Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [233]
17. Emmert observes that the Austrian authorities tried without success to prevent copies entering the Habsburg domains.
18. See Bringa, Being Muslim, p. 165. Her fine book encapsulates the tragedy of modern Bosnia.
19. Thomson, The Outgoing Turk, p. 156.
20. Balkan Muslim cultural traditions were expressed in almost all the languages of the region, for most of the Muslim communities used an Albanian, Slavic, or Greek dialect, although some of the Tartar and Anatolian migrants used Turkish among themselves. Greek and Albanian were more or less interchangeable in many areas. At the court of the most successful (and certainly best-known) local Ottoman ruler in the Balkans—Ali, pasha of Janina—Greek was the official language, not Ottoman Turkish; Ali himself preferred his native Albanian. Indeed, it is uncertain that he was at all proficient in the complexities of Ottoman, for when he made corrections to documents, he used the Greek script. See Fleming, The Muslim Bonaparte, pp. 24–5.
21. Albert B. Lord, “The Effect of the Turkish Conquest on Balkan Epic Tradition,” in Birnbaum and Vryonis (eds.), Aspects, pp. 298–9.
22. The Albanian traditional hero Skendarbeg was shared by both Muslim and Christian communities, but each tribal group constructed “its” hero in different ways.
23. See Banac, National Question, pp. 46–9.
24. I have found Lawrence Stone’s categories—presuppositions, preconditions, precipitants, triggers—a very useful matrix for tracing a way through the complex history of events in the Balkans. See Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution 1529–1642 (2nd ed.), London and New York: Routledge, 2002.
25. See Davison, “Turkish Attitudes.”
26. The Muslim communities had their own local officials who were likewise responsible for the good order of their own community.
27. Halil Inalcik discussed some of the long-term causes of the deteriorating position of the raya in “The Ottoman Decline and Its Effects on the Reaya,” in Birnbaum and Vryonis, Aspects, pp. 338–53.
28. One parallel in the West is how many accusations of witchcraft or heresy were eventually found to be rooted in wholly secular causes.
29. There was a literature about the horror of the devshirme as though it took place within living memory, rather than centuries before. The devshirme was the forced recruitment of non-Muslims into imperial service. The males were taken as soldiers (janissaries) and some were trained as officials and administrators. It did not extend, at the latest, beyond the early eighteenth century. Most converted to Islam but often retained a loyalty to their native communities and kept contact with their families. Apart from the element of religious conversion, so abhorrent to Christians, it did not differ very greatly from military recruitment in Russia or the Habsburg lands.
30. They governed Bosnia and Herzegovina with about 120 officials; the bureaucratic Austrians who took over from them in 1878 employed 600 by 1881. By 1897 this had risen to 7,379. See Sugar, Industrialization, p. 29.
31. See Irwin T. Sanders, “Balkan Rural Society and War,” cited in Rhoads Murphy, Ottoman Warfare 1500–1700, London: UCL Press, 1999.
32. See Ralston, Importing, pp. 43–68.
33. Britain replaced the French in the Ionian Islands.
34. At some points they sought to ally with the Ottomans, at other times to work against them. However, the French presence, their revolutionary ideology and activist government contrasted profoundly with Ottoman torpor, and undermined the Turkish position in the eyes of Christian subjects. The border was permeable, and Greeks, Albanians, and Serbs were well aware of what was taking place in the Ionian Islands and, later, in the Illyrian provinces.
35. J. Savant, “Napoléon et la libération de la Grèce,” in L’Hellénisme Contemporain, July–October 1950, p. 321. Cited and translated in Stavrianos, Balkans, p. 211.
36. Perhaps the best and most succinct statement of the libertarian viewpoint came much