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In the plagues of 1781–1783, more than 300 a day died in Salonika—“reduced almost to a desert,” in the words of the Venetian consul there—while 16,000 died in Sarajevo. Visitations of the plague varied enormously in the number of their victims—not all had such catastrophic consequences—just as they did in the rest of Europe. London and Marseilles were also struck down by plague in the seventeenth century—Marseilles may have lost half its inhabitants in 1720. The difference was that by the start of the eighteenth century, most of western and central Europe had strict and effective quarantine measures in place (often applied against travelers from Ottoman domains)—indeed, control and management of contagious diseases were a major stimulus to the emergence of the modern bureaucratic state; in the Levant, by contrast, plagues recurred for another century and a half, and the last great epidemic struck as late as the years 1835–1838. 14
    Overall figures are unreliable but the trend is clear. Only at the beginning of the nineteenth century did the population of the Balkans begin to approach again the level it had reached in the late sixteenth century and start to move consistently upward. By 1831, at the time of the first Ottoman census, it was probably around 10 million—or just under 20 million when including the populations of Serbia and the future Croatia and Romania. Once the Balkan states won independence, their population began increasing very fast. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the old Ottoman problem of underpopulation had been replaced by the historically new pressure of high birth rates and falling death rates. In 1920 the population of the Balkans was roughly 42.5 million, and rising faster than anywhere else in Europe. “The cardinal facts,” according to one report of 1940, “are that [the Balkan states] are agricultural, overpopulated and poor.” 15
    This demographic pressure on the land was unprecedented. Even at the start of the nineteenth century, a British visitor to Wallachia was impressed by the “incredible richness of the soil”—grass came up to his elbow, the weeds were as tall as a man—and noted “the trifling population of Wallachia (about a million), which is not the tenth part of what the soil could nourish.” With independence, population densities rapidly increased—from 181 inhabitants per square kilometer in Serbia in 1834 to 55.7 in 1905, from 11.8 to 36.1 in Moldavia between 1803 and 1859. Major shifts in patterns of settlement and land use ensued. 16
    As human numbers rocketed, the number of sheep shrank and shepherding fell into decline. Brigandage (in the nineteenth century) and emigration (in the twentieth) were two responses to this demographic dilemma. “The inhabitants live by agriculture or in bad season brigandage, though of late the younger men have begun to emigrate to America,” wrote two British travelers to western Macedonia in 1910–1911. Quitting the countryside to look for work in the towns or specializing in cash crops were other options. But between the two world wars, the state stamped out brigandage (or tried to), the United States curtailed immigration and the economic depression made cash crops unprofitable. Only after the Second World War were solutions to Balkan “underemployment” found through rapid economic growth, renewed emigration and industrialization. After 1960, prosperity pushed birth rates down toward the European average in all but the poorest parts of the peninsula. In other words, the emergence in the Balkans of urban populations at a level close to the European norm, with its characteristic pattern of small families, high consumption, industry and services, is entirely a product of the last five or six generations. Until well into this century, the peasantry predominated, for few people lived in the towns, and few of those who did lacked close ties to the land. 17
    Looking at the peasants dressed in their