Of all the issues which incensed the Greek subjects of the Ottoman empire against their overlords, the way they were taxed was one of the most inflammatory. Foreigners visiting Greece in the years before the revolution heard constant bitter complaints about the burden of taxation, particularly the harach or poll tax. There was a constitutional basis to the tax system, and indeed to all relations between the Ottoman empire and its non-Muslim population, including Greeks: the theory that, on the incorporation of their country into the empire, a contract was deemed to have been made between the Sultan and his new non-Muslim subjects. Under this contract, the Sultan guaranteed to his subjects their lives, and to some extent their liberties and their property, and allowed them to follow their own religion; in return the subjects suffered certain restrictions of their rights and were taxed. But in practice of course this theory did not make paying any more palatable, and the annual collection of taxes from the whole community was felt as a chastisement with scorpions.
During the centuries of Turkish rule the Greek peasants, who formed the bulk of the population, found themselves trapped in a web of increasingly complex, arbitrary and oppressive taxes. They commonly worked as tenants on land owned by an individual landlord or the state, and could be liable for the sheep-pen due, payable when the sheep were penned for breeding; the sheep custom levied at lambing; dues for using the pasturage owned by the landlord; tithes (not always a tenth – sometimes as much as half) on grain, honey and grape products; and fixed dues on most vineyards, orchards and vegetable gardens, as well as on mills (related to the time the mill was in use) and on the peasant’s privately owned house and sheds. In addition all Greeks had to pay to the central government the harach or poll tax, at three different levels according to the individual’s wealth.
The situation worsened for the tax-paying Greek when, in the course of the sixteenth century, tax collection was increasingly put out to tax farmers. The tax farmer paid the bid price over to the treasury, and kept for himself all the taxes he collected. Alternatively, he might sell on the tax-farming rights at a profit to sub-contractors, who then needed to be even more rapacious. Not surprisingly, tax farmers were unscrupulous in wringing the maximum, legally or otherwise, from their victims in order to realise their profit. Also the system became increasingly oppressive. Once it was known that a particular area was profitable, the tax-farming rights were sold for ever higher sums, requiring ever harsher exactions from the peasants. The spread of tax farming, it has been said, ‘accounted more than any other cause for the disruption of the order that had formerly ruled in the provinces’.1
There was a minor change for the better around 1700. From then on tax-farming rights were sold not for a few years at a time but for the lifetime of the tax farmer, thus giving him an interest in the long-term prosperity of the peasants. But by the end of the eighteenth century matters had deteriorated further, for two main reasons. Dues paid to landowners increased because previously independent communities were turned into private estates, or chiftliks; and taxes paid to the government fell increasingly heavily on regions where the population was declining, because the required total remained constant however few people remained to pay it.
In the years preceding the revolution, Ali Pasha of Iánnina in northwest Greece was the most glaring example of a local potentate who increased his private estates at the expense of the long-suffering peasants. His method was to establish a foothold in a village by acquiring some land there, sometimes simply by claiming it as his right. The next step was to put pressure on other villagers to sell to him by driving them into debt at high interest rates through extraordinary exactions, and sometimes also by quartering his Albanian soldiers in their houses. When the peasants could no longer pay their debts, Ali made the village his chiftlik and the villagers in effect his tithe-paying serfs. Ali Pasha and his sons eventually controlled, by one count, 915 chiftliks, and ‘great terror of such a disaster’ was how one contemporary traveller described the villagers’ feelings at this prospect.2
The total tax due from a district took no account of changes in its population, and by the early nineteenth century there were flagrant examples of this inequity. Some areas were favoured because their populations were rising, but Mistrás in the Peloponnese, with a population of 3,000, had to pay the poll tax for 8,500, and on the Cycladic island of Mílos between 2,000 and 3,000 had to pay for 16,000, an injustice so glaring that the Turkish governor felt obliged to contribute. Peasants fled when they could to a more favoured area, or took to brigandage, creating a vicious spiral in Ottoman administration: as a community’s numbers fell, the tax burden on those remaining increased, driving away yet more of them. By the end of the eighteenth century deserted villages were a common sight, in Greece as well as in other parts of the Ottoman empire. The process has been concisely described: ‘The classes that lived on … dues and taxes were engaged during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on a long-drawn-out strangling of the unfortunate geese that laid their golden eggs.’3
Another burden, memory of which still smoulders in the Greek national consciousness, was the Turkish system of devshirme: the forcible conscription of young men and their removal to Istanbul to join the imperial service, especially in a military role as janissaries. This practice, however, had been virtually abandoned by about 1700 and, oppressive as it was, nevertheless gave these young men an opportunity to win advancement and wealth which many exploited to the full.
