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Frontier Anxieties: Toward a Social History of Muslim-Christian Relations on the Ottoman-Habsburg Border

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2020

Edin Hajdarpasic
Edin Hajdarpasic*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Loyola University Chicago; Chicago, Illinois
*
ehajdarpasic@luc.edu
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Abstract

This article reframes the formation of the Ottoman-Habsburg frontier after 1699 in social historical terms. By going beyond diplomatic and military factors, it identifies how the contraction of Ottoman borders affected taxation, landholding, and Muslim-Christian relations in Bosnia. The article argues that peasants in Ottoman Bosnia experienced the mounting pressures of increasing taxation, manipulation over landownership, and religiously inflected hostility, often driven by those Muslim noblemen who tried to capitalize on the destabilizing wake of several wars that the Ottoman Empire fought with the Habsburg, Venetian, and Russian states in the eighteenth century. Through these processes, by the end of the century the meaning of the reaya or raya—an Ottoman term for taxpaying “subjects” that theoretically applied to all denominations, including Muslims—had become synonymous with “Christians,” acquiring a new political significance.

Keywords

Austro-Ottoman warsbordersTreaty of KarlowitzmigrationsubjecthoodFranciscansMuslim-Christian relationsreaya

Information

Type
Article Commentary
Information
Austrian History Yearbook , Volume 51 , May 2020 , pp. 25 - 38
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

Sometime around 1810, an Ottoman Bosnian writer—most likely Mustafa Firaki—penned “A Plea, as Written by the Bosnian Poor.” Composed in a South Slavic dialect written in the Arabic script, “The Plea” articulated growing Bosnian Muslim resentment toward “Christian” advances at the Ottoman borders as well as the Istanbul officials’ neglect of these frontiers. In spirited rhymes, the self-styled borderland petition cried out at the end of each verse to that “burning sunshine,” the sultan:

Bosnia is the head of your frontier (serhat)
On one side is the river Sava
On three sides flows the infidel lava
So you know that, burning sunshine. . . .
We waged war for the borderland
We guarded the Bosnian highland . . .
Fifteen thousand martyrs we gave
But no one cares for that today . . .
Sultan, ruler, burning sunshine.

By linking local fears about shrinking Ottoman borders with discontent against Istanbul's allegedly negligent authorities, “The Plea” positioned itself as an expression of particular social tensions that emerged in Bosnia over the course of the preceding century.Footnote 1 The imposition of a new Ottoman-Habsburg border in 1699 not only demarcated Bosnia as the westernmost Ottoman province in Europe but also helped give shape to profound social transformations in land, taxation, and Muslim-Christian relations in Ottoman borderlands. In other words, the kind of anxieties that Firaki and other Ottoman Bosnian writers expressed about “the infidels” who “took up the sword and surrounded the Turkish land” emerged over the course of the eighteenth century alongside recurring Habsburg-Ottoman wars, mass migrations, land disputes, and a growing sense of local Muslim suspicion of Christian empowerment at Ottoman expense.Footnote 2

The goal of this essay is to propose a set of issues—specifically those concerning taxation, land, and Christian-Muslim relations—that can usefully reframe the formation of the Ottoman-Habsburg frontier in social historical terms, not just diplomatic and military ones. For all the attention that the Ottoman-Habsburg border has received in previous scholarship, it was the conduct of war and diplomacy that continued to guide most research agendas, leaving the relationship of the emerging border dynamics to broader social and cultural currents understudied.Footnote 3 By taking a sustained look at the Ottoman side of this border in eighteenth-century Bosnia, this essay argues that the several pressures in the aftermath of the eighteenth-century Ottoman-Habsburg wars—namely increasing taxation, displacement, and heightened Ottoman anxieties about further losses—helped bring about an unprecedented conflation of class and confessional relations in Ottoman borderlands like Bosnia. Here Ottoman peasants experienced mounting pressures of increasing taxation, manipulation over landownership, and religiously inflected hostility, often driven by those Muslim notables who aggressively capitalized on the destabilizing wake of several wars that the Ottoman Empire fought with the Habsburg, Venetian, and Russian states in the eighteenth century.

Through these processes, the meaning of reaya or raya—an Ottoman term for taxpaying “imperial subjects” once applied to all denominations, including Muslims—became synonymous with “Christians” by the end of the eighteenth century, acquiring a new political significance that it did not have in earlier Ottoman history. Historians have long noted this fundamental transformation of Ottoman subjecthood from nondenominational taxpayers to Christians, yet surprisingly there have been very few attempts to explain more precisely how, where, and why these social differentiations happened.Footnote 4 The following discussion is not meant to deliver a conclusive verdict on this complex topic, which unfolded differently across disparate Ottoman domains and which later became a matter of concerted legal reform after the 1839 Tanzimat Proclamation.Footnote 5 Instead, it aims to identify specific areas and propose frameworks that could be useful in understanding the processes of social and confessional differentiation that were intertwined with massive changes in Ottoman frontiers.

Militarization and Taxation: The Making of a Borderland Province

To forestall further losses to neighboring states, the Ottoman government extensively reorganized major military and taxation institutions after the conclusion of the War of the Holy League in 1699. Paying for the wars and for new military-administrative institutions, however, became a massive and recurring problem in the post-1699 era.Footnote 6 Regarding Bosnia, Istanbul officials began to issue orders for the creation of dozens of new defensive subdivisions that typically covered a small town, main roads, and the adjacent countryside. Overseeing each of these precincts was a kapudan or kapetan, a local commander appointed by Istanbul to maintain military readiness in case of another conflict. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, there were almost forty separate kapudan precincts, each covering in its jurisdiction at least one fortified town and a number of surrounding villages. The kapudans, having been confirmed by the sultan, gained significant authority in military as well as administrative matters: they mobilized the local populace into their retinues; constructed new fortresses; policed public order; oversaw the collection of certain taxes; and appointed a number of other officials to lower posts. The commanders usually served lifelong appointments and, for all practical purposes, turned the new position of the kapudan into a hereditary office held by male members of prominent local families.Footnote 7 The evolution of this peculiar borderland rank was a part of the larger emergence of provincial notables, or ayans, as actors who became more powerful and autonomous across the Ottoman Empire over the course of the eighteenth century.Footnote 8

