Greece, the Hidden Centuries: Turkish Rule From the Fall of Constantinople to Greek Independence
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Greece, the Hidden Centuries
David Brewer is the author of The Flame of Freedom: The Greek War of Independence, 1821-1833. After studying Classics at Oxford University he divided his working life between teaching, journalism and business before devoting himself to the study of the history of Greece.
PRAISE FOR THE FLAME OF FREEDOM
‘fascinating . . . Brewer has done a splendid and useful job for which he is to be warmly congratulated’
Adam Zamoyski, The Sunday Times
‘fresh and compelling . . . this account of the war unfolds with the narrative drive of an exciting historical novel.’
Nicholas Gage, Wall Street Journal
‘a remarkable debut, rigorously researched, engagingly written and capturing perfectly the dramatic yet tragic course of Greek independence.’
Saul David, Sunday Telegraph
‘has all the strengths of old-fashioned narrative history, with a strong sense of pace, a firm control of line, a confident handling of Greek and philhellene sources, a familiarity with the landscape and a nice eye for detail.’
David Crane, Spectator
‘an elegant and sympathetic study of the period’
Murrough O’Brien, Independent on Sunday
‘remarkably detailed and highly readable’
Dominick Coyle, Financial Times
‘The Flame of Freedom makes terrific reading, as thrilling as a good novel’
Roderick Beaton, Times Literary Supplement
Reprinted in 2011 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd
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First published in 2010 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd
Copyright © 2010 David Brewer
The right of David Brewer to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Contents
List of Maps
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Notes on Pronunciation and Names
Prologue – The Greek View of Turkish Rule
1 Greece Before the Turks
2 1453 – The Fall of Constantinople
3 Sultans and Patriarchs
4 The Greek Peasants
5 The Italians in the Aegean
6 Pirates and Slaves
7 The Fall of Cyprus
8 1571 – Lepanto
9 Mainland Greece and Town Life
10 The Greek Church
11 Venetian Crete
12 1669 – The Turks Take Crete
13 Turkish Rule in Cyprus and Crete
14 The Changing Ottoman Empire
15 Hunger and Disease
16 Travellers to Greece
17 1770 – The Orlov Revolt
18 Greeks Abroad
19 Greeks and the Enlightenment
20 The Enlightenment Attacked
21 Prelude to Revolution
22 1821 – The War of Independence
23 One Man’s War – Nikólaos Kasomoúlis
24 Some Conclusions
Chronology
Notes
Select Bibliography
Maps
Greece
Constantinople
The Aegean Islands
The Barbary Coast
Cyprus
Lepanto
Crete
Greek Trade Routes
Illustrations
1 Mehmed the conqueror and Yennádhios
2 Suleyman the Magnificent
3 Turkish high art
4 Turkish bastinado
5 Devshirme boys
6 ‘The Wounded Patriot’
7 Cretan warrior
8 Janissary colonel
9 A supposedly secret school
10 Bombardment of the Parthenon, 1687
11 A Greek shipmaster
12 The shipmaster’s crew
13 Chíos girl
14 Náxos girl
15 Lemnian earth
16 Going to church
17 Balkan brigand
18 Rígas Pheréos
19 Adhamántios Koraḯs
20 Greece as oppressed maiden
21 Mesolongi suicide
22 Birth of Kolokotrónis
Picture Credits
2: Kunsthistorishes Museum, Vienna
3: Topkapi Museum, Istanbul; Royal Academy, London; photographer Hadiye Cangôkae
4 & 5: Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna
9: Emfietzoglou Gallery, Athens
11 & 12: Laographikón Mousío, Míkonos
13: Gennadius Library, American School of Classical Studies, Athens
15: Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris
18 & 20: Benaki Museum, Athens
19: Dhimósia Kentrikí Vivliothíki, Lixoúri, Kephaloniá
21: History and Arts Museum, Mesolongi
22: Thémis Tsirónis
For Elisabeth
Acknowledgements
Sometimes the thanks in a book’s Acknowledgments appear simply formal, but mine are not. I am sincerely grateful to my agent, Bruce Hunter of David Higham Associates, to everyone at I.B.Tauris, and especially to my editor Liz Friend-Smith – it has been a pleasure to work with her. Also to Jessica Cuthbert-Smith for her meticulous copy editing, and to Adrian Roots, who drew the maps.
Of the many libraries consulted I have particularly appreciated the library of King’s College, London. It has a magnificent collection of books on all ages of Greece in English, Greek and other languages, and its librarians are always ready to guide the visitor through its splendid but labyrinthine building.
Comments from others are some of the most valuable influences on the making of a book, and my thanks go to those who have read all or part of the text or helped in other ways: to Roderick Beaton, Hugh Bicheno, Mark Dragoumis, Nikos Kokantzis, John Laughland, Diana Owen, Jerry Schneewind, Lily Venizelou, Paul and Thelma Walters, and Michael and Avra Ward. Any errors remaining are, of course, my responsibility.
