by David Brewer
Tournefort conscientiously carried out the botanical part of his mission and brought home from Crete over 1,300 specimens. His search for plants took him and his party to remote mountain villages where strangers had never been seen before. ‘There is no nation on earth’, wrote Tournefort, ‘more friendly than the Greeks,’11 and the whole village would turn out to see them, inspecting and laughing at their dress, undergarments and hats. Tournefort was often asked to treat the sick, and usually prescribed one of the local plants, apart from an emetic for serious cases. Most of these patients were Greeks, but Tournefort was wary of treating Turks, especially if he expected to return to the village later, since he claimed to fear being bastinadoed if his cure did not work.
In fact, the Cretan villagers helped Tournefort more than he helped them. From them he learned the common names of over 500 plants, which he found were the same as those used by the ancient writers. ‘I regarded the brains of these poor Greeks as so many living inscriptions,’ he wrote, ‘which preserved for us the names used by Theophrastos and Dioscourides. Although subject to certain changes, these living inscriptions will certainly last longer than the hardest marble, because they are renewed every day while marble is defaced or destroyed.’12
Tournefort spoke favourably of both the Turks and the Greeks of Crete, as being well built, energetic, strong and honest. He praised the public order in the island and said there were no hooligans, pickpockets, beggars, murderers or highway robbers, since the penalty for theft was death for Turk or Greek. He castigated only the Greeks who had joined the occupiers, those who had converted to Islam who were less honest than the true Turks and unlike them insulted Christians, and the Greeks who had taken service with the Venetians in their remaining island outposts and captured Turks for ransom, burned and sacked houses, attacked people and committed every sort of cruelty.
The study of the religions of the countries he visited was also part of Tournefort’s task, and in two of his reports he described at length Greek Orthodoxy and the Islamic faith. He was critical of the Greek Church. Church offices were bought and sold, he reported, and the clergy at all levels were ignorant: ‘Do not ask them the reason for their faith, since they are very badly educated.’13 However, this ignorance was the result of the miseries of the original enslavement by the Turks, which had driven the best-educated Greeks abroad. Apart from the general venality and ignorance of the Church there were particular aspects that Tournefort condemned: priests trained at the monasteries of Mt Athos were dangerous knaves, nuns were mostly reformed prostitutes seeking an easy life, and there was nothing good to say of the excessive lamentations for the dead, by paid mourners whose apparent anguish was greater than that of those who wept naturally.
Tournefort examined religions rather as he examined his plants, looking at their external characteristics and determining what their use might be. Hence his attitude to religion was that of a worldly sceptic, reminiscent of Pascal’s famous wager published 30 years before: ‘God is, or he is not. Which option will you take? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in making your bet on the existence of God. If you win, you win the lot. If you lose, you lose nothing. So, without hesitation, bet on the existence of God.’14 Thus Tournefort saw the practice of religion as a matter of costs and benefits. He confessed, sardonically, that he would have made a very bad Greek because all their fasting made the price of salvation too high. He thought that the Greeks who converted to Islam sold their souls too cheaply, gaining only permission to wear Turkish dress and exemption from the poll tax, which was a mere five écus a year. And he believed Islam was the most seductive, and therefore the most dangerous, of all the false non-Christian religions, because it offered the same spiritual rewards as Christianity in the next world while allowing far more sensual pleasures in this one.
Tournefort might be elegantly detached about religious questions, but they continued to arouse strong feelings among the Greeks of Crete. Despite the loss of many Orthodox to Islam, the Greek Church was strengthened under the new Turkish regime. As early as 1647, when most of Crete was in Turkish hands and only Iráklion was holding out, the Turks had promised an Orthodox archbishop for Crete, and by 1659 there were twelve Orthodox bishops subordinate to him. Their jurisdiction covered the whole of Crete, though characteristically the Cretans in Sphakiá remained ruggedly independent. ‘Up to now’, wrote the archbishop of Crete in 1779, ‘the Christians of the Sphakiá district have remained unprovided for by the church, owing to the roughness of the terrain and the tough character of the people.’15 Furthermore, the churches converted to mosques were mainly the Catholic churches in Iráklion, those of St Francis, St Peter, St Titus and – especially humiliating for Venice – St Mark. One Catholic church, St Matthew, was bought for the Orthodox by Panayiótis, the Greek interpreter for the Turks in the negotiations for the surrender of Iráklion, and became the nucleus of the Orthodox community.
