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

by David Brewer

  In the Crimea, the slave trade was supplied by Tatar raids into Ukrainian, Russian and Polish territory. The main market was the Crimean port of Kaffa, in the hands of the Genoese till 1475 and of the Turks thereafter. It is estimated that between 1500 and 1650 at least 10,000 slaves were brought each year to Kaffa, and taxes on slave sales in the middle of the period raised 100,000 ducats a year, indicating 25,000 sales taxed at 4 ducats each.

  Bought slaves might be kept by the original buyer or captured slaves by the captor: Busbecq says that if a Turkish soldier ‘brings back with him from a campaign nothing but one or two slaves he has done well and is amply rewarded for his toil’.17 But many slaves were brought for resale to the Turkish slave markets, of which Constantinople, Bursa and Antalya were the busiest. Slaves awaiting sale in Constantinople were housed, according to the traveller Evliya Chelebi, in the 300-room Vezir Hani, half a mile to the west of Ayía Sophía. From there they were brought to one of the several slave markets, to undergo a humiliating experience, as described by a visitor in the 1550s: ‘At the break of day the slaves are herded together like sheep or goats and taken to the market. The buyers gather and a price is fixed. If the buyers appear pleased, the slaves are stripped of their clothes and displayed in front of their future masters. Each limb is inspected, poked, and probed for possible defects in the articulation of joints. If the buyer is not satisfied, the slave is returned to the merchant in charge. And this will be repeated as many times as there are potential buyers.’18

  However, not all captives ended up in a slave market. Some prisoners of war taken by the Turks were simply sent home when the war ended. Others were ransomed, and there was a network of brokers, often Italian Jews or Catholic organisations, to handle the negotiations. The ransom money did not necessarily have to be paid before release; a promise to pay on return home could be enough, given some guarantee, and the Habsburg emissary Busbecq stood surety for the ransom payment of one high-ranking Spanish officer. Slaves were often allowed to work on their own account and to make enough money to ransom themselves. Life as a captive while awaiting release could be tolerable, at least in Algiers. The city had two bagnios – state prisons for captives – the larger holding about 2,000. There were no dungeons, but there were taverns for drinking and buying food, for playing cards and gambling, and for exchanging reminiscences.

  Ransom was not the only means to escape from servitude. In 1595 a daring Spanish Scarlet Pimpernel made a nighttime raid on the bagnios of Algiers and rescued 32 captives, but such an exploit was rare if not unique. Slaves might simply make a run for it and find refuge where they could. Chíos while under the Genoese harboured many slaves escaping from the Turkish mainland. There was a government department on Chíos, the Ufficio dei Schiavi, to look after them, and the island sometimes welcomed as many as 1,000 slaves in a year. But the Genoese were not so tolerant of their own escaped slaves, and the penalty for harbouring a fugitive slave or removing his irons was death by hanging. Another bolt-hole was in Athens, at the convent of Ayía Philothéï in the north-east of the town, where the nuns sheltered female runaway slaves.

  Finally there was manumission, the voluntary freeing of slaves by their owners, an act earning merit in the Muslim world. This indicates a fundamental contradiction: slavery was justified, but at the same time to release someone from it was meritorious. The Genoese were aware of this contradiction, and resolved it by a juridical formula. A typical Genoese deed of manumission would begin: ‘Since by nature all men are born free, and slavery has been introduced against the laws of nature by the laws of men, those same laws of men have introduced the benefit of manumission for release from slavery.’19 It is surprising to find here a view of man’s birthright of freedom that one associates more with the Enlightenment than with the sixteenth century.

  In this world of Mediterranean slavery, often brutal and always uncertain, how far were the Greeks involved? The short answer is, very little, once Greeks came under Turkish rule, though one might easily think otherwise. Of the time of the Turkish conquest we are told that in 1470 the Greeks of Évia, then under Venice, ‘were in great part reduced to slavery’. When Barbarossa attacked Venetian-held Corfu in 1537 he ‘carried off many thousands of the inhabitants as slaves’. In the same year he attacked the island of Éyina, also at that time under Venice, and ‘about six thousand young women and children were carried off into slavery,’ and in the following year during his Aegean campaign he ‘carried off thirty thousand Greeks into slavery’.20

