Home Page | Tarantella | Urban/Visual Arts | Contact
Department for History of Byzantium and the Balkans
Faculty of History, University of Sofia ‘Sv. Kliment Ohridski,’ Sofia, Bulgaria
Round Table, December 11-12, 2008
Two Hundred Years on the Road: The Term ‘Balkan Peninsula’ (1808-2008)
Slobodan Dan Paich
Director and Principal Researcher
Artship Foundation, San Francisco, USA
The purpose of this paper is five-fold. First, it intends to contribute to the debate about the future of the region with some informed critical reflections and open questions. Second, it may give a broader view of the region’s past from the standpoint of the History of Ideas. Third, it will offer some unifying research and policy models. Fourth, it points to both the benefits and dangers of reading old maps and interpreting archeology. Finally, it attempts to contribute to the education of conviviality.
We will begin with a brief review of territorial identity in Southeastern Europe and reflect on the position of religious and ethnic diversity in the Ottoman Empire.
The Ottoman policy of recognizing the Abrahamic religions institutionalized the coexistence of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism in religious practice, law, and education. In this way, the Ottomans inherited the Arab Convivencia of the earlier middle ages.
Professor Ali Bardakoglu, in his paper Culture of Co-existence in Islam: The Turkish Case, writes that,
‘The Ottoman state defined its subjects according to their religious affiliation. This system of categorization, called the millet (community) system, defined each religious community as a separate community.’1
Earlier in the same essay, he writes:
The Qur’an clearly indicates that Islam is the continuation of Judaism and Christianity, whose followers are described as ‘People of the Book’ (ahl al-Kitab), and whose sacred texts are also accepted as revealed sources.2
Bardakoglu elaborates further:
Historically speaking, the concept of ‘People of the Book’ provided one of the bases of multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and multi-religious states in Muslim history. Umayyads, Abbasids and Muslim empires in Andalusia and in India managed to sustain religious diversity and pluralism in their own time inspired by the spirit of religious liberty and toleration in Muslim culture. The Ottoman state itself developed a unique legal and political instrument, the millet or community system, that enabled co-existence of Jews, Christians and majority Muslims under the same political order and the social domain for centuries.3
Some practical and logistical points from Bardakoglu’s paper can set a tone for this inquiry into Southeastern Europe’s historical concepts of domain, land, and memory. To touch upon the region’s historical characteristics and implied cultural values, we paraphrase Bardakoglu’s logistical facts in the form of a list:
The Byzantine Empire’s relationship to its territories was missionary. The empire’s ambition was to convert all pagans to the Byzantine mode of Christianity. Byzantine geopolitics were closely linked to the establishment of regional religious authorities and secular rulers who were vassals of the empire. The newly converted were allowed to use diverse languages in their religious services, while Greek remained the lingua franca. This form of managing ethnic diversity allowed for differences under the Byzantine Rite. And the regional linguistic units within the Byzantine Empire gave rise to the nationalist movements of the nineteenth century. In its heyday, Byzantium managed its borders by utilizing diverse groups and gave the imperial court an opportunity to create elaborate polices of divide et impera.
The establishment of Christianity created a large schism in the Roman Empire. Byzantium, with its own brand of Christianity, rivaled the Catholic faith of Rome. To protect the interests of Byzantium, and to control and diffuse the indigenous people of the Balkans, Constantinople invited—and possibly encouraged—Slavic tribes from the North to come and settle in the Balkans. A possible hypothesis is that once Christianized, these Slavs were given the land and property of the dispersed indigenous people who were looking to Rome for their protection and allegiances. The centralized institution of Roman Catholic influences gave a great sense of safety and belonging both to the indigenous people in the western Balkan regions and the newly arriving Slavic tribes. The indigenous people who did not run toward Rome may have assimilated with the newcomers.
To protect its borders, the Byzantine Empire had to create, adopt, compromise, and often fight the very kingdoms it had created. An example of this was the complex relationship of intermittent tolerance between the empire and the heretical sects of Paulicians who were expert border guards.
