1: East Meets West?

1 East Meets West?

1718–1797

The Greek nation state would be born out of a series of encounters between Christian Europe and the Ottoman Empire, from whose body it would literally be torn. These began during the period of relatively peaceful co-existence between these traditionally embattled adversaries.

Ottoman expansion into Europe had come to an end with the second siege of Vienna in 1683. However, peace did not break out immediately. The Austrians and the Venetians would each fight two more wars against the Ottomans, and the Russians one, before a relatively stable, defensible and more or less mutually agreed set of boundaries would be established to mark off Muslim Turkey from Christian Europe. These boundaries were consolidated by the Treaty of Passarowitz, signed between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans in July 1718.

To the west, the Adriatic and Ionian seas marked the limits of the Ottoman Empire. To the north, natural boundaries were formed by the river Danube, from Belgrade where its course turns eastwards, and then by the Black Sea into which it flows. On the European side of each of these three natural barriers lay three buffer zones, or borderlands. The first of these was formed by the seven Ionian islands to the west of the Greek peninsula, from Corfu in the north to Cerigo (ancient and modern Kythera) in the south. The second consisted of the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia to the north of the Danube. The third was made up of the northern shores of the Black Sea and their hinterland. In each of these borderlands, Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians occupied elite positions and enjoyed the benefits of wealth and education. It was in these borderlands, too, that the first interactions between East and West took place.

BORDERLANDS

In the Ionian islands, Venetian rule had been established in the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade and was still continuing. In the eighteenth century, conditions there remained very much as they had been in Venetian Crete until the Ottoman conquest, completed in 1669. Indeed many Cretans of the upper classes, who had had a stake in the Renaissance-inspired culture of their native island, had since found refuge there. Almost everyone permanently settled in the islands by this time professed the Orthodox faith and spoke the local dialect of Greek in daily life. But the official language was Italian. Sons of the aristocracy were sent to be educated at schools and universities in Italy. In this way, Western ideas began to filter through to the better-off sections of society during the course of the century. This education was generally available only to the landed gentry, so it was not especially likely to lead to ideas of revolutionary change. The primary loyalties of educated Ionians during the eighteenth century were to their native island, to the Orthodox Church and to the Most Serene Republic of Venice.

The second borderland, the ‘Danubian principalities’ of Wallachia and Moldavia, today forms part of Romania. Here, there was no significant Greek-speaking native population. Most of the inhabitants were Orthodox Christians who spoke the Latin-derived language that we know today as Romanian and was then called ‘Vlach’ or ‘Wallachian’. The Treaty of Passarowitz in 1718 confirmed Ottoman sovereignty, but not direct rule. Instead, the sultans appointed trusted proxies, ‘princes’ drawn from the wealthiest and most highly educated of their Orthodox Christian subjects established in Constantinople. This metropolitan elite was a kind of quasi-aristocracy that had grown up in the service of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of the Orthodox Church. For that reason its members became known collectively as ‘Phanariots’, from the name of the district of the city where the Patriarchate was (and indeed continues to be) housed. Irrespective of their mother tongue, all these people had been educated in the Greek language. In that sense the Phanariots could be thought of as ‘Greek’, even though in modern, ‘ethnic’ terms many were not.

Increasingly, from the late seventeenth century, this group came to be trusted with important offices of state in the Ottoman system, especially those involving a knowledge of languages and a high degree of education. In an age when expansion by military means had given way to the new art of diplomacy, there was a need for a suitably qualified corps of diplomats. Often given the title of dragoman, or ‘interpreter’, these versatile linguists who were also Orthodox Christians became increasingly embedded in the Ottoman system of governance through the course of the eighteenth century.

For a little over a hundred years, from 1711 until the outbreak of the Greek Revolution in 1821, with only brief interruptions during times of war, Moldavia and Wallachia would be ruled by a succession of Phanariot princes. Competition for these offices was intense, and reigns tended to be short. None of his successors would last as long as Nikolaos Mavrokordatos, who after a short period of office in Wallachia and another in Moldavia, settled down to eleven years of undisturbed rule in Bucharest, the capital of Wallachia, from 1719 until his death in 1730.

Just as the Greek-speaking aristocracy of the Ionian islands was continuously and unproblematically loyal to Venice, so the overwhelming majority of Phanariots throughout the eighteenth century identified with the Ottoman state. Indeed, such was the extent of their ascendancy, and so great the trust placed in them, that for Orthodox Christians the standard route to preferment within the Ottoman system, by the second half of the century, had become the Greek language and the educational institutions organized by wealthy Phanariots and the Orthodox Church.

The third borderland consisted of the Crimea and parts of today’s Ukraine. This one does not enter the story until the beginning of the 1770s. From 1768 until 1774 the Russians and the Ottomans were at war. The Russians won, and as a result gained control of the coast and hinterland north of the Black Sea. The same conflict brought disruption to the Danubian principalities, which for the duration passed under Russian control, and devastation to the Peloponnese and some of the islands of the Aegean. At the end of 1769, for the first time, a Russian fleet from St Petersburg sailed via the Straits of Gibraltar into the eastern Mediterranean. A half-hearted attempt by the Russians to induce their Greek-speaking co-religionists to rise up in their support sparked rebellions in the Peloponnese and Crete. When the Russian fleet withdrew, these were easily crushed. The Orlofika, as these events are known in Greek (after the Russian admiral Count Orloff), are often remembered as a kind of proto-national revolution. But self-determination for the Christian inhabitants of the Peloponnese or the islands was never on the table. If the revolts had succeeded, and if the promised military support from Russia had materialized, the local populations would only have exchanged one foreign master for another.

