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

about 1600 has been characterised as a golden age for the Greeks and the other Balkan peoples under their new overlords. The chaos of the last period of rule by Franks or Byzantines was replaced by efficient centralised administration, dues and taxes were broadly speaking no more onerous than before, and the peasant had legal rights instead of being subject to the arbitrary decisions of a landlord.
    Nevertheless, peasant life during these years was hard, as it had always been. All agricultural tools were made of wood, including the plough, which was normally a crooked piece of timber, perhaps with an iron-tipped ploughshare. This was no more than a scratch-plough, which broke the soil but did not turn a furrow, so yields were low, and most fields had to be left fallow for two years out of three. There were no pumps, so unless there was a convenient watercourse the fields could be irrigated only by water drawn from wells and carried in buckets. There were few roads that could take wheeled traffic – some say none at all. 4 So any produce for sale elsewhere, in other regions or to the coast for export abroad, had to be carried on the backs of pack animals, a laborious and expensive business. This was one of the factors that discouraged inland regions from producing for the market rather than for bare subsistence.
    The peasant family was the basic unit of production, working partly on its own land and partly on land belonging to someone else. The family possessed its cottage and cultivated a small surrounding plot of land; typically about 25 yards square, so about the size of a modest suburban garden today. Otherwise the peasant worked on one of the four basic types of land tenure introduced by the Turks but much like those that had gone before.
    The four basic types of land holding were: first, the timar, land granted to Ottoman cavalrymen and often their descendants, in return for which they had to do military service when required; second, land held by a religious or charitable organisation (vakf), which might be either Muslim or Christian; third, private property (mulk), mainly land granted by the Sultan to individuals or left in the hands of the pre-conquest owners; and finally land held by the state (miri).
    One should be careful not to speak loosely of these types of land as being ‘owned’ by the various individuals or organisations. Under fundamental Islamic law complete ownership of land could belong only to God, and by extension to the Sultan, who acted as God’s custodian. The Sultan might grant to others tenure of the land, temporarily or indefinitely, or the right to its produce. But these grantees were never owners of the land, merely its tenants.
    Where the peasant worked for somebody else rather than on his own small plot, he was typically granted a piece of land that could be ploughed by a pair of oxen in a season, an area varying from ten to twenty-five acres. The grant was by a document that gave the peasant legal rights, in particular that the land passed automatically from father to son, and if there was no son it could be bequeathed to other relatives, even women. If the peasant died indebted, the land could not be seized by his creditors. There were restrictions, too. The peasant tenant could not sell the land, give it away or borrow on it, nor change its use by converting arable land to a vineyard or orchard, or by building on it. Arable land had to be cultivated at least one year in three.
    An overriding obligation of the peasant was to share the produce of the land with the primary possessor whether it be timar-holder, religious foundation, individual or the state. The contract between peasant and landholder would specify who was to pay the dues on the produce, who was to pay the costs of cultivation – seeds, use of draught animals and so on – and how the yield was to be divided. The formula varied widely, but a typical arrangement for the Peloponnese was the tritárikon , under which the