Greece, the Hidden Centuries: Turkish Rule From the Fall of Constantinople to Greek Independence

by David Brewer

  The chronicler mentioned above is the writer of the so-called Chronicle of Morea. There are eight versions of the material it contains, three in prose in French, Spanish or Italian, and five in verse in Greek, of which the earliest, written in about 1388 or possibly before, is considered the most authentic and is used here. All eight versions are probably derived from a French original, now lost, which was composed about 1310.

  The Chronicle of Morea was designed either to be read or to be listened to. As its author says, ‘If you know letters, start reading; if, on the other hand, you are illiterate, sit down beside me and listen.’ It opens engagingly with the sentence that stands as the epigraph to this book: ‘I am going to tell you a great tale . . .’.7 The chronicle has its weaknesses. It clearly favours the Franks. Some of its details are wrong. Its many long speeches by leaders cannot be verbatim records, but can reasonably be relied on to express the speaker’s policies. And, as a window on the actual conditions in the Peloponnese of those centuries, it is uniquely valuable.

  The first half-century of crusader rule in the Peloponnese was something of a golden age. De Champlitte returned to France in 1208, where he died soon afterwards, and Geoffroy I de Villehardouin was recognised as overlord of the Peloponnese both by the Latin Emperor in Constantinople and by the Pope, with the title of Prince of Achaia. His rule lasted from 1208 to 1228, followed by those of his two sons Geoffroy II (1228–46) and Guillaume (1246–78). The conciliatory approach of Geoffroy I towards the Greeks was followed by his sons. Guillaume besieged Monemvasía, the precipitous fortress just off the south-east coast, for three years from 1245 to 1248; the town was ‘enclosed in exactly the same way as the nightingale by its cage’, says the chronicle.8 When it finally surrendered there was none of the bloody retribution common at the time and for centuries later. The people of Monemvasía were required in future only to provide boat services, for which they would be paid. Guillaume left the town’s three leading families in control, gave them a grant of land in the Mani, which may have been as rocky as their old home, and, if the chronicle is to be believed, ‘bestowed upon them gifts of horses and chargers, robes all of gold, and scarlet ones as well’.9

  In the following year Guillaume began building the fortress of Mistrás, on a commanding and easily defensible hilltop three miles from Sparta; Mistrás was to remain the administrative centre of the Peloponnese under different rulers until replaced by Tripolis in 1719. Guillaume and his barons brought out from France their existing families or new noble brides, and formed a highly cultivated circle, one of whose products was the splendidly illuminated Manuscrit du Roi, now in Paris. As a contemporary Spanish chronicler put it, ‘one would say that the noblest knights of France were the knights of Morea, and the French spoken there was as fine as that of Paris.’10 But Guillaume was not a remote ruler cushioned in cultivated luxury. ‘He was wont’, wrote a contemporary, ‘to send his most confidential advisers from time to time to the courts of his vassals, to see how they lived and how they treated their subjects.’11 He also went out among his subjects himself, and as the chronicle puts it ‘he went riding with his retinue and strolled among the villages near Monemvasía and the lands in that direction; with joy he went around and passed his time.’12

  For the peasants among whom Guillaume de Villehardouin strolled so benignly, life went on under a continuing feudal system much as it had before. The twin sources of wealth had been, and remained, land and the labour to work it. To convert this wealth into military power, the ruler granted portions of land as fiefs to those who owed him allegiance, who in return had to provide military service. When Geoffroy I de Villehardouin came to allocate fiefs in the Peloponnese he set up a commission to do so, which included, besides himself and other Franks, five major Greek landowners. Twelve large fiefs were granted, with varying requirements for providing mounted knights and other troops when demanded.

  Though some peasants were free, most of them were tied to labour on these fiefs. There seem to have been three categories of these unfree peasants: those with some land of their own, those without such a holding, both types having certain rights, and serfs, without property or virtually any rights at all.

  The free peasant paid taxes to his lord, and unfree peasants above the level of serfs were also obliged to provide labour services to him, for which they must maintain a pair of oxen and an ass, and pass over to the lord a proportion of their crops. Both these groups had certain limited rights under the law. What was called low justice was administered by the fief-holder, and concerned payment of rents and other dues, and lesser civil cases. High justice, administered only by the holders of the major fiefs, covered important civil cases and criminal cases involving the death penalty.

