by David Brewer
Over against God stands the Devil, the basic cause of evil. The Devil has corrupted with sins the good earth that God has created: ‘The Devil has the earth, God the Heavens.’15 For some sins a man is personally responsible: impiety, neglect or abuse of family and mistreatment of those outside the family. Other sins, inherited from Adam, are ancestral: sensuality and especially the envy that is inevitably present when resources are limited. These sins, being inherited, are not blameworthy, but a man shows his nobility by struggling against them as best he can.
The Devil takes many supernatural forms that can either lead into sin or inflict illness on men or animals. These include the nereids who appear as seductively beautiful maidens, the kallikántzari who are thieves, the koukoúdhi associated with the bubonic plague, and many others. These can be warded off by a variety of symbolic objects or rituals, some with links to the church. Among the objects are salt, fire, the red egg dyed at Easter or the head of a viper blessed by the church. The rituals include firing a gunshot with the left hand or a black-handled knife forming a cross with its scabbard.
The consistency and power of this belief system are clear. God is approached through the symbolic, the words of prayer and the rituals of the liturgy. Equally the Devil is fended off by incantations and symbolic acts. Even modern medicine cannot shake the system: a man may never have seen a nereid, but he has never seen a microbe either. Modern and traditional medicine are seen as simply different techniques for achieving the same result.
Furthermore, folk healing was useful in several important ways. It gave sufferers and their families something practical to do about the ailment, it provided a label for it, gave hope for a cure and information about the expected outcome. Folk healing methods could work by suggestion: if the wise woman tells you your headache will go as a result of her ministrations, it may very well do so. Or the treatment could simply be perceived to work: a sufferer from a short-term or intermittent illness goes to a folk healer and then recovers – but would have recovered anyway.
This reasoning, of course, has two major flaws. It assumes that if a treatment precedes a cure then the treatment causes the cure. Also it ignores discrepancies: if the treatment does not produce a cure it is assumed that there was something amiss in the treatment, so the system remains intact and can never be found to be mistaken. But as Richard and Eva Blum eloquently put it, ‘Rationality is a luxury. It can flourish only when protected and nourished; people who live in misery can hardly afford it; its magnificent edifice cannot be ordinarily sustained when there come those awful challenges of dire disease, social disorder, or the deprivation of love. In a sense then rationality can be sustained only by power: either the power of the individual to control events or the power to control himself.’16
It is often maintained that, during the centuries of foreign rule, by Turks and others, two things sustained the Greek people and linked them to the illustrious past of Byzantium and of ancient Greece. These are the Orthodox religion and the Greek language. Their defining role has been the exalted thesis of politicians, Church leaders and intellectuals. But we should not overlook a more humble third element, the beliefs and the practices of ordinary rural folk. Their view of the world sometimes overlapped with Church doctrine but was in the main independent of it. This other strand, central to the lives of so many, was an equally important element of Greek continuity.
16
Travellers to Greece
The earliest travellers to Greece were usually ambassadors or traders, and diplomacy and trade were closely linked. Later the interest turned to studying, and often removing, the antiquities of Greece. Throughout the period the travellers came mainly from France and Britain. France was involved in trading agreements and intermittent alliances with the Ottoman Empire, Britain was concerned mainly with trade, and both were interested in antiquities, prompted by learned societies or royal patronage. By contrast there were few travellers from Germany. Johann Winckelmann, famous for his books on the arts of ancient Greece, never set foot in the country, but relied on reports from a pupil and the study of reproductions in Italy.
Over the two centuries between the late sixteenth and the late eighteenth the travellers’ views of the Greeks swung from initial dismissal of them to eventual fervent support. At the beginning of the period the travellers often treated the Greeks with mockery bordering on contempt, but in time the Greeks were given increasing attention and some respect. Finally in 1770 the Orlov revolt, catastrophic failure though it was, raised the prospect of the liberation of Greece from the Turks and led to the wave of philhellenism that played no small part in the eventual achievement of Greek independence. The travellers’ accounts formed the views of Europe about Greece, but the process was two way: prevailing ideas in Europe influenced what the travellers expected to find, often at the cost of direct observation.
