User:Nostradamus1/Conversions to Islam in Bulgaria

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Historical evidence indicates that a significant portion of the Muslim element in Bulgaria originated outside of the Balkan Peninsula. The rest was made up of converts from among the indigenous populations. However, there are serious disagreements over the number of Orthodox Christians who converted to Islam and over the nature of the conversion process itself.

There is a well-established tradition in Bulgarian historiography which treats the Ottoman period in Bulgaria as a five-century-long dark age during which Ottomans deliberately attempted to wipe out Bulgarian culture and nation by a combination of forced conversion of Orthodox Christians to Islam, assimilation, and massacres. The following quote from Hristov (1980), p. 63) is a representative sample that runs through most Bulgarian historiography:

Bulgaria's fall under Turkish rule ushered in the grimmest period in the history of the Bulgarian people, a period of almost 500 years of foreign domination. During it, the very existence of the Bulgarians as a nationality was threatened as a result of their extermination, eviction and assimilation and the brutal oppression and exploitation to which they were subjected by the Turkish conquerors. Foreign domination held back the development of the country's productive forces, severed the Bulgarians' contacts with all other nations and put an end to their free cultural development.Bulgaria's conquest by the Turks was accompanied by the destruction of whole towns and villages and eviction of the population. Hitherto prospering towns and villages were reduced to ruins and the land was turned into a desert. The population of whole regions were forced to seek refuge in the mountains and in remote areas far away from any roads and communications. Turkish colonists and nomadic herdsmen from Asia Minor were settled in the most fertile regions thus vacated.

This version of Bulgarian experience under Ottoman rule was the creation of Bulgarian emigre intelligentsia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who needed to invent a new past, a past in which Ottoman rule abruptly halted the development of Bulgarian culture, destroyed its ties to Europe and prevented its participation in and contribution to European civilization. The purpose of this imagined past was to mobilize Bulgarians against Ottoman rule and to promote a Bulgarian nation state. Over time this invented past gained general acceptance among the masses and has been perpetuated by Bulgarian historians and ideologues as the authentic experience of Bulgarians under Ottoman rule. Such statements grossly misrepresent, both the conquest itself and the policies followed by Ottomans toward the indigenous populations in Bulgaria and the Balkans. If violence against Orthodox Christians in Bulgaria and the Balkans was a purposeful and consistent Ottoman policy over five hundred years, as the above quote suggests, then, how do we explain the survival of Orthodox religious institutions and Bulgarians as a people over such a long period of time? Mutafchieva (1994), p. 11)'s observations on this question are to the point. She notes that such a policy

could not help being successful in its intentions for whose realization it had sufficient forces and more than enough time. What could have hampered it? Balkan historians answer almost unanimously: the resistance of the Christians owing to their deep commitment to their traditional religion. . . ^[1]But they could hardly be successful in resisting an entire political system mplemented through administrative and military measures; they could hardly be effective against official mass violence whose objective was to Islamize the population of the Peninsula.

Most Bulgarian historians, having committed themselves to the thesis of mass conversions achieved through systematic application of force, quoted fragments from unrelated documents in defense of this thesis. The kinds of questions Mutafchieva raises were not only ignored, but the critics of extreme historical revisionism of the 1970s and 1980s, including Mutafchieva herself, were professionally ostracized. Moreover, the orthodox cannon in Bulgarian historiography of the Ottoman period ignores the many personal narratives of Bulgarians from the post-liberation period who cast inter-communal relations between Bulgarians and Turks, Christians and Bulgarians in a more positive light as generally being tolerant, cooperative and harmonious. It is also a fact that under the pressures of modern nationalism relations between different ethnic and religious groups that appear to be harmonious can and do easily deteriorate into violent conflict marked by unspeakable atrocities. Extreme violence between various ethnic and religious groups that accompanied the breakup of former Yugoslavia is a recent reminder of that fact. However these outcomes were not the result of some fatal flow in Ottoman character, therefore inevitable. On the contrary, these outcomes were historically conditioned.

