No holding back, Islam comes to the Balkans

By the end of the previous essay, I’d broadly covered the wall of time from a few centuries BCE until about the middle of the 11th century and, I hope, painted a mural that, while lacking in detail, provided a general picture of how two Christian sects more or less split the Balkan Peninsula. However, the image is far from complete unless we can account for the third religious sect to occupy a significant part of this wall canvas – the Muslims. This means I have to rewind the clock to make a brief stop in the middle of the seventh century. Once again, although I promise not to immerse you in too much detail, I think you need to know more than the simple TL;DR version that asserts it’s really through Ottoman conquest that Islam came to the Balkans.

According to tradition, Mohammad was born in 570. When he was about 40 years old he began receiving what Muslims believe were divine revelations from the Archangel Gabriel. These revelations would become the basis for the Quran and laid the groundwork for the transition of the polytheistic Arabs to a monotheistic religious belief and practice. In 622, Mohammad led a group of his followers from Mecca to the city of Yathrib which he renamed Medina. This hijrah (the migration of Mohammad and his followers) is considered by Muslims to be the start of the Muslim era.

Over a seven-year period that was neither pretty nor peaceful, Mohammad gained control of Mecca in 629. In the three years prior to his death in 632, he secured agreements from several tribal leaders in the area and, as Islamic practices began to spread, the region remained relatively stable. After his death old conflicts reappeared and that brief stability shattered.

A number of caliphates then followed. The largest of these was the Umayyad Caliphate that lasted from 661 to 750, encompassed some 15 million square kilometers, and ruled over more than 60 million people or about 30 percent of the world’s population at the time. As the map below shows, it was really big:

Next up was the somewhat smaller Abbasid Caliphate which lost the Iberian Peninsula and parts of West Africa. However, its temporal reach stretched from 750 until nearly 1517. So, you might be looking at the map above and wondering about the importance of this since the Abbasid Caliphate had a smaller geographic footprint than the Umayyad Caliphate and neither appeared to have touched Turkey or the Balkans though, if you look closely, you can see a clear Muslim presence on Cyprus toward the east. (It’s the green island a bit to the northwest of Damascus.0 What’s important here isn’t geography but time.

Sometime near the beginning of the 14th century, an Islamic tribe calling themselves Ottomans and led by a man called Uthman formed a small state in the western part of Anatolia. (Anatolia is generally considered to be the Asian part of Turkey.) Uthman led a successful uprising against the Seljuk aristocracy which had declared an independent sultanate in that territory after Baghdad fell to the Mongols.

By the middle of the century, the Ottomans had invaded and begun to occupy present day Bulgaria. Look at a map today and you’ll see that Macedonia and Serbia form the western border of Bulgaria. (Things are starting to take shape now, right?)

I’m going to goose your memory and remind you of the Serbian Nemanjić dynasty that ruled much of the peninsula from 1166 to 1371. The historical record is a little foggy regarding whether there was a single Battle of Maritsa or two battles along the Maritsa River and, if there were two, whether they occurred in the same general area or in different spots. The important factor is that in 1371, a small Ottoman force defeated an army of Serbs and their allies killing thousands of Serbs and watching thousands more drown in the river. This victory brought parts of Greece and Macedonia under Ottoman control and marked the beginning of a long Ottoman campaign to conquer the Balkans and, if you again recall the earlier entry, might be the incident the Ratko Mladić cited in his revenge genocide in Srebrenica.

The next major Ottoman triumph happens in 1389 at the Battle of Kosovo with the Serbs again on the losing side. Although both armies lost a substantial number of troops, the Ottomans, boasting far greater numbers, again managed to annihilate the Serbians.

This defeat is critical to understanding the Serbs, and some say Serbian politics to this day. The battle wiped out much of the Serbian knights and nobility leaving them as something of a peasant nation. National legends and epic poetry enshrine this event and, to some extent, Serbian identity. The Serbs could remember who they were by remembering their enemies. Today’s independent Kosovo is, undoubtedly, a bitter pill for the Serbs.

Bringing reinforcements from the east after their victory at Kosovo, the Ottomans continued their slow march of conquest across the region.

Here’s a brief chronology:

In 1402, the Ottomans moved their capital from Asia Minor to Adrianople or modern-day Edirne in the northwest of present day Turkey. Half a century later, the Ottomans captured Constantinople thus completing the fall of the Byzantine Empire.

For parts if the 15th century, the Serbian town of Smederevo was batted back and forth between the Ottomans, the Hungarians, and the Serbs. Its ultimate fall to the Ottomans in 1459 essentially erased any remnants of an independent Serbian state and, for nearly three quarters of a century, this small town and its fort played an important role as an Ottoman border fortress in the Ottoman-Hungarian Wars.

Note: In keeping with my 2022-2023 reformation of the blog into shorter entries, backdated to maintain their sequence, any comments on this post might pertain to its new configuration. See the explanation in the post Conventions and Conversions.