The periodic recurrence of Habsburg-Ottoman conflicts and other wars in the Balkans left a deep mark on the fraying political and social fabric of the Ottoman borderlands. In Bosnia, the period of relative peace after 1699 was broken by the Venetian-Ottoman war (1714–17) and another Ottoman war with the Habsburgs (1736–39) fought largely on Bosnian territory. Even in times of peace between and after these wars, social turmoil did not subside in Bosnia and other border areas. When the Ottoman-Russian war erupted further east in the second half of the eighteenth century (1768–74), Bosnia escaped direct fighting, but the region's resources were still strained by the Ottoman attempts to mobilize soldiers and raise money for the war. To Ottoman consternation, this war ended in a major defeat, with the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca (1774) sealing substantial territorial losses and enabling Russia to claim the role of external protector of Orthodox Christian subjects in the Ottoman Empire in the subsequent century (a development that paralleled Austria's attempt to assert itself as a protector of Ottoman Catholics, explored in the last section of this essay).Footnote 9 From 1788 to 1792, another round of wars were fought between the allied Austrian and Russian empires and the Ottomans, with fighting taking place along the northern Bosnian border. Paying for these conflicts would prove to be a particularly fraught problem for both authorities in Istanbul and for provincial officials in the affected borderland provinces.

The matter of providing the financial and material resources for the newly militarized provincial administration proved to be especially divisive in Bosnia. In times of war, the Ottoman government often resorted to levying emergency taxes to fund the salaries for provincial administrators.Footnote 10 In the first decades of the eighteenth century, the Ottoman authorities repeatedly tried to reassure both the raya and the soldier-administrators of the Balkan provinces that their social status would be safeguarded in the wake of rampant wartime looting and emergency mobilizations. Such vows, however, proved hard to keep in practice. The Istanbul authorities, financially strapped and destabilized by military losses, tended to rely on intermediaries like the kapudans of Bosnia to realize two somewhat contradictory goals: first, to raise massive taxation revenue from the local populace to pay for the new fortifications and retinues and, second, to avoid further depopulation by assuring the imperial subjects in areas like Bosnia that they would be treated fairly with relatively light taxation and labor obligations.Footnote 11

Crucially, in the 1720s the Porte's officials introduced in Bosnia the so-called peacetime tax, often called taksit, to raise further peacetime revenue by preserving a number of earlier emergency fees that had been levied during the wars. Usually collected biannually (in summer and winter), these postwar financial levies opened major venues for the local tax collectors to adjust and increase dues in the name of the pressing state needs.Footnote 12 For example, in 1771, the provincial administration tried to raise another emergency tax by reapportioning the taksit in Sarajevo to help pay for the ongoing Ottoman-Russian war further east in the Balkans.Footnote 13 When Bosnia once again became the theater of another Habsburg-Ottoman war in the late 1780s, the provincial government called yet again for an increase in taksit, issuing decrees to cities like Mostar to contribute funds for the war chest.Footnote 14 As Markus Koller has argued, it is precisely such social struggles that made the second half of the eighteenth century (especially from the 1750s through the 1780s) an unstable period despite these being technically “peacetime” decades in Bosnia.Footnote 15

What is especially significant in the long run is the enduring manipulation of these “emergency” dues well into the nineteenth century. Generally, peacetime decades between these wars brought little relief because the Ottoman Bosnian administration could always decide to reapportion the taxes for individual districts. The rising taksit levels figured perhaps most prominently in the grievances voiced during the postwar uprisings in the 1740s and 1770s, but the collection of this particular set of dues fluctuated, continuing in the Blagaj area into the 1830s, for example.Footnote 16 The practice of assessing taksit that began in the 1720s ceased in Bosnia only in the 1850s when the enforcement of Tanzimat laws finally did away with this particular legacy of the eighteenth-century wars.

Displacement and Dispossession: Confessional Intensification of Landholding Relations

Among the most conspicuous factors that shaped the remaking of Ottoman borderlands were the massive population displacements and migrations during the series of Ottoman wars with the Habsburg, Russian, and Venetian states (roughly spanning the decades from the 1680s through the 1730s). During these conflicts, Ottoman hostility to potential local Catholic or Orthodox allies of the invading Habsburg troops forced thousands of Balkan Christians to escape to other nearby regions, especially to the Habsburg or Venetian areas; it is estimated that some forty-five thousand Catholics alone left Bosnia in this period.Footnote 17 At the same time, nearly all the Muslims living in Ottoman Hungary, Slavonia, and Transylvania were forced to leave after the Habsburg reconquest, often escaping to the relative safety of Ottoman Bosnia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, and beyond.Footnote 18

What is less well known is the history of further migrations within the Ottoman Balkan provinces following this period. With the continuation of wars in the 1710s and the 1730s, tens of thousands of people from various class and confessional backgrounds continued to migrate across the Dalmatian hinterland, western Bosnia, Herzegovina, Montenegro, and parts of Serbia in several uneven and back-and-forth waves that crisscrossed these rapidly changing regions. Moreover, each round of the Habsburg-Ottoman wars in Bosnia provided occasions for internal displacement within Ottoman domains. Tracing and estimating the numbers of these migrations is notoriously difficult because few surviving records provide consistent and specific details for these resettlements; nonetheless, the existing evidence clearly points to what appear to have been continued population shifts across what is present-day Bosnia, Dalmatia, Montenegro, and Serbia.Footnote 19 Combined with the stagnating size of the Muslim population in Bosnia (which was frequently afflicted with plague outbreaks in urban areas), one consequence of these changes helped create a gradual increase in rural inhabitants usually labeled at the time by a variety of names (often “Vlachs” or “Morlachs” as well as Bunjevci, Srblji, Bošnjaci, Šokci, and Madžari) or often simply identified as “Christians,” especially for the purposes of Ottoman taxation registers.Footnote 20

The displacement and migration of tens of thousands of people across the Ottoman-Habsburg borderlands helped shape new kinds of relations between landlords and peasants on landed estates known as chiftliks.Footnote 21 In Ottoman borderlands like Bosnia, the wartime and postwar displacements of the local population put many peasants in a vulnerable predicament that the more aggressive notables of the area quickly utilized to their advantage. As the Habsburg-Ottoman wars entailed emergency mobilizations, confiscation of material resources like livestock and foodstuffs, and military combat along the Bosnian borderland and even further inland, many peasants faced rapidly evolving relationships to a variety of Muslim notables who claimed to be their “rightful landlords,” ranging from existing estate holders to new pretenders claiming land plots during wars or uprisings. The combined processes of displacement and dispossession meant that the Ottoman peasants—and during the eighteenth century this affected most forcefully the Christian peasants—had their dues raised, their labor obligations increased, and their land plots often taken away by more aggressive notables, usually Muslim town residents trying to take advantage of new opportunities during the wartime and postwar upheavals.