A more significant consequence of the war was the way in which Russia, under Catherine the Great, chose to populate and administer the newly gained territories north of the Black Sea, which at this time came to be named ‘New Russia’. Beginning around 1770, the Russian state embarked on an ambitious programme of resettling there the families of Orthodox Christians who had been displaced from their homes in the Ottoman Empire by the fighting. It is estimated that as many as a quarter of a million Ottoman Christians were encouraged to migrate to ‘New Russia’ during the last quarter of the eighteenth century.¹

By the end of the century, a large proportion of the trade carried on in southern Russia, across the Black Sea and up the Dnieper river was in the hands of these Greek-speaking subjects of the tsars. Positions of responsibility in the Russian government and army were thrown open to talented members of this immigrant population. It was during the same period, and on Catherine’s initiative, that the new towns of Mariupol and Sevastopol were established, with transparently Greek names. The port cities of Odessa on the Black Sea and Taganrog on the Sea of Azov grew up during the same period. Both had large Greek-speaking populations. Catherine and her ministers, during the 1780s, even drew up a grand plan that would have re-established the Christian Orthodox Byzantine Empire with its capital at Constantinople. Had the plan succeeded, it would have left no room for an independent Greek nation state. But by 1792, at the end of yet another war with the Ottoman Empire, although Russian gains had been considerable, it was clear that the Ottoman capital was not for the taking. The plan was quietly abandoned.

Once again, as in the Danubian principalities, the Greek elite in the new territories of southern Russia were incomers from the Ottoman Empire. But this time they were not a ruling elite. Their newly acquired wealth and status derived from the entrepreneurial skills fostered by Catherine’s policies. This was not an aristocracy but a middle class. In other respects, it functioned like its counterparts in the other two borderlands. This was a group that had every reason to owe its primary loyalty to the state that supported it and made its activities possible – that is to say, in this case, to Russia.

Finally, during the second half of the eighteenth century, a fourth ‘borderland’ would open up in which Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians could interact with western Europeans. This, unlike the previous three, was not a single space, and not literally situated near a frontier. Rather, it consisted of a series of local communities established by merchants and traders in ports and trading centres across the Christian continent: Venice, Vienna, Trieste, Livorno, Marseille, Paris, Amsterdam. (Others, further afield, would come later.) These scattered Greek-speaking communities were the pioneers of what would later become a worldwide Greek ‘diaspora’.

This development, too, was very much a consequence of the Russo-Ottoman war of 1768–74, although it had begun even earlier. The treaty of Küçük Kaynarcı, which brought that war to an end, allowed new trading privileges to Ottoman Christian merchants, who were now entitled to some degree of nominal protection by Russia. But there was an important difference between the merchants newly settled in Russia and those who set up trading centres in the west. In ‘New Russia’ the Greek trading communities had been brought there and been helped to prosper as a result of a deliberate policy. In the west the same thing was happening quite spontaneously in many different centres. It follows that the communities in western Europe were apt to be politically more independent-minded than their counterparts in Russia – or, for that matter, than the aristocracy of the Ionian islands or the Phanariots in the Danubian principalities. Perhaps predictably, it would be among these communities of merchants in western Europe that the most active preparations for a revolution would come to be made – although not until the very last years of the century.

CROSSING BORDERS: PEOPLE, IDEAS, GOODS ON THE MOVE

These, then, were the four borderlands where interaction between Christian Europe and the Muslim empire of the Ottomans took place during the eighteenth century. In each of them, Orthodox Christians who spoke Greek occupied elite positions.

Individual members of these elites were extraordinarily mobile, and not only along the trajectories that might have been expected: Ionian islanders to and from Venice, Phanariots between the Danubian principalities and Constantinople, settlers and merchants between their new homes and their native provinces. A glance at the careers of some of the most famous of these men reveals a remarkable mobility, at a time when travel over long distances was invariably slow and uncomfortable, sometimes also hazardous. Take the case of Evgenios Voulgaris. Born into an aristocratic family in Corfu in 1716, Voulgaris went on to study, write and teach at Arta in Epiros, Venice, Ioannina, Kozani, the self-governing Orthodox monastic community of Mount Athos, Salonica, Constantinople, Jassy (capital of Moldavia) and the German city of Leipzig. From there, now under the patronage of Catherine the Great, Voulgaris went on to become one of the first Orthodox bishops to be consecrated in the ‘New Russian’ lands north of the Black Sea. His last years were spent at Catherine’s court at St Petersburg, where he died at the age of ninety. In this way Voulgaris’s restless progress encompassed in turn each of the three borderlands between Europe and the Ottoman Empire, as well as European centres such as Venice and Leipzig, the Ottoman capital itself and several of its provinces in southeast Europe.

The world through which people like Voulgaris moved in the eighteenth century has been characterized in the twenty-first century as an ‘Orthodox commonwealth’.² That is to say, a sense of commonality was based on a shared religion and a shared education in the Greek language. This ‘commonwealth’ had no single geographical centre. Its heartland could be described as the southeastern corner of Europe, known today as the Balkans, but it was sustained by links deep into Russia in one direction and into Anatolia and parts of the Middle East in the other. Under its umbrella came together a broad mix of peoples who would later go on to forge distinct and often competing national identities of their own: Serbs, Bulgarians, Romanians, Moldovans, Ukrainians and (some, but not all) Albanians, as well as Greeks. The collective identity of this ‘commonwealth’, loose though it was, was capable of transcending the different political loyalties of the different elites of the borderlands.

There are two transforming achievements associated with this commonwealth during the eighteenth century. One of these is the development of education, along with the circulation of printed books in modern Greek and the dissemination of secular learning adapted and translated from the West. The other is the expansion of trade. Both have been seen, from the perspective of later national history, as precursors that paved the way for the Revolution of the 1820s. But it is not as simple as that.

What has come to be known as the ‘Greek Enlightenment’ was essentially a process of dissemination of ideas eastwards and southwards from France, Britain and the German states, with gathering momentum during the second half of the century. Much of what was published, or circulated in manuscript, consisted of translations or adaptations, particularly of scientific and philosophical works. It is worth asking how enlightened were these ‘enlighteners’. It is only in retrospect that they have acquired this name, since the 1940s. Most of them believed that the sun revolves around the earth, as their Church still taught. The first exposition of the physics of Galileo and Newton in Greek, ironically enough, and suitably hedged about, comes from a future bishop of the Russian new territories, Nikiphoros Theotokis, in a book published in Leipzig in 1766. It was not until very late in the century that anyone writing in Greek began to question the truth of revealed religion, or criticized the Church as an institution – and even then only rarely.³ This was in marked contrast to the Enlightenment in France. Indeed, very many of these ‘enlighteners’ were themselves in some form of holy orders – unsurprisingly, since the great patron of these early advances in Greek education in the eighteenth century was the Orthodox Church itself. When it came to politics, some were reformers and many were interested in political theory. But none was in any sense a democrat, still less a revolutionary.

Exemplary, in many ways, for those who came later, was Nikolaos Mavrokordatos, whom we met earlier as one of the first, and the longest-reigning, among the Phanariot princes of Wallachia and Moldavia. His father had been educated abroad, in Italy; he himself was unusually little-travelled. Like his father, in addition to his native modern Greek, Nikolaos was proficient in ancient Greek, Latin, Italian, French, Ottoman Turkish, Arabic and Persian. To these, late in his life, he added Hebrew. As a ruler he introduced to southeast Europe the model of the ‘enlightened despot’, overhauling the ancient feudal system and encouraging the foundation of schools. Mavrokordatos was truly a philosopher-prince. Among his surviving works are a book of maxims, written in response to the more famous ones by the seventeenth-century French nobleman La Rochefoucauld. He was also the author of a treatise on the art of ruling. Essays by Mavrokordatos praise books and reading, and condemn the vice of smoking. A long disquisition on contemporary manners has been hailed by some as the first ‘modern Greek’ novel.⁴

If there was ever truly a Greek ‘Enlightenment’, it made no original contribution to philosophy or science. These pioneers may not have made any detectable contribution to the Europe-wide movement. But they did make one very important discovery, one that would come to make an enormous impact within their own sphere. This was the discovery of themselves.

It started with geography. Geographical treatises written in modern Greek, based largely on Western sources, began to appear, the first in 1716, the second in 1728. The purpose of the writers was avowedly educational, and the scope of these works was the whole world. But when they came to adapt the descriptions, which they found in their sources, of a land called ‘Graecia’, they felt bound to draw on sources available to them and familiar in their own language: the chronicles of the Byzantine Empire.

The result was a curious hybrid of geography and history, of radically different modern Western and medieval Eastern ways of looking at the same things. By the time that Grigorios Phatzeas published his Geographical Grammar (freely adapted from an English work of the late seventeenth century) in Venice in 1760, the readers of his book found themselves named indiscriminately as ‘Romans’, ‘Hellenes’ and ‘Greeks’. The first of these terms was what the Byzantines had called themselves, and most speakers of Greek still did. ‘Hellenes’ at this time normally referred only to the pre-Christian, pagan Greeks of ancient times. On the other hand ‘Greeks’ (the Latin-derived name) was what Phatzeas’s foreign sources called both ancient and modern inhabitants of these regions, without distinction. No wonder he and his readers were confused.

During the same period Greek-speaking readers were becoming familiar with the idea that the world beyond the Ottoman Empire was peopled by loosely defined groups known as ‘nations’. This was not yet the era of nationalism, still less of the self-determination of nation states. But the consciousness and articulation of differences based on language, customs and environment, rather than religious affiliation as was customary in the Ottoman Empire, were among the factors that would lead to the emergence of national thinking early in the next century. During the 1780s, writers in Greek were beginning to refer to their own people (still by a bewildering variety of names) as a nation – in the new sense that was then emerging in the West.

By the beginning of the next decade, historical geography was making even larger claims – though these were still well short of revolutionary. Daniel Philippidis and Grigorios Konstantas were cousins, born into an up-and-coming mercantile family in the small town of Milies on the slopes of Mount Pelion in Thessaly. Both took minor orders in the Church, then as professional teachers gravitated towards the Danubian principalities. While based there, in 1791 they published in Vienna the first volume of an ambitious treatise entitled Modern Geography. The long section ‘Concerning Hellas’ was an up-to-date topographical account of the southern Balkan peninsula and the islands of the Aegean, preceded by a hundred-page ‘chronology and history of the transformations of Hellas’ from ancient to modern times. For these authors the inhabitants of the regions they described were ‘modern Hellenes’, the descendants of an ancient ‘nation’. Two things, only, held these moderns back from being as happy and as prosperous as their ancestors had supposedly been. One was the unfortunate habit of quarrelling among themselves (the downside of that illustrious heritage, as the authors saw it), the other the ‘Despotic government’ under which they lived.

In several passages the cousins lament the absence of the rule of law in the Ottoman Empire. Only this prevented its European provinces from being richer than France. Touchingly, though, they write loyally of the Sultan. Following a practice going back to the Ottoman conquest, they give him the Greek title Basileus, which had always been the official title of the Christian emperors of Byzantium. Their programme, insofar as they had one, was for reform of the empire from within. Although more outspoken than their predecessors, Philippidis and Konstantas still wrote nothing that would have encouraged their compatriots to rise up in rebellion against their masters. Their own political loyalties, like those of so many educated Greek speakers of the time, were apt to be fluid. They were Ottoman subjects and their pleas for reform are respectful. On the other hand Modern Geography, published at a time when the empire was at war with Russia, carried a fulsome dedication addressed to ‘Prince Gregory Potemkin, commander-in-chief of Russian forces’.⁵ But then again, after the Revolution, both authors would choose to spend their last years back in the Ottoman Empire, rather than in independent Greece.

The key to this process of self-discovery was language. The Greek language was an evident and indisputable common denominator linking pagan ancient Greece, Christian Byzantium, the present-day Orthodox elites of southeast Europe and a broadly dispersed series of rural communities, each with its own dialect. The notorious Greek ‘language question’ emerged in the mid-1760s, at a time when the elite of the ‘Orthodox commonwealth’ had identified themselves with this language to such an extent that they felt the need to codify it. The ‘question’ boiled down to this: what should be the proper, or correct, or ‘official’ form of the Greek language in which future generations should be taught to write? It was all about writing – there was no attempt to interfere with the diversity of speech.⁶ With more and more people learning to read and write, and more and more books being published in the language with every passing year, the more urgent it became to decide what should be considered correct and acceptable in a book published in Greek. In this way, the pursuit of a national language began several decades before anyone seriously imagined creating a national state.

The debate was often ill-tempered, reflecting the rivalries and the passions of individuals more noted for the strength of their opinions than for any willingness to give ground in the common interest. They spectacularly failed to agree. Indeed it was not until as recently as 1976 that the attempt to legislate for a standard written form of Greek would gain anything approaching universal acceptance. But for our purposes what matters far more is that they asked the question. And for all their disagreements, their different backgrounds, and irrespective of whether they spoke Greek or a Slavic language or Vlach (Romanian), Albanian or even Turkish at home, it was this yet-to-be-standardized written Greek language, along with their affiliation to the Orthodox Church, that brought them together. This was the language in which the self-discovery that was the ‘Greek Enlightenment’ took place. It was also the medium through which the second transforming achievement of the ‘Orthodox commonwealth’ in the eighteenth century came to be made. This was the expansion of trade, both within the Ottoman Empire and between the empire and Christian Europe.

