The Liberation Of Serbia Under Kara-george 1804-13
The liberation of Serbia from the Turkish dominion and its establishment
as an independent state were matters of much slower and more arduous
accomplishment than were the same processes in the other Balkan countries.
One reason for this was that Serbia by its peculiar geographical position
was cut off from outside help. It was easy for the western powers to help
Greece with their fleets, and for Russia to help Rumania and, later,
Bulgaria directly with its army, because communication between them was
easy. But Serbia on the one hand was separated from the sea, first by
Dalmatia, which was always in foreign possession, and then by Bosnia,
Hercegovina, and the sandjak (or province) of Novi-Pazar, all of which
territories, though ethnically Serb, were strongholds of Turkish influence
owing to their large Mohammedan population. The energies of Montenegro,
also cut off from the sea by Dalmatia and Turkey, were absorbed in
self-defence, though it gave Serbia all the support which its size
permitted. Communication, on the other hand, between Russia and Serbia was
too difficult to permit of military help being rapidly and effectively
brought to bear upon the Turks from that quarter. Bessarabia, Wallachia,
and Moldavia were then still under Turkish control, and either they had to
be traversed or the Danube had to be navigated from its mouth upwards
through Turkish territory. The only country which could have helped Serbia
was Austria, but as it was against their best interests to do so, the
Austrians naturally did all they could not to advance, but to retard the
Serbian cause. As a result of all this Serbia, in her long struggle
against the Turks, had to rely principally on its own resources, though
Russian diplomacy several times saved the renascent country from disaster.
Another reason for the slowness of the emancipation and development of
modern Serbia has been the proneness of its people to internal dissension.
There was no national dynasty on whom the leadership of the country would
naturally devolve after the first successful revolution against Turkish
rule, there was not even any aristocracy left, and no foreign ruler was
ever asked for by the Serbs or was ever imposed on them by the other
nations as in the case of Greece, Rumania, and Bulgaria. On the other hand
the rising against Turkey was a rising of the whole people, and it was
almost inevitable that as soon as some measure of independence was gained
the unity the Serbs had shown when fighting against their oppressors
should dissolve and be replaced by bitter rivalries and disputes amongst
the various local leaders who had become prominent during the rebellion.
These rivalries early in the nineteenth century resolved themselves into a
blood-feud between two families, the Karagjorgjevi['c] and the
Obrenovi['c], a quarrel that filled Serbian history and militated against
the progress of the Serb people throughout the nineteenth century.
The same reasons which restricted the growth of the political independence
of Serbia have also impeded, or rather made impossible, its economic
development and material prosperity. Until recent years Austria-Hungary
and Turkey between them held Serbia territorially in such a position that
whenever Serbia either demurred at its neighbours' tariffs or wished to
retaliate by means of its own, the screw was immediately applied and
economic strangulation threatened. Rumania and Bulgaria economically could
never be of help to Serbia, because the products and the requirements of
all three are identical, and Rumania and Bulgaria cannot be expected to
facilitate the sale of their neighbours' live stock and cereals, when
their first business is to sell their own, while the cost of transit of
imports from western Europe through those countries is prohibitive.
After the unsuccessful rebellion of 1788, already mentioned, Serbia
remained in a state of pseudo-quiescence for some years. Meanwhile the
authority of the Sultan in Serbia was growing ever weaker and the real
power was wielded by local Turkish officials, who exploited the country,
looked on it as their own property, and enjoyed semi-independence. Their
exactions and cruelties were worse than had been those of the Turks in the
old days, and it was against them and their troops, not against those of
the Sultan, that the first battles in the Serbian war of independence were
fought. It was during the year 1803 that the Serbian leaders first made
definite plans for the rising which eventually took place in the following
year. The ringleader was George Petrovi['c], known as Black George, or
Kara-George, and amongst his confederates was Milo[)s] Obrenovi['c]. The
centre of the conspiracy was at Topola, in the district of [)S]umadija in
central Serbia (between the Morava and the Drina rivers), the native place
of Kara-George. The first two years of fighting between the Serbians and,
first, the provincial janissaries, and, later, the Sultan's forces, fully
rewarded the bravery and energy of the insurgents. By the beginning of
1807 they had virtually freed all northern Serbia by their own unaided
efforts and captured the towns of Po[)z]arevac, Smederevo, Belgrade, and
[)S]abac. The year 1804 is also notable as the date of the formal opening
of diplomatic relations directly between Serbia and Russia. At this time
the Emperor Alexander I was too preoccupied with Napoleon to be able to
threaten the Sultan (Austerlitz took place in November 1805), but he gave
the Serbs financial assistance and commended their cause to the especial
care of his ambassador at Constantinople.