For example, Orthodox or Catholic peasants returning to a northern Bosnian village from where they had been displaced during the Habsburg invasion of Ottoman Bosnia in 1737–39 faced stark new realities after the conclusion of the conflict.Footnote 22 Those who decided to take up their old plots might find that their former landlord no longer owned this land, which was now claimed by the local kapudan's officers (who legally obtained the right to raise revenue from the village) or a spahi from a neighboring town (who simply staked claims to land during the war). This appears to have been the situation in the village of Brusnica (near Tešanj in northern Bosnia) in 1744. The local court records show that the military retinue of the fortresses of Tešanj, Žepče, and Maglaj complained about a certain Hamza, a local fief-holder who decided to collect taxes from the peasants living in Brusnica as if the estate belonged to him. But according to the initial complaint, the village was not his because it was entrusted to the fortress officers as their revenue-generating estate.Footnote 23 Despite the local officers’ accusations, Hamza kept claiming that he had a legal right to the disputed village “on the basis of an earlier court report and the illustrious sultan's charter.” The local judge, however, found no basis for such claims, concluding that the officers had the proper deeds, which meant that Hamza would be forbidden to meddle with the affairs of Brusnica's peasants. Hamza nonetheless retorted, “I also possess legal documents!” but he could not show them because he allegedly left them in Travnik due to yet another land dispute.Footnote 24

Such officially registered attempts at estate usurpation give the impression that the process of land redistribution occurred mostly between local notables struggling to enlarge and demarcate their plots at each other's expense, which were eventually registered in court. However, left almost entirely out of this picture are the peasants of villages like Brusnica, peasants who were in this area mostly Christian and who had been compelled to pay taxes to aggressive notables (like Hamza) at least some of the time while also having to give dues to the “rightful” overseers of their village (like the fortress officials in this case). This kind of double taxation of the peasants by competing landlords was officially illegal, but in practice it likely continued with little interference from Ottoman courts, especially in cases in which rival notables worked out mutually beneficial arrangements without the involvement of other authorities.Footnote 25

Amid these mounting pressures, Ottoman peasants had a few options to remedy their plight, but probably the most common response was leaving a village altogether for a destination either across the Ottoman-Habsburg border or further inland.Footnote 26 Contrary to conventional assumptions about serfdom in the Ottoman Balkans, most peasants were not inextricably tied to the land. Not only did Ottoman laws provide for circumstances in which they could leave their plots but also in practice peasants often decided to migrate in attempts to find better conditions at another estate in nearby districts.Footnote 27 Villagers from western Bosnia might move to Posavina, where more arable land was available on large estates that increasingly came under the control of a single landlord and was thus out of the reach of petty pretenders. These stipulations, of course, mostly negotiated between landlords and peasants according to local customs and economic trends, resulting in uneven development of agrarian relations across Ottoman Bosnia, with some regions retaining some features of the older type of fief-holdings and taxation (such as central Bosnia) while others developing larger estates where new rules applied, especially to desperate migrating peasants (like in border areas of Posavina or Herzegovina).

The formation of chiftlik estates in the Ottoman Bosnian borderlands, then, entailed not just the notables’ expansion of their holdings but also the forging of new social relations between an estate owner (chiftlik sahibi, but most commonly simply beg or bey)—who was almost always Muslim—and his tenants (chiftchi or čifčija, kmet, rajetin), who were in the eighteenth century usually Orthodox or Catholic peasants, frequently those who were migrating and thus vulnerable to ongoing manipulation of dues and labor obligations. Subjected to fluctuating pressures, most Christian peasants in Ottoman Bosnia were driven to the status of sharecroppers who had no practically enforceable hold on their plots. Even in earlier periods of Ottoman rule, most peasants (Muslim and non-Muslim) did not own their plots outright, but they did exercise the right to hold court-issued title deeds, or tapus, that allowed them to cultivate and sometimes dispose of their land as they saw fit.Footnote 28 But the decades of displacement and dispossession during the eighteenth century made it impossible for many to preserve or obtain title deeds, thus forcing peasants to take on new debts or to let their deeds lapse in the belief that they could still hold on to the land, only to be faced with the fact that their landlord had already claimed their plots as his own. The patterns in Bosnia thus paralleled those developing elsewhere in the Ottoman Balkan borderlands, such as in Wallachia or the Peloponnesus where the aftermath of Ottoman wars with Venice and Russia enabled the transformation of “soldiers into tax-farmers and reaya into sharecroppers,” with major ramifications for Muslim-Christian relations in such destabilized provinces.Footnote 29

At the same time, most Muslim peasants and small-estate owners appear to have used several strategies to escape the most severe consequences of chiftlik formation. Of course, the Ottoman polity was already structured to privilege Muslims over non-Muslims, with differentiated legal standing, taxation policies, clothing laws, building restrictions, and associational constraints elevating Muslim subjects over others. But with the escalation of taxation regimes during the eighteenth century, Muslim peasants could—and did—call on their religious affiliation in creative ways to demand different treatment, sometimes seeking to cast aside their raya status altogether. It should be stressed that the Muslim peasants, like the Catholic and the Orthodox raya, aggressively disputed the local notables’ manipulations of land estates. Even as late as the 1750s, there were cases of both Muslim and Christian raya who rebelled against the imposition of new taxes and tried to organize larger uprisings in certain areas of Bosnia and Serbia.Footnote 30 Yet in Sarajevo during the same decade, many of the Muslim urban poor tried to nominally join certain local guilds to avoid heavy taxation, claiming that they were “janissaries” and not raya.Footnote 31 Moreover, Muslim—and even some Jewish—residents of Sarajevo and Mostar found a degree of success in emphasizing customary tax exemptions (muafname) for their cities or professions based on various precedents, a move that could have even tempted some Muslim peasants to abandon farms and move into towns to seek relief from the rising taksit dues.Footnote 32

Above all, these developments pointed to the widespread desire of the raya to cast aside their status in attempts to secure some reprieve from the mounting social and economic pressures. Though all peasants faced obstacles in abandoning their status, the favored standing of Muslims in courts, coupled with their ability to serve in (or at least nominally claim) positions associated with the Ottoman military (like the janissaries), nonetheless enabled many of them to deflect the pressures exerted by demanding landowners and rising taxation.Footnote 33 There is no doubt that because of their privileged status, even poor Muslims were in general better able to procure, defend, or claim various possessions and exemptions; most of the Christian peasants, however, could not establish similar claims.

