Europe: A History (151 page)
The Balkans lay beyond the sphere of direct French influence. The only region to be held and administered by the French were the so-called Illyrian Provinces— mainly modern Slovenia and Croatia,
[ILLYRIA]
But the breath of revolutionary and national ideas blew into all corners. Greece was strongly affected. In 1799 the ‘Septinsular Republic’ was set up with Russian assistance
[HEPTANESOS]
;
and when the larger part of the Parthenon frieze was carried off from Athens, there was an immediate outburst of national sentiment,
[LOOT]
In Serbia, two risings against Ottoman rule in 1804–13 and 1815–17 also received Russian support. In the Romanian principalities, the Russian occupation of 1806–12, and the consequent cession of Bessarabia, caused resentments which only served to fuel national feelings,
[BOUBOULINA]
The Russian Empire under Alexander I (r. 1801–25), grandson of Catherine the Great, experienced one of the most liberal eras of its history/Alexander’s father Paul I (r. 1796–1801) had bordered on insanity: his internal policy was moved by vicious whims such as the reintroduction of corporal punishment for nobles and civil servants, and his external policy by personal flights of fancy. He left the Second Coalition in 1799 because of his desire to possess the Order of Malta; and in 1801 broke with Great Britain for no sound reason. He was murdered by drunken officers. After that, Alexander settled down to the long confrontation with Napoleon. Guided by his boyhood companion and chief minister, Prince Adam Czartoryski (1770–1861), a Polish nobleman once taken hostage by Catherine, he took a serious and intelligent interest in the political and social problems of the day. He had broad visions for the reconstruction of Europe, and showed genuine concern for the advantages of a constitutional monarchy.
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He incorporated Finland as an autonomous Grand Duchy, liberated the landless serfs of the Baltic provinces; and for a couple of decades turned the western region annexed from Poland-Lithuania into the scene of a liberal social and cultural experiment centred on the University and educational district of Wilno.
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He was responsible for the foundation of a state school system, and of the (advisory) Council of State which remained a central organ of Tsarist government thereafter. Russia was hardly amenable to the application of radical ideas; but a generation of Russian soldiers who were brought into direct contact with Poland, Italy, and eventually Paris itself could not fail to be a source of ferment.
The Napoleonic Wars did not hinder Russia’s territorial expansion eastwards. From 1801 the sixty-year conquest of the Caucasus began with the annexation of Georgia. In 1812, at the very time that Napoleon was approaching Moscow, a Russian expedition planted the tiny colony of Fort Ross on the coast of northern California—more than thirty years before American pioneers had reached the area.
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[GAGAUZ]
With time, the strains of France’s Continental System began to tell, as did the effects of the British blockade. They underlay the Tsar’s alliance in March 1812 with Sweden, and the deployment by Napoleon of a
Grande Armee
of some 600,000 on the Tsar’s western frontier. They equally provided the main bone of contention for the inglorious war of 1812–14 between Britain and the United States. American shipping was long trapped between the contradictory regulations of the British and the French; and in 1807 the boarding of the USS
Chesapeake
by a party from HMS
Leopard
gave grave offence. President Jefferson introduced his own regulations regarding ‘peaceful coercion’ and ‘non-intercourse’, but then gave way to the demands of the ‘war hawks’ of the Twelfth Congress. American forces failed to win any significant territory in Canada; and the British failed to reassert control over their former colonies. From a later perspective, it is ironic to reflect that the Continental System led both to the burning of the Executive Mansion in Washington, from 1814 known as the White House, and to the burning of Moscow.
HEPTANESOS
I
N
March 1799 the French garrison on Corfu capitulated to a joint Russo-Turkish expeditionary force under Admiral Ushtakov. Corfu was the largest of the
Heptanesos
, the seven Ionian Islands, which the Treaty of Campo Formio had handed to France from the late Venetian Republic. (Its capture was the outcome of a rare example of Russo-Turkish co-operation inspired by Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt.) Once established, the Russians shed their Ottoman allies and created a model ‘septinsular republic’ with its own parliament and a constitution (1803) designed by Tsar Alexander’s chief minister, Prince A. J. Czartoryski.
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The aim of their largesse was to outbid the ‘revolutionary’ French and to create the nucleus of a future Greek state. The arrangements lasted for only four years. The Ionian Islands reverted to French possession by the Treaty of Tilsit (see p. 733), only to be picked off one by one by the British Fleet from 1809 onwards.
The British regime proved rather less liberal than its Russian-sponsored predecessor. An imposed constitution gave overriding powers to the governor. A handful of notables ran both the consultatory assembly and the oppressive
colonia
system of landholding. During the Greek War of Independence, the main British aim was to frustrate the islanders’ desire to join Greece. In 1848 and 1849, Cephalonia was the scene of agrarian revolts, which the Governor, Sir Henry Ward, suppressed with mass arrests, floggings, and executions. At the very time that Palmerston was condemning the Austrians as ‘the greatest brutes that ever called themselves the undeserved name of civilized men’, and when General Heynau was unceremoniously dumped into a London horse-trough, Governor Ward was described in the House of Commons as ‘the bloody Heynau of the Ionian Islands’. But to no avail. It was a fitting prelude to Palmerston’s rough handling of the Don Pacifico Affair.
