Read The Balkans: A Short History for Free Online

force, and in part by the extent of its ambition to control its own population—were these challengers to its prestige sought out and hunted down. When a brigand band looted Sámos in 1925 and held the island’s capital for several days, the newspapers in Athens were loud in condemnation: “We should not spare any sacrifice, any means in order to eliminate by radical means the architects of acts which dishonor the country and provoke greater harm to its progress,” wrote one. “The State has not only the duty but also the highest interest to put a stop, without the slightest delay, to these misfortunes . . . and to show that its power stands above every individual and everything.” Modern policing, bureaucracies and roads altered the balance of power in favor of the central authorities; as a result, brigandage and piracy ceased in the twentieth century to plague commerce and travel. Only brief periods of acute destabilization—in the 1940s and 1990s—called up pale echoes of what had once been a chronic social problem. 11
    Push population figures very far back into history and you quickly come up with hypotheses rather than facts. Absolute numbers for populations anywhere in the world before the eighteenth century are largely a matter of guesswork. Even for the nineteenth century, estimates of the size, say, of the Bulgarian population have ranged from 500,000 to 8 million. On the one hand, Balkan statistics have long been manipulated for political purposes; on the other, official Ottoman figures were not designed for modern scholarly purposes. Even so, the long-run demographic trends in the Balkans are fairly clear. For much of its history, the southeast of Europe was a wilderness with large quantities of uncultivated land and relatively few people, especially in the lowlands. Depopulation probably occurred as a consequence of chronic political instability in the final stages of the Byzantine empire, and was evidently not remedied by the Ottoman efforts to resettle the Balkans with nomadic Turkic colonists. Population densities in 1600, when the Ottoman empire was flourishing, were still perhaps half those of France or Italy, and one third those of the Low Countries, though they were far higher than in the Ottoman domains in Asia. “The whole country from Ragusa [Dubrovnik] until within a few miles of Constantinople is for the most part uncultivated and horrible” noted Benedetto Ramberti, the Venetian ambassador to the Porte, “not by nature but by the negligence of the inhabitants, full of dangerous forests and terrible precipices, very unsafe on account of brigands, very wretched as to accommodation.” “In the Ottomans’ estate,” wrote William Lithgow in 1632, “there be great Forrests, and desartuous Countries, proceeding of the scarcity of people to inhabit there.” 12
    Still, population rose and fell in the peninsula apace with the European average until the seventeenth century. Not only did the Ottoman conquest in the fifteenth century not interrupt this trend, the sixteenth century was evidently a time of prosperity and high population growth in the Balkans, as elsewhere in Europe. Evidence from local studies indicates that even Christians who had fled the invading Turks returned from Venetian domains to reclaim their properties. 13
    The real crisis came later in the seventeenth century. Times were hard everywhere in Europe, but in the southeast they were disastrously affected by a combination of political instability, endless wars, frequent plagues and famine. Plague in particular could cut a city’s population by half or even more, and the Balkans were vulnerably located on the disease routes from the Near East to western Europe; some cities were afflicted almost every year. “The sickness rageth as if it would dispeople the citty,” noted Sir Thomas Roe in 1625 as he fled Constantinople. He estimated that the death toll was more than 1,000 daily at its height, and “neare 200,000” in all.