Original scientific paper
Vlach Communities in the Drava River Basin Ecosystem: Between Consistency and Adjustment (16th to 17th Century)
Marko Šarić
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
This paper analyses migrations of Vlach communities from the Dinaric area to the imperial border area in the Slavonian interfluve of the 16th century and the impact of these farmer colonists on the Drava River basin ecosystem and vice versa. The paper investigates changes to the environment caused by pastoralisation and deforestation on the one hand, and the dynamics of adjustments and consistency of Vlach socio-economic structures on the other. The changes are estimated in terms of how much they reflected the ability to adjust in the new climate conditions, and how much they were a result of the economic cycles and the steering processes conducted by the imperial structures. Apart from the environmental and the economic factors, this was also the result of the imperial conflict-prone military and political strategies on the border. History has shown that the most successful adaptations usually take place in the realm of economic structures. Thus, among the Vlachs, sheep farming was in gradual decline and extensitve livestock animal was losing its importance. The most difficult to adopt was the other culture’s value system, and especially the mindset and the customs, and in the case of the Eastern Orthodox Vlachs, also the religion. It can be concluded that until the end of the 17th century, the Vlach communitites, both on the Ottoman border and in the Varaždin generalate, were completely agrarian, but they preserved their tradicional organization of “knežina” and extended family structures.
Keywords
Vlachs; Podravina; Early Modern Age; environmental history; economic history; migrations; Ottoman Empire; Habsburg Monarchy; Military Frontier; Ottoman serhat; Varaždin Generalate
Hrčak ID:
320081
URI
Publication date:
16.7.2024.
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