Greece, the Hidden Centuries: Turkish Rule From the Fall of Constantinople to Greek Independence

by David Brewer

  The position was further complicated by two other factors. One was the question of cargoes: did licence to attack, say, Turkish shipping also extend to English or French ships carrying Turkish goods or passengers? The other ambiguity was over the issue of English Mediterranean passes, which gave a ship the right of free passage to an Ottoman port and so in theory guaranteed it against attack. Initially these passes were available for a small fee from consuls in Mediterranean ports and easily acquired by foreigners. Samuel Pepys, as Secretary of the Navy in the 1670s, tried to put a stop to this by requiring that passes be issued only by the Admiralty in London or, under strict controls, at foreign ports. But the abuse continued, and passes were valuable enough to be bought and sold. By the time of the Napoleonic wars it was claimed that, of 800 ships carrying English passes, 90 per cent were owned and operated by Genoese, other Italians, Greeks and Albanians.

  The most renowned centre of sea raiding in the Mediterranean was the Barbary coast. This stretched from Tripoli in Libya westward as far as Rabat in Morocco on the Atlantic, a coastline of some 1,400 miles. Its main bases were at Algiers, facing Spain, and Tunis and Tripoli facing Sicily. It was aggressive action by Spain that brought the states of the Barbary coast into prominence.

  Spain had completed the expulsion of the Moors from her territory, the Reconquista, with the capture of the city of Granada in 1492 – the same year as Columbus sailed for America. Not content with reconquest, Spain now embarked on conquest of the Moors in north Africa. The campaign was prompted by the archbishop of Toledo, Francesco Jimenez de Cisneros, a bigoted zealot otherwise known as Ximenes, who championed the dying request of Queen Isabella that her husband Ferdinand II should devote himself ‘unremittingly to the conquest of Africa and to the war of the Faith against the Moors’.1 The enthusiastic slogan of the Spanish soldiers was ‘Africa for King Ferdinand.’2

  Spain was initially successful. In 1497 Spanish forces took Melilla, west of Oran, and the island of Jerba, south of Tunis, and went on to more important gains, with the bloody seizure of Oran in 1509, and the capture of Bougie and Tripoli in 1510. But by now the local Arab rulers had appealed for help against Spain to the Sultan, who in response sent a small fleet and appointed as bey of Tunis Aruj, the elder of the brothers known as Barbarossa, the name Barbarossa being perhaps a corruption of Baba Aruj. It was the younger brother Khair-ed-din, born in 1466, who became generally known as Barbarossa.

  The elder brother Aruj recaptured Jerba in 1510 and in 1516 achieved his greatest triumph, the capture of Algiers, but two years later he was killed in action against the Spanish. He was succeeded by his younger brother Khair-ed-din (henceforth referred to simply as Barbarossa), whom the Sultan recognised as bey of Algiers. Barbarossa had an early stroke of good fortune. In May 1520 the Spanish navy left the Mediterranean for operations against the Netherlands, leaving him as master of 600 miles of the Barbary coast from Tlemcen to Tunis and without a dominant enemy at sea. In 1533 Barbarossa was summoned to Constantinople and appointed kapitan pasha in command of all Turkish naval forces, and, as we have seen, it was he who five years later brought most of the Aegean islands under Turkish rule.

  Barbarossa’s appointment is often presented as an astonishing elevation from pirate to Turkish admiral. However as bey of Algiers he commanded a state navy, so was not strictly speaking a pirate at all. Also, although the exploits at sea of his brother Aruj are documented, a modern historian writes that, apart from one doubtful instance, ‘I know of no record of his prowess on the high seas.’3 In Algiers he was primarily a colonial governor, and naval duties were the responsibility of a lieutenant who later became an officer directly responsible to the Sultan. So it is likely that it was Barbarossa’s administrative skills rather than any naval exploits which led the Sultan to appoint him as kapitan pasha.

  Barbarossa was vilified in his own day, and for centuries afterwards, as a pirate – the Great Corsair – but the historian Godfrey Fisher, in his book The Barbary Legend, sets some facts against the myths. Barbarossa, writes Fisher, was actually ‘in his own age reputed by Christians generally to be a wise statesman, an able administrator, and a great soldier, noted for his orderly and civilized conduct of war and courted in turn or simultaneously by the greatest princes, spiritual and temporal, of the Mediterranean.’4

  Fisher also demolishes with relish a number of other legends about the Barbary coast. For example the main Barbary ports, especially Algiers, have been represented as brutal and chaotic dens, lairs or nests of pirates – even wasps’, hornets’ or vipers’ nests. Fisher points out that ‘the standard of law and order throughout most of Barbary was reputed to be higher than in Europe.’5 In support he cites the evidence of the French official Nicholas de Nicholay, who in 1551 visited Algiers, by then under the rule of Barbarossa’s son and successor Hassan, and other neighbouring towns. Nicholay described Algiers as ‘very merchant-like, inhabited of Turkes, Moores and Jewes in great number which with marveilous gaine exercise the Trade of Merchandise’ and as a populous, bustling, well-ordered city, with ‘very faire houses, a great number of Bathes and Cookes houses, a busy port, with numerous trades, and fertile countryside separated from the city on the west by many faire and pleasant gardens’.6 Nicholay was equally complimentary about the Algerian towns of Dellys and Bône. In short, we are invited to see the Barbary coast in a very favourable light.

  We should not conclude, even after this demolition of some of the Barbary myths, that its main port at Algiers was a normal and well-ordered city under an enlightened governor, and whose inhabitants went legally and peacefully about their business. From the 1560s onwards raiders from the Barbary coast were seizing ships and plundering coasts over virtually the whole Mediterranean. Their success was due to two developments. One was the formation of large fleets: eight or nine armed ships, for whom an isolated target vessel was easy prey, and later these fleets might contain as many as 40 ships. The other novelty was the replacement, from about 1580, of oared galleys by light fast sailing ships of the type developed by Christian powers for use in the Atlantic. Between 1613 and 1621 raiders brought back to Algiers nearly 900 captive ships, half of them Dutch and the rest French, Spanish, English or German.

  However, a distinction needs to be drawn between Algerian raiders and raiders from other countries who used Algiers as their base because it was a centre for trade in plundered cargoes and captives. This distinction was often ignored by contemporaries, who regarded any ship originating from Algiers as an Algerian pirate. When the distinction was made it often favoured the Algerians: it was the foreigners in Algiers who were described as ‘the most cruel villains in Turkie and Barbary’, while the Algerians were ‘very noble, and of good nature, in comparison to them’.7

  Virtually all the Christian powers contributed to this international sea raiding in the Mediterranean: Spain, France, Holland and England, (often seen as the most active) as well as the semi-independent bodies of the Knights of St John, based in Rhodes and later Malta, and the Knights of San Stefano based in Livorno. It has been maintained that at the beginning of the seventeenth century piracy of various kinds had virtually brought Mediterranean sea trade to a standstill. Venice in particular suffered. In 1580 Venice lost 25 ships to raiders from Barbary in about a month on the Dalmatian coast alone, and in 1603 raiders from Naples and Sicily cost Venice the loss of an estimated eight million ducats in a year. So marine insurance rates shot up, from about 2 to 40 per cent or even higher, and ships stayed in dock ‘in lamentable idleness’ because nobody would insure them even at the highest rates. A 1607 letter to the Doge from his brother maintained that ‘Trade is suspended, you suffer loss of revenue and duties, shipbuilding ceases, we lose our sailors, and victuals are imported with difficulty. The government is dishonoured, the merchants speak ill of it, some talk of emigrating and everyone is scandalized.’8 Venice was probably not typical. Other states took more effective measures to protect their Mediterranean shipping, and in any case trade cannot have cea
sed altogether or piracy, with no ships to plunder, would have stopped with it. But there is no doubt that for much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries piracy was a crucial factor over the whole of the Mediterranean.

