Greece, the Hidden Centuries: Turkish Rule From the Fall of Constantinople to Greek Independence (44 page)

Grigórios’ denunciation of revolution apparently had no effect whatever on his Greek flock. Greek clergy, including bishops, played an active part in the war of independence, and there seems to be no recorded instance of any Greek refusing to take part in the revolution because the patriarch had forbidden it. The only result of his stance was that the patriarchate found its links with the Greek people severed, and in 1833 one of the first acts of the government of newly independent Greece was to declare the Orthodox Church of Greece autonomous, independent of the patriarchate and under state control. Thus Grigórios, as head of the church, had failed to save his own life, failed to influence his flock and failed to preserve the influence of his office.

It could be argued that the Enlightenment, which the church had so strongly opposed, had also failed in Greece. The progressive teaching
initiatives of the educators were naturally enough shelved during the war of independence and virtually forgotten thereafter. Of the two main revolutionaries, Rígas had called for a different pan-Balkan rising, and Kora
ḯ
s for a revolution at a different time and on a different basis. The failure of Enlightenment thinking to take root in Greece was, of course, partly because its representatives were mainly active outside Greece, in the foreign cities where education was more advanced and widespread and where newspapers and books could be published. There was probably only one simple Enlightenment message reaching the Greeks in Greece: that revolution was possible. The unschooled brigand Theódhoros Kolokotrónis, later a military leader in the war of independence, put it succinctly: ‘The French Revolution and the doings of Napoleon opened the eyes of the world. The nations knew nothing before, and the people thought that kings were gods upon earth, and that they were bound to say that whatever they did was well done.’
²⁵

21

Prelude to Revolution

I
n early 1806 an event occurred that was the worst possible augury for armed revolution: the expulsion of the brigand bands of klephts from the Peloponnese. At the end of the previous year a firman from the Sultan reached the Turkish authorities in the Peloponnese ordering that all klephts should be apprehended and brought to justice. The firman was accompanied by a formal epistle from the patriarch Kallínikos IV which reinforced the Sultan’s order. The epistle emphasised the duty of the Greek civil leaders to hand over klephts in their area, and accused them of having previously been in league with the klephts. The patriarch condemned any who failed to support the Turks against the klephts, while those who did give support were offered remission of sins.

The attack on the klephts began in early January 1806, and for the next three months the Turkish troops harried the klephts all over the central and southern Peloponnese. One of the leading klephts was Theódhoros Kolokotrónis, and he gives a detailed account of these three months in his memoirs. The bands of klephts were constantly on the move, unable to retreat for safety to the mountains because these were covered with winter snow. The Turks had large numbers of troops – 2,000 in one operation, says Kolokotrónis – but the klepht bands were small and split into even smaller groups; Kolokotrónis’ band was initially 100, later reduced to 60 and then to 20, and finally consisted only of Kolokotrónis and two others.

They were constantly short of ammunition and bread. Sometimes these were provided by Greek supporters, but as often refused. At the village of Vérvena south of Tripolis Kolokotrónis demanded supplies, the villagers refused – ‘We’ve got powder and shot for you,’ they said ironically – and Kolokotrónis sacked the place. There were many inducements for the Greek villagers not to support the klephts. If they were suspected of doing so they could be seized, tortured and executed. Villagers were promised armed protection if they killed Kolokotrónis but armed attack if they did not. By the end there was a huge reward for capturing Kolokotrónis alive. Even Kolokotrónis’ old friend Dhourámis, whose son was betrothed to Kolokotrónis’ daughter, succumbed to the
lure of the bounty, trying unsuccessfully to drug Kolokotrónis’ wine with opium before handing him over.

Finally, just before Easter 1806, Kolokotrónis got away by boat to Zákinthos, then under Russian control. After the British took over the island three years later Kolokotrónis served in the Duke of York’s Greek Light Infantry, waiting and preparing to return to the Peloponnese, which he did a few months before the revolution began in 1821.

The events of early 1806 could only be discouraging to any who looked forward to Greek liberation from the Turks. The expulsion of klephts from the Peloponnese was of course far from total or permanent. An estimated 300 to 400 klephts had been killed, others had fled and nine or so bands dispersed, but other bands survived, new bands were formed, and by 1821 klephts were again active in the Peloponnese. Nevertheless 1806 had shown that the klephts could not withstand a determined Turkish attack; that their patriarch backed the Turks against them; that their fellow Greeks could be prevented, by a combination of Turkish terrorising and inducements, from supporting them; and perhaps worst of all that a member of a klepht’s own family might betray him for money. The klephts were the only armed force on which the Greeks could call. If the klephts could be so quickly defeated, there seemed little hope of a successful armed revolution.

However, there were many changes in the course of the years between 1806 and 1821. One was the steadily increasing economic pressure on the Greek population and the resulting resentment. Though official poll tax rates remained much the same, the tax farmers who had bought the rights of collection would arbitrarily increase the amounts due, in Arkadhía for example by over a quarter, and elsewhere by nearly half. There were other inequities because total poll taxes for a district were based on its population, and the population records were not kept up to date. Thus in Mistrás in the southern Peloponnese only 3,000 inhabitants had to pay an amount based on a population of 8,500, and on the island of Mílos the injustice was so glaring – under 3,000 paying for 16,000 – that the local Turkish governor felt obliged to contribute.

