JPI Spring 2018

commander of Belgrade ordered Christians to defend themselves against the defiant janissaries. 40 After
the unrest, reprisals against Christians sparked the Second Serbian Uprising of 1815, which resulted
in greater Serbian autonomy. 41 The rebellion occurred within the border zone between the Habsburg
and Ottoman empires. Many of its leaders and participants had gained military experience and training
in previous battles between the Ottoman Empire and European powers. Discontent primarily derived
from a breakdown of basic law, order, and societal predictability. When combined with Russia’s 1806
plea to join in a war against the Ottomans as well as earlier conceptions of Serbian identity, the
reactionary loyalist rebellion evolved into a struggle for independence. 42
While contemporary nationalism contributed to the revolt as it developed and garnered
support from external forces, most Serbian intellectuals of the time lived, studied, and wrote within
the Habsburg Empire. Additionally, records indicate that only 0.5% of Christians in Belgrade on the
eve of Serbia’s autonomy could read, suggesting that consumption of nationalist literature did not
contribute to the reinforcement of nationality. 43 An identity developed over centuries and rooted in
Christianity, the Serbian language and territorial expansion distinguished Serbs from their Ottoman
administrators. As Rusinow suggests, contemporary conceptions of the nation-state modernized
proto-nationalist Balkan societies into their current form.
In The Bridge on the Drina, Andrić illustrates proto-national identities through scenes of epic
poetry referencing the Serbian Empire in the presence of the peasant classes. In one passage, a
traveling Montenegrin plays his gusle (a bowed lyre) and sings to the Christian bridge laborers about
the Serbian Tsar Stefan two hundred years before the arrival of contemporary nationalism. 44 Later in
the novel, Višegrad’s Christian peasants alter earlier poems and songs to glorify the 19 th -century
Serbian uprisings. The interpretations of external political events further divided the town’s citizens.
In observing the Serbian revolts, “Serbs prayed to God that these saving flames … should spread to
these mountains, while the Turks prayed to Allah to hold their progress and extinguish them, to
frustrate the seditious designs of the infidel and restore the old order and the peace of the true faith.” 45
DRIVERS OF CONTEMPORARY CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM AND THE MUSLIM
‘DELAY’ IN BOSNIA
As the proto-nationalist societies of Bosnia evolved their ideology to resemble Western
European nationalism, several consequences of Ottoman rule drove the process. Revolutionaries
founded their stances on attitudes toward the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian legacies, the results
of Ottoman agrarian control and land distribution, and the ideological consequences of external
geopolitical influences, primarily emanating from Western Europe and Russia.
Regarding land distribution, in 1895 Turks owned 50% of arable land in Rumelia, the area of
southeastern Europe administered by the Ottomans. 46 At the end of Ottoman rule in Bosnia, forty of
the largest landowners were Muslim. Conscious of the divergence, in 1856 the Sublime Porte issued a
reform edict to abolish religious inequality, which the Ottomans subsequently retracted due to Muslim
40
Ibid., 578.
41
Frederick F. Anscombe, "The Balkan Revolutionary Age," Journal of Modern History 84, no. 3 (September 2012): 574-578, Historical Abstracts with
Full Text, EBSCOhost (accessed November 20, 2017).
42
Ibid., 587-588.
43
Ibid., 600.
44
Ivo Andrić, The Bridge on the Drina (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 34.
45
Ivo Andrić, The Bridge on the Drina (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 83.
46
A. Bebler, "Turkey's Imperial Legacy and the Potential for Conflict in the Balkans," Politicka Misao 53, no. 4 (March 1, 2017): 162, Scopus®,
EBSCOhost (accessed November 20, 2017).
JPI Fall 2017, pg. 14