The approach of Bulgarian scholars to the problem of conversions to Islam in Bulgaria during the Ottoman period fits into what Kiel (1985), pp. 33-55) calls 'the catastrophe theory' as outlined in Hristov's quote above. The prevailing view of conversions to Islam of Orthodox Christians in Bulgaria, especially in the central and western Rhodopes, has been that these conversions were the result of a deliberate Ottoman policy of Islamization and absorption and were achieved through the systematic use of force and terror. The 'evidence' for these forced conversions to Islam of Orthodox Christians are several chronicles purportedly describing eyewitness accounts of brutal Ottoman military campaigns in the Rhodopes during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A book published by the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in 1958 containing articles by prominent Bulgarian scholars who participated in an expedition to the Rhodopes in the late 1950s would be used as a justification of assimilation campaigns against Muslims in Bulgaria between 1960s through the 1980s. In the chapter on forced Islamization of Orthodox Bulgarians in the Rhodopes Todorov, a well-known Bulgarian historian, diplomat, and politician claims that there were two waves of forced Islamization of Bulgarian Christians in the Rhodopes. The first wave took place during the reign of Sultan Selim II (1566-1574) in the sixteenth century. For evidence for this Todorov mentions an eighteenth century chronicle describing the events that took place two centuries earlier. The chronicle is mentioned only in passing. There are no quotations from it and no evidence of its actual existence, suggesting that it may be just a figment of the author’s imagination. The second wave of forced Islamization, according to Todorov (1958), p. 68), took place during the seventeenth century under the reign of Mehmed IV (1648-1687). As evidence for this wave of forced Islamization he cites the so-called "Father Draginov chronicle," which was published by Zakhariev in Vienna in 1870 (Zakhariev 1870). Zakhariev claimed that he found the chronicle upended to an old prayer book dated to 1600 but the prayer book has never been found. The chronicle is said to be an eyewitness account of forced Islamization of Bulgarians in Čepino villages in the Rhodopes by Ottoman military forces during the summer of 1600 (later 'corrected' by Bulgarian historians to 1660-1669, to the time of the Venetian-Ottoman war over the island of Crete). According to the chronicle, "The population was threatened, and then converted, and the chronicle has preserved the names of Islamized priests and some local leaders; there was violence, and numerous churches and monasteries were ruined" (Todorova 2003, pp. 2-3). Again, the original of this chronicle has never been found.

Two other documents, the Batunki and Belovo chronicles, which appear to corroborate the events in the Draginov chronicle, were published in 1893 and 1898 respectively. None of the three chronicles exist in the original. Immediately after their publications serious questions were raised about their authenticity, especially that of the Draginov chronicle. Over the years most Bulgarian historians came to accept the nineteenth century origins of the Batunki and Belovo chronicles. A thorough analysis of the language of the Draginov chronicle by (Todorov 1984) established the nineteenth century origins of this document, that it could not possibly be a seventeenth century document as claimed by Zakhariev and others (See Hupchick (1983)). Nevertheless, Bulgarian ideologues continued to treat these as authentic documents describing real events that occurred during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. During the communist period these chronicles acquired even greater importance because the information in them were used in government's anti-Turkish and anti-Muslim campaigns. Since 1989 it has, once again, become possible to subject the texts of these chronicles to an objective linguistic and ethnographic analysis. These analyses confirm the conclusions that Todorov had arrived at about the Father Draginov chronicle in 1984; that the Draginov chronicle as well as the Batunski and Belovo chronicles purporting to describe eyewitness accounts that took place during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are in fact nineteenth century forgeries (See, for example, Kiel (1990), Kelbecheva (2000), and Todorova (2003)).

