Mediterranean Historical Review

ISSN: 0951-8967 (Print) 1743-940X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fmhr20

The Ottoman conquest of the Balkans:

interpretations and research debates, edited by
Oliver Jens Schmitt

Colin Imber

To cite this article: Colin Imber (2018): The Ottoman conquest of the Balkans: interpretations
and research debates, edited by Oliver Jens Schmitt, Mediterranean Historical Review, DOI:
10.1080/09518967.2018.1460097

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09518967.2018.1460097

Published online: 25 May 2018.

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Mediterranean Historical Review, 2018

BOOK REVIEW

The Ottoman conquest of the Balkans: interpretations and research debates, edited
by Oliver Jens Schmitt, Vienna, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2016,
289 pp., €65.00 (paperback), ISBN 978-3-7001-7890-3

This book has the aim of working towards a “consistent model of interpretation” for
historians working on the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans from the fourteenth century
onwards. Research in the area, as the editor points out in his excellent introduction, is
fragmented according to the linguistic capabilities and the particular discipline of each
researcher, whether Ottomanist, Byzantinist or Balkan specialist; and looming over
everything is the legacy of more than a century of nationalist historiography. While
serious academic history writing has by now largely freed itself from this contagion,
nationalism – be it Balkan or Turkish – has woven itself so intimately into perceptions
of the Ottoman conquest that it can still skew the results of historical research. Added
to the problems of linguistic variety, competing disciplinary approaches and nationalist
mystification, is the political fragmentation of the Balkan region itself. At the time of
their appearance in southeast Europe, the Ottomans did not encounter a single powerful
adversary, but rather a multiplicity of competing lordships and colonies and, on the
western edges of the Balkan Peninsula, a struggle for hegemony between Venice and
the Kingdoms of Naples and Hungary. Furthermore, before the late fifteenth century,
the Ottoman marcher lords – themselves often of local Christian descent – could act
almost as independent lords. As a result, the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans was a
complex process that requires the researcher to investigate closely the minutiae of the
countless prevailing local interests, hostilities and alliances. These are some of the
many points which the editor raises in his introduction. I would add that the often frag-
mentary nature of the source materials, written in many languages and stemming from
disparate literary traditions, presents a further difficulty to the researcher.
In these circumstances, establishing “a consistent model of interpretation” would be
very welcome, and this volume makes some headway on the project. The editor’s intro-
duction is particularly useful in signposting the directions for future research, suggest-
ing that it should comprise military history; political history with a regional emphasis;
demography; and not least institutional, religious and cultural history, with an emphasis
on investigating the continuities and discontinuities between the pre-Ottoman and Otto-
man periods. He also makes the case for comparative history, pointing in particular to
the contrast between the historiography of the fall of the Western Roman Empire,
which seeks to explain why the Empire fell, with writings on the fall of the Eastern
Empire a millennium later, which focus largely on detailed, small-scale research. It is
in the spirit of this recommendation that the first of the essays following the introduc-
tion is Maurus Reinkowski’s “Conquests Compared: the Ottoman Expansion in the Bal-
kans and the Mashreq in an Islamicate Context”, which compares Ottoman conquests
in Europe with, especially, the Ottoman conquest of Syria and Egypt. He places these
in a broader context of Islamic expansion, and in doing so touches on themes that recur
2 Book Reviews

