A Concise History of Bulgaria Read online

  Plate 4.1 A page of Paiisi’s great history. The original of the manuscript was returned to Bulgaria after the revolution of 1989, since when mystery surrounds its whereabouts.

  Plate 4.2 Sofronii Vrachanski, a self portrait.

  Economic, Social and Political change in the Ottoman Empire

  As the Ottoman empire contracted it became more open to trade with the rest of Europe. The treaty of Passarowitz allowed Habsburg subjects to use the Danube for commercial purposes and in the 1740s Britain and France were given trading concessions. By the third quarter of the eighteenth century Russia was becoming an increasingly important factor in Balkan affairs. The treaty of Kutchuk Kainardji of July 1774 gave Russia control of the northern Black Sea littoral, but more importantly it allowed Russian trading vessels to operate in the Black Sea and to pass through the Straits into the Mediterranean. The treaty also sanctioned the opening up of the Danube to Russian traders.

  Even more important than its commercial provisions were those clauses of the treaty of Kutchuk Kainardji which gave permission for the construction of a Russian Orthodox church in Constantinople and which extended to the ruler of Russia vaguely defined rights to protect Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman empire. The ‘Eastern Question’ which so plagued nineteenth-century European diplomacy had been born; in it the emergence of a new Bulgarian nation and eventually of a new Bulgarian state was to play an integral part.

  The Ottoman empire’s reduced international power was inextricably linked with a deterioration in its internal cohesion. Throughout the century the quality of Ottoman administration was in decline. Tax farming spread to the detriment of the peasant; the janissaries became less and less disciplined as their numbers increased; and in some areas commercial agriculture appeared with the production of cash crops such as cotton, and in these areas the exploitation of the peasants increased considerably. The most serious problem, particularly in the second half of the century, was the failure of the central government to control the ayans. The ayans were overmighty subjects. In origin they could be local officials who had simply turned their area of responsibility into a personal fiefdom – the pasha of Salonika, for example, collected the sum of 360,000 groschen in one year from his territory; they could be janissaries who had done much the same; they might be local figures who had accumulated sufficient wealth through agriculture, usury or trade to establish political as well as economic domination in an area; or they might be members of a traditionally influential clan or family. The most famous amongst them were Ali Pasha of Yanina, who ruled over southern Albania and northern Greece, and Osman Pasvantoglu, who controlled over two hundred villages in the Vidin region, but there were many others such Ismail Trestenikioglu in Rusé and Ikilikioglu in Silistra. The rise of the ayans led to a virtual breakdown in central government in the Balkans, a period known in Bulgarian as the kûrdjaliistvo. Its effects on the villagers of Vilitsa in southern Macedonia in the 1780s were described by the English traveller E. D. Clarke:

  They are at present in a most wretched condition, owing to the extortions of Ali Pasha, or of those who have plundered in his name. In the short space of six months, they had paid to his tax-gatherers, as they told us, eighty purses, a sum equivalent to forty thousand piastres. Poverty is very apparent in their dwellings . . . Nor can it be otherwise, where the wretched inhabitants are so oppressed by their lords. The whole of the earnings of the peasant is here taken from him; he is scarcely allowed any means of subsistence. Add to this the frequent calamities of sickness and fire, and ‘plague, pestilence and famine’ will be found to have done their work. This village has been twice burned within one year by banditti . . .

  The beginnings of the kûrdjaliistvo can be seen in the 1770s but it reached its culmination in the 1790s and 1800s. In 1791 Sultan Selim III attempted to introduce a reform programme which would re-establish central authority but the ayans proved too strong for him, and his failure merely intensified the process he had endeavoured to check. In 1792 there were large numbers of inadequately controlled Ottoman soldiers milling around in the Balkans at the conclusion of the war of 1787–92 against Russia; and in 1793 a rebellion took place in the Rhodope area under the leadership of Mehmed Sinap. In 1804 it was the conduct of local ayans which precipitated the revolt by various clan and village elders in Serbia, a revolt which was to lead to an autonomous and eventually an independent Serbia. In subsequent years the disorders were more noticeable to the north of the Balkan mountains but they were still disturbing much of Thrace in the 1800s whilst most of the Plovdiv district was under the sway of Kara Mustafa in 1810–12; even as late as 1816 much of the Adrianople area was beyond the reach of the central government and around Burgas the only effective authority was a band of brigands some three hundred strong.

  The upheavals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and especially the wars, had a profound effect on the demographic composition of the Bulgarian lands, and on the distribution of the Bulgarian peoples.

