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History · ·6 min read

Sarajevo defeated the sultan's governor in 1814, and the empire had to sack him

The Ottoman vali tried to tax Sarajevo like any other city. Sarajevo revolted. The vali sent an army. Sarajevo routed it at Umarina, captured his second-in-command, and the vali fled Travnik so fast he abandoned his harem. Six weeks later the sultan dismissed him. Inat, in one long Ottoman year.

By Nedim Hadzimahmutovic · Sarajevo

If you read anything about Sarajevo under the Ottomans, you’ll come across the word “privileges”. Sarajevo had them. Most Balkan cities didn’t. The Sultan’s own charters exempted the city from certain taxes, guaranteed its Muslim population certain administrative rights, and made it — in the vocabulary of Ottoman provincial governance — “the sultanic city” rather than a normal vilayet town.

What follows from this is a mostly-forgotten piece of Sarajevo history that the Explore Sarajevo site’s editorial voice was made for: in 1814, the Ottoman governor of Bosnia tried to strip those privileges. Sarajevo said no. There was a revolt. There was a battle. And the city won.

The person who reconstructed this in detail is the Sarajevo historian Dr Galib Šljivo, working from Vienna archive documents (the K.k. Konsulate Travnik file at the Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv, plus the French vice-consul Paulič’s dispatches from Travnik) as well as the standard Bosnian sources. His paper “Unrest in Sarajevo in 1814” is not a headline history but it is a careful one, and its central finding is one of the clearest examples of Sarajevan inat the archives have ever produced.

The setup

The vali — the Ottoman governor of the Bosnia Eyalet — was Derendeli Silahdar Ali-pasha. In 1813 he’d led a mixed Bosnian-Ottoman army to help retake Belgrade from the Serbian rebels. Sarajevans had marched with him, at Bosnia’s own expense. The campaign worked. Belgrade was back under Ottoman control by October 1813.

Then Ali-pasha returned to Travnik, the eyalet’s official capital, and started acting like every Bosnian governor of the previous fifty years had been unable to. He decided to collect what Istanbul was owed. In practical terms this meant taxing Sarajevo like a normal city. He set the Sarajevo share of a general levy at 300 kesa — a substantial sum — and moved to impose additional taxes on the province’s non-Muslim merchant class as well.

Sarajevans refused to pay.

That refusal was the moment the story starts. The city cited its privileges. The vali cited the sultan’s need. Both sides were technically correct. In the eight months that followed, Sarajevo’s ayan (notables) and ulema (religious scholars) organised a working revolt against the vali’s authority, coordinated with allies in Mostar, Travnik, and Banja Luka.

By September 1814 the vali had had enough. He sent an army.

The battle at Umarina

Šljivo’s paper follows what happened next through the archives. The vali’s ćehaja (deputy) Deli Hasan-pasha marched east from Travnik with an advance guard. Sarajevo’s ayan called up its own armed force — old-style Bosnian irregulars, plus regular volunteers from the Sarajevo mahalas — and moved west to intercept.

The two forces met at Umarina, four hours’ walk west of Sarajevo on the Travnik road.

The fight the archives record was brief. The Sarajevo force surprised the advance guard — Ottoman irregulars, marching in loose column, apparently not expecting a defended engagement — and routed them. Deli Hasan-pasha was captured. The advance guard broke.

The vali’s second column, under Ali-pasha himself and Osman-pasha, arrived behind. It got as far as Praca, twelve miles from Sarajevo, before Sarajevans engaged and broke it too. Osman-pasha was killed. The vali turned around and rode.

He rode back to Travnik so fast he abandoned his harem — the administrative detail Šljivo’s Vienna documents record with a particular Habsburg-consular relish. When he got to Travnik, the city refused to reinforce him. He rode north to Banja Luka, where the Serdar of the north refused to open the gates. He detoured through Jajce, still with no army, and eventually made it to Istanbul as a private supplicant.

On 20 November 1814, six weeks after Umarina, the sultan dismissed him from office.

What this means

The Ottoman Empire in 1814 was not a small operation. Its army was among the largest in Europe. Its administrative apparatus reached from Baghdad to Belgrade. Its provincial governors — the valis — were the instruments through which imperial authority was applied.

Sarajevo defeated one in the field, and the empire had to replace him.

The city fought a battle at Umarina, captured an Ottoman deputy governor, killed a second, and forced the imperial capital to acknowledge that the vali the Sultan had appointed could not, in fact, govern this city.

If you want a definition of inat — the Bosnian word for stubbornness with honour, the attitude the Inat Kuća story turns on — this is one. Not “we won’t move our small wooden house” (that came eighty years later, and is the more famous story). This one is bigger: we will fight the imperial government, and win, rather than accept a tax on a pretence.

The Habsburg angle nobody has written about yet

Here’s the twist Šljivo’s paper adds to the story: while all this was happening, the Habsburgs were watching.

The Vienna consular files at HHStA include the French vice-consul in Travnik — Paulič — sending dispatches through Habsburg mail to the k.k. authorities. The dispatches describe the revolt in detail. Habsburg border commanders at Stara Gradiška, on the Sava, the Ottoman-Habsburg border, were formally instructed to prepare to receive refugees from Sarajevo and Mostar if the political situation demanded it. Sarajevo’s own ayan considered fleeing north across the border.

The Habsburgs were tracking Sarajevo politics in the archive of the k.k. war ministry in 1814 — sixty-four years before they occupied the province.

The line running from 1814 through the 1868 Roskiewicz cadastral survey and the Arthur Evans 1875 tour and the 1878 occupation is longer than the usual accounts have it. The Habsburgs were watching Sarajevo the whole time. Sarajevo’s ayan knew they were watching, and understood the value of that watchful audience.

The bit worth remembering

The vali dismissed on 20 November 1814. His successor arrived in Travnik with a brief to not do what Derendeli Silahdar Ali-pasha had done. Sarajevo’s privileges — the exemptions, the exceptions, the status — held. For the next sixty-four years, until 1878, no Ottoman governor tried to override them again.

Then the Habsburgs came, and, after another set of arguments, kept most of the privileges too.

If you want to know why Sarajevo has always been a difficult city for outside administrators, one answer sits in the Ottoman archives, in Šljivo’s Bosnian-language paper, at a small forest crossing four hours west of the city called Umarina. Sarajevans went there in October 1814, and won.

Two hundred and twelve years later, and thirty years past a vicious modern siege, the city is still doing what it did then: being difficult, being interesting, and being itself.

Vala, if you want to understand inat, read Šljivo.

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