tives without viewing them in the context of the events that led up to them. This is particularly the case, perhaps, in the Balkans, where historical memory is extremely intense if not necessarily accurate. To take an example drawn from another facet of the Balkans conflict of the 1990s, Serbia's determination to hold onto Kosovo was very much bound up with memory of the Battle of Kosovo in the 14th century.
The battle -- an Ottoman Turkish victory over the Serbs -- looms vastly large in the Serbian national self-image, and it was as much because of that long-ago battlefield as for any more immediate reason that Slobodan Milosevic was able to make Kosovo a central element of his nationalist propaganda. We will not attempt here to detail Balkan history back to the 14th century or beyond, but that history is so central to the background of the Dayton Peace Accords and their provisions that it must be taken into account [Deak 38-39].
The Balkans are one of several regions in the world of which it has been said that they produce more history than can be consumed locally. In the case of the Balkans this has its roots in the frequently hostile encounter there of three civilizations and three religious traditions: Western Christian, Eastern Orthodox Christian, and Muslim. The conflict of the first two reached its high point with the fall of Constantinople to the misdirected Fourth Crusade in 1204, but also involved a great deal of conflict between Serbs and Croats.
Islam entered the picture with the Ottoman Empire, which swept across much of the Balkans in the 14th and 15th centuries. The Ottoman (and general Muslim) practice was rarely "conversion by the sword;" both Catholic and Orthodox populations were left with their religious institutions intact, the Ottomans being content to collect taxes (including forcible recruitment of children for their famous corps of Janisseries). Over the years, however, significant numbe...