Original scientific paper

Vlach Question and the Ottoman Sources

Snježana Buzov ; Orijentalni institut u Sarajevu, Bosna i Hercegovina

Abstract

The author tries to actualize the Vlach question in the light of the Ottoman sources as a separate problem, not only as a part of the study for instance of Serbian people in Croatia, or Military Border’s history, or some other historical problem of which, however, the Vlach question is inseparable part. Besides drawing the attention to the importance of the Ottoman sources, as well as the fact that, besides numerous published Vlach canons, a large part of the Ottoman sources about Vlachs is still unpublished, the author gives an interpretation of the legal position of Vlachs in the Ottoman Empire, the causes of its legalization and the mode of its fitting into the system of Islamic law. The author is of the opinion that the Vlachs were an ethnic community and that their ethnic identity disappeared only at the end of the 16th century first in the territories out of their autochthonic regions, i. e. in the wide area over which they were scattered by the Ottoman colonization policy. Because in the Middle Ages Vlach population was dispersed all over the Balkans, where there were several densely populated Vlach regions — in the eastern part of the Balkans there were several provinces called Vlahia (they were Aromanian communities) it is necessary to define which Vlach groups participated in the Vlach migrations in the New Ages. Certainly they were not the Vlach groups from the central Balkans, but the Dinaric Vlachs, mainly from Herzegovinian Sanjak. When the possibilities of settling the Balkans with nomadic Turkmenian population at the end of the Middle Ages were exhausted, the Dinaric Vlachs became the main element of the Ottoman colonization policy. The second wave of migrations were those of Vlach population to Croatian territory, which the author explains by weakening of their organization and changes caused by their coming to a new geographic and social milieu which affected their way of living, with their economic decline as the result. The process of turning the free land into feudal lands as a cause of Vlach migrations can be regarded upon only as a hypothesis, and only later, i. e. in the 18th and 19th centuries, and with great reserve because there have not been any researches of that problem based on the relevant sources so far.

Keywords

Vlachs; Ottoman sources; legal status; Ottoman Empire; migrations; early modern period

Hrčak ID:

251905

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/251905

Publication date:

15.11.1992.

Article data in other languages: croatian

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