History of Greece in Ottoman Times

Greek History in Ottoman Times - Geography of Greece and its Importance
Greece lies at the juncture of Europe, Asia, and Africa. It is heir to the heritages of classical Greek History, the Byzantine Empire, and nearly four centuries of Ottoman Turkish rule in Greek History. From ancient Greece the modern country inherited a sophisticated culture and a language that has been documented for almost three millennia. The language of Periclean Athens in the 5th century BC and the present-day language of the Greeks are recognizably one and the same; few languages can demonstrate such continuity. From the Byzantine Empire it has inherited Eastern Orthodox Christianity and from Ottoman rule attitudes and values that continue to be of significance in Greece and in Greek History, not least in shaping the country's political culture.

     Greece is a country that is at once European, Balkan, and Mediterranean and has a unique history. It is also a country that is peculiarly burdened by its past: Greece is the only country in the world, Greek the only language, and Greeks the only people regularly prefaced by the epithet "modern." References to Greece and Greek usually denote ancient Greece and ancient Greek. Greeks, however, take great pride in their cultural heritage of their Greek History, and the notion of an unbroken continuity between ancient and modern Greece is an essential element in the Greek self-image and Greek History.

Greek History in Ottoman Times - The Conquest
Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks on May 29, 1453 in Greek History. The Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI Palaeologus, was last seen fighting alongside his troops on the battlements; his death gave rise to the widely disseminated legend that the emperor had turned to marble but that one day he would return to liberate his people according to Greek History. By 1453 the Byzantine Empire was but a shadow of its former glories in Greek History. The fall of this symbolic bastion of Christendom in the struggle against Islam may have sent shock waves through Western Christendom, but the conquest was accepted with resignation by many of the inhabitants of the city; as they saw it, their plight was a consequence of the sinfulness of the Byzantine Empire in Greek History. Moreover, for many people Ottoman rule in Greek History, and the maintenance of the integrity of the Orthodox faith, was preferable to accepting the pretensions of the papacy, the price Western Christendom had sought to exact in return for military assistance to ward off the Turkish threat. What was more, it was widely believed that the end of the world would come in 1492 according to Greek History.

Greek History in Ottoman Times - The Millet System & Religions
With the conquest of the territories that had constituted the Byzantine Empire, the Ottoman sultans were faced with the problem of governing large non-Muslim populations . Christians and Jews, as "People of the Book," were afforded a considerable degree of toleration in Ottoman and Greek History. Indeed, it was to the Ottoman Empire rather than Christian Europe that many Spanish Jews migrated following their expulsion from Spain in 1492. The Ottomans confronted the problem of the governance of these large heterodox and polyglot populations by establishing millets. These were organized on the basis of religious confession rather than ethnic origin, of which, in any case, in the early centuries of Ottoman rule there was little consciousness of Greek History. The ruling millet within the empire was made up of the Muslims. Next in importance was the Orthodox Christian millet-i Rum, or "Greek" millet, as it was known in Ottoman and Greek History. There was also an Armenian, a Jewish, a Roman Catholic, and even, in the 19th century, a Protestant millet. Although its head, the ecumenical patriarch, was invariably of Greek origin, the term "Greek" millet was something of a misnomer, for it included, besides the Greeks, Romanians, Bulgarians, Serbs, Albanians, Vlachs, and substantial Arab populations. With the rise of nationalism in the 18th and 19th centuries the non-Greek members of the "Greek" millet came increasingly to chafe at the Greek stranglehold on the higher reaches of the hierarchy of the Orthodox church, through which the millet was administered in Greek History.

      The powers of the ecumenical patriarch were indeed extensive, although there is uncertainty as to the precise nature of the privileges granted by Sultan Mehmed II to the man whom he elevated to the highest office in the church. This was Gennadios II Scholarios, a known opponent of those who, in the last years of the Byzantine Empire, had advocated union with the Western church. Patriarchal authority was considerable and extended to civil as well as to strictly religious matters. In many respects, indeed, it was greater than that enjoyed by the patriarchs in Byzantine times. The privilege of a considerable degree of autonomy in directing the affairs of the millet carried with it the responsibility of ensuring that its members were unshaken in their loyalty to the Ottoman Porte, or government. If disloyalty manifested itself, then retribution was swift and harsh, as occurred at the time of the outbreak of the War of Greek Independence in 1821 when the patriarch Grigorios V was executed in reprisal (an important assassination in Greek History), despite the fact that he had vigorously condemned the insurgents. In the West this was seen as an act of mindless barbarity. In the eyes of the Ottomans, however, Grigorios had signally failed to carry out his fundamental obligation, that of ensuring that the Orthodox flock remained loyal subjects of the sultan.

