In his efforts to smuggle books from Habsburg Croatia into his home in Ottoman Bosnia and Herzegovina after the revolutions of 1848‒49, the Catholic priest and well-known Illyrian nationalist activist, Ivan Franjo Jukić, found himself wrestling with the world of borders: “To get a supply of books from Zagreb, by what route?” he contemplated in a letter to a fellow Ottoman Christian. “I don't know that myself. . . . I've been probing and trying for nine years now, and as you know yourself, sometimes a half-year passes before I get them from Zagreb.”Footnote ² While Jukić had a contact in the Habsburg border city of Brod, convincing someone to carry the materials across the border required personal connections, cash payments, and some finesse. Ottoman censors regularly confiscated reading materials, demanded bribes to make deliveries, or detained suspects.Footnote ³ Both Habsburg and Ottoman officials policed their shared border, requiring travelers to apply for permits to cross. Across the region, governments built detention and quarantine facilities to confine suspicious border crossers, a convention becoming commonplace around the world.Footnote ⁴ The border between Bosnia and Herzegovina and the autonomous province of Serbia was more porous, as was its meaning, because it separated two regions under Ottoman suzerainty; however, there, too, the border became increasingly guarded, especially as the Serbian principality began to issue passports. Every border crossing became a point of potential conflict over what would be filtered out or let in: people, goods, books, ideas.

Change was palpable across the Habsburg-Ottoman borderlands over the long nineteenth century. As nebulous political boundaries slowly became marked by customs houses, border posts, and quarantine stations, frontier lands, long dominated by military garrisons and military ambitions, became a new stage for diplomatic, legal, and economic negotiation.Footnote ⁵ This was in no small part because across Europe, subjecthood, as a legal category, was being redefined through a complex web of nationality and citizenship laws that emerged alongside new Enlightenment ideas for thinking about rights and political belonging.Footnote ⁶ As the laws changed in various domestic contexts and the political languages changed internationally, the status of individuals moving across these borderland regions also shifted. As if these variations in subjecthood and nationality were not complicated enough, contests over Ottoman lands, as well as revisions to the legal status of particular Ottoman provinces, raised questions about the boundaries of Ottoman laws and the legitimacy of the Porte's European possessions. In the early to mid-nineteenth century, several Ottoman provinces in the European borderlands, notably Serbia, Wallachia, and Moldova, achieved a semisovereign status that would be revised and reworked against the backdrop of a shifting international legal system; they would achieve “independence” in 1878 (though such independence came within the context of a hierarchy of European states).Footnote ⁷ In the late nineteenth century and into World War I, core Ottoman lands became sites of more direct European intervention: Bosnia and Herzegovina and the sançak of Novi Pazar fell under different forms of Habsburg occupation; the Russian military occupied lands in Ottoman Bulgaria and Anatolia; and the British occupied Ottoman Egypt.

As the political boundaries of Southeastern Europe changed in the long nineteenth century, so, too, did the meaning of the Habsburg-Ottoman border: the edge of Europe slowly became saturated with legal meaning. Borderland towns and provinces often became places where consular and military officials first encountered challenges created by legal systems in flux. Questions of political belonging and sovereignty were continuously reinterpreted as the various states operating in the borderlands sought to centralize legal structures and strengthen their position vis-à-vis their neighbors. Jurisdictional battles over local, superficially mundane issues became elevated to the status of international conflict simply because they were unfolding on the Ottoman border. Indeed, the border became much more than a line to cross, it became a place to claim or deny political belonging and to clarify new, ambiguous concepts percolating in international law.

The four essays in this forum analyze the Ottoman-Habsburg borderlands as sites of legal encounters, diplomatic negotiation, and cultural contestation. In humanizing border interactions, they reveal how a range of ostensibly nonpolitical actors—merchants, journalists, engineers, an impoverished teenage boy and his sister—became entangled in debates over the changing political world: about the nature and meaning of belonging (in national, political, and confessional terms) and about the boundaries of legal categories of asylum, extraterritoriality, slavery, and rights. In contrast to studies of imperial borderlands that foreground political violence, these essays excavate other kinds of tensions and negotiations. While attention to Europe's imperial borderlands as sites of mass killings and expulsions has certainly produced excellent and important works, an overemphasis on themes of violence has also propagated many myths, most problematic among them the idea of the Balkans as an inherently violent space.Footnote ⁸ There are other stories to be told about the centrality of borderlands and important historiographical silences to address. This forum offers an alternative analytical lens.

