Ottoman Orthodoxy

The Greek-speaking world was conquered gradually over a 600-year period (1071—1669), and with each phase of expansion the newly conquered experienced radical change. Aside from the forfeiture of political power and diminution of legal status, Greeks experienced initial population loss through violence, dispersion and conversion.

The most fertile lands were typically expropriated and the best churches converted to mosques.²⁴ Substantial identity stability was nevertheless provided by the Ottoman state, which ensured that religion served as an important basis for inclusion and exclusion. From the outset the ‘Romans’ were recognised as the ‘conquered’ community, and, as observers of an Abrahamic faith, they were entitled under Islamic law to protection within the abode of Islam (dar al-Islani).

Indeed, Turkish rule reinvigorated religious institutions and gave clerics political powers that they had never quite enjoyed under the previous order. After claiming Constantinople, Mehmet the Conqueror granted the patriarch, the leading cleric within the Orthodox Church, both religious and civil authority over all Orthodox subjects of the empire. Thus, after having lost the Hagia Sophia and many of its great churches, the Church was given administrative authority over a vast population that dispersed across an empire much larger than that ruled by Byzantium’s later emperors. The Church was, among other things, in charge of a fiscal unit: it collected taxes on behalf of the Ottoman sultan, and as such it was a department of state.²⁵ Under the Ottomans, vast regions where ecclesiastical life had been disrupted by invasions (e.g., Anatolia) were restored and reinvigorated.

Greek identity therefore received a new institutional focus, while the clergy were accorded unprecedented power to shape what it meant to be ‘Roman’. Predictably, it reinforced the notion of Orthodoxy as the primary focus of identity.

In the Trabzon-Black Sea region, for example, large pockets of Greek Orthodox Christians who had survived cultural attrition were placed under the direct authority of local monastic orders, which worked hard at limiting further cultural attrition. A large minority of ‘Romans’ (Romeii) was still living and flourishing in the region at the beginning of the twentieth century, while Greek (called ‘Romeika’) was still considered the mother tongue of the descendants of local Rum converts to Islam until relatively recently.²⁶

The paucity of primary evidence means that we know exceedingly little about Greek life under Ottoman rule, save for the fact that the Orthodox ecclesiastical order and Orthodox popular culture (saint cults, belief in Neraids [water nymphs], goblins [kallikantzari] and millenarian ideas) provided fixed reference points for a common identity. Millenarian ideas are particularly interesting in this regard. Richard Clogg, a pioneer of Ottoman Greek history, noted that Greeks of all classes were obsessed with prophecies foretelling the demise of the Muslim empire and the return to Christian rule. Some prophecies featured the idea of Constantine XI, the last Byzantine emperor, who disappeared without trace during the final battle in 1453, and who was expected to return and reclaim his throne.²⁷ Especially popular in the years leading to the Greek War of Independence were the prophecies of one Agathangelos, whose opaque sayings intimated that the end of Ottoman rule was nigh. Many of the Greek chiefs and clerics who fought that war, and who were well acquainted with Agathangelos’ words, were convinced that victory was preordained:²⁸ ‘And like the Israelites under Nebuchadnezzar, so this People will stay subjugated to the impious Hagarenes [early Christian term for Muslim conquerors] until the divinely ordained hour: it will remain under the yoke for 400 years.’²⁹ What such beliefs tell us about the political culture of Ottoman Greeks is that they continued to identify with an extinct Roman/ Christian imperial order.

They regarded themselves as a subjugated people awaiting redemption or resurrection. (Much later, such ideas came to inform the foreign policy agenda of independent Greece, which was to ‘reclaim’ Constantinople and Asia Minor, and which many ordinary Greeks believed would be achieved with divine intervention.³⁰)

The popularity of prophecies points to the fact that for Greek subjects Ottoman rule signified domination without hegemony, and yet so long as the empire persisted it indelibly shaped the meaning of Greekness. After all, it was under the Ottomans that nearly all Greeks were brought within the bounds of a single polity, within which many groups came to enjoy the benefits of an imposed ‘peace’. Under the Pax Ottomanica, commercial interests operated within a milieu that was protected by a state that stood to benefit enormously from duties, excises and monopolies (e.g., silk). The Greeks capitalised on this mutually beneficial arrangement. From the late seventeenth century, Orthodox merchants from throughout the Balkans and Anatolia come to dominate trading links between southern Russia, central Europe and the eastern Mediterranean.³¹ They capitalised even more on Ottoman decline and the greater international attention that it brought to the Mediterra- nean.³² The growth of Russian and Austrian power in the region from the early eighteenth century, along with the expansion of British and especially French military and commercial interests in the Levant, was facilitated by a great deal of local collaboration.

Thus, as European powers began to prise open the Ottoman Empire and plumb its resources on increasingly favourable terms, it was Orthodox and especially Greek Orthodox merchants and interpreters who served as the principal intermediaries. A vast Greek merchant diaspora emerged outside the empire, including Trieste and Odessa, which were the principal imperial ports of Habsburg Austria and Tsarist Russia, respectively.

It was the Greeks who capitalised on the French loss of influence in Mediterranean waters during the Revolutionary period, expanding their interests into western Europe and spawning merchant communities in Marseilles, Amsterdam and London.³³ By the nineteenth century, Greek commercial interests, which frequently operated under foreign (mainly Russian and British) flags and thereby secured certain fiscal and legal privileges, dominated Ottoman external trade and flourished as never before. The changing international order therefore had significant implications for the Greeks, who thrived particularly at the meeting-points and the interstices of the competing empires. When these empires went to war, the Greek merchants were often ready to supply the combatants and to fill the roles abandoned by merchants of the combatant countries. As borders shifted and new powers sought to capitalise on trading opportunities, the Greeks were often in the best position to facilitate such ventures.

The sharp shift in the balance of power between the Ottoman and Christian European empires during the eighteenth century also had far-reaching cultural implications for Ottoman Christians. The works of Traian Stoianovich and Paschalis Kitromilides have demonstrated how the acquisition of a Greek identity had become a rite of passage for upwardly mobile Orthodox Christians, whose mother tongue might have been Serb, Albanian, Vlach or Bulgarian. As they became wealthier, ascended the Church hierarchy, or achieved high office, Orthodox subjects understood it was de rigueur that they also acquire Greek, Greek names and, in many cases, a Greek education. Moreover, becoming ‘Greek’ not only meant acquiring distinctive cultural characteristics but also becoming implicated in an inter-regional and international dispersion of Greeks. In other words, Greeks (like Armenians and Jews) formed networks that extended across borders, forming empires within an empire. These networks also extended beyond the empire, which meant that Greeks and other non-Muslims were especially receptive to outside influences.

Among these influences was the Enlightenment. Kitromilides has been principally responsible for demonstrating the impact of the Enlightenment on the Balkans, of which the main effect was to promote the Classical Greek legacy over the Roman/Christian one—the question of which legacy should define Greekness would become a dominant feature of national public discourse after independence.³⁴ Although educated Greeks never ‘forgot’ the Greek Classics, it was the symbolic power of Europe and the Enlightenment’s obsession with the Classical Greeks that encouraged learned modern Greeks to also subscribe to that obsession. Indeed for many it was the Classics that contained the ingredients of authentic Greekness. One of the leading luminaries of the Greek Enlightenment, Iosipos Moisiodax, who was born into a Vlach-speaking family in present-day Rumania, was accused by a critic, Panagiotis Kodrikas from Athens, as one whose Greekness was completely drawn from learning. Thus, on being:

foreign by birth to the Genos [Nation] of the Hellenes, and consequently not having tasted the milk of Hellenic nurture. Furthermore, he learned the Hellenic language through study not through habit and natural use from infancy. His eyesight and his mind were exercised in the reading of the old [i.e., ancient] authors, but his hearing was not accustomed to the harmony of the dialect of the New Hellenes.

Significantly, Peter Mackridge notes that at the time concern for ethnic origins was rare: Kodrikas’ sentiments anticipated a much later national fixation on ethnic exclusivity. Rather, at the time Greekness was more about class and education.³⁵

<< | >>

↑

Source: Aldrich Robert, McKenzie Kirsten (eds.). The Routledge History of Western Empires. Routledge,2014. — 542 p.. 2014

Ottoman Orthodoxy

More on the topic Ottoman Orthodoxy: