BELGRADE (5 page)

The terms Serb and Croat were used by Byzantine chroniclers to refer to some of the Slavonic tribes in the Balkans. The Serbs generally lived in the central region while the Croats settled in the west and north. The settlement standing where the Sava and Danube met acquired something of a Serbian population during the ninth century, but they were not a dominant presence. In a letter from Pope John VIII to the Bulgarian ruler Boris written in 878 we find the first mention of the name for the city in its Slavonic form, Beograd. It came under the jurisdiction of Bulgarian emperors, who challenged the supremacy of Byzantium in south-eastern Europe.

Belgrade was recaptured by the Byzantine emperor in 1018, and it then became a bone of contention in the regional power struggle between Byzantium and the Hungarians, or Magyars, who moved into the territory north of the Danube. The city was treated as a commodity in political horse-trading. It was taken by the Hungarian King Solomon in 1072 after a long siege, only to be given back two years later when his son was betrothed to a Byzantine princess. In a similar move, the Hungarian ruler Bela III besieged and destroyed the citadel in 1127, but returned it as part of another marriage contract when he gave the hand of his daughter to the Byzantine emperor. Possession of the city passed rapidly from Bulgarian, to Byzantine, to Hungarian control and back again.

It may seem a strange thing to say today, as one stands in Kalemegdan in the capital of the modern Republic of Serbia, that Belgrade did not feature in the appearance of the first independent Serbian kingdom. The centre of Serbian power was established further south around the area of Raška. The Serbs were split into disparate clan groups based on extended families. Then, one of their leaders, Stefan Nemanja, managed to win the allegiance of the others so that he could proclaim himself to be local overlord in 1169. Abdicating in 1196, he took holy orders and retired to a life of quiet contemplation in the Serbian monastery of Hilandar on Mount Athos. His dynasty ruled Serbia for the next two hundred years.

His son, also called Stefan, wanted a crown for himself and the status of a kingdom for his country in order to cement its independence. The Byzantine authorities, in whose religious and political sphere Serbia lay, refused his request. Determined to achieve his goal, however, he approached Rome, and the Catholic Church obliged by sending a Papal legate to anoint him in 1217. Having fulfilled his ambition, he proceeded to shift Serbia’s allegiance back to Byzantium and secured the right to establish an autocephalous Serbian Orthodox Church. His own brother, Sava, a pious monk from Mount Athos, became the first archbishop of this newly-formed institution. Sava was later canonized and adopted as the patron saint of Serbia.

Dragutin became the first Serbian king to rule from Belgrade in 1284 when he was given the city by the Hungarian King Stephen V whose daughter, Katarina, he married. The city, now linked to the Serbian lands further south and its natural hinterland, was in an advantageous position to expand. Under Dragutin’s stewardship the population grew and trade developed. The king paid particular attention to building churches and Serbian influence quickly spread around the city. News of his success in this regard reached Rome and in 1290 provoked a letter of protest from the Pope who was concerned that the Orthodox Church was supplanting the Catholic Hungarian culture of the area. Dragutin died in 1316 and the position of Belgrade again came into question. The city was claimed by Dragutin’s successor, his brother King Milutin, and by the Hungarian crown which had given the city as part of a marriage contract. The Hungarians regarded Belgrade as strategically important for their security and, launching an attack in 1319, they captured the city again.

Meanwhile, during the fourteenth century the Serbian kingdom to the south of Belgrade became a powerful empire under Dušan the Mighty (Dušan Silni). The emperor twice took his armies to the very walls of Byzantium and his territory extended over Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo, northern Greece, Albania and much of Bosnia and Dalmatia. Even so, he was unable to retake Belgrade. His untimely death in 1355 precipitated a power vacuum and left the country in a weakened position. Byzantium, thanks to Serbia’s efforts, also lost much of its former influence. Taking advantage of this predicament, the Ottoman Empire, the largest Muslim power in the world, began to expand from its base in Asia and threaten the Balkan Peninsula. Its army under Sultan Murat met a coalition of Serbs and other Christian forces led by the Serbian Prince Lazar at the Battle of Kosovo on 28 June 1389. According to contemporary accounts, neither side won a decisive victory and both withdrew from the field with the loss of their leaders. But in Serbian myth the Battle of Kosovo is considered a defeat and the beginning of the end for Serbian independence. The Serbian nobles quarrelled amongst themselves while Ottoman forces slowly consolidated their presence in the region. With this increasing competition from their enemies the centre of Serbian interests slowly shifted from the southern provinces further north.

