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The Balkans
from Constantinople
to Communism

DENNIS P. HUPCHICK
THE BALKANS
© Dennis P. Hupchick, 2002

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations
embodied in critical articles or reviews.

First published 2001 by PALGRAVETM

175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Companies and representatives throughout the world

PALGRAVE is the new global publishing imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC
Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly
Macmillan Press Ltd).

ISBN 0-312-21736-6 hardback; ISBN 0-312-29913-3 ebook

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hupchick, Dennis P.
The Balkans : from Constantinople to communism / Dennis P. Hupchick.
cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-312-21736-6
1. Balkan peninsula—History. I. Title: From Constantinople to communism. II. Title.

DR36 H87 2001

949.6—dc21 00-062590

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Design by planettheo.com

First edition: January 2002

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed in the United States of America.

In memory of my mentor,
James F. Clarke
(1906-1982)
 Contents

Preface. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
Note on Spelling and Pronunciation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii
Maps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .xiv
Glossary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxvi

Introduction: Land, People, and Culture. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

P A R T O N E

Era of Byzantine Hegemony, 600–1355

1. East Romans, Slavs, and Bulgars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
2. The First Bulgarian Empire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
3. Byzantium Declines. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
4. Serbia Preeminent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
Further Readings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95

P A R T T W O

Era of Ottoman Domination, 1355–1804

5. Ottoman Conquest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
6. The “Ottoman System”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
7. The Balkan Peoples under the Ottomans . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144
8. Ottoman Destabilization. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164
Further Readings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184
 P A R T T H R E E

Era of Romantic Nationalism, 1804–1878

9. The Rise of Romantic Nationalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
10. Revolutions and Resurrected States . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212
11. Ottoman “Reform” Efforts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234
12. The “Eastern Question” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247
Further Readings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 268

P A R T F O U R

Era of Nation-State Nationalism, 1878–1945

13. Early Nation-States . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275
14. National Conflicts. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 296
15. World War I and Versailles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 316
16. The Interwar Years and World War II. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 338
Further Readings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 360

P A R T F I V E

Era of Communist Domination, 1945–1991

17. Communist Takeover . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 369
18. The Greek Exception . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 388
19. Splits in Socialism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 403
20. Communist Decline and Collapse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 416
Further Readings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 445

Selected General Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 449

Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 456
 Preface

On a late-September evening in 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Cham-

berlain went on radio to address the nation regarding the growing international
crisis surrounding events in Czechoslovakia. The Nazi-influenced Sudeten Ger-
man minority in that state had precipitated a situation that threatened to result
in a German invasion of the country. France had signed an alliance guaranteeing
Czechoslovakia’s security, and Britain was closely allied with France in case of any
future hostilities. An invasion by Hitler’s Germany would force both to live up to
their treaty responsibilities. The frightening possibility of a costly and bloody
European war loomed large, and naturally the British people were concerned. In
the course of his address, Chamberlain, desperate to avoid a conflict, made the
following comment: “How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be
digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway
country between people of whom we know nothing.” The next day Hitler notified
Chamberlain that he was willing to discuss a diplomatic solution to the crisis. The
day after that, the British prime minister flew off to Munich, where he and French
Premier Edward Daladier, under the delusion that peace thus would be assured,
essentially caved in to Hitler’s demands to dismember France’s East European
ally. Fear of spilling British blood to uphold Britain’s moral responsibilities and
ignorance of East European realities led Chamberlain to the Munich appeasement.
Far from preventing the war he feared, his actions ultimately guaranteed its
outbreak a year later.
One cannot help but be struck by similarities between Chamberlain’s reaction
to the Sudeten crisis sixty-odd years ago and those of Western leaders to the war in
Bosnia-Hercegovina that raged between 1992 and 1995. The same ignorance,
befuddlement, and fear reflected in Chamberlain’s telling remark characterized their
efforts to end the Bosnian debacle. Apparently lacking any concrete understanding
of the situation on the ground, caught off guard by the rapid and violent
disintegration of Yugoslavia, and afraid that the resulting regional instability would
threaten relationships in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the
European Union (EU), the Western powers vacillated among inactivity, half
measures, and appeasement of nationalist aggressors—anything to avoid costly, and
potentially bloody, direct intervention—before finally manipulating the parties
involved in the war into signing a tenuous agreement at Dayton, Ohio.
viii THE BALKANS

Later, in 1999, fear of casualties and, once again, a lack of understanding of

Balkan realities led the West to resort to an airwar half measure against Serbia in
an avowed effort to protect the Albanian minority in the Serbian province of
Kosovo from Serbian ultranationalist “ethnic cleansing.” NATO’s bombing
campaign did not spare the Kosovar Albanians from the atrocities that it
supposedly sought to prevent. Ultimately Serbia’s leadership was bludgeoned into
submission and most of the Kosovar Albanian refugees originally forced out of
the region by the Serbs returned to their devastated homes, whereupon they began
perpetrating their own round of atrocities on those Kosovar Serbs who did not
flee when Serbian forces withdrew.
The befuddlement and fear demonstrated by Western leaders during the
Bosnian and Kosovo crises were a direct reflection of an ignorance of Balkan history.
But the leaders merely mirrored the more widespread ignorance of their respective
constituencies. The majority of westerners had little knowledge of, or interest in,
Balkan affairs beyond a rudimentary, generalized, and frequently oversimplified
awareness of assorted cold war-related situations: Yugoslavia was a “good” Commu-
nist country ever since Marshal Josip Tito broke with Joseph Stalin in 1948 and
mixed capitalism with socialism; Bulgaria was the blind puppet and lackey of the
Soviet Union; Romania under Nicolae Ceaupescu was a “friendly” Communist state
that frequently opposed Soviet imperialism; rarely noticed Albania was akin to Tibet,
isolated in its mountains and in its affinities to Red China; Greece was part of
NATO, a member of the West that was not considered part of the Balkans; and
Turkey, another NATO ally, was Middle Eastern and not a part of Europe. When
Yugoslavia disintegrated in 1992, unfamiliarity with pre-cold war Balkan history
made it easy for Western politicians and journalists to blame the resulting warfare
on “centuries-old” ethnic or religious conflicts—again, an oversimplification rooted
in a fundamental misunderstanding of Balkan history—and to tag the fighting
inaccurately as the “Third” Balkan War (assuming, of course, that their Western
audiences were aware that there once had been two others).
Perhaps the unfamiliarity with Balkan history displayed by English speakers can
be blamed partly on a certain lack of general education dealing with the region.
Except for a few occurrences that have played important roles in determining the
course of Western European developments (such as the fall of Constantinople to
the Ottoman Turks in 1453 and the 1914 assassination of the Austro-Hungarian
Archduke Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo), events in the Balkans rarely have found
their way into English-language secondary education textbooks. At the level of
higher education, the same often holds true for courses in general European and
world history.
This “Balkan gap” in recent English-language education can be attributed in
some measure to continuing vestiges of Western European cultural antipathy
toward the Orthodox European and Islamic civilizations that have held historical
 PREFACE ix

sway in the region as well as to a certain lack of available, sound general studies
of Balkan history. When discussing Orthodox Europe and Islam, westerners
frequently portray them as either threatening or as inferior with regard to the
West. As threats, both provide westerners with their most long-standing cultural
bogymen: Orthodox Europe spawned the Byzantine Empire, Russia, and the
Soviet Union; Islam begot the Arab Caliphate, the Spanish Moors, the Saracens,
the Ottoman Empire, and, most currently, Islamic “fundamentalism,” Libya, Iran,
and Iraq. Less concrete (but more insidious because of their casualness) are the
consistent Western portrayals of Orthodox European and Islamic inferiority in
texts and in the media by using culturally negative or pejorative descriptive terms
(such as “underdeveloped,” “backward,” “Asiatic,” “fossilized,” among others)
when discussing them and by categorizing their political and social structures as
innately flawed (such as being politically “autocratic” or “authoritarian” and
socially “inequitable” or “tradition-bound”).
As birthplace for the Orthodox European civilization and dominated for close
to half a millennium by Islamic civilization, the Balkan Peninsula suffers accord-
ingly. Its very name seems unconsciously associated in Western minds with
“otherness,” since it derives from a colloquial Turkish term for mountain. This
perceptual foreignness has been reinforced further by the late-nineteenth- and early-
twentieth-century chaos and divisiveness characterizing the rise of modern nation-
states in the region, epitomized in the term “balkanization.” So tangible is the
negative perception of the Balkans in Western minds that many peoples native to
the region—Greeks, Romanians, Croats, and Slovenes, in particular—adamantly
reject the use of the term, thus hoping to escape the impression of inferiority in the
West. Some Western scholars of the region do so as well because of an awareness of
the cultural implications of the word. Instead, the term “Southeastern Europe” has
become a common substitute.
One might posit that, if the Balkans received the volume of English-language
general historical coverage approaching that given most areas of Western Europe,
then at least westerners’ ignorance of the region would be mitigated and the cultural
biases dampened. This, of course, is conjecture. As it stands, few book-length general
studies of Balkan history have been published in English. Even if the comparison is
limited to English-language books specifically treating Eastern Europe, the Balkans
place far behind those devoted to Central-Eastern and Northeastern European
topics. It would appear that the Balkans enjoy copious coverage only when events
in the region cause some sense of crisis in the West. Both the “Eastern Question”
(1875-78) and the Balkan Wars (1912-13) produced outpourings of predominantly
superficial or subjective publications on the Balkans that ceased once the crises
ended. The current rash of mostly journalistic and memoir publications generated
by the collapse of Yugoslavia, the war in Bosnia-Hercegovina, and the humanitarian
debacle in Kosovo follows in their mold.
x THE BALKANS

Because the prospects are likely that post-Communist turmoil in the Balkans
will continue for some time to come, raising serious security and foreign policy issues
for the United States and Europe, westerners will need to know as much as possible
about the region, especially about its history. The number of reliable and compre-
hensive general histories of the Balkans readily available in English at present can
be counted on one’s fingers and toes, and most of these are limited in scope, dated,
or written almost exclusively for specialists. Supplementing these works are some
English-language studies devoted to important stages in Balkan history, such as the
Byzantine, Ottoman, and modern national periods. For much of the later national
and Communist periods in Balkan history, the reader is forced to cull information
from general studies of Eastern Europe. Augmenting such general studies are a
number of English-language, national-oriented histories spanning all of the periods.
Taken as a whole, however, their coverage is uneven because English-language
histories of states that have been of intrinsic cultural or political interest to the West
(such as Greece and Yugoslavia) far outstrip in number those of the other Balkan
states (including pre-Yugoslavia Bosnia-Hercegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Mon-
tenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia). Also, most of these works have as their focus the
modern national and, especially, Communist periods rather than the Byzantine or
Ottoman, and many of them suffer from nationalist or ideological biases. In any
case, their total numbers are few relative to those available for the rest of Eastern
Europe, let alone to those treating with Western European states.
On the whole, few comprehensive studies of the Balkans exist. More narrowly
directed general works of all kinds tend to emphasize periods in which Western
influences play a significant role. Times in which non-Western forces predominated
in Balkan history are de-emphasized or ignored. Yet it is precisely the non-Western
influences that have made the Balkans “the Balkans”—that region of Europe that
has proven so befuddling to westerners over the years.
The historical survey that follows is an attempt to assist the English-speaking
student and general reader in gaining a basic introductory understanding of Balkan
history in all of its varied cultural stages, from the end of antiquity through the
collapse of communism (but without the usual pro-Western biases) and to provide
them with a resource for launching further, more in-depth study should they so
desire. As the title proclaims, it is a survey history of the Balkans. The term
intentionally and consistently is used throughout the text to emphasize the region’s
cultural and historical uniqueness relative to Western Europe without any implied
qualitative connotation—and nothing more.
The text constitutes an interpretive narrative organized into large, subdivided
sections corresponding to important developmental periods—“eras”—in Balkan
history, beginning with the advent of Slav and Turk settlement in the region and
ending with the collapse of Communist governments in 1991. Post-1991
developments have not been included, since the “facts” surrounding them are still
 PREFACE xi

too sketchy, or partisan, or not at present fully understood regarding their future
significance to provide any definitive insight into the fundamental nature of the
new, post-Communist era. The text represents an interpretive synthesis of ideas
and observations gained by years of extensive reading and research in the fields of
history and Balkan studies and by extended periods of firsthand experience in the
region itself.
In an effort to aid those interested in pursuing study of the Balkans at greater
length, extensive lists of further readings and a selected general bibliography
supplement the text. Rather than fill the text with footnote references to general
data that essentially are well known to specialists, a detailed list of reference readings
pertinent to the material presented is appended at the end of each major text division.
Selected listing of general studies as well as some collections of primary sources
translated into English immediately follow the body of the text. Each of the listings
is organized topically, first by general works and then by state/region.
The references included in the listings are extensive but selective. First, since
this study is targeted specifically at English-speaking introductory students and
general readers, the works listed are published exclusively in English. Thus, many
important source studies have been omitted because they are available only in non-
English languages. Those possessing the ability to read foreign languages will find
more than adequate references to such studies in the notes and bibliographies of the
works cited.
Second, for reasons both of intent and space, only book titles have been
included, most of which represent monographs. It seems unlikely that this book’s
intended readership will be able to jump immediately into digesting the narrowly
focused and highly specialized literature represented by scholarly articles. The titles
listed provide the general in-depth exposure to various issues in Balkan history
usually needed before plunging into the available periodical literature.
As a final, personal note, I wish to extend acknowledgment and thanks to those
who lent support and assistance over the time involved in bringing the following
study to fruition. The completion of the manuscript’s final draft was facilitated
through a sabbatical leave granted me by President Christopher N. Breiseth and the
trustees of Wilkes University. President Breiseth’s enthusiastic support for the
project was inspirational and greatly appreciated. A number of colleagues and friends
at Wilkes University were particularly helpful. Harold E. Cox, a historian who
contributed expert cartographic collaboration on three of my previous book projects,
once again produced the maps supplementing this text. I feel truly fortunate to enjoy
his willing cooperation. J. Michael Lennon, vice president for academic affairs, and
Robert J. Heaman, expert in literary culture, kindly gave of their time to critique
portions of the manuscript to help make it more readable for nonspecialists, for
which I am grateful. Kathleen J. Diekhaus, departmental secretary, rendered useful
clerical aid, and Brian R. Sacolic, reference and database librarian, provided valuable
xii THE BALKANS

bibliographic search assistance. At Palgrave Press, Michael J. Flamini and Amanda

Johnson demonstrated genuine tolerance and great understanding over delays
caused by unforeseen health problems and revisions. Finally, I wish to thank my
wife, Anne-Marie, for suffering through three years of her husband’s assorted
preoccupations, obsessions, and agonies surrounding the project.