The Habsburg-Ottoman rivalry, which dominated regional policy in Southeastern Europe from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century, defined and transformed local concepts of frontier, borderland, and border, as well as ideas of jurisdiction, sovereignty, and rights. In the early modern period, the Habsburg borderland served as the “military frontier,” a place where Christians were invited to settle on the defensive line of Europe.Footnote ⁹ The border also played an important role in the Habsburg imaginary and the European mental map: as Larry Wolff describes in Inventing Eastern Europe, it was one of the cultural frontiers of Europe.Footnote ¹⁰ Beyond lay the imaginary East, a foreign and dangerous world defined by Muslims and dominated by the “Ottoman yoke.”Footnote ¹¹

The Ottomans, of course, had their own understandings of their European borderland in the early modern era, one grounded in internal statecraft and a well-functioning bureaucracy that enabled them to protect the imperial periphery after their massive territorial losses in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.Footnote ¹² These were potentially vulnerable lands, even as they were understood as central to the empire. Historian Kathryn Ebel's work reveals that in the Ottoman cartographic imaginary, the imperial frontier was not represented by physical points of border crossing, such as a river, mountain, or landmark, but by the urban centers in borderlands, where Ottoman courts, businesses, roadways, and markets cemented imperial legitimacy and anchored the periphery to the imperial core.Footnote ¹³ It is thus not surprising that, when faced with pressures on the borderland, the Ottomans would respond with innovative legal, economic, and taxation policies within these cities.

Importantly, the Habsburg-Ottoman borderland under investigation in this forum was also a “language frontier,” as Pieter Judson aptly describes such places.Footnote ¹⁴ South Slavic languages were spoken by diverse communities of Muslims, Orthodox Christians, Catholics, and Jews, people who often engaged in commerce across fluid borders and also shared meaningful religious, cultural, and linguistic connections with people living in other states. These shared linguistic connections would form the basis of many South Slavic national and cultural movements that developed in the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁵ They would also influence the kinds of networks that would be available to people seeking to bypass a border or to politicians aiming to challenge its legitimacy in the first place. To many nationalist activists at the forefront of nineteenth-century movements, the borders represented the stifling of their popular sovereignty and a regional political problem to transcend. By decentering Habsburg history and focusing on events in the periphery, these essays depart from dominant tropes of nationalism and nationalist movements that have long shaped narratives of nineteenth-century Balkan history and instead illuminate how imperial rivalries, legal ambiguities, and ideas of possession shaped the societies in which nationalist movements would emerge. They also posit the utility of analyzing the Habsburg-Ottoman borderlands for making sense of how notions of subjecthood and rights, as well as the larger idea of Europe, became tested and reframed through people's daily lives and their engagements with contested political spaces.

Over the course of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, these regional dynamics and geographic imaginaries became entangled with the European diplomatic dilemma that came to be known as the Eastern Question.Footnote ¹⁶ Put simply, this amounted to the great powers competing for influence and power over Ottoman lands; they also contemplated, on a diplomatic level, their eventual political redistribution. They had two central concerns, which at times conflicted with one another. First was the issue of the European balance of power: to prevent Russian expansion into Ottoman imperial lands, the other great powers sought to buttress Ottoman sovereignty and control changes to the Ottomans’ political boundaries. At the same time, the proliferation of a new European civilizing discourse viewed the Islamic empire as inferior to Europe and began to see the liberation of Christians from the Ottoman yoke as a European mission.Footnote ¹⁷ In the shifting European political imaginary of the nineteenth century, certain Ottoman European possessions with Christian majorities, such as Serbia, Romania, and Greece, became understood as illegitimate and thus detachable from the sultan's domain. And indeed, over the century they would be slowly separated through international treaties and awarded independent status. This Orientalist geographic imaginary undergirds many of the borderland dynamics described in this forum.