In 1807 war again broke out between Russia and Turkey, but after the Peace
of Tilsit (June 1807) fighting ceased also between the Turks and the
Russians and the Serbs, not before the Russians had won several successes
against the Turks on the Lower Danube. It was during the two following
years of peace that dissensions first broke out amongst the Serbian
leaders; fighting the Turks was the sole condition of existence which
prevented them fighting each other. In 1809-10 Russia and the Serbs again
fought the Turks, at first without success, but later with better fortune.
In 1811 Kara-George was elected Gospodar, or sovereign, by a popular
assembly, but Serbia still remained a Turkish province. At the end of that
year the Russians completely defeated the Turks at Rustchuk in Bulgaria,
and, if all had gone well, Serbia might there and then have achieved
complete independence.
But Napoleon was already preparing his invasion and Russia had to conclude
peace with Turkey in a hurry, which necessarily implied that the Sultan
obtained unduly favourable terms. In the Treaty of Bucarest between the
two countries signed in May 1812, the Serbs were indeed mentioned, and
promised vague internal autonomy and a general amnesty, but all the
fortified towns they had captured were to be returned to the Turks, and
the few Russian troops who had been helping the Serbs in Serbia had to
withdraw. Negotiations between the Turks and the Serbs for the regulation
of their position were continued throughout 1812, but finally the Turks
refused all their claims and conditions and, seeing the European powers
preoccupied with their own affairs, invaded the country from Bosnia in the
west, and also from the east and south, in August 1813. The Serbs, left
entirely to their own resources, succumbed before the superior forces of
the Turks, and by the beginning of October the latter were again masters
of the whole country and in possession of Belgrade. Meanwhile Kara-George,
broken in health and unable to cope with the difficulties of the
situation, which demanded successful strategy both against the
overwhelming forces of the Turks in the field and against the intrigues of
his enemies at home, somewhat ignominiously fled across the river to
Semlin in Hungary, and was duly incarcerated by the Austrian authorities.
The news of Napoleon's defeat at Leipsic (October 1813) arrived just after
that of the re-occupation of Belgrade by the Turks, damped feu-de-joie
which they were firing at Constantinople, and made them rather more
conciliatory and lenient to the Serbian rebels. But this attitude did not
last long, and the Serbs soon had reason to make fresh efforts to regain
their short-lived liberty. The Congress of Vienna met in the autumn of
1814, and during its whole course Serbian emissaries gave the Russian
envoys no peace. But with the return of Napoleon to France in the spring
of 1815 and the break-up of the Congress, all that Russia could do was,
through its ambassador at Constantinople, to threaten invasion unless the
Turks left the Serbs alone. Nevertheless, conditions in Serbia became so
intolerable that another rebellion soon took shape, this time under
Milo[)s] Obrenovi['c]. This leader was no less patriotic than his rival,
Kara-George, but he was far more able and a consummate diplomat.
Kara-George had possessed indomitable courage, energy, and will-power, but
he could not temporize, and his arbitrary methods of enforcing discipline
and his ungovernable temper had made him many enemies. While the credit
for the first Serbian revolt (1804-13) undoubtedly belongs chiefly to him,
the second revolt owed its more lasting success to the skill of Milo[)s]
Obrenovi['c]. The fighting started at Takovo, the home of the Obrenovi['c]
family, in April 1815, and after many astonishing successes against the
Turks, including the capture of the towns of Rudnik, [)C]a[)c]ak,
Po[)z]arevac, and Kraljevo, was all over by July of the same year. The
Turks were ready with large armies in the west in Bosnia, and also south
of the Morava river, to continue the campaign and crush the rebellion, but
the news of the final defeat of Napoleon, and the knowledge that Russia
would soon have time again to devote attention to the Balkans, withheld
their appetites for revenge, and negotiations with the successful rebels
were initiated. During the whole of this period, from 1813 onwards,
Milo[)s] Obrenovi['c], as head of a district, was an official of the
Sultan in Serbia, and it was one of his principles never to break
irreparably with the Turks, who were still suzerains of the country. At
the same time, owing to his skill and initiative he was recognized as the
only real leader of the movement for independence. From the cessation of
the rebellion in 1815 onwards he himself personally conducted negotiations
in the name of his people with the various pashas who were deputed to deal
with him. While these negotiations went on and the armistice was in force,
he was confronted, or rather harassed from behind, by a series of revolts
against his growing authority on the part of his jealous compatriots.
