Prince Miloš Obrenović, who ruled Serbia in two periods (1815–1839 and 1859–1860), is best remembered as the leader of the Second Serbian Uprising, the creator of the modern state and as a statesman who abolished feudalism. He ruled absolutist until the Constitution of 1838, after which he left the throne and only returned to his residence in Topcider in old age and before his death.
photo: wikipediaFOR THE PEOPLE TO UNDERSTAND IT: Knez Miloš, unknown author
Although during his time the construction of almost all institutions necessary for a state began (judiciary, schools, hospitals, museums, army, police...), the only institution I relied on during both reigns was the national assembly ("negotiation with the people"). He respected and held the National Assembly at all levels, from the peasant assemblies in each municipality (municipalities at that time consisted of three villages each), through the Nahija assemblies and the main sessions in Kragujevac, which were necessarily held twice a year: on Đudđevdan and Mitrovdan, and sometimes more often. After all, he knew that both the First and Second Serbian Uprisings started with the decisions of the national assemblies (in Orašac in 1804 and Takovo in 1815).
FOR SERBIA TO BE A PEASANT
People's deputies in Miloš's Serbia were represented by Nahi elders and other top officials, but it still did not look like any kind of parliamentarism or democracy, especially when you take into account the absence of real elections, political parties or the fact that all people's deputies respected the decision proposed by the prince himself.
His attitude towards a number of Serbian elders who believed that Turkish feudalism should only be replaced by Serbian feudal lords (and that would be the people's elders) is particularly interesting, which he suppressed most harshly and implemented the decision of educated officials that the land should be divided into flat estates for peasants, freed from feudalism, and that in the future Serbia should be a "peasant" country in the countryside and a capitalist one in the city. He guaranteed everyone the right to private property, peasants the inalienability of property, officials status and salary, and city businessmen (merchants and artisans) unhindered business according to the law. These achievements were confirmed by the Constitution of Sretenj (1835) and the Constitution from 1838, which formally remained in force for more than three decades.
He returned to the throne of Serbia precisely through the national assembly, held in the winter of 1858/59. ("Saint Andrew's Assembly") in Belgrade. Under that veil of the "people's assembly", on which he relied even during the first reign, avoiding other institutions, he also restored the order that suited him, as a ruler, the most at that moment - the so-called patriarchal autocracy. It, as in the time of the first reign, rested on village assemblies and assemblies and rose to large national gatherings, and the justification of that institution of self-organization was found in the fact that it had previously survived even the Turkish era and maintained the people as political being.
At that time, many contemporaries had only heard about Miloš from their elders, they had never seen him live, and now it was an honor for them to come to Belgrade or Topčider and seize the opportunity to observe with their own eyes the man who was a "historical figure" for them and a true "master of the house" - who was absent for a long time only by chance.
Regardless of the pro-Western foreign policy, the previous rule of the defender of the constitution and Prince Karađorđević lost popularity over time because it seemed somewhat depersonalized, bureaucratized and distant from the people in the eyes of the ordinary world. It was without a leader and a leader, without a "fatherly" protector towards the "ordinary man" - to whom he can turn, especially a man from the most numerous class - the peasantry. That government, the defender of the constitution, which rested on educated officials who run the country - became somewhat alienated from the peasants. Dressed in expensive uniforms, with cords and epaulettes, she shut herself up in towns and cities, in county and district offices, and with her arrogance and vocabulary - full of "paragraphs" - she in a certain way repelled and scared the common man, whether a peasant or a city dweller.
At one point, that city dweller or peasant wanted his strict but just host back, to "bring order" and talk to every Serbian and not a "bookie", who has "people's spirit and humor" and knows, can and wants to protect people. Prince Miloš was all of that, in the established representation. He was, according to the same folk representation, someone to whom "nobody is allowed to do anything", someone who was the boss of his "household" in Serbia, and the Serbian peasant considered Serbia as one common household, as a large rural cooperative called Earth or state. This is where the peasant's and townspeople's patriarchal view of power, his culture of power, came from, and Milos long ago proved himself to be a "staff" master, who understands the peasant like no one else and who knows how to protect him from the lords he himself despises. In the mythical representation, during his lifetime he became a "people's tribune", who, like in ancient Rome, successfully fought against the patricians and the aristocracy and - won.
