The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It - Course Information

~ ON SOVEREIGNTY AND SUBJECTS ~ 69
expansion of the list of ‘legitimate’ polities. 161 Her invocation of the interests of
Balkan Christians, whom suppposedly she could not abandon to the Ottomans,
was merely a polite way of expressing her own designs for territorial
aggrandizement.
Even so, we must take into account the disaffection of the Ottoman Empire’s
Orthodox subjects in the later eighteenth century, which made far more people
inclined to throw in their lot with the tsarina’s armies than had been true in earlier
periods. One of the major reasons for discontent was the behaviour of poorly disciplined
and supplied Ottoman soldiers on their marches to the front, especially
of the irregulars who formed a sizeable contingent of the sultan’s field armies.
These considerations are made explicit in an important primary source, one of
the first secular works to have been published in Bulgarian, namely the ‘Life
story and tribulations of the sinful Sofroni’, bishop of Vratsa (1739–1813/
1151–1229). 162 Sofroni was born as Stoiko in the proto-industrial settlement of
Kotel. His father and uncle were both livestock traders (celeb) supplying Istanbul,
and as an aide to his uncle the young and inexperienced Stoiko saw the
capital and had some narrow escapes in his encounters with low-level officials
and urban criminals. In later life, the former celeb became a priest and finally a
bishop. But while originally his family seems to have been quite prosperous, the
author was bankrupted by the robberies of assorted mercenaries, and also by the
back taxes due from his war-ruined bishopric. The local peasantry and townspeople
during the 1768–74/1181–8 war, and during the following years as well,
apparently spent much of their time fleeing from bandits and soldiers, and production
must have been disrupted accordingly. In the end Sofroni was forced to
leave Vratsa and take refuge in a Walachian monastery. In 1810/1224–5, when
another Russo-Turkish war was in progress, the elderly ex-bishop published a
declaration encouraging his fellow Orthodox to side with the Russians. 163 As a
government unable to protect the people it taxed, the Ottoman administration had
lost the legitimacy it previously had possessed in the eyes of many of its non-
Muslim subjects.
Provincial power magnates and international relations in
1774/1187–8
By the standards of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when a strongly
centralized government had attempted to control closely the administration of the
provinces, movements toward decentralization became noticeable, at the very
latest, from the seventeenth century onwards. However, if we disregard the rather
unusual cases of Canbuladoğlu Ali Paşa in northern Syria and of Fahreddin Ma‘n
in present-day Lebanon, these local potentates of the years before 1750/1163–4
but rarely maintained links to foreign powers. Moreover, Fahreddin Ma‘n, one of
the major exceptions to this rule, established connections not to one of the major
states of the day, but to minor Italian princes such as the grand duke of Tuscany.
164 From this viewpoint the threat to Ottoman control remained slight.