Beginning with the conquests of the Balkans and Hungary in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and drawing to an end only with the Habsburg takeover of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1878, the Ottoman interlude in the Croat lands has long been a cause of great anxiety, great sorrow, great resentment, and great pride. For many writers and interpreters of Croat history, the response to the Turkish threat has figured as a source of profound meaning—indeed, even as a source of identity—and they have clearly intended that their audiences see things in this way as well. Even today the encounter with the Turks may still carry that great weight. In one recent study of the long Croat-Turk relationship, for instance, Ottoman-era specialist Ive Mažuran unequivocally calls the time of invasion and occupation “the most tragic period in Croatian history.”Footnote ¹ This, then, is still a past that signifies.

With an eye to the enduring meanings of the Turkish legacy, this essay explores the uses of Croat historical analysis of the Ottoman presence in the Croat lands. It needs to be acknowledged from the outset that with reference to the events of the Ottoman period, the use of the words “Croat,” “Croatia,” and “Croatian” as terms of convenience here will of necessity be a guarded one, made with an explicit recognition of the often anachronistic quality of the categories presumed by the historical and historiographical actors under consideration. Furthermore, the “Croatia” in question is not coextensive with the boundaries of today's independent republic, notwithstanding the frequent and fairly natural tendency in post-communist historiography of a national bent to reprise a common pre-communist stance in treating the past centuries as a run-up to the fulfillment of the national destiny through statehood. (Here, Croat writers are not alone, of course.) Seeing Hrvatska as a geographic entity with an integral, consistent history characterized by hrvatstvo, a distinctive Croat culture and identity, the latter-day interpreters of Croatia's past have generally insisted that the history of the Ottoman presence throughout the “Croat lands” is indeed their own. In this spirit, modern scholarly and popular accounts typically refer to the people who populated these places and built their cultures in Ottoman times as hrvati, “Croats.” There is no small danger of inaccuracy in such retrospective applications of such terms. We can hardly be sure—and indeed have considerable reason to doubt—that the histories that have been put to present use over the past two centuries by people self-identified as Croats were, in fact, wrought in the distant past by historical actors who shared any similar ethnonational consciousness.Footnote ²

For convenience, I will often refer simply to Croat “histories” and “historiography,” but the subject of this investigation is, more broadly and accurately, “history-telling,” a designation that underscores that the accounts under consideration are not solely the products of scholars and others who pursued the writing of history as a vocation, but also the work of key builders of the political, cultural, intellectual, and religious life of the Croats. The Ottoman past has been, in effect, a concentrated lode of meaning that both professional Croat historians and exponents of history-in-politics have mined for lessons about themselves and their neighbors. A sampling of the leading contributions to this expansively conceived “historical” literature reveals recurring areas of emphasis, important motifs that reflect what Croats involved in shaping public consciousness have understood to be the trouble with Turkish rule—and it is usually, though not exclusively, viewed as a source of trouble. The problems surface unmistakably and often: in the main, the burdens of Ottoman history are ascribed to the Croats' subjugation to the harsh customs of Ottoman goverance and what is said to be its characteristic exploitation and incompetence, to the perceived flaws and failings of Islam, and, finally, to special and uniquely Turkish elements in Ottoman culture that purportedly made them worse than other Muslims.

Some of these tendencies in Croat history-telling will be familiar enough to nonspecialists, mirroring larger European patterns of seeing and, yes, stereotyping the Turkish enemy. But the Croat interpretation incorporates distinctive elements, and perhaps even more importantly, the uses of the Ottoman experience for the Croats have been notably varied. The characterizations and categorizations employed in historical assessments of the trouble with the Turks have shown a noteworthy degree of fixity and consistency. But critically, the perceived implications of those diagnoses could and did differ widely over time, changing with the historical circumstances in which Croat writers and their audiences have found themselves. The Turkish past has been, it turns out, remarkably labile, bending to the ideological desiderata of the particular “present” at hand.

A broader, comparative regard for the qualities of (post-)Habsburg historiography should figure here as well. Considered in light of the Austrian and Hungarian traditions, the Croats' treatment of the Ottoman menace has a particular interest and value, allowing us to discern three grand-scale interpretations—to some extent distinctive, to some extent overlapping—in what is largely, though not exclusively, the same set of discrete historical events. For the history that the Croats consider their history with the Ottomans is often the same that the Austrians and Hungarians deem to be their own. While as affaires d'état the conflicts with the Ottoman Empire were ultimately the concern of the Habsburg regime in the power centers of Vienna and Hungary, much of the struggle was fought on what is now Croatian territory or in Bosnia-Herzegovina, a province in which many Croats lived and to which many have laid claim (and a place that is, for this reason, an essential element of the Ottoman record in the places that modern Croat commentators have habitually deemed hrvatsko tlo, “Croat land”).

