The Sandžak

The American novelist Thomas Pynchon’s outré masterpiece Gravity’s Rainbow features a character, Lord Blatherard Osmo, who has made a life’s work out of the ‘Sanjak of Novi Pazar’, the thin strip of territory wedged between Serbia and Montenegro in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and which lay at the heart of the great ‘Eastern Question’ in the lead-up to the First World War. Pynchon was referencing the diplomatic importance once attached to this ‘croix mystique on the palm of Europe’, but it is Osmo’s tragicomic fate to be working in the years before the Second World War—that is, when foreign interest has long since evacuated his object of study. The heyday of the Sandžak’s geopolitical significance is over, at least for now, but it remains an important and little-known regional case-study in the Balkans: a territory that has become historically differentiated from its surrounding areas but that has not achieved the kind of political and administrative autonomy of, say, Bosnia, Macedonia or Kosovo—lands, like the Sandžak, with layered histories and identities but which, unlike the Sandžak, have achieved state sovereignty (although not universally recognised in the case of Kosovo). Since the Sandžak lacks statehood, it lacks an obvious lodestar towards which its historian can head, which makes Elizabeth Roberts and Kenneth Morrison’s admirable book a rather singular curio. The authors have produced an accessible top-down political history of the region (based mainly on an impressive range of Serbo-Croat and English-language secondary sources); they have, in other words, produced a conventional national history the subject of which is neither a nation nor a state

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