The second half of the eighteenth century and the first years of the nineteenth saw a huge increase in coastal shipping in the Aegean. Most of this trade was carried on in small ships that covered relatively short distances. Control of long-distance routes came to be concentrated upon three very small islands: Hydra and Spetses, both close to the northeast coast of the Peloponnese, and Psara in the eastern Aegean. Ships were locally built and owned by small businesses based on the extended family, patronage and the sharing of risk. It was a business model that, astonishingly, survives more or less intact today, and would go on to generate the vast wealth of such legendary shipping dynasties as Onassis, Niarchos and many others.

By the first years of the nineteenth century, ships of between one and two hundred tons, carrying crews of up to sixty men, were operating out of the three islands. Most of this tonnage, we now know, was Ottoman shipping. Owners registered their vessels and paid for the protection of the Ottoman state, and they flew the Ottoman flag. Ottoman records show that most of the owners were Orthodox Christians. Records held in western ports reveal that the captains were ‘Greek’.⁷ Even during times of relative peace in the Mediterranean, seaborne trade was a dangerous business and piracy was common. Routinely, merchant ships were armed (indeed, the traditional Greek expression meaning ‘to equip a ship for sea’ means literally to arm it). The largest Hydriot ship in 1805 is recorded as carrying ‘16 cannon, 60 rifles, 40 carbines, 60 knives, and 60 pistols’.⁸ In precisely what sense these merchants and crews were ‘Greek’ at this time is debatable: most of the inhabitants of Hydra and Spetses spoke Albanian as their mother tongue, but now began to add Greek endings to their family names. Since their own language had no written form, all their records were kept in Greek, which was also the language of their Church.

In this way the three small islands grew rich, and their most successful merchants and sea captains came to acquire a knowledge of the whole Mediterranean. They were also able to amass a tonnage of shipping, and ship-mounted firepower, that would come to play a decisive part in the Revolution once hostilities broke out. But during the eighteenth century, and the first two decades of the nineteenth, there is no reason to believe that their aims were anything other than commercial.

Land trade expanded during the same period, a natural consequence of relative peace in the Balkans. Caravans of camels set out from urban centres in the north of today’s Greece to cross the mountain ranges of the Balkans to Belgrade, Bucharest and Jassy, or to wind along the coast to Constantinople. Often these merchants were ‘ethnic’ Vlachs, speaking Romanian at home, but just like their seafaring cousins of the Aegean, they relied on Greek as a medium for conducting their business and keeping their records. When they opened schools, to enable their sons and the sons of others to expand the business, they could count upon the Orthodox Church to provide the administration and the teaching, and naturally the language of instruction was Greek. In this way the basis for Greek education came to be expanded more and more into the secular sphere, throughout the ‘Orthodox commonwealth’. Exchange of goods and exchange of ideas went hand in hand, each reinforcing the other in a virtuous circle.

These developments would have far-reaching consequences. Without them, it is hard to imagine how the Greek nation state could ever have come into existence. But if these were necessary foundations, on which others would build later, they did not in themselves make revolutionary change inevitable.

TRAVELLERS IN AN ANTIQUE LAND

The movements of people and ideas were not all in the one direction. The new opportunities opened up by trade between Europe and the Ottoman Empire also brought westerners to the great coastal cities of the eastern Mediterranean, or ‘Levant’ as it was most often called at the time: Constantinople, Salonica, Smyrna, Beirut, Alexandria. Many, perhaps the majority, of these were only ever transitory visitors. Others put down roots: Catholic and Protestant families, originally from northern European states, established a presence in each of these cities that would last into the twentieth century. This movement was more or less symmetrical with that of Greek-speaking merchants to European trading centres, though the number of westerners in the Ottoman Empire was probably a good deal smaller. But here the symmetry ends.

What brought Greek speakers to Europe, apart from trade, was the prospect of studying in western centres of learning. The books that they wrote as a result were full of what they had learned, but have little to say about where they went and what they saw there. In the opposite direction, though, a small but growing number of travellers set out to explore the lands beyond the borders of Christian Europe. Many of them wrote up their experiences afterwards, and described in great detail the discoveries they had made. British and French travel literature about Greece and the Levant makes up a sub-genre of its own during the eighteenth century. Some of these books were much read. Even more influential than the travellers were some who never made the journey at all, but wrote about a ‘Greece’ that existed only in their imagination.

One of the oddest – and, with the benefit of hindsight, the saddest – things about these journeys is that the travellers rarely, if ever, encountered the similarly educated elites of the lands they visited. The reason is simple: what brought the travellers to these lands in the late seventeenth and throughout the eighteenth century was not the prospect of meeting and exchanging ideas with people like themselves. That they could do at home. Theirs, as the title of one recent study of the seventeenth century has it, was a ‘quest for classical Greece’.

One of the most respected and frequently cited of these travellers was Joseph Pitton de Tournefort. Commissioned by King Louis XIV of France, from 1700 to 1702 Tournefort led a small expedition through today’s Greece, Turkey, Georgia and Armenia. The account of these travels appeared in two large volumes in 1717, and was translated into English the following year. Tournefort was unusual in that he was a botanist, not an antiquarian. His mission was an official, scientific one. But even his brief included ‘to compare the Antient Geography with the Modern’.⁹ Others drew detailed architectural plans of ancient monuments, recorded ancient inscriptions and tried to identify sites recorded in ancient sources.

Exemplary in establishing the much later science of archaeology were Jacob Spon from France and Sir George Wheler from England in the 1670s, and the Anglo-Scottish duo of James Stuart and Nicholas Revett in the 1750s. It is very much thanks to their efforts that the attention of western armchair travellers came to focus as intensely as it did on the antiquities of Athens that in future would become the focal point of Greece’s capital city. Less reputable, by today’s standards, was the habit of bringing back works of ancient art and on occasion even whole buildings or the decorated parts of them, when resources allowed. The notorious ‘Elgin Marbles’, or Sculptures of the Parthenon, in the British Museum since 1817, or the ‘Venus de Milo’ in the Louvre, in Paris, are only the best-known examples of a practice that was taken for granted by connoisseurs of ancient art throughout the eighteenth century and beyond.

This is not to say that the travellers were indifferent to the modern inhabitants of the lands they visited. One who devoted a large amount of space to the modern Greeks was another Frenchman. Pierre Augustin Guys was a well-to-do merchant who spent many years in the Ottoman Empire. Guys evidently knew the Greeks with whom he did business on a daily basis. But the full title of his book, first published in 1771, gives the game away. The first part was rendered, in the English translation that appeared soon afterwards, as A Sentimental Journey through Greece, which is fair enough. The rest can be literally translated as ‘or letters on the ancient and modern Greeks, with a parallel between their manners and customs’. The reader has been warned. Note, too, the order of words in the title: ‘ancient’ precedes ‘modern’. In the minds of those travellers, it always did.

This meant that a set of stereotypes about the ‘character’ of the modern Greeks became established very early, through these British and French accounts. Words such as ‘debased’ and ‘enslaved’ dominate their vocabulary. Having little concept of the political realities of life in the Ottoman Empire, and conveniently forgetting that most Europeans at this time lived under governments scarcely less autocratic than that of the Sultan, the travellers judged the people whom they met according to their idea of the character of the ancient Athenians and Spartans. The condition of ‘slavery’ in which the Christian subjects of the ‘Grand Turk’ were universally said to live was rarely the object of the travellers’ compassion; more often it excited their contempt. With ‘slavery’ went servility, a character trait repeatedly attributed to those whose apparently willing servitude the visitors found incomprehensible. Other regular attributes of the ‘modern Greeks’ in the travellers’ accounts are deceitfulness and trickery. Not even the precedent of the epic hero Odysseus, who had excelled in just these modern ‘vices’, could lessen the viciousness of his modern descendants in the eyes of the travellers – though some did note the family resemblance.

Only here and there does a more positive counter-narrative peep through. Johann Hermann von Riedesel was the only notable German to make the journey to Ottoman-ruled classical lands in the entire eighteenth century (and even he wrote his account in French). Riedesel set out from Italy for Athens and Constantinople in 1767. A disciple of the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, he was prepared to see in the contemporary inhabitants of Greek lands something of the primal innocence of mankind that Rousseau believed was natural to the human condition. In the Greeks whom he met Riedesel detected a kind of antidote to the corruption he deplored in the contemporary European cities of his day. This was still a patronizing view, to be sure, and it would remain marginal until the 1940s, when the novelists Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell would popularize their own twentieth-century version of it.¹⁰

More influential even than the travellers in shaping the ideas of northern European elites about Greece was one of those who never went there. Johann Joachim Winckelmann has been described as ‘the first German writer of the modern era to achieve European celebrity’ and a ‘hero to a generation of Germans’ during the half-century after his death.¹¹ Born in Prussia in 1717, Winckelmann spent his most productive years in Rome. There, he made his name as a historian and connoisseur of ancient art. More than once he had the opportunity to visit Greece. But he held back from going. In this, Winckelmann set the trend for much of German intellectual engagement with the idea of Greece until well into the nineteenth century. What Winckelmann did, based on his research in Italy, was to convince the art world of his time that the true origins and the true greatness of classical art were to be identified not with the Romans but with the Greeks, whom the Romans had merely copied.

Winckelmann’s History of the Art of Antiquity, published in 1764, quickly established a set of ideas about the ancient Greeks that would become embedded in the consciousness of European elites for half a century or more. Ancient Greek art had been superior to all others because it had been born in the most perfect climate (you could only write this if you had never been there). Then, the ancient Greeks had valued above all freedom. That they had been the first to experiment with early forms of democracy, and therefore invented the concept of political liberty that was dear to Winckelmann and like-minded contemporaries, is true enough. But it is a blatant exaggeration to assert that ‘Freedom always had its seat in Greece, even beside the thrones of the kings, who ruled paternally.’¹² Some of what Winckelmann writes about ancient Greek political institutions is frankly bizarre. According to him, mankind had reached an ideal state of perfection in the historical circumstances of the fifth century BCE. Cultivation of the arts, political liberty and harmony between man and nature had all come miraculously together in ancient Greece. It was an achievement at once unrepeatable and at the same time a point of reference against which any aspiring civilization in the present or future would have to be measured.

In this way, modern Europeans in the second half of the eighteenth century began more and more to think of their own ‘civilization’, and even to define themselves, in relation to that gold standard from the past. A preface added by the anonymous translator to the English edition of Guys’ Sentimental Journey, in 1773, spells out the new way of thinking, as an incentive to draw readers to the book:

It is therefore not surprising, that the civilized countries of Europe should eagerly embrace every opportunity of information, with respect to a people to whom they owe so many obligations. We hereby trace, as it were, our origin; at least, we may say, the source of our manners, and the fountain of our knowledge.¹³

The notion that the rest of the world, and Europe in particular, owes a huge cultural debt to Greece is today deeply embedded in Greek history and the Greek collective consciousness. It has gained a new resonance in the second decade of the twenty-first century, when Greece is crippled by literal debt to European institutions. We should not forget that this is a notion that originated in western Europe, in the time of Winckelmann and the travellers who set out to uncover their own origins in those provinces of the Ottoman Empire that they thought of as ‘Greece’. Truly, as some recent studies have begun to suggest, the ‘idea of Europe’ in the eighteenth century is inseparable from the ‘idea of Greece’.¹⁴

This is why it was such a missed opportunity when the western European ‘quest for classical Greece’ failed to meet and find common ground with the parallel project of the ‘Greek Enlightenment’. In the Orthodox east, too, intellectuals were grappling at just this time with the question of their own communal identity, and looking to the example of the contemporary ‘nations of Europe’ for the new ideas and the new prosperity that they valued so highly.¹⁵ Both groups were fascinated by the ancient Hellenic past. Both were trying to make meaningful connections between that past and the present in which they lived. But there was no meeting of minds. The more that western intellectuals idealized ancient Greece, the harder it became for them to recognize that their quest was shared by men of education and ability who had a much more direct relation to the Greek language than they did themselves. Even today, when there are excellent studies available of the ‘Greek Enlightenment’ and of the works of western travellers and idealists of the period, no one has yet thought to explore these two bodies of writing in parallel – so fundamentally different do they still seem.

That failure of understanding, right at the beginning, before Greece was even born into the world as a modern nation, would cast its shadow over much that would come later. Whenever, in later times, Greeks and westerners have misunderstood or distrusted one another – which has been often – the origin of that distrust can be traced back to these two parallel paths that never met.

PEASANTS, FISHERMEN, FARMERS, MONKS

The story so far has been about elites, whether they lived in the borderlands on the edge of the Ottoman Empire, in the empire itself or in western Europe. But what about the people whose descendants, within a few generations, would come to think of themselves as ‘Hellenes’ and make up the population of the new Greek nation state? Beyond the elites who had the education and the leisure to reflect on the issue, who, during the eighteenth century, were the ‘Greeks’?

Histories written since independence usually take it for granted that there existed an identifiable Greek population under Ottoman rule too. But the Ottomans didn’t divide up their subjects on the basis of language, or what we would today call ‘ethnicity’. The subject peoples of the Ottoman Empire were identified by their religion. In official terminology, all Orthodox Christians were called Rum (the equivalent of Romioi in Greek) and defined as a millet, meaning a religious community. By no means all Orthodox Christians were native speakers of Greek. It was education, and especially the increased use of writing, that established Greek as the common language among the different language groups that made up the Rum millet – in some ways the equivalent of ‘international English’ today.

At the same time, those who did speak Greek as their first language were not invariably Orthodox Christians. There were communities of Roman Catholics in the islands and Romaniot Jews in the larger towns. Followers of all three faiths had the option of converting to Islam. Some did. If Greek had been their first language before their conversion, more often than not it continued to be afterwards. This was most conspicuously the case in Crete, where most of the Muslim population, some 40 per cent of the total in the nineteenth century, were ‘Turcocretans’ who had no other language than the Cretan dialect of Greek. Greek speakers could be Muslim, too.

Still, subject to these caveats, some broad generalizations can be made. Speakers of Greek as a first language seem to have been in the majority throughout most of the islands of the Aegean and the Ionian seas, in Crete and in Cyprus, in the Peloponnese (at this time still more commonly known as the Morea) and the southern mainland of what is now Greece, an area loosely known at the time as Roumeli. Even within that area, significant regions were primarily Albanian-speaking: the trading islands of Hydra and Spetses, for instance, and the southeast corner of Roumeli, comprising ancient (and modern) Boeotia and Attica, including Athens. Further north in the Balkans, around the Sea of Marmara and down the Aegean coast of Anatolia, there were many Greek speakers too, but here they were more evenly interspersed with speakers of other languages. There were Greek-speaking enclaves as far east as the district around Trebizond on the Black Sea, known in Greek by its ancient name of Pontos, and in Cappadocia, the Greek name for the area around Kayseri (Caesarea) in central Anatolia.

Who were these Greek speakers? Apart from their language and (for many, but not all) their religion, what did they have in common? How did they live?

Most would have been peasant farmers, herders, small-time merchants, fishermen, seafarers, monks and lower clergy. The conditions of life in most of the regions where they lived were harsh. Cultivable land is broken up and squeezed between seas and mountains. Communities have always been scattered. Until about the middle of the twentieth century, survival depended on a constant balance of risk. Local economies were based on subsistence. During the eighteenth century it began to be possible for young men to emigrate and find work abroad, and for young women to be married outside their local community. When mouths to feed exceeded the resources available, an alternative solution was brigandage in the mountain regions or piracy by sea. In Roumeli, in particular, the Ottoman authorities recruited local militias, often made up of Orthodox Christians, to keep the bandits in check. But mostly these militias were recruited from the same bandit groups they were meant to control, so that men whose only profession was arms were in the habit of moving back and forth, from enforcers to outlaws and back again. The pirates of Mani, the untamed southernmost part of the Peloponnese, had become notorious by the turn of the nineteenth century. In conditions such as these, the relative peace that gave opportunities to the elites was relative indeed. Ordinary lives were often short. Violence or the threat of violence, crop failure and starvation were never far away.

Any attempt to generalize across these different groups, spread over widely separated geographical areas, is bound to be little more than speculation, if not wishful thinking from the perspective of later times. What kinds of evidence can we draw on instead? There are several, and all have to be approached, for different reasons, with caution. We can start with the European travellers. To them we owe countless anecdotes and observations of customs, opinions and superstitions that might otherwise have gone unrecorded – among them, for instance, the first evidence for the Greek popular superstition about the living dead, or vampires, which much later would lie at the root of a worldwide subgenre of novels and horror films.

Another possible window into the lives of these communities, again through the eyes of outsiders, comes from modern anthropology. Beginning in the 1950s, British, American, French and latterly also Greek anthropologists began to study what were thought of as ‘traditional’ communities in Greece, and elsewhere around the Mediterranean. The classic study of a Greek community was made by John Campbell in the 1950s. Campbell chose as his subject the pastoralists of northwestern Greece called Sarakatsanoi – a proud, self-contained people who in those days still used to move with their flocks of sheep and goats from summer pastures high in the Pindos mountains to the coastal plains for the winter. Confronted by what appeared to the outside observer to be the ‘anarchy of their communal life’, Campbell noticed how a shared code of values, based on honour and shame, had the effect of regulating the mutual hostility of unrelated families.¹⁶

If you cannot trust anyone to whom you are not related either by blood or by marriage, then you can rely on them only if you can bind them to you by an equivalent obligation. The shared code ensures that to honour such an obligation is honourable, to break it shameful. Therefore, those who honour their obligations are the most respected members of the community. Anyone who does not is despised, or even risks being cast out altogether. It is a self-maintaining system. On the one side, it entails the giving of gifts, on the other the bestowal of patronage. In the context of modern, democratic and accountable institutions, this pre-modern system has come to be known as ‘corruption’. In the absence of these institutions, or where they remain weak and underdeveloped, it is a mechanism for survival.