  All the above quotations are from George Finlay’s history of Greece from 1453 to 1821, published in 1877. All the events are from periods when the Greeks concerned were under Venetian or other Italian rule, not Turkish, so were in the Muslim ‘Domain of War’ and not the ‘Domain of Islam’. Several caveats also need mention. The numbers are suspect: Barbarossa is said to have carried off some 40,000 Greek slaves in the two years 1537–8, numbers probably based on the notoriously unreliable oral tradition. One wonders how such numbers could have been accommodated on his ships, and how the slave markets could have dealt with so many. Furthermore Finlay was out to establish his declared thesis that the slave trade was a primary cause of the misery and depopulation of Greece, and his wider sternly moralistic view that the Greeks under foreign rule had become morally degraded, were characterised by apathy and cowardice, and were thus appropriate for enslavement.21

  Once Turkish rule was established Greeks could not be enslaved by Turks. All inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire were equally subjects of the Sultan, and none of them could own another. The devshirme might be regarded as a form of enslavement, and has been so regarded by Greek historians, but those brought in by the devshirme were not literally slaves: they could not be bought and sold. Furthermore, as we have seen, those recruited were sometimes volunteers and in many cases achieved fame and fortune. The paradox is that Turkish rule has been accused of imposing metaphorical Turkish slavery on the Greeks as whole. But it was this same Turkish rule that ensured that individual Greeks did not become literal slaves of the Turks.

  7

  The Fall of Cyprus

  The chain of events that led to the destruction of the Turkish fleet at Lepanto in 1571 began in Cyprus. The island had been in the possession of outside powers for nearly four centuries. In 1191 it had been seized by Richard I of England on his way to join the Third Crusade, and a year later he ceded it to Guy de Lusignan, former King of Jerusalem. Guy’s successors held the island as Kings of Cyprus for nearly 300 years, until in 1489 the Venetian widow of the last Lusignan ruler abdicated in favour of Venice. Cyprus was by then paying tribute to the Sultan of Egypt, an obligation that Venice now assumed. When in 1517 Egypt became part of the Ottoman Empire this tribute became payable by Venice to the Sultan in Constantinople. Thus the shadow of Turkish domination of Cyprus was present from the start of Venetian rule, which lasted only a short time in imperial terms – a mere 82 years.

  The head of the Venetian administration in Cyprus was a Venetian noble with the title of lieutenant. He was assisted by two counsellors, the three being known as the rectors, all based at Nicosia. In peacetime military command was exercised by the Captain of Cyprus (often called the Captain of Famagusta), but in war he was subordinate to a provveditor-general sent out from Venice. Justice was the responsibility of the rectors and various subordinate courts. There was a consultative body with few powers, called the Grand Council of Nicosia. This included all Cypriots who had been nobles under the Lusignans but also any Venetian noble, and Venetians of any rank who had lived in Cyprus for five years. As membership of the Grand Council conferred nobility, joining it was a cheap way of becoming ennobled.

  The weaknesses of the Venetian administration soon became apparent. Those who held the leading positions were appointed for two years only, so they arrived ignorant and left before they could implement any long-term policy. Appeals against the decisions of the rectors had to be made to Venice and in the first year of Venetian rule Cypriots were al
ready protesting that many appeals to Venice were abandoned because they were so expensive. But the chief weakness was lack of money, and the steps taken to remedy the lack.

  Villages, formerly Lusignan and now state property, were sold to private Cypriot citizens in such numbers that there must have been a substantial wealthy class who could afford them. State offices were effectively auctioned, the candidates offering rival so-called loans to the state treasury. The sale of offices in both the Latin and Greek Churches was even more blatant, and continued despite Cypriot appeals to Venice to stop it. At a lower level there were sales of exemption from compulsory state labour, and sales of emancipation to serfs.

  In 1562 the Cypriots raised a revolt against Venetian maladministration, led by a man named as James Diassorin, described as ‘a picturesque character of dubious origin’, and according to one report a Greek who promised to support the Greek Church against the Latin.1 Diassorin aimed to become ruler of Cyprus, and sent an agent to Constantinople to enlist the Sultan’s support. But the agent was betrayed to the Venetians, the plot was revealed, and Diassorin arrested, tried and strangled in Nicosia despite a huge demonstration by the Cypriots in his favour.

