Journal Analele Banatului N.S. Archaeology-History

Zoran Marcov

Probleme de datare a armelor balcanice din sec. XVIII-XIX aflate pe teritoriul actual al Romaniei / Issues Relating to the Dating of the Balkan Arms from the 18th–19th Centuries on the Current Territory of Romania

Jan. 1, 2018

Abstract

e central aspect clari"ed in our research is the one related to the dating of the Balkan weapons of the 18th–19th centuries identi"ed on the current territory of Romania. First of all, the causes that led to an erroneous dating of the Balkan pieces in the Romanian literature, especially during the communist period, must be mentioned. Given the fact that the international bibliography in the "eld of Balkan weapons was at its beginnings, being inaccessible to Romanian researchers, in order to date the Balkan weapons in our country we used the general western chronology for the periodization of the evolution of hand-held weapons, a timeline that does not correspond to the realities of the Balkan Peninsula, in particular of the Eastern territory in general. In the Balkans area, technological innovations such as the percussion cap mechanism had a poor and delayed penetration, as the technological gap between the West and the Balkans was of almost a century. is existing gap between workshops in the Balkan Peninsula and Western Europe has not been addressed by the older Romanian literature. Another reason that led to an erroneous dating of the pieces in our museums was the “custom” of Balkan workshops to copy Italian weapons from the 18th century during the 19th century. It is well known that Balkan workshops purchased weapon components, in particular pipes and detonating mechanisms, from the West, especially from Northern Italy. In the Balkan Peninsula of that period (18th–19th centuries), European production pipes were imported, and sometimes also the wooden components of weapons. Many times the Balkan workshops only assembled and decorated the weapons, and the only indigenous elements were the decorations applied to the weapons. In the Balkans, another practice was used on a large scale, which overturned researchers’ analyses: falsifying inscriptions. e temptation of large incomes led many of the local gunsmiths to engrave, especially on gun butt, the names of famous Italian gunsmiths from the 18th–19th centuries, which makes it di#cult to date those pieces. We have a special situation in cases where inscriptions made from symbols and letters without any logic have been identi"ed. Modern research believes that in these cases we are dealing with the “work” of illiterate craftsmen, who were addressing equally illiterate clients. e problem of engravings “copied” by illiterate craftsmen is also encountered in the Balkan territory in the case of yataghan production, but we cannot speak of a widespread practice. Another problem in the dating of the Balkan weapons is the massive importation of "nished parts from the West, made especially for the Eastern and Balkan markets, given that the weapons specially manufactured for export were made to the tastes of the Balkan customers – respecting the typology and appearance of those from the 18th century. Returning to the dating of the Balkan weapons identi"ed in the territory of Romania, very few of the analysed weapons, except for the yataghans, keep the year of manufacturing. e best situation is in the case of yataghans, where, out of the 59 pieces analysed in our research, 19 of the pieces still have the year of manufacturing damascened on the blade. All the pieces studied fall within the last decades of the 18th century and the second half of the 19th century. In terms of "rearms, a very small number of pieces preserve the year of manufacturing, which does not allow us to carry out an edifying statistical analysis. Of the pieces studied, the years of manufacturing are engraved on a single pistol and on a single ri$e, namely 1814 and 1865, respectively. Under these conditions, Balkan "rearms held in our country’s museums can only be dated generally between the second half of the 18th century and the second half of the 19th century. By analysing the situation of the dated yataghans, we can make a realistic assessment of the periods of Balkanweapons from the current territory of Romania. Out of the 19 dated yataghans, most come from the early decades of the 19th century, 12 pieces (63%), followed by the yataghans dating back to the second half of the 19th century, 4 pieces (21%), while the yataghans dating back to the last decades of the 18th century hold the smallest share, counting only 3 pieces (16%). Although the small number of dated yataghans (19 of the total of 59 weapons investigated) is not representative of the whole country, the results of our analysis are in line with the situation of yataghans kept in the large weapon collections in Belgrade and Zagreb. Speci"cally, we refer to the share held by the yataghans dated in the "rst half of the 19th century, the most numerous of which are kept in our museums and from this point of view the situation is the same as that of the Military Museum in Belgrade and the Croatian History Museum of Zagreb. e di/erences found compared to the situation in Romania result in the much smaller gap between this group of yataghans and those of the second half of the 19th century, namely from the last decades of the 18th century. e large number of weapons made in the "rst half of the 19th century must be linked to the more than di#cult political situation of the European part of the Ottoman Empire at that time. e need for arming became a necessity in the years of the “Serbian Revolution” of 1804–1835, a multi-stage anti-Ottoman movement that materialized with the establishment of an autonomous Serbian Principality within the Ottoman Empire. In the same line with the anti-Ottoman movement in Serbia, the Greek Independence War took place between 1821–1829, which ended with the recognition of the independence of the new Greek State by the great European powers. A con$ict situation was also faced by Bosnia in 1831, but its character was di/erent, as the Bosnians stood up against the reforms made by the central authorities of Istanbul. All these con$icts in the Balkans required massive arming and generated an important weapon production, a fact re$ected in the dating of the Yataghans existing on the territory of Romania. Analysing from a comparative point of view the situation of yataghan dating with that of the Balkan "rearms, related and most of all, contemporary weapons, we can propose an assimilation regarding the periodization of white weapons with the "rearms. erefore, it can be appreciated that the vast majority of the Balkan "rearms existing in Romania, derived from the same sources as the white ones, can be dated in the "rst half of the 19th century, according to the great e/ervescence in the Balkan weapon production level, the regional political situation being presented in the paragraphs above.