  The Greeks too were drawn into the world of piracy. Greek sailors are often mentioned among the crews of foreign raiding vessels, and they began to practise small-scale piracy themselves. The French naturalist Pierre Belon, visiting the Aegean islands in the 1550s, saw ‘three or four men, accustomed to the sea, boldly pursuing the life of adventure, poor men, with only a small barque or frigate or perhaps some ill-equipped brigantine: but they have their bussolo or mariner’s compass to navigate by and also the means to wage war, that is a few small arms for firing at a little distance. Their rations are a sack of flour, some biscuit, a skin of oil, honey, a few bunches of garlic and onions and a little salt and on these they support themselves for a month. Thus armed they set out in search of prey.’9

  Greek seamen continued to serve on the raiders of other states, and in 1740 the first Greek captain of such a ship is recorded: Panayiótis Christópoulos, from Zákinthos, who commanded first a ship from Malta under the direction of the Knights of St John, and then an English-built ship flying the British flag. Later, in the war of 1789–92 between Turkey and Russia, Lámbros Katsónis from Livadhiá commanded against the Turks a flotilla of eighteen ships, flying the Russian flag but with crews of Greek islanders. After the war ended Katsónis turned pirate, and in the words of the bishop of Skiáthos, ‘he began to plunder and lay waste the Turkish islands, extending his pirate activity even to the islands of my humble bishopric of Skiáthos by seizing ships and men whom he kept captive.’10 Still under Russian colours, he also plundered French and Venetian vessels, though the Russians forced him to return much of his booty. The Turks eventually cornered him at Pórto Káyio, the tiny rock-bound harbour at the southern tip of the Mani. He escaped to the Ionian islands and finally to Russia, bitterly accusing the Russians of failing to support him or to appreciate his contribution to their war.

  By the late eighteenth century a new form of Greek piracy had developed. Land-based brigands would seize a ship to attack other ships or plunder the neighbouring coast, and when attacked would flee back to the land. In 1775 a Greek pirate named Karamóschos was raiding the coasts of Kasándhra east of Thessalonika. A Turkish flotilla captured his ships and killed most of the crews, and the few who escaped fled to the mountains of the interior. The pirates were as much a menace to the local Greeks as to the Turks, and the villagers promised in sworn statements to cooperate against the pirates, though under an element of duress: if they failed to do so the village leaders were threatened with heavy fines or death.

  Twenty years later Greek pirates were bolder still, seizing all the ships in Vólos harbour and using them for piracy for three years. As before, when attacked by Turkish ships the pirates fled to the land, and the orders from Constantinople stressed that the villagers should not be alienated: ‘You are not to harm at all any innocent inhabitants during this campaign.’11 But this form of piracy seems nevertheless to have grown and the Turkish authorities to be more ready to grant amnesty. In 1809 a band of pirates said to number about 600, with 400 dependants, was active near the island of Spétses. When blockaded by Turkish ships the pirates surrendered, were granted pardon and resettled in their own villages. After Greek independence it was the Greek government that had to deal with piracy and both Miaoúlis and Kanáris, naval heroes of the independence war, were sent to suppress it. The final flourish of Greek piracy was in 1854 in north-east Greece, then still under Turkish rule, in a failed attempt to take advantage of Turkey’s difficulties in the Crimean war to achieve immediate independence for the region.

  Just as ‘pirates’ could mean different things in different contexts, so too there was no single category of slaves. The Turkish word ‘kul’ could mean a literal slave – somebody’s property to be bought and sold, and having no rights – or very broadly any tax-paying subject of the Sultan; or very narrowly the Sultan’s personal servants, the kapikullari or Slaves of the Porte, from palace gardener up to grand vizier and including the janissary soldiers. Similarly ‘kulluk’ could mean literal slavery, or simply the obligation to provide labour or to pay certain taxes.

  The most privileged of those called slaves were the Slaves of the Porte, with the grand vizier at the apex. A grand vizier of Suleyman the Magnificent described himself as ‘the weakest of God’s slaves’.12 These Slaves of the Porte were originally prisoners of war, or had been brought in by the devshirme conscription, or came from the slave markets. But even the grand vizier was a slave in that he was absolutely subject to the Sultan’s will, and the seventeenth-century traveller Jean de Thévenot describes how the Sultan disposed of a grand vizier who had lost favour, and how readily the vizier submitted to his fate: ‘A messenger arrives and shows him the order he has to bring the man’s head; the latter takes this order from the Great Lord, kisses it, places it upon his head as a sign of the respect he bears for the order, makes his ablutions and says his prayers, after which he freely lays down his head.’13 It was a not uncommon end, and few grand viziers died in their beds.

