Greece, the Hidden Centuries: Turkish Rule From the Fall of Constantinople to Greek Independence (32 page)

But the book’s main elements of popular appeal were perhaps sex and adventure. Lithgow was interested in all varieties of sexual activity, whether ‘venereal tilting’ as he called it, or sodomy, or what he describes as ‘a twofold kind of voluptuous abomination which my conscience commands me to conceale’.
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He also lists the number of brothels in large towns, though how he arrives at the numbers is not clear: over 40,000 in Constantinople, and 15,000, of which 3,000 were homosexual, in Fez.

Adventures are plentiful. They invariably present Lithgow in a heroic role, and sometimes strain credulity. He always travelled on foot (‘pedestriall I’), and was regularly attacked by robbers and murderers, from whom his quick-wittedness always saved him. In the deserts of Palestine Lithgow and his companions were lost at night without a compass, but Lithgow’s knowledge of the North Star put them on the right course. Off the Ionian islands Lithgow’s ship was attacked by a Tunisian pirate galley and the captain and the passengers were prepared to surrender, but it was Lithgow who took the lead, stiffening the captain’s resolve and getting the passengers to man the guns. The pirate was successfully fought off.

Lithgow maintained that the object of his travels was to pursue not any particular branch of knowledge but ‘the science of the world’, that is knowledge of how other people live which, he said, can only be acquired by travellers.
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It might be expected therefore that Lithgow would have much of interest to say about the Greeks, but one would be largely disappointed. He mentions the helpfulness of his Greek laundress on Crete, the kindness of the islanders of Síphnos, and praises the Cypriots as ‘of great civility, hospitality to their neighbours, and exceedingly affectionated to strangers’. He makes occasional political observations; the Cretans would prefer Turkish rule to Venetian, and ‘if Christian Princes could concord, and consult together, it were an easie thing in one yeare to subdue the Turkes, and roote out their very names from the earth.’
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The main reason for this paucity of comment was Lithgow’s bigotry. For him every category of people was already labelled. Catholics were bad, ‘Snaky Papists’ who ‘runne galloping post to Hell’, and Protestants were good. The Turks, he said, were courageous but never kept their promises and were addicted to sodomy, while the Egyptians were rude and barbarous. The Jews were naturally subtle, hateful and avaricious, and the Greeks ‘wholly degenerate from their Auncestors in valour, virtue and learning’.
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Such prejudice is rightly called blind, and it is paradoxical that later travellers, mainly concerned with their own branch of knowledge such as archaeology or botany, tell us more about the Greeks
than Lithgow with his boast that he is studying the comprehensive science of the world.

In the time of Lithgow and Belon a low opinion of the Greeks was commonplace. One charge against them was that they were drunken and dissipated. This was partly due to the classical Latin writers, who were then much better known than those of ancient Greece. Thus the Latin verbs ‘graecari’ or ‘pergraecari’ meant to be like a Greek, dissipated and effeminate (Plautus and Horace). To drink in the Greek fashion, ‘Graeco more’, meant to drink a lot (Cicero). Belon’s contemporary Rabelais repeated this charge, calling the Greeks ‘buveurs eternelz’, though the persistence of the idea of the Greeks as drunkards may have been due simply to the popularity of Greek wines in Europe.

