Life under Ottoman rule

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Albanian soldiers in the service of the Ottoman Empire 12 SOCIALIST ACTION SEPTEMBER 1992 for the Ottomans, since they were generally in conflict with their feudalized neighbors and had the military organization and mores typical of nomadic peoples. They played a major role in the Ottoman army and administration not only in the Balkans but in the empire as a whole. For this, among other reasons, the Albanians were the last Balkan people (with the possible exception of the Bosniaks) to develop distinct national consciousness and aims.

The Ottoman empire, at the outset, was not feudal. It was the sort of society that Marx and Engels described as oriental despotism. But despite its repellant name, this sytem for a time had advantages over European feudalism. The Ottoman state was strong enough to foster trade and concentrate the resources of vast dominions.

Thus, in the Middle Ages, the Ottoman capital of Istanbul had a population of over a million, when London and Paris had populations of around 25,000. Moreover, craft production, finance and trade were left largely in the hands of the empire's Christian subjects who continued to live in the old Greco-Roman cities it conquered. The Ottoman empire was not Turkish in any national sense. In fact, it was anti-Turk.

Even the word "Turk" was a term of abuse, being used only for the Turks who continued a nomadic or semi-nomadic tribal life. Indeed, during the golden age of the Ottoman empire, the sultan faced far graver challenges from the tribal Turks of eastern Anatolia than from any rebellious Christian subjects or European rulers.

In order to prevent feudal fragmentation and maintain the unity of the state, all title to land was vested in the sultan.

Moreover, his military elite and civil service were based mostly on Islamicized foreigners of Christian origin, cut off from their families and thus entirely dependent on the sultan.

The Ottomans did not have a concept of nationality as we know it. They conceived rather of religious communities. Thus, they tended to see all the Christians as being one community and all Muslims as another.

For them, there was no essential national difference between the Slavic or Albanian Muslims and Turkish Muslims.

Their Christian subjects tended to see things the same way.

Under the Ottomans, the Christians enjoyed certain guarantees, although they were politically subordinated to the Muslims. Thus, some Christians could be Ottoman patriots, as were, for example, some important Romanian boyars in the 19th century, who saw the sultanate as a bulwark of conservatism.

The rise of moder Turkish nationalism made it impossible for the non-Turkish peoples to identify with the Turkish state. It ushered in national oppression in the moder sense, that is, attempts to make the state ethnically homogeneous. The genocide against the Armenians is an example of this tendency.

Turkish nationalism was also fed by the increasingly impoverished Muslim masses' hatred of the Christian minorities, who had been left in control of the commercial wealth by the Muslim military and bureaucratic aristocracy.

The Muslim peoples of the Balkans began also to rebel against Ottoman authority, since, among other things, it was less and less able to protect them from the Christians. The most prominent example of this was the Bosniak rebellion of the 1830s led by Husein-kapetan Gradascevic, which aimed at Bosnian autonomy within the Ottoman empire.

The discontent of the Christian subjects of the Ottoman empire had been increasing since the 17th century, when the earlier oriental despotism finally broke down into a particular oppressive form of feudalism.

The state itself was fragmented, when the function of levying taxes and tributes was sold to those who offered to squeeze the most from the sultan's subjects. The Austrians started pushing the Ottomans back down the Balkan peninsula, encouraging Christian rebellions.

In 1690, the Ottomans were still able to crush a major Serbian rebellion, provoking a huge exodus of Serbs to Austrian-controlled territory. This flight and other waves of refugees from Ottoman repression and pillage led to a large Serbian minority living on Croatian lands.—G.F.

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serblans hanged by Austrians In reprisal for assassination of Archduke.

Armies, they put up a credible (continued from previous page)

cities. (In general, in Europe, feudalism arose as a hybrid of the vestiges of Roman class society and the class differences beginning in the nomadic tribes that overran the empire.)

Bosnian resistance to the feudal order was reflected in the growth of the Bogumil religion, which was less hierarchical and exploitative than the Catholic or Eastern Orthodox churches.

Thus, for example, the Bogumils were denounced by the Orthodox cleric Kosme in these terms: "They are enemies of God, who preach disobedience to superiors, who curse the rich, beat up priests, curse the nobles, who call those who serve the emperor and his officials godless, and forbid the serfs to work for their lords."

The Catholic church, in particular, the supreme institution of European feudalism, was determined to crush the Bogumils and put increasing pressure on the Bosnian rulers to persecute the sect. Thus, from the standpoint of those who followed in the Bogumil tradition, and those who in general resented the pressures of the feudalist churches, the Ottoman conquest represented liberation. They went over en masse to Sunni Islam, which has a simple theology and little clerical hierarchy.

Until the times of the reformation, Sunni Islam continued to appeal to rebels against the Catholic hierarchy in the European lands bordering the Ottoman empire. Under Ottoman protection, centers of Protestant learing developed in Transylvania, where Hungarian princes were granted autonomy by the sultan.

The "Yugoslav" peoples The three historically recognized Slavic nations of Yugoslavia,, the Croats, the Slovenes, and the Serbs, became differentiated as a result of the different external pressures that bore on the Slavic tribes soon after their settlement of the Balkan peninsula.

The first to establish a feudal-type state were the Slovenians, but they were quickly caught'up in the course of development tribal mores.

The languages of the Balkan Slavs have remained close. Serbian and Croatian are the same language, distinguished only by stylistic differences and the alphabets commonly used to write them. (In the Near East there is a long tradition of writing the same language in different alphabets, according to religion.) Slovenian is a semi-detached branch of the Serbo-Croat family of dialects.

Thus, on the basis of language alone, 19th century nationalists could make a case that the Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs could be one nation, if they were freed from the foreign overlords that divided them.

The concept of a Yugoslav nation first arose in Slovenia and Croatia, which were briefly occupied by Napoleon's armies. It was expressed as "Illyrianism," from the there was a revolutionary situation in the Croatian countryside. The Croatian masses, naturally enough, were not attracted to "unity" under the sordid Karadjordjevic dynasty.

The various parties in the territories formerly under Austro-Hungarian rule, mainly conservative ones, set up a Yugoslavist National Council in Zagreb to rule both Croatia and Slovenia and negotiate unity with Serbia. But it was viewed by the rebellious masses as an organ of their oppressors, the rich. The Council had to appeal to the Serbian state and army to "restore order."

A National Council official in Zlatina wrote: "The people are in revolt. Total disorganization prevails. Only the army, moreover, only the Serbian army can restore order. ... The mob is pillaging the Gavrilo Princip: He assassinated Archduke Ferdinand.

previous dogmatic position made it possible for it to become more responsive to aspirations of the various nationalities. Under the royal dictatorship, the CP collaborated to varying degrees with a spectrum of anti-centralist forces, even some radical nationalists.

On the theoretical level, Slovenian CP leader Edward Kardelj's book, "The Development of the Slovenian National depariure. karied ian doned Staked s famous five criteria for nationhood. He offered a new, if vague definition, of nations, based on their social history. Thus, the defining feature for the Slovenians was their national alienation from a German-speaking nobility and bourgeoisie. The Croats were marked by the continuity of feudal development, and the Serbs by a rising aggressive rural bourgeoisie.

The CP, Kardelj argued, had missed major opportunities because of its wrong