In the 150 years from the fall of Constantinople to around 1600 few travellers visited Greece. It was difficult to get to, dangerous to travel in and of little interest as a backward part of the Ottoman Empire. Greece then was about as attractive to visitors as, say, the remoter parts of China are today. Those who did visit any part of Greece generally did so with a specific purpose, but fortunately were also often interested in the Greeks and how they lived.
An example was the French naturalist Pierre Belon, whose account of his travels was published in 1553. He had read about the plants, animals and minerals of Greece in the ancient texts. ‘I am determined’, he wrote, ‘to go and see them in the place of their birth,’ and he was also keen to acquire any knowledge ‘worthy of being communicated to our nation’.1 This included his opinions on the Greeks, which were on the whole derogatory. He particularly deplored their lack of education: ‘All the Greeks in both [Turkish and Venetian] areas are in such an amazing state of ignorance that there is not a single city in the entire country that has a university and not a trace of pleasure in learning the arts and sciences.’ The monks of Mt Athos were no better: ‘Among the six thousand Caloyers, who live on the mountain in such a great multitude, one can scarcely find in each monastery two or three who know how to read and write. This is because the prelates and the patriarchs of the Greek church, enemies of philosophy, excommunicated all the priests and monks who possessed, wrote, or read books other than those of theology.’ But Belon approved of the girls of Chíos, as did many later travellers. ‘Their beauty, grace, and loving courteousness’, he wrote, ‘disarm all the visitors inclined to gallantry. Their appearance is such that one would judge them to be nymphs rather than mortal women or girls.’2
Some 50 years after Belon, Greece was visited by the Scotsman William Lithgow, whom we have already met debunking the myth of Arcadia. Born in Lanark about 1582 Lithgow left Scotland, probably in 1602, after some scandal over a girl at which he only obscurely hints. Between 1609 and 1621 he made three long journeys, the first to Greece, Constantinople and the Holy Land, the second to the Barbary states of north Africa, and the third to Spain, from where he planned to go on to Ethiopia but was imprisoned in Malaga as a spy and tortured, after which he returned to England. His full account of his travels after leaving Scotland was published in 1632 as The Totall Discourse of the Rare Adventures and Painefull Peregrinations of Long Nineteene Yeares Travayles.
Lithgow’s book had all the ingredients for popular success. On a practical level it was a useful travel guide, summarising the history of places he visited and telling the traveller exactly how much he would have to pay – in chickins (Venetian sequins) or Spanish pistolls (pistolets, a gold coin precursor of the peseta) – for a guide or for access to the Holy Places. His style of writing was quirky and oddly attractive. It was marked by fine fanciful phrasing of the kind made popular by John Lyly in his 1578 novel Euphues and so known as euphuism. Lithgow’s vocabulary too was individual: ‘scelerate’ or ‘ruvidous’ for ‘wicked’, ‘fatigated’ for fatigued and ‘dispopulosity’ for ‘under-population’. The book was further enhanced by Lithgow’s self-abasing dedica
tion of it to Charles I, in which he disingenuously claims that it is written ‘with a homely and familiar Stile, no ways fit for Sovereignty to peruse’.3
But the book’s main elements of popular appeal were perhaps sex and adventure. Lithgow was interested in all varieties of sexual activity, whether ‘venereal tilting’ as he called it, or sodomy, or what he describes as ‘a twofold kind of voluptuous abomination which my conscience commands me to conceale’.4 He also lists the number of brothels in large towns, though how he arrives at the numbers is not clear: over 40,000 in Constantinople, and 15,000, of which 3,000 were homosexual, in Fez.
Adventures are plentiful. They invariably present Lithgow in a heroic role, and sometimes strain credulity. He always travelled on foot (‘pedestriall I’), and was regularly attacked by robbers and murderers, from whom his quick-wittedness always saved him. In the deserts of Palestine Lithgow and his companions were lost at night without a compass, but Lithgow’s knowledge of the North Star put them on the right course. Off the Ionian islands Lithgow’s ship was attacked by a Tunisian pirate galley and the captain and the passengers were prepared to surrender, but it was Lithgow who took the lead, stiffening the captain’s resolve and getting the passengers to man the guns. The pirate was successfully fought off.