One such analysis is provided by Željazkova (1990a) who concludes that the Draginov chronicle is not authentic but a late-nineteenth century fake. Željazkova gives two primary reasons for her conclusion: first, the lack of confirmation of the events described in the chronicles from any other source, and second, the special status of the central and western Rhodope populations within the Ottoman Empire which argue against forced conversions (Željazkova 1990a, pp. 107-109). She notes that the famous Turkish traveler Evliya Çelebi, who is known for his meticulous observations, passed through the region during the time in question, and does not mention any Ottoman military campaigns in the area. The seventeenth century was a period of intensive contacts between the West and the Ottoman Empire. "A number of special missions, travelers and observers crossed the Ottoman lands in the second half of the century, too. The majority of them being experienced observers, erudites, filled with sympathy towards the enslaved Christians in the European provinces of the Empire, those diplomats and travelers, performing the tasks they were set, carefully and scrupulously recorded everything they saw and heard. They had a special interest in the iniquities of the Ottoman regime, the lawlessness, the heavy tax system, the cases of violence involving Christian subjects, the decay of the economy and agriculture of the fertile Balkan regions" (Željazkova 1990a, p. 107). These observers who traveled through the Rhodopes during the 1660s do not mention anything about Ottoman military campaigns, "about violence, arson and mass bloodshed, accompanying the propagation of Islam," described in the chronicles. A comprehensive survey of seventeenth century historiography of the Ottoman Empire, the history of Ottoman military forces published in Ankara during the 1970s, which describes in detail every battle, do not mention Ottoman military campaigns in the Rhodopes during the 1660s (Željazkova 1990a, pp. 107-108). The second reason to doubt the authenticity of these cronicles, was the special status of many of the villages mentioned in the chronicles. Mutafčieva's (1965) analysis of poll-tax registers (cizye defterleri) from the period in question reveals that seven of the villages from Čepino district mentioned in the Draginov chronicle belonged to the vakıf of the Süleymaniye mosque in Istanbul, not soldiers' (voynuk) villages as claimed in the Draginov chronicle. In fact these villages had been given vakıf status as far back as the middle of the sixteenth century and maintained that status well into the nineteenth century. The claim that the inhabitants of these villages had refused to serve in the military for which they were given the choice between execution or conversion to Islam and that the villagers converted to Islam to escape punishment, is surely false. The inhabitants of vakıf villages were under the personal protection of the Sultan, which meant that local authorities or military units had to exercise restraint in their dealings with the inhabitants of such villages. They were not free to engage in unrestrained violence and other outrages described in the chronicles. Unfortunately, such sober assessments of the evidence were ignored and the 'catastrophe theory' prevailed.

Today there is general agreement on the part of most historians of the Ottoman period in Bulgaria and the Balkans that most conversions to Islam in the Balkans were "voluntary". Lack of evidence for direct coercion does not necessarily mean the lack of pressure on Balkan Christians to convert to Islam. There many have been and were indirect economic, social, and political pressures that were behind many conversions. Islam like other proselytizing religions welcomed converts but it was not an Ottoman policy to enthusiastically recruit large number of converts to Islam, and for sound economic reasons. A significant portion of the Ottoman budget depended on the poll tax (cizye) collected from non-Muslim subjects of the Empire and mass conversions would have meant a loss of this important revenue source to the Ottoman treasury. According to Goodwin (1994), p. 29), "The government even had to discourage the proliferation of converts because of diminished revenues, as happened when Bosnia was taken in 1463 and Herzegovina in 1482." According to Kiel (1990), p. 71) "The cizye was the backbone of Ottoman finances, providing a third to a half of the entire state budget. It was the single largest revenue for the Ottoman treasury, a fact which must be constantly kept in mind when interpreting demographic or religious changes shown in the records, as no state, past or present, can be expected to diminish voluntarily its principal source of income."

What was the purpose of these chronicles, then? According to Željazkova (1990a), p. 106):

A heavy, unequal struggle was waged for cultural and political emancipation and the Bulgarian people needed a prompt answer to some questions, related to their remote and more immediate past. Among them were the questions of why Islam had spread in the Bulgarian lands; whether those fellow-countrymen who had accepted Islam should be considered as renegades, traitors and defectors, or as martyrs who suffered the ordeals of religious fanaticism? Who was to bear responsibility?. . .The answer to these and other similar questions was to help the people master their strength and encourage them in the struggle for national and political independence.

