Chapter V: Turkish Greece (1)

1460-1684

From the second half of the fifteenth down to the close of the seventeenth century, a large portion of what now forms the kingdom of Greece formed an integral part of the Turkish Empire, and from the second part of the sixteenth century some of the Ionian Islands and a few of the Cyclades were alone exempt from the common lot of Hellas. Thus, for the first time since the Frank conquest, a dead level of uniformity, broken only by the privileges of certain communities, prevailed in place of the feudal principalities, whose fortunes occupied the annals of the previous two centuries and more. Greece, so often divided against herself, had found unity in the death of her independence; and the victorious Turks, like the conquering Romans, had obliterated the divisions and the liberties of the Greek States at the same moment. Once more the whole Greek world, with few exceptions, depended upon a foreign ruler, whose capital was at Constantinople, and whose officials, like those of the Byzantine Emperors, administered the affairs of his Greek subjects. There is, however, a considerable difference between the two periods into which the Turkish government of Greece was divided. During the first period, down to the Venetian conquest of the Morea, towards the close of the seventeenth century, Turkey was a flourishing and conquering Power—a danger to Europe, and a strong State. During the second period, from the Turkish re-conquest of the Morea down to the close of the War of Independence, Turkey was declining, slowly but surely, in all save the one art which she has never lost even in her political dotage, the art of fighting. For, like the Roman and the Briton, the Turk has ever been a good soldier, but, unlike those two great unintellectual peoples, many of whose qualities he shares, he has never been a good administrator; even when his arrangements have been excellent in theory, as they often are, they have frequently proved to be miserable in practice.

The political organisation of Greece under the Turks was indeed comparatively simple. Before the conquest of the Ægean Islands all their Greek dominions were comprised within the jurisdiction of the _beglerbeg_ (“lord of lords”) of Rumili, who resided at Sofia[651], and were divided into seven _sandjaks_, so called from the “flag” which was the emblem of each large territorial sub-division, and which recalled the essentially military character of all Turkish arrangements. These seven _sandjaks_, after the year 1470, when the capture of Eubœa rounded off the Greek conquests of Mohammed II, were Salonika, Negroponte, Trikkala, Lepanto, Karlili, Joannina, and the Morea. Negroponte included not only the island of Eubœa, but also Bœotia, and Attica. Its capital was Chalkis, and Athens, Thebes and Livadia, were among its principal cities. Karlili comprehended Ætolia and Akarnania, as well as Prevesa, and derived its name from Carlo II Tocco, whose dominions there had fallen to the Turks. The capital of the Morea fluctuated between Corinth, Leondari, and Mistra, down to 1540, when the capture of Nauplia from the Venetians made that place the residence of the Turkish Pasha. In 1574, when the conclusion of the war of Cyprus had practically extinguished Latin rule in the Levant, a different arrangement obtained. Salonika, Trikkala, Joannina, Patras and Mistra formed five _sandjaks_ under the _beglerbeg_ of Rumili; while the capitan pasha, in his capacity of _beglerbeg_ “of the sea,” ruled over the seven insular _sandjaks_ of Lemnos, Lesbos, Rhodes, Chios, the former Duchy of Naxos (except a few islands bestowed on the favourite Sultana), Santa Maura (with Prevesa), and Negroponte, besides the three maritime _sandjaks_ of Nauplia, Lepanto and Kavalla. And, after the conquest of Crete, three more _sandjaks_, named from Candia, Rethymno, and Canea, were carved out of “the great Greek island[652].”

Each _sandjak_ was in turn sub-divided into a number of _cazas_, or sub-districts, of which there were twenty-three in the Morea. It is now supposed that from 1470 to about 1610, Athens was the chief place of a _caza_ of the _sandjak_ of Negroponte. Just as each _sandjak_ was governed by a Pasha or _sandjak-beg_, so each _caza_ was administered by a lesser magnate known as a _voivode_ or _subashi_, who was assisted by a judge, or _cadi_.

True to the Turkish feuded system, which had been organised in Thessaly at the end of the fourteenth century, and extended to Akarnania and Ætolia on the fall of the Tocchi, Mohammed II distributed Central Greece and the Morea in fiefs to his veteran warriors. These fiefs were of two sorts: the larger fief, known as a _zaimet_, entailed upon the holder the obligation to provide fifteen horsemen; the smaller, called a _timar_, involved the equipment of only two[653]. The standard of the _sandjak-beg_ formed the rallying point of all these feudal chiefs and their horsemen in case of need. About the middle of the seventeenth century the whole area of the present Greek kingdom on the mainland, including Negroponte but without Macedonia and Thrace, was portioned out into 267 _zaimets_ and 1625 _timars_, so that they would represent a force of 7255 horsemen.