Dennis P. Hupchick
Wilkes-Barre, PA, 2001
 Note on Spelling and Pronunciation

An attempt has been made in the following text to render most proper names and
foreign terms in or near their native spellings. Exceptions to this approach are terms
generally better known to English speakers in their Anglicized forms (such as the
names of states, certain cities, and various geographic elements) and the first names
of Greek, Russian, and Western European individuals. Place-names (other than
Constantinople/Istanbul, Adrianople/Edirne, and Nicæa/Iznik) are given in their
contemporary forms, with variants provided in parentheses following their initial
appearances in the text. In the case of languages written in non-Latin alphabets, a
“phonetical” transliteration system, generally following that used by the U.S. Board
on Geographic Names, is employed for Bulgarian and Russian, while for Serbian
and Macedonian a system based on the Latin, Croat form of Serbo-Croatian
(utilizing diacritical marks and familiar in the West for transliterating “Yugoslav”
languages), is used. Turkish terms are spelled in the Latin characters currently used
in Turkey, with appropriate diacritics.
A guide to the simple phonetical pronunciation of certain foreign letters follows.

ai (Greek), é (Hungarian): as long a in bay

á (Hungarian), a (in all cases except Hungarian): as a in ah
c (in all cases except Turkish), t (Romanian): as ts in beats
c, d (Serb, Croat, Macedonian), cs (Hungarian), ç (Turkish): as ch in church
dj (Serb, Croat, Macedonian), gy (Hungarian), c (Turkish): as dzh in badge
e (in all cases): as short e in let
g (Turkish): as silent h in oh
h (Bulgarian, Serb, Croat, Macedonian, Turkish, Russian): as ch in Bach
i (in all cases), oi (Greek), yi (Hungarian): as ee in sweet
j (in all cases except Romanian): as y in yet
ó (Hungarian): as long o in so
o (Hungarian), a (Romanian): as ur in purge
s (Serb, Croat, Macedonian), s (Hungarian), p (Romanian, Turkish): as sh in sheet
sz (Hungarian): as s in say
u (in all cases), ou (Greek): as oo in zoo
ü (Turkish, Hungarian): as yoo in milieu
u (Bulgarian), â (Romanian), i (Turkish), ë (Albanian), ö, a (Hungarian): as short a in but
x (Albanian): as dz in buds
y (Russian), î (Romanian): as short i in it
z (Serb, Croat, Macedonian), zs (Hungarian), j (Romanian): as zh in measure
 Glossary

Ahi Islamic urban fellowship.

Akçe Silver coin used in the Ottoman Empire.
Akinci Ottoman irregular cavalry used for scouting, raiding, and pillaging.
Askeri Ottoman military-administrative (ruling) class.
Avaris Ottoman extraordinary tax, often collected on a regular basis.
Ayan Ottoman semi-independent provincial strongman or governor.
Bakpip “Gift” (Turkish); a bribe.
Ban “Leader” (Croatian); Hungarian title for a nominally subordinate Croatian or
Bosnian provincial ruler.
Banovina Post-1929 province of Yugoslavia.
Bapibazuks Ottoman irregular troops recruited from Muslim villagers and Circassians.
Bey Turkish title for lord, notable, or governor.
Beylerbeyi Highest ranking original Ottoman provincial commander-governor.
Boier Romanian landholding aristocrat.
Bojar Serbian landholding aristocrat.
Bolyar Bulgarian landholding aristocrat.
Calarapi Romanian free peasants.
Car Serbian medieval imperial title.
Celep Livestock breeder or dealer; deliverer of food to Istanbul or to military depots.
Cetnik Serbian anti-Ottoman guerrilla; Serbian World War II nationalist partisan.
Çift Land plot on Ottoman military fiefs reserved for the fief-holder’s personal use.
Çiftlik Privately owned Ottoman capitalistic farm or estate.
Cizye Ottoman poll-tax levied on non-Muslim subjects.
Comes/Knez Dubrovnik head of state.
Dervenci Ottoman mountain pass, road, or bridge guard.
Dervip Islamic mystical order; wandering Muslim holy man.
Devpirme Periodic Ottoman child levy; Ottoman slave administrator class.
Divan Ottoman imperial state council.
Djed “Grandfather” (Slavic); head bishop of the Bosnian church.
Doge Venetian head of state.
Dorobanti Romanian landless peasants; Romanian serfs.
Dragoman Ottoman foreign trade agent for westerners holding capitulations.
Emir Turkish prince or dignitary.
Esnaf Ottoman artisan or merchant guild.
Eyalet Largest original Ottoman provincial military-administrative unit.
Fratia “Brotherhood” (Romanian); nineteenth-century Romanian nationalist orga-
nization.
 GLOSSARY xxvii

Gaza Ottoman holy war.

Gazi Ottoman holy warrior; Ottoman border warrior.
Haiduk Slav bandit; sometimes an anti-Ottoman resistance fighter.
Han Ruler of Turkic or Mongol-Tatar peoples.
Hane “Hearth” (Turkish); household originally constituting the smallest Ottoman
tax unit.
Haraç Ottoman land-use tax.
Has Largest Ottoman sipahilik fief, usually granted out of imperial lands (see
Sipahilik).
Hatti Hümayun Ottoman imperial edict, issued by a sultan (which see).
Hisba Islamic religious injunction against undue profiteering, fraud, and speculation
among artisans.
Hospodar “Governor” (Turkish); Phanariote-era Romanian ruler.
Janissary Ottoman slave standing infantry, recruited through the devpirme (which see).
Kadi Ottoman judge.
Kadiasker Highest Ottoman judge.
Kaghan Avar ruler.
Kaghanate Avar confederative state.
Kanun Ottoman secular law, issued by a sultan (which see).
Kapikulu Ottoman military-administrative slave household of the sultan (which see).
Kaza Smallest original Ottoman provincial military-administrative unit.
Klepht Greek bandit; sometimes an anti-Ottoman resistance fighter.
Knez “Leader” (Serbian); Serbian princely title; head of a Serbian village commune.
Krajina Border zone.
Kralj Serbian royal title.
Kul Ottoman slave.
Madanci Ottoman metal ore miner or processor.
Mahalle Ottoman residential quarter.
Martolos Local Ottoman militiaman.
Medrese Islamic mosque school of higher theological learning.
Millet “Nation” (Turkish); a group of Ottoman subject people considered by the
authorities as a legal-administrative unit, based on religious affiliation.
Mir Russian village commune.
Miri Ottoman Government owned properties, usually land.
Mufti Islamic legal scholar.
Mülk Ottoman private property, usually land.
Müsellem Ottoman landholding light cavalry.
Narodna Odbrana “National Defense Society” (Serbian); early twentieth-century Serbian nation-
alist organization supporting nationalist activities outside of Serbia.
Nazami Cedid Early nineteenth-century westernized Ottoman military force.
Papa High, honorific Ottoman title of rank; high military rank (e.g., a general).
Philike hetairia “Society of Friends” (Greek); nineteenth-century Greek émigré nationalist-
revolutionary organization.
Posveta “Enlightenment” (Bosnian Serb); early twentieth-century Bosnian Serb
nationalist-cultural organization primarily supported by Narodna Odbrana
(which see).
Pronoia Byzantine conditional military landholding.
xxviii THE BALKANS

Reaya “Flock” (Turkish); originally all subjects of the Ottoman state, later restricted
to non-Muslims only.
Samizdat “Self-published” (Slavic acronym); anti-Communist dissident literature.
Sancak “Banner” (Turkish); Ottoman original military-administrative unit forming a
major subdivision of a province.
Sancakbeyi Commander-governor of a sancak (which see).
Securitate Romanian Communist security and secret police force.
Periat Islamic Sacred Law.
Peyülislam “Leader of Islam” (Turkish); chief judge and enforcer of Islamic laws.
Sipahi Ottoman cavalryman, either fief-holding or salaried.
Sipahilik Ottoman military fief system.
Skupstina Serbian national assembly.
Sporazum Yugoslavian Croatian autonomous territory (1939).
Subranie Bulgarian national assembly.
Sufi Mystical school of Islam.
Sultan Ottoman imperial title.
Sunni Muslim belief based on the four recognized “orthodox” legal schools of Islam.
Tanzimat Ottoman nineteenth-century adaptive reform movement and reform group.
Theme Byzantine regional army; Byzantine province.
Timar Ottoman small-size sipahilik fief (see Sipahilik).
Tsar Bulgarian and Russian male imperial title.
Tsarina Bulgarian and Russian female imperial title.
Ulema Islamic learned religious leadership class.
Ustase Croatian ultranationalist terrorist organization.
Vakif Ottoman income-producing property bestowed on religious establishments as
endowments in perpetuity.
Vali Highest ranking Ottoman provincial commander of professional military
forces.
Veliki Knez Medieval Serbian ruling prince.
Veliki Zupan Early medieval Serbian ruling prince.
Vezir Ottoman governor-general or commander-in-chief.
Vilayet Nineteenth-century Ottoman province.
Vladika Montenegrin title for the ruling prince-bishop.
Voievod Romanian princely title.
Voynuk Horse breeder for the Ottoman imperial stables and the military.
Yamak Ottoman auxiliary Janissary.
Yaya Ottoman irregular (auxiliary) infantry.
Yürük Turkic nomadic pastoral tribe.
Zadruga Serbian extended communal family.
Zakonik Medieval Serbian civil law code, issued under Car Stefan Dusan.
Zeamet Medium-size Ottoman sipahilik fief (see Sipahilik).
Zimma Guarantee of protection granted by Muslim authorities to their non-Muslim
subjects under the periat (which see).
Zimmi “Protected persons” (Turco-Arabic); non-Muslims subject to Muslim rule and
protected by zimma (which see), usually denoting an inferior status.
Zupan Serbian princely title.
 INTRODUCTION

Land, People, and Culture

B efore launching directly into the survey of Balkan history, it is necessary to place
the study into context by addressing the question: What are “the Balkans”?
They constitute the geographical region of Europe called the Balkan Peninsula
and are often labeled Southeastern Europe. Although apparently straightforward,
such a description suffers from the inability of geographers to separate definitively
the so-called continent of Europe from that of Asia. Despite this problematic
uncertainty, few would disagree that the Balkans are part of Eastern Europe. Most
fundamentally, the Balkans are defined by the assorted human societies who live
there, most especially by their culture. Culture is a particular society’s shared
perception of reality, which is shaped by the people’s mundane physical and human
environments and provides a common group identity that transcends individual
personal traits. When treating particular societies that inhabit a specific region, one
must consider their culture. Culture itself, however, is a complex issue, existing on
the small-group level as ethnicity and on the large-group level as civilization. It makes
little sense to concentrate primarily on ethnic culture when compiling a general
history of the ethnically variegated Balkans. More useful is the focus on the three
major civilizations—the “native” Orthodox Eastern European and the two
“imposed” Islamic and Western European—that have thrived there over the course
of the past two millennia. Their “origins” and unique interplay among the region’s
inhabitants are what actually lend definition to “the Balkans.”

