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

by David Brewer

  Though the Kalléryis revolt was centred on the prosperous northern region of Milopótamos, the most persistent cause of trouble to the Venetians was the rugged mountainous region round the port of Sphakiá, to which today’s visitors, with aching knees, are returned by boat after descending the Samariá gorge. The men of Sphakiá were formidable fighters, and remained so, showing the same qualities outstandingly against the Germans in the 1940s. The Venetians held them in high regard, and in 1602 the Venetian provveditor-general wrote of them: ‘They surpass all the other inhabitants of these parts. This is not only because they are manly in appearance, competent and agile with muscular bodies, robust, proud, daring and courteous in manner. What most distinguishes them is their keenness of spirit, their greatness of soul, and their unrivalled ability to handle arms, whether bow or musket, in which they are exceptional. That ultimately is why they are without doubt the most daring, the most virile and the noblest of the men on this island.’1

  The Venetian officials administering Crete were, from the beginning, essentially the same as those that Venice later established in Cyprus, and reflected the system in Venice itself. The head of the administration was a Venetian noble based in Iráklion with the title of Duke of Crete, assisted by two counsellors. Subordinate to them were the captains of each of Crete’s regions, initially six and later reduced to four. Military command was exercised by the captain-general, and each of Crete’s fortresses had its own commander. Superior to all of these, including the Duke of Crete, was the provveditor-general, at first appointed only intermittently in times of crisis but from 1569, when the Turkish threat to Cyprus had become obvious, the office was made permanent.

  Both the provveditor-general and the Duke of Crete were appointed in Venice and sent out to Crete for only two years. Venice persisted with this policy in both Crete and Cyprus in spite of its obvious drawbacks. Probably this was in part because Venice was afraid that long-standing colonial administrators would build themselves a threatening power base, partly because candidates would not want to neglect for too long their political careers in Venice – and several provveditors-general later became Doge. The system has been a boon to historians because departing officials were required to leave on record a report on the island and recommendations for improvements. But the inevitable short-termism of the arrangement is clear from the protest of the citizens of Iráklion in 1629 against a proposed new water supply. Besides claiming that it was impractical and unaffordable, they objected that the time left for the current provveditor was too short to finish the scheme, and that no provveditor ever completed his predecessor’s projects but preferred to start his own.

  Venice had secured possession of Crete in 1211, and in the following years established control of the island through granting military fiefs to Venetians. These fief-holders were granted land that had been taken from local landowners or the Church, and in return had to provide troops, cavalry if the fief-holder was of a noble Venetian family and infantry if not. This was the near-universal system of both Christian and Ottoman rule in the period before standing armies became established. In the first century of Venetian rule an estimated 10,000 Venetians were settled in Crete.

  From about 1500 this system began to break down. Cretans were displacing Venetians by buying fiefs or subdivisions of them, and they began to occupy posts in the island’s administration. By 1600 only 164 of the 964 fiefs in the Iráklion region were held by Venetians, the remaining four fifths by Cretans. In 1575 the reforming provveditor-general Giacomo Foscarini reported that most of these supposed providers of cavalry neither owned a horse nor knew how to ride, and when required to show their military credentials would simply borrow horses and put villagers on them. People gathered to watch this ridiculous display and threw rotten fruit and stones at the riders. Thus of the two aims of the fief system – to provide Venetian dominance of the island and the means to defend it – neither was any longer being achieved.

  This movement, from initial Venetian dominance to later fusion of Venetian and Cretan interests, also happened in the relations between the Venetians and the Orthodox Church. At the start Venice abolished the Orthodox bishoprics, and the bishopric promised in 1299 after the Kalléryis revolt seems to have been short lived, if it was established at all. This meant that Orthodox priests had to go abroad to be ordained, either to the Venetian possessions in the Ionian islands where, curiously, Orthodox bishops were permitted, or to Ottoman territory. Some Orthodox priests were thought to practise without being ordained at all. But there was no ban on Orthodox churches, and by the seventeenth century there were 113 Orthodox churches on Crete and only 17 Catholic ones. In 1602 the provveditor-general Benedetto Moro wrote that Catholics and Orthodox often went to each other’s churches, and that Venetian officials should make a point of attending Orthodox services to show solidarity with the Cretans. He also ruled that Catholic priests must not preach against Orthodoxy. In many ways the island had become – to borrow the title of one of the best books on Venetian and Ottoman Crete – a shared world.

  A remarkable expression of these shared values was the so-called Veneto-Cretan renaissance of the last century of Venetian rule. In literature the most famous figure was Vitséntzos Kornáros, author of the Erotókritos, a romance in verse of nearly 10,000 lines from an Italian source but with the action transferred to ancient Athens. Anachronistically the poem contains a fight between a Cretan and a Turk, perhaps a reference to the battle of Lepanto. Of the Cretan artists of the period even the more prominent are little known outside Greece, with one exception: Dhoménikos Theotokópoulos, known as El Greco.

  El Greco was born in 1541 in Iráklion, where he served his artistic apprenticeship. One of his earliest known works, perhaps an examination piece for joining the guild of painters, is of St Luke, the patron saint of artists, painting an icon of the Virgin and Child. The icon is in the traditional Byzantine style while the depiction of St Luke and his studio are Italianate. El Greco was already blending the Byzantine past with the west European present.

