The Failure of Privatisation
In the first half of the eighteenth century military and policing functions on the frontier were outsourced. The state largely turned a blind eye to the banditry and feuding against Christians that resulted.
But peacetime disorder and violence in the aftermath of another war the Ottomans fought against the Habsburg and Russian Empires simultaneously between 1787 and 1792 destabilised Ottoman society in novel ways. As in earlier wars, Muslim irregular warriors were charged not only with fighting foreign combatants but also their Serbian and other domestic Ottoman Christian proxies within Ottoman territory. Because Ottoman non-Muslim subjects consistently supported or joined the invading armies of imperial rivals, the Ottomans worked out legal procedures by the late eighteenth century that systematically abrogated the protected status of such non-Muslim subjects (i.e. the zimmi/dhimmi status). This policy served Istanbul well during times of war, for it effectively allowed its large contingents of irregular troops to live off the property and forced labour of non-Muslim subjects. Since a cashstrapped treasury lacked the funds to pay its irregular warrior populations their contracted salaries, the government increasingly encouraged its irregular soldiery to pillage and plunder, as well as confiscate the property and enslave the womenfolk and children of Serbian and other Ottoman Christian belligerents that joined foreign combatants. But the system was open to abuse: Muslims took advantage of these laws and the wartime conditions to prey upon the innocent, and it was difficult for the centre to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants. It proved a useful cover for traditional feuding and banditry.The consequence of these recurring, wartime ‘states of exception' in Ottoman governance towards the end of the eighteenth century was widespread peacetime violence and instability.
Even when war came to an end, it proved impossible to stop the local feuding. Serbs and Albanians had a shared feuding culture that was fostered by the demands of the border region and shaped by the military needs of Vienna and Istanbul. But the 1787-92 multifront war that the Ottomans fought against the Habsburgs and Russians was particularly caustic for inter-confessional and inter-ethnic relations in the Ottoman Balkans and other parts of the empire. The scale with which imperial governments outsourced violence to different ethnic groups to fight their war by proxy was new. Trying to compete with his ally Catherine the Great's lofty plan of creating a new, Russian satellite Byzantine Empire run by Greeks from Ottoman territory (much like the Habsburgs attempted to create the Serbian Kingdom earlier in the century), Habsburg Emperor Joseph II (r. 1780-90) sent agents throughout Ottoman Serbia disseminating gifts and making promises about wider freedoms and social mobility in a bid to clinch local support. They were also sent to Montenegro and Wallachia, making broad promises of religious freedoms and promoting the advantages to be gained from rule by Vienna.[338]Habsburg Freikorps officers led fifty-men bands of Serbian irregulars (i.e. the same structure as Ottoman boluk divisions) in a series of hit-and-run guerrilla attacks in strategic locations near Belgrade in 1788; these forces attacked, pillaged and slaughtered inhabitants of towns and, more importantly, targeted movements of weapons and provisions leading to Belgrade on imperial highways, fleeing into the surrounding mountains and forests once Ottoman pressure on them became too great.[339] One ambitious Serbian Habsburg agent who led his own Freikorps band, a certain KoCa AndeloviC, became legendary because of his ability to disrupt Ottoman supply lines while terrorising and demoralising the Muslim community far south of Belgrade, all the way down to Nis.
