- 04 Jul 2007 00:22
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Double posting is not allowed, so I merged all your posts into one. -TAL
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On the Road to EU
The Tourkokratia - Was it Really That Bad?
Athens News
Was the 4-century-long Ottoman rule of Greece a burdensome legacy for the nation's overall development? In the first of three articles, historian David Brewer reviews the Tourkokratia at the heights of its power and explains how it was not that bad and even brought some benefits to the Greeks
THE PERIOD of the Tourkokratia is reckoned as lasting from the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 until the formal recognition of Greek independence in 1833.Many Greeks passionately believe a commonly found version of Greek history that paints the Tourkokratia as a period of unrelieved awfulness.
The Greeks are described as enslaved - ipodhouli or en dhoulia. Their children were taken away to serve in theTurkish army or at the sultan's court. The Greeks suffered under constant pressure to abandon their Christian Orthodox religion and convert to Islam. To keep the Greek language alive they had to educate their children secretly.
Any protest or revolt was ruthlessly suppressed. Heavy taxation made their lives miserable. The Tourkokratia cut Greece off from the artistic developments of theRenaissance and the intellectual developments of the Enlightenment. Furthermore the Turks in four hundred years failed to bring any improvements to Greece and left nothing of value behind them.
Given that picture, it may seem ludicrous to ask if the Tourkokratia was really that bad. But a closer look at the history provides some unexpected answers.
Five conflicts, one in each century, immediately or indirectly affected the conditions of the Greeks and provide the framework of the Tourkokratia story. The first, of course, is 1453, the Turkish capture of Constantinople, the end of the Byzantine Empire, and the Turkish annexation of most of the Balkans including Greece. In the next century, the battle of Lepanto in 1571 brought the crushing defeat of the Turkish navy by a combined fleet from some of the powers of Europe. In 1669 the Turks finally won Crete from her Venetian rulers, and consolidated Turkish dominance of the eastern Mediterranean.1770 was the year of the short-lived Orlov revolt in Greece, instigated by Catherine the Great and named for its Russian leaders, which was quickly and ruthlessly crushed. Finally, in 1821 the Greek war of independence broke out, ending 12 years later with the establishment of Greece as an independent state.
The early years
The Turks were not the only rulers in Greece during the so-called Tourkokratia. It was not until the mid 1500s, a century after the fall of Constantinople, that the Turks acquired Cyprus from the Venetians, Chios from the Genoese, and Rhodes from the crusading order of the Knights of St John. It was another hundred years before Turkish rule replaced Venetian in Crete.
What were conditions in Greece like before the Turks arrived? On 12 April 1204 Constantinople had fallen to the crusaders of the Fourth Crusade, who looted the city and established the so-called Latin empire there. This Latin empire lasted only fifty years, and Byzantine rulers returned to govern a diminished empire for another two centuries. For Greece the Fourth Crusade brought a radical upheaval- the division of the country between rival despots.
After 1204 the Peloponnese was ruled for 60 years or so by a crusading family from the Champagne region of France, theVillehardouins, who brought stability and prosperity with them. But this golden age was not to last. The restored Byzantine rulers drove the Villehardouins out of the Peloponnese, and the next two centuries until the Turkish conquest were ones of constant conflict, as invaders from Anjou in France and from Cataluna and Navarra in Spain tried to wrest control of the Peloponnese from the ever-weakening Byzantine empire.
Salonika had no golden age, and it was the scene of constant warfare. Salonika was the biggest commercial prize in Greece, lying on the old Roman Via Egnatia linking Constantinople with the Adriatic coast and the west, and also having a fine harbour. After1204 the city was held by one of the leading crusaders, Boniface of Montserrat. Twenty years later it was seized by the despot of the neighbouring region of Ipiros; and then by theByzantines. In the following century it was besieged by Catalans, governed briefly by chaotic commune at the time of the Black Death, taken by the Turks and then taken back by the Byzantines. The Turks finally captured Saloniki their first lasting Greek possession, in 1430, and held it for nearly 500 years.