This history can therefore easily be seen as a shared one, and it has shown, at times, considerable power to bind together fellow-Habsburg confrères. Yet many Croat history-tellers have come to it with a sense of heroic self-sacrifice equal to that of the Austrians and Hungarians, and probably an even greater sense of victimhood, as seen for example in Eugen Kvaternik's complaint in 1861 that “while the Croats were weak,” the Hungarian “hero” king Mátyás Hunyadi (Matthias Corvinus, 1443–1490) had “permitted the living bulwark of Europe against Turkish barbarism [i.e., the Croats] to be destroyed, and thus deserted Christianity.”Footnote ³ Croat historiography—especially to the extent that it is colored by nationalist sentiment, and that has happened often—can see enemies and oppressors not only in the Turks, but in the Magyars and Germans as well. Not infrequently, the time spent under and against the Ottomans therefore takes on a quality of triple victimization. Croatia is forced to fend off the Muslim onslaught at great cost, while the Germanophone Habsburg subjects enjoy the protection of the Croat antemurale christianitatis, and in the end, loyalty is repaid with a punishment, through Austrian and Magyar domination upon the ouster of the Turks and the restoration of Habsburg rule.Footnote ⁴

For South Slavic peoples in the Habsburg and post-Habsburg sphere, it has been among the Croats that the question of the Ottoman occupation and its legacy has mattered most. To be sure, the issue has been one that has also captured the attention of Slovenes and Prečani Serbs (those living across, preko, the Danube and Sava rivers, i.e., in the Habsburg lands).Footnote ⁵ But the Slovenes did not experience occupation, while the broader Serb tradition as it has evolved in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has been willing enough to incorporate the Prečani community as its own, albeit with occasional sensitivities about the differences that the divergent histories may yield. Consequently, from the perspective of Habsburg studies, accounts of the Ottoman experience that reckon with its importance for Croatia remain the most critical set.

The malleable quality of the received tradition on the Turks has been evident throughout the late-Ottoman and post-Ottoman era. One period, however, demonstrates in an especially potent, clear, and revealing way the potential for a shifting, present-oriented political and ideological use of history: the last decades of Habsburg rule and the years of the so-called “first Yugoslavia” from independence in 1918 until the fragmentation of the country following the German invasion of April 1941.Footnote ⁶ In this critical time of transition, we find the Croats in new circumstances that in practical terms prompted a number of major departures from past patterns of engagement with the Ottomans and with the “Eastern question” more generally. In the closing decades of Habsburg rule, the Ottoman Empire and the Turks had assumed a new significance in and for the Balkans. It was plain to most Croat observers that the Porte was dramatically weakened, increasingly subject to the demands of Europe's great powers and dependent on alliances with them. Some suspected that, indeed, the very existence of the empire was threatened, and many judged it unlikely that the Ottomans would ever regain real control in Bosnia, where their sovereignty had been only nominal since 1878 at any rate.

For all the change that had taken place thus far, more would be coming. The new arrangements of the first Yugoslav state reconfigured the Croat political and cultural landscape. Removed from the affairs of the peoples who would form the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, and with their attentions now clearly directed toward affairs in Anatolia, the Turks and their leaders posed little ongoing threat to the Croats. Bosnia and its Turci, the colloquial name for the territory's Muslim population, certainly remained a matter of continuing controversy, but these “Turks” were by and large actually Slavs and recognized as such. And in any case the battle had now become an intra-Yugoslav affair and could be expected to stay that way. The real Turks were gone.

At least at first glance, then, there are some reasons to think that during this period the Ottomans and their history might have become less of a concern to interpreters of the Croatian past. Ive Mažuran, for instance, has remarked on the paucity of secondary scholarly sources in the interwar era, noting that works on the Ottomans “can be counted on your fingers” (mogu se na prste izbrojiti).Footnote ⁷ Even taking into account the delightful Slavic proclivity to refer to both fingers and toes as “prsti,” this yields precious few sources. If, however, the inquiry is expanded to include “history-telling” more generally, and thus to consider not just specialized professional analyses but also a broader range of public narratives of the history of the Croats in Croatia and Bosnia, we find ample material on the Ottomans and their legacy. Perhaps surprisingly, the encounter with the Turks was one that still mattered a great deal.

The Trouble with Ottoman Rule

One of the most important motifs of the late-Habsburg and interwar-era renderings of Ottoman history is the conclusion that the conquests of the Turks had harmed Croatia immensely by placing many of its people under foreign domination. As a threshold matter, however, it is important to recognize that some judgments of the hardships associated with the long period of war and occupation have little, if anything, to do with the Ottomans per se. Croat history-telling is generously seasoned with complaints about foreign oppression, and the sources appear just as likely, if not more so, to include grumbling or even frank diatribes against Austrian and, especially, Magyar rule.Footnote ⁹ Even after a fairly lengthy disquisition on the suffering, violence, and plunder of the Ottoman era, for example, the prominent Dalmatian statesman and publicist Frano Supilo felt compelled to conclude that, in the end, “it cannot be known which was worse for the freedom and the rights of Croatia: the Turks, or the Vienna-Graz bureaucracy.”Footnote ¹⁰ A careful reading thus requires us to filter out those consequences that are not presented as the results of uniquely Ottoman characteristics.

Yet there clearly remained a specific Ottoman Turkish dimension to Croat concerns about subjugation to foreign control. Historical views of the Ottomans frequently offered them up as practitioners of a distinctive style of governance, one that was, as explained below, at once especially coercive and especially ineffectual. The Turks were cast as bad rulers—spectacularly bad in some versions—who subjected their people to such severity, terror, exploitation, caprice, and incompetence that the occupation was nothing less than a historical catastrophe.Footnote ¹¹ The legacy of the Ottomans could thus continue to weigh heavily even as their practical influence in Balkan affairs waned, a sentiment that turned up often in the commentators' judgment that the occupied territories had been held back considerably by the appalling backwardness of the sultans' rule.

Even for those parts of the Croat lands not ceded to the Ottomans, the misfortune was considered tremendous. Two problems seen as especially grave were the severance of the various Croat territories and the resultant interference with what were taken as natural and long-standing linkages between their populations. (Here again we should be cautious about the tendency to see Croats and Croatian-ness where none may have really existed.) The historical interpretations of the period invoke repeatedly the lost grandeur of the medieval Croat kingdom, rendering Ottoman-era “Croatia” as a realm not only fragmented, but greatly diminished as well. It had become merely the reliquiae reliquiarum, the “remnant of the remnants.” That potent little phrase turns up again and again in the historiography produced in the Habsburg and immediate post-Habsburg periods, where it is often used to show the Ottoman occupation as a great breach in the legitimate tradition of Croatian “state right” and national sovereignty. Notwithstanding the magnitude of the perceived harm, such interpretations tended at the same time to downplay the legal significance of the Ottoman period as an illegitimate interruption, one that could be—like others, significantly—ended and set right.

In that spirit of defiance, Eugen Kvaternik, who with Ante Starčević was one of the founders of the influential nationalist Party of Right, used his 1868 history of the Croats' long involvement in the “Eastern question” to present his people as perpetual defenders of European civilization against unceasing tides of Oriental expansionism and barbarity, dismissing any notion that the Croat state tradition might have foundered under the Turks: “You there in Vienna have forgotten, you wretches, that our nation has experienced, in the course of its national life in the south, moments a thousand times more terrible, and it has not disappeared. But those who have wronged it or done violence to it have vanished without a trace or a sound.”Footnote ¹²

Yet, whatever its ultimate implications for Croatian state right, Ottoman rule was typically seen as exacting a terrible cost. It is in this vein that we find, for example, the Dalmatian politician Ante Trumbić, another of the leading Croat figures in late-Habsburg and early-Yugoslav affairs, railing against the Ottomans' oppression and their violation of Croat self-determination. In his 1936 memoirs, Trumbić argued that the Turks' impositions on Croatia were among the most important forces that had shaped, or perhaps more accurately deformed, Croat history. “Of all the blows suffered throughout history,” he claimed, “much stronger than even the Tatar raids, the Turkish invasion was the hardest and the most damaging in its consequences. . . . Reliquiae reliquiarum olim incliti regni Croatiae! The remnant of the remnants of the once glorious Kingdom of Croatia!, as the Croatian noble assemblies [sabori] used to sigh in their sorrow.”Footnote ¹³ Amid all the talk of disaster, however, this account held out the potential for inspiration as well. For not all was lost:

Critically, this former champion of South Slav unity had opted for anti-foreigner rhetoric of this sort at a time when he had grown disillusioned with his former ideals, after seeing Croatia become embroiled in new conflicts over the unitarist tendencies of Serb politicians and after having to endure, as Trumbić and many others viewed it, almost six years of a centralizing royal dictatorship from January 1929 until the assassination of Alexander I Karađorđević in October 1934. Linking contemporary Croat identity with that of the old medieval and early-modern “political nation,” and thereby connecting the Ottoman experience with the autonomist “state right” principle that played such a dominant role in the Croat politics of the time, Trumbić offered up a reading of the now-distant Ottoman past that had definite and potent present uses, an interpretation that could find a welcome reception among the many Croats who had grown frustrated with Yugoslav politics and disenchanted with the Yugoslav ideal.

