History of Croatia in Ottoman Times

      Balkans in Ottoman Period : Albania ,Bosnia and Herzegovina ,Bulgaria ,Croatia ,Macedonia ,Moldova ,Romania ,Slovenia and Yugoslavia

     Balkan Peninsula easternmost of Europe's three great southern peninsulas, comprising the countries of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro), Macedonia, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, and Moldova.
The Balkans is bordered by Italy on the northwest, Austria and Hungary on the north, Ukraine on the north and northeast, and Greece and Turkey on the south. The region is washed by the Adriatic Sea in the west, the Ionian Sea in the southwest, and the Black Sea in the east. In the north clear geographic delimitation of the Balkans becomes difficult, because the Pannonian Basin of the Great Alfold (Great Hungarian Plain) extends from central Europe into parts of Croatia, Serbia, and Romania. To the south Greece is primarily a Mediterranean country and therefore is not discussed in this article-although its northern regions of Epirus and Macedonia can be considered parts of the Balkans.

     The word Balkan is Turkish and means "Mountain," and the peninsula is certainly dominated by this type of landform, especially in the west. The Balkan Mountains lie east-west across Bulgaria; the Rhodope Mountains extend along the Greek-Bulgarian border; and the Dinaric range extends down the Adriatic coast to Albania. The region is bound in the north by the Julian Alps and by the Carpathians. Among these ranges extensive areas of good arable land are relatively scarce, though the valleys of the Danube, Sava, and Vadar rivers, eastern Bulgaria, parts of the Aegean Sea coast, and especially the Danubian Plain are exceptions. The mountains have a significant impact on the climate of the peninsula. The northern and central parts of the Balkans have a central European climate, characterized by cold winters, warm summers, and well-distributed rainfall. The southern and coastal areas, however, have a Mediterranean type of climate, with hot, dry summers and mild, relatively rainy winters.

      Ethnic diversity is one of the region's most characteristic social and political features. The most numerous of the groups is the South Slavs, who form the majority of the population in Bulgaria, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, and Montenegro. The Bulgarians, Macedonians, and Slovenes speak their own Slavic languages, while the Slavs of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro all speak dialects of Serbo-Croatian.
The peculiar nature identified with "Balkanization" -that is, fragmentation of ethnic groups-derives in part from the compartmentalization brought about by this mountainous relief. But size is also an important determinant of the region's character, for its area is large enough to have provided important bases of occupation for the Byzantine and Turkish civilizations. Subjection to Eastern imperial forces isolated most Balkan societies from Western developments for almost two millennia and created feudal characteristics that persisted until World War I. After this war the viability of the relatively new Balkan states was threatened by political instability, ethnic division, worldwide economic depression, and the rise of the fascist states of Germany and Italy. After World War II, communism brought greater political stability to the Balkans, but at the cost of individual freedom, social and economic problems connected with rapid industrialization, and varying degrees of dominance by yet another outside power, the Soviet Union.

      At no point in history has it been easy to define the Balkans in any other than geographic terms. At times the peninsula has been divided along north-south lines, and at others the divisions have been east-west; what constitutes the Balkans has varied with time, as have the forces operating within the area. There are, however, some features of Balkan history that have remained consistent. These include the fluidity of ethnic groups, the inability of the peoples of the region to agree and cooperate among themselves, a tendency on the part of political authority to devolve to local levels as soon as central power is weakened, the influence of foreign powers, and the difficulty of introducing into the area concepts that have evolved in a different political and social context.

      This article covers the history of the region from antiquity to the ethnic turmoil of the late 20th century. An overview of the region's physical and human geography and of the history can be found in the article Europe For discussion of physical and human geography of individual countries in the region, see Albania Bosnia and Herzegovina Bulgaria Croatia Macedonia Moldova Romania Slovenia and Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro possibly Kosova, too.). Area 257,400 square miles (666,700 square km). Pop. (2001 est.) 60,082,000.

The Ottomans
Conquest and rule
While the various Balkan states fought among themselves for domination in the area, a new danger appeared in the south. In 1362 the Ottoman Turks took Adrianople (modern Edirne, Turkey). This was the beginning of their conquest of the Balkan Peninsula-a process that took more than a century. Serbia fell after the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, Bulgaria in 1396, Constantinople in 1453, Bosnia in 1463, Herzegovina in 1482, and Montenegro in 1499. The conquest was made easier by divisions among the Orthodox peoples and by the even deeper rift between the Western and Eastern Christians.

