Greece, the Hidden Centuries: Turkish Rule From the Fall of Constantinople to Greek Independence Read Free

Masada were in fact murderous thugs, who had killed many fellow Jews. Ben-Yehuda indignantly rejected the idea, but went to his library to check. ‘To make a long story and a painful weekend short,’ he wrote, ‘on Saturday night I knew that the paper was right and I was wrong.’
    To say of some long-held belief that it is a myth is not to say, scornfully, that it is rubbish. Myths have power for ill or for good. Myths can lead to the excesses of fanaticism, but can also nurture and sustain a people in dire adversity. Many Greeks will doubtless be deeply upset by this book’s questioning of some of their ideas about the history of the Tourkokratía and I apologise for causing that distress, which I believe I can understand. Nevertheless the story, as accurately and truthfully as possible, should be told. As the historian Gaetano Salvemini said, ‘Impartiality is a dream, honesty is a duty.’
    The story is often presented, especially in older Greek histories of the period, as one simply about Greeks and Turks. The scene is a sealed stage with just two actors, or perhaps an enclosed arena with only two antagonists. But there is more to the story than that.
    Once the Ottoman Empire had taken Constantinople in 1453 and established its rule in south and east Europe, it became a major player in Europe’s affairs through trade, diplomacy, sometimes alliances, but most significantly through conflicts. The following centuries were punctuated by Ottoman clashes with Venetians, Habsburgs, combinations of European powers known as Holy Leagues, and latterly with Russia. Success or failure strengthened or weakened the Ottoman Empire, and affected immediately, or in the longer term altered, Ottoman relations with its subject people, including the Greeks.
    Five such conflicts were turning points, one, as it happens, in each century. The first was the Ottoman capture of Constantinople in 1453, marking the end of the Byzantine Empire and the beginning of Ottoman expansion into Europe on a large scale. The next was the Ottoman defeat in the naval battle of Lepanto in 1571. This ended the assumptionof Ottoman invincibility at sea, and arguably began the long process of Ottoman decline. But a century later, in 1669, the Ottomans were still strong enough to take Crete from the Venetians, bringing many thousands of Greeks under Turkish rule. In 1770 Greeks rebelled briefly and unsuccessfully against Turkish rule. This was the so-called Orlov revolt, inspired by Catherine the Great as part of Russia’s expansionist plans and named for its leader and one of Catherine’s many lovers, Count Theodore Orlov. Finally, in 1821 the Greek war of independence began, leading twelve years later to the establishment of Greece as an independent nation state.
    To understand the impact on Greece of the first great upheaval in 1453 we need to look at conditions in Greece that preceded it. What changes, for better or worse, did Ottoman rule bring? Greece before the arrival of the Ottomans is the subject of the chapter that follows.

 
    4
     
    The Greek Peasants
     
    T he value to the Ottomans of their newly acquired territory in Greece lay predominantly in the land. The producers of this agricultural wealth were the Greek peasants, who made up 90 per cent of the population. The proportion fell only slowly over the centuries, and even in the 1941 census – the last before the upheavals of occupation and civil war, and post-war migration to cities and abroad – over two thirds of Greeks were classified as rural.
    Although so much of Greece is mountainous, some parts even in that earlier time were richly productive. North of the Gulf of Corinth the broad plains of Thessaly and Macedonia grew abundant wheat, maize and cotton, and were important suppliers to the capital Constantinople. In the Peloponnese wheat was grown in the west, currants on the coastal plains of the southern shore of the Gulf of Corinth, and in the southwest corner figs, and the olives for