I have explored some of this book’s issues in articles for Athens News, and I am very grateful to the paper’s editor John Psaropoulos for the opportunity to do so.
I recently read an Acknowledgements in which the writer’s teachers were thanked, and it struck me that more of us should do that. So I would like to remember, with gratitude and affection, Meston Batchelor, who first taught me Ancient Greek and later shared a keen interest in the Greece of today; to Herbert Brown, who opened my eyes to the scale and excitement of history; and to Eirlys Roberts, who edited my first journalism with an encouraging smile and a steely insistence on clarit
y and accuracy.
My family has been involved in the writing of this book from the start, and I really appreciate the generous encouragement of my daughters and of my step-children. But my greatest debt and biggest thank-you is to my wife Elisabeth. P.G. Wodehouse once light-heartedly dedicated a book to his wife, without whose constant help and encouragement, he wrote, this book would have been finished in half the time. I can genuinely say the reverse. Without Elisabeth’s perceptive comments, encouragement, love and support this book would not have been finished at all. It would probably not even have been started without her painstaking conversion of my handwritten and much-amended drafts into a respectable text. It is her book too, and I am delighted to dedicate it to her.
Notes on Pronunciation and Names
Pronunciation
Greek names can be an irritant or even a barrier to a reader who is not sure how to pronounce them. Stress often falls in unexpected places, so has been marked, but pronunciation of Greek is relatively straightforward because, unlike in English, each letter or combination of letters is always pronounced in the same way. In the transliteration of Greek used here, the vowel sounds are:
a as in basket
e as in bed
i as in the first i in blini
o as in box – even at the end of a word
ou as in boot
The only unusual consonant sounds are:
ch as in loch
dh a soft th as in then – but
th a hard th as in thin
Names
Anglicised versions have been used for the better-known place names – Athens, Corinth, Hydra (not Ídhra) – and personal names – Alexander and, a bit of a hybrid, Georgios rather than Yeóryios or George. For Greek names of the Byzantine era the more familiar anglicised versions are generally used – Isaac, Palaiologos and so on. Thereafter Greek names are transliterated.
All translations are by the author unless otherwise indicated.
The Greeks consider themselves to have been ruled by Turks rather than by Ottomans, so ‘Turks’ is used throughout unless the reference is to the wider Ottoman Empire, as for example in Chapter 14. Strictly speaking, Turks were originally only the Turkish-speaking people of Anatolia, often despised as uncouth, and Turkey did not become the official name of the country until 1923.
Similarly the Greeks continued to refer to Constantinople rather than Istanbul, so ‘Constantinople’ is used throughout, even for the centuries after 1453. Istanbul was not formally adopted as the city’s name until 1930.
Until about 1800 the Balkans meant only a range of mountains in Bulgaria, but is used here in its modern sense of the whole Balkan peninsula. That peninsula was formerly known as the Ottoman province of Roumeli, but ‘Roumeli’ is here restricted, as in Greek usage, to Greece north of the Gulf of Corinth.
I am going to tell you a great tale, and if you will listen to me I hope that it will please you.
The Chronicle of Morea, opening lines
Prologue
The Greek View of Turkish Rule
In the spring of 1705 a Turkish official arrived in the northern Greek town of Náousa, sent by the governor of Thessalonika. The official’s duty was to collect 50 Greek youths for service at the Sultan’s court or in the elite Ottoman army units, the janissaries. The youths were to be under twenty years old and, said the official’s orders, to be ‘graceful and well-bodied’. This was the procedure called devshirme by the Turks and pedhomázoma or child-collection by the Greeks. Sometimes youths volunteered for this service or were put forward by their families, but most were simply selected and marched away, conscripted rather than recruited.
On this occasion there were violent protests. The Greeks of Náousa murdered the Turkish official and his two aides, shouting that they were not going to surrender their sons. A gang of over 100 Greeks was formed, partly of brigands and partly of the Greek militia appointed by the Turks to control the brigands, and this gang proceeded to rob and murder Turks. Náousa was an ideal area for mountain-based brigands, as the town sits below Mt Vérmion, and within a few miles the ground has risen to over 1,500 feet, with the 6,500-foot summit only six miles away.
It took a force of 800 Turks to surround the rebels and defeat them in ‘a mighty and furious battle’. The leader of the rebels was killed in the fighting and eight others were captured and brought in chains before a special court. Defiant to the last, they were sentenced to death by hanging, and their severed heads were paraded through Náousa and then taken to the governor’s palace in Thessalonika.1
This devshirme was one of the last in Greece, perhaps the very last, but for Greeks the memory of the devshirme has never died. The events of 1705 contain all the elements that for centuries to come made Greeks hate Turkish rule and hate the Turks: the forcible removal of Greek boys who were the best of their generation, the heroic Greek resistance and the brutal Turkish retribution.