The Ottomans were well aware of these efforts to reframe their empire's position in the European system. They viewed the Eastern Question as an affront to their sovereignty and actively sought to strengthen imperial institutions in response. An exhaustive program of domestic legal reform, known as the Tanzimat (1839 and 1856), centralized and secularized certain legal structures and laws. The Sublime Porte also sought to clarify categories of Ottoman subjecthood and nationality. Through a series of laws, they gave Christians and Jews new rights and obligations within the Ottoman polity, while also codifying a socioreligious legal system wherein different confessional groups adjudicated their own socioreligious matters. Ottoman subjecthood was changing both as a result of domestic reforms and because of international pressures.Footnote ¹⁸

For many Ottoman bureaucrats working in the borderlands, the multicentury threat of “Christian” advances posed an existential crisis. Even when it was not under attack, the border felt uncertain, as Edin Hajdarpasic examines in his essay here, partly because of occasional conflict, partly because of mass migrations occurring throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Ottoman officials in Bosnia and Herzegovina came to understand themselves, Hajdarpasic argues, as operating in a state of “emergency,” which led to new repressive tax and land policies for Christians. Moving away from the world of diplomacy and military engagements and instead focusing on legal disputes over property and taxation, Hajdarpasic reveals how social pressures on the borderland and the Ottomans’ perceived vulnerability contributed to a reformulation of the idea of Ottoman subjecthood in the nineteenth century. The region's social fabric was gradually shattered as a result of Ottoman land and taxation policies, which led to a reformulation of how class and confession worked in society. This, in turn, would shape how various Bosnians would understand and utilize nineteenth-century political languages in an effort to redefine their status. Central to this analysis is Hajdarpasic's concluding reflection on how Christian activists in Bosnia and Herzegovina came to oppose their classification as raya, an Ottoman taxation category, and instead fought to be classified as “citizens and nationals” of the Turkish empire. But such categories meant vastly different things to people living in and moving through the Ottoman-Habsburg borderlands. Their subjectivity, we shall see in Alison Frank Johnson and Jared Manasek's essays, was a product of both Ottoman policies and the shifting legal norms of the international order.

For people living on the Habsburg-Ottoman borderlands, the Eastern Question—typically understood as a diplomatic problem—was very much a matter of regional politics and everyday legal affairs. Within this system, Ottoman Christians could be savvy political actors.Footnote ¹⁹ In sharp contrast to the image of the backward and repressed Christians living under an Ottoman yoke percolating in the nineteenth-century European imaginary, we see in these essays how Ottoman Christians negotiated with local authorities, learned new international protocols, and maneuvered across subjective legal worlds. At times, Ottoman Christians wrestled with how the Habsburg Empire might serve as a legal protector—not as an occupier, but as a guardian of international law and a mediator with the Sublime Porte.

This is on view in Alison Frank Johnson's essay, which explores how the rights of Christians and the legal category of slavery were deployed in a Habsburg borderland town in 1852. Frank Johnson explores Ottoman-Habsburg-Serbian tensions over “sovereignty, jurisdiction, and personhood” at three levels: the local, the regional, and the international. Frank Johnson's narrative centers around a young Serbian-speaking Orthodox Christian, Milan Ilić, who was born in Ottoman Bosnia, and whose mother and sister had converted to Islam and lived in the harem of an Ottoman notable. Outraged over his young sister's unwilling conversion and desperate to free her from the harem, Ilić takes advantage of Habsburg antislavery laws to demand her freedom when the harem stopped in the Habsburg Danubian port town of Zemun on its way from Ottoman Bosnia to Ottoman Anatolia. By briefly leaving Ottoman territory, the convoy stepped into Habsburg legal domain, a fact of which Serbs were acutely aware. The case raised questions on how, in a world of interconnected borders, the Ottomans’ understandings of legal categories (e.g., slavery, conversion, rights) would jibe with new European norms. Closely analyzing correspondence between the military governor and the foreign ministry, as well as correspondence with officials in Belgrade and Istanbul, Frank Johnson exposes the tangled lines of jurisdiction in mid-nineteenth-century Europe and the ambiguous nature of political belonging. People living in the borderlands were aware that the political norms and laws of different states were changing, and they understood that by crossing into Habsburg territory, they could stake claims according to Habsburg law. Desire for Habsburg intervention was not an invitation for colonial conquest but an act of asserting a voice as individuals in an international order. In this case, it seems to have been driven by a young man's desperation to be reunited with his sister.

But such border crossings raised much broader questions that the Habsburgs would need to ponder; especially notable are the ethics and legality of conversion in Ottoman lands, the boundaries of nationality and their relationship to legal subjecthood, and the nature of the semisovereign provinces that existed within the Ottomans’ European lands.Footnote ²⁰ It soon becomes clear in Frank Johnson's essay that her protagonist, Milan, is working in cahoots with Serbian politicians. Consequently, we see how Serbian actors tried to test the limits of their “autonomous” status within the Ottoman Empire and use Habsburg law and European legal norms to upend their ambiguous semisovereign status.Footnote ²¹ Slavery became a lever through which these Serbian actors sought to make legal claims on behalf of individuals who they claimed as members of their nation, despite their legal status as Ottoman subjects. The Habsburgs became the arbiters of this ambiguity. Policing the border thus became a way of challenging Ottoman concepts of law and legality. As borderland subjects moved through and across borders, they found themselves at once the object of change and the agents of it.

Another legal concept was also beginning to take on new meaning in the Habsburg-Ottoman borderlands of the mid-nineteenth century: extraterritoriality. The principle of extraterritoriality, or the right for subjects of one state to be exempt from its legal jurisdiction and instead claim legal status within another state's jurisdiction, was not new; it had been part of Ottoman-European treaties for centuries, and had played out in consular courts across European and Ottoman lands.Footnote ²² But the meaning of extraterritoriality and who was included slowly changed over the course of the nineteenth century, especially in relation to Ottoman Christians.Footnote ²³ Most famously, the Treaty of Paris in 1856, which ended the Crimean War and was signed by Great Britain, France, the Ottoman Empire, Sardinia, and Russia, enshrined new ideas of subjecthood in international law by allowing European powers to claim jurisdiction over their citizens or nationals who lived in Ottoman lands. Exactly what this entailed and who counted as “foreign” engendered important debate within the Ottoman Empire and is the subject of a robust and dynamic literature both within Ottoman history and in the field of law and empire.Footnote ²⁴ As the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Serbian states each sought to define their legal domain and buttress their legitimacy in the second half of the nineteenth century, the act of border crossing became internationalized, and questions of extraterritoriality became entangled with those of sovereignty and nationality.

A question that emerges in Jared Manasek's essay is where the Habsburg state would fit into this changing system of subjects and citizens, nationals, and extraterritoriality, and how Christians in the Ottoman borderlands understood these categories and sought to exploit them.Footnote ²⁵ The essay begins with a politically charged border crossing in 1873: without asking permission from the Ottomans, a group of Orthodox Christian merchants from Bosnia crossed the Sava River into the Habsburg province of Croatia-Slavonia—a place to which they had regularly traveled for business, and where they had a network of merchant friends—and sought refuge. Their goal was not political asylum in the Habsburg Empire, as would be the case of later political refugees, but rather, to convince the Habsburgs to pressure the Ottomans to be more lenient with them. They had their own interpretation of the Treaty of Paris, Manasek suggests, believing that European powers had an “obligation” to protect them as Ottoman Christians. The great powers disagreed—or, at least, nobody wanted to get involved with the merchants’ case—not the British, the Russians, the Italians, nor the Habsburgs. The Ottomans, meanwhile, were convinced that the Christian men were not mere merchants, but nationalist agitators and potential revolutionaries. In raising questions about the merchants’ intentions and extracurricular activities, Manasek draws upon both Habsburg and Bosnian sources to show how a local dispute could become reinterpreted in different lenses and how local Christian communities used international legal ideas for personal gain. These are, to some extent, the same Christians of Hajdarpasic's and Frank Johnson's essays, albeit now more attuned to the languages of citizenship and rights. Manasek also illuminates how new legal concepts of refuge, protections, and rights—ideas that would soon be fleshed out at the Congress of Berlin in 1878—were being gradually worked out on the ground by local and imperial actors caught up in an unstable political order.

The Berlin Congress marked an important turning point for the Habsburg-Ottoman borderland, for the political map of Southeastern Europe, and for questions of law and rights in European history broadly.Footnote ²⁶ Serbia, Montenegro, and Romania won independence, and Austria-Hungary occupied the Ottomans’ borderland province of Bosnia and Herzegovina, commencing a three-decade campaign to “civilize” the province and integrate it into “Europe.”Footnote ²⁷ Austria-Hungary also assumed a new regional policing function, seemingly on behalf of the other great powers, monitoring her various southern neighbors and threatening military intervention if they misbehaved.Footnote ²⁸ Historians often depict the era of Habsburg occupation (1878‒1908), when Bosnia was still under Ottoman suzerainty, as not particularly different from the period of Habsburg annexation after 1908. However, Leyla Amzi-Erdogdular persuasively argues that Ottoman suzerainty was not a mere formality of international law. To the contrary, before 1908, many Bosnians continued to understand themselves as Ottoman subjects, petitioning the Ottomans for assistance and intervention and anticipating the possibility of the restoration of power.Footnote ²⁹ From the Austro-Hungarian perspective, however, the goal of occupation was to reintegrate the region into “Europe” and sever its cultural and legal ties to the Ottomans. They did so through modernization campaigns, military repression, and sophisticated administrative, legal, and cultural strategies designed to manage the distinctly multiconfessional province.Footnote ³⁰