2
Union with Greece was ruled out as late as 1859, on the advice of the British commissioner, W. E. Gladstone. But it was conceded in 1864 as a face-saving gesture in the general settlement with Greece. During the crisis Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh had been offered and had rejected the Greek throne. It was a nice irony that the British monarchy would eventually also concede the defunct title of Duke of Edinburgh to an exiled Greek prince born on Corfu.
[GOTHA]
LOOT
I
N
1799, the British Ambassador to the Ottoman Porte, Lord Elgin, visited Athens and acquired the finest sections of the Parthenon Frieze. The Parthenon had been used as an arsenal: much of it had been demolished by an explosion: and no one was trying to repair it. Elgin could argue that his deal with the Ottoman authorities was both legal and public-spirited. But the Athenians objected. One of the Greek leaders opposed to Ottoman rule had warned against selling Greece’s treasures to the ‘Europeans’. ‘After all,’ he wrote later, ‘that is what we fought for.’
1
The ‘Elgin Marbles’ constitute one of the prize exhibits of the British Museum; and some people consider them part of the British Heritage.
2
(If large chunks of Stonehenge had been legally transported to Athens, one might equally consider them part of the ‘Heritage of Greece’.)
Many European galleries and museums have been built on the proceeds of national or private loot. In the 17th century, the Swedes extracted vast quantities of art and valuables from Germany, Bohemia, and Poland. Napoleon was the Louvre’s most ardent patron (see p. 722). Much of his archaeological loot from Egypt was looted in turn by the British. Much of the core collections of Russia’s state libraries and museums was carried off from Poland. In the year that Lord Elgin was in Athens, General Suvorov’s army was accompanied to Italy by trained teams of cultural procurers. Heavyweight political power has usually been accompanied by light fingers.
In the twentieth century, the Nazis were generally considered the master art thieves. Goering thought himself a connoisseur; and Hitler, the ex-art student, was planning the world’s largest art centre in his home town of Linz. Cracow, Paris, Florence, Ghent, and Amsterdam, and many lesser centres, were comprehensively robbed. Trainloads of loot reached the Reich from the East. At the end of the war, thousands of Europe’s greatest art treasures were found in a disused salt-mine at Alt Aussee in Austria.
3
Nazi plunder, however, represents less than half the story. The Nazis had nothing to teach the Russians about looting. Fifty years after the war, hoards of old masters and other Nazi booty, which the Red Army had plundered from the German plunderers, started to come to light in Russia. The so-called golden ‘Mask of Agamemnon’ from Mycenae, for example, and the 16,000 items of ‘Priam’s Treasure’ from Troy, once brought to Berlin by Schliemann, were all located in 1991 in Moscow.
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Unknown except to the KGB and a handful of conservationists, these ‘trophies’ and ‘special finds’ had been secretly held for half a century in the Hermitage and the Pushkin Museum and the monastery at Zagorsk. For the most part they derived from private collections such as those of Herzog and Hatvany in
Budapest, of Franz Koenigs in Amsterdam, or of the Krebs Foundation in Mannheim. The talk was of a million works of art. The problem, as with the British Museum, was to persuade the Russian finders that finding is different from keeping.
Not that the other Allies were beyond suspicion. Berlin’s collection of Mozartiana, which had been taken to Poland during the war for safety, did not return from the University Library in Cracow. In 1990, priceless items from the ‘Ouedlingburg Treasure’, including a ninth-century illuminated German Bible in jewel-encrusted binding, were found in a Texas garage once owned by an ex-US Army lieutenant.
5
Needless to say, the legal concept of ‘cultural property’, as enshrined in the Hague Convention of 1954, is a relatively recent innovation.