      Although the Albanians under Skanderbeg frustrated the Ottomans for a time (1443-68), the Ottomans marched ever northward. In 1526 they defeated the Hungarians in the Battle of Mohács, and three years later they sieged Vienna unsuccessfully. The Ottomans now controlled much of central as well as southeastern Europe, but in the northern and western areas their power was much diluted. Transylvania, Moldavia, and Walachia acknowledged the suzerainty of the sultan but managed their own internal affairs-as did Montenegro, which was too mountainous to subdue-while the trading centre of Ragusa (modern Dubrovnik, Croatia) remained independent both de facto and de jure. The western periphery, including Croatia, was still open to the intellectual storms generated by the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, which did not much affect the central Orthodox areas.

      In these central areas the Ottoman conquest brought complete social and political revolution. The old aristocracy almost everywhere was disempowered, and it frequently was destroyed. The main exceptions were Bosnia and Albania where many nobles converted to Islam and retained their land. In Bosnia the Bogomils, equally persecuted by Orthodoxy and Catholicism, had religious as well as material reasons for conversion. In almost all areas the Ottomans introduced the timar system, based on previous Byzantine practices. All land was owned by the sultan-God's representative on earth-but it was leased out to spahis (calvary corps members), who in return undertook to provide troops in proportion to the amount of land held. The peasants worked the land and thus generated income for the spahis, though in the first centuries of Ottoman rule taxation and other levies were usually lighter and more regular than they had been under Christian rule.

      The Ottoman authorities seldom exerted pressure on Christians to convert to Islam, though there were fiscal and legal benefits in doing so. Administratively, the empire was divided into millets , each millet consisting of a single religious denomination. The religious leaders were made responsible for the collection of state taxes and for the maintenance of order within the religious community. Most Balkan Christians, being Orthodox, were members of the millet headed by the Greek patriarch in Constantinople. The taxes that they were required to pay included the devŠirme , an occasional levy on male children who were taken from Christian households to be converted to Islam and trained as members of the administrative elite of the empire, including the military Janissary corps. Despite the horrors of such separation, there is evidence that children who rose high in the imperial service favoured their native areas.

      The devŠirme was last levied in the 17th century, by which time the Ottoman Empire was in irreversible decline. After repelling a second attempt to take Vienna in 1683, the Austrians and then the Russians began to push back the sultan's frontiers. Following the Treaty of Carlowitz in 1699, Hungary, Croatia-Slavonia, and Transylvania reverted to the Habsburg crown, and, with the Treaty of Passarowitz in 1718, Austria regained the Banat of Temesvár. Immediately thereafter the Austrians invited the Serbs, who had been their recent allies, to settle in the border areas of the Habsburg lands as frontier guards; in return, the Serbs were allowed religious freedom. The Austrian Militärgrenze, or "Military Frontier," thus took the momentous step of introducing Orthodox Serbs into Catholic Croatian and Hungarian territory. Meanwhile, the Ottomans suffered further defeats throughout the 18th century. Through the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca (1774), Russia exacted a promise of free navigation on the Danube and insisted on the right to protect Orthodox Christians in the empire.

      The empire's inflexibility accounts for much of its weakness. As the Ottoman system was officially regarded as the implementation on Earth of God's will, it could not be changed. This attitude was pervasive: administrative practices remained unaltered; guilds were set at prescribed numbers, and new ones were difficult to establish; most exports were technically illegal; and estate holders were not legally entitled to bequeath their estates to their heirs. Most of these regulations were evaded by corruption and bribery. At the same time, there was increasing trading in office, not least in tax farming. Under this system the right to collect taxes in a given area could be purchased from a government agency or from government officials. The government determined the amount of tax owed by each individual tax farmer directly to the government, and tax collectors were free to take as much as they could from the taxpayers and pocket the difference. Inevitably the burden of these increased costs was passed down to the peasant and to poor artisans in the towns.