  Serfs, on the other hand, contributed to the fief-holder all their labour and produce apart from what was needed to exist. The serf was a chattel. His lord could take away all the serf’s goods beyond the requirements of bare subsistence, a lord who killed a serf had only to replace him, a fugitive serf could be reclaimed wherever found, and a serf wronged by a lord could not take his case to any superior lord. It was a constrained and miserable existence indeed, though little different from the position of serfs in feudal societies elsewhere in Europe.

  The people of Greece were Orthodox and their new rulers Catholic, so one might have expected attempts to convert the Greeks, or at least conflicts between the two Churches. In fact neither happened except in a few isolated instances. Catholic archbishops and bishops were appointed, in the Peloponnese at Pátras, Corinth, Argos and at Venice’s possessions of Methóni and Koróni, but they did little or nothing to spread Catholicism. They seem to have spent their time at their episcopal seats, and their energy on establishing their jurisdictions and keeping, or clawing back, their landholdings. They were competitors in the local power struggles rather than spiritual leaders. Meanwhile, little changed for the Greeks. Catholic priests in the countryside were virtually non-existent, and though this meant that the Greeks received little pastoral care except from an impoverished local priest, at least their religion was not under threat. The Catholic hierarchy did not regard the Greeks as heretics to be punished, but as schismatics who would one day rejoin the fold through the union of the Churches.

  In the two and a half centuries of Frankish presence in Greece, territory was constantly taken over by rivals, sometimes as a result of a pitched battle. One of the most decisive was the battle of Pelagonia in July 1259 on one of the few plains in the mountainous far north-west of Greece, but which, remote as it was, ended the first phase of Frankish rule in the Peloponnese. It involved three of the major power centres in a contest for Thessalonika. The Kingdom of Thessalonika had changed hands several times since 1204, and since 1246 had been held by the Byzantines of Nicaea. Now the Despot of Ípiros, Michael II, aimed to seize Thessalonika, with the help of his ally Guillaume de Villehardouin, the ruler of the Peloponnese. Guillaume was married to the sister of Michael II of Ípiros, which should have cemented their alliance. Defending the territory of Thessalonika for the Byzantines was John Palaiologos, brother of the Byzantine Emperor in Nicaea.

  In the middle of the night before the battle Michael of Ípiros and his army slipped away, apparently alarmed by the size of the opposing Byzantine forces, and left his ally Guillaume of the Peloponnese to face them. Guillaume’s troops were routed, ‘mown down like grass in a meadow’, as the chronicle said.13 Guillaume himself was captured after trying to hide in a haystack. It was both the end of the first phase of the Peloponnese story, and the beginning of the end of Villehardouin rule in the peninsula.

  The battle losses at Pelagonia were enormous, and it is recorded that the victorious Byzantines ‘spent two days in burying the slain, and treating the uries of those who were wounded’.14 Relatively few of these casualties would have been Greeks; they were mainly the mercenaries hired by both sides. It was said that mercenaries were ‘hired everywhere’ by Guillaume and Michael of Ípiros, while the Byzantines are recorded as hi
ring 300 German cavalrymen, 3,500 archers from Hungary and the Cuman tribe from the Black Sea, and 600 mounted archers from Serbia, besides Bulgarians and even 500 Turks.15 Clearly victory depended upon the horse and the arrow, and of course the money to hire the men to use them.

  So for most Greeks the battle itself would have been a remote and irrelevant clash of other men’s arms. It was the looting before the battle and the pursuits after it that disrupted their lives. Guillaume and his troops had left the Peloponnese in high hopes during March of 1259, ‘when the nightingales begin to warble and all creatures of the world rejoice and are renewed,’ as the chronicler, who seems to have liked nightingales, poetically describes it.16 They crossed the Gulf of Corinth at the narrow part near Návpaktos, and joined forces with Michael of Ípiros. From then on they had to live off the land. Each day a large advance party – 1,000 horsemen and 3,000 foot soldiers – were sent ahead to collect plunder and to reassemble with their booty at nightfall. This procedure continued for the four months that it took the army to reach Pelagonia in July, with losses to the Greek peasantry that can only be guessed at. In the aftermath of the battle the victorious Byzantines pursued defeated fugitives as far as the Aegean coast 100 miles away, and went on to sack Thíva (ancient Thebes) before the end of the year. The towns of Greece suffered as well as the countryside.