In The Encyclopedia of Heresies and Heretics, Chas S. Clifton says:
For a time, [the Paulicians] created a kingdom on the upper Euphrates River, becoming a border state between the Christian Byzantine Empire and Muslim realms to the east. Paulician forces raided the eastern borders of the empire during the ninth century until the emperor Basil I in 872 defeated them. The survivors fled into the mountains of Armenia or took refuge among the Arabs. One group, however, had been settled in Thrace by an earlier eighthcentury emperor to serve as a frontier garrison; these Paulicians have been viewed by some historians as providing the seed of the latter Bogomil belief.5
This quote offers us a glimpse into the complicated relationship Byzantium had with its border guards, and the possible connection and roots of the Bogomils in the Paulician heresy. It may not be an accident that the greatest number of Bogomils lived at the western borders of Byzantium.
Clifton continues with conjecture: that the Bogomil heresy began in the Balkans circa 930. He also proposes that the Bogomil missionaries traveled to Italy and Provence and contributed to the emergence of the Albigensian heresy. He points to the liturgical similarities of the Bogomils and the Albigensians, who both considered the Lord’s Prayer as the only legitimate prayer. Clifton writes that the ‘Bogomil’s congregation had no priesthood or hierarchy; men and women confessed their sins to one another and gave one another absolution.’6 Clifton is among scholars who see the Bogomil teachings as ‘a peasant religious uprising masking the Slavonic speaking Balkan peasants’ resentment of their Byzantine Greek rulers in Constantinople and of Constantinople’s local agents.’7
For a number of reasons we are mentioning the Bogomils in this paper. As an unincorporated religious movement without official representation in Constantinople, their history acutely reflects divisive policies that effected the region of Southeastern Europe. The Catholic Slavs had a measure of support from Rome; and the converted Orthodox Slavs, Ilirians, Dacians, and others had the support of Constantinople. The Bogomils, as heretics who depended on inaccessible territories for their survival, had to have allegiances somewhere beyond Constantinople and Rome.
When the Ottoman Turks conquered the areas of the Balkans where the Bogomil heresy was widespread, many Bogomils embraced Islam. Like the Paulicians, the Bogomils had a close link with Islamic and preIslamic thought from Mesopotamia and Egypt, including early Gnosticism. These ideas had been incorporated into many Christian and non-Christian Gnostic sects.
Throughout the Middle Ages, Byzantine scholars were also students of Arabic civilization, which had preserved a great amount of classical learning as well as Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and other indigenous rituals and thought. Five centuries later, similar threads reappeared in renaissance Florence, where Kabbalah, Neoplatonism, the Hermetic Egyptian mysteries, and the forgotten and hidden histories of early Gnostic Christianity were studied and preserved. The independent city-state of Florence offered a more cosmopolitan climate and collected thinkers of the age who were inspired by the Near East, the Greater Mediterranean, and the Pagan world.
Scholars of the history of culture, starting with Jakob Burckhardt, Aby Warburg, Fritz Saxl, Erwin Panofsky, and particularly Frances A. Yates, have opened research and critical thinking about the Renaissance and its origins in the Byzantine, Arab, Arab-Andalus, and Jewish scholarship of the Middle Ages. Most of them were members of the Warburg Institute of the University of London that describes its work as representing ‘all the strands that link medieval and modern civilization with its origins in the ancient cultures of the Near East and the Mediterranean.’8
Our reason for mentioning these scholars and their research into the Renaissance over the last seventy years is to ask some open questions about the Bogomils and the Balkans. Did certain cultural threads of what would become the Renaissance flow thorough the territories of Byzantine and Roman Christianity and through the Balkans? What made the Bogomils persist, in spite of possible persecution, in the territories of Southeastern Europe? Were the currents of the Renaissance related to the Bogomils? Were the Bogomils the inheritors of the remnants of an earlier Mediterranean religious network? Might they have absorbed and integrated some earlier Balkan cultural currents that were fractured by Imperial Rome?
We shall next look at some issues for the Balkan Peninsula raised by Imperial Rome’s methods of divide and rule (divide et impera) as a dynamic of Pax Romana.