      In Moldavia and Walachia the local nobility had adopted Greek culture, and it was partly through them that Greek influence was extended throughout the Orthodox church in the 18th century, leading to the abolition of the separate Serbian patriarchate in 1766 and of the autocephaly of the Bulgarian church in 1767. The subsequent appointment of Greek bishops and even priests in non-Greek areas caused great resentment; this was exacerbated by the increased trafficking in church offices during the century, which once again passed the costs of purchasing favours down the system until they fell ultimately on poor villagers and townspeople. On the land the high profits to be made from the sale (usually by technically illegal export) of cash crops such as cotton brought about the rise of the çiftlik , a commercially oriented estate whose owner was frequently an absentee landlord and whose peasants were tied to the land and subjected to harsh labour dues.

      In the last two decades of the 18th century, these factors combined with further encroachment by Austria and Russia to produce a virtual collapse of central governmental authority in the Ottoman Balkans. In many areas power lay not with Constantinople but with local warlords who had carved out their own fiefdoms, the most famous being the Albanian Ali PaŠa Tepelenë of Janina (modern Ioánnina, Greece). In some instances these warlords provided some stability, but in most cases they exploited their subjects ruthlessly. Frustration over the weakness of central government rather than over its overbearing presence produced a Serbian uprising of 1804, the first successful Christian revolt against Ottoman rule.

     While the 18th century in the Balkans was dominated by the steady decline of Ottoman power, the outstanding feature of the 19th century was the creation of alleged nation-states on what had been Ottoman territory. Because the emergence of national consciousness and the creation of nation-states were conditioned by local factors, each nation evolved in an individual way. Nevertheless, some general characteristics are discernible.

      The first is that external factors were the ultimate determinants. No Balkan people, no matter how strong their sense of national purpose, could achieve independent statehood, or even a separate administrative identity, without external support. Foreign military intervention on behalf of particular groups was common; Russia aided the Serbs and Bulgarians, while Britain, France, and Russia intervened for the Greeks. The Romanians benefited from the wars of Italian and German unification, and Albanian independence would have been impossible had the Balkan states not smashed Ottoman power in Europe in the First Balkan War (1912-13).

      External intervention came about after indigenous nationalist movements had evolved and eventually fomented unrest or even rebellion. These movements were financed to a large extent by internal wealth, but-with the exception of the peripheral areas of the Greek, Romanian, and Dalmatian lands-such wealth could not be generated until the region had returned to a level of stability that allowed agriculture, trade, and manufacturing to flourish. This situation was not achieved until the 1830s, after the empire had been rocked by the Napoleonic and Russian invasions, the Romanian revolt of 1821, the War of Greek Independence (1821-32), and the suppression of the Janissaries in 1826. Even the Serbs under Karadjordje ("Black George") and Miloš Obrenovi. had only a limited form of autonomy until the 1830s. With the return of relative calm, trade in cloth, animals, copperware, and other goods increased rapidly. Guilds accumulated excess funds and used them to enhance local villages or towns, many of which saw new churches, clock towers, or covered markets in the 1830s and thereafter. The guilds and individual merchants also endowed schools or financed individual scholars to study in Russia, central Europe, or the great educational establishments that appeared in Constantinople. Sometimes wealth was generated by national communities outside what became the national territory of a particular people; for example, the pig merchants of Serbia were not as wealthy as the richest of their Serb trading partners in the Habsburg lands, while the most successful Bulgarian merchants of Constantinople or the Romanian principalities lived in greater opulence than did those in the cloth towns along the foothills of the Balkan Mountains.

Creating a national identity
In the Balkans the formation of the state was subsequent to and consequent upon the emergence of a national movement. In the early years of the 19th century, even among the semiliberated Serbs and Romanians, there was little sense of national identity outside a very small circle of the native intelligentsia. The creation and dissemination of a sense of national identity was usually the work of national apostles who pointed back to more glorious years. In Bulgaria, for example, the monk Paisiy of Khilendar chronicled the glories of the medieval tsars and saints. In the same way, Serbs were reminded of the achievements of Stefan Dušan , and Albanians looked back to the exploits of Skanderbeg . But the echoes of history would not have resonated had a sense of national identity, however weak and apolitical, not somehow been preserved during the long centuries of Ottoman domination.