Although in the particular instance just described Trumbić left implicit the parallels between his resentments of the Ottoman occupation and his worries over present-day Serb domination, he did on an earlier occasion directly link the Ottoman legacy with the Serb political style. As part of a lengthy missive addressed in 1932 to the Manchester Guardian about what he saw as anti-Croat coverage in the newspaper, Trumbić took a somewhat different tack, one aimed directly at current Yugoslav affairs. He reminded his British audience that Serbia

Interestingly, in this version the misfortune of Croatia's long-time subjugation to the Ottomans disappears, and, instead, it is the Serbs whose political culture is left scarred and misshapen by their history under foreign occupation. The Serbs, Trumbić suggested, had taken on some of the worst aspects of their former oppressors: “In Serbia the people used to be: the Turks and the raya [the term used in Ottoman parlance for the non-Muslim masses under Turkish rule]. Today it is similar here with us: the Croats are the raya!”—in other words, a people subjugated in the name of a purported “national unity,” which was really just a mask for “Great Serb expansionism [velikosrpstvo] of the Belgrade type.”Footnote ¹⁶ In the new post-Ottoman political constellation, the image of the old alien overlords had taken on a fresh meaning, communicating a powerful message about misrule, with the Porte now serving as a classic symbol of bad government.

Severe judgments of Ottoman administration were a frequent, even defining, element in the Croat commentary of the period. It was in this spirit, for example, that one very active professional historian of the time, writer and teacher Milan Prelog, diagnosed in the Ottomans' management of his native Bosnia a characteristically blind and recalcitrant approach to governance that seemed uniquely resistant to reform. “All observers of Turkish adminstrative and legal life,” Prelog asserted, “have recognized in the Turks people who do not worry their heads with new ideas, and who are less inclined than anyone to changes and innovations.”Footnote ¹⁷ The Turks' crescent moon thus ends up in these histories as the emblem of cruelty-for-naught: not just an exceptionally harsh rule, but also one in which all the severity ultimately proved fruitless and futile, with the regime held in place not by productivity and success but only by virtue of the Ottomans' military prowess, ebbing though it was, and their lack of scruples about tyranny and violence.Footnote ¹⁸

There is something of a “damned if you do and damned if you don't” quality to these Croat assessments of Ottoman rule. The Ottomans are condemned for an ossified approach to government that resulted first in an administrative style that was too harshly inflexible and unable to adapt and modernize, and later in a practice that was ineffectual, sloppy, and (a bit perversely) too easygoing in some ways. When movements for reform finally did emerge in the later Ottoman period, they were judged from this perspective to be too lenient, too lazy, too little, and too late. Along these lines, the prominent academic historian Ferdo Šišić observed in a 1938 analysis that the Porte's “sincere and well-intentioned” reforms were virtually fated to fail. “The Turk simply did not want to carry them out, and the Christian did not believe them. The Turk namely could not by any means accept that a member of the raya could be his equal, while the Christian, feeling himself to be one and the same with his western, southern, northern, and eastern neighbors, wanted to free himself in whatever way possible, and as soon as possible, from the unbearable Turkish yoke.”Footnote ¹⁹

Šišić's account advanced the idea that Bosnia had by the time just prior to the Habsburg occupation become virtually ungovernable, or at least not governable with the skills and resources that the Turks had at their disposal. He thus quotes as typical of the spirit of the times the resigned, almost fatalist attitude attributed to the Ottoman official Akif Paša who, confronted in 1873 with worries that growing disorder in Bosnia might cause the loss of the territory, responded that “If it is the will of Allah that this be, let it be! But it does not seem to me that this will be such an enormous misfortune for a Muslim empire.”Footnote ²⁰ A stereotypical Ottoman rigidity had thus morphed into a stereotypical Ottoman passivity.