For the sake of the paper’s narrative, we will summarize the period known as the Pax Romana: two hundred years, 27 BC - AD 180, when Roman institutions expanded throughout their known world, bringing prosperity to the Romans. Octavian was Julius Caesar’s great nephew, adopted son, and heir. While the absolute ruler of the empire, taking the imperial name Augustus, he appeared to preserve and restore the Roman Republic and end the civil wars. Many historians agree that the Roman army appeared to be completely loyal to him. In return, Augustus was obligated to employ an estimated 150,000 active legionaries and secure the borders.
Lands bordering the Apennine peninsula, the Balkans, were partially populated with un-Hellenized tribes, living with value systems of an earlier age, appearing wild, uncouth, and threatening to the Roman sense of civility. To subdue and conquer these territories, innumerable campaigns were fought. These campaigns were led initially by Augustus, and afterward by a number of his family and apparent heirs: Marcus Licinius Crassus, campaigning from Macedonia; Tiberius and Drusus, back and forth from Germania; and Agrippa, in his last campaign.
The lands of Southeastern Europe, known to the Romans and later ages as Dalmatia, Illyricum, Pannonia, Moesia, and Thracia, witnessed a great deal of military campaigning. Roman influence marched from the Mediterranean to the Danube—and even into Dacia, across the Danube—bringing Roman institutions from the watershed of the Mediterranean to the watershed of the Danube, culturally different and rich.
The draconian methods of Rome subdued the population by killing the elders, leaders, and potential leaders, and selling the surviving men and boys into slavery. This methodology proved temporarily successful for the Romans, but devastated the cultural and emotional fabric of the region. The workforce, the land maintenance, and thousands of years of agricultural know-how were disrupted. The bereft wives, mothers, and grandmothers became the keepers of the traditions, in ruins.
This brings us to question: What happens to histories, memories, and mythologies when they are covered over by conversions, resettlements, and the denial of their existence? Do they withdraw into the realms of dread, fear, and self-loathing within the individuals and the communities?
Perhaps we can approach these questions with an example historically closer to hand: that of the Southeastern European nations created in the nineteenth century—and their relationship to their Ottoman past. One of the most feared, denigrated, and rejected histories is that of the European debt to the Islamic world. In the Balkans, due to a particular bias and the influence of industrial nations, five hundred years of Ottoman rule are remembered only in derogatory terms. The Inquisition did the same in Spain.
Like any other, the Ottoman Empire had is problems. Life was hard on working peasants and the taxpaying populous; injustice and conflicts were ever-present. Nevertheless, its management of diversity, cultural and educational opportunities, international trade, and protection for Muslim and non-Muslim pilgrims and merchants merit critical consideration.
An important fact that unites all the people of Southeastern Europe is that a great amount of their suffering was caused by divisive polices created by powers outside the sphere of local needs. There are numerous examples. The later manifestations of the Roman Empire—the Christian states of Byzantium and Rome—each used newly arriving and converted Slavs as border guards to defend their territorial claims—and encouraged these tribes to bitterly fight each other, perpetuating the policies of the earlier Roman age. A similar dynamic can be seen in the divisive policies that led to military actions in the Second World War. The political systems of Southeastern Europe were caught between two totalitarian models. Steven W. Sowards in his paper, The Traditional Regimes and the Challenge of Nazism: Collaboration vs. Resistance, writes:
Hitler decided to secure all of the Balkans before launching his invasion of Russia. In a matter of weeks, German armies defeated and occupied every Balkan state that declined to join the Axis alliance.9
The Second World War saw every form of warfare, overt and covert, inflicted on the region. No aspect of life was spared, including the institutions of learning, the national libraries and archives, the maps, and the historic sites.
Before concluding the paper it may be useful to briefly reflect on the use of old maps and archeological findings. There are benefits and dangers of reading old maps and interpreting archeological sites for the purpose of supporting the worldview of an age or an empire. As researchers, political and cultural historians, archeologists, and social scientists, we are all caught when we have to negotiate funding sources for our work. Sometimes it is a shock to discover that some of our findings are used for ideological purposes.