  However, pitched battles such as Pelagonia were not the only way in which territory in Greece was acquired. Marriage was another favoured route, and in histories of the period page after page features a dynastic marriage, whose intricacies require genealogical tables constantly to hand. Such marriages sealed alliances – though not always firmly, as the desertion of Guillaume de Villehardouin by his brother-in-law showed – and provided claims to territory. The marriages were often early and multiple. Guillaume’s daughter Isabelle was married and widowed when barely out of her childhood, by one account when she was as young as fourteen. She later married two further husbands, bringing to each in turn the nominal title to her inheritance in the Peloponnese. Some of the titles acquired by marriage were indeed nominal, but many were real, or must have been expected to be so; otherwise the marriages would not have been so frequent. It has been well said that ‘a sound pedigree and a good marriage allied to hope and a deep pocket’ were what any claimant to lands in Greece required.17

  The second phase of the Peloponnese story began in 1259, when Guillaume de Villehardouin was captured after defeat by the Byzantines of Nicaea. Two years later Guillaume was released and allowed back to the Peloponnese on the condition that he surrendered to the Byzantine Emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos his three main fortresses: Mistrás, Monemvasía and Maḯna. The position of Maḯna, also known as Great Mani, is disputed, but it was probably on the site of the ruin at Mézapos near the southern tip of the Mani.

  The Byzantines, restored to Constantinople in 1261, were now in a stronger position. They were not content simply to hold these three fortresses, but used them as bases from which to regain the whole of the Peloponnese. Fierce clashes and high casualties followed. One woman was said to have been married to seven husbands, one after the other, who were killed in this fighting. The Byzantines fought their way to full control of the Peloponnese, and by 1320 only three of the original twelve baronies remained in the hands of the Franks. A few years later the Byzantine Emperor John VI Kantakuzenos described the condition of the principality: ‘The Peloponnese’, he wrote, ‘is completely ravaged, not only by the Turks who attack the country with powerful fleets, and by the Franks, but especially by the inhabitants themselves who are continually at war with each other, pillaging and murdering. The villages of the countryside, with no defence, are destroyed by enemies from outside, while the towns are the prey of the population; both will soon disappear completely.’18

  John VI determined on decisive action, and this ushered in the third phase. He appointed his son Manuel as the first so-called Despot of the Morea, with a free hand to take all necessary measures. Manuel and his successors as despot were successful in imposing some order internally but were still at the mercy of intervention from outside, principally from the Turks. The last two despots ruled jointly, but uneasily, Thomas Palaiologos having the north-west half and his brother Dimitrios the south-east, including Mistrás, the long-term seat of government.

  Despite the turmoil that the Peloponnese had suffered ever since the establishment of Mistrás in 1249, Mistrás had continued to be a cultural and intellectual centre. Its most distinguished citizen was Georgios Yemistós Plíthon, neo-Platonist philosopher, political theorist and friend of the future patriarch Yennádhios. Plíthon came to Mistrás from Constantinople in 1407 and remained there till his death in 1452, a witness to the last turbulent years of the Byzantine despots in the Peloponnese though not, by a year, to the end of the Byzantine Empire. It was neither the first nor the last period of history in which culture flourished while every other mark of civilisation was collapsing around it. In 1460, seven years after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks, the whole Peloponnese, except for Monemvasía and the Venetian towns, was conquered by Turkish forces and became a province of the Ottoman Empire.