The Trouble with Islam

The invocation of what was often portrayed as a consummately Muslim fatalism—“if it is the will of Allah”—points toward another common trope in the Croat history-telling of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, one that treated the trouble with the Turks as arising in large part from the very fact that the empire was a Muslim one. The coming of Islam to the Balkans was, to be sure, a momentous development, and one that directly and indirectly left lasting imprints on the Croat lands.Footnote ²² The simple fact of large-scale conversion to Islam was, in some accounts, a major problem in itself. From this perspective, the long-term losses of (presumed) Croats to the Muslim religion left the Croat nation divided and blinded to its true identity, setting it up for future trouble in the time of the national awakenings. Along these lines, for example, Ante Trumbić observed in 1905 that “among the Muslims . . . religious fanaticism has absorbed the national spirit, so that, with individual exceptions, they do not have any national sentiment. A Muslim from Anatolia is closer to them than a Croat and Serb from Bosnia-Herzegovina.”Footnote ²³ Both Croats and Serbs were busily trying to win them over, but without much success: “Religion has impressed such a deep stamp into the spirit of this population that little is to be hoped from it. It is permeated with fatalism, it is indifferent to the national cause [narodna stvar], and it does not possess sufficient power of resistance against culture-constructing efforts [kulturtregerstvo, i.e., the work of the Germanizing Habsburg administrators] and is subject to foreign penetration.”Footnote ²⁴ With its de-nationalizing effects, Islam in this view was to blame for leaving the Bosnian Muslims “in a quite primitive cultural state” and for weakening any sense of Slavic identity to the point that the Bosnians had even joined in the 1905 celebrations of the hundredth anniversary of the death of the great German writer Friedrich Schiller, a development that obviously rankled Trumbić enormously.Footnote ²⁵

Beyond the more straightforward question of internal confessional divisions, Islam was often seen to present special problems inherent in the religion and its doctrines. In this regard, another of the leading figures in the making and the telling of Croat history, Bishop Josip Juraj Strossmayer, captured sentiments common at the time in an 1877 letter to William Gladstone in which the cleric questioned “whether it is possible that Christians should remain under the rule of the Koran and its fanatical followers free from tyranny and every kind of cruelty.”Footnote ²⁶ To Strossmayer, the leading proponent of a Yugoslavism that reached beyond narrowly defined Croatian interests, the answer seemed obvious: “Every thinking man,” he wrote, “must answer this question with a decided ‘No.’ The Koran orders in God's name that the Christian dogs should be exterminated by the sword; where this is quite impossible, it condemns them, once more in God's name, to shameful servitude, and excludes them for ever from every right and power and property.”Footnote ²⁷ Although his views were unmistakably shaped by Christianity and his position in the Roman Catholic hierarchy, Strossmayer was by no means alone among his contemporaries in his worries about the Turkish religion. Deprecation of Islam and the tendency to see it as a root cause of the Ottomans' failings were, in fact, frequent features of late Habsburg accounts of Balkan history.Footnote ²⁸

Invocations of the “fanatical” and uncompromising nature of Islam would evidently abate to some extent when Bosnia's Muslims were no longer in the service of, or under the control of, a Muslim empire. Once it became more necessary to curry the favor of Muslim fellow-citizens in the new Yugoslav state, and to win them to a Croat identity if possible, the risks of such harsh critiques of the Muslim religion became much more apparent. With the Turks safely out of the way, and loyalties to a Muslim polity now virtually unthinkable, there were fewer reasons to see Islam per se as an impediment to the nationalist cause and ample incentives to try to bridge the cultural gap between the Catholic and Muslim communities.

The Trouble with Turkish Culture

Some interpreters of Croatian history went even further in their hostility toward the Turks, seeing the burdens of Ottoman domination as the outgrowth of negative cultural and character traits that were specifically Turkish. If Islam was a problem, there was from this perspective something about the culture of this particular group of its followers that made the trouble even worse. Along these lines, Vjekoslav Klaić, one of the greatest Croat historians of the nineteenth century, claimed that the Turks were deemed particularly unappealing even among those who might have been expected to be most sympathetic to them: “The Bosnian gentry of the Muslim faith always hated these foreigners, even though they were of the same religion,” Klaić asserted in an 1878 study. “They always said that there were no more odious people under the sun than the Ottomans.”Footnote ³⁰ Decades later, Milan Prelog's history of the late-Ottoman period in Bosnia described one provincial official as “a sickly person and a weakling, but full of Turkish virtues: wily and daring, with an excessive devotion to the sultan.”Footnote ³¹ And by 1933, Ante Trumbić was venting his frustration with Serbian centralism through a similar sort of stereotyping of Turkish culture, insisting that it was improper to compare Croats, Dalmatians, and Slovenes “with the half-civilized Serbs, with those Balkan types [Balkanci] who are a mixture of the Slav and the Turk.”Footnote ³²