Moreover, the crusaders brought their Catholicism with them. The schism between the Catholic west and Orthodox east had rumbled on for centuries, nominally over doctrinal issues such as the famous filioque controversy - did the Holy Spirit proceed from the Father alone, or from the Father and the Son? But it was really about whether or not the Orthodox patriarch in Constantinople was subject to the rule of the pope in Rome. No longer a remote dispute, the schism had now physically arrived in Greece. Catholic Latin clergy were installed in the cathedrals, though not in the countryside. The former Orthodox archbishop of Salonika wrote of "the stupid and discordant cries of a Latin service ... disturbing good order and holy harmony."
This then was the Greece which the Turks acquired in the series of conquests which began in 1430: a once prosperous land, people whose religion was under threat, and a scene of constant and bloody turmoil.
The fateful year 1453 and its aftermath
It was on Monday, April 2 1453, the day after Easter Sunday, that the first Turkish troops appeared outside Constantinople to begin a two-month siege. The city was the capital of a now shrunken empire, reduced to the despotate of Mistra in the Peloponnese, a few outposts such as the Black Sea port of Trebizond, and the city of Constantinople itself.
Constantinople was walled all round, and without these walls the defenders could not have held out for two months. They were heavily outnumbered - 7,000 against 80,000 attackers. One of the besieged wrote, "We are an ant in the mouth of the bear." These defenders were not only, or even mainly, Byzantine Greeks. There were also Genoese under their captain Giustiniani, Venetians, Cretans, and even Turks loyal to the exiled Ottoman prince Orhan. The Byzantines were led by their last emperor, Constantine XI.
On 6 April, four days after the Turks first appeared, they began to bombard the western land walls of the city, and the bombardment continued intermittently for six weeks. On the Golden Horn to the north the Turkish fleet tried first to force its way past the protective boom but without success. They then resorted to the fantastic idea of dragging their ships overland over a 200 foot high ridge to relaunch them inside the boom. This amazing operation succeeded, and on 22 April some 70 Turkish ships slid into the waters of the Golden Horn. But skirmishes there between the transported Turkish fleet and the defending Genoese and Venetian ships were inconclusive, and the walls along the Golden Horn were not breached.
At this point Sultan Mehmed might have withdrawn and Constantinople might for the moment have survived. The sultan's grand vizier, Halil Pasha, argued that the siege should be abandoned. But more hawkish members of the sultan's court prevailed. The attack was intensified, and Halil Pasha paid for his rejected advice with his life.
The end followed two small mischances. Giustiniani, the Genoese captain commanding the defence of the land walls, was lightly wounded. When he went back behind the walls to be treated, his men thought he was running away and they began to flee. Also the smallest gate in the walls was accidentally left unbarred.
On 29 May 1453, a date still remembered with sorrow, the Turkish troops poured in, and the three-day sack began, sanctioned by both Christian and Islamic codes of war for a city taken by assault. The emperor Constantine died in the fighting, but his body was never recovered. In the late afternoon of that day the sultan entered Ayia Sophia, the greatest church in the city. A Muslim cleric proclaimed that there was no God but Allah, and the sultan himself made obeisance to the God of his faith.
One might have expected that Christianity would now be suppressed, but exactly the reverse happened. The first patriarch under Ottoman rule, Yennadhios, was enthroned within a year of the conquest, and Sultan Mehmed himself handed Yennadhios the robes, staff and pectoral cross of office. The Greeks,like other Christians in the Ottoman empire, were left completely free to practice their religion, under the patriarch's spiritual leadership. The patriarch was now the political as well as the spiritual leader of the Christian Ottoman subjects, responsible for the good behaviour of his flock, and for ensuring that they paid their taxes to the state.
All this promised well. But the church was soon undermined for two reasons: Turkish manipulation and money shortage. Intrigues by the Turks led to repeated changes of patriarch: 61 elections from 1595 to 1695. This signifisantly impoverished the church since the patriarchate had to make a substantial payment to the state at each election. State taxation of the patriarchate also - stead increased. By the beginning of the nineteenth- century the church seemed practically moribund, and a disgruntled traveller maintained that orthodoxy was no more than "a leprous composition of ignorance, superstition and fanaticism."