Land

The Balkan Peninsula is a rugged, irregular, inverted triangle of land jutting

southward from the European landmass into the eastern Mediterranean Sea. It is
2 THE BALKANS

bounded on the west by the Adriatic Sea, on the east by the Black Sea, and on the
southeast by the Aegean Sea. The northern land border of the Balkan triangle is
partially defined by mountain ranges. The Carpathian Mountains provide a limited
boundary to parts of the north and northeast, while the Julian Alps delineate the
peninsula’s extreme northwestern corner. Roughly 300 miles (480 kilometers) of
open land carved by the Danube, Sava, and Drava rivers divide these two chains in
the northwest while, in the northeast, the plains and tablelands of the Danube and
Prut rivers separate the Carpathians from the Black Sea by some 125 miles (200
kilometers). In the northwest, the Sava River often has been designated a boundary
because it once constituted the Ottoman Empire’s most stable border in the area.
Likewise, the Drava River served the same function because it formed a border for
Yugoslavia. Similarly, the Prut River has been used as a Balkan boundary in the
northeast, since it delineated a border of Romania. Using the Drava and Prut rivers
as part of the geographical boundaries, the Balkan Peninsula encompasses some
276,700 square miles (716,650 square kilometers) of territory. (See Map 1.)
Close to 70 percent of the Balkans is covered by mountains. The name “Balkan”
derives from a colloquial Turkish word for a forested mountain. Now the term also
is the name of a string of mountains just south of the Danube River in today’s
Bulgaria, known in classical times as the Haimos (Hæmus), that stretches from the
Black Sea for half the east-west width of the peninsula. To their south stretch a densely
grouped series of mountain ranges—the Rila (with the highest peak in the Balkans:
9,592 feet [2,926 meters]), the Rhodope, the Pindos, and the Taigetos—to the tip
of the peninsula in the Greek Peloponnese. The peninsula’s west is dominated by the
ruggedly limestone Dinaric and Albanian Alps, which run parallel to the Adriatic
coastline but spread extensively inland. The mountains furnish an assortment of
metal ores and minerals, especially in the central and northern regions. Iron, zinc,
chrome, lead, antimony, copper, nickel, gold, and silver ores are present as well as
such minerals as bauxite, lignite, and chromite. The oil deposits of the Carpathian
foothills in the peninsula’s extreme north are the largest in continental Europe.
Except for the mostly narrow coastal plains, most of the peninsula’s lowlands are
river valleys. The Danube’s is the largest, cutting a wide swath between the Dinaric
Alps and the Carpathian Mountains, narrowing at the so-called Iron Gates east of
Belgrade, where the river carves a gorge separating the Balkan and Carpathian
mountains, before again widening into a broad plain extending to the Black Sea.
Others, such as the Drava, Sava, Morava, and Iskur river systems (important branches
of the Danube watershed), the Aliakmon, Vardar, Struma, Mesta, and Maritsa river
valleys (which run to the Aegean Sea), and the Neretva, Drin, Shkumbin, and Vijosë
river valleys (which flow to the Adriatic), provide the interior with both a modicum
of arable land and the primary natural lines of overland communication.
Climatically, the Balkan Peninsula is not a unit. It enjoys a Mediterranean
climate along most of its seacoasts and a continental one throughout its interior.
 LAND, PEOPLE, AND CULTURE 3

Vegetation and land use vary with the natures of the dual climate. Along the Adriatic,
Mediterranean, and Aegean coasts, the land mostly is rocky and denuded, support-
ing such crops as olives, grapes, figs, lemons, and oranges, and the herding of sheep
and goats. In the interior, most of the mountains are forested; cereal crops
predominate in the river valleys and lowlands; vineyards are found in some areas of
the Danubian Plain, in the Maritsa River valley, and along the upper Sava; and
livestock breeding mostly involves pigs and cows, although sheep and goats are fed
on highland pastures. The line separating the two climate zones lies close to the
coastline in most of the peninsula, since the mountains, which form the climatic
border, push close to the seas almost everywhere. (See Map 1.)
Regarding political geography, the Balkan Peninsula historically is of strategic
significance. Its location in the eastern Mediterranean makes it a crossroads of three
continents—Europe, Asia, and Africa—and, since earliest recorded times, its
accessibility by both sea and land opens it to political, military, and cultural
incursions and contentions from all directions. In the past, six foreign empires—
the Persian, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, Habsburg Austrian, and Russian—
sought to possess, whole or in part, the benefits offered by the peninsula’s strategic
location and natural resources with varying degrees of success.
Interspersed among the foreign imperial efforts were those of indigenous Balkan
states. Because of the peninsula’s rugged geography and harsh climate, political life
in the Balkans historically has been far from stable. Small states, beginning with the
classical Greek city-states, have been the rule because of the mountainous topogra-
phy, which tended to separate human habitation among isolated river valleys and
highland plateaus, and resulted in centuries of fierce competition among the states
for control of the geographically restricted available natural resources. The fact that
Balkan states nearly always proved vulnerable to outside empires competing for sway
in the region meant that those resources rarely benefited the inhabitants. Minerals
and ores were either extracted directly by the foreigners or provided to them by
regional states at their mercy.
When Balkan states managed to survive for any length of time, they did so
mostly in the peninsula’s interior, where the geographic division between coast and
mountains had economic consequences. Often the coast, with its important
seaports, was controlled by foreign states that frequently were at odds with those in
the interior, thus effectively barring the latter from secure outlets to the seas. For
this reason, the economies of Balkan states primarily remained agricultural long into
the twentieth century.
Today the Balkan Peninsula is home to nine states as well as a small portion of
a tenth—Turkey. (See Map 2.)
Albania lies in the west, along the Adriatic Sea, and encompasses 11,097
square miles (28,489 square kilometers) of territory divided into two zones: The
north and central coastal plains and the much more extensive interior and south
4 THE BALKANS

coastal highlands (Albanian Alps), which in places reach heights of over 6,550 feet
(2,000 meters). Most river systems run from the highlands to the sea; chief among
them are the Drin, Shkumbin, and Vijosë. Cereal production and some Mediter-
ranean-type agriculture take place on the coastal plains, while forests and livestock
pasturing predominate in the highlands. Chromium and copper represent the
most important mineral resources. The capital for the state’s population of 3.3
million people is Tiranë.
Bosnia-Hercegovina, with its capital at Sarajevo, was home, before the war of
1992 to 1995, to an ethnically and religiously mixed population of 4.6 million
people inhabiting 19,776 square miles (51,233 square kilometers) in the peninsula’s
northwest. The state lies almost completely within the folds of the Dinaric Alps,
some peaks of which are over 6,550 feet (2,000 meters) high. Most of the sparsely
available arable land lies in the valleys of the Neretva, Bosna, and Drina rivers and
in scattered small mountain basins and plateaus. Much of the terrain is covered by
forest, making timber products economically important. Livestock is herded in
upland pastures. Lignite, iron, and manganese are mined in Bosnia, while bauxite
and lignite are worked in Hercegovina. In former times, eastern Bosnia was an
important gold and silver mining region.
Bulgaria, encompassing 42,855 square miles (110,994 square kilometers),
controls nearly half of the eastern Balkans and is home to 8.8 million people.
Geographically, it is fairly well defined: Most of the northern border is determined
by the Danube River, but the extreme northeastern portion that crosses the
Dobrudzhan Plain is undefined; the Black Sea coast serves in the east; the southern
slopes of the Rhodope Mountains partially define the southern frontier, but the line
is arbitrary on the Thracian Plain in the southeast; and the western slopes of the
Struma River valley, along with the northern bend in the Balkan Mountains, roughly
form the western border. Within these boundaries lie the Balkan, Rila, and Rhodope
mountain ranges and an extensive network of river systems, which generally flow
north into the Danube or south to the Aegean. The plain and tablelands of Thrace
and the Danube are excellent for cereal and fruit cultivation. A uniquely important
crop is roses, grown in one particular mountain valley, the attar of which is a crucial
and expensive ingredient in many top-of-the-line perfumes. Pigs, sheep, cows, and
goats commonly are herded. Coal (both black and brown), iron, copper, zinc, and
lead are important mineral resources. The capital city of Sofia has been an urban
settlement since pre-Roman times.
Croatia is populated by 4.7 million people residing on 21,824 square miles
(56,538 square kilometers) of territory in the northwest of the peninsula. Its
crescent-shape physical configuration consists of three regions: Croatia Proper, with
the state’s capital of Zagreb, serves as the central core, from which stretch the two
horns, composed of Slavonia, the northern lowlands lying between the Sava and
Drava rivers, and Dalmatia in the south, which comprises the Adriatic coastline and
 LAND, PEOPLE, AND CULTURE 5

the adjoining Dinaric highlands. Peaks in the mountains exceed elevations of 4,950
feet (1,500 meters) in a few areas. The Sava and Drava are the primary river systems.
Much of the land is forested in Croatia Proper and in the Dalmatian highlands.
Livestock is herded on upland pastures while grains are sown in depressions and
valleys. Mediterranean-type cultivation and scrub evergreens proliferate along the
Dalmatian coast. In the lowlands of Slavonia, cereal and fruit crops predominate.
Mineral resources are limited, consisting of relatively small pockets of iron, natural
gas, oil, and bauxite.
Greece, including its Aegean island holdings and Crete, encompasses 50,962
square miles (131,990 square kilometers) and 10 million people. Its capital at Athens
is built around the remains of the famous ancient acropolis. Mountains cover 80
percent of the triangular-shape mainland, which forms the southern tip of the Balkan
Peninsula, making less than a third of the land suitable for cultivation. The Pindos
Mountains, whose highest peak—Mt. Parnassos—rises to 8,059 feet (2,457 meters),
run the north-south length of the central and southeastern regions, breaking at the
Gulf of Corinth, only to be continued in the Peloponnese by the Taigetos range.
The mountainous interior is linked to the surrounding seas through deep valleys cut
by the Aliakmon and Acheloös river systems. Most cultivation is restricted to the
narrow coastlines, where typical Mediterranean-type crops, including citrus fruits,
are produced. Cereal crops are grown in scattered upland plateaus, the Thessalian
Plain, and in the northern Macedonian-Thracian coastal plain, which is the most
extensive lowland in the state. In the mountains, Mediterranean-type scrub and
pasture predominate. Although a variety of mineral ores are present—bauxite and
magnesite, especially, along with deposits of iron, copper, lead, zinc, and silver—
they exist in such small amounts that they are of little economic benefit. Given the
ruggedness of the terrain, the great extent of irregular coastline, and the paucity of
natural resources, it is little wonder that the Greek economy historically has
depended on maritime trade rather than on agriculture and manufacturing.
Macedonia, situated in the center of the peninsula, today covers 9,778 square
miles (25,333 square kilometers) of territory and boasts a population of 2.2 million
people, governed from the capital at Skopje. It is a mountainous region where the
southern Dinaric and eastern Albanian Alps meet the northern projections of the
Pindos Mountains. While a few peaks in the western, Albanian Alp range can top
6,600 feet (2,000 meters) in elevation, elsewhere summits rarely exceed 4,950 feet
(1,500 meters). The Vardar River system, which bisects the state from north to
south, provides it with its principal lowlands. On these are grown cereals, tobacco,
cotton, and some fruits as well as wine-producing vines. Close to half of the total
territory is heavily forested, but there is some upland pasture for sheep and goats,
along with localized cultivation in valleys and depressions. Mineral resources include
small deposits of zinc, lead, iron, chrome, and manganese. In times past, gold was
mined in the eastern regions.
6 THE BALKANS

Romania, with a territory in the peninsula’s northeast covering 91,699 square

miles (237,499 square kilometers) and containing 23.1 million inhabitants, is the
largest Balkan state. It is divided topographically into two basic arable zones—the
plains and tablelands of the Danube and Prut rivers in the south and east and the
rolling, forested Transylvanian Plateau—by the boomerang-shape and territorially
extensive Carpathian Mountains. Geographically, and for the most part historically,
Transylvania and its neighboring regions, situated north and west of the Car-
pathians, lie outside of the Balkan Peninsula. The southern arm of the Carpathians,
often called the Transylvanian Alps, is higher and more precipitous than the eastern,
with some peaks reaching elevations of over 6,500 feet (2,000 meters). All of the
river systems draining the southern Wallachian Plain and eastern Moldavian
Tableland flow from the Carpathians to the Danube, while those of the Transylva-
nian Plateau mostly run westward, emptying into the Tisza River on the Pannonian
Plain of Hungary. The Carpathians and the Transylvanian highlands are thickly
forested, providing pastureland for sheep and goats and some cultivation in
depressions and valleys. The extensive Wallachian and Moldavian lowlands, as well
as the western edge of Transylvania, are heavily cultivated, with grains, flax, hemp,
tobacco, and grape-producing vines among the important crops. Romania possesses
the richest and most diverse mineral resources in the Balkans. Europe’s largest
continental oil fields lie in the foothills of the southern Carpathians, and Transyl-
vania is rich in natural gas. Large deposits of salt, lignite, black and brown coal,
copper, and iron, supplemented by zinc, manganese, silver, gold, and mercury, are
mined in the Carpathians and in the Transylvanian Plateau. Bucharest, the capital,
sits on the Wallachian Plain.
Slovenia, with a territory of 7,834 square miles (20,296 square kilometers) and
a population of 1.9 million people, edges out Macedonia as the smallest state in the
peninsula. Governed from the capital at Ljubljana, it lies in the extreme northwest
within the terminal ranges of the Julian Alps, among which the highest peak reaches
9,400 feet (2,863 meters). The mountains lend the state a truly “alpine” appearance
reminiscent of Switzerland. Most all of the land not covered by mountains consists
of highly forested foothills and depressions, cut through by the upper courses of the
Sava and Drava rivers. The largest area of lowland is the Drava Basin in the east,
where grains and some fruits and vines are grown. Elsewhere, cultivation is
undertaken in the numerous depressions and valleys. Livestock pasturing and
lumbering are widespread. Mineral resources include modest deposits of oil and
natural gas, brown coal, lignite, zinc, lead, and mercury.
Yugoslavia, a federation today uniting the republics of Serbia and Montenegro
that together comprise 39,507 square miles (102,350 square kilometers) of territory
and 10.7 million people, occupies the north-central regions of the peninsula. Its
capital at Belgrade is situated strategically at the confluence of the Danube and Sava
rivers. The Dinaric Alps dominate the landscape in the south and southwest of the
 LAND, PEOPLE, AND CULTURE 7

state, and Montenegro lies almost completely within their folds. Similar to the
situation of Bosnia-Hercegovina, the state is landlocked, possessing only a short
length of Adriatic coastline in Montenegro, although the Morava River, which
originates in the extreme south, close to Macedonia, provides a relatively direct access
route linking the interior to the Aegean Sea by way of the Vardar River valley. Serbia,
much the larger of the two state partners, is only partially defined by geographic
features. These exist only for its southern half. The Dinaric ranges mark out the
boundaries to the south and west, while the northern bend of the Balkan Mountains
and the Danube River delineate the east. The northern half of Serbia’s borders is
mostly drawn over lowlands (Vojvodina and Srem) forming part of the Pannonian
Plain and generally bisects river lines, making it geographically arbitrary. South of
Belgrade the land rises into somewhat forested hill country, known as Sumadija,
which is drained by the extensive Morava River system. The full range of continental
crops are cultivated on the Pannonian lowlands and in the valleys of Sumadija. The
more densely forested mountain regions offer pasturing and some grain cultivation.
In areas of mountainous and highly barren Montenegro, Mediterranean-type
cultivation takes place. In terms of mineral resources, Montenegro boasts only
bauxite as significant, while Serbia is endowed with numerous deposits of brown
coal, lead, and zinc, along with lesser amounts of black coal and copper.