Crete, after its conquest, was similarly parcelled out into seventeen _zaimets_ and 2550 _timars_, which would produce 5355 cavalry. At first the timariot system was not in the nature of an hereditary aristocracy. The _timars_ were originally life-rents only, conferred for services rendered to the Sultan upon veteran warriors, who might be called upon to appear with their retainers at the call of their liege lord. In the golden age of Turkish administration—if such a phrase can be applied to any Turkish institution—the son of _timariot_ was entrusted with a large fief such as his sire had held only after he had proved his capacity as the holder of a small one. But, like all political systems, the Turkish began by making capacity the sole test of office, and ended by making office the reward of favourites. Gradually the _beglerbeg_ was allowed to bestow these fiefs, which had formerly been in the Sultan’s gift, and that official naturally rewarded his own creatures, just as a British Prime Minister, allowed by weak or preoccupied monarchs to dispense patronage at his will, bestows the honours of the peerage and the baronetage upon subservient, or perhaps recalcitrant, supporters. Thus, in the second half of the seventeenth century, it was the custom of Romania that, if a holder of a _zaimet_ or _timar_ died in the wars, his fief was divided into as many portions as he had sons, unless the rent was no more than 3000 aspers, in which case the whole went to the eldest son. But if the holder died in his bed, his lands fell to the _beglerbeg_, who could bestow them upon the dead man’s heirs, give them to any of his own servants, or sell them, as he pleased[654].

The Turks did not interfere with the Greek municipal system, which had existed for centuries before the Ottoman conquest. As far back as the Byzantine times we find that the Hellenic communities employed representatives, not necessarily drawn from their own members, at the Imperial Court at Constantinople. Thus, in the eleventh century, Michael Psellos represented the Ægean Islands at the capital[655]; but, in some cases, instead of having a permanent representative, whose functions may be compared with those of the agents-general of our self-governing colonies, a local deputation occasionally visited Constantinople to lay its grievances before the central authorities. In the Venetian island of Tenos a similar practice prevailed; there a committee was selected from among the primates to watch over the administration of the Venetian officials. The Turks, like the Romans, were quite willing that their Greek subjects should continue to enjoy local self-government. Accordingly, they allowed the communes to promote commerce and found schools, while Greek naturally continued to be the official language of the communal authorities. There was no hard and fast rule for their election, and no stereotyped title by which they were known all over Greece. But, generally speaking, every town and even every hamlet had its own Greek officials, elected by the Christian inhabitants, or by some portion of them, in a more or less indirect fashion, and variously styled “elders of the parish,” “elders,” _archontes_, “primates,” or, in Turkish, _khodja-bashis_. Thus, at a late period of the Ottoman domination, in the island of Psara the whole community met annually for the election of forty electors, who in turn elected four “elders of the parish”; at the same period, in the island of Spetsai, the five “primates” were elected annually by the ships’ captains and the well-to-do citizens; while Hydra, during a large part of the eighteenth century, was administered by its priests, with whom two laymen were associated. The Morea had certain special municipal privileges. It was permitted to send two or three “primates” to Constantinople, who were able to mitigate the exactions of the Turkish Pashas by the influence which they acquired during their stay there. Moreover, each province of the peninsula used to send two prominent Greeks once or twice a year to the seat of the Pasha to confer with him upon the affairs of the Morea. Sometimes, both there and in Thessaly, municipal office descended as a heritage from father to son, and too often the feuds, which continued to distinguish the Moreote _archontes_, descended, with their dignities, to their descendants. Their duties were to administer the local affairs of their communities, to act as arbitrators in civil cases, to levy local rates, to manage the local treasury, and to act as protectors and advisers of the oppressed. Sometimes they carried out this last duty without flinching, sometimes, however, their conduct earned them the name of “a kind of Christian Turks[656].”