  The eighteenth century had seen an increase in the Bulgarian population in the towns. Some scholars in the past have attributed this to declining levels of health amongst the Turks, and one traveller believed that abortion, a widespread practice amongst Muslims in the seventeenth century, was a major reason for the enfeeblement of the Turks. In fact, there is little hard evidence that the absolute as opposed to the relative number of Turks in the towns did fall. More Bulgarians came into the towns because trade and manufacturing were expanding and, in some cases, because life in the countryside was beginning to become insecure. The kûrdjaliistvo speeded up this process but it did so selectively. The kûrdjaliistvo affected mainly the plains – the word derives from a Turkish one meaning fields or plains – and those threatened by it therefore sought refuge in the small mountain towns which were less likely to receive the unwelcome attention of the ayans and their hangers-on. This was an important development because the mountain towns were predominantly Bulgarian whereas those in the lowlands were much more likely to be subject to strong Greek cultural pressures. The flight to the mountains therefore tended to save Bulgarians not only from the unruly Muslim ayans but also from the hellenising forces which had been operating in many towns in the eighteenth century. At the same time, the insecurity of the lowland settlements increased the economic potential of those towns which remained less affected by the disorders, i.e. the Bulgarian mountain towns. They were to become of great importance when peace and security returned after the 1820s.

  Some Bulgarians, however, fled much further afield than the mountain towns. As in the past, the end of a war produced a wave of emigration, not least because past experience had taught that the Ottoman authorities were likely to take revenge on any area which had showed sympathy with the sultan’s enemies. After each major conflict huge numbers of Bulgarians emigrated, usually joining departing Russian troops. Precise figures are impossible to give, but after the treaty of Kutchuk Kainardji an estimated 160,000 Bulgarians left and after the wars of 1806 to 1812 the number was in the region of 100,000. After the Russo-Turkish war of 1828–9 there was emigration on a massive scale from eastern Bulgaria south of the Balkans, with some estimates putting the numbers of those who left as high as a quarter of a million. This seems to be a huge figure but many travellers in subsequent years attest to the depopulated state of this area.

  The departing Bulgarians settled in what is now Romania, southern Ukraine and Russia. The communities they formed were to play an important part in the later development of Bulgarian culture, none more so than that in Braila, Romania, whose first Bulgarian émigrés had been those fleeing after the abortive Tûrnovo rising of 1598. The Bulgarians of Bucharest were also to become powerful and influential in later years, whilst the many thousands who settled further north are still a distinct ethnic group in the republic of Moldova.

  The upheavals which beset the Ottoman empire in Europe between the 1770s and the 1820s cut short what had been promising economic growth for the Bulgarians. By the
third quarter of the eighteenth century trade was noticeably better than it had been fifty or twenty-five years previously. There were Bulgarian trading concerns with links to Buda, Vienna, Venice, Livorno, Marseilles, Leipzig, Brasov and Odessa, and in most of these cities there were small Bulgarian colonies. In the Vardar valley cotton was being produced for sale in distant markets such as Leipzig, Dresden and Vienna and resident cotton merchants from these and other central European cities were to be found in a number of Balkan towns. Some of this cotton was shipped out through the Mediterranean but most of it went all the way to central Europe by pack horse or was taken thus to Danubian ports such as Vidin or Svishtov. With tobacco, cotton formed the most important export commodity produced in the Bulgarian lands in the eighteenth century, though wax was also exported to western Europe as was some of the rice grown in the Maritsa valley. A commodity with a more limited market appeal was aba, a coarse-grained cloth produced by many Bulgarian guilds in towns such as Stara Zagora, Kalofer, Karlovo, Plovdiv, Sliven and others. Another lucrative occupation was animal husbandry. Centres such as Constantinople and Adrianople with their large Muslim populations consumed considerable quantities of meat, particularly mutton, and the Bulgarian sheep raisers who supplied them became wealthy; many inhabitants of Kotel in the Balkan mountains spent their time rearing sheep in the Dobrudja plains and then driving them to market in the cities to the south of the Balkan range. The profits from animal husbandry greatly outstripped those from arable farming in part because the government exercised a monopoly over the grain trade, buying in the domestic market at low prices and strenuously forbidding exports. The kûrdjaliistvo interrupted but did not destroy their established trade which recovered rapidly as soon as order had been restored. It was upon the wealth thus created that the Bulgarian cultural revival was built.

  The kûrdjaliistvo had a much more lasting impact on the efficiency of the Ottoman war machine as had become apparent during the war of 1806–12 against Russia. When the war was concluded the Porte could not yet turn its full attention to the reform of the army because first it had to deal with the Serbian rebellion. In doing so it greatly strengthened central authority in the empire. By 1814 the original Serbian leader had been defeated and in the following two years an arrangement was finally made by which a small area around Belgrade was left free to administer its own affairs. The appearance of the Serbian danger, however, had sobered the local ayans who had made the kûrdjaliistvo, as did the military expedition sent into Vidin to subdue Pasvantoglu’s successor. The Bulgarian lands were the first to benefit from this move back towards order and stability because they were those nearest to Constantinople. By 1820 in the Balkans the only warlords outwith the control of the Porte were the Albanian rulers of Yanina and Scutari.

  Just as operations to subdue these remnants of the kûrdjaliistvo were beginning the Greek revolt broke out in Wallachia and the Peloponnese in 1821. The revolt once more threw the Ottoman empire and the Balkans into turmoil but once again the result was an ultimate strengthening rather than a weakening of central power, even if that power extended to a smaller area, and even before the small Greek kingdom emerged in 1830 the Ottoman empire had embarked upon a thoroughgoing process of reform.