  In the midst of these abuses and the turmoils they produced, the life of the common people of Cyprus continued on traditional lines, in supplying labour for the huge salt pans outside Larnaka or in agriculture and its associated industries. The island was extremely fertile. Grain was an important product, and the island produced in good years a million or so bushels of wheat and twice that amount of barley. But locusts – still an annual visitation in the late nineteenth century – caused bad years, and when grain was short in other Venetian territories Venice requisitioned it from Cyprus, leading in 1565 to serious grain riots. Other products included sugar, which gradually gave way to cotton, as well as silk, flax, hemp, wax, honey, indigo, oil and saffron. The industries based on these products were mainly in spinning and weaving, and the expensive fabrics camlet and samite were particularly prized. Finally there was Cypriot wine, said to be favoured by Selim II and a motive for his acquisition of Cyprus. It was so strong that if undiluted it was said to burn up a man’s entrails.

  Reports of the character and condition of the Cypriots varied even more widely than usual between different reporters. The aristocratic Dominican friar Stephen de Lusignan, probably associating mainly with others of the upper class, was full of praise. The women were virtuous, the men devout, the people generally gentle and friendly, delighting in fencing, games, music and dancing. But a visitor to the island in 1508 painted a different picture of the condition of the people. The Cypriots, he wrote, were slaves to the Venetians, having to pay to the state a third of their produce or income, forced to work for the state on two days a week, and every year having some new tax imposed on them. Another visitor contradicted Lusignan on the Cypriot character, describing Cyprus as ‘the island in which French pride, Syrian effeminacy, and Greek flattery and fraud came together’.2 As the Turkish threat grew, the question for the Cypriots was whether to support the present Venetians or the prospective Turks as their rulers.

  Cyprus was an obvious target for Sultan Selim II, who succeeded his father Suleyman the Magnificent in 1566. Since the Ottoman acquisition of Egypt and Syria in 1517, Cyprus had been a Venetian outpost tucked into a corner of the Ottoman Empire, from which it was separated by only 60 miles of water. It lay across the sea route from Alexandria to Constantinople used by traders and Muslim pilgrims to Mecca, and these were regularly attacked by sea raiders who, the Turks maintained, sheltered in Cyprus harbours. Moreover, Selim was soon free of other wars, as the Turkish conflict with the Habsburgs over Hungary ended temporarily in 1568. On the other hand, Selim on his accession had signed, as was customary, a new peace treaty with Venice, but senior clerics persuaded him that by taking Cyprus he would only be recovering an island once held by Arabs and the Sultans of Egypt, and therefore that the peace treaty did not apply. Finally, there was the tradition that a new Sultan should mark his accession by a conquest: Constantinople had been taken by Mehmed II in 1453, Egypt and Syria by Suleyman’s father, Belgrade and Rhodes by Suleyman. Suleyman’s son would now take Cyprus.

  There was a widespread belief in Constantinople that Venice would not fight to defend Cyprus, and that she would ‘tolerate any injury however great rather than go to war again’.3 The war party at the Sultan’s court was dominant, and the only proponent of a peaceful solution was the grand vizier Mehmed Sokollu, who by subtle manoeuvres tried to hold back the rush to war. Sokollu, a Bosnian conscripted by the devshirme, was grand vizier for 28 years under Suleyman, Selim II and Selim’s son Murad III. ‘What an apprenticeship in self-control and dissimulation he must have served!’ exclaimed Braudel in his history of the period.4 Sokollu also tried to persuade the Venetian representative in Constantinople that Venice should not fight to keep Cyprus. ‘What do you want’, he asked, ‘with an island so far off that it is useless to you and is the cause of such disorders? Leave it to us, who have so many provinces neighbouring it. And in any case the Sultan is determined to have it.’5