Though he may have only briefly held control over parts of southern Serbia in the spring of 1788, so famous were Andclovic's exploits against the Ottomans stretching from Nis in southern Serbia to Transylvania in the north that Serbs hailed these areas as ‘Koca's borderlands' (Kocina Krajina). Emerging from a new class of pig merchants who made their fortune trading in the Habsburg markets across the border, Andelovic forged a new merchant identity for other likeminded Serbian communal leaders such as Karadorde Petrovid, who later led the First Serbian Uprising of 1804-13 and whose descendants would later reign over the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.In a time-honoured Ottoman tradition, Andelovic even sent the Habsburg emperor Joseph II symbolic parts of the booty that he and his men had seized from Ottoman supply caravans on their way to Belgrade, and he was duly rewarded for his services; the emperor promoted him to captain (kapudan) in the Freikorps and granted him authorisation to roam with 2,000 men over Ottoman territories. Other Serbian irregular outfits followed suit and made their own bids for power, forming notorious ceta bands (irregular warrior bandit bands) that carried out similar hit-and-run assaults in the north near Belgrade, stretching from the Morava to the Drina Rivers into Bosnia, thereby successfully interrupting Ottoman supply routes and terrorising the local Muslim population. Ottoman Albanian irregular forces finally caught up with him in the Banat (today north-eastern Serbia and western Romania) in 1789, impaled him, and at least 100 followers, and in yet another time- honoured Ottoman tradition in kind, sent their decapitated heads to Istanbul.
Ottoman sources provide us with a better understanding of the legal framework with which the Ottomans justified exceptional wartime violence against recalcitrant groups like the Serbs. In 1788 Istanbul responded to Koca Andelovic and other Serbian Freikorps ceta bands in draconian fashion: the seyhu'l-isldm (chief mufti) in Istanbul, Mehmed Kamil Efendi, issued a fatwa (legal opinion) authorising Ottoman irregular forces to execute all Serbs and their communities linked to these bands.[340] [341] The Ottoman central government thereby authorised measures against its own subjects for logistical as much as legal reasons, just as it had done during the previous 1778 war against the Russians, when Istanbul sent Albanian troops to both Moldova and Greece to suppress rebellions that St Petersburg had incited. After the Russians annexed Crimea in 1783, the Tatar aristocracy and warrior castes fled to the Ottoman Balkans en masse. They could no longer supply Ottoman slave markets with Russian subjects. But alongside their Albanian counterparts, they found another source of slaves among Ottoman non-Muslims who had lost their rights as protected zimmi subjects. Though Ottoman troops were supposed to target disloyal Serbian warriors and their kin, they often pillaged, slaughtered and enslaved the general non-Muslim public. Thus, in Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia and the Habsburg Vojvodina, Serbian communities were singled out by Ottoman irregulars. Habsburg sources estimate that even in Transylvania during the war, Albanian forces killed, abducted, enslaved or forced to flee 36,000 21 Transylvanians. The tide of the war, nevertheless, began to shift in Vienna's favour when Habsburg forces captured Belgrade on 6 October 1789, prompting the Ottomans to sign the Treaty of Zishtov (Svishtov in modern Bulgaria) by 1791 and soon afterwards the Treaty of Jassy with the Russians to end all hostilities in 1792. One pressing issue in the negotiations was what would become of Ottoman subjects like the Serbs, Romanians, and Moldovans, who had fought as proxies for the Habsburgs and Russians. Communal leaders in Serbia, Montenegro, Wallachia and Moldova pressed the Habsburgs and Russians to protect them following the conclusion of peace negotiations, fearing the revenge of local Muslims. The third clause of the peace agreement stipulated that Istanbul must issue a general amnesty to all Christian re‘aya who supported foreign belligerents during the war.[342] The crushing defeat and the violence caused by the outsourcing of security was part of the trigger behind Selim Ill's broad reform programme, the New Order (nizdm-i cedid), aimed at creating and training a much larger professional army with the newest techniques and weaponry as well as creating a new treasury that would impose and collect taxes more efficiently to pay for it. What Selim III and his advisors probably did not anticipate was the unity and resolve with which Muslim warrior populations on the frontier would not only resist the reforms but seek revenge against the state for betraying them. Throughout the next decade and a half, between 1792 to 1806, the central government would find itself scrambling to defend not only Belgrade but also the rest of the Balkans from its own disgruntled Muslim irregular forces, whose numbers were swelled by further disgruntlement, becoming