In June 1817 Kara-George, who had been in Russia after being released by
the Austrians in 1814, returned surreptitiously to Serbia, encouraged by
the brighter aspect which affairs in his country seemed to be assuming.
But the return of his most dangerous rival was as unwelcome to Milo[)s] as
it was to the Turkish authorities at Belgrade, and, measures having been
concerted between them, Kara-George was murdered on July 26,1817, and the
first act in the blood-feud between the two families thus committed. In
November of the same year a skup[)s]tina, or national assembly, was held
at Belgrade, and Milo[)s] Obrenovi['c], whose position was already
thoroughly assured, was elected hereditary prince (knez) of the country.
Meanwhile events of considerable importance for the future of the Serb
race had been happening elsewhere. Dalmatia, the whole of which had been
in the possession of Venice since the Treaty of Carlowitz in 1699, passed
into the hands of Austria by the Treaty of Campo Formio in 1797, when the
Venetian republic was extinguished by Napoleon. The Bocche di Cuttaro, a
harbour both strategically and commercially of immense value, which had in
the old days belonged to the Serb principality of Zeta or Montenegro, and
is its only natural outlet on the Adriatic, likewise became Venetian in
1699 and Austrian in 1797, one year after the successful rebellion of the
Montenegrins against the Turks.
By the Treaty of Pressburg between France and Austria Dalmatia became
French in 1805. But the Montenegrins, supported by the Russians, resisted
the new owners and occupied the Bocche; at the Peace of Tilsit in 1807,
however, this important place was assigned to France by Russia, and
Montenegro had to submit to its loss. In 1806 the French occupied Ragusa,
and in 1808 abolished the independence of the ancient Serb city-republic.
In 1812 the Montenegrins, helped by the Russians and British, again
expelled the French and reoccupied Cattaro; but Austria was by now fully
alive to the meaning this harbour would have once it was in the possession
of Montenegro, and after the Congress of Vienna in 1815 took definitive
possession of it as well as of all the rest of Dalmatia, thus effecting
the complete exclusion of the Serb race for all political and commercial
purposes from the Adriatic, its most natural and obvious means of
communication with western Europe.
Though Milo[)s] had been elected prince by his own people, it was long
before he was recognized as such by the Porte. His efforts for the
regularization of his position entailed endless negotiations in
Constantinople; these were enlivened by frequent anti-Obrenovi['c] revolts
in Serbia, all of which Milo[)s] successfully quelled. The revolution in
Greece in 1821 threw the Serbian question from the international point of
view into the shade, but the Emperor Nicholas I, who succeeded his brother
Alexander I on the Russian throne in 1825, soon showed that he took a
lively and active interest in Balkan affairs. Pan-Slavism had scarcely
become fashionable in those days, and it was still rather as the protector
of its co-religionists under the Crescent that Russia intervened. In 1826
Russian and Turkish delegates met at Akerman in Bessarabia, and in
September of that year signed a convention by which the Russian
protectorate over the Serbs was recognized, the Serbs were granted
internal autonomy, the right to trade and erect churches, schools, and
printing-presses, and the Turks were forbidden to live in Serbia except in
eight garrison towns; the garrisons were to be Turkish, and tribute was
still to be paid to the Sultan as suzerain. These concessions, announced
by Prince Milo[)s] to his people at a special skup[)s]tina held at
Kragujevac in 1827, evoked great enthusiasm, but the urgency of the Greek
question again delayed their fulfilment. After the battle of Navarino on
October 20, 1827, in which the British, French, and Russian fleets
defeated the Turkish, the Turks became obstinate and refused to carry out
the stipulations of the Convention of Akerman in favour of Serbia.
Thereupon Russia declared war on Turkey in April 1828, and the Russian
armies crossed the Danube and the Balkans and marched on Constantinople.
Peace was concluded at Adrianople in 1829, and Turkey agreed to carry out
immediately all the stipulations of the Treaty of Bucarest (1812) and the
Convention of Akerman (1826). The details took some time to settle, but in
November 1830 the hatti-sherif of the Sultan, acknowledging Milo[)s] as
hereditary prince of Serbia, was publicly read in Belgrade. All the
concessions already promised were duly granted, and Serbia became
virtually independent, but still tributary to the Sultan. Its territory
included most of the northern part of the modern kingdom of Serbia,
between the rivers Drina, Save, Danube, and Timok, but not the districts
of Nish, Vranja, and Pirot. Turkey still retained Bosnia and Hercegovina,
Macedonia, the sandjak of Novi-Pazar, which separated Serbia from
Montenegro, and Old Serbia (northern Macedonia).
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