. It was these who were ultimately responsible for enforcing the law, and ensuring that the highways and public buildings were kept in repair. Terrorized from above, they terrified those below them, and by such means the apparently ramshackle structure functioned with a degree of equity.

From the early eighteenth century the whole system began to fail. Powerful regional interests, both Muslim and Christian, sensed a weaker hand in Constantinople and began to treat the law with impunity, increasing taxes and requisitions on peasants of all faiths. In Bosnia, local lords known as beys ignored the authority of the state officials. They even prevented the pasha of the region from residing in the capital, Sarajevo, and made him stay in the smaller town of Travnik. The janissaries, who had originally been stationed for limited periods in the Balkans to defend the sultan’s realm, refused to return to Constantinople and acquired land and property, as well as a fearsome reputation among the Christian villagers around their camps. They turned a deaf ear to commands issued from Constantinople, becoming in the regions the effective power within the state, like their fellow janissaries in the capital, who deposed and even murdered sultans. The janissaries based in the fortress of Belgrade were especially notorious for their exactions.

Eighteenth-century Ottoman rulers were concerned