Ottoman Greece
Ottoman rule in Greece Τουρκοκρατία στην Ελλάδα Tourkokratía stin Elláda | |||
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1371–1912 | |||
Location | Greece | ||
Including | |||
Monarch(s) | Sultans of the Ottoman Empire | ||
Chronology
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History of Greece |
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Greece portal |
The vast majority of the territory of present-day
The
The Ottoman advance into Greece was preceded by victory over the
With no further threats, the Ottomans besieged and took Constantinople in 1453, then advanced southwards into Greece and captured Athens in 1456 and the Peloponnese in 1460. The Greeks held out in the Peloponnese until 1460, and Venetians and Genoese clung to some of the islands, but by the early 16th century, all of mainland Greece and most of the Aegean Islands were in Ottoman hands, excluding several port cities that were still held by the Venetians (notably Nafplio, Monemvasia, Parga and Methone). The mountains of Greece were largely untouched and were a refuge for Greeks who desired to flee Ottoman rule and engage in guerrilla warfare.[2]
The
Ottoman Greece was a
The five century period of Ottoman rule had a profound impact in Greek society, as new elites emerged. The Greek land-owning aristocracy that traditionally dominated the
Ottoman expansion
After the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453, the Despotate of the Morea was the last remnant of the Byzantine Empire to hold out against the Ottomans. However, it fell to the Ottomans in 1460, completing the conquest of mainland Greece.[7]
While most of mainland Greece and the Aegean islands was under Ottoman control by the end of the 15th century, Cyprus and Crete remained Venetian territory and did not fall to the Ottomans until 1571 and 1670. The only part of the Greek-speaking world that was never under Ottoman rule is the Ionian Islands, which remained Venetian until 1797. Corfu withstood three major sieges in 1537, 1571 and 1716 all of which resulted in the repulsion of the Ottomans.
Other areas that remained part of the Venetian Stato da Màr include Nafplio and Monemvasia until 1540, the Duchy of the Archipelago, centered on the islands of Naxos and Paros until 1579, Sifnos until 1617 and Tinos until 1715.
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Sultan Mehmed II's entry into Constantinople
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OttomanKnights of Saint John at the Siege of Rhodes (1522)
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The "Battle of Preveza" (1538) by Ohannes Umed Behzad
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The "Battle of Lepanto" (1571) prevented the Ottomans from expanding further
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Siege of Candia (1648-1669)
Ottoman rule
The consolidation of Ottoman rule was followed by two distinct trends of Greek migration. The first entailed Greek intellectuals, such as
The second entailed Greeks leaving the plains of the Greek peninsula and resettling in the mountains, where the rugged landscape made it hard for the Ottomans to establish either military or administrative presence.[9]
Administration
The Sultan sat at the apex of the government of the Ottoman Empire. Although he had the trappings of an absolute ruler, he was actually bound by tradition and convention.[10] Ottoman rule of the provinces was characterized by two main functions. The local administrators within the provinces were to maintain a military establishment and to collect taxes.[11] The military establishment was feudal in character.[11] The Sultan's cavalry were allotted land, either large allotments or small allotments based on the rank of the individual cavalryman. All non-Muslims were forbidden to ride a horse which made traveling more difficult.[11] The Ottomans divided Greece into six sanjaks, each ruled by a Sanjakbey accountable to the Sultan, who established his capital in Constantinople in 1453.
The conquered land was parceled out to Ottoman soldiers, who held it as feudal fiefs (timars and ziamets) directly under the Sultan's authority. This land could not be sold or inherited, but reverted to the Sultan's possession when the fief-holder (
The Ottomans basically installed this feudal system right over the top of the existing system of peasant tenure. The peasantry remained in possession of their own land and their tenure over their plot of land remained hereditary and inalienable.[11] Nor was any military service ever imposed on the peasant by the Ottoman government. All non-Muslims were in theory forbidden from carrying arms, but this was ignored. Indeed, in regions such as Crete, almost every man carried arms.
Greek Christian families were, however, subject to a system of brutal forced conscription known as the
Under the Ottoman system of government, Greek society was at the same time fostered and restricted. With one hand the Turkish regime gave privileges and freedom to its subject people; with the other it imposed a tyranny deriving from the malpractices of its administrative personnel over which it exercised only remote and incomplete control. In fact the "rayahs" were downtrodden and exposed to the vagaries of Turkish administration and sometimes to the Greek landlords. The term rayah came to denote an underprivileged, tax-ridden and socially inferior population.[13]
Religion
The Sultan regarded the Ecumenical Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church as the leader of all Orthodox, Greeks or not, within the empire. The Patriarch was accountable to the Sultan for the good behavior of the Orthodox population, and in exchange he was given wide powers over the Orthodox communities, including the non-Greek Slavic peoples. The Patriarch controlled the courts and the schools, as well as the Church, throughout the Greek communities of the empire. This made Orthodox priests, together with the local magnates, called Prokritoi or Dimogerontes, the effective rulers of Greek towns and cities. Some Greek towns, such as Athens and Rhodes, retained municipal self-government, while others were put under Ottoman governors. Several areas, such as the Mani Peninsula in the Peloponnese, and parts of Crete (Sfakia) and Epirus, remained virtually independent.
The Patriarchate of Constantinople in general remained loyal to the Ottomans against the western threats (as for example during the Dionysios Skylosophos revolt, etc.) The Orthodox Church assisted greatly in the preservation of the Greek heritage, and adherence to the Greek Orthodox faith became increasingly a mark of Greek nationality.
As a rule, the Ottomans did not require the Greeks to become
Some Greeks either became
Treatment of Christian subjects varied greatly under the rule of the Ottoman Sultans. Bayezid I, according to a Byzantine historian, freely admitted Christians into his society while trying to grow his empire, in the early Ottoman period. Later, although the Turkish ruler attempted to pacify the local population with a restoration of peacetime rule of law, the Christian population also became subject to special taxes and the tribute of Christian children to the Ottoman state to feed the ranks of the Janissary corps.[17] Violent persecutions of Christians did nevertheless take place under the reign of Selim I (1512-1520), known as Selim the Grim, who attempted to stamp out Christianity from the Ottoman Empire. Selim ordered the confiscation of all Christian churches, and while this order was later rescinded, Christians were heavily persecuted during his era.[18]
Taxation and the "tribute of children"
Greeks paid a land tax and a heavy tax on trade, the latter taking advantage of the wealthy Greeks to fill the state coffers.[19] Greeks, like other Christians, were also made to pay the jizya, or Islamic poll-tax which all non-Muslims in the empire were forced to pay instead of the Zakat that Muslims must pay as part of the 5 pillars of Islam. Failure to pay the jizya could result in the pledge of protection of the Christian's life and property becoming void, facing the alternatives of conversion, enslavement, or death.[20]
Like in the rest of the Ottoman Empire, Greeks had to carry a receipt certifying their payment of jizya at all times or be subject to imprisonment. Most Greeks did not have to serve in the Sultan's army, but the young boys that were taken away and converted to Islam were made to serve in the Ottoman military. In addition, girls were taken in order to serve as odalisques in harems.[21][22][page needed]
These practices are called the "tribute of children" (
Opposition of the Greek populace to taxing or paidomazoma resulted in grave consequences. For example, in 1705 an Ottoman official was sent from
Influence on tradition
After the 16th century, many Greek folk songs (dimotika) were produced and inspired from the way of life of the Greek people, brigands and the armed conflicts during the centuries of Ottoman rule. Klephtic songs (Greek: Κλέφτικα τραγούδια), or ballads, are a subgenre of the Greek folk music genre and are thematically oriented on the life of the klephts.[25] Prominent conflicts were immortalised in several folk tales and songs, such as the epic ballad To tragoudi tou Daskalogianni of 1786, about the resistance warfare under Daskalogiannis.[26]
Emergence of Greek nationalism
This section needs additional citations for verification. (November 2016) |
Over the course of the eighteenth century Ottoman landholdings, previously fiefs held directly from the Sultan, became hereditary estates (
