By Vlada Stanković | University of Belgrade

Historical Overview

The first half of the 13th century brought about a series of radical political, social, economic, and religious changes in the Balkan Peninsula and in the wider Byzantine world. Byzantine systems of alliances through kinship were established in the last decade of the 12th century during the reign of Emperor Isaac II Angelos (r. 1185–95) with the rulers of Serbia, and Hungary to the north of the Balkans. These enabled the Byzantine Empire to secure and control the majority of its European hinterland, and to promote or strengthen its influence through shared Orthodox Christianity. The Bulgarian Empire, renewed after 1185–86, represented the only hostile rival to the Byzantine Empire in the Balkans in both political and religious terms, especially during the rule of emperor Kaloyan (r. 1197–1207). The established system collapsed with the conquest of Constantinople by the Crusaders of the Fourth Crusade in April 1204, the destruction of the empire that followed, and the overwhelming dominance of the so-called Latins. These aristocrats from western Europe, especially Flanders, Italy, and France, as well as the spiritual prevalence of the Papal authority of Innocent III (pope 1198–1216) and his successors at the helm of the Catholic Church, took control of the former Byzantine territories in the Balkans.

With the Byzantine world in ruins at the onset of the 13th century, the exiled members of the vast Byzantine ruling family formed two polities: one in Asia Minor, with the center in Nicaea under Theodore I Laskaris (r. 1205–22), and the other in the Balkans, under his relative Michael Doukas Angelos (r. 1205–15). However, with the exemption of Bulgaria and the policies of the emperor Kaloyan, who recognized the authority of the pope even before the capture of Constantinople in 1204, the previously established system of kinship alliances held together, and enabled the gradual return of Byzantine influence in the Balkans, including political and spiritual dominance. Only three decades after the collapse of the empire, the Byzantines renewed kinship alliances and tied to Orthodoxy both Serbia and Bulgaria, with the recognition of the Autocephalous Archbishopric in Serbia in 1218/9 and the Autocephalous Patriarchate of Bulgaria in 1234/5 under the Bulgarian emperor John II Asen (r. 1218–41). With this reversal, the Byzantines re-established their influence in the Balkans and created a new power triangle in the region, consisting of Byzantium, Bulgaria, and Serbia, based on kinship alliances and common Orthodox faith, which will last until the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans in the 15th century.

A series of civil wars that shook Byzantium in the first half of the 14th century enabled the establishment of the short-lived Serbian Empire by Stefan Dušan in 1346 (r. 1331–55, emperor 1346–55), which encompassed the vast, former Byzantine territories in northern and central Greece. More importantly, however, the civil wars opened the Balkans to the Ottomans, who achieved a decisive victory on 27 September 1371 on the Ebron/Maritza river. This forced the weakened Christian states in the Balkans to pay tribute, and led to the fall of the Bulgarian Empire in 1393 and the general weakening of the Christian polities in the Balkans, especially during the rule of Sultan Bayezid I (r. 1389–1402), the son of Sultan Murat I who was killed at the battle of Kosovo in 1389. The eight decades that passed until the final fall of Constantinople and Byzantium to the hands of sultan Mehmed II the Conqueror (r. 1451–81) in 1453, witnessed the gradual but seemingly inevitable expansion of the Ottomans over the Balkans, completed by the conquests of Serbia in 1459, Peloponnesos (Byzantine Morea) in 1460, Wallachia to the north of the Danube in 1462, and Bosnia in 1463.

With the conquest of Belgrade in 1521 by Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent or Lawgiver (r. 1520–66), the entire formerly Byzantine and Orthodox Balkans came under the dominance of the Ottomans. But even before that, the Ottoman Empire established a new system of governance in the region, with sanjaks as the main administrative units, and – from the 16th century onward – with the organization of different religious communities (Muslim, Christian-Orthodox, and Jewish) in millets. All the members of millets, regardless of their ethnicity, enjoyed a form of autonomy, especially pertaining to judicial matters.

The above-mentioned ethnic character of the ruling circles in the Ottoman Empire, similar to the previous-mentioned ethnic concept of Romanness in the Byzantine Empire, provoked incessant infighting among highly positioned servants of sultans from different ethnic groups in the first centuries of Ottoman rule in the Balkans. The Grand Viziers from Bosnia, from Serbian ethnic background, prevailed in the 16th century, and those from the Albanian ethnic background dominated in the following century. The 35th Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire, Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, of Serbian origin, instigated sultan Suleiman to restore the Patriarchate of the Serbian Orthodox Church in 1557 (abandoned in 1766), favoring the Serbs over the Greeks and other Orthodox nations in the Ottoman Empire, and triggering centuries-long disputes between the Greeks, the Serbs, and the Bulgarians. A certain level of autonomy, and the diverse ethnic character of the vast Ottoman Empire, provided many opportunities for the sultans’ Christian subjects, especially in trading and other apolitical activities. But every political act of disloyalty and siding with the empire’s Christian enemies was punished by the High Porte or the local Ottoman governors. An entire century before the activities of Rigas Pheraios and the movement for liberation of the Balkans from the Ottoman rule, the Serbs sided with the Austrian Empire in the Habsburg-Ottoman war of 1683–99, which led to their mass migration from the central Balkan regions to the plains north of the Danube (the so-called Great Exoduses of Serbs, under Patriarchs Arsenios III in 1690), forever changing the ethnic balance of these regions.