      One medium for the preservation of national identity had been folklore and folksong. It was these, and especially the epic narrative poetry of Serbia, that had kept alive the memory of Dušan, Skanderbeg, and others. Some told of the exploits of the armed bandits who appeared in most Balkan lands-the klephts, haiduks, and armataloi; these were usually no more than brigands, but, because they discomforted the authorities, they, like Robin Hood in England, were given the characteristics of folk heroes. A sense of national identity also owed its survival to the fact that Ottoman power was concentrated in the towns. The villages were still largely Christian, and here Christian customs survived largely unaffected by the new dominant religion. Also, the Ottomans frequently left the administration of villages in the hands of villagers; this was especially the case in communities entrusted with special functions, such as guarding a pass, supplying water to an imperial palace, or even providing birds for the sultan's falconry. In these self-governing villages, the habits of and the taste for self-administration were acquired, and here too a native leadership cadre was born.

      Religion played an integral part in preserving national identity. Even in the first, violent years of their conquest, the Ottomans seldom touched monasteries, where relics, icons, books, and other cultural treasures were zealously guarded. In the churches the survival of ancient liturgies provided continuity with the non-Muslim past, while even the millet system performed the invaluable function of preserving administration in the native language. Serbian, and even more so Bulgarian, national awareness first became noticeable among the mass of the peasant population in the 18th century when the Greek patriarchate forced Greek bishops and even priests on Serbian and Bulgarian communities.

      Religion could differentiate a Roman Catholic from an Orthodox just as effectively as an Orthodox from a Muslim. In Transylvania before 1848, for example, there was growing dissatisfaction among Orthodox Romanians, who were excluded by the Austrian rulers from the three recognized nations- Saxons, Szeklers, and Magyars (Hungarians-and from the four officially sanctioned religions-Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist, and Uniate.

      The banner of the first small groups of national apostles was taken up by new disciples, and they in turn spread the ideas of national identity, particularly through education and the literacy that it bred. Education took place not only in schools but also, in many areas (particularly Serbia and Bulgaria), in "reading-rooms" -though this English translation does not convey the full meaning of the chitalishte , an institution that not only provided books and newspapers but also organized education for adults and staged plays, debates, and discussions. Nor was it by any means always the case that the new schools were culturally exclusive; in Bulgaria, at least in the early years of the national revival, many subjects were still taught in Greek. Thus, national reawakening was hindered in its early years by the lack of unified national alphabets or literary languages. Indeed, the Albanians had neither until the first decade of the 20th century.

Formation of nation-states
Forging the state
Once the national movements had reached fruition and foreign intervention had taken place, external forces again played a major part in determining the nature of the states that were to be created-though this was less the case with Montenegro and Serbia, which emerged earlier and more gradually than the other states. In all cases the new states were required by the European powers to be monarchies, and-again with the exception of Serbia and Montenegro-they were also required to accept nonnative dynasties. All states except Serbia and Montenegro underwent a change of dynasty, and almost all ended with a minor German princeling on the throne. (Albania was the exception, because it began with a German and ended with a native prince.) The Great Powers also played an important part in determining legal and constitutional structures, usually with the intention of protecting minority rights, as with the Muslims of Bulgaria and the Jews of Romania.

      Once established, the new Balkan states, both before and after World War I attempted to build political and economic structures based upon those that had evolved in the West. However, their endeavour was hampered by their own histories, which had produced societies and psyches much different from those to the west. Population shifts-which inside western Europe had ceased in the 10th century-continued in the Balkans into the 20th century. The Roman and Byzantine empires had suffered constant incursion, and Saxons, Szeklers, and Swabians had been brought into Transylvania to help repair the depredations of the Mongols and other invaders. After the Ottoman conquest Muslimshad moved into Albania, Bulgaria, Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia-some of them migrants from Anatolia, others former prisoners of war or freed slaves, and still others simply converts. When the Russian armies withdrew north of the Danube after the Russo-Turkish War of 1828-29, thousands of Bulgarians left with them, settling eventually in southern Bessarabia and after the Crimean War the sultan's government settled 100,000 to 250,000 Muslim Circassians who otherwise would have been included in Russia, as a defensive force on the northern fringes of the Ottomans' Balkan possessions.

      Further ethnic relocations and atrocities perpetrated by both Ottoman forces and Christian rebels occurred during the process of liberation, and, after the creation of the nation-states, Muslims left in large numbers. Some of these were driven out by force during or immediately after liberation, but many more left voluntarily in subsequent decades. Many Muslims could not adapt to a system in which they were no longer the privileged element. Now that Islamic law did not have automatic supremacy over other legal codes, Christian women could walk freely unveiled in the streets, and mosques could be secularized and turned to profane usage. Even worse, in most new nation-states Muslims were conscripted into the new armies, in which, even if they did not have to wear the cross on their uniforms, they could not escape having to endure Christian holidays and rituals. Those who left were both peasant and landlord. In Moldavia and Walachia, Muslims were forbidden to own landed property, and in other countries they were subject to a land tax. Previously, Muslims had paid taxes on what they produced rather than what they owned, and, because they customarily left up to a third or half of their land fallow, the shift to a tax based on possession rather than production was a considerable burden. As large numbers of Muslims emigrated, fewer remained to pay for and manage schools and other Muslim institutions-even though some of the latter were maintained by vakifs, estates left in perpetuity for this purpose.

      There were ethnic shiftsfor all major religious groups. After the creation of the Bulgarian state in 1878, not only did Muslims leave, but Christian refugees arrived from Macedonia and Thrace. Jews uffering discrimination in Russia moved into Bessarabia, Moldavia, and Walachia throughout the 19th century, and Armenians fleeing troubles of the 1890s found safety in Bulgaria. After the Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908, many Muslims moved into Macedonia and Thrace. After the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, the flood of refugees between Greece and Anatolia led to the first of a series of population-exchange agreements, and there were similar agreements between Bulgaria and Greece after World War I.
At times the creation of independent states exacerbated ethnic problems. The complexities of the ethnic map made it impossible to draw state boundaries that entirely coincided with ethnic divisions and thus created minority problems that were to plague the region for generations. There was a further complication in that the new boundaries frequently interrupted established patterns of economic, social, and cultural activity. For many generations Vlach shepherds had driven their flocks from region to region in the centre of the peninsula, just as Bulgarians had traditionally driven their sheep to market in Edirne or Constantinople. These established activities became more difficult when new state boundaries were established. Traditional fairs, for generations the established medium for the exchange of many products, were also disrupted. In some instances-for example, when the Albanian state was created in 1913-new borders separated villages from their summer pastures or, even more seriously, cut them off from a favourite shrine, church, or monastery. Similarly, new frontiers often separated monasteries from distant properties on whose income they relied. These problems arose from the creation of supposedly modern states in areas where social and economic conditions were far from modern.

      The task of creating Western-style modern states was made more difficult by the lack of capital. With the exception of Romania, where commercialized, export-oriented agriculture was widely developed, most of formerly Ottoman Europe was dominated by small, self-sufficient peasant proprietors. They generated little surplus capital, and, until the end of the 19th century, those peasants or merchants who did have surplus funds found that moneylending provided much higher rates of return than did any form of productive investment. Meanwhile, financial sophistication was so limited that double-column bookkeeping was hardly known. Thus, these states were dependent on the external, developed world for capital and commercial expertise, as well as for arms and for manufactured goods, though such dependence did not necessarily lead to political subservience.

      In the late 19th century, Balkan peasants suffered from a fall in world food prices. The situation was made worse in that, because income from the sale of agricultural produce was declining, governments were less willing to rely upon the tithe as a major form of taxation. Coming at a time when peasant cash incomes were falling and indebtedness was widespread, the decision to require that taxes be paid in cash produced considerable tension. This tension in turn led to outbursts of unrest, to the formation of cooperatives, and, subsequently, to the development of the agrarian political parties that were to play a significant role in most Balkan states after World War I.

      In their political evolution the Balkan states saw strong pressures toward centralization and toward the strengthening of executive as opposed to legislative powers. These trends frequently clashed with the populace's political instincts, particularly in Serbia and Bulgaria, where local power, frequently vested in the village and its elders, had served as a cushion against Ottoman pressure and had been one of the means by which national identity had been preserved. Consequently, much of the constitutional instability that afflicted 19th-century Serbia derived from clashes between the new royal authorities in Belgrade and local village chieftains. Likewise, Alexander of Battenberg, the first prince of Bulgaria, attempted to reconstruct Sofia's municipal council in 1879 and was told that not even the Turks would have dared to do that.
Political participation in all Balkan states soon became restricted to a small segment of the population. The large landowners had a great influence on the politics of Romania before World War I and on Albania after it, but in all countries the intelligentsia was also actively engaged. A distinction emerged, however, between that part of the intelligentsia that remained politically independent and the part that became linked to the ruling apparatus through the system of clientism and jobbery (public corruption) that soon affected the entire peninsula. This development had deleterious effects on the Balkan states. It lured a substantial part of the intelligentsia into state office in return for political obedience and thereby corrupted some of the ablest citizens by leading them to close their eyes to abuses of power. Corruption in turn produced a widening rift between the peasants and those who wielded power; throughout the Balkans it was commonly observed that the worst oppressor was the peasant who had only just entered the ranks of the influential.

      Influence and wealth could be acquired in the bureaucracy, which before 1914 expanded steadily in all states except Montenegro and Albania, but the same goals could also be pursued in the army. The military became a significant factor in Bulgaria after the deposition of Prince Alexander in 1886 and in Serbia after the overthrow of the Obrenovi dynasty in 1903. In Romania the military played a less-prominent role in political power brokering, but it was an avenue for social advancement. After World War I and even during the years of communist domination after World War II, the army remained a powerful factor in the political affairs of all states.
The Balkan states emerged separately and at different times. Although their freedom of action was limited by the Great Powers, they all had claims to further territory that they considered theirs by ethnic or historic right, and notions of Balkan union or solidarity were therefore rare and transitory. The Serbs toyed with such ideas in the 1860s, and the Balkan states did manage to cohere long enough in 1912-13 to destroy what was left of Ottoman power in the peninsula. But fleeting cooperation soon gave way in 1913 to recrimination and bloody conflict. Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece were unable to agree upon a division of Macedonia, and they clashed again over the same issue in 1914.

The world war period
World War I
No Balkan state wished to become embroiled in World War I, even though it was precipitated by the assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne by a Bosnian Serb nationalist who worked in collusion with elements in the Serbian secret police. To Austria's ultimatum of July 1914, Serbia sent an abject reply, accepting most of the demands and offering to submit the most unreasonable ones to international arbitration. Once conflict had been forced upon the peninsula, Montenegro declared war with reluctance in early August, Bulgaria stood aside until committing itself to the Central Powers in September 1915, Romania was not persuaded to join the Allied Powers until 1916, and Albania was powerless to avoid partitioning by the warring parties. Moreover, the Balkans were not a major theatre of operations. The Central Powers finally subdued Serbia after their second onslaught, launched in 1915. In that same year the Allies sent their ill-fated expedition to Gallipoli in the Dardanelles, and in the autumn of 1916 they established themselves in Salonika. However, their armies did not move from the latter location until toward the end of the war, when they marched up the Danube to become the main instrument of Allied authority in south-central Europe in the immediate postwar years.
Nevertheless, although they may have had no desire for the conflict, the Balkan states and peoples could not escape its consequences. All suffered serious economic dislocation, and the mass mobilization resulted in severe casualties, particularly in Serbia. In less-developed societies the impact of total mobilization was felt in other ways. The requisitioning of draft animals, for example, caused severe problems in villages that were already suffering from the enlistment of young men, and many recently created trade connections were ruined.

Greater Romania and Yugoslavia
In the 19th century, state formation in the Balkans occurred when the region's Christian population induced foreign intervention to secure its separation from Ottoman power. This process had not been allowed to penetrate into the Habsburg and Russian empires, however, and these retained their own territories and interests in the Balkans-Russian aspirations concentrating on Constantinople and the Dardanelles and Austria-Hungary's thought to be in securing Salonika. World War I destroyed those two empires. The future of their Balkan possessions-Croatia-Slavonia, Dalmatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Vojvodina, Slovenia, Bukovina the Banat of Temesvár, Transylvania, and Bessarabia-had to be decided by delegates at the Paris Peace Conference (1919-20), not in gradual and piecemeal fashion but altogether and immediately. Because the population of Transylvania, the Banat, Bessarabia, and Bukovina was predominantly Romanian, the bulk of these areas were included in the Romanian kingdom. Most of the remaining areas were predominantly Serbo-Croatian speaking and became constituent parts of the new triune Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes.

