SERBIA

The Serbian revolt was the classic instance of the breakdown of authority in the Ottoman centre creating chaos in the provinces: janissaries, encouraged or forced to seek a living in the pa§altk of Belgrade, had by 1804 been terrorising Christians and Ottoman officials alike for years. In response the Serbs, led by the illiterate but forceful KaracJorcle [Black George] Petrovic, a veteran of the Austro-Turkish wars who was also a wealthy merchant, started arming in self-defence. In January 1804 an attempt by the leading janissaries to round up and exterminate Serb knezes, or notables, sparked serious fighting. Karadorde's rebellion was thus avowedly not against the sultan's authority but against the janissaries, and it was at first, with some misgivings, encouraged by the local governor. The janissaries were routed and their leaders executed in August 1804.

The Serbs, however, demanded as reward not only that they should in future collect taxes in the province but that Karadorde's militia should henceforth be responsible for order and that Ottoman troops should withdraw. Even the reform-minded Selim III balked at this. Mindful of conservative opposition in Constantinople to any concessions to Christians, Selim was also alarmed at Karadorde's appeal for foreign assistance. Ottoman forces were sent to suppress the revolt but instead were beaten back in August 1805 and fighting became general. Karadorde captured Belgrade in December 1806, but long before that he had effectively declared Serbia a self-governing province when, in the autumn of 1805, he convened a Serbian Governing Council.

This new Serbia's existence was a precarious one, always heavily dependent on outside factors. The Russo-Turkish War of 1806 inevitably relieved pressure on the Serbs. Russian assistance, however, was limited, and from 1807 Karadorde's forces were on the defensive. Although the insurgents were joined by Serbs from the Habsburg Monarchy, this was no substitute for the help of a great power. The Serbs were also riven by internal squabbles. Karadorde was an autocratic personality, not above personally despatching rivals among his fellow notables, but as the tide turned against the Serbs his leadership was called into question. When Russia as a result of Napoleon's invasion concluded a hasty peace with the Ottomans in 1812, the end was at hand. Ottoman forces returned to the pasalik in overwhelming strength in October 1813. Karadorde fled to Russia and the revolt was put down with considerable brutality.

Matters did not end there, however. The pasalik remained a hotbed of unrest, bitterness and violence, despite an Ottoman amnesty and the return of thousands of refugees. Many Serbs, especially the wealthier among the knezes who had most to lose, accepted the amnesty, but many did not, and as the months passed the Ottoman authorities' suspicions of the Christian populace, heightened by random acts of violence, translated into ever greater harshness, including systematic torture and executions. In the end it was their fear of arbitrary execution which led even the loyal knezes, under the leadership of Milos Obrenovic, to stage a second revolt in April 1815. This second insurrection loudly proclaimed that it was rebelling not against the sultan's authority but against the local pasha's injustice. Such moderation undoubtedly swayed Sultan Mahmud II to do a deal; even more influential was the fact that, in the wake of Napoleon's defeat, Russian pressure on the Porte in favour of a settlement was harder to resist. In November 1815 Milos was made Supreme Knez or Prince of the province, although still a vassal obliged to pay tribute to the sultan. An Ottoman governor remained, as did Ottoman garrisons in six fortresses. In addition, the Serbs were granted their own judicial body, were made responsible for the collection of taxes and local affairs and were entitled to bear arms. It was de facto if not formal autonomy.

Autonomy was confirmed formally only in 1830 as a result of the Russo-Turkish War of 1828—9, as was Milos's hitherto self-proclaimed status as hereditary prince, but from 1815 Milos worked hard to consolidate his position. Like Karadorde an illiterate livestock merchant, and intolerant of opposition, Milos was nevertheless crafty enough to secure by outward subservience and corruption what he would not have been able to gain by force. When in 1817 Karadorde dared to return to Serbia, Milos had him murdered and sent his head to the sultan as proof of his loyalty. For the same reason Milos refused utterly to get involved in the Greek revolts of 1821. Yet all the while he was intent on reducing the Ottoman presence by buying up Muslim estates, conniving at the terrorisation of those who would not sell and bribing Ottoman officialdom to turn a blind eye to this commercialised form of 'ethnic cleansing'. This process was accelerated after 1830 when Muslims other than the fortress garrison were required to leave Serbia. Although Milos retained much of this Muslim property himself, he sold much of it to his followers, creating in the process the nucleus of a Serbian smallholder class, as Serbs flocked into the principality from neighbouring provinces. At the same time Milos encouraged the founding of schools and welcomed the assistance of Habsburg Serbs or those few natives of Serbia who had profited from a foreign education. Six additional districts claimed by Serbia as part of the original pa§altk of Belgrade were ceded by the Porte in 1833.

Milos's despotic nature, however, created opposition, principally among those of his fellow notables who resented Milos's authority, but also among the handful of town dwellers and intellectuals who objected to the prince's 'Ottoman' ways. Milos was supposed to rule with the assistance of a Skupstina or assembly, but those who feared his arbitrariness increasingly argued for some formal restraint on the prince. By the late 1830s this 'Constitutionalist' opposition was attracting the attention of the great powers, anxious for strategic reasons to deny one another influence in this autonomous corner of the Ottoman Empire.

