Greece, the Hidden Centuries: Turkish Rule From the Fall of Constantinople to Greek Independence (12 page)

In the course of the fifteenth century the position of Chíos as a Genoese outpost became increasingly precarious. In November 1431 the Venetians tried to seize the island, sending a fleet of 29 ships carrying 1,400 troops. The defenders, 700 Genoese and 300 Greeks, resisted fiercely, and managed to hold the fortress in Chíos town. The Venetians were able only to devastate the mastic plantations and the orange groves, and in the following January – only ten weeks after arriving – the Venetians left.

But the main threat to Chíos came from the Turks. In the hope of averting it Chíos agreed sometime around the year 1415 to pay tribute to them, in return for which the Sultan would ‘defend them from their enemies and provide them with grain and food supplies if they should need them’.
³
The tribute, initially under 6,000 ducats, was progressively raised until 40 years later it was settled at 10,000 ducats – still a small price to pay for protection. When Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453 the Genoese colony of Galata north of the Golden Horn also came under Turkish rule. The two other Genoese colonies fell to the Turks
soon afterwards: Phocaea with its alum mines in 1456 and Kaffa in the Crimea in 1475. Chíos was now an isolated Genoese outpost.

In the following years Chíos was regularly late in paying the tribute to the Turks, probably because, due to maladministration, tax revenues were not reaching the treasury. The tribute of 10,000 ducats was not excessive – less than the value of a year’s mastic crop when prices were low, and far less when they were high. In 1536 an envoy of the Sultan came to Chíos to demand three years’ arrears of tribute, and by panic measures the money was raised. The final dénouement came 30 years later, at Easter 1566 when the kapitan pasha Piali, the Sultan’s son-in-law, arrived at Chíos with a fleet of some 80 ships carrying 7,000 troops. He had come to demand the tribute, which was again in arrears.

An account of the fall of Chíos to the Turks was written by the son of the last Chíos governor. According to this, Piali was at first polite and genial, saying that he wanted only to visit the famous gardens of Chíos, and would delay landing so as not to disturb the Easter celebrations. But when the Chíos governor and his colleagues met Piali on his flagship the tone abruptly changed. Piali berated them for not paying the tribute, as well as for sheltering slaves escaped from Turkish galleys and for harbouring pirates from Italy, both of which accusations were probably true. He concluded: ‘It is just, therefore, that you should be punished according to your deserts; that is as traitors, rebels and people disobedient to their Sovereign Lord.’
⁴
This threat was carried out not by force but by a fairly transparent stratagem. Piali told the Chíos governor that he wanted to buy cloth for uniforms and canvas for sails, and to do so some 10,000 of his men, both troops and sailors, went ashore – clearly more than were needed for a shopping expedition. At a prearranged signal they occupied the fortress without opposition, and raised the Turkish flag. It had taken Piali only two days to end two centuries of Genoese rule.

The members of the Mahona were ordered to leave for exile in the former Genoese colony of Kaffa, but were allowed to buy freedom to remain for 1,000 ducats. They found the money by selling their property to the Turks at bargain prices. Eighteen young boys were sent to the Sultan’s seraglio and, according to one of those accounts which has so inflamed hatred of the Turks, were forcibly circumcised, pressured and tortured to become Muslims, and for the most part died refusing.

By contrast, the Chians secured some remarkable privileges by two missions to the Sultan’s court, in 1567 and 1578. The Chians were exempt from forced labour, and there was to be no devshirme. Prisoners were to be properly treated. The usual religious freedom was
assured, with an explicit ban on forcible conversion. The only personal taxation would be the poll tax, and there were to be no extraordinary taxes. Chíos was to have a permanent representative at the Sultan’s court. Perhaps the most valuable privilege was the right to elect their own governors, the
dhimoyérontes
, who collected all taxes, controlled public funds and administered justice. Their continuing powers were summed up by the French vice-consul in the early nineteenth century: ‘En un mot, l’opinion des Primats grecs [i.e. the
dhimoyérontes
] réglait en toute chose la volonté des autorités turques.’
⁵
This lenient treatment may have been intended to ensure peace and productivity in the valuable mastic villages, which later became the personal property of the Sultan’s sister.

