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

by David Brewer

  The guild system was not unique to the Ottomans. It was inherited from the Byzantines, whose rules for the guilds of Constantinople were set down in the tenth century Book of the Prefect, and guilds operated throughout Europe, as described by Iris Origo in her account of the fourteenth- century merchant of Prato.3 The guild system had advantages both for the rulers, whether domestic or foreign, and for the ruled. It enabled the rulers to keep control of economic activity and sometimes to encourage it. The Ottomans have often been accused of taking no interest in trade, and of leaving it in the hands of others – Greeks, Jews, Armenians and foreign concessionaires. A more persuasive view is that the Ottomans were well aware of the importance of trade and of the cities where it flourished, and of course of taxing it. As one historian, Halil Inalcik, puts it: ‘The Ottoman economic mind was closely related to the basic concept of state and society in the Middle East. It professed that the ultimate goal of a state was consolidation and extension of the ruler’s power, and the only way to reach it was to get rich sources of revenues. This in turn depended on the conditions making the productive classes prosperous.’4

  For the ruled, the guild system meant stability – of raw material supply, of quality and of price – and protection from competition. The guild control of commercial activity was not total. Some entrepreneurs operated outside it, in particular the merchants engaged in empire-wide export and import, and some operated illegally within it, acquiring against the regulations a number of shops. Nevertheless, stability was the main purpose of the guild system and its chief characteristic, though ultimately this stability spelt stagnation.

  The guild system was a contributor to economic stagnation in Greece but was not its sole cause. The guild system flourished in other countries that were far from being stagnant, and guilds were long lived: in France until the French Revolution (in spite of an attempt by Turgot, Louis XVI’s reforming comptroller-general, to abolish them in 1776) and in England their privileges were not formally abolished until 1835. But Greece lacked opportunities that these and other countries exploited, principally trading by sea. The Ottoman Empire lost its main avenue of maritime trade – through the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean – to Vasco da Gama and the Portuguese in 1498, and thereafter largely left overseas trade to foreigners by the agreements known as capitulations. Greece itself had no substantial ships or the opportunity to use them until the second half of the eighteenth century. Furthermore Greece lacked a banking and market system, let alone a sophisticated one such as the Dutch, which as early as 1688 operated what we may think of as modern inventions: futures contracts, put and call options, and even investment related to a share index. Finally, Greece lacked education, without which development in any sphere was impossible.

  The Turkish officials with whom the Greek townspeople had to deal were remarkably few, but given the extent of the Ottoman Empire that is hardly surprising. Towards the end of the seventeenth century the empire was divided into 39 major provinces, of which four were predominantly Greek: Roumeli, which extended well north and west of today’s Greece, with Thessalonika as provincial capital; the Peloponnese, capital Mistrás; Cyprus, capital Nicosia; and after its conquest Crete, capital Iráklion. The provincial governor, the voyvoda, had in theory eight officers to assist him, although not all the posts were always filled. The highest in rank was the treasurer. Two others were in control of troops, one for the provincial capital and one for the rest of the province. Three officers registered land holdings. The remaining two were responsible for carrying out sentences passed either by the provincial governor or by an official quite separate from the governor’s administration, the kadi or judge. There was a kadi not only in the provincial capital but in each district. His remit was limited to major crimes and to disputes between Muslims and Christians. All other matters were dealt with in Greek courts controlled by the Orthodox Church.

  Under this overriding Turkish rule there were self-governing Greek organisations in the towns, even in quite small ones. These organisations varied from place to place, and were often preservations from Byzantine times. They were largely drawn from leading members of the guilds, who were usually the richest and most influential figures in the Greek community now that the large-scale landowners of Byzantine and Frankish times had disappeared. In Thessalonika there was a committee of twelve, the dhodhekádha, to run communal affairs and in particular to apportion the tax burden within the community by setting tax rates, just as a guild official apportioned taxes within the guild. There was a similar committee of twelve in Sérres, 70 miles to the north of Thessalonika; here the whole Greek community assembled with the clergy and elected ‘twelve just, good, God-fearing men’ to represent them.

