Greece, the Hidden Centuries: Turkish Rule From the Fall of Constantinople to Greek Independence (9 page)

Money played an important part in this strife, in two ways. One was the payment made by each patriarch on his accession, the
peskésion
, nominally a gift from patriarchate funds to the state treasury. The other was the annual tribute, the
harátzi
, which fell due on St George’s day in April.

The first five patriarchs paid no gift on accession. In fact the reverse had been the case in Byzantine times, the Emperor making a payment to the patriarch. The new practice was introduced in about 1466 by the sixth patriarch, Simeón I, in his machinations to get the incumbent patriarch Márkos II deposed. Simeón promised the state treasury a gift of 1,000 ducats if elected, as he duly was. Note, though, that it was and remained the synod who elected the patriarch, who was therefore not technically buying his office and so was not guilty of simony.

Conflict between Simeón and his predecessor Márkos continued, and was resolved by the Sultan’s Christian stepmother Mara, patroness of the monastery of St John at Sérres, who took a keen interest in church affairs. She proposed her own candidate, her spiritual adviser who was
to become patriarch as Dhionísios I, and sent on his behalf a gift on accession, now doubled to 2,000 ducats, in a silver casket.

The other payment was the annual tribute from the patriarchate, first mentioned when the incompetent Rapha?l was elected in about 1474. Rapha?l offered a reduced gift on accession, back to the original 1,000 ducats, but an annual tribute of 2,000 ducats. When he was unable to pay this tribute he was imprisoned and deposed. Thereafter the relative amounts of the gift on accession and the annual tribute were juggled to produce a package that would satisfy the Turkish officials charged with the negotiations. During Mehmed’s reign the gift on accession varied, from a low of 500 ducats to a high of 3,500, but the annual tribute rose steadily and at Mehmed’s death was 4,100 ducats, the last 100 being paid personally by the bishop of Ochrid to secure confirmation of his disputed appointment.

It was the Greeks who had unwisely introduced the practice of a gift on accession, and it was their bidding against each other for office that had caused both the gift on accession and the annual tribute to increase, though Turkish officials had not, of course, been slow to exploit the situation. The worst of it was that the costs were passed on down the church hierarchy and ultimately fell on the Greek people. As the traveller George Wheler reported a century later: ‘The authority which they (the Greek patriarchs) thus obtain by simony, they maintain by tyranny. For as soon as they are promoted, they send to all their bishops, to contribute to the sum they have disbursed for their preferment, and such as deny, they depose and send others to their charge. Again the bishops send to their inferior clergy; who are forced to do the same to the poor people, or to spare it out of their wives’ and children’s mouths.’
¹⁷
These patriarchal payments continued to be substantial, each fluctuating around 3,000 ducats, the Venetian ducat being the only gold coin used by the Turks since it was the only one not adulterated. The sum of 3,000 ducats was the value of the estate of a wealthy man who died intestate, and whose property was sold. The same sum of 3,000 ducats would pay a troop of 60 janissaries for a year, and in the expensive slave market of Bursa would buy up to 100 slaves.

It is sometimes asserted that there was a ‘steady annexation of [the Greeks’] churches and their conversion into mosques’
¹⁸
and that the Turks refused to allow new ones to be built. This is only very partially true. In the immediate aftermath of the conquest only Ayía Sophía, the greatest church in Constantinople, was converted to a mosque, but apart from the addition of four minarets the conversion was inevitably superficial rather than structural. To this day Ayía Sophía, now a museum, has
the sad air of a building that does not properly express either of the faiths to which it has been dedicated. A year or two later the second greatest church in the city, Áyii Apóstoli, was abandoned, then demolished and a mosque complex built on its site. Áyii Apóstoli was Yennádhios’ first headquarters as patriarch, but the building was in decay, the area around it was deserted and dangerous, and as a final straw a dead body was found one night outside the church.

With the Sultan’s approval the patriarchate was moved to the convent of the Pammakáristos, the resident nuns being transferred to the neighbouring church of Áyios Iánnis. The Pammakáristos was a far better location, being in the Phanar district in the north-west of the city, which was, and remained, a predominantly Greek area. The only indignity suffered by the Pammakáristos came 100 years later towards the end of Suleyman’s reign (1520–66), when on the orders of an unidentified official the cross surmounting the Pammakáristos was removed. This cross had been visible from afar, and it was not altogether surprising that the Turks, especially the more conservative, did not want to see a Christian symbol dominating a Muslim capital city.

As for the abandoned Áyii Apóstoli, Mehmed built on its site a great mosque complex, the Fatih Sultan Mehmed, which stood for three centuries until destroyed by an earthquake in 1766. The complex covered 26 acres, and the dome of the mosque was 85 feet across. The mosque owed much to Byzantine architecture, and those who saw it, including Mehmed himself, compared it to Ayía Sophía. The two faiths were here in harmony rather than in opposition.

The greatest threat to the churches of Constantinople came in 1546, in the reign of Suleyman. It is a curious story.
¹⁹
The Turkish religious leaders issued a fatwa declaring that, as Constantinople had been taken by force, not by surrender, Muslim law required that all Christian churches should be destroyed. This was to be done without delay, in five days’ time. Frantic discussions followed between the patriarch and the grand vizier, who granted the Greeks twenty days to produce witnesses, who must be Turks, to testify that the city had in fact surrendered. Two aged janissaries were found in Edirne and persuaded, on payment of a considerable sum, to come to Constantinople and swear before the grand vizier that they were now 102 years old and at the age of eighteen had been present at the capture of the city. The Emperor Constantine, they testified, had initially rejected peace offers but had finally surrendered. Furthermore, Mehmed had given Constantine a written acceptance, now unfortunately lost, of his surrender. The grand vizier reported this to Suleyman, who immediately overturned the fatwa and ordered that
there should be no more harassment of the Greeks over their churches, now or forever. The averted threat had actually left the Greeks in a much stronger position than before.