The other main charge against the Greeks was that they were cheats. This too was derived from the ancient Latin writers: ‘Graeciae mendacia’ (Pliny), ‘Greek faith’ meaning no faith at all (Plautus again), and in Virgil’s
Aeneid
, probably the best known Latin work during the Renaissance, the condemnation by the Trojan Aeneas of the Greeks’ deceitful use of the Trojan horse, and the poem’s most famous line about Greek gifts, ‘Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.’ St Paul reinforced this idea. Even a Cretan, he claimed, had said that all Cretans are liars, and he accused the Corinthians, and therefore it was assumed all Greeks, of an even wider range of moral failings, as fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, effeminates, thieves, drunkards and extortioners.
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By contrast the Turks were usually well regarded, in part because of another link to the
Aeneid
. The Turks (Turchi) were thought to be the descendants of the Trojans (Teucri in the
Aeneid
). Thus an English chaplain on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1506 wrote that ‘all the country of Troy is the Turk’s own country by inheritance, and that country is properly called now Turkey, and none other.’
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Mehmed the Conqueror, in a letter allegedly sent to the Pope, asked why the Italians, descendants of the Trojan Aeneas, were opposed to the Turks: ‘We are surprised that the Italians are against us, and we can hardly believe it. For we have a natural inclination to love them. They draw their origin from the Blood of Troy and have thence their original nobility and power. Now, we are the ancient heirs of that same blood and power, and our ancestors, who were the issue of the great king Priam and his line, have increased and improved them.’
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However, in the sixteenth century there were more up-to-date reasons for respecting the Turks, to be seen in the reports of Ogier de Busbecq, Habsburg ambassador to Constantinople between 1555 and 1560. The Turks were then regarded as invincible, a reputation not yet dented by
their 1571 defeat at Lepanto. The Sultan, wrote Busbecq, ‘stands before us with all the terror inspired by his own successes and those of his ancestors. Like a thunderbolt he smites, shatters and destroys whatever stands in his way. He roars like a lion along our frontier seeking to break through.’
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But Busbecq was partly motivated by a wish to warn of the weaknesses of his own society: ‘On their side are the resources of a mighty empire: strength unimpaired, experience and practice in fighting, a veteran soldiery, habituation to victory, endurance of toil, unity, order, discipline, frugality and watchfulness. On our side is public poverty, private luxury, impaired strength, broken spirit, lack of endurance and training: the soldiers are insubordinate, the officers avaricious: there is contempt for discipline, licence, recklessness, drunkenness and debauchery are rife; and worst of all, the enemy is accustomed to victory and we to defeat.’
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Busbecq was one of the earliest ambassadors to the Sultan’s court. The first French ambassador, Jean de la Forêt, had been appointed in 1535, and a commercial treaty between France and the Ottoman Empire followed a year later. For England, by contrast, trade preceded diplomacy. In 1553 an Englishman, Anthony Jenkinson, was granted trading privileges throughout the Ottoman Empire. In 1580 the privileges were extended to all English traders, a year later Elizabeth I gave a royal charter to the Turkey (later Levant) Company, and in 1583 William Harborne became the first English ambassador to Constantinople. Diplomacy and trade were closely linked, and until the early nineteenth century the salaries of the English ambassadors, though they were representatives of the sovereign, were paid by the Levant Company.

Many of the early ambassadors saw little of Greece, perhaps only stopping briefly at some of the Aegean islands when sailing to Constantinople. It was often their chaplains who travelled more widely, such as Dr John Covel, chaplain to successive English ambassadors in the 1670s, who gave us an eyewitness account of the annual extraction of Lemnian earth. Covel also produced, at the request of three English bishops, a book entitled
What Are the Sentiments of the Oriental Church of the Greek Orthodox
. In Covel’s view these sentiments were pretty flexible: of certain Greek clerics who believed in the transubstantiation of the Eucharist bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ he wrote: ‘I make no doubt, but that for reward they would declare directly against it.’
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Those who visited Greece as agents of diplomacy or trade could expect some protection from the representatives of their home governments, but those who travelled for other reasons were on their own. They had to rely on letters of introduction to high-ranking Turkish officials and a
janissary to accompany them. The letters usually prompted a friendly welcome and the janissaries warded off most attacks, but nevertheless the dangers were considerable. The travellers risked capture or robbery by raiders at sea, and attacks by brigands on land, especially in mainland Greece. Some fell sick and died. One Frenchman, Joachim Bocher, who discovered the temple of Apollo at Bassae in the Peloponnese, was murdered there in the 1670s, apparently for the silver buttons on his coat. Francis Vernon, travelling widely in Greece at the same period, was a polymath, an astronomer and mathematician who knew seven or eight languages, and has been credited with writing the best account of Greek antiquities up to that time. Vernon survived being twice captured by pirates, and was nearly shot, on suspicion of being a spy, while taking measurements of the Theatre of Dionysus below the Akropolis. But an English friend had often warned him that ‘he would come to some ill end with all his knowledge, if he did not learn to keep his temper. Mr Vernon was a man of admirable vivacity, but he was too cholerick.’
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The prediction was fulfilled, and Vernon was killed on his later travels to Persia, in a stupid quarrel with the locals over a penknife.