On top of illegal tax increases were the illegal and arbitrary exactions by Turkish higher officials. ‘The Viziers (or Pashas) are the men who do the mischief,’ wrote William Biddle, the young American who visited Greece in 1806. ‘Coming hungry from Constantinople they enrich themselves by plundering the people who are absolutely at their mercy and whose complaints can never reach the Grand Seignior. They lay taxes without control and take every opportunity of making new exactions.’
¹

Biddle witnessed the arrival in Livadhiá of the new Turkish pasha at the head of an imposing military procession. The pasha demanded that the townspeople provide quarters for his 200 to 300 followers and pay him 14,000 piastres. They protested that no previous pasha had asked more than 5,000 piastres, but the pasha ‘declared if they did not bring the money immediately, he would set fire to the town and reminded them that their own heads were perfectly at his disposal’.
²
So they had to pay, and Biddle estimated that the total cost to the town was 25,000 piastres, for the pasha’s three-day stay.

A further burden on the Greek peasantry was the expansion of the form of rights over land known as chiftliks. The term literally means simply farm, but came to have two different connotations. One, which could be called the developed chiftlik, was the large estate, common elsewhere in Europe, consisting of wide plains producing a single crop such as grain or cotton, and close enough to a harbour to allow export for profit. These two requirements were met by only a few areas of Greece, such as Macedonia, Thessaly and the west coast of the Peloponnese. In the other form, the exploited chiftlik, the farming was still basically for subsistence, but a local official or landowner, Turk or Greek, simply usurped the right to impose dues on a group of villages, dues that inevitably became punitive.

The most notorious such usurper was Ali Pasha of Iánnina. He had plenty of scope: by 1807 he or his sons held under the Turks the governorships covering most of Greece, including the Peloponnese and much of Albania. Ali would first acquire some land in the area, legally or not, and then impose extraordinary exactions on the other villagers, driving them into debt and forcing them to accept his conditions as chiftlik-holder. ‘Great terror of such a disaster’ was how one traveller described the villagers’ feelings at this prospect.
³
By one count Ali Pasha and his sons eventually controlled 915 exploited chiftliks throughout Greece north of the Gulf of Corinth.

The background to these different forms of economic pressure on the Greeks was the deteriorating Ottoman economy. Since the late 1750s the Ottoman Empire had been engaged in a series of exhausting and expensive wars. Ottoman state revenues were far smaller than those of western European powers: Britain’s revenues were seven times as great and France’s nearly ten times. Furthermore the tax-farming system, though it saved the government the trouble and expense of collecting taxes through its own agents, was extremely costly to the state: by one estimate the government received only a fifth of the money collected on its behalf. The government’s solution was to accelerate the debasement of
the coinage, which as we have seen in Chapter 14 began in the sixteenth century. A result with direct impact on the Greeks was rapid inflation from the consequent increase in the money supply. Thus in Greece as a whole between 1800 and 1820 wages roughly doubled but prices rose much faster, especially the prices of basic provisions: in the same period cheese became five times more expensive and bread six times.
⁴

William Leake, who travelled widely in Greece in the decades before the revolution, summarised the situation, writing from Lárisa:

The Ottoman government was thus steadily strangling, or allowing others to strangle, the geese that laid its golden eggs. But resentment against the rulers is not enough on its own to initiate a successful armed revolution; also required are organisation and opportunity.

The first rudimentary organisation to prepare for revolution was started in September 1814 by three expatriate Greeks, meeting in the Russian Black Sea port of Odessa. There they agreed to found a society, blandly named the Philikí Etería or Friendly Association, based on the Freemasons, with ‘the object of bringing about, in time, the liberation of the fatherland (
patrídha
)’.
⁶
Nikólaos Skouphás, regarded as first among equals of the trio, was born in 1779 in a village near Árta, and had worked at various times as an apothecary, a commercial secretary and a hatter. Emmanuel Xánthos, the eldest of the three, was born in 1772 in Pátmos, and by 1810, at the age of 38, had risen no higher than clerk to a merchant in Odessa. Two years later he set up in Constantinople, with three other merchants, a company to trade in olive oil, but the company failed. Athanásios Tsakálov, born in Iánnina in 1788, was the youngest and perhaps best educated of the three, had completed his studies in Paris only a few years earlier and had as yet no settled career. A hatter, a bankrupt and a recent ex-student: an improbable triumvirate to launch a national movement.

Elaborate rituals, owing much to Freemasonry, were devised for initiation into the different levels of the society, from illiterate Brothers up to
the Supreme Council, the so-called Invisible Directorate. The initiation ceremonies included solemn oaths of secrecy – the tragic end of Rígas had shown how important secrecy was – and an obligation to contribute money. Nevertheless after three years the society seemed to be getting nowhere: far too few members and far too little money. The basic reason was that the founders had not been able to break into Greek society on Greek soil since they were themselves expatriates, and had not been able to break into Greek society abroad since they were of a lower class than the prosperous Greek merchants of the diaspora. When the three founders met in Constantinople at the end of 1817, the first time they had all been together in the same place since Odessa in 1814, Tsakálov was in favour of abandoning the plan and disbanding the society.

However, their discussions during the winter and spring of 1817–18 led to a radical reorganisation. They settled on a permanent headquarters for the society in Constantinople. They decided that they must send recruiting emissaries to Greece, so far largely untapped. To get more money they approached the wealthy banking family of Sékeris, from whom they raised much larger sums than they had ever raised before. Finally they agreed to find a distinguished figure to become the head of the society. Thus the leaders of the Philikí Etería, for all their air of shoestring amateurism, had carried out a reorganisation that could hardly have been bettered by a twenty-first-century management consultant. They had set up a permanent headquarters, they had identified a new market and taken steps to exploit it, and they had a reliable source of funds. Finally, they were now starting the search for, as it were, a new chairman and chief executive.