Though the church was in a shocking state, it was highly valued by the Greeks. Like any other church, it baptised, married and buried, and provided, a social meeting point. It was a link to the saints, especially the Virgin Mary, their frescos and icons decorated the church walls, and the saints were seen as ever present. In daily life and continuing to work miracles the local priest, the pappas, was. probably the literate person in the community, and represented the villagers to the authorities. A prime value church membership was as a badge of difference from the rulers. Church teaching though did not shape personal behaviour. Morality was governed by traditional codes of honour - on theft, adultery, or killing...rather than by Christian precepts.
Some traditional Greek histories suggest that there were forcible or mass conversions to Islam. But the Turks had no incentive to force conversion on Christians and, as a result, lose the poll tax, paid only by Christians. Nor was avoidance of the poll tax a sufficient incentive for the Greeks to convert. They would, it was said, be "selling their souls for a penny worth." Large scale conversion of Greeks seems to have happened only once,and for special reasons, in Crete.
Pedhomazoma - the child collection
Only one part of the Turkish system involved forcible conversion - the drafting of Christian boys for service at the sultan's court or as soldiers in the janissaries. It was called devshirme by the Turks and pedhomazoma, or child collection, by the Greeks. Able-bodied, spirited and good-looking Christian boys under 20 were conscripted, and only one son was taken unless a second volunteered.
The object was to provide the sultan with officials who owed loyalty only to him, andhad no links with any of the Turkish factionswhich were a constant presence at his court. At least one conscripted boy rose to beGrand Vizier, second in power only to the Sultan. Devshirme boys were also needed for the army. An early order for a devonshirme, dated 1601, is expressed in fierce terms: if parents or anyone else resist, they are to be hanged immediately in front of their house-gate.
By 1666 things had changed. Though the devshirme was still described as "one of the most important state affairs", none had taken place "for a long time". The tone had become emollient: "No one is to be wronged or coerced of the villagers". But by 1705 local Greeks were in revolt against the practice. At a devshirme in the northern Greek town of Naousa, three, Turkish officials were killed, and a hundred Greeks took to the hills to rob and murder Muslims. They were captured within a few weeks and their leaders executed. In 1721 the devshirme was officially abolished.
There were some compensations for those conscripted. The boys were lifted out of rural poverty, and some were placed in the Ottoman ruling class and rose to the top of it. The devshirme has been called "the path to glory", and there is evidence of some parents putting sons forward for conscription. But these benefits for a few count little against the anguish of the many who were torn from loving parents, their religion and their language. It is completely understandable that Greeks remember the devshirme with intense bitterness.
Sole responsibility for Greek educati was left to the church and has long been believed in Greece that, because of Turkish oppression, children had to go to school in the church secretly at night. This is a myth. In reality the priest was the only possible teacher, the church the only available school room, and the children went after dark because they worked in the fields all day. The debunking of the myth is slowly working its way down the Greek education system.
Leaving education in the hands of the church brought its own problems. Though apparently there were local schools in most areas, the boys learnt little more than how to read the books of the church services. Until the early nineteenth century, they did not learn secular subjects, and remained ignorant of the scientific and philosophical advances of western Europe.
The bulk of the Greek population, the peasants, benefited from the Turkish occupation because the country was now at peace. A traveller visiting the Greek islands century after the conquest reported that "the inhabitants feel secure under Turkish sovereignty" and that "the land had never been better cultivated or the people richer than now. This must be attributed to the fact that peace has lasted for a long time." Thus the first century of Turkish occupation of Greece brought the unwelcome conscription of boys in the devshinne, but also three considerable benefits - better conditions for the peasants, freedom of religion and education, and the establishment of peace and security.
THE Naval battle of Lepanto, fought on 7 October 1571, was a turning point in the Tourkokratia. The battle pitted a Turkish fleet against a combined navy from Spain, the Papal States and Venice, known as the Holy League. It was commanded by the Habsburg Don John of Austria. The battle was actually fought not at Lepanto, the old name for Nafpaktos inside the Gulf of Corinth, but in open waters just beyond the Gulf of Corinth.
The Holy League won a decisive victory. The Holy League came into being over the Turkish threat to Venetian-held Cyprus. Sultan Selim II succeeded Suleiman the Magnificent in 1566 and it had become almost traditional that a new sultan mark his accession by conquest. Cyprus, held by Venice for the last 80 years, was the obvious target.