From the early days of the Ottoman empire its army had been boosted by slave recruits, non-Muslim captives from wars of expansion, but as the empire’s expansion slowed this source of troops dried up. To make up the shortfall the Ottomans introduced compulsory conscription, called devshirme by the Turks and pedhomázoma, or child-collection, by the Greeks. Under this system non-Muslim youths were forcibly taken as recruits for the so-called new troops, the janissaries, or for other offices in which they owed allegiance to no Turkish faction but only to the sultan himself.
The decrees of the sultans show how the system worked. In 1601 Mehmed III called for a devshirme in Roumeli, northern Greece, ordering the governor-general to ensure that ‘the most good-looking, well-bodied and spirited youths of the infidels between fifteen and twenty years of age be drafted and sent to the janissary units’. The officers in charge were to be totally ruthless: ‘The infidel parents or anybody else who resists the surrender of their janissary sons are to be hanged at once in front of their house-gate, their blood being considered of no importance whatsoever.’4 A later decree dated 1666 from Mehmed IV was concerned, as it says, with the first devshirme in Roumeli for a long time. The age range was now wider: 10 to 20 instead of 15 to 20. Only sons were excluded, and, where there was more than one son, only one might be taken unless another volunteered. The man in charge was no longer the provincial governor but an official sent from Istanbul, since local Turkish authorities were becoming unwilling to lose some of their best manpower and were likely to frustrate the devshirme. As for the treatment of the local population, the tone, belying the brutal facts, was now emollient: ‘No-one is to be wronged or coerced of the villagers during my reign.’5 By the turn of the century resistance to the devshirme had become open and violent. In 1705 the official sent to the northern Greek town of Náoussa to draft fifty new janissaries was murdered, while the crowd shouted their resistance to giving up their sons. The leaders of this resistance took to the hills, but were captured and their severed heads were displayed in Náoussa before being sent on to the governor of Thessalonika.
By this time the practice of the devshirme, though still brutally enforced when it was called for, was becoming extinct and it had been dead for a century when the war of independence began. Though it provided a unique opportunity for some of the conscripts to achieve fame and fortune at the sultan’s court – the path to glory, it has been called – it was the capricious inhumanity of the system that was forever associated in Greek minds with the centuries of Turkish rule. The harsh memory of it has survived to our own day. In the Greek civil war of the late 1940s the Communist-backed rebels removed whole families of children for indoctrination behind the Iron Curtain, and were denounced in an impassioned article by Georgios Vláchos in his respected paper Kathimeriní. Even the Sultan, he commented bitterly, took only one son, and Ottoman oppression was immediately recalled in the article’s title: ‘To Pedhomázoma’.6
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At the end of the eighteenth century most of Greece had been subject to the Ottoman empire for over 300 years, but the Greeks still fiercely resented the Turks as interlopers whose occupation of the country would one day be ended. At the same time ideas from abroad, especially the ideas of the French Enlightenment, began to circulate in Greece.
From the 1750s onwards books by French authors, including Voltaire, Montesquieu and Rousseau, were translated into Greek for the first time, though since many of the translations were only circulated in manuscript, not published, their influence was limited. Some works by Enlightenment authors directly addressed the Greeks’ situation. Voltaire’s Épitre à l’Imperatrice de Russie of 1770 urged Catherine the Great to liberate Greece (which through the Greek revolt led by Count Orlov she tried but failed to do), and in his Tocsin des rois aux souverains de l’Europe he called on the European rulers to drive the Turks from Europe and thus give Greece her freedom. Other works reminded the Greeks of their great classical past: for example, Charles Rollin’s Histoire ancienne, translated into Greek as early as 1750, and in lighter vein Jean-Jacques Barthélemy’s Voyage du jeune Anacharsis, the story of the Scythian prince Anacharsis who goes to classical Greece to be civilised. Even more popular, and with even stronger resonances for the Greeks, was the play Harmodius and Aristogeiton, which told the story of the two ancient Greek heroes who lost their lives in the attempt to overthrow Hippias, the sixth-century BC tyrant of Athens.
