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

by David Brewer

  On the whole therefore the Greeks enjoyed full freedom of worship. Stephen Gerlach wrote that ‘they sing, read and pray, entirely unmolested by the Turks.’20 He also described daily life in the city as peaceful. ‘It is amazing’, he declared, ‘that in such a large city there are no murders and no violence. The Sultan calls it the refuge of the whole world, where all the poor should enjoy safety, and everyone – high or low, Christian or of other faiths – should have justice.’21 For the Greeks in Constantinople life was fairly good. But that was not necessarily true for Greeks elsewhere.

  4

  The Greek Peasants

  The value to the Ottomans of their newly acquired territory in Greece lay predominantly in the land. The producers of this agricultural wealth were the Greek peasants, who made up 90 per cent of the population. The proportion fell only slowly over the centuries, and even in the 1941 census – the last before the upheavals of occupation and civil war, and post-war migration to cities and abroad – over two thirds of Greeks were classified as rural.

  Although so much of Greece is mountainous, some parts even in that earlier time were richly productive. North of the Gulf of Corinth the broad plains of Thessaly and Macedonia grew abundant wheat, maize and cotton, and were important suppliers to the capital Constantinople. In the Peloponnese wheat was grown in the west, currants on the coastal plains of the southern shore of the Gulf of Corinth, and in the southwest corner figs, and the olives for which Kalamáta is still famous. These regions had access to the coast and could export some of their produce, including wheat, as the Greek peasants mainly subsisted on the cheaper grains of barley, maize or rye.

  Much more typical of Greece is the bleak region of Arcadia (Arkadhía), the central district of the Peloponnese with Tripolis as its main town. Yet Arcadia came to be represented in art and literature as a pastoral paradise. How did this romanticised and distorted picture of Arcadia originate?

  The Arcadian myth, established in antiquity, was popularised by the Neapolitan poet Jacopo Sannazaro, whose 1502 romance Arcadia, combining prose and verse, brought together the earlier pastoral themes and set them in an imagined place of tranquil and dignified seclusion. The book was enormously popular and went through 60 editions before the end of the century. By the early 1600s travellers were actually going to Arcadia, and wrote of ‘those pleasant Arcadian plains’, of which there were in fact few, and of the region as ‘famous for shepherds’,1 which would have included goatherds, of whom Pan was the protecting deity. One of the travellers, William Lithgow, experienced the contrast between the ideal and the actual. In Arcadia, he wrote in a flamboyant passage, only just keeping control of his adjectives: ‘Amongst these rocks my belly was pinched, and wearied was my body, with the climbing of fastidious mountains, which bred no small grief to my breast. Yet notwithstanding my distress, the remembrance of these sweet seasoned Songs of Arcadian Shepherds which pregnant Poets have so well penned, did recreate my fatigated corpse with many sugared suppositions.’2

  But Arcadia continued to be romanticised, by painters as well as ‘pregnant Poets’. Guercino in Italy and Poussin in France, among others, included in their landscapes a tombstone with the anonymous and cryptic inscription ‘Et in Arcadia ego’. This was understood as contrasting the deathly chill of the grave with the gloriously happy life of the deceased in Arcadia, and by the middle of the seventeenth century Arcadia had come to stand for an idyllic region of rural felicity.

  Arcadia, mostly hidden away in the central Peloponnese, was of course intriguingly remote, as any idealised Shangri-La must be. Also the very barrenness of the region may have contributed to the high-flown image of it. The travellers would have come across shepherds rather than toilers in the fields. Naturally choosing the summer months for their visits, they would have seen the shepherd sitting on a rock dreamily watching his flock or ambling slowly after it, all under a radiant Greek summer sky, and concluded that the life of a shepherd was easy and carefree, at least compared with agricultural labour. The traveller would have given little thought to the shepherd’s lice-infested clothing and meagre diet, with only a wretched tent or hut to sleep in, let alone how different things would be in the harshness of winter.

  Later travellers, however, were less starry eyed, and described an inhospitable landscape that can hardly have changed over the centuries. As a visitor in the 1880s wrote:

  There is no name in Greece which raises in the mind of the ordinary reader more pleasing and more definite ideas than the name Arcadia. The sound of the shepherd’s pipe and the maiden’s laughter, the rustling of shady trees, the murmuring of gentle fountains, the bleating of lambs and the lowing of oxen – these are the images of peace and plenty which the poets have gathered about that ideal retreat. There are none more historically false, more unfounded in the real nature and aspect of the country. Rugged mountains and gloomy defiles, a harsh and wintry climate, a poor and barren soil, tilled with infinite patience, a climate opposed to intelligence and to culture, a safe retreat of bears and wolves.3

  So much for the myth of Arcadia.

  The first period of Ottoman rule up to about 1600 has been characterised as a golden age for the Greeks and the other Balkan peoples under their new overlords. The chaos of the last period of rule by Franks or Byzantines was replaced by efficient centralised administration, dues and taxes were broadly speaking no more onerous than before, and the peasant had legal rights instead of being subject to the arbitrary decisions of a landlord.

  Nevertheless, peasant life during these years was hard, as it had always been. All agricultural tools were made of wood, including the plough, which was normally a crooked piece of timber, perhaps with an iron-tipped ploughshare. This was no more than a scratch-plough, which broke the soil but did not turn a furrow, so yields were low, and most fields had to be left fallow for two years out of three. There were no pumps, so unless there was a convenient watercourse the fields could be irrigated only by water drawn from wells and carried in buckets. There were few roads that could take wheeled traffic – some say none at all.4 So any produce for sale elsewhere, in other regions or to the coast for export abroad, had to be carried on the backs of pack animals, a laborious and expensive business. This was one of the factors that discouraged inland regions from producing for the market rather than for bare subsistence.

  The peasant family was the basic unit of production, working partly on its own land and partly on land belonging to someone else. The family possessed its cottage and cultivated a small surrounding plot of land; typically about 25 yards square, so about the size of a modest suburban garden today. Otherwise the peasant worked on one of the four basic types of land tenure introduced by the Turks but much like those that had gone before.

  The four basic types of land holding were: first, the timar, land granted to Ottoman cavalrymen and often their descendants, in return for which they had to do military service when required; second, land held by a religious or charitable organisation (vakf), which might be either Muslim or Christian; third, private property (mulk), mainly land granted by the Sultan to individuals or left in the hands of the pre-conquest owners; and finally land held by the state (miri).

  One should be careful not to speak loosely of these types of land as being ‘owned’ by the various individuals or organisations. Under fundamental Islamic law complete ownership of land could belong only to God, and by extension to the Sultan, who acted as God’s custodian. The Sultan might grant to others tenure of the land, temporarily or indefinitely, or the right to its produce. But these grantees were never owners of the land, merely its tenants.

  Where the peasant worked for somebody else rather than on his own small plot, he was typically granted a piece of land that could be ploughed by a pair of oxen in a season, an area varying from ten to twenty-five acres. The grant was by a document that gave the peasant legal rights, in particular that the land passed automatically from father to son, and if there was no son it could be bequeathed to other relatives, even women.
If the peasant died indebted, the land could not be seized by his creditors. There were restrictions, too. The peasant tenant could not sell the land, give it away or borrow on it, nor change its use by converting arable land to a vineyard or orchard, or by building on it. Arable land had to be cultivated at least one year in three.

  An overriding obligation of the peasant was to share the produce of the land with the primary possessor whether it be timar-holder, religious foundation, individual or the state. The contract between peasant and landholder would specify who was to pay the dues on the produce, who was to pay the costs of cultivation – seeds, use of draught animals and so on – and how the yield was to be divided. The formula varied widely, but a typical arrangement for the Peloponnese was the tritárikon, under which the superior landholder took three tenths of the yield while the cultivator kept the rest but paid all the costs and dues.

  These dues were multifarious. A proportion of what was grown was due to the state or to the landholder. This proportion, often referred to as a tithe, was sometimes a literal one tenth, but often a third and could be as much as half. All produce was included: grain, grapes and other fruit, vegetables, straw, eggs and honey. The peasant had little chance of cheating the main dues, which were on grain. He had to bring his whole crop to the landholder, who would separate the portion to be surrendered; this then had to be taken to the village granary if payment was in kind or to the local market if payment was in cash.

  Where proportional surrender was impossible, there were fixed annual dues: on the land itself as opposed to its produce, on buildings and on mills. Sheep were also brought into the system’s net: there was a sheep pen due to be paid when the sheep were penned for breeding, another payment related to the number of lambs born, and yet another for the use of common pastures.

  On top of these requirements there was personal taxation to be paid: the poll tax. This was about twice as high for non-Muslims in the conquered territories as for Muslims, on the grounds that non-Muslims did not have to do military service and so should pay for their own protection by higher taxes. The poll tax was paid by all males over the age of twelve. The rates varied according to whether the peasant held land, and if so on the extent and quality of the land, or was landless, as would be the case for sons working on the family holding. By one calculation the average annual rate for all males in this period was about 45 Ottoman piastres per head. This was roughly the price in the Balkans of a hundredweight sack of wool – a significant amount, but not punitive.

  The Ottoman system for governing its mainly rural subject people was based on the overriding principle that land was ultimately in the control of the Sultan. Mehmed the Conqueror, for instance, in 1478 reviewed all lands held privately or by foundations and brought many back into state ownership, redistributing them to the military as timars – a reform strongly opposed, and largely reversed by his successor Bayezid II.

  In practice, the Ottoman system had a number of objectives that in the early period it largely achieved. It aimed to maximise the revenue to the state without provoking opposition. It was designed to maintain the military, especially the important cavalrymen, without paying cash, by granting them timar rights to land and its produce. A subsidiary aim was to tie the military to the land and prevent the emergence of a rootless and threatening soldiery. Furthermore, peasant holdings had to pass entire to the heir so could not be wastefully fragmented. Also they must not be sold, so individuals could not, at this time, gain dangerous power by acquiring large estates – as in later centuries they were able to do. Overall, the aim was to combine exploitation with equilibrium in a system where all served the state in their unalterable stations in life.

  For the peasant this stability brought some great advantages. In particular, his rights were laid down by law, and he was not subject to the caprice of a private landowner as he had been under Frankish rule. This was also in accordance with the Ottoman principle that in the conquered lands no man should be subject to another as all are equally subjects of the Sultan. Despite resemblances between the Ottoman and feudal systems, the peasant was not a serf. He was thus better off than many of his counterparts in the rest of Europe, and no worse off than most.

  However, this stability also meant, in effect, stagnation. It was virtually impossible for the peasant to improve his lot. He could not acquire more land than his few allocated acres. The land that he had could not be made more productive since ploughing remained shallow, fields continued to be left fallow for two years out of three and there was no way of increasing yields. Even if a peasant did succeed in making his land more productive by better irrigation or crop rotation, he got little benefit. A proportion of the increase went straight to the superior landholder, taxes had to be paid on it, and to benefit from the rest he would have the expense and labour of getting it to market. As long as his family had enough to live on, the peasant had little incentive to do more.

  But there were ways in which the Greek peasant could change his life. One was to move from the plains to the highlands, which make up over two thirds of the terrain of Greece. This might mean only a move to the foothills. Here the sloping ground was harder to cultivate, but had certain advantages: it was further away from the malarial marshes of the plains; mountain streams could be channelled to provide irrigation and the peasant might extend his holding by bringing unused land under cultivation. But often the move was to the high mountains themselves.