  At the bottom of the ladder of privilege were galley slaves. They might be captives in war or from coastal raids, or sometimes criminals, who were condemned to the oar in both Muslim and Christian states. These were very unsatisfactory sources of manpower: many had no experience of the sea, and neither category had any loyalty to the ship on which they served. The remedy was twofold: to hire free volunteers as well as those forced into service, and to command by fear.

  Many accounts of service in the galleys are indeed fearsome. A war captive, Baron von Mitrovic, was a galley slave on a Turkish ship in the 1590s and later wrote:

  The torment of rowing in a galley is unbelievable in extent. No other work on earth is harder because each prisoner has one of his legs fastened to a chain underneath the seat and can move no further than is necessary for him to reach his rowing place on the bench. The heat is so stifling that it is impossible to row other than in the nude or just a pair of flaxen pants. Iron handcuffs are clamped on to the hands of each man so that he is able neither to resist the Turk nor defend himself. His hands and legs thus shackled, the captive can do no more than row day and night, except when the sea is rough, until his skin becomes burned like that of a roasted pig and finally cracks from the heat. Sweat runs into his eyes and saturates his body, causing that peculiar agony of blistered hands. But the ship’s speed must not slacken, which is why, whenever the captain notices anyone stopping to draw breath, he lashes out with a slave whip or a rope dripping wet from seawater until the rower’s body is covered in blood. All the food you get is two small pieces of hardtack. Only when we arrived at islands inhabited by Christians could we sometimes ask for, or buy, if we had any money, a little wine and sometimes a little soup. Whenever we rode at anchor for one, two, three, or more days, we knitted cotton gloves and socks and sold them for a little extra food that we cooked on board. Life on board was so utterly dismal and execrable that it was worse than death.14

  There was welcome respite for the galley slaves in winter when the ships were in port, and the oarsmen were put to other work in the dockyards. But in view of the testimony of Mitrovic and many others, it is difficult to accept the statement of a distinguished historian of the period, that ‘the black romanticism of rowers chained to the galleys should be ascribed to fiction.’15 That is true only in so far as the plight of galley slaves has been used in fiction or dramatised history. An impressive example of this was the French film of the 1940s, Père Vincent, about the seventeenth-century priest Vincent de Paul, later canonised, who served as almoner-general to the galleys. The film had a contemporary message: the galley slaves represented all the Frenchmen recently deported for forced labour by the occupying Germans.

  Between these two extremes of elevation at the Sultan’s court and degradation in the galleys, slaves were used in other way
s. Male slaves were used for construction work on buildings or roads, or worked on the estates of landowners. There were few if any plantation slaves, as used to harvest sugar in the Caribbean or cotton in the southern United States, since Mediterranean products did not generally need such a labour force. Probably the majority of slaves, both male and female, found themselves in domestic service.

  It is impossible to say how far female domestic slaves were sexually exploited. It undoubtedly occurred, but there were limitations: for instance a female slave belonging to a woman could not be touched by her husband. Also there were many instances of female slaves being well treated, if not honoured, in a Turkish household. A freed slave might be married by her former master or benefit from his will, or slaves could even become executors of the will. When considering sexual exploitation we should not be too much influenced by the fact that youth and beauty in a female slave commanded a higher price; a young servant would be a better worker, and a pretty one a more impressive adornment of the household.

  For the Turks there were two main sources of slaves: prisoners of war and the Crimean slave trade. The prisoners were taken in the wars between the Ottoman Empire and the non-Muslims on her borders. In the 1550s Ogier de Busbecq, the Habsburg emissary to Constantinople, saw a procession of such captives: ‘Just as we were leaving the city, we were met by wagon-loads of boys and girls who were being brought from Hungary to be sold in Constantinople. There is no commoner kind of merchandise than this in Turkey, and from time to time we were met by gangs of wretched Christian slaves of every kind who were being led to horrible servitude. Youths and men of advanced years were driven along in herds or else were tied together with chains, as horses with us are taken to market, and trailed along in a long line. At the sight I could scarcely restrain my tears in pity for the wretched plight of the Christian population.’16