Balkans, also called Balkan Peninsula, easternmost of Europe’s three great southern peninsulas. There is not universal agreement on the region’s components. The Balkans are usually characterized as comprising Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia, and Slovenia—with all or part of each of those countries located within the peninsula. Portions of Greece and Turkey are also located within the geographic region generally defined as the Balkan Peninsula, and many descriptions of the Balkans include those countries too. Some define the region in cultural and historical terms and others geographically, though there are even different interpretations among historians and geographers. Moreover, for some observers, the term “Balkans” is freighted with negative connotations associated with the region’s history of ethnic divisiveness and political upheaval. Increasingly in the early 21st century, another pair of definitional terms has gained currency: South East (also styled South-East, Southeast, South-Eastern, or Southeastern) Europe, which has been employed to describe the region in broad terms (though, again, without universal agreement on its component states) and the Western Balkans, which are usually said to comprise Albania, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, and Serbia.
Generally, the Balkans are bordered on the northwest by Italy, on the north by Hungary, on the north and northeast by Moldova and Ukraine, and on the south by Greece and Turkey or the Aegean Sea (depending on how the region is defined). The Balkans are washed by the Adriatic Sea in the west, the Ionian Sea in the southwest, and the Black Sea in the east. In the north, clear geographic delimitation of the Balkans becomes difficult because the Pannonian Basin of the Great Alfold (Great Hungarian Plain) extends from central Europe into parts of Croatia, Serbia, and Romania.
Moldova—although located north of the Danube River, which is frequently cited as the region’s northeastern geographic dividing line—is included in the Balkans under some definitions by virtue of its long-standing historical and cultural connections with Romania. However, Moldova is politically and economically oriented more toward other onetime republics of the former Soviet Union than it is to the Balkan states. More often than not, Slovenia is included as a member of the Balkans because of its long historical ties with its neighbours to the southeast and because of its former incorporation in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes and federal Yugoslavia. Greece, because its northern regions of Epirus and Macedonia are often considered parts of the Balkans, also appears on many lists of Balkan states, but it is arguably better characterized as primarily a Mediterranean country. Turkey, too, is sometimes numbered among Balkan countries, as a result of Anatolia’s presence on the peninsula, and the Ottoman Turks cast a long shadow of political dominance over the region for centuries (earning it the sobriquet “Turkey in Europe” or “European Turkey”).
The word Balkan is Turkish and means “mountain,” and the peninsula is certainly dominated by this type of landform, especially in the west. The Balkan Mountains lie east-west across Bulgaria, the Rhodope Mountains extend along the Greek-Bulgarian border, and the Dinaric range extends down the Adriatic coast to Albania. By some definitions the region’s northern boundary extends to the Julian Alps and the Carpathians. Among these ranges extensive areas of good arable land are relatively scarce, though the valleys of the Danube, Sava, and Vardar rivers, eastern Bulgaria, parts of the Aegean Sea coast, and especially the Danubian Plain are exceptions. The mountains have a significant impact on the climate of the peninsula. The northern and central parts of the Balkans have a central European climate, characterized by cold winters, warm summers, and well-distributed rainfall. The southern and coastal areas, however, have a Mediterranean type of climate, with hot, dry summers and mild, relatively rainy winters.
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Ethnic diversity is one of the region’s most characteristic social and political features. The most numerous of the groups is the South Slavs, who form the majority of the population in Bulgaria, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, and Montenegro. The Bulgarians, Macedonians, and Slovenes speak their own Slavic languages, while the Slavs of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro all speak dialects of Serbo-Croatian.
The peculiar nature identified with “Balkanization”—that is, fragmentation of ethnic groups—derives in part from the compartmentalization brought about by the mountainous relief. But size is also an important determinant of the region’s character, for its area is large enough to have provided important bases of occupation for the Byzantine and Turkish civilizations. Subjection to Eastern imperial forces isolated most Balkan societies from Western developments for almost two millennia and created feudal characteristics that persisted until World War I. After this war the viability of the relatively new Balkan states was threatened by political instability, ethnic division, worldwide economic depression, and the rise of the fascist states of Germany and Italy. After World War II, communism brought greater political stability to the Balkans—but at the cost of individual freedom, social and economic problems connected with rapid industrialization, and varying degrees of dominance by yet another outside power, the Soviet Union.
At no point in history has it been easy to define the Balkans in any other than geographic terms (and, again, even that approach can be problematic). At times the peninsula has been divided along north-south lines, and at other times the divisions have been east-west; what constitutes the Balkans has varied with time as have the forces operating within the area. There are, however, some features of Balkan history that have remained consistent. These include the fluidity of ethnic groups, the inability of the peoples of the region to agree and cooperate among themselves, a tendency on the part of political authority to devolve to local levels as soon as central power is weakened, the influence of foreign powers, and the difficulty of introducing into the area concepts that have evolved in a different political and social context.
This article covers the history of the region as first defined above from antiquity to the early 21st century. An overview of the region’s physical and human geography and of the history can be found in the article Europe. For discussion of physical and human geography, along with the history of individual countries in the region, see Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Kosovo, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, and Turkey. Area 257,400 square miles (666,700 square km). Pop. (2002 est.) 59,297,000.
The abandonment of Dacia in the second half of the 3rd century was a symptom of Rome’s decline, leading to major changes in the 4th century. In 330 the imperial capital was moved to Byzantium, so that any tribe intent on attacking the seat of Roman power and opulence would thenceforth move through the Balkans rather than into Italy. In 391 Christianity became the official religion, and in 395 the empire was divided in two. The dividing line ran through the Balkans: Illyricum went to the western sector under Rome; the remainder went to the eastern half and was ruled from Byzantium (by this time named Constantinople). This deep and long-lasting division did little to alleviate the barbarian incursions of the times. The 5th century saw devastation by, among others, the Alani, the Goths, and the Huns. Most of these invaders soon left or were assimilated, but such was not to be the case with the Slavs, who first arrived in the 6th century.
The Slavs were settlers and cultivators rather than plunderers and within 100 years had become a powerful factor in the region. They separated into four main groups: Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, and Bulgarians (the last being a Turkic tribe, the Bulgars, that was eventually absorbed by Slavs who had already settled in the eastern Balkans). Although in 681 the Bulgars established their own state, the Slavs acknowledged the suzerainty of the emperor in Constantinople.
In the second half of the 9th century, Christianity was adopted by the Bulgarians and the Serbs, both of whom chose the Byzantine rather than Roman variant of the new religion. To the north of the Danube, the Romanians, though not Slav, made the same choice, while the Croats, together with most of the rest of what had been Rome’s section of the divided empire, became part of the western Christian community. The Albanians, isolated behind their mountain chains, were not much affected by either branch of Christianity. The divisions and competition between Rome and Constantinople intensified, with the two communities separating irrevocably in 1054. The dividing line of 395 was thus reinforced: the Croats and Slovenes became an integral part of Roman Catholic Europe, with its Latin script and culture, and the Serbs, Bulgarians, and Romanians joined the Greeks in their allegiance to Eastern Orthodoxy.
The Orthodox east
Within the Orthodox world two monks, Cyril and Methodius, devised an alphabet that enabled their disciples to translate religious texts into Slavonic. This new alphabet enabled the establishment of a liturgical and literary language of the Balkans, but it also meant that, with Greek remaining in use in commerce and in the administration of the Byzantine Empire, the Orthodox world no longer had a common language that functioned as Latin did in the Catholic world. The lack of a universal language developed in part from a political assumption established at the very beginning of the Orthodox Christian world: that the church and the state were twin pillars of legitimate authority. Therefore, whenever a state separated from the Byzantine Empire, the impulse was for an accompanying church to be established. This association of state and church was intensified by the fear of invasion by non-Christians, a fear shared by state and church and ruler and ruled. Ruler and ruled were much less united, however, when social tensions arose—especially when, as was frequently the case, these tensions found expression in support for religious heresies. Any sign of independent thinking within the church was persecuted as a danger to temporal as well as spiritual power, and this hindered the development of those forms of intellectual exchange that later proved vital to the flowering of intellectual life in the West—Catholic Croatia-Slavonia and Dalmatia included.
The Byzantine state’s military power, like that of the Slavic kingdoms that were eventually to challenge it, rested upon landlords who held property in return for furnishing an agreed number of troops in time of war. The Byzantines developed an extensive and highly corrupt civil service, and the imperial capital’s wealth acted as a dangerous magnet, drawing ambitious Balkan leaders to it with disastrous results. There were recurrent conflicts between Constantinople and the first Bulgarian empire until the latter was crushed in the early 11th century. Although reinvigorated by its victory, the Byzantine Empire soon faced further threats. From the east came the Seljuq Turks, a Muslim people whose victory in the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 destroyed Byzantium’s security in Anatolia. Some 125 years later the threat came from Western crusaders, who in 1204 descended upon and seized the imperial capital, holding it until 1261. They also divided the empire into small fiefdoms, most of which lasted little longer than their first rulers. The Crusades had two profound effects upon the Balkans. In the first place the experience of Norman rule greatly intensified the hatred of the Eastern Orthodox against Westerners and Catholics. Second, the weakening of the empire allowed the Venetians to assume domination of seaborne trading in the eastern Mediterranean. The loss of both Anatolia and maritime supremacy deprived the empire of essential reserves of manpower, food, and wealth—losses that it could replenish only in its Balkan possessions.
In the late 12th century, attempts to levy higher taxes led the Bulgarians to revolt and establish a second empire, but this was soon enfeebled by costly wars and by the inability of the ruling Asen dynasty to control local notables. Byzantium’s life was prolonged by these inadequacies and by the inability of the Slavs to unite. In the 14th century Bulgaria was eclipsed by the rising power of Serbia, where Stefan Dušan became king in 1331. This greatest of Serbia’s medieval rulers left behind a legal code, drawn up in 1349, and a legacy of conquest that was legendary. He is also thought to have pondered the seizure of Constantinople, though by the time of his death in 1355 he had taken no positive action toward securing that goal.
The Catholic west
Political stability and unity were no more apparent among the Catholic Balkan Christians than among the Orthodox. The Croats established their own kingdom in the 10th century under Tomislav but in 1102 agreed to become part of the Hungarian monarchy. In the 14th century there was a short-lived Bosnian kingdom under the Kotromanić dynasty, but it also joined Hungary—even though Bosnia was less Catholic in its composition because many Bogomil heretics had taken refuge there.
Hungary had already established its authority as early as the 11th century in Transylvania, where it introduced both Szeklers, a Hungarian-speaking people, and German-speaking Saxons. To the east the kingdoms of Walachia and Moldavia did not emerge until the 14th century; their preoccupations were less with the Turks than with the Hungarians and the Mongols.
Conquest and rule
While the various Balkan states fought among themselves for domination in the area, a new danger appeared in the south. In 1362 the Ottoman Turks took Adrianople (modern Edirne, Turkey). This was the beginning of their conquest of the Balkan Peninsula—a process that took more than a century. Serbia fell after the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, Bulgaria in 1396, Constantinople in 1453, Bosnia in 1463, Herzegovina in 1482, and Montenegro in 1499. The conquest was made easier by divisions among the Orthodox peoples and by the even deeper rift between the Western and Eastern Christians.
Although the Albanians under Skanderbeg frustrated the Ottomans for a time (1443–68), the Ottomans marched ever northward. In 1526 they defeated the Hungarians in the Battle of Mohács, and three years later they sieged Vienna unsuccessfully. The Ottomans now controlled much of central as well as southeastern Europe, but in the northern and western areas their power was much diluted. Transylvania, Moldavia, and Walachia acknowledged the suzerainty of the sultan but managed their own internal affairs—as did Montenegro, which was too mountainous to subdue—while the trading centre of Ragusa (modern Dubrovnik, Croatia) remained independent both de facto and de jure. The western periphery, including Croatia, was still open to the intellectual storms generated by the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, which did not much affect the central Orthodox areas.