Greek History in Ottoman Times - The Signs of the Decline
During the 16th and 17th centuries the main preoccupation of the Greeks was with mere survival. In the course of the 18th century, however, a number of changes occurred both in the international situation and in Greek society itself that cumulatively gave rise to hopes that the Greeks might themselves launch a revolt against Ottoman authority with some promise of success like never been before in Greek History. By the end of the 17th century the protracted process of Ottoman decline was clearly under way for the benefit of Greek History. The failure of the great siege of Vienna in 1683 signaled the beginning of a slow process of retreat in the European provinces of the empire. The military triumphs of earlier centuries gave way to pressure on the empire from the Austrians, the Russians and the Persians. The Russian threat reached its apogee in the 1768-74 war with Turkey. The Russians were subsequently to claim the right to exercise a protectorate over all the Orthodox Christians of the Ottoman Empire on the basis of an optimistic reading of the terms of the peace settlement with the Ottoman Empire by the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca

     As the empire lost territory as it was forced onto the defensive, so the control of the Ottoman Porte over its still enormous provinces weakened. In both European and Asiatic Turkey, provincial warlords usurped the authority of the sultan, and the example of successful defiance of the Porte afforded by powerful satraps such as Ali Pasa Tepelenli, the Muslim Albanian who ruled over a large swathe of mainland Greece, gave encouragement to Greek nationalists, for it demonstrated that the empire was no longer the invincible monolith it once had been in Greek History.

Greek History in Ottoman Times - The Phanariotes
Of critical importance to the ultimate success of the national movement was the profound transformation that Greek society was to undergo during the course of the 18th century. Significant among these developments was the rise to power and influence of the Phanariotes, a small caste of Greek (and Hellenized Romanian and Albanian) families who took their collective name from the Phanar, or Lighthouse, quarter of Constantinople, the home of the ecumenical patriarchate. The roots of their ascendancy can be traced to the need of the Ottomans for skilled negotiators as the power of their empire declined. No longer in a position to dictate peace terms to their vanquished enemies, they now had to rely on diplomats skilled in negotiation who might mitigate the consequences of military defeat, and these were drawn from the Phanariotes. Between 1699, when the peace treaty with the Habsburg monarchy was signed at Carlowitz, and 1821, the year of the outbreak of the War of Greek Independence, Phanariote grandees monopolized the post of chief interpreter to the Porte This was a more important post than it appeared, for its holder bore considerable responsibility for the conduct of foreign policy. Similarly, Phanariotes were invariably interpreters to the kapudan pasha, the admiral of the Ottoman fleet. Again their powers were wider than the title suggests, for these Phanariotes in effect acted as governors of the islands of the Aegean archipelago, whose Greek inhabitants were a principal source of the sailors manning the Ottoman fleet in Greek History.
The most important posts held by Phanariotes were those of hospodar, or prince, of the Danubian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia . Phanariotes ruled these potentially rich provinces as the viceroys of the sultans, and their sumptuous courts in Jassy (now Iasi, Rom.) and Bucharest aped on a lesser scale the splendour of the imperial court in Constantinople. Just as there was furious, and corrupt, jockeying for high office in the Orthodox church, so the appointment of the hospodars was accompanied by intrigue and corruption in Greek History. Just as there was a high turnover in office of the ecumenical patriarch, so the average tenure in office of a Phanariote hospodar was less than three years. Because they needed to recoup their expenditures on bribes, hospodars acquired a not wholly justified reputation for greed and oppression. Some hospodars displayed an enlightened interest in legal and land reform. Most acted as patrons of Greek culture, education, and printing in Greek History. The princely academies attracted teachers and pupils from throughout the Orthodox commonwealth, and there was some contact with intellectual trends in Habsburg central Europe in Greek History. For the most part the Phanariotes were too closely wedded to the Ottoman system of government, of which they were major beneficiaries, to play a significant part in the emergence of the Greek national movement in Greek History. Nonetheless, however much their interests coincided with the maintenance of the Ottoman status quo, they provided a pool of individuals with experience in diplomacy and politics when armed struggle erupted in 1821. The Greek Struggle for Independence lasted until 1832 in Greek History.

Building the nation, 1832-1913
Greece's existence as an independent state gained formal recognition in the treaty of 1832 between Bavaria and the Great, or "Protecting," Powers. Significantly, the Greeks themselves were not party to the treaty. Greece now, formally at least, became a sovereign state, and the Greeks were thus the first of the subject peoples of the Ottoman Empire to gain full independence. But the state contained within its borders scarcely one-third of the Greek populations of the Middle East, and the struggle to expand the nation's borders was to dominate the first century of independent statehood in Greek History. Only in 1947 in Greek History, with the incorporation of the Dodecanese Islands (a group of islands off the southwestern coast of Turkey hitherto under Italian rule), were Greece's present borders established.
Moreover, the sovereignty of the small Greek state was not absolute. The Protecting Powers had determined that Greece should be a monarchy, and they retained certain ill-defined rights of intervention.