  Sokollu was probably exploring, on the Sultan’s behalf, the possibility of acquiring Cyprus cheaply by diplomacy rather than expensively by war, but his efforts failed. In February 1570 a Turkish envoy, Kubad, left Constantinople for Venice to demand the cession of Cyprus, but it seems that even before his arrival Venice was determined to resist. The demand that Kubad presented to the Venetians was: ‘Selim, Ottoman Sultan, Emperor of the Turks, Lord of Lords [followed by Selim’s other titles], to the Signoria of Venice: We demand of you Cyprus, which you shall give us willingly or perforce, and do not arouse our terrible sword, for we shall wage most cruel war against you everywhere; nor should you trust in your treasure, for we shall cause it suddenly to run away from you like a torrent. Beware of angering us.’6 The Signoria drafted defiant answers to both the Sultan and the grand vizier and submitted them to a vote in the Venetian senate. On 25 March 1570 the reply to the Sultan was approved by 199 votes to 5, and that to the grand vizier by 202 votes to 4. These majorities were unprecedented.7

  Any assumption that Venice would not fight for Cyprus was now overturned. A Venetian fleet was immediately sent to the Venetian province of Crete under Marco Quirini, described as ‘a man trained from his youth in naval skills, energetic and never fatigued.’8 Venice also appealed for help to Philip II of Spain and to the Pope, and it was mainly thanks to the Pope’s call for action that a combined fleet was assembled. Pope Pius V, elected in 1566, was a rigorous opponent of the Reformation – he excommunicated Elizabeth I of England – and was a champion of a renewed Christendom against the infidel Turk. Pius V had material as well as religious influence on both Venice and Spain, since an annual grant from ecclesiastical revenues supported the navies of both.

  The combined fleet – a league, but not yet the Holy League of the following year – was gradually put together during the spring and early summer of 1570. At the end of March, only two days after Venice rejected the Turkish ultimatum, the 79-year-old Girolamo Zane was appointed captain-general of the Venetian contingent, leaving Quirini’s Venetian fleet, which had been sent to Crete, to operate largely independently. In June the Pope appointed Marcantonio Colonna, a Neapolitan aristocrat, as commander of the papal ships, and commander-in-chief of the combined naval force. Some weeks later Philip II appointed as commander of the Spanish contribution Gianandrea Doria, great-nephew of the renowned Genoese naval commander and statesman Andrea Doria. The combined fleet would consist of 205 ships, of which Venice contributed 144 (nearly three quarters of the total), Spain 49 and the Papal States 12. But it would be many months before the ships of the allies finally came together.

  The fleet had a common purpose, to save Cyprus from the Turks, but it was far from being unified. Philip of Spain was in two minds. On the one hand he was prepared to support the league because he was unwilling to refuse the Pope’s call to arms. Also he was keen to check any expansion of
the Ottoman influence since Spain was under constant threat from the Sultan’s Barbary outposts, and it was always possible that the Moriscos – the Moors remaining in Spain and nominally converted to Christianity – might again rise in revolt as they had in 1568, and be supported by a Turkish fleet. On the other hand, Cyprus was Venice’s problem, not his. So while Philip instructed Doria, as commander of the Spanish contingent, to obey the orders of Colonna the commander-in-chief, Doria was told to ‘draw the attention of Colonna to what you judge the correct course of action’, that is not to accept Colonna’s orders without question. Doria was also told to ‘look carefully where you put our galleys’,9 and it may be that Philip secretly instructed Doria to slow the progress of the combined fleet whenever possible in the hope that it would not reach Cyprus until it was too late for action.

  Spain’s ambivalence was not the only source of friction. The commanders of the different contingents constantly disagreed since, as one historian has put it, ‘No one’s dignity allowed him to take second place; no one was in a position to claim the first.’10 Sickness was another problem. The Venetian fleet under Zane went first to Zadar on the Dalmatian coast, where he waited two months for his allies to join him, and during that time a disease, perhaps typhus, broke out among his men. The sick were replaced by Greeks from the Venetian possessions of Corfu, Zákinthos and Kephaloniá, some 2,000 in all, but this recruitment simply provided fresh victims of disease.

  It was only on 31 August 1570 that the combined fleet of some 200 ships finally assembled at Soúdha Bay in Crete. Three weeks later the fleet learned that the Cyprus capital Nicosia had fallen, and after some debate it was decided to withdraw and go back to their home bases. Storms battered the returning fleets. The aged Zane, while still on his way home with the Venetian ships, sent to Venice his resignation as their commander. When he reached Venice he was prosecuted as responsible for the expedition’s failure but died before he could be tried. Whoever was responsible, the expedition had indeed failed disastrously, which did not bode well for future combined action against the Turks.