SO THAT THE LORD DOES NOT SPOIL
By the way, Miloš made sure that he did not spoil any gentlemen and that they did not "fall too far", especially some kind of city "aristocracy", inherited on any basis: family (patrician), clerical (titles and positions) or land (feudal). Serbia, he believed, was by nature a peasant country, good and rich, in which there could be no hungry people, and which the peasant liberated with his own hands, cultivated with his own hands and was ready to defend it with his own hands. That hereditary privilege was supposed to remain only on the peasant's, small property, so that there would be land for everyone - with the peasant who keeps his land for his son, and the latter for his grandson, and so on, because that was the greatest asset of the liberated land: free peasant property in a state freed from feudal lords (Turks), in which the people no longer had to suffer spachies. Miloš himself bought his feudal estates in Wallachia and did not act as spachia in Serbia - but somewhere "on the side". Miša Anastasijević ("Captain Miša"), Aleksa Simić, and many others worked similarly, but feudalism was not allowed in Serbia.
The creator of the state, Miloš, also believed that the right of inheritance in the civil service should not exist, even in the so-called oblique inheritances, along kinship lines. This is how he saw the idea of a Serbian state after 1815 - when he formed the first Serbian administration. Only one family had this symbolic privilege, a family that in itself was a symbol of national unity, stood above every administration and guarded the throne of the country, because its progenitor "saved the country from the Turks". In the event that other families start working like that, he believed, the country would collapse. This was the cultural and ethical pattern on which the insurgent Serbia and its idea rested: the peasant's hands feed the country and Serbia must never be hungry, the town lords inherit their trade and craft shops, which more and more often turn into small factories that also fill the state budget, but the officials - servants of the people and servants of the throne, civil servants - apart from good manners, the right and opportunity to educate their descendants and - good upbringing - have nothing to inherit. If it were done differently, only a sin would remain, the sin of nepotism, the greatest urban misery.
Because of all that, Miloš's most favorite target group, to which he always addressed himself the most, was the Serbian peasant, in whom he saw the "health of the people", the people who justified his legitimacy as the holder of the throne. He and the peasant alone had the right to leave the land to his son, the peasant his property, and the creator of the throne - the throne of the land. Any other protection in the state, at someone else's expense, like the bureaucratic "aristocracy", would not be fair: "You Nenadovići, you Stanojevići...", Miloš himself listed the families who in the previous twenty years had "riched themselves" too much and "aristocratized" themselves in the state nurseries, all at the expense paid by the people with their taxes. His overriding ruling goal was "to satisfy the peasant mass of the people", because to the greatest extent it filled the state budget, until the urban economy was sufficiently developed.
The people, especially the peasantry and the elderly, as Đorđe S. Simić says, during the rule of the defenders of the constitution, they fondly "remembered Prince Miloš, under whose arbitrariness they themselves suffered, but with whom all new achievements flowed together every day." Then, when they returned him to the throne, as their tribune, and encouraged by the results and several weeks of work of the St. Andrew's Assembly, they made wide-ranging demands to Miloš - which should at least have been listened to. For example, he freed most of the peasants who fell into greengrocer debts through a simplified court procedure, by giving them the opportunity to take an oath in church that they had repaid the principal of the debt - and the greengrocer no longer had rights over his debtor.
Miloš satisfied the peasantry with various measures and reforms, and he also had to fight with two political currents (parties) that had emerged in the meantime - liberals (free-minded intellectuals), who, interestingly, immediately became his opposition due to his personal power and interference in the judiciary, and conservatives (younger defenders of the constitution, also "faculty" intellectuals, supporters of the former regime). Both parties wanted to limit his power as soon as possible - the liberals with a real national assembly and freedom of the press, and the conservatives - with a stronger state council and also stronger institutions, created during the time of the defender of the constitution, which he would have to respect.
However, Miloš liked to manage the national assemblies himself, and not them by him, and because of the state council and the constitution prescribed by such a council, he had to leave both the throne and the country at one time.
Regardless of the poor results in the second reign, when he died after a year and a half, he was honored as the liberator of the country from Turkish slavery and the creator of the state. He was buried in a place of honor in the Cathedral Church in Belgrade.