  Remote as these upper regions were, with a harsh climate and largely rocky and barren, they offered more resources than one might suppose. Though too high for wheat or vines to flourish, hardier grain such as barley, maize or rye could be grown. Chestnuts from which bread could be made supplemented the diet, as did other mountain fruits such as apples, plums and walnuts. There were animals to be caught: hares, roe deer, wild goats and wild boar. The forests provided limitless wood for fuel, or for converting to charcoal, which could be traded. Many of these mountain people became transhumant stock-breeders rather than tillers of the soil, pasturing their flocks of sheep or goats on the high plateaux in the summer and bringing them down to the plains in winter.

  Also, of course, the mountain regions were more difficult for Turkish tax collectors and other officials to reach. So the mountain communities were left largely self-governing and paid a collective tribute, as at Áyios Pétros in Arcadia and the villages of Mt Pílion near Vólos. In the Píndos mountains east of Árta the region of Ágrapha, where a village of that name still exists, was so called because it was unwritten in Turkish records, and may have escaped the tax net altogether.

  Another way to escape to freedom of a sort was for the peasant to become a brigand, a klepht. The klephts too took to the hills, but whereas peasants who moved to higher ground needed to find land that would at least grow some of life’s necessities or provide pasture for sheep or goats, the klephts could live in barren mountains from which they emerged to plunder and then retreated again.

  Sometimes the bands of klephts would attack settlements in the plains, either a village or a landholder’s estate, and carry away grain and other produce on pack animals, which they also stole. Alternatively they might take captives and demand a ransom. But their favoured targets were travellers, especially merchants on the way to fairs and so laden with goods. The merchants might be robbed or forced to pay for safe passage; the recalcitrant ones would be killed. The best opportunities to ambush them were at the two places the travellers could not avoid and where the road narrowed: bridges over rivers and the passes across mountains.

  The earliest Turkish attempts to control the klephts focused on safeguarding these passes. Armatolí, guards of the passes, were appointed, and were naturally enough recruited from the klephts whom they were meant to control: who else had the necessary skills and experience? A folk song celebrated this dual role: ‘Sing cuckoo, and sing little nightingale, of Nikolaos Tsouvaras, who was armatolós at Loúros and klepht at Karpenísi.’5 Armatolí and klephts would sometimes combine in joint
raids, as they did in the 1705 incident with which this book opens.

  So a delicate balance was struck. The Turkish authorities spent just enough on hiring armatolí to maintain some degree of public order. The armatolí did just enough in restraining the klephts to justify their own employment. And the klephts carried out just enough robberies to maintain themselves without provoking a strong reaction. The life of a klepht was hard and rough. His clothes, including the kilt-like phoustanéla, were simple, filthy and lice-ridden. He carried a heavy cloak, to protect him from the elements and to sleep in. He fed on coarse bread, made from flour and salt that he carried with him, and cheese, with an occasional feast of roast sheep or goat. Drink was spring water, unless a local monastery provided some wine or raki, but alcohol was frowned on as undermining security. His weapons were his pistols, perhaps a long musket, and daggers, primarily to intimidate victims.

  The klephts, though living on the margins of society, came to be seen as heroes. They were regarded as symbols of resistance to authority, and their exploits were praised and their deaths mourned in a host of klephtic ballads. One can distinguish three different types of brigand. First, the common criminal. Second, the fighter against oppression, respected by his social group whatever his motives and methods. And third, the noble robber, the Robin Hood, who always fights honourably to right wrongs of any sort. Over time the perception of the klephts moved from the first category through the second to the third. The romantic philhellenes of the nineteenth century credited them with every virtue: as devout, supremely hardy, faithful and affectionate husbands and uniformly temperate in wine – though the last was perhaps true only when they couldn’t get any. They were acclaimed by many of their countrymen as national heroes. Not so, thought the nineteenth-century historian George Finlay. ‘Amongst the literary Greeks,’ he wrote, ‘it has been the fashion to talk and write much concerning the patriotic spirit and the extraordinary military exploits of the klephts, as if these robbers had been the champions of Greek liberty. But the truth is, that these men were mere brigands, who have plundered the Greeks more than they were ever plundered by the Turks.’6