But perhaps the most ardent and most influential proponent of these damning interpretations of Turkish culture was Peasant Party leader Stjepan Radić, a remarkably prolific public intellectual who was, until his assassination in 1928, the leading factor in Croat political life in the new Yugoslav state. Deeply influenced by the historical-civilizational vision of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, which he had encountered during his studies in Prague, Radić was given to grand-scale syntheses and blanket judgments of national character, and he pressed these into service freely and repeatedly in his struggle for Croatian autonomy. An ardent proponent of agrarian democracy and, ultimately, of republicanism, Radić saw the Turks' “Asiatic” culture as antithetical to the freedom of both individuals and peoples.Footnote ³³ Especially in his work before the establishment of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes in 1918, Radić was dismissive of both the Turks and their religion, though he ultimately softened his critique of Islam in what appears to have been an effort to win over Bosnian Muslims to his Croat national cause. His thoroughgoing Orientalism, however, could sometimes be a matter of finer distinctions. The Turks came in for especially harsh treatment; their Arab rivals—not coincidentally, no threat to the Balkans—often fared considerably better. In one 1913 work, for example, Radić reminded his readers that the Bosnian Muslims were “of the same blood and the same language” as Catholic Croats, whereas “in terms of their religion, they are one with the enlightened Arabs, and by no means with the barbarian [divljački] Ottoman Turks.”Footnote ³⁴

Ideas about the unusually barbaric customs and culture of the Turks were not particularly new to European history-telling, of course, and they appear to have been in wide circulation in South Slav intellectual circles by the early twentieth century, if indeed not earlier.Footnote ³⁵ What is perhaps most significant about their development in the late-Habsburg and early-Yugoslav periods, however, is the way in which new meanings of the history with the Ottomans could be found and pressed into service in historiographical and political-historical discourse. Absent any real Turks to worry about (save the tiny Turkish minorities in Yugoslavia, which posed comparatively few problems), the Ottoman legacy could be retrieved and redeployed as a way of delegitimizing newer national enemies, namely the Serbs, who despite their own history of bitter antagonism to the Ottomans (and their own penchant for anti-Turk rhetoric) could be, and increasingly were, treated as quasi-Turks, marked and corrupted by their centuries under Eastern barbarian rule.

The Trouble with the Trouble with the Turks

There were occasional departures from the tendency to treat the Ottomans and their legacy as a more or less unmitigated evil. It was possible, for instance, to see the response to adversity as something that had, with time, been good for Croatia by building the national character and forging a spirit of resistance. Along these lines, Zagreb historian Josip Horvat, one of the most prolific professionals of the period, argued that the South Slavs' battles against the Turks during the First Balkan War of 1912–1913 had resulted in a widespread energizing effect on the Croat masses. “That war,” Horvat claimed, “contributed more to the feeling of a common destiny of the South Slavs than any person, even more than the greatest ideologues and advocates of the idea of Slavic reciprocity [uzajamnost].”Footnote ³⁷ Through the renewed struggle against the Ottomans, “heroism became a reality”; with victory, the Croat public at last “sensed the triumphal quality of action.”Footnote ³⁸ In much the same way, Ante Trumbić concluded that the long resistance against the Ottomans and others ultimately served as a way to mobilize the Croats' reservoir of “ethical force.”Footnote ³⁹

Curiously, Horvat's political history also gave some credit to the Ottoman legacy for building a Serb character that was, if not entirely admirable, then at least formidable, and in certain ways clearly preferable to aspects of the Croat character. Here again, it was resistance to the Ottomans that served as the critical historical cause. Horvat thus mused that “only a few decades earlier—the older people remember—the Turkish pasha was still sitting in the Belgrade fortress, and at the Kalamegdan citadel the Turks were impaling rebellious Serbs on stakes.”Footnote ⁴⁰ (The Belgrade military outpost was finally handed over to the Serbs only in 1867.) The tradition of rebellion against the Ottomans, he implied, had fostered a resourceful culture among the Serbs that the other South Slavs were ill-equipped to counter. Horvat argued that the pre-World War I Serb political elite had earned their positions only through “painful struggle” against tough, often cruel adversaries.Footnote ⁴¹ These Serb politicians, “wearing not only symbolic shackles,” had thus learned from the Ottomans to be “practical, often downright harsh realists, accustomed to seeing political results achieved only through the force of power, and to the fact that for politics, a little bit of power is more important than the most laudable program.”Footnote ⁴² Seen from this perspective, Ottoman history was clearly alive and vital during the interwar period, and it still held profound implications for the future of Croatia.