A new Serbian ruler, Despot Stefan Lazarević, opened negotiations with the Hungarians and was able to make Belgrade his capital in 1403. By this time the city and its fortress were greatly damaged and depopulated because of frequent attempts to take it by the other powers in the region. Despot Stefan, determined to strengthen the city’s fortifications, extended the walls of his citadel down to the Sava and Danube, thus encompassing for the first time the upper reaches of the fortress with the lower area by the rivers in one defensive whole supported by a series of towers. Under his building programme the city was much more resilient to attack both from the river and from land. In his book
The Life of Despot Stefan Lazarević
, Constantine the Philosopher has left many descriptions of Stefan’s Belgrade above the rivers “where a gleaming white castle is under construction.” (He also tends toward a certain hyperbole in some of his claims: “And who is able to say in writing what is the situation, appearance and beauty of Belgrade!”) When Stefan died in 1427, the Hungarians again occupied Belgrade forcing his successor, Đurađ Branković, to move the Serbian capital further down the Danube to Smederovo. From then until the nineteenth century the city was lost to the Serbs.

Ottoman forces besieged Belgrade unsuccessfully in 1456 when the city’s defence was led by the Hungarian Janos Hunyadi. Yet the huge military organization of the Ottomans could not be stopped so easily and Belgrade finally fell to Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent in 1521. As the Ottoman armies advanced into the Balkans, cities passed into the hands of the new colonial administrators. Much of the urban Christian population “chose to withdraw to inaccessible mountains where they founded new settlements,” explains Nikolai Todorov in his book
The Balkan City 1400–1900
. The cities were significant points in the Ottoman imperial system of communications and security. They existed to maintain authority over the local population and protect trade routes. By the second half of the sixteenth century Muslims formed a majority of the urban population in Serbia. The conquering army drove out the whole civilian population from Belgrade, while a totally new community moved in.

The city duly went through one of its frequent and complete transformations, belonging to a foreign empire, governed by men of a different religion, subject to a radically changed way of life. The Serbs usually referred to their new masters as Turks, or in Serbian
Turci
, although the term is inaccurate as the administrators, soldiers and governors in the service of the Ottoman Empire could come from any part of its vast territories.

The new masters called Belgrade
Dar ul Jihad
, or House of the Holy Wars, giving the name Kalemegdan (from
kale
town and
megdan
battlefield) to the fortified area where previously Celts, Romans, Byzantines, Bulgarians, Hungarians and Serbs took turns to look out over the two rivers. The fort housed a garrison of troops and was the seat of political power for the pasha, or governor, sent by the Sultan to rule the province in his name. Craftsmen and artisans came from the interior of the empire to provide services for them, men who consolidated the oriental look and feel of the place, dominated by Islamic codes of dress, food and social ritual.

Ottoman power spread far beyond Belgrade and into Hungary, Romania, Bosnia, Croatia and Dalmatia, and the city was no longer an outpost of the Ottoman Empire. Rather, it was an important trading, administrative and military centre from which new wars in the West could be supported. Other groups such as Greeks, Armenians and Jews joined the growing community outside the walls, attracted by mercantile interests and the economic potential of the city. Relatively few Serbs continued to live in town and any sporadic attempts to resist Ottoman rule were vigorously crushed.