It lay within sight of Ottoman territory and across a vital sea-route. Pirates, an increasing menace in the Mediterranean, were seizing Ottoman merchantships and then retreating for safety to the coast of Venetian Cyprus. Thus in February 1570 a Turkish envoy was sent to Venice to demand the immediate handing over of Cyprus. The Venetian Senate rejected the Turkish demand.
The Holy League came together only in May 1571, when it was far too late to save Cyprus for Venice. The Turks had landed there and taken most of the island a year earlier, in July 1570. In August 1571, when the Holy League fleet was still in Naples, the last Venetian fortress at Famagusta surrendered. Though Cyprus had now fallen, Don John, urged on by the pope, used his navy to attack the main Turkish fleet. When he reached Corfu he learnt that the Turkish fleet, commanded by Ali Pasha, was in the Gulf of Corinth at Nafpaktos, under the shelter of the town's massive fortress. Ali Pasha would have done well to stay there, but the sultan had ordered him "to find and immediately attack the iInfidels' fleet". So he moved his fleet westwards, out of the gulf to confront the enemy.
The confrontation brought together the largest number of ships that ever fought in a Mediterranean sea battle. Don John had 238 vessels, while the Turkish fleet numbered 230. At dawn on Sunday 7 October 1571, the two fleets faced each other outside the Gulf of Corinth. The lines of ships stretched for four miles, the Turks facing west and the Holy League east. At noon the first shots were fired. The four-hour battle seemed finely balanced and could perhaps have gone either way, but the tally of losses tells its own story. The Turks lost three times as many men as the League and ten times as many ships.
The Holy League fleet had won a victory at Lepanto but failed in its main objective to prevent the Turkish annexation of Cyprus. The Greeks most directly affected were the Cypriots who, far from resenting Turkish occupation welcomed the change from Venetian to Turkish rule. Turkish policy was designed to ensure that they did. As in previous annexations, the policy aimed to make the new territory prosperous, and so a source of tax revenue. It also aimed to make the new Turkish subjects contented: "The reaya are a trust from God to us," wrote Selim II. This avoided the need for expensive repression. Within a year the conciliatory Turkish policy ended forced labour and reduced or abolished taxes.
There are two contrasting views of the battle of Lepanto. One considers it a non-event. After the battle, the Holy League fleet left the easten Mediterranean and was soon disbanded. Within a year, after a determined rebuilding programme, the Ottoman fleet was back to its pre-Lepanto numbers. The Turkish grand vizier told the Venetians that their victory was meaningless. "In wresting Cyprus from you," he said," we deprived you of an arm; in defeating our fleet you have only shaved our beard. An arm when cut off cannot grow again; but a shorn beard will grow all the better for the razor."
The opposing view celebrates Lepanto as a great victory for Christendom over the infidel marking the end of Ottoman invincibility at sea nd the beginning of Ottoman decline. Chesterton's rollicking poem about Lepanto encapsulates this view: "Vivat 'Hispania/Domino Gloria! / Don John of Austria/ Has set his people free!"
Debate over Ottoman decline.
Those who think Lepanto marked the start of Ottoman decline point to defeats on the battlefield, ostensibly insane sultans, scandals in the imperial household, threats from fundamentalist preachers and other reactionaries, rebellions in the provinces, chronically mutinous janissaries and widespread bribery, and ask: if these were not symptoms of decay, then what were they? They also argue that the Ottoman empire was incapable of adapting because it was hidebound by Islamic tradition. As one of the fundamentalist Islamic preachers put it in the 1630s, "every innovation is heresy, every heresy is error, and every error leads to hell."
Those who don't accept the long-decline theory point out that the empire was a powerful military force for at least another century, taking Crete from the Venetians in 1669 and again reaching the gates of Vienna in 1683. The empire, they say, was simply reacting creatively, if not always successfully, to new circumstances.
The decline theory seems more plausible, and the main reason for decline was economic. After Lepanto, the Ottoman empire was no longer expanding, apart from acquiring Crete, with great difficulty, in the next century. The empire could no longer be financed by new acquisitions. This led to debasement of die Turkish coinage by reducing its silver content. But at the same time huge imports of silver were reaching Europe from Spain's acquisitions in South America. To oversimplify the economics vastly, who would want a debased Turkish silver coin when a Spanish or Italian one of the same weight was pure silver?