However, the Orthodox Church in Crete soon became a battleground of warring factions. Now that it was united with the patriarchy in Constantinople, it was obliged to pay patriarchal taxes, an obligation confirmed by the Turkish administration. These taxes were resented, and within a decade payment was in arrears. Two parties developed, for and against the patriarchy, and the latter initially won the day. In 1715 a firman from the Sultan decreed that the Cretan Orthodox Church should now be independent of the patriarchy, and that the archbishop should be a native Cretan chosen by the people and the influential citizens, not imposed by the patriarch in Constantinople. But the victory was short lived, as ten years later the firman was reversed and the Cretan Church again became subject to the patriarchy. The dissension continued, and it was only in 1735 that a satisfactory compromise was reached, with the appointment of an archbishop, Yerásimos, who was both an insider at the patriarchal court and a native Cretan. The Cretan Church was now firmly under the control of the patriarch, and as a pro-patriarchy Cretan poet wrote ‘Where there had been darkness, now there was light!’16
It was religion that determined the fate of many Cretans in the twentieth century. Unlike in Cyprus, there had been no mass importation to Crete of Turks from Anatolia. In part this was because the number of Cretan converts to Islam made it unnecessary, in part because it was impracticable, Crete being nearly 200 miles from the Turkish mainland as against 50 miles for Cyprus. But the Muslim element on Crete was ultimately removed in the 1923 exchange of populations on the basis of religion, throughout the Greek state, of which Crete was by then a part. Their places, and often their homes, were taken by refugee Christians moved from Turkey. In Crete there was strong mutual dislike at first between the indigenous Cretans and the new arrivals. As Michael Herzfeld puts it in his study of Réthimnon, ‘The refugees [from Turkey] lamented a fate that placed them among the rude peasants, while the rural Cretans called the refugees “Turks” – a clear acknowledgement that in some ways the newcomers were more alien than the [Cretan Muslims] who had departed.’17 The Muslim Cretans who had moved in the opposite direction, to a new life in Turkey, kept a strong bond with the land they had left behind, some warmly welcoming Christian visitors from Crete. Their painful nostalgia has persisted into the twenty-first century, as Bruce Clark found when researching his book on the population exchanges. An old lady who as a child lived in a village near Sitía in Crete says: ‘Of course we miss Crete, it was our homeland, and people always miss the place they left. My father had an orchard, growing olives and all kinds of fruit, so many fruit trees you could hardly get in there. It was a wonderful place.’ And an old man is full of a visit four years earlier to his Cretan home village, and says to a visiting Greek: ‘If you ever go to my home village, will you please, please tell them I’m sorry I didn’t thank them enough? Will you tell them I’m sorry I haven’t been back?’18
14
The Changing Ottoman Empire
In the sixteenth century the Ottoman Empire was at the height of its power and prestige. In 1516 Selim I added Syria to the empire and a year later Egypt
, conquests that also made him guardian of the Holy Places of Mecca and Medina, and were thus a triumph in both military and religious terms. His son and successor Suleyman, the Magnificent or the Lawgiver, who reigned from 1522 to 1566, took Belgrade, Rhodes and Baghdad, and annexed Hungary. The empire now stretched from the Barbary coast in the western Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean, and from the southern tip of Greece to within a few miles of Vienna. But by 1853 Tsar Nicholas I of Russia could famously describe the Turk as ‘un homme gravement malade’, and in 1923 the empire, which had been ruled throughout by an unbroken line of descendants of the thirteenth-century founder Osman, was replaced by Ataturk’s republic.