We will give a few historic and geographically more distant examples, away from the current debate over territories, cultural domains, and memory in the Balkans. In England, two leading Egyptologists, Wallis Budge (Sir Ernest Alfred Thompson Wallis Budge) and Flinders Petrie (Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie), whose work matured during the first half of the twentieth century, interpreted the same evidence and archeological material in opposing ways. Budge saw the origins of Egyptian civilization in African myth, ritual, and folklore; Petrie saw it in the arrival of northern non-African conquerors. In Italy, Mussolini financed and encouraged archeological excavations as means of proving a connection between the Imperial Roman past and his ideology. And closer to our time, in Romania, Ceausescu-era polices favored Dacian sites over imperial Roman sites, to support an often politically charged pro-Dacian perspective in scholarship and excavation.
Although I have reflected critically and have based my argument on a number of contrasting theories and findings, while describing the events of the Roman conquest from the point of view of indigenous Balkan cultures, I have demonized the Romans as oppressors, and inadvertently idolized the pre-classical culture. The inevitable bias of my paper arises from a workable hypothesis for Balkan reconciliations through understanding the shared history of an almost identical suffering under different empires, religious schisms, and ideologies.
In so doing, I hope to contribute and encourage the study and education of shared comparative history and its possible role in creating an informed stability, prosperity, and coalition-building for the regions of Southeastern Europe.
As Cicero said in his De Oratore, ‘Historia magistra vitae est,’ history is the teacher of life. Let the research—and the knowledge gained—on similarities and differences lead us to an understanding of each other.
1 Bardakoglu, Ali, Culture of Co-existence in Islam: The Turkish Case. Insight Turkey, Vol. 10, No. 3. 2008, p. 118. Available on-line: www.setav.org/document/Insight Turkey 10-3 Ali Bardakoglu.pdf -. Accessed November 24, 2008
2 Bardakoglu, Ali, Culture of Co-existence in Islam: The Turkish Case. Insight Turkey, Vol. 10, No. 3. 2008, p. 114. Available on-line: www.setav.org/document/Insight Turkey 10-3 Ali Bardakoglu.pdf -. Accessed November 24, 2008.
3 ibid, page 115
4 ibid.
5 Clifton, Chas: Encyclopedia of heresies and heretics. New York: Barnes & Noble 1998, p.121.
6 Clifton, Chas: Encyclopedia of heresies and heretics. New York: Barnes & Noble 1998, p.121.
7 Ibid.
8 The Warburg Institute: Description and History. Online Prospectus, issued by the Warburg Institute, http://warburg.sas.ac.uk/institute/institute_introduction.htm (November 28, 2008).
9 Sowards, Steven: The Traditional Regimes and the Challenge of Nazism. Collaboration vs. Resistance. Transcript of Lecture, issued by Michigan State University, http://staff.lib.msu.edu/sowards/balkan/lect19.htm (November 28, 2008).
Bibliography
Bardakoglu, Ali, Culture of Co-existence in Islam: The Turkish Case. Insight Turkey, Vol. 10, No. 3. 2008, p. 118. Available on-line: www.setav.org/document/Insight Turkey 10-3 Ali Bardakoglu.pdf -. Accessed November 24, 2008
Clifton, Chas: Encyclopedia of heresies and heretics. New York: Barnes & Noble 1998, p.121.
Sowards, Steven: The Traditional Regimes and the Challenge of Nazism. Collaboration vs. Resistance. Transcript of Lecture, issued by Michigan State University, http://staff.lib.msu.edu/sowards/balkan/lect19.htm (November 28, 2008).
The Warburg Institute: Description and History. Online Prospectus, issued by the Warburg Institute, http://warburg.sas.ac.uk/institute/institute_introduction.htm (November 28, 2008).
Slobodan Dan Paich, Artship Foundation, 88 Perry Street, #734
San Francisco, CA 94107, USA • +1 (415) 278 5793 • artship@aol.com • www.artship.org