by David Brewer
13
Turkish Rule in Cyprus and Crete
The Turkish captures of Cyprus and of Crete were separated by a century, but the regimes they established in their two new possessions are best considered together. Similarities are obvious, but there were some important differences.
The Turkish rule in Cyprus established after the final conquest of the island in 1571 was seen by some contemporaries as a change for the worse and by some as a change for the better. A Venetian returning home after the Turkish conquest stopped near Limassol and was told by the Cypriots that they already regretted the ending of Venetian rule. The island was now almost a desert, they said, and the upper classes were reduced by poverty to work as muleteers or pedlars. A few years later a French traveller reported that the Cypriots had become wretched slaves, that many families were secretly leaving, and that the Turks had even threatened to introduce the devshirme on Cyprus. But at the same time a Cypriot writing to Martin Crusius said that the treatment of his compatriots was much milder than before. Which view was right?1
The declared policy of the Turks was certainly one of leniency. The Turkish army commander Lala Mustafa, who later brutally executed the Venetian commander of Famagusta, by contrast ordered in the early days of the invasion that no harm should be done to the Cypriots, and an officer who disobeyed was severely punished. The policy was confirmed and elaborated in the Sultan’s firman of 6 May 1572: ‘The island of Cyprus has been captured by force; therefore the situation of the common people has somewhat deteriorated. So no violence should be done to them; they should be treated with justice. It is important both in the enforcement of the decisions of the sharia [religious law] and in the levying of state taxes, to regard and protect them, so that the country may thus revert to its former prosperous state. Thus I order that you must be careful in giving the common people, who are a trust from God to us, as much protection and mercy as you can.’2
There were good reasons for this conciliatory approach. Two are referred to in the 1572 firman: that it accorded with Turkish principles enshrined in the sharia, and that it was necessary to make the island prosperous and so a source of tax revenue. It was particularly important to win the cooperation of the Cypriot workers on the land because so many productive areas had been left uncultivated when peasants fled to the mountains to escape the disruptions of war. In 1572, 76 villages in productive areas had no farmers and there was a famine that year. A further reason for conciliation was that the Holy League, after its victory at Lepanto, might now attempt to recapture Cyprus.
The administration of the newly conquered island was led by the standard group of Turkish officials, who had been appointed by the army commander Lala Mustafa after the fall of Nicosia in September 1571 and so well before the conquest was complete. Head of the new Cyprus government was a beylerbey, and subordinate to him a bey as chief executive, a defterdar or treasurer, a kadi or judge as guardian of religious and constitutional principles, and various military commanders. The choice of dragoman or interpreter, who was often a useful intermediary between the Cypriots and the Turkish government, was left to the bishops and leading citizens. When the Catholic clergy departed with the Venetians the supremacy of the Orthodox Church and its bishops was of course now unchallenged.
One of the first acts of the Turkish government was to conduct a census of the population, in effect a basis for taxation, which was completed by the end of 1572. The census takers travelled round the country collecting information about individuals – who was head of the family, how much land did he own – and about production – what crops had been grown in the past three years and at what profit, what were the dues expected from customs, fisheries, salt pans and so on.
As a result of the survey, taxes overall were reduced from those in Venetian times. Personal taxes, on individuals and on households, remained at much the same level but tithes, the proportion of produce to be surrendered, were eased. Previously peasants tied to the land had forfeited one third of their produce to the landowner, and free peasants one fifth or less. Now all paid one fifth, and since there were twice as many tied peasants as free this was a widespread benefit. Taxes on animals were also reduced: the sheep tax was halved, and the taxes on newborn animals were abolished. So too was the salt tax.
There were two other benefits to the Cypriots from the change of regime. One was that peasants could buy effective ownership of their land, including the right to bequeath it, even though technically all land still belonged to the Sultan. The price paid was generally the equivalent of a year’s rent. This sometimes led to abuses: speculators bought the land for the set sum, and later tried to sell it back to the peasant at an inflated price. But within a year of the survey’s completion this practice was stamped on, and the authorities told to ensure that a peasant recovering his land paid only the original price. The second benefit was the reduction and then disappearance of forced labour, which had previously been two or more days a week. In a firman of October 1572 the Sultan decreed that peasants should do only one day a week and for the state, not for the landholder, but even this one day seems never to have been enforced.
So it seems clear that, initially at least, the introduction of Turkish rule was a benefit to Cyprus, and the Cypriot optimists at the time of the change were in the right. But over time good regulations were subverted by bad administration. When, after three centuries of Turkish rule, Britain by international agreement took over the government of Cyprus in 1878, a British officer wrote: ‘It seems that in Cyprus it is not so much the laws themselves, but rather the administration of the laws which needs reform. The Ottoman Government is noted for publishing innumerable firmans, laws, and ordinances, which leave but little room for improvement as regards either completeness or natural equity; and it has been either the disregard or mal-administration of those laws which has done so much injury in the country.’3
However, one aspect of the new Turkish rule had far-reaching and unhappy consequences: the policy of establishing an Ottoman element in Cyprus. This policy seems to have stemmed from the Turkish government’s aim to create a mixed population on the island as less likely to be troublesome than a predominantly Greek one. It was almost certainly not, as has sometimes been maintained, to remedy a drastic decline in the Cyprus population. George Hill, in his comprehensive history of Cyprus, examines all the evidence on population figures and concludes that ‘the reports of the earlier depletion of the island were really exaggerated.’4
Some of the settlers were troops who stayed on after the conquest and were granted land on condition that they settled on it and did not become absentee landlords. Many others were Ottoman subjects brought in from other parts of the empire – from Anatolia and even from Damascus and Aleppo. These immigrants were offered inducements, in the form of two or three years’ exemption from taxes and dues, but were to be moved from their homes to Cyprus by force if necessary. Some were useful members of the community – artisans and, when saltpetre was discovered on Cyprus, workers skilled in its refinement as gunpowder. Others were less desirable – peasants who were unemployed or had a bad reputation, and Anatolian brigands. Within a few years of the conquest the Turkish population had risen to some 20,000.
By the mid-twentieth century the Greeks and Turks in Cyprus had become polarised. As Cyprus was not part of the Greek state in 1923, or indeed subsequently, the Muslim Turkish element did not leave in the exchange of populations after the Asia Minor catastrophe of that year. The demand for union with Greece, énosis, which began when the British took over the island in 1878, naturally enough was supported by the Cypriot Greeks and opposed by the Cypriot Turks. By the 1950s the énosis question bedevilled relations not only between Greek and Turkish Cypriots but between Greece and Turkey and between Greece and Britain. Cypriot independence in 1960 failed to bring the Greek and Turkish elements together. In 1974, in response to a Greek army coup that ousted the legitimate government of Archbishop Makários, Turkey invaded Cyprus on the grounds that the cou
p threatened the Turkish Cypriot population. Cyprus remains divided to this day, a division that has its roots in the events of the 1570s. The arm of history is indeed long.
On the surface it might seem that little had changed in the Turkish method of conquest between their capture of Cyprus and their occupation of Crete a century later.
In Crete the Turks had the same interest in winning the cooperation of the Cretans, though the military threat was no longer from a Holy League triumphant after Lepanto but from the continued presence of Venice. Venice still held the three fortified islands of Graboúsa, Spinalónga and, most importantly, Soúdha. On Soúdha island there was a Venetian governor with the title of provveditor-extraordinary, who maintained a network of spies gathering information about Turkish troop movements. On one occasion a Venetian spy even tried to persuade the Turkish commander of the Iráklion janissaries, with whom he was friendly, to switch allegiance to Venice, an approach that the commander refused only with some reluctance. In 1692 the Venetians briefly besieged Chaniá using Soúdha island as a base. Venice’s imperial ambitions in Crete were not yet dead.
The hierarchy of Turkish officials governing Crete was again very similar to that in Cyprus, with head of government, treasurer, kadi as guardian of the law, and military commanders. Officials in Crete were of higher rank than on Cyprus – pasha rather than bey – since Crete was a province or eyalet of the Ottoman Empire in its own right, whereas Cyprus was part of the province of the Mediterranean islands along with Rhodes, Náxos and others.
As in Cyprus, one of the first acts of the new Turkish administration in Crete was to conduct a census, but one with a significantly different purpose. Earlier censuses, including the Cypriot one, had been concerned with individuals. Their status – as Muslim or Christian, free peasant or one tied to a timar-holder – would determine what agricultural tax they paid (though the personal poll tax was still lower for Muslims than for Christians). The Cretan census, however, was concerned only with land, and its owner’s tax liability depended on what the land was used for – vineyards, gardens, vegetable plots and so on. As a result of the census tithe rates were made uniform and generally reduced, probably as in Cyprus to one fifth.
The switch to taxation of land irrespective of its owner was the first step in the dismantling of the traditional timar system. Under this system the holder of the timar portion of land benefited from a proportion of its produce and from the labour of the peasants tied to the estate, and in return had to provide in wartime a body of troops under his command. As we have seen, the Venetians had found that this was no longer effective, and simply led to ludicrous charades of military preparedness. Land was now granted without restriction to its holders, whether military or civilian, Muslim or Christian. A ruling of the Islamic court in Iráklion in the early years of Turkish rule makes this clear: ‘The land is clearly and unequivocally the freehold of its owners and as such they are able to buy it, sell it, and treat it as they wish. Upon their death it can be divided among their heirs, in accordance with the sharia, just as all their other property.’5
Some land in Crete, particularly in the eastern districts, was granted to Turkish soldiers, and such land was called timar, but unlike the original timars these grants were usually minute. They were far too small to provide a permanent income, and were more like a demob grant. Officially there were 482 of these so-called timars, but each of these was subdivided into a dozen or more parts, and the number of holders was nearly 2,000. A soldier might hold a small share of the revenue from several different plots.
But this system did not last long, and was soon replaced by a more efficient way of channelling funds to the central treasury in Istanbul. The first step was to overturn private ownership of land and progressively reclaim it for the state. Thus in the large district of Pedhiádha east of Iráklion only one village was state owned in the first census, but by the time of the census conducted 37 years later, 90 of the district’s 105 villages were state property.
The second step was to reintroduce the Venetian institution of tax farmers, who paid a lump sum to the treasury for the rights to a district’s taxes and kept all the taxes they were able to collect. The tax farm of a single village might cost 15,000 to 20,000 akches, but some were much more expensive. The tax farm for all of Crete’s monasteries cost 480,000 akches, and the one for the customs of Iráklion’s port nearly 600,000 akches. These two combined were worth about 1 per cent of the value of Thessalonika’s total external trade at the time, so were substantial sums for individuals to invest.
Many of these tax-farming contracts were bought by members of the wealthy elite in Constantinople, the most powerful of which was the politically dominant Koprulu family. As one historian has put it, thanks to the growing influence of this elite ‘imperial power was diluted by an increasingly dense network of interest groups at the centre.’6 But many tax farms were sold to janissaries in Crete. Janissaries included both imperial soldiers, that is Turks sent periodically from Constantinople, and local troops.
One picture of the janissaries is, in Edmund Burke’s phrase, one of a rapacious and licentious soldiery. ‘The savagery of the janissaries of Crete was notorious,’ writes one Cretan historian of the island, and gives as evidence a Sultan’s decree of 1762 condemning the outrages of ‘the brigands and malefactors in the employment of the guard of this fortress’ – though it is not entirely clear who these miscreants were.7 Much later, in 1793, a bishop was murdered by janissaries. But a more detailed look at the evidence produces a different picture: of the Cretan janissaries as deeply involved in the civilian economic life of the island, who were janissaries only in that they drew janissary pay.
Thus around 1700 nearly half the bakers in Iráklion were janissaries below officer rank. There are other examples of a janissary as owner of a shop, head of the Iráklion market, involved illegally in the wine trade, and dealing in property. Membership of the janissaries was often purely nominal. Even in the early years of Turkish rule the janissaries, according to the Venetian governor on Soúdha island, included over 1,000 children aged between ten and twelve. In the 1730s a visitor to Crete wrote: ‘There are a great number of janissaries who belong to [companies] which are in other parts of the empire, and are settled here as merchants or tradesmen, and yet receive their pay as janissaries.’8 It was even possible to qualify for janissary pay by simply buying a janissary pay slip on the black market.
However, the main avenue for entry to the janissaries was through conversion to Islam, which was greater in Crete than in Cyprus or anywhere else in the Greek world. Some of these conversions had nothing to do with a military career but were for specific personal reasons. One Cretan is recorded as converting to avoid punishment for associating with the Venetians on Spinalónga; a Christian woman might convert on marriage to a Muslim, or to win guardianship of the child of a mixed marriage. Avoidance of the higher Christian poll tax may have been a reason for some conversions, but this would not explain the much more numerous conversions in Crete than elsewhere.
Perhaps the main reason for conversion to Islam was that the Turkish conquest of Crete took 24 years to complete, far longer than any other acquisition. However, from the end of the second year the Turks held the whole island except Iráklion, and their eventual victory could be foreseen. There was therefore a strong incentive, especially when backed by a money payment, to join the winning side and to demonstrate loyalty to the victors by converting to their faith. Conversion would also ease the path into the military. The Turks regarded local recruits to the militia far more favourably than the Venetians, who accepted them as recruits only when forced to by lack of manpower, believing, as one provveditor put it, that ‘the militias start to deteriorate as Greeks and villagers enter them.’9
The formal process of conversion is not clear. There was still an official circumciser who halfway through the war was ordered to circumcise all converts. But if conversion was on a large scale the corresponding mass circumcision seems improbable.
It is more likely that a declaration before the kadi was enough, especially if a Muslim, perhaps the convert’s employer, acted as sponsor.
In the summer of 1700 the French botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort spent three months on Crete. Turkish rule of the island had by then been established for 30 years, but memories of the Venetians and their long struggle to defend the island were still vivid. Tournefort, born in 1656, was already a distinguished botanist, at the age of 27 being appointed professor of botany at the royal Jardin des Plantes in Paris, a position he held for the rest of his life.
The plan for Tournefort’s travels, approved and paid for by Louis XIV, was that he should go to Greece, Constantinople, Arabia, Egypt and the Barbary coast. His main task was ‘to investigate plants, metals and minerals, to learn about the diseases of these countries and their remedies, and about everything concerning medicine and natural history’.10 But there was a further object: Tournefort was to report on the trade, religion and customs of the inhabitants of these countries. This reflected France’s renewed interest in Ottoman lands since the 1699 Treaty of Karlowitz, which ended the long war of the Ottomans against Venice and her allies and which deprived the Ottoman Empire of much of its European territory. If the Ottoman Empire was to be dismembered, the more France knew about it the better.