How did individual Habsburg soldiers, bureaucrats, journalists, engineers, and the imperial elite traveling into the province understand their new possession? And in what ways did they participate in the revision of the political and cultural imaginary of the European frontier? Maureen Healy takes up these questions through an analysis of Austrian descriptions of and responses to entering and possessing Bosnia and Herzegovina after 1878. She demonstrates how the idea that Europe somehow ended at a river was a mental map, an imaginary construct reified by public discourse and, eventually, in historiographies of the region as well. Among efforts to overcome “the border in the head,” Healy reveals, were political and engineering “performances” upon the physical border. Soldiers, journalists, and the kaiser used appearances at and across the border to shape public perceptions. Meanwhile, Habsburg military engineers aimed to conquer the “massive malarial swamplands” that constituted the border with Bosnia, an environmental and technological challenge that became redeployed in political terms. The act of building bridges not only changed the experience of crossing the border but also sought to change the meaning of the border. We come to learn through this analysis that the Habsburg possession of Bosnia and Herzegovina was not simply a colonial mission but also an assignment to reintegrate Europe's frontier. Indeed, Healy argues, the Habsburgs understood the entire project of occupying Bosnia and Herzegovina as a service to “Europe,” one that combined environmental and modernization efforts with cultural ones. The European frontier needed to be reconquered. By doing this work, the Habsburg state would prove its own Europeanness and strengthen its position within the hierarchy of European states.

Through a close textual analysis of dozens of border accounts, Healy reveals a distinct Austrian “civilizational vocabulary” that developed as they embarked on this project. She draws special attention to the particularly ambiguous yet politicized term of the “Turk” to highlight Bosnia and Herzegovina's non-European qualities. We know that in the nineteenth century, local Christian Slavic-speakers used the term poturčiti, or “to become a Turk,” to describe converts to Islam, fusing concepts of religion to those of political belonging.Footnote ³¹ But the meaning of “becoming a Turk” or even “being a Turk” was changing both in new legal frameworks of subjecthood and nationality and also in the particularities of the Habsburg conquest of the Ottoman European borderlands. Through its military occupation, cultural program, and civilizing mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Healy suggests, Habsburg agents aimed to defeat the “Turk” by transforming him into a “European.” And by the time Bosnia and Herzegovina was annexed in 1908 this project was largely successful in the Habsburg political imaginary, where these Muslims were understood to belong to the empire and also to the European project.

Ultimately, we see in each of these essays that the border was both an idea, a cognitive map of space, and also a tangible place whose borderness was reinterpreted through those who crossed it. The experience of the border proved unstable, and thus presented both a risk and an opportunity. It was a place where ambiguous ideas of Europe coincided with conflicting ideas of sovereignty, nationality, subjecthood, and rights, and a place where international legal norms were being worked out by local actors. The wide range of legal and social conflicts that occurred within these borderland spaces would, in turn, make their way back into the law and society of the metropoles they served.

A final note about the historiographical contributions of these essays. While analyzing any European borderland has its own peculiarities and difficulties, studying the Habsburg-Ottoman historical border, as Healy notes in her essay here, often requires crossing historiographical bridges. Ottoman history remains marginal within European history, and the historical profession consistently draws its own internal borders around what constitutes “European” or “Middle Eastern” history. Indeed, as any gathering of scholars working on the Balkans, Caucasus, or Central Asia soon reveals (much to our great frustration), the major U.S. conferences for those who study the Slavic world (ASEEES) and the Middle East (MESA) are usually held on the same weekend in November, thus requiring that we implicitly declare our professional loyalty, or at least that we commit to one set of conversations, networks, and debates at the expense of the other. That the scholars attending these two conferences were often discussing the same towns, peoples, and histories within their own echo chambers reinforced historiographical divisions over time. One finds similar arrangements in publications: the online forum H-Net Habsburg rarely includes Ottoman material; H-Net Ottoman Empire rarely includes Habsburg material. An appealing possibility for future research, one discernable in some recent workshops, conference papers, and dissertation projects, would include more collaborative work among Ottomanists, Habsburgists, Russianists, and Balkan historians, who, together, could investigate similar questions from their own sources and languages, with the goal of not just crossing but also dissolving these historiographical borders.Footnote ³²