The Greeks found many other reasons to condemn their 400 years or so of Turkish rule, the Tourkokratía, which is commonly reckoned to have lasted from the Turkish capture of Constantinople in 1453 until the formal recognition of Greek independence in 1833. In many Greek histories of the period the Greeks under Turkish rule are described as enslaved – ipódhouli, or en dhoulía. According to such accounts the Greeks were under constant pressure to abandon their Christian Orthodox religion and convert to Islam, and were not allowed to build churches. 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. It is claimed that the Tourkokratía cut Greece off from the artistic developments of the Renaissance and the intellectual developments of the Enlightenment. Furthermore the Turks in 400 years failed to bring any improvements to Greece and left nothing of value behind them. By the last years of the Tourkokratía the people of the former or remaining Turkish possessions blamed the Turks for all their country’s ills. As a nineteenth-century traveller in the Balkans wrote: ‘Every misfortune is attributable to the Turks, and we hear so often that they are tyrants and oppressors that the people generally believe they are so.’2 On this view, the centuries of Turkish rule were indeed dark as well as largely hidden.
However, this picture is far from being completely accurate. For instance, there was no pressure on Greeks to convert to Islam. The Greeks, like other Christians in the Ottoman Empire, were left completely free to practise their religion, and such conversions as happened were for some personal advantage. Church building was in fact allowed, provided that the Turkish government gave permission; this permission was generally granted if the new church was to be in a mainly Christian area and not close to a Muslim mosque. Thus by the eighteenth century there were some 40 Greek churches in Constantinople itself, only three of which had been built before the Turkish conquest of the city. And since the Greek Church was given complete responsibility for Greek education there was no need for it to be clandestine. Secret schools are a myth.
The Turks were not the only foreign rulers in Greece during the so-called Tourkokratía. Until the mid-sixteenth century – a century after the fall of Constantinople – the Venetians ruled Cyprus, the Genoese held Chíos, and the crusading order of the Knights of St John occupied Rhodes, each in turn giving way to Turkish rule. It was another century still before Venice lost Crete to the Turks, a possession it had originally acquired in 1204 in the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade.
In Crete, therefore, Venetian rule or Enetokratía lasted as long as Tourkokratía elsewhere. How did the two regimes differ? The Venetians were as harsh as the Turks in suppressing revolts, which punctuated the early period of Venetian rule: by one reckoning, there were 27 different uprisings in two centuries. Though the Catholic Venetians were generally tolerant of the Greek Church, they were more interventionist than the Turks, banning Orthodox bishops. Venetian taxation was at least as heavy as Turkish, and as much resented. In the final struggle for control of Crete many Cretans supported the Turks as p
referable to the Venetians. One might expect that the Enetokratía would be remembered with as much bitterness as the Tourkokratía. But it is not.
The reasons are fairly obvious. After its loss of Crete in 1669, Venice briefly acquired control of the Peloponnese, but in 1715 the Turks drove the Venetians out of mainland Greece. Venice’s only remaining Greek possessions were the Ionian islands, until she lost those too, and her own autonomy, to Napoleon in 1797. So when Greek independence was established in 1833 Venice, in terminal decline, had not been a threat to Greece for over a century.
With Turkey, Greece’s relations were very different. In 1833 the territory of the new Greek state extended to a line only 100 miles or so north of the Gulf of Corinth, giving it a long land border with the old enemy. As Greece expanded northwards this dangerous trip-wire of conflict remained, and is there to this day along the 100-mile Greek–Turkish border in eastern Thrace. In the Aegean too a wavy and sometimes disputed line separates Greek from Turkish territory, and Greece’s most eastern islands of Lésvos, Chíos, Sámos and Kos are only a few miles from the Turkish mainland. Unlike Venice, Turkey remained an ever-present shadow over Greece and a major force in Greek and indeed European affairs.
If Turkey threatened Greece, Greece in turn threatened Turkey, through the promulgation, only a few years after Greek independence, of the so-called Megáli Idhéa or Great Idea. This was the proposal that the Greek state should be extended to include all Greeks, not just the minority who lived in the Greek kingdom, and that its capital should again be Constantinople once the Turks were driven out. In 1844 the Great Idea was articulated in the Greek parliament by the leading politician of the day Iánnis Koléttis. ‘The Kingdom of Greece’, said Koléttis, ‘is not Greece. Greece constitutes only one part, the smallest and poorest. A Greek is not only a man who lives within this kingdom but also one who lives in any land associated with Greek history or the Greek race. There are two main centres of Hellenism: Athens, the capital of the Greek kingdom, and Constantinople, the dream and hope of all Greeks.’