Combined with increasingly manipulative taxation regimes, the migrations and struggles over land underpinned a slow but profound shift in the way that Ottoman authorities understood who was—and who was not—raya, or an “imperial subject.” As late as the seventeenth century, the raya was an Ottoman taxation category (and more broadly a social classification literally meaning “the flock”) that included a large number of Muslims alongside Christians and Jews, thus cutting across the key markers of difference in Ottoman domains. However, in areas like Bosnia, that category grew over the course of the eighteenth century to include far more Orthodox and Catholic peasants, many of whom had been in some way displaced by the wars, migrations, or resettlements of this period.

Ottoman Anxieties over Borderland Christians

Amid these ongoing struggles, periodic Ottoman mobilizations against “Christian enemies” during the eighteenth-century wars could also give rise to new expressions of Muslim hostility toward local Christians in general. On the whole, this extended period of international hostilities around the Ottoman domains amounted to a crucial rupture in the history of Christian institutions in the Balkans.

The case of the Bosnian Catholic community is especially telling. Ever since the Ottoman conquest of Bosnia in 1463, when Sultan Mehmed II issued a special decree (ahdname), the Franciscan order in this Ottoman region became the de facto institutional structure for Balkan Catholic congregations, which were recognized as a distinct confessional community. But of the ten monasteries and dozens of parishes that once existed in Ottoman Bosnia before 1683, only three—Fojnica, Sutjeska, and Kreševo—survived through the end of the Ottoman-Habsburg wars in 1740s, and each of these had burned down at least once prior to the nineteenth century.Footnote 34 Wartime Ottoman suspicions over the allegiances of Christian inhabitants—particularly Catholics because of Austria's association with Catholicism—near the embattled borders exposed Ottoman Christians as a vulnerable community that some Muslims could target with threats, extortions, or acts of violence.

The outbreak of the Habsburg-Ottoman War in 1737 provides insightful examples of these interconfessional dynamics at work. Following the Austrian attacks, the Ottoman authorities’ suspicion that some Bosnian Christians sympathized or cooperated with the Austrians provided fuel for unchecked rumors. The Franciscan friar Bono Benić, who spent almost his entire life in his native Ottoman Bosnia, described in his chronicle a series of events in which Ottoman allegations of Catholic disloyalty surfaced, including terrifying incidents in 1737 when Muslim soldiers threatened to “kill the raya and the friars” for allegedly being involved in the Austrian attack.Footnote 35 The Ottoman governor did imprison Benić, along with two other Bosnian Franciscan guardians, but they were eventually released after other Ottoman Muslim notables vouched for their trustworthiness. Several years after the 1737–39 war ended, Benić still remained the target of instances of anti-Catholic abuse. In the subsequent decades—indeed well into the 1780s—Benić dedicated considerable energy to securing Ottoman decrees affirming the earlier guarantees granted to Bosnian Franciscans (e.g., rescripts of the 1463 ahdname by Sultan Mehmed II or new documents issued by different paşas).Footnote 36 But when another round of Habsburg-Ottoman wars broke out at the Bosnian frontier in 1788, Franciscan chroniclers recorded incidents evocative of those of 1737, with some local Muslims seizing the wartime occasion to accuse Bosnian Franciscans of siding with the Austrian enemy, extort bribes, and threaten to tear down churches.Footnote 37

Austrian officials sometimes tried to use these Ottoman interconfessional rifts for their own purposes. Since the 1770s, several Austrian military officials had tried to persuade Franciscan friars in Ottoman Bosnia to effectively act as informants for the Habsburg state, offering Austrian support in exchange for information on Ottoman activities.Footnote 38 The Bosnian Franciscan elders routinely turned down such Austrian requests, fearing Ottoman retaliation if such ties were discovered. It was only in 1785, after considerable pressure on the newly appointed Bosnian bishop Augustin Okić, that an Austrian lieutenant named Božić (or Boxich) was able to enter and travel the Ottoman province disguised in Franciscan habit and residing at Catholic monasteries for most of his journey.Footnote 39 The resulting report formed an important part of the growing body of surveillance files that Austria began to gather in an effort to assert control over the Ottoman-Habsburg border in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.Footnote 40 The records of Franz von Dombay, the Austrian dragoman and representative who negotiated the demarcation of the Ottoman-Habsburg border in western Bosnia in the 1790s, similarly emphasized the confessional dimension of border incidents. According to this Austrian official, it was the “unruly” local Muslims, apparently hostile to both the Istanbul-appointed governor and the Habsburg diplomats, who stoked anti-Austrian and anti-Christian resentment along the border.Footnote 41

Certain Christian sites in Ottoman Bosnia, such as churches and to a lesser extent graveyards, emerged as new sites of particularly fraught Muslim-Christian tensions in the eighteenth century.Footnote 42 Ottoman authorities, while willing to recognize existing Christian institutions and arrangements, tried to limit the repair of many edifices and often denied requests for the construction of new churches. While permit procedures for Ottoman Christian buildings were always onerous, they became even more prohibitive across Bosnia in the 1740s and 1750s.Footnote 43 Despite severe obstacles, the Bosnian Franciscans in Kreševo were able to reconstruct their monastery in the late 1760s, which brought “much happiness” to the local Catholics who found little resistance to the new building among their Muslim neighbors. Yet, friar Marijan Bogdanović wrote,

Bad news often ruined our happiness [about the church renovation]. Occasionally we would hear . . . that the Sarajevan janissary corps is getting ready . . . to tear down what we have built. Then we heard about the provocations of some foul commander in Sarajevo by the name of Emir, who, as they said, with deceitful zeal began his sermons with these words: “Whoever is of Muhammed's faith, let's go tear down those shits in Kreševo (ajde ona govna u Kreševu razorit)!” And such rumors reached us from all sides. Let the reasonable reader reflect how much our good was mixed with evil, our joy with misery, and our happiness with crying.Footnote 44

The intensity of Muslim-Christian frictions fluctuated with the passage of time and could be defused by negotiations, bribes to key instigators of violence, or interventions by other locals. In reference to the previously mentioned threats, for example, Bogdanović later noted that the Franciscans gave hundreds of grosh to the janissary elders, including “thirty grosh to that enormous criminal Emir.” The reconstruction at the Kreševo monastery continued despite incidents and obstacles.Footnote 45 At other times, the friar described

a kind of restraint among lower-class [Bosnians], whether it comes from the officials’ orders or from a sense of dejection after the Russian victories [against the Ottomans in 1770], so it seems they are not as abusive toward the raya like they used to be. Regarding this, they said everywhere that a firman was publicly proclaimed forbidding Turkish notables from abusing the raya or allowing others to commit abuses. Yet another firman affirmed peace with the Latins [here meaning the Austrians].Footnote 46