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The Russian campaign of 1812 was, as he later admitted, Napoleon’s greatest mistake. He called it his ‘Polish War’, since most of the action took place on traditional Polish territory and since a successful outcome would inevitably have raised the question of restoring Poland-Lithuania. The frontier which the
Grande Armée
crossed on 22 June 1812 had only recently become the frontier of the Russian Empire. In the eyes of the local inhabitants, it was the historic border linking Poland with Lithuania,
[MIR]
Napoleon was faced with a clear choice between a political campaign, in which he could have used the army to liberate the serfs and to mobilize the anti-Russian sentiments of the population, or a purely military campaign, in which the outcome was left exclusively to the fortunes of war. He noticed that the Poles of Lithuania were rather different from the Poles of Warsaw. So, like Charles XII before him, and Hitler later, he chose to ignore local conditions and paid the price. Keeping all thoughts of the political future to himself, he pressed on through Lithuania to the heart of Muscovy. At Borodino, at the gates of Moscow, he suffered the most costly of all his victories. Moscow was occupied, but burned together with much of its stores. The Tsar simply refused to negotiate, and ordered his army to avoid any major engagement. In November, with starvation pending, the retreat was sounded. The columns of the
Grande Armee
, stretched out over 500 miles, fell victim to the Russian winter, to marauding Cossacks, and to the unseasonal floods of the Berezina. Napoleon fled by sledge to Warsaw, and on to Paris. As for his men, of the 600,000 who had crossed the Niemen in June barely one in twenty survived to tell the terrible tale. As the Emperor once remarked, ‘All empires die of indigestion’,
[MALET] [SPA-SIT’EL]
GAGAUZ
S
HORTLY
after the Russian conquest of Bessarabia in 1812, the Tsar’s new province attracted a wave of immigration. Among the migrants came a group of Balkan Christians known as
Gagauz
. They came from an area of what is now northern Bulgaria, and they settled in the district of Komrat, in what is now Moldavia. Their language belongs to the Ghoz branch of Turkic, and has counterparts in Central Asia. Their religious allegiance was to Slavic Rite Bulgarian Orthodoxy. It is an open question whether they left their ancestral homeland more from hope than from fear. A number of Gagauz communities, which were Moslem, stayed behind under Ottoman rule in Bulgaria.
There are two views about the earlier history of the Gagauz. One maintains that they were medieval Turks who had been partially bulgarized. The other holds that they were turkicized Bulgars, who kept their religion when they lost their language. Neither really fits the facts.
1
The Gagauz were just one of several such minorities in eastern Europe who straddled the Christian-Muslim divide.
2
The Muslim Tartars of the Volga contained a baptised minority, the
Kryeshens
, who had adopted the religion of their Russian conquerors. The Chechens of the North Caucasus, though mainly Moslem, also included some Christians. The Abkhazians were in a similar position
[ABKHAZIA]
,
Albanian Muslims, though a majority both in Albania and in Serbia’s Kossovo province (see Appendix III, p. 1310), form an important minority in Macedonia.
[MAKEDON] [SHQIPERIA]
On either side of the Rhodope Mountains, on the borders of Bulgaria and Greece, there lives a substantial community of Bulgarian-speaking Muslims known as
Pomaks
. They have outlying relations in parts of Macedonia and Albania. Their existence in Greece is not officially admitted. In 1876, it may have been the local Pomak militia rather than the professional Ottoman army which perpetrated what Mr Gladstone denounced as ‘the Bulgarian Horrors’. If so, they were amply repaid amidst the horrors of the subsequent Balkan Wars. But they never left.
3
In Bosnia, religion is the only criterion to divide the Bosnian Muslims from Orthodox ‘Serbs’ and Catholic ‘Croats’. All speak the same ‘Serbo-Croat’ language, and all are Slavs. The Bosnian Muslims (44 per cent of the population in 1991) are often viewed by nationalistic neighbours as renegades who abandoned Catholicism or Orthodoxy in favour of the religion of the ruling Ottomans. In fact, it is likely that prior to adopting Islam many such Bosnian families had been Patarenes.
[BOGUMIL]
In the late 20th century these little-known peoples repeatedly hit the European headlines. In the mid-1980s, Bulgaria’s fading communist regime made a last desperate attempt to maintain control by launching an
ultra-nationalist campaign called ‘the Process for Rebirth’. Mosques were destroyed; and Bulgaria’s Muslim minorities—Gagauz, Pomaks, and Turks—were forced to choose between changing their names or emigrating. Many chose to emigrate. In 1991, when Moldavia declared independence, the Gagauz of Komrat, by then some 200,000 strong, were reluctant to participate. The Chechens defiantly raised the standard of independence from Russia by proclaiming their own national republic in Grozny, whilst the Volga Tatars in Kazan prepared for ‘Tatarstan’.
In 1992, amidst the rapid disintegration of Yugoslavia, the Government of Bosnia declared itself independent in the hope of maintaining the integrity of a multinational republic. It received international recognition, but no significant international aid or protection. The presence of Western charities and of token UN peace-keeping forces did nothing to restrain the orgy of land-grabbing, communal massacres, and ‘ethnic cleansing’ which ensued. A self-styled Serbian Republic of Bosnia based at Pale mirrored the self-styled Serbian Republic of Krajina based at Knin, which had been set up in the lands of the old Habsburg military frontier in Croatia. Within a year, Serbs representing 31 per cent of the population had seized 77 per cent of the territory. Sarajevo, like several other enclaves, was besieged. Croat attacks drove Muslims from mixed western districts like Mostar, whilst Serbs fled the Muslim-dominated districts in the centre. Perhaps a quarter of a million people perished. World leaders whistled whilst Bosnia burned. In the absence of decisive statesmanship, the dissolution of Communism was having the same sort of effect as the Ottoman retreat nearly two hundred years before.
4
[SARAJEVO]
