None of the new states emerged entirely in isolation. Not only were international context and great power involvement crucial, but there were also numerous points of contact, ideological and practical, between the Balkan peoples themselves. The Serbian revolt was assisted not just by South Slavs from the Habsburg Monarchy but also by Greeks and Bulgarians. The Greek revolt was a two-headed affair, with greater hopes pinned initially on the rising in the Romanian principalities than on that in present-day Greece. The Balkan statelets, once established, built up links with each other and reached out to their co-nationals in Ottoman territory; they also, however, found that their longer-term plans for expansion often clashed.
The social composition of the Balkan revolutions varied. Although the majority of participants came from the peasantry, it would be misleading to characterise these as peasant uprisings. In the case of the Serbs and Greeks, many of the leaders were local 'notables', men who had amassed some wealth as merchants or outlaws and had already assumed a leadership role in their communities, often one recognised by the Ottoman authorities. Only in the Romanian principalities did the eventual leadership come from the landowning boyar class, even if the initial revolt of 1821 was led by a non-noble.
A final aspect of the Balkan revolutions worth mentioning is the calamitous consequences for the Muslim population, whether Ottoman officials, ethnic Turks or Muslim Slavs. Modern scholarship has only recently caught up with the fate of the Balkan Muslims, which was long obscured by Christian indignation over Ottoman atrocities. Yet wherever Christians rose against Ottoman rule, the first to die were usually the local Muslims, and the well-documented barbarities of Ottoman forces in subsequent fighting were often committed in retaliation. Regardless of who killed whom first, the effect was a huge demographic shift throughout the nineteenth century: in the century following 1821 it has been calculated that 5 million Muslims were forced out of former Ottoman provinces in the Balkans and along the Black Sea coastline.1
World History