In 1683 the sultan marched his army to Belgrade from where, after a short rest, they continued their advance into Western Europe under the command of the Grand Vizier Kara-Mustafa. The sultan waited in Kalemegdan while his forces headed towards Vienna. Large areas of countryside were emptied of their population who fled rather than face an uncertain fate at the hands of the Turkish troops. In the end, the Turks again failed to take Vienna and their military capability was severely damaged in the attempt. The Austrians counter-attacked, pushing back the Ottoman forces from their northern provinces in Hungary and Croatia and reaching Belgrade in 1688. Taking the city from the Turks, they continued to press south. The Austrian campaign was supported by local bands of Serbian insurgents hoping for liberation from foreign rule, but it finally came to a halt in Kosovo from where they were forced to retreat, retracing their steps back the way they had come.

Mindful of the very real possibility of Ottoman retaliation, Patriarch Arsenije III Čarnojević led a huge number of Serbs, perhaps as many as 30,000 families, in a great migration out of Kosovo. This event had an irreversible impact on the demographic structure of the region. Serbs left their homes in the south and crossed the Sava into the Habsburg Empire of the Austrians and Hungarians to settle on land that had been deserted because of border fighting in the preceding period. The Turks recaptured Belgrade in 1690 while the Austrian attempt to take the city three years later failed. After so much fierce fighting the fortress of Kalemegdan was changed beyond all recognition. The last of Despot Stefan Lazarević’s fortifications disappeared, leaving no sign of the citadel he had constructed. The local population was dispersed far and wide and their homes razed to the ground.

The Peace of Karlovci, signed by the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires in 1699, established a new border between the two warring sides. The frontier now followed the Sava, leaving Bosnia and Serbia to the south in the Islamic state, while the northern and western parts of the Balkan Peninsula in Slavonia and Dalmatia came under Austrian control. The Turkish threat to Europe was over and they were never to advance beyond Belgrade again.

The city acquired a new status; no longer an important point in the system of communication by road and river, it was rather on the northern periphery of the Ottoman domains. The Austrians were firmly entrenched across the two rivers and watched the white walls of Kalemegdan from their vantage-point at Zemun. There was now a Serbian community living to the north of Belgrade as the refugees from the south settled in what had been Hungarian lands. They formed a new orientation for the Serbs living in the small towns of Vojvodina in the sphere of European rather than Ottoman influence. Exhausted by wars and internal problems, the Ottoman Empire went into a period of decline. Austrian forces took advantage of its weakness and attacked Belgrade in 1717. Their commander, Eugene of Savoy, did not make use of the Great War Island to locate his cannon as in previous sieges, instead mounting his main offensive from the east, with his forces crossing the Danube downstream. Control of Belgrade was bounced between competing powers, with the arrival of each new order heralding another time of transition.

Belgrade was a Muslim town for a long period of its history, with an Ottoman garrison, government officials and citizens whose role in the urban scheme of things was determined by their proximity to the pasha. The city that was their home had the appearance and feel of an oriental market town. One seventeenth-century English traveller to Turkish Belgrade, Edward Brown, wrote:

The street where trade is busiest is covered with a wooden roof as protection from the sun and rain. The shops are small. On a low counter, like tailors in England, sits the shop-keeper selling his goods to the buyer who remains outside, rarely going inside... The covered market is a square, paved with flag stones, a fountain in the centre and rows of various shops at the entrance.

Ottoman rule dictated not only the main functions of Belgrade, from which Christians were largely excluded, but also its architecture and urban design. The skyline was filled with the minarets of the many mosques. Houses consisted of compounds in which the family lived, with blank walls facing the outside world and an inner central courtyard. Life was directed inwards, making urban life an intensely private experience, unlike the domination of public spaces in the cities of Western Europe. The Balkan city in Ottoman times was a place of whispers rather than the declamatory oratory of the West. Life did not happen on the streets, but in the closed world of the family, tightly controlled by social etiquette, both physically and symbolically. Buildings were made of wood and with a single storey, while streets were the random spaces between houses, not a regulated system to ease the flow of traffic. The few western visitors to Belgrade could hardly recognize this collection of buildings as any kind of municipality to which they were used.