Greece, the Hidden Centuries: Turkish Rule From the Fall of Constantinople to Greek Independence (27 page)

Many of these tax-farming contracts were bought by members of the wealthy elite in Constantinople, the most powerful of which was the politically dominant Koprulu family. As one historian has put it, thanks to the growing influence of this elite ‘imperial power was diluted by an increasingly dense network of interest groups at the centre.’
⁶
But many tax farms were sold to janissaries in Crete. Janissaries included both imperial soldiers, that is Turks sent periodically from Constantinople, and local troops.

One picture of the janissaries is, in Edmund Burke’s phrase, one of a rapacious and licentious soldiery. ‘The savagery of the janissaries of Crete was notorious,’ writes one Cretan historian of the island, and gives as evidence a Sultan’s decree of 1762 condemning the outrages of ‘the brigands and malefactors in the employment of the guard of this fortress’ – though it is not entirely clear who these miscreants were.
⁷
Much later, in 1793, a bishop was murdered by janissaries. But a more detailed look at the evidence produces a different picture: of the Cretan janissaries as deeply involved in the civilian economic life of the island, who were janissaries only in that they drew janissary pay.

Thus around 1700 nearly half the bakers in Iráklion were janissaries below officer rank. There are other examples of a janissary as owner of a shop, head of the Iráklion market, involved illegally in the wine trade, and dealing in property. Membership of the janissaries was often purely nominal. Even in the early years of Turkish rule the janissaries, according to the Venetian governor on Soúdha island, included over 1,000 children aged between ten and twelve. In the 1730s a visitor to Crete wrote: ‘There are a great number of janissaries who belong to [companies] which are in other parts of the empire, and are settled here as merchants or tradesmen, and yet receive their pay as janissaries.’
⁸
It was even possible to qualify for janissary pay by simply buying a janissary pay slip on the black market.

However, the main avenue for entry to the janissaries was through conversion to Islam, which was greater in Crete than in Cyprus or anywhere else in the Greek world. Some of these conversions had nothing to do with a military career but were for specific personal reasons. One Cretan is recorded as converting to avoid punishment for associating with the Venetians on Spinalónga; a Christian woman might convert on marriage to a Muslim, or to win guardianship of the child of a mixed marriage. Avoidance of the higher Christian poll tax may have been a reason for some conversions, but this would not explain the much more numerous conversions in Crete than elsewhere.

Perhaps the main reason for conversion to Islam was that the Turkish conquest of Crete took 24 years to complete, far longer than any other acquisition. However, from the end of the second year the Turks held the whole island except Iráklion, and their eventual victory could be foreseen. There was therefore a strong incentive, especially when backed by a money payment, to join the winning side and to demonstrate loyalty to the victors by converting to their faith. Conversion would also ease the path into the military. The Turks regarded local recruits to the militia far more favourably than the Venetians, who accepted them as recruits only when forced to by lack of manpower, believing, as one provveditor put it, that ‘the militias start to deteriorate as Greeks and villagers enter them.’
⁹

The formal process of conversion is not clear. There was still an official circumciser who halfway through the war was ordered to circumcise all converts. But if conversion was on a large scale the corresponding mass circumcision seems improbable. It is more likely that a declaration before the kadi was enough, especially if a Muslim, perhaps the convert’s employer, acted as sponsor.

In the summer of 1700 the French botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort spent three months on Crete. Turkish rule of the island had by then been established for 30 years, but memories of the Venetians and their long struggle to defend the island were still vivid. Tournefort, born in 1656, was already a distinguished botanist, at the age of 27 being appointed professor of botany at the royal Jardin des Plantes in Paris, a position he held for the rest of his life.

The plan for Tournefort’s travels, approved and paid for by Louis XIV, was that he should go to Greece, Constantinople, Arabia, Egypt and the Barbary coast. His main task was ‘to investigate plants, metals and minerals, to learn about the diseases of these countries and their remedies, and about everything concerning medicine and natural history’.
¹⁰
But there was a further object: Tournefort was to report on the trade, religion
and customs of the inhabitants of these countries. This reflected France’s renewed interest in Ottoman lands since the 1699 Treaty of Karlowitz, which ended the long war of the Ottomans against Venice and her allies and which deprived the Ottoman Empire of much of its European territory. If the Ottoman Empire was to be dismembered, the more France knew about it the better.