In some circumstances, local Muslim-Christian alliances could emerge around particular incidents. In 1779, friar Bono Benić recorded an event in which Muslims of Vareš rose up to stop an Ottoman judge who tried to extort money from local Catholics by falsely accusing and harassing them. This affair led the friar to declare “that it must be noted and always marveled at how the elders and the entire džemat (mosque community) came to our aid against the [Ottoman] judge so forcefully that he dared not speak.”Footnote 47 Yet even within this context marked by both tensions and solidarities among diverse communities, recurring anxieties over Christian empowerment at Ottoman expense—whether real or imagined—sustained an atmosphere in which some Ottoman Muslims, from aggressive landlords to opportunistic locals, could mobilize anti-Christian hostility for a variety of purposes.

Conclusions

In 1850, the Bosnian Franciscan friar and political activist Ivan Franjo Jukić addressed a petition “on behalf of the Christians in Bosnia and Herzegovina” directly to Sultan Abdülmecid. His first demand was this: “That we are no longer called raya, but citizens and nationals of the entire Turkish Empire.”Footnote 48 By this point, the conflation of “raya” and “Ottoman Christians” was so obvious that it needed no explanation. Yet the modern contestations over late Ottoman and post-Ottoman citizenships emerged out of earlier struggles over Ottoman subjecthood, a category that was nondenominational in early modern Ottoman governance, yet one that emerged as a marker of specifically Christian subjecthood by the end of the eighteenth century.Footnote 49

As the preceding discussion has argued, the concurrent pressures of taxation, displacement, and dispossession intensely reshaped social relations in eighteenth-century Ottoman Bosnia, where the lines of class and confessional differentiation converged to make the raya category the principal marker of Ottoman Christian subjecthood. Here I want to draw attention to two sets of conclusions stemming from this argument. Looking beyond the Habsburg-Ottoman wars, the first set of conclusions concern the impact of the conflicts between Ottoman and European great powers on processes of class and confessional differentiation in the Ottoman borderlands and Ottoman society more broadly. In Bosnia, the convergence of several processes—increasing taxation, mass migrations, redistribution of land estates, and mobilization of anti-Austrian and anti-Christian sentiments during the eighteenth-century Ottoman wars—created mounting social pressures on Ottoman Christians. Combined with the already existing Ottoman structures that privileged Muslims over non-Muslims (differentiated legal standing, taxation policies, restrictive clothing, and building laws), the wartime pressures and emerging anxieties over prospective Austrian, Russian, and Venetian advancements at Ottoman expense helped give new shape to class and confessional differences over the course of the eighteenth century. While these pressures affected different Ottoman regions in different ways, Ottoman Christians in the Balkan borderlands experienced them especially intensely, both as the primary bearers of the escalating tax burdens and land manipulations, and as the confessional communities whose religious affiliations often made them vulnerable to hostile associations with “the enemy.”

The second set of conclusions concern the broader call for a critical reconsideration of the relationship between the changes in the Ottoman-Habsburg frontiers—especially in the post-1699 era of Ottoman territorial contraction—and the contemporaneous social, economic, and cultural changes across both empires. The preceding case studies from Ottoman Bosnia, for example, only underscore how deeply entangled the histories of both Ottoman and Habsburg societies were—yet the historiographies of the two empires remain, for all practical purposes, discrete and poorly connected fields of research.Footnote 50 Until recently, most specialists on the Habsburg domains have directed their collaborative efforts and comparative points of focus toward Central Europeanist or Western Europeanist fields, while the Ottomanists turned much of their attention to the “core” areas like Anatolia and the Levant, with the Balkans being perceived as something of periphery. A number of recent works—and indeed the other pieces in this forum—have already begun to bridge these gaps. Yet much more work remains to be done, not only in connecting Habsburg and Ottoman affairs but also in bringing together the disparate levels of analysis—connecting local microstudies to macrolevel processes, linking histories of diplomacy and the military to histories of culture and society—that remain crucial for a better understanding of borderland dynamics.

Footnotes

I am grateful to Snježana Buzov, Geoff Eley, and Gottfried Hagen for the initial conversations that many years later led me to write this essay; I would like to thank Emily Greble, Baki Tezcan, Cemal Kafadar, and the anonymous reviewer for their insightful comments and useful answers to my questions while working on this article.

References

1 Mecmua no. 27, OZ R-005, Sarajevo Historical Archive. The poem (Mahzar piše bosanska fukara) is usually attributed to Mustafa Firakija, whose notebook contains the now-standard version of this poem. Though nominally addressed to the sultan, the poem's vernacular language ensured that the primary audience for “The Plea” were other inhabitants of Ottoman Bosnia. Lehfeldt, Werner, “Zur Erforschung des serbokroatischen Aljamiado-Schrifttums,” Südost-Forschungen 28 (1969): 94–122Google Scholar; Nametak, Abdurrahman, ed., Hrestomatija bosansko-alhamijado književnosti [Anthology of Bosnian Aljamiado literature] (Sarajevo, 1981), 156–60Google Scholar; Hajdarović, Rašid, “Medžmua Mula Mustafe Firakije,” Prilozi za orijentalnu filologiju [Contributions to Oriental philology] 22–23 (1973): 301–14Google Scholar.