  One cause of the kûrdjaliistvo had been the rebelliousness of the janissaries. They had continued to proliferate in the eighteenth century and their discipline seemed to be in inverse proportion to their numbers. By the end of the century they had become a vast force which, like any debased praetorian guard, had become a byword for intrigue and corruption. They also fiercely resisted any attempt to reform the machinery of the army and government, knowing that any attempt at the restoration of central power and the return to anything approaching honest government must involve an attack upon their powers and their privileges. The war of 1806–12 had shown that the janissaries were also now woefully inadequate and hopelessly outdated as a military force. In June 1826 Sultan Mahmud II, taking advantage of a respite from international pressure on the Greek question, at last seized the janissary nettle. In a swift and bloody operation he liquidated the corps. Thousands were sent to exile in Asia Minor but between five and six thousand were slaughtered in Constantinople itself. It was the first step towards the radical reform which the Ottoman empire clearly needed.

  The Background to the Bulgarian Cultural Revival

  The destruction of the janissaries had two results which in the long run greatly affected the Bulgarians. First, to replace the janissaries the sultan and his ministers decided to create a regular army on the European model. Such an army had to be fed and clothed. And it was primarily to the rearers of sheep and the producers of cloth in the Bulgarian lands that the Porte looked for its sources of supply. The sheep-rearers rapidly grew more wealthy, as did the manufacturers of aba and those of gaitan, the decorative lace used to adorn uniforms, primarily those of the officers. The large-scale purchase of aba and gaitan began in the late 1820s and in 1848 the Porte concluded a commercial agreement with the aba guilds. The need for aba was so great that in order to meet it the Ottoman government in the late 1830s built a factory, its first, at Sliven, whilst in the following decade a private mill began operating near Plovdiv.

  The second effect of the dissolution of the janissary corps and the setting up of the regular army was to increase pressure for a fundamental reform of the landowning system in the empire. This was still, in theory at least, tied to the need to produce spahis for the sultan’s forces, a need obviated by the creation of the regular army. The usefulness of the spahi as a military factor had been in decline throughout the eighteenth century but the profits to be gained from the land he held had increased, and did so even more rapidly after the foundation of the army had multiplied the returns on sheep-rearing. Thus as the military reasons for a spahi holding lands disappeared the economic incentives for him to retain it strengthened. The spahi had originally collected a tithe from his tenants in order to furnish troops for the sultan but now that this function had been discontinued it was the state which had to collect the rent from the spahi lands. In fact there was no longer any justification for the continuation of the spahi system, and during the 1830s it was gradually dismantled. New tenancy agreements were drawn up and though the Ottoman officials generally attempted to carry out this task with fairness and efficiency tensions were sometimes created, especially in the north- and south-west of the Bulgarian lands where tenancies were particularly complicated. At the same time the judicial powers once exercised by the spahi were transferred to state officials, whilst the remaining spahis were given a pension and sent into retirement. The spahis’ pensions were to be funded by a yearly sum paid by each peasant. This occasioned much resentment which, together with the suspicions created by the introduction of the revised tenancy arrangements, added another social factor to the evolution of the Bulgarian national revival. However, agrarian unrest, though it was present, especially in the western regions, was never a dominant feature of the vûzrazhdane and in later years the political programmes produced by the nationalists made little or no mention of it.

  Whilst the peasantry in the north- and south-west still encountered difficulties many merchants and manufacturers grew ever more wealthy. Their new prosperity was reflected in the increasingly opulent houses they built. The splendid vernacular architecture of Kotel, Plovdiv, Koprivshtitsa and other towns which the modern tourist can enjoy was almost always the product of the economic revival of the second and third quarters of the nineteenth century.

  Wealth was accumulated not merely by individuals. In the successful manufacturing and trading ventures economic activity remained predominantly under the control of the esnafs or guilds. By the 1830s they were beginning to have their own disposable surpluses and these they tended to spend on what may be broadly defined as ‘public works’. Under the strict rules of the early Ottoman empire Christian villages were not allowed to erect buildings for public use and thus in most communities even the churches were small and insignificant. Wi
th greater political and social freedom, and with the necessary funds, guilds in the 1830s and thereafter frequently invested in new church buildings, the old, single-aisle edifice usually being replaced by a much larger, three-aisle structure. Monasteries, whose incomes were often already rising as returns from their lands increased, also benefited from the generosity of the guilds, and one of the great symbols of the Bulgarian cultural renaissance was the rebuilding of Rila monastery after a disastrous fire in 1833. In addition to religious foundations local civic institutions were also beneficiaries of the economic boom. Covered markets replaced the old open-air stalls; fountains were installed, and, most typically, a clock tower was erected in the centre of the community; it gave the time according to the Christian as opposed to the Muslim clock and was therefore a symbol of cultural self-assertion and modernity as well as a material attestation of recent attainments.

  The Cultural Revival: Education, Literacy and Literature

  A further outlet for charitable investment was in education, be it in the form of school buildings or public reading-rooms, in equipment such as books, or, in later years, in scholarships for gifted children to study away from home, frequently in Europe; in 1867 the city of Plovdiv was financing five students in Paris, four in Vienna, seven in Russia, two in Britain, and forty in Constantinople.