On the other hand, the position of educated and privileged Greeks within the Ottoman Empire improved greatly in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Greek nationalism was also stimulated by agents of
Greece was peripherally involved in the
Among those who held office in the islands was
Uprisings before 1821
Greeks in various places of the Greek peninsula would at times rise up against Ottoman rule, mainly while taking advantage of wars the Ottoman Empire would engage in. Those uprisings were of mixed scale and impact. During the Ottoman–Venetian War (1463–1479), the Maniot Kladas brothers, Krokodelos and Epifani, were leading bands of stratioti on behalf of Venice against the Turks in Southern Peloponnese. They put Vardounia and their lands into Venetian possession, for which Epifani then acted as governor.[32]
Before and after the victory of the
During the Cretan War (1645–1669), the Maniots would aid Francesco Morosini and the Venetians in the Peloponnese.[35] Greek irregulars also aided the Venetians through the Morean War in their operations on the Ionian Sea and Peloponnese.[36]
A major uprising during that period was the
Greek War of Independence
This section needs additional citations for verification. (August 2019) |
A secret Greek nationalist organization called the "Friendly Society" or "Company of Friends" (
Simultaneous risings were planned across Greece, including in
The Ottomans recovered, and retaliated in turn with savagery,
The atrocities that accompanied this expedition, together with sympathy aroused by the death of the poet and leading philhellene
In October 1828, the French landed troops in the Peloponnese to evacuate it from Ibrahim's army, while Russia was since April
A conference in London in 1830 proposed a fully independent Greek state (and not autonomous as previously proposed). The final borders were defined during the
Capodistria, who had been Greece's governor since 1828, had been assassinated by the Mavromichalis family in October 1831. To prevent further experiments with republican government, the Great Powers, especially Russia,[citation needed] insisted that Greece should be a monarchy, and the Bavarian Prince Otto was chosen to be its first King.
See also
- Dragomans
- Giaour
- Greek Muslims
- List of former mosques in Greece
- Ionian Islands under Venetian rule
- Phanariotes
- Rayah
- Sipahis
- Timeline of Orthodoxy in Greece (1453–1821)
- Hellenoturkism
References
- ^ Bruce Merry, Encyclopedia of Modern Greek Literature, oTurkocracy, p. 442.
- ISBN 978-0-7614-7902-4.
The klephts were descendants of Greeks who fled into the mountains to avoid the Turks in the fifteenth century and who remained active as brigands into the nineteenth century.
- ^ Maurus Reinkowski, "Ottoman "Multiculturalism"? The Example of the Confessional System in Lebanon". Lecture, Istanbul, 1997. Edited by the Orient-Institut der Deutschen Morgenlandischen Gesellschaft, Beirut,1999, pp. 15, 16.
- ^ [1]Douglas Dakin, The Greek Struggle for Independence, 1821-1833. University of California Press, p. 16.
- ^ a b http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i9187.pdf [bare URL PDF]
- ^ Clogg, 2002 [page needed]
- ^ "Greece During the Byzantine Period: The Peloponnese advances". britannica.com. Online Encyclopaedia Britannica. Retrieved 28 April 2012.
- ^ Treadgold, Warren. History of Byzantine State and Society. Stanford University Press, 1997. [page needed]
- ^ Vacalopoulos, p. 45. "The Greeks never lost their desire to escape from the heavy hand of the Turks, bad government, the impressment of their children, the increasingly heavy taxation, and the sundry caprices of the conqueror. Indeed, anyone studying the last two centuries of Byzantine rule cannot help being struck by the propensity of the Greeks to flee misfortune. The routes they chiefly took were: first, to the predominantly Greek territories, which were either still free or Frankish-controlled (that is to say, the Venetian fortresses in the Despotate of Morea, as well as in the Aegean and Ionian Islands) or else to Italy and the West generally; second, to remote mountain districts in the interior where the conqueror's yoke was not yet felt."
- ISBN 978-0571197941.
- ^ a b c d e f g C. M. Woodhouse, Modern Greece: A Short History, p. 101.
- ISBN 0-7914-5636-6.
- ^ Douglas Dakin, 1973, p. 16.
- ^ Crypto-Christians of the Trabzon Region of Pontos
- ^ The preaching of Islam: a history of the propagation of the Muslim faith By Sir Thomas Walker Arnold, pg. 143
- ^ a b The preaching of Islam: a history of the propagation of the Muslim faith By Sir Thomas Walker Arnold, pg. 137-138
- ^ The preaching of Islam: a history of the propagation of the Muslim faith By Sir Thomas Walker Arnold, pg. 128
- ^ Paroulakis, p. 11.
- ^ Douglas Dakin,the Greek struggle for independence, 1972
- ^ James E. Lindsay Daily life in the medieval Islamic world, (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2005) p.121
- ISBN 0-465-09063-X.