Both the law of Islâm and the laws of human nature forbade the wholesale conversion of the conquered to the faith of the conquerors. But Mohammed II, who spoke Greek and knew the Greeks well, recognised, like the wise statesman that he was, the possibility of managing his Christian subjects through the medium of their own Church. The Turks were a foreign garrison in a hostile country, and in the middle of the fifteenth century it was quite possible that some Catholic power might undertake a new crusade for the deliverance of the East. The bitter hatred of the Eastern for the Western Church provided the astute Sultan with a powerful incentive for the toleration and even patronage of the Orthodox religion. He saw that, if he favoured the one branch of Christendom, he would prevent its union with the other, and he made a most politic selection of an instrument for the accomplishment of his plan. One of the strongest opponents of the union had been Georgios Scholarios, a man of great influence with the Orthodox and of equal unpopularity with the Catholics. As soon as Constantinople had fallen, the Sultan caused diligent search to be made for this uncompromising champion of Orthodoxy, and about the end of the same year gave orders for his election as Œcumenical Patriarch, according to the time-honoured forms which the Byzantine Empire had recognised for centuries. Gennadios II, as the new Patriarch was styled, was invited to a banquet by the Sultan, who showed him the greatest attention, and accompanied him as far as the courtyard of the palace, where he assisted him to mount his horse. A _berat_ of the Sultan determined the position, powers, and privileges of Gennadios and his successors. The Œcumenical Patriarch was declared to be “untaxable and irremovable,” and the document, of which only a summary has come down to us in the history of Phrantzes[657], is said to have prohibited the conversion of Christian churches into mosques. The loss of the original _berat_ is of less importance because subsequent rescripts modified these notable concessions, while in practice the privileges of the Patriarch came to be far less respected than in theory. To him was assigned the supreme administration of all churches and monasteries, the right of deposing archbishops and bishops, and the highest criminal jurisdiction over all the clergy. He decided all matrimonial questions, and other suits, in which the parties, being both Christians, preferred his judgment to that of the Turkish courts. He could levy dues for the needs of the Church on laity and clergy alike, and it was provided that existing ecclesiastical property should be respected, and that no Christian should be forced to embrace Islâm. But in these respects, as well as with regard to the fiscal exemption and irremovability of the Patriarch, the ecclesiastical history of the Greeks under the Turks shows us a gradual falling off from the original intentions of Mohammed II. A later _berat_ laid it down that the Patriarch could be deposed for one of three reasons—oppression of his flock, transgression of the ecclesiastical law, and treason towards his sovereign—elastic terms, capable of a wide interpretation. Mohammed II himself deposed the Patriarch Joseph I, for refusing to sanction the marriage of the widow of the last Duke of Athens with George Amoiroutses, the traitor who had been accused of handing over Trebizond to the Turks, and who had a wife still living. From the Turkish conquest to the present day 69 Patriarchs have been deposed, several more than once, 20 were thus removed in the seventeenth century, and the Sultans at times inflicted punishments on the Patriarchs, which recall the horrible mutilations of Byzantine times. From the moment of the conquest, Christian churches, beginning with St Sophia, were converted into mosques, and the seat of the Patriarchate, fixed by Mohammed II at the Church of the Holy Apostles, was successively moved, as church after church became a sacred place of Islâm, till it reached, in the beginning of the seventeenth century, its present home in the Phanar. All over Greece the same process went on, wherever the Mussulmans were numerous, and we have seen at Salonika, Livadia and Larissa buildings which have served first as churches and then as mosques. Certain dues, too, were fixed, which the Patriarch was expected to pay; and soon _bakshîsh_, the bane of Turkey, began to affect Patriarchal elections. This introduction of simony into the Greek Church was due to the intrigues of the Greeks themselves. After the fall of the empire of Trebizond in 1461 many of the Trapezuntine grandees sought careers at Constantinople. Among other posts they coveted that of the Patriarch, and as early as 1467 they conspired with that object against Markos II, the fourth successor of Gennadios[658]. They succeeded in securing his deposition and the election of one of their own party by promising that he would pay an annual sum of one thousand gold pieces and forego the allowance which his four predecessors had received from the government. The evil, thus soon introduced, spread apace. Two years later, an offer of double the sum paid by the Patriarch ensured his removal in favour of a wealthier candidate. Then the annual payment was raised to three thousand gold pieces, and large sums came to be spent in bribes to courtiers, eunuchs, janissaries and the female favourites of the Sultans, the money being ultimately raised out of the clergy and laity. Thus, the history of the Patriarchate resembles that of the mediæval Papacy in that the same means were employed to ensure an election. After the Reformation, Jesuits and Protestants, each anxious to have at the head of the Greek Church a man favourable to themselves, joined in the bidding, and between the years 1623 and 1700 there were about fifty Patriarchal elections, most of them won by bribery. The debts of the Patriarchate became enormous, as a consequence of this almost constant expenditure, and the necessity thus imposed upon the Patriarch of selling all the chief ecclesiastical offices in his gift was one of the main causes which made the Greek Church so unpopular in many parts of Turkey, where the population belonged to another race than the Hellenic. The history of Roumania abounds with examples of the exactions of Greek bishops, who sought to make the wretched people make up to them what they had spent on the purchase of their sees.

Another cause tended, in course of time, to make the Turkish Government less careful of the Patriarch’s privileges and dignities. He had been regarded by Mohammed II as a bulwark against the Catholic powers; but, a century after the fall of Constantinople, Rome, distracted by the Protestant secession, had become far less dangerous, and Venice had lost her last possessions in the Morea, while in the seventeenth century Spain was no longer an enemy to be feared. Moreover, France, the “eldest daughter of the Church,” and the patroness of the Jesuits, had become the ally of Turkey, and supported her _protégés_, who first appeared at Constantinople in 1609, against the Œcumenical Patriarch. Thus, finding himself in little danger from a disunited Europe and an impotent Papacy, the Sultan could afford to modify his attitude towards the head of the Greek Church. After 1657, the Patriarch ceased to be installed by the Sultan in person, who was thenceforth represented by the Grand Vizier, and further restrictions were soon placed upon the honours paid to him. Still, the Œcumenical Patriarch enjoyed, throughout the Turkish domination, a great ecclesiastical and political position, such as some of his predecessors had not held under the Byzantine Empire, such as his successors have never held since the Church in Greece became autocephalous, and the Bulgarian Church became independent. In the Turkish days, he was the spiritual, and in many respects the political, head, not only of the Greek subjects of the Sultan, but of all the Orthodox Christians within his dominions, Bulgarians, Serbs[659], Albanians, and Armenians of the Orthodox rite, who, as well as Greeks, were all collectively described as _Romaîoi_—for in those days religion and not race was the mark by which Ottoman subjects were distinguished. Moreover, he was not only the accredited representative of the Orthodox with the Porte, but he was also the ecclesiastical superior of all the Orthodox communities in the Venetian dominions, and he was therefore permitted to correspond with all those foreign powers which had subjects of that religion. Thus, so long as Venice was a Levantine State, she had continual relations with the Patriarch, and the Venetian bailie at Constantinople conducted diplomatic business with him, no less than with the Turkish government. Mohammed II, in the treaty which he concluded with Venice in the year after the capture of Constantinople, specially provided for the preservation to the Patriarch of all the revenues which his predecessors had received from the Orthodox. We frequently find the Patriarchs intervening with the Venetians on behalf of the Orthodox inhabitants of the Venetian colonies, sometimes urging the claims of the Greeks of Koron, Modon and Crete, sometimes successfully deprecating the adoption of the Gregorian Calendar in the Venetian possessions, and in one case rebuking the Orthodox Cretans for their persecution of the Jews. Nothing more clearly proves the peculiar position of the Patriarch as the head of an _imperium in imperio_, than the fact that the Turkish government conducted its business with him through the medium of the _Reis-effendi_, or Minister for foreign affairs. Not without reason did men address so powerful a personage as “master” and even “king.” We might, indeed, compare his situation with that of the Pope since 1870. Like the Pope, he had no territory, but his ecclesiastical sway ranged over and beyond the dominions of the sovereign, in whose capital his seat was fixed. Like the Pope, he negotiated with diplomatists, corresponded with foreign governments, and combined, or identified, politics and religion. And, like the Pope, he at times intrigued against the monarch who had ensured him the secure exercise of his privileges within his dominions.

