ABSTRACT
By the early seventeenth century, the Balkan Peninsula was divided between the Ottoman, Habsburg, and Venetian empires. Their imperial regimes had largely settled on the borders between them after a century of warfare with each other and an earlier struggle to overcome the native Greek, South Slav, and Albanian regimes, as noted in the introduction. Between the Balkans and the Black Sea, the two Romanian Principalities of Wallachia and Moldovia forged a brief union with Habsburg Transylvania at the start of the seventeenth century. The advancing Ottoman forces obliged the ruling Romanian Princes to pay increasing tribute. In the southern Balkans, cavalry and some infantry (janissary) officers became local warlords who took village lands as inheritable chiftlik, taking the largest part of peasant crops and some livestock for their own use or sale. A peace treaty with the Porte in 1774 established the precedent for Russia as a primary representative of the Orthodox peoples across the Ottoman Balkans.