- ^ Madeline C. Zilfi Women and slavery in the late Ottoman Empire Cambridge University Press, 2010
- ^ Vasdravellis, I. Οι Μακεδόνες κατά την Επανάστασιν του 1821 (The Macedonians during the Revolution of 1821), 3rd improved edition, Thessaloniki: Society of Macedonian Studies, 1967. [page needed]
- ^ Shaw, p. 114.
- ^ Mittheilungen aus der Geschichte und Dichtung der Neu-Griechen. Zweiter Band. Coblenz: Jacob Hölscher. 1825.
- ISBN 978-0521604208
- OCLC 3305912.
LEONARD PHILARAS or VILLERET (c. 1595–1673) Philaras was born in Athens of good family and spent his childhood there. His youth was passed in Rome, where he was educated, and his manhood
- ISBN 0-313-30813-6.
Leonardos Filaras (1595–1673) devoted much of his career to coaxing Western European intellectuals to support Greek liberation. Two letters from Milton (1608–1674) attest Filaras's patriotic crusade.
- The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789-1848, Part 1, Chapter 7, II, pp. 140–142.
- ^ Davy, John (1842). Notes and observations on the Ionian Islands and Malta. Smith, Elder. pp. 27–28.
- ^ American Baptist Foreign Mission Society (1848). The Missionary magazine. American Baptist Missionary Union. p. 25.
- ^ Longnon, J. 1949. Chronique de Morée: Livre de la conqueste de la princée de l’Amorée, 1204-1305. Paris.
- ^ Απόστολου Βακαλόπουλου, Ιστορία του Νέου Ελληνισμού, Γ’ τομ., Θεσσαλονίκη 1968
- ^ Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall: Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches: Bd. 1574-1623, p. 442; note a. "Prete scorticato, la pelle sua piena di paglia portata in Constantinopoli con molte teste dei figli d'Albanesi, che avevano intelligenza colli Spagnoli"[2]
- ^ Setton, Kenneth Meyer (1991), Venice, Austria, and the Turks in the Seventeenth Century, DIANE Publishing p189
- ^ Finlay, George (1856). The History of Greece under Othoman and Venetian Domination. London: William Blackwood and Sons. p 210-3
- ISBN 978-1579582043Page 155
- ^ Finley, The history of Greece under Othman and Venetian Domination, 1856 pp. 330-334
- ^ Dakin, Douglas The Greek Struggle for Independence, 1821–1833, University of California Press, (1973) pp. 26–27
- ^ "Greek Independence Day". www.britannica.com. Retrieved 2009-09-09.
The Greek revolt was precipitated on March 25, 1821, when Bishop Germanos of Patras raised the flag of revolution over the Monastery of Agia Lavra in the Peloponnese. The cry "Freedom or Death" became the motto of the revolution. The Greeks experienced early successes on the battlefield, including the capture of Athens in June 1822, but infighting ensued.
- ISBN 0-19-285439-9.
The Greek uprising and the church. Bishop Germanos of old Patras blesses the Greek banner at the outset of the national revolt against the Ottomans on 25 March 1821. The solemnity of the scene was enhanced two decades later in this painting by T. Vryzakis….The fact that one of the Greek bishops, Germanos of Old Patras, had enthusiastically blessed the Greek uprising at the onset (25 March 1821) and had thereby helped to unleash a holy war, was not to gain the church a satisfactory, let alone a dominant, role in the new order of things.
- ^ Prousis, Theophilus C., "Smyrna in 1821: A Russian View" (1992). History Faculty Publications. 16, pp. 145, 146
- ^ Jelavich, p. 217.
Sources
- Finkel, Caroline. Osman's Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire, 1300–1923. New York: Basic Books, 2005. ISBN 978-0-465-02396-7.
- Hobsbawm, Eric John. The Age of Revolution. New American Library, 1962. ISBN 0-451-62720-2.
- Jelavich, Barbara. History of the Balkans, 18th and 19th Centuries. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983. ISBN 0-521-27458-3.
- Paroulakis, Peter H. The Greek War of Independence. Hellenic International Press, 1984.
- Shaw, Stanford. History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey: Volume I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
- Vacalopoulos, Apostolis. The Greek Nation, 1453–1669. Rutgers University Press, 1976.