  A special case was the village of Métsovo, at the top of the highest pass on the offshoot of the Via Egnatia that leads to Iánnina, and so a control point for the movement of trade or troops. In winter travellers needed help through the snow and in summer protection from brigands. To secure the loyalty of Métsovo the Sultan in the mid-seventeenth century granted the village and its neighbours virtual self-government, in effect loosening their chains in order to bind them more firmly to the regime. The seven-man Métsovo committee consisted of a president plus other members respectively responsible for taxes, markets, churches, schools, water and the local militia.

  These leaders of the Greek communities were initially a valuable safeguard of Greek liberty, preserving freedoms and privileges that dated back to Byzantine times and even, as some historians have maintained, to the city-states of Classical Greece. But in the course of time they came to be seen as simply agents of the Turkish rulers, and their Greek designation as protóyeri, community leaders, was replaced by the Turkish term kochabashi. As a popular song ironically put it: ‘I was a kochabashi and notable of the land. From the rich I demanded money, from the poor as much again. And from a widow, a very poor widow, with a fine vineyard and an ample farm, five times as much.’5 By the time of the struggle for independence in the nineteenth century these representatives of the Greeks were castigated as men ‘who, sharing the sentiments of the Turks, wish to oppress the people, and as the friends and companions of tyrants’6 or more pithily as simply uncircumcised Turks.

  In the southern part of Greece most of the important towns were on or near the coast: Athens, Navplion (Venetian until 1540), Methóni and Koróni (Venetian until 1500), Pátras and Corinth. The exception was inland Mistrás, the Peloponnese provincial capital. North of the Gulf of Corinth Thessalonika and perhaps Vólos were the only major coastal towns. Others lay on important land routes: Iánnina and Lárisa on southward offshoots of the Via Egnatia, which linked Constantinople with the Adriatic, and Tríkala which became a military centre because it lay on the route of any Turkish army moving south. Smaller towns sometimes flourished because of a particular product or trade, such as Kastoriá for furs, fish and wine, Monastíri for textiles and Édhessa for dyeing.

  Of all the Greek townships Thessalonika was the most important, as it had been under the Byzantines. Its location was unrivalled for trade overland because it lay on the crucial Via Egnatia, and for seaborne trade because of its fine harbour. In the sixteenth century Thessalonika’s harbour was described as being able to hold at least 300 vessels, and in the seventeenth ships were putting in at Thessalonika from as far away as England, Algeria and the Persian Gulf.

  When in 1430 the Turks made their last and conclusive attack on Thessalonika the city refused to surrender, though it seems that many of the besieged were ready to do so. ‘They actually declared they were bent on handing over the city to the infidel,’ wrote Archbishop Simeón. ‘Now that for me was something more difficult to stomach than ten thousand deaths.’7 But the refusal to surrender led to thousands of deaths anyway, amid scenes of destruction paralleled 23 years later at the fall of Constantinople. By contrast, Iánnina in the same year 1430 surrendered to the Turks and was spared. From the attackers’ point of view to threaten destruction as the price of resistance made surrende
r attractive, which would save all the human and material costs of siege and assault. But to be credible the threat had to be carried out, and this brought its own costs. The ruined city was no longer economically productive, and had to be revived and repopulated.

  The repopulation of Thessalonika was partly by Greeks: it is estimated that about 1,000 Greeks who had been captured when the city fell were ransomed on the Sultan’s initiative and returned to Thessalonika, as did others who had fled earlier. Muslims were also brought in and, by the time of the first surviving city census of 1478, made up nearly half the total population of 10,000. Even after the population exchange of 1923 there remained a Turkish quarter on the heights above the city. Until the Turks left in 1974 as a result of the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, one could still from that vantage point look out over a Greek city and a Greek sea and feel that one was nevertheless in Turkey. But the most significant new arrivals were the Jews who had been expelled from Christian countries.