These insights from modern anthropology in turn may help explain the frustration experienced by the early travellers and many different outsiders ever since, with what has so often been called the ‘dishonesty’ of the Greeks. Paradoxical though it might seem, the ‘corrupt’ system of patrons and clients places the highest possible value on trust: the system can only work if all parties are playing by the same (unwritten) rules. These rules, in turn, are founded upon the traditional, deep-seated code of honour and shame. An outsider cannot be assumed to be bound by this code, and so can never be trusted to keep his word. Therefore, the unspoken, internalized logic goes, if you can’t trust him, it’s all right to cheat him.¹⁷

The anthropologist, of course, is always working with the present. Campbell himself thought that the way of life and the social values he had observed had probably remained little changed since late Byzantine times. Anthropologists today are more cautious about making such claims. But in this case we can be fairly confident in supposing that communities of Greek speakers in the eighteenth century must have operated in much the same way.

It is time, now, to turn back to evidence from the period itself. Here, we face different problems. Despite the growth of schools in towns, in the countryside throughout the Ottoman Empire very few people could read or write before the late nineteenth century. As a result, written evidence is hard to come by. A rare example of history written ‘from below’, from the beginning of the period, tells of what the author calls the ‘disaster and enslavement’ of the Peloponnese by the Ottomans in 1715. The writer, one Manthos of Ioannina, was apparently a witness to some of the events he narrates and afterwards ended up in the Greek community of Venice, where he published his history in rhyming couplets. Manthos blamed the defeated Venetians almost as much as the victorious Ottomans for the subjugation of his people. In form, his work is an elaboration of the kind of lament that had become current shortly after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. There are many references to ‘Romans’, that is, the Orthodox Christians who in this region would have been overwhelmingly Greek-speaking.

Manthos presents these ‘Romans’ as helpless victims of the actions of others. In his whole narrative there is only a single moment when any of them take the initiative: when the inhabitants of a group of villages in the remote mountains of the central Peloponnese put up a token resistance. As it happens, these insurgents included the ancestors of Theodoros Kolokotronis, who would win fame more than a century later in the Revolution. The pious Manthos, having in the meantime found refuge far away in Venice, dismisses these few defenders of their faith as ‘all of them crazy; they should have known better’.¹⁸ The idea of victimhood, which will often resurface in later years, was already thriving in the early eighteenth century.

Towards the end of the century, the revolt in Crete, which had been sparked by the campaign of Catherine the Great against the Ottoman Empire in 1770, was also commemorated in verse not long afterwards. The Song of Daskalogiannis was composed orally in Sphakia, the mountainous southwest of the island where the revolt had originated. According to the text itself, it was written down just sixteen years after the events it describes. Its hero is one of the richest and ‘worthiest’ of the Christians of Sphakia, Daskalogiannis, or ‘John the Teacher’. Unusually gifted in being able to read and write, Daskalogiannis can communicate with other parts of the Greek-speaking world. When reports arrive that Russian troops have landed in the Peloponnese, he decides that this is the moment to rebel – against the advice of the head of the local Church. It all goes tragically wrong. Daskalogiannis and his associates are forced to capitulate. In captivity the hero remains defiant to the last, and is flayed alive by the Pasha of Candia (Heraklion).

It is a stirring tale, told with epic vividness and an epic love for long speeches. The hero’s explanation of his motives, if these words really were fixed in writing in 1786, are revealing of the attitudes of the time. Daskalogiannis had acted, he declares:

firstly for my native place, and second for the Faith,

and thirdly for the other Christians who live in Crete.

For if I am a Sphakian, I am a child of Crete,

and to see any Cretan suffer gives me pain.

Patriotism begins at home, in Sphakia, and from there extends to the rest of the island. There is no sense of a wider ‘national’ identity in this account. The poet ends with a conclusion not dissimilar to that of Manthos, though his whole narrative has been couched in far more heroic terms: the priest had been right all along. The people of Sphakia had already enjoyed independence, in practice, from the Turks. Thanks to Daskalogiannis’s rash actions, they had now thrown it away.¹⁹

The Song of Daskalogiannis is almost the only case we have of an orally composed narrative that was written down during the eighteenth century. But before long, a rich and varied repertory of narrative and lyrical songs would start to be collected from the oral tradition of just about every Greek-speaking community from the Ionian islands to Cyprus, from Crete to the foothills of the Balkan mountains. These songs reveal a remarkable world of the imagination. In that world, men are expected to be heroes. They have to prove their worth by acts of defiance and violence. Women should be beautiful and modest when young, but at any age are apt to be fickle and devious. It is women who mourn for the dead and also for those condemned to live far away, in xenitiá, a much-used term that may be translated either as ‘exile’ or ‘foreign parts’, and is always imagined as not much better than being dead. Love songs are bursting with richly inventive imagery, often seeming to convey half-hidden meanings. The fantastic and the irrational are never far away: birds and animals speak, thunder and lightning reflect and magnify human dramas, a dead man rides a horse among the clouds (vampires again).

Some of the most characteristic, and widely diffused, themes have to do with death. In a male world where you can only prove your valour by defying ever more potent adversaries, the ultimate test is to take on Death himself. Personified as Charos, a name deriving from the ferryman on the river Styx in the underworld of ancient mythology, Death is a gruff, curmudgeonly figure. Always dressed in black, riding a black horse, he is often depicted trailing a long line of helpless women and children behind him, no doubt like the slave-traders who could still be a threat to daily life in the eighteenth century. Charos in these songs is the opposite of the idealized male hero in every way. Goaded to envious rage by the hero’s irrepressible love of life, Charos confronts him and tells him he has to die. The hero, being a hero, refuses. Instead, he offers to fight his enemy on equal terms. The struggle takes place on the threshing-floor, where in real life the chaff is separated from the edible seed through violent beating. Nine times the hero throws down his enemy. But Charos cannot bear to be beaten. Unable to win on the equal terms he has promised, he cheats: Charos grabs the hero by the hair and pulls him down.²⁰ So Death wins, as he must in the end – but only by violating the code of honour and shame. Death is the ultimate outsider. His behaviour proves, in extreme form, why the outsider can never be trusted: Death is a cheat. So the hero – the upholder of the code of honour and shame, the standard-bearer of the values of the insider – is morally the victor, even when he dies.

We find much the same set of attitudes in the very many songs that have been preserved from the oral tradition that are dedicated to the lives, and usually also the violent deaths, of the mountain brigands known as klefts. The word comes from the Greek klephtis, meaning literally a thief, which during the eighteenth century is what these people were. The later role of these warrior-bands as the most effective fighting force in the Revolution would give to the very word ‘kleft’ a heroic aura that it has never lost since. The songs that commemorate these men first began to be published during the Revolution, and have remained part of the national ‘grand narrative’ ever since.