Although faking such documents out of patriotic duty at the time of their publication can be justified, the perpetuation of the myth of coercive Islamization of Orthodox Christians in the twentieth century cannot possibly serve such noble purposes. Lack of evidence corroborating the events described in the three chronicles has not stopped some unscrupulous Bulgarian historians from using these chronicles to build elaborate scenarios of brutal conversion of Orthodox populations to Islam. Some "revivalist" historians in Bulgaria have used the Metodi Draginov chronicle and other documents of dubious value to write numerous books on the forced conversion of Orthodox Christian populations in the Rhodopes to Islam (See Petrov (1964), Petrov (1975), and Petrov (1977)).

An objective analysis of archival sources preserved in Sofia by some Bulgarian historians show that Islamization in the Rhodopes was a gradual process beginning in the early sixteenth century, perhaps earlier, and continuing through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (See Dimitrov (1965); Željazkova (1990b)). According to Željazkova (1990a), p. 109), "The conversion to Islam in the Rhodopes was obtained not through direct coercion and mass campaigns, organized by the Sultan, but owing to economic reasons and personal choice of the individual, the family or the whole village, and, especially in the case of the population in the vakif villages, with the personal permission and imperial mercy of the Sultan."

The reasons for conversion were many. The rapid and thorough conquest of the Balkans by the Ottomans convinced many Christians that the religion of the conquerors must be superior to Christianity, a conviction leading to conversion to Islam. Christian landowners converted to Islam in order to keep their property. These landowners brought the peasants who worked on their land into the fold of Islam. Christian officials converted in order to maintain their offices and privileges that went with those offices. The egalitarian and universal aspects of Islam drew some Christians to the Muslim faith, while others were attracted by the cosmopolitan outlook of Ottoman Islam. Desire for higher status as members of the religion of the conquered, and hopes for a better life persuaded some to join Islam. The willingness of Ottoman rulers to allow converts to maintain their language and identity within ethno-religious communities (millets) was attractive to some. Like other Christians in Bulgaria and other areas of the Balkans who converted to Islam, most Christians of the Rhodopes converted to Islam for material, political-legal, and social advantages, not as a result of deliberate Ottoman policy or as result of military campaigns expressly organized for this purpose.^[2]

It is a well-established fact that by the early sixteenth century a significant Muslim presence was established in Bulgaria and the Balkans. The problem is to explain the origins of this population. According to Ottoman census statistics for the years 1520-1530, Turkish nomads made up 19 percent of the total Muslim population in the Balkans (37,435 nomad hearths out of a total of 194,958 Muslim hearths). There is scholarly agreement, even among some Bulgarian historians, that this population clearly originated outside of the Balkan Peninsula. What was the origin of the rest of the Muslims? We have already seen that in addition to Yörüks and Tatars, many other Muslims were brought over or emigrated from Anatolia and Asia Minor to settle in Balkan cities and villages. Unfortunately, it is not possible to reliably establish the size of this population because of the limitations of Ottoman census methods. The Ottoman Empire was not organized along ethnic or linguistic lines. It was organized along confessional lines and religious identity was paramount. Therefore, Ottoman censuses provide information on religious affiliation but rarely on ethnic affiliation, because the Ottoman Empire was organized along confessional rather than ethnic and/or linguistic lines.^[3] Consequently we are left to speculate about the proportion of the Muslim population that originated outside the Balkan Peninsula and the proportion that has indigenous origin through conversion. A conservative estimate is provided by Vryonis (1972), pp. 165-166)) who suggests that half of the total Muslim population of 1520-30 may have originated outside of the Peninsula. It is very likely that the actual figure was somewhat higher. The remaining half of the Muslim population resulted from the conversion of part of the indigenous population to Islam beginning soon after the conquest of the Balkans and continuing throughout the five-hundred-year Ottoman rule of the area.