An English visitor to Chíos a century after its fall to the Turks wrote that ‘the Inhabitants injoy greater privileges than any Greeks in the Grand Signior’s Dominions; and more liberty cannot be in any part than what they injoy.’
⁶
The Chians thus emerged from their turbulent past to enjoy a more favoured position under Turkish rule than any other Aegean island or any other part of Greece.

The fortunes of Náxos and its neighbours were determined by the Fourth Crusade. Those who took part in that crusade had agreed in general terms on how they would divide the territory won from the Byzantine Empire: a quarter to the new Latin Emperor of Byzantium and the remaining three quarters split equally between Venetian and non-Venetian crusaders. The specifics of who got what were supposed to be laid down in the agreement known as the
Partitio Terrarum
, but this document was far from complete and far from being fully observed.

There may have been an understanding that the Cyclades would go to Venice, but only two of its islands were specifically allocated in the
Partitio
– Ándhros to Venice, Tínos to the Latin Emperor – and the rest, including two of the largest, Náxos and Páros, were effectively available to anyone. In the event Náxos was seized by the Venetian adventurer Marco Sanudo, nephew of the old blind Doge Enrico Dandolo who had led the Venetians in the Fourth Crusade. Sanudo recognised as his overlord not Venice but the Latin Emperor in Constantinople, who awarded him the title of Duke of Náxos, and by 1207 Sanudo had added to his duchy Páros and most of the islands to the south and west of Náxos. Other Cyclades islands were seized by other Venetian crusaders – Ándhros from Venice by Marino Dandolo, Tínos from the Latin Emperor by Andrea Ghisi – and Sanudo claimed to be overlord of these as well. Thus the Duchy of Náxos was established.

Marco Sanudo and his successors as dukes of Náxos did all they could to be independent of Venice, but it was vital for Venice to maintain its influence in the Cyclades, especially against its commercial rival Genoa, with whom it fought four hot wars between the 1250s and the 1380s. If Venice needed the Aegean islands, the islanders too needed Venice, particularly against Turkish attacks in the area, which began with their brutal seizure of Lésvos in 1462. Venice became in effect the protecting power of the region. Rights of succession to island lordships, and disputes over other matters, were settled by the Venetian senate or in the Venetian courts.

The Cyclades were important because of their position across the sea lanes that linked the Mediterranean with the ports of the northern Aegean – on the Greek coast Vólos and Thessalonika, and on the Turkish coast Chíos and Smyrna, and beyond them Constantinople. Any ship’s captain sailing from the west and rounding the Peloponnese had a choice of three more or less direct routes to the north (see map), all hazardous because of winds, currents and reefs.

The most direct was the channel between Évia and Ándhros, known as the Doro. Though the channel is wide, about five miles across, the current flows south, and as the channel faces due north it was virtually impossible for a sailing ship to get through if the prevailing north wind was blowing. The next passage to the east, between Ándhros and Tínos, is only some 200 yards across at one point, and so named the Steno (‘narrow’). Its advantages are that the current is less strong, and it faces less directly into the north wind. The third channel, the Míkonos strait, between Tínos and Míkonos, was probably the easiest, but for a ship heading for a Greek port it involved the longest detour. To add to the dangers, pirates preyed on these ships, especially when they were forced to wait, sometimes for weeks, for favourable weather for the transit through one of the channels.

The islanders were naturally seafarers, but with no ships of their own took service on foreign vessels. This has led to the enduring belief, for which there is some evidence, that during the long summer months of their menfolk’s absence the women of the islands took to prostitution, their clients being passing sailors or pirates. As one traveller delicately put it, the men left their women ‘to their own discretion and the civility of strangers’.
⁷
Professional prostitutes were of course common in all ports, but it is suggested that these prostitutes were otherwise virtuous wives. There were several ways in which feelings of shame about the unsavoury aspects of this business could be displaced. Travellers made a joke of it: a visiting Dutch naval officer said that the girls of Kéa
must be chaste because they wore 700 ells of cloth as undergarments. Some Greeks claimed that these unhappy women were driven to such straits only by the crushing poverty caused by their colonial oppressors. Or prostitution might even become a source of pride: in the 1960s the islanders of Amorgós would say that their strength and beauty were due to their descent from fearless pirates and comely courtesans.
⁸