Tournefort conscientiously carried out the botanical part of his mission and brought home from Crete over 1,300 specimens. His search for plants took him and his party to remote mountain villages where strangers had never been seen before. ‘There is no nation on earth’, wrote Tournefort, ‘more friendly than the Greeks,’
¹¹
and the whole village would turn out to see them, inspecting and laughing at their dress, undergarments and hats. Tournefort was often asked to treat the sick, and usually prescribed one of the local plants, apart from an emetic for serious cases. Most of these patients were Greeks, but Tournefort was wary of treating Turks, especially if he expected to return to the village later, since he claimed to fear being bastinadoed if his cure did not work.

In fact, the Cretan villagers helped Tournefort more than he helped them. From them he learned the common names of over 500 plants, which he found were the same as those used by the ancient writers. ‘I regarded the brains of these poor Greeks as so many living inscriptions,’ he wrote, ‘which preserved for us the names used by Theophrastos and Dioscourides. Although subject to certain changes, these living inscriptions will certainly last longer than the hardest marble, because they are renewed every day while marble is defaced or destroyed.’
¹²

Tournefort spoke favourably of both the Turks and the Greeks of Crete, as being well built, energetic, strong and honest. He praised the public order in the island and said there were no hooligans, pickpockets, beggars, murderers or highway robbers, since the penalty for theft was death for Turk or Greek. He castigated only the Greeks who had joined the occupiers, those who had converted to Islam who were less honest than the true Turks and unlike them insulted Christians, and the Greeks who had taken service with the Venetians in their remaining island outposts and captured Turks for ransom, burned and sacked houses, attacked people and committed every sort of cruelty.

The study of the religions of the countries he visited was also part of Tournefort’s task, and in two of his reports he described at length Greek Orthodoxy and the Islamic faith. He was critical of the Greek Church. Church offices were bought and sold, he reported, and the clergy at all levels were ignorant: ‘Do not ask them the reason for their faith, since they are very badly educated.’
¹³
However, this ignorance was the result of
the miseries of the original enslavement by the Turks, which had driven the best-educated Greeks abroad. Apart from the general venality and ignorance of the Church there were particular aspects that Tournefort condemned: priests trained at the monasteries of Mt Athos were dangerous knaves, nuns were mostly reformed prostitutes seeking an easy life, and there was nothing good to say of the excessive lamentations for the dead, by paid mourners whose apparent anguish was greater than that of those who wept naturally.

Tournefort examined religions rather as he examined his plants, looking at their external characteristics and determining what their use might be. Hence his attitude to religion was that of a worldly sceptic, reminiscent of Pascal’s famous wager published 30 years before: ‘God is, or he is not. Which option will you take? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in making your bet on the existence of God. If you win, you win the lot. If you lose, you lose nothing. So, without hesitation, bet on the existence of God.’
¹⁴
Thus Tournefort saw the practice of religion as a matter of costs and benefits. He confessed, sardonically, that he would have made a very bad Greek because all their fasting made the price of salvation too high. He thought that the Greeks who converted to Islam sold their souls too cheaply, gaining only permission to wear Turkish dress and exemption from the poll tax, which was a mere five écus a year. And he believed Islam was the most seductive, and therefore the most dangerous, of all the false non-Christian religions, because it offered the same spiritual rewards as Christianity in the next world while allowing far more sensual pleasures in this one.

Tournefort might be elegantly detached about religious questions, but they continued to arouse strong feelings among the Greeks of Crete. Despite the loss of many Orthodox to Islam, the Greek Church was strengthened under the new Turkish regime. As early as 1647, when most of Crete was in Turkish hands and only Iráklion was holding out, the Turks had promised an Orthodox archbishop for Crete, and by 1659 there were twelve Orthodox bishops subordinate to him. Their jurisdiction covered the whole of Crete, though characteristically the Cretans in Sphakiá remained ruggedly independent. ‘Up to now’, wrote the archbishop of Crete in 1779, ‘the Christians of the Sphakiá district have remained unprovided for by the church, owing to the roughness of the terrain and the tough character of the people.’
¹⁵
Furthermore, the churches converted to mosques were mainly the Catholic churches in Iráklion, those of St Francis, St Peter, St Titus and – especially humiliating for Venice – St Mark. One Catholic church, St Matthew, was bought for the Orthodox by Panayiótis, the Greek interpreter for the Turks in the
negotiations for the surrender of Iráklion, and became the nucleus of the Orthodox community.

However, the Orthodox Church in Crete soon became a battleground of warring factions. Now that it was united with the patriarchy in Constantinople, it was obliged to pay patriarchal taxes, an obligation confirmed by the Turkish administration. These taxes were resented, and within a decade payment was in arrears. Two parties developed, for and against the patriarchy, and the latter initially won the day. In 1715 a firman from the Sultan decreed that the Cretan Orthodox Church should now be independent of the patriarchy, and that the archbishop should be a native Cretan chosen by the people and the influential citizens, not imposed by the patriarch in Constantinople. But the victory was short lived, as ten years later the firman was reversed and the Cretan Church again became subject to the patriarchy. The dissension continued, and it was only in 1735 that a satisfactory compromise was reached, with the appointment of an archbishop, Yerásimos, who was both an insider at the patriarchal court and a native Cretan. The Cretan Church was now firmly under the control of the patriarch, and as a pro-patriarchy Cretan poet wrote ‘Where there had been darkness, now there was light!’
¹⁶

It was religion that determined the fate of many Cretans in the twentieth century. Unlike in Cyprus, there had been no mass importation to Crete of Turks from Anatolia. In part this was because the number of Cretan converts to Islam made it unnecessary, in part because it was impracticable, Crete being nearly 200 miles from the Turkish mainland as against 50 miles for Cyprus. But the Muslim element on Crete was ultimately removed in the 1923 exchange of populations on the basis of religion, throughout the Greek state, of which Crete was by then a part. Their places, and often their homes, were taken by refugee Christians moved from Turkey. In Crete there was strong mutual dislike at first between the indigenous Cretans and the new arrivals. As Michael Herzfeld puts it in his study of Réthimnon, ‘The refugees [from Turkey] lamented a fate that placed them among the rude peasants, while the rural Cretans called the refugees “Turks” – a clear acknowledgement that in some ways the newcomers were more alien than the [Cretan Muslims] who had departed.’
¹⁷
The Muslim Cretans who had moved in the opposite direction, to a new life in Turkey, kept a strong bond with the land they had left behind, some warmly welcoming Christian visitors from Crete. Their painful nostalgia has persisted into the twenty-first century, as Bruce Clark found when researching his book on the population exchanges. An old lady who as a child lived in a village near Sitía in Crete says: ‘Of course we miss Crete, it was our homeland, and
people always miss the place they left. My father had an orchard, growing olives and all kinds of fruit, so many fruit trees you could hardly get in there. It was a wonderful place.’ And an old man is full of a visit four years earlier to his Cretan home village, and says to a visiting Greek: ‘If you ever go to my home village, will you please, please tell them I’m sorry I didn’t thank them enough? Will you tell them I’m sorry I haven’t been back?’
¹⁸

14

The Changing Ottoman Empire

I
n the sixteenth century the Ottoman Empire was at the height of its power and prestige. In 1516 Selim I added Syria to the empire and a year later Egypt, conquests that also made him guardian of the Holy Places of Mecca and Medina, and were thus a triumph in both military and religious terms. His son and successor Suleyman, the Magnificent or the Lawgiver, who reigned from 1522 to 1566, took Belgrade, Rhodes and Baghdad, and annexed Hungary. The empire now stretched from the Barbary coast in the western Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean, and from the southern tip of Greece to within a few miles of Vienna. But by 1853 Tsar Nicholas I of Russia could famously describe the Turk as ‘un homme gravement malade’, and in 1923 the empire, which had been ruled throughout by an unbroken line of descendants of the thirteenth-century founder Osman, was replaced by Ataturk’s republic.