In the Ottoman government's drive to generate revenue, everything acquired a money value. The rights to collect state taxes were sold to tax farmers. State offices were bought and sold. Church offices too were effectively up for sale. Widespread corruption inevitably followed.
Perhaps this increasing monetisation had one good effect in Greece as in other Ottoman possessions: that it made possible the rise of commerce. Some Greek towns did become important commercial centres - in the north, Salonica and Ioannina, in the Peloponnese Nafplio and Monemvasia.
Other towns prospered because of demand for a local product: the currants of Corinth, the olives of Kalamata, or the animal furs of Kastoria. But Greek commerce as a whole stayed limited and production remained stuck at the primary workshop level.
Ottoman economic decline also resulted in the introduction of tax farming, undoubtedly a bad thing for the Greeks and other Ottoman subjects. Under this system the tax farmer paid a lump sum to the state treasury and kept for himself all the taxes he could collect. Or to make a quick profit he might sell on the tax farming rights to a subcontractor, who then had to be even more rapacious. It has been well said that "the classes that lived on dues and taxes were engaged during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on a long drawn-out strangling of the unfortunate geese that laid their golden eggs."
In June 1645 an Ottoman fleet landed troops in western Crete. Within weeks the Ottoman forces had taken Chania, within a year Rethimno, and within two years the whole island except Iraklio.
The siege of Iraklio, lasting until 1669, was, the longest siege ever recorded, and was protracted for a number of reasons. Neither Turks nor Venetians could achieve dominance at sea. There was stalemate at Iraklio on land too; defensive walls had become stronger than the guns used to attack them. Also both sides received support from Cretans, Venetians had ruled Crete for over four centuries since 1 2and Cretans and Venetians had in many ways adjusted to a shared world. Under Venice, Greek and Italian cultures had combined in the Cretan version of the Renaissance, famous for the great verse epic Erotokritos and the paintings of El Greco. Venetian rule had softened since the loss of Cyprus. "[The Cretans]," ran a Venetian report, " must always be treated well so that they will remain faithful and devoted."
Venice and Crete
The next crucial conflict was the final struggle between Turkes and Venetians for control of the eastern Mediterranean. In 1645 the Turks launched their attack on Venetian-held Crete; in 1669 they finally took Iraklio; in 1684, Venice retaliated by landing troops in the Peloponnese; but, in 1715, Venice was driven out of Greece for good.
There was a delay of 75 years between the Turkish conquests of Cyprus and of Crete, mainly due to turmoil at the centre. The sultans who succeeded Selim II (1566-74), conqueror of Cyprus, were woefully incompetent.They were dominated by court factions of grand viziers, eunuchs and women of the sultan's family. Competition between factions prevented the adoption of any forceful and consistent policy.
In 1644 under Ibrahim, the most unstable sultan of the series, there were two opposing fractions, one for war to drive Venice from Crete and one for peace. An incident at sea provided a casus belli. In the autumn of 1644 a raiding of vessel from Malta seized three Turkish ships and took their prizes into Venetian territory at the small secluded port of Kali Limenes on the south coast of Crete. Venice was blamed for sheltering pirates, and the war party had its justification for action.
After a twenty-year standoff, the stakes were raised in 1666, The Turkish grand vizier came to Crete in November 1666 to take personal control of the siege. In response Venice appointed a new commander, Francesco Morosini. Bombardment of Iraklio began in eamest and by the summer of 1669 the town was a shattered war zone, "The state of the town was terrible to behold," wrote a contemporary. "There was not a church, not a building even, whose walls were not holed and almost reduced to rubble by the enemy cannon. Everywhere the stench was nauseating; at every turn one came upon the dead, the wounded or the maimed." In September, peace terms, generous to theVenetians, were agreed, and at the end of the month they left, their centuries-long rule finally ended.
The most remarkable feature of the change from Venetian to Ottoman rule was ,that thousands of Cretans, both during and after the war, converted to Islam. It was the only instance of large-scale Greek conversions during the entire period of Ottoman rule. The reason, it has been suggested, was, that by conversion a Cretan could join the Ottoman military and so become part of the ruling order. Many Albanians took the same route. Like the Cretans, they were a warlike people living in harsh mountainous country where fighting, under whatever banner, was a way of life.