People

The Balkans’ harsh and divisive geography played an important role in shaping the
lives of its inhabitants. Mountainous terrain generally fragmented human settlement
among the scattered lowlands and highland plateaus, contributing to the rise of
strong ethnic group identities. In a rugged land where natural resources often were
limited, group cohesiveness was crucial for survival. Competitive conditions bred
ethnic cultures frequently typified by extremes in expression—communal generosity
and stubborn territoriality; overt hospitality and brutal atrocity; bouts of fun-loving
enjoyment and irrational violence. All Balkan peoples traditionally have exhibited
one common characteristic: A sense of passionate, tenacious group pride.
While the ethnographic map of the Balkans is diverse, the peninsula’s popula-
tion of approximately 69.3 million people (not including the inhabitants of
European Turkey and the millions who reside in Istanbul) essentially is comprised
of three primary groupings: Historically ancient peoples, South Slavs, and Turks. In
addition, there exist a smattering of numerically smaller groups of Gypsies, Jews,
and an assortment of other ethnics, such as Italians, Hungarians, Germans,
Ukrainians, and Russians. (See Map 2.)
Contrary to the common perception that South Slavs form the majority in the
Balkans’ total population, ancient peoples (that is, those who reasonably can trace
8 THE BALKANS

the presence of ethnic ancestors in the peninsula at least back to classical antiquity)
account for some 50 percent (roughly 35 million). The ancestors of these peoples
spoke Indo-European languages. The most familiar are the Greeks, who populate
the southern extremity of the peninsula as well as the Aegean and Ionian islands and
Crete. Their ancient origins are so well known, and their classical cultural impact
on Western Europe so recognized, that they need not be described here.
Today the Greeks generally occupy the same territories as they did in antiquity,
despite the sixth- and seventh-century Slavic invasions and settlements of their
mainland Balkan possessions, which forced most Greek speakers to the coastal
peripheries for survival. Only a long process of military reconquest by the Greek-
speaking Byzantine Empire, conducted over the subsequent two centuries, permit-
ted the Greeks to regain control of their ancient homeland’s interior. Even then,
pockets of Slavic-speaking populations survived as far south as the Peloponnese and
in the region of Macedonia. Although speculative arguments have been advanced
that the lengthy Slavic incursions into Greek-inhabited regions probably diluted the
direct genetic link between modern Greeks and their classical ancestors, these
arguments are irrelevant since language, and the self-identity that it conveys (not
DNA) is the fundamental measure of ethnic culture.
Albanians speak a unique language that is thought to have descended from
ancient Illyrian. If so, they then possess an ethnic heritage equaling that of the
Greeks. This heritage would place them among the oldest existing non-Greek ethnic
groups in all of Europe, akin in time to the Basques of Western Europe. Although
today they are confined mostly to a small territory hugging the western Balkan
coastline and its mountainous interior, in antiquity the Illyrians occupied a large
swath of the western Balkans lying to the north of the Greeks, which included
present-day Albania, northwestern Greece, Montenegro, part of Serbia, most of
Bosnia-Hercegovina, and a good part of western Macedonia.
Waves of Roman, Goth, Avar, and Slav invasions and settlements pushed the
Illyrians into the generally mountainous regions that the Albanians inhabit today.
In that rough and isolating environment, their Albanian descendants evolved as a
mostly tribalized, pastoral society divided into two distinct subgroups identified by
dialect: Ghegs and Tosks. The Ghegs, who inhabit the rugged northern regions,
developed as archetypical wild mountaineer tribes—pastoral, warlike, prone to
feuding, and resentful of outside authority. The Tosk tribes, who occupy the less
intimidating southern lowlands and their highland interior, are milder in tempera-
ment and more amenable to central authority. Four and a half centuries of Ottoman
rule over the Albanians did little to weaken the structure of their society or to
moderate their deep-rooted outlooks. Traditional aversion to unified, central
political authority retarded the growth of national consciousness among them until
late into the nineteenth century, a situation that made them vulnerable to threats
from highly nationalist neighbors. Only intervention by the European Great Powers
 LAND, PEOPLE, AND CULTURE 9

in the early twentieth century preserved the Albanians as a nation and a state, and
they have persisted as the least modernized of all Balkan peoples into the present.
The Romanians claim an ethnic heritage as old as that of the Albanians. They
speak a Latin-based language that, in Romanian national thinking, derives from the
Roman occupation of ancient Dacia during the second and third centuries. Dacia
once included the territories of present-day Romania and the Danubian Plain in
northern Bulgaria. It was conquered and occupied by the Roman Emperor Trajan
(98-117) in the early second century. According to Romanian ethnic theory, when
Emperor Aurelian (270-75) withdrew his legions south of the Danube in 270, the
Latinized native Dacians remained behind, surviving successive waves of Germanic,
Slavic, and Turkic invaders by taking refuge in the Carpathian Mountains, from
which they reemerged in the thirteenth century ethnically unscathed to occupy the
Wallachian Plain, the Moldavian tablelands, and the Transylvanian Plateau, where
they have remained to the present. This contention is contested by many non-
Romanians, who reject the possibility of Latin-Dacian survival under the adverse
ethnic conditions that held in the area during the centuries of foreign invasions.
They suggest that the Romanians originated south of the Danube as nomadic
pastoral Latin speakers who migrated into present-day Romania some time after the
arrival of the Turkic Magyars in the Danubian Basin during the late ninth century.
This contention partly is based on the continued widespread existence of pastoralists
in every area of the Balkans known as Vlahs, who also speak Latin-based language.
In fact, the name of the Romanian region of Wallachia is derived from that of those
wanderers, meaning “Land of the Vlahs.” The Romanians counter this argument
by insisting that the Vlahs spread south into the Balkans from Romania. The
question of Romanian ethnic origins is not yet definitively settled.
As for the Vlahs themselves, the theory of their Dacian origin is contested by
one that considers them descendants of Latinized Thracians, an ancient people
contemporaneous with the Greeks, Illyrians, and Dacians, who inhabited the
Thracian Plain (to which they lent their name), the southern and western regions
of today’s Bulgaria, and the eastern portions of present-day Macedonia. They were
a tribal people active in livestock breeding, farming, and ore mining. Close and
continuous commercial contacts with ancient Greek colonies along the Black Sea
coast initially led to their early partial Hellenization, but conquest by Rome in the
first century B.C.E. and six centuries of continuous Roman imperial presence resulted
in the Thracians’ Latinization. The inundation of South Slavs into the Thracians’
homelands during the sixth and seventh centuries led to their absorption into Slavic
culture or their taking to the high mountains, where they subsisted as scattered,
small groups of primitive pastoralists. By the thirteenth century they acquired the
name Vlah. Their wandering lifestyle, small numbers, and wide geographical
dispersion prevented them from forming a nation during the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. Today they constitute an ethnic minority in all of the central
10 THE BALKANS

and southern Balkan states, and their total number is dwindling (perhaps less than
100,000) because of their continual assimilation into the dominant ethnic groups
of those states.
South Slavs constitute the second major ethnic component of the Balkan
population, numbering some 29 million people (over 41 percent of the peninsula’s
inhabitants), divided today among seven major groups: Bosnians, Bulgarians,
Croats, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Serbs, and Slovenes. The South Slavs form
one of the three primary branches of the Slavic-speaking family of peoples in Europe,
the others being the West and the East Slavs. The ancestors of all three entered
Eastern Europe during the fifth through seventh centuries from a common
homeland thought to have been located somewhere in the vicinity of the great Pripet
Marshes, which straddle the border separating today’s Ukraine and Belarus. They
came as part of the lengthy human migratory process that is commonly called the
Barbarian invasions of Europe. Initially all of the Slav tribes must have spoken
dialects of a common Slavic language shaped in the Pripet homeland. But the tribal
migrations in three generally different directions and into three separate environ-
ments, coupled with the passage of time and the later intrusion and settlement of
non-Slavic peoples into the central areas of Eastern Europe, resulted in the formation
of three distinct subgroups of Slavic speakers, corresponding to the western,
southern, and eastern tribal groups.
The South Slavic tribal groups moved south and southwest from their Pripet
homeland, eventually entering the Byzantine-controlled Balkan Peninsula as either
allies of or refugees from the invading Turkic Avars during the second half of the
sixth century. Their search for a new, permanent homeland proved successful. Today
their descendants solidly inhabit virtually all of the northwestern, central, and
southeastern regions of the Balkans.
Turks comprise a third ethnic component of the Balkan population. Although
today numerically small—a little over 1 million people (about 2 percent of the total
population)—they have played a role in shaping the history of the Balkans far
beyond their numbers.
In late antiquity the rolling plains of the Danube and Prut rivers in the Balkans’
northeast served Turkic tribes from the Eurasian steppes as an open door into the
heart of the peninsula and the riches of the Eastern Roman Empire. Huns and related
tribes swept through the Balkans in the fifth and sixth centuries, followed by the
Avars and their allies in the sixth and seventh. Among these latter were the Bulgars,
who established a state south of the Danube. Unlike the Avars, whose settlements
in the Balkans proved transitory, the Bulgar state persisted in the face of concerted
Byzantine pressures. By the ninth century the Bulgars were challenging the
Byzantine Empire for political hegemony in the Balkans, but by that time they also
were well on the way toward ethnic assimilation into their Slavic-speaking subject
population. The conversion of the Turkic Bulgar ruling elite to Orthodox Chris-
 LAND, PEOPLE, AND CULTURE 11

tianity at midcentury opened the gate to their rapid and total Slavic assimilation.
Within a hundred years of the Bulgar conversion, most traces of their Turkic origins
had disappeared, except for their name—the Bulgars had been transformed into
Slavic Bulgarians.
Oguz, Pecheneg, and Cuman Turkic tribes appeared in the Balkans between
the ninth and eleventh centuries. Most of them eventually suffered an ethnic fate
similar to the Bulgars and left little lasting impression, although the Gagauz Turks
of Bessarabia, a region lying east of the Prut River (now known as Moldova), and
some Turks living today in the eastern Balkans may be direct ethnic descendants of
those medieval Turkic interlopers. Additionally, the Ottoman Turks’ five-century
rule over most of the Balkans established numerous scattered enclaves of Turkish-
speaking groups throughout much of the southern portion of the peninsula, with a
heavy concentration in the southeastern region of ancient Thrace.
Among the scattered additional ethnic groups that individually populate the
Balkans in small numbers but cumulatively total a bit over 4 million people (usually
lumped together under the category of “Other” in demographic statistical tables and
accounting for approximately 6 percent of the peninsula’s inhabitants), the Jews
deserve notice. The Balkan Jews are predominantly of southern, Sephardic origin.
While some are descendants of ancient Mediterranean Jewish merchant colonists,
most are the heirs of Spanish Jews who were expelled from Spain following the late
fifteenth century. Numerous Spanish Jews settled in the Ottoman eastern Mediter-
ranean, where they were granted recognition of self-government (on an equal footing
with the Christians of the empire) and additional privileges, primarily within the
Ottoman commercial class. Centered on the old Byzantine Greek port of Thessal-
oniki, the Sephardic Jews came to play an important role in the international
maritime commerce of the Ottoman Empire in the eastern Mediterranean.
The lack of Ottoman anti-Semitism carried over into the post-Ottoman Balkan
world. The independent Balkan states of the twentieth century continued to
demonstrate a tolerance for Jews that was exceptional compared to conditions
elsewhere in Europe. Anti-Semitism in Romania between the second half of the
nineteenth century and the 1940s was caused by an inundation of Ashkenazi Jewish
refugees fleeing rising Russian nationalist chauvinism during the first half of that
period, the effects of the Bolshevik revolution and civil war in Russia, and the rabid
Polish nationalism of newly refounded Poland. The influx of these Jews mixed with
abominable social conditions in Romania to create a volatile situation. The
difference in Romanian perceptions between these northern Jews, many of whom
arrived as land managers for wealthy Romanian absentee landlords, and the southern
Jews, who were considered traditionally benevolent trading partners, sparked a
radical reaction on the part of the Romanian peasantry, who were then suffering
under the region’s most inequitable land distribution system. Of all the peoples of
the Balkans, only the Romanians and the Croats, who historically were tied to
12 THE BALKANS

Catholic Central-Eastern Europe, spawned native neofascist, anti-Semitic move-

ments before World War II and conducted Nazi-style anti-Semitic policies during
that conflict. After the German takeover of the Balkans in 1941, tens of thousands
of Jews in the peninsula perished, especially in Greece and Serbia, where German
occupation freed the Nazis to work their will. As happened elsewhere in Eastern
Europe following the war, the majority of the surviving Balkan Jews emigrated to
the newly founded state of Israel.
All “Other” ethnic groups exist as minorities in the present Balkan states.
Gypsies, who number around 400,000, are found in every state, predominantly as
members of the more economically strapped social classes, often earning meager
livelihoods as beggars, peddlers, musicians, or black marketeers. In the past,
Ottoman and Habsburg defense policies resulted in settling thousands of military
colonists, hailing from disparate ethnic backgrounds, on their borders to guard
against possible enemy incursions. Today close to half a million Hungarians reside
in the northern Serbian province of Vojvodina, where they are joined by fewer
numbers of Czechs and Slovaks, to name just two groups. Significant numbers of
Hungarians and Germans also are present in the Transylvanian regions of Romania.
A large Italian population is found in the Istrian Peninsula of Croatia. Descendants
of Mongol-Tatars live on the tableland of Dobrudzha in both Bulgaria and Romania.
Russians, Ukrainians, Ruthenians—the list can go on—join those already men-
tioned in a crazy-quilt pattern of small enclaves scattered throughout all of the
northern Balkan states, from Slovenia to Romania. The striking ethnic diversity that
the “Other” group lends the Balkans provide the peninsula with one of its most
distinctive characteristics.

Culture

Although consideration of ethnicity inescapably deals with culture on the most basic
level, concentrating on ethnic culture alone offers historical study little more than
a localized spotlight for comprehending the human past. An exclusively ethnic
historical approach is acceptable if focused on a single society. Any attempt to
understand the broader historical reality by relying exclusively on ethnicity becomes
bogged down in the complexities of ethnic diversity, raising the problem of
differentiating the proverbial forest from the trees. General history must approach
ethnic diversity within a context that makes the development and interactions of
numerous ethnic groups comprehensible. This approach can be achieved by dealing
with human culture on the higher level of civilization. Civilization represents the
cultural forest; its member ethnic cultural groups constitute the trees.
Three civilizations coexist among the peoples of the Balkans today: The Orthodox
Eastern European, the Western European, and the Islamic, of which the Orthodox
 LAND, PEOPLE, AND CULTURE 13

European is primary. Orthodox civilization was born in the Byzantine Empire, in

which the Balkans played an integral role. Following the Islamic Turkish conquest of
Byzantine Anatolia in the eleventh century, the Balkans became the chief repository
of Orthodoxy, seconded by Russia, to which the Balkan version of Orthodox
civilization had been exported a century earlier. So ingrained was Orthodox civilization
among the Balkan peoples that it survived, with some modifications, centuries of
official Islamic preeminence during the era of Ottoman domination. The same can
be said regarding the import of Western European civilization, which held firm sway
in the region’s northwestern corner since medieval times but entered the Orthodox
lands in force with the national movements of the nineteenth century, movements
with which the Orthodox Balkan populations still are contending.
That two European civilizations exist may strike some as odd. When westerners
speak of Europe in cultural terms, they commonly apply certain assumptions. These
assumptions are based on the historical developmental phases or periods that
occurred in Western Europe, such as the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, the Reforma-
tion, the Counter-Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and
the rise of modern liberal democracy, nationalism, and the nation-state. If such
assumptions are not applied, then economic ones, once again based on Western
experiences, are—progression from slaveholding, through feudalism and mercantil-
ism, to the Industrial Revolution and market capitalism.
In the Balkans, only the Slovenes and Croats who inhabit the northwestern
corner can be included as European because of their lengthy ties to Western
European developments. As for the other Balkan peoples, their historical experiences
do not coincide with the Western pattern. Their heritage is bound directly to the
Byzantine Empire, which was nothing less than the eastern half of the Roman
Empire that survived the “decline and fall” of the western by a thousand years and
in which the living traditions of the classical world never disappeared. Thus, they
did not experience a Dark Ages or a Renaissance similar to that of the Western
Europeans. The close partnership of church and state in Byzantine society precluded
the emergence of a Western-style Reformation and Counter-Reformation, while the
theocratic society imposed on the Byzantine Balkans by centuries of Ottoman
Islamic rule hindered any sort of secular Scientific Revolution or Enlightenment.
When in the nineteenth century the peoples of the Byzantine-Ottoman Balkans
embraced Western European concepts of nationalism, the nation-state, and liberal
democracy, along with their scientific industrial-capitalist economic foundations,
they did so like botanists attempting to produce new plant strains—by grafting them
onto a different but closely related cultural trunk. They could do so because neither
they nor the Western Europeans doubted that they were European, despite their
developmental differences.
A certain set of unique cultural attributes are European. One obviously is the
Greco-Roman heritage. The hyphenation of the term is important. It expresses the
14 THE BALKANS

cultural reality of the Hellenic legacy, in that it is composed of two related but
different traditions. At its base lies the sense of human reality created by the classical
Greeks: The perception that the individual human is the supreme expression of
universal perfection, serving as a standard against which all elements of creation are
measured. That reality was reflected in every manifestation of classical Greek culture,
explaining its emphasis on ideal realism and sense of timeless universality in every
art form; establishing the context for mythological and philosophical development;
and spawning traits of humaneness and rationality in seeking to understand the
physical world. It also created in the Greek mentality deep-seated propensities
toward mysticism, ritualism, and symbolism concerning the human relationship
with the supernatural world.
When the Romans began their conquest of the eastern Mediterranean world
in the second century B.C.E., they recognized the superiority of Greek culture in
the more esoteric realms of human experience. Because of their agrarian roots, the
Romans’ culture stressed the value of the individual but also of the need for the
individual’s strong commitment to a central authority that represented the will of
society and was charged with ensuring the community’s maintenance, territorial
expansion, and defense. Individualism, coupled with civic responsibilities, nur-
tured in the Romans a practicality in dealing with the world. Out of those traits
grew their highly developed predilections for legalism, organizational efficiency,
militarism, administration—all of the qualities needed for upholding their
centrally governed, agricultural world. Practicality also fostered in them superior
engineering, planning, and technical skills unmatched by any of their contempo-
raries. The Greeks’ realism and rationality sat well with the Romans’ practicality
and orderliness, so the Roman conquerors flung open the door to wholesale
cultural partnership.
The combination of the two cultures was not completely harmonious. Roman
copies of Greek originals displayed subtle but marked differences. The Roman copy
had about it a noticeable sense of concrete photographic realism that was completely
lacking in the elegant, refined, and idealized Greek original. This dual quality
permeated all aspects of the Greco-Roman heritage. It was sustained through the
use of both the Greek and the Latin languages in the Roman Mediterranean world,
and the speakers of each considered those of the other culturally inferior. Latin
speakers predominated in the western Roman provinces; Greek speakers did so in
the eastern ones.
When the Emperor Diocletian (284-305) divided the Roman Empire into two
administrative halves to stabilize the imperial succession and to better defend the
empire’s far-flung borders against foreign enemies, he did so along the invisible line
marking the human cultural divide in the northwestern corner of the Balkan Peninsula
separating the Greek East and Latin West. (This line ran through the territory of
today’s Bosnia-Hercegovina.) Although his administrative action failed to solve the
 LAND, PEOPLE, AND CULTURE 15

grave military and administrative problems facing the empire, Diocletian’s splitting of
the Roman state succeeded in institutionalizing the demarcation—creating the
hyphen—between the two branches of Greco-Roman civilization. After him, the two
branches developed along increasingly divergent lines.
A second common European attribute is the vital role played by peoples new
to the classical Hellenic world—the so-called barbarians—in forging the birth of a
European cultural reality. Without the fifth- through ninth-century barbarian
migrations into Roman territories, one cannot imagine Europe as anything other
than a geographical term. The incursions destroyed much of classical Hellenism,
but that which survived was injected with large doses of the barbarians’ native
cultures, creating a cultural mixture that became the alloy in which Europe was cast.
Mostly Germanic peoples inundated the western, Latin-speaking areas of the
Greco-Roman world. Slavs and Turks settled in its eastern, Greek-speaking Balkan
region. After the dust of the initial German invasions cleared, those interlopers
established settled states of their own, loosely modeled after the Western Empire
they had destroyed. The Germanic states retained a bastardized form of Latin
Hellenism by means of the Roman Catholic church, which survived the disruption
of the invasions to serve as the cultural cement that lent them a measure of cohesion.
The Slavs, who began entering the Eastern Roman Balkans in the sixth century,
never managed to destroy that portion of the classical Hellenic state. Their inroads
cost the empire some territory, but its political, military, and economic strength
ensured its survival. The coming of the Slavs facilitated the transformation of the
East Roman into the “Byzantine” Empire, and Hellenic continuity was preserved.
When Slavic states developed in the Balkans, most did so under the strong cultural
influence of neighboring Byzantium. A living Hellenic tradition was imposed on
the newly settled Slavs by the sheer force of local Byzantine predominance. The
Greek language gained sway over those Slavs whom the empire managed to
incorporate directly within its borders. Those who remained outside of the empire
were brought into close cultural association with it through the invention of a
uniquely Slavic written language—the Cyrillic—which was inspired by Byzantine
Christian missionaries and paralleled Greek literary forms.
One last and most crucial attribute defines Europe culturally: Christianity.
Without it, the other two attributes are meaningless. Although Greco-Roman
tradition and the input of new peoples are important components in Europe’s cultural
definition, their combination with Christianity is necessary to delineate it completely.
No one today considers Syria, Jordan, Egypt, or Libya European states, yet their
inhabitants once were as Hellenized and overrun by outsiders as were those of
France, Italy, Greece, or Bulgaria. In the former case, the outsiders were seventh-
century Arabs, who brought with them the newly born worldview expressed by
Islam. Although the Islamic civilization borrowed heavily from the Judeo-Christian
and Hellenic traditions, equally heavy doses of Mesopotamian and native Arabic
16 THE BALKANS

traditions ensured its unique core cultural identity. The stages of Islam’s historical
development bore little resemblance to those of Europe until relatively recent times.
Christianity is the seminal factor in identifying Europe. In fact, the term
“Europe,” as commonly used today, did not appear until the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries; prior to that time the traditional term was “Christen-
dom.” Only those peoples who have assimilated the Christian worldview completely
have ever been considered European. Since the early Middle Ages, those non-
Christian peoples who entered geographical Europe and found themselves in contact
with the region’s Christian societies were forced to choose between joining them by
converting or risking possible annihilation at their hands. This fact explains the
importance of Christian conversion for relative latecomers, such as Bulgarians,
Czechs, Hungarians, Poles, and Russians, into the European world. Their conver-
sions were their passkeys to membership in the European community. The borders
of Europe became (and remain) synonymous with the limits of mainstream
Christian culture.
Instead of a single European civilization stemming from the demise of
Hellenism by Christianity and barbarian incursions, two basic European variants
emerged because of the cultural division within the parent Greco-Roman civiliza-
tion. They can be considered analogous to twins, since the two sibling civilizations
share a preponderance of fundamental traits but are different enough in character
and mentality to ensure their separate individuality. Both essentially express the same
Christian perception of reality framed in common Hellenic terms, but the forms of
expression differ. The difference depends on the branch of Greco-Roman tradition
out of which each sprang.
That which emerged in the western part of the old Greco-Roman world couched
Christianity in terms of the legality, practicality, and militancy peculiar to the
Romans’ hierarchical Latin Hellenic culture. Latin-based Roman Catholicism,
which institutionalized these basic traits in a Christian context, epitomized the
cultural nature of Western Europe at its most elemental level. Every ethnic society
that espoused the Catholic form of Christianity and adopted the Latin alphabet for
its written language became a human component of Western Europe. Its twin
emerged from the eastern, Greek half of the Hellenic world, where Christianity was
expressed in the highly mystical, ritualized, and symbolic universality of Greek
culture. The Christian institutionalization of those traits occurred in the Byzantine
Empire’s Greek-based Orthodox Christianity. Unlike the Catholic West, which
brooked no deviation from its Latin-based culture, more metaphysical Orthodoxy
demonstrated a multicultural tolerance. Societies espousing Orthodox Christianity
were free to do so in their various native languages, but collectively they constituted
members of Orthodox Eastern Europe.
Today 64 percent (44.3 million) of the 69.3 million inhabitants of the Balkans
are Orthodox Christians, constituting clear majorities in the populations of Bulgaria,
 LAND, PEOPLE, AND CULTURE 17

Greece, Macedonia, Romania, and rump Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro),

while in Albania and Bosnia-Hercegovina they represent the largest religious
minority. Orthodox European civilization is the historically seminal civilized culture
of the Balkan Peninsula’s majority population. This fact, not geography or ethnicity,
definitively places the Balkans in Eastern Europe.
 P A R T O N E