Lithgow maintained that the object of his travels was to pursue not any particular branch of knowledge but ‘the science of the world’, that is knowledge of how other people live which, he said, can only be acquired by travellers.5 It might be expected therefore that Lithgow would have much of interest to say about the Greeks, but one would be largely disappointed. He mentions the helpfulness of his Greek laundress on Crete, the kindness of the islanders of Síphnos, and praises the Cypriots as ‘of great civility, hospitality to their neighbours, and exceedingly affectionated to strangers’. He makes occasional political observations; the Cretans would prefer Turkish rule to Venetian, and ‘if Christian Princes could concord, and consult together, it were an easie thing in one yeare to subdue the Turkes, and roote out their very names from the earth.’6
The main reason for this paucity of comment was Lithgow’s bigotry. For him every category of people was already labelled. Catholics were bad, ‘Snaky Papists’ who ‘runne galloping post to Hell’, and Protestants were good. The Turks, he said, were courageous but never kept their promises and were addicted to sodomy, while the Egyptians were rude and barbarous. The Jews were naturally subtle, hateful and avaricious, and the Greeks ‘wholly degenerate from their Auncestors in valour, virtue and learning’.7 Such prejudice is rightly called blind, and it is paradoxical that later travellers, mainly concerned with their own branch of knowledge such as archaeology or botany, tell us more about the Greeks than Lithgow with his boast that he is studying the comprehensive science of the world.
In the time of Lithgow and Belon a low opinion of the Greeks was commonplace. One charge against them was that they were drunken and dissipated. This was partly due to the classical Latin writers, who were then much better known than those of ancient Greece. Thus the Latin verbs ‘graecari’ or ‘pergraecari’ meant to be like a Greek, dissipated and effeminate (Plautus and Horace). To drink in the Greek fashion, ‘Graeco more’, meant to drink a lot (Cicero). Belon’s contemporary Rabelais repeated this charge, calling the Greeks ‘buveurs eternelz’, though the persistence of the idea of the Greeks as drunkards may have been due simply to the popularity of Greek wines in Europe.
The other main charge against the Greeks was that they were cheats. This too was derived from the ancient Latin writers: ‘Graeciae mendacia’ (Pliny), ‘Greek faith’ meaning no faith at all (Plautus again), and in Virgil’s Aeneid, probably the best known Latin work during the Renaissance, the condemnation by the Trojan Aeneas of the Greeks’ deceitful use of the Trojan horse, and the poem’s most famous line about Greek gifts, ‘Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.’ St Paul reinforced this idea. Even a Cretan, he claimed, had said that all Cretans are liars, and he accused the Corinthians, and therefore it was assumed all Greeks, of an even wider range of moral failings, as fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, effeminates, thieves, drunkards and extortioners.8
By contrast the Turks were usually well regarded, in part because of another link to the Aeneid. The Turks (Turchi) were thought to be the descendants of the Trojans (Teucri in the Aeneid). Thus an English chaplain on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1506 wrote that ‘all the country of Troy is the Turk’s own country by inheritance, and that country is properly called now Turkey, and none other.’9 Mehmed the Conqueror, in a letter allegedly sent to the Pope, asked why the Italians, descendants of the Trojan Aeneas, were opposed to the Turks: ‘We are surprised that the Italians are against us, and we can hardly believe it. For we have a natural inclination to love them. They draw their origin from the Blood of Troy and have thence their original nobility and power. Now, we are the ancient heirs of that same blood and power, and our ancestors, who were the issue of the great king Priam and his line, have increased and improved them.’10