Historians have long debated what changed the Ottoman Empire in the three centuries between the glorious days of Suleyman and its description as the sick man of Europe. In particular, was it a process of decline – the traditional view – or was the empire adapting, with some success, to changed circumstances? One historian, Daniel Goffman, who himself argues for adaptation, puts the decline view with some force: ‘If defeats on the battlefield, ostensibly insane Sultans, scandals in the imperial household, threats from reactionaries, rebellions in the provinces, chronically mutinous janissaries, and widespread bribery were not symptoms of decay, then what were they?’1 Others see the decay idea as springing from a false analogy, mistakenly likening an empire to a living organism that makes a natural and inevitable progress from birth to maturity and then to deterioration and death. Another historian, Molly Greene, wearily describes the decline thesis as a meat-grinder, which converts all the facts into the homogenised elements of a single story rather than the distinct indicators of many different stories.
In the present context we are only partly concerned with whether the changes in the Ottoman Empire represent decline or adaptation, and with debating the exact period at which the changes began. Our main interest is in what changes actually occurred, and in the effect of these changes on the Greeks and on other non-Muslim subjects of the empire.
Broadly speaking, the changes can be seen in the power of the Ottoman military; in Ottoman administration; perhaps at a deeper level in Ottoman psychology; and very definitely in the Ottoman economy. Daniel Goffman’s list of Ottoman weaknesses is a good starting point.
There were certainly some military defeats, on both land and sea, though there is a ‘but’ attached to many of them. In 1565 the Ottomans failed, despite a long siege, to take Malta from the Knights of St John, although that was under Suleyman, when Ottoman power was thought to be at its height. In 1571 the Ottomans’ success in taking Cyprus was immediately followed by their disastrous defeat by a Holy League fleet at Lepanto; but the Ottoman fleet was quickly rebuilt, though quality may have been sacrificed to speed of construction. The Holy League triumph at Lepanto was short lived; its fleet was soon disbanded and Venice, one of the Lepanto victors, accepted a humiliating peace treaty with the Ottomans only two years later. In the eastern part of the Ottoman Empire Baghdad was lost in 1624, but only briefly, and was recovered in 1638. In 1669 the Ottomans were strong enough to capture Crete, albeit after a prolonged siege at Iráklion. In 1683 they besieged Vienna without success; but the earlier sieges by Suleyman in 1529 and 1532 had also been failures. So far the Ottoman military record was mixed, but far from being catastrophic.
However, as we have seen, the last years of the seventeenth century brought major Ottoman reverses. In 1684 a new Holy League in which Austria and Venice were dominant attacked the Ottoman provinces in Europe from both north and south. In the northern offensive the Austrians drove them out of Hungary and pushed on beyond Belgrade to Skopje. In the south Venice seized the Peloponnese and advanced as far as Évia. The conflict was ended by the 1699 Treaty of Karlowitz by which Hungary, Belgrade and territory south as far as Skopje were ceded to Austria and the Peloponnese to Venice. But even these losses were temporary; in 1715 the Ottomans drove the Venetians out of the Peloponnese, and in 1739 Austria ceded back to the Ottomans Belgrade and most of the territory acquired 40 years earlier under the Treaty of Karlowitz.
Nevertheless, Hungary was permanently lost to the Ottoman Empire. The war with Russia from 1768 to 1774 brought further losses. By the 1774 Treaty of Kutchuk-Kainardji, the most humiliating that the Ottomans ever signed, they gave up territory in today’s Romania and granted extensive navigation rights to Russia and to other vessels, including Greek merchant ships, which flew the Russian flag. The treaty also allowed Russia a right – vaguely worded but energetically used by Russia – to protect the Greeks and other Christians of the Ottoman Empire. Only now did the so-called Eastern Question begin to be asked: whether the Ottoman Empire would survive, and what would happen if it did not.
The problem for the Ottoman Empire was not so much that its forces were too weak on the battlefield but that they were too strong at home. The original army, dating back to the fourteenth century, had two main components. One was the cavalry, the timar-holders living off their estates, liable for military service when summoned, and obliged to bring with them a number of armed retainers. The number of timar-holders is first reliably reported in 1525, when there were 10,600 in the European provinces and 17,200 in Asia Minor and Syria. Even if only a third were available at any one time, bringing an average of five retainers, they would form a force of about 50,000 men.
The other main element was the janissary corps of infantry, initially drawn exclusively from devshirme conscription. Originally a few hundred men forming the Sultan’s personal bodyguard, their numbers were increased to about 10,000 by Mehmed the Conqueror and remained at that level until about 1550. But battlefield tactics were changing: battles were increasingly dominated by infantry using firearms rather than cavalry firing arrows or wielding swords, and the infantry fought from entrenched positions that cavalry could not easily overrun. So infantry became more important than cavalry, more janissaries were needed, and by 1600 their number had quadrupled to about 40,000. Janissary ranks were now open to volunteers and not restricted to recruits from the increasingly infrequent devshirme. Meanwhile the number of timar-holding cavalry was declining: they were less needed, and less effective, since comfortable landholders gave little thought to military preparedness, as the Venetians had discovered in their equivalent system in Crete. By the end of the seventeenth century the timars had been largely taken over by the treasury in Constantinople, and the rights to their revenues sold to tax farmers – in part to provide pay for the increased number of janissaries.
Almost from their inception the janissaries were a force to be reckoned with in the internal politics of the empire. It was largely due to the janissaries that in 1446 Mehmed II was deposed, to return to the throne five years later and win renown as the conqueror of Constantinople. Other Sultans were in effect deposed by the janissaries: Bayezid II in 1512, Osman II in 1622, and the mentally unstable Ibrahim I in 1648. In this last case at least the janissaries presented themselves as law-abiding guardians of the state who took care before acting to get approval from both the religious establishment and from Ibrahim’s mother, who was acting as regent for him.
However, it was often the more basic issue of pay that sparked a janissary revolt. Even the earliest, the deposition of Mehmed II in 1446, was in part due to the janissaries being paid in debased coinage. There was a revolt for the same reason in 1589, when it was said that the new coins issued to the janissaries were ‘as light as the leaves of the almond tree and as worthless as drops of dew’.2 While the state treasury tried to reduce the cost of paying the janissaries by debasing the coinage, the janissaries turned to other ways of making money. They took up civilian trades, which meant that they were unwilling to move when called on to fight. Their commanders inflated the payrolls by including janissaries’ children and janissaries long dead. It is remarkable that such a flawed system was still able to put such an effective army in the field.
It was not until the beginning of the nineteenth century that Selim III attempted a radical reform,
the establishment of an Army of the New Order to replace the janissaries. But the attempt met violent janissary opposition and was abandoned, those responsible losing their lives and Selim III losing his throne and ultimately his life as well. In 1826 the janissary corps was destroyed forever on a single June day of carnage in the capital’s At Meydan Square, an occasion known in Turkish history as the Auspicious Event.
There were indeed some ostensibly insane Sultans, or at least ones who were mentally unstable. Perhaps the most extreme example was Mustafa I, who reigned briefly from 1617 to 1618 and again from 1622 to 1623. As one Turkish chronicler records, he was in the habit as Sultan of ‘scattering the gold and silver coins with which he filled his pockets to the birds and to the fish in the sea and to paupers whom he met in the street’.3 Selim II (1566–74) was known as the Sot but it was in his reign that the Ottomans acquired Cyprus. The deranged Ibrahim I (1640–8) has already been mentioned, but it was under him that Crete, apart from Iráklion, was conquered.
Whatever the quality of the Sultans, the functioning of the Ottoman state largely depended upon the grand vizier. At some periods the office-holders alternated rapidly, the grand vizier being deposed and often executed at each setback. But a long period of stability began in the mid-seventeenth century under the remarkable Koprulu family. The first of these was Mehmed Koprulu, originally a devshirme conscript from Albania who served from 1656 to 1661, though already in his seventies when appointed. In 38 of the next 47 years the office was held by members of the Koprulu family – Mehmed’s son Ahmed (1661–76) who successfully concluded the long siege of Iráklion, another son, two sons-in-law, and two nephews. The one major gap in Koprulu tenure was from 1683 to 1689 when an anti-Koprulu faction secured the office, and it was no coincidence that those were the years when the Ottoman Empire lost Hungary and the provinces south of Belgrade.