Era of
Byzantine Hegemony
600–1355

By the opening of the seventh century, the eastern half of the classical Roman Empire
had nearly completed its evolution into the Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire. Its
Hellenism was couched mainly in terms of a highly mystical and ritualized Orthodox
Christianity. Its governance was conceived of as an organic partnership between state
and church, personified by an emperor who was considered God’s viceroy on earth
and the thirteenth apostle of Christ. It epitomized the majesty of the divinely ordained
Christian world-state, expressed by the motto: One God, one Emperor, one Empire.
It was militarily and economically powerful. Little wonder, then, that it exerted an
overwhelming attraction on the primitive Slavic and Turkic barbarians who came
to settle in the Balkan Peninsula. The newcomers found the influence of Byzantium
irresistible and thus were raised, over time, to the level of “civilized” societies. When
they succeeded in founding their own states, these were modeled on the empire,
ultimately creating a Byzantine-like multicultural commonwealth to which they
made significant contributions in their own right. When Byzantium collapsed for
half a century as the result of the Fourth Crusade, its Balkan satellites vied for its
20 THE BALKANS

imperial mantle. And when the frail, resurrected empire underwent a lingering, slow
death in the face of mounting Western threats and Ottoman assaults, its Balkan
cultural offspring briefly surpassed it in regional preeminence.
 CHAPTER ONE

East Romans,
Slavs, and Bulgars

During the late third and fourth centuries the Eastern Roman Empire managed
to weather the storm of successive incursions by peoples from the north. Survival
came at a cost. When the Germanic Visigoths successfully sought refuge from the
Huns within the Eastern Empire’s borders in 376, the situation was unprecedented.
Emperor Valens (364-78) bungled the job of peacefully integrating them and a war
resulted, in which the mounted Goths crushed the Roman infantry and killed Valens
in the Battle of Adrianople (378). Learning their lesson, subsequent eastern emperors
used such assimilation policies as administrative and monetary bribery and inter-
ethnic marriages to pacify the leaders of the various invading peoples. After initially
ravaging wide areas of the empire’s Balkan provinces, the Visigoth Alaric (395-410),
the Hun leader Attila (445-53), and the Ostrogoth ruler Theodoric (471-526) all
were successfully bribed by money or titles to move their activities into the Western
Roman Empire. When the Avars, Slavs, and Bulgars appeared on the borders of the
Balkan provinces in the sixth and seventh centuries, the Eastern Empire’s leaders
and Balkan subjects had little inkling that dealing with them would prove any
different or that the newcomers would transform the demographic and political
landscape of the Balkans.

The Balkans and Eastern Rome to the Mid-Sixth Century

The Eastern Roman Empire’s success in escaping the fate of the Western Empire at
the barbarians’ hands was due to its superior economic and demographic situation.
The Western Empire essentially was agrarian, sparsely populated, and commercially
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
 “You couldn’t do it, John; it wouldn’t be—as far as I can see—right; and
though Honor is a love-child, and her father—according to you—would be
in his proper place at Botany Bay, it isn’t for us to malign him to his own
daughter. No, John,” the old woman continued, for notwithstanding her
jealousy of Honor there existed in the old woman’s heart a certain fund of
good sense, as well as kindliness of nature, to fall back upon in time of
need,—“no, John, we must trust to Providence that all will come right in
time. There’s good, after all, in Honor; and some day, perhaps, she will
have done with whimsies, and take at last to sense.”
 CHAPTER XIII.

LADY MILL HAS BUSINESS ON HAND.

“Did you in all your life ever see anyone so changed as that pretty Mrs.
Beacham? Not less pretty, I don’t mean that; but she looks pale and serious,
and to my thinking still more like a lady than she did when she was
married!”
The words were Kate Vavasour’s—bright, cheerful, merry Kate—who
was walking home on Christmas-day from church with her brother Horace
—a “public man” now, and a very occasional and not over-willing visitor to
his old home.
Several events of importance, events influencing more or less the well-
being of certain individuals connected with this story, had occurred during
the swiftly-passing months which had changed the year from midsummer to
winter.
To begin with: Arthur Vavasour (who after his farewell meeting in
Danescourt grounds had not again seen Honor Beacham) had, according to
expectation, been made one with Sophy Duberly before the altar. In less
than a month from his coming of age, the marriage ceremony was
celebrated with becoming pomp in London, the “happy pair” departing
immediately afterwards for the Continent, bent—according to the
newspapers—on a “lengthened tour abroad.”
Nor did any long period elapse before Horace Vavasour also broke the
weary chain that bound him to home. He had yearned for the long-hoped-
for emancipation; but he experienced—a good deal to his surprise—when
the time came for bidding adieu to Gillingham, very little of the exultation
which he might naturally have expected to have been his portion. All
unknown to himself, the home-raised lad had grown attached to the old
place. The grumblings and complainings, the discontent, and the longing for
change, were more a habit with him than the result of conviction; and when
the hour of parting came, and he looked back on the tearful faces of his two
sisters, standing gazing after him on the steps of the marble portico, Horace
would gladly have given up all his cherished hopes to remain with those
dear fellow-victims in the old home that he was leaving.
 As was only natural, however, those regrets were not of long duration.
Lady Millicent had not made home so sweet to the children committed to
her care, that they should continue for a lengthened period to pine for the
few blessings which that home afforded. By swift degrees, regret for the
past ceased to have a place in the memory of the absent one; whilst the
recollection of the many privations, the dulness, and the tyrannous rules of
far-away Gillingham, remained fixed, as with a sculptor’s chisel, on his
heart for ever.
Kate was during that, to her, dull Christmas time, the only daughter of
the house at home, for Rhoda (an extremely unusual proceeding) had been
allowed to accept of a pressing invitation from the Guernseys to spend a
month with them in Paris.
“Two women were grinding at the mill,” Kate said merrily to her
brother, “and a jolly grind it was too! And it’s just as well that one was
taken, and a great bore that the other—meaning me—was left behind.”
Horace, who had very good-naturedly given up several far pleasanter
engagements for his sister’s sake, and who purposed spending a dull week
at the Chace with the kind purpose of enlivening poor Kate’s worse than
solitude, pinched her cheek playfully.
“All the same a hundred years hence,” he said; and forthwith there
commenced on both sides a series of questions and answers necessitated by
the separation of several months which had taken place between them.
There was much to say. They were on their way to church when the
conversation about Arthur and his wife began—about Arthur, who was said
to be by no means cured of his reckless habits of extravagance, and whom
Horace had parted with only a week before under the portico of the Grand
Hotel in Paris.
“I didn’t think Sophy improved in looks; but then there is a reason, I
believe, for that; and besides, she had been making lion-seeing a toil instead
of a pleasure. She is a jolly girl, though; and I consider Arthur to be one of
the luckiest fellows I know.”
“I wonder if he thinks so himself,” mused Kate.
“I daresay not. Do we ever value any of our blessings till we lose them?
Do you think I cared much about this dear old place till I found myself tied
to that precious office as a paid clerk? Sounds pretty considerable mean, as
the Yankees say, doesn’t it, when one’s mamma has something about sixty
thousand per annum?”
“But you like it, Racy. It’s better than this, I’m sure. Ah, how I should
like to be you! and how I envy—no, I don’t envy Rhoda, because I’m glad
she’s happy, poor dear; but I often think what fun she’s having, and I
wonder whether it will ever be my turn to go away.”
“Your turn? God knows, my poor Kitty! It takes a longer head than mine
or yours to fathom my lady’s projects. I heard from old Randolph the last
thing before I left town yesterday that she was after some underhand work
about the entail. She’ll never rest, I feel certain, till she upsets that clause,
or whatever they call it, in my grandfather’s will which gives the reins of
power to Arthur after he attains the age of twenty-five. Poor old Atty! I
foresee no end of worry and bother for him if the news of this gets about;
but we must hope the best, as Randolph says, while we prepare ourselves
for the worst.”
Old Josh Randolph, as he was familiarly called, had been for very many
years the trusted solicitor and man of business of the Vavasour family. A
better-hearted and a more truly honest man—as all who knew him allowed
—never existed than Joshua Randolph, as one proof of which it may be
recorded in his favour that he had made no large fortune out of the quarrels
and cantankerousness of his clients. Neither—to his credit be it recorded—
had he ever taken undue advantage of their necessities. Young Vavasour,
who had known “Josh” from the time when the heir-apparent was a lad at
Eton, had had recourse to the old man’s advice in many a boyish scrape,
and later, when the handsome youth had grown to be a man, and his
“entanglements” were of a more complicated and less venial character, old
Josh was still the attorney to whose counsels he turned, and who had never
(all praise to him) been detected in that unfeeling act of pilfering, namely,
that of making occasions for the swelling of his lawyer’s bill.
This rarely excellent individual had heard with regret and shame that
work for the long-robed gentlemen was likely, through Lady Millicent’s
bitter discontent, to be ere long cut out. He made no secret of his opinion on
the subject, and Lady Millicent, finding that the family lawyer was not the
“man for her money,” soon removed the light of her countenance from the
steady, old-fashioned firm of which Mr. Randolph was the senior partner.
Her ladyship’s first visit in the Lincoln’s-inn chambers (where old Josh
received her with a slow and respectful courtesy, but without a grain of
subservience either in his speech or manner) was also the last. Far too slow,
perhaps indeed too rigidly honest, for the requirements of the maîtresse
femme was the steady-going anti-progress solicitor. There was something in
the very air of that business-room of his, an air redolent of musty
respectability, that was utterly out of harmony and keeping with Lady
Millicent’s grand manner, her rapid energetic movements, and the
authoritative mode of speech which she habitually adopted. The experiment
had been duly tried of taking the old man by surprise and startling him into
acquiescence; but never—it did not greatly grieve the faithful Josh that so it
was—did the great lady of Gillingham give a second thought to the
inhabitant of that dingy room piled high with japanned deed-boxes and with
ancient faded folios. The lawyer’s absence of sympathy in her ladyship’s
cause was evidenced in every response he made to her questions and
suggestions. A cautious man he was and a composed—one not to be lightly
moved from his opinions, and who deemed the will of the late Earl of
Gillingham a document almost sacred in its character. When Lady Millicent
astonished the clerks at Messrs. Randolph and Bretts’ by the apparition of
her stately person, she was far indeed from imagining that anything short of
the most obsequious compliance with her wishes, and the most thorough
and flattering approbation of her views and projects, would be the result of
her condescension; and to a certain degree there was justification for her
expectations. On the face of it, and at the first cursory view of the
unmotherly mother’s purpose, there was certainly something that was, at the
least, plausible, to justify her undertaking. The late earl’s will had been
made very late in life, and long after Lady Millicent had been taught (no
difficult task) to consider herself the future possessor, during her natural
life, of that rich inheritance. In causing the important clause which deposed
after a certain period the mother regnante in favour of the grown-up son,
Lord Gillingham had, in his daughter’s opinion, departed in a most
unjustifiable manner from the ways of his forefathers. Manifestly (as it was
her purpose to prove) it was flagrantly unjust that such a will should stand.
Long ago she had taken (privately) high legal opinions on the subject. She
had consulted law-books, and entered largely into the question of
precedents; the result of all which exertion and study was the visit to
Lincoln’s-inn, which had been productive of nothing save anger and
mortification. But because Lady Millicent could “make nothing” of the old
lawyer, who was staunch in his adherence to Arthur Vavasour’s interests, it
by no means followed that she felt any doubt either as to the rectitude of her
project, or the advisableness of pursuing it to the end. She was a woman—
as we know—of determined character, and, moreover, one in whom
difficulty and opposition only increased in a tenfold degree the desire to
succeed; so, without any unnecessary delay, she opened negotiations with
another legal adviser, who took a different and more satisfactory view of the
matter than that adopted by the uncompromising Josh; and one consequence
of this proceeding was the remark made by Horace Vavasour to his sister
Kate, on the ill consequences likely to accrue to Arthur from the bare
rumour even of the proceeding in question.
“But how can it hurt Atty so very much?” Kate asked. She was puzzled,
and not without reason, by the anomaly, that Arthur, who had married that
“immense” heiress, and of whom the millionaire Mr. Duberly was said to be
so fond, could be injured in any way by the report of Lady Millicent’s law-
proceedings.
“How!” Horace repeated hesitatingly, and then broke out: “How! Why
because from the time he was sixteen—from my poor father’s death almost
—poor Atty has played the fool. And such a fool! Not having the most
remote idea either of the value of money or of the wickedness of men and
women; with our good father in his grave, and with—but we won’t talk of
her. Poor old Atty! How often in those times that seem so long ago now,
and so miserable—and yet what almost children we both were—he and I
have crept at night into each other’s rooms to consult in our blind ignorance
on what could by any possibility be done! Such a heap of silly ideas as we
propounded then; such methods as we turn by turn proposed to keep the
knowledge of poor Atty’s bills and foolishness from my mother!”
“I daresay that it would have been much better had she known it all
then,” suggested Kate.
“Of course it would have been a thousand times better,” rejoined Horace,
who was beginning to show some deference to his sister’s opinions; “but
how were we to find courage enough to be open? I ask you, Kate—and no
one could answer the question better—whether milady is the kind of mother
to whom the most morally courageous lad in existence could, without a
good deal of winding-up, confess that he had run-up bills, had betted on the
great boat-race, had been to the Jews, and, in short, was no more worthy to
be called her son?”
“Poor dear Atty! I don’t wonder he couldn’t do it; and I suppose (I can
guess now, when I remember all the trouble he so often seemed to be in)
that those bills never were paid, and that—”
“Not only not paid, but more, to the tune of thousands upon thousands,
added to their amount. And then the Jews! But what’s the use of telling you,
child, about such things? Here we are at the church-door, and we shall find
milady—God forgive her!—saying her prayers with as much devotion as if
—”
“Hush,” remonstrated Kate, feeling the indecorum, especially standing
as they two did, on God’s-acre, of speaking harsh truths concerning their
only remaining parent; “hush, Racy dear, she is our mother; let us try to
remember it, however much she may do to put the fact out of our heads.”