However, in the sixteenth century there were more up-to-date reasons for respecting the Turks, to be seen in the reports of Ogier de Busbecq, Habsburg ambassador to Constantinople between 1555 and 1560. The Turks were then regarded as invincible, a reputation not yet dented by their 1571 defeat at Lepanto. The Sultan, wrote Busbecq, ‘stands before us with all the terror inspired by his own successes and those of his ancestors. Like a thunderbolt he smites, shatters and destroys whatever stands in his way. He roars like a lion along our frontier seeking to break through.’11 But Busbecq was partly motivated by a wish to warn of the weaknesses of his own society: ‘On their side are the resources of a mighty empire: strength unimpaired, experience and practice in fighting, a veteran soldiery, habituation to victory, endurance of toil, unity, order, discipline, frugality and watchfulness. On our side is public poverty, private luxury, impaired strength, broken spirit, lack of endurance and training: the soldiers are insubordinate, the officers avaricious: there is contempt for discipline, licence, recklessness, drunkenness and debauchery are rife; and worst of all, the enemy is accustomed to victory and we to defeat.’12
Busbecq was one of the earliest ambassadors to the Sultan’s court. The first French ambassador, Jean de la Forêt, had been appointed in 1535, and a commercial treaty between France and the Ottoman Empire followed a year later. For England, by contrast, trade preceded diplomacy. In 1553 an Englishman, Anthony Jenkinson, was granted trading privileges throughout the Ottoman Empire. In 1580 the privileges were extended to all English traders, a year later Elizabeth I gave a royal charter to the Turkey (later Levant) Company, and in 1583 William Harborne became the first English ambassador to Constantinople. Diplomacy and trade were closely linked, and until the early nineteenth century the salaries of the English ambassadors, though they were representatives of the sovereign, were paid by the Levant Company.
Many of the early ambassadors saw little of Greece, perhaps only stopping briefly at some of the Aegean islands when sailing to Constantinople. It was often their chaplains who travelled more widely, such as Dr John Covel, chaplain to successive English ambassadors in the 1670s, who gave us an eyewitness account of the annual extraction of Lemnian earth. Covel also produced, at the request of three English bishops, a book entitled What Are the Sentiments of the Oriental Church of the Greek Orthodox. In Covel’s view these sentiments were pretty flexible: of certain Greek clerics who believed in the transubstantiation of the Eucharist bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ he wrote: ‘I make no doubt, but that for reward they would declare directly against it.’13
Those who visited Greece as agents of diplomacy or trade could expect some protection from the representatives of their home governments, but those who travelled for other reasons were on their own. They had to rely on letters of introduction to high-ranking Turkish officials and a janissary to accompany them. The letters usually prompted a friendly welcome and the janissaries warded off most attacks, but nevertheless the dangers were c
onsiderable. The travellers risked capture or robbery by raiders at sea, and attacks by brigands on land, especially in mainland Greece. Some fell sick and died. One Frenchman, Joachim Bocher, who discovered the temple of Apollo at Bassae in the Peloponnese, was murdered there in the 1670s, apparently for the silver buttons on his coat. Francis Vernon, travelling widely in Greece at the same period, was a polymath, an astronomer and mathematician who knew seven or eight languages, and has been credited with writing the best account of Greek antiquities up to that time. Vernon survived being twice captured by pirates, and was nearly shot, on suspicion of being a spy, while taking measurements of the Theatre of Dionysus below the Akropolis. But an English friend had often warned him that ‘he would come to some ill end with all his knowledge, if he did not learn to keep his temper. Mr Vernon was a man of admirable vivacity, but he was too cholerick.’14 The prediction was fulfilled, and Vernon was killed on his later travels to Persia, in a stupid quarrel with the locals over a penknife.
Vernon was a member of the first group of travellers to visit Greece and Asia Minor specifically to study ancient Greek monuments. The two leading members were Dr Jacob Spon, a French physician with a passion for antiquities, and George Wheler, an Englishman who had toured Europe with his Oxford tutor. They met in Rome in 1674, when Spon was 28 and Wheler 25. Wheler had recently inherited a large fortune and used it to pay for the expedition. They were briefly accompanied on the first part of their travels by Vernon and another English gentleman, Sir Giles Eastcourt, who also died abroad, succumbing to a sudden unidentified illness at Návpaktos in late 1675.