The main activity of the Cyclades islanders was not at sea but on land as farmers. The system of exploiting the land was similar to that introduced by the crusaders and their successors in mainland Greece, which in turn derived from the Byzantines. The lord owned the estate, and the peasant who worked it paid to the lord dues proportional to the land’s produce, keeping the remainder for himself. Nearly all the peasants were free – there is little evidence of serfdom. However, the lord’s rule was virtually absolute, and appeal to distant Venice was the only redress against the lord’s exploitation, which over time became increasingly frequent.

The farmers on the islands generally produced enough grain to support their small populations – up to about 5,000 inhabitants on the largest islands, a few hundred on the smaller ones. The grain was of the coarser kind, barley or millet. Most islands produced wine, and the vines grown on the fertile volcanic soil of Santoríni produced some of the best, which in time made Santoríni one of the richest islands in the Cyclades. Other products included olives (virtually everywhere), cotton, fruit and vegetables, honey and wax. Livestock was pastured in the hills during summer and on the fields in the plains once the harvest was over.

Some islands specialised in one product, Páros in cotton for example, and Kéa in valonia, the husks of acorns valuable as an essential ingredient in tanning. More widespread was the culture of silk, particularly on Ándhros, Tínos and Kíthnos. On Ándhros silk culture dated back to 1100, the silk of Tínos was considered the best, and for Kíthnos silk became the principal export. When one product became dominant others inevitably declined, and in time the islands that specialised became dependent on imports for essentials, particularly grain. Historians argue about whether such monocultures were a good thing or not. It made basic economic sense to produce what commanded the highest price. Also when the monoculture was silk, production could be in the hands of the peasant, working independently with his family on his own plot rather than on the land of a rich proprietor. On the other hand, apart from the disadvantage of dependence on imports in an uncertain world, the producers were at the mercy of the merchants, who could control both the exports and the imports, and adjust the prices of each to their own profit.

The Italian rulers of the islands were Roman Catholic and their subjects Greek Orthodox. For the Greeks the ultimate authority was the patriarch in Constantinople, who was now subordinate to the Sultan and so, at least in theory, an agent of a power hostile to western Europe. But though some possessions of the Greek Church were taken over by Catholics there was no wholesale imposition of the Catholic system. In practice the Italian rulers would have found such a policy impractical, as there were not nearly enough Catholic clergy available and most of their congregations would have been minute. The policy would also have been impolitic since it would have provoked fierce Greek resistance.

So the two churches developed a form of cohabitation, in which the Catholics gained some powers but the Greeks retained many. When the crusaders first occupied the Cyclades islands after 1204, Catholic bishops were appointed to the seven existing Byzantine bishoprics, replacing Greek bishops. For a time they had the support of a Latin Emperor in Constantinople, but when in 1261 the Byzantine rulers were restored to the capital the influence of the Catholic bishops rapidly declined. Thereafter most of the islands had very few Catholics, commonly about 5 per cent of the population, and only on two did a significant Catholic community develop: on Tínos by the seventeenth century they made up half the population, and on neighbouring Síros as much as 95 per cent. These two islands lie most directly on the trade routes, and the stronger influence of the west from contact with traders may explain their exceptional adherence to the Catholic Church.

The modus vivendi between Catholic and Orthodox quickly developed. On Náxos there was a Greek bishop side by side with a Latin archbishop. But the more usual arrangement was for a Catholic bishop to have under him an Orthodox
protópappas
or head priest. This
protópappas
handled church administration, and though legal matters were in the hands of the Catholic bishop he had to follow Greek law. The
protópappas
also acted as representative of the Greek population. In some churches there was both a Catholic and an Orthodox altar. When Catholic clergy were not available, and sometimes even for preference, the Italians – including the aristocracy – would call on a Greek priest. Religious persecution, which was currently doing so much damage in western Europe, was here wholly absent.