ABSTRACT

By the early seventeenth century, the Balkan Peninsula was divided between the Ottoman, Habsburg, and Venetian empires. Their imperial regimes had largely settled on the borders between them after a century of warfare with each other and an earlier struggle to overcome the native Greek, South Slav, and Albanian regimes, as noted in the introduction. The Muslim Ottoman regime served to separate the religious conflict between Rome’s Latin Church and the Greek-led Byzantine empire which had spread Orthodox Christianity across the peninsula. Its mountain ranges and predominant uplands, while encouraging native division and discouraging trade, were not high or consistent enough to prevent the Ottoman Turkish conquest that began, as seen in Map 0.1, in the fourteenth century. Already controlling most of the peninsula, two Ottoman campaigns had reached the gates of Vienna in 1529 and 1683. Once a Habsburg army had driven the Ottoman forces back from historic Hungary, Transylvania, and Croatia-Slavonia, the two empires signed a treaty at Karlowitz in 1699 and another one at Passarowitz in 1718. It fixed the border between them for the next century, changed only by the brief Habsburg incursion into Serbia and Kosovo (1718–39). Population grew, and by 1780, as seen in Map 0.2, the two empires and Venice’s Dalmatian coast were at least connected by a considerable number of trade routes. Muslim converts had multiplied only in Albania, Bosnia, and mountain areas of Bulgaria. With full Ottoman credentials, they could rise in military and administrative positions but were also open to branding as Turks by the Serb and Croat population.