in the essays which follow, in particular the questions of continuity and discontinuity,
religious conversion and the interpretations of nationalist historians.
Of these, the influence of nationalist historiography is one that, inevitably, forms a
leitmotif throughout the volume. For readers with an interest in the pre-modern roots of
secular nationalism Dubravko Lovrenović’s “The Ottoman Conquest of Bosnia in 1463
as Interpreted by Bosnian Franciscan Chroniclers and Historiographers” is especially
illuminating. In it, the author traces the recurring themes of the mythical betrayal of
Bosnia by “Radak the Manichee”, the Turks as God’s scourge of heretics, and other
topoi found in Franciscan writings from the seventeenth century onwards, and shows
how in 1982 the most recent of the Franciscan historians, Dominik Mandić, “intro-
duced to this event a new ethno-national discourse, trying to present medieval Bosnia
as part of the Croatian ethnic and political arena” (269). Here, it is the secularization of
Catholic mytho-history that has created the foundation for Croatian nationalist mytho-
history. Nationalist historiography, however, whatever its historical roots, is never static,
but shifts with the prevailing political climate. The question of the conversion to Islam
– a major theme of this volume – provides an example of this phenomenon. Grigor
Boykov’s “The Human Cost of Warfare: Population Loss during the Ottoman Conquest
and the Demographic History of Bulgaria in the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern
Era” describes how in the 1980s the Bulgarian government embraced the theory that
the country’s Muslims were not the descendants of Turkish colonists who had driven
out or enslaved the local populations, but were rather the descendants of autochthonous
Bulgarians who had been forcibly converted to Islam. This interpretation of history
went against nationalist orthodoxy but, as it happens, perfectly suited the then govern-
ment policy of forced Bulgarianization.
While the authors of this volume must inevitably confront the distortions and biases
of nationalist historiography, they for the most part avoid its pitfalls. On the fraught
question of conversion to Islam, for example, Tijana Krstić’s “New Directions in the
Study of Conversion to Islam” provides a clear-headed methodological guide to
researchers in this field, summarizing the theoretical approaches of the scholars who
have been most influential in the field – most notably Köprülü, Barkan and Hasluck –
the possibilities and limitations of the source materials, and the definitional problems of
key concepts, such as “syncretism”. While not being the major focus, conversion to
Islam is also a theme that necessarily arises in the two articles which I personally
enjoyed the most, Grigor Boykov’s “The Human Cost of Warfare” and Mariya
Kiprovska’s “Ferocious Invasion or Smooth Incorporation? Integrating the Established
Balkan Military System into the Ottoman Army”. Despite his modest claims, Boykov’s
piece is remarkable for its richness of detail. The overall theme is the change in the
demography of the area within the borders of modern Bulgaria between the fifteenth
and seventeenth centuries, charting the rise in population to the late sixteenth century
and its subsequent collapse: in the seventeenth century, the population never again
achieved the levels it had reached a hundred years earlier. In discussing demographic
change, the author raises important questions concerning, for example, conversion,
immigration of Turks from Anatolia, and climate change. This last is a matter that is
increasingly drawing the attention of historians of Europe and the Ottoman Empire in
the Early Modern period, and Boykov’s pinpointing the abandonment of settlements at
a high altitude from about the 1580s hints at a worsening climate in southeast Europe,
and the possibility of climate as a factor in demographic decline. Kiprovska’s article
tackles a theme that has embodied the clash of nationalisms. While historians in the
Balkans have usually portrayed the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans as a brutal inva-
 Mediterranean Historical Review 3

sion, resulting in the enslavement of the native populations, Turkish nationalist histori-
ans have presented the conquest as largely benign, incorporating pre-existing political
structures into the Ottoman system, and bringing about an improvement in the lot of
the Balkan peasantry. Kiprovska introduces us to both schools of thought, giving a
nuanced account of the establishment of Ottoman rule and incorporation of what might
loosely be described as “the lower nobility” of the Balkans into the Ottoman system.
The article is also extremely valuable in providing a conspectus of the voluminous but
scattered literature on this subject.
Two articles discuss southeast Europe north of the Danube, Andrei Pippidi’s “Tak-
ing Possession of Wallachia: Facts and Interpretations” and Ştefan S. Gorovei and
Maria Magdalena Szekely’s “Old Questions, Old Clichés. New Approaches, New
Results? The Case of Moldavia”. The theme of both articles is how to understand the
relationship of the two Danubian principalities to the Ottoman Empire, given that,
unlike the lands to the south of the Danube, they were never fully conquered and incor-
porated into the Empire as Ottoman provinces. The answer, it seems, is still undeter-
mined, mainly, I suspect, because the Ottomans tried to explain the relationship in
terms of Islamic law, which in fact lacked the conceptual apparatus to describe the real-
ity. In his discussion, Andrei Pippidi not only outlines “the facts” of Wallachian history,
but also provides a short sketch of the first stirrings of romantic-nationalist historiogra-
phy in the nineteenth century, which was to underpin the idea of Romanian nationhood.
The volume concludes with Ovidiu Cristea’s “Venice Confronting the Ottoman Empire:
a Struggle for Survival (Fourteenth-Sixteenth Centuries)”. Venice was not, it is true, a
Balkan metropolis and was never conquered by the Ottomans, but the Venetian colo-
nies were an integral feature of the Balkan political landscape before they fell one by
one to the advancing Ottomans. Furthermore, for much of the period which this book
discusses, the only unbroken, if partial, record of Balkan affairs is to be found in the
Venetian archives.
To conclude, this is a fascinating volume. It does not, I think, provide a “consis-
tent” model of interpretation. Instead, it provides much information, many stimulating
ideas for continuing research, and is blissfully free of inherited prejudices and misinter-
pretations. Finally, I must thank the editor for his political map of the Balkans in 1400.
It allows us finally to locate and make sense of the tangled Balkan dynasties of the
fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.

Colin Imber
University of Manchester
colin.h.imber@manchester.ac.uk
© 2018, Colin Imber
https://doi.org/10.1080/09518967.2018.1460097