  El Greco was well established as an artist when at the age of 26 he left Crete for Venice. There he was strongly influenced by Titian and Tintoretto, and his ‘The Purification of the Temple’ painted while in Venice is wholly Italian in style. Three years later he moved to Rome, where he added Michelangelo to his list of exemplars. But his stay in Rome was a mere eighteen months, and in 1572 he moved to Spain.

  He went first to Madrid, where he produced among other works ‘The Adoration of the Name of Jesus’, an allegory of the battle of Lepanto, commissioned by Philip II. The name of Jesus, IHS for Jesus Hominum Salvator, is blazoned in the sky. Kneeling in adoration on the left are Philip II dressed in black, the Pope and the Doge of Venice, the trio representing the victorious Holy League. On the right the damned – the infidel Turks – are in torment at the mouth of Hell.2

  However, El Greco soon lost favour with the King, and by 1577 he was in Toledo, where he spent the last decades of his life. Some of his works were realist, such as the portrait of which the sitter said that his soul was at a loss to choose between his real body and his painted semblance. But it was in Toledo that El Greco developed the unique personal style of brilliant colours combined with the ‘purposeful distortion and pulling of planes’.3 El Greco died in Toledo in 1614, in relative poverty after many disputes over payment for his work. He was virtually forgotten until well into the nineteenth century, when he came to be recognised as a forerunner of the Impressionists and their successors: ‘Cézanne and El Greco are spiritual brothers,’ wrote the artist Franz Marc.4 Picasso borrowed from El Greco for his ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’. Perhaps the best summary of El Greco’s work was by an early appreciator of it, the critic Théophile Gautier, who wrote in 1845: ‘There are abuses of light and dark, of violent contrasts, of singular colours, extravagant attitudes, draperies are shattered and crumpled haphazardly; but in all that there presides a depraved energy, an unhealthy strength that betrays the great painter and the m
adness of Genius.’5

  Until the late flowering of the Veneto-Cretan renaissance, education in Venetian Crete had been patchy at best. In the early period of Venetian rule in the fourteenth century some schools existed, and popular verses from this time express the moans of schoolboys throughout the ages. One wanted vocational not academic training:

  I didn’t learn a cobbler’s trade, a shipwright’s or a quilter’s,

  At school I learnt – oh my poor head! – just Greek and Latin letters.

  Another thought school was simply a waste of time:

  At length my school became for me a wild and awful monster.

  Of letters I learnt only few, but quickly I forgot them,

  And evermore departed through the same door that I’d entered.6

  These schools may have been basic, but initially Crete was enriched by educated refugees from Constantinople, fleeing the city before 1453 as the Turkish threat grew. Many worked as copyists of classical Greek texts by Thucydides, Apollonius Rhodius and others. Enoch Powell, professor of Greek as well as controversial politician, maintained that fifteenth-century Cretan scholarship made a unique contribution to the study of classical Greek texts. But the general level of education was low, even among the clergy: ‘An uneducated priest is simply an impostor,’ thundered a Cretan abbot.7

  From then on the Catholic Church was the main instigator of education in Crete, but frequently bedevilled it. Cardinal Vissaríon, a Greek converted to the Catholic Church, founded a Greek school in Iráklion in the mid-fifteenth century, but it was distrusted by the Cretans because it propagated Vissaríon’s support for the unification of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. Seminaries to train Cretans as Catholic priests were established in Iráklion in 1592 and later in Chaniá and Réthimnon. The Jesuits established a school in Iráklion in 1585, but their extreme views scandalised the Cretan Orthodox, and twenty years later the Venetian authorities expelled them. A worse fate befell the Calvinists, champions of the Reformation, who started a school at Iráklion in the same period. The Catholic archbishop of Crete called for the public burning of their books, and the three teachers of the school were arrested and sentenced to imprisonment in Venice, the principal for life.

  As schooling was uncertain, there was a demand for private tutors, and troops of the Venetian garrison were often employed to teach Cretan children. But such tutors were sometimes hard to find: a writer in 1579 said that teachers were rare, and then corrected himself: ‘But why do I say rare – there isn’t a single one.’8 Only in the last century of Venetian rule was higher education properly established, with the founding of academies at Réthimnon in 1562, Iráklion in 1590 and Chaniá in 1637. This not only contributed to the Veneto-Cretan renaissance but produced a steady flow of Cretan students to universities in Italy, principally Padua. There, in the decades before the fall of Crete in 1669, 234 Cretan students are recorded as attending the medical school and 290 the law school, and other Greeks studied the same subjects. No wonder that the university of Padua was regarded as the alma mater, not only of Cretans but of Greeks throughout the regions of Venetian or Turkish rule.

  It is clear, however, that this shared world was not without friction, and one cause of it was Venetian recruitment of oarsmen for the galleys. Until the time of Lepanto enough free oarsmen could be recruited, for a limited period and for pay, but as the number of Venetian galleys grew and as service on them became increasingly unpopular there were not enough free oarsmen. Venice tried to solve the problem in various ways: by recruiting oarsmen abroad, in Dalmatia as early as the thirteenth century, and in Venice itself by using convicts. In Crete they drew on the pool of Cretan peasants who were registered for a period of compulsory labour for the state as a form of taxation. The pool was large, some 40,000 in 1629, but it was difficult to recruit even the 400 men needed for two peacetime galleys. Recruitment was brutal, as a report by the provveditor-general in 1594 makes clear: ‘The provveditor gave the order for all those who were to be enlisted to come forward and present themselves. So the men of the village aged between fifteen and fifty came along, and all those who seemed to be the most suitable for service were enlisted in the usual way. Then they were rounded up in the barns or churches and when fifty or sometimes a hundred had been gathered they were chained up to each other in pairs so that they couldn’t get away, and in the custody of the local noble and some horses they were promptly escorted to the galleys.’9 Some villagers fled to offshore islands to escape galley service, some ruined themselves paying substitutes to replace them, and a recruit from Anópolis on the south coast hanged himself rather than serve.

  Another cause of friction between Venetians and Cretans was the question of what crops the island should grow. As on other islands, there was a conflict between grain for self-sufficiency and other crops – in this case vines and olives – for profitable export. In the fifteenth century Crete produced plenty of grain, especially on the fertile plain of Mesará in the centre of the south coast. There was enough to feed Crete and to export large quantities to Venice. But the same century saw a massive increase in vine growing at the expense of grain, and Crete soon came to depend on imports of grain for three or four months of the year. These imports at first came from Ottoman territory until they were banned in 1555, and piracy made grain shipments from any source hazardous. In the following decades vine growing became increasingly profitable. The extra troops stationed on Crete after the fall of Cyprus drove up wine prices, and pirates, especially English ones, came to Crete and bought up all the wine they could, paying fancy prices because they were so rich.

  The Venetian authorities tried a forcible solution to the problem. In 1575 they ordered vines to be ripped up to encourage grain cultivation instead, and there were more such orders in 1584 and 1602, which suggests that the policy was not working. Even when it did force a change of crops this was not necessarily to grain but often to olives, and in 1589 the provveditor-general reported that: ‘The planting of olive trees increased after the [recently issued] prohibitions on viticulture, and is increasing still. I am afraid that if things continue as they are measures will have to be taken to discourage such cultivation, because otherwise olive tree cultivation will intrude on the growing of wheat, just as has happened with viticulture.’10

  The destruction of vines provoked an outcry that was a warning for the Venetians; the landowners declared that they would make ‘no distinction between being subjects of Venice or of the Turks’,11 that is that Venice’s harsh measures risked losing Cretan support against any Turkish invasion. But there were still advocates of Venetian rule by force. In 1616 the priest Paolo Sarpi, adviser to the Venetian state, addressed the Senate on how Venice could keep perpetual dominion over Crete. His ferocious polemic read, in part:

  For your Greek subjects of the island of Candia, the Greek faith is never to be trusted; and perhaps they would not much stick at submitting to the Turk, having the example of all the rest of their nation before their eyes. These therefore must be watch’d with more attention lest, like wild beasts, as they are, they should find an occasion to use their teeth and claws. The surest way is to keep good garrisons to awe them. Wine and bastinadoes ought to be their share, and keep good nature for a better occasion.

  As for the gentlemen of those Colonies,’ Sarpi went on:

  you must be very watchful of them; for besides the natural ferocity of the climate, they have the character of noblemen, which raises their spirits. If the gentlemen of these Colonies do tyrannize over the villages of their dominion, the best way is not to seem to see it, that there may be no kindness between them and their subject. It will not be amiss likewise to dispute all their pretensions to any particular jurisdiction; and if at any time their nobility or title be disputed, it will do well to sell them the confirmation of it at as dear a rate as possible: and, in a word, remember that all the good that can come from them, is already obtain’d, which was to fix the Venetian dominion; and for the future there is nothing but mischief to b
e expected from them.12

  Venetians on the spot saw things differently, and were well aware of the need for Cretan support against a Turkish attack, which was becoming ever more probable. In 1639 the provveditor-general wrote that the Cretan people ‘must always be treated well so that they will remain faithful and devoted. Because when they are oppressed and used too much in forced labour by the fief holders and sometimes even by the representatives of the state, and subjected to extraordinary harshness, they are driven to despair. Then they abandon the kingdom and go to the Turkish territories. They incite the enemy and open the way toward attacks, which perhaps the enemy would not otherwise have thought of.’13 But it was very late in the day for the Venetians to adopt a conciliatory policy towards their Cretan subjects, and too late to win their general support against the imminent Turkish invasion.

  12

  1669 – The Turks Take Crete

  There was an interval of 75 years between the Ottoman annexation of Venetian Cyprus in 1570 and their attack on Venetian Crete in 1645. Also it took them only one year to take Cyprus, but 24 years to take Crete. This contrast prompts two questions. Why did the Ottomans wait for 75 years before consolidating their control over the whole of the eastern Mediterranean? And why was the annexation of Crete so prolonged while the annexation of Cyprus – an island of almost exactly the same size – was so quick?