Interpretations like these that hold up the Ottoman episode as an example of character-building adversity hardly amount to any ringing endorsement, of course. What we see here is only the gain that comes from opposing and overcoming an essential evil. It has been far less clear to the writers and interpreters of Croat history, however, that Ottoman rule could represent much in the way of an affirmative good.

A more genuinely positive approach to the Ottomans has been rare. In the late-Habsburg and early-Yugoslav period, the most significant exception to the general pattern of damning interpretation appears in the work of Ante Starčević, the leading voice of the pro-autonomy “state right” tradition at the end of the nineteenth century and a truly monumental figure in Croatian political and intellectual history. Against the prevailing currents of contemporary national awakening and nationalism in the region, which under the banners of the Illyrian and Yugoslav movements sought to unite the people of the Croat territories with their South Slavic kindred there and beyond, Starčević promoted a Croats-only program that claimed for his more narrowly defined “nation” all the crownlands of the medieval Croatian state and either sought to incorporate as “Croats” the other peoples of what ultimately became Yugoslavia or left them to fend for themselves as they could in their own national formations.Footnote ⁴³

As such, Starčević's brand of nationalism was as distinctive as it was uncompromising and intemperate. For all the fire he poured out on the real or perceived enemies of his cause, he proved, as his writings and speeches show, rather soft on the Ottomans, perhaps remarkably so given the tenor of the times. For Starčević, it appears that the real villains were those who stood most directly in the path of his restoration of the Croatian state, and that meant primarily the great powers of Christian Europe and the Serbs, who came to the encounter with the Croats in the midst of their own national revival, one with expansionist tendencies that ran counter to Starčević's vision. The Ottomans were still on the scene, to be sure, but they posed a far lesser threat to this narrower nationalism rooted in Croatian state right.

Repeatedly, Starčević seemed to go out of his way to find redeeming features of Ottoman rule and to challenge prevailing ideas about the nature of the Turks. Examples of this practice are too numerous to catalogue here, but a few should suffice to illustrate the point. Against the common understanding of Turkish rule as unusually harsh and exploitative, Starčević, writing in 1868, stressed a contrary interpretation: “In all of Europe there has not been an aristocracy so humane to its subjects as in Turkey. For the subjects, the peasants, it has never been better anywhere else than in Turkey. If Russia were to take over such a population, they would run away from Russia, following the Turks, or cause Russia trouble.” Footnote ⁴⁴ Starčević lamented that matters lately seemed to have taken a turn for the worse, but he laid the blame for this on Russia, which he alleged was pursuing a policy designed “to enrage the Christians against the Turks, so that the Turks will be all the more severe and all the more disagreeable toward the Christians. That action,” he claimed, “has succeeded rather well: from day to day it gets worse for the Christians in Turkey. But if their daily misfortune were to be multiplied tenfold, it would in many respects be better for them than it is, for example, for [agricultural] tenants in England and Italy. But that doesn't help: the Christians feel unhappy, and between the Christians and the Muslims there is not, and there will not be, friendship.”Footnote ⁴⁵

Cutting against the grain as he was, Starčević encountered considerable opposition to his forgiving views on the Turks. Asked whether he truly did desire to negotiate with the Ottoman Empire, he remained unapologetic in the face of his questioners' skepticism, insisting that he would indeed do so, and once again basing his position on what he claimed were unappreciated positive aspects of Ottoman history: “Why? Because I know that the Romanian principalities stood under Turkey for about five hundred years, and I know that the Turk never dishonored or trampled upon the agreed-upon rights of those lands. There were rebellions and revolts there, and perhaps the Turk punished the perpetrators, but for the nation, the Ottomans always maintained the agreed-upon rights of national autonomy.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Against those cultural stereotypes that cast the Turks as wily, treacherous, and arbitrary, Starčević presented them as principled and faithful to their understandings: “I know also that today in Albania there are nomads, God knows how many, and that those nomads stand in relation to Turkey in the same legal status that they set as conditions when they came under Turkish rule after the death of George Kastrioti [Skenderbeg]. There is no contract here, there are no words written down, but nonetheless everything here stands today just as it once stood in the past.”Footnote ⁴⁷

From this perspective, there was plenty to be admired in Ottoman governance and Turkish custom, at least with regard to the treatment of subject national groups. Starčević suggested that the European great powers, notwithstanding their self-proclaimed service to Christianity, suffered by comparison: “You see, gentlemen, I want to reach an agreement with every government, but I don't want to do so with those that make an agreement only in order to be able to break it, that neither in words nor in oaths look to do anything other than to defile the faith and to vilify God; I will not come to an agreement with a government for which nothing is sacred other than its own selfishness.”Footnote ⁴⁸ By the time of these pronouncements in 1866, Starčević's political commitments had led him to see Austria and Russia, his prime targets here, as the governments antithetical to God, and not the supposedly infidel Turks.

