As for the fighting men who
subsequently brought the total
(at least in theory)
to 20,000, some of these may also have
been inhabitants of Prizren (which
in 1670 had a population of roughly 50,000)
but the evidence suggests that others
were drawn from further afield. Contarini's account
refers to Piccolomini, on his sickbed in Prizren,
receiving 'the chiefs of the neighbouring peoples, who came
to pay tribute to the Emperor with oaths of fealty.
If, as seems likely, some of these chiefs
had been summoned by Bogdani, we might expect them
to have included leaders of Catholic clans in
the nearby parts of the Malesi; and, indeed,
an Ottoman document written in February 1690(just three months later)
does refer to a large group of mostly
Catholic clans from that area ( including the warlike Fandi)
who had allied themselves with the Austrians.
But the pledge of the total of 20,000 may well have included other
Albanians from areas close to Prizren
who were no longer Catholic, having
been converted to Islam within the previous two or three generations-for example,
the Shulla or Has region, where as Mazrreku reported in 1634,
there had previously been 50 Catholic parishes
but were now only five. Mazrreku also noted that the
conversion to Islam was quite superficial; in 1671
another report on this area stated that
'28 years ago there were many Christians[sc.Catholics]: now
there remain 300 women and very few men, the rest
having abjured their faith in order to escape impositions and taxes.
The point here is not that such people nursed
a burning desire to restore,
one day, their Catholic identity(this may have been true in some cases,
those of the crypto-Christians, but these
seem to have been few in number); rather, it is that
recent attachment to Islam may not have involved
anything like religious conviction, and that it is therefore wrong to assume that such
people would have felt any special duty to support
the Ottoman state merely because they were Muslims.
What was going on in the mind of any local person when he or she
decided to support the Austrians is difficult to reconstruct,
and impossible to prove; but a modern approach which
converts religious identities automatically into some sort of equivalent
of national identities, and then expects blocks of people
to have behaved along those fixed lines,
is unlikely to give us a true picture of seventeenth-century provincial Balkan realities.
The very small educated elite-the Christian clergy, above all-may have understood what Austria was,
and what coming under its rule might mean; but ordinary
people, including clan elders, probably had only haziest idea.
Their recent experience of Ottoman rule was(contrary to what is implied in Stanford Shaw's account)
extremely negative. Taxes and other exacations had, as always, risen sharply during the anti-Habsburg war;
and, what is more, in 1687-9 the beylerbeyi of Rumeli, Yegen Osman
pasha, had treated the territories under his rule as a personal fiefdom
to be milked of its riches, and had employed armies
of personal retaines to plunder it. That
many local people might have welcomed as an alternative
a largely unknown power-one that promised to respect
their local rights, and one that was being
promoted by a local figure, the Catholic Archbishop,
whose moral authority extended beyond his own flock-should
not greatly surprise us.
However, when we recognize that such attitudes could cut across
religious distinctions, this does not mean that we should fall back
into the categories of most nineteenth- and twentieth-century Serbian
or Albanian historians, with their axiomatic assumptions about a 'national' identity
that always strove to throw off Ottoman rule. That
many Albanians continued to serve in the
Ottoman forces opposing the Austrians should not surprise us, even though we cannot
reconstruct the precise combination of factors (economic interest, personal loyalty, local affiliation,
codes of honour, and so on) that may have been involved.
Similar considerations may apply to the case of the Slav Orthodox villagers of the Lume region
South-west of Prizren, whose villages were burnt down by Holstein
because he regarded them as hostile. One early account
described Mahmut Begolli's army as consisting of 'Rascians' as well as Albanians;
some of these 'Rascians' may also have been Orthodox Slavs.