One strange element of the story is the sudden discovery of the two supposedly centenarian janissaries, whose testimony was accepted though it had to be paid for and was clearly false. The other oddity is that Suleyman and his officials went along with this charade. The probable truth is that Suleyman had no wish to antagonise the Greeks, but that conservative Turkish clerics – perhaps those who had the cross on the Pammakáristos removed – wanted a harder line. Suleyman could not simply rescind or ignore a fatwa, and needed legal grounds to overturn it. So he and his grand vizier were content to accept the obviously false testimony of the old janissaries, who would hardly have dared to perjure themselves unless the Sultan approved. Thus Suleyman got his justification in law for his moderate policy.

However, some Orthodox churches fell into decay and were abandoned, being put to use as armouries or warehouses. Some were indeed converted to mosques, though recorded instances are few. But Selim I (1512–20) reopened some of the churches that his father Bayezid II had closed, and during his reign the buildings round the patriarchal church of Pammakáristos were repaired and extended, so that it was said to look like a magnificent fortified castle. In the reign of his grandson Selim II (1566–74) the Pammakáristos church itself was splendidly renovated and adorned with gold and silver images and candelabra, so that even at night it was bathed in reflected light. Official permission was needed for building or rebuilding churches, but it seems that this was readily granted provided that the church was in a predominantly Christian area. By 1547 there were 67 churches in Constantinople itself and another ten in Galata.

On the whole therefore the Greeks enjoyed full freedom of worship. Stephen Gerlach wrote that ‘they sing, read and pray, entirely unmolested by the Turks.’
²⁰
He also described daily life in the city as peaceful. ‘It is amazing’, he declared, ‘that in such a large city there are no murders and no violence. The Sultan calls it the refuge of the whole world, where all the poor should enjoy safety, and everyone – high or low, Christian or of other faiths – should have justice.’
²¹
For the Greeks in Constantinople life was fairly good. But that was not necessarily true for Greeks elsewhere.

4

The Greek Peasants

T
he value to the Ottomans of their newly acquired territory in Greece lay predominantly in the land. The producers of this agricultural wealth were the Greek peasants, who made up 90 per cent of the population. The proportion fell only slowly over the centuries, and even in the 1941 census – the last before the upheavals of occupation and civil war, and post-war migration to cities and abroad – over two thirds of Greeks were classified as rural.

Although so much of Greece is mountainous, some parts even in that earlier time were richly productive. North of the Gulf of Corinth the broad plains of Thessaly and Macedonia grew abundant wheat, maize and cotton, and were important suppliers to the capital Constantinople. In the Peloponnese wheat was grown in the west, currants on the coastal plains of the southern shore of the Gulf of Corinth, and in the southwest corner figs, and the olives for which Kalamáta is still famous. These regions had access to the coast and could export some of their produce, including wheat, as the Greek peasants mainly subsisted on the cheaper grains of barley, maize or rye.

Much more typical of Greece is the bleak region of Arcadia (Arkadhía), the central district of the Peloponnese with Tripolis as its main town. Yet Arcadia came to be represented in art and literature as a pastoral paradise. How did this romanticised and distorted picture of Arcadia originate?

The Arcadian myth, established in antiquity, was popularised by the Neapolitan poet Jacopo Sannazaro, whose 1502 romance
Arcadia
, combining prose and verse, brought together the earlier pastoral themes and set them in an imagined place of tranquil and dignified seclusion. The book was enormously popular and went through 60 editions before the end of the century. By the early 1600s travellers were actually going to Arcadia, and wrote of ‘those pleasant Arcadian plains’, of which there were in fact few, and of the region as ‘famous for shepherds’,
¹
which would have included goatherds, of whom Pan was the protecting deity. One of the travellers, William Lithgow, experienced the contrast between the ideal and the actual. In Arcadia, he wrote in a flamboyant passage, only just keeping control of his adjectives: ‘Amongst these
rocks my belly was pinched, and wearied was my body, with the climbing of fastidious mountains, which bred no small grief to my breast. Yet notwithstanding my distress, the remembrance of these sweet seasoned Songs of Arcadian Shepherds which pregnant Poets have so well penned, did recreate my fatigated corpse with many sugared suppositions.’
²

But Arcadia continued to be romanticised, by painters as well as ‘pregnant Poets’. Guercino in Italy and Poussin in France, among others, included in their landscapes a tombstone with the anonymous and cryptic inscription ‘Et in Arcadia ego’. This was understood as contrasting the deathly chill of the grave with the gloriously happy life of the deceased in Arcadia, and by the middle of the seventeenth century Arcadia had come to stand for an idyllic region of rural felicity.

Arcadia, mostly hidden away in the central Peloponnese, was of course intriguingly remote, as any idealised Shangri-La must be. Also the very barrenness of the region may have contributed to the high-flown image of it. The travellers would have come across shepherds rather than toilers in the fields. Naturally choosing the summer months for their visits, they would have seen the shepherd sitting on a rock dreamily watching his flock or ambling slowly after it, all under a radiant Greek summer sky, and concluded that the life of a shepherd was easy and carefree, at least compared with agricultural labour. The traveller would have given little thought to the shepherd’s lice-infested clothing and meagre diet, with only a wretched tent or hut to sleep in, let alone how different things would be in the harshness of winter.

Later travellers, however, were less starry eyed, and described an inhospitable landscape that can hardly have changed over the centuries. As a visitor in the 1880s wrote: