The Balkans: A Short History Read Online Free PDF

precluded the construction of canals of the kind which helped commerce to flourish in eighteenth-century England and France. They also complicated the construction of railways. Rail moved across Europe like a frontier that replaced wooden towns with brick ones—in a slow and gradual movement from the north and west to the southeast of the continent. While the basic German network was in place by 1870, and had ramified to the Habsburg empire by the end of that decade, it was only after the late 1880s that key rail lines were laid south of the Danube. Both Habsburg and Ottoman authorities made a determined effort to modernize their Balkan domains, but political, strategic and topographical factors intervened and impeded rail construction. And while railways allowed goods to penetrate inland markets from the coastal areas, they did not help create a more unified or coherent regional economy. Rail networks themselves were less dense in the Balkans than anywhere else in Europe west of Brest Litovsk: 21.9 kilometers per thousand square kilometers in Greece in the 1920s, and 31.5 in the old prewar kingdom of Romania, compared with 97 in France, 123 in Germany and 370 in Belgium. 7
    Inheriting a rich network of paved interregional roads from the Romans, the Ottoman authorities developed an effective postal service using inns, caravanserais and post stations that allowed the Tartar government couriers to find fresh horses every few hours and a night’s lodging where necessary. By the eighteenth century, however, this system faced collapse—there were delays and not enough horses—though it still worked well enough in 1841 to impress one traveler as “perhaps the only public service reasonably organized which exists in this country.” By the mid-nineteenth century, the roads were so poor that some detected a deliberate policy by the Turkish authorities of keeping them in disrepair. “It is a favorite idea with all barbarous princes,” asserted one writer, “that the badness of the roads adds considerably to the natural strength of their dominions.” But mountain villagers had their own interest in bad roads too—they made it harder for the authorities to collect taxes. They made trade costlier as well. “Want of roads beyond the district makes exportation next to impossible” was one diagnosis why the fertile Monastir plain exported so little in the mid-nineteenth century. Bulgarian roads at the same time were in “a state of nature” and said to be “good enough in summer.” Bessarabian roads were notorious as among the worst in Europe well into the 1930s. Before the improvements ordered by Serbian Prince Miloš Obrenovic, the one hundred kilometers from Belgrade to Kragujevac took a week to travel.
    From the middle of the nineteenth century onward, schemes of road improvement were pursued throughout the Balkans; in the Ottoman domains, however, improvements initiated by one governor were often simply abandoned once he had been posted elsewhere; for want of upkeep, for instance, a new road laid near Serres in the 1860s was rendered impassable to wheeled transport in just five years. The Salonika Cycling Club, formed at the end of the nineteenth century, was unable to organize excursions beyond the city itself because the roads were so bad. The coming of the railways, which did form the object of Ottoman official concern, often resulted in reduced maintenance of local roads as goods and commerce shifted to the train. 8
    If well-kept roads had not been necessary to Ottoman patterns of conquest, it was largely thanks to the empire’s comparative advantage over its competitors in beasts of burden—the water buffalo, mule, donkey and, above all, its special weapon, the camel, whose novelty and significance astonished contemporary observers. In 1684, the year after the Turks had been beaten back from the gates of Vienna, Johann Christoph Wagner included in his sweeping survey of the Ottoman domains a long eulogy of the