Fifteen years after the fall of Crete, Venice's attempt to recover her position in the eastern Mediterranean brought war to the mainland of Greece for the first time since the original Ottoman conquests.
Venice joined the alliance of powers, another so-called Holy League, that had driven the Ottoman army back from their last siege of Vienna in 1683, and now aimed to push them out of Europe altogether. In 1684, Venetian troops, once again under Francesco Morosini, landed in western Greece aiming to annex Greece.
The Venetians, with intermittent help from the Greeks of the Mani, had immediate and dramatic successes. By summer 1687 they controlled the whole Peloponnese. In the autumn the Venetians besieged Athens, where on September 26 a mortar shot from the besiegers detonated the Ottoman powder magazine in the Parthenon, beginning the Parthenon Marbles saga that arouses passionate controversy to this day. Ironically, the capture of Athens and the unfortunate mortar shot served no purpose; within a few months the Venetians had abandoned Athens as strategically worthless.
The Ottomans, as so often in their history, were now fighting on two fronts, both this time in the west. As well as the Venetian attack on the Peloponnese, the Ottoman forces faced the rapid advance of the Austrian troops of the Holy League, who got as far south as Skopje. At all costs the Ottomans had to prevent the joining of the two arms of the offensive, and in fact they halted the Venetian advance some 30 miles north of Athens. If the two armies had succeeded in meeting, Greece and the rest of the Balkans could have been released en bloc from Ottoman rule by the end of the 17th century, instead of piecemeal in the 19th.
But the Austrian offensive rapidly petered out, and by the end of 1690 Belgrade and all the territory south of it were once again in Ottoman hands. The expulsion of the Venetians from Greece came later. In 1715 a massive Ottoman army of 100,000 drove the 8,000 Venetian defenders from the Peloponnese. In the treaty that followed, Venice retained only the Ionian islands and four towns on the opposite mainland. Venice's days as a major player in Greece were over.
The prelude to independence
The next major event of the Tourkokratia was the Orlov revolt of 1770. It was inspired by Russia and began in one of the most lawless areas of Greece, the southern Peloponnese. Under Catherine the Great, Russia was expansionist and wanted access to the Mediterranean. This was blocked by Turkey's control of the Bosphorus, the only outlet from the Black Sea. Russia saw Turkey as vulnerable, though it was another century before a Russian tsar called Turkey the Sick Man of Europe. In 1768, Russia and Turkey declared war.
Possession of Greece would, of course, give Russia its coveted access to the Mediterranean. Russian agents in Greece reported, with unfounded optimism, that 100,000 armed Greeks, klephts and others, would support a Russian invasion. At the end of February 1770, Count Theodore Orlov, one of Catherine the Great's many lovers, landed at the little harbour of Hilo in the Mani, with five ships and only 500 men. The Greeks were unimpressed, and nothing like the promised 100,000 Greek supporters materialised.
Nevertheless, the revolt had some significant early successes, taking Navarino, Mistra and Kalamata, and further north even briefly holding Mesolonghi. The Turks quickly struck back. In early April, only six weeks after the Russian landing, the Turks and their Albanian mercenaries crushingly defeated the Russians and Greeks at Tripolis in the central Peloponnese.
From then on the Russians retreated. The Albanian mercenaries of the Turks were totally ruthless in suppressing the revolt, plundering and killing. On 6 June 1770, the Russians sailed away ftom their last outpost at Navarino. The revolt had lasted less than a hundred days, and had left the Greeks in a worse condition than before.
Though Russia had failed in Greece she had been overwhelmingly successful in the war elsewhere. In the 1774 Treaty of Kutchuk Kainardji, which ended the war, she was able to dictate her own terms. Russia got her access through the Bosphorus to the Mediterranean. She also acquired the right to protect the Greek and other Christian subjects of Turkey. Even more important for the Greeks was an extension of the treaty five years later, giving Greek ships the right to fly the Russian flag and therefore access to the Black Sea. The door was opened for a huge expansion of Greek maritime trade.
