Scenarios of Revolution from the Mediterranean to the Balkans: Transnational Revolutionary Movements and Garibaldini in the Ottoman Empire after the Crimean War

Abstract

The impact of the 1848 Revolutions was deeply felt in the Ottoman Empire throughout the 1860s. In the aftermath of the Crimean War, the decline of Russian political prestige encouraged revolutionary movements in the Balkans to forge new alliances with transimperial and revolutionary adventurers. Garibaldi’s campaign against the Austrian Empire for the liberation of Venice during this period had significant ideological and political ramifications for the Balkan Peninsula. The volunteers who played crucial roles in the Italian unification wars provided a fresh model of resistance and organization for local revolutionary movements within the Ottoman Balkans. The Garibaldini introduced their political and paramilitary frameworks, developed in opposition to the Austrian Empire, into the Balkans, confronting the Ottoman Empire with a transnational revolutionary movement. Composed of revolutionaries from various nations, the Garibaldini posed a considerable threat to Ottoman provinces in the Balkans. As their influence and popularity grew, they sought political alliances with local insurgents, thereby initiating ideological and organizational transformations within local socio-political movements. Consequently, many of these movements came to be reorganized around revolutionary committees. The interaction between local and national revolutionary committees and the transnational Garibaldian movement was especially evident during the Montenegrin, Bosnia-Herzegovinian, Serbian, Macedonian, and Cretan crises faced by the Ottoman Empire in the 1860s. Furthermore, some European revolutionaries who had served in the Ottoman military following the 1848 Revolutions aligned themselves with anti-Ottoman movements associated with Garibaldi, thereby shifting their political loyalties. This article explores the revolutionary strategies employed by the Garibaldini and highlights the transnational character of local revolutionary movements in the Balkans during the 1860s.