According to Spridonakis (1977), p. 129), conversions to Islam in the Balkans seem to have had a limited objective, mainly to "reinforce the transplanted Anatolian colonies in order to contain more easily a potentially hostile population and thus provide a permanent policy supervision over the entire domain." Contrary to the claim of Bulgarian historians, Ottoman scholars with no ideological axe to grind generally agree that Ottoman policy in conquered territories was not oriented toward the creation of a homogeneous Turkish-Muslim society. As Inalcik (1991:409; See also 1954:103-129) observes, prior to the formalization of the millet system Ottomans "maintained intact the laws and customs, the status and privileges, that had existed in the pre-conquest times, and what is more unusual, they incorporated the existing military and clerical groups into their own administrative system without discrimination, so that in many cases former pronoia-holders and seigneurs in the Balkans were left on their own fiefs as Ottoman timar holders." For a while they were able to maintain their Orthodox religion but since many entered a largely Muslim religious and social milieu they converted to Islam and over time became Turkified. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the formalization of the millet system insured the maintenance of the religious heterogeneity of the Empire. Non-Muslim subjects of the Empire (Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians) came under the official protection of the Ottoman state, the Orthodox Church was strengthened and conversions to Islam declined.

Local political, religious, and socio-economic conditions prevailing in the Balkans during the fourteenth century facilitated the speedy conquest of the region by the Ottomans. By the middle of the fourteenth century when the Ottomans began to expand their rule into Anatolia and the Balkans, "the Christian world of Anatolia and the Balkans was in a state of anarchy precipitated by religious, national, and social conflicts. Islam seemed to offer a constructive alternative to chaos and misery; hence many Christians adopted it [Islam] voluntarily" (Vucinich 1969, p. 236). As Goodwin (1994), p. 29) notes, "In Bulgaria, for example, the choice lay between serfdom and brigandage or Ottoman order. . . The brutal feudal rule of the Bulgarian barons could win no hearts. Once they had bowed their heads to the conquerors, landowners as much as their peasantry were swift to escape the poll tax by being converted to Islam, making religion subservient to economics." According to Sugar (1978), p. 299), Ottoman conquests in Europe brought "law and order into a chaotic situation; religious strife ceased; insecurity caused by endemic wars and civil strife was ended." Most importantly, the majority of Balkan peasants welcomed the Ottomans for economic reasons as well, especially because of the proprietary rights offered them by the Ottoman timar system, which provided the peasants "security of tenure and property . . . something they did not enjoy before the Ottoman takeover" (1978, p. 300). To be sure, there were times, especially during wars and times of tension, when some Ottoman officials and military leaders resorted to coercion to convert Christians; however, only a small percentage of the conquered were forced to adopt Islam. Most conversions, both of the individual and group varieties, were voluntary. According to Wittek (1952), p. 659), "In the Balkans conditions favored [the] acceptance of Islam with retention of language- witness the Muslim Bulgarians (the Pomaks), the Bosnian Muslims speaking Serbo-Croat, the Muslim Albanians." Moreover, the "conquered people of another religion were allowed a definite place under the direction of their own ecclesiastical authorities" (Jelavich 1983, p. 40). There were a number of additional reasons for a positive response to Ottoman conquest and the religion of Islam on the part of Balkan peoples. Vryonis () identifies material, religious, and social advantages of conversion:

First, there were the real or material advantages which would ensue upon religious conversion. A change in religious status meant, in effect, a basic movement from an inferior to a superior class. As members of the triumphant religion, Muslims enjoyed a lighter tax burden and a favored legal position in all their economic and social relations in the eyes of the courts which judged these relations.

As {{Harvtxt|Vryonis|1975a|p=146) observes, "Muslim society was at all times accessible by religious conversion and, indeed, conversion was usually welcomed." Many who had the most to gain from conversion, converted to Islam quite early. These included former government officials, tribal chiefs, landowners, artisans and merchants as well as members of dissatisfied or heretical Christian sects such as the Bogomils in Bosnia (See Cvetkova 1983). A sizable segment of the aristocratic class that survived the Ottoman conquests "made arrangements with the victors and received a satisfactory status in the new situation," even maintaining their Christian religion for a while (Vryonis 1975a, p. 146). But because the Christian timar holders entered a society that was essentially Muslim, they converted to Islam by the sixteenth century, although still carrying the Christian patronymic. At the time of their conversion, they must have brought their serfs into the fold of Islam as well.

Sometimes conversion and absorption of subject populations came about as a result of the activities of religious institutions, especially the missionary activities of dervish orders. Vryonis (1972), p. 168) continues:

Second there were the successful appeal of religious preaching and social ministration of Muslim dervishes, medreses [theological schools], mosques, and imarets [public improvement associations]. These combined effective preaching with the economic affluence assured them by the fact that the Ottoman state was Muslim.