      Inevitably the settlements could not completely follow ethnic lines of division. The Banat and the Vojvodina were very mixed in ethnic composition; Transylvania had substantial Hungarian and German minorities; Bessarabia and Bukovina had many Jewish and Ukrainian inhabitants; the Slovenes did not speak Serbo-Croatian, and neither did the Macedonians or the Albanians of Kosovo. The rationale for including so many minorities in these new states was that it was impossible to draw proper lines of division in such an ethnic kaleidoscope, that larger states would be more economically viable than smaller, more ethnically homogeneous ones, and, more important, that the large states would be more effective barriers against Russian and Hungarian bolshevism. It was also hoped that serious minority problems would be avoided by requiring all states in the area to sign minority-protection treaties that guaranteed the civil rights of all citizens, irrespective of ethnicity.

Problems of integration
In the years immediately after World War I, the Balkans experienced instability and insecurity. Political extremists exploited the political unrest caused by mass demobilization and a return to civilian production. As the chief threat to the newly emerging order was believed to be that of Russian bolshevism, it was not surprising that communist parties had been outlawed in all Balkan states by the end of 1925.

      There were also immense long-term difficulties in uniting the previously disjointed territories. Where railway networks existed, they served the needs of the old empires rather than the new states; those in the former Russian areas even had a different gauge. In addition, legal codes and taxation systems had to be unified, and common currencies had to be forged. The latter process was made difficult in the early postwar years by rampant inflation, which was caused not least by the new governments' spending beyond their means to create or extend the state machinery.
The problems of integration were made much more complex by the fact that the territories involved were differentially developed. The Ottoman conquest had deeply divided the Balkans, those areas under the sultan's authority being subject to different laws, to different social customs, and to a system that adapted painstakingly slowly to economic change. The states that emerged from Ottoman domination-Serbia, Albania, Bulgaria, and, to a lesser extent, Romania-were therefore less developed and poor. Into them were now merged former Russian or Austro-Hungarian territories, some (though not all) of which were more developed. Slovenia, Croatia, and Transylvania had more developed intelligentsias, more efficient and honest bureaucracies, an emerging economic infrastructure, and extensive and frequently profitable trade links with other parts of the empire. These relatively prosperous and advanced areas were now subjected to political cultures that they could regard only as more primitive and less honest. Furthermore, those political cultures were becoming more inclined to centralism rather than the devolution that the new provinces would have preferred. Herein lay the origin of many of the problems that beset interwar Yugoslavia and Romania.

      One issue that was settled with relative ease was land reform. Land redistribution was very much the order of the day, not least because the new governments were convinced that the peasants would be forced into the arms of the communists if the great estates were not broken up. The Romanian government delivered on its promise of land reform as soon as the war was over; the new Yugoslav government passed similar legislation, as did that of Bulgaria, where nearly all land, except church and monastic properties, was already peasant-owned. In the former Habsburg and Russian territories, land reform had clear ethnic overtones. The dispossessed aristocracy belonged primarily to the former dominating elements: German, Hungarian, or Russian; the new owners were predominantly from the formerly subject groups: Croat, Romanian, Ukrainian, and Slovene -though poor Magyar or German peasants were also allowed a share of the redistributed property. The process of redistribution was not equally enforced; it frequently created resentment and perpetrated injustice, and it was perhaps of questionable economic value. Nevertheless, it was a social and political necessity in the climate of the early 1920s, and in many ways the ordered reallocation of property, with compensation to the previous owners, was a considerable achievement for the Balkan regimes.

      With the exception of Albania, internal stability was achieved by the mid-1920s. However, stability came at the cost of stronger central authorities, a trend that was to intensify in the following decade. International relations also stabilized. From the early 1920s until the rise of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, the Balkan states enjoyed a large degree of freedom from foreign influence and interference, owing to the disappearance of the Habsburg and Russian empires and the neutralization of the Dardanelles. The fascist Italy of dictator Benito Mussolini did try to extend its influence in the eastern Adriatic, but it was not strong enough to attempt unilateral territorial expansion. The dangers from the other revisionist states, Hungary and Bulgaria, were controlled by the Little Entente an alliance of Romania, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia created in 1920-21 and backed by the French. Sources of interstate tension did remain, not least over the ultimate destiny of Macedonia, but there was a presumption that international disputes would be contained by the newly formed League of Nations .Although the League of Nations would later falter, it was able to contain the bitter dispute between Bulgaria and Greece in 1925-26.