one of the largest fighting forces in Ottoman society. The bulk of the exiled leaders went on to coordinate revenge attacks on cities, towns and villages in Rumeli, expanding the same repertoires of terror and havoc that the state sanctioned them to visit upon the Serbs during the war, but now they targeted Christians and Muslims alike across a much larger geography alarmingly close to the imperial capital itself. State officials were often complicit in the widespread crime and banditry that marked the civil-war-like conditions in Rumeli in the 1790s. Sources reveal how fluid the boundaries were between imperial officials charged with countering the exiled irregulars - now collectively relabelled in the official sources as ‘mountain' or ‘Albanian' bandits - and the bandits themselves. They also betray the recurring problem that officials faced in being able to recruit reliable troops who could mount effective operations against the bandits. The governor of Belgrade, El-Hac Mustafa, complained in 1795, for example, that his own irregular forces stationed in the city were not reliable, The Privatisation of Violence in the Ottoman Empire being ‘filled with hatred and savagery because exiled bandits were spreading endless lies and baseless rumours among them in order to attract them to their ranks'. However, the correspondence also reveals the correlation between the abuses perpetrated by officials on their irregular soldiers and the latter's propensity to join the Rumeli bandits. A year later, for example, we learn from another official that the Belgrade governor not only prevented his contingent of irregulars from returning back to their homes after their contractual obligations ended, but also pocketed their salaries. Unsurprisingly, once they left Belgrade his soldiers defected to the bandit bands outside the city.[344] The problems Muslim irregular warriors faced in being treated fairly by the state and receiving the salaries promised to them were not limited to the Balkans. A fascinating first-person narrative attributed to an Anatolian irregular warrior, a certain Deli (Crazy) Mustafa, a couple of decades later in the 1820s, reveals similar dynamics in peacetime Anatolia. Parts of Mustafa's narrative recalling his adventures in the Morea during the Greek Revolution (1821-9) read like rites of passage into manhood, as the young warrior boasts of beheading Greek insurgents, pillaging and burning down their communities and enslaving their womenfolk and children - acts that would have won him the respect of his comrades, commanders and other target audiences of his narrative. Mustafa was little troubled by the morality of his actions. After all, during the war Greek zimmi subjects lost their status as protected subjects because of their insurgency against the Ottoman state. However, he showed more circumspection in describing his adventures in Anatolia before the Greek revolt, where his divisions fought rebellious pashas, bandits and Kurdish tribes. He repeatedly describes his commanders abandoning him and his companions, or reneging on their salaries, after which he admits that his division was forced to ‘roam from this to that village' to get by. Here the damage done to local communities was more the result of Ottoman corruption, as officials frequently pocketed funds and provisions allocated for irregular soldiers.[345] It is clear that the privatisation of security fostered organised crime. Men who were recruited into autonomous nodes of coercive force across the Ottoman Empire subjected different regions to rackets, forcing people to pay protection against the disorder and violence that these men themselves perpetrated. But the state was complicit in the crime, as sources describing the insurgency of Rumeli bandits consistently show that the stranglehold they exerted over communities was facilitated by local officials. Istanbul would authorise community leaders to negotiate so-called winter truces with important bandit chiefs that would allow them to remain in the vicinity, draw salaries and provisions from the local population, and enjoy safe havens during the winter season in exchange for pledging to refrain from harming local townspeople during the autumn and winter. In fact, the truces never uprooted the networks. They were often negotiated by corrupt local officials who profited from the sale of pillaged goods, from smuggling and the black market. It was not just with middling local officials that the bandit leaders forged symbiotic relations. A successive line of imperial vezirs (ministers) appointed to fight Istanbul's war against banditry, first from the Balkans and later from Anatolia and the Arab provinces, accepted bribes and facilitated these very networks in their extortion and racketeering enterprises. Imperial elites benefited from bandit leaders in their own struggles with one another, and manipulated accompanying discourses of violence, bandit terror, justice, gossip and rumour to secure their own footing in the topsy-turvy world of Ottoman imperial intrigue and fierce competition over scant resources.[346]