The most comprehensive statement in Greek of the Greek situation and of the path to liberation was the Ellinikí Nomarchía, or ‘The Rule of Law for Greece’. Subtitled ‘A Discourse on Freedom’, it was published anonymously in Italy in 1806. It contains some wild invective against those seen as enemies of freedom, but in its sober passages its debt to Enlightenment thinkers is obvious. It begins, following Rousseau, by describing man’s original state as one of primitive happiness where men had ‘all the virtues without a single fault’; this ended when man in society became dependent on his fellows and so ‘abandoned true happiness and became a slave’. All was not lost, however, because as Condorcet had maintained ‘man is endowed by nature with reason’ and ‘has a proclivity for the better which always motivates him to seek improvement in whatever condition he may be’. But improvement requires the cultivation of virtue, defined in terms reminiscent of Montesquieu as living for the sake of the many and always giving priority to the common good. The Ellinikí Nomarchía then returns to Rousseau’s thought and states that a constitution must be pleasing to the majority; that before a satisfactory constitution can be established there must be a progression from original freedom through anarchy, monarchy and tyranny to nomarchía, the rule of law; and that each of these stages, even nomarchía the best of them, goes through a natural cycle of birth and death. Finally the Ellinikí Nomarchía applies this philosophy to the present situation of the Greeks. The tyranny of the Turks is dying, it claims: ‘The Ottoman state finds itself today in its death throes, and can be compared to a human body, gripped by apoplexy … which little by little weakens and finally dies.’ Only two groups, it says, stand in the way of Greek liberation: the merchants of the diaspora, who enjoy an easy life abroad instead of returning to serve their country, and the corrupt and subservient clergy.7
The church reacted vigorously to this onslaught of Enlightenment ideas. The Paternal Exhortation issued by the patriarchate in 1798 rejected Rousseau’s theory of man’s primitive state of nature, and reasserted the view that man was expelled by God from the Biblical paradise because of sin, and would be readmitted to it in the next life only after enduring the tribulations and resisting the temptations of this one. The devil, responsible for all temptations, had ‘devised in the present century another artifice and pre-eminent deception, namely the much vaunted system of liberty’, but the only true liberty was ‘to live according to divine and human laws’. Therefore the Christian flock was enjoined to ‘guard steadfastly your ancestral faith and, as followers of Jesus Christ, resolutely give your obedience to the civil government’.8 An even more explicit attack on the Enlightenment came in 1819, with the encyclical of Patriarch Grigórios entitled Enlightenment as the Handmaid of Irreligion. What is the point, asked the patriarch, of the young learning about ‘numbers, and algebra, and cubes and cube roots … and atoms and vacuums and whirlpools … and optical and acoustic matters and a myriad of the same kind and other monstrous things … if as a consequence they are … ignorant in the things of religion, injurious to the state, false patriots and unworthy of their ancestral calling?’ Therefore the patriarch commanded his flock to ‘hate the profane mouthings, the manifestly ungodly teachings, of the aforementioned’.9
There was a pungent sexual content in this debate between conservatives and progressives. The patriarch in his 1819 encyclical spoke of the young becoming ‘degenerate and frenzied in morals’. Another conservative asked why people followed Voltaire, and answered his own question: ‘Because his philosophy is profitable to the indulgence of the belly and those parts under the belly.’ Voltaire himself was accused of being ‘a man of violent passions and thoroughly lascivious’. A further writer of the same persuasion broadened the scope of the sexual theme and described Europe as a whole as ‘the great prostitute’.10 The progressives replied in the same coin. The writer of the Ellinikí Nomarchía castigates the Greeks living abroad because they find beautiful ‘the painted and most impudent faces of the most immoral foreigners’ and ‘try as far as they can to flatter, without resistance, some whore’, while he denounces the clergy for worshipping ‘two or three noblewomen, with the greatest shamelessness’, and states flatly that ‘the present bishop of Iánnina is an adulterer and a sodomite’. Perhaps this style of invective was natural in a culture where the Turk was regularly depicted as both a ravisher of women and a homosexual predator, and Greece was portrayed as a desolate maiden awaiting rescue.
