Paper short abstract:

Flight to the mountains as a response to invasion is a familiar trope in literature on the Balkans. More recently, a changing environment has been suggested. This paper will consider the evidence for and the reasons behind movement between elevations in the late medieval and early modern Balkans.

Paper long abstract:

In his The Waning of the Mediterranean, Faruk Tabak proposed a bold narrative of a change across the entire Mediterranean basin in the seventeenth century: "The shift in the epicenter of the basin’s economic life from its lower altitudes to its higher elevations was therefore a momentous change, and represented a dramatic departure from the landscape the region presented to the traveler in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries." In my paper I will engage with this thesis, something that environmental historians have yet to do. Although the book was widely admired, Tabak was also criticized for verging on environmental determinism by failing to take into account politics and local variation. In my paper I will do just that, through a focused treatment of Ottoman Thessaly, going back to the transition from Byzantine to Ottoman rule (fourteenth and fifteenth centuries) and continuing up through the crisis of the seventeenth century that Tabak is referencing. With its wide plains surrounded by towering mountains, Thessaly is the ideal location for considering the relationship between the mountain and the plain in the context of both a change in sovereignty and a new religious landscape, as Muslims from Anatolia settled the Thessalian plain. Drawing on existing studies, my paper will also bring in examples from other parts of the Ottoman Empire to demonstrate the complexity of the strategy of what I am calling verticality.