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Greece - Ottoman Rule

When Constantinople fell in 1453, the Ottoman conquest of the Orthodox Balkans was assured. By that time, most of peninsular Greece was already in Ottoman hands. The other remaining bastions of Hellenism held out for a short time longer. The kingdom of Trabzon (Trebizond), at the southeast corner of the Black Sea, fell in 1461. During the sixteenth century, the Ottomans took Rhodes and Chios (Khios) in the Dodecanese Islands (Dodekanisos), Naxos in the Cyclades, and Cyprus. In 1669 the island of Crete capitulated after a lengthy siege. Only the Ionian Islands west of the Greek Peninsula remained outside the Ottoman sultan's grip; instead, they were part of Venice's expanding empire. The Greek world would remain an integral part of the Ottoman Empire until 1821, when one small portion broke away and formed an independent state. But a significant part of the Greek population would remain Ottoman until 1922.

Greece had been conquered, except a few forts which still remained to Venice. The Duchy of Athens, which had passed in the previous century to the Florentine merchant family of the Acciajoli, was won; the last Duke, Franco, surrendered the Acropolis to Omar son of Turakhan in 1456. When Mohammad visited the city, two years later, he was amazed at the beauty of its buildings and the handsome quays of the Piraeus, and cried: "Islam owes a debt to the son of Turakhan." Subsequently Franco was privately strangled, on account of a plot of some Athenians to restore him. But, on the whole, Athens had reason to be pleased with the change from the rule of Catholic princes to that of the unbelievers. The administration of justice and the collection of the tribute were assigned to local officers, and the only new burden was the tribute of children.

The Peloponnesus was misgoverned by the two brothers of the last Roman Emperor, Thomas and Demetrius, worthless and greedy despots, whose rule was worse than the worst Turkish tyranny. Thomas, notorious for his cruelty, resided at Patras, and oppressed the western part of the peninsula; Demetrius, distinguished by his luxury, ruled over the east, and his seat was in the rocky fortress of Mistra, at the foot of Mount Taygetus, three miles west of Sparta. The court officials, who were the ministers of their oppression, were detested throughout the land, which was further distracted by the hatred between the Greek inhabitants and the Albanian shepherds, who had come down and settled here in the previous century, after the fall of the Servian empire. The invasion of the Turks in 1452 had desolated the land and given the Albanian herds a wider range; the Greek peasants overcrowded the towns, and the most thriving traders began to emigrate.

The Ottoman state was a theocracy, based on strict notions of hierarchy and order, with the sultan exercising absolute, divineright power at its pinnacle. The system first divided subject peoples into the domain of the faithful, the Muslims, and the domain of war, the non-Muslims. An individual's obligations and rights were determined by position in one of these groups. Conversion by foreign subjects to Islam was possible, but the Ottomans did not demand it. Instead, further religion-based classifications were used to rule the subject population.

The non-Muslim community was divided into millets, administrative units organized on the basis of religious affiliation rather than ethnic origin. Accordingly, the four nonMuslim millets were Armenian, Catholic, Jewish, and Orthodox; the last was the largest and most influential. The millets enjoyed a fair amount of autonomy. At the head of each of was a religious leader responsible for the welfare of the millet and for its obedience to the sultan. The head of the Orthodox millet was the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople. The patriarch's position as ethnarch, or leader of the nation, also gave him substantial secular powers. This combination meant that the institution of the Orthodox Church played a vital role in the development of Greek society during the Ottoman era.

In practice, the extent of the empire made control dependent on a complex, decentralized administrative hierarchy. Living on their estates, designated local military leaders, the sipahi, assumed many of the responsibilities of local rule. Over time, the estates became hereditary and stopped serving their intended function. In Greek territory, this policy left massive landholdings controlled by the Ottoman Turks and worked by dependent Greek peasants.

As the sipahi system broke down, a form of provincial administration took its place. The empire was divided into regions that were governed by pashas, who in turn subdivided their realms into smaller units overseen by beys. The Orthodox millet included two types of local government. Ottoman officials and religious judges adjudicated civil and criminal cases involving Muslims and Orthodox citizens. Orthodox priests and Christian primates collected taxes, settled disputes, and effectively governed at the local level. At times the two systems competed, and at times they operated in coordination; the result was complexity, abuse, and cynicism. In this atmosphere, people sought security in direct patronage relationships with individuals in power.

The Ottoman system discriminated against the non-Muslim population by imposing special levies of money and labor, and various restrictions were placed on personal freedom. In court, testimony of a Muslim would always be accepted over that of a non-Muslim. Marriages between Muslims and non-Muslims were illegal. Most hated of all was the forced conscription of male children for service in military or civil service. The burden on the subject population became even heavier and more capricious when the empire began suffering military defeats by Russia in the eighteenth century.

Some parts of Greece were able to escape the direct effects of Ottoman rule. The remote mountains of central Greece, for example, were called the Agrapha, the "unwritten", because the empire had no census or tax records for the region. Other areas were granted special status because they filled particular needs of the empire. Beginning in the late seventeenth century, the Phanariotes, a group of Greek merchant families in Constantinople, gained bureaucratic power by serving the sultan as diplomats and interpreters. In the eighteenth century, the Phanariotes were appointed hospodars, or princes, of the Romanian provinces Moldavia and Wallachia.

The official role given the Orthodox Church in the millet system made its situation in Greek society paradoxical. On the one hand, it helped to keep the Greek language alive and used its traditional educational role to pass on the Greek cultural heritage and foster a sense of cultural identity. On the other hand, the Ottoman authorities expected the church to maintain order. The church became a very conservative institution that protected its role by isolating Greeks from the great intellectual currents of the West, first the Reformation and later the Enlightenment. Secular influences first touched Greek society not in Greece but in the communities of the diaspora.

As the feudal system crumbled, control over such a vast domain became increasingly problematic. Because a standing army would have been prohibitively expensive, non-Muslims were assigned as armatoliks, or armed guards, of specified areas and paid from local taxes. This system was abused flagrantly by independent groups of armed men, some with official sanction and some without, who roamed the countryside and abused the peasant population. Myths have turned the bandits into proto-revolutionaries, but to contemporaries in Greece and elsewhere, they were a force to be feared.

During the years of Ottoman domination, Greek speakers resettled over a wide area inside and outside the empire. Greeks moved in large numbers to Romania, along the coast of the Black Sea, and into all the major cities of the empire and became merchants and artisans. Over 80,000 Greek families, for example, moved into the territories of the Habsburg Empire. Thousands more settled in the cities of the Russian Empire. Commercial dealings between the Ottoman Empire and the outside world were increasingly monopolized by Greeks. Important merchant colonies were founded in Trieste, Venice, Livorno, Naples, and Marseilles. Amsterdam, Antwerp, London, Liverpool, and Paris also received sizeable Greek populations.

The diaspora communities played a vital role in the development of Greek culture during the Ottoman occupation. Greek enclaves in foreign cultures reinforced national identity while exposing their inhabitants to new intellectual currents, including the ideology of revolution. Many diaspora Greeks became wealthy then helped to support communities in Greece by founding schools and other public institutions.