  Expulsion of Jews was nothing new. In 1290 Edward I had expelled the Jews from England, reacting to popular resentment of the Jews because of their power as moneylenders. The expulsion of the Jews from Spain by Ferdinand II in 1492 was in part for the same reason, but was also driven by religious and political motives. A century earlier a wave of anti-Jewish riots in Spain had driven many Jews to be baptised as Christians and become conversos. These nominal converts, who still wielded great influence as financiers, were widely suspected of covertly continuing their old beliefs and practices; indeed, some did so openly. In 1449, in response to more anti-Jewish riots, a decree of ‘purity of blood’ was introduced in Toledo, banning all those of Jewish ancestry from municipal office in the city, a measure soon followed elsewhere. Finally in March 1492 Ferdinand ordered the expulsion within four months of all professing Jews in Spain and in the Spanish dominions of Naples, Sicily and Sardinia, and many conversos left with them, an exodus of between 120,000 and 150,000 people.

  Significantly, the expulsion of the Jews came less than three months after the Spanish conquest of Granada and the final expulsion of the Moors. Thus the year 1492 presented an opportunity for Ferdinand to remedy the total lack of political unity between Castilians, Aragonese and Catalans by imposing an unsullied religious unity. Spain would be Christian, with no place for the Muslim or Jewish faith. To be Spanish was to be Catholic, just as to be Greek was to be Orthodox. But, as many Spaniards had foreseen, the expulsion was economically disastrous, depriving Spain of the Jews’ much-needed capital and skills. Whereas in England in 1290 there were English moneylenders to replace the Jews, in Spain they were replaced by foreigners from Holland, Germany or Genoa, ready to exploit rather than enrich Spain. But Spain’s loss was the Ottoman Empire’s gain. The expulsion and welcome of the Jews provides a striking contrast between Christian persecution and Muslim tolerance, and in economic terms between western Europe’s short-sightedness and sound Ottoman investment.

  When expelled Jews reached Thessalonika they found no Jewish inhabitants because the Jewish community, which had been there since Byzantine times, had been moved to repopulate Constantinople after 1453. But in a few decades the new arrivals had become dominant: the census of 1530 shows a Jewish population of some 16,000, over half the total population and so greater than the roughly equal Muslim and Christian numbers combined. The Jews felt warmly welcome. ‘Come and join us in Turkey,’ wrote one from Constantinople, ‘and you will live, as we do, in peace and liberty,’ and another from Thessalonika wrote that ‘The Jews of Europe and other countries, persecuted and banished, have come here to find a refuge and this city has received them with love and affection, as if she were Jerusalem, that old and pious mother of ours.’ The French commercial agent in Thessalonika described their contribution to the city: ‘The Jews have among them workmen of all artes and handicraftes moste excellent, and specially those of late banished and driven out of Spain and Portugale, who to the great detriment and damage of the Christianitie, have taught the Turkes divers inventions, craftes and engines of warre, as to make artillerie, harquebuses, gunne powder, shot and other munitions; they have also there set up printing, not before seen in those countries.’8

  One skill that the Jews brought to Thessalonika was metallurgy. This was put to work in the mines at Sidhirokávsia, which produced mainly silver but also some gold. The site has now disappeared but was in hilly country about 40 miles east of Thessalonika and a few miles from the sea. Streams supplied water, and the surrounding woods provided timber for the smelting kilns, of which there were reputedly 5,000 or 6,000. Under Jewish instruction many Greeks worked there, but the miners were mainly Bulgarians. At its peak around 1600 the mines produced eight and a half tons of silver a year, but by the end of the seventeenth century the silver deposits had been exhausted and Sidhirokávsia, once so bustling, had fallen into decay.

  The main occupation of the Jews of Thessalonika was in the production of woollen cloth. Their trade was given stimulus and stability when soon after their arrival they were given the contract to supply all janissary uniforms. Wealthy Jews bought local wool and imported dyes, and poorer Jews provided the labour. Thessalonika became one of the main exporters of cloth in the eastern Mediterranean in the sixteenth century. But by the end of the century the Thessalonika wool trade was facing two pressures: one was rising wool prices because Venetian and French merchants were buying up Balkan wool for their own industries, and by 1600 the price of wool had peaked at over ten times its 1530 level. The other pressure was a squeeze on the price of finished goods. This price was controlled by the Ottoman authorities, but more serious was competition from cheaper English goods: ships of the English Levant Company, in the Mediterranean on the way to buy raw silk in Persia, were carrying on the outward voyage any goods that could be sold at even a small profit. The cloth industry of the Thessalonika Jews never again achieved its sixteenth-century prominence. Nevertheless the Jews remained a flourishing element of Thessalonika life until the atrocious events of 1943, when some 45,000 Jews, virtually all of those in the town, were deported by the Germans, most to their deaths in the gas chambers.

