The Balkans: A Short History Read Online Free PDF Page B

virtues of this “splendidly useful” animal, which was “especially reputed” as “the best creation of God.” “What shall I tell you of ?” Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote a friend in 1717. “You never saw Camels in your Life and perhaps the Description of them will appear new to you.” Rapid advances of the Ottoman armies, setting out from Edirne or Constantinople at the start of the campaigning season, relied especially upon these temperamental animals, capable of carrying huge loads over dirt roads, indifferent to mud and slower to tire or thirst than horses. “There are three hundred camels that carry weapons,” noted Konstantin Mihailovic, who saw service in the Ottoman army in the late fifteenth century, “for they have no wagons, so that they will not be delayed with them when they march to war.” For the acute Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, there were “two things from which, in my opinion, the Turks derive the greatest advantage and profit, rice among cereals and camels among beasts of burden; both are admirably adapted to the distant campaigns which they wage. . . . Camels can carry very heavy burdens, endure hunger and thirst, and require very little attention.” Camels continued to be employed in the region well after the heroic age was over; near Delphi in 1884, Agnes Smith spied farmers using some—perhaps descendants of the animals plundered by Greek revolutionaries from Ottoman troops in the Peloponnese during the War of Independence six decades earlier. By the 1920s they had become a curiosity for tourists. 9
    By contrast, the horses that were used by merchants for the fifty-day journey from Macedonia to Vienna—caravans of as many as one thousand conveyed goods from the Balkans to central Europe well into the nineteenth century—fared poorly on the rough tracks and irregular, stony ground. The horses of Rustchuk, in Danubian Bulgaria, which were specially bred for the army cavalry in the early nineteenth century, were prized for their endurance on rocky terrain. But horses were costly to feed, water and look after. Down on the plains, buffaloes and oxen drew carts, plows and even carriages; while in the hills themselves, mules remained the pack animal of choice as late as the 1940s, when trains of hundreds of mules—their drivers fluent in the recently defunct language of the muleteer—carried German and British arms across the mountains of Yugoslavia and Greece during the war.
    In what was always a border zone of Europe, the costs to any state of exerting its authority over the region were thus raised further by the character of the terrain itself. Insecurity was endemic for centuries and took its toll on economic life. In the summer of 1997, after an uprising in southern Albania, armed gangs held up cars across the Greek border and made travel at night unsafe even for the local police. They were the most recent chapter in a much older story; a century earlier, the Ottoman state had been unable to guarantee the safety of travelers after dark. In some areas, of course, it could not protect them during the day either. “The Pasha, who was concerned for our safety, would not listen to our passing the Balcan at Shumla, as robberies and assassinations had occurred there,” wrote von Tietz in 1836, “but recommended us to go by Tirnovo which, although more inconvenient, was much more safe.” By sea, travelers faced the threat of pirates between the fifteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Pirates remained a menace in the Aegean until they were stamped out by joint Ottoman–Greek action in 1839. 10
    The Ottoman state could cope with this state of affairs. It was used to negotiating with, and often amnestying and bringing into official service those outlaws, rebels and brigands too powerful or elusive to punish and kill. Only with the rise of the modern state in the nineteenth and twentieth century—an entity defined in part by its insistence on preserving a monopoly of the use of armed