The ideas of the Enlightenment now began to seep into Greek education. The church-dominated curriculum had hitherto been deeply conservative. Theology was supreme, next came study of logic, rhetoric and metaphysics, and mathematics and the sciences were barely touched. Science teaching was in any case archaic. As late as 1797 a conservative professor published a work dismissing the ideas of Copernicus and Newton, and the physics taught was based on Aristotle until well into the nineteenth century. The nature of phlogiston, the substance supposed to embody heat, was still being debated in 1813, though the phlogiston theory had been exploded by Lavoisier over twenty years earlier. In the non-scientific subjects teaching was bogged down by being conducted in ancient Greek. Gradually however the educational darkness was illuminated. In 1766 a textbook on physics was published in Greek which for the first time introduced up-to-date science into Greece. Its author wrote: ‘The characters of the book of nature are not letters but triangles, parallelograms, circles … pyramids, cones, cubes, cylinders and spheres and all the rest. How can one read the book of nature if he does not know the characters in which it is written?’11 In 1791 the first book on geography was published in Greek, with accurate contemporary maps and observations on the cultures of different peoples. The first book in Greek on algebra was published in 1793 and on chemistry in 1802, both being translations from French and published in Venice. French influence was also dominant in the Chios school founded in 1817, which had expensive laboratory equipment brought from Paris and where the language teacher was Jules David, son of the famous French artist.
The ideas to invigorate Greek education thus came from abroad, and so did most of the money, from prosperous Greek merchants in the major cities of Europe. Schools fell into three categories: primary, where pupils simply learnt to read, with emphasis on church texts; secondary, where ancient Greek was studied; and a few academies, which extended the range to philosophy and the sciences. The local community could often afford a primary or secondary school and these had become widespread by the early nineteenth century; in 1814 the English traveller William Leake claimed that ‘at present there is not a Greek community in a moderate state of opulence … that does not support a school for teaching their children the ancient Greek, and in many instances the other principal branches of polite education’.12 But it was the academies which carried the greatest prestige, and it was these which rich merchants endowed. They were naturally concentrated in places where these merchants operated: around the Aegean, with its seafaring wealth, as at the Greek communities of Smyrna and Kidhoniés (modern Ayvalık) on the Turkish coast, at Patmos and Chios on the islands, and at Athens and Zagorá on the Greek coast, or centred on Iánnina, enriched by the overland trade route from Europe. Only one was built in the heartland of Greece, the academy at Dhimitsána in the central Peloponnese. Unhappily neither the Dhimitsána school nor its magnificent library survived the revolution.
The merchants, not the church, were now paying the piper and were calling an increasingly secular tune. When the Rev. William Jowett visited the Greek academy at Kidhoniés in 1818 he found a well-stocked library and a collection of astronomical and other scientific instruments, while the only vestigial remnant of the church’s influence was a music master to teach church chanting. But secular education still had some way to go. Jowett attended a class in which a master who had studied in Paris and Pisa was lecturing to thirty students on astronomy as part of a three-year course. ‘His audience, however,’ said Jowett, ‘could not all understand him. I liked their practice of putting questions to him though some asked very absurd ones,’ and he concluded that ‘the scientific part of education in Greece is evidently in its infancy’.13
Some saw education, and enlightenment in its broadest sense, as the key to Greece’s liberation: let new ideas enter, and in time the old ideas will wither away and a new society will emerge. Iánnis Kapodhístrias, later Greece’s first president, held this view strongly. His Observations sur les moyens d’améliorer le sort des Grecs, written in 1819, maintained that education, in the hands of a reformed and better-funded church, was the only route to the regeneration of the nation: ‘Nous le repétons, c’est de l’éducation morale et littéraire de la Grèce que les Grecs doivent s’occuper uniquement et exclusivement: tout autre objet est vain, tout autre travail est dangereux.’14 But this gradualist approach was not enough for most Greeks. Even for the unschooled Kolokotrónis the message of the new ideas emanating from France was already clear. As he succinctly put it, ‘The French Revolution and the doings of Napoleon opened the eyes of the world. The nations knew nothing before, and the people thought that kings were gods upon earth, and that they were bound to say that whatever they did was well done.’15 What the Greeks now needed was voices to speak specifically to their country of the steps which would lead to a Greece reborn, and ultimately they needed a call to arms.