The dervish orders brought to the Balkans a version of folk-Islam which shared many elements with folk-Christianity, increasing the appeal of the new religion to segments of the local population. Balkan Islam became a syncretistic religion, heavily affected by the Christian beliefs and practices of the converts including baptism of infants, veneration of holy men and pilgrimages to the shrines of saints, certain types of animal sacrifice, celebration of certain Christian holidays, practices associated with the seasonal cycle, and iconolatry, among others (Vryonis (1972), pp. 172-174); {{Harvtxt|Vryonis|1975b|p=139). This was due, to a considerable degree, to the way dervishes worked, lived, and were perceived by local populations. Sugar (1977), pp. 53-54)), who favors syncretism as a major factor in the conversion of Balkan peoples to Islam, writes:

the dervishes wandered almost constantly, preaching and practicing their tarikat and numerous related ceremonies. They were the babas,a sort of combination holy man, miracle worker, medicine man, etc. and were often regarded as living saints. Their eclecticism and pragmatism knew practically no bounds. Given the numerous similarities between folk-Christianity and folk-Islam, they had no difficulty in fitting local customs into their tarikats. . .It was not difficult for Christians whose faith was of the superstitious folk variety to pass over to a similar but more secure folk versions of Islam.

Sugar (1977), p. 54) feels that this explanation for early mass conversions to Islam is just as valid as interpretations favored by other authors who attribute "such conversion either to the wish of the population to retain its landed possessions or to the desire of previously persecuted heretics (mostly Paulicians and Bogomils) to become the master of their oppressors." Mass conversion may have acted to insulate "the religious practices [of the Christians] from thorough penetration by Islamic practices and beliefs...^[4] One may also assume that of the sedentary Muslims of Anatolia, who came to the Balkans as colonists, some were converts or the descendants of converts who had retained certain Christian elements in their version of Islam.

The dervish orders, in their willingness to equate comparable Christian and Muslim beliefs and practices and to adopt outright some Christian items, played an important role in the spread of Islam throughout the Balkans as well as in the preservation of pre-Islamic religious customs in Balkan Islam. Many Muslim villages "developed around a zaviye (a kind of hostel) maintained by a dervish) or a pious foundation. These institutions enjoyed certain financial privileges which encouraged the formation of villages in their vicinity" (Inalcik 1954, p. 126). Finally, there was the element of fear, particularly in stressful times, which predisposed various Christian groups and individuals to convert.

In addition to conversion carried out through the administrative and military apparatus of the government and the religious institutions, the slave institution also played a role in the conversion process. The conversion of prisoners of war, renegades, and the best known example, that of the devşirme recruits or "child levy" that made up the Jannisary corps, swelled the ranks of Muslims of indigenous origin.

In traditional Balkan historiography and national mythology the devşirme system is said to confirm the violent and alien nature, of not only Islam but the Ottoman Empire as well. It is treated as an unmitigated demographic disaster for Balkan populations in general and for the Bulgarian population in particular. The impact of the devsirme system on Balkan populations is exaggerated for a number of reasons. Large segments of the population were exempt from the levy. According to Goodwin (1994), p. 34), Ottoman provisions for recruitment "forbade taking an only son from a widow or more than a percentage of the youth of a village [usually one boy from every forty households]. . . No levy was imposed on towns" because "Townsfolk were needed for their skills and were regarded as 'soft' when compared with countrymen. No married men might be taken, a provision which had the obvious result that boys were frequently married at the age of 12." The Romanians, Wallachians, Moldavians, Jews, Gypsies, and to some extent Armenians were exempt. Greeks and Slavs made up the bulk of the devşirme recruits. The groups subject to the levy dreaded it and found various ways to avoid it. "This is evident from the searches for substitutes, the regulations about absentee youths and names that vanished from the parish registers. . . A trade in Muslim substitutes. . . had received recognition by the mid-sixteenth century" (Goodwin 1994, pp. 34-35). Since the devşirme system was one of the few ways the non-Muslim subjects could hope to achieve high military and administrative posts in the Empire, it was not unknown for some Christian parents to volunteer their sons to Ottoman service. "The success of the levy is clearly shown by the rise of the best recruits to the highest offices of the state" (Goodwin 1994, p. 35).