Paradoxically, liberal Britain took the side of Milos and the Ottoman government in disputing the need for a constitution, while autocratic Russia backed the Constitutionalists. The result was a Russian victory: under pressure in December 1838 the Porte issued the so-called 'Turkish constitution', which obliged the prince to govern in cooperation with a council of 17, whose members he could appoint but whom he could not subsequently remove. Milos, unable to tolerate these restrictions but without sufficient popular support to resist them, abdicated and went into exile in June 1839. His son Michael succeeded in March 1840, but the Constitutionalists' suspicion of the Obrenovic family generally led in 1842 to the deposition and exile of Michael and the acclamation as prince of Alexander Karadorclevic, son of Karadorcle.

Alexander's elevation owed more to his surname than to any innate strength of personality. The real powers in the land were the Constitutionalists or, as they liked to call themselves, the 'Defenders of the Constitution'. The council was dominated by two notables in particular and an extremely able representative of the new class of educated bureaucrats, Ilija Garasanin. These were conservative authoritarians, who basically believed in rule by their own kind; they were hardly democrats. Yet the Constitutionalist period saw the regularisation of the state bureaucracy, the introduction of a legal code in 1844 and the extension of the educational system. Much of this modernisation was the work of Garasanin as minister of the interior from 1843 to 1852.

Garasanin was also the author of one of the most famous, or infamous, documents in Serbian history, the Nacertanije or Plan of 1844. This memorandum was partially inspired by the Polish emigre Czartoryski, who urged Serbia to act as a unifier of all the South Slavs, against the day when the Slav peoples generally would be able to emancipate themselves from the great multinational empires. Garasanin, however, conceived Serbia's national mission as confined to the liberation of 'Serb' lands, but by this he still understood Bosnia—Hercegovina, Albania, Montenegro and the territory commonly known as 'Old Serbia', among the Ottoman provinces; in addition, Serbia should cultivate cultural links with the Vojvodina in the Habsburg Monarchy. These lands corresponded roughly to the extent of Serbia's lost medieval empire, but they also contained substantial minorities of non-Serbs. Yet Garasanin's vision of a 'Greater Serbia', the Serbian nation-state as it ought to be, informed generations of Serbian politicians, and he did what he could to set the process in motion by establishing a network of agents throughout the Ottoman provinces as well as the Habsburg Monarchy.

The Constitutionalist regime had to tread cautiously because of Serbia's vassal status. Serbia provided not so covert support for its fellow Serbs in the Vojvodina during the 1848 revolution, but Garasanin was aware that this was a dangerous game. The Crimean War demonstrated Serbia's vulnerability even more starkly. Russia, in 1853, insisted on Garasanin's dismissal as a 'revolutionary', and when Russia was forced to withdraw from the neighbouring Romanian principalities later that year, its place as Serbia's mentor was promptly filled by Austria. The 1856 Treaty of Paris formally annulled Russia's right to pose as the 'protector'

Of the Ottoman vassal states; they were instead subjected to the invigilation of all the great power signatories.

By 1858 the leading Constitutionalists were increasingly at odds with those whose loyalty lay with Prince Alexander, and it was resolved to call a Skupstina to resolve the issue of control. The St Andrew's Skupstina of December 1858, however, backfired on both parties by deciding to depose Alexander and recall the ageing Milos Obrenovic to the throne. Milos returned in triumph in February 1859, and although he died in 1860, leaving his son Michael as prince, his reappearance spelled the end of the Constitutionalists' dominance.

The reign of Michael Obrenovic (1860—8) saw a renewed concentration on national liberation. Michael, in contrast to Milos, was educated and cosmopolitan, having spent much of his life abroad. He was determined to free Serbia from Ottoman control and saw the best route to this goal in building up Serbia's military strength while at the same time concluding alliances with other Balkan states and peoples. Conservative by temperament, he found an ideal coadjutor in Garasanin who, restored to favour, acted as prime minister from 1861 to 1867. Both men frowned upon the new generation of Serbia's foreign-educated, liberal youth, some of whom were becoming politically active by the late 1850s, and argued in vain for a greater popular participation in public life. Strongly nationalist, they supported the expansion of the Serbian state, but incurred censorship, prison sentences and exile for their criticisms of Michael's domestic rule. In 1866 Vladimir Jovanovic and others founded the Ujedinjena omladina srpska (United Serbian Youth) or Omladina at Novi Sad in Habsburg Hungary. Though short-lived as a coherent organisation, the Omladina alarmed not only Prince Michael but also the Habsburg Monarchy because it demonstrated the strength of Serb nationalism on both sides of the border.

Serbia's military build-up under Michael and Garasanin meant that, on paper, the government disposed of a national militia of 90,000 men by the end of the decade. In reality, like the frog that puffs itself up to impress its enemies, Serbia's military potential was well below this, but both friends and enemies were obliged to take its pretensions seriously. A network of agents was built up throughout the Balkans, especially in Bosnia and Old Serbia. Alliances envisaging eventual joint military action against the Ottomans were concluded with Montenegro in 1866, Greece in 1867 and the new united Romania in 1868; although in the event these were never activated, the sense of impending crisis was palpable. Relations with the Porte had been especially abysmal since 1862, when the Ottoman governor of Belgrade had bombarded the town. In 1867, following repeated appeals to the powers by Serbia, the Ottoman government finally withdrew its garrisons from the principality. Serbia in 1867 seemed poised to make the decisive breakthrough to independence and national liberation.