Why Did Bosnia and Albania Convert When No One Else Did?
- Thread starter eliphas8
- Start date
Cuāuhtemōc
Banned
Because converting tends to mean paying less taxes than your Christian brethren and advancing up the political ladder in the Ottoman Empire.
They were'nt, their was a large Muslim minority in what is now Greece and to a lesser extent Bulgaria, however the Bulgarian ones largely left or were evicted while the ones in Greece were forcefully evicted from the country by the Population Exchanges of the early 20th century.
That aside, one fo the reasons the Balkans are'nt all Muslim is because the Ottomans not only did'ny try to conver them but in many instances purposefully prevented efforts to do so.
That aside, one fo the reasons the Balkans are'nt all Muslim is because the Ottomans not only did'ny try to conver them but in many instances purposefully prevented efforts to do so.
Yes, but it's more complicated than that... especially in Bosnia.
Before Bosnia's invasion, it had it's own church and was an independent kingdom. The Church was someone heretical as in the late period of the kingdom the Bogumil heresies became widespread. The Church essentially died out because it was poorly organized and had no real head; even the doctrine was pretty iffy. When the Turks took over Bosnia, they executed the high nobility but otherwise left the region alone. The Bosniaks were endeared to the Turks by a new landholding system that benefited them, and the administrative changes they introduced.
Unfortunately I don't know much more about Albania, but it was definitely more than about just getting to pay less taxes. Specific things in Albania and Bosnia lent to the fact that you saw mass conversions: you didn't see those scale of conversions anywhere else. It speaks highly that despite the higher taxes, Greece remained majority Christian in the south and even while there were many Muslims in Bulgaria, there were still a Christian plurality.
Don Grey
Banned
Well greece still had quite a large muslim population and the greeks were converting on mass willy nilly before the orthodox church was restablished and when it was brought to it former glory and extended the conversion rate went down. Remember alot of modern day turks in western and central anatolia are just greeks that converted and asimilated.
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Oh, of course, I'm not denying that there weren't Greek Muslims. What's now northern Greece, especially Thessalonika probably only had a Christian plurality, ditto with large portions of Bulgaria.
But the further south you go, the more majority Christian it is. The rump Greece established after the Greek War of Independence, for instance, was almost wholly Christian. Muslims lived there too before the war of course, but they were either chased out or killed. I doubt there were too many Muslims living in the Morea, for instance.
I'm not sure what the Greeks in Anatolia had to do with the discussion though. I was merely pointing out that Albania and Bosnia were pretty special cases in regards to conversion, with the rest of the Balkans being a splattering of Christians and Muslims. There were areas with great pluralities of course, but Albania and Bosnia are the only two regions IIRC that pretty much abandoned Christianity for Islam.
Didn't large swathes of Albanians flee to Italy? I don't know if these were the upper-classes or something but could it have been the same as Bosnia..?
Fearless Leader
Donor
This is partly true. It's also important to keep in mind that due to the rugged nature of the terrain and the areas' relative poverty, the Ottomans weren't too keen on enforcing Albanian conversions to Islam. In General the Albanians became nominally Islamic in order to avoid taxes/persecution while continuing to practice their Christian and traditional traditions. Over time this situation led to the non-Islamic traditions falling by the wayside.
It should also be noted, especially in the case of the Albanians, that their Islamic beliefs were and are far from orthodox. So I'm not so sure "converted" is necessarily the right word because in my mind a "conversion" involves a distinct turning away from one set of beliefs to another and a subsequent change in behaviour. I think another word is needed but I'm at a loss to what exactly it is.
This is true of Albania as following the collapse of resistance after Skanderbeg's death numerous Albanian nobles and prominent Christian elites fled to Italy where they maintain a kind of ethnic identity to this day apparently.
I think also the number of Bosnians also grew as Muslim Serbs, Macedonians etc. moved there once the Ottoman Empire withdrew. The relatively large numbers of Muslims in Bosnia promised a higher degree of safety from vilgilantes etc than say Belgrade. These people then became Bosnians.
I have read the opposite: Aside from the isolated and generally seen as non Bulgarian people along the Greek border (which practices non Orthodox Islam), the number of ethnic Bulgarians converting to Islam was very few (50,000). The source also stated that men from this convert population frequently served in internal security units with very bad reputations. If so, this may well have reduced Islam's appeal amongst ethnic Bulgarians.
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Yeah, there was probably a great deal of movement to the area too. After all, the Bosniak ethnic group wasn't even considered to exist until the 1960s. They were just "Slavic Muslims" until Tito finally allowed them to say that they were Muslims By Nationality. I believe it was the Austro-Hungarians who began calling them Bosniaks though, to differentiate from the Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs that also lived in the melting pot of Bosnia.
Salonica had actually a Jewish majority before the Balkan wars. If you mean the wider region, it had a Christian majority.
Snake Featherston
Banned
Others converted too, they were just expelled into the rump Empire pre-WWI and as they were Muslim Europeans nobody gave a damn then or now.
Kosta
Banned
Indeed it did; 56% of the city of Thessaloniki was Jewish during the zenith of its Jewish Era.
Good old Cuahtemoc has had some ideas for Zion set in the region of Makedonia with Old Thess as its capital. Crazy stuff.
Snake Featherston
Banned
Actually Salonika was different: its major minority was Jewish. One of the great Sephardic communities. Without Nazism, Judaism is much less Ashkenazic, which is good: the Sephardim are much more fun.
The difficulties are that during the period identity was in many ways tied to religion more than ethnicity, thus you had instances where the Orthodox Christians living in Anatolia were considered Greek and the Muslim population in the Southern Balkans were considered Turks (though more in the 20th century) or just as 'Muslims' in general.