The levy was not an annual affair. It "was supposed to follow a seven-year cycle but was more frequent in the sixteenth century since recruitment was inevitably related to the high command's hunger for heads in a period of great military activity" (Goodwin 1994, p. 35). The number of boys recruited was small, rarely exceeding 8,000 from the entire Balkans and Anatolia at any one time. If the Bulgarians and Greeks had been subject to the military draft their losses would have far exceeded the losses suffered through the devşirme system. The devşirme system was suspended by Murat IV (1623-1640) and by mid-seventeenth century it largely disappeared from Ottoman life. Hence, the demographic impact of the system on the Bulgarian population was not that great.

Most conversions to Islam in Bulgaria were of the individual variety. A few large-scale conversions occurred during the 1660s and again in the beginning of the 18th century in the Rhodope mountain region of southeastern Bulgaria.^[5] According to Vryonis (1972), p. 172), some 74 villages in the Rhodope region of Bulgaria converted to Islam. However, there is no reliable evidence to support the claim of Vryonis (1972), p. 168) that these conversions were "occasioned by the pressures of war and accompanied by the presence of expeditionary armies and heavy tax extortions."

In contrast to Anatolia and Asia Minor, where conquest had taken several centuries and conversion and assimilation of the non-Muslim population was almost total, in the Balkans, conquest was relatively rapid and conversion and assimilation of the indigenous population into Turkish-Muslim society took place only in restricted areas, areas strategically important for the control of the Balkan Peninsula (Vryonis 1971). In the Balkans, the Ottomans were more interested in consolidating their gains than in converting and assimilating subject populations. Large numbers of compact Christian groups especially those who lived in the hinterlands or had moved to the hinterlands to get away from the Ottomans, were not absorbed and retained the administrative structure of their church. Furthermore, even groups who converted to Islam, such as the Greeks of Crete, Bulgarians of the Rhodopes, Albanians and Bosnians, often retained their native languages. When conversion occurred during times of trouble or under direct or indirect duress there appeared "individuals and groups who, while publicly professing Islam, satisfied their conscience by practicing Christianity-- Orthodox or Catholic-- in private." Ottoman efforts to implement equality among the religious communities of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century caused many crypto-Christians to reveal themselves in an effort to have themselves registered as Christians rather than as Muslims, thereby demonstrating their imperfect absorption" Vryonis (1975a), p. 150).^[6]

Although most urban centers in the Balkans became largely Muslim very quickly, the hinterlands remained overwhelmingly Christian. In contrast to Anatolia where almost all of the non-Muslims were Islamized and assimilated into the Turkish-Muslim society, in the Balkans, for the most part, the relationship between the Ottomans and the Christian population was more symbiotic than absorptive (Vryonis 1975a: 150). The system of dhimma regulated the relationship between Muslim and non-Muslim communities in the Empire. As Lopasic (1979:49) explains, the dhimma relationship guaranteed free performance of religion and preservation of traditional custom in return for payment of [cizye] (poll-tax) and recognition of suzerainty. It was an asymmetrical relationship between two partners [similar to a patron-client relationship], one of whom [the non-Muslim community] acknowledged the supremacy of the other [the Muslim community] in return for religious and local autonomy within the limits of certain restrictions.

Outside of the instances of conversion cited above, either carried out as part of Ottoman government policy, pursued by dervish orders as part of their proselytizing mission, or voluntarily entered into by groups and individuals from among the indigenous Christian population for perceived or real fiscal and social advantages, the Ottomans not only left local Christian populations and institutions essentially alone "but gave them legal status by issuing kanunnameler, law codes for them" (Sugar 1969, p. 28). After the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, the non-Muslim subjects of the Ottoman Empire were formally organized into the millet system. Millets were organized on the basis of a profession of faith alone, independently of any consideration of race language or nationality. As McCarthy (1997), p. 129) notes, "The Greek millet included the Orthodox populations of the Ottoman Empire . . . Although called 'Greek,' many members of the Greek Orthodox Church were Slavs and Romanians, 'Greek' only because they were in the Greek Church." When Arab Orthodox Christians came under Ottoman control later on, they also became members of the Greek millet and counted as 'Greeks' in Ottoman censuses. Similarly, the Armenian Grigorian millet included, in addition to Armenians, the Nestorians, the Syrian Orthodox Christians, and the Maronites McCarthy (1997), p. 129).

