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By Root 2666 0

the rule, and even strengthen the authority, of Constantinople surprising: under Selim III, who had been on the throne since 1789, fears that the Balkans might otherwise revolt had led to a great push for reform that for ten years had made a real difference to the Serbian position. Recently, however, things had got much worse: following Napoleon’s attack on Egypt, the Sultan’s need for the support of every man he could raise had led him to abandon his attempts to protect the Serbs. Meanwhile, the yamaks had murdered Selim’s governor, the sensible and moderate Hajji Mustafa, and replaced him with their own man, while at the same time venting years of suppressed frustration on the populace and its leaders, the clergy of the Serbian Orthodox Church and the tribal chieftains known as the knezes. Hence the revolt of 1804: desperate to save their heads, priests and chieftains banded together and established an assembly at the town of Orasac, while irregular levies attacked the yamaks and exacted a terrible vengeance.

We have, then, a revolt in the Balkans, but do we also have Russian imperialism? Evidently not. Prior to 1804 the Russians had almost no contact with the Serbs of the Ottoman Empire, and they returned a non-committal but on the whole rather discouraging answer to a delegation that had travelled to St Petersburg with the news that an insurrection was brewing. When revolt actually broke out, moreover, the Russian position was at first one of neutrality: the commander of the Russian forces on the Adriatic coast refused to supply the rebels with arms, while the Foreign Ministry declared the affair to be of no interest to Russia, characterizing it as merely one more of the incessant disturbances that plagued the Ottoman Empire. Still more interestingly, proposals emanating from the Serbian exiles who had a century before fled to the Habsburg-controlled Vojvodina for a South Slav union of the sort put forward by Czartoryski were simply ignored. Czartoryski aside, neither pan-slavism nor imperialism marked Russian policy in the Balkans: the aim was neither to conquer the area, nor to partition it with France, but rather to prop up the Ottoman Empire as a dependent state that would keep the southern approaches to Russia in friendly hands. Since 1799, indeed, St Petersburg had been allied to Constantinople, and, greatly alarmed by French designs on the Balkans, the Russians were at this time trying to strengthen their military ties with Selim III.

With matters in this state Napoleon played straight into the hands of his opponents. The coronation ceremony held in Paris on 2 December 1804 greatly reinforced the fears that his assumption of the imperial title had already summoned up. The crown was a laurel wreath in the style of those associated with the caesars, and the robe was not only the purple of imperial Rome but also emblazoned with the bee, a creature that had a thousand years before been the badge of Charlemagne. Presiding over the ceremony was Pope Pius VII, whose presence Napoleon at one and the same time required as a means of legitimizing his rule, expressing the supremacy of the temporal power and reinforcing his claim to the mantle of Charlemagne, who had himself been crowned by Pope Leo III over a millennium before. If Pius was treated with scant courtesy by Napoleon, this generated little concern: Pius had been elected at a conclave held in Venice in the very midst of the allied victories of 1799 and had spent the first few months of his papacy as a de facto prisoner of the Austrians, who coveted large parts of his domains and were no friends of ultramontanism. But few could miss the significance of the new emperor’s actions, while still more grim was the symbolism of the new regimental standards awarded to the French army in a dramatic parade on the Champ de Mars: in place of a spearhead, the pole was now topped by a bronze eagle on the lines of that carried by the Roman legions. And all the time international law continued to be trampled upon: on 25 October the British minister in Hamburg, Sir George Rumbold,