SERBIA

SERBIA. The kingdom of Serbia disappeared from the map of Europe in the fifteenth century, following defeats at the hands of the Ottoman Empire beginning with the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. The Ottoman conquest socially leveled Serbia. The Serbian aristocrat either converted to Islam, lost his lands and privileges, or was killed. The result was a society consisting of peasants. However, the memory of independence was kept alive by the Serbian Orthodox Church. A Serbian archbishopric had been founded in 1219 thanks to the initiative of the monk Sava (Rastko Nemanjic, a son of Nemanja, the founder of the Nemanjic dynasty). The archbishop had been raised to the level of patriarch by Stefan Dušan in 1346. Although this patriarchate did not survive him, a Serbian church remained and continued to define the Serbian population culturally. The Ottomans restored the Serbian patriarchate in 1557 at Peć, a city in modern northwestern Kosovo. It lasted until 1766, when fears of collusion with Ottoman enemies convinced the government to abolish it. The church, ministering to its peasant flock via its peasant clergy, nourished the continued existence of a Serbia not as a state, but as an identity.

SERBIA UNDER THE OTTOMANS

Most of medieval Serbian territory fell to the Ottoman province of Rumeli, which extended from the Peloponnese to the Danube; Serbian populations also inhabited the provinces of Bosnia, Kanije, and Temeşvar, until the latter two were taken by the Habsburg Monarchy in wars of the seventeenth century. The notable towns of the Serbian kingdom now became Ottoman garrisons. Belgrade, not a part of Stefan Dušan's Serbia in any case, had up to 40,000 inhabitants in 1632, but was down to 15,000 in 1838. Niš, Kruševac, Peć, and other important towns in Serbia withered. As inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire, Serbs both suffered and benefited. Many Serbs chose to convert to Islam, in which cases they instantly became members of the favored faith and thus part of the ruling class. It is true that Orthodox Christian Serbs were subject to taxes and levies that Muslims did not pay, but those burdens were potentially balanced by the fact that Christians did not have to fight in Ottoman armies. Above all, though, the fact remains that the Orthodox Christians of the Ottoman Empire were administered via the millet system, by which they were governed by their own church hierarchy.

The millet system was established in 1453 as a result of a decree by Sultan Mehmed II (ruled 1444–1446, 1451–1481). It reflected the Ottoman belief that one's identity is fundamentally religious. Thus, while one had the option to convert to Islam and enjoy the fruits of that conversion, one also had the right to maintain one's faith. Thus, the Ottomans administered their subjects as religious beings, and the Orthodox patriarch in Istanbul was given responsibility for the Orthodox Christians of the empire. On the local level, where contact between the believer and the church was most common, the parish priest was of the ethnicity of the flock. The church was made responsible for marriage, divorce, and the collection of dues to the church as well as to the state. The millet system thus ameliorated some of the effects of the Ottoman conquest. Serbian statehood was gone, but a Serbian, Orthodox Christian identity was maintained through what many Serbs see as a "dark age" thanks to a system that allowed a degree of self-administration.

Over the course of the Ottoman conquest and in subsequent centuries, many Orthodox Christians migrated northward and westward under the pressure of the Ottoman advance. Thus, a large Serbian presence was established in the Habsburg Monarchy. Population movements began in earnest after the Battle of Smederevo in 1459, and by 1483, up to two hundred thousand Orthodox Christians had moved into central Slavonia and Srijem. The final major population shift occurred in the 1690s, following an Austro-Ottoman war, when at least 30,000 Orthodox Serbs, led by Patriarch Arsenije III Crnojevic, made their way from Kosovo north to southern Hungary. The center of authority in the Serbian Orthodox Church moved with the migrants. The Patriarchate at Peć, which would finally be extinguished by the Ottomans in 1766, was essentially replaced by the Metropolitanate of Sremski Karlovci, in Croatia. Through the late nineteenth century, two institutions, the military frontier and the metropolitanate, would define Serbian life in the Habsburg Monarchy. The military frontier would exist until 1881. The Orthodox Christians who had made their way from Ottoman territories to the Habsburg Monarchy were given certain privileges, usually including a plot of land, freedom from taxation by the local aristocracy, and freedom of worship, but they paid for these privileges with military service in times of crisis. Individual agreements, the most famous of which was the Statuta Valachorum, issued in 1630 by Emperor Ferdinand II (ruled 1619–1637), regulated the obligations of the Orthodox Serbian population. Settlement patterns, with Banija, Kordun, and Lika in the west, and parts of Slavonia in the east, heavily populated by Serbs, were a result of these agreements.

ORIGINS OF THE INDEPENDENCE MOVEMENT

Although the Serbian population of the Habsburg Monarchy was more advanced economically and educationally, the origins of a modern Serbian state can be traced to the late eighteenth century in the pašalik (Turk., pashalik) of Belgrade, the northernmost reach of the Ottoman Empire in Europe. This region, south of the Danube and Sava rivers and east of the Drina River, would become the geographic core of modern Serbia. The first stirrings of rebellion among the Serbs of the region followed the Austro-Ottoman War of 1788–1791, during which Serbs had fought for the Austrian empire. Thereafter, the Serbs of the region were left to their own devices by the Austrians, who had lost the war. In spite of their disloyalty to the sultan, the Serbs as well as the Ottomans desired stability in the region. However, in the ever-weaker Ottoman Empire, the borderlands had come under the sway of local janissaries, and the pašalik of Belgrade was no exception. The sultan and his Serbian subjects had a mutual interest in destroying the destabilizing influence of the janissaries, and the roots of the Serbian independence movement were thus paradoxically to be found in an alliance of local Serbian headmen with the Ottoman central government. The revolution of 1804 thus began as a movement for economic and political stability within the Ottoman Empire rather than as a romantic-nationalist movement for independence.

See also Austro-Ottoman Wars; Balkans; Ferdinand II (Holy Roman Empire); Ottoman Empire.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Lampe, John R., and Marvin R. Jackson. Balkan Economic History, 1550–1950. Bloomington, Ind., 1982.

Pavlowitch, Stevan K. Serbia: The History of an Idea. New York, 2002.

Sugar, Peter F. Southeastern Europe under Ottoman Rule, 1354–1804. Seattle, 1977.

NICHOLAS J. MILLER