As originally established, millets enjoyed a large degree of autonomy. Each millet had its own leader (milletbaşı) chosen by the Sultan and given "full ecclesiastical powers and jurisdiction." He also "acquired legal powers in those areas, such as marriage, divorce and inheritance that were regulated by canon law" (Sugar (1977), p. 46); Also pages 3, 5, 47-49, 252-259). As long as these ethno-religious communities fulfilled their political and economic obligations to the state, they were free, within limits, to organize their religious, cultural, and educational institutions in accordance with their own needs and desires. As Stavrianos (1958:113) observes, the Ottoman Turks "ruled the Balkans as long as they did because they satisfied the needs of their subject peoples to an acceptable degree..." In the long run, Ottoman policies toward non-Muslims in the Empire strengthened group solidarity among the latter. The law codes together with the millet system were to be instrumental in preparing the groundwork for the development of nationalism in the Balkans, an ideology that was to be used very successfully by various groups to gain their independence from Ottoman rule. Sugar (1969), p. 28) explains:

In the beginning these kanunnameler did little more than recognize as binding the existing customs and conditions, leaving local administration in the hands of those who were responsible for it in the past. While placing numerous burdens on the population, these documents also assured the continuation of existing customs, economic establishments, political command chains, and so on, in short the legalized survival of the identity of nationalities. These kanunnameler never achieved either the status or the influence of constitutions, but they assured differentiation among the various Balkan districts, gave them some, even if minimal, rights, and maintained the cohesion and assured the survival of certain institutions (zadruga, parish, and so forth), thus creating the framework within which modern nationalism could develop.

Although there could be no question about the equality between Muslims and non-Muslim subjects of the Empire, the rights of non-Muslim subjects were recognized and such communities were given considerable autonomy in organizing their own affairs in return for loyalty to the Empire. Such autonomy contributed significantly to themaintenance of separate identities in the Empire which ultimately was used by these communities to gain their independence from the Empire during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Beginning in the eighteenth century, the Ottoman Empire entered a period of serious decline. Taking advantage of this decline, many foreign powers sought to use the millet system to their political and economic advantage by demanding that the privileges of this system be granted to them. By 1875 the number of officially recognized millets had risen to nine and by 1914 to seventeen (Lord Kinross (1977), pp. 320ff); 527-593; Shaw and Shaw (1977), pp. 55-272)). Increasingly ethnic affiliation replaced the profession of faith as the primary criterion for membership in a millet. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the millet system was used by revolutionaries among the non-Muslim subjects of the Empire to further their nationalist ideas and to gain their independence from Ottoman rule.

The Ottoman period in Bulgaria was not a golden age of toleration and equality, far from it. However, it was not a centuries-long dark age of unrelieved cruelty toward Bulgarians either. The Ottoman policies toward non-Muslim subjects and their institutions in the Empire, when analyzed within the broader context of European history, compares favorably with the policies of West European countries toward their minorities during the same period. Bulgarians as a people and their cultural and religious institutions survived, not through the superhuman efforts of Bulgarians but because of the relatively benign Ottoman administration allowed them to survive. After the establishment of a stable Ottoman administration in the Balkans and the formalization of the millet system after 1453, Orthodox Christians were allowed to repair their churches and monasteries damaged during the conquest and to build new ones (See Gradeva (1994); Kiel (1985)). They were allowed to maintain their cultural and religious institutions in return for their loyalty to the Ottoman Empire. This contrasts sharply with the actions of Bulgarians and other Balkan peoples toward Muslims during and after various wars of independence that led to the establishment of independent Balkan states.

[edit] See Also

• Ottoman System in the Balkans

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

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