Key Issues and Debates

Historical studies of the Balkan Peninsula between the 13th and the 17th centuries, similar to the historical changes in the wider late- and post-Byzantine world in this period, offer various, oftentimes opposing approaches, perspectives, and conclusions, particularly regarding three key issues: a) national vs. above-national, i.e. wider perspective and approach; b) the relations of the Byzantines and the wider Byzantine world with the West, and the importance, or the lack of, religious, Orthodox identity, particularly, but not exclusively, in relations to the West; and c) the question of Byzantine identity and the understanding of the Byzantine Romanness either as an elite-promulgated, top-down construct, or as a primary identity marker of all the Byzantines, at least until late into the 15th century.

a) The legacy of 19th-century scholarship, positivistic in approach and strictly divided along national lines, still burdens Byzantine and post-Byzantine studies, and hinders better understanding of the historical, social, cultural, artistic, religious, and economic developments of the Balkans in the late Middle Ages and beyond. The narrow focus on national histories disregards the diverse national character of the Byzantine Empire, and leaves aside close and intensive communication, cooperation, and alliances in the region in these centuries. These were never limited to narrow ‘national borders’, which in reality never existed in the modern understanding of the phrase. The tendency to generalize the history of Byzantium and the Balkans in this period, due to the limited number of sources, Byzantine and Slavic alike, led to another misunderstanding in the scholarship: unrelated events, processes, personalities from different generations and even centuries, and their actions, are uncritically and indiscriminately lumped together regardless of the concrete historical context.

b) The lack of modern, innovative concepts in Byzantine scholarship, evident in all the issues underscored here, hampers discussion and reevaluation of some of the basic features of Byzantium and the broader Byzantine world, and in particular of the medieval and post-medieval Balkans. The concept of a “Byzantine Commonwealth”, a loosely connected political alliance of different national polities based on Orthodoxy, proposed half a century ago by Dimitri Obolenski, has been mostly abandoned due to its overgeneralizing nature. The idea of “Political Orthodoxy”, put forward four decades ago by Hans-Georg Beck still awaits its thorough (re-)assessment. The self-evident fact of the strong Latin presence and even dominance in the Byzantine East from the 13th century onward led to exaggeration of the Byzantine-Latin cooperation, to the point of mutual assimilation, and the proposition of a common Franco-Greek culture, which existed, if at all, only in isolated pockets of Latin, and particularly Venetian dominated areas in the East. All these ideas, rather than concepts, as is the case with the previous issue, suffer from a lack of historical context and generalizations, which lead to oversimplifications of complex historical phenomena and developments. One of these is the phenomenon of Hesychasm, its spiritual and political impact in the Balkans from the 14th century onward, and the creation of a transnational Hesychast network in the region, whose members significantly influenced political, social, and cultural developments.

c) The self-identification of the Byzantines as Romans, and their empire as a Roman Empire, formed for a long time a bedrock of understanding of the Byzantine world and Byzantine political ideology. Until recently, this has not been seriously challenged or analyzed in greater detail. The very nature of Byzantine sources, an overwhelming majority of which emanated from the highest circle of learned men – and one woman – close to, or even members of the imperial family, placed limits to the possibility of understanding what a ‘common Byzantine’ thought about himself/herself, and what emphasis, if any, was placed on the self-identification as Romans. In this aspect as well, a caution is needed, and especially the correct positioning of every single information in its adequate historical context. The collapse of the Byzantine Empire in the 13th century triggered a peculiar competition for the title of the emperor of the Romans, and witnessed the expansion of the Romans in the wider Byzantine world. For the first time in Byzantine history there was an emperor of the Romans who did not rule New Rome–Constantinople, and for a brief period of less than three years, there were actually two Byzantines crowned as emperors of the Romans: John III Batatzes in Nicaea (r. 1222–54) and Theodore Doukas Angelos in Epirus (r. 1215–30), the latter crowned in Thessaloniki in the spring of 1227 by the Archbishop of Ohrid, Demetrios Chomatenos. The ideological and political – and not ethnic – character of Romanness is evident from its expansion into ethnically clearly non-Roman lands: Bulgaria and Serbia. The Bulgarian emperor John II Asen (r. 1218–41) had added Romans to his imperial title after defeating Theodore Doukas Angelos in March 1230, and after becoming the overlord and protector of Mount Athos. The Serbian king and emperor Stefan Dušan similarly added Romans to his royal and later imperial title after he became the overlord and protector of Mount Athos in 1345/6. That the reaction from the Byzantine side in both cases was not hostile but rather positive and approving – at the concrete point in time, at least – shows a need for broadening research perspectives of such complex phenomena and for contextualization of every single act in order to understand its importance and meaning for contemporaries.

Further Reading

Fine, John V. A. The Late Medieval Balkans. A Critical Survey from the Late Twelfth Century to the Ottoman Conquest. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987.

Still valuable, if somewhat outdated conceptually, this book offers a general guide through the history of the late medieval Balkans

Mazower, Mark. The Balkans: A Short History. New York: Random House, 2000.

By far the best overview of the post-medieval Balkans, innovative and with a broad perspective that offers an in-depth look into the complexities of Balkan history.

Obolenski, Dimitri. The Byzantine Commonwealth. Eastern Europe, 500–1453. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1971.

One of the most intriguing concepts for looking at, analyzing, and understanding various aspects of Byzantine influence and dominance over the Balkans and Eastern Europe, Obolenski’s Byzantine Commonwealth is still thought-provoking even if at times over-simplistic.

Stanković, Vlada, ed. The Balkans and the Byzantine World before and after the Captures of Constantinople, 1204 and 1453. New York: Lexington Books, 2016.

The emphasis of this volume is on regionalism and the importance of historical context in the study of late and post-Byzantine Balkans.

This contribution was sponsored by the Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture at Hellenic College Holy Cross.