Vernon was a member of the first group of travellers to visit Greece and Asia Minor specifically to study ancient Greek monuments. The two leading members were Dr Jacob Spon, a French physician with a passion for antiquities, and George Wheler, an Englishman who had toured Europe with his Oxford tutor. They met in Rome in 1674, when Spon was 28 and Wheler 25. Wheler had recently inherited a large fortune and used it to pay for the expedition. They were briefly accompanied on the first part of their travels by Vernon and another English gentleman, Sir Giles Eastcourt, who also died abroad, succumbing to a sudden unidentified illness at Návpaktos in late 1675.

The party of four sailed from Venice in June 1675, stopping at Corfu, Kephaloniá and Zákinthos, from where Vernon and Eastcourt set off independently for the Greek mainland. Spon and Wheler continued round the Peloponnese, visited several Aegean islands and the site of Troy, and reached Constantinople seven weeks later. There, thanks to the French ambassador the Marquis de Nointel who had himself travelled widely in Greece, they were both given French passports putting them under the protection of Louis XIV.

After three weeks in Constantinople Spon and Wheler went to Smyrna, from where they visited Ephesus and saw the famous theatre and the ruined Christian churches. In November 1675 they sailed from Smyrna to Crete, Zákinthos and then Pátras, continuing up the Gulf of Corinth via Delphi to Athens, which they reached in January 1676. From Athens
they explored the surrounding region including the northern towns of the Peloponnese. In March 1676 they intended to travel north as far as Mt Athos, but found that the roads were blocked by snow. Spon left for home immediately and Wheler a month later. Each of them then devoted himself to writing an account of his travels.

What Spon and Wheler achieved was remarkable. In only a few months in Greece they had gathered the materials for the first systematic survey of Greek antiquities, in contrast to the haphazard findings of earlier visitors whom the chaplain John Covel derisively described as ‘Whifflers in those scraps of learning’.
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Spon and Wheler deserve the accolade of being the founders of serious modern Greek travel literature, a title one cannot grant to the blinkered and self-aggrandising William Lithgow, in spite of his book’s popularity. Though the main interest of both Spon and Wheler was in antiquities, they approached their subject from rather different perspectives. Wheler was a keen amateur botanist and took home 1,000 plant specimens from his travels, whereas Spon brought back 2,000 inscriptions. Wheler was also a devout Anglican, and had little sympathy for pre-Christian Greece. He thought that the interior of the Parthenon was dark – as it was before Morosini wrecked the roof – because ‘the Heathens loved obscurity’ so that their ceremonies ‘with all their juggling and cheating, were less exposed to view’. Spon was more open minded. His overriding interest, he admitted, was in antiquities, but he also took an interest in the contemporary Greeks, though he would not go out of his way to enquire about them: ‘I did not really neglect all the details [of ordinary life], when I was able to learn about them with ease and little cost.’
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Both Spon and Wheler, as we have seen in Chapter 9, described life in Athens, where they spent about a month, the longest stop they made in Greece.

Spon was a man for detail, and made precise measurements of the Parthenon and other buildings on the Akropolis, describing their setting and relating what he found to the ancient texts. His work was still praised as a guide by antiquarian visitors a century later. But Spon was fully appreciative of the beauty of what he saw, and wrote of the Parthenon: ‘It was an impressive sight, and we stood for a long time in unwearying contemplation of the building’s beauties. I wish my description of them might give you as much pleasure as the sight of them gave me.’
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Wheler expressed the same idea in almost identical words.

For both of them a constant theme was lament for the deterioration of the monuments. Some of this was due to human activity: ancient fragments were removed to make new buildings, and on the Akropolis the Turks had turned the Erechtheum into a harem, while the whole site
was cluttered with huts housing the Turkish garrison. But much of the decline was due simply to the passage of time. Spon wrote of Delphi, which he had difficulty even finding, ‘nothing remains now but wretched poverty and all its glory has passed like a dream.’
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The lengthy title of Wheler’s book described the Greece he saw as ‘A Lamentable Example of the Instability of human things’.
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Of Athens Spon wrote that ‘time has completed the destruction of what war has spared.’
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