Such an appraisal of the Turkish past ultimately must be acknowledged as a major departure from the standard tropes of history-telling used by Starčević's Croat contemporaries and his near-term successors. In his distinctive reading, Ottoman governance emerges as surprisingly praiseworthy, and the religious regime of the Ottoman establishment comes across as comparatively pluralistic and tolerant. The fact that such views were, on their face, so provocative and controversial suggests the strength and endurance of the historiographical patterns identified earlier. The disparagement of Turkish government, religion, and culture had become frequent, uncontroversial, and sometimes even casual, if perhaps not absolutely de rigeur. Yet despite its exceptional quality, Starčević's approach does confirm, once again, just how flexible, and just how useful, the history of the Ottomans has proven to be in the argumentative strategies of those who have told, and sold, the Croat past.

The Trouble That Will Not Go Away

In the last two decades, with Croatia seeking and then gaining its independence, and the dictates of nationalist mythmaking rising to the forefront, the Turkish encounter has served as prime material for a reading of the Croat past that casts the country and its people as heroes who have finally risen from victimhood and oppression to claim their freedom. In this vein, for example, Ive Mažuran's 1998 volume on the Ottomans reprised a number of the themes that we have seen so carefully elaborated in earlier times. Through the long occupation, Mažuran asserted, “Croatia and the Croat nation were beset by a true catastrophe of the sort not a single nation in Europe has experienced,” and much was lost when no one responded to the Croats' cries for help:

In this view, the consequences were grievous not just in terms of the destruction visited on the territory at the time, but for Croatia's future development as well: “A once flowering, economically powerful, and densely settled territory in which people lived well and comfortably—significantly better and on a higher level than in many parts of Western Europe—was turned into a horrifying wasteland. . . . The high degree of development that had been achieved was interrupted by force, and turned backward by centuries.”Footnote ⁵¹ The reference here to a Croatia that once outshone parts of Western Europe before it was permitted to succumb to the Ottomans signals the return of another resilient trope from earlier Croatian historiography: a deep sense of victimization directed as much toward the ungrateful West as to the Turks themselves.

A similar resentment about the Ottoman invasions likewise figured prominently in the history writing of Franjo Tuđman, the first president of independent Croatia after the collapse of the Yugoslav federation. Tuđman's treatment of the Turks was scathing, emphasizing the “genocidal characteristics” and fanaticism of their “reign of terror.”Footnote ⁵² As evidence of the betrayal of the loyal Croats, he invoked the contemporary observations of Ivan Česmički (Csezmicei János/Janus Pannonius, 1434–1472), a chronicler who had complained bitterly about Christendom's failure to act in the defense of Hungary and Croatia, seeing around himself only “frenzied slaughter, everywhere flames, smoldering embers, and dust. . . . France is slumbering, Spain does not bother with Christ, England is preoccupied with the quarrels of her nobility, neighboring Germany wastes her time in meaningless discussions, and Italy only wants to do business.”Footnote ⁵³ Like Mažuran's interpretation, Tuđman's account reinforces the idea that (insufficiently) Christian Europe was blame to for abandoning Croatia.

That claim, of course, is one that has had its own present-day resonance in light of Croatia's heavy reliance on Western support during the independence struggle and the Bosnian war, support that did not always prove as forthcoming as many Croats would have wished. In Tuđman's view, the consequences were staggering, and the country was still in the process of mending itself. The Turks' domination of the Croat lands meant that “their further development within the Mediterranean and Central European cultural sphere was discontinued.”Footnote ⁵⁴ As seen in Tuđman's own nationalist politics, the makers of recent Croat history have presented themselves as seeking to right the perceived wrongs of the past and return Croatia and the Croats to their proper place in “Europe,” “Central Europe,” and “the West.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Often, a promising means to that end has been the insistence on what is said to be a deep civilizational cleavage between Croatia and the Ottoman East (and the Bosnian East, and the Serbian East). The Turks are now long gone, but in Croat history-telling, their legacy still finds compelling present uses, and the Ottoman crescent remains a potent symbol.