In these central areas the Ottoman conquest brought complete social and political revolution. The old aristocracy almost everywhere was removed from power, and it frequently was destroyed. The main exceptions were Bosnia and Albania, where many nobles converted to Islam and retained their land. In Bosnia the Bogomils, equally persecuted by Orthodoxy and Catholicism, had religious as well as material reasons for conversion. In almost all areas the Ottomans introduced the timar system, based on previous Byzantine practices. All land was owned by the sultan—God’s representative on earth—but it was leased out to spahis (calvary corps members), who in return undertook to provide troops in proportion to the amount of land held. The peasants worked the land and thus generated income for the spahis, though in the first centuries of Ottoman rule taxation and other levies were usually lighter and more regular than they had been under Christian rule.
The Ottoman authorities seldom exerted pressure on Christians to convert to Islam, though there were fiscal and legal benefits in doing so. Administratively, the empire was divided into millets, each millet consisting of a single religious denomination. The religious leaders were made responsible for the collection of state taxes and for the maintenance of order within the religious community. Most Balkan Christians, being Orthodox, were members of the millet headed by the Greek patriarch in Constantinople. The taxes that they were required to pay included the devşirme, an occasional levy on male children who were taken from Christian households to be converted to Islam and trained as members of the administrative elite of the empire, including the military Janissary corps. Despite the horrors of such separation, there is evidence that children who rose high in the imperial service favoured their native areas.
Decline and retreat
The devşirme was last levied in the 17th century, by which time the Ottoman Empire was in irreversible decline. After repelling a second attempt to take Vienna in 1683, the Austrians and then the Russians began to push back the sultan’s frontiers. Following the Treaty of Carlowitz in 1699, Hungary, Croatia-Slavonia, and Transylvania reverted to the Habsburg crown, and, with the Treaty of Passarowitz in 1718, Austria regained the Banat of Temesvár. Immediately thereafter the Austrians invited the Serbs, who had been their recent allies, to settle in the border areas of the Habsburg lands as frontier guards; in return, the Serbs were allowed religious freedom. The Austrian Militärgrenze, or “Military Frontier,” thus took the momentous step of introducing Orthodox Serbs into Catholic Croatian and Hungarian territory. Meanwhile, the Ottomans suffered further defeats throughout the 18th century. Through the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca (1774), Russia exacted a promise of free navigation on the Danube and insisted on the right to protect Orthodox Christians in the empire.
The empire’s inflexibility accounts for much of its weakness. As the Ottoman system was officially regarded as the implementation on Earth of God’s will, it could not be changed. This attitude was pervasive: administrative practices remained unaltered; guilds were set at prescribed numbers, and new ones were difficult to establish; most exports were technically illegal; and estate holders were not legally entitled to bequeath their estates to their heirs. Most of these regulations were evaded by corruption and bribery. At the same time, there was increasing trading in office, not least in tax farming. Under this system the right to collect taxes in a given area could be purchased from a government agency or from government officials. The government determined the amount of tax owed by each individual tax farmer directly to the government, and tax collectors were free to take as much as they could from the taxpayers and pocket the difference. Inevitably the burden of these increased costs was passed down to the peasant and to poor artisans in the towns.
In Moldavia and Walachia the local nobility had adopted Greek culture, and it was partly through them that Greek influence was extended throughout the Orthodox church in the 18th century, leading to the abolition of the separate Serbian patriarchate in 1766 and of the autocephaly of the Bulgarian church in 1767. The subsequent appointment of Greek bishops and even priests in non-Greek areas caused great resentment; this was exacerbated by the increased trafficking in church offices during the century, which once again passed the costs of purchasing favours down the system until they fell ultimately on poor villagers and townspeople. On the land the high profits to be made from the sale (usually by technically illegal export) of cash crops such as cotton brought about the rise of the çiftlik, a commercially oriented estate whose owner was frequently an absentee landlord and whose peasants were tied to the land and subjected to harsh labour dues.
In the last two decades of the 18th century, these factors combined with further encroachment by Austria and Russia to produce a virtual collapse of central governmental authority in the Ottoman Balkans. In many areas power lay not with Constantinople but with local warlords who had carved out their own fiefdoms, the most famous being the Albanian Ali Paşa Tepelenë of Janina (modern Ioánnina, Greece). In some instances these warlords provided some stability, but in most cases they exploited their subjects ruthlessly. Frustration over the weakness of central government rather than over its overbearing presence produced a Serbian uprising of 1804, the first successful Christian revolt against Ottoman rule.