The Orlov revolt, though shortlived and fruitless in itself, was a sign that the world was changing, both in Greece and beyond. The decline of the Ottoman empire was becoming obvious to the powers of Europe, especially to neighbouring Russia. The vultures were eyeing their moribund prey. Also the Greeks themselves were beginning to reach out to the wider world. The treaty of Kutchuk-Kainardji and its successor agreements had opened the Black Sea to them, so the Greeks began to build the larger ships needed for long voyages, especially in the naval Aegean islands of Hydra, Spetses and Psara. The agreements had also given Greeks the right to trade in all Habsburg dominions, which included Austria, Hungary and most of Germany and Italy. Greek merchants therefore became established in cities throughout Europe, and this stimulated the flow of European ideas into Greece.
The so-called Greek Enlightenment, it has to be said, did not amount to much as an intellectual movement. Unlike the Scottish Enlightenment, which contributed new ideas to the debate, it was purely and haphazardly derivative.
Greek thinkers were too wedded to the ancient masters Plato and Aristotle and to conservative church doctrine to be truly innovative.
There was, however, one important message of the Enlightenment which did reach Greece. The American Declaration of Independence of 1776 had proclaimed as self-evident that if any form of government, becomes destructive of the rights of man, "it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it." In Greece, Kolokotronis, former klepht and then military leader in the war of independence, saw the same principle in the French Revolution and expressed the idea more pithily. "The nations," he said, "knew nothing before the French Revolution. The people thought that kings were gods upon earth, and that the people were bound to say that whatever the kings did was well done." The scene was set for the Greek rising of 1821.
So how bad was the Tourkokratia?
Let's look at the charges against Turkish rule:
1. That the Greeks were enslaved. No. Some Greeks were taken as slaves by Turks and others. But the Greeks as a whole were not slaves; they were not the property of an owner who could buy and sell them.
2. That Greek boys were fordbly conscripted. Yes, even though some benefited from this system, and it was abandoned around 1700.
3. That Greeks were under pressure to convert to Islam. No. The relatively few conversions were for personal advantage. There was no pressure to convert.
4. That Greek education had to be in secret. No, not true at all.
5. That Greek revolts were ruthlessly suppressed. Yes, but that was true for most of
Europe.
6. That Turkish taxation was unbearably oppressive. Yes and no. Probably not true of the earlier period, but increasingly true later, as the Ottoman economy declined.
7. That the Turks cut Greece off from Europe's Renaissance and Enlightenment. No. The main barrier to Greek artistic and intellectual development Was the conservatism of the Greek Church, and of the education for which it was responsible.
8. That theTurks failed to develop the country and left nothing of value behind them. Yes, broadly true. They could have done much more to stimulate productive agriculture, drain swamps, prevent soil erosion and build roads and ports to encourage trade.
Next, what can one say on the plus side?
1. There was no official interference with Greek religion. In many cases the Greeks preferred the tolerance of Turkish rule to the proselytising Catholicism of the Venetians. Greece was, spared the religious conflicts that, racked much of Europe: the St Bartholomew's Day massacre of Huguenots in france, the Inquisition in Spain.
2. There was no interference with education, and there was no threat to the Greek language or to Greek culture in general.
3. Greek territory, once acquired by the Turks, was not fought over. The one exception was the Venetian attempt on the Peloponnese in the 1680s. The Turkish conquests of 1453 had saved Greec from the battles of Crusader barons and Turkish occupation spared Greece the horrors of later European conflicts. Greece had no Thirty Years' War.
On balance, therefore, the Tourkokratia was not that bad, and brought benefits as well as disadvantages. But this is to treat a people's history as a matter of accountancy. It would be a better conclusion to recall two things said about the Greeks by Yorgos Seferis, diplomat, poet and the first Greek to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
On the Greeks' own responsibility for their misfortunes, he quoted approvingly an old Cretan saying: "The fate every people makes for itself, and the things its own madness does to it, are not things done by its enemies."
And on reconciliation, Seferis wrote of the destruction by fire of his beloved birthplace Smyrna in 1922, at the end of the Asia Minor catastrophe. Greeks and Turks, he said, blame each other for the fire, but he concluded: "Who will discover the truth? The wrong has been committed. The important thing is, who will redeem it?"
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Double posting is not allowed, so I merged all your posts into one. -TAL
nosce te ipsum