2 Quote (ca. 1810) from Abdulvehab Ilhami mecmua, p. 31b, ms. R-3025, manuscript collection, Gazi Husrev Bey Archive.

3 This is especially true for the period after 1699. Compared to the numerous studies linking earlier Ottoman expansion into Europe with concurrent social, economic, and confessional changes across European-Ottoman borderlands (e.g., in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries), the post-1699 period of Ottoman territorial contraction received less attention along such social-historical lines. Among the major works in this field are: Rothenberg, Gunther E., The Military Border in Croatia, 1740–1881: A Study of an Imperial Institution (Chicago, 1966)Google Scholar; Fodor, Pál and Dávid, Géza, eds., Ottomans, Hungarians, and Habsburgs in Central Europe: The Military Confines in the Era of Ottoman Conquest (Leiden, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ágoston, Gábor, “A Flexible Empire: Authority and Its Limits on the Ottoman Frontiers,” International Journal of Turkish Studies 9 (2003): 15–31Google Scholar; Fichtner, Paula Sutter, Terror and Toleration: The Habsburg Empire Confronts Islam, 1526–1850 (London, 2008)Google Scholar; Norton, Claire, “Liminal Space in the Early Modern Ottoman-Habsburg Borderlands: Historiography, Ontology, and Politics,” in Stock, Paul, ed., The Uses of Space in Early Modern History 1500–1850 (London, 2015), 75–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For useful reframings of social developments, see Roksandić, Drago and Štefanec, Nataša, eds., Constructing Border Societies on the Triplex Confinium (Budapest, 2000)Google Scholar; for a dynamic relationship between external and internal frontiers, see the excellent discussion by Ferguson, Heather L., The Proper Order of Things: Language, Power, and Law in Ottoman Administrative Discourses (Stanford, 2018)Google Scholar.

4 As Baki Tezcan put it, this was a long-term process that generally saw Muslims “move up to become citizens of sorts” while most Christians (and Jews in some areas as well) remained “subjects”; Tezcan, “Ethnicity, Race, Religion, and Social Class: Ottoman Markers of Difference,” in The Ottoman World, ed. Christine Woodhead (London, 2012), esp. 166–67. Beyond the general framework, however, the specific social mechanics of this change remain underexplored. It is telling that historians of the Ottoman Balkans have recognized the problem of understanding raiyyet (or subjecthood) as especially important; see the useful overview on “Reʿayas and Protected Peoples” by Panaite, Viorel, Ottoman Law of War and Peace: The Ottoman Empire and Its Tribute-Payers from the North of the Danube (Leiden, 2019), 316–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the sake of consistency, I here use the term raya rather than re'aya as it more closely matches its multilingual use in Ottoman Bosnia.

5 On the 1869 Ottoman law that became the turning point for reforming subjecthood and citizenship, see Hanley, Will, “What Ottoman Nationality Was and Was Not,” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 3, no. 2 (2016): 277–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for a comparative perspective, see Khoury, Dina Rizk and Glebov, Sergey, “Citizenship, Subjecthood, and Difference in the Late Ottoman and Russian Empires,” Ab Imperio, no. 1 (2017): 45–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Murphey, Rhoads, “Continuity and Discontinuity in Ottoman Administrative Theory and Practice during the Late Seventeenth Century,” Politics Today 14, no. 2 (1993): 426–36Google Scholar.

7 Kreševljaković, Hamdija, Kapetanije u Bosni i Hercegovini (Sarajevo, 1954), 13–64Google Scholar; on the higher-ranking governorships, Hickok, Michael, Ottoman Military Administration in Eighteenth-Century Bosnia (Leiden, 1997)Google Scholar.

8 Yaycioglu, Ali, Partners of the Empire: The Crisis of the Ottoman Order in the Age of Revolutions (Stanford, 2016)Google Scholar.

9 Davison, Roderic H., “‘Russian Skill and Turkish Imbecility’: The Treaty of Kuchuk Kainardji Reconsidered,” Slavic Review 35 (1976): 463–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pollock, Sean, “‘We Slavishly Request…’: Invitations to Empire and Russian Political Patronage in the Balkans,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 1, no. 4 (2000): 751–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar. More broadly, see Sonyel, Salahi R., “The Protégé System in the Ottoman Empire,” Journal of Islamic Studies 2, no. 1 (1991): 56–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Sućeska, Avdo, “Promjene u sistemu izvanrednog oporezivanja u Turskoj u XVII vijeku i pojava nameta tekālif-i şākka” [Changes in the system of extraordinary taxation in the 18th-century Ottoman Empire and the imposition of new dues], Prilozi za orijentalnu filologiju 10–11 (1961): 75–112Google Scholar.

11 Čar-Drnda, Hatidža, ed. and trans., Sidžil tešanjskog kadiluka, 1740–1752 [The court records of the Tešanj magistrate] (Sarajevo, 2005)Google Scholar; hereafter abbreviated as Sidžil TK, followed by case and page number.

12 Frequently subsumed under the imdad-i hazariye and taksit dues were numerous other taxes; see Sućeska, Avdo, “Taksit: prilog izučavanju dažbinskog sistema u našim zemljama pod turskom vlašću,” [Taksit: A study of the revenue system in our lands under Turkish rule] Godišnjak Pravnog fakulteta u Sarajevu [The yearbook of the Sarajevo law school] 8 (1960): 339–62Google Scholar; Sućeska, “Novi podaci o nastanku i visini taksita u Bosni,” [New findings about the origins and levels of the taksit tax in Bosnia] Prilozi instituta za istoriju u Sarajevu [Contributions of the Sarajevo institute for history] 10, no. 2 (1974): 135–54.

13 Sarajevo Sicill, no. 13, pages 34–35, Court Record Collection, Gazi Husrev Bey Archive. (I thank Azra Kasumagić for pointing out and helping me understand this source.)

14 Mostar Sicill, page 34b, OZ-1400, Mostar Archive of Herzegovina.

15 Koller, Markus, Bosnien an der Schwelle zur Neuzeit: Eine Kulturgeschichte der Gewalt (1747–1798) (Munich, 2003), 173–202Google Scholar.

16 See taksit registers for Blagaj, no. 115 (1833) and no. 540 (1846), ZOP, National Arhive, Bosnia and Herzegovina (DABiH).

17 Đaković, Luka, Prilozi za demografsku i onomastičku građu Bosne i Hercegovine: Na osnovu popisa katoličkog stanovništva 1743 godine [Contributions to the demographic and onomastic source materials of Bosnia and Herzegovina: On the basis of the Catholic population count of 1743] (Sarajevo, 1979), 10–11Google Scholar.

18 A much smaller number of Ottoman Muslims in Hungary converted to Catholicism during this period. For an example of movements across the new Ottoman-Habsburg border, see Die Autobiographie des Dolmetschers ‘Osman Aga aus Temeschwar (London, 1980). Ivo Andrić used the resettlement of Danubian Muslims to Bosnia as a backdrop for his memorable character, “Mustafa the Hungarian”: Mustafa Madžar i druge priče [Mustafa the Hungarian and other stories] (Sarajevo, 1965).