Although the Koran forbade the forcible conversion of the Christians, there were various causes which swelled the ranks of Islâm. The Turks, being but a small body of men compared with the great numbers of the Christians, early saw that they could neither preserve nor extend their conquests without the aid of the latter. Accordingly, just as some Christian rulers of the East had enlisted young Turks to fight their battles, so the Sultan Orchan, more than a century before the capture of Constantinople, founded the terrible institution of the Janissaries, a corps entirely recruited from that time till the middle of the sixteenth century from Christian children who embraced the faith of the sovereign. At the outset the numbers of these children were not less than one thousand a year, and they were taken at the tender age of six or seven years at the most; but later on, perhaps in the reign of Mohammed II, a regular levy of children was ordered to be made throughout all the subject provinces of Turkey, with a few favoured exceptions. This tribute of Christian children, or παιδομάζωμα, as the Greeks called it, was subsequently erected into a complete system, and became one of the greatest engines of conversion. Every five years, or even oftener, for the tribute came at last to be levied annually, an officer of the Janissaries would descend with a clerk upon each district, and demand from the head man of the place a list of all the Christian families. Every Christian father was compelled to make a declaration of the number of his sons and to present them for inspection. At first, only one boy out of every five and only one out of every family were taken. Then no proportion was observed, but the government took as many children as it wanted, always selecting the strongest, and not even sparing the only son of a family. The age, too, was raised to ten, fifteen, and even more years. We can easily imagine the misery inflicted upon the unhappy parents by a system which recalled the fabled tribute paid by the Athenians to the Minotaur. We are told by an eye-witness that mothers sometimes prayed God to strike their sons dead in order to save them from enlistment. Others, in order to evade the law, would marry their children at nine years of age; but the authorities soon disregarded these infantile unions, and marriage was no excuse in the eyes of an arbitrary official. There were only two ways of avoiding the payment of this hideous blood-tax—bribery or flight into one of the Venetian colonies, and the latter means of escape became more difficult when Venice lost her last possessions on the mainland. It might have been thought that this tax would have been more likely to cause a rising. Yet in the long list of insurrections against the Turks we can recall one only, that of 1565, which is specially ascribed to this reason, and that was an Albanian and not a Greek agitation[660]. Moreover, as time went on, and the Janissaries became more pampered and more powerful, it was esteemed by many a blessing rather than a curse that their sons should serve in the corps. The Venetian bailie at Constantinople in the middle of the sixteenth century expressly says that the tribute of children had by that time come to be regarded as a special favour enjoyed by the Christians, who were thus able to provide their sons with an easy and comfortable profession! We even hear of Mussulman parents so anxious to share in this singular privilege that they lent their children to the Christians so that they might be enrolled as such among the Janissaries. But the loss to Hellenism and to Christianity through the tribute of children was enormous. If we remember that for two centuries the Janissaries were exclusively recruited from the Christians, and that the latter were chiefly to be found in European Turkey, and if we take into consideration that the tribute children were not only the strongest members of their respective families, but were also prohibited by the original constitution of the corps from marrying, for the Janissaries, like the Zulu army of Cetewayo, were a celibate body, we may form some idea of what a drain the παιδομάζωμα was upon the actual and possible resources of Eastern Christianity. A modern Greek historian[661] estimates at about a million the number of Christian children taken to serve in the corps during the first two centuries of its existence. At last, however, it fell into disuse, and in the seventeenth century ceased to exist. A variety of causes contributed to the decline of an institution which had so greatly strengthened the Turkish army at the expense of the Christian population. From the time when the Janissaries were allowed to marry, they naturally desired to have their own children taken into the corps, while others obtained admission to its privileges by bribery. On the other hand, the Sultans came to regard the Janissaries as dangerous to themselves, much as the Roman Emperors had found the Prætorians to be, and were thus less anxious to have the corps recruited. The number of conversions to Islâm had also narrowed the area of enlistment from among the Christians; and Rycaut, writing shortly after the custom had fallen into disuse, mentions the corruption of the officers and the carelessness in their discipline as the cause of its decay. Accordingly we last hear of the tribute being levied in 1676, though an isolated case is mentioned as late as 1703[662].

Besides the tribute of Christian children, there was a further reason for the conversion of the Greeks in the honours offered to those who apostatised. When the Turks found themselves masters of a great European Empire, they had neither the financial nor the diplomatic skill requisite for conducting it. The Turkish method of keeping accounts was cumbrous, the Turkish language is extremely difficult to write, and the Turks resembled the British in their absolute ignorance of foreign tongues, while treaties and diplomatic correspondence continued to be composed in Greek. But empires are not won by linguists but by men of character, who are easily able to find subtle intellects to do their office work for them. The precise qualities which the Turks lacked the Greeks possessed, and Mohammed II saw at once how useful the versatile talents of his new subjects would be in the administration of his dominions. But there was this difficulty, that nearly all the best educated Greeks had fled abroad after the fall of the Byzantine Empire, and it was owing to this reason that, during the two first centuries of the Turkish rule, the Greeks did not, as a rule, rise higher in the Turkish service than a clerkship in the Treasury or the Foreign Office. There was, however, even at that period, one notable exception, the office of Grand Vizier. Of the five Grand Viziers of Mohammed II, two were Greeks, the former of whom, Mahmûd Pasha, was the first Christian to hold that great position. Under Bayezid II we find two more Greeks as Grand Viziers. Suleyman the Magnificent gave that post to two others, and later on one Grand Vizier was the son of a Greek priest; while the terrible Barbarossa, the scourge of the Christians at sea, was of Greek origin. By the middle of the sixteenth century the Venetian bailie at Constantinople could write that the great places in the Sultan’s service usually fell to the Christians, and the Turks complained that the children of the poor _rayah_ were put over their heads.

But for a long time these mundane advantages could only be obtained by apostasy, and thus the lukewarm Christian had strong incentives to turn Mussulman. But in Greece there were fewer conversions than among the Slavs of Bosnia and the Herzegovina; and when, about the middle of the seventeenth century, the Turkish Government relaxed the strictness of its policy, and abolished religious tests for certain important offices of state, the Greeks were able to gratify a laudable ambition without abandoning the religion of their fathers. By that time education had revived among the Greeks of the capital, so that the lack of qualified Hellenes, which had been felt so acutely immediately after the conquest, no longer existed. It was then that, for the first time, a Greek was appointed Grand Dragoman of the Porte in the person of Panagiotes Nikouses, who conducted the negotiations for the surrender of Candia on behalf of the Turks. From the close of that century down to the War of Independence most of his successors in that post were Greeks[663]. Similarly, the position of Dragoman of the Fleet was usually held by a Greek, and the island of Paros has still many monuments of the family of Mavrogenes, two of whose members conducted the naval negotiations of the Capitan Pasha. One of them, Nicholas Mavrogenes, rose from that rank to be Prince of Wallachia; and it is scarcely necessary to remind those who have studied Roumanian history, that in the eighteenth and the first part of the nineteenth century the two thrones of Moldavia and Wallachia were occupied by Greeks, and the two Danubian principalities were regarded as the happy hunting-ground of the Phanariotes of Constantinople. There was even an idea of erecting the Morea into a Christian principality on similar lines; and, though this was never carried out, the Morea was entrusted to a native governor. But the advancement of the Greeks in the Turkish service, though always beneficial to the individuals concerned and sometimes to their employers, was of doubtful value to the Greek national cause. When their private and racial interests clashed, the Greek officials almost always sacrificed the latter, and, indeed, it would have been an Utopian idea to expect the virtues of heroes and saints from the descendants of men who for centuries had been under foreign domination. It is easy for English historians, belonging to a race which has never known what an alien yoke implies, to demand impossible qualities from a down-trodden people, and we are fond of trying foreign nations by an ideal standard—which fortunately we never apply to our own public affairs. But, after all allowances have been made, it must be confessed that some of the worst blows to Hellenism, such as the loss of Eubœa and that of Crete, were dealt by the Greeks themselves, just as the Bosnian, Cretan and Albanian apostates have ever been the bitterest enemies of the Christians, and the warmest supporters of Turkish rule, so long as it permitted them to tyrannise over their own fellow-countrymen. In other words, religion replaced all racial sympathies, and a Mussulman Slav or Cretan was first a Mussulman and then a Slav or Cretan. Even in our own time, at the crisis of the Greco-Turkish war of 1897, a Greek was trying to counteract Greek interests in the capacity of Turkish ambassador in London; and the show statesmen of the Porte, whose virtues and culture are always exhibited for the edification of Europe, are invariably Greeks. Samos, too, with its Greek prince, was, till 1912, an interesting survival of the former practice of sending Greeks to rule beyond the Danube in the interest of the Sultan.