“Did you ever see any one so changed as that pretty Mrs. Beacham? Still
more like a lady even than she used to be—I mean, she hasn’t the same
fresh country look that everyone admired so before. Mr. Delmaine thinks
her both out of health and out of spirits; he said so yesterday afternoon to
me when mamma and I went to the church to see the decorations. She
attends to her class, though, at the school just the same as ever, and gets the
children on wonderfully with their singing. How well they sang the anthem
to-day! and all, Mr. Delmaine says, thanks to Mrs. John Beacham.”
Rather to Kate’s disappointment, her brother did not enter with much
apparent interest into the question of Honor’s illness or her merits. And yet
he was interested in John’s pretty, pensive-looking wife, more interested
than could well be explained to the young girl walking by his side. There
were many circumstances in Honor’s short life which were perforce
unknown to the high-born and carefully-reared Katherine, whose secluded
life kept her very little au fait of the doings and sayings of the outer world.
Of the former intimacy of her brother at Updown Paddocks she had heard
little or nothing; nor, though it was more than probable that the “ower true
tale” of Honor’s birth had reached Miss Vavasour’s ears, was the subject
one which could well be touched upon with a discreetly-brought-up young
lady. Under these circumstances, it is only natural that Horace Vavasour
should have manifested some unwillingness to pursue the subject touched
upon by his sister. Concerning one cause, amongst others, of Mrs. John
Beacham’s lowness of spirits he might have entertained his own ideas, but
those ideas he, for the moment, wisely kept to himself.
 CHAPTER XIV.

HONOR FEELS LIKE A “LADY.”

Of all the many changes that had taken place amongst the characters in my
story, none was more thorough, even though its features might be less
boldly marked, than that which had gradually crept over the household of
excellent John Beacham. From the moment when he dealt the blow that
levelled his wife’s worthless parent to the ground, John had never been
exactly the same man. A sense of failure, of a disastrous fall in his own
esteem, was in some measure the cause of this woeful alteration: but there
was more, and for worse than this, at the bottom of his apparent
moroseness, of his often sullen temper, and of what his mother called his
“silent ways.” There was far worse indeed than this—far worse than any
morbid impression that he himself had sunk in the opinion of the world at
large; for there was the sight of Honor’s altered face, and a near prospect,
nearer day by day, of some cruel domestic change for this honest, single-
hearted man, whose youth and manhood had hitherto passed so
uneventfully.
The summer had passed away, the autumn-time had come and gone;
from the hedge-rows of the Paddocks the last lingering leaves had fallen,
and another new year was about, with the accustomed rejoicings, to be
ushered in, but still things had not improved in John’s altered home. No
sunshine of the heart brightened up the old walls, and yet, for all that inside
there was gloom, it was necessary, for old custom’s sake, that the show of
merriment should be kept up; for Christmas-time was nigh at hand, and
hospitality, as well as jollity, had, time out of mind, been, at that festive
season, the order of the day at Peartree-house. To give and distribute largely
and ungrudgingly at the dying-out of the old year had ever been an
institution in Mrs. Beacham’s family. “The Turtons,” she was wont to say
(John’s mother was—as of course all the world knew—a Turton of
Cradock, in the West Riding of York) “The Turtons always kep a good table
at Christmas-time both for rich and poor, in their own county; and I’m not
going to do different, though this is Sandyshire. Christmas comes but once a
year, and it’s only right that when it does come, them as can afford it should
give them as can’t their bellies full.”
In furtherance of this charitable object, preparations for feeding the
hungry began betimes in the spacious kitchen of Peartree-house. No
stronger proof could be adduced of the fact, that albeit often cross,
disagreeable, and snappish in the privacy of home, Mrs. Beacham was, au
fond, generous and kind-hearted, as the manner in which, on the grand
occasion of Christmas-time, she fulfilled her welcome duties could fully
testify.
“L’année est morte, vive l’année!” The old cry has been cried, and the
old song sung, till some of us are weary of the semi-joyous and all solemn
sound; but the good Samaritan at the Paddocks addressed herself, even as
she had done for fifty years, to the congenial task before her; and, as I said
before, the old kitchen of the farm-house reeked with preparations for the
coming festival. Such a kitchen as it was! The ceiling half-covered from
beam to beam with flitches of well-smoked bacon—with a store of precious
delf, and a glittering batterie de cuisine in the shape of pots and pans, that
excited envy in the hearts of half the housewives in the neighbourhood; and
with a chimney so wide-mouthed and gaping that the largest spit in
Sandyshire would have been scarcely long enough to span it!
The amount of fuel consumed in that “kitchen range” was, as Mrs.
Beacham was given proudly to say, what nobody would believe; and yet if
any of these incredulous ones had chanced to catch a glimpse at Christmas-
time of that same furnace, methinks that their doubts regarding its
consuming powers would, like other and more material things under its
influence, have melted into thin air.
Many were the mouths which the hospitable widow felt called upon that
day to fill. There was the great “house dinner” as it was called—to which
were invited (a yearly custom so ancient at the Paddocks that the invitation
had come to be regarded as a right) every man and boy employed by Mr.
Beacham upon the farm and breeding-establishment. To these were added
not only the wives and daughters of the middle-aged labourers, but the
“followers”—if they were respectable, and their courtship was pour le bon
motif—from adjacent farms, of the damsels connected with John’s especial
retainers. It was a great object with the givers of the feast that everyone, on
that day at least, should both be and look happy. On all other days (Sundays
excepted) John was, though a just and liberal, very far from what is called
an easy-going master. He required his good penny’s-worth for the penny
given; and men taking service at Updown Paddocks did so with their eyes
open—knowing that under the eye of their new master there would be little
chance of shirking the duties they had undertaken.
By retainers so kept to their work, and in their places, it will readily be
believed that the Christmas dinner at the Paddocks (which took place at
three o’clock on Christmas-day) was an event of importance; and after the
roast-beef and turkeys, the plum-pudding and mince-pies—plum-pudding
with plenty of raisins and citron, let me tell you, and mince-pies fit for a
lord-mayor’s dinner—had been duly discussed, there followed a dance in
the big barn, with punch and pipes to wind up the entertainment.
Many months had not elapsed since the time when few would have
enjoyed the simple pleasures of that holiday season more thoroughly in her
quiet, lady-like way than Honor Beacham. Those months, swiftly passing,
dull and uneventful as they had seemed, had transformed, as effectually as
years of age and experience, a light-hearted and thoughtless girl into a
dreaming, restless, and far from contented woman. Change, with noiseless
foot and imperceptible approach—change, never resting, and for ever at its
silent work, had done its appointed task on pretty Honor Beacham’s tastes
and character.
Nor for honest John himself had the sure work of time and change been
done less effectually than it had been accomplished for his wife. Not that
any alteration was observable in his outward habits, for in truth he was
busier and more active than ever, more engrossed with business cares, and,
in Honor’s opinion, redder in the face, and in the evening time still more
given than of yore, to silence and to slumber. His deep love for his young
wife had not diminished; but busy men cannot afford, as Mrs. Beacham had
been heard say, to “make a noodle of a woman.” In her day, men had
something else to do than to be talking nonsense to a wife, and Honor must
learn to do without such silliness. And Honor—as many a young wife has
done before her, and as wives will do to the end of time—did learn the
salutary lesson, that women are not married to be toys, and that for them, as
well as for the bread-winners of the family, “life is real, life is earnest;” and
that to “wait” does not comprise the whole duty of woman. Gradually—not
so gradually, however, but that Honor perceived, with mixed anger and
sadness, that so it was—John grew to be less mindful of her presence, and
more forgetful of those petits noms of affection, those delicate attentions
with which the busiest men in the early days of matrimony are in the habit
of indulging their newly-bought toys. At that period of her life, it would
have been well for Honor if to work had been one of the necessities of her
being. With the instinct born of natural good sense and a desire to do right,
she understood this truth, and made more than one effort to be permitted a
share in the light daily toil which the old lady so jealously reserved for
herself alone. She was naturally, as John used to say in the days of his
courtship, when Honor was far too intent upon her paid-for duties to walk
with or talk to him—she was naturally a “busy little thing,” and her time,
now that she was a lady at large, often hung with perilous heaviness upon
her hands. That old Mrs. Beacham was the last woman in the world to
understand such a character as that of the young girl whom her son had
sworn at the altar to love, honour, and cherish, has been made more than
sufficiently evident; nor, even had she been able to comprehend Honor’s
peculiar idiosyncrasies of disposition, would the old lady have been
qualified, either through evenness of temper or steadiness of purpose, to
guide her daughter-in-law in a safe and rightful path. Although, as time
wore on, she was, in some respects (and in consequence chiefly of John’s
diminution of outward conjugal affection towards his wife) more disposed
to make the best of that erring young person, yet Honor was often reminded
to her cost, that you never could be sure of Mrs. Beacham. Even at the
exceptional season, when so many hearts and purses (I speak of those who
boast such luxuries) are open, and when cantankerous feelings are supposed
to be lulled to rest, the old lady at Updown Paddocks did, as will speedily
be seen, allow her temper to crop up, to the great hindrance of individual
and general enjoyment in the house over which she ruled.
“I suppose you mean to come and see the dance, Mrs. John?” (Honor
was always “Mrs. John” with her mother-in-law, when the latter chose to
fancy that her son’s wife was remembering the fact that in her veins ran the
gentle blood of the Norcotts). “The people are used to see John, and as I
always come in to have our healths drank, maybe they might be expecting
you as well.”
It was seven o’clock, and they, the scarcely congenial trio, were sitting
silently, that Christmas afternoon, in the little parlour, resting after the
labours of the day; John reading the Farmer’s Gazette, and Honor musing
silently in a big armchair, her habitual seat. In answer to the old lady’s
question, she replied that she was quite willing to go, that there was no
hardship in walking across the farmyard to the barn. The evening was fine
—looking a little like frost, she thought.
“The sunset was beautiful,” Honor went on to say, falling back upon the
commonplace, when she found her mother-in-law looking cross and
dissatisfied at her lukewarm acquiescence. “I watched it from the hill above
the garden. Such masses of red and purple, and such curious-shaped clouds!
Did you notice it, John, before you came in?”
John was unfortunately at that moment so intent upon an article in the
Gazette which touched upon a pet system of his own, that Honor’s question
failed to strike upon his ear. The reason of his silence was perceived by her
at once, and, like a good wife, she forbore to repeat her very trivial
observation. All, therefore, would have been well, and no evil consequences
would have followed on John’s wholly involuntary sin of omission, had not
Mrs. Beacham, who chanced to be in rather an irritating mood, taxed her
daughter indirectly with the terrible crime, in the old lady’s sight, of fine-
ladyism.
“Ha, ha, ha! I beg your pardon, though, Mrs. John, for laughing, but it is
a good joke to hear you asking us busy folk if we’ve been amusing
ourselves with looking at the sun! The sun indeed! My patience! To hear a
woman grown like you talking such nonsense!”
“I don’t think,” said Honor, flushing up, “that it can quite be called
nonsense looking at the beautiful things that God has given us to enjoy. I
have nothing to do, either. I often wish I had. I read, and I draw, and work a
little; but I often wish I was obliged to be busy. I shouldn’t think then, and I
hate thinking.”
She had gone rambling on as if talking to herself. The fact that neither of
her two companions were in the slightest degree capable of entering into the
more sickly than sensible fancies of her young brain, had totally escaped
her recollection, and she was startled, and that not agreeably, when John,
laying down the paper he was studying, looked half sternly and half
anxiously at his wife. He had not listened—who ever does listen to anything
of the kind with entire impunity,—he had not listened without its producing
some effect upon his mind, to his mother’s constant remarks and
insinuations regarding his wife’s conduct and character. Since Arthur
Vavasour’s marriage, and the consequent entire cessation of his visits at the
Paddock, that raw had necessarily healed, but unfortunately those whose
nature it is to buzz about the sore places which will sometimes even in the
healthiest skin be found, are never at a loss to detect the peccant spots,
while to keep the venom rankling in the wound is to them a pleasant,
chiefly because it is an exciting, task.
It may seem strange to those who have not made human nature their
study, that Mrs. Beacham—dearly loving her son—should have seemed to
take positive delight in certain hints and allusions which, as she well knew,
could not fail both to give him pain and to intensify the coldness which too
evidently was beginning to exist between himself and his wife. If anyone
had accused the old woman of the sins of mischief-making and evil-
speaking, her surprise and indignation would have been great and
vehement. In her own mind she probably believed that, by constantly
endeavouring to make it appear that Honor, since the discovery of her birth,
and her temporary association with those above her, had grown proud and
fanciful and discontented, she, John’s mother, was simply doing her duty—
a duty which had for its aim and object the wholesome correcting of “Mrs.
John,” and the expedient enlightenment of a mind—her son’s, to wit—that
was blinded by the mists of uxorious folly. That Mrs. Beacham was herself
rendered happy by the state of things existing at the Paddocks must not be
supposed; but that she was not so, proved only another exciting cause for
the attacks upon Honor, which, whilst John often felt real uneasiness for
Honor’s evident delicacy of health, worried the poor man terribly.
Sometimes—not often, or probably his mother would have shown herself
far more lenient to the pale-faced girl, who never disputed her will, but
whose very submission was an aggravation—sometimes, as on the present
occasion, John would turn angrily upon Honor, speaking sharply to her,
after the fashion of even the best-tempered men who, without being able
either to understand the why, or to suggest a remedy for the evil, find the
comfort of their home broken up, through, as it seems to them, the
wilfulness or the valetudinarianism of a woman!
“It strikes me, Honor,” he said, laying down the paper which he had
ostensibly been studying, and speaking in a cold hard tone, at which his
wife inwardly rebelled, “it strikes me that you have been talking a precious
deal of what I call nonsense. You ‘do this,’ and you ‘don’t do it;’ You think,
and you ‘hate thinking.’ Upon my soul, I’m ashamed, and that’s the truth, to
hear you talk such rubbish. Now, I’ll just tell you what it is. I met Dr.
Kempshall yesterday, and we got talking a little about you. Says he,
laughing, ‘I tell you what it is, Beacham; you are spoiling that wife of yours
by kindness. Women are delightful creatures,’ says he; ‘but it doesn’t do to
let them have all their own way. She wants shaking up a bit, she does; and,
above all, she mustn’t—take my word for it—be given way to. Those
nerves that young women talk about are the deuce and all when they get too
much ahead;’ and, upon my soul, I begin to think he’s right.”
The ready tears rose to Honor’s eyes at this unexpected rebuke; while,
alas, swift as the lightning’s flash, the thought that one she had known in
days gone by would not have used her so, darted through her brain.
“I did not mean to be troublesome; I beg your pardon,” she said, with a
half proud, half sad submission which almost frightened John; and then,
slowly rising from her chair, she left the two alone to talk over her
behaviour as it pleased them best.
Honor Beacham had now known for many a month the true and rightful
cause of a discontent and a misery which, however little justified by that
cause, grew daily less endurable. That cause, she understood full well at
last, had always, ever since the day when she accepted the hand of plain
John Beacham, been in existence. It had required, however, certain
concurrent events to bring it fully and unquestionably to light; and those
concurrent events had not, unfortunately, been wanting in the home of
Honor Beacham. The real and very melancholy truth, to leave off speaking
darkly, lay in this—namely, that Honor Beacham was perfectly unsuited,
not only to the life she was fated to lead, but also to that most excellent
John himself. Something of this had been dimly shadowed out to her in the
early days of courtship; but more, far more, was revealed when the dry and
uninteresting details of home life took the place of honeyed words and
pleasing compliments. But it was reserved (is it not mostly so?) for the
force of contrast to put the finishing touch to such deadly domestic
discoveries as these. Very trying to Honor, after she had grown familiar
with the refined voice, the subdued laugh, and all the conventional graces
(as they appeared to her) of Arthur Vavasour, was the jubilant hilarity, the
rather noisy speech, and, alas, the occasional philological lapses of her
socially-untutored husband. Slowly, yet very surely, the evil worked,
undermining imperceptibly the moral system, and rendering insecure the
foundations of poor little Honor’s more rational hopes of happiness. But it
was not till the memorable day when she made the discovery that in her
veins ran purer blood than that which coursed with such a full and healthy
flow through the arteries of her yeoman husband, that the mischief that had
long been brewing began seriously to develop itself. Then the semi-Celtic
girl, retiring into the fastnesses more of a perilous fastidiousness than of a
vulgar commonplace pride, threw far away from her with reckless hand the
happiness that was within her reach; and dark was the looming of coming
events, which, although she saw it not, cast its shadow before her onward
path. From the moment when Colonel Norcott, whose misdeeds were not
unfortunately (as a warning to others) stamped upon his forehead, addressed
and acknowledged her as his child, the bonds that bound this foolish Honor
to the farmer of Updown Paddocks hung very heavily on her mind.
Yet, reader, I pray you not to blame her too severely for her involuntary
fault. There was no ugly root of pride, no taint of what Mrs. Beacham called
“fine-ladyism,” at the bottom of poor Honor’s loathing of a lot that on the
surface seemed so prosperous and happy. No one—no, not even her
severest judges, not even John’s prejudiced parent—could condemn more
sternly than did the girl herself her worse than coldness towards her
husband—her black ingratitude towards Heaven. But it was in vain she
strove against the feelings which her conscience whispered were so base
and wicked. In vain she told herself how good her husband was, how
honest, how respected, and how generous. Honesty, generosity, and
respectablity are excellent things in their way. With them to back him up, a
man may defy change, and winter and rough weather. He may go through
life with honour, and to his grave lamented; but, alas for him, such gifts
may fail to win a woman’s love, or bind her truant fancy. Still, as I said, or
rather, perhaps, implied before, if Honor had never chanced to mix with
what the world calls gentlemen, poor John’s lack of refinement (vulgar he
never could be called), his occasional conversational solecisms, his hands (a
trifle red and rough), his boisterous laugh, and his general ignorance of the
ways and speech of delicately-reared people, would not, in Honor’s
opinion, have told so heavily against him—would not, in short, have so
shamed, so repelled, and so—for it came at last to that sad climax—have so
entirely disgusted her.
The absence of refinement in her husband’s manners and mode of speech
had never struck Honor so vividly as on the occasion of her return to Pear-
tree House after the ten days which she had passed at the Bell. The room in
which her father had lain there was but a poor one; smaller and far less
comfortably furnished than the nuptial chamber at the farm. The little room,
too, near to it, which had been appointed for her especial use, and where,
lying awake in the silent watches of the night, she had wept and wondered,
so passing strange was the mutation that a turn in the wheel of Fortune had
brought about, was scarcely larger than a closet; but it was near her father!
“Father!” what a sweet sound it had for her, that word, and new as it was
sweet. Twenty times a day did she repeat it in a soft caressing whisper, that
only her own heart could hear; and very tender grew the large blue eyes,
gazing on the nobly-shaped head, lying so still and motionless upon the
hard inn-pillow.
It was not till two days and nights had elapsed since the accident, and
Colonel Fred Norcott was pronounced on the road to convalescence, that
Honor found either time or inclination to notice the, to her, wondrous
elegance and refinement of the sick man and his surroundings. Once
perceived, she was never weary of admiring what was to her so new, and so
in harmony with her own natural tastes. The very sound of her parent’s
voice, low and measured, the almost womanly beauty of his soignées hands,
the marvellous details of his dressing-case, his ivory hair-brushes; why had
not John a dressing-case, and beautiful handles like those, instead of—but
what need is there to dwell either on honest John’s shortcomings, or on the
thousand and one details which, absurd and improbable as it may seem,
went far towards working a revolution in Honor’s feelings, and sent her
back to her husband’s side an altered and a worse than discontented woman.
Worse than discontented, inasmuch as the change which had been wrought
in her was beyond her own control either to modify or to conceal; worse
than discontented, in that it was scarcely likely that this newly-born
fastidiousness would be less than fatal to the conjugal happiness of which
there had been once so fair a promise in the quiet prosperous home of
Updown Paddocks.
 CHAPTER XV.