  One might ask why the Greeks had not taken the opportunity to prosper, especially through the cloth trade that the Jews had so quickly exploited. There were perhaps two main reasons. The Greeks were traders rather than manufacturers; and the Jews brought with them from their original homelands skills and techniques that the Greeks had had no opportunity to learn.

  Whereas Thessalonika was important as a commercial centre, Athens was of interest for its antiquities. It was hardly ever visited in the sixteenth century, so travellers’ accounts of it appeared regularly only in the seventeenth. In the 1670s there was a sudden burgeoning of accounts of contemporary Athens: from the Jesuit priest Jacques-Paul Babin, from the Marquis de Nointel, ambassador to Constantinople, from Jean Giraud, the long-serving French consul in Athens who played host to many visitors, and from both Jacob Spon (French) and George Wheler (English), who travelled together to study antiquities.

  There was another curious work of that time, Athénes ancienne et nouvelle by André Georges Guillet, published in 1675. It was very popular, both in French and in English translation and until challenged, especially by Spon, was accepted as genuine. It purported to be based on a firsthand account by Guillet’s brother, the Seigneur de la Guilletière, who had visited Greece after being captured by the Turks, sold to a Tunisian pirate and eventually released – a suitably dramatic provenance for the book. But almost certainly this brother did not exist, and Guillet got some of his information from Capuchin monks in Navplion and invented the rest. Some of his observations were scurrilous, for example about the French consul Giraud, and he frequently mocked the Greeks. In the end we cannot trust a word he said, and he is worth quoting only to show how the Greeks were presented in one of the most widely disseminated accounts of them.

  The population of Athens in the 1530s had been less than half that of Thessalonika, about 12,500 against 30,000, and its co
mposition was very different. Whereas at that time Thessalonika’s inhabitants were roughly half Jews and a quarter each Greeks and Muslims, the Athenians were almost exclusively Greek, with only some dozens of Muslim residents apart from the transient Turkish garrison of a few hundred soldiers. The total population barely changed in the following centuries, though by the 1670s the proportion of Muslims had increased to about a quarter, and some Albanians, generally considered troublemakers, had settled in the town and the surrounding villages.

  Apart from the Akropolis there was nothing remarkable about the town of Athens. The Jesuit priest Jacques-Paul Babin, visiting in 1672, was surprised to find that the town had no defensive walls. The streets were narrow and unpaved, like those of a village. The houses, he said, lacked magnificence, and were haphazardly built from ancient ruins, ornamented only with bits of marble column or stones marked with a cross from ruined churches. But at least the houses were built of stone, unlike the wooden houses that Babin had seen in Constantinople. The most attractive part of Athens was the surrounding plain, planted with vines, corn and the olive trees that, standing ‘so thick to the west of the city that they seem to be a wood’, provided the main export from Athens. The vines, however, produced wine that de la Guilletière typically described as disgusting – ‘blackish and not fine’.9

  The Turkish government in Athens was represented, as elsewhere, by the voyvoda or governor living in the Akropolis, the kadi or judge, and the Akropolis garrison commander and his few hundred troops with their families. The garrison’s main task was to raise the alarm when sea raiders approached. Athens, wrote Wheler, ‘hath no Walls to defend it self, in so much that they have been frequently surpriz’d by the Pirates from Sea, and sustained great Losses from them: until some Years since, they secured all the Avenues into the Town by Gates, which they built anew, and made the outmost Houses, lying close together, to serve instead of Walls. These they shut up every night: and are by them reasonably well secured from these Corsairs.’10 The garrison soldiers were referred to as janissaries, but according to de la Guilletière they were in fact the dregs of the Turkish militia, with small local businesses that they operated when off duty.