On two occasions, under Selim II, in 1514, and in the early days of the Candian war, in 1646, it was actually proposed to exterminate all the Christians of Turkey. But wiser counsels happily prevailed; and towards the close of the seventeenth century, as we saw, the policy of the Turkish government was to preserve, rather than further diminish, the numbers of its Christian taxpayers. By that time fears were felt lest the Christians should continue to dwindle away, and a taxable infidel seemed a more valuable asset than a less remunerative believer in the true faith of Islâm. Accordingly, in 1691, a first serious attempt was made to secure the Christians against exactions by the _Nizam-djedid_[664], or “new system,” which commanded the provincial governors to levy no other impost than the _haratch_, or “capitation-tax,” from them. Originally, the only fiscal disadvantages of the Christians, besides the blood-tax of their children, had been this _haratch_, which was payable by all unbelievers over the age of ten years, except priests, old men, and the blind, the maimed, and the paralytic. A Christian had also to pay on all imports and exports twice the duty levied upon a Mussulman. But, as is still the case in Turkey, the hardships of taxation arose not so much from its legal amount as from its illegal collection. Thus, in 1571, we hear of the incredible extortions suffered by the Christian subjects of the Sultan, who were mostly so deeply sunk in poverty and misery that they scarce durst look a Turk in the face, and who only cultivated their lands sufficiently for their own wants and for the payment of _haratch_, knowing that the Turks would seize any surplus that was over[665]. However, the _Nizam-djedid_ represented, like the abolition of the tribute of children, a new and humaner policy, which resulted in the diminution of apostasy. From that time onward the Greeks had less temptation to become Mohammedans; the Venetian occupation of the Morea in the early part of the eighteenth century had the double effect of causing many re-conversions to Christianity, and of forcing the Turks to treat their Greek subjects better, from fear of comparisons; while, a little later, the Russian claims to a protectorate over the Eastern Christians further checked the movement towards Mohammedanism.

But it was not only in the numbers, but also in the quality of their population, that the Greek provinces of Turkey suffered from the effects of the Turkish conquest. Almost all the men of learning, nearly all the chief families, in short the intellectual and political leaders of the people, went into exile immediately after the fall of the Byzantine Empire. Mohammed II did, indeed, address a proclamation in Greek to the principal _archontes_ of the Morea, in which he promised to respect their families and property and make them more prosperous than before[666]; but his promises had little effect in checking the general exodus of the great Moreote families. So universal was their emigration, that only four or five of the Peloponnesian clans, which had played the prominent part during the mediæval period, remained behind, and there were similar wholesale emigrations from continental Greece and Eubœa. As the leading men all went with their relatives and followers, the drain upon the Greek population was as serious a danger to the nation as the emigration of the Peloponnesian peasants to America, which has lately been robbing the land of its cultivators and causing widespread alarm in the Greek press. Most of the exiles went, as was natural, to the Venetian possessions in Greece, which thus became what in earlier times the Despotat of Mistra had been to the Franks—a thorn in the side of the Turkish conqueror. Thus, Michael Ralles, one of the most prominent of Spartan _archontes_, and the protagonist of the first Turco-Venetian war after the conquest, and the brothers Daimonoyannai, belonging to the great family of that name at Monemvasia, sought homes in the colonies of the Republic in the Morea; thus, too, Graitzas Palaiologos, the last defender of the peninsula, entered the Venetian service. Other Greek leaders accompanied Sophia, daughter of Thomas Palaiologos, the last Despot of the Morea, on her marriage with the Grand Duke Ivan of Russia, and the Russian Court soon became another favourite resort of the Peloponnesian magnates who had known her father, and whose descendants were recruited three centuries later by a further band of Greek refugees after the abortive rising in the Morea[667]. Many Greeks, anxious to fight against the foes of their own, or even those of their adopted country, became of their own free will Venetian light horsemen, or _Stradioti_, just as others were forced to enlist in the ranks of the Turkish Janissaries. The researches of a learned Greek historian have thrown a flood of light upon the constitution and exploits of that remarkable body of soldiers[668]. The name by which they were known is not derived from the Greek word στρατιῶται (“soldiers”) but from the Italian, _strada_, and signified that those who bore it were “always on the road”—wanderers, who had no fixed abodes. Composed of Greeks and Albanians, the corps was entirely recruited from the Morea, and mainly from Laconia, but the most valiant were the men of Nauplia. Among their leaders we find many historic Moreote names, such as those of Boua and Palaiologos, whose bearers were descendants or relatives of the men who had fought the good fight for the liberty of the Peloponnese. The sixteenth century was the golden age of the _Stradioti_, who demonstrated all over Europe that Greek valour was not extinct. One of them was even in the service of our Henry VIII, fighting in Scotland and acting as governor of Boulogne, at that time an English fortress. But they had their weaknesses, as well as their good qualities, and their inordinate vanity was the favourite theme of Venetian comedians, just as Plautus had satirised the boastfulness of the _Miles Gloriosus_ for the amusement of the ancient Romans. Tasso has blamed their rapacity in the line:

Il leggier Greco alle rapine intento,

but other poets have sung of their triumphs. Indeed, there were bards in the ranks of the “wanderers” themselves, and a whole literature of their poems has been published, mostly written in a peculiar dialect resembling that now spoken in Calabria, where many Greek songs are still sung by the descendants of the numerous Epeirote families settled there after the Turkish conquest—the third time that Magna Græcia had received a large Greek population. One of their number, Marullus, of whom it was said that he “first united Apollo to Mars,” wrote Latin alcaics and sapphics, which, if not exactly Horatian, are, at any rate, as good as the ordinary product of the sixth-form intellect. Another, Theodore Spandounis, or Spandugino, more usefully employed his pen in the composition of a work on the Origin of the Ottoman Emperors, with the patriotic object of arousing the sympathy of sixteenth-century statesmen for the deliverance of Greece. The _Stradioti_, were, however, mightier with the javelin and the mace—their characteristic weapons—than with the pen. The long javelin, which they carried on horseback, was a particularly formidable weapon. Shod at both ends with a sharp iron point, it could be used either way with equally deadly effect; and if it failed, the agile horseman could seize the mace which hung at his saddle bow, and bring it down on the skull of an opponent. Unfortunately, the blow was rarely struck for Greece, and the skull was usually that of a Christian, against whom the _Stradioti_ had no personal or national quarrel.

But Greece was deprived of her literary as well as her military men by the Turkish conquest. For almost the first time in her long history, all traces of learning vanished from the home of the Muses. Most of the scholarly Greeks of that age emigrated to Italy, and, just as, in the words of Horace, “Captive Greece led her victors captive,” after her subjugation by the unlettered Romans, so, sixteen centuries later, she once more spread the light of Hellenic studies in the darkest West. Thus, the Athenian, Demetrios Chalkokondyles, became the tutor of one of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s sons at Florence, while the Spartan, George Hermonymos, was the first Greek who publicly taught that language in Paris. Two other Moreotes, Demetrios Ralles, a soldier and scholar, and Isidore, who had distinguished himself alike in theology and in the defence of Constantinople, spent the rest of their lives in Italy, while the historian Phrantzes wrote his history and died in peace at Corfù under the Venetian protection. We owe much of our modern culture to this fifteenth-century dispersion of the learned Greeks; but the gain of Europe was the loss of Greece. It required the lapse of two whole centuries to make up in the least degree the deficiencies in Greek education, which the departure of all these men of light and leading caused; and if they strove to interest European courts and scholars in the fortunes of their abandoned country, that was of small practical advantage compared with the loss which they inflicted upon it. Had they remained in Greece, their influence would soon have made itself felt; they would have obtained posts in the Turkish service, which might have enabled them to improve the condition of their fellow-countrymen, and their example would have prevented the complete spread of ignorance over large parts of Greece during the first two centuries after the conquest.

The flight of these two classes—the _archontes_ and the men of letters—made the provincial landowners, the peasants, and the parish priests, who mostly sprang from the ranks of the latter, the sole representatives of the Greek nation[669]. But, though Hellenism has never suffered such enormous losses as during the Turkish period, owing to conversions to Islâm and emigration to the West, there never was any time in the history of Greece under alien dominion when the Greek race remained so pure as between the Turkish conquest and the War of Independence. There can be no doubt that, after the long era of confusion and disorder which had followed the break-up of the Frankish power in Greece, even the Turkish, or any other strong Government—and at that time Turkey was strong and the Sultans could govern—must have proved a benefit to the great mass of the population. Moreover, from the date of the Turkish conquest the immigrations of the foreign elements, which had occurred so often during the Byzantine and Frankish period, ceased, and for nearly four centuries the Hellenic race was uncontaminated by alien blood. The Franks left behind them few survivors, except in the islands, and there were no Slavonic raids, while the Greeks, who remained true to their faith, never intermarried with the Turks, for a Greek woman who became the wife of a Mussulman was excommunicated. The two religions remained absolutely apart, and, under Turkish rule, for the first time for centuries, perhaps also for the last, there was no racial rivalry between the Christians of the Near East. Union reigned between Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs, Albanians and Roumanians; and the doctrine of nationalities, nowadays the keynote of Balkan politics, had no influence under the Turkish system of that period, which treated all Christians of whatever race as the inferiors of all Mussulmans, whether of Turkish, Slavonic, Albanian or Greek extraction.