COLONEL NORCOTT FEELS PATERNAL.

In a small drawing-room on the first floor of a house in Stanwick-street,
two persons were, one cold morning towards the end of April, seated at a
late and very metropolitan-looking breakfast. Of those two persons Colonel
Frederick Norcott was one. His outward man, as regarded dress at least, had
not improved since last we saw him, some eight months ago, flânéing in the
grounds of Danescourt. A short and somewhat nondescript garment, one
which might once have done duty as a shooting-jacket, but which had
degenerated into a coat of many uses (namely, one that its owner was in the
habit of dressing, smoking, and, as in the present instance, breakfasting in)
was greasy and out at elbows. The Colonel’s throat, a scraggy one, as is
customary with middle-aged gentlemen who “keep their figures,” was
exposed, by reason of an open shirt-collar, to view, and as he discontentedly
munched, with his still strong teeth, the untempting lodging-house fare
provided for him, the expression of the Colonel’s countenance was not
precisely what could be called a bright and a “shining morning face” on that
warm April day.
The “colonial lady,” seated opposite to her lord, and watching the
changes of his countenance in hopes to discover therein some sign or token
by which to regulate her remarks, was, as I before hinted, a lady of faded
and “washed out” appearance (entre les deux âges), willing still, as was
only natural, to be admired, but swamping all such womanly aspirations in
her deep devotion for, and her overweening appreciation of, the man who
had honoured her with his empty pockets and his once-respected name.
“You sent that letter to the post, of course,” said the Colonel, pushing
away his chair from the table, and preparing for some of the unwelcome
business of the day. The remark was scarcely an interrogative one, for the
master of the Stanwick-street lodging had on the previous day made known
to his submissive wife the wish that she should write in his name a certain
letter on a certain subject, and it had never occurred to him as possible that
Mrs. Norcott could have delayed the duty of attending to his wishes.
 “Honor will of course answer the letter at once,” continued Fred, “and I
should not wonder (let me see, to-day is Wednesday) if she were to be here
the end of the week.”
Mrs. Norcott, a lady of an habitually pallid complexion, flushed slightly
on hearing these remarks. It was not often, to do her justice, that she
ventured on independent action, but in the instance alluded to she had been
rash enough to arrogate to herself, though in a very mild degree, one of the
most valued privileges of her sex.
“I am very sorry,” she began, endeavouring to cover her confusion by
renewed attentions to the tea-pot; “I thought that you hardly meant it. You
spoke in a hurry, and as Mr. Vavasour was here, I could not well ask you
whether I was to write or not.”
Colonel Norcott rose from his chair impatiently.
“What a confounded nuisance!” he exclaimed, planting himself
autocratically upon the rug, with his back towards the empty fire-grate.
“Another day lost, and Vavasour, who—” He stopped short, not in
confusion; Fred was not the man to be easily what is called flabbergasted,
but there were limits, and very strongly marked ones too, to his confidential
intercourse with Mrs. N., and these he probably felt that he had been on the
point of overstepping.
“You ought to have known,” he went on peevishly, “that it is of
consequence to me—that I am anxious, in short, to have Honor here, and
what the d—l made you think for yourself in the matter is more than I can
guess. Come now, out with it,” he continued, growing momentarily more
irritated, and in proportion as the poor colonial heiress seemed disposed to
silence, working himself up to a determination that she should give a reason
for the fear that was in her; “out with it! I suppose you have some excuse
for not doing as I wished, and that excuse I am standing on this rug to hear.”
Thus apostrophised, the unlucky woman had no choice but to obey,
which she prepared to do in evident trepidation and discomposure.
“Now, Frederick,” she began, putting a large bony hand to her brow,
“you really might have a little mercy on my poor ’ead” (as if, par
parenthèse, any man ever had much pity on a plain wife with big fingers,
who dropped her h’s and bored him with her ailments); “I’ve got the most
dreadful ’eadache, and your voice this morning does go through it so!
About Mrs. Beacham I really thought—”
 “Go on, will you?” growled the Colonel.
“Well, I really thought, now I did indeed, that it would never do. In the
first place, though I didn’t see much of her ’usband, it was plain enough to
me that he’s not the kind of man to let his wife go gadding off to London;
and even if he did, why, Frederick, how in the name of goodness are we to
make her comfortable here? Unless you gave up your bedroom—”
“O, hang that!” from Colonel Fred.
“Well, but unless you did, there’s no place for her to sleep in but the attic
next to mine. I would let her have mine,” continued the good-natured
woman, “but that’s small and wretched enough; however, there’s no use,
I’m certain, in talking of it, for Mr. Beacham would as soon see her go up in
a balloon as set off by herself to London.”
Apparently, the Colonel was a little taken aback by the force of his
wife’s arguments, for he paused a while before he replied, and then said,
almost hesitatingly:
“The only thing would be to say that I am ill. Honor would come directly
then. That blockhead of a horse-breaker has scruples of conscience about
that disgusting crack over the skull he gave me, and would never refuse his
wife leave to come, if he had the most remote idea that I was still suffering
from the effects of the blow.”
There could scarcely be a stronger proof of the melancholy fact that poor
Bessie was not now for the first time cognisant of her husband’s tricks and
dodges than the little surprise she evinced at Colonel Fred’s spirited
suggestion. She listened at first in silence, thinking over in her mind the
pros and cons regarding the chances of successfully carrying out his plans:
while not for a moment did it occur to her to raise an objection on high
moral grounds to the trap which was about to be set for the unwary. The
class of wives of which Mrs. Norcott is the type are, as a rule, a cowardly
class; and, moreover, they are women who, taking perhaps too lowly an
estimate of themselves, and certainly too high a one of their partners, are
ready to buy the rare smiles, and equally rare meed of approbation which
falls to their lot, by a mean and truculent subserviency, which in reality
gains for them neither affection nor esteem. As is usual, however, with
persons who are destitute of moral courage, Mrs. Norcott would have gladly
compromised with her conscience, and changed the whole lie for a half one.
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