  The constant upheavals that plagued the Peloponnese between 1204 and the arrival of the Turks were replicated in the rest of the country. The Duchy of Athens in central Greece was under constant attack from neighbours or newcomers seeking to acquire territory. At the start of the fourteenth century the Catalan Grand Army, a force of mercenaries hired by the Byzantines, which was grand only in that it was formidable, arrived in Greece. In 1311, after a decisive battle, the Catalans seized control of the Duchy of Athens. Their methods were so appalling, even by the standards of the day, that the Pope excommunicated them as ‘these senseless sons of damnation’.19 The Catalans gave way to the Acciauoli, originally a banking family in Naples who turned to politics and war, and who captured the Athens Akropolis in 1388. In 1456 they too yielded their possessions to the Turks.

  In the north the two separate provinces, Ípiros and Thessalonika, were unified under the Byzantines after 1259, giving the combined territory access to the sea on both east and west along the old Roman Via Egnatia. Thessalonika, with its fine harbour and its position on the Via Egnatia, was the biggest commercial prize in Greece. It was besieged by the Catalans in 1308, governed by a chaotic commune in the 1340s at the time of the Black Death, occupied by the Turks for ten years at the end of the century, recovered by the Byzantines, ceded by them to Venice in 1423 in a vain bid for survival, and finally taken by the Turks in 1430.

  The rule of the crusaders and their successors in Greece has been described as ‘a unique experiment in the conquest and settlement of lands which possessed their own rich cultural heritage’.20 To call it an experiment is somewhat surprising. The Franks were not experimenting in the sense that they were trying a variety of solutions to their problems to see which worked best. They were imposing on their new territories the only system they knew: acquisition by war or by dynastic marriage, control by occupying or building fortresses, and exploitation by a feudal system similar to that in their homelands. For many and perhaps most Greeks, Frankish rule was in many ways like the Byzantine rule that had preceded it. With the arrival of the Turks another alien rule was imposed on Greece, one deriving from a different religion-based philosophy but as before not a complete break with the past. And Turkish rule brought, if nothing else, stability to the lands of Greece that had been fought over by competing forces for the previous two centuries.

  2

  1453 – The Fall of Constantinople

  The fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 was not the start of Turkish presence in Greece. Far from it. Turkish raids in the Aegean are recorded as early as 1303, and in the following decades Turkish ships attacked the islands of Santoríni, Kárpathos, Éyina, and Évia. On the mainland they raided towns opposite Évia and in the north-east Peloponnese. The raiders were flotillas of individual corsairs, and their object was to take slaves: 20,000, it is said,
in a single raid on Évia. Only the Venetians were powerful enough to challenge the Turks at sea, and Venice became in effect the protecting power of Greece against the Turkish corsairs.

  By 1361 the Turks were on the threshold of today’s Greece, having captured Adrianopolis, modern Edirne, within five miles of the present Greek–Turkish border. This otherwise insignificant town has the distinction of being the most frequently contested place in the world because of its position at the European end of the Europe–Asia land bridge. It has been fought over whenever military forces have moved from west to east, as the Romans did, or east to west as the Turks had now done. By one reckoning Edirne has been the scene of fifteen major battles or sieges over the centuries, of which the Turkish capture of 1361 was the twelfth. A few years later Edirne became the capital of the Ottoman Empire.

  From Edirne the Turks moved west and then south through Greece. In 1391 they took Thessalonika from the Byzantines after a four-year siege. They then advanced south through Thessaly, capturing major towns, and within a few years were masters of Sálona, modern Ámphissa, and Livadhiá, only a few miles north of the Gulf of Corinth. Then came a check to Ottoman expansion. In 1402 the Turks were heavily defeated at Ankara by the forces of Tamerlane, and the Sultan was taken prisoner. In the next year the Byzantines recovered Thessalonika from the Turks, but the Turks took it again in 1430, and thereafter held it for nearly five centuries.

  The Turks were now established in most of Greece, and indeed most of the Balkans. The lands of today’s Bulgaria and Romania, as well as Albania, Bosnia and Serbia, were all Turkish vassal states, acknowledging Turkish supremacy and paying tribute. But the final bastion of the now shrunken Byzantine Empire remained unsubdued: Constantinople itself. The Turks had tried unsuccessfully to take the city in a seven-year siege in the 1390s, and again in 1422. In the spring of 1453 Turkish forces appeared again outside the walls of Constantinople, the last barrier, symbolic as well as actual, to the total Ottoman domination of south-east Europe.