The Balkans: A Short History by Mark Mazower

commonwealth, an attitude that contrasted with the papacy’s growing insistence upon Latin: many languages, one Church was the secret of Byzantine Orthodoxy.
    The Balkans were too mountainous, too vulnerable and fragmented to make for an easy religious or linguistic homogenization. It was not only the Albanians who sought the protection of the hills. The Vlachs were a shepherding people who preserved their Romance language right up to this century amid Greek- and Slav-speaking majorities; the Sarakatsani were another even smaller nomadic group. Orthodoxy predominated but did not prevail everywhere. The kings of Croatia followed the Latin rite and Catholicism, despite their Slavic background, while in Bosnia a third, Bosnian church spread before disappearing with the arrival of the Turks. A Bulgarian tsar was crowned by the Pope in 1204 while Catholic and later Protestant missionaries devoted their energies—though with little reward outside Albania and the Aegean islands—to proselytizing for the true faith. Small Jewish communities too existed throughout the peninsula.
    Greek, as the ruling language during the Byzantine period, and as the language of the Gospels, Christian culture and classical learning through Ottoman times as well, attracted ambitious young Vlach or Slav men—just as Venetian, German and later French would do as well. As late as the 1860s, according to the memoirs of one Ottoman official, Greek was still known to “all Romanians of distinction” and used in preference to Turkish when Ottoman and Romanian notables met. Jewish communities that dated back to classical times acquired Greek as their vernacular tongue. Western Europeans too could turn into Greeks. In 1833, several hundred Bavarian mercenaries accompanied King Otto to Athens: a century later, SS officials, scouring Europe for precious German blood, found their great-grandchildren living on farms in Attica. Most had forgotten German and become Greek-speaking and Orthodox. Of course, hellenization had its limits. North of the old Via Egnatia, Greek made few inroads among the Slavic-speaking villages. In northern Albania and the Danubian provinces, too, its use remained confined to higher church clergy, and in the latter case to the courts of native princes. Even within what would later become Greece, many peasants spoke Albanian until the 1950s. But in general, knowledge of Greek remained the main path to learning, religious authority and political power for as long as the Byzantine empire existed. 6
    The dominion of Greek culture over Balkan Christians was not ended by the collapse of Byzantium between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. But it was transformed through the arrival of a new people—Turkish-speaking, Muslim by religion. These Turks defeated the various Christian powers of southeastern Europe—not only the rulers of Byzantium, but also Serb, Genoese, Hungarian, Venetian and other dynasties—and in doing so, unified the region politically and economically in an empire that lasted for five centuries. Before their conquest of the Balkans, the Turks had been active in the region as allies and auxiliaries of the very Christian powers that they later ended up subjugating; after it, they continued to use Christian soldiers, notably in their military campaigns in Anatolia and the Middle East. Christian–Muslim relations were thus based on generations of interaction, and conquest and collaboration more closely resembled patterns evident in the British takeover of India than in the German invasion of Poland.
    Even before the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Christians were turning to Islam for many reasons. A fifteenth-century Greek archbishop noted with disgust the voluntary conversion of those who were motivated by “the desire to win silver, become notables and live in luxury.” By the early sixteenth century several hundred thousand had probably converted. Members of the Bosnian and Byzantine nobility, including some of the