19 See especially Jovan Pešalj, Monitoring Migrations: The Habsburg-Ottoman Border in the Eighteenth Century (Ph.D. diss., Leiden University, 2019). On Bosnia, see Petrić, Mario, “O migracijama stanovništva u Bosni i Hercegovini” [On populations migrations in Bosnia-Herzegovina], Glasnik Zemaljskog Muzeja [Herald of the National Museum] 18 (1963): 5–16Google Scholar; Pelidija, Enes, “O migracionim kretanjima stanovništva bosanskog ejaleta u prvim decenijama XVIII stoljeća” [On migratory population movements in the Bosnian province in the early 18th century], in Migracije i Bosna i Hercegovina [Migrations and Bosnia-Herzegovina], ed. Šehić, Nusret (Sarajevo, 1990), 119–31Google Scholar; Skenderović, Robert, “Zapisi o doseljenim sarajevskim katolicima u najstarijoj brodskoj matici, 1701–1735” [Documents concerning the settlement of Sarajevan Catholics in the oldest church books of Brod, 1701–1735], Scrinia Slavonica [Slavonia annual review] 10 (2010): 143–60Google Scholar; and Bronza, Austrijska politika prema prostoru Bosne i Hercegovine, 1699–1788 [Austrian policies toward the space of Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1699–1788] (Banja Luka, 2012), 309–29. Many of these syntheses draw on birth records, taxation registers, or other evidence of demographic movements that say little about specific motivations or intentions of Ottoman, Venetian, or Habsburg subjects in choosing particular routes or places of migration.

20 Milenko Filipović makes this point throughout his ethnographic study of northeast Bosnia; see his Prilozi etnološkom poznavanju severoistočne Bosne [Contributions to the ethnographic study of northeastern Bosnia] (Sarajevo, 1969). On similar processes in the Dalmatian hinterland, see Wolff, Larry, Venice and the Slavs: The Discovery of Dalmatia in the Age of Enlightenment (Stanford, 2002), 45, 145–48, 286Google Scholar.

21 A great deal has been written about chiftlik formation as a dimension of the economic integration of the Ottoman Empire into the “modern world-system”; see Wallerstein, Immanuel and Kasaba, Reşat, “Incorporation into the World Economy: Change in the Structure of the Ottoman Empire, 1750–1839,” in Économie et societé dans l'Empire ottoman, eds. Bacqué-Grammont, J. L. and Dumont, Paul (Paris, 1983)Google Scholar. For a reconsideration of these debates, see Keyder, Çağlar and Tabak, Faruk, eds., Landholding and Commercial Agriculture in the Middle East (Albany, 1991)Google Scholar.

22 Sidžil TK, L 22-a3, 77.

23 Sidžil TK, L 23-d3, 89.

24 Sidžil TK, L 23a-d3, 91and L 34-d6, 112.

25 It is unclear whether any peasants in this case were returning from across the Habsburg military border (Militärgrenze); they could have been attracted to emigrate there by a lighter taxation regimen, though one linked to conscription obligations that were systematically enforced. On some features of this system, see Lazanin, Sanja and Štefanec, Nataša, “Habsburg Military Conscription and Changing Realities of the Triplex Confinium,” in Constructing Border Societies on the Triplex Confinium, eds. Roksandić, Drago et al. (Budapest, 2000), 91–116Google Scholar.

26 See numerous examples in Sidžil TK, L 11-b, 12-b, 48–53.

27 Filipović, Nedim, ed., “Sedam dokumenata iz kodeksa Br. 1” [Seven documents from codex no. 1] Prilozi za orijentalnu filologiju 3–4 (1953): 437–54Google Scholar, especially documents dated 1776 and 1779.

28 McGowan, Bruce, Economic Life in Ottoman Europe: Taxation, Trade and the Struggle for Land, 1600–1800 (Cambridge, 1981), 52–56Google Scholar.

29 Zarinebaf, Fariba, “Soldiers into Tax-Farmers and Reaya into Sharecroppers,” in A Historical and Economic History of Ottoman Greece: The Southwestern Morea in the 18th Century, eds. Zarinebaf et al. (Athens, 2005), 9–47Google Scholar. Also see similar conclusions regarding Ottoman Wallachia by Aksan, Virginia, “Whose Territory and Whose Peasants? Ottoman Boundaries on the Danube in the 1760s,” in The Ottoman Balkans, 1750–1830, ed. Anscombe, Frederick (Princeton, 2005), 61–86Google Scholar; and Yıldız, Aysel and Kokdaş, İrfan, “Peasantry in a Well-Protected Domain: Wallachian Peasantry and Muslim Çiftlik/Kışlaks under the Ottoman Rule,” Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies 20 (2018): 1–16Google Scholar.

30 Muslim leaders, like the kadi Abdulkarim Muharemija of the Tuzla area or sheikh Muhammed of Užice, were at the forefront of popular agitations that included Christian peasants. See Spaho, Fehim, “Pobune u tuzlanskom srezu polovicom XVIII vijeka” [Rebellions in the Tuzla area in the 18th century], Glasnik Zemaljskog Muzeja 45 (1933): 71–76Google Scholar; Mušić, Omer, “Poslanica šejha Muhameda Užičanina beogradskom valiji Muhamed-paši” [Sheikh Muhamed of Užice's dispatch to the Belgrade governor Muhamed Paša], Prilozi za orijentalnu filologiju 2 (1951): 185–94Google Scholar; also Tričković, Radmila, “Buna užičkog šejha Mehmeda 1747–1750 godine” [The rebellion of the sheikh Mehmed of Užice, 1747–1750], in Oslobodilački pokreti jugoslovenskih naroda od XVI veka do početka Prvog svetskog rata [The liberatory movements of the Yugoslav peoples from the 16th century to the First World War], ed. Milić, Danica (Belgrade, 1976), 101–14Google Scholar.

31 On some occasions, Sarajevan janissaries allowed those who paid a fee to don the military garb and proclaim, “We are janissaries,” thus claiming they are not raya and do not owe such taxes. Sućeska, , “Pokušaji muslimanske raje u Bosni da se oslobode rajinskog statusa u XVIII stoljeću” [The attempts of the Muslim re'aya of Bosnia to exempt themselves from the re'aya status in the 18th century], Godišnjak Pravnog Fakulteta u Sarajevu 33 (1985): 242–44Google Scholar.

32 Hadžijahić, Muhamed, “Sarajevska muafnama” [The Sarajevo register of tax exemption], Godišnjak društva istoričara Bosne i Hercegovine [The Yearbook of the Historical Society of Bosnia-Herzegovina] 14 (1964), 67–119Google Scholar; Sućeska, Avdo, “Da li su sarajevski jevreji bili mu'af?” [Were the Jews of Sarajevo exempt from some taxation?], Godišnjak Pravnog fakulteta u Sarajevu 23 (1975), 191–205Google Scholar; Gadžo-Kasumović, Azra, “Obnovljena muafnama Novog Jajca/Varcar Vakufa iz 1734. godine i ehalija” [The rescript of the tax exemption register of Jajce/Varcar Vakuf in 1734], Anali Gazi Husrev-begove biblioteke [The Annals of the Gazi Husrev Bey Library] 37 (2016): 28–30Google Scholar; and Acun, Fatma, “The Other Side of the Coin: Tax Exemptions within the Context of Ottoman Taxation History,” Bulgarian Historical Review 1–2 (2002): 125–39Google Scholar.

33 Bašeskija, Mula Mustafa, Ljetopis (1746–1804) [Chronicle, 1746–1804], ed. and trans. Mujezinović, Mehmed (Sarajevo, 1997), 283–84Google Scholar.

34 Jelenić, Julijan, Kultura i bosanski Franjevci [Culture and the Bosnian Franciscans], vol. 1 (Sarajevo, 1915), 310–28Google Scholar; see esp. Tóth, István, “Between Islam and Catholicism: Bosnian Franciscan Missionaries in Turkish Hungary, 1584–1716,” The Catholic Historical Review 89, no. 3 (2003): 409–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Benić claims the Ottoman threats were based on a rumor started by an Orthodox captive: “The damned schismatic answered, ‘The cause of all this is your raya and the friars.’ When the Turks heard that, they all went up in great agitation. And the army cursed the raya and us. Then the pasha, being a wise man, said to everyone, ‘Let's first beat the Germans, and only then, God willing, when we come back, we'll cut down the men above age seven, and turn their women into slaves.’ . . . Thus they went off to fight [without attacking the monastery].” Benić, Bono, Ljetopis sutješkoga samostana [The chronicle of the Sutjeska monastery], ed. Gavran, Ignacije (Sarajevo, 2003), 122Google Scholar. For a very similar account of the same event, see Lašvanin, Nikola, Ljetopis (Sarajevo, 2003), 208–9Google Scholar.

36 Benić, Ljetopis sutješkoga samostana, 142, 146–47, 159–61, 214, 218, 284, 310.

37 Bogdanović, Marijan, Ljetopis kreševskoga samostana, 1765‒1817, ed. and trans. Gavran, Ignacije (Sarajevo, 2003), 215–18Google Scholar.

38 Bronza, Boro, “The Habsburg Monarchy and the Projects for Division of the Ottoman Balkans, 1771‒1788,” in Empires and Peninsulas: Southeastern Europe between Carlowitz and the Peace of Adrianople, 1699–1829, eds. Mitev, Plamen et al. (Berlin, 2010), 85–94Google Scholar.

39 This 1785 German-language report is reprinted in Kreševljaković, Hamdija and Kapidžić, Hamdija, eds., Vojno-geografski opis Bosne pred Dubički rat od 1785 godine [The military-geographic survey of Bosnia before the Dubica War of 1785] (Sarajevo, 1957)Google Scholar. On Ottoman accounts of the ensuing war, see Korić, Elma, “Bosansko pograničje u vrijeme Dubičkog rata 1788–1791,” Prilozi za orijentalnu filologiju 65 (2015): 213–37Google Scholar.

40 For numerous Austrian military surveys of Bosnia of this period, see box 18, StAbt Türkei III (Grenzverhältnisse), Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv (HHStA).

41 Schmidt, Jan, “Franz von Dombay: Austrian Dragoman at the Bosnian Border, 1792–1800,” Wiener Zeitschrift Für Die Kunde Des Morgenlandes 90 (2000), esp. 123–34Google Scholar. On similar remarks by the French consul in Ottoman Bosnia, see Cascavilla, Giuseppe Pio, “Pierre David's Consulship under Hüsrev Mehmed Pasha's Rule as Governor of Bosnia,” French Historical Studies 41, no. 4 (2018): 620, 641Google Scholar.

42 In 1781, friar Bono Benić reported that two Ottoman Muslim clerics began to demand that the cross in front of the Catholic communal graveyard in Kreševo be removed and that friars no longer carry crosses in funeral processions. Petitioned by the Franciscans for help, the Ottoman governor issued an order “that everyone should stick to the usual customs,” but unnamed local Muslim instigators nonetheless proceeded to imprison a Kreševo friar and apparently force the Franciscans to alter the funerary customs, a change that Benić saw as “unprecedented since the Ottoman conquest of Bosnia some 320 years ago.” In such local incidents, seemingly symbolic struggles over Christian public practices revealed much deeper changes in Muslim-Christian relations that occurred in the eighteenth century. Benić, Ljetopis sutješkoga samostana, 319.

43 Sidžil TK, L 19-b, 83 and L 24-b3, 139.

44 Bogdanović, Ljetopis kreševskoga samostana, 89.

45 Ibid.

46 Bogdanović, Ljetopis kreševskoga samostana, 155; see also 225. These Franciscan chronicles can be usefully read alongside the contemporaneous chronicle of the Ottoman Muslim cleric Mustafa Bašeskija, whose notes conveyed a sense of Ottoman Muslim tension around the raya: “Many [in Sarajevo] lack sense and are crazy when they consider it almost their mission to make the raya miserable. This much I know, such actions are against the holy Qur'an.” Bašeskija, Ljetopis (1746–1804), 156; also 88, 98, 116, 177, 299.

47 Benić, Ljetopis sutješkoga samostana, 302.

48 Jukić, “Želje i molbe kristjanah u Bosni i Hercegovini, koje ponizno prikazuju njegovom carskom veličanstvu sretnovladajućem sultanu Abdul-Medžidu” [The desires and requests of the Christians in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which they humbly present to their Imperial Majesty, the felicitously ruling Abdülmecid], in Zemljopis i Poviestnica Bosne [The geography and history of Bosnia] (Zagreb, 1851), 155–64.

49 For related examples in Ottoman Bulgarian regions, see Mirkova, Anna, Muslim Land, Christian Labor: Transforming Ottoman Imperial Subjects into Bulgarian National Citizens, 1878–1939 (Budapest, 2017)Google Scholar.

50 For a recent survey of these fields, see Yılmaz, Yasir, “Nebulous Ottomans vs. Good Old Habsburgs: A Historiographical Comparison,” Austrian History Yearbook 48 (2017): 173–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.