Most of these songs refer to individuals who lived in the early nineteenth century. But a few songs date back further. The oldest of them narrates an episode that may have taken place in Roumeli around 1750. In it, Christos Milionis has been proscribed by the Ottoman authorities. A Muslim by the name of Suleiman is sent to bring him in:

[Suleiman] caught up with him at Almyros, they kissed as friends,

all night they stayed up drinking, until dawn,

and when dawn broke they went out to the bandit lairs.

And Suleiman called out to kapetán Milionis:

‘Christos, the Sultan’s after you, the Muslim nobles want you.’

‘So long as Christos lives, he won’t bow down to Turks.’

Musket in hand they went for one another;

fire answered fire and both of them fell dead.²¹

There is no knowing whether the specific form of defiance hurled by Milionis in the song was actually uttered in or around 1750, or may instead reflect the patriotism of a later age when the story came to be written down in this form. In any case, just as striking is the evidence the song provides for a shared code of behaviour, and even intimacy, between Christian and Muslim armed men in the mountains of Roumeli under Ottoman rule.

Finally, among the Greek-speaking Orthodox population there was in circulation a series of tales and prophecies that linked the fall of the Christian empire of Constantinople with divine providence and faith in a future restoration. Much of this material, too, is known to us only through texts that were published later. These include what is perhaps the most famous of all the Greek folk songs. Called simply ‘Of St Sophia’ or ‘The Last Mass in St Sophia’, versions of this song tell, in only a dozen or so lines, how on the eve of the Ottoman conquest the celebration of the liturgy in the great cathedral of Orthodoxy was interrupted by a voice from heaven: it is God’s will that ‘the City’ (Constantinople) should fall to the infidel. The shock experienced by the faithful is projected onto the icons of the saints. Miraculously, all the painted likenesses begin to weep. The voice – or is it perhaps the voice of the poet and singer of the song? – soothes the distraught saints in touching, homely fashion. Addressing the icon of the Mother of God as an earthly mother would comfort a crying child, the song ends:

Hush, Lady Mother, do not cry and weep,

once more with years and ages, once more these things are yours.²²

In the nineteenth century, and into the twentieth, these lines were read as a positive statement about the future. But in the oldest versions the tense is not future but present, and the word translated here as ‘once more’ can also have the force of ‘still’, or ‘all the same’. The song of St Sophia, as it was performed shortly before the Revolution of 1821, is above all an affirmation on the part of Orthodox Christians that their faith has not been lost with the conquest, that the bond linking them with the familiar figures depicted on the icons in every church is indissoluble, come what may. If these words also implied a prophecy of redemption in the future, it concerned the Orthodox Church, not (as it would later come to be reinterpreted) the Greek nation state.

Another often-repeated story tells of the ‘marble emperor’, Constantine XI Palaiologos, whose body was never found after the conquest of his city by the Ottomans in 1453. Constantine did not die, the story goes, but instead had been taken by an angel to a secret place within the city walls and there turned to stone. In various versions it is prophesied that when the day comes, appointed by God, the emperor will be restored to life and at the head of a victorious army will chase the former conquerors all the way to their original homeland in central Asia.

Other prophecies can be traced through written sources going back to the late fifteenth century, or even before the fall of Constantinople itself. It is hard to tell to what extent, if at all, these build upon originally popular traditions. A set of ‘oracles’ attributed to a thirteenth-century mystic by the name of Agathangelos (meaning ‘Good Angel’) began to circulate at the beginning of the 1750s. But this pious forgery seems to have been a top-down intervention. References to a fair-haired, or fair-skinned, race from the north that would bring deliverance were seized upon, during and after the war between the Russian and Ottoman empires from 1768 to 1774. The deliverers must surely be the Russians. On the other hand, evidence for the circulation of the oracles of the supposed ‘Agathangelos’ comes mainly from the very end of the century and well into the next. So it is hard to be sure how widely these beliefs were shared, or how seriously they were taken, during the earlier period.

What this evidence does show is the deep devotion of Orthodox Greek speakers to their religion, to its accumulated traditions and to some collective memory of the lost empire of Constantinople. When it comes to the ancient past, the enthusiasm of their own elites and the western travellers was met with puzzled wonder or disbelief. As good Christians, the Orthodox flock knew that people called ‘Hellenes’ had lived in these lands a long time ago and had worshipped false gods. These ‘Hellenes’ were therefore the exact antithesis of the decent, honourable, God-fearing Romioi of the eighteenth century. Oral traditions, mostly recorded later, tell how the ‘Hellenes’ must have been a race of giants, to have built the walls and monuments that could still be seen. Pagan temples and particularly statues were apt to possess supernatural, dangerous powers – hence, no doubt, the inspiration for the emperor turned to marble.

Even in the nineteenth century, when travellers and antiquarians came looking for the ruins of the ancient sanctuary of Delphi, the locals would apply their own logic and ingenuity to make sense of it all:

The Mylords aren’t Christians, that’s why no one ever saw them make the sign of the Cross [in the Orthodox manner]. They’re descended from the ancient pagans the Adelphians, who kept their treasure in a castle that they called Adelphi [Brothers], after two brother princes who built it. When the Virgin Mary and Christ came to these parts and everyone round about became Christian, the Adelphians thought they’d better make themselves scarce. So they left for Frank-land [western Europe] and took all their treasure with them. The Mylords are their descendants, and they come here now to worship those stones.²³

It makes for a delightful story – and it serves to highlight the conceptual gap that separated the Greek villagers from not just the western antiquarians, but also from the elite of the ‘Orthodox commonwealth’ who shared the same language and religion. If this was the picture even after independence, we may ask ourselves how much of a meeting of minds did take place between eastern Christians and the emerging secular identity of western Europeans during the century before. These first encounters were at best partial and full of mutual misunderstandings. The new ideas that spread eastwards helped the elite of the ‘Orthodox commonwealth’ to begin to redefine its own identity, but left the great majority of Greek speakers untouched. Expanding commerce brought wealth to some and opportunities to many that had not known them before. But whether among the educated elites or at the level of popular culture, there is little evidence for anything that could be called revolutionary sentiment during most of the eighteenth century.

All this was about to change, as the century drew towards its close.