Education was scanty enough in the Venetian possessions, as we saw in the case of Corfù; but it was much worse in Turkish Greece. For two hundred years after the conquest there was practically nothing done for the instruction of those Greeks who remained under the Turks, and even archbishops could with difficulty write their own names correctly. Larissa in Thessaly was then one of the wealthiest of Greek sees; yet a Greek scholar, who examined the archiepiscopal records during the Turkish period, found them a mass of bad grammar and remarkable spelling. As for literature, though Sathas has compiled a work on the Greek authors of the long period between the capture of Constantinople and the War of Independence, only four of them, with the exception of a few theological writers, came from Greece proper. Two of these four were the brothers Laonikos and Demetrios Chalkokondyles, of Athens, the former of whom wrote his history of the Turks in Italy, while the latter composed his critical editions of Homer, Isokrates and Suidas at Milan, where his monument may be seen in the church of Sta Maria della Passione. The remaining two were born and bred in Nauplia, at that time Venetian. One, Zygomalas, composed a _Political History of Constantinople from 1391 to 1578_; the other, Malaxos, produced a vernacular version of the _Patriarchal History_ of the same city, where both resided for a great part of their lives. Another historical work, the _Chronicle_ of Dorotheos, Metropolitan of Monemvasia, was written in Moldavia. It originally contained the history of the world from the creation down to the year 1629, but was subsequently extended to 1685, and for two hundred years after its publication was “the only historical text-book used by the Greek people.” At last, towards the middle of the seventeenth century, an educational revival began in Greece, which derived its origin from the _Flangineion_, or Greek school founded by the Corfiote, Flangines, at Venice, in 1626, and still existing. The Hellenic community in that city, largely composed of business men, interested—as the Greek merchants of London, Manchester and Alexandria still are in the intellectual, moral and material welfare of their fatherland, sent out educational missionaries, who spread the gospel of learning in the home of their race. One of these Greeks of Venice, a native of Joannina, founded in 1647, two schools, one in his native town[670], another at Athens, where the Catholic monks also taught the young Athenians about the same period.

It must not be supposed that the Greeks acquiesced patiently in the Turkish domination for more than three centuries. The long rule of the Franks had had the effect of making the natives far more warlike than they had been before the Latin conquest; but the conviction of the overwhelming power of the Turks rendered them reluctant to rise, except when they were sure of foreign aid. During the first few years which followed the capture of Constantinople it seemed, indeed, as if such assistance would be speedily forthcoming. The East expected, and the West meditated, a new crusade against the Infidel. A Greek poet appealed to “French and English, Spaniards and Germans,” to make common cause for the recovery of Constantinople[671]. The many learned Greeks who had been scattered all over western Europe by the loss of that city endeavoured to interest the rulers of Christendom in the fate of their fellow-countrymen. Prominent among these missionaries of Hellenism was the famous Cardinal Bessarion of Trebizond, who was twice regarded as a likely candidate for the Papacy, and who travelled across Europe with untiring zeal on behalf of the conquered Greeks. The Popes of that period—men, for the most part, of learning and statesmanlike views—warmly supported the plan, and Pius II set out to Ancona, where the crusaders were to assemble. But his death at that seaport caused the collapse of the proposed expedition, and the crusade, for which such great preparations had been made, ended in a fiasco.

For 80 years after the Turkish conquest Venice continued to keep a foothold in the Morea, and consequently Greece became from time to time the scene of Turco-Venetian wars, for the Sultans naturally desired to round off their Greek territories by the acquisition of the remaining Venetian colonies upon Greek soil. The first of these wars, lasting, more or less continuously, from 1463 to 1479, led to the temporary capture of the lower town of Athens by Vettor Capello in 1466—the second occasion on which that famous city had fallen into Venetian hands. It is characteristic of Turkish toleration, that at that time the heretics, known as the _fraticelli della mala opinione_, whom in that very year Pope Paul II was persecuting and imprisoning in the castle of Sant’ Angelo[672] and whose church may still be seen on Monte Sant’ Angelo between Poli and Casape in the Roman Campagna, were living quietly at Athens. For more than a century Athens disappeared from the notice of the western world, but a Greek chronicle in the library of Lincoln College, Oxford, informs us that seven severe plagues afflicted the city between 1480 and 1554, and that the aqueduct was begun in 1506. We know, too, of the existence of three Metropolitans of Athens during the first century of Turkish rule, and somewhat later an Athenian became Œcumenical Patriarch. But the honour of having momentarily re-occupied Athens was far outweighed in the minds of the practical Venetians by the definite loss of Argos and Negroponte during this war, while the Greeks had been the chief sufferers whichever side was victorious. The next Turco-Venetian war, which began in 1499 and was closed by the treaty of 1502-3, yet further diminished the colonies of Venice, involving the loss of Lepanto, her last outpost on the mainland north of the Isthmus, and of Modon, Koron and Navarino, in the Morea, where Nauplia and Monemvasia, with the castles depending upon them, alone remained. The thirty years’ peace which followed enabled Greece to recover somewhat from the ravages of the late struggle, while patriotic Greek exiles, like Markos Mousouros and Joannes Laskaris in vain tried to interest the powers in a fresh crusade for their deliverance. Charles V was not the man to liberate Greece for the sake of those ancient heroes and sages, whose names Laskaris invoked in an eloquent speech, and when, in 1532, war broke out between him and the Sultan, he showed more anxiety to damage the Turks than to benefit the Greeks, who paid dearly for the triumphs of the Genoese admiral, Andrea Doria. The re-capture of Koron (like that of Modon by the Knights of St John in the previous year) merely led to its abandonment and the compulsory emigration of its unwilling inhabitants to Sicily and Naples. Then, in 1537, came the Turco-Venetian war, which was destined to cost the Republic Ægina, Mykonos, the Northern Sporades and her last surviving colonies in the Morea. For nearly 150 years after the disastrous peace of 1540 Venice did not own an inch of soil on the mainland of Greece, except the Ionian dependencies of Parga and Butrinto, but of her insular dominions Cyprus, Crete, Tenos and six Ionian islands still remained.